“Oh, I know. I believe his body is dead right now. But John’s spirit isn’t. Why else do you think that bolt of lightning came out of the blue and struck that tree, causing it to fall on that teacher of yours? That was pure, vintage John. He was trying to help you, in that overly dramatic way of his.”
The minute he mentioned the lightning, the red pulled back from my vision the way an ocean wave receded from a shoreline. What he was suggesting was crazy …
… crazy enough to be true.
The lightning had been an odd coincidence, considering the fact that my boyfriend had always been able to control the weather with his mind and the way he’d always showed up whenever someone was threatening me.
Except that John was dead.
“Thunder and lightning were a signature trick of John’s,” I heard myself murmur, despite the fact that I refused to allow myself to hope.
“So you told me,” Mr. Smith said, rising from his chair and going to his bookshelves. “It makes sense that he’d try to protect you in the afterlife as he did in life … whatever afterlife he’s experiencing right now, that is.”
“But,” I said. No. I wasn’t going to hope. “That’s impossible. Unless … ”
“It’s no more impossible, I should think, than anything else you’ve experienced so far, such as finding yourself in an underworld that exists beneath our world, and discovering that you, a fairly below-average student, are the co-regent of it. Now, where did I put that book?”
“You mean … ” I was starting to feel something other than anger. It felt, dangerously, like optimism. “ … you think John is around somewhere? Like in spirit form?”
“More than in spirit form,” Mr. Smith said. “I think your friend Mr. Graves is right about there being an imbalance in the Underworld. I have my suspicions about what caused it, but more important, I do believe it caused an opportunity for the death god, Thanatos, to capture John’s soul. The question is, how are we going to save him?”
14
The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world …
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XXXIV
There are other questions, of course,” Mr. Smith was saying as he stood with his back to me, scanning his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. “And other pressing concerns. How are we going to help all those poor souls you left behind in the Underworld? And how are we going to defeat the Furies and return the Fates, and thus restore the balance so that this fair isle doesn’t turn into a flaming ball of magma? But,” he added lightly, “I believe once we’ve located and recovered John, those other things will be a bit easier to manage. I hope so, anyway. All of the bridges are shut down due to the storm, so it’s far too late to evacuate.”
I was barely listening to him. Instead, I was glancing around the room, my mind spinning. Mr. Graves, the man of science, had been right? There was a Thanatos keeping John’s soul from reentering his body, holding him captive between life and death?
Had John really caused that lightning bolt to strike that tree and kill Mr. Mueller? If he had, that meant he’d been with me the whole time. Was he here with me now? If so, why couldn’t I feel him? All I could hear was the insistent howl of the wind outside, sucking and banging the shutters against the windows, a strange contrast to the cheerful music playing down the hall.
What if it was true, and John had become some kind of guardian angel to me? In a way, the thought was oddly comforting. But I didn’t want a guardian angel. What good would that do me? Guardian angels couldn’t hold you in their strong arms and tell you everything was going to be all right. They couldn’t eat breakfast with you, or tease you, or tell you that you looked beautiful even when your hair was piled on top of your head because you’d just washed your face and you knew you didn’t look beautiful at all.
I wanted John, the boy, not John, the angel. I wanted him whole, back the way he was, not some stupid angel ….
John? I asked with my mind, looking cautiously around the room. Are you here? If you’re here, give me a sign.
“Ah,” Mr. Smith said, after having stepped onto a small library ladder to find the tome he’d apparently been looking for. “Here it is.”
He walked over to a wide mahogany desk and opened the book to the appropriate page. I rose from my chair to take a look.
On the page before me was a photo of an ancient Greek statue. It showed a winged boy mounted on a galloping horse, swinging a sword over his head.
Well, some of the legs of the horse were galloping. The others had fallen off in an earthquake or something. So had the boy’s face, and most of his wings.
“Thanatos,” Mr. Smith said. “The Greek personification of death.”
I looked down at the photo. “He’s just a kid.”
“I suppose you could say that. The Romans did view him as a child of the dark night. It was said even the sun was afraid to shine upon him. But that kid, as you refer to him, destroyed whole armies with a single swipe of that sword. He killed without a thought to his victims. He was said to be without mercy, without repentance, and without a soul.”
“So in other words,” I said, “a typical teen boy.”
Mr. Smith frowned at me, then read aloud from the inscription beneath the photo. “Here’s what the poet Hesiod wrote in Theogony about Thanatos: ‘His spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast. He is hateful even to the deathless gods.’”
“Because he was shut up in his room all day,” I said, “sexting and playing video games.”
Mr. Smith frowned. “They didn’t have video games in the years before Christ —”
“You know what I mean,” I said. Something about the statue bothered me. It reminded me of something or someone, but I couldn’t figure out who, especially since the form had no face. “If the gods were deathless, then how did he manage to kill John?”
Mr. Smith raised an eyebrow. “Miss Oliviera, I told you upon one of our very first meetings, John isn’t a god. He’s simply an unfortunate young man who was thrust into a position of great responsibility at a very young age —”
“How come there’s nothing about this Thanatos guy in the Hades and Persephone myth?” I interrupted. I already knew how great John was. I didn’t need to hear it.
“Because he doesn’t figure in it. He’s a minor player in Greek mythological literature, considered more a spirit than a deity. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed we all have a little Thanatos within us. He called it the death drive and claimed it’s what makes us engage in risky behaviors from time to time.”
I raised an eyebrow, remembering the way John had clung to the wheel of the ill-fated ship until the last minute. “That sounds like John. So how do I get him away from this Thanatos, once I figure out who he is? I’m guessing he wasn’t Mr. Mueller, or John would already be back.”
Mr. Smith shook his head and closed the book.
“I ought to have known, given our past conversations,” he said tiredly, “that you wouldn’t understand. You can’t literally engage Death in a fight to the death for the life of your boyfriend, Pierce.”
“Whatever, I get it that this Thanatos freak is probably a metaphor,” I said, beginning to pace the room. “But in case he’s not, I’ve already killed one guy tonight. What’s to keep me from killing another?”
Mr. Smith regarded me helplessly from behind his desk. “Because that is not who you are. I understand that with your teacher, you were acting in self-defense. But the entire reason John was so drawn to you is because you are the spring to his winter. You are the water to his fire. He is the storm. You are the sun that appears after the storm.”