Abandon by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page B

any cell reception, and” — I took a step nearer to him so the guards wouldn’t overhear what I said next, even though I was pretty sure, what with all the loud protesting going on behind us and the clanging of the anchor chain as the boat docked on the other side, I was safe — “those guys organizing the lines? They’re very rude.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. He slipped the tablet back into his pocket, then shrugged off his coat and wrapped it around me, pulling it — and me — close by the collar. “Is this better?”
    A little bit shocked that he’d so missed the point of what I was trying to tell him — but undeniably much warmer. His coat weighed a ton and was practically steaming from his body heat — I nodded. He hadn’t let go of the collar.
    It felt odd to be so near him. He definitely was no kindly uncle. He was, instead, very much a young man close to my own age.
    And crackling with male sexuality.
    I wondered if I should have just stayed in my line. Everyone in it was filing for the boat, which looked, now that I could see it up close, fairly comfortable.
    “I didn’t mean just me,” I went on more slowly.
“Everyone
here is freaking out. They’re wet and cold, too.” I pointed towards the line of people who weren’t being let onto the ferry that had just docked. “What’s going on with them?”
    He looked in the direction I’d pointed, then back down at me. He was still holding on to the collar of his coat, keeping it snug around my shoulders.
    “You don’t need to worry,” he said. His expression had hardened again, however, and his eyes gone a stormy gray, as if this was a subject he didn’t like discussing. “A boat’s coming for them, too.”
    “Well, they still deserve to be treated better,” I said, wincing as another man tried to make a break for the ferry line before a guard used force to subdue him. “It’s not their fault —”
    He stepped even closer towards me, effectively blocking my view of what was going on in front of the ferry. “Do you want to go someplace else?” he asked. “Someplace away from here? Someplace warm?”
    “Oh,” I said, feeling a rush of relief. He’d realized there’d been a mistake. He was going to fix it. I was going home. “Yes,
please.
”
    And then I blinked. Because that’s what human beings do, especially when they’ve been crying.
    But when I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t home. I wasn’t standing on the shore of the lake anymore, either.
    And what I’d been hoping was the end of the nightmare I’d been going through turned out to be just the beginning.

“Thee it behoves to take another road,”
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
“If from this savage place thou wouldst escape.”

DANTE ALIGHIERI ,
Inferno
, Canto I
    I nstead of home , or standing by the lake, I was in a long, elegantly appointed room.
    The horse was gone. The guards were gone. The beach along the lake was gone. All of the people — the people who’d been waiting in the lines — were gone, too.
    The wind was still there, though. It caused the long, gauzy white curtains, hanging from the elegant arches along one side of the room, to billow softly.
    But the wind was the only thing I recognized. Everything else around me — the white-sheeted bed topped with a dark, heavy canopy on one end of the room; the pair of thronelike chairs at the long banquet table sitting before an enormous hearth at the other; the ornate antique tapestries, all depicting medieval-looking scenes, which hung here and there on the smooth, white marblewalls; even the white divan on which I was sitting — I had never seen before in my life.
    I was dreaming. I had to be.
    Except that everything — the sound of water bubbling in the fountain in the courtyard outside the arches; the softness of the fur rug beneath my suddenly bare feet; the smell of the burning firewood in the hearth — felt so real. As real as everything had felt a split second before.
    Most real of