“I’m fine,” I said, giving her a forced smile.
We stepped out of the booth near the harbor and I paused to bump fists with Abe, the nephilim guarding the entrance, before continuing down the pier toward my ship. Ellen pressed herself in close behind my right shoulder, her eyes nervously darting around as she tried to stay out of everyone’s way. Reapers scrambled across the docks, meeting up with their units or sailing partners to coordinate schedules. They maneuvered around a parade of lesser deities lugging merchandise toward the market area along the eastern coast of Limbo.
“Watch it,” a feisty pixie yelped as he nearly brained Ellen with a basket of crystals.
“Sorry!” She ducked, and then stumbled forward as she stepped on the inside hem of her robe. I grabbed her arm just shy of her face-planting on the dock and pulled her upright.
“Keep your eyes open,” I said, minding my tone. She looked shaken enough.
Her chin trembled and she tucked in closer to me, stepping on my heels twice before we finally reached the ship.
“I hate the docks,” Ellen said as we stepped off the ramp onto the main deck. “I hate this robe. I hate the sea. I really hate the sea,” she repeated, gripping the deck railing as the morning tide rocked the ship against the dock. In the distance, a horn announced the beginning of the workday at the Three Fates Factory.
Saul bayed out a happy greeting as he clambered up the ramp behind us. Kevin’s helljacks joined in as they followed him aboard, and then Coreen finished their song with an annoyed woof under her breath, as if reprimanding them.
Kevin was a step behind, a donut in one hand and a coffee cup stamped with Nessa’s shop logo in his other. I’d spotted him a coin for the morning treat in exchange for him taking my hounds along for his morning run around the city with the helljacks.
His eyebrows shot up when he noticed Ellen. He swallowed hard and licked his lips before turning a questioning look to me. “What’d I miss?”
I gave him a pained grimace. “Jenni decided Ellen should take up reaping, and I get to show her the ropes.”
He looked confused, but he nodded anyway. “Anyone exciting die recently?”
I dug his docket out of my pocket and handed it over. “We’re on separate runs for most of the morning, but before lunch we’ll meet up at a hospital in Nebraska to collect a few strays from a Posy Unit fire harvest, plus one extra from your list.”
Kevin perked at that. “Can I stop at the original scene of the fire and have the helljacks catch a whiff? I’d like to test their tracking ability on the job.”
“Sure, but I’m leaving the hellhounds behind. I can’t afford the extra coin on the days they’re not really needed.” The confession made me cringe, but it was the truth.
Now that I was living in Tartarus with Bub, the daily commute was killing me. I was making just enough to cover that, the ship’s docking fee, and groceries. I was considering cutting the retirement plan Jenni had set me up with a while back. It was either that or crack open my stagnant savings account soon.
Saul nudged his muzzle against my leg and I scratched his ears with a sigh, feeling sorry that I couldn’t bring him along. “Manto,” I said, pointing toward the captain’s cabin facing center deck.
I’d given up the swankier cabin that consumed the stern of the ship. Kevin hadn’t been interested in tagging along to Hell with me when we broke our lease at Holly House. He’d checked out several different apartments around Limbo, but when our paychecks shrank, he began sleeping on the ship. It didn’t get much cheaper than that.
In my guilt, I’d offered to trade cabins with him. I was living in a mansion, even if it was surrounded by a smoking hellscape. I could live without the fancier ship cabin if it meant making my apprentice more comfortable with our sad pay grade.
Kevin didn’t seem to mind the new arrangement. He’d been doing more work to the ship lately, and I’d even agreed to move everything over from our storage unit and give him the extra coin after our contract expired. He was using it to buy tools and building supplies for his remodeling projects. It kept him busy and out of trouble, and the ship had never looked better.
“I’ll see you on the flip side,” Kevin said, giving Ellen and me a casual salute as he headed down the ramp with his docket and the helljacks. Coreen watched her babies go and then headed for my cabin, pausing in front of me for a quick pet. She sneezed and gave me an accusatory look before continuing on her way.
