Death's Mantle 2
Date: 2020-02-04 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy
Description: There isn't much time left for Lucian North to save his brother. Discovering a new way to grow exponentially stronger, Lucian forms an unsteady alliance with the angel Danira, one that he hopes could grow into something more. Matters are complicated once Lucian is given a deadline by the Council of produce his predecessor, who has mysteriously disappeared, or be tortured until he relinquishes his mantle. Hunted by parasites, injuresouls, fallen angels, and now his own kind, Lucian must level up in a way he's never fathomed before, crafting everything from mechas to bone armor designed to withs
Publisher: Boycott Books, LLC

~Book Two~

Harmon Cooper

Copyright © 2020 Boycott Books, LLC

Edited by Adam Luopa

Audiobook narrated by Andrea Parsneau and produced by Podium Publishing

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

Death is before me today:

like the recovery of a sick man,

like going forth into a garden after sickness.

Death is before me today:

like the odor of myrrh,

like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today:

like the course of a stream,

like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today:

like the home that a man longs to see,

after years spent as a captive.

--From "Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Soul" written around 2000 BCE, also known as "Dispute Between a Man and His Ba," taken from a papyrus of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Grim Mecha

Chapter Two: Happy Hunting

Chapter Three: Life Goes On

Chapter Four: Father of Mine

Chapter Five: Scratched Off

Chapter Six: Beach Bummed

Chapter Seven: The Committee on Luminaries

Chapter Eight: Purple Demon Bug

Chapter Nine: Cursive

Chapter Ten: Fifth Avenue Showdown

Chapter Eleven: Not Alone in Kyoto

Chapter Twelve: Potions, Potions, Potions

Chapter Thirteen: Hallucinations

Chapter Fourteen: Angelic Coffee Break

Chapter Fifteen: Jellyfish in Salem

Chapter Sixteen: Eavesdropping

Chapter Seventeen: Chocolate and Robots

Chapter Eighteen: Cold Day

Chapter Nineteen: Taj Mahal

Chapter Twenty: Boss Battle

Chapter Twenty-One: A Metaphor for Something

Chapter Twenty-Two: Tea with Yoshimi

Chapter Twenty-Three: Demon Goat

Chapter Twenty-Four: Fallen Angel

Chapter Twenty-Five: Troubled Sleep in an Endless Desert

Chapter Twenty-Six: Death Hunter Squared

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Violent Echos

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Mantlecore

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Setting the Stage

Chapter Thirty: Blasted Beach

Chapter Thirty-One: All Involved

Chapter Thirty-Two: On a Pale Horse

Chapter One: Grim Mecha

The cars blazed by below, an occasional horn, headlights flashing. The clouds above were dark, the stars drowned out by the lights running along the interstate highway.

Lucian North sat on the edge of a billboard looking out onto I-95, his crows chasing each other in circles around it.

He glanced back up at the words above him, a smile coming across his face as he reread the advertisement: Heaven or Hell? Only You Can Decide.

It was an appropriate billboard for a man who had taken Death’s mantle.

It had been three days now since Lucian had gone after his predecessor at the South Wind; three days since he had found himself on a beach in Portland, Maine with the angel known as Danira, both of them watching their crows play near the shoreline; three days since he’d finally gotten the attention of his brother Connor’s parasite.

And over the last three days, Lucian had all but wasted away at his hideaway, the place Old Death had seemingly bequeathed to him.

He’d mostly played Zero Enigma, but he’d also read some. And feeling like he should do something, he had also created a new item that would come in handy.

Hopefully, Lucian would be able to test it out soon.

His Soul Points flashed before him:

Lucian had plenty of power to work with, not that he was really planning on going hunting tonight.

He would start back up tomorrow, feeling especially rejuvenated after his three-day staycation, a time in which he was able to zone out, to forget about everything happening in his life for once.

But Lucian knew that he couldn’t waste away forever, that he had a limited amount of time to stop his brother’s early death. He also knew that he had enemies hunting for him now, from Death Hunters, to the Progeny of Light, to Watchers, which was the term he’d heard thrown around for fallen angels.

It was a hell of a life he had stumbled upon.

Wearing his black robes, his hood over his head, his cape on his shoulders, Lucian watched vehicles pass, their front windshields momentarily visible in the high-mast lighting.

They were moving too fast, and he was at too high a vantage point, to check their drivers’ death dates.

He couldn’t help but wonder how some of them would react had they been able to see the Grim Reaper sitting on a billboard that asked people the ultimate question: Heaven or Hell? Only You Can Decide.

If the drivers below knew the truth, if they knew that they didn’t quite have a say in how things played out after they died, how would they react? How many people actually believed what they thought they believed, and what would happen if those beliefs were stripped away from them by a sobering truth? What if they could see the parasites feeding on them, the angels gaining strength from their hope, demonic beings like Lucian trying to set things straight, bringing order to the madness?

What then?

A gray bus caught Lucian’s attention.

It was in the slow lane, and as it moved toward him he noticed white tendrils coming out the tops of the windows and curling up to the rooftop.

“Of all places…” Lucian looked right to see his crows, Hugin and Munin, hovering in the air. The spherical devices with their sharp beaks nodded at Lucian, almost as if they were waiting for permission to go after the bus.

“What else is there to do?” he asked them as he pressed off the ledge of the billboard, bolting into the air.

Lucian slammed down on top of the rooftop of the gray bus, cars passing all around him as he conjured his MX-11, the green light on the side of his futuristic gun blinking, indicating that it was ready.

His sword with a modified strip of lava in its center took shape in his free hand. He heard the whir of his shoulder-mounted semi-autonomous energy cannon letting him know it was ready.

The bus started to switch lanes, and as it did, white tentacles careened toward Lucian.

The parasites bubbled up on the other side of the rooftop, their cores red, pink fists pounding on the rooftop as their forms started to merge.

Lucian was intimately familiar with this particular type of parasite, the kind that frequented mental health hospitals.

The first one came for Lucian and he sliced through it with his sword, kicking up in the air and spinning, firing at the next one.

A fist cracked him in the side of the head and Lucian went flying off the top of the bus. He hit the highway and started running, jumping back into the air and using the front of an eighteen-wheeler as a springboard to send himself back to the rooftop of the bus.

The same fist came at him and Lucian cut through it with his sword, spinning and blasting another tendril. His cape bloomed with life, but didn’t separate from his body. It stayed hooked to his shoulders, batting away parasitic tendrils with razor-sharp swaths of cloth, blood spritzing the air as Lucian continued to engage the parasite.

Hugin tore through one of the tentacles only to be caught by another parasitic limb, this one covered in lesions and sharp spikes.

It slammed Lucian’s crow down onto the rooftop, leaving an indentation as his shoulder-mounted weapon blasted the tentacle with concentrated bursts of energy.

Another tendril wrapped around Lucian’s leg, which he quickly cut through with his sword.

Everything flashed as a log-sized fist struck Lucian in the back, sending him tumbling forward.

He landed on the highway, jumping just in time to avoid being hit by the car behind the bus. He ran for a moment, a truck passing by him.

As he’d done before, Lucian jumped from the rooftop of the sedan to the side of the eighteen-wheeler, crawling up to the top.

He launched himself into the air and landed on the back of the bus, immediately blasting the huge fist with his MX-11, his black cape swirling in the air behind.

Lucian saw his other crow blaze past, tearing through two tendrils before slamming into a thick one covered in outward-facing teeth.

Realizing that this wasn’t going to play out too well on the rooftop of the bus, Lucian aimed his gun at his feet, kicking both legs up in the air as he fired. A hole melted through the rooftop, exposing the inside of the cabin, which hosted a few patients being transported to what Lucian assumed was another psychiatric ward.

“Here we go,” Lucian said under his breath as he dove in.

The cabin of the bus was suffocating, the parasites all pressed together, at least four of them all gunning for Lucian at once. He tried to fight them back, but was quickly overwhelmed, the parasites grabbing onto his arms and wrapping around his neck.

His crows burst into a few of the clear white tendrils, but they were unable to free him.

As his shoulder-mounted weapon continued to fire, a smile crept across Lucian’s face.

“All of you are so fucked,” he whispered as an explosion tore through the side of the bus, the vehicle careening toward the left.

It hit the railing and flew over the side, smashing into a tributary that fed into the Long Island Sound.

The parasites came up, hissing and screeching as Lucian also took to the air.

“They’re all yours,” he said, turning to his newest creation. It was a mechanized version of Lucian, complete with black robes and bladed gun arms, that he’d named Grim Mecha.

Grim Mecha was metallic, just like his crows, and as he hovered, both Hugin and Munin lowered down onto his replica’s shoulders, docking.

The bus slowly started to sink into the water beneath them, the parasites writhing as they bubbled out of the hole in the roof, joining forces and growing stronger.

Grim Mecha looked to Lucian, his replica’s eyes blazing purple as he turned his attention back to the growing threat below.

Lucian’s newest creation blasted off toward the giant parasite now rising out of the water, tearing straight through its body.

Grim Mecha exploded back out of the water, severing one of the parasite’s limbs and going straight for its vertical eye, energy pouring into Lucian, who was still floating in the air, cars blasting by on the bridge in front of him.

“This is so awesome,” Lucian found himself saying as a clawed tendril tried to bring his replica down.

Grim Mecha caught the stray limb and brought his hand back, snapping the sharp fingers as it circled around, using the thick hunk of parasitic flesh as a shield to block a stinger attack.

Tendrils shot out of the water and wrapped around Grim Mecha’s throat, attempting to drag him under. A blast that caused a wave tore out of the back of his head, disintegrating the tentacle.

With a flick of his wrist, Lucian conjured a wall of injurecrows, his blackened IEDs, all of which took off toward what was left of the conjoined parasite.

They exploded on contact, and his replica followed up with powerful blasts from his bladed arms.

More explosions, more lasers, more badassery.

Lucian was goddamn proud of himself for what he had created, and even though he hadn’t been planning to use him tonight, it was good to see Grim Mecha in action.

He felt more energy pouring into him.

Lucian looked down to see what was left of the parasite slowly sinking into the water, everything filtering away. The bus was almost under now, and even though he knew that this wasn’t the case, that this battle was taking place on a different plane of existence, it gave Lucian satisfaction to know that he had easily bested his enemies.

He knew there were fights coming his way that would truly push him to his limits.

But for now, he couldn’t wait for the next competitive angel or Death Hunter to dare come after him.

He was looking forward to the challenge.

Grim Mecha returned to Lucian and they bumped fists.

“That was sick,” Lucian said.

His replica merely nodded, Hugin and Munin undocking and returning to Lucian's side.

Rather than filter away, as many of his items did when he wasn’t using them anymore, Grim Mecha looked to the sky, a ball of energy starting to form beneath his heels. He blasted up as if he were a rocket, disappearing into the darkness.

“Best thing I ever created,” he said as his status appeared.

Hugin flew in front of Lucian and gave him an agitated look.

“Let me rephrase: it’s the best thing I’ve created after you two. And don’t forget, you two can join him whenever. I thought that would be a cool feature.” He placed his hand on his crow's smooth head, Hugin nuzzling Lucian’s palm. “So take no offense.”

Lucian glanced at his status again, seeing that he had gained ten Soul Points, which wasn’t half bad.

Taking a cue out of Grim Mecha’s playbook, he rocketed up into the air, lowering back down onto the ledge in front of the Heaven or Hell? Only You Can Decide billboard.

“It shouldn’t be long now,” he said, looking out to the highway.

Lucian saw his brother’s blue truck coming down the highway, one of the headlights dimmer than the other. He spiraled down toward the highway and swooped up, landing in the bed of his brother’s truck.

It was time to check on him.

Chapter Two: Happy Hunting

Lucian pressed forward into the cabin of the truck, sitting between his brother and his future sister-in-law. He looked to Connor, noticing that nothing had changed about his date of death. He then glanced at Samantha, noticing no changes either.

Name: Connor North

Date of Birth: 11/01/1980

Date of Death: 06/06/2021

Name: Samantha Reese

Date of Birth: 07/15/1986

Date of Death: 12/19/2072

“This was supposed to be a vacation, Sam,” Connor said with a grumble. He was wearing a long sleeve polo shirt, his puffy winter jacket stuffed in the small cabin behind him. “Ma wanted us to get away for a few days. Let’s not fight about that. Not today, anyway.”

“You don’t have a job; we have a mortgage payment coming up that you know my paycheck can barely cover. It’s something we have to talk about. I know that it upsets you, Connor, but without Jen around, we have more of an opportunity to actually feel these things out, to say what we want to say.” Samantha reached her hand through Lucian and dropped it onto his brother’s arm, squeezing it. “Don’t take it personally, but we’re going to be husband and wife in a month; we have to be able to talk about these things.”

“Dammit,” Connor said, jerking the steering wheel erratically. “I just…”

“Don’t get angry.”

“I’m not getting angry!”

“Relax,” Lucian told his brother, watching as he ground his teeth, a fury spreading over him.

Lucian could see the parasite sticking out of the back of his brother’s shirt with, its clear skin and the yellow swath of flesh running through it. The parasite had definitely noticed him, and Lucian had already tried to drive his hand through it, seeing if he would have any effect on it.

But no.

He still wasn’t strong enough to actually engage the demon bug. Glaring at the parasite, hatred swelling in the space where his heart should be, Lucian tuned back into what his brother was saying.

“I told you, I’ve reached out to everyone I know; they all know I’m looking for work. I talked to a few hiring managers. Hell, there may be an opening at the hardware store up the street. The guy who has worked there forever, Greg, he’s retiring. It takes time.”

“I know it takes time, honey,” Samantha said, her voice growing soft. “I’m just worried, that’s all. You have to understand what it feels like, this close to getting married and then having one of us lose our jobs. I just wish there was something I could have done…”

“There was nothing you could have done!” Connor said, hitting his fist against the steering wheel. “Sorry… Sorry…”

“Be careful. You’re driving!”

“I am being careful! The road is too busy tonight. Sorry.”

Lucian’s crows pressed into the cabin, hovering just in front of him. While Connor and Samantha continued to have a heated discussion, his crows bounced into one another, playfully looking at Lucian as they did so.

“Stop it,” he told them, feeling like he was supposed to be part of this conversation somehow.

Hugin turned its attention to the parasite sticking out of Connor’s shirt. Lucian’s first crow backed up a few paces and then took off toward the parasite, cutting straight through Connor’s body and out the driver’s side window.

His crow returned, and for a moment Hugin was bathed in golden light from a streetlamp, Lucian recalling that Danira also had crows, hers golden with cherub wings.

That thought made him happy.

He didn’t know when he would see her again, nor if they would be enemies when he did, but he hoped it was soon.

“I’m sorry, Connor, I just don’t see how going to Stamford for a couple days is going to help our situation. What if you get a callback? What if they want to interview you?”

“Then I will tell them they can interview me in three days,” he said, his knuckles white from gripping the steering will. “Can we drop this?”

“I know we need a break, but…”

“Everyone needs a break, Sam. Ma is going to take care of Baby Jen. You and I are going to pretend like we don’t have a shitload of problems waiting for us when we get back to Beverly. Can we at least do that? Can we postpone this fight until then?”

Samantha glanced out the window, folding her arms over her chest. She looked like she wanted to say something, but she ultimately stopped herself, nodding at her own reflection. “I suppose.”

Lucian hung around long enough to see his brother and future sister-in-law get checked into a hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, a room paid for by his mother.

He didn’t know why he decided to tag along with them to this point; he knew he wasn’t going to be strong enough to kill Connor’s parasite, and he definitely wasn’t interested in hearing their argument. Especially since he knew that Samantha was correct, that she was unaware of his brother’s addiction problem.

As Lucian watched Samantha and his brother lie on the bed, Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky finger together.

He reappeared on top of Old Death’s home, on the cliff overlooking the empty city with saber-shaped buildings and flying vehicles buzzing in the air.

Everything empty.

Seeing Connor and Samantha hash it out only made Lucian appreciate the complexities of a relationship, the parts that one person knew, and the parts the other didn’t. He had experienced some of that with Katy, his last serious relationship.

And being able to see both sides play out, to move effortlessly from one room to another, gave Lucian a power that most people would dream to have. Lucian had never been into politics, but he wondered briefly what it would be like to visit the nation’s capital, to hear what people were saying behind closed doors.

What secrets could he uncover now that he was in this form?

“Aliens,” he said to himself, smiling as he turned toward the glistening lake that sat across from the hangar he’d created. He snapped his fingers and his crows appeared, the two taking off toward the lake.

Ezra, Old Death’s cat, came out of the hangar, stretching and yawning before making his way over to Lucian.

“Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Lucian asked as he stooped down to pet the cat, who purred lightly.

Ezra made his rounds, and then turned his attention to Hugin and Munin, who dipped in and out of the water, chasing after each other.

“At least I have you three,” Lucian said as he made his way to his workshop.

As he stepped inside, his robes disappeared, leaving him in a black shirt and a pair of comfy house pants that he’d created over the last three days.

Knowing that he had other things that he could do, but also feeling the urge to be distracted, Lucian sat on his bed and went for his video game controller.

He powered up the system, the flatscreen attached to the ceiling flickering as it turned on.

The intro music for Zero Enigma played, those familiar strings followed by the combined crash of a tympani and the rest of the orchestra.

Lucian’s avatar appeared, still with his scythe.

Just to get his hands loose, he pressed the [O] button to perform an attack, and [L2] to cast a wicked lightning bolt that struck a tree.

The companion he had named Danira was with him as well, and as he moved through some of his attacks, she also brought her weapons to the ready, prepared to engage.

It was too bad that Zero Enigma didn’t allow him to customize his companions.

The gameplay was only set up to exploit companions, not actually allowing one to customize them, aside from taking away their armor. Companions could die, and once they did, Lucian could find another companion at any pub across the land.

It was as simple as that.

But Lucian enjoyed the game, and he especially liked the skill tree system and the uniqueness of some of the quests. He also enjoyed how everything he did would have an effect on the game somehow. He wished he could officially partner up like it was an old-school JRPG, where the companionship had been preordained, and party members were customizable and actually part of the dialogue and story.

If the current Danira were customizable, he would replace her robes with sexy golden armor.

He would give her large white wings, curly blonde hair, a strip of blue over her face. For a weapon she would have a golden sword, and if he were able to really customize it, in her other hand she’d have a sick futuristic firearm, one ringed in glowing energy.

“If only…” he whispered to himself as he turned in the direction of the nearest village.

A flash caught Lucian’s attention.

He looked toward the lake to see that…

“Shit.” Lucian rolled out of bed and his black cape came to him, swirling before settling onto his body. By the time it had settled, he had his carbine in one hand and his lava sword in the other, ready to engage.

“I don’t know who you are,” Lucian growled as he turned to the three cloaked figures that stood before the lake, “but you have picked the wrong…”

Lucian never got the chance to finish his sentence.

His arm was now lying on the ground, one of the cloaked figures holding a double-bladed scythe, which she’d apparently thrown at him.

Legs sprouted from Lucian’s severed arm, his hand still on the trigger of his carbine.

It began firing at the three cloaked figures, using its centipede-like bone legs to stabilize itself.

Lucian flew up into the air, aware that it would take a moment for his arm to heal up.

One of his assailants appeared before him, delivering a blow to his stomach that sent him flying downward. He crashed through the ceiling of his workshop, losing his lava sword. After a quick recovery, Lucian blasted upward again, launching an enormous fireball at the female with the double-bladed scythe.

With a swipe of his free hand, Lucian invoked dozens of injurecrows, which he sent toward the cloaked figures on the ground, as well as the one currently roasting in the air.

He also called Grim Mecha to him, the mechanical reaper appearing in a flash. The rockets on his feet fired as he slammed into his assailant.

The woman tossed her scythe at Lucian again, cutting his body in half.

He didn’t feel any pain, even though his legs were falling away from him.

And rather than smacking into the ground, his cape swooped under the bottom half of Lucian’s torso, keeping him airborne.

His arm and hand regrown, Lucian began firing his MX-11 at the figures on the ground.

“Enough!” one of them said, just as Lucian’s two crows were about to tear through his body.

They stopped, as if they had pressed their sharp beaks into an invisible wall.

A few of his injurecrows slammed into the invisible barrier, exploding on contact.

Lucian’s Grim Mecha simply fell to the ground, causing a crater and kicking up a load of dust.

The female Grim Reaper now floated before him, her hood down, black holes where her eyes should be.

“You cannot defeat us,” she said calmly.

“Like fuck I can’t,” Lucian equipped his plasma blowtorch.

He pulled back the lever, his upper torso still suspended by his cape.

The concentrated blast of energy tore right through the woman’s chest, Lucian thrown backward, his cape stabilizing him.

When he was done blasting he looked to see that the woman was completely healed up, and that her ends of her cloak were now spiraling toward him.

One of the tendrils wrapped around his neck, the other two went for his arms, his cape fighting her cloak and eventually losing.

Lucian was slowly dragged to the ground, where his severed arm that had been firing his carbine joined him, trying to protect him.

One of the men below snapped it in half, and threw it over his shoulder.

“We are not Death Hunters,” the man said, pulling his hood back.

He had long blonde hair, his handsome features at odds with his darkened cloak and his overall deathly demeanor.

The figure next to him also pressed his hood back, revealing an utterly androgynous face, Lucian barely able to recognize this Death as a man. His hair was in a topknot and his skin was bronze.

“If I let go, will you stop trying to fight us?” the woman asked.

Lucian looked at his crows, which were still trying to slam into the invisible barrier that was now protecting all three cloaked figures.

“Who are you?” he asked, his voice suddenly a little haggard.

One glance at his Soul Points and he saw that the fight had taken way more out of him than he would have anticipated.

“What the hell?” he whispered to himself, trying to come to grips with how he’d dropped nearly eight hundred Soul Points in such a short amount of time.

And while he wasn’t experiencing pain, Lucian was starting to notice a tingling sensation, which only reinforced his belief that his energy and power, and even his pain tolerance, were tied to his Soul Points.

“We are members of the Committee on Luminaries,” the woman said in a firm, but gradually softening voice.

“The what?”

“We monitor interactions with the Progeny of Light,” the man with long blonde hair said.

“The Death Council?” Lucian asked.

“A part of it, yes,” the woman replied.

She walked over to Lucian’s legs, and grabbed his foot. With a short tug, she dragged the lower half of his torso over to him, tossing it in front of Lucian.

“Put yourself back together,” the androgynous Death said. “And let’s wrap this up.”

“We have time, Gaspard,” the blonde-haired man quickly replied. Lucian tried to shift his torso forward, reconnecting his lower half to his upper half. “Lucian North, it has come to our attention that you recently visited the South Wind.”

“I did,” Lucian said with a grunt.

“We’re merely here to gather exploratory information as to what occurred there. At a later time, you will be brought before our Committee, where everyone there will have a chance to question you.”

“Why do you care if I went to the South Wind?” Lucian asked as his torso started to stitch back together.

He was able to sit up now and, as feeling returned to his feet, he slowly stood.

Lucian could tell that his cape was still agitated, the ends of the garment flickering up, still ready to engage. He also saw his crows raring to go, both hovering behind the three Deaths.

“It has come to our attention that Cuthbert is still alive. And not only is he alive, but he has disappeared with a member of the Progeny of Light.”

It took Lucian a moment to connect the name Cuthbert with Old Death, Lucian only recently becoming familiar with his predecessor’s human name.

He didn’t remember the name of the angel that Old Death had been imprisoned with, but he did recall that she was a brunette with gray streaks in her hair, and small wings on her ankles.

“I don’t know where he went, or anything about her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Why did you go after him?” the woman asked. “Did he ask you to rescue him?”

“No, it was my own choice.”

The Death named Gaspard snorted. “Very bold move for someone who has only recently taken the mantle.”

“Some of us are made differently than others,” Lucian said through gritted teeth. He didn’t like the way the man was glaring at him, a purple fire burning behind his eyes.

“I see the Death of the twenty-first century likes to play with toys,” the man continued, walking over to Grim Mecha. He brought his foot back and kicked Lucian’s android in the face.

“Gaspard,” the Death with long blonde hair said, “perhaps it is best if we don’t rile him up too much. After all, we need him to comply with our request.”

“Yes, Lord Lifton,” the man said, nodding as he re-approached, his hands now behind his back.

“You have some spunk, don’t you?” the woman asked as she watched Lucian curl his fists at his sides.

“Yeah, I guess you could call it that. I’m winding down for the evening when the three of you show up, attack me, ask me vague questions, and talk shit about my creations. How would you feel, huh?”

The woman tilted her head, Lucian feeling uncomfortable looking her in the face considering she had two dark holes for eyes, something he could have sworn he’d once seen in a video game, or maybe a gothic music video.

“I suppose it’s a bit late for this, but we should introduce ourselves,” the man with long blonde hair said. “My name is Lord Lifton, and I am the chairman of the Committee on Luminaries. This is Gaspard, the vice-chair, and Mastima, the principal investigator. We will be able to go into more detail once you are called before the Committee, but you should know that what you have done has had repercussions across this world and others.”

“Repercussions?”

“It is not often that a gate to Heaven is breached by one of our own. In fact, the last time this was done was well before any of our times, and while it isn’t the first issue our kind has had with the Progeny of Light, it continues to be a sore spot for them. We would like to understand more about why you went.”

“I already told you why.”

“And we would like to know more about your relationship with your predecessor, and what you experienced at the South Wind.”

“Am I under arrest or something? Are you going to take away my power?” Lucian asked, realizing as soon as the words left his lips how dumb he sounded. But that was what he was feeling, so he went with it.

“It is not our role, nor is it within our power, to arrest you or strip away your mantle,” Lord Lifton said. “Your mantle cannot be stripped away. It can only be given away by you. That said, there are ways to coerce a Death into prematurely passing his mantle on, but we are not here to do that either. Our primary goal at the moment is just to better understand what happened.”

“And have you already gone to Yoshimi? I’m sure she can tell you.”

“We have tried,” the woman named Mastima said. “But she hasn’t been as forthcoming.”

Lucian grinned, recalling the female Death from Japan and how powerful she had grown in the wake of the atomic bomb attacks in the 1940s. “She kicked your asses, right?”

Gaspard frowned at Lucian, his eyebrows quivering. “That’s not…”

“We figured we would start with you,” Lord Lifton said, cutting his counterpart off. “From there, we may interview her and, if we are able to catch up with him, Cuthbert. If he contacts you before our conversation, please let him know we are looking for him.”

“And your Committee can’t just find him?” Lucian asked. “Aren’t the three of you basically omnipotent? Can’t you just press your thumb and pinky together and teleport to wherever he is?”

“Different Deaths are capable of different feats at different levels,” Lord Lifton explained calmly. “Your predecessor was able to create all this with his mind alone,” he said, gesturing toward the city in the distance. “Haven’t you ever thought deeply about that? Do you know how many beings he would have to have helped pass on to gain this much power? Surely he would be able to hide himself.”

“A lot,” Lucian finally said.

“Yeah, a lot,” Gaspard said with disdain.

“And clearly Cuthbert is interested in your well-being, or he would just collapse the place,” Mastima added. She pressed a strand of hair out of her face, the woman completely focused on Lucian.

“Our Committee will meet a day from now,” Lord Lifton said with finality. “At about this time. I want you to be here, waiting for a portal to appear. If you are not here, we will send someone to get you. But this process is much easier if you just follow our rules and comply with our demands. Until that time, good luck, Lucian, and happy hunting.”

Chapter Three: Life Goes On

It took awhile for Lucian to wind down after being visited by the Committee on Luminaries. He spent a good hour tinkering with Grim Mecha, still not certain why he had just fallen out of the sky when the three Deaths showed up. He also checked Old Death’s house below, a portion of the forest near his workshop, and took a quick spin over the futuristic city in the distance, making sure that no one else had found him.

Lucian wasn’t happy that he’d been taken down so easily, even though he assumed that the three combined had centuries of experience in combat.

But even knowing that didn’t make it sting any less.

And it wasn’t that Lucian was a particularly competitive man; no, the sting he currently felt centered around a sense of pride he had started to develop based on his creations, and the fact that the three stronger Deaths had just shown up here at his domicile, able to quickly tear him down.

To help himself fall asleep, Lucian figured it would be best to fire up a video game. It had worked when he was alive, and it seemed to work well enough now that he was dead.

Lucian was back in Zero Enigma in a matter of moments, his avatar coming upon a small cottage somewhere between the cities of Karonyoff and Murgnar.

As he approached the cottage, a barbarian tore out of the front door of the home, dragging a woman by her hair. A guy who Lucian presumed was the woman’s husband burst out after the barbarian, bleeding, the man trying to stop his wife from being abducted.

As was often the case, Lucian was presented with several options for how his avatar could respond.

And as was usual, he went with the snarkiest one:

[Looks like you just kidnapped your last fair maiden.]

The barbarian tossed the woman into the vegetable garden.

Rather than come back with a witty reply, he charged Lucian with an ax. Lucian struck the muscled man with an electric bolt, Danira also firing off magic at the barbarian.

He was a bit of a tank, absorbing damage like a sponge.

The barbarian reached Lucian’s avatar in no time, Lucian barely managing to step aside to avoid a strike.

He came back up with his scythe, an arc of blood spritzing the air as he cut into the barbarian. The burly fighter managed to strike him in the face, a blow that would have killed a person had this not been a video game.

It did have the effect of stunning Lucian, his avatar stumbling backward as he tried to get his bearings.

Danira drew a sword, which she used to strike the barbarian again and again.

Lucian pulled up his skill tree and cycled out his electric power, replacing it with a dark power he’d learned that allowed him to absorb his opponent’s HP.

One of the reasons he liked using this particular power was that he could hold down [L2] to keep using it while he struck his opponent, absorbing HP and dealing damage at the same time. As long as he kept an eye on his MP, which he could easily replenish by tossing back a potion, Lucian would be able to take his opponent down easily.

At least in theory.

While draining the barbarian’s HP helped some, every now and then the barbarian’s health bar would kick up a notch, which told Lucian that his opponent had some sort of regeneration ability.

This meant he would need to lay it on even more thickly by using stronger attacks.

Lucian quickly accessed his items menu and found a potion that doubled his attack power for thirty seconds. He chugged it and went on the offensive, draining the barbarian’s HP while also striking him with his scythe. He noticed that his hits were taking more from his opponent’s health bar, Danira’s as well.

Figuring he would end this soon, Lucian pulled the item menu back up and scrolled to a potion that sped up his striking time, allowing him to get in double the number of hits.

It was all over at that point, Lucian’s avatar beating the barbarian to death.

His opponent fell; an icon started blinking over the man and the woman who lived in the cottage, letting Lucian know that a dialogue was now available.

But he had more important things to do first.

Lucian ignored the couple as his avatar checked the man’s body, looting it for some shillings and a single health potion.

The barbarian also had an ax, but it didn’t seem all that great compared to Lucian’s scythe. He was about to discard it when he noticed that there had been an enchantment on the ax that slowly regenerated HP for the user.

Pulling up his menus again, Lucian spent some skill points reversing the enchantment and removing it from the ax. He then went to his scythe, seeing that he still had a few slots available for enchantment. He put the new enchantment there, discarded the ax, and finally made his way over to the couple.

“Thank you,” the woman said, coming to him. She practically fell into his arms, hugging Lucian as her bleeding husband limped over to them both, eyeing Lucian’s avatar warily.

Lucian’s dialogue options appeared, and as usual, he chose the funniest option, something about claiming the woman now, just to tease the husband.

The husband looked at Lucian’s avatar with bewilderment in his eyes. “How could you say such a cruel thing?”

Unfortunately, Lucian’s dialogue options didn’t allow him to press the matter any further.

Instead, the woman returned to her husband’s arms, comforting him. The man was still bleeding, but it looked like it was mostly just a flesh wound, nothing that would kill the farmer.

Or whatever he was.

“We can’t thank you enough,” the farmer said, a light shining in his eye, and a green plus sign popped up, letting Lucian know that he had done something positive. “We don’t have much, but I do have an old family recipe made from the grapes and the onions in this garden.”

“Grapes and onions?” Lucian whispered to himself.

“It may sound strange,” the man continued, his accent crappy and faux British, just like all the accents in the game. “But it is one that has very interesting effects. If you wait here a moment, I can bring you a couple of bottles. Would you like that?”

Lucian chose the dialogue option that was akin to skeptically agreeing to the man’s request.

“Don’t worry; it won’t kill you.”

Rather than go and get the odd brew himself, the man ordered his wife to go to their cellar and bring up a couple bottles.

The screen cut to the woman entering and then exiting the home, two bottles with her.

“Be sure to stop by if you’d ever like another. Of course, for more, I’ll be forced to charge you a small fee. Just to cover my costs.”

Lucian took the potions and immediately pulled up his inventory list, trying to see what effect they had. The explanation box simply stated that the potion was from a grateful couple and that the effects were unknown.

[Effects: ???]

“That’s about enough of that,” Lucian said as he powered down his system.

Tomorrow, he would work on something that he’d been thinking about for the last three days.

Lucian sipped from a cup of coffee that he had augmented, adding a touch of cinnamon to it and just a dash of cream. He was getting better and better at making it, so much so that he had joked with one of his crows the other day that he should open up a coffee shop somewhere in the city.

Since Lucian had full control over his environment, he purposefully had the sun rise twice over the body of water in front of his workshop, its bright reflections on the waves calming him, reminding him that there really was beauty everywhere even if he was dead, even if it was in some made-up environment created by his predecessor.

Old Death.

Lucian wondered what he was up to, how he was faring with the angel he had escaped with, and if he was happy. He recalled Old Death saying that he would eventually die after passing on his mantle.

Or at least, Lucian thought he said that.

Then again, his predecessor had been starving himself, in a way, by going out on limited excursions. Or had he been? Did he actually have to hunt?

Lucian finished his coffee, and created another by simply tapping his finger against the rim.

And what would this Committee ask Lucian anyway? Why were they so interested in what happened at the South Wind? What would they possibly be able to gain from Lucian’s account?

In the end, two of them, the woman named Mastima and the blonde-haired man known as Lord Lifton, seemed cordial enough. It was the third Death that he was wary of, the one named Gaspard.

He seemed to especially despise Lucian.

“It’s time,” Lucian told his spherical creations once he finished his second cup of coffee. Hugin and Munin rested on a pillow, Ezra the cat near them, lightly tapping his tail against Munin’s body.

Hugin was the first to rise, Lucian’s crow slowly lifting into the air and vibrating. As it did so, the top of its head opened, its retractable claw coming out and nudging Munin.

“You have to use your claw for that?” Lucian asked, amused.

When Munin didn’t respond, Hugin used its retractable claw to lift the other crow and pound it against the pillow.

Lucian laughed as Munin shot up into the air, angry as ever.

“That was messed up,” Lucian said as he stepped out of his workshop, his two crows taking off, chasing one another.

Grim Mecha landed in front of him.

His creation was the exact same size as him, and with his hood over his head he was practically a perfect clone of his creator. His replica was more muscular than him, his body reminding Lucian of some of the Batman movie costumes from the mid-2000s.

Like Lucian, his creation had claws. Grim Mecha also had guns hidden all over his body, this on top of the rockets in his heels, which Lucian knew weren’t necessary, but also definitely made him cooler.

His creation did not have sentience, at least no more than Hugin or Munin had. Lucian was aware that he could give him sentience, but that wasn’t something he was interested in, at least not at the moment.

He liked being by himself, and while he could artificially create a companion, Lucian had this itching feeling that it would only make him feel more alone.

“Are you ready?” he asked his creation.

Grim Mecha lifted his arm, and as he did a blade began to press out of his metallic flesh, a gun barrel forming on the other side.

Lucian’s creation aimed his gun at him.

“Not yet,” Lucian said as he brought a table made of stone up from the ground.

“Armor,” he whispered to himself, realizing that it obviously was going to have to be bone armor.

Because of course it was.

Lucian began to envision what bone armor would look like, and how it would work regarding how he liked to fight.

He rolled up his sleeve, and as he did, a bone material began to press out of his skin from a center seam. It wrapped around his arm, cascading down to his hand, encasing it completely like it was a cast.

Knuckles and other joints appeared on the outside of the armor, allowing Lucian to move his hand, fingers, and his wrist.

Still focusing on his armor, Lucian began thickening the bone by growing and hardening it, concentrating so hard on strengthening his armor that he could feel his temple throbbing.

Once he was done, the armor from his elbow to the tips of his fingers was about half an inch thick.

He flicked his finger against it, and then held his arm out.

“Try to cut it off,” he told his creation.

Grim Mecha approached Lucian, something slightly mechanical about the way that he walked that was definitely intimidating.

His creation brought his bladed arm back and drove it into Lucian’s wrist, the blade repelled by the bone.

“Try shooting it off,” Lucian said, holding his arm out and trying not to cringe as he watched Grim Mecha lift his energy weapon.

Lucian knew that it wasn’t going to hurt him, but there was still something human about him, something that made him wince and cringe from time to time when he expected pain.

His creation blasted it, bone chips flying into the air.

“Okay, thicker,” Lucian said as his armor reformed, thickening and flattening so it remained fairly close to his body. “Try again.”

Grim Mecha did as instructed, again raising his gun arm and firing at Lucian’s newly formed armor.

This time there were no bone chips, although there was a slight indentation in the armor.

“I believe that will be okay,” Lucian said as he started to extend his armor over the rest of his body.

His robes pulled away from his body, his cape lifting off and joining his Grim Mecha.

For a moment it looked like his cape was watching Lucian skeptically, but then he figured he was just projecting this emotion onto the inanimate object.

He could feel his skin splitting as more of the bone armor formed, his rib cage hardening, solidifying as it spread down toward his groin, his thighs, his knees, his shins, and finally his feet.

Lucian now stood in his full armor before his workbench, everything covered aside from his skull.

“I have to see what this looks like…” Lucian said to himself as a mirror lifted from the ground like the stone table had, the soil falling away.

His two crows zipped back over to him, saw what he was doing, and flew back toward the water, Ezra joining them on the shoreline.

Lucian turned once, not quite certain what to make of the off-white bone armor. For one, the color wasn’t going to fly with him. As soon as he thought this, he began to darken it until it was a gunmetal gray, so it looked like a bit like unpolished metal.

He nodded. “Much better.”

Lucian felt a shift in his face as his cheekbones pressed forward, a mask made of the same thick bone armor taking shape over his features. He moved his jaw, seeing that it was also hinged. As the structure continued to form, it began to spread up the crown of his head, and from there down to the back of his neck.

“Damn,” he said as he took in his new appearance, Lucian completely decked out in bone armor complete with a skull mask.

He recalled his robes to his body, watching as they swirled into place. His hood came over his head, just a bit of his skull mask visible.

He really did look like the Grim Reaper now. He admired himself as his cape settled on his shoulders, bunching up in a way that made him look even more intimidating.

His Soul Points flashed before him, Lucian seeing that he had spent a little over three hundred points to create his armor, realizing yet again that this was something he should have done days ago, before going to the South Wind.

“What do you think?” he asked Grim Mecha. His arms wide, Lucian walked in a short circle, letting his creation take him in.

Grim Mecha nodded, raising his fist for a fist bump.

“That’s all?”

Grim Mecha nodded again.

“Maybe I should make you sentient,” Lucian said under his breath. “Well, are you ready to do this?”

The stone workbench he’d never actually used and the mirror filtered away as his scythe formed in his hand.

Grim Mecha nodded, Lucian’s crows docking into the nooks on his shoulders.

Lucian appeared at what was quickly becoming his old stomping grounds. The psychiatric hospital in Manhattan was as foreboding as ever with its tall, imperial structure, the way its shadows nearly reached the black gates out front, grasping for the streets beyond as they crisscrossed through the city.

Lucian spiraled up into the air and blasted down to a building he was becoming quite familiar with, instantly pressing inside.

He stopped at the end of one of the hallways with its inspirational quotes on the wall, everything sanitary, everything depressing as hell. With a wave of his hand, he sent Hugin and Munin forward to root out the parasites.

Lucian felt like he was in his element now, growing increasingly confident in his ability day by day. He had taken a bit of a hit the previous night when the three Deaths had visited him, but he was back to feeling powerful, like he was becoming a formidable opponent.

Lucian felt movement as his cape lifted off his shoulders. It braided into the air, taking off down the hallway.

One look down at his hands and the armor Lucian had created earlier began to form, twisting together and spreading up his arm as it hardened. It stitched over his chest, his lower half, and finally it grew over his skull, everything but the mask hidden by his black robes.

Figuring he would start off with a bang, Lucian also conjured a wall of injurecrows, his scythe appearing in one hand and his other hand charged, ripples of electricity oscillating around his knuckles as he readied himself.

The first two parasites broke through the wired glass, their forms tearing the doors off their hinges as they met in the middle of the hallway.

They made squishy noises as they plaited together, the demon bug’s slimy skin pulsing and reforming as it thickened.

Eyes lifted on the back of the conjoined creature, its limbs merging into a giant blade that resembled the end of a screw.

Using the walls to boost itself, the merged parasite exploded in Lucian’s direction.

Lucian kicked off the ground with a huff, charged up the wall, and narrowly dodged the parasite’s first attack.

He slapped his hand onto the creature’s sticky flesh, electricity charging through its body.

His injurecrows blasted off, explosions everywhere in a matter of seconds, the fluorescent lights on the ceiling fizzling out as the shattered fixtures fell to the ground.

More parasites burst out of their rooms; a tendril whipped around Lucian’s neck and drove him straight into the ground. He felt the impact, but his armor protected him, leaving a small crater as he flipped back up to his feet.

He brought his scythe around, the bladed end charged with energy as he cut through one of the parasite’s limbs. He struck it again and again, one of his crows darting into the parasite’s vertical eye.

A beautiful light poured into Lucian.

“That’s the stuff,” he said as he threw his scythe to the other side of the room, his cape swooping up and latching onto it.

Lucian’s MX-11 formed in his hand and he began firing at the massive parasites lifting and falling over one another in the center of the room.

More explosions signaled that his injurecrows were hitting their marks, Lucian ducking as Munin flew by, his spherical creation bursting through a muscled arm reaching for him.

The nearest demon bug let out a garbled sound as his crow circled back around to peg it again.

Lucian electrocuted another slithering and slimy chunk of parasite, twisting at the waist to fire at one coming at him from across the hallway.

More light flowed into him, followed by another wave of energy.

The parasites still standing started to hiss and squeal, Lucian going for his sword.

Lucian’s cape whipped past holding his scythe, and slammed down onto a parasitic limb. The end of the scythe dug so deep into the limb that it got stuck, Lucian’s cape launched back to the other side of the hallway, where it swelled up like a mushroom cloud before going to retrieve its weapon.

Lucian spun, cutting through a barbed tail.

Another barbed tail struck him in the chest, his armor deflecting it, Lucian realizing yet again that he was an idiot for not crafting armor earlier.

Then again, it wasn’t like he could die…

He flourished his sword and jumped into the air, where he landed with his feet on the ceiling just as a bladed limb tore past him.

His sword overhead, Lucian cut through the limb, the lava portion of his sword causing the parasite’s wound to hiss as it cauterized.

He dropped back to the ground, his focus returning to the hallway.

It was messy, it was visceral, it was surreal.

More light poured into him courtesy of his crows, who had tag-teamed a parasite in the far corner of the hallway.

Most of the parasites were now dead, and from what Lucian could tell there were two left, both of them joined together, still trying to attack him with their screw-shaped blade.

His cape belted into the conjoined parasites, covering them completely and causing confusion as Lucian charged forward.

He cut through a spiked stegosaurus tail trying to take his head off. Another limb managed to hit him in the chest; he was thrown back a few paces, but not impaled this time.

His injurecrows cracked into the back of the conjoined parasite, explosions sending viscera into the air.

Going for the kill, Lucian drove his sword into the demon bug’s center mass. He yanked his blade up, pulling it out to the right and then brought it back across, cutting the top of the parasite off just as Hugin dove into its vertical eye, which had shifted to the side of the monster’s body.

More light poured into him, and not a moment too soon.

A golden spark at the end of the hallway caught Lucian’s attention as his stats flashed in front of him.

Lucian recognized both of the angels; a half-grin stretched across his face, shielded by his mask.

“It seems you have armored up,” said the male angel with dark hair and bronze skin.

Lucian had taken Hashul on twice now, and as the angel stood before him, a spear began to take shape in the man’s hands.

But that wasn’t why Lucian was grinning.

He was grinning at Danira in her gold and white armor, a blue stripe across her face, a gargantuan energy weapon in her hands.

Lucian was too distracted by her to stop the spear spiraling in his direction.

Chapter Four: Father of Mine

The spear went straight through Lucian’s body, the weapon turning to light at the last moment and completely bypassing his armor. It hardened after it tore out of his back, driving Lucian straight to the floor. A bubble of energy exploded at the end of the spear, sending Lucian downward.

He struck the floor below, wood and brick and pink fluffy insulation falling on top of him, a cloud of dust temporarily obscuring the hole he’d made in the ceiling. He tried to press himself up, but as he did he was blasted in the shoulder by Danira, who only managed to get one shot off before Lucian’s cape collided with the female angel, whipping her up and back.

His crows spiraled toward Hashul, the angel batting them away with his spear as Lucian got to his feet.

Another explosion signaled that Danira was making her way to the hallway below. She landed, not trying to strike somewhat of a superhero pose but doing so anyway. Lucian thought that he saw a sliver of concern on her face, concern that told him she wanted to speak to him.

But he couldn’t be sure once Hashul joined her, both of them preparing to attack, their wings shrinking in size to better fit into the basement hallway.

“It’s time,” Lucian said to himself as he conjured Grim Mecha.

The mechanized version of himself burst through the ceiling, firing his gun arm as he made a beeline toward Hashul.

He met the male angel, bringing him down almost immediately.

Lucian’s creation was quickly thrown off; Hashul hopped to his feet and traded blows with Grim Mecha.

Danira took a few steps away, trying to get an angle on Lucian’s creation so she could take him out.

An injurecrow popped Danira in the shoulder, exploding and sending her stumbling away.

Another one hit its target; she was tossed into the opposite wall, the front of her armor smacking into a framed picture, glass tumbling to the floor, more debris kicking up into the air.

Still holding onto her absolutely enormous gun, Danira slid one leg to the side, getting into a crouching position as she aimed her weapon at Lucian.

He was just equipping his carbine when Danira fired, her shot going wide.

She was too close to have missed; Lucian knew at that moment that her blast should have taken his head off.

He started to fire his weapon as well, not quite hitting her, the bullets always just a few inches away.

Grim Mecha lifted Hashul by the neck and drove the angel into the wall. Hashul responded by stabbing Lucian’s creation in the neck with a golden dagger. He withdrew the blade and tried it again, Grim Mecha headbutting the angel.

His eyes turned purple, filling with energy. Grim Mecha exploded Hashul’s head into a fine mist with a direct hit that painted the wall with the angel’s blood.

“Seriously?”

“What?” Lucian asked.

“You gave him laser eyes?” Danira asked as she saw her companion fall, his head missing. He lay on the ground now, his hands and legs twitching.

“Did I kill him?” Lucian asked, still aiming his weapon at Danira. “And of course I gave him laser eyes. Why would I not give him laser eyes?”

“No, you didn’t kill him; demons like you aren’t able to kill us.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“At least not at your level,” she said under her breath. “His head will regrow.”

“You two are both like me, aren’t you?” Lucian asked, going with the question that he had pondered over the last several days. “I mean, you feed off hope, while I feed off death and other terrible things, if that’s any way to put it. But as I was saying, you can only get so strong, and the hope you feed off makes you permanently stronger. But you can also grow weak, and that’s when you become vulnerable. Sound about right? I’ve been thinking about this lately.”

Danira shook her head. “He will be back to one piece soon…”

“Not if I can help it.” Lucian nodded to Grim Mecha.

His replica lifted his bladed arm and the metal started to glow, humming with purple energy. He bent forward and quickly cut Hashul in half.

“Tell him to stop,” Danira started to say, anger splashing across her face.

Grim Mecha grabbed the top of Hashul’s torso with his free hand and tossed it to the other side of the hallway, leaving the angel’s legs behind.

“He really needs to get better armor,” Lucian said.

A blast of energy tore into Lucian’s shoulder, his arm blown clean off.

“He’s not the only one,” Danira quipped, still aiming her gun at Lucian.

“Did you have to go and do that?” Lucian asked as he looked down at the place where his arm used to be.

He could feel a tingling sensation as it started to regrow; he also knew that he could mechanize the severed arm if he wanted to, the arm already turned over on its belly of sorts, his fingers drumming on the ground.

“Stand down, and leave,” Danira said.

Lucian’s crows lowered, and as they did, Danira’s golden crows with cherub wings appeared.

But rather than attack each other, the four of them took off, twisting onto the floor upstairs.

And even if she didn’t want to, Danira couldn’t help but allow a smile to spread across her face. “We’re going to have to work on that,” she said as she slowly lowered her enormous weapon.

“Yeah, that would definitely blow our cover.” Lucian glanced up, seeing a flash of gold and silver as their crows played in the hallway above them.

Grim Mecha approached Danira from behind, his purple eyes locked on her, awaiting orders from Lucian.

“Tell your robot not to push it,” Danira said, ignoring Lucian’s creation.

He shook his head at Grim Mecha, his creation stepping aside and standing guard.

“Are you going to copy my design again?”

“No, I’m just going to keep improving this beauty,” Danira said as she tapped her hand on her energy weapon. The angel’s futuristic gun was about twice the size as it had been the last time Lucian saw it, with black accents and a flickering red light on the side. He also noticed that there was a faint halo circling around the muzzle.

“So…”

“So?” she asked.

“Why are you attacking me here? I’m trying to get stronger; I’m not trying to hurt anyone. And why did you have to bring that douchebag?”

“Hashul has been a member of the Progeny of Light longer than I have,” Danira said, lifting her weapon again, a different light on its upper receiver flashing.

“Come on; you don’t like him either.”

“Maybe,” she said with a firm smile. “Look, you need to find a different place to hunt. They’re onto you.”

“You’re the one usually following me around, which tells me you may play some part in them knowing…”

“Please,” she said, rolling her eyes slightly.

Both of them heard a gurgling sound from behind.

Lucian glanced over Danira's shoulder to see Hashul’s neck starting to reform, his arms trying to drag his body along the ground to locate his lower half, which was standing on the other side of the hallway, repeatedly walking into the wall. Grim Mecha watched the whole charade with an indecipherable look on his face.

“That’s unpleasant,” Danira said, her voice lowering. “Hashul’s going to wonder why I haven’t helped him.”

“Should I blow your leg off to make it look more like a battle? After all, eye for an eye. Isn’t that from your book?”

“Funny,” she said, ushering Lucian away with her weapon. “Go, demon. We can talk another time.”

“Tonight,” Lucian said without thinking it over.

“Tonight?”

“The same beach. You know where. Meet me there tonight.”

