The Golden Age of Death (A CALLIOPE REAPER-JONES NOVEL)

by Amber Benson

  And so the years had melted away almost without notice…but his feelings for the mysterious woman he’d met that day had never gone away.

  Even now as she climbed to her feet later, her features distorted in anger, he couldn’t stop staring at her, she was so breathtaking.

  “Well, don’t just stand there staring at me, Freezay,” she chided him. “Let’s rip this Siren’s heart out.”

  It took everything inside of him not to oblige her.

  * * *

  even though this was the first time Noh had seen a Vargr, she wasn’t in the least bit afraid of them. The rational part of her brain knew she should be terrified of the slavering beasts that could destroy her with one chomp of their jaws. They weren’t just plain old bad guys, but competent killing machines taking infinite pleasure in the violence they wreaked.

  But her animal side, the one that’d taken control of her body now, wasn’t at all scared. It was fearless. It wanted to wipe the floor with the Vargr’s brains, then eat their guts on toast points for breakfast. She wasn’t usually so gory in her revenge plots, but she was worried about Callie, about what the shitheads were trying to do to her friend, and anger brought out the nasty in Noh.

  As they reached the front door, she heard Clio say:

  “We have to keep moving.”

  Noh looked over at Jennice, not sure the other girl was going to be doing much “moving” once they got outside. From her glassy-eyed stare and inability to connect to what was happening around her, it seemed like she’d gotten more information than she could handle and had blown a brain fuse trying to process it all. From the car ride up to Sea Verge, Noh had gathered Jennice possessed no knowledge of the Afterlife—which meant she must’ve been hella surprised when creatures like the Vargr showed up and started trying to eat her.

  “Outside,” Clio said, pointing to the front door.

  Noh wrapped her fingers around the doorknob and felt a strange prickling sensation flow up her arm. She shivered and almost didn’t open the door, but then Clio was shoving Jennice into her back and it was impossible for her not to open it.

  Jennice screamed, and Noh saw what had caught the girl’s attention: A pack of Vargr were waiting for them on the front stoop. Noh’s survival instincts prevailed and she quickly slammed the door shut in the Vargr’s faces. Then she turned back to Clio, waiting for her to issue another set of instructions, but the girl looked stumped.

  “What should we do now?” Noh asked encouragingly.

  Obviously they couldn’t go back the way they’d come, and the front was just as dangerous. Her question went unanswered as a Vargr claw slammed into the front door, cracking the heavy wood separating them from the monsters outside.

  Jennice screamed and cowered against Noh as another concussive crack splintered the wooden door even more.

  “I guess there’s no time like the present to open that door and beat the shit out of those disgusting mongrels,” Clio said, swallowing hard.

  Noh liked Clio’s plan very much. If she had to choose between fight or flight, she’d go with fight every time.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” she said, grasping the doorknob.

  Then she let the front door fly.

  thirteen

  Daniel watched Kali make short work of the remaining Vargr. He and Jarvis had tried to help, but she’d yelled at them to back off. Apparently, she enjoyed a bloody fight way too much to share it. He didn’t know if Freezay had caught up with Starr, but God he hoped so. He was pretty damn sure she was the reason the Vargr had shown up at Sea Verge. It was why he’d stayed away from the wormhole system to begin with. It was just another way to track someone or be tracked by someone else—and it was something he’d wanted to avoid until he’d found Callie and was assured of her safety.

  The minute he’d set foot in Sea Verge, he’d sensed there was magic at work. At first, he’d hoped this meant Jarvis was cloaking Sea Verge to protect Callie’s location, but when he realized she was gone, he knew the magic was being used for other purposes. Put two and two together—and it meant Jarvis had placed a spell on Sea Verge to keep unwanted guests from finding and accessing the mansion.

  So, why had it been so easy for him and the girls to breach the spell?

  The only answer he could come up with was they’d been wanted; left exempt from the spell so they’d be able to find the house without any trouble. Freezay must’ve been on the exemption list, too, but wormholing in with Starr (who wasn’t) had probably been what destroyed the spell.

