Meg Cabot - Awaken

“Get everyone off the dock,” were the last words I was able to gasp out before Alastor wheeled around, practically whipping my head off.

Fortunately, it seemed as if Henry had heard me. He must have, since behind me, I heard him bellow, “Everyone, please, it’s too dangerous to stay here. We’ve got to follow Miss Oliviera — she’s the lady on the big black horse. Walk, don’t run —”

That’s all I heard before Alastor took off thundering down the pier, his hooves flying so quickly I wondered if they were making sparks. At the speed he was going, the wind whipped my face so fiercely my eyes began to water. All I saw ahead of us were blurred shapes. I could only hope the horse wasn’t knocking people down in his frantic flight to escape.

Though I couldn’t see, I could hear. Once I no longer heard the hollow drumming of Alastor’s hooves on the wooden boards of the dock, but the much deeper thud of his feet hitting dry sand, I began to pull his reins as hard as I could to the left, knowing that when a horse’s eyes are forced to look in a direction he doesn’t want to go, he has no choice but to slow down, and eventually to stop or turn in that direction. I knew, of course, that the castle was where I was supposed to be heading, but I couldn’t leave the beach without turning around for one last look for my bird and the boy I hadn’t told I loved.

Alastor wasn’t giving up without a fight. I thought he was going to pull my arms from their sockets, but he finally slowed down — with considerable snorting — and eventually stopped, pawing ill-temperedly at the ground.

“Sorry,” I said to him. “But you’re not the only one who’s suffering here.”

I twisted in the saddle to look behind me and saw that very few of the departed had listened to Henry’s advice of walk, don’t run . People at the end of the dock had already begun to shove against those in front of them, desperate to get to what they perceived as the safety of the shore before the waves of debris-filled water hit them.

I didn’t blame them, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone was crushed or pushed off the pier and into the water, where the choppy waves would sweep them up and under the dock and out of sight.

What happens to the soul of someone who went missing in the Underworld? I wondered.

Better question: What was going to happen to these people now that the ships that were supposed to take them to their final destinations had been destroyed?

This was something I hadn’t considered before inviting them all up to the castle. Would the Fates provide new boats? How could they, if the Furies had driven them off?

I had more important things to worry about at the moment, however. I scanned the surface of the water for John. Surely he’d had time to blink himself — as Henry liked to say — out of the ship’s wheelhouse before the collision. Only, where had he ended up? Why had we spent so much time kissing and no time agreeing on a point to meet afterwards? Next time I was going to know better. If there was a next time …

There had to be. To think otherwise was to invite madness.

Instead of John, however, all I saw — besides bewildered lost souls beginning to shiver in winds that were rapidly turning freezing cold — was Frank, standing at the end of his dock, brandishing a pair of brass knuckles.

“You think dying was painful?” he was demanding of the men and women who were shuffling past him. Word had obviously spread about the evacuation. “Try breaking out of this line. I’ll show you what real pain feels like.” He noticed me and gave me a smile, along with a wink and cordial nod. “Hello there, Miss Pierce.”

“Hello,” I said. “Where’s Mr. Liu?” I had to raise my voice to be heard above the sound of the steadily rising wind.

“He’s over there,” Frank said, waving at a bulky figure farther down along the pier, “making sure all of our ‘guests’ are headed away from, and not into, the water. Some of them seem to think this is their golden opportunity to escape what the Fates have in store for them.”

They aren’t wrong , I thought a little bitterly. The Furies have made sure of that.

“Have you seen John?” I asked him.

“Not yet, but don’t you worry about him,” Frank called back. “He always turns up.”

I found nothing in this remark to inspire confidence, since I happened to know at least one of the places John liked to “turn up” was the cemetery.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, if you see him before I do, would you tell him —”

One of the men in Frank’s line broke ranks, darted across the beach, and fell to his knees at Alastor’s feet, causing the horse to stagger backwards a few steps in alarm. The man didn’t look like a lot of the people from the rest of his line. He was probably around my dad’s age and was dressed pretty conservatively, in a pair of khaki pants and a collared shirt that had been neatly pressed at one time.

The effect was somewhat ruined by the large bloodstained bullet hole in the center of it, however.

“Sweetheart,” he said, his hands clasped in supplication as he looked up at me from the sand. “You gotta help me. There’s been some kinda mistake. I’m not supposed to be here. I keep telling these guys, I’m supposed to be with those other people over there” — he pointed at my dock — “but they won’t listen —”

“Sorry.” I hated it when people I didn’t know called me sweetheart. How did they know whether or not my heart was sweet? “But I have to go.”

“You don’t understand,” Khaki Pants pleaded. There were tears running down his face. “I’ve got a daughter about your age. She needs me. Yeah, I may not have been the most perfect father, but who is? That doesn’t mean I deserve to be with these people here.”

I stared down at him, thinking of my own dad. Which line would he end up being sorted into when he died, this one, or the one with Hospital Gown, Chloe, and Reed? A lot of people really hated my dad, the infamous millionaire Zack Oliviera, because his company was partly responsible for one of the largest accidental oil spills in history, which was still affecting the wildlife and economy of not only Isla Huesos but also the entire Gulf shoreline.

That didn’t mean my dad was a bad person, however. He’d always been there for me when I needed him (well, with the exception of those times his mother-in-law had tried to murder me). But he hated Grandma and had done everything he could to keep me away from her. Dad was almost like a walking Fury detector, now that I thought about it.

Maybe the Fates made mistakes, just like people. Obviously they did, if they thought it was fair to punish someone like John for a crime he’d been completely justified in committing.

I was opening my mouth to tell the poor man in the khaki pants that though I sympathized with his plight, there wasn’t much I could do to help him at the moment — I had problems of my own — when Frank strode up and wrenched the man back to his feet.

“The lady said she has to go,” Frank snarled, dragging Khaki Pants back to the line. “You can tell her your sad story — which I’m sure is perfectly true — later.”

“It is true,” Khaki Pants insisted. “You know, I was abused as a child. Isn’t anyone going to take that into account? It’s not my fault —”

“If I had a piece of eight for everyone I met down here who tried to use the fact that he was abused as a child as an excuse for his behavior, I’d be the richest man in the world,” Frank said. “My father abused me as a child, but I never hurt anybody. Well,” he added thoughtfully, “anybody who didn’t deserve it, that is.”