How to be Death (5 page)

“You didn’t have to be so rude,” I said to Jarvis as he hustled me away from the girls and toward the exit.

“I am not rude and I am not a Debbie Downer,” Jarvis growled back at me as we hit the cool morning air, the shop door closing behind us with a soft
thunk
.

“Besides, you have an appointment to keep,” Jarvis said brightly. “And you mustn’t be late. It is a true honor for Mademoiselle La Rue to offer her services so freely.”

“All right,” I said, not wanting to argue with someone taller and snootier than me. “I’ll be good and go see the French lady.”

Jarvis smiled, pleased I was letting him win—because, more than anything, the ex-faun liked to win an argument. I think spending the majority of his existence as a faun, and a short one at that, had given him a Napoleon complex, making him testy and argumentative when he wasn’t taken seriously. It
was an annoying part of his personality, one you could
almost
overlook when he was small, but now that he was a supertall human with long, gangling limbs, it was less easy to ignore … and even more frustrating.

The hustle and bustle of Paris enveloped us as I followed Jarvis down winding cobblestone streets and open-air markets, past outdoor cafés crammed full of Parisians calmly sipping their espressos while, next to them, expatriates from North America and the rest of Europe hurriedly scribbled the pathos of their existential crises into dog-eared journals. It was like a mini-Shangri-la for the disaffected and disenfranchised of the world.

I’d only been to Paris twice with my family when I was a teenager, but each time we’d done the tourist thing: museums, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles … in that order. I’d never been given free rein to go where I wanted in Paris before, had never walked down rambling old streets that seemed to lead nowhere then magically opened up to reveal seventeenth-century squares filled with tiny shops and cafés—and let me tell you, it was amazing.

“Do you like the city?” Jarvis asked as we walked underneath a crumbling stone archway and stepped into a tiny alleyway, the surrounding buildings so high they blocked out most of the natural light.

“Very much,” I said as we picked our way across the ragged cobblestones, Jarvis in the lead.

As we walked, he grinned back at me, his eyes dancing with pleasure—and that was when I realized Jarvis could just as easily have opened a wormhole right into Mademoiselle La Rue’s shop; instead he was giving me a treat, showing me the Paris he loved.

“Paris is awe—” I started to say, but wasn’t able to complete the sentence because I had to prevent myself from running into Jarvis, who’d stopped short in front of a tiny wooden door.

“We’re here,” he said, pointing to a hand-carved sign hanging neatly above the doorway that read:
SALON DE COUTURIER—PROPRIÉTAIRE: MADEMOISELLE LA RUE
.

We stood there way longer than necessary because I was
waiting for Jarvis to open the door and go inside ahead of me, but he didn’t budge.

“What?” I said, gesturing for him to go in first, but he shook his head.

“I’m not allowed inside. It’s by appointment only.”

“But you’re with me and it’s my appointment, so …” I trailed off.

Jarvis shook his head.

“You must go alone, Calliope.”

I sighed, hating when Jarvis said stuff like that. Whenever ceremony dictated I do something alone, it usually meant the event was going to require a lot of sacrifice on my part and it was not going to be fun.

“It seems silly for you to wait outside …” But Jarvis was immovable. So with a feeling of growing disquiet, I reluctantly pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside, expecting the worst.

It was a tiny space, boasting wide, wooden plank floors and gorgeous, white plastered walls that looked as if they’d been installed before the French Revolution was even a blip on Marie Antoinette’s radar. Just below the point where ceiling met wall someone had hand-painted a frieze of baby angels frolicking on fluffy cream clouds, masterful brushwork lighting their cherubic faces from within as they contemplated their surroundings with innocently manufactured expressions, their adorable derrieres and apple-round cheeks yummy enough to pinch.

While the rest of the shop was classic in its design, the space’s good bones were overwhelmed by an ostentatious Louis XIVth desk and chair set, the golden gilt and scrolling so over the top, so gaudy, I had a hard time ripping my eyes away. A matching full-length mirror, dressed in the same eye-catching gilt as its desk and chair brethren, stood in the corner of the room, reflecting back the whole of the shop in the silvered expanse of its face.

My first impression was I’d have been happier shopping at Walmart than in this snooty shop—but we all know that the only princess gownage at Walmart is in the Barbie aisle.

As soon as I’d stepped into the room, the tinkling of the tiny
silver bell above the front door had given away my presence, causing Mademoiselle La Rue to trot out from the back of the shop, her softly rounded body firm and supple as a racehorse. She wore her mane of light blond hair long and loose around her shoulders so that it seemed to float around her face in waves of softness, her pale pink lips, egalitarian brow, and aquiline nose instantly giving away her Gallic origins. Her large bosom and swollen hips were encased in a pale pink, watered silk wrap dress, cinched in the middle to show off a tiny, twenty-four-inch waist. Her legs were pale and smooth, her pink manicured toes peeking out shyly from within camel-colored peep-toe slingback pumps.

She smiled warmly at me, her pale lips curving slightly as she took in my Marc Jacobs blue jean dress and bright red ballet flats. My hair had finally started to grow again, the thick brown locks falling just above my shoulder blades and naturally curling inward a little bit at the ends, creating the illusion that it actually had some body. I’d worn my hair short for years, realizing it was easier to maintain a short cut than to spend hours in front of my bathroom mirror brushing rats’ nests out of my long hair. But since I’d moved back to Sea Verge, I’d begun to let my hair grow again, and now I didn’t even mind the morning detangling ritual; I found it cathartic even.

“You have modern tastes, yes?” Mademoiselle La Rue said, her English lightly accented, but impeccable.

