A gas leak. Just as Lillian had hoped.

Moments after the explosion collapsed the floor above the club, chaos ensued, and the street was flooded by emergency responders. Sirens screamed all throughout the night, as police officers and paramedics worked on pulling out survivors and sorting the wounded from the dead. Meanwhile, firefighters tried putting out the raging flames before they spread to nearby apartment complexes.

Around an hour after the whole place went 'boom', as Mason had put it, the police managed to draw out a conclusive report. Apparently, the owner of the building, who lived on the floor above the club, had forgotten to turn his stove off (meaning one of our bosses had turned it on for him) before going on a trip to Santa Barbara with his new girlfriend. Add to that combination Lillian's two cigarette-loving reaps, who thought it a good idea to break into the place to get it on, and the result was a flaming disaster.

Long story short, it was awful. And none of us cared.

Don't get me wrong, we weren't heartless monsters. It's just that we were too busy being stuck in an alley across the street from Paradise, dealing with our own, dead chaos to notice the living one.

"Are you kidding me?" what used to be a curvaceous bombshell of a girl shrieked, her left cheek sagging. One of the nastier side-effects of death was that whatever... changes happened to the body, also happened to the spirit. So unless Lillian's former Playboy bunny stopped using her energy to rant and focused on moving on, she would be stuck looking like a Chucky doll someone had left inside a pre-heated oven.

"I'm dead? I'm DEAD?!" She continued.

Lillian rolled her eyes, at her wit's end. "Yes, yes, finally, you get it."

"No way," Her Keanu Reeves lookalike boyfriend replied, examining the stump of his burned hand.

He had gotten stuck on the throne when the explosion happened. The blast had been kinder to him, burning only half of his body and taking off his right arm. Not ideal, but compared to his girlfriend, who was a heaping mess of roasted flesh, burned hair and melted skin, he had sure gotten off easy.

"No, no, no I can't be dead, I can't be, I'm only twenty-one! I had just started living my life!" The Chucky girl raged.

-I hadn't even done that, and you don't see me complaining.

Lillian groaned. "Yeah, I know this is hard and all, but..."

"Take it back! Take it back right now!" She shrieked trying to grab Lillian, still not on board with the whole ghost thing.

"Oh, Jesus, bargaining," Lil made a face at me as if seeking help.

I shrugged, pointing at my own mess, that was blessedly having an identity crisis instead of attacking me.

"Man, what the hell have I done with my life?" Corey Thatcher wondered, absentmindedly scratching one of his many cuts. Being down in the club, he'd managed to avoid the fire, but not the glass and bits of the ceiling. "I've wasted all these years dealing dope for Doug when I could've been a... a... a fucking Feng Shui consultant or something, you know?"

"I'm sure you could've," I blurted out. "But, that's all behind you now, and it's time to move on."

"Jesus. I never got to say goodbye to Darth Vader."

I arched a brow, taken aback. "Darth... Darth Vader?"

"My dog, man. My pug."

-A drug dealer with a pug.

Of course.

"Ugh, who cares about your stupid dog!" Mike, Mason's delightful reap roared, his plaid shirt covered in blotches of blood. "I never even got laid, man! I died a freaking virgin."

-Of all the things to worry about.

I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything less. People did have the tendency to obsess over the smaller, more trivial things, in order to avoid dealing with the real issues they had.

Upon hearing his comment, Mason—thus far content on ignoring his now dead high school fan club—snapped to consciousness.

"That is the saddest thing I've ever heard."

"We totally should've boned that slut, Jenny Stevenson. She like slept with everyone on the football team!" another one of Mike's friends complained.

"Or groped Mrs. Carmine. Jesus that woman had a sweet..."

"Ah, okay, just because you're dead, doesn't mean you have a license to be complete pervs. Now, all of you just calm down!" I shrieked my nerves already on the verge of snapping.

"But... but I can't be dead!" Chucky screamed, making the streetlight above us flicker.

-Oh great, dead for half an hour and already able to do poltergeist parlor tricks.

I hoped Lillian would send her into the light first before the bitterness had a chance to overcome her and anchor her to this world.

-And saddle us with the freaking Calvary.

But, given the present state of things, it seemed I would be needing the Cavalry after all.

-Where is Logan Winslow?

The third person to be obliterated by the blast, Logan should've been the first one to find me, his reaper, the moment his soul departed from his body. Curiously enough, there was no sign of Mr. Perfect and his electric blue eyes. That made me nervous. I wasn't in a mood for dealing with Kevin tonight.

-Give him more time. He'll show up.

I reaped him. He was dead. He had to show up.

"He was a good friend. My best friend. And now, I'll never see him again. Oh, Darth Vader!"

