“Polly Frances Luccardi, will you permit me to untether your soul and escort you to the Door?” I asked. The pressure increased and I gasped for breath.
“For the last time, no!”
My heart and lungs reinflated; my ribs sprung back into place. A surge of power pushed out of my fingertips and snapped the tether holding Mrs. Luccardi to her body. A lot of Agents untethered agreeable souls using magic, but I didn’t like it. I don’t know what a binding felt like to anyone else but it made me feel like elephants had been tap-dancing on me. Give me a silver knife and a straightforward cut any day. Unfortunately, I could only use my knife on the cooperative. No one knew exactly why, but souls that refused the Door had to go through the rigmarole of a binding.
“Polly Frances Luccardi, by your own words and of your own volition, your soul is bound to this Earth for eternity,” I said, a little breathless.
“Fine. My babies!” she cried, holding her incorporeal arms out to the cats that were now starting to nibble her corporeal body’s ankles.
Whatever. I got out of there before she realized that her little Snoogums was about to make her former shell into breakfast, lunch and dinner. If I had more time, I would have tried harder to convince her to go to the Door. Now I would have to file more paperwork, and Patrick would have to file more paperwork, and he would bitch about it and I would bitch about it and J.B., our supervisor, would be an annoying bastard about the whole thing because he’s very insistent on closed lists. But I’d deal with that later. First, I had to get home in time to show the apartment, and I had only a few minutes.
Death is just another bureaucracy, and in a bureaucracy so large, sometimes people fall through the cracks. There are plenty of reasons why people don’t get an Agented escort to the Door, and they don’t all have to do with kitty love. If a person suffers a violent death, they may leave their body involuntarily—snap the tether that binds them to their mortal self and flee in anguish and madness before an Agent arrives. Sometimes a soul will allow itself to be untethered, come along quietly and then break away from the Agent before they arrive at the Door, fearful of what lies behind it.
Sometimes an Agent is hurt or killed and that person’s list may lie dormant for an hour or two until replacements are notified. If that happens, the window of opportunity may close—souls might break their own tethers and wander free, or just refuse to be escorted, like Mrs. Luccardi.
Any of these possibilities creates ghosts, souls that will never pass through the Door. Ghosts have an annoying way of begetting other ghosts, showing up when an Agent is trying to work and convincing the confused deceased that they’re better off haunting this mortal coil than taking their chances with the Door.
The thing is, you can’t force a soul to be untethered and escorted. The soul has to choose the Door. Like so many mystical things, three is the key number. If the soul is asked three times and refuses the Door, then the Agent metaphorically wipes his hands and the soul becomes a ghost. The Agent is magically bound to leave them alone.
Of course, there are lots of ways around the “asking thrice” rule. You can tell people whatever they need to hear for as long as it takes to get them to agree to be escorted—like Heaven exists and that’s where they’re going, or they will join their beloved Ethel, or whatever.
I can’t attest to the veracity of any of that. All I know is that every Monday I get a plain white envelope in the mail. In that envelope is an ordinary piece of white paper with a typed list. The list has the names, locations and death times of people I’m supposed to escort. I go to the appointed place at the appointed time, take out my knife and untether the soul. Then I tell them something pretty and take them to the Door. I don’t even know what they see when they open the Door. My vision goes black as soon as they touch the doorknob, and returns when they’re inside. The only time I’ll get to see what’s behind the Door is when I get escorted there myself, and someday I will. Nobody outruns death. Not even death’s lackey.
I flew in the kitchen window eight minutes late. I own a brick two-flat in Chicago’s west Lakeview neighborhood and live on the top floor. My wings curled and shrank until they disappeared into my back. I don’t really understand where they go—I just know that they unfurl when I need them, and when I don’t there are only two long scars that bookend my spine. A good thing, too—it was hard enough trying to get through puberty as an Agent of death without having to explain my big flapping wings to everyone in my ninth-grade class.
The doorbell buzzed as I pulled my apron over my head and tossed it on the counter. The pears for the tart I had been making before Patrick’s call had turned brown and the crust was still rolled out on the cutting board, completely unusable now.
I strode through the kitchen and into the short hallway, then stepped into the dining room. The front door to my apartment opened into this room. I tapped the button on the intercom next to the door.
“Yes?”
“Gabriel Angeloscuro for Madeline Black.”
The potential tenant. Goody. “I’ll be right down.”
I grabbed the keys for the downstairs apartment off one of the hooks that hung next to the intercom. Just as I opened the door to head downstairs, I heard a thump behind me and turned.
A small stone gargoyle, about eight inches high, sat perched on one of the dining room windowsills. His face was extremely ugly in a cute sort of way—a kind of strange cross between a cat and a hawk. He had pointed feline ears, a large curved beak nearly as wide as it was long, and slitted cat’s eyes. Small bat wings arched from his back. His hands and feet were tipped with curved raptor claws. He crossed his arms over his adorable little Buddha belly and glared at me.
“You look crankier than usual, Beezle,” I said.
“Hmph.” His voice was two grindstones turning with no grain between them.
“Did you get a look at the potential?”
“Hmph,” he said again. He looked supremely pissed off.
“What does ‘hmph’ mean, Beezle? Did you scope him for me or what?”
He opened his mouth, closed it again, then finally said, “He’s a handsome devil; I’ll give him that much.”
“Oh, that’s real useful,” I grumbled, and headed downstairs, slamming the front door behind me.
