“Pierce.” It had been Alex’s voice I heard in my ear. “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to get away from here. Look. The storm. It’s getting worse.”
He was right. The thunder was growing louder, and somehow, it had begun to rain, though at first I thought that was because the fog had finally closed in on the beach.
Except that the fog had turned from white to red. It was the color of poinciana blossoms. The mist clung with enough persistence to make it feel like a steady drizzle ….
“Oh, God,” I’d murmured, looking down at my arms, then at John’s chest. We’d each been covered in a fine spray of pink.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.
Then Alex pointed upwards. I saw that the ravens that had survived the sound of the ships’ impact had regrouped and were spinning in a tight circle, waiting for a chance to do what the old man in the hospital gown had assured us they were waiting to do … feed on the dead. Only now, I realized with horror, it wasn’t the flesh of the dead they wanted.
It was the body of my dead boyfriend.
“The castle,” I’d said, scrambling to my feet. “We need to get him — get everyone — to the castle, now.”
Mr. Liu wanted to carry John, but Alastor put up such a fuss, rearing and whinnying and thrusting his nose against John’s body, as if he were trying to nudge him back to life — or at least knock him off the bigger man’s shoulder — we gave up and laid him across Alastor’s saddle. The horse seemed comforted by the feel of his master’s weight across his back and, allowing me to hold his reins, turned to head back towards the castle without once balking or even so much as snorting.
I wished more than once during that long, frightening walk through the red mist, with the departed souls fighting and complaining behind us that they did not understand what was happening — except, thankfully, for Reed and Chloe, who helped along Mrs. Engle, which turned out to be the name of the nice old lady in the pearls — that I could be an animal and not fully understand what was happening. Then maybe I’d have been able to delude myself into thinking that John was only sleeping, or unconscious, and that I could nudge him awake, the way Alastor had tried to.
I wished it almost as much as I wished that Hope would suddenly appear, fluttering her (mostly) pure white wings and fussing about, letting me know all was not lost.
Except that Hope never put in an appearance, even when we finally reached the room John and I shared. I’d been sure I’d find her perched on the back of my dining room chair, fastidiously grooming herself. To my utter disappointment, her perch was empty. She wasn’t there, or anywhere else that I could see.
Not only that, but no fire blazed in the enormous hearth to greet us, as it had every other time I’d walked in. None of the sconces along the passageway had been lit, either. The gleaming silver bowl in the center of the table, normally heaped to overflowing with grapes and peaches and apples and pears, was empty. Even the fountain that usually burbled so animatedly in the courtyard was silent.
All of this, I thought with foreboding, could mean only one thing: The Fates had deserted us.
Tears filled my eyes, but for once I didn’t mind them because they blurred the sight of John’s long-limbed body stretched out beside me, completely still and virtually the same color as the crisp white sheets beneath him.
Thankfully, they also blurred the faces of the people gathered around John’s room and the bed on which he lay, which was a small mercy. What would I want to look at Alex for, as he slouched on the couch and mindlessly (and irritatingly) flipped through the pages of a book he’d found on the nightstand? Zzzzzpppt went the pages. Zzzzzpppt.
Or Chloe as she knelt at the end of John’s bed, murmuring whatever prayers she’d been taught were appropriate to say at someone’s deathbed (which weren’t doing any good, as far as I could tell. John’s eyelids never stirred).
I definitely didn’t need to see Reed, still shirtless and looking all around the room, like, What is this weird place?
I didn’t even want to look at Kayla as she sat beside me, patting me on the shoulder and murmuring over and over again, “Everything’s going to be all right, chickie. Everything’s going to be fine.”
How did that make any sense? Everything clearly wasn’t going to be all right. Nothing was ever going to be all right again.
“Here, dear,” Mrs. Engle said, removing, then replacing, a cup of tea that Henry had thrust into my hands, even though I had never touched it to my lips. She kept refilling it from a pot Henry had brought from the kitchen. Every time the pot ran low, I heard Henry’s overlarge shoes clip-clop against the floor as he shuffled out to refill it. “Try to drink it, won’t you? It will help.”
What was she talking about? Tea wasn’t going to help anything.
Crying helped a little. The tears kept me from seeing the expression on Frank’s face as he mumbled, periodically, “I think I’ll go check on that lot out there in the courtyard,” in a voice so clogged with emotion, I knew he was actually leaving the room so no one would see his tears.
Mr. Liu, meanwhile, sat silent as a stone at the bottom of one of the double sets of curved staircases that led to a set of — locked — doorways back to earth. His brawny arms folded over his chest, his head bowed so low, his long, single black braid had fallen over one shoulder, his face was cast in shadow.
The fact that I knew he, too, was crying — and that the reason Henry kept slipping from the room for more tea wasn’t because anyone wanted it, but so I wouldn’t see his tears — didn’t make it easier to bear.
Maybe because he was a man of science and it was his job to break bad news, Mr. Graves was the only permanent resident of the Underworld not shedding any tears. His words simply caused other people to.
“When I said troubling,” the doctor went on, fumbling to slip his old-fashioned stethoscope into one of the deep pockets of his black coat, “of course what I meant was that it’s troubling in an intellectually curious manner. You see, all of us were granted eternal life, so long as we don’t stray too far from the Underworld. Technically, the captain didn’t do that.”
“But technically,” Kayla said, “he’s still dead.”
“Well, yes,” Mr. Graves admitted. “I’m afraid that’s true.”
In the brief silence that followed, my personal cell phone buzzed — no doubt I had another text message from the National Weather Service in Isla Huesos — and at the same time, John’s tablet, which was tucked into my sash beside the phone, let out a chime.
No one remarked on this, least of all me. John’s tablet had been doing this at regular intervals — notifying me whenever a new soul had arrived and needed to be sorted.
How John hadn’t been driven witless by these near constant alerts, I had no idea. I was ready to pitch the stupid thing across the room. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t do anything to bring John back.
“So what gives, Doc?” Reed asked.
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Graves looked confused.
“Why’d the dude die?”
“Oh. I’m afraid I don’t know.” Mr. Graves sighed. “I can’t find a wound. No sign of trauma or internal injury. He doesn’t appear to have drowned —”
“Why did he die this time and not before?” I asked, my voice sounding croaky from disuse. “He’s been hurt by Furies plenty of other times, badly” — I kept my gaze averted from the scars on his chest, the scars it seemed a lifetime ago that I’d run my fingers across, making him gasp — “and he didn’t die then. Why this time?”