Serpent's Storm (11 page)

“I’m sorry, Jarvis,” I said, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me over the drone of the helicopter and the rain splattering against the windscreen.

I sat back in my seat, feeling lost and terribly alone. Usually in these situations I had Jarvis’s steel trap of a mind to lean on, but now, left to my own devices, I didn’t have a clue as to what was happening around me—or why it was happening. Was what Hyacinth said true? Was there something wrong with my dad, and had the power of Death somehow transferred to me? I thought back to when I’d first entered the bathroom and found Jarvis. I remembered barging into the room, seething with anger, only to find my friend lying on the ground in a half-inch of water. I knew he was immortal, so I hadn’t been concerned about checking to see if he was breathing or if he had a pulse. No, I’d just squatted down beside him and made sure he was all right . . . but had he
really
been all right? I racked my brains, forcing myself to remember any bits of minutiae I might’ve missed.

And then it hit me. Something I’d totally forgotten in the heat of the moment: There’d been a piece of blue-gray metal protruding from Jarvis’s head when I’d first gotten there. I hadn’t paid it any attention then, having no idea the stuff might be important, and had just brushed it away with my hand so I could get a better look at the gash on my friend’s head—but I did remember that it was at this very moment that Jarvis had returned to consciousness.

Only, he
hadn’t
returned to consciousness, I realized with horror. No, I had roused Jarvis from a sleep much deeper than anything this reality had to offer: I had woken my friend out of Death.

Whatever that blue-gray metal was, it was Jarvis’s weakness—like Superman, all immortals had one that could kill them. That was the only thing that made any sense. The Ender of Death hadn’t come to my office just to harass me—he’d come to assassinate Jarvis, and like a fool, I’d let it happen. But if that were the case, then if, like Hyacinth surmised, I was now Death, why hadn’t the Ender of Death killed me, too?

None of it made any sense.

But I did know that if I’d been smarter, I would’ve protected my friend instead of leaving him alone in the bathroom. I’d let myself get distracted by bodies in the cupboard and illusions of police brutality, condemning Jarvis—who now sat in a pool of goopy skin and muscle because of me—to a new life as a sentient skeleton.

“We’re here,” Hyacinth said into the headset, interrupting my thoughts, and I felt the helicopter begin its initial descent.

The storm had moved on, so now only the fingers of gray thunderclouds were visible above us. Hyacinth had done a pretty incredible job of piloting us through the thick of it, and I couldn’t help but feel kind of indebted to her for her quick thinking. If she hadn’t hustled us out of the House and Yard offices when she did, Jarvis and I would’ve been in a wormhole going God knows where when his skin had started to melt, and I just didn’t think I would’ve been able to deal. I had no idea where we were or what plans my former boss had for getting us home, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt because of all of the above.

I gazed down at the landscape taking shape below us and was surprised to find we were in the middle of a large marsh. I could see nothing around us but empty land stretching out as far as the eye could see. It was totally desolate out here, with no signs of human habitation, and I couldn’t quite imagine what’d made Hyacinth choose this isolated place as her landing strip.

As we touched down, the land gave way beneath us and I could feel the helicopter’s legs sink deep into silt and mud. Hyacinth pressed a series of buttons on the flight control panel, and the whirring blades above us slowed their pace and then came to a gentle stop. The helicopter lurched forward as the mud it was now shackled to settled, sucking the machine farther into the morass.

“Where are we?” I asked as I pulled my headset off and let it fall to the floor of the cockpit, glad to be rid of it. It’d put unnecessary pressure on my scalp, so that the gash on my head hadn’t been able to scab over yet.

“A safe place.”

That was all I could get Hyacinth to tell me as she opened her door, letting a torrent of fresh air into the stuffy compartment that made me shiver. I could smell the tang of the sea in the air, the rotting saltiness of seaweed and ocean water putrefying just out of sight. I knew we had to be near water for the smell to be so pungent, but since Manhattan was an island, this bit of information wasn’t very helpful in gauging our position.

