Scythe Does Matter

The Reluctant Reaper 2

by

Gina X. Grant

Previously in The Reluctant Reaper Series . . .

SYBIL ORDERED DANTE to go find me a glass of water, then plunked down on the bench beside me, her leg brushing against mine.

“Calm down, gal-pal. Put yer noggin ’tween yer knees and try not to breathe.”

I recognized that advice from the day she and I met, the day Dante escorted me to Hell. Despite my misery, an involuntary grin tugged at the corner of my mouth.

“Oh, Sybil.” My smile faded and I dropped my head in my hands, whispering, “I’m so screwed.”

“Well, that’s a little personal, doll-face, but thanks for sharin’. And thanks to Judge Julius, you can keep on with that, you know, personal stuff.” Sybil nudged me with her elbow. When I raised my head and met her eyes, she said, “Now I hate to beat my gums, but you really dodged a bullet here today.”

I took a moment to catch up with her, but when I got there, I still didn’t understand. “What are you saying? You were there. I lost my appeal.”

“Right. And now you can go home with Dante and carry on wit’ yer afterlife. I’m not usually a nosy parker, but I gotta sing like a canary on this one. Take my advice. Don’t bother gettin’ that stapler evidence. Just let it go. Stay here. Be happy. In fact, I can go get you a confession form right now. Just say you knowingly sold yer soul for that Conrad guy and then Dante can get his job back and you guys can live happily ever after. Or, you know, be dead happily ever . . . whatever.”

“But I have to try again. If I lose the final appeal, I don’t get my life back and Conrad gets his twenty-five-year extension after all—an extension gained at the expense of my life. If I win, I’ll get my life back, Conrad will be punished and I’ll see Dante again when I die. It was Dante’s idea. He said when you’re over seven hundred years old, you can do another half century in your sleep. Got the advice from his buddy van Winkle. Dante promised he’d wait.”

I wasn’t sure he would. I thought maybe that was his way of saying, Thanks for the sex. Of course I’ll call. If he had really wanted me to stay, he hadn’t said anything.

It was hard to be mad at someone for being supportive, but I was managing.

“No, kiddo. You’re not gettin’ it. If you win, then that proves he made a mistake and scythed the wrong soul. There’s a zero tolerance policy with Reapers. He loses his job and with it, his spot here in Hell.”

“You’re saying that he won’t be here when I get back? That I’ll have to wait for him? I can do that.” Sure I could. With time out of whack, whatever time Dante had left in his next life might be only a couple of weeks for me.

“Nuh-uh. Lemme lay it out for you, Kirsty, crystal clear. If Dante gets sent back to the Coil, you can forget about ever seein’ him again. Once he’s back in the death cycle, he probably won’t even remember you.” She placed one hand on my shoulder.

“He . . . He won’t even . . .” A lump grew in the back of my throat, choking off my words. So Dante really did want to get rid of me, even at the price of the job he loved and the place he’d called home for seven hundred years. My eyes burned and my—

“Holy Jeez!” I shouted when a hand touched my other shoulder. I jumped ten feet in the air. And I mean that literally. But unlike when Dante surprised me in my hospital room back on the Coil, this time I didn’t pass through the ceiling but clunked my head painfully against it. Ow. Why were the rules so different here?

Dante waited till I’d reseated myself before sitting on my other side. His warm thigh pressed against mine in a much different way than Sybil’s. I was sandwiched between two people I cared about. And they cared about me. I would have been happy if Dante hadn’t looked positively tortured. How much had he heard?

“I was not going to say anything, cara. I knew you wanted nothing more than to get your Coil life back. How could I not support that?”

My chest tightened painfully, like I was caught between a rock and a heart place.

I searched his eyes for the truth. “You don’t want me to go?”

“Never, cara. How could you not know? All the times I told you I loved you. Ti amo.”

Ohhh! So that’s what that means. Hell’s universal translator had rendered it as “I love bullets.” It had seemed a weird thing to say in bed, but now I knew.

“I ti amo you, too, Dante.”

I should be happy to stay with the man I loved—who loved me, too—but Conrad’s triumph cast a shadow over my happiness.

“Mi dispiace, cara. I’m sorry your appeal didn’t go so well, but I cannot help being glad you’re going to stay with me.” He stroked his hand down my cheek. “At least until your next appeal.”

Sybil stood, smoothing down her skirt. “I’ll leave you two love birds to yer billin’ and cooin’.”

Startled out of our bittersweet moment, I jumped up.

“Not on your afterlife, girlfriend. We’re going to fix this and I need your help. Now listen to me, both of you. I’m going to get my life back, Dante’s going to get his job back, Conrad’s going to Hell, and then Dante and I are going to be together. I want my cake, the icing and to eat it, too.”

“Then justice will be served . . . along with that cake!” Sybil crowed, fisting the air.

“We will find a way to get the right stapler.” Dante’s hand edged toward his belt loop where his confiscated scythe should have been. “Or we will find another way.”

I grabbed his hand and squeezed it. I may have never accomplished anything before in any of my lives or after but now was exactly the time to start. That bastard Conrad was having the time of my life and it was time I got it back.

Today was the first day of the rest of my afterlife!

Chapter 1

Some Things Are Better Left Unplugged

DANTE HUGGED ME hard. “I’m so proud of you, cara, for taking charge of your life.” The “finally” was implied. I prickled but kept my mouth shut.

Sybil stared at me. “Yeah, doll-face. That’s great that yer gonna do that, but how?”

I watched a small insect crawl across the floor before saying, “I don’t know. I was hoping you guys might have some ideas.”

We all sat on the hard pine bench outside the courtroom, thinking our little hearts out.

Finally, I sighed, saying, “I got nothing? You?”

Dante shrugged, “Mi dispiace, cara. I got nothing either.”

“I gotta whole lotta noth— Hang on a sec.” Sibyl held her finger to her lips, glancing left and right, up and down. “Ah-ha!” She brandished her day planner at an oversize dung beetle hiding under the bench. “Get outta here, ya big stoolie, before I break all six of yer legs.” She raised the book like a sword. “And wipe that shit-eating grin off yer face!”

“You’ll never take me alive!” the beetle shrieked, scuttling away.

“What was that?” I asked, half curling up on the bench so my feet weren’t on the floor. Bugs give me the creeps. I hadn’t seen many in Hell since the time flies.

“It’s a Beelzebug. They’re supposed to sweep for bugs in here but . . .” She eyed the courthouse’s ornate crown molding. Anything could be hiding in the fancy carvings and recessed corners. “We better move this confab to the staff room.”

Dante and I followed Sybil into the employee lounge, a drab room with dumpy furniture. In jarring contrast to the rest of the space, a pretty spray of flowers decorated a beat-up table near the door. “Bug spray. Keeps ’em out,” she explained, jerking her chin toward the flowers. “We can hold our bull session in here without being eavesdropped on. Now, Kirsty. About your life . . .”

My life was a mess. Afterlife, too. I really wanted to sit down. A sagging sofa along one wall sang a siren song to my spinning head. Not to mention spinning stomach. I hadn’t worked so hard to keep my last meal down through the ferry ride only to lose it here.

Dante seemed focused on Sybil, his firm grip keeping me upright—and also keeping me from reaching the sofa. “Sybil, you had something to tell us?” he prompted.

“No, I just hate being eavesdropped on. Sorry. I got nothing either.”

We all had big fat nothings. And I only had a couple of months to fix this—months, like the rest of time, being relative. But I had resolved to do something and do something I would.

Apparently, that something was to pass out.

The faces around me blurred and spun and I didn’t so much slip into unconsciousness as dive headfirst into a long, spinny journey with flashes of light, sound, and fury.

I found myself plunked into a hospital room. I often dreamed about this room. In my dreams, I’d float up by the ceiling, just like I had the day I’d been scythed, watching my body lie there in that metal-railed bed, hooked up to high-tech medical equipment that blinked and beeped.

The first thing I always did, dream or no dream, was try to force my way back into my body. I’d throw myself at the poor sleeping carcass over and over, trying to re-soul my body like a well-worn shoe.

My attempts always failed.

Sometimes I woke up back in Dante’s bed in Hell crying as if my little heart would break. On those occasions, Dante would wake up and hold me until I calmed down enough to sleep again.

Sometimes, in my dream, I’d get a pattern going with the diving and bouncing. Then I’d wake up still bouncing, dark marks appearing on my chest. I jokingly called it “rhythm and bruise,” trying to make light of it so Dante wouldn’t think I was unhappy in my life with him. I’m pretty sure he saw through my ruse, though. Perhaps my continued obsession with getting my Coil life back gave me away.

Today’s dream was different. I still hovered up near the ceiling, but everything was clearer. More in focus. As if I had somehow been transported back to my body. Well, near it, anyway.

The girl in the bed had grown gaunt and ashen. I stared at her, feeling too numb even to try to climb back into my physical body. Machines fed her, machines breathed for her. On one side of the bed, that clear plastic bag continued to fill with embarrassing yellow fluid. But I didn’t blush. I had no true presence here. I was just an observer.

But not the only one. On this trip there were people in the room. My aunt Carey and her partner, Leslie. My former boss Conrad, who’d stolen my soul and ruined my life, and Shannon, his daughter and my best friend. The women were weeping. Even Leslie, who was always so stoic.

An unfamiliar woman in a lab coat stood with them, holding a clipboard and a pen. The stethoscope necklace proclaimed her as some sort of medical professional. I could see her lips moving and she gestured toward me with the pen. Not the floating me, the bedridden me. I drifted around like an astronaut, kicking off walls until I could angle around to hear her better.

“You’ve been very brave, Carey.”

Carey sniffed. “Tha—” She tried again. “Thank you, Doctor.”

The doctor nodded, her fingers circling my ankle as she spoke. I felt nothing. What connection did I have with the body on the bed? The doctor watched her own hand stroke my calf as she continued. “A great deal of money has been spent keeping your niece in this private care facility . . .”

“Money was never an issue,” Conrad said, placing his hand on Carey’s shoulder. “Kirsty was like a second daughter to me and it happened at a company function. Paying for her care was the least I could do.”

So Conrad felt guilty enough to cover the cost of this place. Well, what needed to be paid over and above the provincial health care system. Nice of the skegging skegger. Look at me, using Hell’s all-purpose swear word. I was really starting to fit in here; good thing I was leaving as soon as I could swing it.

Carey gave him a watery smile while shrugging away from his hand. She had always been a good judge of character and apparently she liked him about as much as I do—which is to say not much.

I played his words over in my mind. He was talking past tense in terms of my care. What had changed? Had some new law rescinded whatever tax break he’d been getting? Had he maxed out a handy health care subsidy? Or was it that now that he had used my blood to forge my signature on the contract amendment, he couldn’t risk my coming back to life and denying it?

“But as you know,” the doctor continued, driving my train of thought off the rails. “The likelihood of her waking is practically nonexistent at this point. It’s very brave of you to face that grim reality. You are doing the right thing for others who could use this bed, this level of care. Others with . . . more promising prognoses.” She gripped my ankle more tightly. Not that I could feel it, but I could see her knuckles whiten from where I hovered nearby. “You’re doing the right thing,” she repeated, voice cracking along with her professional demeanor.

Carey nodded. I didn’t think she could speak if she tried.

“Our lawyers have prepared the documentation. If you could just sign here, where it says ‘Next of Kin.’ ”

When Carey didn’t reach for the clipboard, Conrad took it instead. He gently placed the pen in my aunt’s hand and supported the clipboard while she signed. Looked like he couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. Knowing him, he’d probably booked a meeting right after this and didn’t want to be late.

I peered over my aunt’s shoulder as she signed her name. For a moment I was surprised the ink was blue, rather than the red I’d become accustomed to.

July 2, she wrote on the date line. So, my time in Hell equaled about ten months on the Coil. Today, anyway. Might be different tomorrow. Ten months to the day since I’d been reaped. We were only a couple of months off in Hell.

We.

They.

Where did I belong now? Where had I ever belonged? I wished my soul felt as numb as my body. Instead it felt cold and shaky and desperate.

The doctor took the clipboard from Carey’s trembling hand. She studied it carefully. “She’ll only last a few minutes once we remove the breathing tube.”

Leslie held Carey’s right hand, Shannon her left. At the doctor’s nod, the nurse who’d been standing by the door came in to assist. Conrad stepped back as far as possible, pressing himself into the wall, craning his neck to watch, his face slightly manic.

The doctor and nurse worked efficiently. The doctor shut off one machine, while the nurse yanked a plug from the wall and wound the cord around another device. Then the nurse held out a tray to receive the breathing tube.

Everyone in the room held their breath. Even me.

The doctor pinched my wrist between fingers and thumb, eyes on her watch.

I floated back up to the ceiling, watching myself die.

Suddenly, I felt a tugging. Then with dizzying speed, my body sucked me in like a big, fleshy vacuum cleaner. I hit bottom with a thud and a gasp.

A gasp that was echoed by six others. My eyes remained shut so I couldn’t see.

But I could hear.

“Oh, my God!”

“Kirsty!”

“She’s breathing on her own, Doctor!”

The exclamations tumbled over one another. I could hear the doctor ordering people back as she and the nurse leapt into action. I could feel them reattaching the little cardboard disks of the heart monitor. Then the near-painful squeeze of the blood pressure cuff. Shaky fingers drew back my eyelid and painful light burned into my brain.

I couldn’t see. I was blind.

Trapped!

I drew another loud, wet breath. My lungs burned and my throat ached. I hurt everywhere. Pain meant life. I’d kick-started my body into operation. Maybe that was why it had worked this time—my dying body had reached out in desperation and yanked its lost soul home.

I wasn’t dead yet. I was going to live. Was I going to wake? What if I didn’t? What if I was trapped in this useless carcass—aware yet unable to do anything—for years and years and . . .

I hadn’t suffered from claustrophobia since I first arrived in Hell but I sure did now. I’d been desperate to get back in my body. Now all I wanted was out again.

I threw myself upward, away from the body. I’d bounced away before, but now I was stuck, imprisoned. The judge had promised me my life back if I could find proof that Conrad had tricked me. But I couldn’t find that proof of Conrad’s forgery—specifically the ensorcelled stapler—if I was stuck in here. I had to get out! We’d agreed that being stuck in my comatose body wouldn’t qualify in the eyes of the courts of Hell as “getting my life back.” I didn’t deserve this corporeal punishment. There must have been a mistake! Would Dante report me missing? Would he assume I’d gotten what I wanted? I hadn’t, and if I was stuck in here, I couldn’t see about getting the mistake corrected. I panicked and ricocheted about inside my carcass like a fly stuck in a very small, person-shaped room.

“Doctor. She’s spiking. Blood pressure through the roof. It’s as if she’s having a panic attack.”

Cold air hit my chest as the doctor yanked my gown open. A frigid circle of metal pressed into my flesh. “Her heart rate’s out of control! Nurse, hand me that syringe of Valium, stat! Stand back. I need room to work!”

Valium? Why had she brought Valium if they were just going to pull the plug? My mind worked at lightning speed. I was trying fight, flight, and get the fuck outta here all at the same time. Oh, I realized. The Valium hadn’t been on hand for me, but in case Carey or Shannon fell apart. But now I was going to get it. I couldn’t afford to be sedated. I had to get out. I had to . . .

Sharp pain pierced my bicep. They’d disconnected my IV drip so they’d had to inject. Now more than ever I had to . . . oh, my. I felt pretty good now. Maybe I’d just take a moment to enjoy the flashing colors on the backs of my eyelids and then I’d do . . . whatever it was that was so important.

My brain felt hazy, as if a fog had risen up inside my body. A fog just like the one I’d blundered into my first day in Hell. It blanketed my brain in soft cotton. I lacked the energy and the will to escape. Peace descended. Maybe I actually was dying. I felt suspended in that dreamy space between waking and sleep. I was happy. Or at least not unhappy. Maybe just numb. I was good at numb. Lotsa practice. Go with my strengths.

I listened as my family, friend and evil ex-boss kept vigil. The doctors urged them to go home. The hospital staff would watch over me and call them in the unlikely event I awoke.

Finally, late in the evening, only Conrad remained at my bedside. I knew him by his breathing and non-stop string of business calls. The medical staff had long since departed, although they popped in now and then to take my pulse and change the embarrassing bag. A steady stream of Valium had been added to my saline drip, but I was still breathing on my own.

I heard the sound of metal scraping on tile as Conrad drew a chair over close to me. He patted my cheek and ran his hand down my shoulder. Shoving the short sleeve of the hospital gown up a bit, he left my bicep exposed. Based on what I’d seen while floating, it wasn’t much of a bicep. I could feel how shrunken and weak my body had become in the months I’d been comatose. I felt wasted in every sense of the word. Thank you, Valium.

Conrad stroked my arm for a moment then pinched me. Hard. In my mind I gasped, but my physical body just lay there, breathing shallowly.

“So. You’re not dead yet, eh? That’s good. I never wanted you to die, Kirsty. I was . . . I am really fond of you. And so is Shannon. I sometimes felt like I had two daughters, you and Shannon. Especially after you came to work for me.” He stroked a thumb over the sore spot where he’d pinched me, although whether to soothe me or erase the red mark so he wouldn’t get caught abusing the patient, I didn’t know. He’d pinched me really hard.

“I read that doctors believe coma victims can hear what’s going on around them. I keep up on this stuff, you know.”

Hmmm. So was he telling me this just in case I woke up? Talk about hedging your bets. Conrad always did think ahead. I would have shaken my head in ironic admiration, except I couldn’t move. All I could do was lie there and listen to his poisonous spiel. Even the pretty colors no longer distracted me.

“I want to explain to you why I made the Deal for my soul in the first place. I’m sure Shannon’s told you she developed a rare blood disorder when she was just a toddler.” He paused.

Yes, she’d told me, but if he was waiting for acknowledgment, he’d be waiting a long, long while.

He cleared his throat, perhaps moved by his own story. Maybe even he fell for the ol’ Conrad Deal–induced charm. “The doctors couldn’t do anything. My baby daughter was going to suffer greatly and then die. But there was this experimental drug. Not covered by the Ontario health care system. The cost was beyond me. I was just a young account exec back then, barely thirty years old and working for a big PR firm for trainee wages. But someone knew someone and eventually I met this . . . witch, I guess you’d say she was. The same one I got to charm your stapler when I needed your blood.” Oh, great. I was already pretty sure Conrad had something to do with that little fiasco, but it was nice to finally get confirmation.

If only Judge Julius were here.

“For a reasonable fee, the witch put me in touch with a purchaser of souls. I sold mine so that I could afford the medication Shannon needed.”

He paused so long I thought he was done, but he must have just made a pit stop on his jaunt down memory lane, because he sighed and continued his pathetic rationalization.

“You’re probably thinking I should have just traded my soul for a miracle cure. But that would have meant I already got what I bargained for and would have to go to Hell right then and there. Shannon would have grown up an orphan, since her mother died not long after she was born.”

This I knew. Losing a parent—both, in my case—had been something that bonded Shannon and me together on a deep emotional level over the years.

“So, instead, I negotiated for a successful PR firm and twenty-five more years. That way I could take care of Shannon and still keep my family together.”

I could sort of see why Conrad had gone with his plan. But did he really have a point or was I falling for his manipulation yet again?

“Shannon’s doing fine now. The drug she needs has been added to the list of approved treatments and so now the Province of Ontario pays for it instead of me. But still . . .” He faltered. He actually seemed to care. “I had to keep it up. I had to.”

Maybe I’d been wrong about him. Maybe he was a good guy who’d made a bad decision. Plus, I really had thrown myself in front of Dante’s scythe.

No, goddamnit! I was doing it again. Making excuses for him. Of all the creatures I’d met in Hell and on the Coil, my earthly boss was by far the most evil. I’d cast him in the role of father figure, but as of this moment, I was casting him out!

I recalled how he’d tried to steal my soul without asking. It was true he had a lot resting on his shoulders and that kicking me to the curb hadn’t meant much to anyone except the four—no, three—people who’d been at my bedside today.

But he’d gone about it all wrong. If he was going to steal a soul, he should have found someone old and down on their luck years before the deadline and arranged to buy that person’s soul. Someone who would have been grateful for a few good years. He could even have lined up a couple of contingency souls in case one passed on before the appointed time. If I, in my drugged-out state, had come up with this plan that was obviously the lesser of two evils, then the only reason he hadn’t thought of it was because he hadn’t bothered. I was there. I was handy. I was easy. And I had been a very good employee. Now I was getting mad again. Maybe the Valium in my saline drip was wearing off.

A monitor pinged close by. I needed to calm down before they upped my dosage.

“I’m sorry about forging your signature on that amendment, Kirsty. I just panicked. I’d come here and extracted the blood from you before a Reaper guy—not the dark-haired one that scythed you, but a different one, showed up demanding the paperwork.”

Then Conrad’s voice changed. He sounded predatory and insincere.

“That Reaper came back just now to tell me the verdict. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think it would go down like this. I promise, when the next Reaper comes for me in two months, I’ll tell him the truth.” His voice still sounded wrong. I could hear him lying. Funny how he’d always managed to convince me—and everybody else for that matter. I recalled that I’d felt the same thing when he’d been weaving his spell around my ex-colleagues when he’d announced my untimely coma in his crappy memorial speech, which was essentially: “Kirsty would have wanted us all to go back to our desks and work.” Not!

I could see right through his highly manipulative rhetoric now. He sounded pathetic and slimy. Apparently I had just enough bodily control to roll my eyes, even if I couldn’t open them.

“Only problem is, Kirsty, I don’t have a soul anymore since I already sold it. I doubt they’ll let me trade mine for yours. But I’ll do everything I can to get you your life back. To save you. I’ll talk to your aunt. She loves you so much and has been so miserable since you’ve been in here. And she’s gotta be, what? Sixty? Sixty-two? She’ll be happy to trade her life for yours. I’ll talk to her and to the Grim Reaper. No one’s ever out-negotiated me!”

Awww, that’s sweet. I knew Aunt Carey loved me more than enough to agree to trade her life for mine. I had finally learned that, although I still shuddered when thinking about what an ungrateful brat I’d been, never recognizing all the sacrifices she’d made after taking me in and raising me.

Wait. What?

I struggled against the Valium-induced brain fog.

He was lying! Trying to play me! Hedging his bets. Now, if I got the stapler and proved he’d tricked me, he wouldn’t lose his extension and go to Hell—he’d just flash a brand-spanking-new contract amendment. He’d get yet another innocent victim to sign away her soul on his behalf.

And the victim he had in mind just happened to be my beloved Aunt Carey.

Under no circumstances would I want Aunt Carey to trade her soul for mine. And that wasn’t even what was going to happen. She would be trading her soul so he could get another extension regardless of whether I got my life back or not. But knowing Conrad, that’s what he’d tell her. I knew that sly tone of voice—he believed he’d won.

Over my almost-dead body!

I couldn’t let it happen. I had to get back to Hell. While I hadn’t made quite enough effort on my own behalf, I would defend my aunt to the death—and from beyond the grave!

I needed to take this skeggin’ bastard down.

Struggling against the tethers of modern medicine and the natural order of things, I battered my soul against the shell of my physical body. But that wasn’t working any better now than it had before. Since the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I decided to try the rational approach instead.

For a change.

I concentrated on relaxing, taking the deep, centering breaths Dante had once told me not to. Thinking of Dante calmed me.

Slowly I stopped panicking and began pushing against my bonds with deliberate, focused effort. I started to see results. I could feel whatever holds a soul inside a body stretching, loosening its metaphysical grip. I guess I’d been so close to death for so long that the ties that bind had weakened. Just as I decided I’d exhausted my mental and emotional reserves and was going to need a short nap before trying again, I felt the ethereal umbilical cord snap and my soul floated free.

I could see again! Looking down, I noticed the room was empty now. As empty as the body lying lost and alone beneath me. Even Conrad had gone. Time must have passed while I struggled to freedom.

Since time was so wonky, I had only a couple of months or so until Conrad would try his evil tricks again. I’d better hurry.

When Dante had first brought me to Hell, we’d walked a long and winding road. But I’d somehow transported almost instantaneously backward from Hell to my body today when I’d fainted. Despite screwing up my eyes and my courage, I couldn’t duplicate that journey. I was desperate enough that I even tried clicking my heels together and saying, “There’s no place like Hell. There’s no place like Hell. There’s no place like Hell.”

I guess I’d just have to walk. Or at least run/float. No newbie anymore, I charged through the hospital wall and along the path Dante had led me on that fateful day. As I ran, I checked my pockets. When I’d disembodied my soul again, I found myself in the same outfit I’d donned this morning: black leggings, an oversize purple T-shirt and my usual hiking boots. Uh-oh. No coins. In fact, since I wore leggings, I had no pockets, either. Well, Charon would just have to front me. He knew I was good for it and besides, nobody rips off a hugely powerful demon like him. He’d hike up his evening gown, toss off his high heels and chase them down.

Like a bat into Hell, I raced home as fast as my insubstantial legs would carry me, red dirt flying under the awesome hiking boots Dante had given me on my second day in hell. I really covered ground. When you don’t need to breathe, you can’t get winded.

I charged right through a huddle of gee-gnomes. Two of the little creatures leapt at me, colliding midair where I had been a moment before. They must have stung each other because when I looked back, their bodies lay on the ground, bubbling and mutating. Serves them right. What goes around, goes to ground. Or something.

I ran on. Reaching the slippery slope, I dashed downward, slipping, falling, tumbling ass-first on the Good Intentions. It didn’t hurt, though. It felt like a dream from which I was just now waking. I continued to fall, my surroundings becoming more and more dreamlike. In the way of dreams, I knew I wasn’t really here.

Where would I wake? The Coil? The slippery slope? Or home?

And when had I started thinking of Hell as home?

Chapter 2

Get an Afterlife!

I AWOKE BLEARILY. It had all been a dream. Except not.

I opened my eyes just wide enough to see I was still in bureaucracy’s staff lounge, just down the hall from the courtroom where my appeal had been so cruelly denied.

In my peripheral vision, I noticed dark stains on the pillow—tearstains or drool marks or venomous leakage. Who knew? They were long dry, so not from me. Ick.

I rocked up so quickly my head spun.

“Oh. You’re awake. Finally. Bene.” Dante put down his book.

