“Aw, shucks, it was nothing.” I shrugged as I took the silvery cup from his hands.
The burning sensation I’d felt when I first touched the magical object was gone, replaced now by the warm weight of something magical that was ready to do my bidding.
“How did you find us?” I said as I literally had to drag my eyes away from the cup, its magical force was calling out to me so fiercely.
“The Cup of Jamshid showed us,” Clio said. At the mention of its name, the thing began to glow a bright silvery white color, and I could feel the thrum of life inside it, like there was a heart welded right into the metal.
“Thank you for all of this,” I said to Daniel as I gave his hand a squeeze. It was pretty hysterical to watch the man blush. The real Daniel was so the opposite of the Devil.
“Oh, give me a break,” Kali said. “This isn’t the Love Boat, for Christ’s sake.”
“Shut up, Indian Princess,” I said tartly, not even looking in her direction. After a few seconds, Daniel broke the weird connection between us by clearing his throat.
“Uhm, remember how you drank the paralysis potion back in the desert—” he began.
“Well, I kept wondering how anyone could possibly know where you were at any given time, let alone pinpoint your exact location so they could feed you a magic potion . . .”
“Uh-huh,” I said impatiently.
“There had to be a trick to it. And the only charm I could think of that could do it was—”
“A homing spell!” Clio said excitedly.
“Precisely,” Daniel said, giving Clio a wink.
“But who would put a homing spell on white girl here?” Kali said, totally not buying Daniel’s scenario.
“It’s a totally hard-core spell, so it would have to be someone really well versed in magical theory,” Clio said, her cute forehead scrunched up with thought.
“We can?” I said hopefully.
“It’s easy as pie, Cal,” Clio said as she held out her hands, giving them a shake before placing them on my shoulders. It took only about two seconds after her touch for a sharp, jarring pain to shoot up both my arms.
“Ow!” I screeched. “Stop it! That hurts!”
Clio dropped her hands and looked down at my arms . . . where a handcuff-shaped circlet of bright purple glowed warningly from around both wrists.
“Well, I guess that answers the first question.” I sighed. “Now we know who did this to me. It was that stupid wannabe detective from the Psychical Bureau of Investigations.”
“The very one,” I said as I handed Daniel the Cup of Jamshid, then lifted my wrists up in the air for a little attention. “Would someone please take them off me?”
“Let me do it,” Kali said, pushing her way past Clio, who was already reaching out to try to take the spell off me. Under Kali’s breath, I heard her say:
And then she grabbed my wrists.
I watched in horror as her hands caught fire, turning a succession of painful-looking red and brown colors before she got smart and dropped my arms, letting them slam painfully into my sides. Luckily, it hadn’t all been in vain. When I looked down, the purple circlets were gone.
“That bloody hurt!” Kali wailed as she glared at my wrists with such intense hatred that I kinda feared for their lives—that is, if wrists had lives.
“So what do we do now?” Clio said, looking from me to Daniel.
I really wanted to give my sister some amazing, well-thought-out answer. Some new, wonderful idea that would put us right on the road to finding our father and going home, but my only problem with all that was—
I wasn’t anyone’s fearless leader. I couldn’t come up with some crack plan right out of my ass. I was just some girl who worked in the home and garden sector, and had a cruddy dating track record.
But apparently I was still one of the honored few in our universe that was on speaking terms with God because I didn’t have to wait very long for some help from above.
“Why’s the cup glowing like that?” I said, my eyes instantly drawn over to the silvery object in Daniel’s hands. Not waiting for anyone to reply to my rhetorical question, I nimbly plucked the cup from his fingers and looked inside it.
“What the—” I started to say, but my attention was caught by the startlingly clear image of my father’s face suspended in the depths of the liquid. His eyes were closed, and the skin of his face so pinched and ashen that it made me sick—he looked awful, no, worse than awful.
I wanted to look away—I mean, what kid wants to see their parent looking like a semiconscious corpse—but I couldn’t, even when I felt Clio’s hand on my shoulder.
“What do you see?” she asked. “What is it?”
I shook my head, waiting for the image to clear, but instead it changed.
“Oh, no,” I breathed as I realized what I was looking at now. “This can’t be. It doesn’t make any sense.”
At best, the kidnappers would make their demands while hiding their victims away for a while to keep everyone on tenterhooks, and then when they’d gotten whatever ransom they wanted, they’d let their hostages go.
Only, I was starting to suspect that ransoming “hostages” had never been this kidnapper’s intention. I mean, didn’t the word “hostage” kind of imply that there was something someone wanted in exchange for the victim’s safe return? And strangely enough, in this case, no one ever brought up the existence of a ransom note. Period.
So, either the kidnapper’s plan was never to let anyone go, or maybe—just maybe—the plan was for no one to know that a kidnapping had ever taken place at all.
That was what the Devil had been trying to tell me when he’d been picking my brains through the old guard at the Psychical Bureau of Investigations: No one had ever reported the kidnapping to the authorities, so why the Hell was one of their agents investigating the case?
If I hadn’t been me, and I didn’t know all the things I know about myself—like I was a quasinormal girl who didn’t have any aspirations toward usurping her father’s position as the Grim Reaper—then I probably would’ve had to put myself at the top of the list of people who benefited from his “disappearance.”
Someone out there had gone to a lot of pains to discredit me by putting a buttload of money in my bank account, then spreading the story that I’d accepted said money as payment from the Devil to do away with my father and the others. No wonder the King of Hell wasn’t a happy camper—that put just as much blame on him as on me.
I had to lump Daniel in with the Devil. The guy was his protégé—whatever that entailed—and probably wasn’t allowed to come up with big, fancy kidnapping plans all by himself anyway.
I wanted to clear my family at one fell swoop, but I didn’t have enough information to rule them out. My mother and Father McGee had been very persistent about dragging me—kicking and screaming—into all of this insanity, but they both did seem genuinely worried about Father and Thalia.
I had no problem vouching for Clio—c’mon, if you didn’t know your kid sister, then who did you know? She and Runt were as innocent as newborn babies, as far as I was concerned.
And Jarvis saved my life. Enough said.
