Servants of the Storm (34 page)

“I give you a lead role, and this is how you repay me? By being late on opening night? In costume. Now! Everyone’s in place and the mayor is here, for heaven’s sake.” She sees Baker trying to hide behind Isaac and sticks her finger in his face. “You, too, Joshua.”

The way she’s staring at us makes me think that saying no might cause exactly the sort of scene we don’t want, so I shrug and push through the door into the dressing room. At least we’ll blend in if we’re in costume.

“Hurry,” Isaac says nervously behind me, and I hear Rosewater start to yell at him with her usual hatred of non-cast members backstage where they don’t belong. Hopefully his soothing cambion powers will work to calm her down.

The dressing room is empty and messy, heartbreakingly familiar. I lean the shotgun against the wall and drape my peacoat over it in case anyone comes in. After slipping into my costume, I swipe some glitter over my eyes, a pathetic attempt at Nikki’s usual artistry. My hair is a tragedy, but I’m not actually going onstage, so I don’t even know why I’m bothering. Habit, I guess. As I slip my boots back on, the door opens, and I spin with a growl. It’s Mrs. Rosewater’s assistant, some freshman whose name I never bothered to learn.

“You have to hurry,” she says dully. “It’s time.”

This kid is usually having a jittery freak-out, so I look closely at her eyes. The pupils are wide, and she’s staring off into space, drugged. I’m afraid to ignore her and have her raise the alarm,
but I’m also not willing to hurt her. At least she still has both of her pinkies.

I link my arm through hers. “I’m having trouble with my costume. Can you help me?”

I lead her a few feet over to the bathroom and shove her inside. “Hey!” she says, but it’s a feeble protest. I slide a chair under the dented doorknob, and she scratches at the door as I bolt out of the room.

Baker is standing right outside, still in his normal clothes.

“You actually got in costume?” He looks me up and down appreciatively.

I’m about to give him an earful about where his eyes should go, when Isaac whispers, “Get with the program, Scrappy-Doo. It doesn’t matter. We don’t have much time. Old Murph’s office is down this hall.”

He opens a door labeled
NO TRESPASSING
. I’ve watched Old Murph disappear through it a hundred times, and the stench smacks me in the face.

“Dovey? It’s past curtain time!”

I spin around and see Mrs. Rosewater rushing toward me, her face flushed hot pink. Behind her in the hallway stands a distal servant, his eyes black and dumb. It’s Logan in his costume. I can’t stop staring as someone yanks me backward by my toga, and I fall on my butt in the dark as Isaac slams the door in Mrs. Rosewater’s face.

Baker helps me up and takes my hand as we move down the hallway. Behind us Mrs. Rosewater yells and beats on the solid
door before going suddenly silent. I feel like a cow in a chute being herded toward something unavoidably horrible. It’s darker and feels smaller than the other hallway, and even though it’s colder, the demon stink clings to the brick walls. We pass two other doorframes on the way, both clumsily bricked in. The air is dead and still, and warm light shines from a few bare bulbs and under the final door. A sign reads
MANAGEMENT: STAY OUT
. And I wish I could.

Isaac pulls the gun out of his jeans, and Baker flicks open his knife. That’s when I realize that my hands are empty. My shotgun is still under my peacoat back in the dressing room. “Shit! My gun!”

I turn to go back out into the now welcome green hallway, and Isaac whispers, “No. Too late. We can’t go back.”

I swallow hard and nod, my hands curling into fists. Then I remember something. Even if he’s on my side, his aim sucks.

“Give me my daddy’s gun,” I say softly, and Isaac’s eyes go a shade blacker as he slips it into my hand and steps aside.

Baker puts his hand on the knob and looks at me. I get into shooting stance, arms taut and trembling just the tiniest bit, and I nod.

He opens the door.

OLD MURPH LOOKS UP FROM
his desk and snarls. I want to shoot him like I did Mr. Hathaway, but I can’t. He’s got one hand on Jasmine, who’s sitting on the desk, facing him with her back to us. I can’t tell if she’s drugged or not, but her shoulders are shaking with what looks like sobbing, and her toga is torn at the shoulder, and chunks of her beautifully curled hair have been ripped out. As much as I want to slap her most of the time, I definitely don’t want to risk shooting her.

“You’re missin’ your curtain time, crazy girl,” Old Murph says. “You go back and play your part, and I’ll let you take Little Miss Sassy with you. You give me any trouble, she loses a finger.”

