Page 22 of Midnight in the Garden of Okay and Meh
Mabel
please wait while your video chat host admits you to the room.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I was ordered to join a video call, but a screen full of dragons wasn’t it.
“Er ... hello,” I said, counting two female dragons, one male, and a Dark One and his Beloved. “I’m Mabel. Is one of you Aisling Grey?”
“That’s me,” a woman with long, curly hair said. Next to her sat a big black dog who seemed to watch the screen with an intensity that made me slightly uncomfortable. “I’ll do the introductions, shall I? Ysolde and Baltic are here to lend their support.”
A woman with blond hair waved. In another window, a man sat half-hidden in shadows, making no sign that he was even aware of the video call, but I had the feeling that, like the dog, he was paying close attention.
For some reason, that worried me.
“Also present are Allie and her husband, Christian.”
A woman with dark hair also waved, while her vampire gave a nod of acknowledgment.
“And this is Jim, my demon,” Aisling finished, gesturing toward the dog.
“Hello to all of you,” I said, taken aback by the presence of a demon. I didn’t often have call to work with them. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, but I feel obligated to point out that although the Broker told you I was available for the guiding of your deceased’s spirit, I am, in fact, busy at the moment, and have limited time to do reaper work. It’s not my main job, you see.”
“That’s all right,” the blonde named Ysolde said, making a vague gesture of dismissal. “This shouldn’t take very long. It’s more a retrieval situation than anything else.”
“We would like you to bring someone out of the Akasha,” Allie said with a glance at her mate. He, like the dragon half in shadows, had said nothing, but I was willing to bet he was thinking a whole lot of things.
Now, that was odd. “Really? I’m sorry, I thought the Broker said you were a Guardian, Aisling. I must have misheard.”
“No, I am one,” she answered with a flash of a smile. “And yes, I am fully able to summon people out of the Akasha, assuming that’s what you were going to ask.”
“The problem is that the man we want you to escort out isn’t in the normal part of the Akasha,” Ysolde said.
She was evidently sitting in a living room, because behind her, a door slammed and a lanky young man stormed through the room, trailing a waist-high blaze of fire behind him.
Ysolde said nothing, but the man in the shadows heaved a sigh, and without warning, his square disappeared off the screen.
“I’m not sure that I’d consider any part of the Akasha normal,” I said, a sudden worry gripping my gut.
“So very true,” Aisling said, nodding. “But in this case, it’s definitely ultra-superstrength Akasha.”
“The man we want guided out of there is in the Thirteenth Hour,” Allie said.
The grip on my insides seemed to be made of steel, and I started shaking my head as soon as she finished speaking. “No, I’m sorry, that’s impossible. The Thirteenth Hour is basically a prison.”
“If you’re worried about getting in there—” Aisling started to say, but I stopped her.
“The problem with the Thirteenth Hour isn’t getting in. ... It’s getting out. That’s kind of the whole métier of prisons,” I told her, praying they’d accept that fact and move on. I really didn’t have time for it, not now when Papi had me by my metaphorical short and curlies, and I was desperate for a way out of what he wanted.
Two more people appeared in the video chat screen, a dark-haired man and a woman who wore a T-shirt with a silhouette of a line of small buildings, with the words Axegate Walk: The Next Generation underneath.
“Good afternoon,” the man said in what I thought of as a plummy British accent. I realized he was also a vampire, and wondered what on earth two of his kind were doing mingling with dragons. “Our apologies for being late. We have been interviewing stewards, and one of them got away from us.”
“Literally,” the woman said, giving the man a wry smile. “He ran off to another Hour.”
“This is Finch and his wife, Tatiana,” Aisling said. “They are the leaders of the Seventh Hour of the underworld, and they agreed to join us in brainstorming.”
I murmured something polite, and tried to frame a statement about finding another reaper—although there were only three of us in the world at the moment—because I simply didn’t have the time or energy to help them, but before I could, Ysolde spoke up.
“I thought the whole point of being a reaper was that you could take people out of one form of afterlife and shepherd them to another,” she said with a slight frown. “I don’t see how it works if you can’t do that for us and the man in question.”
