by Amber Benson
Even though Caoimhe, my birth mother, was back in my life now, I still carried some doubts about her feelings for me. I knew I was being childish and insecure, but I found myself needing as much reassurance as I could get that she’d actually wanted me, that giving me up had not been her choice.
“Of course she wanted you,” Anjea said sharply. “You were, and are, a very loved child.”
I hadn’t intended to cry, but Anjea’s words cut me to the quick. To have her confirm I was wanted—by both of my parents—felt like washing away the pus from a festering wound. I guess I hadn’t really understood how disconnected I’d felt from the woman who’d actually raised me. I knew she cared for me, but she’d always been so much closer to Thalia and Clio—her daughters by blood. I’d spent my life trying to please her, to make her love me as much as she seemed to love them. I didn’t know this was an impossible task. That I was a constant, living reminder of something terrible from her past: her beloved husband’s infidelity.
“But that is neither here nor there,” Anjea said, yanking me out of my thoughts. “Those who seek to keep the world in decline and humanity trapped in its darkest phase, they want to destroy you, Mistress Death. Because with your destruction comes the blackest time of all.”
This was a lot to take in.
I turned to Jarvis, expecting him to know what Anjea was talking about, but from the look on his face I realized this was news to him, too.
“Did Calliope’s father know about this?” Jarvis asked.
Anjea nodded.
“It was why he fought so fiercely to keep Calliope free of her fate for as long as possible.”
Jarvis nodded, digesting her words.
“And how does Marcel fit into all of this?” I asked, curious as to what her answer would be.
“He is the Ender of Death, true,” she said. “But we have made a bargain, one you have just sealed for us.”
I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t like bargains that concerned me but I had no voice in.
“If you chose not to spare the creature that murdered the person you loved most in the world—your father—then you would blacken your soul with revenge. The balance would be destroyed and those who sought to keep humanity in the dark would have no further beef with you. Though they would still seek to unseat you as Death, but for personal reasons only.”
“That doesn’t sound very good,” I said, kind of glad now Anjea had stepped in when she had.
“It would be a catastrophe, Mistress Death, for us all,” Anjea agreed.
“But I did spare him, so what does that mean?” I asked.
“It was why we came here, to this desolate spot, so we would not be observed, or interrupted if we reached this summit. Now we must decide if the deal is to be finalized, or not.”
I shifted my gaze from Anjea to Jarvis, trying to gauge what he was thinking, but he looked as confused as I felt.
“And what is this deal you would like struck?” Jarvis asked on my behalf.
“The Ender of Death will put away his directive for the next thousand years. He will become the Champion of Death, and he will fight on your behalf,” Anjea said. “And believe me—when you leave this place, you will have much need of a champion. Someone is seeking to merge our universe with another, one where your old nemesis, Frank, is Death. You don’t exist in that universe, so you will be destroyed utterly if the two are allowed to come together as one. You must stop this.”
“That makes no sense,” I said, shaking my head as I tried to comprehend what Anjea was saying. Instead, I focused back on the Ender of Death. “The whole point of the Ender of Death is to kill Death. Why would he agree to something like this?”
“It was a trick,” Marcel said, wading into the conversation for the first time. “I didn’t think you would last two seconds in battle and Anjea believed otherwise. We made a wager and I lost. Now I am bound by my word.”
“There has to be a catch,” I said, finally, because I’d been hanging around the Afterlife long enough to know you never got anything free. There were always strings attached.
Anjea looked down at Marcel, who nodded—and I knew she was about to tell us all about the dreaded “strings” that came with this pretty little deal.
“There is always a catch, Mistress Death,” Anjea agreed. “When the Golden Age is over, if you are still the reigning Death after those thousand years, you will bend your neck to Marcel and he will have the satisfaction of chopping your head off, rescinding your immortality.”
I just stood there, trying to take in what Anjea had said, but I was dumbfounded. What she was implying sounded more like handcuffs than strings. Jarvis saw my distress and squeezed my shoulder, letting me know he wanted to speak to me, alone.
