Serpent's Storm

by Amber Benson

  “Look, you can come with me as far as the shoreline, Starr,” I offered, trying to appease her. “But I have to go back on land and I don’t think it’s really possible for you to go with me—”

  She stopped thumping me and cocked her head curiously, her eyes wide as she digested what I’d just said.

  “Why not?” she asked, putting a long finger in her mouth to suck on. More and more she was becoming like a spoiled, human child.

  I inclined my sea serpent’s head in the direction of her fish tail.

  “I don’t think it’s physically possible to walk on land with a fish tail. So . . .”

  I trailed off, thinking I’d done a nice job of dissuading her, but when she grinned up at me, a fiendish look in her eye, I knew I’d screwed up.

  “You have the jewel,” she said, batting her long, feminine eyelashes in my direction. “You can wish me a pair of legs.”

  Shit, I thought. Somehow I walked into playing the Tom Hanks role in a very unfortunate remake of the movie Splash.

  “Look, I just don’t think it’s a good idea. What if you got hurt?”

  Starr merely rolled her eyes at me—which was the first time I’d experienced an underwater eye roll—then shrugged.

  “You don’t really care if I get hurt,” she pouted. “You just don’t want to do what you promised.”

  “Honestly,” I said, letting the cold current roll over my body, “you’re right. I don’t want to be responsible for you, especially when I don’t even know what I’m doing right now. I know Heaven is the next destination, but as far as my ultimate fate is concerned, well, I’m totally clueless.”

  “Well, you can’t just be a wuss and let everyone push you around—”

  Like what you’re doing right now, I thought, not amused.

  “Fate is an important thing,” she continued, moving her tail in lazy circles. “But you have to make your own destiny, Little Death. You aren’t just a will-o’-the-wisp. You are a strong, powerful woman who has to live her life like she’s large and in charge.”

  I sighed. I’d been hoping to use this opportunity to disengage myself from the Siren, but it seemed like Starr was in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Besides,” she added mischievously, “your mother would kill me if I let you wander off all by yourself.”

  “Hold on, are you saying—”

  But Starr didn’t let me finish the question.

  “Yup, that’s Auntie Starr to you, pip-squeak.”

  eighteen

  From the look on my face, Starr must’ve sensed that she’d opened a Pandora’s box. Since she’d been hanging up on a wall for God knew how long, I guess there was no way for her to know my mother had been passing herself off as a human being since she’d become the Grim Reaper’s wife. Sure, there’d been rumors that with her ridiculous beauty and slim physique, she had to be part Siren, but she’d always laughed them off.

  Still, it made sense that she and Starr were related: they both had the same stunning facial structure, liquid blue eyes, and pale, spun gold hair. Starr’s face was rounder than my mother’s and her pale pink lips were fuller, but otherwise the similarity was remarkable.

  “Achelous is father to both your mother and I, but while I was born from a sea nymph, her human mother died in childbirth,” Starr said, her demeanor serious now that she’d realized what an impact her little bon mot of information had had on me. “Your mother was raised in a human orphanage and knew nothing of her birth parents until she was sixteen. Achelous found her and told her of her parentage. She came and stayed with us for a while, but the sea was never really your mother’s home, so she left and returned to land.”

  My sisters and I had never been privy to much information about our mother’s family history. She’d always been pretty cagey about her past: to the point where the only thing we knew about her was that she was an only child who’d lost both of her parents when she was very young.

  And even that turned out to only be a half-truth, I thought.

  “Why don’t we get to land, and then I promise I’ll explain myself more fully,” Starr said coaxingly. This mellower version of Starr was a marked improvement on the impulsive Siren I’d first encountered back on land.

  “Okay,” I said, waffling. Every time I thought I had a handle on my family, they turned my world upside down all over again.

  “This way,” Starr said, pointing north with a long, girlish finger. She shot out into the current, her tail pin-balling away from me as she streaked like lightning through the murky depths of the water. When she realized I wasn’t following her, she stopped.

