Authors: Amber Benson
How to be Death (2 page)
Call it a knack, a talent, a penchant …
a proclivity
. Call it what you will—my ability to inject myself into whatever nut-ball scenario crossed my path was, without a doubt, one of the most defining characteristics of my personality. If I were a wittier dame, I’d say that Trouble was my middle name, but since I’m more
Clueless
than femme fatale, I think I’ll leave the film noir–isms to someone with a better grasp of the material. Needless to say, for those who’ve crossed my path … to know me is to wish you’d never met me.
The reasoning for this particular turn of phrase is two-pronged. While part of me is still a twentysomething girl who possesses a hard-core fashion obsession and a propensity for getting into ridiculous scrapes that invariably involve my friends—and even casual acquaintances—(Prong Number One), there is another, more all-encompassing aspect of my personality that’s a real stinger of a Prong Number Two: I am, for lack of a better euphemism,
Death
…
the Grim Reaper
… or, just as aptly,
the Girl Who Can Wish You Dead
.
They all pretty much apply.
And now you see why most people wish they could go an eternity without stumbling across my path. There is no human being in existence—barring suicidal depressives and doomsday cultists—who wants to get all up in Death’s business, yet
to humanity’s consternation, I’m like a bad penny: I just keep turning up.
Death and taxes—you can count on us.
Now I haven’t always been the head gal in charge of the passage of human souls from one plane of existence to the next. No, I was once a quasinormal human being wannabe who worked in a nice little white cubicle, honey-combed inside the right-angle confines of a tall Manhattan skyscraper, doing all the grunt work for the Vice-President of Sales at a company called House and Yard—they make the majority of the house and yard crap you see the overtanned, overplasticized hucksters who populate the Home Shopping Network shilling.
Being the assistant to a tyrannical boss who likes making your life a living Hell just for the fun of it, well, that sucks in its own right. But when your erstwhile boss turns out to be a Supernatural baddie who’s been making your life miserable in order to keep you under her Wagnerian thumb just in case she ever wants to use your family connections to try and take over Death … somehow that’s even suckier.
Hyacinth Stewart—said Wagnerian Blonde
and
plus-sized ex-model extraordinaire—had done exactly that. It was only sheer luck she and her cohort, a Japanese Sea Serpent God named Watatsumi, hadn’t succeeded in doing away with me and assuming the Presidency of Death, Inc., in my stead after my father—the last Death—had been murdered by his arch-nemesis, the Ender of Death or “Marcel,” as the bloodthirsty pain in the ass liked to be called. It was also a testament to the love and help of my friends Jarvis, Runt, and Kali and my younger sister, Clio, that I was still alive and kicking to take over my dad’s job once all the fallout was over.
Without them—and one other person, who I won’t mention because just their name dredges up an achy, hollow place in my heart—I would’ve been mincemeat. Which meant that because so many people had endured so much suffering and given so much of themselves (like their lives) to get me installed as the President of Death, Inc., I had no business disparaging the job, regardless of how badly I hadn’t wanted to take it.
I just had to ignore the little voice in the back of my mind that liked to remind me of how unprepared I was for the job,
that kept whispering:
You’re just a girl—and not even an erudite one at that
. True, I loved the very pedestrian triumvirate of fashion, shopping, and food, but that didn’t mean I was a total airhead, incapable of running the show—I had a college degree and I knew PowerPoint, for God’s sake.
Still, no matter how much ammunition I gathered against its insidious undermining, the voice persisted, letting me know I had no business being in charge of Death, Inc., especially when it was run exactly like a corporation (hence the heavy-handed “President and CEO” title I now bore like a cross) and needed a boss with business acumen, smarts, and finesse. Three things I wasn’t really sure I 100 percent possessed. Sure, I’d been a damn fine assistant in my day—for as much as I hated the job—but that didn’t mean I was capable of assuming the helm of a multinational conglomerate and not running it into a sandbar.
Yet here I was, the titular head of a giant, multinational, multidimensional conglomerate, whether I wanted the job or not.
All these thoughts ran through my brain while I stared into the gaping interior of my Louis Vuitton overnight bag, trying to decide if the skimpy, white, rhinestone-encrusted string bikini I wanted to bring along on the trip made me look slutty or not.
The question of bikini sluttiness aside, my real problem wasn’t
what
I was packing, but what I was packing it
in
. My obsession with high-end retail was legendary; I was a conspicuous consumer right out of the pages of Thorstein Veblen’s perennial classic,
The Theory of the Leisure Class
. Recently, I’d been working hard to curtail my excessive love of luxury brands in favor of a more economical shopping approach, but truth be told, I was finding it to be a very daunting task, indeed: the Louis Vuitton weekend bag was just another symptom of my luxury addiction gone out of control.
