Abandon - Meg Cabot [96]
“Oh,” she said, fanning herself with the ends of her scarf. “I’m here to get you. Your mom wants you home. Something terrible has happened. Your uncle Chris —”
“I already know,” I said flatly. “They took him in for questioning.”
“Oh,” she said again, looking surprised. “Well, if you already know, why are you just standing there? Let’s go.” She took my arm, and then, when I didn’t move, tugged on it.
“Pierce,” she said, annoyed. “What’s wrong with you? We don’t have time for games. It’s about to pour, can’t you tell? There’s a storm coming. I don’t want to get wet. Let’s go.”
“What about Alex?” I asked.
“He left already,” Grandma said without skipping a beat.
“Really?” I said. “He did? Did you call him?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. He said he couldn’t find you. Now come on, I don’t have all day. I have to get back to the shop. Let’s go.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Not with you.”
“What are you talking about?” Grandma was a little bit shorter than me, but she was wider and therefore had a lower center of gravity. When she pulled, she pulled hard.
But I could be stubborn, too.
“Pierce! What is the matter with you?” she demanded. Her grip was so strong, it felt as if it was cutting off my circulation. “I’ve told your mother again and again to keep you away from all that caffeine —”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” The courtyard. The breezeway. Her tassels. Everything was starting to turn red. But I didn’t care. “Anything you can do so I won’t remember. But guess what? I do remember, even more than you’ve guessed. You sent me into the cemetery the day of Grandpa’s funeral on purpose. You did it so I’d meet John.”
Grandma blinked at me uncomprehendingly. “What?” she said. “I don’t know what you’re —”
“Grandpa didn’t know anything about your little plan, did he?” I went on, ignoring her. “Richard Smith told me you told Grandpa you didn’t believe in death deities. But you do believe in them, don’t you? You not only believe in death deities, you like torturing them, don’t you? Because that’s what Furies do.”
Now Grandma had gone the color of her gauchos. Outside the breezeway, the wind had picked up. It was stirring her short gray curls. But she kept holding on to my arm.
“I don’t know where you’re getting this stuff,” she said. “But if you’ve been talking to Richard Smith, I can only imagine what you’ve heard. That man’s a lunatic, obsessed with the idea that death is a natural part of life, or some such nonsense, when you should know better than anyone, Pierce, what really happens when we die. So you just take everything he says with a grain of salt. I only came here to pick you up and take you to your mother —”
“Using whose car?” I demanded. “Not Mom’s, because she just called Alex from wherever they’re questioning Uncle Chris, and yours got impounded. So big mistake, Grandma. You know what the other mistake you made was? Killing me.”
That’s when I saw a flicker of something in those blue eyes. Not fear. It was too reptilian to be fear.
It was more like…
Hatred.
“Oh, I know you thought I’d never figure it out,” I said, still trying to rip my arm from her grip. But she hung on, her expression changing. Now she looked like the wild thing I’d once been so convinced John was.
Except his eyes, even at their most hopeless, had never looked at me with such hatred. Never once. His eyes might once have looked dead, but I had never doubted that there was life in there somewhere. With Grandma, I suddenly wasn’t so sure.
“You sent me into that cemetery when I was seven so I’d be certain to meet John, didn’t you? Then that way when I died, I’d be sure to go to the Underworld here in Isla Huesos, and I wouldn’t be afraid of him, and then maybe he’d notice me and choose me to be his consort, the way Hades chose Persephone. Right?”
It had started to rain, fat, hard drops that made rattling noises against the metal roof of the breezeway.
I ignored them. All my attention was focused on the woman in front of me. If that’s what she even was. I got the sense she hadn’t been my actual grandmother for a long