Case 15 - Ep. 2: Souls By Fire

The Reaper's Mercy by Beki Yopek

Closing time at The Down South Lounge didn’t exist unless Nia said it did. When Apathy’s skyscraper night clubs shut down at 2am for clean up duty, the after-partiers left downtown New Purgatory and flocked here. Every demon living in the First Circle had spent motes and waged war on their livers at the bar where The Reaper and I now sat. None of the demons in any Circle could know how bad The Coalition had wrecked us.

That’s why Reap and I used the last of his brimvisibility to sneak into The Lounge and ask Nia to clear the place out.

I watched Nia shoo a blue-haired grifter demon out with a pushy, “Get the heck out, please,” then downed half of my Sin and Tonic. I couldn’t even taste the alcohol, and the flatscreens behind the bar blaring their music videos sounded as flat as their sources. A paranoid glance around The Lounge showed me the warmly lit standing room tables, the dart booths behind them, the pool tables to my left, and the arcade way at the back. The glass reappeared when I set it on the bar’s polished wood and let go. Adrenaline still prickled in my veins from the fight at the Motery Center. Tonight, I needed shots.

The Reaper audibly slugged the rest of his Hallelujah Tequila, the full highball glass vanishing when he grabbed it and materializing empty. “We will appear to be even weaker after today. Prudence’s fall and our failed trap set us further behind. It sends the wrong message.”

When I heard the double doors snap closed, I shucked my torn blazer and let it fall to the floor and reappear. “Now we’ve both killed a Septuplet. I don’t think The Coalition will screw with us anytime soon.”

Nia flapped behind the bar on vanilla wings and brushed her dark, crescent moon hair back with one hand. Then she squinted at the six barstools nearest her. “I could help a lot more if I could see you. Can’t you switch that brimvisibility off?”

I shook my head.

Nia’s lips quirked up. “You’re shaking your head aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I grumbled, kicking myself. “And no I can’t. Brimstone Chemistry isn’t like Blood Magic. Wait. You know that. You studied Haloxite Chemistry in college.”

She bobbed her head and grinned wider. “I know. Good thing you’re invisible, or The Reaper might see how embarrassed you are.”

“I’m strung out, Nia. We both almost died and you’re being all devious and walking me into verbal traps.”

Nia clapped a palm on her chest over her Down South Lounge top. “I am not devious. Looks like you need a refill.”

“Two shots this time. Phlegethon’s Kiss.”

“Ooh, the heavy stuff,” she breathed. “You better tell me what happened at work.” Nia whirled around and lifted a pink decanter off the top shelf, then giggled and put it back. “Whoops, that one’s too dangerous.” She snagged a bottle of Styx Comfort and two shot glasses with her hands, and a bottle of amaretto and an acetylene torch from beneath the bar with her wings.

An exhausted laugh escaped me at the sight. Some weight whisked off of my mind as Nia juggled the bottles and the torch between pours. Either it was a miracle she didn’t spill any, or she had bar tending down to an exact magic. Flames flickered from both shots when she slid them toward me. My hand reappeared along with the rest of me when I reached for one, and The Reaper’s black bones shone once more from the stool next to me. 

“You look like krapfen,” Nia said.

“That’s a swear word,” I replied, downing a shot flames and all. Dual fires burned down my throat and I groaned, then smacked my lips. “It burns so sweet.”

“Krapfen is a German dessert, Avaline.” The Reaper rumbled. “No more tequila for me, thank you. With our Case Notes destroyed, we might as well update Niariel now while it’s fresh in our memories. I am sure she will listen to our account of the Cuban Missile Crisis before we have to return to Fountainia. Once we contact the SPD from there, Seraphs will arrive to document our stories, and that will take time.”

Nia put the bottles back and tilted her halo at us. “All your writing’s gone?”

“It is,” Reap said while I threw back shot number two. He steepled his finger bones. “Almost everything went to plan, save for the shot to The Soul Fountains’ reputation and the loss of the Case Notes.”

Nia pouted a little, then hurried into the office behind the bar and emerged with a handful of loose leaf paper and a pencil. “Finish what you started, and I’ll help with the lost stuff. Now screw the taboos and tell me everything.”

Amaretto lingered on my breath as I let it all out. I shared Reap’s two-week plan to suss out The Coalition’s leader. The way we lured Avarice to his office. How I’d ended her existence with Seversoul. 

