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

by Amber Benson

  The Vargr massacre had elicited enough blood to keep her happy for weeks. When she was done eviscerating and decapitating her enemies—and there were many of them—she found her body caked in their red, hot gore. It was quite an aphrodisiac. She was intoxicated by the taste and smell of herself and she swore she wouldn’t bathe for at least twenty-four hours. She liked the feeling of viscera all over her skin.

  And it wasn’t a bad moisturizer, either.

  As she surveyed the mess she’d made of white girl’s pad, she remembered she’d left one of the Vargr alive and kicking. It was one of the smaller females, and she’d only broken its back, so it was incapacitated, but it wouldn’t die, for now.

  She marched back through the carnage, stepping on as many body parts as she could, enjoying the feel of crunching bones and matted fur under her feet. She’d decapitated most of her kills, but a few had escaped the treatment and those were the ones who hadn’t changed back into human form. She felt sorry for the human ones. They looked weak and powerless next to their furry brothers and sisters.

  That was one thing she did not want: to be powerless in death. She didn’t fear death, she relished it, and if she didn’t die while in battle, then she would consider her demise a failure.

  She couldn’t remember exactly where she’d left the survivor, so she just started kicking the bodies as she walked until one of them groaned and she saw it still retained its head.

  “Hey, fur ball,” she said, giving the beast another kick in the flank. “I got something to tell you and you’d better listen well.”

  She squatted down next to the helpless creature, its blood-flecked tongue lolling in its mouth.

  “Tell that master of yours that I got white girl’s back,” she said, whispering in the Vargr’s ear. “So fuck the hell off.”

  She stood up and gave the beast a final kick.

  “You gonna remember that, fur ball?”

  The beast nodded weakly.

  “Now I’m gonna send you back where you came from.”

  She slapped her hands together and a whirling vortex appeared in front of them. Slipping her hands under the wounded beast, she lifted it into the air and heaved it into the wormhole. Having received its due, the wormhole closed up like a lotus flower and disappeared.

  Kali rubbed her hands together, pleased with her good work. She’d promised white girl she’d look after her, and Kali was not one to shirk her duties. Now she had another task to start on and she needed a little help for this one—namely, someone (Indra) whose golden tongue could persuade even a corpse to sit up and live again. She’d already let Indra know what was happening and that she was on her way to collect him. He had a vested interest in the outcome of this battle because he was in love with white girl’s sister—and if he and Kali didn’t help out, his lady was not gonna survive this hostile takeover. Immortal or not now, when white girl, aka Death, ceased to exist, then the bad boys would execute any of her remaining friends and family. Kali knew this for fact because if she were the one on the other side, she’d do the exact same thing.

  Lucky for white girl, Kali had a soft spot for dipwads who threw girly magazines at her head (something Callie had done on their very first meeting). She would use everything in her power to keep white girl sitting pretty—and that meant getting her hands dirtier than they already were. Something she was very much looking forward to.

  Surveying the damage, Kali saw her work at Sea Verge was done. She thought about taking a wormhole to Indra’s house, but decided against it. As much as she liked killing Vargr, this was not the time for that—and hopping into a wormhole would only clue the bad boys in to where she was headed. True, she’d told Jarvis she would try to draw out their pursuers, but it had been a lie. She had other business to attend to, business that came directly from white girl’s own mouth.

  Instead, she made her way back to the garage, a separate building just down from the main house where she knew Jarvis kept the earthbound transportation. She was looking for something spiffy, preferably an automobile, but when she opened the garage door, her eye caught sight of something hot pink hiding in the corner underneath a white drop cloth.

  “Now wait one minute,” she whispered as she crossed the garage, making a beeline for the drop cloth–covered, hot pink thing.

  Ripping away the covering, she gasped because what she saw underneath it made her heart do a little flip-flop.

  “So. Damn. Hot,” Kali breathed, as she stared, in utter fascination, at the hot pink Segway standing before her.

