by Meg Cabot
“Thirsty?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she said, taking the water gratefully. “Do you know what the awful-smelling stuff is in the pots that old man is brewing back there in the castle?”
I nodded. “Beer. Yes, I know, Mr. Graves has been trying to get his recipe right for quite a while.”
“He made me taste some,” Kayla said between sips of water. “I hate beer. But I’ve had worse, actually.” Her gaze moved past me to take in the beach, the dock, and finally the gigantic horse standing next to me. She slowly lowered the now empty water glass. “What the hell?”
“Oh, we’re not in hell,” Chloe informed her, sprightly. “We’re here waiting for the boat that’s going to take us to our final destination.”
Kayla’s gaze slid towards her. “Really,” she said, her pierced eyebrow lifting. “How nice for you.” Then she noticed Reed. “Well,” she said, her expression changing. “Hello.”
He grinned. “Hi. How are you today?”
Kayla’s smile was bright enough to light up the entire Underworld. “Doing much better now that I met you. I’m Kayla Rivera, who —”
“Sorry, she has to go now,” I said to Reed. I took Kayla by the arm and dragged her a few feet away. “Could you please not flirt with the dead people?” I hissed at her.
She glanced back at Reed over a bare shoulder, startled. “No way. He’s dead? That guy does not look dead. How’d he die?”
“What does it matter?” I asked. “I thought you liked Frank.”
“I like Frank, but I’m not dead. Is that what’s with Cindy Lou Who’s hair over there?” Kayla nodded at Chloe. “Is that blood? She’s dead? I thought she just had a bad experience with some hair dye.”
“They’re all dead,” I said. “I thought Mr. Graves explained it to you.”
“He did, in between beer tastings. But how am I supposed to tell who’s dead and who’s not if they don’t have telltale bloodstains? You know, it’s good this place gives out free gifts, because who’d want to stay if they didn’t?” She patted the sparkling amethyst-tipped pins in her own voluminous hair, which matched the purple streaks she’d dyed there. “I’d be so out of here otherwise. Dead people and giant horses and dogs and homemade beer? Yuck. FYI, if my mom doesn’t hear from me by the time her shift at the hospital ends, she’ll probably call out the National Guard.”
“Good luck with that,” I said. “Remember that reward my dad was offering for my safe return from my kidnappers?”
“Oh, was this where you were?” Kayla looked surprised. “No wonder you were in no hurry to come back. I wouldn’t, either, if I was kidnapped by someone who looked like that.” She grinned a little wolfishly at John, who still stood with his back towards us, peering through the spyglass Henry had rushed down from the castle. Then she added, “Which Frank does, of course. Where is Frank, anyway?”
I pointed at the dock across the beach. “Over there.”
Next thing I knew, she’d shot over to the railing to wave and blow kisses in Frank’s direction, which didn’t work out quite as well as I suspect she’d hoped, since when Frank looked up and smiled — almost as if he’d felt Kayla’s kiss travel on the hot wind, then settle upon the jagged scar that ran down one side of his face — one of the men in the line behind him used Frank’s momentary distraction to wrap a burly arm around his throat.
Fortunately Frank reacted quickly and decisively by thrusting the heel of his hand into the other man’s nose. Kayla looked upset by the turn of events, her hands flying to her face in alarm. Concern for Frank hadn’t been why she’d gasped, however.
“Guillotine,” she shouted across the beach. “Use a guillotine chokehold on him, Frank, you idiot!”
I shook my head in wonder. It wasn’t that I was surprised by what Kayla was screaming, or that I minded that she’d been checking out my boyfriend’s backside — which I had to confess did look particularly well proportioned in the snug-fitting jeans he was wearing.
It was that the way she was acting reminded me of something my dad had once told me. The military had performed a study to find out what kind of equipment my dad’s company could provide to help keep fighter pilots calm and levelheaded when they were flying in their F18s and being shot at by the enemy, thousands of feet above the earth at speeds exceeding a thousand miles per hour.
