Servants of the Storm (16 page)

“Dude, you are the craziest—” I start, but he interrupts me.

“Before you decide that I’m insane, just hear me out. And believe me when I say that your friend Carly is involved.”

Carly.

Just one word, and I’m suddenly willing to listen, no matter how crazy he sounds.

With a soft smile he gets up and goes across the room to rummage in a dorm fridge. We’re in what seems to be a studio apartment, with a beat-up armoire, a small desk, two couches, and a closed door that I hope is a bathroom. There’s a tiny kitchen in the corner—just a short counter, a utility sink, and an old pie safe. And there are books everywhere, stacked up on the floor and even holding up one corner of the armoire where a leg is missing. The ceiling is high and peaked and unfinished, with bare wood rafters and a tin roof.

No bed. Guess he doesn’t sleep much.

Isaac comes back and helps me drink some flat Coke.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s all I’ve got.”

But it’s cold, and it feels wonderful against my throat, so I gulp it all down. It doesn’t quite wash away the gross taste coating my mouth.

“What does Carly have to do with demons?” I say, in something resembling my regular voice.

“Demons are all over the world.” He sounds like a teacher giving a lecture. “But they’re concentrated in places that have had a natural disaster. Really powerful demons are actually what
cause natural disasters in the first place. Hugo, Katrina, Sandy, Josephine. Hurricanes and tornadoes and tsunamis and earthquakes. Even the flood before Noah’s Ark. A powerful demon decides to take over a new area or fight the reigning demon, and boom! Natural disaster. They feed on the chaos and hopelessness and sadness and desperation, after. And they take over.”

I exhale through my nose and tamp down the pain radiating up my arm and roiling in my stomach. This shit is getting old. “Hurry up to the part about Carly.”

“I am. It’s all important. So when Josephine came, when she made the hurricane, she brought even more demons than were here before, and they needed servants. To run errands, do the demons’ bidding, find victims, produce pills to keep the people complacent, drug the groundwater. And that’s what happened to Carly. She’s a servant.”

“The demons are . . . using her?” I swallow, but there’s a big lump I can’t push past. The thought of Carly, my best friend, my blood sister, being controlled by something like Kitty . . . it’s too much to take. Pain blooms through my body, and I realize I’ve been squeezing my hands together. Blood is seeping into the T-shirt. I don’t care.

“You ready for stitches yet?”

“Get back to Carly.”

Isaac gently separates my hands before holding up his own pinkie.

“If a demon takes your pinkie distal phalange, the last joint
of your last finger, they claim you. When you die, they take your soul, too. So long as they have the bone and your soul in their possession and you’re dead, you have to do their bidding. You are, in effect, their slave.”

“So Carly . . .”

“The demons found her during the storm. Kitty took her bone, then killed her and took her soul so she could use Carly as a servant. I’m sorry.”

“But I saw her,” I say. Tears spring to my eyes, and I want to grab his shoulders and shake him, but every tiny movement shoots fire down my fingers. “A tree knocked her into the water. I saw her washed away in the flood, and then I saw her at her funeral.”

“Think hard,” he says slowly. “You saw her go under, but you didn’t watch her die. What was really in her casket?”

I close my eyes and go back to that moment, to the one Tamika mentioned, when I was standing over Carly’s coffin at her funeral. I can see the maroon silk of the open casket, the shining white enamel of the lid. I can see her mama’s hand, squeezing a white tissue. I look down in the casket and see . . .

Carly. Dead and still and smooth, with a faint cosmetic blush to her dark cheeks that was never there in real life.

Wait, that’s not right.

I look again. Deeper.

And then I see what’s really there.

An old, moldering corpse, a bundle of bones and rags and
bits of mud stuck through with twigs. The face is stretched and leathery, the mouth puckered shut and the eyes gaping, black holes. Carly’s best church dress clings to the rib cage, and dark fluids have leaked into the white cotton, gluing it to the bones.

And that’s when I started screaming, because I saw it. I knew it wasn’t Carly.

“It wasn’t her,” I say, voice breaking.

A sob explodes out of me, and Isaac leans over to draw me into a careful hug. But I don’t think about his breath on my face, the way he smells, the screaming pain in my finger. I just see the dead thing in the casket, the not-Carly.

