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

by Amber Benson

  Clio was never one to give up easily.

  “We turn around and go back the way we came. They have to be gone by now, I would think. It’s been hours.”

  Clio hoped she was right. It did feel like they’d been walking for hours—but with the ever-present gray limestone floor and walls, it was hard to get a bearing on how long they’d actually been inside the passage.

  “You think that’s such a good idea?” Frank asked.

  He looked even worse than when she’d first discovered him. His cheeks were razor blades protruding from the sides of his face, his eyes all bruised and sunken in. Whatever process was causing this marked change in Frank, it was progressing at an alarming rate. She just hoped she could get him out of Purgatory before he totally wasted away.

  “I don’t have another plan up my sleeve, so…” She trailed off, happily daring him to come up with something better—anything to keep them out of the bad guys’ clutches.

  Frank shook his head, and they were both horrified when a handful of his hair fell out, floating to the floor.

  “Jesus,” Clio breathed, as Frank’s face tightened and he reached up, gently patting his scalp.

  Even more hair came out in his hand and he lurched forward, his gait unsteady. Clio grabbed him around the waist, so he wouldn’t fall over then helped him to sit down on the cold, stone floor. Once he was on his butt, he promptly rolled into the fetal position and began to rock back and forth against the wall.

  Because he was doing it so silently, it took Clio a moment to realize Frank was crying—the tip-off was his skinny rib cage moving up and down in an exaggerated manner as the sobs wracked his body. It was pathetic to watch Frank cry, his whole body overtaken by emotion. Clio wanted to avert her eyes, walk away, and give him some privacy, but compassion filled her veins and she knelt down beside him, her hand reaching out to touch his wasted cheek.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked, and he nodded.

  “I feel all achy and feverish, like I got the flu,” he whispered, the tears still coursing down his face. He reached up and wiped them away, but it was a futile gesture because there were already more coming.

  “Okay, we have to get you out of here. Damn the assholes, we’re taking a wormhole. I don’t care if they follow us,” she said, putting her hand on Frank’s shoulder.

  “You know, you remind me of a friend I once had,” Frank said suddenly. “He was brave like you, willing to fight the good fight.”

  It felt strange having Frank describe her as “brave” because all she felt right then was weak and scared. The polar opposite of brave.

  “He died when we were real young—”

  Frank was still talking and Clio realized he was delirious.

  “I let him down, though. Shoulda been there when he needed me, but I was sick…and I let him down. Then the animals got him.”

  “I can’t imagine that’s true—” she began to say, but Frank only shook his head, the violence of the action bouncing his skull off the limestone. Clio knew it must’ve hurt him, but Frank seemed to have embraced the pain as his punishment.

  “You don’t know…you don’t know,” he moaned.

  “Okay, we’re gonna get you out of here now.”

  But Frank wasn’t listening. His eyes were rolled up in his head, fluttering back and forth like moth wings.

  “Frank?” Clio said, shaking him. He didn’t respond, his rigid body starting to thrash. She watched in dismay as his head slammed into the limestone wall over and over again.

  Clio didn’t know what to do. She’d never seen anyone have a seizure before, didn’t know how to help him. She just had to sit there and wait until it was over.

  “Frank?” she kept asking, trying to break through to him, but he was gone, trapped inside his flailing body.

  When it was finally finished, Frank slumped against the wall, his limp body unable to move. His eyes were unfocused, but Clio could see he was still conscious and alive inside.

  She didn’t waste another second, just used her powers to call up a wormhole right there in Death, Inc., under everyone’s nose.

  It appeared with a low rumbling that came to a crescendo as a flash of light rent the air in front of them.

  “Let’s scram,” she said, dragging Frank toward the shimmering tear in the fabric of space/time.

  He opened his mouth, trying to speak, but Clio shushed him.

  “Not the time,” she said—and then she pulled him through the wormhole behind her.