Ellen leaned into me, but she waited for Kevin to disappear before voicing her concerns. “I can coin off with you, right? I don’t have to learn all the coordinates today, do I?”
I puffed up my cheeks and blew out a troubled breath. “I think it’s going to take more than a week to get you settled. Jenni better not have been pulling my scythe about that bonus.”
The dock had mostly cleared off by the time we stepped off the ship. A few reapers vanished from sight as they rolled their coins, off to collect the recently departed. Ellen looked relieved to have the extra breathing room, until it came time for us to leave.
“You know how this works, don’t you?” I asked. She gripped my shoulder and put a hand over her chest, closing her eyes tightly as if in pain. I cleared my throat and waited for her to look up at me. “I do this every day, all day. You’re not going to die. I promise.”
She blinked stiffly and took a deep breath. Once her nails retracted from my shoulder, I rolled my coin three times, sending us on our way.
Chapter 3
“Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive.”
—Elbert Hubbard
Ellen’s first harvest was a funeral, the easiest of low-risk assignments. They used to be my favorite. Sometimes, if my schedule was mild enough, I’d hang out and let the soul watch their loved ones gather round them one last time. It gave them a greater sense of closure, and occasionally, it gave them a good laugh. The stories they told were to die for—often quite literally.
“What if she’s already left her body?” Ellen whispered, gazing down into the open casket of her first catch of the day, an elderly woman named Bertha. The old gal was surprisingly small. Nothing at all what I expected a Bertha to look like.
“Only one way to find out,” I said, shifting impatiently from foot to foot.
A mature crowd was slowly shuffling toward us from the funeral home entrance, and I wondered how many of them I’d see again in the near future. The organist began to play a melancholy tune as everyone took their seats. Soft sobs and whispers escalated until I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying over the collective chaos of grief, and Ellen continued to drag her feet.
“What if she’s possessed by a demon? Didn’t that happen to you once? I don’t want to be set on fire.” She twisted her hands together over her stomach.
“That was an accident. You’ll be fine,” I snapped, hoping she’d forgotten that that demon had been Bub. It had been an accident, and he’d had all the proper paperwork to prove his possession was legal. The soul wasn’t even on my docket. Anyway, it was ancient history. And Ellen was only bringing it up to stall.
“This is really nice. What do you think it is? Walnut maybe?” she said, running her hands across the glossy lip of the casket. “If I were a soul, I don’t think I’d mind staying in here—”
“Ellen!” I gave her a wide-eyed glare.
“Fine.” She huffed and turned her face away as she plunged her hand through Bertha’s chest. Then she ripped the soul out like she was a stage magician yanking a tablecloth—or rather, an amateur magician with a bad habit of ruining perfectly good dinner settings. Bertha didn’t appreciate the reeling any more than I imagined fine china enjoyed being smashed against a wall.
“Christ almighty!” she wailed, giving Ellen a horrified sneer. “If my heart hadn’t given out yet, I’m sure that ride would have done the trick.”
“Sorry,” Ellen mumbled, her cheeks flushing. The soul straightened her Sunday dress and then jumped when she noticed
me standing behind her.
“I’m dead enough. I don’t need you spooks trying to rile me up,” she barked.
I ignored her and turned to Ellen. “See? Piece of cake. Let’s get her to the ship and try another one.” Ellen reached for my shoulder, but I waved her off. “I know you know the coordinates for the harbor. I’ll get you around the mortal side today, but you can at least practice coining off on your own when we head back to the ship.”
Ellen let loose an exasperated sigh, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she dug a coin out of her robe pocket and put her other hand on Bertha’s shoulder. I waited for her to coin off before following.
After we’d stashed the soul on the ship, we headed out for two more funerals and a street racing accident. I was saving the more difficult harvests for after lunch, when Ellen would hopefully have her shit together. Failing to tackle the random odd jobs would look even worse than failing to find the rest of the missing factory souls, and there was one job on my docket in particular that concerned me.
