The Golden Age of Death (A CALLIOPE REAPER-JONES NOVEL) (34 page)

“You think it’ll hold us?” Jennice asked.

“We shall know soon enough,” Jarvis said, putting his foot on the first step, then letting his weight settle.

Luckily, the step appeared to hold him.

“It’s all right,” Jarvis continued. “Just step where I step and you should be fine.”

“She went up these things pretty fast,” Jennice said. “You sure she’s not a ghost, too?”

This made Jarvis laugh.

“If she’s a ghost, then I want to be exactly like her when I die.”

The funny thing was he wasn’t joking. Noh was growing on him. Ghostly or not, she, like Calliope, was definitely a force to be reckoned with—and Jarvis had a soft spot for strong-willed women. In fact, the woman Jarvis was currently smitten with put Calliope and Noh
both
to shame. His special lady friend, Minnie, was like Mother Nature to their gale force winds.

He wondered how Minnie was doing and if she knew what was happening down here on Earth. He doubted she, or God, her boss, missed anything—they always seemed to have a finger on the pulse of humanity.

To his surprise, thinking about Minnie made him feel better. He found he didn’t really mind being in a dirty building with cobwebs and mouse droppings, chaperoning two will-o’-the-wisp girls. Just knowing Minnie was out there, waiting for him made him feel as though everything would be all right in the end.

These thoughts were interrupted when Jarvis’s sensitive nose decided it’d had enough of dusty, dirty environs and let out a massive sneeze that rattled his body. This was followed by a second, and even more explosive sneeze, which forced Jarvis to reach into his suit coat pocket for his handkerchief.

His hand found the handkerchief easily enough, but as he reached around inside the pocket, it was with dawning horror Jarvis discovered something else was not where it was supposed to be: The original, Angelic copy of
How to Be Death
was gone.

*   *   *

they’d been able
to dodge their pursuers by following the secret passageway. Until it dead-ended at a blank brick wall. The lighting inside the passage was so low Clio had to use her hands to search the walls, hoping to find a secret button or
latch that would allow them to continue onward, but she came back empty-handed.

“Now whadda we do?” Frank asked, but it was less a question and more a whine of defeat.

Clio was never one to give up easily.

“We turn around and go back the way we came. They have to be gone by now, I would think. It’s been hours.”

Clio hoped she was right. It did feel like they’d been walking for hours—but with the ever-present gray limestone floor and walls, it was hard to get a bearing on how long they’d actually been inside the passage.

“You think that’s such a good idea?” Frank asked.

He looked even worse than when she’d first discovered him. His cheeks were razor blades protruding from the sides of his face, his eyes all bruised and sunken in. Whatever process was causing this marked change in Frank, it was progressing at an alarming rate. She just hoped she could get him out of Purgatory before he totally wasted away.

“I don’t have another plan up my sleeve, so…” She trailed off, happily daring him to come up with something better—anything to keep them out of the bad guys’ clutches.

Frank shook his head, and they were both horrified when a handful of his hair fell out, floating to the floor.

“Jesus,” Clio breathed, as Frank’s face tightened and he reached up, gently patting his scalp.

Even more hair came out in his hand and he lurched forward, his gait unsteady. Clio grabbed him around the waist, so he wouldn’t fall over then helped him to sit down on the cold, stone floor. Once he was on his butt, he promptly rolled into the fetal position and began to rock back and forth against the wall.

Because he was doing it so silently, it took Clio a moment to realize Frank was crying—the tip-off was his skinny rib cage moving up and down in an exaggerated manner as the sobs wracked his body. It was pathetic to watch Frank cry, his whole body overtaken by emotion. Clio wanted to avert her eyes, walk away, and give him some privacy, but compassion filled her veins and she knelt down beside him, her hand reaching out to touch his wasted cheek.

“Does it hurt?” she asked, and he nodded.

“I feel all achy and feverish, like I got the flu,” he whispered,
the tears still coursing down his face. He reached up and wiped them away, but it was a futile gesture because there were already more coming.