“Let me discuss this for a moment with my Executive Assistant,” I said, holding up my hand.
“Hurry, Mistress Death,” Anjea said, “even now those who seek your demise are on their way.”
I grabbed Jarvis by the parka collar and dragged him a few feet away from where Anjea and Marcel were standing, waiting for my answer.
“What do you think?” I whispered.
“I don’t know what to think,” Jarvis said, his voice low and uncertain.
“I mean, it’s definitely stamping an expiration date on my ass,” I continued, “but if it’ll bring about this Golden Age, then maybe it’s what’s supposed to happen.”
Jarvis nodded then immediately shook his head.
“No, I think we should ask for more time to think it over. We have no idea if this is just a ruse to keep Marcel’s head in place, or if there is truth to what Anjea is saying.”
I trusted Jarvis implicitly—if he said to ask for more time then we’d just go ask for more time.
“You’re right,” I agreed. “We’ll ask for more time then we’ll go home and get the crew together, see what they think.”
And by crew, I meant Clio, Daniel, my friend, Kali, and my talking hellhound pup, Runt.
“Agreed,” Jarvis said.
Satisfied with our decision, we broke our huddle, and turned around to let Anjea know what we’d decided—but my words froze in my throat. The ice behind us was covered in arterial blood…Anjea’s arterial blood.
Her body lay on its side, blood gushing from the gaping hole where her head should’ve been. I spotted the head—eyes wide, mouth in a terrible rictus of pain—resting a few feet away, where it had landed after it’d been forcibly removed from her shoulders. A flash of brown wings crossed my field of vision and I stepped back as Anjea’s owlet flew past my face then zoomed upward, disappearing into the frozen white sky.
I shifted my gaze away from the owlet and found Marcel, scythe flashing, as he battled a man wielding a golden ax. I knew the man hadn’t been there when Jarvis and I had gone into our huddle, so I surmised he’d just wormholed in for a surprise attack.
“Gold must have been Anjea’s weakness,” Jarvis whispered in my ear, as he pointed to the golden ax the stranger was using like a meat cleaver.
I nodded, my eyes riveted on Marcel. He cut a graceful figure as he used his diamond-bladed scythe to slice away at the man who’d murdered Anjea, beating him farther and farther away from where Jarvis and I were standing.
“Get out of here!” Marcel yelled back at us, startling me out of my state of inaction. “I’ll find you—I always make good on my word!”
Jarvis yanked my arm, pulling me behind him as he tried to distance us from the carnage.
“I guess that means we’re accepting the deal,” I said weakly.
Jarvis ignored me, focusing on the spell he was using to call up a wormhole and get us the hell out of Ridge A.
“Jarvis, are you listening to me?” I said, having a hard time focusing on what was happening.
“Of course I’m listening to you,” Jarvis said, as the air around us began to shimmer and quake. “It means, Mistress Calliope, someone is out to get you. Someone very, very bad.”
I watched as the wormhole final
ly coalesced into being in front of us, the beginnings of hysteria gnawing at my insides. Suddenly, I felt something wet on my cheeks and I reached up with tentative fingers, terrified I’d find blood on my face.
But when I looked down at my hand, there was no blood.
Only tears.
six
“And so we returned to Sea Verge,” Jarvis concluded. “And everything had changed.”
The tea in his hands was cold and he had barely tasted it. He set his mug back on the kitchen island and waited for the unhappy response he knew was coming.
“Calliope would never do that,” Clio said.
Behind her, Daniel had begun to pace again, the echo of his heavy tread filling the otherwise silent room.
“This is bullshit. Cal would never get involved with the Ender of Death. He murdered our dad,” Clio continued.
