Underworld

by Meg Cabot

  This was no foundation on which to build a lasting relationship. It wasn’t as if my parents were going to like him much, either, if they ever got the chance to meet him. I wasn’t sure my dad would consider any guy good enough for me, but a death deity who’d kidnapped me from my school cafeteria — even to protect me from Grandma — was never going to be high on his list.

  And what about what Richard Smith, the sexton of the Isla Huesos Cemetery, had said to me that rainy day in his office about why John might have given me the necklace Hades had forged for Persephone?

  Clearly there had to have been some kind of mistake. Persephone had been the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and the goddess of springtime. I’d been kicked out of one of the most exclusive girls’ schools on the East Coast for assault, my GPA was marginal at best, and I was probably the only seventeen-year-old girl in the entire state of Florida who’d yet to pass her driver’s license exam. How did any of that qualify me for the position of Queen of the Underworld?

  Persephone and I did have something in common, however. Our boyfriends had the same job …

  … a reality that was impossible to ignore when the deep, sad sound of a marina horn cut through the stillness of the morning air. I recognized it immediately from my last visit to his home, and knew all too well what it signified.

  “They’re waiting for me down at the beach,” John said with a groan, dropping his head to the indentation between my neck and shoulder.

  These words chilled me far more than any nightmare ever could. They, I knew, were the souls of the dead, who gathered by the shore of a massive underground lake just on the other side of the walled courtyard beyond the stone arches, to wait for the boats that would ferry them to their final destination….

  John was the person who decided which boat they would board. The horn I’d heard signaled that a boat was arriving to pick up the latest batch of passengers.

  I shivered, feeling suddenly cold. A dankness seemed to cling to every of inch of my body, despite the fire in the hearth and the warm tenderness of his touch. He must have noticed, since he reached for my hand and pressed it against his naked heart.

  “Pierce,” he said, as if I’d wounded him somehow. “Don’t look like that.”

  “I didn’t mean to.” I felt foolish. But I couldn’t help remembering my last visit to his world, when I’d been one of those souls, waiting on that beach to be sorted. “It’s not your fault. It’s just … that horn.”

  He kissed the palm of my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. All the laughter was gone, both from his eyes and his voice. “Sorry for all of this — sorry for your nightmares, sorry for what your mother must be going through, not knowing where you are, and sorry most of all for the times when I … well, when I didn’t behave around you as I ought to have. You weren’t far from wrong last night when you called me … what was it? Oh, right. A wild thing.” The entreaty in his eyes was difficult to resist. “But you know I only ever acted that way when you were putting yourself in danger … or when you were acting as if you didn’t care about me.”

  With the hand that wasn’t holding mine, he reached up to trace the links of the gold necklace I wore around my neck.

  “For so long, I thought you hated me,” he went on, his eyes hooded by his long, dark lashes. They were completely wasted on a boy. “If I had known that you never stopped wearing this after I gave it to you, I might have been a little less … agitated.”

  I felt myself blush, and not only because his wandering fingers had strayed dangerously close to the neckline of my gown, seeming to search for my own heart.

  “Well, I think you’ve figured out by now that I never hated you,” I said, steering his hand firmly to the less intimate territory of my waist. “And I know you didn’t mean to be so wild then, John. I’m not sure about now….”

  My primness brought a smile back to his lips. With his heavily muscled frame, those scars, and that long dark hair that had a tendency to fall into those absurdly light eyes, I was certain few girls would have called him handsome, much less cute.

  I was equally certain, however, there wasn’t a single girl my age who’d have been able to resist him. There was something so ruthlessly masculine about him that it was impossible not to feel a kind of magnetic attraction.

  Especially when he smiled. Smiling, he went from the brooding juvenile delinquent the girls back at Isla Huesos High School might have whispered about, to the misunderstood hottie they’d definitely have slipped their number if he’d asked for it … and maybe more.

  I couldn’t help feeling as if in escaping with him to the Underworld to avoid being killed, I’d gotten myself into a whole different level of trouble.

  “Pierce, I know how many questions you must have,” he said. “And I swear I’ll answer them all — the ones I can, anyway — as soon as I get back. But for now, just know that I mean to — I’m going to — make this place feel like home to you, if you’ll give me the chance.”

  Home? The Underworld? A gigantic underground cavern where the sun never shines, wracked by perpetual damp, to which dead people show up every five minutes?

  I raised my eyebrows. “Okay. But first, maybe we should talk about —”

  Boundaries. That’s what I meant to say. But he distracted me again.

  “I know you never liked school,” he went on, the corners of his mouth still irresistibly turned up, “or you wouldn’t have gotten yourself thrown out of your last one. I know, I know … that was mostly my fault.” He grinned down at me. I don’t know what he was finding so amusing. He certainly hadn’t been laughing about what had happened with my study hall teacher at the time. “But anyway, there’s no school here. You’ll like that. But there’s still plenty here with which to entertain yourself while I’m working. I can get you all the books you need to graduate from high school, since I know that’s what you said you wanted. In the meantime, there are all my books….”