Just when I’d finished venting, Nia pushed the paper and pencil at me. She found my eyes and held them, her voice solemn. “It means so much that you worked up to telling us about your history with Avarice. I don’t think either of us will forget the day you told us. I know how long you suffered under her. That pain will stay there even though she’s dead. However you justified what you did as her bodyguard, don’t use that pain to justify another downward spiral. If you feel yourself slipping, you can fall back on us.”

It was probably a little more than the alcohol spreading its warmth from my chest outward. I smiled and twirled the pencil. “You’re such a cheeseball angel.”

“And you wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Damn right. So, the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Nia’s wings ruffled in excitement. “That’s one I haven’t heard yet. I thought I was your best friend.”

The Reaper cackled while I continued. “Avarice had just dropped Prudy a couple thousand feet out of the sky. . .”

Case 13 - Ep. 3: Brimvisibility

Soul Fountains Schemes by Beki Yopek

It might be ridiculous to say I was flying away from a weaponized door, but when your attacker was a fallen angel who’d carved spells into the wood, that door became a demon trap. I pumped both wings and looped behind the door, then slapped one bleeding hand to the carved-out word on the back and flared some unguided Blood Magic. It splintered and tumbled to the ground where The Reaper was slashing away at tin roof slabs pelting him from the rapidly disappearing shed. Souls still swirled around the tools and equipment mounded up in the rice paddy’s lone shed where a well-sized hole in the ground emanated crimson light.

Every reason for Jack and The Coalition to hole up here in Korea on the 38th parallel hit me. They were building underground soul caches against both Heaven Law and The Soul Fountains.

Then Jack Te-Konos spear-tackled me in the chest halo-first.

Hot bruises welled up under the skin and I cried out, reeling at the dense pain radiating through my right breast. The agony sank deep under the ribs and wouldn’t let up. Flapping at random to escape made it worse and a scream tore out from my windpipe as soon as I could catch a breath. We plummeted to the dirt and rolled among American and Korean corpses, dust and rank fluids caking to our clothes and wings.

Gasping, I shoved myself up with both bloody palms only to have a blazer that was half-slashed to ribbons shove itself over both shoulders. The sleeves scissored my weight from under me and I face-planted in the muck, the pain re-doubling. He’d turned his freaking blazer into a trap with the same magic he’d used on the shack. Both slashed sleeves slid over my own blazer and the whole garment shoved downward, pinning me from neck to hips. 

I flapped and snarled, then craned around to find Jack standing over me with the haloxite knife I’d been carrying pointed straight at me in his left hand. I surged the Blood Magic and the unguided spell ripped the arm from Jack’s ruffed shirt. He’d cleaned my blood off the knife with his sleeve while I’d been cringing in pain. It was a sign of how much he’d blindsided me. I’d forgotten fallen angels couldn’t be hurt with haloxite. 

It took the brimstone of a demon’s horns to do that.

Wriggling both wrists underneath me, I spat, “You’re making underground soul stashes you fangel bastard.”

“Ava,” Jack scolded, walking around in front of me. “I thought you had more class than to use that word.” He took out a comb with his right hand and ran it through his ink black hair. “Fallen angels are rebellious leaders. We’re more worthy of the term ‘angel’ than the actual angels are.”

“You think you’re the one in control,” I grunted, still squirming. “You’ve just handed your leash to someone else besides The Big Man Upstairs.”

“I’ve heard He doesn’t like being equated with men. You know, I’m the only one of us who’s actually seen Heaven, so I ought to know. My proud support of The Coalition goes back decades, remember?”

“Brainless dogs like you will lick any master’s shoes.”

He dangled the haloxite knife over my head. “You’re just mad because if humanity keeps going the way it’s going, you’ll starve just like you almost did during The Industrial Revolution.”

Jack had been there when Avarice taunted me about nearly starving from life force deprivation. That was during World War II. I’d underestimated Jack before and paid for it. He’d read the subtext of my back-and-forth with Avarice back then. He was shrewd enough to combine that with my actions these past decades to make a snap judgment about me. Keyword: snap.

It wasn’t hard to writhe like I was in pain. Disguising where I put my hands was harder since Jack’s blazer was fueled by the same spell the door and tin slabs had been. A thought hit me and I strained to laugh. “So Avarice told you to get functional clothing and this is how you took it?”

