Finder's Keepers - Chapter 5

V. You Got Jack'd


The sidewalk beneath her feet was a sort of raised ribbon of fog, entirely unreal. It settled around her ankles as she walked, a stream of low-lying mist clinging to the earth. If she went long enough without thinking about it, it vanished entirely, leaving her with an unobstructed view of the pitch black earth beneath her feet now. Tar. That's what she thought of as she scuffled her faded and heavy combat boots through what she thought was dirt but might as easily have been charcoal. She resisted the temptation to look up and around herself—more than once already she had peered into the branches of the towering, ash grey trees overhead and seen one too many inhuman shapes moving. Surely Bixby at the very least would tell her if something too bad was lurking around… right?

She stumbled over a tree root and almost came crashing face first into the dirt. The sidewalk she'd vaguely been following had nearly led her right into the massive trunk of a gnarled… tree. Oak? Maple? She couldn't tell—there didn't seem to be any bark on the trunk or limbs, just smooth grey (dotted everywhere by coin-sized vibrant purple and green shapes she was pretty sure were Other Side bugs). There weren't any leaves on the trees either, and not a single one on the ground. This didn't surprise her; already she was growing used to the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing on the Other Side conformed to logic as she knew it.

Behind her Eferiel was humming something that sounded suspiciously like a hymn to himself, stretching his arms over his head every now and then in a way that made his wings beat. She'd spun around more than once thinking some giant eagle or dragon was swooping down to carry them all off.

Bixby trudged along behind even Eferiel, keeping in sight of them mostly because Kimberly's own progress was so slow. It wasn't that the hellhound didn't seem capable of keeping up—his legs were as thick around as her own calves and far more finely muscled—he just didn't seem to possess the will to move. She wondered briefly, as they stepped around another large tree, how he'd ever gotten himself assigned to collecting human souls. Was that a punishment in Hell? Eferiel certainly hadn't sounded too pleased with the job…

"Where are we going, exactly?" Kimberly suddenly thought to ask, her voice rippling outward and back on the cool night breeze and momentarily hushing the chirping, hissing, and creeping of monster feet which had already become background noise to her.

The angel stopped walking. After a moment of what appeared to be honest consideration, he tossed his hands up. "I was following you."

"You were following me. The girl who didn't know this placed existed until about ten minutes ago."

"I assumed you knew which direction was the right one, since you set off at such a determined pace." The angel was not making any great effort to keep himself from laughing at her expense.

"No," she seethed, "just no. And you seem to know an awful lot about this place for someone who can't navigate it!"

"Textbooks," Eferiel said, completely serious.

"…There's school in Heaven?"

"That's extremely insulting actually." The angel crossed his arms, wings flaring. "We are the most civilized of peoples in any realm and that is due in large part, of course, to our excellent educational organiz—"

"Bixby!" Kimberly screamed back toward the dog (who really wasn't all that far away from them now). "Is there school in Hell?"

The hellhound wheezed back at her, his voice not raised a half decibel from its usual dreary monotone, "Nope."

"When I get my body back, I'm coming with you!"

Eferiel squawked in a decidedly parrot-like way.

In the few moments they had paused to speak, Bixby finally caught up, panting lightly, his rolls of furry flesh swinging. "If you'd waited…" he groaned, "I coulda told you…"

"Could have told us what?" The angel cocked his head in that down-the-nose manner which could only mean a rather cutting remark was on its way. "Have you perhaps navigated the Other Side an uncountable number of times during rampant hedonistic missions for material pleasures and power and therefore know to whom we might appeal so as to speed up our irritating and unwanted epic quest?"

"Yup," the dog said simply.

Eferiel smacked his own forehead soundly with the palm of his hand. Then he turned on a dime and began to speak to the sky. "Dear Lord, I have not always been the most patient—"

"Or patient at all," Kimberly piped up, hands cupped around her mouth.

Eferiel glared back over his shoulder, positively caustic, and she could tell he was grinding his teeth even though his mouth wasn't open. He turned back around to the bruise-colored sky. "I have not always been the most patient, or the most kind—"

"Or kind at all," Bixby grumped, flicking a dismissive ear.

If Eferiel's face got any redder from anger, Kimberly was sure he was going to just have an aneurism and die. Could angels die? She wondered briefly if he would take that question the wrong way.

