Meg Cabot - Awaken

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto XXVII

The twinge of hope I’d felt turned to a spark.

I knew that was ridiculous. Dead was dead. If anyone knew that, it was me.

Still, I couldn’t help noticing Mr. Liu’s head jerk up, as if he, too, had felt a spark of hope.

Nor could I help repeating, “Wake up? How could John wake up from being dead?”

“Like me, you mean?” Alex asked. Now that most of my tears had dried up, I could see that the book he was holding was A History of the Isle of Bones , which Mr. Smith had loaned to me, and which had caused John and me to have one of our biggest fights.

I couldn’t remember who’d won that fight. I couldn’t remember why we’d fought — why we’d ever wasted what precious little time we had fighting about anything at all — in the first place.

“Not like you,” Mr. Liu growled at Alex from the darkness, his tone disapproving.

“Mr. Liu is right,” Mr. Graves said. “You were granted a second chance at life by your cousin and Captain Hayden. The captain, on the other hand, was granted a second chance at life by the Fates, along with a set of extraordinary gifts, one of which was the ability to grant life himself. He then brought all of us back to life. We’ve all been attacked by Furies before, but none of us has ever been killed.” He turned his head back towards me. “It was from a Fury attack that I lost my sight, you know. Though we heal much more quickly here, we’re not immune to injury or pain. But this is the first time death has been the result of a Fury attack.”

I glanced involuntarily at John’s supine body, taking in the long white scars that marred his otherwise perfect skin. The fact that the full-time residents of the Underworld weren’t immune to injury had been plainly obvious to me for a long time.

The fact that they were immune to aging, but apparently not death, was only just dawning on me.

“So?” Alex asked rudely. The jibe at his not deserving his second chance at life had evidently stung a little.

“So while it’s not likely ,” Mr. Graves said, “I’d say there’s every reason to be hopeful that the captain will recover his heartbeat, just as I’m hopeful that with time, I’ll recover my sight.” He reached out to pat my knee, the part of me that was closest to him. I don’t know how he’d known it was there. Maybe he felt my body heat, the way I could feel Typhon’s hot breath. “Time heals all wounds, you know, Miss Oliviera, even in this place.”

I suppose he did it to comfort me, the way Kayla had patted my shoulder. But I didn’t feel comforted, neither by the gesture nor his words. The spark of hope I’d felt died as surely as if someone had doused it with a cup of tea.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Mr. Graves was supposed to make everything better, not tell me the same kind of platitudes my own doctors had told my parents back when they’d been convinced I was crazy because I kept seeing a leather-jacketed mystery boy every time my life was in jeopardy.

Every reason to be hopeful? Time heals all wounds?

When someone in the medical field started spewing those golden oldies, it was time to give up all hope entirely.

I wanted to leap from the bed and strangle him, but I was pretty sure people who strangled blind doctors didn’t get to go on the nice boat after they died.

“So we’re just supposed to sit here and wait, while the Furies are out there, most likely preparing to attack again? We’re supposed to hope John comes back from —” I shook my head, overwhelmed with confusion and, suddenly, frustration … though at whom or what, I wasn’t sure. “Where is he, anyway? His soul, I mean? Where would the soul of the lord of the Underworld go when he dies while he’s in the Underworld?” In my imagination, John and Hope were somewhere together, enjoying a nice plate of waffles. But I highly doubted this was the case.

“Now that ,” Mr. Graves said, his unkempt gray eyebrows furrowing, “is an interesting question, and one over which the captain and I have had some lively discussions. According to the myths — in which of course I do not believe as a man of science — there was a Greek god of death, Thanatos, and he —”

I shook my head, images of John and Hope dining on waffles instantly dissipating. “Thanatos? Who’s Thanatos? I thought Hades was the Greek god of the dead.”

“Only of the Underworld,” Mr. Graves said. “Thanatos was a very minor god, but it was he who was in charge of bringing actual death upon mortals and then escorting them to Hades.”

“Like the angel of death?” Chloe asked, innocently, as I felt the ground seem to rock beneath me.

“Oh, he was no angel,” Mr. Graves said. “Even the gods themselves, including Hades, hated Thanatos, because he would take life indiscriminately. And once taken, he would never surrender it. Nonsense, of course, but the Greeks weren’t known for their scientific expertise … although interestingly, it’s from the name Thanatos that we get certain medical terms, such as eu thana sia, which literally translates to a good death —”

“You knew about this Thanatos guy all along,” I asked carefully, having recovered from the shock of his revelation, “ and you never thought to mention him before ?”

Mr. Graves looked a bit startled. “Of course I knew about him. But you can’t think that means I believe him to be real. I only mentioned him because you asked me —”

“What if he’s real?” I demanded, climbing to my feet. “What if he’s real and he has John?”

“But that’s preposterous,” Mr. Graves said with a humorless laugh. “He doesn’t exist.”

“We’ve never seen the Fates before, either, but we know for a fact they exist, don’t we?”

Mr. Graves blinked. “Yes, but we’ve seen empirical evidence of their existence.”

“We may be looking at empirical evidence of the existence of Thanatos right now!”

“My dear Miss Oliviera,” Mr. Graves said. “It’s good not to lose hope. But keep in mind Thanatos is a fictional character made up by an ancient civilization in order to explain death, a natural phenomena, to a frightened populace in the absence of science.”

“Like Hades and Persephone?” I countered. “And the Underworld? That kind of fictional?”

Mr. Graves’s mouth fell open, but he seemed at a loss for what to say. I’d stumped him.

“What if Thanatos is the one who’s behind this Fury attack,” I demanded, “and he has John? If he does exist, I want to find him, so I can do something to help John” — I flung my arm out to indicate the next room and the courtyard beyond it — “and maybe even all of those people out there, other than sit around and hope .”

I half expected that at the mention of her name, there’d be a flutter of white wings and Hope would show up. But she didn’t. Either she was lying dead somewhere on the beach with all those other birds, or she’d fled — along with the Fates — for some place where hope actually existed.

Mr. Graves cleared his throat, but it was Mrs. Engle who spoke.

“You’ve already helped all of us a great deal, dear,” she said kindly.

“You really have,” Chloe agreed from where she sat on the floor, stroking Typhon’s head. The two of them made an odd-looking pair, like something out of an illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast … if Beauty had had blood in her hair.

“Well, I’m not so sure,” Henry harrumphed as he came clomping back into the room, a newly warmed pot of tea in his hands and an apron tied around his waist that was so large on his childish body, the hem trailed nearly to the floor. “All the people you’ve helped can barely fit into the castle as it is. They’re spilling over into the back gardens and the stable yard and into the hallways, not to mention my kitchen —”