by Amber Benson
As soon as I’d stepped into the room, the tinkling of the tiny silver bell above the front door had given away my presence, causing Mademoiselle La Rue to trot out from the back of the shop, her softly rounded body firm and supple as a racehorse. She wore her mane of light blond hair long and loose around her shoulders so that it seemed to float around her face in waves of softness, her pale pink lips, egalitarian brow, and aquiline nose instantly giving away her Gallic origins. Her large bosom and swollen hips were encased in a pale pink, watered silk wrap dress, cinched in the middle to show off a tiny, twenty-four-inch waist. Her legs were pale and smooth, her pink manicured toes peeking out shyly from within camel-colored peep-toe slingback pumps.
She smiled warmly at me, her pale lips curving slightly as she took in my Marc Jacobs blue jean dress and bright red ballet flats. My hair had finally started to grow again, the thick brown locks falling just above my shoulder blades and naturally curling inward a little bit at the ends, creating the illusion that it actually had some body. I’d worn my hair short for years, realizing it was easier to maintain a short cut than to spend hours in front of my bathroom mirror brushing rats’ nests out of my long hair. But since I’d moved back to Sea Verge, I’d begun to let my hair grow again, and now I didn’t even mind the morning detangling ritual; I found it cathartic even.
“You have modern tastes, yes?” Mademoiselle La Rue said, her English lightly accented, but impeccable.
I had trouble deciding how old the Frenchwoman was; her face was unlined, her body in the full blush of youth. In the timeless fashion of the French, she could have been twenty-five or forty-five, it was impossible to tell—but there was something about her voice, something knowing in the lilt of her words, that made me think she was much, much older than I even suspected.
She possessed a Marilyn Monroe nineteen-fifties vibe that was blatantly apparent in the contours of her shape (large bosom and hips, tiny waist) and the way she wore her makeup: heavy black liner and thick, painted brown brows. She could have been one of Alfred Hitchcock’s cool, blond beauties ripped from her celluloid home and thrust into the modern era.
“If by modern tastes, you mean I’m more ‘Alexander McQueen’ Givenchy than traditional Givenchy, then, yes, I have very modern tastes,” I said and Mademoiselle La Rue laughed, the gentle sound like the burbling of a mountain spring.
“Well, I can appreciate any couturier who can drape his own fabric,” Mademoiselle said, “and Monsieur McQueen was a master.”
With those words, I realized my mistake—the old adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover” totally applied here. Mademoiselle La Rue may have owned a few pieces of gaudy French furniture and dressed like the heroine from Vertigo (and who says there was anything wrong with that?), but behind all the voluptuous beauty beat the heart of a true fashionista.
“Please call me Noisette,” Mademoiselle La Rue said, smiling shyly at me.
I told her to call me Callie—and then we spent the rest of the afternoon drinking espresso and talking favorite designers while Noisette quietly sketched the outline of the gown I would one day wear to my first ever Death Dinner and Masquerade Ball.
So needless to say, I had not stuffed the gown in my weekend bag. I knew quality when I saw it and Noisette had made me the most beautiful gown I’d ever seen. As far as I was concerned, it was both a pleasure and a privilege to wear it.
“Shall we go then?” Jarvis asked, as visions of secret fashion assignations in Paris danced in my head.
I nodded, then shivered as the odd spooky feeling I’d had earlier returned to settle uncomfortably around my shoulders like an unwanted mink stole. I followed Jarvis and Runt out of the library, trying to dispel the morbid thoughts, but nothing I imagined was potent enough to displace the unease I felt. No matter what I did, I could not seem to unseat the gnawing dread that was starting to replace my excitement at attending my first ever Death Dinner as President and CEO of Death, Inc. Of course, I had no idea this was only a harbinger of what was to come, that I was about to spend the next twenty-four hours trapped in a blood-drenched whodunit.
three
The amount of luggage we had was ridiculous. Six bags for a three-person party—all because Jarvis traveled with way more luggage than any normal dude had a right to. Runt and I each had, like, a bag, but Jarvis had packed his entire wardrobe and the kitchen sink into four large, brown steamer trunks that looked like they’d have been more at home on the Titanic than in the twenty-first century.
“Are you sure you really need all that?” I’d asked as we stood in the foyer at Sea Verge, preparing to wormhole our way to the Haunted Hearts Castle, the location of this year’s annual Death Dinner and All Hallows’ Eve “Eve” Masquerade Ball.
Set in the heart of the California Central Coast, the Haunted Hearts Castle had been the chosen locale of the event for the last twenty years. The Castle’s owner, Donald Ali, was one of those rare human beings intuitively aware of the Supernatural world. He came from a long line of truly psychic men and women who had made alliances with the purveyors of the Afterlife, creating a niche for themselves as liaisons between the human world and its Supernatural brethren. They weren’t immortal and most of them had no magic-handling skills to speak of, but they were Sensitives, eager to engage with the unseen Supernatural world and collect all the “perks” that went along with working for and being socially involved with the Afterlife.
