by Meg Cabot
What could I say? The stone had turned ebony. I tugged gently on the chain, hoping he’d let go.
Except of course he only held on more tightly, keeping me a prisoner in his store.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really do have to —”
“You shouldn’t be walking around the streets wearing this,” the jeweler interrupted. “It belongs in a safe-deposit box. By rights I should confiscate it, if only for your own safety. Where did you even get it? Do your parents know you have this?”
It had been only a month since the accident. Everyone at school was already beginning to treat me differently because I’d been acting so weird since coming back from the dead. I’d lost all interest in going to the mall and working with the animal rescue groups I used to love. I’d said that odd thing to Hannah about how I’d always protect her from “the evil” (I’d been referring to my necklace, of course, but she hadn’t known that). Soon I would lose the part of Snow White in the school play.
I was already slipping into a glass coffin of my very own.
But somehow I still found a way to assure the jeweler, in a stammering voice, that the necklace was a family heirloom, thank you very much. And that my mother was, in fact, waiting for me in the car outside and that I needed to go meet her right now. Though I was actually more frightened at the idea of walking outside that store and possibly running into him than I was at staying inside with the extremely irritable jeweler.
That’s when I heard the bells on the shop door tinkle behind me, indicating that someone was coming in.
My heart sank. No. Please, no.
“I don’t believe you,” the jeweler said flatly. “In fact, just so you know, my assistant is on the phone in the back with the police right now. They’re on the way. So your mother — if she is waiting outside, which I sincerely doubt, since you’ve clearly stolen this — can come inside and join us, if she cares to, and watch you being arrested for grand theft.”
Except that my mother was never given the opportunity to do so. Because John stepped forward.
And the walls of the shop seemed to turn the color of blood before my eyes.
“Excuse me,” John said in his deep voice, which sounded completely out of place in such a small, upscale boutique. He looked completely out of place in it, already so menacing because of his size but even more so now because of the black leather jacket and jeans he was wearing.
I thought I was going to pass out. What was he doing there? Had he come to take me back because I’d broken the rules? Was that why the stone in my necklace had turned black, to warn me?
The jeweler glanced over at him, annoyed. “My assistant will be with you in a moment, sir,” he said.
“No, thank you,” John said, as if he were refusing an offer of peanuts on a plane. “Let go of her.”
The jeweler’s eyes widened slightly. But he didn’t let go of me.
“Excuse me,” the jeweler said, looking indignant. “But are you acquainted with this young lady? Because she —”
That’s when John — not looking angry, or annoyed, or anything at all, really — reached across the counter and took hold of the hand the jeweler was using to hold me captive in his shop, as if John were feeling for his pulse.
But John wasn’t feeling for the jeweler’s pulse. That wasn’t what he was doing at all.
The jeweler gave a little gasp. His mouth fell open. Some of the coldness went out of his eyes. Instead, they filled with fear.
I didn’t know — then — what John was doing. My mind was still reeling over the fact that he was there at all.
But I recognized, in a way the jeweler clearly hadn’t, the dangerous set of his jaw and the determined look in his eyes.
And the anxiety that washed over me had nothing to do anymore with my own safety.
“John,” I said. I’d pried the pendant from the older man’s clenched fingers and was already backing away from the counter. I couldn’t take my gaze from the jeweler’s face. It had drained of all color. “Please. Whatever you’re doing. Don’t. It’s all right. Really.”
It wasn’t all right. It was obvious that it wasn’t all right.
But this turned out to be the correct thing to say, since John — after throwing an agitated glance in my direction as if to gauge the truth of my statement — let go of the jeweler’s wrist.
As soon as he did this, the old man took another gasping breath and then staggered back, clutching at his heart.
He wasn’t the only one. I was clutching at my own heart after the look of stinging reproach John flung me a second later…just before the jeweler’s assistant appeared in the back doorway and said, “Okay, Mr. Curry, the police are on their way — oh, my God! ”
Then — coward that I am — I pivoted and ran blindly from the store, the bells on the door tinkling behind me.
But what else was I going to do? Stick around until the cops showed up?
I sprinted straight to my mom’s waiting car.
“Pierce,” Mom said, lowering her cell phone and looking surprised as I collapsed, shaking all over, into the passenger seat. “There you are. I was just trying to call you. Did you forget your phone again? You weren’t picking up. Where were —”
“Drive,” I panted. “Just drive.”
“What’s wrong? Didn’t you like that new doctor? Jennifer McNamara’s mother said he —”
“It’s not that. Let’s just go.”
The next few hours were agony as I waited for the police — or him — to show up at our door. Surely, someone had seen the car I’d jumped into and had written down Mom’s license number. What if there’d been security cameras in Mr. Curry’s shop?
But the police never came.
Neither did John.
And though I scanned the paper every day, even the obituaries, I never saw a single story pertaining to the jeweler.
