How to be Death (3 page)

Having said my piece, I waited for the traditional Jarvis tongue-lashing to begin, but to my surprise, he circumnavigated my expectations and, with a weary sigh, sat down on the bed beside me, making the comforter poof even more.

As I batted at the comforter, trying to unpoof it, I decided the room I’d grown up in seemed much smaller whenever the new and improved Jarvis was in it. It was as if his long, skeletal frame took up space in the fifth dimension, displacing more matter in our third-dimensional world than it was supposed to.

“Keep it,” Jarvis said, patting my shoulder.

Those two words were like a shot of adrenaline straight to my heart. I immediately sat up straighter, my brain wary and wanting confirmation on the validity of the words I’d just heard Jarvis utter.

“Really?” I said, not believing him, but really, really wanting to.

He shrugged, his shoulders encroaching on earlobe territory.

“We’re attending the annual Death Dinner and Masquerade Ball and you’ll need a carryall. So, I suppose it wasn’t the worst of purchases.”

It was weird to think the fake excuse I’d conjured up for myself as I stood outside the plate glass window of Barneys’ happy-shopping-funland was now the exact rationale Jarvis was using to allow me to keep the bag.

It was like Jarvis had pawed his way into the confines of my mind and implanted a brainwashing device that scrubbed out the old Callie in favor of the more mature Callie 2.0. Or was the answer even simpler than that: Was I just embracing my new job with enough verve that I was starting to think like Jarvis?

Creepy!

this idea was
kind of unsettling, but not as unsettling as I’d expected it to be. Over the course of the last few months, I’d found I had a bit of a knack for the whole Death thing. I mean, this was no “duck to water” scenario, or anything so instinctual, but with each new task or problem I overcame, there was the growing awareness I wasn’t a total dunce at the job. My dad had set the reins of Death, Inc., in my hands for a reason and I was determined, now that he was gone, not to let him down.

Which meant in the future I was going to have to think a lot more like Jarvis than I wanted to—and I was also going to have to tamp down the persnickety voice in the back of my head that said I wasn’t good enough for the job. If I could do those two things, then I might actually—Heaven forbid—have a chance at making a go of the family business.

“FYI: That thing totally makes you look slutty.”

Startled out of my thoughts, I looked up to find my little sister, Clio, standing in the doorway to my bedroom, hands on hips, face squirming with disgust as she focused on the tiny, white rhinestone-encrusted bikini top I held in my hand. I quickly dropped the now noxious piece of fabric back onto the bed, watching as the long white ties dangled off the edge of the comforter like spandex mealworms.

“You really think so?” I said, knowing she was right, yet still
wanting to take the damn thing with me anyway. It might’ve been a slutster piece of clothing … but it was
my
slutster piece of clothing, and besides, it made my butt look amazing.

“I know so,” she shot back, rolling her eyes. “But don’t let me stop you from embarrassing yourself.”

I decided to let the potshot pass without comment. Instead, I stared down into the empty weekend bag, willing myself to get a move on. I had a wormhole-calling lesson in fifteen minutes and then Jarvis, Runt, and I were heading to the Haunted Hearts Castle, where the annual Death Dinner and Masquerade Ball were being held.

“I wish you were going with us,” I said to Clio—and I meant it. I’d started to rely on her counsel, as far as the day-to-day running of Death was concerned, and not having her keen mind with me at the Death Dinner made me nervous.

She may have just turned eighteen that summer, but she was the smartest person, other than Jarvis, I knew. With her techno savvy (she could hack her way into any computer) and intuitive knowledge of how people operated, I’d been more than pleased when she’d decided to eschew college for a year to work at Death, Inc., helping me put the company back in order after it was almost demolished by the Devil and our not-so-dearly departed older sister, Thalia.

The two of them had staged a coup on Purgatory, murdered my dad—who’d been the President and CEO before me—and nearly destroyed the Hall of Death, where the Death Records for all of humanity were housed. They and their cohorts had worked hard to decimate the employee pool at Death, Inc., so that now we were dangerously understaffed, a problem we were still trying to remedy. I’d met with five possible replacements for Suri, the Day Manager of the Hall of Death, but none of them had had the chutzpah and class of the young woman who’d lost her life defending the records from my older sister’s evil clutches.

And she’d been just one of the many casualties we’d had that day.

I’d inherited a job that was in flux, that needed my complete and utter attention—and since my old boss Hyacinth was officially MIA (she was actually spending her time jailed in Purgatory for the part she played in the Death, Inc., coup, but no one
in the human world knew that), I’d gotten laid off from my assisting job at House and Yard just in time to devote myself full stop to rebuilding the company.

Because I’d been so busy, at first I hadn’t missed my old life: the Battery Park City apartment I’d had to give up, my friends (who I never really saw anyway), and the City of New York itself. But now things had started to settle down and I was beginning to feel a burning yen for my past existence. I liked Newport, Rhode Island, where Sea Verge, the family mansion, was located, but the provincial city was
not
New York. There were no all-night diners, the shopping was boutique-centric, and everyone I’d ever known there had either fled or was married with a bunch of rug rats. So needless to say, the Mommy and Me crew weren’t really interested in hanging out with a cosmopolitan, single gal newly arrived from the wilds of Manhattan.

