The meaning of my words finally seemed to penetrate, and he sighed, tearing his eyes away from the grisly sight that surrounded us. The car began to jerk, wheels grinding against the track as we neared our final destination.
“I’m sorry, shall I do it now?” he asked, distracted.
I nodded my head. “Yes. Now would
definitely
be a good time.”
I held on to the little faun, as much for my support as his own, while he began the preparations for the spell. He mumbled a few words under his breath and then the air around us split, revealing a gaping hole in the ether in front of us. Pulses of staticky, amber-colored lightning cascaded out of the wormhole, coursing down the metal carriage of the subway car and slithering like electrically charged worms as they shot across the floor toward us.
Jarvis let out a low moan as the light converged around his hooves and then shot up his haunches. Instinctively, I took a step back as the fierce amber light consumed Jarvis’s whole body and he moaned again, painfully. The light flared and then began to burn out, its gold tones fading into Jarvis’s skin. As soon as he looked reasonably normal again, I reached out for him, steadying his body as he fainted into unconsciousness.
I gasped, never having seen a wormhole behave in quite this manner before. Usually they were more like swirling masses of black nothingness that you stepped through in order to quickly get to a new location in time and/or space. Sure, it beat the hell out of traditional traveling methods as far as efficiency was concerned, but I wasn’t really a fan. The whole experience always left me feeling like a load of wash that’d been tossed around too long in an overenergetic dryer.
The train jerked twice as it screeched to a stop, the doors sliding open to admit the next wave of commuters. There was a bloodcurdling scream as the people on the platform discovered the carnage awaiting them inside. As much as instinct prevailed upon me to see what was happening back on the platform, I didn’t dare turn my head. I was afraid if I wasted any more time, Jarvis and I were going to get lynched by the angry mob. With as much strength as I could muster, I looped my arm around Jarvis’s waist and, straining under our combined weight, dragged the two of us into the gaping wormhole.
It was only much later, as I stood on the brink of losing everything and everyone I loved, that I truly understood the omnipotence of fate. It didn’t matter what choice I’d made that day—to stay or to go was irrelevant—the hands of fate had been set into motion by a chain of events I had absolutely no control over. Of course, I had no idea then that fate was actually leading us out of the frying pan . . .
and into the searing heat of the fire.
four
The wormhole took me back to work on time—actually with
two
minutes to spare—and in a relatively economical manner. I usually likened travel by wormhole to riding a Tilt-a-Whirl on the “spin your head off setting,” but on this trip there’d been only minimal trauma to my person via the wormhole’s pummeling effects and I’d even managed, unbelievably, to keep my chicken shawarma pita down in my stomach where it belonged.
As glad as I was not to be on the subway car anymore, I had to say going back to work was not exactly what I’d imagined when I’d initially stepped into the wormhole. Personally, I didn’t want to return to my cubicle and stare at my eyestrainingly bright computer screen while trying not to worry about whether or not the NYPD was hot on my trail, patiently waiting to take me out back and firing-squad me with a pack of Uzi machine guns. Ostensibly, my arrest would be for masterminding a full-scale terrorist massacre on the New York City Subway System—something I did
not
do and had
no
intention of taking any false credit for—but God knows what other trumped-up charges they might decide to add to the warrant.
My fear of the NYPD was then compounded by the terror that my boss, Hyacinth, would stride out of her office to ask me where her dry cleaning was and, instead, would find me nervously biting my nails as I stood over my shell-shocked and “not so imaginary” faun friend who was sitting catatonically in my rolling black office chair.
Loverly.
Lucky for us, the wormhole hadn’t dropped us off at my cubicle, but had had the decency to deposit us into an empty stall in one of the office unisex bathrooms. That meant there were at least a hallway and the office kitchen between me and the end of normal life as I knew it.
“Jarvis? Are you okay?” I asked, crawling over to where he lay on the cold, tiled floor. He shrugged, his face turned away so I couldn’t read his expression, but I had a feeling Jarvis was not feeling okay, regardless of what the shrug implied.
