Serpent's Storm (12 page)

“Dammit,”
I said under my breath, clutching my bruised elbow in my hand. In the time between closing my eyes and reopening them, the world had returned to normal—only Jarvis wasn’t in it anymore and there was nothing
normal
about that. I started to cry again, but my eyes were still wet from my first bout of tears, so it wasn’t like anyone but me would know the difference.

“You did the right thing,” Hyacinth said as she held out a large but very feminine hand to help me out of the helicopter. “Your father would be very proud of you.”

“Who cares if he’s proud of me,” I said, ignoring her hand so I could clamber out of the aircraft by myself. I didn’t want her help; I just wanted to be left alone.

“Callie . . .” Hyacinth warned, but I was having none of it. I brushed by her proffered hand and jumped out of the helicopter without any help—only to catch my foot on the side of the door and go skate-sliding onto the muddy, grassy marsh floor, where I then tripped on a piece of exposed driftwood and landed hard on my butt.

“What’s the point of all this?!” I yelled, flopping back onto the muddy ground, not caring that my whole backside was now an impromptu mudsicle. “I mean, why are we
doing
this? It’s so stupid. Life. Is. Stupid. We go around and around and we learn
what
? Seriously, what do we learn?”

I looked over at Hyacinth for an answer, but she remained silent, her cornflower blue eyes ever watchful.

“That’s right!
Ding, ding, ding!!
You got the correct answer,” I crowed. “Human beings learn
nothing
! They live, they die, they’re reborn, and then they do it all again . . . and for what? What is the goddamn
point
?”

I was possessed. The words poured out of me like poison and I couldn’t stop myself. As far as I was concerned, the hypocrisy of life and death, the stupidity of the system, had been laid bare before me, and I wanted to stomp on it, crush it, destroy it so it could never hurt me like this again.

“I hate it!” I screamed at the mottled gray sky above me. “I hate Death and I want it to stop!”

I lay in the muck, exhausted, my throat raw from screaming. My breath came in short, staccato bursts and my face was covered in blood and mud and tears. I rolled over on my side and retched into the grassy marsh. There wasn’t much in my stomach, but what was there came out fast and without fanfare. When I was done, I rolled onto my back again and stared up at the sky, bleary-eyed. I could see the clouds, long grayish cotton fluffs of varying shapes and sizes, but they didn’t really register.

“Are you done now?”

Hyacinth stood above me. Her fair hair was a wild and staticky puff around her head, while her eyes remained calm seas in her pale face.

“I don’t know,” I said, teary again. “I just feel so bad. I just . . . my heart
hurts
. . . you know?”

I rubbed at my eyes with muddy fingers, my stomach a gurgling knot.

“I know right now everything seems pointless,” she said, “but I promise you that there is a purpose.”

“What? You mean
fate
?” I said, scoffing at the word. “That
God
—or whoever created this roulette wheel of a universe we live in—has some big tapestry of fate hidden somewhere, and it’s this stupid ‘wall hanging’ that demanded Jarvis die? So he did? That’s the answer to everything?”

I smacked my fist into the mud as hard as I could, and the muck replied with a satisfying
splat
. It felt good to vent some of the anger brewing inside me while I waited for Hyacinth to reprimand me or tell me I was being juvenile.

“Aren’t you gonna tell me to stop acting like a brat?” I said finally, baiting her.

She didn’t take the bait. Instead, she knelt down in the muck beside me and sighed.

“I think you have every right to be upset, Callie.”

This gave me pause. It was so rare to have someone validate what I was feeling that it cowed me.

“You do?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I do.”

As I lay there, waging war with my own disparate emotions, another bank of thunderclouds passed overhead, blotting out the sun and sending a gray pall over the marsh. The wind picked up as if in answer, and an icy shaft of foreboding, matching the swirling mass of grief and anger all tangled up inside my brain, shot through me. All my instincts said to feed the anger, to stoke it as high as possible, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the grief, but I knew it was a cop-out, an excuse to, once again, not have to be responsible for my own feelings.

Hyacinth seemed to sense my turn of mood. She gave me a weary smile, then held out her hand for me to take, a peace offering. I stared at it, making my decision.

