Serpent's Storm (10 page)

“Are you coming?” Hyacinth bellowed as she stuck her head back through the doorway to hurry me along. I could tell by the look of annoyance she wore she was fast running out of patience.

I never said I was a damn Olympian, lady,
I thought to myself, but I kept my attitude in check, replying with as much saccharin as I could muster:

“On my way!”

I huffed my way across the landing and out onto the rooftop. Because of the height, the wind was vicious, tearing at my clothes and hair and pushing me bodily toward the lip of the rooftop.

“This way,” Hyacinth called, her voice carrying on the wind. I followed the sound of her words to the far side of the rooftop, where she stood hanging from the cockpit of a gun-metal gray helicopter, beckoning me forward with her free hand. The other was clutching a flight headset already plugged into the control panel.

I jogged over to the helicopter and crawled into the passenger seating, slamming the door behind me. I saw Hyacinth had already buckled Jarvis into the backseat and I sighed with relief. Hyacinth handed me the other headset and I fitted it over my head, filling my ears with the hiss of static.

“Where are we going?” I asked as Hyacinth closed her door and began flipping switches at—what seemed to me to be—random. Suddenly, the blades above us roared to life and the helicopter thrummed with burgeoning energy.

“Somewhere safe,” she replied as she gripped the cyclic stick, which resembled a giant joystick and controlled the steering. The helicopter gave a sharp jerk, then lifted off the ground, and I couldn’t help but grin with surprise as I realized we were airborne.

While the helicopter gained speed and altitude, I marveled at the bird’s-eye view of Manhattan spread out before me. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything so beautiful.

“This is amazing—” I started to say, but then some strange instinct for the macabre made me turn around to look at Jarvis. What I saw in the backseat of the helicopter made the rest of that sentence disappear completely from my mind. I gagged as the bile rose in my throat and I had to look away before I got sick right there in the cockpit.

I felt my hands instinctively cover my face as I shut my eyes and tried to blot out the image I’d just seen—although I was pretty sure it was gonna be ingrained in my memory for the rest of my immortality anyway.

“What’s wrong?” I heard Hyacinth’s words echo in the headset I was wearing, but the disembodied quality freaked me out and I ripped them from my ears. I didn’t care that the roar of the helicopter blades was deafening. I wanted the sound to overwhelm my brain and block out the image etched in my mind.

“His face,” I moaned, letting the headset fall to the floor of the cockpit. “It’s sloughed right off the bone.”

I twisted around in my chair, my eyes settling on Jarvis’s prone body, where it sat, strapped to the bench like a child in a car seat. The pale bone of his exposed skull reflected back the golden sunlight streaming in through the transparent shell of the helicopter like fire. I stared at his tattered body and, for my trouble, was gifted with the spectacle of cloth-covered skin and muscle sloughing off his right arm bone before slipping past the seat and pooling on the floor with the rest of his already-melted flesh. I was glad the whir of the blades made it impossible to hear anything above their din, so I wasn’t subjected to the sound of Jarvis disintegrating before my eyes.

“Jarvis,”
I whispered, my ability to speak compromised by the sight of him.

From the collarbone up, he was skeleton, the flesh having melted away like butter in a pan, leaving only pristine bleached-white bone in its stead. For some strange reason, Jarvis’s eyeballs had remained fixed inside their sockets, but since his eyelids and eyelashes had fallen away with the rest of the delicate skin of his face, it was hard to gauge what my friend might be thinking, trapped inside his putrefying body. I knew he was still sentient by the wild twitching of his eyeballs inside the smooth orbital bones of his skull, but I really needed the other aspects of the face—facial muscles, eyebrows, etc.—to give me the emotional context.

It’s amazing what your mind decides to settle on during times of high stress,
I thought to myself as I tried to remain clinical about my friend’s situation—as if that were really possible.

Another piece of Jarvis’s flesh detached, denuding his right shoulder of skin and muscle. Like a fool, I tried to catch the blubbery stuff in my hands before it could splat on the floor, but it was no use. The subcutaneous fat was as slick as baby oil, and the gelatinous skin and muscle slithered right through my fingers, splattering against the leather of the adjacent seat like tallow.

