《Demon Marked》


 1. The Executed

    I lay on the metal cot inside my cell staring up at the ceiling. The remains of my last supper lay on the tray by the slot in the door. My date with the chair was a few hours away. I had long been reconciled with the idea that this day was coming. There was no point in fighting it, in fact I deserved it. That tends to happen when you  do the things I did, and when you do those bad things in wrong place a date with the executioner is inevitable. When the priest had come to visit I had prayed with him only because I didn¡¯t want his trip to be a waste of his time. I knew there was no forgiveness or redemption in store for me.


    I was still awake when the appointed hour came, although I hadn¡¯t heard them come get my supper tray. When I heard the guards enter death row I stood up and waited. Their orders were crisp and clear in my mind as I obeyed, knowing those words would be among  the least I would hear.


    The walk to the execution room was louder than I expected. The sound of my shoes shuffling across the cement floor, the clanking of the chains that I was bound with, the thumps of the guard¡¯s hard soled boots, the whispered prayers of the priest. It was surreal how loud those noises were, considering any other time in my life I would never have noticed them.


    Then the chair was right there in front of me and the guards were unlocking my leg and hand cuffs so I could be seated. There was a pane of one way glass to my left, I knew that family members of some of my victims were in the room beyond to see justice done. There might even be someone from the press to witness my last moments


    ¡°Any last words?¡± The warden¡¯s voice startled me, I didn¡¯t know he had come into chamber.


    ¡°It¡¯s too late for that. Let¡¯s get this over with,¡± I replied quietly.


    Without urging from the guards I turned and sat in the chair placing my arms and legs into position. They were business like as they went preparing me and securing the straps I wouldn¡¯t have expected them to be any different. These guards were simply men with a job to do. Then the chamber was empty of everybody but me.


    The jolt hit hard when it came. It surged through every part of me and was thousands of times more painful than anything else I had ever felt. The pain lasted for less time than it took to blink and then was gone.


    Then there was nothing. No light, no sound. Just endless nothing.


    Then I could see, sort of. Everything was hazy like looking through frosted glass. Only those objects right in front of me formed coherent images. As I turned my head anything I wasn¡¯t looking directly at faded into swirling fog. Then I could see myself, or rather my body slumped on the chair. Thin tendrils of smoke wafted up from me. The shape of indistinct person moved up to my body and checked for vital signs. The person was just a shape to me  I could see nothing about their face. After a few seconds the person¡¯s headed turned and nodded to somebody I couldn¡¯t see. I could see the person¡¯s head moving as if they were talking but I heard no sound.


    ¡°We need your assistance!¡± a voice, or rather, many voices boomed out of the nothingness around me. The words echoed around in my skull and made my bones rattle down to my toes.


    ¡°Wait, how the hell can I feel my toes if I am dead?¡± The thoughts raced back and forth through my head.


    I was so startled by this that I forgot about the voices as I tried turning this new fact over in my head.


    Something around me sighed, and I felt multiple presences nearby. There was nothing to see in the vast emptiness I was standing in but there was something there with me. Several somethings. I was pummeled by raw emotions from hate to love and everything in between. Whatever was around me was both the ultimate evil and the ultimate good at the same time and I could feel myself being torn to shreds. As suddenly as the emotions hit me, they were gone.


    ¡°We are sorry for the discomfort, but as we said ¨C we need your assistance.¡±


    There was still immense power behind those voices, but it no longer felt like that power was directed right at me. The words were only a bit less intense.


    ¡°What? Who?¡± I had trouble thinking clearly, and hearing voices when I should be dead was downright unsettling. That didn¡¯t take into account I shouldn¡¯t be feeling anything either. Well, I didn¡¯t think I¡¯d be feeling anything at this point.


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    ¡°Why are they always like this?¡± a voice dripping with hate and malignance demanded. The sound of it was so close to nails on a chalkboard I had to cringe away from the pain.


    ¡°Their souls are so finite, so small that they have a hard time coming to terms with their transition between existences. You know this brother,¡± this voice was filled with nothing but love which I could feel warming my insides.


    ¡°I can still feel cold and warmth. Nobody ever talked about this!¡±


    ¡°Something has been let loose on the world that should not be loose. We need you to help return it to where it belongs,¡± the good voice interrupted my thoughts.


    ¡°Why me?¡± I asked weakly looking around for whoever was actually doing the talking.


    ¡°You have just died, and we are able to hold your soul here before it recedes back into the cosmos that is time.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± I was thoroughly confused now.


    ¡°Your brain is so underdeveloped you¡¯ll never understand that.¡±


    I could hear the dismissiveness in that tone.


    ¡°To put it into terms your ignorance can understand,¡± the malignant voice continued. ¡°You are in a place where we can BOTH reach you and are able to exert influence over you. So, use your ears and listen!¡±


    I had decided I didn¡¯t like this one, even if that did sound like something I would¡¯ve said when I was alive and I would¡¯ve used a similar tone.


    ¡°There is an object of power that has been stolen from this place of nothingness and it has somehow been brought to the world you just left. Whoever is using it is untrained and has already made several fatal mistakes. They just haven¡¯t caught up to him yet. If this person manages to release too much of the power this object holds while it is in your old world the fabric that is time will be unraveled and everything ceases to exist.¡±


    I tried to work through what I had heard. Beyond the fact that I should¡¯ve been dead, or at least I thought I should¡¯ve been dead I was hearing voices. Was I the butt of some wild joke the prison warden and guards had dreamed up to torture me? I was able to grasp what they said but not why they said it. Transition between existences? What kind of new age hippie mumbo-jumbo is that?


    ¡°These humans are infuriating with their inability to use their brains to grasp anything beyond the basic concepts! We are wasting our time explaining this to him.¡± It was the darker of the two voices I had been hearing.


    ¡°What kind of trickery is going here?¡± I asked, still thinking this was some sort of joke and I was the butt of that joke. I still hadn¡¯t been able to find any hint of how they had managed to pull it off.


    Something grabbed me. I could feel myself being crushed like I was a grape in a wine press.


    ¡°You are infuriating,¡± that something roared. It felt as if that something was right in my face. ¡°We don¡¯t have time to deal with your childish behavior.¡±


    A surge of energy ripped through, all at once more painful, more exhilarating than what went through me on the electric chair. A brightness overwhelmed me, followed by a sensation of being stretched to impossible lengths. When I thought I would snap under the tension my head and feet shot together


    Then I went tumbling across pavement and slid to a stop on my face up against a brick wall. I knew that was going to hurt sooner than I would have liked. As I tried to push myself to my knees pain hit me from every part of my body. I hurt more than I ever had in my life before.


    After a moment of being on my hands and knees the throbbing in my head eased up enough for me to lift my head and look around. Wherever I was it was sometime after dark. I found myself up against the wall of a squat building on the edge of a parking lot. An apartment complex from the look of the nearby buildings. There was a strange smell on the air, it was new to me and I couldn¡¯t place it. Vehicles of all sorts were parked in many of the spaces. There were marks in the gravel and dirt that ended at me showing me where I had slid across the lot. The other end of those marks stopped near the middle of the lane way down the center of the parking lot giving me no sign of where or how I began my painful slide.


    ¡°Damn, that hurt,¡± I whispered to myself as I tried to get to my feet. I was still wearing the orange prison shirt and pants. The arms, chest and the legs of my outfit bore the marks of my slide. Dirty, torn and I could see what may have been blood soaked into the material. The lighting here was too dim to be sure but looking at my hands there was a dark liquid seeping from the scrapes that could have been blood. I¡¯d have to take a look when I got to somewhere with better lighting.


