Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“You’ll want to fuck off, now,” said Mike, who despite being a nice guy, had his limits, which he was very close to reaching with this particular spirit.

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” said the ghost.

In an instant he had rolled into the beam he was sitting on and Concepción materialized on the beam next to Mike, so close she could have sat on one of his safety lines.

“Thank you,” she said. “My brave champion.”

“Why?” asked Mike. He felt better just seeing her, in fact his emotions had swung from morose and anxious to elated and nearly giddy as soon as she appeared.

“I think you can understand now that we need you,” she said. “He is just one of many.”

“You need me for what?”

“To join us, of course,” she said.

When she arrived, he was already in the coffee shop, sitting in one of the conversation areas in a wingback chair, his long legs stretched out before him like a fun slide.

She said, “Just because the forces of darkness are rising and the end of the world is nigh, don’t think I’m going to play Armageddon bone monkeys with you, M. This is just coffee.”

She called him “M,” because she refused to call him Minty, it being, in her mind, entirely too cheerful and perky and kind of stupid, and because he told her once that when he had worked security for a casino in Vegas he said they referred to him as M.F., which everyone thought stood for motherfucker . So “M” for short.

“A double espresso for me, then,” he said with a smile.

She put her enormous spike-studded purse on the chair to the side of him. “How about two singles?”

He nodded. “That would be perfect, Darque.”

She turned to conceal her own smile and headed off to the counter to get their coffee. She knew he’d conceded to having two single espressos because he knew that watching him drink from the teeny-tiny cups made her laugh, so she’d won coffee already. But he had called her Darque, which she loved, so maybe he’d won. Fucksox!

When she returned with their coffees she said, “Are you sure you want to talk about this stuff here?”

“You didn’t want to come to my place.”

But she did want to come to his place, be charmed into insane make-up sex where he enveloped her pale and luscious beauty like a great spider, rendering her helpless in his grasp, stinging her again and again (although not in the butt) until she screamed. But he was too old, too tall, too rich (she would not be a slave to his economic stability—even at the price of moving back into a crap apartment in the Sunset), and most of all, he was way too dark and cool.

She said, “Well, in public I thought there’d be less sobbing. It would be less embarrassing for you.”

“Very considerate of you,” he said. “You know that one voice mail, I was having a bad reaction to some cold medicine. So, you know, just ignore that one.”

“Which one was that?” she said, eyes wide, which, with her dark and abundant eye makeup, made her look like a silent film star overplaying an insane person—Brigitte Helm, crazed anarchist/robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was what she was going for.

“You know which one,” he said, then he took a sip from a tiny cup.

“Oh, you mean my new ring tone? Sure. Okay.” She smiled coyly into her latte. This was what the personal ads would refer to as “light dominance and humiliation” and she decided this was something she was keeping in mind as one of her dating profile preferences.

“Charlie Asher is alive,” Minty said.

“What?” She looked up so fast she spilled a little coffee in her lap. “Wait, what?”

“Audrey put his soul into one of those Squirrel People things. He’s been living with her at the Buddhist Center since we buried his real body.”

Lily had actually been there when he died from the Morrigan’s poison… well, right outside the room. She had gone to Asher’s funeral. She’d been devastated. He’d been annoying, but she’d thought he’d always be there. She’d probably ended up with Minty Fresh because she had been so traumatized over Asher’s death, at least that’s what her friend Abby had told her. Now Asher was alive? Tears welled in her eyes and she wiped them back. She said, “Wait. What?”

“Asher needs a new body and I’m going to try to help him find one. I need to find someone who is going to die, but of an accident that won’t ruin their body too much. Audrey has some Tibetan Book of the Dead gris-gris she going to do.”

“Wait,” said Lily. “What?”

“Rivera, the homicide cop that was following Asher, working the soul vessel cases? The one that shot the Morrigan while she was giving Charlie a hand job? He’s a Death Merchant now.”

“Rivera?” Was everybody special but her? For fuck’s sake. Armani cop, Rivera? “Wait, how long…”

“I sent him the Big Book of Death myself. Asher told me that Rivera was able to see him while he was collecting a soul vessel, so even back then he was becoming. He opened a bookstore over on Polk.”

“Rivera?” she said.

“A woman appeared in his shop out of nowhere, a banshee, shrieking, warning him that shit was going down—‘an elegant death,’ she said. Then she Tased him and disappeared.”

“A banshee?” How did you get that job? She would be awesome at that. They give you a Taser?

“Rivera hasn’t collected a soul for a year. Turns out, Charlie Asher was supposed to keep collecting soul vessels as well. He hasn’t. His shop should have stayed open. We should have never opened that restaurant.”

“Well I could have told you that,” she said. Pizza and jazz, really a stupid combination. Would have been obvious to here if she hadn’t been all woo-wooed over the enormous mint Death Merchant at the time.

Minty said, “We’re not sure that the Death Merchants who were killed when all that went down were replaced. I’m trying to find out, now. There could be a thousand or more uncollected soul vessels. That’s way, way worse than what caused the last un-fucking-raveling. No telling what kind of shit going to show up.”

“Well little Sophie is the Big Death, right, the Luminatus, she can just smack them down like before, right?”

“She might not be. Asher says her hellhounds are gone.”

He put down his first espresso and tossed back the second. Lily found no joy whatsoever in watching.

“Gone? Wait. What?”

“And the Emperor is running around, talkin’ about he got to make a list of all the forgotten dead, which would be on par crazy per usual if all this other shit wasn’t going down.”

“But no one has seen the Morrigan, right?” Lily was the one who had first figured out who—what—the raven-women were, and she’d seen firsthand the entity that had led their attack, a winged bull-headed thing that had nearly destroyed Charlie Asher’s secondhand shop looking for soul vessels. Charlie had seen the Morrigan rip the creature to shreds in the vast underground grotto that had formed under the financial district. Historically speaking, it had been a fucked-up day.

“Nah, Sophie took them out, we’re hoping that was a forever thing.”

“I’m going to need another coffee. You?”

He shook his head. She nearly lost her balance when she stood up—the maelstrom of new and disturbing information she was trying to process making her light-headed. He caught her arm and steadied her.

“You all right?”

She nodded. “I just need a minute with you not telling me stuff.”

She stumbled over to the counter and ordered, stood there and waited even after the barista told her he would bring it to her. It had all gone to shit so fast—one minute she was the boss of the whole situation, the next she’s stumbling around trying to grasp the idea that Charlie was alive and was trying to escape from the body of a squirrel person. (And what deeply creepy little fucks they were, even for her, for whom deeply creepy had long been a goal.) Had M dumped all this on her just because she’d been winning? Didn’t matter. She needed to talk to Charlie Asher, she needed in on this grand and dark debacle that was about to happen. She picked up her coffee and returned to the Mint One.