Serpent's Storm (30 page)

“This way,” Jarvis said, taking my arm and leading me into the thick of the crowd.

The station was swarming with a plethora of interesting creatures—many that I’d never seen before—intermingling with humans and humanoid-like beings that probably didn’t have a molecule of humanness in their entire body. Some were buying train tickets, others huddled in small groups talking worriedly among themselves. I saw three Bugbears, one with a large gash in his tail, waiting at one of the ticket booths, and I wondered how many family members they’d left behind when they’d made their escape. There were also fauns and satyrs, a tiny red dragon, some mermen—I could tell by their gills—all waiting for tickets or pointing determinedly at the destination board.

As I marveled at the startling variety of life around me, at the utter uniqueness of each of God’s bizarre creations, I was forced to wonder why he/she had lifted Man to such a lofty place among this pantheon. And I realized, as I stared at the veritable Tower of Babel surrounding me, that I couldn’t think of one good answer to my question.

“Is it always this busy?” I whispered.

Jarvis shook his head, but it was a tall, bearded man in a top hat, horns, and black tails walking in the same direction as us who responded to my question.

“No, this stampede is because of what’s happening in Purgatory. Death has been beheaded and the Devil and one of Death’s Daughters, along with the Devil’s loyal minions, have overrun Death, Inc. This mad rush is on their way to help fight them.”

I thought of my father, who’d done nothing wrong but had been destroyed nonetheless, and my mother and baby sister who were alive (maybe) only at the Devil’s behest—and I felt ill.

“What about Hell?” I asked, thinking of Runt and Cerberus now. “What’s happening down there?”

“We don’t know,” the man said, shaking his head. “There’s been no word since yesterday.”

“Thank you,” I said, grateful for any information I could get.

The man tipped his hat to us before veering off in another direction, losing himself in the crowd.

“Where are we going?” I asked as Jarvis led us to an unoccupied ticket booth.

“Two tickets to Heaven,” he intoned into the booth’s window.

“Uhm, there’s no one there,” I said, but Jarvis raised a finger for me to be quiet.

Suddenly, two tiny pink tickets magically appeared on the counter in front of us.

“Thank you,” Jarvis said politely. As he pocketed them, I peered into the booth to see if there was anyone hiding inside, but no matter how I squinted, I couldn’t see anyone or anything.

“Who’s in there?” I asked, curious. “It looks empty.”

“It’s not,” Jarvis replied, turning away from the window—and since he seemed to know where we were going, I let him lead us back into the crowd. “You remember when your friend Daniel was a shade, his body trapped in Hell so he would be forced to do the Devil’s bidding?”

I nodded.

“That was what was inside of that ticket booth: a damned soul who has chosen to let its body rot in Hell rather than do what the Devil demands.”

“Oh,” I said as comprehension flooded my brain. “Gotcha.”

We picked our way through the throng, our footsteps and those of the people around us melding together into a cacophony of echoing sound as we moved toward the arched tunnel marked DEPARTURES. Other people/creatures around us were carrying train tickets in a rainbow of hues, but I saw no one else with pink ones like ours.

“How come everyone is here?” I asked, picking up my pace to keep up with Jarvis’s longer strides. “Why aren’t they just using the wormholes?”

“Because it’s through Purgatory that all wormhole activity is monitored—”

“So?” I asked, interrupting him.

“If you’d let me finish, Miss Calliope,” he said, rolling his droopy eyes heavenward in a signature Jarvis move. “What I was going to say, before you rudely interrupted me, is that all wormhole activity is monitored and
regulated
through Purgatory. If the Devil has taken over the building, then he’s disabled the system so no one can get in or out of Purgatory.”

“Shit.”

“Yes,” Jarvis agreed with me. “Shit is definitely apropos.”