Pulse monitors were applied to the fighter pilots’ chests and were read around the clock by scientists on the ground.
The problem, Dad said, was that the heart rates of the fighter pilots remained perfectly steady when they were in the air, and even when they were under simulated attack.
It was only when those same pilots were back home, jockeying for a position with their shopping cart in line to buy dinner at their crowded local grocery store, for instance, that the scientists saw the readings on their heart monitors skyrocket.
It just goes to show, you can’t tell how anyone is going to react in any given situation, Dad had said.
It was no surprise to me that Kayla was taking completely in stride the discovery that there was an underworld beneath the island on which she lived. The only thing I’d ever seen really upset her was when she’d witnessed John and me revive Alex. She’d been sure we were vampires …. Oh, and my suggestion that she join me for ice cream once after school with Seth Rector’s girlfriend, Farah Endicott. I’m pretty sure Kayla thinks Farah’s a vampire, too.
“Uh-oh,” Kayla said, elbowing me. She pointed at John, who was slowly lowering the spyglass Henry had passed him, his expression troubled. “Looks like the boyfriend’s not happy.”
But when I glanced in the direction John had been peering with the small folding telescope, I saw what could only be good news: the prow of a second ship breaking through the thick wall of fog.
The passengers over on the pier manned by Frank and Mr. Liu saw it, too. They began to cheer. They thought they were being rescued from their present misery.
They didn’t know they were about to board a ship to some place much, much worse.
“What’s wrong?” I crossed over to John to ask. “Haven’t you had two ships come in at the same time before? You don’t have to worry, you know. We’ll all help.”
John handed the spyglass back to Henry. I wasn’t sure if he’d even noticed me, let alone Kayla; he’d been so transfixed by whatever it was he’d viewed through the lens.
“Let Frank and Mr. Liu know what’s happening in case they haven’t noticed yet.” John was speaking in a swift, low voice so quietly, I was certain only Henry and I could hear him. “Tell them I’ll take care of it, but they’ll need to be ready just in case.”
Henry nodded crisply. “Right away, Captain,” he said.
Henry pulled his own tablet — or magic mirror, as Henry adorably referred to it — from a coat pocket, and began to type.
“Just in case?” I stepped away from Kayla, lowering my voice to match John’s so she and the others wouldn’t overhear. “In case what, John? What’s going on? I said that Alex and Kayla and I can —”
“The problem’s not that the boats are coming in at the same time.” John’s tone was barely audible. He didn’t want to broadcast his concerns to the public. But his expression was graver than I’d ever seen it. “It’s that they’re coming in too fast.”
When he looked down at me, I saw something in his light gray eyes that I’d seen there only a handful of times before: It was fear.
“Pierce, those boats aren’t going to stop until they hit something. And the only thing in their way is us.”
When they arrive before the precipice,
There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments,
There they blaspheme the puissance divine.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto V
What?”
I whirled around to see for myself.
The first ship — as large as the ferryboat to Martha’s Vineyard my parents and I used to take on vacation, which could easily fit hundreds of people as well as their car
s — was churning straight at us through the mist, looking like a great white shark headed for its prey.
The second boat was plowing through the water towards the dock on which Frank and Mr. Liu were still toiling.
John was right. Both ships were making a direct path for the docks.
I spun back towards John. “Can’t you contact the captain and tell him to turn, or … or drop anchor, or whatever it is boats do?” My knowledge of nautical terms was limited to things written on raunchy-joke pirate shirts I saw the tourists wearing around Isla Huesos, such as Give up your booty or Prepare to be boarded.
“There is no captain to contact.” John’s mouth was a grim, flat line.
“Then who’s steering them?”
“Normally? The same forces that decided to put me in charge,” he said, his lips now curving into a bitter smile.
“The Fates?” I cried, appalled.
Of course. Who else was going to ferry the souls of the dead to their final destination?
