by Meg Cabot
Frank tilted the rearview mirror so he could see Alex.
“It’s true, mate,” he said. “First time I ever met her, you were all she talked about, how she had to go back and fetch you out of that coffin. Nearly drove the captain mad.”
I gave Frank a disapproving look in the mirror to show him that I didn’t need his help. When I looked back at Alex, I could see that his expression remained defiant, but his eyes had a sheen to them, reflecting the light … or maybe some unshed tears.
“I did worry a lot about you,” I said to Alex. “And your dad, too. But if we don’t fix what’s happening in the Underworld, your dad’s problems aren’t going to matter, nor is anyone else’s who lives in Isla Huesos, because Isla Huesos itself isn’t going to be around for much longer.”
Then it occurred to me. Alex’s eyes were reflecting the light.
What light? All the streetlamps were out, and the dashboard console was glowing green.
“Someone’s coming,” I said, glancing away from Alex and down at the diamond at the end of my necklace. Sure enough, it was no longer the comforting purple it always was in Kayla’s presence but a deep black.
“What’s that?” Kayla asked, pointing.
Through the streams of rain battering the windshield, I could see a single white arc of light swinging along the sidewalk.
“A lantern,” Frank said.
“No,” I said, my skin growing cold, and not because of my damp clothes or because Kayla had the AC set so high. “It’s a flashlight.”
“A flashlight?” Kayla echoed in disbelief. “Who’d be out in weather like this?”
“No one we want to run into,” I said. “Start driving.”
“Where?” Kayla asked, beginning to back out from her parking space.
“Anywhere,” I said, reaching into my bag, at the same time that Alex said, “Except my house.”
Whoever was holding the flashlight noticed the lights on Kayla’s car and began to approach at a more rapid clip. I heard a male voice shouting. It was impossible to distinguish exactly what he said with all the wind and rain. But his voice sounded disturbingly familiar.
“Faster, Kayla,” I said tensely.
“I’m trying,” Kayla said. “But I was never good at parallel parking.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Frank said. “You should have let me drive —”
“You weren’t even born in this century,” Kayla snapped.
“He’s crossing the street,” Alex said as the shadowy figure loomed closer.
Suddenly the man was in front of the car, seemingly half blown there by the wind. The headlights from Kayla’s car threw his features into strong definition. I couldn’t help giving a gasp.
“Do you know him?” Frank asked, glancing back at me.
“From a long time ago,” I said, my voice barely audible above the pounding of the rain on the roof of the car and the rhythmic tempo of the windshield wipers. “But … it can’t be him. There’s no way he’d be here. There’s no way he’d —”
Though he couldn’t possibly have been able to see me through the windshield — especially with me in the backseat and the glare of the high beams in his face — it seemed to me as if our gazes locked. I could have sworn a little smile of triumph played upon his face.
“Pierce.” Now there was no way to mistake what he was saying. He raised his flashlight and pointed the beam directly at me, through the windshield. “Come out of the car, and I won’t have to hurt the others.”
I didn’t feel afraid, exactly. It was more a sense of inevitability, like I’d always known this moment was going to come. I wasn’t at all surprised that it came outside the cemetery gates John had kicked open in frustration when we’d last discussed this particular individual.
“Shit,” Kayla said. “He’s in front of us, and I can’t back up. We’re trapped.”
“Who is he?” Alex demanded. “What does he want with you?”
“Mr. Mueller, my teacher from my old school,” I said calmly. “See how he keeps one hand in his pocket?”
Everyone looked. Mr. Mueller did, indeed, have one hand clutched tightly around his long, heavy metallic flashlight, while the other he kept hidden away in the pocket of his long black rain slicker.
“John crushed that hand to pieces,” I explained, “when Mr. Mueller touched me inappropriately with it.”
I didn’t figure they needed to know the part about how, at the time, I’d been trying to entrap Mr. Mueller to prove he’d caused the suicide of my best friend, with whom he’d been having an affair.
“Great,” Alex said. “That’s just great, Pierce. So what’s he want now, the rest of his hand back?”
