Case 11 - Ep. 3: Bandwagon Pride

A World For A Secret by Beki Yopek

The shattered wall re-formed around me like a stockade, pinning both hands in front of me and leaving my wings and legs hanging back outside of the synagogue. Pride, in her fully decorated black-and-gold Convictionist uniform, kept touching the wall and cranked her white collar power all the way up. Overhead, the burning synagogue’s walls Re-Glorified and its stained glass windows assembled themselves from the shards on the sidewalk. Outside those windows, The Night Of Broken Glass raged on, and The Reaper harvested dozens of souls on the surrounding Munich street.

I could have screeched and brought my boss down my ex-instructor, but maybe too much of her nature had rubbed off on me.

While ceiling beams and capstones slid into place, Pride drew a haloxite flensing knife from within her uniform. She said, “You left me and latched onto the first organization that would support you.”

Pride drew closer and I pumped my wings hard, but I couldn’t move or reach the stained glass window six feet above where I was trapped. I sucked in a lungful of brick dust and smoldering wood. “I’d say you’re obsessed with the old Convictionists. Hell has moved on since then. Get with the times.”

Pride pressed the tip of the flensing knife on my scalp between the horns, but didn’t break the skin. “Humans used to summon us. Earth was a whole Domain where people devoted ceremonies and resources to attracting our attention. To feeding us the life force of their enemies. They were just like demons that way. Ever seeking the upper hand.”

“So you joined The Coalition,” I spat, trying to ignore the death that hovered two inches above my brain. “A build-it-yourself parasite system. Throw everything the Fountainians built straight to the Ninth Circle and sacrifice their cause for yours.”

Pride leaned forward at the waist like a sparring champion taking a bow. “I fight for something that will last longer than you and your Reaper’s Soul Fountains. Your way is a fad. A little for everyone. Who can be proud of a molehill? Demons want more.”

“There was nothing to stop us going extinct when the Industrial Revolution came,” I said, flapping my wings as much as I could with them half-encased in brick. “Factory production saved humanity and wrecked us. All the opportunities to get summoned and make a living vanished.”

Pride leapt up, pumped her wings once, and shattered the stained glass window overhead with both wings. She back-flapped out of the way so none of the sharp pieces would slice her immaculate uniform. Glass shards showered down on me, gouging holes into my blazer and blouse. The right sleeve tore loose and hung off me like a beggar’s rag. I kept pumping both wings even though I knew I couldn’t gain any momentum to power through the wall I was stuck in.

“The Coalition will have more,” Pride shrieked. “Your pitiful Soul Fountains will end because they don’t do enough for the beings that support them. Demons will not live on scraps. Angels will always demand more than they’ve earned. Why do you think they fall so often?”

The Hades watch on my left wrist flickered with the firelight outside. If I didn’t get free soon, my former instructor would kill me. Or The Reaper would find out about my history with his enemies. I tasted rage as I snarled, “Everything you ‘build’ is just going to get wrecked again. It doesn’t matter what you fight for, because you’re too conceited to maintain it.”

Pride bared her teeth and brandished the haloxite knife. “What’s more fragile? Pride, or prudence? I could slice your horns off inch by inch. That would guarantee a long lasting lesson.”

I cackled like The Reaper did when he was amused. “You just tack onto others’ accomplishments and call them your own. You’re such a bandwagon bitch you don’t even build anything yourself.”

She did exactly what I wanted and sank the blade into the back of my hairline until it touched bone. Pain bit through my head and I wailed, biting my tongue because I knew I couldn’t bite through it. My horns protected me from a lot of things, but haloxite was the only thing that could hurt or harm me. I clung to the idea that it was also the only thing that could save me and kept screaming.

Pride lapped it up. “Avaline, you were a great student who made a ridiculous choice. This is where it got you. Your adherence to prudence makes you more logical, and more predictable. I never could train that out of you. It is why your previous master fired you, and it is why I found you starving for life force. You should never have shared your life force network idea with us. If you had the proper amount of pride, you would have nurtured it yourself and flourished because of it.”

If The Reaper had come around the synagogue and heard any of that, he’d fire me on the spot too. It was time to cover up this history before he found out how much fuel I’d given The Coalition when I was younger. 

When I wrenched my right arm up to my scalp, Pride laughed, clearly assuming I was flapping my wings harder.

Blood dripped onto the paving stones and I smeared my right palm and forearm with it. Then I screeched and unguided Blood Magic surged out of me.