I didn’t know anything else about the guy—except that I hated his guts and would fry him like a fish the next time I saw him—but he was fast becoming my primary suspect. He was obviously a liar who knew entirely too much about the kidnapping situation to be only an innocent player in the game. He was the one who’d had the most opportunity to spread the bullshit story about me taking bribes, he was the jerkoid who’d kidnapped Jarvis, he was the one who’d put some sort of magical tracking device on my wrists when he’d cuffed me, and that meant he was the bastard who’d sent that poisoned Midori Sour to me—ruining the beauty of that frosty beverage forever in my mind. The only thing that I couldn’t figure out was how the heck this jerkoid detective had gotten himself mixed up with Indra’s arch nemesis, Vritra.
You remember Vritra . . . the scary serpent creature that owned the disgusting human corpse castle? The very castle in which—if the Cup of Jamshid could be believed—my father and the other hostages were being held against their will?
I gave my band of merry men and women—Daniel, Clio, Kali, and Runt—the best explanation I could muster as to what I’d seen in the cup. I don’t think you can ever really give a good description of something as heinous as Vritra’s castle, but I tried. Needless to say, I only ended up making myself a little sick since I was the wussiest member of my little crew. All Clio wanted to know was how they got the bodies to stick to the walls of the castle.
“But we really need you to take us to the first place in Indra’s memory. If you can get us to that pavilion . . .”
“It’s why Indra needed you, Kali,” I said. “You weren’t his downfall; you were his savior. You gave me the map to Vritra’s castle in Indra’s memories. And because of that, once we’re there, I can find the place blindfolded. It’s like Indra’s legacy or something.”
I really didn’t want Clio and Runt to go with us into Vritra’s realm, but no matter what I did, Clio was one step ahead of me. The girl was the smartest one in our family for good reason.
“You want me to tell Mom?” she threatened, pulling out her BlackBerry.
“Does that thing really work out here?” I asked, incredulous.
“You wanna find out?” she said.
Our last order of business before we left Indra’s soundstage was to try to give the Gopis a proper burial. None of us could stomach leaving them there, soaking in their own viscera like that. Daniel suggested we set the soundstage on fire, but I didn’t have the heart to do it.
Finally, it was Kali who had the best idea of all.
“You know, the Gopi are just lying here, doing nothing for nobody,” she offered, pursing her lips. “You could just resurrect them.”
“You are Death, aren’t you?” she said, goading me into it.
I promptly called every single one of the Gopi back into being. The only problem was that they’d been dead a little too long to return to a normal state of existence. From afar, the Gopi looked okay, but if you got up close and personal in their business . . . well, that was another story. A number of the ladies were missing body parts or had co-opted body parts that didn’t quite fit. There were a few missing eyeballs and teeth—and one headless Gopi who couldn’t stop walking into the staircases and knocking herself out.
It was hard to believe that these were the same beautiful women I’d envied as they twirled like dervishes for Indra’s camera. Now they were little more than walking zombies with broken fingernails, in tattered saris.
“Ladies,” I called, and they slowly turned to face me.
Seriously, as I surveyed the crowd, I kept imagining I was staring at the extras rejects from the “Thriller” music video. All we needed was Vincent Price, and we’d be ready to go.
“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to use the word ‘Vritra,’ Callie,” he whispered. “You seem to be agitating them.”
He was right. They had started to repeat the name among themselves, and the sound of their bitterness was only building with each passing second.
“Why don’t you come with us?” I said to the assemblage. “Let’s go kick some Vritra ass!”
“Let’s go!” I said, turning to Kali, who was totally getting freaked-out by the weird Gopi behavior.
“Give me your hand, white girl—and the rest of you, hold on to a piece of her shirt,” Kali yelled over the drone of the Gopi chanting.
“What about them!” I said, indicating the Gopi.
“They don’t need my help,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes wide. I turned my head and saw why Kali was looking a little overwhelmed.
The Gopi were eating each other.
Not really chowing down, not tearing flesh, nor drawing blood . . . Instead, they were swallowing each other whole. One would unhinge her jaw the way a snake did when it was about to consume its dinner, and her partner would climb inside. This went on and on, Gopi consuming Gopi, until only three were left—one of them being the headless Gopi—and then two . . . and then finally only the headless Gopi remained as her last sister with a head unhinged her own jaw and ate herself.
“They may look like they’re eating one another,” Kali continued, “but as each one is consumed, they are actually being transported into the next realm so they can find Indra and fulfill their mission to protect him. Only the last one will remain trapped on this plane.”
I kind of felt sorry for the poor, headless Gopi as she wandered pathetically around the soundstage, but I forgot her plight the moment Kali began to squeeze my hand, and I felt all the little bones inside my skin begin to break into a million pieces.
twenty-eight
I looked in the mirror and once again I was Indra: all tall and lithe and with a well-muscled body and a regal face and an extremely large . . . Hmm, I wondered if I’d get a chance to give the package a test-drive this time? But then I blinked, and sadly, I was the only person staring back at me in the mirror’s reflection.
It was getting dark in Vritra’s realm. And that meant all the bad things would be coming out to play soon.
Daniel stood behind me, his hand holding on to the bottom of my tank top, dangerously close to my, ahem, derriere. Clio, Runt’s leash looped in her belt, was holding on to my shoulder.
“Did you just have a penis?” she said, her eyes flaring. “Like maybe Indra’s penis?”
I ignored her.
“Where’s Kali?”
Daniel shook his head, his eyes taking in the glorious profusion of tent that surrounded us.
“I don’t think she could come with us. I felt her trying to cross over, but it wasn’t happening,” Daniel said. “I think she was more than a map, Callie. I think she was the only conduit by which we could cross over into this realm.”
“That’s so cool,” Clio said, and Runt barked.
“I wish she was here,” I said, shivering. Daniel caught my eye, his own eyes full of worry.
“Me, too.”
There was a familiar chanting sound just outside the tent, and we all ran to the side just in time to see the Gopi as they marched, en masse, across the desert toward Vritra’s castle. They looked better here, more alive, but it was kind of hard to tell really because they were so far away.
“Well, I never thought I’d say this, but seeing a whole army of living-dead Indian milkmaids crossing the desert floor to slay a sea serpent is kinda comforting,” I said.
Daniel snorted.
I turned to Clio, who was admiring herself in the mirror. She caught my eye, and gave me a reassuring smile.
“Look, Clio, I think you’re aces, and that’s why if anything happened to you, I’d shoot myself—” I began.
“I know,” she said, cutting me off. “You want me to stay here.” She indicated the tent, and I nodded happily. I couldn’t believe my luck. My headstrong little sister was actually gonna do what I told her to!
“Bite me, Callie.”
I knew it was too good to be true.