“Can’t you tell him we don’t have it?” Kayla asked with mounting hysteria.
“Don’t worry,” Frank said. “The captain took care of one hand. I’ll take care of the other.” He started to get out of the car.
“Frank,” I cried. Now I wasn’t feeling so calm. “Don’t —”
Mr. Mueller didn’t like Frank getting out of the car instead of me. He raised the flashlight high in the air, then brought the end of it down so hard on the windshield, it left a perfect imprint in the shape of the instrument. Crystalline lines spread out from the indentation, all the way towards Kayla, who screamed.
“No one gets out but the girl,” Mr. Mueller rasped, right before his mouth turned into a yawning chasm of blood and razor-sharp teeth, hundreds of them in multiple rows, like a shark.
Now it wasn’t only Kayla screaming in terror. Frank swiftly shut the door and locked it, even as the entity into which Mr. Mueller had turned scrambled for the handle.
“Drive,” I said, my heart slamming against the back of my ribs.
“There’s nowhere I can go,” Kayla said.
“Go forward,” I said as Mr. Mueller darted around the front of the car, clearly intending to reach her door.
“But we’ll hit him,” she cried.
“Exactly,” I said.
“I can’t kill someone!”
“You hit your brother in the head with a fire extinguisher.”
“But that was family! And I didn’t kill him.”
When she still didn’t move, frozen in terror behind the wheel, I dove between her seat and Frank’s to hit the gas pedal at her feet with my hands.
I couldn’t see where the car went. My gaze was on the gas pedal and Kayla’s purple silken slippers. But I felt the lurch as the small compact rocketed forward. The top of my head slammed into the dashboard as the car impacted something large and heavy, something that let out an unearthly scream before landing hard against the hood. Kayla, shrieking, steered wildly, seemingly to shake off the assailant, stepping on my fingers as she tried to brake, crying, “Pierce, Pierce, what are you doing? We hit him, oh, my God, Pierce, we hit him, it’s over, let go!”
Finally Frank wrapped strong hands around my arms and thrust me back into my seat, saying, “It’s all right. He’s gone.”
When I pushed my hair from my eyes and looked behind us, my heart still thumping like a drum, I saw that Frank was only partially correct. In the red glow of Kayla’s taillights lay a large misshapen lump of Mueller, rain pouring all around him.
Not too far from where he stretched across the middle of the road lay the heavy flashlight, its beam pointing haphazardly at his feet. That’s how I happened to notice his shoes.
“Tassels,” I said in disgust.
Alex, too, was turned in his seat.
“You guys,” he said. “He’s still moving.”
Disappointed, I said, “Kayla, back up over him.”
Kayla cried, “No! We should call an ambulance.”
“He was going to kill us.”
“He’s a Fury,” Frank said. “Let’s go. He’ll be all right.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a bolt of lightning shot down from the sky, striking a massive sapodilla tree in the yard of a nearby home. The ensuing fireball caused us all to duck and s
hield our eyes.
When we turned to look back, most of the sapodilla was gone. What was left of its trunk lay twisted and in flames in the middle of the road on top of Mr. Mueller’s remains, which steamed gently in the rain.
“Well,” Frank said, after a moment’s stunned silence. “He probably won’t be all right now.”
“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Kayla cried, gripping the steering wheel. “I just murdered someone! Someone not even related to me. A teacher!”
“You didn’t murder a teacher,” I said calmly. “I did. And I should have done it a long time ago. He was a perv who caused my best friend to kill herself. For all we know, he could be Thanatos.”
“The lightning is what actually killed him,” Frank pointed out. “Not us.”
“Still,” Kayla said as she gazed tearfully at her windshield. “Look what he did to my car. No way will my insurance cover this.”
“Do you want to save the Underworld,” I asked her. “Or not?”
Kayla shook her head, her aurora of bouncy curls restored, thanks to the AC.
“I just want to go home,” she said.
