Servants of the Storm Read online

  “I had to know the truth. I had to find Carly.”

  I wish I could find the words to explain to him how she was my sister in every way that mattered. How we mixed the blood of our thumbs in my backyard and swore we’d always be there for each other, no matter what. How we used to meet in the shed behind her house whenever something went wrong, how she would hold me and listen to every word and then wipe my tears away and force me to my feet and back out into the cruel world. How we faced down bullies, Axel the German shepherd, puberty, bigots, and parents who weren’t as present as they should have been, thanks to my mother’s coldness and the fact that Carly’s dad was never around. I think about how she was there for me when my grandmother died, never leaving my side until I could finally stop crying. How losing her has left me less than I am, and how fighting for her is the only way to get back the part of my heart that I lost.

  Isaac takes my good hand in his and leans closer.

  “You can’t bring her back,” he says. “There’s no way to bring her back.”

  “Is she alive? Is she dead?” I say. “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s dead. She’s like a zombie. Less than a zombie. Maybe some tiny spark of her is left, but not enough to change anything.”

  “Can we . . .” I shudder and shake my head. I can’t say it.

  “You can’t kill her. She’s already dead. Her soul is trapped.”

  “What do you mean, her soul is trapped?”

  I can’t stop a whimper from escaping, and he exhales. “I know it’s a lot to take in, and I’m sorry. I know how much it hurts. Do you want the drink now?”

  I grit my teeth. “No. Keep talking. I can take it.”

  But I’m getting to the point where I can’t. Passing out would be so easy.

  “Demons store the distal bones in their stomachs, since they don’t eat or have stomach acid. But from what I can tell through reading all these old books, they keep the souls in a thing called a dybbuk box, hidden somewhere in the demon’s territory. The only way to free a distal servant completely is to get their distal bone and destroy it, preferably by burning. When you open the dybbuk box, the soul is set free. When both of those things are done, the body finally disintegrates.”

  “So it’s pretty much impossible.”

  He exhales, low and long. “Yes.”

  “So Kitty has Carly’s distal. And mine.”

  Isaac nods, eyes dark. “And mine.”

  “And that means that when we die . . .”

  I can’t finish it. In the silence I can feel my heart beating in my pinkie, wrapped deep in the fabric, the veins trying to pump life into a fingertip that isn’t there. I try to twitch the stump, and almost throw up from the pain.

  “When we die, we belong to her,” he says softly.

  14

  I LET MY HEAD FALL back against the pillow, barely noticing my good hand still wrapped in his. I’m thinking about the corpse in Carly’s casket, now buried six feet below her gravestone on the hill at Bonaventure. I’m thinking of the picture on the wall at Café 616, where she’s screaming and dead and then being grabbed by the fox-eared girl. By Kitty, who now holds me captive too.

  And I’m remembering other things, things I had forgotten that happened right after Josephine. When Mrs. Lowery in the cafeteria had acid-green eyes and live rats writhing under her apron and I threatened her with her own pizza cutter, just like Tamika said. And when I saw a giant, scale-covered monster dog pawing at my window and went running down the street, yelling that Grendel was the devil.

  And more recently I remember chasing the girl down the alley behind the Paper Moon Coffee Shop, following her all the way to Charnel House. And meeting Isaac for the first time there.

  “What did you give me, that first night?” I ask, voice low.

  He chuckles ruefully and runs a hand through his hair.

  “What I’m supposed to. It was the only way to keep you from becoming a distal servant.”

  If my finger weren’t blaring pain, I would strangle him for drugging me. “What’s in it?”

  “Not all of the bottles at Charnel House are alcohol,” he says. “I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know who makes them. Even brought some home to test it out, check it under a microscope, but couldn’t find out anything useful. I just know that the distal servants come and go, delivering things to and from the ‘Employees Only’ door. I don’t know what’s behind it or who’s in the kitchen. I only know what I’m supposed to serve to anyone who finds their way through the front door, anyone who accidentally follows a distal servant. The servants are kind of programmed to go there if they’re followed, and it’s my job to dope people and send ’em back home. The clear drink makes you forget, makes you dreamy and drunk and pliant. And the red one makes you see what’s really there. I always wondered why it even exists. Never used the red one before you showed up.”