  It looked as though the Goddess of Death and Destruction had found her mode of transportation.

  twenty

  CALLIOPE

  Marcel was dead—at least this incarnation of him.

  His body lay in the desert sand, the fierce light from the sun beating down on his twisted features: the purple tongue, the petechial hemorrhaging in his eyes, the splotchy fingerprints wrapping around his throat like a necklace. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, but it soon would. And I didn’t want to think about what the desert heat would do to the body after a few hours on “broil.”

  I looked up at Cerberus, the giant, three-headed hellhound (I thought he resembled an overgrown black lab, but I would never tell him that), trying to ascertain his thoughts on what we should do next. I trusted him implicitly, not just because he was Daniel’s friend and Runt’s dad, but also because he was wise and didn’t take shit from anyone.

  I was beyond pleased that when Runt had made her wormhole jump she’d chosen to go to her dad—because anywhere Cerberus happened to be was what I would call “safe.”

  Cerberus’s two dumb heads (they possessed the good-natured disposition of traditional dogs) were busy sniffing Marcel’s corpse and enjoying the fine stench of death it was exuding, while the third head (I affectionately referred to him as “Snarly head”) was busy watching me.

  Snarly head was the thinking man’s head and the only one you wanted to have a dialogue with. He differed physically, and in disposition, from his two brother heads because he was a Cyclops—his one giant yellow eyeball hardly ever blinked—and he was about as excitable as a rock. Let’s just say whenever the two dumb heads were busy licking their shared balls, Snarly head was the only one who had the decency to look embarrassed by the spectacle.

  I could tell Snarly head had lots to say on the subject of what we were gonna do with Marcel’s body, but since I was Death, he wanted to be respectful and let me speak first, if I was so inclined. I had an idea of what I thought we should do, but was loath to say it out loud because it was so goddamned unorthodox it would probably get me yelled at.

  I looked from Runt to Snarly head, then I took a breath and said, “I want to call him back from death.”

  No one yelled at me.

  This was a good sign.

  “Is it a terrible idea?” I asked, my energy flagging as the heat beat down on my head and I remembered where I was again.

  As if I could ever really forget.

  Hell was the place I hated most. The heat was infernal—it never let up even at night—and it was the scene of some of my most spectacular failures. And did I say I hated the place?

  No, I despised it.

  “I think you’ve had many ideas that were much worse,” Snarly head said, his large yellow eye, unblinking.

  “Really? You think this one might be okay?” I asked, surprised by his answer.

  Snarly head nodded.

  “What I think…is that your idea is worth a try.”

  I looked over at Runt, who was sitting in the sand beside her dad, black tail thumping. I took this as a sign she was telling me to go for it.

  “What about this schmuck?” I said, pointing at Alternate Frank, who was still trussed up like a heifer. His pale skin wasn’t used to Hell’s furnace-like heat and he was only turning redder by the second.

  Alternate Frank had been silent since we’d taken the wormhole into Hell, and as far as I was concerned, the longer he kept his mouth
shut the better.

  “You will need him,” Snarly head said, turning so he could stare at my prisoner with his giant yellow eye. “Possibly as a bargaining piece—but you will also need to interrogate him, find out what he knows so you are then in synch with your enemy. So as much as I would like to tear him limb from limb and feed his carcass to the crows…”

  I knew exactly how Snarly head felt. This was the man who was partially responsible for the attack on Runt, and who’d murdered Marcel, and God knew what else.

  “Okay then, we hold on to him…for now,” I said.

  With the Alternate Frank situation settled, I returned to the next matter at hand: Marcel’s reanimation.

  I tried not to think about what this would mean for my future. If I brought Marcel back to life now, then I’d still be liable for my part of the agreement I’d made with him and Anjea in the Antarctic. The world would have its Golden Age of Death and then, when it was all over, I would be sacrificed to Marcel. It still might happen anyway—I didn’t know if the bargain carried over to his next incarnation or not, but with my luck it probably did.