“I…”

Lucian took a step closer to her, ignoring the fact that his arm was only halfway grown at this point. “It’s been a couple of days. I’ve…”

Danira bit her lip.

“I’ve…” Lucian wanted to kick himself at that moment but he just couldn’t say the words that were pressing against the back of his teeth, that he missed seeing her. Instead, he simply nodded his head, his skull mask filtering away. “Never mind.”

“I was wondering when you were going to take the mask off,” Danira said. “And a skull? Could you be any more cliché?”

“I thought it would look kind of cool,” he told her.

“This isn’t a popularity contest.”

“But it does look cool, right?”

“For a demon? Yes. Well, maybe. Just go, Lucian.”

“But tonight? Will you be there?”

“Yes,” she finally whispered. “No. Maybe. Leave. Let’s not complicate this any further.”

“Stop looking at me like that,” Lucian told Hugin. They were in Beverly, Massachusetts, sitting near the steeple of a church not far from his mom’s home.

Hugin buzzed in front of Lucian, its head tilted to the right. Wanting some attention as well, Munin pressed into its counterpart, trying to push Lucian’s first crow out of the way.

“And I’m aware that I’ve double booked myself for tonight,” Lucian said, which was the first thought that came to him upon arriving in Beverly.

He was supposed to go before the Committee on Luminaries to talk about what happened at the South Wind.

It only took Lucian a moment to weigh hanging out with Danira versus going in front of the stuffy Committee.

“It’s important to know your enemy,” he reminded Hugin, “even if she’s not really my enemy.”

Hugin rolled once in the air, Munin copying its movement.

“Stop giving me shit. I know she blew off my arm back there. That was for a reason.”

Rather than continue to joke around with Hugin, Lucian decided it was time to do what he came here to do.

He dropped into one of the buildings near the church, moving through the wall. He passed through an old building that was being refurbished, two men tearing out a portion of the rotted framing, hard at work, something Lucian was intimately familiar with considering his past in construction.

Their death dates appeared before him and he pressed on:

Name: Caleb McDonald

Date of Birth: 01/30/1990

Date of Death: 03/09/2079

Name: Danial Ahmed

Date of Birth: 06/05/1987

Date of Death: 12/19/2058

He shifted downward, coming into a storefront that sold organic CBD products. A woman stood behind the counter unloading a box of ointments with stylized marijuana leaves on them. The place was meant to look classy, like it wasn’t selling marijuana products.

Name: Eliza Strickland

Date of Birth: 09/03/1995

Date of Death: 05/22/2077

He paused to look at the woman for a moment, noting her beauty.

There was something special about the shop attendant and the way she hummed as she unpacked the ointment. She had dyed her hair white, and there was a tattoo of a spade behind her ear, visible due to her short haircut. Hugin and Munin moved over to the woman to investigate, which snapped Lucian out of his spell.

He continued onward, moving through the buildings until he came to an apartment complex. He didn’t know if his ex still lived here, but Lucian assumed she did, as it had been a hell of a deal, the place larger than comparable apartments in the area.

Sure enough, Katy’s Toyota was in the parking lot, the vehicle covered in salt residue from the last freeze.

Lucian moved to her door, Unit 4J, and pressed through.

He really wished he could smell in that moment.

Katy had found a Japanese home goods store on Newbury Street in Boston’s esteemed Back Bay that specialized in aromatherapy. Lucian knew the place would have smelled great, especially as he passed a defuser sending a fine mist into the air.

Lucian and Katy had been together for about five years before finally breaking up. He’d wanted her to marry him, but Katy wasn’t ready at the time. He’d pressured her, she’d gotten busy with grad school, and they’d eventually drifted apart. They’d gotten back together for a spell, now with Katy wanting Lucian to marry her, but that one fell apart too.

They hadn’t seen each other much before he died, but Katy did come to his funeral, which was why Lucian was now in her apartment.

He wanted to check on her.

He found his ex sitting on her couch in her house clothes, her knees pulled to her chest as she spoke quietly on the phone. Her death date appeared before Lucian:

Name: Katy Weston

Date of Birth: 11/18/1994

Date of Death: 10/24/2097

“Hi, Katy,” Lucian said, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him. He then looked at her death date again, realizing that she was going to live past a hundred years old.

He smiled at this thought.

Katy was always striving to take care of herself and push onward no matter the obstacle; she wasn’t the type to let something as trivial as death get in her way.

Lucian was just about to tune in to what she was saying when he saw a photo of himself in an arrangement on the wall.

A dark feeling came over him as he stopped in front of the photo, recalling that Katy and he had spent a long weekend skiing in Vermont, how the lodge they stayed in had a power outage. They’d been forced to bundle up under thick blankets for the night in front of a roaring fire that grew so hot that the two found themselves alternating between cuddling under the blankets and ripping them off to let the cold air back in.

At that moment, Lucian couldn’t help but ask himself where it all went wrong, and for that matter, why it had to go wrong. But maybe it was better that way; maybe it was better that they hadn’t married and Katy hadn’t had to go through becoming a widow at such a young age. Even if she would have eventually recovered, those kinds of things left scars.

“Hold on, it’s my dad,” she said, switching to another call. “Hello?”

Lucian gulped for Katy. Her father and his terrible behavior was the only real baggage that came with dating her. There had even been a few times when Lucian had to step up to the man, to tell him to back off.

He’d thought at the time that it would win him favor in Katy’s eyes, but she’d actually gotten angry with him for calling her dad out. So he’d backed down after that point, letting their strange relationship take its unnatural, ugly course.

“Dad, you know I can’t,” Katy started to say. “I…”

Lucian moved closer to her, picking up what her father was saying.

“You know I’m good for it,” he clamored. “There was just this issue with my paycheck. Work is taking a look at it. It’ll just be a few days.”

“You still owe me from the last time I loaned you money,” Katy said flatly, a curl of her curly brown hair falling onto her forehead.

Her dad coughed, the phone clipping out. “I’m going to pay you that too.”

“And the loan before that. Dad, I love you, but…”

“You love me... but? After all I’ve done for you? Your mother had to go and goddamn die on us,” her father said, his tone turning nasty, “and you know who took care of you? Me! Your good ol’ pop. I worked two jobs to put you through school.”

“Dad, that’s what parents are supposed to do. We have talked about this before, and my therapist…”

“Therapist? I’m the first person to recommend and pay for therapy for you. Remember that? You were eleven years old; I was working two jobs to put you through school.”

“Stop saying you put me through school; stop saying you worked two jobs. You know one was seasonal. That’s not the same as working two jobs year-round. I took out loans to go to college and grad school, and I’m just now able to pay them back.”

“And you wouldn’t have done that without me. Now you got a good job working for the state, you’re making more money than I ever made, and goddammit, Katy, you know I’m proud of you. To think my daughter was able to turn all this around, to pull herself up by her bootstraps.” He paused, Katy’s brow furrowing. “Sorry, I’m just getting carried away over here.”

“Where are you, Dad?”

“Outside Boston, on the subway. There’s a German couple on here and they got a screaming baby girl. You never screamed like that. I think it’s the Nazi nursery rhymes the mother is reading to her. It’s riling the kid up.”

“Dad! They can probably hear you.”

“No, they left. But they were on here. Guess I should have mentioned that,” he said in his thick Boston accent.

“Why are you on the subway? Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“Nothing to deliver today, and I wanted to see about my paycheck. Look, Katy, all I got right now is the clothes on my back and about six cigarettes. And that has to last me an entire weekend? You know I’m trying to cut back, but I’m going to need more than six. I suppose I could bum a few. Anyway, all I’m asking is for you to transfer enough for me to get through the weekend, say… four hundred dollars.”

“Four hundred?” Katy bit her lip, her eyes darting left and right as she stared at the floor. “Dad, you know I’m saving to get a condo.”

“And pay your student loans, I know. But look, don’t worry so much about your loans. I’m sure you’ll get a raise at some point and those loans will be a thing of the past. If I can ever get your uncle’s boat up and running, he says I can sell it, and I’ll definitely help you with those loans. The system is a predator, you know that. A single father can’t put his daughter through college, so she takes out loans and they come collecting. Fucking higher ed mafia if you ask me, but hey, I shouldn’t say that ‘cause I’m in Boston right now. Who knows what kind of Harvard or MIT graduate student is on this train right now…”

“Fine,” Katy said, cutting her dad off. “I’ll transfer it to you. Please, I need you to pay me back, though. It’s two thousand dollars now.”

“Two thousand? What about all the times...?”

“Dad, please, you know I can’t do this. My therapist…”

“How much are you paying that goddamn therapist? If you sent that money to me instead, I’m sure I could double or triple it. I know a guy…”

“Dad, I’m hanging up the phone.”

“Wait, Katy!”

“Yes?”

There was another long pause, Lucian boiling with rage as her father asked, “Can you transfer it right now?”

“Sure,” she finally said, bowing her head.

Lucian’s cape lifted off his shoulders, anger swelling inside him.

It was time to pay Katy’s father a visit.

Chapter Five: Scratched Off

Lucian dropped to the roof of one of the trains heading out of Boston.

He recalled playing a video game in which he ran on top of train cars, fighting enemies coming at him from the front and the back.

He smirked at this thought; it was uncanny how many details from his current life he could relate to gaming.

The wind whipped past him, the train clanked on the tracks below, and as the train sped along, Lucian shifted into the train car.

Half a dozen death dates appeared before him and he ignored them all.

The train came to a stop, the doors on the right sliding open, people spilling out.

He pressed through a man carrying a heavy duffel bag; a pair of Asian women speaking softly about the clothing they had purchased on Newbury Street; a family all in New England Patriots apparel, the mother scolding one of her children, yanking on his arm as they stepped off the train.

Lucian settled his gaze on Katy’s father.

Her father wore a Red Sox training jacket with the letter B on the sleeve. He was heavier than the last time Lucian had seen him, the man currently working on a stack of scratch-offs.

Lucian recalled a time that Katy’s father had gone into detail about his strategy for scratch-offs, how he always asked the clerk what number the ticket roll was at, how he liked to only scratch the tickets that were somewhere between seventeen and forty-one on the roll because this was where the winners always were, at least according to the man who had blown through more money on scratchers than anyone would care to admit.

Once, Lucian and Katy had just finished having sex when her dad called to announce his big winnings. Katy was still topless as she sat up, Lucian watching her get excited for her dad then suddenly shifting to concern.

He’d won five hundred dollars that day, but it had cost him six hundred to do it.

Her dad considered this breaking even.

As Lucian watched her father move to the next scratcher, a disgruntled look on his face from not winning on the last one, he recalled a time that Katy had borrowed her dad’s car.

“Don’t judge me,” she’d said in a moment of self-awareness that she rarely exhibited.

“Don’t judge you for what?” he’d asked.

She motioned toward the glove box, which was stuffed full of lottery tickets.

She then shifted her hand toward the center console, which was covered in cigarette ash and paper particles from the scratchers.

The man’s death date appeared.

Name: Frankie Weston

Date of Birth: 06/16/1958

Date of Death: 04/19/2020

“You’re supposed to be dead, Frankie,” Lucian whispered as he noticed something on Frankie’s back.

It was a greed parasite, the type Lucian had seen back at the casino in New Hampshire, but it was something else as well.

Part of the demon bug was black and shriveled, yet its upper half was peach-colored and bulbous like a caterpillar. Lucian suddenly recognized that Frankie was inflicted by two parasites, one keeping him alive and the other feeding off his addiction.

To make matters worse, the two parasites had merged.

Lucian hesitated for a moment as he wondered how Katy would react if he killed the parasites keeping her father alive.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have much time to contemplate this as a muscled stinger shot out of Frankie’s back, tearing into the floor at Lucian’s feet as he flashed away.

The battle was on.

A fireball burst from Lucian’s hand, engulfing the muscled stinger. A tendril shot toward him and wrapped around his wrist, just as his handgun appeared. He managed to fight the tendril off, aiming the handgun at the parasite on Frankie’s back.

He unloaded his magazine, the bullets striking the parasite and sending splashes of inky black liquid into the air.

Lucian’s crows dug in, both ripping into the peach-colored portion of the parasite’s body, ripping off one of the eyes jutting out of the top of the demon bug.

Lucian’s sword materialized in his hand just as one of the parasite’s tendrils broke through the train window.

Air gushed into the cabin; Lucian pressed off the metal floor, landing on the ceiling.

He charged toward the parasite, cutting through stingers, its muscled fists, its praying mantis-like blade arms.

One of the demon bug’s blade arms cut through Lucian’s shoulder, reminding him to equip armor.

No matter.

Legs sprouted out of Lucian’s arm and it attached to the side window. Two retractable claws burst out of the knuckles on Lucian’s severed arm and it took off.

His arm cut through one of the thicker tendrils as it flipped itself into the air, landing on the enormous growth of parasite now bubbling out of Frankie’s shoulder.

It drove its claws in again and again, Lucian going with his plasma blowtorch once he saw his opening.

Because his arm was still regrowing, Lucian had to use his chin to trigger the handle on top of the blowtorch. This action sent him spinning backward, a beam of concentrated energy cutting into the floor and tearing out of the train cabin, the exit point rimmed in bright orange.

Still upside down, Lucian used his weight to lower the blowtorch in the direction of Frankie’s two parasites.

The blast completely fried the parasite, disintegrating his severed arm as well.

As the train came to a stop, a thick light spiraled out of Frankie’s back and into Lucian’s chest.

“See you around, Frankie,” Lucian said, turning away from the man.

The Newburyport/Rockport line sped away, Lucian perched on top of a shelter meant to help people to shield themselves from the rain and snow. It dawned on him at that moment how odd he would appear if someone could actually see him, how creepy it would be.

Here he was, Death incarnate, watching an older man with a stack of scratchers step off the train, Lucian’s crows hovering over his shoulders.

Lucian smirked at this visual as Frankie dumped his stack of losers into a trashcan. A cold wind blew up as Frankie checked his phone, typing in his bank code to see that his daughter had transferred him the money.

A spare paper bag tumbled past; Lucian’s smile faded away.

He was upset at the way Frankie treated Katy, but deep within him, he knew that there was nothing he could have done about it in the past.

Even though she did it out of the kindness in her heart, Katy enabled Frankie.

But now, as the Grim Reaper, Lucian had just sped up Frankie’s death.

And he didn’t know how much he’d sped it up by.

He dropped down to the ground, his cape swelling up behind Lucian before settling on his shoulders.

Lucian despised Frankie more than he’d ever despised the man before.

To take advantage of Katy like he did, to totally abuse his power in their relationship…

Another call came in, Frankie grumbling as he fished his phone out of the front of his Red Sox jacket.  “Yeah, I got the money, Pat, just like I said. Put it all on the Broncos. No, not all of it. Just three-hundred. Make it three-fifty. That’s all I can spare at the moment. A man’s got to eat. Yeah? I know the odds, and I’m following it. I’ll try to get some more over the next day. Yep. Yep. I’ll get it transferred now. You know I’m good for it, Pat. I’m serious, this time. My daughter just sent me some of the money I loaned her.”

Frankie paused, not paying attention to the couple walking behind him, the younger man clipping him in the shoulder.

“Hey!” Frankie shouted, rearing his hand back like he was going to strike the man with his phone. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going, pal?”

Rather than say anything, the man stopped dead in his tracks and turned to Frankie.

“Yeah? There a problem, pal?” Frankie asked, his phone still in the air. “I’m standing here, ya fuckin’ prick. Hold on a sec, Pat, I got to deal with some little prick here.”

The punch came out of nowhere, striking Frankie so hard in the face that Lucian heard the bone crack.

Frankie fell, smacking the back of his head on the metal railing before finally reaching the pavement.

He slipped to the ground, his face red now, blood gushing out of his nose.

The crowd began to part; the man who’d punched him took a step back, his girlfriend grabbing his arm, fear coming across her face as a cold look settled across his.

“It was him,” someone said as a station security officer pushed his way into the crowd.

Lucian floated next to the man in shock, watching it all play out as people pushed through him, watching as Frankie’s death date started to blur.

A police officer pushed his way through the crowd and cuffed the guy who’d struck Frankie, a dark look on the man’s face as his girlfriend argued with another officer who’d showed up on the scene. A doctor in the crowd came to Frankie’s aid, trying to make sure nobody moved him until the ambulance came.

It was too late.

They were all too goddamn late.

Frankie Weston was dead.

Chapter Six: Beach Bummed

Lucian North floated just a few inches above the beach in Portland, Maine. To his left was a recently painted lighthouse sitting atop a pile of rocks; to his right a small cliff that overlooked the sea, a single bench on the cliff. Behind the bench sat the mysterious cliffside home shielded by an old wall.

Everything was as it should have been, from a couple seagulls with ruffled feathers hopping on the beach, to a man and woman taking their shaggy dog out for a walk along the shoreline.

The only thing out of place was Lucian, Death incarnate, the Grim Reaper loitering on the beach, deep in thought.

He had already checked on Katy.

Being there while she received the call from the hospital had been brutal for him, especially with the knowledge that he had been directly responsible for her father’s passing.

How long would her dad have stayed alive had Lucian not intervened? He cursed himself again and again, Hugin checking in every so often before racing back out to the water to join its counterpart.

Lucian couldn’t shake this feeling that he had played God.

And even though the conjoined parasite had attacked him in the subway, not the other way around for once, Lucian wished the outcome had been different.

What made it even worse was his ability to be there with Katy, but not for her.

Driven by guilt, Lucian knew he’d wind up checking on her time and time again over the next few weeks to make sure she was okay.

But what happened if she wasn’t? To be as strong as Lucian was, but to have absolutely no power, not even able to make a phone call, would only make his continued existence even more excruciating.

“Goddammit,” Lucian whispered, the sun nearly gone, just a ripple of crimson and orange shifting across the waves as they broke on the shoreline.

“That’s no way to speak about Him,” a voice said from behind Lucian.

He turned to find Danira standing there in all her glory, her wings slowly shrinking, light shimmering around her.

“You came,” he said, instinctively smoothing his hands over his robes. He felt his cape clamp down on his shoulders, offering him encouragement.

“I always keep my promises.”

“Did you promise? From what I recall, you mostly waved me away. How’s Hashul?”

“He has recovered.”

“Still an asshole?”

Danira didn’t answer his rhetorical question as she approached him, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, her gaze fixed on the horizon, the darkening landscape, and lumpy islands in the distance.

“We have to stop doing this, you know,” she said, not looking away from the water.

“Doing what?”

“Meeting.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Because I’m a demon?” Lucian asked, the ends of his cape lifting into the air and settling.

“This won’t end well for either of us.”

“You’re taking this too seriously.”

Danira tried to stop a smile from crossing her face. “I’m much older than you.”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“You’ve been a demon for less than a month.”

“Are we back to calling me a demon?”

“Lucian.”

“Danira.”

She turned to him, a line knitting between her brows.

“I can’t be curious?” Lucian asked.

“Curious about what?”

“All of this. The only person I had to talk to before you was my predecessor, and now…” Lucian thought to Yoshimi, the Japanese Death whom he’d befriended. “I guess I’m not completely alone, but it’s nice to have a friend.”

“Is that what you think? That I’m your friend?”

“I don’t know what I think,” Lucian told her. “But I definitely would appreciate it if we didn’t try to kill each other anymore.”

“You know that’s not possible,” she said.

“That’s what I’m trying to get to the bottom of. Why is it not possible? We experience similar things; you see the parasites as demons…”

“Demons are demons,” she said firmly.

“Do you really believe that? You’re starting to know me better, know what I’m all about. You don’t really think of me like that, do you? Don’t you see that that’s not what I’m here to do?”

“I feel like we had this exact same conversation on this beach just a few days back.”

“We did,” Lucian said.

“Where have you been, anyway?”

“I needed to take some time off,” he told her.

“And what did you do during that time?”

Lucian turned away from her, rubbing his hand on the back of his hood. “I played video games, worked on a few creations.”

“It’s hard to imagine a thing like you playing video games.”

“A thing? I thought I was a demon.”

“And what video game were you playing?”

“It’s called Zero Enigma. Heard of it?”

Danira shook her head.

“I’ve been playing it for a while. I suppose I should complete the main storylines, but I kind of got wrapped up in some side quests.”

“Side quests?”

“Actually, I named a character after you,” Lucian said, grinning at her. “She doesn’t look much like you, but she has a sword and can use magic. A spellsword.”

“And what’s this spellsword do?”

“She kind of follows me around and helps me kick-ass,” Lucian explained. “I mean, um, successfully complete my side quests. But we fight too. Not each other. Bad guys. I guess that’s the easiest way to put it.”

“Good to know.”

“It’s not what it sounds like.”

“There has been a lot of concern, you know,” she said, tone of her voice changing as she changed subjects.

“About what?”

“What happened at the South Wind. The Progeny of Light are considering it an attack, and some of them think it was coordinated.”

“Coordinated? By who?”

Lucian’s crows sped in front of him, chased by Danira’s spherical creations. They all slammed together into a big group, dropped into the water, and came back out spinning.

“Yes, between you and the Watchers, the fallen angels.”

“But you know that’s not true, right?” Lucian asked. “You were there; you saw what Azazyel was doing.”

“I saw it, but my community isn’t unlike yours. I mean yours when you were alive.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There are sensationalists, and some of them secretly like the drama that the sensationalist can pass.”

“So someone’s spreading false rumors?” Lucian asked.

“That’s right.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, my own kind is also interested in what happened. In fact, they were supposed to meet with me, or rather, I was supposed to meet with them, tonight.”

“Then why are you here?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Because fuck them. They have no power over me,” Lucian said, trying to sound as confident as possible. “And I already told them everything that happened. I went after my predecessor, who your people had imprisoned.”

“We had a very good reason,” she started to say. “And now they have run off, Leliel and the demon.”

“Where do you think they went?”

“Where would a demon and an angel go?”

“Las Vegas?” Lucian asked with a grin.

Danira chuckled. “So you think they have gone to sin?”

“I mean, in a way they have already committed the ultimate sin by going against their own kind. You have to give them credit for that.”

Her smile faded. “No, I don’t. There has been a team tasked with finding her, and once they do, they will banish her.”

“Banish her?” Lucian asked. “She has already banished herself.”

“It has to be official. Once she is banished, she will be a Watcher just like Azazyel. Until that time…”

“Yet your people were imprisoning her,” Lucian said. He didn’t want to argue with Danira, but her thought process was starting to annoy him.

“She was going to stand trial for allowing your predecessor into the South Wind,” she said.

“You know, there’s always the option of just letting them be…”

“Why would we do that?”

“What purpose does finding them serve? They apparently love each other, and they both seem to be willing to sacrifice everything to be together. What purpose does it serve your God, or any God, to take this away from them?”

Danira never had a chance to answer.

Portals rimmed in purple energy fizzled open on the beach, Deaths in black cloaks appearing. Lucian recognized Gaspard and his topknot immediately, the androgynous Death dropping into an offensive pose as long whips made of purple light started to stretch from his fingers.

Danira looked to Lucian. “What have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything,” he said, his lava sword taking shape in his hand, his armor forming.

“You… You told them I would be here.”

Lucian didn’t have time to respond.

Danira pressed off the beach, her enormous energy weapon appearing in her hand. A light blinked twice on the side of the weapon, the muzzle glowing with golden energy.

The angel’s wings expanded as she fired upon the first Death, her crows coming to her instantaneously. They bore down on the beach, their wings turning razor-sharp as they spun, the two quickly taking another Grim Reaper down.

“Go!” Lucian shouted to Danira.

He ran toward one of the Deaths, swinging his lava sword overhead. His shoulder-mounted energy weapon materialized into existence, blasting at one of the Deaths that Danira was engaging.

“You dare help her?” Gaspard roared, whipping his long energy tendrils in Lucian’s direction. They struck Lucian so hard that he went flying backward into the water. His own crows came to his rescue, distracting Gaspard long enough for Lucian to take to the air, his robes dripping wet.

His cape exploded off his shoulders, twisting around him and wringing out any excess water as it made a frantic beeline toward Gaspard. It struck the man, wrapping around his face and chest, preventing him from seeing.

Lucian bolted back toward shore, his carbine now tucked under his arm.

He began firing almost immediately, bullets cutting into the sand, a few reaching Gaspard as Lucian’s cape continued to distract him.

Gaspard finally ripped Lucian’s cape off and pitched his finger-whips forward, all ten of them pressing through Lucian’s body and tearing out his back, a searing force writhing through him.

He could hear Gaspard shouting something from below, but he was too far away to actually pick out what the man was saying.

It was only a matter of time before he was brought underwater again, Gaspard’s bladed fingers pulling him back out and slamming him onto the shore repeatedly.

His robes tried to fight them off, but as he did Gaspard’s tendrils grew even stronger, thickening and starting to burn Lucian’s flesh.

He grabbed onto as many of Gaspard’s tendril-like fingers as he could, quickly sending a spark of electricity in his opponent’s direction.

A blast of energy tore through Lucian’s shoulder just as he was getting the upper hand. He looked up to see that Danira was now firing on him, an absolutely furious look on her face.

“What are you doing?” he managed to shout as he shocked Gaspard again, Lucian’s crows spinning around him, desperately trying to help.

Lucian was lifted even higher into the air, blood misting out of his body even as his wounds started to heal up.

Danira carried him now, her wings making her move faster than he had ever seen her move before.

She was inches away from his face too, her hands clutched onto the front of his robes, her eyes narrowing on him as they ascended.

“This was all your plan, wasn’t it!?” she shouted, shaking him. “Tell me the truth!”

“My plan? How could you think that? I’m trying to save you!”

They were higher in the atmosphere now than Lucian had ever been, the beach below a smudge of grayish-brown below.

“Please…” he started to tell her. “You have to believe me. I would never…”

“I don’t believe you,” Danira said in a soft voice.

“I didn’t want them to come. Why would I want that? Why, after what we’ve already been through, would I want something like that?”

The world started to blaze past as Danira drove him straight down to the ground.

They tore into the beach, leaving a crater in their wake. The angel was up in the air in a matter of moments, her wings flaring up as she lifted back into the air.

“Please…” he said, reaching out to her.

Danira flapped her wings once and was gone.

Lucian struggled to his feet, conjuring a wall of injurecrows as soon as he was able.

He sent them in Gaspard and the other Deaths’ general direction, Lucian trying to shake off the confusion he was feeling, the guilt he was experiencing even though he knew this wasn’t his fault.

He would never do anything to trap or harm Danira, but now that she thought that this was what he had attempted…

Lucian heard explosions as he pressed out of the crater, his MX-11 in his hands almost instantly.

It only took a moment for Grim Mecha to appear, Hugin and Munin docking on his shoulders. His replica went to town on some of the Deaths that had come with Gaspard, slicing and dicing through their forms, blasting one of them with his laser eyes.

His MX-11’s powerpack fully charged, Lucian rushed forward, swinging his weapon and punching at any tendril or Death that dared come near him, Lucian’s retractable claws now pressed out of his knuckles.

He reached Gaspard, and as he did Lucian’s head was severed, his body falling to the side.

A ball of energy controlled by Gaspard’s fingers now engulfed Lucian’s head, purple energy oscillating all around him.

“Do you want to continue this?” Gaspard asked Lucian’s floating head. “Not only am I able to prevent your body from rejoining with your head, but I can also drain your power.”

Lucian felt a strange sensation in the place where his body should be, his energy starting dissipate.

He glanced at his Soul Points and saw that they had dropped significantly.

“Okay,” he finally said.

“Okay? That’s all you have to say for yourself? You skip out on a Committee request to meet with an angel?” Gaspard asked, his dark eyes burrowing holes into Lucian.

“I wasn’t meeting with her,” Lucian said, defiant as ever. He watched his body stand behind, aiming its MX-11 at Gaspard, waiting for the signal.

“You are a poor liar, you know that?”

“I didn’t come to the interrogation because I didn’t want to come. I’ve already told you everything. The angel just happened to show up here. I was about to fire on her when you came.”

Gaspard looked to some of the other Deaths still engaging Grim Mecha. They began flattening, eventually dropping onto the sand and slithering their way over to his body. They lifted once they reached his feet, swelling into his form.

Grim Mecha also turned his attention to Gaspard, waiting for Lucian’s signal.

“They weren’t real?”

“Nothing is real,” Gasper said, a dire look taking shape on his face. “I don’t know how we will handle this infraction, but I do know that the Committee still wants to see you. I believe it is best that we go there now, or I can drain your power here, and continue to do so for all eternity. You see, Lucian, not only are you inexperienced, you are incredibly naïve, and the fact that you even thought it was a good idea to attack me, to defend Life, tells me that…” Gaspard paused, shaking his head with utter disdain. “Well, I suppose we can leave that discussion for the Committee.”

Chapter Seven: The Committee on Luminaries

Lucian North sat in front of a long table, the ends curving away from him.

The room was mostly made of wood, the molding carved with what looked like blooming roses, the floor crafted from dark marble with a vein of blue through it. It was imposing, imperial in a gothic way.

The five chairs before him were currently empty, Gaspard telling Lucian to wait, that the Committee would meet in a private chamber before the questioning began.

Lucian had commented on how it was odd for them to bring him in for testimony without actually being ready for said testimony, only to be reminded that he was supposed to speak to them earlier, that he had been meeting on the beach with the Progeny of Light instead.

So he waited.

His crows were with him, Hugin and Munin hovering over his shoulders. He had already sent them around the room, taking over Hugin’s visuals so he could get a better look at the space and the documents on the table.

Oddly enough, when he’d viewed the documents up close the papers were blank, but he could clearly see that there was writing on them from his current position.

The back door opened, the Grim Reaper known as Lord Lifton shuffling out.

The lantern-jawed man was in all black, his dark blonde hair tied into a ponytail, a stoic look on his face. The alluring female Death named Mastima followed him out, followed by a pair of gaunt women that looked like twins, both with silky black hair, pale faces, and upside-down red triangles on their foreheads. Gaspard was the last to file out, the androgynous Death with the top knot taking the seat on the left.

“The ranking member of the Committee of Luminaries would like to make a few opening statements,” Lord Lifton announced. Pages started flying off the desk to Lucian’s right, zipping into a typewriter that began pecking away at what was said. “It has come to our attention that three members of the Progeny of Darkness have violated one of the barriers that the Watchers put on Earth thousands of years ago, in the Land of Giants.”

“In the Land of Giants?” Lucian whispered under his breath. “You mean Tibet?”

“Those Deaths are Cuthbert Byrne, Lucian North, and Yoshimi Masamune. Efforts to reach Yoshimi and Cuthbert have proved fruitless. The Committee has now turned its focus to Lucian North, who has recently taken Cuthbert’s mantle. We have brought Lucian here today to answer additional questions about what took place at the South Wind, and why he decided to attack one of the only remaining gates to Heaven left on Earth. I will begin the questioning, and then I will open it up to the rest of the Committee for any questions they may have. The questioning will end with the minority ranking member, who has asked for a punishment due to Lucian’s tardiness.”

“I’ve already told you everything,” Lucian groaned.

Mastima shot him a look that caught his breath short. The black holes that were her eyes lasered into Lucian, making him instantly regret speaking out of turn.

“How did you come to learn of the South Wind?” Lord Lifton asked, his tone cordial, inviting even.

Lucian cleared his throat and began telling them how he had first discovered it in his predecessor’s library, in the Book of Enoch. He then explained how he journeyed to Japan just because he could, how he encountered Yoshimi in Kyoto, and how he later went back to her for help in locating his predecessor. “As I have already told some of the Committee members,” Lucian said, looking from Gaspard to Lord Lifton, “I went to the South Wind to rescue him.”

The typewriter continued to peck away, the two twin Deaths saying something to one another.

“Did your predecessor ask for you to come after him?” Lord Lifton asked.

“No. We were attacked by angels in New Mexico at an assisted living facility. He was captured, I was not.”

“Why weren’t you captured?” Gaspard asked.

“I will handle the questioning for now,” Lord Lifton told his colleague. “But it is a good question. Lucian North, why weren’t you captured alongside your predecessor?”

“I wasn’t captured because I fought back. Old Death, I mean Cuthbert, didn’t fight back. It was like he wanted to be captured.”

“It isn’t the first time he has done something so bold,” Lord Lifton said, “but last time he did something like that, he used it as a trap to fight as many angels as he possibly could.”

“He was inviting them to capture him.”

“You’ve already mentioned that,” Gaspard said.

“Again, the ranking member will do the questioning,” Lord Lifton told his colleague, a sharpness to his voice this time. “So give us a timeline, then, Lucian North.”

“A timeline of what? I believe I’ve already given you a timeline.” Lucian saw one of his crows twitch out of the corner of his eye, also agitated with the whole charade.

“Arriving in the Land of Giants. Let’s start there.”

“I arrived with Yoshimi,” he said, the typewriter starting up again. “We briefly moved through a village there; I don’t remember the name. We headed toward the South Wind, where we were attacked by two Death Hunters. One was named Menor, the other was named Alice. I accidentally killed Alice, but only because she attacked me. I am not a Death Hunter.”

“Yet you have killed another of our kind,” Gaspard mumbled, Lord Lifton ignoring him this time, one of the twins frowning at the mouthy Death.

“How exactly did you kill her?” Lord Lifton asked.

“I started off by exploding parts of her body, mostly her face. I then…” Lucian gulped, reliving what had happened. “My severed arm did the rest. It pressed down her neck hole, and more of my injurecrows exploded her. Then Azazyel came.”

“And this wasn’t arranged in some way?” the man asked, not at all phased by Lucian’s previous answer. “Because that is the rumor that some in the Progeny of Light have started to spread.”

“Arranged? What? No,” Lucian told Lord Lifton, the twin Deaths again whispering something to one another. “I believe Azazyel was hunting Yoshimi, that’s why he was there. When I visited Yoshimi a few days earlier, he had been there looking for her at that time too. But he didn’t find her then, and I wasn’t strong enough for him to give two shits about me. I’ll tell you who did find Yoshimi at her residence, though—the two Death Hunters, Alice and Menor. So maybe they were tracking her as well. Maybe you should talk to them. Wait, you can’t.”

“So you’re saying that the leader of the Watchers and the two Death Hunters were there for Yoshimi, and that this wasn’t arranged in some way, correct?”

Lucian shook his head at the suggestion. “Why would we arrange for someone to come and attack us? It really doesn’t make any sense, does it? I know that there are those in your ranks,” he said, glaring at Gaspard, “and also some angels that have fallen for this insane conspiracy theory, but the truth is quite simple: I wanted to rescue my predecessor and I recruited Yoshimi, who had her own baggage that also showed up.”

“I see. Mastima?”

Something flashed across Mastima’s black eyes as she focused on Lucian. “Do you know anything about the arrangement that Cuthbert Byrne might have had with Leliel, the angel he was imprisoned with?”

“He mentioned her, but only as a warning not to get involved with angels. It sounded like he’d had female problems. At least, that’s what I took from what he said. I didn’t know that was why he allowed himself to be captured. Of course, looking back, it makes sense. Maybe he wanted to join her so they could run away together. But it was a surprise to me. After making it to the other side of the gate, I sent my crows to find him. That’s when I discovered that she was there as well. And I freed them both. Because,” Lucian again looked at Gaspard, “like I keep saying, that’s why I went there in the first place. I don’t care about the South Wind, nor do I know much about its purpose, now or in the past. You mentioned several times that I am new to all this, and…”

“And?” Mastima asked.

“And maybe you and the other Committee members should put yourself in my shoes to understand how I interpret all this. There are five of you, who I’m assuming have more experience than I could possibly imagine. I want you to remember yourselves as a new Death, like I currently am, and what you felt at the time. I didn’t want this. I just wanted to die,” Lucian said, instantly wondering if this was truly what he had desired when Old Death came for him in his living room. “Why would I have some grand conspiracy to kickstart a war between Life and Death?”

“Point taken,” Mastima said.

“I didn’t have a choice in becoming Death—that’s what I’m trying to say here. And all your rules, and your past wars, and misunderstandings? I don’t really see the point in them. I don’t care about them aside from their historical contexts, or whatever. Angels want to help people, and from what I can tell, we want to help people as well. We do so in a different way, but there are other types of parasites…”

“No,” Gaspard said, a line knitting between his eyebrows as he stared Lucian down. “We are absolutely not here to discuss theories of other kinds of parasites. There is one type of parasite that Deaths hunt, and it is the type that is keeping a person alive.”

“Are you serious with this guy?” he asked Lord Lifton, who didn’t respond. “All of you must know that there are other kinds of parasites...” Lucian looked to each of them for support. When he didn’t get any, he continued. “How is it that I am growing stronger from going after different types of parasites if they don’t exist? How is that possible? How have I become this strong so quickly?”

“Lord Lifton, this is not what we’re here to talk about,” Gaspard said, a disgusted look on his face.

“Does anyone else on the Committee have questions for Lucian North before we wrap this up?” Lord Lifton asked, clearly uncomfortable.

“Considering you were late,” one of the twins said, “what do you have to say about meeting the angel instead of adhering to our invitation? It appears as if you haven’t taken your predecessor’s advice when dealing with the Progeny of Life.”

“Heh,” Lucian started to say before changing his tone. “I, um, didn’t meet the angel. She was there on the beach and was about to attack me when Gaspard came.”

“Lies,” Gaspard hissed.

The woman continued. “And have you met with this angel before?”

“We have fought each other, so yes,” Lucian said, frustration starting to make his muscles tense. The fact that Danira thought he had arranged an ambush was something that he knew was going to be difficult to deal with.

“And her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you recognize her, Gaspard?” the woman asked her colleague.

“The only thing distinctive about her was the blue band painted across her eyes. I may have fought her before; I can’t tell.”

“Lord Lifton?”

“I haven’t personally dealt with her.”

“Mastima?”

“Like Gaspard, I believe I’ve seen her before, perhaps in a battle. But that is all.”

“Lucian North, I would advise you to be extremely careful when dealing or conversing with angels. Only the Council, and its Committees, should have contact with the Progeny of Light,” the other female twin said as the typewriter continued to wail away. “They have been known to lure our kind into traps before, even going so far as befriending them only to later betray them.”

“I’m not friends with her.”

“He clearly is,” Gaspard said, throwing his hands up.

“You have been warned, Lucian North,” the first twin said.

“I suppose I should wrap this up,” Gaspard told Lucian, a few of the committee members nodding. “Because of your complete and utter disregard for our request, we now have a new task for you to complete.”

“A task?” Lucian asked.

“That’s right, a task. You have a limited number of days to locate your predecessor and bring him before our Committee. If you fail to do so, we will continue to drain your power until you have decided to give up your mantle.”

Lucian felt his cape ruffle on his shoulders. “You are threatening to torture me?”

Gaspard laughed. “No, it’s not torture, it’s leverage. Find your predecessor, bring him to us, and then you can continue going about doing whatever you’d like, within reason. If you are unable to find him, we will have to strip you of your power. But only you can strip yourself of your power, hence the need for leverage.”

“What you are describing is torturing me until I give up my mantle,” Lucian said, his fists tensing. “Just to be clear.”

“Well, if it helps you to think of it that way, that’s fine,” Gaspard said with an exaggerated shrug.

Lord Lifton nodded. “We will be in touch soon, Lucian North. Until that time, good luck.”

Lucian was suddenly standing in front of his workshop, the futuristic city in the distance, stars twinkling in the deep purple sky above reflecting off the lake in front of him.

“Assholes,” Lucian said under his breath as he turned to the lake, Ezra the cat coming to him and weaving between his legs.

As much as Lucian would have liked to call it a night, there was something else he still needed to do.

Chapter Eight: Purple Demon Bug

Lucian appeared in Katy’s apartment, his cape lifting and settling.

The lights were off in her living room, and a single slit of yellow and orange cut through the darkness, letting him know that she was in her bedroom.

“I don’t know if I want you to see this,” he said, looking to his two crows.

Hugin made a gesture that reminded Lucian of someone looking away with disappointment, and Munin looked like it had shrugged.

His two crows disappeared, and after a moment to settle his thoughts, Lucian floated closer to Katy’s bedroom door.

He paused there for a moment, the weight of the day suddenly heavy on his shoulders.

With a deep breath out he pressed forward, noticing, as he had noticed countless times before, just how feminine and clean Katy’s room was. She never had a lot of talent when it came to creative decorating, so Katy went with whatever they had at the home goods store, as long as it had a gray and white theme to it.

There was a white bookshelf with self-help books on it, and a display with black lettering that spelled K-A-T-Y. Lucian felt a fluttering sensation in his chest. It was still there, the ampersand next to the Y, but Lucian’s name was now missing from the other side.

As he floated further into the room, he came to a white faux fur rug, a black-and-white picture of Audrey Hepburn on the wall, a lamp with white fringe on it, Lucian ignoring all these things as his eyes fell to Katy, who was curled up on the bed.

She breathed lightly as if she had been sobbing for so long that there wasn’t a drop of water left inside her. Lucian noticed black smears across her white comforter—her eyeliner—Katy not bothering to do anything about her makeup.

Her phone rang and she slowly reached her hand out to it. Blinking her eyes open, Katy saw that it was one of her close friends, a picture flashing on the screen of the two of them in Miami.

She hesitated, but finally decided to take the call.

“Hello?” she said, her voice hoarse.

Lucian tried to hear what Julia was saying on the other line but she spoke too quickly, Katy simply nodding absentmindedly.

“I think I’m okay,” she finally said. “Yeah, I would like that. It was just so sudden…”

Katy started to suck in deep breaths in an attempt to squeeze out more tears. None came. She listened to her friend for a moment, weighing how she should explain what happened to her father. “He hit his head,” she said, not going into detail about her father stirring up trouble at the station. “He fell and hit his head. It killed him.”

Lucian sat on the corner of her bed, wishing that he could just reach over and place his hand on her leg, to reassure her, to let her know that he was sorry.

It truly was his fault.

If he hadn’t messed with fate…

Lucian hated what he had become in that moment, and for some reason this hatred reminded him of the Committee, how they were all just like him, just feeding off people. And now look what had happened because Lucian had acted when he should have just kept to himself.

There were real-life repercussions for his actions.

Katy hung up the phone and laid down on her side, curling her legs back to her chest.

Lucian recalled what it had been like when he was with her, when he had seen her like this before, whether it had been after she’d done poorly on a test, or the couple times her family had really gotten to her, usually her father.

And as she lay there sobbing, Lucian did what he had done on the rare occasion that Katy became emotional. He laid down next to her, placing an arm over her body, his form sinking into hers.

Lucian sat up, feeling creepy, instantly moving away.

He was just starting to apologize when he noticed something on Katy’s back, something he hadn’t seen before.

It was a purple parasite with coarse black hairs, bits of its body pressing out of the exposed part of her neck like giant zits.

“Purple?” Lucian asked as he pressed to his feet, pushing back in the air, his shotgun appearing in his hand.

As he squeezed the trigger, the demon bug exploded out of Katy’s back, wrapping around Lucian’s neck and flinging him into the wall. He continued to fire at it, and once he was out of slugs, he started beating at the tentacle with his weapon, his lava sword appearing in his other hand.

The black hairs on the parasite’s skin thickened and advanced on Lucian, pressing into his eyes and into his nose.

Horrible images. His mother split in two; his brother tearing into his cheeks with his own fingernails and ripping his mouth open; Katy being stabbed repeatedly; Danira having her head cut off and her skull caved in…

Lucian screamed, instinctively using his wind power to whip up the air around the room. He was hurled into the other wall, where he cracked his back, the pain washing over him.

Pain?

The purple parasite’s hairs dug deeper into Lucian’s face, pulling his skin apart, tunneling into his skull cavity as he dropped his sword.

It became increasingly clear to Lucian that whatever this parasite was, he wasn’t going to be able to beat it, not at the moment, anyway. And the more Soul Points he used, the weaker he felt, and the more pain he experienced.

Kamikaze it is.

Even as Lucian’s thoughts started to cloud over, the terrible images continuing to play out in his mind’s eye, he went for his grenade launcher.

The cylinder rotated as he began firing off grenades at the floor, the ceiling, at himself, his body torn in half, a piece of his torso heaved across Katy’s room.

One of his hands was completely mangled now, his other still attached to a severed arm across the room.

As the purple parasite started to descend upon Lucian, ballooning in size, Lucian’s arm sprouted legs and ran over to him, crawling up what was left of his torso and jamming itself back into Lucian’s arm socket.

The purple demon bug met him head-on, and as it did Lucian managed to press his thumb and pinky finger together, vanishing.

Chapter Nine: Cursive

Lucian fell onto his side, his Soul Points appearing before him.

He was down a lot more than he expected, but he figured it had something to do with Gaspard’s attack and the purple parasite, the way it had jammed its bristly hairs into his body. Lucian shook his head, cringing as he recalled the feeling, and the powerful visuals that came with it.

Whatever that thing was, Lucian was going to have to kill it.

But what would killing it do to Katy?

The last thing Lucian wanted was to hurt her in any way.

So maybe he would have to do something else, perhaps he would pay a visit to an old friend, if he could find her.

Yoshimi would know what to do.

Ezra came to Lucian, rubbing his head against Lucian’s mangled hand.

“It’s been a day,” he told the cat, its tail hooking in the air. Lucian summoned his crows, both of them tilting their heads as they looked him over, concern on their faces. “I’ll be okay,” he told the two, waving them off.

They took off to the shoreline, chasing one another, Ezra slowly following after them.

Lucian felt a tingling sensation as his hand started to repair itself and his leg slowly stitched back together.

It felt like his entire body was pulsing. Rather than stand up and walk, Lucian lazily dragged himself to the bed in his workshop.

He pulled his body up, and tucked himself under the red blankets.

Lucian kept alternating between red and black as a motif for his space, which was a part of his power he actually liked. Lucian had already changed up the decorations in the workshop multiple times now; there was even a point a few days ago where he had gone for almost a skatepark feel with graffiti running across the walls, tagged up skulls, and silhouetted Banksy rip-offs.

He blinked his eyes twice and the television that hung from the ceiling came on, Lucian growing drowsy as he watched another docuseries about narcotics, this time about heroin being smuggled to the Port of Miami. The documentary followed a drug dealer wearing a skull mask, not unlike the one Lucian wore.

Lucian got the urge to check on his brother, but he knew he wasn’t strong enough to kill the addiction parasite yet, and he knew that Connor would actually get in less trouble in New York and Stamford, Connecticut than he would back in their hometown.

Especially with Samantha around.

Still, he would have to check on him the next day, but not before he went back downstairs to Old Death’s room and looked through his predecessor’s things, hoping to figure out where he ran off to.

Lucian had no idea where he would find Old Death, nor did he know what he would do when he found him.

It wasn’t like he was strong enough to force the man to come with him. Perhaps he would take sympathy on Lucian and come of his own accord. But for some reason, Lucian had a feeling it was going to be challenging to not only find him, but also to convince him to meet with the Committee.

Lucian didn’t even remember falling asleep.

He simply woke up hours later, fully recharged, and as he did he conjured the sun and a fresh cup of coffee seasoned with just a touch of cinnamon.

Lucian stepped outside and formed a chair out of a root that he’d pulled from the soil. He took a seat, looking out over the water, his crows zipping forward.

Glancing at the sheer scale of things in this strange world created by his predecessor gave Lucian an idea. He didn’t want to use too many Soul Points, but at least he could get started on it, and he definitely had enough space to conceptualize his next creation.

Lucian set his coffee cup down on another root that lifted from the ground. He took a step closer to the water, scanning the lake and the trees that surrounded it. He chose a spot on the left bank, and the trees began to melt back.

He floated over to the space he’d just created and lowered softly to the ground.

Lucian knew enough about his ability to know that he didn’t have to completely understand how his creations worked. The weapons he had already made, and the ones that he would make in the future only had one limitation: his imagination.

But he also recognized the scale of what he was about to create and while it may not be useful for most situations, he had a feeling there would come a time when a weapon such as this would be handy.

Lucian returned his focus to the frame, a schematic playing out in his mind’s eye. The metal was a deep shade of purple, and as he thickened it, Ezra sashayed over to him.

The cat weaved in and out of the bars that would become the left foot of his creation. He jumped to the top of the metal and crouched on it, watching as Lucian formed what would be the waist.

Once he was finished forming the framework for the legs and the waist of his newest creation, Lucian checked his Soul Points.

“That many already?” he whispered to himself. He stopped what he was doing, a table made of roots sprouting from the bank. He turned away from his newest creation, watching the various pieces of his bone armor take shape on the table.

Lucian lowered his hand over them, the armor thickening and then condensing, hardening. He did this several times, and then checked his Soul Points again.

He was just about to stop when he decided to create one more item.

He recalled a first-person-shooter in which the player could unlock a particle-beam weapon if they played the game on hard mode and were able to beat the first boss in under two minutes.

It had taken Lucian about a week to actually do it, and he had to watch plenty of YouTube videos for pointers, but he beat the boss in the end, a cyborg with weaponized arms.

Lucian recalled reading the stats of the particle-beam cannon, and thinking about how the weapon was designed to disrupt the target’s molecular structure. It was a fun weapon to use in the game, Lucian spending a good chunk of time just running around the city and ionizing vehicles.

But he remembered there being a bit of a learning curve with it as well.

The weapon did not immediately destroy the target; rather, it heated up rapidly, exploding inanimate objects, and basically melting a normal enemy.

As Lucian started to craft his gun, he remembered Danira’s enormous weapon, how it looked like something she shouldn’t even be able to wield.

He smiled at this thought, hoping that they would run into each other soon, that he could explain himself to her.

The weapon started to take shape, a muzzle just about the size of a dartboard, a spherical core forming at the center of the weapon, encased by what almost resembled a bubble.

Lucian ran a smooth surface down the weapon, and from there added a SWAT team vibe to it, going with all black, then shifting the color to gunmetal gray, the screws keeping the particle-beam cannon together gleaming for a moment before their color softened.

“Who cares what it looks like,” he said as he lifted the weapon, noticing that there were two power packs on the opposite side of the grip arranged along the stock.

It really was strange how his power worked.

He didn’t remember putting these there, yet here they were, and rather than ponder why his weapons arranged themselves the way that they did, Lucian raised his hand, a rock the size of a shipping crate rising from the center of the lake.

He aimed the particle-beam cannon at it and squeezed the trigger.

Lights lit up along the side of the cannon, changing shades as the weapon powered up.

Just like the video game, he didn’t fire immediately; it had to charge first. When it finally did what it was designed to do, the beam that tore out of the muzzle nearly caused Lucian to lose his footing.

“Whoo!” he shouted as he continued to hold the trigger, the rock finally exploding, sending bits of gravel into the air.

Lucian repaired the rock with a wave of his hand, his crows coming to him as he squeezed the trigger again, the lights on the particle-beam cannon glowing again as they approached the two energy packs on the stock.

It was so bright when it fired that Lucian wished he was wearing a pair of sunglasses. As Lucian was deciding if he should take one more shot, he figured it couldn’t hurt to create a pair of aviators.

“That’s more like it,” he said as he placed the sunglasses on.

