Awaken

14

The Guide and I into that hidden road

Now entered, to return to the bright world …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XXXIV

There are other questions, of course,” Mr. Smith was saying as he stood with his back to me, scanning his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. “And other pressing concerns. How are we going to help all those poor souls you left behind in the Underworld? And how are we going to defeat the Furies and return the Fates, and thus restore the balance so that this fair isle doesn’t turn into a flaming ball of magma? But,” he added lightly, “I believe once we’ve located and recovered John, those other things will be a bit easier to manage. I hope so, anyway. All of the bridges are shut down due to the storm, so it’s far too late to evacuate.”

I was barely listening to him. Instead, I was glancing around the room, my mind spinning. Mr. Graves, the man of science, had been right? There was a Thanatos keeping John’s soul from reentering his body, holding him captive between life and death?

Had John really caused that lightning bolt to strike that tree and kill Mr. Mueller? If he had, that meant he’d been with me the whole time. Was he here with me now? If so, why couldn’t I feel him? All I could hear was the insistent howl of the wind outside, sucking and banging the shutters against the windows, a strange contrast to the cheerful music playing down the hall.

What if it was true, and John had become some kind of guardian angel to me? In a way, the thought was oddly comforting. But I didn’t want a guardian angel. What good would that do me? Guardian angels couldn’t hold you in their strong arms and tell you everything was going to be all right. They couldn’t eat breakfast with you, or tease you, or tell you that you looked beautiful even when your hair was piled on top of your head because you’d just washed your face and you knew you didn’t look beautiful at all.

I wanted John, the boy, not John, the angel. I wanted him whole, back the way he was, not some stupid angel ….

John? I asked with my mind, looking cautiously around the room. Are you here? If you’re here, give me a sign.

“Ah,” Mr. Smith said, after having stepped onto a small library ladder to find the tome he’d apparently been looking for. “Here it is.”

He walked over to a wide mahogany desk and opened the book to the appropriate page. I rose from my chair to take a look.

On the page before me was a photo of an ancient Greek statue. It showed a winged boy mounted on a galloping horse, swinging a sword over his head.

Well, some of the legs of the horse were galloping. The others had fallen off in an earthquake or something. So had the boy’s face, and most of his wings.

“Thanatos,” Mr. Smith said. “The Greek personification of death.”

I looked down at the photo. “He’s just a kid.”

“I suppose you could say that. The Romans did view him as a child of the dark night. It was said even the sun was afraid to shine upon him. But that kid, as you refer to him, destroyed whole armies with a single swipe of that sword. He killed without a thought to his victims. He was said to be without mercy, without repentance, and without a soul.”

“So in other words,” I said, “a typical teen boy.”

Mr. Smith frowned at me, then read aloud from the inscription beneath the photo. “Here’s what the poet Hesiod wrote in Theogony about Thanatos: ‘His spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast. He is hateful even to the deathless gods.’”

“Because he was shut up in his room all day,” I said, “sexting and playing video games.”

Mr. Smith frowned. “They didn’t have video games in the years before Christ —”

“You know what I mean,” I said. Something about the statue bothered me. It reminded me of something or someone, but I couldn’t figure out who, especially since the form had no face. “If the gods were deathless, then how did he manage to kill John?”

Mr. Smith raised an eyebrow. “Miss Oliviera, I told you upon one of our very first meetings, John isn’t a god. He’s simply an unfortunate young man who was thrust into a position of great responsibility at a very young age —”

“How come there’s nothing about this Thanatos guy in the Hades and Persephone myth?” I interrupted. I already knew how great John was. I didn’t need to hear it.

“Because he doesn’t figure in it. He’s a minor player in Greek mythological literature, considered more a spirit than a deity. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed we all have a little Thanatos within us. He called it the death drive and claimed it’s what makes us engage in risky behaviors from time to time.”

I raised an eyebrow, remembering the way John had clung to the wheel of the ill-fated ship until the last minute. “That sounds like John. So how do I get him away from this Thanatos, once I figure out who he is? I’m guessing he wasn’t Mr. Mueller, or John would already be back.”

Mr. Smith shook his head and closed the book.

“I ought to have known, given our past conversations,” he said tiredly, “that you wouldn’t understand. You can’t literally engage Death in a fight to the death for the life of your boyfriend, Pierce.”

“Whatever, I get it that this Thanatos freak is probably a metaphor,” I said, beginning to pace the room. “But in case he’s not, I’ve already killed one guy tonight. What’s to keep me from killing another?”

Mr. Smith regarded me helplessly from behind his desk. “Because that is not who you are. I understand that with your teacher, you were acting in self-defense. But the entire reason John was so drawn to you is because you are the spring to his winter. You are the water to his fire. He is the storm. You are the sun that appears after the storm.”

I stopped pacing to stare at him. “Are you purposefully trying to make me throw up?”

“Miss Oliviera, please,” Mr. Smith said, opening his arms wide as if to say, Why are you blaming me for stating the obvious? “I know that to you I must seem sometimes like the silly old man who loves to talk about death deities, but give me some credit for having lived a bit longer than you and having seen a few more things. Yes, storms are damaging, but we need them because they clear away the bracken that prevents new flowers from having a chance to grow. And of course we need the sun to shine on those new flowers that without the storm might never have had a chance to bloom.”

