Serpent's Storm (16 page)

Kali rested her chin on her chest, unable to look at me.

“There’s a war on, white girl. And now that we know you’re still free,” she said, her voice hoarse, “you gotta stay out of harm’s way.”

“Kali, please,” I said, begging.

Torn, my friend sighed, her brown eyes ringed with exhaustion.

“All right, white girl, I’ll make you a compromise. I’ll send your spirit back so you can see what’s happening—”

“Thank you,” I said gratefully, knowing it was the best I was going to get.

“Don’t thank me, dipwad,” she glared. “Just keep your lily-white ass out of trouble.”

“I hate it when you call me that,” I laughed, releasing her wrists so I could wipe away the tears of gratitude.

“Then don’t be a dipwad, dipwad,” the Hindu Goddess replied matter-of-factly.

“You said there was a war on?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

“Your sister and her minions are colluding with the Devil and the Ender of Death to take over Heaven, as you may or may not know,” Kali said, gesturing to the blood on her sari. “This is from fighting a whole horde of Hellspawn outside of Purgatory. And you better believe my ass when I say it’s been a bloody mess. They’ve overrun the building and taken prisoners, holding them hostage so they can lord it over us.”

“And Sea Verge?” I asked.

Kali shook her head.

“We’ve been out of contact with them since this morning. We sent Clio over to do reconnaissance once we heard there had been trouble—”

I grabbed Kali’s shoulders, almost shaking her.

“Watch the sari, white girl—”

“You said you sent Clio. That means she’s not with you now . . .”

I trailed off.

“She was with Indra, but she volunteered to scout out Sea Verge for us,” Kali confirmed.

“She was with Indra?” I sputtered. “Wait, you mean she was
with
Indra . . . like having a
sleepover with him
with him?”

Kali shoved me aside and walked over to the water.

“I don’t go messing in other people’s nasty business, white girl.”

“Okay, totally doesn’t matter,” I offered, following her over to the water. “As long as she’s all right—”

“I didn’t say that, either, dumb girl,” Kali shot back, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t know what Clio’s found, because we haven’t heard from her, so I don’t know if she’s A-okay or not.”

“Take me there, then,” I said. “Let me find my sister.”

Pulling a razor-sharp blade from her cleavage, Kali faced me and plucked my hand from my side. She raised it high into the air, holding the knife out with her other hand. I watched, transfixed, as the steel blade caught the light, reflecting the mottled sky.

“You know what happens next, Death’s Daughter,” Kali said—and then she plunged the blade toward the meat of my palm. At the last moment, she slowed her momentum, letting the blade only kiss the skin as it drew a straight red line of blood across my hand.

She dropped my wrist and pressed the blade into her own hand, the blood burbling up like an oil slick. She wiped the blade on her sari before resheathing it in her bodice, leaving another bloodstain to dry on the matte purple fabric of her dress.

“I have to sever your body from this plane, hold on . . .” She grabbed my bloodied hand and squeezed, our blood comingling like we were two children completing a blood brother ritual.

“Ow!” I cried as she ratcheted up the pressure, the tiny bones in my hand cracking like kindling being thrown into the flames of a fire. I could feel the cartilage and tendons being ripped out of place as Kali twisted my hand in hers. The last time this happened, the pain had been so intense that I’d blacked out. This time, I was prepared for what was to come, so it wasn’t as bad.

“Close your eyes, dipwad,” Kali hissed in my ear, yanking my wrist with enough force to dislocate it. I did as she asked, shutting my eyes so tight you couldn’t have pried them open with a crowbar. My hand ached like a bitch and I was sure the Goddess of Destruction had permanently crippled me, but I didn’t care. I was grateful for her help.

“Thank you, Kali,” I whispered, my body going numb as a subarctic wind whipped by from out of nowhere and enfolded me in its wintery embrace. My body became light as a feather and I drifted in the air, my fragile soul floating on the back of the wind. I spun in the air, faster and faster, until I was a human top dancing on the slipstream.

As the wind dropped and I felt myself falling, I ignored my fear. It was a controlled fall and I relaxed into it, consciously working to ease the tension from my muscles. I hit the ground hard, my left hip taking much of the brunt of the fall, but there was no pain.

