“Ah, here we are! Back home!”

  I staggered as my body suddenly slammed into itself, yet another thing that shouldn’t be possible and yet was the only was to describe what it felt like.

  “It w-wasn’t like that before!” I sputtered as Gildebrak caught me, steadying me by her firm grip on my shirt.

  “To be fair, you were unconscious before.”

  Fair point.

  I looked around clearly, trying to reorient myself, and I realized I was in the actual office part of the Dead Offices. Not the giant tram system, not the beautiful soul collector, not the cafeteria, cafe, or whatever strangely milquetoast structure they had within the realm. Nope, we were in a space with rows and rows of cubicles, as well as nondescript, banal hallways going in seemingly every direction.

  “Shhhh!”

  A sharp reprimand to my right had my head snapping in that direction, but I calmed when I saw it was a small, older woman, complete with coke bottle glasses and a disappointing glare. A wrinkled, liver spot covered finger was held to her mouth.

  “Oh, you hush,” Gildebrak said, rolling her eyes as she let go of my hand. “You folks here in Fates act like a single distraction will cause the next Pompeii.”

  “There has never been a next Pompeii specifically because of the work done here in the Fates, Miss Gildebrak. I would have thought an experienced Reaper such as yourself would be more than aware of that.”

  My Reaper guide and I both whirled toward the new voice, and I wasn’t quite sure who I had been anticipating belonged to that voice, but no matter what, any estimation my mind could have generated would have been woefully insufficient.

  It was a woman, standing just a half dozen or so feet away from us, except woman didn’t seem like quite the right word. Heck, I wasn’t even sure that human was!

  She was tall, nearly seven feet tall, although admittedly several inches were from the meticulously coiffed bun on her head and another three or so from her classic looking wedges. The woman was muscular too, visible even through the refined lines of her designer looking three-piece business suit. She was style and grace personified, with deep burgundy across her lips and golden eyeshadow over her umber gaze.

  She was beautiful. Breathtaking. Powerful. Terrifying.

  “Ay, we didn’t mean any harm, Ayelala. Just needed to get to ol’ Orson and update him on some super important stuff. Like top tier mission important.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” the woman said, and that was when her gaze landed fully on me. She looked me up, then down, then right through me like my soul was paper and she was rapidly folding it into origami before clicking her tongue as if she found me lacking and it was my fault. “And what is this?” she asked pointed with a perfectly manicured finger, her polish a crisp nude against her deep, sorrel complexion.

  “This? Oh! You mean Bridges. She’s our newest Reaper! Bridges, meet Ayelala, the Goddess of Evil Dead, Justice, and Punishment.”

  Wait.

  I was standing in front of a goddess!?

  That felt like the kind of thing that a girl should be warned about, but I was so very much unwarned. In fact, someone could consider myself completely blindsided.

  “Your majesty,” I said, dipping into the clumsiest curtsy to have ever been curtsied.

  “Enough of that,” the woman said flatly, every single word out of her mouth so crisp that I knew even the sleeping dead wouldn’t misunderstand her. “I’m a goddess, not one of your earth royals.” And that was all she said to me before her attention was right back on Gildebrak, and I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not.

  Had I just ticked off the goddess of evil dead?!

  One, I didn’t know that was a position that existed, let alone a position someone would actually want. Two, what was with the evil part?! Seemed kinda sinister to be in the actual department name!

  “Gildebrak, as much as you know every department wishes to help the Lord of the Dead in any way needed, surely you don’t think that I am unaware that you were removed from all covert missions and had your rank reduced by three levels after the Vermillion debacle.”

  My Reaper guide winced, and I hadn’t ever seen the relatively glib young woman look so thoroughly cornered. “Unaware is a strong word. Perhaps I hoped something along the lines of it slipping your mind.”

  Ayelala took a couple of steps forward, her wedges clicking commandingly on the floor, until she was towering over the both of us. “Things do not slip my mind, Reaper. I am the golden scales of justice that decides what every evil soul’s personal hell shall be. As you can imagine, that requires incredible acumen.”

  It was strange. The woman didn’t speak with heat, or threat. Not even aggression. She spoke matter of factly and perhaps even almost bored. The goddess reminded me of a lawyer, or perhaps even a judge, crossed with Miranda Priestly who probably knew how to use an automatic weapon.

  “Please do not put me in the position where I have to turn that acumen toward you.”

  Gulp. Quite literally for the both of us.

