The Golden Age of Death (A CALLIOPE REAPER-JONES NOVEL) (25 page)

The tuna was still up against his neck, pressing itself into his flesh.

Yes, I’m the one talking…telepathically…to you.

The tuna backed away so that they were no longer touching, and its voice faded.

Freezay stared at the fish.

The fish stared at Freezay.

Freezay raised his hand and beckoned the tuna to come close again. The tuna swam forward, pressing its side into Freezay’s cheek.

There. Now we can talk again.

Freezay didn’t know what to say to the tuna.

There’s no need to be nervous.

The tuna’s telepathic voice was very warm and feminine.

Oh, that’s very sweet of you to say.

He decided he was being rude not to ask the tuna’s name—

It’s Skye. Like the Isle of.

The tuna’s ability to predict his thoughts—

Just call me Skye. Calling me “the tuna” is so impersonal.

Freezay knew there was only one thing he needed to do. He needed—

To ask for my help? Yes, that’s why I’m here.

He needed the tuna to untie him.

Your wish is my command.

The tuna swam away from his cheek then dove downward, toward the coral. Fascinated by the tuna’s—Skye’s—dexterity, Freezay stared as she bit into the filament until, suddenly, he was free, and his body began to ascend slowly up to the surface.

Skye swam after him, catching up to his floating form with zero exertion of effort. She slid her body against him so he could grab ahold of her long flank with both hands, reconnecting them.

There you go.

Freezay wanted Skye to know he would be eternally—

No need to be grateful. It was my pleasure.

With a smile and nod to the bizarreness of his situation, Freezay gave up on communication altogether and decided just to enjoy the ride—

Splendid idea,
Skye, the tuna, replied telepathically.

*   *   *

it felt very
strange to have one’s whole body compressed into something the size and shape of a walnut. Thank God, it hadn’t hurt—and boy had Bernadette expected it to hurt—so, at least there was that. She did have to admit not having a body made life a lot easier. For one thing, you didn’t get cold. You didn’t get hungry and tired either, which was nice. Your joints didn’t ache like they normally did—she’d only recently been diagnosed with arthritis and hadn’t been looking forward to taking all the toxic medicines she’d been prescribed, and that still didn’t completely stop your immune system from destroying your joints from the inside out.

Of course, there were downsides to not having a body, too. Like being dead. This was a downside Bernadette could not get behind. Still, she would never have been able to squeeze her old body into a container as small as the one she was in right now. Heck, who was she kidding? She hadn’t been able to get her
bottom into a size-sixteen pant in years, and now, here she was, all nested up in a tiny green-glass perfume bottle.

After she’d agreed to do what they asked, the twins had been as sweet as pie—and they weren’t half as scary once their friends were gone. They’d described what they wanted her to do (fold herself up into a tiny ball) and then they’d explained how she could then will her new, smaller self into the green-glass bottle they were holding between them.

She’d cottoned on pretty quickly, easily manipulating her essence into whatever shape she wanted. Getting into the bottle had been harder. Her soul hadn’t wanted to go, had fought her efforts to force it inside. Finally, the gentle twin had removed an oval-shaped silver bell from her hair, ringing it three times in quick succession. The trilling sound had an immediate effect on Bernadette. She was at once totally free and, at the same time, totally enmeshed in the sound. It filled every ounce of her spirit and made her want to laugh and cry at the same time. It was orgasmic, as powerful as a religious epiphany, and she was afraid it might make her lose her mind if it’d gone on too long.

Not that she had a physical mind to lose. It was whatever made her
her
—her soul, maybe?—she was terrified of misplacing.

After what seemed like an eternity, the ringing stopped. Though the bell had only rung three times, it had felt like hours to Bernadette. That was when she’d had to remind herself she was on Afterlife time. Things worked differently in death than they did in life. Bells rang for hours instead of seconds, Victorian zombie twins came to collect you for nefarious purposes…and God was missing in action.

Bernadette decided she no longer felt like praying. It hadn’t done much for her in life, and it had been less than helpful in death. The only thing she felt compelled to ask for—and it wasn’t praying, it was just asking the universe for help—was the safety of her grandson, Bart. It was all she cared about in the entirety of the world, all she needed or wanted. If these Victorian zombies left Bart alone for eighty or ninety years, then all of her suffering, all of the terribleness of death, would be fine. Well, maybe not fine, but at least bearable.

