How to be Death

by Amber Benson

  Jarvis was used to my ignorance—actually, I think he counted on it so he could lecture me without guilt—and was more than prepared to explain the provenance of How to Be Death: A Fully Annotated Guide.

  “After the fall of Lucifer, God asked the angel Metatron to create a treatise giving implicit instructions on how one might end the reign of humanity on Earth, now and forever,” Jarvis began as I unhooked the bustle of my long skirt and shrugged out of it, letting the heavy material fall to the floor around my feet. With the skirt gone, the bodice was instantly transformed into a cute little minidress version of the gown. Très chic!

  “Metatron created an instruction manual on how to kill humanity?” I asked, confused because I’d always thought God was, like, humanity’s biggest fan.

  “There must always be balance in the universe, Calliope,” Jarvis replied, loosening his bow tie as he sat down on the edge of Runt’s bed. “And God has to prepare for every eventuality. At least if this knowledge is contained in one book and that book lies in the possession of a nonbiased party—Death—then there is some modicum of safety.”

  “So Death is the only thing keeping humanity from destroying itself?”

  Jarvis nodded his head.

  “As Minnie said earlier, humanity is incapable of reading or touching the book—”

  “The big face melt-off, I remember,” I interjected—and I could tell Jarvis was pleased I’d been paying attention. To show my continued interest, I picked the tiny book up from where I’d set it down on the dresser and flipped it open, the strange Angelic language as indecipherable now as it’d been when I’d first looked at the book.

  “But Metatron took pity on humanity,” Jarvis went on. “Wanting to give them some knowledge of the fate awaiting them, he imparted a generalized version of the book to the human, Enoch, who transcribed Metatron’s words into what would then become the Book of Enoch.”

  “But the Book of Enoch doesn’t have the instruction stuff in it,” I said, starting to catch on. “So it’s kind of a warning without any teeth—but this copy of the book, the one Minnie gave me, it’s the real deal. It has all the missing information in it.”

  Jarvis nodded.

  “Exactly. And the safest place for it is in the Hall of Death.”

  Jarvis’s words caused my mind to start whirring, realization dawning inside me.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, waving the book in front of me. “This thing is supposed to live in the Hall of Death?”

  “Yes—” Jarvis began, but I cut him off.

  “This is what my sister was looking for, isn’t it?” I said, my throat tight with emotion. “This book was the reason why Suri and all the others in the Hall of Death had to die—so Thalia could find this book and keep control of humanity’s fate for herself.”

  Runt had hopped onto my bed when we’d first come inside, curling up in a ball next to my pillow and shutting her eyes, a nod to the fact that it was way past her bedtime—but when she heard the urgency in my words, she instantly opened them again. Assessing the situation and deeming it urgent, she eased herself off the bed and trotted over to me, dragging her side against my leg before settling her butt down on top of my left foot, in a gesture of consolation.

  “Yes, I think the book was the reason your sister stormed the Hall of Death while the Devil was countering our attack down in Hell.” Jarvis sighed, his eyes morose.

  I saw that Jarvis had come to this conclusion much earlier in the game than I had. Probably because he’d been in possession of all the pertinent information, while I had remained in the dark until now.

  It had been a bloody, horrible day—and one that would be forever etched in memory. Jarvis, Cerberus, and I had released all the souls from Hell as an offensive tactic to get the Devil to leave Purgatory and return to his own dominion. It had worked, but it had left his coconspirator (my sister, Thalia) and a small retinue of Bugbear guards free to lay siege to the Hall of Death, killing everyone inside except for Tanuki, the giant man who ran the Death Record filing system.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” I said, sadness welling inside me. “Don’t you think I should’ve known this?”

  Jarvis dropped his eyes, his hands tightening into two curled fists on his lap.

  “You should have been told,” he murmured. “It was wrong of me to keep this information from you.”

  I didn’t know what to do with his apology. It did nothing to ease the sense of anger-fueled guilt I was experiencing.

  “Whatever,” I said, turning away from him and dislodging Runt from my foot in the process.

  “Calliope,” Jarvis said, “I only withheld this because I didn’t want to burden you. You’ve had so much to deal with these past few months. It seemed irrelevant now—”

  “Nothing is irrelevant, Jarvis,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  I could see Jarvis’s face reflected back at me in the tiny art deco makeup mirror that sat on top of the dresser. He looked miserable, shoulders slumped, eyes downcast. Sensing my scrutiny in the mirror, he lifted his head and grimaced, but I didn’t drop my gaze.

  “I haven’t made this easy for you, Jarvi. I know that,” I said. “But I’m ready to do this thing the right way.”

  Jarvis nodded, looking a bit less morose.

  “You were put into an untenable situation, Calliope, and I have been trying very hard to make things easy for you, to not overwhelm you,” Jarvis said. “I think of you as if you were my own daughter, and I only wanted to make the transition as painless as possible.”

  I sat down on the bed beside my Executive Assistant and sighed.