  The magic hit her hard enough to take her breath away. And if she was feeling it, then she knew it was even worse for Frank. She’d always made fun of Callie for her hatred of traveling by wormhole, but if this was Cal’s experience every time she took one, then Clio finally understood her dislike.

  She felt as though she and Frank were socks in a washer, getting all tumbled around on the heavy cycle. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t fun, either; especially for Frank, who was already hurting so much.

  This thought made her wonder if the reason for someone having a terrible wormhole experience might lie in the psyche of the person doing the traveling. Callie was predisposed to hate the experience, so her brain created what she was expecting—and she had a feeling Frank, sick as he was, might be of the same mind as her sister.

  Like two rag dolls, the wormhole spit Clio and Frank out in the middle of a gravel driveway, a few feet away from Clio’s Honda Element. She had no idea where they’d ended up, just that she’d asked the wormhole to bring them to her car, wherever it might be. She had expected to find Jarvis and Noh with the Element, so it was kind of a disappointment to pick herself up and discover the car was abandoned.

  “Damn,” she muttered under her breath as she scooted over to Frank, who was lying on his side in the gravel, his skin pale blue in the moonlight.

  “Callie, I’m sorry I almost killed ya,” Frank said, reaching up with a shaking hand and trying to touch Clio’s cheek. “It wasn’t my idea. I always had a little soft spot for ya.”

  Shit, he thinks I’m Callie, Clio thought. This is awkward.

  “I, uh, forgive you.”

  He patted her cheek.

  “Thank you. Thank you for that.”

  He closed his eyes—and Clio had never before been so happy to have someone fall into unconsciousness. As much as she loved Callie, she just didn’t have the wherewithal to deal with her sister’s fucked-up love life right then.

  With Frank down for the count, Clio took a moment to investigate her surroundings.

  The car seemed to have been abandoned in favor of going on foot. Clio assumed the reason for this choice had been the giant wrought iron gate and heavy spelled padlock blocking the entrance—and she figured (rightly) no one was getting past the gate without a key or a counter spell.

  She didn’t know what to do. She’d really been hoping to find Jarvis and the others, but now she was at a loss.

  Without thinking, she yelled Jarvis’s name into the night sky.

  That was silly, she thought, her only response coming from the crickets humming in the grass.

  She sat back down in the gravel beside Frank.

  She wasn’t sure what to do next. She could try and drag Frank with her while she explored the grounds, looking for a way inside, or she could just leave him “resting” in the gravel—but neither option seemed very appealing.

  “Shit,” she said under her breath, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin between her kneecaps. She knew she needed to make a plan, but she was just so frickin’ tired all she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and go to sleep.

  And then she remembered something important; something she should’ve thought of immediately.

  Clio had a cell phone.

  It was just too bad she didn’t get a chance to use it.

  * * *

  caoimhe woke up in the muted silence that comes just before first light. Her head ached something fierce and her eyelids didn’t want to cooperate, unwilling
to open no matter how fervently she begged. So she just lay there, trying to remember what she’d done to give herself such a massive hangover. Had she been at the pub all night? She didn’t think so, but no matter how hard she fought to recall the previous evening, nothing came back to her.

  She focused, instead, on asking her head to stop aching—and what a joke this was. She felt like her brain had zero control over her body these days, and even less so when she was hungover. Finally, after an age, she was able to crack on eye open and get a glimpse of her surroundings. She was happy to discover she was in her own bed, in her own bedroom, in her own flat. It’d been a long time since she’d woken up in a strange place with this kind of hangover, but there’d been a time in her life—not long after she’d given Calliope up to the girl’s father—that she’d tried to blot out her pain in alcohol and a string of very unfulfilling sexual dalliances with random strangers.

  Her memory failed her for a moment, or maybe she’d just zoned out. But now something, some idea she was missing, started to eat at her. She ran back through her thoughts, trying to discover what the missing link was…alcohol, hangover, random hookups, and one’s own bed…Calliope.

