Secondhand Souls

1. Day of the Dead

It was a cool, quiet November day in San Francisco and Alphonse Rivera, a lean, dark man of fifty, sat behind the counter of his bookstore flipping through the Great Big Book of Death. The old-fashioned bell over the door rang and Rivera looked up as the Emperor of San Francisco, a great woolly storm cloud of a fellow, tumbled into the store followed by his faithful dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, who ruffed and frisked with urgent intensity, then darted around the store like canine Secret Service agents, clearing the site in case a sly assassin or meaty pizza lurked among the stacks.

“The names must be recorded, Inspector,” the Emperor proclaimed, “lest they be forgotten!”

Rivera was not alarmed, but by habit his hand fell to his hip, where his gun used to ride. Twenty-five years a cop, the habit was part of him, but now the gun was locked in a safe in the back room. He kept an electric stun gun under the counter that in the year since he opened the store had been moved only for dusting.

“Whose names?”

“Why the names of the dead, of course, ” said the Emperor. “I need a ledger.”

Rivera stood up from his stool and set his reading glasses on the counter by his book. In an instant, Bummer, the Boston terrier, and Lazarus, the golden retriever, were behind the counter with him, the former standing up on his hind legs, hopeful bug eyes raised in tribute to the treat gods, a pantheon to which he was willing to promote Rivera, for a price.

“I don’t have anything for you,” said Rivera, feeling as if he should have somehow known to have treats handy. “You guys aren’t even supposed to be in here. No dogs allowed.” He pointed to the sign on the door, which not only was facing the street, but was in a language Bummer did not read, which was all of them.

Lazarus, who was seated behind his companion, panting peacefully, looked away so as not to compound Rivera’s embarrassment.

“Shut up,” Rivera said to the retriever. “I know he can’t read. He can take my word for it that’s what the sign says.”

“Inspector?” The Emperor smoothed his beard and shot the lapels of his dingy tweed overcoat, composing himself to offer assistance to a citizen in need. “You know, also, that Lazarus can’t talk.”

“So far,” said Rivera. “But he looks like he has something to say.” The ex-cop sighed, reached down, and scratched Bummer between the ears.

Bummer allowed it, dropped to all fours, and chuffed. You could have been great, he thought, a hero, but now I will have to sniff a mile of heady poo to wash the scent of your failure out of my nose—oh, that feels nice. Oh, very nice. You are my new best friend.

“Inspector?”

“I’m not an inspector anymore, Your Grace.”

“Yet ‘inspector’ is a title you’ve earned by good service, and it is yours forevermore.”

“Forevermore,” Rivera repeated with a smile. The Emperor’s grandiose manner of speaking had always amused him, reminded him of some more noble, genteel time which he’d never really experienced. “I don’t mind the title following me, so much, but I had hoped I’d be able to leave all the strange happenings behind with the job.”

“Strange happenings?”

“You know. You were there. The creatures under the streets, the Death Merchants, the hellhounds, Charlie Asher—you don’t even know what day it is and you know—”

“It’s Tuesday,” said the Emperor. “A good man, Charlie Asher—a brave man. Gave his life for the people of our city. He will long be missed. But I am afraid the strange happenings continue.”

“No, they don’t,” said Rivera, with more authority than he felt. Move along. Moving along. That it was Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, had put him on edge already, sent him to the drawer to retrieve the Great Big Book of Death, but he would not give weight to more reminders. Acknowledge a nightmare and you give it power, someone had told him. Maybe the spooky Goth girl who used to work for Charlie Asher. “You said you needed a ledger?”

“To record the names of the dead. They came to me last night, hundreds of them, telling me to write down their names so they are not forgotten.”

“In a dream?” Rivera did not want to hear this. Not at all. It had been a year since all that had happened, since the Big Book had arrived, calling him to action, and he’d walked away. So far, so good.

“We slumbered by the restrooms at the St. Francis Yacht Club last night,” said the Emperor. “The dead came across the water, floating, like the fog. They were quite insistent.”

“They can be that way, can’t they?” said Rivera. The Emperor was a crazy old man, a sweet, generous, and sincere lunatic. Unfortunately, in the past, many of the his insane ravings had turned out to be true, and therein lay the dread that Rivera felt rising in his chest.

“The dead speak to you as well, then, Inspector?”

“I worked homicide for fifteen years, you learn to listen.”

The Emperor nodded and gave Rivera’s shoulder a fatherly squeeze. “We protect the living, but evidently we are also called to serve the dead.”

“I don’t have any ledgers, but I carry some nice blank books.”

Rivera led the Emperor to a shelf where he stocked cloth and leather-bound journals of various sizes. “How many of the dead will we be recording?” Something about dealing with the Emperor put you in a position of saying things that sounded less than sane.

“All of them,” said the Emperor.

“Of course, then you’ll need a substantial volume.” Rivera handed him a sturdy leather journal with letter-sized pages.

The Emperor took the book, flipped through it, ran his hand over the cover. He looked from the book to Rivera and tears welled in his eyes. “This will be perfect.”

“You’ll need a pen,” said Rivera.

“Pencil,” said the Emperor. “A number two pencil. They were quite specific.”

“The dead?” said Rivera.

Bummer ruffed, the subtext of which was: “Of course, the dead, you tree-bound squirrel. Haven’t you been paying attention?” Rivera had still failed to produce any treats and had ceased scratching Bummer behind the ears, so fuck him.

Lazarus whined apologetically, the subtext of which was: “Sorry, he’s been an insufferable dickweed since he was given the powers of a hellhound, but the old man likes him, so what are you going to do? Still, it wouldn’t kill you to keep some treats behind the counter for your friends.”

“Yes, the dead,” said the Emperor.

Rivera nodded. “I don’t stock pencils in the store, but I think I can help you out.” He moved back behind the counter and opened a drawer. When the Great Big Book of Death had shown up in his mailbox, he’d bought the calendar and the pencils as it had instructed. He still had five of the pencils he’d purchased. He handed one to the Emperor, who took it, inspected the point, then dropped it into the inside pocket of his enormous overcoat, where Rivera was fairly sure he would never find it again.

“What do I owe you for the book?” asked the Emperor. He dug several crumpled bills from his coat pocket, but Rivera waved them off.

“It’s on me. In service of the city.”

“In service of the city,” repeated the Emperor, then to the troops, “Gentlemen, we are off to the library to begin our list.”

“How will you get the names?” asked Rivera.

“Well, obituaries, of course. And then perhaps a stop at the police station for a look at the missing persons reports. Someone there will help me, won’t they?”

“I’m sure they will. I’ll call ahead to the Central Station on Vallejo. But I can’t help but think you’ve got a big task ahead of you. You said you need to record all of the dead. The city has been here, what, a hundred and sixty years? That’s a lot of dead people.”

“I misspoke, Inspector. All of the dead, but with some urgency about those who passed in the last year.”

“The last year? Why?”

The Emperor shrugged. “Because they asked me to.”

“I mean why the emphasis on the last year?”

“So they won’t be forgotten.” The Emperor scratched his great, grizzly beard as he tried to remember. “Although they said lost, not forgotten. So they won’t be lost to the darkness.”

Rivera felt his mouth go dry and his face drain of blood. He opened the door for the Emperor, and the ringing bell jostled his power of speech. “Good luck, then, Your Majesty. I’ll call the desk at Central Station. They’ll expect you.”

“Many thanks.” The Emperor tucked the leather book under his arm and saluted. “Onward, men!” He led the dogs out of the shop, Bummer kicking up his back feet against the carpet as if to shed himself of the dirty business that was Alphonse Rivera.

Rivera returned to his spot behind the counter and stared at the cover of the Great Big Book of Death. A stylized skeleton grinned gleefully back at him, the bodies of five people impaled on his bony fingers and rendered in cheerful Day of the Dead colors.

Lost to the darkness? Only the last year?

Rivera had bought the pencils and the calendar as the Big Book had instructed, but then he’d done absolutely nothing else with them except put them in the drawer by the cash register. And nothing bad had happened. Nothing. He’d peacefully taken an early retirement from the force, opened the bookstore, and set about reading books, drinking coffee, and watching the Giants on the little television in the shop. Nothing bad had happened at all.

Then he noticed, just below the title on the Big Book were the words “revised edition.” Words that had not been there, he was sure, before the Emperor had come into the shop.

He pulled open the drawer, swept the pencils and office supply detritus aside, and pulled out the calendar he’d bought. Right there, in the first week of January, was a name and number, written in his handwriting. Then another, every few days to a week, until the end of the month, all in his handwriting, none of which he remembered writing.

He flipped through the pages. The entire calendar was filled. But nothing had happened. None of the ominous warnings in the Big Book had come to pass. He tossed the calendar back into the drawer and opened the Great Big Book of Death to the first page, a first page that had changed since he’d first read it.

It read: “So, you fucked up—”

“AHHHHHHHIEEEEEEEEEE!” A piercing shriek from right behind him.

Rivera leapt two feet into the air and bounced off the cash register as he turned to face the source of the scream, landing with his hand on his hip, his eyes wide, and his breath short.

“Santa Maria!”

A woman, wraith thin, pale as blue milk, trailing black rags like tattered shrouds, stood there—right there—not six inches away from him. She smelled of moss, earth, and smoke.

“How did you get—”

“AHHHHHHHHIEEEEEEEEE!” Right in his face this time. He scrambled backward against the counter, leaning away from her in spine-cracking dread.

“Stop that!”

The wraith took a step back and grinned, revealing blue-black gums. “It’s what I do, love. Harbinger of doom, ain’t I?”

She took a deep breath as if to let loose with another scream and there was an electric sizzle as the stun gun’s electrodes found purchase through her tatters. She dropped to the floor like a pile of damp rags.

2. The Rumors of My Demise

You can’t just shag a nun one time then dine out on it for the rest of your life,” said Charlie Asher.

“You’re not exactly dining out,” said Audrey. She was thirty-five, pale and pretty, with a side-swoop of auburn hair and the sort of lean strength and length of limb that made you think she might do a lot of yoga. She did a lot of yoga. “You never leave the house.”

She loved Charlie, but in the year they’d been together, he’d changed.

She was sitting on an Oriental rug in what had been the dining room of the huge Victorian house that was now the Three Jewels Buddhist Center. Charlie stood nearby.

“That’s what I’m saying. I can’t go out like this. I need to have a life, make a difference.”

“You have made a difference. You saved the world. You defeated the forces of darkness in battle. You’re a winner.”

“I don’t feel like a winner; I’m fourteen inches tall, and when I walk, my dick drags in the dirt.”

“Sorry,” Audrey said. “It was an emergency.” She hung her head, pulled her knees up to her chin, and hid her face. He had changed. When she’d met him he’d been a sweet, handsome widower—a thin fellow who wore nice, secondhand suits and was desperately trying to figure out how to raise a six-year-old daughter on his own in a world gone very strange. Now he stood knee-high, had the head of a crocodile, the feet of a duck, and he wore a purple satin wizard’s robe under which was slung his ten-inch schlong.

“No, it’s fine, fine,” Charlie said. “It was a nice thought.”

“I thought you’d like it,” Audrey said.

“I know. And you did save me. I’m not trying to be ungrateful.” He attempted a reassuring smile, but his sixty-eight spiked teeth and glassy black eyes diluted the reassuring effect. He really missed having eyebrows to raise in a friendly way. He reached out to pat her arm, but the raptor talons that she’d given him for hands poked her and she pulled away. “It’s a very nice unit,” he added quickly. “It’s just, well, not very useful. Under different circumstances, I’m sure we’d both enjoy it.”

“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.

“Shame. I was hoping munchkins would come sing the ding-dong song in your shop.”

“She’s not dead.”

“We could knock off a couple of verses if you want. I’ll start. You come in on ‘which old witch’?”

“She’s not dead.”

“How long’s she been out?”

“About twenty minutes, then thirty minutes, that’s when I called you, then”—he checked his watch—“about fifteen minutes.”

“So she came to and you rezapped her?”

“Until I could figure out what to do.”

“You miss the job, don’t you?” Cavuto pushed his hat back on his head and looked to Rivera for the confession. “You know, technically, you being active reserve, you can ride along with me anytime you feel like Tasing someone. Zapping random hippie chicks in your store can’t be good for business. You’ll have to buy lunch, of course.”

When they were both on the job, Cavuto usually started talking about lunch while he was still eating breakfast.

“She’s not a normal hippie chick.”

“No doubt, most people are just down then right back up. That’s a long time to be out from a stun gun.”

Rivera shrugged. “It’s her best quality, as far as I can tell.”

“You’re going to have to figure something out, you can’t keep stunning her, I can smell burning—is that Scotch?”

“Peat, I think. Yeah. That’s not from the stun gun, that’s just how she smells.”

“Want me to cuff her? Take her in? I can probably get a psych hold on her for the outfit alone.”

“I think she might be a supernatural being,” Rivera said. He rubbed his temples so he didn’t have to look at Cavuto’s reaction.

“Like the alleged bird woman you allegedly shot nine times before she allegedly turned into a giant raven and allegedly flew the fuck off? Like that?”

“She was going to kill Charlie Asher.”

“You said she was giving him a hand job.”

“This one’s different.”

“No hand job?”

“No, in that she’s a completely different creature. This one doesn’t have claws that I can see. This one just screams.”

“But you’re sure she’s supernatural because…?”

“Because when she screams my head fills with images of people dying and other horrible things. She’s a supernatural being.”

“You’re a supernatural being, ya berk,” said a female voice from the floor. She sat up.

Rivera and Cavuto jumped back, the latter with a slight yip.

“One of those wee soul collectors, ain’t ya? Sneakin’ about all invisible-like.” She tossed her hair out of her face—a twig flew out onto the carpet.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” said Cavuto, acting as if he hadn’t just yipped in fear like a tiny frightened dog.

“AHHHHHHHHIEEEEEEEEE!”

The two jumped back farther as she climbed to her feet. Cavuto shook his head as if trying to clear a cloud from his vision.

“See?” Said Rivera.

“Do you have any ID ma’am?” asked Cavuto.

“I’m Bean Sidhe, ya great mortal twat! AHHHHHHHIEEEEEEEE!”

“ZZZZZT!” said the stun gun.

She fell back into a pile of rags. Cavuto had snatched the stun gun and put her down himself. He handed it back to Rivera then knelt, drew the handcuffs from his belt, and snapped them around her slight wrists.

“She’s cold.”

“Supernatural,” said Rivera.

“She’s not the only one, evidently.” He took off his hat so Rivera could see his cocked eyebrow of inquisition.

“I’m not supernatural.”

“I don’t judge. I am not a judger. It’s traumatic. I know how I felt when I got outed by surprise.”

“How was that a surprise? You were marching in the Pride Parade wearing your dress blue uniform with no pants and a yellow codpiece.”

“Didn’t mean I was gay; Cops without Pants was the theme that year. You got any duct tape? That shriek is fucking spooky.” Cavuto rolling with the weird, as he always had. He had the ability to deny a supernatural situation while simultaneously dealing with it in a practical way, which is why Rivera had called him in the first place.

“You’re going to tape her mouth?”

“Only until I get her to St. Francis and can get them to sedate her and sign off on a psych hold. I’ll say she did it herself.”

“St. Francis isn’t ten blocks from here. Throw her in the car, hit the lights, and you’ll be there before she comes to.”

“I’m not going to carry her to the car when she is perfectly capable of walking on her own, probably.”

“I’ll help you. It might be twenty minutes before she comes to.”

“Plenty of time for you to go buy burgers down the block and bring them back.”

“I’ll call the order in and go pick it up.”

“Curly fries. Two doubles, no tomato. You’re buying.”

“Inspector Cavuto, you are a huge lunch whore,” said Rivera, reaching for the phone.

“Protect and served, lunch—SFPD motto.” The big cop grinned. “But it may not be a bad idea to keep her down. I have some zip restraints in the car for her ankles. Call for burgers.”

Rivera hit the burger button on speed dial and watched his ex-partner lumber out to the brown Ford sedan, which was, as usual, parked in a red zone. The big man popped the trunk and stirred around inside.

The girl from the burger place came on the line with a perky, “Polk Street Gourmet Burgers, can I help you?”

“Yeah, I’d like—”

ZZZZZT!