He pointed the comb at me and kept twiddling the knife over my head. “That blazer that’s kicking your ass has more tears in it than last time. Those are my--”

“Yeah yeah, they’re from all the times someone tried to kill you and failed.”

Jack’s face curled in a smug grin. “You remembered. I’m honored. And look, your bonehead manager’s on his way.”

The Reaper floated in front of me at the top of my vision, sandwiched between several tin roofing slabs. Only his robes and the shadows undulating off his bones stuck out of the cracks. His scythe appeared in my vision next, followed by Apathy, the other being who’d been flying behind Jack on the soul-covered rice paddy. Apathy’s bald, rail-thin form walked a lap around me, his battered slacks and smoking jacket soaking up mud and blood from the human bodies that festered around us.

“This reminds me of Hell,” Apathy commented. He dragged Reap’s scythe so the blade carved a circle into the dirt around me. “Fifth Circle. The war Circle. Rage used to decorate his property with cadavers imported from Earthen war zones.”

“Yessss,” Reap said, cackling. “And I am now thankful I destroyed him at The Battle Of Amiens.”

Apathy rested his forehead against the tin holding The Reaper prisoner. “Hmm. Good memory. Yes, most unexpected. I shall speak for Rage when we have you in front of the Seraph Police Department.”

At the time, I hadn’t heard any significance to those words because that cheap shot to the boobs hurt like home. I lifted my head from the dirt and hissed, “So Fickle Jack gets a new master and thinks he can march us right to the Seraphs?”

Jack barked a laugh. “New master? I go where I want and build what I choose.”

Apathy dragged the scythe past my head, then started circling around behind me a second time. “That he does. How dare you see through my plans, Ava.”

“Cliches are lazier than original words, dick.”

“Now that’s just vulgar,” Apathy said, completing his second circle. “Jack, are our enemies always so un--”

I flared unguided Blood Magic and aimed both palms to point behind me underneath my body. Blood had leaked all over them and I used the magic to surge forth and sweep Apathy’s feet from under him. I knew he’d be too careless to expect a trap from the trapped, and he fell on his bohunkus a second before I plowed into Jack Te-Konos’s shins horns-first. I felt them pierce one foot and one calf before the magic within his entangling blazer weakened. Oh, he screamed like a pansy too.

Ripping off Jack’s grubby blazer along with the one I wore, I wrenched my horns left and right, tearing through the fallen angel’s bone and muscle tissue. Silver blood dripped from his legs onto my horns and into my hair. He dropped the haloxite knife and it sank point first into Apathy’s left shoulder, scraping bone and drawing out a screech. Tempted as I was to finish them both off, The Reaper’s freedom and securing his scythe came first.

I flapped toward the tin cage Jack had rigged up with his heavenly magic and searched for the French words carved into the metal. I found them and smeared orange blood onto each one, then let loose a third Blood Magic wave. The unguided spell tore holes in the slabs where the words were and ripped them straight into the mud like gravity had thrown a temper tantrum. The rest of the holey metal flopped to the ground, useless. With Reap free, I seized his scythe off the ground where Apathy had let it fall after he’d been tackled and knifed.

The scythe was a foot taller than me and harder to lug around than the staves and sticks I’d trained with as a martial artist. Reap’s wingless flight carried him a whole mile ahead of me. I didn’t catch up to him until I reached the outskirts of Seoul. Seraphs patrolled the skies above the South Korean city in search of demon thieves or any other Three Domains trouble. Tastes of mud and grit still clung to my mouth and I spat into the open air.

Handing The Reaper his two-toned scythe, I rubbed at my chest and groaned. “You can have this. I won't be swinging that awkward thing around any time soon. We should tell the SPD about those underground soul stashes The Coalition is setting up.”

Reap gripped the weapon and his voice became an ice floe. “It is best we did not end them back there. Better that we continue our work than sacrifice it in vain and only damage The Coalition. Let us return to the Seoul hell divide and unload what souls we have. Then we shall reveal this subterfuge to the Chief Seraph.”

Case 13 - Ep. 2: Brimvisibility

Soul Fountains Schemes by Beki Yopek

“When we harvested souls in Mexico City,” The Reaper rasped, “they called this Montezuma’s Revenge.”