The soul was a CNH, Currently Not Harvestable, from about a decade back. A sighting had been reported around the anniversary of its death last year, so theoretically it was expected to show again. If it didn’t, it would have to be reported as CNH a second time, and the new report would bear my name rather than the reaper on the Lost Souls Unit who had let it get away the first time. Lucky me.
By the time Ellen and I made it to the hospital where we were supposed to meet Kevin, I was ready to start drinking the hard stuff. Ellen’s method of extracting a soul had improved, but her whining had not. She glanced around the dreary morgue in the hospital’s basement and made a disgusted face as her shoulders trembled.
“This place is icky,” she whispered. “I think I prefer the funerals.”
“Oh, it gets better.” I snorted as she turned around and caught sight of the charred bodies laid out on a pair of autopsy tables.
“Ewww,” she groaned, curling her fingers up under her chin. “Do I really have to touch… that?”
“Good grief, Ellen.” I rolled my eyes and walked over to the first body. “It’s for, like, half a second. Get over it.” I reached past blistered, black flesh and gripped the spiritual matter beneath, pulling the soul free in one fluid motion.
From Ellen’s docket, I knew it would be one of two teenagers who’d been caught unawares while playing video games in a burning apartment building. Not that I could tell them apart in their crunchy mortal state, but as souls they were more distinct. I was able to match the first one up with the picture in his file—lanky build, scruffy blond hair, and the beginnings of a mustache that looked more like a pair of sickly caterpillars dangling from his upper lip.
“Anthony Richards?” I asked, just to be sure.
“Uh…” he answered, frozen in place. All except for his wide eyes that darted around the dank morgue.
“Great,” I said, accepting his drooling as confirmation. I snapped the file shut and turned to Ellen. “Your turn.” I cocked my head toward the remaining body.
Ellen made a gagging face and shuddered again, but when my eyes narrowed she managed to take a tentative step toward the autopsy table. Her hand reached out, pausing inches shy of her charge.
“Ellen?” I said sharply.
She jerked her hand back and squeezed her hip with it before turning to glare at me. “I wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d stayed out of Grim’s business, you realize?”
“Ugh.” I dragged my hands down my cheeks and groaned. “I was being blackmailed by Horus. You know that. Everyone knows that, thanks to the trash mags.” I didn’t have many secrets these days, which in theory should have made my life easier. In theory.
Ellen turned her nose up. “You should have gone to Grim when that happened. He would have put that deadbeat deity in his place.”
“Grim tried to kill me the last time I saw him. Or have you forgotten?” I raised an eyebrow and folded my arms. “Look, if you don’t want me to shadow you, I’m sure Jenni can find someone else—”
“Yeah, like that would be any better.” Ellen huffed and her hand slid down to her side in defeat. She glanced over at the crusty body on the table and took a deep breath before attempting to touch it again.
The second soul was shorter than the first, though twice as wide. He tumbled out of his body and rolled off the table, but he recovered quickly, clapping his hands after he’d jumped to his feet, as if his spill had been intentional and for our entertainment. He looked like he’d been trying to grow facial hair too—or else he was just too lazy to shave the splotchy bits of fuzz off his chin.
“Ooh la la,” he said, following it up with a low whistle as his gaze rolled up and down Ellen. There was a hunger in his eyes I wasn’t used to seeing in the freshly deceased. Human teenagers were an odd, unpredictable bunch, full of hormones and bad ideas.
“Daniel Marcum,” I read from his file.
His eyes zipped across the room to meet mine and he bobbed his double chin. “Who’s asking?”
“The Tooth Fairy,” I answered dryly, taking in his overcrowded trap. “Looks like you’ve been holding out on me.”
Daniel smirked and glanced up at his shell-shocked friend. “You like them mean, Tony. You can have that one.”
I made a face at him. Then I grabbed both boys’ shoulders and turned them toward the autopsy tables, eliciting a yelp of surprise from Tony.
