Underworld (14 page)

Something was wrong. Very wrong. It wasn’t until I heard an all-too-familiar voice from the bottom of the stairs that I knew what it was.

“Pierce,” my grandmother said. Her tone was venomous.

I felt John’s fingers tighten around my arm. I didn’t have to look down at my necklace to know it had turned as black as the heart of the plump old woman standing by the newel post, clutching her purse in one hand and a spare set of my mom’s house keys in the other.

“Grandma,” I said. I felt Hope’s heart give a panicked skitter in my hands.
Now
she began to struggle, frantic to get away from the evil presence she sensed all around her …

… or maybe the fear she felt radiating from me.

The front door stood wide open behind my grandmother. I had no idea how she’d managed to get in without either of us having heard her.

But I wasn’t going to run.

“When I heard you were back, I thought, no, even
she
wouldn’t be stupid enough to come to the most obvious place any of us would think to look for her,” my grandmother said. “But you didn’t disappoint. That’s the one good thing about having a stupid grandchild. She’s so predictable.”

“You’d better get out of here,” I warned her, narrowing my eyes. “My dad’s on his way, and you know how
he
feels about you. There’s no way he’s going to believe the things you’ve been saying about me.”

“Isn’t he?” Her mouth curled into a smile that anyone else would have described as angelic … but I knew better. “What about your young man?” Her reptilian gaze fell on John. “She’s got you wrapped around her finger, hasn’t she? What did she do, cry? So of course you let her have whatever she wanted, which was … what? To come see her mommy.” She sneered, then reached into her massive purse. “Well, this just makes everything a lot more fun.”

There was a Band-Aid on her cheek covering the place where I’d hit her. It was hard to see in the semidarkness of the foyer, but the skin around the bandage looked redder than the skin on the opposite cheek, but more like she’d layered on the rouge a little too thickly than like my fist had actually damaged it that badly. I wondered if rouge wasn’t the only thing Grandma was laying on a little thick.

“Stay back,” John warned her in a hard voice, pulling me close.

“Pierce,” my grandmother said, giving me a scandalized look. “Whatever is the matter with that young man of yours? He’s so violent! All I was doing was trying to talk some sense into you … again. Good thing those nice police officers are sitting in that squad car out there, so when he goes after me — like he’s about to — and I try to defend myself, they’ll hear all the screaming, and come running in to arrest him … while you, Pierce — I’m afraid I’m going to misfire, and you’re going to suffer the brunt of it. This is military grade. I’m told the burning sensation goes away in ten to twenty-four hours. But it’s excruciating.”

She pulled a canister of pepper spray from her purse, aiming it directly at my face.

Before she could press the nozzle — even before John could whisk me away to safety — my uncle Chris startled us all by stepping into the living room and calling, “Hey, did anyone see a bird? It was the darnedest thing, I opened the door to come inside, and a
bird
flew into the house.” His bulky silhouette came into view. He paused when he saw us on the steps.

“Oh, there it is,” he said, his gaze falling on Hope in my hands. “Good job, Piercey, you caught it.” Then he noticed Grandma. “Mom, what are you doing here?” he asked curiously. “I thought you went home to rest.”

“I did,” my grandmother said, suddenly sounding like a weak old woman as she dropped the pepper spray back into her purse. “But I heard Pierce was back. I can’t believe you didn’t call me right away. Isn’t it the most joyous occasion? Alleluia.”

Upstairs, I heard my mother’s voice from her bedroom. “Christopher? Is that you? Who are you talking to? I’m on the phone.”

The slant of yellow light spilling from my mother’s bedroom widened perceptibly. She was heading down the hall towards the stairs — and us — her bare feet silent on the thick rugs.

What happened next could best be described as an explosion … except that there wasn’t any fire or heat, so no one got hurt.

Afterwards, they probably blamed it on a power surge brought on by a lightning strike. I wasn’t there, however, so I wouldn’t know.

