Servants of the Storm

by Delilah S. Dawson

  “You’re missin’ your curtain time, crazy girl,” Old Murph says. “You go back and play your part, and I’ll let you take Little Miss Sassy with you. You give me any trouble, she loses a finger.”

  “They’re going to take her pinkie down there anyway,” I say, and he laughs. The gray hairs on his head rise up and quiver toward me.

  “I didn’t say anything about her pinkie, sugar.”

  I swallow hard. “Isn’t she supposed to be onstage?”

  “As long as the doors are locked, it doesn’t matter what’s onstage.”

  I shake my head once. The gun doesn’t waver. Baker and Isaac subtly move toward the desk, one on either side. I watch the hump-backed demon and the girl, wishing I’d spent more time at the range, wishing I trusted my aim better. Old Murph reaches casually into Jasmine’s hair with his other hand, strokes a curl, and then rips it out savagely and brings it to cracked lips. He sucks it up like a spaghetti noodle as Jasmine shudders. His acid-green eyes don’t leave mine as he reaches for another curl, and I notice his thick fingers making indentations in her shoulder.

  “Y’all keep on creeping close,” he says darkly, “and we’ll see how many bits of her I can rip off before you get here. I been at it awhile.”

  The hand that had been caressing her hair goes to her chin and turns her head to show me where her left ear has been ripped off. I wince and say, “Jasmine?”

  She snakes her head around too fast, and Isaac lunges for her, snatches a handful of toga, and yanks her to the ground. Old Murph launches himself across the desk with more power than he should have, and I pull the trigger and lurch back before he can touch me.

  “What do I do?” Baker shouts, but I can’t look up. Old Murph is crawling toward me with a hole in his shoulder, a bulging, bleeding, hump-backed monster with elbows that bend the wrong way.

  “Shoot him again!” Isaac yells. My eyes dart to Isaac for one second, and he’s trying to hold on to Jasmine, but she’s fighting him. Something tugs the hem of my toga, and I look down into Old Murph’s hair and close my eyes and shoot him at point-blank range. Black acid soaks into the gold-edged bedsheet of my costume, and I kick him away and dance backward.

  “Give me your knife,” I say, voice shaky, and Baker’s already there.

  I know how to take a demon’s distal now, and Isaac’s knife feels like it was made for the purpose. Hell, maybe it was. It only takes one good stomp. I pick up the chunk of gray finger with a dry corner of my toga and look around for the means to burn it, and that’s when I notice that Jasmine is sitting on top of Isaac, her knees pinning his hands to the ground as her long fingers squeeze around his neck. Both of her pinkies are nubs. His eyes are terrified and frantic, his mouth moving, but he’s turning purple.

  “Jasmine! You crazy bitch! He’s on our side!” I yell as Baker runs over, and her head swivels too far around until she finds me. She only has one eye left, but it’s as black as pitch, all around.

  Baker shakes her shoulder like he’s trying to wake her up. She hisses and tries to claw him across the face. He barely escapes getting blinded by her long nails, but Isaac is able to wrench out from underneath her while she’s focused on Baker. I watch them grapple, feeling helpless.

  I can’t shoot Jasmine. I don’t know what’s wrong with her, and there might still be something worth saving. I don’t think she’s a distal servant, but she can’t be human anymore. The places where her eye and ear were ripped off aren’t bleeding, and the ragged holes where her curls of hair were torn away look black and tarry. She’s crouched and moving toward Baker, mouth open but silent, which is also against her nature. I fold up the knife and throw it to him. He catches it but clearly doesn’t know what to do with it.

  Isaac coughs as he crawls away from Jasmine. “She can’t be saved,” he whispers. “Shooting her is a kindness.”

  I aim the gun at her face, then let my arm drop so it’s pointing at her chest. Her head swivels over to me, an entirely inhuman movement. I recognize nothing worth mercy, but still I don’t shoot.

  “Dovey, Old Murph is moving again,” Baker says quietly.

  Jasmine almost has Baker backed up against the desk, but he’s watching the lump of old man on the other side of the room. Murph’s back is twitching. I hunt around for his distal and find it still clutched in my fist.

  “Watch out!” Baker yells.