“How long have I . . . ?”

“How long have you been asleep? About half an hour.” He shook his watch and held it to his ear, before shrugging and turning his attention back to me. “But it’s so difficult to tell.”

“Difficult to tell when I’m awake?”

“No, silly. Hard to tell how much time has passed.” He held out his wrist. The little hands were wringing across the face. It looked very alarmed. “How are you feeling?”

“Like death warmed over—literally. I’ve been to Hell and back. No, wait. It’s so confusing.” I scrubbed my hands over my face. My cheeks felt tight, as if tears had dried there.

Dante moved to my side, kneeling on the floor next to me. He grasped my hand, peering at me till I met his gaze. “Kirsty, I’m so sorry. If only I hadn’t made arrangements to get the wrong stapler. If only I hadn’t scythed you wrongfully in the first place. I can’t begin to—”

I placed my fingers on his lips. Okay, maybe I used my whole hand and I was not that gentle.

“Look. Nobody made me jump in front of Conrad.”

Dante started to speak again. It came out as “gihcr fab gkoin.” I still had my hand across his mouth. I ignored his interruption and continued.

“Like the judge said, I’ve treated Hell as a way station. As if I were just passing through. Maybe that’s true for most souls, but I’m not most souls. I’m still alive, but now I get that I’m going to be here a while longer. I know Conrad forged my name on that amendment, but I have no way of proving it unless I can get that stapler. Yes, yes.” I acknowledged his attempt to speak again. “The right one this time. But even then, there’s no guarantee my appeal will be granted. They may deny it for the second and final time.”

Sybil had looked up the rules a while back. There were no further appeals on appeals of appeals. That held little appeal.

Dante nodded vigorously, my entire arm going up and down with the motion.

“So here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to take me down to Pit U. And we’re going to enroll me in the Reaper Academy. Yes, yes, you were right. You were right. I was wrong. Happy?”

I didn’t want to hear it right now so I left my hand on his lips. It felt kind of nice.

“Sdi wod?” His eyes bored into mine—no, not literally.

He grasped my fingers, gently drawing my hand away from his mouth. He kept hold of my hand, though, whether for comfort or to keep me from rendering him speechless again, who knew? He grasped my other hand in his free one and we sat there, holding hands.

“Why now?” he asked. Probably for the second time.

Although I trusted him completely, I still wasn’t ready to let him know my new plan: to become a Reaper so I could travel back to the Coil and scythe Conrad. Why not? Dante had done it to me, hadn’t he? Only a few hours ago, I’d wanted nothing more than to get my own life back—to make it all about me. Now my main motivation was to keep my aunt safe from Conrad’s evil clutches.

I knew Dante wouldn’t approve. The Reaper Code included some sort of prime directive about noninterference. And Dante lived and died by—well, existed—by that code. Dante’s integrity was one of his best features—that and his amazing cheekbones—but when it came to saving my aunt, I couldn’t let anything interfere, not even the Reaper I loved. Instead I answered his question with something almost as true, something I’d been thinking about for a while now.

“I’ve seen a lot of injustices since I’ve been down here. And that may be just the way things are in Hell, but I want to be in a position to help enforce the few rules we do have. Like when I first got here and Loki tried to roofie me—that isn’t acceptable behavior, even here.”

Dante paled and his mouth turned hard at the corners. We’d never spoken about my close encounter of the perv kind when Dante had rescued me from that skegging trickster.

I blushed and wanted to look away, but I forced myself to meet his gaze. I felt awkward talking about Loki. I blamed myself a little—I had gone off with a stranger, after all—but mostly I was mad. Nobody should take advantage of a woman in need.

I was also uncomfortable not telling Dante, a good and honest man, the whole truth about my reasons for wanting to become a Reaper.

“Going to the Reaper Academy is a good idea, cara. And if, by the time you finish your course, you choose to pursue your appeal, you will be well positioned to retrieve the stapler yourself.”

I nodded. That wasn’t my plan, but it was close. The timing would be awfully tight. I would have to leave the second I matriculated and got a scythe of my very own in my grabby little hands. But let him believe that if he liked. I’d do what I had to do and then come back. I knew I wasn’t going to tire of Dante and leave him. I just needed to save my aunt and then we could be together forever. Now or in fifty years. I had two months to figure out some way to make it all work.

Either way, we’d be together.

I pulled out my hellphone. “I’m calling Charon. I need to let him know I lost my appeal.” Char was gossip central. I only needed to make this one call and he’d tell everyone who’s anyone in Hell my bad news. Plus he’d just kill me if he wasn’t the first to know. I didn’t want to find out if he could really do that.

Dante squeezed my free hand as I hit the speed-dial button for Char. He was 666.

“Girlfriend!” Charon answered.

I yanked the phone from my ear and lowered the volume. I quickly filled him in on the judge’s ruling. As soon as I got to the words “appeal denied,” he screeched, “You’re staying! I missed you so much these past four hours. Eternal damnation just hasn’t been the same without you.”

I grinned. That was just like Char to make light of something he knew must be killing me. He wasn’t much for listening to your problems, but he was great at cheering you up.

“Oh really? I can tell by the trance music blasting in the background how you’ve been in mourning since I left.”

“Honey, I know you really wanted to go, but it’s hard for me to be sad that you’re staying.”

Before the call got maudlin and I bawled in front of Dante yet again, I made plans with Char to go clubbing real soon. Char liked to party hearty, until he was nearly clubbed to death. And I could use both a night out to forget my problems and a good friend’s companionship. Plus a powerful demon in your corner is never a bad thing.

He agreed—I could hear him nodding, horns scraping against the phone. Then I clicked off and turned back to my Reaper.

“Andiamo,” he said. Whether that referred to love or bullets, I didn’t care. Holding hands, we left the courthouse together.

For some reason, it had turned unreasonably cold. I longed for the polar bear fleece hoodie Dante had bought me. Suddenly I remembered telling Shannon on my last day on Earth that it would be a cold day in Hell before I saw the inside of a classroom again.

Oh, look. I’d been right.

The trek across Hell from the Reincarnation Station and courtrooms should’ve taken about half an hour, but we kept running into friends who had already heard the news and wanted details. Most of the souls and demons we ran into seemed really happy I was staying. Either I’d made more friends down here than I ever made on the Coil or misery just loved company. No, I realized, I had made friends who honestly liked me. I began to see why Dante didn’t mind staying.

If life is what you make it, well, then afterlife is too.

Chapter 3

Finishing-Off School

EVENTUALLY DANTE AND I arrived at the university. He led me over to the Registrar’s Office, where he leaned over the counter and rummaged in a drawer until he found a brochure on joining the Reaper Corps. He handed it to me and I flipped it open. “Reaping 101. No prerequisites required.”

I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until I read the requirements. I mean, why would I notice, when I didn’t need to breathe?

Anyway, I’d been worried that the requirement for becoming a Grim Reaper would be that one needed to be actually dead. But apparently not. Thank G—er, someone.

I scanned the text, checking out the curriculum. “Reap What You Sew: Styling your Robe.” I hated to dress like everyone else and had plans to jazz up my robe with sequins or piping or something. I’d ask Charon for help with that one. I recalled Char asking Dante to help him re-glue some unstuck sequins to his horns during my very first crossing of the Styx. If he could glam up his big, scaly horns, then he could make my Reaper robe sparkle like a teenage vampire.

“Stick Handling: You and Your Scythe.” I’d played hockey in high school, as well as in my past lives so that class ought to be a piece of cake. She shoots, she reaps!

“Death Coaching: Don’t be the Rude of All Evil.” I was a PR professional. I could fake sincerity with the best of ’em.

There were other courses required to get your baccalaureate in Reapage, but I figured I could handle most of them. As Dante had told me a while back, Reapers did more than just reap. They were Hell’s SWAT team, Swiss Guard, customs agents, bounty hunters and apparently the referees in various sporting events. In short, they were the only trustworthy beings in Hell. And wasn’t I off to a great start by lying about my reasons for joining up? I planned to misuse my scythe the instant I got it.

I checked out the reading list. While there were a couple of actual textbooks, I was relieved to find that the required reading consisted mainly of photocopies of the relevant sections of the major religious tomes: the Bible, the Koran, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Torah, and a novel titled Good Omens. Go figure.

The more I read, the more I knew I could do this. The course lasted two semesters. The five-week classroom portion was already two weeks along. Then the practicum activities in the field took another two weeks. Seven weeks in total, five for me. That was cutting it close to the day when the judge would rule me dead if I didn’t show up with the stapler of the damned. If Coil time proceeded along the same space-time discontinuum I’d observed in the hospital, then I had only another two months to earn my scythe and get back to the Coil to rescue my aunt. And it might not even be that long; time was passing more and more erratically as, well, time passed.

It suddenly occurred to me I didn’t have enough Karma Kredit points for tuition and I said as much.

“All retraining courses are free,” Dante responded. “It’s covered under the GI Bill.”

“G.I.? Weren’t those the slippery things on the hill on the way in?”

“Nah, those were Good Intentions—other people’s. This is Grim Intent—your own. Same acronym, different meaning. Capisci?”

Right. Because that’s not confusing at all. “So, you’re saying the courses are all free if you’re grimly intended?”

“That’s right. Life isn’t the only place where the best things are free.”

I nodded. That settled it, then. I had grim intentions. The grimmest.

“I think we’re ready now,” Dante called to three large creepy beings with leathery wings, pointy horns, forked tongues and tails who had been completely ignoring us. Now they descended on us like commissioned salesmen. That’s when I discovered that the “Demonic Procession” course had nothing to do with pomp and circumstance as I’d assumed when I’d seen that brochure a while back. Instead, demons were in charge of processing paperwork and they were devilishly good at it.

While the forms were confusing and the administrators scary, being processed by a demon turned out to be pretty painless. After only a couple of hours (Hell time) I had a student card proudly displaying my student number (XXXIVb) and a cafeteria pass.

Dante had disappeared somewhere around the ninety-minute mark, telling me to wait for him in the nearby reception area.

I’d read the syllabus three times by the time Dante finally showed with another guy in tow. The man had Professor written all over him. Not literally, but he looked like something out of a publically funded version of Hogwarts. Long white hair merged seamlessly into a long white beard. A huge smile beamed from his kindly face, causing little laugh lines to crinkle around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. He had on khaki pants and matching shirt under his Reaper robe, which he wore open like a suit jacket. There were even suede patches sewn onto the robe’s elbows. I didn’t know a robe could have elbows, but his did.

Dante gestured toward me. “Professor Colin Schotz, may I present your newest pupil, Kirsty d’Arc. Kirsty, Professor Schotz.”

From Dante’s deferential manner, I wondered if I should rise and curtsy. But they’d come to me and I was a woman (this time ’round), so I just held out my hand to be shaken or kissed or whatever passed for a formal greeting here.

“On your feet, student! There’s a professor present.”

I looked around. Hadn’t Dante said there wouldn’t be any cops or military here?

“Ten-SHUT!”

I hadn’t even been a Girl Scout, let alone a soldier, but there’s something about having those particular syllables shouted at you that makes you leap to your feet, backbone ramrod straight and be all you can be.

I stuck out my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Professor.”

Instead of shaking my hand, the professor saluted. But it wasn’t the professor now. Same body, different head. Apparently this guy had two heads like Bob the Barker, who worked with my friend Sue Sayer, except in this guy’s case they appeared only one at a time. The new head sported an extreme buzz cut and the body had lost its preoccupied academic stance and assumed a rigid military bearing. A jagged scar ran across his face, starting at the right side of his hairline and traveling down toward the left corner of his mouth, disappearing into the craggy frown lines on his clean-shaven jaw. A black patch covered his right eye. He had fierce blue eyes—I mean, eye—whereas kindly Professor Schotz had had warm brown ones.

Dante repeated his gracious gesture. “Sergeant Colin Schotz. May I present Kirsty d’Arc, your new recruit.”

Instead of shaking my hand, he hauled a raft of papers out from under his arm. “These are the required readings. The prof’s already distributed them in class. I’m doing a huge favor for Dante here, letting you enroll partway through the semester. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” He got all up in Dante’s face. “And she’d better not fail. Got that?”

Sergeant Schotz spun around and started away, black robe flaring out behind him. Suddenly he turned and came back to me as if he’d remembered something.

“Welcome, my dear. Welcome.” I faced the professor again. Mostly. “Don’t let him intimidate you. We’re all playing on the same team here. Or, at least, I am.”

“Only if you make the cut,” one half of his mouth said, corner slanting downward. “There’s no team in I!”

The professor winked at me with his good, brown eye. Half his face was now the sergeant’s, complete with eye patch. Could the sergeant still see? “Don’t pay any attention to him, Ms. d’Arc. I may be schizophrenic, but at least I’ll always have each other.”

This time when he turned, he did march away.

Okay, that was disturbing. And it was going to be distracting if he—they—couldn’t keep it together. I’d have to figure out a way to pay attention to lectures in class.

Dante rocked up and down on his toes. “So, what did you think of my boss?”

He looked so pleased I couldn’t tell him Colin was both odd and scary. “I’m looking forward to his teaching.”

“He’s a great professor. And a terrific drill sergeant. You’ll like them. He’s amazing.”

“Well, he’s something, all right.” He. They. I had a distant memory of Char and Dante talking about a he that was a they the day I arrived. Since Colin Schotz was in charge of the Reaper Corps in addition to his teaching role, I would really need to impress him if I was ever going to get back to the Coil in time to warn Aunt Carey about Conrad.

“What’s his story?”

“Story? What do you . . . Oh, the soldier and the scholar thing? Okay. You know how, when you get here in Hell, you assume the form you believe yourself to be?”

“Yeah . . .” I said slowly. No, wait. The new decisive me was more sure than that. “I mean, yes, I do know that.”

“Colin had two dominant incarnations and he can’t decide which him is the him he wants to be down here. So we get two instructors in one.”

“Can he keep track of stuff, like what homework he assigned the day before?”

“You won’t need to worry about that. Professor Schotz teaches only the in-classroom work, while Sergeant Schotz is in charge of the fieldwork. But do not let the professor’s kindly demeanor fool you. You must be sure to have all the readings and homework done on time or it’s . . .” He sucked air between his teeth, generating a slashing noise as he drew a finger across his neck.

“He’ll kill me?!”

“Oh, no. I mean you’ll have to repeat the semester. Now, we’d better hurry.”

No kidding. No way did I have time to repeat anything. I looked down at the stack of papers in my hands. “Do I go to class now or do I go home and start reading these?”

Dante looked at his watch. “Neither. It’s time for lunch. I hear they have deep-fried ectoplasm on a bun. Yum.”

Dante strode toward the cafeteria at a good clip, his robe flaring out behind him as Professor Schotz’s had. I’d grown to love that look and couldn’t wait to get a robe of my own.

If I passed, of course.

I followed Dante. I’d been in Hell long enough that ectoplasm on a bun sounded good to me, too. As I walked, I shuffled through the papers Professor Schotz had given me instead of watching where I was going. I’d believed I was headed toward the cafeteria, but when I arrived at the door and pushed on the handle to walk through it, I stumbled down an unexpected step. I nearly turned my ankle as I hit hard-packed dirt instead of marble tiles. The door slammed shut behind me, the bolt clicking into place.

I’d landed in an unkempt courtyard. Now what? I did a quick reconnoiter of the space, which looked desolate and unused. All brick walls and no windows. I didn’t see another door and a couple of abortive attempts told me this one had locked behind me. What I did see was another person. Or, you know, being. Tall, dark and not exactly human, she leaned up against a wall watching me coolly, toying with a cigarette. She reminded me a bit of my former coworker Indira, only without the blond streaks. And with a few extra arms.

“There’s a trick to it, you know.” She smiled, teeth brilliantly white against her dusky skin.

I couldn’t help but smile back. “No, I didn’t know that. I’m new.” While I didn’t have to breathe anymore, I did need to force air over my voice box in order to speak. I took a deep breath to say more, but accidentally inhaled an unpleasant mouthful of cigarette smoke. You’d think I’d be used to smoke, what with all the fire down here, not to mention the brimstone and cusswords, but I hadn’t been exposed to tobacco smoke since Lord Roland Ecks and his pipe when I’d stumbled across the time machine. I started hacking up a lung, a little worried that might be more than just an expression down here.

“Sorry.” She dropped the butt on the ground amid a pile of others, grinding it beneath her boot. Then she pushed off from the wall and came toward me. “I know I shouldn’t smoke, but it gives me something to do with my hands.” To illustrate, she put her hands on her hips, crossed her arms over her chest and patted her long straight hair. That left one free hand to hold her textbooks. “I never know what to do with them.”

“Really?” I gasped, coughing fit mostly over. “I would’ve thought having three pairs would allow you to do all sorts of things simultaneously.”

“Too bad it doesn’t work like that. Three sets of arms, but only one brain. You should have seen me try to learn piano.” She rolled her eyes. She only had two of those. “On the other hand,” she said with a grin, “I can beat you in keyboarding with two hands tied behind my back. Hands down.”

I laughed. “You’re like a one-woman arm-y.”

“Good one. I gotta hand it to you, it’s not often someone comes up with a crack I haven’t heard before. I’m Kali, by the way.”

“I’m Kirsty.” I shook her extended hand, eyeing the other five. “So, what’s the trick for getting back out of here?” I gestured toward the locked exit.

“Oh, it’s easy. Stand back.” She waved her hand over the lock mechanism. The lock exploded, pieces flying all around us. “You just have to be a god.” She gestured for me to precede her through the doorway.

“Thanks. I’ll remember that for next time.” I walked through the door and she followed. “Doesn’t that piss off the maintenance staff? Having to constantly replace the lock?”

“Nah, they got some guy who fixes things the same way I destroy them.” She shrugged. “I’d prefer that, actually, but you get what you get in the way of god-like powers, right?”

I nodded. The last god I’d met hadn’t impressed me much, but Kali seemed pretty decent. “So what’s a nice god like you doing in a place like this?”

“I got bored with the whole deity thing so I’m studying to be a Reaper. How about you?”

“Me, too. Not the god thing. Just the Reaper thing.” I touched my chest. “Late enrollee.”

“Cool. Maybe we can be study partners. Listen, I gotta go see a man about a god, but I’ll see you in class.” She headed down the hallway while I reoriented myself and took a step toward the cafeteria. From halfway across the mezzanine, Kali called back to me, “Hey, Kirsty. You didn’t ask me what I was the god of.” She had a big goofy grin on her face.

“Hey, Kali,” I called. “What are you the god of?”

“Nothing special,” she yelled, continuing to stride backward as she spoke. “Just, you know, death, destruction, chaos and those earring backs that always go missing.”

I nodded once, trying to look knowing and blasé. One of my earrings went plop at my feet, its little butterfly back suddenly gone. I’d had my ears repierced last month, but if I was going to hang out with Kali, maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.

I was so scoring her as my study partner! Being the god of death and destruction would give her a hell of a leg up on the rest of the class. Or an arm up. Whatever.

Kali had reached the edge of the mezzanine and was about to turn down the hallway when I shouted, “What about socks in the dryer? They always go missing, too.”

“Nah. That’s been assigned to Poseidon’s portfolio.” She waved all her right hands. I could hear her laughing as she moved down the hallway and out of sight.

I pushed my way through the cafeteria door, getting the right one this time. I found Dante with two yellow trays in front of him—the kind with little plastic partitions so that one mystery food doesn’t touch any other mystery food. Maybe the cafeteria staff feared a fatal food chain reaction.

“Hey. Where you been?”

“Took a wrong turn. Met a god. You know. No big deal.”

He nodded without really looking at me. He took a bite of his lunch and made a note on a napkin that was already covered with inky scrawls. Black ink this time. But I supposed it made sense to use actual ink in academia—if you tried to take notes in class with a blood-pen, you’d probably pass out before the lecture ended.

I chewed in silence as Dante scribbled away. Since I’m very much the patient type—not—as soon as I’d taken a couple of mouthfuls, I tried to read his chicken scratchings upside-down. No luck; it had to be in Latin or Italian or something. I had a couple more bites and then I asked, “muff fu iting?” He looked at me oddly but didn’t answer. I swallowed and asked again. “What’re you writing?”

“Nothing, really. I’m just toying around with the idea of updating something I wrote a long time ago.” The tips of his ears pinked. My Reaper was hiding something.

“And?” I prodded.

“And setting it to music.” He looked down at the paper again. “You’re from now, right?”

“Yeah, from now minus ten months or so, but I try to keep current.” I took another bite. “Au courant,” I added, thinking of Lord Seiko Kobe, the time engineer. We’d become friends once I apologized for tricking them. He seemed to understand I’d had no choice. I should call him to let him know our coffee date for next week was still on, although by now he’d have heard about my reanimation interruptus. Nothing moved faster than gossip, in this world or any other.

Shoving the food into one cheek with my tongue, I said, “Though it’s hard to know when now is, what with time being so weird.”

“What would you think if I redid my epic poem to music? Maybe the kids stuck studying it today wouldn’t hate me so much.”

He looked nervous. Along with my mouthful, I swallowed the flip answer I’d been ready to give. I considered what I knew of his poetry, which wasn’t much. I’ve never read any of it, but I figured I knew what it was about: death, misery, punishment and suffering. So I asked him, “You mean like a funeral dirge or a country-and-western song?”

“No!” He did that squinty thing with his eyebrows that he does when he’s not happy. “I mean rap. Hip-hop.”

Hip-hop? His fourteenth-century epic redone as rap? I found it difficult to get my head around that. “Are you telling me that in all these centuries it’s never been set to music?”

“Well, yeah, some guy in the sixteen hundreds wrote a symphony inspired by it. I met him once when he came through here. Nice guy. I think he’s an accountant now.” He moved his chair forward to yank his Reaper’s robe out from under one of the legs. Then he sat down again, brushing dust from the hem. “It didn’t catch on at the time, though.”

I grinned. “You know what they say. If it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it.”

He glared at me. “If you don’t want to hear it, just say so.”

“No, I do. I really do want to hear it.” Well, I did now that he’d roused my curiosity. I never could make much sense out of the classics. Maybe a rap version was just what I needed—just what the modern world needed.

“You’re not thinking of going back, are you?” It was out of my mouth before I thought. And with real fear in my voice. There was a pretty good chance I wouldn’t get my life back if, when the time came, I was off saving Aunt Carey’s life instead of showing up for my last-chance appeal. I really didn’t want to be stuck in Hell without Dante. He was by far the best thing that had happened to me since I got here. Or possibly ever.

“Nah. I’ll find a deserving rapper and let it leak through.”

“Leak through? I’ve heard of divine inspiration, but Hellish inspiration?”

“Just listen, okay?” He looked around. The cafeteria was nearly empty, with only a being or two remaining, chowing down on their mystery food of choice. Using his index fingers as drumsticks, Dante beat a 4/4 rhythm on the table.

Twisting up his lips, he did a fair imitation of those scratching noises DJs make by moving a record back and forth. I grabbed a couple of clean napkins, wiping half-chewed ectoplasm off the table. Keeping the beat, he began to rap:

“So I’m cruisin’ thru de woods one day,

Da year is thirteen-ten.

I’m huntin’ me a leopard,

Or maybe a dragon.

“I’m gettin’ kinda tired,

’n’ wandered off da path,

I fell into a valley

And landed on my ass.

“I felt a little queasy,

From fallin’ an’ from fear.

I saw in great big writin’,

‘’bandon hope when ent’rin’ here.’ ”

He stopped drumming and flipped over the napkin. Would this thing never end? Wait, why could I still hear drumming? I looked around the cafeteria and saw three or four beings keeping time with their . . . appendages. Maybe Dante was on to something.

“I know that I was chosen,

I ain’t gon’ tell no lie.

Lucy Phurr does like me,

Cuz I’m a way cool guy.

“I found myself a mentor,

He wore a homespun gown.

He led me to the center,

And we went down, down, down.”

His voice went lower and lower and lower as he repeated the last word. I realized I too had been keeping the beat. It was really rather catchy. I found myself wanting to know what happened next.

“Hey, that’s pretty good. You’re not such a bad poet, after all.” I grinned to show I was kidding.

His cheeks flushed. He looked down, toying with his watch. “Grazie. It’s just that—oh, for the love of . . . We’ve got to get you to class. Colin is going to be furious if you’re late on your first day.”

We grabbed our stuff and raced through the unhallowed halls.

Chapter 4

A Pain in the Class

DANTE LEFT ME at the classroom doorway with the whispered instruction to grab a seat. I stood there a moment, panting heavily from my run, out of the breath I didn’t actually need. I watched him stride to the front of the room where Professor Schotz was writing something on the chalkboard.

Did my Reaper have to be so far away?

I threw myself into the empty seat next to Kali. Some teacher’s pet at the front of the class turned around and gifted me with a withering look. As if I weren’t nervous enough already.

The classroom reminded me of a dungeon. Although the common areas of the building were formed of concrete blocks painted institutional gray, our classroom appeared to be much older, constructed of rough-hewn stone set in crumbling mortar. Some of the bricks seemed damp and slimy. Fungus and spiderwebs adorned the room. At least there weren’t any chains or actual implements of torture hanging from the walls.

Unless you count the fact that the professor had just finished writing tonight’s readings on the board. Three chapters? In addition to all the catch-up work I had to do? Could I ask the time lords to make time for me? Could they do that?

“Welcome to ‘Reapage 101,’ Ms. d’Arc. Perhaps you could express to our friend Reaper Alighieri that next time he should get you here before we begin.”

“I think I can safely say, Professor, that next time I’ll be getting myself here. And I’ll make sure it’s on time. Sorry.” The further I went along with that explanation, the more I felt like a schoolgirl. One of the reasons I always hated the idea of going back to school was how powerless teachers could make me feel. Well, I was an adult now and no one could make me feel like a stupid kid again. I sat up straight and checked out my classmates.

Three young women in cowboy hats in the back row giggled. The one in the middle flicked her blond hair back over her shoulders. She snapped her gum and swung her cowboy-booted feet up on her desk.

A nearly identical girl on her left—same blond hair, same cowboy-esque fashion sense—copied the gesture, her own boots clunking onto the work surface in front of her. “Like, that’s so rad, man.” She brushed her overlong bangs out of her eyes and I realized she was Asian, which made the blond hair look very exotic.

