Servants of the Storm

by Delilah S. Dawson

  “Here we go,” I say, every nerve on edge as I smile so wide my cheeks hurt.

  I hook a finger into the handle and pull quickly, jumping back as the tiny snake strikes. I was ready for it this time, but my heart still ratchets up into my throat. Baker gently pulls me back farther and uses his stage sword to knock the snake onto the ground and cut it in half, leaving another puddle of goo.

  I reach in for the black box that matches the one from my dream.

  Before I know what’s happened, I pull my hand back, shocked, clutching it to my chest. There are two red marks in the meat of my thumb, and a triangular gray and brown head waves back and forth inside the drawer, right behind the box.

  “But we killed the snake,” I say dumbly.

  “They cheated. Told you it was always a trap. Stupid demon jagoffs.” Baker holds out his arms like I’m going to just fall into them, but I can’t move.

  “Shit,” Isaac says softly. He grabs the gun off the top of the cabinet and points it at the snake but doesn’t shoot.

  “Somebody get the box.” I swallow hard. “Now.”

  “Forget the box. We’ve got to get the venom out.” Baker grabs my hand gently to look at the punctures.

  “I don’t care.” I jerk it back. “Give me that box. Then find Tamika’s. And Logan’s.”

  “Kill that snake and do what she says,” Baker says to Isaac, his voice hard. “I’ll take care of Dovey.”

  Isaac gives me a long, guilty look and tucks the gun back into the waistband of his jeans like a moron. Baker hands him the sword, and the third snake lands on the floor and dissolves under Isaac’s boot. Something slams into the door across the room, and I gasp and stumble.

  “Sit down,” Baker says gently but firmly. With a hand on my back, he guides me to the nearest antique couch. I flop onto the moss-colored velvet, my hand clutched uselessly over my heart.

  “But Carly’s box,” I say. “The demons.”

  “Let Isaac fight the snakes. And if they manage to break down the door, we’ll take care of them. If you don’t do what I say, you’re going to die before either of those things happens.”

  I’ve never heard his voice so strong and steady, never seen his eyes so serious and worried. He puts my hand down in my lap and bends over to look at my thumb. The door creaks desperately under what sounds like a battering ram.

  Baker turns my chin toward him. “I’m going to tie something around the top of your arm. Your job is to hold still and be calm and keep your hand below your heart.” I try to turn around and check on Isaac, but Baker won’t let go of my face. “And if we do that, you might live long enough to find the stupid box and get to a hospital, and they might have antivenin. But if you don’t do what I say, I’m going to call 911 on Isaac’s phone and pick your ass up and carry you upstairs past all those demons and scream my fool head off in the middle of The Tempest. You got it?”

  “I got it,” I mumble. He fiddles with my arm, but I ignore it and focus on listening to Isaac’s progress behind me.

  There’s a light thump, and then a big thump, and Isaac says, “Jesus Christ, how many snakes can be in one drawer?”

  “Get another stick to wedge it out, then. Find some tongs. Whatever. Just get that damn box,” Baker says. He’s busy with the tourniquet, his hands steady and gentle. He would make a good doctor one day. “Idiot,” he murmurs under his breath.

  I can’t see Isaac, since I’m having trouble moving my head and I’m feeling nauseated. But I hear wood scrape on wood, and he grunts, and then something heavy lands on the ground with a familiar rattle that has nothing to do with snakes.

  “Got it!” At the sound of his triumph, tears spring to my eyes. A roar shakes the door across the room, and metal squeals.

  Someone puts the box into my good hand, and it’s identical to the one in my dream.

  “This is it,” I say. “This is Carly’s soul.” I hug it to my chest. Up close the polished black wood smells like watermelon lip gloss and Popsicles in the summer and hair oil. Like Carly.

  A door slams against brick somewhere far off, and the world tilts sideways as I look up.

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to piss off a demon?” Kitty says.

  Pointing my dad’s sawed-off shotgun at my chest, she pulls the trigger.

  31

  THE SHOTGUN CLICKS.

  Because I never loaded it.

  Kitty snarls and pulls the trigger again with another empty click.

