Meg Cabot - Awaken

I glanced away from Frank and his new friend, distracted by the crowd of lost souls who’d gathered around Alastor. They were keeping a careful distance from his baleful glare but looking up at me expectantly, like I had something they wanted.

It took me a second or two to realize that I did.

“Excuse me, dear,” an old woman said in a quavering voice. In her silk blouse, with a pearl necklace at her throat and a cane in her hand, she could have been a teacher from my old school in Connecticut. Maybe that’s why I didn’t mind so much when she called me dear. “It’s getting quite cold. We saw the accident, so I know it will be a while before the next boat arrives. Is there somewhere we can go in the meantime to be out of this wind?”

I looked up and down the beach, though I knew very well there was no shelter of any kind for them, unlike at a normal terminal. Passengers had never had to wait that long for a boat before. Of course, never before had they faced such dangers as bird bodies plummeting from the sky and much worse, for all I knew.

There was only one thing I could say — though I knew John wasn’t going to like it very much when he found out.

“Yes,” I said to the old woman. I pointed towards the castle. “You can go there.”

“Oh,” she said, her gaze following the direction of my finger. “I see.”

She didn’t look all that excited. It took me a second or two to realize why. Every time she took a step, her cane sank into the wet sand as she leaned on it. It was many, many feet to the castle.

Worse, I could see that several of the people from Frank’s line — including Khaki Pants — were eyeing her pearl necklace with a great deal of interest, even though I had no idea what they thought they were going to do with it once they’d snatched it. It’s not like there were any pawnshops in the Underworld where they could make a quick buck selling it.

“Hold on a minute,” I said to the old lady with the pearls. “I’ll get you some help.”

I glanced around for Mr. Liu. He was so huge, he could pick her up and set her on his shoulder.

Only, Mr. Liu looked busy. One of his charges really had jumped into the lake, as they’d feared would happen, and Mr. Liu had leaped in after him. Now he was towing him to shore.

It seemed like I was going to have to start offering rides to the castle on Alastor’s back like he was a pony at a children’s party. He ought to love that.

Then I heard Mr. Liu call my name … my first name. Mr. Liu had never called me by my first name before, only Miss Oliviera. Normally unwavering in his old-world politeness, I knew something truly horrible must have happened to make him forget it.

Alastor must have heard the urgency in Mr. Liu’s voice as well, since his ears turned forward, and before I had a chance to press my heels against his sides, he’d plunged into the water, splashing towards the Asian man and the body he was towing …

… a body that, as I grew closer, I began to realize looked familiar. It was male, and shirtless, in black jeans.

It was John. And he looked — there was no other way to put it — dead.

After she thus had spoken unto me,

Weeping, her shining eyes she turned away …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto II

He said he couldn’t die.”

I looked accusingly at Mr. Graves from the bed where I was sitting next to John’s lifeless body.

“He can’t.” The ship’s surgeon had a strange instrument pressed to his ear. It looked like an upside-down trumpet, only it was made of wood. He pressed it against John’s naked chest, listening for the same heartbeat I’d been unable to find down on the beach. “At least, he isn’t supposed to.”

“Then I don’t understand what’s going on here,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. “Because he seems super dead to me.”

“To me as well.” Mr. Graves moved the trumpet-like instrument to a different part of John’s chest and listened some more. “This is very troubling.”

“ Troubling? ” I echoed. “I think I could find a better word than troubling to describe the fact that my boyfriend, who was supposed to be immortal, is dead.”

My voice broke a little on the word dead . I couldn’t stop replaying over and over in my head that last moment I’d spent with John on the dock.

Tell me you love me , he’d said.

Why hadn’t I said yes when I’d had the chance?

How could any of this be happening?

When I’d tumbled off Alastor’s back and into the rough waves to snatch John’s lifeless body away from Mr. Liu, he’d assured me in a voice as broken and ragged as my own that if we got him up to the castle and to Mr. Graves, the surgeon would know what to do.

I’m not sure if Mr. Liu had ever really believed the ship’s surgeon had some magical cure for death that the rest of us didn’t know about, or if he’d only said this to placate me, seeing my near-hysteria. He couldn’t have thought it would keep me from doing what I’d done next, which was drag John to the beach — with Mr. Liu’s help, and Frank’s, when he’d realized what was happening — and attempt to revive him myself.

Why wouldn’t I think I could bring John back to life? I’d done it for Alex. I knew a thing or two about CPR, since it’s what had saved my life the first time my grandmother had tried to kill me. I was convinced it — or my diamond pendant, or a combination of both — would work on John.

Only they didn’t. Of course they didn’t. This was the Underworld. This was where things came to die.

It wasn’t until someone took me by the shoulders and physically pulled me away from him that I realized my own lips had grown as cold and frozen as John’s from pressing my mouth — along with my heart — against his for so long.

“Pierce.” It had been Alex’s voice I heard in my ear. “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to get away from here. Look. The storm. It’s getting worse.”

He was right. The thunder was growing louder, and somehow, it had begun to rain, though at first I thought that was because the fog had finally closed in on the beach.

Except that the fog had turned from white to red. It was the color of poinciana blossoms. The mist clung with enough persistence to make it feel like a steady drizzle ….

“Oh, God,” I’d murmured, looking down at my arms, then at John’s chest. We’d each been covered in a fine spray of pink.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.

Then Alex pointed upwards. I saw that the ravens that had survived the sound of the ships’ impact had regrouped and were spinning in a tight circle, waiting for a chance to do what the old man in the hospital gown had assured us they were waiting to do … feed on the dead. Only now, I realized with horror, it wasn’t the flesh of the dead they wanted.

It was the body of my dead boyfriend.

“The castle,” I’d said, scrambling to my feet. “We need to get him — get everyone — to the castle, now .”

Mr. Liu wanted to carry John, but Alastor put up such a fuss, rearing and whinnying and thrusting his nose against John’s body, as if he were trying to nudge him back to life — or at least knock him off the bigger man’s shoulder — we gave up and laid him across Alastor’s saddle. The horse seemed comforted by the feel of his master’s weight across his back and, allowing me to hold his reins, turned to head back towards the castle without once balking or even so much as snorting.

I wished more than once during that long, frightening walk through the red mist, with the departed souls fighting and complaining behind us that they did not understand what was happening — except, thankfully, for Reed and Chloe, who helped along Mrs. Engle, which turned out to be the name of the nice old lady in the pearls — that I could be an animal and not fully understand what was happening. Then maybe I’d have been able to delude myself into thinking that John was only sleeping, or unconscious, and that I could nudge him awake, the way Alastor had tried to.