"You need to sleep," Uriel said, crossing his arms. "Even your apprentice takes better care of herself, and she's dead."

"I can sleep once I have my scythe back." Death flipped through another newspaper. "Besides, what's that saying? No rest for the wicked?"

"Demons sleep. I'm guessing you've gotten three hours of sleep in the last five days."

"By my time yes, by yours no. Did you get those papers or not?"

Uriel tossed a pile of papers bound with a ribbon onto the table. Death scrambled to undo it before reading through them. Some of the papers were ripped, some were stained, and some of them were in a language I'd never seen when I was alive.

"As for you." Uriel fixed his eyes on me. "Don't do anything stupid. Making deals for your soul is dumb enough, but when you're part of Death's realm, you could end up screwing up the balance."

"Hey, it's my job to yell at me, not yours." I said, before taking another bite of soup. "And it's really hard for me not to do something stupid, there's something about this place that rubs off on you."

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, kid. Get me another cup of coffee." Death's eyes never left his papers which were surrounded by thirty coffee mugs. I sighed, slid off the barstool, and grabbed another one from the cabinet. Steam rose from the fresh coffee along with its overwhelming scent. I grabbed the instant coffee and stirred in an extra two spoonfuls.

"Have you considered drugs?" I asked, placing the mug next to him. He continued working like he hadn't heard me.

Uriel moved to stand behind Death. His hands glowed softly as started running his fingers through Death's hair. "You need to take a break. It's not going to do any good if you aren't at your best when you go after Jacob."

"I'm fine," Death said, batting Uriel's hands away. He continued reading through papers. Coffee spilled over the table, and I hurried to set the cup upright. Snagging a towel from the oven handle, I mopped it up. I tossed the towel onto the bar. My hands closed around six coffee mugs, the handles to each hand, and I carried them to the sink.

"This isn't exactly how I pictured my day going." I turned on the water and rinsed out the mugs, hoping they would get a coffee ring in the bottom.

"You aren't doing anything until I'm sure you won't reopen one of the wounds. I've never had to heal bullet wounds before, normally I just reap people who have those."

"You're not my dad, Death."

"No, I'm your boss. Now go take a nap."

"Hey, I'm the one who's slept. You go take a nap, and I'll read through this stuff."

"How about no?" Death continued shuffling through papers. "You don't even know what I'm looking for."

"Something to do with an immortal?"

Death shook his head. "I already know where I can find a thing to track him down. There's a guy who collects weapons in New York. The address is over there." He gestured to a piece of paper sat apart from the rest.

"Then what are those for?"

"Just stuff on if Life could deconstruct my scythe." His hand moved to mess with the scarf, only to fall back to his side. "I don't think she can, but she knows how much easier that makes my job. It's so much easier to slice through the chain than to use my powers to erode it." A soft sigh left Death's lips, and when Uriel started running his fingers through his hair again he didn't swat him away.

"You need to sleep, Death. It's not healthy to keep drinking this much coffee," Uriel said.

"I've seen how much coffee your dad drinks."

"Did I say his lifestyle was healthy?"

"It's not like I can die."

"And it's not like it won't effect you either. Death or not, you need to take care of yourself."

"He's getting more sleep than I did last year," I said while gathering more cups.

"Shush. You're not helping."

"Who said that's what I was trying to do?"

Uriel shot a glare at me. "Don't you have something to be doing? Training, reaping, annoying someone?"

"You heard Death. I'm not allowed to do anything until he's sure I'm fine. And I think I'm doing a pretty good job annoying you right now." I grinned. "As boring as this is, I'm not going to be much help anywhere else. My arm still hurts." I rubbed at the spot where one of the bullets had lodged.

Before either of them could comment, Death's head hit the table with a loud thud. I stared at him, before looking up at Uriel, who looked at Death with a satisfied smile. He looked at me.

"He'll be out for the next eight hours. Should we move him or try to find one of his eight game consoles?"

"Let me guess, he only has games whose franchises are dead?"

"I get him some other games for Christmas." Uriel shrugged. He snapped his fingers and a blanket draped Death's shoulders. "We can always get some from my place."

"We celebrate Christmas?" I assumed Christmas and everything would've fallen under the neutrality net.

"You guys celebrate it every other year. We used to have a big gathering with Life and Death and-" He pointed down. "-but there was something that happened a while ago that put an end to that."

"What happened?" I asked, following him into the living room. He sat on the ground and opened the cabinet in the coffee table.

"It's nothing important." His wings fluttered as he pulled console after console from inside. I saw a Gameboy, Nintendo 64, Game Cube, PlayStations, an Atari, and several other things I didn't know the name of. He pulled out a box full of games and memory cards. "Do you like Pokemon? Or Crash? Or Spyro? Or a Little Einstein's game?"