  He was going to have to quiz Jarvis about this if they ever got out of Sea Verge alive. Not that he was worried about himself, or Clio and Jarvis. They were immortal and could withstand a vicious Vargr attack—but he seriously doubted Jennice and Noh (who were mortal) could. As for Freezay, he figured the man had to have some supernatural blood in his veins or else he wouldn’t have worked at the PBI, but this was just an educated guess.

  He felt a light touch on his shoulder and turned to find Jarvis standing beside him.

  “I think Kali has this well in hand,” Jarvis said, eyeing the Hindu Goddess of Death and Destruction as she plucked one of the dead Vargr’s eyeballs from its head and popped it into her mouth.

  While the two men watched, she chewed and then swallowed the gelatinous mass. Jarvis seemed amused by the strangely sensual act, and Daniel had to agree there was something compelling about what they’d just witnessed.

  Though he’d never personally been attracted to the woman, when he was working as the Devil’s protégé the Devil had liked to take on Daniel’s appearance in order to seduce and torment women—especially the Goddesses he deemed to be “goody-two-shoes.” Kali had been on the Devil’s hit list, and now it made interacting with the high-strung, and rather violent, Goddess kind of awkward.

  Kali, and the many other victims of the Devil’s seductions, had been made aware of the truth, that Daniel wasn’t the one to pin their anger on. And though they intellectually knew he wasn’t the responsible party, he still couldn’t help but feel weird whenever he walked into a room and they looked at him sideways.

  The Devil had not made Daniel’s post-protégé life very easy.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right. Kali has things well in hand,” Daniel agreed. “Let’s go find the girls.”

  He’d barely gotten the words out of his mouth when there was a loud scream from the other end of the hallway.

  “Shit,” Daniel said, and the two men took off at a run.

  At first he let Jarvis lead the way, but when they got to the front door—and he saw the splintered wood—Daniel pushed past the lankier man and sprinted down the front steps.

  But he needn’t have run. He found the girls had things well in hand. Even Jennice had snapped out of her fugue and gotten into the act, both arms raised in the air as if she were casting a spell—and who’s to say she wasn’t. If the three Vargr skipping in a circle in front of her were any indication, then she was a very powerful lady, indeed.

  A few feet away from Jennice, Clio and Noh were taking turns beating a large Vargr over the head with a rake and a shovel, respectively.

  “She just made them start dancing,” Clio called over to Jarvis and Daniel, as she took her turn with the rake. “It was amazing.”

  Kali appeared in the doorway behind Jarvis, and when she saw the Vargr at play, she began to laugh.

  “Oh my God, those Vargr look like trained seals! What will white girl’s friends think of next?”

  She was out of the doorway in three steps and, in two more, was happily ripping the spinal columns out of each of the dancing Vargr. As Kali felled the third Vargr, Jennice’s body began to twitch and then she collapsed onto the stairway, her face covered in sweat.

  Jarvis knelt down beside her, taking her hand and holding it in between his own.

  “Are you all right?” Jarvis asked.

  “Just…exhausted.”

  She closed her eyes, letting herself lean against Jarvis for support. Whatever she�
��d been doing to keep the Vargr incapacitated had expended a lot of her energy.

  Clio and Noh moved out of the way so Kali could have a go at their Vargr, but the Goddess ignored the rake and shovel, taking pity on the mongrel by smashing its head in with her foot, blood and brains spilling into the grass.

  “Don’t play with your food,” she admonished Clio and Noh as she plucked another eyeball from the mess of brain and skull in the grass and ate it.

  “That’s pretty disgusting,” Noh said, but there was no judgment in her voice.

  “Eyeballs are a delicacy, ghost watcher,” Kali said with disdain. “I can’t help it if you white girls are squeamish.”

  Daniel had never heard the term “ghost watcher” before and that was probably because he knew Kali had made it up. But the sentiment was correct. Callie had told him stories about her time at the New Newbridge Academy, and all the odd things she and Noh had experienced together there. He knew Noh could see ghosts, or detached souls, as she liked to call them, and he knew this was why she’d been able to tell Jarvis was in the wrong body.

