Servants of the Storm

  Her arm locks down on me, squeezing our bodies together in a way that’s deeply unnerving on a lot of levels. I squirm, and Isaac’s eyes lock onto mine, pleading for something just out of my reach. Kitty’s hand slides down my arm to clench my wrist again, and I gasp when I feel my bones grind together.

  “Don’t—” he says, but it’s too late.

  With a low chuckle the fox-eared girl yanks my hand up to her mouth and bites off the tip of my pinkie finger. She lets go of me, and I fall to the ground, screaming again and again and again as my heart pumps out through the jagged stump with sickening squirts of blood.

  Kitty stands over me, laughing, but all I can see through the fog and the darkness and the lights are her black heels, and they have scales like a reptile. My heart beats fast in my ears, each thump pushing me further away from myself. I curl up in a ball around my hand, cradling it to my chest and sobbing. It hurts so much, like it’s more than just a finger.

  “Go now. And take her with you. Consider it a loan,” Kitty says, her voice far away and cruel, cool as the winter moon.

  Rough arms scoop me up. Everything hurts. I’m a raw nerve, and it’s too much. I can’t stop screaming. And I’m floating, floating in his leather arms, and the air swirls with smoke and pulses with light and sound, and blood is everywhere and she’s laughing again. I turn to look over his shoulder, and she’s holding something up between her fingers, something shaped like a pill, but it’s the tip of my pinkie finger, and she pops it into her mouth like a butterscotch candy.

  My head droops over his arm, and he murmurs something to me, but it’s as useless as water and runs out of my ears, and it would just be easier to quit fighting the flood, and I close my eyes and let the dark river take me away.

  13

  IN MY DREAMS I’M DROWNING. the thick water chokes me, coating my insides with scum and rot. I wake up trying to scream, my lungs burning. A whimper is all that comes out. My finger is on fire, and my fist curls around a wad of fabric, and a hand clamps over my mouth, and it tastes like rubbing alcohol, and Isaac leans close and whispers, “You can’t scream anymore, or things will get bad.”

  I nod my head and swallow. He gives me a dark glare, his black eyes serious. It seems like they should be blue, but nothing makes sense anymore. I nod again. His hand leaves my mouth, just a little, just enough for me to say, “Okay.” My throat is so raw that it’s the best I can do.

  He sits back, watching me. I swallow again and try to sit up, but my hand hurts too much and I can’t put pressure on it. It feels heavy and overly warm where it lies on my stomach, and it’s wrapped in fabric. An old T-shirt. The one he was wearing earlier.

  “What happened?” I manage to whisper.

  Isaac hunches over me on a narrow couch, his hip touching my side as I lie on my back. He runs a hand through his hair, which is tangled and streaked with dried blood and sweat. His undershirt is wet and bloody too, and his jacket is gone, although the room is a little cold. There’s a pile of blankets over me, and I struggle a little but don’t have the strength to move.

  “Are you sure you want to hear this now?” he asks.

  I sigh and shudder.

  “Where’s my pinkie finger, Isaac? And where’s yours?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I laugh, a mad little giggle. It’s just too funny. “Jesus H. Christ, boy. How many fingers do I have to lose before you’ll tell me shit?”

  He leans in, his face deadly serious. He holds up his left hand to show me the stump of his pinkie and says, “I have to stitch your finger shut or you’ll bleed to death. I’m going to give you something that will help dull the pain. If I tell you everything, do you promise to drink this stuff?”

  I sigh. “No. Take me to the hospital.”

  “No. Promise.”

  “If you tell me what’s really going on.”

  “There’s no point in not telling you. You’re in it now, Dovey. But I’ll take that as a promise.”

  “I promise. But you have to tell me first. Before I’ll drink it.”

  I lift my ragged hand again and start unwinding the shirt to inspect it. He gently forces my hand down onto my stomach and pats my arm. After staring at it for a moment with an unfathomable sadness in his dark eyes, he looks me dead-on.

  “There’s no good way to say this.” His eyes burn into me. “Demons are real.”

  I pause a moment, waiting for more. He just stares. I snicker.