He barely heard the sound, just a spine-wrenching white-hot pain that started at the back of his neck and bolted to his extremities. Through the sizzling disruption of his thoughts he remembered he’d left the stun gun on the counter behind him. When he came to, Cavuto was kneeling over him.

“How long was I out?”

“Ten, maybe fifteen seconds.”

Rivera rubbed the back of his head. Must have hit it on the edge of the counter when he fell. Every joint in his body hurt. He rolled to his hands and knees and looked back to where the raggedy woman had been lying.

“Gone,” said Cavuto. He dangled his handcuffs in front of Rivera’s eyes. They were still locked. “I heard her scream again, ran in, she was gone.”

“The back door is locked,” said Rivera. “Go after her.”

“Not going to matter. She’s gone.”

“What’s with all the smoke? She start a fire?”

“Nope. Just a cloud of smoke behind the counter where I guess she was standing when she zapped you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” said Cavuto. “You’re going to need to call someone with more experience at this than me.” He picked up the phone receiver from the floor, held it to his ear. “Yeah, did you get that order? Two double burgers, medium well, everything but tomatoes, curly fries.” He looked at Rivera. “You want anything?”

3. Something About Sophie

Sophie Asher was seven years old. She lived in San Francisco with her aunties, Jane and Cassie, on the second floor of a building that overlooked the cable-car line in North Beach. Sophie had dark hair and blue eyes, like her mother, and an overactive imagination, like her father, although both parents were gone now, which is why she was looked after by her aunties; two widows who lived in the building, Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Korjev; as well as two enormous black hellhounds, Alvin and Mohammed, that had simply appeared in her room when she was a toddler. She liked dressing up like a princess, playing with her plastic ponies, eating Crunchy Cheese Newts, and making grandiose declarations about her power over the Underworld and her dominion over Death, which was why she was currently in a time-out in her room while Auntie Jane was frantically chattering into the phone out in the great room.

From time to time, Sophie popped her head out the door and fired off another salvo of flamboyant nonsense, because she was the Luminatus, dammit, and she would have the last word.

“I am become Death, destroyer of worlds!” she shouted, her passion somewhat diffused when the pink ribbon holding her pigtail caught in the door as she ducked back into her room.

“So, that’s what we’re dealing with here,” said Jane into the phone. “She’s gotten completely out of hand.” Jane was tall, angular, and wore her short platinum hair sculpted into various unlikely permutations, from angry spikes to soft finger waves, all of which played counterpoint to the tailored men’s suits she wore when she worked at the bank, making her appear either fiercely pretty, or frightfully confused. Right now she wore a houndstooth tweed Savile Row suit she’d inherited from Charlie, waistcoat with watch chain, and a pair of eight-inch patent-leather red pumps the same shade as her bow tie. She might have been the result of a time-travel accident where Doctor Who parts were woven into the warp with those of a robot stripper.

“She’s seven,” said Charlie. “Finding out that you’re Death—it’s hard on a kid. I was thirty-three when I thought I was the Luminatus, and I’m still a little traumatized.”

“Tell him about the tooth fairy,” said Cassie, Jane’s wife. She stood barefoot by the breakfast bar in yoga pants and an oversized olive-green cotton sweater, red hair in loose, shoulder-length curls—a calm snuggle of a woman, a chamomile chaser to Jane’s vodka and sarcasm shooter.

“Shhh,” Jane shushed. Sophie didn’t know that Jane was talking to her father, thought, in fact, that he was dead. Charlie had wanted it that way.

“She doesn’t play well with others,” said Jane. “I mean, since she’s this magical thing, she has unrealistic expectations about other magical—uh, persons. She lost a tooth the other day—”

“Awe,” said Charlie.

“Awe,” said Bob, and the other Squirrel People in the room with him, who were gathered around the speakerphone like it was a storyteller’s campfire, made various awe-like noises.

“Yeah, well, the tooth fairy forgot to put money under Sophie’s pillow that night—”

At “tooth fairy,” Sophie popped her head out the door. “I will smack that bitch up and take her bag of quarters! I will not be fucked with!”

Jane pointed until Sophie retreated into her room and closed the door.

“See?”

“Where did she learn that? Little kids don’t talk that way.”

“Sophie does. She just started talking like that.”

“She didn’t when I was alive. Someone had to teach her.”

“Oh, so you’re fine that she all of a sudden becomes Death incarnate without so much as seeing a Sesame Street segment about it, but a little light profanity and it’s all my fault.”

“I’m not saying that, I’m—”

“It’s Jane’s fault,” said Cassie, from across the room.

“You traitorous dyke.”

“See,” said Cassie. “She’s uncouth.”

“I am couth as fuck, Cassie. Who has cash anymore? I was going to pay the kid for the tooth the next day. Sophie has unrealistic expectations.”

“What do you want me to do?” Charlie asked. “I can’t exactly discipline her.”

“That’s the point: no one can discipline her.”

“Fear of kitty?” Charlie asked. When Sophie was just learning to talk, and Charlie had bought her dozens upon dozens of pets, from hamsters to goldfish to hissing cockroaches, only to find them dead a few days later, he discovered, quite by accident, that if Sophie pointed at a living thing and said the word “kitty,” said thing would immediately become unliving. The first time it had happened, to a kitten, in Washington Square Park, had been a shock, but the second time, only minutes later, when Sophie had pointed at an old man and uttered the dreaded k-word, only to have him drop dead on the spot, well, it had become a problem.

“Thing is, I’m not sure she does the k-word anymore,” said Jane. “I’m not sure she hasn’t lost her, you know, powers.”

“Why would you say that?”

Jane looked across the room to Cassie for support. The petite redhead nodded. “Tell him.”

“The hellhounds are gone, Charlie. When we got up yesterday morning they were just gone. The door was still locked, everything was in its place, but they were just gone.”

“So no one is protecting Sophie?”

“Not no one. Cassie and I are protecting her. I can be pretty butch, and Cassie knows that karate for the slow.”

“Tai chi,” said Cassie.

“That’s not a fighting thing,” said Charlie.

“I told her,” said Cassie.

“Well, you guys need to find the goggies! And you need to find out if Sophie still has her powers. Maybe she can protect herself. She made pretty quick work of the Morrigan.” Charlie had chased the raven-women into a vast underground grotto that had opened up under San Francisco, and was engaging them in battle when little Sophie showed up with Alvin and Mohammed and more or less vaporized them with a wave of her hand. Not in time, however, to save Charlie from the Morrigan’s venom.

“Well, I can’t have her just kitty someone,” said Jane. “That may be the one bit of your training that stuck.”

“That’s not true,” said Cassie. “She puts her napkin in her lap and always says please and thank you.”

“Well, try it,” said Charlie. “Do an experiment.”

“On Mrs. Ling? Mrs. Korjev? The mailman?”

“No, of course not, not on a person. Maybe on a lab animal.”

“May I remind you that most of your friends are lab animals.”

“Hey!” said Bob.

“Not them,” Charlie said. “I mean an animal that doesn’t have a soul.”

“How can I be sure of that? I mean, look at you—”

“I guess you can’t,” said Charlie.

“Welcome to Buddhism,” said Audrey, who had moved to the corner of the room to allow space for the Squirrel People to gather around the phone.

“That’s not helpful,” Jane called.

“Just find the hellhounds,” Charlie said. “No matter what is going on with Sophie, they’ll protect her.”

“And how do I do that? Put up posters with their picture. Lost: two four-hundred pound indestructible dogs. Answer to the names Alvin and Mohammed? Hmm?”

“It might work.”

“How did you find them?”

“Find them? I couldn’t get them to go away. I kept throwing biscuits in front of the number 9 °Crosstown Express bus to get rid of them. But she needs them.”

“She needs her daddy, Charlie. Let me tell her you’re alive. I understand if you don’t want her to see you, but we can tell her you’re out of town. You can talk to her on the phone. Your voice is kind of the same—a little scratchier and squeakier, but close.”

“No, Jane. Just keep pushing through like you have been. You guys have done a great job with Sophie.”

“Thanks,” Cassie said. “I always liked you, Charlie. Thanks for trusting me to be one of Sophie’s mommies.”

“Sure. I’ll figure something out, I need to talk to someone who knows more than me. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Jane said. She disconnected and looked up to see Sophie coming out of her room, a hopeful light in her eyes.

“I heard you say ‘Charlie,’ ” she said. “Was that Daddy? Were you talking to Daddy?”

Jane went down on one knee and held her arms out to Sophie. “No, sweetie. Daddy’s gone. I was just talking to someone about your daddy. Seeing if they could help us find the goggies.”

“Oh,” said Sophie, walking into her auntie’s embrace. ”I miss him.”

“I know, honey,” Jane said. She rested her cheek on Sophie’s head and felt her heart break for the little kid for the third time that day. She blinked away tears and kissed the top of Sophie’s head. “But if I’ve fucked up my eyeliner again you’re getting another time-out.”

“Come here,” Cassie said, crouching down. “Come to nice mommy. We’ll have ice cream.”

Over at the Three Jewels Buddhist Center, Bob the Beefeater looked at the dead phone, then at Charlie. “Lab animals? Little harsh.”

The Squirrel People nodded. It was a little harsh.

“Jane’s a very damaged person,” Charlie said with a shrug of apology.

Bob looked at the other Squirrel People in their miniature finery and mismatched spare parts. “We’ll be under the porch if you need us,” he said. He trudged out of the dining room. The Squirrel People fell in behind him. Those with lips pouted.

When the last of them was out of the room, Charlie looked to Audrey.

“Something’s going on.”

“Apparently.”

“My daughter needs me.”

“I know.”

“We need to find her dogs.”

“I know.”

“But she can’t see me like this.”

“I can sew you a different outfit,” said Audrey.

“I need a body.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Something’s happening,” Charlie said. “I need to talk to someone else in the business.”

Mike Sullivan had worked as a painter on the Golden Gate Bridge for twelve years when he encountered his first jumper.

“Stand back or I’ll jump,” said the kid.

He wasn’t a kid, really. He looked to be about the same age as Mike, early thirties, but the way he was clinging to the rail made him seem unsure and less grownup. Also, he was wearing a gold cardigan that was two sizes too small for him. He looked as if his grandmother had dressed him. In the dark.

Mike had been on the bridge when there had been jumpers before. They lost about one every two weeks, on average, and he’d even seen, or more frighteningly, heard a couple hit the water, but they usually went over by the pedestrian rails at the road level, not up here on top of one of the towers. This was Mike’s first face-to-face, and he was trying to remember what they had taught them during the seminar.

“Wait,” Mike said. “Let’s talk about this.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Especially not with you. What are you, a bridge painter?”

“Yeah,” said Mike, defensively. It was a good job. Orangey, often cold, but good.

“I don’t want to talk about my life with a guy who paints a bridge orange. All the time, over and over. What could you possibly say that would give me hope? You should be on this side of the rail with me.”

“Fine, then. Maybe you can call one of those hotlines.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

Who goes out without a phone? This guy was a complete loser. Still, if he could get closer, maybe Mike could grab him. Pull him back over the rail. He unhooked the safety line from the left side, rehooked it over the upright, then unhooked his right cable and did the same thing. They had two safety lines with big stainless-steel carabineers on the ends so one was always clipped to the bridge. Now he was within the last few feet of the top of the tower. He could walk up the cable and reach the guy in the stupid sweater. One of the guys on the crew had reached over the pedestrian railing and caught a jumper, dragged her by the collar to safety. The Parks Service had given him a medal.

“You can use my phone,” Mike said. He patted his mobile, which was in a pouch attached to his belt.

“Don’t touch the radio,” said the sweater guy.

The maintenance crew used the radios to keep in touch, and Mike should have called in the jumper before he’d engaged him, but he’d been walking up the cable more or less on autopilot, not looking, and didn’t notice the kid until he was almost to the top.

“No, no, just the phone,” said Mike. He took off his leather work glove and drew the cell phone from its canvas pouch. “Look, I already have the number.” He really hoped he had the number. The supervisor had made them all put the suicide hotline number in their phones one morning before shift, but that had been two years ago. Mike wasn’t even sure if it was still there.

It was. He pushed the call button. “Hang on, buddy. Just hang on.”

“Stay back,” said the sweater guy. He let go of the rail with one hand and leaned out.

Hundreds of feet below, pedestrians were looking out over the bay, strolling, pointing, taking pictures. Hundreds of feet below that, a container ship as long as two football fields cruised under the bridge.

“Wait!” said Mike.

“Why?”

“Uh, because it hurts. They don’t tell you that. It’s seven hundred and fifty feet from here to the water. Believe me, I think about it every day. You hit at a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour, but it doesn’t always kill you. You feel it. It hurts like hell. You’re all broken up, in the cold water. I mean, I’m not sure, but—”

“Crisis hotline. This is Lily. What’s your name?”

Mike held up a finger to signal for the kid to wait just a second. “I’m Mike. Sorry, they were supposed to connect me with the suicide hotline.”

“Yeah, that’s us. But we don’t call it that because it’s depressing. What can I do for you?”

“I’m not calling for me, I’m calling for this guy who needs some help. He’s over the rail on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“My specialty,” said Lily. “Put him on.”

“Stay back,” said tiny sweater guy. He let go with one hand again. Mike noticed that the kid’s hands were turning purple. It was a nice day, but up here, in the wind, it was cold, and hanging on to cold steel made it worse. All the guys on the crew wore long johns under their coveralls, and gloves, even on the warmest days.

“What’s his name?” asked Lily.

“What’s your name?” Mike asked sweater guy.

“Geoff with a G,” said sweater.

“Geoff with a G,” Mike repeated into the phone.

“Tell him he doesn’t have to tell people about the G,” said Lily.

“She says you don’t have to tell people about the G,” Mike said.

“Yes I do. Yes I do. Yes I do,” said Geoff with a G.

“The G is important to him,” Mike said to Lily.

“Is he cute?”

“Pardon.”

“What’s he look like? Is he cute?”

“I don’t know. He’s a guy? He’s going to jump off the bridge.”

“Describe him.”

“I don’t know. He’s about thirty, maybe. Glasses. Brown hair.”

“Is he clean?”

Mike looked. “Yeah. To the eye.”

“He sounds nice.”

“She says you sound nice,” Mike conveyed to Geoff.

“Tell him if he comes down, we can get together, chat about his problems, and I’ll give him a blow job.”

“Really?”

“The point is to get them past the crisis, Mike. Get him off the bridge.”

“Okay,” said Mike. To Geoff, he said. “So, Geoff, Lily here says that if you come down, the two of you can get together and chat about your problems.”

“I’m done talking,” said Geoff.

“Tell him the rest,” said Lily. “The second part usually closes the deal.”

“She says she’ll give you a blow job.”

“What?” said Geoff.

“I’m not saying it again,” Mike said to Lily.

“Tell him I’m beautiful.”

“Really?”

“Yes, fucktard, really. How are you not getting this?”

“Maybe I should just put you on speaker, and you can tell him.”

“Nooooooo,” wailed Geoff. He raised his free hand and swung out into space.

“She’s beautiful,” Mike said.

“Not again,” said Geoff. “No more.” He pushed off into space. No scream. Wind.

“Fuck,” Mike said. He looked, then looked away. He didn’t want to see him hit. He cringed and anticipated the sound. It came up from the water like a distant gunshot.

“Mike?” said Lily.

He caught his breath. He could feel his pulse rushing in his ears and the sound of people shouting below. A code blue came over his radio, signaling for everyone on the crew to stay secured in place until the captain of the bridge could assess the situation.

“He went over,” Mike said into the phone.

“Balls,” Lily said. “This is on you, Mike. This is not on me. If you’d given him the phone—”

“He wouldn’t take it. I couldn’t get close to him.”

“You should have had him call me himself.”

“He didn’t have a phone.”

“What kind of loser goes out without a phone?”

“I know,” said Mike. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“Well, couldn’t be helped,” said Lily. “You’re going to lose some. I’ve been doing this awhile, and even with your best moves, some are going in the drink.”

“Thanks,” said Mike.

“You sound nice,” said Lily. “Single?”

“Uh, kind of.”

“Me, too. Straight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, I have your number. Okay if I call you?”

Mike was still shaking from Geoff’s dive. “Sure.”

“I’ll text you mine. Call anytime.”

