Underworld by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page B

the person in the courtyard could be John. Except that my necklace had never before turned black in his presence. It had always stayed the color of his eyes, a silver-gray.
    And while we hadn’t parted on the best of terms, wouldn’t he have called out a greeting?
    To be on the safe side, I switched off my phone and — keeping a careful eye on the curtains — slipped it up one of the tight sleeves of my dress.
    “John?” I called. My voice came out sounding strangely high and girly. So I cleared it and said, again, “John?” That was better. I sounded more authoritative. “Is that you?”
    Nothing happened. No one appeared through the curtains.
    I could have sworn I saw another shadow.
    “John,” I said, my tone sounding more panicked. “If that’s you, could you come in here? Because there’s something we really need to talk about.”
    Of course there was no response. I was pretty sure it wasn’t because John was giving me the silent treatment.
    I’d always wondered why in scary movies the girl alone in the house felt like it was such a good idea to go outside to investigate the creepy noise. Why couldn’t she just stay inside where it was safe until the police got there?
    Now I understood a little better. I’m not particularly brave — except maybe when it comes to rescuing people or animals other than myself, and often by the time I get around to it, I’m too late. But I had to do something . I couldn’t call the police, because there weren’t any police in the Underworld. I had no idea how to get hold of John, since he hadn’t given me one of those tablet things, and I certainly didn’t know his number, if he even had one, to call him from my phone … which only seemed to play videos of my cousin trapped in a box, anyway. And I wasn’t going to wait for whatever it was that was out there to come in and get me .
    I grabbed a heavy gold candlestick from the mantel. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but if someone was going to hurt me first, I’d definitely act in self-defense.
    Holding the candlestick baseball-bat style, I stepped cautiously up to the arch where I’d seen the shadow. The material of the curtain was sheer enough that I could make out some tall shrubs and even the outline of the fountain through it.
    Any of those shapes could be a Fury waiting to pounce, I warned myself. Demons came in all sizes. The satyrs on the tapestries in John’s bedroom proved it.
    My heart in my throat, I reached out to pull back the curtain, ready to swing the candlestick at anything that moved….
    Nothing did, though. I saw only the courtyard, with its gloomy stone pathways and droopy-branched trees, along with the fountain, at the middle of which was a stone statue of a beautiful woman in a long dress, pouring water from an amphora that seemed never to empty.
    I couldn’t understand it. Something had been out there. I was sure of it. The bird — maybe even my diamond — had told me so.
    Lowering the candlestick, I stepped through the curtain and out onto the gravel path. The moist, chilly air clung to me as if we were long-lost friends, the burbling of the fountain eclipsing all other sound.
    Until a figure darted out from behind a shrub.
    I screamed and whirled around in time to see him duck through the closest arch. I followed him back inside only to encounter Hope, swooping from her perch to check on me. Her wings got tangled in the gauzy curtain, causing it to balloon out over my head. This made me cry out a second time, and throw my arms over my face to protect my eyes. When I finally untangled us both, I saw that he’d gotten away.
    I’d also seen that he wasn’t any kind of otherworldly creature like the ones depicted on the tapestries. He wasn’t a satyr or a walking skeleton or even a man. He was a child, a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old.
    He was also dressed in the strangest clothing I’d ever seen. And that was counting the dress I had on.
    When I caught