I crawled over to the bathroom door and slid the lock into place. There was another bathroom at the other end of the hall, so if someone had to pee they could just go there. I sighed, easing myself against the wall facing a bank of sinks and the long rectangular—and unforgiving—mirror that hung above them. I could finally see Jarvis’s face reflected back at me and was surprised to discover he wasn’t as badly off as I’d first thought.
“I really need your help,” I said lamely.
He caught me looking over at him and gave me a wink, shaking off the traumatized look he’d worn ever since we’d wormholed out of the subway. He sighed and sat up, shakily brushing the dirt and debris from the subway car off his suit jacket.
“I have been racking my brain, trying to understand what happened,” Jarvis said. He stood up and walked over to the bank of sinks, turning one on and vigorously washing his hands with the tropical-scented hand soap from the dispenser.
My dad’s Executive Assistant was a bit of a clean freak, but then I was, too, so at least we had that in common.
“Any ideas yet?” I asked. “Because, honestly, I feel like there’s some jerkoid out there trying to set me up. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
Jarvis nodded, drying his hands with a paper towel.
“And what was that Vargr thing?” I added. “And how does it figure into all of this?”
“A Vargr,” Jarvis answered, “is similar to a werewolf, but with one very marked difference.”
“Yeah?” I said uncertainly, really hoping this wouldn’t send Jarvis off on a lecture tangent. The poor guy loved to impart esoteric knowledge the way other people loved to . . . well, I couldn’t actually think of anything other people loved to do as much as Jarvis loved to lecture.
“A Vargr is never made. It is only born,” Jarvis said succinctly, raising a well-shaped brow in my direction and almost daring me to comment on his lack of lecture.
I opened my mouth to comment, but immediately thought better of it. I wasn’t gonna be the one to look a gift horse in the mouth—I
sorely
wanted to encourage more succinctness in the future—so I wisely let it ride.
“And what was it doing on the subway with us?” I said instead. “It obviously wanted to eat me, but someone or something intervened.”
Jarvis nodded his agreement.
“You’re right when you say you don’t have enough control over your powers to do the kind of damage we saw on the subway train,” he added. “Although please do not take that as a slight, Miss Calliope. I’m sure if you put your mind to it, you could learn to do much worse.”
Someone telling me I could learn to perpetrate magical mass killings if I wanted to shouldn’t have made me feel better, but it did. I’d known in my heart Jarvis would see the truth, that I really
was
a helpless magic practitioner. As a kid, my dad had forbidden my sisters and me from practicing magic at Sea Verge—not that the ban had stopped either of my siblings from doing what they wanted. They both had way more cunning than I’d ever possess, and they ascertained as long as they kept their magical endeavors “outside” the confines of my dad’s house, then they weren’t really subverting his wishes. I’d always been more of a stickler to the rules, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do something that went against my dad’s wishes back then. Unlike either of my sisters, I didn’t even begin to
think
about rebelling until I went away to college.
I was the average kid in the family—the middle child, sandwiched in between an abrasive, supermanipulative, Type A older sister (Thalia), who embraced her supernatural birthright with way too much gusto, and a younger, computer genius sister (Clio), who also happened to look like a miniature Kate Moss in combat boots.
I guess I should’ve been bitter and resentful about the short shrift I’d been given in life—apparently, I got the average gene, while my sisters split all the others—but instead of lingering on my lack of excessive brains and beauty, I did the one thing I could think of that would set me apart from my luckier siblings: I became the token normal person in my abnormal family.
Literally.
I was the one who got acne, gained twenty pounds when I hit puberty, and whose brain got all hot and bothered when it looked at fashion magazines, but then short-circuited when it had to study for a test. The funny thing was, even though my sisters were both more talented and more beautiful than me, I was never actually jealous of either of them. I may have whined about the weight and the acne, but the rest of it, the normal part, I loved.