“Crap, okay, just do what Daniel or I tell you to and keep your mouth shut. I’ve been here before and you haven’t so—”
“Whatever,” she said dismissively.
“I mean it,” I said firmly.
“Fine.”
“Okay, then let’s get out of here,” I said, and headed for the sand. I was still holding the cup in my hand when I noticed that for the first time ever it was freezing cold to the touch. I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t think it was a good thing.
“The cup’s like a block of ice,” I whispered to Daniel as the three of us and Runt clomped through the sand, following the trail of footsteps the Gopi left behind. I hadn’t had to use my memory once since we’d gotten here—thank God for small miracles—because I couldn’t have found the pavilion again, let alone the corpse castle.
“What’s it mean?” he asked, and I shrugged. I have no idea; that’s why I’m asking you, I thought to myself.
Out of nowhere Runt started barking like Cujo, and Clio had to throw all her body weight into yanking Runt back by the halter or the puppy would’ve run off into the darkening twilight.
“What is it?” I called up to her, but Clio didn’t answer. It took Daniel and me a minute to catch up to her, but when we did, I saw why she was being so quiet.
We’d reached Vritra’s castle. And we were late. The battle had already begun.
The castle stood in all its villainous horror just like I remembered it. There were still too many eyes to count, too many blackened tongues protruding from lacerated mouths, eviscerated entrails plastered together, cracked bones rammed in place. It made me sick to look at it.
I looked over at Clio again, and I could see the enormity of the evilness of the place filling her imagination with a hundred thousand nightmares.
“It’s built out of people, Callie. You said it was a castle . . . but it’s really a mausoleum.” She stumbled over her words as she spoke, and right then I would’ve given up shopping for the rest of my life if I could’ve only peeled away this image from my sister’s brain forever.
But I couldn’t.
“I think you’re right, Clio,” I said, squeezing her arm. “It’s anything but a castle.”
I looked over at Daniel, but he was too busy surveying the fighting to pay much attention to what the castle was made of.
“The Gopi are winning,” he said, pointing to where one of the Gopi was slaughtering a brigade of scarlet and black armored soldiers.
These were the very soldiers that Indra had defeated so deftly with his double-headed scepter the last time I was here. It made me remember that they were just the first—and easiest—defense that Vritra had protecting his castle of bodies.
“There’s more where they came from,” I said. “Just wait.”
It didn’t take the Gopi long to destroy the first wave of soldiers. Once all the infantrymen had been killed, the Gopi stood around poking at the dead bodies, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.
From where we stood—which was as far away as I could convince Clio and Daniel to stand from the action—we could still here the faint chant of the word “Vritra” as it was carried through the air toward us.
“This is creepy,” Clio said, rubbing Runt’s head more for her own comfort than for giving Runt the scratchies.
“Just wait,” I repeated. It was going to be very interesting to see what Clio and Daniel did once the goop monsters reared their ugly heads.
We didn’t have to wait long.
The earth began to shake, knocking some of the less-well-put-together Gopi onto the ground. The others who were able to retain their balance looked up at the sky, their eyes locked on something that we couldn’t see—but that I could remember.
“What’s going on?!” Clio shrieked as she grabbed my hand, terrified. She shrieked again as a loud belching sound filled the air and the stench of poop and burning hair assailed our nostrils.
“Ew!” Clio wailed, covering her nose. I looked over and saw that Daniel was doing the same thing.
The smell is even worse than I remember.
“Just wait,” I said—it was fast becoming my mantra. Suddenly, the sky was lit up with fire as the giant masses of black goop sailed through the air like cannon balls and splatted thick and gooey onto the ground, taking out chunks of earth—and any Gopi not quick enough to get out of the way.
Runt started barking again, but this time Clio was so focused on the goop balls flying through the air that she wasn’t quick enough to stop the puppy from yanking her leash free and running helter-skelter right into all the action.
“Runt!” Clio screamed as she instinctively took off after the hellhound, completely forgetting the insanity that was going on all around her.
“Clio! Come back!” I yelled, but I was too far behind for them to hear me.
All I could do was watch in horror as Clio, her eyes pinned to Runt’s retreating back, tripped on a fallen piece of armor . . . and sailed headfirst into one of the glistening blobs of black goop.
“Clio!” I screamed as the goop ball swallowed her whole. I took off again, dodging fallen soldiers, attack Gopi, and black goop balls, until I reached Clio’s side. The only part of her body that was still visible was her left arm, which stuck out from the goop at a weird angle.
“Damn it,” I cried, plunging my hands into the viscous, gluelike stuff and pulling at my baby sister’s arm. The more I pulled, the less she budged—but the more I got myself entangled in the goop. It seemed like hours that I fought for my sister, but it could have been only seconds because when I looked back to where I’d left Daniel, he was still quite a distance away from us and running pretty damn fast.
“Daniel!” I shouted, willing him to reach me before I was subsumed, but there wasn’t enough time. Too soon, I felt the goop overwhelm me, and then I was sucked down into a black, hazy world—one from which I was afraid that I would never escape.
The last thing I remembered as I was sucked down into unconsciousness was clutching the Cup of Jamshid so tightly in my hand that it felt like my fingers were going to freeze off.
“callie ? ”
It was Clio’s voice, sounding small and scared. I opened one eye and didn’t see anything but darkness, so I shut it again.
“Callie,” she said again, shaking me. The girl was persistent—I’d give her that. I cracked both eyes open this time, and that was when I saw Clio, her whole person covered in black glop, sitting next to me, holding the severely tarnished Cup of Jamshid in her lap.
“The cup,” I said, my voice a whisper.
“I had to pry it out of your hand,” Clio said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand but just smearing more goop onto her face.
“Where are we?” I said, sitting up, my back cracking as I lifted myself from the cold stone floor.
I could see that we were in some kind of massive feasting hall—there was a long wooden table in the center of the room, bits of meat and sauce drying to its top from the last meal, and this was facing a huge stone hearth that Clio and I and about twenty roast pigs could’ve fit into easily. All along the sides of the table were rough-hewn wooden chairs and candelabra with thick, dripping tallow candles that gave the room its only light except for the raging fire in the hearth.
The place reeked of sweat, unwashed bodies, and death. It seemed that the castle was just as unsettling on the inside as it was on the outside.
“Give me the cup,” I said, holding out my hands. Clio deposited the poor blackened thing in my hands, and I held it up to the light so that I could see inside it.
“What do you see?” Clio asked.