To pair them with the weapon, Lucian quickly made a carbon sunglasses case on the opposite side of the gun. He made sure the aviators fit, and once he was sure, he put them back on, aiming at the rock again.

“I am ridiculous.”

Lucian tested the weapon again; it took a moment before the particle beam finally met its target, but once it did it was glorious indeed.

He lowered his new cannon, sending it to his inventory list.

“All in a good day’s work,” he said to Hugin and Munin as his stats appeared.

With his gun put away, Lucian turned toward the entrance to Old Death’s home.

He took the stairs down into his old bedroom, making his way over to the window and staring out at the city.

Lucian hadn’t slept in his room for several days now, and as he examined his old workshop and the giant flat-screen television that he had created, gaming systems beneath it, he was feeling almost nostalgic.

He shook his head at this notion, wondering how he could feel this way for a place that he had barely lived in.

Stepping into the living room, Lucian glanced to the couch where Old Death used to sit, the man always looking tired.

He figured there would be more information in the library on the floor below, but he wanted to check his predecessor’s bedroom first, hoping that there would be something there indicating where he could have run off to.

Lucian made his way into Old Death’s bedroom, the centuries-old furniture immaculate, everything clean and where it should be. As he had countless times before, Lucian looked out the window to the city beyond, wishing at that moment that people lived there, that it was actually a city worth visiting and not an empty shell.

He recalled the time he visited, and another time, just a couple days ago, that he had decided to fly over and check it out.

It was an illusion, a frustrating one at that, and it reminded Lucian of some of the games he’d played in which there had been towns on the horizon, or a part of the city just beyond reach.

That is what would have been there had Lucian been able to reach those zones.

“But why?” Lucian asked aloud as he continued to look out at the city. “Why create something like this?”

His two crows burst into the room, Munin colliding with Hugin, the two spinning off into a portrait of a ship moving through a tumultuous sea.

“Hey,” he said, both of them zipping in front of him and coming to attention. “Search his room, and don’t make a mess. Let’s see if there are any clues regarding where he may possibly have gone.”

The retractable claws came out of the top of his crows’ heads and they took off, searching through his predecessor’s things. Munin tore into the dresser, flinging things out of the drawers. Hugin zipped through the blankets and twisted under the bed.

“I said not to make a mess,” Lucian told them as Munin latched onto a comb and tossed it into the air. Lucian caught and examined it, noticing that it was a nice piece, one made of bone. He thought about combing his own hair, but then he stopped, realizing that he never really combed his hair at all, he really wasn’t that type of guy.

Making his way to the dresser, he placed the comb back in the drawer.

Hugin raced over to Lucian, his body weighed down by a thick leather journal. He dropped it on the drawer, causing a magnifying mirror to fall off onto the ground, shattering.

“We have to be careful,” Lucian told them as Ezra snuck into the room. The cat hopped onto the bed and did a single circle before making himself comfortable.

Lucian started to thumb through the journal, impressed by Old Death’s beautiful cursive handwriting. It looked like something that would be in a famous letter in a museum, the penmanship perfect.

Cursive was a lost art; with computers and text messaging and emails, and everything in between, there really was no need to utilize this medium anymore. Still, part of him wished that his culture had held onto it, just to preserve its beauty.

It was amazing how quickly things became obsolete.

He leafed through the journal, skimming through the passages, noticing that everything was written before 1920.

As his crows continued to go through the room, both of them turning to the armoire, Lucian wondered why the journal stopped when it did.

“Are there any more like this over there?” he asked.

Hugin shook its head and continued searching through the armoire.

“Munin, head to the library below and see if you can find anything that looks like this.”

His crow took off, and as it did Lucian sat on the bed, finding the very last entry in the journal:

Leliel,

Words can’t express the sorrow I feel knowing you will never see what I’m capable of, what I would like to do for you. I know that you will never read this; I know that we may be forced to fight each other, and if that is the case, that you will kill me.

I sense that is not what you want, that you desire much more than what the Progeny of Light can give you, and I desire much more than the confines that have been handed to me. I write these words not for you, then, but for me. I write these words to remind myself that Life or Death, Heaven or Hell, Angel or Demon, love still exists, and that I have experienced it even in this form. Love transcends anything that humanity could ever create, and anything that spiritualism could ever fabricate or destroy. I can’t bear to think of never seeing you again, but there are those that would condemn us for eternity for what we have done. I wish…

Lucian turned the page, seeing that it was blank. He flipped through all the other pages as well, noticing that there wasn’t another marking after the very last sentence.

Munin burst back into the room.

“You didn’t check that quickly,” Lucian told him. His crow nodded, Hugin also looking up at its counterpart skeptically.

“Go with him, both of you check around. In the meantime, I will do some checking of my own.”

Lucian closed the journal and placed it on the bed, his pinky finger and thumb meeting.

Chapter Ten: Fifth Avenue Showdown

Lucian North appeared outside of a side street coffee shop, Fifth Avenue directly behind him. It was a cloudy day, a bit cool, but not as cool as it would have been in Massachusetts.

He ignored the people moving past a taxi driver as the cantankerous man honked his horn repeatedly. A woman handed out flyers to a flash sale at one of the dozens of fast fashion shops that lined the famous street. A man wearing a baseball cap instead of a helmet biked past, followed by a woman in a cashmere dress walking a Shiba Inu and talking on her glittery smartphone, her high heels clicking against the dirty pavement.

Lucian focused on Connor and Samantha, who were just entering a boutique coffee shop with minimal seating and vines growing from the walls.

He floated over to his brother and future sister-in-law, Connor complaining about shopping, even though neither of them was carrying a shopping bag.

“We just got here,” Samantha said. “And we even ate before we started.”

“There has to be a bathroom around here,” Connor said, changing the subject. “All coffee shops have bathrooms. Hey,” he said to the barista behind the counter, a thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple and a nose piercing. “You guys got a bathroom?”

“Sorry,” the barista said in an effeminate voice. “There’s one at the Nike store, if that helps.”

“The Nike store?” Connor spun around, looking to see if he could see the Nike store from the inside of the boutique coffee shop.

“It’s on Fifth Avenue,” the barista said, a hint of disdain in his voice as he silently judged Connor. “There’s also a public bathroom in Rockefeller Center too, but it’s further.”

“Okay, well, how are you supposed to have a coffee shop and not have a bathroom?” Connor asked him.

“Connor,” Sam said, her hand coming to his shoulder. A couple of customers in line started to grumble; one man actually told Connor to hurry up with his order.

“You know what? I’ll step out,” Connor said, his hands in the air, “and I’ll meet you at the Nike store. Unless you want to come with me…” he told his wife to be. “We can get coffee somewhere else.”

Embarrassed, Samantha quickly slipped out of the boutique coffee shop, Connor stomping up a cloud of dust as he made his way to the traffic light. “These New Yorkers are so goddamn rude, way different from the people in Boston. And there aren’t enough goddamn bathrooms in the city. With all this walking around here, you’d think there would be a public bathroom.”

“But you just went back at the restaurant,” Samantha told him.

“And I have to go again. I drink a lot of water. What’s wrong with having to go to the restroom?”

“I didn’t say anything was wrong with having to go to the restroom…”

An Asian woman shouldered past, an enormous shopping bag in each hand, her cheeks artificially red.

“We don’t got enough money to shop,” Connor said once he saw Samantha look at the woman’s bags for just a second longer than she normally would have.

“I know, but we could window shop, and Baby Jen…”

“Baby Jen has plenty of clothing,” Connor told his fiancée as they reached the intersection, the Nike store just across the street in a three-story building. There was a big orange check on its exterior, a mob moving in and out of the place.

“Where’s the restroom?” Connor asked the first sales associate he saw after they made it inside, the two of them now standing before a grouping of video installations showing the history of Nike shoes.

“Third floor, all the way back. Past the athletic shorts,” a young black woman said, as if she had said the same thing a thousand times before. She continued rearranging neon shoelaces as Connor turned to the stairs.

“I’ll be right back, Sam.”

Lucian waited with Samantha for a moment, watching as she was finally able to take a breath, Connor clearly stressing her out.

“I’m sorry,” Lucian said, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him. He then started to wonder why Connor need to use the restroom so badly, especially if he had just used it.

Lucian floated up through the ceiling, moving past a pair of mannequins in active poses.

He arrived on the third floor and turned in the direction of the restroom, where he saw Connor waiting with his arms crossed, leaning against the wall and tapping his foot. His brother looked at his watch, looked up at the locked door, and sighed miserably. “Come on, come on…”

Another person got in line behind him; Connor gave the man a look that tried to showcase both his annoyance and his desire for sympathy. Both were going to have to wait in line for God knew how long just to take a quick piss.

They were in this together.

“Can you believe this?” Connor asked as another thirty or forty seconds passed.

The man behind didn’t say anything; he had headphones in.

“How hard is it?” Connor asked under his breath. “Whip it out and go; squat and go. That’s it. How hard is this…”

Lucian almost chuckled.

His brother was being erratic, and if Lucian weren’t suspicious of his brother’s intentions, he would have found his behavior humorous.

Connor had a short temper; sometimes it worked to his advantage, but most of the time he ended up looking like an idiot and having to apologize after.

In a way, it was part of his charm.

The bathroom door finally opened and a Muslim woman stepped out, not making eye contact with either of the men.

Groaning now, Connor slipped into the restroom, Lucian floating through the door as he slammed it shut. His brother locked the door, and then waved his hand in front of his nose, complaining now about how strong the woman’s perfume was.

Making a face like he was holding his breath, Connor quickly took a small plastic bag filled with white powder out of his jacket pocket. The bag had been twisted until it almost resembled a small carrot.

Connor reached into his back pocket for his wallet and set it on the counter. He got out a flat gift card, made sure it was clean, and placed it down.

Connor used his teeth to tear off the end of the twisted baggie, carefully laying out a line.

He glanced at himself once in the mirror, and then went about rolling a dollar bill.

“Please,” Lucian said as he watched his brother snort the line. “Connor, you have to stop.”

The parasite on his brother’s back seemed to swell in size for a moment, something Lucian had never seen it do before.

An eye popped off the demon bug, examining Lucian.

But he knew he was still too weak, and rather than do anything, rather than stand here and watch his brother snort pills, Lucian simply started to sink into the floor, cursing himself for not being stronger, for not being able to stop his brother.

He floated through the floor back to the second floor, where he paused, looking curiously toward a burst of light heading in his direction.

Lucian was sent spinning backward as an incredible force exploded through the window, sending the mannequins, shards of glass, and displays flying, all the people suddenly gone.

Lucian pressed himself up and as he did he saw Menor down on one knee, the dark-skinned Death Hunter completely naked, a skull painted across his face.

Lucian’s armor grew out of his body; his semi-autonomous energy weapon formed on his shoulder; a wall of injurecrows took shape as his carbine appeared in his hands.

“Lucian…” Menor said as he got to his feet, their interaction now taking place on a different plane of existence, all the people now just mannequins and displays and a blast radius rimmed with sparkling shards of glass that reached well past Lucian’s feet.

“Showing up naked?” Lucian asked.

“You killed her…”

Jagged bone protrusions tore out of Menor’s arms and legs.

They quickly spread up his body and as they did they turned to metal, forming rugged spikes, the Death’s muscles swelling, the white skull painted across his face swallowed up by his newfound armor as it formed into a sharp helmet.

He opened his fingers and his ax burst through one of the windows, coming straight to his hand.

The bit of the ax spawned sharp teeth, saliva dripping off them and onto the ground as they gnashed.

“And now…” Menor narrowed his eyes on Lucian, who also had just called his armor to him. “Now, you pay.”

Lucian was struck so hard that he was momentarily blinded, the Death Hunter slamming him through the walls until they were outside, where they crossed a side street and collided with another building.

They tumbled to the ground, Menor’s ax taking flight, lifting into the air as Lucian lost hold of his carbine.

His shoulder-mounted cannon started to fire at the ax, Lucian conjuring an enormous fireball, which he used to blast himself in the opposite direction before turning his burning hands to Menor’s throat.

“You can’t kill me!” Menor cried, his armor puncturing Lucian’s hands even as flames poured from Lucian’s palms, the inferno raging all around them.

Lucian’s injurecrows caught up with him, exploding into Menor’s back, sending both of them tumbling down to the street, where they landed in a patch of manicured trees, smashed through a small iron fence, and ripped through the pavement, depositing the two in the sewer.

Lucian managed to get on top, cement and bits of rebar falling on top of his head as he stabilized. He blasted off, his cape lifting off his shoulders, momentarily distracting Menor.

Menor’s ax cut Lucian in half, his torso spinning off to the side, his feet still standing.

Lucian conjured Grim Mecha, who swiftly grabbed the ax and began hacking at its maw with his blade arm. He spilled forward toward his legs, hoping to reunite his body with his torso.

A loud noise met his ears as Menor zipped out of the sewer, Lucian’s cape still smothering the Death Hunter as injurecrows hurtled into his body.

Lucian’s legs dropped to the ground; he managed to whip his body around, willing them to reattach as sewer water gushed by him.

He went with his carbine again, this time triggering the zero-point energy field manipulator and using it to further disrupt Menor while he healed.

His body mended, Lucian toggled the weapon, firing his carbine at Menor just to distract him for a moment, Grim Mecha continuing to battle the ax above him.

He knew that at some point he would have to equip his particle-beam cannon, but he wanted to wait until it was the right time, until he knew that he could either get away, or finish Menor off.

Killing a Death gave him a huge boost when it came to Soul Points, and if this one was going to be actively hunting him…

Lucian torpedoed into the air, slamming into his cape and Menor, the three of them cracking into the corner of a building before spinning off and bringing down a tower of scaffolding.

Lucian went through three levels with Menor on top of him, the man punching him repeatedly, his armor absorbing it all.

“You killed… You killed my sister!”

Menor headbutted Lucian as they continued to break through the scaffolding, everything going black for a moment.

Lucian threw him off; Menor clipped his back against the crane operator’s booth.

In the moment it took to catch his breath, Lucian noticed that he wasn’t quite experiencing pain, but he was feeling himself grow weaker.

His stats appeared.

“Shit…” he whispered as he got to his feet, accidentally kicking away a traffic cone. “Your sister?” Lucian asked, not knowing if that was what the Death Hunter had actually said.

“You destroyed her… You absorbed her!”

Menor tackled Lucian, an injurecrow going off between both of them, Lucian momentarily blinded by the explosion.

“How was your sister a Death?” he managed to ask, his eyes starting to heal.

“I split…”

Lucian felt a force against the small of his back that sent needles through his body.

He dropped to the ground, a numb feeling coming over his limbs and quickly dissipating.

“I split my mantle with her,” Menor said, his voice haggard.

Lucian waited for the final blow to be delivered, but heard a blast instead.

He swiveled around to find Grim Mecha firing at Menor.

Lucian took this opportunity to fly into the air. He landed on the rooftop of an Art Deco building with exquisitely carved gargoyles on the parapet.

His particle-beam cannon formed.

His hands shook, the lights reaching the two energy packs near the butt of the weapon.

His first blast didn’t really do anything to the Death Hunter, but as Lucian held his finger on the trigger, the concentrated energy beam bored a hole in his opponent’s chest.

Menor’s ax came flying at him, slicing sideways through Lucian’s neck and cutting his head off.

But Lucian’s body continued to fire on the Death Hunter anyway, even as Lucian’s head lay on the rooftop, the ax coming back around to go for his body again.

Lucian watched a swarm of injurecrows disrupt the ax’s trajectory, throwing it off course.

He heard a final scream below.

A blistering blue-white light exploded all the way up to the rooftop, where it arced into Lucian’s headless body, the light so hot that it felt as if it had burned his pupils.

Lucian’s body fell to the side, his arms taking over, dragging his body over to his head.

Lucian had killed Menor.

Chapter Eleven: Not Alone in Kyoto

Once his head was reattached to his body, Lucian’s cape settled onto his shoulders. His cape gave him a firm squeeze, Lucian suddenly feeling rejuvenated, stronger than he had ever felt before.

His stats appeared before him:

A bit of gleaming metal caught his attention; he looked to the other side of the rooftop to see that Menor’s cannibalistic ax was still there.

Grim Mecha landed; Lucian nodded his creation over to the ax.

His replicant stepped over to the weapon and picked it up, the ax glowing for a moment, its teeth appearing and then slowly hardening.

Grim Mecha walked it back over to Lucian.

“If it’s like Thor’s hammer, then it will come in handy,” Lucian said as he took the ax, looking it over.

The handle was made of a black wood that was as hard as steel, and as Lucian turned it over in his hands he saw something burned into the wood, the words ‘To my dearest brother’ written in a woman’s handwriting. The head of the weapon had been acid etched with an elaborate design that almost looked Celtic.

To test how he would summon the teeth, Lucian simply shook the ax handle, the teeth taking shape and gnashing together.

“To the inventory,” Lucian said as the weapon disappeared.

He was just about to lower onto the streets when the rooftop entrance burst open, injuresouls spilling out, one of them immediately latching onto Lucian.

It took him a moment to get his bearings as the bandaged demon chomped at Lucian, another injuresoul cracking Lucian in the side, both of them careening down to the street below as more swarmed over the building’s ledge.

Lucian rolled and began punching at the first injuresoul, Grim Mecha already in the air and fighting some of them off.

Everything was dark now, a terrible storm approaching as Lucian continued to struggle with the injuresouls on top of him.

He wanted to fight back; with his newfound power he wanted to test just how strong he was, but he also realized that now wasn’t the time, that he should wait until he was fully charged to begin this experiment.

He slugged one of the injuresouls in the face, his retractable claws sprouting from his knuckles just as his fist connected.

Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky finger together, his form reappearing next to the spire of the Empire State Building, which was well over a mile away from the action.

He dropped down to the circular rooftop just above the observation deck, away from the mayhem.

After a deep breath out, he looked in the direction of Fifth Avenue, to see that there was no indication that he had just been fighting there, that the world was back to the way that it should be, cars moving through the streets below, a helicopter aimed in the direction of LaGuardia, a plane in the air high above the city, passing by a wispy cloud.

Lucian sat, his legs dangling over the ledge as he looked down.

It only took him a second to conjure Hugin and Munin, both of his crows looking to him in distress as they hovered before him, Lucian smiling at his two spherical creations.

“I did it,” he told them. “Another Death Hunter down.”

Hugin tilted its head at Lucian.

“He came at me,” Lucian explained. “I didn’t go after him. Injuresouls came too.”

Once his crows were sure that he was okay, they took off, doing spirals around the top of the Empire State Building as they chased each other.

Lucian continued to stare out at the city, going over what had just happened, recalling the injuresoul’s face, the one that had tried to take a bite out of him.

He was now up by almost three thousand Soul Points. And even if he hated to admit it, Lucian continued to appreciate the advantage in going after other Deaths. And naturally, as he remembered what had been written on the ax’s handle, Lucian started thinking about what Menor had said, about splitting his mantle.

“And he gave it to his sister…” Lucian said to himself.

If he was unable to stop the parasite that had latched itself to his brother, would he be able to split his mantle?

This thought troubled Lucian.

He knew his brother well enough to know his temperament, and while part of him wanted Connor to experience what Lucian had become, he also didn’t want his brother to be cursed in the same way he was. It was already tragic that Lucian would have to watch his niece grow old; he couldn’t imagine doing that if it were his daughter.

Between Connor’s temperament, and the complications that came with being a Grim Reaper, Lucian wasn’t sure if splitting his mantle should even be an option.

But there was still a part of him that wanted to do everything he possibly could to help his sibling.

Lucian needed someone to talk to about this, someone that knew what he was going through, who could relate to his experience. Specifically, he wanted to speak with Yoshimi, but he knew it was going to be difficult to find her.

“We need to go to Japan,” he announced to his crows, “but first…”

Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky together, appearing in front of a white building that had an enormous escalator inside the front entrance floor. It was a clothing store called Uniqlo, and it only took Lucian a moment to locate his brother and his future sister-in-law in the mob of people shopping inside.

“You know how I like sweaters,” she told Connor, placing her hand on a pink sweater beneath an advertisement claiming that all Uniqlo sweaters featured an advanced technology woven into them known as Heat Tech.

“Thirty dollars for a sweater?” Connor asked, his hand a bit twitchy, but otherwise, he seemed fine. “That’s more like it. I can’t believe this place exists on Fifth Avenue.”

“There are deals everywhere,” Samantha reminded him, a soft smile on her face, “you just have to look for them.”

Lucian stood strong with his MX-11 tucked under his arm, anticipating that this may be the moment. He was already aiming it at the parasite bubbling out of his brother's jacket, an eye watching Lucian.

Rather than let it attack him, Lucian squeezed the trigger, his blast ripping into the demon bug, their plane of existence changing for a moment and then resettling.

In the end, it didn’t even quiver.

Connor and Samantha continued to discuss winter clothing, and heading back to Beverly a day early.

Realizing that he still wasn’t strong enough yet, Lucian lowered his weapon.

He began thinking of Kyoto, and as he did he pressed pinky and thumb together.

Lucian appeared in front of a convenience store with a peculiar name.

It was a hazy night, the moon barely visible.

“Family Mart,” Lucian said as a young Japanese woman shuffled in with a man twice her age. A Japanese youth looking at his cell phone stepped out of the store, pressing right through Lucian.

Realizing he hadn’t really been inside a Japanese convenience store before, Lucian floated through the doorway, just as the cashier finished greeting the older man and the younger woman.

It was definitely cleaner than the convenience stores he had seen back in the States.

Rather than pizza and hotdogs, there was a boiling vat of liquid, one of the employees pulling trays out of the hot water. Using chopsticks, he arranged what looked like dumplings, but were shaped in odd ways, on a series of plate warmers.

Lucian gasped.

Old Death had explained that he would be able to read and understand all languages, but he hadn’t really paid attention the last time he was in Japan. Now, floating in the middle of a convenience store between the aisle that sold candy and the aisle that sold toiletries and medical supplies, Lucian realized he could comprehend everything.

He could even read the magazines.

He scanned through a few of them, stopping on one with the cover partially hidden by a black bar. “Women in Uniforms, huh?” he read, realizing then that it was a dirty magazine.

Lucian switched his focus to another one, a magazine called Atelier, which had a famous American celebrity on the cover, advertising his newest collaboration with a Japanese fashion brand. There were a ton of mangas as well, Lucian wishing he was able to actually pick up one of the books and flip through it.

“I humbly thank you for visiting our store,” the cashier said, bowing to the old man and the young woman as they finished purchasing a bottle of water and some aspirin.

The old man grunted; the woman made a cute sound with her throat as she hooked her arm in his and followed him out, their stats hovering over their heads.

Name: Shoyo Kanemaru

Date of Birth: 09/21/1961

Date of Death: 04/30/2039

Name: Hisako Agano

Date of Birth: 01/15/1997

Date of Death: 12/31/2084

Lucian turned to the cashier and the young man dealing with the dumplings, whose hair was tied back by a bandanna, a surgical mask covering his face.

Name: Toshiki Izumo

Date of Birth: 07/14/1976

Date of Death: 10/11/2048

Name: Yukimori Hata

Date of Birth: 08/26/2000

Date of Death: 08/26/2079

“Your death date and your birthday match,” Lucian told the man. “I wonder how many people that happens to.”

He started to float up, and as he did Lucian called his crows to him, both of his spherical creations taking shape.

Now above the convenience store, he looked to the right to see the oddly shaped buildings, some of them several stories high but smaller looking than the buildings in the West, and definitely not as wide. Most of the floors had balconies with clothing lines crossing them, and a few were being used as extra storage space at the moment, packed all the way to the top with boxes and children’s toys.

Lucian turned in the direction of the geisha district, the same one where he had first encountered Yoshimi.

He floated above the homes, his eyes falling upon a temple that sat on a hill, its structure well lit, and casting ominous shadows on the buildings situated before it.

He rose just a bit higher into the sky, Lucian crossing his legs under him and sitting in the air. His crows took off; he observed them for a minute as they weaved through the main thoroughfare below, checking a few last-minute shoppers on the street with all the stores on it.

Lucian had been meaning to explore the shops, but rather than follow his crows down, he simply took over Hugin’s pane of vision, controlling his crow as he weaved it in and out of another convenience store and into a high-end cosmetics boutique, the women inside looking absolutely pristine.

One of the shop assistants discussed a technique for preventing wrinkles in the corner of one’s mouth with an older female customer, the older woman pursing her lips.

“Time to move on,” Lucian whispered to himself as his crow left the cosmetics store and moved into a place that was closed.

Lucian had Hugin back up a little so he could actually look at these handmade altars, considering for a moment the difference between how the majority of Asia honored their dead versus where he’d come from.

It really was different when a whole group of people thought that they would be reborn versus going to heaven and never returning.

Lucian checked another shop, this one selling souvenirs, seeing a group of loud Chinese tourists finishing up buying tchotchkes and other knickknacks. He then came to a store which used well water for filtering its coffee, the sign claiming it had been using the water in the reservoir beneath the shop since it opened thirty years ago.

“Now that’s some coffee,” Lucian said, instantly wanting a cup.

He opened his eyes and found a cup of coffee floating before him, which he gladly took a sip from, just a hint of cinnamon to it, a bit of maple syrup too. “Just sitting here, floating in the air above Kyoto, drinking coffee,” he said to himself. “If you can hear me, Yoshimi, you know where to find me.”

He slowly sipped his coffee, feeling both lonely and content, hoping she would come soon.

When she didn’t, Lucian figured he would get a nice little set up going.

His video game controller appeared in his hands, a giant flat-screen TV now floating in the space before him.

He was aware that he could just project the image onto the area in front of him, but he liked the clarity that the TV offered, as well as the familiarity.

Lucian powered up Zero Enigma, nodding his head to the theme music and the big gong sound that indicated the game was set to begin.

He recalled the last time he’d played that there had been a strange grape-onion potion, which he still needed to consume. Now standing in the countryside next to Danira’s avatar, Lucian thought about chugging it right then and there, but he figured that would be a waste. He could always save, and then chug it…

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asked himself as he started jogging, Danira following behind him and jogging funny.

“This is what we should do together,” he told his companion, even though she couldn’t hear him. “Next time we meet, we should play a two-player game. Maybe one of those kiddy games. You know, like one of the racing ones. Those are always fun. Maybe you don’t know how to play games, but we can find an easy one.”

As Lucian absentmindedly ran through the countryside, he envisioned the next time that they would meet and what he would say to her. He had a feeling she would be mad as hell at him. But it was true, he hadn’t tried to set her up.

“Not with those assholes,” Lucian said, mostly referring to Gaspard.

He brought up the map by pressing the touchpad and went to a city known as Baryn Willow, which was near an unexplored part of the map. He had been meaning to check this part of the map out, but the world was so big that he hadn’t gotten around to it.

[Would you like to go there now?]

Lucian pressed [X] and the loading screen appeared, this time reminding him about how the best weapons were only available by breaking down items and then recombining them.

“Yeah, yeah, everyone knows that,” he said as Hugin came to him, lowering into his lap. Munin eventually joined him, settling on Lucian’s shoulder, the fabric of his cape making a small bowl for the crow to sit in.

“Maybe we can play together sometime,” he told Hugin. “I would just give you a controller that plugs into you, or vice versa. I don’t know exactly how all that will work, but we are definitely in the right country for strange video game controllers,” he said, laughing aloud.

Lucian kept on running through the countryside in Zero Enigma, having to recharge his stamina every now and then when he sprinted for too long. He fought off a wolf, which wasn’t very difficult, the beast coughing up predictable loot in the form of a fang and a poor quality fur.

“Want to see something?” he asked Hugin, nodding to the screen.

Lucian opened his menu and scrolled to the fur, equipping it. Suddenly, his avatar was no longer wearing dark robes. Instead, he wore the fur as if it were a potato sack, Lucian wishing that Danira was there so she could respond to it.

“She would think it was funny,” he told Hugin. “Well, maybe.”

He continued along with his companion until they came to a small farm, the farmer outside fixing his scarecrow. The man commented on Lucian’s fur, and he thought about engaging him for a moment, but decided against it, especially when he looked up to see a black mass lowering toward him.

“Just who I was looking for,” Lucian said, smiling at Yoshimi as his television disappeared.

“You were playing video games?” she asked, a bit perplexed by Lucian’s actions.

“Just killing time. To be honest, I have found killing time to be an integral part of being the Grim Reaper.”

“Why have you come here?” she asked, cutting to the chase.

“To see you, and…” Lucian stood, smoothing his hands over his robes as if it would make him more presentable. “I have a few questions. Lots of questions, actually.”

“We should talk somewhere else.” Yoshimi reached her hand out and Lucian softly placed his hand in hers. “I think you will like my new place.”

“Wow, this is some place you’ve got,” Lucian said looking again to the waterfall outside of a floor-to-ceiling window.

Lucian and Yoshimi were seated at what he would call a coffee table, but was probably called something else, the table just about a foot and a half above the ground, black, inlaid with delicate stones that had been polished until they almost had a mirror-like quality to them.

Similar to the decor in Yoshimi’s last place, the paper-thin walls were covered in markings that indicated how many parasites she’d killed.

Thousands upon thousands.

There was no window on what he assumed was the front-facing wall, the centerpiece of the entire room being the waterfall, which meant that if the home had actually existed in real life, it would have had to be built jutting out of the rock wall of a cliff, which Lucian knew would have been a hell of a construction job.

“I can’t have people finding me, as you know,” she said as she poured Lucian a cup of tea.

“I get that.”

“The waterfall gives the place an ambiance, does it not?”

“I’ll say.”

Yoshimi set a small saucer before Lucian, and placed the cup on it. She poured herself a cup of tea as well, Lucian almost making the faux pas of cheersing her.

“Heh,” he said under his breath, mostly for himself as he laughed at his lack of Japanese tea ceremony manners. “Well, it’s a nice place, but you probably already knew that. I’ve been working on a little place of my own as well, but I don’t know if I’m proud enough of it to invite you there. What can I say? It’s a bit of a man cave.”

“I’m sure it is,” Yoshimi said as she took a sip from her cup of tea.

Following what he assumed was proper etiquette, Lucian too took a sip, instantly feeling rejuvenated. “I don’t know how you do it with the food and beverages you make, Yoshimi, but they are awesome. I managed to get my cup of coffee tasting the way I like it, but haven’t really experimented with any other foods.”

“Have you tried pouring all your energy into it yet, and not doing anything for a day while you recharge?”

Lucian gave her a funny look. “Not really. But speaking of recharging, I took a few days off. I didn’t really pour all my energy into anything. I was mostly…” He grinned. “Playing video games. I’ve been playing this one game forever.”

“Imbuing food with your power could be a way for you to create elixirs, which is essentially what I have done through the food and drinks that I have learned to make over the years. If it wasn’t clear, this tea is an elixir, that’s why it is so refreshing.”

“You mean I could, like, create potions or something?”

“You could call them that, yes.”

“Well, I have plenty of Soul Points now to work with,” Lucian said. “And I guess that brings me to my first question…”

“Please, ask away.”

“Actually, let me save that question. I have a few other things to tell you about and ask before we go there. That one is maybe a bit controversial.”

“I see,” she said, taking another delicate sip of her tea.

“The thing is, you were there at the South Wind, so you know what happened.”

“Indeed, I was.”

“And guess who showed up right outside my home just the other day.”

“Injuresouls?” she asked.

“Nah, they came later. The Committee on Luminaries decided to pay me a visit, and as you can imagine, they had questions.”

When she didn’t reply, Lucian continued. “Anyway, they were asking all sorts of questions about why we were at the South Wind, and Old Death’s whereabouts, and what I know about it. They even brought me in front of the Committee. Well, sort of. I was supposed to show up myself, but then I got distracted with something and they came and got me. Just rounded me up,” Lucian said, not wanting to reveal to her that he had been meeting with Danira.

He’d already been warned by Yoshimi about associating with the Progeny of Light.

Yoshimi made a sound with her throat. “They have a habit of doing that when you don’t obey their requests.”

“But they have no real jurisdiction over me, at least that’s what I thought. That was until they told me that they would torture me until I gave up my mantle if I didn’t help them find Old Death. Can they actually do that?”

“They are more powerful than you, so yes, they can,” Yoshimi said, a strand of her dark hair falling in front of her eyes, contrasting with the pale moon white of her face. She politely swept it aside.

“It has sort of pissed me off, to be honest with you,” Lucian told her. “You know as well as I do that my predecessor could be anywhere. How am I supposed to know where he ran off to with the angel? And just so you’re aware, in case you didn’t already get the word, they’re looking for you too.”

A cold expression swept across Yoshimi’s visage. “Those fools will never find me, and if they do, I will make them regret the day that they even assumed they were powerful enough to question me on their terms.”

The way she said this sent a chill down Lucian’s spine, the intense focus on Yoshimi’s face something that he hoped never to see in an opponent.

“Anyway, that was the gist of it,” Lucian said. “So now they’ve given me a limited amount of time to find him.”

“That’s another trick that they use,” Yoshimi said bitterly. “By not giving you a precise amount of time, they assume that will make you work harder. It also gives them the time they need to debate how they should actually handle this. Did the ranking member explain your potential punishment to you?”

“No, it was another guy, a real…” Lucian swallowed. “Well, you know.”

“There is always one of them like that,” Yoshimi assured him, “and I don’t keep track of who these people are any longer, or their make-believe rankings. It really doesn’t concern me; they have no real power over me. They generally only have power over newer Deaths, and those that believe in their system, of which there are thousands, believe it or not. Remember, they don’t acknowledge that there are other types of parasites; the Council and its Committees generally want to simplify the role of Deaths to make it crystal clear, and, in my opinion, to never expand upon our horizons and our responsibilities. They also want to keep us at war with the Progeny of Light, but that is a conversation for another day.”

“I get it,” Lucian said as he took another sip from his cup of tea, a warm feeling moving over him. He wanted to know more about making these elixirs, but he had other questions, and her brief explanation sort of made sense. “I know that you don’t know the guy, the former me, but do you have any thoughts on how I could find him? I don’t want the Committee to come down on me. Like you, I’d prefer to be left alone.”

“At your level, this is probably a wise decision,” she said, “and I would begin by searching through his things.”

“Already did that, although I haven’t asked my crows if they found anything while I was out.”

“Then that is what I would do if I were you; I would keep looking.”

“Maybe I could create something that will lead me to him, like they have in video games sometimes. It’s worth a shot, but it may not work. I don’t know how half the things I create work, yet they do.”

“I doubt that something that you could create out of thin air would help you find him. If this were the case, one of the Deaths that is more powerful than you would have already done so,” she said bluntly. “They would have done it for me as well. So I don’t believe it’s a possibility.”

“Makes sense. Okay, I got another question for you. Have you ever heard of a Death splitting their mantle? I just found out about this recently, and like I said, I’ll get to that piece in a moment. But have you ever heard of that?”

“Yes, I have. Where did you come to learn of this? I am assuming you are asking about this regarding your brother and his parasite problem, as a worst-case scenario.”

“I’m not quite there yet,” Lucian admitted to her. “I don’t really know how my brother would fare in this role, especially with his addictive nature. But I guess I should just come clean with it: I killed Menor. Today, maybe an hour ago, an hour and a half ago. I really don’t understand how time works as a Grim Reaper, but you get the point.”

Lucian noticed a swift tightening of Yoshimi’s throat. “You killed him?”

“I was checking on my brother. He’s in New York City with his fiancée, Sam; they’re taking a little mini-vacation paid for by my Ma. Anyway, Menor just showed up out of the blue. He looked like he’d gone crazy. Believe it or not, the guy was naked, his face still painted with the white skull, and as soon as he saw me he grew bone armor that quickly turned to metal, which reminds me to possibly turn my armor to metal as well. Anyway, we went at it.”

“Menor had been a Death Hunter for a long time. How did you manage to beat him?” she asked. “He has even given me trouble…”

“To be honest with you, I think he could have beat me. I was always ready to teleport out of there, but the dude was so blinded by rage that he wasn’t thinking straight. He had a weapon, which is mine now, an ax. He probably could have just hacked me into bits, but instead, he had his weapon flying around, and then he was blindly attacking me, not thinking about the kind of weapons I could have, no real strategy. When he did actually get to me, he was super strong, easily able to overpower me. But I had a few backup plans, and was able to get to another rooftop to test out a new gun I’ve developed. It’s a particle-beam cannon. Ever heard of one of those?”

“No, but I can imagine what it does.”

“It basically microwaves the molecules inside someone and causes them to explode. I hit him with that, and even though his ax came at me, cut my head off even, my body still did what I told it to do which was continue to shoot at him.”

“So now you have killed two Deaths.”

Lucian shrugged. “Looks like it. And the reason I asked about splitting a mantle is because he revealed to me that he had split his mantle, that Alice was his sister. Which explains why he was raging out. So I was just wondering if you knew anything about that.”

“It is a possibility,” Yoshimi told him as she refilled her cup of tea, her tone of voice telling him that she didn’t want to elaborate. “Would you like some more?”

“Sure, the stuff is great.”

Once she was finished filling Lucian’s cup, she continued. “It is true that those two were trying to kill me, and this was an unwanted burden that I pushed onto you. It is also true that you didn’t mean to kill them, or at least this is arguable. But you have now killed two Deaths.”

“And that’s what I wanted to ask about: is this actually a bad thing?”

Yoshimi paused, the light from the waterfall rippling across her face. “You mean becoming a Death Hunter?”

“Like you, I’m not trying to hunt Deaths, the ones who aren’t bothering anybody. But these kinds of Deaths, the ones that are going after people? Has anyone ever been a Death Hunter for Death Hunters?”

“I can see the appeal. Killing one from the Progeny of Darkness is a great boost to your own power,” Yoshimi said, not answering his question. “But it can also bring you unwanted attention. There are those in our spiritual plane of existence that have been Death Hunters for hundreds, if not thousands of years. They generally only go after larger targets, fallen angels, and a few have formed alliances to rid the world of injuresouls.”

“I had a feeling those things were killable. Old Death warned me against engaging them, but I have had to defend myself and try to get away from them.”

“Everything is killable. But you would be ill-advised to consider yourself strong enough to take on injuresouls,” she said firmly, “even with your newfound power. But as to the question if being a Death Hunter is bad, because that’s what you’re hinting at, correct?”

Lucian nodded.

“I personally don’t believe there is any honor in becoming a Death Hunter, but I also don’t believe there is much honor in becoming Death. We are parasites that feed off other parasites, or at least that was one way I used to look at this role. What honor is there in that?”

Lucian considered this for a moment. Even though this role was unorthodox, there was still part of him that thought it could be used for good. “So it’s not exactly bad?”

“If you want to get stronger, it is one way to do so rapidly, but you will also bring attention to yourself that perhaps you would like to avoid. I suppose the real question is: what level of risk are you comfortable with?”

Lucian paused, considering what Yoshimi had just said. “What if I don’t know the answer to that question?”

“You should start to have at least some passing familiarity with the risks you would like to take in this role. How powerful do you plan to become? And aside from trying to save your brother, what are your ultimate goals?”

“I have to save him,” Lucian said firmly.

“You could always ask a friend, or, as previously discussed, you could split your mantle.”

“I’m not ready to do any of that yet,” he admitted.

“Good, because I’m not here to help you fight your battles,” she said, a thin smile on her face. “But I am here.”

“You went with me to the South Wind,” Lucian reminded her.

“I did, and it was a risky thing to do. You did well there, by the way. I never told you that; as you may recall, I was pretty busy with my own affairs once Azazyel showed up.”

“I remember,” Lucian said, a brief flash of their battle painting across his mind’s eye. He had been distracted with finding Old Death, but he recalled what it was like when a fallen angel had shown up, especially once he brought the fight to the other side of the gate.

“I know he is still out there looking for me,” Yoshimi said, her expression darkening. “And he may kill me.”

“You could just stay hidden forever,” Lucian suggested.

“I could, but that isn’t really who I am. Actually…”

Lucian waited for her to speak, the woman heavily contemplating what she was planning to say next.

“Actually, it may be who I am. What’s wrong with hiding? It’s easy enough to go out there, find a quick snack, and return here.”

“Something tells me that’s not how you really feel,” Lucian said.

Her eyes softened as she looked Lucian over. “You shouldn’t know me as well as you do.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I do. I’ve never been close to any other of our kind before. I’ve had plenty of battles with them, some that I have lost, and others that I have won. But I’ve never been close to another Death.”

“I thought I was getting along pretty well with Old Death, but now I don’t know if I’ll ever find him again. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t know anyone else like this either, aside from the Deaths on the Committee.”

“It does strike me as odd that our kind would structure ourselves in this way, especially with the power that we all possess, and the near inability, aside from sheer torture, to inhibit another Death’s power.”

“Bureaucracy exists on all planes. Who would have thought being the Grim Reaper would come with bureaucracy? Not me.”

“Nor me.”

“Okay, maybe I’m taking up too much of your time,” Lucian said, trying to read the vibe she was putting off. “I’m sorry I came all the way here to Kyoto to find you and bother you. I just wanted to ask you these questions, to let you know that they were looking for you as well, the Committee.”

“And the Death Hunters, and the fallen angels, and the Progeny of Light. A lot of different people would like to see me dead.”

“Somehow, I have the feeling that you’re going to show them all in the end. And if they got to know you a little better, that would be a different story altogether, I’m guessing. But I’m still new at this. What do I know? Okay, I’ll get going. But I’ll probably want to contact you again. Do you have a better way for me to contact you than to come to Kyoto and play video games while I wait around for you to show up?”

“Let’s make it easier for you next time,” she said as she took a clip from her hair that Lucian could have sworn wasn’t there just moments ago.

Yoshimi extended her open palm toward him, her kimono pulling away, revealing just a small sliver of the pale skin of her wrist.

“Is my hair really getting that bad?” Lucian asked, running his hand over his head. He had short hair now so it was meant to be a joke; Yoshimi made no indication of acknowledging his humor.

“Throw this clip at any object and it will shatter. That will call me. The clip will reform, and you can use it to call me again.”

“I really appreciate it,” Lucian said as he took the hair clip from her. It was an absolutely exquisite piece made from a very dense wood, the clip suddenly warm.

Another question came to Lucian: “Have you ever seen a purple parasite?”

“A purple parasite?”

“Yeah, this person I know, my ex-girlfriend, her father recently passed and…” Lucian cleared his throat. “Anyway, I checked in on her, and I noticed a purple parasite on her back. It put up a hell of a fight. I didn’t have much power left, so I got out of there. But I wanted to ask you before I went back to check on it.”

“You say her father passed?”

“He did,” Lucian said, trying to hide the awkwardness in his voice. Even though he knew Yoshimi would not care if Katy’s father had died because of his actions, he still didn’t want to tell her how it happened, how it was all his fault.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the mental health parasites now, white, usually some type of red core, vertical eyes,” she said.

“I’ve seen and killed plenty of them, thanks to you.”

She nodded. “If her father has just passed, I would say that this particular parasite is an offshoot of one of them. That can happen, you know; different parasites can join forces as well.”

“Yep, I’ve fought one of those before,” Lucian said, again thinking of Katy’s father and what he had experienced on the train coming out of Boston.

“So that’s another thing that could have happened. Sometimes they actually merge together; other times they are both present separately on a person’s body.”

“Good to know. I appreciate your patience.” Lucian stood, and as he did he did something that he had never really attempted before. He placed his hands at his sides and bowed toward Yoshimi. “I hope I’m doing this right,” he said, his head still down.

“You amuse me, Lucian,” was her only reply.

“Okay, well, I’ll get out of your hair, with your hair clip. Sorry. I bet I’ll have other questions though, and once I do, I’ll be sure to give you a shout,” he said with a wave. “Also, I don’t know why you would ever need me for anything, but I am here if you do need me for something. So there.”

Yoshimi stood, bowing to him as well. “I may take you up on that offer, Lucian.”

Chapter Twelve: Potions, Potions, Potions

Lucian started to float up into the air, where he crossed his legs beneath him. He hovered there, looking out at the lake that sat in front of his workshop.

Sabre City was behind him now, all the buildings empty even though flying vehicles moved through the air. Surrounding the lake were acres upon acres of thick woods, a place Lucian had never ventured.

His predecessor’s home was beneath his feet.

Hugin and Munin buzzed around, both looking happy, if two spherical drones with beaks could look happy.

“Anything?” he asked the two of them, referring to the search they had performed earlier in the library.

He thought for a moment about giving Hugin the ability to speak but decided against it, not sure what kind of voice he would give his creation. Then again, he could always just take it away once his crow spoke to him…

“Whose voice would you like?” he asked Hugin as he gazed at his crow.

His crow did a backflip.

He considered giving Hugin a feminine voice, but then Lucian always thought of his two crows as male, and he knew doing that would throw him off a little bit.

A smile came to his face when he gave his crow the voice of Old Death, a bit haggard, ancient, and constantly teetering on the verge of collapse.

“I can talk,” Hugin said, his beak moving. “How wonderful.”

Munin looked to his counterpart, and made a gesture that reminded Lucian of a shrug.

“Just temporarily,” Lucian told Hugin. “Now, did you find anything that would help me locate him?”

“There are many interesting books in that library, some of which would interest you greatly, but we didn’t find anything that we thought would help. Cuthbert has taken extensive notes in some of the books, but nothing regarding a location he might have gone. There was also a notebook of insults he had written down.”

“I figured as much,” Lucian said. “Maybe we should check around the South Wind. Maybe he didn’t go very far from there.”

“That isn’t a bad suggestion. And he did like the desert. At least, I believe he said something to that effect. Perhaps we can check there.”

“Which one? There are lots of deserts.”

“He had a couple of books on the Gobi Desert,” Hugin explained, “one about an American who had traveled there in the early twentieth century, a man who the author claimed Indiana Jones was based upon.”

“Some guy traveled to the Gobi Desert and they based Indiana Jones on him?”

Lucian did what he would have done had he been alive. He pulled out his smartphone and typed in a question about who Indiana Jones was based on.

He came to a page about a man named Roy Chapman Andrews, an archaeologist who had led expeditions through China and Mongolia in the early twentieth century, his expeditions famous for discovering fossilized dinosaur eggs.

Lucian dropped to a sentence claiming that the movie wasn’t based on this man, that it was based on this archetype of an adventurer/archaeologist, although Chapman fit the bill.

“Not quite,” he told Hugin, “but I see what you’re trying to say. Sorry to fact check you there,” Lucian said as he threw his phone over his shoulder, the device fizzling out of existence. “So Old Death was interested in deserts.”

“I believe so,” Hugin said, still using Lucian’s predecessor’s voice. “Perhaps we could check the deserts.”

“That’s some task,” Lucian said. “But it at least gives us a start. And if any of those assholes from the Committee come sniffing around here, I can say that I’m at least working on something, that I got a lead.”

Lucian took away Hugin’s ability to speak, his crow nodding.

He would have to decide later if he wanted his crow to speak to him all the time. It was a bit jarring, especially with the quiet he had grown used to, and choosing his predecessor’s voice was definitely not the way to go.

As Lucian levitated, his legs still crossed beneath him, he began to change the color of the sky, darkening it, a purple hue running across everything above him as stars took shape.

“Potions, potions, potions,” he said, recalling, or at least attempting to recall, exactly what Yoshimi had said about using his own power to make an elixir.

But what would this elixir do?

Lucian was still deciding that; he figured it could be handy to have one that, for example, doubled his strength, replenished his Soul Points, or one that made him twice as fast as he normally was. Then again, perhaps he could just give himself those skills with a wave of his hand.

Still, part of him liked the idea of being able to down a potion and get a power.

As much as he tried to get away from being a guy who had grown up playing too many video games, it was always part of him. Any gamer alive would love to be able to actually use potions to enhance their powers.

And here Lucian was, in whatever his “life” could be considered, and he had the actual opportunity to make them.

But how?

He began with a beaker, which he quickly dropped, realizing it was a bit contrived.

With a wave of his hand, a cauldron appeared in front of him, floating.

“That’s more like it.”

Curling his fingers, Lucian scooped up some of the water from the lake, depositing it into the cauldron, where it began boiling.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he told Hugin, whom he felt was judging him. “Since when have you known me to do things the normal way?”

Lucian sluiced his hand through the air. The water began to circle inside the cauldron, bubbles popping off it.

As it did so, he stretched his palm out above the liquid and imagined his Soul Points coming through him, merging in his head and moving down his body, out the palm of his hand.

Sparks and whirling bits of energy fell from his palm into the swirling water. It changed the color of the liquid, becoming black, thicker.

“That did something,” Lucian said, looking at his stats. “A lot of something, by the looks of it.”

“But we aren’t done here,” he said to his two crows. He imagined himself pressing even more power into the liquid. Once he figured he had done enough, he created a ladle.

“Too much?” he asked Hugin, who nodded.

Lucian banished the ladle and summoned a small glass bottle. He dipped it into the liquid and filled the bottle to the top.

Once he was finished, he stepped down from the air, walking a few paces away from his kettle.

“Here goes nothing,” he said as he threw it back, wincing at the sour flavor.

His heart started to race.

Lucian placed his hand on his chest, even though he knew he didn’t actually have a heart, feeling once again what he had felt so many times up until the point that he had died.

A full-on panic attack came, Lucian getting down onto the ground, his heart beating so hard that he could feel it in his wrists, his breath shortening.

“No,” he whimpered, laying his back on the ground, trying to steady his breath, to lower his heart rate as he relived his heart condition.

He began to feel lightheaded, his vision blurring, his two crows floating above him as his chest pulsed.

The feeling went away and Lucian sat up, gasping.

He began to spit up the black liquid, eventually crawling over to the lake and dipping his head under the water. He drank as much of the water as he could, and laid back, his hands on his stomach.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he told his two creations, both of whom buzzed above him.

Ezra the cat had joined them now, the feline perched under the floating cauldron, looking up at it as if he were judging if he could jump high enough to reach it.

“I’ve got to try again,” Lucian told his companions as he levitated back into the air, crossing his legs beneath him.

He focused on the cauldron for the second time, the water swirling within it, his hand over the surface of the liquid as energy poured out of him.

Lucian had the notion to summon Yoshimi with her hair clip, but decided against it, figuring he would do it another time, that he needed to forge his own path.

He had to be able to do these things on his own.

He also needed to know more about the power he possessed, and he felt foolish for not digging deeper into it earlier. Then again, Old Death’s teaching style had mostly been for him to go around and figure it out himself, which had allowed Lucian to create without limitation, but he also didn’t quite know what he was doing.

And he had a feeling, especially if he planned to become a hunter of Death Hunters, that he would need to know more about his power.

He also needed to know how to locate other Deaths.

This last notion was especially important. It seemed that anyone could locate Lucian when they wanted, but he could not locate them.

Yet another thing he planned to ask Yoshimi.

Lucian focused more energy into the cauldron, humming the theme music from a popular JRPG that had a particular tune that played when someone crafted a potion.

“That should do it,” he said again as he checked his stats, seeing that he had poured another thousand Soul Points into it.

Lucian shook his head.

