There’s a lot of perks to being the biggest, baddest gunslinger in the Wild West. People think you’re cool, even though you know you’re not. You get to drop awesome one-liners. You get to stop the villains and save the day.

  The problem with being the alien-universe version of Jesse James is that every new gun in town wants to make a name for himself by being the one to take you out. You’ve basically got to be ready for a showdown any time you step outside.

  Even when you’re working.

  The lobby elevator dinged. Drunk clubgoers spilled out, coming down from the rooftop and bringing the stink of booze, smoke, and sweat with them. A shark guy shredding on an air guitar and yelling on off-key solo, a muscley dog girl in a halter top and electric blue cowgirl hat, and a scrawny six-armed Shinotochi guy hanging off one of her rippling biceps.

  It had only been about six months since I was mistakenly reaped from Earth by a ditzy Angel of Death and dropped here, but by then I was pretty much used to sights like that. They weren’t even the weirdest aliens I’d seen so far. And I guess the six-armed Shinotochi guy wasn’t technically an alien here, since Ryu was one of his race’s native planets.

  I slipped by the noisy trio into the elevator.

  The Shinotochi guy stared as I passed them.

  I leaned back against the elevator wall and pretended not to be prepping for an attack.

  He might just have been staring at the meat roach—this universe’s not-so-affectionate nickname for humans—with the cloaked Spirit. While I was hiding my Cursed Death with Last Light, Last Breath, he couldn’t get a read on me, which usually pointed to somebody up to no good.

  Or he could have been staring at my clothes. The fashion in this universe leaned toward a mix of cowboy and Asian. He and his pals had stepped that up for their night on the town, sporting a wardrobe of retina-scorching colors broken up by random fluffs of fur and strips of leather. His shirt was sleeveless, with a V so deep that you could see the tie of his neon green hakama. A feather-lined hood hung down his back just in case his head suddenly got cold on this rainforest pit-oven of a planet. I’d never been to a club back on Earth, but I guess that’s the kind of thing the cool kids wear to party.

  My pinstriped suit probably looked more appropriate for attending Al Capone’s funeral than dancing the night away at the most popular night spot on Shinotochi-Ryu. It doesn’t matter what universe you’re in, if you’re wearing a pinstriped suit, everybody knows you’re a gangster.

  I wasn’t exactly thrilled with my wardrobe shift either, but the Komodo Emperor hadn’t given me a choice. “You are Eight-Legged Dragon Rank 019 now, Death cultivator. You do not dress like criminal who just stepped off shuttle from Van Diemann. You uphold the image of Dragons!”

  At least he wasn’t making me slick my hair back. Yet.

  I pushed the button for the rooftop. Its light was broken, but the elevator dinged, and the panel started to slide shut. Some greenish barf was crusted on the matte metal finish.

  V-Neck craned his head around to watch me as his rowdy friends dragged him toward the archway to the street.

  I hoped it was just seeing a skinny dork dressed up in a suit.

  But I’d seen looks like that before over the past couple months since I’d become the most high-profile Eight-Legged Dragon in the Big Five. It wasn’t just recognition, it was something else, too. Something that said, “This is about to go all shootout at the O.K. Corral.”

  Was the elevator door shutting unnaturally slow?

  I jammed the Door Close button. It was sticky and spiderwebbed with cracks, so pushing it was probably pointless.

  V-Neck leaned over to his dog-lady girlfriend and said something I couldn’t hear over his shark pal’s air guitar.

  I sent Miasma to beef up Dead Reckoning and covered my arms in a cloaked version of Death Metal.

  “Nuh-uh!” the dog-girl barked at her boyfriend.

  “Shut up, Shelly,” V-Neck snapped. “Don’t look.”

  “I’m not.” She twisted her muscley upper body, doing the most obvious rubberneck ever out from under her bright blue cowboy hat.

  Her puppy dog eyes went from my suit to my face and then doubled in size, showing whites around the edges.

  “It is him!” She elbowed the shark, stopping him mid-hammer-on and almost knocking him over. “Sliver, it’s the Dragons’ Death cultivator!”

  The shark’s toothy jaws dropped open. “Dude, no way.”

  Dead Reckoning went off.

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  Spirit attack incoming from their direction. I couldn’t see it. I tried to stop whatever had been thrown at me with an invisible Death Metal, but the Miasma shield wouldn’t block it.

  The festering knife scars in my side screamed, pain burrowing into my internal organs as the attack aggravated what had never fully healed. It felt like poison oozed into my veins from the tangled mess of tissue there.

  I slapped my hand on the elevator’s sensor panel and the door’s glacial slither closed stopped.

  The shark yelped. “Oh no, bro! Split!”

  He and the dog-girl turned and ran.

  V-Neck held his ground.

  “I’m a Mortal supertype, too.” He grinned. “Festering Sore Spirit. Hard to defend against for anybody but Antiseptic cultivators, and even they have trouble. Everybody’s got something festering somewhere, you know?”

  Smarting off has always been a problem for me, so I get it when other people’s mouths start writing checks that their Spirit can’t cash. But the knife scars were a literal and figurative sore spot. Him poking at them woke up that black cobra coiled inside my chest.

  Dropping Last Light, Last Breath, I poured necrotizing frost onto the old wounds, killing the nerve endings.

  “You really want to do this?” I stepped out into the elevator lobby. “I gave you the chance to walk away, but you want to take me on?”