I glanced at Kali, raising an eyebrow in question.

“Ignore the Death Valley girls. They’re not actually stupid, but they like to appear that way.”

Okay, I’d met girls before who went out of their way to play dumb; I could handle that. I wanted to check out the other students, but the professor moved on quickly. Kali held up her handout so I could figure out where we were. I listened to the lecture, taking notes and trying to stay focused. Class was harder than I remembered and I was out of practice.

I did mention I hated school, right?

It didn’t take long for me to realize that Reaper Academy was different from any other school I’d ever attended. But I had an unexpected advantage: losing my parents and being shuffled around meant that I hadn’t internalized much in the way of religion, despite my brief stay with my preacher grandfather. I wasn’t intimately familiar with the Bible—Old or New Testament—or with any other major religion, for that matter. As a child, I’d prayed not to God, but to Santa. After all, he delivered. The other students each had the religion of their time and place drilled into them and they had a lot to unlearn. I did not. Go, atheists! (Not that we’d been right, either.)

Aunt Carey was really big on ethics, though. She’d been a little smug about teaching me to follow a nonsectarian moral code. We’d believed we were morally superior since we were doing what was right because it was the right thing to do. Not because we were going to get rewarded or punished in the hereafter. In fact, we hadn’t given the hereafter much thought at all.

The first hour of class went pretty much as expected. The readings were interesting in some parts and dull in others. The giggly girls at the back of the room were annoying. The brown-noser at the front of the room was also annoying. And the sitting still nearly killed me, figuratively speaking. Since I’d been in Hell, I’d spent a lot of time running around, first looking to go home and then, once I’d moved in with Dante, looking for ways to earn my keep. At my old PR job, I was constantly running around the office going to meetings, seeing clients, getting coffee, making copies.

Maybe the class got a break every day midway through the afternoon or maybe Professor Schotz declared one in deference to my fidgeting. It didn’t matter. I was just grateful for the chance to get up and move around.

Kali insisted she didn’t need another cigarette; she was trying to cut down. So we walked outside the classroom and hung around the hallway. It was exactly the sort of thing I’d done in high school. The Death Valley girls hightailed it to the washroom, chattering about makeup and hair-care products as they passed. I let out a long sigh of relief as their giggling and the clump-clump of their boot heels echoed away.

I hadn’t worried about my looks much since I’d arrived in Hell. I had plenty of other things on my mind and no extra Karma Kredit points for hair color and makeup. Char had referred me to a great stylist whose punishment for excess vanity on the Coil was cutting hair for free for all eternity. I ran my hand through my soft, healthy layers. Since beings of all sorts and from all ages resided in Hell, all styles were current. I wore a shag cut that to me was retro, but to some had been the hottest thing when they’d taken their last spin around the Coil.

Dante had gifted me with my hiking boots and a few other sensible clothing items that he seemed to like so I wore them all the time. I had only one pair of earrings that were now, thanks to my new friend, short one butterfly back. I didn’t even bother with makeup anymore. My soul-body—that is, the one that had popped out of my Coil body back in the men’s room that fateful day—was free of blemishes and scars. At least until I managed to get new ones. It was like a body reboot and I was enjoying my flaw-free skin for now. But unlike me and my new Zen attitude toward my looks, the Death Valley girls dyed and primped as if they expected the being of their dreams to pop up any second. My heart gave a little flutter when I realized that the being of my dreams was currently collating papers at the front of the room; I heard the rustle-rustle via the room’s open doorway. My eyes narrowed. I hoped to Hell none of the Death Valley girls had their hearts set on my Reaper. But they’d shown no interest during the first half of the class so I relaxed. Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill them after all.

Could I even do that?

I hadn’t been able to check out the two classmates sitting directly behind me, but apparently they’d noticed my late entrance. They walked up now. No, not walked. They swaggered or at least the one in front did. He was the taller and broader of the two and he wore a college letterman jacket. He stomped up to Kali’s side, smiling, but even though I didn’t know the man, something about his smile seemed phony—predatory, even.

I smiled back at him. After my earlier revelations about not being the underworld’s greatest judge of character, I decided to keep an open mind. It was hard, though; I disliked this guy on sight.

“Hey, Kali,” the jock said. “Doin’ a little charity work?”

Kali’s eyebrows drew together. “Say what?”

“Hangin’ with the in-betweener,” he sneered, gesturing in my direction with his chin, as if he couldn’t be bothered to actually look at me.

“What are you talking about?” Kali asked. She stood up straighter. Or maybe she actually got taller. Who knew with gods?

I stepped closer to her side. “Are you referring to me?” I glanced down, reading his name off his jacket since he hadn’t introduced himself. “Rod.”

“Nobody’s talking to you, Limbo Bimbo,” Rod hissed in my face. “We know all about you, right, Horace?

The second guy, who had “geeky hanger-on” written all over him (no, not literally) nodded hugely, his entire face following his out-thrust chin up and down.

Assured that his wingman had his six, Rod snarled, “Why don’t you go back up to the Mortal Coil where you belong? Living thing!” He spat the last two words. I repeated them to myself silently. When had “living thing” become an insult?

“Yeah. What he said,” Horace added. Then he looked kind of ashamed and took a step backward.

Rod’s verbal attack left me speechless, which is pretty unusual for me. This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered prejudice for being alive among the dead and demonic, although most beings seemed more curious than bigoted. It had never been bad enough to make me feel unwelcome, but I certainly didn’t need a couple of blockheads riding me about it. I held my temper and tried to figure out the best strategy for handling this. I might have been in Hell several months already—probably a lot longer than these newly dead jerks—but here at Pit U, I was the new kid on the block. Maybe they hazed everybody who joined the class mid-semester.

“Hey, guys.” I held up my hands in a gesture meant to say Look! I’m unarmed, which contrasted mightily with Kali’s body language since she was never un-armed. “What’s all this—”

“Is this about your dumb jock pal who got sent packing?” Kali cut in.

Rod took a step back. “So what if it is?” He pointed right in my face. “She shouldn’t be here.” I was tempted to bite his finger, except it didn’t look too clean.

When neither Kali nor I responded, Rod pointed at me again. “She’s taking up a spot that should have gone to somebody else who might actually use it. She’s just going to sit through the training, then get her appeal granted and go back to her nice life upstairs, in her old body, forgetting everything she learned down here. I was told when I signed up that they’re looking for continuity, for commitment. She’s just killing time.”

Kali opened her mouth to defend me, but I cut her off. “No, it’s okay, Kali. Rod’s right. I have been just killing time. But I’ve put that slacker attitude behind me now and I’m looking to make the best of the time I have here. I may not be willing to commit for centuries but are you?” I paused. Suddenly the rest of the hallway must have become very interesting to the boys. They looked anywhere but at Kali and me.

I figured as much. These guys were only interested in earning enough points to get themselves a decent reassignment, just like everybody else. Back on the Mortal Coil, it usually comes down to money. Here in Hell, it’s the Karma Kredit points. More assured of my footing, I carried on. I might not actually own the moral high ground, here, but at least I was renting it. “I’m sorry your friend didn’t make the cut. But I don’t think the timing is right to pin it on me. I only decided today to start Reaper training. So if your friend was already flunking out . . .” I let the sentence hang. Let them do the math.

Rod opened his mouth and closed it again. Horace looked a little lost and dangerously close to thinking on his own.

Just then the three blondes clunk-clunked up the hall from the washroom, their makeup a little heavier, bleached hair artfully tousled. “Whassup?” asked Crystal/Amber/Tiffany. I hadn’t yet learned to tell them apart.

“We’re trying to get straight with Ms. Staying Alive,” Rod answered. “I was just explaining to her how we don’t like her kind around here. You’re either dead”—he hitched one thumb over his muscular shoulder—“or you’re gone.”

“Oh, it’s okay, Rod. She’s got dual citizenship,” one of them, I think Crystal, supplied helpfully. “She’s not wandering around up there having a great life.” She pointed at the hallway ceiling, then lowered her voice and whispered, just loud enough for everyone to hear, “She has coma toes.” Behind her the other two blondes nodded. Everyone looked at my feet.

“Coma toes?” Even Rod and Horace looked confused.

The spokes-blonde shook her overlong bangs from her eyes, looking just a little bit exasperated with our apparent ignorance. “You know, coma toes. It’s the medical term for when your feet are asleep. It’s when you have one foot in the grave, like Kirsty here and are waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Actually, it was my jaw that dropped. Never had I heard anyone mix so many metaphors in one simple and totally inaccurate sentence. It was almost poetry. And not like the stuff Dante writes.

Rod turned to me, shaking a finger in my direction like I was a misbehaving child. “You may think you’re some god’s gift to the underworld, but I’m here to tell you you’re not. It’s not all about you, you know.”

Everyone stared at me, no doubt wondering how I was going to respond. Progressing from taken aback to skeggin’ furious, I opened my mouth to let him have it just as the guy from the front row poked his head out into the hallway and called us back in. Apparently he didn’t take breaks.

I snapped my mouth shut, unwilling to make enemies on my first day. “He’s not worth it,” Kali told me, laying a hand on my shoulder. I nodded my agreement, pushed my anger down inside me and allowed her to guide me back to my seat.

The rest of the afternoon progressed in much the same manner as the earlier part. I fumed for the first few minutes, so angry at Rod I could hardly concentrate, but eventually the importance of my mission coupled with the interesting nature of the lecture overcame my fury and I paid attention. It was a good thing I did, because we covered a lot of important ground.

We learned that most souls find their own way to Hell when their bodies die. A large portion of our job would be to chase down those souls that either couldn’t or wouldn’t make their way to Hell on their own. This included people who didn’t want to leave their situation, either because they loved it or hated it too much to put it behind them, as well as people who were too stupid to even realize they were dead. If a soul was in really deep denial, it might put up quite a struggle.

Occasionally somebody like my ex-boss Conrad, who’d made a Deal with the Devil and then didn’t want to go when his time was up, would make a run for it. That’s when Reapers took on the role of bounty hunter. We’d have to hunt down the soul, nail it with our scythes and drag it back to Hell. You might earn a Karma Kredit bonus point for snagging a runner. But it wasn’t often a newbie Reaper was given those kinds of assignments; circumstances had to be exceptional. Sergeant Schotz, in his role as head of the Reaper Corps, preferred a Reaper with some really meaningful field experience under his or her belt.

Professor Schotz droned on. Dante occasionally interrupted to clarify something or point out that one of my classmates had a question.

It wasn’t long before my mind wandered back to my own personal experience. Dante had been sent that day in the men’s room to collect Conrad’s soul and transport it back to Hell. Since I now knew they only sent Reapers when they expected a runner, how had they known that Conrad would try to back out of his Deal? Did they conduct a prophet-and-loss analysis before assigning missions so the Reapers knew exactly what to expect? How had they not seen my wrongful reapage? Were the seers ever wrong? Should you not believe everything you’re foretold?

And thanks to me—or at least Conrad’s manipulation and me falling for it—Dante had been busted back to teacher’s aide. The demotion, temporary or not, must really rankle, especially if it came with a cut in the ol’ points paycheck. And now he was supporting me, as well. He refused all my offers to spend any of my twenty-eight little points. I hoped he hadn’t been fined on top of it. I felt guilty about my part in his demotion. Even if it hadn’t been my time to die, I’d still been the one to leap in front of the scythe, defending that skegging bastard, Conrad. And then I got mad all over and had to rein my temper back in again.

Sometimes dull, sometimes fascinating and almost always obscure, at least the course material wasn’t hard. It was a lot of memory work and common sense, just like any course. Although I could see a lot more practical applications for what I was learning in Reaper Academy than in some of the courses I’d been forced to take in high school. Like physics, for instance. Who needed to study that? You either live somewhere where your feet stick to the ground consistently or you don’t.

I spent the next couple of weeks scrambling to catch up, getting to know my classmates better, liking Kali more and liking the quarterback and his geeky sycophant less.

The teacher’s pet at the front of the room turned out to be okay, if a little intense. His name was M’Kimbi and he’d had an extremely hard life in an African nation with a very short life expectancy. Don’t ask me which nation. I was a little hazy on my geography and it seemed rude to say, “So, M’Kimbi. I’ve never heard of your country, but I’m sure it’s very nice.”

After the difficult time he’d had during his most recent go-around on the Coil, M’Kimbi wasn’t too eager to return so he wasn’t taking any chances that he might get a similar incarnation next time. Interestingly, it was his people’s religion that was, of all the religions on Earth, the closest to what actually happens when you die. M’Kimbi took great pride in that fact, exhibited mostly by turning around from his front-row seat and smiling a huge, pearly smile at the rest of us every time he got a particularly difficult answer right. Especially if someone else had gotten it wrong first. It was only mildly annoying. And besides, he kept the best notes, which he was willing to share, so we forgave him. It was hard to fault someone for being enthusiastic, but we tried.

I was kind of enthusiastic myself. I enjoyed the Reaper Academy a lot more than I’d ever liked school previously. Whereas in high school I’d skipped classes and ducked study hall, now I read the notes, studied the handouts and even picked up a few of the additional resources they always list but never refer to. Aunt Carey had sacrificed so much for me; the least I could do was graduate from Reaper school, gain access to the Coil and save her from Conrad.

So I studied hard. Love and lifesaving are great motivators.

The texts were surprisingly interesting, delineating, among other things, the differences between hauntings, poltergeists and demonic possession. The main course material had been ghost-written, and the ghost had been kind enough to visit our class and autograph our texts.

The more I studied, the more questions I had. Back on the Coil, I’d just turned to Google and Wikipedia for all my answers. Hell’s techies were still trying to get the UnderWorld Wide Web up and running. I heard there was too much downtime and they were trying to find a work-around. I hoped we’d get a reasonably priced ISP soon so I could look up things like where M’Kimbi’s country was. Maybe find a copy of that poem Dante had written. Surely after seven centuries it would be in the public domain. I would have ordered a copy, but there wasn’t an amazon.hel yet.

I also wondered why Dante had said not to touch someone else’s scythe that first day when I’d grabbed his on the road to Hell. Nothing had happened then, right?

Although Dante and I lived together, now that I was in school, we didn’t do much together socially. Who had time? I was busy studying while Dante took his teacher’s aide job as seriously as he’d taken reaping and he had way too much integrity to play favorites in class. Most beings in Hell played favorites the way I’d played hockey—that is to say, early and often. But not Dante, damn it!

But we did share the best things in afterlife: the bathroom, the TV remote and a bed. Since we usually ended up arguing over the first two, the third gave us a nice way to make up. And Dante was really good at making up.

Sometimes I picked stupid little fights just so we could make up. Although he usually saw through me, that didn’t mean he would say no. Sometimes he did say, “Kirsty, you should be studying.” Then I sulked. Oh, I studied at the same time but I can multitask.

When it was time to put the books away for another day and crawl into his huge Arabian Nights–style bed (first putting little Jenni the gargoyle out in the living room. She looked far too much like a person for me to allow her to watch), we proved to each other how much we cared. Sex before slumber was my favorite. I liked to think of it as being laid to rest. Our future wasn’t certain, but we had right here, right now and it felt so right. I didn’t want to be left.

One time we, uh, laid to rest again the next morning. Except there was no rest involved. Just lazy sex as good as it can be without kissing—mourning breath. Ewww! Afterward Dante glanced at the bedside clock. “Oh, skeg!”

No matter how off time was we were going to be late. We fast-forwarded our morning routine, skipped breakfast and practically flew into class, faces red, Dante’s robe on inside out. The cowgirls giggled knowingly, the jock rolled his eyes, while Kali high-fifteened me on my way by. I ducked my head, but I couldn’t wipe the stupid got-some grin off my face. My smile only widened when I looked at Dante and saw the same idiot-in-love grin mirrored on his face.

Another student joined the class after I did, which took some of the hater heat off me. There was a lot of secrecy around him but Kali had a great sense of rumor and was able to find out that he was a fallen angel who had joined the Witless Protection Program. His cherubic face, the halo-shaped tan line across his forehead and the occasional bit of white fluff stuck to his clothing all confirmed the rumor to the careful observer. Once his right horn fell off, revealing that it was only stuck on with Velcro, we accepted the rumor as fact. Talk about your dead giveaway. His name was Ira and we liked him immediately, even if he was a bit straight-laced. He played a mean harp.

Professor Schotz was indeed your stereotypical kindly professor, handing out guidance and encouragement in equal parts, right up until finals. I anticipated being given a written exam and when I say “anticipated,” I mean “dreaded.” At least Sergeant Schotz kept himself under wraps. I can’t say I missed him. I was more than a little leery about the fieldwork portion under the sergeant’s command.

We were given three days off to study for exams all day and I usually went out with friends in the evenings. Why not? If things went well in this portion of the curriculum, I’d be halfway to getting my scythe and hightailing it outta there.

Not that I had a tail.

Nothing could stop me from reaping Conrad’s sorry ass and dragging his soul to Hell.

Then I’d lock it in a cell and throw away the cell!

Chapter 5

Pass or Flail

ON THE DAY of the final exam, I arrived at the classroom about an hour early. Shockingly, I was the last to show up. Time had grown increasingly weird and nobody wanted to be late for the final. M’Kimbi had tried to spend the night in the classroom until campus security kicked him out.

My entire future hung on this test. Anyone who didn’t pass would have to repeat the semester. I couldn’t afford the delay. Even if everything went perfectly, graduation day would be dangerously close to the end of my appeals window. I had to pass and get promoted to the final segment, the fieldwork part, or the judge would rule that my body should die and my aunt would be at Conrad’s mercy. That sure put the dead in deadline!

The other students and I talked among ourselves quietly while we waited for the exam to start. At least for the day, we put aside all our old rivalries and resentments except for one: Rod still hated me for the crime of being alive, which still made no sense. Really, all he had to do was wait.

Right on the bell, Professor Schotz arrived with Dante in tow. Crystal, one of the Death Valley girls (I had learned to tell them apart by now and discovered they had dyed their hair after they got here) had explained to us all that since Dante was proctoring our exam, that made him a proctologist. Between that and my “coma toes,” I really hoped she hadn’t been a medical professional in her past life. Or would be in any future one, for that matter.

Professor Schotz opened his briefcase and pulled out a single sheet of paper covered in scrawled handwriting. One by one, each of us found a reason to go up to his desk to try to read it. Even Ira. For a former angel, he was a bit of a bad boy.

“Attention, class. If I may have your attention.” Professor Schotz removed his glasses and polished them on the hem of his robe treating us to more skinny white leg than I cared to see.

Replacing the glasses on his nose, he cleared his throat. “Very good, then. Let’s get started, shall we? Reaper Alighieri will be coming around with a skull full of items, the selection of which will indicate whom you’re teamed up with for this exam.”

Teams? Just what I needed: added pressure. I hoped I wouldn’t be matched with Rod or Horace. I would have prayed, but I hadn’t yet figured out to who.

Or even whom.

Dante moved among the desks, walking up to each student and holding out the bowl-like upside-down skull. We each drew out a small object. At first I thought the hard, round object I’d selected was a marble but then I squawked and nearly dropped the petrified eyeball. Kali held hers at arm’s length, eyeing the eyeball suspiciously. We exchanged a worried glance and then checked again. “Green,” I told her, rolling the eyeball around my palm. “Hazel with flecks of gold,” Kali responded, turning hers this way and that to reflect the dull torchlight that lit the room. Behind us, Ira tossed his in the air, catching it before it hit the floor, then tossing it up again. “Mine’s purple, with horizontal slits,” he informed us. We all sighed. So it wasn’t the sergeant’s missing blue eye. Somehow that would have made the whole thing that much ickier.

M’Kimbi and two of the Death Valley girls had drawn something that made me think of kidney stones, while the remaining Death Valley girl, Rod the jerk—I mean jock—and his geeky buddy Horace all drew three matching . . . somethings we couldn’t identify. Nor did we want to, given the circumstances. We were quick to return them to the skull when Dante made a return trip collecting them for the next session.

“Everyone, find your teammates, prego,” Dante instructed. “They’ll be the other two classmates who have drawn similar objects.”

Kali and I turned our chairs around. Ira sat behind us so our little team was already a group that liked each other and worked well together. I began to suspect Dante had rigged the game in my favor. Maybe he didn’t have quite as much integrity as I’d believed, not that I was complaining. Like Sybil had said the day I arrived: “This is Hell. We play favorites.”

The composition of my team was definitely to my advantage, but was it to my partners’ as well? Kali and Ira were both supernatural beings with a lot more insight into the wide world of death and reapage than me. I worried I might drag them down. Looking around the room, I realized I wasn’t the only one who had reason to be nervous.

M’Kimbi had his hands full with Tiffany and Amber. I didn’t envy him his place on Team Valley Girl although Amber had a photographic memory. She could spout the assigned text verbatim, even if she sometimes had trouble applying it in a practical manner. Crystal, despite her tendency to crucify the language, had a fair amount of common sense. Together they made a pretty formidable team, but today they were split up. I was a little worried for them. It wasn’t a win-sum-game situation. We could all pass and I hoped we would.

Except maybe Rod. I’d be quite happy to see him held back another semester. He could repeat the semester with his friend that had failed. Maybe he’d like that. I know I would.

But that was unlikely to happen. Rod may have been a jerk and a bully but he wasn’t stupid, damn it. And Horace was nerd-smart. The jury was still out on Tiffany. The Death Valley girls depended so much on each other that it was hard to know where one’s attributes ended and the others began.

Professor Schotz clapped his hands. “Let’s get started. We have a lot of questions to get through today. There are nine of you and nine questions, so you only get one chance. Each team will choose a being to go first. That being will come to the front of the room to answer. Once a being answers the question correctly, he or she will return to his or her seat and send up the next teammate. Should a spokes-being answer a question incorrectly, he or she will be eliminated. Therefore, your performance today will reflect on you both as a team and as an individual.”

Kali and I both turned to Ira. “You go be our spokesman—spokes-angel—whatever.”

Ira’s eyes shot wide. “Shhh! That’s supposed to be a secret.”

This was the first time any of us had admitted that we all knew he was an angel. Maybe it wasn’t exactly the greatest time to ask, but I was curious. And if either of us got eliminated, I’d never know about him. The other teams were still electing their spokes-beings so I seized the opportunity.

“Why are you here, Ira?” I asked. “I thought we were all working toward getting great incarnations and maybe, down the road, earning our way into heaven. What did you do to get yourself kicked out?”

“I didn’t get kicked out. I got bored. It’s so skeggin’ dull up there. I put in a request to become mortal but I had to go through the same channels as everybody else. That meant coming here, filling out the paperwork and taking whatever they give you at the Reincarnation Station. Unlike Hell, Heaven doesn’t play favorites. You wouldn’t want to receive preferential treatment, now would you?”

He paused, probably for dramatic effect, no doubt assuming he’d asked a rhetorical question, but both Kali and I responded.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like preferential treatment. How ’bout you, Kali?”

“Me? Absolutely. I’m a god. I live for preferential treatment. And the occasional human sacrifice. Kidding. Kidding. That was a long time ago. I’ve given it up.”

I raised an eyebrow. From what I’d gathered from the tobacco stains on her fingertips, giving up vices wasn’t Kali’s strong suit. She raised her eyebrows back at me in exaggerated innocence and held out her hands in a gesture of surrender—tripled. “Honest. And let me tell you, giving up human hearts was a skeg of a lot easier than cigarettes. I’m just saying.”

Ira giggled. He’d recently taken up smoking himself as part of his new, rebel-without-a-cloud image. The giggling so went with that.

“Okay,” he continued. “I couldn’t actually get preferential treatment. I know. I tried. Anyway, angels only get one chance to be mortal and live a human life so I want to make it a truly awesome one. That’s why I’m studying to be a Reaper. I need to make some decent Karma Kredit points if I’m going to live the good life.”

Dante’s role as proctor involved him swaggering up and down the aisles between desks, looking severe, right hand resting on the hip where his confiscated scythe no longer hung. Having met Sergeant Schotz, I was sure that Dante’s confiscated scythe was under lock and key somewhere and only Schotz had the key. It was no one’s vault but his own. Dante halted when he reached my little group, laying both palms flat on my desk and leaning in. Keeping his voice low, he asked, “Is there a problem here, amici?”

I blushed. “We’re just trying to figure out how to handle this so we all pass. Any advice for us?” I tilted my head and tried to look appealing—either sexually appealing or appealing for help, I wasn’t fussy.

He leaned in closer still. “Do I have any advice? Sì.” He cut his eyes at the other members of the class and lowered his voice to a sexy growl. “What you three need to do is try to answer all the questions correctly.” He stood up and moved to the next group.

Well, that was helpful—not! Somebody would not be getting laid to rest anytime soon.

“So, Ira. Are you going up first? Or you, Kali?” I stared at my teammates apprehensively.

Ira looked thoughtful, while Kali picked worriedly at her cuticles—all thirty of them. A few long moments passed in silence.

I drew a deep breath and bit the bullet. “My guess is that he’ll ask the questions in the order he taught the work. He’d want us to learn from this exercise as much as from anything else we did in class. Which means he’s going to ask the easiest questions first. And that means I, as your weakest link, should go first.” I started to stand but Kali grabbed my arm—in several places.

“No. That’s what he’ll anticipate us thinking so he’ll put the hardest questions first. Ira, you go.” She certainly wasn’t sparing my feelings about being the weakest link. She looked at me with her face all screwed up, her eyebrows drawing in close. “We’re all in this together,” she said. “No offense?”

“None taken,” I assured her. “I was late joining the class.” I shrugged. “And I’m not a supernatural being or anything . . .” My stupid eyes burned a bit. I was not going to let my teammates down. Or my aunt.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll go.” Ira stood just as Amber and Crystal headed to the front of the room, cheered on by their respective teams.

While we’d been futzing around, gossiping and trying to choose our first spokes-being, Dante had returned to the front of the room and set up a tiny tableau consisting of an hourglass, a bell and a hammer. Never had three ordinary objects seemed so ominous.

The three examinees stood shoulder to shoulder at the front of the room. A drop of sweat trickled down Ira’s cherubic face. Amber and Crystal looked shaken, no doubt at the prospect of competing with each other.

