Serpent's Storm (25 page)

As the water got shallower, it became almost impossible for me to navigate in my sea serpent form, so I wished myself back into my normal body. It felt odd to swap out the power of the larger animal body in favor of my much weaker human shape, but I was glad to be small again as I dog-paddled closer to the shore, my feet dragging across the bottom of the sand bar. I could’ve swum farther down the coast, beaching myself in a more desolate setting, but I needed something only the inhabited part of the island could provide.

I made my way along the beach on foot until I found an unmanned dock and clambered up the weathered wooden ladder. It was still dark out, but morning and the sunrise were fast approaching, so I knew I had to get where I was going soon or else deal with the onset of the human morning, which was about as appealing as eating a plate of sea slugs. Having to weave in and out of morning commuters in my dingy clothes while they sipped their coffees and checked their BlackBerrys was not how I wanted to spend my morning.

The dock I’d climbed on to was deserted; a boarded-up bait-and-tackle shop and a CLOSED FOR THE WINTER sign on Betty’s Fried Oyster Shack gave evidence as to why. My feet squelched in my shoes as I walked down the empty boardwalk, the sea breeze making the gooseflesh on my exposed skin stand at attention like little hair follicle soldiers. My teeth decided to get in on the freezing action, doing nothing to warm me as they chattered away in my skull. I decided I was much better suited to warmer environs—so long as they weren’t of the Hellish variety. I’d spent enough time in Hell to know I could do without the type of heat the Devil employed down there: namely, the kind that made you sweat out body oil, rather than just plain old saltwater and electrolytes.

I stuck to the boardwalk, following the curve of the shoreline rather than turning off onto one of the residential throughways I passed. As amazing as a warm bed and a cadged bowl of cereal and milk sounded, I wasn’t skilled enough in the criminal enterprise of breaking and entering to give one of the houses a try. And being of the klutzy persuasion, I could easily imagine myself caught in a half-open window, my ass hanging out in the breeze for the whole world to see, while inside, a lady in a brown housecoat smacked me upside the head with a toilet brush. Besides, the boardwalk appeared to be where all the commerce in the village happened—and that was where I’d find what I was looking for, if it existed at all.

After a ten-minute walk, though, I was no closer to finding what I sought than when I’d begun.

I was starting to get annoyed with myself—and the part of my brain that’d told me to go with Starr was now lobbing self-recriminations at me. I was in the middle of nowhere, looking for something that probably didn’t exist, it was cold, and I was wet and I smelled like old leather and fish. Definitely the kind of aroma that would get you killed out in the wild by a pack of feral dogs.

“This sucks,” I muttered in between the teeth chattering.

I’d done what I
thought
was the right thing, but I’d just screwed myself up. Depressed by the wretchedness of my current situation, I was sorely tempted to crawl into a doorway and take a nap, hoping that things would look brighter in the light of day.

Brighter, but not better,
I thought uncharitably.

I checked the empty doorways as I passed them, looking to see if any of them would be appropriate for sleeping in, but then something caught my eye and I instantly changed my intentions.

At first, I thought it was only a shadow, but when I turned my full attention on the image, it refocused into something more tangible. My heart stopped for the span of two heartbeats—I know this because I counted—and then everything slid into slow motion. The air around me grew heavy with promise, my brain electrified by what it was processing. Then the world clicked back into normal speed and I was jogging toward the shade, fighting back tears as I ran.

“Jarvis!?”
I screamed, my eyes locked on the petite shade barreling ahead of me like a nor’easter. I knew in a way that I couldn’t give voice to, that this was Jarvis . . . or at least some incarnation of him.

“Jarvis! Wait for me!” I called, a stitch forming in my side as I raced to keep up with him.

I was having trouble navigating the uneven boards of the wooden boardwalk as I scampered after the shade, but it still came as a surprise when my toe caught in a gap and I pitched forward, my arms pinwheeling uselessly as I went down, my knees taking the brunt of the fall. I slammed into the decking so hard I cried out in pain, but ignoring my bruised knees, I used the boardwalk’s guardrail to hoist myself back onto my feet. My lungs heaving, I searched for Jarvis’s shade, but it was no use.

