Abandon - Meg Cabot [13]
If I’d been looking for precisely the wrong thing to do and say, I’d found it. In an instant, the shutters that had swung open when he saw I still had the necklace came slamming back down over his face and his eyes.
Snatching the pendant out of my hand, he demanded, ”Following you? Is that what you call it?”
I blinked back at him, stunned by his reaction. So much for adroitness and sensitivity. Also humor.
“I gave you this” — he shook the necklace in my face, his deep voice lashing out at me like the rain I could smell already beating the mangroves offshore — “because, as I thought I made clear, it affords its wearer protection from evil…something which, I might add, you seem to need more than most, since every time I see you, you’re in some kind of mortal peril or another. But since you obviously don’t want me — or it — in your life, here’s a thought. Stop coming here. And don’t wear it.“
On the words don’t wear it, he turned and threw it — my beautiful necklace — as hard as he could. It went sailing through the night sky to land somewhere in the vast darkness of Isla Huesos Cemetery’s nineteen acres.
It shouldn’t have been like watching him throw my heart away.
But it was.
He governs everywhere, and there he reigns;
There is his city and his lofty throne;
O happy he whom thereto he elects!
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
The next time I saw him after that day in the cemetery with Grandma, I was dead.
Of course I said the first thing everyone says when they open their eyes after hitting their head, sucking in a gallon of pool water, and then going flatline.
“Where am I?”
Because I wasn’t at the bottom of our pool anymore…though I was still wearing the clothes I’d had on when I fell into it. They were damp now, and clung to me like a chilly second skin. I wasn’t on a hospital gurney or in an ambulance, either.
Instead, I was in a vast, subterranean cavern that seemed to go on forever, along the shore of a windy lake.
I wasn’t alone, though.
“Name?”
A towering man in black, having heard my Where am I?, turned towards me, raising the glowing tablet he held in his palm.
I was too dazed to do anything but reply, “Pierce Oliviera.”
“You’re over there,” he said, after inputting my name.
I looked in the direction he was pointing. We were standing, I realized, in a crowd of what looked like thousands of other people — mostly senior citizens, but some my own age, or even younger — all of whom seemed as miserable as I was.
They just weren’t necessarily soaked to the skin or dazed from a violent blow to the head.
But they were, like me, being ordered into two lines by huge men dressed all in black. The men looked the way the older girls from school who took the train into New York City to sneak into nightclubs described the bouncers who carded them — muscular, bald, black-leather-clad, and tattooed all over. In other words, super scary.
Unlike my best friend, Hannah, I’d never had the courage to try to sneak, underage, into a club in the city. I didn’t have a fake ID. I could barely remember where I put my real one.
So I didn’t dare disobey the orders of the man in front of me. The lines snaked towards the lake, into which two docks jutted. One line was extremely long. The other was a bit shorter. He was pointing towards the shorter one.
“Stay in your own line,” he growled. It was an order.
I hurried wordlessly to the end of the shorter line, too frightened to utter another sound.
It was only when I found myself standing behind a tiny, sweet-looking old lady that I tapped her on the shoulder and asked, “Excuse me, ma’am?”
She turned around. She had