Just as my grandmother shouted, “Pierce is home!” my mother said, in a disbelieving voice, “Pierce? Where?” Mom lifted her hand to switch on the elaborate silver and wrought iron chandelier that hung in the foyer, and John’s arms closed around me —

Then a brilliant burst of light filled the room, dazzling my eyes, and causing my mother to scream.

W
hen I opened my eyes again, I was standing next to John in a dark, quiet alley.

High wooden fences rose on either side of us, blocking the view of all but the roofs of the houses behind them. Over the top of the fences hung the thickest growth of bougainvillea I’d ever seen, forming a brightly colored rainbow of yellow, red, and pink flowers all up and down the road. The smell of night-blooming jasmine was almost as heavy in the warm, humid air as the rain, which hung so low in the fast-moving purple clouds overhead, I felt as if I could taste it. Frogs chirped noisily, a cicada rasped, and farther off in the distance, I could hear music.

“What,” I asked, dazed, “was
that
?”

Hope, to show she had not liked what John had done any more than I had, gave a few furious whistles and dug in with her talons, causing me to open my hands with a cry and let her go. She flew off, though not far. I saw her settle on top of a poinciana tree in someone’s backyard, its branches stretching across the alley. She was easy to spot since she was so white, and the poinciana tree had lost nearly all of its blossoms. They lay scattered across the alley floor like a decaying red carpet. She furiously began to groom herself to show how indignant she was at the way she’d been mishandled.

John’s dark eyebrows were raised in an expression of contrition … but his eyes didn’t show a single hint of remorse.

“I apologize,” he said smoothly. “I’ll admit that was a cheap magician’s trick. But I couldn’t let your mother see us vanish into thin air right in front of her. I’m sure she was upset enough already.”

“That would make two of us,” I said, still trembling, both from the close encounter with my grandmother and John’s method of rescuing me from it. The place where Hope had clawed me had begun to sting. I looked up and down the alley, wondering where we were … and how long it would be before the Furies found us this time.

“Pierce.” John’s voice changed. It softened. He reached out to cup my face in both his hands, looking down at me intently. “I’m sorry. I should never have listened to Mr. Smith’s advice to take you to see your mother. He meant well, but under the circumstances, your grandmother was right … I should have known it was the first place the Furies would look for you, once they heard you were back.”

I thought about overhearing my mother’s voice as she spoke to my father on the phone, the way it had softened when she’d begged him to hurry up and get there, and the way he’d called her Debbie. I hadn’t heard the two of them speak that kindly to each other in years.

“It was worth it,” I said emphatically.

John dropped his hands and simply looked at me. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad, then. Still, I’m sorry you didn’t get to say a proper good-bye to her. You realize that your uncle is going to tell your grandmother everything about our visit … including that we’re looking for Alex?”

I nodded, shuddering a little, and not at the lightning that lit up the clouds above the telephone wires. “Where are we?” I asked, absently raising the cut in my hand to my lips.

“Coffin Fest,” he said. “It’s being held on the street around the corner. It’s where your uncle says your cousin is. Hopefully we’ll be able to find him and convince him to give up on whatever his plans are concerning the coffin, then get him home before your grandmother has time to spread the word about where we are. But I wouldn’t count on it. Let me see your hand.”

“It’s nothing,” I said, pulling my hand from my lips. For such a small cut, it throbbed a bit. “Only a scratch.” All I could think was,
Home
. That’s what he’d called it. The Underworld, where I now lived … with
him
. My heart began to thud uncomfortably behind the zipper down the front of my dress.

It was fine, I told myself. I liked it there. There was no bougainvillea, but there were black lilies and mushrooms. It was cold, but there was always a fire to sit by. It was just …

A strong gust of wind stirred the bougainvillea and rustled the skirt of my dress, and for a second the music from the street fair sounded louder. It was Spanish music, pulsating with life and energy.

It was the opposite of what was waiting on the other side of his crypt.

“Pierce,” he said, and tugged on my hand. “Let me see.”

I surrendered. I had no idea how he could even locate the tiny pink scrape in the quickening darkness. The street lamps on either end of the alley had come on, but their glow didn’t reach to where we were standing.