  Still, if I took the gamble and let Marcel stay down for the count, then I might be able to marshal all my strength and wit together to beat Uriah Drood and his minions—but the likelihood of me being erased from the universe before that could happen was very high.

  Logic won out over self-preservation.

  “Let’s do this thing,” I said, kneeling down in the sand beside Marcel’s inanimate corpse.

  I placed my hands on his tortured face, the rigid, dead flesh making me queasy. I’d done this once before, unwittingly. It felt strange to be doing it now, on purpose.

  “Live,” I whispered.

  There was a crack of rolling thunder above me and then the cloudless blue sky split in two, rain pouring down on us in warm, wet waves. I was soaked instantly and had to push my waterlogged hair out of my face so I could see.

  I felt the muscles in Marcel’s face shudder beneath my fingers and then his one good hand shot up and wrapped itself around my neck, pulling me down toward him. I was too surprised to pull away as his lips brushed mine. Heat and a powerful attraction exploded between us, and then, my body thrumming with power, he released me and tilted my head so he could whisper into my ear:

  “You are brave.”

  I looked down into his eyes, the whites so bright they resembled bleached eggshells.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  I held out my hand and he took it, letting me help him to his feet as the water continued to beat down on us.

  “We’re in Hell?” he asked, looking around.

  His experience in Hell had been about as wonderful as mine, so I doubted he was very happy to be here.

  “Yup,” I said, using my hands to slick my hair back off my face.

  “Great,” he said, arching an eyebrow before turning his attention to his murderer. “And what do we have here?”

  He knelt down beside Alternate Frank, who was still lying trussed up in the (now) wet sand, looking as miserable as a drowned rat.

  “We have to keep him alive,” I said, shaking my head. “So, if you’re thinking about doing something naughty—not gonna happen.”

  Marcel grabbed Alternate Frank by the chin and shoved his head back, then he leaned in close enough to whisper:

  “One day I will cut your balls off and feed them to you.”

  “You can eat sh—” Alternate Frank started to say, but Marcel sucker punched him in the mouth and blood poured from the wound.

  “You don’t have the right to speak to me,” Marcel hissed, the cords standing out on his neck.

  He looked like he wanted to say more—a lot more—but I grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him to his feet.

  “Do you know Cerberus?” I said, taking Marcel’s good hand and leading him toward Snarly head. I didn’t want him spilling any more of Alternate Frank’s blood.

  “We’ve…met,” Marcel said as he and Snarly head eyed each other—but this was all either of them offered on the subject.

  “All right, then,” I said, changing the subject—my very obvious way of diffusing the situation. “Now what do we do?”

  Marcel blinked at me, while Runt remained silent. Only Cerberus replied, but his words were not intended as an answer to my question.

  “You’re Death. It is your time to make the big decisions.”

  “Ha,” I laughed, but Cerberus was right. It was time for me to get the show on the road.

  I reached up and patted him on the chin, rubbing one of the spots I knew Runt liked. Cerberus closed his eye, leaning his head into my hand and enjoying the impromptu scratching session.

  As we stood there, the rain stopped as suddenly as it’d begun. Nature’s response to my powers was always an interesting thing to behold.

  “Well, we don’t have Drood,” I said, shaking off some of the rainwater—I knew ten minutes under Hell’s sun would have us all dry as a bone.

  “We haven’t even seen him,” Marcel said. “But he seems to know what we’re going to do before we do it.”

  That wasn’t exactly true, but we had experienced a lot of bad luck since our arrival in Purgatory.

  “I think shithead over there,” I said, pointing to Alternate Frank, “was hiding out in Drood’s compound. Someone brought him over to our world from his alternate universe and now he’s just waiting until the two universes merge so he can take over.”

  Alternate Frank snorted.

  “Have you got something to say?” I asked, glaring at him.

  “Nope, got nothing to say to you, sis,” he replied then spit out a tooth, his mouth still bloody where Marcel punched him.