  “Angels, too, I bet. And unicorns. How much blood have I lost, Isaac?”

  “Enough. Because a demon bit off part of your finger. There aren’t any angels, but Savannah’s full of demons. Think back. You know it’s true, Dovey.”

  Memories flash through my head. Kitty’s fox ears, her black eyes, the veins in her cheeks. The man in the fedora at Kitty’s, and his snake tongue flicking my ear. I just shake my head. I don’t want to believe it.

  The couch creaks as Isaac shifts, and he talks to me in a low voice, all in a rush.

  “That’s a lot to take in, I know. I’ll start with something simpler.” A wry grin. “Me. Did you hear Kitty call me ‘cambion’?”

  I nod.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  I shake my head. It’s easier than talking.

  “Merlin from Arthurian legend? Caliban from The Tempest, the play you’re actually in the middle of right now? Which isn’t a coincidence, by the way.”

  I shake my head again and think back to Baker’s wild makeup and twig-snagged hair. “Caliban’s a monster, right?”

  “Cambions aren’t necessarily monsters.” He fidgets with his cross, stares down as if the thumb-polished silver holds all the answers. “At least not physically. How about a succubus? An incubus? Heard of those?”

  I shrug.

  “This would be easier if you were a Dungeons and Dragons girl,” he says wryly. “I’ve never had to explain it before. Let me back up. Okay, so you know what a demon is, right?”

  I give him my mom’s best lawyer look, a practiced eye roll that communicates utter contempt and questions the person’s sanity.

  “Okay. So, seriously. Demons are real, whether or not you want to believe it. They’re all descended from Adam’s first wife, Lilith, who wasn’t made out of his rib like Eve was.” He walks to a bookshelf spilling over with old books and brings a beat-up tome with a leather cover to me. He flips it open to a see-through page with a drawing of what looks like Adam and Eve, naked in a garden. “Lilith was made out of clay, just like Adam, and she wanted to be his equal. Guess where that got her?”

  My family isn’t big into religion, although I used to go to church with Carly most Sundays. But I can guess exactly where Lilith ended up.

  “Kicked out of Eden?”

  His smiles at my sass. “Exactly. But Lilith was pregnant when she was cast out, and she had thousands of children, and they became demons. And they all have some weird animal aspect, because Lilith sprouted bird wings and hawk feet as soon as she defied God and left Eden.”

  He turns a few pages of the book to show another illustration, this one of a scary woman with wings and feathery clawed toes. She looks pissed.

  “Her children are higher demons. There are also lesser demons and imps. But higher demons are the ones in charge.”

  “Okay, so you’re telling me Kitty’s a demon. What does that have to do with you being a . . .”

  “A cambion. I’m getting to that. So demons feed on people’s emotions, most of them negative, like fear, hopelessness, grief. But some demons feed on lust and sex. An incubus is a male sex demon, and a succubus is a female sex demon. Still with me?”

  I shrug. “Sure am. Nice to meet someone crazier than me.”

  He ignores the dig and looks down, focusing on the book in his hands. “So here’s where it gets really weird. And gross. A succubus has sex with a human guy and retains his . . . um, fluids. And then the succubus transfers them to an incubus, and then the incubus has sex with a human woman and de
posits the . . . fluids. And then the human woman has a baby, and it’s cold and beautiful and doesn’t breathe for seven days.”

  “So?”

  “It’s called a cambion.” He gives me an ironic and devastating smile, and says, “And that’s what I am.”

  “You’re a demon baby?” I say, voice quivering.

  I try to push back from him, hoping that this is a hallucination, just another side effect of whatever is making me crazy. This beautiful guy who works at a hotel and gets pit stains—he can’t be a demon. Demons aren’t real. I’m backed against the wall, but there’s nowhere to go, and the movement has made me light-headed. I have no choice but to listen to him, but I can feel my lips drawn back in disgust, in horror, in some old, animal sentiment that knows that something about him is desperately wrong.