  “Can you see the Vargr’s souls when they die?” he asked her.

  Noh shook her head.

  “Over the years I’ve learned to tune my radar way down around Death,” she said. “I feel them leaving their bodies, but unless I want to make a connection with them, I don’t see them.”

  “I bet that took you a long time,” Daniel said, and Noh nodded.

  “You have no idea.”

  Over Noh’s shoulder, Daniel could see Freezay—aided by a strange woman—dragging an unconscious Starr toward them.

  “Caoimhe!” Jarvis shouted, getting up from his perch on the stairs.

  There was no point in running to help them. They seemed to have Starr incapacitated. As they got closer, Daniel could see Caoimhe was not happy, her lips set in a firm line, dark eyes livid. From the flare of her nostrils, he intuited she’d rather be slamming Starr’s face into the ground than gently carrying her back to Sea Verge for questioning.

  “Would you care for any assistance?” Jarvis asked, trotting over to Freezay, but the taller man waved him away.

  “I see you’ve been busy,” Caoimhe said, surveying the multitude of mutilated Vargr corpses.

  She dropped Starr’s arm and Freezay did the same, letting the Siren’s unconscious body flop onto the grass at their feet.

  “Thank you for letting me know what’s been happening, Daniel,” Caoimhe added, looking pointedly at Jarvis.

  “I—” Jarvis said, but she shook her head.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure you were only doing what Callie asked of you.”

  Worried Callie had kept her birth mother in the dark about her situation, Daniel had decided to call Caoimhe from the road to let her know what was happening. He wasn’t surprised to learn she hadn’t heard a peep from her daughter. She’d listened silently as Daniel had spoken, then, when he was done, she’d told him thank you for the information and hung up on him. He knew Callie was just trying to protect them all with her information blackout, but, well-intentioned as it was, he did not appreciate being left out of the loop—and he’d gotten the impression Caoimhe would feel the same way.

  And he was right. She’d shown up at Sea Verge like a momma bear protecting her cub, ready to fight, maim, or kill anyone who tried to hurt her daughter.

  “Let’s kill it,” Kali said, stepping away from the headless corpse at her feet and crouching down beside Starr.

  “No!” Clio said, physically putting herself between the Hindu Goddess and the unconscious Siren. “We need to find out what she knows first.”

  Kali wasn’t impressed by Clio’s argument.

  “What can she know, baby Death?” Kali said as she stood up, the front of her sari a blood-stained mess. “Very little about the fate of your sister. I can promise you this.”

  “I don’t care,” Clio said—and she looked ready to throw down with Kali in order to get her way. “I want to hear what she has to say, then you can do whatever you want with her.”

  Kali mulled over Clio’s offer, head cocked as she weighed the myriad of possibilities this presented.

  “Deal.”

  She offered her hand to Clio and they shook on it.

  “I think we’d better get moving,” Jarvis said, looking nervously around the yard. “By wormholing here with an uninvited guest, Freezay destroyed the spell protecting the house. It’s how the Vargr were able to gain entrance to Sea Verge and I assume they won’t hesitate to press their advantage again—and soon.”

  “Speak of the Devil,” Daniel said, as the plaintive baying of a male Vargr raised the hair on the back of his neck.

  He turned to the others, his face grim.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  * * *

  there was a welcome committee waiting for Bernadette at the end of the tram’s loop. The twins had called in reinforcements, though none of the four Victorian-garbed young men they’d brought with them seemed very happy about having to chase a dead woman around an amusement park parking lot.

  Bernadette didn’t blame them. If she could go back in time and change the outcome of the afternoon’s roller-coaster ride, by God she would. She didn’t want these crazy monsters chasing her any more than the monsters wanted to be chasing her. She used the word “monster” because in her mind, only monsters would steal another person’s soul—and she was pretty sure that’s what these odd people were trying to do.

