Awaken

17

Another one, who had his throat pierced through,

And nose cut off close underneath the brows,

And had no longer but a single ear …

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XXVIII

Seth lowered the cup from which he’d just sipped, his face never changing expression. But I saw a few drops of beer spill out onto his black polo shirt.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “But you better remember who I am, little girl. No one messes with a Rector and gets away with it.”

I had to laugh. What had he thought, exactly, encouraging me to sit down with him? That I’d be too intimidated by his good looks and social position to mention it? Or had he planned on raising the subject himself and making some kind of threat, and I’d beaten him to it?

If so, it had been a dumb miscalculation on his part.

“You do know what I’m talking about, Seth,” I said. “I’m sure your father’s shown you the security tape by now, so you know my friends and I got Alex out. He’s alive, and he’ll be testifying against you … for all of it, not only your trying to kill him.”

Anyone looking at us would have thought we were having a perfectly friendly conversation. We were leaning close together. Even though there were so many people in the room, laughing and screaming and dancing, and the music was playing so loudly, it was almost as if the two of us were alone in our own romantic little bubble.

Except there was nothing romantic about what we were discussing.

“You know what’s going to happen now,” I went on. “You’ll be arrested for attempted murder. You’re eighteen, so you’ll be tried as an adult, like my uncle Chris was twenty years ago, when he took the blame for that drug run your dad sent him on. It’s nice we’re keeping it all in the family, isn’t it?” I smiled at him pleasantly. “So I guess instead of saying, ‘Aw, poor Farah,’ we should be saying, ‘Aw, poor Seth.’ Right?”

I had to hand it to him: He covered pretty well. He didn’t even blink when a streak of lightning lit up the sky outside so brilliantly, it looked bright as noon.

“Seriously,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I do know if you ever repeat any of what you just said, my family’s attorneys will slap a slander suit against you so fast, you won’t know what hit you. I don’t care how much money your father has.”

“Really?” I couldn’t have sounded less impressed. “Did you ever consider that if there’s a tape of us getting Alex out of that coffin, there’s also a tape of you putting him in there, Seth?”

He did blink, then. But only once.

“Listen, you crazy whip-carrying bitch. Your cousin is dead, so he’s not testifying about shit,” he said. “And even if you did have a copy of that tape, there’s nothing on it. We checked. Lightning must have fritzed out the cameras or something ….”

I laughed again as his voice trailed off, and he realized his mistake.

“I thought you didn’t know what I was talking about,” I said.

The thunder outside was nowhere near as menacing as the expression on Seth’s face looked as he demanded, “What makes you think anyone would even believe you? Everyone knows why you moved here in the first place. You killed your teacher back east.”

“I did kill my teacher,” I said. “But it wasn’t back east.”

“You stupid slut,” Seth said. He was angry now … really angry. Enough so that his blue eyes looked more like ice than pool water, and I glanced in Bryce’s direction to make sure that if those tanned hands, hardened from so much football practice and windsurfing, happened to wrap around my throat, I’d have backup. “You really think anyone would believe you? You punched your own grandmother in the face, then ran off with that long-haired freak. You’re mentally unstable, your boyfriend’s got a million-dollar bounty on his head, and if you come anywhere near me, I’ll make sure every news outlet in the country hears how you stalked me exactly the way you stalked that teacher of yours —”

I was still staring at the front of his shirt. My mind seized on the detail that had been bothering me since I’d noticed it in the photo Farah had sent me earlier in the evening: Those polo shirts Seth habitually wore — like the one he was wearing tonight — all had little men stitched over the left breast.

Little men riding a galloping horse.

The boy in the photo Mr. Smith had showed me of Thanatos, the Greek personification of death, had also been riding a galloping horse.

Only instead of swinging a sword high in the air with one arm, the man on the front of Seth’s shirt was swinging a polo mallet. He lacked wings, but then, so did the statue, now that time and natural disasters had worn them away.

He destroyed whole armies with a single swipe of that sword, Mr. Smith had said. 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’d joked, a typical teen boy.

Just like Seth Rector, whose parents, in the middle of their family mausoleum, had erected a statue of Hades and Persephone.

The goal of the Furies has always been to destroy the Underworld, Mr. Smith had said.

“Are you even listening to me?” Seth hissed. “I don’t think you know who you’re messing with.”

I raised my gaze to lock with his. “Oh,” I said. “I know exactly who I’m messing with. The guy who killed me — not to mention my best friend, my guidance counselor, my cousin, and now my boyfriend. Am I right?”

Something in my tone caused his eyes to widen, not so much with alarm as with incredulity.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “As crazy as everyone says.”