    Many of the apartments in the buildings surrounding me were dark, but there quite a few with lights on. I needed a shower and a change of clothes, maybe something to eat, then I could figure out where I was. I chuckled to myself as I clued into the fact that the vehicles around me would give me a clue where I was. At the same time the throb in my head had eased up significantly, but I still had¡ªa need, a pull to head off in a certain direction. It was faint but there. Turning in a circle showed that the direction it pulled me was in the same direction no matter which way I turned. I assumed that mental tug was pointing me at whatever those beings wanted me to find.


    In search of at least one answer I slowly made my way to the nearest cluster of vehicles to get a look at their license plates. The plates had blue lettering with the image of a sailing ship in the middle on a white background.


    ¡°Nova Scotia. Canada¡¯s Ocean Playground,¡± I read the words out loud. I was a farm boy from the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. Geography was never a favorite topic of mine.


    ¡°This day just keeps getting better,¡± I mumbled to myself as I set off in search of an apartment I could get into without too much fuss.

 2. A Demons Hunger

    I staggered from the parking lot towards the nearest of the apartment buildings, I needed to get a change of clothes and look at my wounds. As I moved along the side of the building, I felt a hunger growing inside of me. Not a hunger for food, a different kind of hunger that I was unused to feeling. The strength of that hunger, that need grew faster the more steps I took. The burn of it filled every corner of my body. My eyes lost the ability to send my brain information I could understand. What images my brain deciphered were something out of a nightmare.


    Thick fog drifting in a directionless wind. At times the fog thinned out, not enough to see anything distinctly but there was a change. Muted red hues of color flickered across the fog somehow casting shadows that danced with the movement of the mist.


    I could hear faint sounds, muffled as they were by the mists around me. There were sounds coming from all around me. I could hear shrieks of terror that seemed to embolden me. People running made me want to chase them. Grunts of pain that brought me pleasure. There was somebody laughing that sounded a lot like me.


    ¡°That¡¯s it,¡± a voice full of malice said. An evil voice my prey didn¡¯t seem to hear, or they were too scared of me to pay any heed to the words echoing through my hunting grounds. ¡°Give into your needs. Consume them all.¡±


    I could smell the stench of flesh burning, but there was more than that on fire. There was fire all around me. I was an apex predator, and the smell of fear led me to my prey. The smell of blood and entrails assaulted my nose, and I relished those scents. It didn¡¯t matter whether they hid, they ran, or they fought back, all of them fed my hunger. I laughed as I gorged myself on their fear.


    When I had sated that hunger within me, I staggered away from that trail of destruction I had created. Heedless of where I walked or the distance I covered; it was the stumbling path of a drunkard. In that instant I was drunk from the euphoria of that gory feast. Then darkness overtook me, and I fell to the earth face first in a deep slumber.


    ¡°That was quite the display. You made certain groups sit up and take notice, and now they have their own hunters after you,¡± the voice was feminine and angry. Even though I was exhausted I came awake in an instant.


    I pushed myself to my knees, my body aching as if I had just spent all day doing full speed tackling drills. The owner of that voice was sitting in from me perched on a large rock. Her hair, dark as ebony hung down and framed her face. There was no mistaking her eyes, which were utterly devoid of life. Those eyes were the color of blood. Her clothes were form fitting and a shade lighter than her hair. Against the trees surrounding us she stood out like a sore thumb.


    ¡°Who are you?¡± I demanded as I looked at her, and then felt the evil rolling off her in waves.


    ¡°You may call me Angel,¡± she mustered all the disdain she could and fed it into that ¡°you¡±. Her words dripped with irony and a small smile played across her lips at her joke. Clearly, she was not afraid of me, nor did she hold me in much regard at all.


    ¡°A demon¡¯s first feeding is not supposed to be that dramatic. It draws too much of the wrong attention. Who is your progenitor? I don¡¯t feel their mark on you,¡± the words flowed from her mouth.


    ¡°Demon? Progenitor?¡± I hoped my confusion was evident. I had no clue what she was talking about.


    ¡°The one that tempted you. The one that made you fall deeper into the blackness of your soul. The one that made you become a demon.¡±


    That information had not made things any clearer to me. I was confident this woman who appeared to like the goth look was trying to feed me a line of garbage. I mean everyone knows that demons don¡¯t exist, they are a thing of myth and legend.


    ¡°You aren¡¯t making any sense lady. Go away and leave me alone.¡±


    I climbed to my feet and turned away from her then started walking. Once more I had no direction in mind, I needed to get away from that whack job. After a couple of steps, I turned to make sure she wasn¡¯t going to follow me. The woman was gone. Angel, or whatever her name really was, had made no sound when she left. There was no sound coming from around me either.


    I kept my head on a swivel looking and listening for that woman, but I didn¡¯t detect any of those signs. It was like she had vanished into thin air. What I did notice though, was that the woods were entirely devoid of ANY signs of life. There were no sounds of birds or squirrels or any other critter I would have expected to be here. Nothing, until I came to the edge of the trees.


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    Down a slight slope from me the torched remains of a dozen cars sat in a parking lot. Easily that many more had sustained some damage. Two apartment buildings had been razed. Besides the remnants of household appliances very little else remained. Another building had lost its upper floors to the blaze. Dozens of firefighters worked to extinguish hotspots in the buildings and among the vehicles. A dozen of the bright red firetrucks were spread around the scene with their hoses snaking all over the place. Police held back a mob of press and other onlookers making sure the firemen had no interference.


    In a state of disbelief, I watched the scene for a few minutes. Understanding was slow in coming, but it did come. When that understanding came, it was in the form of brief replays of nightmares I had created.


    *flick*


    I crashed through a patio screen door. The family inside looked at me in surprise and fear. I didn¡¯t know what they saw, but their fear was plastered upon their faces. The first scream didn¡¯t happen until I had raked a clawed hand across the face of the nearest of the children. The strike had sent the boy tumbling across the living room, his head barely still on his shoulders.


    ¡°Claws? When did I get claws?¡± I wondered to myself as I heard myself laughing out loud.


    *flick*


    I kicked open a door and stepped into a hallway. I could feel the feel the terror I was bringing down upon the heads of the people who lived in this building. I could feel myself growing stronger as the fear of these insects fed my hunger. A woman ran towards the entrance of the building seeking to escape to safety. She was half dragging, half carrying an elderly man. I laughed, an evil sounding laugh and much louder than I had ever laughed before. Without thought I sent a ball of fire hurtling down the corridor into the two people. They screamed as the fire engulfed them and set the building¡¯s entrance aflame. Their deaths fed my unending hunger too. I didn¡¯t notice as I stared in awe at my hands.


    ¡°I can make fire?¡±


    The question flitted through my thoughts for an instant before the hunger took over and I lost myself again.


    *flick*


    I was laughing at a man I had disemboweled. He was sliding down a wall trying to keep his insides from spilling out onto the floor and failing miserably. His woman screamed and twisted underneath me as I took her for my own. He feebly yelled at me stop. I laughed again as I drove my hand into her chest and ripped out her heart. The man lasted long enough to watch me eat his wife¡¯ heart then I ripped his head from his shoulders simply because it briefly caused him more pain before it come off. Fire alarms were going off throughout the building now.


    *flick*


    A man hit me with a base ball bat from behind and readied a to strike a second time. I spun around faster than the man was expecting. I lashed out with a clawed hand, forcing my hand deep into his abdomen. So deep, my clawed fingers ripped through his back taking part of his spine with them. I used the dead man dangling on my hand like a weapon and battered another person to the ground. I stepped forward and with a massive stomp the man¡¯s head shattered. Blood, bone, and brain matter shot across the floor in a spray. More fear and death to feed that gnawing hunger.


