How to be Death

by Amber Benson

  Surprised, I watched as she stepped inside it, cold air wafting around her.

  “Now don’t forget! The Assyrian Gardens in ten minutes,” she called back to me before sliding the door closed behind her.

  She didn’t have to say it twice. I wouldn’t have missed our assignation for anything in the world.

  Intrigued by her odd disappearing act, I counted to ten, then walked over to the freezer and slowly worked the door open, trying to be subtle about my entrance. The cold air hit me like a brick wall, my breath turning to steam as my body temperature dropped five degrees.

  “It’s freeeezing,” I said under my breath, my whole body shivering as I stepped farther into the freezer.

  I looked around expecting to find Zinia somewhere inside, but the freezer was empty of life. A few sides of pork hung from the ceiling, but that was the closest approximation to a living creature I could find. The rest of the space was taken up with bags of frozen vegetables and assorted other food items. I searched the inside, looking for another exit, but there was nothing. All three walls were made of smooth, unbroken metal—no hidden doorways anywhere in sight. Frustrated, I left the frozen wasteland and returned to the kitchen.

  Where had Zinia gone? I wondered, and then my brain began to hum as a newly born hypothesis began to take shape.

  I debated going back to the drawing room to tell Freezay what I’d learned, but the few minutes I’d lost when I’d searched the freezer made it impossible for me to get there, impart the information, and get back to the Assyrian Gardens in time to meet Zinia. I was just going to have to wing it and hope nothing happened to screw up the exchange or else I would have both Jarvis and Freezay breathing down my neck.

  The kitchen had two entrances: one that led to the interior of the building and one that went outside. I’d taken the former to get to the kitchen, but the latter was going to be the easiest way to get out of the building unnoticed. Before I left, I made an executive decision, turning off the burner beneath the stockpot. I just didn’t think leaving food simmering away on a stove with no one watching it was a very a good idea. I knew Zinia was a world-class chef, but she’d been so emotional when she’d left that I didn’t think she’d notice if the whole house burned down around her.

  I unlocked the oversized door leading to the outside world and pushed it open. The sun was hiding behind a cloud and it was starting to get chilly again, giving me a good indication of how cold it was going to be when the sun finally went down for the night. Unused to the warm California weather, I’d almost forgotten it was autumn and that Halloween was upon us, but the blast of Arctic air was a good reminder.

  To my pleasant surprise, I found an empty golf cart sitting just outside the door, the key dangling in the ignition. I looked around, but I saw no one, so I climbed inside. I turned the key, taking the pink rabbit’s foot keychain as a sign good luck was in my future, and smiled as the cart roared to life.

  Though the weather wasn’t what I was used to for this time of year, I could still taste the smoky scent of October in the air as I drove along the pathway that led to the pool. With the wind in my hair, I felt free for the first time in ages and I was hit by the intense urge to chuck all the Death stuff and just find myself a pumpkin patch to go roll around in. There was just something about the autumnal season that made me happy. I could waste away a whole afternoon traipsing through the golden brown of a ripened field, eating a freshly grilled ear of corn as I searched for the perfect jack-o’-lantern-in-waiting. Too bad I wasn’t going to get to enjoy Halloween this year. There would be no parties, no trick-or-treaters, no scary movies to get your blood boiling with fear—instead I was going to be helping Edgar Freezay search for a murderer. And as spooky as that sounded, I wasn’t really loving the reality-show version of Clue I was stuck in, that was for sure.

  When I got to the pool, the location of my now-infamous croissant attack, I eased on the brake, hoping the Assyrian Gardens would just present themselves to me. Fat chance of that—wherever I looked, all I saw was Greek and Roman statuary; nothing my eye alighted on was Assyrian.

  “Assyrian Gardens anyone?” I said, though I hardly expected a response from the giant Greek statues encircling the circumference of the pool.

  It appeared as if I’d taken the cart as far as it could go. The path got smaller when you went past the pool, so abandoning my little battery-powered friend, I got out and followed the curve of the cement pool basin, my sneakers slapping against the concrete edge. Scanning the surrounding area, I was on the lookout for anything that seemed in the least bit Assyrian—and then I saw it, nestled in between the legs of an armless marble Apollo. No, I’m not talking about what you think I’m talking about—what I saw through Apollo’s legs was the entrance to the Assyrian Gardens.

  Cutting through the ring of statues, I followed the path until I’d made my way over to Apollo. Pushing through the foliage that surrounded the statuary, I found myself standing at the top of a short flight of marble stairs. At the bottom was a twisted terra-cotta path that took me right into the heart of the gardens.

  Taking the stairs two at a time, I jogged down the path. Demarcating one epoch from the other (Greek from Assyrian, in this case) was a small reflecting pool sitting in the middle of a wide-open space, a primitive-looking obelisk resting on a platform above it. The obelisk showed a frieze of a man sitting astride a horse, his face in profile. It was so unmistakably not Greek that I knew immediately I’d found what I was looking for.

