Awaken (17 page)

John took a threatening step towards Seth, but I put out a hand to stop him. I’d forgotten how Seth and his father had been inside my house.

“You weren’t comforting her,” I said. “You went there to get the coffin materials back.”

“If your cousin rats my family out,” Seth said, “all of you might find yourselves in coffins — real ones.”

“And you,” John said, taking a forceful step, one I was powerless to stop, “might find yourself thrown out of those windows over there.”

“John,” I said, grasping his arms with both hands. To Seth, I said, “If building this place is in violation of some kind of environmental regulation, I’m sure someone would have already noticed by now, don’t you think? Unless,” I added, my voice dripping with sarcasm, “your dad bribed a bunch of people to look the other way, which I can’t imagine he’d have done, because he’s always been such an upstanding, law-abiding citizen, hasn’t he?”

Only Seth, John, and I remained in the house. I don’t know who Seth was trying to impress when he said, “Reef Key has been in my family for years. My great-great-great — whatever — grandfather William Rector bought it from Isla Huesos County in 1845 when it was nothing but a sandbar covered in shrubs. No one else has ever given two shits about it. We should be able to do whatever we want with it.”

To John’s credit, he didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t show any indication at all that he’d known Seth’s
great-great-great —
whatever —
grandfather William
, nor that he had despised him for the thieving pirate he’d been, colluding with ship captains to wreck their own boats on purpose so that Rector could swoop in and “save” their cargo for one half its value. John’s own father hadn’t been much better, having been one of those captains willing to risk the lives of his crew for a percentage of the profit from that cargo.

“It appears to me,” John said with admirable calm, “that your family — and you in particular — does whatever it wants, regardless.”

“Damn right,” Seth said. “And we’ve gotten rich because of it. Maybe not Oliviera rich, but —”

Something struck one of the sliding glass doors overlooking the backyard. Not with enough force to break it, but hard enough to make a startlingly loud sound. I threw both arms in front of my face, and John quickly thrust me behind him, placing himself between me and the still rattling glass.

“Oh, crap,” Seth said with a shaky laugh. “That scared me. But look. It was just a bird.”

“A bird?”

Horrified, I lowered my arms and started for the windows, but not before John had a chance to grab and stop me.

“Not that bird,” he said. “Hope is safe.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “Was she with you?”

“No,” he said. “But trust me, she has enough sense not to be out in a storm like this.”

“Well, that bird didn’t,” I said. “Why would Hope? What if she’s trying to find me?”

“Hey, you should see this,” Seth said, from in front of the sliding glass doors, where he’d gone to look out over the balcony. “It’s some kind of black bird. There’s hundreds of them. They’re all over the place. They’re raining down from the sky. I’ve got to get a shot of this.” He dug into his jean pocket for his cell phone. “No one will ever believe it.”

“Seth,” I said anxiously. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

I knew he’d tried to kill my cousin. I knew he’d probably killed Jade. I knew he — or at least a death god who’d possessed him — had ordered my boyfriend to be killed by the Furies, then held him captive. He’d threatened to kill me, multiple times, and even threatened my mother. But I couldn’t stand there and watch him kill himself.

Seth laughed. “God, would you relax? I’m not stupid, all right? These doors are made from the same kind of glass they use in windshields, impact resistant.”

Remembering Chloe, and the tiny shards of glass she’d had embedded in her hair like diamonds from a tiara, I said, “
Impact resistant
doesn’t mean if something hits them hard enough they won’t shatter.”

Seth had his mobile out and was snapping away eagerly as, outside, the wind raged and ravens rained from the sky.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “You guys can run if you want, but I’m staying here. These babies can withstand gusts of up to two hundred miles per hour —”

Another raven struck one of the doors, almost as if it had hurled itself at it in an effort to get inside. No, to get at
someone
inside. Not Seth. It hadn’t chosen the sliding glass door nearest Seth. It had chosen the one nearest us.

John and I exchanged looks. We were under attack.

