Dark Passions at Death's Door

24 - Sounds About Right

The Valkyrie was using his name a lot more.

Byron shivered. She's figuring me out. I'm mentally fighting with a demigoddess. Lord, give me the strength. Don't kill the demigoddess, just slow her beautiful butt down.

He'd thought up a fairly-okay-ish plan on how to get that to happen. It would take some time, but Hell, if all this was going down on his watch... Well, at the very least, he could find a way to keep her out of the line of fire.

Try and talk her out of the damnable trail she was blazing. That, and make sure she made it through her ascension without further problems.

"Pardon me, Valkyrie." He ran his tongue over his teeth. "I don't like the idea of forcing someone to vow something that would go against their will."

A vow for silence over something like sex was just petty. And no, it wasn't the same that he did vows to the Lore with those that touched his scythe.

That was entirely different. Scalpere Deus was a dieumort, a god-killer, a thermonuclear device of Lorean proportions. And it was his, by rite of passage into becoming a reaper.

The Banemen were the only ones out of the immortals in the past 20,000 years to unlock the secrets of dieumorts and made them available to immortalkind. That was before the deities took offense and decided to have them wiped out (mostly).

And the Banemen only got a single god-killing 'shot' in each item, be it an arrow, a sword, or some mystickal bauble or spell scroll.

The never-ending fey quiver with the dieumort arrow from Lucia the Huntress was a major upset in the pantheons.

He'd overheard from Abigale and Aphrodite that some of the goddesses were planning to have the quiver destroyed or captured.

Now, the deities would have to contend with reapers returning.

And Death's own did not care about some punkass second- or third-rate goddess or god's feelings. If the deities went dark and evil, they were earning a reaping. Plain and simple.

That pleased him.

Hang onto your asses, boys and girls.

With that in mind, one couldn't allow a permanent dieumort of the reaper's kind to just fall into the wrong hands. Thankfully, the weapon resisted being carried. None other than immortals deemed worthy could wield it.

And a reaper could recall his weapon by instinct and will alone. Then his brain paused, considering what he'd seen.

Phenїx had lifted the reaper's scythe easily, and it hadn't cut her when she did. On the other hand, she was a oracle demigoddess, one of the rarest around, and already a rising star for her balancing out evil. The scythe would see that as worthy(ish).

He shrugged it off. Ah well, that's her. Figures.

"It isn't like that, reaper," Nїx snapped him back out of his head. "They'd consider it an honor. It's almost as sacred as a bonding or marriage pact to a nymph. It means you value your privacy and you value them!"

Byron leaned back, pondering the sky. All right, fair, he valued them as fellow immortals with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He also valued what they thought of him.

Many thought he was a creep. And Lorean females were not shy about telling him so. Or saying it within earshot.

Frankly, after seeing them endure some heinous stuff of late, he wasn't keen on seeing them harmed. Plus, it just felt wrong sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time.