Page 12 of Death Trap

I didn’t even want to think about thewhat ifs.It only made me even queasier.

But besides that, he was right. I had the name of the reaper I’d replaced, the only one besides Azrael who knew about my life before death. This Benjamin Tanner was the key to knowing who I was.

I had to find him.

“Where do Released reapers go?” I asked, my mind rushing with what I had to do and how much closer I was to what I craved.

“I don’t know,” Simon said matter-of-factly. “No one does. They just disappear.”

“They have to be in the afterlife somewhere,” I replied. “Maybe a different dimension?”

“If that was true, his name would come up when searched in the soul database.”

I tapped my watch’s black screen and waited for the thinking dots to show up. I spoke Benjamin’s name clearly. After a moment that felt too long, the wordsSoul cannot be foundflashed across the screen.

I leapt from the bench. “This damn thing is broken!”

“What do you mean?”

“It keeps saying ‘Not found.’ It’s been doing it all day.”

Simon peered at my watch. “Really? That’s strange.”

“I tried with two other souls today. One I know has to be here, maybe in the human afterlife, but nothing came up for her name, either.”

“Let me try.” Simon followed the same steps I had: tapping the screen on his own watch, speaking Benjamin’s name—first and last—and then waiting as it searched. When he glanced down at his wrist again, he frowned. “That’s strange… His name isn’t showing anything on mine, either. It should at least have his profile with the word ‘Released’ next to it for the records. Let me try the other two souls you put in. What were their names?”

I gave him Marla’s sister’s and Wyatt’s wife’s names. He searched for them, too, but when the lines on his forehead deepened, I knew he’d had no luck either.

Guess my watch wasn’t broken, after all.

“And you say one of these souls is in the human afterlife?”

“Shouldbe.”

“The only way these souls wouldn’t be showing in our database is if they were in Hell. We have no access to any Hell dimensions,” Simon said.

“But there’s no way Lisa is in Hell. You see? That’s the thing. She was a kind soul. Didn’t do anything in her life that would warrant a trip downstairs.”

“Do you know her?” he asked.

“Not personally, no.”

“How do you know this, then?”

“Her husband is here, and he can vouch for her,” I said.

“Well, sometimes mates don’t exactly tell their spouses everything they’ve done throughout their lifetime. There may have been something she did to send her soul to Hell that he doesn’t know of.”

I shook my head. “I really don’t think so.”

“If she’s not coming up on either of our watches, that’s the only explanation I can think of.”

“So, since you’re saying the only souls we don’t have access to are the ones in Hell, that means all three of them—Benjamin included—are there? In Hell?”

“It seems so…”

Passing the folder back to Simon, I marched past him and started back down the path toward the front gate.

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