The Twilight Prisoner by Katherine Marsh

Author:Katherine Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Publishing Worldwide

XV | The Dead End

Jack flew with Cora above Lexington Avenue. It was the darkest hour of the night, just before dawn. The streets were crowded both with the dead, drifting reluctantly back to the fountains, and the living, bleary-eyed, hurrying to work or back home after the night shift. The city had finally cooled down and the sky had become overcast, the tireless lights illuminating the clouds a pinkish gray. Jack began to shoot up vertically, as if they were on an elevator racing up into the air.

“Where are we going?” Cora asked.

“I want to show you something,” said Jack. First, before he told her the truth, he wanted just one more happy moment with her, the kind he had imagined having when he dragged her into the underworld in the first place.

Cora looked down in alarm. They were hundreds of feet up. Jack smiled, remembering how he had felt the same way when Euri had taken him here.

“We’re almost there,” he assured her, as the city shrank into a miniature kingdom below them. With a final kick of his legs, they were face-to-face with a steel eagle, and then they sailed over its head and landed on its neck. “The top of the Chrysler building,” Jack explained. “It’s my favorite place.”

Cora had her eyes shut. She slowly opened one of them. Gradually she opened the other. The city sparkled with lights, blinking, solid, flying through the air, unmoored from the ground. To the south, rising out of a cloud, loomed the Empire State Building, the red light atop its antenna seeming to graze the sky. The wind whipped through their hair.

“Euri took me here. I didn’t know I could fly then. I was pretty scared. But when I saw the view . . .”

“It’s beautiful,” Cora admitted. She turned to him with a serious look. “But why did you take me here? What do you want to tell me?”

Jack knew it was time. But instead, he looked out over the city. “Don’t you feel like a god being up here?”

Cora frowned. “You’re hiding something.”

“We can only stay three days in the underworld before—” he said, half-choking on the words. “I should have told you. But I thought we’d be out by now....”

“Before what?”

He opened his backpack and pulled out the Unofficial Guide, flipping to the page that explained the one rule about visiting the underworld that he hadn’t told her about—and that couldn’t be broken. “Here,” he said, handing her the guide.

Cora’s eyes darted across the page as she silently read.

“I don’t understand,” she said a moment later. But the panic in her voice told Jack she did.

“After three days, the strain of being here becomes too much on living bodies. I should have told you.”

“I’m going to die?” she said quietly.

“We still have two days,” Jack said hurriedly. “We can still find Viele.”

But Cora didn’t seem to hear him. She grabbed his arm so hard that he felt the imprint of her fingers. “I can’t die, Jack. My mother.

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