Awaken

“Gee,” I said, walking over to my bag, pulling out John’s tablet and then my own phone. “And I only figured it out because of his shirt.”

“I meant to ask you about that,” John said. “How did you figure it out? What about a shirt?”

“The little polo player on the shirts Seth always — never mind,” I said, when I saw John’s blank expression. Not only was he the kind of boy who never noticed what other boys wore, but he was a boy who’d been born more than a century and half ago and had no idea what designer labels were. “Look, I’ll grant you that natural selection is a good argument for not helping Seth. But I know someone else who had a father who did a lot of stupid, wicked things. You. Aren’t you glad someone gave you a second chance?”

John scowled. “I only did one wicked thing, and I did it to save the lives of my crew.”

“One wicked thing? I could name a half dozen wicked things you’ve done today alone. You killed a man!”

“He was a Fury, and you tried to kill him first. I only finished what you started,” he said.

“You’ve been wanting to kill Mr. Mueller for years,” I said.

“And Darwin would agree with me that the species is better off without him.” His brow wrinkled as he looked at me. “Why are you wearing my father’s whip on a belt around your waist?”

I had forgotten all about it. “Oh … Mr. Liu gave it to me. For protection, I think.” Another white lie, but less embarrassing, I felt, than telling him what Mr. Liu had really said, about my needing it because I was a kite with no strings.

“My father’s whip?” Now his eyebrows went way, way up.

I realized the subject needed immediate changing.

“Oh, look,” I said, casually handing him his tablet. As usual, I’d been able to make nothing out on it, since the symbols it displayed were completely foreign to me. But there were several messages on my own phone, and I began to read them aloud to him. “Kayla says they’re at the hospital, and everything is fine. Well, Farah’s probably going to have to have her stomach pumped, so that’s not so good. And they’ve closed all the roads, so they’re going to have to stay there a while. Maybe all night, until the storm ends. Unless you want to go get them, of course.”

“If they’re not in any danger, why would I leave here?” John asked, sinking down onto my bed. He was staring at the screen of his tablet, as I’d known he would. It had been a long time since he’d seen it, and he was a workaholic. I was sure it was telling him all sorts of dire things about the state of the Underworld, not to mention the status of people who were in peril of dying and traveling there soon.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s okay. Frank really likes the cafeteria food. But Kayla isn’t sure her mom is so wild about Frank.”

John let out a sarcastic laugh, still staring down at his screen.

“You might want to laugh more quietly,” I said, loosening the belt Mr. Liu had given me, and allowing it to fall to the floor, “unless you want my mom to come in here and not feel so wild about you.”

John sobered instantly. “What about Alex?”

“There’s no word from him,” I said. “Alex only calls or texts me when he’s dying. Is he?”

John glanced back down at his screen. “No.”

“Well, that’s a nice change. What about Seth?”

“He’s on the brink, but I think he’ll live,” he said. “Unfortunately.” I sank down beside him on the bed, and he showed me his screen. On it, Seth was huddled in a closet, his face bathed in the light of his cell phone as he shouted frantically, “What do you mean, the roads are closed? Someone has to come get me, the generator failed, I don’t have any electricity. There’s no air-conditioning. Do you have any idea what the humidity is like out here?”

Seth’s image disappeared as John turned off the tablet and placed it on my bedside table.

“It appears,” John said, “that he’s going to be fine, if a little uncomfortable.”

“Any word from Mr. Graves on how he and the others are doing?”

“As well as can be expected, under the circumstances,” John said. “At least they were when I saw them a little while ago.”

I stared at him. “You saw them? When?”

“On my way back to life,” he said. “I had to stop and pick up a few things, you know, such as my body, before I could rip you away from the arms of Thanatos.”

“So that’s how you got this,” I said, leaning forward to pluck at his shirt. “And the boots. I wondered. I wish I could have been there to see everyone’s faces when you went from being stone-cold dead to sitting up and talking.”

“There were some screams,” John said. “Particularly from one old woman —”

“Mrs. Engle,” I said. “She’s a school nurse. She was very attentive to you when you were dead. You know, I think she and Mr. Graves may have a little thing going on.”

John looked at me in astonishment. “A thing? What exactly happened while I was gone? Conditions were not as I left them. I told you to go back to the castle, not take everyone on the beach back with you.”

I slipped off my shoes and tucked my feet beneath me, not easy when wearing such a long skirt. “I had to make some tough executive decisions,” I said. “Running that place is not easy. I don’t know how you’ve done it all these years. We had problems with kamikaze ravens as well. I thought that with Thanatos gone, maybe the Fates would come back, but I guess not if Mrs. Engle is still around.” Then something occurred to me, and I gasped. “Oh, John!”

He looked at me in alarm. “What is it?”

“I’ve killed Thanatos. How is anyone’s spirit going to be escorted to the Underworld? Isn’t that what Thanatos does? Mr. Smith said the word once. A psycho … psychopomp. One who escorts the souls of the newly dead.”

I could tell from John’s expression that this was the first time the thought had occurred to him, too.

“Is the soul of everyone who dies from now on going to be trapped between this world and the Underworld, like you were?” I asked. “Have I made things worse? Oh, no. I’ve got to call Mr. Smith and ask him —”

John’s fingers wrapped around mine before they could reach the phone.

“No,” he said. “Don’t. You haven’t made things worse.” His gray-eyed gaze was imploring. “How could you? Pierce, what you did — I know I wasn’t happy about the way you did it, but what you did … when I was … where I was … it was the worst place I’ve ever been in my life. I thought the Underworld was the worst place I’ve ever been when I first got there, and I was all alone, but where he kept me — I can’t even put into words how horrible it was.”

The fingers around mine were like ice. In the dim light from the electric candle, I could see that his forehead was dewy with sweat, even though the house was still cool with air-conditioning. The power hadn’t been out for that long.

“It was like a cellar,” he said, “dark and cold, and I didn’t know when or even if I’d ever be let out. I could see a crack of daylight streaming through, but the door to get to it was just beyond my reach, no matter how hard I strained against the ropes that were keeping me bound. What was worse was that I knew the light wasn’t light at all … it was you. I could see you, hear you, smell you, even. But I couldn’t reach you.”

“Oh, John,” I said, my heart welling for him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you?”

In the flickering light from the fake candle, I could see a muscle leaping in his jaw. He was hunched forward on the side of my bed, his elbows on his knees. I had never seen him look more miserable, except maybe for when he was telling me about his father. I laid a hand on his back. It felt hard as a boulder.

“The closer you came to finding me,” he whispered, “the wider the shaft of light became. I could see more and more of what you were doing. But I still couldn’t reach you, and I couldn’t get you to understand that I was there, to see me or hear me, the whole time. It nearly drove me mad.”

“I did know that you were there,” I said, lifting my hand to stroke some of his tangled hair. “At least I began to suspect you were once you sent that tree crashing down on Mr. Mueller. That was quite subtle, not at all your usual style.”

John chuckled grimly at my sarcasm. He captured my hand in one of his own.