Underworld (20 page)

I was in no condition to think rationally, though. I certainly wasn’t in any condition to see John.

He must have had a good reason. He’d said he’d a good reason. What was it? Oh, yes. He hadn’t agreed with the course the captain had set.

“He was the one who struck the first blow, Pierce,” he’d said. “You’ve got to believe me. I never meant to kill him.”

“Of course,” I’d murmured. “You were only protecting yourself.”

From his own father, it turned out.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. Speaking of wrecks, I looked like one, circles under my eyes and my lips the color of sand. The hairband I’d been trying to use as a disguise really wasn’t doing me much good, either.

I splashed some water on my face, then dug inside my bag for my cosmetic kit, which I’d always carried in case my father showed up at school to sweep me off to a fancy restaurant. This had actually happened once or twice.

What I couldn’t understand was why Robert Hayden had been listed as captain of the
Liberty
in the book if he’d been dead, as John had maintained, before the ship arrived in Isla Huesos. There’d obviously been no record of the murder … or the mutiny. Maybe the historian who’d written the book was going by what had been listed on the ship’s log. It was possible the
Liberty
hadn’t been at port long enough before the hurricane struck for anyone to find out her captain had been murdered at sea … by his own son.

Through the window, I heard a woman’s voice rise in indignation, and then a slap, and a faint scuffle. The ordinary sounds of a street festival at which there’d been way too much alcohol served, I supposed, dully.

After some lip gloss and eyeliner, I began to look more human … and feel that way, too. It was amazing how a little makeup could boost your confidence. Kayla was totally right about that. I took out the elastic band and finger-brushed my hair, the way I’d seen her do it.

I looked a thousand times better. Maybe John was right about the white dress.

Of course, he’d also killed his father, so possibly his judgment wasn’t the best.

Except that it
was
. I knew it was. Why else had he been given the job of keeper of the dead? Why else when he was around did I always — well, almost always — feel so safe and secure?

He’d told me I was lucky my grandmother was possessed by a Fury. At least that way I knew why she was so hateful. There was no explanation, he’d said, for why the people in his family were such monsters.

Finding out your father was a monster was a good reason to kill him. Perhaps, given the opportunity, I might kill my grandmother.

I was going to go out there and ask him, I decided.
Why did you kill your father?

It was then that I heard a familiar
coo, coo
, and looked up. Hope was sitting on the sill of the stained-glass window, fluttering her wings impatiently enough to reveal the dark feathers beneath the creamy white ones.

“I’m coming,” I said to her, distracted. “All right?”

I looked to see if I’d left anything behind. The black dress. I didn’t want it anymore. I knew it was wasteful to throw away a dress, but it was the dress my grandmother had tried first to kill, then pepper-spray me in. It was also the dress I’d been wearing when John had fudged the truth about the identity of the man he’d killed.

I decided it was an unlucky dress, and that I never wanted to see it again.

I pulled it from the sink, wrung it out, then stuffed it into the garbage can. Then I threw some paper towels over it so no one would notice it right away, for good measure.

I turned to unlock the door, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I did so.

The diamond on the end of my necklace was jet-black.

Blacker than the uniform belonging to the female police officer who kicked open the door a second later, sending it crashing against the sink, and making Hope vanish in a puff of white and black feathers.

T
he police officer didn’t have her gun drawn. Instead, she’d pulled out her Taser. I could see the electric blue spark leaping from one deadly looking metal prong to the other at the tip, so I knew it was charged … and on.

“Pierce Oliviera,” the policewoman said. “Right?”

Without even thinking about it, I shook my head, denying who I was. No. I wasn’t Pierce Oliviera.

In a way, I wasn’t even lying. I didn’t know who Pierce Oliviera was anymore. I didn’t think I’d been that girl for some time … not since becoming an NDE, anyway. And certainly not since I’d become a resident of the Underworld.

Somehow spending so much time amongst the dead hadn’t given me
less
of a sense of self. If anything, it had shown me how much better suited I was to their world, and how little welcome I was — like now, for instance — in my own.

The crazy thing was, I knew the policewoman’s name. She’d been with Police Chief Santos a few days earlier when he’d questioned me at school about Jade’s death, because they’d found my bike chained to the cemetery fence. Her name was Officer Hernandez. She was a diminutive brunette who’d looked then as if she’d wanted to tase me simply for being alive.

And now here she was about to tase me for … for
what
, exactly?