“Be that as it may,” Jarvis said. “It is what happened. And as much as I detest it, it cannot be changed—”
“How is it possible for someone like Anjea to be killed and, yet, no one in Hell heard a word about it,” Daniel said. “She’s the Vice-President in Charge of Death for the Australian Continent—”
After they’d returned from Ridge A, Jarvis had had the exact same thought, so he’d done some checking, making an incognito trip to the Hall of Death on Calliope’s behalf.
But there’d been no mention of the Vice-President’s demise in her Death Record, and this had given Jarvis pause.
He knew what he’d seen with his own eyes, and that included the beheaded corpse of the Vice-President in Charge of the Australian Continent. He’d been present as Marcel battled her murderer, giving Jarvis and Calliope a chance to escape, unscathed.
None of it made any sense. Death Records didn’t lie and their magic was intractable, making it impossible for anyone to tamper with them.
In the end, he hadn’t been able to come up with a plausible answer as to why Anjea was still listed among the living—but somehow she’d managed to cling to some semblance of life up on Ridge A.
“That was my first thought, as well: How could there be no uproar over Anjea’s murder? So I went to the Hall of Death and checked her Death Record myself,” Jarvis said.
“And there was nothing?” Clio asked, concern growing steadily in her eyes. “No mention of her death in her record. That’s impossible. I interned at the Hall last summer and I got to know their system pretty well. It automatically records all births and deaths, including the ones for immortals. No one—not even Death, herself—can mess with those things.”
“I know,” Jarvis said. He was as confused by the situation as Clio and Daniel were.
Only Noh remained silent, observing the others through half-lidded eyes.
“The records are indestructible,” Clio said, setting her mug down hard on the counter, the sound jarring to everyone. “They can steal them. They can salivate over them. They can molest them. They can try to destroy them, but they can’t change them. It’s impossible.”
“I know.”
This was all Jarvis had to say in reply to Clio’s angry tirade—because she was right. The Death Records only recorded the truth.
“Does that mean Anjea’s alive somewhere, then?” Daniel asked as he leaned against the kitchen island. “That she engineered this whole fake death thing in order to trick Callie into making this deal with the Ender of Death?”
“I need to get to Purgatory and look at the records—” Clio said, starting to get up from her stool, but Jarvis laid a hand on her shoulder, staying her.
“You can’t wormhole from Sea Verge,” Jarvis said as Clio stared at the restraining hand on her shoulder. “It will destroy the protective spell Calliope asked me to create around the mansion before she left…”
Clio narrowed her eyes.
“And you won’t be received warmly when you get to Death, Inc.,” Jarvis continued. “I almost didn’t make it out myself. Except for Kali, the Board of Death has been co-opted by Uriah Drood and his minions. The Harvesters and Transporters are doing his bidding, too. All in direct opposition to Death, Inc., protocol. All because they’ve presented the Afterlife with another version of the truth: a new Death.”
Clio stared at him as though he were speaking in tongues. She didn’t want to believe what he was saying—and he couldn’t blame her. The whole thing sounded entirely implausible, even to his own ears.
“That’s impossible,” she said, finally, stepping away from him.
“The balance of power has shifted,” Jarvis said. “And Calliope Reaper-Jones is being written out of the annals, her deeds eradicated as if she never existed. Uriah Drood is even now in the process of installing his new Death in her place.”
Three pairs of disbelieving eyes were locked on him now, waiting for him to continue. It wasn’t that he hadn’t expected their disbelief—he’d been mentally preparing himself for it, in fact. But the reality of having people he cared about look at him as though he were a liar, was much easier imagined than experienced.
“Drood has tapped into something great and terrible. He’s using the knowledge inside of the original copy of How to Be Death in order to create a giant collision between our universe and another. And in this other universe, Calliope Reaper-Jones does not exist. There, Purgatory is under the control of a different Death. One who exists in our universe, as well, but in a different capacity.”
“You’re not talking about me, are you?” Daniel asked, a worried expression on his face.
