Serpent's Storm

by Amber Benson

  I reached out my hand to touch him, but my fingers slid through the phantom image of Jarvis’s former self, and the skin of my fingertips brushed only rigid bone. I let my hand rest there, as close to my friend as I could get. I wanted him to know I would help him, whatever the cost.

  “Tell me, Jarvis,” I said, the lump in my throat threatening to choke me.

  “So simple, Calliope,” the faun answered, his words a soft whisper from desiccated lips.

  “Wish me dead.”

  eight

  Tears slid down my face. I closed my eyes, my heart thumping sluggishly in my chest as time slowed and I did the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my entire life.

  I killed my best friend.

  “Good-bye, Jarvis,” I whispered, my fingers brushing only empty bone where there had once been a shimmering, beautiful soul.

  “I wish you dead, my friend.”

  As the words left my lips, I felt the power I held inside me intensify until I was thrumming with it, making the air around me heavy with prickling energy. Suddenly, the sky went black above us and the heavens split apart, sending a shower of rain tumbling down to the earth. The deluge was followed by a screaming wind—like someone plucking the taut strings of a piano in frantic sixteenth notes—that made the fragile hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I looked over to where Hyacinth had been standing to see what she made of this new development, but to my surprise, she was gone, or more likely, she hadn’t been transported into this strange break in time with us. I scanned the horizon, but a wave of darkness had inked us in, leaving Jarvis and me alone in our helicopter cocoon.

  I fumbled with the catch, pushing open the passenger door as I tried to look farther into the murky shadow enveloping us. A jarring crack of thunder sounded overhead, followed by a flash of lightning that illuminated the darkness for a split second, heralding the arrival of two strange men. It was as if they had been there, waiting just outside the door of the helicopter, forever. But only by the intoning of those six words—I wish you dead, my friend—had they been made visible to me. Like mirror opposites, one of the men was tall and fat, the other short and stout. Each wore a black Victorian-style suit with a wide black cravat cinched so tightly around his throat it would’ve strangled a living person. Each man had a black watered-silk top hat perched at a jaunty angle on his head and a black silk handkerchief stuffed into his suit pocket. It was then that I recognized them for what they were: Harvesters, come to collect the dead.

  The larger man had a sparse red goatee that nicely set off his dead-white pallor, and two black holes floating in his face where his eyes should’ve been. He carried a thin-poled butterfly net in his left hand and a tiny silver bell in the other. When he saw me, he gave me a low, proud bow, then rang the miniature bell without further ceremony. The small iron clacker swung with abandon, clattering into the sides of the bell with a cacophonic tinkling sound. The hair on the back of my neck prickled as the notes rang, clear and true, a sensuous call from the dead, beckoning a fellow comer home—but even the living like me were chilled by the haunting report. As the last ring faded into silence, Jarvis’s skeleton twitched in place, and a pale gray wisp unspooled itself from inside Jarvis’s skull, wafting out of one of his flattened nostrils as if it were a smoky snake called out of its bamboo basket by a snake charmer. It circled around the faun’s head, floating in the air like a cloudy halo.

  The smaller of the two men pulled a pint-size glass jar from his pocket and twisted off the intricate brass lid to reveal a pale, golden gelatinous substance swirling inside it. He, too, was missing his eyes, but he wore no goatee like his partner—only a fat Fuller Brush mustache that failed to give his round, piggish face the hint of respectability he was obviously trying to engender.

  The cloud gathering around Jarvis’s head began to undulate, faster and faster, until the frenzied pace made my head swim, and then, like a phalanx of energetic bees, the cloud buzzed toward the jar. With a practiced ease, the tall man lifted his net, swooping up the cloud before it could reach the glistening contents of the jar.

  “Wow,” I breathed, watching as the tangled cloud disappeared, leaving only empty net behind it.

  Now the smaller man bowed, sinking even lower to the ground than his partner had. Before I could tell him he didn’t need to do this, he popped back up and the two men saluted me.

