Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

“I know, I feel like a bad genie.”

“Don’t tease, Audrey, it’s hard enough without imagining you dressed as a genie.”

They’d made love once, well, a few times, the night before he’d died, but after she’d resurrected his soul in this current body, which she’d built from spare parts and luncheon meat, they’d agreed that they would abstain from sex because it would be creepy—­and because he lost consciousness whenever he got an erection—­but mostly because it would be creepy.

“No, I mean I feel like you made a wish, and I granted it, but you forgot to specify the circumstances, so you were tricked.”

“When did I ever wish I had this?” He gestured to his dong, which unfurled out of his robe and plopped onto the rug.

“You were pretty delirious when you were dying. I mean, you didn’t explicitly ask for it, but you did go on about your regrets, most of which seemed to be about women you hadn’t had sex with. So I thought—­”

“I’d been poisoned. I was dying.”

During his battle in the sewers below San Francisco with a trinity of ravenlike Celtic death goddesses called the Morrigan, one had raked him with her venomous claws, which eventually killed him.

“Well, I was improvising,” said Audrey. “I’d just had sex for the first time in twelve years, so I may have put a bit too much emphasis on the male parts. Overcompensated.”

“Like with your hair?”

“What’s wrong with my hair?” She patted her swoop of hair, which approximated the shape of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and would have looked more in place on the runway of an avant-­garde fashion show in Paris than it did anywhere in San Francisco, especially in a Buddhist center.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Charlie said. How had he blundered into talking about her hair? He was a beta male and he knew by instinct that there was no winning when it came to discussing a woman’s hair. No matter where on that path you started, you were bound to stumble into a trap. Sometimes he thought he might have lost a mental step or two in the transfer of his soul to this body, even if it had been done only moments after his death. “I love your hair,” he said, trying for the save. “But you’ve said yourself that you were sort of overcompensating for having your head shaved for twelve years in Tibet.”

“Maybe,” she said. She was going to have to let it go. For one thing, as a Buddhist nun, being vain and whiny about how her hair looked was a distinct regression in spiritual evolution; plus, she had trapped the man she loved in a tiny body she’d cobbled together from disparate animal parts and a good-­sized block of turkey ham, and she felt responsible. This was not the first time they’d had this discussion, and she couldn’t bear to extricate herself from it using a weak, Kung Fu of the Disrespected ­Hairdo move. She sighed. “I don’t know how to get you into a proper body, Charlie.”

So there it was, the truth as she knew it, laid out on the carpet as limp and useless as—­well—­you know.

Charlie’s jaw (and there was a lot of it) dropped open. Before, she’d always said it might be complicated, difficult, but now . . . “When I ­started buying soul vessels from your and the other Death Merchants’ stores, putting them into the Squirrel ­People, I didn’t know how to do that either. I mean, I knew the ritual, but there was no text that said it would work. But it did. So maybe I can figure something out.”

She didn’t believe for a second she could figure it out. She’d moved souls from soul vessels into the meaty dolls she constructed, using the ­p’howa of forceful projection, thinking that she was saving them. And she’d used the p’howa of undying on six terminally ill old ladies, thinking she was saving their lives, when, in fact, she had simply slowed their deaths. She was a Buddhist nun who had been given the lost scrolls of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and she could do things that no on else on earth could do, but she couldn’t do what Charlie wanted her to.

“The problem is the body, isn’t it?” asked Charlie.

“Kind of. I mean, we know there are ­people out there walking around without souls, and that eventually a soul vessel will find them, they will find it, but what would happen to their personality if we forced your soul into someone, then they encounter their soul vessel?”

“That would probably be bad.”

“Right, plus, when a soul goes into a vessel it loses its personality: the longer it’s out of a body, the less personality it retains, which is good. I think that’s why we learn as Buddhists that we have to let go of ego to ascend spiritually. So what if I could move your soul into someone who didn’t have a soul, hasn’t encountered their soul vessel yet. It might destroy their personality, or yours. I don’t want to lose you again.”

Charlie didn’t know what to say. She was right, of course. The Squirrel ­People were prime examples of souls without memory of their personalities. Except for a ­couple, whom Audrey had moved when the soul had been fresh in the soul vessel; all of them were just goofy little meat puppets. They’d built their own little city under the porch.

“Phone,” said the meat puppet Bob as he entered the room, followed by a dozen other Squirrel ­People Charlie’s size. Bob was so called because Audrey had constructed him using a bobcat skull, which now sat on the bright red miniature beefeater uniform of a Tower of London guard. He was the only one of the Squirrel ­People besides Charlie who could talk; the others hissed, clicked, and mimed to get their points across, but they were all elegantly dressed in the costumes Audrey had made for them.

Bob handed the cordless handset to Audrey, who clicked the speaker button.

“Hello,” she said.

A little girl’s voice said, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds!”

Audrey held the phone out for Charlie. “It’s for you.”

Detective Inspector Nick Cavuto, Rivera’s partner on the SFPD for fifteen years, stood over the pile of pale and black that lay on the floor behind the counter of Rivera’s store.

“Looks like you killed a witch,” he said. “Sad,” he said. “Lunch?”

He was six foot four, two hundred and sixty pounds, and took great pride in playing the old-­school, tough-­guy detective: wearing a fedora from the 1940s, rumpled suits, chomping on cigars he never lit, and carrying a blackjack in his back pocket that Rivera had never seen him use. In the Castro, where he lived, he was known as “Inspector Bear.” Not to his face, of course.

“She’s not dead,” said Rivera.