  “I guess you did the right thing, Jarvi,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulder. “At least, I think my dad would have approved.”

  Jarvis swallowed, a single tear streaking down his cheek.

  “I miss him very much, you know,” Jarvis said.

  “Me, too,” I replied, my throat constricting even as I fought to stay strong.

  We sat in the deepening silence, each lost within the maze of our own thoughts, Runt a lump of snoring fur between our feet. There was no assuaging the guilt I felt, so I let my mind wander instead, surprised that it kept returning to the two armed human bodyguards waiting outside the door, their sole focus to keep me out of harm’s way for the next twenty-four hours—a notion that was at once comforting and extremely unsettling.

  “So what do we do with the damn thing while we’re stuck at the Death Dinner?” I said finally, tired of the extended silence.

  “Any magic we worked would dissolve once the clock struck midnight,” Jarvis said thoughtfully. “That means there would be no point in concocting an obscuring spell.”

  “It has to be a clever hiding place in its own right,” I agreed, my eyes searching the room. “Someplace no one would ever think to look.”

  Runt’s ears perked up at my words.

  “I know where to hide it,” she said, thumping her tail happily. “It’s perfect!”

  She stood up and stretched, waving her rump in the air like a flag, then took off, her paws padding on the soft fibers of the Oriental carpet. Jarvis and I followed her as she made a beeline for the white, mosaic-tiled bathroom. Once inside, she promptly clicked her way over to the closet and plopped her dark bulk down in front of it.

  “There’s a false bottom. Open it and see,” she said, waiting for one of us to slide the closet door open for her. I took the bait, sidestepping her tail so I could inch the wooden slider down its track.

  “How do you know it’s a false bottom?” I asked her, shaking my head because I just couldn’t see a way to pop the bottom up or slide it out.

  “I noticed it when we were checking out the bathroom earlier,” she said, cocking her head as a fiery gleam came into her bright eyes. “Try opening one of the little drawers, Cal.”

  I did as she said, slowly pulling out one of the built-in drawers set into the wood just below the sliding door, but nothing happened.

  “Do the other one
, too,” she said.

  I pulled the other drawer out of its wooden frame, so that now both drawers hung out in the air—and suddenly there was a sharp click. A cylindrical piece of wood that I’d originally taken for a knot in the closet’s molding slid upward into the air.

  “Whoa,” I said, impressed.

  “It’s a dowel,” Runt said matter-of-factly, and I wasn’t about to argue with her.

  “Now watch this.”

  Runt lifted her paw, setting its weight down on top of the dowel, then giving a happy yip, she pushed it back into the molding, the false bottom sliding open to reveal a hidden compartment built into the wall behind the closet.

  “You’re amazing!” I said as I knelt down to give the pup’s neck a squeeze. I’d forgotten that Runt was such a master at hide-and-seek, so it was only natural she would be the one to discover the best hiding spot in the Castle.

  “Looks as if someone else has been using it for safekeeping, too,” Jarvis said as he rooted around inside the secret compartment, up to his elbow in dismembered cobwebs. A moment later his fingers grasped their prize, a tarnished silver locket, and pulled it up into the light. He cleared the dust off with one powerful puff, his large fingers fumbling with the clasp until it popped open.

  Inside the locket was the small black-and-white portrait of a woman with long, dark hair and a mysterious Mona Lisa smile, the turned-up corners of her lips giving only a hint at her personality.

  She’s beautiful,” I said, staring at the picture.

  Jarvis flipped the locket over, looking for any kind of inscription, but there was nothing; not even a name had been etched into the silver.

  “She’s nameless, too,” Runt said.

  “And no one seems to have breached the compartment until now,” Jarvis said, indicating the cobweb detritus he’d scraped off his sleeve. “So it appears as if we’ve found our hiding place.”

  We waited as Jarvis returned to the bedroom, fetching the book so I could set it inside the false bottom with the mystery locket—we’d decided to let sleeping dogs lie, so the locket went back in, too. I closed the two drawers, one after the other, and we watched as the dowel reset itself, sealing away the hidden compartment from even the most prying of eyes.

  “Let some bad guy find it now,” I proclaimed to the world at large as I grinned at my coconspirators, proud of the bang-up job we’d done. I didn’t think we could’ve found a better hiding place if we’d tried.

  It was only later, upon closer inspection of the strange events that transpired during the course of the evening, that I wondered if I hadn’t jinxed us.

  nine

  “Time to go,” Jarvis said as the small desk clock reached a quarter to the hour and Runt yawned sleepily, the heat in the room making everyone tired.

  We’d been sitting around for the last ten minutes—Runt and I curled up on my bed, Jarvis sitting ramrod straight in the desk chair—waiting until it was absolutely time to leave the safety of the room for the quick jog over to the main house. Neither the pup nor I wanted to leave the toasty room, but since neither of us could come up with a good enough argument to get me out of the Death Dinner, it was a moot point. So one after the other, we got up and trooped after Jarvis as he stepped out into the chill of the October night.