“Well, you won’t have a home anymore if these guys have their way. So how about you drive us to Mr. Smith’s house instead, and we find out what’s going on around here?” I glanced at Alex. “Is that okay?”
He was looking back at the massive branch covering Mr. Mueller’s corpse.
“What?” he asked. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking … maybe you did do a few things back at your old school in Connecticut other than sit around and make doilies.”
“Thanks for finally noticing,” I said.
They were awake now, and the hour drew nigh
At which our food used to be brought to us …
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XXXIII
Pierce?” Mr. Smith said, looking from me to Frank to Alex to Kayla and then back again as we stood, bedraggled from the rain we’d dashed through in order to get to his front porch. “What on earth —?”
His voice was nearly drowned out by the loud rock music booming in the background. It was a song my parents used to listen to a lot back when they were happily married.
Mr. Smith didn’t live too far from the cemetery, but his house was in a new condo village (designed to look like old Victorian town houses) off a pretty popular road in Isla Huesos known for its bars and restaurants. While everywhere else we’d driven was in total darkness — and some places half underwater, deserted except for TV vans and news journalists standing in the water in hip waders, reporting earnestly on the “life-threatening conditions” wrought by Hurricane Cassandra (Cassandra apparently being the name given to the “monstrous” hurricane bearing down on South Florida) — Mr. Smith’s town house was brightly lit. He’d closed all his dark green storm shutters, but light still streamed out behind them, onto the porch.
“How come you have power?” Alex asked Mr. Smith. “And is that Queen playing on the stereo?”
“Oh,” Mr. Smith said, looking a little embarrassed. “Patrick and I have a generator. We usually ask the neighbors over for a little hurricane party whenever there’s a storm. That way they can watch the forecast and we get to enjoy the lobster from their freezers that would otherwise spoil.”
Kayla stared at him. “We just killed a man with my car,” she said.
Frank quickly put his arm around her. “Please excuse my girlfriend,” he said to Mr. Smith. “She’s had a bit of a shock. May we use your water closet?”
Mr. Smith’s eyes widened to their limits behind his gold-rimmed spectacles.
“You mean my bathroom? Yes, of course, come in,” he said. “Where are my manners? I’m so sorry. Patrick?”
As he called for his partner, we filed, dripping, into Mr. Smith’s foyer, which was painted a tasteful pale blue with white trim. There was a wooden staircase, also trimmed in white, leading to a second floor, a doorway to a manly looking study walled with ceiling-to-floor bookcases, and, not surprisingly, an old-fashioned hat rack, covered with Mr. Smith’s many straw hats and fedoras. On the wall were framed vintage art posters of the Jazz Age burlesque dancer Josephine Baker.
This was not the kind of art I’d expected to see in Mr. Smith’s house.
“More refugees from the storm?” A man carrying a red drink cup and dressed in a white shirt and khaki shorts came strolling down the hallway along the side of the stairs. “The more, the merrier —”
He dropped the cup when he saw us. Red liquid spilled onto the expensive Persian hallway runner. Neither man seemed to notice.
“Patrick,” Mr. Smith said. “You remember Pierce, don’t you? You met her at Coffin Fest the other night.”
“Oh, my God, of course!” Patrick cried, rushing over to give me a big hug.
Patrick had been a self-proclaimed fan of mine since the media firestorm over my alleged kidnapping had catapulted the photo of John snatching me — and the reward my father had offered for my safe return — into the media. Patrick was a sucker for stories about thwarted young love. He thought my parents didn’t approve of John because he was older and lived out of town.
Patrick didn’t know how much older than me John was, and how far out of town John lived.
Correction: had lived.
“What are you doing here?” Patrick asked, his face wreathed in smiles. “Rich, why didn’t you tell me they were coming? It’s all right. There’s plenty of lobster tacos.”
I couldn’t bring myself to hug him back. I was in too much shock over everything that had happened, in addition to having heard Patrick call Mr. Smith Rich. I couldn’t think of Mr. Smith as anything but Mr. Smith.
