Underworld Read online

  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. I realized I was starving. I’d had nothing to eat since lunch the day before. And even then, I hadn’t eaten very much due to having gotten some bad news: Furies had murdered my guidance counselor, Jade.

  Though I looked for them, I didn’t see any pomegranates amongst the ripe pieces of fruit piled high in silver bowls at the center of the table. Gleaming strawberries, glowing peaches, and glistening grapes. But not a single piece of the fruit Persephone ate that — at least according to the version of the myth we’d been taught back at the Westport Academy for Girls — supposedly doomed her to an eternity in the realm of the dead …

  Even before meeting John, I’d often wondered if Persephone had eaten those six pomegranate seeds on purpose, knowing that for six months of every year for the rest of her life, she would have to return to the Underworld — and to Hades, her new husband, of whom her mother Demeter most definitely did not approve.

  Pomegranates were considered by the Greeks to be the “fruit of the dead.” As a native of Greece, Persephone would have known that.

  Maybe life with Hades — even in the Underworld — had been preferable to life with her overprotective mom and those nymphs. Could Persephone simply not have wanted to hurt her mom’s feelings by saying so out loud?

  It had to be safe to eat all the food on John’s table. He wouldn’t have offered it if it wasn’t.

  “Thanks,” I said, gratefully accepting the cup of tea. “So you’re telling me that a spread like this appears here every morning?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It does. Also one at lunch, and again at dinner.”

  “But who cooks it?” I asked, imagining 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 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?” I stared at the fluffy perfection of the stack before me. “None of this makes any sense.”

  He looked surprised. “Is there something you want that isn’t here? Simply name it.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just … you eat.”

  He hadn’t joined me at the table since the horn from the marina had sounded again, and he’d sunk down onto the couch instead to put on his boots. But he’d grabbed a piece of toast, downing it as he did up his laces. “Of course I eat,” he said, around the toast. “Why wouldn’t I eat?”

  “I’ve seen the crypt where your bones are buried on Isla Huesos,” I pointed out. “It says ‘Hayden’ — your last name — right above the door.”

  He looked very much as if he was willing a change in the topic of conversation.

  “What of it?” he asked tersely.

  “Why do you need to eat if you’re dead?” I asked, the questions bursting from me as I ate. “How can you have a heartbeat, for that matter? Why is there a Coffin Night for you back on Isla Huesos when you not only have a crypt, but you seem very much alive to me? What did you do to end up in this job, anyway?”

  “Pierce,” he said in a weary voice. He’d pulled a black tablet from his pocket and was typing swiftly into it. I recognized it as the same device he’d used the day I’d shown up at the lake, to look up my name and find out which boat I was supposed to be on … a boat he’d then made sure I’d missed. “I know I said I’d answer your questions, but I was hoping to make it to the end of the day without you hating me.”

  “John,” I said. I got up and went to sit next to him on the couch. “You could never do anything to make me hate you. What is that?” I nodded at the device in his hands. “Can I have one?”

  “Definitely not,” he said flatly, putting it back in his pocket. “And I remember a time when you most definitely did hate me.” He stood up. He’d been intimidatingly tall in his bare feet, but in his work boots, he towered above me. “That’s why I’m not discussing my past … at least for now. Maybe later, when you …” He broke off whatever he’d been about to say, and finished instead with, “Maybe later.”

  I felt my heart sink, then chided myself for it. What had I thought, that John was some type of angel who’d gotten the job as a reward for good behavior? He’d certainly never displayed angelic-like behavior around me … except when he’d been saving my life.

  What did someone have to do to become a death deity, anyway? Something bad, obviously. But not so bad that they got sent straight to wherever it was truly evil people, like child murderers, ended up. From what I knew about John, being a death deity seemed to require a strong character, swift fists, a willingness to adhere to a certain set of principles, and a basic sense of telling right from wrong….

  But could it also require something I hadn’t considered? Something not so desirable?

  “You can’t have any worse skeletons in your closet than I do,” I said, with a forced note of cheeriness in my voice, watching him pull a fresh black shirt from a wicker hamper. “After all, you’ve met my grandmother.”

  He pulled the shirt over his head, so I couldn’t see his naked chest anymore, which was both a good and bad thing. But I also couldn’t see his expression as he replied, in a hard voice, “Be thankful everyone in my family is dead, so you’ll never have to meet them.”

  “Oh. I … I’m sorry,” I said. I’d forgotten the terrible price he’d had to pay for immortality … like watching everyone he’d ever loved grow old and die. “That … that must have been awful for you.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he said, simply. His shirt on, he turned to look at me, and I was startled by the bleakness of his expression. “In a way, you’re lucky, Pierce. At least your grandmother is possessed by a Fury, so you know why she’s so hateful. There’s no explanation for why the people in my family were such monsters.”

  I was so shocked, I didn’t know how to respond. People aren’t supposed to say those kinds of things about their families.

  The important thing was to forgive, my father had once told me. Only then could we move forward….

  “Except my mother,” John added. From the same hamper he’d drawn the shirt, he pulled out a leather wristband, covered in some lethal-looking metal studs, and began to fasten it … a safety precaution of his profession, I supposed. Some departed souls needed more encouraging than others to move on. “She was the only one I … well, it doesn’t matter now. But she was the only one who ever cared. And so she was the only one I ever missed.”

  Oh, God. My mother. I hadn’t thought about it before, but suddenly the reality of my situation sank in: I was going to have to watch my mother get old and die.

  Although, even people who weren’t trapped in the Underworld had to face that burden … watching their parents age and inevitably die. The difference was, those people aged along with their parents. Together they enjoyed the holidays, went on vacations, helped one another through the hard times and celebrated the good.
r />   Was I ever going to get to do any of those things? Could lords of the Underworld and their consorts even have children? I was pretty sure I’d read that Hades and Persephone had never reproduced. How could they? Life couldn’t grow in a place of death. Even the plants in John’s garden, exotic as they were, were a bit gloomy looking … not from lack of care, but because mushrooms and black flowers were the only flora that seemed to thrive in a place constantly shaded from the light of the sun.

  Still, if John was going to continue to rain down spine-shattering kisses on my neck and roam around without a shirt, I needed to make sure that was really true about Hades and Persephone. I didn’t know how much longer my resistance to his charms was going to hold out, especially after that dream. The last thing I needed was an accidental pregnancy resulting in a demon Underworld baby. My life had already gotten complicated enough.

  What I was starting to think I needed more than anything was my own bedroom.

  “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 me, 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….

  “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 with 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, seeking 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.

  “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 ate 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.”

  I didn’t hate him.

  After the way the sight of him being carried away by that wave in my dream had gutted me, I knew I’d never be able to hate him.