As Graham pushed his way through the door to the psychic store, Albert could smell a strong aromatic incense wafting out through the opening. With the dark lighting of the interior, however, that was the only thing he could sense. The door shut quickly and loudly behind Graham, leaving Albert alone on the street once again.

“Maybe, once he comes back out, you should wait here.” Albert mumbled as he looked down to the cat spirit sitting at his feet. “You’re pretty good at slipping past people’s attention, but I don’t want to risk this going poorly.”

Pincushion tilted her head to the side, seemingly understanding Albert’s request. But he wasn’t entirely sure. Her previous following of instruction could have just been a fluke. Stranger things than Albert incidentally asking an animal to do the thing it was going to do on its own anyway had already happened. Albert would have made a list if he’d thought to compile all of the strange things that had occurred since he’d died—and he probably would have organized them by the degree of strangeness. But such an effort had not been undertaken, as the thought had never occurred to him and the vast number of strange incidences had quickly become too many to count.

“You can follow me again when I leave. If you want.” Albert added on as he knelt down to get on the cat’s level.

It was the closest he’d intentionally gotten to the animal spirit, and it seemed to make her happy. Pincushion purred and rubbed her whiskered face against Albert’s outstretched hand. It was profoundly calming, almost unnervingly so. For a moment, Albert wondered if the purring had caused a hypnotic effect, or if the cat itself had some kind of ability which could dull his senses. But somewhere amid offering to scratch the animal spirit’s ears and chin, an alternative explanation arose in Albert’s mind. A far more reasonable one.

There was no more sensible explanation for Pincushion’s behavior than that she was an intelligent creature with simple desires. And if her simple desires were to receive affection and purpose from someone that could see her, she had certainly done that. And, while it felt egotistical, Albert considered it the cat’s opinion that her purpose was to help him. It was a stretch, but at the same time the simplest solution. If Pincushion had a mind of her own, and Albert was the first person with any kind of spiritual sight or presence that she’d encountered, why wouldn’t she stick to him? He hadn’t kicked her, hadn’t told her to leave, hadn’t done anything bad to her at all. If anything, if the cat was following him by sticking close when he used his quill—which was his guess up to that point as to how she’d followed him—Albert could see how the cat might interpret the travel as being taken on an adventure as a reward of sorts. He’d never heard of cats in particular being adventurous animals, dogs maybe, but she wasn’t just a cat anymore. It almost felt like she was a child, and she seemed to have that same kind of wide eyed and wondrous look that some small children sometimes do when they get to see things they had never imagined before.

“Atta girl.” Albert whispered to the cat through her loud purring.

Minutes passed like that, with Pincushion gladly accepting the affection that Albert offered. And, in turn Albert felt the relaxation of another creature’s trust and acceptance. It was the calmest state of mind he’d experienced in what felt like weeks. Albert quickly realized that the incredibly simple desires of the cat, combined with it’s separation from any other supernatural being, made it the most trustworthy being he had encountered and could be fully honest with.

After an uncertain amount of time—Albert had stopped paying attention to the storefront while he had relaxed—Graham swung the door to the psychic shop open again.

“She’s willing to talk.” The collector said quickly. “But I don’t like our odds. She seems off her rocker.”

“What do you mean?”

Graham waited until the door had fully swung shut and settled behind him before carrying on. “I mean, I think she’s got a screw loose and she’s acting like she’s really psychic.”

“That’s not that bad… right?” Albert asked, the concern on Graham’s face causing concern of his own.

The muscles in Albert’s shoulders tightened instinctively at the stress he was being delivered. The tension came as a surprise, as Albert hadn’t realized just how relaxed he’d become while he’d been waiting or even how tense he’d been before.

“If this Madame Offry is as nuts as I think she is, she might be a very old contractor. Old enough to have lost her mind.”

“Is that a normal thing for contractors to do when they get old?”

“It’s not unheard of. A lot of older contractors stop working altogether after a while because they lose touch with how people actually behave. The ones that don’t retire after that tend to go a little nuts.”

“We should be brief then.” Albert announced as he began to formulate a simple conversational approach. “What did you tell her?”

For once, Graham looked at Albert with a degree of approval; as though Albert had just proven that he could do the work he’d agreed to with some degree of competence. “Not much. I said I was a collector working for a contractor from out of town, and that I had an arbitrator with me waiting outside. I made it clear we were not beneficiaries of the McClellans, but that they had asked us to act as a channel of communication.”