"Lord! Can everybody just please shut up?!" Lillian shrieked, her slender fingers working her temples. She looked moments away from punching someone. Which was saying something, considering she was always a picture of poised elegance.

"C'mon, please, I'll give you whatever you want, just take it back!" the Chucky girl screamed.

"Please, please, I want to see my boyfriend!" another one of Lil's reaps begged.

"This is mental!" Keanu Reeves this time.

"I hate this!"

"This isn't happening!" the ankle pants guy.

"It's not fair!"

"I'm too young, I can't be dead!"

"No, no, no!"

All at once, the sounds of earthly chaos were drowned out by the wailing of the recently deceased. Their cries were so intense, they were causing the lights emanating from the apartment windows above us to flicker. Hearing so many of them wail all at once... well, let's just say, they brought back unwelcome feelings about my own death.

-Geez, I forgot how awful it felt.

The fear, panic and confusion, all tearing at my soul like invisible, clawed paws, tethering me to the earth. My head swam as I remembered how I cried and wailed, screaming how unfair it was, how I was only seventeen and had done nothing with my life.

-Just like them.

I had reaped many souls in the five years I'd been doing this, and with every single one of them, I got a bitter reminder of how pathetic death really looked.

"Alright, that's it," Mason clenched his fists. "Everybody shut the FUCK UP!"

I had never seen so many ghosts go so quiet so fast.

In two hops, Mason was on top of a dumpster, looming over our little back alley supernatural gathering, like a 90s rock star.

"Let's get one thing straight. You, all of you, are dead," he said, his hand sweeping over our reaps. "Repeat after me; I am dead. I am deeeaaaddd. Got it? Good."

They all gazed at him dumbfounded, silent as the grave.

He let his words sink in for a minute before continuing. "Now that we've established you're dead, let's move on to the important stuff. Like getting your info and then sending you on your way."

"But..." Chucky girl moved to protest, but Mason quickly cut her off.

"Ah, no, no, no. What did we establish? You're dead, sweetheart. And I'm pretty sure you've known there's no coming back from that since you were like six. So quit trying to bargain with us. We're Grim Reapers, not God, got it?"

Chucky girl's scowled at Mason, fury pouring out of her half-melted eyes. Her expression made Lillian nervously tap her hand against her thigh.

-Great, if she starts haunting the stupid club, we will be so screwed.

"Okay, but, do we at least get to see our families?" asked Mike, his bloodshot eyes filled with childish innocence.

I moved to take over, when Mason waved me away, irritated.

-Oh no.

"Yeah, yeah sure, just lemme go get my ghost-mobile, and all of you can hop on, and I'll take you to your homes to play Haunted house with your families."

"Really?"

"Fuck no! Do I look like Sylvia Brown to you?"

I rolled my eyes, nervously wiggling my toes. My heels were killing me.

"Mason," I warned, but he refused to listen.

-Here we go again.

If Mason were half as good at anything as he was at avoiding his responsibilities, he'd be a genius.

Apart from extracting souls, Grim Reapers were also responsible for aiding them to move on by any means necessary. That also included helping them clear up any unfinished business they might have with the world of the living. Considering some random cosmic rule allowed ghosts to linger safely on earth without becoming angry poltergeists for about forty days, that unfinished business could drag on for quite some time.

It was exhausting having to deal with just one dead person and their baggage, not to mention the baggage of their friends and family. Really, when excluding the actual reaping itself, it was the most depressing part of my job. Like studying or flipping patties for nine hours straight at McDonald's. Which is why Mason did everything in his power to avoid doing this particular part of his Grim duties. Including lying to his reaps about what the rules were for the recently deceased.

"But... but... I wanna see my boyfriend!" screamed one of Lillian's reaps.

"Yeah, I wanna see Darth Vader too."

"My mom!"

"My grandma!"

"I need to delete my browser history before my dad finds it," commented Mike.

"Yeah, and I have a question?" One of his friends raised a hand, gawking at Mason through his broken, hipster glasses. "Since we're ghosts now, can we like walk through walls and stuff? Cause I totally want to go see my next-door neighbor."

"Chelsea? The one with the killer..."

"Really? Did we have to get stuck with the hormonal pervs?!" I wailed, cutting their boy banter short.

But my annoyance did nothing to stave off the onslaught of cries, complaints, and demands. In fact, it only got worse and worse, the requests getting increasingly bigger and more bizarre. By the end of it, Lillian couldn't take it anymore and agreed to help her reaps say goodbye to their families and pets, hide the embarrassing stuff, and resolve whatever bets they had with their friends. Mason, cornered by his dissatisfied reaps, had no choice but to do the same.

"Jesus, I'm not going to be done by morning!" He complained, shakily lighting another cigarette.