  “Noted. I’ll do my best. But Orson really is expecting us, so…”

  The woman gave the tiniest of sighs before making a vague gesture with her hand. “Be on your way. And next time go through the official tramway without cutting through the Fates section.”

  “Yes ma’am.” We went to hurry away, but the woman spoke again right before we turned down the hall.

  “And don’t cut through the birth records either.”

  Gildebrak clicked her tongue, and I swore I heard her swear a little under her breath. “Gotcha!”

  “And not the miracles division either.”

  “Righteo!”

  Suddenly Gildebrak was gripping my arm and practically yanking me around the corner. “Come on! Before she forbids any more of my shortcuts!”

  I followed along, more than a bit dazzled. I couldn’t believe that I had just met a real, actual goddess.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Wow!

  While I’d never been a huge fan of the gods—if they were so great, why had my mother had to suffer so much before she died?—but it was one thing to pass by their temples and recruitment centers with a pit in my stomach and another thing entirely to meet one in person. It was… strange. In a good way? Or perhaps a terrible way. Both?

  Yeah, probably both.

  The power that had been radiating from her had been intimidating, sure, but also exhilarating, like it called to something primal in me that just longed for worship. Everything about her had exuded power and certainly, two things that I often felt in short supply of.

  “You handled that well, by the way,” Gildebrak said after we made it a good distance and turned down a couple of different halls. Her short legs strode along like she knew exactly where she was going, but if it were up to me, we would be utterly lost. Everything around us lacked anything remarkable enough to make it memorable, and every hall we turned down looked identical to the last. It was like being in the backrooms, minus the almond water.

  “I did?” I asked, still a bit speechless. I didn’t feel like I’d done well. I’d been riding high off of our success with Jessica, but that same skill certainly didn’t seem to translate to interacting with a goddess. “She’s… something else.”

  “Yeah, there’s no one like Ayelala, that’s for sure.”

  “How come I’ve never heard of her?”

  “Well, partially because she’s a West African goddess and your ancestors did their best to destroy or demonize as much of that region’s culture as they could, and partially because you live in America.”

  “What, like gods have territory ranges or something?” I scoffed, finally feeling like I was coming a bit back to myself. Wow, it had really been a long day already and things were still happening.

  “No, but there’s only so many souls and we all know people have their biases. A lot of the gods who are here on this continent are here because they have successfully found followings here, not because they have a penchant for American tourism.

  “But mostly, the reason is that she doesn’t have her own afterlife.”

  “What do you mean?” I was confused. How could someone so powerful not have her own afterlife.

  “I mean exactly what I said,” the Reaper repeated before realizing that I wasn’t being a smart aleck, I was genuinely confused. “You get the whole souls go to the afterlives of the gods they swear fealty to, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure everyone knows that.”

  “Right. Well, she doesn’t have one, ergo, no one really worships her as their main god. Because where would they go?”

  “But I thought all gods had an afterlife! Isn’t that a part of their whole schtick?”

  “Most do, but most certainly not all. And Ayelala’s already got enough on her plate. In case you didn’t hear her back there, she really does design, implement, and guard all the personal hells for every soul too evil to make it into any afterlife.”

  “Wait. That wasn’t some sort of threatening hyperbole?”

  “Trust me, there wasn’t a thing hyper about her bowlie. She’s the real deal, and that’s why so many people are terrified of her. Oh, that and the fact that she’s our bosses’ boss.”

  “Wait, really?”

  “Yup, if the Lord of the Dead is our manager, well, you can consider her the head honcho around here. And she’s really not kidding about not ticking her off.”

  I swallowed hard and a lot of that confidence I’d gained from Jessica waned a little.

  I just had so much to learn.

  “We didn’t tick her off, did we?”

  “We didn’t,” Gildebrak clarified before pulling me down yet another hall. “But I may have.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. I’m not on the most solid footing around here. Orson’s not gonna boot me or anything, but he has stuck his neck out there for me, which is why I’m doing my best to give you the red carpet treatment around here. If he asks me to jump, I just ask how much style he wants me to put into it; I figure I owe him at least that much.”

  That was an awful lot of lore that was dumped on me at once, but I stored it away in my brain to puzzle over another time. Because, at that moment, I was shocked to realize that I possibly recognized where we were.

  “I'll keep that in mind.”

  “I'd rather you didn't, but I figured I might as well be honest considering that you're definitely an official Reaper now.”

  “Wait, like officially officially?” Maybe I had missed a few steps, but I was pretty sure that there was a bit more of a process to it. After all, they'd chosen an office setting for a reason, I figured it came part and parcel with endless bureaucracy and red tape.

