Servants of the Storm

by Delilah S. Dawson

“You know what it’s like when they drug you, Dovey,” he says quietly. “I hope you’ll forgive me, at least. I . . . I just didn’t know. It happened before Josephine. The demons were more hidden then, more contained. Kitty had a different boss, and Able kept things low-key.”

  Able. I remember that name. I think Josephine mentioned him at Riverfest. But I’m not giving Isaac any more of my secrets. I look at him sideways, sly. “So did you like it?”

  He sighs deeply and rubs his eyes with one hand. He’s only going about fifty now, so I loosen my death grip on the passenger side door and settle back down.

  “Seriously. I was seventeen. I was nerdy and awkward, and a hot chick was into me, and we fooled around, and then we did it, and then she ruined my life. She’s a succubus, for chrissakes.”

  “So you liked it.”

  “Of course I liked it!” he yells. “And I freaking hate myself for it!” He slams a fist into the steering wheel, and the car jerks to the right. “Are you happy now?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Good.”

  He sighs. “Can we just forget about the naive-kid-gets-tricked-into-losing-his-virginity-to-a-sex-demon thing and get back to the part where we save your friend’s soul?”

  He’s landed on the one subject I can’t avoid or deny, the thing that’s pushing me to keep going even when every step along the path makes me want to go home and take my pills and hide under my bed with the dust bunnies.

  “All I got out of visiting Casa de Crane is that he’s a liar who wants to jump me, and all of Kitty’s dybbuk boxes are stored in a cabinet somewhere,” I say, my tone brisk and businesslike. “Nothing about Carly. Total waste of time.”

  “Well, the cabinet thing is good news,” he says. “I read about it in that book I showed you, but I didn’t know for sure that it was a real thing. If we can find it, you’ll have Carly’s soul at least. And if we can figure out how to kill Kitty, we’ll get Carly’s distal. Not to mention mine and yours.” He nibbles his lip while he’s thinking, and I catch myself staring at it and thinking about him nuzzling my neck and kissing me. Then I think about him doing that to Kitty, with the black veins in her skin and those cruel, jagged teeth, and I have to look away to keep from gagging.

  “Could it be at Riverfest?” I ask. “Or do they have another hangout? Does she have a special crypt in the cemetery or something?”

  “Demons aren’t big into graveyards. They need live food. The cabinet could be anywhere in her territory, though, which is downtown.” He scratches his chin, and I remember how his stubble rasped against my cheek. “Dawn has the suburbs, and Marlowe has the swamps and islands. If demons were the Mafia, those three higher demons are like Josephine’s underbosses. Riverfest is kind of neutral territory, not close enough to home for Kitty. If Crane’s actually telling the truth, she’ll want to keep her cabinet away from the other demons. Keep it guarded. Protected. Like the distal bones are.”

  “Maybe somewhere in the club?”

  “Probably not. Too many outsiders, too many witnesses. She probably keeps it kind of close, but she also wouldn’t expect us to be looking for it. Demons think of cambions kind of like dogs.”

  “Dogs? Really?” I raise an eyebrow at him. “Because isn’t that bestiality?”

  He groans, and I giggle. Laugh or go crazy, I guess.

  “I mean, they use us. We’re tools.” I burst out in maniacal laughter, and he shakes his head. “Shut up, Dovey. Seriously. They think of us like ranchers think of sheepdogs—like we’re smart and useful but not creative and independent. And, yeah, they’ll use the hell out of us to make more distal servants or do their errands. But the point is that we need to find the cabinet, and we don’t have long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You remember when I tried to talk you out of doing the play?”

  I exhale through my nose and roll my eyes. “Yeah, and?”

  “Kitty’s got something big planned. It’s one of the reasons we had to see Crane tonight—to make sure he didn’t know about it. Josephine’s doing some sort of secret high demon ceremony to celebrate her anniversary, and Kitty’s doing her own thing.” He pauses, takes a deep breath, shoots a sideways look at me. “At the Liberty Theater.”

  “What, Kitty’s going to come see The Tempest?” I snort. “Hope the bitch bought tickets. It’s already sold out.”

