Servants of the Storm (36 page)

“Isaac,” I say weakly, “come here.”

He spins and kneels by my side. I hold out my arms.

“This is the wrong time for a hug,” he mutters.

“It’s not really a hug,” I whisper, and he hugs me anyway.

“Hold tight. We’re going to find a way out of this,” he whispers back.

“I know.”

I glance over his shoulder at Kitty. Her pouty mouth turns down when she sees Isaac hugging me, and she throws a lamp
against the wall with a growl. I slide my good arm under the hem of Isaac’s leather jacket.

“Don’t even think about it,” he says.

“I’m not.”

“Dovey—”

But before he can ask me to be calm or reasonable, I yank my dad’s .38 out of the back of his jeans, aim for Kitty’s chest, and pull the trigger.

The report echoes around the brick. Isaac yells, and Kitty staggers back with a shriek as a black hole blooms in her thigh.

“You did not just shoot me, bitch!” she roars.

My head’s reeling from the blast, and my stitched pinkie stings from the recoil, but I aim the gun and shoot again. She’s leaping over the junk now, as agile as a cat and fighting her way across the room. The shot goes wild. So does the next one. I try to count bullets in my head, but the number gets all muddled. I either have two left or zero, or seven, but none of that sounds quite right.

Kitty’s black-stained leg collapses as she leaps over a table, and I know my time is short. With only one working arm, and that one getting shaky, it’s hard to aim.

“Hold me up,” I whisper to Isaac, and his hands are steady and gentle around my back, my chest tight against his.

I hold the gun up like my dad showed me, using Isaac’s shoulder to prop up my arm. I close one eye, lining Kitty up in the sight as she charges me.

And then I pull the trigger with the last of my strength, gratified to hear the crack of a shot instead of an ineffectual click. With Isaac’s help I collapse back against the couch.

“Did I hit her?” I say. “Did I get her in the stomach?”

“She’s down.” Isaac grabs the gun from my hands and holds it like a club, standing over me protectively.

I can hear Kitty panting on the floor, trying to draw in a rattling breath. I must have hit her in a lung with one of my shots, somewhere near the heart but not near enough, if demons even have those organs at all. Across the room the deer-eared girl has the shotgun aimed at us, her face screwed up with fury as she pulls the trigger. She must not know much about guns. The shells are still upstairs in my jacket pocket. Seconds later she leaps toward us, holding the shotgun upside down like a baseball bat.

I giggle.

“Just hold still,” Isaac says. “Just hold on.”

The rooster man lurches at Isaac from the side with a sharp black knife and slashes his leather jacket across the arm. Isaac hits him with the gun butt, and they clinch, topple over, and roll around in the black goop left over from the dead snakes. The deer girl is almost here with the shotgun. She doesn’t even pause as she steps over the place where Kitty is coughing. The entire cabinet of drawers starts rattling along with Kitty’s every breath, like the snakes and bones are furious. The only thing I have to defend myself with is Carly’s box, and I’m not about to risk it. I pick it up from the couch and hold it to my chest as if somehow it can protect me.

The deer girl is silent as she approaches, and I wish she would say something. Her eyes are wide and black as she raises the shotgun overhead. Only as she begins her downswing does she smile. I hold up my bad arm on instinct, unwilling to let go of Carly’s box. I close my eyes and turn my face away.

But just when I expect the blow to land, there’s a gurgle and a clatter as the heavy shotgun hits the floor. I open my eyes to find Baker standing over me, his hand wrapped around Isaac’s knife. It’s lodged in the deer girl’s throat, and when he jerks it out, black blood foams out through the hole. She slumps over onto the table.

“What do I do? How do I kill her?” he asks me, voice shaky.

I just giggle drunkenly and say, “Give her your mom’s meatloaf.”

“Jesus, Dovey,” he says. “You’re going into shock. Isaac! A little help?”

“Slit her throat. Stab her in the heart. Whatever. Just kill her more. Chop off her pinkie. And then help me!” Isaac yells as he rolls around with the rooster man.

In that tiny twist of a second, I focus on Baker’s face, watching the disgust and fear coalesce into determination. He jabs the knife into the girl’s throat and saws across, and her hands scrabble at him, but he slaps them away. She flops over and then is still, and he uncurls her pinkie and slams the knife down into the concrete floor, his face a mask of fury. She gurgles and coughs, and then deflates a little—but not completely. Baker holds up her distal with a triumphant grin, and I think that I must have looked
like that after killing Mr. Hathaway. When Baker looks back at me, his eyes are black, as black as night.