John lifted a warning finger to his lips, pointing at Kayla and the others, all of whom were watching the boats, completely unaware of the impending danger. John evidently wanted to keep it that way, since he took me by the arm and pulled me closer towards Alastor, from whom everyone always steered a wide berth, so we’d be out of their hearing range.
“I don’t want to cause a panic,” John said in a low voice.
I highly doubted Kayla or Alex knew what a Fate was — at least in the context I’d used the word — but I nodded anyway.
“Of course,” I said. “But I don’t understand. After all you’ve done for the Fates, working like a slave down here for nearly two hundred years, this is how they repay you? Why would they do that? It’s so unfair —”
My indignant sputtering on his behalf wrenched a smile out of him … a smile I recognized all too well from some special moments we’d shared in his bedroom the night before.
“So you do still care about me,” he said. He slipped an arm around my waist. “I wasn’t sure. You never answered my question.”
“What question?” I asked. What was wrong with boys? They got romantic at the weirdest times. “What are you even talking about?”
“You know what I’m — what’s that?” He sprang away from me as quickly as he’d pulled me towards him. I felt something reverberate at my waist.
“Oh,” I said, pulling my mobile phone from the sash of my dress. “It’s nothing. I have my cell set on vibrate. I keep getting these text alerts about the storm back in Isla Huesos.”
I turned the phone off and tucked it away again.
“What about that?” He pointed at the whip on my hip. “Why are you still carrying that?”
I looked down at it. “Oh. I don’t know. To keep it out of the hands of children, I suppose.” I laughed to show him I was joking, although I wasn’t really. My cousin Alex’s behavior still bordered on the childish sometimes.
John didn’t laugh, however.
“That whip was my father’s,” he said, his face carefully devoid of emotion. “He used to use it on the ship when he … ” He seemed to want to say something, but decided better of it. “Well, he used to use it quite often. I have no idea how your cousin found it. I thought it went down with the Liberty along with everything else belonging to my father.”
“Oh, John,” I said softly, touching the side of his face. Now I understood why the sight of the whip had upset him so. John’s relationship with his father had been what my therapists would call challenging. “I’m sorry. I’ll get rid of it.”
“No,” he said, and managed a smile, though it seemed to me one wracked with the pain of memories best forgotten. “Everything that’s ever turned up from the ship has always done so for good reason, like your necklace.”
As he spoke, he’d reached out to tug my diamond from the bodice of my dress, with the confident proprietorship of a lover. But when the grape-size stone tumbled into his hand, the smile faded.
The diamond was the color of onyx.
My heart gave a sickening lurch, the kind it gives when you hear the siren to an emergency services vehicle going down your street and you realize the reason it’s so loud is because it’s stopped in front of your house. It’s your house that’s on fire, someone you love who’s sick or in trouble or hurt.
Normally? The same forces that decided to put me in charge, John had replied when I’d asked who was steering the boats.
Who was steering them now?
Furies.
No wonder my diamond had turned black. It had nothing to do with the weather.
“John, what’s happening?” I asked, feeling as sick as if someone had punched me in the stomach. “I thought Furies could only possess humans on earth. How could they come here, to the Underworld? We told Alex and Kayla they’d be safe here, but we may as well have left them in Isla Huesos if Furies —”
“Don’t worry,” John interrupted, dropping my diamond and reaching for my shoulders to give me a little shake. “They are safe here. Or at least they will be. I’m going to fix this.”
“How?” I tried not to let my doubt show, but all I could think about was Mr. Graves’s warning: pestilence. If this wasn’t pestilence, I didn’t know what was. “If the docks are destroyed, all of these people — Chloe, Reed, everyone — their souls will never get to where they’re supposed to go.”
“Yes, they will,” he said, firmly. “Because the docks aren’t going to get destroyed.”
“But if the Furies have control of the boats —”
“You’ve got to trust me. I know I’ve let you down before —”
“What?” I shook my head. “No, you haven’t.”