“Okay,” Mike said.

“But the blow-job thing is not automatic, Mike. That’s strictly a crisis-line thing.”

“Of course,” Mike said.

“But not out of the question,” said Lily.

“Okay. What do you do if the caller is a woman?”

“I commiserate. I can go from zero to co-miserable at the speed of dark.”

“Okay.”

“I know things, Mike. Many things. Terrible, dark, disturbing things.”

“I should probably report in or something.”

“Okay, call me, bye,” said Lily.

“Bye,” he said.

Mike put his phone back in the pouch then made his way to the top of the tower, hooked his safety lines on the high cables, then sat down, took off his hard hat, and ran his fingers through his hair, as if he might comb some of the strangeness out of the morning that way. He looked up at the giant aircraft warning light, sitting in its orange-painted steel cage twelve feet above his head, at the very top of the bridge, and behind it the sky began to darken as his vision started to tunnel down. He had just about fainted when out of the side of the light tower a woman’s torso appeared—as solid as if a window had opened and she had peeked out, except there was no window. She was jutting right out of the metal, like a ship’s figurehead, a woman in a white lace dress, her dark hair tied back, some kind of white flower pinned in her hair above her ear.

“Alone at last,” she said. A dazzling smile. “We’re going to need your help.”

Mike stood and backed up against the rail, trying not to scream. His breath came in a whimper.

4. Tribulations of the Mint One

Nestled between the Castro and the Haight, just off the corner of Noe and Market Streets, lay Fresh Music. Behind the counter stood the owner, seven feet, two-hundred and seventy-five pounds of lean heartache, the eponymous Mister Fresh. Minty Fresh. He wore moss-green linen slacks and a white dress shirt, the sleeves flipped back on his forearms. His scalp was shaved and shone like polished walnut; his eyes were golden; his cool, which had always been there before, was missing.

Minty held Coltrane’s My Favorite Things album cover by its edges and looked into Trane’s face for a clue to the whereabouts of his cool. Behind him the vinyl disc was spinning on a machined aluminum turntable that looked like a Mars lander and weighed as much as a supermodel. He had hoped that the notes might bring him into the moment, out of a future or a past, anxiety or regret, but Gershwin’s “Summertime” was skating up next on the disc and he just didn’t think he could take the future-past it would evoke.

He had wept into her voice mail.

Did Trane look up from the album cover, lower his soprano sax, and say, “That is some pathetic shit, you know that right?” He might as well have.

He put the album cover down in the polycarbonate “now playing” stand and was stepping back to lift the tone arm when he saw the profile of a sharp-featured Hispanic man moving by the front window. Inspector Rivera. Not a thing, Rivera coming to the shop. It was cool. The last time he’d spoken to Rivera, the Underworld had manifested itself in the city in the form of horrible creatures, and chaos had nearly overcome the known world, but that was in the past, not a thing, now.

He willed a chill over himself as Rivera came in. Then—

“Oh, hell no! Get your ass right back out that door.”

“Mr. Fresh,” said Rivera, with a nod. “I think I need your help.”

“I don’t do police work,” said Fresh. “I’ve been out of the security business for twenty years.”

“I’m not police anymore. I have a bookstore over on Russian Hill.”

“I don’t sell books either.”

“But you still sell soul vessels, don’t you?” Rivera nodded to a locked, bulletproof case displaying what appeared to be a random collection of records, CDs, tapes, and even a couple of old wax cylinders.

To Minty Fresh, every object in the case glowed a dull red, as if they’d been heated in a furnace, evincing the human soul housed there, but to anyone but a Death Merchant, they looked like, well, a random collection of recorded media. Rivera knew about the Death Merchants. He’d first come to the shop with Charlie Asher when the shit had gone down, when the Death Merchants around the city had been slaughtered and their stores ransacked for soul vessels by the Morrigan—“sewer harpies,” Charlie had called them. But now that Rivera was one of them, a Death Merchant, he could also see the glow. Minty had sent him the Great Big Book of Death himself.

Fresh said: “Y’all read the book, then, so you know you shouldn’t be here, talking to me. You know what happened last time Death Merchants started talking. Just go back to your store and keep collecting the objects when they come up in your calendar, like you been doing.”

“That’s the thing: I haven’t been collecting soul vessels at all.”

“The fuck you mean, you haven’t been collecting them at all?”

Minty Fresh made a motion with his hands of leveling, as if he were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth of calm over a counter constructed of contemporary freak-out. With concerted effort now, and lower register, he said, “Never?”

“I bought the date book, and a number two pencil,” Rivera said, trying to accentuate the positive. He smiled. In the background, Coltrane improvised a boppy, playful riff around “Summertime” ’s sweet, low-down melody. “The names and numbers showed up on the calendar, like the Big Book said they would? But I didn’t do anything about them.”

“You can’t just not do the job. Someone has to do it. That’s why they put it in the book, right in the beginning, right by the part about not having contact with other Death Merchants. You just ignore the Big Book, shit gonna get muthafuckin’ freaky up in here.”

“It already has,” said Rivera. “That’s why I’m here. A woman appeared in my shop, not exactly a human woman. A dark thing.”

“The Morrigan?” Minty could still see the Morrigan’s three-inch talons raking the wall of a dark subway car where she had confronted him. He shuddered.

“Different,” said Rivera. “This one didn’t have any bird features. She was just pale—dressed in black rags, like a shroud. I didn’t see any claws.”

“How you know she wasn’t just a raggedy woman?”

“She disappeared. Puff of smoke, while my partner watched. Locked door. And she told me. She said she was called Bean Sidhe. Had a really thick brogue, I can’t say it the way she did.”

“Banshee,” said Minty Fresh. “You pronounce it banshee.”

“That makes sense,” said Rivera. “She did a lot of shrieking. You’ve seen her, then?”

“Until ten seconds ago I thought the banshee was a myth, but I recognize the description. My ex—woman I know—did a lot of research on Celtic legends after that last—”

“Then you know what she’s doing here?”

“Not being a detective like you, I can only guess, but I had to guess, I’d guess she the sound the Underworld make when you throw shit in its fan.”

Rivera nodded, as if that made sense. “She did call herself a ‘harbinger of doom.’ ”

“That’s all I’m saying,” said Minty.

“There’s more,” said Rivera.

“Of course there is.”

So Rivera told Minty Fresh about the Emperor’s quest to record the names of the dead, of his insistence that they would be forgotten, and how in the past, the kindhearted madman had been somewhat ahead of the police on supernatural goings-on in the city. When he finished he said, “So, do you think there’s anything to it?”

Minty Fresh shrugged. “Probably. You broke the universe, Inspector, no tellin’ how bad.”

“You sound happy about that.”

“Do I? Because I don’t like that the universe is broken, I keep all my shit there.” For the moment, he did feel a little better, because as much as he had convinced himself that he was losing his grip on his cool, here was someone who was clearly worse off than he. Then he looked at Rivera, standing there easy in his Italian suit, his lines and aspect sharp as a blade, and he realized that the cop, or the ex-cop, had not lost his cool. The world might be unraveling around him, but Rivera was chill as a motherfucker.

“So what do I do?”

“I’d start with doing your job.”

“I’m retired—semiretired.”

“I mean picking up the soul vessels.”

“You think they’d still be there?”

“You had better hope they are.”

“How do I find them?”

“I’d start with your date book full of names, Detective Inspector—that was your title, right?”

Some of Rivera’s chill seemed to slip a bit. Rivera undid a button on his suit jacket, evidently to show that he was in action mode.

Minty smiled, a dazzling crescent moon in a night sky. “Did you just unbutton your coat so you could get to your gun?”

“Of course not, it’s just a little warm in here. I carry my gun on my hip.” Rivera brushed back his jacket to show the Glock.

“But you’re still packing, despite your retirement?”

“Semiretirement. Yes, I started carrying my old backup. The banshee took my stun gun. She zapped me with it.”

“So she can just appear out of nowhere and knock you out?”

“Looks that way.”

“Well, good luck with that,” said Fresh, feeling ever so much cooler.

“I’ll call you,” said Rivera. “Let you know how it goes.”

“If you feel you have to.”

Rivera turned as if to leave, then turned back. “Didn’t you have a pizza and jazz place at Charlie Asher’s building in North Beach?”

“For a while. Didn’t pencil out.”

“You were in it with that spooky girl from Asher’s shop?”

“Also didn’t pencil out.”

“Sorry,” said Rivera, and he seemed genuinely so. “That can be tough. I’m divorced.”

“No damage can’t be buffed out.” said Minty. “Girl ain’t nothin’ but tits and sass.”

Rivera nodded. “Well, good luck with that.” He turned and left the shop, once again, chill as a motherfucker.

Minty Fresh shuddered, then picked up his mobile and began to scroll through his contacts, stopping on Lily’s number, but before he could hit call to set in motion another humiliating surrender of his cool, the phone buzzed and the screen read Three Jewels Buddhist Center.

“Sheeiiiiiiit,” said the Mint One, slow and dreadful, pronouncing the expletive with a long, low sustain of dread.

An iguana in a musketeer’s costume ran under Minty Fresh’s chair and through the beaded curtain into a butler’s pantry, where Charlie Asher sat on an empty mixed nuts can.

“Nice hat,” Charlie said.

The musketeer removed his hat, holding it with perfect little hands (previously raccoon paws, Charlie guessed), and bowed grandly over it.

“You’re welcome,” Charlie said.

The musketeer scampered on through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. Charlie looked through the swinging beads at Minty Fresh, who was sitting on an inverted dining room chair, his knees up around his elbows, putting Charlie in mind of a very large, mint-green tree frog.

“You never seen that hat before?” asked Minty.

“Every day, but it makes him feel special if you notice it.”

“Ain’t you sweet.”

Charlie slid off his can and started through the beaded curtain.

Minty Fresh waved him off. “Ease on back there, Asher. I need to talk to you.”

“Why can’t you talk to me if I’m on the same side of the curtain as you?”

“Because I start looking at you, and before I know it I forget what I’m talking about, and I think maybe I should chase you away with a stick.”

“Ouch.” Charlie slunk back into the pantry and sat on his can. “What’s on your mind?”

“You called me.”

“But you showed up.”

Minty Fresh hung his head, rubbed his scalp. “I’m thinking maybe us talking isn’t the same now as it was before.”

Charlie was happy to hear it. “So you think now that Sophie is the Luminatus, everything is over, so we don’t have to worry about the rise of the Underworld?”

“No. I think that shit might already be rising. When you were collecting soul vessels, how many you think you picked up a year? On average?”

“I don’t know, a couple a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

“Yeah, me, too. So that’s about a hundred a year. And about fifty-five hundred people a year die in the city proper. So that means there must be, call it, fifty-five Death Merchants.”

“That sounds about right,” Charlie said. “I met the Death Merchant in Sedona who collected my mother’s vessel, he said about two a week, too.”

“Right,” said Minty. “So, when they all came up, when it hit the fan, we only knew a dozen Death Merchants in the city, and the Morrigan killed all but three of us. Two if we count you as dead.”

“Which I don’t,” Charlie said.

“But you don’t collect soul vessels anymore. You don’t have a shop to turn them around.”

“Okay, don’t count me.”

“And I sent your copy of the Great Big Book of Death to Inspector Rivera.”

“Yeah. I wonder how he’s doing.”

“He was in my shop right before you called. A banshee appeared in his bookstore and zapped him with a stun gun.”

“So, not adjusting well to retirement?”

“He hasn’t collected a single soul vessel.”

“None?”

The Mint One shook his head. “That’s at least a hundred souls not collected, not passed on to the new owner. Plus, we don’t know what happened to the souls the other dead Death Merchants were supposed to collect.”

“I always assumed that when a Death Merchant died someone took his place. Audrey says the universe just takes care of the mechanics of it. Everything seeks balance.”

“Audrey, the one who put you inside that little monster?”

Charlie waved his talons in the air as if to dismiss the point and realized that he might be helping to make it. “So you’re saying—what are you saying?”

“Rivera said the names appeared in his date book, even though he didn’t pick up the souls. What if no one has been collecting the souls of the Death Merchants who were killed? What if by defeating the Underworlders we threw things out of balance? What if the Death Merchants who were killed weren’t replaced? What if there are a thousand souls that haven’t been collected since the Morrigan rose? Maybe more. A lot of people were killed in the city at that time. What if some of them were Death Merchants we didn’t know about, and all of those souls haven’t been collected?”

“I used to hear them moving under the streets, calling out, if I was late collecting just one,” said Charlie. “When they got their hands on all the soul vessels in our shops—”

“It was a shit storm,” said Minty. “Now multiply that by ten, twenty.”

“So you think this banshee—?”

“I think the bitch is announcing coming attractions.”

“Sssssshit,” Charlie said, letting the s hiss out between his multitude of teeth.

“Uh-huh,” said Minty. “You know where your old date book is?”

“At my apartment, I guess. I can’t imagine Jane would have thrown it out.”

“Call her.” Minty pulled his phone from his jacket pocket.

“You’ll have to help me dial.” Charlie waved his talons before his face again. They were not suited for touch screens and buttons. He gave Minty Fresh the number. Cassie answered and they waited while she found Charlie’s date book—a three-year calendar with only one year used when he had died.

“It’s filled in for the whole year, Charlie,” said Cassie over the speaker. “The latest entry is today. How can that be?” Charlie looked up at Minty Fresh and again missed having eyebrows—if he’d had them, he’d have raised one at the tall Death Merchant.

“I don’t know, Cassie. I’m trying to figure it out. Let’s put the book back and I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. Thanks.”

Minty disconnected them. “With you and Rivera, that’s a couple of hundred souls uncollected right there.”

“And you think it might be thousands.”

“In the Bay Area alone.”

“We’re probably fine, all those souls and nothing has happened.”

“Banshee,” said Minty, holding a long finger in the air to mark his point. “She calls herself a harbinger of doom, Asher. You know what a harbinger is?”

“I’m really hoping it’s a brand of Scotch.”

“It’s a messenger that tells you what is going to happen. With a banshee, that message is that death is coming.”

Charlie shrugged. “Big Death or little death?”

Fresh shrugged, shook his head.

“Then you need to help me find a body,” said Charlie.

“What?”

“That’s why I called. You help me find a body, then I can help you fix whatever the banshee is warning us about.”

“Like a corpse-type body?”

“Not exactly. Someone who is going to be a corpse, but before they become a corpse.”

“Doesn’t that describe everybody?”

“I mean right before they die. Like we have to be there at the moment of death.”

“Are you asking me to help you kill someone, because no.”

“Let me get Audrey. She’ll explain.”

5. The People Under the Porch

Chöd,” said Audrey. The d was silent, it rhymed with “foe.”

“Chöd?” Minty Fresh repeated. He couldn’t stop looking at the surprised comma of her hair, for which he was grateful, because it kept him from looking at Charlie, which made him uncomfortable. When Audrey came in she insisted that Charlie come out of the pantry, so now they sat at an oak table in the breakfast room of the Buddhist Center, Audrey and he on chairs, Charlie sitting on his mixed nut can atop the table.

“Chöd’s the ritual I will perform to get Charlie a new body.”

When Minty had first seen her in his shop, several years ago, when she was rail thin, wore no makeup, and her shaved head was still in stubble, it would have been easy to believe she was a Buddhist nun, although he remembered at the time thinking she might be a chemotherapy patient, but now, with her drag-queen hair and a girlish shape filling out jeans and a San Francisco Giants thermal, it was hard to make the leap. This woman had been given the secret books of the dead by a Tibetan master? How could that be? She was dating a puppet!

“She can’t use the p’howa of forceful projection ritual that she used to put souls into the Squirrel People,” said Charlie.

“There would be no way to know that there wasn’t another soul in someone’s body,” Audrey said.

“We don’t know what would happen, but at best you’d end up with two personalities battling,” Charlie added.

“More likely two lunatics in one body, neither functioning,” said Audrey.

“And y’all can’t just use a corpse why? Your thingy of undying?”

“P’howa,” Audrey supplied.

“Because it’s not permanent,” Charlie said. “You remember the old ladies who were here at the Buddhist Center when you and I first came here, the ones that were in my book but who didn’t die because Audrey used the p’howa of undying on them?”

“Yeah, weren’t they living here?”

“Well, they’re all dead.”

