Meg Cabot - Awaken

“It appears to me,” John said with admirable calm, “that your family — and you in particular — does whatever it wants, regardless.”

“Damn right,” Seth said. “And we’ve gotten rich because of it. Maybe not Oliviera rich, but —”

Something struck one of the sliding glass doors overlooking the backyard. Not with enough force to break it, but hard enough to make a startlingly loud sound. I threw both arms in front of my face, and John quickly thrust me behind him, placing himself between me and the still rattling glass.

“Oh, crap,” Seth said with a shaky laugh. “That scared me. But look. It was just a bird.”

“A bird?”

Horrified, I lowered my arms and started for the windows, but not before John had a chance to grab and stop me.

“Not that bird,” he said. “Hope is safe.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “Was she with you?”

“No,” he said. “But trust me, she has enough sense not to be out in a storm like this.”

“Well, that bird didn’t,” I said. “Why would Hope? What if she’s trying to find me?”

“Hey, you should see this,” Seth said, from in front of the sliding glass doors, where he’d gone to look out over the balcony. “It’s some kind of black bird. There’s hundreds of them. They’re all over the place. They’re raining down from the sky. I’ve got to get a shot of this.” He dug into his jean pocket for his cell phone. “No one will ever believe it.”

“Seth,” I said anxiously. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

I knew he’d tried to kill my cousin. I knew he’d probably killed Jade. I knew he — or at least a death god who’d possessed him — had ordered my boyfriend to be killed by the Furies, then held him captive. He’d threatened to kill me, multiple times, and even threatened my mother. But I couldn’t stand there and watch him kill himself.

Seth laughed. “God, would you relax? I’m not stupid, all right? These doors are made from the same kind of glass they use in windshields, impact resistant.”

Remembering Chloe, and the tiny shards of glass she’d had embedded in her hair like diamonds from a tiara, I said, “ Impact resistant doesn’t mean if something hits them hard enough they won’t shatter.”

Seth had his mobile out and was snapping away eagerly as, outside, the wind raged and ravens rained from the sky.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “You guys can run if you want, but I’m staying here. These babies can withstand gusts of up to two hundred miles per hour —”

Another raven struck one of the doors, almost as if it had hurled itself at it in an effort to get inside. No, to get at someone inside. Not Seth. It hadn’t chosen the sliding glass door nearest Seth. It had chosen the one nearest us.

John and I exchanged looks. We were under attack.

The second door didn’t hold. The entire panel shattered into a spiderweb configuration, then the glass fell from the metal frame and splintered against the tiled floor at our feet.

John yanked me into his arms.

“We’re going,” John shouted to be heard above the wind and rain.

I knew what was going to happen next. When I opened my eyes again, I’d be somewhere else — most likely the Underworld. John didn’t know that in the Underworld, ravens were also raining from the sky … or maybe he did. There wasn’t time to ask, nor was there time to tell him. There was time to say only one thing.

“Seth.”

John’s hold on me tightened. He knew precisely what I was saying. Save Seth, too.

“No,” he said.

And as I heard another glass door explode, the room disappeared.

When I opened my eyes again, we were in darkness.

Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving,

Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly,

That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto V

At first I couldn’t tell where we were. All I knew was that it was quiet, and dry, and so dark that John’s face was indistinguishable to me, though it was merely inches from mine.

Then lightning flashed, and I was able to recognize, through a few patterns thrown across the floor, that we were on the landing on the stairs of my mother’s house.

“John,” I cried, releasing the deathlike grip I’d been keeping on his neck. “Here?”

“Shhh.” He pointed up the stairs. Down the hallway, dimly lit by a single battery-operated LED candle, I could see that the door to my mother’s bedroom was closed. “It was the only place I could think of.”

“But —” A million questions flickered through my mind, dancing as wildly as the fake candle flame.

Then thunder rumbled … not so loud as it had out on Reef Key. We were inland — well, as inland as anyone could be on a two-mile-by-four-mile island — and on as high ground as Mr. Smith’s house. The storm wasn’t nearly as bad here as it had been out by Mr. Rector’s spec house. Besides, Uncle Chris had boarded up every single one of my mother’s windows as tight as a drum.

The thunder was still loud enough, however, that I was worried it might wake my mother, and the last thing I needed at the moment was a barrage of parental questions.

“Follow me,” I said, taking John’s hand. Creeping up the rest of the stairs, I snagged the LED candle from its table in the hallway, then led him into the room across the hall from my mom’s, gently closing the door behind us once we were both inside.

“Is this your room?” John asked with a grin, looking around at the lavender walls and curtains my mom’s decorator had chosen.

“Yes.” I set the LED candle on my desk and looked around. Nothing had changed since the last time I’d been there, except that the good-bye letter I’d left for my mother was gone. Seeing the room for the first time from John’s perspective, however, I felt mortified. It seemed so devoid of personality. No surprise, since I’d had no say whatsoever in its décor … no interest, either. “Can we not talk about it?”

“Why?” he asked, surprised. He was so tall and broad-shouldered, he resembled a rhinoceros in a tea shop as he moved about, inspecting things. “I like it. Is this yours?”

He picked up a stuffed unicorn Hannah Chang had given to me for my birthday and that I’d kept on my bookshelf as a matter of habit for so long, I’d forgotten I owned it.

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn’t know you liked unicorns,” he said.

“I don’t,” I said, blushing. “I mean, I do, but not the rainbow kind. Someone gave that to me as a gift. I —”

Bringing him here had been a huge mistake. Although I hadn’t brought him here, I remembered. He’d brought me. I was actually a little surprised he’d never been in my room before. But John had odd, old-fashioned standards, and I was quite sure that while he’d considered it perfectly acceptable — even his moral duty — to spy on me at school, the Isla Huesos Cemetery, airports, city streets, jewelry shops, and every other public venue, my bedroom would be completely off-limits.

“John, we can’t leave him out there,” I said, deciding it was time to change the subject. “He could be hurt.”

John picked up a bottle of black nail polish I’d left on a shelf, sniffed it curiously, then made a face and put it down again.

“Who could be hurt?” he asked.

“Seth,” I said. “He could be dying. I know how you feel about him, but that wasn’t him. That was Thanatos. Well, okay, yes, some of it was him. But the part about you, that was Thanatos. I know you probably have post-traumatic stress from whatever he did to you, and I totally understand that, he completely deserves to be punished, but that’s not our call to make. You’re better than he is, you still have your humanity, and he doesn’t. We can’t —”