I was back in my office, and once again it was dark and I could only see a couple pieces of furniture. The desk was empty this time, no Ginny tied up and naked on top of it. I did see her blood dried up and smeared in splotches all over it, though.

I walked around the room and picked up various things, hoping there would be something to explain what was happening. I assumed this had something to do with my connection to Death. Was it trying to warn me about something again? What the hell was all this crap?

I heard the door open and suddenly saw someone standing there. They were wearing a poncho that looked to be made of burned material, and the hood was pulled over their head, covering half their face in shadow. What I could see was covered in a golden skull mask. All except for the eyes. Their eyes practically glowed.

They saw me, that much I could tell. I didn't move, but they circled me, and if I could see the look on their face, I was positive they'd be smiling at me. A lecherous, almost predatory smile. A smile I'd seen before and never wanted to see again.

I didn't need to hear his annoying drawl to know this was the guy from the bleachers, from the last time I'd had one of these dreams. “I didn’t think I’d be seein’ you again, little Danielle.”

I didn’t know how to respond, but I sure as hell knew I wanted to. Naturally, I started with the first question that really came to mind. “Who the fuck are you?”

He stopped and leaned against the desk. "Oh, I'm just a simple angel, here doin' my job. One I inherited from you, actually."

"The temporary Death."

He laughed. "Oh, it ain't gonna be temporary for too long, not once I reach my goal. Just gotta cut off that last pesky part that's attached to you."

I wanted my scythe so bad right now, if only to scare this asshole, but then again, he probably had one of his own. I settled for grabbing him by the collar. "I'm coming to fuck you up, you sonuvabitch, you hear me?!"

I assumed he was smiling under that creepy mask, at least until he took it off and confirmed my assumption. "Go ahead and try, Danielle," he whispered, "every entrance is blocked and even the old codgers like Jubril and Ezekiel can't get back up here. You ain't got a chance."

I let him go and backed away. "That's what you think. I have a way, I'm headed there now. And when I get my friends and I into Heaven, the first thing I'm gonna do is wipe the floor with your ass."

He grabbed me by the neck and spun us around. He hoisted me into the air and slammed me down onto the desk, down into the desk. I felt the splintered wood underneath me and just knew something was probably sticking in me. The pain took me by complete surprise, as I thought this whatever it was ran on the rules of a dream, but clearly that was wrong.

He knelt down and whispered in my ear, "I hope you do, darlin'. I'm lookin' forward to gettin' rid of my only competition."

 

---

I awoke and immediately checked my back for splinters or pieces of wood sticking through it. The only thing I found was sweat sticking me to the vinyl seats of the car. I managed to peel myself off and realized that the car was stopped and I was the only one in it, in the backseat where I’d spent another uncomfortable three and a half hours between the angel brothers. There were girls who liked being stuck in the middle of a back seat with two boys, but I couldn’t stand it. Granted, said two boys were also basically family, but that's besides the point.

I got out of the car and instantly felt my muscles trying to relax themselves from the position I’d been sleeping in for I don’t know how long. We were in a parking lot, and the only one around me was Hadraniel, drinking from that flask Sam had… Five days ago? Jesus Christ, we’d been on the road too long. I hoped our little vacation was almost over.

"Well, look who dragged herself out of bed at three in the morning," Hadraniel said, with just a hint of inebriation in his voice.

"Where's everybody else?" I asked through a yawn.

"Grabbing food at this Thai place we passed a minute ago. We've only been here a couple minutes."

I crawled up on top of the hood and stretched out some. "Where are we?"

"Just inside Miami, somewhere near… Hell, this place is confusing to me. London is easier to figure out."

"Have you ever actually been to London, or is that just where your accent comes from?"

He took a gulp. "Angels are just born with an accent of some kind. The most annoying one is the American southern drawl,” he said that in a pretty laughable imitation.