Tears formed again in my eyes. “Stop it.”

“Now you’re the one who’s being silly,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s good to be the storm and be able to defend yourself and others when you have to, but it’s just as good to be the sun … maybe better.”

“I’m not the sun,” I said, reaching up to wipe my tears. “Or springtime, or water, or any of those things. I’ve been told on pretty good authority that I’m a kite with no strings, fueled by anger.”

“Of course you are,” Mr. Smith said, “when John isn’t around. I believe I mentioned that he wasn’t particularly enjoyable company before you came into his life. That’s why it would be nice to get the two of you back together. You really only function well as a pair.”

“Right,” I said in a not very steady voice. “So maybe we should concentrate on figuring out what’s happening in the Underworld.”

“What’s happening in the Underworld is fairly obvious,” Mr. Smith said, peeking inside my tote. My cell phone had begun to ring. “The goal of the Furies has always been to destroy the Underworld. And now that they’ve killed John — or believe they’ve done so, anyway — and crippled the transportation of souls, the only thing that stands in the way of their goal is you. Once you’re gone, there’ll be nothing left of the Isla Huesos Underworld, and your friend Mr. Graves’s prediction will come true: Pestilence will reign here on our once fair isle.”

“So I was right,” I said. “There really is a Fury convention going on out there.” I nodded towards the shuttered windows. “Except the only activity on the agenda is killing me.”

“I would imagine so,” Mr. Smith said, reaching inside my bag. “Unless, of course, we can throw a spanner in the works.”

“What does that mean?”

“Throw a —” He heaved a sigh as he drew out my cell. “Good God, do they teach children nothing in school these days? In olden times, the only way workers in factories could get breaks was if one of them threw a tool into the machinery, causing it to break down. A spanner is a type of tool. The only way we’re going to stop the Furies is if we —”

“I already know,” I said. “Kill Thanatos, bring back John, then find boats to replace the ones we’ve lost.”

“You do understand Thanatos is only a symbol of death, much in the way a white dove is a symbol of hope, or a pomegranate is a symbol for fertili —”

“Someday you and I are going to have a long talk about pomegranates, but not now.” I extended my hand, palm out, towards him. “Give me my phone.”

“Someone named Farah Endicott seems to need you quite urgently,” he said dryly, having glanced at my screen. “Apparently there is a party and you are missing it. She’s attached a very rude photo. Pardon me for having looked, but she uses a font that is extremely large, and quite a lot of what I believe your generation calls emoticons and what my generation calls an inability to conduct face-to-face conversation.”

“Yeah,” I said, taking my phone as he passed it to me. “There’s a Coffin Night party at Seth Rector’s dad’s place in Reef Key. I thought it would be canceled due to Hurricane Cassandra. I guess not.”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Smith said. He was still poking through my bag. “Master Rector’s party appears to be quite the rager, as you people call it. I won’t, of course, mention to you that it seems a bit coincidental to me that you received an invitation to his party after you dispatched a Fury, and that I’m quite certain you’re being lured into a trap so that you can be killed. You’ll have figured that out yourself.” He pulled out my copy of A History of the Isle of Bones. “I didn’t give this to you, you know,” he griped. “I only loaned it to you. It’s out of print. It’s not like you can download copies on the Internet.” He flipped through his precious book like I might have hurt it. “Did you actually read it?”

“Of course I read it,” I said, glancing up from my phone. I was looking at the photo Farah had sent. It was of her and Seth and their friends. They were all giving the camera the finger. Classy. “Well, the parts about John, anyway.” I paused, looking around nervously for signs, like flickering lights, John might be eavesdropping. “It was good,” I continued. “I promise to give it back later. And of course I know this party is a trap, I’m not stupid. And quit going through my stuff.”

“So sorry,” Mr. Smith said, closing my bag. “I’ve never been privy before to the personal effects of a co-regent of the afterworld.”

I barely heard him. I was staring at the photo Farah had sent. Where u at, girl? she’d written at the bottom of the photo. We miss u! Get on over here! Mr. Smith had been right about Farah’s generous use of emoticons, many of which were smiley faces wearing devil horns.

That wasn’t what I found so fascinating about her message. It wasn’t even the garishly painted wooden coffin in the background, on which our class’s year had been scrawled in gold, or the fact that a girl I didn’t know was riding the coffin like a horse.

It was Seth, with his tussled blond hair and easy smile, straight white teeth and an allover surfer tan. He looked so wholesome in his polo shirt and board shorts — well, except for the obscene gesture he was making to the camera. The shirt he had on in the photo was black, probably in honor of the occasion, Coffin Night.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me about him.

Oh, yeah. He’d killed my cousin.

“You’re not going,” Mr. Smith said. “Are you?”

“Of course we’re going,” I said, lowering the phone. “They actually invited me the other day, before I killed Mr. Mueller.”

Mr. Smith sighed. “The police will be looking for you.”

“They’ve been looking for me all along,” I said.

“But you hadn’t killed anyone then.”

“We’ll have to be extra careful,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

He sighed again, then looked heavenward. “At least use Patrick’s car. The police won’t be looking for that.”

“Why Patrick’s car?” I asked curiously. “Why not yours?”

“You’ll see,” Mr. Smith said.

A few minutes later, I did.