The cobra queen, p.1
The Cobra Queen, page 1
For Berndt
What is a spirit guide?
I typed my query into the search engine on my work computer and glanced furtively around the open-plan office. On finding that I was unobserved, I sat down low in my chair and pressed enter. This was no mere work query. This was, well, personal.
It was only four o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and I was at the boutique New York fashion magazine where I work. Despite our shared name, my only actual connection with the magazine is my unglamorous position as assistant to the editor. But I do look deceptively important on my business card: Pandora English, Pandora Magazine. I wasn’t above milking that coincidence when I needed to, short of lying, of course. I’m no good at lying. I don’t have a lot of work experience, but I know it’s frowned upon to surf the Internet during paid work hours. Thing is, I don’t have a computer at home and I don’t have the Internet either.
Nervously, I chewed the inside of my lip and clicked on the first search result that came up: A spirit guide is defined as an entity that remains a disincarnate spirit in order to act as a guide or protector to a living incarnated human being.
Disincarnate? Lieutenant Luke wasn’t always disincarnate. Sometimes he was really quite carnate indeed. He was very handsome and attentive, and, well, the thought of his carnate moments made my cheeks hot. We had a very special date in just two nights, on the Blue Moon. I’d been looking forward to it all month. I licked my upper lip, which had suddenly become dry, and continued reading: Spirit guide can also refer to totems, angels, guardian angels.
Hmm. I guess I could think of Lieutenant Luke as a guardian angel. I liked that idea, actually. Still, what did that mean exactly? That he would push me out of the way of speeding trains or stop me from stepping off cliffs? He’d come to my aid in the past, and mine to his, for that matter. But why did I have a spirit guide at all? What were the rules of engagement here? Is it ethically okay to date your guardian angel? Was that done? I had a serious crush on my spirit guide and I didn’t know what to do about it for a bunch of reasons – not least was that I had something like a boyfriend already. His name was Jay Rockwell, and he was nice and rather handsome and tall, if a bit embarrassingly wealthy. Oh, and sometimes he didn’t remember me (paranormal ‘erasure’, long story), but by regular-world standards he was what people commonly called ‘a catch’. Plus, you know, he was alive. The whole issue of dating two men at once was awkward, when only one knew about the other, and only one was living, and … My life was complicated.
The door opened behind me and I closed the search browser so fast you couldn’t even see my hand move.
‘Pepper,’ I declared and stood bolt upright.
Pepper Smith was the editor of Pandora, and my boss. She was bright, fashionably thin and highly caffeinated, and today she wore her ice-blonde hair in a severe bun right on the top of her head. I think fashion-types called it a ‘top knot’. Her lightweight blazer was a striking emerald green, and she wore dark denim finished with a matching green stitch. She was wearing black platform boots with cut outs that showed off fuchsia, pedicured toenails. I was pretty sure I’d never seen Pepper in the same thing twice and today was no exception.
I stood to attention in front of her and she raised a pale sculpted eyebrow at me. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘Sorry … Nothing,’ I said and leaned back against the edge of my cubicle, faux casual.
She eyed me suspiciously. ‘You are a strange girl.’
There was no comeback for that, really.
‘Can you work late tonight?’ she asked.
‘Tonight?’ I found myself nodding automatically, though I suspected I would be exhausted by nightfall. I’d been up late with my … well, my spirit guide slash guardian angel slash sometime other boyfriend. (Can you tell I am feeling guilty?) It had become a bit heated – his lips were like sweet mist and when he kissed me I felt like I was floating … Don’t get me started. Suffice to say, sleep was a thing of the past since I’d moved to New York.
‘Certainly I can work late,’ I replied.
‘The fashion shoot has moved. We’re shooting at the Temple of Dendur but we can’t get in until after dark,’ my boss explained.
‘Oh.’ I blinked. The Temple of Dendur was quite familiar, though I’d never seen it in person.
‘For the Egyptian-themed shoot,’ my boss said with a hint of impatience.