Despite the crudity, however, I shot straight up and braced myself against the car, as if that asshole were actually somewhere around me, even though I knew he couldn’t be. But that sounded almost too close. “Um… Do you happen to know who got the temporary Death gig while I’m on probation?”

He raised an eyebrow. “What prompted that?”

“Just answer the question first.”

He rubbed at the back of his neck. “Uh… Kar… Karael. He’s an annoying bloke, I knew him in primary school. Why?”

“Has a southern American accent?”

“Yeah, he does.”

I slid off the car. “I met him the day all this started. I was on the bleachers, waiting for Kevin to get done with practice, and he just appeared and was creepy as fuck. That night, I had this weird dream that wasn’t a dream where he had Ginny tied up on the desk back in the office and was basically thanking her for being a pawn. Then, just a little bit ago, I had another not-a-dream where he told me he’s the one behind Heaven being locked out.”

He stared at me blank faced, almost terrified. “That’s… Oh, fuck!”

“What?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. After picking a number from his contacts, he impatiently whispered, “C’mon, you bloody twat, pick up the phone…” Then, when whoever he was calling answered, he said, “Sam, you three need to get your arses back here. What? Yes, I said arse, I’m British you sod. Just hurry the fuck up.”

"Is this more serious than before?" I asked.

He stuffed his phone back in his pocket and took a long swig of the flask. "Extremely. Now we know who's behind this shite."

 

---

"I don't believe it," Sam said after I finished telling him my story. "Karael is… No. He's not like that."

Thandie laughed. "You sound like you love him."

He turned red. "What? No, no… I just…"

Hadraniel interjected, "Karael's been a friend of our family for a long time, going right back to our earliest school days." He handed Sam the flask, who quickly downed it as fast as he could. "It also complicates things with Azrael."

Kevin asked, "Why?"

"Because that sod is Azrael's son." He leaned against somebody's car. "A bastard, but but his son nonetheless, and he is aware of Karael, even if he has no use for him."

"Would he still help us?" I asked.

Sam shrugged. "Hell if I know. The two of them haven't had much contact, and Azrael's not really interested in seeing any angels in his life right now."

"But he still had sex with one nine months before Karael was born?" Kevin inquired.

Thandie broke into a mixture of a laugh and a cough. "Angels have sex?"

Sam responded, "Frequently."

Hadraniel glared. "Speak for yourself, wanker."

I drove the conversation back to the point, "Yes, he clearly did, Kevin."

Sam shook his head. "Not necessarily. Karael's mother has never been seen, so far as I know, and Azrael only left him with our parents, nothing more."

I raised an eyebrow. "Karael lived with you?"

Hadraniel shook his head. "Not long. Angels are relatively self sufficient thanks to our magic, so almost immediately after being left with us, he was gone. But we were fairly certain he had a human mother. He wouldn't be the first hybrid. God's daughter, Sariel, is as well."

Thandie asked, "Is she hot?"

Sam put his arm around her. "She's… Not all that fond of humans."

"I'm a demi-god, y'know."

"Yeah, but only in the sense that your terrifying and disturbingly creepy father is Zeus. You're a normal human otherwise."

“The point, guys!” Kevin exclaimed.

“The point is it makes getting Azrael to help us potentially harder,” Hadraniel explained. “He doesn’t have love for his son, but he might still have a problem with us taking the bastard down.” He turned to me. “He’s still our only option, though.”

I nodded. “And maybe, though highly unlikely, he’ll have some kind of information we need to stop Karael.”

 

---

The man who had once been the original Death turned out to be a large, bald man of about five-foot-nine. He looked somewhat like God, but at the same time that similarity was down to the fact that both were bald. This guy looked less like Mr. Clean and more like a hunter. He wore a pair of tan shorts and a white wife beater underneath a tan short sleeved button up tee-shirt.

“You’re absolutely sure this is the guy?” I asked Sam.

He shrugged. “I only met him once, but he’s got the angel energy coursing through him and he looks familiar. If he’s not Azrael, hopefully he can send us to him.”

