John," I murmured, rising from the bed and going to stand by the table, staring down in astonishment at the gold-rimmed china plates and intricately embroidered napkins in sapphire rings. "How did all of this get here?"
"Oh," he said casually. "It just does. Coffee?" He lifted a gleaming silver pot. "Or do I seem to remember you being more partial to tea?" His grin was wicked.
I gave him a sarcastic look-it was a cup of tea I'd thrown into his face to escape from the Underworld the last time-then sank down into the chair where the bird was perched.
But who cooks it?" I asked, imaging an underground kitchen staffed by tiny, invisible chefs. "Who serves it?"
"I don't know," he said, with a disinterested shrug.
I couldn't help laughing. "John, food magically appears here three times a day, and you don't know where it comes from? You've been here for almost two hundred years. Haven't you ever tried to find out?"
He shot me a sarcastic look of his own. "Of course. I have theories. I think it's part of the compensation for the job I do, since there isn't any pay. But there's room and board. Anything I've ever wanted or needed badly enough usually appears, eventually. For instance"-he sent one of those knee-melting smiles in my direction-"you."
I swallowed. The smile made it astonishingly hard to follow the conversation, even though I was the one who'd started it. "Compensation from whom?"
He shrugged again. It was clear this was something he didn't care to discuss. "I have passengers waiting. For now, here." He lifted the lid of a platter. "I highly recommend these."
I don't know what I expected to see when I looked down...a big platter of pomegranates? Of course that wasn't it at all.
"Waffles?
It kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was…
“Ready for-?” He broke off, and then frowned as if it had all become clear. “Wait.” He dropped his arms from around my waist and took a step away from me. “You think I spent the night wit you?”
“Didn’t you?” I blinked back at him. “There’s only the one bed. And…well, you were in it when I woke up.”
Thunder boomed overhead. It wasn’t as loud as the violent cracks that had occurred in my dream. Although the rumbles were long enough-and intense enough-that the silverware on the table began to make an eerie tinkling sound.
And my bird, who’d been calmly cleaning herself on the back of my chair, suddenly took off, seeing shelter on the highest bookshelf against the far wall.
I realized I’d just insulted my host, and no joke was going to get me out of it this time.
“For your information, Pierce,” John said, his tone almost disturbingly calm-but his eyes flashed the same shade as the stone around my neck, which had gone the color of the metal studs at his wrists-“I spent most of last night on the couch. Until one point early this morning, when I heard you call my name. You were crying in your sleep.”
The salt water I’d tasted on my lips. Not due to rain from a violent hurricane, but from the tears I’d shed, watching him die in front of me.
“Oh,” I said uncomfortably. “John, I’m so-“
It turned out he wasn’t finished.
“I put my arms around you to try to comfort you, because I know what this place can be like, at least at first. It’s not exactly hell, but it’s the next closest place to it. You wouldn’t let go of me. You held on to me like you were drowning, and I was your only lifeline.”
I swallowed, astonished at how close he’d come to describing my dream…except it had been the other way around. I’d been his lifeline; only he’d let go of me, sacrificing himself so that I could live.
“Right,” I said. “Of course. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, especially since my mother had always worried so much about my talking in my sleep. On the other hand, I had been upfront with him about my lack of experience when it came to men. “But this is good, see?” I reached out to take his hand. “I told you I could never hate you-“
He pulled his hand away, exactly like in my dream. Well, not exactly, because he wasn’t being sucked from my grasp by a giant ocean swell. Instead, he’d dropped my fingers because he was leaving to go sort the souls of the dead.
“You will,” he assured me, bitterly. “You’re already regretting your decision to-what was it you called it? Oh, right-cohabitate with me.”
“No,” I insisted. “I’m not. All I said was that I want to take things more slowly-“
That had nothing to do with him-it had to do with me and my fear of not being able to control myself when he was kissing me. It was too humiliating to admit that out loud, however.
Well,” I said, trying to keep my tone light as I walked over to put my arms around his neck, though I had to stand on my toes to do so. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? You told me something about yourself that I didn’t know before-that you didn’t, er, care for your family, except for your mother. But that didn’t make me hate you…it made me love you a bit more, because now I know we have even more in common.”
He stared down at him, a wary look in his eyes. “If you knew the truth,” he said, “you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d be running.”