It was amazing how many points he still had left. He recalled the days when he was running around with less than two hundred points; how pathetic that seemed compared to where he was now.

And he knew that he would grow stronger.

It was inevitable, especially with the way he played…

“It’s not a game,” he reminded himself as the glass container lowered into the cauldron, coming out with the black liquid inside it.

But the system Lucian had devised, and the way he went about doing it, made it feel like a game at times.

He lowered to the ground, this time stepping a little closer to the shoreline, the waves rippling toward him and then moving away, the twinkling stars above casting blips of dancing light on the surface of the water.

Hugin and Munin lowered in front of Lucian, Hugin buzzing with worry.

“It’s fine; I can’t die like this,” Lucian said, mostly for himself.

He took a deep breath in, and threw the potion back.

His arms exploded off his body, the air misting with blood.

His heart wasn’t thrumming this time around, but he did feel like an idiot for what just happened. He also realized a fatal flaw in his experiment: if he had an actual stat sheet, he would be able to see what the potion did, if it actually did anything at all.

But he didn’t, and he didn’t feel like making one at the moment.

That was one thing Lucian hadn’t really introduced to his role.

He’d never been the type of gamer that really looked at those things, unless he was trying to min-max something, and while he had built some of his Grim Reaper user interface from scratch, there were details he didn’t want to add to it, knowing that they would only distract him in the end.

But without being able to check what the stuff did, aside from blowing off his arms, what good was it? And further, if he could create a potion that had a specific task, like doubling his strength or his speed, how would he tell it that? Also, how would he rate himself if he were to create a stat sheet?

When he’d created weapons earlier, they just sort of took shape, Lucian having to do little aside from imbuing them with his imagination. Making potions apparently required more effort, and if not effort, more know-how.

“Yoshimi,” he whispered to himself as he gave up on his project, the cauldron falling to the ground and shattering.

After his arms reformed, Lucian turned his attention to the giant creation he was working on, which was situated to the left of the lake.

He still had over seventeen hundred soul points left; he figured he would put as many of them into this newest creation of his as possible.

He’d already crafted the legs and waist, so he started there at the next logical location, pouring his energy into the torso as locking mechanisms cascaded up the sides of his creation’s legs, merging over its inevitable stomach and doubling back down, the object growing stronger with each pass, more durable.

Lucian did this until he was starting to feel lightheaded.

As Ezra came over to him, weaving between his legs, Lucian slowly moved back to his workshop, where he crawled into bed.

He thought about playing video games for a moment, but he ended up watching a rerun of a sitcom he had been a fan of as a child.

It wasn’t the same now that he was Death.

Chapter Thirteen: Hallucinations

Lucian awoke, no dreams.

He recalled Old Death telling him that he would have vibrant dreams in his new role, yet he never had them, or if he did, he could never remember them.

He sat up, noticing that it was still dark outside. With just a thought the sun began to rise, its orange light reflecting off the lake.

His crows were at the end of the bed, resting on a pillow, Ezra wrapped around them. The cat turned onto its back, curling its paws to its chest and looking adorable.

It yawned as Lucian sat up, crossing his legs beneath him.

A hot cup of coffee with just a touch of cinnamon appeared in his hand. He patted his lap, inviting Ezra to him.

Lucian sipped his coffee as he looked out at the absolutely gorgeous view he was presented with every morning. The sunsets were equally stunning, Lucian never having lived in a place with such a fantastic view when he had been alive.

It made him think for a moment about the people on Earth who could afford incredible views, what their perspectives must be like. The people waking up in a penthouse in Manhattan, or someone with a home with views of the mountains, or the ocean.

It must have been nice.

Once Lucian was done with his coffee, he walked out to what he considered his training area and equipped the ax he had received from Menor.

It glowed with energy as he looked it over.

Lucian threw it into the air, the ax’s handle slamming back down to the palm of his hand.

“Just like Thor,” he said as he raised a pillar of stone from the lake.

He hurled the ax at the pillar, the weapon cutting through it and returning to his hand. He shook his wrist out and the teeth on its bit appeared, gnashing, growing in size.

“I wonder where he got this thing,” Lucian said, realizing that the former Death Hunter had probably created it. For some reason, it hadn’t disappeared with his body, perhaps because Lucian grabbed before its owner was officially dead.

He raised a few more pillars from the water, cutting into each of them. He then threw the ax in a circular pattern, as if he were Mario throwing Cappie.

“Woo-hoo,” Lucian said under his breath, mimicking Mario.

He practiced with his weapon for a little bit longer, and then decided to do what he should have done last night, but had ended up expending too much energy fiddling around with elixirs and his newest creation, which was still resting to the left of the lake, awaiting Lucian’s next surge of energy.

He pressed his thumb and pinky together and appeared at a coffee shop, where he saw Katy seated at a table with her friend, Julia.

As Lucian focused on the two of them, their death dates appeared.

Name: Julia Reynolds

Date of Birth: 10/16/1995

Date of Death: 08/07/2086

Name: Katy Weston

Date of Birth: 11/18/1994

Date of Death: 10/24/2097

“Did he ever say what he wanted? I mean, I know some people don’t want to talk about that kind of stuff, but sometimes…”

“All Dad ever said was that he was going to win the lottery, and that he would probably die right after he won because he had pretty bad luck. But that he was going to make sure that he set it up in a trust fund for me.” Katy shuddered. “This just doesn’t seem real. I had literally just spoken to him, and sent him money. And…”

“No,” Julia told her she took a sip from her coffee. “You told me.”

“It just all came apart so quickly. It seems so surreal. And now…”

“Did he leave you any debts?”

“Actually, no.” Katy wore a big scarf even though it was warm inside, her cheeks red, Lucian wishing at that moment that he could reach out and comfort her. “I figured he would have, but he was renting his flat from a friend, and he stopped using credit cards years ago after he couldn’t get anymore because of his bad credit. I don’t think they could have come after me anyway, but at least he didn’t have that kind of debt. This has been a hard month or so,” she said. “First Lucian, now this.”

“That’s right,” her friend said. “You went to his funeral, right?”

“I did, and it was so sad. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different had I been there.”

“You shouldn’t think like that.”

“No, I’m serious. How would things have been different if I was there to help him, to take care of him?”

Julia frowned. “Lucian was a grown man; he could take care of himself.”

“But we parted in such a stupid way. It was like neither of us were ready, yet both of us needed each other. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just reimagining the past. But being at his funeral was…” She swallowed hard.

“It’s okay,” Julia told her. “It’s okay.”

“You know, even though I’m in the medical profession now, I swear to you that there was a time when I first heard his diagnosis and I thought it was because of me. That I had broken his heart.”

“No, it wasn’t you…” Lucian said, a sinking feeling in his gut.

He noticed the purple form start to swell on Katy’s back as she continued this pattern of thinking, blaming herself, her friend Julia trying to tell her that it wasn’t her.

“You motherfucker,” Lucian said under his breath as Menor’s cannibalistic ax appeared in his hand.

He charged forward at the parasite, and as he did it shot purple limbs covered in black-bristled hair at Lucian.

His armor formed just in time, his ax flying into the air and cutting into the parasite, taking a few of its limbs off.

His plane of existence changed, Lucian now jumping from table to table in the coffee shop as purple tendrils and bloated spiky fists chased after him.

He cracked his head on a light fixture and dropped to the ground, his body shooting up so that he was now standing upside down on the ceiling. His crows flew forward, Hugin and Munin slicing through tendrils.

“Get the fucker,” Lucian growled as his scythe appeared in his hand. He began cutting away at the tendrils, even as some of them reached him, the hairs crawling up his arms despite his armor.

He started to feel dizzy.

Plumes of color were introduced to his environment; a neon blue, then a neon green, then sharp yellow hues.

Suddenly Lucian was standing on the edge of a cliff, just about to step off.

He caught his balance but was still tossed off the cliff by something striking him in the back of the head, Lucian tumbling forward. He began to freefall with his arms out wide, not able to comprehend what happened.

The parasite.

It had somehow affected his mind, and upon realizing this, Lucian was able to break free from its mental trap.

He was back in the coffee shop again, several of the windows shattered as his ax twisted in and out, cutting through tendrils, Lucian’s particle-beam cannon appearing in his hands. He blasted the parasite, assuming it would explode after it was heated up for a moment.

But that never happened.

A portion of it tore off, but the goddamn demon bug kept coming at him, this time with dozens upon dozens of sharp stingers.

Lucian’s cape swirled in front of him at the very last second, preventing some of the stingers from reaching him. His crows spun in and out of the space between Lucian and the parasite, trying to take out as many as they could.

He conjured Grim Mecha, his replica launching into action with his blade arm.

The parasite moaned and quaked as Lucian and Grim Mecha worked through its limbs.

And Lucian thought that they had gained the upper hand when all the tendrils and tentacles and stingers and bloated fists on the ground had just fallen off and fizzled out.

But then they started to merge together, Lucian so distracted on taking out the tendrils coming for him that he failed to stop the ones on the ground from moving up his body, using their bristly hairs to break through his armor and dig into his skin.

Suddenly, Lucian was at his own funeral, his mother seated with his family, his open casket front and center.

A parasite burst through the stained glass mural, the shards of glass melting in the air as they twisted toward Lucian.

They grew into liquid daggers as they pierced his chest, Lucian thrown backward into the parking lot, where he smashed into his brother’s truck, car alarms going off.

A force made of melted stained glass dropped onto Lucian, screaming in his face as its razor-sharp teeth gnashed at him.

He struggled to push it off, Lucian eventually able to fling it to the other side of the parking lot.

He started running, his speed starting to slow because of the sand…

“Sand?”

Lucian was on the beach in Portland, Maine, the sand making it difficult for him to run any faster, his body sinking in further and further with each step.

His heart thumped in his chest.

He could feel himself growing short of breath, his limbs tingling, a strain in his throat, a vein pulsing on the side of his head.

His heart beat faster.

Lucian was suddenly gasping for air, pursued by the stained glass creature, which easily caught up with him now that it was in the form of a wolf.

His heart exploded.

The wolf made of melted stained glass drove him into the ground, ripping flesh from Lucian as he started to scream.

Something hit Lucian in the face and everything went black.

He was back in the coffee shop, lying in a pile of rubble, Grim Mecha scrambling to help him to his feet.

“We… have to come back,” Lucian said to his creation, realizing that this wasn’t a battle he could win, that he was going to need a different type of strategy to take the purple parasite out.

He pressed his pinky and thumb together, going to the first place that came to mind.

Chapter Fourteen: Angelic Coffee Break

Lucian appeared in his brother’s backyard.

He stumbled forward, dropping to one knee just before the shed, a thin layer of snow on the ground.

“That was brutal,” he said under his breath as he stood, his Soul Points appearing.

“Over twelve hundred?” he asked aloud with a groan.

While what he had been through was vexing, especially the demon bug’s mind-bending psychological attacks, Lucian didn’t feel like he had spent twelve hundred Soul Points in the battle. This annoyed him, and as he’d already noticed before, his usage was tied to his overall count.

Had he been in the battle at a lower level, he probably would have expended fewer points.

But there was nothing he could do about that now.

It was going to take some strategy to beat the parasite tormenting Katy.

And was it actually tormenting her? After losing her father and her ex-boyfriend, shouldn’t his ex be feeling a little depressed? Wasn’t that normal?

Lucian also had a fear at the back of his mind that he hadn’t really thought through yet, one that probably should have been a focus for him: if he removed the parasite, what would happen next?

“She’s not going to die,” he reminded himself. “You saw her death date. She’s got a long time left.” He looked up to Hugin, who hovered in front of him. Munin had already taken off, checking out his brother’s place and rushing to the backyard after dipping inside the home and running into Tuck the cat.

“Katy is going to live to be a hundred,” Lucian mumbled to himself. “Imagine that.”

“You should be able to imagine it now, demon.”

Lucian turned just as the blast of energy cut through his torso, throwing him back into the fence. He landed in a patch of snow, a grimace on his face as he looked up to see Danira standing over him, her gun aimed at his face.

Hugin and Munin took off toward her, her cherub crows responding by colliding with them, golden energy spiraling around the two pairs of crows as they tried to overpower one another.

“Danira?” Lucian tried to press himself up, realizing he was unable to at the moment, thanks to the large chunk of his side that was missing. “Wait a minute, I don’t want to fight you.”

The angel glowered at him, the blue stripe on her face practically a V as she looked him over. “You would rather ambush me instead?”

“That wasn’t an ambush,” Lucian said as his wound began to heal up. “I barely know those guys. In fact, it was only one guy, a real asshole too, and those were the replicas he created. Look, there isn’t a bone in my demon body that would want to betray you.”

Danira blasted him again, this time Lucian’s arm flying off at the shoulder.

“Stop shooting me!”

What was left of his severed arm sprouted legs, immediately running up the fence and getting into a position that would allow it to fly at Danira if Lucian so wanted.

Danira stepped over to him. “I could destroy you right now,” she said as she placed the muzzle of her enormous energy cannon against the top of his head.

“You aren’t being serious,” he told her. “You know that I would never do anything to you.”

“I can’t trust you.”

“So you want to shoot me instead? Because you’re not going to kill me by shooting me. Not yet, anyway. You will have to shoot me a lot. You will have to keep shooting me.”

“I believe that can be arranged.”

“Come on, Danira, lighten up,” Lucian said, tilting his head up to her and flinching. The size of the angel’s weapon caught him off guard, even though he was expecting this visual. “You know me.”

“I know nothing about you.”

“And I know something about you. You have lived multiple lives. Your last life was in the body of a woman named Danielle Morales. You were killed in a club shooting on Valentine’s Day, 2019. You’ve been an angel for something like four thousand years. A long time, but you don’t look a day over twenty. You know about all these forgotten cities that I don’t know anything about. You like to copy my weapon designs.”

Danira’s face contorted into a grimace.

“I don’t want to fight you,” Lucian told her. “I really don’t want to fight any of your kind, unless they’re coming after me. Look, I know that you know that I wouldn’t ever do anything like ambush you. Come on. That’s not the kind of guy you take me for, is it?”

“You’re a demon; you will not be the first that I have extinguished.”

“Oh, come on. You only say that when you’re mad at me,” Lucian said, offering her a crooked grin.

Danira hesitated, finally steeling herself and shoving the muzzle of her weapon against Lucian’s face. “You still haven’t convinced me. How do I know that you aren’t working with fallen angels?”

“You don’t believe that conspiracy theory. Only an idiot would think that, not saying that you’re an idiot,” Lucian said, lifting his one good hand at her, and showing her his palm. “Do you want me to make some flowers for you and craft you a box of chocolate and apologize for what happened? Because I will, even though I had nothing to do with it. And I’m not great at creating food yet, but I can make a good cup of coffee. If you’d like that.”

“Are you offering me flowers, chocolates, and coffee?”

“In that order? Sure, if it will get you to lower your gun and call off your crows. Our crows are supposed to be friends, you know. They shouldn’t be fighting each other,” Lucian said, aiming his chin at their spherical creations, which continued to slam into one another, neither able to overpower their opponent.

“You really have become a pain in my…”

“Angels don’t cuss,” Lucian reminded her.

Danira blasted a hole in the ground next to Lucian, leaving a small crater, smoke billowing off it. She lowered her weapon, and as she did it pixilated, disappearing completely.

The angel stood there for an excruciatingly long minute in her white and gold armor, her skirt beating in the wind, silence stretching between them.

At that moment Lucian wanted to comment on what she wore, but figured he should keep his mouth shut, especially after she had just spared him from a prolonged battle. Besides, he had seen her armor up. He assumed what she was wearing right now was sort of her casual attire.

“So I can get up now?” he asked us his arm regrew.

“You can.”

“How did you sneak up on me like that, anyway?”

“I have my ways,” she said as she lifted a fist in the air, her crows suddenly zipping over to her.

Lucian’s crows came to him as well, and after he gave them the go-ahead, they took off, Danira’s crows now playing with Lucian’s as they chased each other around his brother’s backyard.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“The same reason you are. Actually, that can’t possibly be true. To be honest with you, I was checking in on my ex-girlfriend.”

“Because that’s not bizarre behavior.”

Lucian smirked at her. “It’s not like that. I’m not using this role…”

“You don’t have to explain yourself,” she said.

“Well, I feel like I do when I’m being accused of being some kind of pervert.”

“I didn’t call you that. You called yourself that.”

“Anyway, something’s happened and she has one of these parasites now. I’m trying to take it off her, but it is wicked fierce.”

“Wicked fierce?”

“I know you call them demons, and I call them parasites, but I’m assuming that you have seen different types, right?”

She begrudgingly nodded.

“Well, this is a new type for me, the one Katy has. It’s purple. And I believe it is related to the mental health parasites I go after sometimes at the institutes. You know, like last time you attacked me. We have to stop meeting like this, by the way.”

“I get the feeling that we are going to meet this way more often than not,” the angel said, bringing her arms to her chest.

“What’s that look supposed to mean?”

“I was promised flowers, chocolate, and coffee,” Danira said, not able to stop from smiling at Lucian.

“Okay, I can do the flowers, and I can definitely do the coffee, but my chocolate probably isn’t going to taste great. I’ll give it a shot, though.”

“Lucian, I’m kidding.”

“Are you sure? Because I can definitely make some coffee. It’s the least I could do.”

“Drinking a demon’s coffee? Where does that fall on the list of things that I’m not supposed to do?”

“Stop calling me a demon. Those parasites? They are demons. Me? I’m just a guy who ended up with an unorthodox day job. If it hadn’t been for my heart condition and my predecessor coming for me, well, who knows where I would be. I might be…”

“What would you be doing if you were alive?” she asked skeptically.

“I don’t know. Considering my condition, I’d probably be at home playing video games, awaiting death. But maybe, just maybe, I would have gotten inspired by this weird dream I had in which I became the Grim Reaper. That inspiration would see me doing something else. Maybe going out and doing some community service, or taking up a hobby. Maybe yoga. That has to be good for the heart. Maybe not. Pilates? Or is that just for women?”

“I don’t know what to say to you right now,” Danira finally told him.

“How about a cup of coffee?” Lucian asked, conjuring a cup before she could tell him no.

“That is…”

Lucian could have sworn that he saw her cheeks grow red for a moment, as if she were blushing.

But then a semi-cold look return to her face, the blue stripe across her face accentuating the fact that she wasn’t amused.

Danira took the coffee and drank from it.

“See? Not bad, right?”

“How did you do this?”

“Do what? Make coffee? I just made it.”

“No, it tastes like it tasted down here,” she said, her face lighting up.

“You don’t know how to make food as an angel?”

“We don’t eat food,” she reminded him. “From what I’ve been told, you don’t either.”

“You’re telling me that none of the angels who came down here and then reincarnated ever figured out how to make some actual food?”

She shook her head. “None that I know of, but there are thousands and thousands of them. I am…” Danira took another sip from her coffee and didn’t say anything.

“You’re what?”

“Not so popular amongst the others,” she admitted.

“What? An awesome…” Lucian bit his lip. He didn’t want to sound corny. “I mean, a powerful, take-no-prisoners angel like you?”

“If you hadn’t noticed this about me, I am a stickler for the rules. I’m not really the type that likes rapid and sudden change. Some people would say that I am a bit rigid.”

“You? Rigid? Get out of here.”

“I know that you think I am too; you aren’t going to hide it with that goofy smile of yours.”

“This is just the smile I have when I see you,” Lucian said, wanting to kick himself over how stupid he just sounded.

“More,” she said, holding her cup out to him.

“Your wish is my command,” he told her as he filled another cup. He filled his own mug as well, raising it to cheers her.

Danira did not cheers him back.

“Have you made any other type of food?”

“No, but I was working on some elixirs. That didn’t go so well.”

“Elixirs?”

“You know, like potions in a video game. I want to be able to down something that doubles my strength. That’s the idea, anyway. But to do so, I would have to figure out what my strength was. And then I would have to build a character sheet for…”

“The things you do have real-life repercussions,” she reminded him. “This isn’t a video game.”

“I would argue that life is basically a video game.”

“Would you?”

“Yeah, you start off at age one, and you get to a certain level, who knows what that level would be. For me, it wasn’t very high, just up to about level thirty. The things you do during that time affect what happens later on in your life. Your diet affects your well-being, the people you surround yourself with, the amount of money you grow up with—all of that has an effect. But there are always ways to level up, kind of like a sub-level up, really, or a skill level up. And anyway, that’s what you do. You go from one thing to the next, accumulating your inventory list, in this case, a house and a car, you know, maybe a vacation home up in Maine if you are really good at the game.”

“Life is not a video game, Lucian.”

“You haven’t played many video games, have you?”

“I played a few because of the younger brother I had in a previous life. But nothing substantial, nothing that makes me agree with you that life is a video game.”

“It sort of is,” he said, taking another sip from his coffee. “I know that you don’t want to admit that, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people on this Earth that wouldn’t want to admit it, but the way you play life determines the outcome. I would say life is the hardest, and possibly most rewarding video game, and that’s before you die and you’re given Death’s mantle, or an angel’s mantle, if that’s how that works.”

“It is not how it works.”

“Good to know; we never really went into that very much. But, especially toward the end there, that’s how I viewed life. With the heart condition I had, to think that my life was so trivial that it would just start and end kind of bummed me out. So I would think of it as a video game. I made it to a certain level, and if I kept fighting, maybe I could have made it to the next one. After all, miracles do happen. Hell, if I was a Buddhist, maybe I would respawn,” Lucian said, trying for a joke and falling flat.

“What you just said trivializes the experience of living.”

“I’m not saying that living…”

“What?”

“I’m just sitting here thinking about the fact that I’m dressed as the Grim Reaper looking at a beautiful angel and having a conversation about how life is a video game in my brother’s cold-ass backyard, not that I feel the least bit cold. And, I’m dead. Kind of odd, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what to say to you,” Danira said after a long pause.

“Are you busy at the moment?” Lucian asked her.

“If you’re asking me on another date…”

“No, nothing like that. Well, maybe something like that. I’m trying to get rid of my ex-girlfriend’s parasite. It’s a real shitty situation she’s in, and I would like to help her. But this parasite keeps doing something to my mind,” Lucian said, knocking on the back of his head. “I was wondering if you would like to check it out with me. Maybe its power won’t affect you the same way.”

Danira looked out at the yard, and from there up to their crows, which were spinning in the air, all of them now chasing Munin. “Okay, but only after another cup of coffee.”

Chapter Fifteen: Jellyfish in Salem

Lucian and Danira stood on Katy’s rooftop, looking out over the small city of Salem, its downtown mostly made of brick buildings, the homes just across the street seemingly abandoned, on the verge of blight.

There was a Dunkin’ Donuts sign hawking pumpkin spice concoctions, the flavor of the season even as winter rolled in from the northwest.

It was a hazy day, a gray day, the sun a pale yellow orb partially hidden by the clouds, Lucian not at all affected by the gloomy weather.

This was New England.

This was what it looked like in winter.

And having never lived anywhere else, it was entirely normal for Lucian.

“Are you going to stare at the donut sign all day?” Danira asked him.

“Was I staring?”

“You seem to be gazing off into the distance, like you are contemplating something.”

“I’m wondering how I can make a donut,” Lucian joked. “I mean, I know how, but I want to make one that tastes good, one that’s just right. And everyone I know knows that Dunkin’ is garbage when it comes to donuts. That place is only good for coffee.”

“Good to know. If I ever decide to become human again and I, for some reason, make the unfortunate decision of being born in this region of the United States, I will keep that in mind.”

“How’s that work anyway?” Lucian asked.

“Being reborn?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a decision that I make, but as you can imagine, it does have to go through a process.”

“See? I was just ranting to myself about that,” Lucian said, smirking at her.

“Ranting to yourself?”

He shrugged.

Hugin collided with one of Danira’s golden crows, the two spinning off.

“Watch it,” he called over to his spherical creation. “Anyway, yeah, ranting to myself about all the bureaucracy in the spiritual world. And who else am I supposed to rant to? There’s pretty much you, and…”

“And?”

“Another Death, a friend of mine. You saw her back at the South Wind. But she’s a little older than me and from a different culture, so we really don’t have that much in common. I mean, we do, we have this,” he said, gesturing to himself, “but you know what I mean.”

“And you think we have something in common?” Danira asks, as her enormous weapon started to form in her hands.

“I mean, you were American, I was American…”

“I was an angel reborn in an American’s body. I have lived in all regions of the world. I am over four thousand years old…”

“Okay, so we have a few differences. We can learn from each other.”

She was just starting to look down at her weapon when she paused, the angel raising an eyebrow at Lucian. “And what am I supposed to learn from you, exactly?”

“Easy, I can teach you to play video games, how to do construction, I don’t know… Probably some other things too.”

“Why am I starting to regret this?” Danira asked as her wings started to grow larger. “Let’s deal with this demon. She’s in there, right?”

“Katy? Yeah, last I checked,” Lucian said.

Just to be sure, he dropped down into the roof, saw that Katy was lying on the couch, a pack of ice on her head. Lucian zipped back to the rooftop. “She’s still there.”

“Distract the demon; I will come at it from the outside.”

“A surprise attack, huh?”

“Something like that. We will make this quick, and then I have other things to do.”

“You sure you don’t want to go to the movies after?” Lucian asked, trying to hide a snarky grin. “We can get in for free.”

Danira scoffed at the suggestion. “Don’t press your luck, demon.”

Rather than respond, Lucian equipped his scythe and one of his handguns with the extended mag. He knew he would quickly discard the gun, but figured he would go in stirring up trouble, in an effort to be as distracting as possible.

His bone armor began to press out of his body, rippling as it hardened, his skull mask stretching over his face.

“You look tough.”

“Where’s your armor?”

“Here,” she said as a similar process started up, Danira’s armor painting over her body, made of what resembled tempered steel, with golden and white flex joints. A glimmering cross took shape just beneath her breasts as her sharp golden mask formed, completely covering her face.

“The cross is a nice touch,” he told her.

“It has always been there.”

“I never noticed.”

“It’s not for you to notice.”

Before he dipped down into the rooftop, Lucian also invoked a dozen injurecrows, his black airborne IED’s floating before him.

“I haven’t made any of those yet,” Danira said.

“If you do, you’re going to have to pay me a royalty or something.”

Lucian dropped through the ceiling into Katy’s living room, sending a row of injurecrows at his ex even though he couldn’t currently see the purple parasite.

It was strange doing this, but he knew what his action would do, and he was right as explosions rocked the couch, the plane of existence changing as the parasite grew larger, sending a half dozen writhing purple tentacles in Lucian’s direction.

He fired his handgun at it until he finished the magazine and tossed his weapon aside, cutting through stingers and tentacles, his crows also helping him, his IED’s exploding at random.

Lucian’s cape flew off his shoulders, smashing into a muscled arm with centipede legs on the bottom side of it, stingers lifting off the back of the arm, black bristly hairs curling in his direction.

The stingers tore through Lucian’s cape, but their struggle gave him the moment he needed to dive out of the way. Lucian hit the parasite with fire daggers, all of which exploded out of his open palm.

A stinger came at him; Lucian sliced through it with his claws. Another tendril wrapped around his neck, thick hairs starting to press out of it and dig into his armor.

He glanced at the window, expecting Danira any moment now, and when she didn’t come he conjured more injurecrows, ignoring the terrible strain he was now feeling in his head.

Just to give himself a little space, Lucian equipped his carbine with its zero-point energy field manipulator. He toggled the switch to the field manipulator, even as he was being smothered by the demon bug’s tentacles.

He squeezed the trigger, a blast of energy engulfing the parasite and allowing Lucian to slam against the ceiling, throwing it off guard.

The windows blew out and Danira flew in, the angel firing shot after shot at the parasite.

It responded by growing even larger, the tentacles around Lucian’s waist and chest bulging, tightening their grips. They bashed him against the wall, the building material giving way.

Lucian was thrown outside, and he would have easily recovered had it not been for the fact that he was now partially hallucinating, all of his movements heavily exaggerated.

His fingers were suddenly twice as long as they should be, and in one moment he would see himself freefalling out of the building, only to be sinking into a deep body of water, and then back to falling.

As he tried to lift himself up, he overcompensated, flipping over onto his belly.

Lucian fell onto a parked Oldsmobile, the impact jolting him awake.

He lay there for a moment, blinking, at points seeing what he expected to see—the building overhead, and the occasional blast indicating that Danira was fighting the parasite. But he was also seeing other things, a whale passing over him, a school of sharks circling above, jellyfish, tons of jellyfish...

Lucian brought his hand to the side of his head, everything spinning, his focus now on his heart.

Was it beating differently than it should have been?

Lucian shook his head.

“You don’t have a heart,” he reminded himself as he finally was able to get to his feet, and wash himself of his bizarre hallucination.

He shot up into the air, and as he did, he looked inside the apartment to see Danira now on her knees, the purple parasite pulsing all around her, one of its tendrils jutting into her mouth, her eyes rolled into the back of her head.

Lucian was just starting to take off to her when he realized he would need backup, that he wasn’t going to be able to do this on his own.

He thought in that moment of calling Yoshimi, but he didn’t want to bother her, and he didn’t know how Danira would react if she actually showed up.

Even though the last time he had summoned him it hadn’t gone as well, Lucian went with Grim Mecha. But rather than just one, he focused more energy into his replicant, splitting him into two reaper androids.

“Let’s do this, boys,” Lucian said as he twisted forward, his sword in hand.

He cut through tendrils and stingers and fists, the parasite hissing and squealing as he fought his way in.

Lucian was not going to let this thing hurt Danira.

He reached her in a matter of moments, and as he did, he saw his two replicas coming at the purple demon bug from the other side, blasting and slicing their way through.

And he thought he had done it.

Lucian thought this was the end of it, that he was going to save the angel and tear the damn thing apart at the same time.

But Lucian was sadly mistaken.

The parasite snapped the tentacle that was in Danira’s mouth, her body flipping across the room. It latched onto Lucian’s face, more tentacles starting to squeeze around his head, his body, two sharp stingers diving into his eyes.

Even as his imagination flared up, colors and lights and insects and terrible screams at the back of his head, Lucian managed to conjure more of his spherical IED’s, explosions all around him now.

He could feel that his torso was now separated, at least partially, his arm starting to rip back, Lucian experiencing complete terror as the parasite started to shred his body to pieces.

A flash of light, blinding white, and the parasite let out a gasp.

Another flash, this one coming so close to Lucian that it felt like he had flown next to a star.

One final blistering shot.

Lucian’s torso fell to the floor, and as his eyes started to regrow, his vision blurred into focus.

Danira stood over him in her golden armor, her hair matted with blood, her weapon pointed at the ground, smoke billowing off its muzzle. She blasted what was left of the parasite again, and once she was finished, her armor started to melt back.

“Lucian…” she said, her voice a little haggard as she turned to him. Danira stumbled for a moment, quickly regaining her composure as she grabbed his leg and brought it over to him, dropping it to the ground.

“Thanks…”

“Heal up,” she told him.

Lucian patted his hands on his body to see what was missing.

While he’d thought his torso had been ripped to pieces, it was only his left leg, which Danira had already brought back over to him.

He began the healing process, his strength starting to return to them as his Soul Points flashed in front of his face:

“Crap,” he whispered to himself after seeing the damage.

That fight really had taken more out of him than he would have expected. He assumed it was what had happened at the end, whatever the parasite was doing to his mind and his body at the same time. Perhaps it was draining him in some way, which would account for how quickly his numbers had depleted.

Once he was able to stand, he did so.

Danira stepped through the debris and out of the hole in the wall and batted her wings once, lifting into the air, the sky gray all around her.

His crows now with him, Lucian joined her.

“I thought I was going to save you there…”

“You did, and then I saved you.”

“So we’re even?”

She smirked. “Yeah, we’re even.”

“Thanks for doing this,” he told her, nodding back down at Katy’s apartment. “She was a good girl, and she has been dealt a couple of nasty cards, myself included.”

“The poor thing.”

“I guess you have to go?”

Danira nodded, the blood quickly drying up as her armor disappeared, the angel back in her short skirt and partial armor, her hair shimmering again.

“Okay, well, maybe…”

“How about we go someplace I want to go next time?” Danira asked him, running her hand through her hair.

Lucian looked at her for a moment, trying to see if she was kidding with him. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, I am. As long as you are going to keep working on your food skills. I know a place we can go, something a bit interesting. I’m guessing you haven’t been there before.”

“About the only places I’ve been are the East Coast, Japan, and Tibet. I guess that’s not so bad when I put it like that.”

“Next time, then.”

“When?” Lucian started to ask, but Danira was already gone, a spark of golden energy left in her wake.

Chapter Sixteen: Eavesdropping

It was definitely a strange shift in dynamics to go from hunting Katy’s parasite with Danira to his brother’s home, but that’s exactly what Lucian did.

Sam and Connor had just arrived, Sam in the kitchen whipping something up for a late lunch. She hummed some songs she’d heard on the radio, their cat weaving between her legs until it caught sight of Lucian.

Tuck hissed; Sam quickly dropped to pet the cat, her fur-lined sandals squeaking against the linoleum floor.

“What has gotten into you?” she asked.

Sam’s phone buzzed; she looked at it, nodding as she read the message. “Honey, it’s your mom. She says she wants to keep Baby Jen another night if it’s okay with you. I think she’s showing her off to a few of her friends or something.”

“Showing her off?” Connor asked as he came up from the basement, an agitated look on his face.

“Yeah, she mentioned something about it before we left for Stamford. She’s got a couple of friends that want to meet with her before they head south for the winter. She even bought Jen a dress, just to make her look cuter.”

“She’s not a doll, and I wish I could head south for the winter,” Connor said.

“No, you don’t. You and Lucian both like the cold; it would be too warm for you down there.”

“Maybe, but maybe I would get used to it. You making sandwiches?” he asked as he saw her slicing cucumbers.

“I told you I was. Don’t you listen to me?”

“I listen, but sometimes you speak too quietly,” he said as he came up behind her, placing his hands around her waist. Connor kissed Sam’s neck, as she slowly lowered the knife to the wooden cutting board.

“Tuck is acting strange again, just hissing at nothing,” she told her husband-to-be.

“Maybe he’s getting older, or maybe we have a ghost.”

“Stop it.”

“He’s a good cat though, aren’t you, boy?” Connor asked as he bent down and scratched the cat behind the ear. “A little mouthy, but what good pet isn’t?”

“So what do you think? Should we just let Jen stay over there tonight?”

“What does Baby Jen want?” Connor asked.

“You know how she loves her grandma. She doesn’t even know we’re back.”

“Then I think there’s no harm done in letting my mother keep her hostage. We have the house to ourselves for once,” Connor said, gesturing toward the living room.

“Honey,” Sam said, “your nose.”

Connor reached his hand up to see that his nose was bleeding. “Shit, must be the weather,” he said, quickly turning from her and going for a paper towel.

“Let me help you,” she started to tell him.

“I can handle this myself. I’ve had a bloody nose before.”

“You’re doing it wrong,” Sam told him as he wiped the blood away. “Tilt your head back, and hold your nose up. When was the last time you had a bloody nose?”

“I got in a fight a couple of years before I met you…”

“I don’t want to hear about you fighting. I already told you that,” she said, playfully slapping his arm. “My future husband isn’t going to go around fighting people.”

“That guy really had it coming. I was just sitting there at the bar, minding my own business and having a beer. And then this guy comes up and says that I sat in his seat. Well, I wasn’t sitting in his seat,” Connor told her, now pinching his nostrils with the paper towel. “And there were plenty of seats at this bar. You’ve been to the place, I forget the name of it because it’s changed so many times, right there in downtown Beverly. Used to be called Ray Johnson’s. Anyway. Nobody goes there but locals, and everyone there knew me at the time.”

“I find that a little discouraging.”

“It is what it is. It was a great place to hang out, and I made a bunch of friends there. Some of those friends may be coming to the wedding.”

Sam gave him a disgusted face. “Some of your bar friends?”

“Kidding, well, just a few, anyway. This guy, like I was saying, he really had it coming.”

“Yet you were the one that got the bloody nose, right?” she asked him.

“Well, he sucker-punched me.”

“I thought I said I didn’t want to hear the story…”

“You’re the one that asked about it.”

“Okay, tough guy, but your fighting days are over. You are a father now and almost a…”

“I know, husband. Almost a husband.”

“The wedding is next month.”

“Yeah, I know. And hopefully, I have all this figured out by then,” he said as he winced.

“Are you okay?”

“Just my back,” Connor said, letting out an uncomfortable sigh. “It flares up. You know that.”

“So what should we do tonight, if we don’t have to take care of a baby?” Sam asked, returning to the cutting board.

“We could always make another baby,” Connor said with a sly grin, even as he continued to pinch his nostrils, portions of the paper towel now crimson.

“Stop it,” she said.

“What? Maybe we have some dinner, share some wine, that sort of thing. You know, pretend that the house isn’t covered in baby toys and we don’t have a little poop machine coming back to us tomorrow.”

“Do not call Jen a poop machine.”

“Well, that is sort of what she is. Tuck too.”

Lucian chuckled; he could tell that they were being playful, and it made him feel good to see the two getting along, to feel like he was actually interacting with them.

But as soon as this thought started to bubble up, a couple of things came to Lucian.

For one, his brother’s nose was bleeding because of his addiction, something Sam still hadn’t picked up on yet. There was also the fact that Lucian was eavesdropping on them, that he wasn’t part of the conversation. He was merely a spirit floating around watching their lives play out.

And if he were able to rid Connor of this parasite, that’s all Lucian would ever be to them.

He would be a photo on the wall, a memory, an eternal ghost.

If everything went according to plan, Lucian would watch them grow old together, or divorce, one of them dying before the other, or the two of them going their separate ways.

He would then shift his focus to Baby Jen, watching her grow up, the trials and tribulations of being a teenage girl in the twenty-first century, the relationships that she would eventually stumble into, be they good or bad, and the one that potentially produced a child, yet another being for Lucian to watch over.

And even as he was feeling happy to see his brother and sister-in-law get along, he also experienced a deep sense of melancholy, Lucian suddenly removed from the situation because of what he was, cursed to see things play out until he decided to relinquish his mantle.

A shadow.

His shoulders drooping, Lucian started to float up.

He pressed through the ceiling and into the attic, continuing past dusty storage boxes, eventually arriving on the rooftop, which was dotted with patches of snow.

Lucian switched his focus to his original intent all along.

He needed to grow stronger.

But after getting a taste of what it was like to kill a Grim Reaper, and the instant boost of power he had received through both occurrences, he no longer had the urge to waste his time going after the smaller kills.

And maybe this was the allure of becoming a Death Hunter.

It was a way to instantly level up.

Lucian stood in front of the lake near his workshop, the ends of his robe beating in a slight breeze that he had conjured. The sun was setting, as he had told it to do, and with the thousand or so Soul Points he still had available, Lucian figured he would craft until he was exhausted.

Back before his newest creation, Lucian began working on its chest, layers of metal lifting and pressing into each other, swirling as they formed into shapes that he could have never drawn on paper yet existed somewhere in the back of his mind.

The structure hardened, and as he continued pouring power into it, Lucian began carving out a compartment for himself. With Danira on his mind, he started to sharpen the ends of the metal, polishing it, but then decided to make it rugged.

He got to the shoulders, and started to feel lightheaded.

Lucian brought up his Soul Points, noticing that he had burned through almost a thousand points in a fairly short amount of time.

“That fast, huh?” he whispered to himself as he walked to the end of his creation.

It was enormous, seven or eight stories high, thick too. Solid.

“I wonder…”

One thing he’d noticed about his power, or at least the way that he had created his user interface to help him better understand his power, was that he had no real knowledge of how much crafting something reduced his Soul Points. Of course, smaller things seemed to barely take any power, and larger things seemed to take much more, like what he was currently working on.

But that was a given; that made sense.

And as he looked at his giant creation’s foot, he wondered if there would be a way for him to better understand and better account for the power that he was using.

Lucian imagined he could spend a couple weeks just creating everything he could possibly think of, and noting how much it took to create. That seemed tedious, and it also wouldn’t do much in giving him more Soul Points to work with.

For that, he needed to either go after parasites, or go after what Lucian was starting to contemplate more and more as the day wound to a close: Death Hunters.

“But how to lure them out?” he asked himself as he climbed up onto his creation’s leg.

He looked at the lake, the glint of his two crows moving over the water distracting him. Hugin dove in, Munin following after.

Figuring he had nothing to lose, Lucian’s robes disappeared and he hopped down from his new project.

He reached the shoreline and waded into the water.

It was the perfect temperature; he knew that with just a thought he could make it cold or hot, whatever he wanted.

He lowered onto his back, his arms out wide as memories washed over him. As he floated, Lucian remembered what the shorelines in Beverly looked like in the summer, how refreshing it was after a long, gray winter, but how he also appreciated the winter, the cold beaches, the icicles, the adventure of it all.

Just starting his car could be a chore depending on if there’d been a lot of snow, or if it had rained hard the previous night and the temperature dropped, everything covered in a thick sheen of ice.

And with that memory came the sounds of the winter, the snowplows scraping against the street; the way everything was dampened, quiet; the flimsy windows in his apartment allowing brumal gusts to actually reach his face as he slept.

The water started to turn cold.

It grew warm again as Lucian thought about his brother, about his mother, the last few days he was alive, some of the fights he’d been in since.

He could feel something in his chest again.

Lucian knew it was his imagination, but it was there, the same feeling that had caused him to go in for the first checkup.

He could see it now, driving up to the doctor’s office, ice on the streets, a sheet falling down his front windshield as he parked his car.

The ice shattering.

The doctor telling him that she wanted Lucian to see a specialist.

“A specialist?”

“I think it would be best,” Dr. Parsneau told him as she folded her arms over her chest. “It’s better to check these things out.”

Lucian did what his doctor told him. Hell, Dr. Parsneau had been his doctor almost his entire life. He was going to listen to her regardless.

And that’s how Lucian found himself on another icy day, taking his shirt off in front of a nurse, the woman typing some things on the laptop.

“Go ahead and lay down here,” the nurse told him after checking his pulse. “On your side; here, I will prop up a pillow behind you. Make sure you’re comfortable.”

“These beds will never be comfortable, but you already know that,” Lucian told her.

She smiled. “I don’t like them either, especially the paper pillowcases. But you know how it is, you have to keep things clean.”

“And disposable,” Lucian said.

“And that,” the nurse said as she rubbed lubricant on a metal applicator that almost reminded Lucian of a microphone.

She pressed it into his chest and started moving it up and down, telling him to breathe normally. Every now and then she would lower her hands and type something on the computer.

Eventually, Lucian glanced over his shoulder and saw that the nurse was looking at a black-and-white image of what he assumed was a vein in his heart.

She paused, using the pointer on the mouse to measure the diameter of something. “Now I see what it is,” she said under her breath.

“Everything okay?”

“Dr. Murphy will call you with the results.”

“Not Dr. Parsneau?”

“That’s your primary care; Dr. Murphy is the cardiologist.”

“Right. You can’t tell me anything?”

“No, unfortunately, that’s not my job here. My job is just to capture as much as I can, so we can get a 3-D representation of your heart. Now, just breathe normally and be quiet for a moment, I need to listen to something.”

Lucian heard his heartbeat, the sound filtered and slightly percussive.

“So is this an echocardiogram, or is it an ultrasound?” he asked her once she told him he could speak again.

“It’s both.”

Lucian tried to chuckle. “Because the doctor told me I needed to come in for this, and she said ‘ultrasound,’ I was thinking she might have gotten my records mixed up.”

“Ultrasounds aren’t just for pregnant women,” the nurse said as she typed. “Relax, and I want you to shift onto your back now. Remember, breathe normally. Don’t take deep breaths because they affect the signal.”

“This is how I breathe.”

“Then take short breaths. And to answer your question—ultrasounds can be done almost anywhere.”

“Even your leg?”

She nodded. “Especially legs. We do it all the time.”

“Why’s that?”

“To check the veins in their legs for various procedures. About the only place we don’t do ultrasounds is on the actual stomach and the lungs, because of oxygen. There are other tests for that.”

“Good to know,” Lucian said.

Lucian was cheerful for the rest of the day, cheerful for the next two days even.

Then he received the news.

It was all downhill from there.

Sometimes Lucian wondered how much longer he would have been happy had he not received the diagnosis, had he not known what was happening, had the effects not started to ramp up as they had.

At the time, he thought it was unfair.

He wasn’t a beacon of health, but he took care of himself, he wasn’t a smoker, and he barely drank; he stupidly figured these were just about the only ways to suffer from a serious illness at his age.

It was a painful education, and an incredibly expensive one, a condition Lucian wouldn’t wish upon anyone.

He opened his eyes, breathing, not knowing how long he’d been floating...

Lucian felt weak all of a sudden, and rather than swim back to shore, he called his cape over, allowing it to drag him to his bed.

Lucian thought about firing up Zero Enigma, but he figured he could play it another time. There would be plenty of time tomorrow, especially if he decided to stay home all day, working on his newest creation.

The sooner he finished it, the sooner he would be able to use it.

And he didn’t know how he would use it yet, but he knew it would come in handy at some point, perhaps as a Hail Mary.

“Tomorrow,” Lucian said as Ezra hopped onto the bed, his crows settling on their pillow. “There’s always tomorrow, until there isn’t.”

Chapter Seventeen: Chocolate and Robots

With over four thousand Soul Points at his disposal, Lucian planned to get his creation up and running the following morning.

But there were a few things he wanted to try out before he started up.

For one, he wanted to try to make chocolate.

As stupid as that sounded, it would be quite impressive if he were able to make chocolate that tasted like actual chocolate. For Danira, obviously, but also for his own practice, because he still hoped to make some kind of elixir that would help him out in a bind, something that would make him faster or stronger.

He knew that Yoshimi could do it, or at least he assumed she knew how, and she did so without having an actual stat sheet. But all Lucian had been able to do was blow his arms off, which would have made for a good party trick, but that was pretty much it.

There was a piece of the puzzle that he was missing; Lucian was certain of this.

Maybe it required leveling up in a way, working on small things before he learned to make bigger things.

He recalled the food and the tea he’d had with Yoshi, how they actually tasted real. Perhaps he needed to get to that level first, to be able to create better-tasting food before he was able to produce elixirs out of thin air.

And Lucian was going to begin with chocolate.

While Lucian wouldn’t consider himself an expert in the kitchen, he did know how to bake and cook, and he had helped his mother make chocolate mousse before, which was one of his father’s favorite dishes. He knew what chocolate was supposed to taste like, and he knew, or at least he understood by texture, the difference between a bar of chocolate and a hunk of fudge.

Lucian conjured an apron with a skull on it, which looked like something the Punisher would wear at an Avenger’s barbeque.

A table appeared on the other side of his workshop with a burner on it, a pot of chocolate already boiling on it.

Lucian knew this was going to take several rounds and a bunch of taste tests to get right.

He was up for the challenge.

As he got to work, his crows chased each other out, Ezra eventually following them.

Lucian produced a spatula and started stirring the chocolate, making sure that it didn’t stick to the pan.

He knew he could just form it out of thin air, but he had a feeling, a sense that it would taste better if he did it this way. If he actually spent the time adjusting the flavor, adding more butter or more sugar, or perhaps something else to spice it up, perhaps he would get a better product in the end.

Lucian lowered the heat on the burner and tasted the chocolate, noticing that it was quite bitter.

“Darker,” he said, before realizing that that would mean the chocolate became even more bitter. “Not darker.”

The chocolate boiling in the pot darkened then lightened. A cup of sugar appeared in the air; Lucian poured it in, adding butter as well. His nostrils flared open as he smelled the chocolate, the scent almost right.

But there was still something off about it, something that didn’t seem right.

Still stirring, he pulled out a smartphone and looked up how to make chocolate.

The fact that he could use a phone for research, but not for social media or email, annoyed him. But there was little he could do about this fact. And besides, who was he supposed to go to for tech support? One of the Committees?

Lucian frowned at this thought, realizing that they were going to want answers soon.

All he had really found out was that his predecessor liked deserts, which wasn’t a lot of information.

Lucian understood Old Death’s fascination with deserts, but if it was all he had to work with, it probably wouldn’t satisfy the Committee’s request considering they told him to find Old Death.

Lucian hoped they would give them the equivalent of another couple weeks before they came, but since they didn’t give him an actual deadline, there really was no telling.

So rather than overanalyze what they would do once they finally did come for him, he focused on finding a chocolate recipe.

He could always conjure beans and grind them up in a melangeur, eventually producing chocolate liquor, but he was pretty sure if he kept working at it, that he could get it right this way as well without needing to actually grind anything.

A few clicks later and he found a recipe that seemed easy enough, combining the cocoa powder with cocoa butter, milk powder, confectioners’ sugar and a touch of salt. The dark chocolate recipe also had coconut oil and honey added to it, with just a touch of vanilla extract.

Hugin buzzed over to him and Lucian looked at his spherical creation. “What kind of chocolate do you think an angel would like, milk chocolate or dark chocolate?”

Hugin nodded.

“That’s not an answer.”

Lucian thought about giving his crow a voice again, but last time he’d done so, it’d been a little weird. Lucian had grown accustomed to being alone and talking to himself; while he could create something to talk to him, he was still undecided if he actually wanted that.

The silence was nice, and talking to himself wasn’t half bad, as long as no one was watching.

Of course, no one was, but Lucian had had the notion several times now of how weird it would be for someone to see him rambling around in his dark robes, talking to himself while creating weapons that would be better off in a science fiction book than they would the spiritual plane of existence.

“She’s not very sweet; maybe if we give her dark chocolate it won’t do anything, which means milk chocolate will sweeten her up.” Lucian said, before instantly chastising himself. “You sound like an idiot. Dark chocolate, give her dark chocolate. And don’t say anything to her about being sweet or not being sweet, or being able to be sweetened. Otherwise, she will shoot you.”

Hugin buzzed off as Lucian worked on the dark chocolate recipe, starting from scratch this time, and adding all the ingredients as per the instructions he’d found online.

A thought occurred to him: Lucian licked his finger to see if he could taste the sugar. He couldn’t, but he added it anyway. He tried the same with the salt, still not able to discern an actual taste from it.

It was starting to smell better now, like real chocolate.

Lucian decided to try it out.

He created a spoon and took a little scoop from the pot, letting it cool for a second before tasting it.

It was still a little bitter, but there was something that he liked about it; a deep sweetness, savory in a way that made Lucian think that he was onto something.

He added a bit more honey, and stirred it for a while, letting all the ingredients melt together before tasting it again.

“That’s it,” he said to himself, still wondering why the individual ingredients didn’t have a taste.

With a wave of his hand, a molding pan appeared.

Lucian poured the chocolate in, and after it was all set, he activated his breathing power, cooling it off almost instantly but not actually turning it to the equivalent of chocolate ice cubes.

“Okay, here we go,” he said as he took out his first piece of cooled chocolate and gave it a try.

The flavor hit Lucian so hard that he almost stumbled backward.

