She moved to the counter opposite Charlie and set the cigarette case down in front of him.

Charlie could barely move. He stared at her, not even conscious that to avoid her eyes he was staring at her cleavage, and she appeared to be looking around his head and shoulders as if following the path of insects that were buzzing around him.

“Touch me,” she said.

“Huh?” He looked up, saw she was serious. She held out her hand; her nails were manicured and painted the same deep red as her lipstick. He took her hand.

As soon as she touched him she pulled away. “You’re warm.”

“Thanks.” In that moment he realized that she wasn’t. Her fingers had been ice-cold.

“Then you’re not one of us?”

He tried to think of what “us” might be? Irish? Low blood pressure? Nymphomaniac? Why did he even think that? “Us? What do you mean, ‘us’?”

She backed away a step. “No. You don’t just take the weak and the sick, do you? You take anyone.”

“Take? What do you mean, ‘take’?”

“You don’t even know, do you?”

“Know what?” Charlie was getting very nervous. As a Beta Male, he found it difficult enough to function under the attention of a beautiful woman, but she was just plain spooky. “Wait. Can you see this thing glowing?” He held out the cigarette case.

“No glow. It just felt like it belonged here,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie Asher. This is Asher’s.”

“Well, Charlie, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t know exactly what you are, and it doesn’t seem like you know. You don’t, do you?”

“I’ve been going through some changes,” Charlie said, wondering why he felt compelled to share this at all.

The redhead nodded, as if confirming something to herself. “Okay. I know what it’s like to, uh, to find yourself thrown into a situation where forces beyond your control are changing you into someone, something you don’t have an owner’s manual for. I understand what it is to not know. But someone, somewhere, does know. Someone can tell you what’s going on.”

“What are you talking about?” But he knew what she was talking about. What he didn’t know was how she could possibly know.

“You make people die, don’t you, Charlie?” She said it like she had worked up the courage to tell him that he had some spinach in his teeth. More of a service to him than an accusation.

“How do you—?” How did she—

“Because it’s what I do. Not like you, but it’s what I do. Find them, Charlie. Backtrack and find whoever was there when your world changed.”

Charlie looked at her, then at the cigarette case, then at the redhead again, who was no longer smiling, but was stepping backward toward the door. Trying to stay in touch with normal, he focused on the cigarette case and said, “I suppose I can do an appraisal—”

He heard the bell over the door jingle, and when he looked up she was gone.

He didn’t see her moving by the windows on either side of the door; she was just gone. He ran to the front of the store and out the door onto the sidewalk. The Mason Street cable car was just topping the hill up by California Street and he could hear the bell, there was a thin fog coming up from the Bay that threw colorful halos around the neon signs of the other businesses, but there was no striking redhead on the street. He went to the corner and looked down Vallejo, but again no redhead, just the Emperor, sitting against the building with his dogs.

“Good evening, Charlie.”

“Your Majesty, did you see a redhead go by here just now?”

“Oh yes. Spoke to her. I’m not sure you have a chance there, Charlie, I believe she’s spoken for. And she did warn me to stay away from you.”

“Why? Did she say why?”

“She said that you were Death.”

“I am?” Charlie said. “Am I?” His breath caught in his throat as the day played back in his head. “What if I am?”

“You know, son,” the Emperor said, “I am not an expert in dealing with the fairer sex, but you might want to save that bit of information until the third date or so, after they’ve gotten to know you a little.”

While Charlie’s Beta Male imagination may have often turned him toward timidity and even paranoia, when it came to accepting the unacceptable it served him like Kevlar toilet paper—bulletproof, if a tad disagreeable in application. The inability to believe the unbelievable would not be his downfall. Charlie Asher would never be a bug splattered on the smoky windscreen of dull imagination.

He knew that all the things that had happened to him in the last day were outside of the limits of possibility for most people, and since his only corroborating witness was a man who believed himself to be the Emperor of San Francisco, Charlie knew he would never be able to convince anyone that he had been pursued and attacked by giant foulmouthed ravens and then declared the tour guide to the undiscovered country by a sultry oracle in fuck-me pumps.

Not even Jane would give him that kind of quarter. Only one person would have, could have, and for the ten-thousandth time he felt Rachel’s absence collapsing in his chest like a miniature black hole. Thus, Sophie became his co-conspirator.

The tiny kid, dressed in Elmo overalls and baby Doc Martens (courtesy of Aunt Jane), was propped up in her car seat on the breakfast bar next to the goldfish bowl. (Charlie had bought her six big goldfish about the time she’d started to notice moving objects. A girl needs pets. He’d named them after TV lawyers. Currently Matlock was tracking Perry Mason, trying to eat a long strand of fish doo that was trailing out of Perry’s poop chute.)

Sophie was starting to show some of her mother’s dark hair, and if Charlie saw it right, the same expression of bemused affection toward him (plus a drool slick).

“So I am Death,” Charlie said as he tried to construct a tuna-fish sandwich. “Daddy is Death, sweetie.” He checked the toast, not trusting the pop-up mechanism because the toaster people sometimes just liked to fuck with you.

“Death,” Charlie said as the can opener slipped and he barked his bandaged hand on the counter. “Dammit!”

Sophie gurgled and let loose a happy baby burble, which Charlie took to mean Do tell, Daddy? Please go on, pray tell.

“I can’t even leave the house for fear of someone dropping dead at my feet. I’m Death, honey. Sure, you laugh now, but you’ll never get into a good preschool with a father who puts people down for their dirt nap.”

Sophie blew a spit bubble of sympathy. Charlie popped the toast up manually. It was a little rare, but if he pushed it down again it would burn, unless he watched it every second and popped it up manually again. So now he’d probably be infected with some rare and debilitating undercooked toast pathogen. Mad toast disease! Fucking toaster people.

“This is the toast of Death, young lady.” He showed her the toast. “Death’s toast.”

He put the toast on the counter and went back to attacking the tuna can.

“Maybe she was speaking figuratively? I mean, maybe the redhead just meant that I was, you know, deadly boring.” Of course that didn’t really explain all the other weird stuff that had been happening. “You think?” he asked Sophie.

He looked for an answer and the kid was wearing that Rachelesque smart-ass grin (minus teeth). She was enjoying his torment, and strangely enough, he felt better knowing that.

The can opener slipped again, spurting tuna juice on his shirt and sending his toast scooting to the floor, and now there was fuzz on it. Fuzz on his toast! Fuzz on the toast of Death. What the hell good was it to be the Lord of the Underworld if there was fuzz on your underdone toast. “Fuck!”

He snatched the toast from the floor and sent it sailing by Sophie into the living room. The baby followed it with her eyes, then looked back at her father with a delighted squeal, as if saying, Do it again, Daddy. Do it again!