“Six months,” said Audrey. “That’s the longest anyone lasted.”

“Really? Sorry. Why didn’t you call me?”

“The Big Book said we weren’t supposed to call you,” said Charlie. “I believe you said something like, ‘Don’t ever call me, Asher. Ever, ever, ever.’ ”

Minty bowed his head and nodded. He had said that. He said, “But you did call, and there you sit, you and all your little friends are fine, a year later, not even a stain on your wizard coat, while those old ladies died in six months.”

“We don’t quite know how they work—the Squirrel People,” Audrey said, wincing a little toward Charlie.

“It’s okay,” Charlie said, putting his claw out to comfort her. “I’m one of them.”

Audrey put her index finger in Charlie’s talon and looked into his expressionless black eyes.

“Wait,” said Minty Fresh. “Y’all aren’t…?”

“No,” said Charlie.

“No way,” said Audrey.

“That would be creepy,” said Charlie. “Although, did I show you this?” He started to unbelt his robe, beneath which he appeared to be wearing an innertube wrapped around his waist.

“No!” said Minty Fresh. “I mean, yes, you showed it to me.” He held up a hand to block his view of Charlie and squinted between his fingers until the croc-headed puppet person retied his wizard robe. He found it easier to cope with the sight of Charlie if he pretended he was a really complex speakerphone, but a speakerphone with an enormous peen was a peen too far.

“Mister Fresh,” said Audrey, “we need you to help us find someone who will willingly vacate their body for Charlie.”

Fresh pushed back on his chair as if he needed distance in order to see her. “How the hell would I find someone like that, and if I did, why the hell would they do that?”

“Well,” said Charlie, “if they knew they were going to die anyway, that their soul was going to leave their body anyway, they might.”

And at last Minty Fresh knew why they had called. “Y’all want me to tell you when a new name appears in my date book so you can what, go talk someone into giving up their body?”

“Yeah, and it’s going to have to be the right person,” said Audrey. “It’s going to have to be someone who will die accidentally. If it’s someone who is terminally ill, I don’t know if the disease won’t just continue like it did with the ladies.”

Fresh shook his head. “You know the names don’t come annotated with a cause of death? Just a name and the number of days we have to retrieve the soul.”

“Right,” said Charlie. “But Audrey can go find the person. See if they’re sick. If they’re the right gender. I don’t think I could deal with being a woman.”

“Because being a woman would be a step down from what you are now?” Minty Fresh smiled.

“Because if I woke up in the morning and saw my breasts, I’d never get out of the house,” Charlie said.

“He does like breasts,” said Audrey.

“Although we only had the one night together,” Charlie said.

“But you were very attentive,” said Audrey.

“I’m always attentive. I’m looking at them right now.”

“Stop it!” Minty said. They were a couple. They were talking like a couple. The freaky-haired Buddha nun and the crocodile-wizard monster. It was wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. Was he the only person on earth who had to be alone? “I can’t do it. You shouldn’t have called.” He stood.

“You’re the only one who can help,” said Charlie.

“It’s impossible. I have to get about finding out if the other Death Merchants in the city were replaced, if they’re doing their job.”

“Mr. Fresh,” said Audrey, standing. “When I thought the Death Merchants were somehow imprisoning human souls, when I was trying to rescue the soul vessels from you guys, the Squirrel People helped. They fanned out all over the city. I found a few of you, but they found others on their own. They can see the glow of a soul vessel. They can move around the city in the shadows. They could help. We could help.”

“No.” Minty Fresh turned to leave, bent to go through the door. He’d learned his lesson about the hundred-year-old doorways in this place before. There was still a forehead-shaped dent in the woodwork above the kitchen door from when he’d stormed in here to save Charlie the first time.

Charlie jumped off the table and scampered after the big man. “Fresh, my daughter needs me! She doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

“Well, go see her.”

“I can’t go see her like this.”

“She’ll be fine. Kids are resilient.” He didn’t know anything about kids, but he’d heard people say that. “She’ll understand. She’s the Big Death.”

“No she’s not. She seems to have lost her—well—powers; she’s just a normal kid. Her hellhounds disappeared, and if the Underworld is rising again, she won’t have anyone to protect her.”

Fresh stopped but didn’t turn. “I don’t mean to be critical, Asher, ’cause I know you got a lot on your mind, but that’s the part of the story you lead with.”

“Sorry.” Charlie stood in the entry to the parlor. Audrey joined him.

“Calling you was my idea,” said Audrey.

“So,” said Minty, “the one thing that was supposed to end all this light versus dark, manifestation of the Underworld on earth, crazy shit that went down a year ago, the rise of the Luminatus, that has been undone?”

“Apparently,” said Charlie.

Minty turned to them now and began to count on his fingers. “So there’s a banshee loose in the city, warning of coming doom. You, Rivera, and possibly many other Death Merchants have not been collecting soul vessels for over a year, and we don’t know what happened to the souls of all those who died in the city during that year. You don’t even have a shop anymore to exchange the vessels if you were collecting them. And the only thing that was keeping the forces of darkness at bay has been demoted to, what, a first grader?”

“Second,” said Charlie. “But she’s in the advanced reading group.”

“So, really, we are totally, completely fucked. And by we, I mean everybody.”

“Pretty much,” said Charlie, nodding furiously enough that his jaw flapped a little.

“Life is suffering,” said Audrey, cheerfully.

Fresh nodded. “All right, then. I’ll call you with the names.”

“Just like that?”

“I have to collect the souls anyway. I find someone in my book is young, healthy, male, and what else?”

Charlie started to untie his robe again, “One about this size if—”

Audrey interrupted, “Just the name and address if you have it. We’ll see if we can find any Death Merchants.”

“Yeah, you gonna have a hard enough time convincing someone they are going to die so they need to vacate their body so the wizard lizard there can move in.”

He turned to leave, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, did I tell you that the Emperor is making a list of all of the city’s dead?”

“What for?”

“No fucking idea, I just didn’t want you to be the only one got to whip out a surprise.” He laughed—the resigned laugh of the doomed—as he walked out.

Outside on the street he paused by the door of the great bloodred Caddy as he fished in his jacket pocket for his keys. Fog had rolled up out of the bay at sundown and was drifting in a misty wave from the south. On this street they had come for Charlie, the Morrigan, snaking out of the sewer grates at either end of the block, singing their taunts even as Fresh was bearing down on them in the Caddy—screeching in anger and agony as he ran them over, the claws of one raking into the metal of the Caddy’s hood as she was dragged under the bumper, the other tearing at the rear fender as his tires burned across her back. The guy at the body shop said the fender looked like it had been attacked by a grizzly bear. He’d never seen anything like it. “Me either,” Minty had said. “Nobody has.”

He cocked his head, thinking he might have heard a female voice on the street above the jingling of his keys. Just laughter, maybe—girls out for dinner or drinks a block away on Mission Street, their voices echoing distant and diffused because of the fog. Probably.

They stared at the doorway as they listened to Minty Fresh’s steps recede and the front door close behind him.

Audrey checked the clock. “I have to lead a meditation at seven. They’re going to start arriving soon. You might want to get out of sight.”

“I should have asked him about Lily.”

“He would have brought it up if he wanted to talk about it. Why don’t you go ask Bob and the others if they remember all the places they collected soul vessels? They really might be able to help.”

“I don’t really feel welcome down there.”

“Don’t be silly. They love you.”

“Lately it feels like they might be plotting to kill me.” Despite having been liberated from his beta-male DNA, Charlie still viewed the world with glassy-eyed suspicion, due in no small part to the fact that he had already been murdered once and hadn’t cared for the experience.

“Take snacks,” Audrey said. “They love snacks. There’s some trail mix on the counter.”

“Sure, snacks,” Charlie said, heading for the kitchen. “If only Jesus had thought to take snacks with him into the lion’s den.”

“Jesus didn’t go into the lion’s den, that was Daniel.”

“Well, Daniel, then. I thought you were a Buddhist.”

“I am, but that doesn’t make me an oblivious nitwit, too.”

“Is that any way for a nun to talk?” Charlie called back, but Audrey had already headed upstairs to change. He scampered into the kitchen, grabbed a packet of trail mix off the counter, jumped down, ducked out the dog door, hopped down the back porch steps, then through the little hatch under the steps into the sanctuary of the Squirrel People.

The city under the house was a maze of mismatched found objects patched together with zip ties, silicone glue, and duct tape, all lit from above by low-voltage LED lights strung along the floor joists of the great Victorian, which kept the entire space in a state of perpetual twilight. Audrey had purchased the lights at Charlie’s request, after he had watched several of the Squirrel People nearly burn the house down while trying to construct an apartment from discarded yogurt containers by candlelight.

There was no one around.

Charlie had spent very little time down here, choosing to spend his days on the upper floors of the Buddhist Center, either with Audrey or reading from the many books in the library. When he was reading he could fly away into the wildest skies of imagination, untethered to the reality that his soul was trapped in a wretched creature cobbled together from meat and bone, like us all.

Charlie entered the main passage, which was constructed entirely from automobile side windows. Once in it, he felt as if he were walking in a long, serpentine aquarium. Despite the disparate materials from which it was constructed, the Squirrel People’s city had a strange symmetry, a uniformity of design that Charlie found comforting, because it was built for someone his size, yet disturbing, because it was so unlike anyplace human beings lived.

“Hey,” he called. “Anyone home?”

He made his way along a street that was lined by old computer monitors, each gutted of its electronics and filled with a nest built from throw pillows and fabric scraps.

Still no one. The city had tripled in size since he’d been down here, and as he moved he encountered open, communal spaces, as well as what were clearly spaces meant to preserve privacy. The Squirrel People did not mate, as there were no two alike, no two made from the same sets of parts, but they paired off, each finding some affinity with another that Charlie could not see. The only thing they had in common beyond their size—which was chosen quite by accident when Audrey was studying to be a costume designer, long before she’d gone off to Tibet, and she had wanted to design and sew elaborate costumes without the expense of the materials for full-size models—was that each housed a human soul. The first of the Squirrel People had been little more than animated dress forms. Later, Audrey had scavenged the shops of Chinatown for animal parts, trying to give each of them a distinction, trying different parts for limbs, testing efficacy, using first fresh meat and later smoked for the protein that the soul would direct into forming a unique, living creature.

“The universe is always seeking order,” Audrey had said. “The Squirrel People, how they come together, is the best example I’ve ever seen of that.”

“Yeah, or it’s black magic and creepy necromancy,” Charlie had said.

She’d smacked the tip of his enormous dong with her fork, which he thought a not very Buddhist thing to do, and said so. “Buddhist monks invented kung fu, Charlie. Don’t fuck with us.”

“Hey, Bob!” Charlie called down the corridor. “It’s Charlie, I need to talk to you.”

He didn’t really need to say it was Charlie, since he and Bob were the only of their kind for whom Audrey had constructed vocal cords. After Charlie, she’d found out she hadn’t actually been saving souls by making the Squirrel People, but had stopped them in their karmic progression, so he had been the last.

The computer monitor street branched into a half-dozen different passageways, each constructed from a different material. Charlie ducked into one that looked to be made of plastic drainpipe, and shuffled along its length, cutting back and forth until he heard voices coming from the far end. Voices?

He slowed as he approached the end of the passageway and peeked into the wide chamber it opened upon. The Squirrel People had excavated an amphitheater here, under the house, perhaps ten feet below ground level, and it was larger than the grand parlor upstairs. He was looking down over a large group of the people who were surrounding a central platform that looked as if it had been constructed from an old snare drum. How could they have gotten all this stuff down here without being seen?

Bob stood on the snare drum in his bright red beefeater uniform, holding his mighty spork over his head as if it were the staff of Moses.

“Bring the head for Theeb!” he shouted.

“Bring the head for Theeb. Bring the head for Theeb.” The Squirrel People chanted.

From another passage an iguana-headed fellow in a tricorner hat and a squirrel girl in a pink ball gown emerged carrying a silver tray between them. On it was the raggedly severed head of a calico cat.

“Bring the head for Theeb,” they chanted.

Charlie backed into his chamber. How were they chanting? Sure, some of them were still making the clicking noises, the growls, the hisses he was used to, but some were chanting. They had voices.

He crouched and backed away until he was out of sight of the amphitheater, then he turned and scurried out of the city under the porch.

6. Ghosts of the Bridge

A great regret of ghosts lingered on the Golden Gate Bridge. Mad as bedbugs, they slid down the cables, swam in the roadway, hung

off the upright lines, whipped in the wind like tattered battle flags, dangled their feet off the anchor piers, and called into the dreams of sleeping sailors as their ships passed through the Gate. Mostly they napped, curled up in the heavy steel towers, entwined together in the cables like impassioned earthworms, tucked under an asphalt blanket snoring into the treads of a million tires a day. They drifted along the walkways, spun and buffeted by passersby, wafting along like tumbleweeds, rebounding at the shore to bounce back the other way, waves of spirits, a tide of sleeping souls, dozing until awakened by human anguish in their midst. They could sense a jumper on the bridge and gathered around to watch, to curse, to encourage, to haunt, taunt, and gibe, which is how the ghost of Concepción Argüello came to find Mike Sullivan, the bridge painter, that day.

“Oh, pardon me,” she’d said. “It appears I have upset you. Of course, you need time to adjust. We’ll talk another time.”

She disappeared back into the steel of the tower, leaving Mike breathless and deeply, deeply freaked out. Still, when his supervisor called him down to be debriefed by the highway patrol and the captain of the bridge, Mike didn’t mention the ghost, and he declined the counseling they offered. He’d done the best he could, they said, considering the circumstances. Most of the time, someone who was thinking about jumping just needed someone to say something—someone to notice them, pull them out of the vortex of despair forming in their own mind. The state patrolmen who worked the bridge on bicycles were all trained to look for and engage anyone who was alone, looking pensive, crying at the rail, and they had a great record for bringing people back from the edge, getting them to snap back into the world with just a word of kind concern. He’d done fine, he’d be fine, just take the rest of the day off, regroup, they’d told him.

Mike had taken the rest of the day off, and he had rested, but unfortunately, he had also shared his tale of the ghost in the beam with his girlfriend of fourteen months, Melody, who first suggested that he might have had a ministroke, because that had happened to a guy on the Internet. When he insisted that no, he had seen and heard what he had seen and heard, she responded that he needed to see a shrink, that he was emotionally unavailable, and furthermore, there were much hotter guys than him at the gym who wanted to sleep with her and she had known deep down that there was something wrong with him and that’s why she’d never given up her apartment. He agreed that she was probably right about those things and that she would probably be better off if she slept with the hotter guys at the gym. He’d lost a girlfriend, but he’d gained a drawer in his dresser, a third of the clothes rod in his closet, and all three shampoo shelves in his shower, so he really wasn’t all that broken up about the breakup. Once she was gone, he realized that he didn’t feel any more alone than he had when she had been in the room with him, and he was a little sad that he didn’t feel sadder. All in all, it had been a productive day off.

He’d been back at work for a week and was hanging in the framework under the roadway when the ghost came to him again.

“You know,” she said softly, her voice reaching him before she appeared, sitting on the beam above his head, “when they were building the bridge they strung a safety net under it.”

Mike caught his safety lines and tugged them to make sure they were both secure before he reacted. “Holy shit,” he said.

“When a workman would fall, and he was caught by the net, he was said to have joined the ‘Halfway to Hell’ club. I think I am also in that club.”

She had an accent but not much of one, and this time she wore a black dress with a wide lace collar. Her hair was pinned back into a bun, and again, there was a flower in her hair. He didn’t know what to say, but he had been preparing himself for her to reappear, just so he wouldn’t be surprised in a bad spot and end up tumbling off the bridge to his death. Hallucination or not, he’d resolved to be prepared. He said, “There’s seagull shit all over these beams. You’re going to mess up your dress.”

“Ah, you are so gallant, but I am beyond the reach of huano de la gaviota.”

“You are Spanish, then?”

“I was born on Spanish soil, yes, right there at the Presidio, in 1792.” She pointed a delicate finger toward the San Francisco shore and the fort beyond it. “I beg your pardon, I am Concepción Argüella. My father was the governor of Alta California, commandante of the El Presidio Real de San Francisco.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Mike said. He didn’t reach out to shake her hand, or even to kiss it (that seemed like what he should do, her being so formal and everything), but he was hanging two hundred feet over the water, and she was a good twelve feet away, and if she floated over to him, he thought he might completely lose his mind, so he sort of bowed—nodded, really. “I’m Mike Sullivan, I paint the bridge.”