"I have not been the kindest, or the most good—"

"Or good at—"

"Would you cut that out?!" Eferiel shrieked at the top of his lungs, sounding more like an offended cockatoo than anything else. The things crawling in and on the trees around them stilled completely. Even the wind seemed to freeze, afraid to blow. "I am praying here!" He grabbed one of his own wings and shook it a little. "Angel! Praying! Respect!"

Kimberly and Bixby both seemed to know when it was best for them to just sit down and shut up. The hellhound gave a near indignant yawn, but other than that the pair of them stood awkwardly by, trying not to look very interested in what Eferiel was saying to some God they'd never seen.

"I have not been the most good, but I have always, always treated my position with the solemnity and earnestness that it is due. I finish my work on time. I finish everybody else's work on time! I have done my best to uphold every single one of your teachings—even those few psalms you forgot about after the fourteenth century! So I believe with all the ventricles of my heart that my current suffering has some grander meaning in the plan you so carefully construct for us all."

Bixby snorted. Eferiel kicked blindly backward at him without missing a beat. "Even if I stub my toes on these dirty tree roots and stain my robes with the tarry filth they call earth in this world, and even if all my feathers lose their brightness and my halo gets stolen by ogres and the human girl's prattle causes my eardrums to burst and the hellhound's hideousness leads me to gouge out my own eyes, I will never question you Lord!"

Kimberly gawked, unsure where to first combat the unfair claims against herself and Bixby.

But Eferiel was not finished. "I will never question you Lord, but these two pieces of pea-brained and skeptic infidel scum that have attached themselves to me like leeches just cannot believe in the goodness and rightness of your Grace! So please Lord, pleasepleaseplease, give us—I mean them—a sign that all of this is really part of your righteous and perfect and from-great-suffering-comes-great-happiness plan!"

Kimberly Finder hadn't thought the Other Side had crickets, but there, Eferiel had found them. The night remained absolutely still. There was no sudden message from God. The angel's skyward stare was starting to look a little manic.

"Anything Lord, just any sort of sign would be great! Anything!"

At that exact moment, a grey blur reaching approximately the speed of sound slammed with a painful crack! into Eferiel's face. The angel keeled over backwards.

"That's some sign," Bixby wheezed through a shark-toothed grin.

Whatever the grey blur was, it was now struggling to free itself from Eferiel, using claws and teeth and… horns? Eferiel caught the blur and forced it into stillness at last, and for a long moment Kimberly Finder could do nothing but blink vacantly, not unlike a cow in appearance.

"What… what is that?" she whispered at last. Being held just a few inches from Eferiel's now bloody nose (weird, angels had blood) was the largest rabbit Kimberly had ever seen. It must have been the size of a decent dog breed, like a Welsh Corgi or something, and it had huge, wiry muscled legs. Jackrabbit? She'd never seen one, but this didn't look like a house bunny by any stretching of the term.

And it also had antlers. Like an antelope.

The rabbit squirmed rather effectively out of Eferiel's grip and without the slightest concern for the angel, settled on Eferiel's chest. It balanced on its long back feet, and tied around one of its front paws was a small cloth bag like those she always used to get from the "pick ten shiny stones for five dollars" bins at theme parks. Its ears were so long they draped down its back. Kimberly jerked back a little when she realized that its eyes were wide, alert, and focused on her with a dark glint of intelligence.

"I," the horned rabbit said, "am a jackalope."

Kimberly's gasp surprised even her. You'd think I'd be used to these things already…

"I am Wyoming B. Cottontail to be exact," the jackalope drawled, inclining his head politely in her direction.

"Are you going to budge off me anytime soon?" Eferiel muttered, although with a nose full of blood it sounded considerably more like "Aw yah gunna bahjof ah me neetime zoon?"

The jackalope looked down and seemed to belatedly realize that he was resting on the once spotless robes of an angel. "Well I'll be!" He whistled through his large front teeth loudly and thumped his right back foot once in evident delight (although the intensity of this delight caused Eferiel to wince). At last he hopped off the angel onto the barren ground, where his silvery brown fur stood out vividly against the absolutely unbroken black of the dirt. Eferiel clambered into an upright position, gingerly rubbing his kicked chest with one pale hand and his nose with the other. If angels could bruise, Kimberly thought, he was going to have some lovely battle wounds tomorrow.  