  “What about the food?” I ask.

  “It just arrives through the window if I’m supposed to serve it. I’ve never tasted it.”

  I have to smile.

  “It was delicious, whatever it was. And it made me dream about Carly.”

  “No, it didn’t,” he says. “I gave you a little something I wasn’t supposed to, at the end. I felt bad for you. You were so determined.”

  My memory flashes on three sword-stabbed cherries dripping with juice. “The red drink that makes you see more than you should? So the dream was . . . real? Carly told me I had to eat collards, told me to go to 616. And there was a black box with carvings on it that rattled.”

  He leans forward, excited and shaking his head in amazement. “Seriously? That’s Carly’s dybbuk box. It holds her soul. You find that, and you set her free.” He flips the pages of the Lilith book until they fall open on a rough drawing of the exact box I remember. In the picture it’s surrounded by slavering demons and weird symbols. His finger strokes the drawing of the carved black box like it’s the puppy he never had. “Is that what you saw?”

  I nod slowly, and he smiles as if I’ve just answered a question that’s stumped him forever.

  I try to remember every particular of that dream, but even now, with whatever cocktails of demon drinks I’ve had, with whatever losing my own bit of pinkie means, I still can’t recall everything. And I’m not sure what all Carly said.

  “So what about my finger? Why can’t we go to the hospital?”

  “I don’t think you want to try to explain this to anyone,” he says with a sad smile. “And believe me—you don’t want to go to the hospital. But I can stitch it up. I’ve done it before.”

  “Why?”

  He ignores the question and trades the demon book in his lap for a small glass of pungent amber liquid sitting on the floor at his feet. It smells like smoke and fire.

  “It’s time. You need to drink this.”

  “I don’t think I want to drink anything else from you,” I say quietly.

  “Smell it. It’s whiskey. Straight up.” I shake my head; I already smell it. And I don’t want it. “Have you ever felt a needle and thread go through your skin before?” he asks. “Sometimes it sticks a little in the muscle or clicks against the bone.”

  I have a dizzy moment when I feel like I might pass out or barf. I struggle to sit up, and his arm cradles my back. When he hands me the glass, I inspect the liquor and find it pretty but way out of my league. After Carly and I borrowed most of her mama’s peach schnapps and took turns upchucking in Carly’s old toy box, I decided I never, ever wanted to taste alcohol again.

  “I don’t drink,” I say.

  “It’ll help you relax. And it’s really strong, so it’ll make you feel numb.”

  Now is the moment when I decide if I will trust the very hot but very strange boy I met in a demon bar. His eyes are on me, dark and earnest, waiting. Even after everything he’s told me, after he’s admitted he was made by demons and that he drugged me at their bidding, it doesn’t escape me that he’s currently the only expert and a
lly I have, the only person who has any idea what I’m going through. It doesn’t feel like much of a choice. I twitch my pinkie experimentally and almost pass out again. While the little stars are still dancing on the edges of my vision, I toss the drink back in a couple of gulps and gag.

  “Did you just give me cat piss?”

  He pours another glass out of the bottle and holds it to my mouth until I tip that back too. My throat is on fire, and my belly is in revolt. I burp and am surprised that flames don’t shoot out of my mouth.

  He laughs and picks up my bandaged hand.

  “This is going to suck,” he says, slowly unwrapping the shirt. “So you can talk or sing or cuss me, or do whatever you need to do to get through it. As long as you don’t scream. I need this job, and I need this crappy carriage house apartment, and I need the Catbird Inn. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The fabric sticks a little as it pulls off the stump of my pinkie, and I almost scream. But there’s a sort of faraway numbness creeping out from my firestormed belly. Bit by bit my body is going warm and fuzzy and sleepy. The feeling seeps down my legs and out my arms, and Isaac watches my face carefully. My hand is shaking, blood flowing into the T-shirt. I grit my teeth, waiting for the numbness to reach my fingers. His dark eyes meet mine, and I feel that sucking feeling, like he’s a vacuum drawing me out into nothingness. And then the color drains out of his eyes, leaving them ice blue and clear as the summer sky.