“I have. But I’m not going to this time, I swear it.”
“John.” This was exactly like him. He always took everything on himself, convinced he had to save the world and do it single-handedly. “No. Let me help you for once. That’s what I’m here for, at least if everything Mr. Smith says is true —”
“You can help me. Here.”
Surprised, I held one of my hands out to meet the one he stretched towards me. Except for the mooring lines, this was as close as I could recall to John ever requesting help from me. It wasn’t his fault he was so stubbornly intent on protecting me. Back when he’d been born, women were put on pedestals and told to do nothing all day but look pretty (except for all the women who got worked to death on farms or in cotton mills or having a baby every year because there was no birth control). Even though John knew things were different now, he still tended to think of me as one of those pedestal ladies.
So it was a bit of shock when what he handed me were the reins to his man-eating horse.
“Take Alastor,” he said in a low, urgent voice, “and get back to the castle. Whatever happens, you’ll be safe there, behind the walls.”
“Um … what?” I said, more out of astonishment than from any need for further information, since I had a pretty good idea of what he’d said and absolutely no intention of following his instructions.
“Alastor knows the way,” he went on. “If you’re on his back, no one will dare interfere with you. People,” he added, “tend to be intimidated by Alastor.”
“I can’t think why,” I said dryly, looking up at the stallion’s ink-black eyes, which at that moment happened to be rolling towards John, as if to echo my own skeptical thoughts about his plan. The horse had laid down his ears, a sure indicator that he was displeased … enough so that Hope, my pet dove and full-time protector, sensed it and flew down from the cavern’s ceiling to scold him, fluttering around the stallion’s head and trilling her disapproval.
Alastor’s ears flicked forward as he eyed the bird, looking as if he’d like nothing more than to make a bite-size snack out of her.
“Alastor,” John said in a warning tone, and the horse whickered innocently.
I shook my head. “John. That’s a very nice plan, but I think I can do more than run away and hide in the castle. And what about A
lex and Kayla?”
“Take them with you. And I’m not asking you to run away. I’m asking you to —”
“What about all these other people?” I interrupted, looking around the beach. It was hard to keep my temper, but remembering my job as a consort, I tried. “There must be a thousand of them, at least, and more souls coming every minute. We can’t just abandon them.”
“I have no intention of abandoning them.” He’d begun to peel off his black T-shirt, a sight which simultaneously confused and thrilled me. It also made me angrier at him, because he was using unfair weaponry against me. “Get yourself to safety. Leave the rest to me.”
“You think I’m just going to — I’m sorry, is it too warm in here for you?”
He stared at me uncomprehendingly, his hair adorably mussed from where his shirt collar had ruffled it coming over his head. “What?”
I didn’t know whether I wanted to grab him by those wide, muscular shoulders and kiss him or shake the living daylights out of him.
“Why are you undressing?” I asked.
“Pierce, there isn’t much time,” he said, sitting down at the edge of the dock. “You’re a skilled rider. You should be able to handle Alastor without any problem. He’s not really as wild as he acts. He’s simply not used to polite society. He only needs a little taming.” Bending over to unlace his tactical boots, he glanced up at me from beneath some of the long dark hair that had tumbled across his eyes. “A bit like his owner, as you keep assuring me.”
I shook my head again. “How could you know anything about my riding skills? You’ve never seen me on a horse. I used to ride back in Connecticut, but you couldn’t possibly have seen me then, because you and I weren’t —”
My voice trailed off. Together, was what I was going to say, until I remembered that just because we hadn’t been together didn’t mean he hadn’t been watching me … or watching over me, as I’m sure he’d have preferred to think of it. Death deities couldn’t always be counted on to follow modern social niceties, such as “Don’t spy on people.”
Remembering how often I’d eavesdropped on my parents, I realized humans couldn’t always be counted on to follow this rule, either, so I didn’t hold it against him.