It was perfect.

It was exactly what chocolate was supposed to taste like.

“Damn, damn,” he said as he ate another piece of chocolate, followed by another.

Now it was time for the next test.

Lucian stepped away from the chocolate he had made and shook his hands out. He turned his palm upward and a square plate appeared, three pieces of chocolate arranged in the center of the plate.

He pretended Danira was in front of him, offering her the chocolate.

He then took a piece and tried it, smiling when it tasted just like the chocolate he’d just made.

Maybe the secret to it all was actually learning to make the recipe and then conjuring it freely. It had been the same with coffee, but coffee didn’t have as many ingredients as chocolate, especially the way that Lucian liked his coffee.

He ate another piece, Ezra coming over to investigate.

“I’m pretty sure I can’t give chocolate to cats,” he told Ezra. “Then again, you aren’t actually alive.”

Lucian considered this for a moment and decided that it probably wasn’t going to kill the cat.

He placed the last piece of chocolate on the ground, and Ezra came running over to it. The cat sniffed it, and started eating it, reluctantly at first, but then with added enthusiasm as he finished it.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Lucian asked, his apron vanishing. He checked his stats and saw that he wasn’t doing too bad.

Much to his surprise, it hadn’t taken too much to make the chocolate; then again, he had a lot more points to work with now than he had in the beginning.

Ready to switch gears, he turned to the lake and his giant creation.

This time he rose into the air above his creation, which was still lying on the ground to the left of the body of water. Lucian focused on its shoulders. He made sure there was plenty of space for tracking missiles and shoulder-mounted canyons, as well as a gun that would conjure injurecrows.

The shoulders finished, he moved to the right arm, first making the overall structure, and then adding a blade that snapped out of the forearm.

Figuring it would be best to have two options available to him, Lucian allowed for the blade to be used as a cutting tool or as an energy weapon, his next step being to add a compartment just above the wrist that also fired a concentrated energy blast.

He could create a larger gun for his creation later, which he would probably strap to its back.

For now, he focused on making sure the hand had dexterity, that it was able to swivel and move fluidly, to do anything he would possibly ask it to do.

He thought about giving the fist the power to fire off, so he could do a rocket-powered punch, but decided against that.

As he moved to the left arm, he changed his mind and returned to the right hand, and definitely gave it the ability to do a rocket-powered punch.

After all, why not?

He made the left arm the same as the right, with the same capabilities. Perhaps when he had everything up and running he would switch out their abilities, but for now, he just wanted to get his creation working.

It took Lucian a fair amount of time to finish the left arm, and once he was done, he went back to the right side, double-checking everything, strengthening it, making it rugged. He then moved to the torso, the waist, the feet, being sure to add rockets to the bottoms of the heels.

Lucian shifted his focus to his creation’s head.

He definitely wanted something that looked fierce, so we went for a mask similar to the one that he had created for himself, a skull made of metal, cliché but apropos, with beady purple eyes, sharp features, and as Lucian continued to configure it, without a jaw.

His creation wasn’t going to do any talking.

Only ass-kicking.

Lucian stepped back and focused his energy forward.

He continued to pour it into his creation, feeling the strain in his head, all of his life force flowing out of him as his mecha started to power up.

He heard a buzzing sound, his creation’s eyes flaring up and locking on Lucian.

But before he could finish, Lucian fell, exhaustion bringing into the ground.

“Whew…” he said, his stats hovering before him, too blurry for Lucian to actually make them out.

Lucian had literally poured all of his energy into his creation, and it still needed more.

But it was almost there, and as Lucian called his cape to take him to his bed, a name for his newest creation came to him.

Lucian smiled.

It was a ridiculous name.

Chapter Eighteen: Cold Day

Lucian finished his cup of coffee, savoring the last sip.

He didn’t know what the day would bring, so he decided not to focus on forcing more of his power into his newest creation.

Sure, he wanted to take it for a test drive, but he figured he would have plenty of time for that later, and besides, Lucian really wanted another day of pumping it full of energy before he powered it on.

There was always tomorrow, especially for Lucian.

He tried another piece of chocolate, smiling at the flavor.

“She’s going to love it,” he told Hugin, who hovered before him. Ezra still slept at the foot of the bed, Munin cuddled up with the cat.

Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky together, instantly appearing in his brother’s backyard.

It was later in the day than he thought it would be, and as he floated his way into the home, he noticed that Sam was already gone.

Connor, who was looking at his phone when Lucian entered, glanced up when the cat meowed, its eyes focused on Lucian.

“All right, all right, Tuck,” Connor told the cat. “I’ll go get her.”

Connor stood, stretching his arms over his head. His phone buzzed and he quickly swiped the message away, nodding.

“Just a quick stop,” he said under his breath as he put his jacket on.

Lucian followed Connor to his truck, watching as his brother fumbled in the front of his jacket for his keys. He got inside the vehicle, shivering for a moment as it started to warm up, the windows fogging until he changed the direction of the heat.

Once he fired off another message, Connor backed out of the driveway, heading toward the mall.

“Don’t go there,” Lucian said, remembering the apartment complex where the drug dealer named Kenny lived. Or maybe it was the other dealer named Tim who lived there, the one who Lucian had gone after once he saw one of the peach-colored parasites on his body.

He didn’t know what had happened to him, and he really didn’t care.

Connor turned to a sports radio station, Lucian’s brother complaining about the Patriots’ tight end as he heard a play-by-play of their last game. “They’re going to do it this year,” he said to himself assuredly. “I just know it.”

As Lucian sat next to Connor in the truck, he wished that there was something he could do, something he could say, even if it involved Lucian scaring the living shit out of him.

Anything to prevent him from going to get more.

And part of Lucian knew that he shouldn’t torture himself with watching his brother’s decline; he should be active, out there trying to grow as strong as he possibly could. But at least he had an idea how he could do that, and it didn’t involve going after measly parasites any longer, not if he could help it.

As Lucian watched his brother drive erratically, he planned to meet with Yoshimi.

He had more questions for her, starting with how to locate other Deaths.

He also wanted to know more about the whole elixir business, and what she knew about their shared power. He didn’t sense that she would judge him for becoming a Death Hunter, and he didn’t plan to hunt much anyway, and even then, he only wanted to go after the ones that were hunting others.

A Death Hunter for Death Hunters.

There had to be a way for him to do this.

Connor pulled into a parking spot at the rundown apartment complex and reached into his pocket for his wallet.

He counted his cash.

Lucian didn’t know how he was still hiding the amount of money he was spending on his addiction. He figured Samantha would have noticed that there was money missing from their account.

Then again, maybe they didn’t have a shared account.

Connor folded several twenty-dollar bills and stuffed them in his pocket, away from the rest of the cash that was in his wallet. He pulled his hood over his head and stepped out of the truck, making a grunting noise as the cold slapped him in the face.

He found his way to the same door he always went to and knocked, a different guy opening up this time and waving him in.

This guy was much larger than Connor, which was saying something considering Connor was a pretty big man. The man had light brown skin, curly black hair, and he wore a black hooded sweater with stains on it, his hands tucked into the front pocket as he followed Connor over to the kitchen.

“Connor,” Kenny the dealer said from the table. Lucian instantly recognized the man with his shaved head and the face tattoo of a cross on his right temple.

“Hey,” Connor said.

“As I said, no hard feelings about what happened last time. That stuff is strong. That was my bad.”

“I told you it was cool,” Connor said under his breath. “How’s Tim doing, anyway?”

“Not great, but don’t worry about him. He’ll get better. Anyway, I got the shit you like, well, similar to the shit, but for real stronger than last time. You got to try this.”

Kenny took a pill bottle out from a drawer next to the table and reached for a small mirror. He shook half of a pill out of the bottle, and then cut it up with a razor, his dirty fingers contrasting with the whiteness of the pill.

“Have a taste. You know how I do,” Kenny said. “And like I told you, this shit isn’t like that last shit.”

“No,” Lucian said, watching as his brother sat down at the table and snorted up the pill that Kenny had chopped up for him.

Once he was finished, Connor took a deep, satisfying breath.

“Well?”

“It’s good, it’s really good,” Connor said on the exhale.

“Hell yeah, it is,” Kenny’s enforcer said, the big man standing near the two of them.

Their death dates wavered over their heads.

Name: Kenny Emerson

Date of Birth: 07/02/1986

Date of Death: 04/16/2037

Name: Nathan Ward

Date of Birth: 01/15/1990

Date of Death: 06/29/2056

Kenny gave the man named Nathan a look that told him to shut up, which he did immediately, turning his attention back to the door.

“I was just going to buy a few, but let me go ahead and…” Connor did the math in his head. “I have two hundred.”

“Okay, pills are normally thirty, but since you’re a repeat customer, I’ll throw in an extra. So seven for two hundred. We square?”

“Got it,” Connor said, as he reached into his pocket to get his cash. He also got his wallet out, adding to the balance.

The pills were exchanged and Connor saw himself out.

Once he was back in his truck, he pulled out his phone, just as their mother called. “Ma, I told you I was coming.”

“Jen is bouncing off the walls looking forward to seeing you,” his mother said, her voice now on speakerphone as Connor started to back out of the parking spot.

“Yeah, I’m happy to see her too, Ma.”

“Where are you? I thought you’d be here fifteen minutes ago. You have a job interview or something?”

“No, I don’t have a job interview; I’m just running behind, Ma. I needed to pick something up for Sam,” Connor said as he started to pull on to a side road. He braked hard, a Honda Accord speeding in front of him. “Fuck!”

“Hey, watch your language around your mother!”

“Sorry, Ma. This asshole cut me off. He almost clipped the front of my truck.”

“Language…”

“Sorry.”

“Pay attention,” Lucian said, boiling with rage now as he watched his brother finally pull onto the road, a little shaky behind the wheel.

He still didn’t know how to react to seeing Connor do drugs before going to pick up his daughter with the plan of driving back home with her in the truck.

It was just so…

“Fucked…” Lucian shook his head, feeling intense heat in his core.

He wanted to shake his brother at that moment, to choke him, to scream in his face and let him know what he was doing, what he had become.

That he was going to die.

But Lucian was absolutely powerless, and it was as damning as it was crushing.

Lucian thought about riding all the way to their mother’s house with Connor. He thought about waiting for Connor to pick up Jen, and tagging along with them for a while, just to make sure that Baby Jen was safe.

But there was literally nothing Lucian could do. Aside from killing the parasite that he now saw poking out of Connor’s shirt, one of its tendrils massaging the back of his brother’s head, all he could do was watch his brother’s decline.

His hand now trembling, Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky finger together, appearing on Katy’s rooftop.

He had to get away.

Lucian paused above Katy’s apartment for a moment, oblivious to the cold or the falling snow.

He couldn’t feel anything anyway, and if he could, he would just produce a thick jacket to keep warm.

It was that easy.

After a second to collect his thoughts, he dropped down into Katy’s apartment to find her sitting at the table, typing on a laptop. She wore glasses, and she had a notepad next to her.

He hovered over her for a moment, seeing that she was taking notes on a variety of things, from ways to cope with the loss of a loved one, to best practices for managing an estate.

Lucian smiled at her.

At least by removing the parasite that had been on her back, he had done her some good.

He knew that she wasn’t over the loss of her father, but at least the demon bug wasn’t feeding off her, his ex’s life trajectory in stark contrast to his brother’s.

Lucian watched her for a moment, wishing that he could somehow make his presence known. He knew that she would live a long time, and he vowed to periodically check on her, to make sure that she was doing okay.

While there wasn’t much he could do, if another demon bug ever came around, Lucian could rid her of the parasite.

It was the least he could do.

Lucian pressed his pinky and thumb together, his form swirling into shape on the beach in Portland.

He made his way to the right of the beach, up the winding cliff and to the bench that overlooked the sea, clumps of the island in the distance.

It was full-on snowing in Portland, and for once Lucian was glad that he couldn’t actually feel the weather, especially when a breeze picked up, one that would have been bitterly cold.

For a moment, Lucian simply floated in the air, at one with his thoughts, his deeds both good and bad, still adjusting to the role of Death.

His moment of recollection was interrupted when he saw a portal open up, Gaspard stepping out of it.

“Lucian,” the androgynous Death said, his hair in a tight topknot, his eyes full of disdain. The man’s dark robes swirled around him and then settled.

“Are you wearing eyeliner?”

“Excuse me?” Gaspard asked, his frown deepening.

“Do you always have to show up unannounced?”

“Be careful how you speak to me,” he said. “Especially when I don’t have the others with me.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

Gaspard took a step forward, and Lucian did the same.

“So you’ve killed two of our own,”  Gaspard said. “Anything you care to say about that?”

“Are you on the Committee for Death Hunters too?”

“Very well,” he said, ignoring Lucian’s snide remark. “Then we can move on. I believe you know why I’m here.”

“If my predecessor wanted me to know where he was, he would have told me. He could be anywhere, in any world. Places that I don’t even know about. There’s really no telling. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

“The Committee is starting to view your lack of cooperation as insubordination.”

“I’m not trying to be insubordinate,” Lucian told Gaspard, throwing his hands up in the air. “I really don’t know where he is. If you want to find him, one of you should use whatever power you use to keep finding me on him.”

“Your movements are predictable; it is easy to find you.”

“Okay, well his movements should be predictable too. He has been Death a lot longer than I have, and if you and the Committee have become so good finding me, surely you must have kept track of him and have a general idea of where he would be. All I know is that he likes deserts. That’s what I have found out.”

“He likes deserts?” Gaspard’s eye twitched. “That’s all you been able to uncover in that home of his?”

“You can come look for yourself if you’d like.”

“I have more important things to do.”

“Yeah? Me too.”

“I have had the mantle for several hundred years now. You will speak to me with respect.”

“I don’t have to respect you; I don’t have to respect the Committee; I don’t have to respect anyone. We are all in this alone, and even if you have formed a little group that gets together and investigates things, everyone is in this for themselves. If you were trying to do something beneficial for all of us, you would figure out a way to smooth over the differences in the disputes that our kind has had with the angels.”

“Those…” Gaspard shook his head. “There is a lot that you don’t know, and even more you will never understand. Some disputes are necessary.”

“Masters of war kind of shit, huh?” Lucian asked with a shrug, feeling agitated, both from what his brother had just done and the sudden intrusion. “Well, let me put it to you like this: if, for some odd reason, my predecessor comes to me, I will tell him that you are looking for him. I will keep trying to find him, but you and I both know that if he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be found.”

“That’s not really why I’m here,” Gaspard said as he smoothed his hand over his robes, a sinister smile parting his lips. “Well, not exactly. I’m not here for your same excuses. I’m here to give you a deadline. You have four days. Find Cuthbert and tell the Committee of his whereabouts, or have him come to us. If you do so, our little interactions will be done. If you do not find him, as the minority leader on the Committee, I will see to it that the punishment we have already laid out is administered. Four days. We’ll meet you here unless you instruct him to come to us.”

“You really want to make me give up my mantle, don’t you?” Lucian asked, his prolonged claws starting to tear out of his knuckles.

“Cooperate, or face the consequences.”

“For some reason, I think that the Committee leader, the blonde-haired guy…”

“Lord Lifton.”

“Yeah, him, the one that sort of looks like a preppy Witcher. For some reason, I would think that he’d be interested to know that you’re threatening me. Or the lady with the black eyes.”

“Mastima,” Gaspard said, his teeth grinding together.

“I think she’d be interested too. What was her role again?”

“Investigator.”

“Then why isn’t she here? I want to work with her. She is, after all, an investigator, right?”

“Four days,” Gaspard said gravely as he started to turn away from Lucian.

“I will do what I can do, but there’s really nothing else I can tell you here. If Old Death wants me to find him, he will find me.”

Gaspard paused, offering Lucian a sinister grin. “Then you’d better hope he finds you.”

A portal began to form behind Gaspard as he held up four fingers, reminding Lucian of how long he had.

Lucian responded with his own number, one that only took a single digit.

Chapter Nineteen: Taj Mahal

Hugin and Munin spun off toward the sea, swirling around each other before dipping into the water and coming back out.

Now seated on the cliffside bench, Lucian watched the two with envy, wishing that life were that simple.

There had been a time when he was younger than he’d felt the same about a family pet named Sparky, whose main job alternated between looking cute and keeping the family company. Sparky was cared for, well-fed, never had a working day in his life.

Sparky was stupid, but lucky.

“A demon feeling sorry for himself?”

Lucian’s shoulders tensed as he turned to see Danira standing behind him in her white and gold armor, a glimmering radiance about her. Everything about her glowed, including the blue band that stretched across her eyes.

“It’s complicated,” he said, turning back to the sea.

She came around the front of the bench, her wings shrinking before she sat next to him.

“Why are you always at this spot?”

“Why do you keep calling me a demon?”

Danira smirked. “Because that’s what you are.”

“I feel the same way about this spot.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t know. The connection made sense in my head, something about not being able to change what we are. In a nutshell: I feel at home here, so something about this spot makes me feel like who I am. Sorry. I’ve got a lot on my mind today. Also, stop calling me ‘demon.’ How many times do we have to go over this?”

“But it’s what you are.”

“So you’re saying that I’m the same as the parasites that you and I have fought together? That I’m no better than them? Is that what you’re saying?”

Danira hesitated.

“That’s what I thought. Also, what did I do to deserve becoming a demon? Can’t you look at the life I lived or something and see that I wasn’t too bad of a guy? If I was such a bad guy, would you be hanging out with me now?”

“All fair points,” she finally after a long pause, a pause which made Lucian suddenly feel bad for calling her out. “Consider it a term of endearment.”

Lucian laughed. “Calling someone a ‘demon’ is a term of endearment? I’ll never get you.”

“There’s not much to get.”

“Four thousand years of baggage and you say there’s not much to get?” He waved his hand at this suggestion. “I can’t even imagine some of the things you’ve seen or been through.”

“Speaking of which, are you ready to go?” Danira said, standing.

“Go where?” he asked as his crows returned to him.

“I told you that I would take you somewhere.”

Danira reached her hand out to Lucian, turning it over, a golden energy spiraling above her palm. “Do you trust me?”

“Fuck it,” Lucian said, placing his hand on hers.

They flashed away, and it was only as they began to lower that Lucian realized that they hadn’t really teleported, they had actually blasted off into the air, Danira’s wings at full span as they barreled toward the ground.

They stopped just in front of a rectangular pool of water, revealing the Taj Mahal’s reflection.

“Whoa,” Lucian said, turning and seeing the famous tomb with its four minarets framing the white marble structure.

He suddenly felt foolish; if he’d wanted to come to the Taj Mahal, he could have come on his own, yet here he was, his mouth agape as if he were a tourist.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Danira asked. “That’s what it looks like, you know.”

“What what looks like?”

“Heaven.”

“So a bunch of white buildings that resemble mosques with reflecting pools in front of them?” Lucian asked, skepticism in his voice.

“Some places, yes. Anyway, I told you I would take you somewhere, so I figured I would take you here.” She shrugged. “It’s better than the places you take me.”

“Yeah, I can see how the Taj Mahal is better than my ex-girlfriend’s apartment. But I don’t know, that beach in Portland is something else. You’ve got to admit that.”

It was morning in India, a haze on the horizon, the groundskeepers busy sweeping some of the stone steps with short brooms. There was another man at the end of the reflecting pool using a net to scoop something out of it. There were women working on the grounds as well, all of them in rags, the parts of their arms and legs Lucian could see no thicker than twigs.

“What do you know about the Taj Mahal?” Danira asked him.

“Wasn’t it built by some guy for his dead wife? Something like that? I think we went over it once in world history class. Or maybe it was a question at a pub quiz. My ex used to like to go to those.”

“Shah Jahan was more than some guy,” Danira said, her smile thinning. “He was a powerful leader, the fifth Mughal emperor, who reigned for almost thirty years.”

Lucian looked back up at the gleaming white structure. “And that’s when he built this?”

“I was a midwife for Mumtaz Mahal, his wife,” Danira said, continuing her explanation without answering Lucian’s question. “The Shah was so distraught after she died giving birth that he obsessed over this building for the rest of his reign. Twenty-two-thousand laborers, and over a thousand elephants to transport the marble from other parts of India, not to mention donkeys, yaks, and other animals that took part in the construction of this building. The town of Agra was so vibrant then,” she said, sweeping her arm behind her toward what Lucian assumed was the city that surrounded the Taj Mahal.

He turned back to the famous structure, finding it cute that Danira had mentioned the animals taking part in the construction, as if they’d had a choice.

“All in all, with the outer buildings, it took twenty years to finish the structure. I was alive during that entire time. I watched it go from a plot of land that was given to the Shah by a rich businessman to what it is now.”

“And you were still a midwife?”

She nodded. “I was good at what I did, and it was while I was away that the Shah’s wife died giving birth. There were many that thought that had I been there, I would have prevented her death. But if I had been there, then the world wouldn’t have this. And there’s no telling if I would have been able to help her or not. It’s easy to speculate about things after the fact.”

Danira floated up, and Lucian joined her, both of them heading toward the entrance to the tomb.

They lowered, Lucian noticing just how finely the marble had been carved, almost as if it were made of paper. There were small portions of the ivory white stone that seemed to be deteriorating some, but the structure was otherwise solid, and while he couldn’t feel temperature, it looked like it would be cold inside.

“Shall we?” Danira said, gesturing toward the entrance.

The entrance was closed, but that didn’t stop either of them from pressing through it, where they entered a U-shaped hallway that wrapped around to a set of tombs.

Lucian looked up at the dome ceiling, feeling the ambiance of the place.

“Their bodies aren’t really in the sarcophagi,” Danira told him, gesturing toward the two tombs in the heart of the room. “They are much further below, in another chamber.”

“To build all this for love...” he said, feeling the power of the space, light reflecting through the carved marble adding to Danira’s sparkle.

“Indeed.”

“He got to see it completed, right? The Shah.”

Danira nodded. “I believe he could see it from Fort Agra.”

“Was that where he lived, then?”

Danira shook her head as they hovered above the tombs, something completely sober about the place, a serenity that Lucian could feel down to his very core.

“The Shah became quite ill in 1657, a year before it was completed. One of his sons, a wicked man the locals called Alamgir—which is Persian for ‘Conqueror of the World’—took his father’s throne and imprisoned him in Fort Agra for the rest of his life. I suppose the Shah could see it from there, and I do believe there were a few times when he was allowed to visit, but they kept a close eye on him.”

“His own son did that to him?”

“It was a trying time to be alive,” Danira admitted. “Under the Shah, things were generally peaceful, and the people of Agra and other outside laborers were constantly consumed by the completion of this structure.” She looked up at the dome, her voice echoing, or at least Lucian felt like it was echoing. “And then he became sick, his son took over, and everything started to fall apart. The economy changed, people became crueler, wars broke out. I died during this period. Of old age, thankfully. But it is a constant reminder to me of how fragile our lives are, the things that tether our lives to others, and how quickly they can be disrupted. Anyway…”

A bladed tail tore through one of the walls, marble flung into the air as the tail dug deeper into the structure again.

An explosion, followed by a purple ball of flame, engulfed the inner dome, Danira grabbing Lucian just in time, both of them bursting out of the top.

They looked down to the courtyard to see what Lucian knew to be a Death Hunter, his arms wide at his sides, the man holding two swords, a tail lifting over his head like that of a scorpion.

“Friend of yours?” Danira asked.

“Not in the least bit,” Lucian said.

The man drove one of his swords into the ground, a wild grin taking shape on his face.

Parasites began to boil out of the stone, stingers, fists, tendrils, and tentacles all aimed in Lucian and Danira’s direction.

Lucian barely had time to blink as one of the stingers tore into his body, driving him into the ground. He ripped the stinger apart with his claws, and pulled what was left of the demon bug out of his body, his armor instantly forming, cascading down his arms and up to his body as his skull mask took shape.

A parasitic limb hit him so hard in the back of the head that he stumbled forward, Lucian getting to his feet just as another one delivered an uppercut that sent him flying into the reflecting pool in front of the Taj Mahal.

“He can conjure parasites?” Lucian asked under his breath as he blasted into the air.

He went with his carbine, unloading his magazine at incoming tendrils as he tried to track the instigator, the Death Hunter.

With a wave of his free hand, he created a sphere of injurecrows, all of them heading to the ground below. He called upon his two crows as well, Hugin and Munin spiraling off, followed by his cape.

Lucian clicked another magazine in and continued firing at the parasites below.

Explosions sent debris into the air, his airborne IEDs doing their damage as his cape whipped by, engulfing a parasitic arm and preventing it from reaching Lucian.

And even though he knew that he couldn’t actually destroy the Taj Mahal, Lucian felt some despair as Danira crashed into the dome, the angel flying out covered in bits of marble, a portion of the structure giving way as one of the minarets fell.

Lucian returned his focus to his actual enemy, the Death Hunter, momentarily ignoring the parasites that the man had summoned.

To deal with the demon bugs, Lucian called upon Grim Mecha, his replicant nodding after his hardened metal body formed.

Electricity sparked out of Lucian’s hand as he soared forward to the other Death, tackling the man from behind and forcing a shock through his body.

The Death Hunter’s eyes flared up; his razor-sharp teeth swelled in size as he tried to take a bite out of Lucian.

Lucian’s response was to send a fist straight to his chin, his knuckles bouncing off as if he’d struck a springy rubber wall. The man’s tail grabbed Lucian by the throat and tried to pull his head from his body. Luckily, his armor protected him, Lucian thrown backward instead, straight into a circular bush.

A half dozen swords appeared around Lucian, all stabbing into the ground at once, pinning him by his arms and legs.

Lucian mentally called his crows to him, Hugin and Munin swirling in the air above him and instantly diving into his shoulders, ripping his arms from his body.

There was no pain associated with this, but he winced anyway.

As soon as Lucian was able, he sat up, his arms starting to regrow. His shoulder-mounted cannon took shape as well, firing at any tendrils that got close to him as he waited for his new arms.

A blistering blast cut into the Death Hunter, Danira now with her futuristic weapon in her hands, firing at him repeatedly, the angel stabilized by her wings.

“That’s my kill!” Lucian said, even though he knew that she couldn’t hear him.

He had no idea what benefits, if any, she would receive from killing the Death Hunter, but he needed the Soul Points.

The bone legs sprouted from Lucian’s severed arms, both of them prying themselves from the ground. They crawled over to his legs and worked to pull the swords out as well.

In the meantime, Lucian conjured more injurecrows, which he sent toward both of the battles taking place, the one between Danira and the Death Hunter and the one between the parasites and Grim Mecha, who continued to hold his own.

“Come on, come on,” Lucian said as his arms finished up. Once they were ready, he went for his plasma blowtorch, which he let charge for just a moment before pulling the handle on top of the energy weapon.

The beam of power cut into the Death Hunter, throwing him off guard, the man looking over his shoulder at Lucian as he spun away.

Danira blasted the Death Hunter again, her two cherub crows spiraling forward and trying to rip the man’s body apart.

He whipped them away with his tail; Lucian got to his feet, figuring he would add a wildcard to the mix.

Menor’s cannibalistic ax formed in his hand, and he glanced down to it, the bit melting away as teeth formed.

He threw it in the air, the ax going straight for the Death Hunter.

The man managed to block the attack with one of his swords, but then the ax came around again, this time chomping into his leg, and dragging him down.

“It’s my kill!” Lucian shouted again as he took off, his gun that fired electric tripwire now in his hands.

Danira heard him this time.

She nodded as her wings pressed her body backward, Lucian firing the tripwire once he was moving faster.

He triggered another round, dropping a net made of oscillating electric energy over the man, which shocked him every time he tried to press against it.

More of his injurecrows materialized into existence, all of them circling over the Death Hunter before dropping. The explosions were large enough to cause the ground to quake, another minaret falling.

“Finish the demon!” Danira cried, the angel just a few feet behind Lucian.

“I plan to,” he growled.

Lucian’s particle-beam cannon formed, and he even thought about putting on the pair of aviator sunglasses that he had clipped to the side, but decided against it as lights began to scale up the body of his newest weapon, reaching the two energy packs.

Before he could fire off a shot, the Death Hunter exploded out of Lucian’s tripwire, tackling Lucian and blasting off through one of the walls of the mausoleum. Marble layer after marble layer fell on top of them, the man driving Lucian as far down as he could.

The two were deposited in a dark room with two sarcophagi holding court in the center of the space.

Lucian immediately started to press himself up, his Soul Points appearing before him, letting him know that he still had plenty of juice.

“You have created quite a name for yourself,” the other Death said, his accent reminding Lucian of someone who spoke Spanish as their first language.

“And the day is young,” Lucian said as his two crows tore into the underground tomb, spiraling toward the man. He whipped them away with his bladed tail, the Death Hunter leaping onto one of the sarcophagi. Lucian’s cape came in next, his opponent ultimately cutting it away with his swords.

He spun in Lucian’s direction with his swords wide, Lucian diving out of the way just in time.

His ax spiraled down through the hole in the ceiling, dust and debris falling with it.

It slammed into the back of the man, driving him forward.

Lucian took this as an opportunity to lunge for him, retrieving his ax by its handle, his foot now on the man’s back, even if the man’s tail was seconds away from piercing the back of his skull.

He drove his ax into the man’s back just as a stinger tore into the back of Lucian’s head.

His vision now distorted, Lucian returned the favor, blood spurting into his face as he cut in even deeper with his ax.

The man’s tail lifted Lucian and flung him backward.

Everything buzzing on the periphery, Lucian called Grim Mecha to him, his replicant appearing in a matter of seconds and engaging the Death Hunter with his bladed arm.

The Death Hunter was quite the swordsman, and even as the back of his head and neck healed, he managed to block all of Grim Mecha’s attacks.

But he was overwhelmed, and this gave Lucian the time he needed to call upon his particle-beam cannon again, his vision starting to stabilize.

His ax twisting through the air, his crows swirling all around, and Grim Mecha going toe-to-toe with the Death Hunter, Lucian triggered his weapon, the blast instantly hitting his opponent.

He trained the beam on him, knowing how it worked, that it would take a moment.

The resulting explosion was practically a supernova considering the small and confining space.

Lucian was thrown into a wall so hard that he broke through it into the soil beyond, momentarily covered in dirt. He kicked his way out and fell to his knees, the dust settling as he looked up to see if he had done the job.

A spiral of energy rose into the air, blindingly white as it descended upon Lucian.

His Soul Points appeared; Lucian saw that he had gained over three thousand by killing the hunter.

He rolled onto his back, his arms out wide, sucking in deep breaths as his wounds began to heal. Lucian could see up to the top of the tomb now, and he knew Danira was up there waiting for him, that she’d let him finish the job, just as he had requested.

It was time.

It was time to go after Connor’s parasite.

Chapter Twenty: Boss Battle

“I hate to see the place like this,” Lucian said as he joined Danira, both of them now hovering above what was left of the Taj Mahal. It was bleak, ugly. To see such a famous structure turned into a pile of rubble, even though he knew what he was witnessing wasn’t real, made Lucian’s heart sink. The only thing left was the famous reflecting pool, its waters muddied with debris.

“It will be okay,” she said, clearly agitated by what had happened. “And he’s gone?”

“He is, and before you can accuse him of being associated with me somehow…”

“No, I know who that one is,” Danira said firmly. “He’s a Death Hunter known as the Spaniard.”

“The Spaniard?”

The angel ran her hand through her hair, parting it over to the left side of her head. “I have fought him before.” She took a deep breath. “That was a tough battle.”

“Did you lose?”

“He was still alive, wasn’t he?”

Lucian smirked, his crows buzzing around him. “Sort of. Did he always have a sword tail?”

“Not at first, but the second time I fought him he did. And I guess from that time onward.”

“How many times have you fought him?”

“Seven or eight times. He was responsible for killing one of the lower-ranked Progeny of Light.”

“Hold on,” Lucian said, tilting his head as he looked at her. “I thought you said my kind couldn’t kill your kind.”

“Why would I tell the enemy that I am vulnerable?”

“Okay, fair point. Well, regardless of what he did in the past, he won’t be able to do it again in the future. I put an end to it.”

“You actually killed him?” Danira asked, no change in the tone of her voice. “I thought he ported away.”

“Now my third Death. I’ve killed three.”

Danira nodded, but Lucian couldn’t tell if she was impressed or not. “Three, huh?”

“What do you know about Death Hunters?”

“When demons kill each other, they help thin their own ranks, so I have no real opinion of them,” she said with a shrug.

“What if I were to become a Death Hunter of Death Hunters? Would you have an opinion then?”

“You only want to go after those that go after your own kind?”

Lucian shrugged. “We have it hard enough as it is, being omnipotent and all.”

“Nice humblebrag.”

“All kidding aside, killing the Progeny of Darkness, as you call us…”

“Or demons, more appropriately,” Danira corrected him.

“Or that, my pet name.”

“More like your nickname.”

“You say tomato, I say tom-ah-toh. Anyway, if you didn’t know, killing one of my own multiplies my power tenfold, twentyfold even. It’s not even calculable. In a short amount of time, killing those three has made me stronger than I would have been had I been doing this for a year. Well, maybe not that long, but you get the picture.”

“And you are asking what I would think if you became a hunter of your own kind?”

Lucian hesitated as he tried to decipher the look on her face. One of Danira’s eyebrows raised as she took him in, the angel still with that shimmer about her that always caught Lucian’s attention. “Yes.”

“And my opinion matters to you?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s fine,” she said with a smile. “The less of you there are, the better.”

“You know, when you say things like that…”

“I’m just stating the facts. If you grow stronger by going after the most ruthless of your kind, it’ll prevent them from coming after me. It also leaves the angels responsible for monitoring and removing the Progeny of Darkness with an easier task.”

“So you still want to remove me, even after all we have been through?”

“Did I say that?”

“You didn’t not say that.”

She floated just a bit higher, her wings taking her up.

“Wait, are you going?”

“Well, our little encounter with the Spaniard has definitely put me in a foul mood.”

“Just hear me out. I was thinking about trying to go after Connor’s parasite,” Lucian explained quickly. “Now that I have even more power, I might be strong enough. Who knows? Want to come?”

Danira slowly lowered to Lucian. “As you may recall, I can’t do anything to that demon.”

“That’s okay,” he said, waving her concern away. “You can act as support for me.”

“Your sidekick again?”

“Would it make you feel better if we just agreed for me to be your sidekick?”

Danira couldn’t help but grin at him. “I don’t know what it is about you.”

“We can try to figure that out later,” Lucian said as he offered his hand to her.

Danira’s golden cherub crows hovered over her shoulders as she looked into Lucian’s palm with hesitation. Eventually, she lowered her fingers onto it, Lucian feeling a spark move between them.

They reappeared in a parking lot outside a hardware store in Beverly, exhaust smoke billowing out of Connor’s truck as he sat in his vehicle. The windows were slightly fogged, Baby Jen’s handprint visible on the passenger side window.

“I thought he would be with Jen,” Lucian said.

“Did you check on him earlier or something?”

Lucian gulped, remembering his brother going to the dealer’s home and doing a line before picking up his young daughter. “It was bad.”

“How bad?”

“He…” Lucian grimaced. Figuring it wouldn’t hurt her know what it happened, he explained the situation, Danira’s wings slowly shrinking as she shook her head.

“I hate to see this type of selfishness, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it play out in the lives of humans, and it won’t be the last.”

“Yeah,” Lucian said, feeling dark all of a sudden. “Let’s see what we can do about it.”

He pressed his head into his brother's window, tuning in as Connor spoke on the phone.

“Don’t worry, Sam,” Connor muttered.

“But what did they say?” she asked, her voice coming out of the phone’s speaker.

“The position has been filled. That’s what they said. I told you it was useless for me to come down here and check on it.”

“It’s good to make an appearance; you never know if that person is going to show up for the job or not. You just never know.”

“Why wouldn’t they show up for the job?” Connor asked, staring out at the sidewalk in front of the hardware store, the snow and ice pressed to the far end to make a walkable path.

“You have to keep trying, Connor. You can’t stop now.”

“Yeah…”

“Also, I was checking the account—what happened to some of our emergency savings? It’s like half of what it used to be.”

“That’s what the emergency savings is for,” Connor told her, his eyes flaring wide for a moment. “This is an emergency. I don’t have a job right now.”

“I understand that, but what are you spending it on? I mean, I’m not trying to pry here…”

“But you are, and I’m spending it on expenses; you know how it goes.”

“What expenses? I’m covering the mortgage and the car payment.”

“I still have medical bills,” he said bitterly.

“You do? I thought those were paid off.”

“No, I’m on a payment plan. Don’t you remember?”

“I didn’t think we did a payment plan. I thought…”

“I’m handling it,” Connor told her. “Don’t worry about it. I’m coming home. Do you need me to pick anything up from the store?”

“No, we should eat here tonight.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. Do you need something in particular? Some vegetables, milk, I don’t know. Beef? Do we need beef? I could sure use a beer. We have beer?”

“Just come home. We have everything we need here; let’s save money.”

Lucian’s handgun took shape as he glared at the demon bug, which was partially sticking out of Connor’s shirt, a piece of it attached to the back of his skull.

Figuring he would test it out before he really lit into the parasite, Lucian squeezed the trigger.

The parasite screeched, ballooning in size and tearing out of the windows and roof of the truck, the vehicle toppling onto its side as Lucian was thrown backward.

He was caught by Danira, who quickly lowered him to the ground.

“It worked!” Lucian said, feeling elated. “I have to do this; I have to do this, now!”

With a wave of his hand, Grim Mecha appeared, followed by the second Grim Mecha. Lucian summoned up a cube of injurecrows, all of which he sent forward immediately, led by Hugin and Munin. His cape swelled off his shoulders, spiraling toward the action as well.

“Give it everything you’ve got,” Danira said, her gun in her hand now even though she wasn’t able to touch the demon bug.

Explosions rang out.

Lucian waited for the smoke to blow away to see that the clear parasite with yellow stripes running through it had grown even larger, all but engulfing his brother’s truck, a giant blob of spiked tendrils radiating animosity.

One of its tendrils struck Lucian so hard that he was thrown into the hardware store, a display of power tools falling on top of him.

He pushed himself out of the rubble.

More tendrils came to him, Lucian hearing additional explosions and the report of weapons firing as his two replicants took on the parasite.

He erupted through the wall, his lava sword in one hand and his MX-11 in the other as he made a beeline for the demon bug, which had grown even larger.

A fist connected with Lucian’s jaw, throwing him backward again, Lucian now skidding onto the rooftop rather than tearing through another wall.

“Armor,” he said, his bone armor instantly forming, the skull mask knitting over his face.

He took a running leap and landed on top of the parasite, tentacles and eyes all around him as he started driving his sword into it, again and again, screaming as he did so, simultaneously firing his weapon, oblivious to the tentacles wrapping around his legs, moving up to his knees.

His body was torn in two just a few seconds later, Lucian’s torso tossed to the ground.

Danira landed, grabbed him, and lifted into the air before pair of stingers cut into the pavement of where he’d just been.

“It’s getting larger,” she said, supporting Lucian’s entire body weight with one hand.

“You’re strong,” was the first thing out of Lucian’s mouth before he snapped back into the action, willing his legs to regrow faster, even though he knew they would reform on their own.

He watched for a moment as his two replicants continued blasting and cutting into the demon bug, which only grew larger, now practically the size of the entire parking lot and pressing into the hardware store, the brick giving way.

“Wait…” Danira gasped. “We have to stop; tell them to stop!”

“What? Why?” Lucian asked, his plasma blowtorch already appearing in his free hand.

“Your attacks are making the demon stronger!” she said, realization painting across her face. “We have to try something else…”

“You think?” he asked, just as more of his injurecrows slammed into the side of the demon bug, its form bubbling, growing even larger as the smoke cleared.

“Just look at it closely for a second!”

“Okay… okay…”  Lucian called back his creations.

His crows, his cape, and his two Grim Mechas all retreated at once, the enormous blob of parasite now writhing with anger, its tentacles twisting into the air as they tried to locate Lucian.

His Soul Points appeared:

“I’ve made it this far,” Lucian said through gritted teeth. “I have to do this now.”

“It’s not working.”

“Then what? How do I kill it? How would I do it in…” Lucian’s head bobbed left and right.

“How would you do it in what?”

“A video game…”

Danira’s eyes went wide. “You’ve lost your mind, demon.”

“No, I haven’t, angel.”

Lucian recalled a video game he’d played several years back that had a boss who absorbed all of his attacks, growing stronger with each blow.

After several hours of trying to beat the boss, Lucian discovered by accidentally selecting the boss with the cursor that he could heal him, which was unusual.

So he tried doing that, and he found that healing him actually drained his own power but also injured the boss, preventing his opponent from absorbing his attacks.

Of course, Lucian didn’t have enough hit points to completely kill it, so he had to go back to a dungeon and level up for a few days before returning, healing the boss until he killed him.

Lucian tried at that moment to explain all this to Danira, who seemed like she was about to short-circuit by the time he finished.

“I don’t know what that has to do with the situation,” she finally said, exasperated.

“I have to pour my power into it. I have to get closer to it, I have to…”

“You have to let it absorb your power and destroy itself; is that what you’re suggesting?”

“Yes, and…”  Lucian suddenly felt elated. “This is going to work.”

“Wait…” Danira called after him as he raced down to the parasite, his hands now over his head as he dove straight into the demon bug’s body.

Surrounded by thick and pulsing goo, Lucian threw his arms out wide, suddenly smothered, everything closing in around him.

He began willing his power out of his body, monitoring his Soul Points in real-time as they dropped.

The drop happened rapidly.

He started to notice something else, a cold feeling starting to move through him, everything in his periphery morphing blue.

His expendable Soul Points dropped even more, nearing the two thousand mark, the number decreasing rapidly until it hit the one thousand mark, everything around him vibrating now, pain starting to seep through.

Lucian pressed more of his power out, ready to die, to kill this parasite that plagued his brother. He ground his teeth beneath his mask as his bones began to crush, the parasite's body condensing as it squeezed the life out of him.

Five hundred Soul Points…

Four hundred Soul Points…

The number continued to drop until he was in the double digits, seventy, sixty, fifty…

Everything went dark.

Lucian’s form starting to give way, his strength leaving him.

Twenty Soul Points…

This was it, and Lucian knew it.

And even though all the muscles in his face felt like they had been torn to shreds, he still managed to smile as he reached ten measly Soul Points.

The explosion that followed was unlike anything Lucian had ever experienced before. Flashes of color amidst the darkness, every fiber of his being torn to shreds, and indescribable pain knifing him to the very core.

It was over.

Chapter Twenty-One: A Metaphor for Something

Lucian was finally able to open his eyes, everything blurry aside from a magenta corona of light.

“Ugh…” he tried to press himself up, but the pain was too excruciating. “Shit…”

“Lucian…”

He didn’t recognize the voice; he only knew that it was that of a female, his thoughts jagged, his entire body limp.

“Lucian…”

“Ugh…”

Something moved across his pane of vision, and he tried to focus on it, failing.

“Lucian…”

He gasped, a sense of calm moving over him. “Danira?”

“Where can I take you?” she asked, her voice coming to him in truncated waves.

“Old Death… Home. Take me...”

“How? Is that where you stay?”

Lucian tried to nod, an intense pain shooting down what was left of his spine. His vision blurred into focus for just a moment as he registered the concern on the angel’s face.

She really seemed to care.

Danira grabbed his hand. “I know how your kind teleports; do it, take us there.”

“I have…” Lucian felt like he was trying to smile, but he couldn’t tell if he had any control over his face or not.

“Lucian, just take us there.”

“Chocolate. Forgot…”

“Did you say… chocolate?”

He tried to nod again.

“Lucian, this is serious, you are vulnerable here.” Danira’s voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Injuresouls.”

“Okay…”

“I can help you,” she said, and from what he could tell, she was now controlling his hand.

“Do it, teleport.”

Lucian thought of Old Death’s home.

He appeared there instantly, his stats flashing before him, even though he couldn’t make them out.

He could tell by the blur on the ‘Available’ line that he was lower than he had ever been before, and for a moment it looked like two letter Bs next to one another, Lucian’s brain kicking into overdrive and slamming into a brick wall as he tried to cobble together what had just happened.

“I killed… I killed… parasite.”

“Where are we?” Danira asked, her voice tinged with awe. “And yes. You did it, Lucian.”

“My home… inherited home.”

“You live on a cliff? What city is that?”

“Need… rest… fake city.”

“I’m staying here with you. You can rest as long as you’d like.”

Everything changed on the periphery as Lucian’s body was levitated, Danira leading him to what he assumed was his workshop.

His pane of vision changed trajectories once he was lowered onto his bed.

He suddenly felt warm, sleep coming to him almost immediately.

Lucian was on a long bridge, a glow in the distance. There was ice on the surface of the water below, skeletal trees along the riverbanks.

He recognized the area as Turners Falls, Massachusetts, a place he had become familiar with through his uncle, who lived in Gill.

Still not yet realizing that he was dreaming, Lucian started to float into the icy darkness, cars passing beneath him, more memories coming to him of Thanksgivings spent in the area, a couple of Christmases too, back when his father and his uncle were closer, before life had gotten in the way.

He continued toward the town, the stars sparkling above, the moon lighting his way.

But he could never reach the other side.

Every time he thought he had made it, the town seemed further away.

He kept trying.

Lucian spent the entirety of the dream trying to cross the bridge, no matter what came at him, be it a frigid squall or the parasites that were now bubbling up from the recently paved road below, tentacles and tendrils reaching for him, occasionally latching onto his ankle, and pulling him down.

He cut through any demon bugs that tried to stop him, never giving up.

Lucian would make it to the end of the bridge, no matter what it took.

He awoke with a gasp, in his bed, his Soul Points appearing in front of his face.

He tried to make sense of the number. It was different than it had been before, he was sure that he had been somewhere around seven-thousand-three-sixty, which meant that…

“I did it!” Lucian said, sitting up and seeing Danira lying at the end of his bed, the angel startled by his sudden exclamation.

“I killed the… you’re here?” he asked her, confusion setting in.

“Are you okay?” came her genuine reply.

“I did it, I did it…”

It was then that Lucian realized that Danira was actually in his most private of private places, on his bed no less, his crows and Ezra on a pillow on the floor, Hugin already lifting off the pillow and coming to Lucian.

“Then I guess I should go…” she said awkwardly, as she pressed her hair to the other side of her skull.

“No, stay. I…” Lucian swallowed hard. “We did it. We did it, right?”

“You did it. I merely pulled you out of the mess,” Danira explained to him. “Your video game hunch was correct. Whatever it was, exactly.”

“Transferring my own power to it to kill the parasite, that’s what I did,” Lucian said hurriedly. He now had his feet on the floor, looking over to Danira, who sat in a similar position as him, her feet on the floor.

“Well, whatever you did, it worked wonders.”

“I have something for you,” he told her. “I forgot about it earlier. I should have given it to you at the Taj Mahal.”

“You have something for me?”

Lucian turned his palm over. The stylized rectangular plate appeared with four pieces of chocolate on it, all arranged at an angle.

Danira raised an eyebrow at him. “You made me chocolate?”

“Do you want me to make coffee too?”

“I don’t really know if I should be…”

“You are already here,” Lucian said, offering her the chocolate. “You slept here. Or I think you slept. I don’t know. But I told you from the start I’m not like the others, and I don’t want you to think of me like them either. And after seeing what I just did back there, I think it should be pretty clear what I plan to do with this role. I want to go after the big ones, maybe even working my way up to…”

“Watchers?” Danira asked, a bit of apprehension in her voice now.

“Maybe, yes. Yes. Please, you have to try one. I think I got the recipe perfect this time.”

Danira took a piece of chocolate and placed it in her mouth, her eyes lighting up at the flavor.

“Good, isn’t it?”

“How did you…?”

He produced a cup of coffee and handed it to her as well. “Chocolate and coffee. I meant to give you flowers too, but I forgot. I suppose they wouldn’t be very hard to make…”

“No, this is too much. I mean, this is enough.” She quickly ate another piece and another, taking a sip of coffee with it.

“I’ll make more,” Lucian said, more chocolates appearing on the plate. He took one as well, enjoying the flavor.

“How did you know I liked dark chocolate?”

“A hunch,” he said, as Hugin lifted into the air, tilting his head at Lucian in a funny way. “What? It was a hunch.”

“I was going to look around,” Danira said, nodding her chin toward the lake. “But then I realized I was pretty exhausted too, and you were acting strangely in your sleep.”

“I was?”

“Were you having a bad dream?”

“More of an exhausting dream. I was having this dream about a bridge and never being able to reach the end. I guess it’s a metaphor for something.”

“A never-ending journey,” Danira said as she ate another chocolate. “It seems that is a similarity that we share.”

“Seems like it,” Lucian said. “Anyway, there’s not much to explore here, just in case you’re wondering. There’s a forest over there, and then if you didn’t see, there’s an entrance outside, to the right. That goes downstairs to the cliffside home, which is where my predecessor used to live. And that city over there? It’s just empty. I think he put it on the horizon just as a decoration. It’s weird.”

“So he lived below, and now you live up here?”

“I have a room below too, if you want to see it. Old Death has a pretty extensive library that he has put together. Lots of stuff. I’m sure I could learn so much in there, but I just get distracted. Anyway, I built this place up here so I could have a space of my own, and so I could train and work on some of my weapons. You saw what I was making out there, right?”

She nodded. “That seems unnecessary.”

“I still need to spend a few more days cycling energy into it, but once it’s done, it should be pretty legit, dare I say, legit as fuck.”

“I wasn’t a big fan of twenty-first-century slang.”

“You used the word ‘humblebrag’ earlier, or at least I think you used that word.”

Danira started to roll her eyes and stopped. “I did. So maybe I am a bigger fan than I thought.”

“Yeah, maybe you are. More chocolate?” Lucian asked, offering her the plate as more pieces appeared.

“Yes, absolutely. This is the best…”

She smiled at Lucian, a genuine smile, one that wasn’t tinged with self-hatred for associating herself with a demon like him. It was a smile that actually made him feel warm, that she truly appreciated him. “This is the best chocolate I’ve ever eaten.”

“Nonsense. I’m sure that when you were alive during the Egyptian times, or the Renaissance, or whatever, that you had better chocolate.”

“Egyptian times? They didn’t eat chocolate. Regardless. Maybe you’re right, but there’s just something else about this chocolate. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t eaten it in so long.”

“So long?” Lucian laughed. “You only died like what, last year?”

She smirked. “Yeah, Valentine’s Day.”

“What a crappy day to die. Well, unless you’re single and depressed, then it may be a good day to die.”

“I don’t know, it was still pretty crappy,” she said.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Lucian said, suddenly feeling bad. “I take that back.”

“It’s fine. More coffee, please,” she said, offering her cup to him. Lucian touched his finger to the side of the cup and it refilled with coffee, the word ‘Angel’ tracing across the cup in glowing cursive letters.

“How’s that?”

“That’s so corny.”

“Not as corny as mine,” he said, showing her his cup, which read ‘Demon.’

