Copi Oro

A short story that started as a small idea. . . but got bigger as I wrote it. Now it just feels like a brief overview of a full novel. . . perhaps a novel I could get to writing someday. It's on the back-burner. This was also inspired by another short story I wrote, "Fate's Brother".

And it's never too early for Halloween.

Hope you enjoy.

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Copi Oro

By Andi May

“So, how’d you die?”

Well, that was one way to introduce yourself. Go right ahead and make that the first thing you do when you meet somebody: ask them how they died. This guy sat across from me at the table, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed and his muddy boots propped up on the armrest of a neighboring chair. He was wearing a threadbare plaid shirt and some ratty jeans, but what really caught my attention was that his face looked like it had been mauled by a bear, or maybe a wolf. It was covered in some nasty scars. He looked bored, and that told me he was only here for dinner because he had nothing better to do.

I figured this guy didn’t know any sign language, so I couldn’t really answer him. I just sat there quietly with an eyebrow raised.

He shrugged when I stayed silent. “You’re a quiet one, huh? Whatever.”

I sighed.

The two of us sat quietly across from each other at a massive dining table that could sit probably thirty people. We were in a dark and cold banquet hall with a high ceiling gilded in dark pewter. A colossal chandelier with two dozen dimly lit candles was hanging from it. The windows of the hall were completely swallowed by heavy maroon curtains, and the intricate gothic floral designs in the woodwork of the walls gave off ominous shadows in the flickering candlelight. It was my understanding that the Manor was built sometime in the last half of the nineteenth century, and I was sure nothing had changed in the approximately one hundred fifty years since then. It had been eerily quiet as the two of us sat there staring at each other, but other tenants of the house eventually started traipsing into the hall.

I had been in the mansion for about a month now, but I spent that entire month in the dark attic recuperating from an accident. I had been unable to move, and I was working on being less dead dead. This was my first time joining the other undead and supernatural tenants of Ananke Wayward Manor for dinner.

I was pretty good at making deductions on who was who, and what is what. A trio of women came into the hall, giggling and whispering with each other as they sat at the end of the table together. They had snow-white skin, piercing black eyes, and unnaturally red lips. All three looked like they could’ve been sixteen years old, thirty years old, or seventy years old. I didn’t even need to see their fangs nor see the t-shirt that one of them was wearing that said Edward Cullen doesn’t sparkle to know that they were vampires. A little later a man dressed up like a 1600s sailor shimmered into existence on a chair a few seats down from me. I stared at him long enough to be able to see through him. He was obviously a ghost. Another young woman with stringy black hair tangled with seaweed and scales on her arms and legs walked in timidly and sat next to the ghost. She was definitely a mermaid. Someone came in clutching a tarnished lamp like it was the most valuable thing on the planet, so I could only assume he was a genie. A goblin then walked in, a ghoul, a banshee (the wheezing screeching sound she was making was a dead giveaway), a walking scarecrow, and even a mummy. It had been a while since I’d seen one of those, and he definitely didn’t smell as rancid as the last one I had encountered. I wondered what he had been embalmed with.

All the creatures chatted with each other casually, though I could tell every once in a while someone gave me a cautious glance. I didn’t mind, I was used to being different even amongst creatures like these. I didn’t exactly have the best first impression when I first got to the house, either.

It was when my somewhat functioning nose got a whiff of pot roast coming from the kitchen that a bright glowing orb of light the size of a baseball zipped into the room and then buzzed around my head like a bee. I didn’t really pay it mind, and it seemed to have been irritated by that. The orb settled on the table in front of me then flashed and shimmered until it turned into a young girl sitting cross-legged on the table. She had pointed ears, brown hair woven with vines and colorful flowers, and she was wearing a frock made of leaves. There was a green tint to her fair skin since she had chlorophyll running through her veins. She had wings that were clear as glass but sparkled brilliantly in the candlelight.

A fairy.

She looked like she was twelve years old, though I’m sure she was a century or two older than that. She had the biggest most obnoxious smile on her face. The rose smell emanating from her was intoxicating. I could smell it so well, probably because her face was only an inch from mine as she stared at me like I was the greatest invention since Miracle-Gro.

“Dahlia, you dumbass, get off the table,” the guy in the flannel across from me grunted at her.