‘Yes,’ I replied, because I knew precisely which shoot she meant and why the Temple of Dendur would be the perfect location. This summer would apparently be all about ancient Egyptian-themed fashion – Cleopatra and the like – and we were devoting most of an issue to the look, which included chunky gold jewellery, winged eye makeup, sandals worn with long dresses that draped luxuriously, or skin-tight ‘mummy’ bandage dresses for the body-con types. (That was an important fashion term now – ‘body-con’, as in conscious. I’d been regarded as somewhat clueless when I’d asked what it meant.) The big shoot had been organised for Thursday at a studio nearby in SoHo, and I knew when and where because I had organised it on Pepper’s behalf. But since then, it seemed she’d had a favour come through and everything had changed. ‘That’s good then. Isn’t it?’ I ventured, wondering how we could fit in a planned eight-hour shoot in one night.
‘Of course it’s good,’ she replied. ‘But time is short now.’
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur. The Met had a famous Egyptology section, including a temple for Isis and Osiris, the gods of resurrection and the afterlife. The more I thought about it, the more a strange cocktail of delight and fear took hold of me. I knew about the place. My mother had talked about it.
‘What time am I to be there?’
‘We have an eight thirty start time for the first look, after the sun goes down,’ my boss informed me. ‘You’ll arrive at seven and start the set-up with the photographer. There’s a lot of glass in there. Astrid will have to put up backdrops.’
I had yet to attend a photo shoot that took less than four hours and I knew for a fact that we had a lot of looks to shoot. Oh, it would be a late night then. Another one, but this time with no Lieutenant Luke as an inducement. Still, I’d always wanted to see the Temple of Dendur in person – since I was a kid, actually – and, more importantly, I could use the extra pay. Pepper was good about things like paying overtime, though her predecessor, Skye DeVille, had not been. (Skye had sure pushed the boundaries of proper employer conduct on a few occasions, and that was even before she’d become a bloodsucker.)
‘Can Morticia come?’ I blurted.
The receptionist, Morticia, is my friend. In fact, she is my only truly normal girlfriend in New York, though you wouldn’t think so with a name like that. I didn’t particularly like the idea of hanging around late at night at the Met, which is at the corner of Central Park. I hoped I didn’t need to explain why. It wasn’t the threat of muggers, actually, but I was happy for Pepper to think that.
My boss hesitated. Her pale, steely eyes took in the front desk for a moment. ‘Well, that is a good idea, I suppose. We could use an extra set of hands if we plan to get out of there by midnight.’
Yes.
I relaxed a touch.
‘Seven o’clock sharp at the main entrance to the Met on 82nd and Fifth,’ Pepper said.
She turned around and walked back into her office. Just before she closed the door behind her, she gave me another curious look. I thought she was going to say something, but she just looked me up and down and then disappeared, the door making a faint clink behind her.
Strange girl, I could imagine her thinking.
She didn’t know the half of it.
It was just past five as I descended the stairwell from the office, pushed the heavy street door open and stepped out on to the Manhattan sidewalk.
SoHo’s Spring Street was busy, as always, and after growing up in sleepy Gretchenville (population 3999 with my recent departure) I was not quite used to the pace of Manhattan yet. It was hardly the biggest change I’d had to get used to since moving to the Big Apple, but there was something about the constant noise and movement of pedestrians and cars that took adjustment. Even in my great-aunt’s mansion in Spektor, which was far uptown and curiously quiet, you could often hear the distant sounds of sirens late into the night. It wasn’t for nothing that they called New York the city that never sleeps. The sky was still bright, which was a nice change after my first Manhattan winter, and on this particular warm late-spring afternoon the business people and arty types who pushed past me on the sidewalk wore suits with the jackets off, or short-sleeved T-shirts or dresses. The days were already longer and gloriously … alive. I wondered how long the sun would shine and the people of Manhattan would remain oblivious to the supernatural trouble that was stirring.
And it was stirring. I had no doubt of it anymore.
