Esprit de Corpse

she began to chuckle.

It sounded like a cement mixer filled with drunken cats.

Conrad coughed and tried to speak. “Why can’t—Voice! I . . .”

Maddy’s voice wasn’t just raspy as Theresa’s or Shannon’s had been after Maddy’s earlier attempts at strangulation. This was an abrasive squawk. Stephen Hawking would have turned down a chance to have a voice like that.

Already, bright red blood had seeped through the bandages at Maddy’s throat. Conrad had done real damage to Maddy’s vocal cords when he’d slashed her with the stapler. Never had the words he brought this on himself rung truer.

In his ruined voice, he croaked, “I may not—” He coughed. Red spittle dampened one corner of Maddy’s mouth. “See you, but—” He coughed again, his face growing pale. “You’re there. Just pop out.”

He stopped trying to speak. He clenched Maddy’s bound hands into fists and screwed up her—now his— face. After only a few moments, his face went from bloodless to red and sweaty. His new tattooed arms quivered.

Conrad made this awful sound like running a stick across corrugated iron. It might have been the sound of frustration, the damaged-vocal-cord equivalent of my earlier argh.

“Why can’t—?” he ground out.

Oh. He was trying to exit Maddy’s body. For some reason he couldn’t. He was stuck.

The EMT slipped a needle into his trembling arm. “Just a little something to relax you.” And Conrad slowly slumped back down on the dirty tiles.

“Okay, let’s get her onto a gurney and to a proper medical facility. Someone needs to get a look at her neck, but I’m pretty sure the damage is permanent.”

They scooped Conrad up and carried him to a third gurney, the other two long since wheeled away. He smiled dreamily as Maddy’s guard recuffed him to the gurney’s metal frame on both sides. Pinkish drool trailed from the corner of his new mouth.

Ignoring the remaining people who puttered around the crime scene, I fisted the air and, without taking my hand off Maddy’s soul, tried to locate my boyfriend.

Dante managed to manifest a little, looking nearly as far gone as Shannon had just before being re-homed. I forced a fake smile on my face so he wouldn’t worry. All thoughts of anger and jealousy left my body like a soul departing a fresh corpse. “You okay?” I asked. I could see right through him now. We needed to get back to Hell as quickly as possible, Conrad or no Conrad. We could always come back for that skegger.

In twenty-five years.

If Schotz let us.

If we were still Reapers.

If we were still together.

Dante returned my smile with one just as fake. And very, very faint. He knew he was in rough shape. I’d deactivated my scythe at some point. Dante didn’t look strong enough to activate his own, but I knew Reapers can transport souls of the newly dead. So why not the oldly dead? After seven centuries, Dante was well and truly dead. They didn’t get much deader than him. Oh, sure his friend Virgil was . . . I yanked my attention back and I reached out to touch Dante. As had happened back at the jail, my hand passed right through him.

Now what? I could teleport myself back to Hell, but if I couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t take him with me. Dante’s mouth moved, but even though I was a spirit now like him, I couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell me. I could barely hear a whisper, like branches rustling in the breeze.

If his last words were about Beatrice, I was going to be so mad.

Wait. He was holding up two fingers. A peace sign? Was he trying to make up before he faded away? And why was he then holding up only one finger and then tapping his forearm with it?

I had to squint to see it, but it was familiar. So familiar. Where had I seen that combination of hand motions before?

“Two words, first word, one syllable,” said a pleasant voice. What the . . . ? I turned to find Maddy’s disembodied soul staring intently at Dante’s dim outline. “Go ahead.”

Apparently when Maddy had lost her tattoos, scars, and other bodily add-ons, she’d also lost her smoker’s cough and whisky voice. She had a pleasant voice. In another life she could have done telemarketing.

Maybe she had and that was what had driven her insane.

I took a second to look at her now. If I hadn’t seen her pop out of her old body, I never would have recognized her. Just as I’d lost my dyed hair and tattoo, so had Maddy. In fact, she looked like a lovely young woman, face sweet, hair naturally blond. Who dyes naturally blond hair that awful red color?

Realizing he’d lost my attention, Dante was performing for Maddy, playing charades as if his afterlife depended on it.

“Call in,” Maddy muttered. “What does he want you to call in?”

I flipped open my hellphone. “No use. No bars,” I said, holding it up for Maddy to see. There weren’t a lot of places on the Coil where you could phone home.

“No, that’s not it,” Maddy said to me. “He’s shaking his head.”

I joined her now, the two of us, Reaper and murderous soul, playing parlor games in the women’s bathroom, trying desperately to save the afterlife of my dying boyfriend.

Dante pointed at me, then Maddy. Okay. Got that part. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth. I could see the “Please wash your hands” sign right through him.

“Call in. Calling,” Maddy guessed.

Dante dropped his arms. He appeared exhausted, at least as much as I could read his expression at this point. Finally he raised his arms again. He made the peace sign again. “Second word,” Maddy announced. Then he cocked his index fingers at us and mimed firing at us repeatedly.

“Calling Fire. Call in Fire.” Maddy jumped up and down. “He wants you to pull the fire alarm!” Her eyes gleamed. To her it was all a game.

But to me it was afterlife and death. “No,” I said, keeping my eyes on Dante’s form. “Not fire. Shots. Call in shots.”

Maddy turned toward me and I swear if her hands hadn’t been manacled behind her back she would have crossed her arms over her chest. “Calling Shots. That makes no sense.” Her upper lip curled in a Billy Idol sneer.

“Yes, it absolutely does.” I focused on Dante. “You want me to go take Maddy back to Hell with me and return with help?” I asked, knowing how Lassie must have felt.

“Hell? I’m not going to some fuckin’—Ow. What was that for?”

I’d clunked Maddy on her no-longer-dyed-a-weird-color-of-red hair with my deactivated scythe. “Shut up. Can’t you see I’m trying to talk to my boyfriend?”

Perhaps in Maddy’s world, thunking someone over the head and telling them to shut up passed for conversation. She peered at Dante. “He’s kinda pale, dontcha think? Cute though.”

Great. A serial killer found my boyfriend hot. I felt so much better knowing that. Not!

“Should I go?” I asked again.

Dante nodded, big brown eyes looking all soft and sad. And now that I looked, they were more transparent than brown. I didn’t have long. I had to go.

I felt like I was leaving a puppy behind. I laid one hand on Maddy’s quite-substantial arm and concentrated on the office of Sergeant Colin Schotz. I bounced my head once. That was completely unnecessary, of course, but just standing there thinking deep thoughts lacked flair

By the time it occurred to me that I couldn’t transport Maddy with her body still alive on the Coil, I’d already done so.

Desperation is the mother of intention. Maybe it was because her body still had a soul, or maybe it was because I was running Scythe 2.0, but no matter why, it worked.

The last thing I saw was Dante standing there, one hand raised toward me. I could see right through his flesh to his skeleton beneath. For once he looked like a Grim Reaper and not like those late-night TV ads for hooded blankets.