Cat's Claw

by Amber Benson

  Ignoring the throbbing in my head, I asked the one question that I really didn’t want to ask, but that I really needed an answer to:

  “Look, I have to ask you something kind of important, Madame Papillon, but please, please, please, I would be grateful if you would just keep it to yourself—you know, not share it with my folks,” I finished, grimacing.

  She nodded, but I had no way of knowing whether she was really trustworthy or not. She could be a pathological liar and I wouldn’t know a thing about it until it was too late.

  “Ask your question and I will keep it between us,” the older woman said, patting the puff of hair that was Muna. “Even my Minx will not be told tale of this privileged conversation.”

  Boy, it was starting to feel just like a trip to my therapist’s office. Only, I wasn’t the one paying for the privilege this time.

  “I’ve done some . . . coalescing,” I whispered, feeling strangely dirty about the whole thing. It’s not like Daniel and I had ever had sex or anything, so I don’t know why I was feeling like such a prude.

  “Oh,” the aura specialist said, then cleared her throat. “I see.”

  “It was done to save my existence, I think, and only the once.” I gave her a pitiful smile and she patted my hand in r eturn.

  “My poor little one, there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” chided the aura specialist. “There’s nothing wrong with coalescing . . . especially if it was done to help you.”

  “Could that cause my aura to get all intertwined with the guy’s aura?” I asked, feeling like a sixteen-year-old virgin in a sex ed class who hasn’t really grasped the concept of how one acquires an STD.

  “Yes, I think coalescing could cause something like this to happen,” Madame Papillon said sagely. “I’ve never seen it before, but theoretically it could happen.”

  She set her mug of tea down on top of the construction worker and sighed deeply. She took my hand in her own and squeezed it.

  “You asked me if the dead have auras. Was this in reference to the person you coalesced with?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I thought he was dead, but now I don’t know . . .” I stammered, but she shook her head, silencing me.

  “Take this to heart, my dear,” Madame Papillon said and I noticed for the first time how beautiful she must’ve been as a young woman. She had the most exquisite bone structure and truly haunting eyes, eyes that could almost hypnotize you if you weren’t careful.

  I blinked to dispel the image that I had conjured in my mind of the younger, more beautiful Madame Papillon, and that was when she hit me with it, the one thing that could turn both my heart and brain to mush:

  “I have it on good authority that your young man is anything but dead.”

  four

  Alone in my messy apartment, I sat on my Pottery Barn sofa and slowly pulled on the piece of thread that Muna had excised from the upholstery, wondering what my next move was going to be.

  After the whole emotional blow of finding out that Daniel wasn’t dead after all, well, the rest of Madame Papillon’s visit had just seemed to fly by. Of course, it wasn’t until she and her wily Minx were long gone that I realized exactly how out of it I had been.

  I had agreed to let her give me a magic lesson.

  And not just any kind of magic lesson, mind you. I wasn’t just gonna spell something. Nope, I was going to let the aura specialist teach me how to summon and navigate wormholes, something that I had never ever been able to do in my entire life.

  All I had to do was summon her and the lesson was mine—free of charge.

  My older sister, Thalia—who was now safely ensconced in a tiny cell in the nether regions of Purgatory as she served out the one hundred years of solitude she’d gotten as punishment for her part in my father’s kidnapping—had once told me that I was magically inept, that I wasn’t even fit to be the servant of someone who could wield magic. I was only twelve at the time—and going through a sensitive, pudgy period where nothing about my body and/or mind felt right, so her accusations of magical ineptitude really felt like they were just par for the course. But still, I couldn’t totally blame Thalia for my feelings of magical inadequacy.

  Puberty is when magic really starts asserting itself in young women—must be something to do with all the hormones kicking through their systems—but for me, puberty came and went without magic ever manifesting itself at all. I was horribly embarrassed by my lack of magical talent and even more embarrassed by how ecstatic my father was about my magical duncehood.