She looked down at the massive jackrabbit… antelope… jackalope thing. Ignoring the fact that until about three minutes ago she'd firmly believed that jackalopes did not exist, there was also the small fact…

"Don't… jackalopes live in the west? Like… Wyoming and those places?"

The jackalope named Wyoming drew himself up to his full rabbit height, antlers to the sky, and the look on his face had the hint of a proud smile (although how she knew that, Kimberly wasn't sure, because the jackalope's mouth didn't stretch upward in any real way).

Still, there was something decidedly amused and decidedly proud when he declared, "I'll be the first to tell you then, little lady, that the proud and noble race of the jackalope has seized, in recent years, upon its manifest destiny—"

No way, Kimberly Finder thought, and a grin stole over her face.

"—that is, its most righteous and most imperative task to establish in this world the moral dignity, the great experiment of liberty, and the federated self-government entrusted to us as proud members of the lapine peoples!"

Eferiel seemed to have given up trying to wipe the blood off his face with his hands, because now he was holding a trailing edge of his robe over his nose, and it was growing a distinctly purpleish spot. He stared. Through the silk—it had to be silk, right?—robe his almost incredulous voice squeezed out, "Moral dignity? Manifest destiny?" Although with a nose full of blood, it came out sounding quite different.

"A federated self-government?" was more along the lines of what Kimberly wanted to know. "Is there a nation of jackalopes here on the Other Side?"

"Oh no, darlin', much bigger than that," Wyoming assured her, brushing his face and enormous ear with a suave front paw. "What we the lapine peoples—" he paused when he noticed the absolutely blank look on her face. "That means rabbit darlin'."

"Ooh!" Kimberly nodded. "Gotcha, gotcha. I just… totally forgot that one."

He steamrolled on as if he'd never had to stop. "What we the lapine peoples have is something much greater: the foundations of a truly impeccable nation—no, an empire—built upon the principles of freedom and equality the likes of which this world has never before seen! And our capital is like onto nothing the other kingdoms on this Side can begin to imitate."

Kingdoms? Kimberly thought, but closed her mouth the second she'd opened it. This crazy rabbit was already doing enough talking—best not to encourage.

"Yes, Lagomorpha is a diamond among coal you could say," the jackalope preened.

They were never going to get anywhere looking for her body if they kept chatting about rabbits! For the first time since they had met, Kimberly shared a long-suffering look with Eferiel. Wait a minute… since when was Eferiel one to sit patiently through anything? Wasn't he in a hurry here? Why hadn't he said anything to the jackalope about them needing to go? Kimberly cocked her head to the side. Again her mouth opened, this time to tell the jackalope they really did have to be going because Bixby had finally alerted them to the fact that he knew where they should be going—hey, she thought suddenly, where is Bixby?

The hellhound was utterly and completely gone. Trying to be discrete, Kimberly's eyes darted over her left shoulder and then her right. She scanned the area around and behind Eferiel and then further out, until after a few seconds more, she was absolutely sure that the hellhound was nowhere to found. Did he… did he just get tired and give up? The thought struck a cold chill down her spine. Stuck with just Eferiel for who knows how long until they found her body?!

But all this thinking went on quite rapidly and quite independently of the conversation—which had continued on without her actual participation. Or had it?

"The biggest and the brightest of all capital cities," Wyoming was saying, fiddling with one of his own antlers.

And "Brightest?" Kimberly said, completely without meaning to. She hadn't even thought the word—it had come right out of her mouth as if the jackalope had placed it there himself. She cursed herself, internally of course.

"Of course it is," the jackalope drawled.  "You've surely seen it."  He pointed up with a paw ill fit to the gesture, and for a moment she thought it was pointing at the top of the nearest tree. The only thing beyond that was the enormous and brilliant moon, crawling with whatever strange creatures inhabited its surface.

Whatever strange creatures inhabited its surface?

Kimberly Finder stared up at the giant moon with equally giant eyes. It could not be. It simply could not be. The adventure had only just begun, and she had officially seen everything.

"A kingdom of rabbits… on the moon…"  

"Well where else would we put it?" Wyoming scoffed, thumping the black dirt for emphasis. "Couldn't have it down here with all the darn—"

A sudden choir of howling and yipping broke through the relative quiet of the night, the voices of dogs—Or something else? Kimberly twitched—winding their way through the vague brace of trees.