I looked up into the sky, half expecting to see the creature who had taken me up there one night.
‘It’s going to be nice out tonight,’ came a voice behind me, and I whirled around.
It was my friend, the receptionist Morticia. She was standing in front of the Evolution store, next to the full-sized medical-grade skeleton that guarded their door. The skeleton was holding a sale sign, and the wind caught it, making the plastic bones rattle.
I took a breath, pushing aside all the things I couldn’t tell my friend, all the things that now, conjured by the sight of those bones, f
‘Did you buy something?’ I asked.
The Evolution store had some real human skulls, along with the medical-grade replicas. The shop window was lined with Venus flytraps and dead butterflies in frames. A stuffed warthog stared at me through the window with lifeless glass eyes. It was an unusual shop and Morticia was often drawn to it. I was too, though these days I’d had my fill of the dark and weird.
‘Nope. Just, uh, looking,’ she said and joined me on the sidewalk, though I could have sworn she had a large book behind her back that she slid into her satchel. She seemed not to want to share the tome with me, so I didn’t ask about it.
I folded my arms, suddenly cold. ‘Hey, is it okay that I roped you into coming tonight? I would have totally understood if you’d said no. I kind of volunteered you without even asking. Sorry if it was the wrong call.’
‘Are you kidding me? You know I’ve always wanted to be on one of the shoots. Plus I love the Met.’ Morticia drew out the ‘o’ in love, gesticulating dramatically with both hands to make her point. ‘It is the most awesome place ever!’
Though Morticia had rather a penchant for exaggeration, we had a fair number of similarities, all things considered: she was about my age and height, and neither of us had a lot of friends or much of a relationship with our parents. The reasons were quite different – she was on bad terms with her folks, whereas mine were dead. (Dead-dead, not undead. And there is a big difference, let me tell you.) Also, we were both alive – which is a category I’ve begun to pay attention to lately – but the similarities probably ended there. She was a bit of a goth and she had a tattoo, and though I had never dyed my light-brown hair, she changed her colour a lot. At the moment her shaggy hair was dyed a stark raven black so black it was almost blue. Last month it had been the colour of red food dye.
I tended to wear vintage hand-me-downs from my great-aunt, who’d been a designer in the forties and fifties, whereas Morticia always seemed to wear the same black dress, striped tights and Doc Martens. With her panda-black eye makeup and gangly, Olive Oyl build, she was the antithesis of pretty much everyone else who worked at Pandora. I liked that about her. And her name was deceiving. She’d changed it from ‘Bea’ to Morticia, probably to spite her parents, but she was just a normal young woman living in Jersey and working the front desk at Pandora. Meanwhile, I had the slightly less odd name of Pandora, having evidently been named after the woman in Greek mythology who opened a box and let all the evil into the world, yet I lived in a strange suburb on Addams Avenue, a street named for Charles Addams, the Addams Family creator and creator of Morticia’s chosen namesake. I hadn’t yet told Morticia about that. Nor had I mentioned to her that Mr Addams himself was a resident of the suburb I lived in. And by resident, I mean that he buys his newspaper from the same store I do. No matter that he passed away in the late eighties.
‘I thought you might enjoy it,’ I said, looking down at my scuffed ballet flats. ‘I remembered you saying that you’d never been on one of the fashion shoots before, and you wanted to.’
‘I was always keen but Skye never asked me,’ she admitted.
Even hearing my previous boss’s name made me sneer a little.
‘Are you heading home to eat or change or anything?’ I asked, though I imagined her wardrobe consisted of identical black dresses and striped stockings.
She shook her head.
Right.
I was wearing a forties shirtwaist day dress belonging to my great-aunt, and I had a vintage cardigan in my leather satchel for when it cooled. Technically I didn’t really need to go home and change, and taking Morticia to my new home was something I’d often considered but ruled out for a range of reasons. It wouldn’t take someone long to figure out things were, well, different in Spektor. Maybe we could go for dinner near the museum, I thought, and I wouldn’t need to rush home at all?
