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

by Amber Benson

  With those words, I knew I’d won. I could talk Jarvis into giving me the full Enoch story if I was willing to do a little cajoling in return.

  “He was friendly with the Angels…?” I asked, letting my words trail off.

  “Mmh,” he replied.

  “Mmh,” I thought, is not an answer.

  “And he was friends with the Angels because…?” I tried again.

  “I don’t know the how and the why of Enoch’s relationship with the Angels,” Jarvis said. “I just know he had one and was allowed into their world when no other human was.”

  It drove me crazy when Jarvis got purposely vague.

  “You’re mad at me for not wanting to read the book,” I said, leaning back in my chair.

  “No, I’m annoyed with you for being so childish,” Jarvis shot back. “The crossed-fingers thing.”

  He added this as if he thought I’d have no idea what he was talking about.

  “I’m sorry about the fingers thing,” I said—and I meant it. “I just didn’t want to read the book.”

  I batted my eyelashes at my Executive Assistant and caught the merest hint of a smile at the corner of his lips.

  “I see that baby smile,” I said, leaning forward in my chair and crooning at him in a high-pitched, singsongy voice. “Yes, I do. I see that little baby smile.”

  Jarvis looked at me like I was nutso—and he was probably right.

  “Oh, stop it,” he said finally with a shake of his head, but I think there was a part of Jarvis that actually liked how silly I could be at times. “Apology accepted if you stop goo-goo-gah-gahing at me.”

  “Done,” I said, sitting back and smiling at him.

  “Where, oh, where is the mature woman I was speaking to no less than five minutes ago,” Jarvis sighed to himself.

  “I’m mercurial.”

  That was all I could offer him.

  “That you are,” he agreed, nodding his head. “That you are.”

  The ring of the doorbell, its chime loud and sonorous, surprised both of us.

  “Who in the world?” Jarvis asked, standing up.

  He looked anything but excited that an unannounced visitor was putting in an appearance at Sea Verge.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, setting the copies of How to Be Death and The Book of Enoch down on the side table next to my chair and hopping up to follow Jarvis.

  But when I got to the door, he shooed me away with his hand.

  “Go sit back down. You aren’t a parlor maid.”

  I glared at him, but then shrugged my acquiescence, allowing Jarvis to close the door before I turned around and flopped back into my chair.

  But when the door to the study finally opened again, it wasn’t Jarvis standing in the doorway as I’d expected. Instead, I found myself staring into the haunted eyes of Marcel, the Ender of Death. He looked haggard, his lean face pinched, the ends of his hair sticking up from the crown of his head at odd angles. He was wearing a pale baby blue T-shirt with the slogan “Revenge Is A Dish Best Re-Heated” emblazoned across the front and a pair of light gray linen slacks bunching at his ankles. The flesh-toned huaraches he had on were at least two sizes too big for him, showing off unkempt toenails and lightly down-covered feet.

  But the shocker, the thing that totally blew me away, was the long black nylon leash he held in his right hand…and the creature at the end of it.

  My hellhound puppy, Runt.

  She looked as bad as Marcel, her black coat covered in dirt, the tip of her heart-shaped pink nose abraded and bleeding.

  “Oh my God,” I said, racing to the hellhound pup and wrapping my arms around her neck.

  Jarvis came into the room hot on Marcel’s heels, his face white as a sheet.

  “Calliope—” he began, but I was intent on Runt and ignored him.

  I let her nuzzle my face, her warm breath coming out in short bursts that tickled my cheek. I could feel her heart thudding against my arm and her usually warm body was chilly underneath her matted coat.

  And that’s when I felt the warm wetness soaking into my shoulder—it was the only thing besides her breath that wasn’t cold as death. I sat back, confusion rippling through me.

  “Your shirt,” Jarvis whispered, pointing at my chest.

  I looked down at myself and gasped. The front of my white T-shirt was soaked in bright, red blood.

  “They went for her voice,” Marcel said, eyes downcast. “There was nothing I could do.”