Because my family was so vastly different, all that human frailty was extremely alluring. I very badly wanted to be like everyone else, with their human problems and instinctive knowledge of just how finite time actually was—something which forever forced them to live within the constraints of the here and now, aware that Death was riding just beyond the horizon, lustily coveting their souls.
I left any thoughts of Death as a Pale Rider behind and returned to the problem at hand.
“Thanks, Jarvis. I appreciate your mass-killing support. No matter how many times I get singled out as the bad guy, you’re always in my corner. Thank you.”
Jarvis waved my thank-you aside, his brow knit in concentration as I watched the wheels spinning away in his head. I could see he was as baffled by the situation as I was.
“I think what you said might be correct, Miss Calliope,” he said finally. “Although there is one other possibility, I can’t imagine it would be that . . .”
I ignored the last part, fixating on the idea of who could be trying to frame me.
“So who could it be? I mean, it can’t be Thalia,” I offered, biting my thumbnail. “She’s in Purgatory under lock and key.”
My older sister—and the person who had previously tried to make me the fall guy in her wicked scheme to take over Death, Inc., and all the rest of Death’s purveyance—had been sentenced to one hundred years of solitude in a cramped cell in Purgatory.
And I had no doubt that were we to go take a peek, this was exactly where we would still find her. Security in Purgatory was insanely tight, something I knew from personal experience. Jarvis and I had recently been on a “research” trip to the Hall of Death (housed within the confines of the Death, Inc., building in Purgatory), and we’d had a slight run-in with the armored knights guarding the place: I’d almost lost my head to a broadsword during our visit, and needless to say, it was not something I was dying to repeat anytime in the near future.
“Yes, I suppose it would seem unlikely that she would be able to escape without help,” Jarvis murmured, but his mind seemed elsewhere. “The security in Purgatory is nothing if not reliable. Also, your father made certain the original brimstone structure was retrofitted with every security allowance possible when he created the Death, Inc., offices.”
“So this is what we do know,” I said. “We know that we don’t know who’s trying to set me up. We also know we don’t know what that Vargr was doing on the subway with us. And we definitely know that we don’t know what the hell we’re gonna do about any of this!”
I moaned at the hopelessness of our circumstances, quietly banging the back of my head against the white subway-tiled wall in frustration.
“Frankly, I can think of only one possible next step,” Jarvis said, leaning against the sink. “I think it would be best if we returned to Sea Verge and consulted with your father.”
I swallowed hard.
I knew Jarvis was right. The smartest thing to do under these circumstances was to go to my dad for help. He was Death, for God’s sake, and I knew without a doubt he would help me no matter who or what was trying to frame me. Still, I didn’t really want to go back to Sea Verge and have my dad fix all my problems for me.
Once upon a time maybe, but not now.
Things had changed. I’d been working hard to shed the old me, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give the new me a test spin. I would take the initiative this time and not just passively let some asshole use me as a dodge for his/ her evil scheming. I was gonna fight for my good name, and if I drew a little blood in the process, well then, so be it.
I mean, I don’t want to be a wuss forever, do I?
I looked around me at the white-tiled bathroom, realizing the irony of my situation. It was right here in this very spot where, only a few precious months ago, I’d begun my return to the supernatural world. It was in this very restroom Jarvis had used a magical cupcake to unspell a forgetting charm I’d placed on myself and then informed me of my father’s kidnapping and begged me to return home with him. Of course, like the sap that I am, I’d relented and we’d made the journey (via wormhole) to Sea Verge that same afternoon. It was there, in the bosom of my familial home, that my mother and our family’s lawyer, Father McGee, had strong-armed me into taking over Death, Inc., until my dad could be found. Little did I know the strange odyssey I would be forced to embark on—or the friends I would make along the way—as I sought to save my dad’s job and my family’s immortality.
“Okay, I see how talking to my dad is an option,” I began, weighing my words, “but first, I want to call Daniel. He might have some ideas and I—”