Awaken

23

“What avarice does is here made manifest

In the purgation of these souls converted,

And no more bitter pain the Mountain has.”

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Purgatorio, Canto XIX

Everything all right in here?” Uncle Chris stepped inside to ask. “I thought I heard you scream, Deb. There a palmetto bug in the trash compactor again?”

Mom was clutching the collar of her robe closed at her neck. All the color had drained from her face. She stood there shaking her head, staring at the spot where John and my father had been standing a second before.

“I … I don’t understand. Where did they go?”

“To get the boats, Mom,” I said.

“But how did they … they were standing right there. And then they … ”

“It’s called teleportation,” I said gently. “If John pictures a person or thing in his head, he can go to where that person or thing is. And if he’s touching someone, he can take that person with him. But he can’t stay away from Isla Huesos or the Underworld for too long. If he does, he’ll begin to age and die.”

Uncle Chris looked at us. “Are you talking about World of Warcraft? Alex loves that game. Don’t you, Alex? How many points do you have? A billion?”

“That’s right, Dad,” Alex said. “A billion.”

I glared at Alex. This was stupid. He should tell his father the truth already. He’d suffered more than anyone because of it all — well, almost anyone. Uncle Chris hadn’t died.

Alex seemed to read my thoughts almost as easily as John had. Or maybe he was only reading my disapproving expression.

“Hey, Pierce,” Alex said, getting up from his counter stool and going to the refrigerator. “Remember when we played World of Warcraft and we hit the level where the guy was just an innocent pawn being used by all the much more evil characters?”

“I do not remember that level,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I do.” Alex opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk, and drank from it. “You insisted we tell him the truth, and he couldn’t handle it, and did something dumbly noble, and died. Don’t do that in this level.”

“Alex,” my mother said. “Please don’t drink milk straight from the carton.”

Uncle Chris saw the file Alex had stolen from Mr. Rector’s office sitting on the counter. “What’s this?” he said curiously, reaching for it.

“Don’t!” Alex and I both cried at the exact same time.

“It’s nothing,” Mom said. She quickly lifted the file. “It’s something of mine … for work.”

“Work?” Uncle Chris squinted down at the file in her arms. “It says Rector Realty on it. You work at the Marine Institute. What has the Marine Institute got to do with Rector Realty?”

“I’m, um, doing some research,” Mom said. “On Reef Key. Just a little private research of my own. In fact, I was about to head upstairs and get dressed and start my research right now on the computer.”

“That’s a good idea, Aunt Deb,” Alex said. “Want me to come help you?”

“No, thank you, Alex,” Mom said with some of her old acerbic dryness. “I’m quite capable of getting dressed and doing research on my own.”

“Really, Aunt Deb,” Alex said, following my mom as she backed out of the kitchen and down the hallway, towards the stairs. “I want to help.”

What Alex wanted, I knew, was not to let that file out of his sight. He wasn’t used to trusting adults — it wasn’t as if any had ever been there for him in the past — and it didn’t look as if he was ready to start now.

“Really, Alex,” I heard my mother say from the hallway. “I’m not going to do anything without your permission, and I’ll give it back when I’m done with it.”

Uncle Chris, looking a little anxious, watched them go.

“Piercey,” he said in a low voice, so they wouldn’t overhear. “Does Alex seem … different to you?”

“Different?” I asked. “In what way?”

“I don’t know,” Uncle Chris said. “He seems a little more … mature, or something. Almost overnight.”

Being murdered by your peers, then brought back from the dead, could certainly have that effect on you.

I didn’t mention this to Uncle Chris, however. All I said was, “I don’t know. I haven’t really noticed.”

I didn’t like lying to him. But he was Alex’s father and Alex didn’t want him knowing the truth, so I felt like I had to respect that.

“Well, I’ve noticed,” Uncle Chris said, reaching up to scratch his head beneath his Isla Huesos Bait and Tackle baseball cap. “I think it’s a good thing. Maybe that New Pathways program you two are in at school is working on him. Or maybe it’s you, being a good influence on him, Piercey. But I’m finally starting to get the feeling I don’t have to worry about him as much. You know?”

I swallowed. I couldn’t believe Uncle Chris and I were having this conversation.

“Uh,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Uncle Chris said, grinning at me. “I was kind of suspicious of that boyfriend of yours at first, but I think maybe he’s a positive role model for Alexander.”

I tried not to glance at the burnt spot in the living room carpet. “Maybe. Or maybe Alex straightened up because he’s so worried about you, Uncle Chris, and that murder charge against you.”

