Abandon Read Online Free PDF

sarcasm.
    “I meant,” he said, “what are you doing
here,
now, tonight? In the cemetery. After hours.”
    I swallowed hard.
    Of course. Of course he knew what I was doing on Isla Huesos. He always seemed to know where I was and exactly what I was doing. He’d probably seen my plane touch down. He’d probably watched as I dragged my bags off the luggage carousel, and Mom helped me wheel them to the car. I wondered if he’d been watching when we’d had to struggle so hard to lift them into the back of her hybrid SUV because they were so heavy. Nice of him to come over and offer us some help.
    I could practically feel the anger coming off his body in waves.
    I knew I’d hurt him once (in my defense, he’d hurt me first. False imprisonment
is
a felony. I’d looked it up).
    But given that he’d shown up
twice
since then to save my life — or at least I suppose that’s what he thought he was doing — I’d assumed he’d forgiven me.
    Yet his eyes weren’t showing the slightest flicker of warmth, let alone remorse, for what he’d tried to do to me. So I guess I’d been wrong.
    “Look,” I said, my voice a little gruff with some anger of my own. He had no right to be so rude. Sure, he’d surprised me, so I’d screamed.
    But he’d known this whole time I’d been on the island and he’d never once stopped by to say hello? Not that I wanted him to, since every time he showed up, someone seemed to get hurt. But still.
    “I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d come by to make sure everything between us was, you know.” I realized I’d really dug myself into a hole with this one. Why hadn’t I listened to Mom and just stayed on my bike? “That there were no hard feelings.”
    He continued to stare at me. “No hard feelings,” he echoed.
    “Right,” I said. This was going even more horribly than I could have imagined. And clearly, I had a reputation for being able to imagine quite a bit. “I’m over what you did to me. And I just wanted to make sure that you understood that what I did toyou…what happened when I…
you know.
Left. That it wasn’t personal.”
    “Oh, I understand,” he said. His tone was as cool as his gaze. “You were extremely impersonal about it. You made your decision. Then you acted on it.” He shrugged and folded his arms. “Without any regard to the consequences.”
    Stung at his pointed reminder of my behavior that day — You were extremely impersonal about it. You made your decision. Then you acted on it — I felt tears well up.
    Oh, God. Now I was going to
cry
in front of him? Mom wanted everything to be perfect? Well,
this
was perfect.
    “I was
fifteen,”
I said, trying not very effectively to get a grip on myself. I had rehearsed this conversation so many times in my head, I should have had it down cold by now. The problem, of course, was that conversations with him in real life never went the way they did in my head. “Who’s ready for that kind of commitment at
fifteen?”
    “Seventeen’s better for you?” he asked pointedly.
    Horrified, I cried, “What?
No!”
    “Well,” he said, “for someone who keeps claiming she’s not ready to die, you have an interesting way of showing it.”
    I stared straight into those dead eyes. “What does
that
mean?”
    “Only that most people who place any kind of value on their lives don’t go wandering around in cemeteries after dark. But then again, it is
you
we’re talking about.”
    Isla Huesos Cemetery’s nineteen acres were completely without security cameras or guards. The cemetery sexton went home promptly at six o’clock, as he’d testily informed me one night afterkicking me out (and scolding me for using “a place of public veneration as a thoroughfare”) while locking the cemetery gate.
    So if he
did
decide to take me back with him to his world — which I was fairly certain he had the power to do — unless there was some drunk who was sleeping it off behind a tomb somewhere who’d heard