Awaken

7

“Dost thou not hear the pity of his plaint?

Dost thou not see the death that combats him

Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt?”

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto II

The sound of splintering wood and sheering metal as the two ships collided echoed so loudly through the cavern that the sound felt almost like a physical blow. For some of us on shore — those of us not lucky enough to have hands to fling over our ears to protect them, that is — it was a physical blow.

“The ravens,” the old man in the hospital gown cried.

It had begun to rain. But no ordinary rain, unless raindrops had suddenly turned into large black birds.

The ravens that had been flying in their predatory circles above, stunned by the sound of the ships imploding, began to drop, one by one, from the air, landing like grenades of blood and black feathers all around us.

“Watch it,” Reed said, pulling Alex and Chloe out of the way as one of the birds shot by them, nearly striking them both. Instead, it hit the dock railing, then ricocheted into the water, where it bobbed for a moment, until, incredibly, it recovered itself. After giving its wings a good shake, it flew away, though it got only as far as a nearby boulder before crash-landing again in confusion.

It was one of the lucky ones. Most of the other birds plummeted into the sand or rocks, while recently departed souls screamed in horror at the piles of tiny bones and feathers all around them.

My heart already in my throat over John, I glanced about frantically to check on Hope. Though her wings had never been clipped, she surely hadn’t been flying at as high an altitude as those ravens when the echo sounded, and could not have been as badly affected by it as they were. And with those blinding white feathers, she should have been easy to spot — much easier than John, who could be halfway to the bottom of the lake by now ….

I hadn’t told him I loved him. Why hadn’t I told him I loved him?

Better not to think of that now. But I had no better luck spotting Hope anywhere on the shore than I did John in the water, since Alastor, like the ravens, had been stunned by the sound of the colliding ships and panicked in response to the assault on his sensitive ears. He reared, frantic to get back to the castle and to his comfortable stable, where birds didn’t plummet from the sky and people weren’t screaming at the sight of the birds’ mutilated corpses all around them. Though I tried to soothe him, it was like trying to calm a thrashing shark.

“Careful!” Kayla ducked as the stallion’s enormous, silver-clad hooves swung dangerously close to her face.

I was holding on for dear life, but I managed to get out two words: “I’m trying.”

There was nothing I could do but allow Alastor to go where he so badly wanted to. He was too strong for me to control when he was in this agitated state, and the more he tried to resist me, the more likely he was going to hurt someone … probably me.

Alastor wasn’t the only one panicking, either. The people standing at the front of the pier, who would have been the first to board the boat if it had actually arrived, were instead the first to suffer the aftereffects of the ships’ collision.

In the moments following the initial impact, the boats sprang apart as lake water rushed in to fill their empty passenger holds. What I could also see from my high vantage point on Alastor’s back — whenever he twisted in that direction — was that a four-foot wave filled with debris was surging outwards from the crash and heading directly towards the pier.

“Get everyone off the dock,” were the last words I was able to gasp out before Alastor wheeled around, practically whipping my head off.

Fortunately, it seemed as if Henry had heard me. He must have, since behind me, I heard him bellow, “Everyone, please, it’s too dangerous to stay here. We’ve got to follow Miss Oliviera — she’s the lady on the big black horse. Walk, don’t run —”

That’s all I heard before Alastor took off thundering down the pier, his hooves flying so quickly I wondered if they were making sparks. At the speed he was going, the wind whipped my face so fiercely my eyes began to water. All I saw ahead of us were blurred shapes. I could only hope the horse wasn’t knocking people down in his frantic flight to escape.

Though I couldn’t see, I could hear. Once I no longer heard the hollow drumming of Alastor’s hooves on the wooden boards of the dock, but the much deeper thud of his feet hitting dry sand, I began to pull his reins as hard as I could to the left, knowing that when a horse’s eyes are forced to look in a direction he doesn’t want to go, he has no choice but to slow down, and eventually to stop or turn in that direction. I knew, of course, that the castle was where I was supposed to be heading, but I couldn’t leave the beach without turning around for one last look for my bird and the boy I hadn’t told I loved.