Professor Schotz smoothed out his paper. “As soon as you know the answer, raise your hand. First person to raise his or her hand gets to respond. Answer to the best of your ability. I’ll decide if the answer is correct.” The professor tapped his own chest, indicating there was no higher authority than himself. “If nobody answers, everybody standing up here fails. No marks given for vagueness, stalling or faking it.”

Everybody tittered.

“Remember, I was a student once myself, lo these many, many decades ago so I know all the tricks. No telepathy, either.” He stared pointedly at Kali. “Don’t make me get the tinfoil hats!”

He held out his sheet of paper. I squinted at it but no way could I make out even word one from where I sat.

“First question.” He ran one finger down the page. “In three sentences or less, describe a Reaper’s responsibilities.”

All three hands whipped ceiling-ward but only Amber’s stayed up. The others struggled as their arms were forced back down and pinned to their sides by magic. There was no question about who was going to answer the question. And what an easy question it was, too. Oh, skeg. He was starting at the beginning. I should’ve gone first.

“As you can see, I’m using a spell to determine who raised their hand first. In this case, our Ms. Amber has the floor. Go ahead. A Reaper’s responsibilities are . . . ?”

Amber took a small step forward. She usually enjoyed attention, but today she looked like she’d rather be under a rock. She licked her lips and stared at the floor.

“A Reaper’s responsibilities are as follows . . .” Now she raised her head and looked so far upward that only the whites of her eyes showed. “One.” She held up her perfectly manicured index finger. “When on the Mortal Coil, a Reaper will apprehend any soul or shade not traveling to Hell of its own accord. Two . . .” She raced on, as if afraid she’d lose her momentum. “When in Hell during peacetime, a Reaper will answer calls of distress and maintain some semblance of peace as decreed by his or her own judgment. Three . . .” At this point she realized she’d neglected to hold up a finger on two and seemed to get confused by all the advanced math involved. Finally she sorted it out by clasping both hands behind her back. Out of sight, out of mind; she was no mathlete. “Should Hell be under attack, the Reaper Corps will rise and defend our home unto the death.”

You know, I’d studied that passage, too. But I’d been so focused on memorizing the words, it wasn’t until I listened to Amber that I actually comprehended what was being said. What did they mean, “during peacetime?” When did Hell go to war? Did we fight with the next Hell over? I knew there were other Hells and other Hell dimensions. It was in one of the handouts.

What if I got asked a question about Hell going to war? Panicking, I leaned over and whispered my question to Kali.

Keeping her eyes focused straight ahead, she grabbed a pen and paper, scrawling one word across it: apocalypse.

Ah, now I remembered. I sagged back in my chair, adrenaline draining from my body. At some point in the undefined future, Hell would go to war with Heaven. In the meantime, most disputes were solved by playing ice hockey every second Tuesday.

Professor Schotz rang the bell enthusiastically. “Very good, Amber. Please take your seat and send up another of your team members. That is indeed the correct answer, right out of the textbook, and it segues nicely into my next question.”

M’Kimbi jogged to the front, high-fiving Amber on the way.

“Can a Reaper, who is either an immortal being”—he nodded toward Kali and Ira—“or an already dead soul like most of the rest of us—except you, of course, Kirsty.” He smiled in my direction.

I squirmed in my seat, wishing he hadn’t singled me out like that. And I wished he’d finished the question. Or had he and I’d somehow managed to miss it?

Behind me Rod made a rude noise.

“Can a Reaper die?” the Professor finally finished his question. “Ira?”

The angel stared straight ahead, shoulders back. The big bulge under his hoodie twitched and I wondered if he was nervous. He claimed it was a backpack but you never saw him get books or snacks from it. And I’d never seen a wing-shaped backpack before.

“Yes, Professor. In some extreme cases, sir, an individual, whether mortal or immortal, can die a permanent death whereby they disappear and are not to be seen again on any plane: Heaven, Hell or Mortal Coil. They just sort of fade away.”

Professor Schotz nodded and rang the bell absently, as if he hadn’t really been listening. The bell hung from a little stand and now I noticed it had a string tied to its clapper. So if the bell is rung by yanking on the string, what then, was the hammer for? I swallowed hard, not looking forward to seeing a demonstration or worse yet, feeling one.

“Yes, Ira. That is also correct. Thank you.”

Ira walked back to his seat. I wanted to acknowledge his triumph but somehow the subject matter was a big ol’ buzzkill. Kali caught my gaze, nodding. She went to the front of the room.

“Question three. Where do these doubly dead souls go? Yes, Crystal.”

“They get fed back into the death cycle, sir.” She grinned hugely, obviously very proud of herself.

“I’m afraid not, Crystal.” He held out his hand like a surgeon. “Hammer!” Dante slapped the small hammer into Schotz’s outstretched palm. I shivered in my seat. Here’s where we find out what the hammer is for.

“Thank you for playing along, Crystal. Have a nice afterlife.” He tapped her hard on her dyed blonde head with the hammer.

“Ow.” She rubbed the spot. “What is up with that? It, like, hurt, you . . . whoa!” A strong wind rose inside the classroom, whipping papers and pencils off desks. I yanked my hair out of my face, squinting against the stinging dust.

At the front of the room, Crystal began to spin as if she were in the midst of her own personal tornado, like the Tasmanian Devil in the cartoons. The swirling vortex whipped her out of the room, not via the door, but directly through the wall—without damaging the wall. It was like when I’d first been scythed up on the Coil and some physical laws still applied while others went out the window.

The room remained silent for a long moment as the papers and dust settled and then it erupted into a chorus of questions.

“What just happened?”

“Where’d she go?”

“Is that fair?”

Tiffany and Amber just squealed.

The professor waited for the commotion to die down. Dante tapped the hourglass, raising a single eyebrow at the professor.

“Did you think there’d be no penalty for an incorrect answer? We cannot have mistakes—forgive me, Dante—in the Reaper Corps. Ms. Crystal has been cast out. As you know from the readings, there’s quite an honored tradition around casting out.”

Tiffany and Amber squealed louder. Professor Schotz shook his head and raised his hands in a placating gesture.

“Now, girls, please. It’s only temporary. She will have the opportunity to retake the in-class portion of the training with the next group. Hopefully she’ll do better next time. It was obvious to me from her answer that she was not nearly as familiar with the coursework as a Reaper needs to be. Once you’re out in the field, there’s no room for error. Souls are at stake!”

Crystal’s BFFs settled down, apparently realizing they still had an opportunity to carry out their plans to be reincarnated together. Since they intended to pool their Karma Kredit points, this was just a temporary setback for them. Once they’d been assured their friend was safe, they turned their attention to more important things—like re-sheveling their disheveled hair and makeup.

I’d been nervous before but now I was a total mess. I didn’t want to spend five more minutes in this or any other classroom. I’d been lucky to join this class partway through. To have to start again, this time from the beginning . . . no. Just, no! I had a deadline and time was moving faster and faster.

After a few more minutes, Professor Schotz called the class back to order, carrying on where he’d left off. Rod swaggered to the front of the room, replacing his fallen teammate. The swagger was obviously false bravado as sweat dribbled down his Neolithic forehead. He shouldered his way in between Kali and M’Kimbi, flashing Horace a shaky thumbs-up.

“Now,” Professor Schotz began again. “Can one of you give me the correct answer? Where do doubly dead souls go?”

Nobody raised a hand. They all just looked around as if the answer were written somewhere in the room.

The hourglass pinged, startling me. I hadn’t realized the answers were timed. “C’mon, people. No answer within the allotted time earns all three of you a failing grade.”

M’Kimbi promptly raised his hand. At a nod from the professor, he answered, “No one knows, sir.”

“Sadly, that is correct. You may be seated.” Professor Schotz gave the bell a halfhearted shake. Damn. I should have had that kind of question. There were so many things I didn’t know I’d be sure to get it right.

But the nature of the questions about a soul’s final death was depressing as Hell. I knew we dealt in death but the life of a Reaper had seemed exciting: chasing down errant souls, bringing in cheaters like Conrad Iver. Now I wasn’t just nervous, I was scared and depressed. I was glad we were going to that new Mexican place after the final—if we got out of this alive. I might just indulge in a little firewater later. It would help me let off steam.

One by one, my classmates answered their questions, cycling through until every team except for mine was on its last entrant. With Kali at the front and me as yet untested, we still had two to go. I had already bitten my own nails down to the quick. If Kali had still been sitting next to me, I might have started on hers.

The professor shuffled his single sheet of paper, which was a skill in itself. I dug my nails into my palms as he asked the next question. “What happens if you shout the magic word Expelliarmus?”

Choruses of “Huh?” and “Wha—?” filled the air. Even I went, “What text was that . . . ?” And then I realized why it sounded familiar and wished I was up there.

Kali grinned. “It’s a disarming charm, sir. It sends another wizard’s wand flying.”

Dante burst out laughing. “I didn’t think anybody would get that one right, Professor.”

The professor actually giggled as he rang the bell for Kali’s answer. “Well done, Kali. Do you know why I just asked a ridiculous question like that in the middle of an exam? And this is an aside, not part of the test.”

Kali shrugged, all six shoulders moving in unison. “Because you’re a big Harry Potter fan?”

“Yes, there is that. But what it’s supposed to demonstrate is that it’s important to keep up with trends and behaviors back on the Coil. And that it’s important to keep a sense of humor. Death can be a real downer.”

Professor Schotz looked over the heads of the three students at the front of the room, settling his gaze on me. When he continued, I had the sense he wasn’t talking to the entire group anymore.

“Ours is a depressing business at times. We have to deal with bargain breakers, rip people from the bosoms of loving families, and when we make friends here in Hell, often they leave just as we’re getting attached to them.” He smiled, raising his hands to embrace the entire class once again. “It’s important to make the most of your death. You only live . . . well, as many times as it takes.” He removed his glasses and polished them on his robe again, leaving a greasy smear on the dark fabric and not really cleaning the lenses at all.

Kali returned to her seat, stopping on the way to lean down and hug me. When you’ve been hugged by a six-armed god, you’ve really been hugged. I sat back and grinned. Until I realized everyone was looking at me.

“Oh, skeg,” I muttered. It was finally my turn to face the death march. Rendered clumsy by nervousness, I stumbled from my seat, awkwardly making my way to the front of the room.

I stood between Horace, who, while he’d chosen his friends poorly, was actually supersmart, and Tiffany, who could be logical but wasn’t fast on her feet. The Death Valley girls tended to depend on Amber’s eidetic memory rather than learn the material themselves. Then Horace answered his question and it was down to Tiffany and me.

“Next question.”

I focused so hard I could barely concentrate on the question. It wasn’t only that my own future rode on this and that I’d get my own personal tornado if I couldn’t answer. No, I was afraid I might let down my team, disappoint my professor and Dante. Not to mention endanger Aunt Carey’s life.

Of course, if I didn’t pass this time, I could always repeat the course with Crystal. But by the time I graduated—assuming I did that time—my aunt would have already become Conrad’s next victim. I couldn’t fail. I couldn’t. If I failed . . .

“Could you repeat the question, Professor?”

Question? What question? It’s a good thing Tiffany asked. I’d been too wound up to pay attention.

The professor looked up, his sharp gaze dancing back and forth from Tiffany to me and finally landing on me. He gave one of those little coughs that’s more about disapproval than phlegm.

“One more time, then. Please pay attention, everyone. Once you have received your scythe, what is the one thing you are not to do?”

The pause that followed was the kind of silence that’s comprised of shuffling feet and averted gazes. Even those examinees who had already answered their questions looked puzzled.

“Come on now, people. This was in the handouts.” Professor Schotz tapped his foot. Dante tapped the hourglass. I looked over and noticed the sand was rising—actually flowing upward from the bottom bulb back to the top. Was this the result of something Dante had done or were those crazy time engineers and their wacky time machine at it again? Then Dante winked. I would so thank him later.

That’s when Tiffany raised her hand. It was a little tentative and I had to admire her bravery. If one of us didn’t answer, we’d both fail.

The professor looked a little surprised, if the gaping mouth and eyes like saucers were anything to go by. He coughed again, although this time I think it was to cover his shock.

“Very well, Tiffany. You go, girl.” The audience tittered and he looked embarrassed. One more cough before he repeated, “What is the one thing you should not do with your scythe?”

Tiffany scrunched her face up, looking adorably focused—and also like she really, really wasn’t sure of her answer. “Um, you should never, uh . . . cross the streams?”

“Cross the . . . ?” The professor’s eyebrows arched up his forehead. “And right after that we’ll use the force, shall we? No, that is incorrect. I’m sorry, Ms. Tiffany, but you’re going to have to repeat the classroom portion of Reaper training along with your friend.”

Tiffany forced a brave little smile. Her lower lip didn’t tremble though, nor did her eyes tear up. In fact, she looked relieved and maybe a little pleased.

“That’s okay,” she said, voice calm and even. Her words were for the professor but her gaze was fixed on her remaining buddy, Amber. Why did she not sound upset about having to repeat the course? After all, she wasn’t exactly academic material . . .

Suddenly I got it and for the first time all semester, I kind of admired her. She had allowed herself to fail so Crystal didn’t have to go through the classroom work again by herself. Amber was with people and beings she already knew but Crystal would be with total strangers . . . some probably stranger than others. Tiffany had made this huge sacrifice for her friend and at the same time given me more time to think. She could have said nothing and then I’d have to repeat the semester, too.

Now I just needed to focus enough to make use of the time she’d given me. I know I’d heard this before, but what was it?

Professor Schotz tapped Tiffany with the hammer—a lot lighter than he had Crystal—and the whirlwind started up again. Within seconds, Tiffany was whisked through the wall to join her friend.

I had to admit I felt a little envious. I’d certainly never made any friends in life who loved me enough to stay with me through death and higher education.

Nor had I been that kind of friend. On the day I’d been attacked by my stapler gone wild, Shannon had invited me to go back to school with her. I’d pretty much laughed in her face. Nice, I chastised myself. No wonder the people I worked with at Iver PR—the people I’d thought of as my friends—hadn’t felt warm and fuzzy toward me.

Well, that would change. When I got my life back, I’d be willing to die for Shannon.

Now the professor turned his attention to me, the last soul standing.

“All right, Kirsty. It’s all yours now. I hope you get it right, because I believe you will make an excellent Reaper.” He looked at me sternly but a twinkle in his eye belied his serious demeanor. “It’s the same question. Just pay attention.”

Which was the worst thing he could say, because now my attention was all about paying attention to the fact that he was speaking and not actually on what he was—

“What is the one thing you should not do with your scythe?”

I glanced over at Dante, who seemed focused on the hourglass. The flow of sand had reversed again and now there were only a few grains remaining in the upper bulb. It was now or never. Well, now or next semester.

What did I have to lose? I grasped at some hazy memory as it floated by my mind’s eye. “You should never let anyone else touch your scythe.”

“That is correct!” Professor Schotz seemed really pleased I’d gotten it right. He rang the bell for at least five clangs, grinning the whole time. “Now, class.” He turned to address the room at large. I figured this was my signal to return to my seat so I scooted back to my chair, creating a tiny tornado of my own in my rush through the dusty classroom.

“I have one more question for you—all of you.” The professor addressed the class. “What would happen if you used another Reaper’s scythe?”

He peered at us, waiting. I noticed Dante didn’t flip the hourglass this time. Even he looked puzzled, eyebrows rising until they were lost under his artfully tousled—or perhaps just messy—bangs. I glanced at my classmates only to find they were all looking at each other. Eventually everybody’s attention settled on Amber.

“Tell us, Miss Perfect Memory. What’ll happen if we swap sticks?” Rod had such a wonderful way with people. Amber had just been separated from her BFFs. Couldn’t he be a tad more sensitive?

But Amber seemed fine on her own. She sat up a little straighter, her cowboy accessories shoved onto the chair next to her that had been Tiffany’s. She’d even yanked her fluffy blond tresses back into a ponytail and—gasp!—her lipstick hadn’t been reapplied in minutes. The pale peach was notable by its absence. It was a good thing her lips weren’t covered in their usual layers of goo because she was rubbing her mouth absently, obviously deep in thought.

Rod started in on her again. “Looks like Little Miss—”

“Shut up, Rod,” Ira said through clenched teeth. “Give the lady a chance or so help me, I’ll use my contacts and you’ll never pass through the skeggin’ pearly gates.”

Whoa! Go, Ira!

Rod shut right up, his face turning an alarming shade of violet.

Kali turned around and whispered to Ira, softly so only I could hear. “I thought nobody was supposed to know about you.”

Ira grinned and whispered back, “Yeah, but obviously you all suspect. And I may have let it slip out that I’m an undercover angel. I just didn’t say undercover doing what.” He waggled his eyebrows, managing to look a little less angelic for once.

He opened his too-pretty mouth to say something else but at that moment Amber raised her head.

“There’s nothing.” She laid her hands palms down on the desk. “I read all the handouts, all the original texts and scrolls they came from and the optional reference materials as well.” She blushed and had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. You can’t pull that ditzy-blonde routine for the whole semester and then turn around and be the hardest-working—and possibly the smartest—person in the room without some fallout.

Now I understood why Professor Schotz thought it wise to separate the Death Valley girls, although it had seemed cruel at the time—which was, assuming time was progressing at a reasonable rate today, about twenty minutes ago.

“That’s right, Amber. Very good.” The professor grasped his lapels and rocked back on his heels. “We have no idea what would happen, only that it would be disastrous. Catastrophic. Perhaps apocalyptic. Unfortunately, the answer is lost in the mists of time.” He made a fluttering gesture with one hand. “And speaking of time, I have one final, final question for the group. Last one. I promise.”

We all fidgeted in our seats. Surely we hadn’t come this far just to fail. I held my unnecessary breath.

“And the question is . . .” Professor Schotz grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “Where are you going to go to celebrate,” he glanced at his wrist, “in about five minutes, Hell time?”

I thrust my hand in the air, yelling, “I know this one. I know this one!”

Laughing, the professor said, “I see a hand at the back. Yes, Kirsty?”

I rose and looked him right in the eye. “We—” I stopped. Originally the plan was to be just my fun clique: Kali, M’Kimbi, Ira and me. Now I let my gaze rest on each person in the room, including Amber and Rod. When I looked at Kali, she nodded. I made a sweeping and inclusive gesture. “We’re all going to that new Mexican place, Taco Hell, at the corner of Shallow and Vain. Care to join us?”

“Join you? I’m buying!”

Chapter 6

Sudden Death Overtime

THE COURSE CURRICULUM hadn’t mentioned the weeklong break between semesters. While everyone else relaxed and caught up on errands, visits and sleep, I went crazy. I wouldn’t graduate until the week of my twenty-sixth birthday. That left me just a few days to obtain my scythe and go AWOL to the Coil. And that was if time was on my side, which it usually wasn’t.

I waylaid Professor Schotz in the hall and begged him to cancel our hiatus.

He laughed, telling me I was the first student ever to do that. And sorry, no. The only thing Professor Schotz and Sergeant Schotz agreed on was fly-fishing so they’d be gone the entire week.

I remembered the things I’d seen swimming in the Styx on my first crossing and wished him luck. I hoped they had a catch-and-release law down here; eating too many fish Styx couldn’t be good for you.

I spent some time pacing and fretting. When that didn’t seem to accomplish much, I tried researching why you should never use someone else’s scythe. Picture me spending my free time in Hell’s reference library. No, seriously.

I did manage to root out a few oblique references in the university’s Reaper resource materials. As the professor had said, however, the supposed dire consequences remained shrouded in history and mystery. I’d grabbed Dante’s scythe the day he dragged me to Hell. Other than him freaking out, nothing had happened. I began to think it was an apocryphal tale based on rumors gone viral.

In the meantime, time grew wonkier and wonkier. The increasing lack of synchronization kept the Reaper Corps’ Soul Collection Department crazy-busy. Reaper Dispatch would send experienced Reapers out after souls and they would return empty-handed, reporting that they’d arrived days too late or days too early. The souls had either taken off deliberately or just gotten lost. Most souls found their own way, eventually, but it was traumatizing for them to wander around like, well, lost souls. The Satanic nurses set up a counseling station where they tried to cobble damaged souls back together but it didn’t always work. Something had to be done.

I considered this from the comfort of our rooftop apartment. I had a terrific view of the city—four stories up is a lot in a town comprised largely of one- and two-story buildings. Only the downtown area featured a few high-rise structures and I considered that to be part of the skyline’s charm, especially as time got more and more temperamental. Sometimes half the city would be shrouded in darkness while it was noon where I stood. The poor guy who drove the chariot of light across Hell’s roof was all over the place. Once I saw him nearly collide with himself on his way back from sunset. Charon complained he couldn’t choose between day and evening wear.

And exactly when had I begun thinking of Dante’s apartment as “our” apartment?

My week between semesters passed in a series of fits and starts. Mostly fits. It was nearly impossible to meet up with friends for a specific meal so we just started hanging out at Claire Voyant’s deli whenever. I might arrive to find Sybil having breakfast, Dante lunch and Lord Seiko dinner, when Khali and I had popped in for a late-night snack.

Monday morning arrived before I knew it—literally. And possibly before anyone else knew it, either.

Remembering that the second-semester class would be taught by the military-issue version of our instructor, I was all ready when Dante suggested we head to class two hours early. Actually, I’d been ready to go since my clock said 5:00 a.m. His watch said 7:30. Class started at 9:00. Somewhere in there, someone was right. Or maybe not. Dante handed me a steaming cup of his excellent coffee, which had cooled a bit in the time it took him to cross the room. According to his watch, ten minutes had passed between the kitchen and the living room, a journey of about ten paces. When we retraced his steps back into the kitchen to fill little Jenni’s food and water bowls, time ran backward. The coffeemaker pinged readiness of the cup I’d already downed. It swirled around in my stomach, ending up hiding behind a kidney like it didn’t know if it should be there or not.

We walked in companionable silence to the Reaper training facility, which was located off-campus.

Good thing we left early. It took us nearly an hour to walk to the edge of the city where the dark woods began, and then another forty minutes to reach the training grounds. Plus, we discovered we’d also lost an hour to DST—not daylight saving time but Damnable Screwy Time.

We arrived to find the training grounds were actually grounds—fieldwork in a field. Who knew? The second half of the course would be taught in a big white canvas tent. We ducked through the flaps and entered to find some of my classmates milling about. Dante headed to the front of the tent and stood at parade rest behind the instructor, who was, to my surprise, still kindly Professor Schotz. Where was the “what doesn’t kill ya (again) makes ya stronger” sergeant? Had Professor Schotz finally had enough of his alter ego and had him altered? Or maybe just shoved him into the Styx?

I grabbed a comfy-looking rock next to Kali and sat. Professor Schotz launched into a glowing rundown of Sergeant Schotz’s qualifications and experience and how lucky we were to have him as our instructor. He really seemed to admire the guy—no false modesty here.

A few more people straggled in after me and I expected them to get a grand chewing-out, but the professor just shrugged. How could you be on time when time itself was tardy? Finally the entire group assembled in the tent. It was time, and past time, to begin.

“And so, it gives me great pleasure to turn your Reaper education over to my bitter half, Sergeant Schotz.” The professor gestured toward himself and bowed his head. When he raised it, the thinning white ponytail had morphed into the crew cut and the kindly professorial features and manner had blitzed away. I think the sergeant was actually taller than the professor but wouldn’t dare ask. Or sneak up behind him with a measuring tape. Something about a measuring tape always makes men nervous.

“Thanks, Prof. You can go back to your nice, safe, hallowed halls now,” the sergeant all but sneered. It looked like the admiration wasn’t mutual—more of a love-hate kind of thing.

“All you greenhorns,” he snapped at us, “and any other color horns among you. You better listen up and listen good.”

We all sat up straighter.

Everything about the sergeant demanded attention.

“I’m in charge of making Reapers outta you idjits. And the key words here are, ‘I’m in charge!’”

He paced the front of the tent, one hand resting on his scythe while he gestured with the other.

I glanced over at Dante, who was standing at parade rest near the whiteboard. I thought he looked kind of naked without his trusty scythe. Which only got me thinking about Dante naked and then I missed the rest of the sergeant’s scary pep talk. I tuned back in just in time to hear, “Now, the first thing we’re gonna do is take a ten-mile hike. You think you outta-shape idjits can handle that?”

He spewed the last so hard he sent one of his teeth flying across the tent to land in the flattened grass at M’Kimbi’s feet.

“Get that!” the instructor ordered.

M’Kimbi tried to pick it up but it squirted from his fingers. This time it bounced and landed near Amber who made a grab for it but it sailed over toward Kali. She used all six hands but it still skittered away from her grasp. Grasps.

Finally, Sergeant Schotz bent down and picked it up, shoving it back into his jaw. He chewed air a few times to settle it back into place. Anger painted his scarred face as he surveyed us, his scathing single-eyed gaze jumping from one Reaper candidate to the next. “I see you are all total incompetents.” He raised his hand, pointing accusingly, face twisted and red. “You can’t even manage to pick up one teeny-tiny item. You can’t handle the tooth!”

Chapter 7

Brute Camp

THE TEN-MILE TREK was unsurprising, some of us able to make it and some not. I was able to go the distance—barely.

The rest of the boot camp portion of our program proved equally predictable. Sergeant Schotz would insult us a bit, then order us to do something strenuous. After that he’d give us a grudging compliment. I felt like I was watching a M*A*S*H-up of every military-themed movie I’d ever watched: An Officer and a Gentleman meets Private Benjamin and G.I. Jane while wearing Stripes. That didn’t make the physical training any easier, but it kept me entertained.

I wondered what could be the point of physical conditioning since we didn’t really have bodies anymore. But we definitely had muscle memory, and mine remembered strain and pain and how much it hurt to work out.

And yet, by the end of the second week, I began to notice that I was shaping up rather nicely. No wonder Dante had such a stunning body under that robe; Schotz’s training worked better than any gym I’d ever joined. (Notice I specified “joined,” not “regularly worked out at.”)

My colleagues were also developing lean muscle mass. Kali now sported both a six-pack and six rock-hard biceps. Even Ira’s wings bulked up. We’d all given up the pretense that we didn’t know he was an angel. You may be able to hide your light under a bushel but you can’t hide your wings under a tank top.

Schotz also devised mock soul runs. He’d divide up the class into Souls and Reapers and then the Souls would have a few minutes to hide or run, at which point their assigned Reapers would have to find them and haul them in. In other words, we played hide-and-seek.