I found out why the next time we were in the area. There was a For Rent sign in the jewelry store window. When I asked a salesclerk in the dress shop next door about it, she told me that she’d heard Mr. Curry was recovering from a heart attack and had moved…possibly to Florida. She thought he said he had grandchildren there.
And thank God, because everyone on the block had hated that cranky old man, and now maybe finally they’d get a decent shoe store on the block, and that dress would look so cute on me, did I want to try it on?
From what I was able to put together, by the time the police arrived, the jeweler’s assistant was too busy giving Mr. Curry CPR to remember the fact that he’d actually called them about some girl who might have been in possession of a stolen necklace.…Never mind some guy in a leather jacket who’d disappeared as mysteriously as she had.
Maybe that’s why I’d never shown my necklace to another person again.
It had been hard not to feel ever since as if…well, as if John were watching me. Maybe even protecting me. A little over-zealously.
Especially after what happened at school, with Hannah and Mr. Mueller.
What I’d never been able to understand is why. Why would he bother? I’d run away from him.
And now that he’d just hurled the necklace off into the maze of aboveground crypts that made up the Isla Huesos Cemetery, I knew that wasn’t because he’d wanted it back.
I should have gone to look for it. I should have, but I didn’t.
Because when he lifted his arm to fling the necklace, I saw — as might be expected of someone who’d been kicked out of the Westport Academy for Girls — that I’d gotten it all wrong.
It wasn’t any of my business, of course. Not anymore. He’d just seen to that, by hurling my necklace the equivalent of a football field away. Except that I had decided recently to begin making everyone’s business my business. It was part of the “new start” Mom wanted us to have on this island.
And his business had always been my business. He was the one who’d started all of this. He’d come up to me. The first time, anyway.
So I couldn’t
go look for my necklace. I had to stay. I had no choice, really.
Which was why that night in the cemetery I stood my ground and asked, “What happened to your arm?”
Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
He stared down at me as if he suspected I was insane. Well, why would he be any different from anybody else?
“What?” He still seemed pretty mad. A good sign of this was when his chest started to rise and fall as if he’d been running, which it was doing now.
So I should have known better than to do what I did next, which was reach out and run a finger down the scar I’d just spied, snaking up the underside of his arm, then disappearing into his black sleeve.
I should never have said, “That one’s new.”
But I did anyway.
He jerked his arm away as if my finger were a live wire and I’d just tried to electrocute him.
“Stop that,” he said, glaring. “It’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing to me,” I said worriedly. I’d started to add a few things together in my head and didn’t like what I was coming up with. “Is that a consequence?”
His eyes narrowed. I could feel the heat from his body, and smell the scent I remembered so well — a mix of wood smoke and something that reminded me of autumn.
“I am not a bird,” he said in a dangerous voice. “I don’t require aid, from you or anyone else. Does your mother know where you are right now?”
It was funny that he mentioned my mother. Because it was her voice I was hearing in my head just then, urging me to tell him that thing I hadn’t said the last time I’d seen him, that awful day at school…that thing he hadn’t given me a chance to say. He’d left before I could.
Well, he’d had to. The police were coming. Again.
Not that my mother knew anything about him, except what the psychiatrists (and now, I knew, Grandma) all believed: that he wasn’t real.
But if Mom had known what I knew about him, she’d have wanted me to say it. I obviously needed to say it, now more than ever, because it was clear that my initial assessment of him hadn’t been that far off:
He was a wild thing, like that dove I’d found, badly in need of someone’s aid, even if he didn’t agree.
And though by helping him, I might only be hurting him more, I had to at least try.
So I said what I probably should have said to him a long time ago: “I’m sorry.”
His eyes narrowed even more. “Pardon me?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, more loudly this time. “For what I did to you the day I died. If there were…consequences. Especially for you.”
He didn’t respond, except to continue to stare down at me as if I were the one with the antisocial personality disorder. Who gives a girl a necklace — especially one with a stone that changed colors like the sky, sometimes gray as a February morning, other times, black as midnight — and then hurls it across a cemetery when she very politely tries to give it back because she suspects he might be enduring consequences on her behalf?
But why was I the only one apologizing? It would have been nice to hear a “sorry” or two out of him.
Because he had been horrible to me the day we’d met.
And, yes, he’d sort of made up for some of it by what he’d done for me at the jewelry store, and later, at school with Mr. Mueller.
But still. I’d lost so much. True, I’d gotten my life back. But what about all the things I hadn’t gotten back? Like my parents’ marriage, and Hannah, for instance. I hadn’t been back at school for even a full day after I got out of the hospital before my then best friend, Hannah Chang, dumped me for telling her that — among other things, like hanging out at the mall hoping to catch glimpses of her older brother’s friends, and neglecting Double Dare — the “Hold your breath when you go by the graveyard, or evil spirits will possess your soul” thing we used to like to play was stupid, and that I wasn’t doing it anymore.
