Chapter 6
The Clepsydra
1
The Villa
“I give up, this is ridiculous,” Crow said and tossed the controller aside.
Clio smiled, and got up to turn off the game. “I'm sorry. I've had a lot of time on my hands.”
“I guess. Let's just leave it at that and let me keep my pride only wounded and not slaughtered.” He laid back into the pillows and waited for her to return to bed.
Calliope's bed lay empty in the room beyond. Clio frowned at it.
“It's still early, she'll be home. Maybe her and Annie made up.”
Her gaze dropped to the floor and she shrugged. The bed beckoned her and she turned the stereo back on with the remote control.
Clio closed her eyes and rested her head against his chest. Her thumb swept across the face of his tattoo.
“What are you thinking about?” He asked.
“The past,” she said. “I was married before.”
His face paled, but held his expression.
Clio knew it was probably the last thing he ever expected to tumble out of her mouth. He waited for her to continue.
“He died.” The strangled quality to her words left a strange sensation in her brain.
“Oh,” Crow said. “I'm sorry.”
“You remind me of him.”
“How did he die?”
Her eyebrows raised and for a moment, she thought she might tell him.
“That's a tale for another night, I think,” she finally said.
The air between them disappeared. His mouth met hers with an urgency she was becoming familiar with.
Nothing felt so momentous as kissing a mortal. Their time was always running out.
2
Downtown
Annie tossed the broken guitar aside. Calliope would surely feel that come sunrise. She lay face down on the pink carpet, out cold.
“God, you don’t know when to quit,” he said and moved to open the door.
The dark haired woman with pale white skin and blood red lips slipped into the room. Her eyes were hidden behind large dark shades and a black leather bag dangled from her long thin hands.
“You look like shit. I told you not to overexert yourself,” she said.
“She’s tougher than she looks.”
“Pick her up and put her on the daybed,” she said.
The daybed rocked when he dumped Calliope upon it. The woman crouched beside the bed and opened the bag. A syringe, some surgical tubing, and an empty blood bag were dumped onto the bed beside the incapacitated muse.
Annie kneeled in front of where she lay on the daybed, his beautiful sacrifice. With amazing expertise, the woman tied off Calliope’s arm, inserted the needle into her vein, and drained about a pint of the muse’s blood into the bag. She removed the needle and placed a cotton ball over the wound.
Annie gingerly laid a Power Puff Girls Band-Aid over the cotton. He closed off the blood bag and put it into a small ice chest packed with ice.
The woman stood and folded her arms across her chest. “You did well,” she said.
“I’m a bastard,” Annie replied, his breath still wet and heavy.
“There are more things going on here than just you being a bastard,
“This is going to kill Bliss, isn’t it?”
“Do you care?”
“Of course I care!” Annie roared. “I’ve always cared!”
“Tell that to Violet, dearest,” she said and moved for the door.
“Aunt Meg.”
She stopped but did not turn around.
“Do I have to lose both of them?”
“Do you want to live?” Meg asked and disappeared out the door.
Annie was still kneeling before the daybed and his gaze finally rested on Calliope’s face. His lips caressed her neck and he sat back on his heels to take in what he had done to her. It had all happened so fast, Annie hadn't been confident he could do it to her, stealing so much of her blood. He knew he was a killer, but had never been a thief before.
His shaking hands enfolded hers to warm them. Shuddering, he suddenly sobbed and buried his face into her flat stomach. He cried like a child who had broken his best toy and rocked her unconscious body with tormented weeping. After a full twenty minutes of uninterrupted bawling, he sniffed a couple of times and picked up the phone.
3
The Villa
They looked at the telephone ringing on the desk across the room. Crow's expression fell. He got up and she shook her head desperately at him, but he quieted her with a brief kiss.
“Don't worry,” Crow told her and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Got a delivery for you, Lover-boy,” Annie said on the other line, loud enough that Clio could hear every word. His voice sounded funny.
“Can I get it in the morning, Annie? I'm exhausted.”
“Did I catch you with your pants down? Finish her and get your ass over here.” Annie hung up.
Crow looked to Clio on the bed. “I've gotta make a delivery. Do you want to go?”
“It was that easy?” The bed swung under her excitement.
“Whoa, it is not going to be that easy,” he said. “That place has got a lot of security.”
“I know, I know, but at least we have a way in now.”
“I don’t want him to know you’re going, I’ll go pick up whatever he wants me to take and come back here for you.”
“Okay,” she said. Her fingertips brushed across his dyed black hair and freckled nose. She glanced down at her watch. “I have some things I need to do anyway.”
Crow kissed her, picked up his keys, and left.
She laid back into the cushions and took a deep breath. Something dug into her back and she pulled it out.
Crow's baseball.
