Underworld (7 page)

“All the more reason I should go with you,” I said. “If there
are
Furies in the area, I can warn you.” I pulled out my diamond. It was back to a silvery gray. “That’s why I was looking for you in the first place —”

He knit his brow. “What are you talking about?”

“My diamond turned black when I first saw the video of Alex —”

“That’s impossible,” he said flatly.

I was getting a bit tired of everyone telling me how impossible everything I seemed perfectly capable of doing and observing was.

“No,” I said. “It did. It does, every time the video plays —”

“It should only turn color in the presence of Furies.”

“And you should show up on film,” I reminded him. “But you don’t, which was how I got accused of assaulting my study hall teacher last year, when you were the one who actually did it, even though there was a video of the whole thing. You just weren’t on it.”

He glowered as he always used to whenever the subject of Mr. Mueller came up. “That man was evil. You should never have —”

“— gotten myself into that situation, I know. But anyway, that’s when I saw Henry and followed him to the kitchen, and met everyone, and we started talking —”

“I was wondering where they all disappeared to,” John muttered. “I should have known
you
were the distraction. It’s nothing to do with you,” he added quickly, noticing how I’d raised my eyebrows at the word
distraction
. “They’re good men — they’ve stuck by me through —” Whatever he’d been about to say he bit off suddenly, saying instead, “Well, quite a lot. But as you’ve probably already gathered, we don’t get a lot of company around here. At least, not of the living variety. I’m sorry if they were pestering you —”

“They weren’t pestering me,” I said, wondering exactly what it was he and the crew of the
Liberty
had endured. “And they clearly adore you. But there’s something I don’t understand … Aren’t you a little young to be a captain? Not that I’m sure you weren’t wonderful at it,” I added hastily, “but Frank’s got to be your same age, and Mr. Graves and Mr. Liu are both older than you. How on earth did it happen?”

He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss.

“The title is honorary,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t stop them calling me that, even though I’ve asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the … accident.”

Accident?
I supposed this was another one of those things he didn’t want to tell me because it would make me hate him.

Recognizing that dropping that particular topic — for now at least — would probably be best, I said, “John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know
exactly
where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos — just this one time, to help Alex — and I’ll never mention going there again. I’ll even,” I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, “forgive you for the waffles —”

John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings.

“Pierce,”
he said.
“Do you mean that?”

When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned.

“You’ll never mention going back to Isla Huesos again if I take you there right now, this once, to talk to your cousin Alex?” he demanded. “You’ll give … cohabitation another chance?”

His sudden fierceness was making me nervous.

“Of course, John,” I said, “But it’s not like I have a choice.”

“What if you did?” he asked, his grip tightening.

I blinked. “But I can’t. You said —”

He gave me a little shake. “Never mind what I said. What if I was wrong?”

I reached up to lay a hand on his cheek. It felt a little scratchy, because he hadn’t shaved. I didn’t care about stubble. What I cared about was the desperate need I saw in his eyes. The need for me.

“I’d come back,” I said, simply, “to stay with you.”

A second later, the lake — and everything around it — was gone.

W
hen John flung us both back to earth, it wasn’t to the middle of a breezeway at Isla Huesos High School, the last place I’d been before I’d found myself in the realm of the dead, and so where I’d been expecting to next cross paths with the living.

Which was why I was surprised to find myself instead inside a small, dark room that smelled strongly of earth, ankle deep in dead leaves … and bloodred flower blossoms that looked strangely familiar.

“Where are we?” I asked, ducking my head. The vaulted ceiling, supported by rough-hewn wooden beams that looked at least a century old, was lower than my standing height.

“Shhh,” John said. He’d been forced to kneel, and was peering out from behind the rusted metal grate that barred the single door. “There are people out there. I don’t want them to hear us.”

I stared around the bare room, which was windowless, save for a few tiny cross-shaped slots in the thick brick-and-plaster walls. I could see that a substantial shiny new chain had been wrapped several times around the grate and securely fastened with a padlock, to make certain that no one could get in or out of the structure.

Slowly, comprehension dawned. A metal grate, chained and locked? A dim, cramped space? Dead leaves? Red flower blossoms?

“Are we inside
your crypt
?” I hissed, rushing to John’s side, the dead leaves and flowers crunching beneath my feet.

I didn’t rush to John’s side for fear of ghosts. I had just exited an entire realm of ghosts. I’d had a near-death experience before. I knew what being dead was like.

I’d simply never been on this
side
of death before.

“Yes,” John whispered. He was still peering out through the door. “This is the crypt they assigned me.”

Not
where his body was buried. I noticed the subtle wording right away.

Looking around, I saw that he was right. John’s crypt was empty, except for the two of us, and lots and lots of dead leaves. There was no coffin.

Wasn’t that the point, after all, of Coffin Night, which Isla Huesos High School celebrated every year, even though the administration frowned on it? The senior class built John a coffin — though they’d been doing it so long, no one remembered anymore who the coffin was for, or why they even did it — and hid it.