  That was it. That was the disconnect: her daughter Calliope.

  Her energy returned like a shot of adrenaline and she sat up, her body filled with purpose. She slid her legs over the side of the bed so the soles of her feet touched the floor—and the room shifted to the right, her head pounding with blood as she fought to remain upright in the wake of the vertigo.

  “Don’t make a sound.”

  She raised her head, fighting the woozy feeling trying to overtake her, and saw a tiny owlet perched on the bottom of the window frame just across from where she was sitting. It was too chilly to have the window open, but for some unknown reason, either she or Morrigan had left it open a crack, and now a little creature had taken this as an open invitation to enter the flat.

  “What—” Caoimhe started to say, but the owlet shushed her with a squawk from its miniature beak, its downy brown feathers ruffling in annoyance.

  “Quiet.”

  The owlet was looking at something over Caoimhe’s shoulder. Caoimhe turned to find Morrigan asleep in the bed beside her, her partner’s red hair splayed across the white pillow like blood splatter.

  “Morrigan shouldn’t know you’re here?” Caoimhe asked, whispering her question.

  The tiny owlet bobbed up and down, letting Caoimhe know this was the correct answer.

  “She won’t help you,” the owlet said. “She wants to keep you for herself.”

  Caoimhe’s brain was assailed by a flash of memory, something she didn’t want to remember, but was important to hold on to.

  Morrigan at the fireplace. Morrigan turning as Caoimhe scuttled across the bed, trying to escape.

  Caoimhe closed her eyes, trying to catch more of the memory, but this was all her brain seemed to have cataloged. Of course, just this little bit was enough to make her understand the owlet’s need for secrecy.

  “I may not look like myself, but my owlet has kindly allowed me to share this body with it,” the creature was saying, and Caoimhe had to rip herself out of her own head to make sure she was following the owlet’s words.

  “I came to you once, long ago when you were with child—”

  Caoimhe’s breath caught in her throat. This wasn’t just an owlet—this was Anjea, the Vice-President in Charge of Australia for Death, Inc. The seer who’d come to her when she was pregnant with Calliope and told her her child was special and must be protected at all costs. It was because of this woman she’d given Callie up and been excommunicated from her daughter’s life.

  “What happened to you?” Caoimhe whispered, her body trembling with fear.

  The owlet sighed, ruffling its feathers as it prepared to give her a thorough explanation.

  “I knew they would come for me, so I took the precaution of splitting my soul between my body and my owlet. They came as I had predicted they would and I left my body before they could destroy it,” the owlet that was Anjea said. “It was the only way to make sure I would survive to help your daughter.”

  Calliope was in danger. Caoimhe could taste it. She wondered if this was why Morrigan had been after her in the memory. If Morrigan knew something was terribly wrong and was trying to stop her from helping Callie…? She shuddered, the thought too hideous to follow any further.

  The owlet seemed to be reading her mind.

  “Morrigan has made a deal with the God Watatsumi to support his Death, Frank, in favor of your daughter. She will stop you from going to Calliope if you wake her.”

  Caoimhe nodded she understood, though, if what the owlet said was true, she knew she would never return to Morrigan’s bed again.

  “Calliope needs our help now,” the owlet continued. “I’ve come to fetch you. Will you go with me?”

  “If it’s to help Calliope, then I’d follow you anywhere.”

  Silent as a mouse, Caoimhe stood up and, ignoring her dizziness, crossed the room to her dresser. Easing the dresser drawer open as quietly as possible, she pulled out a soft white T-shirt and began the ritual of dressing.

  twenty-three

  CALLIOPE

  Judas Iscariot had been letting way too many souls into the interior of Hell. He’d had no idea he was doing it because someone had put a spell on him, making him an unwitting poppet in a nasty game of “steal the souls.” But now Judas knew what had been done to him, he was beside himself with guilt. The trick would be to calm him down enough to glean what we could about his mystery friend. I was convinced the friend would turn out to be Enoch, the guy Jarvis had mentioned in conjunction with the human translation of my How to Be Death book, but we would just have to wait and see what information we could cadge out of Judas.