  I try to stand up, but my legs are going numb. Isaac appears, catching me before I fall and gently lowering me back to the couch.

  Kitty laughs and says, “Really, Isaac? That’s your rebound? I thought you had better taste.”

  When the rest of us crossed the room, we squeezed between things or stepped over them. But not Kitty. After she throws the shotgun to one of her demon minions, she picks up the first mannequin and hurls it against the brick wall. It slams against the word Best and shatters into body parts. The next thing in her path is a fancy chair, and she crushes the seat under her boot so hard that splinters fall into my lap. Isaac steps in front of me, blocking her from view. My hand is starting to swell up, and I can feel my arm stretching and pulsing against the old silk scarf Baker tied above my elbow.

  Which reminds me. I can’t see him. Where’d he go?

  “Baker?” I say, slurring like I’m drunk.

  “Or butcher or candlestick maker?” Kitty says, kicking over a couch and throwing a globe into the bricks, where it explodes into shards. “You really should have taken your pills, Billie Dove. You’re going a little mad, you know.”

  I look around the room, but everything is sideways and glittery. Kitty crosses slowly, leaving devastation in her wake. Just like Josephine. Two other demons are behind her, a pretty girl with soft, pointy deer ears who’s got my shotgun and a thin man with a rooster’s wattle under his chin. I don’t recognize them, but I don’t have to. They are what they are. And I know what I have to do.

  “Isaac,” I say weakly, “come here.”

  He spins and kneels by my side. I hold out my arms.

  “This is the wrong time for a hug,” he mutters.

  “It’s not really a hug,” I whisper, and he hugs me anyway.

  “Hold tight. We’re going to find a way out of this,” he whispers back.

  “I know.”

  I glance over his shoulder at Kitty. Her pouty mouth turns down when she sees Isaac hugging me, and she throws a lamp against the wall with a growl. I slide my good arm under the hem of Isaac’s leather jacket.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he says.

  “I’m not.”

  “Dovey—”

  But before he can ask me to be calm or reasonable, I yank my dad’s .38 out of the back of his jeans, aim for Kitty’s chest, and pull the trigger.

  The report echoes around the brick. Isaac yells, and Kitty staggers back with a shriek as a black hole blooms in her thigh.

  “You did not just shoot me, bitch!” she roars.

  My head’s reeling from the blast, and my stitched pinkie stings from the recoil, but I aim the gun and shoot again. She’s leaping over the junk now, as agile as a cat and fighting her way across the room. The shot goes wild. So does the next one. I try to count bullets in my head, but the number gets all muddled. I either have two left or zero, or seven, but none of that sounds quite right.

  Kitty’s black-stained leg collapses as she leaps over a table, and I know my time is short. With only one working arm, and that one getting shaky, it’s hard to aim.

  “Hold me up,” I whisper to Isaac, and his hands are steady and gentle around my back, my chest tight against his.

  I hold the gun up like my dad showed me, using Isaac’s shoulder to prop up my arm. I close one eye, lining Kitty up in the sight as she charges me.

  And then I pull the trigger with the last of my strength, gratified to hear the crack of a shot instead of an ineffectual click. With Isaac’s help I collapse back against the cou
ch.

  “Did I hit her?” I say. “Did I get her in the stomach?”

  “She’s down.” Isaac grabs the gun from my hands and holds it like a club, standing over me protectively.

  I can hear Kitty panting on the floor, trying to draw in a rattling breath. I must have hit her in a lung with one of my shots, somewhere near the heart but not near enough, if demons even have those organs at all. Across the room the deer-eared girl has the shotgun aimed at us, her face screwed up with fury as she pulls the trigger. She must not know much about guns. The shells are still upstairs in my jacket pocket. Seconds later she leaps toward us, holding the shotgun upside down like a baseball bat.

  I giggle.

  “Just hold still,” Isaac says. “Just hold on.”