The fairy suddenly looked appalled and quickly turned her head to look at him. “Roger, watch your potty mouth in front of the new guy!”

He just grunted then realized picking at the dirt under his fingernails was more appealing than arguing with her. The fairy — Dahlia — turned her head back to me but was a little nicer about my personal space this time.

“Hi!” she said gleefully. “I just wanted to say hi and give you a proper welcome since I’m sure Roger here didn’t do that! He doesn’t talk much. And then I heard you don’t talk much either? That’s okay! I’ll talk enough for the two of us! I’m Dahlia, I’m one of two fairies in the house! The other one is my brother but he’s down in the basement feeding the Venus flytraps quick before he joins us for dinner except dinner is pot roast and that’s yucky so my brother and I will eat all the salads if nobody wants their salad! His name is Crann. My brother, anyway, his name is Crann, Crann isn’t the name of the Venus flytrap, or the salad. The Venus flytrap’s name is Cruncher, and there’s two more named Muncher and Stomper. My brother came up with those names. I named all the tomatoes, but there are a lot of names. I can give you the list of names later! Aside from all the happy plants there are a couple living things here: me, my brother, and Roger and Cobia the mermaid and Omar the Genie and Henry who can’t ever join us for dinner because he lives in the swampy pond in the backyard and then of course the Ananke sisters. But then did you know that you’re the thirteenth dead thing to be in this house right now? Spooky cool! There’s even some poltergeists here!”

In response, a glass of water on the table suddenly tipped over.

Dahlia waved at the spilled glass. “Hi Steve!” She turned back to me and got extremely close to my face again. “Oh WOW. You really DO have two different colored eyes!”

I’m sure my eyes had glazed over at that moment, but her fingertip being half a millimeter from my green eye made me more alert. I just nodded gently, my dead muscles straining in the process.

“A green one and a brown one! I wonder since you have two different people’s eyes if you can see two different ways? I always wondered if everyone saw colors the same way. Like I learned that pink is pink but if somebody else sees pink as blue but then learned to call that color pink anyway. So then for you with two different eyes does pink look blue to you?”

Even if I had a voice I wasn’t sure I could answer.

“Geez, Dahlia, give the guy a break, would ya?”

I recognized that voice as spoke into the room. Sis Ananke. She was the young woman that had nursed me back to health. . .er, back to whatever kind of health works for the undead. I was still unsure how to show her my gratitude for what she had done the past month.

She walked into the hall carrying a platter with a large pot roast, and the goblin and banshee got up to take it from her and serve it to the table. Sis then came toward me and Dhalia, giving the fairy a glare to get off the table. Dahlia was quick to scurry into a chair and squeak a sorry!

Sis was beautiful in her own way, and that was the most beautiful thing about her. Since she was the only living thing I had seen for the past month whenever I was actually conscious, I had gotten to know her features well. She had choppy rocker hair, as she liked to call it, dark brown but with streaks of red and white. She always had bracelets with studs and black and purple beads cluttering her wrists that clinked when she put ointments and cooling cloths to my charred skin. She always wore a silver-studded belt that held up ripped black jeans. She usually had blood-red Chucks (I’m pretty sure that’s the name she called them) on her feet, and some sort of off-the-shoulder rocker T-shirt like she had now. This one said Me and Bobby McGee across the front of it. Her face had harsh features in a stunning way, and it looked like it had far more wisdom behind it than her age showed. Which, she did. She looked like she was in her mid-twenties, but she was far older than the house. How much older? I wasn’t sure.

She was a witch. Trained in magic, voodoo, sorcery, the works.

“How’s it going, MJ?” she asked me as she pulled the chair from under Roger’s feet and then sat in it. She smiled at me, that same smile full of genuine care for my well-being.

I shrugged to give an I’m alright answer.

“MJ?” Dahlia wondered. She was jittery in her seat next to me. “His name is MJ?”

“It’s what I’ve been calling him,” Sis said as she gestured toward my own t-shirt. I looked down at it. It had some dude’s feet wearing black shoes and white socks, with Michael Jackson printed across the top. It was the shirt I always wore, the shirt I woke up dead in. It was a symbol, apparently, that I was born and dead sometime after 1983, but a nearly forty-year time span didn’t really narrow it down. I had no idea who Michael Jackson was, and I remember how appalled Sis was when she found that out. That was the day she brought up her record player and played Thriller for me while she tended to me in my bed.

