Undead and Unforgiven(4)

She looked at the clipboard again, then up at him. “Oh. Jeez. Look, not to be a hard-ass, but the only crackers we have for you are saltines.”

He nodded, resigned. Definitely Hell, then.

“And all cheese except spray cheese,” she said, reading from the clipboard.

Dammit.





CHAPTER

ONE

“Elizabeth!”

I was doing my best to ignore the dead priest, and it wasn’t going well. Had I thought he was persistent in life? Pshaw. In death he was indefatigable. That’s the word, right? Indefatigable? Never gets tired? Always nagging? Huge downer on my downtime?

“We’ve rescheduled the meeting three times.” He skidded to a halt in front of me, panting lightly.

Yeah, well, it’s about to be four times.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t debate Smoothiegate even one more time. You guys are just gonna have to accept that blackberries are gross and suck it up with raspberries instead.”

I got an exasperated blink. (That man can say more with his eyelids than most can with their mouths.) “Not that meeting. The, uh . . .” He trailed off, then made himself say it. “The Ten Commandments Redux.”

Heh. It was a great idea, if tedious in execution, and for no other reason than Father Markus really, really hated the name. “It’s Remix, and you know it.”

“Regardless. We have to get started.”

“I know.” (I did know.) “And while I was researching—”

“You researched?” he said, sounding shocked. Then he instantly corrected his tone. “Of course you did. Good for you.”

“Well, I had an idea for what to do with some of the souls that have been here for a while.”

“Which is?”

“I have to keep working on it.” I had no idea how my plan would go over: probably like an anvil. It meant big change. It meant changing the very nature of Hell. Father Markus was a good enough guy, but he was also a traditionalist. Baby steps. That was key. “I’ll tell you more about it. Later.”

He made a ttkkt! noise of disapproval. “Procrastination is another word for cowardice.”

“It’s really not.”

He’d switched from Reminder Mode to Cajoling Mode. “Now, Betsy.” Ohhh, I knew that tone. “You know the hardest part is just sitting down and getting started.”

“Mmm.” (No, the hardest part was keeping out of his way so I could avoid his eight zillion meetings. My own fault for being in Hell’s food court again!)

Father Markus, though he’d ended up in Hell after he died, still thought of himself as a priest. You could look like anything you wanted here, but most people stuck with what they were familiar with: how they looked in life. In Father Markus’s case, that meant the traditional priest garb: all in black except for the collar. He had a little bit of hair left, all white, which went around his head in a fringe, leaving the top bald and shiny. Like, really shiny. The king of the vampires once checked his reflection in it. His hands and feet were small and sleek; he was in comfortable black shoes, dull leather Dockers. He’d lived his whole life in Minnesota and had the same flat Midwestern accent I did.

But I liked his eyes the best: small and brown, intent and expressive. They scrunched into smiling slits when he was happy, and focused like lasers when he wasn’t. In life he’d been in charge of a pack of teenage vampire hunters, and since most vampires were murderous assholes, I couldn’t entirely blame him for assuming all vampires were murderous assholes. I broke up the decapitation-happy team and Father Markus went his own way until he died. Now he was stuck working with me, in case he didn’t already know he was in Hell. To his credit, he decided it was an honor, and never indicated what a pain in his ass I was. (Out loud, anyway.)

“The first meeting,” he was rambling, “is always . . .”

The dullest. The lamest. The boringest. Wait. Boringest?

“. . . the hardest.”

“Yeah, y— Wait.” I realized he’d put a hand on my elbow, and while we talked, he was gently nudging me toward the Lego store, where we held most of our meetings. “Are you steering me, you sly, nagging s.o.b.?”

“No, no. Escorting.”

“Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean I can’t kill you again.” As threats went, it was about a 4.2 on the Lame-O-Meter.

“Just take a deep breath,” he suggested with a small smile. “It’ll be over soon.”

“Totally pointless; I don’t have to breathe. You don’t have to breathe.”

“It’ll all be over soon, then,” he said again. “I’ll stick with that one.”