“Okay, we have to get you out of here. Damn the assholes, we’re taking a wormhole. I don’t care if they follow us,” she said, putting her hand on Frank’s shoulder.

“You know, you remind me of a friend I once had,” Frank said suddenly. “He was brave like you, willing to fight the good fight.”

It felt strange having Frank describe her as “brave” because all she felt right then was weak and scared. The polar opposite of brave.

“He died when we were real young—”

Frank was still talking and Clio realized he was delirious.

“I let him down, though. Shoulda been there when he needed me, but I was sick…and I let him down. Then the animals got him.”

“I can’t imagine that’s true—” she began to say, but Frank only shook his head, the violence of the action bouncing his skull off the limestone. Clio knew it must’ve hurt him, but Frank seemed to have embraced the pain as his punishment.

“You don’t know…you don’t know,” he moaned.

“Okay, we’re gonna get you out of here now.”

But Frank wasn’t listening. His eyes were rolled up in his head, fluttering back and forth like moth wings.

“Frank?” Clio said, shaking him. He didn’t respond, his rigid body starting to thrash. She watched in dismay as his head slammed into the limestone wall over and over again.

Clio didn’t know what to do. She’d never seen anyone have a seizure before, didn’t know how to help him. She just had to sit there and wait until it was over.

“Frank?” she kept asking, trying to break through to him, but he was gone, trapped inside his flailing body.

When it was finally finished, Frank slumped against the wall, his limp body unable to move. His eyes were unfocused, but Clio could see he was still conscious and alive inside.

She didn’t waste another second, just used her powers to call up a wormhole right there in Death, Inc., under everyone’s nose.

It appeared with a low rumbling that came to a crescendo as a flash of light rent the air in front of them.

“Let’s scram,” she said, dragging Frank toward the shimmering tear in the fabric of space/time.

He opened his mouth, trying to speak, but Clio shushed him.

“Not the time,” she said—and then she pulled him through the wormhole behind her.

The magic hit her hard enough to take her breath away. And if
she
was feeling it, then she knew it was even worse for Frank. She’d always made fun of Callie for her hatred of traveling by wormhole, but if this was Cal’s experience every time she took one, then Clio finally understood her dislike.

She felt as though she and Frank were socks in a washer, getting all tumbled around on the heavy cycle. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t fun, either; especially for Frank, who was already hurting so much.

This thought made her wonder if the reason for someone having a terrible wormhole experience might lie in the psyche of the person doing the traveling. Callie was predisposed to hate the experience, so her brain created what she was expecting—and she had a feeling Frank, sick as he was, might be of the same mind as her sister.

Like two rag dolls, the wormhole spit Clio and Frank out in the middle of a gravel driveway, a few feet away from Clio’s Honda Element. She had no idea where they’d ended up, just that she’d asked the wormhole to bring them to her car, wherever it might be. She
had
expected to find Jarvis and Noh with the Element, so it was kind of a disappointment to pick herself up and discover the car was abandoned.

“Damn,” she muttered under her breath as she scooted over to Frank, who was lying on his side in the gravel, his skin pale blue in the moonlight.

“Callie, I’m sorry I almost killed ya,” Frank said, reaching up with a shaking hand and trying to touch Clio’s cheek. “It wasn’t my idea. I always had a little soft spot for ya.”

Shit, he thinks I’m Callie,
Clio thought.
This is awkward.

“I, uh, forgive you.”

He patted her cheek.

“Thank you. Thank you for that.”

He closed his eyes—and Clio had never before been so happy to have someone fall into unconsciousness. As much as
she loved Callie, she just didn’t have the wherewithal to deal with her sister’s fucked-up love life right then.

With Frank down for the count, Clio took a moment to investigate her surroundings.

The car seemed to have been abandoned in favor of going on foot. Clio assumed the reason for this choice had been the giant wrought iron gate and heavy spelled padlock blocking the entrance—and she figured (rightly) no one was getting past the gate without a key or a counter spell.

She didn’t know what to do. She’d really been hoping to find Jarvis and the others, but now she was at a loss.