The hiding is symbolic
, Mr. Smith had told me, explaining the ritual.
The hiding represents burying.

All so John would stop haunting the island. Because however John had died, all those years ago —
if
he had died — his body had never been found. And his anger over that was thought to have brought the hurricane in 1846 that had killed so many people, and caused the old Isla Huesos Cemetery to flood, and displace all the coffins buried there.

That’s how the new Isla Huesos Cemetery — the one we were in now — had become such a famous tourist destination, because of its unusual crypts — all raised in order to keep the coffins within them above sea level, so they wouldn’t be washed out to sea (or into people’s yards) like they had during that devastating hurricane in October 1846.

I shivered, kneeling beside John in the leaves and dead flower blossoms that carpeted the floor of his tomb.

“Why did we come back this way instead of popping up somewhere less … cramped?” I asked, substituting the word
cramped
for
creepy
. I was trying not to feel weirded out that I was in my boyfriend’s crypt. It was only a building, after all.

A very unpleasant one.

“This is a portal,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“A what?”

“A portal,” John whispered. “A direct link from here to the Underworld. That’s why you don’t feel dizzy this time.”

I hadn’t even noticed, but he was right. I didn’t feel sick, for once, though we’d just jumped between astral planes.

“This is a doorway through which the souls of the departed enter the world of the dead after they pass,” John explained softly. “The doorway closes behind the dead once they enter. They can never leave again —”

“Unless they escape,” I interrupted. Because this was what had happened to me.

He glanced down at me with a teasing smile. “Unless I choose to
let them
escape,” he said, “because they seem to want their mothers so badly.”

“That was
two years ago
,” I reminded him. I shouldn’t have mentioned the thing that morning about being inexperienced with men, even if it was technically true. He was never going to let me help him if he always thought of me as someone he had to protect. “And do I have to remind you that you didn’t
let
me escape, I —”

“Shhh.” He held up a hand. “Someone’s coming.”

I looked past his shoulder as a family walked down the pathway along with Mr. Smith and some other people who were dressed in business attire and carrying clipboards. It was difficult to hear what they were saying, but not hard to imagine what they were discussing … a crypt. The people dressed in business attire were probably from a local funeral parlor.

The family wore the somber, unhappy expressions of the newly bereaved. Someone they loved had passed away.

Not far behind them followed a man in coveralls — obviously a groundskeeper who worked in the cemetery. He was pushing a wheelbarrow, in which he was collecting the many palm fronds that littered the path. The high winds of the approaching storm must have torn them from the trees in and around the cemetery.

I remembered the hurricane for which we’d been dismissed early from school the day before. Was it still on its way? I had no way of knowing. From John’s crypt, I couldn’t quite see the sky, though the warm air certainly seemed oppressive enough for rain.

I tried to concentrate on staying quiet, the way John had asked me to.

This was hard to do, though, when I kept remembering the last time I’d stood amongst so many poinciana blossoms, the fiery red flowers beneath my feet. It had been the night I’d run into John in front of this very crypt, and been so convinced he was going to kiss me … only he hadn’t. I’d thought he’d hated me, until I’d learned the next morning from my cousin Alex that poinciana blossoms had turned up all along the walk in front of my mom’s house.

There was only one person who could have put them there.

Who could have guessed that less than a week later, I’d be
inside
that crypt with that person, going to search for Alex. It was incredible how much had changed. What was my mom going to say when she saw me? Would John let me introduce him? What had my grandmother told everyone about what had happened at school? Knowing her, it definitely wasn’t anything good.

“What about Furies?” I whispered to John, suddenly fearful. “Can Furies use the portal?” I looked down to check my necklace — clear — and noticed for the first time that I wasn’t wearing my Snow White gown or slippers. Somehow I was back in the clothes I’d worn to school the day before, a black zip-front sundress along with a pair of metallic silver flats.

Which was good, because running around Isla Huesos in a long white dress would not only have attracted too much attention, it would have been inconvenient, especially considering the temperature. Even inside the crypt, the air was as thick and as warm as soup. I could only imagine what it was like outside.

“Furies escape the Underworld by finding weak-willed people to possess,” John whispered back. “Only the newly dead can use this portal. Or me. That’s why Mr. Smith had to start locking the grate. Too many people have seen me coming and going, and have gotten curious.”

I looked around the small dark room — its walls were so old and ill-maintained, the roots of the enormous poinciana tree growing nearby had begun to push through — and tried to imagine anyone curious (or foolhardy) enough to follow John into it.

“Can Mr. Graves and the others use it?” I asked, thinking of how Henry had said he’d never been to Isla Huesos.

John shook his head.

So it was another one of those things only death deities could do, like the ability to make birds come back to life, and create thunder at will.

It didn’t seem fair.

