Serpent's Storm (3 page)

“I gotta go,” I said, pushing myself up onto my knees.

“You don’t
have
to go,” Daniel said, but I ignored him as I crawled off the bed and began searching for my robe.

“I’ve told you a million times, if I’m late for work—”

“Hyacinth will have your head,” Daniel finished for me.

“Exactly,” I said as I dragged the robe from its hiding place under my bed, slipping it over my shoulders before making a beeline for the bathroom. Worried about being late and getting my head bitten off at work, I didn’t even take the time to say good-bye.

“I’ll miss you, Cal . . .” he called after me, but he didn’t make a move to stop me—and I was too preoccupied to notice the hurt look on his face.

Funny thing was, when I thought back to that moment, the only thing I remembered was the sense of finality I felt as the bathroom door clicked shut behind me. Little did I know then that the next time I saw Daniel, two people I loved would be dead and my whole world would be utterly changed forever.

New York in the late fall is a beautiful thing. It marks the beginning of scarf season, when people start hauling out their heavy winter coats from the back of the closet, digging up mittens and earmuffs from the bottom drawer of the wardrobe where they’ve been hibernating during the off months. All across Manhattan people shut their windows against the cold, cranking their thermostats up as high as they’ll go, daring Mother Nature to catch them if she can.

I loved walking in the fall air, my breath a frosty wreath in front of my face as I marveled at the beauty of my chosen home. I loved the city with a passion, the way it made me feel as if I’d been thrust into the teeming heart of humanity and, at the same time, left utterly to my own devices. It was easy to blend in with the crowd here, to escape into the monotony of urban life and not think, just react.

I loved that I could walk or take the subway wherever I wanted. Or if I was feeling particularly blasé about my finances, I could hop in a cab and take it all the way uptown. There was so much to see here, so many people to interlock my fate with. For me, it was enough just to stand underneath a canopy of skyscrapers and breathe the salty, human-scented air.

Of course, there were bad things about the city, too, but like a love-struck schoolgirl with a myopic view of the thing she adores, I revered what I wanted about the city (and myself) and ignored the rest. I pared away the bad parts until all that was left was a fantasy world. One I could float through without really having to be engaged in what was going on around me. A place where I could be and do whatever I wanted without being judged by anyone—even when I majorly screwed things up.

In the summer, New York City was stuffed to the gills with people walking, talking, and eating. It was only as the air crisped and the leaves in Central Park started to change their color that the cacophony died away and the city began its preparation for the long, hard winter to come. The fall was that happy time between the two extremes, when people were still out on foot—albeit wrapped up to their ears in outerwear, not half-naked like in July and August—enjoying the outdoors and knowing full well as soon as the first snow fell, even they would be taking refuge indoors, where it was warm and toasty.

I personally didn’t mind the cold because it was a very good excuse to trot out all my winter goodies. Today, as the wind whistled down through the construction site and the row of street vendors camped out next to the subway stop at Canal Street, I was wearing a thickly woven Prada scarf I’d gotten as a gift from my sister Clio on my last birthday. It was light gray and went splendidly with the purple plaid knee-length skirt, gray tights, and creamy charcoal leather cropped jacket I’d gotten at H&M the week before.

I know shopping at H&M might be seen as slumming it a little, but I was seriously learning that relaxing my rigid “designer only” policy was freeing to both my pocketbook
and
my psyche. My jacket may not have been culled from the finest lambskin money could buy, but it looked supercool and was definitely within my price range—no need to forgo lunch for a week because I’d plumbed my bank account of every last penny to buy it, either.

Clad in my Swedish import best, I may’ve looked like a discount fashion plate, but I was so not feeling the love on the inside. I was running late from an aborted lunch experiment, and I knew if I didn’t make this train, I was gonna be up shit creek without a paddle. My boss, Hyacinth Stewart, was a complete and total taskmaster. She’d just as soon put my bloody head on a pike as dock my meager pay if I wasn’t back at my desk—butt in chair and furiously answering e-mails—by one o’clock.