I bent over one of the hundreds of corpses at the edge of a rice paddy on the 38th Parallel in Korea. This young American soldier had died of intestinal disease, like a good third of the bodies around him. Flies buzzed in noxious clouds that shifted through the abandoned paddy like wind eddies made visible. The sun baked the Korean landscape and everything around us to the point where the trees were brittle husks, and anything in the half-dried-up paddy was a petri dish.

Oh, and half the soldiers had literally crapped themselves to death.

I plugged my nose with one hand and reached up to touch my left horn with the other. “Some days I’m real thankful that brimstone horns are part of the whole demon package. If I had to worry about infections from drinking the wrong thing, I’d be dead already.”

The Reaper paced around the edge of the paddy, swinging Seversoul and absorbing handfuls of fresh souls into the two-toned scythe blade. “You didn’t drink the water, did you Avaline?”

I kept both nostrils pinched closed while I talked. “Yes, I go around doing all the shit that would kill a human just to prove I’m superior. You sure you don’t want a day off from harvesting? This war’s not going to stop for a year at least.”

The Reaper tilted his skull under his brown hood like he was considering saying one thing, but went with, “I’d prefer to stay away from cities where humans carry cameras.”

I swatted both wings at a swarm of flies. Most of them tumbled helter-skelter, some of them died and peppered the mud. “Because cameras can see us when the human eye can’t?”

Reap nodded and jerked a phalange at a second paddy brimming with souls. “Humanity must have gotten enough powdered haloxite from The Coalition to design those cameras. The only way they could penetrate our horns’ protection to see us is if they combined that with some sort of spell equivalent to a summoning or a proper prayer.”

I unfurled both wings, then eyed Reap. “What makes you think that?”

He launched skyward and I followed, flapping up out of the miasma and over stands of trees and rickety farmhouses to the next paddy over. When we touched down, there were fewer corpses and more souls than last time. I wondered if even the dead could smell that stank blanketing the place. I drew out my Blood Magic folio in case there was trouble, but the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Americans, and the South Koreans had already withdrawn with as much of their dead as they could stand to haul away. 

I asked again, “Reap, do you really think Avarice would give humans any magic at all? Human souls produce the life force that feeds all demons and angels. Last thing any of us wants is for our only source of food to kick our asses.”

He lifted his scythe in front of a soul cluster and hesitated. “Those smoke clouds that burst from their cameras have to contain haloxite. You must have seen--”

I slapped my knee and burst out laughing. “Those cameras are decades old. They have new ones now, Reap. This is the fifties. Cameras capture light and reality a lot better than human eyes and minds can.”

He harvested the cluster and moved to a larger one ambling toward the farmhouse shed. “So you believe that science trumps magic?”

I searched the area for more souls and intruders who might be gorging themselves since the former battlefield was deserted and Seraph-free. “Science can do things that magic hasn’t found a way to counteract yet. Humans get pictures of ghosts and demons all the time these days.  All those hauntings and random demon attacks are really just the small-time souls in the backwoods we don’t have time to harvest.”

The Reaper hovered a couple feet off the ground and raised his scythe in both bone hands. “The Coalition must have demon supporters living as hermits among those small human settlements.” He pointed the blade at the line of souls lingering around the shed. “This is why we venture away from civilization on occasion. Coalition demons could sip life force from souls that are too far out from the major cities for us or the SPD to be interested in.”

When he stopped talking, voices permeated through the shed’s thin walls. I threw up a hand in warning and hissed, “Wait, there’s no reason for humans to hide in a shed this long after a battle.”

As though the beings within had heard me, the flimsy wood doors crashed outward and pelted at me and The Reaper. He swiped his scythe through one of the door missiles with a well-timed swing, and I flapped skyward away from the thing. Whenever magic fueled something mundane and wide that came for me, it was because someone wanted to entrap me. Aside from killing, a solid trap was the best way to get a pain-in-the-rump demon out of the way.

“Jack Te-Konos,” I shouted as the fallen angel emerged from the shanty. “What, did Avarice get sick of you painting her toenails?”

I back-flapped and dodged the door, watching for Jack’s next move. He stood at the door, adjusted his torn blazer and ruffed shirt, then combed his hair while a sheet of tin hurled itself at The Reaper next. By the time I’d drawn my haloxite knife and drawn blood from a palm, Jack had unfurled his oil-black wings, flown skyward, and arced toward me with another being flapping behind him.

I opened the other palm with the knife tip and groaned, then readied two unguided Blood Magics. One for the trap, and one for the fallen angel who’d almost entangled us again.