  “Aren’t you coming, Little Death?” she said curiously.

  I was torn.

  Part of me wanted to follow suit, to slalom through the blue sea after the Siren . . . but then another, more persistent voice—one that spoke in a clipped British accent reminiscent in tone to the late Jarvis de Poupsy—begged me to stop looking to other people to solve my problems, insisting that my downfall would always be listening to others rather than following my own instincts.

  It wasn’t a hard call to make. Not after I took a moment to really think about it.

  “I can’t go with you, Starr,” I said suddenly.

  The Siren stared at me, her blue eyes hard to read.

  “You’re not a very nice niece,” she pouted.

  “I promise when this is all over, I’ll make it up to you,” I said.

  The Siren perked up at that.

  “Really? You promise you’ll make it up to me?”

  I nodded my big sea serpent head.

  “If I had a pinkie, I’d pinkie swear it.”

  Starr clapped her hands together happily.

  “Goodie!” she trilled then she threw her arms around my scaled flank, hugging me tightly to her breast.

  “Be safe, Little Death, and ask yourself the smart questions,” she murmured. Then, using my flank as a starting block, she pushed off and shot out into the deep, dark sea.

  I waited until Starr was only a tiny speck way out in the distance then I turned around and I swam back the way I had come.

  somewhere in the back of my mind I had an uneasy feeling about leaving Starr to fend for herself. Frank’s warning about becoming the responsible party for the Siren if I let her go free echoed in my head. Still, I tried my best to put those thoughts away as I swam through the shallow waters leading back to the strange island I’d just left behind me.

  I circled around the shoals until I reached the island’s far eastern side. I didn’t know if I would find what I was looking for this far east, but it was better than going back and getting caught by Evangeline and the Bugbears. Just the thought of leaving Daniel to shoulder all the heavy lifting made me feel terrible, but he’d sacrificed himself in order to get me out of there—and the best thing I could do to thank him was to go to Heaven and secure God’s help.

  As the water got shallower, it became almost impossible for me to navigate in my sea serpent form, so I wished myself back into my normal body. It felt odd to swap out the power of the larger animal body in favor of my much weaker human shape, but I was glad to be small again as I dog-paddled closer to the shore, my feet dragging across the bottom of the sand bar. I could’ve swum farther down the coast, beaching myself in a more desolate setting, but I needed something only the inhabited part of the island could provide.

  I made my way along the beach on foot until I found an unmanned dock and clambered up the weathered wooden ladder. It was still dark out, but morning and the sunrise were fast approaching, so I knew I had to get where I was going soon or else deal with the onset of the human morning, which was about as appealing as eating a plate of sea slugs. Having to weave in and out of morning commuters in my dingy clothes while they sipped their coffees and checked their BlackBerrys was not how I wanted to spend my morning.

  The dock I’d climbed on to was deserted; a boarded-up bait-and-tackle shop and a CLOSED FOR THE WINTER sign on Betty’s Fried Oyster Shack
gave evidence as to why. My feet squelched in my shoes as I walked down the empty boardwalk, the sea breeze making the gooseflesh on my exposed skin stand at attention like little hair follicle soldiers. My teeth decided to get in on the freezing action, doing nothing to warm me as they chattered away in my skull. I decided I was much better suited to warmer environs—so long as they weren’t of the Hellish variety. I’d spent enough time in Hell to know I could do without the type of heat the Devil employed down there: namely, the kind that made you sweat out body oil, rather than just plain old saltwater and electrolytes.

  I stuck to the boardwalk, following the curve of the shoreline rather than turning off onto one of the residential throughways I passed. As amazing as a warm bed and a cadged bowl of cereal and milk sounded, I wasn’t skilled enough in the criminal enterprise of breaking and entering to give one of the houses a try. And being of the klutzy persuasion, I could easily imagine myself caught in a half-open window, my ass hanging out in the breeze for the whole world to see, while inside, a lady in a brown housecoat smacked me upside the head with a toilet brush. Besides, the boardwalk appeared to be where all the commerce in the village happened—and that was where I’d find what I was looking for, if it existed at all.