    *flick*


    I pounced upon a fleeing family, how they had eluded me this long didn¡¯t matter. They would die now and feed my hunger. There had been much to feed on this night, but I was still within the iron grip of that hunger. I could feel the well had been nearly filled, but nearly is not full so the hunger wasn¡¯t ready to let go.


    One hand flashed out and into the back of the mother. She was caught by my claws as I buried them deep. I could feel the warmth of her blood drenched skin on my hand. I raised her up and she squirmed there on my clawed hand, each movement eliciting a new scream. Her life blood spilling down my arm. My other hand reached out and backhanded her husband. The force of the blow sent him tumbling across the floor. Once he came to a stop, the man never moved again. The children rooted to the spot fared no better than their parents.


    *flick*


    I was back on the edge of the trees looking down at the chaos I had caused. I know there had been far more killing and feeding than I had seen in those brief glimpses of the nightmare I had been. There was no guilt within at what I had done. Instead, there was an eagerness for more, an eagerness to unleash that hunger again. It had been incredible feeding on the fear and terror of the people that had been in those buildings.


    Yet, throughout the time when hunger had been the one controlling me, I could feel an awareness of something far off that I needed to find. No knowledge of why I needed to find this thing, just that the desire to find it was powerful. Finding that object would have to wait.


    I saw five people that separated themselves from the mob at the police tape and worked their way towards me. I saw nothing out of the ordinary about them, but I knew instantly they were the enemy. I could feel their power, even the weakest of them would be more than a match for me in a stand-up fight. They radiated so much power that they glowed to my inner sight, another ability that I didn¡¯t know I had.


    One of them must have seen me, as she pointed her raised arm in my direction with the palm facing me. I had no warning as a white pulsating ball of fire raced by my head. It was close enough to cause burns on the right side of my face as it streaked past. That ball of fire expended itself against a tree without leaving a mark of any kind.


    ¡°Angel Fire!¡± I hissed not knowing how I knew what the ball had been. The burn on my face bubbled and caused immense pain. Things would go very badly for me if I didn¡¯t move fast. So, I turned and sprinted back into the trees.


    I charged onwards dodging trees and crashing through the underbrush. The brush caught at my clothing and slapped at my hands and face. None of that mattered. I had to get away from these people. I needed to find a way to mask my nature from them, as I was sure that they could see me the same way I saw them, but I doubted I glowed with the same white fire that they had.

 3. Hunters and the Hunted

    I bolted through the trees, not having any idea where I was going. More bolts of angel fire blasted past me. Some came way too close for comfort. Stumbling over a root turned out to be a lucky break for me as another ball of liquid white fire hurtled through the space my head had just been. My face still ached from the first near miss, this near miss was far worse. I grunted with the agony of it, and smelled hair burning. Using a tree for help I pulled myself back to my feet, and as I started to move away, I noticed my hand had seared the tree. The mark was the shape of a large, clawed hand. Stupefied, I stood staring at that mark for too long. The significance of that charred mark and its shape were beyond what I was capable of dealing with.


    I was tossed like a ragdoll by another ball of those painful white balls that struck the tree right in front of my face. The agony was beyond description as it burned me to the core. I crashed through smaller trees and bushes. The leaves and branches slapping at my skin like whips. My face bounced from a large tree, a good solid elm tree, sending me pin wheeling in another direction. Something cracked and popped as I struck that elm, but that was nothing compared to the pain of angel fire.


    There was no way I could let those others get me. I couldn¡¯t take another hit like that, not even a close one. It still felt like I was being melted from the I side out. I pushed myself to my feet, one arm was no help at all in effort. It hung limply at a weird angle just below the shoulder, my jaw hung slackly on one side, and only one eye seemed to be functioning. I couldn¡¯t see out of the other one.


    Once on my feet I snarled, well groaned would be more accurate. Raising my hand the way I seen the woman in the parking lot do I channeled my anger and let loose. My own ball of fire, black demon fire formed just beyond my hand. Its darkness was shot through with veins of bulbous green fire. It strained me mentally to hold it until I was ready to let it go at my enemies. The strain of holding on to that fire was incredible, almost as painful as being hit with angel fire.


    A branch snapped in the underbrush in front of me and I let loose with my demon fire. At least that was what I wanted to do. The globe of fire traveled maybe the length of my arm and dissipated with a barely audible hiss.


    I cursed loudly and started to run again. Desperation kicked as I took off looking for anything that could give me a advantage over my pursuers. For the moment they had me beat in numbers and knowledge. I didn¡¯t have any idea of what I was capable of doing, or how for that matter. Whatever had happened at the apartments wasn¡¯t something I did consciously or had control over.


    It didn¡¯t sound like anyone was chasing me, but that was meaningless. I was making enough noise as I barged through the trees and underbrush a blind person could track me down. I was finding out firsthand that it¡¯s difficult to both run and come up with plans when you don¡¯t have any idea as to where you are, where you¡¯re going, or who is out there chasing you.


    I sort of had an idea why. I hadn¡¯t exactly been a good person in my previous existence, and I didn¡¯t think I could go any lower on this one. The old saying was you reap what you sow, I got that, and I was paying for what I had done. That didn¡¯t mean I had to be happy about what was happening.


    I skidded a stop behind another elm tree and crouched down beside it. My eyes once more scanned the wooded terrain in front of me as I tried to slow my breathing down. There was a lot of foliage, so I was hoping it would be harder to approach me without a bunch of noise.


    Something else I would need to learn was patience. In less than a minute I was getting antsy to move or attack. There was movement but nothing that I could be sure was one of the angels that I had seen a few minutes ago. If they were angels. I only knew that the woman I had seen had been capable of wielding it, and that one of them had launched several balls of that crap my way. That and the fact that it was very painful.


    A shape stepped out of the greenery and didn¡¯t appear to be looking in my direction. With a snarl I launched myself at them. I hit the person in the side, sending us both to the ground. My arms were wrapped around my target¡¯s torso, and I squeezed as hard as I could as we rolled through the bush.


    The man I struggled with sent a flurry of elbows towards my face, but the angle we were at made the effort futile. He didn¡¯t have the leverage to do anything serious. One of my hands came free and I used it to throw a punch. The jab wasn¡¯t much more than a glancing blow, but the stink of burning flesh filled me with pleasure.


    Where my fist had connected with his cheek there was a large, smoking burn. He rolled away clawing at the burn. Yet, he hadn¡¯t uttered a sound. Not being one to waste an edge up in a fight, I dove back on top of him.


    Both of my hands found flesh, and he burned. He burned gloriously. There were marks on his skin where my hands had found it, but the burning came from inside him. Smoke coiled up from his eyes and ears as he thrashed. His flailing turned into feeble thrashing, then stopped altogether. It seemed a long time before I let go and stood up.


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    At my feet was a withered husk that had once been human, or at least I thought he had been a human. This guy hadn¡¯t put as much of a fight as I thought he would have if he had been an angel. Had I surprised him enough that he wasn¡¯t able to fight back, or was there something else involved that I hadn¡¯t been aware of? In the end it didn¡¯t matter all that much what he had been. He was dead, and that was one less person hunting for me.


    Standing around debating myself about his origins and my defeat of him wasn¡¯t going to do me any good. I needed to be moving and putting more distance between this guy¡¯s friends and me. I had no intention of finding out what happened to someone like me when they died. On top of that, I was positive I had died once and that got me here. It also gave me a ton of questions that I had no answers for.