The paving stone whipped upward and knocked Pride’s knife hand up and behind her. I knew she’d keep her grip-she was a trained martial artist-so I wrenched my body around and smeared blood from my forearm in an almost complete circle on the wall. Another blast of unguided Blood Magic shattered the wall in a ring around me and I pumped both wings at the same moment. Pride brought the haloxite knife around and sank it into the meat of my right shoulder. Agony seared me deep, but my momentum was too much for Pride and the full weight of Ava plus brick wall equalled one wrecked Pride.

Bleeding from the head and upper arm, I reeled and clove to the one thread of focus I had among the pain and chaos. My ex-instructor tried Re-Glorifying the wall again to pull me and it off of her. I panted and lashed out with a third pulse of Blood Magic. The ring of brick barreled forward and pancaked her like an anvil from an old cartoon. I flew straight out of the hole I’d just made in the synagogue wall. Seraphs were nearby in the skies above, and they’d stop any more violence between us and The Coalition. 

It was about time Heaven Law worked in my favor.

Pride didn’t give chase, but The Reaper found me a couple hundred feet above the city of Munich. He hadn’t learned to speak bullshit-ese back in 1938, so I chucked him some deuces and he believed it. Blood on my head? I’d head-butted a demon thief and used Blood Magic to knock him into the next Domain. Blazer ripped to shreds? That’s what happens when you barrel roll through a stained glass window for fun. I still had a long shift ahead, and those souls wouldn’t harvest themselves.

Now all I had to do was keep pretending I hadn’t fucked things up so bad.

Don’t tell anyone else.

Please.

Case 11 - Ep. 2: Bandwagon Pride

A World For A Secret by Beki Yopek

Taboos were as common in Hell as snowballs. Demons did things according to the sins that fueled them. My home city of New Purgatory was full of skyscraper night clubs and ultra-modern condo towers because the only thing the demons there cared about was partying. I’d lived there since the Industrial Revolution because the landlords maintained the condos while the demon tenants did whatever they wanted, no holds barred. Demon society overlooked me, and that’s how I liked it.

I wanted to be too busy kicking ass and harvesting souls to think about the Industrial Revolution.

They could pretend The Industrial Revolution wasn’t taboo if they were preoccupied with finding, feeling, fucking, and forgetting each other. When their appetites mattered more than the pain they buried, they could continue with life and feel rewarded for achieving goal after goal, all the while pretending that their buried pain wasn’t festering. 

Addressing the pain was the taboo. Covering it up was the norm.

Damn. I’m doing the same thing right now. Ranting instead of writing.

Reap, we’ve worked together for a hundred and thirty five years. This Case Note is one of those things I’ve only told Nia. 

The Industrial Revolution started with one idea, that sparked one factory, that led to all of humanity relying on mass production. They didn’t need to summon demons or pray to angels if they could shoot someone themselves or heal a loved one with quick doses of medicine. That left 98% of demon kind starving for life force. We used to get life force by devouring it off of humans’ souls like corn from a cob. After their souls left the bodies we’d been summoned to murder, it was dinner time. We were all used to being Convictionists, spending our free time promoting demon summoning on Earth so we could get our daily life force. 

November 9th and 10th, 1938. The Night of Broken Glass. That night started with a single event too. One Polish-Jewish student shot one German diplomat and chaos erupted like a grease fire. Humans had gotten used to blindly following their leaders, just like we’d gotten used to thinking the Convictionists in power knew how to bring our old lifestyle back by repeating the same thing over and over.

The Reaper and I descended upon Munich that night armed to the horns. It had been several years since The Coalition struck at us, so I expected a fight and had brought the Blood Magic folio and haloxite knife to defend The Reaper. That and I’d had the chemical-toed boots prepared as a surprise for Jack Te-Konos or whatever Septuplet awaited us.  

A “demonstration” was in full swing when I touched down in front of a wrecked store front with The Reaper close behind me. The souls that shone among the rioting Nazis were mostly stale; their life force was about to vanish since we hadn’t harvested here in a while. Looking skyward, I spotted dozens of Seraphs flapping in a circuitous pattern above the city. No demon thieves swooped down upon the exposed souls. I puffed out a breath and said, “Slow days are the best.”

The Reaper tilted his horns, glancing around us. “There is anarchy in the streets.”

I shrugged. “Slow for us.”

The Reaper picked his way through the hundreds of Nazis and Jewish business owners lashing out at each other. He held his scythe high over their heads so as not to remove the soul from a living person. I watched as men and women destroyed windows, stole merchandise, and made a general mess of the business district. Sweat and burning wood and paint wafted through the area, and I could taste the despair on the breeze the same way I did during my Convictionist days when I’d been summoned by a murderous human.

Harvesting was slow work with all the live bodies thrashing and sprinting around. I kept The Reaper between me and each cluster of souls while we traversed road after road. He drew handfuls of the dead into his scythe with downward jabs, sweeping Seversoul down, around, and up again. Two images flashed in my mind and I blurted, “This reminds me of Chicago in the late 1800s. Remember the Haymarket Square riot?”

