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

by Amber Benson

  The last holdouts were the Harvesters and Transporters—they’re the guys who do the actual collecting and shepherding of souls into the Afterlife—and they liked things the way they were. They had zero interest in changing their mindset, preferring the old, heavy-handed techniques to my dad’s new logic-based, corporate way of doing business.

  When they got wind of what my dad was proposing, they did the only corporate thing they would ever do: They unionized.

  They thought this would give them some control over my dad’s “invasive” changes. And though it gave them more leverage than they would’ve otherwise had, it never brought them the ultimate power they were seeking.

  The union did fight and win the right for the Harvesters and Transporters to continue to wear their Victorian “ghoul garb”—as my dad called it—on the job. My dad thought their over-the-top Victorian costumes and props made the wrong impression on the newly deceased, but he’d had to cave to their demands when the union had promised to defend their rights to “free dress” by going on strike. Once they discovered this technique worked, the union used it to strong-arm my dad into doing what they wanted on a regular basis.

  In the little time since I’d been appointed president and CEO of Death, Inc., Uriah Drood, the all-powerful head of the Harvester and Transporter’s Union, had twice pulled the strike card out and waved it in my face. We’d been at loggerheads from the moment we’d met, and he was just looking for an excuse to make my life miserable. Well, at least ours was a mutual “unappreciation” society: I didn’t like his sneaky, underhanded way of doing business, and he just didn’t like me, period.

  It made me proud to think someone as abhorrent as Uriah Drood found me so nauseating—though perhaps it wasn’t the wisest choice to add him to my roster of enemies. He was the vindictive sort, and I knew our strained relations were going to come back and bite me on the ass some day.

  But I kinda felt that way about a lot of the enemies I’d made, including my arch-nemesis, the Ender of Death.

  The Ender of Death was the only one of my enemies I hadn’t personally cultivated. He wanted me dead purely because it was in his job description. To this end, he’d officially challenged me to a single-combat throw down where only one of us could come out alive. I’d hedged, putting the challenge off for as long as I could, but the day of reckoning was fast approaching—and I was pretty sure the outcome was not going to be in my favor. I was a lover of fashion and food, not a fighter of supernatural bad guys. A fact that Marcel—Marcel was the human name the Ender of Death went by in this incarnation—was well aware of.

  I didn’t want to die, but I’d made a bargain with Marcel and now it was time to pay up.

  You see, my older sister and the Devil had staged a coup on Death, Inc., and Heaven, and I’d asked Marcel to back off the “kill death business” until I could stop them. To my surprise, he’d agreed to my request, so long as I promised to duke it out with him once I’d set Death, Inc., back to rights.

  He’d been true to his word, staying out of my business while I did what I needed to do. But now that everything had (mostly) returned to normal, my verbal promissory note had finally come due.

  I didn’t like it—I mean, who liked getting killed?—but this fight to the death was going to happen and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Jarvis told me I was being a fatalist, but I was pretty sure this was what one would call “pragmatic” thinking. I knew my chances for coming out of the duel with my life intact were pretty slim and I just wanted to get it over with. I’d done some checking with my friend, Kali, who was a member of the Board of Death, and she’d reassured me that upon my untimely end, at least two (or three) “possible” Deaths would be called up to vie for my job.

  I’d worried my boyfriend, Daniel, would be up for the job again—he’d been a challenger my first time at bat—but since I’d drunk from the Cup of Jamshid and been a sitting Grim Reaper through one annual Death Dinner, Daniel was safe. After being the Devil’s (now former) protégé for so many years, Daniel was too involved with the politics of Hell to want to take over the reins of Death, Inc. At least he didn’t have to worry about that now.

  To reassure me even further, Kali had done something highly illegal. Something that could’ve gotten her kicked off the Board of Death if anyone had discovered her transgression: She’d dipped into the Death Records and retrieved the names of two “possible” Deaths. Thankfully, one of them allayed my fears and gave me the faith to finally accept my fate.