“Scrappy,” Isaac gasps as he fights the rooster man. “The knife.”

“Put your arm back down below your heart,” Baker says gently to me. “I’ll be right back.”

I cradle my hand, ignoring the fact that it’s turning black and puffy. On the other side of the table, Isaac and Baker are rolling around with the rooster man, and there’s shouting and cursing and falling hat racks. But here on the couch it’s calm. I raise Carly’s dybbuk box up with shaking hands.

“You think you won, don’t you?”

I look down, and Kitty’s face is on the ground by the couch, her hand wrapped around my ankle. I didn’t even notice her touch. In her other hand is a wicked black knife like the one the rooster man pulled on Isaac.

I hold up my puffy hand and wiggle it back and forth. There’s something outrageously funny about it, like it’s made of old tires.

“Maybe.”

She laughs, a cold and breathless sound. Funny how we’re so close, and yet neither one of us can move.

“You’re going to die before you can open it, you know. You’re going to die right here on the couch. But I won’t. And then you’re mine forever. And I’ll have the last laugh. I’ll make you hunt down your parents and kill them slowly. I’ll send you out to steal children in the night. I am going to punish you for a very, very long time.”

“Maybe.”

She drags herself up onto her elbows. There’s a long, black stain on the floor behind her, like a slug trail. I giggle a little. A fox-eared slug. She gets a hand on the arm of the couch, dragging herself closer. I’m mesmerized by the tiny black veins in her face, and by the little black hairs sprouting out of the tops of her ears.

Kitty is right, of course. I can’t beat her now. But there is one thing I can do. I look around the room, but the deer girl is still down and the rooster man is still fighting. It’s just me and Kitty. No one can stop me.

“So what do you think about that, bitch?” she says, holding the knife up like a question mark.

“Time to see what’s behind door number one,” I say, and I put a boot in Kitty’s face and flick the lid on Carly’s dybbuk box.

NOTHING HAPPENS, AND I OPEN
the box wider and scrabble around with the fingers of my good hand. It’s empty, and tears prick behind my eyes. Somewhere in the back corner I touch the tiniest thing, hard and round and as tight as a flower’s bud. I pull it out to look at it, but it erodes to ash and floats away.

A hidden warmth flares in my numb fingertips. It blooms and grows, like a lightbulb turning on, and the heat shoots up my arm, setting all my insides aglow. I feel Carly’s arms around me, feel the sharp cut of my dad’s pocket knife on the pad of my thumb and the warm slickness of our mingled blood between our fingers. I feel a necklace placed just so around my neck, a Popsicle dripping down my fingers, a hand squeezing mine behind a shivering curtain. I close my eyes, wishing to hold on to this feeling, this completeness, forever. I can hear her voice in my memory, the
half-laughing honey sweetness of my best friend saying, “I knew you could do it, Dovey. I knew you’d get your lemon chiffon.”

And then, in the space of a single heartbeat, I feel a sudden rush of limitless joy and wonder, like a thousand church choirs singing on a sunny day, like a bird flying into the sun, and then the feeling is gone, and I know that I’ve succeeded.

Carly’s soul is free.

Tears run down my face, warm and welcome, and I laugh with happiness.

“Keep laughing,” Kitty growls. “I know just what to put in that empty box.”

I watch her inch her way toward me, knowing full well that she’s as unstoppable as the winds of Hurricane Josephine. I was helpless then, and I’m helpless now. But it doesn’t matter. Not really. I’ve done what I came to do. I just wish I could have saved myself, too. That place Carly’s soul went to? It seemed mighty fine. I can only hope that being a distal servant is like being asleep, that there’s not enough of you left to be horrified by the things you’re forced to do.

But I know that’s a false hope; I saw the terror in Carly’s photo at Café 616. I slump down a little farther without meaning to.

Kitty’s got an arm up on the couch beside me when the knife plunges into her neck. Isaac plants a boot on her shoulder and yanks out the blade.

“I want you to watch me while I finish you off,” he says, eyes black and deep.

