Underworld by Meg Cabot

up to him, he was racing down the hallway … or at least as fast as he could race, considering he was carrying a silver tray with some of the breakfast things from John’s room — or our room, I guess I should say.
    That didn’t seem to stop him, however, from speeding away as fast as a water bug.
    Once I got over my initial shock, it occurred to me that it was highly unlikely that a ten-year-old boy who was running away from me intended to do me harm. Especially since he was dressed in what must have been the height of fashion in the 1840s — black pants that cut off at the knee, white stockings, huge clumpy shoes with silver buckles; an oversized blue velvet jacket covered a shirt that might once have been white, but had seen better days.
    If he had shown up in that ensemble anywhere else — except possibly a Renaissance fair — he’d have gotten the snot kicked out of him. In the Underworld, he actually fit right in.
    “Wait,” I cried. For a child carrying about twenty pounds of silver, he seemed exceptionally mobile. He was already halfway down the hall. “Come back!”
    “Sorry.” He didn’t even slow down to look at me. “We’re not supposed to speak to you.”
    “What?” I had to break into a jog — and lift my long skirt — in order to catch up with him. “Who said you couldn’t speak to me? Who’s we ?”
    My mind was spinning. John had said nothing about additional occupants of the castle. Furies, maybe, but not people. He’d said only that he’d told his “men” that if they saw me anywhere I wasn’t supposed to be, they were to bring me straight to him.
    This was no man … and no Fury, either. When I looked down at the stone at the end of my necklace, I saw that it had gone gray again. The threat of danger had passed. Unless the only danger there’d ever been was the one threatening Alex….
    The boy, meanwhile, kept walk-running. The sconces up and down the hallway hardly cast enough light to see by, sending flickering shadows everywhere, including along the deep red velvet curtains that hung on either side of every door — all locked. I’d tried them earlier — that lined the corridor. I had no idea where he thought he was going.
    “What were you doing out there in the courtyard?” I demanded. “How long were you there?” I had a sudden, horrifying thought. “Were you spying on me?”
    That got to him. He paused long enough to turn a pair of huge blue eyes up at me. “No,” he declared, indignantly. “I was gathering your breakfast things to return them to the kitchen. But then you came back and wouldn’t stop playing with your magic mirror. So I had to hide because the captain said we weren’t to talk to you. I wasn’t spying.”
    “Oh,” I said, flummoxed by this response. He’d reeled off a string of unfamiliar names and objects — Who was the captain? What magic mirror? — so I hardly knew how to respond.
    “And the captain won’t like that you were messing about with his things,” he added darkly. “He’s very particular about them.”
    I looked down in the direction of his gaze and realized I still held the candlestick in my hand.
    “Oh,” I said, again, embarrassed that I’d been caught arming myself against someone who, back in my world, would have been a fifth-grader. I turned and set the candlestick on a small marble table nearby. Then I turned back to him and said, because he was so small, and the silver tray so large and heavy-looking, “Here, why don’t you let me help you with —”
    This was a mistake.
    “No,” he said, and took off again. “Captain Hayden told me to do it.”
    Captain Hayden ?
    “Do you mean John?” I asked, following him.
    “Yes, of course,” the boy said scornfully, as if my ignorance made me the crazy one. “Who else?”
    Who was this little boy? And what was this “captain” business? John might be over a hundred and eighty years old in earth years, but physically he was only eighteen or nineteen. I