“No, it wasn’t her. But you were the only one who saw it,” he says.

“Why even have a funeral if it wasn’t her? It’s . . . so cruel.”

He sighs. “The demons know that people need to keep their rituals. Funerals and mourning are important to our psyches. And for them it’s like a buffet. All that sadness and grief in one place. They show up in black suits and hats pulled low. And feed.”

I remember now. All those knees I stepped past, all those faces turned avidly forward. “I saw them. Strangers at her funeral. They looked so . . . reverent.”

“That’s the problem. You’re not supposed to see that. They drug the water, distribute pills to obscure their world using their demon magic. For whatever reason you were able to see through their illusions. After that you saw them on the street, you saw
them in your dreams, and you saw them in people you’ve known your entire life.”

“Mr. Hathaway and Grendel,” I say with a grimace. “Old Murph.”

He nods slowly, his jaw against my forehead. I inhale, taking in the scent of faded cologne and dried blood and the sweat of worry, and it feels so intimate, with his stubble against my skin, that I push away and lie back against the pillows. It crashes down on me that he’s right, that the darkness I’ve felt creeping in is real, is tangible. That I’m not crazy, but the world is.

“Why am I the only one seeing these things?” I ask in a tiny voice.

“I don’t know. Neither does Kitty, apparently. Most people’s brains just skid right over it, thanks to demon magic. I don’t know what happens behind the locked door of Charnel House, but that’s where the pills and drugs come from, where the demons make and distribute them. They can’t have normal people watching and interfering, so you had to be specially drugged to keep you blind. For most people the drugs in the groundwater are enough. Those pills you quit taking, they were for your own good. Because you don’t want to see what’s really out there, taking over Savannah.” He smiles ruefully, blond hair falling over one dark eye. “I tried to tell you.”

“I had to know the truth. I had to find Carly.”

I wish I could find the words to explain to him how she was my sister in every way that mattered. How we mixed the blood of our thumbs in my backyard and swore we’d always be there
for each other, no matter what. How we used to meet in the shed behind her house whenever something went wrong, how she would hold me and listen to every word and then wipe my tears away and force me to my feet and back out into the cruel world. How we faced down bullies, Axel the German shepherd, puberty, bigots, and parents who weren’t as present as they should have been, thanks to my mother’s coldness and the fact that Carly’s dad was never around. I think about how she was there for me when my grandmother died, never leaving my side until I could finally stop crying. How losing her has left me less than I am, and how fighting for her is the only way to get back the part of my heart that I lost.

Isaac takes my good hand in his and leans closer.

“You can’t bring her back,” he says. “There’s no way to bring her back.”

“Is she alive? Is she dead?” I say. “I don’t understand.”

“She’s dead. She’s like a zombie. Less than a zombie. Maybe some tiny spark of her is left, but not enough to change anything.”

“Can we . . .” I shudder and shake my head. I can’t say it.

“You can’t kill her. She’s already dead. Her soul is trapped.”

“What do you mean, her soul is trapped?”

I can’t stop a whimper from escaping, and he exhales. “I know it’s a lot to take in, and I’m sorry. I know how much it hurts. Do you want the drink now?”

I grit my teeth. “No. Keep talking. I can take it.”

But I’m getting to the point where I can’t. Passing out would be so easy.

“Demons store the distal bones in their stomachs, since they don’t eat or have stomach acid. But from what I can tell through reading all these old books, they keep the souls in a thing called a dybbuk box, hidden somewhere in the demon’s territory. The only way to free a distal servant completely is to get their distal bone and destroy it, preferably by burning. When you open the dybbuk box, the soul is set free. When both of those things are done, the body finally disintegrates.”

“So it’s pretty much impossible.”

He exhales, low and long. “Yes.”

“So Kitty has Carly’s distal. And mine.”

Isaac nods, eyes dark. “And mine.”

“And that means that when we die . . .”

I can’t finish it. In the silence I can feel my heart beating in my pinkie, wrapped deep in the fabric, the veins trying to pump life into a fingertip that isn’t there. I try to twitch the stump, and almost throw up from the pain.

