“But—” The word sounded so abrasive even the demon judge leaned away. “Can’t—Stuck—”
He managed to point both index fingers at his new body in spite of the handcuffs.
The judge activated his gavel and struck Conrad lightly on the head with it. It might not have been a sharp blow, but given that Conrad had already been severely brained by me less than an hour ago, it must have hurt.
Good.
The judge looked at some sort of read-out on the gavel. “Huh. Looks like you’re locked in. How’d that happen?” Julius’s gaze jumped from Conrad, to Shannon to me. I tried to hide behind Dante.
Dante merely stepped aside.
Traitor.
I stood up straight and adjusted my outfit, which I’d been wearing for three days now. “I think it must have been me,” I said in a tiny voice.
“What?”
“How?”
“Cosa?”
“I think I, er, um, stapled him into Maddy’s body.”
“Stapled?”
“With a stapler?”
“You found the stapler?”
“Yes, I had the stapler. Remember, Your Hon—I mean, Judge. My appeal? I told you Conrad had tried to trick me out of my soul with an ensorcelled stapler. Well, it was also the murder weapon used to end my life permanently. Because it was evidence in my murder trial, it was in the courtroom and I snagged it and when it looked like Conrad was going to get away with everything by jumping bodies again and displacing yet another . . .” At Dante’s keen look, I amended, “Displacing a soul. ”
“And then I grabbed the stapler and stapled his head right where it was bleeding. So I think I must have stapled Conrad’s soul into Maddy’s body.” My voice grew tinier and tinier as I finished my confession. I clasped my hands behind my back trying to look as innocent as possible.
“Are you going to punish us?” I said finally, voice cracking and quavering almost as much as Conrad’s did.
One of Julius’s eyebrows crawled up his face. He turned and stalked over to the corner by the empty bed and waved a c’mere gesture at us. We all started walking toward him. “No, no. Only Colin.” The caterpillar brow raced back down, going head to head with its compatriot across the judge’s nose, giving him an angry look. They were really well trained.
The judge and the head of the Reaper Corps conferred for what seemed like hours. A glance at my watch told me it had been three minutes, tops. I shook it and held it to my ear. Cerberus had nuzzled my arm last week, getting dog slobber all over it. But it seemed it takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Maybe time was out of sync again.
Or possibly, I was just impatient.
Impatience. Jealousy. I was creating my own personal hit parade of sins. I hoped I didn’t have seven and that they weren’t really deadly. Not that I could die again anyway, I hoped.
Finally the judge and our boss strode back over to Conrad’s bedside. I tried to hide behind Dante again. I was never good with authority figures.
Or with waiting. “Oh, please. Don’t send Dante back to the Coil. Or me. We’re good Reapers. We tried our best. We can do better. Please don’t separate us. We’re in love.”
The judge and sergeant looked pained while Dante looked embarrassed.
But he came through this time, stepping up beside me and grasping my hand. No matter how mad we were at each other, I knew we still wanted to stay together. How would we finish our fight if we weren’t? “Whatever punishment you see fit to visit upon us, we would be grateful if we could suffer together.”
What? No, I didn’t want to be punished at all. But still, Dante wanted us to be together. How sweet.
“They saved me,” Shannon rose, interjecting herself bodily into the conversation. “My dad would have let me fade right out of the death cycle. Is that the right term?” The judge and our boss scowled. I guess they knew that because of our—okay, my slow response in reaping Conrad, Shannon had been displaced from her own body. But I couldn’t be mad at her. She may have outed me as an incompetent Reaper, but she was only being honest. I’d have tried to obfuscate instead of admitting my mistake. I was obfuscating on thin ice right now. “But thanks to the quick thinking and personal sacrifice made by these two, I got my life back.”
“And go back—CEO—Iver PR—” Conrad croaked.
“Actually, Dad. That’s not—”
“Look,” Sergeant Schotz cut in. “Nobody’s getting punished. Well, ’cept him.” He tossed his sizable chin in Conrad’s direction. No, not literally. “If you give us a second here.”
He glared at us, looking exactly as if we were all getting punished. I squeezed Dante’s hand tighter but refused to let myself hide behind him again. I was no coward.
Meep!
“In fact, we’re pretty skeggin’ pleased with how this all worked out. Conrad here turned out to be a worse skegger than we thought.” Schotz rounded now on Conrad, who probably would have tried to hide behind Dante himself if his new, tattooed wrists weren’t handcuffed to the bed. “Lettin’ your daughter fade out of existence. Why, I oughta!” He raised his deactivated scythe, but I realized it was an empty threat. “Nah.” He said, turning away from Conrad and addressing his Reaper Corps again. “Me’n Jules here think you two have come up with a pretty creative punishment for this skegger. Now he’s gotta live out his twenty-five-year extension not just in a prison, but also in a woman’s body! And, you’ll never talk anybody into anything again with that voice. Bwa-ha-ha!” Schotz concluded.
“Bwa-ha-ha!” Judge Julius joined in.
“Bene!” Dante cried, fisting the air.
“Awesome!” I added. Wait. What’s so wrong with being in a woman’s body? Then something else occurred to me. “So I’m not in trouble for reaping Maddy?”
“What? Oh, no. Of course not. It’s right in the Reaper code: Thou shall not suffer a bitch to live.”
Conrad looked ashen as he struggled against his bonds, turning fifty shades of gray. “Just—kill—self,” he ground out.
“Oh, I’d advise against that course of action,” the judge told him. “See, your extension isn’t only a maximum number of years, it’s also the minimum.”
“What?” I said.
“How?” Shannon asked.
“Cosa?” Damn universal translator.
“That’s right, girlie. Er, Conrad. If you do damage to that body, you’re still stuck in it. If you do somethin’ fatal like jump offa building or drink poison, you’ll be stuck with coma-toes.”
“Been talking with Crystal, sir?”
“What? Er, right. Comatose, I mean.”
“Excuse me. Am I interrupting?”