Abandon - Meg Cabot [98]
Just Let’s go.
“I’ll be back for you,” I tossed over my shoulder at the thing that used to be my grandma. I think I was slightly hysterical. John carried me around the corner towards the entrance to B-Wing.
“No,” John said to me in the same voice he’d used that day in the jewelry shop. Like he was refusing beverage cart service. “You will not be back for her.”
“What do you mean?” I lifted the hair that had fallen into my face so I could see where we were going. “John, do you know what she is? She’s a Fury. You said there weren’t any Furies after me, but guess what. There are! My own grandmother is one. And she killed me! She knitted me the scarf I tripped over when I died. John, she’s been trying to hurt you since before I was even born —”
But he wouldn’t put me down, even when I squirmed, until we reached a portion of the breezeway that he seemed to feel was a safe enough distance from my still-screaming grandmother that I’d be out of danger — or she would. Even then, when he stopped and set me back down on my own feet, he kept me pressed up against a locker with his hands on my shoulders so I couldn’t get away.
“I know” was all he said, his expression grave.
I gazed up at him, shocked. “You know? About my grandmother? How? ”
“Not about your grandmother,” he said, shaking his head. “Although it makes sense. I should have guessed. You were right about Furies being after you.”
“I knew it!” I burst out. “My necklace turns black when they’re around.” I lifted the pendant to show him. The diamond was still as dark as tar. “It did this with the jeweler and Mr. Mueller. I don’t care what you say, John, I think they were both Furies, too. This thing has not been wrong once. I just didn’t know how to read it. It’s too bad it didn’t come with a user’s manual or anything. Because knowing what all the different colors mean would be really bene —”
“Pierce,” he said. His expression was grimmer than I’d ever seen it. “The Furies killed Jade.”
My eyes instantly filled with tears. I dropped the necklace. The heavy diamond struck my chest with a thump. “Oh, John, no. My grandmother —” I was too upset to finish the sentence.
“No, not her. But if what you’re saying is true, they were probably friends of hers. It was three men who killed Jade. She said she didn’t recognize them. They were wearing masks.”
“Why Jade?” I asked. “Jade never did anything to anyone.”
Except offer them good advice and red licorice.
“Don’t you see?” His gray eyes looked haunted. “Jade died because they mistook her for you, Pierce. You’re always tearing through that cemetery on your bicycle —”
I lifted my anguished gaze towards his. “John. If Mr. Mueller was a Fury, then this isn’t even the first time they’ve hurt someone else because of me. Because…Hannah. What about Hannah?”
He stared back at me, speechless. The rain had picked up. Now it was starting to pour.
“I should,” I said in a small voice, “have let you kill him.”
“No,” he said, tightening his grip on my shoulders. “You were right to stop me. With the jeweler, too. It’s not them doing the killing, Pierce. It’s the Furies possessing them. I forget sometimes.”
“There must be some way we can stop them before they hurt someone else, John,” I said. “There must be a way.”
“They’re unstoppable,” he said. “You can break their bones, you can even kill the bodies they’re in. It doesn’t do anything.”
“But when I hit my grandmother just now —”
“If hitting them was any use, do you think there’d be any of them left?” he demanded. He kept looking around the corner, as if he expected my grandmother to show up there any minute. “Believe me, I’ve hit enough of them enough times, they ought to be extinct by now. But they always come back. They just find some new body to inhabit, some new weak-minded soul to corrupt.”
“Then what are we going to do?” I asked, reaching up to put my arms around his neck, desperate for some kind of comfort.
He buried his head in the place where my neck met my shoulder,