How to be Death (8 page)

“Actually,” Jarvis continued, “you will be sitting at the head of the table next to Kali—”

I sat up, feeling excited about something for the first time since we’d arrived.

“I didn’t know she was coming tonight,” I said, giddy that Kali was on board for the Death Dinner. If the Hindu Goddess of Death and Destruction was gonna be there, then the night was bound to get interesting.

“She wasn’t supposed to attend, but Wodin found himself indisposed and Kali was selected to represent the Board of Death,” Jarvis said, pulling a pair of pince-nez from his suit coat pocket and sliding them up his proboscis of a nose.

“Oh, please, not the pince-nez.” I squirmed, disliking the tiny, templeless glasses a little more each time I saw them. I hadn’t minded them so much when Jarvis was in his faun’s body—the Tom Selleck visage and small stature actually made the pince-nez seem kind of roguish—but on his new Brooklyn-hipster-cool face, they just looked ridiculous.

“Am I going to have to use ‘the hand,’ Calliope?” Jarvis intoned, looking down his nose—and pince-nez—at me.

Jarvis was referring to his favorite quote of all time: a Fran Drescher,
Nanny
-era bon mot he liked to whip out whenever possible, regardless of the fact it was about as très passé as Vanilla Ice. Now, as much as I loved to tease my Executive Assistant, I’d actually been dying for him to trot out the Drescher quote because I’d had a little “surprise” made for him and it was best shared while “in context.”

“Runt?” I said, turning to the hellhound. “Can you get that, uhm,
thing
for Jarvis, please?”

Runt, who was in on the surprise, hopped down from her
spot on the bed and began to nose around inside her pink leather bag until she found the prize I’d asked her to stow away for me.

“Clio, Runt, and I love you very much,” I said as Runt carried the metallic gift bag over to Jarvis, who took it with only a smidge of healthy trepidation.

I didn’t blame him. If the tables were turned and
I
was the one getting a nicely wrapped package from him, I’d be nervous, too.

“What is it?” Jarvis asked, holding the paper handle between two fingers like the thing was full of dynamite set to explode on a hair trigger.

“It’s a present. For you,” Runt said excitedly, sitting back on her haunches and patiently thumping her tail against the carpet as she waited for Jarvis to dig in.

The pup didn’t have a mean-spirited bone in her body so she was oblivious to Jarvis’s apprehension. In her world, friends never played mean pranks on each other. Thankfully, this was a world neither Jarvis nor I inhabited because as much as it sucked to be on the receiving end of an embarrassing incident, it was equally as joyous to be the one doing the embarrassing.

Jarvis cleared his throat—biding his time, I surmised—then he removed his trusty pince-nez from his nose and lovingly placed them in his pocket, where they would be safe from any indignities he might be about to suffer. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and stuck his hand into the bag, expecting the worst. When nothing terrible happened—no explosion, no animal attack, or steel trap shutting on his wrist—he opened one eye and looked down to see what his fingers had plucked from inside the bag.

With a sigh, he lifted the sea foam green T-shirt up into the air so it unfolded lengthwise, allowing him to see the quote I’d had screen-printed onto it especially for him.

“
TALK TO THE HAND—IT’S NOT RETRO ’TIL IT’S ON A T-SHIRT
,” Jarvis read out loud, taking his time with the words as a funny look stole across his angular face.

Eyebrows scrunching together to form a solid line of bushy hair just below his forehead, Jarvis’s lips pursed into that weird pretzel shape you make when you eat something supertart like
a Sour Patch Kid. Though he continued to hold the T-shirt up in the air, his focus was definitely elsewhere.

Runt started to whine, pacing, as dogs are wont to do when they’re nervous or confused. She and I had both thought Jarvis would love the T-shirt, so this kink in the plot was throwing her little world into retrograde. Darkness had begun to settle like a cloak around the room and the windows, which had shown me such a brilliant view of the sunset earlier in the afternoon, were now empty. I reached over and turned on the bedside lamp to add some warmth to the paltry yellow glow coming from the overhead lighting.

