Awaken

How long ago that day seemed.

The police chief stood next to my mother on the porch, his hands on his hips, slowly shaking his head.

“Christopher,” he was saying. “Why’d you have to go and do that? Now I’m going to have to take you in and waste my afternoon writing up a report, when I have a thousand more important things to do today. Do you have any idea how many downed power lines and flooded homes I have to deal with? There are people who lost everything they owned in Cassandra last night. The electricity is still out on half the island. Half the high school is underwater. And you’re going around acting like this? Give me a break, will you?”

My heart began to beat a little faster with excitement. Half the high school was underwater?

Then I remembered I lived in the Underworld now. I didn’t have to go to school anymore. What a relief.

“What precisely are you going to charge him with, Chief?” my mother asked dryly. “Assaulting my front walk with a planter?”

“Let’s go,” I whispered to Alex. I was aware that, though Uncle Chris had the undivided attention of the police officers, my mom’s neighbors could still see us, and some of them were beginning to nudge one another and look in our direction. “This is our chance.”

Alex remained glued where he was, however.

“No,” he whispered back. “I don’t like the looks of this.”

“What are you talking about? Your dad will be fine. They’re not going to arrest him. He didn’t do anything. Well, anything illegal. It’s not against the law to smash up your sister’s flower planters.”

“Your necklace, though,” Alex said, nodding to it. “It’s still black.”

I looked down. He was right about that.

“There’s a Fury around,” he said. “Does the combination of guns and Furies sound like a good one to you?”

I looked back at the police officers gathered in Mom’s yard. “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But it could be any one of these people. It could be her, for all we know.” I pointed at a three- or four-year-old girl standing on the sidewalk a few yards away, staring at us with her finger in her mouth. She was wearing a shirt that said Daddy’s Little Princess on it.

The police chief was rubbing his chin. I could tell from his stubble that the past few days had been as difficult for him as they had been for me. He hadn’t even had time to spare on personal grooming.

As the chief rubbed his chin, he finally noticed his men — and a single female officer — had their pistols drawn.

“Hey,” Chief Santos said to them in a surprised voice. “Saddle up the pieces, people. There’s no need for that.”

All but one officer obediently slipped their guns back into their holsters. The one who did not was a husky guy with a lot of dark hair. He kept his firearm pointed steadily at Uncle Chris.

Chief of Police Santos didn’t notice. He turned back to my mother to say something in a low voice that Alex and I were too far away to hear.

But I was sure none of my mother’s neighbors missed what the dark-haired officer shouted a second later.

“Send the girl out!”

Police Chief Santos spun around.

“Poling,” he said, making a disgusted face as his gaze fell on the officer still holding the gun. “Are you nuts?”

Poling? Where had I heard that name before?

“Not nuts, sir,” Officer Poling said. “Just here to do my job. We came to get the Oliviera girl, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“Not like this, you numbskull. We came here to question her, not shoot her. Put your firearm away, before I shoot you myself.”

I noticed a number of my mother’s neighbors beginning to hurry indoors, sensing that the scene had taken a sudden turn for the worse. No one came to get Daddy’s Little Princess, however. She stayed where she was, still staring at us and sucking on her finger.

“Sorry, sir,” Officer Poling said, his pistol not wavering. “Pierce Oliviera killed a friend of mine. We have to bring her in.”

I felt the blood in my veins grow cold. He knew. But how?

“What in the hell are you talking about, Shawn?” Chief Santos demanded.

“My friend Mark,” Officer Poling said. “She killed him. She’s going to have to pay for that. I have my orders.”

Mr. Mueller’s first name was Mark.

“Orders?” the police chief echoed. “Orders from who, Shawn? Not me. And who the hell is Mark?”

The dark-haired man looked up. It was almost impossible not to follow the direction of his gaze, even though a part of me wanted to keep my eye on his gun.

When I raised my head, however, I knew it would be impossible to look away.

The sky above our heads was filled with ravens — the same kind that had been circling the ceiling of the cave in the Underworld just before the Furies had caused the ships to sink. There were hundreds — maybe thousands — of the scavenger birds, their black wings spread out against the cloudless blue sky, flying in circles above Isla Huesos, some of them letting out their odd, almost human-sounding cries.

I had seen ravens on the island before, but always over the cemetery, and of course at Reef Key, not my mother’s house. It had made sense to see them in a graveyard and a development that had been built over a burial site. They were carrion birds, after all. They ate the dead.

So what was with the flybys over the nice gated subdivison?

The ravens clearly knew something the rest of us were just beginning to suspect … like that maybe there were about to be some dead bodies for them to feast on.

Daddy’s Little Princess pointed to the sky with the finger she’d been sucking. “Bad birdies,” she said. She was speaking to Alex and me conversationally, imparting information she seemed to think we needed to know. “Bad.”

“Yeah, kid,” Alex said. “I think we figured that part out already.”

Only Chief of Police Santos seemed unfazed at the sight of the silently wheeling ravens.

“Don’t tell me you’re taking orders from a bunch of damned birds, Shawn,” he growled. “I don’t have time for that kind of thing today.”

Officer Poling did not appear to care what his chief had time for.

“Either the girl comes out,” the young officer said, taking careful aim, “or I shoot her mother in the head.”

The bottom of my world dropped out as I saw Officer Poling swing the mouth of his gun directly at my mother.

Suddenly I remembered where I’d heard his name before. Officer Poling had been one of the two officers helping Jade to patrol the cemetery the night she died.

Helping Jade? Or helping to murder Jade in order to cover up for a crime some other Furies had committed?

What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion, although in reality it must have taken only a couple of seconds.

Uncle Chris stepped in front of my mother to shield her from Officer Poling’s bullets with his own body. Chief of Police Santos did the same thing, only he stepped in front of both Uncle Chris and my mom, attempting to push them back inside the house and to safety.

Meanwhile, every cop standing around Officer Poling struggled to draw his or her weapon in order to point it at their colleague, sensing their chief was under attack, shouting, “Stand down! Stand down!”

In a few seconds more, the wealthy community of Dolphin Key was going to become a shooting gallery.

“We’ve got to stop this!” Alex whirled around to shout at me. “They’ll kill each other.”

Daddy’s Little Princess had another opinion. “Run,” she said in the same matter-of-fact voice she’d used before about the bad birdies, shaking her head until her blond ringlets quivered. “Run