“I love it!” Dahlia shrieked. Another orb of light zipped into the room and then shimmered into a boy who looked almost identical to Dahlia. I figured that was the brother, Crann. Dahlia seemed to completely forget about me as she ran and flew around the room playing tag with her sibling.

Hope she didn’t annoy you too much. I suddenly heard Sis’s voice in my head. With her skills in magic, it was the way she could communicate with me. For a while my mind was too mushy for the spell to work, but as I got stronger it was a relief to have somebody to really talk to.

I smiled and sent thoughts back to Sis. Nah. She meant well.

Sis shared the smile for a moment, but then it faded into solemnity before she thought: You’re up and moving, but how are you really feeling?

I’m alright, I thought back, and I meant it. The fact that I could even move again was a relief. Thanks to you.

She just waved me off with a grin.

Physically I felt better, but my memory was, well, basically nonexistent, and that might’ve been what she was getting at. I remembered the past eighteen months before the accident, the eighteen months since waking up dead. But before that, I had no idea. I had no idea how I lived, how I died, or even really how I came to be undead. While she nursed my undead body, she also tried a lot of methods to help jog my memory, but nothing worked. Thinking about it all, I looked to my hands for the hundredth time since finally being out of bed. They were two different color skin tones, each with a scar at the wrist to connect to even more different skin tones. My whole body was a patchwork of skin grafts, stitched together in rainbows of threads. My muscles were random pieces put together, too, and I knew I didn’t have all my organs on account of being undead but I knew they were mismatched as well. My fingers used to be all different sizes and lengths on top of it all, but after the accident, they were all normal-sized and aligned now. All my bones were aligned and matching now.

My unbeating heart sunk with despair when I thought about the bones that held me upright. My hands shook as I placed them on the table and I figured I probably would’ve started crying if I had properly functioning tear ducts. A moment later, I felt Sis’s warm hand gently rest on top of mine. She seemed to know what I was thinking (If she was mind-reading or really just that intuitive and observant, I wasn’t sure). She whispered in my head: Just don’t let his sacrifice go to waste.

Never. I thought back.

She smirked and spoke out loud. “Good.”

“What’s good?” Dahlia appeared next to me with a plate of heaping spinach and lettuce.

“Nothing,” Sis told her.

“So do you eat brains?” Dahlia suddenly asked me.

“Not all zombies eat brains, Dahlia,” Sis told her. “It depends which pantheon he died with, and he doesn’t remember anything about being alive. Besides, he’s not really a normal zombie.”

“Oh yeah!” Dahlia shrieked in delight as her brother sat next to her, more focused on his own salad than anything else. “He’s a Frankenstein, not a zombie!”

“Frankenstein's monster, you mean,” Roger abruptly chimed in.

“Yeah! That!” Dahlia giggled.

Roger then looked slightly confused, but only slightly. "But I thought the whole point of Frankenstein's monster was ‘it's alive!’, and I definitely don't hear a heartbeat coming from this guy.”

Sis considered. “My guess is that he was a Frankenstein monster in life… but died again.”

Roger shrugged and went back to his nails. His interest in the topic had already subsided.

Dahlia piped up again. “So is your name really MJ, or is it Frankenstein’s Monster? Maybe it’s Frank!”

I shook my head. I didn’t know how to tell her that I actually had two names rattling around in my sluggish brain, and I wasn’t sure which one to go with. The two names were really the only things I had in my memory about my identity when I woke up dead, and I wasn’t sure why or what that meant. I let Sis go with MJ, though, because I felt like it was too complicated to get it into thought-talk with her about it. And, well, I liked MJ.

The chatter in the hall suddenly stopped when the head of the house walked in. Sis’s older sister, Clo Ananke. I had only met Clo once, she visited me in the attic when I first got here, and after that it had always just been Sis watching me. Clo was a hefty woman, and I mean that in all the best ways possible. You just knew she was in charge, and that she was powerful. Her facial features were very much like Sis’s, but she looked like she was in her early forties and had much more wisdom behind those eyes. She also dressed a bit more like how you picture a witch would — hat and all — but classy and well-kept. A black corset, a skirt of billowing silk fabrics of dark purples and reds, buckled boots. She had it all except for the green skin and warts.