I couldn’t see a bloody thing. Stupid cup, I thought to myself as I threw it into the wall. It made a hollow pinging sound when it hit the stone, then clattered to the floor and lay still. Clio crawled over to the cup and gently picked it up.
“It’s not the cup’s fault, Callie.”
I nodded. She handed it back to me, and I put it down, opting instead to stare at my goop-covered hands.
“I didn’t see anything.”
“You didn’t?” Clio asked tentatively.
“Nothing.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nose.
“Okay,” she tried. “What did you see before? Where in this place did you see Dad?”
I closed my eyes, trying desperately to remember, but all I could see was my father’s ashen face and the way his eyelids fluttered once, then didn’t move again.
“I don’t know,” I wailed.
“Well, we can’t just sit here waiting to get eaten,” Clio said finally as she took the cup and stood. “Let’s go exploring.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, pouting like a small child. Clio grabbed my arm and yanked on it, trying to force me to stand.
“Stop it,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Not until you get up and stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she said, pulling on my arm again.
“I said to stop it!” I slapped her hand away from me, and too late I realized that I’d hit her a lot harder than I’d meant to. She gasped at the sting of flesh on flesh, and then her eyes filled with tears. She dropped my arm and scuttled away from me.
“I really hate you sometimes, Calliope,” she whispered, and then she took off. At first, I just watched her go, her long legs carrying her through one of the myriad of doorways that led in and out of the hall.
“Clio, wait!” I called, but my voice only seemed to get sucked up in the roar of the fire and the steady drip of tallow onto the floor.
Damn it, I thought as I stood up and marched over to the doorway Clio had gone through. But when I got there, I saw the door was padlocked shut.
That’s weird, I thought. I must’ve been mistaken.
I tried every single door in the whole place—and every one of them was locked up tight as a drum. I had no idea what to do now. I’d lost my sister, and I was nowhere near finding my father.
I walked over to the hearth and sat down in front of it, letting the warmth penetrate my skin and sink into my bones. I closed my eyes and sat there, trying to collect my thoughts and calm my brain.
“Shit, shit, shit . . .” I moaned under my breath.
“Mistress Calliope?”
My eyes popped open, and I looked around frantically, trying to locate the sound of Jarvis’s voice.
“Jarvis?” I hissed. “Is that you?”
I looked up and saw the stairway hidden inside the heart of the hearth.
“How do I get in there?” I said, but Jarvis didn’t seem to have any ideas for me.
“I couldn’t tell you, Miss Calliope. I’ve only ever seen this side of the hearth.”
There were no buckets of water to put out the flames, no blanket to suffocate them with, so I sucked it up and made a running leap for the bottom step.
I was really hoping it would turn out to be magical fire—specifically a magical fire that didn’t burn.
Magical fire, my ass.
I felt like one of those Yogis running across a bed of hot coals on bare feet, only I didn’t have the luxury of being able to transcend my body and get my mind away from all the pain that fire can so lovingly wreak on delicate human skin.
“Ow!” I yelped as my foot found purchase on the last step of the stairway. I made a grab for the wrought-iron railing that encircled the winding staircase, but yanked my hand back when I realized it was superheated from being so near the fire.
“Yikes,” I said under my breath, still feeling the bite of the iron rail and knowing it would probably leave a scar on my palm.
I pushed my body up the stairway, feeling the cool air from above as it hit my face and neck, offering me a bit of freedom from the heat. I reached a landing that I thought was the top of the stairs but was really only the bottom of another hearth. When I looked up again, I saw that the winding stairway actually continued upward, farther than I could see.
“Mistress Calliope!”
Sitting in the corner of a small room filled with large, rickety spindles—the Sewing Room, presumably—was Jarvis, a large, bloody gash streaked across his handsome cheek. He was tied to one of the decrepit spindles by a long length of that same nylon string my father had bound Monsieur D to the palm tree with. Jarvis and Monsieur D were both magically adept, I realized now, so the string must’ve possessed some kind of antimagical property.
Jarvis gave me a big, toothy grin. He looked very happy to see me.
“I decided that no one would ever come for me. That I would be bound here for the rest of my natural existence,” he said, the giddiness he felt at seeing me—or just another friendly living being—evident in the tone of his voice.
“It’s good to see you, too,” I said, feeling a little choked up as I knelt down and gave the faun a hug. “Thank you for saving my life,” I whispered in his ear.
I swear to God he blushed.
“How do I get you out of this mess?” I said, my fingers fumbling with the string. He shook his head.
“I can only be released by the magician that created the spell,” he offered sadly.
“Screw that,” I said, reaching for the string and snapping it in two. “I’m Death, and I can kill anything. Even a spell.”
Jarvis looked at me, wide-eyed.
“You did it, didn’t you? You completed the tasks!”
I nodded.
“I always knew you could do it!” he said, tears in his eyes.
Jarvis believed in me—and he was proud of me, too. Would wonders ever cease?
I grabbed his arm, helping the faun to stand, but I could see he was still sore from his struggle with the detective. I doubted he would be able to keep a very fast pace.
“Can you walk?” I asked, and he nodded, a determined look on his face. Suddenly, he saw the cup in my hand and gasped.
“You brought the Cup of Jamshid here? Are you out of your mind?” he nearly screeched at me.
“What?” I said, not understanding why he was getting all freaked-out about the stupid cup.
“You want to let the cup fall into the detective’s hands? Do you know what that would mean?”
I shook my head. I loved Jarvis, but he really could be a bit tedious at times. I just hoped I wasn’t going to get another supernatural history lesson.
“The Cup of Jamshid grants eternal life . . . ?” he said, doing that teacher thing where you make the class answer a question, expecting your students to chime in with the “because” part. I decided to humor him—after all, he had saved my life.
“And because it has the power over life and death, it would be a totally bad idea for some bad guy to control it,” I said in a monotone. Jarvis looked surprised, but he nodded his head happily at what I was saying.
As much as the whole question-answer game was just superfun, I’d really started to worry about Clio and the rest of my family. We were gonna have to say hasta la vista to the Sewing Room and get our asses in gear if we were gonna do any people-rescuing.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, taking Jarvis’s hand and guiding him back to the hearth. Together, we stepped inside and started to climb.
The next landing we passed belonged to another empty room—this one a well-appointed, feminine-looking bedroom. The next two didn’t grab our interest either—more bedrooms. It wasn’t until we reached the fourth, and seemingly final, landing that we hit pay dirt.
“I think this is it,” I whispered in Jarvis’s ear as we had reached the topmost part of one of the turrets.
