How to be Death (6 page)

Runt followed me inside, dropping her pink leather bag on the floor beside the other bed while I went back and closed the courtyard door, extinguishing some of the natural light that had flooded the room upon our entrance.

“It’s lovely,” she agreed, her toenails click-clacking on the terra-cotta tile as she wandered over to check out the attached bathroom. To her pleasure, someone from the Castle staff had thoughtfully placed a water bowl and food dish filled to the brim with dog kibble underneath the white pedestal sink for her to use during her stay. On closer inspection we discovered the bowls were actually expensive white bone china soup tureens, their delicate fluted tops rimmed with a light cornflower blue pattern that blended perfectly with the minute blue-and-white mosaic tiles of the bathroom floor.

“Is that a closet?” I asked, sidestepping Runt’s water bowl so I could open the white wooden closet door and peek inside.

“Not much to it,” Runt said—and I had to agree. It was the thinnest closet I’d ever seen, not even seven inches in width by my guess, making it impossible to hang anything substantial inside it.

“What do you put in there?” I asked, but it was a rhetorical question. Obviously the closet, like many of the other decorative features of the Castle, was only for show.

Closing the shallow closet, we left the bathroom and returned to the bedroom.

“I think I’m gonna take a nap, Cal,” Runt said as she hopped up onto her bed and circled three times, curling up in a tight ball of fluffy black fur in the center of the coverlet.

I looked out the window—there were two in the room, each separated from the other by a sliver of wall—and gaped at the beautiful panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, marveling at how the sun resembled a pat of butter melting over the horizon.

“I’m gonna go for a walk, clear my head,” I said, entranced by the view through the windows. “Maybe get a better look at that sunset.”

My words fell on deaf ears. Runt was already snoring softly into her armpit. I lifted the edge of the coverlet over her, tucking it in around her prone form, then I slipped my sandals on and went outside for a better view.

*   *   *

“shit.”

When you run into someone you don’t want to see, there’s something known as a ten-second rule: You have ten seconds to either hide, pretend you don’t see them, or suck it up and say “hi.”

I’d wasted nine seconds of my precious ten standing stock-still in the middle of the garden, my heart racing the Kentucky Derby inside my chest. I wanted to run—you could definitely lump that into the hiding category—but shock had bolted me to the walkway, my feet stuck to the brickwork like they’d been superglued there. As the final second came and went, I cringed, realizing I was screwed. I hadn’t managed to make an exit, so now I was going to have to endure the suck-it-up-and-say-“hi” option.

Ugh.

I was trapped in one of the myriad sculpture gardens that graced the Haunted Hearts Castle—they all had specific names, but since they looked pretty much the same to me, I had no idea which one I’d stumbled into—so it wasn’t like I could pretend I didn’t see him as he stood by the edge of the garden, looking out at the vista that lay a thousand feet below him, the brilliant sapphire jewel tone of the Pacific Ocean edged with silver where waves crested and broke across the sandy lip of the beach.

He had his back to me, but from the rigid set of his shoulders, I could tell he knew I was there. His hair was still as dark and thick as I remembered, but now he’d cut it so short the pale skin at the nape of his neck was exposed, making him
seem
vulnerable even though I knew he was anything but. He was wearing an untucked white button-down shirt and a pair of loose khakis rolled up at the ankle, but my imagination immediately took liberties where Daniel, the former Devil’s protégé, was concerned, and instead, I saw him the way I remembered him best: sprawled naked as a jaybird across the bed of my old Battery Park City apartment, a wry, seductive grin inked across his face. We’d spent enough time together that I knew every curve of his body, every hard place where muscle met bone and
sinew. I’d licked and kissed every inch of him, and in the privacy of my dreams, I still did.

Daniel was the man whose very name made me want to cry because I’d loved him then lost him without even really meaning to. He was my big love—I knew that in my heart—and I’d fucked it up by letting some jerkoid finger me on a New York City Subway platform. I know it sounds crass—and it was—but it was the truth. I’d been scared of the magnitude of our relationship, had even, out of fear, pushed him away, and then I’d done the one thing he could never forgive: I’d cheated.

Therein lay my dilemma.

I was in love with Daniel—and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Especially now that he was the acting Steward of Hell, looking after the Devil’s former dominion while God figured out how to punish Lucifer for committing the ultimate faux pas: trying to stage a coup on Heaven and Purgatory. My friends and I, including Daniel, had foiled the Devil’s plot, but during the course of the endeavor I’d lost a number of people I loved—including my man—and even though Daniel was still alive, he was as dead, at least to me, as all the others were.

My one comfort was that his new job had him so busy undoing all the evil stuff the Devil had done down in Hell, that it left him no time for any kind of a personal life—this important piece of info I’d wheedled out of Runt, whose father, Cerberus, had been granted the position “Hand to the Steward of Hell” for his part in helping to unravel the Devil’s nefarious plans—and if anyone knew what Daniel was up to these days, it was him.

“How you doing, Cal?”

While I’d been mentally undressing him, Daniel had turned around—and the effect he had on my heart was devastating. My breath caught in my throat so it was all I could do to gurgle a strangled, “Hi, Daniel” back at him.

Though the sun was still out, its last rays keeping the night at bay, I felt frozen in place by the intensity of his gaze. “Paul Newman eyes” my mother had called them when she’d first gotten a look at Daniel’s ice blue peepers. To my surprise, she’d given me a sly wink of approval—something I’d rarely gotten from her in the past and would be even more hard pressed to
come by in the future since she’d left her old life behind and returned to the sea.