The worn leather was soft as skin, supple, and shiny. The stitches were rubbed down to the color of the ball and she ran it under her nose, such a distinct and comforting smell. The clock blinked across the room.
Almost
She pulled a cord hanging from the ceiling and pulled the attic ladder down. Once inside, she flicked on the dull bulb that hardly illuminated anything at all.
Clio picked her way through boxes and trunks, wardrobes and ghostly furniture clad in white sheets. Her hip caught upon a small box sitting on a side table and she sent the contents spilling onto the wood floor. She swept down to scoop the papers back into the box.
They were letters from Julian, Clio recognized the spidery scrawl right away. She glanced down at her watch again and frowned. Her hands shook as she picked up the yellowed papers and she cursed herself for it.
When she was finished, all that was left was a large brown envelope she had never noticed before. She unwound the clasp and peered inside.
It was empty but for an audio reel. Clio slid it into her palm. A small slip of paper followed and fluttered to the floor. She pocketed the reel and picked up the paper. A receipt from a
Clio cocked her head. The light was too dim for her to make out the faded writing of the purchase description. She pushed the paper into her pocket with the reel and lifted the box back to its place.
You have more important things to do than reminisce, Clee.
In the attic corner was a trunk older than fifteen or twenty of Crow's generations. The trunk was made of mahogany with gold inlay and had gold hinges and locks. Her fingertips traced the designs with unexpected emotion. This relationship with Crow could have come at no worse a time.
Annie's seven years with Calliope were up.
The trunk opened without creak or scrape. Clio dug around in its darkness and lifted a bulky object out. She closed the trunk and carried her treasure to Calli's room.
Clio stopped and put the wrapped objects on Calliope’s desk. Her hand drifted to the reel in her pocket and she glanced down at her watch again. She ran back up to the attic and returned with a dusty alligator case.
The reel to reel could have used a good cleaning, but Clio didn’t have the time. She blew the dust from the wheels and attached the audio reel. She plugged it in and stared at the Play button.
Her finger lingered over it until she worked up the nerve to press it. A voice came through thin, and far away.
“The scroll appears to be of a foreign Hellenistic dialect, maybe from an undiscovered city-state.”
Clio took a sharp intake of breath. Julian.
“I have not yet worked out the meaning of the text, but it seems to be a prophecy of some sort. It tries to sound as though it is from a province of the Underworld called Tartaros, an entirely mythological locale.”
She frowned and turned her gaze toward her bundle on the desk.
“It mentions a muse and a twenty year war for the Underworld, the only actual quote I can be sure of is ‘At the dawn of the next millennium, a muse shall bring about the fall of Hades and begin the twenty year war.’”
Clio’s hand trembled against her mouth.
“I’d like to confer with an outside contractor I work with, an expert on Muse Mythology before I continue with the translation. I will be meeting with her over Christmas. I am hoping she can shed some light on the history of the text and maybe have a theory about the strange patois. I am bringing her a copy of my notes and a copy of the scroll. This is Dr. Julian Mercado,
She stared at the tape flipping where it ended. Her hand pulled out the piece of paper in her pocket. The receipt’s purchase description said “le pendentif d'un défilement doré.”
A gold scroll pendant.
Clio didn’t know what to think.
Her gaze moved towards the bundle again and she went to it. Something terrible was coming and neither her nor Calliope should be attached to any mortals. They had to leave.
She unwrapped the clepsydra and placed it on the makeshift altar at the far end of her sister’s room. Each piece had been wrapped in raw silk, embroidered in the symbols of Clio's office. Two separate pieces emerged from the silk: a large bowl of gold and a smaller bowl of hammered bronze. The small bowl bore a hole the size of a pin at its center.
Clio sat and stared at her precious clock. She tiptoed to Calli's bath, filled a pitcher full of water, and returned to the bowls. Inside the large golden bowl was a thin silver band, running the rim a couple of inches beneath the lip, and she filled the bowl with water to the silver band.
She set the pitcher down and stared at the clepsydra. Once she set it in motion, there would be no turning back. Two thousand years of strict adherence had seen to that.
A clepsydra was a water clock invented by an ingenious prostitute of the same name in an effort to get the most of her time and money. Varying the sizes of inner bowls would get different time allotments. Smaller bowls measured time in increments of minutes, some measured hours, and they had discovered the bronze made a satisfying alarm when it struck the bottom of gold.
Her fingers dipped in and out of the dimples of the hammered bronze and she set it in her lap. Clio lifted the bowl with trembling hands and set it to rest atop the water in the golden bowl. It caught, teetered to the left, righted itself, spun, and settled.
In twenty-four hours, the bronze bowl would fill with water through the pinhole and strike the bottom of the gold. After that, Calliope must disappear out of her mortal's life forever.
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