“Alright. That sounds truthful.” Albert muttered. “We are technically under contract, but since the contract is void if we’re in danger and there aren’t any direct repercussions for not completing our end of the deal we should be fine saying that we really are a neutral third party.”

“The contract says as much too.” Graham added. “We’re only associating with them on the basis of being an independent third party.”

“They had us enter that contract under duress though, so we aren’t strictly neutral.” Albert countered. “There’s a seed of doubt about whether or not they’ll actually enact retribution if we cant get them what they want.”

The collector’s brows narrowed as he gave Albert a look of confusion, but also there was a hint of pride at the insinuation. “I don’t think that matters.”

“It matters to me,” Albert said with a shake of his head as he tried to explain. “It doesn’t matter if we’re being contractually honest if it doesn’t feel completely honest. If they really are on the edge, then they’re going to be paying attention more to the way we behave instead of how we thread the needle of our obligations. They haven’t seen the contract we’re under, so our following it doesn’t matter to them.”

“That does make sense.” Graham mumbled. “I’ll let you do the talking then. Maybe you’ll get lucky and Madame Offry is the kind of person you can deal with.”

The idea of relying on luck wasn’t thrilling. Albert knew that there was only so much he could really do before he decided on a course of action that luck couldn’t get him out of. That had been his experience playing chess with Amy. It seemed the harder he tried to reach a specific goal, the less his luck aided him.

“Maybe we’ll have some luck. But if talking to her is a bad idea in general, my luck isn’t going to do anything.”

“And that’s why I’m here.” Graham patted Albert on the shoulder and stepped back towards the shop door. “Keep your quill in your hand, though. No telling when we’ll need to bolt.”

At the collector’s prompting Albert immediately moved his quill from his backpack to his pants pocket and left his hand half in the pocket to both conceal the exposed feather and keep it close so that he could use it to leave if need be.

By the time his quill was set, Graham was already halfway in the shop’s front doors. Albert had no choice but to follow at that point. No real choice at least. If he’d left then and there things wouldn’t have gone over well. He would have the fear of the McClellan’s in his mind, on top of the fear of what Graham and Death would do to him for bailing on legitimate work. Even if negotiating some kind of peace didn’t benefit Death at all, Albert thought that there was a good chance the information about who was doing what kind of contracting in the area would be useful. It didn’t matter if Death didn’t do anything with the information, he’d probably be grateful if Albert gave it to him and upset if he learned that it was information he could have had but Albert didn’t manage to get.

All of the stresses of his situation followed Albert into Madame Offry’s shop, weighing on him and distracting him from most of his surroundings. The only thing that didn’t follow Albert was Pincushion, though the cat spirit meowed faintly—almost sadly—as it stood vigilant by the front door.

If Albert had been paying better attention to his surroundings he might have seen some of the hints that would have otherwise turned him away. The lack of visible scent making substances, like incense or candles, might have been a good giveaway that something was off. But Albert only smelled the pungent aroma of lavender, sage, and wisteria. The smell seemed to dull Graham’s alertness as well, a sign Albert should have noticed as the collectors tense posture had stood out to him more than once. But now they were both relaxed and their sense of caution had been diminished by Graham’s first successful foray into the den.

The biggest giveaway that something was wrong was the lack of sales material. There were tables and shelves lined with merchandise, mostly trinkets and items that looked more occult than they really were, but there was no sign of a place to pay or any indication of price. Moreover, there was no sign of the proprietor. Only the faint sound of a woman humming behind a bead curtain at the back of the main storeroom.

“Pardon me, Madame Offry—I hope I’m pronouncing that right…” Albert began as he approached the curtain with Graham a step behind him and to the side.

Albert made out the faint outline of a woman sitting at a table behind the curtain, along with some hint at her attire. The cream colored lace and bedazzled outfit certainly matched the stereotype of a medium from old TV shows and movies. The drape over her face though, further obscured the woman from Albert’s eyes. And that was all he ever saw of her.

---

The last memory Albert had before waking up was drawing back the curtain with his hand and stepping into the back room of Madame Offry’s. His vision, or rather, the memory of his vision, went blank after that.

