Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

“Oh,” said Lily. “Sure. Go ahead. You’ll save her, Brian. Want me to mark it on the big board for you?”

“That’s not a thing, Lily.” He lifted his finger and said into the headset, “Yes, Darla, I’m here. Can you tell me the address where you’re staying?”

Sage said, “The board is supposed to be for bulletins, BOLOs, events going on in the city, things we all need to know before we answer a call.”

“You mean like Lily got FIVE AND A HALF!” Lily said, tapping the board next to her number. She thought as she moved: Booty dance. Booty dance. Right up on Sage’s desk with my great big booty—­

“Lily, please stop twerking my desk.”

“Fine,” said Lily. “I’m going on break. Try not to kill anyone while I’m gone.”

“You’re so sad,” said Sage.

“No, you’re sad,” said Lily. She threw a booty bounce of dismissal toward Sage as she walked into the locker room.

She dug her mobile out of her locker and headed outside to smoke as she checked for messages. He’d cried on her voice mail, which had been satisfying at first, but then kind of pathetic. She wasn’t going to be fooled into calling him back just because he’d succumbed to a moment of wuss. He was Death, after all! Or at least Assistant Death. How could you compete with that? They all had something special, Charlie Asher, even little Sophie, had been singled out by the universe as special, while she, Lily Darquewillow Elventhing Severo (the Darquewillow Elventhing was silent) was just a failed restaurateur and part-­time suicide hotline counselor. But she did have that. She saved lives. Most of the time. Kind of.

She listened to the message of Minty Fresh weeping after her again, a message which she had no intention of erasing, ever. The next message was from him, too, and hoping there might be begging—­she could use some begging—­she listened, but as soon as she heard the words “motherfuckin’ forces of darkness and whatnot,” she cut off the message with a punch of the callback button.

8

Friends of Dorothy

Mike Sullivan found himself waking up every morning thinking of the ghost, Concepción, and again, every night before he went to sleep. He made a special effort to wash his coveralls, so they were sparkling white speckled with International Orange, which didn’t come off in the wash, and he polished the scuffs off his hard hat with car wax. As he shaved in the morning, he practiced the expression on his face he would have when he told her the fate of her Russian count, and all day, every day, throughout the day, he tried to be prepared for her appearance. He had spent five days painting the structure under the roadway before she returned.

“Oh, Señor Sullivan, I am so happy to see you,” said Concepción, swinging around one of the trusses under the bridge like a real girl might swing around a lamp post in the park on a joyful summer day in a musical comedy, her skirts flaring out around her.

“I’m happy to see you, too,” he said. “Please call me Mike.”

“Mike it is, then,” she said with a shy smile and a fluttering of her eyelashes. If she’d had a fan, she would have flirted from behind it. “What have you found out of my Nikolai?”

All of Mike’s preparation had not prepared him for this, for a ghost that was light of spirit. A sullen, grieving, heartbroken ghost, yes, but not this bright and laughing Conchita who skipped amid the heavy steel like a feather on the wind.

He checked his safety lines, then took off his hard hat and held it over his heart, just as he had practiced. Then he told her. Watching the light go out of her eyes made him feel as if he’d just kicked the angel of mercy in the mouth.

“A horse?” she said.

“Sorry.”

“A horse? A horse! A goddamn horse! I wept for two centuries and he fell off a horse six weeks after he sailed away?”

“Really sorry,” Mike said. “But he was riding across Siberia to St. Petersburg to get permission from the Czar to marry you when he fell.”

“Nobody just falls off a horse. Who falls off a horse?”

“It said on the Internet that he snapped his neck when he hit the ground, so he didn’t suffer.”

“All this time, I thought I might have said something wrong, I worried he had fallen in love with another, that the Czar had imprisoned him for breaking the rules of trade, but no, for him it was over in an instant. He didn’t have to go all the way to Siberia to fall off a horse. We had horses here. My father had men who could have pushed him off a fucking horse.”

“Excuse me, Conchita,” said Mike, “but that doesn’t sound like the Spanish lady who—­”

“What do you know about Spanish ladies? You, with your stupid ­bucket, you, spattered with your orange paint.”

Mike swallowed hard and put his hard hat back on. “But you can rest now, right? You can be at peace.”

“Peace!” Her dress and hair whipped around her as if in a hurricane wind, although it was a calm day on the bay. “Oh, there will be no peace. I am two hundred years grieving, it will take at least a hundred to get over my anger. Oh, yes, señor, there will be haunting. Such haunting as no one has ever seen. If anyone in those cars passing above is of Russian blood, I shall visit such horrors upon them, they will wish they had fallen off a horse. They will beg to fall off a horse.”

“But he loved you,” said Mike. He was grateful to whatever circuit breaker in his brain had stopped from telling her that she was beautiful when she was angry, for, although she was, she was also scaring the shit out of him, nearly as badly as the first time she’d appeared to him.