I didn’t know what I’d been thinking, going so far downtown for lunch, but I’d read on this fashion blog about a new restaurant that’d opened in SoHo—and happened to be coowned by three supermodels of late nineties’ fame—so I was exceedingly curious about getting a look at the place. Of course, you needed reservations months in advance just to have a drink at the bar; still, I had an hour to kill for lunch and I was more than willing to pop by and see if I could worm my way in for a look-see.

I’d had to settle for stargazing at the struck metal and glass sign on the front of the building—no supermodel action on the agenda for me that afternoon. I did spy a couple of polished-looking women in Armani who I thought I recognized from the society section of
W
magazine, but they only stopped on the sidewalk long enough to coo over the Pinkberry two doors down, completely ignoring the fashionable new restaurant I’d been obsessing over. After that, my highly annoyed stomach had growled three times in quick succession to remind me it needed feeding, and I’d grudgingly given up my spot in front of the restaurant I obviously was not gonna see the interior of, grabbing a chicken shawarma pita from a Pakistani street vendor I passed as I trudged back toward the subway stop.

For some reason luck was with me. I ended up elbowing my way onto the subway platform just as the train arrived. I slid in and immediately found a seat—which should’ve clued me in that something was amiss—because I never find a seat on a crowded train. Usually, I end up mashed underneath the armpit of some really tall, grubby guy with incredibly strong body odor, so this was a rare treat.

“Hello, Mistress Calliope,” I heard a melodious male voice whisper into my ear.

I jumped in my orange plastic subway seat, spilling tahini sauce all down the front of my shirt.

“Dammit, Jarvis!” I choked, pulling a Kleenex from my purse and quickly wiping at my shirtfront. I sighed when I realized there was no helping the beige stain now front and center on my white sweater—and the Kleenex I was using to dab the stain was only sloughing off and making it look even grittier.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked through gritted teeth, looking over at my father’s Executive Assistant, who was sitting primly on the seat beside me, fiddling with his pocket watch. He was wearing a fitted blue wool blazer with gold buttons, no pants, and a pince-nez perched precariously on the end of his aquiline nose.

“I am here to force you into finally making good on your promise,” he replied in his clipped British accent. “Since you obviously were not going to come to me, I had to come to you.”

“But here? On the subway?
Right now?
” I glared at him, hoping he’d at least put a spell on himself to prevent anyone of the human persuasion from noticing the cute little goat haunches he happened to be sporting.

Oh, did I forget to mention Jarvis is a faun who prefers to go around without pants—regardless of the fact that not wearing pants is tantamount to sharing entirely too much information about one’s self with people one does not know?

No one sitting or standing near us seemed to have noticed that a supposedly mythological creature was hoofing it on the subway with them, so I relaxed a little. The last time Jarvis had been spotted out in public, it had been by a little boy at a Starbucks and it had almost caused a scene.

“I think the time is ripe to make the introduction you promised me,” Jarvis said, interrupting my train of thought
and
ignoring the look of surprise that overtook my face.

“Oh
that
,” I said, relaxing as I realized Jarvis wasn’t here to badger me on Cerberus’s behalf. The promise he was referring to was of a more personal nature.

“Yes,
that
,” Jarvis replied, getting all persnickety.

“But now?” I repeated, no witty rejoinder finding its way into my head and out through my mouth.

“I’ve had my eye on the lady in question, and I feel if I am ever going to act, I must do it now,” Jarvis continued, his thick black eyebrows raised in consternation.

He may have been a faun—a half-man/half-goat whose human torso balanced precariously upon cloven-hoofed lower extremities right out of the barnyard—but he was still a pretty handsome-looking fellow. He had a head of thick black hair he kept carefully pomaded in place, a Tom Selleck mustache that would be considered “sissy” on anyone else’s face, and dark, luminous eyes that were always keyed in on exactly what I didn’t want them to see. Still, where human women were concerned, I had a feeling his smaller stature—Jarvis was no taller than four-eleven on a good day—and lack of human-looking equipment downstairs might preclude him from catching the eye of the lady he was enamored with at the moment:

Namely, Hyacinth Stewart, my power-monger boss.

