Deaths Excellent Vacation

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 Akasha 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