  “I’m exactly what I just said. I’m made out of people, but with demon help. It’s not like . . . It’s not something I did on purpose. It’s just something that I am. Cambions are cunning and attractive and extraordinarily persuasive, and demons create us solely to use us.”

  “But . . . why?”

  “Demons hate the sun and have weird animal parts. The higher demons might look attractive at night, but under harsh light they’re all wrong, and the lesser demons are even more twisted and ugly. They all feel deeply superior, so they don’t go out much. They think of regular humans as stupid food animals, like cattle. But cambions are smart and beautiful, with magic that demons can’t use themselves. If people are cattle and demons are ranchers, cambions are kind of like sheepdogs. So long as the demons can control us, we’re the perfect underlings. The perfect weapons.”

  “So you can do magic?”

  “Just a little. I can influence people, make them forget things, manipulate them.”

  “Creepy.”

  “But you’ll notice I’m helping you remember things. A cambion is what I am, not who I am.”

  Let’s assume what he’s telling me is true. It’s a lot to take in—this whole other world. Demons herding people like cattle, feeding on them and using them. And cambions—which just sound gross. But Isaac is here, helping me now. Surely he can’t be all bad? Surely he’s more person than . . . demon thing?

  “So if you’re a cambion, what about your parents?”

  “They think I’m totally normal. They don’t even know demons exist. Normal people aren’t supposed to. When I was born, the doctors thought I had breathing problems and put me on a ventilator for a week, and then I miraculously recovered and have been fine ever since. I try not to visit my folks very much these days. I don’t want them to see what I’ve become.” He runs his hands through his hair, his eyes far off. “A long time ago they used to call people like me changelings. Like fairies left us behind. Or like your buddy Caliban, who was supposedly the son of an evil witch.”

  “So are you . . . evil?”

  A dozen emotions cross his face.

  “I don’t think so. But I’m supposed to be. It’s complicated.”

  He says it conversationally, as easily as if we were discussing the weather or politics or what to have for lunch. But I’m sure Isaac can see the doubt and disbelief on my face. No matter what I’ve seen this week, all the strange things that have happened, they’re all just too bizarre to be real.

  “Dude, you are the craziest—” I start, but he interrupts me.

  “Before you decide that I’m insane, just hear me out. And believe me when I say that your friend Carly is involved.”

  Carly.

  Just one word, and I’m suddenly willing to listen, no matter how crazy he sounds.

  With a soft smile he gets up and goes across the room to rummage in a dorm fridge. We’re in what seems to be a studio apartment, with a beat-up armoire, a small desk, two couches, and a closed door that I hope is a bathroom. There’s a tiny kitchen in the corner—just a short counter, a utility sink, and an old pie safe. And there are books everywhere, stacked up on the floor and even holding up one corner of the armoire where a leg is missing. The ceiling is high and peaked and unfinished, with bare wood rafters and a tin roof.

  No bed. Guess he doesn’t sleep much.

  Isaac comes back and helps me drink some flat Coke.

  “Sorry,” he says. “It’s all I’ve got.”

  But it’s cold, and it feels wonderful against my throat, so I gulp it all down. It doesn’t quite wash away the gross taste coating my mouth.

  “What does Carly have to do with demons?” I say, in something resembling my regular voice.

  “Demons are all over the world.” He sounds like a teacher giving a lecture. “But they’re concentrated in places that have had a natural disaster. Really powerful demons are actually what cause natural disasters in the first place. Hugo, Katrina, Sandy, Josephine. Hurricanes and tornadoes and tsunamis and earthquakes. Even the flood before Noah’s Ark. A powerful demon decides to take over a new area or fight the reigning demon, and boom! Natural disaster. They feed on the chaos and hopelessness and sadness and desperation, after. And they take over.”

  I exhale through my nose and tamp down the pain radiating up my arm and roiling in my stomach. This shit is getting old. “Hurry up to the part about Carly.”

  “I am. It’s all important. So when Josephine came, when she made the hurricane, she brought even more demons than were here before, and they needed servants. To run errands, do the demons’ bidding, find victims, produce pills to keep the people complacent, drug the groundwater. And that’s what happened to Carly. She’s a servant.”