“Aww, man!” Daniel was trying to play it cool. He slapped Tony on the back and cackled out a nervous laugh. “Well, you did say you wanted to get baked.”
The soul files were pretty vague most of the time, especially when it came to low-risk harvests, but occasionally, pieces of the bigger puzzle slid together. I glanced through the boys’ files again.
“You managed to bake six other souls in your building too,” I said.
Tony looked like he was going to be sick. “My sister was down the hall doing laundry. Did she make it out in time?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. She wasn’t on our lists, but that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t harvest her this morning.”
Daniel looked less pleased with himself. Tony wasn’t interested in his jokes before, but now he was extra inattentive with the news that his sister might be dead too. Daniel’s accusing glare told me where he’d laid the blame. Seemed I was getting a lot of that lately.
I ignored him and glanced down at my watch. “Kevin’s late.”
“Only by five minutes,” Ellen said.
“Let’s go upstairs and check on him.” I retrieved my coin from my robe pocket.
Hospitals put me on edge, especially after Bub’s rebel ex-succubus had attacked us in one last year. She’d also attacked me in the parking garage of Holly House. It could have happened anywhere, so dreading these places didn’t make good sense. I found the unwelcome anxiety annoying more than anything else. Fear was a lot of things, but rational was rarely one of them.
Ellen nudged the two souls closer to me and filled in behind them, a silent request to coin the whole gang upstairs, including her. We were really going to have to work on her transportation efforts. But I wasn’t up for another fight today. I sighed and gave her a berating glare before rolling my coin.
Kevin’s charge was supposed to be in the cancer ward on the fourth floor, so that’s where I took us. The brightly lit hallways were busier up top. A festive bulletin board plastered with crayon-colored pumpkins announced an upcoming Halloween party, and fake spider webs stretched from every available corner of the nurses’ station.
Ellen gave the receptionist behind the wide counter a longing look, while Daniel gasped and dodged out of the way of a moving lunch cart. The nurse driving the cart sidestepped to maneuver around the front counter. Her shoulder brushed through Tony’s. He remained in a daze and hardly seemed to notice, but Daniel’s mouth formed an oh, as if the idea that they were truly dead was still sinking in. Their charred remains clearly hadn’t been enough evidence.
The chemical smell of
disinfectant mingled with the bland aroma of hospital food—meatloaf and green beans. It was depressing. If I’d been on a mortal deathbed, there would be cake every single day.
Further down the hallway, Kevin leaned against the open doorframe of a patient’s room. His arms were folded casually across his chest, the watch on his wrist facing up as if he’d been scrutinizing it for some time. He spotted our lot as we approached and stood up straighter.
“The harvests must have gotten mixed up on my docket,” he explained with a grimace. “I almost missed my last soul. They were getting ready to lower his casket when I got there.”
I glanced behind him. “Where are the helljacks? I thought you wanted to test their sniffers.”
Kevin’s frown deepened. “I didn’t want to waste any more time by going to the scene of the fire if this harvest file was off too.”
“Good call.” I squeezed his shoulder and peeked into the room he was watching.
The soul we were waiting on, a ninety-year-old man named Theodore, sat upright on the hospital bed inside. A halo of gray hair encircled the top of his head, the spattering of sunspots making it look very much like an oversized egg smooshing a nest. The lunch tray suspended over his lap was mostly empty. He didn’t look like he was struggling through his final breaths, but death was sneaky that way sometimes. Though to be fair, no one was ever really prepared for it.
A spoonful of orange gelatin paused halfway to the man’s shriveled lips, and his cataracted eyes watered as they focused on me. “More dessert,” he grumbled before slurping down another bite. “Cherry and lime.”
My breath caught in my throat. Was he talking to me? That wasn’t possible. Maybe he was senile or hallucinating. That happened often enough this close to the end, right? I turned back to Kevin and Ellen. Their surprised faces were all the confirmation I needed.
So much for dodging the council’s shit list.
Chapter 4
Hellfire and Brimstone Page 2