  I looked up at Jarvis and saw tears dripping down his cheeks onto the starched collar of his dress shirt.

  This was bad. This was really fucking bad.

  “Runt?” I said, my voice cracking.

  But she couldn’t answer me.

  nine

  There were things in his life that confounded Daniel. He didn’t know why the automatic faucets in public bathrooms refused to work for him without a fight, or why he could never seem to hail a taxicab whenever he was in Manhattan. He could live with these minor complications. They were annoying, but survivable.

  There was only one thing—it was a person, actually—that had the power to overwhelm and confuse him like nothing else in the world. One minute his mind was flooded with images of her: the way she laughed (cackled was a better word, really), the way her body looked when she was half-naked in front of him, dressing for the day, the smoothness of her skin and its warm vanilla musk arousing him even in memory.

  The next minute he wanted to kill her.

  She drove him that crazy.

  She was chaotic and reckless. “Headstrong” and “stubborn” were just words—and they didn’t even begin to describe her, or how tough it was to get her to do anything she didn’t want to do. Sometimes when he thought of her, a picture of a mule would pop into his mind. He knew it was terrible, no one should ever imagine their girlfriend as an ass, but there were days—too many to count—when she deserved it. Because she was, without a doubt, the most exhausting and erratic creature he’d ever encountered.

  But, God help him, he loved her anyway. There was just something about her that made him feel like he was home whenever he was with her. It’d been such a long, long time since he’d felt this way he was loath to let it go. Even when she’d fucked around on him, it’d almost killed him to distance himself from her. He’d been devastated, totally sideswiped by her selfishness and lack of respect for their relationship and he knew if he’d been his old self, he would’ve wrung her neck.

  Literally.

  Not that it would do any good. She was an immortal like him, though she’d been given her immortality at birth while he’d had to sell his soul for his.

  Still, he’d suffered something fierce when he’d been forced to do without her. He’d tried to interest himself in other women, but he couldn’t even manage a smile for any of them, let alone an erection. Instead, he’d thrown himself into his work, spending every waking second trying to restructure Hell. The Devil had been an awful manager, much more interested in his own pleasure than the day-to-day running of his dominion. Daniel and his friend, Cerberus, the former Guardian of the North Gate of Hell, had their work cut out for them as they’d begun to unravel all the twisted skeins of corruption the Devil had left behind when he’d been dethroned.

  Even though they were making headway dismantling the old system, Hell was still not a place for the faint of heart. It had always been a bit of a dump, and even when they were through with the restructuring, it would still be a pretty miserable place, but it wouldn’t be nearly as scummy as it’d been when he’d accepted the Devil’s bargain all those years ago and become the de facto “Devil’s protégé”—a title he’d loathed.

  But back then his ambition had been great and he hadn’t cared what he’d had to do to secure his immortality. He’d done truly terrible things at the Devil’s behest, some of which would be burned into his soul forever. Others were just fleeting memories, like old newsreels flickering behind his eyelids whenever he was feeling weak, fu
ll of self-loathing and hatred.

  He’d never shared any of this with Calliope. He knew, as flighty and kooky as she was, she’d cut him out of her life forever if she even guessed at the horror his former self had wrought. Sure, he was reformed now. No, better than reformed.

  He was a zealot in the quest for good. But no matter how much good he did to make up for his past behavior, the taint of evil would never leave him.

  His biggest worry was Callie would discover who he’d been and how black his soul was—and it would end their relationship forever. If her thinking he was some kind of Goody Two-shoes was the price he had to pay for her to remain unaware of his past, then so be it. He’d rather she find him milquetoast than know what a bastard he’d been.

  But then she’d sent him that song, thinking he’d let her go willingly—and unaided—to her own death. What she didn’t understand was Daniel had no intention of letting her go. He’d put too much time and effort into making their relationship work for her to go and just get herself killed.

  Yes, he’d said “killed”—because even immortals had weaknesses that could be exploited in order to destroy them. And everyone knew Callie’s was the rare earth element, promethium.