  If I died during my battle with the Ender of Death, I would leave this Earth knowing that at least one of the next “possible” Deaths was more than fit for the job.

  And how did I know so much about a random name Kali pulled from the Death Records, one might ask?

  Well, because this “possible” Death was anything but random.

  She was my baby sister.

  Clio.

  Though it was almost unheard of for two siblings to be “possible” Deaths within successive generations, Kali said it had happened once before. As a member of the Board of Death, privy to certain secret information, she’d had her suspicions Clio was a “possible” Death. But she hadn’t known for sure until she’d pulled Clio’s Death Record and read what was written inside. She’d wormholed to Sea Verge—my familial home in Newport, Rhode Island—immediately after reading it, so she could let me know what she’d discovered.

  I don’t know why, but after she left, I decided not to tell anyone what I’d learned. Not even my most trusted friend and Executive Assistant, Jarvis.

  No one really believed I’d be out of the job so quickly that the next generation of “possible” Deaths would need to be called up—and maybe the need wouldn’t arise. Maybe the impossible would happen and I’d kill Marcel instead of him killing me. Stranger things had happened…but I wasn’t betting on it. I was prepared to meet my end—and knowing Clio would have the opportunity to battle for my job made me feel kind of okay about my (possible) impending demise.

  I’d never really wanted to be immortal, to live forever while my human friends slowly withered and died. Though I knew firsthand Death wasn’t the be-all and end-all—heck, I was the gal in charge of making sure human souls got to their preordained Afterlife destinations—it still didn’t stop me from disliking the process.

  On more than one occasion, I’d asked Jarvis why the Afterlife worked this way. Why humans needed to die and be reborn, why each body a soul is housed in gets its own personality, and when that body dies and the soul is recycled, that personality is destroyed, never to be used again? But all he had to say on the subject was this: That’s the way things are and we shouldn’t question it.

  Well, screw that. I lived for questioning things. So I’d done a lot of thinking about God’s system and I’d come up with a few hypotheticals that might give an answer to my unanswered question.

  The one I liked best went something like this: God just wanted to experience everything. Through us, his/her creations, he/she gets to do every job, be every kind of personality, try every kind of sex, be in and out of every kind of love, feel every emotion, enjoy every kind of pain or bliss.

  I’ve decided that maybe God is just the biggest voyeur in the history of History—and instead of chasing down meaning, we should just enjoy our lives as best we can, so that God can then enjoy them through us.

  Radical, I know, and probably not right, but it was my hypothesis and I was sticking to it. There was an order to the world. One I couldn’t see, but at least, as Death, I was privy to the Afterlife, so that, though I still missed the people I loved who’d died, I knew their energy lived on.

  That somewhere my dad, and even my older sister, would be born into other human bodies and get to restart the game of life.

  And who knew, maybe I’d accidentally run into them again—or if I was feeling sly, I could cheat and access my dad’s Death Record to find his next incarnation. (I was still angry with my sister for almost murdering me, so I
would not be seeking out her Death Record.)

  But I kept these thoughts to myself because no matter how much I wanted closure with my dad, if I found him again, well, it wouldn’t be him anymore. Whatever magic it was that made him “him” would be gone, and, in the end, it would just be me being selfish, wanting to hold on to something that didn’t exist anymore.

  And if I’d learned anything from my time as Death, it was this: Being selfish sucked.

  two

  Jennice McMartin stood at her desk, umbrella in hand, marveling at her good luck. It was after regular business hours, and she’d only been in the office by chance, but when the call had come in she’d somehow had the foresight not to let it go to the message machine—or maybe she should just chalk it up to her inability to let a ringing phone go unanswered. Either way, her actions had worked in her favor and the windfall had landed right in her lap.

  “Easterly Realty, we sell the home you don’t want to. This is Jennice speaking, how may I help you?”