We crossed the threshold of the Departure’s archway, leaving the station behind us as we followed the crush of bodies down a wide brown-and-white mosaic-tiled walkway. The arched ceiling soared twenty feet above us, and long pewter pendant fixtures cast in an art deco chevron motif dangled from the ceiling at ten-foot intervals, bathing the chamber in pale yellow light. Spaced between the light fixtures were tall, arched doorways with corresponding platform numbers embedded in the overhead tile work. The doorways were shrouded in darkness so that whatever lay beyond them remained in shadow. To keep myself occupied as we walked, I started counting doorways, but stopped when I hit one hundred and fifty-seven—and the tunnel still had no end in sight. With each subsequent doorway we passed, we lost more and more of the crowd as they peeled away to find their platforms.

Soon, only Jarvis and I remained, trudging forward like two refugees from a modern-day civil war. Jarvis, wearing his cheap business suit and thin addict’s body, looked the worse for wear. He had dark smudges under his puppy dog eyes, and the pomade in his hair had started to dissolve, leaving a tuft of dark hair sticking straight up in the back. I didn’t even want to think about how I looked. Suffice it to say, I could smell my own stench and it told me I was fit for a Dumpster and nowhere else.

When we reached doorway number three hundred and seventy-five, I stopped in protest.

“My feet hurt and you look like you’re gonna fall over,” I said to Jarvis. “Can we just take like a two-minute break . . .
please
?”

“We only have one more to go,” Jarvis said, shaking his head and pointing at an arched doorway on our left.

“Okay.” I sighed and picked up my feet.

Jarvis got there first but waited for me.

“Here’s your ticket,” he said, thrusting one of the pink things at me. I took the proffered ticket, and then together we entered the darkened doorway, stepping out from behind a column to find ourselves on a normal New York City subway platform with people milling about, reading the paper and playing with their cell phones as they waited for their train to arrive.

I heaved a sigh of relief, glad we hadn’t ended up somewhere strange . . . and then I started looking around me. After that, I wasn’t so sure
how
I felt anymore—definitely not relieved.

There was something
odd
about the people—humans only now—that surrounded us. An older man reading a book on one of the benches to our right was so transparent I could see the brick wall through his head. Down at the end of the platform, two skinny young women in yoga gear and thick hoodies casually held their yoga mats at their sides: one woman was slightly transparent, while the other was almost totally gone.

A Hispanic nanny and her tiny Caucasian charge, both wrapped in medium-weight coats as they waited hand in hand by the turnstiles, weren’t very see-through at all.

The station itself looked normal, with dirt on the concrete floor, smears of God knew what on the white-tiled walls, and a stack of grubby newspapers sitting on the floor by the turnstiles. Beyond the turnstiles, a heavy African-American woman in an MTA uniform sat inside the information booth, reading over some paperwork. She was almost totally solid, like the nanny and her charge.

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked Jarvis as I took a seat beside him on one of the empty benches.

“Nothing is wrong with them, Miss Calliope,” Jarvis said.

“No,” I argued, shaking my head. “There is definitely something wrong with them. I can see right through that guy.”

I pointed at the guy on the next bench over, reading his book. I could see the book’s title—Dostoevsky’s
The Double
—through the man’s transparent hands.

Jarvis sighed.

“Yes, I forgot, you’re seeing their deaths—”

“What?”
I growled back at him.

“These are human beings, Miss Calliope. You are Death, well, at least, half-Death right now, so your powers are growing. I suspect what you are seeing right now is how long they each have left to live on this earth.”

My stomach, which was already a burning mess, flipped over with an acidy gurgle, and I fought another burp that was crawling up my throat.

I didn’t want to know how long these people had left on the earth, I didn’t want to see their impending deaths—this was an awful, awful thing!

“This is the way of Death,” Jarvis said, continuing his explanation in the vacuum of my silence. “It’s not as bad as you think, though. Having done it before.”

I felt terrible. I hadn’t asked Jarvis anything about what he’d been through. Granted, things had been a little nutty since we’d hooked back up together, but still, I’d acted thoughtlessly.

“What happened to you when you died?” I asked. “I mean, I’d like to know, if you’d like to tell me.”

Jarvis shrugged.

