He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss.
“The title is honorary,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t stop them calling me that, even though I’ve asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the … accident.”
Accident? I supposed this was another one of those things he didn’t want to tell me because it would make me hate him.
Recognizing that dropping that particular topic — for now at least — would probably be best, I said, “John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know exactly where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos — just this one time, to help Alex — and I’ll never mention going there again. I’ll even,” I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, “forgive you for the waffles —”
John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings.
“Pierce,” he said. “Do you mean that?”
When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned.
“You’ll never mention going back to Isla Huesos again if I take you there right now, this once, to talk to your cousin Alex?” he demanded. “You’ll give … cohabitation another chance?”
His sudden fierceness was making me nervous.
“Of course, John,” I said, “But it’s not like I have a choice.”
“What if you did?” he asked, his grip tightening.
I blinked. “But I can’t. You said —”
He gave me a little shake. “Never mind what I said. What if I was wrong?”
I reached up to lay a hand on his cheek. It felt a little scratchy, because he hadn’t shaved. I didn’t care about stubble. What I cared about was the desperate need I saw in his eyes. The need for me.
“I’d come back,” I said, simply, “to stay with you.”
A second later, the lake — and everything around it — was gone.
When John flung us both back to earth, it wasn’t to the middle of a breezeway at Isla Huesos High School, the last place I’d been before I’d found myself in the realm of the dead, and so where I’d been expecting to next cross paths with the living.
Which was why I was surprised to find myself instead inside a small, dark room that smelled strongly of earth, ankle deep in dead leaves … and bloodred flower blossoms that looked strangely familiar.
“Where are we?” I asked, ducking my head. The vaulted ceiling, supported by rough-hewn wooden beams that looked at least a century old, was lower than my standing height.
“Shhh,” John said. He’d been forced to kneel, and was peering out from behind the rusted metal grate that barred the single door. “There are people out there. I don’t want them to hear us.”
I stared around the bare room, which was windowless, save for a few tiny cross-shaped slots in the thick brick-and-plaster walls. I could see that a substantial shiny new chain had been wrapped several times around the grate and securely fastened with a padlock, to make certain that no one could get in or out of the structure.
Slowly, comprehension dawned. A metal grate, chained and locked? A dim, cramped space? Dead leaves? Red flower blossoms?
“Are we inside your crypt?” I hissed, rushing to John’s side, the dead leaves and flowers crunching beneath my feet.
I didn’t rush to John’s side for fear of ghosts. I had just exited an entire realm of ghosts. I’d had a near-death experience before. I knew what being dead was like.
I’d simply never been on this side of death before.
“Yes,” John whispered. He was still peering out through the door. “This is the crypt they assigned me.”
Not where his body was buried. I noticed the subtle wording right away.
Looking around, I saw that he was right. John’s crypt was empty, except for the two of us, and lots and lots of dead leaves. There was no coffin.
Wasn’t that the point, after all, of Coffin Night, which Isla Huesos High School celebrated every year, even though the administration frowned on it? The senior class built John a coffin — though they’d been doing it so long, no one remembered anymore who the coffin was for, or why they even did it — and hid it.
The hiding is symbolic, Mr. Smith had told me, explaining the ritual. The hiding represents burying.
All so John would stop haunting the island. Because however John had died, all those years ago — if he had died — his body had never been found. And his anger over that was thought to have brought the hurricane in 1846 that had killed so many people, and caused the old Isla Huesos Cemetery to flood, and displace all the coffins buried there.
That’s how the new Isla Huesos Cemetery — the one we were in now — had become such a famous tourist destination, because of its unusual crypts — all raised in order to keep the coffins within them above sea level, so they wouldn’t be washed out to sea (or into people’s yards) like they had during that devastating hurricane in October 1846.
I shivered, kneeling beside John in the leaves and dead flower blossoms that carpeted the floor of his tomb.
“Why did we come back this way instead of popping up somewhere less … cramped?” I asked, substituting the word cramped for creepy. I was trying not to feel weirded out that I was in my boyfriend’s crypt. It was only a building, after all.