I stayed in my seat while Hyacinth slipped out of the helicopter, landing with a
squelch
—that made me cringe for her shoes—in the marshy muck that had served as our landing strip. I watched as she took a cell phone from her cleavage and dialed a number from memory. While she waited for whomever she was calling to pick up the other end of the line, I made a mental calculation of my “personal space” situation.

I could
feel
the matted blood in my hair without having to touch it, and I was pretty sure I looked like the remains of a fatted calf after a trip to the slaughterhouse. I was glad I didn’t have a mirror. I didn’t want to see the monstrosity I’d become: the blood all over my face, my clothes all torn and bloodied, my scarf gone. I just wanted to curl up in a ball and pretend none of this was happening. And if I couldn’t have that—which, at this point, was looking highly unlikely—then I wanted a nice, long, hot shower to wash away the dreck, so I could be returned to a state of quasihuman normalcy.

Oh, and I wanted Jarvis not to be dead anymore.

“Miss Calliope?”

I whirled around in my seat, almost giving myself whiplash in the process.

“Jarvis?”
I cried, not daring to believe what I was hearing until I saw it firsthand. Jarvis—the Jarvis I knew and loved, flesh and all—was sitting in the backseat. I looked down at the floor, expecting to see a pile of discarded skin and muscle, but there was nothing, just the faun’s adorable little hooves.

“Are you alive again?” I asked, feeling tears I hadn’t even known were there pricking at the backs of my eyeballs.

But Jarvis only shook his head.

“I don’t want to be your shade,” Jarvis said, his big dark eyes full of sadness. “I know you didn’t intend to do this to me—”

“No, I didn’t,” I said, my voice stretched thin as I tried not to cry. “I don’t want you to be my shade.”

Jarvis nodded. He knew I would never hurt him on purpose. He was my friend—probably the only one I had in the whole world besides my hellhound pup, Runt, and my sister Clio—and I would undo whatever terrible thing I’d done to turn him, even if it killed me.

“You must let me go, Miss Calliope,” Jarvis said, his voice calm.

“But I don’t want you to go,” I begged, understanding the finality of what the faun wanted. “I need you, Jarvi. I can’t do this without you. You’re my rock.”

Jarvis tried to give me a reassuring smile, but it was a grotesque approximation of what a smile like that should be, more of a grimace really—and it broke my heart. I clutched the seatback, my fingers digging into the buttery leather as if it were a lifeline.

“I’ll always be with you, Calliope,” Jarvis said softly. “You’re my friend. And even in Death no one can change that.”

I would never make Jarvis my shade. I would never steal his body so his soul would be forced to do my bidding. It was a horrible existence—lonely and utterly cruel—and I would never allow it to be Jarvis’s fate.

Even if it meant I lost my friend forever.

“What do I have to do?” I said, breathing hard as I wiped my nose on the back of my bloodied hand. “Just tell me what to do.”

“So simple . . .” Jarvis began, but faltered as another grimace of pain distorted his features and the illusion of his former self—something he’d been magically projecting for my benefit, I realized belatedly—flickered long enough for me to see the skeletal frame beneath it. I understood that somehow, using whatever vestiges of magic were left in his body, my friend was trying to make me remember him as he had been in life, not as what he had become in Death.

I reached out my hand to touch him, but my fingers slid through the phantom image of Jarvis’s former self, and the skin of my fingertips brushed only rigid bone. I let my hand rest there, as close to my friend as I could get. I wanted him to know I would help him, whatever the cost.

“Tell me, Jarvis,” I said, the lump in my throat threatening to choke me.

“So simple, Calliope,” the faun answered, his words a soft whisper from desiccated lips.

Tears slid down my face. I closed my eyes, my heart thumping sluggishly in my chest as time slowed and I did the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my entire life.

I killed my best friend.

“Good-bye, Jarvis,” I whispered, my fingers brushing only empty bone where there had once been a shimmering, beautiful soul.