  The rooster man lurches at Isaac from the side with a sharp black knife and slashes his leather jacket across the arm. Isaac hits him with the gun butt, and they clinch, topple over, and roll around in the black goop left over from the dead snakes. The deer girl is almost here with the shotgun. She doesn’t even pause as she steps over the place where Kitty is coughing. The entire cabinet of drawers starts rattling along with Kitty’s every breath, like the snakes and bones are furious. The only thing I have to defend myself with is Carly’s box, and I’m not about to risk it. I pick it up from the couch and hold it to my chest as if somehow it can protect me.

  The deer girl is silent as she approaches, and I wish she would say something. Her eyes are wide and black as she raises the shotgun overhead. Only as she begins her downswing does she smile. I hold up my bad arm on instinct, unwilling to let go of Carly’s box. I close my eyes and turn my face away.

  But just when I expect the blow to land, there’s a gurgle and a clatter as the heavy shotgun hits the floor. I open my eyes to find Baker standing over me, his hand wrapped around Isaac’s knife. It’s lodged in the deer girl’s throat, and when he jerks it out, black blood foams out through the hole. She slumps over onto the table.

  “What do I do? How do I kill her?” he asks me, voice shaky.

  I just giggle drunkenly and say, “Give her your mom’s meatloaf.”

  “Jesus, Dovey,” he says. “You’re going into shock. Isaac! A little help?”

  “Slit her throat. Stab her in the heart. Whatever. Just kill her more. Chop off her pinkie. And then help me!” Isaac yells as he rolls around with the rooster man.

  In that tiny twist of a second, I focus on Baker’s face, watching the disgust and fear coalesce into determination. He jabs the knife into the girl’s throat and saws across, and her hands scrabble at him, but he slaps them away. She flops over and then is still, and he uncurls her pinkie and slams the knife down into the concrete floor, his face a mask of fury. She gurgles and coughs, and then deflates a little—but not completely. Baker holds up her distal with a triumphant grin, and I think that I must have looked like that after killing Mr. Hathaway. When Baker looks back at me, his eyes are black, as black as night.

  “Scrappy,” Isaac gasps as he fights the rooster man. “The knife.”

  “Put your arm back down below your heart,” Baker says gently to me. “I’ll be right back.”

  I cradle my hand, ignoring the fact that it’s turning black and puffy. On the other side of the table, Isaac and Baker are rolling around with the rooster man, and there’s shouting and cursing and falling hat racks. But here on the couch it’s calm. I raise Carly’s dybbuk box up with shaking hands.

  “You think you won, don’t you?”

  I look down, and Kitty’s face is on the ground by the couch, her hand wrapped around my ankle. I didn’t even notice her touch. In her other hand is a wicked black knife like the one the rooster man pulled on Isaac.

  I hold up my puffy hand and wiggle it back and forth. There’s something outrageously funny about it, like it’s made of old tires.

  “Maybe.”

  She laughs, a cold and breathless sound. Funny how we’re so close, and yet neither one of us can move.

  “You’re going to die before you can open it, you know. You’re going to die right here on the couch. But I won’t. And then you’re mine forever. And I’ll have the last laugh. I’ll make you hunt down your parents and kill them slowly. I’ll send you out to steal children in the night. I am going to punish you for a very, very long time.”

  “Maybe.”

  She drags herself up onto her elbows. There’s a long, black stain on the floor behind her, like a slug trail. I giggle a little. A fox-eared slug. She gets a hand on the arm of the couch, dragging herself closer. I’m mesmerized by the tiny black veins in her face, and by the little black hairs sprouting out of the tops of her ears.

  Kitty is right, of course. I can’t beat her now. But there is one thing I can do. I look around the room, but the deer girl is still down and the rooster man is still fighting. It’s just me and Kitty. No one can stop me.

  “So what do you think about that, bitch?” she says, holding the knife up like a question mark.

  “Time to see what’s behind door number one,” I say, and I put a boot in Kitty’s face and flick the lid on Carly’s dybbuk box.

  32

  NOTHING HAPPENS, AND I OPEN the box wider and scrabble around with the fingers of my good hand. It’s empty, and tears prick behind my eyes. Somewhere in the back corner I touch the tiniest thing, hard and round and as tight as a flower’s bud. I pull it out to look at it, but it erodes to ash and floats away.

