Serpent's Storm

by Amber Benson

  A fact I was still trying to come to terms with.

  With the economy in the crapper, and me being a coward who hated confrontation, there was no chance I would have it out with Hy. So instead of dealing with my future in a productive way, I spent my days at work in my cubicle silently stewing in my own juices as I answered e-mails, took phone calls, and fervently wished my boss would get run over by a bike messenger.

  I knew it was a mean thing to wish on anyone, but I couldn’t help it. I was a wuss.

  And so, these were the myriad reasons why I hadn’t made good on my overdue promise to introduce Jarvis to Hyacinth, a promise I really did need to fulfill—and soon—or else the faun might take things into his own hands, and then where would my future job prospects be?

  “Okay, there has to be a smart way to do this,” I said. “There has to be a legitimate way to introduce you guys without her having a freak-out and firing me.”

  “And pray tell, why would she freak out?” Jarvis asked testily.

  “Oh, I don’t know why she would freak out, Jarvis. Maybe it’s because you’re a midget with the hoofs and private parts of a goat,” I shot back.

  “Such terrible parenting these days,” the arthritic old woman on the other side of the bench said as she raised her newspaper between us like some kind of homemade cootie barrier.

  “Excuse me?” I growled at the business section of the New York Times, but the lady didn’t even twitch.

  My suspicions aroused, I turned my attention back to Jarvis.

  “What kind of glamour did you put on yourself?” I said, peeved.

  He just grinned at me.

  “Tell me!” I said, grabbing him by the lapels of his blue suit coat.

  Suddenly, a man in white coveralls and a baseball cap, who had been quietly minding his own business across the aisle, stood up and lumbered toward me.

  “I dunno how you treats yo’kid in da privacy of your own home, but if you go touchin’ him again on dis’ train, I’m gunna show you what’s what.”

  I gaped at the man, trying to process what it was exactly he was saying to me because apparently I wasn’t fluent in what was either Brooklyn- or Long Island—ese.

  “Mean it,” he sputtered at me as he returned to his seat, giving me the stink eye, for all that was worth. I was more frightened of his giant, hamlike fists.

  “Did that guy just threaten me?” I growled out of the side of my mouth at Jarvis.

  “I suppose it could be categorized as a threat.” Jarvis shrugged, all nonchalant in a way that made me want to slap him upside the head.

  “You just had to spell yourself to look like a little kid, didn’t you?”

  Jarvis gave me a happy nod, and for the first time I caught a glimpse—by way of his reflection in the window across from us—of the glamour he’d put on himself. No wonder Mr. Brooklyn-ese thought I was a Grade A, primo jerk. Jarvis had chosen the most angelic-looking child in the whole of the free world to spell himself into. With big, blue button eyes, a shock of white blond hair that came to a swirling cowlick at the crown of his head, and two missing incisors right in the front of his mouth, Jarvis was unimpeachable. I would lose every battle we got into as long as he continued to look like Dennis the Menace on steroids.

  “Ah, it does give one pleasure to see you under the gun, Miss Calliope.”

  “Jarvis,” I started to hiss at him, then thought better of it, modulating the sound of my voice so as not to appear aggressive with the child. “They think you’re my kid, don’t they.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  Jarvis giggled gleefully.

  “So not fair,” I added, still keeping an eye on the guy across the aisle. He’d pulled out a tattered MAD magazine, but was only pretending to read it.

  “Not my kid!” I said, pointing at the top of Jarvis’s head. “Seriously, not mine.”

  The guy continued to ignore me, but a few of the other people on the train openly stared at my outburst. Just at that moment, thankfully, we hit a bump in the track, and the whole car was jostled sideways, so trying to remain upright took precedence over staring at Jarvis and me. Besides, I’d long since stopped being embarrassed by all the weird things that happened to me—like fauns pretending to be children, pretending to be nice to you, so they can get what they want: an introduction to your plus-sized boss.

  Ew!

