His voice wasn’t cold anymore, but when I looked up at him, I saw that he wasn’t smiling, either. Nor did he smile when Typhon, struggling to return with the driftwood, tripped over it instead, then fell into the waves.
It was going to take more than an apology, I suspected, to make him smile again.
“Is this why you hid my phone from me?” I asked. “So I wouldn’t be able to see what the Furies were doing to my family? Did you know something like this was going to happen? Did you know all along?”
“No,” John said, his arms tightening around me. “I didn’t even know you had a phone, to be honest. You dropped your bag when you crossed over yesterday, and Henry must have put it away. He was trained to wait on ship’s officers. He’s a little fuzzy on any aspects of the job outside those duties.”
I remembered the orderliness with which John’s clothes had been organized, as opposed to his books.
“Oh,” I said, reaching up to wipe my streaming eyes. All I could hear was the wind and, more distantly, the sound of waves splashing against the hull of a tall boat that was pulling away from a nearby dock. Though the boat stood higher than a three-story house, and held many hundreds of people, none of them waved the way passengers on cruise ships so often do when departing from an exotic port. This wasn’t that kind of boat, and they weren’t leaving on that kind of trip.
I saw two large figures in black moving busily around the crowded dock. One had a long dark braid, the other a scar across his face. Mr. Liu and Frank.
“I’ve never seen one of those work here,” John mused as he looked down at my cell phone. “And certainly not in that way. Henry started calling the tablets we found when we arrived here ‘magic mirrors’ because they work like the ones in the fairy tales. Ask them a question and they tell you the answer … generally only to which boat the departed soul in front of you is assigned, but to him, that seemed magical enough….”
I probably should have taken the fact that the Fates — or whoever — had granted my smartphone the same power as the “magic mirrors” John and his crew had as evidence of my burgeoning consort powers, or something.
But I was still too upset about Alex to think of anything else.
“Henry said sometimes your tablets tell you more.” I looked up into his eyes. “Henry said he saw his mother get her purse snatched once, and you went and rescued her.”
John looked skyward. Only in this case, the sky was the ceiling of the vast subterranean cavern in which the Underworld was sealed. It glowed, as always, a depressing shade of grayish pink.
“That was different,” he said. “Henry’s mother was being attacked by a local street thug back in his native village. It wasn’t a trick of the Furies, as this very likely is. Here, put this on. I can tell you’re freezing.”
He didn’t lend me the leather coat he was wearing in order to keep me warm, the way he had the last time I’d been in this same place. Instead, he pulled something from a polished wooden rack. Similar racks, I noticed, appeared at random intervals all along the twin docks.
After he unfolded it, I saw that it was a blanket, kind of like the ones they give out on long airplane flights. Only this one was much thicker, made to withstand the chilly dampness of the beach.
“I know you,” he added, helping to arrange the blanket over my shoulders. “You won’t drop the subject until I agree to check on your cousin, so I’ll do it. But only under one condition.”
“John,” I said, whirling around to clutch his arm again.
“Don’t get too excited,” he warned. “You haven’t heard the condition.”
“Oh,” I said, eagerly. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Thank you. Alex has never had a very good life — his mother ran away when he was a baby, and his dad spent most of his life in jail…. But, John, what is all this?” I swept my free hand out to indicate the people remaining on the dock, waiting for the boat John had said was arriving soon. I’d noticed some of them had blankets like the one he’d wrapped around me. “A new customer service initiative?”
John looked surprised at my change of topic … then uncomfortable. He stooped to reach for the driftwood Typhon had dashed up to drop at his feet. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, stiffly.
“You’re giving blankets away to keep them warm while they wait. When did this start happening?”
“You mentioned some things when you were here the last time….” He avoided meeting my gaze by tossing the stick for his dog. “They stayed with me.”
My eyes widened. “Things I said?”
“About how I should treat the people who end up here.” He paused at the approach of a wave — though it was yards off — and made quite a production of moving me, and my delicate slippers, out of its path. “So I decided to make a few changes.”
It felt as if one of the kind of flowers I liked — a wild daisy, perhaps — had suddenly blossomed inside my heart.
“Oh, John,” I said, and rose onto my toes to kiss his cheek.
He looked more than a little surprised by the kiss. I thought I might actually have seen some color come into his cheeks.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“Henry said nothing was the same after I left. I assumed he meant everything was much worse. I couldn’t imagine it was the opposite, that things were better.”