It was a grand, sweeping space with windows that looked out into the darkness of the surrounding night. It would have been a romantic place with all the stone and candles and beautiful views—as long as you were able to ignore the chains embedded into walls and the prisoners pinioned into them.
“Father!” I cried as I saw him, his body leaning forward, chains wrapped around his arms and torso and legs. He looked terrible, but when he heard my voice, he lifted his head up and blinked at me.
I handed Jarvis the cup and ran over to my father, holding him up so the pressure from the chains was lessened.
“Father, are you okay?”
He nodded, a small smile of mirth playing in the corners of his mouth. I guess he was right. It was kind of a dumb question.
“Jarvis and I are here to rescue you,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. I doubted seeing Jarvis and me, and realizing we were the “rescue party,” really made him feel much better.
“Thank you, Calliope,” my father said, his voice low and booming even though he must’ve been exhausted. “We have to free the others, too.” He indicated with his head to where the rest of the Executives from the company lay chained to the walls, trapped in the same predicament.
As I counted the men and women chained here and there, I realized something funny: There weren’t enough of them. I counted again, and still I got the same number. Someone was missing.
Someone really important.
“Where’s Thalia?” I said, my voice scared.
“Why, I’m right here, Callie,” a cold voice said behind me.
twenty-nine
My father’s eyes were sad, sadder than I’d ever seen them before. It didn’t take me long to understand—I wasn’t a complete dummy. I took a step back from him and turned around.
“Thalia,” I breathed, my eyes having a hard time accepting what I was seeing. My older sister, Thalia, tall and beautiful but with a cruel look etched on her fine-boned face, stood beside Jarvis, her hand grasping him painfully by the scruff of the neck. In her other hand, she held Clio in much the same way.
“Look who I found wandering in my castle,” Thalia said, her voice like ice.
“Your castle?” I whispered.
She gave me a wicked smile, and Jarvis cringed.
“Of course it’s my castle. Who else would it belong to? I am Vritra’s new wife, after all.”
I was aghast.
“You married that slimy serpent?”
She didn’t take the bait; she only squeezed Clio’s neck harder, making her gasp with pain. I was incredulous. I couldn’t believe Thalia’d done something so stupid—and was being such a bitch about it to boot.
“Leave them alone!” I said. “They’re just a kid and a faun.”
I got two nasty looks from Jarvis and Clio, but I didn’t care. It was the truth, and if the truth would set them free, then screw them both.
“I’ll let them go, if that’s what you want, Callie,” Thalia said as she marched over to one of the windows. Clio whimpered, and Jarvis closed his eyes.
“Wait!” I screamed. “Just wait a minute . . .”
She turned back around, still clutching her prey, her hands like talons. It was becoming very hard to reconcile this monstrous woman with the girl who had once been my sister.
“Tell me something, Thalia. Why did you do it?” This seemed to please my older sister—just like it did anytime anyone asked a supervillain in the movies to explain their dastardly plans. She slackened her grip on Jarvis’s neck and licked her lips, eager to impart the details of her perfect crime to me.
“Calliope, you must know by now that you’re the one with the birthright—you, the one who doesn’t even care about the business. I slaved for Dad, I gave my lifeblood to that company, and the only thing they ever gave me was the Vice Presidency of Asia. Asia . . . ? Come on! What the hell was that? Nothing!”
“Asia’s nice,” I mumbled.
“Shut up, Callie. I’m talking right now.”
I did as she said.
“Of course, it is the reason I met Vritra, so maybe you’re right, Callie: Asia is nice.”
I swallowed hard, trying to think of anything to keep her talking.
“And you two planed the whole thing together?” I said.
She nodded.
“Of course! And what a brilliant plan it was. We would kidnap the top echelon of Death, Inc., send the Board into an uproar, and then like magic I would appear—sadly, the only one to have escaped from the kidnapper’s clutches. The Board would grant me the interim Presidency of Death, Inc., since I was the highest-level Executive left. Then unbeknownst to everyone else, Vritra and I would find the Cup of Jamshid, dispose of any other contenders for the position, and have the market cornered on Death. And no matter what the Board did, we’d have all the control!”
I stared at her. It really was a brilliant coproduction between two seriously twisted minds.
“That’s terrible, Thalia, and really mean-spirited,” I said. “How could you do it?”
“No, the question is: How could you come back and stick your nose into something that doesn’t concern you? I would’ve laughed if anyone had even suggested that you would actually try to attempt those stupid tasks.”
“Hey! I completed those tasks, you bitch!”
I saw the shift in her thinking right there and then. The idea that I might actually be Death had never even entered her brain. I could see her mind start working in overtime, reassessing the situation as quickly as it could—which, knowing Thalia, was pretty damn quick.
I knew I had only one chance to stop her before my modelicious-looking sister from Hell could think of something truly terrible to do to me.
“I’m sorry, Thalia. You’re my sister, and I guess even though you’re actually a horrible, evil creature underneath it all . . . I still love you. So, it kind of sucks to have to do this to you.”
I raised my hand and pointed my index finger at her chest.
“Do it, Callie!” Clio screamed.
“Die,” I whispered.
Now, I knew that Thalia was still immortal because she was part of my bloodline, but if I could set her on fire in an exact repeat of what happened with the Devil, then I would have the advantage.
I almost cried when Thalia’s body erupted in flame.
“You bitch!” she shrieked as she dropped Jarvis and Clio, her body engulfed in a raging inferno.
The moment I saw that Clio and Jarvis were out of harm’s way, I rushed Thalia, hitting her right in the stomach, the force of our collision sending us flying out the window, each of us clutching on to the other like a pair of tandem skydivers.
We hit the ground hard, both of us getting the air knocked out of our lungs.
“Damn, that hurt,” I wheezed. But it didn’t hurt half as bad as the kick to the head that Thalia gave me as she was clambering to her feet.
“You stupid bitch!” she screamed as she made another run for my head. This time I saw it coming and was able to roll out of the way, but not before I caught sight of her mangled face and hair. She wasn’t regenerating as quickly as the Devil—and she wasn’t in the middle of a shape-shift, either—so the damage was pretty bad. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, and her nose was just a smidgen melted-looking. Her hair was black with soot and scorched almost to her scalp.
Yep, my evil sister looks like crap.
As she raced for me again, her fists balled and her teeth bared, I decided that I really didn’t want to deal with her anymore. I was tired of her bad attitude and her evil-looking, lashless eyes.
