A Grim Reaper's Guide to Living Twice

Book 3: A S.C.Y.T.H.E. Mystery

by Maxie Dara

Genres: Fantasy; Humorous Fantasy; General Fiction; Mystery; Cozy Mystery

Synopsis

He’s been charged with possession before, but never like this.

Jack McCoy was a thief and a liar. Then he died.

Margaret Chen transported souls for the biggest afterlife collection company in North America. Then she met Jack.

Possession isn’t really supposed to be possible, but Jack McCoy never let a little thing like reality stop him. Now he’s committing the ultimate identity theft, living a new life in Margaret’s body while his own lies six feet under. Keeping up appearances as a geriatric grim reaper for S.C.Y.T.H.E. is a full-time job, but when Jack is sent to collect the soul of an old friend, his criminal past catches up with him and suddenly he’s planning the heist of his (after)life with a gang of misfits he never thought he’d see again.

Now the only woman he’s ever loved depends on his success in stealing a priceless list of souls from S.C.Y.T.H.E., but someone keeps beating him at his own game. Time is running out. If Jack puts one bunioned foot out of line it will cost him not only the people who matter most but also his second chance at life...

Release date: November 3, 2026

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 336

Sample

1

The thing about dead bodies is they always look slightly disappointed. Something about the way the lips fall after rigor mortis fades, probably. Whatever it was, it was the least of Jack McCoy's worries. Because the thing about Jack McCoy was that as comfortable as he was with other people's disappointment, he'd never been quite so comfortable with death. Which made his nine-to-five a daily disappointment of its own. Because the other thing about Jack McCoy was that he worked as a grim reaper, though he'd never say as much to his colleagues. Around the office, Jack's fellow soul harvesters preferred the term "Collections Agents." Jack didn't care what he was called or what his colleagues preferred, but he needed to fit in, so Jack was a Collections Agent too, in the Murder department of S.C.Y.T.H.E.-Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences-where he'd now worked for just shy of two months, though his host body had worked there for decidedly longer.

Because the other other thing about Jack McCoy was that he was dead.

Not quite so decisively dead as the corpse in front of him, mind you. No, while Jack had lucked out and possessed the reaper S.C.Y.T.H.E. had sent to collect his soul, this guy was fully committed to the bit. Jack tapped a waxy, outstretched finger with the toe of an orthopedic Mary Jane pump.

"Could you not do that?"

Jack looked from the body on the ground to the soul hovering just to its left. They would have been fully indistinguishable from each other if not for the soul's slight transparency and the fact that his skull and brain matter weren't currently visible.

"Sorry."

"It's fine," said the soul. "It just tickles a bit is all." He examined the incorporeal finger corresponding with the fleshy version Jack had prodded.

Jack glanced down at his own hands, heavily weathered and spotted and sporting a manicure in a pearly peach. Well, they weren't his hands, exactly, but they'd begun to feel less foreign these days. The arthritis in the first two knuckles of the right hand, the weakened grip strength, the wedding ring he would pawn for a pretty penny if he thought he had any chance of getting away with it. He wasn't exactly driving a Ferrari here, but he was beginning to get used to the ride.

"What now?" the soul asked.

The real answer to that was something Jack had decided was none of his business when the question first occurred to him nearly two months ago. The guy in front of him would find out for himself soon enough, so Jack just offered a shrug.

"Come on, we're going for a drive."

They were the very same words Margaret Chen had said to Jack when he'd died, in the very same voice, and they seemed to offer as little comfort now as they had then.

Hovering over his own body back then, untethered and unable to fully comprehend the situation, Jack hadn't particularly wanted to go for a drive. What he'd wanted was more of the life he loved. It was all he'd ever wanted. And if he couldn't have that back, he'd take the next best thing. Taking, after all, was one of the things Jack did best. He just needed a plan.

Breaking into a house was easy; you just watched and waited for everyone inside to leave and then made yourself at home.

Margaret had given her client an impatient look, but Jack ignored it. His brain, or whatever did the thinking for him now, whirred the way it always had when the seed of a scheme took root. Something had begun to blossom, but it wasn't quite there yet. Jack needed more time; something the old woman in front of him seemed unwilling to provide. Which was fair, Jack decided. She probably didn't have an excessive amount left of it herself.

