Cat's Claw (24 page)

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Authors: Amber Benson

Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy fiction, #Fiction - Fantasy, #Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Fantasy - Contemporary

BOOK: Cat's Claw
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This time the cat answered me, its pale gold eyes full of amusement.
“You thought wrong,” the cat said, its voice smooth as silk. It blinked as it stood up and lazily slipped between the ranks of my armored guard. The knights didn’t move a muscle as the cat sat down beside me.
“Tell them to go,” the cat said before bending its head forward to lick one of its paws.
Without hesitation, I said: “Go away, knights.”
They did as I asked, breaking rank as they fell in step behind each other and marched back down the hall, eager to return to their individual posts. Now that I wasn’t in possession of the Shade anymore, I wasn’t so interesting to the knights.
“Well, that was easy,” I said to the cat before my body was overtaken by another sneezing fit.
“You’re just allergic,” the cat said softly. “It’s not fatal. I swear it.”
Once the knights had completely disappeared, Jarvis came over and kneeled down before the cat.
“Miss Calliope,” Jarvis said, his voice low. “I want you to meet someone very special.”
He inclined his head toward the cat, who began to purr greedily.
“This is Bast, ex-Egyptian Goddess and Queen of the Cats.”
I gave her a quick smile.
“Hey, as long as you’re not out to kill me, it’s very nice to meet you,” I said, trying to decide if it was appropriate to extend my hand for a shake or not.
“You don’t understand,” Jarvis said, agitated. “
This
is not just some arbitrary creature that you are meeting, Miss Calliope.”
“Okay?” I said, not really understanding what Jarvis was getting at. He sighed and tried another tack.
“This,”
Jarvis intoned,
“is your father’s spirit guide.”
fifteen
 
 
“Spirit guide?”
I repeated after I had sneezed one last time. “How namby-pamby can you get?”
Now, as far as spirit guides go . . . Okay, I know that the Afterlife is full of all kinds of strange and unique creatures, but did they have to get so clichéd about it? I mean,
come on
. I could handle Executive Assistants and Devil’s protégés galore, but an anthropomorphic cat that guided you through the spirit world was so New Agey it was ridiculous.
“Spirit guides are an integral part of the Afterlife and the supernatural world,” Jarvis said, his voice coming out all snippy.
I could tell he was annoyed with me for being so obnoxious, but seriously, I was allergic to the damned cat, and while I was in such close proximity to it, how dared he expect me to be chipper about my situation—my head hurt, my nose wouldn’t stop running, and my eyes were turning into mini waterfalls.
Madame Papillon may have been wrong about cats being my weakness, but at least I could hold on to the fact that I was still highly,
highly
allergic to the furry little monsters.
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to get about twenty feet away from you,” I said to the cat as I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, my ankles
popping
loudly as I stood up.
Ow!
Great, not only was my face a red, blotchy mess, but now I was turning into an arthritic cripple, too. Boy, this was fast becoming so
not
my day.
As soon as I was back on my feet, I brushed the dirt and lint off my clothes and moved as far away from Bast as I could—not that it mattered anymore whether or not there was any crud on my “going to the Goodwill as soon as I get home” Missoni sweater.
Looking around me for the first time since I had awakened from my mock death, I noticed that the party had finally ended and “the neighbors” had returned to their homes again. I sighed, happy not to be the center of attention anymore, but I did wonder exactly what the people who had watched my little meltdown had thought about the whole thing.
The two monks were long gone, as well as the other people I’d spied lurking farther down the hallway. They’d been too far away, so I hadn’t been able to see who or what they were, but I knew they’d probably made a few mental connections concerning my identity.
Had they all thought I was some crazy loon who’d accidentally been let into the Hall of Death, or did they know precisely what I was? That I was the Grim Reaper’s Daughter?
I had never really given much thought before to the fact that I was a flesh-and-bone representative of my father and his administration. I’d always assumed that it didn’t matter what people thought of me, that I was my own person who could do exactly
what
I wanted,
when
I wanted, and it affected no one. But now I was starting to think otherwise, that maybe I had more of an impact on how my father was perceived here in the Afterlife than I realized.
“Uhm, Jarvis,” I asked curiously, “does everyone in here know who I am?”
Jarvis didn’t even deign to reply. He just snorted and smoothed his mustache down against his upper lip. Bast, the Queen of the Cats, continued to stare at me, her molten yellow eyes following my every move, but I wasn’t too worried about her. She and I shared a secret—she was still in possession of Daniel’s Shade—and
she
knew that
I
knew that
she
knew what the deal was. If she had really wanted to get me in trouble, she would’ve done it already.
No, she had other plans for me, and I was just going to have to wait and see what they were.
“We keep records of who comes and goes, so I’m sure if someone didn’t know your name before, they would after today,” Suri piped in helpfully.
The young Day Manager of the Hall of Death seemed to be in much better spirits now that the Shade was gone and the knights were back at their individual stations. I got the impression Suri was one of those people who loved to deny they had any problems—except a battalion of knights following around one of your patrons was a problem too obvious to ignore.
“Since everything seems to be in order again,” Suri said happily, “how may we at the Hall of Death help you, Death’s Daughter?”
The name made me cringe. If there was anything in this world that made me want to gnaw my own arm off, it was someone using an appellation that denoted I was not my own person . . . but some kind of derivative of my father.
“Just call me Callie,” I said to Suri, “and we’ll be just fine.”
The girl smiled at me and nodded.
“Callie it is, then, but only if you call me Suri.”
“Sure, okay, whatever you like,” I replied. Apparently, now that things had returned to normal, Suri was going to try to be my new best friend—yay!
Not
.
“We have a letter from Death himself, requesting the Death Record of a particular individual,” Jarvis said, interrupting the pleasantries between Suri and me and producing a small, cream-colored envelope with the Death, Inc., seal on it.
I mouthed the words “thank you,” but Jarvis shook his head.
“Follow me, then . . .
Callie
,” Suri said, taking off down the hall toward the main desk. “By the way, you still need that bathroom?”
I looked over at Bast, who had apparently decided to join us for the duration, before shaking my head.
“Nope, I think having the death scared out of me kinda sent my bladder into shock,” I replied.
This seemed to put a kibosh on any more conversation and we finished our walk to the main desk in silence.
 