He kicks her over. She flops onto her back with fear written
across her beautiful, eerie features. With a sneer he jabs the knife into her stomach and rips across in one violent slice. Oh, how I want to look away. But I can’t. It’s all black inside, like Josephine’s pool, but the things floating in the muck are distals. Dozens and dozens of pinkie tips, completely whole and tinged with black. Kitty shudders, and her insides writhe.

I can barely manage a whisper. “Hot pink. Nail polish.”

Isaac stares at me, and there is nothing human in his face. “What?”

“Find. Carly’s distal. Burn it.”

I look away as he digs through the dozens, maybe hundreds, of fingertips. Even when I feel something wet drop into my hand, I can’t look. I know the feel of a distal now, and I clutch it tightly to my chest.

“Watch, Dovey. Watch so you know she’s gone.”

I open my eyes to find Isaac pulling Kitty’s arm to the ground and uncurling her fingers, pinning her pinkie to the concrete floor. But I don’t want to watch; my eyes slide away. I find myself transfixed by a single drop of black blood dribbling out of her fox ear to drop sideways onto the ground.

“What happened to gravity?” I ask no one in particular.

The last thing I remember is Baker scooping me up. My head droops over his arm, and I watch upside down as the fox girl bleeds out into a wide black pool surrounded by pill-shaped bits of fingers. An ink-eyed demon in a leather jacket stands over her, knife in one hand and a lighter in the other, his long blond hair not quite covering his all-black eyes.

I WAKE UP IN A
hospital bed. The second my eyes open, my mom is next to me, holding my hand with a look of ferocious determination, like she can heal me with her thoughts. My dad is on my other side, smoothing hair over his bald spot and sucking on his mustache and crying in a chair. That’s just as it should be, just what I’d expect them to do. Everything is dreamy and white and smeary around the edges, like someone rubbed Vaseline around the corners of the room.

When I try to sit up, searing hot pain consumes my left arm. I stare at it hard, trying to figure out why it’s wrapped in gauze past the elbow and completely immobilized. Then I remember the baby snake hiding in the drawer.

Hazy dreams crash into real memories, and I say, “Where are Baker and Isaac?”

My mom sighs and sniffles and says, “Baker’s in a different wing of the hospital, honey. And we don’t know who Isaac is.”

“He’s one of the two guys who brought me in,” I say. “From the Liberty.”

My parents exchange a glance, and I read sympathy and concern and fear, among other things. My mind is a little slow, though, and I can’t help feeling like I’m missing something.

“They found you with Baker,” my mom says. “He managed to call 911 before he passed out.”

“Is he okay?”

They look at each other again. My dad shakes his head and blinks away tears.

“They think he’ll recover,” my mom says, her voice breaking.

“When can I see him?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says gently. “How do you feel? Are you in pain? Should we call a nurse?”

I try to sit up, but it’s hard to do with one hand wrapped in gauze and the other . . . burning? It’s clenched in a fist, and when I manage to open it, the palm is red and burned, with shadows of ink-black demon blood sunken into the lines.

Most important, that hand is empty.

“Where is it?” I ask, frantic. “Did they save it? Or send it to the incinerator? I felt her leave! They can’t take her back!”

“Sweetie, you need to relax,” my dad says in his soothing voice, standing and walking around the bed to hold my mom’s hand.

I glance around the room, at the sterile table beside the bed. Nothing of mine is here. Not my clothes. Not my half of the Best Friends necklace. And definitely not Carly’s distal.

“I can’t relax,” I say, voice shaking. “This is serious. This is important. What did they do with it?”

My mom sits down in the chair beside my bed and hangs her head. She looks up at me with deep circles around her eyes and new crow’s-feet. In her no-nonsense lawyer voice she says, “If you’re talking about the . . . finger . . . they saved it as evidence.”

“Evidence? No, they can’t save it. It needs to be burned. It has to be destroyed.”

I know I’m babbling, but how can they see me this upset and just sit there watching me? So calm, so sad. So resigned.

“Please. Mom. Dad. I’ll never ask you for anything ever again. But you’ve got to get it back. I can’t tell you why, but I need Carly’s finger.”

My mom looks up at my dad, and he looks down at her. He moves closer to her side, and she wraps her arm around his waist and leans against him. My dad subtly picks something up off the bed, and I see him pushing a button. Cold creeps into my arm, and things start to get hazy. A tear squeezes out of my mom’s eye, and she dashes it away.