I’d seen it sitting all by its lonesome in the window of Barneys—seriously, I wasn’t even in the store, I was standing on the sidewalk minding my own business, thankyouverymuch—and it’d just looked so darn cute and adorable I couldn’t resist saving it. Besides, I was going to the Death Dinner, arguably the most important event on the Death, Inc., calendar, and I needed
to look presentable now that I was the Head Honcho in charge of everything.
At least that was my rationale.
Being the President of Death, Inc., had its advantages—and a very generous living stipend was one of them—but before I’d accepted the job, I’d made a resolution to myself that I would get my shopping problem under control. To that end, my Executive Assistant, Jarvis, had put me on a budget.
A very
small
budget.
In my heart, I knew keeping my mitts off the money and doing exactly as Jarvis instructed were the only ways to make my resolution a reality, but it was just too damn hard—and I was too damn weak. When I’d put my corporate card down on the counter at Barneys and rescued the Louis Vuitton weekend bag, I’d blown Jarvis’s budget for the month in one fell swoop.
As soon as I stepped foot out of the store, the guilt set in.
Hard-core.
Using an old tactic from my shopping-whore days, I immediately ripped the tags off the bag so it would be harder to force myself to return it, but that made me feel even
guiltier
—and instead of being excited about my overpriced, monogrammed cowhide purchase, all I felt was ambivalence. I couldn’t really enjoy the thing because it was a verboten purchase, but I couldn’t bring myself to give it back because deep in my heart of hearts I
loved
owning something so deliciously extravagant.
Feeling the kind of shame a puppy does when it pees on the carpet, I’d hidden the bag under my bed (behind a bunch of dust bunnies and an old snowboard that I’d only used once, to deleterious effect—a broken collarbone that, because of my immortality, had healed in three hours instead of three months), but since Jarvis was so familiar with my predilections to excess, the subterfuge only lasted, like, two seconds.
Like a shark scenting blood in the water, he’d gone right to the source of my guilt, snagging the offending bag from under my bed and brandishing it above his head like Martin Luther with his ninety-five theses.
“And what is this, pray tell?” Jarvis said in his clipped British accent—an accent that still sounded strange coming out of the mouth of the lanky, hipster body Jarvis had appropriated after I’d accidentally wished him dead.
“It’s, uhm … a
bag
?” I said innocently.
One bushy, brown eyebrow kinked in derision—and for, like, the thousandth time since Jarvis had acquired his new body, I marveled at how bizarre it was to see the old Jarvis expressions on this new, angular face.
“Oh,
really
?” he rejoined, trilling the
r
in “really” like no one’s business, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “A
bag
, you say? I would never have guessed.”
Jarvis had been an extended member of my family for as long as I could remember—growing up, he’d been my dad’s long-suffering Executive Assistant and then, when my dad was kidnapped and I was named interim head of Death, Inc., in his stead, he’d become my own Man Friday. Over the past year we’d had our ups and downs, mostly because I’d had zero interest in running Death, Inc., and my bad attitude had peeved him to no end, but I knew when push came to shove and I needed someone in my corner, Jarvis would always be there. A fact he’d proven again and again as he’d helped me extricate myself from one ridiculous scrape after another, never once complaining about my ineptitude. Okay, he might’ve complained once or twice, but that was it and he was probably more than justified.
Anyway, it was still strange to think that the Jarvis I’d known as a child—the tiny four-foot-eleven frame, goat haunches (you read that right—Jarvis was a faun in his previous incarnation), and thick
Magnum, P.I.
–era Tom Selleck mustache—was gone, replaced now by the long-limbed, emaciated body standing in front of me, shaking the Louis Vuitton travel bag in my face like it was anathema.
“And wherever did you find
said
bag?” he’d continued, glaring at me.
“Uhm, wow, I have no idea how that got there …” I hedged, but this only garnered a “tut-tut” from Jarvis, whose hand-on-hip stance brooked no argument.
Jeez, I couldn’t get anything past the guy. He knew my every trick, tell, and twitch … and he wasn’t buying even a word of my dissembling. I might as well have just finished off every sentence with “And, yes, I’m a big fat liar!” and been done with it.
“Okay.” I sighed, feeling bad for trying and failing to pull a
fast one—mostly I felt bad about the failing part, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “I know exactly how that bag got there and it’s not pretty.”
Jarvis nodded, gesturing for me to continue.
“I fell off the wagon.”
Jarvis raised the other eyebrow, making it seem as if two hairy caterpillars had overtaken his forehead.
I sighed.
“I didn’t even go in the store—it was in the window and I couldn’t just leave it there—so I used the corporate card—”
Jarvis winced, a pained expression pinching his face at the mention of the “corporate card,” but I soldiered on.
“And now I feel like a jerk, so I put it under the bed and I can’t even enjoy it. It’s terrible,” I said as I flopped onto my mattress, the fluffy purple comforter I’d bought online poofing out around me.
The pained expression slowly melted into a wide-lipped grin as I continued:
“I mean, I feel exactly like the dude in
A Clockwork Orange
—reconditioned to feel only disgust for my old, bad habits,” I added, staring ahead glumly.