It had taken more than a few minutes for the bag to empty out, for some reason the red stuff seemed to be moving progressively slower as time passed. I was certain it wasn’t that I was anxious, because I wasn’t. I was by no means in a rush. I was concerned that Hope had my soul now instead of Dante, and Dante didn’t seem at all rushed to get it back. I couldn’t feel safe until it was out of her hands. I wouldn’t leave without the transaction happening first, and that wouldn’t happen until Dante felt well enough to do it. When the bag finally emptied though I was surprised to see Hope move first and shrug off his arm.

“Here.” Hope held out her hand which was now engulfed in brilliant blue flames. I’d never seen it before but I was sure it was my soul. I could feel it in my bones. “I can’t hold onto this anymore, I feel like you’re going to spontaneously combust or something without it.”

“Why?” Amy had left a while ago, so I had no one to ask but them.

“She’s concerned I’ll continue to act recklessly if the only person I have to worry about is myself.” Dante reached out and grabbed hold of her flaming hand. “If I’m directly linked to you, I’ll have to force myself to be more careful.” The fire dissipated and the room felt darker than it had before. “It’s one of the reasons you’re here in the first place.”

“Well that’s one answer. I hope that’s not all you had to tell me.” If it was it would have been the biggest anti-climax ever.

“I never said I’d tell you anything. I said show. Think of that reason as a little fun fact. It’s not all that important, not unlike yourself. Not to be rude, but the only reason I haven’t bothered to tell you much of anything about what’s going on is because you’re not that important.” I couldn’t help but glare at him silently. What kind of jerk steals your soul to use you in his twisted plot but says you weren’t important? I mean, I had to be important or else I wouldn’t have been there at all, right? “In the context of the issue that is. To me personally you hold a significant role in helping me remember to value my life, without which I can no longer continue my venture.”

“Not to be rude, but that sounds like bull to cover for saying I wasn’t important.”

“Believe what you want.”

“So when did you intend to show me these things you keep promising?”

“Does right now work for you?” He yanked the IV from his arm and started walking towards me.

“Oh no you don’t.” Hope grabbed hold of his arm and ended up getting dragged along behind him. It was a little funny to watch, but had I laughed I have no doubt that I would have ended up staked to a chair again. “I’m not letting you go anywhere without me again.”

“Fine you can come. We are going somewhere very personal to you, I guess it wouldn’t actually be right if you didn’t.” Dante put his hand on my shoulder, his touch was much softer than it had been before. “I’m feeling a little weak still, Hope, would you be so kind as to take us to the tomb?”

In an instant I was plunged into absolute darkness. I could still feel Dante’s hand on my shoulder, but I couldn’t see it. Without my sense of sight my other senses had to compensate, I really wish they hadn’t though. Wherever we were, whatever this tomb was, it smelled of rot and decay. I could hear the sound of water dripping into a puddle somewhere and I could feel the hard ground underneath my feet. I was wearing boots so I couldn’t feel it that well, but I don’t think I would have noticed it at all if my senses hadn’t been going into overdrive.

“Are we in a cave or something?” My voice echoed off the walls, making me feel a little claustrophobic as they bounced back to me.

“It’s not just a cave, you little brat, it’s a tomb! Show some respect!” Hope smacked me across the back of the head. Both her voice and the sound of the hit echoed. I was amazed that she was showing any kind of restraint, she probably could have thrown me through whatever walls were around us and made a whole new cave. I still had yet to see either Hope or Dante display their power however, so I could only guess.

“Don’t be so harsh on her, she can’t see anything yet.” Dante turned to me, I could tell because his eyes were glowing faintly. Nothing like when I’d first seen them, but the violet light seemed to suit his gentler tone. “Here.” A blue fire blazed into life in his hands. It wasn’t my soul, I couldn’t feel the same connection as before.

“Is that someone’s soul?” It was a stupid question, I already knew that it was, so I didn’t let him answer. “Will doing that hurt it?”

