Awaken

26

And lo! at one who was upon our side

There darted forth a serpent, which transfixed him

There where the neck is knotted to the shoulders.

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XXIV

Really? It was my grandmother Mr. Smith was so afraid of?

I wanted to laugh.

I didn’t, of course. It would have been rude. But honestly, my grandmother wasn’t that frightening. True, she’d killed me once — and tried to kill me a few other times. And when she got her Fury face on, she was ugly as sin, which I could understand for Mr. Smith — who wasn’t as experienced with Furies as I was — was probably quite frightening.

But she was still only my grandmother.

Granted, she’d bested me once or twice — okay, three times — before.

This time, however, things were going to be different. This time, I wasn’t some scared, lonely high school girl. This time, I was armed with John’s father’s whip, which I knew how to use. This time, I was on my own turf, the Isla Huesos Cemetery, which I’d tromped through so many times, I knew it like the back of my hand. This time, I had friends — not to mention the police — who were about to show up any minute to support me.

This time, I had the power. This time, I was queen of the Underworld.

Most important, this time, I was ready for her.

What I wasn’t ready for, I realized the second I spun around to face her, was the fact that my grandmother had an arm around my best friend, Kayla Rivera’s waist and was holding a knife to her throat.

“Hey, Gran —” The words died on my lips.

“You’ve always thought you were so amusing.” My grandmother’s voice was scornful. “There goes Pierce, with another one of her little jokes. But you aren’t amusing. You know what you are? An abomination, just like him.”

My pulse stuttered, then quit altogether.

Now I knew exactly why Mr. Smith had been so frightened and had kept repeating the word wonderful. It’s hard to think of anything witty to say when there’s an innocent girl with a knife stuck to her carotid artery, a girl who’d been dragged into a battle between good and evil simply because I happened to sit next to her at school one day during an assembly.

All ability to think rationally fled my brain. Not Kayla. Those were the only words my mind could summon up. Not Kayla.

Then, No wonder my diamond had always turned purple around her. Not because it was her birthstone. It was a warning … a warning that I needed to save her from dying at the hands of a Fury.

At the hands of my grandmother.

“If you hurt one hair on her head, I swear … ” My fingers tightened on the handle of my whip.

My grandmother only laughed. It sounded like the cackle from one of the ravens.

“Or what?” she asked. “You’ll hit me with that dirty old rope? That’s exactly what an abomination like you would do, strike her own grandmother.”

I wasn’t surprised Grandma didn’t recognize a whip when she saw one. She wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer … not like the knife she was holding to Kayla’s neck. It was a knife I recognized, a knife from a very expensive gourmet knife set. I knew that for a fact, because it was a knife from my mother’s own kitchen. I’d used it many, many times to slice apples and sandwiches.

Now it appeared my grandmother had stolen it and intended to use it to slice open my best friend’s throat.

“Pierce,” Kayla said.

The word slipped out of her without her seeming to have meant it to. As soon as it did, she bit her plump lower lip as if to remind herself to keep still, or the razor-sharp knife that had already, I saw, caused a ruby-red drop of blood to slide down the side of the silver blade would cut even more deeply. All of the dark lipstick Kayla normally wore had been chewed off due to the effort she was making to keep still, and her eye makeup was smudged from the tears she’d shed, though I could tell she’d been trying to hold them back.

Kayla was no longer wearing her flowy lavender Underworld-issued gown — I could imagine her hanging it back up in her closet, thinking, I’m going to save this to wear later, maybe for Prom — but a black belted shirtdress covered in kicking zebras, with black platform wedges.

Obviously, when she’d chosen this outfit, it had never occurred to her she’d be wearing it in a hostage situation.

“It’s all right, Kayla,” I said, though she and I both knew this was a lie. “Where’s Frank?”

This was the wrong thing to ask.

“Dead,” my grandmother said with delight. Her cackle was echoed eerily by the ravens. “Dead for good, this time, the way all of you walking abominations should be.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, though the tear tracks on Kayla’s face seemed like explanation enough.

My grandmother sneered. “Look for yourself,” she said, and nodded towards a nearby crypt.

Made of white marble, very old and weathered, the crypt bore an epitaph dedicated to MY BELOVED WIFE, MARTHA SIMONTON, 1820–1846.

At first I saw nothing but a fat green iguana lounging in the sun on top of the tomb. Then I noticed a pair of familiar-looking black leather boots. They were attached to a pair of legs sticking out from behind the vault. Flung into the weeds not far from the boots lay a heavily tattooed, muscular arm.

I recognized the tattoos. They were rings of thorns, the same tattoos I’d seen around Frank’s biceps the first time I’d met him in Mr. Graves’s kitchen.