Alastor wasn’t giving up without a fight. I thought he was going to pull my arms from their sockets, but he finally slowed down — with considerable snorting — and eventually stopped, pawing ill-temperedly at the ground.

“Sorry,” I said to him. “But you’re not the only one who’s suffering here.”

I twisted in the saddle to look behind me and saw that very few of the departed had listened to Henry’s advice of walk, don’t run. People at the end of the dock had already begun to shove against those in front of them, desperate to get to what they perceived as the safety of the shore before the waves of debris-filled water hit them.

I didn’t blame them, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone was crushed or pushed off the pier and into the water, where the choppy waves would sweep them up and under the dock and out of sight.

What happens to the soul of someone who went missing in the Underworld? I wondered.

Better question: What was going to happen to these people now that the ships that were supposed to take them to their final destinations had been destroyed?

This was something I hadn’t considered before inviting them all up to the castle. Would the Fates provide new boats? How could they, if the Furies had driven them off?

I had more important things to worry about at the moment, however. I scanned the surface of the water for John. Surely he’d had time to blink himself — as Henry liked to say — out of the ship’s wheelhouse before the collision. Only, where had he ended up? Why had we spent so much time kissing and no time agreeing on a point to meet afterwards? Next time I was going to know better. If there was a next time …

There had to be. To think otherwise was to invite madness.

Instead of John, however, all I saw — besides bewildered lost souls beginning to shiver in winds that were rapidly turning freezing cold — was Frank, standing at the end of his dock, brandishing a pair of brass knuckles.

“You think dying was painful?” he was demanding of the men and women who were shuffling past him. Word had obviously spread about the evacuation. “Try breaking out of this line. I’ll show you what real pain feels like.” He noticed me and gave me a smile, along with a wink and cordial nod. “Hello there, Miss Pierce.”

“Hello,” I said. “Where’s Mr. Liu?” I had to raise my voice to be heard above the sound of the steadily rising wind.

“He’s over there,” Frank said, waving at a bulky figure farther down along the pier, “making sure all of our ‘guests’ are headed away from, and not into, the water. Some of them seem to think this is their golden opportunity to escape what the Fates have in store for them.”

They aren’t wrong, I thought a little bitterly. The Furies have made sure of that.

“Have you seen John?” I asked him.

“Not yet, but don’t you worry about him,” Frank called back. “He always turns up.”

I found nothing in this remark to inspire confidence, since I happened to know at least one of the places John liked to “turn up” was the cemetery.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, if you see him before I do, would you tell him —”

One of the men in Frank’s line broke ranks, darted across the beach, and fell to his knees at Alastor’s feet, causing the horse to stagger backwards a few steps in alarm. The man didn’t look like a lot of the people from the rest of his line. He was probably around my dad’s age and was dressed pretty conservatively, in a pair of khaki pants and a collared shirt that had been neatly pressed at one time.

The effect was somewhat ruined by the large bloodstained bullet hole in the center of it, however.

“Sweetheart,” he said, his hands clasped in supplication as he looked up at me from the sand. “You gotta help me. There’s been some kinda mistake. I’m not supposed to be here. I keep telling these guys, I’m supposed to be with those other people over there” — he pointed at my dock — “but they won’t listen —”

“Sorry.” I hated it when people I didn’t know called me sweetheart. How did they know whether or not my heart was sweet? “But I have to go.”

“You don’t understand,” Khaki Pants pleaded. There were tears running down his face. “I’ve got a daughter about your age. She needs me. Yeah, I may not have been the most perfect father, but who is? That doesn’t mean I deserve to be with these people here.”

I stared down at him, thinking of my own dad. Which line would he end up being sorted into when he died, this one, or the one with Hospital Gown, Chloe, and Reed? A lot of people really hated my dad, the infamous millionaire Zack Oliviera, because his company was partly responsible for one of the largest accidental oil spills in history, which was still affecting the wildlife and economy of not only Isla Huesos but also the entire Gulf shoreline.

