Meg Cabot - Awaken

Kayla wasn’t the only one to echo, “Evacuate?” but she was the person standing closest to me, so she was the only one to whom I responded softly, so the others couldn’t hear.

“We need to get back to the castle,” I said. “John says it’s the only place we’ll be safe.”

Kayla blinked her exotically made-up eyes. “Safe from what?”

“Those invisible forces of evil I mentioned earlier —”

I didn’t mention that I’d been John’s primary concern, or that he hadn’t said anything about Chloe or Reed or the others. But how could I take Alex and Kayla and leave the rest of them all standing there? Who was to say the Furies wouldn’t come after them?

Before Kayla could say anything, Hospital Gown burst out with, “Evacuate? We’ve been waiting here for hours; we’re at the front of the line, and now you’re telling us we’ve got to move some place else?”

All around him, old people lifted their voices to unite with Hospital Gown’s in a chorus of protests. “He’s right!” and “We’re not going anywhere!” and “We want to speak to someone in charge!”

You try to do one nice thing for people, and look what it gets you.

“ I’m in charge,” I shouted back at them.

I’d have been better off staring them down in cold silence, but to do that I’d have to have been more sure of what I was doing. And I hadn’t the slightest idea of that.

Still, I plunged on, hoping, like a substitute teacher on the first day of school, that the volume of my voice would hide my anxiety and make up for my lack of experience.

“All I want to do is make sure none of you gets hurt,” I yelled. “So get in line behind me and we’ll all —”

It was too late. Alastor’s ears pricked forward and he snorted. Then Hope let out a squawk of alarm and suddenly took off from between Alastor’s ears, as if frightened by something. But what? I wondered. I hadn’t been shouting that loud. Could she have sensed my own fear?

As I looked around to see what had startled her, a bolt of lightning split the air, thrusting the entire cavern into stark white daylight, instead of the perpetual pinkish dawn it seemed nearly always to be in.

Chloe wasn’t the only one who screamed. I’m pretty sure Kayla and Alex — as well as Hospital Gown and most of his friends — did, too. I know my ears were ringing afterwards … possibly from a scream of my own.

When I lowered the arm I’d lifted to protect my dazzled gaze, I saw that the two ships were so close to the docks, I could have looked into John’s eyes — if his long hair wasn’t partially obscuring his face — as he struggled to twist the wheel, which some unseen force was attempting to pull in the opposite direction.

Furies. Without any weak-willed human bodies to possess the way they did on earth, they couldn’t be seen by the naked eye. But I should have known that they were all around us, not only by the color of my diamond and what had happened to the boats, but also by the chill in the air, the lightning, and now the almost undetectable but ever increasing shaking of the boards of the dock beneath us. The remaining water glasses on the tray Alex had left on the railing began to drop into the water one by one, until finally the empty tray itself slipped, with a plop, into the lake.

People seemed eager to take my advice to evacuate now. The problem was, they couldn’t.

“W-what’s happening?” Chloe cried, reaching for the closest solid thing she could grab on to, which happened to be Alex.

True to his name of protector of man — and now girl — Alex slid an arm around her just as the waves began to slap over the side of the pier, dampening everyone’s legs to the knee.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think Pierce is right. We’d better —”

His voice was drowned out by the loudest clap of thunder I’d ever heard.

Except that it wasn’t thunder. I twisted in the saddle to see if John was all right, knowing as I did that there was no possible way he was going to be able to employ that trick Reed had suggested and rig something to hold the wheel in place as he leaped to safety.

I was right. The sound we’d heard was the prow of the boat John had been steering, ripping out the hull of the ship in front of it as it rammed against it, with John still aboard.

“Dost thou not hear the pity of his plaint?

Dost thou not see the death that combats him

Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt?”

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto II

The sound of splintering wood and sheering metal as the two ships collided echoed so loudly through the cavern that the sound felt almost like a physical blow. For some of us on shore — those of us not lucky enough to have hands to fling over our ears to protect them, that is — it was a physical blow.

“The ravens,” the old man in the hospital gown cried.

It had begun to rain. But no ordinary rain, unless raindrops had suddenly turned into large black birds.

The ravens that had been flying in their predatory circles above, stunned by the sound of the ships imploding, began to drop, one by one, from the air, landing like grenades of blood and black feathers all around us.

“Watch it,” Reed said, pulling Alex and Chloe out of the way as one of the birds shot by them, nearly striking them both. Instead, it hit the dock railing, then ricocheted into the water, where it bobbed for a moment, until, incredibly, it recovered itself. After giving its wings a good shake, it flew away, though it got only as far as a nearby boulder before crash-landing again in confusion.

It was one of the lucky ones. Most of the other birds plummeted into the sand or rocks, while recently departed souls screamed in horror at the piles of tiny bones and feathers all around them.

My heart already in my throat over John, I glanced about frantically to check on Hope. Though her wings had never been clipped, she surely hadn’t been flying at as high an altitude as those ravens when the echo sounded, and could not have been as badly affected by it as they were. And with those blinding white feathers, she should have been easy to spot — much easier than John, who could be halfway to the bottom of the lake by now ….

I hadn’t told him I loved him. Why hadn’t I told him I loved him?

Better not to think of that now. But I had no better luck spotting Hope anywhere on the shore than I did John in the water, since Alastor, like the ravens, had been stunned by the sound of the colliding ships and panicked in response to the assault on his sensitive ears. He reared, frantic to get back to the castle and to his comfortable stable, where birds didn’t plummet from the sky and people weren’t screaming at the sight of the birds’ mutilated corpses all around them. Though I tried to soothe him, it was like trying to calm a thrashing shark.

“Careful!” Kayla ducked as the stallion’s enormous, silver-clad hooves swung dangerously close to her face.

I was holding on for dear life, but I managed to get out two words: “I’m trying.”

There was nothing I could do but allow Alastor to go where he so badly wanted to. He was too strong for me to control when he was in this agitated state, and the more he tried to resist me, the more likely he was going to hurt someone … probably me.

Alastor wasn’t the only one panicking, either. The people standing at the front of the pier, who would have been the first to board the boat if it had actually arrived, were instead the first to suffer the aftereffects of the ships’ collision.

In the moments following the initial impact, the boats sprang apart as lake water rushed in to fill their empty passenger holds. What I could also see from my high vantage point on Alastor’s back — whenever he twisted in that direction — was that a four-foot wave filled with debris was surging outwards from the crash and heading directly towards the pier.