It would have been more fun if Aunt Carey’s life and my entire future weren’t resting on the outcome.

Eventually, the day of the final test arrived. Sergeant Schotz unrolled a rough map of the woods clipping it to the rolling whiteboard at the front of the tent. Using a Magic Marker—and by the way, they aren’t really magic, even in Hell—Dante carefully dabbed five little red dots at intervals around the map.

“This is your assignment.” The Sergeant rapped a knuckle on the board and began pacing in front of the map. The entire class leaned right to see the board, then left, then right again as his pacing obscured first one side of the board, then the other. Finally, he stopped pacing, now completely blocking our view of the map. “You will locate each of these five checkpoints.” He rapped the board again, harder this time. Dante grabbed the edge of the board as it wobbled on the uneven ground, threatening to topple over and take our instructional map with it. The sergeant didn’t seem to notice.

Schotz picked up the marker and turned to face us. “At each station, you will acquire an item to prove you were there.” He stabbed the air with his marker. I flinched even though he was three or four feet away. He just had that effect on people.

Yes, I was sitting on a front rock. Like M’Kimbi, I was a suck-up now, too. My aunt’s life depended on it.

“If you do not acquire at least four of the five tokens, you will not only fail this test, but you will also fail the entire course. You will fail to enter the Reaper Corps. You will not now, nor ever, become a Reaper.”

Amber raised her hand tentatively.

“You will not be allowed to repeat the course.”

Amber lowered her hand again.

“Now, to make things a little more interesting, there are seven candidates here today, but only six of each item at each station. Not only must you get to each checkpoint, but you must not be the last to arrive. The recruit who obtains the least number of tokens is history.” He sliced the marker across his throat in illustration. He’d removed the cap earlier, so, whether deliberately or accidentally, he inscribed a thin red line across his own neck. I got the picture. “Any questions?”

“What are the tokens?” Ira asked, his beatific features drawn and pale.

Good question. Maybe they were items we could obtain some other way.

Annoyed that anybody actually had a question to ask, Schotz spat, “Each of you idjits must bring me the feathers of a seagull, a crow and a vulture. A whisker from a catfish. And a hair of a hyena.”

“Great,” Kali muttered. “A scavenger hunt featuring real scavengers.”

Ignoring my friend’s comment, I did a mental calculation: seven students, six each of five items, that’s . . . My eyes crossed and I bit my tongue. That’s, uh, not enough. Somebody wasn’t going to graduate. I bit my tongue harder, vowing it wouldn’t be me.

“Lastly, it’s every man, woman and whatever for themselves. No partnering up. No helping each other. One man is an island. Got it?”

Oh, skeg. He’d not only forbidden cooperation but he’d encouraged competition. If someone got more tokens than they needed, would they share with the less fortunate? Would they fail for doing so?

“So you all know your assignment, then.” His eyes darted from face to face, inviting exactly zero questions this time.

“Sir! Yes, sir!” we shouted in unison.

I gulped, surveying my classmates. A god, an angel, a smart young woman with total recall, two smart men. Me. Rod. How the skeg was I going to accomplish this? Who was going to lose? Rod glared at me. I knew exactly what he was thinking.

“Oh, wait. I almost forgot.” The sergeant grinned in a predatory manner, which suggested that he hadn’t forgotten anything at all. “I’ve also hidden a crystal skull in a secret location. The person who finds it graduates head of the class.” He giggled. Actually giggled! Sadistic skegger. “Get it? Skull? Head? And no skullduggery! Bwahahaha!”

He sounded insane, except I would have made the same joke.

M’Kimbi raised his hand. He was either very brave or very . . . no, he was very brave. “Question, sir.”

Sergeant Schotz scowled. M’Kimbi had spoiled his big finish. “What is it?”

M’Kimbi pointed toward the map, staying well out of the reach of the sergeant’s Magic Marker. “I would like to inquire what the large black section at the center of the forest is, sir.”

“That is a government-restricted facility. You just stay away from that. You hear me? Under no circumstances are any of you to go anywhere near that black hole. You could be charged. You could end up doin’ time.”

The rest of the group looked terrified and confused. Only I knew what lay within the restricted area. I’d wandered into it before by accident and despite my friendship with Lord Seiko, I didn’t plan on dropping in unannounced again.

Chapter 8

Doesn’t Prey Well with Others

AS SOON AS we were out of sight among the trees, Kali, Amber and I hooked up and made plans. We convinced one another that this, too, was part of the test—to ignore his edict forbidding collaboration and immediately partner up. After all, once we were on the job, we wouldn’t turn each other away when we requested help, right? Right? And if the sergeant had really wanted us to work independently, he would have taken away our phones.

Amber, of course, had the map memorized, so it was her job to keep us on track to each of the five token stations. Kali and I would have our eyes on the ground looking for dropped feathers. We doubted we’d find a hyena or a catfish, but maybe we could beat the odds by adding to the supply of tokens.

“You’re a god, Kali. Can’t you just conjure them up?” Amber asked.

“Sadly, no,” she replied. “I’m much better at making things go away. Death and destruction, remember?”

One of my earrings plopped at my feet.

“And earring backs. Sorry.”

Amber nodded. She had turned out to be pretty cool once she’d been stripped of her friends. She was even letting her dyed hair grow out. Thanks to the weirdness of time, it was now black with yellow paintbrush-tip ends drifting around her shoulders. I liked it.

“We need to split up. Let’s each take a checkpoint, grab three of the tokens and call in.”

“That’s great for you, Amber. But how do Kali and I find our checkpoints?”

“I can talk you in, like an air traffic controller, dudes. I’ve got this, like, mental map.” She tapped her temple. “Plus, I can do that thing with the three angles.”

“What the skeg?” Kali looked confused. “Ira already left.”

“No, not angels. Angles. Three angles,” Amber clarified. “You know. Triangulate.”

“Why bother?” I asked. “The phones now have built-in GPS.”

“Right. And that’s good. It’ll show me where each of us is so I can tell us how to get to the checkpoints.”

“I get it. Amber, you’re brilliant. Skeggin’ brilliant.” Kali punched Amber in the shoulder. I winced in sympathy. Amber rubbed her arm.

“My phone has a walkie-talkie function. Do yours?” I asked. They nodded. “Good. We need to stay off the main channels. Open channel D.”

“B?”

“Did you say P?”

“No D. D. As in death.”

“Who’s Beth?”

I grabbed each phone and set it on Channel D. Then I set the GPS functions so we could pinpoint each other’s locations.

Amber closed her eyes and concentrated. Opening them again, she pointed left. “Kali, head that way. I’ll keep an eye on your position via my phone display and let you know if you go off course. You should reach checkpoint alpha in about twenty minutes. Or, you know, yesterday morning.” She rolled her eyes so hard I could hear it. “Contact us when you get there. Go. Go. Go!”

Kali swelled up to her full height and maybe some added extra. “Who do you think you are, giving me orders?”

Amber cowered. And, I admit it, so did I. Had Amber gone too far?

Then Kali punched her in the arm again, maybe a little harder than last time. “Just kidding.” She took off through the trees, branches snapping and flying out of her way as she went, entire trees ripping from the ground in her wake. “Death and destruction. Death and destruction!” she called back over her shoulder as she ran.

My other earring fell to the ground. I stuffed it in my shirt pocket with its mate.

Next, Amber pointed straight ahead. “Kirsty, I’m giving you checkpoint delta. It’s the farthest away, but the straightest route. You should get there in about forty-five minutes, time willing. By then, Kali and I will have looped back and hit the remaining checkpoints. We should all arrive back in this clearing in about two hours. Or thereabouts, time being irrelevant.”

I knew what she meant. What could you do? Given the way things were, we might get back before we left. I drew a deep, unnecessary breath and was about to charge farther into the forest when I heard a weird tearing noise.

Like fabric giving way. Where had I heard that before? “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what? We don’t have time for this. Are you going or what, Kirsty?”

“Right. Right.” And off I went.

As I raced down a well-worn path toward checkpoint delta, I opened channel D and yelled, “Can you hear me now?”

“Roger that,” Amber responded.

“Who’s Roger?” Kali asked. “Is he dating Beth?” Sometimes even the most up-to-date immortal missed cultural references. “I’m there. Er, here. Time must have folded in on itself, ’cause I’ve only been running about ten minutes.”

I checked my hellphone. The digital readout differed from Kali’s by thirty-five minutes.

“Anyway,” Kali continued, “I’m at checkpoint alpha, but I can’t find any feathers or whiskers or fur here. There’s just a cord hanging from a branch that may have . . . Wait! What the skeg?”

“What?” Amber and I said in unison.

Kali lapsed into a language I didn’t recognize. Blue smoke drifted from my phone. “There’s a nice little carving in the tree. It says ‘Rod was here.’ Damn. He grabbed all of the . . . seagull feathers. There’s a small piece left on the ground that must have torn off when he yanked them down. He’s probably going to share them with Horace and let everybody else fail. Son of a skeg!”

I heard Amber sniffling over the sound of Kali’s swearing. If Amber flunked out without a chance to take the course over, she’d be permanently separated from her friends. Much as I believed she would be better off without them, it wasn’t my place to tell her that. And besides, we were a team. We’d pull each other through. Each of us had something to offer that the others didn’t, and that made us stronger.

“No, wait!” I said, the lightbulb coming on over my head. No, not literally. “Rod isn’t going to share the tokens. He’s going to trade them! We all will. Amber. Kali. Pull yourselves together and get to the next location. Grab all the tokens you find there, not just enough for us. We’ll trade for the rest. And keep an eye out for the crystal skull. That’ll be our ace in the whole shebang.”

“More orders from mere mortals.” Kali sighed. “I remember a time when humans begged and prostrated themselves to us gods. There were offerings. Sacrifices.”

“Grow up, Kali,” I snapped, worrying just a little about the range of her powers. But I was the next best thing to dead already, and my backless earrings now resided in my pocket, so what else could she do to me? “That skull is the ultimate trading card. As long as we all pass, who cares about being head of the class?”

The silence was telling, but after a long pause, the begrudging responses of “right” and “yeah, okay” let me know I’d chosen my friends wisely. Perhaps figuring out I was a lousy judge of character had been the first step toward learning how to be better at it.

“Okay, I’m signing off and continuing toward my first checkpoint. Amber, give Kali her new marching orders. And guys? Hurry the skeg up!”

I sprinted along the path, confident (mostly) that Amber would give me a shout if I strayed too far off course.

Nearly an hour later, Amber’s voice squawked over the phones. “I’m almost there. When I find the hyena skin or whatever, I’m supposed to take, like, the whole thing, right?”

“Yeah.” I felt cold inside. I hated to do it this way, but Rod had left us no choice.

I reached checkpoint delta too late. Three catfish lay on the ground, covered in dirt, each one shaved clean of its whiskers. The small clearing reeked of dead fish.

I didn’t know who to feel sorrier for: the slaughtered fish or myself and my friends, who weren’t going to graduate. And my poor aunt.

I hunkered down and stared at the fish, mesmerized by the rainbow light glinting off their opalescent scales.

I flailed and landed on my ass when one of the fish flopped about in the weeds. It—the fish, not my ass—was still alive! I grabbed it around the fishy equivalent of its neck, mindful of the barbed spikes on its sides. (And for the record, can I just say, Ewww!) I plopped it back in the small stream nearby, tossing in the other two in the vain hope they might be alive as well. They didn’t float back up to the surface so perhaps they’d survived.

Maybe being a Reaper didn’t mean everything I did had to be about death.

I rinsed and rinsed my hands in the stream, murmuring, “Out. Out damn slime.”

After a while I felt cleaner. At least my hands, anyway. I hoped the others had found and taken all the other tokens.

I hated to play dirty. But sometimes you had to. And if I had anything to say about it, that skegger Rod was going down.

Chapter 9

Time Well Bent

SEVERAL MINUTES—OR HOURS—LATER, I checked in with the gals. Kali had found both her checkpoints, but it was the same story: no scavenger bits to be had. Amber reported no better luck. They’d run into M’Kimbi and Ira. Both of them had come up empty, as well. We were well and truly skegged.

“Let’s head back to the clearing. Maybe when Rod shows up with everything, Sergeant Schotz will give us a do-over.” Static hissed and sparked. I could hear the disappointment in Amber’s voice even over the bad connection.

“Not likely,” I said. “He’ll probably fail us all and give Rod the highest commendation.”

“I’ll destroy them all!” Kali shouted. A blast of scorching wind nearly fried my ear.

“No, you won’t.”

“I know, but I feel better when I say it.”

I understood. I wanted to wring Rod’s weasel-like neck, so the god of death and destruction must want to rip his head off. I compared my position on the phone’s map display with the position Amber had given me and began to jog back toward the clearing where we’d met up before. “Maybe we can lay in wait for Rod and . . . Oof!”

I fell face-first onto the path and something smashed into my shin, but I kept my death grip on the phone. “Ow! Ow!”

“What?” said Amber.

“What?” said Kali.

“What?” Ira’s voice. He must have stumbled onto our channel.

“Nothing. Ow! Nothing. I just tripped.” Great. Not only was I going to fail the class, but I was going to do so with a massive bruise on my leg. I rolled into a sitting position, brushing dirt and twigs and not a few bugs off my jeans.

“You okay?” Amber asked.

“Yeah. Fine.”

“What did you trip over?” Kali asked.

“What the skeg does that . . . ? Oh, God!” Like Kali had a short time ago, I fell back into old habits, using a Coil swear word. Stinky blue smoke colored the air before me. “God,” I murmured a second time.

“What?” said Amber.

“You talking to me, girlfriend?” said Kali.

“I’m homesick,” said Ira.

“We might as well go check in.” I deliberately didn’t answer their questions as I picked up the object I’d tripped over and used my shirtsleeve to wipe some of the grime off its crystal surface. “Gather everyone, including Rod, and meet me at the clearing just inside the woods.”

“Even Rod?”

“Yeah. Especially Rod. Horace must have his hellphone number. It was on the class list.”

We all met up in the clearing, straggling in one disappointed classmate at a time. We shared our experiences in the forest and before long, I’d pieced together a picture of how Rod had accomplished the impossible.

Rod must have been watching from nearby because he waited until we’d all assembled to make a grand entrance, his backpack bulging with dead-animal artifacts.

“Hi, losers.” He took gloating to a whole new level. “Come to congratulate me on my triumphant triumph?”

Kali rose. And rose and rose. Seven feet looked good on her. It spaced her three pairs of arms nicely along her torso. Good thing she favored stretch fabrics. “You cheated, Rod.”

“Hey, who let the gods out? Woof! Woof!” he taunted. When she refused to rise to the bait, he pasted a look of mock innocence on his face and said, “Cheated? I did? How did I do that?”

“You got someone else to bring you all the tokens,” I said. “It’s the only way you could have managed it.”

“Not someone, something. Flying monkey demons, if you must know. Nobody said you couldn’t hire outside help. But we were told, very specifically, that we couldn’t partner with each other.” He glanced meaningfully from Kali to Amber to me. “I saw you guys in this clearing about half an hour ago, making plans.”

Something about that statement irked me, but I had bigger catfish whiskers to fry. “So you’ve got all of the tokens. What are you going to do with them? Will you get to choose who fails the course?”

“Are you kidding? You’re all flunking out. Finders, Reapers. Losers, weepers. The key word there being looooo-zers! Ha! I’m going down in history as the only being in our whole class to graduate.” He did an embarrassing little dance. I think it had something to do with football, but I couldn’t be sure. I only ever played hockey, and hockey players don’t dance. Wrong kind of skates.

“Even me, Rod?” Horace, who had been Rod’s only friend through the program, stepped forward.

“Yeah, buddy. Sorry. You coulda done the same thing. But you didn’t. So just me. I’m the only one who’s gonna make the final draft pick this round.”

“But, Rod,” I crooned, “I really need to graduate. I could make it worth your while.” I sidled up to him, doing my best to make promises with my eyes and my body. I was willing to do almost anything to save my aunt. Like make promises I had no intention of keeping.

“Well, baby. This is unexpected, but I think not. I’m not interested in a coma victim who’s all pasty and saggy back on the Coil. Now, if your goddess buddy wants to get handsy with me, maybe we could work something out.”

I clamped my teeth together before I said anything I’d regret, but stood my ground. He danced about some more. “The only thing that would make this moment better is if I could get my hands on that crystal skull.”

Bingo. Now I had him. “You want the skull, do you? Then how ’bout we talk trade?”

I yanked the crystal skull from my backpack, drawing oohs and ahs from my colleagues.

“I’ll trade you this crystal skull for the remaining five of each token, the ones you don’t need. That way you can still be king of the class and all but one of us can graduate. Think about it. You’re still number one all the way. First round draft pick. Star player. Um . . .” I was running out of sports terminology. I knew from my PR days that you needed to relate to people in their own language. “You’ll be the quarterback from Hell!” I shouted. “MVP of the team! But you need a team to be star of, right? Right?”

His eyes gleamed and his lips pulled back in something that would have been a smile if it weren’t so nasty. He wasn’t stupid by any means and I knew he was considering my offer.

“C’mon, Rod.” Kali stepped forward. She’d sized herself down to a petite five foot two, twirling her hair around one finger and sucking on another, making herself look all sexy and corruptible. “Wouldn’t you rather have me as a friend than an enemy?”

“And me,” Ira said. “I can put in a good word for you with the Man Upstairs.” He gave a saintly smile and pointed toward the treetops.

“And us, too,” the rest of the gang chorused.

Rod held out his hand, “Okay. Give it to me.”

I stepped back, holding it out of his reach. “You first. You have to decide which of us doesn’t graduate.”

“I don’t give a skeg. Just give me a second here.” He rooted through his pack, drawing out one of each token and stuffing them in his jacket. “Okay. Here’s the rest. You put the skull down and I’ll put the pack down. Then we both pick up the other item. Okay? One . . . Two . . .”

I bent to place the skull on the ground, but that skegger grabbed the skull from my hand and charged toward the edge of the clearing without dropping the backpack.

Now he had everything—all the tokens and the crystal skull!

“He has retained the objects!” M’Kimbi shouted.

“He’s getting away, dudes!” Amber cried.

“Kali, don’t!” I cried as she raised all of her arms, a terrible and powerful glow emanating from her eyes.

I crouched low to the ground, petrified when she turned her glowing gaze in my direction.

“Relax, girlfriend,” she intoned. “I’m just going to stop him.”

Fire crackled from all thirty of her slender fingers and a tree crashed loudly, just out of sight.

“Oh, skeeeggg!” Rod’s voice drifted back to us.

Before we could head toward the sound, Rod reappeared in the clearing, a nasty scratch on his right cheek and twigs sticking out of his hair. Dante, who also sported a few twigs of his own—although on him they looked good—gripped Rod’s shoulder with one hand and balanced the skull in the other.

Something was different about my Reaper. Or rather, something was the same, again. After nearly a year’s absence, his scythe bounced at his hip, once more Velcroed to his belt loop.

Horace rushed to Rod’s side. At first I figured he was stupidly going to defend his former friend, but instead, he ripped the backpack of tokens out of Rod’s hand. “Give me that carrion luggage, you skeg-hole!” He lugged the pack over to the middle of the clearing, knelt on the ground and began to rifle through it.

“Hold up! Everyone. Time-out! Vieni qui subito!” Dante shoved Rod roughly to his knees in the dirt next to Horace. He handed me the skull. I clutched it to my chest as Dante gestured for us all to gather around.

“I need everyone to be quiet for a moment. Look through the trees. There.” He pointed to a space between a huge cypress and a Douglas fir. The fir was all matted.

“What are we . . . ?”

“Shhh! Dante commanded, laying a finger on his lips.

We watched in silence, having grown used to taking direction from Dante in his role as teacher’s aide. And maybe I had taken direction from him on a few more intimate occasions. Although come to think of it, it was usually me giving the directions, like “Oh, yeah. Right there.” And “Don’t stop.” My attention was yanked back to the clearing by the voices that floated toward us. I could just make out the back of a tall woman with dark hair . . . and six arms! She was talking to a gal with dark hair and paintbrush-tip ends and another with a mouse-brown shag.

“. . . need to stay off the main channels. Open channel D.”

“B?”

“Did you say P?”

“D. D. As in death.”

“Who’s Beth?”

“That’s us!” I whispered. I ran a hand over my hair. How often do you get a chance to see yourself from the back? I wiggled a bit, wanting to ask, “Does this forest make my ass look fat?”

“We had that conversation about three hours ago,” I said.

“Or right now,” Kali added. “What’s it mean?”

“It means,” Dante whispered, “we’ve got a bigger problem to solve than finding fur, fins or feathers.” He gestured for us to follow him back to the clearing.

In order for this to be happening now, it had to have happened the first time round, right? Dante and all of us had to have watched Kali, Amber and me setting out.

We hadn’t heard him before.

If we heard him now, would that change the future? The past?

My head hurt.

But I knew what I had to do. What we had to do, even if it meant we all failed the course.

“Guys, I think it’s time to go see the engineers,” I said.

“Guys, I think it’s time to go see the engineers,” I said.

“Guys, I think it’s time to go see the engineers,” I said.

Kali slapped me.

“Hey!” I cried, rubbing my burning cheek. I knew she’d pulled her punch, but still. “It’s not me. It’s time and . . .”

But it had worked. Her slap had stopped time from looping back on itself like a broken record. Why had it worked? I had an idea.

“Kali, when did time start going weird? Really weird, even for Hell time?”

“Uh, it’s hard to know. When you’re a millennia-old immortal, you don’t really pay that close attention to the date.” She raised her hands in a gesture of apology.

I got a little seasick looking at all those waving palms.

“Amber? You’d know exactly when it happened, right?”

“Sorry.” She shook her bangs out of her eyes. “I’ve only been here a few . . . let’s just say not that long.”

“Dante. When did Hell time go all wonky?” I waited for him to think. “Yes. When you were grounded, right? Like when I came to Hell, right?”

“Sì,” he said. I could see him gradually getting a clue.

So everyone who’d told me it wasn’t all about me was wrong—dead wrong. It was, in fact, utterly and completely about me. Sue Sayer was the only one who’d said so, way back then, but I hadn’t put two and two together until this very unstable moment.

I was the problem.

And I needed to deal with it.

Now.

But I needed help. Could I ask everyone here to sacrifice their Reaper careers to help me fix something I’d set wrong on my first day in Hell?

I raised my gaze and spoke to the entire group. “So, my friends. Do you want to finish the test and graduate and gain everything you’ve been working for these past two semesters?” I paused, gazing out at the sea of uneasy expressions. “Or do you wanna go see some guys about a time machine?”

I listened to the eruption of voices. The general consensus appeared to be “What the skeg?”

“We don’t have time for long explanations. In fact, we don’t have time for any explanations. Let’s just say Rod was right. I am the problem, or at least I created one the day I got here and I need your help fixing it. It’s like everyone said all along—I killed time!”

“We haven’t got time for this!” Rod snarled, tearing away from Dante’s grip.

“We’ll just have to make the time,” Kali replied, hands on hips and head and heart. “I stand by my friends.”

In that instant, I loved her so much I practically worshipped her.

“Thank you. Who else is in?”

Amber raised her hand. So did Ira. Horace glared at his former friend and moved over to stand beside me.

“Will it count toward our final grade?” M’Kimbi asked. Suck-up.

Dante cleared his throat. “We’re all going. It’s not optional. Remember that Reapers are Hell’s own SWAT team and we need to go swat something.” He crossed his arms over his chest and I went all tingly inside.

At that moment, I might have loved Dante, too. More than usual.

“Okay, then. We’re all in this together. Amber, you saw the map. The big black spot we were told not to go to? Well, we’re going there. Which way is it?”

“This way,” she answered. “I just hope we’re in time. Or if that’s even possible anymore.”

We charged through the underbrush, following Amber, who led us straight and true. Ira flexed his wings and rose above the trees to travel as the angel flies. I ran with the pack, managing to jog my way to a space beside Dante. My lungs burned even though breathing wasn’t strictly necessary. Still, I needed to know. “What’s with . . .” I panted. “The scythe.” I eyed the pewter cylinder dangling at his waist.

“Schotz ordered me to take it in case I needed it. Just for this emergency. I have to give it back after . . .” He kept his gaze on the path, but I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: Would there be an after?

Despite time being off—or because of it—we all arrived at the time machine clearing in just a few minutes. And there we stopped dead.

Over the time terminal, a giant whirlwind roared and spun—the steroidal cousin of the one that had swept my two former classmates from our classroom. The tornado pulsed like a beating heart, if hearts were black, filthy and expanding rapidly. A seagull swooped toward us, flying too close. A horrific squawk scraped across my eardrums as the poor bird disappeared into the swirling maelstrom. A single feather drifted toward the earth and I made a mental note to grab it later—if there even was a later.

The sound of tearing fabric practically deafened me. I remembered now. I’d heard it the day I’d arrived, when I pushed the miswired emergency button.

The engineers and their people had set up a crisis center at the edge of the clearing. Plans and blueprints covered the ground, weighted against the sucking wind by rocks and tools.

One of their documents whipped loose and bounced along the ground toward the terminal. A workman dived for it, but he never hit the ground. Instead, a swirling tentacle of wind separated from the main mass and shot toward him. He tumbled and spun, out of control. The tentacle whipped around his waist, drawing him into the gaping maw of the tornado. The last thing I saw was the sleeve of his red shirt as he disappeared from view.

This thing was sentient. And it was coming for me and my friends!

“Kirsty!” Lord Seiko cried, rushing toward me. “It’s a vortex between this dimension, Hell, and Heller, the next one over. We must have started it that day when we . . .”

“When I bumped the lever by mistake, causing the dry run to be a dress rehearsal. And then I hit the defective emergency switch. I screwed up.”

“It was an accident. On all our parts.” Even in a crisis, Seiko was still gracious. “The fact that you exist simultaneously on both planes, coupled with the surge of energy in the time machine, must have caused a rip in the fabric of the universe—or at least the curtain between Hell and Heller.”

I gawked at the huge tear in the air. The rip must have been expanding a fraction each day for nearly a year, sending time into a tizzy.

Seiko turned back toward his coworkers, the wind whipping his hair. His foot hit a hole in the ground where a rock had been sucked away. He stumbled, waving his arms to keep his balance and staggered into the danger zone.