“That’s a little better.”

They drank silently for a moment, their crows now chasing each other over the lake.

“We have to check on my brother later, or I can do that,” Lucian said, just to speak. “I’m sure you have stuff to do. I also have to find my predecessor. That’s something that I’ve got to do. The Death Council, and particularly the Committee on Luminaries, have been giving me hell about finding him. I have four days, well, three days now. If I don’t find them, they’re going to do something terrible to me.”

“Like what?” she asked, concern painting across her face.

“Like torture me until I give up my mantle. I don’t know. I think maybe I could appeal it, or talk to the actual guy in charge of the Committee, rather than his little bitch-ass enforcer, Gaspard. Sorry, didn’t mean to cuss.”

“It is the same one that attacked you on the beach?”

“That’s the one.”

She nodded. “Gaspard… Ah, yes. I am familiar with him. Just in passing, though. He has given a few others of my kind trouble before.”

“The asshole sure seems ready to boot me out of Camp Death. So I have to do something about it. I plan on searching the place below again, seeing what I can find. Maybe I missed something in my last search. I’ll admit that I had my crows do most of it, but they didn’t find anything, except that Old Death liked deserts. I mean, what’s so great about that, right?”

“There is an appeal to the desert that many, who have never lived there, will never understand.”

“No, I didn’t mean that part, I meant what’s so great about uncovering that he likes deserts?”

“I see your point.” Danira bit her lip before finally nodding. “Maybe I can help you look around?”

“You would do that?”

“I was supposed to go to a meeting, but I’ve been to the same meeting every time it was called since I last died. I’m also the person that runs the meeting; people rarely show up. Some of the time it’s me just sitting there talking with one or two angels about, well…”

“Angel stuff?”

“How did you know?”

“This is going to sound rude, but please don’t take it like that: I’m guessing you guys just sit around talking about God, as if He’s actually paying attention. Sound about right?”

A wry smile took shape on her face. “Something like that. So, where shall we begin?”

“You know, I like the way you use the word ‘shall,’” Lucian told her as he turned toward the lake. “I don’t remember anyone in my life using that word, except when they were reading something at church.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“It wasn’t, but now I realize it could be construed as such,” he said with a shrug. “Sorry, it’s the chocolate talking. Sugar high or something. Let’s have some more, then another cup of coffee, maybe two, and then head downstairs. Are you game?”

“I really hate twenty-first-century slang.” Danira offered Lucian her cup. “Top me off; we’ll see how I feel after another cup of coffee.”

Danira stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out at the city on the horizon, its saber-shaped buildings especially beautiful as the sun was setting.

They’d looked through Old Death’s things for a couple hours, finding nothing aside from a pretty extensive collection of books and hand-scribbled nonsense.

“Coffee?” Lucian asked, a cup appearing in his hand, the word ‘Angel’ scrawled across it.

“How did you know?” she asked as she took the cup from him.

“Lucky guess. So that’s what I’ve been saying, something the Committee doesn’t seem to understand: I have no idea where this guy went.” An idea came to Lucian. “Is there any way that you could track whatever-her-name-is?”

“Leliel?”

“Yeah, her.”

“Not really. I can ask and see if anyone has heard from her, but I’m assuming that they haven’t. She is technically a Watcher now, a fallen angel. She no longer has her wings.”

“I seem to remember her having wings on her ankles,” he told Danira.

“It’s a metaphor. But I will see what I can do.” Danira took a sip of the coffee, savoring its flavor. “What about you? What are your plans for the rest of the day?”

“First, I’ll check on my brother. And then I believe I need to have a conversation with a friend of mine. Maybe she will have an idea, although she didn’t really have one last time.”

“The other Death?” Danira asked.

“Yes, Yoshimi. And about her, I don’t know how much power you have when it comes to calling off the angelic attack dogs, but if I were you, or if I were anyone who was tasked with going after her, I would rethink that strategy. She’s incredibly powerful; she really has no interest in dealing with bureaucracy.”

“Are you saying the Progeny of Light is a bureaucratic body?”

“I’m not saying that; I’m just saying that Yoshimi kind of does her own thing. People don’t bother her, and she doesn’t bother anyone.”

“This is going to become more and more complicated, isn’t it?” Danira asked with a sigh.

“What do you mean? You and me?”

She nodded.

“I don’t see why it has to be complicated. But that’s just me being honest. Look, I know we’re playing for different teams here, but I see us as on the same side, especially with what I’m planning to do with the mantle. No one likes radical change, I get that, but what is the point of being enemies, especially you and me? And sure, before you light into me again like you did earlier…” he started to say, recalling the small debate they’d had while looking through Old Death’s library.

“I didn’t light into you; I just explained to you some of the history between our associations so you can better understand why there’s bad blood.”

“There’s definitely going to be some bad blood, I get that. But I’m going to maintain a naïve optimism about it and ask a simple question: does there have to be?”

“That is quite naïve.”

“Yeah? Maybe. I don’t know the next time we’re going to have to fight each other, but I want you to know now that all my shots are going to go wide, and if I do have to go at you with the sword, I’ll be sure to keep it to flesh wounds.”

“The next time we have to fight, I’m going to disintegrate you,” Danira said with a playful snarl.

“Really? Here I am offering an olive branch, and you’re talking about turning me to pixie dust.”

Danira suddenly turned to Lucian and placed her hand on his cheek, startling him. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

She was gone before he could react, the woman beamed up by a golden ray of energy.

“Did you see that?” Lucian asked over his shoulder, looking for his crows. “Hugin, Munin. Did you guys see that?”

Hugin and Munin appeared almost instantly, both of them nodding.

“She touched me in like a caring way,” Lucian said, placing his hand where Danira’s hand had just been. “Then again, right before she did that, she said she was going to disintegrate me next time we fight.” He shook his head, not able to contain his goofy grin. “I guess that’s just the way it goes with women, especially heavenly beings.”

Hugin fell to the ground, Munin cascading after him, both of them pretending like they were dead.

“I know, I know it was lame,” Lucian told them. “I never got the chance to be a dad, but had I been given the chance, I would have leveled the block with my dad jokes.”

Still, with his hand on his cheek, Lucian returned to his former bedroom and took the stairs to the top, his focus shifting to his newest creation, the one that he still wasn’t quite satisfied with.

For something this large, something this powerful, Lucian knew that he was going to need to pour even more energy into it.

He had plenty of Soul Points now, more than enough to experiment. As he walked over to the towering mecha, the name Lucian had come up with returned to him.

“Grimzilla,” he said, weighing the words, and figuring it would work.

He had Grim Mecha, and he now had Grimzilla.

And the name made sense, even if the giant robot didn’t have a tail. He could give it one like the Spaniard had, of course, but maybe that would come after he got it to actually work.

Lucian cycled more of his power into Grimzilla, his hands stretched in front of him as he imagined the mecha’s armor strengthening, the craftsmanship improving.

It really was strange how his power worked, how he didn’t have to actually do any of these things on his own.

He simply willed them in his creation, and as he did so he saw portions of the metal harden, grooves starting to form on Grimzilla’s legs for aerodynamic purposes, more compartments with hidden energy weapons taking shape.

After a bit more enhancing of his creation, Lucian saw that he was down a couple thousand Soul Points.

He still wanted to check on his brother, and he knew that anything could happen once he met Yoshimi.

Lucian’s crows came to him, and as they did he pressed his thumb and pinky finger together, his form wisping together in his brother’s backyard.

It was a cold day, snowflakes falling from the sky and melting once they reached the ground.

“Here goes,” Lucian mumbled as he floated into his brother’s home. He found Connor sitting on the couch, reading something on his phone. Baby Jen was lying next to him, her eyes closed at the moment.

Lucian’s heart skipped several beats once his brother’s death date appeared.

Name: Connor North

Date of Birth: 11/01/1980

Date of Death: 07/19/2058

“It worked,” Lucian said, finding it hard to catch his breath even though he couldn’t technically breathe.

Killing the parasite had worked.

“I know you can’t hear me now, but one day, I’m going to tell you what I did to save your life. I don’t know how that’s going to work. I don’t know where you’re going to go once you pass, or how I will get there. No one has been clear to me on that,” Lucian told Connor, Tuck the cat taking notice that Lucian was in the living room. “But I’ll tell you one day, and you can thank me then. No, you don’t have to thank me. I didn’t mean it like that. I would do it again if I had to. I want you to take care of yourself…”

After fiddling with his phone for another moment, Connor made his way over to the dining room table, where he had his little kit out, half a pill on a small circular mirror.

Lucian’s shoulders dropped as he watched his brother chop up a small section of the pill and press the shavings into a line.

He cleared one of his nostrils, just to make sure there was no blockage, and once he did Connor snorted the line, sniffing again just to make sure he got it all.

“Whew,” he said, his eyes going wide for a moment before a haze settled in.

“Daddy?”

Connor turned to see that Jen was awake, the young girl standing on the couch as she looked over at her father.

“Don’t stand on there,” he said, his first reaction being to hide what he was doing, then realizing that she was too young to really process what was on the table.

Connor went to his daughter, picked her up in one hand and walked back over to his small kit.

“Don’t tell Mommy,” he said as he zipped it up, hiding the evidence.

“Mommy,” Jen said, looking to the door.

“That’s right, she’s coming in a couple hours.”

“You asshole,” Lucian said under his breath, wishing he could clock his brother for doing drugs in front of his niece.

Lucian’s cape started to bubble on his shoulders, a strange mixture of anger and disappointment spreading through him.

“Yoshimi,” Lucian finally said with a deep breath out, no longer wanting to witness what was going on in his brother’s home, especially since he was helpless to intervene.

The geisha comb formed in his hand, and rather than break it on his brother’s floor, Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky together.

He appeared in Tokyo, hovering above Shibuya Crossing, the streets quiet below.

All the lights of the famous shopping district were off save for some of the taller buildings and a few streetlamps, most of the shops closed aside from the occasional convenience store, and a few of the bars.

Lucian brooded for a moment, spiraling up and down, trying to calm his nerves.

He felt his muscles tense and relax as a taxi slowed to the curb to pick up a drunken couple, the woman leaning against the man as he tried to maintain equilibrium.

The Japanese man made a gesture like he was going to vomit, but he stopped himself just in time, the woman patting him on the back.

Lucian hadn’t been to Tokyo before, but he was familiar with Shibuya Crossing, especially as it was used in several animes as a key location.

Lucian could see why.

With Shibuya Station on one side and a shopping district that reminded him of Times Square, it really was no wonder that people flocked to this area.

It was also clear why it would be inspirational, especially if someone just felt like people watching, perhaps from one of the covered pedestrian bridges that crossed the street with their large windows, or at a Starbucks coffee shop that was on the seventh floor of a building overlooking the crossing.

Looking around again, Lucian saw dozens of American brands here, from Hooters—oddly enough—to a massive Under Armour store with a black geometric form outside of it. As he floated around, his eyes fell upon a sign pointing to a Denny’s.

“Denny’s? What kind of food will they have at a Denny’s in Tokyo?”

To answer his own question, Lucian floated in the direction of the sign, finding that the place was open twenty-four hours, just like a Denny’s in America.

The sign was lit too, and as Lucian floated in front of it he saw that they served food that looked almost like what he would get at a Denny’s in America, but smaller and more proportioned. The pancake in the picture was perfectly round and the bacon had no creases in it. Even the over-easy egg looked like someone had trimmed it around the edges, making it perfect.

“Weird,” Lucian said as he dropped the comb on the ground, Yoshimi’s piece shattering.

It reappeared in his hand in a matter of seconds.

He was just about to throw it down again, but then he recalled that she said it would do this, that once was enough.

Or at least he thought that she told him that once was enough.

A group of people stumbled out of a small bar, the women dressed nicely, their high heels clacking against the pavement as they tried to help each other stand. The man that was with them smoked a cigarette, a serious look about him as he watched the women.

They started speaking, and once again, Lucian came to realize that he could understand them fluently.

“Why did you let us drink so much?” one of the women asked the man. “I still have work tomorrow!” She made a pouty face, her friend laughing as she hugged her arm. “We both have work tomorrow!”

“What about karaoke?” the man asked. “There’s a good karaoke bar around here.”

“That would be fun,” a third woman said. She was with the group, but had been standing off to the side, quickly messaging someone on her phone. “I really want to sing some American songs. Practice my English.”

“Maybe we could sing…”

The two women that were latched onto each other exchanged glances.

“What song?” the woman on the right asked.

“I can’t remember the name...” her companion said, humming a tune.

The man ashed his cigarette. “It’s not very far from here. Come on.”

Lucian ignored their death dates once he saw a spark on the other side of the street.

The spark lifted into the air, forming a tree and showering the pavement with what looked like digital cherry blossoms as Yoshimi appeared.

“You called?” she asked.

“That was some entrance!” Lucian told her, suddenly feeling less distraught than he had been upon leaving his brother’s home.

“It’s just a thing I like to do sometimes. We should go somewhere else. Injuresouls, Watchers, the Progeny of Light, the Progeny of Darkness, or Death Hunters will be here if we stay too long.”

“In that order?”

“Let’s hope not,” Yoshimi said as Lucian’s vision started to fill with digitized cherry blossoms.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Tea with Yoshimi

Lucian and Yoshimi sat before one another, the room cast in the light from the sparkling waterfall outside. After a graceful bow of her head, Yoshimi poured him a cup of tea, Lucian graciously taking it from her.

The female Death wore a sparkling kimono with a large swath of black fabric wrapped around her stomach. Her hair was up in two buns, and her lips were shaded with a deep red that was at odds with the paleness of her skin.

“I have something as well,” he said, a plate appearing on the table, six pieces of chocolates arranged on it at an angle.

“You made those?”

“I did. I’m still learning, but they have been well received so far.”

“I see,” she said as she went for a pair of chopsticks. She lifted one of the chocolates to her mouth, taking a small nibble from it.

“This is really good.”

“You think? I mean, I tasted it and it tasted fine to me. I have tasted it a bunch, actually,” Lucian said with a chuckle. “I don’t know how much chocolate I’ve eaten, but I’m definitely going to gain weight if I keep eating like that.”

“Yes, it’s very good.”

She took another bite of the chocolate and set it down on her own plate.

“Sorry to bother you, by the way. I’ve got a lot of questions, and I figured you’d be the person to ask. I don’t even know where to begin.”

A full arrangement of sushi and sashimi appeared on the table, some of the pieces in bamboo boats, others on small, rectangular plates garnished with ginger and wasabi.

“I’m looking forward to this,” Lucian said, and just as he was about to dig into one of the rolls, he stopped, remembering his manners.

He cleared his throat and went for the chopsticks, which he used sloppily at first, until he got the grip under control.

He dipped a roll in a small saucer of soy sauce and placed it in his mouth.

On his next go around, he started off with a dab of wasabi, doing the same, enjoying the intense flavor.

“Did you come here to eat, or did you come here to ask me questions?” Yoshimi asked with a soft smile.

“Apparently both,” Lucian said after he had finished chewing. “Okay, so I got a little bit of a dilemma. I’ve got about two and a half days left to find my predecessor, otherwise Gaspard is going to try to rip me a new one. Now he’s saying that they’re going to force me to give up my mantle, but I have a feeling that maybe I can appeal this decision with the Committee. I don’t know. Is that how that would work?”

“You could certainly appeal it, but they may hold you during the appeal process, and as a minority leader, Gaspard definitely holds some sway over the other Committee members.”

“It’s not like there are that many members,” Lucian said, recalling that the Committee had only five people on it, two of which were twins. This made him wonder if they had split their mantles as well, something he hadn’t considered before. “Anyway, I have to find him. I don’t want to lose my mantle.”

“You know how to call me, right?”

Lucian looked to her, trying to hide the surprise on his face. “You would intervene?”

“If they come for you, you know how to reach me. I don’t think they will like seeing me in this scenario, especially after…”

The two were quiet for a moment as Lucian waited for her to finish.

“… Especially if they plan to do something with an acquaintance of mine.”

“I will take acquaintance,” Lucian said graciously. “I don’t want to have to call on you, but if it comes down to it, I’ll take you up on your offer. I actually wouldn’t mind finding him, just to see how he’s doing. I kind of like the guy, even though he was a bit lazy at first. Maybe not lazy, just unorthodox.”

“You told me before that you stay in a place he created, is this not the case?”

“It is. He basically built a home into the side of a cliff overlooking this big, futuristic city. All fake. And by fake, I mean there’s no one there, but the lights are on. Flying vehicles, too. Anyway, I added a little spot of my own at the top of the cliff, so I have a place where I can train. There’s a lake up there too, a forest, and I put up a workshop as well.”

“So even though he is gone, you are able to live in a place that he created solely for himself. You don’t find that odd?”

“I find everything about this odd,” Lucian admitted. Both of them went for a piece of sushi, and when he was finished eating, he continued. “But I have just sort of learned to accept the oddity, if that makes sense.”

“It does make some sense, but you do realize for him to create something that large would require him to use some of his mantle, do you not?”

“His mantle? But I have his mantle.”

“Yes, you do,” Yoshimi said. “Do you remember Menor and the way he had split his mantle with Alice?”

“I was just thinking about that, regarding a pair of twins on the Committee.”

“Yes, them,” Yoshimi said, her right eye twitching.

“But yeah, I remember him talking about splitting his mantle.”

“You don’t just have to split your mantle in half to get the same result. Does that make sense?”

“You mean you can split it into more than two pieces?”

“Yes, I don’t know the number of pieces, but it is safe to say that you could split it into dozens upon dozens of pieces if you so desired. I suppose I shouldn’t dance around what I am suggesting here: your predecessor created this world you live in with a portion of his mantlecore. I don’t know how large of a portion, but it must be substantial. Otherwise, it would have collapsed had he died, or disappeared.”

“And because he gave whatever was left of his mantlecore. You said mantlecore, right?”

“Yes, he gave you his mantle, which is another way to say his mantlecore.”

“Since he gave it to me, I’m allowed to live there and exist there.”

“Right. Are you able to modify it freely?”

Lucian nodded. “Easily.”

“So, if a piece of him is there, and you’re currently living there, perhaps you need to start there,” she said as she brought her tea to her lips.

“Start there? I searched his room and his library, nothing.”

“No, not just there, the entire place. Search every part of it. See how far it goes, how big the space is. Did he leave anything behind?”

“Actually, he left a cat named Ezra.”

“Maybe you should ask the cat where to find him. The cat may know. That doesn’t mean it will tell you, but it’s a start.”

“I’ll do that,” Lucian said. “I’d like to find him.”

“But if you are able to, and they come, call me. I will…”

“You don’t have to,” he said softly.

“You didn’t let me finish. I will clear the air—let’s just keep it at that. I was there at the South Wind; I saw firsthand what happened. Perhaps my testimony will persuade them to leave you alone.”

“I hope it doesn’t have to come to that,” Lucian said.

Part of him wanted to go toe-to-toe with any of his adversaries, especially Gaspard, but he also knew that stirring up trouble with the Council of Death may not work out in his favor.

“What are your other questions?”

“I guess I should have started with this one, considering we haven’t seen each other for a couple days. How are you doing?”

She looked away from Lucian. “Why do you ask that?”

“Hey, no reason, and I’m not trying to bother you or anything. I thought it was rude for me to show up and just start asking questions.”

Yoshimi returned her gaze to Lucian, her eyes sparkling for a moment then turning dark. “I am doing fine. I have mostly stayed here. I thought you came here to ask questions related to your journey, not mine.”

“I didn’t want to be selfish,” Lucian said. “And I thought that maybe you have had something going on as well.”

“I haven’t, and I don’t consider you selfish.”

Another spell of silence stretched between them, Lucian eventually speaking.

“Okay then, moving on. Here’s a question I’ve been wondering. How are people finding me?”

“What do you mean?”

“It seems like Death Hunters can just appear wherever I am, angels too. How are they finding me?” Lucian exhaled audibly. “And before you answer that, I should probably let you know that I killed another Death Hunter, one known as the Spaniard. Familiar with him?”

Yoshimi nodded. “And you are growing stronger?”

“I am, but as I told you before, I’m not trying to go after regular Deaths.”

“You’re going to paint a target on your back if you keep killing our own kind,” she said. “But that is something you have to deal with on your own. Let’s put it this way: new Deaths and old Deaths alike put off a scent. Those that know how to tap into that scent can find them quite readily. I can’t explain to you how to tap into this, as this wasn’t something that came suddenly to me. It was only after years that I was able to notice it.”

“So, I have to smell it.”

“It’s not that kind of scent. It is something that you feel, something that can take a while to recognize. I’m sorry I don’t have a better explanation than that.”

“That’s fine, at least it gives me something. Now, another question.” Lucian ate a piece of sashimi that had a tangy burst of flavor in its center.

“You like that one, yes?”

“I do,” he said, going for another.

“It’s something I came up with.”

Lucian finished eating and continued. “Long story short, I tried to make an elixir and ended up blowing my arms off. What I’m looking to do is to create like a potion—or elixir, as you call it—that increases my strength, or makes me twice as fast. Something like that.”

“It blew off your arms?”

“Yeah. Kind of funny, now that I think about it. My first attempt was basically me trying to pour my energy into…” He thought again about what he had attempted to do with the water in the lake. “Actually, it wasn’t as much me bottling my power as me trying to enhance something with my power.”

Yoshimi offered Lucian an honest grin. “You really are going to pry all my secrets out of me, aren’t you?”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Lucian said, bowing his head. “But everything you do tell me, just know that I really appreciate it, and that I take it to heart.”

“Aside from the hunting Deaths part.”

“You never told me that I shouldn’t hunt them; you only said that it wasn’t a great idea, and that you don’t consider us honorable creatures anyway.”

“Good, so you are listening.”

“I’m trying,” Lucian told her.

“I’m glad you came,” Yoshimi said as she went for another piece of chocolate. “I was wondering when you would call me.”

“You can always show up uninvited, if you’d like.”

“I think I would be more of a third wheel if I did that.”

Lucian swallowed hard. “Third wheel?”

“You said you had a friend, right?” she asked, Lucian not able to tell if Yoshimi was teasing him, or being serious.

“I guess you could say that,” he finally said. “I’m just trying to make sense of all of this.”

“We all are,” she assured him, “except that some of us have realized that sense can’t be made of our situation, and it is best just to exist.”

“I’m not there yet, which brings me to my last question.”

“Yes?”

Lucian recalled killing his brother’s parasite, and the anger he had felt a bit earlier when he’d seen his brother still using, even though his parasite was gone. He quickly explained the situation to Yoshimi, the mysterious woman listening intently and never stopping him to ask questions.

“So you did it,” she said after he’d finished.

“I did, but I just don’t know what to do now. It is still affecting him; he’s going to hurt himself or someone else. And if that is the case, he’s going to blow through his family’s finances, or get caught somehow and bring embarrassment to himself. You see the dilemma here.”

“I do,” she said. “Perhaps it is time that you stopped checking on him for a while. I have had to do that before with people I cared about. I...” A dark look came over Yoshimi’s face. “Let’s leave it at that.”

“Stop checking on my family?”

“It may be the only way.”

Lucian considered this for a moment, finally shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Yoshimi, I just don’t think I can do that.”

Chapter Twenty-Three: Demon Goat

Lucian smiled at Ezra as the cat weaved between his legs.

“I need to practice conjuring milk,” he said under his breath as Ezra purred. Remembering that the cat seemed to like chocolate too, Lucian created a small rectangular plate, akin to the plates that Yoshimi had used, and set several pieces of chocolate on it.

He placed the plate on the ground and crouched next to Ezra as he petted him. “That’s a good kitty. We’re going to make this easy. Are you willing to work with me?”

Ezra arched his back as Hugin took interest in the cat. The compartment on Hugin’s back opened, the retractable claw coming out and slowly lowering onto Ezra.

“Hey…” Lucian started to say.

Hugin started petting the cat gently, looking up to Lucian for confirmation. Once Munin saw what Hugin was doing, it lowered as well, petting the cat too, Ezra loving it.

“You’ve got your chocolate, you’re getting your pets, now tell me: where is he?”

Ezra paused. The cat looked to Lucian, something flickering behind his eyes.

Or at least Lucian thought something had flickered.

“That’s right, kitty, I’m asking you directly. You’re clearly some kind of magical cat, or better, a cat made from magic. So where is he? I’ve got to talk to him. The Committee is going to be coming for me soon if I don’t.”

Ezra returned to the piece of chocolate.

“Now come on; don’t be like that. I’m just asking for you to show me, to show us,” he said, motioning to Hugin and Munin, “where Old Death is. Cuthbert. Boy, is that a weird name to say. Cuddy. Didn’t he call himself that? Stop staring at me like that. These people are going to come after me and do some terrible shit, or force me to do some terrible shit, if I don’t find him.”

It took Lucian twenty minutes of trying to coax Ezra into helping him before he finally gave up.

If that cat somehow knew where his predecessor was, he wasn’t going to tell him.

“Some help you are,” Lucian said as he turned his attention to the giant mecha he was creating. He floated over to it and quickly checked his Soul Points, seeing how much he had to work with.

“Definitely enough,” he said to himself as he started to cycle more energy into his creation. Grimzilla was done, but Lucian wanted to be sure that it was as powerful as he could make it before turning it on.

This got him wondering if he could do the same thing to other items he’d created.

To test this theory, he equipped his lava sword and cycled power into it the same way he’d cycled power into Grimzilla. To his surprise, a soft sheen cascaded down the weapon, its lava core igniting and settling. It didn’t look any different after the sheen died down.

“So it works on my weapons as well, or at least it makes them shinier,” he said to himself as he returned his attention to Grimzilla.

Once Lucian was down to about two thousand Soul Points or so, he stopped cycling and powered his creation on.

Grimzilla’s purple eyes flashed once.

His mecha abruptly sat up, a whirring noise meeting Lucian’s ears as he floated before his creation.

“Welcome,” he said, not able to contain his smile.

Grimzilla pressed to his feet, the ground quaking a bit as he took a step forward. The giant mecha looked at his hand and flexed his fingers, nodding as he did the same to his other hand. The retractable blades in his forearms popped out, the sharp ends rimmed in energy.

Unlike Grim Mecha, who had a blade arm, Lucian had decided to give Grimzilla full dexterity. This would allow him to do things like pick up an opponent and slam the enemy to the ground, lift things, or simply do what he was doing now.

Grimzilla wiggled his fingers as if he were playing an air piano. He squeezed his hands into fists and took a few practice swings.

“Easy, big guy,” Lucian said as Grimzilla nearly stomped Ezra, the cat curious as to what Lucian had created. Ezra bolted away, Munin following after him.

“Ready to go for a spin?” Lucian asked.

Grimzilla nodded. The heavily armored cockpit on the front of his body opened and Lucian floated up to it. He had trusted his instinct fully when designing the giant mecha, and as he settled in the cockpit, Lucian was glad for his active, yet architecturally sound, imagination.

The cockpit was comfortable, the seat made of plush leather with enough room to move around that he didn’t feel cramped. Due to the design, Lucian sat at a forward-facing angle, which would allow him to be ejected if that’s what needed to happen.

Once he was in, the hatch began to close, a series of lights powering on and displaying information. Lucian saw his Soul Points appear alongside Grimzilla’s power levels, noting the two were tied together.

With a swipe of his hand, he rearranged the information, moving the data he probably wasn’t going to use much, like trajectory and RPMs, off to the side. Once he was set, his pane of vision changed as a variety of feeds were cast into the cockpit.

They painted across the back of the hatch, Lucian able to select which angle he wanted to go with. With this feature, he’d be able to see what was behind him and below, depending on which feed he switched to, reticles on the screen zipping to the left and right as he cycled through feeds.

Lucian chose the simplest feed, the one coming from Grimzilla’s eyes. Once that was set, Lucian whispered the words, “Let’s go.”

Everything shook around him for a moment as Grimzilla lifted into the air. The mecha now felt like an extension of Lucian’s body as he flew forward, stopped, and backpedaled, Lucian using, of all things, a video game controller to control his creation.

Lucian had considered ways to control him, and while it would have been cool to have something like a haptic response suit to completely mirror his movements, in the end, he’d gone with what he knew, video games, an FPS-style controller layout in particular.

And the controller response was pretty good.

He could easily trail left and right, there was a boost, and there were options as to which weapon he equipped, and ways to force fire. Since Lucian wouldn’t always be in the cockpit, Grimzilla was fully autonomous as well. The self-autonomy also would allow him to use his own AI to fight while Lucian was in the craft, controlling some of the energy weapons hidden away in compartments along his craft’s body.

“Time to test you out,” Lucian said, giant boulders rising from the lake.

He shot through them, the air filling with debris. He then grew pillars of stone from the lake, which he raced toward, cutting through them with his energy blades.

Lucian practiced for nearly thirty minutes, getting familiar with using his creation’s weapons. The meter on his Soul Points flashed once he reached a thousand.

“Shit,” he said, wishing he had more juice. “Let’s wrap it up for now. It’s exploring time.”

Grimzilla lifted higher into the air than Lucian had ever flown in Old Death’s world. The cliff below shrank in size as Lucian moved toward the empty city, which he took a lap around before noticing a spark in the distance, something past the forest.

He hit the jets; Grimzilla blasted away toward the spark, eventually clearing the forest and coming to an endless desert filled with soft dunes, a slight breeze moving through the sand.

“Hold here,” Lucian said. The hatch opened on the cockpit and he floated up to Grimzilla’s shoulder. “That’s some desert,” he said, once he could get a better view of just how far the dunes stretched.

From his current vantage point, it almost looked like an ocean, the sun setting, its dark pink rays reflecting off the sand.

Lucian turned back in the direction of the forest, which seemed far away now, a black line on the horizon.

“You can really book it, can’t you?” he asked Grimzilla as he settled onto his creation’s shoulder. Lucian snapped his fingers and Hugin and Munin appeared, both looking tired. “Trying to keep up?”

Hugin nodded.

“Sorry about that. Okay, so Old Death likes deserts, and this world, that he made with his mantle, is apparently surrounded by a desert. So maybe this is where we should look for him. Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking here?” Lucian asked as he lowered Grimzilla down.

His giant mecha kicked up a lot of sand, but eventually he found solid ground.

Lucian checked his Soul Points again.

“That should be enough,” he said as he created several dozen crow replicas, all about twice Hugin’s size. “Don’t get jealous,” he told Hugin and Munin as they watched the replicas line up. “These ones are for surveillance.”

The surveillance crows took off and Lucian settled into the increasingly large shadow created by his mecha’s body.

He conjured a bed, and once that was set, a flat-screen television appeared in the air, Zero Enigma already loading.

“Let’s call it a night,” he told Hugin and Munin once they lowered onto their cushion. “We’ll let the surveillance crows do some searching and we’ll see what we can figure out in the morning.”

After the loading screen, which reminded Lucian that he had a skill tree available for each of the powers he learned, his avatar formed. He was still in the fur he’d equipped last time he played, and rather than run around looking like an idiot, Lucian re-equipped his robes.

“Yeah, it’s not as cool,” he told Hugin, who seemed to be watching what Lucian was doing. “But my robes are enchanted.”

Lucian opened the map and selected an area known as Rejnar Canyon.

Another loading screen started up as he fast traveled there, this one reminding Lucian that different items have different effects.

“Duh.”

His avatar appeared at the start of the canyon, Danira at his side.

“That’s right,” Lucian said, recalling that he’d gotten a bottle of onion wine and that he hadn’t tried it yet. Since its attributes were only listed as [???], Lucian quicksaved before throwing the potion back.

Everything went dark; the music that indicated a character had died played.

“Um, okay,” Lucian said as he loaded his save file.

A breeze picked up, one that he hadn’t caused himself, whipping up grains of sand. Lucian had the notion to put aside his video game controller and enjoy the desert, but there would be plenty of time for that after he did a little grinding in the canyon.

The load screen started up again, this time reminding him that looted items could be stripped of their component powers.

“Thanks for the reminder,” he said as his avatar reformed, Danira at his side. “Not going to try the onion wine again,” Lucian said under his breath as his character started running. “Fool me once…”

Lucian noticed a random NPC standing in the shade of the canyon, and as he approached her, a scene started up.

“Mister? Can you help me, mister?”

[Depends on what you need.]

“Please, mister, my goat ran off.”

[You want me to find a goat? I have better things to do.]

“This isn’t any goat; it’s a magical goat!”

[Does it taste better than a regular goat?]

“How could you say something like that?” she asked, frowning. The NPC moved awkwardly before continuing. “Do you think you could help me?”

[I’m not really in the livestock business.]

“Please!”

[Sure, I’ll help.]

Lucian grinned. There was no other dialogue option by that point; he’d been cornered into helping.

“Thank you!” the young girl said, suddenly smiling. “My goat’s name is Marlena. I think she should be close by. I can hear her bell. You can always call her name, if that helps.”

A prompt appeared.

To call the young girl’s goat, press [L3] and [R3] at the same time.

Lucian’s avatar began moving through the canyon, occasionally coming across enemies as he listened for the bell.

Pressing [L3] and [R3] made the screen flash, but as always, they never played his avatar’s voice. This was likely due to the amount of voice-over work they’d need due to the wide selection of avatars available, from male to female, elf to goblin.

Lucian had started the game as a goblin, but had later gone to one of the temples to change his race once he discovered that the goblin always had trust issues at the villages, leading townspeople to constantly challenge him or accuse him of stealing something.

The screen flashed again as Lucian called the girl’s goat.

Something moved on the screen and he took off toward the movement, coming to a dead end.

“There you are,” Lucian said as he cornered the goat named Marlena. And he thought that was going to be easy too; the cut scene would play, he’d return the goat to the girl, and the girl would give him some type of reward.

But the cut scene never started up.

Instead, the goat began to quiver, its body exploding into a cloud of viscera as a flesh-colored monster with horns and spikes took shape.

“A parasite, huh?” Lucian said, already cycling through some of his options in his head.

He attacked first with his scythe, just to see if it had any effect.

The goat surged forward, taking quite the bite out of Danira, who had already started firing at her with bursts of electric magic. She came in with a sword as well, Lucian doubling up her attacks as they attempted to hack the goat to pieces.

The goat’s life bar flashed, which Lucian took to mean that it would soon die.

Instead, it grew even larger, sprouting another head.

For a moment, Lucian wondered if it was like the parasite that had latched onto his brother, the demon bug growing in power with each strike. But he could see its life bar, and it hadn’t risen any, which meant this was simply another stage in the fight.

He cast fireballs at it before switching to his ability that drained life and reduced attack power. Danira fell, his companion killed by an especially nasty blow, the words CRITICAL STRIKE appearing on the screen and fading as she died.

“Nooo…” Lucian said under his breath, this time going to his inventory list and throwing back a potion that doubled his strength, and another that made him impervious to harm for one minute. He also chugged a potion that refilled his HP and fourth that added to his overall speed.

He started hacking away at the monster goat, occasionally casting magic at it, the demon’s life bar slowly starting to dwindle.

It took him another round of potions, but Lucian finally took the fucker down.

As soon as he did, the young girl appeared on the screen.

“What did you do?” she cried, balling up her fists in anger.

[Your goat attacked me first.]

“But Marlena was such a sweet goat!”

“Yeah, right,” Lucian grumbled. “You see what she did to Danira over here?”

The young girl ran off, leaving Lucian’s avatar with some XP, but not much else.

“What the hell kind of side quest was that?” he asked as he opened his map, selecting the nearest city.

With Danira gone, he’d need to get another companion, preferably female.

Lucian expanded the map and checked out a few of the other cities. There were some at the far ends of the map that he hadn’t explored, and he’d visited the ghost people in the Lawless Lands before, but he wasn’t at the right level at the time, and wasn’t able to actually converse with the townspeople.

But that was ages ago, hell, when Lucian was alive, and there was one village called Nuxvar that he could fast travel to which totally had a pub.

“Pub it is,” Lucian said, recalling when he’d first come to Old Death’s world and liked to booze a bit. It hadn’t had an effect on him then, and thinking back now, he realized it hadn’t really had a taste either.

Maybe it was a good thing Old Death hadn’t told him about how he could use his mantlecore to enhance the flavor of things. He may have spent a lot of useless energy trying to get wasted, especially at the start of all this.

“Probably smart not to tell a new Death that stuff,” he whispered to himself as he selected the village of Nuxvar, a prompt asking him to confirm.

The load screen started up, featuring an image of a sword with leather wrapped around its hilt, reminding Lucian to revisit past towns, that new quests can come up.

“Duh,” Lucian said under his breath as his avatar took shape.

The village of Nuxvar was bathed in twilight, an eerie melody moving through the air. The beefy guard at the village gate, who had the upper half of a man and the lower half of a ghost greeted him.

“Welcome to Nuxvar,” he growled, Lucian momentarily startled by how gritty he sounded.

Responses appeared, and as usual, Lucian went with snarky.

[What’s someone have to do to get a body around here?]

The guard laughed. “You think you are pretty funny for a mortal, don’t you?”

There was no option to reply, so Lucian moved on.

Apparently, he was at the right level to talk to the people now, and as he moved through the village, people called out to him.

“Mortal!” one of them said, an elderly man with a voice that sort of reminded Lucian of Old Death. “May I have a word with you?”

The quest box appeared and Lucian declined it.

The NPC turned nasty. “Then be gone, you filthy scoundrel!”

Lucian thought about engaging the man for a moment, but decided to move on instead, walking up a set of stairs that led to the residential area. His first action was to verify that there was indeed a pub, which was toward the end of the area.

And once his final destination was secure, Lucian circled back around to the first home. The door was locked; he attempted to pick the lock, but wasn’t able to get it open. There was always the option of smashing through the front door, but he figured he’d check for a side entrance just in case.

He moved around the home, past a few shrubs with red berries on them, where he found a door.

“Lootville,” Lucian said as his avatar entered the home and began stealing stuff.

There wasn’t a lot, but he was able to get some cheesewheels to add to his collection, as well as a shitty pendant that he could either sell or give to the next person that begged him for a random item, which happened quite frequently in Zero Enigma.

Lucian exited the front door of the home like he owned it, no one the wiser as he moved to the next place, which just so happened to be two stories. As he moved to the top floor, he encountered a ghastly woman in one of the rooms.

“I’ll stop you, thief!” she shouted.

Lucian torched her, which apparently worked on ghost people.

He heard the sound that indicated his character had done something bad, that his reputation had been stained by his actions. Before the sound could finish or the woman could fizzle away, Lucian’s avatar moved over to the woman and checked her body, finding a dagger and a potion.

“Dang,” Lucian mumbled, hoping for better loot as he ransacked the next house. There was only one more house to go, and he was able to get a pouch filled with silver from this one, which made his whole looting side quest worth it.

Now it was time to get to the pub.

He entered the dimly lit space to find a bard serenading a small group of pub goers.

“...The mermaid from Murgnar was a fantastic sight, with scales a-plenty and gracious curves, her hair was golden and her clams were white…”

Lucian turned to the bar and started up a few quick dialogues, seeing who was up for hire. The ghost people at the bar were too infatuated with the bard to pay any attention to Lucian, so he moved to the corner of the pub, where he found a female warrior sitting with a couple empty pints in front of her.

“What do you want?” she asked drunkenly, the scene starting up.

The buxom woman had her hair in a giant braid. Aside from the swath of flesh visible across her chest—which never made sense to Lucian regarding women and fantasy clothing, but there was little he could do about it—she was heavily armored,  her shoulder pads practically reaching the bottom of her ears.

She was also a ghost.

[Are you for hire?]

She glared at Lucian’s avatar. “What kind of bloody question is that? If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, you’re at the wrong bar!” The ghost warrior placed her hand on the hilt of her sword.

“Dang,” Lucian said, seeing that his only option was to explain what he meant by his request. He would have liked to see that dialogue continue.

[I would like to hire you to be my companion.]

“Would you now?” she asked with a snarl. “I don’t come cheap.”

[I’ve got money.]

She finished her ale and named her price; Lucian was presented with the option to bargain with her and he sprung for it.

[How about we cut your price in half and call it a day?]

“You dare insult me?” she cried. The woman stood and drew her sword. “You will pay me double or I will kill you.”

Lucian laughed, seeing that he’d now been given the option of paying her double or fighting her to the death.

“Sold,” he said, accepting her offer. “Welcome to the team, Danira Two.”

Chapter Twenty-Four: Fallen Angel

“Where am I?” Lucian whispered to himself upon waking. It took him almost a minute to remember that he’d flown around Old Death’s world and had discovered this desert that ran endlessly along the horizon.

He eventually got to his feet, a cup of coffee appearing in his hand. As he sipped from it, Lucian looked up at Grimzilla, the giant mecha standing guard.

His creation glanced down to him and Lucian waved back.

Grimzilla didn’t return his gesture, the giant mecha stoic as ever, his face instantly serious because of the fact that he didn’t have a mouth.

Lucian called his surveillance crows back to him, all of them returning at once.

“Anything?” he asked, taking another sip of his coffee.

They all shook their heads.

Lucian transferred their feeds to the floating flatscreen television that he’d gamed on the previous night. He quickly cycled through some of what they had recorded, all the video in black and white, and all of it confirming that the desert was lifeless, not even a scorpion.

“Keep searching,” he said, returning to his coffee.

His surveillance crows zipped away, Hugin and Munin appearing.

“Not much longer now,” he told them, toasting Hugin with his cup of coffee. Hugin tilted forward, clinking Lucian’s cup with his beak. “We’ve got to find Old Death, or get ready for a fight.”

Figuring he’d get one thing out of the way, Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky finger together.

He appeared in his brother’s home, where he found Connor sitting on the couch, absentmindedly scrolling through his phone.

Name: Connor North

Date of Birth: 11/01/1980

Date of Death: 07/19/2058

“Whew,” Lucian said under his breath as he noticed that his brother’s death date hadn’t changed.

That didn’t mean he’d stopped using though, Connor getting sloppier with his habit, his mirror with pill residue on it resting on the table, the small pack where he kept his supplies tossed haphazardly onto a chair.

“She’s going to find out, you know,” Lucian told his brother, now floating directly in front of him. He felt his cape tense up and he ignored it. “Seriously, man, you’ve got to get over this shit. Get some help, whatever. You’ve got a family. You’re getting married next month.”

Lucian noticed something that resembled black silk beginning to form in the corners of the room. The space darkened as injuresouls swelled into the room, taking him completely off guard.

There were six of them, all covered in bloody bandages, their heads starting to crack open as their teeth grew in size. Lucian's plane of existence changed, the battle about to begin.

“Hell no,” he growled, Menor’s cannibalistic ax appearing. Lucian’s bone armor pressed out of his skin, his crows took off, and injurecrows materialized.

Feeling a bit OP, Lucian charged into the pack injuresouls, swinging his ax as they all fell onto him at once. As before, they completely absorbed his attacks, regrowing any limbs he managed to hack off.

One of the demons scurried over the others, launched into the air, and went straight for Lucian’s face. It clamped its jaw around his skull, dark energy swelling into Lucian’s head, his thoughts suddenly vivid, his energy draining from him.

Lucian tossed the ax up so it could handle things on its own, his claws growing out of his fingers as he tried to pry the injuresoul off, explosions ringing out around the room.

Lucian and a few of the injuresouls were thrown through the wall into Jen’s bedroom, Lucian still having the wherewithal to call backup in the form of Grim Mecha, who immediately started blasting at the pack.

Lucian kept an eye on his Soul Points as he finally got the injuresoul off him.

He had already expended over a thousand points, and he knew this number would grow rapidly with this sort of opponent.

Back in the living room now, Lucian overpowered the injuresoul that had tried to take a bite out of his face. He was thrown backward again when a purple blast of energy disintegrated the roof, the injuresouls in its wake also banished at once.

“What the fuck?” Lucian asked as the smoke cleared, his eyes falling upon an angel with dark hair and gray armor.

Azazyel.

The angel lowered into what was left of the home.

More pillars of energy rained down from the sky, destroying what was left of the injuresouls, all of whom were looking up at him, hissing and screaming, saliva spraying out of their mouths.

“Lucian,” Azazyel said, turning his focus to him.

“What are you doing here?”

“You’ve grown stronger since we last met,” the fallen angel said. “Normally, I like to go after more powerful targets, but many of them have become wise to the way I am able to find them. So, what will it be?”

“What will what be?”

“You are aware that I have been searching for Yoshimi,” Azazyel said in a solemn, matter-of-fact voice. “Will you take me to her?”

Lucian felt anger flare inside him. “Take you to her?”

“Yes. I am not here to hunt you; I’m here to hunt her. You are not a worthy opponent.”

“You can go fuck yourself,” Lucian said as he fired a shot from his MX-11 at Azazyel, the blast striking the angel in the chest and doing absolutely no damage.

“Very well, Lucian. Goodbye.”

A purple-white pillar of blistering energy struck Lucian, driving him through the floor and to the basement below. Blocks of concrete fell on top of him, the dust settling as he tried to get back to his feet.

Lucian’s Soul Points appeared:

He had to blink twice.

He’d checked his stats just moments ago and he’d only been down a thousand points.

As it stood, one strike from Azazyel had taken three thousand points, and with what he had left, two more shots would finish him for good.

As his eyes settled on Azazyel, who floated above him, strands of his dark hair in his face, Lucian pressed his pinky and thumb together, going to the first place that came to mind.

The beach in Portland was calm and quiet, a light snow on the ground, the sky above gray with a handful of dark clouds cutting through the monotony.

“Great,” Lucian mumbled. He was just about to summon Yoshimi to warn her, when he noticed a spark of light in the sky.

Danira landed like a comet, her wings flapping once and kicking up a ton of air.

“Lucian, are you okay?” she asked, her eyes rising with concern.

“I’m all right; I was checking on my brother when injuresouls came, followed by Azazyel.”

Danira gasped. “Azazyel came for you?”

“Not for me exactly; for Yoshimi. He was trying to get her whereabouts out of me. I told him where he could stick his little query.”

The angel nodded as her enormous energy weapon started to form in her hands, a halo circling around the muzzle of the gun.

“I don’t think he’s coming here,” Lucian said as he glanced around. His armor started to peel away, submerging back into his skin. “Then again, he tracked me to my brother’s house somehow. Shit. How does everyone keep tracking me?”

“Lucian.”

“Yeah?” Lucian returned his attention to Danira to see her aiming her weapon at him.

“Is he behind me or something?” Lucian asked, a grin forming on his face.

Danira triggered her weapon, the blast cutting him in half.

Two other angels appeared, a heavily armored female and Hashul, the angel whom Lucian had fought several times now.

“What the fuck?” Lucian cried, instantly going into defense mode as he summoned his two Grim Mechas.

His lower half completely gone, he pulled himself away as his cape spun in front of him, his crows also taking off. Once again, Lucian invoked Menor’s ax, which immediately twisted into the air and came to his defense.

The ax managed to stop Hashul’s golden spear attack, the angel’s weapon rimmed in oscillating light as the ax knocked it away.

Lucian’s cape slammed into Danira, forcing her next shot to miss its mark.

Her cherub crows appeared and tried to rip the cape to shreds as Lucian regrew his legs. He had reformed all the way to his knees by this point, but he needed his feet to be able to move around swiftly.

While still on the snow-covered sand, Lucian aimed his palm at the other angel, who had curly blonde hair and a broadsword with ancient script trailing down the blade. A bolt of lightning struck the woman down, throwing her off guard while some of Lucian’s injurecrows charged forward.

His spherical IEDs brought calculated confusion to the fight, everything partially obscured by smoke and settling sand.

Lucian’s feet finished forming as his armor cascaded down his body.

He shot up into the air, flaming mad now as his particle-beam cannon formed in his hands. His crows, cape, injurecrows, and Grim Mechas continued pummeling the angels, giving Lucian the time he needed to choose a target.

The beam cut into Hashul, the angel’s body exploding into a mist of viscera a few seconds later.

A golden pillar from the sky indicated another angel had appeared, this one a dark-skinned female with blade arms that Lucian swore he’d seen before.

She was before him in a flash, her blade pressing through his stomach as she bared her teeth.

“You will not survive this battle, demon,” the angel roared, the woman too busy trying to get the last word in to see that Lucian had equipped his shotgun.

Point-blank range never felt so good as Lucian fired two slugs directly into her chest, the woman’s upper half torn to shreds. She fell; Lucian ripped her blade out of his body and threw it over his shoulder as Danira spiraled toward him.

She met him with her sword this time, Lucian barely able to get his lava sword conjured in time.

“What the fuck, Danira?” he asked, a cold look on the angel’s face as she swung at him again and again, Lucian barely managing to block her attacks. “Speak to me!”

Grim Mecha appeared behind her, Lucian grimacing as he saw his creation bring his blade arm to the ready. He spun out of the way just in time for Grim Mecha to tear through Danira, the angel taken off guard.

His replica grabbed her by the wing and started hacking at her, Lucian wanting to call him off, for none of this to have happened in the first place.

Why would she betray him like that? After what they’d been through? After what he’d told her of his intentions?

A dark look came over Lucian’s face.

And he almost did it.

He almost summoned his plasma blowtorch with the goal of frying Danira for betraying him like this.

But he couldn’t.

Even as she finally got the upper hand, the angel turning and cutting into Grim Mecha’s body, Lucian knew he wasn’t going to be able to engage her like this.

Not until he knew why she had done it.

So he went with his gun that fired a tripwire, Lucian taking several shots at Danira that took her straight to the ground. She landed on the beach next to what was left of the dark-skinned angel, who’d already begun to heal. Hashul wasn’t far off, just a head at the moment, but slowly stitching back together. The other female angel had been completely dismembered, Grim Mecha and Lucian’s crows doing a number on her.

“Why?” Lucian asked, seconds away from pressing his thumb and pinky finger together. He needed a moment to process this; he was keenly aware that Danira could just show up in Old Death’s world.

Lucian’s Soul Points flashed before him:

Just over a thousand Soul Points left.

If they did come after him, he’d have to be ready.

As much as it pained Lucian to do so, especially without knowing why Danira had ambushed him, he pressed his pinky finger and thumb together, his form vanishing.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Troubled Sleep in an Endless Desert

Lucian summoned his two Grim Mechas, his replicants appearing before him, their purple eyes blazing. He’d made sure the sun was in the sky, its light now reflecting off their metallic bodies.

“Get ready for anything,” he said, the two launching into the air.

He paused for a moment in front of Grimzilla, his newest creation still on the outskirts of Old Death’s world. It had taken Lucian off guard upon appearing in the desert, but he’d quickly adjusted, immediately letting his giant mecha know that someone may be coming for him.

And why?

Even as he conjured his injurecrows, Lucian couldn’t help but play back what happened on the beach in Portland. Again and again, no matter how he tried to process it, the situation was crystal clear: Danira had betrayed him.

“No, there must be some reason…” he whispered to himself as he called his surveillance crows to him.

With a wave of his hand, Lucian gave them all side-mounted energy weapons, calling forth more of them and instructing them to form a perimeter.