  Jennice thought the Easterly Realty tagline Brett had come up with did more to hurt their business than help, but since she was only a junior real estate agent, no one listened to her opinion. Forced to say something she thought was stupid, she did her best to put a cheery face on it, trying very hard to keep her voice light whenever she answered the phone—especially when Brett or Calista were in the office. They liked her to sound chipper and “can do” whenever she talked to a prospective client.

  “Is this Jennice McMartin?” the voice—rather snooty with a slight British accent via Brooklyn—inquired.

  This was already shaping up to be an odd call because no one ever asked for Jennice by name.

  “Yes, this is Jennice. How may I help you?”

  “The family I work for would like to commission you to sell their home.”

  Jennice frowned, imagining the only property—a trailer out at the Shangri-La Mobile Home Park—that Brett and Calista had let her sell by herself.

  The owner was a crotchety old man who’d been very vocal about how much he hadn’t liked the color of Jennice’s skin (mocha-caramel). She’d ignored his bad attitude and gotten him a reasonable offer on his property, which he’d taken without once telling her “thank you” for all her hard work. At first Jennice was hurt by the old man’s snide remarks and ill temper, but after she’d gotten her commission check and seen the number on the dollar-amount line, she’d felt a lot better. Still, the Shangri-La experience had made her leery of potential clients.

  “Are you a referral from Shangri-La?” she asked, keeping her tone bright.

  “Shangri-La?” the voice on the other end of the line asked, sounding confused.

  “The mobile home park,” Jennice added. “Are you calling about listing a trailer?”

  There was a derisive snort—maybe this wasn’t a Shangri-La referral after all—and then the voice said:

  “If you are referring to Sea Verge as a trailer, then I—”

  “Sea Verge?” Jennice squeaked into the phone, cutting the speaker off midsentence.

  This had to be a joke. Sea Verge was one of the old stately mansions on Bellevue Avenue—and it was worth millions and millions of dollars.

  “Yes, I represent Calliope Reaper-Jones, the heiress of the Reaper-Jones fortune,” the voice continued, as if Jennice hadn’t squeaked at all. “And she would like for you, personally, to sell her family abode. Does that sound like a task you might be up to?”

  Jennice nodded before realizing the man couldn’t see her nod over the phone.

  “Uhm, yes, I could…do…that. But,” she said, her good sense taking over, “I’d need to see the property, meet with Ms. Reaper-Jones.”

  There, she’d covered her butt. If this was a hoax, then the man would hang up. Or make up some elaborate excuse about how Ms. Reaper-Jones was away on business. Or something.

  “Can you be at Sea Verge in twenty minutes?” the man on the phone said, a pleased note to his voice.

  Jennice almost nodded again.

  “Yes, I’ll get in my car right now.”

  “My name is Jarvis. I’ll meet you at the front door.”

  There was a click as the line went dead, but Jennice continued to stand at her small, untidy desk for a few seconds longer, clutching the sweaty phone in her hand.

  Her mind couldn’t help but tabulate the commission on a home like Sea Verge. The number was so large she could hardly fathom it. Unshed tears collected in the corners of her olive green eyes as she realized her prayers had been answered, that a miracle had occurred—and she’d only stopped by the office, a shabby little rattrap in the not-so-nice neighborhood of Newport Heights, by sheer chance.

  On her way to the hospital to see her mother for evening visiting hours, she’d realized she’d forgotten her umbrella at work. Normally she would’ve just left it there under her office chair, but the weather report on the radio had called for heavy rains later in the night and she’d decided, on a whim, to stop by and pick it up.

  I can pay for momma’s care now, she thought, the tears running down her apple-round cheeks.

  Her mother had the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s and two nights earlier she’d fallen in the shower, breaking her hip—and nothing Jennice tried could fix it. This was something that’d never happened before and part of her wondered if it was her mother’s way of letting her know she was tired of life, that Jennice should just let her go. The thought made her shudder. She couldn’t imagine a world without her mother in it.