“Oh, that,” Uncle Chris said with a shrug. “I didn’t do it, so I’m sure it will all get straightened out soon. It was nice of your mom to post my bail.”

His naïve belief that the charges would be dropped and everything would work out because he was innocent was sort of astonishing for a man who’d spent so many years in prison. Granted, he’d spent those years in prison for a crime he truly had committed (although the penalty had been far too severe, especially for possession of a drug that was now legal in many states), but surely he must have met a lot of people in there who’d been convinced they were innocent. How could he have so much faith he’d be exonerated?

I guess that was just Uncle Chris. He was a truly positive person. No wonder my mom felt so bad about not coming forward and telling the truth about Mr. Rector. He was a slimebag who preyed on those who weren’t able to defend themselves.

Like the dead.

“Hey, what boats did your dad and that boyfriend of yours go to get?” Uncle Chris asked.

“Oh,” I said. “For, uh, John’s business. His boats got destroyed in the, er, storm, and my dad says he knows a guy who has some other boats John can use.”

“That’s nice,” Uncle Chris said. “I hope your mom and dad get back together. He makes Deb really happy. And I think that John fella makes you happy, too, am I right?” His eyes glinted at me teasingly.

I smiled back at him. “What would make you happy, Uncle Chris?” I asked.

He grinned in that sweet, slightly childish way of his that never failed to tug on my heartstrings.

“If everyone I loved was happy, of course,” he said, as if it should have been obvious.

It was kind of funny that right as he said this, the doorbell rang.

I uttered a curse word I’d picked up from spending way too much time in the company of Frank and Kayla. Uncle Chris looked at me in surprise. “Piercey!” he said, shocked.

“Sorry.” My heart began to drum inside my chest. I heard rapid footsteps in the hallway.

“It’s Chief of Police Santos,” my mother said, her face a mask of concern. “I saw him on the front porch from the window.”

“There are cop cars all up and down the street,” Alex said, skidding into the kitchen right behind her. “Po-pos here to take us to the big house.”

“You don’t know that,” Mom said to him.

“Oh, yeah? Why else do you think they’re here, Aunt Deb? To help you clean up your lawn after the big storm?” Alex’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Yeah, that’s a special service the Isla Huesos police chief offers to all the attractive new divorcées on the island.”

“Mom,” I said, my heart in my throat. “I think we need to borrow your car.”

“How’s that going to work?” Alex demanded. “Chief Santos parked in her driveway. And don’t think he didn’t do it on purpose to block us from getting her car out of the garage. Are we supposed to ram him?”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. I looked at Alex. “How did you guys get here? In your car?”

“We walked,” Alex said. “Your genius boyfriend had Frank slash all my tires to keep me from going out after Coffin Fest, remember?”

“Oh, right,” I said. That had worked really well, since Alex had gone out anyway and gotten himself killed.

“This is crazy,” Mom said, as the doorbell rang again, this time accompanied by a knock and a deep voice saying, “Dr. Cabrero? We know you’re home. We need to ask you a few questions about your daughter.”

“I’m going to open the door and invite him in and explain the whole situation —”

Both Alex and I had glanced down at the diamond at the end of my necklace. It was the color of onyx. “No!” we cried simultaneously.

“Go out the back,” Uncle Chris said.

I looked at him, startled. I had almost forgotten he was in the room, he’d grown so quiet. Go out the back were the first words he’d said since my mom and Alex had said it was the police at the door.

“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.

The police chief was rubbing his chin. I could tell from his stubble that the past few days had been as difficult for him as they had been for me. He hadn’t even had time to spare on personal grooming.

As the chief rubbed his chin, he finally noticed his men — and a single female officer — had their pistols drawn.

“Hey,” Chief Santos said to them in a surprised voice. “Saddle up the pieces, people. There’s no need for that.”

All but one officer obediently slipped their guns back into their holsters. The one who did not was a husky guy with a lot of dark hair. He kept his firearm pointed steadily at Uncle Chris.

Chief of Police Santos didn’t notice. He turned back to my mother to say something in a low voice that Alex and I were too far away to hear.

But I was sure none of my mother’s neighbors missed what the dark-haired officer shouted a second later.

“Send the girl out!”

Police Chief Santos spun around.

“Poling,” he said, making a disgusted face as his gaze fell on the officer still holding the gun. “Are you nuts?”

Poling? Where had I heard that name before?

“Not nuts, sir,” Officer Poling said. “Just here to do my job. We came to get the Oliviera girl, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“Not like this, you numbskull. We came here to question her, not shoot her. Put your firearm away, before I shoot you myself.”