I smiled and a small laugh made it's way from my throat. "We're going on a trip in our favorite rocketship, zooming through the sky. Little Einsteins."

"Thanks for that," Uriel said, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

"I'm sorry-"

"No, you're not."

"-but I can't hear that and not sing."

Uriel hooked up the Playstation, put in a memory card, and put in the Spyro disc. We sat in relative silence as he started playing the game, muttering comments about how Spyro should be able to fly without powerups. I wasn't too sure about that, but I wasn't about to argue with someone who has wings.

"You know, if you don't tell me what happened, I'm going to sing every song I can remember from my childhood," I said. Uriel didn't respond. I kicked my legs over the back of the couch and stared at the screen. "The phone, the phone is ringing. There's an animal in trouble, there's an animal in trouble somewhere."

"You are a two year old, you know that?"

"Am I annoying you?"

"Yes."

"Good." I took a deep breath before singing. "Welcome to the blue house, hello from the small mouse, things to do, fun for you, howdy from the big bear, want some fun, here's where, just for you."

"I don't know what that was from, but please stop."

"Bear in the Big Blue House? Seriously? You don't know that one?" I raised my eyebrow. He shook his head. "I guess it makes sense. Only reason I remember that is because I had to babysit my cousin and I found some old VHS tapes. It's kinda weird once you get older."

"And Wonder Pets isn't?" Uriel spun the control stick in a circle, landing a perfect 360 on the skateboard.

"Don't ever disrespect Ming Ming like that again."

The next move Uriel tried to do ended with him wiping out. He sighed and paused the game. "If I tell you a vague approximation of what happened will you stop singing? Because I may be a being of heavenly love but that doesn't mean I won't punch you."

"Huh, guess my cousin was right. Being super annoying can get people to do what you want," I mumbled. Who knew the four year old would be right? No wonder she's a spoiled brat, if I could do this to an angel in about ten minutes what could she make her parents do?

Uriel turned and looked at me. Running a hand through his hair, he curled his wings around himself. "We don't get drunk easily, but when we do, we can say some pretty hurtful things. One of those things- well, there's a reason we don't get along with Death as well as we used to."

I frowned. "But you guys get along great."

"No," he said. "We don't. Well, at least Raphael and I don't. Michael and Gabriel are on better terms with him. If one of them told him to sleep, he'd do it in an instant. Dad's a bit iffier but that might be from like eight different things."

"What did you guys tell him?" Death hadn't gotten mad at me yet, and he sat there while I talked back to Uriel. He wasn't upset when I sat in the summoning circle, or when I forced him to stop while we were in New York so I could get a bagel.

Uriel waved a hand dismissively. "It doesn't matter, Ardia. It was a long time ago, and I'm pretty sure he's forgotten the actual reason he was mad in the first place. Though it is nice seeing him acting like this again."

I didn't ask what he meant by that, though I doubt he would've answered. The moment he finished talking, he unpaused his game and left the skate park. I watched him play for a while longer, eventually getting fed up with the outdated graphics. I got up and walked to the kitchen. Death sat slumped onto the table with a small puddle of drool forming on a piece of paper. Picking up the address, I didn't look at it before going back to the living room.

"Uriel, can you take me to this place?" I dropped the paper on his lap. He looked at it before nodding.

"Just don't get killed."

"I'm dead."

"Don't get anymore dead. Dear Father, I sound like Michael." His hand dragged over his face. "I need to spend less time around him. Maybe spend a century locked in the library." Uriel stood up and with a wave of his hand things piled together, nowhere near organized. "I'll get it later."

He grabbed my shoulder and warmth washed over me. Bright light erased the living room. I blinked rapidly, hoping it would do something. It didn't. Only after an excruciating minute did my vision return, leaving me in a dark room, without Uriel.

Even with my night vision back, it was hard to see; probably because of the excessively bright way Uriel brought me here. I knew it was because he was an angel, but why did it have to be so bright?

I stumbled through the room, running into tables. Each corner I hit sent a surge of pain through my side. The pain faded as quick as it came, only to sharpen with each repeated blow to the area. Slowly my eyes adjusted, letting those blows become less and less frequent. I reached up and my hand closed around a beaded metal chain. I pulled it.

Strings of lights came on, illuminating the room and banishing the shadows. There were maybe thirty lights with three over each long table. Tables that were completely covered in guns. I walked between them, my hands brushing over the metal surface. There were papers, labels, taped to them.

I had no idea how to identify something that Jacob had owned. I should've asked how to before I left, but that would've been too easy. Instead, I had condemned myself to wander and look at weapons until Death woke up, which could be anywhere between two seconds or twenty hours. Thanks, weird time system.