He found the wound, though, and passed his thumb lightly across it. A strange warmth filled me … not the uncomfortable, oppressive warmth from the pervasive humidity, but a tingling sensation that started in my hand, then slowly spread up my arm. The wound did not vanish, but it stopped hurting.

“How did you do that?” I breathed, in wonder.

“I keep telling you,” he said, lifting my hand and then pressing it to his lips. “The job comes with certain compensations.”

The tingling increased … but only because his lips always had that effect on me.

“John,” I said. My heart was pounding, but whether it was from his touch, an electrical charge from all the lightning that was churning in the clouds overhead, or the Spanish music, I didn’t know. It could have been my fear, which had kicked into a high setting from seeing my grandmother again. “What would happen if we ran away?”

“Ran away?” he repeated with a soft laugh, lowering my hand and looking down at the blue veins that ran across the back. “And where, exactly, would we go?”

“I don’t care,” I said recklessly. “Somewhere far away from here, where the Furies can’t find us. Why do we even have to go back? We can go anywhere. I have a ton of credit cards. They’re still good until my dad cuts them off. My parents think that’s what we’ve done anyway, so why not really do it?”

He didn’t raise his gaze to meet mine, just continued to play with my hand, spreading my fingers out, seeming to compare their size against his, which were much larger.

“Do you hate what I am that much?” he asked, in a voice that I noticed was merely curious, as if whatever I said in response, it didn’t much matter to him … which meant, I knew, that it did.

“No,” I said quickly. “I don’t hate it all. What you do is important, I understand that. I just don’t understand why
you
have to do it. It doesn’t seem fair. Why can’t Frank do it? Honestly, I think he’d enjoy it.”

“You said you’d stay,” John reminded me. I noticed that as usual, he’d ignored my question about why
he
had to be the ruler of the Underworld of Isla Huesos.

“I said I’d stay with
you
,” I pointed out.

“What about Alex?” he asked.

“He’ll be fine, too,” I said. “If he’s old enough to think he doesn’t have to come home when his father asks him to, isn’t he old enough to take care of himself?”

“I don’t think you really believe that,” John said. His fingers folded over mine. “Any more than you believe in anything you’re suggesting. Do you?”

“No,” I admitted softly. Still, wild desperation seized me. “But John, don’t you
want
to run away sometimes, forget all the things you have to do, and only do things you
want
for a change? And if we did, what’s the worst that could happen? Besides the pestilence Mr. Graves was talking about?” The idea of Isla Huesos swarming with walking dead didn’t bother me that much now that I knew my dad was on his way. He’d take care of my mom, and Alex and Uncle Chris, too … I didn’t care what happened to Grandma.

I didn’t want to think about people who’d been kind to me since my arrival on Isla Huesos and probably didn’t deserve to be destroyed by pestilence, like Mr. Smith and my friend Kayla. I pushed thoughts of them out of my mind.

John looked up from my hand, his eyes narrowing as he examined my face. “You haven’t eaten since breakfast,” he said, pulling me in the direction from which the music was flowing. “Let’s go. There’s no reason we can’t look for your cousin and get you something to eat at the same time, if we hurry.”

I
was
hungry, I realized. I was also feeling a little light-headed. Wait a minute …

“You’re trying to change the subject,” I accused him.

“I told you there were compensations for the job,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulders, since I apparently wasn’t moving quickly enough for him. Soon my feet were practically flying across the pavement. “Well, there are punishments, too, for those who break the rules.”

He’d spoken of punishments before. Of consequences.

“But if we went somewhere the Furies couldn’t find us,” I persisted, “how could they punish us?”

“Whenever someone leaves the Underworld who isn’t supposed to,” he said, “it leaves an imbalance in the realm. The Furies may not punish the person who left, but they’ll happily take out their wrath on those left behind.”

Turning my head, I caught a glimpse of the hand he’d wrapped around my shoulder. There they were … the scars that had been inflicted because of what I’d done when I was fifteen. The consequences of my thoughtless action.