  “If you want me to introduce you to Hy, then you have to get rid of that ridiculous glamour. No way José am I going into my building with Dennis the Menace in tow,” I said. “There will be no end to the questions, and frankly, everyone at the office already thinks I’m a nut ball.”

  “As you wish, Mistress Calliope—”

  “And none of that ‘Mistress’ crap, either. You call me Callie just like everyone else does,” I interrupted, “or the deal is off.”

  Jarvis extended his dainty hand and we shook on it.

  Without warning, the train hit another bump and the whole car was plunged into darkness. I squeezed Jarvis’s hand, not liking this premature night thing one little bit.

  “Mistress Calliope—”

  Jarvis’s eyes were like two shining marbles in the unexpected, inky darkness—yet they weren’t trained on me, but on something outside our window. I followed his gaze and saw a creature stalking the tunnel walkway just beyond the glass. It was surreally pale, its long-limbed body fluid as it navigated its way past our car and down through another subway tunnel that splintered off our line. As it disappeared, I tried to recall exactly what I’d just seen, but found all I could draw back into my mind was a blurry afterimage of the thing. I couldn’t have told you if it had a face or whether it was male or female.

  As soon as it was completely gone, the lights flickered twice then returned to their full, preblackout brightness. I let go of Jarvis’s hand, embarrassed he’d caught me freaking out. It wasn’t like I was scared of the dark or anything . . . Okay, maybe I was a little scared of the dark, but mostly it was just being trapped in a speeding subway train hurtling through pitch-blackness toward God knew where that made me nervous.

  From the looks of it, no one else in the car had seen what we’d seen—otherwise I was pretty sure there would’ve been a stampede for the emergency brake cord. In fact, the old lady beside me was quietly reading her paper as if nothing had happened.

  Not even the blackout.

  I wondered how it was possible to make a subway carload of people forget what they’d just seen, or maybe I had the whole thing backward—maybe human beings were trained to ignore the weirder stuff; like there were synapses missing inside their brains, so that when magical stuff went down, it just didn’t register.

  Later, I was gonna to have to ask Jarvis for a little insight into the matter, but first I wanted to know what I’d just seen outside the window.

  “What the hell was that thing?” I whispered to Jarvis.

  “My poor little dense child,” Jarvis intoned.

  I rolled my eyes. Jarvis had spent enough time in my company to know my knowledge of the Afterlife was pretty limited—mostly because I had absolutely zero interest in the subject. I suppose if I really cared, I could’ve taken a crash course on the topic and be a Mr. Know-It-All like him, but somehow the idea held very little appeal.

  “Give me a break, Jarvi, and stop being so patronizing. You know I have no clue what that thing was, so why don’t you just spill the info—”

  “But you must know why the New York Subway System was originally built?” He sighed.

  I took a deep breath and held it for a few moments before releasing it, my lips now formed into what I hoped was a condescending smile.

  “Jarvi, I have no idea why the subway was originally built,” I said, a smile still plastered on my face with the superglue of annoyance. “All I know about the New York Subway is I can buy a single-ride ticket and ride up and down any goddamned subway line I want to until I have to get off to pee.”

  “Well, that is one use, I suppose,” Jarvis cons
idered, “but the real reason the subway was created was to provide a more literal conduit to Heaven—”

  The words weren’t even out of his mouth before I was talking over them.

  “No way! That’s so cool—”

  “Callie, quietly, please—”

  “But—” I said.

  “No buts,” Jarvis said quickly, his eyes scanning the train to make sure no one was listening in on our conversation.

  “Tell me—”

  “We should discuss this in another environment,” Jarvis said firmly, his eyes resting on a tall, cadaverous man standing beside the emergency exit. “A safer environment.”

  “Why?” I whispered, getting unsettled by the rigid set of Jarvis’s shoulders. “Is that guy listening to us?”

  Jarvis merely nodded at my words. I followed Jarvis’s stare, taking in the cadaverous man’s shabby charcoal suit, scuffed Hush Puppies, and the fact that he was staring straight ahead, his eyes looking nowhere in our vicinity.

