How to be Death by Amber Benson

squeeze.
     
    “You’ll be great,” she whispered—then she gave Jarvis a wink before melting into the restless masked crowd.
     
    Minnie’s thoughtful gesture took me by surprise. My last experience with the woman would not have led me to believe she possessed an ounce of empathy within her overlarge bosom, but as usual, I was learning (the hard way, of course) not to judge a book by its cover; until push came to shove, you just never knew
who
was gonna have your back.
     
    To my surprise, Runt gave my hand a lick then followed Minnie out into the masses, leaving me in Jarvis’s more than capable hands. I swallowed hard and followed my Executive Assistant as he made his way over to the small band of men and women who were obviously waiting for us to arrive as they huddled under the safety of the rented tent.
     
    Upon our arrival, Jarvis immediately started introducing me to the four Continental Vice-Presidents I didn’t know. I’d had my superweird run-in with Anjea, the Vice-President in Charge of Australia, earlier in the night, but Jarvis had either forgotten or didn’t care because he went right ahead and introduced me to the Aboriginal woman as if we’d never laid eyes on one another before.
     
    With her long, unkempt hair and wizened face, Anjea was still as creepy as I remembered from our last encounter, but at least she’d changed into a nice silk robe that matched the silvery strands in her hair. She nodded her head as Jarvis introduced us, her unearthly eyes boring into mine with so muchintensity I thought she might attack me. To my relief, she stayed aloof, only her eyes telegraphing her interest in me.
     
    “Calliope, you look so glamorous,” a tall Native American man in a navy tuxedo said as he stepped up to greet me, holding a crow’s beak mask at his side, the string pinched between the fingers of his right hand.
     
    His deep-set brown eyes—eyes that had seen more than their share of suffering—crinkled at the edges as he smiled down at me, his tiny chin coming to a beardless point below a wide-lipped mouth.
     
    “Naapi,” I replied, letting the tall man embrace me, careful not to smush his mask against the folds of my dress.
     
    The Vice-President in Charge of North America had been a friend of my father’s for as long as I could remember, and when I was a little girl, he’d been a frequent visitor to Sea Verge, staying for days at a time to confer with my dad and Jarvis about Death, Inc., business. His trips might originally have been intended as just “business,” but this changed once Clio and I discovered he was a master storyteller, one who could keep us entertained for hours on end with all the thrilling tales he knew about the American Old West. Clio and I’d harassed him unmercifully, begging him to tell us story after story—not realizing until much later that they all came from firsthand experience.
     
    He had a myriad of tall tales, but our favorites included ghostly Buffalo Men who roamed the desert plains, scalping any white man who dared cross their path; young braves who went on vision quests but got lost in the land of the spirits, unable to return to their grieving families; a young woman who married an Indian brave from another tribe only to discover her new husband was actually an evil spirit. Naapi bewitched our impressionable young minds, weaving his tales with deft hands until we looked upon those stories as if they were a part of the tangled skein of our own memories.
     
    Not long after my dad’s death, Naapi had come to Sea Verge offering his condolences and his services should the need ever arise. I knew Jarvis and my dad had considered him an ally, and I bore only positive memories from the time I’d spent with him as a child, so I’d accepted his offer graciously. In truth, hewas one of the few people I was actually looking forward to seeing here at the Death Dinner.
     
    After Naapi and I’d dispensed with the pleasantries, Jarvis had introduced