  “Before I even think about letting you take me, I want to know why,” Bernadette said, climbing out of the now-stationary tramcar.

  She wished the tram driver would notice her, but like all the other living people she’d encountered since she’d died he seemed oblivious to the confrontation happening three cars behind him.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, the driver hopped out of his seat and jumped onto the asphalt, walking back toward her car as he untucked the tail of his white shirt from the waist of his pants. He stepped onto the running board of Bernadette’s tramcar and began to futz with one of the burned-out light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Though he was inches from her, he might as well have been a million miles away, and Bernadette wondered how often, as a living person, she’d been surrounded by ghostly figures without knowing it?

  She’d never spent much time thinking about the mechanics of what happened to a soul after it died, other than the going to Heaven or Hell part. She’d just assumed you closed your eyes and died then when you opened your eyes again you were standing in front of St. Peter—or, if you weren’t so lucky, you opened your eyes to find yourself being prodded in the rear by the business end of a pitchfork.

  These were her preconceived ideas on the subject, but they did nothing to prepare her for what she’d encountered during the course of her death. All the hours spent in church, listening to the minister preach about charity, turning the other cheek, and believing in Jesus Christ above all else, had absolutely no bearing on the reality of what happened to your soul when you died.

  The tram operator finished playing with the light bulb and returned to his seat. He started the engine with the twist of a shiny silver key and the tram gave a sharp jerk, shooting forward. Bernadette watched it zoom back toward the theme park entrance, leaving her in the lonely darkness of an empty parking lot.

  While the driver had futzed with the light bulb, the twins had been conferring, their heads bent so close together their cheeks touched. Now that the tram driver was gone, they were taking their sweet time in responding to Bernadette and this made her edgy. When she finally got sick of waiting for an answer, she said:

  “What if I won’t go with you? What if I fight you or go on the run?”

  This got their attention.

  “For our needs, you must come willingly,” the twins said in unison, their voices melding into one, only upping the creepiness factor and making Bernadette even more wary of their intentions.

  “Well, how about I just keep
running until you get tired of chasing,” Bernadette said.

  The twins laughed, their voices a cohesive cackle. That’s when it dawned on Bernadette they had no intention of letting her go. They were just going to play with her until she gave in to them.

  “We won’t stop with you. If you give us trouble, we will take your daughter, your grandson…We will steal the souls of all the people you love,” the twins said in their eerie, singular voice.

  She knew they were using her grandson to manipulate her, but she couldn’t take the chance that what they were saying was true. There was no way she would do anything to jeopardize Bart’s life. Not now, not ever.

  “If I go with you, you’ll leave Bart alone?” she said, her voice tremulous.

  The twins nodded.

  “You have our word.”

  Resigned to her fate, she dropped her head and sighed.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  The twins shared a knowing smile. It was always easier when they crushed their prey’s spirit.

  * * *

  there were too many of them to take one car, so they’d had to split up. Jennice and Noh had climbed into the backseat of Clio’s Honda, while Jarvis took the front passenger spot and Clio manned the steering wheel.

  As Clio watched Freezay and Caoimhe loading the Siren into the back of Daniel’s car, she had the instinctive urge to change the lineup. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Daniel and Freezay—actually, she didn’t know who to trust anymore, but this wasn’t why she had the desire to switch passengers. It was all very simple: She wanted to be the one to deal with the Siren when it regained consciousness.

  “We should go now,” Noh said, turning in her seat so she could stare out the back window at the pack of Vargr loping across the grass toward them.

  Clio threw the gearshift into drive, slamming the accelerator pedal to the floor with her foot, and forcing the car forward. In the rearview mirror, she could see the Vargr racing to reach the cars before they made it onto the main road. By wormholing them into the backyard, their master had put them at a clear disadvantage and now they were trying to make up the difference. Luckily, this gave Clio and the others just enough of a head start to get away—and little did the hapless Vargr know that Kali, the bloodthirsty Goddess of Death and Destruction, was lying in wait for them just past the front entrance to Sea Verge.