  Jasmine leaps for me, and Isaac knocks her down. There’s something big in his hand, and he smacks her in the head with it, a solid, sickening thump. She slumps over, and dark, slurry fluid oozes from a gash in her head. Isaac pops her again, and I turn away. The thing I saw in his hand is a doorstop made from a brick wrapped in a hand-sewn gingham cat, the sort of thing my grandmother used to make and give as gifts. I want to throw up, but I can’t. Movement catches my eye, and I carry Old Murph’s finger to a shelf of knickknacks.

  Isaac appears by my side and puts a paper matchbook in my hand. With a nod of respect I hand him my gun. Baker comes up behind us, puts a hand on my shoulder as I drop the twitching finger into an old ashtray. Like I’ve done this a thousand times before, I strike a match and catch the entire matchbook on fire. The boys crowd close as I drop it into the ashtray and watch the flame until the finger catches and starts to burn with a sick, heavy funk. I glance at Old Murph, grateful to see him collapsing inward like rotten fruit, just like Mr. Hathaway did.

  “What happened to Jasmine?” Baker asks softly, and Isaac and I turn to look at what’s left of her.

  “Murph turned her into an imp.”

  “How did he . . .” I start, but I can’t finish.

  “Fluid exchange. You don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter now. They’re like rabid dogs. If you see another one, kill it.” Issac wipes the black ooze from his face with the back of one hand. “Come on. The guard’s dead. Let’s hit the basement.”

  I feel numb inside. First Carly, then Tamika. Now Logan and Jasmine. If we don’t hurry up and do something, they’ll get Nikki, too, and Mrs. Rosewater, and everyone else I know. I close my eyes and exhale slowly, feeling around inside my mind until I find what I’m looking for. Time to tap into whatever cambion powers I can summon. All I feel is rage, but that’s enough.

  There’s only one other door in the room, an old and crooked thing that looks like a closet. We all turn to it at the same time. Isaac hands me the gun and opens the door. Narrow stairs, straight down. A single grimy bulb lights the way. I hold up my toga and descend, my boots heavy on the wooden steps. The door clicks behind us, and we’re just three vessels of warmth in the dark, cold stairway. Strained noises filter in, and I realize it’s the sound of a big crowd. I imagine poor Mrs. Rosewater freaking out, thinking that missing most of her lead actors on opening night is the biggest problem she could possibly ever have.

  She has no idea.

  I move faster, already planning how we’ll shoot out the glass doors out front and set the theater on fire. But first, I have to be sure Carly’s dybbuk box has been opened and she’s free. And Kitty has to be dead, her stomach emptied of distals. Maybe a fire would take care of that problem for me, just destroy the whole dybbuk cabinet, but I could never rest again if I didn’t know for sure. I trip and catch myself with a hand on the brick, and it’s cold, and hundreds of people on the other side of it are waiting patiently to lose the one thing every human being should never have to doubt: their ability to die and stay dead.

  By the time I reach the door, the lightbulb at the top of the stairs is as far away and untouchable as a midnight star. The boys stop behind me in the pitch-black space, and Isaac turns on his phone, throwing us into eerie, blue-black relief. I am desperately aware of their warmth, their breath, the brush of Isaac’s leather jacket and the rustle of Baker’s puffer vest. When a hand bumps into my arm, traces down to my hand, and intertwines fingers with mine, I know instinctively that it’s Baker.

  “Are we ready?” I whisper.

  Isaac whispers, “Do it,” and Baker just squeezes my han
d and then lets go.

  29

  THE DOOR SQUEALS OPEN AND bounces off the wall. Isaac catches it with a hand, holds it open as my arms swing into shooting stance. The room beyond is even darker than the hallway, the silence within deep and sucking. Cool air rushes over my bare shoulders. I’m frozen in place, not about to barrel into the pitch black. And I’m surprised as hell that nothing’s rushing at me, claws outstretched, like Jasmine did.

  Isaac hands me his phone with the screen lit. I take a deep breath, holding the phone out with one hand and the gun in the other. I’m terrified and exhilarated, and it reminds me of my first time onstage, somewhere overhead. It was so dark in the wings, and I was shaking and about to throw up and scream all at once. Carly squeezed my hand, as Baker did just now. Then the music started, and the spotlights came on, and everything just clicked into place. I knew at that moment that I was meant to be onstage, that I had been given a gift. That I could slip into someone else’s skin and command the attention of everyone in the audience.

