Death's Mantle 2

by Harmon Cooper

“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.”
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  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 oth
ers,” 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?”