Underworld (23 page)

The caller was not unknown. At least not to me. It was my cousin Alex. I recognized his voice right away.

“Pierce,” he said. “Pierce?”

It made sense that the connection was terrible … so staticky and distant that I could barely hear him.

What I could not figure out was why he sounded so out of breath.

“Alex?” I put my finger in the ear to which I was not holding my phone so I could hear him. Hope chose that moment to come swooping into the room and land on the bed, where she proceeded to waddle across the comforter, then butt me in my bare foot with her head, cooing extremely loudly. I ignored her. “Alex, I can’t hear you very well. Can you speak up? Where are you?”

“Pierce,” Alex said, in that same ghostly voice, as if he were speaking from a grave. “I —” I heard only static. “— something so stupid. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”

“Wait,” I said. I flung a panicked look in John’s direction. “
Where
are you? You sound awful. I thought Frank and Kayla took you home.”

John was already pulling out the tablet he kept in his pocket. His fingertips flew over it. I had no idea what he was doing. I was fairly certain those tablets only worked for looking up the names of the dead, or in John’s case, checking up on my activities on earth. But maybe he was texting Frank.

“There’s no air in here, Pierce,” Alex said. I could tell he was crying. “You’ve got to come, quick … can’t call the cops, because I think some of them are in on it, and if I call my dad, he’ll just get in …”

I felt goose bumps break out all over my arms. “Alex,” I said. I was already scrambling off my bed and looking around for my shoes. “You’re breaking up. What’s happening? Did you go out again? Did you go look for the coffin? Because they haven’t even finished building it yet.”

“Not
that
coffin,” Alex said. His voice was growing even fainter. His next words sounded like cries from the beyond … except
I
was the one in the beyond. “I figured it out … I know where they’re hiding it all.”

Then there was nothing. The call died.

“Hiding what? Alex?” I cried, pressing the phone so closely to my ear, it hurt.
“Alex?”

I turned towards John, panicked, holding out the phone. “He’s gone. He’s in trouble, and he’s gone.”

Mutely, John held his tablet towards me. The screen showed the same picture I’d seen on my cell phone earlier: Alex, trapped inside what looked like a coffin.

“Why are
you
seeing that?” I demanded, slipping on my shoes.

“Pierce,” he said somberly. “You know why I’m seeing it. Think about who I am.”

Cold horror gripped me. “Is he dead? He can’t be. I thought we saved him!”

“I did, too,” John said, his frown so deep I felt my heart give a double flip. “But this says he’s at the cemetery.”

“The cemetery?” I burst out. “What’s he doing at the cemetery? I thought Frank and Kayla took him home.”

“They did,” John said, looking down at the screen. “He must have gone out again. Pierce —”

“What?” My heart was thumping at twice its normal speed. “Come on, John, we’ve got to go. Where is he exactly?”

John turned off the tablet and put it away, still not meeting my gaze. “He’s inside the Rector Mausoleum.”

“
Inside
it?” None of this was making any sense to me. “That’s impossible. What would he be doing there?”

“I don’t know,” John said. He finally lifted his gaze to me, and when he did, I saw the regret etched in his eyes. “But, Pierce, I’m afraid it’s too late. He’s already dead.”

H
e can’t be dead.” That’s what I kept saying.

“He can’t be. You’re wrong. Just because you’re the lord of the dead doesn’t mean you know everything. You were wrong about the Furies being indestructible. So you could be wrong about Alex.”

“Fine,” John said, looking as if he were longing to punch something. “We’ll go down to the beach and find him, and then you’ll see that
this
, I’m right about —”

“No.”
Maybe I was being hysterical. I don’t know. It just didn’t seem possible. The last time I’d seen Alex, he’d been alive. Standing there stiff as a board because I’d been hugging him and saying I loved him, too proud — or damaged — to tell me that he loved me back.

But he’d been alive. It didn’t make any sense. How could he be dead?

What John kept saying — that we didn’t have to go back to earth to find Alex — made even less sense.

John gave up insisting that if anyone was going to go back to Isla Huesos to look for Alex, it wasn’t going to be me. He gave up reminding me what had happened the last time I’d gone to Isla Huesos — that everywhere I went, there’d been a Fury waiting to harm me in some way. He had basically given up saying much of anything at all, except that Alex was dead.

“He called me. Out of everyone, he called
me
, John. I’m going to help him.”

“Pierce,” he said, compassion and sympathy in his voice, but hard reality in his eyes. “There isn’t any point. He’s dead.”

I whirled on him fiercely. “So was I. But my mom pulled me out of that pool and gave me mouth-to-mouth, and the EMTs gave me CPR, and I came back to life. Remember? So stop arguing and take me to him while there’s still time.”

That’s when John stopped arguing, took my arm, and one … two … three …
blink
.

We were in his crypt. But we weren’t there alone.

In the dim light of dawn, I could barely make out the shapes of two men wearing what appeared to be pirate costumes lying crumpled on the floor. They were semiconscious, their hands and feet tied with strips of what looked like their own clothing. Frank was sitting with his legs crossed at the ankles beside them, his back up against the wall, an empty bottle of Captain Rob’s Rum in his hands.