“Eat,” was all she said as she sat at the head of the table. The chatter recommenced and they all dug into the food that had appeared on the table when I was talking with Dahlia and Sis. It all looked delicious, the pot roast, the mashed potatoes, the green beans, the salads, the bloody broth for the vampires, but it wasn’t anything I ever ate. Brains certainly weren’t my thing, but the food I normally ate wasn’t something you’d typically find on a dining table like this, even this particular dining table complete with bloody soup. I didn’t actually come to dinner for the food, I just came at Sis’s insistence to start moving around again, and to try and meet the other tenants. I noticed everyone dug in except for me and the two Ananke sisters. The two were merely drinking out of goblets, but I couldn’t tell just what exactly it was that they were drinking.

Dinner went quickly, and I had to remind myself what it was like to be around the living and unliving again. I was so used to being alone in the dark only occasionally visited by Sis. I found myself enjoying being around so many creatures, even if I couldn’t really partake in the conversations. I just listened. The vampires talked about the atrocities of some guy named Van Helsing, the banshee and the goblin talked about how they teamed up to scare off some kids trespassing in the "haunted" woods around the Manor, the mermaid and the ghost shared a couple shy kisses, Dahlia threw grapes at Crann and he caught them in his mouth, Roger and Sis chatted about some comeback tour Queen was about to do. Eventually, everyone started to fade from the table and go back to their rooms or whatever it was they did in such a large mansion. Dahlia asked me and Roger if we wanted to hang out with her and Crann in the greenhouse, but Roger said it was a full moon and he’d rather be in a dungeon than hang out with her. It came to be that I was the only one left at the table, so I figured it was time to head out myself. I managed to get my slow-moving body up and I inched myself through the kitchen and out the backdoor of the Manor. It was late evening now, the sun was down, so I could finally get outside for fresh air for the first time in a month. Not that I really had functioning lungs to take in the fresh air.

I pushed the door open gently and smelled the fresh trees and leaves of the backyard. The backyard was huge and surrounded by a heavy forest of pine trees. I could see Henry's pond about half a mile back from the house, but only more trees beyond that. Ananke Wayward Manor was the mansion at the edge of town, at the end of the road, hidden in the woods. Not many humans made their way this far. . . the goblin and the banshee apparently didn’t give them much of a chance to, anyway.

I was excruciatingly sluggish as I made my way across the lawn. I also wasn’t used to having legs the same length. I had always walked with a limp to compensate for two different femurs, but now that they matched, I had to relearn how to walk. I finally got under a tree and managed to sit up against the trunk. The air felt good against my dead skin, and the stars were slowly starting to appear. I had missed the stars. The Lanes of Inbetween were up there with them, and I missed being there.

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the full moon dominated the sky now and I could hear wolf howls from somewhere in the woods. That was when Clo came out of the house and started walking toward me. I started to try and get up to greet her, but I suddenly felt a force push me back down on my rotting rump. I looked up at Clo and she had her wand pointed at me. She had magically sat my butt back down.

“No need to get up,” she said as she flicked her wand and a canteen appeared in my hands. Her magic worked faster than Sis’s did.

She sat down next to me, and gestured toward the canteen. “Drink.”

I hesitated, but nodded. My hands were stiff and fumbling, but I managed to put the canteen to my mismatched lips. I recognized the taste of it immediately, and then gulped it down swiftly. I could go an abnormal amount of time without any sustenance, but it had been months since I had what I needed, and it was weighing on me. This, in the canteen, was exactly what I needed. Sis never knew what I needed, but apparently Clo did.

When I finished, I hand-signed thank you to her, but I wasn’t sure if she knew ASL.

“You’re welcome,” she ended up answering.

We sat quietly for a moment.

“Sis said you have his bones now,” she whispered to me.

I froze for a moment, surprised that she knew about it. I nodded gently.

“No need for your guilt,” she said to me pointedly. “Don’t wallow, that will only waste energy and time.”

I wanted to say yes ma’am, but I just gulped and nodded again.

“Even if your hands are laggard, tell me everything that happened,” she ordered me.

I took in a breath, then found myself smiling at the first memory I had of Copi Oro.

“Oh, yeah. Boss mentioned you were a quiet one,” he had laughed.

I had sighed in response.

“Hey man, I dig it, no worries. I should properly introduce myself,” he had said when he reached out a hand for a handshake. “Name’s Copi Oro.”