Even though I’d lobbied hard against it, Jarvis had insisted we take a wormhole to California. I’d begged him to consider a more traditional form of transportation, but my Executive Assistant was dead set on making me wormhole it to the Haunted Hearts Castle, telling me that no Grim Reaper under his watch was ever going to travel commercial to a formal Death, Inc., event. I offered a compromise which I thought was great: Death, Inc., could buy a personal jet and then we could all hit the West Coast in style—no commercial airlines, no TSA shenanigans; just luxury, luxury, luxury—but sadly, that suggestion was ixnayed, too.
Which was how I ended up on my knees in the middle of one of the Moroccan-themed courtyards at the Haunted Hearts Castle, throwing my guts up all over the hand-painted mosaic tile work—and let me just tell you that linguine backward is not a pleasant experience.
With that said, it’s pretty apparent I am not a fan of traveling by wormhole and will do anything within my power to avoid it because, invariably, stepping into a great whirling mass of energy so I can be shunted into another time and/or place leaves me nauseous and unhinged. I know it’s a necessary part of being Death, but I hate it with a passion reserved for cilantro and people that hit their pets.
Anyway, after I’d heaved the last of my lunch onto the gorgeous, blue-and-white mosaic tiles leading to the guest bedroom Runt and I would share for the duration of our stay at the Castle, I picked up my weekend bag—sans vomit, thanks to Runt’s quick nose shove—and stepped into what I can only call a true masterpiece of opulence. We’re talking sumptuous scarlet and indigo brocade tapestries on the walls, thick octagonal terra-cotta tile floors overlain by antique carpets chosen for the metallic accents that neatly dovetailed with the neo-Byzantium-styled gold leaf of the fireplace mantel; the place was an Oriental pleasure palace for the senses.
“Wow,” I said, setting my bag down on one of the two full-size beds and running my hand across the smooth sheen of its deep burgundy, watered silk coverlet. “This place is unreal.”
Runt followed me inside, dropping her pink leather bag on the floor beside the other bed while I went back and closed the courtyard door, extinguishing some of the natural light that had flooded the room upon our entrance.
“It’s lovely,” she agreed, her toenails click-clacking on the terra-cotta tile as she wandered over to check out the attached bathroom. To her pleasure, someone from the Castle staff had thoughtfully placed a water bowl and food dish filled to the brim with dog kibble underneath the white pedestal sink for her to use during her stay. On closer inspection we discovered the
bowls were actually expensive white bone china soup tureens, their delicate fluted tops rimmed with a light cornflower blue pattern that blended perfectly with the minute blue-and-white mosaic tiles of the bathroom floor.
“Is that a closet?” I asked, sidestepping Runt’s water bowl so I could open the white wooden closet door and peek inside.
“Not much to it,” Runt said—and I had to agree. It was the thinnest closet I’d ever seen, not even seven inches in width by my guess, making it impossible to hang anything substantial inside it.
“What do you put in there?” I asked, but it was a rhetorical question. Obviously the closet, like many of the other decorative features of the Castle, was only for show.
Closing the shallow closet, we left the bathroom and returned to the bedroom.
“I think I’m gonna take a nap, Cal,” Runt said as she hopped up onto her bed and circled three times, curling up in a tight ball of fluffy black fur in the center of the coverlet.
I looked out the window—there were two in the room, each separated from the other by a sliver of wall—and gaped at the beautiful panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, marveling at how the sun resembled a pat of butter melting over the horizon.
“I’m gonna go for a walk, clear my head,” I said, entranced by the view through the windows. “Maybe get a better look at that sunset.”
My words fell on deaf ears. Runt was already snoring softly into her armpit. I lifted the edge of the coverlet over her, tucking it in around her prone form, then I slipped my sandals on and went outside for a better view.
* * *
“shit.”
When you run into someone you don’t want to see, there’s something known as a ten-second rule: You have ten seconds to either hide, pretend you don’t see them, or suck it up and say “hi.”
I’d wasted nine seconds of my precious ten standing stock-still in the middle of the garden, my heart racing the Kentucky Derby inside my chest. I wanted to run—you could definitely lump that into the hiding category—but shock had bolted me to the walkway, my feet stuck to the brickwork like they’d been superglued there. As the final second came and went, I cringed, realizing I was screwed. I hadn’t managed to make an exit, so now I was going to have to endure the suck-it-up-and-say-“hi” option.
Ugh.
I was trapped in one of the myriad sculpture gardens that graced the Haunted Hearts Castle—they all had specific names, but since they looked pretty much the same to me, I had no idea which one I’d stumbled into—so it wasn’t like I could pretend I didn’t see him as he stood by the edge of the garden, looking out at the vista that lay a thousand feet below him, the brilliant sapphire jewel tone of the Pacific Ocean edged with silver where waves crested and broke across the sandy lip of the beach.