  “Can I kick him?” Marcel asked, glowering at Alternate Frank.

  I shook my head.

  “You can kick me, little priss,” Alternate Frank said to Marcel. “But that don’t mean I ain’t gonna kick you back.”

  “Ignore him,” I said, taking Marcel by the shoulders and forcibly turning him back around to look at me.

  Marcel was like a small child with poor impulse control. I was really gonna have to watch him, or else he was gonna beat Alternate Frank’s face in when I wasn’t looking.

  “Drood knew you were coming,” Marcel said, his nostrils flaring. “He’d spelled the house against you.”

  “It was a precaution,” I disagreed. “The only person who knew where we were going was Jarvis—and I trust him as much as I trust myself.”

  Marcel raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, shut up,” I said, punching him in his good arm. “I’m totally trustworthy.”

  Making fun of me seemed to have taken the edge off Marcel’s bad mood. Not that I blamed him; he’d been clinically dead, for God’s sake—and no one felt like doing the hokey pokey after something like that. I was just getting ready to say as much when I felt a concussive boom ratchet through my body, so loud I instinctively covered my ears to protect them.

  “What the hell?” I said, as I removed my palms from the side of my head, only to discover that a cacophonous ringing in my eardrums was affecting my ability to hear properly.

  Marcel, who was still facing me, pointed to something or someone just over my shoulder. I whirled around to discover Daniel walking toward me, the original copy of How to Be Death, the one written in Angelic tongue and impossible to read, held out in front of him like an offering.

  He said something, but I could only make out a few of the words, the rest were gibberish.

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t hear anything,” I said. I knew I was speaking too loudly, but that’s what happens when you can’t hear anything. “How did you get the book and how did you get here?”

  Once again, Daniel spoke, but all I managed to decipher was: Jarvis and massacre. Neither of those two words left me with a happy feeling in my stomach.

  “Just…stop…for a minute,” I said, shaking my head, as if this would somehow restore my hearing. “I can’t
hear anything.”

  Daniel nodded, letting me know he understood. I turned back to Marcel.

  “Can you hear anything?”

  He shrugged and I took that as a “yes.” I switched my gaze from Marcel to Runt, who also nodded, and then, finally, to Cerberus, who was already talking to Daniel—so obviously his hearing hadn’t been affected, either.

  As I watched, Daniel grabbed Snarly head in a headlock and then the two of them, a grown man and a three-headed hellhound, were rolling around in the sand, tussling with each other. I’d seen them get all rowdy together before, and, I had to admit, it was pretty darn adorable.

  But back to the problem at hand.

  Why was I the only one who couldn’t hear anything?

  I leaned my head to the right and smacked the heel of my palm against my temple a couple of times then switched sides, repeating the process. This was something I’d done as a kid when I was trying to get the water out of my ear canal after I’d gone swimming. Needless to say, it didn’t work in this waterless situation.

  Daniel, clothes covered in dirt and sand, set his hand on my shoulder and I jumped. Not being able to hear made normal interaction nearly impossible.

  Daniel held How to Be Death out for me to take, and I extended my palm, letting him slip the tiny tome into my hand. Instantly, my ability to hear returned in a rush and I was able to catch Cerberus saying:

  “…if Drood wants a battle, he’s going to get one.”

  He was talking to Marcel, who was nodding.

  “I can hear again,” I said as I put the book into my back pocket and then grabbed Daniel, pulling him into me so I could squeeze him tight.

  He seemed confused at first, but then he grinned and leaned down to kiss me.

  “I missed you,” I whispered in his ear, after we’d broken apart and I was carefully ensconced under his arm.

  “I missed you, too,” he said, pulling me even closer.

  As for my temporary hearing loss, I was pretty sure it was the book’s way of punishing me for not protecting it better. Here it was, down in Hell—which was probably the worst place for it—under the former Devil’s protégé’s control, so why wouldn’t it be pissed off at me?