Awaken

“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “I was sure I was caught that time!”

“You murdered your dad?” Kayla said. She’d been silent almost the entire time on the porch … understandably. The Fates may have won this round, but it was hard to call it winning when we’d lost Frank, though none of us as yet had had the courage to admit this to Kayla. Perhaps, in a way, she was beginning to sense it.

Chloe’s laughter quickly died. “I know it’s a sin,” she said. “The Bible says he who strikes his father or mother shall surely be put to death. But I did die because of what I did. So maybe someday the Lord will forgive me.”

Kayla and I exchanged glances. I supposed this logic made a certain sense to Chloe, although I didn’t think it was fair for her to have died for defending her mother.

“I thought you’d been waiting your whole life to go to heaven,” I said to her gently.

“How are you so sure this isn’t heaven?” Chloe said, looking very serious.

“Because innocent people like Frank get killed here,” Kayla said. “I highly doubt that happens in heaven.”

I nodded. “Seriously,” I said. I didn’t want to cause Chloe to second-guess her decision, especially since there was nothing she could do about it now, but I wanted her to understand the consequences … which made me feel a bit like John. “The Underworld is not heaven.”

“I know that,” Chloe said. “But maybe I feel the way that old man said … like I want to do things to help people. I don’t think you get to do that in heaven.”

“Old man?” Mr. Smith was on his phone, presumably with the hospital, checking on Patrick, but he paused his call to cast a scandalized glance at Chloe. “Did that young woman just call me an old man?”

“Oh, no. She was talking about Mr. Graves,” I lied to him.

He nodded and returned to his phone call, though I wasn’t certain he believed me.

“In the Underworld, I’ll get to help people, and to me, that seems like heaven,” Chloe was going on, oblivious.

Kayla stared at her. “You know,” she said. “I kind of get what she’s saying. Only I want to help people have better hair.”

“Well,” I said to Chloe. “Great. Because the Underworld is where you’re going to have to live now. It’s where we all live now, at least seventy percent of the time.”

“One hundred percent of the time,” John said.

“There are so many of us now,” I said. “I was thinking we could probably time-share all the soul-sorting down there.”

“I don’t know what time-share means,” John said.

“A time-share in the Isla Huesos Underworld,” Reed said. “That sounds like heaven to me. ‘The parched ground shall become a pool,’” Reed quoted, “‘and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of jackals, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.’”

Mrs. Engle, impressed, began to applaud. “Oh, lovely,” she said. “And very apt. Isaiah?”

“Exactly,” Reed said, and winked. Chloe sighed again and clung to his arm. To me, he mouthed over her head, “My dad’s a pastor.”

I rolled my eyes, realizing Alex had never stood a chance with Chloe.

Funny how, as I was thinking this, I heard Alex call my name and turned to see him walking up to the porch.

“Where’s Kayla?” he asked.

“She’s right here,” I said. Kayla, who’d been sitting beside me, stood up. “Where have you been all this time?”

“Busy,” Alex said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Got a package for her.”

Frank was walking behind Alex, looking unhappy as he brushed the dust from his trousers.

“Does anyone have a drink?” he asked. “Dying’s thirsty business.”

30

O joy! O gladness inexpressible!

O perfect life of love and peacefulness!

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Paradiso, Canto XXVII

Anything can happen in the blink of an eye.

One. Two. Three.

Blink.

A girl meets a boy, full of sadness and longing. The boy takes that girl to another world, a dark world from which he tells the girl there is no escape.

You don’t have to worry about that girl, though, because she knows there is a way to escape, a way to break the curse, let sunlight into the world …

… or at least let the boy out for a vacation every now and then.

Mr. Graves had been right. There was a pestilence causing an imbalance in the Underworld. What he’d been wrong about was the cause. He’d suspected the pestilence was caused by John or one of the permanent inhabitants spending too much time away from the realm of the dead.

And while certainly the Underworld could not function smoothly without anyone to attend to the needs of the dead, leaving it for too long was not the cause of the imbalance.

The cause of the imbalance was Alex. None of us realized it — least of all Alex — until I released Thanatos from his prison inside Seth Rector’s body, and he found a new home inside Alex.

“He really seems to like me,” Alex informed us cheerfully, as we watched Kayla’s tearful reunion with Frank in front of Mr. Smith’s cottage. “Watch what I can do now.”

Alex picked up a coconut and kicked it. It disappeared, seemingly into the stratosphere. If Alex had any interest in continuing high school — which he did not — he would now have been extremely welcome on the Isla Huesos football team, instead of an object of ridicule to them.

“I can do that,” John said, unimpressed.

“Well,” Alex said. “I could kill you with a single touch. Should I do that, instead?”

“Please don’t,” I said, wrapping hands protectively around John’s arm.

“And how did you discover that you had this remarkable grasp over life and death?” Mr. Graves asked.

“Well,” Alex said. “After I got that little girl back to her mom — who thanked me profusely, by the way — and was following all the cops who were tailing Pierce on her bike, I saw them stop, because that crazy cop had pulled out his gun and was going to shoot this guy with a chain saw. And I felt this crazy urge come over me to go over and yank out the cop’s soul. I honestly can’t explain it any other way.” He took a swig from the water bottle he held. “So I did it.”

“You yanked a man’s soul from his body?” I asked slowly.

“Yeah,” Alex said with a shrug. “It was easy. That’s when I knew I had that death dude living inside me. And honestly, you guys, I’ve never felt better in my life.”

I think all of us were astonished except for Chloe, who said, “Well, it makes sense. After all, your name does mean protector of men. And who is a greater protector of men than someone who brings them the sweet relief of death?”

Frank and John and Mr. Liu and I all gave her sour looks, and Chloe hastily added, “Except of course someone who escorts their souls to their final resting place. That’s a really important job, too. And obviously anyone who dies before their time won’t consider you very protective, Alex.”

“Yeah,” Alex said with a nod. “I’m going to have to work on that. But I think it’s a handy skill to have, you know, in emergencies. I really can’t believe Thanatos spent so long in Seth’s body. I think even he thought Seth was a drag. But it was a Rector tradition to have Thanatos dwelling within the youngest male, so —”

My eyes widened. “So the Rectors knew?”