“No!” I screamed, charging toward him. Just as a tentacle of evil whirlwind reached for him, I tackled him, throwing us both to the ground. I clung to him, making us an immovable object in the face of the irresistible force. I realized I was still holding the skull and tossed it aside so I could use both hands to grip my fallen friend.

“Nooo!” Rod charged in, diving for the skull. He grabbed it, only to make the worst fumble in history—MVP my ass. The skull shot from his grip. It bounced along the ground, coming to rest in a clear patch of grass near the doorway into the machine itself. Rod charged after his prize. Wind tore at his clothing, sucking at him, sucking him in. A starfish of tendrils reached for him, wrapping around his body like a giant windy squid. He rose into the air slowly, legs still pumping. He hung suspended for what seemed like an eternity and may well have been. Then the vortex howled and snatched him away. His screech hung in the air long after he’d gone. Finally, it died away.

On the ground, I held on to Seiko, unable to move, unable to scream.

“Make a chain!” Horace yelled above the wind. “Now!”

Kali charged in first, able to grip both Seiko and me, two arms apiece, leaving two free. Dante threw himself down next, feet practically in Kali’s face. She shouted something about there being Hell to pay when this was over, but she wrenched her ego under control and wrapped her last set of arms around his ankles. Horace copied Dante’s move so Dante was able to grab his legs and then M’Kimbi did the same. Ira and Amber held onto one of M’Kimbi’s arms each, functioning as anchors. The air filled with white feathers as the wind ripped at Ira’s wings. The tiny part of my mind still fixated on graduating wondered if we could steal a black Magic Marker from Schotz and fake a couple of seagull feathers. Look, I was desperate. But saving my aunt and getting my life back had to wait until I’d saved my friends.

And the world.

I’d met the other two engineers who comanaged the project with Lord Seiko when I’d first stumbled onto their time machine. Now I watched as Lord Roland, his great-great-grandson Lord Tim, and some of the workmen rushed over to help. But even with the additional manpower, there was no way they could haul six people along the ground while a malevolent vortex yanked our chain.

The wind surged, becoming a giant vacuum determined to eat its fill. I’d finally found the evil incarnate I’d always expected in Hell. And it came from the dimension next door! There goes the neighborhood.

“I can’t hold on much longer,” Kali screamed, the wind snatching at her words.

We pulled and heaved in the tug-of-war to end all wars. I thought my arms would rip out of their sockets. I silently thanked Sergeant Schotz for all the physical training. Now I knew why it had been important. No strain, no gain.

“Climb the chain. Furthest out first!” Roland shouted, deerstalker cap and accent both whipped away in the wind.

That would work. I wanted Seiko to go first, but he pushed at me until I realized this Chip ’n’ Dale routine only wasted time while the wind grew stronger. Still holding onto me, Seiko passed me to Kali, who helped me crawl up to the next person. By the time I reached Dante, the wind’s grasp had lessened a little. Great news, since Dante didn’t have an extra set of arms to support me and still hang on to the person in front of him.

I crawled over Dante as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very. Seiko crawled up behind me.

When we’d raced out of the clearing toward the time machine, Horace had donned Rod’s backpack containing the tokens we needed to graduate. I used it now to drag myself over him to the next person in line. First one of the straps gave and then the other. Trust Rod to have bought a cheaply made backpack. I shoved it aside and grasped Horace around the neck. The wind grabbed the backpack immediately and it flew, along with all our hopes of graduation, into the vortex. Now Rod would have all the tokens he’d wanted so badly. Poor Rod.

“How do we stop this?” I screamed, once I’d scrambled onto safe ground.

“We must shut it down!” Roland shouted.

“Yeah, man. Shut it down,” Tim seconded.

But how? The vortex pulsed and roared like a great sucking chest wound between Hell and Heller. As we’d fought for our lives, it had expanded to encompass nearly the entire clearing, vacuuming up everything in its path. It tore at the time machine building, ripping off the lion heads and tearing away the weaker sections of paneling. The terminal now resembled a desiccated body—chunks of tortured materials clinging to the shuddering skeleton of rebar and I-beams and concrete. The metal frame twisted and shrieked. Having torn holes in the roof, tendrils of evil descended into the building, giving birth to tiny new twisters that spun through the interior. How could anyone enter the building now? How could we shut the time machine off?

“Won’t the time machine just get torn apart and stop working?” Horace shouted over the roar.

“No. We relocated the main engines underground not long ago,” Seiko explained. “It would take a nuclear attack to destroy it. All you see aboveground are the controls. Once they’re torn away, we won’t be able to shut it off and the vortex will suck all of Hell and the Mortal Coil into its ravenous belly.”

And the Mortal Coil! Oh, no! “What about when it runs down?” I yelled in his ear. “You guys told me it runs on spices.”

“That’s so last millennium. It’s thermal powered now. We hooked it up directly to the Earth’s core when we planted the engines underground.”

“Did you ever hook up the computer systems I suggested?”

“Yes, we did, but we kept the older systems in place just in case.”

“How, then, can one deactivate this device?” M’Kimbi asked, eyes wide with fear, mouth a firm line of determination.

“There’s an emergency button inside.” I said, looking to Roland for confirmation. He nodded grimly. Then he sneezed, knocking a fair amount of grit from his mustache.

“I’m afraid our Kirsty is correct. There’s a button inside that must be depressed. It will turn the machine on.”

“On?” Horace asked. “Don’t we want to turn the skeggin’ thing off?”

“No. No,” Seiko said. “It has been set off. We now need to turn it on. That will stop the fluctuation of the time parameters in terms of the juxtaposition of the . . .”

A glint caught my eye. The crystal skull still lay where Rod had fumbled it. On a patch of grass. Why grass? Everywhere else the grass and soil had been torn up until the bones of Earth lay bare. Boulders and massive tree roots were all that remained where lawn and topsoil had been swallowed up by the swirling menace.

Atop the building, a huge box comprised of metal ribs and filters perched just above the door—the massive air conditioner I’d noticed the day I arrived. The AC unit shuddered and wavered, metal screaming as it torqued, its welds and bolts threatening to give at any second. For the moment, though, it held and in doing so, blocked the terrible sucking wind, leaving a clear path just in front of the open door. I looked around.

“I’ll go,” Dante volunteered, tearing off his robe.

“You’re a brave young man,” Roland told Dante, who was quite possibly several hundred years his senior. “But ’tis clearly my responsibility. I’ll go.” Roland gripped his pipe between his teeth resolutely.

“I’ll go,” Ira stepped up. “It’s what we do.”

“You throw yourself into the whirling vortex of evil?” M’Kimbi asked. He tended to be very literal.

“No. We do what’s right. And miracles. We also do miracles.”

“Nobody would even miss me,” Horace said.

Before my friends wasted any more time volunteering, I stepped in. “No. This is my fault. I bumped the lever the first day I was here and that’s when it all went wrong.”

“Time machines just aren’t what they used to be,” Seiko said grimly.

“I’m going to fix it,” I said. “And I’m going to live. Er, stay dead. Er, keep on keepin’ on.”

Tossing his fist in the air, Timothy gave me a right on, sistah salute.

“But first, there’s something I have to do.” I turned to Dante. “In case I don’t make it.”

I grasped his chin, leaned up against him and kissed him on the mouth. He wasn’t a PDA kind of guy so it took him a second to get with the program, but then he wrapped his arms around me and kissed me back. I melted against him, teasing his tongue into my mouth, nearly losing myself in the kiss. I slid my hands to his waist, letting my fingers tangle in his belt loops. I pulled back just enough to draw a breath—and suddenly I really, really needed one. Go figure.

Looking deep into his eyes, I asked dreamily (but loudly, since the whirlwind was making such a racket), “Remember the day we met?”

“Sì,” he breathed, moving his hands to my shoulders, meeting my gaze, lips curling upward in a dazed smile.

Firming my grip at his waist, I smiled apologetically. Then I said, “I did this.”

I grabbed his scythe and shoved him roughly away from me as I had on that day in the men’s room when I’d sent him bouncing into a bank of sinks. The Velcro tab made a ripping noise audible even over the wind as his scythe tore from his belt loop. Dante sprawled on the ground still looking dazed and more than a little surprised.

I blew him one more kiss and raced toward the building.

My legs pumped hard, my heart did, too. I hated that I’d had to make what might be our last kiss a distraction and I hated more that I’d had to cut it short, but I just couldn’t afford to let him try to stop me.

Shoving regrets of love and betrayal aside, I sprinted to the relatively windless area immediately before the entrance to the time terminal.

Above me, the AC unit shifted again. If its moorings snapped now, I’d be was a goner. I’d be crushed or sucked into the vortex or, given my luck, probably both. What would happen to my unsouled body back on the Coil?

Sensing I was there, the vortex sent tentacles toward me, but something about the AC unit kept it back—maybe it blocked its view of me or maybe it had something to do with the crystal skull. Or maybe it couldn’t get a fix on me because I simultaneously inhabited two planes of existence. My bi-dimensional existence had caused the problem in the first place, after all.

No matter why, I appeared to be safe from the vortex—for the time being. Which wasn’t saying much, time being pretty conceptual at the moment.

With a deep roar, the vortex wrapped its typhoon arms around the top half of the AC unit and snapped it off. The ground behind me churned. Clods of dirt pelted against my back as they flew upward into the dark tear in the sky. My tiny circle of safety had just gotten tinier. Cut off! As Sergeant Schotz had said, one man—or in this case one woman—is an island. Nobody could get to me and I couldn’t get out again without stepping directly into the lethal whirlwind.

I stood in the clearing, about ten feet from the opening. Through the wreckage of the terminal, the emergency button taunted me, pulsing red like a bloody heartbeat, clearly visible even through the swirling debris. The metal framework of the building shrieked and shuddered a little more.

Behind me, my friends, my teammates, my boyfriend and others watched in silence.

The skull grinned up at me from the ground at my feet.

“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio . . . not at all.”

Grasping Dante’s scythe, I thrust out my arm. I’d been told I wasn’t supposed to take another Reaper’s scythe—not even to touch it. But maybe, just maybe, if you were trying to stop the end of the world, it was worth the risk.

I activated the scythe using the button located near the top rim. I knew that now, since we’d practiced with training scythes. The handle extended upward and downward simultaneously, like the weirdest glowing purple erection with a blade at the top. I admired it a moment while I rifled through my brain, reviewing all the important things I’d learned about scythes and Hell and being a Reaper during my time at the Reaper Academy and while in Hell. Facts and figures whirled through my brain like my own personal mental vortex.

And then I abandoned all that book learning and field practice. What I needed now, I’d learned back up on the Coil.

I flipped the scythe upside-down and slammed the curved blade against the skull with every erg of power I possessed. The crystal skull shot through the door and directly at the glowing red button. With deadly accuracy, it found its target. I not only hit the button, I smashed it to smithereens! My old hockey coach would be so proud.

She shoots!

She scores!

She saves the world!

And behind me the crowd went wild as the vortex began to slow its churning spiral, retracting its tendrils, shrinking into a tiny black hole that managed to suck in one last time fly. A final blast of wind shot in my direction, but died to a mere breeze just before it reached me.

I fisted the air in triumph. I’d won. It’d been—

The world went blindingly, roaringly white. I fell back and hit the ground hard. If I’d been able to hear anything, I think I would have heard bones snapping—my bones. Good thing I didn’t need to breathe, because the lead weight on my chest prevented my lungs from expanding even the slightest bit. Every part of my body screamed with pain and I wished I were dead. More dead. Really dead. I lay there for an eternity. Several eternities.

The AC unit must have been teetering on its last bolt. That final blast was all it needed to fly off the roof and land on me, squashing me flat. A hero’s reward. Not!

Then, suddenly, the pressure lifted. Someone heaved the AC unit off me. Vaguely I wondered if I looked like Wile E. Coyote after an anvil had flattened him. I felt hands on my body. Maybe on my body parts. Were they collecting limbs and sticking them back together? My eyes flew open but the fiery brilliance didn’t change. Voices called to me, but they seemed very far away. I closed my eyes again. Blessed blackness washed over me. Oh, wait. We’re not supposed to say bless—

Chapter 10

Regeneration Gap

SOMEONE SHOOK ME. Someone else doused my face with liquid, which turned out to be iced tea and got my hair all sticky. I sat up, sputtering.

“Dude. You okay?”

“How you doing, girlfriend?”

“Kirsty. Cara. Can you hear me?”

Why were they asking me such hard questions? Wasn’t the oral exam over?

I turned my head toward the last voice to speak. I loved it when Dante’s handsome (although still a little blurry) face was the first thing I saw when I awoke.

Another face swam into view. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I can’t count that high,” I answered, grasping Kali’s nearest hand and squeezing it.

“She’s all right!” Kali hugged me hard and still had enough arms left over to draw my friends into the group hug. “You’re all right!”

Something white flashed at the corner of my eye. I turned my head to look directly at it, but it moved away. Was it residual glinting from the vortex supernova? I turned my head the other way, but it moved that way, too.

“Amber, have you got a mirror?”

“A what? Oh, yes.” She fumbled in her pack, producing a compact. “Old habits die hard.” She looked at Dante before handing me the mirror.

Dante sighed. “She has to know.”

My hands shook. It took three tries for me to depress the little trigger that popped open the compact. I stared in it. I turned my head from side to side.

“It’s white. My brown hair, once blond with peach streaks, is white.” I bounced my gaze from face to face—not just my trainee buddies, but all the workers and engineers who were busily assessing damage, making plans or just standing around. Other than Lord Roland, who’d had silver-gray hair to start with, I was the only one who now sported hair so white it reflected our so-called daylight.

“It glints,” M’Kimbi said, reaching his hand out, but not quite touching. “Like that frost that coats objects on cold mornings.”

“Hoarfrost,” Amber supplied.

“What you calling my girl?” Kali leapt in, brandishing six fists.

“No. No.” Amber backed away from the angry god, her own two arms raised in submission. “I read the dictionary once. It’s the kind of frost M’Kimbi described.”

Ignoring my dear, silly friends, I checked myself out instead. My face and arms carried a mass of scrapes and bruises, but somehow I was okay. No broken bones. I’d suddenly healed from having a giant AC unit dumped on me. Unbelievable. I rolled into a sitting position, finding myself perched on the picnic table where the workers ate lunch. I must have been carried there after the blast. Ira perched on the edge of the table, smiling at me shyly.

“Ira, did I just get squashed by a five-hundred-pound air-conditioning unit?”

He nodded.

“And am I now sitting on a picnic table, whole and well, having this conversation with you?”

He nodded again.

“How did that happen, exactly?”

Ira shrugged, his pretty-boy lips tilting into a secretive smile. “I can’t go into the specifics, Kirsty. Trade secrets, you know. But it’s like I said before, this is what we do.”

“Miracles, right?” I grinned at him. “Thanks, Ira. You’re a peach.”

“No,” he said. “I’m an angel. Don’t let the complexion fool you.”

“I see our lady of the hour is going to live.” Lord Roland Ecks sauntered over, puffing on his pipe, his grin so wide smoke leaked out the corners. “Or at least not die any worse than she already has.”

He offered ’round a dusty bottle of hundred-year-old scotch (made yesterday, aged in a time machine) and as soon as he’d gone back to what was left of the terminal, his great-great-grandson, Lord Timothy Ecks produced some nice Hell-grown weed. After what we’d been through, we could do with a little Reaper madness. He’d cured it in honey, which really sweetened the pot.

Seiko came by to thank us for saving his life—there was much bowing and promises of lives and afterlives owed. He also reported that, although the time terminal had been ripped apart, most of the important components were salvageable. With a lot of hard work, they’d be able to get time straightened out this very evening.

“It’s about time, man,” Timothy declared.

Seiko just looked at him.

We held a small impromptu memorial service for Rod. Horace was the only one who had really gotten to know him and he said Rod was an okay guy, just really, really goal-oriented. Horace cried a little and so did the rest of us. Then he announced that a good party was an appropriate tribute to his late friend. The workers, who had also lost one of their own, agreed wholeheartedly.

“To Raul!” The workers hoisted their scotch.

“To Rod!” My classmates hoisted whatever poison they preferred.

I glanced at Dante who was across the clearing, being a great big party pooper. He’d been standoffish all afternoon, not indulging in pot or booze and keeping his distance from me. Well, too bad. I had questions and I voted him most likely to know the answers. Cornering him, I asked, “What happened to them? Rod and Raul, I mean.”

“I have no idea. They may be dead—as in ceased-to-exist dead. Or they may have ended up in Heller. Nobody knows much about it, except that it’s supposed to be way, way worse than here.” He turned and walked away from me.

Uh-oh. He was mad I’d touched his scythe, again. How mad was he? Did I even have a boyfriend anymore?

Tears welled in my eyes, until someone arrived bearing pizza. I had a nice buzz on, so I was easily distracted. Plus I had a bad case of the munchies, man.

We had a real good party going when Dante’s hellphone rang. “Okay, kids. Time to go. Sergeant Schotz is waiting.”

Talk about buzzkill.

“Let ’im wait.” I took another toke. “We’re all gonna fail anyway, right?” I looked around. Oops. Now I was the buzz killer. I dropped the joint in our bonfire. It was time to quit or get off the pot.

Reluctantly, we gathered our stuff—stuff that hadn’t gotten sucked into the vortex—and started our death march back.

Chapter 11

No Quest for the Wicked

“SO . . .” SERGEANT SCHOTZ stopped pacing, his eyes roving over his disheveled and now slightly smaller class. He shook his head slowly from side to side. “So . . .” He started again. He’d been doing this for a while now.

Suddenly he broke pattern, rounding on Dante. “Reaper Alighieri?”

Dante snapped to attention. “Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Not a single feather. Not even a hair of the hyena?”

I heard teeth grinding in the ensuing silence and the muscles along the Sergeant’s jawbone pulsed. No wonder his teeth were loose. At least he wasn’t spitting them at us this time.

“No, sir. Sorry, sir. Mi dispiace.”

I felt bad for Dante. My heart bled. No, not literally. But it reminded me of all the cuts and scratches I’d acquired during the day. I checked my elbow, where I’d had a real nasty gash. Nearly healed. In fact, all my lacerations had become faint red lines or disappeared completely. Apparently miracles don’t leave scars. The bruises had taken on a nice week-old green patina.

The engineers must be well on their way to restoring time, because it ticked along nicely now, with only the occasional hiccup.

Of course, for those of us who’d indulged in Timothy’s weed, time still seemed weird and stretchy. Maybe I was still a little baked. It was hard to focus on Schotz’s conversation. I blinked and tried to concentrate. Wishing for aspirin or more pizza or both, I rubbed my temples. Having an AC unit dumped on your head can have a resounding after-effect. Or maybe it was the booze. This was like the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday all over again. Wasn’t I older and wiser than that?

Kali looked over at me, gesturing surreptitiously for me to lean toward her. Her six hands were always in motion, especially since she’d quit smoking, so her brief beckoning gesture went unnoticed by others. Slowly, loath to draw Schotz’s attention my way, I leaned into the space that separated our assigned rocks. She slid one hand up my spine to rest on the back of my neck. When she removed it again I was sober and the headache settling between my eyes had become bearable.

“Also god of hangovers,” she mouthed, keeping her eyes on Schotz. “I rarely mention it.”

At the front of the room, Schotz continued his tirade. “You say you had the tokens and the crystal skull and they all got sucked into a swirling vortex of evil. Do I have that right?”

He made “swirling vortex of evil” sound like “a dog ate my homework.”

“Not quite, sir.” Dante cleared his throat. “Only the tokens got sucked in to the vortex.”

“Ah, so you have the skull then?” He held out one hand.

Dante shuffled his feet and stared at the wall over Schotz’s head. “I’m not sure exactly where it ended up. Earth’s molten core, maybe?”

Schotz opened his mouth and stared. He stayed like that awhile.

Finally Dante said, “Uh, I’m sorry?” and that kicked our instructor back into play.

“So no tokens. No skull. Which, by the way, I need for next semester. And you managed to lose one of my students. One of my recruits! How is that even possible? You’re already dead.” He eyed the classroom, his gaze landing last on me. “Mostly,” he corrected.

I cringed. I felt like a coward letting Dante take the brunt of Schotz’s rage.

“And yet, you and your charges managed to save the world, you say. Not just Hell, but the Mortal Coil, as well.”

“When you put it like that, sir . . .”

“Sir?” A voice from behind me squeaked. “Sir?” It said again, more firmly this time.

I swiveled around on my rock. What was Horace thinking?

“Yes, Reaper Recruit Horace? Is there something you think you can add to this conversation?”

“Yes, sir. I think maybe I can. I think maybe we deserve to fail. I mean, we cheated. Well, some of us did. Rod brought in hired wingmen. I tried to con a raven out of some feathers when no one was looking.”

“I used my wings even though I knew that gave me an unfair advantage,” Ira admitted.

“I used my powers of death and destruction to clear a path for myself through the woods,” Kali added.

“I used my total recall,” Amber said.

“We worked as a team.” I arose from my rock, thinking that since I’d never be able to save my aunt now, I might as well be honest and join the rats going down with the sinking ship. “You specifically said we were to work alone, but we combined Amber’s memory with Kali’s powers and my . . .” What had I added to the team? What, indeed, could I even bring to the job as Reaper? What had I been thinking? “We cheated, sir.”

“Do not look at me,” M’Kimbi said. “I did not cheat.”

“Maybe not, but you would have,” Dante said. “If I hadn’t caught you snooping around last night, looking for the specifics of the test!”

I swung my surprised gaze from M’Kimbi to Dante So that’s what he’d meant by working late last night. He’d been patrolling the campus for cheaters. I looked at M’Kimbi, shocked that the class’s number one suck-up had tried to cheat. Under my piercing gaze, I was pretty sure M’Kimbi blushed.

“You tried to steal the test?” Ira asked, admiration in his voice.

“We’re all cheaters. Dirty, rotten cheaters,” Amber said miserably, her voice catching. “We don’t deserve to be Reapers.” A single tear rolled down her cheek, leaving a trail through the smudged makeup and grime.

“What?” shouted Sergeant Schotz. “You all cheated? You all don’t deserve to pass?”

We nodded.

“Where, exactly, do you idjits think you are?”

I looked up, not understanding the question. Sweat slithered down my back.

“In a field, sir?” M’Kimbi answered.

Schotz ignored him. “This is Hell, for skeg’s sake. You’re supposed to cheat. You’re supposed to do whatever it takes to accomplish your task. You can lie, cheat, steal, pay for or con someone into helping you. You can trick and bribe and do whatever it takes in the line of duty. You weren’t supposed to get your colleague sucked into a space-time vortex, but these things happen.” He shrugged. “So every last one of you deserves to be considered for Reaperhood.”

I raised my head. I felt hope for the first time since Rod’s backpack had disappeared into the vortex.

“The only thing keeping you from passing is the fact that, in spite of having used all your tricks and cunning and powers and gifts, you didn’t manage to bring back a single skeggin’ token you’d been sent after.”

I slumped again. Maybe I should just walk away. Why was I even sitting here listening to this? Maybe hope, like that one coil in Dante’s sofa, really did spring eternal. I sat glumly and listened to Schotz rail against our uselessness and stupidity.

“I ought to— What’s that?” A tinny version of Glory, Glory, Hallelujah interrupted him.

“I believe it’s your hellphone, sir,” Dante said.

“I know it’s my skeggin’ phone. Hello? Schotz here. Sergeant Schotz, that is. Oh. Yes, ma’am. I—”

He stepped outside for privacy. Of course, we could still hear every word. We were in a tent, for skeg’s sake.

“They did?”

“They said that?”

“She touched his what?”

Uh-oh. I was done for now. And I couldn’t even make a quick getaway since Schotz chose that moment to reappear, blocking the tent flap, hands on hips, face the color of a fine merlot.

“Do you people have any idea who that was?”

Silence reigned, whether from fear or because we’d finally learned to recognize a rhetorical question, I couldn’t tell.

“That was Her Satanic Majesty. Calling me. Me. Here I am, just trying to do my duty to Hell and you . . . you . . . you bunch earn me a call from the Queen of Darkness.”

I stopped breathing altogether. I didn’t need to, right?

“And do you know why she called me?”

Another rhetorical question . . . I hoped.

“That’s right. She had a call from some powerfully placed and well-connected friends of hers. A certain group of engineers who were working on a top-secret, highly sensitive project.”

Uh-oh. Now I was really in trouble. Could I run? Could I hide?

“And they told her that you recruits, you promising young men and woman and . . . no, that’s it with this group, right? Just men and women?” He glanced at Dante for confirmation. Dante nodded.

“That you people saved the world. That you risked yourselves to save them personally and also saved Hell, the Coil, and the big secret project. Maybe even Heaven, too.”

He glared at us like we’d saved the worlds just to aggravate him.

“There’s to be some sort of big time reset tonight at the darkest hour just before dawn and then, for the first time in millennia, we’ll be synced with Coil time. And we’ll stay that way.”

“What . . . What does this mean for us, sir?” Amber asked.

“What does it mean? What does it mean?”

I covered my face, suddenly feeling sick and faint.

“It means, kids, that you’ve all passed with flying colors. There’ll be a big party tonight to celebrate the synchronizing of Hell time with Coil time. Then tomorrow there’s to be an even bigger graduation ceremony. Lucy herself is going to be there to present you with your scythes!” He mopped his face, wiping away dirt and sweat and all trace of Sergeant Schotz, leaving behind Professor Schotz, who smiled and congratulated each of us.

“Now, see Dante tomorrow to arrange for your robes. Kali and Ira, you two had better come early for a custom fitting. Extra appendages are, well, extra.”

Chapter 12

Death’s Not So Bad When You Consider the Alternative

CHAR DROPPED BY to help me get ready. I’d borrowed one of Claire Voyant’s diaphanous toga-style gowns for the party, since the pale gossamer silk complemented my new white hair. Char braided in a light orange ribbon, in memory of the peach streaks I’d had back on the Coil. Maybe I would get my nose repierced. A ruby stud would look awesome with my Reaper robe. So might a new tattoo.

I preened before my mirror. I couldn’t wait for Dante to see the new me. I hadn’t seen him since we’d left class. Maybe if he liked what he saw, he’d stop being mad at me.

