Free Awaken by Cabot Meg Page A

someone was crushed or pushed off the pier and into the water, where the choppy waves would sweep them up and under the dock and out of sight.
    What happens to the soul of someone who went missing in the Underworld? I wondered.
    Better question: What was going to happen to these people now that the ships that were supposed to take them to their final destinations had been destroyed?
    This was something I hadn’t considered before inviting them all up to the castle. Would the Fates provide new boats? How could they, if the Furies had driven them off?
    I had more important things to worry about at the moment, however. I scanned the surface of the water for John. Surely he’d had time to blink himself — as Henry liked to say — out of the ship’s wheelhouse before the collision. Only, where had he ended up? Why had we spent so much time kissing and no time agreeing on a point to meet afterwards? Next time I was going to know better. If there was a next time …
    There had to be. To think otherwise was to invite madness.
    Instead of John, however, all I saw — besides bewildered lost souls beginning to shiver in winds that were rapidly turning freezing cold — was Frank, standing at the end of his dock, brandishing a pair of brass knuckles.
    “You think dying was painful?” he was demanding of the men and women who were shuffling past him. Word had obviously spread about the evacuation. “Try breaking out of this line. I’ll show you what real pain feels like.” He noticed me and gave me a smile, along with a wink and cordial nod. “Hello there, Miss Pierce.”
    “Hello,” I said. “Where’s Mr. Liu?” I had to raise my voice to be heard above the sound of the steadily rising wind.
    “He’s over there,” Frank said, waving at a bulky figure farther down along the pier, “making sure all of our ‘guests’ are headed away from, and not into, the water. Some of them seem to think this is their golden opportunity to escape what the Fates have in store for them.”
    They aren’t wrong , I thought a little bitterly. The Furies have made sure of that.
    “Have you seen John?” I asked him.
    “Not yet, but don’t you worry about him,” Frank called back. “He always turns up.”
    I found nothing in this remark to inspire confidence, since I happened to know at least one of the places John liked to “turn up” was the cemetery.
    “Okay,” I said. “Well, if you see him before I do, would you tell him —”
    One of the men in Frank’s line broke ranks, darted across the beach, and fell to his knees at Alastor’s feet, causing the horse to stagger backwards a few steps in alarm. The man didn’t look like a lot of the people from the rest of his line. He was probably around my dad’s age and was dressed pretty conservatively, in a pair of khaki pants and a collared shirt that had been neatly pressed at one time.
    The effect was somewhat ruined by the large bloodstained bullet hole in the center of it, however.
    “Sweetheart,” he said, his hands clasped in supplication as he looked up at me from the sand. “You gotta help me. There’s been some kinda mistake. I’m not supposed to be here. I keep telling these guys, I’m supposed to be with those other people over there” — he pointed at my dock — “but they won’t listen —”
    “Sorry.” I hated it when people I didn’t know called me sweetheart. How did they know whether or not my heart was sweet? “But I have to go.”
    “You don’t understand,” Khaki Pants pleaded. There were tears running down his face. “I’ve got a daughter about your age. She needs me. Yeah, I may not have been the most perfect father, but who is? That doesn’t mean I deserve to be with these people here.”
    I stared down at him, thinking of my own dad. Which line would he end up being sorted into when he died, this one, or the one with Hospital Gown, Chloe, and Reed? A lot of people really hated my dad, the infamous millionaire Zack Oliviera, because