“Gopi!” I screamed, hoping that there were at least a few of the ladies still in existence. “Gopi! This is Vritra’s wife! She’s bad!”
Thalia just stared at me, disbelieving.
“Are you insane? We killed all those Gopi—”
The first Gopi attacked from behind, slamming herself into Thalia, so that the two ended up in a heap on the ground.
“Well, I resurrected them,” I said as I watched three more Gopi pile onto my sister. I had experienced a Gopi attack firsthand, so I decided that it would be just fine to leave Thalia in their capable—if half-dead—hands.
Like I’d been saying, I had bigger fish to fry.
“Vritra!” I screamed. “Show yourself!”
Sidestepping dismembered Gopi body parts, and what was left of the goop men, I felt just like Indra when he called out the nasty demon the last time I was here: totally insane.
You didn’t goad the bad guy like that unless you had a plan, and I was not in possession of anything even resembling a plan.
When I reached the castle moat, I stopped and screamed again:
“VRITRA, SHOW YOURSELF!”
There was a low rumbling sound, and then Detective Davenport came striding out of the castle’s drawbridge dragging Indra on a piece of chain behind him like a dog.
Oh, Lord, how stupid had I been, I thought to myself. I had never put together the truth.
Detective Davenport was Vritra.
“You called,” the detective said. I saw that he had put on another nicely tailored men’s suit and a pair of highly polished dress shoes to come out of his castle and meet me.
Talk about being Mr. Vanity, I thought disgustedly. The man was worse than Madonna when it came to costume changes. I really was afraid this whole experience was gonna put me off shopping for at least the next six months.
“We’re gonna end this now,” I said, my voice coming out firm and confident—score one for me.
But instead of shaking in his shoes and cowing before me, Davenport only laughed. And it was not a nice laugh.
“Don’t you dare laugh all condescendingly at me, you jerkoid,” I yelled, but this only made him laugh harder.
I didn’t know how to shut the guy up permanently—even though I thought a knuckle sandwich would do just fine if I were given half an opportunity to serve it. I could try the “die” thing, but I had a feeling that he’d weather all the burning just fine. Other than that, I was at a complete and utter dead end.
“Have I stymied the great Queen of Death?” he said.
I had nothing. Not one idea that would allow me to slay Vritra and put everything back together the way it was before all this started. In truth, all I wanted was to be Dorothy and click my ruby red slippers together three times until I was home again, safely tucked in bed with a pint of Cherry Garcia.
But going home wasn’t an option for me; I didn’t know if it ever really had been. I was the daughter of Death—no, amend that; I wasn’t the daughter of Death . . . I was Death—and as much as I whined about it, I was never going to escape it. I was never gonna be anything but what I was.
“No way have you stymied this white girl!” I yelled, preparing myself for utter annihilation by goading the detective just that little bit more. “You’re nothing but a slimy little eel that the world should’ve gotten rid of eons ago!”
Davenport howled, rage glistening out of every pore, as he sized me up for attack.
I was at the point of no return. I was going to have to try my “die” routine and hope for the best. I closed my eyes, said a quick good-bye to all the people in my life that I loved: Jarvis and Clio and my mom and dad, Runt—
My thoughts were interrupted by a loud bark from inside the castle. Suddenly, I saw her. She was moving so fast she looked like a streak of midnight as she raced across the ground, her teeth pointed right at the detective’s ankles.
“Runt!” I screamed as she made contact.
She was unstoppable, gripping his leg and shaking her head around to dig her teeth deeper into his flesh. All this to protect . . . me.
“Stupid dog!” he screamed, leaning back and kicking Runt hard in the side with his foot. She gave a heart-rending howl, and her body flew backward, limp.
“Runt, no!” I cried as I watched her disappear over the edge and into the moat.
“Oh my God,” I wailed. “Please not my dog.”
But she was gone.
I couldn’t stop crying. My hatred for the creature in front of me was so great that I thought I was going to burst with it. I started to march toward him, my hands balled into the tightest fists I could manage. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I tried to shake it off, but it grasped me so hard that I was forced to stop moving forward.
I turned on whoever was behind me, my eyes streaming and anger making my heart a hard ball of stone.
“Leave me alone!” I screamed, my rage palpable.
“I can’t,” Daniel said.
I shoved at him, trying to escape his grasp, pummeling him with all that I was worth, but he was too strong.
“I’m sorry, Callie,” he said, his eyes wistful. “I can’t let you do this.”
He held me as tight as he could to keep me from abusing him, then leaned down and kissed me hard on the lips.
“Good-bye,” he whispered as he broke the kiss and punched me firmly in the stomach. I fell forward, gasping for breath, the lack of oxygen making me see stars.
“I saved your life . . .” I wheezed.
“And I saved yours,” he said, then walked away. I sat kneeling on the ground, clutching at my aching stomach. I watched him go, my heart reeling from the betrayal. I couldn’t believe that I had misjudged him so badly.
He crossed the gap between the detective and where I lay in about twenty strides.
“I’m one of the other possibilities,” I heard Daniel say as he held out his hand to Davenport. “I want to offer my services to you. With me at your side, we can claim the mantle of Death by birthright, and no one can contest it.”
The detective looked uncertainly at Daniel. “You want to align yourself with me?”
“I do,” Daniel replied. “Shall we shake on it?”
He stuck out his hand, and the detective stared at it.
“It’s no trick,” Daniel said, turning to look back at me. “She’s less than nothing to me. I want to be Death.”
This seemed to cinch it for the detective—the jerk. He took Daniel’s hand, and they shook.
But not for long.
“Go to Hell,” Daniel said, slamming his other hand into the side of the detective’s head. He lost his balance, and they both pitched forward off the side of the drawbridge.
What the hell had just happened?
I barely had time to wonder at the insanity I had witnessed before there was a gut-wrenching earthquake, and the whole world seemed to go upside down.
Rising from the bottom of the moat was Vritra—in full serpent mode.
He was a hideous thing to behold as he thrust himself onto the ground and started sidewinding toward me. I quickly climbed to my feet, my stomach still aching, and started to run.
Right for Vritra.
I had forgotten something. Something I should’ve remembered a long time before this: I have the Sea Foam.
And I was gonna use it to kick the demon’s ass.
But before I could reach the serpent, it stopped moving forward and instead began to shake itself like a giant cat. I looked farther down its body and saw that Indra had the monster by the tail and was pulling him away from me.
“Indra!” I screamed. “Wait, I have something for you!”
