Mikayla S
Soren
A couple of weeks after we take off early from work to fuck in the waterfall, my life with Zayla is leveling out. She’s still having trouble with some parts of her job, but I try to step back and leave her to work things out.
I’m here for her if she needs to talk, or if she wants advice.
But I’m not her boss; Lucifer is. He has to deal with her on the job performance.
Our sex life is fine, though, and that’s what really matters to me. There haven’t been any more nights away, but we keep things interesting. How could it not be interesting, with Zayla in my arms?
Today I got a major call-out, where I was unexpectedly needed at a scene of great carnage and confusion. When I got there, it looked like all hell had broken loose.
I am Death. Supernaturals fear me. My team of reapers rip the souls of supernatural creatures out of their forms. But usually, supernaturals don’t die in such large numbers.
“What the hell happened here?”
I ask the first dead werewolf I come across.
He’s standing in a forest clearing, with a picturesque little thatched roof cottage off to one side. Turning to me, he just shakes his head.
“I...I don’t know,” he says. His chest is torn open, his lungs hanging out in a bloody mass.
Spread throughout the clearing are nearly a hundred supernatural dead. Werewolves, yes. Also vampires. And chimera, basilisks, manticore, and centaurs. There are cyclops and trolls, unicorns and pegasus, dragons and griffins and sphinxes.
“I know that my pack was contacted secretly,” the werewolf says, “and asked to send representatives to a meeting. We were supposed to be talking about a peace treaty between our people and the rogue wolves.”
Another dead supernatural wanders close and hears what the first one is saying.
“They were rogue centaurs,” the half-man/half-horse who’s joined us says.
“No, they were rogue trolls,” says another, a dead troll who’s been standing like a boulder surveying the destruction.
“You mean,” I say, “that rogue supernaturals lured you all here at the same time?”
“That is how it happened,” a dead vampire swoops in to join us.
My arrival has been noticed across the mass of bloody bodies torn limb from limb, and more of the spirits are clustering around every second.
“I don’t know about you,” a dead basilisk hisses, “but my people will be defenseless until they elect a new leader.”
“You were their leader,” I ask, “the head of the basilisk flock?”
That one nods. “Yes,” he says. “We were all the heads of our groups.”
Rogue supernaturals lured the heads of all of the different supernatural families here, to this clearing in the woods, and then attacked.
Suddenly, Zayla’s father flashes into my mind. Zayn is the current head of the werewolf pack my wife comes from. What if he’s here?
What if he’s dead?
Frantic, I race throughout the clusters of souls waiting to be reaped, searching. I circle the clearing once, then twice, then three times, but he’s nowhere to be found.
Thank God for that!
Somehow, Zayn wasn’t here when the attack happened.
But I still have nearly a hundred souls to reap. And a crime to figure out.
I’m going to be here all day.
I’ve got to get to work.
Throughout the day, I question the souls I reap one at a time, as I send them through a portal to Purgatory. They all tell the same story.
They were lured here with the promise of peace from rogues.
Each of the different types of supernaturals has faced attacks from rogue creatures of their own kind in recent months. Rogue dragons. Rogue vampires. Rogue basilisks. Rogue manticores.
Rogue werewolves, like the ones who attacked Zayla and left her nearly dead. And who have continued to prey on those in her pack since.
As the hours pass, I can see that this is a war, but not a war devised by my brother Devlin.
This is a supernatural war.
But who is fucking behind it?
For every different supernatural creature I question, every leader of their respective peoples who is now dead, tells me the same, exact thing.
When they all began to gather here, in this forest clearing, there was one rogue being who stood apart from them all.
He was perched on top of the thatched-roofed cottage, on a platform surrounded by guards.
A figure in a black cloak with a hood, so that no one saw his face.
To the dragons, the figure appeared to be a dragon, with wings lifting beneath the cloak, although never seen clearly.
To the manticore, it appeared to be a manticore, with a lion’s tail whipping beneath the cloak.
To the trolls, it appeared to be a troll, massive rocky shoulders making the shoulders of the cloak stand out like boulders.
And every species of supernatural creature tells the same story.
When all were gathered uneasily together, wondering what the hell was going on, why other supernaturals were there, an entire fucking army of rogues attacked from all sides.
In a massive clash, the rogues from all species fell on the leaders and slaughtered them in a massive battle. The battle never ended until everyone in the clearing was dead.
And the entire time, that cloaked figure just stood on top of the cottage roof and watched it all fucking happen.
Just as I am sending the last dead supernatural’s spirit through the portal, I hear a sound behind me. I whip around just in time to duck as an enormous black-haired centaur swings a massive broadsword through the air.
It would have chopped my head off.
I have no weapon so I can only dodge away from the open portal. The centaur follows me.
It is alive, not a soul. It is a rogue.
I feint left, then right, leading it away from the open portal. I can’t go too far, though. If this creature gets into purgatory, who knows what damage he could cause.
Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see more shadowy rogues creeping through the bodies strewn across the ground. The rogue army never left!
In a last desperate move, I grab a fallen troll’s bloody club from the corpses on the ground and swing it in an arc towards the pursuing centaur.
Crack!
The club connects with the centaur’s front horse legs, sending it crashing to the ground.
I sprint for the portal and dive through, pulling it shut behind me just as the rogue army’s forerunners reach the spot where I stood just moments before.
They almost made it inside!
In fact, it was so close, I think as I stand up and brush myself off, that they almost made it into purgatory.
So close that the portal chopped off a rogue sphinx’s wing when it slammed shut. The feathered wing is flapping across the floor as if looking for its body to reattach.
I scoop it up, holding it tightly as it tries to escape.
“Sorry, asshole,” I say as I stride off down the hall towards the conference room. “You’re evidence. And I’m calling a meeting. Devlin! Craven! Zennen! Come to the conference room, now!”