“When we die, we belong to her,” he says softly.

I LET MY HEAD FALL
back against the pillow, barely noticing my good hand still wrapped in his. I’m thinking about the corpse in Carly’s casket, now buried six feet below her gravestone on the hill at Bonaventure. I’m thinking of the picture on the wall at Café 616, where she’s screaming and dead and then being grabbed by the fox-eared girl. By Kitty, who now holds me captive too.

And I’m remembering other things, things I had forgotten that happened right after Josephine. When Mrs. Lowery in the cafeteria had acid-green eyes and live rats writhing under her apron and I threatened her with her own pizza cutter, just like Tamika said. And when I saw a giant, scale-covered monster dog pawing at my window and went running down the street, yelling that Grendel was the devil.

And more recently I remember chasing the girl down the alley behind the Paper Moon Coffee Shop, following her all the way to Charnel House. And meeting Isaac for the first time there.

“What did you give me, that first night?” I ask, voice low.

He chuckles ruefully and runs a hand through his hair.

“What I’m supposed to. It was the only way to keep you from becoming a distal servant.”

If my finger weren’t blaring pain, I would strangle him for drugging me. “What’s in it?”

“Not all of the bottles at Charnel House are alcohol,” he says. “I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know who makes them. Even brought some home to test it out, check it under a microscope, but couldn’t find out anything useful. I just know that the distal servants come and go, delivering things to and from the ‘Employees Only’ door. I don’t know what’s behind it or who’s in the kitchen. I only know what I’m supposed to serve to anyone who finds their way through the front door, anyone who accidentally follows a distal servant. The servants are kind of programmed to go there if they’re followed, and it’s my job to dope people and send ’em back home. The clear drink makes you forget, makes you dreamy and drunk and pliant. And the red one makes you see what’s really there. I always wondered why it even exists. Never used the red one before you showed up.”

“What about the food?” I ask.

“It just arrives through the window if I’m supposed to serve it. I’ve never tasted it.”

I have to smile.

“It was delicious, whatever it was. And it made me dream about Carly.”

“No, it didn’t,” he says. “I gave you a little something I wasn’t supposed to, at the end. I felt bad for you. You were so determined.”

My memory flashes on three sword-stabbed cherries dripping with juice. “The red drink that makes you see more than you should? So the dream was . . . real? Carly told me I had to eat collards, told me to go to 616. And there was a black box with carvings on it that rattled.”

He leans forward, excited and shaking his head in amazement. “Seriously? That’s Carly’s dybbuk box. It holds her soul. You find that, and you set her free.” He flips the pages of the Lilith book until they fall open on a rough drawing of the exact box I remember. In the picture it’s surrounded by slavering demons and weird symbols. His finger strokes the drawing of the carved black box like it’s the puppy he never had. “Is that what you saw?”

I nod slowly, and he smiles as if I’ve just answered a question that’s stumped him forever.

I try to remember every particular of that dream, but even now, with whatever cocktails of demon drinks I’ve had, with whatever losing my own bit of pinkie means, I still can’t recall everything. And I’m not sure what all Carly said.

“So what about my finger? Why can’t we go to the hospital?”

“I don’t think you want to try to explain this to anyone,” he
says with a sad smile. “And believe me—you don’t want to go to the hospital. But I can stitch it up. I’ve done it before.”

“Why?”

He ignores the question and trades the demon book in his lap for a small glass of pungent amber liquid sitting on the floor at his feet. It smells like smoke and fire.

“It’s time. You need to drink this.”

“I don’t think I want to drink anything else from you,” I say quietly.

“Smell it. It’s whiskey. Straight up.” I shake my head; I already smell it. And I don’t want it. “Have you ever felt a needle and thread go through your skin before?” he asks. “Sometimes it sticks a little in the muscle or clicks against the bone.”

I have a dizzy moment when I feel like I might pass out or barf. I struggle to sit up, and his arm cradles my back. When he hands me the glass, I inspect the liquor and find it pretty but way out of my league. After Carly and I borrowed most of her mama’s peach schnapps and took turns upchucking in Carly’s old toy box, I decided I never, ever wanted to taste alcohol again.