“Ah, I would have guessed that from your bucket of paint and your dashing coveralls,” said the ghost. “May I thank you for keeping our bridge looking beautiful? We all very much appreciate it, Señor Sullivan.”

“We?” Mike said. He was still trying on the idea of talking to a ghost; he wasn’t ready to be gang-haunted.

“There are many here on the bridge.”

“Why?” Mike asked.

“It is a place between places, and so are we, between places.”

“No,” said Mike. “Why are you here?”

She sighed, a light and ghostly sigh that was lost in the wind, and she told him.

Although I had never set foot in Spain, I was very much raised as an aristocratic Spanish lady—California was Spanish land then. I lived in the grand governor’s house in the Presidio, and my mother saw to it that I was dressed in the finest fabrics and latest fashions from Madrid. I was educated in letters by the friars and nuns of the Mission, and in the ways of the world by my mother, which is to say, despite our station in the wildest reaches of the Spanish empire, I was sheltered. I spent most of my life in our house and the gardens around it, surrounded by soldiers and priests, never venturing into the settlement of Yerba Buena. But then, when I was fifteen, there came through the Golden Gate a Russian ship, their chief officer, Count Nikolai Rezanov, seeking supplies for the Russian colony of Sitka far to the north, which was starving.

My father received the count with great courtesy, and he spent many evenings at our home. My mother was intent upon showing the Russian that even in the colonies, the manners and traditions of old Spain could be maintained. Many dinners with officers and local officials and their wives were served. Even when our home was filled with guests, I could not tear my attentions from the count. He was so handsome and worldly, and he regaled us with tales of the north and Japan, where the czar had sent him as an ambassador. I was breathless in his presence, so I would retreat to the corners, but I soon found that as often as I tried to look at him from across the room, to drink him in, I found him looking back, and my heart rejoiced. I could not hide my love behind a lace fan, and he could not disguise his attentions behind courtly manners.

Finally, he passed me a note one evening when kissing my hand and I hurried away to the kitchen just to read those few precious words: “Tonight. The garden. When the moon is over Alcatraz.” He knew, somehow, that I could see the island from my bedroom window, and after the guests had left and the house was long silent, I waited, watching the moon for what seemed months, but before it was over the island, the fog spilled in through the Golden Gate like milk poured into tea, and the night sky was nothing more than a gray shroud. I could wait no longer. Still in my party dress, I went to the garden, not even stopping to take a cloak, and before the chill could settle upon me, I saw him.

“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “The fog—I have been here all evening.”

I ran to him, then stopped, bounced upon my toes, feeling as if I might burst with excitement. He took me in his arms and kissed me. My first kiss.

In the weeks that followed I lived only for the time I could be in the presence of my beloved “Nikolasha,” and he was the same for me. He made excuses to be at the fort during the day, and I made excuses to be out and about when he was there. Even a glimpse of him during the day would make my heart leap and sustain me, until evening, when I could see him again in my parents’ house, and later, in the garden. Even as our love grew, though, so did the specter of time begin to loom over us. Nikolai had come to establish trade with the Spanish colony to sustain the struggling Russian settlements in the far north, but Spanish law dictated that the colonies could not trade with a foreign power. For all of his courtesy and goodwill, my father could not grant the count his request.

“And what if I were to marry your daughter?” Nikolai said one evening over dinner.

“Yes,” I blurted out. “Yes, Father, yes!”

My father smiled, as did my mother, for they had not been blind to our attraction, and when my father spoke, my mother smiling in a bemused manner the whole time, I knew they had discussed this possibility before it had even occurred to Nikolai.

“I would honored to grant you my daughter’s hand, but it is not in my power to enter into a trade agreement with Russia, nor, I daresay is it yours to speak for the Czar. But if you bring me a letter of permission from the Czar, sanctioning your marriage to my Conchita, then I think I can convince the king to grant a trade agreement with your colonies. In the meantime, the people of Alta California and Mission de San Francisco, will give, out of Christian charity, enough supplies to sustain the people of Sitka through the winter. No trade will have taken place, no law broken. You can deliver the supplies on your return voyage to Russia to gain the Czar’s permission.

Nikolai was ecstatic. Normally composed and ever so dignified, he stood and cheered, then apologized and bowed to everyone at the table individually, after which he sat down and collected himself.

I was in tears and my mother held me as I wept with joy onto her shoulder.

“I may be gone some time,” Nikolai said, trying to calm himself. “Even after I reach Mother Russia’s shores, I will have a long trek across Siberia to reach St. Petersburg to get the Czar’s permission. It may be more than a year before I am able to return.”

“I’ll wait!” I said.

“The Czar will likely order I stop at the other colonies on the return voyage and the journey is too treacherous in the winter. If I miss the season, I may be two years.”

“I’ll wait!” I repeated.

My father smiled. “We shall all wait, Count Rezanov, as long as it takes.”

“Forever,” I said. “If it takes forever.”

When he sailed out of the bay I felt as if my heart went with him, and I swear I could feel the tether, even as I stood on the hill above the Golden Gate and watched the mast of his ship disappear over the horizon. And I waited, after a year running to the top of the hill any time the guard announced a ship. Two years.

I spent whole days, wrapped in a cloak against the fog, staring out to sea, thinking that my presence might pull him to me. I knew he had to feel the same thing, the tether to his heart, and I would be there above the Gate so he could follow it across the ocean, home, to me.

For forty years I waited, meeting every morning with the thought of him, ending every night with prayers for him, and he never returned. Word never came. What had befallen him? Whom had he met? Had he forgotten me? I died a nun, for I would have no one else, and when he did not return, the only way to keep my father from making me marry another was to marry God. Yet I was an unfaithful wife, for I was Nikolai’s and he was mine, always and forever, and there could be no other for me, not even God.

“That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” said Mike, who was shivering in his safety harness, and not from the cold wind coming in the Gate. He held out his arms to her, to hold her, to comfort her.

Concepción bowed her head to hide her tears, then slipped off the beam and floated toward him.

Mike’s radio crackled. “Sully! The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Mike scrambled for the mic strapped at his shoulder. “Wha, wha, wha.” He whipped his head around so quickly, looking for his coworker that his hard hat nearly came off.

The radio: “I’m on the lower north tower, about a hundred feet below you. Seven o’clock.”

Mike spotted him. Bernitelli, wiry little Italian guy. Berni, they called him, working in a window washer’s lift, suspended from cables a hundred feet over the bay.

“I’m okay,” Mike said into the radio. “Just shooing some gulls that were getting in fresh paint.”

“You hooked in?”

“Of course.”

“Then stop waving your arms around and hang on. I thought you were going to take the big dive.”

“Roger that,” Mike said. “Sorry.”

Concepción stood right beside him, now, as solid as the bridge itself, the wind whipping her dress around her legs. Strands of her dark hair blew across her face and she wiped them back behind her ear, then reached out to touch the stream on his cheek left by a tear. He couldn’t feel her hand, but at the gesture he felt a pain rise in his chest, an emptiness, and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, then opened them. She was still there, but smiling now.

“So you never knew—you don’t know what happened to him?”

She shook her head. “Perhaps he found someone else. Perhaps the Czar kept him in Russia? We would ask after him whenever a Russian ship anchored in the bay, but no one had heard of his fate. Had I been a fool, a young girl who clung forever to a broken promise? Perhaps he was pretending all along, playing on my affections to get my father to release supplies for his colonies. This is why I have come to you: to find out.”

“You waited two hundred years?” He realized, even as he asked, that if you were chatting with a ghost, two hundred feet above the San Francisco Bay, you really had no right to question anyone’s judgment.

“You are the first person who could hear us. Sometimes, when someone is about to jump, they can hear us, but they do not answer, and soon they are here with us. By that time, it is too late for answers.”

“Then everyone who has ever jumped—they are all here? They, like you, they—”

“Not all of them, but most.”

Mike tried to count in his head, about one jumper a week, since the bridge was opened, nearly eighty years ago—it was many. “That’s—”

“Many,” she said. “And there are others. Not only those who jump. Many others.”

“Many,” he repeated.

“A bridge is a place between, we are souls that are between.”

“So if I can find out what happened to your count, then what, you move on?”

“One hopes,” said the ghost. “One always hopes.”

“One moment, please.” Mike spidered his way back into a matrix of beams so he was out of sight of Bernitelli, then reached in his coveralls for his smartphone, but paused. It couldn’t be this sudden: two hundred years and he simply looks something up on a search engine and resolves her mission, puts her to rest? What if her count had married another woman? What if he had used her, lied to her?

“Concepción, you have a modern way of speaking, do you know about the Internet?”

“Please, call me Conchita. Yes, I have heard. We hear the radios in the cars as they pass, listen to the people walking on the bridge. I think the Internet is new way people have found to be unpleasant to one an-other, no?”

“Something like that.” He typed the count’s name into a search engine, then, when it suggested he’d spelled it wrong, he hit search. In seconds, the result was back and he tried not to react as he read what the count had done, so many years ago. When she had first appeared, while he was still in shock over the sweater guy going over the rail, she had shown him pity, given him a week to prepare for her reappearance. She had warned him she was coming the second time and had only appeared to him after he was safely hooked to the bridge. She had shown him consideration. He owed her the same.

He shook his head at the phone and said, “Unfortunately, the Internet has sent me to the library to look for word of your count. It may take some time; can you come to me again, soon?”

“It takes great will to come to you like this, but I will return.”

“Thank you. Give me a couple of days. I’ll be working under the roadway for the next few days.”

“I will find you,” she said. “Until next time, thank you, Mike Sullivan.”

In an instant she was beside him. She kissed his cheek and was gone.

Rivera was standing in the living room of a woman named Margaret Atherton, who was eleven months dead, when he realized he wasn’t invisible.

“Hold it right there, you son of a bitch, or I’ll splatter you across that wall,” said the old man, who had entered the room from the kitchen while Rivera was rifling through a side table drawer. Rivera fought instinct and did not reach for the Glock on his hip. Instead he looked over his shoulder to see a man, at least eighty years old, shaped like the letter C, pointing an enormous revolver at him.

“Wait! I’m a cop,” Rivera said. “I’m a policeman, Mr. Atherton.”

“What are you doing in my house?”

Rivera didn’t have an answer. People weren’t supposed to be able to see him when he was retrieving a soul vessel. That’s what it said in the book. That’s what Minty Fresh had told him. “You aren’t actually invisible, it’s just that people won’t notice you. You can slip right into their houses when they bring in the groceries, and as long as you don’t say anything to them, they won’t notice you.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Rivera had said.

“Yeah,” said the big man. “That’s the hard to believe part.”

The old man said, “If you’re a cop, let’s see a badge. And you do anything sketchy I’ll turn you into pink mist.”

When did old people start talking like that? The old fellow was slight and frail-looking, like he might just fall apart at a touch, a man of ash, yet he held the heavy revolver with the steadiness of a bronze monument.

Rivera turned and reached slowly into his jacket pocket for his badge wallet. He’d gone back to active duty two days ago, thinking that the credentials and access would help him to track down the missing soul vessels, but he hadn’t expected this—only the fifth person on his list, the first four were washouts, and already he was abusing his authority. Rivera held up the badge.

“Mr. Atherton, I’m looking into the death of your wife. I knocked and the door was open. I thought something might be wrong, so I came in to check on you.”

“In the side table drawer?” The old man squinted down the sights of the big revolver.

Silent and dark as a shadow, she stepped out of the kitchen behind Atherton and touched the stun gun to his neck.

ZZZZZT!

The old man spasmed, dropped the gun, then fell and twitched in place a bit.

“AIEEEEEEEEEEE!” shrieked the banshee. Then, to Rivera, “Hello, love.”

Rivera fell to a crouch as he drew the Glock and leveled it at her chest. “Back,” he said. He moved to the old man and checked his pulse while keeping the Glock trained on the banshee.

“That’s no way to treat someone who just rescued you.”

“You didn’t rescue me.” Rivera moved the big Smith & Wesson away from Mr. Atherton, and shuddered. It was a.41 Magnum and would, indeed, have splattered parts of him all over the wall if the old man had shot him. “You might have killed him.”

“And he might have killed you. He’s fine. Catchin’ a bit of a nap is all. I’ve your wee box o’ lightning here if you need to give him another buzz.” The banshee clicked the stun gun and a bolt of electricity arced between the contacts.

“Put that down. Now. And back away.”

The banshee did as she was told, grinning the whole time. The old man let out a moan. Rivera knew he should call an ambulance, but wasn’t sure how to explain why he was here.

“Why are you here?” Rivera asked.

“Same as I told you, puppet, harbinger of doom. Usually death, ain’t it?”

“I read about your kind. You’re supposed to call hauntingly in the distance—‘a keening wail,’ they said. You’re not supposed to just appear out of nowhere zapping old people and screaming like a—”

“Like a what? Like a what, love? Say my name. Say my name.”

“What doom? What death? Mine? This guy?”

“Oh, no, he’ll be fine. No, the death I’m warning of is a right scary shit, innit he—a dark storm out of the Underworld, he is. You’ll be wanting a much bigger weapon than that wee thing.”

“It was big enough to stop one of your feathered sisters,” he said.

Rivera lowered the Glock. Actually, it was smaller than the fifteen-round 9-mm Beretta he’d shot the Morrigan with when he’d been on active duty before, nearly half the weight, only ten shots, but more powerful—it was a man-stopper. What did she know about the size of a man’s weapon, stupid, sooty-assed fairy anyway.

“Oh, you shot one of those bitches, and you still draw breath? Aren’t you lovely?” She batted her eyelashes at him coyly. “Still, won’t do for him what’s coming.”

“So you’re not here to warn of some general rising of forces of darkness and—”

“Oh, there’s those, love, to be sure. But it’s the one dark one you’ll be wanting to watch for—not like that winged dolt, Orcus, what came before.”

Rivera hadn’t seen it, the huge, winged Death that had killed so many of the Death Merchants. Charlie Asher had seen it torn apart by the Morrigan before they came for him.

“This one is worse?”

“Aye, this one won’t come bashing through the front door like Orcus. This one’s sneaky. Elegant.”

“Elegant? So you’re not part of the dark rising, you’re just here to warn me, I mean, us?”

“Appears so. Unsettled souls attract a bad lot. This city of yours is a whirlwind of ’em.”

“Like here, in this house?” Rivera was hoping. Maybe she could help.

“No, love, no human souls here ’cept yours and old Smokey’s there.”

Rivera looked down at Mr. Atherton—his shirt collar was smoking from where the stun gun had arced. He patted the ember out.

“So that’s why he could see me…” He looked to the banshee, but she was gone, leaving behind the smell of damp moss and burning peat. Somehow she’d managed to grab his stun gun as she left.

“Fuck!” said Rivera, to no one in particular.

7. Shy Dookie and Death

A study in sadness: Sophie Asher—sitting at the picnic table by the edge of the playground, away from the other kids, denied access

to friends, laughter, and fun, condemned to watch from afar like some exile—was in a time-out.

He walked across the playground with something between a limp and a soft-shoe, as if there were brushes playing rhythm on a snare drum under his steps. He was tall, but not too tall, thin, but not too, dressed in different shades of soft yellow from shoe to hat, the latter a butter-colored homburg with a tiny red feather in the lemon-hued band. He sat down across from Sophie and swung his long legs in under the table.

Sophie saw him, but didn’t look up from coloring her ponies. He was wearing sunglasses on an overcast day, which Aunt Cassie would explain as him protecting his retinas from UV radiation and which Aunt Jane would explain as him being a douche.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to be here,” Sophie said. There was no gate into the playground, and he hadn’t come through the building, past the nuns.

“It’ll be all right,” said the yellow man. His voice was friendly and he sounded Southern. “Why so sad, peanut?” He smiled, just his lower teeth showed, one of them was gold, then he matched her pout to share her sadness.

