Awaken

Unfortunately, the lumps beneath the comforter stayed exactly where they were, except that they began to move slightly.

“Actually,” I said, “it’s kind of a funny story.”

“Is it?” Mom asked. “Your letter to me was far from humorous.”

John threw the comforter from his head and chest and stood up. Thankfully, he was wearing his jeans, although I didn’t know how or when he’d pulled them back on.

“I’m very sorry we had to meet under these circumstances, ma’am,” he said, extending his right hand. “My name is John Hayden. I’m very much in love with your daughter.”

I don’t know why John didn’t simply grab my hand and blink us somewhere else, the way he had the last time we’d encountered my mother. I supposed it had something to do with what he’d said the night before, about wanting to be open with my parents, and also probably something to do with the fact that no one was actually trying to kill us.

He didn’t know my mom very well.

Her dark eyes widened to their limits. She did not shake John’s hand.

“Pierce, I’d like you and your friend,” she said, stressing the word friend as if it tasted unpleasant in her mouth, “to get fully dressed and then come downstairs so your father and I can discuss a few things with him.”

Now it was my turn to widen my eyes. “Dad? He’s here?”

“He’s in the kitchen,” my mother said, “making waffles. Or at least he was. Right now he’s on the phone with his lawyers, since I just received a somewhat disturbing phone call from Seth Rector’s father, complaining that you and — John, is it?” She gave John a skeptical look, as if she doubted that was his real name. “That you and John assaulted his son last night at some party. What you were even doing at a party in the middle of a Category Three hurricane, I don’t care to know, let alone why you assaulted him. But Mr. Rector fully intends to press charges.” She sighed. “Another name to add to the long list of people you’ve struck in the face, including your own grandmother.”

My jaw dropped.

“You’ve got to believe me, Mom,” I said. “Those are all lies. Everything Seth is saying is a lie, and everything Grandma said is a lie, too. Like I said in the letter I left you, I wasn’t kidnapped. Grandma tried to kill me. Twice. John is the one who saved me —”

My mother had already started shaking her head.

“Pierce,” she said. “Please. I’m so tired of all this. I don’t know what your father and I ever did to make you so unhappy. Maybe we weren’t the best role models, and Lord knows we went through a rough patch. But it isn’t fair of you to take it out on innocent people like Seth and your grandmother —”

“Innocent?” I burst out. “You’ve got it all wrong, Mom. John saved me from them. He saved me from Mr. Mueller, too. I can prove it. Remember the shadow on the security tape from my school in Westport? That was him. That was John. He saved me from Mr. Mueller again last night.”

Mom’s expression changed. Her mouth, which had tightened into a thin, disapproving line — she usually wore lipstick but obviously wasn’t wearing any this early in the morning — fell open. I saw the hand she’d kept wrapped around the coffee mug tremble slightly, and she reached out to clutch the doorknob to my room, as if to steady herself.

“Mr. Mueller?” she echoed faintly, her gaze flicking from me to John. “They just said something on the news about how there was only a single fatality in the area from last night’s storm … a Mark Mueller of Connecticut who was struck by a falling tree. But surely … that couldn’t be the same Mark Mueller as —”

“It was, ma’am,” John said gravely. “You can ask Mr. Richard Smith. He’ll tell you that it’s true. I believe he’s an acquaintance of your father’s —”

“That crazy old cemetery sexton who was so rude to me that first day of school?” My mom looked at me like I was the one she thought was crazy. “What’s he got to do with any of this?”

“You can just ask Alex, Mom,” I said. “He was there, too.”

“Alex?” My mother’s hand shook some more. “You know where Alex is? He hasn’t been answering his cell. His father’s frantic —”

“I do know where he is.” John stepped forward and neatly rescued the drooping mug from her hand, before she’d spilled a single drop. “Not to worry, Alex has been with us.” John didn’t add the part about Alex’s having been murdered, then revived. “Why don’t we go downstairs so we can talk about this with your husband —”

“Ex-husband,” Mom said like someone in a daze, as John took her by the elbow. “Pierce’s father and I are divorced. But we’re reconciling —”

“What?” I’d shuffled from the bed, wrapped in my comforter, to rifle through my closet in search of something to wear. Hearing the bombshell Mom had just dropped, however, I nearly dropped the comforter.

“We still have a lot of things to work through. Obviously.” Mom shot me another disapproving look, no doubt because she’d seen what I had on beneath the comforter, which wasn’t much. “And the last thing we need right now is to become grandparents, so I hope the two of you are at least using protection.”

I blanched. I’d forgotten all about that particular detail during the storm, what with all the love talk, and the thunder, and the nearly having gotten killed a few hours earlier. What had I been thinking? Or, more accurately, not thinking? Mr. Smith had said he’d never heard of a death deity capable of siring children … but what if that was only because the Underworld was so inhospitable to new life? He’d said nothing of what might happen outside the Underworld.

Fortunately John could not know what she was talking about. They didn’t have protection — at least the reliable kind my mom was referring to — back when he’d been alive.

“It’s all right, Dr. Cabrero,” he said soothingly. The doctor was a nice touch. It made up for all the ma’ams. Mom hated it when boys ma’amed her. “We’re going to be married, just as soon as your daughter will have me.”

Oh, my God.

“Zack!” my mother began to shout hoarsely. She turned and ran from the bedroom. “Zachary!”

Furious, I let the comforter drop and from the closet ripped the first dress I touched.

“Are you crazy?” I hissed at John, pulling the dress over my head, then searching for a pair of sandals. “Do you have a death wish or something?”

“They’re your parents,” John said. He’d found his shirt and was tugging it on. “They deserve to know the truth.”

“The truth? That I have to live eighteen hundred miles below the earth, with a bunch of dead people, for the rest of eternity? How well do you think that’s going to go over?”

“They love you,” he said, following me as I darted into the hallway and started down the stairs. “They’ll understand.”

“You don’t know my parents,” I said. “I’ve been trying to tell them the truth about you since the day I died and met you, and all it’s gotten me is a lot of appointments with a bunch of shrinks. They are not going to believe the truth about you, and they are not going to let me be with you.”

On the landing, John caught hold of my arm, then turned me around to face him.

“Pierce,” he said, looking down into my eyes and smiling as he smoothed a dark curl of hair from my forehead. “They can’t stop us from being together. And they will believe you. Because I’m here with you. You’re not alone anymore.”

Though my heart was hammering with fear — a worse kind of fear, in a way, than I’d felt when it was Mr. Mueller who’d stepped into Kayla’s car headlights, or when I’d realized Seth was Thanatos — I smiled tentatively back at him.

John was right. My parents couldn’t stop us from being together. So many people had tried — Furies included. But none of them had succeeded.

“Could someone please explain to me what in the hell is going on here?” I heard a familiar voice bellow