“They’re going to take her pinkie down there anyway,” I say, and he laughs. The gray hairs on his head rise up and quiver toward me.

“I didn’t say anything about her pinkie, sugar.”

I swallow hard. “Isn’t she supposed to be onstage?”

“As long as the doors are locked, it doesn’t matter what’s onstage.”

I shake my head once. The gun doesn’t waver. Baker and Isaac subtly move toward the desk, one on either side. I watch the hump-backed demon and the girl, wishing I’d spent more time at the range, wishing I trusted my aim better. Old Murph reaches casually into Jasmine’s hair with his other hand, strokes a curl, and then rips it out savagely and brings it to cracked lips. He sucks it up like a spaghetti noodle as Jasmine shudders. His acid-green eyes don’t leave mine as he reaches for another curl, and I notice his thick fingers making indentations in her shoulder.

“Y’all keep on creeping close,” he says darkly, “and we’ll see how many bits of her I can rip off before you get here. I been at it awhile.”

The hand that had been caressing her hair goes to her chin and turns her head to show me where her left ear has been ripped off. I wince and say, “Jasmine?”

She snakes her head around too fast, and Isaac lunges for her, snatches a handful of toga, and yanks her to the ground. Old Murph launches himself across the desk with more power than he should have, and I pull the trigger and lurch back before he can touch me.

“What do I do?” Baker shouts, but I can’t look up. Old Murph is crawling toward me with a hole in his shoulder, a bulging, bleeding, hump-backed monster with elbows that bend the wrong way.

“Shoot him again!” Isaac yells. My eyes dart to Isaac for one second, and he’s trying to hold on to Jasmine, but she’s fighting
him. Something tugs the hem of my toga, and I look down into Old Murph’s hair and close my eyes and shoot him at point-blank range. Black acid soaks into the gold-edged bedsheet of my costume, and I kick him away and dance backward.

“Give me your knife,” I say, voice shaky, and Baker’s already there.

I know how to take a demon’s distal now, and Isaac’s knife feels like it was made for the purpose. Hell, maybe it was. It only takes one good stomp. I pick up the chunk of gray finger with a dry corner of my toga and look around for the means to burn it, and that’s when I notice that Jasmine is sitting on top of Isaac, her knees pinning his hands to the ground as her long fingers squeeze around his neck. Both of her pinkies are nubs. His eyes are terrified and frantic, his mouth moving, but he’s turning purple.

“Jasmine! You crazy bitch! He’s on our side!” I yell as Baker runs over, and her head swivels too far around until she finds me. She only has one eye left, but it’s as black as pitch, all around.

Baker shakes her shoulder like he’s trying to wake her up. She hisses and tries to claw him across the face. He barely escapes getting blinded by her long nails, but Isaac is able to wrench out from underneath her while she’s focused on Baker. I watch them grapple, feeling helpless.

I can’t shoot Jasmine. I don’t know what’s wrong with her, and there might still be something worth saving. I don’t think she’s a distal servant, but she can’t be human anymore. The places where her eye and ear were ripped off aren’t bleeding, and the ragged holes where her curls of hair were torn away look black and tarry.
She’s crouched and moving toward Baker, mouth open but silent, which is also against her nature. I fold up the knife and throw it to him. He catches it but clearly doesn’t know what to do with it.

Isaac coughs as he crawls away from Jasmine. “She can’t be saved,” he whispers. “Shooting her is a kindness.”

I aim the gun at her face, then let my arm drop so it’s pointing at her chest. Her head swivels over to me, an entirely inhuman movement. I recognize nothing worth mercy, but still I don’t shoot.

“Dovey, Old Murph is moving again,” Baker says quietly.

Jasmine almost has Baker backed up against the desk, but he’s watching the lump of old man on the other side of the room. Murph’s back is twitching. I hunt around for his distal and find it still clutched in my fist.

“Watch out!” Baker yells.

Jasmine leaps for me, and Isaac knocks her down. There’s something big in his hand, and he smacks her in the head with it, a solid, sickening thump. She slumps over, and dark, slurry fluid oozes from a gash in her head. Isaac pops her again, and I turn away. The thing I saw in his hand is a doorstop made from a brick wrapped in a hand-sewn gingham cat, the sort of thing my grandmother used to make and give as gifts. I want to throw up, but I can’t. Movement catches my eye, and I carry Old Murph’s finger to a shelf of knickknacks.

