Awaken

When I lowered the arm I’d lifted to protect my dazzled gaze, I saw that the two ships were so close to the docks, I could have looked into John’s eyes — if his long hair wasn’t partially obscuring his face — as he struggled to twist the wheel, which some unseen force was attempting to pull in the opposite direction.

Furies. Without any weak-willed human bodies to possess the way they did on earth, they couldn’t be seen by the naked eye. But I should have known that they were all around us, not only by the color of my diamond and what had happened to the boats, but also by the chill in the air, the lightning, and now the almost undetectable but ever increasing shaking of the boards of the dock beneath us. The remaining water glasses on the tray Alex had left on the railing began to drop into the water one by one, until finally the empty tray itself slipped, with a plop, into the lake.

People seemed eager to take my advice to evacuate now. The problem was, they couldn’t.

“W-what’s happening?” Chloe cried, reaching for the closest solid thing she could grab on to, which happened to be Alex.

True to his name of protector of man — and now girl — Alex slid an arm around her just as the waves began to slap over the side of the pier, dampening everyone’s legs to the knee.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think Pierce is right. We’d better —”

His voice was drowned out by the loudest clap of thunder I’d ever heard.

Except that it wasn’t thunder. I twisted in the saddle to see if John was all right, knowing as I did that there was no possible way he was going to be able to employ that trick Reed had suggested and rig something to hold the wheel in place as he leaped to safety.

I was right. The sound we’d heard was the prow of the boat John had been steering, ripping out the hull of the ship in front of it as it rammed against it, with John still aboard.

7

“Dost thou not hear the pity of his plaint?

Dost thou not see the death that combats him

Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt?”

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto II

The sound of splintering wood and sheering metal as the two ships collided echoed so loudly through the cavern that the sound felt almost like a physical blow. For some of us on shore — those of us not lucky enough to have hands to fling over our ears to protect them, that is — it was a physical blow.

“The ravens,” the old man in the hospital gown cried.

It had begun to rain. But no ordinary rain, unless raindrops had suddenly turned into large black birds.

The ravens that had been flying in their predatory circles above, stunned by the sound of the ships imploding, began to drop, one by one, from the air, landing like grenades of blood and black feathers all around us.

“Watch it,” Reed said, pulling Alex and Chloe out of the way as one of the birds shot by them, nearly striking them both. Instead, it hit the dock railing, then ricocheted into the water, where it bobbed for a moment, until, incredibly, it recovered itself. After giving its wings a good shake, it flew away, though it got only as far as a nearby boulder before crash-landing again in confusion.

It was one of the lucky ones. Most of the other birds plummeted into the sand or rocks, while recently departed souls screamed in horror at the piles of tiny bones and feathers all around them.

My heart already in my throat over John, I glanced about frantically to check on Hope. Though her wings had never been clipped, she surely hadn’t been flying at as high an altitude as those ravens when the echo sounded, and could not have been as badly affected by it as they were. And with those blinding white feathers, she should have been easy to spot — much easier than John, who could be halfway to the bottom of the lake by now ….

I hadn’t told him I loved him. Why hadn’t I told him I loved him?

Better not to think of that now. But I had no better luck spotting Hope anywhere on the shore than I did John in the water, since Alastor, like the ravens, had been stunned by the sound of the colliding ships and panicked in response to the assault on his sensitive ears. He reared, frantic to get back to the castle and to his comfortable stable, where birds didn’t plummet from the sky and people weren’t screaming at the sight of the birds’ mutilated corpses all around them. Though I tried to soothe him, it was like trying to calm a thrashing shark.

“Careful!” Kayla ducked as the stallion’s enormous, silver-clad hooves swung dangerously close to her face.

I was holding on for dear life, but I managed to get out two words: “I’m trying.”

There was nothing I could do but allow Alastor to go where he so badly wanted to. He was too strong for me to control when he was in this agitated state, and the more he tried to resist me, the more likely he was going to hurt someone … probably me.

Alastor wasn’t the only one panicking, either. The people standing at the front of the pier, who would have been the first to board the boat if it had actually arrived, were instead the first to suffer the aftereffects of the ships’ collision.

In the moments following the initial impact, the boats sprang apart as lake water rushed in to fill their empty passenger holds. What I could also see from my high vantage point on Alastor’s back — whenever he twisted in that direction — was that a four-foot wave filled with debris was surging outwards from the crash and heading directly towards the pier.

“Get everyone off the dock,” were the last words I was able to gasp out before Alastor wheeled around, practically whipping my head off.

Fortunately, it seemed as if Henry had heard me. He must have, since behind me, I heard him bellow, “Everyone, please, it’s too dangerous to stay here. We’ve got to follow Miss Oliviera — she’s the lady on the big black horse. Walk, don’t run —”

That’s all I heard before Alastor took off thundering down the pier, his hooves flying so quickly I wondered if they were making sparks. At the speed he was going, the wind whipped my face so fiercely my eyes began to water. All I saw ahead of us were blurred shapes. I could only hope the horse wasn’t knocking people down in his frantic flight to escape.

Though I couldn’t see, I could hear. Once I no longer heard the hollow drumming of Alastor’s hooves on the wooden boards of the dock, but the much deeper thud of his feet hitting dry sand, I began to pull his reins as hard as I could to the left, knowing that when a horse’s eyes are forced to look in a direction he doesn’t want to go, he has no choice but to slow down, and eventually to stop or turn in that direction. I knew, of course, that the castle was where I was supposed to be heading, but I couldn’t leave the beach without turning around for one last look for my bird and the boy I hadn’t told I loved.

Alastor wasn’t giving up without a fight. I thought he was going to pull my arms from their sockets, but he finally slowed down — with considerable snorting — and eventually stopped, pawing ill-temperedly at the ground.

“Sorry,” I said to him. “But you’re not the only one who’s suffering here.”

I twisted in the saddle to look behind me and saw that very few of the departed had listened to Henry’s advice of walk, don’t run. People at the end of the dock had already begun to shove against those in front of them, desperate to get to what they perceived as the safety of the shore before the waves of debris-filled water hit them.

I didn’t blame them, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone was crushed or pushed off the pier and into the water, where the choppy waves would sweep them up and under the dock and out of sight.

What happens to the soul of someone who went missing in the Underworld? I wondered.

Better question: What was going to happen to these people now that the ships that were supposed to take them to their final destinations had been destroyed?

This was something I hadn’t considered before inviting them all up to the castle. Would the Fates provide new boats? How could they, if the Furies had driven them off?