Servants of the Storm (17 page)

“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 ally 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 stop 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.”

“You give up pretty easy.”

He shakes his head, defeat and exhaustion written in the slump of his shoulders. “What’s the point in fighting an impossible fight? You might feel different once you’re sober and not in shock.”

And I do feel weirdly numb and dreamy. And yet like anything is possible.

“So what now?” I say.

“Now you go to sleep and start healing.”

“And what about tomorrow?”

“It’s already tomorrow, Dovey.”

“What about today?”

“Today’s the first day of the rest of your life without the tip of your pinkie,” he says.

“You’re not funny,” I say. “And that cat piss is definitely wearing off.”

I flex my hand, and my pinkie burns, like the skin is being
pulled too tight and the blood doesn’t know where to go.

“I can always give you more,” he says gently, pushing down my hand and waggling the whiskey bottle, but I shake my head. I don’t want to feel that shit coming back up. I pull my hand under the blankets and roll over onto my side.

Isaac kicks off his boots and lies down on the couch across from mine, pulling a raggedy blanket over himself. It’s the kind of blanket old ladies use on their laps, and it’s got a big cross on it. It’s strange, to think about him at college, studying religion.

The other couch is shaped to fit him, and I wonder how many times he’s spent the night awake on it, reading or thinking. If it were me, I’d rather spend every day figuring out how to beat the demons and get my life back. I couldn’t hide away in a carriage house, waiting for bad things to happen.

As if he can tell what I’m thinking, Isaac says, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in dealing with demons, it’s that sometimes you have to let things go.”

“I told you,” I say. “I’m half lawyer. I never learned how to let go.”

I’M DREAMING AGAIN. THIS TIME
the light is warm on my face, and the familiar smell is comforting. I’m in a parlor that I know intimately but have never actually set foot in. Carly’s grandmother never let us past the line where the nice carpet began. She didn’t want us to mess up the vacuum marks.

The old damask couch is stiff and scratchy under my jean shorts, the carpet thick and soft under my feet. A huge slice of chocolate cake and a cup of sweet tea sit on the coffee table in front of me, each centered perfectly on a doily.

“You ain’t eating.”

I look up to find Gigi staring at me, her eyes as sharp as a razor blade dripping with lemonade. I haven’t seen her since Carly’s funeral, when I stood with her and Miz Ray at the coffin. She’s looked a hundred years old for the past ten years, the smile
lines around her eyes in sharp contrast to the harsh frown lines of her mouth. She’s wearing pink sweatpants and a matching sweater with kittens on it that Carly and I gave her for Mother’s Day when we were ten, but her proud carriage still makes her look queenly.

“Last time I ate in a dream, it went poorly,” I answer. I poke the cake with the polished silver fork, testing to see if it’s going to turn into grave dirt. Or worse.

She laughs, looking crafty.

“Gigi’s magic is all good, sugar. Go on and eat. I’ll wait.”

And I know her ways, so I eat the cake and sip the tea, and it’s just as good as I remember. Her mangy old cat struts through the door and twines around my ankles. Gigi watches me all the while, hands clasped over her old-lady belly, and legs crossed at the ankle above her house slippers. When I’m done, she nods, her lips pursed.

“I want you to do something for me, Billie Dove.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

She leans forward. “You come see me. We got to talk.”