by Amber Benson
“Where’s Robert?” I demanded. “What did you do to our intern?”
Marcel smiled, using a long, square-tipped finger to point down the hall toward the office kitchen. I quickly rolled away from him and used the wall to pull myself to my feet. My legs were shaky as I took the first few tentative steps, but I felt my adrenaline kicking back in with each footfall. From my vantage point, the kitchen looked completely normal; the small fridge was where it was supposed to be, the coffeepot was still burbling on its attached hot plate, and the box of mostly eaten pastries still sat on the counter where I’d left it after I’d ravaged it earlier in the morning. Maybe Marcel was just pulling my chain, making me walk all the way down the hall for absolutely nothing, but a niggling voice in the back of my mind was telling me otherwise: I had a very bad feeling about the fate of our poor office intern.
My heart was in my mouth as I rounded the kitchen counter, hoping against hope I wouldn’t find Robert sprawled on the floor, a half-eaten bear’s claw stuffed down his gullet, but thankfully, the floor was empty.
“There’s nothing here,” I said, turning around to find Marcel standing directly behind me—I hadn’t even heard him get up from his spot on the floor, let alone cross the rest of the hall.
Creepy.
He didn’t deign to answer me, just shrugged his shoulders and looked down, his long eyelashes fluttering. I followed Marcel’s gaze to the bottom cabinet, the one that usually held coffee accoutrements like filters, wooden stirrers, Sweet’N Low, etc.
“You wouldn’t—” I began, but I didn’t finish the sentence. I knelt down, my sweaty fingers fumbling to grasp the plastic handles and throw open the cabinet doors.
I found the intern crammed down inside the bottom kitchen cabinet, naked except for a pair of bright yellow boxer shorts hanging low enough on his hips to reveal the crack of his ass. His head was tilted at a very odd angle . . . one that was not natural to any living human I’d ever seen—and the niggling feeling I’d had about the intern’s fate blossomed into full-scale panic. This was entirely my fault. If I hadn’t been working at House and Yard, our poor intern would never have had any cause to run into the Ender of Death.
Shit!
I slammed the cabinet door shut, the sound reverberating in the empty hallway.
“You killed him,” I growled, guilt and rage bubbling up inside me, making me want to scream. Not wishing to draw any more attention to the situation than I already had, I worked hard to maintain my indoor voice.
“Why would you do that? You’re the Ender of Death, for God’s sake!” I added, staring at Marcel like he was some kind of nasty little bug under a microscope, one I would’ve happily exterminated right there on the spot.
“Calliope, you must have some idea of what is happening,” Marcel said, leaning against the bone white refrigerator. “Greater forces than you are at work and you will have to bend to their will sooner or later. So why not save yourself the suffering and do it now.”
“Greater forces of what?” I said, slowly inching away from him. Marcel might think I was playing dumb, but I really had no clue what the jerkoid was talking about.
“Who do you think sent the Vargr welcoming party?”
“That was you?” I said as I stepped out into the hallway, putting a little more distance between us. I did not want to be trapped in a tiny U-shaped space with Marcel.
“Me and the greater forces, babe. They’re responsible for putting your little friend in the cabinet, too. I’m just here at their behest to offer you the chance to capitulate before something even worse comes your way.”
“I don’t think so, asswipe,” I said, reaching forward with both hands and shoving the son of a bitch as hard as I could. He wasn’t prepared for my surprise attack, and the force of the blow sent him backward into the thick plastic door handle of the refrigerator. He howled in pain as the handle rammed into the soft flesh of his lower back, but I didn’t stick around to see what happened next. I turned on my heel and ran back to the bathroom, my body slamming against the solid door, knocking the wind out of me. I tried the door handle, adrenaline keeping me on my feet, but it was locked. I began to hammer on the doorframe instead.
“Jarvis!!! Let me in!!! Emergency!!” I yelled.