“Do you ever take them with you?” I asked. “Like me?”

“I should have taken them this time
instead
of you,” he said. “Unlike you, they’re capable of grasping the meaning of the word
quiet
.”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“You’ve seen them,” John said, with a grin. “If people notice
me
walking in and out of a crypt, what do you think they’re going to say about Henry, or Mr. Liu, or
Frank
? And you’ve heard Mr. Graves. He refuses to entertain the idea of any of them going.” He shifted into a fairly good imitation of the blind man. It wasn’t unkind, but it was accurate. “
Isla Huesos is an island of sin. If the dead go unsorted, there will be nothing but pestilence.
”

I got the message. Still, I was concerned.

“But wouldn’t they like some time off?” I asked. “Not Mr. Graves, maybe, but the others? We could do something about their clothes, the way you did your own.” I pointed to John’s black jeans, T-shirt, and tactical boots, which I was fairly certain he hadn’t acquired by strolling into the local menswear shop downtown with a credit card. “With so many people opting for homeschooling these days, it wouldn’t be hard to explain what Henry’s doing out of class. And I don’t think anyone would say much about Mr. Liu or Frank. Isla Huesos is a really popular stop with motorcycle clubs, and those two could completely pass for a couple of —”

I broke off, realizing John was looking down at me with one eyebrow raised.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, his mouth twisted into another lopsided grin. “You just never run out of suggestions for how I could do my job better, do you?”

“Well,” I said, flushing. “I’m only trying to help. Isn’t that what a consort is supposed —?”

He held up a hand for silence, then listened.

“I think they’re gone,” John said, nodding to the grate.

“But how are we going to get out of here?” I asked. “We’re locked in. Do you want me to call Mr. Smith?” I pulled out my phone, which I’d been relieved to find in my book bag, hanging from my shoulder. “I’m sure he has the key —”

John turned his head to give me a cynical look. Then he reached out and grasped the chain in both hands.

“John,” I cried. “What are you —?”

Then I remembered the night I’d stood in front of this very crypt and seen the shattered remains of a similar chain lying in front of it. Not severed by bolt cutters, but literally pulled apart, the way he was doing now. Because his leather coat had disappeared exactly the way my gown had, he had on only his jeans and the black T-shirt he’d thrown on that morning.

So I got to witness firsthand how those metal links got broken. The muscles in his upper arms pumped to the size of grapefruits, and the fabric of the T-shirt tightened around them almost to tearing….

Then the metal gave way with a musical twang, and the chain snaked noisily from the grate, falling to the rain-softened earth with a clunk.

“By all means,” John said, brushing his hands together in a self-satisfied way, “let’s call Mr. Smith.”

I ducked my head, hiding my blushing cheeks by pretending to be busy putting my cell phone back in my bag. Encouraging his occasional lapses into less than civilized behavior seemed like a bad idea, so I didn’t let on how extremely attractive I’d found what he’d just done.

“You know,” I remarked coolly, “I’m already your girlfriend. You don’t have to show off your superhuman strength for me.”

John looked as if he didn’t for one minute believe my disinterest. He opened the grate for me with a gentlemanly bow. “Let’s go find your cousin,” he said. “I’d like to be home in time for supper. Where’s the coffin?”

“It’s at my mom’s house,” I said.

“
What?
” That deflated his self-satisfaction like a pin through a balloon. He stood stock-still outside the door to his crypt, the word HAYDEN carved in bold capital letters above his head. “What’s it doing
there
?”

“Seth Rector and his girlfriend and their friends asked me if they could build it in my mom’s garage,” I said. “They said it was the last place anyone would look.”

John shook his head slowly. “Rector,” he said, grinding out the word. “I should have known.”

I threw him a wide-eyed glance. “
You
know Seth Rector?”

“Not Seth,” he said, darkly.

“Wait. You know his dad?” The Rectors were an extremely influential family in Isla Huesos. Besides having the largest and most ornate mausoleum in the cemetery — it made John’s, which was fairly large, look like a kid’s playhouse — Seth’s father was a realtor and developer whose signs, Rector Realty, were plastered over the windows of every empty shop downtown. “What’s your connection to the Rectors?”

“It’s a long story,” John said, the corners of his mouth tugged down as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. He turned around and started walking towards the cemetery gate. “Your mother’s house is only a few streets from here. We can walk without anyone noticing us if we stick to the side roads.”

“You say that about everything,” I complained, trailing after him. “Everything is a long story, too long to tell me. I suppose after two hundred years, or whatever, things get a little convoluted, but can’t you paraphrase? How do you know the Rectors?”

When we rounded the corner, it became apparent there wouldn’t be time for any stories at all, paraphrased or not. Not because the gray clouds that were hanging so threateningly overhead had burst open, the way I was half expecting them to, but because the family we’d seen earlier, along with Mr. Smith and the people holding the clipboards, were climbing into their various vehicles in the parking lot right in front of us.