I had trouble deciding how old the Frenchwoman was; her face was unlined, her body in the full blush of youth. In the timeless fashion of the French, she could have been twenty-five or forty-five, it was impossible to tell—but there was something about her voice, something
knowing
in the lilt of her words, that made me think she was much, much older than I even suspected.

She possessed a Marilyn Monroe nineteen-fifties vibe that was blatantly apparent in the contours of her shape (large bosom and hips, tiny waist) and the way she wore her makeup: heavy black liner and thick, painted brown brows. She could have been one of Alfred Hitchcock’s cool, blond beauties ripped from her celluloid home and thrust into the modern era.

“If by modern tastes, you mean I’m more ‘Alexander McQueen’ Givenchy than traditional Givenchy, then, yes, I have
very
modern tastes,” I said and Mademoiselle La Rue laughed, the gentle sound like the burbling of a mountain spring.

“Well, I can appreciate any couturier who can drape his own fabric,” Mademoiselle said, “and Monsieur McQueen was a master.”

With those words, I realized my mistake—the old adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover” totally applied here. Mademoiselle La Rue may have owned a few pieces of gaudy French furniture and dressed like the heroine from
Vertigo
(and who says there was anything wrong with that?), but behind all the voluptuous beauty beat the heart of a true fashionista.

“Please call me Noisette,” Mademoiselle La Rue said, smiling shyly at me.

I told her to call me Callie—and then we spent the rest of the afternoon drinking espresso and talking favorite designers while Noisette quietly sketched the outline of the gown I would one day wear to my first ever Death Dinner and Masquerade Ball.

So needless to say, I had not stuffed the gown in my weekend bag. I knew quality when I saw it and Noisette had made me the most beautiful gown I’d ever seen. As far as I was concerned, it was both a pleasure and a privilege to wear it.

“Shall we go then?” Jarvis asked, as visions of secret fashion assignations in Paris danced in my head.

I nodded, then shivered as the odd spooky feeling I’d had earlier returned to settle uncomfortably around my shoulders like an unwanted mink stole. I followed Jarvis and Runt out of the library, trying to dispel the morbid thoughts, but nothing I imagined was potent enough to displace the unease I felt. No matter what I did, I could not seem to unseat the gnawing dread that was starting to replace my excitement at attending my first ever Death Dinner as President and CEO of Death, Inc. Of course, I had no idea this was only a harbinger of what was to come, that I was about to spend the next twenty-four hours trapped in a blood-drenched whodunit.

The amount of luggage we had was ridiculous. Six bags for a three-person party—all because Jarvis traveled with way more luggage than any normal dude had a right to. Runt and I each had, like,
a
bag, but Jarvis had packed his entire wardrobe
and
the kitchen sink into four large, brown steamer trunks that looked like they’d have been more at home on the
Titanic
than in the twenty-first century.

“Are you sure you really need all that?” I’d asked as we stood in the foyer at Sea Verge, preparing to wormhole our way to the Haunted Hearts Castle, the location of this year’s annual Death Dinner and All Hallows’ Eve “Eve” Masquerade Ball.

Set in the heart of the California Central Coast, the Haunted Hearts Castle had been the chosen locale of the event for the last twenty years. The Castle’s owner, Donald Ali, was one of those rare human beings intuitively aware of the Supernatural world. He came from a long line of truly psychic men and women who had made alliances with the purveyors of the Afterlife, creating a niche for themselves as liaisons between the human world and its Supernatural brethren. They weren’t immortal and most of them had no magic-handling skills to speak of, but they were Sensitives, eager to engage with the unseen Supernatural world and collect all the “perks” that went
along with working for and being socially involved with the Afterlife.

Even though I’d lobbied hard against it, Jarvis had insisted we take a wormhole to California. I’d begged him to consider a more traditional form of transportation, but my Executive Assistant was dead set on making me wormhole it to the Haunted Hearts Castle, telling me that no Grim Reaper under his watch was ever going to travel commercial to a formal Death, Inc., event. I offered a compromise which I thought was great: Death, Inc., could buy a personal jet and then we could all hit the West Coast in style—no commercial airlines, no TSA shenanigans; just luxury, luxury,
luxury
—but sadly, that suggestion was ixnayed, too.

Which was how I ended up on my knees in the middle of one of the Moroccan-themed courtyards at the Haunted Hearts Castle, throwing my guts up all over the hand-painted mosaic tile work—and let me just tell you that linguine backward is not a pleasant experience.

With that said, it’s pretty apparent I am
not
a fan of traveling by wormhole and will do anything within my power to avoid it because, invariably, stepping into a great whirling mass of energy so I can be shunted into another time and/or place leaves me nauseous and unhinged. I know it’s a necessary part of being Death, but I hate it with a passion reserved for cilantro and people that hit their pets.

Anyway, after I’d heaved the last of my lunch onto the gorgeous, blue-and-white mosaic tiles leading to the guest bedroom Runt and I would share for the duration of our stay at the Castle, I picked up my weekend bag—sans vomit, thanks to Runt’s quick nose shove—and stepped into what I can only call a true masterpiece of opulence. We’re talking sumptuous scarlet and indigo brocade tapestries on the walls, thick octagonal terra-cotta tile floors overlain by antique carpets chosen for the metallic accents that neatly dovetailed with the neo-Byzantium-styled gold leaf of the fireplace mantel; the place was an Oriental pleasure palace for the senses.

“Wow,” I said, setting my bag down on one of the two full-size beds and running my hand across the smooth sheen of its deep burgundy, watered silk coverlet. “This place is unreal.”