The Golden Age of Death (A CALLIOPE REAPER-JONES NOVEL) (30 page)

After he’d made the choice to go along with fate instead of fighting it, he felt a lot better and was able to enjoy being pulled
through the water. Since he didn’t have to do any work, he took the down time to study his new friend. From her lack of mermaid tail, he could see she wasn’t a full-blooded Siren, but her legs and lower body were covered in scales and her feet were elongated like flippers, so there had to be some Siren blood there.

He appreciated the fact she was wearing a swimsuit, so he didn’t have to stare at her nude body. He’d had a hard time with Starr’s nudity—apparently he was a glutton for Siren punishment—and he didn’t need another round of that. Things were just too crazy to throw sex and attraction into the mix.

He wanted to ask her where they were going, but he wasn’t sure if talking worked underwater. He decided to give it a shot and see what happened.

“Where are we going?” he asked, expecting his words to get lost in the rush of water, but he was pleasantly surprised to hear his own voice echoing back very distinctly in his ears.

She turned her head, her mouth trained in his direction, but one eye still looking ahead.

“I’m taking you to land. I can’t help you after that, but I can get you started on your journey.”

She seemed to think this ended the discussion because she returned her attention back to swimming. Freezay didn’t try to get more out of her, just chilled out and enjoyed the ride. It felt like eons since he’d been able to relax. If he thought back, really tried to place the last time he’d had this feeling, it would’ve been more than three weeks earlier.

He’d been between jobs—which was a rare thing for him. If he didn’t keep his brain occupied, he got maudlin and did stupid things like drink two bottles of rum in an evening and get himself kicked out of his favorite bar. But for some reason fate had conspired to give him a night off, and this time he wasn’t feeling all antsy on the inside like he usually did.

He’d taken up residence at the bar early, but he’d limited himself to one drink every two hours. Couple that with the greasy basket of fries and the cheeseburger he had taken his time over, and it had guaranteed him a stay at the bar until closing. He’d been a good boy that night, and the bartender, Jessica—a twenty-four-year-old, “Sister Golden Hair” song
come to life—had taken pity on him and come back to his place after she’d tipped out, letting him make love to her until the sun had come up.

That was the last time he hadn’t been totally stressed out—and it had been very,
very
nice.

“We’re almost there,” his guide said, turning back to give him a smile. “Another few minutes.”

Freezay felt like they’d been traveling for hours, the blonde woman pulling him behind her like a swaddled child, but now as he looked around, expecting to see land, he found nothing but open sea. He had no idea where they were. They could’ve been in China for all he knew.

“Are we near the U.S.?” Freezay asked and the blonde laughed.

“Yes, you’re in U.S. waters. In fact, we’re just off the Massachusetts coastline.”

“Well, that’s a relief, I guess,” he said.

He didn’t know Massachusetts very well, so this was going to be interesting. A wet man with no money and no car was not what you wanted to be when you hit the streets of suburbia.

“Time to go up,” she said, and began the ascent to the surface.

Twilight was fast approaching as they broke through the surface of the water. He squinted his eyes, but could barely make out the shape of the shoreline in the darkness.

“I’ll tow you in closer,” the blonde said, “but no land, all right?”

He nodded, just pleased to be sucking air again. The water breathing wasn’t terrible, but it left a thick briny taste in his mouth.

It only took them a few minutes to reach a sandbar, and then Freezay could stand again.

“This is as far as I go,” his guide said.

He stuck out his hand and she took it. They shook once and then he released her slender palm.

“Thank you, whoever you are,” he said, giving her a wink. “My mystery woman.”

She smiled, but her eyes were still sad. When she didn’t take the bait, he shrugged—he wasn’t going to get her name after
all—then he stepped off the sandbar, dog-paddling toward the shore.

“Wait!” she called after him, and he stopped, turning back around and treading water.

He waited as she collected herself. It was hard to tell what she was thinking because twilight had finally overtaken the sky, hiding her face in shadow.

“Please tell Calliope and Clio I love them…and that I’m sorry.”

