Mission 2: Care

"W-w-why, why did I take the moped?"

Bice kept asking herself that question, her little motorized bicycle bouncing along on the bricked roads of the rapidly darkening residential area. Dante's pizzas teetered precariously on the luggage carrier behind her, probably with their toppings plastered to the box's cover. Hitting another bump, she lurched forward, jolted around like some weather-beaten leaf in the midst of a hurricane. Both her neck and the delivery were sure to have a good number of objections when the ride was over.

Dusk was descending swiftly, painting the congested skyline with empurpled smoke trails and great swaths of darkness. The declining sun cast a warm gleam over the streets and robed the clouds overhead in gossamer shrouds of gold and violet. Night, as grand and magnificent as it seemed, was what Bice feared most. The last thing she needed was to get lost in the labyrinthine alleyways of this unfamiliar neighborhood, where all the structures, neoclassical and nestled against one another, all looked the same.

It was by the neon sign, situated proudly on a brick awning, that she identified Dante's shop. The words "Devil May Cry" cast a wan, flickering crimson light down on the staircase leading to the front of his establishment. At least, she'd been expecting a storefront.

The double doors of Dante's establishment appeared to have been ripped off from their hinges and lay strewn, in splintered pieces, across the sidewalk. Odd, she thought to herself, with a trembling smile that betrayed her true terror. Her heartbeat sounded like a rushing torrent of water in her ears, and it was a curious palpitation; the excitement of the hunter mixing with the trepidation of the hunted. She should've anticipated this. Dante was, after all, a renowned demon hunter, and delivering him pizzas would never be a walk in the park—or some romantic moonlight tryst.

"Hey, Dante?" she called, slowing to a gradual stop in front of the building, but received no answer from within its darkened interior.

The engine's dying throbs left her words dangling helplessly from the chill black night outside. She had one foot on the stoop's first landing, pizza boxes in hand, when the cracking of gunshots sent her tumbling backwards. The noise, grating against the stillness, exploded all around her again, mixed with cries of unendurable suffering, eldritch and terrifying and most definitely not human.

Bice stood there in front of Devil May Cry, knees trembling and knocking together in terror. She had to remember how to breathe—inhale, exhale, hold and release. The idea of demons being real received a short, candlelight flicker of recognition. In all honesty, she had anticipated Dante being some paranormal reality show host, someone who "hunted" devils for fun.

She was dead wrong.

It registered in her mind, against the incessant pounding of her heart, that she should simply come back at, in plainer terms, a better time. No need to get involved, she thought to herself, slinking away from the commotion.

And then something smashed into the pavement at her feet, sending jagged chunks of cement flying out in every direction. Bice fell, face-first into a pizza box, and let out an indignant, "What the heck?!"

She rolled onto her back, eyes squeezed shut in frustration, half expecting an apology from Dante or whoever it was that knocked her over. All she got was a bestial snarl, more terrible than anything she had ever heard in her life, in return. It dawned on her, like some earthshattering revelation, that Mr. Fredi had been completely and irrevocably right. Delivering pizzas to Dante was dangerous. More like deadly. She'd give him every right to say "I told you so" to her if she managed to leave the ordeal uneaten and undigested.

"D-Dante," Bice whispered, opening her eyes to see the massive, shadowy form of the demon before her. Its arms swirled about its hulking body like tendrils of mist, even darker than the black surrounding them. Eyes on a vaguely fish-like, ichthyic head winked at her, hungrily, and she couldn't stifle the scream that had jumped to her lips. "Dante, come and get your damn pizza before I get freaking tentacle raped!"

A plume of red unfurled in front of her, brushing up against her cheeks, and she found the hem of Dante's coat draped over her head

"So you are my pizza delivery girl!" Dante's voice exclaimed, orotund and flippant. "Good to see you again, Bice. Don't worry 'bout the tentacles."

"I thought I was going to die!" she cried in objection, struggling to pull the muffler of his jacket from her face.

"Uh-uh," he said, and took a step back, in a repelling gesture, so that his pant leg pressed her back. "Show's not for you. Cover your eyes and count to ten."

"What? I—"

"One!" shouted Dante, followed by the strident, clarion battle-cry of a gunshot. "Keep going."

"T-two," Bice breathed, eyes hidden away beneath two tremulous hands. Another bullet exploded from Dante's firearm, and she could hear a sickening squelch of blood from where it penetrated the demon's flesh. "Three."

"Alright, let's do this," she heard Dante say, accompanied by the metallic ring of an unsheathed blade.

"Four!" Bice reminded him.

The only sounds that reached her were those of Dante's grunts and the monster's death throes.

"Five!"

Stab.

"Six!"

Hack.

"Seven!"

Slash.

"Eight!"

Screaming. And then silence.

"Nine… Ten?"

Bice panted in fright, peeking out through splayed fingers. Dante smiled down at her, his whitish hair obscuring those forget-me-not blue eyes in a characteristically devil-may-care fashion. He wielded an enormous sword, even longer than his entire body, with laughable ease, as if it were nothing. A pile of smoldering, blackish sludge lay at his heels, with a few stray wisps of cooling scud trailing off its surface.

She stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded. "…Nice."

"You don't seem surprised," he said, his head tilted inquisitively to one side.

"I'm just really good at hiding it."

"I see. And I also see those pizzas you've brought with you."

Bice heaved the proverbial sigh of relief. "You know what? I'll make sure that Mr. Fredi doesn't charge you for these ones. Just as thanks for saving my life and all."

"I would hope so!" cried Dante with a look of faux disgust, slinging the sword over his back. "Not after where those things have been…"

"What?"

