It's a Wonderful Death - Sarah J. Schmitt Page 0,17

nice to see a familiar face.

“Well, we have been doing it a while,” Hazel quips, her quick retort taking me by surprise. She leads us down a dark hallway to the very end.

I could be mistaken, but I think she takes a quick breath, like she needs a minute to muster up some courage, before knocking on a door.

“Enter,” a voice bellows. It could be my imagination, but I think I see Yeats cringe and I wonder what’s behind the wall that could make an angel nervous.

“Hello, Azrael,” Hazel says, bowing her head as she leads us in.

“Don’t look directly at him,” Yeats hisses before following her.

“Hazel, why is one of your charges standing before me?” the voice asks and I give in to my temptation to peek.

Big mistake. Instead of a beautiful winged creature with perfect hair and perfect skin, I find myself looking at a figure with four faces and the most enormous pair of gold-tipped wings I can imagine. His body is covered in eyes of various shapes and sizes. One looks directly at me and then blinks out, disappearing completely. I have to bite my cheek to keep from shrieking.

“Begging your pardon, Azrael, but something unusual has occurred,” Hazel says.

Azrael’s quartet of heads turns in our direction and I snap my gaze away. “Well, what is it?” I hear him ask.

This time, Yeats answers. “RJ, the charge, showed up in the Lobby today. She watched her life disc and then I met up with her to counsel her on the transition.”

“Nothing about that sounds remarkable or worthy of my time,” Azrael answers, turning all but one of his faces away.

“On our way to the Hall, I found Hazel looking for me. She was hysterical because RJ had disappeared from radar.”

“I wasn’t hysterical,” Hazel says defensively. I hide my smirk. She totally was.

“Get to the point,” Azrael roars, and the ground shakes below my feet.

“Her arrival date in the Akashic Records is different than her actual arrival date,” Hazel blurts out.

I can feel the heat of all four faces zeroing in on me. I tuck my chin tighter to my chest. “What did you say?” Azrael bellows.

Hazel clears her throat and I glance at her out of the corner of my eye. “When her light went out, I scanned the Earth but couldn’t find her. My next stop was the Hall of Records. I didn’t think it was possible for me to miss notification about a charge’s arrival, but I didn’t know what else it could be. When I located her file, the dates were different.”

I gather up my courage, praying this Azrael doesn’t turn me into a pile of smoldering ash for what I’m about to do. With as much bravado as I can muster, I say, “Can I please say something?”

The room is completely silent. Hazel and Yeats are frozen in place. Out of the corner of my eye I notice the room illuminates in a red glow. I hear the sound of Azrael’s footsteps as he comes closer to me. When his hand lifts my chin up, I clamp my eyelids shut, not wanting to see the myriad of eyes looking back at me.

“Look up, child,” Azrael says. There’s tenderness in his voice that I don’t expect and I slowly open one eyelid and then the other. Gone is his grotesque form. Instead, I am looking at a tall tan man with broad shoulders and a serene look on his single face. “Now, you know why they told you not to look at me,” he says, the laugh dancing on his words tells me he knows I saw his true self.

“RJ,” Hazel says, and if not for Azrael signaling her to be quiet, I’m pretty sure she’s about to launch into a lecture.

Turning back to me, he says, “Why don’t you tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”

So I do. I tell him about the fortune-teller at the school carnival, Gideon’s accidental collection of my soul, and meeting Sandy, Yeats, and Hazel. Except for a few questions to clarify my story, he remains quiet, listening to each detail. It’s the first time since my arrival that I feel like someone actually cares what I have to say. When I finish, he nods thoughtfully.

“This is interesting, indeed,” he says.

Yeats clears his throat. “How would you like us to proceed? The Akashic Records are never wrong.”

Azrael motions for him to be silent. “I’m well aware of the infallibility of the Akashic Records, seeing as how