Shooting Eros - The Emuna Chronicles: Complete Boxset: Books 1 - 3
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Shooting Eros
The Emuna Chronicles Complete Box Set: Books 1-3
Benjamin Laskin
Aretê Books
Copyright © 2014, 2017 by Benjamin Laskin
All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-1-5001-8671-5
Created with Vellum
In memory of my beloved father, Nathan Laskin, who is playing tennis with the angels.
Contents
Shooting Eros
I. Shooting Eros
1. Prologue
2. Staging Ground
3. Spear Words
4. Chance Encounters
5. Dormitory Davids
6. Doggie Style
7. Whistling in the Dark
8. Graceland
9. Old School
10. Wedding Crashers
11. Party Animals
12. Coffee Buzz
13. Breathless
14. Remembrance Day
15. Flying Pig
16. Swerve
17. Spitfire
18. Hamanaeus
19. Phantom Man
20. Honey Marooned
21. Future Shock
22. Malachim!
23. Sackcloth and Ashes
24. The Last Weed
25. Goaltending
26. Starman
27. Skipping Odds
28. X-Files
29. Castaways
30. Six Degrees of Separation
31. Jailbirds
32. Grace Period
33. Clueless
34. Memory Lane
35. The Mess
36. Going Ballistic
37. Fool’s Game
38. Crush
39. Dear Diary
40. Crossroads
41. Lady of the Lake
42. Pesto
43. Dinner Theater
44. Stairway to Heaven
45. The Four
46. Buddy
47. Scout’s Honor
48. Alley Oops
49. Backdoor Deal
Shooting Eros
I. Shooting Eros
1. Enemy of My Enemy
2. Time Bomb
3. Bubby
4. Judges
5. Brothers
6. Pastrami on Wry
7. Good Tipper
8. Girddy Up
9. Going Green
10. Sidekicks
11. Shalom Aleichem
12. Corrupted
13. Lunkhearts
14. Digitus Impudicus
15. The Thirty-six
16. Trigger Happy
17. Rinse, Repeat
18. Real Sport
19. Night Vision
20. Lost in Space
21. State of Grace
22. Cruel World
23. Turkish Delight
24. Level 3
25. Headbangers
26. Happy Warrior
27. A Second Chance
28. Street Smarts
29. Vigilantes
30. Heaven Bound
31. Nose Jobs
32. Booty and the Beast
33. Jailhouse Crock
34. Grace under Fire
35. Nuts
36. True Grit
37. Cliff Hangers
38. Trigger Finger
39. Swimming to Phoenix
40. Free Agent
41. Double Duty
Shooting Eros
I. Shooting Eros
1. Gathering of Angels
2. Confidence Course
3. Mirror Mirror
4. Shadows of a Doubt
5. Dead-end Job
6. Death Watch
7. Moving Targets
8. Farewell to Arms
9. Perseus
10. Fancy Pants
11. Rainbow’s End
12. Mission Implausible
13. Role Call
14. Two Degrees of Detonation
15. Of Good Courage
16. Monster Mash
17. Show Time
18. The 300
19. Heaven’s Hell
20. Cramped Quarters
21. Bushwhacked and Hectored
22. Battleground
23. Dog Eat Dog
24. Ride of the Valkyrie
25. Demon Hunters
26. Breakfast of Champions
27. Rats
28. Mind Blowers
29. Cleaning Clock
30. Leap of Faith
31. Stern Gang
32. Judgment Day
33. Sticks and Stones
34. Blues Brothers
35. I Spy
36. Winging It
37. Slip-sliding Away
38. Fishy Stories
39. Mazel Tov!
40. Family Ties
41. Epilogue
A Message from Benjamin Laskin
Other Novels by Benjamin Laskin
Special Offer
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Shooting Eros
Emuna Chronicle 1: Hell-bent
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1
Prologue
My name is Kohai. I am a cupid cadet. A soldier of love. If this manuscript has fallen into your hands it means that you are among the chosen. There are no coincidences.
This chronicle documents the true account of a small band of cupid commandos who are risking everything to save love from extinction. It is the story of a war that has raged from time immemorial, but a war whose end may be close at hand. You think that true love is possible, but I’m here to warn you that if we fail in our mission, it will not be for much longer.