  “Zinia?” I whispered as I sat down on the edge of the blue slate-tiled reflecting pool.

  I got no response, so I tried again, a little louder.

  “Zinia?!”

  I heard the crunch of shoes on the path and turned around to find Zinia coming toward me, a beatific look on her face. She was carrying a small metal box—and I remembered what Minnie had said about human beings handling the book. Constance had taken precautions, using a lead box to make the book transportable by human hands.

  “I have your book!” Zinia called out to me, picking up speed the closer she got. “It’s right here in the—”

  A shot rang out from somewhere behind me, and instinctively I dropped to the ground—Zinia still too far away for me to help her.

  “Get down!” I yelled at her as another shot rang out nearby.

  She tried to turn and run back to the main house, but she was frazzled and didn’t see the upraised piece of tile in the middle of the path. Tripping over it, she pitched forward and the box flew from her hands.

  “Oh, no!” she cried as the box hit the ground, the lid popping open and the book cartwheeling out onto the ground.

  It was then, as she crawled along the path, her hand only inches from the exposed book, that I understood what was about to happen next and my mind reeled with horror.

  “Don’t touch it!” I screamed at Zinia—but she either didn’t hear me or didn’t trust what I was saying.

  Too late … her fingers had made contact with the book’s cover for the first and only time.

  “Oh … God,” she gurgled, retching the contents of her stomach onto the ground—and then, as I watched with disbelieving eyes, her entire body spontaneously combusted.

  As soon as the melting began, she let out a horrific wail—like the sound of a thousand kittens mewling as their hearts were ripped out of their bodies. I covered my ears to block out the piteous sound, but that still left my eyes free to bear witness. I stared, unwilling to tear my gaze away, as the skin of her face turned putrid and liquefied off the bone, her poofy blond hair igniting into tongues of orangy-blue flame that turned its tendrils into a sooty, charred black that then disintegrated into ash and blew away on the breeze. Through it all, her eyeballs remained intact, their irises fixed on me, imploring me to do something to help her, but my powers were moot. I could do nothing to save her, nor was I able to put a quick end to her suffering.

  Still, I could try and comfort her. Lifting myself off the ground, I crawled to my feet a
nd started to cross the divide that lay between us.

  “Get down!” a voice screamed as another shot reverberated through the air, and suddenly I felt the weight of another body slamming into me, wrestling me to the terra-cotta-tiled pathway.

  “Get off me!” I yelled as I tried to fight my way free.

  “It’s me, Cal,” Daniel breathed into my ear, his body pressing tightly against mine as he fought to keep me on the ground.

  When I realized who it was, I stopped squirming, but my heart continued to beat in frantic bursts.

  “We have to help Zinia,” I cried.

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for her,” Daniel started to say.

  “I don’t care,” I said, trying to push him off me so I could go to her on my own.

  “Wait, just stop it,” Daniel hissed. “I’ll go with you.”

  I relaxed.

  “Just do what I tell you,” he said and then he motioned for me to follow him as he began to slither across the terra-cotta on his belly.

  It only took us a minute to reach Zinia’s prone body, but it was already too late. Her suffering was over. The body that had once housed her soul was now a charred mess.

  “Oh, God,” I said, hot tears flooding my eyes. “She was innocent, Daniel. She was just trying to help someone she loved…”

  As I began to cry in earnest, Daniel enfolded me in his arms, pulling me tightly to his chest as we lay on the ground.

  “It’s okay, Cal,” he whispered, his lips brushing my cheek. “It’s okay now. You’re safe with me.”

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “I should’ve protected her.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Daniel said, squeezing me tighter. “It’s just not.”

  Suddenly, I felt his whole body tense as he saw something in the foliage behind me.

  “What?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

  And then he was off and running, chasing after whatever had sparked his interest. I rested my chin on the ground as I lay there, alone, forcing my lungs to move the air in and out of my chest. I tried not to cry as I fought back the guilt threatening to overwhelm me.

  It’s okay. You’re safe with me.

  Daniel’s words reverberated in my head as I closed my eyes—the pain and joy inside me so intertwined, they were almost the same feeling.

  twenty-two

  Daniel had still not returned as the sun began to wane, the afternoon slowly giving way to evening. It was probably for the best since he wouldn’t have condoned what I was about to do. I let my hands hover just above Zinia’s charred form, then closed my eyes and directed all of my energy into one conscious thought:

  Be alive again.

  But it was useless—just as I’d known it would be. There was no magic inside me, no ability to use my powers to rip her out of Death.

  There’s nothing I can do for you, I thought miserably.