I sighed. “Alright, let me go first. I don’t immediately register on the angel-o-meter right now, so hopefully I don’t make him kick us out right away.”

“Shouldn’t Kevin or I go?” Thandie asked.

I jerked my thumb at the sleeping figure of my boyfriend in the backseat of the car. “You mean that Kevin?”

“Besides,” Hadraniel started, “you’re Greek and the daughter of Zeus. Azrael’s got this thing against Greeks for all the pits your ancestors threw babies into.”

“Oh, so he’s Pro-Life?” Thandie giggled.

“No politics, please,” I said, though the joke did make me laugh internally at least. “I’m going.”

I made my way toward Azrael’s house. It was a shack, really, sitting in a secluded area of the Miami beach. That it satisfied one person was a surprise. There were few windows, and probably only enough surface area for a small bedroom and maybe a kitchen at best. I got the impression he didn’t serve a whole lot of guests, and if he did, it was likely only on the boat I saw docked at the edge of a poor looking pier or at the small umbrella-shaded table and three chairs that sat just outside the home. I didn’t even see a grill.

I didn’t want to surprise or annoy him, so I approached slowly and in plain view. He wasn’t looking my way, but he also wasn’t really looking in any direction other than the open sea. He had a bottle next to him, but as I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t alcohol of any kind. He was slowly downing a bottle of Dr. Pepper, presumably trying to iron out which of the twenty-three flavors was sloshing around in his mouth at that very moment.

I was going to end up surprising him after all, it seemed, as he still hadn’t turned in my direction when I got up to the house. I took a deep breath and went to knock on the side of the house…

“I know you’re here already,” he said, a British tone to his voice. Great. Another one. I quickly pulled my hand away as he turned around in his chair and faced me. “You’re out awfully late, and I don't think you're here to do what your job description says."

I found myself almost at a loss for words. "My… Um…"

He motioned to me with his soda bottle. "The current Death. God told me about you just shortly after you were appointed."

Oh, wonderful. "Yeah… That's me. Or, well, it was."

He turned back to face the water again. "Is that true? Funny, the power is still surging inside you." He reached forward and pulled one of the chairs out from under the table. "Sit down and explain to me why you're here."

I sighed and walked over to the table. I took the seat he offered and then he handed me a bottle of soda. “So…”

“Tell me why it is you’re supposedly not the current Death.”

“Well… I nearly killed two people who were assholes, but maybe didn’t deserve to die. And so, God put me on probation, and someone else has the power now… Someone who's blocked Heaven from the rest of us."

He looked like he was going to fall over in his chair. "Blocked it? That's not supposed to be possible!"

I weighed my options and decided that now might not be the best time to tell him it was his son. "We talked to Jubril, and--"

He cut me off. "We?"

I pointed in the direction of the car. "My watcher, Hadraniel. His brother, Samael. The current Thanatos, my friend Thandie. My boyfriend, Kevin."

He stood up. "You brought the sons of Raziel to my home?"

I blinked. "I don't know who that is."

He forcibly stood me up and shoved me back the way I came. "I need you to leave."

"Wait, what did their dad do? What's that got to do with…"

He shushed me. "I'll not have either of those two here, not when it means he'll know."

I was about to say something in protest, to explain to him that Jubril had sent us to him in hopes that it would get him to calm down, but Hadraniel beat me to the punch. “A bit too late for that, old man,” he said, “Jubril’s the reason we’re out here.”

I didn’t even notice him and Sam walking up to the place, but there they suddenly were, Sam with his hands in his pockets and Hadraniel holding a death grip on that flask. For a long time, the two of them just stood there, looking at Azrael. Azrael, likewise, just stood there staring at them. It was like a tense, biblical Mexican stand-off that I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to be in the middle of.

Azrael was the first to speak: “You know he’ll find you.”

Sam shrugged. “Not really important. He can find us anyway, and you. Karael’s the one that locked up Heaven."