True, at fifteen, we were too old for things like that, anyway.
But I hadn’t helped matters by cheerfully informing her, “Don’t worry about the evil, Hannah. I can see it now. And I’ll protect you from it.”
No wonder she called me crazy. It’s what everyone at school started calling me afterwards.
I guess I can’t blame them. Why wouldn’t you call someone who says she can see evil — and has the ability to protect people from it — crazy? Especially when she later failed so spectacularly to do so.
I know Hannah only called me crazy because she was worried about me. She must have thought I’d come back from the hospital after my accident acting…well, a little mentally unstable.
Hannah told me she was sorry later, and I could tell she really meant it. Friends sometimes drift apart, she said. Like she had with Double Dare. She just didn’t have time for horses anymore, she explained. She’d moved on to other things. Like basketball. And boys.
I told her it was fine. By then I was way too deeply dug into my real-life glass coffin to care anymore — about her, about the evil I’d promised to protect her from, or even the fact that everyone thought I was crazy.
It wasn’t until the following year that I realized what a mess I’d made of everything.
By then it was too late for Hannah, of course.
I knew I couldn’t blame any of that on John. It’s only in fairy tales that princesses can afford to wait for the handsome prince to save them. In real life, they have to bust out of their own coffins and do the saving themselves.
And in what fairy tale would John ever be any sane person’s idea of Prince Charming anyway? He was the opposite of charming. More like Prince Terrifying.
But then…maybe he couldn’t help being terrifying.
Any more than I could help being the way I am, or reacting to him the way I had when I was fifteen.
“I’m not just apologizing,” I said, wondering why it was that, now that I was older, I still couldn’t seem to find the right thing to say to him, “because of what you did for me in the jewelry store, or last spring at my old school, either.”
This time, instead of tilting his head, he just tilted a single dark eyebrow. This didn’t exactly make things easier. His expression was still impossible to read.
“This has nothing to do with that,” I said when he remained silent. “Not that I’m not grateful. Because I am. I’m sorry I didn’t thank you then. Things just got a little…hectic after you left.”
Hectic was hardly the word to describe the firestorm John had left in his wake the day he showed up at the Westport Academy for Girls.
“Which,” he said, “is why you and your mother are here now. Making a new start.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So I’m not going to be needing you at my new school. And just so you know, I had that situation back in Westport completely under control before you showed up.”
Now both eyebrows rose.
“I did,” I insisted. “I didn’t need your help. That’s what the camera was for —”
His hand shot out, so quickly the gesture was a blur, on the word camera. Before I knew it, he’d grabbed my upper arm in a grip that didn’t hurt, exactly, but wasn’t gentle, either, and I was being dragged towards him.
The shades that had been pulled down over those eyes finally came flying up again — just for a moment.
“What camera?” he demanded.
“The camera,” I murmured, beginning to think I probably shouldn’t have opened my mouth about this, “that I set up inside my backpack —”
To say he looked shocked would have been an understatement of the grossest proportions.
“Are you telling me that you planned it?” he asked. “What happened that day with your teacher. That was on purpose? You meant for him to do that to you?”
Maybe he really wasn’t followi
ng me around. Because if he had been, surely he’d have known about this.
“Well,” I said, my mouth dry. “Yes.” Then, before he had a chance to explode, since I could see he was about to, I added quickly, “It was the only way I could get proof of what Mr. Mueller was really like, because no one believed that he and Hannah had…”
My voice trailed off, because when I glanced up into his face, I saw that his mouth was pressed into a flat line…like the one my heart had gone into the day I’d fallen into his world.
I knew this wasn’t good. This was all very, very bad.
“But I never intended to let it get that far,” I said quickly. “I took total responsibility for everything that happened that —”
His grip on my arm tightened.
“How could you have put yourself in such a dangerous situation in the first place?” he demanded. “And for something so stupid? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?”
Well, yes. I did…now. Back then, I hadn’t had the slightest idea, or I wouldn’t have tried it.
But I said, trying to shrug it off, “Really, it wasn’t that big a —”
“You shouldn’t have been there,” he said through gritted teeth. “Any more than you should be here now.”
And the next thing I knew, he was physically dragging me away from the crypt.
“The cemetery gates are locked at night,” he muttered. Poinciana blossoms exploded beneath those heavy black boots.
I barely heard him. It was true that once, I had somehow managed to escape from him — and from death. But that had been because of those defibrillation paddles and that shot of epinephrine back in the real world…or so the doctors insisted. My escape had had nothing to do with anything I’d done back in his world, they said. Because his world wasn’t real.
Except — as I knew better than anyone — it was.
“How did you even get in here? That fence is seven feet high. With spikes at the top,” he was saying under this breath.