I’d hoped that Beezle would get a sense of the potential tenant’s essence for me, so that I would know if he were good, bad or indifferent. Gargoyles can see the true natures of things, which is very handy in a portal guardian. It’s always nice to know if the thing that appears to be human standing on your doorstep is a serial killer, a vampire or just the UPS guy. And when you’re an extremely single woman living alone, you want to know if the person renting the apartment below you is on the up-and-up or the no-way-in-hell.
My last tenant, Jess, was a delightful widow who had rented the space for more than ten years. Five months earlier she had moved to Wisconsin to be closer to her grandchildren. I’d done some necessary updates on the apartment and then started advertising, but there had been no takers.
It was kind of weird, actually. Quite a few people had come to look at the place, gushed about the space, promised to bring back a deposit, but nobody returned. And after five rent-free months, I was pretty desperate for a tenant.
I pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the small foyer. Gabriel Angeloscuro stood on the porch with his back to the main door, a large pane of glass with oak trim. He looked about a foot taller than me, and trim underneath his long black coat. His dark hair was slightly damp from the light October drizzle and curled a little at his neck and ears.
The expensive shine of his shoes made the already shabby paint job of the porch look even worse. Flecks of red paint peeled up under his feet, and I worried that he might catch the fabric of his coat—which appeared to be wool, dry clean only, and sporting a designer label—on a jutting nail. The interior of the building looked pretty good, but it was hard for me to keep up with repairs on the outside—yet another compelling reason to get a tenant and some rent money ASAFP.
For a brief moment I wondered why a man so well dressed would need to rent an apartment at all, much less rent one in my middle-class neighborhood. A guy like that should be in a condo in the south Loop, or somewhere else where trendy people with money bought trendy property. He turned around and met my eyes through the door, and for the second time in the last hour I felt like all the breath had left my body.
Beezle was right. He was a handsome devil. Way beyond handsome, actually. More like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. He looked like an Italian Renaissance painter’s ideal figure, from his broad forehead and carved cheekbones to the long, slightly arrogant Roman nose and the tiniest of clefts in his chin.
As jaw-dropping as his face was, it was his eyes that were most compelling. At first glance I thought they were brown. But as I looked, and looked, I realized they were closer to black, black like the ocean under the moon, an endless expanse of glinting waves reflecting the sky. There were stars in his eyes, stars and a hint of fire, a sun going supernova a million light-years away.
He didn’t move or say a word. I realized that he stood on one side of the door and I stood on the other, and that I held the apartment keys in my left hand and the doorknob in my right. For a second I wasn’t sure if I would turn the knob to let him in or hold it fast so that he could never enter. I felt like I was on the trembling edge of something, that if I allowed him to enter my home, my life would change irrevocably.
Then he smiled, the slightest upturn of the corners of his mouth. “Are you going to allow me in to view the apartment, Ms. Black?”
Blood rushed into my cheeks as he politely waited for me to turn the knob. I’d gaped at him like the class nerd panting after the quarterback. So what if he was good-looking? It didn’t excuse my rudeness.
Off to a great start,
I thought. At this rate I would never get a tenant.
I opened the door quickly and stepped back to allow him to crowd into the small foyer. He smelled spicy-sweet, like apples and cloves.
“Sorry about that; please come in,” I said. I held out my hand for him to shake. “Madeline Black. I’ve been a little distracted today.”
His own hand was covered in buttery leather glove. He grasped my hand briefly, impersonally, and I wondered why I was disappointed. “Gabriel Angeloscuro.”
“Well,” I said, trying to pull it together and remember why he was there. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”
He nodded and I turned to open the apartment. The two apartment doors sat side by side with the mailbox and a small security light in between. The right-hand door was for the first floor.
The door opened into a small nook before expanding into a long room divided by an archway. The layout was practically identical to my own apartment above.
“As you can see,” I said, “this is the living room/ dining room area. The floors are the original hardwood and they’ve recently been refinished.”
He walked to the large picture window that faced the street, seemingly not hearing a word I said. “How long have you owned this building, Ms. Black?”
“Nineteen years.”
“You seem awfully young to have owned this building for so long.”
“I inherited the building from my mother.”
After she was murdered.
“I see.” He tapped one of his fingers idly against the glass. “I’m sorry for your loss. And your father?”
“Not in the picture,” I said shortly. I had never met the man, never seen a photograph of him. His name wasn’t even on my birth certificate. Whoever he was, my mother hadn’t thought too much of him. She’d never spoken of him.
“Again, I am sorry to hear that.”
This was not a line of questioning that I wanted to continue. It seemed much too personal for a tenant-landlord relationship. “Those windows were just installed four months ago. They’re a lot more energy efficient and they help keep the house warmer in the winter.”
He turned away from the window and touched the metal coils of the steam heater that sat directly below the window. He seemed to be refocusing himself, remembering why he was there. “This is an older heating system, yes?”
“Yes, unfortunately, it’s much more expensive to replace. It’s also unnecessary, since the steam heat keeps the building very warm, even during a Chicago winter. But the kitchen and bathroom have been updated in the last year.”
I waved him toward the back of the house. He walked slowly through the empty rooms, his heels ringing on the floor.
“This is one of the bedrooms,” I said. A very small room opened off the living room. “There’s a large storage space in the closet.”
He obligingly opened the closet door and looked inside. “Are those your apartment stairs above this space?”
“Yes,” I said. “If you’ll come this way, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”
“It must be difficult,” he said as he stood inside the closet and stared up at the diagonal ceiling.
“What’s that?”