Despite me doing this to myself, I got bored quickly. I picked up a sword, put it down, picked up another sword, and I put that one down too. I repeated this over and over with different types of weapons. Each one I picked up made a feeling of unease grow, especially as I found weapon after weapon that I could name.

One of the tables near the singular exit had dismantled weapons and all sorts of tools for care and maintenance. My eyes caught on one in particular. I reattached the barrel and held the Queen Anne pistol in my hand. It was rather plain, especially compared to some of the other guns in this collection, but the decorations, or lack thereof, wasn't why I picked the gun up.

I almost shoved it into the waistband of my jeans. I didn't. I took it apart and placed it back. My hands braced me against the table as I took a deep, steadying breath. They came away sticky, covered in grease and oil. I groaned and wiped them on my pants.

"You're not putting those jeans in my washer." The sudden voice made me jump. Death moved to stand beside me, rubbing his eyes.

"I thought Uriel said you'd be out for eight hours," I said, moving to look at more guns. "But I'm glad you're up. Trying to find a gun in here is harder than finding a needle in a haystack."

"We better get looking then."

"And how are you going to do that without getting your gloves dirty?"

"This is why you bring backup gloves." Death pulled a pair of worn, yellow work gloves from his cloak. "Hey, you want a dead wasp?"

"No."

"Your loss." He tossed it onto one of the tables, where it would wait for an unexpected person to put their hand on it. "I wish so many of these didn't have wood. Accidentally destroying stuff gets old fast." He tugged the gloves over his.

I pressed my lips together, picking up a Glock. "How do you read?"

"Uh, with my eyes?" Death glanced at the gun and shook his head. I put it back down and moved further down the table. I kept my gaze on anything but the labels.

"I mean, how do you not destroy books? I see you read them with gloves on and with them off, but sometimes you destroy thing. Why?" As I spoke, I kept looking through the variety of guns and swords and knives. My fingers closed around the handle of an old weapon. I picked it up. A switchblade plus revolver plus brass knuckles, the Apache Revolver. "You know, my dad taught me about this thing."

"Frankly, I'm more impressed with the duck foot pistol." Death held up a gun with four separate barrels. "And I swear I saw a tri blade spiral knife over there. I don't know where this guy got one. They were outlawed in the Geneva Convention because they were so lethal."

"For a reaper who has a strange fascination with living creatures, you seem to like weapons." I took the pistol from him and placed it back in its spot. I nudged it so it laid exactly as it had earlier.

He shrugged. "Why shouldn't I? If I have to reap people, I might as well know as much as possible about the different ways to kill them. Plus you spend as much time as I do around battlefields, you start learning about things."

We kept looking, and I started growing anxious as more time passed. I could hear the creak of the floor above us. If we weren't looking for something that belonged to Jacob, I wouldn't have been as worried. I still would've worried, but being a ghost is less stressful when people can't see you.

"Have you found it yet?" I asked, almost wincing as my anxiety cam across in my voice. Tapping my fingers against a table, I cleared my throat when Death didn't respond.

His pale, almost nonexistent eyebrows were drawn together in concentration. He stared down at a gun before huffing. "I have no idea."

"Do you at least know what year it's from?"

"Nope."

I sighed, shook my head, and pinched the bridge of my nose. "Why can't anything be easy with this?"

"Because religion."

I glared at him. The creaking on the floor above us grew louder. I looked at the labels; I couldn't move fast enough as I looked through every single thing. The small slips of paper had the name of the weapon, the tear it was produced, and where it was obtained.

There were no Jacob's.

It shouldn't have been surprising, since the immortals try to destroy anything with direct connections to themselves, but it made panic settle in my chest.

"Death. Is there any way you can find it using your powers? Like that wax thing?"

"Why do you want me to?"

Swallowing the words that tried to burst from my mouth, I tugged at my shirt's hem. "It's just, every minute we waste, that's another minute the balance gets more and more messed up. I might be dead, I might be your apprentice but I'd rather have an afterlife than see the apocalypse this soon."

"Oh," Death said. He looked away from me. "It works better if I have stuff from that era to make the symbols. I could try it, but with my powers this tapped I could accidentally turn this place into an open portal or into ground zero for a mysterious fatal illness."

"So how do we find it? What does it even look like?"

"Um, it's a flintlock. I know that much. Most of the immortals lived in England at some point, so maybe- You okay, kid? You look like you've seen yourself."

I rushed to the table of dismantled weapons and picked up the Queen Anne pistol. I quickly gave it to Death. "This it?"

"How did you know it was this one?" He asked, tucking it into a pocket.

"I, uh, just had a feeling." I rubbed the back of my head. "Hey, do you mind if I keep ahold of this one?"

"Why?"

I never answered.

Chapter: 3,076

Book: 52,022

I have no idea where my cat is. I need to find her or else my mom will kill me

See yah