Free Serpent's Storm by Amber Benson Page A

surmised that it was coming from somewhere in the direction of my feet and immediately slid away from the cabinet, stepping out into the hallway, where it was ostensibly safer. The door to the bottom cabinet flew open and the very alive body of our nearly naked office intern crawled out, gasping for breath like a deep-sea fish caught on a line. He grasped at the floor with both hands, using leverage to disentangle his limbs from the cabinet’s embrace. He flopped onto the ground, his pale white torso covered in splotchy red patches where it had pressed into the wooden interior of the kitchen cabinet.
    I wanted to look away, to give the poor guy some privacy, but he reached out a shaky hand and wrapped it around my ankle. I instinctively took a step backward, easily slipping out of his infirm grasp.
    “Sorry,” I said, feeling bad I had recoiled from his touch. I hadn’t done it on purpose. It had just happened unconsciously.
    He stared up at me, eyes wide as saucers, bare body shivering despite the fact the building’s ancient heating system was going full blast. It took me a moment to realize that, while he might be disoriented by his experience, he wasn’t the least bit angry with me for my reaction. He was just totally confused by the situation as a whole.
    “What happened to me?”
    The sentence came out in a rush, his lower lip trembling as if he was about to cry. I wanted to kneel down beside him, the picture of calm reassurance, and promise him everything was going to be all right. But since I had no guarantee this was actually the case—and my body didn’t seem to want to touch his flesh anyway—I decided against the Florence Nightingale act. The truth probably wasn’t something I should be sharing with the poor guy, either, so instead I opted for a hybrid of the two:
    “Help!!” I screamed as loudly as I could. “Man down in the kitchen! Help!”
    This only seemed to add to the nearly naked intern’s terror and confusion. He made a keening sound low in his throat and closed his eyes as if forced blindness were the answer to all of his problems.
    “Look,” I said, crouching down on my heels so I was closer to his level, but still just out of reach. “Someone is gonna come out here any second and help you. I’m sorry it can’t be me, but you give me the willies when you touch me and that can’t be a good thing.”
    My honesty seemed to do the trick. Robert stopped making the pitiful noise deep in his throat and cracked his bloodshot eyes open just wide enough to get a fix on my position.
    “Please don’t leave me,” he begged, and I sensed he was about to pounce seconds before he actually did. It was enough lead time to stand up and rest my leather-clad foot right in the middle of the intern’s solar plexus. The impact—I tried not to push him too hard—sent him sprawling, and I watched guiltily as his head bounced against the cabinet door, knocking him out.
    I can’t believe it—I’m two for two in the kitchen/fight arena.
    “Hang in there,” I offered meekly, hoping someone would find Robert’s prostrate body where it lay flat on the floor sooner rather than later.
    Then, feeling as though I were the new Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World, I jogged away from the kitchen and back toward the bathroom, where I used my newfound moves to smash the crap out of the bathroom door with two well-aimed kicks—and this time, the puppy opened right up for me.
    It was like I was made of magic.

six
    “What the hell, Jarvis!” I said as I stepped through the bathroom doorway, my eyes scanning the white subway-tiled space for my dad’s Executive Assistant. I had a bone to pick with the meddling faun and I was itching to get started.
    But what I found in the bathroom stopped me dead in my tracks. The room had been ransacked—sinks ripped from the wall, toilet stall doors hanging askew on their metallic hinges, cracked subway tile on the wall caked in scarlet streaks that could only be blood.