Serpent's Storm

by Amber Benson

  As abruptly as it had started, the white-hot heat dissipated, leaving me with a chill that wracked every cell in my body and made me shiver uncontrollably, my teeth cracking together like nunchakus. I figured it would be a miracle if I didn’t bite my tongue off before this crazy ride was over.

  Trying to ignore the weird shivering that had overtaken my person, I unhunched and slowly opened my eyes to find out what was going on with the Vargr attack already in progress. But before I could get a fix on what was happening, the lights flickered then went out, sending the car into a fathomless darkness punctuated only by the occasional flash of blue light marking the places where emergency phones were hidden inside the subway tunnel—something that was of absolutely no help to me.

  With the disappearance of the light, a sense of foreboding filled the car, and the people around me started to panic, terrified by the supernatural weirdness they’d just been thrust into the thick of. Most people had no idea the supernatural world even existed, nor were they prepared for some of its (heretofore imaginary) minions to make a surprise appearance on their lunchtime subway commute.

  High-pitched voices, underlined by a tremolo of fear, intermixed until the cacophony of words was unintelligible. One thing I’ve learned about human beings is that whenever they’re in the middle of a crisis, they are certain that the louder and more insistent they become, the more chance of surviving they have. I’m pretty sure this tack doesn’t really work, but they hold on to the idea regardless.

  Ignoring the squawking of the people around me, I reached up and felt for my face, my shaking fingers hooking into the weave of my Prada scarf and almost choking me in the process. I assessed the rest of my limbs, finding, happily, that whatever energy had overtaken me hadn’t done any outward damage—even though my body continued to vibrate like a plucked string. Still, my joy at being physically A-okay receded sharply as I realized that by all intents and purposes I shouldn’t be standing upright.

  As great as it was to find myself all in one working piece, the Vargr had been gunning for my throat, so why the hell wasn’t I lying in a pool of my own blood on the nasty-looking subway floor?

  I pictured my physical body, lying in bloody pieces on the dirt-and-germ-laden fire-retardant flooring of the subway train—and then I pictured myself trying to Purell said bloody mess as it lay strewn across the floor.

  Ah, the joys of being immortal.

  The fact that my body had been used as some kind of magical superconductor and I was still functioning, with no teeth marks anywhere I could feel, meant that a little supernatural assistance had been thrown my way. And the only person I could think of with any magical ability within a fifty-foot radius was—

  Jarvis!

  I’d totally forgotten about my dad’s Executive Assistant during all the craziness. Apparently, I turned into a complete and selfish bitch when I got caught up in a monster attack—not that this was any kind of a shocker. Being less self-involved was something I’d been working on as of late, but since I’d spent the last few years on my own, it was still hard for me to remember to play well with others.

  “Jarvis!” I hissed, but my voice was lost in the panicked chatter of the other human beings trapped in the subway car with us. They sounded like a pack of royally pissed-off parakeets, annoyed someone had walked past their cages at the arboretum.

  “SHUT UP OR DIE, PEOPLE!” I screamed and felt another pulse of energy slam into my body. Shivering, I reached out a hand, searching for the faun, but I only came away with empty air. Somewhere in the darkness I heard the tolling of a bell, thirteen times in quick succession, and I hoped that meant someone was working on getting the lights back on soon.

  “Jarvis?”

  Oh, God, I totally let the Vargr beastie eat Jarvis, I thought miserably, my head starting to pound. I should have put a kibosh on the whole cowardly lion act and protected my friend, whether I got turned into immortal beef jerky or not. I was immortal, for God’s sake. I could live without a chunk of my intestines—and besides, who says an all-liquid diet is such a bad thing anyway?

  “Jarvis, where are you? Are you here? Oh my God, did you get eaten?” I whispered, terrified I wasn’t gonna get a response. “Jarvis?! Did I let you get eaten? Please don’t be in someone’s stomach—”

  Suddenly, I felt a cold, clammy hand grasp my wrist, and I went rigid, fear turning me to stone where I stood, my feet frozen to the plastic flooring. It seemed the Vargr wasn’t gonna let me off so easily. I was about to become the main course in a Vargr brunch.