She looked down at a piece of paper she was holding crumpled in one hand. I was horrified to see that it was one of the “missing” flyers my mom had had stacks of all over her living room, with my photo emblazoned on it.

“Yeah,” Officer Hernandez said. “It’s you, all right.”

Then she held up the Taser like it was a knife she intended to embed in my chest.

I was too scared to think. I saw what she was right away — not a member of Isla Huesos’s finest, doing her job (although I doubted Police Chief Santos told any of his officers to tase me), but a Fury.

I should have screamed. If I had, I’m sure John — wherever he’d disappeared to — would have come right away.

Instead I did the stupidest thing possible. I stood there and asked,
“Why?”

“My father,” she said, shaking her head as if I were simpleminded. “He told me what your boyfriend did to him —”

What?
I was too confused even to think of screaming after that. My eyes were transfixed by the dancing blue flame I saw coming closer and closer to me. Realizing what was going to happen if that flame actually touched me, I kicked her as hard as I could — blindly, because I couldn’t bear to look into that leaping electric spark.

The soles of my ballet flats made contact with something soft. I heard a pained grunt, and then a crash.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that my kick hadn’t sent Officer Hernandez far. She’d dropped the Taser, though. It had skidded beneath a chair a few feet away.

“Resisting arrest,” she said, from between gritted teeth. “Not smart.”

Then she tackled me. She was in better shape than I was, and stronger, too. We hit the carpeted lobby floor with a thud that knocked all the wind from me. As I lay beneath her, stunned, I saw the face of the hotel desk clerk peek around the corner, then just as quickly dart away. He wasn’t going to get involved in an altercation between an officer of the law and someone who hadn’t even paid for a room.

Not that I needed my boyfriend to fight my battles for me, but in this case a little help might have been nice.
Where was John?

This became an especially urgent thought when one of her hands closed around the diamond dangling from my necklace.

“Still don’t get it, do you?” she asked, almost pityingly, as she began twisting the chain around my neck. “Maybe this will jog your memory. My father once tried to take this necklace away from you, knowing it was much too valuable — and dangerous — for little girls like you to play with. But your boyfriend didn’t like that very much, did he?”

That’s all it took to make me remember.

“Mr. Curry,” I gasped. The links tightening around my throat reminded me instantly of the time I’d foolishly shown the Persephone Diamond to a jeweler back in Connecticut. He too had pulled it uncomfortably close around my neck. Fortunately John had shown up just in time and objected.

Unfortunately, John’s objection had been in the form of stopping the jeweler’s heart.

“Wait,” I begged the woman, trying to slip my fingers between the links and my skin … anything to ease the pressure on my windpipe. “I
saved
your father. I stopped John from killing him. He recovered…. The salesgirl in the shop next door … said he retired to move in with … his daughter in … Florida….”

The chain turned out to be much sturdier than it looked. Hades must have forged the links out of some kind of indestructible gold alloy, because my neck was closer to breaking than the chain.

I couldn’t believe I was being choked to death with something John had given me so long ago out of love.

“That’s me,” Officer Hernandez said coldly. “I’m the one he moved in with. Now I’ve got a message for your boyfriend…. Tell him it’s no use. There’s no safe place for you, not even the Underworld. We’ll always find you —”

The amateur sunsets on the walls were beginning to swim as my vision faded. I heard a strange noise, a sort of drumming in my ears. I assumed that was the blood leaving my head. Pretty soon, my air supply would be completely cut off, and I’d be brain-dead. I reached out blindly to try to gouge my fingers into the police officer’s eyes while I still had control of my limbs.

And then a miracle happened … several miracles, all at once, actually.

The first was that I heard John’s voice snarl, “Why don’t you give me that message yourself?”

Then Officer Hernandez cried out in pain. I couldn’t understand why, since my fingers had barely made contact with her face, but she let go of my necklace anyway, and the pressure on my throat suddenly eased. I clawed at the links, pulling them away from my neck, then gratefully gulped in one lungful of oxygen, then another, thankful for the first time in my life for the cloying odor of potpourri, because the fact that I could smell it again meant that I was alive.

By that time my vision had returned enough for me to see John standing over me, his expression tender and livid by turns.

“Pierce.” His voice sounded far away. He was lifting me gently by the shoulders. “Are you all right? My God, your throat …
are you all right?
”

“I’m fine,” I said. I turned my head and noticed that Officer Hernandez was slumped to the hotel floor beside me. Her eyes were closed. She looked dead. “What did you do to her?”