I noticed a number of my mother’s neighbors beginning to hurry indoors, sensing that the scene had taken a sudden turn for the worse. No one came to get Daddy’s Little Princess, however. She stayed where she was, still staring at us and sucking on her finger.

“Sorry, sir,” Officer Poling said, his pistol not wavering. “Pierce Oliviera killed a friend of mine. We have to bring her in.”

I felt the blood in my veins grow cold. He knew. But how?

“What in the hell are you talking about, Shawn?” Chief Santos demanded.

“My friend Mark,” Officer Poling said. “She killed him. She’s going to have to pay for that. I have my orders.”

Mr. Mueller’s first name was Mark.

“Orders?” the police chief echoed. “Orders from who, Shawn? Not me. And who the hell is Mark?”

The dark-haired man looked up. It was almost impossible not to follow the direction of his gaze, even though a part of me wanted to keep my eye on his gun.

When I raised my head, however, I knew it would be impossible to look away.

The sky above our heads was filled with ravens — the same kind that had been circling the ceiling of the cave in the Underworld just before the Furies had caused the ships to sink. There were hundreds — maybe thousands — of the scavenger birds, their black wings spread out against the cloudless blue sky, flying in circles above Isla Huesos, some of them letting out their odd, almost human-sounding cries.

I had seen ravens on the island before, but always over the cemetery, and of course at Reef Key, not my mother’s house. It had made sense to see them in a graveyard and a development that had been built over a burial site. They were carrion birds, after all. They ate the dead.

So what was with the flybys over the nice gated subdivison?

The ravens clearly knew something the rest of us were just beginning to suspect … like that maybe there were about to be some dead bodies for them to feast on.

Daddy’s Little Princess pointed to the sky with the finger she’d been sucking. “Bad birdies,” she said. She was speaking to Alex and me conversationally, imparting information she seemed to think we needed to know. “Bad.”

“Yeah, kid,” Alex said. “I think we figured that part out already.”

Only Chief of Police Santos seemed unfazed at the sight of the silently wheeling ravens.

“Don’t tell me you’re taking orders from a bunch of damned birds, Shawn,” he growled. “I don’t have time for that kind of thing today.”

Officer Poling did not appear to care what his chief had time for.

“Either the girl comes out,” the young officer said, taking careful aim, “or I shoot her mother in the head.”

The bottom of my world dropped out as I saw Officer Poling swing the mouth of his gun directly at my mother.

Suddenly I remembered where I’d heard his name before. Officer Poling had been one of the two officers helping Jade to patrol the cemetery the night she died.

Helping Jade? Or helping to murder Jade in order to cover up for a crime some other Furies had committed?

What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion, although in reality it must have taken only a couple of seconds.

Uncle Chris stepped in front of my mother to shield her from Officer Poling’s bullets with his own body. Chief of Police Santos did the same thing, only he stepped in front of both Uncle Chris and my mom, attempting to push them back inside the house and to safety.

Meanwhile, every cop standing around Officer Poling struggled to draw his or her weapon in order to point it at their colleague, sensing their chief was under attack, shouting, “Stand down! Stand down!”

In a few seconds more, the wealthy community of Dolphin Key was going to become a shooting gallery.

“We’ve got to stop this!” Alex whirled around to shout at me. “They’ll kill each other.”

Daddy’s Little Princess had another opinion. “Run,” she said in the same matter-of-fact voice she’d used before about the bad birdies, shaking her head until her blond ringlets quivered. “Run away.”

Something struck me about the little girl’s eyes. I didn’t have time to analyze it, but I knew it reminded me of someone.

“Alex,” I said. “Grab her.”

He looked down at me uncomprehendingly. “What?”

“Grab the kid,” I said, pointing at Daddy’s Little Princess. “Figure out where she lives and take her inside so she doesn’t get hurt if anyone starts shooting. Then meet me at the cemetery.”

Alex did as I asked, grabbing the little girl by her elbows. She laughed, thinking we were playing a game. “What are you going to do?” Alex asked.

“This,” I said. Keeping one hand on my handlebars, I raised the other and began to wave. “Hey! Officer Poling?” I shouted. “Looking for me? I’m over here.”

Officer Poling’s face wasn’t the only one who swung in my direction. Every single officer who’d had a gun trained on him looked my way, too. So did my mom and Uncle Chris. So did Chief of Police Santos. So did Daddy’s Little Princess. So did Alex.

Besides my mom’s and Officer Poling’s, Alex’s expression might have been the one that was most shocked.

“Are you crazy?” Alex demanded. “He’s going to come after you now.”

“That’s the idea,” I said, and stepped hard on my pedal.