Scythe Does Matter

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?”

“Si,” 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