I continued out the memory, and hand-signed it along for Clo.

I gave a small smile as hello and grasped Copi’s bony hand.

His literally bony hand.

Copi Oro was a walking talking human skeleton. Smooth ivory bones, but etched with swirly designs and flowers of bright blues, greens, reds, oranges, purples, and lots of yellow. His skull was. . . what did they call it? A calavera. He had just sockets for eyes, but they were etched to look like marigolds. He had green waves of swirly designs above those sockets that moved like eyebrows to show just how expressive this guy was. There were more vibrant colors adorning his entire bony face and around his toothy mouth that moved to show when he was smiling. He had a shag of black hair on top of his skull (I wasn’t sure how that worked) with a tie-dye bandana tied around his forehead. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I was looking through his rib cage as he stood there in front of me. He had paisley pants on and no shoes which completed his look of dead hippie.

He wasn’t the first skeleton I had encountered in the week since waking up dead, but he was certainly the liveliest.

“Cold grip, man,” he said as the swirls around his teeth formed into a smile and he politely shook my hand, “you’ve been dead for a hot minute. Kinda bogus deal, though, you look so young and so little. Twenty maybe?”

I shrugged.

“It’s chill, dude. Boss said you’ve been stewing in a bit of an identity crisis too, huh?” he asked me. “You’ve got two names floating around that skull of yours, huh? That’s whack.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

“He was calling you Attie. I’ll stick with that. That groovy?”

I shrugged. I didn’t mind.

“So you’ll be my partner, man. Since I don’t have an ofrenda to get to anymore anyway, I happily lend my services to the Boss to help the wayward dead get to their peaceful resting places or happy existence as undead or supernatural. Right on, right man? I guess I’m a wayward whack, too, but gotta keep busy since there ain’t no rest for the wicked. And since Boss has been spending most of his time and energy lately out looking for a decent replacement so that he can retire, I know the old coot is strapped for labor to do his usual jobs. Glad he found you, glad you’re willing to jump on the train to help, dude. That’s chill.”

I nodded in agreement. Since I didn’t really know who I was, I was happy that the Boss had given me this job. I figured I could at least be useful to someone while I tried to get my undead life together.

So, Copi Oro and I worked together to help lead the dead. It all depended on which pantheon or belief a person lived on that determined where to take them or how they would exist after they died. Copi was an expert on using copal and marigolds to guide the dead, so that was our usual method to help the restless. Ghosts and spirits were usually mindless when they were stuck in the Lanes of Inbetween, but copal incense was so intoxicating it could guide their wandering minds anywhere. The brightness of marigolds could light up the path to the Underworld, the Land of the Dead, Valhalla, the Afterlife, Janna, Firdaus, Eden, Heaven, Hell, an Ofrenda — you name it. Of course some souls became undead creatures like me or Copi, and we’d help them sort it out, but most went to a final resting place.

It ended up being I was a “pretty slick Bruce Lee kung-fu wannabe”, as Copi called me. I couldn’t remember how or why, but I knew how to fight, even with mismatched body parts. I could fight off all dark and evil creatures and spirits that tried to eat or destroy innocent souls before they made it to safety. Because, you know, not everything was happy and peaceful in the afterlife, not every ghost was your friendly Casper (Copi taught me that reference). If someone was evil in life. . . they were most likely evil in death. It was my job to fight off those evil spirits, monsters, or demons.

Copi was the guide, I was the muscle. We worked well together, and he became the only thing that kept me grounded in death and sane from the impeding weight of my blank memory and uncertainty about my past. I remembered a conversation I had with Copi, and how he sort of felt the same kind of connection with me.

“Hey, man,” he had said, “I never told anybody this before, but I gotta be straight with you. I never had an ofrenda to begin with. I had no family, no life really, when I was alive. For a skeleton like me, an ofrenda — a place to be remembered — means everything. Not having it for so long, man, roaming the Inbetween with nowhere to go? Whack. I was happy when the Boss approached me for a job. But having you, man, having a family even in death, I really dig it. I feel like I have purpose for the first time in my entire existence.”

We did become family. He wasn’t my best friend, he was my brother. We had been through so many tough situations together not just in fights, but some really heart-wrenching and emotional trauma with spirits and souls that we lead. Even though it was our mission to bring happiness to the dead, leaving the people you cared about in the living was never easy, and we never got used to witnessing loved ones having to separate.