“I’m in a T.O.,” said Sophie. She glared over her shoulder at Sister Maria la Madonna con el Corpo de Cristo encima una Tortilla, the Irish nun, who had stripped her of her recess and exiled her to this cold limbo by the fence. The nun returned her gaze with a stern, tight-lipped resolve—mime anger. The nun didn’t seem to see the man in yellow at all, which likely was something else she would be stern about.

“How’d you do to get yourself in such a fix, peanut?”

“I told them I had to go home to go to the bathroom and they said no.”

“You have bathrooms in the school, don’t you?” He said bathrooms with an f instead of a th, which she liked and decided that’s the way she would say it, too, from now on.

“It was number two,” she said, putting down her crayon and really looking up at him for the first time. “I don’t do number two away from home.”

“So you got shy dookie. That’s okay, I had that, too, when I was little. Shoot, bitches need to respect a person’s habits.”

“That’s what I said. But they’re all anti-Semites.”

“Y’all lost me, peanut. This a Catholic school, right?”

“Yeah, I go here because it’s by our house, but I’m a Jewess.”

“You don’t say?”

“And an orphan,” Sophie added gravely.

“Aw, that’s sad.”

“And my dogs ran away.”

He’d been shaking his head to the rhythm of the sadness of her story, but he stopped and looked up when she mentioned the goggies. She missed them. She didn’t feel safe without them, so she was acting out, that’s what Auntie Cassie would say.

The man in yellow whistled, a long, sad oh my gracious note. “You got shy dookie, and you an orphan?”

“I’m like Nemo,” Sophie said, still nodding, lots of lower lip to show her tragedy.

“You don’t say, you the captain of a submarine?”

“No, not that Nemo. The clown fish.” Her daddy had been a huge nerd and had taught her about Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, but she meant the real Nemo.

“Shoot, that the saddest story I ever heard, Shy Dookie.”

“That’s not my name.”

“That’s what I’m gonna call you.”

Sophie considered it for a moment. It could be her hip-hop name. Her secret hip-hop name. She shrugged, which meant, “Okay.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can just call me the Magical Negro,” said the man in yellow.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that word.”

“It’s okay. I’m allowed.”

“Some words hurt people and you’re not supposed to say them. I have a word I’m not supposed to say. A really bad word.”

“You do, do you? What that word?”

“I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.”

“You got a lot of secrets.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe this meeting we havin’, this be our little secret.”

“When a grown-up tells you it’s our little secret, it means they might be up to something. You should be careful.”

“You don’t never be lyin’, peanut. You don’t never be lyin’. I do need to be careful. How long it been since you seen them dogs of yours, child?”

“This morning,” she lied. It had been a week since the giant hellhounds had disappeared. “I like your hat,” she said to change the subject. “It’s nice. Daddy said you should always say nice things about a person’s hat because it was an easy way to make them feel better.”

“Why, thank you, peanut.” He ran his fingers around the brim. “You miss your daddy, don’t you?”

How did he know? That wasn’t right. He was a stranger. She nodded, pushed out her lip, went back to coloring her ponies.

“You miss your mama, too, I’ll bet.”

She had never met her mama, but she missed her.

“You think they gone because of you, peanut? ’Cause of how special you are?”

She looked up at him.

“Don’t look at me like that. I know. I’m special, too.”

“You should be careful,” Sophie said. “I need to go.”

She stood and looked toward the building. The mean nun pointed for her to sit back down, but then the bell rang and the sister waved her in.

Sophie turned back to the man in yellow, held out the page she had been coloring. “Here, you can have this.”

“Well, thank you, peanut.” He took the drawing, then untangled from the table and stood as he looked at it. “That’s very kind.”

“Their names are Death, Disease, War, and Sparkle-Darkle Glitter-tits,” Sophie said. “They’re the four little ponies of the Apocalypse.” Sophie liked saying things that shocked people, especially nuns and old people, but he wasn’t shocked.

The man in yellow nodded, folded the drawing, and slipped it into his breast pocket. He looked over his sunglasses and Sophie could see for the first time that his eyes were golden-colored. “Well, y’all take care, Shy Dookie,” he said.

“Bye,” Sophie said. She took her handful of crayons and skipped back into school. Once in the door, she looked back to the picnic table. The man in yellow was gone.

I’m not invisible,” Rivera said into the phone.

“I never said you were invisible,” said Minty Fresh. “The Big Book never said you were invisible. It says ‘people may not see you’. Even if you are retrieving a soul vessel, people can see you if you call attention to yourself.”

“I didn’t call attention to myself. The old man walked in on me —was going to shoot me.”

“And the bitch just Tased him. You know, that banshee know how to party.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying this, Mr. Fresh, but if I hadn’t known the EMTs who arrived to take care of the old man, I’d be facing breaking and entering charges.”

“Emergency operator didn’t record your call, then?”

“I didn’t call. The old man had one of those electronic alert medallions. I just pushed the button and they dispatched.”

“Yeah, shit tend to work out like that. If our frequent phone calls don’t cause the end of the world, I’ll tell you about my unified theory of irony someday.”

“I’ll look forward to that. Meanwhile, that’s five out of five people from my calendar who I visited and there was no evidence of a soul vessel.”

“And out of five, even you would have found one. Even a blind squirrel—”

“They weren’t there.”

“Maybe you should try starting at the end of the list. Catch up on the most recent names, the people just went on your calendar. Retrieve those and work backward.”

“When? I’m officially back on duty. I have real cases to work.”

“Well, you put this off anymore, shit gonna get real up in here real quick. Let me call your attention to exhibit A, Inspector: motherfucking banshee Tasing motherfuckers in the privacy of their own home.”

“I know. I know. But, assuming I find the soul vessels, how am I going to sell them? With my caseload, I can’t open the bookstore.”

“Hire someone.”

“I can’t afford to hire someone. I’m barely keeping the doors open working there myself, and I don’t even take a salary.”

“You do what you’re supposed to do, collect the soul vessels, the money will come. It always does.”

“That more of your unified theory?”

“Experience. I’ve known a dozen Death Merchants. Everyone said the same thing: as soon as you start doing it, the money comes. You are catching up, Inspector. You’re not going to have time to work in your store at all. It’s a bookstore. There’s a multitude of bright, overeducated motherfuckers with liberal arts degrees who would be happy to come work for you, just on the outside chance someone might ask them about Milton or Postmodernism or something, just like for my record store, there’s a shitload of insufferable know-it-all hipsters who will work for next to nothing for the privilege of condescending to customers about their musical knowledge. Just run an ad and hire someone.”

“What about that spooky girl who used to work for Asher?” Rivera asked. “She knew all about our business. I mean, if it’s all right with you, I know you two—”

“I told you, it ain’t a motherfuckin’ thing, Rivera.”

“Sorry. Do you have her number?”

“I’ll call her for you.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Fresh.”

“I do not want to, I’m doing it because she won’t trust you if you try to tell her what’s going on.”

“Trust me? But I’m a cop.”

“Seriously? You did not just say that to a black man.” The Mint One disconnected.

Crisis Center. What is your name, please?”

“Kevin.”

“Hi Kevin. I’m Lily. Where are you calling from, Kevin?”

“I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m going to jump.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Nope. Not going to happen. Not on my watch.”

Now he was going to tell her his story. Lily liked to watch French movies with subtitles on her tablet while listening to the story. The stories were usually pretty similar, or at least it seemed that way, because they were always calling from the same chapter. The chapter where someone is thinking about jumping off a big orange bridge or walking in front of a train.

Kevin told her his story. It sounded sad. But not as sad as what poor Audrey Tautou was going through on the screen. Lily knew there would be sad French accordion music and she tried to work an earbud from her tablet under her phone headset ear so she could feel the full weight of poor Audrey’s despair…

Kevin paused. Lily paused her movie.

“Don’t do it,” she said. “There’s stuff to live for. Have you tried that cereal with the chocolate inside? Not on it, inside the actual cereal. How about pizza under a flaming dome? That shit is tasty insanity. Fuck, Kevin, you kill yourself without trying that, you’ll hate yourself even more than you do now. I’m a trained chef, Kevin. I know.”

“At least it will be over.”

“Oh, hell no, it won’t be over. You could hit the water, blow out an eardrum, shatter a bunch of vertebrae, die cold and in excruciating pain, and then, like five minutes later, you’re a squirrel in a top hat and tap shoes, fighting a pigeon with a spork over a used donut. I have seen things, Kevin, terrible, dark, disturbing things. You do not want to go there.”

“Really, a spork?”

“Yeah, Kevin, the fucking detail you want to grasp on to is the spork. That was the point of the story. Not that you’ll be a squirrel in tap shoes, fighting a pigeon over a donut? That’s a custard donut, Kevin. Custard is running out of the donut onto the pavement. There are ants on your donut, Kevin.”

“Whoa, ants?”

“Ants are still not the important part, Kevin, you douche waffle.”

“Hey, I don’t even like custard donuts.”

“Jump, Kevin. Over you go.”

“What?”

“Geronimo! Let loose a long trailing scream as you go—warn any boaters or windsurfers to look the fuck out. No sense dragging someone along with your dumb ass.”

“Hey?”

“Take the leap, Kevin. Into the maelstrom of suffering that will open for you.”

“At least it will be different.”

“Yeah, different in that it will be worse. Since when did a two-hundred foot drop into icy waves full of sharks spell hope to you, huh? You think you’re depressed now? You think you’re hopeless now? Wait until you’re reincarnated as a crazed, scurrying little creature, desperate, afraid of everything, wearing stupid outfits. I’ve seen them, Kevin. I’ll show you. You take a look at them, see what you’ll become, and if you still want to jump, I’ll drive you back there and push you off. Deal?”

“You’re lying.”

“I am. I don’t have a car. But I’ll pay your cab fare and say good-bye to you over the phone as you go. Worst-case scenario, you get to see some really creepy little animal people and two hours from now you’re in the same place you are now, and I’m giving you hot phone sex as you’re plummeting into the shark cafeteria.”

“Really?”

“Really. Your phone got a camera?”

“Yeah.”

“Send me a selfie.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah, how am going to know what you look like?”

“Okay. This shirt has a little coffee stain down the front.”

“Got it. Now head for the city side of the bridge. I’ll be there in ten.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“I’m going to borrow my boss’s. Head for the tollgates. I’ll park the car in the visitor center and walk up.”

“Can’t you stay on the line until you get here.”

“Would love to, Kevin, but I can’t tie up the crisis line. Look, I’ll call you from my cell in a second. They make us leave them in the locker room, so give me five minutes. Head for the tollbooths. I’ll call you in a bit.”

“How will I know you?”

“I’m Asian.” She wasn’t Asian, but there would be a metric fuckload of Asian girls on the bridge for him to think were her. “Ten minutes. Don’t jump, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. But my battery is low.”

“You’d better not jump because your fucking battery ran out, Kevin. Have a little faith, for fuck’s sake.”

“I wish you’d quit swearing.”

“Oh, right, I’m your fairy godmother. Now, allow me to grant your wish. See you in ten.” She hit the disconnect button.

Lily sent Kevin’s photo to the Ranger station on the bridge with a note: Jumper, headed your way. Temporarily paused him. Detain and hold for psych eval. Another save for Darquewillow Elventhing!

“Woooo-hooooo, bitches!” One for the big board! Lily rose from her seat and headed for the big whiteboard at the head of the bullpen. The other three counselors dove for their mute buttons. She snatched up the marker and wrote SAVES THIS MONTH, then wrote her name and drew in a big 5 1/2 next to it with an exclamation point.

“Five-point-five, losers, and it’s only the seventeenth of the month. That’s right, at least two more weeks to try to catch this train of effective fucking crisis intervention!”

“That’s not a thing, Lily,” said Sage, a freckled blond girl about Lily’s age, wearing a huge fisherman’s sweater and cargo pants, who had clearly given up on giving a shit about her hair before she’d even started grad school. That kind of neglect didn’t show overnight. She was working on her master’s thesis in crisis counseling or something.

“It’s not a thing for you,” said Lily. “Because you are a loooooser. La-la-la-looooozzer.” Although she knew she was too old for it, and it was far beneath her dignity to indulge in such things, she did a subtle booty dance of victory to mark the moment.

“You’re so broken,” said Sage. “How did you ever get a job here?”

“Death is my business, Sage. They came to me because they knew I would dominate! Five and a half—yay-ooooooh!”

One of the other counselors, a tall fortyish guy with a mop of blond hair, looked over his glasses. He had his finger on the mute mic button like he was holding the mouth of a poisonous snake closed. “Lily, any chance you could wrap it up? I have to get an address and find out what pills this girl swallowed before she passes out.”

“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.

She stopped raging for a moment. “Do you think so?”

“It says so in all the books. His love for you is legendary. A few years ago they brought earth from his grave to mingle with yours in Benicia. Your name is inscribed on his tombstone in Russia, with the words ‘May they forever be together.’ ”

“Oh,” she said. She bit a nail, kept a delicate finger against her lower lip, as if to keep it from trembling.

“I’m very sorry, Conchita,” Mike said.

She smiled again, all for him. “I know. You are my gallant champion. You have done as I asked and I have given you no thanks.”

Mike shook his head. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think of anything to say, he was having trouble even swallowing—being forgiven for not being able to change history had touched him more than he would have ever guessed.

She reached out and caressed his cheek and he was sure that this time he could feel her touch.

“I must go now,” she said. “But I will come to you again, if I may?”

Mike nodded.

“And I must ask you, my gallant champion, for another favor.”

“Anything,” he managed to say without his voice breaking.

“There is another one here on the bridge that would speak with you, but if you don’t wish to hear him, I will understand, my champion.”

“As long as I’m hooked in, I suppose it will be okay. No sudden surprises, okay?”

“I will send him now,” she said. “I will see you soon. Thank you, my love.”

“Wait, your what?” Mike said, but she had stepped into a beam as if stepping behind a curtain and was gone.

Before he could pick up his paint bucket to move on, a guy in a suit and a wide-brimmed fedora floated down from the roadway and settled in a seated position on the beam where Mike was standing.

“Nice-looking broad,” said the guy in the hat.

Mike realized that at the appearance of the second ghost, even though he was braced for it, he peed just a tiny bit in his shorts. Just a bit. There’s something about being suspended over a two-hundred-foot drop that snaps you to attention, and in a second he was back in control, dealing with a weird situation in the only way you could, weirdly.

“I thought you knew her,” Mike said. “She brought you to me, right?”

“Well, yeah, but I’ve never seen her. Persons are less put together on this side of the bridge, you don’t so much see each other as you get an impression of them as they go by, and the impression I get most of the time is they’re loopy as a snake salad. Not this broad, though.”

“So you two talked?”

“Sure, you could say talked. Ghosts mostly communicate by odor. Gotta tell you, you got a house that smells like farts, you got a haunted house. Next time you think, oh man, Grandma farted, think again, it might be your dead grandpa. Unless your grandma eats a lot of cabbage, then it’s probably her. Cabbage can be a rough road for old people. But’s there’s good, too. Every time you smell peaches, a ghost just got his rocks off. I should have known that broad was a dish before I even saw her, she smelled like peach pie.”

Mike wanted to punch him. The ghost looked as solid as any person, sitting there on the beam, his feet dangling, ships and wind surfers passing two-hundred feet below, and Mike wanted to punch him right in the mouth for saying Concepción smelled like peach pie—like ghost come. Instead he swung his paint mop, which is what they used most of the time—a rough, fist-sized mop on the end of a two foot stick, to spot paint the bridge —swung it backhand, hoping he could knock off the ghost’s stupid ghost fedora. Instead the mop just whiffed right through the shade and flung paint off into space. The ghost didn’t even notice.

Exasperated, but trying to hide it, Mike said, “Well, why are you here? Why did she send you to me. She said it’s difficult for you to appear this way, so why?”

“Whoa, don’t get sore, I’m getting there.”

“Well, get there.”

“Fine,” said the ghost, thumbing the lapels of his jacket. “You don’t have to hit me with a brick.”

I was working in the Naval Investigations Service out of Chi-town when we first got word of a potential enemy propaganda operation called the Friends of Dorothy operating on the West Coast, probably originating in Frisco. I know, What’s Naval Investigations doing in Chicago, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean? That’s the slickness of our strategy, see: Who’s gonna suspect navy cops in the middle of Cow Town on the Prairie, am I right? Of course I am.

