Underworld

by Meg Cabot

  Tears stung my own eyes … not only because I was so disappointed, but because of the cold. A biting wind blew in from the surface of the lake, whipping my hair around my face and flattening my skirt to my legs.

  “Pierce,” John said, after taking the driftwood from Typhon’s mouth and tossing it away again for the dog to chase. He put out a long arm to catch me by the waist, then pull me to him. “I know you’re worried about your family, and you want to go back to Isla Huesos to help them. But Mr. Liu was right. What you’re seeing on that screen may not have happened yet. It may never happen. It’s more like a glimpse, a … shadow of something that could happen in your cousin’s life. What we have to be concerned with are the facts. We know for a fact that someone in your family has tried to murder you … twice. Did it ever occur to you that what you’re seeing might be a trick by the Furies to lure you from here so they can try to kill you again? It’s you who needs protecting, Pierce, not your cousin.”

  “I’m already as close to dead as I can get, living here,” I pointed out. “What does it matter if they kill me?”

  “They can still hurt you,” he reminded me, in a voice that was every bit as cold as the wind from which his body shielded me. “In ways you can’t imagine, and that I’d rather you never find out.”

  He didn’t have to say more. The scars left over from similar attacks — not just on him, but on his shipmates, too — were testament enough.

  “Oh, John,” I said, with a groan, dropping my head to rest it against his chest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said this morning. Not the way it came out, anyway. I was upset.”

  I felt his lips brush my hair. “I know,” he said.

  His voice wasn’t cold anymore, but when I looked up at him, I saw that he wasn’t smiling, either. Nor did he smile when Typhon, struggling to return with the driftwood, tripped over it instead, then fell into the waves.

  It was going to take more than an apology, I suspected, to make him smile again.

  “Is this why you hid my phone from me?” I asked. “So I wouldn’t be able to see what the Furies were doing to my family? Did you know something like this was going to happen? Did you know all along?”

  “No,” John said, his arms tightening around me. “I didn’t even know you had a phone, to be honest. You dropped your bag when you crossed over yesterday, and Henry must have put it away. He was trained to wait on ship’s officers. He’s a little fuzzy on any aspects of the job outside those duties.”

  I remembered the orderliness with which John’s clothes had been organized, as opposed to his books.

  “Oh,” I said, reaching up to wipe my streaming eyes. All I could hear was the wind and, more distantly, the sound of waves splashing against the hull of a tall boat that was pulling away from a nearby dock. Though the boat stood higher than a three-story house, and held many hundreds of people, none of them waved the way passengers on cruise ships so often do when departing from an exotic port. This wasn’t that kind of boat, and they weren’t leaving on that kind of trip.

  I saw two large figures in black moving busily around the crowded dock. One had a long dark braid, the other a scar across his face. Mr. Liu and Frank.

  “I’ve never seen one of those work here,” John mused as he looked down at my cell phone. “And certainly not in that way. Henry started calling the tablets we found when we arrived here ‘magic mirrors’ because they work like the ones in the fairy tales. Ask them a question and they tell you the answer … generally only to which boat the departed soul in front of you is assigned, but to him, that seemed magical enough….”

  I probably should have taken the fact that the Fates — or whoever — had granted my smartphone the same power as the “magic mirrors” John and his crew had as evidence of my burgeoning consort powers, or something.

  But I was still too upset about Alex to think of anything else.

  “Henry said sometimes your tablets tell you more.” I looked up into his eyes. “Henry said he saw his mother get her purse snatched once, and you went and rescued her.”

  John looked skyward. Only in this case, the sky was the ceiling of the vast subterranean cavern in which the Underworld was sealed. It glowed, as always, a depressing shade of grayish pink.

  “That was different,” he said. “Henry’s mother was being attacked by a local street thug back in his native village. It wasn’t a trick of the Furies, as this very likely is. Here, put this on. I can tell you’re freezing.”

  He didn’t lend me the leather coat he was wearing in order to keep me warm, the way he had the last time I’d been in this same place. Instead, he pulled something from a polished wooden rack. Similar racks, I noticed, appeared at random intervals all along the twin docks.

  After he unfolded it, I saw that it was a blanket, kind of like the ones they give out on long airplane flights. Only this one was much thicker, made to withstand the chilly dampness of the beach.

  “I know you,” he added, helping to arrange the blanket over my shoulders. “You won’t drop the subject until I agree to check on your cousin, so I’ll do it. But only under one condition.”

  “John,” I said, whirling around to clutch his arm again.

  “Don’t get too excited,” he warned. “You haven’t heard the condition.”

  “Oh,” I said, eagerly. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Thank you. Alex has never had a very good life — his mother ran away when he was a baby, and his dad spent most of his life in jail…. But, John, what is all this?” I swept my free hand out to indicate the people remaining on the dock, waiting for the boat John had said was arriving soon. I’d noticed some of them had blankets like the one he’d wrapped around me. “A new customer service initiative?”