  Bringing someone back from the dead was never an advisable endeavor. I’d only done it once—and that had been by accident. Jarvis was living proof of what strange things could happen when you wished someone alive again: He’d been a faun before I’d gotten my Death hands all over him, and now, after my meddling, he was stuck in the twentysomething body of a five-boroughs hipster. I couldn’t say it wasn’t an improvement physically—although I did miss his flashy Tom Selleck mustache—but he was alive and kicking and that was all that counted.

  For Zinia, it wasn’t even an option.

  “Cal?” I looked up to find Daniel standing above me. He was out of breath from running, his hand cradling his left side.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just a stitch,” he said when he saw my face, dropping his arm so I could see he was unharmed. “I couldn’t catch him, the bastard.”

  “It was a him?” I asked.

  “A very specific him,” Daniel said. “He was moving fast, but it was definitely Oggie. I didn’t see a gun, though.”

  “Oggie?” I said, shocked. The Vice-President in Charge of Africa was the last person I would’ve suspected of attempting to commit murder. “Are you sure?”

  “As much as I hate to say it, I’m pretty damn positive,” he said, shaking his head. “If he had nothing to do with it, why did he run? It only makes him look guilty.”

  I sat there on the ground beside Zinia’s body, wondering what could make someone do something so horrible. What did Oggie have to gain by killing Coy, Constance, and now Zinia? If he was interested in bringing about the destruction of the human world, well, getting his hands on the book was one way to get the ball rolling, but something felt wrong about that hypothesis. Not that I was the greatest judge of character. I’d been wrong about people before and had paid dearly for my naïveté. This was probably just another episode of Calliope Reaper-Jones: Pollyanna at Large—

  Shit, the book! I thought.

  In the fallout after Zinia’s death, I’d totally forgotten about it. I had to find that book before … I didn’t know before what, but I needed to find it.

  “Where’s the book?” I said, climbing to my feet, tension filling my body. I felt the tendrils of hysteria beginning to grip my heart, but I beat them back into submission. Now was not the time to start freaking out.

  “Oh, Jesus, the book is what did this to her?” Daniel said, looking down at Zinia’s body.

  I nodded. Together we searched the area around the body, but to my chagrin, both the metal box and the book it had contained were nowhere to be found.

  “It’s gone,” I murmured as I sat down on the tile, my body starting to tremble from exhaustion and shock. “Someone took it…”

  “Jesus,” Daniel said, sitting down next to me. “What’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, leaning forward so I could rest my elbows on my knees, cupping my chin between my hands. “I just don’t know. The book’s gone and three people are dead. I thought I was getting better at this whole Death thing, but if this is any indication…”

  Daniel took my hand.

  “You’re doing a good job—murders notwithstanding—and you shouldn’t second-guess yourself.”

  His words were nice, but they were just words. They didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Let’s go get Freezay,” I said, pulling my hand out of Daniel’s grasp. “Maybe he can make some sense out of all of this.”

  freezay had not been a happy camper when we’d found him. The look of pure disappointment on his face when I’d told him what had happened was enough to make me want to go drown myself in the pool. He’d insisted on going to see the body immediately, ignoring my repeated apologies all along the way.

  Now, as he knelt down beside what remained of Zinia, it seemed as if his anger had transferred from me to whoever had stolen the book.

  “Do you smell that?” Freezay said, crouching down so that his nose was almost touching the pool of vomit Zinia had loosed right before she melted.

  Daniel shook his head, but Runt nodded.

  “Smells like garlic,” she said.

  “She was cooking with it, I think,” I said, having a hard time dragging my eyes away from the body.

  Freezay opened his mouth as if he was going to say something, but then shut it again.

  “Freezay?” Daniel asked, but the detective just shook his head.

  “All right,” Freezay said. “Enough chitchat. Let’s go find Oggie and get him to explain his rationale for running away from a crime scene.”

  “What about Zinia?” I asked, not wanting to leave her body on its own in the middle of the garden. “Maybe we could at least get a sheet to cover her with?”

  Dusk was upon us now, the light disappearing faster and faster with each passing second. Pretty soon, we were going to be having this conversation in the dark.

  “Here,” Daniel said, taking off the light linen jacket he was wearing and draping it across Zinia’s torso. “Is that all right?”

  I nodded. Pleased t
hat at least one of the corpses was being treated humanely.

  “Thank you,” I said as we followed Freezay back down the pathway to Casa del Amo.

  “Of course,” he said, then he reached out and took my hand in his. I squeezed his fingers, letting him know—without uttering a word—how much I’d missed him.

  While we were canoodling, Freezay had picked up the pace so that now he and Runt were almost two body lengths ahead of us.

  “Anyone had eyes on Jarvis recently?” he called back to us.

  “I saw him over by Casa de la Luna earlier,” Daniel said.

  “What were you doing there?” I asked, my voice low enough that only Daniel heard my question.