Anyways, we get word that new troops shipping out to the Pacific out of San Fran are being approached on the down low by this Friends of Dorothy bunch, who are playing up on their prebattle jitters, trying to cause some desertions, maybe even recruit spies for Tojo.

So the colonel looks around the office, and as I am the most baby-faced of the bunch, he decides to send me out to Frisco under cover as a new recruit to see if I can get the skinny on this Dorothy and her friends, before we got another Axis Annie or Tokyo Rose on our hands, only worse, because this Dorothy isn’t just taking a shot at our morale on the radio, she’s likely running secret operations.

I tell the colonel that despite my youthful mug, I am an expert on the ways of devious dames and I will have this Dorothy in the brig before he can say Hirohito is a bum, maybe faster. So five days later I find myself on the dog-back streets of San Fran with about a million other sailors, soldiers, and marines waiting to ship out.

Well, San Fran is getting to be known as Liberty City, as this is the spot where many guys are going to see the good old U S of A for the last time ever, so in spite of restrictions and whatnot all along the Barbary Coast, every night the town is full of military guys out for one last party, looking for a drink or a dame or the occasional crap game. It’s a tradition by this time that the night before you ship out, you go up to the Top of the Mark, the nightclub on the top floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel on California Street, where a guy can have a snort whilst looking at the whole city from bridge to bridge, and if he’s lucky, a good-smelling broad will take him for a twirl around the dance floor and tell him that everything is going to be okay, even though most guys are suspicious that it’s not. And these are such dames as are doing this out of patriotism and the kindness of their heart, like the USO, so there’s no hanky-panky or grab-assing.

Word has it that the Friends of Dorothy are recruiting at the Top of the Mark, so I don a set of navy whites and pea coat like a normal swabby, and stake out a spot by the doorman outside the hotel. As guys go by, I am whispering, “Friends of Dorothy,” under my breath, like a guy selling dirty postcards or tickets to a sold-out Cubs game (which could happen when they make their run for the pennant). And before long, the cable car stops and off steps this corn-fed jarhead who is looking around and grinning at the buildings and the bay at the end of the street like he’s never seen water before, and he’s sort of wandering around on the sidewalk like he’s afraid of the doorman or something, and I gives him my hush-hush Friends of Dorothy whisper.

So Private Hayseed sidles up to me and says back, “Friends of Dorothy?”

“You’re damn skippy, marine,” says I.

And just like that, the kid lights up like Christmas morning and starts pumping my hand like he’s supplying water to douse the Chicago fire, or maybe the Frisco fire, as I hear that they also have a fire, but I cannot but think that it was not a real fire, as Frisco is clearly a toy town. Kid introduces himself as Eddie Boedeker, Jr., from Sheep Shit, Iowa or Nebraska or one of your more square-shaped, corn-oriented states, I don’t remember. And he goes on how he is nervous and he has never done anything like this before, but he’s about to go off to war and might never come home, so he has to see— and it’s all I can do to calm the kid down and stand him up against the wall beside me like he’s just there to take in the night air and whatnot. You see, I am dressed like a sailor, and he is a marine, and although technically, swabbies and jarheads are in the same branch of the service, it’s a time-honored tradition that when they are in port they fight like rats in a barrel, which is something I should have perhaps thought of when I picked my spy duds.

So on the spot I compose a slogan of war unity so as to shore up my cover. “Fight together or lose alone, even with no-necked fucking jarheads.” I try it out on the doorman like I’m reading it off a poster and he nods, so I figure we’re good to go.

“C’mon, marine,” I says to the Private Hayseed, “I’ll buy you a drink.”

So we go up the elevator to the Top of the Mark, and I order an old-fashioned because there’s an orange slice in it and I’m wary of scurvy, and I ask the kid what he’ll have, and he says, “Oh, I ain’t much for drinking.”

And I says, “Kid, you’re about to ship out to get your guts blown out on some godforsaken coral turd in the Pacific and you’re not going to have a drink before you go, what are you, some kind of moron?”

And the kid provides that, no, he’s a Methodist, but his ma has a record of the Moron Tabernacle Choir singing “Silent Night” that she plays every Christmas and so I figure the answer is yes and I order the kid an old-fashioned with an extra orange slice hoping it might help cure stupid as well as scurvy. But I also figure that old Eddie here is exactly the kind of dim bulb that Dorothy and her cohorts will try to go for, so I press on, pouring a couple more old-fashioneds into him, until the kid is as pink-faced as a sunburned baby and gets a little weepy about God and country and going off to war, while I keep trying to slide in questions about Dorothy, but the kid keeps saying maybe later, and asks if maybe we can’t go hear some jazz, as he has never heard jazz except on the radio.

Well, the bartender provides as there is an excellent horn player over in the Fillmore, which is only a hop on the cable car, so I flip him four bits for the tip and I drag Eddie down to the street and pour him onto the cable car, which takes us up the hill and over to the Fillmore, which is where all the blacks live now, as it used to be a Jap neighborhood until they shipped them off to camps and the blacks moved in from the South to work in the shipyards bringing with them jazz and blues and no little bit of dancing.

And as we’re getting off the car, I spots some floozies standing outside the club right below a War Department poster with a picture of a similar dame that says, “She’s a booby trap! They can cure VD, but not regret.”

And as we’re walking up, I says, “Hey, toots, you pose for that poster?” And one of the rounder dames says, “I might have, sailor, but I ain’t heard no regrets yet,” which gives me a laugh, but makes Private Eddie just look down and smile into his top button. He whispers to me on the side, “I ain’t never done anything like this before.”

I figured as much, but I say to the kid, “That’s what the Friends of Dorothy are for, kid,” just taking a shot in the dark.

And he gets a goofy grin and says, “That’s what the guy said.”

And I say, “What guy?” but by that time we’re through the door and the band is playing, the horn player going to town on the old standard “Chicago,” to which I remove my sailor’s hat, because it is, indeed, my kind of town. So we drink and listen to jazz and laugh at nothing much, ’cause the kid doesn’t want to think about where he’s going, and he doesn’t want to think about where he came from, and I can’t figure out how to get behind this Dorothy thing with the band playing. After a few snorts, the kid even lets a dame take him out on the dance floor, and because he more resembles a club-footed blind man killing roaches than a dancer, I head for the can to avoid associating with him, and on my way back, I accidently bump into a dogface, spilling his drink. And before I can apologize, when I am still on the part that despite his being a pissant, lamebrained, clumsy, ham-handed army son of a bitch, it is a total accident that I bump into him and spill his drink, he takes a swing at me. And since he grazes my chin no little, I am obliged to return his ministrations with a left to the fucking breadbasket and a right cross which sails safely across his bow. At which point, the entire Seventh Infantry comes out of the woodwork, and soon I am dodging a dozen green meanies, taking hits to the engine room, the galley, as well as the bridge, and my return fire is having little to no effect on the thirty-eleven or so guys what are wailing on me. I am sinking fast, about to go down for the count. Then two of the GIs go flying back like they are catching cannonballs, and then two more from the other side, and through what light I can see, Private Eddie Boedeker, Jr., wades into the GIs like the hammer of fucking God, taking out a GI with every punch, and those that are not punched are grabbed by the shirt and hurled with no little urgency over tables, chairs, and various downed citizens, and it occurs to me that I have perhaps judged the kid’s dancing chops too harshly, for while he cannot put two dance steps together if you paint them on the floor, he appears to have a right-left combination that will stop a panzer.

Before long, guys from all branches of service are exchanging opinions and broken furniture and I hear the sinister chorus of MP whistles, at which point I grab the kid by the belt and drag him backward through the tables and the curtain behind the stage and out into the alley, where I collapse for a second to collect my thoughts and test a loose tooth, and the kid bends over, hands on his knees, gasping for breath, laughing and spitting a little blood.

“So, kid,” I says. “You saved my bacon.” And I offer him a bloody-knuckled handshake.

Kid takes my hand and says, “Friends of Dorothy,” and pulls me into a big hug.

“Yeah, yeah, Friends of fucking Dorothy,” I say, slapping him on the back. “Speaking of which,” I say, pushing him off. “Let’s take a walk—”

“I gotta get back to Fort Mason,” the kid says. “It’s nearly midnight. The cable cars stop at midnight and I gotta ship out in the morning.”

“I know, kid, but Friends of Dorothy,” I says. I’m aware all of a sudden that I have strayed somewhat from my mission, and that if the kid goes, I’m going to have to start all over again, although I suspect I have not exactly stumbled onto the mastermind of the diabolical Dorothy’s organization. But still.

“Look,” says the kid. “This has been swell. Really swell. I really appreciate you, you know, being a friend, but I gotta go. I ain’t never done nothing like this, never met anyone like you. It’s been swell.”

“Well, you know—” I says, not knowing how to bail this out. That one tooth was definitely loose.

Suddenly the kid grabs me again, gives me a big hug, then turns and runs off toward the cable-car stop. He’s about a half a block away when he turns and says, “I’m going to go see the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning. Oh-six-hundred. Ain’t never seen a sunrise over the ocean. I’ll meet you there. Say good-bye.”

And I’m am tempted to point out several things, including that he will have to see the Golden Gate Bridge as he passes under it when he ships out, that we are on the West Coast and the sun doesn’t rise over the ocean, and that there is no need to run, as I can hear the bell of the cable car and it is still blocks away, but these being finer points than I want to yell up an alley when there are MPs still on the prowl, I say, “I’ll be there.”

“Friends of Dorothy,” the kid says with a wave.

“Friends of Dorothy,” I say back at him. Which goes to show you, right there, the difference between sailors and marines: marines are fucking stupid. Running when you don’t have to.

So next morning I’m on the bridge, crack of dawn, so hungover I feel like if I don’t close my eyes I might bleed to death, but not having to worry about it, since my eyes are too swollen up to bleed, and I see the kid, all by himself, about halfway down the bridge, out in the fog, waving like a goddamn loony when he sees me. So I limp out to him, and when I get close he starts running at me, so I says, “No running! No goddamn running!”

But he keeps running, and now he’s got his arms out like to give me a big hug, which I am in no mood for.

So I back away and say, “At ease, marine.”

And he stops, bounces on his toes like a little goddamn girl.

“I couldn’t wait to see you. I thought about you all night. I couldn’t sleep,” he says.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s good,” I say. “But about the Friends of Dorothy—”

“I’m sorry about that,” the kid says. “Really sorry. I mean, I want to, but I never did anything like that before. I mean, in Kansas nobody’s like that. I thought—I mean, if my folks—I thought I was the only one. Then this guy in boot camp told me about the Friends of Dorothy.”

That’s right. It was Kansas. Anyway, I says, “That’s it, you got to tell me about Dorothy, everything you know, Eddie.”

“But I don’t know nothing. I just, I just have these feelings—”

Then the kid grabs me, right then, and gives me a great big wet one, right on the kisser. I was so surprised I just about shit myself. So I push him off of me, you know, big flat palm to the chin, and when I get done spitting, I say, “What the hell was that about?”

And the kid looks like I just shot his dog. “Friends of Dorothy,” he says.

“Yeah, the Friends of fucking Dorothy, that’s why I’m here, but what the fuck was that? You queer or something?”

And he goes, “Friends of Dorothy. Like the Scarecrow. Like the Tin Man. Like the Cowardly Lion. People ain’t got anyone else like them. But Dorothy don’t care. Like you. Like us.”

“I ain’t like you, kid. I got people. I got a wife and kid back in Chicago. I’d be out shooting the ass off of Tojo myself if I hadn’t blown my knee out in football in high school. I’m not Dorothy’s friend, I’m not your friend, kid.”

“Friends of Dorothy,” the kid says. “We find each other,” he says.

“Queers? That’s what this is about? A bunch of fairies? Marines? Sailors? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Friends of Dorothy,” the kid wails.

“Not anymore. Naval Investigative Service. I’m taking you in, kid. You’re going in the brig, and if you ever wanna get out, you’re going to tell me everything you know about the Friends of Dorothy. Everyone you ever talked to about them. I need names, places, dates.”

“But I’m shipping out today. I ain’t never done nothing like this.”

“And you’re not going to again,” I says. “It’s time of war, kid, and being queer is a court-martialable offense. You and your Friends of Dorothy are traitors. Hell, they might even shoot you. You might make it back to Kansas, but it’s going to be in chains, to Leavenworth.” Rough, I know, but I’m hungover and annoyed that I’ve been made a sap, and I’m just trying to scare the kid so he’s easier to handle.

The kid starts shaking his head and backing away. “You can’t tell my folks. You can’t tell my dad. It would kill him.”

“Everyone’s going to know, kid. It’s going to be in the papers, so you might as well come clean.”

Then he turns and really starts to run.

“Where you think you’re going, kid? I got the whole fleet I can send after you. A deserter. A queer traitor and deserter.”

“Friends of Dorothy,” he wails. His face is melting into a big glob of snot and tears.

“Yeah, Friends of fucking Dorothy, traitor. Let’s go, Boedeker.”

The he just starts wailing, crying it, “But Friends of Dorothy! Friends of Dorothy!” and then, again with the running, but this time for the rail, and before I can get close to him, he’s over, headfirst. Hit the water like a gunshot. I bet they could hear it all the way to Fort Mason.

I look down and he’s just all bent up, like a broken scarecrow, floating dead in the waves.

“That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” said Mike Sullivan.

“Yeah, it was the war. Tough times.”

“So, you, did you, I mean, did you jump, too?” asked Mike.

“Nah, I went back to Chicago. Heart attack in ’58.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Smoked a lot, ate a lot of bratwurst, we didn’t know stuff in those days.”

“No, why are you on the bridge?”

“No idea. Guess that’s why the Spanish broad wanted me to tell you my story. You want I should fetch her?”

“Maybe that would be good,” Mike said. The ghost’s story had made him a little woozy. He couldn’t figure out if it was nausea or anxiety, but neither were to be taken lightly when you were up on the bridge.

“So long, bridge painter,” said the ghost. “And by the way, you can tell the dame that you have not been helpful in the least. I feel like I’m the only one did any talking here. No offense.”

“You’ll want to fuck off, now,” said Mike, who despite being a nice guy, had his limits, which he was very close to reaching with this particular spirit.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” said the ghost.

In an instant he had rolled into the beam he was sitting on and Concepción materialized on the beam next to Mike, so close she could have sat on one of his safety lines.

“Thank you,” she said. “My brave champion.”

“Why?” asked Mike. He felt better just seeing her, in fact his emotions had swung from morose and anxious to elated and nearly giddy as soon as she appeared.

“I think you can understand now that we need you,” she said. “He is just one of many.”

“You need me for what?”

“To join us, of course,” she said.

9. Coffee with Lily

When she arrived, he was already in the coffee shop, sitting in one of the conversation areas in a wingback chair, his long legs stretched out before him like a fun slide.

She said, “Just because the forces of darkness are rising and the end of the world is nigh, don’t think I’m going to play Armageddon bone monkeys with you, M. This is just coffee.”

She called him “M,” because she refused to call him Minty, it being, in her mind, entirely too cheerful and perky and kind of stupid, and because he told her once that when he had worked security for a casino in Vegas he said they referred to him as M.F., which everyone thought stood for motherfucker. So “M” for short.

“A double espresso for me, then,” he said with a smile.

She put her enormous spike-studded purse on the chair to the side of him. “How about two singles?”

He nodded. “That would be perfect, Darque.”

She turned to conceal her own smile and headed off to the counter to get their coffee. She knew he’d conceded to having two single espressos because he knew that watching him drink from the teeny-tiny cups made her laugh, so she’d won coffee already. But he had called her Darque, which she loved, so maybe he’d won. Fucksox!

When she returned with their coffees she said, “Are you sure you want to talk about this stuff here?”

“You didn’t want to come to my place.”

But she did want to come to his place, be charmed into insane make-up sex where he enveloped her pale and luscious beauty like a great spider, rendering her helpless in his grasp, stinging her again and again (although not in the butt) until she screamed. But he was too old, too tall, too rich (she would not be a slave to his economic stability—even at the price of moving back into a crap apartment in the Sunset), and most of all, he was way too dark and cool.

She said, “Well, in public I thought there’d be less sobbing. It would be less embarrassing for you.”

“Very considerate of you,” he said. “You know that one voice mail, I was having a bad reaction to some cold medicine. So, you know, just ignore that one.”

