Luck cleared her throat, demonstrating her eagerness to continue this little gathering she’d instigated.
The sooner I finished, the better. “Um, well, I’d get up in the morning around seven. Some days, I’d meet with clients or do paperwork. You know, file motions and such. Sometimes I’d have court. Those were the most interesting days, and I think what I was best at, getting up in front of a judge and jury, and trying to sway them over to my way of thinking.” My thoughts wandered back to those days. I’d wear one of my classic black suits that lent my girlish looks more of a mature, respectable appearance. “It was invigorating,” I said, mostly to myself, as I stared off in space. Some mornings, I still had to remind myself of where I was and that I didn’t have clients anymore.
Luck groaned. “That sounds just tragic!” She had a flair for the dramatic.
“It doesn’t sound that bad—” Murphy was cut off by Luck’s elbow meeting his ribs. He opened his mouth, as if to complain, and then just shut it again. Good move, Murphy. He didn’t have a chance against her.
Luck either didn’t notice his annoyance or, more likely, didn’t care, as she covered her heart with her hand. “What a tragedy. It’s a blessing it all ended.” She looked around the room, giving everyone the evil eye until they started agreeing with her.
Pleased, she moved on to the next thing on her list. “Who’s got the one month dead coin?”
“I thought we weren’t actually dead?” I asked.
There was a lot of ambiguity surrounding that subject. We weren’t mortal anymore, that was for sure. I could swing by my grave and prove that anytime I wanted. But we had bodies with needs and could get hurt or killed. And although I’d been told we didn’t age, my hair continued to grow. I still woke up hungry in the morning, and watch out if I didn’t get a cup of coffee. It was like we were straddling some invisible fence between immortality and human frailty.
“Seriously? Are we dead or not?” I asked again when I still received no response.
I got several yeses and nos at the same time, confirming my own belief. Somehow, we were neither.
Luck turned to me and her eyes flared. “We are not ruining this wonderful meeting with another dead debate. Now, who has the coin?”
No one spoke. This could go bad and quickly. Please, could someone have the goddam coin so we could be done?
“I thought Jockey was getting it?” Crow said, the black bird on his shoulder cawing in what could’ve been agreement. If the bird had any sense, he was mocking us all for the fools we were.
“Death said he was getting it!” Jockey, always a little bit defensive to begin with, stood in alarm.
Death, who appeared to be middle-aged man in a sweater vest, looked up from his How to Help Those of the Recently Deceased book. “No one told me to get anything. I thought Mother was getting it.” Death free-lanced as a grief counselor when he wasn’t escorting the newly departed along their way. Really, the guy knew how to work both ends of a situation, and he was excellent at both. He helped kill your loved ones, and then collected a check from teaching you how to cope with it. I could only imagine how bad that would be for his booming business if it got out.
Mother, surrounded by her beefy gardeners, just shrugged in her perfectly petite way. Mother Earth didn’t particularly like to get her hands dirty in trivial matters she considered beneath her.
“Fine. I’ll get it myself tomorrow, you bunch of lazy good-for-nothings!” Luck was practically frothing at the mouth at her coworker’s lack of enthusiasm in making her meeting a rousing success
“Is this almost over?” my boss, Harold, asked. His chair was situated at the very outer limits of the space, where he could still claim participation and yet not have to interact much. Harold didn’t particularly care for me, but he wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type, so it was very hard to distinguish the difference between his likes and dislikes. I’d yet to find anyone or thing he did like, other than his piles of papers.
Before Luck could address Harold’s question, Fate walked in. His eyes immediately landed on me and stayed there. My gaze quickly moved away, but it didn’t lessen the effect, or how my senses seemed to attune only to him now.
Everyone else’s eyes shot to him. He had a way of doing that, hogging all the attention. This was a meeting about me, not that I wanted it, but he even hogged this. The fact that I didn’t think his hogging problem was intentional made it no less annoying.
In truth, it was just something about him. I used to think it was his dark good looks, or maybe his height and build, but the more I got to know him, the more I realized it was none of those things.
Even if his looks were the first thing that drew your attention, there was something else entirely that kept you transfixed. It was something in the way he moved, the way he spoke, and the look in his eyes. It wasn’t that the people around him were lacking, it was that he just had more of everything.
To sum it up, Fate was like the Universe’s experiment in extra credit. If the rest of us were a scoop of vanilla ice cream, he was a sundae, with extra fudge and a cherry.
Luck stood and pointed a finger at him. “You’re late. You said you would be here,” she scolded, in no way wilting, even under Fate’s full glare, something that caused most people to whither.
I, on the other hand, tried to avoid all direct contact. I’d been dodging Fate for the past few weeks. It wasn’t that I disliked him. It was just…complicated.
He’d been letting me, too, up until a couple of days ago. But something had changed in the past forty-eight hours. He’d become a hunter and I the prey. I didn’t like the feeling of being a gazelle sprinting away from the lion with about as much cover as the grass on the plains.
No matter where I ducked lately, he showed up. Obviously, I should have expected him to come to this. I just wish he hadn’t.
“A job ran late,” he said to Luck, unperturbed. He found a chair at the back, slung his arm across the empty one next to him and kicked his feet up on the one in front of him. Only Fate, the space hog, would need three chairs to get comfortable.
The second his eyes turned back on me again, I started squirming in my spot. Wow, look at that interesting dirt mark on the wall near the door. The pretense became more than that as I realized just how dirty the walls really were. You would think they could get a painter in this place. Hell, give me a gallon and I’d do it myself. Someone really needed to get a handle on the housekeeping around here.
There was even shadowing around the doorknob. No wonder they always tried to dim the lights. I’d thought it was Harold being cheap, trying to lower the gas and electric bill. We might be Unknown Forces of the Universe, but Santee Cooper, the local electric company, sure knew how to find us. I’d seen the bills on Harold’s desk last time I was snooping.
Somewhere in those stacks, he’s got a file on me. I never passed up an opportunity to try and find out what they’d written about me. One of these days, and I had a lot of them coming since I was signed on here for the next thousand years, I’d find it.
The dirty door I’d been staring at opened suddenly, and a blond Adonis stood there, making everything look even shabbier with his elegance. No, not just an Adonis, this was the real deal. Cupid. Decked out in a suit of white silk, from head to toe, he was a sight to behold. Large diamonds in his ears and on his fingers, flashing their value the way only a superb stone could, dimmed in comparison to the person wearing them.