As the words left my lips, I felt the power I held inside me intensify until I was thrumming with it, making the air around me heavy with prickling energy. Suddenly, the sky went black above us and the heavens split apart, sending a shower of rain tumbling down to the earth. The deluge was followed by a screaming wind—like someone plucking the taut strings of a piano in frantic sixteenth notes—that made the fragile hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I looked over to where Hyacinth had been standing to see what she made of this new development, but to my surprise, she was gone, or more likely, she hadn’t been transported into this strange break in time with us. I scanned the horizon, but a wave of darkness had inked us in, leaving Jarvis and me alone in our helicopter cocoon.

I fumbled with the catch, pushing open the passenger door as I tried to look farther into the murky shadow enveloping us. A jarring crack of thunder sounded overhead, followed by a flash of lightning that illuminated the darkness for a split second, heralding the arrival of two strange men. It was as if they had been there, waiting just outside the door of the helicopter, forever. But only by the intoning of those six words—
I wish you dead, my friend
—had they been made visible to me. Like mirror opposites, one of the men was tall and fat, the other short and stout. Each wore a black Victorian-style suit with a wide black cravat cinched so tightly around his throat it would’ve strangled a living person. Each man had a black watered-silk top hat perched at a jaunty angle on his head and a black silk handkerchief stuffed into his suit pocket. It was then that I recognized them for what they were: Harvesters, come to collect the dead.

The larger man had a sparse red goatee that nicely set off his dead-white pallor, and two black holes floating in his face where his eyes should’ve been. He carried a thin-poled butterfly net in his left hand and a tiny silver bell in the other. When he saw me, he gave me a low, proud bow, then rang the miniature bell without further ceremony. The small iron clacker swung with abandon, clattering into the sides of the bell with a cacophonic
tinkling
sound. The hair on the back of my neck prickled as the notes rang, clear and true, a sensuous call from the dead, beckoning a fellow comer home—but even the living like me were chilled by the haunting report. As the last ring faded into silence, Jarvis’s skeleton twitched in place, and a pale gray wisp unspooled itself from inside Jarvis’s skull, wafting out of one of his flattened nostrils as if it were a smoky snake called out of its bamboo basket by a snake charmer. It circled around the faun’s head, floating in the air like a cloudy halo.

The smaller of the two men pulled a pint-size glass jar from his pocket and twisted off the intricate brass lid to reveal a pale, golden gelatinous substance swirling inside it. He, too, was missing his eyes, but he wore no goatee like his partner—only a fat Fuller Brush mustache that failed to give his round, piggish face the hint of respectability he was obviously trying to engender.

The cloud gathering around Jarvis’s head began to undulate, faster and faster, until the frenzied pace made my head swim, and then, like a phalanx of energetic bees, the cloud buzzed toward the jar. With a practiced ease, the tall man lifted his net, swooping up the cloud before it could reach the glistening contents of the jar.

“Wow,”
I breathed, watching as the tangled cloud disappeared, leaving only empty net behind it.

Now the smaller man bowed, sinking even lower to the ground than his partner had. Before I could tell him he didn’t need to do this, he popped back up and the two men saluted me.

“Long live the Reign of the New Death!” they said in harmony, each open mouth revealing rows of ruined and decaying teeth. Then, in tandem, they stepped back into the darkness, fading away into the murky shadows until I was left alone again in the helicopter.

Only
this
time, I was truly alone, because Jarvis was gone.

Forever.

I closed my eyes and sat back, letting my head rest against the cool of the leather seat. I felt the tears flooding my eyes, seeking an outlet I didn’t want to give them. I pressed the backs of my thumbs into my eye sockets, holding the tears at bay by sheer will, but it was a losing battle—they leaked out anyway, scalding my hands and cheeks, burning my eyelids with their evil saltiness.

I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be happy I’d released Jarvis into a better existence, but it didn’t feel like that was what I’d done at all. I felt more like I’d failed him.

It shouldn’t have gone down this way,
I thought to myself, feeling miserable.

“Don’t do this to yourself,” Hyacinth said.

I sat up with the abruptness of someone caught doing something embarrassing—I guess
crying
does rank somewhere on the embarrassing scale—and as punishment, I banged my elbow on the frame of the door.