Cat's Claw by Amber Benson

with pagans, Satanists, and atheists, so it took me a minute to realize that these were three young would-be Satanists I was spying on.
    I stepped a little closer and saw that the two males were twins , both dressed in matching black T-shirts, black jeans, and black work boots. The female, who upon closer inspection couldn’t have been more than twenty, was wearing a black stretchy dress, black leggings, and a bizarrely shiny black plastic cape. All three of them had white pancake makeup slathered over their faces and necks—the girl had added heavy black eyeliner to her eyes, so that she sort of resembled an albino raccoon—and their matching hair color was a shade of Manic Panic called Ebony. Although it had been a very long time since I’d played “Let’s shock the parents with a scary new hair color,” so Manic Panic might’ve been calling it something else by now.
    As I watched the three little Satanists huff and puff, but not blow anything down, I tried to remember Jarvis’s exact words on how the whole Heaven/Hell thing worked.
    In my experience, the Afterlife can get a tad confusing, so you just have to remember one very important thing: Even when you think you have a handle on the way the whole setup runs, it can turn around and surprise the crap out of you anytime it wants.
    Okay, let the Jarvis-style lecture begin:
    I know everyone thinks Death is just some old, skeletal guy in a robe, skulking around with a scythe in his hand, looking for his next victim, but in actuality, Death is run a lot more like a multinational conglomerate than one might ever imagine. Every person has his or her place in the process—and without their participation, the whole thing would just fall apart into a million pieces.
    I mean, even my dad, Mr. High and Mighty President and CEO of Death, Inc., was really just a cog in a much bigger piece of machinery. He has to answer to a higher office, just like everyone else, because, yes, even in Death there are checks and balances to keep one entity or another from trying to stage a coup in the Afterlife.
    Far from being a one-man operation, Death was really a bureaucracy, with enough red tape and paperwork to make you ill. In fact, I think my dad spent more time trying to appease his Executives and the Board of Death than he did anything else.
    And I knew from experience how hard to please those people could be . . . but I digress. Back to:
    “Death 101, or How Does That Persnickety Afterlife Work?”
    Okay, when a soul dies, it doesn’t just magically move on to the next dimension. A soul is actually pretty helpless right after it’s passed, so it has to be collected by a group of people called harvesters. The harvesters usually work in teams of two, using something that I think resembles a butterfly net to scoop up the floundering soul, thus beginning its progression into the Afterlife.
    Once a soul has left the earthly plane and moved into the supernatural realm, it becomes solid again. At this point, the harvesters have finished their job. Another person called a transporter takes over from there, explaining to the soul the basic principles of the Afterlife and what the process will be like as it transitions from one dimension to the next. The transporter shepherds the soul on its journey to Purgatory, where it is then judged, sentenced, and sent to either Heaven or Hell (based on how naughty or nice it was on Earth).
    After the soul has done its allotted time in the Afterlife, it will then be returned to the Soul Pool for recycling—and then the process of Rebirth and Death begins all over again.
    When I was a kid, my dad made us watch this documentary on television called The Power of Myth . It was really just this mythologist named Joseph Campbell talking to the camera and telling stories.
    Basically, he was pitching the idea that all myths are variations on the same themes—if you break them down to their essence—that, whether humanity wanted to believe it or not,