Underworld by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page A

cousin Alex when I was feeling sad — that I looked down and noticed a film was playing on the screen.
    Only I hadn’t pressed anything on the keypad.
    I’d downloaded a few films onto my phone, but this wasn’t one I recognized. It was a video of my cousin Alex.
    I’d only moved to Isla Huesos a short time before, and had just been getting to know my mom’s side of the family, with whom my dad had never gotten along. I’d never made a video of Alex, and to my knowledge, he’d never sent me one.
    Even if he had , I doubted this was the type of film he’d make. In it, Alex was struggling to get out of some kind of box, beating on the sides of it as if he were trapped.
    There was no sound. No matter how much I messed with the volume, I could hear nothing, though Alex’s lips were moving.
    A terrible suspicion began to creep over me. Alex didn’t have theater as one of his extracurriculars, and he’d never expressed an interest in film to me.
    The suspicion turned to fear.
    The lighting was excessively dim, but Alex’s face appeared dirt-smeared. Through the smears ran pale tracks of what I realized were tears.
    That’s when I knew: Alex wasn’t acting.

 
    I don’t know how long I sat there, dumbly watching Alex struggle inside the box. I couldn’t quite understand what I was seeing, much less how I was able to see it, or why.
    All I knew was that someone I cared about was in serious trouble. This wasn’t something I was about to ignore — especially given what had happened to Jade, and before that, my best friend Hannah, back in Westport. Both of them had died … maybe not directly because of me, but I could have done more to prevent their deaths, especially as Jade’s had been directly Fury-related.
    A single glance down at the diamond at the end of my necklace told me that what was happening to Alex could be Fury-related, too. Instead of its usual dove gray, the stone had turned black….
    No wonder I was feeling so frightened.
    I had to find John, and right away. I had to tell him. Something terrible was going on back in Isla Huesos. Something so horrible, the Persephone Diamond could pick up the Fury-vibes via cell-phone video.
    “This is proof ,” I turned to say to Hope, “that bringing me to the Underworld hasn’t made the problem go away.”
    Only Hope was no longer on the back of the chair where she’d been perched for her busy feather-grooming ritual. She was huddled on the high shelf from which I’d dragged the crate containing my book bag, her head tucked under her wing.
    “What’s wrong with you?” I asked her, proving I was completely losing it. Like she was going to answer me.
    Then I heard it: the crunch of a footfall on gravel.
    There was no mistaking the sound … especially because the bird heard it, too. She lifted her head from her wing, and looked towards the stone arches, the ones that led out to the courtyard.
    Only then did I notice the breakfast things were gone. Someone — or some thing — had come and taken them away, most likely while I’d been bathing. Surely I hadn’t been so absorbed in watching the screen of my cell phone that he — or she. Or it — had done the work in front of me.
    I followed the gaze of the bird. She was peering at the long white curtains, softly billowing in the breeze. That’s how I happened to see, out of the corner of my eye, the same thing she had … a dark shadow moving beyond one of the stone arches.
    I was not alone.
    “Who’s there?” I cried, leaping up from the couch onto which I’d sunk and desperately holding up my phone like it was a weapon.
    There was no response from the courtyard.
    The silence was hardly comforting. My diamond had turned black — maybe not even because my cousin was in danger, like I’d thought, but because I was.
    You’re safer, because I can protect you. John’s words of warning came flooding back. But you have a heartbeat, Pierce, and you’re in the land of the dead.
    It occurred to me that