Meg Cabot - Awaken

I saw Chloe give Reed’s foot a nudge with her own. “How can you say that?” she whispered.

“I didn’t mean you.” Reed smiled at her. “Your spirit’s looking plenty good from here.”

Alex, having overheard this, curled his lip in disgust.

“Not me ,” Chloe whispered, and nodded in my direction. “ Her . How can you say that after everything she did to help us?”

Reed glanced towards me. “Oh, right. Her spirit’s looking pretty good, too,” he added generously.

Alex rolled his eyes and said, “Fates aren’t the kind of spirits you can see, you idiot. They’re like Furies. You can only —”

“I always thought that the Fates were Greek goddesses in charge of mankind’s destiny,” Mrs. Engle interrupted, seeming anxious to break the sudden tension between the two boys, both of whom were clearly attracted to Chloe. When Mrs. Engle saw that she had their attention, she went on, “I worked as a school nurse for thirty years — retired now, of course. But those kinds of things do tend to sink in and stay with you —”

“Who cares what the Fates are?” Alex burst out. Mrs. Engle’s scheme wasn’t working. “The question is, where’d they go? And how do we get them back?”

“I don’t think it will be easy,” Mr. Graves said. He sounded annoyed with Alex. Welcome to the club. “I believe they’ve been driven away because there’s an imbalance here. An imbalance is virtually always caused by pestilence —” A note of primness crept into the surgeon’s voice, as it always did whenever he gave a lecture on pestilence, his favorite subject (aside from beer). “Whenever an imbalance occurs and pestilence is able to slip into a system, it causes infection.”

“Like when I got my eyebrow pierced,” Kayla asked, “and I didn’t clean it well enough, and it got infected?”

“You pierced your eyebrow ?” Mr. Graves turned his head towards her, his expression horrified. “Good God, young lady, why ?”

“Never mind that now,” I said impatiently. “What can we do to fix the imbalance … drive away the Furies and get back the Fates?”

“Well,” Mr. Graves said, returning his attention to me. “If we could determine what’s caused the imbalance, I’m quite certain we could correct it. But until then, I’m afraid we, like the captain, have only one thing to hang on to, and that’s —”

I held up a single hand. “Don’t say it.”

Mr. Graves looked taken aback. “How did you know what I was going to say?”

I lowered my hand. “Because it was going to be hope. And I don’t want to hear the word hope again. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

Hearing this was apparently more than Chloe could bear. She rose from the floor — leaving Typhon looking sad to have lost his ear scratcher — and hurried towards me.

“Pierce, you mustn’t say that,” she said. “These light momentary afflictions are preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison —”

I cut her off with a grim look. “I’ve got bad news for you, Chloe. There’s not going to be any eternal weight of glory unless we get you, and all the rest of these people, to a boat. Mr. Graves, I’ve got some news for you, too.” I turned towards him. “In twenty-first-century America, where I’m from, we’ve got better weapons against infections than hope.”

Mrs. Engle coughed politely. “Dear, if you’re speaking about antibiotics, I believe the doctor was using the term infection as a metaphor —”

“Why, yes,” Mr. Graves said to Mrs. Engle, looking pleased. “I was.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said. I lifted the diamond on the end of my necklace. “I’m talking about this.”

“I don’t know what an antibiotic is,” Henry said, reaching around his waist to untie the apron he was wearing, then tossing it to the floor. “But if you’re talking about killing Furies, I’m ready.”

“So am I,” Frank said, drawing a knife from his belt. “Only where do we find them?”

“The same place we can find food for our guests,” I said. “And a couple of new boats to take them where they need to go.”

Mr. Graves looked bewildered. “And where would that be?”

“Isla Huesos,” I said.

Mr. Graves’s expression of bewilderment turned to a frown. “Isla Huesos? That port of degradation and sin?” I’d forgotten he wasn’t a fan. “And how do you think you’re going to get there? Only the captain possessed the ability to travel between this world and the next, and he is, to put it mildly, indisposed.”

“That isn’t strictly true,” I said. “Well, it’s true John’s indisposed, but it isn’t true he’s the only one who possessed the ability to go back and forth between this world and the next.” I glanced down the hallway at the curved double staircase I knew so well. “Does anyone know where John keeps the keys to the doors at the top of those stairs?”

For the first time in a long time, I saw Mr. Liu smile. “No,” he said. “But I know where there’s an ax.”

The infernal hurricane that never rests

Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine;

Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them.

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto V

It will never work.”

I was at the dining table, filling my tote bag with things I thought I’d need for my journey, trying to ignore Mr. Graves.

“It won’t bring him back,” Mr. Graves continued in a low voice, so the others wouldn’t overhear. “And even if it would, the captain would never want you to risk your own life in order to save his.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing he isn’t around to watch,” I whispered. Raising my voice, I said to my cousin Alex, “Give me that book.”

“You think A History of the Isle of Bones is what’s caused the imbalance that’s making this place implode?” Alex read off the title in a sarcastic voice as he handed the book over. “Yeah, Pierce, I’m sure that’s probably it.”

“Things were fine around here before it showed up,” I said tersely as I put the book in my bag.

“In that case,” Alex said, “you better take me along, too.”

“The whole reason they brought you here is because everyone back in Isla Huesos was trying kill you,” Kayla pointed out. “Remember?”

“Actually,” Mr. Graves said, “they succeeded in killing him.” Lowering his voice again, he whispered to me, “Just as the Furies succeeded in killing the captain. Which was always their ultimate goal. Now that they’ve succeeded, I can’t imagine they’ll continue to attack us. So you see, Miss Oliviera, there’s no point in your embarking on this scheme of yours —”

“Really? What are we going to feed these people?” I asked. “How are we going to get them to their final destinations? Are we simply going to wait for the Fates to come back? Or are we going to make our own luck, like my father always said a truly successful person does?”

Mr. Graves shook his head. “I highly doubt your father would go along with this if he knew what you were up to.”

“Well, then it’s a good thing he doesn’t know.”

“Not everyone back in Isla Huesos was trying to kill me,” Alex declared. “Only Seth Rector and his cronies. Which goes to show that I was onto something. If I wasn’t close to finding evidence implicating them instead of my father in Jade’s murder, why would they have killed me?”

“Because you found their stash,” Kayla reminded him. “Drug dealers tend not to like that.”

“That’s why Pierce has got to take me with her,” Alex said. “I can explain that to the police.”