Read Spirit Wars for Free Online

through telepathy!
    “Bravo!” Sephtimus hisses. “Faster than the others.”
    Others?
What does he mean others?
    “One
thought at a time, meatball. First, let me address your sloppy question with a
proper answer.” He motions with his thin human fingers holding the cigarette
towards the now lively, constantly shifting mosaic of the mystery girl at the
coffee shop.
    “This,”
Sephtimus rasps, “this is my Helen, as you would say in your tongue, my
Cleopatra, my Delilah.” His metaphors sound as though
they’ve been pilfered from comprehensive summaries, highly suspicious and out
of place. Who could’ve imagined hearing Death quote from English literature,
even the Bible!
    “She is the fly in my ointment, the chink in my armor.” He blows a
thick and impressive smoke ring that slowly elongates into a tiny Scream mask
before it dissolves. “My problem. Yours to solve.”
    Even as he started saying these things he had taken on the air of
a mafia boss barking out orders, like it has been ingrained in him to expect
nothing but blind obedience. But the whole thing’s so unexpected it takes a
while for me to digest it: Death, more powerful than all the politicians and
tycoons of the world combined – he who can take away the only thing that really
matters and send hundreds of billions of people through eternal torment, Death
is… in love?
    “Yes, that's how you would put it, wouldn't you? Tiny,
insignificant, annoying sack of flesh that you are. Love. That silly, pathetic
excuse for raging chemicals inside your faulty, substandard bodies. Only
childish mortals can invent something as trivial as love. Something your
half-baked minds can swallow hook, line and sinker.” He stands up and starts
pacing back and forth like a husband outside the delivery room, cigarette smoke
trailing behind him as immutable as water on taro leaf. “As blissful as it may
be, I can't regress to such ignorance.”
    “Oh how shall I put this?” he asks out loud while massaging his
temples hard. Seeing the Grim Reaper show human reactions to stress is eerie
and thoroughly disorienting. He says: “It’s aggravating that I can't put
this predicament into your hollow human words.”
    Just when I think I see a point of
vulnerability in Death's swagger and bullying, his eyes start to glow like
lumps of coal. “I suppose for you to understand you must first see. And for you
to see, I need to furnish you with my own eyes. Very well…”
    Sephtimus
floats inches from the floor, suddenly as light and diaphanous as a ghost ship
with parchments for sails. “ I hereby lend you the
unique privilege of being nowhere…
    “… and everywhere all at once …”
    Because
I’m hanging about a foot from the floor myself, we stand face to face. I don’t
feel any relief at all when I glimpse the outline of human eyes within the
holes of his mask because their scleras are still glowing and soon flashing as
bright as headlamps. More than that, they become exploding suns in a bleeding
sky, the last sources of light in a world spinning wildly out of orbit even as
it gets incinerated. And it’s like all the hair on my head has gone white in my
terror as Sephtimus floats right into me – and through me. Three hundred and
sixty degrees around us, all the videos freeze up.
    T he
monitors now show people doing things backwards, chirping like chipmunks and
getting noticeably younger and shorter as the days rush by. But the one common thread running through all these scenes,
directly or indirectly, is Sephtimus’ object of affection.
    The chapters of her life fill every screen. On one she’s crashing
a driver’s-ed car over a street island, on another she’s tossing her graduation
cap in the air; next, she’s sipping her first bitter taste of beer, being
kissed by a guy in the darkness of a movie theater, wincing at the stain of her
first period, riding on a swing pushed by her father from behind till finally
she’s blowing out ten candles on a birthday