  John looked surprised at my change of topic … then uncomfortable. He stooped to reach for the driftwood Typhon had dashed up to drop at his feet. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, stiffly.

  “You’re giving blankets away to keep them warm while they wait. When did this start happening?”

  “You mentioned some things when you were here the last time….” He avoided meeting my gaze by tossing the stick for his dog. “They stayed with me.”

  My eyes widened. “Things I said?”

  “About how I should treat the people who end up here.” He paused at the approach of a wave — though it was yards off — and made quite a production of moving me, and my delicate slippers, out of its path. “So I decided to make a few changes.”

  It felt as if one of the kind of flowers I liked — a wild daisy, perhaps — had suddenly blossomed inside my heart.

  “Oh, John,” I said, and rose onto my toes to kiss his cheek.

  He looked more than a little surprised by the kiss. I thought I might actually have seen some color come into his cheeks.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  “Henry said nothing was the same after I left. I assumed he meant everything was much worse. I couldn’t imagine it was the opposite, that things were better.”

  John’s discomfort at having been caught doing something kind — instead of reckless or violent — was sweet.

  “Henry talks too much,” he muttered. “But I’m glad you like it. Not that it hasn’t been a lot of added work. I’ll admit it’s cut down on the complaints, though, and even the fighting amongst our rowdier passengers. So you were right. Your suggestions helped.”

  I beamed up at him.

  Keeper of the dead. That’s how Mr. Smith, the cemetery sexton, had referred to John once, and that’s what he was. Although the title “protector of the dead” seemed more applicable.

  It was totally silly how much hope I was filled with by the fact that he’d remembered something I’d said so long ago — like maybe this whole consort thing might work out after all.

  I gasped a moment later when there was a sudden rush of white feathers, and the bird he’d given me emerged from the grizzly gray fog seeming to engulf the whole beach, plopping down onto the sand beside us with a d
isgruntled little humph.

  “Oh, Hope,” I said, dashing tears of laughter from my eyes. Apparently I had only to feel the emotion, and she showed up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you behind. It was his fault, you know.” I pointed at John.

  The bird ignored us both, poking around in the flotsam washed ashore by the waves, looking, as always, for something to eat.

  “Her name is Hope?” John asked, the corners of his mouth beginning to tug upwards.

  “No.” I bristled, thinking he was making fun of me. Then I realized I’d been caught. “Well, all right … so what if it is? I’m not going to name her after some depressing aspect of the Underworld like you do all your pets. I looked up the name Alastor. That was the name of one of the death horses that drew Hades’s chariot. And Typhon?” I glanced at the dog, cavorting in and out of the waves, seemingly oblivious of the cold. “I can only imagine, but I’m sure it means something equally unpleasant.”

  “Typhon was the father of all monsters,” John said. He’d given up trying to suppress his grin. “The deadliest of all the creatures in Greek mythology.”

  “Nice,” I said sarcastically. “Well, I prefer to name my pets something that reminds me there’s —”

  “Hope?” His grin broadened.

  “Very funny.” True, I’d admitted to him that I was inexperienced. But I didn’t have to prove it by acting like I was twelve. “But you must think there’s hope, too, or you wouldn’t be taking me to help Alex.”

  The smile vanished. “I never said I was taking you to help your cousin Alex. I said I was going myself, and only under one condition — that you stay here, where it’s safe.”

  My heart fell. I couldn’t hide my disappointment, so I didn’t bother trying.

  “John, how are you going to help Alex if I don’t go with you?” I asked. “You don’t even know where the coffin is hidden. I do. And supposing Alex hasn’t gotten himself locked into it yet … how are you going to talk him out of doing whatever boneheaded thing it is he’s planning on doing that’s going to get him locked into it? You can’t. He’ll never listen to you, because he doesn’t know who you are. Which is why I have to go with you.”

  “Did you not listen to a word I said?” John looked down at me like the awards for most naïve girl in the world had already been handed out, and I’d won first prize. “This whole thing could be a trap.”

  “All the more reason I should go with you,” I said. “If there are Furies in the area, I can warn you.” I pulled out my diamond. It was back to a silvery gray. “That’s why I was looking for you in the first place —”

  He knit his brow. “What are you talking about?”

  “My diamond turned black when I first saw the video of Alex —”

  “That’s impossible,” he said flatly.

  I was getting a bit tired of everyone telling me how impossible everything I seemed perfectly capable of doing and observing was.

  “No,” I said. “It did. It does, every time the video plays —”

  “It should only turn color in the presence of Furies.”

  “And you should show up on film,” I reminded him. “But you don’t, which was how I got accused of assaulting my study hall teacher last year, when you were the one who actually did it, even though there was a video of the whole thing. You just weren’t on it.”