The jackalope froze so completely that she was almost afraid he'd died on the spot. Only the frantic shivering of his nose alerted her to his continued breath, and his eyes seemed to swell, huge and black in his head. Even Eferiel sat up straighter, peering out into the dark with a look of bravado that suggested he was planning on a fight.  His wings quivered slightly where they were tucked against his body.

"Coyotes!" Wyoming whispered, in a voice as horrified and low as the sound of something dragging through bone dry leaves. "They caught up."

So that's what he'd been running like crazy from, she thought.

Ripping into motion without warning, the antlered rabbit's head darted in both directions almost at once. "Here," he gasped. "Here, you keep a hold of this for me won't yah?" He held out the paw he had not been using, the one to which the tiny pouch was tied. For a moment Kimberly wasn't sure what to do, but when the jackalope shook the limb desperately, she reached out and untied the pouch cord from his paw.

Her fingers were clumsy, and Wyoming kept jerking halfway out of her hold whenever a yip or yowl would carry on the night mist to their ears. Finally, she managed to untie the narrow strings, and took the soft bag in her hand. It felt like there were two large stones or marbles inside.

"I'll want those back," the jackalope insisted, still in that same furious whisper. "So you keep 'em safe for me, all right?"

Eferiel was making frantic motions behind the jackalope's back, shaking his head and then flicking his hand across his throat in a very clear statement of ixnay. Kimberly felt like she'd just made the second worse mistake of her life (and afterlife), but just as during the conversation, she was utterly powerless to stop herself from nodding and tucking the pouch away into the voluminous pocket of her pants. Did jackalopes have mind control, or what?!

There was another howl, this one much closer, and Wyoming seized up once and then shook himself from head to foot, massive ears flapping.

"I'll be seeing you little lady!" he said, and then he vanished in one stunning leap, once again nothing more than a grey blur rapidly disappearing into the night.

Eferiel was hanging his head. Without looking up, he groaned. "I can't believe you took that." The pouch felt almost warm where it sat against her leg.

"I didn't mean to," Kimberly whined. "I thought about giving it back, but something wouldn't let me."

"Yes, that's—" The angel did not get to finish his statement, because at that exact moment, a huge pack of writhing and barking coyotes stampeded straight toward them. Kimberly half-ducked, throwing her arms up over her face and trying to make herself the smallest target possible. Eferiel leapt to his feet finally, shedding black dirt off his robe like water drops off a windowpane.

The lead coyote jerked to a sudden halt not five feet away from them, and the other coyotes skidded up behind it. Kimberly shrank even further into her own clothes as the leader inhaled an enormous rattling breath.

It was then that Kimberly noticed the first coyote had no eyes at all. Where its eyeballs should have been there were black, empty sockets, open and oozing. Dark stains that had to be blood dripped like tear trails over its narrow furred cheeks. Sightless or not, it still twisted its head to stare directly at her.

"I smell him," it said, and its voice was a gravelly snarl colder than a Russian night in winter. "Where is he?"

It was talking to her. It was mostly certainly talking to her, and oh god if she didn't answer it was going to sick its pack on her and they'd eat her, soul matter body or not and then this whole quest would be pointless because she wouldn't be going to Heaven or Hell and—

"Where?!" It was less word than howl.

"I… um… I…" she stuttered.

"Don't think she knows," a rather familiar, rather depressed voice droned out suddenly from the trailing end of the large coyote pack.

"B-Bixby?" she called out, surprised by the tinge of wild hope in her voice and the fluttering in her chest (wait, did she have a beating heart after all?). Beside her, Eferiel sighed. Apparently he had noticed the hellhound's absence too—and had been hoping it was permanent.

The coyotes were as bizarre as anyone could expect of the Other Side: they were extremely tall, with legs grotesquely stretched upward like taffy, and there was not an inch of meat on any of their bones—vertebrae and hips and ribs jutted out, as if their fur was loose tent material draped over the moving frame of their skeletons. They looked like they would devour the whole world if they could. Among their russet and grey fur, Bixby's black coat stuck out like a sore thumb, although it was only against the backdrop of the coyotes that Kimberly could really see Bixby at all. She hadn't realized before, but the dirt was almost the same color as his fur, and his golden eyes were like two chips of glass, occasionally catching the light of the massive moon.