I didn’t know how to transfer the Sea Foam to him manually, so I was gonna have to do it by magic.
I closed my eyes and wished with every ounce of my being that the Sea Foam would leave me and go over to him. My skin began to burn like it was being slathered in hot coals, but then the heat was gone, replaced with a shower of coolness that drenched me from the inside out.
When I opened my eyes, I knew the Sea Foam had left me.
Indra, still holding Vritra’s tail with one hand, reached inside his tattered pants and pulled out his scepter.
“I am avenged,” he yelled as he plunged the scepter into Vritra’s neck. Then, he took Vritra’s tail in both hands and leaned forward, sinking his teeth into the slimy scales. The demon howled in pain and rage and tried to turn back on itself to get at Indra, but it was no use; the scepter was in the way.
I watched, fascinated, as the Sea Foam raced out of Indra’s body and injected itself into Vritra’s skin, turning the giant demon tail a bright shade of gold.
It took only a few moments for the rest of his body to follow suit, each muted brown scale transmogrifying into a brilliant golden hue until the monster looked like a humongous, golden statue of itself. Then Indra pulled the scepter from Vritra’s body, and the giant demon exploded, sending tiny shards of golden glass in every direction.
Indra smiled and gave me the thumbs-up—which I weakly returned. He looked as pleased as punch that he’d vanquished his mortal enemy—with a little help from his friends.
“Callie,” Clio yelled as she and Jarvis led my father and the rest of the Death, Inc., Executives out of the castle and down the drawbridge. They all looked the worse for wear, but at least they were free and in one piece. Clio dropped our father’s arm and ran over to me.
“We couldn’t get them out of the chains with magic because they were spelled, but then I thought of summoning up some bolt cutters, and that totally did the trick,” she said, extremely proud of herself. It turned out that sometimes the practical choice worked far better than magic ever could.
“Good job,” I said, my voice catching in my throat as I ruffled her hair. She gave me a funny look.
“What’s wrong, Cal?”
More than anything in the world, I didn’t want to have to tell her about Runt and Daniel. Runt, who had saved my life more times than I could count, and Daniel . . . whose last lie saved us all. I still didn’t understand why he’d done it, why he’d sacrificed himself for me. Maybe I never would. And the awful part was that I’d totally thought he was a traitor, right up until the very moment he’d pushed Vritra into the moat and forced him to take on his true form.
Oh, Daniel . . .
“Where’s Runt?” Clio said, an edge of hysteria creeping into her voice. I couldn’t answer, or I would’ve started crying again.
“Where’s our dog!” she demanded, grabbing my arm and shaking it, trying to force me to speak.
“Clio . . .” I started to say, and then I heard something. It was very faint at first, and I put my finger to my mouth to shush her so that I could hear better.
If that’s what I think it is . . .
“Do you hear that?” I said frantically. I pulled away from Clio’s grasp and ran over to the side of the moat, crawling onto my belly so that I could see down.
I’d like to say that I believe in miracles . . . but this was almost too much.
Down inside the moat, on a piece of rock sticking out of the side of the dirt wall—the only such outcropping I could see in either direction—was Runt, standing on her hind legs and barking up a storm as she pawed at the sheer dirt wall. I don’t know how the dog managed to land on the only safe piece of real estate down there, and frankly I don’t care. The only thing that mattered to me and to Clio was that she was alive and very, very eager to get back onto safe ground.
“Someone help me get her up!” I called as I looked back to Clio. She ran over to my side and slithered onto her belly so that she could see over the edge, too.
“How did she get down there?” she asked me.
“It’s a long story—”
“And I know. You’ll tell me all about it later,” Clio said. I nodded, glad that we finally had an understanding.
“So, how we gonna do this?” I said, looking down at Runt, who was whining pitifully. Clio gave me a devilish smile.
“Can you get some of the Gopi to come over here?”
with a little help from the last few remaining Gopi, we were able to get Runt out of the moat. It’s very interesting what you can do with body parts when they’re not attached to a body.
Jarvis, Indra, and Father stayed to help us with Runt, but the rest of the Executives hightailed it out of Vritra’s realm as fast as the wormhole they conjured could take them. Not that I blamed them. The place was pretty horrible, and now that Vritra had been destroyed, the castle was starting to disintegrate, ravaged bodies falling every which way. It was pretty disgusting.
The Gopi had made short work of Thalia, wrapping her up in their tattered saris and presenting her to me like some kind of weirdo Christmas present. I hadn’t wanted to offend them, so I’d just smiled and nodded as nicely as I could. I did notice the small star tattoo on Thalia’s lower leg, and I instantly remembered the first time I saw it.
She’d come home from her first semester at college proudly brandishing her new tattoo at anyone who came into her sight. I’d been soooo jealous because Mother wouldn’t even let me get my ears pierced, let alone have someone ink something permanently onto my skin. Thalia had spent the whole weekend lording it over me, and I had totally detested her for it.
It’s funny the things we forget.
Well, I didn’t know what was going to become of my sister, but I had a pretty good idea that she was not gonna be at Thanksgiving this year. After what she’d pulled, I didn’t think that Purgatory was good enough for her. I mean, she did try to kill me, Father, a bunch of other innocent people—and she’d absolutely ruined Midori Sours for me.
Apparently, she’d committed a similar injustice to Father: at the Executive meeting where they’d all been kidnapped, they had drunk a toast in honor of Thalia’s promotion to Vice President in Charge of Asia. Of course, they had no idea that they were actually toasting with a Brandy Alexander—paralysis cocktail—that she and Vritra had whipped up especially for the occasion.
I don’t think my father or I would ever look at an alcoholic beverage in quite the same way. Nor did I think I would ever look at my father’s job in quite the same way, either.
As much as I loved my family, I was still so not ready to join the family business. The minute we’d pulled Runt up to safety, I’d been at Father’s arm, begging to be released from my suffering. I wanted those Death powers—and that nasty little voice—out of my head, and I meant now.
“Callie,” my father said, “we can only make the transference if we have the Cup of Jamshid.”
“But we do!” I said. “Jarvis, get your butt over here—spit spot, on the double now!”
Jarvis didn’t even bat an eyelash at my words, but came trotting over with the cup in hand. I took it from him and passed it to my father.
“But how did you—” my father began, but I cut him off.
“I gave it to Jarvis before Thalia came into the room.”
Jarvis nodded. “And I put an invisibility spell on it the moment it came into my possession. Just to be on the safer of sides.”