  While he seemed aware of, but not overly excited about, Thalia’s prowess as a magic handler, with me, it was all about discouraging the ability. Something I still didn’t 100 percent understand, especially now that he was sending Madame Papillon over to my place for private lessons—and probably paying her more for her time than I made all year.

  The one thing that my dad and I did agree on when it came to magic was that it was best to keep the supernatural aspects of one’s life under wraps. Especially when it came to letting humanity know anything about you and your abilities. I had taken that idea to heart, trying as best I could to kill all the supernaturalness inside myself. This was part of what had led me to take that forgetting charm, so that no one would ever take me for anything other than a human being while I was living out in the human world.

  My dad’s approach wasn’t nearly as extreme; he had just put the kibosh on magic handling in the confines of his house.

  Apparently, neither of my sisters had taken that rule very seriously, as both of them were pretty adept when it came to magic. I, on the other hand, couldn’t even open a can without a can opener, let alone jump through space and time by summoning a wormhole.

  Well, I decided, I was gonna remedy that one sooner rather than later. Then maybe I could figure out how to get my hands on that wannabe corpse, the Devil’s protégé.

  I thought back to what Madame Papillon had said about Daniel still being alive and I got both nervous and angry at the same time. How could he just leave me hanging like that, thinking he was dead and off to some other aspect of the Afterlife? I mean, I knew in my heart that I could never do something like that to someone I cared about . . . which then led me to a thought that made me feel even worse than I was already feeling.

  Maybe he didn’t let me in on this whole still-being-alive thing because he didn’t give one rat’s ass about my feelings. I was just some girl he had coalesced with once and that was it.

  Okay, so I wasn’t the queen of self-confidence, but no matter how much my brain kept telling me that I was being a total nut bag and overreacting, the insidious worm of doubt kept creeping closer and closer to my heart.

  What if Daniel had faked his own death because he thought I was gonna go all stalker-y on him, or something? I mean, here I was thinking he’d saved my life when he took on the demon Vritra, but maybe that was all just some elaborate ruse to get away from me!

  Looking back, I had to admit that I probably hadn’t been the nicest person in the world to be around—especially when I thought Daniel and the Devil were in league to steal my dad’s job and make my family mortal again—but I didn’t think I had done anything weird enough to make Daniel want to stay out of my life forever.

  Not that I could remember, at least.

  In fact, there had even been a time when I thought that maybe Daniel and I might’ve been making a sort of love connection, or something. Now, in retrospect, it seemed like the only thing Daniel and I had been making together was bad blood.

  Okay, now I wasn’t just angry and nervous anymore. Nope, the two feelings had metamorphosed into something much, much worse. A feeling that I had never experienced until right that very moment:

  Resentment.

  I was a woman scorned and I wasn’t going to take it sitting down! I was going to find the jerkoid and make him explain to my face why he had pulled the wool over my eyes, no matter how long it took!

  This was my new mission in life and I was just going to
have to accept the fact that things were not gonna be pretty until I got my hands on the man and ripped the truth out of his cowardly little mouth.

  Having accepted my new mission, I gave the piece of thread in my hand a good, hard yank, ripping off the entire side panel of the couch’s upholstery in the process.

  “Shit,” I said out loud as I stared at the piece of fabric in my hand, seething.

  Daniel, the Devil’s protégé, was going to rue the day he ever messed with me, I thought angrily as I looked down at my shredded couch.

  Now all I had to do was find the bastard.

  And thank God I knew just the person to help me do it.

  my younger sister Clio’s bedroom looked like one of those retro Japanese sneaker stores you walk by and then have to do a double take because you realize it’s a sneaker store only in retrospect.

  Of course, her room hadn’t always looked so sleek and spaceshiplike—it had actually been a much more hospitable environment up until about two weeks before, when Clio had decided to completely remodel her room from floor to ceiling.

  For someone like me, who enjoyed sitting in a chair that looked like a chair—and not a wedge of aluminum—the place looked pretty stark.