The pack made way for Bixby, shuffling out of the range of his gigantic paws, which probably could have crushed the coyotes' spindly feet without his even trying. The leader of the pack had tossed his head around to watch the hellhound, and although he made no deferential motions, it was obvious he had no plans on picking a fight with Bixby. Kimberly relaxed a bit, despite herself.

"This is her," Bixby mumbled, "the one I told yah 'bout." The eyeless coyote looked back at her, empty sockets trained on her face like a real gaze would be. Kimberly waved nervously before she thought about it. Bixby went on in his normal monotone bawl, "The one who doesn't know anything."

"H-Hey!" Her attempt to defend herself was half-hearted at best. Something told her it might almost be better if the coyotes thought she honestly didn't know anything.

"Smells a lot like rabbit for someone who doesn't anything…" the leader muttered darkly, his voice slithery like the voices of those eels in The Little Mermaid…

"He was here!" Kimberly piped up, her own voice awkwardly loud from her nerves. She flailed a bit in Eferiel's direction. "He knocked…. our friend down and freaked us out—"

"Speak for yourself," Eferiel sniped under his breath.

"B-But then he heard you all coming and he ran away!" she finished rather lamely. It wasn't like her story was unbelievable, but her shuddering believe-me-I'm-definitely-not-lying voice was not exactly confidence inspiring.

The coyote pack leader seemed to think exactly that. Kimberly wasn't sure how she knew, but there was definitely a suspicious edge to the set of his mouth, fangs showing underneath a curl of lip every other second or so. He sniffed deeply again, and then without warning he padded forward to her. Kimberly froze, subconsciously covering the opening of her pocket with her hand. The coyote slunk around her for a moment, muzzle out, and at last his nose made contact with the skin of her hand. She did not even blink. The wet flesh of his nose was like a block of dry ice pressed to her fingers. It literally burned. The coyote breathed again.

"You touched him," the pack leader snarled, and the other coyotes began to yip and shuffle their feet as if preparing to descend upon an enemy. "I can smell his filth!"

She pressed her hand more deeply into her thigh, pulling as far away from the coyote's mouth as she could without obviously flinching. "Um yeah… see, he got all tangled up when he ran into… my friend… and I helped untangle him—"

One of the coyotes in the multitude barked in frustration, and the pack leader jerked around to snarl it into silence again, his ears lying perfectly flat against his skull and all his sharp, yellowing teeth revealed. Kimberly did flinch away then.

The eyeless coyote turned back to her again, ears still back in obvious anger. "Tangled?" His voice had all the hint of the growl still in it.

"Y-Yeah he had… um… this little bag—"

The pack of coyotes burst into a raucous cacophony of barking and howling, leaping up and biting at each other in a furious tussle of fur. The leader did not even try to quiet them this time; rather, he stared intensely at her, the flesh around his empty eye sockets narrowed to oozing slits.

"What did he do with the bag?" He demanded an answer with a flash of fang.

"He—" Kimberly Finder did not want to lie—not with her limbs or afterlife on the line—but something told her that the jackalope would be furious too if she gave away the pouch, and none of the coyotes had yet exhibited the power to do strange things to her mind… If he hadn't noticed it yet, then… "He didn't want me to touch it!" she offered, awkwardly loud again. The lie tumbled out of her mouth, and Eferiel shook his head at her. "He told me it was important and he ran off right after."

"What did he do with it?" the coyote repeated, words curling into almost unintelligible growling.

"He took it with him," she said, trying her very hardest to sound confident.

For a moment she was sure it hadn't worked, because he stared up at her with his empty eyes sockets, breathing heavily, considering the scents… and then the coyote leader whirled backward toward his pack, flashing past Bixby. With a rallying howl, his pack circled once, noses to the ground, and then, having caught the scent, they plunged with enormous bounds into the darkness of the sparse trees again.

"What about my question?" Bixby called, although for all the enthusiasm he said it with, she almost thought he didn't want an answer.

The coyote leader did stop though, although it was obviously reluctant—his sightless eye holes looked resolutely forward along the trail the jackalope had taken, and it was only with effort that he tore his gaze look away to stare back toward Bixby.

"If anyone would know, the Salamanders would," the coyote called back, and then not even a half second later, he had spun back around and was tearing away.

Bixby harrumped. "No respect for elders," he muttered to himself, lurching his way over to where Kimberly and Eferiel stood.

"Where'd you go?" was the first thing she thought to ask, although there were honestly more pressing questions.

"Went to find them, but he was all stirred up," Bixby groaned.