I felt my hackles rise at the sound of someone clearing their throat behind me. I shivered, my mind racing as I tried to figure out how to defend myself against Marcel’s next attack.
I stopped banging my fists against the wood and slowly turned around. My breath sat like a lead weight in my lungs as I waited for Marcel to wrap his fingers around my throat again. But to my surprise, the Ender of Death was nowhere to be seen. Instead, my boss, Hyacinth Smith, loomed before me, her carefully manicured hands planted firmly on her wide hips. With her black jersey Donna Karan dress and (newly) white-blond hair, she looked like a Valkyrie on speed. She raised an eyebrow in my direction—and I could see her brain trying to process what she was seeing.
I didn’t need a mirror to know I looked like something the cat dragged in. My hair was totally out of place, with strands hanging down into my eyes, and I could feel the red welts from Marcel’s fingers starting to swell around my neck like a blood blister necklace.
Gross.
“Callie, you do know there’s another bathroom down the hall, don’t you?” Hyacinth said. Her voice was like cream silk, but with an undertone of derision so fierce, it made me feel like I was now the nasty little bug under the microscope in need of extermination.
I didn’t know how best to respond, so I just nodded my head. My eyes flicked over to the kitchen to make sure Marcel was missing-in-action—and this insubordinate behavior did not please my boss.
“What are you looking at?” she asked with aggression as she followed my gaze.
I shrugged.
“Uhm, nothing, Hy,” I said, swallowing hard as I tried to replenish some of the saliva that had mysteriously disappeared from my mouth upon her arrival.
I let my gaze return to her face and she unwillingly shifted her eyes back to mine.
“What’s wrong with you, Jones?” she said, choosing to ignore my lie.
I shook my head.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I squeaked. “I promise.”
She narrowed her eyes, but didn’t reply. Suddenly, she was swishing away from me, down the hall, toward the kitchen.
“No!” I screamed, taking off after her. “You can’t go in there!”
She picked up her pace when she heard me cantering down the hall after her, but I was younger and in better shape (surprisingly) than she was. I passed her with seconds to spare, blocking the bottom kitchen cabinet with my body.
“Stop!” I cried, thrusting my hands out in front of me like a shield, leaving Hyacinth to either obey my orders or get forcefully shoved backward. She went for the less violent alternative, waiting in the hallway well out of my arms’ reach, her face perfectly composed except for the bright shade of fuchsia staining the apples of her cheeks. This was, I recognized, an early predictor that my boss was becoming exceptionally pissed off by something—and that something was me.
I’d never been on the receiving end of one of Hy’s angry outbursts before, but I’d seen it happen to a number of other people in our office and it was not a pretty sight.
“Calliope Reaper-Jones, put your hands down and get out of my way,” Hyacinth said, her even tone belying the fact she was near her boiling point.
Still, I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was frozen in place, unresponsive to the impulses my brain was sending down to my body telling me to move out of the way and let Hy do what she wanted. I took a deep breath and it was like I was inhaling poison instead of air. I felt light-headed, as if I were somewhere above my body watching the proceedings tick by while I acted as a conscientious objector to my own life. All I could do was stand there while the things I’d worked so hard to attain all my adulthood slipped inextricably out of my grasp. The thump of my heart skipping a couple of beats brought me back
to myself, but this return to reality just reaffirmed the one thing I already knew: I was quickly running out of options. I could either let Hyacinth find the body (and go to jail for a human lifetime) or I could lose my job (and my human existence) while keeping my immortal freedom intact.
I stared at my boss, willing her to back down first, but I knew it was useless. She’d never backed down from anything in her life—and she wasn’t about to start with her unruly Executive Assistant.
“If you do not get out of that kitchen right now . . .” Hyacinth said, taking a dramatic pause to give more weight to her words. This was her way of making me understand that she didn’t want to issue a definitive ultimatum, but that I was forcing her hand.