Note: This testimony is part memoir, part chronicle, and whether the story is told in the first or the third person, I, Cadet Kohai, am responsible for every word. In places and times where and when I was not physically present, I have relied on an infallible source—something that I have only recently learned to navigate—knowledge gleaned from the Midrashic Record, or Midrasha.
For now, think of the Midrasha as a hyper-dimensional library—a super-enriched, aether-based, holographic recording of every living moment of every being who has ever lived. Every individual, from time antediluvian to the ever-updating present, has his or her own ‘Book of Life,’ and it is stored in perpetuity in the Midrasha. I have transcribed every word and thought of every character that appears in this chronicle exactly as they were recorded in the Midrasha, employing literary license as little as possible, and only for the sake of clarity.
Now brace yourself, because by the time I finish, or someone finishes me, nothing is ever going to look the same to you again.
2
Staging Ground
Year 2034 of humankind’s Gregorian calendar.
From behind a large pine tree I observed six cars parked at the edge of a cliff overlooking the glittering cityscape below. At my back stood a grove of towering evergreens, and above sparkled a cloudless, crystalline night sky.
In one car I spied a shy, fidgeting couple. In a second, a passion-fueled pair groped madly at one an
other, and in a third, a young woman fended off her date’s amorous advances. The remaining partners cuddled or kissed, the lights of the sprawling metropolis before them. Drifting across the plateau from a car’s stereo I heard the forgotten twentieth-century crooner, Lou Rawls, singing, “Love is in the air…”
Then it began.
A pack of slinking figures stole out of the woods towards the unsuspecting lovebirds. As they neared, I saw that these entities were neither human nor cupids like me. They were otherworldly—beastly and demonic. With surprising speed, the creatures pounced and dragged the shrieking couples from their cars.
Startled, I sprang backwards and tripped. I scrambled to my feet and reached for my weapon, only to recall with bitterness I had yet to be issued one.
At that moment, ten mini-maelstroms, vortices of sparkling light, appeared out of thin air and touched down upon the plateau amidst the tumult. From each vortex bounded a heavily armed man in night camouflage. It was a squad of elite cupid commandos, the most recent crop of cadets about to graduate from the Cupid Academy.
The soldiers wore black, full-face helmets, and strapped to their bodies and in hand, they carried the latest in love warfare: plasma rifles, photon-emitting submachine guns, demon dusters, pulsar passionator guns, lust grenades, and other matchmaking weapons.
Immediately sensing danger, the monsters flung away their victims, and roaring, turned to face the intruders.
A furious battle ensued, the cupid commandos blasting away at the demons with their lethal weaponry. The beasties exploded, flamed, or melted into sickly goop. A nauseating stench filled the air. In just a couple of minutes it was all over. The creatures that weren’t vaporized or defragmented—parts of which hung draped and dripping from tree branches, or oozing down car windows—lay sprawled or mangled on the ground.
Applause and whistling erupted as night turned to day with the flick of a switch inside the immense geodesic dome that housed the Cupid Academy Training Center. “Lover’s Leap” and its battleground returned to a porcelain white stage. The cars, the forest, the sky above, the city below, and the very tree I had been hiding behind, vanished.
The ‘lovers’ removed their wigs and masks, the ‘creatures’ stepped out of their costumes, and they all slapped one another on the back in congratulations. Together they walked over to the commandos, who took off their helmets, and so exited virtual reality.
The players were made up of young men and women, cupid cadets and celestials. By human standards they looked to be in their late teens and early twenties. They laughed, shook hands, and exchanged more pats on the back.
I removed the virtual reality goggles I was wearing, as did my mentors, Captain Cyrus and Captain Volk. Because the three of us were uninvited onlookers, we stood quietly and undetected at the far side of the stage beside a large, slowly spinning model of Planet Earth. We wore white jumpsuits, and the captains sported their customary blue baseball caps with a big, red letter ‘C’ on them.
Captain Cyrus was a tall, V-shaped, and strapping cupid warrior who would pass for his early thirties in Earth years, though his actual age could be measured in centuries. The captain had thick, curly black hair, pellucid-blue eyes, and a dark, trimmed beard. Even by cupid standards Cyrus was considered exceedingly handsome. Confident, and at ease in any situation, the captain was a commanding presence wherever he stood. It was Captain Cyrus who chose me from among all the other cadets to be his and Captain Volk’s sole apprentice. It was a decision that I did not understand, and one that left the entire academy scratching their heads.