Adrenaline coursed through my veins, making my heart beat like a metronome set to an “extra fast” tempo. My eyes flew open and I found myself lying on my side in the backyard of Sea Verge. Only, it wasn’t me anymore. At least, it wasn’t my
body
—my body was back at the marsh in New York. My
soul
was here at Sea Verge, enmeshed with someone else’s soul.

I was filled with joy—my dad was alive and kicking! I couldn’t believe I’d listened to any of those false pronouncements, that I’d let them trick me into thinking my dad was dead. I wanted to tell them all where to stick it, but I put my anger on hold to deal with more pressing matters: namely, why was my dad lying on the ground in the backyard with the Ender of Death standing over him?

“I know what your weakness is, Death,” Marcel said as he stood over me/my dad, grinning like an idiot.

I wanted to kick the guy right in his pointy little eyeteeth, but I wasn’t in control of my dad’s body, so I was forced to sit back and, like a passive spectator, do nothing. It was pretty frustrating, but I told myself to relax, because it was a futile waste of energy to get worked up about it. Luckily, my dad seized the moment himself, rolling away from the Ender of Death before crawling back onto his feet.

“You are the Ender of Death,” my dad said, lifting his hand to wipe away a smear of blood from his nose. “It’s your job to know my weakness.”

Apparently, there’d been some kind of fight before I’d gotten there—which was where the bloody nose came from. Once my dad was standing, Marcel lunged, but my dad sidestepped him, slamming his fist into the Ender of Death’s cheekbone and giving the crazy man a nasty-looking cut on his cheek.

Wait a minute,
I thought, something clicking in my brain.
I saw that cut on Marcel’s face back at my office. But if my dad had just given it to him . . .

And that’s when I understood that Kali, the crazy Goddess, had sent me back in time. It shouldn’t have surprised me because it had happened to me before. Frustrated, I wondered if she’d even realized what she’d done, but I didn’t have time to linger on that thought because the Ender of Death was attacking me/my dad again.

“I am going to fulfill my destiny right here and now, Death,” Marcel said, both fists raised as he smashed into my dad, sending him sprawling back onto the ground.

This time my dad just lay there in the grass, looking resigned.

“It doesn’t matter what you do to me. My daughter will find you and destroy you.”

It took me a minute to realize my dad was talking about me. I was shocked. He was putting his faith in me, the daughter who’d shunned his work and run away from home so she wouldn’t get suckered into the family business. I’d never done anything to earn his trust, but here he was giving it to me anyway.

“I will give your daughter a chance to relinquish her power,” the Ender of Death said, nonchalantly pulling at the bottom of his T-shirt. “I will offer her a way out, but I hope she will not take it. Then she will die by my hand, just as you will.”

My dad began to laugh, his whole body shaking with it. He was tickled by something the Ender of Death had said, but for the life of me, I couldn’t have told you what. Actually, I wanted to tap into his brain and see what was so goddamn funny, but I found that it wasn’t an option.

“What’s so funny?” Marcel barked, assuming he was the butt of some secret joke. Fueled with anger, he struck my dad in the shoulder with his foot. I felt my/my dad’s shoulder bloom with pain and I suspected the Ender of Death had broken our collarbone.

This was crazy. Why wasn’t my dad fighting back? Why was he allowing Marcel, the insane Ender of Death, to hurt him?

I got my answers in rapid succession:

“Don’t hurt him!”

My dad turned his head and I saw my sister Clio and my mother kneeling in the dirt a few feet away. My mother was sobbing and her head hung forward so I couldn’t see her face. Beside her, my dad’s attorney, Father McGee, looked on, his face composed. Clio, defiant as ever, knelt at attention, hatred oozing from every pore in her body. Her left eye was a swollen purple mess, and a fierce blow to her face had split her lower lip almost in two. Standing on either side of them, keeping them restrained with papyrus rope, were the Jackal Brothers.

“Quiet, Clio,” my dad started to say, but one of the jackal-headed bastards took matters into his own hands. He slammed his fist into the side of Clio’s neck and she slumped forward, dazed.