“Jarvis?” I took a few hesitant steps, but there was no response. I was alone again on the boardwalk, not a soul in sight, not even on the paved pathway that led away from the sea and into the heart of the residential area.

“Damn,” I said, slamming my fist into my upper thigh in frustration.

It was easy to fall back on old habits. I could’ve sat down on the wooden treads and thrown myself a high-end pity party, tears would’ve flown, I would’ve rued the day I was born, yada, yada, yada . . . and I would’ve been about as effectual as a hangnail.

Instead, I closed my eyes and counted to ten in my head. With each number, I found myself relaxing as the tension and bad vibes left my body. I opened my eyes and looked around, noting that the sun was just starting to peak over the horizon, shooting streaks of orangey-yellow light into the faded gray-blue patchwork sky. The path I stood on led directly to a normal suburban street, tiny cottages bordering the sidewalk like overgrown white, gray, green, and blue wood-washed flowers. I noticed that the porch lights had begun to melt into the morning light, leaving only tiny halos of illumination around each lightbulb, but that the few cars parked higgledy-piggledy in driveways and on the street itself were still as silent as giant, sleeping beasts.

“Okay,” I said. “What happens next?”

And that’s when I noticed that the paved walkway beside the boardwalk forked into two separate paths. The first path fed away from the boardwalk and into the suburban sprawl, where it dead-ended at the street. The other, more oddly shaped path—it resembled the curling body of a coiled snake—turned away from the sleeping population of the island, its final destination a wrought iron spiral staircase that led upward into the sky.

I held my breath, my body frozen in place as I realized I’d arrived at my destination. Jarvis—or whatever I’d been chasing—had led me right to the very place I’d been seeking since I’d crawled out of the freezing water earlier that morning:

This was the entrance to a New York City Subway station.

“Thank you, Jarvis,” I whispered, hoping that wherever he was, he could hear me. It was strange, but I had the funny feeling I hadn’t seen the last of the faun; that not even Death would be powerful enough to keep him out of my life.

A shock of cold air hit me in the face as I stepped onto the first stair, making me shiver involuntarily. The black wrought iron railing was cold to the touch—further chilling my body—and I felt the whole structure tremble under my weight as I climbed the next couple of steps. The stairway had been constructed in pieces, each stair connected to its brother by a series of thin iron joists, giving it the appearance of a discombobulated black skeleton rising up into the air.

I felt the prickle of eyes, the stare of a stranger drilling a hole into the back of my head, and I picked up speed, my feet pounding against the rickety stairway as I pulled myself up the last few steps. I heaved a sigh of relief as the stairway opened out onto the subway station, but my relief was short-lived when I found my way to the platform obstructed by a gleaming silver, full-height turnstile. If it had been one of the normal turnstiles you usually see in a subway station, I could’ve just jumped over it, fare be damned, but this revolving-door style of turnstile made that impossible.

“Shit,” I mumbled, reaching into my pockets but coming up empty—I was wet, bedraggled . . . and without a cent to my name.

I felt my hackles rise as the sense of being watched intensified. I looked both ways, hoping to find a manned ticket booth as I scanned the space, but there was nothing. Only one primary yellow MetroCard machine to my left, which was useless to me without cash or a credit card. Right now, I was alone on the wrong side of the station, but I had the impression this wouldn’t last for very long. Something, or someone, was stalking me, waiting for just the right moment to slip out of the shadows and attack.

“And just where do you think you’re going, dollface?”

I whirled around at the sound of the Ender of Death’s voice. The tips of my fingers went numb and my whole body began to shake. I didn’t know if it was fear or all-consuming rage that was making my body react so intensely.

The Ender of Death was the last creature I’d expected to find leering at me from the other side of the turnstile in this subway station to nowhere, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d murdered my dad and Jarvis to fulfill the dogma of his appellation—so adding another name to his kill list wasn’t really a big deal. But I sensed there was more to it than that.