  The floor was silver industrial-grade linoleum stamped with curlicues that perfectly matched the textured, gray-fabric-covered walls like they had been made to go together. The bed was one of those Tempur-Pedic mattresses set into the floor, so that when its silver, curlicue-covered comforter was all tucked in, it looked exactly like—you guessed it—the floor.

  Something I discovered when I stepped on it and, unprepared for the floor to give way underneath my foot, fell on my face.

  Not pretty, but not too painful, either.

  There was also a large, metal modular workspace in the corner where Clio kept her myriad computer equipment. Beside it was a flat-screen television mounted on the wall, directly in line with the bed. Since I didn’t even have a TV in my bedroom, period, the idea of something so big and movie theater- like that you could watch while lying flat on your back and eating Cheetos seemed pretty novel to me.

  I wondered how hard it would be to take my own TV—one that was little more than a curio since I didn’t have cable—and mount it on the ceiling above my bed, sort of like what they did in motels and hospital rooms. That might be pretty cool, huh?

  Then I realized exactly how much I did not want my bedroom to in any way, shape, or form resemble a motel or hospital room and decided that it might be best to just leave well enough alone. My little twenty-two-inch TV was doing perfectly fine out in the living room gathering dust.

  “I can come back if you’re busy,” I said as I watched as my little sister sitting in one of those delicious-looking ergonomic chairs in front of her computer, click-clacking away at the keyboard.

  I was on the wedge of aluminum that only resembled a chair.

  Without missing a beat, she turned her head in my direction and rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever, Cal.”

  “I mean,” I said, shifting my weight as I tried to make myself more comfortable on the aluminum wedge, “if you’re busy, I don’t want to bother you, or anything.”

  Her fingers still flying over the keyboard, she shook her head. “Don’t be a dweeb. I’m almost done and then I promise to give you my full, undivided attention.”

  “Oh, goodie,” I mumbled sarcastically.

  She gave me a sardonic smile, followed by about twenty seconds’ worth of fluttering eyelashes, then she went back to her work.

  Suddenly, I felt something cool and slobbery licking the top of my right hand. Startled, I yanked my arm away with such force that I nearly fell off the wedge chair and onto the linoleum.

  “Goddamn it!” I yelped as I looked down to find our hellhound puppy, Runt, happily wagging her tail at me. “Don’t do that, Runt! You nearly gave me a heart attack . . . Jeez.”

  The beautiful, black hellhound pup sat back on her haunches and cocked her head at me. I could tell exactly what she was thinking: Calliope Reaper-Jones needs to take a chill pill—and she was so not wrong.

  “Sorry, Runt. It’s been a rough couple of weeks,” I said as I reached out to scratch behind her soft, furry ears. She inclined her head forward so that I could get a better purchase on her neck and amp up my scratching. I took that as a sign that she had accepted my apology and didn’t hold my being all jerk-y against me.

  I looked down into her bright pink eyes and felt an overwhelming sense of love for the beautiful, midnight-colored puppy that had saved my life on more than one occasion. She was an amazing companion and friend, and I really, really, really looked forward to the time when she would develop the ability to talk. Then we could actually have a real conversation, instead of me constantly having to intuit what she was thinking.

  I know that normally dogs don’t ever develop that kind of ability, but since she was the daughter of Cerberus, the Guardian of the North Gate of Hell—and he could talk like no one’s business—I got the distinct impression that Runt was gonna have a heck of a lot to say when her vocal cords finally started working properly.

  “Uhm, about Runt,” Clio said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I looked up and saw that she had shut down the computer and was now giving me her “full, undivided attention.” I gave my seventeen-year-old baby sister a long, clinical look, noting that she had finally decided to grow out her hair . . . a fact that gave me considerable pause.

  Clio had been sporting a shaved head ever since her very cute twentysomething substitute biology teacher had made inappropriate overtures in the dating direction at the beginning of the school year, but now, instead of the baldpate I was used to, about two inches of fluffy black hair stood in its place. I knew that if she was starting to embrace her hotness again, then there had to be a reason for it . . . and that reason could only be of the male persuasion.

