Awaken

John and I exchanged looks. We were under attack.

The second door didn’t hold. The entire panel shattered into a spiderweb configuration, then the glass fell from the metal frame and splintered against the tiled floor at our feet.

John yanked me into his arms.

“We’re going,” John shouted to be heard above the wind and rain.

I knew what was going to happen next. When I opened my eyes again, I’d be somewhere else — most likely the Underworld. John didn’t know that in the Underworld, ravens were also raining from the sky … or maybe he did. There wasn’t time to ask, nor was there time to tell him. There was time to say only one thing.

“Seth.”

John’s hold on me tightened. He knew precisely what I was saying. Save Seth, too.

“No,” he said.

And as I heard another glass door explode, the room disappeared.

When I opened my eyes again, we were in darkness.

19

Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving,

Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly,

That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto V

At first I couldn’t tell where we were. All I knew was that it was quiet, and dry, and so dark that John’s face was indistinguishable to me, though it was merely inches from mine.

Then lightning flashed, and I was able to recognize, through a few patterns thrown across the floor, that we were on the landing on the stairs of my mother’s house.

“John,” I cried, releasing the deathlike grip I’d been keeping on his neck. “Here?”

“Shhh.” He pointed up the stairs. Down the hallway, dimly lit by a single battery-operated LED candle, I could see that the door to my mother’s bedroom was closed. “It was the only place I could think of.”

“But —” A million questions flickered through my mind, dancing as wildly as the fake candle flame.

Then thunder rumbled … not so loud as it had out on Reef Key. We were inland — well, as inland as anyone could be on a two-mile-by-four-mile island — and on as high ground as Mr. Smith’s house. The storm wasn’t nearly as bad here as it had been out by Mr. Rector’s spec house. Besides, Uncle Chris had boarded up every single one of my mother’s windows as tight as a drum.

The thunder was still loud enough, however, that I was worried it might wake my mother, and the last thing I needed at the moment was a barrage of parental questions.

“Follow me,” I said, taking John’s hand. Creeping up the rest of the stairs, I snagged the LED candle from its table in the hallway, then led him into the room across the hall from my mom’s, gently closing the door behind us once we were both inside.

“Is this your room?” John asked with a grin, looking around at the lavender walls and curtains my mom’s decorator had chosen.

“Yes.” I set the LED candle on my desk and looked around. Nothing had changed since the last time I’d been there, except that the good-bye letter I’d left for my mother was gone. Seeing the room for the first time from John’s perspective, however, I felt mortified. It seemed so devoid of personality. No surprise, since I’d had no say whatsoever in its decor … no interest, either. “Can we not talk about it?”

“Why?” he asked, surprised. He was so tall and broad-shouldered, he resembled a rhinoceros in a tea shop as he moved about, inspecting things. “I like it. Is this yours?”

He picked up a stuffed unicorn Hannah Chang had given to me for my birthday and that I’d kept on my bookshelf as a matter of habit for so long, I’d forgotten I owned it.

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn’t know you liked unicorns,” he said.

“I don’t,” I said, blushing. “I mean, I do, but not the rainbow kind. Someone gave that to me as a gift. I —”

Bringing him here had been a huge mistake. Although I hadn’t brought him here, I remembered. He’d brought me. I was actually a little surprised he’d never been in my room before. But John had odd, old-fashioned standards, and I was quite sure that while he’d considered it perfectly acceptable — even his moral duty — to spy on me at school, the Isla Huesos Cemetery, airports, city streets, jewelry shops, and every other public venue, my bedroom would be completely off-limits.

“John, we can’t leave him out there,” I said, deciding it was time to change the subject. “He could be hurt.”

John picked up a bottle of black nail polish I’d left on a shelf, sniffed it curiously, then made a face and put it down again.

“Who could be hurt?” he asked.

“Seth,” I said. “He could be dying. I know how you feel about him, but that wasn’t him. That was Thanatos. Well, okay, yes, some of it was him. But the part about you, that was Thanatos. I know you probably have post- traumatic stress from whatever he did to you, and I totally understand that, he completely deserves to be punished, but that’s not our call to make. You’re better than he is, you still have your humanity, and he doesn’t. We can’t —”

“What’s The Lord of the Flies?” he asked, reading from the title of a book on my bookshelf.

“It’s a really boring book with no girls in it. I don’t even know why I still have that; they made us read it for school.”

“Do you like anything in your room?” he asked.

You, I wanted to say. I like you. I love you.

I don’t know why I couldn’t say it. I don’t know why everything was suddenly so awkward. Maybe because we’d left Seth Rector to die. Maybe because we still needed to save the Underworld, and through saving the Underworld, Isla Huesos. Maybe because my mother was asleep in the next room.

“Everything I like I already took to the Underworld.” I indicated my tote bag, which I’d lugged from Mr. Smith’s house to the party, and from the party to my house. I wasn’t the sort of girl who forgot her purse, although I had a tendency to forget most everything else. “I packed it in there when you brought me here the last time, to say good-bye to my mom. Just like I packed everything I needed to come here to rescue you. Like your tablet. I have it, in case you want to check to see whether or not Seth is still alive.”

He put the book back where he’d found it.

“It won’t make any difference,” he said. “I happen to agree with Mr. Darwin’s theory of natural selection. That’s from a book Mr. Smith loaned to me, On the Origin of Species. Perhaps you read that in school, as well as the one about the lord of the flies.”

“No,” I said flatly. “But I’ve heard of it.”

“Then you’ll agree that if it’s Seth Rector’s time to die, it’s because he’s less suited to his environment than the rest of us.” I opened my mouth to disagree, but John held up a finger to stop me. “Not because we might have rescued him, but because he does extraordinarily stupid — even wicked — things. So isn’t it better that he doesn’t live to reproduce and make little Rectors who’ll most likely also do extraordinarily stupid, wicked things? Doesn’t Seth Rector’s father also do stupid, wicked things? And his father before him? Do you think it was an accident that Thanatos happened to choose to possess Seth Rector? No. He chose Seth Rector because Seth Rector’s was the mind most easy for him to access and corrupt. It was the mind most like his, of anyone on this island. I suspect Thanatos has been possessing the minds of the Rector men for many, many years, because they’ve all been as stupid, yet wicked, as Seth.”