“You just have to have a little faith, Calliope.”

This time I took her proffered hand and let her pull me up, so that now I stood above the muck . . . instead of wallowing in it like a baby.

“So where are we and what are we gonna do about that bastard, the Ender of Death?” I said, wiping my hands on my jacket. “I want to rip his guts out and make him eat them.”

“All right,” Hyacinth said, unfazed by the gore factor of my revenge plot. “But first, we need to get rid of the helicopter and the faun’s body.”

I wasn’t prepared to hear someone refer to Jarvis as “a body” yet, but I held my tongue. The Jarvis I knew and loved was gone, and his skeleton wouldn’t care what we did to it now. It was a simple shell that had once housed a good and loyal friend. And so, it was with grief-stricken body and soul that I merely nodded in response when Hyacinth informed me what she intended to do next.

Together, we gathered as much exposed driftwood as we could find, piling it inside the interior of the helicopter and around what was left of Jarvis’s body—his skeleton had already started to desiccate, the bones of his haunches crumbling into a chalky powder on the floor. With a level of strength I’d never seen in a woman, Hyacinth ripped the gas tank out from underneath the transmission and doused the driftwood kindling with its contents. Next, she held up the lighter she’d taken from one of the compartments in the cockpit and flicked open the lid.

She paused before igniting the spark.

“Would you like to do the honors?” she asked. I started to shake my head
no
—then I changed my mind.

“Yeah, I wanna do it.” I took the lighter from her hand and pressed my thumb into the cold, metal wheel. It was heavier than I’d imagined and I felt its weight settle in my hand.

As much as I wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening, I didn’t think I could bear to
not
be the one who set Jarvis’s funeral pyre alight. Somehow, it would be wrong not to do this service for my friend.

With a shaky breath, I depressed my thumb against the spark wheel and the pale gold flame flickered to life, singeing the delicate skin at the tip of my finger. I flinched at the pain, but I didn’t drop the lighter no matter how badly it hurt me.

I didn’t dare.

I allowed it to burn for a moment, shielding it from the wind with my left hand, then I let it fly. My aim was good and it sailed into the cockpit of the helicopter. With a seductive
whoosh
, the fire took hold of the aircraft, lighting it up like a tinderbox. I watched as the flames lapped at the metal body of the machine, turning it black and sooty, while the intense heat cracked the tempered glass with a loud popping sound before finally melting it into a twisted hunk.

It was a fitting good-bye for my dad’s Executive Assistant, Jarvis de Poupsy.

Something inside me broke . . . and I giggled. I couldn’t help it. I stifled the indiscretion, covering my mouth with my hand, but then I stopped trying to control anything and just let the smile that was threatening break over my face. For as long as I had known Jarvis, just the mere mention of his full name gave me the giggles. Jarvis would’ve hated me for my lack of decorum, but he would’ve understood. He would’ve known it was a giggle of love and that it was the best way I had to say good-bye.

Good-bye, Jarvi,
I thought to myself, but I knew, wherever he was, he’d heard me.

Hyacinth waited for the last of the flames to extinguish themselves then she indicated that I should follow her as she picked her way through the marsh grass toward the sea. Silently, we traversed the muck until we came to the edge where the marsh fell into the water and we stopped. A seagull screamed above us, but I barely noticed because my eyes were transfixed by the sprawling view of the Manhattan skyline that greeted me once we’d left the confines of the marsh.

“Where are we?” I breathed, my eyes sucking in the beatific vision of the city I loved so well.

Hyacinth, too, seemed in awe of the view.

“We’re in Queens, on an island right across from the city.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

I couldn’t believe that here, in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, we were still in the Triborough Area. It was amazing. A drop of rain fell from the darkening sky, hitting me squarely in the eye. I blinked and wiped it away. The air was getting colder, and the way the wind was blowing, it appeared we were gonna be in for another pummeling rainstorm.

“It kind of blows one’s mind, doesn’t it?” Hyacinth said. “That something so pristine and untouched like this protected marsh—that we have now desecrated—can be so close to one of the largest man-made rattraps in the world.”