I opened my mouth to acquiesce. An apology was right on the tip of my tongue, but before I could form the words, a giant belch issued from the depths of my belly. I covered my mouth with my hand, but the damage was already done.
Hyacinth’s nostrils flared at my rudeness.
“Then consider yourself fired.”
It was like getting sucker punched right in the gut while being concurrently poked in the eyeballs with a pointy stick. Still, my unresponsive body stayed wedged in between the kitchen cabinets, blocking Hyacinth’s way. It appeared that my decision had been made for me. My body, apparently, would rather see the end of my so-called “normal” life than allow me to rot in jail.
I sighed and felt my eyes smarting with tears. This time my thoughts seemed to flow from my mouth in a flood of words.
“I’ve really enjoyed assisting you, Hy, and I’m sorry that our working relationship is ending this way.” My throat ached from the throttling Marcel had given me—and from something else, too. Something that, if I’d been forced to describe it, I would’ve likened to despair.
“I accept that you’re firing me, but I will not move from this cabinet,” I continued, clearing my throat in a last-ditch effort to not emotionally lose it in front of my (now) former boss. “So, that’s it, then.”
Finished with my speech, I bit my lip, trying to channel the pain I was feeling into a physical outlet. I hoped it would pull me back from the brink of the full-scale tear-fest I was on the precipice of having.
For the first time since I’d known her, Hyacinth Stewart (the woman with the mad skill set for figuring out a person’s weakness and then exploiting it) was speechless. She’d pegged me for a total pushover—which normally would’ve been a correct assumption—only she’d chosen to confront me during the most transitional period of my entire life. She had no idea I was in the process of extracting myself from the “normal” world so I could return to the bosom of the Afterlife. All the years of trying to change myself, to fix the quirks that made me different from the human beings who surrounded me, were fast becoming irrelevant. The past few months had been the brine, changing the consistency of my soul until I was ready to step out of my old skin and become someone new.
Hy’s mouth worked open then shut, then open again, her brow furrowing in intense concentration. Finally, she cocked her blond head at an angle and said:
“Clean out your desk.”
No sooner had the words cleared her lips than she turned around and sashayed back down the hallway, hips swinging in time to the click of her heels. I watched her go, all the tension I’d been holding in my jaw and shoulders dissipating with her exit. I felt the countertop pressing into the small of my back and I closed my eyes, letting my body sag against it, elbows resting on its smooth, laminate surface for support.
My moment of respite was interrupted by the crack of knuckles against wood. I surmised that it was coming from somewhere in the direction of my feet and immediately slid away from the cabinet, stepping out into the hallway, where it was ostensibly safer. The door to the bottom cabinet flew open and the very alive body of our nearly naked office intern crawled out, gasping for breath like a deep-sea fish caught on a line. He grasped at the floor with both hands, using leverage to disentangle his limbs from the cabinet’s embrace. He flopped onto the ground, his pale white torso covered in splotchy red patches where it had pressed into the wooden interior of the kitchen cabinet.
I wanted to look away, to give the poor guy some privacy, but he reached out a shaky hand and wrapped it around my ankle. I instinctively took a step backward, easily slipping out of his infirm grasp.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling bad I had recoiled from his touch. I hadn’t done it on purpose. It had just happened unconsciously.
He stared up at me, eyes wide as saucers, bare body shivering despite the fact the building’s ancient heating system was going full blast. It took me a moment to realize that, while he might be disoriented by his experience, he wasn’t the least bit angry with me for my reaction. He was just totally confused by the situation as a whole.
“What happened to me?”
The sentence came out in a rush, his lower lip trembling as if he was about to cry. I wanted to kneel down beside him, the picture of calm reassurance, and promise him everything was going to be all right. But since I had no guarantee this was actually the case—and my body didn’t seem to want to touch his flesh anyway—I decided against the Florence Nightingale act. The truth probably wasn’t something I should be sharing with the poor guy, either, so instead I opted for a hybrid of the two:
“Help!!” I screamed as loudly as I could. “Man down in the kitchen! Help!”