We became some of the best employees for the Boss. But, despite how good we were at our job, we could only ever do it at night. Whatever kind of Frankenstein monster I am, whatever kind of creature I am, the sunlight has always been too much for me to bear. If I stayed out too long and the sun rose, my skin would fry and burn, my hair would be on the verge of bursting into flame, my insides would literally boil, my green eye and brown eye would start to melt in their sockets, and whatever lifeforce I had that kept my undead-self around would fade away. I never wanted to die die. We had always made it work, but it was certainly a hindrance to our job. So, after a while, Copi had the idea to look into witchcraft.

“I got some connections, man,” he had said. “There’s a witch I worked with years ago to help some atheists with their afterlife. She and her sis run a boarding house for kooky folk with no place else to go. She's all about helping us sort. She could be swell, maybe she got something for you?”

That’s when I heard about the Ananke sisters. I also quickly learned that Copi Oro tried dating Sis Ananke at one point. When we knocked on the door of Ananke Manor at sundown one day, she answered, but quickly slammed the door in our faces when she saw his ridiculous toothy grin.

“Get out of here, Copi,” Sis had grunted through the closed door. She clearly sounded annoyed and exasperated to have seen such a loser again.

And, well, as much as I love Copi, I didn’t blame her. He was kind of an insufferable flirt and self-proclaimed “player”.

“Aw, chica, mamacita, don’t leave a sack of bones hanging! You’re a real bunny, ya know?” he called. He then tried peeking through the windows along the porch but every window he tried she closed off with a heavy curtain.

“I don’t have time for a two-timing loser like you!” she called.

Two-timing? I rolled my eyes. Copi, what have you been doing?

“Oh come on, ace, help a brother out!” Copi said with a hokey suave voice. “My man here could use your expertise.”

Sis then briskly opened the door again and Copi stopped trying to get a bony leg through a crack in a window. He scurried to attention then straightened his nonexistent bowtie.

“Help who?” she asked him. She then looked over to me and did a scan from head to toe. “This guy?”

Copi nodded, then the green lines he had for eyebrows wriggled in suaveness. “How about a kiss, for this guy, too?” He puckered his nonexistent lips.

“Ugh!” she grunted then tried to slam the door shut. But, I put a Frankenstein foot in the door jam before she could. I looked to her apologetically, then shot Copi a look of annoyance. His ASL had gotten a little better since hanging with me, so I signed to him: Would you knock it off?

He fixed his mop of hair then cleared his bony throat. “Alright, alright. Sis, my girl, my man here needs some witchcraft expertise. We came to you at this late hour, see man, cuz the brother can’t get out in sunlight. Hoping you or your big sis had some ideas.”

She then eyed me more closely, trying to figure out what I was. “Zombie?”

I shook my head.

“Well, that’s just it ace, we aren’t sure what he is. Boss wasn’t so sure either,” Copi told her.

She raised an eyebrow. “Did your Boss send you here?”

Copi shrugged a scapula. “Not directly, per se, but he knows we’ve been out looking for ideas.”

She grunted. “Last time I tried working with Reapers I only got myself in serious trouble for messing with the natural order of things.”

“Ah, see, ace, we aren’t Reapers,” Copi told her. “You know that, man.”

She faltered. “I don’t know how much help I would be. Clo would be better at it, but she’s out of town for her Coven meet.”

“I have all the faith in the world in you, ace,” Copi assured her.

She rolled her eyes again, but opened the door and signaled for us to come in. But, as Copi tried to sneak past her into the house she pointed a sharp finger at his skull.

“I swear, though,” she started to say, “if you try anything funny, Copi, I’ll boil your bones for tonight’s stew.”

He put his hands up in surrender. “Hey, ace, I’m only here for my man here. It’s all chill.” He cleared his throat nervously but grinned as he filed into the manor behind me.

And that’s when all Afterlife broke loose.

Sis had explained that she had to know someone’s pantheon, their belief, before she could try altering their nature. Superficial spells could work on someone, sure, but doing a spell that altered how they existed was dangerous stuff. And because I had no idea what my pantheon was, she didn’t really know where to start. If sunlight killing me was part of who I was and how I existed, she said she’d screw with the natural order if she tried to alter it. She figured she’d go ahead and try the most mellow spell first, one that worked for a lot of pagan beliefs, but we quickly learned that I myself went against the natural order. My existence was against the natural order.

