Scythe Does Matter

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.