  Today I need to be in the skin of a cambion. I need to kick ass. So just like I did three years ago behind the black curtains of the wings, I offer a small prayer and say “Action.” Then I take a step into the room.

  My gun smacks into something, and I falter, fear rising in my throat. But whatever it is, it doesn’t fight back. I swing the phone over and recognize the plastic face of an old dummy, her drawn-on eyebrows surprised and a little beat-up.

  In the silence I hear only my breathing, but I can feel Baker and Isaac close behind me.

  “See if there’s a light switch,” I whisper.

  The sound of hands brushing brick ends with a muffled “Aha.” There’s a click, and some flickers, and then the hum of fluorescent lights fills the air. I shield my eyes with the hand holding the phone and stumble backward into the guys.

  It’s the antiques store. Or at least all the crap I saw in there, mixed in with old stage props. Mannequins, useless tables, grandfather clocks, oil paintings of monkeys in party hats. Everything is jumbled together randomly with wooden stage sets and boxes, a rush job.

  “What the hell?” Baker says.

  “We found it,” Isaac says, giving me a warm smile.

  “Found what?”

  He points, and I smile too. The word Best is painted on the brick in fancy, faded white letters as tall as I am, with “Furniture Co., Savannah, Georgia” beneath it. And it was here all along, right under our feet.

  “Now what?” Baker says.

  “Now we lock the door and look for the dybbuk cabinet,” I answer, and it’s good that my plan is a declaration instead of a question, that I’m finally sure of the next step.

  “Why are you so positive it’s here?” Isaac asks. “Of all the places in the entire city, why here?”

  I stare him down, unblinking. “Because Carly said it would be.”

  For once he’s smart enough not to argue.

  I move farther into the room, ducking under the mannequin’s arm and angling my body around an old fainting couch. Isaac slides a heavy bolt to lock the door and heads in a different direction, toward a drooping armoire. But Baker stays in one place.

  “I don’t get it,” he says.

  “We’re looking for a bunch of boxes in a cabinet,” I explain. “I know it sounds crazy, but one of them contains Carly’s soul. Even if we can’t kill Kitty and get Carly’s distal bone back, at least this will set her spirit free. Right?” I look to Isaac, and he shrugs.

  “Supposedly.”

  “A box with a soul in it. That’s pretty creepy,” Baker mutters, opening an old jewelry box. “But at least all the other demons and thingies are upstairs, right?”

  “For now,” I mutter.

  Across the room Isaac opens doors and drawers in the armoire. He tosses out old gloves and strings of fake pearls, but I can see his frustration. I scan the jumble of stage sets and antiques and familiar props. There’s the house from The Wiz, Bottom’s donkey head from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then I notice something in the far corner of the room that looks like a cabinet or table half hidden under a faded flowered tablecloth. A little drawer peeks out from under the corner of the blanket, and it looks like it might be a card catalog, the kind that’s nothing but small drawers.

  I climb over a table and push past an umbrella stand. It’s like going through an obstacle course, moving through the room. The closer I get, the more sure I am that we’ve finally found Kitty’s dybbuk boxes. Something in the cabinet rattles, and the sound is just like the black box from my dream, and I push myself to move faster through the junk.

  A loud clank startles me, but it’s just Baker across the room, yanking open the door to an antique stove.

  “It’s just a bunch of crap,” he says. “Mardi Gras beads and shoelaces and . . . What is this, a garter belt?” He flings a stretchy scrap of satin across the room.

  “Yeah, I’ve got nothing,” Isaac says from the armoire. “Costume jewelry and clothes and mothballs.”

  I crawl under a dining room table that has heavy feet like lion’s paws and finally reach the cupboard under the tablecloth. Whisking the flowered fabric away, I can’t help gasping. It’s perfect. The wooden cabinet has dozens and dozens of drawers, each with a number on a brass plaque. Something rattles in the bottom right corner, the drawer that’s a little open. As I reach for it, another one rattles closer to the middle.

  “Look at this!” I say, heart pounding with excitement. “Guys, this has got to be it.”

  I set my dad’s pistol on top of the cabinet and reach for the drawer that’s rattling the loudest.