Horrified, I stopped walking, just at the edge of the alley. The music was loud and festive, and I could see the bright lights and crowds of the street fair. I could even smell the dizzyingly intoxicating scent of grilled meat.

None of that mattered anymore, however.

“You mean they’d make poor Mr. Graves and Henry suffer for things
we
did?” I asked, my voice breaking.

John had dropped his arm from around my shoulder. Now he stood looking down at me with an odd expression on his face … it seemed almost like pity.

“Yes,” he said. “So the sooner we get back, the safer all of us will be.”

Beginning to realize the enormity of the sacrifice he was making for Alex — and for me — I nodded, speeding up my pace … only to slow down again when I noticed the towering structure of the Isla Huesos lighthouse as soon as we left the shelter of the alley. Looming a hundred feet into the air, it was one of the tallest structures on the island … and one that I had refused to go inside when my mom had brought me for the requisite tour, remaining at the bottom to read instead all the plaques about the brave residents who, in the nineteenth century, risked their lives sailing out to save the stranded crews and cargoes of ships that wrecked while traveling through the shallow waters between Isla Huesos and the coral reef that surrounded it.

Now the Isla Huesos lighthouse sat empty, decommissioned after the hurricane of October 1846 almost completely destroyed it, even rearranging the physical shape of the island, so that the lighthouse sat almost a half mile inland.

That’s how someone was able to hang a sign from one side of the lighthouse, then string it all the way across the street along which Coffin Fest was being held. In bloodred letters, the sign read:

Welcome to Coffin Fest!

Brought to you by Captain Rob’s Rum

Island of Bones Radio Station 95.5

And Rector Realty

Party ’til You’re Wrecked!

John must have noticed my expression when I saw the sign, since he asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just … at school, they held a special convocation to announce that Coffin Night was canceled.”

Not only that, but Chief of Police Santos had put in an appearance to stress the seriousness of his department’s efforts to quell the community’s enthusiasm for the tradition, forbidding local hardware stores from selling large quantities of wood to minors to discourage bonfires and coffin-making.

Yet here was a perfectly public event celebrating it — off school grounds, of course — with corporate sponsorship, no less.

“The police do that every year,” John said. “It never works.”

Apparently not. Underneath the sign streamed hordes of people, most of them dressed normally, but some wearing costumes, many of them pirates, others dressed as zombies or ghosts or undertakers or sexy skeletons. Almost all of them were carrying red plastic drink cups, despite the fact that there was a police cruiser parked next to the crosswalk. Two very bored-looking police officers leaned against it, flirting with a couple of sexy girl pirates in tight bustiers and high heels.

Everyone I saw was smiling, despite the thunder rumbling overhead, and the fact that already I had felt a few drops of light rain fall.

I glanced back at John. Since I was pretty sure by now that he had died in a shipwreck, the event seemed … well, tasteless. Though of course the festival organizers hadn’t had any way of knowing that the reason for Coffin Night himself was going to show up.

“It’s horrible,” I said to him emotionally, nodding at the sign. I found the fact that drops of fake blood were dripping from the letters particularly offensive. That was my
boyfriend’s
fake blood they were using to promote their businesses and products.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a crooked smile. “If there’s going to be a coffin hidden anywhere on Isla Huesos — outside the cemetery, of course — it’s kind of them to let us know this is the place.”

I didn’t share his confidence. He hadn’t heard Seth Rector’s elaborate plans for how they were going to hide the coffin. The plans had referenced an airplane hangar. None of them had included Coffin Fest.

“Well, I still think it’s
horrible
,” I said again. “And now not only does my grandmother know we’re here, so does the entire Fury population of the island, I’m sure.
And
we were both on the front page of the paper this morning. How are we going to walk in there without people recognizing us?”

“Like this,” he said, his smile turning enigmatic, and took my hand.

A second later, he was guiding me across the street, dodging laughing couples and some people dressed as vampires and even young parents pushing babies in strollers, until we were standing in front of a booth selling frozen fruit slices on a stick. We’d passed directly in front of the police officers, but they never looked away from the two girls in the pirate costumes.