How to be Death Read online

  “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 o
ver 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.

  Now, here I was twenty years later, following in my dad’s footsteps. I’d fought my fate for as long as I could, never realizing that maybe it wasn’t such a terrible fate after all. Death was the great leveler between Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil … and it was up to me to make sure that things stayed in balance.

  Of course, the nagging little voice chose just that moment to rear its nasty head.

  If you’re up for the job, that is, it whispered. The balance will be kept only if you can manage it.

  Then with doubt simmering in my brain, I took Noisette’s gown from the armoire and began to get ready for my first ever Death Dinner and Masquerade Ball.

  five

  The gown was delicate black gauze, spreading out around my feet in waves of fabric that simulated the nacre layers of a bed of oyster shells. The boning in the bodice held tight to my rib cage, dipping down to expose the rounded curves of my cleavage before nipping in at my waist and flowing sinuously over the arc of my hips in ragged swaths of material. In keeping with my position as Death, two large rhinestone skulls decorated the bodice. Except that, considering Noisette’s bill, there was a good chance they were not rhinestones …

  The gown swayed as I walked, the tattered gauze flowing around me like kelp caught in the undulating currents of the sea. I’d borrowed a pair of strappy black high-heeled sandals and some simple diamonds from my mother—heck, it wasn’t like she was there to care if I raided her amazing, designer-strewn walk-in closet—but I’d eschewed any other adornment, thinking it would weigh down the ephemeral qualities of the gown.

  “You look amazing,” Runt said as she watched me snap on the back of my left earring then adjust the bodice of the gown so my cleavage was a little less exposed.

  “It’s the dress. Whoever said that clothes make the man, well, they were on the money,” I shot back at her, but inside I was just as blown away as Runt was by how good I looked. Noisette was the couturier to the Gods for a reason, I decided. The woman had to weave magic into her creations because I’d never looked half as beautiful as I did in this gown.

  Of course, I’d helped the gown out a little bit by doing a pretty bang-up job on my makeup and hair. After taking a quick shower, I’d set my lanky locks in hot rollers and applied a healthy dose of smoky silver eyeliner and shadow. Then I’d released my hair from the torture devices (the hot rollers) and used a spray borrowed from my sometimes-Goth kid sister, which darkened my usually fairly nondescript brownish hair to a mysterious glossy black. Then I blew it out, poufing it up far more than usual, then pulling down a few strands in what I had to admit were some pretty darn sexy wispy bangs. No denying it—I looked hot.

  There was a rectangular mirror attached to the back of the delicate oak vanity and I stood in front of it, admiring my handiwork. In its surface, I could see the whole room reflected back at me: the two hand-carved teakwood beds with their glorious gold-and-scarlet coverlets, the gold gilt mantel, curving art deco armoire, and matching deco dresser that took over the far corner of the room, the delicate tracery desk and chair next to me—the whole space was a potpourri of dark wood paneling and spicy red-and-gold accents.

  As I stood in my glittering black gown beside Runt, who was wearing her best dress collar (red, which looked especially nice with her fur), my dark eyes seemed lit from within. I surveyed the beauty that surrounded us and realized that I looked as if I was born for the part I was about to play.

  There was a polite rap at the door—a patented Jarvis move—and Runt and I called out “Come in!” at the exact same time, which totally made us giggle.

  The brass knob turned, hinges creaking as Jarvis, clad in a tailored black tuxedo, gold cufflinks, and shiny black dress shoes with gold buckles, swung the door open and stepped inside, instantly slipping his pince-nez onto the end of his nose so he could give us a quick once-over. Pleased by what he saw, he smiled and brought his hands together happily, rubbing them in anticipation.

  “Noisette has outdone herself with that gown,” he purred. “Do a spin, Calliope. I want to see the ruching in the back.”

  I rolled my eyes, embarrassed, but obliged him by doing a quick turn in place, the dress gracefully flowing around me as I baby-stepped in a circle.

  “Perfect!�
� Jarvis said, giving me a wide smile. “Ladies, I have to say, you both look exquisite.”

  “You look great, too, Jarvis,” Runt said. “And we were both ready on time just for you.”

  “Yes, and that impresses me most of all,” Jarvis agreed. “Shall we go then?”

  He offered me his arm, which I accepted, and the three of us left the comfort of the suite, stepping out into the tepid October night.

  “who’s that?” i asked as we passed a tall man I’d never seen before standing in the courtyard. He was wearing a dark suit and tie, an earpiece plugged into his right ear. He nodded to Jarvis as we passed by, his eyes giving my scantily clad upper body a discreet once-over that was both embarrassing and exciting.