The second door didn’t hold. The entire panel shattered into a spiderweb configuration, then the glass fell from the metal frame and splintered against the tiled floor at our feet.

John yanked me into his arms.

“We’re going,” John shouted to be heard above the wind and rain.

I knew what was going to happen next. When I opened my eyes again, I’d be somewhere else — most likely the Underworld. John didn’t know that in the Underworld, ravens were also raining from the sky … or maybe he did. There wasn’t time to ask, nor was there time to tell him. There was time to say only one thing.

“Seth.”

John’s hold on me tightened. He knew precisely what I was saying.
Save Seth, too.

“No,” he said.

And as I heard another glass door explode, the room disappeared.

When I opened my eyes again, we were in darkness.

A
t first I couldn’t tell where we were. All I knew was that it was quiet, and dry, and so dark that John’s face was indistinguishable to me, though it was merely inches from mine.

Then lightning flashed, and I was able to recognize, through a few patterns thrown across the floor, that we were on the landing on the stairs of my mother’s house.

“John,” I cried, releasing the deathlike grip I’d been keeping on his neck.
“Here?”

“Shhh.” He pointed up the stairs. Down the hallway, dimly lit by a single battery-operated LED candle, I could see that the door to my mother’s bedroom was closed. “It was the only place I could think of.”

“But —” A million questions flickered through my mind, dancing as wildly as the fake candle flame.

Then thunder rumbled … not so loud as it had out on Reef Key. We were inland — well, as inland as anyone could be on a two-mile-by-four-mile island — and on as high ground as Mr. Smith’s house. The storm wasn’t nearly as bad here as it had been out by Mr. Rector’s spec house. Besides, Uncle Chris had boarded up every single one of my mother’s windows as tight as a drum.

The thunder was still loud enough, however, that I was worried it might wake my mother, and the last thing I needed at the moment was a barrage of parental questions.

“Follow me,” I said, taking John’s hand. Creeping up the rest of the stairs, I snagged the LED candle from its table in the hallway, then led him into the room across the hall from my mom’s, gently closing the door behind us once we were both inside.

“Is this your room?” John asked with a grin, looking around at the lavender walls and curtains my mom’s decorator had chosen.

“Yes.” I set the LED candle on my desk and looked around. Nothing had changed since the last time I’d been there, except that the good-bye letter I’d left for my mother was gone. Seeing the room for the first time from John’s perspective, however, I felt mortified. It seemed so devoid of personality. No surprise, since I’d had no say whatsoever in its décor … no interest, either. “Can we not talk about it?”

“Why?” he asked, surprised. He was so tall and broad-shouldered, he resembled a rhinoceros in a tea shop as he moved about, inspecting things. “I like it. Is this yours?”

He picked up a stuffed unicorn Hannah Chang had given to me for my birthday and that I’d kept on my bookshelf as a matter of habit for so long, I’d forgotten I owned it.

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn’t know you liked unicorns,” he said.

“I don’t,” I said, blushing. “I mean, I do, but not the rainbow kind. Someone gave that to me as a gift. I —”

Bringing him here had been a huge mistake. Although I hadn’t brought him here, I remembered. He’d brought me. I was actually a little surprised he’d never been in my room before. But John had odd, old-fashioned standards, and I was quite sure that while he’d considered it perfectly acceptable — even his moral duty — to spy on me at school, the Isla Huesos Cemetery, airports, city streets, jewelry shops, and every other public venue, my bedroom would be completely off-limits.

“John, we can’t leave him out there,” I said, deciding it was time to change the subject. “He could be hurt.”

John picked up a bottle of black nail polish I’d left on a shelf, sniffed it curiously, then made a face and put it down again.

“Who could be hurt?” he asked.

“Seth,” I said. “He could be dying. I know how you feel about him, but that wasn’t him. That was Thanatos. Well, okay, yes, some of it was him. But the part about you, that was Thanatos. I know you probably have post-traumatic stress from whatever he did to you, and I totally understand that, he completely deserves to be punished, but that’s not our call to make. You’re better than he is, you still have your humanity, and he doesn’t. We can’t —”

“What’s
The Lord of the Flies
?” he asked, reading from the title of a book on my bookshelf.