"'Cause Bice-butt pizza."

She opened her mouth in protest, and then noticed, with a strong flush of embarrassment, that she had been sitting squarely atop the three pizza boxes.

"Had a comfy seat, huh?" asked Dante, extending a hand to help her up.

"Bet it tastes pretty good, too," Bice told him, finding that she was able to laugh for the first time that night. The sound of her own giggling sounded wonderfully ebullient in her ears. She took Dante's hand and got to her feet, ungracefully stumbling on numbed legs into his arms.

"Well," remarked Bice, burying her face unthinkingly into the soft folds of his shirt. "Isn't this just… cheesy?"

"What, the pizza?"

The next moment her unwonted joy shrank back, appalled, and made a hasty retreat into its shell of self-restraint. She pulled away, plucked the pizzas from the ground and handed them over.

"Um, enjoy your meal," she added, nervously tucking a rebellious lock of dark hair behind her ear.

"Hey," he called, just as she had begun to mound the moped. "Stay and have a slice."

"W-wow. That'd actually be really nice, but, you know, I don't want to give you any more trouble…"

"That was nothing. I wouldn't let ol' fish-face or his buddies get anywhere you and the pizza."

Bice let out another peal of laughter, hesitantly gravitating towards him. "That's awfully sweet of you. Well, I've never actually had Mr. Fredi's pizza myself so—"

"No way," he interjected. "Okay, lemme get this straight. You haven't tried his sundaes or his pizza. You have no idea just how cheesy this stuff is. You haven't lived yet."

He said the last sentence so solemnly and with such a straight face that Bice couldn't help but accede to his desire. She followed him into Devil May Cry, through the empty doorpost, wondering all the while if he would ever get that fixed. The moiling, inky darkness was set alight by the glow of a ceiling-mounted lamp, momentarily blinding Bice in its brilliance.

"Too bright for you?" Dante inquired casually, throwing the pizzas down onto his desk.

A few flashing spots danced madly across her blurred field of vision, but she answered, "Nope. And—hold it!"

He froze, reaching halfway for the pizza in an opened box, with a look of utter confusion clinging to his face. "Wait what?"

"Are you seriously going to eat that pizza without washing your hands? I mean, seriously? After dicing up that… that thing, really?" She seized him by the wrist and extracted a bottle of hand sanitizer from her pocket, squeezing the gel onto his hand, gloves and all.

"Really?" he asked her in return. "I never took you for a germaphobe."

She shrugged her shoulders and squirted him with more hand sanitizer. "What can I say?"

Dante snatched a slice of pizza and strolled away, mumbling beneath his breath. "Really, here's the son of the Legendary Dark Knight, using moisturizing aloe hand sanitizer…"

"What was that?" asked Bice through a mouthful of dough and cheese.

"Nothing."

"Mm, so," she continued, her eyes roving restlessly around the room, "nice business you've got here. I really didn't believe Mr. Fredi when he told me what you do for a living. I'm just a girl from Boston after all, wasn't really expecting actual monsters to come out of the woodwork."

"Welcome to my world," said Dante with a smirk. "Boston, Mass, huh? Why'd you come out here?"

"I went to college nearby." Bice stopped to swallow a bite. "It's kind of weird. I majored in forensic science and… yeah, I'm delivering pizza now. I bet my parents are kind of pissed at this point."

"No kidding. But pizza beats forensics any day. I wouldn't worry too much. It's a crazy world out there; you're bound to find something better."

Bice wiped some crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled gently. "I'm kind of happy the way things are going now." That was what led to meeting Dante, she thought to herself.

Dante blinked once, then twice, before letting out a laugh. "Glad you see it that way. Everything's looking pretty good right now, actually…"

"Are demons always coming after you?"

"…Basically."

At first, Bice wanted to ask why, but decided against it. "It was kind of scary, for me anyway. Probably not for you, but, I don't know… you're really brave to fight against those things. I have no idea how you do it. It's amazing."

"I have my ways," he said coyly. "At least there's someone around to appreciate my line of work."

"Mr. Fredi said it would be dangerous for me to be around you," she blurted.

"As much as I hate to admit it, the guy's got a point. I don't want anything weird targeting you for being too close to its prey. Get what I'm saying?"

"…Yeah. The crossfire looks especially scary from where I'm standing. B-but… I know nothing would happen to me, not as long as you're here."

"You're killing me," said Dante, flopping down in a chair behind his desk. "Needy one, aren't you…"

"Maybe," she said, leaning over the wooden surface so as to more carefully peruse his features. "But I think you're stuck with me. Mr. Fredi doesn't really have anyone else to be his delivery person."

"Huh?"

Bice darted away and took a sudden interest in examining the flat-screen television leaned against the wall. "Xbox, huh? So you like gaming?"

"From time to time. It's more like that one little break in the monotony of life."

"Ah, hey, you've got DmC: Devil May Cry? Let me ask, which came first, the game or your store?"

"The store, definitely," answered Dante, pointedly, glancing over his shoulder at Bice crouched by the TV, with video game in hand. "I swear someone stalked me and made a game out of my life. It's creepy."

"Considering the hero's name is Dante too, yeah."

"And just about everything else," grumbled Dante.

"Everything?"

"Err, you know, I've never actually played it before…"

"Me neither." She gave him a slow, shy smile. "Want to try now?"

Dante got to his feet and approached Bice, his arms folded confidently across his chest. "Wouldn't pass up a chance for more demon slaying."


(Upcoming - Mission 3: Deal)

"Let's make a deal. I beat DmC by midnight and I get to ask you a favor, any favor. I don't, and you get to do the same."