Daniel and Calliope had both been in the running to become Death after Calliope’s father was kidnapped, but Daniel had forgone the opportunity, deciding to help Calliope win the job, instead.
“No, you’re not Death in this other universe,” Jarvis said reassuringly.
“How do you know what you’re saying is even scientifically possible?” Clio asked, eyes narrowed as she tried to logic out the problem. He’d known that she, alone, would want hard, scientific proof—this was the way her mind worked—but it wasn’t something Jarvis could give her.
“I have nothing but my word to give you, Clio,” Jarvis said. “Kali came here, she spoke to me and your sister. Everything I’ve said came directly from her mouth. Drood has done what your sister and the Devil, as outsiders, could not do. He’s taken over Death, Inc., from the inside out.”
“It’s Frank, isn’t it?” Daniel said, suddenly, nostrils flaring with anger as he looked around the room, begging someone to contradict him.
Jarvis felt bad for him. He knew Frank was the man Calliope had almost ruined her relationship with Daniel over, and it would be like someone sprinkling salt on an open wound, having Frank reintroduced into his life like this—but, sadly, the acting Steward of Hell was correct.
“Kali said that in the other universe, Frank is a despotic Death—one who abolished Death, Inc., and returned Purgatory to the Dark Ages, destroying all the improvements your father, Clio, instated when he took over the job in our universe.”
“If this is true. If what you and Kali say is really happening is really happening,” Clio said. “Then we have to do something about it. We can’t just sit here talking and not acting—”
Clio had never lived in a world where Death, Inc., didn’t exist, where the management of Purgatory was overseen by dictatorial, power-hungry madmen who did as they liked without any thought to how their craziness might affect the rest of the Afterlife. But Jarvis had been around long enough to remember the darker days, before Clio’s father had taken over Death, and he knew he would do anything not to have Purgatory plunged back into the Dark Ages.
“—so let’s go to Death, Inc., and do something. It’s very simple. We’ve fought these assholes before and we can do it again.”
Jarvis appreciated Clio’s enthusiasm, but there was nothing “simple” about this situation.
“So this is why Callie’s room is empty,” Daniel said. “Because her life is being erased?”
Jarvis nodded.
“She won’t exist
here much longer unless something drastic is done to stop the two universes from joining. And as they get closer to becoming one, the more things will change.”
Noh had remained mostly silent during the course of the conversation, but now she spoke:
“It’s the truth. It seems illogical, but I feel in my bones that it’s right.”
“Then let’s go,” Clio said, striding toward the door.
“Wait,” Jarvis said before Clio could reach the threshold.
“What?” she said, turning back around to shoot him a look of annoyance.
“Calliope. Your sister,” Jarvis said, trying to find the right words. “She has empowered me to keep you here at Sea Verge.”
Clio rolled her eyes at him.
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t dictate what I do or don’t do—” she began, but Jarvis cut her off.
“You and Jennice, the Realtor upstairs, are two of the next ‘possible’ Deaths.”
Clio froze, her body rigid as she tried to take in what Jarvis was telling her.
“Calliope wants the two of you protected, here at Sea Verge,” Jarvis said, the words difficult for him to get out. “If she is killed before the universes merge, then the game is changed completely—”
Clio stared at him, uncomprehending. Only Daniel seemed to understand what Jarvis was getting at.
“She’ll ask the Ender of Death to kill her before the universes merge, Clio,” he said. “That way you, the possible ‘Deaths,’ will rise up in this universe in the wake of her death. The two of you must exist in both realities, so you’ll be able to continue the fight against Frank for her.”
He fixed his gaze on Jarvis—and it was all Jarvis could do to nod.
“She’ll sacrifice herself for our world,” Daniel finished. “And she needs you, and that girl upstairs, alive and well, so if that happens, you can save the rest of us.”
Clio shrank visibly as Daniel’s words sank in.
“No…” she said, her voice strangled by emotion.
Then she turned tail and fled the room.
Noh started to go after her, but Jarvis held her back.