She didn’t wait for an acknowledgement, just dove into the waves and was gone.

*   *   *

there was a
reason the Cult of Kali was so dark and violent: The woman had an almost insatiable thirst for blood. This she then passed down to her followers, and they obliged her accordingly with feasts of violence. She appreciated their devotion, but it wasn’t enough. Every so often she liked to dip her hands into warm blood she’d drawn for herself.

The Vargr massacre had elicited enough blood to keep her happy for weeks. When she was done eviscerating and decapitating her enemies—and there were many of them—she found her body caked in their red, hot gore. It was quite an aphrodisiac. She was intoxicated by the taste and smell of herself and she swore she wouldn’t bathe for at least twenty-four hours. She liked the feeling of viscera all over her skin.

And it wasn’t a bad moisturizer, either.

As she surveyed the mess she’d made of white girl’s pad, she remembered she’d left one of the Vargr alive and kicking. It was one of the smaller females, and she’d only broken its back, so it was incapacitated, but it wouldn’t die, for now.

She marched back through the carnage, stepping on as many body parts as she could, enjoying the feel of crunching bones and matted fur under her feet. She’d decapitated most of her kills, but a few had escaped the treatment and those were the ones who hadn’t changed back into human form. She felt sorry for the human ones. They looked weak and powerless next to their furry brothers and sisters.

That was one thing she did not want: to be powerless in death.
She didn’t fear death, she relished it, and if she didn’t die while in battle, then she would consider her demise a failure.

She couldn’t remember exactly where she’d left the survivor, so she just started kicking the bodies as she walked until one of them groaned and she saw it still retained its head.

“Hey, fur ball,” she said, giving the beast another kick in the flank. “I got something to tell you and you’d better listen well.”

She squatted down next to the helpless creature, its blood-flecked tongue lolling in its mouth.

“Tell that master of yours that I got white girl’s back,” she said, whispering in the Vargr’s ear. “So fuck the hell off.”

She stood up and gave the beast a final kick.

“You gonna remember that, fur ball?”

The beast nodded weakly.

“Now I’m gonna send you back where you came from.”

She slapped her hands together and a whirling vortex appeared in front of them. Slipping her hands under the wounded beast, she lifted it into the air and heaved it into the wormhole. Having received its due, the wormhole closed up like a lotus flower and disappeared.

Kali rubbed her hands together, pleased with her good work. She’d promised white girl she’d look after her, and Kali was not one to shirk her duties. Now she had another task to start on and she needed a little help for this one—namely, someone (Indra) whose golden tongue could persuade even a corpse to sit up and live again. She’d already let Indra know what was happening and that she was on her way to collect him. He had a vested interest in the outcome of this battle because he was in love with white girl’s sister—and if he and Kali didn’t help out, his lady was not gonna survive this hostile takeover. Immortal or not now, when white girl, aka Death, ceased to exist, then the bad boys would execute any of her remaining friends and family. Kali knew this for fact because if she were the one on the other side, she’d do the exact same thing.

Lucky for white girl, Kali had a soft spot for dipwads who threw girly magazines at her head (something Callie had done on their very first meeting). She would use everything in her power to keep white girl sitting pretty—and that meant getting her hands dirtier than they already were. Something she was very much looking forward to.

Surveying the damage, Kali saw her work at Sea Verge was done. She thought about taking a wormhole to Indra’s house, but decided against it. As much as she liked killing Vargr, this was not the time for that—and hopping into a wormhole would only clue the bad boys in to where she was headed. True, she’d told Jarvis she would try to draw out their pursuers, but it had been a lie. She had other business to attend to, business that came directly from white girl’s own mouth.

Instead, she made her way back to the garage, a separate building just down from the main house where she knew Jarvis kept the earthbound transportation. She was looking for something spiffy, preferably an automobile, but when she opened the garage door, her eye caught sight of something hot pink hiding in the corner underneath a white drop cloth.

“Now wait one minute,” she whispered as she crossed the garage, making a beeline for the drop cloth–covered, hot pink thing.