  I kicked myself for coming downtown in the first place. If I’d stayed in my cubicle at work, none of this would be happening. Jarvis wouldn’t be the goat kebab appetizer on a wolf-man’s lunch buffet . . . I wouldn’t be the dessert.

  “Oh my God, please don’t eat me . . .” I began, trying to sound as meek and pathetic as possible. If I was going to be Vargr fodder, then I at least wanted the creature to feel cruddy about it.

  “I taste like crap . . . I swear, if you eat me, you’re talking like major league indigestion—”

  “Hush now, Miss Calliope.”

  Even though I couldn’t exactly see him in all the darkness, we’d been through enough Callie-induced scrapes for me to recognize Jarvis’s snooty British accent whenever I heard it. Instantly I relaxed, letting the fear slide down my back and disappear into the pitch-black ether surrounding us. I squeezed Jarvis’s bony hand, exceedingly relieved to find my friend hadn’t been turned into a goat kebab, after all.

  Sadly, my guilt-induced headache was less easy to get rid of: it’d sunk its teeth into my brain and had obviously liked what it’d found there. It wasn’t going anywhere until I got my hands on a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol and downed its contents.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered, squeezing Jarvis’s hand again, very happy he was alive and well, standing beside me. The darkness made it impossible to see what was happening around us, so I hoped Jarvis was more clued in to the supernatural 411 than I was.

  “I’m not certain,” he began, “but I believe the spell you used incapacitated the Vargr—”

  “Hey, I didn’t do a spell,” I said, protesting my innocence. “And I’m pretty sure I would know if I had done one, don’t you think?”

  “Miss Calliope, I was sitting beside you and you definitely used a spell.”

  Jarvis might think I was capable of doing the kind of magic that would subdue a savage Vargr, but when he actually stopped to think about it, he would realize how highly unlikely it would be for me to pull off something so advanced all by myself. I mean, I knew me pretty well—I’d only been kicking around in this body for twenty-some odd years—and I knew there was no way I could successfully subdue a Vargr without help. I couldn’t even call up a wormhole, and that was one of the most basic magic spells around.

  If I was going for full disclosure here, I’d say the only advanced magic I’d ever been capable of producing revolved around me being stuck in a tight spot and magic just “popping” out of me in order to save me from sudden dismemberment.

  Maybe this was what had happened with the Vargr, but I doubted it. Every other time I’d been saved by magic, there’d been no ill effects—being dipped in a vat of Icy Hot, anyone?—so I was pretty certain the magic hadn’t come from me.

  Pretty pathetic, huh? I could create an Excel spreadsheet, beat the bejesus out of any living creature that got between me and the sale rack at Bloomingdale’s, but I couldn’t pull a rabbit out of my hat without a pair of training wheels and a copy of Magic for Dummies clutched in my hand.

  I vehemently shook my head in disagreement because I knew I hadn’t done a spell, but then I remembered we were in the dark and Jarvis couldn’t see me.

  “I didn’t do a spell. I don’t know how to do spells,” I said. “You know this about me. I’m totally magic defective.”

  There was a pause as Jarvis thought that one over.

  “I suppose someone else could’ve been working the spell throu
gh you,” Jarvis conceded finally. “If you’re sure the magic didn’t come from you.”

  “Absolutely, positively certain,” I said.

  As I waited for him to reply, I noticed the subway car had gone deathly silent. I’d been so busy arguing with Jarvis I’d completely missed the changeover. Part of me assumed we’d scared the crap out of our fellow riders with all our magic talk and that they were being good little church mice, recording our conversation on their iPhones to hand over to the Bellevue commitment crew who were waiting for us at the next stop. Yet deep inside I knew I was being naïve. I mean, these people had been chattering like drunkards, and now you could hear a pin drop. The whole situation gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach—and I was doing everything within my power to ignore it.