“Jarvis, are you okay?” I asked, my voice finishing half an octave higher than it’d started.

“I’m … It’s just …” The words had left Jarvis’s mouth of their own volition, and when they stopped, they were replaced not by silence, but by the trembling of his lower lip.

To my astonishment, one giant tear surfaced in the caruncle of his right eye, then slowly slid down the side of his face. The tension in his body seeming to dissipate with the release of the tear, he let out a long, shuddering breath before dropping his hands into his lap.

Runt got the message more quickly than I did. Instantly she was beside him, her textured pink tongue licking his hand as he began to cry in earnest.

“I thought it was going to be something terrible,” Jarvis hiccupped as more tears snaked down his cheeks, the sobs making his skinny body shake uncontrollably.

I got up from my perch on the bed, picking my way over the luggage on the floor until I was beside my Executive Assistant, my arms wrapping around his shoulders.

“Well, that’s the last time we get
you
a present,” I cooed, trying hard to lighten the mood—my intention had been to make Jarvis happy, not send him on a crying jag.

Jarvis and I had been through a lot of pretty heavy shit together, but damn, I’d never have pegged him for a guy to get emotional over a T-shirt.

“I’m fine,” Jarvis said, pulling away from me so he could wipe the tears from his cheeks. To his credit, he was able to compose himself pretty quickly.

With the T-shirt sitting like a talisman on his lap, he took a shuddering breath and smiled up at me.

“Thank you,” he said, looking down at the T-shirt again. “Thank you both.”

“And Clio, too!” Runt added—the kindest, sweetest hellhound in all history.

“And Clio, of course,” Jarvis said, giving the back of Runt’s head a pat.

“We imagined you having a totally different reaction,” I said as I sat back, my butt against the desk. “More along the lines of ‘happy, happy, joy, joy,’ you know?”

“It is the nicest, most thoughtful gift
anyone
has ever given me,” Jarvis said softly. “It truly is.”

Now I was the one starting to feel all teary-eyed.

“It’s just a T-shirt,” I mumbled.

“But it took thought and planning and genuine affection,” Jarvis said as he lifted the T-shirt up to his chest.

“And it’s sea foam green, which is kinda, you know, an inside joke,” I added quickly. “’Cause we have inside jokes.”

After my dad was kidnapped, I’d been forced into completing three impossible tasks by the Board of Death to prove I was capable of handling the Death job until my dad was found. The first task had been to borrow Runt from Cerberus (obviously, I’d never really given her back) and the second was to collect this magical sea foam stuff from the God Indra (the same Indra who was now Clio’s boyfriend). Jarvis had been instrumental in the tasks getting completed—more than instrumental, it wouldn’t have happened without him—and I thought it would be cute to get the T-shirt in
sea foam
green ’cause I’m just a big, old, sentimental dork.

“That’s not really an inside joke,” Jarvis said. “It’s more of a shared history.”

“Same difference,” I replied as Jarvis took off his suit coat and slipped the T-shirt over his blue button-down. I’d opted for a crew neck T-shirt in large and it seemed to fit my Executive Assistant perfectly.

“Does it look good?” Jarvis asked Runt.

She barked her approval.

“Should I wear it to the Masquerade Ball?”

I laughed.

“Then everyone will know it’s you.”

Jarvis considered this for a moment, then shook his head.

“That doesn’t really matter in my case—and it might actually be nice to wear my catchphrase…”

I didn’t want to encourage him—but I didn’t want him to start crying again either—so I just gave a noncommittal nod and hoped better sense would prevail.

“Speaking of Masquerade Balls,” Jarvis said, digging in his suit coat pocket and pulling out the dreaded pince-nez again.

“Uhm—”

“I need them to see, so bugger off,” he said in response to my look of disdain.

Resting the glasses on the bridge of his nose, he cleared his throat, the light from the lamp refracting in his lenses.