Ripping away the covering, she gasped because what she saw underneath it made her heart do a little flip-flop.

“So. Damn.
Hot
,” Kali breathed, as she stared, in utter fascination, at the hot pink Segway standing before her.

It looked as though the Goddess of Death and Destruction had found her mode of transportation.

Marcel was dead—at least this incarnation of him.

His body lay in the desert sand, the fierce light from the sun beating down on his twisted features: the purple tongue, the petechial hemorrhaging in his eyes, the splotchy fingerprints wrapping around his throat like a necklace. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, but it soon would. And I didn’t want to think about what the desert heat would do to the body after a few hours on “broil.”

I looked up at Cerberus, the giant, three-headed hellhound (I thought he resembled an overgrown black lab, but I would never tell him that), trying to ascertain his thoughts on what we should do next. I trusted him implicitly, not just because he was Daniel’s friend and Runt’s dad, but also because he was wise and didn’t take shit from anyone.

I was beyond pleased that when Runt had made her wormhole jump she’d chosen to go to her dad—because anywhere Cerberus happened to be was what I would call “safe.”

Cerberus’s two dumb heads (they possessed the good-natured disposition of traditional dogs) were busy sniffing Marcel’s corpse and enjoying the fine stench of death it was exuding, while the third head (I affectionately referred to him as “Snarly head”) was busy watching me.

Snarly head was the thinking man’s head and the only one you wanted to have a dialogue with. He differed physically, and in disposition, from his two brother heads because he was a Cyclops—his one giant yellow eyeball hardly ever blinked—and he was about as excitable as a rock. Let’s just say whenever the two dumb heads were busy licking their shared balls, Snarly head was the only one who had the decency to look embarrassed by the spectacle.

I could tell Snarly head had lots to say on the subject of what we were gonna do with Marcel’s body, but since I was Death, he wanted to be respectful and let me speak first, if I was so inclined. I had an idea of what I
thought
we should do, but was loath to say it out loud because it was so goddamned unorthodox it would probably get me yelled at.

I looked from Runt to Snarly head, then I took a breath and said, “I want to call him back from death.”

No one yelled at me.

This was a good sign.

“Is it a terrible idea?” I asked, my energy flagging as the heat beat down on my head and I remembered where I was again.

As if I could ever really forget.

Hell was the place I hated most. The heat was infernal—it never let up even at night—and it was the scene of some of my most spectacular failures. And did I say I hated the place?

No, I despised it.

“I think you’ve had many ideas that were much worse,” Snarly head said, his large yellow eye, unblinking.

“Really? You think this one might be okay?” I asked, surprised by his answer.

Snarly head nodded.

“What I think…is that your idea is worth a try.”

I looked over at Runt, who was sitting in the sand beside her dad, black tail thumping. I took this as a sign she was telling me to go for it.

“What about this schmuck?” I said, pointing at Alternate Frank, who was still trussed up like a heifer. His pale skin wasn’t used to Hell’s furnace-like heat and he was only turning redder by the second.

Alternate Frank had been silent since we’d taken the wormhole
into Hell, and as far as I was concerned, the longer he kept his mouth shut the better.

“You will need him,” Snarly head said, turning so he could stare at my prisoner with his giant yellow eye. “Possibly as a bargaining piece—but you will also need to interrogate him, find out what he knows so you are then in synch with your enemy. So as much as I would like to tear him limb from limb and feed his carcass to the crows…”

I knew exactly how Snarly head felt. This was the man who was partially responsible for the attack on Runt, and who’d murdered Marcel, and God knew what else.

“Okay then, we hold on to him…for now,” I said.

With the Alternate Frank situation settled, I returned to the next matter at hand: Marcel’s reanimation.

I tried not to think about what this would mean for my future. If I brought Marcel back to life now, then I’d still be liable for my part of the agreement I’d made with him and Anjea in the Antarctic. The world would have its Golden Age of Death and then, when it was all over, I would be sacrificed to Marcel. It still might happen anyway—I didn’t know if the bargain carried over to his next incarnation or not, but with my luck it probably did.