Meg Cabot - Awaken

“What?” I asked him, confused not so much by the words, but that he, my sweet, beloved uncle, was the one saying them.

“The two of you,” he said, pointing first at Alex and me, then at the backyard. “Go out the back way. The wall’s too high to climb, but I saw some bikes by the gate back there. You could get on them, then peddle towards the cemetery. The cops won’t be able to follow you. There’s a big tree down across the middle of the road. They’re still trying to find guys with enough chain saws to cut it apart since it’s too big to lift.”

I stared at him. He meant the tree that had fallen on top of Mr. Mueller.

Alex shook his head at his father pityingly. “Dad, you of all people should know you can’t run from the po-po. Besides, I told you, the driveway is blocked by their squad cars.”

“But we can still get bikes around them,” I said.

“Sure,” Alex said. “But they’ll see us.”

“Not if I create a diversion and distract them,” Chris said. “In prison, we had a name for when we did that.”

Alex and I widened our eyes at him. “What was it?”

“Well, prison riot,” Uncle Chris said with a shrug. “That was the most accurate term for it, although we did try to think of a better one.”

“No,” my mother said, looking outraged. “This is wrong. Christopher, you are not going to —”

“You’d better go,” Uncle Chris said, lifting my tote bag — which I’d left sitting at the bottom of the stairs — and handing it to me.

The thumping on the door had become more fevered. Now I heard the chief of police say, “Dr. Cabrero, I have a search warrant. I don’t want to break down your door, but if you don’t open it, I will.”

“Go,” Uncle Chris said, and pushed us towards the backyard.

Alex faced his father, flabbergasted, but finally grabbed his backpack from the chair over which he’d slung it. “Don’t do anything stupid to get yourself thrown back in jail, Dad,” he said.

“Why would I do that?” Christopher asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

Alex shook his head, wearing an expression that clearly read, This is going to be a disaster .

“Christopher, wait,” I heard my mom call as she raced after her brother, who’d gone striding towards the front door.

I didn’t stick around to see what was going to happen after that. I grabbed the front of Alex’s shirt and dragged him through the French doors and across the back porch, down the steps and around the side of the house, towards the back gate and the bicycles Uncle Chris had said he’d seen.

“This is never going to work,” Alex was muttering. “They’re going to see us. And what about your necklace? There’s obviously a Fury out there. For all we know, it could be Chief Santos.”

“It isn’t him,” I said. I was surprised to see my bicycle sitting beside my mother’s. Somehow she’d retrieved it from the cemetery, where I’d left it locked up, or the police had returned it after I’d gone missing. “My necklace never turned black around Chief Santos before.”

“Well, maybe he’s a Fury now. Maybe they’ve possessed everyone on the entire island except us, like some kind of plague. Oh, hell no.” Alex looked down at the two bikes, mine and my mother’s. “I’m not riding a girl’s bike.”

“Fine,” I said, yanking mine from its kickstand. “Stay here and get arrested. You deserve it for being such a sexist snob. I’m leaving.”

“Get arrested?” Alex grabbed my mom’s bike — which was a red single speed with a simple wire basket — and hurried after me. “I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who —”

“Shhh,” I said. We’d reached the gate that led from the backyard to the driveway. I held up a hand to silence Alex as I listened to what was happening on the front porch.

“I already served my time,” I could hear Uncle Chris shouting. “Don’t I have any rights?”

“Of course you have rights, Mr. Cabrero,” Chief of Police Santos was saying in a patient tone. “We’re not here for you. We’re here to talk to your niece. We understand that she and this fellow we all were so worried had kidnapped her — but who we now come to find out is actually her boyfriend — were at a Coffin Night party last night out on Reef Key and caused a considerable amount of damage —”

“Persecution!” Christopher shouted. “You people are persecuting me and my family!”

“Now, hold on there, Christopher,” Chief Santos said. “Let’s not get excited.”

I heard a crash, then my mother cry, “Oh, Christopher!”

“Come on,” I whispered to Alex, and opened the gate.

Uncle Christopher had been right, I saw, as Alex and I quietly steered our bikes from the backyard, keeping our heads ducked well below the Isla Huesos squad cars parked along my mother’s driveway. Riots really did cause a distraction.

Especially since Uncle Chris had lifted one of the heavy flower planters on my mother’s front porch and thrown it as hard as he could at the stone walkway below, causing the planter to explode into a million tiny pieces of dirt, plaster, and petunias.

Not only were quite a few of my mother’s neighbors (who’d been outside in their yards cleaning up after Hurricane Cassandra) staring, but every single one of the officers accompanying Chief Santos had drawn their firearm and had it trained on Christopher.

This had to be the most exciting thing ever to happen in my mother’s wealthy suburban community, which was guarded twenty-four hours a day by a gated security station. The whole reason Seth Rector and his friends had befriended me my first day of school was because they knew I lived in Dolphin Key, and they believed if they stashed the senior class coffin in my garage, it would be safe from the juniors.

How long ago that day seemed.

The police chief stood next to my mother on the porch, his hands on his hips, slowly shaking his head.

“Christopher,” he was saying. “Why’d you have to go and do that? Now I’m going to have to take you in and waste my afternoon writing up a report, when I have a thousand more important things to do today. Do you have any idea how many downed power lines and flooded homes I have to deal with? There are people who lost everything they owned in Cassandra last night. The electricity is still out on half the island. Half the high school is underwater. And you’re going around acting like this? Give me a break, will you?”

My heart began to beat a little faster with excitement. Half the high school was underwater?

Then I remembered I lived in the Underworld now. I didn’t have to go to school anymore. What a relief.

“What precisely are you going to charge him with, Chief?” my mother asked dryly. “Assaulting my front walk with a planter?”

“Let’s go,” I whispered to Alex. I was aware that, though Uncle Chris had the undivided attention of the police officers, my mom’s neighbors could still see us, and some of them were beginning to nudge one another and look in our direction. “This is our chance.”

Alex remained glued where he was, however.

“No,” he whispered back. “I don’t like the looks of this.”

“What are you talking about? Your dad will be fine. They’re not going to arrest him. He didn’t do anything. Well, anything illegal. It’s not against the law to smash up your sister’s flower planters.”

“Your necklace, though,” Alex said, nodding to it. “It’s still black.”

I looked down. He was right about that.

“There’s a Fury around,” he said. “Does the combination of guns and Furies sound like a good one to you?”

I looked back at the police officers gathered in Mom’s yard. “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But it could be any one of these people. It could be her , for all we know.” I pointed at a three- or four-year-old girl standing on the sidewalk a few yards away, staring at us with her finger in her mouth. She was wearing a shirt that said Daddy’s Little Princess on it.