Margaret had checked the fine gold watch on her wrist then and looked out a nearby window of the empty club, into the great blue eternity of the sky beyond. And for a very brief moment, her spirit wasn't quite so heavy in its shell. Jack had seen it in her eyes, the gentle vacancy we all allow ourselves from time to time when we're especially tired or bored or dealing with an uncooperative disembodied soul. But there was something more. It was as though this woman had suddenly felt the weight of all her years landing on her all at once, the barrier keeping them at bay nudged away by Jack's stubbornness, or by a tucked-away sadness, or by the person attached to the wedding ring she absently stroked with her thumb. Maybe by it all. And for barely a blink, her eyes said she was done here. Jack had seen it, and it was as good as an empty house. And suddenly that seed of a scheme was a flower.

Without a single thought to the implications, he'd leapt forward and through the old woman, a tick attaching to its host. There was darkness for a moment, and Jack had nearly felt as though he'd died again. But that wasn't it. His eyes had been closed, he realized, and when he opened them, he knew they weren't his eyes at all. The world looked blurrier, and the ceiling was higher than it had been. And his boob itched. And he had a boob. Two, in fact. And just like that, Jack had possessed the body, and by extension the life, of Margaret Chen. He'd committed his final heist.

Or so he thought.


The office was bustling by the time Jack got back just after the lunch hour. No one in this place ever dawdled or took a slightly-too-long nap in their car or had a slightly-too-boozy afternoon meal, so Jack couldn’t either. He bobbed a cottony, silver-white head at everyone he recognized and everyone he didn’t, just in case, before snaking across the bland gray office and sinking into the battered rolling chair in his cubicle that wasn’t actually his cubicle.

His new face stared up at him from a photo in a silver frame on the desk, several years younger and pressed to the cheek of a man Jack had come to know as Wesley. Wesley was also dead, which Jack figured was the only thing they'd have in common. The man in the photo was dressed in a navy sweater over a button-up, like something you'd see on a lawyer at a country club on the way to a lobster dinner. Margaret had clearly done well for herself. Jack could feel her small spark of pride, emanating from somewhere indecipherable, at the thought. Her spirit was mostly dormant since Jack's takeover, but Wesley always brought her briefly back to life. In the photo, she stood primly beside her late husband, a cream cashmere sweater tied jauntily around her shoulders. He knew from experience how much time went into styling that stiffly curled hair-something Margaret had mastered but he decidedly hadn't. In life Jack would have looked at Margaret and Wesley as ideal marks, but even in Margaret's own skin, her wealth was beyond his grasp, her bank accounts secured with information she kept locked away in a part of her he couldn't access. For now that was fine, because whether she'd meant to or not, she'd given him access to something far more important to a dead man.

Jack gave the photo a salute and cracked open the ancient laptop in front of him to begin writing up a report on his morning collection. It was a pretty light day in Murder. Jack had only one more file on his desk, which meant the rest of the day would be paperwork. This was his favorite kind of day, which would have seemed laughable to him a few months ago. Paperwork (or anything with the word "work" attached, frankly) wasn't exactly in Jack's wheelhouse, but it beat seeing gunshot wounds and blunt force trauma up close, so he'd learned to adjust.

When he finished his report, he flipped open the lone file and scanned for an address, then braved a glance at the cause of death so he'd know what he was in for. What Jack didn't check was the client's name, because that never mattered to him. What Jack should have checked was the client's name, because that was about to matter quite a bit. Maybe, if he had checked, he could have prevented what was about to come. But, like paperwork, forethought wasn't in Jack's wheelhouse, so instead he closed the file and headed towards the beginning of his own downfall.

2

A stabbing in a back alley struck Jack as a little cliché. Not that he had much appreciation for the more creative murders, mind you, but, inadvertent pun aside, this whole setup felt a little hack.

He pulled up to the curb in Margaret's Mercedes and peered down the alley to the body sprawled across the pavement, a pair of sneakers peeking out from behind a dumpster. No blood was visible from this vantage point, for which Jack was grateful. It gave him an extra moment to steel his stomach. He unbuckled his seat belt and adjusted Margaret's hair without thinking; one of the leftover tics of his host, who apparently found it a faux pas to arrive at a crime scene with flyaways.