  “Dovey, wait—” Isaac says.

  But I’m too close. It’s just like my dream. Just like Carly said. I had to eat my collards and go to Riverfest and kill demons, had to follow all Carly’s clues, but now I get my lemon chiffon pie. Now I get to put my best friend to rest and maybe save my own soul and all those people upstairs waiting breathlessly for the play to start.

  I grab the handle and pull.

  30

  THE RATTLESNAKE CURLED INSIDE STRIKES the edge of the drawer and I barely jerk my hand back in time. I step away, shivering, as its fangs scrape against the wood. Its tail rattles even harder now that it’s free of its confines. Ice water seeps into my veins.

  “Did you seriously think the thing you wanted most was just going to be sitting there, in an unlocked drawer?” Baker yells as he rushes over. “Number one rule of video games: it’s always a trap.”

  “Maybe,” I say, taking another step back.

  It’s a baby snake, and it’s only got two rattles, but it’s unnaturally vicious. The angular gray head curves over the edge of the drawer, the black tongue flickering in and out. Isaac scrambles over the dining table and lands beside me. There’s a black iron bookend shaped like a pug dog in his hand, and he pushes me back gently until my butt’s against the table. I hop up to sit. I’ve never liked snakes, and I like them even less after Riverfest. As soon as the baby rattler lands on the ground and curls up to strike, Isaac slams the bookend on top of the snake and chops it in half. It dissolves into a black puddle.

  “Why would Kitty put snakes in the drawers?”

  Isaac slams a fist on top of the cabinet, and I jump as dry scrapes and rattles erupt from within it. “I told you. Demons think we’re stupid, but that doesn’t mean they take chances. Kitty left Old Murph as a guard, left booby traps and fail-safes. She can’t stand over the cabinet, but she can make it hard as hell and nearly fatal to get into it. The snakes aren’t . . . well, they’re demon magic.” He points to the black puddle that used to be a rattler. “They can probably hurt demons, too.”

  The drawer nearest to me rattles, and I flinch back from it. “They can’t all be snakes, right?”

  “Nothing in those drawers is going to be nice. Check the top and back of the cabinet,” Isaac says. “Maybe there’s a map. Grab something heavy and get ready, Scrappy-Doo.”

  Baker pulls a wooden stage sword out of
the umbrella stand and scrambles over to join us.

  Careful not to touch the cabinet, I edge behind it. Sure enough, there’s a pencil-drawn diagram on the back with letters and numbers on every square. Only problem is, they’re not letters I recognize.

  “What is this, a demon alphabet?”

  “Aramaic, probably. Another fail-safe. They have something similar at Charnel House,” he says. “Behind the bar. So you know what to mix.”

  “These aren’t drink recipes,” I say, running a finger along the old-fashioned block letters. “Do you know what they mean?”

  Isaac joins me behind the cabinet, his shoulder warm against mine. His finger crawls over the tiny inked letters.

  “Well?” I ask.

  He grunts. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to read Aramaic? Give me a minute.” His finger runs over every square. “I’m pretty sure they’re names. The demons have to keep track of their servants. But there’s no Carly Ray.”

  My heart falls. We’ll have to open every drawer, every box. Kill every snake. It’s going to take forever. And then I remember.

  “Wait. Caroline Jean. Is there a Caroline Jean?”

  “Yeah, I think I saw that.” Isaac’s finger stops on a square. Number twenty-two. He gives me a doubtful look, but I’m too excited to care.

  “Her legal name. ‘Ray’ was her mom’s last name, but she wanted to keep her dad’s last name on paper. ‘Jean.’ And she hated being called ‘Caroline.’ ”

  I edge around to the front of the cabinet with Isaac right beside me. Both of the guys are looking at me, Isaac like he’s impressed and finally has hope, and Baker like he’s proud but nervous. Maybe they feel like I do, like we’re about to open a treasure, about to finally see some return on a trying couple of days and a year’s worth of tragedy. Isaac said it was impossible, but here we are. Saving ourselves. I think about burning down the whole room, just grabbing Isaac’s lighter, setting a curtain on fire, and tossing it over the cabinet. But it’s still not final enough. I want to be sure that the deed is done and the souls are free forever.