    I picked a random direction and started moving. The trees began to thin out, so I slowed my pace. Bursting into the open without knowing what was ahead of me was asking for trouble. Every thirty or forty paces I stopped to look around and listen. I wanted some kind of warning if I was going to get attack. The only thing I noticed was the total silence that had descended on this patch of trees.


    There were the sounds of a city¡ªthe sounds of cars and their horns, the sounds of sirens, I even heard the sound of an airplane so where overhead. All those sounds were distant though. There was nothing to be heard within a hundred yards or so of me. Nothing. No squirrels, no birds, not even insects. It was more than a little eerie. To me it was a bad sign. The silence could have been the result of my presence and the death I had caused. That didn¡¯t feel right though. There was something else in play nearby now.


    I sunk into a crouch once more. Deciding to try something different, I closed my eyes and cleared the chaos from my mind. That happened quite a bit faster than I expected. Everything I had done to this point had happened without my input. Maybe, just maybe, if I let mind relax and wander I would notice things I wasn¡¯t noticing when actively looking for them. Minutes ticked by as I just crouched there.


    The first thing I felt was that distant tug. I still had no idea of direction that tug was pulling me. I felt a pulse in that tug, steady and slow almost like a heartbeat. Then I felt the little creatures. Those squirrels and the birds I didn¡¯t hear. They were there, but all of them were hiding. The fear emanated from them in a rush. The little buggers feared me. My mind pushed on and I realized that even the plants were scared. The trees, the bushes, the grass. Every living thing recoiled in terror from me. Further and further my mind pushed, until off in the vague direction I had come from I found people.


    These people were gathered near the buildings I had destroyed last night. One had a strange essence about her. Weird how my brain identified that person as a female that easily, then I consciously recognized her. She was the one who had fired that first ball of angel fire at me. Now in a wide circle around me I could sense other people going about their business. Other than that woman there didn¡®t seem to be any threats close enough for me to worry.


    Had she given up the chase that soon? Maybe she decided helping the survivors of the apartments was a more immediate concern. An evil grin appeared on my face as I focused my will on that woman.


    Bit by bit I increased the strength of that will, then I fired it like a missile at her. She must have sensed something at the last second as she started to turn. That turning didn¡¯t help her out as the lance of black force hit her and tore right through her. There were no physical injuries on her body for anybody to see. It was different for me, I could see the force I hit her with had ripped her soul right out of her body. The link between the two had been severed, and I feasted.


    I tore her soul apart like I was ripping paper, and her agony gave me such delightful pleasure. As I fed I felt the aching in my face fade away. My smashed eye slowly pulled itself back together and then I could see out of it once more.


    Now I knew how to find, and kill, my prey.


    ¡°You quicker figuring that out than I thought you would,¡± that mocking voice from behind me again. I couldn¡¯t help but think I had heard that voice before today. I couldn¡¯t sense her behind me, I wasn¡¯t feeling anything there.


    ¡°Of course, you return after the fun is over.¡± I turned and sneered at the woman who called herself Angel. The sneer on her face was more condescending than it has been before. To the best of my knowledge this was only the second time I had met her. Yet, I knew that wasn¡¯t correct. We met before, someplace else, I just couldn¡¯t remember where or when.


    ¡°My, oh my. The little fly in the ointment finally learns a couple of things and now it thinks that it knows everything.¡±


    She might have been considered pretty, even beautiful by some until those red eyes looked their way There was a coldness that seemed to radiate from those eyes that said she would rather tear you to pieces and revel in the gore than have a conversation over coffee with you.


    We stared at each other for a long while. Her gaze never flickered, and it didn¡¯t take long before it grew uncomfortable. Angel didn¡¯t move either. It was if she had become a life like statue among these trees.


    ¡°Did you come here to flirt some more, or did you have something more in mind?¡± I broke the tense silence. I knew damned well she had nothing of the sort on her mind. I was certain her idea of a good time was far different than what I had implied.


    ¡°Are you ready to listen, or do you want to keep blundering around like an idiot?¡± Angel¡¯s expression remain unchanged. She had the personality of a rock. ¡°If you are willing to listen then follow me.¡±


    She broke the stare by turning and striding off and not bothering to look back in my direction. It wasn¡¯t long before I did follow. After all she might have some useful information for me. At least that¡¯s what I told myself.

 4. Questions and Answers

    Angel set a brisk pace as she led me out of the woods and into the of the city. It didn¡¯t take long for me to figure out what the strange smell was that I encountered when I slid on my face across the parking lot had been. In front of me the city lights spread out towards and away from a shoreline. A tanker ship lay at anchor in the harbor with its lights on as well. Across the harbor more lights spread out into the night. There was so much light the clouds above me were bathed in the light. The sounds of the night city were much louder here than they had been in the wooded area. Combined the lights and noise had a dizzying effect on me. This was something I was definitely not used to.


    I found that I remembered little of my previous life. Only that I had done some very nasty things and that I had paid for them, in fact I was still paying for those crimes. What exactly those crimes happened to be was lost to me. Forgotten like some horrible dream.


    I followed Angel only because I had a ton of questions, and with any luck she might have an answer or two for me. It also occurred to me to wonder what her motives were for even talking to me in the first place. What she thought of me was immaterial, it was the why of what she was doing here talking to and helping me.


    She walked down streets, through alleys, past parks and across highways. I followed as I tumbled over everything that had happened in the last few hours. Well, at least everything I could remember of those hours anyways. Those memories amounted to little enough even with the little bits of information I had learned.


    I knew I was a demon. More correctly, Angel had called me a demon. Given what I could glean from my memories of that time just after I had skidded on my face across that parking lot, I was inclined to believe Angel. Then add in that demon fire I was able to call upon and what I had done to that man in the trees. I didn¡¯t think there was anything else I could be.


    Then there was the fact that that I knew what angel fire was when it was launched at me. I had never seen anything like it before, so I didn¡¯t know how I knew what it was. It also didn¡¯t need to directly hit me to hurt. A near miss hurt bad enough for me, I didn¡¯t need to experience a full-on hit.


    When I realized Angel had stopped walking, I was barely able to stop from running into her back. We were on a hill well outside of the city. The lights of the city were just a glow on the horizon. It was startling to see how far we had walked without me knowing it. The hilltop was bare, except for a rotting, moss-covered stump of a large tree. The nearest living tree were at least a hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill.


    ¡°We should be safe enough here,¡± she said. ¡°At least, nobody can listen in while we sort out happened to you.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± I asked. She had revealed a little bit of information with that statement, but I wasn¡¯t sure if that was intentional or not.


    ¡°One, we know you are a demon,¡± she held up a finger. ¡°Two, you didn¡¯t become a demon the way most of us become demons. So that¡¯s where we need to start. What do you remember of your life before dying?¡±


    ¡°Its hazy, like I am trying to remember a dream. I know I did some bad things and hurt a lot of people. I know I was condemned to die for those crimes,¡± my eyes had glossed over as I told this story. ¡°Then there was nothing. A nothing that had no end. It was empty and desolate. I remember two voices. One was so angry and full of hate; the other was bursting at the seems with happiness. There was so much power in those voices. Hearing them turned me inside out. There was talk of me having to find something.¡±


    I stopped there trying to find the best way to explain what I could remember happening next.


    ¡°Then it felt like I was being pulled in every direction and crushed all at once. After that I woke up in the parking lot near those apartments.¡± A shudder went through me as those feelings came back to me.


    Angel looked thoughtfully into the distance as she pondered what I had said.