That didn’t mean my dad was a bad person, however. He’d always been there for me when I needed him (well, with the exception of those times his mother-in-law had tried to murder me). But he hated Grandma and had done everything he could to keep me away from her. Dad was almost like a walking Fury detector, now that I thought about it.

Maybe the Fates made mistakes, just like people. Obviously they did, if they thought it was fair to punish someone like John for a crime he’d been completely justified in committing.

I was opening my mouth to tell the poor man in the khaki pants that though I sympathized with his plight, there wasn’t much I could do to help him at the moment — I had problems of my own — when Frank strode up and wrenched the man back to his feet.

“The lady said she has to go,” Frank snarled, dragging Khaki Pants back to the line. “You can tell her your sad story — which I’m sure is perfectly true — later.”

“It is true,” Khaki Pants insisted. “You know, I was abused as a child. Isn’t anyone going to take that into account? It’s not my fault —”

“If I had a piece of eight for everyone I met down here who tried to use the fact that he was abused as a child as an excuse for his behavior, I’d be the richest man in the world,” Frank said. “My father abused me as a child, but I never hurt anybody. Well,” he added thoughtfully, “anybody who didn’t deserve it, that is.”

I glanced away from Frank and his new friend, distracted by the crowd of lost souls who’d gathered around Alastor. They were keeping a careful distance from his baleful glare but looking up at me expectantly, like I had something they wanted.

It took me a second or two to realize that I did.

“Excuse me, dear,” an old woman said in a quavering voice. In her silk blouse, with a pearl necklace at her throat and a cane in her hand, she could have been a teacher from my old school in Connecticut. Maybe that’s why I didn’t mind so much when she called me dear. “It’s getting quite cold. We saw the accident, so I know it will be a while before the next boat arrives. Is there somewhere we can go in the meantime to be out of this wind?”

I looked up and down the beach, though I knew very well there was no shelter of any kind for them, unlike at a normal terminal. Passengers had never had to wait that long for a boat before. Of course, never before had they faced such dangers as bird bodies plummeting from the sky and much worse, for all I knew.

There was only one thing I could say — though I knew John wasn’t going to like it very much when he found out.

“Yes,” I said to the old woman. I pointed towards the castle. “You can go there.”

“Oh,” she said, her gaze following the direction of my finger. “I see.”

She didn’t look all that excited. It took me a second or two to realize why. Every time she took a step, her cane sank into the wet sand as she leaned on it. It was many, many feet to the castle.

Worse, I could see that several of the people from Frank’s line — including Khaki Pants — were eyeing her pearl necklace with a great deal of interest, even though I had no idea what they thought they were going to do with it once they’d snatched it. It’s not like there were any pawnshops in the Underworld where they could make a quick buck selling it.

“Hold on a minute,” I said to the old lady with the pearls. “I’ll get you some help.”

I glanced around for Mr. Liu. He was so huge, he could pick her up and set her on his shoulder.

Only, Mr. Liu looked busy. One of his charges really had jumped into the lake, as they’d feared would happen, and Mr. Liu had leaped in after him. Now he was towing him to shore.

It seemed like I was going to have to start offering rides to the castle on Alastor’s back like he was a pony at a children’s party. He ought to love that.

Then I heard Mr. Liu call my name … my first name. Mr. Liu had never called me by my first name before, only Miss Oliviera. Normally unwavering in his old-world politeness, I knew something truly horrible must have happened to make him forget it.

Alastor must have heard the urgency in Mr. Liu’s voice as well, since his ears turned forward, and before I had a chance to press my heels against his sides, he’d plunged into the water, splashing towards the Asian man and the body he was towing …

… a body that, as I grew closer, I began to realize looked familiar. It was male, and shirtless, in black jeans.

It was John. And he looked — there was no other way to put it — dead.