Awaken

19

Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving,

Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly,

That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto V

At 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.”

The fingers around mine were like ice. In the dim light from the electric candle, I could see that his forehead was dewy with sweat, even though the house was still cool with air-conditioning. The power hadn’t been out for that long.

“It was like a cellar,” he said, “dark and cold, and I didn’t know when or even if I’d ever be let out. I could see a crack of daylight streaming through, but the door to get to it was just beyond my reach, no matter how hard I strained against the ropes that were keeping me bound. What was worse was that I knew the light wasn’t light at all … it was you. I could see you, hear you, smell you, even. But I couldn’t reach you.”

“Oh, John,” I said, my heart welling for him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you?”

In the flickering light from the fake candle, I could see a muscle leaping in his jaw. He was hunched forward on the side of my bed, his elbows on his knees. I had never seen him look more miserable, except maybe for when he was telling me about his father. I laid a hand on his back. It felt hard as a boulder.

“The closer you came to finding me,” he whispered, “the wider the shaft of light became. I could see more and more of what you were doing. But I still couldn’t reach you, and I couldn’t get you to understand that I was there, to see me or hear me, the whole time. It nearly drove me mad.”

“I did know that you were there,” I said, lifting my hand to stroke some of his tangled hair. “At least I began to suspect you were once you sent that tree crashing down on Mr. Mueller. That was quite subtle, not at all your usual style.”

John chuckled grimly at my sarcasm. He captured my hand in one of his own.

“You’ve always been able to make me laugh,” he said. “Even when things are at their worst. How do you do that?”

“According to Mr. Smith, it’s because I’m the sunshine,” I said, unable to keep a note of self-deprecation from creeping into my voice, “and you’re the storm.”

“That sounds like something he would say.” Grinning, he pressed my fingertips to his lips. “I think he’s probably right.”

“Oh, John, no!” His lips felt as icy to the touch as his hands. “Why are you so cold?” I slipped my free hand around his shoulders while I tried to think what a responsible adult, like my mom or Mrs. Engle, would do in this situation. “Do you want me to make you some soup? I could go downstairs and make you some soup — it’s a gas stove, so it should still be working — and bring it back up —”

“I don’t need soup,” he said. “All I need is you.”

He dropped my hand to snake his arm around my waist, burying his face in the curve between my neck and my shoulder — a favorite place of his — then sending me sinking slowly back against the voluminous pile of soft “accent” pillows my mom’s decorator had insisted on stacking against my headboard.

You don’t sleep on them, the decorator had explained to me. They’re called throw pillows because you “throw” them off the bed right before you go to sleep.

I don’t know why anyone would bother throwing those pillows off the bed when they made such a deep, comfortable nest for two people who’d been through as much as John and I had recently. I liked the way they towered around us, forming a safe cocoon against the world as John clung to me in the semidarkness, his heart pounding hard against mine, listening to the rain as it continued to pour down outside my shuttered windows.

At least, I thought, he was able to speak about what he’d been through. That had to be a good sign. On television, doctors were always saying how it was healing for soldiers and other victims of violent assault to talk about their traumatic experiences.

“What else?” I asked, as thunder rumbled off in the distance and his lips roamed sleepily along the curve of my collarbone.

“What do you mean, what else?”

“I mean, what else about when you were with Thanatos?”

He lifted his head to stare down at me as if I were a madwoman. “Why would I want to talk about Thanatos now?”

“Because,” I said, “talking about it might be therapeutic. Whether you admit it or not, you’ve had a lot of distressing experiences in your life.”

He leaned up on one of the accent pillows to look me in the eye. “So have you.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But my parents have also paid for me to have a lot of therapy, so the chances of my suffering from any long-term neurosis is minimal.”

“This is all the therapy I need,” he said, raising his hand from my waist to another part of my anatomy, nearer my heart.

I sucked in my breath. “I’m pretty sure in therapy, that would be called a diversionary tactic.”

“Then I need a lot more diversionary tactics,” John said, his fingers moving to tug on the string that kept the bodice of my dress closed in the front. “Also, there’s something you promised to tell me that you still haven’t said —”

I don’t know if it was the intoxicating mixture of his closeness; his kisses; the comforting cocoon of pillows; the romantic, constant drumming of the rain outside; or the fact that, after so long, we finally seemed to have found somewhere we could safely be together. But it wasn’t long before I found myself murmuring, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” exactly as I’d longed to the entire time he was gone.

He expressed his love for me, as well, as emphatically as ever …. so much so that I was relieved for the booming thunder outside, since I knew it would cover any sounds we might make that could wake up my mom — though at times I wasn’t certain whether the thunder was being generated by John or the storm itself.

Later, lying lazily in his arms beneath my white down comforter, I said, “We can’t fall asleep. There’s too much we still have to do.”

“I know.” His chest was rising and falling beneath my cheek in a slow, rhythmic movement as he breathed. “But I think it’s all right for now.” He held up my diamond, the only thing I was wearing. “It’s silver. There’s no danger. We deserve to rest for a few minutes.”

“No,” I said firmly. “If we fall asleep and my mom finds us in here, she’ll kill you all over again.”

“If you’d just marry me,” he said, “the way I asked you to, everything would be fine.”

“You don’t know my parents,” I said. “Believe me, everything wouldn’t be fine if we got married.”

“I would rather be open with them,” John said. “I can provide for you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s not really the issue. And besides, you live in an underground cave.”

“In a castle in an underground cave.”

“That is currently overrun with the souls of the dead.”

John thought about this. “With a bit of luck, that’s something we’ll soon resolve.”

“Luck,” I said, gazing sleepily at the still flickering LED candle. “That’s something neither of us has ever had much of.”

He stroked a lock of my hair. “We found each other, didn’t we?”

“That was my grandmother, not luck. She made sure we met so she could kill me later and break your heart because she hates your guts.”

His hand stilled on my hair. “Oh. That’s right.”

“Don’t let me fall asleep.”

“I won’t,” he said.

The last thing I remember was lightning as it made a bright white stripe against my wall when it flashed between the slats of the shutters. I never heard the thunder that followed, however.