Death's Mantle 2

by Harmon Cooper

  “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.
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  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?”