  He glowered as he always used to whenever the subject of Mr. Mueller came up. “That man was evil. You should never have —”

  “— gotten myself into that situation, I know. But anyway, that’s when I saw Henry and followed him to the kitchen, and met everyone, and we started talking —”

  “I was wondering where they all disappeared to,” John muttered. “I should have known you were the distraction. It’s nothing to do with you,” he added quickly, noticing how I’d raised my eyebrows at the word distraction. “They’re good men — they’ve stuck by me through —” Whatever he’d been about to say he bit off suddenly, saying instead, “Well, quite a lot. But as you’ve probably already gathered, we don’t get a lot of company around here. At least, not of the living variety. I’m sorry if they were pestering you —”

  “They weren’t pestering me,” I said, wondering exactly what it was he and the crew of the Liberty had endured. “And they clearly adore you. But there’s something I don’t understand … Aren’t you a little young to be a captain? Not that I’m sure you weren’t wonderful at it,” I added hastily, “but Frank’s got to be your same age, and Mr. Graves and Mr. Liu are both older than you. How on earth did it happen?”

  He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss.

  “The title is honorary,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t stop them calling me that, even though I’ve asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the … accident.”

  Accident? I supposed this was another one of those things he didn’t want to tell me because it would make me hate him.

  Recognizing that dropping that particular topic — for now at least — would probably be best, I said, “John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know exactly where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos — just this one time, to help Alex — and I’ll never mention going there again. I’ll even,” I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, “forgive you for the waffles —”

  John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings.

  “Pierce,” he said. “Do you mean that?”

  When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned.

  “You’ll never mention going back to Isla Huesos again if I take you there right now, this once, to talk to your cousin Alex?” he demanded. “You’ll give … cohabitation another chance?”

  His sudden fierceness was making me nervous.

  “Of course, John,” I said, “But it’s not like I have a choice.”

  “What if you did?” he asked, his grip tightening.

  I blinked. “But I can’t. You said —”

  He gave me a little shake. “Never mind what I said. What if I was wrong?”

  I reached up to lay a hand on his cheek. It felt a little scratchy, because he hadn’t shaved. I didn’t care about stubble. What I cared about was the desperate need I saw in his eyes. The need for me.

  “I’d come back,” I said, simply, “to stay with you.”

  A second later, the lake — and everything around it — was gone.

  When John flung us both back to earth, it wasn’t to the middle of a breezeway at Isla Huesos High School, the last place I’d been before I’d found myself in the realm of the dead, and so where I’d been expecting to next cross paths with the living.

  Which was why I was surprised to find myself instead inside a small, dark room that smelled strongly of earth, ankle deep in dead leaves … and bloodred flower blossoms that looked strangely familiar.

  “Where are we?” I asked, ducking my head. The vaulted ceiling, supported by rough-hewn wooden beams that looked at least a century old, was lower than my standing height.

  “Shhh,” John said. He’d been forced to kneel, and was peering out from behind the rusted metal grate that barred the single door. “There are people out there. I don’t want them to hear us.”

  I stared around the bare room, which was windowless, save for a few tiny cross-shaped slots in the thick brick-and-plaster walls. I could see that a substantial shiny new chain had been wrapped several times around the grate and securely fastened with a padlock, to make certain that no one could get in or out of the structure.

  Slowly, comprehension dawned. A metal grate, chained and locked? A dim, cramped space? Dead leaves? Red flower blossoms?

  “Are we inside your crypt?” I hissed, rushing to Jo
hn’s side, the dead leaves and flowers crunching beneath my feet.

  I didn’t rush to John’s side for fear of ghosts. I had just exited an entire realm of ghosts. I’d had a near-death experience before. I knew what being dead was like.

  I’d simply never been on this side of death before.

  “Yes,” John whispered. He was still peering out through the door. “This is the crypt they assigned me.”

  Not where his body was buried. I noticed the subtle wording right away.

  Looking around, I saw that he was right. John’s crypt was empty, except for the two of us, and lots and lots of dead leaves. There was no coffin.

  Wasn’t that the point, after all, of Coffin Night, which Isla Huesos High School celebrated every year, even though the administration frowned on it? The senior class built John a coffin — though they’d been doing it so long, no one remembered anymore who the coffin was for, or why they even did it — and hid it.

  The hiding is symbolic, Mr. Smith had told me, explaining the ritual. The hiding represents burying.

  All so John would stop haunting the island. Because however John had died, all those years ago — if he had died — his body had never been found. And his anger over that was thought to have brought the hurricane in 1846 that had killed so many people, and caused the old Isla Huesos Cemetery to flood, and displace all the coffins buried there.

  That’s how the new Isla Huesos Cemetery — the one we were in now — had become such a famous tourist destination, because of its unusual crypts — all raised in order to keep the coffins within them above sea level, so they wouldn’t be washed out to sea (or into people’s yards) like they had during that devastating hurricane in October 1846.

  I shivered, kneeling beside John in the leaves and dead flower blossoms that carpeted the floor of his tomb.

  “Why did we come back this way instead of popping up somewhere less … cramped?” I asked, substituting the word cramped for creepy. I was trying not to feel weirded out that I was in my boyfriend’s crypt. It was only a building, after all.