  Taking a key from his suit coat pocket, he locked the door—which was the only entrance to the suite—then deposited the key back into the same inside coat pocket, patting his breast to make sure the key was safely entombed. I thought the whole thing was overkill. We had two bodyguards, and one of them was going to be stationed by the door at all times, so what was the point of locking it?

  “And what if something happened to the guards?” Jarvis said, looking piqued. “You want anyone to be able to just waltz into your room and lie in wait for you?”

  I shook my head, but I thought the scenario was a little far-fetched. Still, I’d learned it was always easier to let Jarvis have his way than to fight him over superfluous details.

  “It’s freezing,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself and trying my best to keep up with the nimble-footed ex-faun, the first bodyguard trailing behind us like a silent wraith.

  Keeping my eye on the man who was supposed to keep his eye on me, I decided that the word “mercenary” was the perfect descriptor for the two fellows whose charge was to keep me safe from the Ender of Death for the next twenty-four hours.

  Even though I knew the bodyguards were a (probably) necessary fashion accessory for the evening, I still hated feeling like I’d stepped into the middle of a John Le Carré novel. All the cloak-and-dagger stuff had never been my cup of tea, and as the bodyguard’s shadowy presence dogged us across the courtyard and onto the stone path leading up to Casa del Amo—his compatriot had remained behind to guard the door like I’d anticipated—I couldn’t help feeling like there was something “wrong” about the men, a subtle, malignant energy I didn’t like, swirling around them like a swarm of aggressive wasps.

  “Stop,” Jarvis said abruptly, holding out his arm to block my path, but only succeeding in jarring me with his arrested movement, so that I misstepped and tripped over a raised stone in the path, accidentally slamming my elbow into the small of his back as I fought to remain upright.

  With a strangled grunt, Jarvis fell to his knees, his hands grasping blindly at his back as he searched for the tender spot I’d gouged. Runt, who’d been following along at my heel, was more graceful than either of us, entirely circumventing the mini–traffic accident with a little hop.

  “I’m sorry, Jarvis!” I squeaked, trying to help him up—but he waved me off.

  “Stay away—”

  I took a step back, giving him room to collect himself. I didn’t want to get blamed for any further mishaps.

  “Is it bad?” I asked as he gritted his teeth and palpated the spot with his fingers. Guilt swelled in my chest and I felt terrible—like I’d accidentally hit a baby or something.

  “It’s … all … right,” Jarvis said through clenched teeth, his usually pale complexion red with pain. After a few moments, when it appeared that nothing was busted, I held out my arm, hoping he’d see it as a peace offering. With a sigh, he reached out and took the proffered hand, letting me help him climb back onto his feet.

  “Why’d you stop like that?” I asked as he brushed the dirt from the knees of his tuxedo pants. Unlike me, he was still in the same clothes, not having had a chance to change since the ball.

  He didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to—because ahead of us, I could hear the tinkling of Coy’s giggle as it floated down to us from where she and Daniel stood, blocking the entrance to Casa del Amo.

  “Oh, God.” I winced, wanting to turn tail and run, but Jarvis grabbed my arm before I could get away. “I don’t want to see them, Jarvis. Please.”

  Jarvis’s grip tightened on the flesh of my upper arm, not unpleasantly, but hard enough to keep me from fleeing the scene.

  “Calliope Reaper-Jones, Daniel will be a part of your business affairs for as long as he remains in charge of Hell,” he hissed through his teeth. “So you’d best get used to dealing with him—and whatever trollop he might have on his arm.”

  “He’s right, Cal,” Runt said, her tone neutral, but she was definitely telling me to suck it up and act like an adult.

  I don’t wanna go, I thought miserably, but with both Jarvis and Runt ganging up on me, I didn’t stand a chance of squeaking out of it.

  “Ready?” Jarvis asked as he stapled a warm smile of greeting onto his face, then giving my arm a gentle tug, he forced me forward. I inhaled deeply, hoping the influx of fresh air would unstick my brain, but it backfired, a whiff of Coy’s heady floral perfume making me sneeze.

  “Bless you,” Runt whispered, but Jarvis didn’t deign to reply.

  “Let’s go,” he said as he led me toward utter emotional ruination.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick,” I moaned, half walking, half cowering behind my Executive Assistant.

&
nbsp; Ahead of us, Daniel had finally noticed our arrival—I guess they’d been too wrapped up in each other to see our Laurel and Hardy routine down at the bottom of the path—and he instinctively took a step away from Coy, almost as if he didn’t want to offend me by standing too close to her.

  It was only as we approached the two of them that I realized something important—something I should’ve realized when I’d first met the woman but had been too oblivious to notice during our previous encounter. Coy wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill girl Daniel had met in a bar, chatting her up over peanuts and a light beer.

  No, Coy was a Goddess.

  How I knew this, I don’t know—but there was just something reminiscent of Kali about her and that’s what clued me in.