  This was not a hypothesis he’d come to on his own. That’s not to say he wouldn’t have gotten there eventually, but he’d been encouraged down the path by someone who was in the perfect position to know what they were talking about: Watatsumi, the man who’d first clued the Afterlife in to Callie’s immortal weakness.

  He’d gotten the Dolly Parton song she’d e-mailed him, and, in his gut, he’d known something was wrong. But then the Japanese Water God, Watatsumi, had shown up, unannounced, at his office door and he’d understood the magnitude of what was happening to his girlfriend.

  “What are you doing here?” he’d said standing up and looking to see who’d let the small Japanese man into his office.

  Though they were still very understaffed, Daniel had been almost certain his secretary, Hans, had come in early, too—but when he’d looked past Watatsumi, he’d seen that his secretary’s bland beige office was empty.

  When the Devil was running the show, he’d spent most of his time at the Pleasure Castle he’d built for himself in the southern jungles of Hell. Daniel had never liked the Devil’s Pleasure Castle—it reminded him of an S&M version of the Winchester Mystery House—so when he’d been granted the Stewardship of Hell, he’d moved the whole operation to a compound of old ramshackle warehouse buildings just within the shadow of the Eastern Gates of Hell.

  He didn’t love the setting, how dilapidated the buildings were, or how hot it got inside them without air conditioning, but they were a much more appropriate environment for doing business than a sex castle had ever been.

  “Nice building,” Watatsumi had said, stepping into the small office and setting his palms down flat on the edge of Daniel’s cluttered desk.

  The smaller man’s monotone cadence had always set his teeth on edge, and this time it was no different.

  “What do you want?”

  He was two seconds away from calling Cerberus and having Watatsumi shunted into one of the myriad of prisons dotting Hell’s landscape, but the Water God sensed Daniel’s intention and cut straight to the chase.

  “Uriah Drood has brokered a deal with a creature called ‘the Man in Gray.’ This Man in Gray seeks to merge our world and another. It will mean the end of your Little Death”—Daniel realized he was talking about Callie—“and it will seriously uproot my own plans.”

  Daniel opened his mouth to interrupt, but Watatsumi wouldn’t let him speak.

  “I don’t like you. You don’t like me. But we share a common enemy. If we work together, we can stop the porcine Drood before he takes over our world.”

  Daniel knew Watatsumi was notorious for manipulating and double-crossing those he’d made “arrangements” with. There was no way he was getting involved with the Water God.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Watatsumi stood back up and shrugged his sagging shoulders. The black kimono he wore made him look smaller and older than the last time Daniel had seen him.

  “I need your help,” the Water God said, finally, looking beaten.

  It wasn’t a plea, exactly, but it made Daniel pay closer attention to what the Water God was saying.

  “Why would I help you?” Daniel asked. “You nearly killed my girlfriend.”

  Under the guise of helping her, Watatsumi had slipped Callie a wish-fulfillment jewel full of promethium, and if fate—and her friends—hadn’t intervened, she’d have died.

  “I make no bones about that,” Watatsumi agreed. “It is true. And I would do it all again. But now we need to help one another—”

  He pulled a small orange jewel from his kimono pocket and held it up to the bright, yellow light coming in through Daniel’s office windows.

  “A wish-fulfillment jewel. I will give it to you if you will help me. Proof of my goodwill.”

  He set the small piece of orange beryl on Daniel’s desk—and both of them stared at it.

  “Help me? Help you? It’s all the same,” Watatsumi continued, shrugging again.

  “How do I even know you’re telling the truth?” Daniel asked, his eye glued to the jewel on his desk. “Maybe you’re just trying to get to Callie through me.”

  Watatsumi nodded, as if this were a good question.

  “Go to her and see. Then you will know.”

  This answer unsettled Daniel.

  “But take the jewel,” Watatsumi added. “If you decide to help, use it to call me. We will strike a bargain then—and I will tell you how we will stop the Man in Gray.”