  “Relax, Dovey,” he says, voice even and soothing and deep. I go boneless.

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” I ask, unable to move. Another glass is at my mouth, and I’m swallowing it like a baby bird. The whiskey churns in my belly, hot and stinging. “They keep changing color.”

  “It’s a cambion thing. The black comes from the demons. The light blue is just something you see when I’m using cambion magic or you’re on pills or drinking their water. It makes me seem harmless and handsome.” He gives me a winning, practiced smile, and I snort.

  “What were you born with?”

  He looks angry for a moment. “They used to be blue for real.”

  Just then the numbness reaches my fingers and my face. My eyes stay locked on his, and my jaw loosens up, and quite unexpectedly I smile and say, “I like them better blue.”

  He gives a genuine smile and says, “So it’s working now. Good.”

  He reaches to the floor and brings up a bright clip-on reading lamp, a bowl, and a first aid kit. I’m no longer attached to the action. It’s like watching a movie where things happen in slow motion. The lamp goes on the table, its naked bulb pointed at my belly. Then he holds my bleeding hand over the metal bowl and pours peroxide on it, and the liquid bubbles and steams over the ugly, jagged stump of my finger. For one quick second I notice that the meat within is pink, with the faintest rim of glistening yellow. Somewhere inside I scream and cringe, but mostly I just watch the pretty pink water sizzling over my flesh and sloshing into the bowl. Pink and fizzy.

  “Can I have another Shirley Temple?” I say in a dreamy voice.

  “Later,” he says with a fond smile that makes me a little swoony despite the numbness. “Now, Dovey. This isn’t going to hurt you. You won’t feel a thing.”

  I nod. He picks up another bottle and pours something else over my stump, and it’s cold and sharp. The liquid gets a little less pink, and the blood slows down. He pats the stump gently with a bit of gauze and rinses off his hands with rubbing alcohol. He has competent-looking hands, which I like, but he also has four of them, which seems unusual.

  He turns away, and when he turns back, he’s got a curved needle and a long piece of black thread with a nubby knot tied in the end. Holding it up in the light, he looks at me earnestly, blue eyes shining.

  “Are you ready?”

  I feel queasy. I open my mouth to complain, but “You’re pretty” is what comes out.

  “Glad to hear it,” he says.

  Placing my hand palm-up on his knee, he begins to slowly stitch the jagged skin around the stump of my pinkie finger. As fascinating as it is, I can’t see what’s really going on. I can feel the needle poking through, just barely, but it feels like it’s happening miles away. Before I know I’m doing it, I start reciting my lines as Ariel. I’m so lost in my dramatic reverie that I barely notice the needle pulling my skin taut, much less Isaac’s filling in Prospero’s lines like a pro. When I get to the lines,

  I have made you mad;

  And even with such-like valour men hang and drown

  Their proper selves. . . .

  You fools! I and my fellows

  Are ministers of Fate,

  Isaac mutters, “That’s enough.”

  “Why do I have to stop?” I say.

  “Because it’s a little too close to home,” he answers. “And because your finger’s done. Sit up.”

  He holds it up, and sure enough my pinkie is now capped with a line of small stitches and two bristly black knots. It doesn’t hurt a bit and looks really funny. I sit up and wiggle it back and forth while he empties the bowl in a utility sink and puts the first aid box in a drawer.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” I say, slurring and wobbly. “Plus, new caterpillar finger!”

  I inch my pinkie across the back of the couch.

  “You’re going to feel different when the whiskey burns off,” he says, coming back to sit beside me. “It’s going to sting and pull, and you’re never going to stop feeling your fingertip. No matter how much time passes, no matter how many times you look at the place where it used to be, it’ll itch and burn and freeze, just like it was still there.”