I didn’t take offense at Hyacinth calling New York City a rattrap, but in no way did I agree with her.

“What are we doing here?” I asked, shivering as the heavens opened up and the rain came down, drenching us before we could do anything about it. I didn’t care. In fact, I was happy for the free shower—maybe it would wash away the blood and grit I was covered in.

The sea turned choppy before me, licking at the marsh grass, inching closer and closer to where we stood. I took a few steps back, but Hyacinth held her ground.

“We came here to get some help,” she called over to me as the rushing wind stripped the words from her mouth almost before I could make them out. “And we’re not leaving until we get it.”

There was an emptiness, a desolation to this place we had come to that frightened me. Not because I was going to die here, but because I was afraid of what kind of creature would call this place home.

“We have come for guidance!”
Hyacinth screamed into the wind, which whipped her bright gold hair around her face and tore at the white sheath dress she wore.
“We will not leave until we are satisfied!”

I half expected Hyacinth to pull out a knife and sacrifice a goat or something to whatever monster she was calling up from the depths of the stormy sea, but instead, she took out a small white bone and held it up for the wind to take. Instantly, the bone was funneled into the sky, where it hovered in the air for a few hesitant moments before it was flung into the water by unseen hands.

The second the bone hit the water, the winds died down and the sea became calmer.

“Where did you get that bone?” I asked Hyacinth, but she ignored me.

Dammit, I knew exactly where she’d filched it. Where else but from Jarvis’s poor desiccated corpse?
What a bitch!
A powerful surge of adrenaline slammed through my veins and I very nearly tackled the Viking-like woman beside me, but seeing as she outweighed me by about two hundred pounds, I decided it would be safer to just let my anger go.

“We have offered you a gift,” Hyacinth bellowed. “Now show yourself, you old bastard!”

The seawater began to churn and froth, the wind screaming around us like a banshee, and I covered my ears to block out the terrible wailing. Then, like the return of the Leviathan from the very depths of Hell, the sea split apart and a solid wall of water crashed over us, washing me away from the safety of the land and out into the foaming sea.

Like a freight train running at full throttle, the wave crashed over me, knocking my legs out from under my body and sucking me into a swirling vortex of saltwater and seaweed. I was so surprised by the turn of events that I went under with my mouth wide open—and let me tell you, having your lungs inflated with saltwater is never a pleasant experience. I went into shock, the cold and the inability to draw a breath causing my brain to default into panic mode. I started struggling against the pull of the tide, clawing at my amorphous captor as if I could break its watery embrace by sheer dint of will. Which was totally ridiculous; I wasn’t going anywhere the water didn’t want me to go.

I felt a tug on my leg and I realized I was no longer being dragged as viciously by the water as I’d initially been. Now I was free-floating, with very little tidal pull working over my body. I also discovered—though it freaked me out to no end—that my lungs weren’t screaming for air anymore. I was perfectly fine to hold my breath—or not hold my breath—while I sailed through the murky seawater. I opened my eyes, the saltwater stinging the delicate vitreous humor, but after a few moments my eyeballs adjusted and I was able to get a better look at my new surroundings. To my surprise, I found myself in a massive underwater grotto, miles away from the frightening wall of blackness that had originally captured me. Encircling me on all sides were mountainous embankments of coral in varying shades of blood orange and cream, their strange squiggly outcroppings like skeletal branches of a denuded forest. Marveling at the intricate beauty of the cavern, I used my arms and legs to propel myself forward, careful not to get caught on the intricate outcroppings of coral, which were sharp enough to slice open my skin like a razor blade if I was unlucky enough to get too close to them.

As I maneuvered around the coral cavern, the lack of available light made it hard to get my bearings. To add to that, the farther forward I trekked, the less light filtered down, making it nearly impossible to discern which way was “out” and which way led deeper into the impenetrable ocean depths. To my relief, a smack of tiny Day-Glo purple jellyfish swam out from the gray shadows ahead of me, surrounding me with their luminescent bodies. Shimmering like neon blossoms in the dusky gloom, they beckoned me to follow them—and together we raced through the coral caverns.