Meg Cabot - Awaken

I didn’t feel afraid, exactly. It was more a sense of inevitability, like I’d always known this moment was going to come. I wasn’t at all surprised that it came outside the cemetery gates John had kicked open in frustration when we’d last discussed this particular individual.

“Shit,” Kayla said. “He’s in front of us, and I can’t back up. We’re trapped.”

“Who is he?” Alex demanded. “What does he want with you?”

“Mr. Mueller, my teacher from my old school,” I said calmly. “See how he keeps one hand in his pocket?”

Everyone looked. Mr. Mueller did, indeed, have one hand clutched tightly around his long, heavy metallic flashlight, while the other he kept hidden away in the pocket of his long black rain slicker.

“John crushed that hand to pieces,” I explained, “when Mr. Mueller touched me inappropriately with it.”

I didn’t figure they needed to know the part about how, at the time, I’d been trying to entrap Mr. Mueller to prove he’d caused the suicide of my best friend, with whom he’d been having an affair.

“Great,” Alex said. “That’s just great, Pierce. So what’s he want now, the rest of his hand back?”

“Can’t you tell him we don’t have it?” Kayla asked with mounting hysteria.

“Don’t worry,” Frank said. “The captain took care of one hand. I’ll take care of the other.” He started to get out of the car.

“Frank,” I cried. Now I wasn’t feeling so calm. “Don’t —”

Mr. Mueller didn’t like Frank getting out of the car instead of me. He raised the flashlight high in the air, then brought the end of it down so hard on the windshield, it left a perfect imprint in the shape of the instrument. Crystalline lines spread out from the indentation, all the way towards Kayla, who screamed.

“No one gets out but the girl,” Mr. Mueller rasped, right before his mouth turned into a yawning chasm of blood and razor-sharp teeth, hundreds of them in multiple rows, like a shark.

Now it wasn’t only Kayla screaming in terror. Frank swiftly shut the door and locked it, even as the entity into which Mr. Mueller had turned scrambled for the handle.

“Drive,” I said, my heart slamming against the back of my ribs.

“There’s nowhere I can go,” Kayla said.

“Go forward,” I said as Mr. Mueller darted around the front of the car, clearly intending to reach her door.

“But we’ll hit him,” she cried.

“Exactly,” I said.

“I can’t kill someone!”

“You hit your brother in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

“But that was family! And I didn’t kill him.”

When she still didn’t move, frozen in terror behind the wheel, I dove between her seat and Frank’s to hit the gas pedal at her feet with my hands.

I couldn’t see where the car went. My gaze was on the gas pedal and Kayla’s purple silken slippers. But I felt the lurch as the small compact rocketed forward. The top of my head slammed into the dashboard as the car impacted something large and heavy, something that let out an unearthly scream before landing hard against the hood. Kayla, shrieking, steered wildly, seemingly to shake off the assailant, stepping on my fingers as she tried to brake, crying, “Pierce, Pierce, what are you doing? We hit him, oh, my God, Pierce, we hit him, it’s over, let go!”

Finally Frank wrapped strong hands around my arms and thrust me back into my seat, saying, “It’s all right. He’s gone.”

When I pushed my hair from my eyes and looked behind us, my heart still thumping like a drum, I saw that Frank was only partially correct. In the red glow of Kayla’s taillights lay a large misshapen lump of Mueller, rain pouring all around him.

Not too far from where he stretched across the middle of the road lay the heavy flashlight, its beam pointing haphazardly at his feet. That’s how I happened to notice his shoes.

“Tassels,” I said in disgust.

Alex, too, was turned in his seat.

“You guys,” he said. “He’s still moving.”

Disappointed, I said, “Kayla, back up over him.”

Kayla cried, “No! We should call an ambulance.”

“He was going to kill us.”

“He’s a Fury,” Frank said. “Let’s go. He’ll be all right.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a bolt of lightning shot down from the sky, striking a massive sapodilla tree in the yard of a nearby home. The ensuing fireball caused us all to duck and shield our eyes.

When we turned to look back, most of the sapodilla was gone. What was left of its trunk lay twisted and in flames in the middle of the road on top of Mr. Mueller’s remains, which steamed gently in the rain.

“Well,” Frank said, after a moment’s stunned silence. “He probably won’t be all right now.”

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Kayla cried, gripping the steering wheel. “I just murdered someone! Someone not even related to me. A teacher!”

“You didn’t murder a teacher,” I said calmly. “I did. And I should have done it a long time ago. He was a perv who caused my best friend to kill herself. For all we know, he could be Thanatos.”

“The lightning is what actually killed him,” Frank pointed out. “Not us.”

“Still,” Kayla said as she gazed tearfully at her windshield. “Look what he did to my car. No way will my insurance cover this.”

“Do you want to save the Underworld,” I asked her. “Or not?”

Kayla shook her head, her aurora of bouncy curls restored, thanks to the AC.

“I just want to go home,” she said.

“Well, you won’t have a home anymore if these guys have their way. So how about you drive us to Mr. Smith’s house instead, and we find out what’s going on around here?” I glanced at Alex. “Is that okay?”

He was looking back at the massive branch covering Mr. Mueller’s corpse.

“What?” he asked. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking … maybe you did do a few things back at your old school in Connecticut other than sit around and make doilies.”

“Thanks for finally noticing,” I said.

They were awake now, and the hour drew nigh

At which our food used to be brought to us …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto XXXIII

Pierce?” Mr. Smith said, looking from me to Frank to Alex to Kayla and then back again as we stood, bedraggled from the rain we’d dashed through in order to get to his front porch. “What on earth —?”

His voice was nearly drowned out by the loud rock music booming in the background. It was a song my parents used to listen to a lot back when they were happily married.

Mr. Smith didn’t live too far from the cemetery, but his house was in a new condo village (designed to look like old Victorian town houses) off a pretty popular road in Isla Huesos known for its bars and restaurants. While everywhere else we’d driven was in total darkness — and some places half underwater, deserted except for TV vans and news journalists standing in the water in hip waders, reporting earnestly on the “life-threatening conditions” wrought by Hurricane Cassandra (Cassandra apparently being the name given to the “monstrous” hurricane bearing down on South Florida) — Mr. Smith’s town house was brightly lit. He’d closed all his dark green storm shutters, but light still streamed out behind them, onto the porch.

“How come you have power?” Alex asked Mr. Smith. “And is that Queen playing on the stereo?”

“Oh,” Mr. Smith said, looking a little embarrassed. “Patrick and I have a generator. We usually ask the neighbors over for a little hurricane party whenever there’s a storm. That way they can watch the forecast and we get to enjoy the lobster from their freezers that would otherwise spoil.”