Her magic sent a spiral of darkness around me, and caused me to attract all the evil that Copi and I had always tried so hard to stop from attacking innocent souls. I don’t remember most of what happened, it happened so fast, but when the first spirits of evil showed up at Ananke Manor, Copi and I knew we had to leave to protect the creatures of the house, and Sis herself. Copi quickly laid out a path of marigolds and lit copal that even the evilest of spirits couldn’t resist, and we led them to the Lanes of Inbetween.

The Lanes of Inbetween was homecourt for me and Copi. It led to any ending we wanted to get to. It was like a bridge among the stars, among reality, among the planes, the highway everyone commuted after death. We fought the countless hordes of spirits while we were there, but we soon realized the darkness had gotten so great, the spirits were flooding into the realities and endings of every pantheon. We were spreading evil to the places that should never have evil.

But then, I got an idea when I remembered that evil spirits shared a certain trait with me.

They couldn’t be in sunlight, either.

Every time these spirits had shown up while Copi and I were on the job, it was of course at night, because we only ever worked at night. Other coworkers of ours always said that they almost never fought evil spirits while they worked during the day. Evil couldn’t stand light.

Remembering that, I took a Lane that I knew would bring us to somewhere in the Land of the Living with the sun still up. The spirits followed, too consumed by their desire to kill or eat me to notice the doom they approached.

They disintegrated, burned, melted, and disappeared as soon as the rays hit them, one after another. But, I was slowly doing the same.

“Man, what are we doing out here?!” Copi had shouted at me when the spirits vanished and he finally comprehended where we were and what I had done.

We were in a hot desert, and the sun showed me no mercy. I collapsed to writhe in pain on the hot sand. His confusion quickly evaporated when he saw how much pain I was in and he rushed to my side.

“Let’s get you out of here,” he said. He started to pull some marigolds out of his pockets to make a way back to the Lanes.

I found myself realizing that if the sun could kill me like it killed all that evil, how was I any different than those spirits? I still had no idea who I was, and I could’ve just been pretending all this time to be something that I wasn’t. What if I was evil? What if I was evil in life and that’s why I woke up as this abomination? Copi and I had seen many times that someone evil in life could be even eviler in death. What if I was the very thing I was trying to protect innocent souls from?

I shook my head through the pain and frantically signed my hands NO to Copi.

“What?!” he argued. “Enough of that, man.”

I grabbed his bony hand as I clenched my mismatched teeth in silent pained screams. I looked him in the eye sockets, and he seemed to understand what I was getting at.

“You aren’t evil,” he whispered to me as he caringly gripped my hand back. “You aren’t like them.”

He then looked at me from my head to my feet as my mismatching skin crackled and burned.

“I think you’re what everyone, everything, should want to be,” he told me. “You’re everything. You embody everything. And if you, my man, are so worried that being a little bit of everything is evil, maybe I’ll give you one big whole thing. I'll prove to you that I believe you are not evil.”

My vision was dimming and the pain was too much to bear, but I found myself not liking what he was implying. I usually didn’t mind being mute, but right then, I wished more than anything that I had a voice.

“You gotta keep on keeping on, Atropos,” he said to me in a whisper.

I was on the verge of blacking out, but I felt my undead heart flutter at the sound of one of the names that had been rattling around in my head for so long. He knew?

“Yeah, I knew,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “Atropos and Thanatos, right?”

He knew.

“You’re the Boss’s heir, but the heir to everything,” he said. I could tell he truly believed what he said. “You gotta live man, don’t be trippin’ out. . . Thank you for giving me purpose again, my man. This, this is my purpose, right here.”

That was the last thing I heard before drifting into unconsciousness. The next thing I knew I woke up in the attic of Ananke Manor.

My hands had grown stiff as I signed to Clo, and I realized I started making a weird gasping sound. I was crying. I was crying without tear ducts and without a voice.

Clo didn’t say anything for a long while, she let me be. I felt embarrassed, but reliving it all through my undead hands was hard to get through. It wasn’t until Sis came out into the night to join us that I started getting my weird gasps under control.

I sniffed and wiped at my nose, though my undead nose didn’t really ever run.

