From Hell with Love by Kevin Kauffmann Page A

recounted before he bent over and held the sides of his head, his face the picture of anguish.  In his mind swirled a thousand possibilities of things to come, but the violence was the most distracting.  He saw it all over again, the destruction of the palace and the sprawled-out body of Lucifer.
    “He…he was fighting something, it looked like a shadow, but then he was…someone stabbed him in the back.  The person was wearing,” Cadmus explained before horror took over his face, before he straightened up and looked his friend in the eye.  “They wore a dark cloak.”
    “Cadmus…” Niccolo muttered, but as the idea bounced around in his head, he realized what Cadmus was thinking.  “Oh, stop it; it wasn’t you.”
    “It could be…” the reaper said before breathing out, but Niccolo grabbed his friend by the shoulders and shook him.
    “It’s not, Cadmus, you would never do that to Scratch!  Snap out of it!” he shouted.  “It was just a guy in a cloak, right?”
    “Yeah…”
    “Well, here’s some news for you, you’re not the only one who wears a cloak.”
    “But…”
    “And you said that it was all blurry and chaotic, right?  It could easily mean nothing ,” Niccolo explained, his voice starting to tense up at the possibility that it meant everything.  Cadmus seemed to break out of his daze and leaned down to grab his scythe where he had dropped it.  When he stood back up, he looked at Niccolo with despair.
    “Almost everything was blurry, but Lucifer was not.  Someone killed him.”
    “Well, shit, like right now?  Do you know what time it is?  Can we stop it?” Niccolo asked, his mind racing at the thought that his father figure was about to be murdered.  Cadmus looked to the palace rising out of the center of Dis and shook his head.
    “That,” he said as he pointed, “was definitely on fire during the…vision.”  Biting his lip, Cadmus looked back at his friend and slouched slightly.  “We have some time to figure this out.”
    “Well, we go and tell Scratch what’s going on, then!” Niccolo said as he shouted out instructions to the dormant entity in his mind, causing a green mist to appear in front of him.
    “Don’t be so hasty!  I’ve never dealt with a reaping like this.  It could be something entirely different,” he urged as a horse coalesced from the mist and stood next to Niccolo.  The beast was a fearsome creature, its sleek black coat interrupted by diseased patches of green tissue, and it almost seemed to gaze into their souls with its emerald eyes.  A green fog seemed to issue from both the eyes and the horse’s mouth, but neither Niccolo nor Cadmus was alarmed by its appearance.  Niccolo merely used the stirrups attached to the grey saddle to leap onto its back.
    “We need to warn him, Cadmus.”
    “Need to warn him about what?  I was asleep,” a baritone voice echoed from the ether, but the Horsemen knew who was speaking.  Niccolo just lowered his human hand to the horse’s mane and ran his fingers through the black hair.
    “Cadmus just got a vision of Scratch dying, getting stabbed in the back,” Niccolo said as he grabbed the reins with his maimed hand.
    “Since when do you get visions, Horseman?” the voice asked as the beast turned its attention to Cadmus.
    “A side effect of reaping one of the Fallen, Plague.  I don’t know if we can trust it entirely, though.”
    “Why the hell not?  You said you get their memories,” Niccolo said as he shifted in the saddle, but Cadmus frowned as he rubbed his forehead with his left hand.
    “Nico, I’ve never had to deal with this kind of power.  It’s a whole new game.  I want to talk to Buné, first.”
    “Just who did you reap?  I’ve never heard of this before,” Plague asked, his eyes narrowing at the question.
    “Räum,” Cadmus said as he worried the handle of his scythe with both hands, looking down at the corpse just fifteen feet away.
    “What?  That’s…” Plague