Without thinking, she yelled Jarvis’s name into the night sky.

That was silly,
she thought, her only response coming from the crickets humming in the grass.

She sat back down in the gravel beside Frank.

She wasn’t sure what to do next. She could try and drag Frank with her while she explored the grounds, looking for a way inside, or she could just leave him “resting” in the gravel—but neither option seemed very appealing.

“Shit,” she said under her breath, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin between her kneecaps. She knew she needed to make a plan, but she was just so frickin’ tired all she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and go to sleep.

And then she remembered something important; something she should’ve thought of immediately.

Clio had a cell phone.

It was just too bad she didn’t get a chance to use it.

*   *   *

caoimhe woke up
in the muted silence that comes just before first light. Her head ached something fierce and her eyelids didn’t want to cooperate, unwilling to open no matter how fervently she begged. So she just lay there, trying to remember what she’d done to give herself such a massive hangover. Had she been at the pub all night? She didn’t think so, but no matter how hard she fought to recall the previous evening, nothing came back to her.

She focused, instead, on asking her head to stop aching—and what a joke this was. She felt like her brain had zero control
over her body these days, and even less so when she was hungover. Finally, after an age, she was able to crack on eye open and get a glimpse of her surroundings. She was happy to discover she was in her own bed, in her own bedroom, in her own flat. It’d been a long time since she’d woken up in a strange place with this kind of hangover, but there’d been a time in her life—not long after she’d given Calliope up to the girl’s father—that she’d tried to blot out her pain in alcohol and a string of very unfulfilling sexual dalliances with random strangers.

Her memory failed her for a moment, or maybe she’d just zoned out. But now something, some idea she was missing, started to eat at her. She ran back through her thoughts, trying to discover what the missing link was…alcohol, hangover, random hookups, and one’s own bed…
Calliope
.

That was it. That was the disconnect: her daughter Calliope.

Her energy returned like a shot of adrenaline and she sat up, her body filled with purpose. She slid her legs over the side of the bed so the soles of her feet touched the floor—and the room shifted to the right, her head pounding with blood as she fought to remain upright in the wake of the vertigo.

“Don’t make a sound.”

She raised her head, fighting the woozy feeling trying to overtake her, and saw a tiny owlet perched on the bottom of the window frame just across from where she was sitting. It was too chilly to have the window open, but for some unknown reason, either she or Morrigan had left it open a crack, and now a little creature had taken this as an open invitation to enter the flat.

“What—” Caoimhe started to say, but the owlet shushed her with a
squawk
from its miniature beak, its downy brown feathers ruffling in annoyance.

“Quiet.”

The owlet was looking at something over Caoimhe’s shoulder. Caoimhe turned to find Morrigan asleep in the bed beside her, her partner’s red hair splayed across the white pillow like blood splatter.

“Morrigan shouldn’t know you’re here?” Caoimhe asked, whispering her question.

The tiny owlet bobbed up and down, letting Caoimhe know this was the correct answer.

“She won’t help you,”
the owlet said.
“She wants to keep you for herself.”

Caoimhe’s brain was assailed by a flash of memory, something she didn’t want to remember, but was important to hold on to.

Morrigan at the fireplace. Morrigan turning as Caoimhe scuttled across the bed, trying to escape.

Caoimhe closed her eyes, trying to catch more of the memory, but this was all her brain seemed to have cataloged. Of course, just this little bit was enough to make her understand the owlet’s need for secrecy.

“I may not look like myself, but my owlet has kindly allowed me to share this body with it,”
the creature was saying, and Caoimhe had to rip herself out of her own head to make sure she was following the owlet’s words.

“I came to you once, long ago when you were with child—”

Caoimhe’s breath caught in her throat. This wasn’t just an owlet—this was Anjea, the Vice-President in Charge of Australia for Death, Inc. The seer who’d come to her when she was pregnant with Calliope and told her her child was special and must be protected at all costs. It was because of this woman she’d given Callie up and been excommunicated from her daughter’s life.

“What happened to you?” Caoimhe whispered, her body trembling with fear.