I’d graduated from Sarah Lawrence with a degree that prepared me for absolutely nothing. Sure, I knew what the term “postmodern feminism” meant, but I’d had no idea how to roll calls or make an Excel spreadsheet. I was woefully unprepared for my first foray into the workforce—despite the fact that I was starting at the bottom rung of the ladder, in what could only politely be termed an “entry-level” position.

You’d think a chimp could do my job (I’m the Executive Assistant to the Vice President of Sales at the aptly named House and Yard—the company that brings you all the house and yard crap you see at three in the morning on the Home Shopping Network), but you would be sadly mistaken. Dealing with the whims of a highly neurotic boss who wants nothing more than to make my life a living hell is
not
for the banana-slurping constitution of a primate.

Opposable thumbs or not.

I respected Hyacinth for her astute business acumen, but I had loftier goals for myself. I wanted to work for
Vogue
—or any other fashion rag that would have me—so I was kind of annoyed by my boss’s unwillingness to promote me or, at the very least, put in a good word with one of her publishing diva girlfriends. I just knew she had the connections to give me a leg up if she wanted, but ever since I’d heard through the grapevine—the grapevine being my fellow Executive Assistant in crime, Geneva—that Hyacinth actually
liked
having me around, I’d known there would be no plans for advancement in my future.

A fact I was still trying to come to terms with.

With the economy in the crapper, and me being a coward who hated confrontation, there was no chance I would have it out with Hy. So instead of dealing with my future in a productive way, I spent my days at work in my cubicle silently stewing in my own juices as I answered e-mails, took phone calls, and fervently wished my boss would get run over by a bike messenger.

I knew it was a mean thing to wish on anyone, but I couldn’t help it. I was a wuss.

And so, these were the myriad reasons why I hadn’t made good on my overdue promise to introduce Jarvis to Hyacinth, a promise I really did need to fulfill—and soon—or else the faun might take things into his own hands, and then where would my future job prospects be?

“Okay, there has to be a smart way to do this,” I said. “There has to be a legitimate way to introduce you guys without her having a freak-out and firing me.”

“And pray tell,
why
would she freak out?” Jarvis asked testily.

“Oh, I don’t know why she would freak out, Jarvis. Maybe it’s because you’re a midget with the hoofs and private parts of a goat,” I shot back.

“Such terrible parenting these days,” the arthritic old woman on the other side of the bench said as she raised her newspaper between us like some kind of homemade cootie barrier.

“Excuse me?” I growled at the business section of the
New York Times
, but the lady didn’t even twitch.

My suspicions aroused, I turned my attention back to Jarvis.

“What kind of glamour did you put on yourself?” I said, peeved.

He just grinned at me.

“Tell me!” I said, grabbing him by the lapels of his blue suit coat.

Suddenly, a man in white coveralls and a baseball cap, who had been quietly minding his own business across the aisle, stood up and lumbered toward me.

“I dunno how you treats yo’kid in da privacy of your own home, but if you go touchin’ him again on dis’ train, I’m gunna show you what’s what.”

I gaped at the man, trying to process what it was exactly he was saying to me because apparently I wasn’t fluent in what was either Brooklyn- or Long Island—ese.

“Mean it,” he sputtered at me as he returned to his seat, giving me the stink eye, for all that was worth. I was more frightened of his giant, hamlike fists.

“Did that guy just threaten me?” I growled out of the side of my mouth at Jarvis.

“I suppose it could be categorized as a threat.” Jarvis shrugged, all nonchalant in a way that made me want to slap him upside the head.

“You just
had
to spell yourself to look like a little kid, didn’t you?”

Jarvis gave me a happy nod, and for the first time I caught a glimpse—by way of his reflection in the window across from us—of the glamour he’d put on himself. No wonder Mr. Brooklyn-ese thought I was a Grade A, primo jerk. Jarvis had chosen the most angelic-looking child in the whole of the free world to spell himself into. With big, blue button eyes, a shock of white blond hair that came to a swirling cowlick at the crown of his head, and two missing incisors right in the front of his mouth, Jarvis was unimpeachable. I would lose every battle we got into as long as he continued to look like Dennis the Menace on steroids.