  “Long live the Reign of the New Death!” they said in harmony, each open mouth revealing rows of ruined and decaying teeth. Then, in tandem, they stepped back into the darkness, fading away into the murky shadows until I was left alone again in the helicopter.

  Only this time, I was truly alone, because Jarvis was gone.

  Forever.

  I closed my eyes and sat back, letting my head rest against the cool of the leather seat. I felt the tears flooding my eyes, seeking an outlet I didn’t want to give them. I pressed the backs of my thumbs into my eye sockets, holding the tears at bay by sheer will, but it was a losing battle—they leaked out anyway, scalding my hands and cheeks, burning my eyelids with their evil saltiness.

  I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be happy I’d released Jarvis into a better existence, but it didn’t feel like that was what I’d done at all. I felt more like I’d failed him.

  It shouldn’t have gone down this way, I thought to myself, feeling miserable.

  “Don’t do this to yourself,” Hyacinth said.

  I sat up with the abruptness of someone caught doing something embarrassing—I guess crying does rank somewhere on the embarrassing scale—and as punishment, I banged my elbow on the frame of the door.

  “Dammit,” I said under my breath, clutching my bruised elbow in my hand. In the time between closing my eyes and reopening them, the world had returned to normal—only Jarvis wasn’t in it anymore and there was nothing normal about that. I started to cry again, but my eyes were still wet from my first bout of tears, so it wasn’t like anyone but me would know the difference.

  “You did the right thing,” Hyacinth said as she held out a large but very feminine hand to help me out of the helicopter. “Your father would be very proud of you.”

  “Who cares if he’s proud of me,” I said, ignoring her hand so I could clamber out of the aircraft by myself. I didn’t want her help; I just wanted to be left alone.

  “Callie . . .” Hyacinth warned, but I was having none of it. I brushed by her proffered hand and jumped out of the helicopter without any help—only to catch my foot on the side of the door and go skate-sliding onto the muddy, grassy marsh floor, where I then tripped on a piece of exposed driftwood and landed hard on my butt.

  “What’s the point of all this?!” I yelled, flopping back onto the muddy ground, not caring that my whole backside was now an impromptu mudsicle. “I mean, why are we doing this? It’s so stupid. Life. Is. Stupid. We go around and around and we learn what? Seriously, what do we learn?”

  I looked over at Hyacinth for an answer, but she remained silent, her cornflower blue eyes ever watchful.

  “That’s right! Ding, ding, ding!! You got the correct answer,” I crowed. “Human beings learn nothing! They live, they die, they’re reborn, and then they do it all again . . . and for what? What is the goddamn point?”

  I was possessed. The words poured out of me like poison and I couldn’t stop myself. As far as I was concerned, the hypocrisy of life and death, the stupidity of the system, had been laid bare before me, and I wanted to stomp on it, crush it, destroy it so it could never hurt me like this again.

  “I hate it!” I screamed at the mottled gray sky above me. “I hate Death and I want it to stop!”

  I lay in the muck, exhausted, my throat raw from screaming. My breath came in short, staccato bursts and my face was covered in blood and mud and tears. I rolled over on my side and retched into the grassy marsh. There wasn’t much in my stomach, but what was there came out fast and without fanfare. When I was done, I rolled onto my back again and stared up at the sky, bleary-eyed. I could s
ee the clouds, long grayish cotton fluffs of varying shapes and sizes, but they didn’t really register.

  “Are you done now?”

  Hyacinth stood above me. Her fair hair was a wild and staticky puff around her head, while her eyes remained calm seas in her pale face.

  “I don’t know,” I said, teary again. “I just feel so bad. I just . . . my heart hurts . . . you know?”

  I rubbed at my eyes with muddy fingers, my stomach a gurgling knot.

  “I know right now everything seems pointless,” she said, “but I promise you that there is a purpose.”

  “What? You mean fate?” I said, scoffing at the word. “That God—or whoever created this roulette wheel of a universe we live in—has some big tapestry of fate hidden somewhere, and it’s this stupid ‘wall hanging’ that demanded Jarvis die? So he did? That’s the answer to everything?”

