How to be Death

by Amber Benson

“It’s a funerary cuff,” Jarvis said. “Aztec, I believe.”

  The cuff gave me the creeps and I was more than happy to hand it back to Freezay, who set it on the night table, where the twin set of dragon eyes stared malevolently back at us.

  “Interesting once again,” Freezay mumbled before fixing his gaze on me again. “So finish your story about the book, though I think I already know the denouement.”

  “We hid it in the bathroom,” I said, indicating Jarvis, Runt, and myself. “But when I went back to get it after Coy died, it was gone.”

  “And that gives us the answer to our first question,” Freezay said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “We know the murder was tangential to the real crime—and that was the theft of the book.”

  “Explain that again?” Daniel said, and I noticed he seemed tense, something that was unusual for him.

  “This was no elaborate murder,” Freezay said, not bothering to explain his theory further. “I think we should adjourn to the scene of the crime.”

  He didn’t wait for us, just opened the door and stepped out into the night. I poked Runt lightly in the butt with my toe and she raised one eyelid sleepily.

  “I’m so tired, Cal,” she yawned, stretching. “This is the longest night ever.”

  “No kidding,” I agreed. “But we gotta get a move on.”

  The pup got up and went with me to the door, Daniel right behind her, but as he moved to follow her over the threshold, Freezay called back to him, his tone firm.

  “Not you!”

  “What the—” Daniel said, stopping in the doorway. “What do you mean ‘not you’?”

  Freezay was back like a shot, weaving around Jarvis and me, until he was standing in the doorway, facing Daniel, his hat bunched tightly on his head.

  “I don’t care what you do,” he said, “but you’re not coming with us. Don’t argue or get combative, just take it with my apologies and know that I actually like you.”

  Freezay patted Daniel’s arm affectionately, but this only confused Daniel more. I watched as his urge to argue was tempered by the realization that cool logic would serve him much better in this particular situation.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll stay here,” he said quietly. Then he turned to me, his eyes imploring me to listen. “Be careful, Cal. Please. Just be really fucking careful.”

  Daniel rarely cursed. Not that he was uptight about it, but it just wasn’t his bag. So the idea he’d just used the word “fuck” in a sentence meant he was really worried about me—and worry, the insidious snake that it is, doesn’t like to announce its presence, but just springs, fully blown, into your brain and starts whispering its secrets.

  And now I was infected with it—crap!

  “I’ll be careful,” I said, trying to reassure him and myself at the same time—and not doing a very good job of either.

  “I’m serious, Cal,” he said, unexpectedly crossing the divide between us and pulling me into his arms.

  The hug lasted only a moment, but I savored his nearness as if it were the finest of wines—and just as suddenly as it had begun, the hug was over, and dazed, I was following Freezay, Jarvis, and Runt out into the misty dawn.

  the two bodyguards had dutifully maintained their watch during the night, neither one seeming the worse for wear, though this was probably because they were trained to handle every eventuality—even bizarre situations like this one. Upon our arrival, Jarvis had introduced them to Freezay, who looked even more bizarre in the burgeoning daylight, both men giving him a polite nod. For the most part, Freezay had ignored them, pushing his way into the murder room as soon as the door had been unlocked.

  Jarvis asked the bodyguards to remain outside, closing the door behind him as he stepped into the room, allowing Freezay the freedom to work without curious or prying eyes distracting him.

  “Oh, she’s dead all right,” Freezay said as he circumvented the puddle of sticky arterial blood, heading straight for the bathroom instead of the corpse.

  I looked at Jarvis, who shrugged, then together we followed Freezay into the bathroom.

  “Now, show me how this works,” the detective demanded as he stood in front of the closet door.

  “It’s very simple,” I said as we all crowded around behind him. “You just slide the door”—I slid open the cabinet door—“and pull out these drawers.”

  I knelt down, my fingers curling around the metallic drawer pulls as I eased both drawers open, their rollers squeaking as the dowel began to protrude from its hiding place within the molding.

  “You just press this and voilà!” I said, putting my palm over the dowel and pressing it back into place, the bottom sliding away to reveal the hidden compartment beneath it.

  “It’s very ingenious how they’ve done this,” Freezay said, letting his muddy green eyes roam over the hidden compartment, then using his fingers to dig where his eyes could not. “I wonder if the whole compound isn’t riddled with things like this, hidden compartments, et cetera.”

  “But the book?” Jarvis pressed, eyes skittering nervously between the three of us. “Do you think it can be found?”

  Freezay stood up, rubbing the dirt from his hands onto his pants, the thick fibers of the wool trapping it and adding another, darker, layer of striping to the pattern of the fabric. He took off his bowler hat and the shock of white-blond hair stood up at attention.

  “I need a haircut,” he said, ignoring Jarvis’s question and running his hands through his hair before ramming the bowler back down onto his head. In the light of day, I could see faint age lines in the crevices of his face. He had no pores to speak of, his skin as smooth as a baby’s bottom, except for a hint of raggedy blond stubble on his chin.