John barely spared her a glance. “I didn’t do anything to her,” he said. “Yet. Pierce, I’m so sorry. I was out here waiting for you the whole time, until there was a disturbance in the courtyard … that singer, the one from the stage. She was flirting with Mr. Liu. Then she attacked him.”

This, more than anything, brought me to my senses. I remembered the sound of the woman’s voice I’d heard from the window while I’d been in the ladies’ room, and the scuffle afterwards. I’d thought it nothing but noises of the street festival. “Mr. Liu?” I echoed in alarm. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” John said, his tone grim. “Embarrassed, more than anything. I should have known it was all just to distract me from you. I didn’t have any idea the danger you were in until Hope appeared from out of nowhere in front of me, screaming. I didn’t even know doves
could
scream.”

Hope. I turned my head and saw her perched on the mantel of the faux fireplace, peering down at me worriedly.

“Is she all right?” I heard a familiar voice thunder. “Is she —?”

“She’s alive,” John said to Mr. Liu, who’d come crashing into the lobby through one of the French doors to the veranda, heedless of the patio furniture in his way. There was a fresh set of bloody fingernail marks — feminine, from the look of them — down the side of his face, but Mr. Liu did not appear to be aware of them. “Barely.” To me, John said, “Can you stand up?”

“Of course I can stand up —”

But I couldn’t. My hands were shaking, and I felt as if my legs had turned to liquid. If it hadn’t been for his steadying arms around my waist and shoulders, half-lifting me to one of the nearby overstuffed chairs, I’d never have made it.

It was only then that I began to notice other things….

The hotel desk clerk peering around the corner from his desk, looking more than a little upset over the disturbance in his lobby. Henry having come in through the veranda doors with Mr. Liu to peer down at me, and Mr. Liu pushing Henry back with a murmur, “Careful!” Henry protesting, crying, “But I want to see the Fury!” The fact that the drumming sound I thought had been the blood rushing from my brain was actually coming from outside …

It had begun to pour heavily. The storm that had been threatening for hours had finally arrived.

Perhaps most surprising of all, however, was the sight of Mr. Smith, the cemetery sexton, standing beneath one of the sunset paintings, with his hands on his cheeks.

“Oh, thank heaven, she’s all right,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to be useful?”

John set his jaw. “Yes,” he said, a curious note of resentment in his voice. “You can go. You’ve been enough trouble for one —”

“John,” I said softly.

I had no idea why John was so angry with the cemetery sexton, but at that particular moment, I didn’t care, because I had noticed something odd about Officer Hernandez’s body:

It was smoking.

The policewoman hadn’t sat up and lit a cigarette, but there was definitely steam of some kind exiting a wound I saw in the middle of her palm … exactly where she’d wrapped her hand around my diamond as she’d tried to choke me with its chain. It resembled a stream of black smoke, almost as if Officer Hernandez had been shot …

… or her soul was departing her body.

Except that I was fairly certain she hadn’t been shot — not by any of the people gathered in that room, anyway — and I was close enough to see that as she lay on the old-fashioned carpet, she was still breathing. So she wasn’t dead.

Then, over the steady stream of the rain outside the veranda, I heard what sounded like a shriek, so high-pitched it was barely audible … an angry, hate-filled cry that seemed to be coming from the black vapor streaming from the woman’s hand.

Neither smoke nor a soul, to the best of my knowledge, was capable of screaming.

Hope heard it as well, since she tilted her head at the sound and moved, startled, out of the way of the pale apparition as it began to travel towards the wide-open French doors.

I laid my hand on John’s arm, still around my waist as he knelt beside me, and pointed.

“John, do you see that?” I asked. “Do you think it’s the —?”

Instead of answering, he leaped to his feet. For a second I thought he was going to try to catch it, which made no sense to me — how can you catch pure evil, especially when it’s made of something as intangible as smoke?

But then I saw him hurl a ball of light and energy from his fingertips — exactly as he’d done at my mom’s house — at the black thing I saw trying to escape through the doors to the back porch. Only this time, the power was directed at a single target: the Fury that had been possessing Officer Hernandez.

There was an explosive display of sparks, and a much louder scream than the one I’d heard before — and then the voice was abruptly cut off. When I lowered the arms I’d thrown over my eyes to shield them from the brilliant burst of light, all that was left of the black vapor trail I’d seen was a dark smudge on the wood-paneled wall.

The Fury was gone.