Dante wasn’t speaking to me after the trick I’d pulled. Apparently he didn’t think it was fair for me to use my feminine wiles to get my hands on his scythe, and in front of everybody, too.

To me, the whole saving the world thing balanced out a little deception, but I think he was more upset that I’d put myself at risk. I was sure he’d get over it—eventually. But at seven hundred years old, he’d probably had lots of practice holding a grudge.

He hadn’t actually asked me to get out of his apartment. He just hadn’t come home yet. I tried not to dwell on it. By this time tomorrow, I would have saved my aunt and that was what was important. And if in doing so, Conrad got his, so much the better.

Once Dante found out I’d gone AWOL and scythed Conrad, well, then he’d have something to be mad about. I gulped. Saving my aunt’s life would probably cost me every chance of getting my life back on the Coil, my relationship with Dante and my dream job as a Reaper, but that was the price I had to pay. No choice, really. And so far, everything about my simple yet elegant plan had fallen into place.

Nothing could go wrong now.

In honor of the time reset, the gala was to be held in the great hall at the Reincarnation Station. At first it seemed like a strange place for a party; that’s where I’d filled out the paperwork when I first arrived, so I didn’t think of it as a function space. It wasn’t until I walked inside that I remembered all the hourglasses, clocks and miscellaneous timepieces ringing the room. Yup, still there: New York, Paris, Greenwich, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Addis Ababa and more. The sands, hands and digits still ran in all directions and at all speeds.

I sighed, thinking about the first time I’d seen this room. Dante had been beside me then. He should have been with me now, but if I hadn’t already ruined my chances with him, I was about to. I was sure it was worth it but that didn’t help me feel less lonely as I stood in the middle of the cavernous room, alone with my champagne, watching hundreds of people and other beings mill about as I searched the crowd for Dante’s face.

Finally, over the rim of my glass, I saw him.

He was standing in one of the doorways, leaning against the frame. Instead of his usual Reaper’s robe or casual wear, he’d dressed for the party in a well-cut tuxedo that showed off every plane of his magnificent body. I swallowed hard, feeling my face heat up when he looked in my direction. I raised my hand to wave, but quickly dropped it to my side again when he made eye contact.

I’d thought maybe he would smile. I’d hoped he might be able to overlook this afternoon’s little act and forgive me. In my daydreams, he crossed the room with a purposeful stride, took me in his arms and never let go.

In reality, his face remained cold and expressionless. He held my gaze for a minute and then turned on his heel and walked away.

Fine. I didn’t need him.

I turned away, too, eyes blurring, and bumped smack into a tall Nordic-looking woman with hair almost as light as my own. A familiar figure fidgeted nervously at her side. “Ah, Kirsty. We’ve been looking for you. I’m Sigyn. Loki’s wife.” She paused to glare at her husband. “And we have something to say to you.”

She elbowed Loki. He unhunched himself and met my gaze.

All moisture left my mouth while a trickle of sweat ran down my spine.

“I’m sorry,” he began, forked tongue flicking over his lips. “I should never have tried to get you stoned without your permission. I meant well. I thought if you could just relax a little, you’d feel better. You looked like you’d been through the wringer. Your hair stood out around your head like one of those little troll dolls. And there were sticks in it.”

“Look, Kirsty.” Sigyn drew my attention before I could even decide how I felt about Loki’s explanation. “We hope you’ll find it in your heart—assuming your species has one—to forgive my husband.” A smile flashed across her face for a second before her expression returned to seriousness again.

“I’ll . . . I’ll think about it,” I said. Loki’s story jibed with what Claire had told me at the time—that he hadn’t planned on doing me harm, but still, getting someone high without their permission was pretty unconscionable, even for Hell.

“All right, Kirsty. We’ve taken up enough of your evening. This is, after all, your party.”

I nodded but didn’t smile. It wasn’t a fist-the-air moment, but I did feel better to some degree.

I placed my empty glass on a nearby end table. “I’m going to go be with my friends now.” I glanced across the room and saw Kali and Amber looking bored.

I walked away from Mr. and Mrs. Loki and didn’t look back.

I had just joined my friends when all over the room people began counting down from ten. Determined not to mope over that damned Reaper, I joined in, screaming, “Nine, eight, seven!” along with everyone else. The hourglasses and clocks began to hum, dance and spin. It felt like New Year’s Eve at a fancy party, right out of When Harry Met Sally.

“Six, five, four!” I shouted, trying not to think about Dante. The countdown grew deafening. The clocks shrieked, whistled and blasted like fireworks. A rainbow blazed out of the digital display that showed the time in San Francisco.

I covered my ears against the cacophony of catcalls and clockwork. I squinted against the flashing lights, seeking the timepiece labeled Toronto. What time was it there? I needed to know. A tiny part of my brain noticed I hadn’t referred to Toronto as “home.”

“Three, two, one!”

The noise crescendoed just as a blinding, brilliant light flashed. It was comprised of all colors and at the same time none.

Then there was sudden silence.

Dead silence.

Clocks righted themselves and began ticking like normal clocks should. Digital readouts showed reasonable hours. The hourglasses froze, having simultaneously returned to their upright positions. The sands shifted and began to flow downward.

I blinked away black spots from my eyes. Then I spun around, seeking the Toronto clock as I had the first time I’d been in this room. Now where . . . ? Found it! High up in a corner, amid ancient sundials and clocks from the age of Louis XIV and Seth Thomas, beside a collection of whirring watches, sat the hockey timer.

“Oh, skeg. It’s nearly tomorrow!” My twenty-sixth birthday. Time was finally running smoothly, and I was running out of it.

Chapter 13

My Unfair Lady

I WOKE AT dawn, surprised I’d slept at all. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised to awake alone. Disappointed, but not surprised. The door to the guest room—the one I’d never actually slept in—was closed for the first time since I’d moved in.

I checked my hellivision—for the first time since someone said “Let there be light,” it was the same date both in Hell and on the Coil. The news said we could expect a few more glitches, but that pretty soon, it would all be worked out.

So I could safely say that today was my graduation from the Reaper Academy. It was also my twenty-sixth birthday, the anniversary of my accidental reapage and the anniversary of Conrad’s original soul Deal. Today Conrad Iver would try to get my beloved Aunt Carey to trade her soul for his by lying to her and telling her it was to save me. Clever bastard. I was his bargaining chocolate chip, and Aunt Carey loved chocolate.

And me.

I was cutting it close. As soon as I got my scythe I would go AWOL, run down to the ferry and get Charon to take me over along with the souls who were being reincarnated today. I couldn’t teleport because I existed simultaneously on both planes, so I’d have to travel backward up the slippery slope, over the GIs and make my way past the gee-gnomes and through the void. But I could still arrive minutes too late. It would all depend on the graduation ceremony. But that bastard Conrad was goin’ down! And I meant that very literally.

I hadn’t told a soul. Or a demon. Or anyone for that matter. I tried hard to not even think about it in case one of the psychics read my mind and turned me in. I’d avoided both Claire Voyant and Sue Sayer. I’d apologize later—in this afterlife or the next.

But here’s a fun factoid I’d stumbled upon when I’d been researching scythes between semesters: you can’t be scythed twice. Apparently I wasn’t the first person to be reaped prematurely after all; it had just happened so long ago, nobody remembered. But I’d read the dustiest old tomes and scrolls I could find. According to a couple of obscure references, if I could get back into my body, then I couldn’t be scythed out of it again until I decided to go.

If things went according to plan, then I’d rescue my aunt, see Conrad punished and get my life back. I couldn’t wait. In fact, I really couldn’t wait. I might have lost a year of my life, but I wasn’t losing another minute. I had to get going.

The fact that Dante was obviously done with me only made the decision easier.

I dressed carefully. I wanted to look my best to receive my scythe, but I needed to wear something that didn’t interfere with my escape strategy. I decided on stinger-proof black leather pants and low-heeled boots, the better to charge up the slippery slope with. I then selected a wine-colored, scoop-back top that showed off my new tattoo. When I’d been reaped, the tattoo I’d gotten for my twenty-fifth birthday had stayed with my body on the Coil. Finally deciding to replace it, I’d gone out after the bash last night and gotten a pair of wings tattooed across my shoulder blades. Not feathery angel wings like Ira’s, but bat-like wings with a ton of intricate detail. I was a bad-ass Reaper now. And once I’d finished being Kirsty d’Arc on Earth—say fifty, sixty years from now—I was coming back to Hell and making the most of my afterlife. I’d drag evil skeggers like Conrad to Hell. I’d be the best Reaper ever!

But I was living out my life on the Coil first. Hell would just have to limp along without me till I was good and ready to go. All those things I’d resolved since finding out I was just dead weight, I was going to do. I’d save the whales and recycle. Read to the blind. Get a cat. Tell my aunt I loved her. Tell Dante . . .

I fluffed my hair out. The white took some getting used to. It sparkled even more than Ira’s wings. It was going to look great against my black Reaper robe. I’d paid extra for velvet piping. Oh, sure, I’d only get to wear it for a few minutes today, but it’d be here when I got back. I just hoped my friends would be, too.

And Dante . . .

I went looking for him, hoping to apologize for touching his scythe. Jeez, he usually liked me to touch his . . . never mind. Even though he was mad at me, at least we could walk over to the campus together while I picked up my robe.

But he must have left our apartment while I was in the shower, without even saying goodbye.

That was pretty petty of him. I was starting to feel righteously indignant. So what if I’d touched his skegging tool? Well, he had to be at the ceremony. I’d catch him there. We could fight it out and then make up like we usually did. I couldn’t help smile when I thought about how we liked to make up.

But that wouldn’t happen. I’d be breaking the few rules we had down here and Dante wasn’t likely to forgive me this time. I sniffled back tears, trying hard not to ruin my mascara. If it was over with Dante, then I didn’t have anything to stay for. I’d bring Conrad’s soul in. One look at Charon and some of the other denizens of Hell and he’d sing like a canary. Once he’d confessed, they’d grant my life back and I would probably never see Dante again.

I ended up redoing my makeup from scratch.

I still managed to arrive at school early. I picked up my robe, hung out in the caf with some of the other Reaper grads then finally wandered into the area set aside for the graduation ceremony. I took my place among my classmates in the seats marked “Reserved” in the front row. I felt like a big bundle of nerves as I checked my death watch. Time may not have been out of sync anymore, but the minutes crawled by as I waited to go up onstage.

There were interminable speeches and commencement exorcises and finally, finally, Professor Schotz strode onto the stage.

He retold the story of our “daring rescue” (his words) and managed to make us all sound very brave and noble. Even Rod. Especially Rod.

The engineers, who couldn’t be there due to time commitments, had endowed a chair in the name of Raul Manjay, the worker who’d been lost to the vortex first. A moment of silence was observed in memory of Rod and Raul, followed by a moment of screaming and yelling. It was a time-honored Hellish tradition and I, for one, felt it was much more cathartic than silent prayer.

Even while I appreciated the sentiment, I was anxious to get on with the ceremony. I had a lying, cheating, Deal-welching ex-boss to confront.

Dude, where’s my scythe?

“And now . . .” The voice of the Emcee (Evil Creature) boomed out over the assembled masses. And the rest of us, too. “It gives me indefinable pleasure to welcome this year’s graduates. Six bright personages who are being inducted into the Reaper Corps here today. Cadets, due to your bravery above and beyond the call, you are all graduating magna cum laude!”

“With noisy melted rock?” I teased, feigning ignorance. I’d taken a semester of Latin in high school.

“With great honor,” Ira translated. Kali flicked the back of my head.

“Ow.”

“And to present your scythes to you today, we are honored to have our great Dark Underlord—make that Underlady. None other than Her Satanic Majesty herself. Everyone, please join me in welcoming Lucy Phurr.”

There was a smattering of polite applause. I craned my neck, anxious to finally see the ruler of Hell in person. Preceding Lucy, a mousy-looking woman with a bad haircut and an ill-fitting suit ambled onto the stage. I peered closer. Oh, wait. That wasn’t some lady-in-waiting or other attendant; that was the great queen herself. Huh. She seemed . . . ordinary.

Lucy accepted the microphone from the Emcee. Her pale lips moved but even in the front row I heard nothing.

Some underling trotted out and showed her how to turn the mic on.

“Thank you,” she said to him, nearly deafening us. He showed her how to adjust the volume. She thanked him again, this time at a manageable volume level and faced us. “And thank you all for inviting me to be part of your commencement ceremonies today. Before I hand out the scythes, there are just a few words I want to say.” The mic clunked on the podium and the crinkle of paper grated across the sound system and my eardrums. “Sometimes we forget, here in Hell . . .”

After five minutes of boring drivel badly delivered, I tuned her out. Even feeling smug about how much better a speech I could have written for her got old fast. This gal could use a good makeover and a huge PR campaign. I felt sorry for her. “Sympathy for the Devil”—now the campaign in my head had a theme song.

“Lucy ought to fire her speechwriter—with real fire,” I whispered to Kali. She nodded and yawned. You’d think with six hands she’d put one over her mouth.

The speech went on and on and on. I fidgeted until Kali flicked me again. Ow.

“And on that note, I’d like to call the graduates to the stage.”

M’Kimbi punched me in the arm, grinning. “She is addressing ourselves. We must go to her now.” He dashed to the stage, shouldering Horace out of the way. Ira bypassed the stairs and flew to the front. I ended up near the back of the line, glad there were only six of us now, then appalled at myself for that selfish thought. Why, if Rod were here, I’d be glad to see him—at the back of the line, that is.

“C’mon. C’mon.” I jittered nervously. I had a scythe to get and an aunt to save.

“Before we begin to distribute your scythes . . .”

Oh, seriously, lady. Now what?

“I’d like to call Reaper Alighieri up on the stage. Dante, dear. Where are you?” She shaded her boring brown eyes and scanned the crowd. “Oh, yes. There he is, in the back. While we wait for Dante to make his way up to the stage, I’ll just entertain you with an amusing anecdote, shall I?”

She told some dull tale about a soul Deal she’d once made. I barely listened, although the name Faust seemed familiar. Instead I searched the crowd for Dante. He stepped past me on the way to the podium without so much as a glance in my direction. By the time Lucy Phurr finished her speech, Dante stood before her and my feet had started hurting.

“To show my appreciation for the part you played in averting the recent crisis, it is my pleasure, Reaper Alighieri, to reinstate your rank of Reaper First Class before this assemblage and permit you the right to come and go between Hell and the Mortal Coil as you see fit in the execution of your duties as Reaper.”

She shook his hand while we whooped and yelled. I was proud of him, finally getting to go dirt-side again. I wondered if we could partner up on some of the more difficult reaps that lay ahead of us. After I finished living out my life on the Coil, that is. And if Dante ever agreed to speak to me again. And if they still let me be a Reaper when I returned from rescuing my aunt and having a life. I suspect that going AWOL your first day on the job is something that goes in your personnel file, even in Hell.

Dante left the stage and Lucy Phurr began calling us over to the podium one at a time.

She congratulated each new Reaper warmly and personally. It took for-skeggin’-ever: Ira, M’Kimbi, Horace, Kali. Only Amber remained behind me.

It reminded me of my high school graduation, when I felt like a jittery bundle of boredom. Of course, when I’d looked out into the audience on that day, in addition to my friends, Aunt Carey and Leslie had been there, smiling proudly.

My friends were here today, too. Charon and Claire. Sue and Bob. I hadn’t expected Sybil to get the day off, but there she was, right down front. She waved. I gave a tiny finger wave back, but she kept waving, getting wilder and wilder until she resembled a crazy helicopter. What the skeg? She smiled hugely, gesturing and pointing at the two nice young women sitting beside her. They looked awfully familiar. Who could they . . . ? Oh, my God! I must have been thinking that so loudly that the air turned blue despite the fact I hadn’t said anything out loud. “Oops,” I said to Amber, waving the rotten-fish fumes away. Amber narrowed her eyes at me. Well, excuse me. What’s a little more sulfur in Hell? Then I remembered what had made me take the Lord’s name in vein and turned back to the audience. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There sat Aunt Carey and Leslie—the youthful, healthy versions.

Carey looked so proud. And a little dazed. They must have only just arrived in Hell. Sybil had broken all protocol to bring them to my graduation. I was so touched.

Wait. Wait! Aunt Carey and Leslie were here? Now? At my graduation? I stared at Sybil. She mouthed, “Car accident,” grimacing in sympathy.

The whole family could be together again.

But I still wanted my life back, didn’t I?

And Conrad still needed a soul to buy his extension with. If he couldn’t get Carey’s, then who would he go after? Who would he try to trick into trading their soul for his?

I had a horrible inkling.

“Kirsty d’Arc!”

Oops. I’d made the Queen of Hell call me twice. My bad. I crossed the distance to the podium.

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Kirsty. You’ve been causing quite a stir since you got here.”

I probably should have been nervous, but really, I was preoccupied and unimpressed. I shook her hand, wondering if I should curtsy. “Thank you, Ms. Phurr.”

“Oh, please. Call me Lucy.”

Just hurry up and give me my skeggin’ scythe, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

“You’ve proven yourself a worthy denizen of Hell, Kirsty, and a contributing member of our little subterranean society. It’s my great pleasure today to present you with your scythe and bestow upon you the time-honored title of Reaper, Grim or otherwise.” She produced my beautiful new scythe, waving it around as she spoke.

Light glinted off its shiny chrome surface, practically mesmerizing me. I reached for it, but she whipped it away again.

“I’m not going to give you this scythe, however. At least, not right now.”

What the skeg? Hell was all about temptation, and my patience was at an end. I considered shouting, “Let’s do lunge” and diving for my scythe to rip it from her grasp, although that kind of behavior might come back to bite me on the ass someday.

“Excuse me, ma’am. I thought I’d earned—”

“Well, Kirsty. I’ve got a special gift for you. Instead of a scythe, I’m granting your appeal!” She sounded exactly like Oprah during one of her “Favorite Things” episodes, complete with little hand-claps and a big, toothy smile.

“You’re what?” I shrieked.

“Yes, I know. It’s hard to believe. Well, away you go now. Have a nice life.”

She gave a dismissive little gesture and I levitated, like a puppet, drifting away from the stage. Away from my friends. My family. My afterlife. Dante.

“Nooo!” I screamed, unheard over the applause. Applause? Oh, great. Was everyone glad to see me go?

My soul flew faster and faster, passing through Hell’s roof, scaring the skeg out of ol’ Sol as he drove his chariot along, dragging daylight behind him.

I was getting my life back, which was what I wanted, right? But how the skeg was I going to reap Conrad without a scythe to call my own?

Chapter 14

Karmageddon

MOMENTS LATER, I bounced into my body. I drew a great gasping breath and tried to open my eyes. It took three tries since they were nearly crusted shut with dried tears. Had I been crying in my sleep?

I lay there, trying to absorb what had just happened. I had just been handed everything I wanted. Shouldn’t I be happy?

“Nooo!”

Blinking some more, I looked around. Ow. Talk about a stiff neck.

The hospital room was exactly the way I’d dreamed it over the months I’d been away—except for the tragic tableau before me.

Just as I’d feared, now that Conrad couldn’t steal my aunt’s soul to guarantee his extension, he’d found another person he was willing to sacrifice. Someone with no family except her father.

And he didn’t even need to. There was no way I could locate the stapler and find a way to get it to Judge Julius in the few remaining minutes before the anniversary was up. Conrad could have just waited and his original extension would be granted. He didn’t know that, though, and so now it was up to me to do something to save Shannon’s life.

And I would, just as soon as I could remember how to make my muscles work.

I willed myself to move or yell, but fog wrapped my brain and my muscles refused to answer when I called. The spirit might be willing but the flesh was damn near useless. I could only watch in a daze as Conrad wheedled and pleaded with Shannon to sign the contract amendment.

“Okay, Dad. Okay. Calm down and let’s talk about this.” She sat in a plastic guest chair, papers and office supplies scattered on the wheeled bedside table in front of her. She must have been doing office work while she sat with me. What? I wasn’t scintillating company?

“Sign first, then we’ll talk.” Conrad waved a thin sheaf of papers at her. His fingers covered the heading, but I knew exactly what it read: Contract Amendment.

“Sure, Dad.” Shannon’s voice had a “don’t make the crazy person crazier” tone. She picked up an ordinary pen. “Where do I sign?”

“Not with ink,” Conrad grabbed up another office item from Shannon’s temporary workspace. Even dented and speckled with Liquid Paper, I’d know it anywhere. He pressed the little release button on the bottom, allowing my old stapler to swing open like a huge, gaping jaw. My heart pounded, but even so, I could still hear the click of the staple dropping into place, its chiseled points reflecting light like a pair of vicious fangs—the vampire of the stationery world. “It has to be in blood!”

He hoisted the stapler as Shannon shot a hand up to protect her face. In a flash, Conrad slashed the stapler across her upraised palm.

“Dad, what the hell?”

“Now sign it!” he ordered, shoving all the other papers to the floor and dropping the contract amendment onto the bedside table. “Sign it,” Conrad repeated, tossing a fountain pen on top of the document. He brandished the stapler in a threatening manner. She examined her hand, her palm seeping blood from the fresh scratches.

“Okay. Okay.”

He moved toward her. She reared back, the plastic chair back creaking like a cry for help.

“Use that.” He pointed the stapler toward the fountain pen. “Draw the little lever back to get some blood inside.” He raised the heavy metal stapler again. Surely he wouldn’t—couldn’t—bash Shannon’s head in to get the blood he needed. How could he do that to his own daughter? Originally Conrad had sold his soul to save his infant daughter’s life, but now he was willing to sacrifice hers to save himself.

He’d changed in the year I’d been in a coma. He’d grown desperate and afraid, willing to give up everything that had ever meant anything to him just so he could keep control of Iver Public Relations.

Fear clogged my throat and panic filled my lungs as I realized Conrad, this man whom I had once revered and admired, really could club his own daughter to death.

Frightened and confused, Shannon cradled her wounded hand to her chest, a trail of blood trickling between her fingers.

They hadn’t noticed my return from the dead. I took a quick inventory of my situation. No feeding tube; I must have just had my massage therapy. I could feel an uncomfortable pull between my legs, though. Uh, oh. I was still leashed to that embarrassing bag.

I tried to imagine what I’d be thinking if someone wanted me to sign a contract in my own blood, wanted it badly enough to injure me for it. Shannon was probably thinking, “I should humor him.” No way was I going to allow that to happen.

“Don’t do it!” I shouted, finally getting my voice box in gear. What came out was more like, “Nnngghl,” and possibly some saliva. I tried again. “Shannon.” Closer. Close enough to get her attention.

“Kirsty! You’re awake!” She half rose from the guest chair. “You’re okay!”

Conrad strode over to the bed, waving the stapler at me menacingly. “Sign it or she won’t be!”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll sign. I’ll do whatever you want.” She took a step toward me. “Kirsty, I . . .” She sniffled. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’ve been deader,” I managed, stalling. I sat up on the third try. “Don’t do it, Shannon,” I begged, croaking the words out in the direction she’d been before the room started spinning. “You’ll be signing the rest of your life away.”

“It’s okay, Kirsty. It’s just a piece of paper.”

“It’s so much more than that.” I held my head still with both hands. I succeeded in stopping the room from spinning but without my hands to support me, my spine went spineless and I flopped back down on the pillow, panting with all the effort.

“Sign it or Kirsty dies.”

Killing me wouldn’t serve Conrad’s purpose, since he couldn’t use my soul twice and the first time was still in question before Hell’s courts. But threatening me might extort Shannon into giving him what he wanted.

“Please, honey. Do it for Daddy?” His face twisted into something that should have been a smile.

My gut twisted, too.

Selling your soul is supposed to slow the aging process so he should only have looked around forty. And he did, except that he’d put on weight and developed a shifty, smarmy appearance. His face was bloated and toad-like, a reflection of the man he’d become. No company would have trusted him with their public image if it hadn’t been for his soul Deal. Maybe they never would have.

I tried to recall what he’d looked like when I’d first met him. Maybe he’d always been this creepy and it was the Deal that had made me feel so warm toward him. He’d always been a father figure to me, and look what kind of father he’d turned out to be. One ready to trade away the life of his own daughter!

Willing strength into my limbs, I tossed back the sheets. The hospital gown slid down—who bothers to tie the gown on a coma patient? My arms felt rubbery and there was nothing fine about my motor skills, but I managed to disengage myself from my remaining medical tethers. Ouch!

I shoved myself to the edge of the bed using my hands to get my legs in gear. I slid off the bed and directly onto the floor, blue cotton pooling around me. I yanked the gown up over my flabby body. Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.

Shannon knelt on the floor beside me, pulling the gown up and beginning to tie it behind my neck.

I shrugged her off; covering my pale and saggy breasts was not our main concern at the moment.

Through gritted teeth, I told Conrad, “You’re going to have to kill me or I’m going to tell the world what you did to me.”

Conrad threw back his head and laughed. “Who’d believe you? It’s just some coma-induced hallucination. Reapers. Scythes. It’s quite a good story, though. Maybe you should write a book.”

I squinted at him, unfocusing my eyes and surveying the room. Skegging Reapers. They’re never around when you need one. I was on my own here.

“Shannon will believe me.” I turned to meet her gaze. “Won’t you?”

She looked confused and skeptical.

I doubted she’d buy my story, but the way Conrad pulled back a little told me I’d hit a guilty nerve. “Shannon, your wonderful dad here made a Deal with the Devil. He’s actually lousy at public relations.”

“Why, you ungrateful bitch! I made you everything you are today! Without me—”

“Yes, you did! You made me the incapacitated, atrophied coma victim I am today. Without you, I’d still have a life. You stole a year from me!” I looked down at my out-of-shape body. After a year of lying still, moving proved painful. I hurt. (Especially “down there,” and I didn’t mean in Hell. You try removing a catheter yourself.) I sagged. I had no home. No family. No career. No friends. Everyone and everything I cared about, and everyone who cared about me, was back in Hell.

Except I did have one friend left on the Mortal Coil. One person who’d remained loyal to me through thick and thin, through sick and sin. I was going to do whatever it took to keep her from suffering the same untimely demise I had. Plus, there was no way I was letting Conrad get any more time on Earth. Lucy Phurr had totally screwed up my original plan with her stupid gift of life. I needed a new plan. I had always been fast on my feet—well, not literally at the moment, but . . . Ah-ha! Got it. Now I just have to . . .

