Free Roaring Blood (Demon-Hearted Book 2) by Ambrose Ibsen

been on the Veiled Order's watch-list for many years. A practitioner of death magic.”
    Mona wasn't one to emote; the drooping, wrinkly skin of her ancient face looked more or less the same whether she smiled or frowned. I did, however, detect a change in her expression when Kubo let that bomb drop. She paused, looking down to the floor, and loosed a great sigh. “A necromancer has the scythe?” She shook her head and slithered off into her workshop, momentarily disappearing from view. “That's very bad news.”
    Joe was posted near the door, tinkering with a bunch of vials. He looked into them, sniffed at the liquids stewing inside, then cringed and set them back down. When he was done, he made his way to the table where I sat and had a look at my side. “I'll be damned. She really patched you up good, Lucy. If not for Mona, we'd have been screwed.”
    Mona had done great work; she always did. But of far more interest at that moment was her talk of the scythe. The weapon belonged to the god of death, Thanatos? How in the hell had Agamemnon gotten ahold of it, then?
    Kubo echoed my thoughts. “It's a formidable weapon, I'm sure, but it can't be the Scythe of Thanatos. How could a lowly necromancer take control of a legendary weapon like that? It's unthinkable. I don't know much about death magic, about this scythe's history, but relics of that caliber don't just turn up at a rummage sale. Surely it's just a knock-off, a cursed blade, Mona.”
    Mona returned with a faded tome in her slight hands. She set it down on the table with a thud, sending up a cloud of smoke that gave me a hacking cough. “I wish it were so, Takeshi, but the fact that it could wound a Demon-Heart so seriously is proof-positive, in my book. Would that the scythe's only power was a deadly curse; the enemy you face has tapped into immense power-- power that mere mortals were never intended to wield.” She cracked the cover of the massive volume, flipping through it till she stumbled upon the passage she sought. “The Scythe of Thanatos allows its wielder to lord over the dead. For a necromancer, it will act like an antenna of sorts, amplifying his spell craft by an order of magnitude. To the best of my knowledge, the weapon hasn't been seen since the days of ancient Greece. It's the weapon of choice of Thanatos.” She looked to me, elaborating further for my benefit. “That is, the character humans often refer to as the 'Grim Reaper'. The god of the dead, who is responsible for claiming the souls of the deceased and ushering them to the Beyond.”
    I chortled, hopping off of the table. “The Grim Reaper? No way... Like, a skeleton in a black cloak? You expect me to believe that?”
    Hands in his pockets, Kubo sidled over to the book and scanned it along with Mona. “The depictions of such a figure throughout the centuries in works of art is no coincidence. I've never seen him, of course, but it's said he does indeed look like that. But that's the thing...” He fixed a steely gaze on Mona. “This is a god we're talking about. A god isn't going to just misplace a legendary weapon. How did he get ahold of it?”
    Mona simply shook her head. She didn't have any guesses.
    I toyed with my earlobe and began to consider everything I'd been told about this necromancer, Agamemnon. He'd been on a watch-list, considered a threat for more than two decades. Then, he broke out of jail and simply dropped out of sight. If I was remembering things correctly, he'd flown under the radar for the past ten years.
    Ten years is a long time. Anything could have happened in that window. Maybe the clever bastard cozied up to the god of death at that time. Maybe he came up with some plan to steal his weapon. There was literally no telling. Curious as I was, I honestly didn't see the point of all this conjecture, though. The fact remained that the necromancer had the scythe, and that was a very bad thing for us.
    “So,” began Kubo, “you mean to say that the scythe