Isaac appears by my side and puts a paper matchbook in my hand. With a nod of respect I hand him my gun. Baker comes up behind us, puts a hand on my shoulder as I drop the twitching
finger into an old ashtray. Like I’ve done this a thousand times before, I strike a match and catch the entire matchbook on fire. The boys crowd close as I drop it into the ashtray and watch the flame until the finger catches and starts to burn with a sick, heavy funk. I glance at Old Murph, grateful to see him collapsing inward like rotten fruit, just like Mr. Hathaway did.

“What happened to Jasmine?” Baker asks softly, and Isaac and I turn to look at what’s left of her.

“Murph turned her into an imp.”

“How did he . . .” I start, but I can’t finish.

“Fluid exchange. You don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter now. They’re like rabid dogs. If you see another one, kill it.” Issac wipes the black ooze from his face with the back of one hand. “Come on. The guard’s dead. Let’s hit the basement.”

I feel numb inside. First Carly, then Tamika. Now Logan and Jasmine. If we don’t hurry up and do something, they’ll get Nikki, too, and Mrs. Rosewater, and everyone else I know. I close my eyes and exhale slowly, feeling around inside my mind until I find what I’m looking for. Time to tap into whatever cambion powers I can summon. All I feel is rage, but that’s enough.

There’s only one other door in the room, an old and crooked thing that looks like a closet. We all turn to it at the same time. Isaac hands me the gun and opens the door. Narrow stairs, straight down. A single grimy bulb lights the way. I hold up my toga and descend, my boots heavy on the wooden steps. The door clicks behind us, and we’re just three vessels of warmth in the dark, cold
stairway. Strained noises filter in, and I realize it’s the sound of a big crowd. I imagine poor Mrs. Rosewater freaking out, thinking that missing most of her lead actors on opening night is the biggest problem she could possibly ever have.

She has no idea.

I move faster, already planning how we’ll shoot out the glass doors out front and set the theater on fire. But first, I have to be sure Carly’s dybbuk box has been opened and she’s free. And Kitty has to be dead, her stomach emptied of distals. Maybe a fire would take care of that problem for me, just destroy the whole dybbuk cabinet, but I could never rest again if I didn’t know for sure. I trip and catch myself with a hand on the brick, and it’s cold, and hundreds of people on the other side of it are waiting patiently to lose the one thing every human being should never have to doubt: their ability to die and stay dead.

By the time I reach the door, the lightbulb at the top of the stairs is as far away and untouchable as a midnight star. The boys stop behind me in the pitch-black space, and Isaac turns on his phone, throwing us into eerie, blue-black relief. I am desperately aware of their warmth, their breath, the brush of Isaac’s leather jacket and the rustle of Baker’s puffer vest. When a hand bumps into my arm, traces down to my hand, and intertwines fingers with mine, I know instinctively that it’s Baker.

“Are we ready?” I whisper.

Isaac whispers, “Do it,” and Baker just squeezes my hand and then lets go.

THE DOOR SQUEALS OPEN AND
bounces off the wall. Isaac catches it with a hand, holds it open as my arms swing into shooting stance. The room beyond is even darker than the hallway, the silence within deep and sucking. Cool air rushes over my bare shoulders. I’m frozen in place, not about to barrel into the pitch black. And I’m surprised as hell that nothing’s rushing at me, claws outstretched, like Jasmine did.

Isaac hands me his phone with the screen lit. I take a deep breath, holding the phone out with one hand and the gun in the other. I’m terrified and exhilarated, and it reminds me of my first time onstage, somewhere overhead. It was so dark in the wings, and I was shaking and about to throw up and scream all at once. Carly squeezed my hand, as Baker did just now. Then the music started, and the spotlights came on, and everything just clicked
into place. I knew at that moment that I was meant to be onstage, that I had been given a gift. That I could slip into someone else’s skin and command the attention of everyone in the audience.

Today I need to be in the skin of a cambion. I need to kick ass. So just like I did three years ago behind the black curtains of the wings, I offer a small prayer and say “Action.” Then I take a step into the room.

My gun smacks into something, and I falter, fear rising in my throat. But whatever it is, it doesn’t fight back. I swing the phone over and recognize the plastic face of an old dummy, her drawn-on eyebrows surprised and a little beat-up.

In the silence I hear only my breathing, but I can feel Baker and Isaac close behind me.