    ¡°That place of emptiness sounds like what we demons call the ¡®Reception Area¡¯. Its where souls of damned people wait to be collected and taken to whatever hell awaits before you become a demon. As far as I know, there is no other demon that has heard the voices you spoke of.¡±


    I could see the distaste cross her face as she spoke of being ¡®collected¡¯. Could that feeling of being stretched and crushed have been my personal hell? It didn¡¯t seem bad enough, but I didn¡¯t have anything else to compare it to. Even getting hit by angel fire didn¡¯t feel quite that bad.


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    ¡°Collected?¡± I asked, prompting her for more information.


    ¡°The demon that tempted you, made you do bad enough things to damage your essence, finds you after you die. You are then taken before the Great Tormentor, a demon you never want to meet. The Great Tormentor then enjoys torturing you and driving you into madness. It seems to last forever, but when he is done you are so very different. You are a demon and then let loose so you can in turn tempt and terrorize more people. You do it because it is the only way to get your madness to abate even a little bit. The things the Tormentor does to you can¡¯t be forgotten or buried. Hurting someone else is the only way to make your pain go away for even a second.¡±


    It was her turn to shudder, and I could see both pain and madness etched in the lines of her face. I could see those emotions boiling in those red eyes of hers that had looked so dead earlier. What had been done to her to cause that kind of reaction. I couldn¡¯t begin to imagine the torture a person could endure before breaking like that.


    ¡°Why help me then? Wouldn¡¯t it be better for you to have killed me?¡±


    ¡°I was nearby when the sky opened and spit you out. I watched as you thundered across the sky like a comet. Your aura was that of a demon as you hurtled towards the ground. That isn¡¯t how it typically happens and was different enough to arouse my interest. If I could see and sense you at that point so could any other demons or angels in the area. So, I needed to get to you first. I didn¡¯t expect you to create as much¡­noise as you did.¡±


    I thought about what Angel had said, and how she had said it. There was no doubt she was leaving important details out of what she was telling me. Whether that was bad or really bad for me was something I needed to work out on my own.


    ¡°The incident at the apartments is what you were referring to when you said ¡®noise¡¯?¡± I made air quotes with my fingers with the word noise.


    Angel nodded agreement before she spoke. When she did speak, she was looking off into the distance and not at me.


    ¡°The release of that level of energy reverberates for long ways. Both angels and demons will detect, most will come and investigate. Normally, it tends to end badly for the one at the center of it.¡±


    Was this another evasive answer on her part?


    ¡°Demons crave power above everything else,¡± she continued. ¡°If they find a someone or something with power, they have an obsessive need to control it. They would rather it be destroyed than let another demon get it. Power can come in many forms.¡±


    ¡°This little meeting, here in the middle of nowhere is you deciding how to control or destroy me?¡± I asked with my arms waving to indicate the hilltop we were standing on. The irritation was evident in my tone as she flinched slightly when I asked the question.


    ¡°No!¡± she replied a little too quickly for my liking. ¡°I told you; you are an oddity to demon kind. There will be demons, many of them stronger than either of us who will want to control or destroy you. There are one or two trying to find you now because you are an unknown and could bring all sorts of trouble to their plans.¡±


    She had turned back to look at me, she had her arms folded across her chest. There was a defiant look about her face. Another little tidbit had slipped out of her there. Angel was aware of other demons looking for me. That meant they had sensed what had happened at the apartments. Whoever was hunting for me terrified her. Plus, there was the hint that she didn¡¯t consider herself a powerful demon. More correctly, she was aware of the limits of what power she did have. On top of that, she was unsure of just how powerful a demon I was. Which meant I needed to be afraid of whoever was looking for me.


    ¡°How do you know I am being hunted right now?¡± I demanded. Why had she waited to tell me this? Was this part of some plan to lead me into a trap, and had I already fallen into it?


    ¡°One of them is my progenitor. He was torturing me when you came hurtling out of the sky. Your appearance distracted him long enough for me to get away. I found you first, but a demon can always find those whose fall they caused. He is probably angry enough to destroy me when he finds us.¡± The words came out in a whisper and a visible shiver ran through her body. Whoever her progenitor was seemed to be a nasty, brutal individual.


    Well damn. She gave me a whole lot to chew on. The first thing that came to mind was that I¡­we needed to run. Right now. Run as fast as we could, as far as we could. Would it really matter though if he could track her down?


    ¡°Then we better get out of here,¡± I muttered, voicing part of my thoughts aloud.


    There was a flash of hope in her red eyes. I¡¯m not sure how I saw it, but it was definitely there for a brief second before fading away.


    ¡°I doubt we can run fast enough,¡± she muttered as she glanced back in the direction of that nameless city.


    ¡°We won¡¯t know until we try. I don¡¯t give up easily,¡± I retorted. I turned and started moving away from the city. I stretched out my long legs in a pace I knew I could keep up for a long time. Apparently, it was something I had a lot of practice doing when I had been alive. My walking pace was helped somewhat as I started out by the fact I was going downhill. Once I reached the treeline it didn¡¯t slow down all that much. I seemed to be comfortable moving across country even at some speed. Angel let out a soft curse behind me and jogged to catch up.


    After some time at that pace, she put her hand on my arm and came to a stop. I halted beside her. She scanned the trees around us with a hint of fear.


    ¡°We have been caught,¡± she sounded dejected. ¡°Don¡¯t give him your real name when he asks.¡±


    I was caught off guard when a voice boomed out of the trees around us. It didn¡¯t seem to come from any particular direction, but it felt heavier behind us. We turned just as a tall shadow came into view.


    ¡°Oh, my little Angel, trying to run away again? You are so going to regret fleeing our little game. First, though what little toy have you snared for me now?¡±

 5. Anger Unleashed

    The shadow came forward, moving through the trees with a silent grace. I had never thought I would be considered a short man, but this guy had a good two feet in height on me and was massively built. It seemed that he favored the raw physical, intimidating type of power. If it came down to a fist fight, I would be in trouble. His eyes were a deep red, darker than Angel¡¯s and his hair the same black. He was rubbing his palms together as he walked.


    ¡°Did you think you could hide from me, Angel? I have so many new ideas to try out I am going to enjoy our next session.¡±


    A nasty looking grin spread across his face as he looked to her. His eyes turned back to me. and I felt the full weight of his presence on me. I could understand why Angle was so frightened of him. His size and demeanor made me question how bad I wanted a punch or two in the face.


    ¡°Where did you find this insect at, and why haven¡¯t you marked him yet?¡± He started to say something else but paused for a moment before speaking again. ¡°Oh, you weren¡¯t thinking of getting him to help you escape, were you? You wouldn¡¯t do that because you know how angry that makes me and you have seen me angry. Haven¡¯t you my little Angel?¡±


    I heard a soft moan of terror from the woman beside me. For some reason that made me stand just a little bit straighter. Even more confusing for me I stepped forward just enough to get in between this clown and Angel. Putting myself into harm¡¯s way over a woman was not something I thought I would ever do. Especially a woman that happened to be a demon that I wasn¡¯t certain had my best interests at heart. This would need to be played carefully.


    ¡°You hear that wind, Angel?¡± I asked looking at the newcomer with that smart arse smirk I wore when I was getting mouthy with somebody. ¡°My mistake, that wasn¡¯t the wind. It was this blowhard sack of horse dung.¡±


    I could almost hear Angel¡¯s mouth drop open in astonishment at what I had said. The nameless demon looked almost as surprised as I was for a brief second. The look turned to anger, but I didn¡¯t let up on him.


