Meg Cabot - Awaken

“Well, hey there,” he said, as pleasantly as he’d spoken to me, albeit a bit more loudly in order to be heard above the noise of the chain saw.

I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation because I didn’t stick around. I saw that Chief of Police Santos’s cruiser had pulled up just behind Officer Poling’s. Yellow Vest was right. He could take care of himself.

I couldn’t understand it. Why hadn’t the maintenance worker tried to stop me, when the police were clearly in pursuit of me? I was obviously a criminal.

I didn’t have time to ponder it. I could only pedal, so close to the cemetery now that I could see the black wrought iron fence looming in front of me. Even if he got past the guy with the chain saw and Chief Santos — which seemed extremely unlikely — there’d be no way Shawn Poling could follow me into the cemetery, because the gate would be closed and locked. Mr. Smith had assured all of us that day in the school assembly that the gate would be locked all through Coffin Week.

And Officer Poling wouldn’t be agile enough to climb that high, spiked fence. He’d never catch up to me now. Or by the time he did, I’d be safely back in the Underworld, where John and I would try to return everything to normal … or as close to normal as things could get in the Underworld.

Except there was no possibility of “normal” anymore. Though the day was turning out to be one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen on Isla Huesos — the sky was a pure, cloudless blue, the temperature perfectly warm, the wind a little too strong for boating — what I saw in front of me as I grew closer to the cemetery filled me with horror.

Not foliage green, but of a dusky colour,

Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled,

Not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison.

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto XIII

The ravens that had been circling my mother’s house were now swooping low in the sky above the graveyard. And the storm that had raged past Isla Huesos the night before hadn’t spared one inch of Isla Huesos’s burial ground.

Branches torn from trees lay thrown across the top of tombs like drunken sailors on shore leave, and nearly every decorative stone angel or cherub was missing a wing. Coconuts had been fired like missiles by the gale-force winds through any mausoleum containing a stained-glass window, shattering it, and the formerly neat pathways through the crypts were carpeted with fallen palm fronds.

The place looked like a battle zone.

There was no need for me to climb the fence, since the thick black gates that Mr. Smith had assured us all would be so securely bolted now swayed obscenely ajar, looking as if something — or someone — had battered them from the outside until they’d simply given way.

The cemetery sexton’s office hadn’t escaped unscathed, either. The windows of the small cottage where Mr. Smith kept his office had been safely shuttered in preparation for the storm, but that hadn’t spared the house’s roof from being crushed in half beneath the weight of the large Spanish lime tree that had fallen on top of it … the Spanish lime tree that used to litter its fruit all over the cottage’s backyard, and in the branches of which Hope had once huddled in fear of Mike, the cemetery’s (now former) handyman, when he’d tried to kill me.

Worse, everywhere I looked, I saw people … people who’d wandered into the cemetery through the wide-open gates, carrying rakes and hoes and other pieces of gardening equipment, probably to clean up their loved ones’ graves.

“Oh, no,” I couldn’t help murmuring with a groan. “No, no, no … ”

A sickening sense of foreboding grew in the pit of my stomach. If winds could twist solid metal the way they had the cemetery gates, and blow over a tree as thick and sturdy as that Spanish lime, how could a structure as old as John’s tomb escape without damage? It was so old — the red bricks that made up its walls so decrepit — would it even be standing? And what about our tree — the poinciana under which we’d met and kissed, its blossoms forming a scarlet umbrella above our heads?

I pedaled more quickly, my heart booming so loudly in my chest I could no longer hear the sound of the chain saw, or even the sirens. I couldn’t even hear the crunching of sea grass and palm fronds beneath my bicycle’s wheels as they passed over them. My only thought was that I had to see how badly John’s crypt had been affected by the storm, if the poinciana tree was even still there …

… And then I rounded the corner and saw that it was.

Well, most of it was.

Every single blossom was gone from the tree. They lay upon the ground like an undulating carpet of scarlet silk.

The tree had also lost a large limb. It had fallen across the roof of the crypt, causing part of it to cave in.

I was relieved to see that was the only damage. The redbrick structure still stood, the word Hayden bold as ever in block lettering above the entrance to the vault.

Standing in the middle of the carpet of red poinciana blossoms was a man. His back was to me. The sun was so high in the air and shining so brightly that, since I wasn’t wearing sunglasses, it was difficult for me to determine his identity.

For a second my heart lifted, because I was certain it was John, returned from his journey to fetch the boats my father had found for him. Even now, the passengers in the Underworld were probably being boarded, order was being returned to the realm of the dead, and my father was back at my mom’s house.

Of course John was waiting for me on a carpet of red poinciana blossoms. It only made sense that this would be where I’d find him. Later we’d have to deal with my grandmother, and the fact that I’d killed Thanatos, not to mention Mark Mueller. But for now, John and I would reunite in the place where, so long ago, we’d first met.

Then, as I got closer, I realized the man standing on the carpet of poinciana blossoms wasn’t John after all. He was too small and too thin to be John, and was wearing a hat. John would never wear a hat.

Besides, this man was sweeping the poinciana blossoms away from the front of John’s tomb with a broom. John would never do this … except, of course, to sweep them up to spread them in front of my mom’s house.

Then, as I got even closer, I recognized who the man was. I felt silly for not doing so before. It must have been wishful thinking on my part to ever imagine he was John.

“Mr. Smith,” I said, a myriad of emotions washing over me — relief, happiness, confusion, and, yes, a twinge of disappointment that he wasn’t John. I leaped from my bicycle, letting it fall to the ground, and rushed towards him.

“Mr. Smith, what are you doing here? I’m glad to see you, but still, there’s a Fury after me. They know I killed Mr. Mueller — or that John and I did, anyway. John’s alive, by the way. I saved him. Anyway, it’s complicated, and Chief Santos is trying to stop the guy who’s after me, but you should really get out of here if you don’t want to get shot or have to stick around answering questions forever, or whatever.”

The cemetery sexton turned around. He’d been standing with his back to me. I guess he hadn’t heard me coming.

Funny, this had always been a bit of a bone of contention between us (until he got to know me better, of course). Mr. Smith had never liked the way I’d used “his cemetery” as a public thoroughfare, whipping around it on my bike, “endangering” mourners, and showing “no respect for the dead.”

That’s what he’d used to say until he found out the real reason I’d always been hanging out in “his cemetery” … John.