“Now,” he continued, pulling out a piece of neatly folded parchment paper from his pocket and reading from it. “Your schedule for the night is as follows: At nine o’clock you will attend the All Hallows’ Eve ‘Eve’ Masquerade Ball. There you will greet the guests and make pleasantries—”

“Sounds like a blast,” I said to Runt, who thumped her tail in agreement.

“Then you will come back to the room, and at eleven forty-five on the dot, I will accompany you to Casa del Amo,” Jarvis continued, ignoring me. “I suggest that you ladies begin your toilet now. It’s almost seven and I expect both of you to be ready and waiting when I come back to fetch you at eight thirty because we have a quick stop to make before dinner.”

“Okay, I think we got it—” I started to say, but Jarvis bulldozed over me as he continued his directions.

“Your gown is hanging in the armoire, right here,” he said, pointing to the art deco oak armoire in the corner before turning to Runt, “and your collar is in there as well.”

“I think we can manage this,” I said as Jarvis stood, pocketing both the parchment and pince-nez. “Right, Runt?”

“It’s going to be a lovely evening,” Runt said, her ears standing at attention. “I’m excited to see all the different dresses and masks!”

“I’m curious to see who’s wearing which designer,” I said to Runt as Jarvis gave us one more warning to be ready on time then left us to get dressed himself.

“I just wish we were wearing masks,” Runt said sadly as I removed her plain, pink collar and slid the rhinestone one around her neck, adjusting it so it wasn’t too tight.

“Me, too.”

I really was a bit bummed about the whole mask thing. Everyone else got to be all mysterious and sexy … while I was forced to pull a Queen/hostess move and just stand at the door, unmasked, greeting everybody. Being the Grim Reaper had its perks, but this wasn’t one of them. I may have gotten the awesome couture gown, but I’d be maskless for the entire All Hallows’ Eve “Eve” Ball.

When Jarvis had first explained the evening to me, my first question had been:

“But why not have the ball on Halloween?”

That’s when it was painstakingly explained to me that at midnight on October 31, magic ceased to work. People still died, but Death couldn’t collect their souls until midnight on the following night when it officially became All Saints’ Day. This was why people considered Halloween to be the time when the veil between life and death was at its thinnest—what they didn’t realize was that the spooky stuff they encountered was due entirely to the presence of the recently departed souls who were left wandering around the Earth while they waited for magic to return. Once the second hand hit twelve on November 1, signaling the beginning of All Saints’ Day, everything went back to normal and the transporters and harvesters I employed at Death, Inc., could then come and collect the orphaned souls.

It was a logical explanation for the existence of Halloween, but one I was perfectly fine ignoring in favor of the spooky, costume-wearing consumerism the Western world had accorded to the holiday. I wanted to see kids dressed like vampires and zombies, pretty princesses and Ronald Reagan, their jack-o’-lantern buckets, paper bags, and pillowcases exploding with candy and other treats. There was something deliciously unsettling about someone with half their baby teeth still in their head screeching “Trick or Treat” at you as they shoved their candy collecting receptacles in your face.

If you think I’m just being a sentimental human wannabe,
well, let me tell you, I acquired my love of the fiendish holiday directly from my dad, the former Grim Reaper himself.

Whenever I thought of Halloween, I had a very distinct memory of my dad dressed, for some odd reason, as a Wall Street banker, his mane of wavy blond hair curling around his handsome face, as he held my hand and carried Clio—who couldn’t have been more than two—while we trudged through the darkness toward whichever unsuspecting house was next on our “hit list.” Until I’d taken over his job, I’d never understood that for my dad, Halloween was his one and only night off the clock. When there were no Death duties to attend to, no bureaucratic problems that needed solving … magic was on hold, and for that one precious evening, he wasn’t the Grim Reaper, but a normal man who cheerily spent his night of freedom hiking up and down Bellevue Avenue—and farther inland when the candy dried up there—making sure his daughters, the Cowardly Lion and Snow White, respectively, went home with an equal amount of candy in their buckets, so there’d be no squabbling over the spoils.