He had his back to me, but from the rigid set of his shoulders, I could tell he knew I was there. His hair was still as dark and thick as I remembered, but now he’d cut it so short the pale skin at the nape of his neck was exposed, making him seem vulnerable even though I knew he was anything but. He was wearing an untucked white button-down shirt and a pair of loose khakis rolled up at the ankle, but my imagination immediately took liberties where Daniel, the former Devil’s protégé, was concerned, and instead, I saw him the way I remembered him best: sprawled naked as a jaybird across the bed of my old Battery Park City apartment, a wry, seductive grin inked across his face. We’d spent enough time together that I knew every curve of his body, every hard place where muscle met bone and sinew. I’d licked and kissed every inch of him, and in the privacy of my dreams, I still did.
Daniel was the man whose very name made me want to cry because I’d loved him then lost him without even really meaning to. He was my big love—I knew that in my heart—and I’d fucked it up by letting some jerkoid finger me on a New York City Subway platform. I know it sounds crass—and it was—but it was the truth. I’d been scared of the magnitude of our relationship, had even, out of fear, pushed him away, and then I’d done the one thing he could never forgive: I’d cheated.
Therein lay my dilemma.
I was in love with Daniel—and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Especially now that he was the acting Steward of Hell, looking after the Devil’s former dominion while God figured out how to punish Lucifer for committing the ultimate faux pas: trying to stage a coup on Heaven and Purgatory. My friends and I, including Daniel, had foiled the Devil’s plot, but during the course of the endeavor I’d lost a number of people I loved—including my man—and even though Daniel was still alive, he was as dead, at least to me, as all the others were.
My one comfort was that his new job had him so busy undoing all the evil stuff the Devil had done down in Hell, that it left him no time for any kind of a personal life—this important piece of info I’d wheedled out of Runt, whose father, Cerberus, had been granted the position “Hand to the Steward of Hell” for his part in helping to unravel the Devil’s nefarious plans—and if anyone knew what Daniel was up to these days, it was him.
“How you doing, Cal?”
While I’d been mentally undressing him, Daniel had turned around—and the effect he had on my heart was devastating. My breath caught in my throat so it was all I could do to gurgle a strangled, “Hi, Daniel” back at him.
Though the sun was still out, its last rays keeping the night at bay, I felt frozen in place by the intensity of his gaze. “Paul Newman eyes” my mother had called them when she’d first gotten a look at Daniel’s ice blue peepers. To my surprise, she’d given me a sly wink of approval—something I’d rarely gotten from her in the past and would be even more hard pressed to come by in the future since she’d left her old life behind and returned to the sea.
As much as I disliked how she’d handled the situation, I couldn’t really fault my mother for ditching out on Clio and me—my dad’s murder had pulverized her already-fragile psyche, and then my older sister’s defection, and subsequent murder, had been the death knell. The dual blow of losing both husband and daughter had turned our mother into a wraith, a Milquetoast ghost of her former self. Clio and I hadn’t known what to do with her, so we’d brought her back to Sea Verge—the home my parents had shared for so many years—and installed her in her old rooms, hoping it would somehow draw her out. Instead, it’d done the opposite: She’d burrowed even deeper inside herself, sitting for hours on end in an old Chippendale chair that looked out over the mercurial blue sea. And then one day she was gone. Back to the water from whence she’d come.
My hope was that she’d returned to the Siren family she’d disowned when she’d married my dad, but I had no idea of her true fate. The woman had borne more suffering than any one creature should ever have to—and being an immortal, instead of just one lifetime to mourn the loss of the thing she’d held most dear, she would have an eternity in which to do it.
“Oh, you know,” I said finally, though I didn’t have a clue what that meant.
There was an awkward pause as I stared at Daniel and he held my gaze. It took every ounce of strength I possessed not to start blubbering in front of him because just being near the man was the most exquisite torture I’d ever known. I’d never been an overly emotional person before, but these days I’d become a pro at crying over absolutely nothing. I was getting so good at it, in fact, that I was actually considering adding it to my professional skill set.
In the days after my dad died and Daniel broke up with me, I’d been numb, my brain set on autopilot just so I could get through the day, but as time had worn on, all the pain and frustration had returned full force and the grief I thought I’d escaped had come back to stab me in the heart.
“How have you been?” I asked, keeping my voice as level as possible—which was really frickin’ hard when all I wanted to do was howl like a banshee.
Daniel shrugged, his eyes shifting downward, unlocking from my gaze.
“I’m all right. Keeping busy.”
I nodded. What else was I supposed to do with that innocu
ous piece of information?
“Well, I’m good,” I said finally, opting for a lie rather than the messy, mushy truth. “Been taking meetings and Jarvis has been giving me all these lessons, trying to get me up to snuff on all this Death stuff—”
I cringed, embarrassed by the extreme case of diarrhea mouth I’d just developed. God, I just couldn’t seem to shut myself up.
“That’s great, Cal,” Daniel said, taking pity on me and interrupting my verbal barrage.
“Yep, pretty great,” I echoed.
I suddenly felt very uncomfortable; my brain itching with the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped inside my own body, a sensation I could only imagine was reminiscent of being encased inside a too-tight spacesuit. I’d never experienced such an odd feeling before, and it made me want to rip my skin off so I could crawl out of myself. My light gingham summer dress, which I usually loved wearing, was now as heavy as a shroud, making my flesh squirm underneath the crinkly cotton fabric.
“How are you, really?”
