Meg Cabot - Awaken

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno , Canto V

What?”

I whirled around to see for myself.

The first ship — as large as the ferryboat to Martha’s Vineyard my parents and I used to take on vacation, which could easily fit hundreds of people as well as their cars — was churning straight at us through the mist, looking like a great white shark headed for its prey.

The second boat was plowing through the water towards the dock on which Frank and Mr. Liu were still toiling.

John was right. Both ships were making a direct path for the docks.

I spun back towards John. “Can’t you contact the captain and tell him to turn, or … or drop anchor, or whatever it is boats do?” My knowledge of nautical terms was limited to things written on raunchy-joke pirate shirts I saw the tourists wearing around Isla Huesos, such as Give up your booty or Prepare to be boarded.

“There is no captain to contact.” John’s mouth was a grim, flat line.

“Then who’s steering them?”

“Normally? The same forces that decided to put me in charge,” he said, his lips now curving into a bitter smile.

“The Fates ?” I cried, appalled.

Of course. Who else was going to ferry the souls of the dead to their final destination?

John lifted a warning finger to his lips, pointing at Kayla and the others, all of whom were watching the boats, completely unaware of the impending danger. John evidently wanted to keep it that way, since he took me by the arm and pulled me closer towards Alastor, from whom everyone always steered a wide berth, so we’d be out of their hearing range.

“I don’t want to cause a panic,” John said in a low voice.

I highly doubted Kayla or Alex knew what a Fate was — at least in the context I’d used the word — but I nodded anyway.

“Of course,” I said. “But I don’t understand. After all you’ve done for the Fates, working like a slave down here for nearly two hundred years, this is how they repay you? Why would they do that? It’s so unfair —”

My indignant sputtering on his behalf wrenched a smile out of him … a smile I recognized all too well from some special moments we’d shared in his bedroom the night before.

“So you do still care about me,” he said. He slipped an arm around my waist. “I wasn’t sure. You never answered my question.”

“What question?” I asked. What was wrong with boys? They got romantic at the weirdest times. “What are you even talking about?”

“You know what I’m — what’s that ?” He sprang away from me as quickly as he’d pulled me towards him. I felt something reverberate at my waist.

“Oh,” I said, pulling my mobile phone from the sash of my dress. “It’s nothing. I have my cell set on vibrate. I keep getting these text alerts about the storm back in Isla Huesos.”

I turned the phone off and tucked it away again.

“What about that?” He pointed at the whip on my hip. “Why are you still carrying that ?”

I looked down at it. “Oh. I don’t know. To keep it out of the hands of children, I suppose.” I laughed to show him I was joking, although I wasn’t really. My cousin Alex’s behavior still bordered on the childish sometimes.

John didn’t laugh, however.

“That whip was my father’s,” he said, his face carefully devoid of emotion. “He used to use it on the ship when he … ” He seemed to want to say something, but decided better of it. “Well, he used to use it quite often. I have no idea how your cousin found it. I thought it went down with the Liberty along with everything else belonging to my father.”

“Oh, John,” I said softly, touching the side of his face. Now I understood why the sight of the whip had upset him so. John’s relationship with his father had been what my therapists would call challenging. “I’m sorry. I’ll get rid of it.”

“No,” he said, and managed a smile, though it seemed to me one wracked with the pain of memories best forgotten. “Everything that’s ever turned up from the ship has always done so for good reason, like your necklace.”

As he spoke, he’d reached out to tug my diamond from the bodice of my dress, with the confident proprietorship of a lover. But when the grape-size stone tumbled into his hand, the smile faded.

The diamond was the color of onyx.

My heart gave a sickening lurch, the kind it gives when you hear the siren to an emergency services vehicle going down your street and you realize the reason it’s so loud is because it’s stopped in front of your house. It’s your house that’s on fire, someone you love who’s sick or in trouble or hurt.

Normally? The same forces that decided to put me in charge , John had replied when I’d asked who was steering the boats.

Who was steering them now?

Furies.

No wonder my diamond had turned black. It had nothing to do with the weather.

“John, what’s happening?” I asked, feeling as sick as if someone had punched me in the stomach. “I thought Furies could only possess humans on earth. How could they come here, to the Underworld? We told Alex and Kayla they’d be safe here, but we may as well have left them in Isla Huesos if Furies —”

“Don’t worry,” John interrupted, dropping my diamond and reaching for my shoulders to give me a little shake. “They are safe here. Or at least they will be. I’m going to fix this.”

“How?” I tried not to let my doubt show, but all I could think about was Mr. Graves’s warning: pestilence. If this wasn’t pestilence, I didn’t know what was. “If the docks are destroyed, all of these people — Chloe, Reed, everyone — their souls will never get to where they’re supposed to go.”

“Yes, they will,” he said, firmly. “Because the docks aren’t going to get destroyed.”

“But if the Furies have control of the boats —”

“You’ve got to trust me. I know I’ve let you down before —”

“What?” I shook my head. “No, you haven’t.”

“I have. But I’m not going to this time, I swear it.”

“John.” This was exactly like him. He always took everything on himself, convinced he had to save the world and do it single-handedly. “No. Let me help you for once. That’s what I’m here for, at least if everything Mr. Smith says is true —”

“You can help me. Here.”

Surprised, I held one of my hands out to meet the one he stretched towards me. Except for the mooring lines, this was as close as I could recall to John ever requesting help from me. It wasn’t his fault he was so stubbornly intent on protecting me. Back when he’d been born, women were put on pedestals and told to do nothing all day but look pretty (except for all the women who got worked to death on farms or in cotton mills or having a baby every year because there was no birth control). Even though John knew things were different now, he still tended to think of me as one of those pedestal ladies.

So it was a bit of shock when what he handed me were the reins to his man-eating horse.

“Take Alastor,” he said in a low, urgent voice, “and get back to the castle. Whatever happens, you’ll be safe there, behind the walls.”

“Um … what?” I said, more out of astonishment than from any need for further information, since I had a pretty good idea of what he’d said and absolutely no intention of following his instructions.

“Alastor knows the way,” he went on. “If you’re on his back, no one will dare interfere with you. People,” he added, “tend to be intimidated by Alastor.”

“I can’t think why,” I said dryly, looking up at the stallion’s ink-black eyes, which at that moment happened to be rolling towards John, as if to echo my own skeptical thoughts about his plan. The horse had laid down his ears, a sure indicator that he was displeased … enough so that Hope, my pet dove and full-time protector, sensed it and flew down from the cavern’s ceiling to scold him, fluttering around the stallion’s head and trilling her disapproval.