    ¡°You know this guy?¡± I glanced at her as I casually flicked a thumb at her progenitor. Being a flippant jerk was something I knew without a doubt was something I had always been good at


    ¡°Toy, I will allow you to call me Marchenko,¡± his voice rattled with barely constrained anger.


    ¡°I don¡¯t give a damn what you call yourself. You are nothing more than the dirt beneath my feet. If you have nothing worthwhile for me to listen to, waddle off back to the cesspool you call home,¡± I replied and added in a dismissive wave for effect.


    That one surprised even me, I couldn¡¯t help but smiling at that one. The snort of surprise Angel let out was just the icing on the cake for some reason. Marchenko on the other hand, was almost purple with rage. I doubt few demons talked to him like I had been. It was also pretty far down on the list of my greatest ideas.


    ¡°Angel, be a good girl and tell this wretch what I am about to do to him. Then when I am done with him, I am going to find the one who holds his mark and break them too.¡±


    His command dripped with hate. I knew that he wasn¡¯t very far from his breaking point. Time to push him over the edge.


    ¡°First, she is done listening to your useless babble. Second, I¡¯m going to rip that tongue out of your mouth so you can stop wasting that hot air.¡±


    There was no way I could let this bag of hot air beat me. I had too much at stake here. There were too many unknowns. Had Marchenko been using Angel to get to me? If he had, did that make him afraid of me? I realized that the walls of my will were holding. Marchenko looked to be straining harder than I had to hold him off. Then I thought of what Angel had said about power. The biggest part of Marchenko¡¯s power was in his physical size. He was intimidating to look at, but that made him nothing more than a neighborhood bully. I knew how to deal with those. Or at least I thought I did.


    On my face there must have been a hint of fear because he laughed at me. One the inside though I felt a like a spring ready to break loose. I was ready to put this guy down, and more than likely take a beating in the process.


    Marchenko struck first. Not all that surprising since he had been practicing this sort of thing for far longer than I have. It wasn¡¯t a physical attack that came my way. His energy hit me with the force of a tsunami behind it. I stumbled backwards a yard or two from that first strike. He didn¡¯t wait long to strike out at me. Again, I was driven backwards. I had no experience as a demon to compare this with, but I already felt like I was twelve rounds into a fifteen round title fight. Sweat rolled down my face and got into my eyes.


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    ¡°Rip out my tongue?¡± He sneered; his voice was full of contempt for my pitiful defence.


    I saw the next attack coming. It started with him pulling strands of power from the air around him and push it into a ball of crackling energy in his hand. It was the same thing I had tried to do with the demon fire in the city. I saw him doing it and I understood. When that energy came my way, I was able to roll to the side.


    As I rolled, I pulled on that same power, but I didn¡¯t wait as long as he had waited. I came to feet hurling strike after strike. None of them were all that powerful on their own. Marchenko was still forced to dodge or defend himself or he would take a bunch of small blows.


    The two of us dodged through the trees and underbrush. Fist size balls of that crackling energy streaking back and forth as we attacked each other again, and again. It was more mentally exhausting than anything I had ever done. The effort began to show on me way to soon for my liking. Then I stumbled over exposed root. In itself that wouldn¡¯t have been a problem, but I had to switch my focus to staying on my feet. A blob of energy sent me face first into the ground.


    Marchenko was on top of me in an instant, his fists were on rapid fire. Each hit bringing with it a wave of pain and nausea. I tried to burrow deeper into the earth with each hit. That was the only way to get away from that flurry of fists. Except it didn¡¯t work. I felt everyone of those hits, and they all hurt like hell.


    The brute grabbed me by the back of my shirt and lifted off the ground enough to toss me into a tree. My body bent backwards as my spine slammed into the tree. A grunt of pain escaped from my lips as the impact paralyzed me for precious seconds. I tried to roll away from the tree and the attack I knew was coming. I was too slow and the kick to my face flipped me over. I tasted blood and my vision went black briefly.


    ¡°You haven¡¯t begun to taste my wrath, my power!¡± he bellowed as he picked me up again. I was still too dazed to think straight, but I knew enough that this fight had gone wrong somewhere and that I needed a new plan. Getting my face punched or kicked in was not working out for me. He held my face level with his and sneered again.


    ¡°You are going to watch me turn Angel into a blubbering mess. Then she is going to get to watch as I make you hurt like you have never hurt before.¡±


    There was loud crunch and pain jolted through me as Marchenko flung me into another tree. I had a vague awareness of one of my collar bones breaking. I still struggled to get up even with my right arm hanging limply at my side. There were far too many cobwebs in my head, and my eyes refused to focus. Another foot connected with my head, followed by another crunch as my head bounced the tree I had just hit.


    I ended up laying against the trunk of the tree with my face in the dirt. Blood was coming out of my mouth and nose as I struggled to breath. Sometime in the beating Marchenko had dished out to me he had broken some of my ribs. Every panting breath sent pain through me.


    I flinched as I heard flesh hitting flesh once more. This time it wasn¡¯t directed my way. I couldn¡¯t see who was getting hit this time. I tried to shift my position to see. The shock of trying to move while laying on top of a broken collar bone and some messed up ribs glued me in the position I was in. All I could do was concentrate on taking one breath at a time.


    Time crawled by as I lay there. I could hear some sort of fight in the trees around me. Multiple people were out there doing whatever they could to inflict a massive amount of pain on each other. The sounds would get louder as they got closer, then fade away as the fight moved away from me. At one point somebody fell on top of me.


    Realization slowly set in that I could feel the fight. Whoever was out there fighting was throwing around a massive amount of energy. It created a noise that was inaudible, but easily sensed if one knew what they were looking for. I understood what Angel had meant before about angels and demons being attracted to that noise. Had the fight between Marchenko and I attracted someone else or multiple people? I started to get a feel for the rhythm of the battle going on around me.


    Then it dawned on me that if I could feel that energy couldn¡¯t I draw on it and use it myself? I was one hell of a third-rate demon if that hadn¡¯t occurred to me. After all I used it against Marchenko when I was still in the fight. So, I did.


    Slowly at first, just a small trickle that I fed into my broken body. I gasped as my ribs and collar bones pushed and pulled themselves back into their proper places. My mouth and nose righted themselves as well. I was able to breathe properly for the first time in what felt like forever. Once I had felt my body become whole once more, I stopped pulling on the energy. The last thing I wanted to do was alert whoever was fighting that I was back and ready to go.


    After a few moments of laying there listening and feeling that battle rage in the trees I pulled my legs under me and pushed myself up to all fours. Then I quietly got to my feet, looking around to see if there was anyone close to me. I heard a bellow of rage from somewhere in the trees, but there was nothing near me. At least, nothing that I could see, but I could still feel that energy being used.


    In the darkness I heard a snapping twig. I froze, still standing beside that tree. Then the soft sound of leaves being rustled as something moved them, and this was close. I wasn¡¯t smart enough to work out where the sound came from. I was still trying to figure that out when a bag of some sort was popped over my head. I tried to draw some energy from the world around but all that got me was a dazzling display of bright lights in my eyes.


    ¡°You are a stupid one, aren¡¯t you toy?¡± a voice hissed in my ear. ¡°You can¡¯t even tell what is real and what isn¡¯t.¡±


    I knew that voice. This night had not gone according to plan at all.

 6. Marchenkos Toy

    The sack had somehow rendered me helpless. Paralyzed helpless. I may have toppled over, but I wasn¡¯t sure. I had no sensory input to help work out was happening. I only tried to draw on the power once more. The disorienting display of brights came back with a vengeance.