"What was in the rabbit's bag that he wanted so bad?" Kimberly wondered out loud, slipping her hand in her pocket and feeling the velvety soft material of the pouch. She was glad she had—

"His eyes, of course," Bixby droned, as if that was the most obvious answer in the entire world.

"His eyes?!" Kimberly almost shrieked, reining in her voice at the absolute last second. She tore her hand out of her pocket and then, panicking, whipped around to wipe it on Eferiel's robes.

"What do you think you're—"

"Eyeballs!" she moaned. "There are eyeballs in my pocket!" She was suddenly the complete opposite of glad that she'd successfully tricked the coyotes away. The jackalope had been the bigger bad guy here! He's stolen that poor coyote's eyes! No wonder they were all up in arms about him.

She should give them back. Dogs had great hearing right? They probably weren't out of range yet, if she yelled at the top of her lungs… It was only right to give them back and god, she certainly didn't want them! Forget giving them back to the jackalope—they weren't his to begin with. Besides, she thought, what were the honest chances of seeing him again?

She gingerly fetched the pouch out of her pocket, dangling it by the tie pinched between two fingernails. Cupping her free hand around her face to amplify her voice, she opened her mouth to shout—and Eferiel promptly clamped his own hand down over her lips.

"Not a word," he whispered in her ear, a hot warning hiss, and to her surprise Bixby also nodded his head heavily.

The angel waited a second longer before he released her, to be sure she wouldn't shout.

"Why'd you do that?" she asked, genuinely confused. She lowered her own voice to a whisper. "If these are really his eyes, then they belong to him, and we should give them back! Aren't you all for good works?"

"Be that as it may," the angel rejoined, "what you have in your hand is a loan."

That last word carried a lot more weight that she was used it; it almost echoed, certainly ominous, on the cool breeze. "A loan?"

"Something you gotta give back," Bixby said. "If the rabbit asked for it back—"

"He told me to keep them safe for him," Kimberly mumbled.

The hellhound groaned, shaking himself from head to toe as if he were covered in water. "If he told you that, then it's definitely a loan."

Kimberly looked to Eferiel, who was always more than ready to supply a response. "But what does that mean to make a loan on the Other Side?"

"It means that if you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, he'll make you pay him back in full."

"But I didn't make any bargain!"

"You took the pouch," Bixby grumped.

"I didn't want to! He like… mind-controlled me into it!" she tried desperately to defend herself.

"Regardless," Eferiel interrupted, "you took it, and in doing so you agreed to keep it safe until the point in time that you can return it to him. If you violate this agreement, he will find a way to make you suffer."

"But what are the odds of me ever seeing him again anyway? It was a chance encounter in the first place!" she argued.

For the second time since meeting, Bixby and Eferiel shared an exasperated look. "If he said he'd be seeing you," Eferiel sighed, "you'll most certainly be seeing him."

"Great!" she wailed. "Just great! Now I'm stuck with a nasty pair of probably rotting eyes that I have to keep safe until I meet the random magical mind-controlling bunny again. Why did neither of you think to warn me about this?! How are we ever going to get my body back?"

"I might know that one," Bixby offered, almost in exchange for all the bad news he'd given her.

"What?"

"First," Eferiel insisted, "decide on what you're going to do with those eyes."

Good point, Kimberly thought, holding the pouch as far away from her body as she could manage. "I am not putting them back in my pocket. Hell no."

Bixby had been sidling up slowly over the course of the conversation, and now he turned his saggy head up her, pendulum ears swinging. Without a word he stretched, opened his mouth, and his purple forked tongue flicked out like a whip, wrapping around the pouch. It flew off her finger and into the hellhound's shark-toothed mouth so quickly she had absolutely no chance to pull away, let alone to stop him.

"Bixby!"

Eferiel was silent, but he'd wrinkled his nose in disgust and it looked like he'd gotten stuck that way.

"Bixby," she repeated, "why would you do that?! Now I'm going to have to pay back—"

"Keepin' 'em safe," Bixby muttered, and it was even more muffled than normal, as if the pouch was still making its slow way down his throat.

"Safe?" Kimberly groaned. "What about your big fat stomach says safe place?!"

"And," Eferiel added, "exactly how do you intend to retrieve the eyes when we need them?"

There was a long, horrific moment of silence. Even the giant bugs on the trees stopped humming.