  “She won’t be there for the show. More like for the audience.”

  Fear grips my heart, as icy and cold as the rain on my face was when Carly was swept away. My mom and dad will be there tomorrow night. Friends, family, teachers, people from the neighborhood. Almost everyone I know.

  “What’s she going to do?” I ask.

  “I don’t know exactly. I mean, who knows what a demon is going to do? But it’ll be bad. All those people, closed off in one of Kitty’s oldest haunts. I thought there might be a chance that Crane would know something about killing demons, or that maybe Dawn would be onto Kitty’s plans. But he would have hinted about something this big. It looks like we’ve got one day to find this mysterious cabinet and kill something that can’t be killed.”

  I watch Isaac carefully, trying to separate out my feelings for him. Is my crush on him because he’s a cambion, and do I still feel the fire now that I know about his relationship with Kitty? Does he like me, maybe even care about me, or is he just using me? He could have told me beforehand the full reason we walked into Crane’s snake pit. I don’t know whether or not I can trust him, really. I don’t know whether or not he’s evil, if maybe I’m evil too. But still, he’s all I’ve got. And he looks seriously upset, and hopeless. And I sense that he’s being honest. For now.

  “I think I might have a clue,” I say.

  I reach into my pocket for the chain, for the pendant that’s become a comfort in just a few short hours. Then I dig deeper. Then I check my other pockets.

  “What is it?” he says.

  “Carly’s necklace,” I say, tears in my eyes. “It’s gone.”

  23

  I’VE JUST EMPTIED MY POCKETS on the side of the road, and the necklace is definitely gone.

  “Tell me you didn’t lose it at Crane’s place.” Isaac curses under his breath and mutters, “Tell me you didn’t let him steal it.”

  Oh, God. That hug. The heavy-handed and very distracting butt pat. We both know what’s happened.

  “I wondered why you kept patting that pocket like you had a wad of hundreds in there. That asshat. He probably thinks he can pawn it,” Isaac says. “He’s always hard up for cash.”

  “It’s not worth anything.” I can’t stop feeling around my collarbone for Carly’s necklace that was never there. “It’s just kid jewelry. Carly’s grandmother gave them to us when we turned ten. Our birthdays are a week apart, and we had a party together right in the middle, and that was our gift. And then tonight I saw Carly at Riverfest, and I asked her how I could help, and she pulled it off and gave it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even get a good look at it in the light.”

  I wrap my arms around myself against the cold and bite my lip to keep from shrieking at the moon. I keep losing pieces of Carly. What I saw tonight—that wasn’t her. But somewhere in the poison-purple skin, deep down, there was enough of a spark left to give me a final gift. And I let some piece-of-crap demon boy toy steal it from me. I feel so stupid. But there’s no way I’m saying that out loud.

  “Do you still have your half?” he asks me.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So if there are two halves of the same necklace, then maybe there’s something about yours that matches hers. Maybe there’s something she wanted you to see.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, gingerly poking the wiry black stitches in my pinkie and sniffling. “I don’t even know if she understood me. It’s like she wasn’t there. It was her, but she wasn’t there. Maybe she was just . . . I don’t know. Saying good-bye.”

 
; “Maybe,” he says. “But maybe not.”

  “Whatever.”

  He grabs me by the shoulders, and I look up. His eyes are ice blue, but I’m too hopeless to feel their electricity. Or maybe now that I know about his power, I’m immune. Whatever it is, he can’t touch me inside, powers or no.

  “Don’t let them do this to you, Dovey. ‘Whatever’ isn’t good enough. You can’t give up now just because you lost something. Get in the car. Let’s find your half of the necklace. At least have a look.”

  I see something flicker over his shoulder. A flock of geese, hightailing it. I realize that after the second-longest night of my life, it’s almost dawn. The sky is lavender, and the breeze is chilly and smells of dry leaves and car exhaust. And somewhere, lurking around the edges, the air reeks of decay.

  It didn’t used to smell like this. November mornings used to smell like fires and candy corn and getting on the bus with Carly. The air wasn’t pure, but it didn’t always stink like something was dying, right out of reach. Only since Josephine has it been this way. She brought it all, took away everything that was good. And she took my best friend—or Kitty did. I’ll never stop loving Carly. And I’ll never stop fighting the thing that took her away from me.