  I’d seen his books. Almost all of them had been written before his birth, which had been more than a century and a half before mine. Many of them were books of love poems. He’d tried to read to me from one of them the night before, in order to cheer me up.

  It hadn’t worked.

  I thought it more polite to say “Thank you, John,” than “Do you have any books that aren’t about love? And young couples expressing that love? Because I do not need encouragement in that direction right now.”

  “And you have this whole castle to explore,” he said, an eager light in his eyes. “The gardens are beautiful….”

  I glanced skeptically at the billowing white curtains. I’d already seen the gardens outside them. Deathly black lilies and poisonous-looking mushrooms were beautiful, in their own way, especially to people like my mother, an environmental biologist who had a fondness for exotic plants and trees.

  But I’d always preferred ordinary flowers, like daisies — the kind that grew wild, not cultivated in a garden. What chance did a poor, wild daisy have against a sophisticated black lily?

  The night before, when I’d still been determined to escape and had tried to climb the garden walls, I’d seen that John’s castle was on a little island, surrounded by water. There were no boats to cross it. Even if I could find one, the only place to go was the next island. That was the one where he worked, though. And there was no way to get from there to where I wanted to go, back to the land of the living.

  “But you should know I’ve told my men that if they do see you anywhere you’re not supposed to be, they’re to bring you straight to me.” Had he read my thoughts? He must have noticed the owlish look I gave him, since he added, his voice growing hard, “Pierce, it’s for your own good. There are dangers here that you —”

  “You told me there’s no one here who can hurt me,” I interrupted. “You said I’m safe here.”

  “You’re safer, because I can protect you,” John said. “But you have a heartbeat, and you’re in the land of the dead —”

  “You have a heartbe
at,” I pointed out. I’d felt it beating, as strong and steady as my own, beneath my hand. He certainly seemed fit for someone who was supposed to have died so many years earlier, not to mention so violently in my dream.

  “Yes,” he said. “But that’s different. I’m … Mr. Smith already told you what I am.”

  I thought it strange that he didn’t want to say the words death deity out loud. It wasn’t like I hadn’t noticed he had gifts that were unlike a normal nineteen-year-old boy’s.

  Then again, I was having communication difficulties of my own, so maybe we were even. I decided to drop it.

  “So Furies can find me here, too?” I asked instead.

  “They can,” he admitted, sounding more like himself again. “But it will be much harder for them to attack you in a fortified castle in the Underworld than in your high-school cafeteria. Still, even with me around, and a necklace that warns when Furies are coming,” he added, tugging on the chain I wore around my neck so that the large round diamond at the end of it slipped from the bodice of my gown, then tumbled into his palm, “that doesn’t mean you’re invincible, Pierce, whatever you might like to think.”

  I sucked in my breath defensively. “But Mr. Smith said —”

  “Mr. Smith is a fine cemetery sexton,” he said, holding the diamond up so that it caught the light filtering in from outside the stone arches. Whenever John was around, the stone glowed a deep silver gray, the same color as his eyes, but when people like my grandmother, who definitely did not have my best intentions at heart, were present, it turned a warning shade of black. “And I’ll admit he’s been better at his job than any of his predecessors. But if he’s got you under the impression that just because this necklace was forged by Hades to warn Persephone when Furies were present, it also has the power to defeat them, you’re wrong. Nothing can defeat them. Nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried everything.”

  His scars were testament enough to that.

  Imagining what he must have endured — and remembering what he had gone through in my dream — caused tears to gather under my eyelashes. One of them escaped and began to trickle down my cheek before I could wipe it away without him noticing.

  “Pierce,” he said, looking alarmed. Nothing seemed to discomfit him more than the sight of my tears. “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not,” I lied. “I’ve seen what the Furies have done to you, and it’s so unfair. There’s got to be a way to stop them. There’s got to be. And in the meantime, can’t I at least go back to warn my mom about what’s going on? Even if it’s only for five minutes —”

  His expression darkened. “Pierce,” he said. “We talked about this. Your mother is in no danger. But you are. It’s too risky right now.”

  “I know, but I’ve never been away from her for this long without her knowing where I am. She’s got to be freaking out. And what about my cousin Alex? You know he lives with my grandmother, and now that Uncle Chris is in jail, Alex will be with my grandmother all alone —”

  “No, Pierce,” John said, so sharply I jumped.

  Thunder crashed, seemingly directly overhead. Technically, where we were — hundreds of miles beneath the earth’s crust — there shouldn’t have been any meteorological phenomena. But it was one of John’s many special gifts that, when he felt something very deeply, he could make thunder — and lightning — appear … with his mind.

  I blinked at him. He might have liked to believe otherwise, but it was clear the wild part of him was far from tamed. And as much as John might have wanted to pretend that this place was my home, it wasn’t.

  The palace was a prison. He was the warden … even if he was a warden who was only holding me captive for the best of reasons, to keep me safe from my own relatives.

  “You don’t need to shake the place down,” I said reprovingly. “A simple no will suffice.”

  He looked a little sheepish. When he spoke again, it was in a much gentler tone.

