Meg Cabot - Awaken

For a second, the room seemed to turn as red as the flowers that grew on the tree across from John’s crypt in the Isla Huesos Cemetery.

I didn’t panic. It seemed like a good sign to me, the first indication that the blood was beginning to pump again in my veins. I’d been almost sure it had frozen solid when I’d first seen John’s body floating in the water.

“What was I supposed to do?” I demanded. “Furies are on the loose, birds of prey were dropping out of the sky like feather bombs, there aren’t any boats coming, and it’s raining blood. Do you think I should have just left them there?”

“Miss Oliviera.” It was Mr. Graves’s voice. I couldn’t see anything too well, due to the red staining everything. But I could hear perfectly well. “Need I remind you that they’re already dead?”

“ Souls of the dead.” I pointed at John, though of course Mr. Graves couldn’t see my finger, and to be truthful, I could see only the dimmest outline of it. “ He could be one of them. I was one of them once. She’s one of them.” I pointed in the general direction of Mrs. Engle. “So are they.” Chloe and Reed. “No one gets left behind. No one .”

“I understand that,” Mr. Graves said gently. I’m certain he couldn’t tell what was happening with my vision — no one could but me. But he must have recognized by the tremor in my voice how upset I was. “All of this — everything you’ve done — serves the dead and serves them well. But a physician’s responsibility must always be what’s best for the living . Regardless of the strength of our feelings for the dead, we must always think to ourselves, How can I best serve the living? For it is the living whom we serve and who matter most.”

Slowly, the red began to recede from my eyes.

“I know that,” I said, slightly ashamed for my outburst. “I went to Coffin Fest.” With the very person for whom it had been named — whether its organizers knew it or not. “I do understand how important it is to properly dispose of the dead” — my gaze slid towards John’s body — “when the time comes.”

“Then you know,” Mr. Graves said, “that it isn’t only because of the threat of disease. It’s because of the very real possibility of revenants.”

“Could you people please speak English?” Reed asked. “What’s a revenant?”

“A revenant is someone who’s come back from the dead,” Mr. Graves said, “the way many in Isla Huesos believe the captain had, because they often saw him roaming the cemetery. That’s how Coffin Night became a tradition …. The people of Isla Huesos came to believe if they enacted a yearly funeral pyre tradition, the captain, whose spirit was restless from an improper burial, would rest. But a revenant is dead, not alive, like you and the captain.”

“Wait. You mean a zombie?” Reed’s voice rose excitedly. “Is that what those Fury things are that everyone keeps talking about? Zombies? ”

“Or ghosts?” Alex asked. “If you guys say we were running from ghosts back on that beach, I swear to God, I’ll —”

Henry slammed the teapot down on a side table with enough force to shut up both Alex and Reed. When he spun around to face us, the expression on his pink-cheeked face was as angry as I’d ever seen it.

“Ghosts? You think a ghost did that ?” He thrust a finger at John.

“Well, isn’t that what those Fury things are?” Alex asked. “Really badass ghosts?”

Mr. Graves rolled his sightless eyes towards the ceiling.

“Ghosts want to hurt people on earth who wronged them while they were alive.” Mr. Liu’s deep voice came from the recess of the staircase. “Furies only want to hurt the captain — and those of us close to him — for wronging them after death. The closest thing to a zombie is what any of you would be, if you left this world and reentered your corpse after it had begun rotting.”

Looking a little shame-faced, both Reed and Alex lowered their gazes to the floor. In the silence that followed, the sound of a scuffle could be heard breaking out in the courtyard. Then Frank’s voice, grounding out a curt warning, drifted towards us: “Everyone keep your hands to yourself, or I guarantee you’ll lose ’em.”

The warning was accompanied by a curse word or two colorful enough to make Chloe blush. Mrs. Engle seemed offended, too, since she said, in a scandalized tone, “Really, I’ve had as much of this as I can take. Ghosts and Furies and zombies? Could we please try to remember that a young man is dead?”

She seemed to have forgotten that she, too, was dead.

“Sorry, ma’am.” Frank appeared in one of the archways, pushing back the gauzy curtain and striding, panting and bloodied from a cut on his forehead, into the main room. “But it’s getting a bit dicey out there.” To me, he said, “It’ll be dark soon. What are we going to do about that lot?” On the words that lot , he tilted his head in the direction of the courtyard.

“They’re hungry, but there’s nothing to feed ’em or to give ’em to drink, except beer,” Henry added. “We’re already running low on tea.”

All eyes, I noticed with alarm, were on me, as if I were supposed to do something about the fact that we were running low on tea.

“What are you looking at me for?” I asked. The anger flowing through my veins had definitely been preferable to the despair that had been slogging through them before, but now that it had faded, along with the light outside, I felt tired and confused. “ I’m not in charge.”

As if in direct denial of this, John’s tablet began to chime again at my waist to indicate that yet another new soul had entered the land of the dead.

“Actually,” Mr. Liu said, rising to his feet, “I think you are in charge. The captain gave that to you.”

“Right. He chose you. You’re the one .” Henry sounded exactly as he had the first day we’d met, when he’d been just as quick to assure me that I was not, in fact, the one . “Don’t you remember?”

I looked from the chiming tablet back towards their inquisitive faces.

“Well, I don’t know what to do,” I said, though I knew this wasn’t a good thing for anyone in a management-level position to admit. “What have you guys done before when this has happened?”

Mr. Graves’s shaggy gray eyebrows rose to their limits as he stared at a point several feet above my head. “Miss Oliviera,” he said. “The Furies have never destroyed two of our boats and killed the captain before. And certainly no one has ever invited the souls of the dead up from the beach and into the castle.”

I didn’t miss the unspoken accusation in his voice. No one until you , you strange girl who sees red — literally — whenever you get angry.

“True,” Frank said. “But then the Fates have never left us before, either.”

The Fates have never left us before, either . The words caused a chill to go down my spine and the fine hair on the backs of my arms to stand up. I glanced over my shoulder at the still, waxen form of John stretched out upon the bed. Wake up , I attempted to will him with my mind. Don’t leave me alone with this mess. Don’t leave me alone, ever .

His wide chest didn’t move. His eyelids remained shut.

“What are Fates?” asked Chloe in a small voice, from where she still knelt beside Typhon at John’s bedside.

“The opposite of Furies,” Mr. Graves explained to her. “Spirits of good, instead of evil.”

“Well,” Reed said dryly. “There definitely aren’t any of those around here.”