“Where would I go?” I asked, with a laugh I hoped didn’t sound as nervous to him as it did to me. “You bolted all the doors, remember? Now, since you shared something I didn’t know about you, may I share something you don’t know about me?”
Those dark eyebrows rose as he pulled me close. “I can’t even begin to imagine what this could be.”
“It’s just,” I said, “that I’m a little worried about rushing into this consort thing…especially the cohabitation part.”
“Cohabitation?” he echoed. He was clearly unfamiliar with the word.
“Cohabitation means living together,” I explained, feeling my cheeks heat up. “Like married people.”
“You said last night that these days no one your age thinks of getting married,” he said, holding me even closer and suddenly looking much more eager to stick around for the conversation, even though I heard the marina horn blow again. “And that your father would never approve it. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’m sure I could convince Mr. Smith to perform the ceremony-“
“No,” I said hastily. Of course Mr. Smith was somehow authorized to marry people in the state of Florida. Why not? I decided not to think about that right now, or how John had come across this piece of information. “That isn’t what I meant. My mom would kill me if I got married before I graduated from high school.”
Not, of course, that my mom was going to know about any of this. Which was probably just as well, since her head would explode at the idea of my moving in with a guy before I’d even applied to college, let alone at the fact that I most likely wasn’t going to college. Not that there was any school that would have accepted me with my grades, not to mention my disciplinary record.
“What I meant was that maybe we should take it more slowly,” I explained. “The past couple years, while all my friends were going out with boys, I was home, trying to figure out how this necklace you gave me worked. I wasn’t exactly dating.”
“Pierce,” he said. He wore a slightly quizzical expression on his face. “Is this the thing you think I didn’t know about you? Because for one thing, I do know it, and for another, I don’t understand why you think I’d have a problem with it.”
I’d forgotten he’d been born in the eighteen hundreds, when the only time proper ladies and gentlemen ever spent together before they were married was at heavily chaperoned balls…and that for most of the past two centuries, he’d been hanging out in a cemetery.
Did he even know that these days, a lot of people hooked up on first dates, or that the average age at which girls-and boys as well-lost their virginity in the United States was seventeen…my age?
Apparently not.
“What I’m trying to say,” I said, my cheeks burning brighter, “is that I’m not very experienced with men. So this morning when I woke up and found you in bed beside me, while it was really, super nice-don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it very much-it kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was…
We can take things as slowly as you want, but you know it’s too late now to change your mind, Pierce,” he said, in a warning tone.
“Of course,” I said. I could see I had approached this all wrong. Where, when you actually needed one, was one of those annoying women’s magazines with advice on how to handle your man? Although that advice probably didn’t apply to death deities. “Because the Furies are after me. And I promised you that I wouldn’t try to escape. That isn’t what I was-“
“No,” he said, with an abrupt shake of his head. “The Furies have no part in this. It doesn’t matter anymore whether or not you try to escape.” He was pacing the length of the room. A muscle had begun to twitch wildly in the side of his jaw. “I thought you knew. I thought you understood. Haven’t you read Homer?”
Not again. Mr. Smith was obsessed with this Homer person, too.
“No, John,” I said, with forced patience. “I’m afraid we don’t have time to study the ancient Greek poets in school anymore because we have so much stuff to learn that happened since you died, such as the Civil War and the Holocaust and making files in Excel-“
“Well, considering what they had to say about the Fates,” John interrupted, impatiently, “Homer might possibly have been of more use to you.”
“The Fates?” The Fates were something I dimly remembered having been mentioned in the section we’d studied on Greek mythology. They were busybodies who presided over everyone’s destiny. “What did Homer have to say about them?”
John dragged a hand through his hair. For some reason, he wouldn’t meet my gaze. “The Fates decreed that anyone who ate or drank in the realm of the dead had to remain there for all eternity.”
I stared at him. “Right,” I said. “Only if they are pomegranate seeds, like Persephone. The fruit of the dead.”
He stopped pacing suddenly and lifted his gaze to mine. His eyes seemed to burn through to my soul.
“Pomegranate seeds are what Persephone happened to eat while she was in the Underworld,” he said. “That’s why they call them the fruit of the dead. But the rule is any food or drink.”
A strange feeling of numbness had begun to spread across my body. My mouth became too dry for me to speak.
“However you feel about me, Pierce,” he went on, relentlessly, “you’re stuck here with me for the rest of eternity.