  “I’m sorry. Force of habit.” He gave me another one of his heart-stopping smiles, then extended his palms. “I know something that will make you feel better.”

  If I hadn’t been looking down at that exact moment, I wouldn’t have believed my eyes. I’d have thought he’d made a sleight of hand, pulled it from his sleeve like a magician.

  He wasn’t wearing any sleeves, though, and he was no magician. He’d almost killed two men in my presence using nothing but his fingertips. He traveled back and forth between two dimensions, his world and mine, far more easily than other people commuted to and from work, because he didn’t need to use public transportation, or even a car. He just blinked, and poof. It was done.

  “There,” he said. “What do you think?”

  I … I don’t understand,” I said, looking down at the small white creature that nestled in his hands.

  “She’s for you,” John explained, still smiling. “To keep you company when I’m away. I know how you love birds.”

  He was right about that. I had a weakness for animals of any kind, especially the sick and injured. It was how John and I had met, in the Isla Huesos Cemetery, when he’d come across me weeping inconsolably over a wounded bird. I’d been all of seven years old, but he’d been exactly the same as he was now — the age at which he’d died and become the death deity of the Underworld beneath Isla Huesos.

  In an effort to stop my childish tears, he’d taken the bird’s limp body from me. A second later, it had flown off, its life magically restored by him.

  How could either of us have known then that it was my grandmother who had purposefully injured the creature, using it to lure me into meeting John not only that first time, but a second time, as well?

  That second time, since I had been fifteen and not a child, a different kind of magic had occurred … the kind that can happen between any two people who find themselves attracted to each other.

  The only problem was, that time it had been me, and not the bird, who’d died. And it was here, in the Underworld, that we’d encountered each other.

  Back then, I’d been much too frightened of this place — and of him, and of my feelings for him — to think of staying.

  Everything was different now, I realized. Now I only felt frightened of losing him the way I had in my terrible nightmare …

  … and of how quickly he was able to banish that feeling with his kisses, the way he had when I’d woken in his arms. But that fear was a whole other issue.

  I guess, considering our history, I could hardly blame him for believing that a pet bird would banish all my fears. The bird in his hands now looked very much like the one from the day we’d met … some kind of dove, but with black feathers beneath her wings and tail. My mother would have known exactly what type of bird she was, of course. It was from her that I’d inherited my love for animals.

  “Is this the same bird…?” I let my voice trail off. Doves don’t live that long, do they? This one looked as bright-eyed and alert as the one that day in the cemetery. She was even cooing softly.

  Unlike that day in the cemetery, however, when John uncupped his hands, this bird didn’t instantly unfold her wings and fly away. She stood and peered about, taking in her surroundings, including me. I couldn’t help letting out a soft “Ooh!” of delight.

  John smiled, pleased that his gift was a success.

  “No, that was a wild bird that returned to its mate after we released it. This one is tame, see?” He held out his finger, and the bird butted her face against it, smoothing her feathers. “But she does look a little like that bird, which is why I thought you’d like her. Why? Would you prefer a wild bird?” His eyebrows constricted. “I could find one for you. But then it would have to stay in a cage to keep it from flying away. I didn’t think you’d like that….”

  “No,” I said hastily. I wouldn’t like that. Then there’d be two of us who were prisoners.

  But I thought it better not to say this second part out loud.

  “That’s good,” John said, holding the bird toward
s me. “You’ll have to think of a name for her.”

  “A name?” I stretched out a finger, as John had done, to see if the bird would rub her head against it. “I’ve never named an animal before. I wasn’t allowed to have any pets growing up. My father always said he was allergic.”

  Now John’s eyebrows lifted. “Allergic? Even to birds?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking of the oil spill my dad’s company was responsible for, and had recently had to clean up. “Allergies are sometimes an excuse he uses for anything messy he doesn’t want to have to deal with.”

  Instead of rubbing my finger with her head, the bird stretched out her wings, fluttered them a few times, then flew away. I let out a cry of dismay, thinking that she wasn’t as tame as John had thought, and that she was going to escape.

  She flew only as far as the other end of the room, however, landing on the back of one of the thronelike chairs positioned on either side of the long dining table.

  “She’s hungry,” John said, with a grin. “You must be, too. Breakfast is waiting. I’m sorry I don’t have time to eat with you before I go, but I think you’ll find everything here you need….”

  For the first time since waking, I noticed that something in the room where I’d fallen asleep was different, besides the fact that there was a boy on the bed with me. The table was covered in silver platters laden with fruit of every variety; plates of perfectly crisp toast dripping with butter; golden brown muffins arrayed in ivory baskets; soft-boiled eggs sitting in jeweled cups; icy pitchers of juice; and pots of aromatic tea and coffee. They had all appeared as magically as if brought by an invisible waitstaff.

  “John,” I murmured, rising from the bed and going to stand by the table, staring down in astonishment at the gold-rimmed china plates and intricately embroidered napkins in sapphire rings. “How did all of this get here?”

  “Oh,” he said casually. “It just does. Coffee?” He lifted a gleaming silver pot. “Or do I seem to remember you being more partial to tea?” His grin was wicked.