She’d been in her green-glass prison for a long time when she suddenly realized someone had removed the top, and she
was free to come out. She focused on her soul, pushing it from the confines of the perfume bottle, and then, suddenly, her soul was expanding, stretching back into its original, human form.

She felt so much better now that she wasn’t in the bottle. She hadn’t realized how constraining it’d been in there. She also hadn’t realized her senses had shut down until her sight and hearing began to return in fits and starts. It reminded her of Bart’s computer when he had to reboot it, all black screen and then a whirling ball of color.

When her eyes had finally adjusted and she was able to see again, she found herself goggling at her surroundings. She kept wanting to pinch herself, to make sure she was experiencing what she thought she was experiencing: a biblical frieze right out of the Old Testament come to life before her awestruck gaze.

As a child, she’d imagined the Red Sea as a bloody, foaming beast bowing before Moses’s raised staff, parting so he could bring his people forth to a new life. Who cared if this new life entailed wandering in the desert for forty years? At least the Jews were free of Pharaoh’s rule, right?

Reality dovetailed nicely with Bernadette’s imagination. The sea before her was red and frothy, bubbling up with eddying pools of foam that reminded her of watery tentacles—yet, the man who stood at the edge of the cauldron-like sea, a thin metal staff in his raised hand, was not like any kind of Moses she’d ever dreamed of. He was tall and statuesque like a racehorse. He even had a horse’s forelock of black hair draping his brow. His skin was the color of a ripe peach, firm and tan, and his pitch-black hair descended in luxuriant waves to his shoulder blades.

He was wearing a long, pale blue caftan that split at the neck—revealing a tuft of thick black chest hair—but covered the rest of him completely except where its sleeves fell back from the wrists of his upraised arms. He was doing something to the water, controlling it with his mind so it leapt and foamed, parting briefly every now and then to reveal a sandy, rock-strewn bottom. Then the water would fall against itself, covering the sea floor again.

The man half turned in Bernadette’s direction and she saw dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and an equine shape to his face. He
smiled at her, beckoning her forward with his free hand, and the warmth of his expression made Bernadette’s heart flip-flop.

“Come!” he called, the smile never leaving his face.

She looked around, making sure he was really calling to her—there was no one else there, just an empty expanse of desert—then she took a tentative step toward him.

“Don’t be afraid, Bernadette.”

His voice was loud, but got softer as she crossed the divide between them. Like a promise, he held his hand out for her to take, his pianist’s fingers trembling slightly. His features became doughier as she got closer to him, her relative closeness and the harshness of the desert sun finally revealing all of his flaws.

He wasn’t nearly as handsome as she’d first thought. His eyes were too close, his chin too long, and his thick hair had chunky white dandruff peppered through it.

The only thing that held true was his smile. It never once lost its hold on her.

“Are you Moses?” Bernadette asked as soon as she’d reached him and his hand was grasping hers.

The man laughed, showing pristine white teeth.

“I’m just the Gatekeeper to the East…I have stood here for centuries, tasked with guiding souls to their proper destination.”

“Oh,” Bernadette said as the man’s hand began to get sweaty, making it hard to hold.

She tore her eyes away from his puffy face, choosing to stare out at the roiling sea, instead. She didn’t think it was a very heavenly sea, all red and swollen and seething—and it made her wonder where, exactly, she was…because she was starting to feel pretty certain this
wasn’t
Heaven.

“Are you ready to walk the sea?” the man asked, continuing to smile down at her.

His smile hadn’t seemed at all sinister at first, but now Bernadette couldn’t look at it without getting creeped out. She hated to admit it, but the man was starting to make her feel very uncomfortable.

“I don’t think I want to,” she said. “No, I’m sure I don’t.”

She tried to remove her hand from the man’s, but he held on tightly, not letting her go.

“Take me back home,” she said.

The man gave her a sad smile, one more real than the one he’d first worn.

