The Immortal Read Free

was

    CHRISTOPHER PIKE
    intense and I began to perspire. The buildings in the vicinity were dirty. I couldn't complain—I was from ll.A.
    "It's cooler on Mykonos," Helen said as I wiped my forehead.
    "That's good," I said. "How long is the flight there?"
    "A half hour," Helen said.
    "Will there be someone to meet us at the airport?" Silk asked. She had dressed up for the trip—always a mistake. Her purple dress and coat were close to being ruined. She had brought more bags than the rest of us combined. Helen and I were dressed casually in khaki shorts. Dad had on a pair of pants he should have thrown out the year before. He had to unbutton them to sit down.
    "It's questionable," he said.
    "Oh, Bill, didn't you make sure?" Silk asked, a whiny tone to her voice. Silk had a habit of whining when she was tired and if she didn't get her daily nap, which was supposed to be at about five o'clock. I hated whiners.
    "I faxed the people at the hotel a number of times, honey," Dad said. "They said they'd do what they could. We can always catch a cab."
    "The cab drivers on Mykonos are all crazy," Helen told Silk. "They hate redheads with a passion. They think they're witches."
    "Oh, dear," Silk said.
    We finally got a cab. The driver drove like a madman. I supposed I would have done the same if I 10
    THE IMMORTAL
    had to wait in line at the airport several times a day—it would have driven me nuts. He took us straight to Olympic Airlines. At the terminal I had to help with Silk's luggage—we all had to. I handled her bag roughly; it felt as if it was stuffed with back issues of Cosmopolitan, maybe an X-rated video or two.
    We groped our way inside, out of the heat and into an oven, and still no one spat on us. Helen looked disappointed when I pointed that fact out to her.
    The flight to Mykonos was in forty minutes. I amused myself by sitting on the floor—all the seats were taken—and reading my latest thriller. The hero was about to find out that the woman he was defending had not only actually committed the murder but had cheated on the bar exam as well when the two of them had taken it twenty years earlier. Spicy stuff. I glanced over at my father as he typed in a few words on his laptop and gave him a wink. He smiled—he knew he wasn't going to write more than a useless sentence or two in a crowded airport.
    At last we were on the plane, a two-engine prop job that I hoped had been built in the U.S. Inside, before takeoff, it was a thousand degrees, and it warmed my heart to see Silk on the verge of passing out. But the air-conditioning came on once we were in the air. I sat in the back of the plane beside Helen.
    She peered out the window.
    "I have always dreamed of renting a sailboat and sailing from island to island," she said, almost with a sigh. "Wouldn't that be heaven?"
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    CHRISTOPHER PIKE
    "It does sound wonderful," I said. "Maybe we can do it when we get older—and learn to sail."
    "Sailing around these islands is not always that easy. There's a wind that comes up around Mykonos called the meltimi. One second the water is flat and calm and the next it's churning. The meltemi will probably kick in a time or two while we're here."
    Half an hour later we were at Mykonos. We had to walk from the plane to the terminal. The airport was small; there were no pushing crowds. The surrounding terrain was rocky, hilly—what tourists thought all Greek islands were. Yet even though it was arid, it was beautiful. I liked it immediately. Athens had not been as horrible as Helen had described, but there had been a certain heaviness to the place. Mykonos was the opposite. There was a feeling of life in the air, of fun, of adventure. Indeed, I suddenly felt as if I had reached an important crossroads in my life. I knew this would be a trip to remember for a long time.
    There was a gentleman waiting for us—Mr. Ghris Politopulos. At first I assumed he was a hired hand at the hotel where we were staying, but he was both the owner and