“I didn’t know they were coming, Patrick,” Mr. Smith said in a voice that suggested he didn’t approve of his partner’s effusiveness. “Could you please get them some towels and maybe some warm drinks? As you can see, they ran into a bit of trouble on the way over.”
“Car trouble?” Patrick asked sympathetically, finally letting me go. “Did you have trouble finding a parking place? I know there aren’t many left; everyone from down island comes up here to park during storms so their engines won’t flood. There’s still room in the aboveground parking garage behind our building if you want to move your car. That’s where we keep ours —”
“Patrick,” Mr. Smith said, taking me by the arm. “The drinks and towels?”
“Oh, right,” Patrick said, laughing at himself. “Sorry. I just get so excited during storms! I love how everyone comes together to help everyone else out. I wish there could be that feeling of community every day. Anyway, drinks and towels — not to mention tacos — are back here in the kitchen. Follow me, everyone.” He seemed to notice what we were wearing for the first time and looked us up and down with delight. “Oh, my gosh, costumes! Is someone throwing a fancy-dress hurricane party? Why didn’t we think of that, Rich?” To me, he asked, with a grin, “Where’s that hot boyfriend of yours? Oh, my gosh, I love your belt.”
Tears filled my eyes, but not because his question had reminded me that John was gone. It was because, in the background, the song had ended, and I could hear the laughter of Mr. Smith’s neighbors as they shared their food and his lovely home. I realized we’d entered a true shelter from the storm, filled with life and love. There was no sign of the death and pestilence we’d been dealing with for so many hours.
The tears were because I felt horrible for spoiling this little oasis, for bringing that death and pestilence along with us. That’s what I was now, I supposed: a harbinger of doom, queen of the Underworld.
I saw Frank closing Mr. Smith’s front door and locking it, after first having peered outside to make sure we hadn’t been followed. I knew both from his relieved expression and the pale gray my diamond pendant had turned that we’d brought with us no Furies. We were safe … for the moment.
I managed to control my tears and didn’t think anyone had noticed them until I felt an arm around my shoulders. Startled, I looked up and saw my cousin standing beside
me.
“John’s gonna meet up with us later,” Alex said to Patrick. “He’s got some stuff to do now. I’m Alex, by the way, Pierce’s cousin.”
“Oh,” Patrick said, shaking the hand Alex had extended. “Nice to meet you. I’ve got a shirt that would probably fit you if you want to change out of that wet one.” He eyed Frank, who stood a head and a half taller than everyone else in the room. “You, we probably can’t accommodate. What are you supposed to be, anyway, a Hell’s Angel?”
Frank shrugged his enormous shoulders. “Yes,” he said simply.
As Patrick led the others down the hall towards the laughter and music, Mr. Smith steered me by the arm into the book-filled library, closing the white-paneled French doors behind him.
“What in heaven’s name is going on?” he asked, thrusting a fluffy blue-and-white towel at me from a basket that sat on the floor by another set of French doors. I supposed they led out to a pool area, which would explain the towels, but since they were covered by storm shutters, it was impossible for me to tell. “What was that girl talking about? Did you really kill a man? And where is John?”
I sank down into a brown leather armchair and pressed the towel against my damp hair.
“Yes, we did kill someone,” I said, the words coming almost robotically from my lips. It was surprising — but then again, not surprising at all — how little I cared about having killed Mr. Mueller. Maybe emotion would come later. Or maybe not. “He tried to kill us first, though.”
“Good God,” Mr. Smith said. He sank into the mate of the leather chair in which I sat, his brown skin suddenly looking almost as gray as his short-cropped hair. “Who was he?”
“A teacher from my old school in Connecticut.”
“What on earth was he doing here?” Mr. Smith asked, slipping off his spectacles in order to polish them, something he often did in times of great distress.
“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me. Did we awaken the ancients, or create an imbalance, or some mumbo jumbo like that? That’s what Mr. Graves thinks.”
Mr. Smith shook his head before slipping his glasses back on. “I don’t know who Mr. Graves is, nor did I understand a single word you just said. Go back to where your teacher tried to kill you.”
