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 i
n 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.”
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