“They were waiting for us at Mr. Smith’s house,” Kayla said. Her voice was a barely audible whisper. I had only seen her looking as frightened and sad once before, and that had been in this very same cemetery, the night we’d whisked her to the Underworld, assuring her she’d be safe there. How wrong we’d been. “We tried to fight them, Pierce, we did. But there were too many of them.” Tears streamed freely down her face. “I think they killed Patrick, too.”

I swung my head to stare at Mr. Smith.

“No,” I said, feeling as if I’d been punched in the chest.

He was staring up at the sky again, scanning it, I guess for that glimpse of hope — or Hope — he’d mentioned before. He didn’t meet my gaze.

“Yes,” my grandmother said with a smile, still holding the knife to Kayla’s throat. “Did you think you could go around flouting the laws of nature and never have to pay? Did you think you could kill one of ours, and there’d be no repercussions? Now we’re even.”

Now we’re even. Her words echoed again and again in my head, like the cries of the ravens. Now we’re even.

Even? She thought we were even for what she’d done to Frank, to Patrick, to Kayla, to Jade, to me, to my family, to my friends, and to John?

The red blanket of poinciana blossoms beneath Mr. Smith’s feet seemed to spread and grow before my eyes until it covered the ground not only beneath my own feet but my grandmother’s as well. The soil beneath Frank’s prone body turned as red as the drop of blood slowly trickling down the knife blade my grandmother was holding to Kayla’s neck. The path that curved through the cemetery went scarlet, looking like a twisted play on the children’s song “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” Only now it was the Murder Brick Road.

Had the poinciana blossoms really moved, blown by one of those strong winds left over from the hurricane, or was my vision playing tricks on me again, because I couldn’t control the red-hot wind that Mr. Liu had said fuels my anger?

I didn’t know. I didn’t care. For once, I had no interest in controlling my anger. I let it sweep over me the way the poinciana blossoms swept across my feet.

I slipped the whip Mr. Liu had given me from my belt. It was the string he’d told me to hold on to when I felt the wind might blow me too far away.

But it was also a string I knew from experience could steer the direction of that wind.

“We’re not even,” I said to my grandmother. “Because this isn’t a game. This is war. And I’m going to win.”

Despite the red swimming before my gaze, my aim was unerring, just as it had been in my mother’s kitchen that morning. This situation wasn’t so different, really, than when Alex had taunted me with the butter knife. All I had to do was remove the blade my grandmother was holding, the same way I’d removed the blade from Alex’s hand.

The only difference was, I had to do it without hurting Kayla. I didn’t care if I hurt my grandmother.

It happened so quickly, she didn’t even realize what had occurred. One millisecond, the knife was in my grandmother’s grip, and the next, the shining blade was lying harmless at Mr. Smith’s feet, and Kayla was free.

“Snake!” my grandmother screamed, clutching her wrist and looking around, stunned, for the serpent she thought had leaped from the ground and bit her. It was many moments before it dawned on her that that serpent was the granddaughter she had, for so many years, considered a useless, dim-witted fool.

“Go to Mr. Smith,” I said to Kayla, because she looked equally stunned, not certain she was entirely free.

Her face crumpled, and she ran to the cemetery sexton, who dropped the broom and took her in his free arm, the other holding the knife in a ridiculous defensive stance he must have seen in an Isla Huesos Community Theater production of West Side Story.

“It’s not over, Pierce,” he warned, as Kayla clung to him. “There are others.”

“Of course there are others,” I said, taking off my necklace and walking towards my grandmother, who was staring at me with her tiny, dead eyes narrowed in hatred and disbelief, cradling what appeared to be a broken arm. “There will always be others. I’ll have to spend the rest of my life fighting evil Furies. With great power comes great responsibility. I know, I saw the movie.”

I wasn’t really listening to Mr. Smith. I was trying to figure out how John and I were going to revive Frank. Patrick wasn’t going to be a problem, if he actually was dead. He hadn’t been dead to begin with. But Frank?

Frank was going to be a problem. His soul wasn’t being held hostage by Thanatos. Because there was no Thanatos anymore. So how could Frank be dead?

“No, Pierce, you don’t understand,” Mr. Smith said, his voice rising with something that sounded a little like hysteria. “There are many, many others. And they’re coming this way. Right now.”

I turned around to see what he was talking about. Then I froze.

Every single one of the people who’d been in the cemetery tidying up their loved ones’ tombs was now moving steadily in my direction, their rakes and shovels held high in the air, like villagers intent on driving a monster from their princess’s castle.

The problem was, these people had mistaken the princess for the monster. I could tell by the direction of their flat, dead-eyed gazes, and the name their slack-jawed mouths kept murmuring over and over, the same name Officer Poling had been shouting through his squad car’s loudspeaker.

Pierce Oliviera.

It wasn’t my grandmother they were coming after.

It was me.