“This soul isn’t like yours, Samantha. This is the soul of a deceased mortal who willingly promised it to me. I can only take the souls of those who give them willingly, usually after they die, or those who surrender them through defeat.” He paused for a second. “I suppose since I’m being forthright for a day I should tell you that you fall into the second category. By murdering someone you surrendered yourself to darkness.” I looked at him blankly in confusion. “Hello, nice to meet you, my name’s darkness? Devourer of souls, scourge of humanity, and bane of mortals, destroyer of worlds? Do I have to spell it out for you? I’m the bad guy.”

“Uh huh….” I grunted.

“Uh huh what?”

“Nothing, I’m just letting that sink in. I just hadn’t thought about it before, what I do makes me who I am. I killed someone, which makes me evil.”

“You too huh?” He laughed a little.

“Well I work for you, you’re the bad guy, so that makes me the evil minion right?” It made sense, to me at least.

“You’re a real conformist aren’t you, no self-respect.” Dante sighed. “I was almost hoping you’d be as much of a challenge as Amy is, but I don’t suppose it’d be right to give the bad guy what he wants.”

“You’re one to talk, Dante.” Hope chimed in. “Mister doom and gloom all the time, it’s like you have a rain cloud hanging over your head twenty four seven. We all have flaws, and you didn’t really give her a choice but to conform.”

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“Thank you… Hope.” I honestly never expected to say those words, but she deserved them.

“You’re welcome, and if you ever tell Amy that I stood up for you I’ll leave you both staked to the ceiling until gravity pulls you down.”

There was a long silence after that. I certainly didn’t want to get staked to the ceiling, and I don’t think Dante wanted whatever it was he knew she’d do to him if he had smart comments on the matter. However awkward, the silence had a benefit, it gave me a chance to take in the now illuminated room around me. It wasn’t much of a room actually, it was a very small caved in place. I could see some stone brick work in some places that marked that it had been built as part of a larger structure, but the rest was lost to what was probably decades of neglect. Whatever this tomb had been a part of was likely long forgotten.

“Well now that the air is clear you can see why I brought you here.” I could, there were two iron slabs stuck into the wall that marked the graves of Victor and Agatha Richmond.

“Victor and Agatha…” I’d heard both names before. “Victor, the old Death.” I looked over to Dante for confirmation only to find a surprised look. “And you’re Agatha.” I pointed to Hope, who just shrugged. “Who are you?”

“Agatha was a spoiled little rich businessman’s daughter. She died. I’m not her anymore.” I couldn’t see Hope’s face well by the dim light of the burning soul, but I thought I saw a sad smile. “That’s what happens when you become a contractor. You still remember that life, but it doesn’t belong to you anymore.”

“And Victor?” I looked to Dante. For all I knew Dante could have just been Victor in disguise and the two of them could be married. That was the first thing that came to my mind anyways.

“The rich businessman who found out that he couldn’t buy his daughter’s cure with money.” Hope said it as though recounting an old story she’d heard. “He died and came back first, saved me from my sickness, only to have to suffer through my death a day later. Overcome with grief he brought me back too. We realized later that we would have been better off if we’d just let the plague kill us and stayed dead.”

“Who brought you back?” I was looking at Dante now.

“Only a contractor can raise other contractors, it’s a competitive business though, so they generally only make replacements for themselves before they retire and disappear.” Dante gestured to himself as he mentioned replacements.

“The Death before my father was named Mordred, he was raised by Hades, who was raised by his father Chronos who in turn was raised by a contractor we call the Old Man. No one really knows of any contractor older than the Old Man. Soon after we were both raised my father drained Mordred of all his souls and amassed a large wealth, Hades hasn’t gone near him since. None of the Greeks really like anyone, so it’s not that big of a deal.”

“How many of you are there?” I was a little awestruck by her story. Hades was the Greek god of the underworld, she’d just said the Greek’s as in all of the Greek gods.