Lucian then created remote sentry weapons on tripods, their forms spherical just like his crows, with weapons mounted on the bottom of the spheres and additional rotating cannons on top of the devices, retractable just like his crow’s claws.

He thought about setting them out himself, but figured he could focus on other things, like preparing for when Danira showed up with her entourage. All eight of his new sentry drones scurried away and formed a tight circle around him, ready to engage.

Lucian’s plasma blowtorch took shape in his hands, his armor reformed, and his shoulder-mounted cannon materialized into existence.

He waited.

And he waited.

Lucian couldn’t help but curse Danira under his breath, anger swelling inside as he relived all they had been through together.

“No,” he reminded himself. “It was all a cover. You’d never do something like that,” he said on her behalf, even though he couldn’t be sure that his words were true.

But then Lucian remembered what one of the twin Deaths on the Committee on Luminaries had said about the angels actually befriending their kind only to later betray them.

Lucian shook his head again and again, as if that would do anything.

He knew Danira wasn’t devious like that, but just in case she was, he had to be ready.

“Come on,” he said, looking up at the sky, expecting a golden pillar to form, the heavens to open up, angels to descend upon the desert with their blades drawn.

It wasn’t going to be an easy fight, especially with his lack of power.

But he was as ready as he would ever be, anticipating it even.

Ready to be done with it all.

Another thought came to Lucian as he waited for his opponents to arrive: he still needed to warn Yoshimi.

Azazyel was looking for her, and he had attempted to kill Lucian for refusing to give up Yoshimi’s location.

Lucian didn’t know how useful he would be in a fight against the Watcher, but if he could help in any way, he planned to do so.

Yoshimi had been the only person who hadn’t left him high and dry, and even if she was a bit reserved and hard to read at times, she continued to support Lucian in his efforts, to guide him in her own way.

And he appreciated that.

Hugin dropped before Lucian, looking like it wanted to say something.

“Speak,” he said, Hugin nodding.

“I don’t think Danira is coming,” Hugin said in Old Death’s voice.

“Change voice. Let’s go with…” Lucian shrugged. “Sure, Katy’s voice.”

“I don’t think she is coming,” Hugin said in Katy’s voice.

“She ambushed me at the beach; she knows how to get here. You know that. Hell, to be honest with you, I don’t even know how to ‘get’ here, but you understand what I’m saying. Danira knows where I am. She must know. Let’s keep it like that.”

“It didn’t seem like she wanted to kill you.”

“Were we in the same fight? She shot me,” Lucian reminded his crow, who continued to stare at him curiously. “I have fought her before, remember? I know how she acts when she’s not trying to kill me. Remember back at the psychiatric ward?”

“You should rest, Lucian. We can keep watch over you. She will not get through to you even if she does come. You need to recharge.”

“Why do I feel like I’m talking to myself right now?” Lucian asked Hugin.

“Because you are. I am an extension of you.”

“Change voices. Let’s go with a genderless voice. You know, like something a smart device would use.”

“Very well. Does this please you?” his crow asked in a voice that was neither male nor female.

“It doesn’t please me, but at least you’re not telling me that you’re part of me in my ex-girlfriend’s voice. So I am talking to myself, right?”

“You are,” Hugin said.

Lucian’s surveillance drones, injurecrows, and Grim Mechas were visible behind his spherical creations, all of them geared up and ready to go.

“Good to know.”

“And you should rest. We can handle this. If she does come, you will have plenty of time to engage Danira.”

“But I don’t want to engage her,” Lucian said, not able to hide the pain in his voice. “I don’t want her to be my enemy, and I don’t want to be her enemy. Is that too hard to ask?”

“Maybe. I don’t have the answer to that question.”

“You just want me to relax, right?”

“I want you to sleep,” Hugin said.

“Okay,” Lucian said, sitting down in the sand. He brought his knees up to his chest, pulling them in closer with his arm.

“That is not sleeping, Lucian.”

“Fine.”

He conjured his bed, watching as it lightly settled onto the ground. Lucian stood again, and with a wave of his hand, the grains of sand attached to his robes fell away.

He laid down onto the mattress and looked up, seeing Grimzilla standing over him. His enormous creation looking stoic at that moment, ready to engage.

Hugin flew into his pane of vision. “Do you believe me now?”

“Yes,” Lucian said. “I’ll rest.”

Even with all the anguish he was experiencing, it didn’t take Lucian very long to fall asleep.

And once he was out, Lucian was greeted by a vivid dream in which he was walking around the Stop & Shop on Elliot Street, heading toward the produce section, the grocery store completely empty.

Lucian could feel that his breaths were labored, and with each step he took, he felt like he was sinking deeper into the ground. He looked down at his smartwatch, a gift from his mother, and saw that his BPM was pushing nearly two hundred.

Things started to blur.

Lucian could sense his heart beating in his body now, in his throat, and in his skull.

He reached out for one of the fruit stands and fell.

Lucian tried to pull himself up, crying for help, everything around him starting to darken, to twist in an abstract yet sinister way as dark clouds rolled across the ceiling.

It felt like his whole body was his heart now, each pump shaking him to the core, his heartbeat now painful, sending daggers through his veins and out to the tips of his fingers.

It felt like his lungs would never fill.

With each panicked breath in, Lucian tried to push himself up.

Something swelled over by the meat department, an ominous smog heading his way.

Injuresouls fell out of the fog, their jaws distended, their bandages wet with blood.

They soared over Lucian, their forms growing in size as they surrounded him, slowly latching onto him.

The pain was excruciating, but Lucian was completely helpless to stop it.

He was smothered, his ability to breathe all but disabled, his heart seconds away from exploding in his chest.

“Lucian,” he heard Old Death say.

He glanced around frantically trying to find him.

“Lucian…”

One of the injuresouls came right for Lucian’s face, its maw opening and revealing a set of razor-sharp teeth.

“Lucian!”

Lucian gasped, sucking in a deep breath as he blinked his eyes open.

He was back in the desert, and as his vision blurred back into focus, his eyes focused on a hooded man standing over him, an angel behind the man.

His predecessor.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Death Hunter Squared

“How did you…?”

Old Death threw his hood back and laughed. “My boy, I’m the one that created this godforsaken dump. Ha! You don’t think I have the power to show up whenever I’d like?”

“But what about my…” Lucian looked behind the man to see his crows hovering in the air.

“Your little robots? Clever inventions, I must say,” Old Death told Lucian as he lifted his palm toward Hugin, the crow landing in his predecessor’s palm. “But they’re not going to come after me in my own world. And besides, you gave them some sort of intelligence, did you not?”

“Yes, he did,” Hugin said in a genderless voice.

“See?” Old Death cautiously looked up at Lucian’s largest creation. “I wasn’t sure about this one, but he hasn’t given us any trouble yet.”

“That’s Grimzilla. I haven’t been able to test him out yet, at least not on an actual opponent.”

Both of Old Death’s eyebrows raised. “It’ll be an interesting day when you do.”

Lucian got to his feet, his Soul Points flashing in front of him:

His eyes then fell to the angel standing behind his predecessor, the woman known as Leliel. She wore an outfit that reminded Lucian of a cleric’s robes, her brown hair with gray streaks in it pulled back into two tight braids. Leliel’s robes stopped just below her shins, revealing a set of wings on her ankles.

“Nice to see you,” Lucian said with a nod.

She gave him a warm smile. “It’s nice to see you too, Lucian.”

“It appears you’ve gotten yourself into a bit of a bind,” Old Death said with a chuckle, the desert wind tracing through his long gray hair.

“You think? I got the Committee on Luminaries breathing down my neck and planning to torture me until I give up my mantle, and if that didn’t sting, now my angel friend has decided to attack me. And I’m not even mentioning Azazyel, who has also tried to kill me. Things have been better.”

“I see. I find it quite unfortunate to learn that a Watcher has taken an interest in you. But I suppose it comes with the territory. Azazyel has been gunning for me for quite some time. He is one of the reasons I created this place,” Old Death said with a wave of his hand. “The incompetent flapdoodle.”

“He’s pretty intense,” Lucian started to say with a grin. “But I don’t know if I would go as far as calling him a ‘flapdoodle,’ whatever the hell that is.”

“Then he’s a dull-swift mopus, if I’ve ever met one. I presume that the Committee wants to speak to me?”

“Wait, how did you know I was looking for you?” Lucian asked suddenly. “You never answered that.”

“Lucian, this is my world,” Old Death told him. “Must I remind you of this every time we meet?”

“Yeah, I learned about that. You didn’t give me your full mantle, or mantlecore, did you?”

“Only a fool would completely give away their mantle, something you should remember when the time comes. And bequeathing one’s mantle and giving their mantlecore aren’t exactly the same. No, I didn’t give my mantle to you completely, but I did give you most of it, which should count for something. The rest I have kept for myself, a part of which I originally used to create this world to keep both of us safe.”

“So you’ve been here this entire time?”

“Here and other places. There are some beautiful beaches that we visited,” he said, smiling over at Leliel. “You know, for species that can go anywhere, neither the Progeny of Light nor the Progeny of Death spend much time on tropical islands. And they should, considering the state of many of these islands, and where they will be a hundred years from now.”

“The angel knows about this place,” Lucian said. “She has been here, just so you know.”

“Then maybe she isn’t trying to kill you after all,” his predecessor said with a cheerful shrug. “Otherwise, she would be here now.”

“Maybe,” Lucian said, rubbing the place where she had blasted him.

“You have changed since we last met, my boy. Although, our last meeting was not necessarily the best time or place for two old chaps to catch up.”

“Thank you for saving me in the end,” Lucian said. “I never was able to tell you that.”

“No, thank you. It was, after all, you who came after us. I’m happy to see that you’ve grown so strong, but you still have a way to go, my boy. I’m sure you recognize that.”

“Yeah, I figured. Some extenuating circumstances have really upped my power.”

“Extenuating circumstances? Do tell.”

“Well, when I met you, I had just killed my first Grim Reaper. Anyway, her partner came after me, so I got rid of him as well, right there on Fifth Avenue if you can believe that. I was attacked by another one known as the Spaniard at the Taj Mahal. I killed him too.”

“The Spaniard was always a foozler.” His predecessor’s bushy gray eyebrows formed into a V as he looked at Lucian. “But I digress. You have become a Death Hunter then, is it?”

Lucian shook his head. “Not quite. I’m calling myself a Death Hunter of Death Hunters. I’ll think of a better title for that in the future. Death Hunter Squared, something catchy like that. My point is: I’m not trying to go after innocent Deaths.”

Leliel laughed. “Innocent Deaths, that’s one way to put it.”

“Yes, it is a way,” Old Death said, a grin starting to stretch the corners of his lips. “And your brother? How is the poor fellow faring?”

“It worked,” Lucian said, his eyes filling with hope that was quickly shattered by the fact that his brother was still using. “I became strong enough to kill the parasite that was attached to him. It was a tough fight. It took me and the angel I keep mentioning to do it, the same one that attacked me.”

“This angel that keeps appearing in your narrative,” Leliel said. “Do they have a name? Surely, you call them something other than ‘angel.’ Although that makes a cute pet name.”

“Danira.”

“Danira?” Leliel’s eyes went wide. “But she…”

“We have sort of become friends, well, until she attacked me. Hold on, what were you going to say?”

Leliel cleared her throat. “Of all the angels, I would least expect her to befriend the Progeny of Darkness. She has been an angel as long as I have, and both of us are from a city known as Nineveh. She was especially affected by the first war between our two species, having lost several friends and a lover to a particularly powerful Death.”

“So that’s why she has been so tough on me?”

“That, and her conviction for the cause. I must say, I don’t know how you managed to befriend her in the first place. For a couple thousand years, Danira attempted to kill all Deaths on sight. I had to help rescue her countless times, but there were an equal number of times in which she succeeded.”

“Really? She seemed very hesitant with me, even the first time we met.”

“That’s likely due to a number of reasons. One thing she probably didn’t mention to you is that she had recently rebirthed as an angel.”

“No, she told me that. She died on Valentine’s Day, 2019.”

Leliel nodded. “What she likely didn’t tell you is that whenever the Progeny of Light decides to revisit the Earth in the form of a human, once they return to our spiritual plane of existence, they have to rebuild their power. Unfortunately, we don’t build power as quickly as your kind. As Death, you could theoretically go and hunt to your heart’s content. You don’t have to rest, you can just keep hunting to refill your power. Our cycling works differently than that, and while there is a lot of hope out there, and it isn’t always very strong, Death always wins.”

“So that’s why she went soft on me, she wasn’t fully powered yet. Is that what you’re saying?”

“It is merely my theory, but yes.”

“Good to know,” Lucian told her, returning his focus to his predecessor. “I feel like I have so much to ask you, but I suppose we should deal with the most pressing matter: what am I supposed to do about the Committee? They sure got a lot of questions for you. If you don’t meet with them, they’re going to take it out on me.”

“The cowards. And meeting with those stuffy hornswogglers is about the last thing I would like to do at the moment,” Old Death said with a groan. “But I can understand that they are curious as to what happened at the South Wind.” He looked to his counterpart. “Alas, it appears as if the war between Life and Death is inevitable, no matter how we frame what happened at the South Wind, just as we have discussed.”

The angel turned away, a dark look on her face.

“So what do you propose we do then?” Lucian asked, interrupting their little moment.

“I propose we answer them, but we do so in a way that makes things worse for all sides.”

“Are you sure, Cuthbert?” Leliel asked, turning back to the conversation.

“I am, my dear. This is the chance we’ve been waiting for.”

Lucian couldn’t quite figure out his predecessor’s angle. “Why would we want to make things worse? Am I missing something here?”

“Because sometimes, that’s the only way to make things better,” Old Death explained. “The next war between our two sides is inevitable, and it is through the rebuilding process that we will be able to put things back together in a way that is more beneficial for both sides. Leadership at the top needs to change, but as long as they are coordinating with each other to keep us apart, nothing will ever happen. So that’s my answer. We bring everyone to the table, and we do it later today so we can be done with it and move on.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Violent Echos

Lucian paced as he considered his predecessor’s plan.

Even though he didn’t completely agree with it, he was going to go along with the strategy, for once listening to the people who had more experience in these affairs than he did.

Lucian was by no means a fan of how things were between Life and Death. But if what Old Death had hinted at was true, that there was calculated collusion between the forces at the top to keep the forces at the bottom confused and warring against one another, then maybe this really was the only option.

Maybe it was the only way.

Lucian had two things he wanted to do before everything kicked off later that afternoon, and one wasn’t going to take but a moment.

His crows still huddling before him, his sentry tripods set up, and his robotic creations still standing guard, Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky finger together, quickly saying goodbye to the desert and hello to a backyard glazed with snow, no temperature whatsoever associated with his change in location.

His two Grim Mechas appeared behind him as well, Lucian keenly aware that he was a wanted man. They fanned out as his sentries took shape, all of them getting into position and forming a perimeter around the house.

“You know what to do,” he said as he pressed through the back door, where he found the living room empty aside from Tuck the cat, who slept under the coffee table.

Lucian’s crows zipped over his shoulders, quickly moving through his brother’s home as Lucian took a look around the place.

It was clean, aside from a small pile of Jen’s clothing on the floor, and as he floated toward the kitchen, he passed in front of some of the family photos hanging on the wall.

These were mostly photos of Connor and Samantha, a trip they’d taken to Miami. There was another photo of Connor wearing a hard hat and holding Sam in his arms, and another one was taken at the hospital; newborn Baby Jen wrapped in blankets with a bright red face.

For some reason, seeing that photo reminded Lucian of the smell of the hospital.

He couldn’t even identify the smell, only that it was sterile and cold.

Standing in front of the photo and remembering what he had been through only made Lucian think of just how strange his world was, that in the same building, a life could first spark or fizzle out, the only thing separating them a set of ceilings and walls.

How many hospitals had he driven by when he was alive? How many countless lives, both new and old, were contained within the same structure? And how hard was it that he could just pass by, never knowing what lay on the other side.

Lucian shook his head; he knew where his brother was.

And rather than gaze at the photos any longer, he slowly began to lower himself into the basement, straight through the concrete and wood, the installation and wiring.

Lucian found Connor lying on the couch, his head back, his mouth open.

His kit was next to them, pill residue on a sliver of mirror.

“No,” Lucian said, a sharp pain boiling through him. “No…”

It couldn’t be.

Lucian equipped his shotgun.

He aimed it at the parasite on his brother’s back, his armor starting to form. His first shot went straight through the demon bug, coming out the other end as the shell flew to the other side of the room.

He squeezed the trigger again, hoping for better results this time.

He tried to grab the parasite, his hand going straight through its body.

And even though he knew it wouldn’t work, Lucian attempted to beat at it with the butt of his shotgun, all to no avail.

“Lucian?” Connor asked, his eyes going wide, a dazed look on his face.

“You can hear me?” Lucian’s armor peeled away as he moved in front of his brother, a sense of elation moving coming over him.

Connor looked around the room, his hands twitching. “You’re not fucking here.”

“I am here!” Lucian cried, everything darkening around him.

“If you were here… I don’t know…” Connor said. “I’m sorry…”

“You have to do something about this. You have to try, you can’t give up…”

“Whatever…” Connor whispered to himself. He closed his eyes and rolled his head back, getting comfortable again.

Lucian focused on his brother’s death date, confirming that it was true, that the date had changed again.

Name: Connor North

Date of Birth: 11/01/1980

Date of Death: 12/01/2020

The parasite was back, and Lucian now had less than a month.

Hovering above his brother’s rooftop, Lucian could see all the way to the ocean, a pyramid of light spreading across it. There were cars moving up the street, a postal worker parked on the side of the road, a woman and a man walking briskly, both bundled up.

It was snowing again, just a dusting, really, and as Lucian watched a few flakes fall, he dropped Yoshimi’s geisha comb onto the rooftop.

“She should be here soon,” he told Hugin, who hovered before him, concern painted across his crow’s face.

Lucian was ready to teleport away if need be. Azazyel had shown up the previous day uninvited. Who knew if he’d do the same now.

“It’s going to be a very difficult day,” his crow said in the genderless voice Lucian had assigned it.

“It is.”

“We still have time to get stronger before your brother’s death date comes. Look at how strong we have become in this short amount of time. Do not give up hope, Lucian.”

“It’s weird to think that I am essentially talking to myself right now,” Lucian mumbled as he looked up at his spherical creation.

“Maybe it’s best to stop thinking of it like that.”

“Maybe.”

“Your crow can talk?”

Yoshimi stood off to Lucian’s left, as if she had been there the entire time. She was in a dark kimono that was long at the sleeves, her hair down this time, her face less pale than it normally was, a touch of pink around her eyes.

Startled, Lucian took a step back, almost equipping a weapon out of sheer instinct.

“Did I frighten you?”

Lucian lowered his hand. “I’m good; it’s been a rough few days.”

“Let’s go,” she said, a swirl of pink energy reaching Lucian.

He expected to appear back in her home, but instead, their forms took shape in a large cave behind the waterfall. It was a cozy space, the cave walls polished like marble, Japanese prints hanging from them, featuring images of the sea, a ronin, an old man carrying a heavy load. It was cozy yet exotic, a place Lucian would have loved to hang around in for a while and just be.

“Change of scenery?”

“This is where I rest,” she said, motioning to a cabinet pressed against the rock wall.

“You rest in the cabinet?”

Yoshimi smiled. “No, my futon is in there. Do you happen to know many Japanese people that sleep in a cabinet?”

“Yeah, I guess that doesn’t make sense,” Lucian said, scratching the back of his head.

“The waterfall isn’t actually water, it’s metal,” she said. “Well, I guess it has the consistency of boiling metal. If anyone is able to find me, they will have to come through that waterfall to reach me. It’s the only way. If they do, it will slow them down considerably.”

“Good to know,” Lucian said, watching as Munin skidded to a halt in front of the waterfall and changed its trajectory.

A cushion appeared on the ground, another one across from it, both featuring elaborate embroidery of a dragon twisting around the peak of a mountain, cherry blossoms on the four corners of each cushion.

Lucian sat, and as he did a polished black table took shape, small treats arranged on plates forming on top of the table. There was an empty plate as well.

“For your chocolate,” Yoshimi said.

“You really liked it, huh?”

She nodded. “Please.”

Feeling a sense of pride, Lucian swirled his hand over the plate, the chocolates appearing.

“Why have you called me?”

“Some things have come up,” Lucian said as she poured him a cup of tea. “For one, Azazyel is looking for you. He came to me, and when I wouldn’t take him to you, he attacked. A single blast from him nearly killed me.”

“You did that for me?” she asked, pausing as her dark eyes settled on Lucian.

“Of course I did; you’re my friend. And even if you weren’t my friend, that guy can eat a bag of... Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t talk like that here. Let me try again: Azazyel can go fuck himself.”

“Your sentiment is appreciated,” Yoshimi said, “and the unrefined way you speak is fine. I quite enjoy the forthright nature of Americans. It is very different from the more reserved Japanese.”

“It’s hard to be reserved when someone shows up at your brother’s house, asks where your friend is, and attacks you once you won’t give up the goods. Just my two cents.”

“It appears as if many people are looking for me.”

“Yeah, you’re a popular lady. The Committee on Luminaries wants to talk to you; I’m sure the Progeny of Light are interested in having a little conversation, and now you have the number one Watcher sniffing around for you. That’s not to mention Death Hunters.”

“And how’s that going?”

“It’s going. I haven’t been going after any of them, because I still don’t have that power yet. Or maybe I do have the power, I just haven’t really had the time to sit around and mess with it. I don’t know. It’s been hard to focus lately, especially with the looming deadlines.”

“Have you found your predecessor?”

“I have, and that’s another reason I reached out to you,” Lucian said as he took a sip from the tea. It was warm and soothing, something about its flavor reminding him of green tea and honey. “He found me—I guess I should say it like that. I was betrayed, by the way.”

“By your predecessor?”

“No, by the angel who I was starting to become friends with. She attacked me with other angels, ambushed me. Anyway, I was still pretty low on Soul Points due to my little confrontation with Azazyel, so instead of fighting them, I ported back to the place I’m staying, which just so happened to be a desert.”

“Why a desert?”

Lucian smirked. “I guess I should back up a little bit. Long story short: I took your advice. I checked the world that Old Death had created and discovered that it was surrounded by a desert. Imagine that. So I was out there looking for him, which was why I returned to the desert once I teleported away from the angels. But anyway, like I said, I was low on power and so after I set up some sentry weapons, I took a little rest. I woke up and I shit-you-not, Old Death was standing there with the angel that he’d been imprisoned with at the South Wind, Leliel. So they found me. ”

“And what did he say?”

“Not a lot, but to confirm your suspicions, he only gave me a part of his mantle. I don’t know how much. The guy was friendly as always, using old slang that I didn’t really understand, the usual stuff. Because the Committee is closing in on me, he’s going to help out.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Sort of. It’s another reason why I am here. I wanted to tell you about his plan, and what is about to go down.”

“Please, go on,” Yoshimi said as she set her teacup down and went for a chocolate.

She ate the piece of chocolate slowly as Lucian explained his predecessor’s plan, occasionally offering a nod at what he told her.

“Anyway, that’s the gist of it,” Lucian said as he finished up.

“I see.” Yoshimi was silent for a moment, a line finally knitting between her eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Lucian.”

“Sorry about what?”

“If you have come here to ask me for my help in this matter, I am unable to do so. Please do not call me when all of this happens.”

“Yeah,” Lucian said as he swallowed hard. “I get it. I really do. I’m not so keen on his idea either, but I see his point, and I’m going to go along with it. But to cut to one of the things that he said: do you think the people at the top are coordinating? He mentioned that the Progeny of Light and Death, those at the top, are keeping all of us at war.”

“I’ve had my suspicions,” she admitted.

“That’s why I’m going along with it. I believe him.”

“Then that is entirely your prerogative,” Yoshimi said as she used a pair of chopsticks to take another chocolate. “And he does make a fair point, I just don’t want to be the one responsible for doing this, nor the likely repercussions.”

“I’m trying to avoid those as well. That’s why my role in it is kind of limited in his plan. I’m just there to bring the Committee. The rest is on him and his angel.”

She nodded. “Well, I wish you luck. I’m afraid that whatever happens today will be something that continues to have violent echoes once it has passed.”

“I figured as much.” Lucian shook his head. “Things could be simple, you know?”

“Perhaps they could, but they usually aren’t.”

“I guess we aren’t that much different from the humans we once were. Which brings me to my next issue,” Lucian said, recalling his brother’s death date. “The parasite is back.”

“The parasite?”

“The one on my brother. His death date is sooner now too, at the end of the month, if you can believe that.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Yoshimi said, some of the color draining from her face. At least Lucian imagined it did.

“I know you told me not to check on my family, but I just have to see this through,” Lucian said. “So I stopped in before calling you. I’m sorry,” he said, losing his train of thought. “This is just… Not what I expected.”

“You cannot engage the parasite?”

“Nope. I tried, but not this one. I have to get stronger,” he said, gritting his teeth. “It’s the only way.”

“I would be willing to help you if you aren’t able to get to that level by the necessary date,” Yoshimi told him with a slight bow of her head. “But first, you should try to do so on your own.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Lucian said, not able to make eye contact now, feeling weak all of a sudden.

“It’s the least I could do, especially as I’m not able to assist you later today.”

“Is it always this complicated, being Death?”

A slight grin formed on Yoshimi’s face. “Do you want the real answer to that question?”

“I figured as much.”

The two sipped their teas silently for a moment, Lucian’s crows still zipping around the room.

Lucian cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind me asking, I wanted to know more about this mantlecore situation. I need to know how to use it, and how using it affects me.”

“I suppose I should explain it to you, especially with what you are set to face.” Yoshimi stood, motioning Lucian toward her. “Come, I have a place at the back of the cave where we can practice.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Mantlecore

Yoshimi led Lucian down a narrow pathway that opened up into a cavernous space, the ceilings twice as tall as they had been in the other room, the floor slick and black.

“Is this where you train?”

“It is,” she said. “Do you have a similar place to train?”

“Yeah, I think I told you about it. It’s on top of Old Death’s home. His home is built into a cliff, and I cut out a place for myself on top of the cliff. I made a little workshop too. It’s quaint.”

“That’s helpful.”

“It is, especially with some of the things that I’ve been working on. I should show you, really.”

“I’m sure I’ll see them at some point,” Yoshimi said with a soft smile. “But today, I’m going to tell you something your predecessor really should have explained to you at the start. I know that you will need some of your power for what is supposed to happen later today, but you did say that you can gauge your ability, correct?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Good, then perhaps you can set yourself a limit to expend if you choose to utilize what I’m about to show you.” Yoshimi waved him in front of her. “You have asked before about making food, and something I didn’t tell you about was that it takes a little bit of your mantlecore away to do so, but a very trace amount.”

“So making food is bad for me?”

“It’s not exactly bad for you, due to it being such a small amount. What is bad for you is when you create an entire world, as I have done, and as your predecessor has done. Also splitting your mantle, that takes a toll. When you make something like your crow,” she said, gesturing toward Hugin, “you use your power to do so, but you don’t extinguish your core.”

“I still don’t understand why creating something like this doesn’t do anything to my core, but creating food does.”

“How much harder was it to create food than it was to create your crow?” she asked.

“It was a lot harder, actually. And it took some trial and error.”

“That’s why. When you create something as complex as food, with its taste and smell and the memories associated with it, it is shaped by your mantlecore, not your actual power. Of course, since you are tracking these things, you will see that creating them drained from your power, which recovers daily.”

“It does.”

“But your mantlecore doesn’t. Don’t forget that. Here’s where these potions you’ve suggested come into play. To enhance an object you would need to use some of your mantlecore to do so, which means you would need to be careful in what you enhanced.”

“Do you think I’ve already been doing it some?” Lucian asked.

“With your chocolate? Yes.”

“No, something else, something you haven’t seen yet. I’ve been working on this giant robot that I’m calling Grimzilla. He’s enormous. Like the size of a building in Tokyo or something. I named it after Godzilla.”

“I’m familiar,” she said. “And why do you think that creating this has used some of your mantlecore?”

“Because of the sheer size of the thing. Most of the weapons have been out of thin air and with little forethought. Or maybe I made them out of necessity. Yeah, sometimes it was just a necessity. But this wasn’t that type of creation. I’ve worked on Grimzilla for several days, and there were a few days that I just poured my power into him until I was exhausted. That’s why I’m wondering if it affected my core.”

“Your goal being?”

“To make him stronger,” Lucian said with a shrug. “This one is sort of my showstopper, you know, only to be used as a last-ditch resort. And I wanted him to be incredibly powerful.”

“And large, it seems.”

“If you want to see it…”

“You really are interested in showing me, aren’t you?”

“It’s maybe the coolest thing I’ve made yet, so yeah. I want to show it off a little.”

“Very well.” She extended her hand toward Lucian. “We can continue our discussion there.” Lucian lightly touched her palm, both of them whisked away to Old Death’s world, to the desert, where Grimzilla stood guard in all his mecha glory.

“Oh, my,” Yoshimi said as she looked up at his towering creation, Grimzilla’s shadow completely covering both of them.

Her eyes moved to the giant blades slowly pressing out of Grimzilla’s forearms, weapons starting to lift from compartments on his shoulders, as if he were showing off.

“Yeah, he’s pretty big.”

“How do you plan to use this robot?” Yoshimi asked as she floated into the air. She stopped at about eye level with his creation, Lucian joining her.

“Like I said, a showstopper. He’s going to come in at the end swinging and breaking things and shooting at anyone or anything trying to take me down.”

Yoshimi cautiously placed her hand on his creation’s chest.

“That’s the cockpit,” Lucian told her. “Or at least that’s what I’m calling the cockpit. I don’t know what else I should call it.”

“You can control this thing as well?”

“Yeah, he’s pretty sweet, right?”

“It is a bit unorthodox, but I guess it could work.”

Lucian rubbed the back of his head. “Maybe I did go a little overboard. Anyway, this is him.”

“Well, there isn’t really a way to tell if you have put some of your core into this, at least I’m not aware of a way I could gauge this. But we can examine your mantlecore and see what it looks like, to see how much you have.”

“Seriously? We can do that?”

Yoshimi nodded as she lowered to the ground. “Let me start by showing you mine.”

As soon as Lucian touched down, the female Death brought her hand over her chest. She began to pull her hand back, energy radiating from her palm. Once she was about eight inches away from her chest, a purple ball of energy began to form.

“This is my mantlecore,” she said as it floated into the space between them.

For a moment the sphere was bright, but then the light oscillating around its edges settled, Lucian noticing that part of it was missing, that there was something frayed about it, pixilated in a way.

“Do you see?”

“The pieces that are missing, right?”

“It’s subtle, but it should be visible.”

“Yeah, I see it. Little bits missing,” Lucian said as he took a step closer to it, examining her mantlecore. “How did you pull it out of your body like that?”

“I will get to that moment. What you should understand about your mantlecore is that it is directly correlated to your power, yet while you can replenish your power, you cannot rebuild your core. Even if I went out and killed every Death in existence, consuming all of their power, I would not be able to fix any of the pieces that were missing from mine. I would grow incredibly strong, but I wouldn’t be able to repair it.”

“Weird,” Lucian said, wishing it were the other way, that killing other Deaths actually rebuilt his core.

Yoshimi continued: “The more frayed your core is, the less powerful your weapons and powers are. So even if I were able to do what I just said, kill every Death, I wouldn’t grow much more powerful than I am now. I’ve hit my limit because of the slow degradation of my mantlecore due to the things I’ve had to create.”

“So creating these worlds, that’s what has diminished your core?”

“Yes, and generally abusing my power in the beginning, when I was a young Death. The reason I told you, or rather, I suggested that you leave your family behind is because I didn’t do that myself.” She bowed her head in shame.

“What do you mean?”

“I ended up splitting my core several times to try to convert them.”

“So splitting your core…” Lucian nodded. “Okay, that definitely makes sense, that would extinguish your mantlecore. You said that already. Wait a minute, are you saying your family are all Deaths now?”

“They were, until I had to kill them.” A dark look came over Yoshimi’s face as she relived the experience. “Some people don’t take very well to this life. In fact, most don’t. The ones you have met are the ones that have tolerated it. You’d be surprised how many people try to split their mantle only to be greeted by disaster through the person they have passed it onto. I had to take action.”

“So you had to kill your own family members once they became like us?”

Yoshimi didn’t say anything, but Lucian could tell by her body language that she wanted to move on.

“But that is neither here nor there. The past is the past, and even Death can’t change that. Anyway, are you ready?”

“Sure, show me how to do this.”

“It isn’t really that hard,” she said, a slight breeze whipping up the ends of her kimono.

“Simply place your hand over your chest and press your power into your hand, the same way you would strengthen your giant robot, or create a piece of chocolate.”

“Okay,” Lucian said as he touched his chest.

He imagined himself pulling his power forward, and as he did so, he started to withdraw his hand.

Nothing happened at first, but then a purple sphere of energy ignited and quickly turned white, Lucian able to now feel it, as if his fingers were moving through water.

Once he got the hang of the way it felt, he presented his mantlecore to Yoshimi, the ball of energy hovering in the air between them next to hers.

“Well?”

“It’s quite strong,” she said. “Can’t you tell? There are hardly any signs of usage.”

Lucian examined it, noticing that it looked nothing like Yoshimi’s core.

“You have a ways to go,” she said, bringing her core back into her body.

Lucian did the same, pressing his mantlecore into his chest as a warm feeling spread through him.

Yoshimi tilted her head as she looked him over. “You know, I have given some thought to the potion that you were trying to create, and subsequently created.”

“Yeah, it blew off my arms.”

“I’m aware,” she said with a rare chuckle. “I’m sure it was entertaining for your creations.” Yoshimi gestured toward Hugin and Munin.

“Maybe,” Lucian said. “Why do you bring it up?”

“You have never experienced something like a potion outside of these video games of yours, correct?”

“I guess you’re right, aside from some medicine.”

“And you tried to create it in the same way you created your wonderful chocolate, is that correct?”

Lucian nodded, not sure of where she was going with this.

“Do you still have it?”

Lucian smiled. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,” he said, a boiling cauldron appearing in the air.

“You used the cauldron to make it?”

“Yeah, I know it’s cliché. I filled it with lake water. I forgot to mention, there’s a lake near the place that I stay. This isn’t my home, in case you couldn’t tell.” Lucian nodded toward the desert. “Actually, where are my manners…”

He offered Yoshimi his hand. As soon as she touched Lucian, they were whisked away to his workshop, the illustrious city on the other side of the cliff, the cauldron still floating in the air.

“That’s the water,” Lucian said, smiling out at the lake. “I have a room downstairs too.”

“I see, so…”

“Old Death, he lived down there,” Lucian said, pointing to the ground. “I went ahead and added this place up here.”

“And you realize to do so that you may have had to use your mantlecore, right?”

“I realize now that you have told me how all this works, sure. Wait, how would I know if this was my mantlecore or just my Soul Points?”

“Soul Points, yes, that’s what you call your power.”

Lucian nodded.

“You know, considering the size of what you have done here, it could lean either way. I should rephrase that statement: usage of your mantlecore is not necessarily related to the size of what you create, although your giant robot may lead you to believe otherwise. There are other subtle aspects to it, and from my experience, weapons generally never drain any of the core. Strengthening one, as you did with your giant robot, that would take some of the core. Relating this back to our original conversation, you had to focus to make your chocolate. Have you had to focus on anything else in the same way?”

“Coffee, would you like some?”

“Sure,” she said with a nod.

Lucian procured a cup of coffee and handed it to her. Yoshimi took a sip, impressed with the flavor. “It is good.”

“It was important to get it right,” Lucian said as his crows zipped around, Ezra appearing. “I also focused some into my sword, but not a lot.”

“When you created this area up here, did it put a strain on you in any way?”

Lucian thought back to when he first built his workshop. “I can’t say that it did. It came sort of naturally to me.”

“Then it likely didn’t use your core.”

The two stood there for a moment, each drinking their cup of coffee. When they were finished, Yoshimi motioned the cauldron over to her. She took a look at the liquid inside, and glanced back to Lucian.

“Anyway, like chocolate, I just sort of poured my power into it. Actually, I guess there was more with the chocolate. You know, I’m not saying this right. I looked up a recipe for the chocolate,” Lucian said. “Which makes no sense because the sugar and butter and whatever didn’t have flavor, but the chocolate did. Anyway. I feel like I poured a lot into the cauldron, but maybe it was all in my head.”

Yoshimi’s eyebrows raised.

“Yes?”

“Was it always so dark and sludgy?”

“It was after the second time, before I blew off my arms. Yeah.”

“I may need to study this for a little bit longer,” she finally said. “I really wish you could have this potion available to you in today’s battle, but I don’t want to get it wrong. I would like to have some time to test it, to modify with my own power, if need be.”

“You don’t have to do that...”

“I want to do it. To be honest, I’ve never heard of someone creating an elixir like this to use in a fight. As you have experienced, the food I make is naturally rejuvenating, but it won’t do much to your power, it will just make you feel better. But to create something that would actually replenish your power, that may take a little experimenting. You don’t mind if I take this cauldron with me, do you?”

“Not at all,” he said, floating it closer to her. “It was just sitting in my inventory list not really doing anything.”

“Your ‘inventory list.’ I like the way you use that term.” Concern flashed across Yoshimi’s dark, nacreous eyes. “Be safe today. And know when it is time to leave. Again, I’m sorry that I’m not able to join you.” She bowed to Lucian, and he graciously returned her bow.

“This is my fight to fight, and it’s not really my fight actually, it’s my predecessor’s fight. But I’ve got to be there for the start of it, and I’ve got a few of my own surprises for these clowns.”

“Yes, many of them really are clowns, but even clowns can be dangerous.”

“I’m pretty sure Stephen King wrote a couple books about that,” Lucian said with a smirk.

“An author?”

“American author. You wouldn’t know him.”

“I’m afraid not.” She bowed again, the cauldron now floating to her left. “I appreciate your company, Lucian.”

“I appreciate yours as well.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Setting the Stage

Lucian paced back and forth, deciding how he should proceed. He was still in front of his workshop, Grimzilla standing to the left of the lake, his two Grim Mechas standing in front of him.

For one, he would need more replicants.

With a wave of his hand, Lucian created another Grim Mecha, who lined up with the other two.

“That should be good, for now.”

It made sense to want to make his creations stronger, but if there was a limit, Lucian needed to be careful.

Even with the fact that he could create an entire world and still not drain his mantlecore, evident in the place he was currently standing, he wanted to preserve it.

Lucian had no idea how long he would be a Grim Reaper, but he planned to be powerful all the way until the end, the exact opposite of how he’d been in his real life.

But there was one thing that he could put power into, something that would always be with him.

Lucian’s armor grew out of his skin, coating his body and hardening.

After it formed, he focused on the armor, thickening and condensing the bone-like material. He added ridges, smoothed them out, and began imagining make-believe metals of ungodly strength. Adamantine, Carbonadium, Mithril, Vibranium.

He grew a bit lightheaded as a warm sensation moved through him, his armor taking on a metallic sheen.

By the time he was finished, Lucian practically resembled one of his replicants. He was completely decked out in head-to-toe metal, all the joints flexible, Lucian able to move just as fluidly as if he weren’t wearing the armor.

“What about us?” Hugin asked, the crow hovering before him. Munin wasn’t far off, his spherical creation doing circles around Ezra.

“I guess you two will always be with me, so it makes sense to make you a bit stronger,” Lucian raised his hand, and Hugin moved forward, power filtering out of Lucian’s fingertips and swirling around his crow. “Munin, get over here.”

The second crow came to them as well, joining Hugin until their metal darkened.

“That should be enough,” he said. “I don’t want to overdo it. This has to last.”

“Understandable. Shall we go then?”

Lucian grinned at Hugin. “When did you start using the word ‘shall?’”

“When you started using it.”

“I used it?” Lucian asked.

“You should eat some chocolate before we go.”

“Good call,” Lucian said as a plate of chocolate appeared in the air. He ate the pieces one at a time, observing his stats.

Lucian knew at that moment that he should have been paying more attention to his Soul Points while he was working on augmenting things, especially considering what he had to do today. He definitely didn’t want the battle to take place in Old Death’s world, Lucian preferring to do this in a familiar location, somewhere that gave them the element of surprise.

The beach in Portland, Maine.

It was perfect for what he planned to do.

“Maybe if I just rested for an hour…” he said. “Hugin, can you wake me up in an hour or so?”

“Time works differently here.”

“Crud. Can you wake me up in the equivalent of an Earth hour then?”

“I believe…” His crow bobbed its body left and right. “Sure. I will attempt to do that.”

“I really need to make a healing potion,” Lucian said as he floated back to his workshop. He lowered onto his bed, resting with his hands over his chest. He fell asleep quickly, and woke up to Hugin poking him with its beak.

“Just another… Twenty minutes…” Lucian said, pressing his spiritual creation away.

“Sorry, we have to go.”

Lucian checked his stats:

“That’s a little better,” he said as he mentally added a quick nap to his repertoire. It occurred to him that he could do something like this in the real world, but then he remembered Old Death telling him something about leaving himself prone, that it was best to rest here.

Maybe he hadn’t been such a bad instructor after all.

“Here goes nothing.” Lucian pressed his thumb and pinky finger together, Hugin and Munin racing over to him.

The three of them appeared on the beach in Portland, Maine.

It was a cloudy day, the surrounding neighborhood cast in subtle gray tones.

Lucian looked out to the sea, and as he did a light began to shimmer beneath the waves.

Once that was set, he summoned a dozen of his sentry tripods. They scuttled forward, burying themselves in the sand at Lucian’s command.

He then waited.

Lucian waited long enough that he got bored.

At some point, he thought about conjuring a television so he could play his game, that or a handheld unit, but he eventually decided against it, especially once he saw a man step onto the beach, a metal detector in his hands.

Name: Brock Johnson

Date of Birth: 01/17/1975

Date of Death: 10/19/2052

The man had a parasite similar to his brother’s, clear with yellow running through it. It definitely noticed Lucian, an eye peeling off the back of the parasite, a stinger starting to appear.

But Lucian didn’t engage it.

That wasn’t what he was here for.

To get away from the parasite, Lucian floated toward downtown Portland, figuring he would lure them back to the beach if they came while he was exploring.

He stayed mostly on the coastline until he reached a series of docks, which he hovered past, coming to a narrow, winding road surrounded by old brick buildings. A few of the streets opened up to larger thoroughfares, big enough for vehicles, but many of the streets maintained their old-school East Coast charm with their cobblestone appeal and walkability.

As he glided around, Lucian noticed that dozens of people had parasites of all colors, shapes, and sizes attached to them.

Some were clear with yellow running through them—the addiction parasite. He saw the leech parasite, as Yoshimi called it, the fat demon bug caterpillar-like with multiple legs, a hint of peach to its skin.

He also saw the greed afflicted parasites—black, shriveled, no eyes.

There was a homeless man with a mental health parasite, the demon bug clear with red filling, a vertical eye running down its back.

Lucian also saw someone with a purple parasite, like Katy had.

He’d seen similar things in New York, people and their demon bugs, but he hadn’t paid much attention to them, mostly due to being so focused on following his brother and future sister-in-law at the time.

And looking out to the streets, Lucian was reminded of why he was here, why this role mattered.

He could help people, if he so chose, or he could just go around getting stronger and stronger, creating new enemies.

Perhaps there was a scenario in which Lucian did both, increasing his power and helping others. But first, he had to handle his brother’s situation.

Of this he was sure.

Lucian didn’t mind being a Death Hunter of Death Hunters, an otherwise pious Grim Reaper who helped those who were afflicted.

But he needed to take care of his family first.

After all, with the power he’d been given, it would be incomprehensible for him not look after his loved ones.

Lucian saw a few other types of parasites as he floated back toward the beach, one on an older man in a red hat who carried a scowl on his face, a small, brain-like parasite with feelers hanging off his neck. He also saw a purple parasite that had yellow splotches on it, the demon bug covered in dozens of lips. There was also a sinewy parasite with shades of gray running through it attached to a young man.

In time, Lucian would find out what these parasites were, and what they were capable of.

But for now, he needed to focus on what happened next, and more importantly, surviving it.

Lucian floated back and forth on the beach, itching for the showdown to get started.

He knew he was prone, but he’d already been instructed not to do much of the battling, to operate along the outskirts.

Still, he had some ideas of his own.

And as Yoshimi had said, this could very well backfire. He didn’t know where that would leave him with Danira in the end, but he couldn’t worry about that now.

It was too late for that.

In the meantime, Lucian conjured more injurecrows, his black spherical IED’s lining up behind him.

He also called forth his three Grim Mechas, all of whom hovered along the perimeter of where he assumed the Committee would show up.

A sudden sense of sorrow bloomed in Lucian’s chest as he thought of Connor and his forthcoming death date.

“Focus,” he reminded himself, also recalling that Yoshimi said she would help in the end if she needed to.

So at least he had that.

Even with her offer, he still wanted to do it on his own; he wanted to be the one who saved his brother.

A portal signaled that the action was about to start.

Gaspard was the first to appear, the androgynous Death loosening his hands, as if he were ready to attack Lucian.

“I was wondering if you’d come,” the man said with a smirk, the Death barely able to contain his excitement at seeing Lucian alone, assuming that he had failed.

“I’m here,” Lucian said.

“It seems that you have brought some of your toys. Were you planning on doing something?”

Lucian looked around at his injurecrows, and from there to his three Grim Mechas. “I’m just trying to protect myself in case you do something,” he said with a shrug.

“You do realize that you are powerless against me, do you not? I understand that part of your nature, especially considering when you were born, is to believe that you are capable of something, that you have some uniqueness about you that will allow you to persevere. Poor child of the twentieth century. Let me assure you, Lucian North, that is not the case if you cross me. You have been given plenty of warnings, and I have continued to hold back. But all that can change.”

“I’m just doing what you asked of me,” Lucian said, showing him his hands.

Lord Lifton appeared, the handsome Death offering Lucian a firm smile. Next to him stood Mastima, a hood over her skull. They were also joined by the twins, the ones Lucian had yet to be introduced to.

“So, you have made contact with your Cuthbert,” Lord Lifton said. “That is good to know.”

“Have you been spying on me or something?”

“I assume that you wouldn’t appear here, or at a place so accessible, had you not done what we asked,” the leader of the Committee of Luminaries informed him. “Care to tell us how to locate him?”

“I thought it would be best if I just brought him here. You guys wanted him so badly, right?”

“You’re bringing him here?” Mastima asked, taking a step back.

“At least one of you has seriously threatened my existence because of this guy. Why would I not ask him to come handle this himself? I figured this was the best course of action, rather than letting you guys surprise him with whatever bullshit you were planning to surprise him with,” Lucian said with a shrug.

“Very well,” Lord Lifton said, raising his hand to calm his colleague, who was just about to shout something at Lucian.

“Temper, temper,” Lucian told Gaspard, smiling to the twins. “You two never told me your names.”

“Mariah,” the black-haired twin on the left said, her voice matter-of-fact.

“Destiny,” said the one on the right, a little more cordial.

“I didn’t know people actually named their kids that.”

Destiny started to frown.

The two were identical, their faces pale, upside-down red triangles painted on their foreheads. The only thing that seemed to be different about them was the stitching on their outfits. Like the other Deaths, they wore all black, but the one named Mariah had an outfit with silver stitching, while her sister’s featured black stitching.

“So you split your mantle?” Lucian asked both of them.

“That’s not what we’re here to discuss,” Mariah said tersely.

“Well, it has been good knowing all of you, but I guess we should get this show on the road.” Lucian smiled at the five of them, knowing full well that Gaspard was boiling in his skin at the moment. He started to turn away from them and stopped. “You know this could have been simple, right?”

“Excuse me?” Lord Lifton asked.

“I already told you what happened at the South Wind. It seems like someone in your ranks, or perhaps somewhat higher, actually believes this conspiracy that I, along with Yoshimi and Azazyel, of all people, teamed up with my predecessor to attack the South Wind. So they put pressure on you to get to the bottom of it. But there is no bottom, and by coming at me, you’ve only made it worse for all of us. And just a hunch here, but I’m guessing the five of you are smart enough to know that that isn’t what happened at all, right?”

He paused, waiting for one of them to say otherwise.

“Good, at least we’re on the same page then. Anyway, you could have just taken my word for it, but no, you proceeded to threaten me,” Lucian pointed a finger in Gaspard’s direction, “and my predecessor didn’t take very kindly to that.”

A double-bladed scythe appeared in Mastima’s hand, armor starting to cascade down her body as it were made of silk.

“She gets it,” Lucian said.

As Lucian had been instructed to do, he pressed his thumb and middle finger together.

Old Death appeared in a flash behind him, gripping his sword tightly. Leliel was with him as well, the angel carrying an ax.

“Ha! If it isn’t a bunch of cock robins and stuffy crinkum crankums,” Old Death spit.

Lucian stepped aside to see that his predecessor looked younger than he had before, a gleam about him he’d never seen before. He had an air of confidence to his demeanor as well, his posture one of a person ready to engage, to preserve his good name.

“I see you have come to fight.” Lord Lifton cleared his throat. “It is not our intention in asking to meet with you, Cuthbert, nor has it been our intention in putting pressure on Mr. North.”

“It’s Lucian. Mr. North was my father.”

Old Death smirked. “That’s my boy,” he said under his breath, returning his focus to the five Committee members who stood before him. “You want answers?” he growled. “I got them. But you’re going to have to beat them out of me.”

“The man is weak,” Gaspard said flatly. “Not only has he given his mantle to this poor fellow…” he stuttered over the words, as if he were trying to come up with an insult. “Anyway, the fool has also poured much of his mantlecore into creating an insanely large world. He presents no threat to us. Mastima?”

The female Death took a step forward.

“This is going to be fun,” Lucian’s predecessor said as he flourished his blade.

“I can handle her.” Leliel brought her ax to the ready. “We have battled before.”

“One on one,” Mastima said, her dark, soulless eyes now locked on the angel.

“But maybe I’m coming at this too brashly,” Old Death said. “Maybe I should give you a little insight into my thinking pattern, and what happened at the South Wind. What do you think, Lucian?”

“I don’t know, it’s really up to you,” Lucian said, now standing behind his predecessor and the angel, as he had been instructed to do. “They didn’t take my word for it, though.”

“But you know what would be more interesting?” Old Death asked. “It would be more interesting to actually create the spark that produces the war. After all, isn’t that what you, and those that run the Committees want, Lord Lifton? Isn’t it? You can go ahead and be honest, if you’re even capable of rectitude.”

“I’m sorry,” Lord Lifton said, barely able to hide his dire expression. Whereas before he had seemed quite passive, the man was absolutely seething now, just a few shades away from all-out rage.

“Do I have to spell it out for you, you dandy prat?”

“What do we do?” the twin named Mariah asked her sister.