“It’s a really boring book with no girls in it. I don’t even know why I still have that; they made us read it for school.”

“Do you like
anything
in your room?” he asked.

You
, I wanted to say.
I like you. I
love
you.

I don’t know why I couldn’t say it. I don’t know why everything was suddenly so awkward. Maybe because we’d left Seth Rector to die. Maybe because we still needed to save the Underworld, and through saving the Underworld, Isla Huesos. Maybe because my mother was asleep in the next room.

“Everything I like I already took to the Underworld.” I indicated my tote bag, which I’d lugged from Mr. Smith’s house to the party, and from the party to my house. I wasn’t the sort of girl who forgot her purse, although I had a tendency to forget most everything else. “I packed it in there when you brought me here the last time, to say good-bye to my mom. Just like I packed everything I needed to come here to rescue you. Like your tablet. I have it, in case you want to check to see whether or not Seth is still alive.”

He put the book back where he’d found it.

“It won’t make any difference,” he said. “I happen to agree with Mr. Darwin’s theory of natural selection. That’s from a book Mr. Smith loaned to me,
On the Origin of Species
. Perhaps you read that in school, as well as the one about the lord of the flies.”

“No,” I said flatly. “But I’ve heard of it.”

“Then you’ll agree that if it’s Seth Rector’s time to die, it’s because he’s less suited to his environment than the rest of us.” I opened my mouth to disagree, but John held up a finger to stop me. “Not because we might have rescued him, but because he does extraordinarily stupid — even wicked — things. So isn’t it better that he doesn’t live to reproduce and make little Rectors who’ll most likely also do extraordinarily stupid, wicked things? Doesn’t Seth Rector’s father also do stupid, wicked things? And his father before him? Do you think it was an accident that Thanatos happened to choose to possess Seth Rector? No. He chose Seth Rector because Seth Rector’s was the mind most easy for him to access and corrupt. It was the mind most like his, of anyone on this island. I suspect Thanatos has been possessing the minds of the Rector men for many, many years, because they’ve all been as stupid, yet wicked, as Seth.”

“Gee,” I said, walking over to my bag, pulling out John’s tablet and then my own phone. “And I only figured it out because of his shirt.”

“I meant to ask you about that,” John said. “How
did
you figure it out? What about a shirt?”

“The little polo player on the shirts Seth always — never mind,” I said, when I saw John’s blank expression. Not only was he the kind of boy who never noticed what other boys wore, but he was a boy who’d been born more than a century and half ago and had no idea what designer labels were. “Look, I’ll grant you that natural selection is a good argument for not helping Seth. But I know someone else who had a father who did a lot of stupid, wicked things. You. Aren’t you glad someone gave
you
a second chance?”

John scowled. “I only did one wicked thing, and I did it to save the lives of my crew.”

“
One
wicked thing? I could name a half dozen wicked things you’ve done today alone. You killed a man!”

“He was a Fury, and you tried to kill him first. I only finished what you started,” he said.

“You’ve been wanting to kill Mr. Mueller for years,” I said.

“And Darwin would agree with me that the species is better off without him.” His brow wrinkled as he looked at me. “Why are you wearing my father’s whip on a belt around your waist?”

I had forgotten all about it. “Oh … Mr. Liu gave it to me. For protection, I think.” Another white lie, but less embarrassing, I felt, than telling him what Mr. Liu had really said, about my needing it because I was a kite with no strings.

“My father’s
whip
?” Now his eyebrows went way, way up.

I realized the subject needed immediate changing.

“Oh, look,” I said, casually handing him his tablet. As usual, I’d been able to make nothing out on it, since the symbols it displayed were completely foreign to me. But there were several messages on my own phone, and I began to read them aloud to him. “Kayla says they’re at the hospital, and everything is fine. Well, Farah’s probably going to have to have her stomach pumped, so that’s not so good. And they’ve closed all the roads, so they’re going to have to stay there a while. Maybe all night, until the storm ends. Unless you want to go get them, of course.”