Jarvis’s metamorphosis was moving at an accelerated rate and I deduced that his skeleton would be stripped clean of flesh within the hour. A school of piranhas couldn’t have done a more thorough job if they’d tried. Jarvis’s skin loss problem was gonna need a very quick fix—the word “superglue” kept flashing in my mind—or I was going to be left dealing with a silent skeleton instead of a helpful faun.

What do I do?
I thought, frantically racking my brain for some kind of an answer, but I didn’t have any experience with a situation like this.

In the pilot’s seat beside me, Hyacinth spoke abruptly into her headset, gesturing at me wildly, but in my freaked-out state I couldn’t understand what she wanted.

“What are you saying?!” I yelled over the cacophony of the helicopter blades, but Hyacinth only shook her head and gestured again, pointing down to the floor of the cockpit where my headset lay, twisted in its own cord. I swallowed hard then reached down and scooped up the offending thing, sliding it back over my head.

“. . . can’t do anything for him right now,” Hyacinth said, the last half of her sentence crackling into my ears as I eased the headset in place. “Please stop freaking out and collect yourself. You’re behaving like a child.”

I started to protest, but I knew she was right. I was acting like a little shit. I needed to calm down and put everything into perspective. Jarvis’s face may have fallen off, but that didn’t give me permission to lose my shit.

“What’s happening to him?” I asked, aiming my words into the headset’s protruding mouthpiece, having a bit more control over my hysteria now. There was a moment of radio silence—and I assumed Hyacinth had decided not to answer me—but then she began to speak:

“He was dead, Callie, and you roused him out of Death to do your bidding.”

“He can’t be dead,” I said, my voice rising. “He’s immortal. You can’t kill an immortal with a blow to the head. Besides, he was healing, I saw it myself, and FYI, if I were going to ‘rouse’ someone out of Death, I think I would know about it!”

“Yes, I would hope that that would be the case, but you’re very unskilled in the art of Death, so who knows what you’re capable of,” Hyacinth said, her disembodied words like thoughts being implanted into my brain. “And what you saw earlier was the beginning of the
turning
process. You should at least know from your own experiences that immortals don’t heal that quickly.”

As much as I hated to admit it, I deserved the disparaging tone Hyacinth was using on me. I
was
a kindergartner when it came to the supernatural world. I knew next to nothing about the subject. I know being the Daughter of Death should’ve made me an expert on that kind of stuff, but I don’t think you can ever learn about something you’re not interested in. Like in school, you see kids who hate being there, and no matter what you do, you just can’t inspire them to retain the information they’re supposed to be learning. As far as I could tell, you had to
want
knowledge; you had to be really interested in a subject in order to absorb it.

And the last thing I had ever been interested in as a kid—or as an adult—was Death and the supernatural world it encompassed. But because I
had
experienced the healing process of an immortal firsthand (I’d banged myself up pretty good here and there growing up), I did recognize it didn’t happen as rapidly as what I’d observed in Jarvis. If, like Hyacinth said, this
turning
thing was really happening to Jarvis, then it explained a lot.

“Okay, say it’s true,” I said, “and Jarvis is turning. What does that actually mean?”

Hyacinth sighed, which translated into a loud
hiss
in my headset.

“I won’t know for certain this is what is truly transpiring until we arrive at Sea Verge—”

“We’re going home?” I interrupted, excitement and relief flooding my body. “Thank God!”

“Let me finish,” Hyacinth said in a sharp tone, deflating the good vibes I’d just conjured up. “As I said, I won’t know the veracity of this hypothesis until I can verify that your father is no longer among us.”

“What!”
I cried, the meaning of her words like a sharpened stake plunging into my soul. I may’ve been oblivious at times, but I wasn’t an idiot. I understood what she was driving at.

“Callie, you can’t
turn
the dead unless you
are
Death.”

She didn’t even bother to look at me as she let this callous statement hang in the air. Not even an iota of compassion from the woman. She continued to pilot the stupid helicopter like nothing had happened, the rigid set of her shoulders and unbroken line of her mouth giving only the barest hint that there was emotion bubbling somewhere inside her—a fact that was hardly encouraging.