  I decided to make my own assessment of the situation.

  “Are you sure?” I said, relaxing as I decided the cadaverous man was just some sad sack who happened to be riding the same train as us. Obviously, Jarvis needed to get over the whole “secrecy” kick he was on, because no one cared what the hell we were talking about.

  “Do you never listen to a word I say?” Jarvis sighed.

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I listen when I think you’re saying something important—”

  Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity near our man—people trying to move out of his way actually—and I realized there was something very wrong about the way his body was shuddering underneath his clothing. He shrieked once, the sound like sewing pins being shoved into my eardrums, and then fell forward onto his knees, his back arching inhumanly as his body slowly started to change shape, the contours of his shoulders pushing in on themselves as they elongated.

  “Oh, shit . . .” I said under my breath.

  “Yes, Callie, ‘oh, shit’ is an appropriate response,” Jarvis rejoined, scowling at me for like the three-thousandth time in our relationship.

  I watched, frozen in my seat, as the cadaverous man—who now looked like a cadaverous, furry wolf-man with long, muscled forearms and a nasty set of serrated teeth—hunkered down into a crouch, a long string of drool hanging like a pendant from his elongating jaw. I watched in horror as his jaw continued its bizarre re-forming until it was more muzzle than mouth, his eyes shifting from dull gray to a piercing rain-slicker yellow.

  With a sharp crack, the transformation was complete and the creature stretched its newly reconstructed limbs, making sure all was as it should be. Then, like buoyant fingers quickly doing an arpeggio up my spine, I felt the beast turn its head and train those strange yellow eyes onto the hollow of my throat. I gulped as the creature threw back its head and howled, a sound so chilling that one of the women a few seats down from Jarvis began to sob. Fear pulsed like a live diode through the subway car, but I had a strange feeling this man/ beast wasn’t after indiscriminate bloodshed. No, he had one goal rattling around in that nasty old skull case of his and I was pretty certain it concerned me personally.

  The beast began to sniff, its gaping nostrils flaring as it combed the air, searching for a particular scent tangled among the many. Its eyes flared as it found what it was seeking, but it took one more exaggerated inhalation, as if savoring what it had discovered.

  “I can smell your fear, Death’s Daughter,” the creature rasped, human speech not so easy now. “Come to me and spare these poor mortals.”

  His words were spoken pointedly in my direction, and everyone in the car turned to look at me, a miasma of their fear, anger, and pity enveloping me. I looked around, wondering why there were never any superheroes around to save me when I happened into one of these gnarly, monsterthemed situations.

  “Uhm . . . no?” I said, my mouth moving without any help from my brain. “You do understand the concept of the word ‘no,’ right? It means that there is no way in hell am I going to come to you, wolf boy—”

  I felt Jarvis clutch the hem of my scarf, yanking hard, as if to remind me of the delicate footing I was currently on.

  “Beware, Calliope, the Vargr are cunning beasts,” Jarvis muttered into my ear as the creature inched toward me on its padded paws.

  “Come . . . to . . . me,” it keened, beckoning me forward with one hairy, bloated claw. Its knuckles and sharpened, talonlike nails were deterrent enough to keep me from answering its call. I could feel the stares from the rest of the passengers and realized some of them would gladly sacrifice me if it meant their own freedom.

  It was kind of a chilling realization.

  Still, I was not gonna let the creature tear my throat out for fun, no matter what anyone else was thinking. I shook my head firmly in the negative, unwilling to speak again because I was afraid my voice would come out about two octaves higher than normal.

  “So be it,” the beast growled, throwing back its head and rending the air with another bone-chilling howl, this one causing every hair on my body to stand at rigid attention.

  Immobile in my fear, I sat stiffly in my seat, my eyes glued to the naked muscles at the nape of the creature’s neck as they twitched uncontrollably underneath its tufted brown pelt. The creature was annoyed by its inability to bend me to its will and it growled ferociously, the nauseating stink of its breath crossing the length of the subway car, making everyone gag.

