Esprit de Corpse

I’d been right about everyone being in the room Shannon was in. What I hadn’t figured on was that the room Shannon was in was actually Conrad’s room. After everything he’d done to her, Shannon still wanted to spend time with her dad?

Maddy’s body lay on the bed, handcuffed to the metal frame on either side. Shannon sat in one of the hard plastic guest chairs at the foot of the bed. A uniformed policeman sat on a second chair out in the hallway, politely eavesdropping. I’m sure he wondered why the skeg she’d want to visit her former cellmate and attempted murderer. Knowing that in reality she was visiting her father and attempted murderer, I couldn’t help but agree.

Dante stood by the bedside hale and hearty again. Was hale something like wan? I’d really have to look that up one day. Along with bombastic. He tossed the crystal skull in the air and caught it again, then pointed to something on the contract amendment Sergeant Schotz was trying to read with Judge Julius peering over his shoulder.

“Dante!” I exclaimed. I wanted to throw myself at him but refrained, fearing another face-plant in case he wasn’t corporeal to me.

“Oh, hi, Kirsty. Glad you could join us.”

Oh, so two could play cool as a bat. “I see the skull did the trick.”

“Yup.”

He tossed the crystal skull to me and I nearly fumbled it, memories of Rod’s fatal fumble surfacing again.

I tried to return it to Sergeant Schotz but he waved me off, focused as he was on the amendment.

Judge Julius stood up straight, hooked his glasses over his horns and smoothed his trained caterpillars into place. “Looks in order,” he said to Shannon. Apparently we were visible to her. I willed myself to manifest for her. I had the trick of it now.

“Oh, hi, Kirsty. When did you get here?”

“A second ago.” I gave her a little finger wave, not anxious to draw too much attention to myself.

“So you,” the judge continued, speaking at Shannon. “You get a twenty-five-year extens—What? Oh, I see. How am I supposed to know who’s in what body?” He harrumphed, put his glasses back on his judicious face and focused on Conrad instead. “Ah, yes. So you, Conrad Percival Iver, have found someone willing to surrender their remaining time on the Coil to you. I have communicated with Reaper Monroe at Hell’s Cells and he tells me the de-souled individual, one . . .” Julius flipped pages. I could see a note in Dante’s handwriting added underneath the bloody signature line. “. . . Madeline Ann Stryker, says she’d rather be incarcerated in Hell than here on the Coil. Says the view’s better.” He stopped to consider this, then shrugged and continued. “Plus while incarcerated down there she can earn an early release for bad behavior. So,” he summed up, “you get to keep the body you’re in. You’ve earned yourself twenty-five more years of earthly life in that nice, healthy—” He stopped, took in Maddy’s badly dyed hair, multiple tattoos and damaged throat. “Well, relatively young body, anyway. Congratulations.”

“But—” The word sounded so abrasive even the demon judge leaned away. “Can’t—Stuck—”

He managed to point both index fingers at his new body in spite of the handcuffs.

The judge activated his gavel and struck Conrad lightly on the head with it. It might not have been a sharp blow, but given that Conrad had already been severely brained by me less than an hour ago, it must have hurt.

Good.

The judge looked at some sort of read-out on the gavel. “Huh. Looks like you’re locked in. How’d that happen?” Julius’s gaze jumped from Conrad, to Shannon to me. I tried to hide behind Dante.

Dante merely stepped aside.

Traitor.

I stood up straight and adjusted my outfit, which I’d been wearing for three days now. “I think it must have been me,” I said in a tiny voice.

“What?”

“How?”

“Cosa?”

“I think I, er, um, stapled him into Maddy’s body.”

“Stapled?”

“With a stapler?”

“You found the stapler?”

“Yes, I had the stapler. Remember, Your Hon—I mean, Judge. My appeal? I told you Conrad had tried to trick me out of my soul with an ensorcelled stapler. Well, it was also the murder weapon used to end my life permanently. Because it was evidence in my murder trial, it was in the courtroom and I snagged it and when it looked like Conrad was going to get away with everything by jumping bodies again and displacing yet another . . .” At Dante’s keen look, I amended, “Displacing a soul. ”

“And then I grabbed the stapler and stapled his head right where it was bleeding. So I think I must have stapled Conrad’s soul into Maddy’s body.” My voice grew tinier and tinier as I finished my confession. I clasped my hands behind my back trying to look as innocent as possible.

“Are you going to punish us?” I said finally, voice cracking and quavering almost as much as Conrad’s did.

One of Julius’s eyebrows crawled up his face. He turned and stalked over to the corner by the empty bed and waved a c’mere gesture at us. We all started walking toward him. “No, no. Only Colin.” The caterpillar brow raced back down, going head to head with its compatriot across the judge’s nose, giving him an angry look. They were really well trained.

The judge and the head of the Reaper Corps conferred for what seemed like hours. A glance at my watch told me it had been three minutes, tops. I shook it and held it to my ear. Cerberus had nuzzled my arm last week, getting dog slobber all over it. But it seemed it takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Maybe time was out of sync again.

Or possibly, I was just impatient.

Impatience. Jealousy. I was creating my own personal hit parade of sins. I hoped I didn’t have seven and that they weren’t really deadly. Not that I could die again anyway, I hoped.

Finally the judge and our boss strode back over to Conrad’s bedside. I tried to hide behind Dante again. I was never good with authority figures.

Or with waiting. “Oh, please. Don’t send Dante back to the Coil. Or me. We’re good Reapers. We tried our best. We can do better. Please don’t separate us. We’re in love.”

The judge and sergeant looked pained while Dante looked embarrassed.

But he came through this time, stepping up beside me and grasping my hand. No matter how mad we were at each other, I knew we still wanted to stay together. How would we finish our fight if we weren’t? “Whatever punishment you see fit to visit upon us, we would be grateful if we could suffer together.”

What? No, I didn’t want to be punished at all. But still, Dante wanted us to be together. How sweet.

“They saved me,” Shannon rose, interjecting herself bodily into the conversation. “My dad would have let me fade right out of the death cycle. Is that the right term?” The judge and our boss scowled. I guess they knew that because of our—okay, my slow response in reaping Conrad, Shannon had been displaced from her own body. But I couldn’t be mad at her. She may have outed me as an incompetent Reaper, but she was only being honest. I’d have tried to obfuscate instead of admitting my mistake. I was obfuscating on thin ice right now. “But thanks to the quick thinking and personal sacrifice made by these two, I got my life back.”

“And go back—CEO—Iver PR—” Conrad croaked.

“Actually, Dad. That’s not—”

“Look,” Sergeant Schotz cut in. “Nobody’s getting punished. Well, ’cept him.” He tossed his sizable chin in Conrad’s direction. No, not literally. “If you give us a second here.”

He glared at us, looking exactly as if we were all getting punished. I squeezed Dante’s hand tighter but refused to let myself hide behind him again. I was no coward.