As much as I disliked how she’d handled the situation, I couldn’t really fault my mother for ditching out on Clio and me—my dad’s murder had pulverized her already-fragile psyche, and then my older sister’s defection, and subsequent murder, had been the death knell. The dual blow of losing both husband and daughter had turned our mother into a wraith, a Milquetoast ghost of her former self. Clio and I hadn’t known what to do with her, so we’d brought her back to Sea Verge—the home my parents had shared for so many years—and installed her in her old rooms, hoping it would somehow draw her out. Instead, it’d done the opposite: She’d burrowed even deeper inside herself, sitting for hours on end in an old Chippendale chair that looked out over the mercurial blue sea. And then one day she was gone. Back to the water from whence she’d come.

My hope was that she’d returned to the Siren family she’d disowned when she’d married my dad, but I had no idea of her true fate. The woman had borne more suffering than any one creature should ever have to—and being an immortal, instead of just one lifetime to mourn the loss of the thing she’d held most dear, she would have an eternity in which to do it.

“Oh, you know,” I said finally, though I didn’t have a clue what that meant.

There was an awkward pause as I stared at Daniel and he held my gaze. It took every ounce of strength I possessed not to start blubbering in front of him because just being near the man was the most exquisite torture I’d ever known. I’d never been an overly emotional person before, but these days I’d become a pro at crying over absolutely nothing. I was getting so good at it, in fact, that I was actually considering adding it to my professional skill set.

In the days after my dad died and Daniel broke up with me, I’d been numb, my brain set on autopilot just so I could get through the day, but as time had worn on, all the pain and frustration had returned full force and the grief I thought I’d escaped had come back to stab me in the heart.

“How have
you
been?” I asked, keeping my voice as level as possible—which was really frickin’ hard when all I wanted to do was howl like a banshee.

Daniel shrugged, his eyes shifting downward, unlocking from my gaze.

“I’m all right. Keeping busy.”

I nodded. What else was I supposed to do with that innocuous piece of information?

“Well, I’m good,” I said finally, opting for a lie rather than the messy, mushy truth. “Been taking meetings and Jarvis has been giving me all these lessons, trying to get me up to snuff on all this Death stuff—”

I cringed, embarrassed by the extreme case of diarrhea mouth I’d just developed. God, I just couldn’t seem to shut myself up.

“That’s great, Cal,” Daniel said, taking pity on me and interrupting my verbal barrage.

“Yep, pretty great,” I echoed.

I suddenly felt very uncomfortable; my brain itching with the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped inside my own body, a sensation I could only imagine was reminiscent of being encased inside a too-tight spacesuit. I’d never experienced such an odd feeling before, and it made me want to rip my skin off so I could crawl out of myself. My light gingham summer dress, which I usually loved wearing, was now as heavy as a shroud, making my flesh squirm underneath the crinkly cotton fabric.

“How are you, really?”

Daniel’s question caught me unaware. It was so pointed, so real, that it distracted me from the weird sense of internal entrapment I was experiencing.

“Uhm …” I started to say then stopped, wanting to answer him honestly. “Actually, not so great, really. If you want to know the truth.”

He nodded like he’d expected as much.

“Me, too,” he confided, finally looking me in the eye. “Not so great.”

My throat constricted, the soft flesh of my tongue pressing firmly against my upper palate as I tried not to cry. It was a useless dodge; I wasn’t strong enough to fight back the wave of utter misery that overwhelmed me.

“I, uh …” The words wouldn’t come without bringing tears.

Daniel nodded again as if he knew what I was thinking. As if, in fact, he had the exact same emotions coursing inside him, too—though he seemed to have a much better handle on the crying part. He let out a shaky breath and grinned, but there was no happiness in his eyes, only my misery mirrored back at me. We stood like that, two people experiencing a shared, bone-aching pain, and in that moment, we were the only two people left in all of the world. I could feel my heart thunking like sludge, its steady beat drowning out all other sound as I stared into Daniel’s eyes. We were in a vacuum, a lonely place of our own making, where nothing else existed but each other.

Then the moment was lost as he sighed and looked away. I sensed him trying to recollect his emotions, to blot out this brave new world our misspent love had created. When he looked back up at me, the connection had been severed, the thrum between us, which had been so strong that it shook me from the inside out, was gone and I was back in my own body, the itch to climb out of myself, no more.

“OMG! Is that Calliope Reaper-Jones?!”

The voice was loud and unmistakably feminine. I turned around to find its saucy-looking owner barreling toward me, her large, braless breasts jiggling inside a tight, blue spandex minidress that barely grazed the tops of her very tanned upper thighs. She was tiny, barely five feet on a good day, I guessed. Yet the dangerously high wedge heels she’d strapped on to her dainty feet made her much closer to my height.

“You didn’t tell me you knew her,” the girl chided Daniel as she slid between us and possessively took his arm, letting me know, without words, he belonged to her.

It was like a punch in the gut to see the girl hanging all over Daniel like he was her own personal jungle gym. She was laying on the classless sexual mojo act with a trowel, letting me know exactly where I stood as far as Daniel was concerned. And at least he had the decency to look embarrassed by the show.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” she cooed, oblivious to the fact neither Daniel nor I had said a word since she’d sashayed her perky butt over and interrupted our little …
whatever
it was.

“Calliope, this is Coy.”

She stuck her hand out and the charm bracelets she wore looped around her wrist jangled in concert.

“Hiya!” she chirped, her pouty red lips bunched together in what I realized, belatedly, was a smile.

With a feeling of resignation, I took her delicate brown fingers in mine and let her pump my arm up and down.

“Nice to meet you.”

She did that pout/smile thing again, the corners of her eyes bunching up adorably around creamy, chocolate milk–colored irises and dark fringed lashes.

“Oh, it’s just amazing to finally meet you,” she giggled. “I’ve been following your career and you’re, like, amazing.”