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“Hello, Teriza,” Michael said with mild annoyance. He took in her provocative attire. “If you’re out clubbing tonight, I’d suggest the city. Not much going on here.”

“Oh, now, Michael, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get rid of me. And I just got here.” She faked a pout. “I’m sure Dante doesn’t mind if I hang around. Do you, Persuasion?” She was playful poison, and Dante laughed at her flirting.

“Teriza, I think you will do whatever the hell suits you. As always.”

Her blood-red-lipsticked mouth curved into a smile. She draped an arm around Dante and rested her head against his shoulder, purring, “It’s so nice to see you back on the surface. It’s been such a long time. And we have so much
business
to conduct, don’t we?” Her eyes slid to Michael’s, catching his glare.

When a reaper said she had business to conduct and angels disagreed, it usually meant trouble. Michael reassessed the scene. Both teens were loading goods into their pockets while Jamael fumbled with the safe.

Teriza sauntered around Michael, trailing a sharp fingernail across his chest. “You remember last time, Michael? When you stole that drowning kid’s soul from me? I swore next time I’d take you for a walk on the dark side.” She brought her glossy red lips close to his scowling face. “Aren’t you the least bit curious to see how wonderfully bad it can be? Hmm?” She reached up to stroke his face but Michael batted her hand away. She laughed and turned on her innocent act. “But isn’t that why you’re here?” When Michael refused to answer, she shifted to the demons.

As one who took pride in her independence, Teriza hardly required demonic help to do her job. She looked them over suspiciously.

“Well then, how ’bout you boys tell me what you’re doing here.”

“We gotta see a man about a dog,” Wolfgang said, and she laughed.

“Yeah, Degan told me about this human chick who can see into the spirit world. But I said somebody was yankin’ his leash.”

This unexpected revelation caught Michael off guard and his aura flushed with renewed energy. His eyes locked with Dante’s.

The demon inside Dante stirred, emitting a fresh wave of cinnamon into the air. With angels in such close proximity, Persuasion was chomping at the bit. It would like nothing better than to pick a fight, especially with this one. But Dante steeled himself against the urge. He was here to get answers, and the time had almost come.

Santiago, Degan, and Vaughn crowded into the store, adding to the semicircle around the guardians. Ski mask guy from the back yelled for his partner to make the clerk open the safe. He ran up the aisle, cussing, knocking crap off the shelves, and passing through the guardians unnoticed. He hit the register, and both guys stuffed cash into their pockets. They yelled at Jamael to hurry up. Jamael punched in the code for a fourth time but the safe wouldn’t open.

“It’s locked me out!” he snapped against their berating. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it!”

“Try again!” Baseball cap guy choked out. He worried about the camera—that damned blinking red eye glaring down like a droid from
Star Wars
. He wanted to shoot it but didn’t want to trigger any alarms.

Jamael canceled the entry and tried again, touching the keypad deliberately.
Grab the gun! Shoot them before they shoot you!

Michael stiffened and glared at Wolfgang. “Get out of his head.”

“Sorry, no can do.”

“Gabe, take care of this,” Michael ordered.

Gabe went to Jamael and blocked Impatiens’s line of vision. This weakened the compulsion but didn’t kill it entirely, so Gabe laid a hand on Jamael’s shoulder, passing a calm sensation into him. He didn’t affect Jamael’s free will, but just relaxed his adrenaline rush and slowed his breathing. This would allow Jamael to make a sensible decision.

“Degan,” Dante said evenly, “tell me about this girl who can see you in spirit form.”

Degan twitched with agitation. The energy in the store had tightened like an electric wire. Facing Demon Knights was nerve-wracking for any soul seeker, but a mixed audience of guardians had him visibly shaking.

“Well, she, um, she could see me. I mean, I’ve seen her twice and I’m sure she could see me. She looked right at me and all, so …” He shrugged and pulled at the
frayed edge of his grungy shirt.

Dante looked at Michael’s brothers in anticipation. If Dante was correct in his assumption, things were about to get very awkward for Michael.

“You know that’s impossible,” Raph snarled at the soul seeker. “No human can see into—” He stopped short, remembering what Michael had said about Sophia. She had seen him in spirit form at an accident. Was there
another
girl who could see entities from Hell in spirit form? Or had Sophia seen both Michael
and
Degan?

“You should go now,” Michael warned Degan.

“But … you know I got Soul Patrol. I’m just doing my job.”