Having Clio in my direct orbit made everything a lot easier. I could talk to her about anything, and no matter how dorky I sounded, she never judged. After my dad’s death, she’d spent a few months living with her boyfriend, Indra, a Hindu God who’d carved out a human existence for himself making Bollywood musicals—hiding in plain sight, if you will—and though I’d pretty much written him off as a narcissistic jerkoid when I’d first met him, I’d had to eat my words when he’d shown himself to be a stand-up guy, sticking to Clio like glue during the crazy emotional roller-coaster ride she’d endured in the aftermath of our dad’s death. I was a little shaky about the age difference—I’m talking millennia here—but other than that, I was all for the relationship.

But I would’ve been a liar if I hadn’t said I wasn’t a little disappointed when Clio chose to spend the weekend helping Indra shoot his new film rather than coming with me to the Death Dinner. I knew I was in good hands—Runt, my hellhound pup, was a master at sniffing out bad guys, and Jarvis was just aces, in general—but, still, I was gonna miss having my little sister to lean on.

“You know I’d go with you in a heartbeat, but Indra really wants me to be there for the shoot,” Clio said, ripping me out of my thoughts again and back into reality.

“I know,” I said.

“It’s his first nonmusical and he’s really nervous about it,” she added, the tendrils of her short pink hair framing her face like starfish arms.

Clio and I were both part Siren, which accounted for Clio’s stunning good looks and feminine demeanor (sadly, the stunning good looks had missed me by a mile), but even I could see that the gift of beauty was a double-edged sword. Clio had spent a good chunk of her high school career hiding her features behind thick, black plastic-framed glasses and a shaved head, in hopes she could stave off the bevy of lovesick men who followed her everywhere.

Not a chance.

Poor Clio, all she wanted was to be taken seriously—an impossibility when your high school teachers develop inappropriate crushes on you, giving you A-pluses even when you’re purposely turning in D-minus work.

“Well, you know you’ll be missed,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “But I totally get it. Mr. Sex on a Stick needs you.”

Mr. Sex on a Stick was what I called Indra whenever I wanted to rile Clio up. I hadn’t coined the term, a magazine had that dubious honor, but it was still my favorite way to harass my sister. I don’t think she particularly enjoyed the fact that her man was an object of sexual fascination to millions of horny housewives across the world.

“Gross!” she said, coming into the room just long enough to grab a pillow off my bed and lob it at my head.

“I’m just saying—” I bleated as the pillow connected with the side of my face.

“Get packed, butthead,” Clio mock-growled at me. “Jarvis wants you down in the library stat for your wormhole-calling lesson.”

And with that piece of info imparted, she flounced back down the hallway, leaving me to finish my packing in peace. I sighed and started pulling clothes from my closet, nicely folding a trio of light summer dresses and a white linen pantsuit into my weekend bag so they wouldn’t get too wrinkled. Some PJs, socks, and underwear rounded out my wardrobe, but it wasn’t until I’d pretty much filled the bag to the brim that I had a change of heart about my slutster status. Picking up the string
bikini from its resting place on my bed, I covertly slid the wanton thing between the folds of the white linen suit, where it disappeared nicely inside the similar-colored fabric.

Slutster or not, I was gonna look
fine
in that bikini … and if the man-whose-very-name-made-me-nauseous-with-unrequited-love-whenever-I-thought-about-him was there and he just happened to see me looking all hot and sexy? Well, that was just an added bonus.

Eat your heart out, Daniel,
I thought as I zipped up my bag and hoisted it off the bed, ready for whatever Trouble came my way.

I just hoped it was the kind punctuated by a capital
T
.

Hee
-
haw!

“You do understand the concept of folding space? Correct?”

Jarvis’s voice had that smarmy “know it all” quality to it that really rubbed me the wrong way. He acted like I was supposed to just intuitively know/understand all these advanced physics concepts like “folding space” and “string theory.” I got that all of these things were the framework upon which magic, time travel, etc., were based, but it didn’t mean my brain was up for grasping the actual science part.

“I get that time and space are, like, ideas…”

I trailed off as Jarvis closed his eyes, trying to calm himself.

“Why do I have to know this stuff?” I asked again for, like, the three-thousandth time. We’d been working on the whole wormhole-calling thing for the past few months and the best I could do was set Jarvis’s hair on fire.

I hadn’t meant to do it, I’d just gotten frustrated—I’m good at the magicky stuff only when I’m feeling emotional or am in a high-stress situation—and then before I knew what was happening, Jarvis’s hair was doing an impression of Michael Jackson at his infamous Pepsi commercial shoot. Luckily, Jarvis is way more adept at magic than me and was able to put out the fire before it did any permanent damage, but he’d watched me like a hawk ever since.

“You have to understand why spells and wormholes work
in order to fully control them,” Jarvis intoned, in an exact repeat of what he’d said the first—and last—time I’d asked him the question.

Jarvis, his patience worn thin, sat down heavily on one of the library’s wingback chairs, his long legs splayed out in front of him like he was a gangling schoolboy. Resting his elbows on the arms of the chair, he started massaging his temples as if that would make the lesson run smoother.

As much as I hated to admit it, I was a terrible Death student. I didn’t like magic, I didn’t like monsters, I was not a fan of the recently departed … and liking all those things kinda went hand in hand with running Death, Inc. I think my noninterest was the biggest reason why I sucked at wormhole calling—I once heard someone say emotion can’t get through a tense muscle, and I was pretty sure you could supplant “emotion” with “magic” and it would wholly apply to my problem.

“Shall we try again?” Jarvis said finally, opening his eyes to look at me again.