The air outside was brisk, the last of winter's chill still clinging to the breeze like icicles to an awning. Jack wrapped his tasteful burgundy peacoat tighter around his borrowed torso and moved towards the alley.

When he had decided to inhabit the body of Margaret Chen, he hadn't considered all it would entail. He hadn't really had time to think it through, but even if he did, he probably wouldn't have taken it. He rarely did. All he knew in that fateful moment was that he was dead and he didn't want to be. That Margaret was alive and seemed just apathetic enough about it for Jack to hitch a ride. And before he knew anything more, he was wrapping the life of an eighty-three-year-old grim reaper around himself as tightly as he wrapped her peacoat now. With that life came an unexpected amount of death, and Jack found himself reluctantly walking towards it again.

The body in the alley lay face down, sprawled in a way you had to be fairly dead to achieve. Blood had deepened the dead man's charcoal gray jacket to black in three different places on his back, the shredded fabric peeled back just enough to reveal torn skin. Jack averted his eyes and put them to more productive work locating the recently evacuated soul. It wasn't hard to find; they rarely were. Souls tended not to stray too far from their bodies immediately after death-the last tether they had to life.

He recognized the scar first: a raised crescent that traced a puffy cheekbone and curved just under the left eye. According to the scar's owner, it was the result of a broken bottle wielded during a drunken brawl. According to fact, it involved a stoned Peter Pan rewatch and a mental lapse regarding the concept of gravity.

Dale Keegan was thirty-three, a year younger than Jack. Not an ideal age to die. Jack might have taken a moment to reflect on that, or maybe on the disconcerting connection to his recent past currently hovering in front of him, but he didn't get the chance. Dale's glance shot up from where it had been lingering on his own discarded body, his eyes landing on Margaret in her tasteful coat before widening.

"Jackie?"

Jack froze. To the outside world, he was a five-foot-nothing octogenarian with a four-step skin-care routine. Jack didn't exist; couldn't exist. It was what allowed him to continue existing at all.

Before he could say anything, Dale's essence continued. "Holy shit, is that you? What the hell are you doing in there?"

"I-" For the afterlife of him, Jack couldn't think of what words belonged on the end of that sentence. He was too busy trying to figure out how Dale could recognize him behind his geriatric disguise.

"Damn weird day, man. Got stabbed a few hours ago and now one of my best friends is an old lady. What's up with that?"

Jack found himself looking over his shoulder, as if anyone else could hear Dale's words. "Hey, I need you to keep it down, okay?"

This elicited a knowing grin from Dale.

"Nice to see you're up to your old tricks," said the spirit.

Though possession was definitely a new trick for Jack, he couldn't argue his track record of often questionable life choices. They were the foundation of his whole relationship with Dale. They were work friends of a sort-work that would have ended in a decent jail stint if they ever got caught.

"You on the run, Jackie? Seems unnecessary if you're already dead, but you always did manage to get yourself in over your head more than most."

"Can you stop saying my name now?" said Jack. This neighborhood was always swarming with agents from his department, and the last thing he needed was a colleague overhearing this conversation. "What the hell happened to you, anyway?"

"One of the Winston brothers finally caught up with me." Dale shrugged. "Can you believe it took the dumbasses this long?" He glanced back down at his body, head cocked in consideration. "Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. But what's your deal now, Jackie? Hiding out in an old lady, what's that all about?" Jack probably could have-should have-explained the whole situation. About the opportunity to stay alive, about Margaret, about S.C.Y.T.H.E., which, back in the day, would have led him to come up with some half-cocked scheme to use Margaret's unassuming appearance for nefarious purposes. At which point Dale would have egged him on to do something profoundly stupid. And illegal. And fun. But now the only chance Jack had to avoid being a bodiless spirit like Dale was to fully embrace the role of Margaret, and that meant leaving all those habits behind.

"Let's go for a drive," Jack said instead. In his mind he was already halfway to dropping Dale off at the processing warehouse.

"Great idea, Jackie. To Billy's?"

"No, not to Billy's, dude. I have a job to do."

Dale's eyes lit up at that. "Can I get in on it?"

"Not that kind of job."

"Then what- Oh." Dale looked at his feet, the left of which a cockroach was currently scampering through. "You're a working man now, Jackie, I get it. You died and the old ways died with you."

"It's not like that," Jack said, too quickly. "I have to keep up appearances, that's all."