  “Well, not officially officially yet, because the Lord of the dead has to grant you rites, as well as a whole bunch of permissions. But once I tell them what happened, that's practically guaranteed!”

  She hauled me through a set of nondescript wooden doors, and we were back in the original hallway that led to the room I had woken up in—was that really just yesterday?

  Despite every crazy thing that I'd been through, it was more than a bit uncanny to me that I could even recognize anything at all. Maybe it was this way for everyone, but I was beginning to get the feeling that some parts of the dead realms came a bit naturally to me.

  I suppose the real question was, what did that mean for me?

  I had neither the answer, nor the time to ask it, before Gildebrak was practically kicking down the door at the end of the hallway, tugging me after her into what had to be the Lord of the Dead's Office.

  So much for any subtlety.

  To his credit, however, Mr. Mortie looked nonplussed. “Ah, Gildebrak. I’m glad you were able to return from your rescue mission with our guest intact.” His gaze landed on me, and I watched once more in fascination how some of his features would age, while others stayed the same, constantly changing his visage without any of it being unsettling. “And I’m glad to see that you are in one piece, Bridges.”

  “I might be a teensy bit scraped,” I said, turning to show him my back.

  “Gildebrak, why you haven’t taken her to medical yet?”

  “No time,” the woman said flatly, already flopping into one of the three oversized chairs facing the desk.

  “What do you mean no time?” The Lord of the Dead shot right back, and I couldn’t help but agree. While adrenaline was doing wonders for me, if there was someone who could make my wounds go bye-bye, well, I’d prefer to heal them first and talk shop second.

  “Why does everyone keep asking me what I mean lately? Did I suddenly develop a stutter?”

  While Gildebrak seemed endlessly sassy or glib, occasionally I heard a much harder edge in her voice. Not quite biting, but with a hint of warning to it. This was one of those times, and even Morty raised one of his salt and pepper eyebrows.

  “What I mean is that good ol’ Bridges here did something incredible, and I will now one hundred percent vouch for her and her Reaper-ness, sir.”

  That actually seemed to give the man pause, and he took off his glasses to consider me again. Not for the first time, I felt completely evaluated, assessed, and analyzed by a higher being.

  It was pretty invasive.

  “That’s a pretty heavy fealty you’re taking on there,” he murmured, and although his use of the word didn’t make sense to me, I figured it was some sort of Dead Office term. So often it seemed like they truly spoke their own language.

  “She’s saying she’ll take on all responsibility for you if something goes wrong. And considering her already apparent tenuous position due to whatever this past incident was, it’s quite a risk for her.”

  Gildebrak was really doing that for me? I was flattered, but she didn’t really know me apart from anyone else. What could have possibly made her want to do that?

  “I’m aware. But I promise you it’s worth it, cause I watched her cleanse a level five phantasm all on her own.”

  I watched as all of Orson’s body language changed, like lightning had struck through him, and if his stern gaze wasn’t on me again, but this time much more shocked. “A level five all on her own?”

  “Yes sirree bob! I helped her contain it, gave some direction, but she took lead on the whole sitch all on her own. Even had a nice blether with the spirit.”

  The Lord of the Dead’s eyes never left me and I found myself still being evaluated. Geez, was this like a whole ocular interview? “Well, if that’s the case, I suppose we better get her started. I get the feeling there’s probably going to be a backlog with her that needs to process.”

  “Backlog?” I asked in confusion.

  “Built up experience,” Gildebrak explained like that explained anything at all. “Sooo, does that mean we’re headed to the induction chambers?”

  Orson’s face was completely flat as he answered. “Well, that is where we do tend to induct new Reapers.”

  “Alright then, when do you want us there? I assume it’s far too late to do it in the morning?”

  “We’re in the Dead Offices, there are no mornings, just endless mid-afternoon.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  Gildebrak might, but I certainly didn’t! No morning? Endless afternoons? While I could get why that would be an eternal purgatory for an office worker, to me, mid-afternoons and incredibly early in the morning were the only two times I tended to have to myself.

  “I did. But no, we’re not going to wait. I actually have a pressing matter for the both of you to attend to so come on, we’ll handle the ceremony forthwith.”

  “What about taking her to medical?”

  Orson paused and I got the feeling it was one of the rare times he let a detail slip. “Right. Get her to medical, feed her, wash her up, then meet me at the induction chambers. We have a lot to do.”