    Then I discovered a couple of other things over the next little while. First the sack was something that Marchenko had devised himself, or so he told me more than once. The only sound audible to me was Marchenko¡¯s voice, and that wasn¡¯t constant. That seemed to be something else he could manipulate. It didn¡¯t matter because I already hated his voice. He had a high-pitched voice that was hard to listen to. I wanted to rip my ears off but had no choice but to listen to his incessant drone when he deigned to talk to me.


    I also learned that the cloth the sack was made from had fibres of some metal I had never heard of. Rhodium or something like that. Marchenko wasn¡¯t shy about telling all about rhodium that it interacts with demons and angels in all sorts of ways. The greater demons used it in their prisons and torture rooms.


    After the sack got removed it took a while for my eyes to grow accustomed to the absence of light in the room. Even then I wasn¡¯t able to see all that clearly. When you are shackled to a wall in a room that has no windows, it is very easy to lose track of time. When the only break in the monotony is to be tortured to your breaking point, or to watch others be tortured it is madness inducing. Of course that is what Marchenko wanted to do to me, Angel and others. He said he was going to teach me the meaning of pain and agony.


    Marchenko had placed us in a large stone room. There were nearly a dozen prisoners in here one of which was an angel. It turned out that I was the only male among the prisoners. At first, he seemed to enjoy torturing me the most. Then he pushed me to the point where I didn¡¯t feel any pain at all when he tortured me. The cat-o-nine-tails had long stopped getting so much as a grunt when he flayed the skin off my body with it. His physical abuse of me didn¡¯t work, but he found something that did.


    He ensured we could all hear and see everything when he came to have some fun torturing one of us. While I would that he come to have his fun with me, he knew that wasn¡¯t useful anymore. I am sure the others were thankful it wasn¡¯t them that time. Marchenko had discovered, much to his delight, that he got a huge reaction out of me when he tortured one of the females in front of me. There was a contraption that he put head into that held my eyes open, and my head still. When did things to those women I roared soundlessly and thrashed against my chains to try and break free. I wanted to rip his head off of his shoulders with my bare hands. All I would end up doing every time was biting my own tongue or rip the skin from wrists or ankles. To cause me pain and agony like he had promised he only had to begin to hurt one of the others.


    There was one angel that he had so thoroughly broken that she willingly did whatever Marchenke told her to when she was released from her cage. She even went back into that cage when she was ordered to even as she had to sit with her knees up against her chest and head bent down on top of her knees to get into that cage. Marchenko, would occasionally bring her out of that cage to heal the others, even if only a little. It was just enough to keep their physical form from dying.


    I knew that in my past life I had done some bad things to people. I only had a vague recollection that I had killed many people and how I had killed them. Many of my victims were women. I didn¡¯t care that any of my victims had died. I was not a good man before. What Marchenko was doing to Angel and his other prisoners made me look like a saint next to him. What had changed and why was I different now?


    ¡°Are you having as much fun in our sessions as I am?¡± he asked once while cackling with glee as he stood there covered in blood and bits of flesh from one of his prisoners.


    My eyes just tried to burn holes through him. Even knowing better, I kept trying to reach him, to strangle him, to cave his head in as I bashed it off the floor. I wanted to use that whip he so loved using on him, I wanted to flay every inch of his flesh from his body repeatedly. No matter how much I tried though, it was useless. He was out of reach for the time being, but I watched him and stoked that hatred. The more that hatred for him grew, the more I felt that I had hated someone this much before.


    Then his sadism took a darker turn. Marchenko decided he was going to have us torture each other. It was easier for him to make Angel do what he wanted her to. She was terrified of him and what he had done to her in the past. She would do anything she could to avoid that again. In some ways Angel was as mentally broken as the one that spent her time locked in that cage. The one thing he couldn¡¯t make her do was tell him why she hadn¡¯t placed her mark on me.


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    All the other demons and angels broke at some point and took to hurting their fellow prisoners to avoid being punished. None of them showed any enjoyment in the acts. Even the demons showed revulsion at torturing the others.


    Somewhere in that cycle of being tortured, watching the others get tortured or be the one inflicting the pain I had a moment of clarity, and something Angel had said when we were alone outside the city floated at the edge of my awareness. I had no clear memories of who I had been, who was the one that had made me fall and become a demon. In the empty it wasn¡¯t my progenitor that had found me. I didn¡¯t bear the mark of that demon. I hadn¡¯t been made to remember all those things by that demon.


    Angel, and all the other demon prisoners did though. I figured the angels, even the one in the cage remembered the acts that had made them what they are. I knew Marchenko did too. Before his death, he wouldn¡¯t have been any better of a person than he was right now. That revolted me for some reason. That meant that as a human I wouldn¡¯t have liked what he was doing to the others anymore than I did now. Whatever demon had marked him and made him remember his despicable life was off somewhere revelling in the pain that Marchenko inflicted.


    It also meant that Marchenko couldn¡¯t put his mark on me. No matter what he did to me, he could never break me. That prerogative belonged to my progenitor. Then I understood he would need to find my progenitor and kill them to be able to break me. For some reason I doubted he had the ability to do that. Especially since I didn¡¯t know who or where that demon was.


    The next time he allowed me to talk, I laughed at him.


    ¡°You¡¯re nothing but a pile of¡­¡± I started to shout at him before he cut off my ability to speak. Just from his posture I could tell he was angry with me. He started to lash out at me with his whip in one hand and a large knife in the other. First, he would snap the whip across my body, the barbed heads ripping gouges out of my flesh. Then he would slice or stab with that knife. My body shook, not with pain as he hoped but with more laughter. It was soundless but an unstoppable avalanche. Each guffaw that he couldn¡¯t hear but he could see, drew him closer to me and to the edge. I didn¡¯t know if demons could be anymore insane though I was well on my way to finding out.


    The angrier he got, the more ineffective his attacks were. I only laughed harder. Things got even better when one of the angels started to laugh at him too. Whether she understood what was happening or Marchenko¡¯s madness was spreading I didn¡¯t care. He had seen where I was looking and when he saw that woman laughing at him, he stood still and shrieked.


    Slowly all the others were laughing silently at him. All of us, in our shackles or cages laughed at the demon that had somehow snared us all. He had caught us and demeaned us all with the abuse he inflicted, but that didn¡¯t make him better than us. Marchenko wanted to be better than somebody at anything, but here in this room he had devised to inflict physical and mental pain he wasn¡¯t better than anyone.


    He was a bully at his core. He was insecure about himself and needed to feel good. You no longer holder the balance of power when the people you are trying to bully laugh at you. The advantage has been lost and there is no way to get it back.


    When you are lost in a strong emotion like Marchenko was, you can no longer think clearly. Once you have lost the capability to make rational decisions, you are no longer doing things consciously but instinctively. Some instincts take a lot of repetitive work to build up to the point where you do them without thinking. Its building up the muscle memory, the gut memory of what to do when. You¡¯re training yourself. Other instincts like lashing out at something that has angered or scared you¡ªthat fight or flight instinct, happen instantly without thought and you have very little control over them. Again, unless you have spent a lot of time training yourself.


    By his reaction, I figured it never entered Marchenko¡¯s mind that he would ever be laughed at while he was a demon. He didn¡¯t know how to handle it, what he needed to do to regain control. He was too far gone to regain control now. His prisoners laughing at him made him worse. The angrier he got, the smaller in stature he became. Even his appearance was powered by his thoughts. In that rage he reverted to lashing out at random, but he lost conscious control of the prison he had constructed to hold us. His whip got caught in one of his other implements of torture, which only fired him up even more. Whatever he done to bind the other prisoners and I started to come undone. The shackles started to fall open. Soon I could hear a couple of the others laughing at him. Then I was free.


