Death's Excellent Vacation

by Charlaine Harris

  “But Mistress—” Buttercup started to protest, but it did no good. I flashed her a charming grin before settling back in the seat.

  “No, my dear. I know the demon offends you, but consider this a good learning experience. Aisling claims it is harmless, and after meeting it, I am in complete agreement.” She flashed a smile my way. “Effrijim is too much of a gentleman to cause trouble, I’m quite sure.”

  I straightened up a little, pleased by the gentleman comment. “Damn straight. Although ya know, you can just call me Jim rather than Effrijim. I really don’t use it much ’cause it’s kinda sissy sounding, don’t you think?”

  “Not at all. I think it’s quite distinguished. It suits you,” she said nicely. I rubbed my face on her just because she didn’t think the name was awful (it is, but she didn’t admit that, which wins beaucoup brownie points in my book). “I must admit that I’m a bit curious as to why you chose to adopt the form of a dog when you could have appeared in human form.”

  “Don’t get me started on human form,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s awful, just awful. When May—she’s the silver wyvern’s mate and a really nice chick even if she is a doppelganger—when May made me take up human form a few months ago, everyone laughed at me. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the trauma of that experience.”

  “How very odd,” Anastasia said, looking me over. “I can’t imagine preferring a canine form over that of a human, but I’m sure you have your reasons.”

  Buttercup looked sour and mean at the same time, but she kept her piehole shut for the trip to the airport. Until the plane took off, that is.

  “Mistress?” I was curled up on a love seat that sat along one side of the jet when Buttercup unsnapped herself from a big comfy chair and moved forward to where Anastasia was sitting with a book. “Are you all right? Mistress?”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked, hitting pause on the DVD I was watching. I slid off the seat and wandered forward, wondering if the old lady was scared of flying or something. I would reassure her that Drake’s pilot was really good, and there was nothing to worry about over a quick trip to Paris.

  “Mistress?”

  “I think . . . Oh dear, I don’t feel well. Don’t feel well at all,” Anastasia said groggily. “I can’t seem to keep . . . eyes . . .”

  “You’re having some sort of an attack,” Buttercup said briskly, shaking the old lady by the shoulders. “We will get you to a doctor immediately, but Mistress, the demon! If you are unable to command it, it will do who knows what heinous acts!”

  “Hey!” I said, allowing a little blop of slobber to hit her shoe nearest me. “I don’t do heinous! Not when I’m on vacation, anyway!”

  “Mistress, you must make an effort!” Buttercup demanded.

  Anastasia’s eyes fluttered open, the faded blue of them cognizant but obviously sedated. A horrible, nasty suspicion filled me at the sight of her dilated pupils. “The demon . . . You must take charge.”

  “Now, wait a sec,” I said, shoving my head in between them to try to sniff at Anastasia’s breath. It looked to me like she’d been slipped a mickey. “No one needs to take charge of me. I’m a sixth-class demon. I’m not really bad. Besides, Aisling would skin me if she found out I did anything bad—”

  “I am yours to command, Mistress,” Buttercup said, grabbing me by the collar and hauling me back. “Tell me what you want.”

  “No, listen to me—” I started to say, but the old lady’s eyes rolled back in her head as she said softly, “I grant you the authority given to me.”

  I stared in horror first at her, then at Buttercup as she straightened up, a victorious smile on her face.

  “You drugged her!” I gasped, shocked to my toenails.

  “You’ll have a hard time proving that where you’re going,” she said, then waved her hands around in a hokey manner and said quickly, “Effrijim, I command you in the name of my mistress, in the name of your Guardian, and in the name of all that is good and right in the world. I banish your unclean being to the Akasha, where you belong!”

  “Noooo!” I wailed halfway through her speech, but it did no good. One second I was standing next to a comatose old lady who thought I was distinguished, and the next I was next to a rocky outcropping that jutted up out of a sepia-toned landscape filled with shadows, horror, and endless torment.

  Two

  “WELCOME to the Akasha. Is this your first time here?” a chirpy voice asked. “Would you like some introductory literature?”