  After a ten-minute walk, though, I was no closer to finding what I sought than when I’d begun.

  I was starting to get annoyed with myself—and the part of my brain that’d told me to go with Starr was now lobbing self-recriminations at me. I was in the middle of nowhere, looking for something that probably didn’t exist, it was cold, and I was wet and I smelled like old leather and fish. Definitely the kind of aroma that would get you killed out in the wild by a pack of feral dogs.

  “This sucks,” I muttered in between the teeth chattering.

  I’d done what I thought was the right thing, but I’d just screwed myself up. Depressed by the wretchedness of my current situation, I was sorely tempted to crawl into a doorway and take a nap, hoping that things would look brighter in the light of day.

  Brighter, but not better, I thought uncharitably.

  I checked the empty doorways as I passed them, looking to see if any of them would be appropriate for sleeping in, but then something caught my eye and I instantly changed my intentions.

  At first, I thought it was only a shadow, but when I turned my full attention on the image, it refocused into something more tangible. My heart stopped for the span of two heartbeats—I know this because I counted—and then everything slid into slow motion. The air around me grew heavy with promise, my brain electrified by what it was processing. Then the world clicked back into normal speed and I was jogging toward the shade, fighting back tears as I ran.

  “Jarvis!?” I screamed, my eyes locked on the petite shade barreling ahead of me like a nor’easter. I knew in a way that I couldn’t give voice to, that this was Jarvis . . . or at least some incarnation of him.

  “Jarvis! Wait for me!” I called, a stitch forming in my side as I raced to keep up with him.

  I was having trouble navigating the uneven boards of the wooden boardwalk as I scampered after the shade, but it still came as a surprise when my toe caught in a gap and I pitched forward, my arms pinwheeling uselessly as I went down, my knees taking the brunt of the fall. I slammed into the decking so hard I cried out in pain, but ignoring my bruised knees, I used the boardwalk’s guardrail to hoist myself back onto my feet. My lungs heaving, I searched for Jarvis’s shade, but it was no use.

  I’ve lost him.

  “Jarvis?” I took a few hesitant steps, but there was no response. I was alone again on the boardwalk, not a soul in sight, not even on the paved pathway that led away from the sea and into the heart of the residential area.

  “Damn,” I said, slamming my fist into my upper thigh in frustration.

  It was easy to fall back on old habits. I could’ve sat down on the wooden treads and thrown myself a high-end pity party, tears would’ve flown, I would’ve rued the day I was born, yada, yada, yada . . . and I would’ve been about as effectual as a hangnail.

  Instead, I closed my eyes and counted to ten in my head. With each number, I found myself relaxing as the tension and bad vibes left my body. I opened my eyes and looked around, noting that the sun was just starting to peak over the horizon, shooting streaks of orangey-yellow light into the faded gray-blue patchwork sky. The path I stood on led directly to a normal suburban street, tiny cottages bordering the sidewalk like overgrown white, gray, green, and blue wood-washed flowers. I noticed that the porch lights had begun to melt into the morning light, leaving only tiny halos of illumination around each lightbulb, but that the few cars parked higgledy-piggledy in driveways and on the street itself were still as silent as giant, sleeping beasts.

  “Okay,” I said. “What happens next?”

  And that’s when I noticed that the paved walkway beside the boardwalk forked into two separate paths. The first path fed away from the boardwalk and into the suburban sprawl, where it dead-ended at the street. The other, more oddly shaped path—it resembled the curling body of a coiled snake—turned away from the sleeping population of the island, its final destination a wrought iron spiral staircase that led upward into the sky.

  I held my breath, my body frozen in place as I realized I’d arrived at my destination. Jarvis—or whatever I’d been chasing—had led me right to the very place I’d been seeking since I’d crawled out of the freezing water earlier that morning:

  This was the entrance to a New York City Subway station.