A look of disgust and anguish crossed Azrael's face, and he dropped his soda bottle to the sand beneath him. He fell back into his chair and looked to be ready to either cry or scream, I wasn't sure which. The angel brothers had said there was no love lost between Azrael and his son, but that was not what I was seeing.

I sat back down and said, “He’s the one who took over as Death while I’m on probation.”

His eyes widened in shock. “God gave him the power?” He turned to Sam and Hadraniel. “Why?”

Sam answered, “He must have trusted him.” He laughed. “Look where it got us.”

“Oh, it bloody got you somewhere, didn’t it?” Azrael stood up and walked over to the brothers. Almost simultaneously, I started to feel an odd sense that something was wrong. “I tell God that the boy is too dangerous on Earth, and he gives him to your sad excuse for a father. What happened to him after that?”

Hadraniel stepped forward. “He left us. That sod decided we weren’t good enough for him and left! We tried to welcome him, tried to treat him like a member of the family, but we clearly weren’t the family he wanted!”

I stood up. "Stop yelling, please." That feeling was still lingering, and I just couldn’t figure it out.

Azrael shoved his index finger in Hadraniel's face. "You think I was? You think he wanted anything to do with me? His mother abandoned him on my doorstep, he'd been born being told I hated him!"

"Please stop," I urged. Something just felt wrong, off, like there was a pressure in my chest or something.

Sam stepped up to bat. "And I'm sure leaving him with a family of strangers in another plane of existence did wonders for his feelings of abandonment and parental love. Our dad tried his damnedest to include Karael, but that little bastard didn't want to be around us if he couldn't help it."

The pressure spread to my arms and hands. "Guys… Please…"

I heard Thandie ask, "What's up with Dani?"

"Clearly, you lot didn't try hard enough," Azrael spat out, "because now that little bastard is mad on power and you've no way to stop him!"
I was lightheaded, now. I couldn’t understand why, but I knew it had something to do with them arguing. Was something or someone trying to tell me I needed to be the one to stop the arguing? Just what the hell was this?

“That’s what we came to you for!” Hadraniel shouted.

“Maybe you should’ve gone to someone else!”

“Shut up!” I shrieked. I felt a surge of energy course throughout my body, something both frighteningly alien and yet strangely familiar. It lasted seconds, it lasted a lifetime, it was like something I knew intimately and yet couldn’t peg down at all. In fact, it was a lot like…

I looked around and saw everyone, including a now awoken Kevin, staring at me. It reminded me of the day I screwed up with Ginny’s parents. That was when I realized what it was and why this was so familiar: I’d just used the Reaper power. And the way I figured out what I’d just done? I was holding my scythe.

Kevin asked, “What did I miss?”

Almost as if the thing was on fire, I dropped the scythe and took several steps back from it. I hadn’t seen the damned thing in seven months, and now I was almost terrified of the fact that I’d just summoned it. How the hell had I done that?! Instantly, it shifted shape, turning into that familiar teddy bear that I also hadn’t seen in months.

Azrael took notice of that. If it were possible for an angel to look like he’d seen a ghost, that was what Azrael looked like. He slowly approached the scythe bear and picked it up, almost surprised he was holding it. Then again, that was originally his scythe, and he was probably just confused that it now took on the shape of a teddy bear when not in use. He turned it this way and that in his hands, and then the most confusing thing I’d ever seen happened: He started crying.

“This is what it becomes for you?” he asked.

“Yeah…”

“That son of a bitch!”

“Who are you talking about?”

“This is the first time it’s taken this shape since I was the one who wielded the power.”

“You used to carry around a teddy bear?” Sam asked.

Azrael walked over to me and handed me the bear. “I gave it that shape in honor of the first soul I needed to reap. She loved that bear, never left it behind anywhere. And I wanted her to know that I’d never leave it as long as I was Death.”

I looked up at him. “She?”

He nodded. “My daughter.”