"No…" Eferiel suddenly murmured, "No, on second thought I absolutely do not want to know. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely do not want to know. Don't you say a word!"

Kimberly shuddered from wavy ponytail to combat-boot-clad toe. She was definitely not getting anywhere near those eyes again, even if her whole afterlife depended on it!

"If that problem's solved," the hellhound grumbled, obviously put out, "we've got a bigger one left."

Shaking her head to clear out all the strange happenings that had welcomed her to this utterly bizarre world, Kimberly straightened up, nervously wiping her hands together and then against the legs of her pants.

"You said you know where to find my body?" she asked, not quite sure if the minute shivering of her own shoulders was eagerness to be done with this already insane adventure or fear at the thought of meeting anything worse than she already had.

"Know someone who might know," Bixby corrected, letting his back legs flop down into a sit in the dirt.

Before Kimberly could question what he meant by that, Eferiel had flicked his wings in eye-catching irritation. The look on his pale face was one of solemn, sharp calculation.

"The Salamanders?" he asked Bixby, and Kimberly recognized that she was once more being shut out of the loop. Damn angels and their textbook knowledge! Damn hellhounds and their vast worldly experience!

"Why would a salamander know where my body is?" she asked, but the question was completely ignored by both Eferiel and Bixby, neither of whom bothered to break their half-antagonistic stare. There was definitely something about these salamanders that was rubbing the angel the wrong way—and Bixby didn't look too pleased with the subject either.

"And that was…" Eferiel prompted, although it sounded like he probably knew the answer already.

"The coyote king," Bixby confirmed. "We go back…" He huffed in that way that flapped his voluminous lips, lamenting wearily. "Normally not such a bad guy."

Eferiel glanced over the last comment as if he hadn't even heard it. "Then the jackalope was…"

"Yup," Bixby confirmed again.

Kimberly rubbed her temple, resisting the urge to stomp her booted foot. "Hey guys… Hey guys!"  Finally they spared her a look, Eferiel's face still eerily solemn and Bixby's eyes drifting slowly off as per usual. Neither one of them bothered to say anything. "So I know you're off in 'we know so much more than you' land but I wanted to remind you that I am right here and I am not amused by this fill-in-blank style of conversation! I can't fill in the blanks! And since this is my body we're talking about here, I'm kind of thinking that I should be the first to be filled in!" She heaved a huge breath to make up for saying all of that in one.

Bixby made that familiar rolling shrug motion. "Salamanders are firekeepers. Know a lot. You don't wanna upset one."

"Great," Kimberly sighed. She had about an 80/20 chance of doing just that.

"But we won't be able to summon a Salamander here," Eferiel mused, completely missing that "Fill me in!" memo she'd just sent. Apparently you had to summon salamanders? Couldn't they just go find a pond or overturn some logs?

"It'll haveta be No Man's Land," Bixby replied, equally misty in his response, and with equal consternation. Apparently there was something not fun about summoning salamanders? Or something not fun about the decidedly not-fun-sounding "No Man's Land"? Kimberly felt like beating her head against the nearest tree trunk—or beating their heads against the nearest tree trunk, and she might have done so if it weren't for the oversized beetles. Having beetle juice on her hands would just be the dust on top of this aged fruitcake adventure they were having.

"And we'll need frankincense," the angel said, in a tone that suggested he was reminding Bixby as much as himself, although from the disgruntled look on the hellhound's face, Kimberly was pretty sure he'd been about to say the same thing.

"Okay, just stop," Kimberly interjected before they could shove her even farther out of the loop. "Let me see if I've got even a little of this… The coyote king whose eyes the jackalope stole told you, Bixby—" the hellhound nodded vaguely, "—that if anyone would know where my body is right now, it would be the salamanders." Eferiel nodded now. "And in order to talk to a salamander, we need to summon one, and to summon one, we have to get to No Man's Land. And we need frankincense."

"To burn," Bixby added.

"Okay, we need to burn frankincense in No Man's Land to summon a salamander," she finished with a firm and decisive tone as if their primary problem was solved with that deliberation. Except… "Um, where do we get frankincense?" she thought to ask then.

Eferiel rolled his icy blue eyes toward Heaven. With all the grace of someone too tactless to avoid sounding holier-than-thou, he quoted textbook fact at her: "From Frankenstein, of course. Where else would you get frankincense?"