“Fine,” I said, yanking mine from its kickstand. “Stay here and get arrested. You deserve it for being such a sexist snob. I’m leaving.”
“Get arrested?” Alex grabbed my mom’s bike — which was a red single speed with a simple wire basket — and hurried after me. “I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who —”
“Shhh,” I said. We’d reached the gate that led from the backyard to the driveway. I held up a hand to silence Alex as I listened to what was happening on the front porch.
“I already served my time,” I could hear Uncle Chris shouting. “Don’t I have any rights?”
“Of course you have rights, Mr. Cabrero,” Chief of Police Santos was saying in a patient tone. “We’re not here for you. We’re here to talk to your niece. We understand that she and this fellow we all were so worried had kidnapped her — but who we now come to find out is actually her boyfriend — were at a Coffin Night party last night out on Reef Key and caused a considerable amount of damage —”
“Persecution!” Christopher shouted. “You people are persecuting me and my family!”
“Now, hold on there, Christopher,” Chief Santos said. “Let’s not get excited.”
I heard a crash, then my mother cry, “Oh, Christopher!”
“Come on,” I whispered to Alex, and opened the gate.
Uncle Christopher had been right, I saw, as Alex and I quietly steered our bikes from the backyard, keeping our heads ducked well below the Isla Huesos squad cars parked along my mother’s driveway. Riots really did cause a distraction.
Especially since Uncle Chris had lifted one of the heavy flower planters on my mother’s front porch and thrown it as hard as he could at the stone walkway below, causing the planter to explode into a million tiny pieces of dirt, plaster, and petunias.
Not only were quite a few of my mother’s neighbors (who’d been outside in their yards cleaning up after Hurricane Cassandra) staring, but every single one of the officers accompanying Chief Santos had drawn their firearm and had it trained on Christopher.
This had to be the most exciting thing ever to happen in my mother’s wealthy suburban community, which was guarded twenty-four hours a day by a gated security station. The whole reason Seth Rector and his friends had befriended me my first day of school was because they knew I lived in Dolphin Key, and they believed if they stashed the senior class coffin in my garage, it would be safe from the juniors.
How long ago that day seemed.
The police chief stood next to my mother on the porch, his hands on his hips, slowly shaking his head.
“Christopher,” he was saying. “Why’d you have to go and do that? Now I’m going to have to take you in and waste my afternoon writing up a report, when I have a thousand more important things to do today. Do you have any idea how many downed power lines and flooded homes I have to deal with? There are people who lost everything they owned in Cassandra last night. The electricity is still out on half the island. Half the high school is underwater. And you’re going around acting like this? Give me a break, will you?”
My heart began to beat a little faster with excitement. Half the high school was underwater?
Then I remembered I lived in the Underworld now. I didn’t have to go to school anymore. What a relief.
“What precisely are you going to charge him with, Chief?” my mother asked dryly. “Assaulting my front walk with a planter?”
“Let’s go,” I whispered to Alex. I was aware that, though Uncle Chris had the undivided attention of the police officers, my mom’s neighbors could still see us, and some of them were beginning to nudge one another and look in our direction. “This is our chance.”
Alex remained glued where he was, however.
“No,” he whispered back. “I don’t like the looks of this.”
“What are you talking about? Your dad will be fine. They’re not going to arrest him. He didn’t do anything. Well, anything illegal. It’s not against the law to smash up your sister’s flower planters.”
“Your necklace, though,” Alex said, nodding to it. “It’s still black.”
I looked down. He was right about that.
“There’s a Fury around,” he said. “Does the combination of guns and Furies sound like a good one to you?”
I looked back at the police officers gathered in Mom’s yard. “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But it could be any one of these people. It could be her, for all we know.” I pointed at a three- or four-year-old girl standing on the sidewalk a few yards away, staring at us with her finger in her mouth. She was wearing a shirt that said Daddy’s Little Princess on it.
The police chief was rubbing his chin. I could tell from his stubble that the past few days had been as difficult for him as they had been for me. He hadn’t even had time to spare on personal grooming.
As the chief rubbed his chin, he finally noticed his men — and a single female officer — had their pistols drawn.
“Hey,” Chief Santos said to them in a surprised voice. “Saddle up the pieces, people. There’s no need for that.”
All but one officer obediently slipped their guns back into their holsters. The one who did not was a husky guy with a lot of dark hair. He kept his firearm pointed steadily at Uncle Chris.
Chief of Police Santos didn’t notice. He turned back to my mother to say something in a low voice that Alex and I were too far away to hear.
But I was sure none of my mother’s neighbors missed what the dark-haired officer shouted a second later.
“Send the girl out!”
Police Chief Santos spun around.
“Poling,” he said, making a disgusted face as his gaze fell on the officer still holding the gun. “Are you nuts?”
Poling? Where had I heard that name before?
“Not nuts, sir,” Officer Poling said. “Just here to do my job. We came to get the Oliviera girl, and that’s what I intend to do.”
“Not like this, you numbskull. We came here to question her, not shoot her. Put your firearm away, before I shoot you myself.”
I noticed a number of my mother’s neighbors beginning to hurry indoors, sensing that the scene had taken a sudden turn for the worse. No one came to get Daddy’s Little Princess, however. She stayed where she was, still staring at us and sucking on her finger.
“Sorry, sir,” Officer Poling said, his pistol not wavering. “Pierce Oliviera killed a friend of mine. We have to bring her in.”
I felt the blood in my veins grow cold. He knew. But how?
“What in the hell are you talking about, Shawn?” Chief Santos demanded.
“My friend Mark,” Officer Poling said. “She killed him. She’s going to have to pay for that. I have my orders.”
Mr. Mueller’s first name was Mark.
“Orders?” the police chief echoed. “Orders from who, Shawn? Not me. And who the hell is Mark?”
The dark-haired man looked up. It was almost impossible not to follow the direction of his gaze, even though a part of me wanted to keep my eye on his gun.
When I raised my head, however, I knew it would be impossible to look away.
The sky above our heads was filled with ravens — the same kind that had been circling the ceiling of the cave in the Underworld just before the Furies had caused the ships to sink. There were hundreds — maybe thousands — of the scavenger birds, their black wings spread out against the cloudless blue sky, flying in circles above Isla Huesos, some of them letting out their odd, almost human-sounding cries.
I had seen ravens on the island before, but always over the cemetery, and of course at Reef Key, not my mother’s house. It had made sense to see them in a graveyard and a development that had been built over a burial site. They were carrion birds, after all. They ate the dead.