“I think so, yeah.” I wince as Fifi scrubs extra hard. “Hey, can you go a little lighter than that?”
I glance over my shoulder at her and as our eyes meet, she bursts into tears.
“It’s okay!” I tell her, panic racing through me at her wet eyes. Fifi should always be smiling, and I feel awful that I somehow did this to her. “I’m fine!”
“You could have died! You could have been stuck in that horrible place forever! You have to think these things through better, Ellie!” she wails. “What would I have done if you actually got stuck down there? Or died?”
She’s sobbing so hard now that I can barely understand her, and my guilt ratchets up several notches. “I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear. And I’m fine. I’m right here.”
“Still. What if you weren’t?” She keeps crying.
“But I am! Right, Arjun?”
“Right!” He looks almost as desperate to calm her down as I feel. “So, Ellie, did Kyrian say anything else you haven’t told us? About the snakes or whatever?”
At the word “snakes,” Fifi throws her head down on my shoulder and lets out a long, low wail.
I give Arjun a “seriously, why?” look as I awkwardly pat her back. “No, Kyrian didn’t say anything—” I break off, because all of a sudden I remember one of the last things he said to me.
“What?” Arjun asks, and if nervous excitement was a person, right now he would be the poster boy. Who knew he had such an obsession with the Underworld?
“Get my backpack, will you?” I point toward the door, where I dropped it when I came in.
“Your backpack?” Fifi’s head comes up, and though tears are still running down her cheeks, she, too, has an excited smile on her face. “Did he give you a present?”
“Of course not.” And just like that, she deflates before my eyes. “But he did tell me to check my backpack when I got back to the surface.”
“And you’re just telling us this now?” She bounds past Arjun in a single leap and picks up my bag before returning it to me just as quickly. “What are you waiting for? Open it!”
I do, ruffling past my notebooks, laptop, and the three different books I’ve got in it before I come across something I very definitely did not put in the bag myself. Something I absolutely did not have possession of before I went to the Underworld.
Slowly, carefully, I pull the book out of my backpack.
“What is it?” Arjun asks, leaning in to get a better look.
“It’s a book,” Fifi says, sounding more than a little disappointed.
“I know it’s a book,” he tells her, rolling his eyes. “But what kind of book?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “All the books down there looked like this—black with silver foiling. But, just like this one, none of them had titles.”
“So what are you waiting for?” Arjun reaches for the cover. “Let’s open it.”
I don’t know why I do it, but I turn just enough that the book is out of his reach.
Fifi grins a little. “Oh, yeah. He’s totally hot.”
“It’s not like that, I swear. It’s just—” I break off, unsure how to explain what it feels like to hold this book. All I know is it feels serious. Weighty. Like important things are in here, and I don’t think we should treat it casually.
“Just what?” Arjun asks.
“Important,” I finally say. “It feels important.”
“That’s even more of a reason to open it,” Fifi tells me, face open and eyes finally clear. “Go ahead, Ellie.”
I nod, then slowly turn the cover. Then gasp, because on the very first page, it readsBook of Death.
“Is that—” Arjun starts.