“It wasn’t so bad. The Ender of Death knew my weakness and there was nothing I could do to protect myself. Right before he murdered me, he intimated that he might’ve dispatched your father, as well, and that was the hardest blow.”

Jarvis paused, his throat constricting.

“Your father was my friend and he deserved better than that,” Jarvis continued, his brown eyes filling with tears.

I nodded, my heart squeezing tighter with every word he uttered.

“Luckily,” Jarvis continued, a lighter tone in his voice now, “I was dispatched by an incompetent.”

“Huh?” I said, not understanding.

“You do a terrible job as Death. You aren’t committed to the job—”

“No, duh,” I shot back.

“So, you leave a little spark of life in the souls you dispatch.”

I sat up in my seat, pleased.

“I do?”

Jarvis nodded.

“In my case, it was a positive thing. It gave me enough power to escape from the Harvesters and find my way back into another body.”

“And why would it
not
be positive?” I asked nervously.

“All souls must transmigrate,” Jarvis said. “You give them the power to fight against the system, and if they try hard enough, you give them the freedom to escape.”

“Oh,” I said. “I can see how that might not be a good thing.”

Neither one of us had anything else to add to the conversation, so we sat in silence, waiting for our train. Jarvis was right, though. If I was gonna be Death, I was gonna have to commit myself to the job, or else I was going to ruin everything my dad had worked so hard to achieve.

Looking for something to do while we waited, I checked out the ticket I was holding. It was one of those rectangular, mass-produced paper tickets like you see at school raffles or at cheap carnivals, only this one was in a blistering shade of hot pink instead of the requisite red or yellow. It had the word TICKET on one side and KEEP THIS COUPON on the other, with no reference to what the ticket was supposed to be used for anywhere on it.

“Budget cuts?” I said, pointing at the ticket. “Or are they just cheapos?”

Jarvis laughed, looking down at his own ticket.

“Yes, I
have
always found these to be a tad bourgeois,” he said with a smile.

We sat in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I knew so little about Jarvis’s life that I couldn’t have told you what he was thinking about, but I was still trying to wrap my mind around my indiscretion with Frank and why I’d let it happen. Jeez, if Jarvis hadn’t been there to wrest me out of Frank’s control, who knew where I would’ve found myself?

“I’m glad you came back,” I said to Jarvis unexpectedly. “I don’t think I could’ve done any of this without you.”

“Well, that’s not entirely true, Miss Calliope,” Jarvis said, an evil grin spreading across his face. “You did manage to accomplish the ‘getting jiggy in the subway’ part all by yourself.”

And before I had a chance to properly respond (i.e., smack Jarvis upside the head), our train arrived.

With a loud
screech
, the train pulled into the station, the doors opening to unload its burden of passengers onto the subway platform.

Except no one got off this train.

I looked in both directions, thinking maybe it was just the cars in front of and behind us, but from what I could tell,
no one
had disembarked.

“This is ours,” Jarvis said, standing up. “The pink train.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The train was silver like all the other subway cars I’d ever ridden on, and then I noticed the number on the side of the car:

Three hundred and sixty-seven.

In hot pink neon.

I’d seen trains with red numbers—and white numbers, too—but
never
ones in neon pink.

Interesting,
I thought. Very
interesting.

We climbed through the doors and sat down on a two-seater bench. I was still waiting for other people to get on with us, but no one did.

“I guess it’s just us, huh?” I said finally when the doors slammed shut and the whole train shuddered to life.

“To them,” Jarvis said, pointing to the people still waiting in the station, “the sign says this train is out of service.”

“And what do those people make of me and you getting on an out-of-service car?” I asked deliberately.

Jarvis pointed at the window across from us. If I’d expected to see my reflection, I was sadly mistaken. Instead, a tall Asian man in stained beige coveralls, a buzz cut revealing the topography of his bumpy skull, had taken my place. Beside me, a short Hispanic man in matching coveralls sat primly in his seat, hands clasped in his lap, a silly little smile playing on his lips.