This only seemed to add to the nearly naked intern’s terror and confusion. He made a keening sound low in his throat and closed his eyes as if forced blindness were the answer to all of his problems.
“Look,” I said, crouching down on my heels so I was closer to his level, but still just out of reach. “Someone is gonna come out here any second and help you. I’m sorry it can’t be me, but you give me the willies when you touch me and that can’t be a good thing.”
My honesty seemed to do the trick. Robert stopped making the pitiful noise deep in his throat and cracked his bloodshot eyes open just wide enough to get a fix on my position.
“Please don’t leave me,” he begged, and I sensed he was about to pounce seconds before he actually did. It was enough lead time to stand up and rest my leather-clad foot right in the middle of the intern’s solar plexus. The impact—I tried not to push him too hard—sent him sprawling, and I watched guiltily as his head bounced against the cabinet door, knocking him out.
I can’t believe it—I’m two for two in the kitchen/fight arena.
“Hang in there,” I offered meekly, hoping someone would find Robert’s prostrate body where it lay flat on the floor sooner rather than later.
Then, feeling as though I were the new Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World, I jogged away from the kitchen and back toward the bathroom, where I used my newfound moves to smash the crap out of the bathroom door with two well-aimed kicks—and this time, the puppy opened right up for me.
It was like I was made of magic.
six
“What the hell, Jarvis!” I said as I stepped through the bathroom doorway, my eyes scanning the white subway-tiled space for my dad’s Executive Assistant. I had a bone to pick with the meddling faun and I was itching to get started.
But what I found in the bathroom stopped me dead in my tracks. The room had been ransacked—sinks ripped from the wall, toilet stall doors hanging askew on their metallic hinges, cracked subway tile on the wall caked in scarlet streaks that could only be blood. Water from the dislodged pipes spewed from underneath the busted sinks, flooding the floor and pooling in red eddies where Jarvis lay propped up against the base of one of the toilets. A ragged gash in the side of Jarvis’s head gaped open, revealing the pulpy-red tissue that lay just beneath the faun’s skin.
“Jarvis?” I said, speaking his name again, but this time without a trace of anger in my voice. Now the anger had been replaced by worry. I knew a normal human would’ve been dead ten times over from a blow of that magnitude, but Jarvis was an immortal, thank God. Still, the gash on his head was prett
y gross, and I felt terrible knowing how badly his head was gonna hurt once I roused him.
Ignoring the mess around me, I navigated my way through the torrent of water to where the unconscious faun lay, and knelt down beside him, turning his head so I could get a better look at the wound. I noticed a fleck of blue-gray metal protruding from the gash and plucked it from the abraded skin, tossing it across the room. This action caused Jarvis to stir beneath me.
“Mistress Calliope?”
His voice was weak, but firm.
“Are you okay?” I asked as he lifted his chin and gave me a snaggle-toothed grin. I inhaled sharply at the sight of his three front teeth, each of which had been cracked in half, the stumps remaining stubbornly fixed in his upper gums.
“Been better,” Jarvis lisped, keeping his tongue away from the jagged edges of his ruined teeth. He coughed, and the spittle that came up was a shade of pink that did not bode well for the faun. The way he winced when he coughed—or even when he drew a breath, for that matter—informed me he probably had a few busted ribs and other internal injuries, too.
“What happened?” I asked as he slid his hand into mine. His pulse was thready under my fingers, but at least I could still feel it.
He tried to shake his head, but the effort was too great. Instead, he swallowed back another cough and closed his eyes for a moment to conserve his energy. While I waited for his answer, I looked around the room, trying to figure out my next move. We couldn’t stay in this bathroom forever, but I wasn’t good enough with magic to open a wormhole and get us out of there.
“The Ender of Death,” Jarvis said finally, opening his eyes. “He came in to call up a wormhole. Caught me by surprise. I tried to stop him, but—”