“I think you’re full of shit,” I said after a protracted silence. “I think it’s all bullshit, so there. My dad is immortal. No one can kill him . . .”

The syllables streamed from my lips without thought. I sensed this nauseous rush of invective was an intuitive reaction to information I wasn’t ready to process yet, but I had no control over it. It was like if I could just keep talking, just keep my lips in perpetual motion, I could purge the growing terror Hyacinth had stoked inside my gut. For her part, my former boss remained silent—although I did notice that her grip on the steering shaft was so intense the skin of her hands was bloodless.

All around us, the sky began to darken, going from pale blue to foreboding gray in an instant. The change in air pressure screamed that the threat of rain was fast approaching, and as if to prove its point, the helicopter was snared in a massive downdraft. Caught by the unexpected violence of the encroaching storm, we lurched to the left, my head slamming into the side of the door. Mind-numbing pain engulfed every synapse of my body as the metal hinge on the side of the door sliced into the thin skin of my scalp. I felt something warm and viscous on my face, shrouding my vision in a blurry haze. I tried to wipe the stuff away with my hands and clear my vision, but I couldn’t seem to get my fingers to do what I wanted them to do. It took me a few moments to comprehend that it was blood pouring from the gash in my scalp and not some unknown liquid cascading into my face. I wanted to scream, to rage against the stupidity of what was happening to me, but my throat was like a vise, allowing no sound to escape. All I could manage was a strangled gurgle—which did nothing to relieve the pressure enveloping my brain and sending me into a miasmic veil of nausea.

I closed my eyes, fighting back the urge to puke. I didn’t think my getting sick would help the situation very much. Opening my eyes again was like trying to pry open two rusted window frames. All I wanted to do was to sink into a black abyss and then wake up back in my bed in Battery Park City, but the rocking of the helicopter wasn’t helping my wish one bit. It only seemed to stoke my nausea, dragging me back into a more alert state.

“Crap,”
I moaned, reaching up with my right hand to feel around in my scalp for the bloodied gash.

I winced as my fingers palpated the tender skin around the cut, biting my lip against the pain. When my speculative probing got too intense, I yanked my hand away and wiped my blood-coated fingers on the underside of my seat. The wound didn’t seem very deep, and if I remembered correctly, the scalp tended to be a heavy bleeder even when the wound wasn’t really that bad.

More like a dog’s bark being worse than its bite,
I thought miserably.

While I was musing about scalp wounds and barking dogs, Hyacinth was working hard to hold the steering apparatus steady, keeping the helicopter on an eastwardly course. As my eyes refocused on my surroundings, I realized the rocking sensation I was feeling stemmed from the terrible lightning storm our tiny helicopter was entering. I watched, surprised at how quickly the storm was enveloping us.

Rolling black rain clouds had eaten up all of the sky, making it hard to see farther than a few feet into the distance. A flash of white-hot lightning split the horizon, producing enough light, at least for a few seconds, to verify that the darkness around us was absolute.

“What’s going on?” I asked uncertainly. The intensity of the storm was making my arm hair stand on end.

“What did you say?” Hyacinth asked, not daring to breach her concentration by peeling her eyes from the windscreen. It was taking everything she had just to pilot the helicopter away from the encroaching rainstorm.

“What’s. Going. On?”
I said again, slowing down my speech and enunciating as best I could.

“I don’t know where this storm came from, but it’s not a good thing,” Hyacinth replied, flicking a few switches on the control panel as she spoke. “Makes it really hard to keep the helicopter steady.”

There was another bump and the helicopter went into free-fall. My stomach migrated into my throat and I screamed—just as the helicopter righted itself again.

“Where are we going?” I asked after my stomach had slid back down my throat.

“It’s not much further now,” Hyacinth said as she banked a sharp left, sending us careening into pitch-black airspace.

I knew I wasn’t going to get a straight answer out of Hyacinth about where we were going, so I turned my attention back to Jarvis. The poor little guy looked the worse for wear, his jawbone hanging from the rest of his skull by a thin filament of flesh. I wanted to do something to help him, but I didn’t think trying to get into the backseat while we were in the middle of an aggressive rainstorm was the smartest course of action. It wasn’t like I was gonna be able to hold his hand or anything.