“Oh, hello,” he said with a wave when he saw us. “Welcome to the party.”

“What happened?” John demanded. He did not sound pleased.

“Got here to meet you, as we planned, and found
them
waiting.” Frank gave the bottle a toss, catching it expertly by the neck, then tossed it again. “Looks like they were planning to ambush you and Pierce when you showed up. As hired muscle goes, they don’t seem to have been the best choice. It’s usually not the brightest idea to drink on the job … but I suppose they got started at the festival and didn’t see any reason to stop. I simply hurried things along. Didn’t I, my fine fellows?” Frank gave one of the unconscious men a little shove with the toe of his boot.

“Go ’way,” the man murmured, before rolling over on his comfortable bed of poinciana blossoms and red drink cups. “We’re waiting for someone.”

“Find your own tomb,” the other said. “We’ve got dibs on this one. Nice ’n’ dry.”

“In my experience, challenging a total stranger to a drinking contest never works out well,” Frank went on, with a wink at me, “especially when the drink in question is the one his former employer used to force his entire crew to drink on a daily basis. Remember, Captain? Ah, memories.”

Frank held up the bottle. For the first time, I noticed that Captain Rob’s Rum had a picture of a ship captain on the label. He bore a slight resemblance to John … if John had been much older, with a long mustache, side whiskers, and a repulsive smirk on his face.

It was only then that it hit me: Captain Rob of Captain Rob’s Rum was
Captain Robert Hayden
. I wondered which of John’s ancestors had turned the tragedy of his father’s alcoholism into such a lucrative business. It obviously hadn’t been John.

I saw him grimace with distaste.

“Probably acquaintances of our old friend Mike,” he said, looking down at the two drunk men. “I doubt they scaled the cemetery fence in their condition.”

Frank nodded. “Not with those spikes on it. Someone had to have let them in through a gate.”

“The way he did the night of Jade’s murder,” John said, thoughtfully. “Mike, probably.”

Frank brightened. “I didn’t think of that. We could torture them a bit to find out.”

John threw me an uneasy glance. “I think we’d better leave them here and move on for now….”

I wasn’t really listening. On top of the fact that I was so tortured with worry about Alex, it didn’t smell so good inside John’s crypt — one or both of the two men had apparently been sick on himself.

“Right,” Frank said, eyeing me. “They’re trussed up nice and tight. Not like they’re going anywhere …”

I was relieved to see that the chains around the gate to John’s crypt remained broken. This was evidently how the two Furies had gotten inside it. Not waiting for John to do it for me this time, I pushed open the gate and stepped onto the cemetery path outside his crypt, relieved to smell the fresh morning air.

It had stopped raining. The rising sun was putting in a valiant effort to burn off the fast-moving clouds, streaking the sky in the east with brilliant stripes of orange, red, and lavender. This was good, since it meant we had light to see by — the city had started turning out all the streetlights in and around the graveyard in an effort to combat what the newspaper said the police department was calling acts of “teen vandalism.”

Some of us knew vandals had nothing to do with it, and turning out the lights wasn’t going to do anything to improve the situation.

“— all the way to the door,” I could hear Frank saying behind me as I moved quickly along the gravel path. “I gave him his phone and his keys, just like you told me, then we waited until he went inside. We
watched
him.”

“I believe you,” John said, in a calm voice. “What about his vehicle?”

I knew what they were talking about. Alex. Frank was defending himself, insisting he’d completed his assignment of making sure Alex got home safely.

I was certain Alex
had
gotten home safely, but then he’d snuck out again.
Why?
Why hadn’t he listened to me? Why hadn’t he listened to Kayla?

My heart was thumping as fast as a rabbit’s as we moved along the path towards the Rector mausoleum, easily visible amidst all the tombs, as it was the biggest one in the cemetery. Two stories high and made entirely of shiny taupe marble, it had its own little fence around it, a low chain like the kind at a fancy art museum, warning patrons not to touch. Beyond the chain was a grass lawn, probably one of the only ones in all of Isla Huesos. Tropical climates, my mom’s landscape architect had explained, were inhospitable to grass. The Rectors had to pay a fortune to maintain that grass.

“— however he got here, it wasn’t by driving,” Frank was saying. “I put the knife from my boot into every one of those tires —”

Alex didn’t need a car to get to the cemetery, though. My mom’s house was only a few blocks away from here, and Grandma’s house, where Alex lived, was even closer than that. He’d probably walked.

“— didn’t want to go home.” Frank’s voice drifted towards me, carried by the strong wind that was also stirring the tops of the palm trees around us, planted at periodic intervals between the tombs and the statues of weeping angels.

“What?”
John’s voice was sharp.

“She didn’t want to,” Frank said. He sounded defensive. “You know what girls are like these days. They do what they want. She didn’t want to go home. She said it wasn’t late and she wanted to stay out.”

“Then where
is
she?” John sounded alarmed.

“I don’t know. She dropped me off here. I don’t know where she went after —”

“She dropped you off
here
?”

