Abandon (31 page)

Now John was kissing my hair. “I don’t care who your father is.”

“Well, you should care, John,” I said, “because I have news for you. I’m not the kind of girl who can just vanish into thin air and not have my disappearance get noticed. As you yourself once pointed out, there are people who care about me. Maybe not as many as I used to think, considering my grandmother is a Fury, but enough. I just can’t believe
you
would do this. Especially as someone who gets to have a whole
night
dedicated to him because his body never got a decent burial. Am I right? Coffin Night is about you, isn’t it?” He neither confirmed nor denied it, just went on kissing me. “You have to admit, it’s not very fair that you’re not allowing me the same basic courtesy.”

“Pierce.” He finally lifted his head and looked down into my soft, wet eyes. His own gaze was far from soft. It was as steel-flecked and determined as I’d ever seen it. His voice was even harder. “I know what you’re trying to do. And the answer is no. You can be
upset with me. That’s fine. You’ve been upset with me before, and I survived. You’re usually upset with me, so I’m actually used to it. I’m prepared to sit here and have you be upset with me for months, if necessary. For
years,
if that’s what it takes. Just so long as I know you’re somewhere I can protect you.”

His arms tightened around me. They were as hard as his voice and gaze. “You don’t know what they’re capable of. What they did to Jade — that was nothing. They must have realized she wasn’t you. If it
had
been you, what they would have done…I can’t even tell you. Because it would have been unspeakably evil.”

I’d stopped crying. Not just because I’d realized it wasn’t going to do any good — he was onto me — but because something in his voice had made me forget my own sorrow for a moment, and recognize someone else’s.

His.

“When I first saw her lying there this morning,” he went on, “I did think she was you for a second or two. If it
had
been you…well, I don’t know what I would have done.”

I thought I saw something — a flicker of pain — in his eyes. It was there, and then it was gone, like the fish that sometimes flashed beneath the surface of the water when I rode my bike across the bridge above the highway.

Whatever John had been through — whatever they had put him through, whatever
I
had put him through — had left a scar. On the inside this time, where I couldn’t touch it.

This was something else for which I was accountable.

“So you can’t try to leave here again,” he said in a hard voice. “Do you understand? No matter what.
You can’t leave this time.
It
won’t be easy, but I at least have a chance of protecting you here. Out there, I have none.”

I don’t know what made me do it.

But I reached up and ran a hand along his face. I should have been angry with him.

And I was.

But I was also sure that despite how tightly he’d sealed those doors, there had to be another way out.

I knew I was going to find it. I had to. Not to get away from John, but to get back to
my
world to let my mother know I was all right. And to help prove Uncle Chris was innocent. And to make sure my grandmother and all the rest of the people being possessed by Furies were brought to justice, or at least didn’t hurt anyone else, including John, ever again.

Because in spite of what John and Richard Smith said, I was sure there had to be some way to stop the Furies. There just had to be.

In the meantime, I wanted to let him know how sorry I was…truly sorry for any pain I’d caused him and for the way I’d hurt him the last time I was in this room. I’d said I was sorry before, back in the cemetery.

But this time, when I reached up to stroke the face I’d burned with tea a year and a half earlier, and whispered “I’m sorry” to him, I really meant it.

He took my hand and pressed his lips to my palm.

“Why don’t you give it more of a chance this time?” he said with another one of those smiles that tugged on my heartstrings. “Who knows? You might even start to like it here.”

I smiled back at him…then glanced, involuntarily, at the bed looming behind him.

And I realized, with a sinking feeling, that he was right. There
was
a chance I might start to like it here.

And maybe that — not him — was what I’d always feared most of all.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

W
hat really happens to us after we die? That’s a question every culture in the world has attempted to answer, from the ancient Aztecs to the Christians and Muslims of today. Each has developed their own mythology relating to an afterworld through which the souls of the newly dead must pass. It was while studying those afterworlds (when I was in high school) that I first became interested in death deities, in particular the myth of Hades and Persephone, and the roots of the story that would become
Abandon
began to dig in.