  I leaped to my feet and realized right off the bat that something truly horrendous had happened.

  “Argh!” I yelled, lifting up my arms and staring with horrified shock at five long fingers at the end of each of the two arms. “I’m in human form again!”

  “You certainly are,” the perky voice said, a tinge of disapproval sounding as it added, “And you seem to have misplaced your clothes—by the love of the saints! Don’t do that again!”

  I straightened from where I had bent double to look at my feet, turning around to face the person to whom the voice belonged.

  A little woman stood in front of me, one hand clapped over her eyes.

  “Fires of Abaddon! I got sent to the midget section of the Akasha? I’m in human form in the midget section?”

  An irritated look crossed the woman’s face as she lowered her hand. “That term is offensive, and shows archaic and ignorant thinking. We prefer the term little people, not that there is a little-person section of the Akasha.” She took a deep breath, then slapped another smile on her face, but this one looked awfully brittle. “So long as you promise never to bend over again when I am behind you, I am willing to overlook the fact that you are without clothing. Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yes, here is a pamphlet that details the Akasha, including a brief history, notable members, and what you can expect over the centuries. Since you look confused, I’ll give you a brief overview of the situation: The Akashic Plain, as it is more formally known, is what mortal beings think of as limbo, although in reality it’s much more than that. Beings of both light and dark natures are banished here for eternal punishment without any hope of escape or reprieve.”

  I took the pamphlet she shoved at me. It was illustrated with faces of various beings in perpetual torment.

  “The Akasha is governed by the Hashmallim, who are kind of a form of Otherworld police, although they are not bound by any rules except those of the Court of Divine Blood. Are you familiar with the Court?”

  “I can’t believe that rotten Butterbutt changed me into a human when she banished me. She did it on purpose; I just know she did. Of all the double-dealing . . . Now what am I supposed to do? I can’t stand around like this,” I said, waving my hand toward my torso. A horrible thought struck me. I looked. “Satan’s little imps! My package! It’s . . . it’s . . .”

  The tiny little woman gave my package due consideration. “Unimpressive is the word that springs immediately to mind, and I use the word springs without any innuendo whatsoever.”

  “Aw, man! I’m human with a short-changed knapsack!”

  “Sir.”

  “What? Oh, yeah, I used to be a sprite,” I said. “I’m familiar with the Court. So when did the Akasha get greeters?”

  “A few years ago, when it was noticed that many people arrived here without a clue as to what to do next.” She pursed her lips. “Some people appear to be even more clueless than others.”

  “Since this is the ultimate place of punishment, I figured suffering untold torments was pretty much the plan of the day,” I said. “This is horrible. I can’t stay like this until Aisling notices that I’m not in Paris. I gotta do something!”

  “That is your own concern, sir. I should warn you that there is no way out except through intervention of the Sovereign, and it’s not likely that it will bother itself with something like a sixth-class demon, now is it?” She tipped her head to the side as she beamed at me. “Especially not one that insists on prancing about the Aka
sha in the nude. Enjoy your eternity here. Ta-ta!”

  She turned and picked her way through the rocky, jarring landscape until she disappeared behind a particularly jagged piece of rock that thrust upward out of the earth as if it had burst forth by immeasurable forces.

  “I’d like to ta your ta, sister,” I muttered. “Great. Just great. My first day on vacation, and I end up in the Akasha, naked, and in friggin’ human form. Good thing I still have my cell phone. I’ll just call Ash up and tell her she has to summon me the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of here.”

  I picked up my backpack and had just extricated the cell phone Aisling gave me for my last birthday when a herd of five fur- and-leather-clad phantasms suddenly appeared and plowed right into me.

  “Hrolf! Look! A naked demon!” One of them stopped long enough to give me the once-over. “What’s it got here, then?”

  “Hey!” I yelled when the phantasm snatched the cell phone right out of my hand.

  “A demon? ’Ere? Roll ’im, Runolf,” another of the phantasms said as they continued to move onward.

  “Fires of Abaddon! Give that back! And my backpack! Hey!”