  “Uhm, Jarvis?” I said. “Do you hear anything funny in here? Actually, I mean, do you hear a lack of anything funny in here . . . ?”

  The lights flickered back on just as the words left my mouth. I blinked a few times, my eyes stinging as they tried to adjust to the sudden onslaught of fluorescent light. Jarvis’s hand found mine again, and this time the crunch he gave my fingers was anything but reassuring.

  “Miss Calliope . . . ?”

  Jarvis’s words trailed off into a very definitive question mark. I looked around the car, reaffirming that the silence I’d just registered had not been brought about by our magic-centric conversation. Nope, something a lot more insidious was responsible for the lack of human chatter on this particular subway car . . . and that insidious thing was Death.

  While Jarvis and I’d been babbling our heads off, someone or something had laid waste to every single living creature in our subway car. I did a silent head count, my eyes roving over the dead bodies draped over plastic seats, faces pressed against windows, hands hanging limply in the aisles. In front of Jarvis lay the Vargr, who in death had returned to his original form, that of a tall, gaunt man. I reached out my foot and poked the man’s shoulder with the tip of my shoe, hoping against hope this was all just a prank, but the man was deadweight, his body immovable. I wanted to squat down and touch his face, move his lips back to see if those nasty-looking Vargr teeth were still in residence, but something held me back. I wouldn’t call it fear, per se, but more like a healthy respect for the dead.

  I looked around at the other dead folks, but I couldn’t tell what had killed them. From where I was standing, there appeared to be no blood on the bodies, no sense that any kind of violence had overtaken them. Their faces were peaceful, and if I chose to step into the world of denial, I could almost believe they were sleeping. There were no lines of terror etched into their skin, no glazed and sightless eyes staring reproachfully up at me, laying the blame at the dainty feet of the itinerant Daughter of Death.

  I observed the thirteen corpses—men and women who up until a few moments ago I’d shared oxygen with—and tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I knew it wasn’t my fault, yet I couldn’t help but feel responsible for the loss of life. If Jarvis and I hadn’t been on this train, would these people still be alive? I had absolutely no idea, and to dwell on the question too long might bring answers I couldn’t—and didn’t—want to deal with.

  Who was I kidding? The time to not deal with this stuff had passed me by about ten minutes earlier when I was walking down Canal Street chowing down on my chicken shawarma. Suddenly, a really horrible thought came unbidden into my mind and wouldn’t go away. It sat there like a whiny baby, demanding I pay attention to it.

  What if these Deaths had nothing to do with the situation and everything to do with me? I’d been set up before and I knew the hallmarks pretty well. Maybe whoever had killed these people had done it to place the blame squarely at my feet?

  “Jarvis, we have to get out of here before we get to the next stop,” I said, looking over at the shell-shocked faun, who only nodded. “Otherwise, you and I are going to end up locked away in a human prison for the next thousand years.”

  “These poor people,” Jarvis said, his voice trembling with emotion.

  “I know,” I said, wrapping my arm around his shoulders, “but right now I need you to ignore everything in this subway car and open a wormhole so we can get out of here before the police lay their hands on us.”

  Jarvis nodded, but his eyes were still locked on the motionless human bodies. “Please, Jarvis,” I said, feeling the brakes of the subway car engage as the train began its imminent stop at the next station.

  “We have to go now.”

  The meaning of my words finally seemed to penetrate, and he sighed, tearing his eyes away from the grisly sight that surrounded us. The car began to jerk, wheels grinding against the track as we neared our final destination.

  “I’m sorry, shall I do it now?” he asked, distracted.

  I nodded my head. “Yes. Now would definitely be a good time.”

  I held on to the little faun, as much for my support as his own, while he began the preparations for the spell. He mumbled a few words under his breath and then the air around us split, revealing a gaping hole in the ether in front of us. Pulses of staticky, amber-colored lightning cascaded out of the wormhole, coursing down the metal carriage of the subway car and slithering like electrically charged worms as they shot across the floor toward us.