Reap cackled. “I thought you’d be comparing me to a rice farmer wading about in his paddy.”

“I was thinking more a wheat farmer, but that works too. Since when did the Collector Of Souls get such a random imagination?”

He turned his skull at me the way a stern teacher or librarian would. “Let us focus on the harvest. We cannot fly and harvest by the hundreds this time. There are too many living humans in the area for that.”

“Okay, I’ll fly above you and call out the next cluster of souls.”

With that I leapt skyward and flapped fifteen feet above The Reaper so he didn’t nick me with that brimstone-and-haloxite scythe. Bunches of souls glimmered in the darkness here and there like ripe grapes on the vine. One bunch on a street corner with Nazis waving torches. Two clusters on a rooftop, however they’d gotten there. Four groups in a line going into a boutique that was half-burning and spilling light everywhere.

I led him to each soul bunch and we harvested them, making our way to the boutique. I pointed out a demolished synagogue with almost a hundred souls about two blocks away from the fracas. Nazi men and women both in uniform and in street clothes poured out of the synagogue with molotov cocktails, clubs, and guns in their hands. Stained glass peppered the pavement beneath each window, where souls wandered in circles around the outside and inside.

“We’d better hurry and harvest that group there,” I called to The Reaper. “Fire can’t hurt us, but I am not buying a new wardrobe.”

Reap looked where I was pointing, then took to the air without the need for wings. “I thought you would relish another trip to Inner Pleonia.”

“I actively avoid the Fourth Circle. Don’t care how fancy the shops are.”

“Avarice employs the best tailors and clothiers."

"Sure," I snarked. "It would look great if we lined the enemy's pockets."

"All her legitimate businesses are there.”

“So maybe you should go there and get some new duds.”

“These robes have served me well as long as I can remember. They will do.”

We flew over the rioters and entered the synagogue’s front door, which was splintered in pieces and piled against the wall on the left where a fire was already crackling. I flapped away from it and landed among the pews in the center. If the fire those rioters had started engulfed me, I’d lose my Folio and the chemical-toed boots I hadn’t gotten to use yet.

While The Reaper swept his scythe through soul after soul, I gazed at the ceiling that hid us from the Seraphs, the overturned pews where hungry fires burned, and the bodies in the far corner. Then I froze when I saw the uniform on the woman standing over the still-living humans.

Pride sank a triangular trench knife into a victim who screamed and collapsed, twitching as the blood ran freely out of the wound. Moments later, the Jewish woman expired and her soul stood up from her corpse, life force radiating from her toes to her tormented face. Pride straightened her spine and raised her chin high. My former martial arts instructor examined every inch of her black-and-gold Convictionist uniform to make sure no blood had spattered onto it. Then she reached out a hand and drank the life force from the fresh soul.

This had been the first time I’d seen Pride in decades, and at the time, I sure as hell didn’t want The Reaper to know anything about her or us. Let him be distracted by the hundred or so souls he was harvesting in the area. While my boss circled the synagogue outside, I blitzed at Pride and drew the haloxite knife from inside my blazer. Fury and pain fueled every wingflap. Red slivers swirled behind both eyes.

I wanted to cover up that pain by killing its source.

Pride pivoted on her back foot at the same moment I swung the knife blade at her neck. She seized my arm with one of hers, whipped me over her head, and hammered me down onto the shattered brick of a destroyed windowsill.

Pride touched the remaining brickwork with her other hand and cut loose with her white collar power. Re-Glorify. The recently wrecked brick re-formed around my hand and head, trapping the rest of me in plain view of the Seraphs overhead on the outside of the synagogue.

That left me trapped with the Septuplet I’d hoped never to see again. 

Case 11 - Ep. 1: Bandwagon Pride

A World For A Secret by Beki Yopek

“You never told me Jack Te-Konos shot your toe off in the Spanish Civil War, Avaline.”

I eyeballed The Reaper the way a death-fearing human wouldn’t. “What about your leg during The Battle of Amiens? You never mentioned you had surgery either.”

We entered The Reaper’s re-built office and he sat behind his new glass-topped desk. “I went to Abel Memorial Hospital in Eden. Bones are easier for them to rejuvenate than the whole flesh package.”

His modern vernacular was getting better. Or worse depending on whether you saw the obvious joke or not. I tossed my crimson hair, then wiggled my toes in their chemical-toed boots. “One toe is a lot easier to rejuvenate. How’d you get your leg back?”

“Myth Medicine. You?”