 
when we got
there, we found a man sitting behind the desk, waiting for us. I did a double take because I hadn’t noticed him before—but here he sat, his chin in his hand, watching our ragged procession with not even the hint of a smile on his buttery, round face.
He was a pudgy man who appeared to be in his late thirties, but with the weird way time ran in the Afterlife, he could’ve been any age. The first thing that came to my mind when I looked at him was that he resembled a less flour-y, more Sumo Wrestler-y version of the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Upon our arrival, he dropped his hand from his chin so that both arms were now folded on top of the long desk, his puffy body stuffed into one of those ergonomic office chairs like a perennial breakfast favorite of mine: pigs in a blanket. The desk Pudge Boy sat behind came to my waist. It was made of warm, cherry wood and boasted lots of nicks and scratches on its scarred surface. There was a computer on the desk to the man’s right, but it didn’t look as if it was much employed. In counterpoint, the large apothecary’s cabinet standing behind the desk like an enormous green-painted sentinel seemed well-worn with age and use.
Suddenly, the man’s face broke into a wide grin and he began to laugh, his tummy rolling up and down with waves of mirth.
“Tanuki, this is—”
“I know who she is,” he said, and this only seemed to amuse him more.
“They need a Death Record, please,” Suri said, oblivious to Tanuki’s massive sense of good humor.
“Is
this
the one you want?” Tanuki said, his mirth instantly replaced with a mischievous grin as he whipped a bright pink folder right out of the very air. “Or is
this
the one you seek?”
Now the pink folder was gone, disappearing right before our eyes, only to be replaced by an even brighter orange one. I stared at him, uncertain as to what he was playing at. We were supposed to get the stupid Death Record and then get the hell out of Dodge. This wasn’t supposed to be some kind of bloody magic show.
“Neither,” I said, grabbing the orange folder right out of the man’s hand and holding it up for all to see.
There was a shocked silence as everyone looked at me, their eyes glued to the orange folder I clutched in my hand. Even poor Tanuki looked up at me with shock and maybe a little bit of awe. I don’t think he—or anyone else for that matter—thought I had the hand-eye reflexes necessary to pull off that kind of sleight of hand. Little did they know the bizarro things I’d had to do since I’d started my job over at House and Yard. My boss, Hy, was a tricky bitch, so that meant in order to stay employed, I’d had to learn a few tricks of my own.
“You seem like a very sweet guy, whatever your name is, but I’m in no mood to play any games with you right now,” I said, my voice loud enough to carry down the hall. “Now, here’s your folder back.”
I put the orange folder back into his hand. He looked down at it, then started to giggle.
“I like this one,” he said to Suri. “She means business.”
“I try,” I said helpfully. “Hey, Jarvis, pass my friend here the note from Pop.”
Jarvis bristled at my calling my dad “Pop,” but he forked over the letter without further hesitation.
“Here,” I said, passing it across the desk to Tanuki, “this oughta do it.”
Tanuki unfolded the envelope and pulled the letter Jarvis had forged out of its cream binding. He scanned it quickly, then nodded.
“It’s a red folder, Suri,” Tanuki said, looking nervously over at his boss.
Suri only shrugged.
“So be it,” she said.
“But—” he started to say before Suri cut him off.
“Just call it up, Tanuki.”
Tanuki sighed unhappily and turned around in his rolling chair. He used his tiny legs to scoot himself across the carpeted floor and over to the apothecary’s cabinet. He opened one of the little drawers, closed it, then opened it again. He scooted all the way down to the far side of the cabinet and repeated the process with another drawer. This time, before he closed it, he whispered the name “Senenmut” into the drawer.
Somewhere up above us, I knew that a cascade of folders was flipping its little guts out, as it searched for the Death Record that we wanted. Almost immediately, the last drawer that Tanuki had closed flew open and a bright red folder popped out of it. Tanuki moved so quickly that I barely registered he’d even caught the folder, let alone that he was now holding it out for me to take. I reached for it and Tanuki caught hold of my wrist.
“Be careful. The red files are always bad news,” he whispered in my ear, before he released my arm. I took the file folder he pressed into my hands, holding it to my chest.
Part of me didn’t want to deal with what was in that file, but the other, more intrepid side of myself was itching to find out where Cerberus’s lost charge might be.
“Open it,” I heard a soft, reedy voice say.
I looked over and saw that Bast had taken the opportunity to jump up onto the desktop and was now sitting on her haunches beside me, waiting for me to proceed with the opening of the folder.
“Is that an official spirit guide request?” I asked as I covered my nose with the back of my sleeve, hoping to ward off another sneezing fit.
Bast purred and rubbed her head against my arm.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said, answering my own question. Slowly, I eased the folder open, and a thin slip of paper fell out onto the desk.

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