“Well there are about six of the Greeks left, the rest were either killed or their assets were seized by another contractor, which is pretty much the same thing as dying. There’s Trish, that one Russian guy… I can never remember his name, he’s a recluse. The Old Man, my father, Dante, me… ooh and Eleanor, almost forgot about her,” Dante made an anxious face at the mention of Eleanor. I remembered her of course, she was pretty much the whole reason I was in this mess. “The McGregors, there’s about five of them. Bunch of jerks. The warlord guy from Africa, that snobby British woman that used to sneer at me, though I haven’t seen her in awhile. Let’s see, who else, there’s those two Chinamen and their wives… uh... Suffice it to say there’s a good few of us, but we’re not the most social group so we don’t really keep in touch.”

It took me a while to take it all in. The lines were all starting to connect in my mind. I was starting to make sense of the mess of information I had about contractors, how they came about, what they did. I knew about collectors. What I didn’t know about, or rather who I didn’t know about, was Dante. He had yet to mention anything about himself other than that he had been raised to replace the previous Death.

“Who are you then, Dante?” I was a little aggravated that I had to ask again.

“I am nothing more than what you see before you.” He held his arms up. With blue fire burning in both hands and his violet eyes glowing in the dark behind his curtain of black hair, he looked demonic. There was no other way to describe him. That’s what he wanted me to think though, and it was all I was going to know unless someone decided to tell me otherwise. All I did know was that he was still hiding something.

“Do I really have to be precise when I ask you things?”

“I have to be precise with you, why not make it a two way street?”

“Who were you? And why are you hiding it?” That sounded straightforward enough.

“The answers to those questions are irrelevant. The purpose of you being here is to give you a clearer understanding of what I am now, not who I was before. Whoever I was is obviously dead and gone. There’s no point in me telling you about him.”

“Really? Are you really going to try to sell that garbage to me?” What kind of person brings you somewhere to tell you that they aren’t going to tell you anything? “Is that it then?”

“No. It isn’t. You understand what I am, but I also need you to understand what I’m doing.” Dante held up a shard of glass, it was hard to tell with the dim lighting, but the only thing I saw through the glass was darkness. “You recognize this, right? It’s what I got from Trish, the whole reason we went there. It’s also the reason I had you dig up that grave. In fact it’s also the reason you’re still alive.”

“You see my predecessor, for reasons he can’t even properly recall, had a special mirror made that could show someone who they really were. At least that’s what he requested and signed for in the contract, but the rebellious little soul that was forged into physical creation of the mirror had something else in mind. The mirror didn’t just show who someone was at their very essence, their soul, it became a physically linked copy of whatever it reflected. Look in the mirror, see your soul and crack it while looking, you die and the mirror takes the broken bits of your essence for whoever puts it back together. Like this.” Dante held up a larger plate of glass with a mismatched assortment of round and jagged edges. He dropped the small shard above the top and it stuck to one of the jagged edges like it was magnetized. “Once the true nature of the mirror was revealed, it was ordered that it be destroyed once and for all. For some strange reason, however, he couldn’t do it. Through a series of events not known to me, the mirror was shattered and the pieces spread across the face of the earth with a bit of a tortured soul trapped in every shard.”

Dante handed the mirror to Hope who tucked it away into a bag. She didn’t look comfortable handling it. Even after it was out of sight she looked uneasy.

“Because my predecessor could not destroy it, and the stupid lackey he had trying to couldn’t either, it’s my job now. I needed to know where the pieces were hidden away of course, so I recovered a list of the original locations from the body I had you exhume. Many have been found and relocated since the list was written however, so it isn’t as easy as just collecting things on a list. Most of the remaining pieces are in the possession of contractors like Trish, who have no clue as to their true potential. I may be the bad guy, but I’m doing the right thing. For now. I need you to understand that so that I can rely on you, without having to force you to do anything.”

“So, this has basically been a sales pitch.” I groaned. I was right before, there was no way I would ever get decent answers.

“No. The mirror isn’t my only concern. I have one other goal…”