  Runolf the phantasm—a ghost that’s been banished and has no hope of ever regaining his or her ghostly self back—stopped long enough to jeer at me. “We’re Vikings, demon. We stop for no man! Or . . . er . . . demon. Yar!”

  “That’s pirate-speak, not Viking-speak, you idiot!” I yelled as I started after him. Here’s the thing, though—phantasms come from ghosts, right? So they aren’t big in the corporeal department to begin with, and once they’ve been phantasmed, they’re even less on the whole “can touch things in the plain of reality” scale. So while they could zoom around the place like a ghostly Viking blight, those of us bound to physical forms had to fight our way through a landscape that brought new meaning to the phrase cut your feet to ribbons. They were out of sight in a matter of a couple of seconds.

  “Ow. Ow ow ow. Ow. Son of a sinner! Now I have a rock shard stuck between my toes!”

  I sat down and yelped, leaping up immediately. “What the—ass skewers? This is worse than Abaddon!” I moved over to a spot that was mostly free of sharp, rocky spikes and plopped down to suck on my sore toes. “Man, this is supposed to be my vacation. Not having fun! I wanna go home.”

  “At least you have a vacation,” a voice spoke behind me. “I haven’t had any such thing in . . . Oh, it must be seventy years now.”

  I peered over my shoulder, eyeing the woman who perched on a rock behind me. “It ain’t much of a vacation, sister. Who’re you?”

  “My name is Titania,” the woman said, giving me one of those sultry-eyed once-overs that nymphs were so known for. “You’re naked. You’re a demon and you’re naked.”

  “Yeah, and you’re a nymph. I didn’t know they sent you guys to the Akasha. I thought they just ripped off your wings or beat you with your halo if you did something bad.”

  She made a face. “You’re thinking of faeries. They are the wicked ones. If I ever catch that bastard, lying, two-timing Oberon, I shall show him that he can’t just throw me away like this. I have rights, too, you know!”

  “Titania, huh? What do your friends call you for short? Titty?” I snickered to myself.

  She straightened up and gave me a look that would have melted my guts if I weren’t a demon. “They call me Titania!”

  “Gotcha. Wait a sec . . . Oberon? Titania?” I kicked my brain into high and dug through some old memories. “Midsummer’s Night Dream?”

  “Pfft.” She examined a rose-tipped fingernail. “That Will Shakespeare got it all wrong. He said I was a faery. As if! He totally dissed us nymphs, and let me tell you, the nymphood was not happy about that.”

  “Yeah, I heard you guys can be kind of . . . eh . . . militant,” I said, wondering if she wanted to use those long nails to hit all my scritchy spots. Then I remembered I didn’t have scritchy spots. At least, not in this repulsive form. I glared at my package.

  “What on earth are you doing?” she asked.

  “Glaring at my crotch. A Guardian did this to me,” I said, mourning the loss of my fabulous doggy form.

  She, too, stared at my groin. “She has a lot to answer for.”

  “You said it. I wish I could do something to pay her back. Hey! Nymphs! You guys are all militant and badass, right? I could have some of your buddies beat up the Guardian who screwed me over.”

  “We prefer the term proactive to militant.” Titania pulled out a nail file and tended to a fingernail. “And if you had spent your life as underestimated and overlooked as we have been, you’d be proactive about making sure people got their facts right, too.”

  “I’m a demon,” I answered, carefully sitting down and examining my abused foot. “I am all over underestimated.”

  “Anyway, Shakespeare got it all wrong,” she continued. “Oberon isn’t king of the faeries at all. He’s just an advocate for the Court of Divine Blood.”

  “Advocate? Like a lawyer?”

  “An obscenely vile one, yes.”

  “Yeah? So what did you do that you got tossed in here?” I asked.

  “Oberon, my former lover and disgusting lint in the underbelly of the worst sort of beings, decided to dump me, a priestess in the house of Artemis, for a naiad. Can you believe it? He dumped me for a water trollop!” Her expression went from outraged to calculating in a split second. “But he’d just better watch out, because the minute I’m out of here, I’m going to get my pound of flesh.”