  I smacked my fist into the mud as hard as I could, and the muck replied with a satisfying splat. It felt good to vent some of the anger brewing inside me while I waited for Hyacinth to reprimand me or tell me I was being juvenile.

  “Aren’t you gonna tell me to stop acting like a brat?” I said finally, baiting her.

  She didn’t take the bait. Instead, she knelt down in the muck beside me and sighed.

  “I think you have every right to be upset, Callie.”

  This gave me pause. It was so rare to have someone validate what I was feeling that it cowed me.

  “You do?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I do.”

  As I lay there, waging war with my own disparate emotions, another bank of thunderclouds passed overhead, blotting out the sun and sending a gray pall over the marsh. The wind picked up as if in answer, and an icy shaft of foreboding, matching the swirling mass of grief and anger all tangled up inside my brain, shot through me. All my instincts said to feed the anger, to stoke it as high as possible, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the grief, but I knew it was a cop-out, an excuse to, once again, not have to be responsible for my own feelings.

  Hyacinth seemed to sense my turn of mood. She gave me a weary smile, then held out her hand for me to take, a peace offering. I stared at it, making my decision.

  “You just have to have a little faith, Calliope.”

  This time I took her proffered hand and let her pull me up, so that now I stood above the muck . . . instead of wallowing in it like a baby.

  “So where are we and what are we gonna do about that bastard, the Ender of Death?” I said, wiping my hands on my jacket. “I want to rip his guts out and make him eat them.”

  “All right,” Hyacinth said, unfazed by the gore factor of my revenge plot. “But first, we need to get rid of the helicopter and the faun’s body.”

  I wasn’t prepared to hear someone refer to Jarvis as “a body” yet, but I held my tongue. The Jarvis I knew and loved was gone, and his skeleton wouldn’t care what we did to it now. It was a simple shell that had once housed a good and loyal friend. And so, it was with grief-stricken body and soul that I merely nodded in response when Hyacinth informed me what she intended to do next.

  Together, we gathered as much exposed driftwood as we could find, piling it inside the interior of the helicopter and around what was left of Jarvis’s body—his skeleton had already started to desiccate, the bones of his haunches crumbling into a chalky powder on the floor. With a level of strength I’d never seen in a woman, Hyacinth ripped the gas tank out from underneath the transmission and doused the driftwood kindling with its contents. Next, she held up the lighter she’d taken from one of the compartments in the cockpit and flicked open the lid.

  She paused before igniting the spark.

  “Would you like to do the honors?” she asked. I started to shake my head no—then I changed my mind.

  “Yeah, I wanna do it.” I took the lighter from her hand and pressed my thumb into the cold, metal wheel. It was heavier than I’d imagined and I felt its weight settle in my hand.

  As much as I wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening, I didn’t think I could bear to not be the one who set Jarvis’s funeral pyre alight. Somehow, it would be wrong not to do this service for my friend.

  With a shaky breath, I depressed my thumb against the spark wheel and the pale gold flame flickered to life, singeing the delicate skin at the tip of my finger. I flinched at the pain, but I didn’t drop the lighter no matter how badly it hurt me.

  I didn’t dare.

  I allowed it to burn for a moment, shielding it from the wind with my left hand, then I let it fly. My aim was good and it sailed into the cockpit of the helicopter. With a seductive whoosh, the fire took hold of the aircraft, lighting it up like a tinderbox. I watched as the flames lapped at the metal body of the machine, turning it black and sooty, while the intense heat cracked the tempered glass with a loud popping sound before finally melting it into a twisted hunk.

  It was a fitting good-bye for my dad’s Executive Assistant, Jarvis de Poupsy.

  Something inside me broke . . . and I giggled. I couldn’t help it. I stifled the indiscretion, covering my mouth with my hand, but then I stopped trying to control anything and just let the smile that was threatening break over my face. For as long as I had known Jarvis, just the mere mention of his full name gave me the giggles. Jarvis would’ve hated me for my lack of decorum, but he would’ve understood. He would’ve known it was a giggle of love and that it was the best way I had to say good-bye.