  Of course, all of this was way easier said than done.

  “No more crying,” I said, patting Judas’s arm. “We need you to tell us everything about this mystery guy.”

  Judas nodded then bit his lip.

  “He called himself ‘the Man in Gray.’”

  I wanted to say: Well, that’s a stupid name.

  But instead, I said:

  “That’s great. A great descriptor.”

  I looked over at Daniel and Marcel, who were standing by the bloodred sea marking the entrance to the East Gate of Hell. They were whispering together, heads lowered so I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  I decided to ignore their conspiring and concentrate on Judas. He seemed comfortable with me, Runt, Cerberus, and Bernadette (the soul who’d clued us into the discrepancies between who was actually on the scroll and who was a plant from the Man in Gray), but every so often he would look sideways at the boys as if he were afraid they were going to come over and attack him.

  “Look right here,” I said, drawing Judas’s focus away from Daniel and Marcel and back to me. “Where were the souls you let in supposed to go? Did he ever say anything about that?”

  Judas looked nonplussed. There were tears in the corners of his eyes, and I saw before me a beaten man, one who cowed before everyone and everything because of the centuries spent existing under the weight of such immense guilt.

  “No, he didn’t say a thing about anything like that. We never talked about souls.”

  “It’s okay,” Bernadette said, coming over and wrapping an arm around Judas’s shoulder. “No one’s trying to make you feel bad. This is all very important. Just think hard and we’ll see what’s hidden in that noggin of yours.”

  Turning the “grandmotherly setting” to high, she squeezed him to her and he finally started to calm down.

  “He did sometimes refer to something he called The Pit,” Judas whispered. “It was where he was doing his top-secret project.”

  Cerberus gave a start and my gaze slid to him. Something Judas said had registered with Snarly head. I could see it in his large, unblinking eye.

  “What?” I asked.

  Snarly head frow
ned, shook his head.

  “It could be nothing—”

  “If you’re thinking it, then it’s not nothing,” I said.

  I could tell Snarly head was pleased with my compliment.

  “She’ol,” he continued, more brusquely. “It has been called The Pit by many. It’s where Enoch has spent these many centuries in imprisonment.”

  “Doesn’t sound like he’s imprisoned there anymore,” Daniel offered.

  I had to agree with Daniel. It looked like someone had sprung him from jail in order to further their own ends.

  “Do we know where The Pit is?” I asked.

  Daniel and Cerberus exchanged a look. Ugh, more male conspiring—it drove me nuts. If we were going to play girls against boys, then I was taking Judas for the girl’s team. The boys could just hang out in the desert all by themselves and we ladies (and Judas Iscariot) would go fix the problem without them.

  “Obviously you guys know something you’re not telling me,” I said, letting them see my annoyance.

  “We’ve been having problems with that part of Hell for a while now,” Daniel said, rubbing the weariness from his eyes. “It’s always been kind of a no-man’s-land, but since the Devil was deposed, it’s gotten even worse. Besides, She’ol has always been the purveyance of the Angels—until recently. Since they’ve opted to stay mostly out of the human world these days, places like She’ol have been up in the air, as far as who has control over them.”

  “So someone like Enoch could be AWOL and no one would have any idea he was even gone.”

  At least Snarly head had the courtesy to look sheepish about not divulging this pertinent piece of information until now. Did they not think I’d want to know something like this? I mean, c’mon menfolk.

  “Boys, I think it’s high time you led us into the interior of Hell and showed us The Pit. This way we can actually try to stop the whole universe-collision-extravaganza before it’s too late.”

  I let my gaze linger on Alternate Frank, who was hanging upside down from the dumb head’s mouth, drool covering his torso. He did not look happy about it.