“If they’re not in any danger, why would I leave here?” John asked, sinking down onto my bed. He was staring at the screen of his tablet, as I’d known he would. It had been a long time since he’d seen it, and he was a workaholic. I was sure it was telling him all sorts of dire things about the state of the Underworld, not to mention the status of people who were in peril of dying and traveling there soon.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s okay. Frank really likes the cafeteria food. But Kayla isn’t sure her mom is so wild about Frank.”

John let out a sarcastic laugh, still staring down at his screen.

“You might want to laugh more quietly,” I said, loosening the belt Mr. Liu had given me, and allowing it to fall to the floor, “unless you want my mom to come in here and not feel so wild about you.”

John sobered instantly. “What about Alex?”

“There’s no word from him,” I said. “Alex only calls or texts me when he’s dying. Is he?”

John glanced back down at his screen. “No.”

“Well, that’s a nice change. What about Seth?”

“He’s on the brink, but I think he’ll live,” he said. “Unfortunately.” I sank down beside him on the bed, and he showed me his screen. On it, Seth was huddled in a closet, his face bathed in the light of his cell phone as he shouted frantically, “What do you mean, the roads are closed? Someone has to come get me, the generator failed, I don’t have any electricity. There’s no air-conditioning. Do you have any idea what the humidity is like out here?”

Seth’s image disappeared as John turned off the tablet and placed it on my bedside table.

“It appears,” John said, “that he’s going to be fine, if a little uncomfortable.”

“Any word from Mr. Graves on how he and the others are doing?”

“As well as can be expected, under the circumstances,” John said. “At least they were when I saw them a little while ago.”

I stared at him. “You saw them?
When?
”

“On my way back to life,” he said. “I had to stop and pick up a few things, you know, such as my body, before I could rip you away from the arms of Thanatos.”

“So
that’s
how you got this,” I said, leaning forward to pluck at his shirt. “And the boots. I wondered. I wish I could have been there to see everyone’s faces when you went from being stone-cold dead to sitting up and talking.”

“There were some screams,” John said. “Particularly from one old woman —”

“Mrs. Engle,” I said. “She’s a school nurse. She was very attentive to you when you were dead. You know, I think she and Mr. Graves may have a little thing going on.”

John looked at me in astonishment. “A
thing
? What exactly happened while I was gone? Conditions were
not
as I left them. I told you to go back to the castle, not take everyone on the beach back with you.”

I slipped off my shoes and tucked my feet beneath me, not easy when wearing such a long skirt. “I had to make some tough executive decisions,” I said. “Running that place is not easy. I don’t know how you’ve done it all these years. We had problems with kamikaze ravens as well. I thought that with Thanatos gone, maybe the Fates would come back, but I guess not if Mrs. Engle is still around.” Then something occurred to me, and I gasped. “Oh, John!”

He looked at me in alarm. “What is it?”

“I’ve killed Thanatos. How is anyone’s spirit going to be escorted to the Underworld? Isn’t that what Thanatos does? Mr. Smith said the word once. A
psycho
…
psychopomp
. One who escorts the souls of the newly dead.”

I could tell from John’s expression that this was the first time the thought had occurred to him, too.

“Is the soul of everyone who dies from now on going to be trapped between this world and the Underworld, like you were?” I asked. “Have I made things worse? Oh, no. I’ve got to call Mr. Smith and ask him —”

John’s fingers wrapped around mine before they could reach the phone.

“No,” he said. “Don’t. You haven’t made things worse.” His gray-eyed gaze was imploring. “How could you? Pierce, what you did — I know I wasn’t happy about the way you did it, but what you did … when I was …
where
I was … it was the worst place I’ve ever been in my life. I thought the Underworld was the worst place I’ve ever been when I first got there, and I was all alone, but where he kept me — I can’t even put into words how horrible it was.”