  “Hell yeah! I knew the second I saw you on Ryu’s Spirit boards that I could take you.” He laughed and shook his head. “The most infamous Death cultivator on the planet, just some puny little human. I never thought I’d actually get the chance to face off with you.”

  While V-Neck talked, Judgment Beyond the Veil projected a movie of all the worst stuff he’d ever done in his life onto his eyes. Most of what I saw there he’d done out of selfishness and rampaging ego, no large-scale evil. He was just another nobody who thought taking out the Dragons’ Death cultivator was his shot at the big time.

  “Sorry, pal,” he said, smirking like he’d practiced this line a hundred times in the mirror, “but this is about to hurt. A lot.”

  He thrust out his left three arms.

  Another wave of Festering Sore stormed through the knife scars, shattering the frostbite and leaking putrefaction into the surrounding muscle. The pain made me lightheaded. My Eight-Legged Dragons tattoo always ran at a low burn, trying to repair those stupid scars, but at the renewed attack, the healing script ramped up to a boil.

  I prowled toward V-Neck, pretending like I couldn’t feel a thing.

  “You think you know how this is gonna go?” I stuck my right hand out to my side.

  The Lunar Scythe ripped across my skeleton, tearing through muscle and skin, and formed, jet black and gleaming in my fist. The decaying rags of suit-sleeve fluttered around the fleshless white bones of my arm.

  On my opposite wrist, my HUD buzzed with a message notification. I ignored it. Hard to scare somebody off if you stop to check what sort of takeout your girlfriend wants for supper.

  I stalked forward another step.

  V-Neck scrambled an unconscious step back.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re messing with?” I asked him.

  To make sure he did, I grabbed the handle of the scythe with my other fist, too. The last of my soft tissue disappeared.

  Where the skinny John Dillinger cosplayer had stood a second before, now there was a leering skeleton, wielding a huge, glittering black reaper-blade.

  Eyes bugging out, V-Neck winged another Spirit attack at me. Except this time there were no festering knife scars to attack because there was no flesh to have scars. There was a nick in my lowest rib, but all the bone marrow inside was long-dead, petrified solid. Nothing squishy left to fester except my subconscious, and I’d had enough practice ignoring that kind of festering that it didn’t bother me.

  V-Neck froze. His mouth worked open and shut, but no sound came out. He looked like a guy from a horror movie realizing he was about to get eaten by the monster.

  That gave me an idea.

  I sent Miasma smoking from my eye, nose, and mouth holes. More rolled along the floor like mist as I crept toward him. The click of my footbones on the dirty tile echoed impossibly loud. I let the Lunar Scythe hang down so its blade scraped across the stone.

  A hair-raising whine scraped out of V-Neck’s throat.

  That black cobra inside me soaked up his terror like sunlight, basking in it.

  Fear the Reaper, the name for the new Spirit ability rang through my head. It felt right. A lot less clunky than saying, “intimidating somebody so bad that they need to change their pants,” anyway.

  I clicked forward another echoey step, dragging the scythe along with me.

  V-Neck screamed and spun around, sprinting out into the night after his friends.

  I let go of the Lunar Scythe. The immortal weapon ripped back across my skeleton to wait for its next summons. Muscle, skin, and gangster suit covered my bones in a heartbeat, whole and undecayed.

  Refreezing the nerves in my messed-up side, I got back on the elevator. Frostbite in my ribs, fire in my biceps from the healing script. It was a weird combination, but by then I was used to it.

  The door started its leisurely slide closed again.

  “Oh crap.” I slapped my hand on the pocket of my suit pants, then dug into it.

  The ring was still there. I blew out a relieved breath. Somehow it hadn’t dropped out and gotten lost when the Lunar Scythe had turned my clothes to rags.

  It was probably stupid to bring the ring with me, but I didn’t want to leave it in the apartment. Kest might have gotten there before me, and she would have sensed the new, unfamiliar piece of metal the second she walked in. The way she got when she went Metal-crazy, she would turn the place inside out until she found it.

  The elevator door closed. I relaxed back against the wall and starting Reclaiming the Dead breathing, recycling the Miasma from all those horror-movie special effects back into my Spirit sea. My HUD beeped a reminder that I had a message.

  It was pretty much what I’d expected—Kest wanted spicy ramen with fish cakes. She also promised to set an alarm so she wouldn’t get absorbed in her Metalhead project and forget about eating.

  I’ll pick it up, I sent back, because I knew how this went and I wanted food on hand for when she forgot, shut off her alarm, and I didn’t see her until lunchtime the next day. My script tattoo wasn’t eating me alive anymore now that I had a steady supply of Spirit to feed it, but I was still starving pretty much all the time.

  On the elevator panel, red numbers slowly counted upward.

  V-Neck might have been a jerk, but I was glad I hadn’t had to kill him. One of the hot shots who tried to take me out last week hadn’t been so easy to run off. I still heard him every time I pulled Wrathblade.

  My Ten covenant was to destroy evildoers with Cursed Death, and I’d sworn to my Spirit or to kishotenketsu or whatever never to take another innocent life. But guys like V-Neck and the hot shot from the week before fell into an uncomfortable gray area. They weren’t innocent, but they weren’t totally evil, either. Killing guys like that did something to my insides. The fewer of those I had to take out, the better.

  Besides, I was there to kill somebody else.