  I’m going to find Carly’s bone and bring her the peace she deserves. And I’m going to do it for myself, because I don’t want to be part of Josephine’s rot. I want my own peace. And if Isaac’s willing to fight, I’ll do it for him, too.

  “My mom really is going to freak out,” I say, shoving my hands deep into my pockets and trying not to show how ashamed I am of myself for almost giving up.

  “She’s really not. I bet she’s fast asleep and doesn’t even know you were gone.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Trust me. If she’s on pills or drinking from the tap, she’s tuned in to their magic, to their needs. She’ll sleep through anything. If there’s one thing I know about, it’s how demons can dick us over us when they want something.”

  The look I give him can only be described as cutting.

  “You know what I mean.”

  We get back into my car, and the pleather seats have gone ice-cold while we’ve been standing outside, breathing clouds of vapor and hunting for a necklace that’s clearly long gone. But the necklace’s mate is sitting at home on my bathroom counter, and sleep is starting to sound pretty good too. And breakfast. Whether my mom kills me or not, someone’s feeding me breakfast first. When Isaac pulls into a Waffle House, it shines like a golden beacon through the frost on my window.

  “You’re buying, asshole,” I mutter.

  I order every single thing I want and eat until I’m full. Isaac buys the crappy local paper, and we take turns reading the whole thing section by section, folding it neatly, passing it back and forth over the table like we’re completely normal people and not demon-made monsters trying to save the city from an albino alligator and a fox-eared girl. I play a game with myself, trying to pick out which news stories and crimes are just more demonic bullshit.

  A smile creeps, unwanted, across my lips. I slide my waffles through the hot, buttery syrup and slurp down my extra-sugared coffee and pretend for just a few seconds that Isaac is really all that he seems, and that a demon has never had her tongue in his mouth, and that I have a chance with him, and that I would actually want one. I pretend that we’re happy and that things probably aren’t going to go desperately wrong.

  Isaac pays like it was actually a date, and I notice that he’s a good tipper, not that it matters. I crawl back into the car on sleepy feet, and he helps buckle me in.

  “Feeling feisty?” I say with a chuckle as he gets the seat belt arranged, and he waggles his eyebrows, which is definitely not how I reacted when Baker used that line on me at Riverfest. I fall asleep shortly after that, too exhausted and full to hold on to consciousness. I barely blink my eyes when the car stops and I feel Isaac’s arms around me, lifting me, my body swaying as his footsteps crunch on gravel. The scent of incense and old books washes over me.

  “Sleep deeply,” someone says.

  And I do.

  Much later a car engine turns off, and the air around me goes cold.

  “We’re here,” Isaac says.

  I feel like I’ve been asleep forever, and I open my eyes on an afternoon sun caught in a sharp blue sky.

  “Where?”

  “Your house.”

  I blink and rub my eyes, confused and muddled. My car is parked in its normal place in front of my house, and I’m curled up in a ball with Isaac’s leather jacket draped over me. I breathe in deeply and unfold my arms. I smell the aged wood and sugared meat of Charnel House, the tang of the whisky he made me drink during surgery, the leather and cinnamon of Isaac himself, and a smoky, spicy scent that’s so familiar it hurts.

  “Smells like incense,” I mutter.

  He chuckles. “It is. From church. I go there a lot to think and pray.”

  It’s the last thing on earth I expect him to say, until I remember that ornate cross he’s always wearing and that he mentioned he wanted to study religion at Duke. He must go somewhere very different from the Baptist church where I sat with Carly every Sunday, our feet swinging in white patent leather shoes with lacy socks. We used to scribble notes on the offering cards, and it only occurs to me now that playing hangman in church is probably blasphemous. I never really liked going to church and being told what to think, but Carly’s mama made her go, so I went with her. Her favorite part was the doughnuts and chocolate milk before Sunday school, although she also loved the story of Adam naming the animals.