“Go away,” Michael repeated, and Degan slouched, turning to leave.

Dante lifted a hand, and an invisible force stopped Degan as if he had hit a brick wall. He stumbled back and recoiled in fear. It was hard to say which was worse, an angel ordering him to leave or a demon making him stay. All in all, it was better to be back at the cemetery with Teriza, sitting on headstones and chucking empty wine bottles at stupid humans trying to raise the dead.

“Tell me, Degan,” Dante ordered. “Do you know this girl’s name? The one who can see soul seekers?”

The tension between Dante and Michael was palpable, and Degan’s eyes flicked back and forth between them. “She, um. No, I don’t know her name. Ask Michael, he was there.”

A ripple of energy passed through the guardians, and Raph and Gabe turned and stared at Michael. Dante smiled magnanimously.

Michael hadn’t told his brothers that Sophia could see into both spirit realms!

“Well, well. Somebody is keeping secrets from his brother guardians.” Dante clicked his tongue reproachfully. “Bad form, Michael. What would the Halos think? Oh, but wait, you have yet to become a Halo. Still a servant under the sign of the Arc, forced to protect unworthy humans. How disappointing for you.”

“I’d rather bear the mark of the Archangels and be a servant to humans than wear the brand of the dead and be a slave to your Master, Dante. I pity you.”

Dante’s face flushed with hatred and Persuasion sizzled his eyes with pent-up rage. His nostrils flared and he spoke tightly through a clenched jaw, “I am a
Knight
of the Royal Court! Do. Not. Pity—”

A blast of gunfire exploded Dante’s last word. Baseball cap guy had lost his patience and shot out the camera. Glass and plastic rained down, and Jamael instinctively threw an arm over his head. Then the teen panicked and punched Jamael in the kidneys, and the young clerk went down.

Wolfgang clapped and roared with laughter.

Teriza perked up. “Uh-oh! Almost time!” She opened the quiver on her back but instead of retrieving arrows, she pulled out a black iron cylinder. Inside was a death contract.

Michael stiffened at the sight of it, the binding obstacle that stopped him and his brothers from protecting a soul. Without a contract, guardians and spirit walkers were free to fight off any dark entities trying to Take a Forgiven soul: freak accident victims, souls lost in comas, and the like. But a contract meant the soul had been marked as Unforgiven and released by The Council of Guardians. It meant guardians couldn’t protect it, and entities from below had a right to fight over it.

Michael frowned, wondering if their “call” had been wrong. They were here to protect everyone in the store, so why the death contract?

Teriza grinned with anticipation and spiced up her centuries-old routine. She greedily wrapped her hands around the cylinder and her face became animated with a kid-on-Christmas-morning look.

“ ’Twas the nightmare before Deathmas and all through the house—”

“Hey! Where are you?” A gruff voice bellowed from the parking lot, and the teens inside the store froze.

“Man, why you gotta shoot the camera? It tripped a silent alarm!” the guy in the ski mask griped and ducked behind a magazine rack. His partner followed and they peered out the door. “That ain’t no cop.”

“Who the hell is it?”

A lone man stood in the parking lot staring at the store. The teens conferred and decided the cops wouldn’t be long now; they had to make a run for the car.

Every spiritual entity inside the store flashed to the parking lot and watched the teens walk out with guns drawn. Their aim was on a middle-aged man in striped pajama bottoms, a ratty robe over a wife beater tank, thick glasses, and a Donald Trump comb-over. He had a tin can in one hand and a gun in the other. He saw the guns aimed at him and slowly raised his. He looked bewildered and scared.

Wolfgang broke out laughing. “I don’t believe it! Look who grew some figs!”

“I don’t want trouble,” the man said nervously to the teens. “I just want that guy who broke my window.”

“Hey, dude! Back off!” baseball cap guy yelled at the man. “You don’t want none of this!” He stepped closer, rolling his gun sideways. Ski mask guy grew nervous beside him. Should he shoot the man or run for the car? The driver was yelling to the teens to forget the man and get in.

Vaughn made himself a target in front of baseball cap guy’s gun. “I’ll take some of that,” he pleaded. “Come on, I haven’t had a hit all day.” The demons laughed at their antics while the guardians watched in disgust.