  “Ew,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Wait—a human pound of flesh or meat from, oh, say, the rump of a corn-fed Black Angus cow? Because the latter sounds really good right about now. Especially with a whisky barbecue sauce.”

  “If I could just find a way out, I could rally the sisters and we’d have our revenge!”

  “On who, Shakespeare? Got news for you, babe. He’s dead.”

  “No, not him. Oberon.”

  I thought. I always think better sitting down. “Not that I want to rush you, since I’ve got at least ten days before Aisling comes back from her cruise and finds out that witch on two legs drugged her boss just so she could banish me, but I’m a bit confused. I get that boy toy dumped you in here when he was hooking up with a naiad, but how does that translate to you nymphs going to war against him?”

  “He’s Oberon,” she said, just like that made sense. When I scrunched up my face in an attempt to figure that out, she added, “He didn’t just have me banished to the Akasha—he had all nymphs banished from the Court in order to curry favor for his own kind.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, dredging up a memory. “I think I remember reading something about that. You guys got run out of town because you were causing all sorts of trouble.”

  “We did nothing of the sort. Oberon just made it look like we did,” she said, leaping to her feet and shaking her fist at the air. “He will pay for that! He will pay for—” Her words suddenly stopped.

  I lifted an eyebrow in a move just as smooth as the one Drake makes whenever Aisling says something outrageous.

  “You’re a demon,” she said.

  “You got that right, baby cakes. Sixth class,” I said, winking. “But if you are interested in hooking up with me, I gotta tell you that I’m in a relationship right now with a Welsh Corgi named Cecile. She has the cutest little fuzzy butt you ever did see.”

  She stared at me just like I said something weird.

  “You’re a demon,” she repeated. “Thus, you can get me out of here.”

  “If I could get anyone out of here, it would be me, because I have a score to settle with a conniving apprentice Guardian, but I can’t, so I won’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You’re a creature of Abaddon. You can’t be dictated to by the Court. That means you can get out.”

  “The Court doesn’t have any say over me, but I’ve been sent here, in a roundabout way, by my demon lord. I can only get out if she summons me, and she’s not going to know what that w
itch Butterfat did until she gets back and finds out I’m not with Amelie or Anastasia.”

  “There has to be another way!”

  “Well, yeah, the Hashmallim guarding the door could let me out, but that’s never happened, so it’s not worth thinking about.”

  “Oh!” she said, stamping her foot and pointing to a spot in the distance. “Don’t you dare cross me, demon! I will make your life a living hell if you don’t get me out of here!”

  “Look, sister, I just said—”

  “Do it!” she bellowed.

  Thirty hours later I gave in to her gigantic ongoing hissy fit and headed over to the circle of Akasha, the center of the whole place, where three Hashmallim stood guard over the entrance. It was an ugly spot, like the rest of the Akasha, nothing but sharp jagged rocks with dead-looking scrubby plants that were the same shade of sepia as the dirt.

  “Hi, guys,” I said as I got up to the nearest Hashmallim. If you’ve never seen one of these guys, they’re Freak City with a capital Freak. They look like something that Jim Henson would have dreamed up after a night of hitting the opium pipe: tall and gaunt figures draped in black, but not really black, some sort of living black that moved and shifted, and oh yeah—they had no faces. Seriously freaky. “How they hangin’? Er . . . that’s assuming you have any to hang. So, this nymph named Titania and I were wondering if we could get out of Dodge. She’s got some vengeance thing, and I want to give a trainee Guardian what for.”

  The Hashmallim didn’t say anything. He just stood there and stared at me. Kind of. If he’d had eyes, he would have been staring me down. Then again, maybe he was looking at my package. “Now, I know you guys have rules and everything, so Titty and I—”

  “Don’t call me Titty!” came the echo of a roar that rolled down from a nearby rocky hilltop.

  “We are happy to make it worth your while, if you know what I mean,” I said, dropping my voice so the other Hashmallim couldn’t hear. “I’ve got a credit card. Well, OK, it’s actually Aisling’s that she lets me use on TV shopping channels, but still, I know her PIN—I can pull out a wad of cash big enough to choke a behemoth. So whatcha say? Shall we talk turkey?”