“There is no going back, Bernadette,” he said, a mournful undertone to his words. “One can only go forward when one is on the path leading into the heart of Hell.”

*   *   *

“you can’t go
back,” Morrigan said, her red eyebrow arched in a look of pure disdain.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed beside Caoimhe, her long white fingers gently pulling at the tangled strands of her lover’s hair.

“I have to, love,” Caoimhe said.

She knew what Morrigan had done—because Morrigan had told her in detail—and she was very sorry her partner had wasted her energy. She wasn’t going to stay in their lovely, sun-drenched Balmoral flat doing nothing as her daughter was erased from the world.

Of course she’d expected such resistance from her jealous wife, which was exactly why she’d told her nothing of Daniel’s call. She’d just gotten her things in order, putting together her few meager possessions (most of what they owned jointly
really
belonged to Morrigan), so she would be ready to go to Sea Verge. She knew she’d arrived in time to stop that horrible Siren, Starr, from absconding into the sea, but then something had happened in the car and she’d blacked out, waking up here, in her bed with Morrigan at her side.

“I forbid it,” Morrigan said, standing up and walking to the mantelpiece.

Stress had made the blue veins underneath her pale skin stand out and her prized red hair seemed limp. She was still a beautiful woman, but she looked wrecked.

“You can’t forbid me to do anything, love,” Caoimhe said, sitting up in bed, her head swimming. She remembered an explosion, a bright flare of orange, and knew this must be what was responsible for the vertigo she was experiencing. “I’m my own person.”

She’d always been her own person. It was something she prided herself on. No one could ever say she was beholden to anyone or anything. Even when Morrigan had tried to force
immortality upon her, Caoimhe had resisted—not because she didn’t want to spend forever with her wife, but because she hadn’t earned it, herself.

“I detest that about you, you bitch,” Morrigan said, her back to Caoimhe. “So hatefully independent.”

“Yes, it’s the truth,” Caoimhe said, slipping her feet into her slippers and standing up.

She felt woozy for a moment, but the feeling passed, and she was able to walk across the room without keeling over.

“It’s also what you love about me,” Caoimhe finished, wrapping her arms around Morrigan’s slender waist.

She nuzzled against the soft fluff of hair at the nape of Morrigan’s neck then pressed her lips to the warm flesh.

“You really are hateful,” Morrigan said, trying to ignore Caoimhe’s lips on her skin.

“I am?”

Morrigan nodded.

“Terribly hateful? Or just plain old hateful?” Caoimhe asked—and she thought she’d won Morrigan over.

“No,” Morrigan said, pushing Caioimhe away. “You can’t seduce me into doing what you like.”

The jig was up. She wasn’t going to get Morrigan’s approval, no matter what she did. She’d hoped this wasn’t going to be the case, but in her heart she’d suspected as much.

Her wife did not care for her daughter. Not because she disliked Calliope, personally, but because she hated anyone who took Caoimhe’s attention away from her. It was a flaw in Morrigan’s character, but through the years, Caoimhe had come to accept it was a part of who her lover was. She didn’t try and change Morrigan—that would’ve been like squeezing blood from a rock—but she didn’t reward the bad behavior, either.

“She’s your boss and you’re willing to just throw her under the bus,” Caoimhe said, her tone harsh.

Selfishness was another of Morrigan’s characteristics she didn’t love.

“I’m just a lowly Vice-President,” Morrigan whined.

“So?” Caoimhe said.

“So nothing,” Morrigan replied. “If she can’t take care of herself, then she doesn’t deserve to be Death—”

Caoimhe rested her hands on her hips, the silky dressing gown she wore making her feel strangely vulnerable.

“That’s enough! I don’t want to hear another word against Callie.”

Morrigan saw Caoimhe meant business and decided not to push the issue.

“Now, I’m going to meet Jarvis and the others at the agreed upon place and there’s really nothing you can do to stop me,” Caoimhe said, eyes narrowed.

“But isn’t there?” Morrigan said, taking a step toward Caoimhe.

Caoimhe sensed Morrigan had something up her sleeve, and she knew it was not going to be pleasant. She tried to back away, to put as much distance between them as she could, but for every step back she took, Morrigan took one closer.