  With his peace said, the small man turned and shuffled back out the way he’d come. Daniel got up and ran for the doorway, but Watatsumi was gone. The hallway as empty as it had been before the Water God’s arrival.

  Daniel went back to his desk and sat down, his mind racing, then he opened his laptop—yes, even in Hell, computers were a necessary evil—and put on the Dolly Parton song Callie had sent him, really listening to the lyrics and its “I will always love you” refrain.

  That had been the decider.

  After that, he hadn’t stopped to think, he’d just acted, leaving Hell posthaste, not even stopping to let Cerberus, his second-in-command, know where he was going. If there was any validity to what Watatsumi had told him, he didn’t want anyone to know where he was going. Also, he didn’t dare go directly to Sea Verge in case someone was monitoring the wormhole channels. Instead, he chose to take a wormhole to the John F. Kennedy airport in Queens, New York, where he purchased a very expensive round-trip ticket to Boston that left him with three hours to sit at the airport and twiddle his thumbs.

  Of course, there had been no thumb twiddling. He’d put his downtime to good use, finding a payphone—one that took all the change in his wallet—and soon he was speaking to an old and very well placed friend who owed him a favor.

  In his previous “Devil’s protégé” existence, he’d associated primarily with the high rollers and movers and shakers of the criminal underworld. Everyone knew where there was greed and ambition, there was usually someone willing to sell their soul to the Devil. These were the people Daniel preyed on, and these were the people he still had some pull with, though his influence was slowly waning as the men and women he’d partied and played with died off, their positions now filled by others.

  As the Devil’s protégé, soul collecting had been his purveyance. He’d targeted the underbelly of the human race, tricking his victims into selling their souls for Earthly riches, never realizing when they died, they’d become the Devil’s property: shades without bodies, forced for eternity to do the Devil’s bidding.

  Daniel had been a master at the art of trickery, using human vanity and avarice to entrap his unsuspecting victims. In his heyday, he’d collected so many souls he’d eventually lost count. He’d had no conscience, luxuriating in the hunt and the kill, giddy with pow
er.

  And then one day it had changed.

  It was a long story, but suffice it to say, he’d grown a conscience. It’d been a rude awakening, but he’d never looked back.

  Until now.

  Now he was forced to delve into his former life to save the woman he loved.

  The flight to Boston hadn’t taken long. When he’d arrived at Logan International Airport, a black sedan was waiting for him in one of the short-term parking lots, the key in the ignition, as promised. Marty, his old contact with the Patriarca Crime Family, was always as good as his word: If he said a car would be there waiting for him, it would be there. He hadn’t wasted any time, just hopped in the driver’s seat and headed for Newport.

  But when he’d arrived, he’d found that Watatsumi was right. Calliope was gone and Jarvis seemed like he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Daniel worked very hard not to let anyone, especially Jarvis or Clio, see how unsettled he was. If they’d even guessed at his intentions, they’d have tried to talk him out of it.

  So he’d put on his concerned face, acting as though he was as in the dark as the others were. It was a lie, of course, but thanks to Watatsumi, he had a pretty good idea about what was going on.

  And then when Clio had taken off, leaving them all standing in the kitchen, Daniel had sensed now was the time to contact Watatsumi and set things into motion. He’d excused himself and gone to the bathroom, the orange wish-fulfillment jewel burning a hole in his pocket.

  * * *

  clio followed jennice back downstairs. She felt as though a great and terrible weight had been lifted from her shoulders. When she was stressed out—and she was in stress city with Cal being gone—all her tension went right into her left shoulder. It was a minor annoyance she’d learned to live with, functioning as though everything was normal even when all she wanted to do was put her life on pause and go get a massage. But after Jennice had touched her, the pain had vanished, gone almost as if it’d never existed in the first place.

  This was miraculous in itself then add the emotional relief that came with her touch, and the effect was even greater—or maybe it was all tied together, psychological pain manifesting as physical pain and vice versa.