  A hidden warmth flares in my numb fingertips. It blooms and grows, like a lightbulb turning on, and the heat shoots up my arm, setting all my insides aglow. I feel Carly’s arms around me, feel the sharp cut of my dad’s pocket knife on the pad of my thumb and the warm slickness of our mingled blood between our fingers. I feel a necklace placed just so around my neck, a Popsicle dripping down my fingers, a hand squeezing mine behind a shivering curtain. I close my eyes, wishing to hold on to this feeling, this completeness, forever. I can hear her voice in my memory, the half-laughing honey sweetness of my best friend saying, “I knew you could do it, Dovey. I knew you’d get your lemon chiffon.”

  And then, in the space of a single heartbeat, I feel a sudden rush of limitless joy and wonder, like a thousand church choirs singing on a sunny day, like a bird flying into the sun, and then the feeling is gone, and I know that I’ve succeeded.

  Carly’s soul is free.

  Tears run down my face, warm and welcome, and I laugh with happiness.

  “Keep laughing,” Kitty growls. “I know just what to put in that empty box.”

  I watch her inch her way toward me, knowing full well that she’s as unstoppable as the winds of Hurricane Josephine. I was helpless then, and I’m helpless now. But it doesn’t matter. Not really. I’ve done what I came to do. I just wish I could have saved myself, too. That place Carly’s soul went to? It seemed mighty fine. I can only hope that being a distal servant is like being asleep, that there’s not enough of you left to be horrified by the things you’re forced to do.

  But I know that’s a false hope; I saw the terror in Carly’s photo at Café 616. I slump down a little farther without meaning to.

  Kitty’s got an arm up on the couch beside me when the knife plunges into her neck. Isaac plants a boot on her shoulder and yanks out the blade.

  “I want you to watch me while I finish you off,” he says, eyes black and deep.

  He kicks her over. She flops onto her back with fear written across her beautiful, eerie features. With a sneer he jabs the knife into her stomach and rips across in one violent slice. Oh, how I want to look away. But I can’t. It’s all black inside, like Josephine’s pool, but the things floating in the muck are distals. Dozens and dozens of pinkie tips, completely whole and tinged with black. Kitty shudders, and her insides writhe.

  I can barely manage a whisper. “Hot pink. Nail polish.”

  Isaac stares at me, and there is nothing human in his face. “What?”

  “Find. Carly’s distal. Burn it.”

  I look away as he
digs through the dozens, maybe hundreds, of fingertips. Even when I feel something wet drop into my hand, I can’t look. I know the feel of a distal now, and I clutch it tightly to my chest.

  “Watch, Dovey. Watch so you know she’s gone.”

  I open my eyes to find Isaac pulling Kitty’s arm to the ground and uncurling her fingers, pinning her pinkie to the concrete floor. But I don’t want to watch; my eyes slide away. I find myself transfixed by a single drop of black blood dribbling out of her fox ear to drop sideways onto the ground.

  “What happened to gravity?” I ask no one in particular.

  The last thing I remember is Baker scooping me up. My head droops over his arm, and I watch upside down as the fox girl bleeds out into a wide black pool surrounded by pill-shaped bits of fingers. An ink-eyed demon in a leather jacket stands over her, knife in one hand and a lighter in the other, his long blond hair not quite covering his all-black eyes.

  33

  I WAKE UP IN A hospital bed. The second my eyes open, my mom is next to me, holding my hand with a look of ferocious determination, like she can heal me with her thoughts. My dad is on my other side, smoothing hair over his bald spot and sucking on his mustache and crying in a chair. That’s just as it should be, just what I’d expect them to do. Everything is dreamy and white and smeary around the edges, like someone rubbed Vaseline around the corners of the room.

  When I try to sit up, searing hot pain consumes my left arm. I stare at it hard, trying to figure out why it’s wrapped in gauze past the elbow and completely immobilized. Then I remember the baby snake hiding in the drawer.

  Hazy dreams crash into real memories, and I say, “Where are Baker and Isaac?”