“Oh, I know you didn’t literally kill me,” I said, plucking my necklace from the bodice of my gown, then beginning to twirl the diamond around my finger on the end of its chain. “You just pluck people’s souls from their bodies. You literally killed Alex though. And Jade, too, I think. You know what Jade told me once, before she died? That there’s no such thing as crazy. There’s no such thing as normal, either. Those aren’t therapeutically beneficial words. I don’t know if that’s really true. But I do know one thing: If you don’t let go of my boyfriend’s soul in the next five seconds, you’re going to find out just how crazy I can get.”

“You can’t do anything to me, you crazy bitch,” he said, glancing back towards his friends. “Not in front of all these people.”

“Oh, yeah?” I dropped my diamond and leaned forward, planting one hand on either side of his chest, trapping him inside my arms. He leaned back as far as he could, until his spine was stopped by the raised end of the chaise lounge. “Watch me.”

He could easily have gotten away. He could have knocked me aside and stood up. But he didn’t. He simply lay there, breathing hard, wondering what I was going to do.

What I did was lower myself slowly against him, then reach up to cup his cheeks between my hands. When he still didn’t protest, I pressed my mouth to his, my hair forming a dark, fragrant tent around our faces.

He didn’t knock me aside then, either. It wasn’t because he was too much of a gentleman to hurt a lady. Look what he’d done to Jade. He didn’t knock me aside because he liked it … at least at first. He opened his lips beneath mine, let out a faint moaning sound, and lifted his hands to grip my waist, which just showed that all boys — even ones possessed by Greek personifications of death — could be shockingly stupid sometimes.

Seth closed his eyes, but I didn’t. That’s how I saw the diamond dangling from my pendant fall against the curve of his bicep as he clutched me to him.

It’s also how I saw the diamond begin to burn his flesh.

He evidently didn’t notice the pain or the smoke. But plenty of other people did.

“Woohoo,” I heard Cody hoot. “Rector, you dog. You two are smoking!”

Seth was too busy trying to ram his tongue into my mouth to pay attention … an attempt I thwarted by moving my face away from his and kissing him on the cheek instead.

Unfortunately, he kept moving his head so that my lips met his open mouth. This was very unwelcome, but didn’t last long, since the smell of his charring skin — and the sensation of it — soon caught his attention.

He ripped his mouth from mine, then looked down at his arm. “What the —?”

It was too late. The blue smoke from the wound in his arm was circling in a slow arc towards the ceiling.

“Uh, Seth, Coach said no smoking until end of season, remember?” Bryce did not understand what was happening.

Seth released me, shaking his arm until the diamond rolled harmlessly away, onto his shirtfront. Then, as the stone began to seer through the cotton jersey, he thrust me roughly away from him, towards the far end of the chaise.

“Stop it,” he said in a voice that sounded nothing like Seth’s. It was deep and wild, and as angry as the ocean outside the glass doors. “Stop it now.”

“I’m not doing anything,” I said. I glanced towards Seth’s friends, my eyes wide and innocent. “You guys, you saw it. Seth and I were kissing, and now he’s having some kind of fit or something. Maybe you should call his dad.”

“Seth?” Bryce looked down at us, his expression troubled. “Hey, bro, what’s going on?”

Seth gritted his teeth as he clutched at his arm. The wisps of smoke that escaped from between his fingers turned thicker … and blacker. Black as my diamond. Black as his pupils, which seemed to fill the entirety of his eyes.

“I’ll kill you,” he snarled, saliva bubbling out of the sides of his mouth. “I’ll kill you for this.”

“Dude,” Cody said, slapping a hand to Seth’s back. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t touch me.” Seth whipped his head around to rage at him. Cody instantly pulled his hand away.

“Um,” I said. “I don’t think he’s okay.”

Outside, there was a flash of such brilliance, I thought at first it was a nuclear explosion. It lit up the sky, the sea, and the entire room … which was immediately after plunged into total darkness when the generator ground to a halt. Girls screamed — a particularly shrill sound, since the speakers had also failed — and I heard glass breaking. Then thunder crashed with such violence, the entire house shook.

When the lights flickered back on a second later, causing us all to blink, I saw that there was a tall figure standing behind Seth who hadn’t been there before.

“Hey,” Cody said, noticing the figure as well. “Who are —?”

Who are you? That’s what he was probably going to ask. But before Cody could finish his sentence, the figure grabbed a handful of Seth’s shirt, then dragged him from the chaise lounge to his feet.

“It’s one thing to kill me,” John said to him. “But kiss my girlfriend? I don’t think so.”

Then he pulled back one of his powerful fists and planted it squarely into the center of Seth’s face.