  I could sense the coiled energy seething inside the beast, compressing its physical form into a ball of tightly muscled fury as it bided its time, waiting to pounce. All it needed was a reason to attack and it was gonna be exhaling that nasty breath all up in my face.

  And I am that reason, I realized grimly as the beast suddenly leapt into the air, its body a missile with canines, making a beeline straight for my Prada-clad throat.

  three

  Let’s pause a minute for a little station identification.

  I mean, it’s not every day you see a Vargr throat-ripping scenario play out on a New York City Subway car, so let me just give you a little background info on myself, which will, hopefully, clarify things a bit.

  My name is Calliope Reaper-Jones and I used to be a normal girl—okay, scratch that last part. In truth, I was never a normal girl. But in my own defense, I always wanted to be normal, and I really thought wanting to be like everyone else actually got you halfway to being there.

  You see, I was born into a family of immortals—with my father being one of the chief immortals in all of the Afterlife. Call him what you would—Death, the Grim Reaper, the Man with the Golden Scythe, he pretty much answers to any of the above—his supernatural pedigree seriously put a dent in my attempts at normalcy.

  Growing up, I desperately held on to the fact I was half-human on my mother’s side (i.e., the Reaper-Jones hyphenation) with all the tenacity I could muster, but whether I liked it or not, it was the nonhuman part of my heritage that would forever assert itself in my life . . . no matter how hard I tried to keep it hidden away from prying eyes.

  My own immortality—bestowed upon me at my birth—was something I despised. It made it impossible for me to do anything but outlive all my friends, and frankly, that also kind of killed my ability to assimilate: assimilation being the key to a normal existence, as far as I was concerned.

  Being the denial-loving creature I am, I decided the best thing I could do in the situation was to pretend I wasn’t Death’s Daughter. That, in fact, I was really the offspring of some businessman who just happened to be extraordinarily gifted with money. That would explain the huge mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, called Sea Verge, which my family called home, and the funds necessary to send my sisters and me to the best private schools on the East Coast.

  And so went the first decade and a half of my life: me taking all of my familial weirdness and shoving it way down deep into the darkest recesses of my mind, where it stayed, unwanted and ig
nored, for a very long time.

  But then a few months ago my dad had to go and get himself kidnapped, and suddenly, all of the supernatural craziness I’d been suppressing came back to bite me on the ass. I was thrust headfirst into the family business, forced to complete three nearly impossible tasks by the Board of Death in order to take over my dad’s position as President and CEO of Death, Inc. Plus, I had to figure out who’d kidnapped him and get him back before all hell broke loose.

  Piece of cake, right?

  I don’t think so.

  Finally, after ensuring order was restored to the Afterlife, I’d taken pity on my estranged family and—against my better judgment—agreed to try and get reacquainted with them, for better or worse.

  So far things had been leaning toward worse, which was how I now found myself sitting on an uptown subway train trying not to get my throat ripped out by a Vargr.

  “stop!” i screamed, my mouth overriding my brain as I stood up, shutting my eyes against the oncoming attack (two very disparate acts, but my body has never seemed to understand the word contradiction). I gritted my teeth and covered my face with my arms, waiting for the onslaught of violence to begin, but before any Vargr teeth could rip into the reasonably smooth flesh of my throat, my entire body was enveloped in a pulsing white-hot heat. I tried to scream—the pain being pretty damn intense—but only strangled gurgling bloomed from between my lips.

  As if the subway car were moving in tandem with whatever strange energy had hold of me, it began to shudder, bouncing on the track like some irate five-year-old was playing demolition derby with it. Still hunched over, arms covering my face, awaiting my imminent dismemberment (something that would really hurt and would also make my immortality not very much fun for the foreseeable future), I swallowed hard, my nerves on fire. Pins and needles shot up my arms and legs as an intense burning sensation numbed me from the inside out. It felt as if I’d fallen into a vat of Icy Hot and was now experiencing the afteraffects of a menthol overdose.