When Albert awoke, he found himself laying on his bed. The clock on his nightstand read 6:12 pm. The world outside his window seemed to match.

At first, Albert couldn’t discern the significance of what had happened. The events he had experienced just before his memory went blank seemed like a lucid dream. And they were absurd enough to be one. Everything that had happened from the moment he had gone to Death’s office to the end of his memory were completely outside the realm of possibility. Teleportation, spectral cats, a pub run by two soul dealing contractors that had challenged him to a dare game, playing five finger fillet with a man he hardly knew, visiting a psychic’s store in the same town. It was ridiculous. No matter how he looked at it, there was no way any of it had been real. And everything before it as well, there was no way it had been real either.

Albert couldn’t believe he had been so stupid as to believe that he could have been killed and then come back from the dead. He couldn’t believe that he’d thought he’d seen ghosts or spirits, or anything else.

But as he sat there, on the edge of his bed. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been far to vivid to be a dream.

With a groan, Albert made his way out to the living room. He had expected his mother to be there on the couch like she normally was when he got home from school, but she was gone. He hadn’t just gotten back from school though, so of course she was gone. She was at work. He must have gotten back home while she was taking a nap and the fallen asleep and missed her entirely. It had happened before.

Albert wandered aimlessly around the apartment until he remembered that he still had homework that he needed to do. There was a math quiz page due tomorrow and there’d probably be a pop quiz in his history class on the reading section from the start of the week. They seemed far more important that he seemed to remember them being. For some reason, when he’d been given the homework, it hadn’t felt urgent at all. In fact, he hardly remembered getting the assignments in the first place.

For some reason, when Albert went back to his bedroom to get the work from his backpack, he hesitated. His backpack was where he’d stored his arbitration gear. The quill, the phone, the documents, all of it. When he finally managed to work up the nerve to look inside the bag, its only contents were notebooks and textbooks and folders of loose papers. It was just school supplies.

Once again, Albert felt incredibly foolish. There was no way any of those things could have been in his bag to begin with. None of that had happened. It had just been a dream. His mother couldn’t afford a cellphone for herself, let alone him, and there was no way someone would just hand him one for free. And the rest of the supplies and documents, they had figment of his foolish imagination. Magic wasn’t real, contractors weren’t real, collectors weren’t real, and soul arbitration wasn’t something that could possibly exist without magic. And magic definitely wasn’t real.

The daze persisted as Albert went about completing his homework. It wasn’t distracting really, it just felt like he’d down a cup of cold medicine and then passed out for a few hours. But the aftermath, the daze, wasn’t painful, mostly numbing. He could still think straight, at least when it came to homework. But everything else, any desire to think back on the daydreams of the past week or so, resulted in staring into space for minutes on end. The distractions were tedious, and so Albert quickly resolved to focus only on school work.

By the time that Albert was nearly done with all his assignments, he had gotten tired and was primed to eat something quick and go to bed. He just had one assignment left. It was for his first period class, and Albert didn’t really get why he hadn’t done it first, but sometimes there was just a natural rhythm to homework. When Albert flipped through the notebook he kept for the class, however, he didn’t find the notes he was looking for. Instead he found something scrawled across the page in his own handwriting, though he couldn’t remember writing it down at all. At least, not clearly. And as he read the first line of messy handwriting, memories began to return.

1a) what is spiritual property.

Spiritual property is something that you possess which is tied to your soul, not your living body.

1b) what spiritual property do I have?

Amy can't say for certain, but Death probably wants it pretty bad.

1c) what does Death want with my spiritual property?

No clue. Probably just wants it for vanity.

2) What happens to a spirit when it dissipates?

No clue. There's no way to tell.

3) What does Death do with the souls he collects?

He uses them like batteries. Maybe he eats them?

4) Are there other beings out there like Death?

Not going to bother with that one. The answer is probably yes, and a lot.

5a) Why does my body react to successful arbitration the way it does?

I'm doing what Death does, so maybe I'm becoming like him?

5b) Is that normal and/or safe?

I'm afraid to ask, because I'm sure the answer is no.

Below that, in a different colored ink, was a different bit of text. It was still Albert's handwriting, but it didn't make as much sense. The way the letters were formed looked odd too, like the pen was weirdly shaped. It simply said: Pincushion.