“I sat on my ass and chugged life force from motes for two weeks so it’d heal on its own. Didn’t you ever wonder why Contressa ran double shifts after Madrid?”

When The Reaper shook his head, the firelight LEDs overhead flickered and lent his shadowy skull even more shadows. “You are a responsible demon. I presumed Niariel helped you or you’d gotten surgery on your own.”

The old bag of bones respected independence. One reason I enjoyed working for him. I smirked. “I’ve only been to Heaven recently. Something about self-righteous angels and the SPD’s snobby attitude keeps me away usually.”

“Ah,” Reap replied. “Your new angel with benefits.”

Yep, his modern sensibilities were getting too fine-tuned. Reading subtext was now on his list of powers. I strolled over to the filing cabinets that lined both sides of his office and opened a drawer. Removing pen, paper, and folders, I took the bundle to the desk and sat in one of the chairs in front of it. “You and Nia are way too interested in him. What’s the deal?”

The Reaper waved the ebony bones of one hand at the bay windows behind him, where dozens of usher angels and banker demons ran fresh souls through The Soul Fountains below. “To use your own words, ‘There is only one angel I trust.’ Now there are apparently two.”

“Reap,” I drawled, dragging out the “e” sound for a couple seconds. “It’s Thursday. We just harvested from a million-plus city. You sure you aren’t strung out after Sydney?”

“Who are you talking to right now?”

Maybe having the old job-obsessed Reaper back would be better than the Reaper that’s come out since we started writing these Case Notes. I rolled my eyes. “Okay, okay. Maybe you’ll meet Terrence after we get done writing these things. Nia's got a surprise for you tomorrow, so don't wear yourself out too much." 

I dropped the big point like a word bomb. "Seems to me you’re looking for whoever plots things out for The Pneuma Coalition.”

When The freaking Reaper stared at you with his mandible hanging low, it meant you’d genuinely stunned him. I pressed on. “You said The Motery Center or someone plots our cities and when to harvest from them. Last night you asked me to recall Madrid, and that was the night we discussed route plotting before Avarice sicced Jack Te-Konos and his infinite rifle spell on us.”

Nodding his skull, The Reaper rasped a dragon’s whisper. “Yes, Avaline, that is on my agenda, but do NOT write that. In fact, I confess I threw away your final page from last evening. Musings that seem true will mis-direct any Coalition members who catch onto what we’re seeking. I left those in.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him. “So you’re an editor now?”

The Reaper raised five black phalanges and counted off on them. “It is public knowledge that you detest cellular phones.”

“For a damn good reason, yes.”

“Rumor has spread at The Down South Lounge that we are training new bodyguards.”

“We shouted that one out to the whole floor of gamers there.”

He ticked off his last three bone digits. “We’ve been seen in a destroyed office more than once. It is known we don’t like being interrupted while you and I are alone here. And finally, no Seraphs have been seen here at the Motery Center since we began.”

I did the mental math and came up with an equation I hadn’t known The Reaper was balancing this whole time. “You conniving genius. We’re luring The Pneuma Coalition here. That’s why you wanted me and Nia to sneak in the ingredients last time. Once the mastermind in their ranks sees we’re ‘weak and vulnerable,’ they’ll come to this office themselves to try and end us while the SPD is ‘gone’ and no one’s paying attention.”

If The Reaper had lips, they’d be sliding up into a cheshire smirk. He purred, “And you thought your boss was angry yesterday for no reason.”

I snorted a laugh. “Hey, you got a hug from Nia. She’s genuine with those who are genuine with her. You were actually pissed.”

“Of course I was. I remain as angry as ever. If I had more time among harvests and writing with you, I’d be plotting a better system for harvesting souls."

It was the chilly office that made me shiver. 

It wasn't the guilt digging itself up from the mental grave I'd buried it in.

The Reaper didn't seem to notice and he continued. "A system where the Seraph Police Department could keep The Coalition away from our souls indefinitely.”

Crossing my arms, I said, “Do you even want the brimvisibility for your own protection?”

The Reaper waggled his carpals in a yes-and-no gesture. “It is also a trap we may need to spring at a moment’s notice. Have the vials mixed and completed as soon as you are able. Now let us discuss November 9th and 10th, 1938.”

I raised the pen. “So we’re going over the Convictionists again, huh?”

“They gave rise to The Coalition according to you. This next historical event requires the eyes of someone who’s experienced in how they worked before The Industrial Revolution shook The Three Domains.”

Fear and embarrassment sparked a fire in me and I flinched. The Reaper had just proven he was an excellent planner. Had he read into my lies and reviewed the Case Notes when our shifts were over? 

G-O-double-D I hoped not. No way was I going back to what I was before The Industrial Revolution. I’d die before that happened.