  Whoever the guy was, I kind of felt sorry for him. If Clio had decided to stop hiding her beauty, then the poor guy was a goner. Seriously, my sister was probably the most beautiful person I had ever seen in my entire life—and that included Kate Moss and Christy Turlington—which only gave credence to the rumor that our mother was part Siren.

  Only someone with Siren blood could be that amazing looking, as far as I was concerned. My mother was vehement that she was entirely 100 percent human, but I likened that to the old saying: The lady doth protest too much. With her pitch-black hair and doe eyes, Clio could send any man to his doom on the rocks of love without even batting an eyelash—just like all good Siren progeny.

  I, unlike my two sisters, wasn’t born with the gifts of beauty and/or a genius IQ. With my short brown hair and large brown eyes, I was attractive, but not beautiful—and my brain was definitely more attuned to the latest issue of Elle than to anything school oriented. Not that I was a terrible student, mind you, but I was definitely glad I would never be called on to answer another math problem in my lifetime.

  “Earth to Callie,” Clio said, bringing me back to reality. I was tempted to blurt out: “So, who’s the lucky guy?” but instead, I kept my mouth sensibly shut on the topic, choosing only to reply to Clio’s initial statement—as much as I was dying to pry into my sister’s love life.

  “What about Runt?” I asked demurely, tickling the puppy’s neck underneath the pink and silver rhinestone halter she was wearing, a place where I knew she particularly loved being scratched.

  “Dad didn’t tell you?” Clio said, surprised.

  “No, Dad didn’t tell me anything,” I replied, starting to get nervous. What had my dad decided not to tell me about now?

  “Oh,” Clio said, scrunching up her nose, a confused look on her face. “I thought he would’ve let you know.”

  “Let me know what?” I said, exasperated by all the pussy-footing around.

  “That’s why I thought you were in town,” Clio continued, ignoring my question. “Because you’d been summoned.”

  “What?!” I nearly shr
ieked, feeling like my world was about to tip upside down again. I so could not deal with another round of tasks from the Board of Death—no matter whose immortality was at stake.

  I guess my sister didn’t know me very well if she thought I’d gotten my ass up at the stroke of six on a Saturday morning to take the three-plus-hour train ride from Penn Station to Providence, then wait another whole hour for the pleasure of taking the ferry into Newport just so I could deal with a whole bunch of bad-news supernatural business.

  Trust me, if I had known I was in the process of being summoned , I’d have gotten on the train to Baltimore instead.

  “Oh boy,” Clio said, looking worried. “You better go see Jarvis. He has all the info.”

  “Crap,” I replied.

  As much as I had grown to like my father’s Executive Assistant during the time when he had been my Executive Assistant—and had helped me fulfill the three tasks the Board of Death had given me in order to take over my dad’s job and save my family—I still had absolutely no interest in getting a lecture from the faun right then. Literally, there was nothing Jarvis loved more than giving me a lecture—and those suckers could go on for centuries.

  It was sort of sad in a “I have no life of my own” kind of way.

  “Do I have to?” I moaned, knowing that if I had been summoned . . . then I had to. “Okay, at least fill me in a little bit, Clio. Who summoned me? Dad?”

  Clio shook her head.

  “Mother?” I asked, desperately hoping that my mother was not the person doing the summoning. The last time she’d asked for a favor, I’d ended up in Hell.

  Clio shook her head again as I continued to scratch Runt’s neck, her tail thumping contentedly on the floor in a legato rhythm that was very lulling.

  “Who?” I moaned, not liking this one bit.

  Clio looked down at Runt, then back up at me.

  “Runt’s dad.”

  Oh shit, I thought. Cerberus had summoned me?

  “Did he say why?” I asked, even though I already knew it could only be because of one of two things: He either (1) wanted his daughter back, or (2) was calling in the favor I owed him—and both options seemed incredibly unappealing to me at that moment.