  “Thank you, Jarvis,” I whispered, hoping that wherever he was, he could hear me. It was strange, but I had the funny feeling I hadn’t seen the last of the faun; that not even Death would be powerful enough to keep him out of my life.

  A shock of cold air hit me in the face as I stepped onto the first stair, making me shiver involuntarily. The black wrought iron railing was cold to the touch—further chilling my body—and I felt the whole structure tremble under my weight as I climbed the next couple of steps. The stairway had been constructed in pieces, each stair connected to its brother by a series of thin iron joists, giving it the appearance of a discombobulated black skeleton rising up into the air.

  I felt the prickle of eyes, the stare of a stranger drilling a hole into the back of my head, and I picked up speed, my feet pounding against the rickety stairway as I pulled myself up the last few steps. I heaved a sigh of relief as the stairway opened out onto the subway station, but my relief was short-lived when I found my way to the platform obstructed by a gleaming silver, full-height turnstile. If it had been one of the normal turnstiles you usually see in a subway station, I could’ve just jumped over it, fare be damned, but this revolving-door style of turnstile made that impossible.

  “Shit,” I mumbled, reaching into my pockets but coming up empty—I was wet, bedraggled . . . and without a cent to my name.

  I felt my hackles rise as the sense of being watched intensified. I looked both ways, hoping to find a manned ticket booth as I scanned the space, but there was nothing. Only one primary yellow MetroCard machine to my left, which was useless to me without cash or a credit card. Right now, I was alone on the wrong side of the station, but I had the impression this wouldn’t last for very long. Something, or someone, was stalking me, waiting for just the right moment to slip out of the shadows and attack.

  “And just where do you think you’re going, dollface?”

  I whirled around at the sound of the Ender of Death’s voice. The tips of my fingers went numb and my whole body began to shake. I didn’t know if it was fear or all-consuming rage that was making my body react so intensely.

  The Ender of Death was the last creature I’d expected to find leering at me from the other side of the turnstile in this subway station to nowhere, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d murdered my dad and Jarvis to fulfill the dogma of his appellation—so adding another name to his kill list wasn’t really a big deal. But I sensed there was more to it than that.

 
He looked just like any normal human being to anyone who saw him walking down the street, all fluffy hair and patrician features, but it was only a mask. I could see the raw obsession in his eyes as he stared at me from the other side of the turnstile. The years spent trapped in Hell at my dad’s discretion had gnawed away whatever humanity he’d originally possessed, leaving only compulsive hatred behind, whittled like a sharpened stick ready to destroy whatever lay in its path.

  “I’m going to Heaven,” I spat at him. “Bite me.”

  The blood pounded in my temples. My vision tunneled into a pinhole: with Marcel’s face as the bull’s-eye. If I’d had the capability to destroy him, I would’ve done it right then.

  Believe me when I say I tried.

  “Die, you bastard!” I screamed. Of course, nothing happened, and Marcel laughed loudly at my pathetic attempt to get rid of him.

  “I won’t go that easily,” he said, his long fingers grasping the bars on the other side of the turnstile. “Besides, when my time here is over, there’ll be another and another and another of me after that to take my place.”

  “Whoopee,” I said dryly. “Isn’t that just peachy keen for you, then.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I told you that you should’ve given yourself up back at your office,” he replied. “Then maybe all of this could’ve been avoided.”

  “Bullshit. You’d already killed my dad before that.”

  Marcel shrugged.

  “Yes, you’re right about that. Your father deserved to be dispatched from this existence. He had no right to do what he did to me . . . But your friend, Jarvis, well, that one was all you, Calliope. We needed to stop the flow of information in order to keep you in the dark.”

  I swallowed hard, my throat dry as a bone as the weight of his words slammed into me. There was no way of knowing if he was telling the truth or not, but it didn’t matter. He’d hit a nerve, and all the pent-up guilt I was harboring broke through. It was all I could do to gulp back a sob. I may not have hurt Jarvis with my own hands, but I was just as responsible for his death as the Ender of Death was.