  Unhappily, Jennice had gone with the ambulance to the hospital, all the time worrying about how exactly she was going to pay the bill. Medicare only paid for so much and the kind of care her mother was getting was going to add up very quickly. She’d spent the past two nights sitting vigil at her mother’s bed, wondering if it might be better to pray for the end, rather than the speedy recovery that would just extend her mother’s pain. But she couldn’t do it.

  Instead, she’d prayed to God for something to happen, that someone would find it in their heart to help her. What she was really asking for, though she hated to admit it to herself, was for a miracle—and now it’d happened. She knew she shouldn’t count her chickens before they hatched, but in her heart she was certain this wasn’t a false hope. This Calliope Reaper-Jones had been sent by God specifically to help her, Jennice McMartin.

  Praise the Lord, she thought as she finally set the phone receiver back in its cradle.

  Holding the umbrella tightly to her chest, she walked toward the exit, her whole body shaking with relief as the heavy weight of desperation fell away from her shoulders for the first time in almost forty-eight hours.

  As she stood by the door, Jennice gave the cluttered office one final look before flipping off the overhead light switch.

  She had a funny feeling she’d seen the last of Easterly Realty.

  * * *

  there was someone in the house.

  Not that anyone else would have known it, but Edgar Freezay had a sixth sense about these things. With the sensitivity of a seismograph, he could feel the hum of another entity, low and regular, coming from somewhere inside the bungalow. There weren’t many rooms in the place—a bedroom, a miniature kitchen, a bathroom and a living room looking out over the ocean—so it wouldn’t be too hard to flush the uninvited guest from their hiding place.

  “I know you’re in here and, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” he said, the sound of his voice echoing in the emptiness.

  He’d always had a strange fondness for Clark Gable—and for Gone with the Wind, actually—so he liked to trot out the quote whenever possible. Besides, it was the truth. He really didn’t give a damn who was in his house.

  Setting his keys down on the white-tiled, eat-in bar linking the kitchen to the living room, he went about his business—his business being fixing himself a drink. He picked up a heavy-bottomed highball glass from the drying rack next to the kitchen sink, then extracted a bottle of scotch from the nest of (mostly empt
y) liquor bottles on the mini wet bar in the living room, pouring himself three fingers of the golden liquid and gulping it down in one swallow. He poured himself two more fingers and, thusly fortified, he went to sit on the gray twill couch, his eyes locked on the swell of the ocean below his window.

  Freezay sipped from the highball glass, eyes forward, but his other senses were on alert, waiting for the telltale signs his mysterious guest was about to show himself. He knew it was a man and not a woman because of the smell, the slight hint of musky English Leather aftershave (his own aftershave, probably stolen from his own bathroom) that lingered in the air. It was stronger by the couch than it’d been in the kitchen, probably because his visitor had sat here, looking out at the ocean in much the same way Freezay was doing now.

  It made Freezay wonder how long his guest had been in residence. Surely the man hadn’t slept here the night before, taking Freezay’s absence as an invitation to use his bed. (God Freezay hoped not.) Still, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. It was his fault anyway. He wasn’t supposed to have spent the night in Los Angeles, ensconced in all the luxuries the Sunset Downtowner motel had to offer (that number was zero), but he’d been too tired after a day of pounding the sun-baked sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard to drive the three and a half hours back to the Central Coast.

  He’d opted for the motel because, at the time, it’d seemed the lesser of two evils. Maybe it hadn’t been the wisest of decisions. A man had to sleep, though, and it beat having your car shoot over a cliff because you fell asleep at the wheel—now that was just a stupid way to get yourself and your car mangled up for nothing.

  “I don’t know who you are, but why don’t you have a seat,” Freezay said, not turning his head as he gestured with the highball glass for his guest to take the brown leather armchair kitty-corner to the couch.

  He felt his mysterious guest leave the safety of the hall, the man’s sock-footed tread making no whisper as he stepped into the sunken living room and took the seat Freezay had pointed out.