Captain Volk, sturdy and ruggedly good-looking with bristle-short, rust-colored hair and beard, was Cyrus’s best friend and longtime comrade in arms. A no-nonsense cupid commando—stoic in demeanor, blunt in word and deed—Volk was fiercely loyal to Cyrus, and to his sworn duty.
At the Academy, the captains were known for their unorthodox ways, and the mystique they wore like a cloak. The ignorant considered the two warriors to be crackpots: has-beens or curious artifacts of a time gone by. But to those who knew anything of their true exploits, Cyrus and Volk were living legends.
Mostly, however, the captains were ignored and left alone, which suited Cyrus and Volk just fine.
I, Kohai, was their sole student. My best friend and roommate, Virgil, once described me as “a lean, mean, thinking machine.” I confess, however, that the other cadets’ descriptions of me weren’t so flattering, and were closer to the human designation of “a wimpy, pencil-necked geek.”
I turned to the captains. “How come I’m not learning how to do that?”
Cyrus said, “If that’s what you want to learn, Kohai, we won’t stop you.”
“I’m just saying—”
“We weren’t asking,” Volk said.
A dark-skinned, bearded, grave-looking cupid with a shiny, black baton approached the cadets. He wore a white and grey camouflage jumpsuit, and holstered a demon duster at his side. The imposing figure was Commander Sett. A grizzled veteran of innumerable campaigns, every Academy cadet trembled before him.
Sett whistled and said, “Quit acting like a bunch of fairies!”
The cadets snapped to attention.
“Better than yesterday,” he groused, “but that means half of you morons would still be goop.”1
Note 1: ‘Goop’ is a term used for a dead cupid or celestial. If a cupid or celestial meets his or her death on Earth, the body turns to a puddle of clear, oil-like ectoplasm, which soon evaporates. What becomes of us after gooping is speculation. The professors at the Academy teach that there is "nothing" afterwards. They insist that death is an end, just as birth was a beginning—no before and nothing ever after. The ancient sages whose work I study in the archives, however, saw things differently. They spoke of a ‘Book of Life,’ of judgment, and an afterlife of one kind or another. They taught that all souls—the existence of which the Academy categorically denied—would be in the Creator’s hands: weighed, and then rewarded or punished accordingly.
Sett pointed his baton at a cadet. “You!”
The cadet threw back his shoulders and saluted. “Sir, Cadet Hector, Sir!”
“Don’t you know a Blame Demon from a Fault-finding Demon, Cadet? Blame Demons are two-thirds stinking vapor. Had this been for real, you’d have taken out two of your own men with that over-dialed laser blast, you dolt.”
“Sir, I wasn’t thinking, Sir!”
“It’s not about thinking, Cadet. You know, or you’re goop. Got that?”
“Sir, yes, Sir!”
Sett thrust his baton towards another cadet. “And you.”
“Sir, Cadet Terence, Sir!”
“Hand to hand with a Mocking Demon, Cadet? Very impressive.”
“Sir, thank you, Sir!” Terence turned to his fellow cadets and flexed his big biceps.
Sett snorted. “You’re so stupid you died twice. Your shrieks of agony are still ricocheting between the pillars of Heaven. Hand to hand with any of these bastards and you don’t stand a chance, but a Mocking Demon? In your dreams, Cadet. In real life, that beast would have turned you into confetti.”
Sett shook his head in disgust.
“If any of you hope to graduate next week, then you’ll be back here at thirteen-hundred sharp to watch this pathetic exhibition on playback, move by moronic move. Then we do it all again until you get it right.”
“Sir, yes, Sir!” the cadets sounded in unison.
To solidify his threat, Sett barked the two words that every cadet dreaded most, “Commando Ajax!”
The warrior stepped forward. The cadets shrank two steps back.
Ajax was a giant, both in stature and deed. At nearly eight feet of solid muscle, he towered over every other cupid soldier, none of whom were small. He had long, flowing black hair that covered his shoulders, a thick black beard, and cold, obsidian-like eyes. Commando Ajax was the most decorated of living cupid soldiers, having earned every medal the Academy could pin on his immense chest.
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