A streetlamp sputtered, eventually dying out, and the man with the tin can was cast in shadows. Dry wind stirred trash into the gutter as an ambulance siren faded away in the opposite direction. Ski mask guy was edging toward the curb when a loud explosion echoed against the concrete buildings, and there was Jamael standing in the doorway with the gun shaking in his hands. His aim had been careless, but return fire was instant and deafening. Baseball cap guy twitched, firing at the man who instantly shot at him. The blasting prompted Jamael to squeeze the trigger over and over. Ski mask guy whipped around, firing wildly in every direction. Echoes reverberated off the buildings and transformed the random shots into sounds of machine-gun fire. Faint spiritual lights flashed in rhythm with the blasts as the guardians protected the human souls. Random bullets sprayed into the redbrick building, the convenient store window, and the chest of the man in the bathrobe.

He gasped in surprise and then dropped the can and gun as he fell to his knees. His eyes bulged and his mouth gaped in disbelief, and then he toppled sideways, rolling onto his back.

The teens took off running and climbed into the car, tires squealing across the pavement as the car sped away.

Teriza sauntered over to the man laid out on the concrete. She peered down and wrinkled her nose like it was roadkill.

“Eeuuw! It’s still alive.”

“
That
guy is the Take?” Wolfgang snarled.

Teriza nudged the man with the tip of her Jimmy Choo. “Come on, sugar, die already. I gotta party to go to.” She looked up and smiled at Wolfgang. “Wanna finish what you started?”

Wolfgang’s face darkened with an evil grin, and he walked over to a parking meter and ripped it out of the ground. “Here, his time’s expired.” He slammed the metal post into the man’s gut. Both ends of the body shot up, the man nearly folding in half before flopping back down. Blood gushed from his chest and mouth.

Teriza cooed excitedly, “Oooh! Here he comes!” She opened the scroll and started reciting in a deep, authoritative tone: “ ‘Gary Wayne Paulson, I hereby claim you on behalf of …’ ” She broke form and giggled. “The
fabulous me
!”

“What are you doing?” Dante chuckled at her childish behavior.

“Oh, just sprucing up the festivities. You know, after five centuries of the same
ol’ … a girl needs a little variety.” She winked and continued.

“Ahem, as I was saying. ‘I claim you, Gary Wayne Paulson, as my scourge and dub you … Paulson the Pervert!’ ” She thwacked him with a thorny branch that had instantly appeared in her hand. Three times across his body and the faint imprint of Gary Wayne Paulson slowly peeled off the convulsing body impaled with the parking meter. The imprint stood beside her, and they peered down at his messy remains.

“Pathetic, huh?” she said.

“Am I dead?”

Teriza looked at the others, “Dead humans say the darnedest things.”

“I’m not ready to die!” Gary cried out.

Teriza shrugged like she’d heard it all before. “Too bad, toots. Game over.”

“No! I can’t be! I … have things to do! I can’t be …” He was horrified, whipping around in panic. The angels and demons watched emotionless. “But where … am I going?” He knew instantly and threw himself at Michael’s feet. “Please! For God’s sake, please take me with you!” He grabbed at Michael’s legs, but his filmy hands passed through unaffected.

Michael looked down in disappointment. He waved a hand, casting the imprint away to float aimlessly across the parking lot.

This was the moment every soul seeker waited for, when a detached soul drifted unfettered in the night. Since all dark entities were in competition with one another, the soul was technically fair game, and Degan was craving to grab it for himself. Teriza was his good friend and had the death contract, but he could swipe it like a runner stealing home when the pitcher wasn’t looking. After all, there was nothing more enjoyable for the Master and The Order of Reapers than deadly competition, even among their own servants. Those who collected the most souls won favor, something that came in handy below. But any entity that left Hell with a death contract and returned without the marked soul was subjected to The Order’s special brand of torture.

Luckily, Degan had only to steal souls, no contract necessary. But he had a quota to meet, so he was antsy like a kid denied candy at Halloween. His fingers curled and his body twitched with need.

“Huh-uh.” Teriza shot him a warning look and then cracked her whip, snapping it around the imprint’s ankle before he sailed too far away. She laughed at Gary’s wailing, and then whistled, calling her minions. Mournful howls rose from the shadows and dark smudges pushed forth like roiling black smog. They took shape as hideous faces with razor teeth and snapping jaws. A pack of vicious piranhas, they bit and clawed and tore at Gary’s imprint, devouring him in chunks. He cried out in horrendous pain, begging for
help. Teriza’s red fingernails extended into daggers and she slid one under Gary’s quivering chin.