He looked just like any normal human being to anyone who saw him walking down the street, all fluffy hair and patrician features, but it was only a mask. I could see the raw obsession in his eyes as he stared at me from the other side of the turnstile. The years spent trapped in Hell at my dad’s discretion had gnawed away whatever humanity he’d originally possessed, leaving only compulsive hatred behind, whittled like a sharpened stick ready to destroy whatever lay in its path.

“I’m going to Heaven,” I spat at him. “Bite me.”

The blood pounded in my temples. My vision tunneled into a pinhole: with Marcel’s face as the bull’s-eye. If I’d had the capability to destroy him, I would’ve done it right then.

Believe me when I say I tried.

“Die, you bastard!”
I screamed. Of course, nothing happened, and Marcel laughed loudly at my pathetic attempt to get rid of him.

“I won’t go that easily,” he said, his long fingers grasping the bars on the other side of the turnstile. “Besides, when my time here is over, there’ll be another and another and another of me after that to take my place.”

“Whoopee,” I said dryly. “Isn’t that just peachy keen for you, then.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I told you that you should’ve given yourself up back at your office,” he replied. “Then maybe all of this could’ve been avoided.”

“Bullshit. You’d already killed my dad before that.”

Marcel shrugged.

“Yes, you’re right about that. Your father deserved to be dispatched from this existence. He had no right to do what he did to me . . . But your friend, Jarvis, well, that one was all you, Calliope. We needed to stop the flow of information in order to keep you in the dark.”

I swallowed hard, my throat dry as a bone as the weight of his words slammed into me. There was no way of knowing if he was telling the truth or not, but it didn’t matter. He’d hit a nerve, and all the pent-up guilt I was harboring broke through. It was all I could do to gulp back a sob. I may not have hurt Jarvis with my own hands, but I was just as responsible for his death as the Ender of Death was.

“What do you want from me?” I asked, my hands shaking.

Marcel smiled like a crazed saint bound on a pyre, his face lit from within by his own madness.

“I just want what I want from every Death I meet,” he murmured, his voice low and malevolent.

Way back at the beginning of time as we know it, God created the Heavens and the Earth and things were good. All the angels and demons (demons didn’t get a bad rap until way later in the future) lived happily together, enjoying their immortal existence by spending their days creating beautiful works of art, singing, dancing, and just having a grand old time. The angels were the good stewards of Heaven, and the demons, who were in charge of the day-to-day running of the place, kept everything in perfect working order. Everyone, regardless of their place in Heaven’s hierarchy, was grateful to God for creating them, and they paid their creator homage in their works of art, their music, and their poetry. There were no conflicts, no aggression, no bad vibes; Heaven was a splendid place to live.

Now back then, Hell was just a suburb of Heaven—a quiet place with beautiful gardens and an overabundance of fruit and veggies that was used for recreational purposes only. The denizens of Heaven loved to take day trips there to frolic in the gardens, eat the fruit and veggies, and just, you know, chill. It was a nice place to visit, but no one wanted to live there full-time because it was in another dimension of time/space and kind of far from all the hubbub of Heaven.

But then one day, totally out of the blue, God decided to do something nuts. He/she proclaimed from on high that he/ she was going get rid of the original inhabitants of Earth—the dinosaurs—and in their place he/she was going to people the Earth with these weird little furry creatures called
Homo sapiens
. When God showed the first
Homo sapiens
prototype (he/she called the very apelike creature “Adam”) to the assemblage up in Heaven, everyone was aghast. They couldn’t understand why God would want to get rid of the lizards—which were always a gas to watch because they attacked and ate each other in spades—and replace them with those weird furry beings.

God didn’t like being second-guessed, especially when it came to the
Homo sapiens
—or “human beings,” as God had nicknamed his/her newest creations—and he/she got very mad. He/she decreed that anyone who said anything bad about the human beings would be stricken from the Record of Heaven and unceremoniously tossed out into Hell, where they could spend their immortal eternity weeding vegetable beds and watering plants. It seemed that God had chosen to lavish all his/ her love and affection on these new human beings, totally forsaking the angels and demons he/she had created first. The demons especially felt God’s cold shoulder. They had less magical ability than the angels, which put them closer in origin to the human beings, so it was particularly hard for them to accept a new hierarchy where they were placed at the very bottom of the pecking order.