  “Where’d he come up with this stuff?” she said once, eating a doughnut off her finger while wearing it like a ring. “ ‘Giraffe’ and ‘elephant.’ Hmph. I would’ve given them good names. Like ‘Maximillian’ or ‘Peaches.’ Or ‘Steve.’ ”

  I can’t remember the last time I ate a doughnut, and I can’t remember the last time I went to church. But something else is bothering me, other than how weird it is to think of Isaac sitting in a pew in his leather jacket, praying. I look up. My car is exactly where I park it every night. And it’s afternoon. And that’s not right.

  “Wait,” I say. “Where have I been all day? And how’d you find my house?”

  He smiles his most charming smile and says, “You fell asleep, and I couldn’t wake you up, so I took you back to my carriage house and tucked you in on the couch to sleep it off.”

  “But how did you know where I live?”

  “Because I know everything. And when I have drugged girls bleeding all over my apartment, I Google them so I’ll know where to dump the body.”

  But it sounds so . . . convenient. And manufactured. And when he smiles that smile, I’ve learned not to trust him.

  “You’re lying,” I say flatly.

  His face goes through a bunch of different emotions from guilt to anger to sadness to confusion. Before he can say anything, my front door opens. My mom steps out onto the top step and waves lazily. The sleep leaves my system when Mr. Hathaway appears behind her, his smile huge with what I used to think were false teeth.

  I’ve known him all my life, but now I really see him. In the light, as he is. Now I just wonder how he fits all those teeth in one mouth.

  “Oh, crap. They know,” Isaac says under his breath.

  “Know what?” I say. But I know. Oh, I know.

  “It doesn’t matter. The demons know something. Why else would Hathaway be in your house?”

  “He’s a neighbor.”

  “He’s a lesser demon!”

  “My mom doesn’t know that. People come to her all the time with problems or to ask legal questions. Or to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  “He doesn’t eat sugar, Dovey.”

  My head drops. He’s right, and we both know it. There is no innocent reason Mr. Hathaway should be here. Not now, on a Friday afternoon. Not ever. Yet there he stands, right next to my mother. And he’s been waiting for me, maybe all night. And I’m t
he one who made it easy for him, leaving my mom alone when she was clearly under the influence of demon drugs. I shiver in shame and anger, and adrenaline pulses down my arms and legs. The rage starts to boil in my chest. I want to run, to scream, to hit something really hard.

  Taking over my city and killing my best friend were bad enough. But now the demons are in my house.

  “Tell me about him. He’s not like Kitty, right?”

  “Lesser demon, like Old Murph. They feed on sadness, depression, hopelessness, mostly. Making their neighbors miserable. Scaring kids.”

  “Sounds like him. That’s not too bad.”

  “Don’t underestimate lesser demons. Sometimes they . . . well, they’re kind of like vultures. If something’s already dead or easy to kill, they might eat it. Are there lots of old people in this neighborhood?”

  He gives me a meaningful look, and I go cold all over, thinking about my grandmother, who died in her house just a block away. They said it was a stroke. I saw Nana in her coffin. But I saw Carly, too.

  “Used to be more old folks. A lot died during Josephine. And after.”

  Isaac nods slowly. “And Hathaway’s been here all along.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Do you know how to fight?”

  “Sure,” I say with a Jasmine-esque head shake. “Onstage, with a wooden sword. Goddamn, boy. I’m a seventeen-year-old girl!”

  “But not a normal one,” he says quietly.

  And that’s when I realize that he’s right. I can feel it, inside me. Lurking, coiled. Waiting. Something dark, something not right. Something starting to wake up, fueled by my anger. And I want to turn that power against the demons, use what they’ve given me to destroy them and free us all, free the whole damn city.

  “Y’all come on in and sit a spell,” Mr. Hathaway calls from the doorway. “Miz Greenwood cooked up a fine Sunday dinner.”

  Isaac gets out and yells, “Yeah, but today’s Friday.”

  Mr. Hathaway’s smile widens.

  “Food’s still edible, even when it’s old,” he says, and he puts his hand on my mom’s shoulder. I jump out of the car, and it takes everything I have not to run up the sidewalk and strangle him with all nine and a half fingers.