“I’ll ask you again,” Marcel said, leaning in toward my dad’s face for maximum effect. “Why are you laughing at me?”

My dad shrugged.

“I laugh because you will never win. It’s very simple. Calliope will kill you and then the next incarnation of the Ender of Death will be called up and she will fight them, too.”

It was nice to hear how confident my dad was about my prowess as a killer, but I thought he was going a little overboard—I was as much a crack assassin as I was a Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist.

The Ender of Death sneered at my dad, not liking what he was saying one teensy bit.

“Well, then,” the Ender of Death replied, “it’s a pity you won’t live to see it.”

Marcel turned on his heel, making his way over to where the Jackal Brothers stood with their hostages.

“Let me have it,” Marcel said, extending his hand. With horror, I watched as one of the Jackal Brothers drew a clear-bladed scythe from a sheath at his hip and laid the iron handle in Marcel’s outstretched palm.

So this is my dad’s weakness,
I thought, staring at the scythe. I’d never have guessed that something so simple could end my dad’s immortal life forever.

Marcel turned around, a smirk lifting the corners of his mouth as he walked back over to where my dad waited.

“Good-bye, Death.”

He lifted the scythe high in the air, the diamond blade so clear I could see the sun—a tiny orange ball shimmering on the horizon—through it. Time froze and then began again, but in slow-mo, so that I could enjoy the delicate curve of the scythe as it sailed through the air toward me/my dad.

“NO! Please don’t hurt him!!”
I heard my mom scream, but it was like her words were being strained through a sieve so that I could hardly understand their meaning.

I knew my dad couldn’t hear my thoughts. I was reliving something that’d already occurred in the past and I had no ability to change its outcome, no matter how desperately I wanted to. Still, I urged my dad to get up and flee, to save himself from his own impending death, but he was immovable. His body remained prostrate in the dirt before the Ender of Death’s diamond-bladed scythe even as the
whoosh
of the blade cut through the air and the sound of death filled my ears. I caught a glimpse of the diamond blade in my peripheral vision, moving so quickly I could only hold it in my gaze for a second.

It was jarring to be back in my own body—even more so to have been a mute witness to my father’s murder. Everything Jarvis and Hyacinth had said was true: I was Death again, well, at least partly, until Daniel came along to challenge me—then all bets were off. The strangest part of the experience had been hearing my dad tell the Ender of Death that I would avenge him. My dad had never spoken to me like that before. In fact, he’d done everything to dissuade me from using magic, almost as if he were protecting me from my birthright . . . something I’d never considered before.

With the obstinacy of a child, I’d railed against joining the family business . . . but maybe that was just what my dad had intended, what he had wanted all along: for me to be as far away from Death as possible—but thinking the idea was my own. He’d been shielding me from the supernatural world, letting me have a real life while it was still humanly possible to do so—and I’d completely misunderstood his intentions. I’d been living under false pretenses, existing in the land of denial not because I wanted to, but because it had been engineered that way by my parents.

I had this odd feeling I’d never really known my father— and now I was never gonna get the chance to remedy it, because he was gone. I had already done so much crying I didn’t think I was capable of any more tears, but I was wrong. The tears came freely, and once they’d begun, they didn’t want to stop.

“He’s dead.” I shuddered. “They killed him with a diamond-bladed scythe, cut his head off.”

Kali was gone—back to Purgatory to help try and reclaim Death, Inc.—or else she would’ve laughed in my face when I continued with: “They have my mom and sister and I have to go back and save them.”

Hyacinth was much kinder. She merely shook her head no.

“You’ll do them no good dead. You have to prepare to face the challenge ahead of you. Only then can you save your family.”

Hyacinth was right.

If I wanted to help anyone else, I had to help myself first.

“I’m ready,” I said to Hyacinth, but she merely nodded and pointed to the sea.

“Ask for his help.”

“Help me—” I started to scream, my voice sailing across the waves, but it proved to be unnecessary. Watatsumi had many ears listening to our conversation, and within seconds the water at the marsh’s edge was alive with bubbles.