Abandon Read online

  “Shhh,” I said, unable to bear letting him finish that sentence. What could he possibly have done to make my grandmother hate him so much? “It’ll be okay. We’ll find a way —”

  “No.” Suddenly, he straightened. But still he didn’t release me. He held on to my shoulders. “It won’t be okay, Pierce. They’re Furies. They’re on earth. And they’re after you.”

  “But the necklace,” I said, gesturing to it. I wanted to let him know that I could protect myself. I had protected myself. I just hadn’t managed to protect anyone else. “With a little more practice, now that I understand what’s going on, I’m sure I —”

  He shook his head.

  “Pierce,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since I found Jade. And there is one thing I can do to protect you from the Furies.”

  I looked up at him, hardly daring to let myself hope. “Really? What?”

  “I’m afraid you’re not going to like it,” he said.

  “Why? What is it?”

  He kissed me gently on my forehead, letting his lips linger there.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked in confusion.

  “Just do it. I promise it won’t hurt,” he said.

  When realization of what he was about to do dawned, I lunged. When he caught me, I kicked him. I pried at his rock-hard grip and pleaded with him. I struggled to escape.

  “John,” I cried. “No. Don’t do this. Not this way. It’s what they want, my grandmother told me. Please, I’m begging you —”

  But it was too late. He was too strong. I couldn’t get away.

  And of course, eventually, I blinked.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  “Before me there were no created things,

  Only eternal, and I eternal last.

  All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”

  DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto III

  None of it had changed. The gauzy white curtains in the elegant archways, blowing in the gentle breeze. The tapestries hanging from the smooth marble walls. The fire in the hearth. The fruit in the gleaming silver bowls on the long banquet table. Even the sky was the same. It was still pink, a perpetual twilit evening.

  And the bed. The bed was still there, of course. It was still white-sheeted, canopied, and built for two.

  I broke from his arms as soon as he released me — which happened the second we got there.

  “No!” I gasped as soon as I opened my eyes.

  I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I was back there, the place from so many of my nightmares.

  “Pierce,” he said in that infuriatingly unruffled voice. “Don’t get upset. You know this is for the best.”

  Don’t get upset? This is for the best?

  I was even in the same dress.

  Well, maybe not quite the same. But looking down at myself, I saw that I was wearing something remarkably similar to the gown he’d put me in — with his mind — the last time he’d flung me to this place. It was long and white and flowy. When I lifted a hand defensively to my hair, I felt something prickly in it.

  “Flowers?” I pulled them from my head and hurled them to the floor in disgust. “Are you crazy? And stop dressing me! I can dress myself.”

  “I thought you’d like it,” he said, seeming hurt. “You look very pretty.”

  There was no response I could make to this except to burst out, “I’m going to kill you!”

  He considered this. “You’re too late,” he informed me.

  Then he crossed the room to one of his shelves, pulled a book down from it, went to the couch, sat down, opened the book, and began to read.

  Just like that. Conversation over. Wonder what we’ll have for dinner later?

  Well, if he thought this was the end of it, he was very, very mistaken.

  I stormed past him on shaking legs, straight through the archway I’d taken to the hall to freedom the last time I escaped.

  He didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t utter a sound.

  I should have suspected something then. But of course, I didn’t. I had hope. Then.

  They were still there…the staircases, exactly the way I remembered them. Looking back over my shoulder, I waited for him to say something. Stop. Wait. Let’s talk about this. The Furies. What do you plan on doing about them if you get out?

  But he didn’t say a word.

  Lifting the hem of my idiotically long skirt, I plunged down the stairs, exactly as I had last time.

  The door was locked. Of course.

  I should have known he’d have thought of this. He wouldn’t be tricked a second time.

  Still, I threw my weight against the door. I kicked and shoved at it.

  When it became obvious it wasn’t going to budge, I took the second staircase, the one that curled upward. The door at the top of that one was locked as well.

  Even then, I didn’t give up. I was all over the rest of the hallway like a sniffer dog at customs, my hands pressed to the walls for secret passageways.

  I found nothing but an elaborate bathroom — complete with a sunken tub and a view over a pretty garden, where the flowers he’d put in my hair grew.

  I scrambled out the bathroom window and raced across the garden, then attempted to throw myself over the wall. When I got to the top, I saw…

  The lake. The same lake beside which, a year and a half ago, I’d stood and shivered with the rest of the dead.

  There were no boats, of course. Except the boats.

  And those were picking up passengers only on the other side of the lake, not on the one where I was.

  When I returned — defeated, my dress torn and dirty from climbing the garden wall — to the room with the bed, he was sitting exactly where he’d been when I left, reading the exact same book.

  “I hope you’re not planning on kicking me,” he said, not even bothering to look up from his book, “as hard as you did those doors.”

  “I will,” I said, “if the next words out of your mouth are Pierce, you just need to relax. How long have you been planning this?”

  “You know it’s the only way,” he said, turning the page. The fact that he’d ignored my question did not slip past me. “If you want, we can visit the stables later. I’m sure Alastor has gotten over his animosity towards you by now.”

  I sat down on the couch beside him. I was starting to understand why, every time I’d seen him over the past year and a half, he’d looked so wild. I felt the same way, as if the castle walls were already starting to close in on me.

  “John,” I said, reaching out and laying a hand on his arm. “Am I dead?”

  He lowered the book and looked me in the eye. His expression was guarded. “No, Pierce,” he said. “Of course you’re not dead. The whole reason I brought you here was to protect you from the Furies, who are trying kill you. I thought you understood that.”

  I was speechless. “Then back on Isla Huesos, I just…disappeared?”

  “I suppose so,” he said, after giving it some thought. “I don’t really know. I’ve never rescued a girl I love from the Furies before.” He looked alarmed as he noticed my eyes were filling with tears.

  “Don’t cry.”

  “How can I not?” I asked him. “You just said you love me.”

  “Well, why else did you think all of this was happening?” He set the book aside to wrap his arms around me. “The Furies wouldn’t be trying to kill you if I didn’t love you.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. Tears were trickling down my cheeks, but I did nothing to try to stop them. His shirt was absorbing most of them. “You never said anything about it. Every time I saw you, you just acted so…wild.”

  “How was I supposed to act?” he asked. “You kept doing things like throw tea in my face.”

  I glared up at him through my tears.

  “This isn’t funny,” I said. “Do you know that if I don’t show up at my cousin Alex’s car at two o’clock today
, my friend Kayla is supposed to call the police? She’ll do it, too. Who knows what kind of lies my grandmother is going to tell them when they ask? She’ll probably say you killed me and dumped my body in the ocean somewhere. My mother will never get over it.” I began to sob against his chest, just thinking about my mom. “She has no idea who you are.”

  “Shhh,” he said, smoothing my hair with a rough hand. “It doesn’t have to be like that. Richard knows who I am. I can tell Richard. I can have him tell your mother, if you want, that he knows me, and we ran away together and got married. I can even give him letters from you, if you want, to give to her —”

  “John,” I said, lifting my head to look at him. “What century do you live in? Nobody writes letters anymore, let alone runs off to get married at seventeen. And if you give letters from me to Richard Smith to give to my mom, not only will my dad make sure Richard gets arrested for colluding in my disappearance, he’ll probably have him taken to some secret location to be water-boarded. Do you even know who my father is?”

  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

  What 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 yearl
y (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.

  MEG CABOT

  THE ABANDON TRILOGY

  The Myth of Persephone, Darkly Reimagined

  — BOOK TWO: UNDERWORLD —

  Escape 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.

  About the Author

  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.