“Shhh…”

“Yes, what do we do? A fair question indeed, young lass!” Old Death laughed. “You damn well know that this is because of your actions, and the actions of those above you, as well as the actions of equally-ranked members of the Progeny of Light, that our two spiritual forces have been at war for ages. But it has never been a full-fledged war, not for thousands of years. And that is the twist: we have been made to think that we are at war, to think that we should be trying to kill one another, when we have the same goals.”

“We do not have the same goals as them,” Gaspard said, pointing at Leliel.

“Look at that, Lucian, the Committee’s fart-catcher wants attention again. Please, if I dare say, fuck the fuck off, Gaspard, and let the adults speak.” Old Death blew a mocking kiss to the enraged Death. “What? You don’t know? He must know,” he said, returning his focus to Lord Lifton. “He must know what is actually going on here.”

Lord Lifton’s shoulders lifted and suddenly, Old Death was lying on the ground, thrown backward by an invisible blast.

“Yes, just what I was hoping you would do you,” Old Death said, baring his teeth. He looked up to the dark gray clouds, a smile forming on his face as gold columns rained down from the sky, seven angels appearing on the beach. “Impeccable timing, as always.”

Chapter Thirty: Blasted Beach

Lucian immediately recognized the blast that followed.

It came from Danira’s enormous energy weapon, her shot skidding along the beach just to Lucian’s right, nearly cutting through one of the twin Deaths.

Menor’s cannibalistic ax formed in Lucian’s hand, the weapon frothing at the mouth as he tossed it in the direction of the angels.

Lucian was thrown backward once a spear hit his body, nearly breaking through his armor.

That was another thing Lucian was ready for this time.

As Old Death had given the Committee hell, he had grown his armor, all aside from his skull mask, which was now firmly over his face. Had he not, the spear of light may have torn right through him.

And he knew who the spear belonged to, the angel known as Hashul appearing over Lucian, energy sparking off his wings as he beat them in the wind.

Lucian’s cape swelled forward, his retractable claws growing from his knuckles.

He delivered a punch straight into Hashul’s stomach, the angel retaliating with a fist to Lucian’s chin that made everything flash for a moment. His cape twisted forward; Hashul batted it away as Lucian took to the high ground.

Floating just a few feet in the air now, Lucian equipped his gun that fired electric tripwire. He shot Hashul with it several times, his cape still distracting the man.

He was just about to bore down on him with his particle-beam cannon when another angel engaged him, hitting Lucian in the face with an enormous hammer.

All Lucian could think as he flew back through the air, eventually smacking into a pile of rocks on the shoreline before the small cliff of his favorite beach, was why an angel had a giant hammer, and why he hadn’t thought of crafting one.

It was a dumb thought, a thought that made him grin even while he was actively dealing with the Progeny of Light.

One of his Grim Mechas came to the rescue, colliding with the female angel with the hammer while his injurecrows whistled toward her, exploding on impact.

This gave Lucian just a second to turn his attention to the greater battle, seeing who was engaging who.

Mastima traded blows with Leliel; Old Death took on Lord Lifton while Gaspard fought off some of the angels. The twins, each of whom had long, slinky swords, fought Danira, who’d gone with her sword so she could more easily engage her opponents.

Lucian did a quick check of his Soul Points, just to make sure he had plenty to go around.

His crows raced over to him, Hugin and Munin checking on Lucian before he waved them away.

“I’m good,” he told them as he began conjuring huge fireballs rimmed in electricity. He aimed his palms at Hashul, three of his fireballs connecting, the angel’s wings catching on fire as electric shock moved through him.

Lucian shot over toward the angel who had continued to be a thorn in his side, and just as he did, his remote sensory weapons began to come out of the sand, firing at anyone that came near them that wasn’t Lucian or his companions.

Lasers going off, explosions, the sounds of weapons clinking together, cries of anger and anguish, poofs of magic, Menor’s ax twisting through the air while gnashing its teeth, searing blips of light, crows flying all around—the fight was starting to resemble what had happened at the South Wind, only more visceral and cantankerous with all of Lucian’s tech at full throttle.

A wild look on his face, Hashul lunged at Lucian with his spear, the angel gritting his teeth as Lucian stepped beside him, anticipating his attack and dodging it completely.

His shotgun in his hands now, Lucian fired two slugs straight into the angel’s side, blowing off his arm.

Lucian charged Hashul, cracking the butt of his shotgun against his face, even as the angel tried to conjure enough power to blow Lucian off.

Lucian’s head went right, his body to the left, as one of Danira’s golden cherub crows decapitated him, cutting straight through the armor covering his neck.

“Shit!” Lucian said as his decapitated head hit the sand, bouncing once, Hugin whisking over him to engage the cherub crow.

Lucian managed to see Danira at that moment, a firm look on her face as she continued to engage the twin Deaths. She was now in head-to-toe armor, the only way Lucian able to recognize her being her hair.

And he couldn’t help but have this feeling she knew what had just happened, that she was purposefully ignoring him.

One of his Grim Mechas landed, and scooped Lucian’s head into his arm.

His replica advanced toward Lucian’s body, which continued to try to strike Hashul with the butt of his shotgun.

Grim Mecha touched down, handing the head to Lucian’s body and taking over, repeatedly stabbing the angel as the man tried and failed to fight back, his replicant guarding Lucian while he healed.

Once Lucian’s head had mended back to his body, he got into position again to take on the angel, only to be tossed aside by tendril-like fingers that came for him, Gaspard suddenly appearing to Lucian’s left.

“We’re on the same side,” he started to say, batting away the fingers as he got back to his feet.

“You know very well what you did here, Lucian,” Gaspard said, baring his teeth, his hair a mess now and partially covering his face. “You have caused an all-out war.”

“It wasn’t me who caused it.”

“This is going to be very painful for you.”

Rather than respond, Lucian kicked up into the air, his carbine forming under his arm. He began unloading his magazine at the man, even as Gaspard’s sharp fingers tore in Lucian’s direction.

He flew to the right; his injurecrows careening into Gaspard’s body, tossing the Death back to the shoreline and filling the air with sand and smoke.

Lucian took this moment to toggle his weapon from carbine to zero-point energy field manipulator mode.

Once he did, he squeezed the trigger, a wave of force latching onto Gaspard, Lucian able to repeatedly slam him against the shoreline, waves washing over the man as he tried to free himself from Lucian’s weapon.

But Gaspard was a more experienced Death, and it wasn’t but a second later that a flying blade cut Lucian’s arm off.

That same arm fell down to the sand, sprouted legs, and continued to trigger his weapon.

Lucian landed, ignoring the tendrils now coming for him as he stopped in front of his opponent. Even though it was hard to hold with one arm, he went for his MX-11, and he was just about to fire at Gaspard when a new portal opened up.

A man dropped down to the beach, Gaspard saying something under his breath, something that sounded like he was afraid.

The man was clad in all black, clearly a member of the Progeny of Darkness. Instead of a cape, he wore a trench coat, replacing a set of robes with black jeans, a black button-up shirt, and a black hat.

“It’s Wyatt, you fool, the Death Hunter,” Gaspard said as the man in question parted his trench coat, revealing two six-shooters on his belt. “You’ll never be able to…”

Lucian was sent to the ground before he heard the report of the man’s revolver. The man did the same to Gaspard, Lucian managing to roll to his side as Wyatt approached the two.

“So you’re the new Death come to raise hell, right?” Wyatt asked in a thick southern accent, still aiming his revolver at Lucian.

“I wouldn’t say I have come to raise hell,” Lucian told him, “but I keep seeming to find myself in situations like this.”

Wyatt was quiet for a moment, the Death Hunter not at all concerned with the battle still happening behind him.

A blast from one of the angels came searing in his direction; Wyatt simply lifting his revolver in the air, completely absorbing the attack with his weapon.

He spit, and ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth before speaking again. “Good to know. I’ll be dealing with you in due time. But for now…”

Gaspard sprung forward; Wyatt cracked him upside the head with his revolver. He quickly got on top of Gaspard, a rope appearing in his hands. He fired two shots into the back of Gaspard’s head, Gaspard going limp as Wyatt strung him up, his rope glowing with energy.

“Now you stay right there, boy,” Wyatt told Lucian, the brim of his hat shielding his eyes. “You’re next.”

“Like fuck I am,” Lucian said as he fired at Wyatt with his MX-11.

The Death Hunter absorbed Lucian’s blast, just as two angels came swooping down with swords rimmed in golden energy.

Wyatt managed to shoot one of them out of the sky; the man quickly made his way over to the other angel, grabbed her by her wing, flipped her over, and fired two shots into the back of her skull.

Gaspard managed to turn his head and look over at Lucian, the sand now sticky with his blood. “Leave, you fool… Leave…”

“I ain’t done with you yet, boy!” Wyatt called over to Lucian as the Death Hunter took down the next angel.

Lucian looked to Old Death to see him being overpowered by Lord Lifton. The opposite could be said about Leliel in her match with Mastima, the angel clearly winning the fight.

The twin deaths were still taking on a couple of the angels including Danira, Lucian’s Grim Mechas, Menor’s ax and crows adding chaos to the fight.

And he was just about to do it; Lucian was just about to port away, to live to fight another battle when a purple pillar of energy struck the center of the beach, throwing everyone off their feet, including Wyatt.

Azazyel appeared, the angel’s gunmetal gray armor spreading up his arms as a sharp mask formed over his face.

Chapter Thirty-One: All Involved

Old Death raised his sword at Azazyel. “Well, if it isn’t the mumblecrust from Manchester. En garde, you worthless sack of buzzard dribble!”

Lucian’s predecessor lifted into the air; Azazyel met him in a matter of seconds, striking Old Death so hard that the man was sent spiraling backward, straight into the water.

“It appears as if everyone has decided to come to the beach today,” Azazyel said in a grave voice, locking eyes onto Lucian. “Aside from someone I’ve been looking for.”

Movement to Lucian’s left caught his attention; Wyatt grabbed Gaspard, a portal appearing, the Death Hunter vanishing with the Committee member.

Lucian barely had time to register what had happened, but he was glad that there were fewer opponents now.

“I’m not done with you yet!” Old Death shouted at Azazyel as he emerged from the water, his robes swelling forward until they formed what almost resembled a giant bat. The fabric crashed down onto Azazyel, hardening instantly as he tried to fight it off.

Figuring he would try to help, Lucian equipped his particle-beam cannon and aimed it at the Watcher.

It took a moment to charge, Azazyel still trying to fight off Old Death’s robes when Lucian blasted him, his action taking Leliel off guard. The angel dove for cover.

Seeing an opportunity, Mastima charged forward, driving her scythe into Leliel’s stomach.

The angel cried out, but managed to push the female Death away with her ax. She leaped into the air, the wings on her ankles propelling her forward as she cut Mastima’s arm off.

A purple pillar of light bore down onto the beach; Lord Lifton sprang into the air, the twin Deaths got out of the way just in time to avoid being vaporized.

The angels started to gather, all of them now in a cluster with Danira at the center, who seemed to be hesitating.

Upon gathering her wits, she motioned the angels forward, the group flying toward the first opponent they could reach.

The twin Deaths ended up engaging the three angels; another fired shots from his energy-rimmed wings at Azazyel, who continued to fight his way out of Old Death’s robes; another couple came toward Lord Lifton, including the ones that Wyatt had shot earlier and the male angel known as Hashul.

The battle was back on as Lucian’s Grim Mechas returned to the fray, explosions sounding off as his injurecrows met their targets, more sand and rubble thrown into the air.

Lucian knew it was coming, even as he continued to try to microwave Azazyel, he was well aware that there was an opponent heading his way.

Danira landed, but rather than fire upon Lucian, the angel struck him in the face with the butt of her gun, Lucian stumbling backward and losing his grip on his weapon.

Silent as ever, Danira aimed her weapon at him. Lucian’s cape swelled forward and disrupted her shot, the blast cutting off to the right and bringing down some of the cliffside rock into the ocean, his favorite bench disappearing as well.

And as much as he hated to do it, Lucian knew that he would have to engage her.

He rushed forward with his claws drawn, knocking Danira’s weapon out of her hands.

His lava sword formed; she responded with a blade of her own, made of golden fire.

Lucian advanced on her with a calculated swing, Danira easily dodging his attack.

He managed to twist around and bring his sword up, kicking out of the way just in time to avoid her next strike.

Danira landed behind him and pressed off the ground, her wings lifting her as she spun into the air. She dropped just before Lucian and tried to sink her blade into his stomach.

His armor protected him, her blade slipping off to the side as Lucian brought his own sword back, going for an overarm hack that was destined to land.

Danira fell to one knee as Lucian drove the enhanced blade into her shoulder, cutting through her armor.

“I’m sorry,” he started to say, Danira’s only response being a grunt as she lunged forward, tackling him to the beach.

The two rolled toward the shoreline just as Azazyel unleashed another blast of energy from the heavens, this one coming within a few feet of them.

They stopped, Danira now on top of Lucian, fear racing across her face, evident even though she wore a sharp mask.

“You didn’t mean it, did you?” Lucian asked suddenly. “When you attacked me…”

Straddling him, Danira pulled her fist back and punched Lucian so hard that he could have sworn his mask cracked.

He tried to buck her off; she gripped him even tighter this time, cracking another fist against his chin.

He managed to flip her around; a spinning scythe flew in their direction, Lucian pressing down on Danira as it razored over their heads.

The scythe returned to its owner, Mastima, the female death trying to best Leliel yet again.

“Argh!” Danira kicked Lucian off her, the angel bursting forward and latching onto him, torpedoing straight up into the air, well past the fight.

Lucian was familiar with this move; remembering that she had done it to him once before.

“I know you don’t mean any of this,” he shouted as he got his bearings, as they spiraled higher and higher into the air. He quickly checked his Soul Points, seeing that he was close to the halfway point:

“Lucian…” Danira said, her voice tinged with anguish as the two reached an apex in the sky, the battle still raging beneath them.

“I don’t want to fight you.” Lucian pressed away from her, his MX-11 appearing in his hands.

He pointed his energy weapon at her, Danira staring at him defiantly. “Is that what you plan to do, demon?” she asked with a snarl.

“You’re the one that attacked me…”

Lucian glanced down, and even though they were pretty high up, he could see his predecessor struggling to overpower Azazyel, Old Death mostly on the defensive.

Lucian was just returning his attention to Danira when another purple column appeared in the sky, this one directly next to them.

But rather than fire down to the beach, it sucked both of them into a vortex, shooting them out the other end. Danira and Lucian landed onto the beach below, leaving a crater in their wake.

“Are you okay?” he asked her as one of her angels flew in the air above them, the woman struck out of the sky by one of the twin Death’s slinky swords.

Lucian crawled over to Danira, noticing that her armor was cracked now, that she was moaning in pain.

She lifted her arm, and as she did it started to turn black, to wilt away.

“What’s going on?” Lucian started to ask.

“Lucian…” Danira said, her mask instantly disappearing.

And even though he never tried it before, Lucian pressed his energy forward as he had done multiple times before, imagining himself healing her.

To his surprise, Danira’s arm started to return to its normal color, her fingers reforming.

“Lucian, don’t…”

“Just hang tight…”

“Demon…”

“Angel…”

Danira shoved him away.

She sprung to her feet, her sword in her hand, hesitation on her face as she looked him over. Danira quickly scanned her arm to see that it was completely healed. And for a split second, a soft smile came over her face, the same type of smile she’d given Lucian when he’d created chocolate for her.

“We don’t have to fight…” Lucian nodded toward the ocean. “I have a surprise.”

Lucian turned in the direction of the sea, and as he did the waves started to part.

It took a moment for everyone fighting to see the absolutely enormous mecha lifting from the water, but once Grimzilla was visible, most everyone stopped fighting for a moment to watch him hover over the ocean, the waves now lashing against the shore.

Grimzilla’s eyes shone purple as cannons began to lift off his shoulders, the robot’s energy blades forming.

“You are so ridiculous…” Danira said.

Grimzilla began his attack, hundreds upon hundreds of injurecrows swarming toward the beach. The mecha’s concentrated energy blasts that cut through some of the angels, reaching the Progeny of Darkness.

In response, the twin Deaths opened a portal and left, quickly followed by Lord Lifton.

“That’s my boy!” Old Death screamed, using the distraction to charge at Azazyel.

He lunged forward, black injurecrows flying in between his attacks, explosions kicking up sand, Old Death now focused solely on killing his opponent.

But Azazyel was fast, and clearly stronger than Lucian’s predecessor.

He grabbed the man by the throat; Old Death’s head exploded.

Before it could even begin to reform, a bolt of energy lifted from the ground, striking Old Death’s body and blowing out the top of his neck hole, turning him into a fine, bloody mist.

“No!” Lucian cried as he flew toward Azazyel.

He was struck backward by a series of energetic gusts that sent him flipping toward the sea.

Still not ready to give up, and all but ignoring his Soul Points, Lucian lifted in the air toward Grimzilla, the cockpit on the front of his creation opening.

He landed inside, and as the hatch started to shut, information appeared on the reflective screen in front of him.

He focused all of his firepower on the fallen angel, and as he did so, Azazyel rose into the air, his arms forming into two darkened blades as he flew toward Lucian.

Lucian swatted him away using Grimzilla’s towering energy blade.

The rockets on his feet helped Lucian spring forward, Grimzilla slicing at Azazyel as the tiny man blocked each attack.

Anguish now on her face, Leleil faced Azazyel; Mastima turned her focus to Azazyel as well, the Progeny of Light gathering around Danira. Lucian’s only goal now was to finish the Watcher.

No matter what.

For his predecessor, for Yoshimi, for himself, and even for the Progeny of Light, who had been struggling with the man for ages.

Reticles cascaded across Lucian’s pane of vision as retractable cannons on his creation’s body traced Azazyel’s every movement.

And just as Lucian felt that he was starting to get the upper hand, that it looked like Azazyel’s power was beginning to wane, Lucian’s mecha was struck by a purple pillar of energy from the sky.

Everything short-circuited for a moment, the cockpit shaking, alarms going off.

The trauma caused a health bar to materialize in front of Lucian, one indicating that he wasn’t going to be able to take more than a couple shots like that.

“Not strong enough,” Lucian said, chastising himself for not pouring more of his mantlecore into his creation.

But this was supposed to be a Hail Mary, and as Azazyel flew at him again, Lucian released one of his fists, the fist exploding from his wrist and driving the fallen angel into the cliff, deep enough that the top began to crumble, Azazyel at least nine or ten feet in by the time Lucian’s fist reversed its trajectory, returning to his wrist.

“Did I do it?” Lucian said to himself, looking at his own Soul Points and seeing that while there had been some change, his creation was taking the brunt of Azazyel’s attacks.

He could see Danira floating above the beach, her angels with her, all of them turning toward the cliff where Azazyel had crash-landed. Lucian’s Grim Mechas joined them, ready to engage, as did his crows, Leliel and Mastima making up the rear of the group.

Lucian could see their facial expressions now on the screen before him, all of them enlarged, a conversation taking place between Leliel and the angels, Mastima chiming in.

And for a moment he thought that they were about to engage one another, that the fight was going to go on indefinitely until people ported away.

But this wasn’t the case.

All of them made toward the partially exploded cliff together, where Lucian used to sit on his lone bench, their weapons at the ready.

And as Azazyel started to emerge, they all attacked at once.

The man was able to bat a few of them away with his wings, which were starting to grow larger, Azazyel also using his bladed arms to block their attacks.

The first one he took down was Leliel, the fallen angel feigning a strike, Leliel moving to block it and Azazyel bursting past her, the woman cut in half.

He was shot back to the beach by Danira, Lucian tracking him the entire time, ready to engage the fallen angel with Grimzilla’s weaponry.

Azazyel flung his sword at Danira and it passed right through her armor, driving her backward and pinning her against the cliff.

“Not on my watch, asshole,” Lucian said as he fired on Azazyel, focusing on his legs and knocking the angel off his feet, which gave Hashul the chance to attack.

The male angel came forward with the golden spear, driving it into Azazyel’s body. He was shot backward, a small bolt of lightning lifting from the ground and tearing him in half.

Another pair of angels came around, Azazyel also striking them with white-purple energy that ripped through their bodies.

Back on his feet, the fallen angel started to engage Mastima.

Lucian managed to blast Azazyel in the back with a burst of searing plasma, Mastima cutting into him with her scythe. Azazyel responded to Lucian’s surprise attack with another purple blast from the sky that caused Grimzilla to short-circuit for a moment.

His arms returned to their normal form and an even larger sword appeared in the fallen angel’s hands; he engaged Mastima for a moment longer before he finally got his hit in, a slice that separated her body from her right shoulder to her left waist.

And Lucian was just about to blast him again, when another purple burst of energy rained down from the sky, Grimzilla powering down this time.

“Shit!”

Lucian heard a percussive sound directly in front of him, followed by the sound of metal on metal as Azazyel pried open the cockpit, alarms going off all around Lucian’s head.

His Soul Points flash in front of him:

Lucian barely managed to get his hands up in time as the hatch of his craft flew open.

He summoned bursts of fire rimmed in electricity from his right hand, conjuring wind from his left.

Injurecrows exploded all around them, smoke billowing into his face as Azazyel reached into the cockpit for Lucian.

It didn’t matter what he threw at the fallen angel, Azazyel seemed to absorb it all.

The fallen angel was, however, showing signs of being worn down, his hair disheveled, scratches all over his armor, an exasperated look about him even though he wore a mask.

Seeing just a small sign of weakness gave Lucian a boost of courage, and even as a voice at the back of his head told him to run, to leave the fight now, he exploded out of the cockpit, tackling Azazyel and driving him down into the water.

They hit the seafloor and bounced up, Azazyel dropping fist after fist despite the fact that they were underwater, the two of them eventually making their way to the shoreline.

They finally made it to the beach, and as they did Azazyel threw Lucian off. Lucian was struck by a bolt of purple energy before he could hit the ground, Azazyel’s blade arms reforming.

“I’m not done with you yet, you chicken-hearted milksop!”

Old Death stood behind the fallen angel now, haggard, covered in blood, dragging his sword on the ground as he cursed under his breath.

“You are no match for me,” Azazyel said.

One of the female angels tried to attack him from behind; Azazyel blasted her so far backward that it seemed as if she had completely disappeared.

“Try me, you festering mollycoddle…” Old Death spit. “You’ll be surprised what I’m capable of!”

“No, no I won’t.”

The pillar of energy that struck Old Death was unlike any that Azazyel had conjured before. As soon as it hit him Lucian cried out, the pillar growing larger, Lucian reaching out only to be whisked away.

He glanced up to see a familiar angel above him now, an uncomfortable look on her face as Danira saved Lucian yet again.

Azazyel’s blast radius grew quickly; the explosion that followed sent Lucian and Danira spiraling away from the beach.

The two of them smacked into a rooftop, their weight carrying them straight through and separating them once they hit the floor below.

Lucian tried to press himself out of the rubble, pain spreading through him now, everything flashing for a moment.

He knew the best thing to do would be to go, to get as far away from the battle as possible, but he also had to know if Old Death was okay, if Danira had made it through.

He turned in the direction that she had fallen; Lucian started to press the rubble away. His hands came under a bathroom sink and he hoisted it into the air, throwing it behind him.

“Danira? Danira?” he called out as he searched through the scree.

He felt something grab his leg. He looked down to see her hand slipping toward his ankle.

Lucian dug Danira out of the debris, the angel coughing as he pulled her into his arms. “You have to go…”

“I have to go back to the beach…” he said, his vision blurring and refocusing on her face. His Soul Points flashed, an intense pain moved through his body, but he ignored it all, his sole focus on the angel.

Danira was pretty scraped up, her hair a mess now, blue paint smeared across one of her cheeks.

“You are such an idiot, demon,” she said, reaching her hand to his cheek, Lucian’s skull mask immediately filtering away.

“Why did you attack me?”

“We can’t…”

“Don’t say it,” Lucian said, his voice quivering.

Now wasn’t the time. Even so, he didn’t want to hear it, he didn’t want to be told that they couldn’t be together.

Not now.

Not after everything they’d already been through.

“I’m going back to the beach,” he said, still holding the angel in his arms, not wanting to let go.

But he knew he had to.

He had to check on…

“Lucian, you don’t understand, your…” Danira swallowed hard. “He’s dead. There’s no way he survived it. You need to leave here. Now. Save yourself. The next time we meet…”

“Please don’t,” Lucian said, looking deeply into her eyes.

“Next time, I have to…”

“I’m not going to let you kill me.”

“Demon.”

“Angel,” Lucian said through gritted teeth. “No. Absolutely not.”

“We have to…” Danira sighed miserably. “Set me down; I have to go.”

Lucian did as he was instructed to do, Danira now on her feet, the angel looking up at the enormous hole in the roof of the home. “Lucian, I’m sorry.”

“But…”

Danira turned to him, and as she did her golden sword appeared in her hands. She swung at Lucian so quickly that there was no chance for him to block her.

His head separated from his shoulders.

Everything flashed black.

The last thing he remembered seeing was Danira’s foot in front of him, her sword down by her side.

It was over.

Chapter Thirty-Two: On a Pale Horse

Lucian gasped.

His Soul Points appeared before him, a blur of blackened color with white streaks through it, everything murky, cloudy, terrible.

He knew what it felt like to be almost out of power, his heart fluttering in his chest.

Lucian heard the beep of hospital medical equipment, this sound falling away quickly, a new sound taking shape, one of movement, of wings.

“Where…?”

The words that met Lucian’s ears were muffled, distorted.

As he tried to understand them, his perspective changed.

He briefly saw a swath of beige, and he mentally reached out for it, realizing that he no longer had arms or legs.

And if he no longer had arms or legs, it occurred to him that he likely didn’t have a body; an image of Danira decapitating him as if he’d seen it from a security camera in the corner of the room flashed across his mind’s eye.

“No…”

Lucian had the overwhelming sense that this was his final stop in whatever he could call his life, that he was in Heaven, about to be banished to Hell.

And even with all of the fear that was running through him, Lucian couldn’t help but mentally smirk at this last thought.

Heaven or Hell? Only You Can Decide.

The words rang out in his skull mockingly, Lucian already having been forced to choose neither.

“Where…?”

Again, no reply.

More details started to come to Lucian regarding what had just happened, how they’d been flung into someone’s house by Azazyel’s final attack, how he’d tried to go back for his predecessor.

And why?

Aside from giving him this curse, what had his predecessor truly done for Lucian?

Lucian’s thoughts skipped from questioning his loyalty to what would happen to him next.

He had already made the journey from living to dead, so what then? How would the Progeny of Light torture him? Would they imprison him at the South Wind for all eternity? Would they absorb his power?

Had he somehow been picked up by a different entity, perhaps an injuresoul?

Lucian willed himself to blink, the wind slapping against his face.

Wind?

He got the sense that he was flying now, that he was being carried. He heard noises again, and he could have sworn that a female voice called him demon, but he couldn’t be sure.

He saw the glint of something sparkling in the distance, but was unable to interpret what it was.

The movement stopped.

Lucian was stationary for a moment, resting on something soft.

It was night and he was suddenly back in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, hovering over the bridge that stretched into the city. There was a sheen of ice on everything, the river below frozen, the moon a bleached bone sliver in the sky.

Lucian tried to speak, but no sound came out of his mouth as he looked down at his hands, and from there to his feet, seeing that he was indeed alive.

A white sports car began to take shape beneath him. It was a beautiful vehicle with deep curves and a wide stance, twin exhausts and an epic spoiler.

It hummed, beckoning Lucian toward it.

He lowered down, his eyes falling upon a license plate that read MORTIS.

Lucian recalled trying to fight his way across the bridge previously, but maybe…

He could already see the swell of injuresouls at the other end of the bridge, the terrifying creations spreading in his direction.

A new idea came to Lucian, a way to take out as many of the incoming horde as possible.

It was an insane idea.

It was an idea that shouldn’t work, but this was generally the department in which Lucian thrived.

He came to the driver’s side door and it popped open suicide-style.

Lucian lowered into the vehicle, noticing that there was a large flat screen in place of the center console, a single button on the screen.

But he didn’t press the flashing button, not yet anyway.

He brought the door down and placed his hands on the steering wheel. He revved the engine, nodding excitedly, realizing how fast the car was going to be able to travel.

He revved it again, and this time he shifted into drive.

Lucian took off, leaving the sound of burning rubber behind him as he blitzed toward the crowd of injuresouls.

He turned the wheel just in time, the back end spinning out, Lucian smashing into the mob, crunching some of them under his squealing tires.

The injuresouls beat at his windows, but none were able to break inside as Lucian backed up into several more of the demons, running the bumper of the white sports car into the bridge’s railing.

He sped forward again, braking just in time to stop himself from flying off the bridge and into the frozen river below.

More injuresouls swirled around him, Lucian barely able to see, the button on the dashboard flashing.

But Lucian wasn’t ready to eject himself or abort his attack.

So he backed up again, slamming his foot onto the gas pedal and speeding forward, the white vehicle taking out more injuresouls and crunching over the bodies of others.

The front of the car started to lift as a few of them attempted to pick up the vehicle.

Lucian slammed his foot on the gas pedal and again shredded his shadowy opponents, his tires screeching as he skidded to a halt. They tried this strategy again the next time he came around, the injuresouls finally able to flip Lucian’s vehicle over.

The front windshield shattered; one of the injuresouls used its claws to pull itself into the cabin of the vehicle, its jaw dislocating, bloodied bandages flailing from its neck as Lucian went for the blinking button on the dashboard.

As soon as he touched it he was atop a pale white horse, his sword in his hand, cutting down his opponents.

The white horse kicked through an injuresoul, Lucian bringing his sword straight into the mouth of another one of the demons.

He kept fighting them, his horse helping when it could.

But they kept coming.

Endless.

Infinite.

It was at this point that Lucian realized that he was halfway to the other side of the bridge. And when he made it, then what? What could possibly lie on the other side of the divide, past the Empyrean, further than he had ever traveled before?

There was only one way to find out.

Lucian used his shotgun to take down another one of his opponents. He yanked on the reins of his horse, the beast charging forward.

His enemies tried to stop him, but Lucian tore through the demons, blasting his gun behind him to keep those on his tail from catching up.

And he did it.

Lucian reached the other side of the bridge, his heart sinking when he saw that there was another bridge beyond; this one was even longer.

Energy poured into him as he took a deep breath in. The energy continued to strike him, warm at first but increasingly hot as it overpowered him, his heart giving way.

Lucian awoke with a gasp.

He was in his workshop, no pale horse in sight.

A corona of light came to Lucian as he blinked his eyes open, and for a moment he thought Danira was standing there, that she was looking over him, taking care of him.

But she wasn’t.

He was alone.

Lucian sat up, and brought his hands to his temples, massaging them for a moment.

His Soul Points appeared before him, telling him he was back at full charge:

A cup of coffee materialized in Lucian’s hand as he started to sift through everything that had happened back at the beach in Portland.

He started with how his predecessor had appeared, challenging the Committee, the angels arriving, the fights that followed. This led him to remembering Gaspard coming after him, and the Death Hunter known as Wyatt coming as well.

That would be something that would likely play out in the coming weeks.

What had happened to Gaspard after Wyatt disappeared with him? Of course, Wyatt was smart to leave once Azazyel arrived, and Lucian didn’t feel sorry for Gaspard in the least, but he had the itching feeling that he would have to somehow get involved with that at some point.

After all, Wyatt was after him.

Lucian shook his head as he remembered Grimzilla rising from the sea, the sinking feeling in his chest upon seeing his predecessor go down…

“I don’t know,” he said to his crows, both of whom were hovering at the end of the bed.

A thought came to Lucian.

“Who saved me?” he asked Hugin.

“Danira,” Hugin said in its nondescript voice. “But she cut your head off first.”

“I remember that part. But why?”

“Because you were trying to go back to the fight,” his spherical creation told him. “She cut off your head and then came here. You first appeared in the desert, and then she flew to your workshop.”

“I did?” Lucian asked, trying to recall what had happened and only coming back with a few blurred flashes of color.

“She placed you in the bed and waited. She left, just now.”

“I really don’t get her,” Lucian said, his energy sinking for a moment. “Why can’t things just be simple between us?”

“Maybe they will be one day, my boy...”

Lucian was startled to hear Old Death’s voice.

He glanced around his workshop, searching for the man.

“Down here,” Old Death called to him.

Lucian looked to the floor to see Ezra the cat staring at him, a twinkle in his eye. “Come,” Old-Death-as-Ezra said, turning to the lake.

Lucian was up in a matter of seconds, floating out of his workshop and toward the lake. He saw Grimzilla standing to the left, his towering creation powered down at the moment, his head dipped ever so slightly. He could see the empty city on the other side of the cliff, the morning sun reflecting off the towering skyscrapers, a few flying vehicles buzzing in the air, everything glimmering.

They reached the shoreline of the lake and sat, Old-Death-as-Ezra looking over his shoulder at Lucian.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting this,” Lucian said, his coffee cup that read ‘Demon’ still in his hand.

“And I wasn’t expecting you to feed me chocolate the other day, but it was decent, and I’m glad you’re learning how to create more complicated items. Your giant robot here was quite the treat,” Old Death said, looking up at Grimzilla. “Ha! You sure gave those blowsabellas and gundiguts a shock, big guy.”

“Where do you get these words?” Lucian asked, still a bit shocked to see his predecessor in feline form.

“You should know by now, my boy,” the cat said. “I’ve been a collector of rare words for over two hundred years. This should come as no surprise to you. It is an art form, truly.”

“I didn’t say I was surprised; I’m just wondering why you don’t go with easier words.”

“Like what? What would you call everyone back at the beach? Festering fuckboys and Raggedy Ann bitches? Because that works too.”

Lucian snorted. “I don’t know if I would call them that…”

“You get my point, and if you don’t, let’s move on anyway. I have a hairball that may make its presence known at any moment, so please be aware.”

“So… You’re a cat now?” Lucian asked as he scratched the back of his head.

“No, I am a bloody panther. Kidding. I have always been this cat, well, it has always been me. Or…” Old Death bobbed his head left and right for a moment, his ears flitting back. “No need to get too deep into that philosophical conversation, not yet anyway, not until the hairball comes! Ahem, I’m still getting used to being in this body, like I said.”

“So… you aren’t dead?”

Old Death laughed until he started hacking up something. He arched his head forward, coughing up a hairball, a disgusted look on his face. “Bleh. There, that’s better. We are both dead, Lucian, never forget that. I just haven’t fully died yet. This cat is all that is left of me now. I wish I’d made him a bit larger. But I suppose this vessel will do.”

“What about Leliel?”

“I don’t know how she’s going to feel about me becoming a cat, but we can scratch that itch—pun obviously intended—when we get there. I’m sure she’s alive, and if that’s the case, she will show up here at some point. Perhaps I will leave with her then. Who knows? It would be nice to have a body again.”

“Is that even a possibility?”

“Maybe, but we can talk about that another time. What a fight on the beach, eh?” he asked, excitement flashing across his eyes. “A glorious skirmish indeed. And it worked. That will be the battle that starts the war. And once the war is over, then we will be able to rebuild, to restructure and prevent those at the top from pitting those at the bottom against one another. I sense some hesitation from you, some skepticism, but rest assured that this is the right way forward. It couldn’t have gone better, well, aside from Azazyel showing up, but I had a feeling that pigeon-livered mutton-shunter would be there. Now, you were lamenting earlier about your angel, if I recall, so I’m sure you can appreciate what I’m trying to do here. Maybe try to look at it in that frame of mind.”

“I wouldn’t say I was lamenting…”

“Spare me,” Old Death said, his tail flickering. “I know what it’s like to be in love with Life. And it took quite some time for mine to eventually come around. You know, similar to your situation, she was the first that attacked me. Leliel, that is, but that was so very long ago.”

“Way back in the 1700s, huh?”

“End of the 1700s. I’m not that old,” Old Death said with a growl.

“Take it easy…”

“I’m merely joking. And as for the growl, I’m still getting used to being a cat.”

“You haven’t been Ezra this entire time?”

“If I had wanted to, I could have taken over his body, like I’m sure you can do with your own creations,” he explained. “But I didn’t spy on you or anything. I was quite busy. The angel and I had a lot of frustrations to get out, and I’m not saying that we spent most of our time together getting our jollies off, but we didn’t not spend most of our time together getting our jollies off.”

“Good to know,” Lucian said, not able to hide the smile on his face.

“Ezra was a backup plan, really,” he said as he looked himself over.

“So then you never really wanted to die, huh?” Lucian asked. “You gave me your mantle, you made this big show of being ready to go, but then you got yourself kidnapped by the angels so you could reunite with Leliel. Am I piecing this together correctly?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Old Death told him. “It was my intention to pass, but then I got the feeling like I should give it one more shot. So I did, I got myself captured. And I got to be with her once again, and I thought that that would be it, that I would be reabsorbed into the spiritual world, or perhaps imprisoned forever. I knew that if I were to be imprisoned, that I would only last so long before my power petered out. You see, in my previous reincarnation, and in the same reincarnation that you are currently in, your power will dwindle if you don’t occasionally go out for the hunt, regardless of what that hunt is,” he said, his tone of voice changing. Lucian got the feeling that he was referring to taking down Death Hunters. “So, I may have just fizzled out at some point, but then you came, which I must thank you for yet again. It really lit a fire under my old ass! I would like to live a bit longer, at least until the end of the war. Maybe longer after that.”

“As a cat?”

“Until something else comes about,” Old Death told him. “It is strange, if you think about it. I am now alive in one of my own creations, and I no longer have to feed myself to stay alive because my creations are all tied to the world that I created, which is a part of your mantlecore.”

“Yeah, I wish you had told me about this mantlecore thing.”

“All in due time.” Old Death twitched his head to the left quickly as Hugin and Munin flew by, both of them dipping into the water. “So now I exist because you exist.”

“I have a question for you,” Lucian said after a long pause. “You didn’t quite give me all of your mantlecore when your title was handed over to me, otherwise this world would have collapsed. Does that mean I am weaker than you were? Does that even make sense?”

“Your mantlecore is hardly splintered. It took a lot of my core to make this place as vast as it is, but in the process of transferring it to you, yours was hardly affected. We can thank my predecessor for that. He rarely created anything; the old chap had been at it for a long time, meaning his mantlecore was quite pure. There are others of our kind out there, perhaps ones that you’ve already encountered already, whose cores have been splintered many times, reducing their overall power. But that’s not the case with you.”

“Good to know,” Lucian said. “Because I have a feeling that I still have a bunch of battles coming up, and I’m going to need all the power I can get.”

“Sadly, I believe you aren’t wrong there. But I will be around to provide guidance, and enjoy your toys,” Old Death said, yawning. “I am allowed to play video games, am I not?”

Old Death eventually decided to take a nap, Lucian figuring he’d get on with his day.

His form first took shape on top of Katy’s apartment, his eyes naturally falling to the Dunkin’ sign across the street, the sun’s reflection bearing down on the orange and pink advertisement. Lucian tried to remember what had been advertised on the billboard before but couldn’t.

Deciding he was going to make this quick, he dipped down into her apartment, noticing that she had a candle going on her breakfast bar.

He couldn’t smell it in his current form, but he imagined it was either vanilla, based on the color of the candle, or something related, like warm cookie or chestnut.

Lucian ran his hand over the flame, noticing that he didn’t feel any heat, nor did his movement cause a small waft of wind to irritate the fire.

“Yeah, I knew that was coming,” he said once Hugin twisted in front of Lucian, giving him a funny look. “But it’s good to test, right?”

Katy came out of the bedroom in a La Salle University shirt that was large enough to cover the house shorts she was wearing. She waved her hand, blowing on her fingers so her peach-colored nail polish would dry. Her stats appeared in the air above her head and faded away:

Name: Katy Weston

Date of Birth: 11/18/1994

Date of Death: 10/24/2097

Katy’s phone rang, her eyes darting across the living room and straight through Lucian.

She pressed through him, Lucian wishing in that moment that he could at least smell her, that even something as small and as simple as that would make him feel alive.

Katy tapped the speaker button, a man’s voice filling the room. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Hi, Uncle Steve.”

“You holding up all right? I meant to call you yesterday, but…” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “This news hit me hard. I know your father and I weren’t so close, not in the later years anyway…”

“He always spoke fondly of you,” Katy said, her eyes filling with concern. “I’m glad you reached out, really.”

“I just wanted to talk to you on the phone before I see you at the funeral. I thought that would be best; no sudden surprises…”

Lucian started to float upward, passing through the building and returning to the rooftop. It was good to see that she was okay, but it pained him to remember that he’d been the cause of her father’s death, and that he’d caused the parasite that followed.

At least it was gone for now, hopefully for good.

Lucian’s crows were just joining him when he pressed his pinky and thumb together, appearing in his brother’s backyard, his cape swelling around him and giving his shoulders a sympathetic squeeze.

His Grim Mechas formed, the three fanning out. Lucian waited for his armor with its metallic sheen to grow out of his skin, and once it did Lucian summoned his surveillance crows, followed by his sentry tripods, all nine of them scurrying off.

He knew he would need to travel like this from here on out, that there seemed to be more entities after him by the day, be they Watchers, injuresouls, angels, or Death Hunters.

Hugin dropped in front of him, the crow returning from a quick check of his brother’s home.

“Your family is here,” Hugin said in its genderless voice, Munin buzzing next to it.

“All of them?”

“Your mother too, but Lucian…”

“It’s fine, I’ll be alright seeing them all together,” he said, waving his crow’s concern away.

The sun was still out, not a cloud in sight. It was a pretty day, most of the ice from a recent freeze retreating into the shade.

There was something hopeful in the air, and as he glanced back toward the lemon sun, Lucian envisioned Danira coming down from the sky with her enormous energy weapon, the halo of energy radiation around its muzzle.

He recalled the first time they’d met in his backyard, the battles they’d had, and the point where it seemed like they were going to grow closer only for everything to fall apart.

Lucian gazed down at his feet, noticing he wasn’t casting a shadow as he should have been.

It struck him at this moment that he really was some type of abomination, not much different than the demons that he hunted.

But Lucian shook his head at that thought, realizing it came from a negative corner at the back of his mind, a corner that should be shunned, forgotten, painted in a brighter color.

His goal was to save his brother, and to do so he needed to grow stronger.

Yoshimi had said that she would help, so there was that, and while he spent the next few weeks growing stronger, he would have to navigate a minefield that he himself had helped create.

He had to constantly be on guard, powered up, ready for anything that came his way.

It wasn’t going to be easy, but neither was sitting in his living room on his deathbed playing video games only to have the Grim Reaper come for him, then to somehow save the Grim Reaper and be given his mantle.

Lucian smirked at that.

He had come a long way, and this was just the start.

He glanced over his shoulder one more time to make sure that his security detail was in place, and once he did he floated into the back of his brother’s home, straight through the back wall.

Samantha and his mother were in the kitchen, Jen playing on the couch, the television on and playing a Disney movie.

“Bob had a saying about that,” his mother told Sam. “‘You win some, you lose some, but most of the time, you barely break even.’ He always said pithy little things like that, you know how he was. He would sort of take a saying that was already out there and give it this little twist, you know, to the end of it. Oh, look at me, I can’t even think of another example right now. He did it so often. You know, I should’ve written those things down,” she said, her voice trailing off.

“It’s okay,” Sam told her as she stirred something over at the stove. “I’m sure they’ll come to you when you need them.”

And that was the moment that Lucian’s heart stopped.

His hand twitched; he suddenly felt like he was being suffocated, like the walls were closing in.

“Please, no,” Lucian whispered as he focused on their death dates.

Name: Samantha Reese

Date of Birth: 07/15/1986

Date of Death: 12/01/2020

Name: Sylvia North

Date of Birth: 05/04/1950

Date of Death: 12/01/2020

“Oh my God, no…” Lucian was barely able to mumble as he turned in the direction of the couch, seeing Baby Jen’s death date as well.

He fell to one knee, his cape trying to keep him up and failing.

Name: Jennifer North

Date of Birth: 08/17/2017

Date of Death: 12/01/2020

His brother stumbled up from the basement, his eyes halfway open, the parasite visible under his shirt, one of its tentacles attached to the back of Connor’s head.

“I’m getting hungry, ladies,” he said with a big grin that was the exact opposite of the gaping expression Lucian was currently making.

Name: Connor North

Date of Birth: 11/01/1980

Date of Death: 12/01/2020

“Just let us finish up in here,” his mother said playfully. “Unless you want to come help.”

Lucian staggered to his feet, completely supported by his cape now, Hugin and Munin helping him stand as well.

Upon reaching the back door, he turned back to his family, again checking to verify what he had seen, that it was true.

Their death dates had changed to match Connor’s.

They were all scheduled to die on the same day, less than a month away.

The end.

Back of the Book Content

Reader,

You know the drill by now. The success of independent books, like Death’s Mantle, are directly tied to the number of reviews the book receives. This helps the book get picked up in algorithms, and placed before the eyes of other readers.

Please take a moment to review Death’s Mantle Book One if you haven’t already. That’s where the story starts and it’s the first thing people see when they look at the books. If you are a fan of listening to books as well, the narration, performed by Andrea Parsneau, is something to behold. It moved me so much that I momentarily forgot that I’d written the book (dumb, I know).

So grab the audio if you’d like.

After that, please review the second installment.

I’ll wait.

Now continue for some musings.

Health Scare

It wasn’t long after my dad died that I really became concerned with my own body, hoping I could detect any signs of a future ailment.

During a yoga class, I noticed that there was a lump on the bottom of my foot.

Being the millennial that I am, I immediately went to Google to see what this lump could be.

And of course, I stumbled upon an article that said the lump might be a sign of cancer.

I began monitoring the lump, pressing my foot against it whenever I could, judging if I was just thinking it was there, or if it was really there. The thing was, when I touched the bottom of my foot, I could feel it.

But if I stood, I couldn’t feel the lump.

Eventually, I made an appointment with the podiatrist, and since I live in Connecticut, that meant making an appointment within Yale’s medical network. Alongside my wife, whom I scared with my potential foot cancer self-diagnosis, we drove to the outskirts of Bridgeport, to a medical complex near a movie theater.

I remember at the time thinking that this was sort of convenient. Go to the doctor for minor surgery or a checkup, and then catch a flick afterward.

We came to the podiatrist’s office on the second or third floor, I can’t remember, and I signed in.

After waiting in a room with a couple other guys, all of whom had some foot issue that I wasn’t able to decipher by the looks on their faces, I was called by the nurse into a private room. She did the usual, taking my weight, my blood pressure, and then asked what was going on.

“There’s a lump on the bottom of my foot,” I told her, showing her the bottom of my foot.

“You should take your shoes off.”

“Right.”

Once I did so, she examined what I assumed was the lump, didn’t say anything, and left, telling me that the doctor would be in shortly.

The doctor eventually came, and after a brief conversation, he took a look at my foot.

“It’s a callus,” he said bluntly.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I had foot cancer.”

“You don’t have foot cancer. It’s a callus,” he said, getting an instrument that looked sort of like a cheese grater.

The doctor proceeded to scrub the bottom of my foot, which didn’t feel like anything at all considering the thickness of the callus that he’d just diagnosed.

As he did so, he told me that he was once a runner, and that’s how he got into the feel of podiatry. He also told me I didn’t have the frame of a runner.

(Gee, thanks.)

“You’re good to go,” he said, showing me his foot shaving instrument again. “Next time, you can order one of these when this happens.”

My wife and I went to a diner afterward, because we love going to diners, both of us relieved that I didn’t have foot cancer.

A month or so later, I got a bill in the mail for $180.

Rather than complain about how broken the American healthcare system was, I paid the bill, vowing to go to a salon next time and get a mani-pedi instead of paying a doctor almost two hundred dollars to shave the bottom of my foot.

Lesson learned.

I hope.

You’re a Winner!

The concept for Katy’s dad was modeled after my own father, and a former customer I became friendly with back in the early 2000’s.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always a writer of science fiction and fantasy. There was a spell (pun intended?) in which I worked as a cashier at a 7-Eleven in Round Rock, Texas, a long spell in fact, nearly two years.

During this time there was a truck driver who came in daily spending upwards of two hundred dollars on lottery scratch offs.

Sometimes he would scratch them off at the counter, allowing the employees to enjoy the high he got when he thought he was just about to win big.

He had a system, as all scratchers do, as well as a slew of superstitions and preconceived notions as to what role would be a winning ticket roll, and what ticket number the win would likely be on.

I didn’t mind helping him with his addiction; it was entertaining.

He never really won much, not more than a couple hundred dollars. But to do so, he would always spend upwards of a grand a week.

My dad didn’t spend as much as the customer did, but he was, especially toward the end of his life, really trying to win big.

He had a system and a spending limit per day.

When he was bored, he would drive into town, smoke cigarettes in his car as he scratched tickets keeping the winners and losers. (He kept the losers to double check later, to make sure that he didn’t accidentally make a mistake in his scratch-a-thon.) He would then stockpile the winners and cash them all out at once to buy more potential winners and losers.

He would also use the winning lottery tickets as a form of currency.

When I first moved back to America from Asia, my father would give me a ticket with twenty dollars on it and tell me to drive to Austin and have a good time. Use the ticket to put gas in the car, get a burger or a cup of coffee. That sort of thing.

His goal up to the end was to win a large sum and put the money in a trust fund to be distributed between my brother and me.

Noble, and knowing him, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he would have done.

One more to go.

Death’s Mantle is a trilogy, and since this is the second book, there will be one more to follow. Perhaps in the future I will release a spinoff related in this world if the demand is there (hint: review these books). But for now, I’m keeping it to this trilogy.

Thank you for the continued support, for reading my ramblings and reviewing my books.

Yours in sanity,

Harmon Cooper

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Other Books by Harmon Cooper

I have written over thirty books. Here are some of the highlights!

https://geni.us/Way-of-the-Immortals

My first cultivation novel about a monk, a bird and a drifter from Massachusetts karmically fighting their way through a world based on Bhutanese, Mongolian and Tibetan landscapes and literature.

Hate your job. Win the lottery. Get a superpower. House of Dolls.

https://geni.us/HouseofDolls

My best-selling Superhero Harem Adventure about a sci-fi writer and the superpowered women who are trying to kill him. Fun content, adult read!

https://geni.us/CherryBlossomGirls1

A fantasy harem adventure inspired by Pokemon Go!, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and the Persona family of video games. Check out this Amazon best seller!

https://geni.us/MonsterHuntNYC

What if Ready Player One was a multi-part epic? Gritty LitRPG action, gamer humor, fantastic fantasy worlds, and a killer MC.

(This one is related to Monster Hunt NYC)

https://geni.us/TheLoop

If you love dark fantasy, RPGs, Witcher, Punisher, or Mad Max, you'll love this powerful gamer trilogy about a man and his wolf companion.

https://geni.us/LastWarrior

Tokyo, Japan meets online fantasy gaming and South Park-styled humor. Yakuza, goblins, action, intrigue - add this book to your inventory list!

(This one is related to Monster Hunt NYC)

https://geni.us/FICK