  Good-bye, Jarvi, I thought to myself, but I knew, wherever he was, he’d heard me.

  Hyacinth waited for the last of the flames to extinguish themselves then she indicated that I should follow her as she picked her way through the marsh grass toward the sea. Silently, we traversed the muck until we came to the edge where the marsh fell into the water and we stopped. A seagull screamed above us, but I barely noticed because my eyes were transfixed by the sprawling view of the Manhattan skyline that greeted me once we’d left the confines of the marsh.

  “Where are we?” I breathed, my eyes sucking in the beatific vision of the city I loved so well.

  Hyacinth, too, seemed in awe of the view.

  “We’re in Queens, on an island right across from the city.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded.

  I couldn’t believe that here, in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, we were still in the Triborough Area. It was amazing. A drop of rain fell from the darkening sky, hitting me squarely in the eye. I blinked and wiped it away. The air was getting colder, and the way the wind was blowing, it appeared we were gonna be in for another pummeling rainstorm.

  “It kind of blows one’s mind, doesn’t it?” Hyacinth said. “That something so pristine and untouched like this protected marsh—that we have now desecrated—can be so close to one of the largest man-made rattraps in the world.”

  I didn’t take offense at Hyacinth calling New York City a rattrap, but in no way did I agree with her.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked, shivering as the heavens opened up and the rain came down, drenching us before we could do anything about it. I didn’t care. In fact, I was happy for the free shower—maybe it would wash away the blood and grit I was covered in.

  The sea turned choppy before me, licking at the marsh grass, inching closer and closer to where we stood. I took a few steps back, but Hyacinth held her ground.

  “We came here to get some help,” she called over to me as the rushing wind stripped the words from her mouth almost before I could make them out. “And we’re not leaving until we get it.”

  There was an emptiness, a desolation to this place we had come to that frightened me. Not because I was going to die here, but because I was afraid of what kind of creature would call this place home.

  “We have come for guidance!” Hyacinth screamed into the wind, which whipped her bright gold hair around her face and tore at the white sheath dress she wore. “We will not leave until we are satisfied!”

  I half expected Hyacin
th to pull out a knife and sacrifice a goat or something to whatever monster she was calling up from the depths of the stormy sea, but instead, she took out a small white bone and held it up for the wind to take. Instantly, the bone was funneled into the sky, where it hovered in the air for a few hesitant moments before it was flung into the water by unseen hands.

  The second the bone hit the water, the winds died down and the sea became calmer.

  “Where did you get that bone?” I asked Hyacinth, but she ignored me.

  Dammit, I knew exactly where she’d filched it. Where else but from Jarvis’s poor desiccated corpse? What a bitch! A powerful surge of adrenaline slammed through my veins and I very nearly tackled the Viking-like woman beside me, but seeing as she outweighed me by about two hundred pounds, I decided it would be safer to just let my anger go.

  “We have offered you a gift,” Hyacinth bellowed. “Now show yourself, you old bastard!”

  The seawater began to churn and froth, the wind screaming around us like a banshee, and I covered my ears to block out the terrible wailing. Then, like the return of the Leviathan from the very depths of Hell, the sea split apart and a solid wall of water crashed over us, washing me away from the safety of the land and out into the foaming sea.

  nine

  Like a freight train running at full throttle, the wave crashed over me, knocking my legs out from under my body and sucking me into a swirling vortex of saltwater and seaweed. I was so surprised by the turn of events that I went under with my mouth wide open—and let me tell you, having your lungs inflated with saltwater is never a pleasant experience. I went into shock, the cold and the inability to draw a breath causing my brain to default into panic mode. I started struggling against the pull of the tide, clawing at my amorphous captor as if I could break its watery embrace by sheer dint of will. Which was totally ridiculous; I wasn’t going anywhere the water didn’t want me to go.