  “I don’t mean to harp on this,” Jarvis tried again, “but there’s something more you should know.”

  I’d thought we were all up to speed, but it appeared Jarvis had held a few things back from the rest of us.

  “We don’t need to get the book back just for safekeeping,” Jarvis continued, falling effortlessly into lecture mode. “It actually serves another purpose. When it’s in Heaven, it’s power is anodyne—but upon its return to Earth, the magic it contains becomes fecund, so that on All Saints’ Day, the day after it is placed in the hands of the next Death, it binds itself to its new owner and will remain within that master’s power for the next three hundred and sixty-five days.”

  Well, that put things in a whole new light.

  “Jarvis, please, you have to stop withholding information,” I said, exasperated by his unwillingness to be frank with me. “What else aren’t you saying?”

  “That’s the last of it,” he said, looking sheepish. “But now you understand the urgency.”

  At my feet, Runt let out a loud yawn that ended in a whine.

  “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “It’s just so bright out now and it was so dark when we started.”

  Freezay didn’t seem too troubled by Jarvis’s admission.

  “As frightening as the information you just disclosed is, we can’t let it sway us from the other matter at hand,” Freezay said, reaching down with a large, calloused palm to pat Runt on top of the head. “We find the murderer and, I guarantee you, we find the book. The two go hand in hand—of that, I’m convinced.”

  “He’s right, Jarvi,” I said. “We can’t just sit around freaking out over what might be.”

  “But the book takes priority—”

  I shook my head.

  “They both take priority.”

  “Agreed,” Freezay said. “You’ll see, Jarvis. One will illuminate the other.”

  Jarvis didn’t seem convinced, but he let Freezay lead us out of the claustrophobic atmosphere in the bathroom and into the open environs of the bloodstained bedroom.

  The murder room was just as we’d left it the night before. Dried blood the color of rusted metal was everywhere, congealing on the Oriental carpet and around the meaty globules of viscera that comprised the rent bone and musc
le of Coy’s neck. I’d never seen a decapitation before, but if the aftermath was any indication, it was an experience I could do without.

  I watched as Freezay fell onto his hands and knees and sniffed the bloody remains, his bowler-hatted head only inches from the corpse. He made a face and sat back up, resting his hands on his knees.

  “Her head is somewhere in this room,” he declaimed, scratching his nose. “Probably in your suitcase.”

  “My suitcase?” I squealed. “I don’t want her head in my suitcase!”

  Leaving the corpse to its eternal repose, Freezay got up and, waving my hysteria away like an excitable gnat, stalked over to my overnight bag (my new, expensive Louis Vuitton overnight bag) and unzipped it. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see any of my clothes covered in gore.

  “Yup, there she is,” I heard Freezay say—and I cringed, knowing this did not bode well for the future of my new bag.

  Opening my eyes again, I found Freezay hunched over my bed, his hands inside the innards of my Louis Vuitton travel bag. He’d set the bag on top of the sheets, opening it wide enough for everyone to see Coy’s severed head, sitting upright in a nest of my bloodied clothing, looking like someone’s sick idea of a booby prize.

  Thankfully, the vertebrae and exposed gristle of the neck were hidden beneath the fabric of my white linen pantsuit—which made up the first layer of the severed head nest—so, if you wanted to, you could kind of pretend the rest of Coy’s body was hidden underneath the mattress like some kind of grotesque magician’s trick. That is, until you turned around and saw her actual body splayed out on the floor, a Death-centric installation art piece of the macabre.

  Upon closer inspection—once I’d swallowed back the bile of horror the first glimpse of her head had produced—I noticed her face was relatively free of blood, but that her dark hair was another matter entirely, the ends sticky with congealed gore and gunk. In death, her irises had rolled up behind the orbital bones, leaving only the bloodshot sclera visible between dark, fringed lashes. Lips were drawn back in a frozen rictus of horror, exposing hot pink gums and a set of strong teeth—teeth, I noticed, that were white in front, but markedly yellow from the incisors back.

  “Somebody whitened her teeth,” I heard myself saying and instantly felt guilty for pointing it out.

  “The nose isn’t hers, either,” Freezay said matter-of-factly.

  “How do you know that?” Jarvis asked and Freezay pulled Coy’s driver’s license out of his pant’s pocket. The picture was an older one, and in it, Coy was in possession of a real honker of a nose.

  “Found this back at the other room. The California DMV is notorious for not updating your photo—even when you accidentally/on purpose lose your driver’s license,” he replied. “See the date? Poor thing’s been stuck with this picture for a long time. Must’ve driven her batty.”

  “Why didn’t she just use a glamour or a spell or something?” I asked, confused. If she was a Goddess, then she could easily change her appearance without surgery.

  “A glamour doesn’t change what you feel on the inside,” Jarvis said, trying to answer my question. “And there are many supernatural creatures who can see through them, so they’re worthless in certain situations.”