I realized they were talking about Kayla. I wasn’t too alarmed. If anyone could take care of herself, it was Kayla. Alex was the one I had to worry about. Wasn’t that what Uncle Chris had said? My eyes filled with tears as I remembered the conversation he and I had had in the driveway of my mom’s house. I was never the one he’d felt he had to worry about, he’d said.

I was supposed to have taken care of Alex, because he was the one Uncle Chris had always worried about. And now I’d let him down.

I saw the birds before I saw the mausoleum doors. They were just like the ones I’d seen in the Underworld, black ones, wheeling around high in the air, dozens of them, circling in a flight path directly above the Rector mausoleum. They were silent as death.

“Oh, God,” I said, and started to run.

John got to the doors first. They were gates, just like on his crypt. But the Rectors’ weren’t scrolled wrought iron, decorative and rusted, and kept closed by a bike chain and lock. They were thick black steel, modern and new, like doors to a prison cell, with the lock built in.

I flung myself at them, gripping them with both hands and shaking them in panic.

They didn’t budge, of course.

“It’s all right,” John said soothingly. “Pierce, it’s all right, I’ll open it.”

“How?” My voice had a hysterical edge to it.
“How?”

“Stand back,” he said, and pushed me gently towards Frank, who put his hands on my shoulders and steered me aside.

Then John did something that completely astonished me … but it shouldn’t have, after everything I’d been through with him, and already seen him do. He turned around, and, just as he had done to the cemetery gates that terrible night we’d fought so badly, and he’d thrown my necklace away, he kicked those thick steel doors, causing a noise so loud, I threw my hands over my ears, and turned around worriedly to see if he’d woken anyone.

Of course he hadn’t. We were in the middle of nineteen acres of tombs. There was no one to waken … except the dead.

The gates crashed open.

John strode inside, and I followed, my pulse skittering. The mausoleum was made up of wall after wall of burial vaults, one stacked on top of the other, with shiny brass nameplates beneath each, starting, at the top, with William Rector and his wife, then their sons and their wives, then their children and grandchildren, and so on, six to a stack. The Rectors were evidently as skilled at producing offspring as they were at building profit-making businesses. As the vaults reached eye level, the dates on them became more recent, until finally came a dozen on which the nameplates were empty.

In the center of the mausoleum was an elaborately large fire pit, in which burned an eternal flame fueled by the open air … the building had no roof. A copper hood shielded the dancing flame from the elements. On top of the hood was a hideously ugly bronze statue in the modern style. The statue was of a couple, dressed in togas, wrapped in an embrace. Cupped in their hands was a piece of fruit. I couldn’t be sure, because realism did not appear to be the artist’s specialty, but it looked to me like a pomegranate.

“Good God,” Frank, who’d trailed after us, said when he saw the statue. “Rector’s even sicker than any of us thought. I’ve never wished I was blind before, like Graves, but I do now, because then I’d never have to look at
that
again.”

“Frank,” John said, his gaze on my face. “Be quiet.”

“But what do they
do
in here?” Frank wanted to know. “Have picnics with their dead relatives and admire their ugly art?”

Ignoring Frank, I stood in front of all the vaults, my fingers balled into fists. I was having trouble catching my breath. I felt as if the statuary were watching me …
laughing
at me. “Which one is Alex in?” I asked. “How can we tell?”

John stood at my side, helping me scan the nameplates. “He’s in an empty one.”

My heart lurched. “Of course he is.” If they’d stuffed him into a coffin with a corpse — I didn’t want to think about it. “But there are so many empty ones….”

I became distracted by the fact that Hope was pecking something on the stone floor … something that clearly wasn’t edible, because it was an unnatural shade of red, and not shaped like a poinciana blossom.

“Hope,” I said to her. “Stop that.”

Of course she didn’t. She looked up as I approached to take whatever it was away from her, then waddled out of my reach, as if annoyed with me for disturbing her meal, and began to peck elsewhere. I leaned down to examine what she’d been trying to eat.

It was a long, thin red streamer … exactly the kind that might fall from the pom-pom of someone dressed as a cheerleader, then stick to the bottom of her boyfriend’s shoe.

In front of the streamer was a vault at ground level. It had a blank nameplate.

“This one,”
I said to John, pointing. “It’s this one!”

Without hesitating, he ripped open the burial vault door, even though it was locked.

Inside, there was a coffin. Why would there be a coffin in a vault with an empty nameplate?

I stood there with my heart in my throat as John and Frank rushed to pull it out. It wasn’t a homemade, four-by-eight plywood coffin, painted in the IHHS school colors. It was a
real
coffin, a casket, actually, made of glossy black lacquer, man-sized … and sealed airtight.

I gasped. Was this some relative of Seth’s whom his family had just buried? Maybe the nameplate hadn’t yet arrived. Had we made a mistake? Were we disturbing the final resting place of Seth Rector’s grandfather?

It was too late, though. Because when they finally dragged the coffin all the way out of the vault, Frank accidentally dropped his end. The coffin fell over and the lid came unlatched. There was a hissing sound, like something decompressing….

Oh, no
, a voice inside me whispered.
Oh, no, oh, no.