  It does prickle a little, but the whiskey’s still in my blood. I relax back against the scratchy couch and watch Isaac. He’s kind of a mess, but I like it.

  “How long has your distal thingy been gone?”

  The words are out before I’ve thought them, slow and slurred as an August afternoon.

  “I’m nineteen now, and Kitty took it when I was seventeen,” he says. “Bit it right off. Sound familiar?”

  “S’a very exclusive club.” I mean it as a joke, but he looks horrified.

  “It’s not funny. I mean, you know—it’s terrifying. One of the demons that helps make a cambion is supposed to take the cambion’s distal, usually when we turn seventeen, and fill us in on the whole demon thing, since that’s supposedly when most people start seeing weird shit and thinking they’re crazy. The demons hold on to our bones until we’re twenty-one, when we’re given a choice. Be free during life and a distal servant after death, or have our distal burned and work for them while we’re alive but know that our souls will be free one day.”

  “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” I chime in.

  “You can make deals with them before then, because demons love making deals. But basically I’ve got two more years to decide whether I want to be a tool of demons now or after I’m dead.”

  I start giggling, then full-out laughing. He looks at me like I’m crazy, but the blood loss and the whiskey and everything just finally strikes me, and I lose it in great, gasping whoops. He watches me, cautious but patient.

  “You’re so stupid,” I say between giggles.

  “A minute ago I was pretty,” he shoots back with a grin.

  “No, it’s just that you’re totally ignoring the third choice.”

  “There is no third choice.”

  “Sure there is. Get your distal and burn it.”

  Isaac stands suddenly, hands curled into fists and nostrils flaring. He’s as angry as he was facing down Kitty. Even through my haze I now realize what it cost him to go there and confront the demon that owns him. He gives one rueful chuckle and kicks over a pile of books.

  “Do you know how hard it would be, getting a distal out of Kitty’s stomach? Demons are as smart as hell and twice as mean and travel in packs with their minions. And they’re supposedly really hard to kill. They’d rip me to shreds just for pointing a gun at her, not that a gun would sto
p her for long. Don’t even bother. It’s never happened.”

  “So get a bunch of cambions—”

  “There aren’t a bunch. And we don’t get along.”

  “Normal people—”

  “Can’t see demons. And if you gave them the red stuff, they would probably just freak out. Besides, that’s like . . . I don’t know. Using baby cows to fight a war, sending them off to get slaughtered.”

  “There has to be a way, Isaac.”

  “I’ve read everything I can find on demonology. The Bible. The Talmud. The Alphabet of Ben Sira. Kabbalah. I’ve asked every priest, witch, voodoo lady, and psychic. That stupid pinkie bone is the key to everything. And even if you could get it, you still have to worry about the soul in its dybbuk box.”

  His eyes are distraught and angry, and it’s somehow so familiar. I’ve seen him before. There’s a memory scratching at the back of my mind, something I can’t quite recall.

  “Tuck your hair behind your ears,” I say.

  He’s leery, but he does what I ask, tucking his grimy blond hair behind both ears and looking at me like I’m the one who’s crazy, which is a first from him.

  “Turn that way. And the other way.”

  Then I finally see it.

  “Were you going to tell me you used to go to my school?” I ask.

  “I didn’t think it mattered,” he mutters. But he won’t meet my eyes.

  “You were the only guy with long hair. You were tall and skinny. You wore a goofy coat. I remember you.”

  “So?”

  “I just think you should have told me, is all.”

  He shrugs and lets his hair go. It falls back over his eyes. “A lot has happened since then.”

  “So you dropped out of school to be a demon baby?”

  He rolls his eyes and tries not to laugh. “I graduated last year, and I’ve been working at the inn ever since. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do, what to choose. I thought I wanted to study religion. Got accepted to Duke. And then I found out about demons, and everything just fell apart. I mean, demons are real but angels aren’t? How can I believe in a God who lets this happen? It didn’t seem worthwhile to keep studying when everything was going to end when I turned twenty-one, anyway.”