It had only two points of egress, the door to the hallway from which I’d just entered, and against which I’d been pinned-and now leaned against for support-and the other to the stable yard where a man dressed all in black leather had shoved John’s dog, and where I was assuming John kept his horse, Alastor, another creature from the Underworld who hated my guts.
He was going to have to get in line, though. The boy who’d pulled Typhon off me was standing a few feet away, next to the wooden plank table that ran down the center of the room, staring at me with a look that suggested he disliked me even more than the dog had. It was difficult not to notice the size of his bare biceps-not as large as John’s, but still impressive-since he’d folded his arms across his chest, and this had caused the muscles to bulge. The fact that they were circled in vicious-looking rings of black tattooed thorns did even more to draw attention to them.
It was hard to figure out if that was why he was so much more noticeable than anyone else in the room, or if it was because he was what my friend Kayla would have called smokin’ hot, despite a jagged scar that ran down one side of his forehead, through a dark brow, and halfway to the center of his left jaw. Whoever had wielded that knife had thankfully-for him-spared his dark eye.
Not so thankfully for me, however, since he was able to use both eyes to give me a deathlike stare.
“Um,” I said, finally feeling the blood flow returning to my limbs. “You might want to think about getting that dog neutered.”
The boy with the thorn tattoos sneered. “I’m guessing she’ll be wanting to get us all neutered,” he said.
On the other hand, if these four-Mr. Graces, the brutish Frank, the mysterious Mr. Liu, and rude little Henry-were the only company John had had for a hundred and sixty-odd years, it explained a lot about his brooding.
Meg CabotI rose on still unsteady legs to walk over and shake Mr. Grave’s hand.
The doctor simply stared over my head, seeming to notice neither my hand, nor me standing there in front of him.
This was explained when Frank said to me scornfully, a second later, “He can’t see you. He’s blind.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling mortified. I hadn’t noticed until that point that Mr. Grave’s eyes had a milky-white sheen to them, and that he’d never once looked directly at anyone who was speaking. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Mr. Graves said, managing to find my hand anyway and give it a squeeze. “It’s not your fault.”
“Actually, it could have been,” Frank said. “It was a Fury that-“
“Frank, the young lady said she’d like to see the captain. Why don’t you go fetch him?” Mr. Graves snapped. To me, he said, “Miss Oliviera, I do apologize. It’s been quite some time since these fellows have been in the company of a young lady.”
“Speak for yourself, old man,” Frank said. He came to his feet with sudden alacrity. “Why don’t I just take her to the captain?”
“I hardly think that’s a good idea,” Mr. Liu muttered, into his teacup.
“His orders were if she showed up, we were to bring her straight to him,” Frank said.
Mr. Graves’s face expressed the exact dismay I felt upon being reminded of this. “Just go and fetch the captain, Frank. Or young Henry can do it.”
“What?” Henry cried, looking stricken. “I don’t want to go down there. All those dead people. And I’m the one who always gets stuck handing out the blankets-“
“It’s not important,” I said quickly. Blankets? What blankets? What on earth as Henry talking about? “I’ll just wait until John comes back-“
“See?” Henry looked triumphant. “I told you. She’s not the one.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Frank said, impatiently. “Either way, we’re stick with her.”
This wasn’t a very nice thing to hear about yourself-that people thought of you as someone they were stuck with. Not that I hadn’t been thinking the very same thing about them…and not that I didn’t share Henry’s fear that I wasn’t Queen-of-the-Underworld material.
Her name is Hope?” John asked, the corners of his mouth beginning to tug upwards.
“No.” I bristled, thinking he was making fun of me. Then I realized I’d been caught. “Well, all right…so what if it is? I’m not going to name her after some depressing aspect of the Underworld like you do all your pets. I looked up the name Alastor. That was the name of one of the death horses that drew Hades’s chariot. And Typhon?” I glanced at the dog, cavorting in and out of the waves, seemingly oblivious of the cold. “I can only imagine, but I’m sure it means something equally unpleasant.”
“Typhon was the father of all monsters,” John said. He’d given up trying to suppress his grin. “The deadliest of all the creatures in Greek mythology.”
“Nice,” I said sarcastically. “Well, I prefer to name my pets something that reminds me there’s-“
“Hope?” His grin broadened.
“Very funny.” True, I’d admitted to him that I was inexperienced. But I didn’t have to prove it by acting like I was twelve.
John looked down at me like the awards for most naïve girl in the world had already been handed out, and I'd won first prize.
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