I cast a look at Corey Thatcher, absently staring at the starless sky. "Tell me about it."

"Are you coming? I could use the company. It's kind of boring with just Lillian."

I forlornly shrugged off his biker jacket and shook my head. "Don't let her hear you say that. No, I can't. I'm still missing one."

He frowned. "Really? That's weird."

I shivered. "Yeah, I know."

Souls tied to reapers always seek them out when they die. It was like the holiest rule of reaperhood. That and 'don't piss off Kevin'.

"I'm sure he'll turn up. Go walk around the club again. Sometimes they just can't bring themselves to wander too far from their bodies."

I nodded hugging myself. I regretted giving him his jacket back with a passion of a thousand suns. Luckily for me, he was in a gentlemanly mood tonight.

"Here, keep it." He tossed it back at me, grinning.

"What about you?" I asked, eyeing his black sweater.

"I'm good, I'll get another one in like ten minutes," translation: he will steal another one in ten minutes. "You can give it back to me later."

Impending larceny aside, I couldn't help but smile and gratefully sink back into the rustling leather.

"Thanks. See you later."

He took a long drag of his cigarette, eyeing his skittish high-schoolers.

"If I don't die. Again."

I smiled and watched him cross the street into the chaos. There Lillian waited impatiently next to his Ford Ranger, trying to keep as far away from the gathered officials and news crews as possible.

"Now what?" Corey asked, persistently wiping at the blood staining his cheeks. I wondered how long it would take him to figure out that it would never come off.

"Now we wait."

We did. For about ten minutes. After that, I was too cold and too bored to keep standing in one place in six-inch heels and decided to go after the blue-eyed moron myself.

As expected, the entire street was closed off. Still too drained of energy to dematerialize, I decided to do a quick walk around the periphery, hoping my presence would draw Logan Winslow out of whatever hole he was hiding in. I made my way through scores of curious spectators and the occasional news crew gathered around the yellow police tapes, scanning the burning pile of rubble for any sign of ghostly energy.

All I got were some very exhausted and pissed off living folks. My nerves started doing their trademark flailing again, and dread bloomed in the pit of my stomach.

-What could've happened?

He couldn't have just wandered off. I'd reaped him, he was tethered to me. He literally couldn't go anywhere without me.

-Unless he's still...

I shook my head, feeling stupid for even considering something like that. He was dead. His name had popped up in my book the previous morning. I reaped him, and my boss had sealed the deal when he dropped the ceiling on him. That was it.

-Nobody ever survives when their name pops in the book.

The book was never wrong. It was the first, harsh lesson of reaperhood. Every person whose name had appeared in my Ledger had died on schedule. There was no question that the book—whatever it was, or wherever it came from—was always right and painfully accurate about it.

Just to convince myself I dug it out of my stocking, much to the dismay of the two elderly women next to me. Flipping it open, I found the last two entries. There it was, clear as day, on the first page. Logan Winslow's name, age, place, and time of death. All I needed to do now was put in his details, pack him off to the pearly gates, and my job was done.

-Or it would be if I could find him.

I wasn't the only one annoyed by this sudden glitch. Corey was floating around the charred rubble aimlessly, one blink away from throwing anchor and becoming the next Amityville horror. He was deteriorating so fast, he was already making the gathered spectators shiver in discomfort, distantly aware of his presence.

-Oh, come on.

I couldn't let him linger. I really didn't want to bear him and his suffering on my conscience. Even though hauntings rarely turned into the creepy, horror movie messes most people knew of, the souls who didn't move on still suffered immensely. The pain of their death, the grief, the anger, all those things accumulated over time, becoming like iron shackles that tethered them to the earth, imprisoning them in the maze of their own tragedy. As time past, the pain would grow too big, and they would lose the ability to move on their own. Then, only forced evictions through exorcisms and cleansing rituals could set them free.

-I'm not going to let him get stuck here.

I had managed to get every one of my reaps to move on, and I certainly wasn't going to break that streak because of one missing dead guy.

-He's probably still a bit disoriented from his death.

Everyone coped with their demise differently. Maybe Logan just needed a bit more time to come to his senses and find me.

-Yeah, that must be it.

I would take care of him later. But for now, I needed to take care of the soul present.

With one last look at the smoking rubble that was once club 'Paradise', I tucked my notebook back in my stocking and signaled my reap to follow me, to resolve whatever issue he still had in the world of the living. Stalking into the night, I silently hoped—no, prayed—that this little mix up wasn't going to come back and bite me in the ass.

***

Things are starting to heat up! Let us know in the comments why you think Mr. Perfect didn't show up for his appointment!. Best guess gets a sweet! 🍪🎂🍰🍩🍭🍨🥧🍫🍦

With love, Thea and Ivy :)