Sis had to have seen me crying, but she didn’t say anything as she sat on the other side of me, leaning against the tree trunk.

“The fresh air feel good for a cooped-up corpse like you?” she asked me after a while as she looked up to the stars.

I just nodded.

The three of us sat for a long while. So long that the full moon was starting to fade into dawn and the wolf howls had stopped.

Sis then noticed the empty canteen in the grass between us. She picked it up and sniffed it. She sat upright then, and looked to her sister in alarm.

“This is Nectar,” she said. "He needed Nectar."

Clo nodded. “Yes.”

Sis looked to me with wide eyes. “Your Boss. . . he’s Hades, huh?”

When she said the name, I suddenly had a vivid memory flash across my mind.

I remembered waking up in complete darkness and coughing up spiderwebs and dust. I was in a coffin. I managed to push the cover off to find I was in a coffin up on a dais, and in an unsightly garden. The garden certainly had to have been beautiful at one point, but now everything was decaying, dry, brown, gray, and lifeless. It was the middle of the night, and it was deadly silent. I remembered feeling lonely and scared. I had tried to get out of my final resting place but tumbled down the stone steps that led up to the dais. It was hard for me to move. That was when I heard a gentle laugh. I probably should’ve jumped at the sound of a voice, but I didn’t. The voice was deep and velvety, but there was a sense of calming gentleness to it.

“I have twisted Fate with Death,” the voice had said.

The memory cut short when Sis stood to really look at me. “You’re not a Reaper, you’re a Fate. You and Copi were Fates.”

I nodded solemnly.

“And Copi was. . .” Sis started to say, I could tell she was trying to put something together. “Hades tried to make him his replacement.”

I didn’t know what she meant by that, but that’s when Clo spoke up.

“Yes,” she said. “Hades thought that since Copi had no ties to the living and no ofrenda to return to, he would be the perfect reincarnate. Hades, despite being of Greek, was trying to bring all the pantheons together, and he thought that Copi being a blank slate would be the perfect vessel.”

“But. . . not belonging is the opposite of what Hades needed,” Sis concluded.

Clo stayed silent, but Sis knew she was right. Sis crouched down next to me and gently took my hands.

“I know your memory is hazy, but does the word Moirai sound familiar to you?” Sis asked me gently.

My head was hurting. I wanted to say yes it did, but I wasn’t sure.

“The Moirai are Fate personified,” Sis explained. “Hades has many working for him as Fates, but the Moirai are the true Fates personified. They were three goddesses from long ago: the first spun the threads of life, the second measured it, and the third cut it short.”

“Clotho, Lakhesis, and Atropos, respectively,” Clo whispered.

I. . . I knew those names. Of course I knew Atropos, but I knew the other two.

“Hades had intended to find his Thanatos to take his place as Death so that he could finally rest,” Clo continued. “But, he realized that the third Moirai had been missing for too long. Copi wasn’t the right fit. Hades didn’t need someone who didn’t belong, he needed someone that belonged to all. Someone that was proof that all could exist together equally and in harmony, in life or death.”

My hands were shaking, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.

Sis grasped my hands gently again to try and steady them. “The evilness was after you because you are the missing piece to set it all right. Evil has swallowed the world because there has been no Atropos to stop it, the threads of life have been spinning out of control. Evil hasn’t been getting its final resting place like everything else has. Atropos hasn’t been around to cut evil short.”

Copi was always the right fit I said to her in my thoughts. I was still hung up on that idea. I didn’t like how Clo said he wasn’t the right fit.

Sis smiled. “That annoying skeleton? Yes, actually, he really was.”

“Regardless of your past,” Clo said, “I will say he did set you on the right path for the future. He made you the right fit.”

I hadn't realized how long we had been outside, how early it was getting, until the morning sun peeked over the Manor and shined into my eyes. I panicked momentarily and started to scramble to my feet to get back indoors, but stopped abruptly when I realized my eyes were fine. I wasn't burning, I wasn't being destroyed by the sunlight.

Sis smiled when she saw my nature had in fact been changed. “Copi was the change you needed.”

I clenched my fists tight, feeling Copi’s bones under my mismatched skin. His bones saved me, changed me so I could exist in the light. I knew who I was now. I was the Boss.

---

May no seas fare smooth.

—Andi May