  “The demons are . . . using her?” I swallow, but there’s a big lump I can’t push past. The thought of Carly, my best friend, my blood sister, being controlled by something like Kitty . . . it’s too much to take. Pain blooms through my body, and I realize I’ve been squeezing my hands together. Blood is seeping into the T-shirt. I don’t care.

  “You ready for stitches yet?”

  “Get back to Carly.”

  Isaac gently separates my hands before holding up his own pinkie.

  “If a demon takes your pinkie distal phalange, the last joint of your last finger, they claim you. When you die, they take your soul, too. So long as they have the bone and your soul in their possession and you’re dead, you have to do their bidding. You are, in effect, their slave.”

  “So Carly . . .”

  “The demons found her during the storm. Kitty took her bone, then killed her and took her soul so she could use Carly as a servant. I’m sorry.”

  “But I saw her,” I say. Tears spring to my eyes, and I want to grab his shoulders and shake him, but every tiny movement shoots fire down my fingers. “A tree knocked her into the water. I saw her washed away in the flood, and then I saw her at her funeral.”

  “Think hard,” he says slowly. “You saw her go under, but you didn’t watch her die. What was really in her casket?”

  I close my eyes and go back to that moment, to the one Tamika mentioned, when I was standing over Carly’s coffin at her funeral. I can see the maroon silk of the open casket, the shining white enamel of the lid. I can see her mama’s hand, squeezing a white tissue. I look down in the casket and see . . .

  Carly. Dead and still and smooth, with a faint cosmetic blush to her dark cheeks that was never there in real life.

  Wait, that’s not right.

  I look again. Deeper.

  And then I see what’s really there.

  An old, moldering corpse, a bundle of bones and rags and bits of mud stuck through with twigs. The face is stretched and leathery, the mouth puckered shut and the eyes gaping, black holes. Carly’s best church dress clings to the rib cage, and dark fluids have leaked into the white cotton, gluing it to the bones.

  And that’s when I started screaming, because I saw it. I knew it wasn’t Carly.

  “It wasn’t her,” I say, voice breaking.

  A sob explodes out of me, and Isaac leans over to draw me into a careful hug. But I don’t think about his breath on my face, the way he smel
ls, the screaming pain in my finger. I just see the dead thing in the casket, the not-Carly.

  “No, it wasn’t her. But you were the only one who saw it,” he says.

  “Why even have a funeral if it wasn’t her? It’s . . . so cruel.”

  He sighs. “The demons know that people need to keep their rituals. Funerals and mourning are important to our psyches. And for them it’s like a buffet. All that sadness and grief in one place. They show up in black suits and hats pulled low. And feed.”

  I remember now. All those knees I stepped past, all those faces turned avidly forward. “I saw them. Strangers at her funeral. They looked so . . . reverent.”

  “That’s the problem. You’re not supposed to see that. They drug the water, distribute pills to obscure their world using their demon magic. For whatever reason you were able to see through their illusions. After that you saw them on the street, you saw them in your dreams, and you saw them in people you’ve known your entire life.”

  “Mr. Hathaway and Grendel,” I say with a grimace. “Old Murph.”

  He nods slowly, his jaw against my forehead. I inhale, taking in the scent of faded cologne and dried blood and the sweat of worry, and it feels so intimate, with his stubble against my skin, that I push away and lie back against the pillows. It crashes down on me that he’s right, that the darkness I’ve felt creeping in is real, is tangible. That I’m not crazy, but the world is.

  “Why am I the only one seeing these things?” I ask in a tiny voice.

  “I don’t know. Neither does Kitty, apparently. Most people’s brains just skid right over it, thanks to demon magic. I don’t know what happens behind the locked door of Charnel House, but that’s where the pills and drugs come from, where the demons make and distribute them. They can’t have normal people watching and interfering, so you had to be specially drugged to keep you blind. For most people the drugs in the groundwater are enough. Those pills you quit taking, they were for your own good. Because you don’t want to see what’s really out there, taking over Savannah.” He smiles ruefully, blond hair falling over one dark eye. “I tried to tell you.”