Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

“I’m in,” said Babd. “Let’s go.”

“Ladies,” came a deep voice out of the dark, which was strange, because they could all see in the dark, and they couldn’t see where the voice was coming from.

“Ladies,” said Lemon. Now he stood there, a palm out, an open flame burning on his palm, illuminating the room. “What are you doing in this shit hole?”

“They came into the other place with guns. Blowed us up,” said Macha.

“Look at us,” said Nemain.

“Don’t look at us,” said Babd.

“We need to go get the rest of the soul puppets, the ones that taste like ham.”

“No, we not going back there, ladies. But I know a place where you can scoop souls out the air like eatin’ cotton candy. Thousands of them. Y’all ain’t seen nothin’ like it. Why, I bet once you done there, you be able to rip souls right out of a human like the old days. Ain’t no gun or car can hurt you, then.”

“Where?” asked Macha.

“Why, when y’all are done, you’ll probably be able to bring the Underworld up anywhere y’all want. Maybe everywhere.”

“Where? Where? Where?” asked Nemain.

“What’s cotton candy?” asked Babd, who was the dimmest in a triad of very dark creatures.

“Well, I’ll show y’all,” said Lemon. “But we going to have wait until it’s dark out. They’s a lot of open ground to cover to get there.”

“Open a door into that place,” said Macha.

“I’ll get y’all close, but you can’t just wade in and scoop them all up. You nibble round the edges, maybe, and before anyone know what happen, they’s one soul in particular you gotta shred. You don’t get that one, you lose the rest.”

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; “Take us there,” said Nemain.

In the days when the Underworld was in flux with the light, and gods rose and fell like mushrooms in a damp forest, there came into being two brothers, Osiris and Set. Osiris, with his queen, Isis, rose to reign over the kingdom of light, and Set ruled over the dark, the Underworld, with his queen Nephthys, who was fine. Set was jealous of his brother’s land and worshippers, and plotted against him, while Osiris, radiant and self-­assured, yearned for a taste of the dark world in Nephthys, and so he did tap that ass. From that union came a son, the dark, dog-­headed god, Anubis. (As well as his jackal-­headed brother Upuaut, who would be put in a basket and set adrift in the sea, to make his way unguided in a new land, but his is another story.*)

When Set learned of his wife’s affair, he murdered Osiris, and to assure that Osiris would never be reincarnated, Set cut the body into pieces and hid the pieces among the darkest, most distant corners of the Underworld. Isis was overcome with grief and searched in vain for her beloved. But the dutiful dog-­headed god, Anubis, Osiris’s son in the Underworld, found the pieces of his father’s body and returned them to Isis. Anubis mummified his father’s body and Isis raised his spirit to rule over the ­people of the sun. For his ser­vice, Anubis was given the realm of the dead in the Underworld, and it was his lot to see that order was kept and justice done to the passing souls of man.

Set was left to seethe with jealousy and wait for chaos to come about, and with it, his opportunity to rise again to power over the kingdoms of light and darkness.

In the waiting area, Lily sobbed in her mother’s arms while Rivera, Charlie, and Audrey stood by feeling helpless. Audrey squeezed Charlie’s hand until it hurt, but he was actually grateful for the pain, because it took his mind off of everything else. Rivera stood aside, observing, until Lily’s mom looked over her daughter’s shoulder at him. He recognized that same helplessness in her eyes that he’d seen in the families of so many murder victims—­and he touched her back, lightly, and for only a second, to let her know he was there, another human being: backup.

The medical crash team had pulled curtains across the glass in Minty Fresh’s room, but after twenty-­two minutes the curtain whooshed aside and the doctor came through, paused a second at the desk, then turned to come through the double doors into the waiting room, the look on his face broadcasting what he was going to say: “There was nothing we could do.”

Before the doctor reached them, Charlie felt himself go light-­headed; his vision tunneled down, went black, and he collapsed. The doctor helped Audrey catch him and lower him into a chair.

Asher, what the fuck you doing here?” said Minty Fresh.

Charlie looked around, saw literally nothing but the big man, standing perhaps ten feet away from him, wearing only a bedsheet.

“Where’s here?” asked Charlie.

The Mint One adjusted his sheet, which was too small for a man his size to wear as a toga, opting instead for a sarong/towel wraparound effect. He looked around. They might have been standing on a sheet of black glass under a starless night sky, except he could see Charlie and Charlie could see him, so technically, it wasn’t dark. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again he could see that they were inside a large stone chamber, lit with bronze oil lamps that jutted from the wall and threw long shadows up to a high, ­pointed ceiling. Across one wall and plane of the ceiling stretched the elongated shadow of a dog’s head with long pointed ears. Minty searched but couldn’t see the dog that was casting the shadow, yet there it was, a shadow thirty feet tall, and still reaching only halfway to the apex of the ceiling.

“I’m going to guess the Underworld,” said Minty Fresh.

“You’ve been here before?”

“I had it described to me once,” said Minty Fresh. “And you look like your old self.”