  This window into Coy’s insecure world made her seem more human—more vulnerable even—and I found myself wondering who, exactly, the real Coy was. I hadn’t given her a chance, hadn’t tried to get to know her because I’d hated her on sight for being with Daniel. But maybe if I’d met her under different circumstances, where there was no romantic rivalry to divide us, I might’ve actually liked her. She and I had definitely shared a love of fashion and we obviously had the same taste in men.

  “Why would someone do this?” I said, guilt squeezing my insides. “Why take off her head and then stuff it in my travel bag? Why not take it with them?”

  To my disgust, Freezay reached into the travel bag and, grasping the head by the hair, hoisted it up into the air so he could get a better look at the point of disarticulation. He’d made the move so unexpectedly, I hadn’t had time to cover my eyes, so now I found myself staring at the head, fixated by the bizarre image as it hung there in all its grotesque glory, like a particularly unsettling Halloween mask or a Miss Mofet reject from The Silence of the Lambs.

  “You’ve seen a cat covering its feces in a litter box,” Freezay said, the head swinging by the hair as he examined the neck. “Almost as if it’s embarrassed by what it’s done? I would apply the same principle here.”

  Freezay released his grip on the head and it dropped into my bag with a soft thunk, the sound making the skin on the back of my neck crawl.

  “And then, of course, there are the ritualistic aspects of the murder,” he continued. “The killer has set up the scene to lead us in a very particular direction—”

  Freezay stopped speaking, his focus somewhere else entirely for a good ten seconds, and then suddenly he was grinning up at us, his pale features arranged into an expression that was more demon than detective.

  “I need to turn the body over,” he said, eyes gleaming with excitement. “I think there’s more to this than just a simple decapitation!”

  seventeen

  “You say that like it’s an awesome thing,” I said and Freezay nodded his head eagerly, the bowler hat sliding down low over his forehead.

  “Of course it’s an awesome thing,” he cried, shoving the hat brim out of his eyes. “The more clues the better. Now take her arm, Jarvis, and let’s do this thing.”

  Jarvis blanched, a red splotch magically appearing on the apple of each cheek. My Executive Assistant was a peach, but when it came to getting his hands dirty with bloody stuff, well, it wasn’t really his strong suit.

  “I don’t think I, really, I …” he murmured, clearing his throat twice and looking markedly uncomfortable.

  Jarvis did so much for me and required so little in return, I decided saving him from further embarrassment was a good way to say thank you.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, squatting down beside the body.

  “If you would be so kind as to take the other one,” Freezay said, his hands already wrapped around Coy’s upper right arm. I grabbed the left one, the skin cold and clammy to the touch, and together, we hoisted the body up onto rigid legs.

  “Oh, Lord,” Jarvis cried, leaning against the wall for support.

  “What?” I said, trying to look across the body.

  “Her heart’s gone, Cal,” Runt said, padding over to Jarvis and licking his trembling hand.

  “Let’s lay her onto her back,” Freezay said, but Coy’s legs had locked into rigor mortis, making them stiff and unwieldy.

  “Not … working …” I said, straining against the weight of the dead body and silently cursing Jarvis for being such a wuss.

  Sometimes I couldn’t believe the situations I found myself in: Here I was, at roughly sixish in the morning, wearing my pajamas and dragging a dead body all over the place when I should’ve been happily snoozing the morning away.

  Amazing.

  “One more time, but first—” Freezay drew his right foot back, kicking first the back of one knee and then the other, cracking the rigor so we could lower the headless body to the floor.

  “That’s so gross,” I said—then I finally saw the gaping hole in Coy’s chest—the place where a heart should be, but wasn’t—and I realized that was way grosser than Freezay kicking the rigor out of her knees.

  “A knife,” Freezay said, able to examine the wounds now that the corpse was on its back. “The assailant wielded it in his left hand and once the body was on the ground, they stood over her and stabbed downwards.”

  Bile rose up in the back of my throat, but I couldn’t look away. I watched, fascinated, as he ran his finger along the grizzled edges of the wound, the congealed blood and gore not fazing him one bit.

  “Next, the assailant worked the knife through the neck, severing the flesh and muscle, but they had to flip her over
to have a better go at the vertebrae.”

  I should have been grossed out watching Freezay inspect Coy’s body, but instead I found myself mesmerized. There was a hyperreal quality about the scene, the lights brighter, the shadows deeper … the blood redder than it should’ve been. My eye was drawn to the glint of one single emerald green sequin that had somehow detached itself from the bodice of Coy’s dress and found its way into the gory mess that used to be her heart.

  Of that ventricular muscle, there was no trace—and we savaged every nook and cranny in the place, upending furniture, opening drawers, and lifting up bed frames—but still, we came up empty-handed.

  As we wrapped up our search for the missing heart, Runt discovered something interesting: a clue that would make no sense until much later in the investigation when even more tragedy had struck.