‘Do you want to … meet up at the museum, or …?’ Morticia said, clearly fishing, and perhaps thinking the same thing. We always talked about catching up outside of work but we never did. My strange life in Spektor tended to see to that.
‘Well, why don’t we just …’ I began, trying to think of the best place to eat on a budget, but I trailed off as a familiar figure stepped out of the sea of pedestrians right behind her and I was rather abruptly at a loss for words.
There he was.
My guardian angel.
My heart stopped for a moment, then resumed at quite a pace, and I felt my cheeks grow warm.
Second Lieutenant Luke Thomas appeared and stood only a couple of feet away, watching me with that irresistibly tender look of his, square jaw clenched and brow knitted with concern. As always, he wore his leather riding boots and a long frock coat with bright gold buttons done up to the collar. The blue Union soldier cap sat at an angle on his longish blond hair, the cap emblazoned with a crest of two gold cavalry swords. His own ghostly cavalry sword hung from the weathered leather belt that was cinched tight over his trim waist. In the early evening light he was translucent and faded, like a dashing hero in an old film, washed out by the sunlight. Lieutenant Luke had the brightest, most beautiful blue eyes I’d ever seen, and now those eyes drank me in longingly, turned inquisitively to Morticia, then looked at me again with a silent question. Shall I go? he was wondering. He’d expected me to be alone.
My breath caught in my throat, I licked my lips and considered my options.
‘Are you okay?’ my friend asked.
Why does the most perfect man I’ve ever met have to be dead? Why?
‘I’m … I’m fine. We have to be at the Met on 82nd by seven for the fashion shoot. We could maybe …’ I said after a moment, in an exaggerated voice, trying to convey the situation to my spirit guide. He would have expected me to be free tonight. Of course, I had expected I’d be free, until the news from Pepper.
‘Grab something to eat?’ Morticia said, finishing my sentence for me. Her head was cocked to one side, shaggy black hair falling into her eyes.
‘Yes. No. I mean … You don’t have to go,’ I said a little loudly.
Gosh, I wasn’t doing this well at all.
‘Are you okay? Why are you talking funny?’ Morticia asked.
Good question.
‘Am I talking funny?’ I fidgeted with my satchel. Of course you are talking funny, Pandora. You are trying to talk to a living woman and a ghost at the same time.
I’d last seen Lieutenant Luke at about two in the morning. We’d started out talking and then at some point we’d been entangled on my bed, and I’d been in that gentle embrace of his, and his lips … well. Now I found I couldn’t think straight with him standing there so close to us. It wasn’t just his presence, of course, it was the fact that Morticia was there too, just a few feet away from him, each of them part of very different worlds. I was not yet accustomed to seeing Luke outside the confines of the mansion in Spektor – this was a fairly new ability for him, the ability to get out at all, as he’d previously been cursed to remain in the building. The idea of going out for dinner with Morticia and somehow ignoring Luke’s presence seemed a hopeless proposition. I had considered telling her about him, but she’d almost certainly think me mad.
I took a breath, steadied myself. ‘Hey,’ I finally managed. ‘I’d love to grab a bite to eat some other time, but have something to do right now. Why don’t I meet you at the steps of the museum. I think they want us at the 82nd Street entrance. Say ten to seven?’ I suggested to Morticia. It seemed a small miracle that I’d been able to string a couple of sentences together.
‘Okay,’ Morticia said and nodded, though I might have detected some hurt in her voice. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked me, for perhaps the first time giving me a strange look. I was pretty used to being looked at that way by nearly everyone else. Those kinds of looks had started before I was ten, to be perfectly frank. But Morticia had never seemed to think I was odd. Until now.
‘I’m fine,’ I replied unconvincingly. ‘I would like to grab dinner another night though. Sorry I have to rush off. So, I’ll see you just before seven, okay?’ I called out, backing up on the sidewalk, moving in the direction of the subway station. ‘On the steps? Is that okay?’
