The Reaper rose, confusion in its eyes as its tongue lolled. Valentine cast the jawbone aside and readied his femur for another strike.
The Reaper turned and ran, but Valentine was after it, a wild predator drawn by flight, got on its back and drove the sharpened femur up through the gap left by the jaw.
Crying, Mona pressed her hands against the wound in Colin's back. Blood came up under her fingers anyway.
As the Reaper collapsed there was another, running from the woodland path in the direction of the goalposts, its feet a blur, a strange oversized leering jack-o'-lantern mask atop its head. Valentine picked himself up, left the twitching, dying, genetically engineered corpse, and ran toward the new one, ink-smeared bone in his hands. The Reaper slowed, perhaps not used to a man running toward it.
A mindless feral howl sounded from Valentine's throat. His heart seemed to fill his entire chest cavity, its throb rattling his ribs and collarbones...
Some sane corner of his mind hammered out thoughts as fast as letters flew from a quick typist:
You don't know how to fight you great thirsty slug you've forgotten how, send all the puppets you want,
you can no more fight than fuck time to face me, product of a warrior race bred and tested in ten thousand years' battle, scarier than any costume, don't run you'll just die tired...
The Reaper turned and ran. Its mask slipped, and it blindly plowed into a tree, lurched onward, tearing the mask free to run.
Valentine angled through the trees, yipping like a hound on a hot scent, caught up to it just outside the glowing eyes of the goalposts. It turned at the last second, threw up its arms to ward him off, and Valentine caught it at the knees with a diving tackle, knocking it down, felt claws open wounds in his shoulders as he drove his femur up between its legs. The Reaper didn't have sexual organs, but its skeleton had a gap.
Kill it so they send me another. And another... no.
Valentine fought to form words.
"You", he said, straddling the Reaper, feeling stronger than he had ever felt in his life.
He twisted the femur. "You, at the other end. Talk, or I make your puppet into a corn dog".
"sssstop! pleasssse".
Valentine withdrew the femur, and the Reaper lashed out with its free arm. He caught it at the wrist and twisted it until he heard a snap.
"Stop it", Valentine said. It was like talking in a foreign tongue; he had to force himself to make words. "I'll take your toy apart a limb at a time. Then I'll hang your churchmen from the goalposts".
"what do you want? i give you your life, i give the female her life, i give the man his life, just let my servant go".
"Are you Seattle? The head honcho?"
"no, i am but a keeper of..."
"I want to talk to your chief. King. Grand and Exalted Overlord, whatever he calls himself. The one in the big tower".
"he does not deal with your kind directly".
"Then through you. I don't care. Tell him I have an offer".
"what could a human give such as he?"
"Adler. The leader of the resistance".
The Reaper's slit eyes widened, "impossible!"
Valentine reached up, got his hand around its windpipe, felt the thick muscles that drove the tongue.
"grraack..". Valentine released his grip, "yes, yes, cease and desist, i contacted, he assents, you shall have your meeting with his representative among the mortal".
Mouthpieces: Every Kurian organization depends on layers of intermediaries between the Kurian Lords and their human herds. Seattle is no different.
All the layers of police, troops, secret police, church investigators, even diplomats to other Kurian Zones, report to one man's office in Seattle, and that man is Maxamom Silas. Impressive looking, with a good eye for clothes, and an even more impressive speaker and judge of character, he's something of a born second-in-command. Some in the know of the ins and outs of Seattle's realm believe him to be more important than the lesser Kurian Lords in the feudal conglomeration, especially with recent desertions of the Kurians supposedly guarding the borders of Seattle's empire.