Although
Abandon
is fiction, many aspects of the story are based in fact. In general, of people who report a close encounter with death, 20 percent also report having had a near-death experience, which can encompass any of a number of sensations. Often merely having come so close to dying is reported as being much
more distressing for people than the near-death experience itself. Obviously, this is not the case for the main character of
Abandon
, Pierce Oliviera.

During the French Revolution, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were stripped of possession of the crown jewels, which then became property of the nation, and were promptly stolen from the royal storehouse. Many of the jewels were recovered, but not all.

The setting of
Abandon
is partially based on the island of Key West, the original Spanish name for which was
Cayo Hueso (cayo,
in Spanish, means “small island” and
hueso
is “bone”). Key West is thought to be an English mispronunciation of the words
Cayo Hueso.

The island was given this name by Ponce de Leon, who is rumored to have been searching for the Fountain of Youth when he discovered human bones littering Key West’s beaches while he and his crew were charting the area around 1515. Most likely, the bones belonged to the island’s original inhabitants, the Calusa Indians. It was a poisoned arrow shot by Calusa Indians that killed Ponce de Leon in 1521.

In 1846, a Category 5 hurricane known as the Great Havana Hurricane destroyed nearly every building on the island of Key West (which had by then grown to be the largest town in Florida, as it was ideally located for trade with the Bahamas, Cuba, and New Orleans), although reports of the exact number of deaths are still in dispute.

That the hurricane destroyed the Key West lighthouse and naval hospital, then washed most of the coffins from its cemetery out to sea, are known facts. It was because of this hurricane that
the Key West cemetery was moved to its current location on Passover Lane, and why aboveground stone crypts are now mandatory there.

It is rumored that this is also how Coffin Week — during which the Key West High School’s senior class builds and hides a coffin somewhere on the island for the junior class to find — became a yearly (though much frowned-upon) ritual.

Each chapter of
Abandon
begins with a quote from Dante Alighieri’s
Divine Comedy,
or
Dante’s Inferno
(in which Dante describes his journey into the Underworld, guided by the Roman poet Virgil), because many of the characters in
Abandon
have been abandoned in some way. Some may have even abandoned all hope.

If you are interested in reading more about the Greek Underworld, I recommend Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes.
Is John Hayden’s Underworld and the Underworld of the Greek gods the same place? That’s a question to be answered in further books.

I am very excited about this series, and I hope you are, too. I can’t wait to share the next installment,
Underworld,
with you.

M
EG
C
ABOT

THE ABANDON TRILOGY
The Myth of Persephone, Darkly Reimagined
— BOOK TWO: UNDERWORLD —

E
scape from the realm of the dead is impossible when someone there wants you back.

Seventeen-year-old Pierce Oliviera isn’t dead.

Not this time.

But she is being held against her will in the dim, twilit world between heaven and hell, where the spirits of the deceased wait before embarking upon their final journey.

Her captor, John Hayden, claims it’s for her own safety. Because not all the departed are dear. Some are so unhappy with where they ended up after leaving the Underworld, they’ve come back as Furies, intent on vengeance…on the one who sent them there and on the one whom he loves.

But while Pierce might be safe from the Furies in the Underworld, far worse dangers could be lurking for her there…and they might have more to do with its ruler than with his enemies.

And unless Pierce is careful, this time there’ll be no escape.

MEG CABOT’S
many series and books for adults, teens, and tweens have included multiple #1
New York Times bestsellers
and have sold more then fifteen million copies worldwide. Her Princess Diaries series has been published in more than thirty-eight countries and was made into two hit films by Disney. Meg also wrote the
New York Times
bestselling Mediator, Airhead, and Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls series;
Insatiable;
as well as the award-winning novels
All-American Girl
and
Avalon High
. Meg lives in Key West with her husband and two cats. Visit Meg online at www.megcabot.com.

BOOKS BY MEG CABOT

Abandon

Airhead
Being Nikki
Runaway

Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls series

The Princess Diaries series
The Mediator series
Vanished series
Avalon High series

All-American Girl
Ready or Not
Teen Idol
How to Be Popular
Pants on Fire
Jinx
Nicola and the Viscount
Victoria and the Rogue

Insatiable
Heather Wells series
Queen of Babble series
The Boy Book series