Father looked down at the cup, and once again it was a shiny, silvery color, all the tarnish completely gone. He handed me the cup, and I saw that it was full of liquid.
“Drink,” he said, and I did. It was cool and tropical and left a coconut aftertaste on my lips. Yummy.
I handed the cup back to him, and he lifted it to his mouth, drinking deeply. As soon as the liquid touched his lips, his body began to glow, and all the grief and exhaustion of the past few days was lifted from his face and shoulders. I didn’t need to be a magical rocket scientist to know that I was finally free of my burden.
“Why did you rescind my birthright?” I said suddenly. I didn’t know where the words had come from, but there they were right there for everyone to hear.
I expected Father to be mad at me for being so blunt, but instead he laughed.
“You were a child, Calliope. You weren’t ready for the job yet,” he said soothingly. Jarvis nodded, backing him up.
“The Devil made that wormhole in the basement so that he could lure you to the Cup of Jamshid before you were of age. If your father hadn’t asked the Board to rescind your birthright, you’d have been forced to take the job,” Jarvis finished, pleased with himself.
“So, it wasn’t because you didn’t think I could handle the job,” I asked.
He smiled fondly—no, cancel that—proudly at me.
“It was because I didn’t want you to be forced to do something that you weren’t ready for.”
“Oh.”
“Any more questions?” my father asked.
I nodded.
“Dad, can we go home now?”
epilogue
I sat at my desk in my old room at Sea Verge staring into one of those lighted makeup mirrors. I had had a real bitch of a time putting on the false eyelashes I’d bought at the drugstore that morning, but now that they were finally in place, I thought the effect was quite charming.
As I stared at my reflection, I found it hard to imagine that the silly young woman with the false eyelashes smiling back at me had ever been the Grim Reaper. But she had been, if only for a very few—yet very memorable—hours. Now, thank God, I was finally back to being my old, normal self.
Not that my life was ever gonna really be normal again. Since I was back in touch with my family, of course, it was expected that I’d show up for the obligatory holidays, family gatherings, etc., whether I wanted to or not. But strangely, I found that it wasn’t as much of a hardship as I had once made it out to be. In fact, I guess I was kind of looking forward to Christmas with the Grim Reaper and family—as weird as that sounded coming from the girl who once upon a time placed a Forgetting Charm on herself so she’d never have to deal with said crazy family again.
I dabbed a touch of perfume behind both ears and thought about what had happened when I’d shown back up to work. I still hadn’t asked Jarvis what excuse he’d given my boss about why I’d missed work, and frankly I didn’t want to know. Whatever he’d said had made everyone behave very solicitously toward me, and no one had said a damn thing about “taking off too much time,” or harassed me about “no paid vacation.” I decided that I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
I was startled out of my thoughts by a knock on the door, making me almost drop my precious bottle of Chanel No. 5 onto the floor.
“Crap,” I said, fumbling with the bottle. “Come in!”
The door opened, and Clio stepped inside, Runt right behind her. She looked lovely in a fitted yellow silk dress, and high-heeled sandals that looked vaguely familiar.
“Are those mine?” I asked, pointing at her shoes.
“And if they are, what are you gonna do about it?” she replied tartly.
I shrugged.
“Nothing. They look good.”
She blushed.
“Thanks. I wanted to let you know that the limo is here,” she said.
“It is?” I shrieked, fumbling with the clasp at the back of my dress. I’d borrowed a vintage deep purple Halston from my mother’s closet, and even though it looked amazing, it had been a bitch to put on.
“Here, let me help you,” Clio said, coming over and easily doing up the clasp.
“It’s harder when you’re doing it backward,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
I started hunting for my Manolos, but somehow they’d gotten shoved under the bed. I climbed to the floor—careful not to hurt the dress—and stuck my hand underneath the bed skirt like a vet birthing a baby cow.
“Go on down,” I called. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Uhm, Callie,” Clio said, and I looked up, surprised by her serious tone of voice. “I just wanted you to know that Daniel was a good guy. He didn’t mean to punch you in the stomach . . . well, not really.”
“Why’re you telling me this now?” I asked as I found one of the shoes and dragged it out of its hiding place.
“Because you should know. He used the Cup of Jamshid to find me and Runt back here at Sea Verge. He said that you needed us, that I shouldn’t believe anything bad anyone said about you. That you were the greatest person he had ever known—and he’d known a lot of people.”
Runt came out from under the bed, the other shoe in her mouth. I took it from her, but didn’t have the heart to put either of them on.
“Yeah? He said that?”
Clio nodded.
“He knew what the cup was, Callie. He could’ve used it to trick you and become Death himself . . . but he didn’t. I don’t know why. But he didn’t.”
I sat there in stunned silence. Why had I never realized any of that before?
“Well, I guess I better go down and make sure they don’t leave without us,” Clio said. She closed the door softly behind her, taking Runt and leaving me alone with my thoughts.
I had looked long and hard inside that moat, but I had never found any trace of Daniel’s body. I had wanted to think that he went straight up to Heaven—do not pass Go; do not collect two hundred dollars—and was right now playing an unending game of Parcheesi with God, but who knew?
Only Death.
Maybe someday I would work up the nerve to pull out his Death Record and see what really happened to him . . .
And who he really was.
But until then I didn’t want to think about sad things that I had no control over.
I slipped my shoes on and stood up, admiring myself in the mirror. I thought I looked pretty damn good, even if I did say so myself.
Although I really wasn’t one hundred percent feeling it, I put on a happy face and thought about how exciting it was to be going to my first Bollywood premiere. Indra had invited my whole family to the screening of his “Masterpiece” (his word, not mine), kind of as a thank-you for all the help we’d given him, I guess.
At first I did wonder if Kali had put him up to it, but then I decided that I really didn’t care what the reason was. It was just kind of cool to be invited.
Period.
I knew that no matter what happened tonight, I was going to go to this thing, and I was going to make myself have a good time—even if it killed me.
I gave myself a quick wink in the mirror for courage, then I picked up my clutch bag. I flipped off the overhead light and closed my bedroom door firmly behind me as I headed down the stairs, following the gentle hum of conversation coming from the front hall. I could just make out Clio’s voice intoning the words “Mr. Sex on a Stick.”
Oh, brother, I mused, here we go again.
I had a funny feeling this premiere was gonna turn out to be a hell of a lot more interesting than I’d imagined.
I just hope the Gopi remembered to bring their heads.
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DEATH’S DAUGHTER
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