Still, when John said that thing in my dream about how he’d rather die than let me die, even though I knew that could never be, I realized something: I wanted to believe in the fairy tales, too. My subconscious — just like all the doctors had tried to reassure my mother — had worked out the resolution to a problem that had been bothering me for a long time. What I really wanted was to run towards John, not away from him.
Only now that I’d finally realized it, he was about to drown.
No wonder my heart gave a lurch like it was my own life I was watching disappear right in front of me.
“Take my hand,” I begged him.
I sounded like someone possessed. I was possessed, with the fear of watching the sea swallow him up before my eyes. It figured that the minute I’d finally admitted to myself how much I loved him, I was about to lose him. Maybe this was my karmic punishment for having taken so long to figure it out.
A wave lifted him, as if in answer to my prayers, and suddenly, miraculously, he was so close, our fingers touched.
The look in his eyes turned into something like hope. I leaned out even farther to grasp his wrist, feeling his hand lock around mine. I smiled, overwhelmed with love and joy, daring to believe he was safe, and the ending to my own story might be a happy one after all.
Then from out of nowhere came another one of those powerful swells …
… and I saw the hope in his eyes die.
“Don’t let go!” I shouted, knowing in my heart that this was exactly what he would do. Even as I said the words, I felt his fingers loosen from around my wrist. He was releasing me on purpose, not wanting to pull me down into the cold waves with him….
A second later he was ripped away from me by a wave so big, it tossed him like a toy. I screamed his name, clinging to the wooden rail, my tears indistinguishable from the rain pelting my face, a hole as big as the sea seeming to split open inside me. Only when lightning streaked the sky did I see him again, a tiny, shadowy figure crested atop a swell a dozen yards away. He raised an arm as if to say good-bye.
Then the water closed over him. I was alone in the storm, and he was gone forever.
My pulse still pounding from the dream, I opened my eyes. My hair was stuck damply to my face and neck, my fingers so tightly clenched into fists that it hurt when I tried to straighten them.
Wait. It had been a dream, right?
If so, then why, when I licked my lips, did I taste salt water? And why did that slant of light filtering through my bedroom curtains look so unfamiliar?
Because they weren’t my bedroom curtains, I realized. The curtains in my bedroom weren’t long and white and ghostly. They didn’t hang from ornately carved stone arches. There wasn’t a stone arch to be found in the house my mom had bought in a gated community in Isla Huesos, where we’d just moved from Connecticut, thanks to my parents’ divorce being finalized and my expulsion from the Westport Academy for Girls for decidedly unladylike behavior.
Nor would Mom’s decorator have chosen medieval-looking tapestries picturing satyrs chasing half-clad nymphs around as a design motif.
That’s what lined the wall opposite the stone arches, though, as well as sconces lit by actual flames….
No way would Mom have okayed those (total fire hazard), or the enormous four-poster canopy bed in which I lay.
It wasn’t until a deep, masculine voice said my name — in a voice so loud, I startled — that I realized I wasn’t in the bed alone.
“Pierce.”
The boy from my dream wasn’t dead at the bottom of the ocean. He was in the bed next to me. Not only was he in the bed next to me, but he was holding me in his arms. The reason my name had sounded so loud was because my head was resting against his chest.
Which was shirtless.
Mom would definitely not have okayed this.
Suddenly, it all came rushing back. Underworld. I was in the Underworld.
And this time, I wasn’t dead.
I gasped and sat up. Instantly, his strong arms released me.
“It’s all right,” John said, sitting up as well. His tone was gentle. So were his hands, going to my shoulders to soothe me. As gentle as if I were the bird I’d once watched him bring back to life.
Except that I knew the enormous power behind those callused fingers. I’d seen them stop hearts as easily as they’d started one.
“Pierce, you were having a nightmare,” he said.
Nightmare? It took me a second to make the connection — the nightmare from which I’d just woken, about him drowning. He didn’t mean the one that was unfolding right now before my disbelieving eyes as I looked down at our legs, entwined on top of the exquisitely embroidered white comforter.
Because while I wasn’t wearing anything I’d have chosen for myself — I was dressed in the same kind of long flowing white gown as the nymphs in the tapestries — at least I was fully clothed.
I couldn’t say the same for him. He had on jeans — though they were so formfitting, he might as well have been naked. The black denim molded itself to him like a second skin.
Nightmare … or quite excellent dream? I guess it depends on how you looked at it. His shirt was many feet away, tossed carelessly across the low white divan by the fireplace.
His bare chest and shoulders were surprisingly tan for someone who’d spent most of the past two hundred years trapped below the surface of the earth, allowed out only for short periods of time in order to commit felonies, such as kidnapping girls (admittedly, he’d done this to protect me from being murdered, but it was still illegal). His skin was the same gold as a lion’s coat, just as warm and smooth …