Page 28 of Death is My Ride or Die

Lucifer trod closer. “You got us into this mess, so you will get us out. Faith isn’t just scared of us; she’s scared of your father. Good thing your strongest illusions are of people you’ve killed. It’s why you’re so damn good at being David Star.”

Asshole. Pressure built in my jaw from clenching it. “You want me to stage an attack as Malphas to traumatize her.”

He nodded once. “Break her. Completely.”

“I don’t have my scythe, and I’m underfed. I’ll need at least a week.”

“Four days. No longer.”

Goddamn it. Weakened and without my scythe, four days was impossible.

“Consider it done,” I said.

“Excellent,” Lucifer said with a slice of his grin. “While you’re at it, you really should focus on recovering your scythe. You’re looking frail. That just won’t do for my second-in-command, now, will it?” He strode past me, clapping me hard on the arm as he went, and my fangs gnashed together.

He’d dislocated my shoulder.

“Four days, Alex,” Lucifer repeated. Then he vanished into a surge of flames.

More than anything, I needed my scythe back. That conversation had been Lucifer’s vindictive way of telling me he had no intention of helping me get it.

I grasped my injured arm and maneuvered it, popping my shoulder back into place. “Motherfu—” My vision momentarily went black, and I wheezed in a breath that my corpse didn’t require. The pain subsided eventually, leaving me with an irrepressible rage and the urge to reap more blood.

My palms lifted and beckoned the night. Darkness consumed the roof in an instant, clinging to my torso and forming a new cloak. Dragging on a new pair of leather gloves, I sent a message to my reapers to meet me at the warehouse in thirty minutes.

Meanwhile, I had time to kill.

Shadows poured over my shoulders and launched at my target, clinging to his mortal frame and burrowing in like parasites. They rapidly ate away at his skin as he screamed and writhed against my hold in terror.

The beast inside me purred at the gruesome sight.Delicious.

More shadow wrapped around my gloved hand as I punched forward and plunged my fist inside his chest. I latched on to his life’s essence and tore, ripping his soul and scream out clean. The body sagged lifeless against the brick wall, and I inspected the cerulean orb of his spirit hovering in my palm.

The mortal had lived his life practically a saint.

“What a loser.”

I crushed his soul to smithereens in my fist and sent him to Hell anyway.

Perhaps that was a little too harsh. . . I laughed darkly at the thought.Nah.Let them straighten it out down there. I don’t have time for this.

Pain radiated up the sides of my temple, promising another vicious surge of hunger.

Without my scythe as my guide, I had to collect souls the old-fashioned way, something I hadn’t done since Lucifer had summoned a wizard to set up my scythe to organize the souls I need to hunt via Wi-Fi. We’d had Wi-Fi decades before the mortal world.

Growling under my breath, I held out my hand, summoning an absurdly outdated scroll. My to-kill list unfurled past my boots and almost flew into a rancid puddle on the sidewalk before I hastily reeled it back in with a curse.

“Ridiculous,” I grumbled, uncapping a ballpoint pen with my teeth to manually cross off the mortal’s name. “I feel like fucking Santa Claus.”

But the dead had to be collected somehow. The time I’d been in Limbo had set me and my reapers back on soul collecting. The only thing keeping the shell of my human body from decomposing was my soul. My corpse had suffered significant malnourishment without me inside it.

I would have plumped back up in a week on my own, but I didn’t have time for that. Brooding, I shoved my to-kill list into my cloak and stalked down an apartment alleyway alongside an orange cat. My legs bent as I jumped, propelling myself off a fire escape and scaling the building to the roof with ease.

Soon I was back in the air, rocketing past Manhattan. Hurling winds and rain carried me down onto an old industrial warehouse, where I landed with perfect balance on the peak of the iron structure. The old glass windows had been refurbished in places from ongoing renovations, but there was a gaping hole in one of them. I tucked my wings in and dropped through it, landing on an iron beam ten feet below that speared the center of the warehouse in two. I leapt off and flipped as I dove backward, plummeting from the forty-foot drop.

My boots smacked against hard concrete. I shook off the water from my cloak with a sharp tug. “Evening, boys.”

Ahead, the Seven Deadly Sins stood in formation like lethal soldiers. They’d formed an aisle so that three stood on one side and three stood on the other. Clad in all-black armored uniforms, their faces concealed by cowls.

---