  Jarvis let out a low moan as the light converged around his hooves and then shot up his haunches. Instinctively, I took a step back as the fierce amber light consumed Jarvis’s whole body and he moaned again, painfully. The light flared and then began to burn out, its gold tones fading into Jarvis’s skin. As soon as he looked reasonably normal again, I reached out for him, steadying his body as he fainted into unconsciousness.

  I gasped, never having seen a wormhole behave in quite this manner before. Usually they were more like swirling masses of black nothingness that you stepped through in order to quickly get to a new location in time and/or space. Sure, it beat the hell out of traditional traveling methods as far as efficiency was concerned, but I wasn’t really a fan. The whole experience always left me feeling like a load of wash that’d been tossed around too long in an overenergetic dryer.

  The train jerked twice as it screeched to a stop, the doors sliding open to admit the next wave of commuters. There was a bloodcurdling scream as the people on the platform discovered the carnage awaiting them inside. As much as instinct prevailed upon me to see what was happening back on the platform, I didn’t dare turn my head. I was afraid if I wasted any more time, Jarvis and I were going to get lynched by the angry mob. With as much strength as I could muster, I looped my arm around Jarvis’s waist and, straining under our combined weight, dragged the two of us into the gaping wormhole.

  It was only much later, as I stood on the brink of losing everything and everyone I loved, that I truly understood the omnipotence of fate. It didn’t matter what choice I’d made that day—to stay or to go was irrelevant—the hands of fate had been set into motion by a chain of events I had absolutely no control over. Of course, I had no idea then that fate was actually leading us out of the frying pan . . . and into the searing heat of the fire.

  four

  The wormhole took me back to work on time—actually with two minutes to spare—and in a relatively economical manner. I usually likened travel by wormhole to riding a Tilt-a-Whirl on the “spin your head off setting,” but on this trip there’d been only minimal trauma to my person via the wormhole’s pummeling effects and I’d even managed, unbelievably, to keep my chicken shawarma pita down in my stomach where it belonged.

  As glad as I was not to be on the subway car anymore, I had to say going back to work was not exactly what I’d imagined when I’d initially stepped into the wormhole. Personally, I didn’t want to return to my cubicle and stare at my eyestrainingly bright computer screen while trying not to worry about whether or not the NYPD was hot on my trail, patiently waiting to take me out back and firing-squad me with a pack of Uzi machine guns. Ostensibly, my arrest would be for masterminding a
full-scale terrorist massacre on the New York City Subway System—something I did not do and had no intention of taking any false credit for—but God knows what other trumped-up charges they might decide to add to the warrant.

  My fear of the NYPD was then compounded by the terror that my boss, Hyacinth, would stride out of her office to ask me where her dry cleaning was and, instead, would find me nervously biting my nails as I stood over my shell-shocked and “not so imaginary” faun friend who was sitting catatonically in my rolling black office chair.

  Loverly.

  Lucky for us, the wormhole hadn’t dropped us off at my cubicle, but had had the decency to deposit us into an empty stall in one of the office unisex bathrooms. That meant there were at least a hallway and the office kitchen between me and the end of normal life as I knew it.

  “Jarvis? Are you okay?” I asked, crawling over to where he lay on the cold, tiled floor. He shrugged, his face turned away so I couldn’t read his expression, but I had a feeling Jarvis was not feeling okay, regardless of what the shrug implied.

  I crawled over to the bathroom door and slid the lock into place. There was another bathroom at the other end of the hall, so if someone had to pee they could just go there. I sighed, easing myself against the wall facing a bank of sinks and the long rectangular—and unforgiving—mirror that hung above them. I could finally see Jarvis’s face reflected back at me and was surprised to discover he wasn’t as badly off as I’d first thought.

  “I really need your help,” I said lamely.