With grim determination and a little help from Shannon, I managed to haul myself up. It was a short distance from where I swayed to where Conrad stood, wielding the stapler. With every bit of strength and willpower I possessed, I put one foot in front of the other. I moved like a zombie—dead gal walking—but I moved.

“Don’t come any closer, Kirsty. I swear I’ll brain you.”

“Do it, Conrad. You took my life from me once with that skeggin’ stapler. Go ahead and do it again. I dare you!”

I lurched another step toward him. I glanced behind me, where Shannon stood frozen, her eyes wide with fear.

“I love you, Shannon. You’ve always been a great friend to me. Like the sister I never had.”

Only a few steps remained. It was more than I could manage with my wasted muscles and weakened lungs. “Go ahead. Make my day,” I said to Conrad. I threw myself the remaining distance, more falling at him than tackling.

A moment’s hesitation, then bam! I heard more than felt, the sound of the heavy metal stapler crashing into my skull.

Bam! Bam! Crunch!

Shannon wailed.

Maybe I did, too.

While having one’s skull pounded like an old stump makes a distinct sound, it wasn’t enough to alert anyone outside this room. No nurse or doctor would come running and save me.

Then the pain slammed into me. My head throbbed like nothing I’d ever experienced before—not even when a five-hundred-pound air-conditioning unit had squashed me like a bug. I cried out, screaming in pain and fury.

Conrad hit me again—bam!

The pain was so great I couldn’t breathe, and that felt very different now that breathing was important to me again. I shuddered, slithering back down to the icy-cold floor. I realized I was counting, getting slower and slower.

Well, you can’t blame a gal for dying.

Everything went black . . . and then my soul sprang free. Half-naked, pale and saggy Kirsty lay on the floor, one side of her poor shaved head a different shape from the other. At last, I was really dead. I glanced down at myself—the spirit version of me—to see I sported the same fit body and kick-ass outfit I’d worn to my graduation.

“Bastard!” Shannon smashed a bedpan (empty, thankfully) on Conrad’s wrist. He dropped the stapler onto the bed with a howl. It bounced once, the impact causing it to open like a great, gaping mouth. It left a gory outline in red smears and gray bits.

Shannon reached for it, keeping her eyes on her father.

“No, don’t!” I screamed, not wanting her to get fingerprints on the blunt instrument that had orchestrated my final demise. But she couldn’t hear me anymore.

She wrapped her fingers around the black metal, ready to defend herself with Conrad’s weapon of choice. Why couldn’t he have used a gun like a normal person?

I heard another bam! Not like a stapler hitting a skull, but sort of a whoosh-bam. Where had I heard that before?

“You murdering bastard!” Shannon yelled, hands spasming on the stapler. “You did this. All this time I thought you cared about her. You killed my best friend. First you stole her life and then you killed her.”

Ah, now she believed me.

“Yes, I did. Just as she says. But sweetheart, I did it for you. I did everything for you.”

The whoosh-bam sound echoed again, just behind me, but I kept my attention on the family feud.

Conrad turned to me, eyes narrowed. “You! No. I’ve got something to offer. Let’s talk!” For a moment I thought he could see me, but he was looking over my shoulder. I spun around. Dante stood behind me in all his Reaper glory, the way I’d first seen him. His robe billowed out behind him, eyes furious, expression dark and grim.

I sagged with relief. I’d been expecting him. What I hadn’t expected was for him to be flanked by Sergeant Schotz and Judge Julius.

“Well?” Dante asked, half turning toward his escort.

“I’ve seen enough. His confession will stand.” The judge nodded, bad hairpiece flapping up and down with the movement.

“Thank you, Judge. And Sergeant, because that proves I mistakenly reaped Kirsty before her time, I know you’ll be confiscating my scythe again and sending me back to the Mortal Coil. I’ll turn myself in as soon as—”

“Forget that, Reaper Alighieri. It’s obvious this creep tricked you, so I’m lettin’ it slide.”

“But, sir. I—”

Judge Julius cut in. “You’re arguing with your boss, Dante? Don’t look a gift scythe in the mouth. This is Hell. We play favorites.” He opened his own mouth, fluorescent light glinting off his demonic fangs. “Besides, I had to study your poems in school. For that cruel and unusual punishment, you belong in Hell.” He raised his gavel and whoosh-bammed away.

Sergeant Schotz nodded, lowering his gaze to stare grimly at my half-naked body lying on the floor.

I moved to try to cover myself, but my hand passed right through the blue gown and my own chest. Dante quickly moved in to cover it for me, succeeding where I had failed. I needed to learn that trick.

“Too bad,” Sergeant Schotz said. “ ’Fraid you can’t get your old life back now.” He nudged my shoulder with his foot, causing my arm to flop once.

Shannon squealed. What had it looked like to her? Zombie Kirsty rising from the walking dead?

The sergeant lowered his head. When he raised it again, Professor Schotz looked at me, face crumpled with commiseration. “But at least you’ve cleared your name. Both of you. And you, Kirsty, have a good job and a good afterlife waiting for you back home.”

Home. Yes, sir. That was where I was going. But I had one more thing to take care of first.

The whoosh-bam sounded once more, judge and professor transporting away.

Dante nodded to me gravely. He raised his scythe handle to shoulder height, ready to activate it. “Conrad Iver. You sold your soul, and I have come to collect.” He coughed. “I hath come to collecteth thine soul, I mean.”

He activated his scythe. The two purple lights shot out, up and down from the handle, the top one arcing out to form the blade. You have to admit, it’s pretty impressive. I couldn’t wait to try my own.

“I can still make it worth your while. I can get you other souls. Not just one or two. I can get you as many as you need. What’s your weekly quota?” Conrad weaseled and wheedled, turning my stomach with every whiny word. “I’ve got some homeless folk lined up who think they’re giving blood.”

And then he laughed. Not the evil-villain “Bwahahaha!” that I expected. No, this was a little friendly chuckle, like an in-joke shared between old friends.

That was it. The last straw. My blood simultaneously ran cold and boiled. Above Dante’s head, the clock ticked. Only seconds remained in the anniversary hour. My old body had been weak and useless, but my Hell body was in great shape. I leapt across the room—charging right through the hospital bed—and snatched the scythe right out of Dante’s hand.

Before Dante even had a chance to scream, “Don’t touch my scythe,” I’d whipped around and sliced it through Conrad’s body.

“I’ll see you in Hell, you skeg-hole!”

Conrad’s eyes flew wide and his red face grew redder. Staggering backward, he crashed into equipment, falling to the floor, clutching his chest. Shannon dropped the stapler and rushed out the door, screaming for help.

In seconds, the room was a hive of medical personnel shouting things like “stat!” and “clear.”

“Oops,” I said, retracting the scythe and handing it back to Dante. “I think this is yours.”

“Dammelo!” He snatched it from my hand angrily. I noticed the absence of blue smoke. I really was back on the Coil. “Don’t you know by now you’re never supposed to touch anyone else’s scythe?”

“That’s just an old wives’ tale. I researched it and there’s no evidence. Besides”—I sidled up to him, feeling confident and powerful—“this is the third time I’ve touched your scythe.” I traced a finger down his chest. “And nothing’s happened . . .” I gave him my sexiest smile. “. . . Yet.”

Behind us the doctor called Conrad’s time of death, citing heart attack. And mine, citing blunt trauma. Strangely, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. I’d spent a year trying to get my life back and now all I wanted was my afterlife.

The medical staff began to pack up their gear. Hospital security took possession of the stapler, dropping it in a clear plastic bag. They led Shannon away, sobbing. I hoped a few of those tears were for me.

Dante and I were alone now, except for the dead bodies, but that was okay. Some of my best friends are dead people.

“So . . .” I moved another inch closer. “Is there anything of mine you’d like to touch to make us even?”

Dante looked exasperated, pursing his lips and furrowing his forehead. A tiny muscle in his cheek jumped. He gripped my shoulders. Was he about to shove me away? I guess I deserved it.

Apparently not. Slowly, he lowered his face until his lips were just a breath away from mine.

“So you think you’ve won, don’t you, you little bitch?”

Not exactly the romantic words I longed to hear.

But wait, Dante’s lips hadn’t moved. I’d know if they had because they were barely a millimeter from my own. We looked at each other, eyes crossing with the proximity, and then at Conrad’s body, which was still lying on the floor where he’d died, awaiting the coroner.

Above his corpse, Conrad’s spirit rose. Most people’s souls look like healthy, younger versions of their favorite incarnation, but in Conrad’s case, instead of a handsome, young man, he retained his toad-like, smarmy bastard look. That must have been how he truly saw himself.

“You’ll never take me alive!” he shouted.

“But you’re not ali—” Dante began.

Conrad turned to flee, but Dante was an old hand. In one smooth motion, he activated his scythe and hooked the blade around Conrad’s feet, sending him crashing to the ground. In a ninja-esque move that struck me as very sexy, Dante leapt across the room and pinned the escaping spirit to the floor.

“Cuffs!” Dante called.

I pawed through the pockets of his robe and produced a pair of rusty iron manacles linked together with a length of clanking chain. Dante was so old-school.

I slapped them on Conrad just like we had in Reaper practice sessions.

I helped Dante haul Conrad to his feet. The newly dead shade fought and struggled, but with both hands secured behind his back, he was no match for two trained Reapers.

Without meeting my eyes, Dante said, “You sacrificed your remaining life for her. That was very noble.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t have?”

“Absolutely not, you little—” Dante clapped a hand over Conrad’s mouth.

“No, I have to say I’m glad you did.”

“And you, Dante.” I pulled him in close. “You were willing to give up everything for me. To go dirt-side again, even though you don’t want to.”

“For you, cara, I would give my all.”

Conrad made muffled noises and rolled his eyes.

I laughed. “Let’s get this skegger home where I can tell you I love you, too. And show you. In private.”

We tried the teleportation method, but apparently it doesn’t work when there are three on one scythe and we weren’t willing to separate now that we were finally together. So we had to walk to Hell. Again.

We hurried through the wall and the void. We had a brief battle with the gee-gnomes. I was tempted to let them sting Conrad but I was a professional now. I did my duty, getting a defiant soul home. We skated across the Good Intentions and slid down the slippery slope. Finally we crossed the Soul Train tracks and met Char as he was just about to push off with another load of the recent dead.

Char had updated his drag inspiration by a few decades since I’d seen him last. Today he was wearing a knock-off of Lady Gaga’s meat dress, much to Cerberus’s slobbery delight. If it hadn’t been a miniskirt at the beginning of the day, it was now. Cerby licked his chops, looking very satisfied.

“Hey, guys. Good to see you again. Girlfriend, I love your new look! You just can’t go wrong with leather pants. But what’s with the stupid matching grins?”

Chapter 15

Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fondler

WE DROPPED CONRAD, still protesting and fighting his bonds, at Hell’s Cells. We filled out the paperwork as fast as our veins could provide ink, but the processing took ages. Midnight chimed all across the city when we finally left Hell’s Cells and headed for home. Our home. Where we lived, together.

My lips were frozen in a blissful smile. Every time I looked at Dante, he blushed. I knew exactly what he was thinking, because I was thinking it, too. I couldn’t wait to get home and demonstrate exactly how I felt.

The trip across town seemed to take forever, but at last we arrived back at our apartment complex. I was tempted to race up the three dangerous flights of stairs but I wanted to appear casual, so I reined in my desires and started to saunter across the dusty courtyard.

Only a step or two in, Dante grabbed my hand, drew me close, and kissed me.

Whoa! It was a real kiss this time—no tricks. No distractions. No interruptions, either. None until the long-dry fountain burst into a shower of crystal-clear water, spraying us. And the cat that always sat there.

Dante brushed my damp, white hair from my shoulders and chased me, laughing, up the stairs. Upon reaching our apartment, he fumbled with his key, opening the door on the third try. We tumbled in, nearly tripping over little Jenni in the foyer.

“Shhh!” Dante whispered.

I giggled some more. “Why? We’ve never cared if the neighbors heard us before.”

“That’s why I was late getting to you, cara. Before I could round up the judge and Colin, I first had to settle your aunt and Leslie in our guest room.”

Oh, of course. I felt ashamed of myself for not thinking about them. I was still the selfish kid who hadn’t appreciated them. And now I had a second chance to tell them I loved them. And I would. First thing tomorrow. It would be inconsiderate to wake them, wouldn’t it? This was going to be a do-over for me. I hadn’t done anything like this as a teen, but now I was sneaking a boy into my bedroom. Trying to be quiet and not get caught only added to the mood.

I grabbed Dante’s hand and dragged him into our sexy Arabian Nights bedroom, where I threw myself on the bed and pulled him down after me. I laughed, I moaned, I might even have screamed a little if we weren’t trying to be quiet. And also? Dante put his hand over my mouth. When he wasn’t busy either kissing me—and man, was kissing great when you didn’t need to breathe—or telling me “Ti amo,” over and over.

“I love you, too,” I answered, so, so glad I’d chosen to stay. There’s no place like Hell. There’s no place like Hell. There’s no place like . . . oh, yeah, right there!

I would have clicked my heels together but I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Chapter 16

Inter-Lewd

SOME THINGS ARE worth waiting for. And one of them is pillow talk.

“Dante,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Hmmm?” He nuzzled my shoulder.

“Why don’t you want to go back to the Coil?”

“I thought I explained. Nobody gets me up there.”

I waited. He’d either elaborate or begin the next round. I was okay with either option.

He rolled on his back and scratched his chest. “It is like this. Back in my day, when we visited someone, we stayed for many days. Sometimes weeks. And while there, your host threw lengthy parties. They would invite their friends and neighbors and serve much wine. On one occasion, a group of writers and philosophers were drinking and a challenge was issued. There may have been a bet involved. It was so long ago, I don’t remember. I do remember locking myself in my room with more than one bottle of wine and emerging three days later with my ‘epic’ poem about Hell. It was the ultimate ‘Mary Sue.’ ”

“Mary Sue?” I’d never heard the term before. Assuming it was a term and not an ex-girlfriend. One time, in the heat of passion, he called me Beatrice. I didn’t speak to him for days.

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Mary Sue, or in my case, Marty Stu, is a writing term for when an author places themselves in their story as the best and brightest character. In my case, I wrote about myself being the only person on Earth so admirable and so worthy that Lucy invited me for a tour d’Hell. And when I got there I found all my enemies being sorely punished. I regret to say, Kirsty, that it went on and on and on.”

I yawned hugely. I hadn’t realized discussing poetry could be even more boring and obscure than the poems themselves.

“So,” he continued, somehow mistaking my yawning for interest, “my poem is circulated among our group, much like those emails of today in which you are directed to forward it to five friends or dire events will befall you. All my close friends found it hilarious. But as scribes made more and more copies and it traveled outside my immediate circle, people began to take it seriously. They thought I was that arrogant. That full of myself.”

“And in conclusion . . . ?” I yawned again, making the words sound weird. Hopefully that would hurry him up so we could get back to the cuddling.

“And in conclusion . . .” He laughed, leaning over to kiss my forehead. “In conclusion, now students today are forced to study it, scholars analyze it and academics deconstruct it. And no one realizes it was supposed to be funny. It’s like telling a joke and having it fall flat—flatter than the Coil.”

“Uh, Dante. You do know the world isn’t flat, right?”

“But of course I do. Galileo drops by regularly.”

“Oh.” I yawned again. “I guess you guys were contemporaries, eh?”

“I suppose you would consider us so. What’s a few centuries between scholars?”

I chose not to answer that. My eyelids grew heavy and I figured we might as well nap while we recovered enough for round two.

Just before I drifted off, Dante mumbled, “I love you.”

“I love you, too. You can scythe me anytime.”

Chapter 17

Look Before You Reap

“C’MON, BABY.”

I don’t know how many times my hellphone played the Reaper Corps theme song as I struggled up from the deepest, darkest depths of REM sleep.

“Baby, take my ha—”

I’d been sleeping the sleep of the dead, of course. How else would I sleep? Finally I surfaced into consciousness.

“ ’Lo?” I answered, silencing Blue Öyster Cult mid-lyric.

“Kirsty? You’d better get down here right away.” Kali’s voice crackled from the tiny speaker, sounding as distressed as I’d ever heard her. I half sat up, rubbing crusty dried gunk from my eyes, the corner of my mouth and . . . never mind. Despite having no psychic abilities at all, I clearly foresaw a shower in my future.

“Down where?”

“To Hell’s Cells.”

I thumped the heel of my hand against my forehead, trying to dispel some of the got-some brain fog. I had a memory once, I just forgot where I put it.

A recent memory floated within reach. I grasped for it, almost had it . . . Ahhh. Now I remembered. Dante’s friend Monroe had told us the holding facility where he worked needed an extra pair of hands. And Kali was nothing if not handy. She had six of ’em, after all.

Obviously, she’d landed the job. Only Reapers need apply.

“So what’s up?” I asked. Dante rolled over and opened his eyes. I held a finger to his lips to keep him from speaking. He kissed my finger softly and my insides melted. No, not literally.

“What? I missed that, Kali. Say again, please.”

“I said, something weird went down with that soul you brought in. That Conrad guy. You didn’t use another Reaper’s scythe on him, did you? Because if you did, I think we’ve finally figured out what happens when you do.”

As Kali described the scene in the cells, all the blood drained from my face. My stomach flip-flopped and my heart clenched.

“Oh, skeg!”

To be continued in Book 3 of The Reluctant Reaper series, Esprit de Corpse: Hell Is Where the Heart Is.

Acknowledgments

THEY SAY WRITING is a lonely profession, but that has not been my experience. I can’t remember exactly when, why or how I decided to write a book about a Grim Reaper, but since then, I’ve had help and encouragement from so many people that I’m worried I’ll miss thanking someone. So if you aren’t named here, please know that I appreciate your help more than words can say.

Over the years, several people read, reread and helped me rewrite various versions and chapters of this book. Great big thanks to Debra Jess, Kay Lynne Simpson, Lisa Stone Hardt, Lauren Stephenson and Joan Leacott for their feedback.

Thanks to the members of the QuinceApple brainstorming group for their input on bits and pieces and marketing materials along the way. Special thanks to creative stimulators Bonnie Staring and Tina Christopher.

Thanks to my awesome agent, Rosemary Stimola and her equally awesome assistant, Allison Remchek. The amount of time and effort they put into this series speaks of their faith in my potential. And thanks to my fabulous editor at Simon & Schuster, Adam Wilson, for liking my book enough to publish it and for working with me to make it the best book it can be.

Grazie to Elisa Rolle for the speedy Italian translations.

My biggest thanks to my friend and mentor, Kate Freiman, for not just giving me feedback and encouragement, but for always being there for me, sharing her wealth of knowledge and squealing with me at each milestone of success.

Thank you all!

Check out a sneak peek of Esprit de Corpse, Book 3 in The Reluctant Reaper series!

I PUSHED OFF the doorframe and got right up into Dante’s chauvinistic (but handsome) face. “Now you listen to me, bucko.” I was mad. Really mad. I’d never called anyone “bucko” before in my life. I wasn’t even sure what it meant, although it reminded me of an interesting four-letter word. “Just because you’re seven hundred—”

The lights dimmed and flickered. I clapped my hands over my ears to shut out the terrible screeching noise, like universes being ripped apart. Suddenly, a massive, horrific demon complete with horns and forked tail appeared before us. Shannon looked up from her client call: “Callyouback,” she squeaked. She didn’t so much hang up the handset as drop it somewhere near the cradle. I could tell from her trembling jaw and brand-new lack of breathing that she could see it, too.

As Dante had done, the demon had materialized facing Shannon, who cowered behind the big oak desk. With his back to us, he hadn’t noticed Dante and me.

I could see him clearly now, his personal twister left somewhere along the slippery slope or dusty red trail. Conrad’s dark red skin stretched tight over misshapen muscles. His hooves and the spike at the end of his tail were the same articulated gray chitin as his curved and pointy horns. The horns scraped the ceiling tiles, raining white flakes down on his shoulders like the dandruff of the damned. Pointy leathery wings sprouted from his shoulder blades. They didn’t look like they’d support his weight and might have evolved less as flighty appendages and more as extra places to stick talons.

From where I stood, I couldn’t see his face and I was very, very glad. I had enough to take in as it was. He was the most horrible creature I’d seen on the Coil or in Hell, the conservative business suit doing nothing to counter his overall ghastly appearance.

“Hello, dear.”

I nearly jumped out of my skin. His body may have grown oversize and grotesque, but his voice hadn’t changed. It was the same light, smarmy tone that had wrapped his junior account exec around his little finger, which was now scarlet, clawed and not so little.

“Dad?” Shannon whispered through chattering teeth. She leaned as far away from the scary monster as the ergonomically correct chair would allow, while at the same time, reaching out one hand toward him. Talk about your mixed messages.

“I thought you said he couldn’t teleport,” I whispered to Dante.

“Must have gone to see whoever it was that ensorcelled your stapler and got a one-time pass,” he answered, keeping his voice low and his eyes on demonic Conrad.

I ground my own teeth and leapt forward, thrusting myself between them, just as I had done a year ago with Conrad and Dante. “Conrad!” I shouted, gaining his full attention.

And I was immediately sorry I had. His eyes. Oh. His eyes were the worst part. They were soft and human, like a puppy trapped in that bloated and loathsome body.

I almost pitied him as he crouched to avoid hitting the ceiling.

Almost.

But any pity I felt was instantly displaced by an overwhelming urge to do something, anything, to hurt this man who’d stolen my life. An atavistic impulse kicked in—and when I say kicked . . . I did! Just as I’d kicked Dante in the brimstones back on the road to Hell, I kicked Conrad in his overgrown shin with all my might. And face-planted on the carpet as my coma toes, and then my entire body, passed right through him.

“You!” he cried, fear in his voice. But his eyes weren’t on me, they were on Dante.

I hauled myself up off the carpet to stand before Conrad, yelling and waving my arms at him. But just like Shannon, he wasn’t even aware of me.

But Dante he could see.

My Reaper stepped up beside me, overlong hair and sexy black robe billowing about him as if the winds of justice blew for him alone.

“I, Dante Alighieri, Reaper First Class, by the powers vested in me, hath come to collect thine soul and escort it back to Hell!”

Gosh, he was so cute when he did that. I hadn’t appreciated him the first time he’d come for Conrad’s soul and taken mine instead, but now I did. My knees grew weak and my heart pounded. Five more minutes of his manly Reaper act and I might find myself forgiving him.

He brandished his glowing scythe, holding it high and threatening.

Behind me, Shannon had finally caught enough breath to start screaming.

Oops, I’d forgotten all about my own scythe. If I’d been thinking straight, instead of fighting with my boyfriend, I could have reaped Conrad’s giant crimson ass by now.

I yanked my scythe from my waist. But before I could activate my shiny repurposed farm implement, before Dante could swing his scythe, Conrad dashed around us, his hooves gouging great holes in the carpet tiles. He banked off the big oak desk, charged ’round the front and dove beneath it, out of sight.

Shannon’s screams cut off abruptly. She ceased cowering in her dad’s chair. Instead, she sat up straight like a cheap mannequin with rebar up her, uh, back, eyes glazed, expression dazed.

I ran around—okay, through—the desk, but I didn’t see how Conrad could fit under it. And when I checked, he hadn’t. Where had he gone?

And then Shannon turned her focus my way. She had her father’s eyes and I don’t mean she’d genetically inherited his eye color. She actually had Conrad’s eyes peering out from her otherwise familiar face.

She opened her mouth, but no scream sounded. Instead Dante and I were treated to one of those classic villain bwahahaha! laughs.

Should have seen that coming, I thought, retracting my scythe.

As the laugh faded away, a small moan drew my attention. Behind the big executive chair, half hidden under the credenza, a second Shannon lay sprawled. While the one in the chair seemed solid and earthbound, the one on the floor had a hazy, ethereal quality.

“Dante,” I whispered from the corner of my mouth, turning my focus back on Conrad, who was now wearing his daughter like a bespoke suit. “He’s displaced her soul! Get him out! Get him out of her!”

Dante’s personal wind had dropped away, leaving him with nothing more than tousled hair, more tousled than usual, that is. “I don’t know if we can. Or if we’re even allowed to.”

I turned to face him, tears blurring my vision. “What do you mean ‘allowed to’? He’s stolen her body just like he stole my life! We have to get him out. I know there aren’t many laws in Hell, but surely there’s a law against this!”

Dante moved up beside me again, lowering his scythe. “I don’t know, Kirsty. After all, possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

GINA X. GRANT

Gina writes wacky fiction featuring crazy creatures. She loves the absurd, the funny and the fantastical. Despite a degree in business management, Gina has kept her quirky sense of humor, which bleeds through in everything she writes.

She lives in Toronto, Canada, just blocks from the house she grew up in. She’s married to a friendly curmudgeon from a mining town in northern Ontario. Together, they live with a miscellany of rescued pets, all named for famous jazz musicians.

Visit her online—http://www.ginaxgrant.com/

Follow her @GinaXGrant—www.Twitter.com/GinaXGrant

Visit her Facebook fan page—www.facebook.com/ginaXgrantAuthor

Content

Scythe Does Matter
The Reluctant Reaper 2
by
Gina X. Grant

Previously in The Reluctant Reaper Series . . .

Chapter 1 Some Things Are Better Left Unplugged

Chapter 2 Get an Afterlife!

Chapter 3 Finishing-Off School

Chapter 4 A Pain in the Class

Chapter 5 Pass or Flail

Chapter 6 Sudden Death Overtime

Chapter 7 Brute Camp

Chapter 8 Doesn’t Prey Well with Others

Chapter 9 Time Well Bent

Chapter 10 Regeneration Gap

Chapter 11 No Quest for the Wicked

Chapter 12 Death’s Not So Bad When You Consider the Alternative

Chapter 13 My Unfair Lady

Chapter 14 Karmageddon

Chapter 15 Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fondler

Chapter 16 Inter-Lewd

Chapter 17 Look Before You Reap

Acknowledgments

Check out a sneak peek of Esprit de Corpse, Book 3 in The Reluctant Reaper series!

GINA X. GRANT