“Which one was that?” she said, eyes wide, which, with her dark and abundant eye makeup, made her look like a silent film star overplaying an insane person—Brigitte Helm, crazed anarchist/robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was what she was going for.

“You know which one,” he said, then he took a sip from a tiny cup.

“Oh, you mean my new ring tone? Sure. Okay.” She smiled coyly into her latte. This was what the personal ads would refer to as “light dominance and humiliation” and she decided this was something she was keeping in mind as one of her dating profile preferences.

“Charlie Asher is alive,” Minty said.

“What?” She looked up so fast she spilled a little coffee in her lap. “Wait, what?”

“Audrey put his soul into one of those Squirrel People things. He’s been living with her at the Buddhist Center since we buried his real body.”

Lily had actually been there when he died from the Morrigan’s poison… well, right outside the room. She had gone to Asher’s funeral. She’d been devastated. He’d been annoying, but she’d thought he’d always be there. She’d probably ended up with Minty Fresh because she had been so traumatized over Asher’s death, at least that’s what her friend Abby had told her. Now Asher was alive? Tears welled in her eyes and she wiped them back. She said, “Wait. What?”

“Asher needs a new body and I’m going to try to help him find one. I need to find someone who is going to die, but of an accident that won’t ruin their body too much. Audrey has some Tibetan Book of the Dead gris-gris she going to do.”

“Wait,” said Lily. “What?”

“Rivera, the homicide cop that was following Asher, working the soul vessel cases? The one that shot the Morrigan while she was giving Charlie a hand job? He’s a Death Merchant now.”

“Rivera?” Was everybody special but her? For fuck’s sake. Armani cop, Rivera? “Wait, how long…”

“I sent him the Big Book of Death myself. Asher told me that Rivera was able to see him while he was collecting a soul vessel, so even back then he was becoming. He opened a bookstore over on Polk.”

“Rivera?” she said.

“A woman appeared in his shop out of nowhere, a banshee, shrieking, warning him that shit was going down—‘an elegant death,’ she said. Then she Tased him and disappeared.”

“A banshee?” How did you get that job? She would be awesome at that. They give you a Taser?

“Rivera hasn’t collected a soul for a year. Turns out, Charlie Asher was supposed to keep collecting soul vessels as well. He hasn’t. His shop should have stayed open. We should have never opened that restaurant.”

“Well I could have told you that,” she said. Pizza and jazz, really a stupid combination. Would have been obvious to here if she hadn’t been all woo-wooed over the enormous mint Death Merchant at the time.

Minty said, “We’re not sure that the Death Merchants who were killed when all that went down were replaced. I’m trying to find out, now. There could be a thousand or more uncollected soul vessels. That’s way, way worse than what caused the last un-fucking-raveling. No telling what kind of shit going to show up.”

“Well little Sophie is the Big Death, right, the Luminatus, she can just smack them down like before, right?”

“She might not be. Asher says her hellhounds are gone.”

He put down his first espresso and tossed back the second. Lily found no joy whatsoever in watching.

“Gone? Wait. What?”

“And the Emperor is running around, talkin’ about he got to make a list of all the forgotten dead, which would be on par crazy per usual if all this other shit wasn’t going down.”

“But no one has seen the Morrigan, right?” Lily was the one who had first figured out who—what—the raven-women were, and she’d seen firsthand the entity that had led their attack, a winged bull-headed thing that had nearly destroyed Charlie Asher’s secondhand shop looking for soul vessels. Charlie had seen the Morrigan rip the creature to shreds in the vast underground grotto that had formed under the financial district. Historically speaking, it had been a fucked-up day.

“Nah, Sophie took them out, we’re hoping that was a forever thing.”

“I’m going to need another coffee. You?”

He shook his head. She nearly lost her balance when she stood up—the maelstrom of new and disturbing information she was trying to process making her light-headed. He caught her arm and steadied her.

“You all right?”

She nodded. “I just need a minute with you not telling me stuff.”

She stumbled over to the counter and ordered, stood there and waited even after the barista told her he would bring it to her. It had all gone to shit so fast—one minute she was the boss of the whole situation, the next she’s stumbling around trying to grasp the idea that Charlie was alive and was trying to escape from the body of a squirrel person. (And what deeply creepy little fucks they were, even for her, for whom deeply creepy had long been a goal.) Had M dumped all this on her just because she’d been winning? Didn’t matter. She needed to talk to Charlie Asher, she needed in on this grand and dark debacle that was about to happen. She picked up her coffee and returned to the Mint One.

“So?” she said as she sat. She sipped her coffee.

“So,” Minty Fresh repeated, tenting his long fingers on his chest.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Rivera is trying to catch up on his list, retrieving soul vessels. He’s back on the force.”

“When was he not a cop?”

“Retired. Temporarily. Back now. He needs someone to work in his shop. He asked for you.”

“Wait. What?”

“Eventually we’re going to have to figure out a way for Asher’s shop to open again, too, if everything doesn’t blow up. But first things first.”

“You called me, had me come down here, dumped all this world-shaking shit on me because you want me to work in fucking retail?” Oh, it was so wrong. So, so, unfair. Bullshit, that’s what it was. Bullshit!

“He needs someone,” said Minty.

“Someone, but not me. Some anonymous, unspecial person with no talent, not me. I’ve saved five and a half lives this month already.”

“A half?”

“Jumped but lived, so, you know, technically, I didn’t stop the guy from jumping, but he failed, too, since he lived, so it’s a tie, so half a save. Anyway, the point is, I have important things to do.”

“I told him that.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did. I told him you were special,” he said.

“Wait,” she said, then dug into her purse for her phone to buy time to think. What was he trying to pull now? She was not going to let him get away with that weak-ass charm thing he did. She looked at her phone to check the time, then stood up. “Look, I’ll let you know. I’ve got to go. I have a date with the guy who paints the Golden Gate Bridge.”

That sounded way less impressive than she had hoped it would.

“There’s only one?”

“Yes,” she said. She had no idea. There was now.

“Y’all have a good time, then,” Minty said. “Good seeing you, Darque.”

“Yeah, you too,” she said, fussing with stuff in her purse as if she were searching for car keys, which she wasn’t, since she didn’t have a car, but it was a thing you could do when you couldn’t think of what to do.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said. He watched as she walked away and thought, She’s too young, too short, and way to motherfuckin’ spooky, and I miss her. But at least I won coffee.

At the door of the coffee shop she turned and said, “You did not win.” Then she walked out.

Motherfuckin’ spooky, he thought.

Dawn, pink and chilly. The Emperor of San Francisco was trudging along the waterfront by the Aquatic Park when a guinea pig dressed in the pumpkin pants and satin doublet of an Elizabethan dandy ran by on disproportionately long, wading-bird legs, a small model tugboat thrown over its shoulder. It was followed by two equally patchwork creatures dressed in what appeared to be red shop rags, the type that are sold in rolls; one creature had the head of a calico cat, the other that of an armadillo, the latter chanting “go, go, go” as they passed.

“Well, you don’t see that every day,” said the Emperor. Lazarus, the golden retriever, ruffed in sympathy, but Bummer, the Boston terrier, was already after them, hell-bent for leather, emitting a staccato growl that sounded as if he had swallowed a very small and angry motorcycle and was trying to keep it down as he ran.

Not in my town, Bummer thought. Not in my town.

Lazarus looked to the Emperor as if to say, We have to go after him, don’t we? He fell into a tolerant trot while the Emperor tucked his walking stick under his arm and hitched up the army-surplus map bag he had slung over his shoulder to hold the heavy journal containing his list of the dead, and strode along behind.

His bad knee had been bothering him more than usual lately, since they’d started sleeping nearer the water, in and around Fort Mason, sometimes in a nook or cranny at the St. Francis Yacht Club, instead of in the utility closet behind the pizzeria in North Beach whose benevolent owner had cleared out the space and even provided a key for the Emperor and his men. Something about being closer to the bridge helped the names of the dead come to him, and on recent mornings he could scarcely work the stiffness out of his hand before the names and numbers began flooding his mind, and he would have to sit down wherever he was and record them. At first he’d gone to the library, and to the police station, and even to City Hall to get the names the dead had asked for, but these were names he hadn’t found there, and the dates went back much further than the year the dead had originally asked him to record.

At the edge of the park, streetcar tracks, long unused, ran into a long concrete trench where the street cars used to pass before entering the tunnel under the great meadow above Fort Mason. Bummer chased the hodgepodge creatures into the trench, knowing that there was a set of steel doors closing off the tunnel at the end and soon he would tear ass out of whatever these things were, or at least stand tough and give them a stern barking at.

As the doors came into his view, Bummer smelled a foul, avian odor that he’d encountered before, and he stopped so abruptly he nearly toppled over. The doors covered only the lower portion of the tunnel; the arch above, nearly four feet high, was open and dark. At the base of the doors was a wide puddle that looked like tar or heavy oil.

The Emperor and Lazarus caught up to Bummer just as one of the creatures, the calico-cat-headed one, bounced up and over the doors, into the dark arch. As the second one, the guinea pig, crouched to leap over the top of door as well, out of the puddle came a sleek feminine hand with long talons that impaled the little dandy in the chest. Another hand snaked out of the dark liquid, snatched the toy tugboat, and submerged, then a third emerged, talons bared, and with the first one tore the guinea pig to shreds; blood and silk splattered the door and the concrete walls of the trench.

The third creature turned and ran back toward the Emperor and his men, who also turned and followed it out of the trench.

Above his own rasping breath the Emperor heard, “Oh, that’s delicious, isn’t that delicious?” in a breathy, female voice, that wafted from the dark tunnel.

They’d agreed to meet at an independent coffee place off Union Street in the Marina called The Toasted Grind. Did nobody drink anymore? Lily wondered. She loved coffee, but this was turning out to be a stressful day and a couple of stout Long Island iced teas would certainly take the edge off, especially if the bridge guy was buying. She’d only agreed to this because the bridge guy had called as she was getting ready to meet M, and she thought it would be something she could tell the Mint One that would make him jealous. Oh, well.

“Are you Mike?” Lily said, walking up to the guy who she figured was Mike. He was, as he’d described himself, “kind of normal-looking”: midthirties, medium height, medium build, dark hair, greenish eyes, a lot like Charlie Asher, only with more muscle. He was wearing jeans and a clean, blue oxford-cloth shirt, but it was clear he had shoulders and arms—Charlie’s arms had just been props he used to keep his sleeves from collapsing. Why was she even thinking about Asher?

He stood. “I am,” he said. “Lily?”

“Sit,” she said. She sat across from him. “You know this is not a date, right?”

“Of course. Thanks for meeting me. You know, on the phone, that first day, you said you knew things, and well, I wanted to pick your brain.”

“In Fiji, they have a special pick just for eating human brains. They call it a brain fork.”

“Not like that.”

“I know,” she said. She signaled to the server, a girl about her age with a short blond mop of mini-dreadlocks.

Lily ordered a black brewed coffee and Mike followed her lead until the server said, “You want anything in that?” directed at Lily.

“Like?”

“We just got our liquor license. We don’t have the bar put together yet, but we can make you an Irish coffee.”

“A shot of Irish whiskey would be great,” Lily said.

“You?” the girl asked Mike.

Mike cringed a bit and looked at Lily when he answered. “I’m trying to stay away from depressants. I’ve just gone through a breakup and some stuff.”

“Me, too,” said Lily. “Put his shot in mine as well.”

The server smiled. “I know. I’m dating an old guy, too. Don’t you love how they act like every decision is life-altering?”

“I’m not an old guy,” said Mike.

“It’s not a date,” said Lily.

“I’ll be back with your coffee,” said dread girl. “Anything else right now?”

“A Viagra and a pair of handcuffs,” said Mike, deadpan.

“Nice,” said dread girl, then to Lily, “If you don’t want him, I’ll take him.” And off she went.

“You’re sharper than you look,” Lily said.

“Thanks. I think. You’re younger than you sounded on the phone.”

“My experience weighs on me far more than my years show.” She sighed, a tragic sigh that she didn’t get to use much anymore since she’d been forced by a brutal society to behave like a grown-up, and since she’d lost weight, most of her mopey Goth clothes didn’t fit, so she was almost never dressed for tragic sighing. “I’ve seen too many things that can never be unseen, Mike.”

“I guess I thought you were older because of how you dealt with that jumper.”

Was he trying to say something? She didn’t need anyone else judging her and she wished she had worn something low-cut so she could accuse him of looking at her boobs, which he totally was not, which was annoying. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“You were so calm, unconcerned. I mean, that guy died.”

“You think I’m unconcerned? That I don’t care? Do you know why I’m cynical and snarky on the crisis line?”

He shook his head.

“Because it works. It’s normal. They need normal, fast. They need out of the spiral they’re in, so if they’re suddenly offended by me, or horny for me, I don’t care. What they’re not focused on is their own pain, they’re not alone, there’s someone else on the planet with them who is annoying and possibly sexy, and it gets them to put the pills or the gun down, it gets them off the bridge in a safe way. That’s my jam. It used to be being dark and mysterious, but you can’t out-dark the people I was hanging out with, and if I get the least bit drunk or high, I tell everyone everything I know, so I’m a fucking loser at mysterious. Yeah, we lost that guy, but I saved five others this month. I’m good at what I do.” Five and half, bitches! she thought.

“I know, that’s why I called you,” Mike said.

“Wait. What?”

“And because she told me to.”

“Who told you to?”

Their coffees came before he could answer and he waited for Dread Girl to leave before he answered her.

“This is going to sound really strange,” he said. “I can’t quite believe I’m going to say it—”

“If you start talking about your ex, I will knock you out of that chair—”

“A ghost. The ghost of Concepción de Arguello, daughter of the governor of Alta California.”

“Where is that? I don’t even know where that is,” Lily said. He was doing that big lie with a little detailed lie to give it the credibility thing.

“It’s here,” Mike said, gesturing to the street and around them. “This is Alta California.”

“This is the Marina. This is where you go between the fraternity or sorority house and your first divorce. Look around, except for our waitress, who I guarantee doesn’t live in this neighborhood, it’s all people who are completely self-absorbed without a shred of self-awareness.”

“Wow, that’s harsh,” Mike said.

“You haven’t served them,” Lily said. She smiled, not a lot of teeth but a sparkle of mischief in her eye, then sipped her hot liquor through the straw.

“Ghost,” Mike said.

“So?” Lily said.

“This was Alta California in the early 1800s.”

“You’re not going to just forget you said that, then? I’m willing. I mean, to be honest, you’ve probably lost your shot with me, because I have a rule about not boning the mentally disturbed, but we can be acquaintances, and I promise not to cock-block you with the waitress—she seems into you. But don’t you think that was disrespectful, her hitting on my date like that.”

“I’m not your date.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

“You told her that.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“She said that you knew Death and could help with the Ghost Thief. That I should call you.”

“The waitress?”

“The ghost.”

“You’re going to tell me, so tell me?” she said. She signaled for the waitress to bring her another, then, in her head, she conjured sad French accordion music playing, mimes and ballerinas entering the stage to act out Mike’s story, guys rhythmically kicking Gérard Depardieu in the kidneys as a backbeat, because fuck him, why did he have to be in everything French?

So he told her, about Concepción, about the other ghosts, about how they had only spoken to him, about the Friends of Dorothy, about all of it, and as he told her, she believed him, because his wasn’t even close to the most bizarre story she’d been part of, and then she realized…

“Oh my fucking god, the guy who paints the fucking bridge orange for a living is special and I get to go back to retail. Oh, fuck me. Fuck me roughly with a big spiky demon dick!”

“Huh?” said Mike, who hadn’t expected that particular reaction. “People are looking.”

“Fuck them!” Lily said. “They’re not special. I know, because I’m not special and I recognize the symptoms. Although all you Marina people think you’re fucking special, don’t you? You entitled fucks!”

The waitress was making her way over to try to settle Lily down, but Mike signaled that he had this and she went the other way.

“Concepción evidently thinks you’re special,” Mike said. “She said you would be able to help save them from the Ghost Thief.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” Lily said.

“Maybe you’re supposed to find out,” Mike said. “And right now I need you.”

“What for? You’re the magic ghost-talker guy.”

“I need you to talk me out of jumping off the bridge.”