    I was shot across the room towards him. My anger and hatred fueled my explosion of movement, but I was still in control. I held that rage in check as I slammed into him. My hands were ablaze with black and white fire as I grappled him to the floor. His bellows of rage turned to incoherent screams of pain as I reached for that energy and pushed it through my hands into him. He squirmed underneath me, but now I was bigger than him. My fire burned into him, and I didn¡¯t let up until Marchenko was nothing but a shriveled husk.


    My fire wasn¡¯t contained to just Marchenko. Tendrils of fire leapt like bolts of lightning from me to the other angels and demons. None of them were burned the way he had been. They were all lifted off the floor as the fire scoured away wounds and scars that had been inflicted by the dead demon underneath me.


    All of them received my mark.

 7. Torment Unending

    Then the fires faded away and I stood up. We stood there, angel and demon staring in utter shock at what had happened. I didn¡¯t think it was possible for a demon to mark an angel, or the other way around. I had no idea where the symbol came from, but it was my mark. Everyone knew that without thinking about it.


    One the inside of the right forearm was a black tattoo, about the size of my palm. Four lines were drawn so that their center points all intersected at the same spot. A circle was drawn around the center point. One line had triangles drawn at its ends, another had diamonds. The third line had pentagons, while the last line sported hexagons at its ends. I stood there looking the various women as they looked between me and the new marks on their arms.


    ¡°Well, that was unexpected,¡± I said quietly, it was still loud enough to break the silence that had permeated the room. My head was cloudy, like I was in a fog. It didn¡¯t the same as just before I went crazy at the apartment. No, it was more like I was getting over a sickness. I felt full, plugged up in a way. Maybe there aren¡¯t even words for what I was feeling.


    ¡°How is that even possible?¡± one of the angels uttered. I simply shrugged. Everybody else in this room had a better idea of what had happened than I did.


    ¡°How? How did you do that?¡± the voice was strong and melodious even to my demon tainted ears. I looked to the speaker. The angel was a woman of exquisite beauty, her hair hung well down her back and was the color of a summer sunset, shot through with oranges and reds.


    For a response I could only shrug helplessly. There was no playbook that I was following. Nothing I had done while thinking about doing it compared to what I had done without knowing how or what I done it. If they thought an angel being marked was out of the realm of possibility, what had happened to me? All I saw were dots that I couldn¡¯t begin to understand how to connect.


    ¡°I am way out of my league here. Less than a dozen hours before Marchenko captured me, I was a living man waiting to die for crimes I committed. None of that matters at the moment, I need to get out of this place and find somebody that can give me some answers. So, unless any of you can help with that, you can leave.¡±


    The place I wanted to get out of was this room of Marchenko¡¯s. It was a place where evil far nastier than anything I wanted to be associated with had been committed. The room was a discomforting place to be for me, I couldn¡¯t imagine how it would feel to an angel that had been here far longer and undergone far worse acts than I had endured.


    That statement drew shocked expressions from all of them. That was a move that they had not expected. None of the women made to go anywhere as if looking for the trap I had set for them. Only there was no trap being set by me.


    One of the angels stepped forward, raising the arm that had my mark on it. ¡°You are just going to let us leave after you did this? Why, just so you can snare us later? I¡¯d rather you begin tormenting my sisters and I right now.¡±


    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± I was dumbfounded, and I know my face showed it. The top part of the walls started to dissolve into the darkness above us. I think it was starting to dissolve. Either that or the darkness was slowly descending into the room itself.


    ¡°Putting your mark on us is a way of claiming your property among demons. It marks us as yours, it can be used to control us and none of us including the demons can stop you. We can¡¯t fight back, we can¡¯t disobey,¡± Angel explained to me. ¡°Among the angels it works a little bit differently, with them there is no ownership, more like the bearer of an angel¡¯s mark has been chosen.¡±


    ¡°We don¡¯t time to waste on this foolishness,¡± one of the angels piped up. ¡°The room is coming apart around us.¡± All eyes turned and looked to where she was pointing. I had been correct in thinking the walls were dissolving. Then furniture started to fade out of sight. It turned a hazy transparent then ceased to be at all. The walls stopped existing just a couple of feet above our heads now. Then in a rush all the features of the room vanished, as if they hadn¡¯t been here to begin with.


    A loud chuckle echoed through the echoed through the space we were standing in as the last of the room disappeared. A chuckle that sent shivers down my spine and made the hairs stand up on my arms.


    ¡°Toy, do you think it would really be that easy?¡± the voice boomed all around us. ¡°I control you as easily as I control them.¡±


    I turned trying to find the source of the voice, but it was all emptiness around me. There was nobody there for me to see. Again, that loud chuckle echoed, this time it came from right beside my ear. My mind raced trying to work out what was happening, but I was way out of my depth. I was beyond lost and nowhere close to reaching an understanding. Then it struck me I was alone in that space. The angels and demons I had freed from Marchenko¡¯s grasp were gone. They had vanished with no sound, no trace of them remained.


    The walls of the space started moving closer together, shrinking the space. It was hardly noticeable at first, but they were moving in towards me. Inexorably the walls came onwards. The space grew smaller, I could feel the space being squeezed. The air grew heavy as the wall closed in.


    Panic set in as I tried everything. I couldn¡¯t pull on the energy demons used; I couldn¡¯t pull on that fire that I had killed Marchenko with. There was nothing there when I reached out for it. It was if it never existed, or I had been cut off from reaching it somehow.


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    ¡°The little toy begins to understand now, and soon he will understand what its like to be entirely mine to control. Won¡¯t he, Angel?¡±  I heard Angel scream, or maybe I was allowed to hear her scream. It was primal scream of fear and agony that pierced the space I was in. Hearing those screams, I went mad throwing myself at the walls of my small prison. I cracked then ripped out my fingernails on the rock, blood trails followed my fingers as I tried to claw my way through the wall.  I fell to the bottom of what I now knew to be my prison. There was barely enough room for me to fold my legs in front of me. I scraped my knees as I tried to reposition myself.


    The laughter still rang in my ears, the sound of it driving me further into the despair that was setting in. I tried to cover my ears with my hands but that was no help. When that didn¡¯t work, I began to smash my head off the walls. I smashed my nose and rubbed my forehead and cheeks almost to the bones on the walls. That brought the tang of blood to my nose, which brought the hunger to me.


    At times I was struck by blows that weren¡¯t there. Whip-like tendrils of black flame snapped across my torso and legs. Pain burned through my veins as chunks of my flesh were torn away. Vague nightmares of being placed in an iron maiden and having those spikes get driven through me, or stretched out a rack until my joints were ripped apart.


    There was always screaming. I couldn¡¯t tell if it was just me screaming or there were others as well. My bouts of yelling myself hoarse flipped between the fear of being trapped here and anger at the hunger I couldn¡¯t satisfy.


    I tried to climb the inside of prison, and all I managed to do accomplish was scrape the skin of my arms and legs. That fresh smell of blood drove me into that ravenous rage. I needed to feed; I needed to bask in the emotions the act of feeding brought out in prey when they knew they couldn¡¯t run another step. The terror, but most of all the pain that they felt as I fed on them.


    My teeth gnashed and I growled. More screaming, it might have been again, or it could have been someone else.


    A voice. It was a voice I knew that I hated. It was a voice that I needed to destroy.


    ¡°Are you ready for your next meal?¡± that voice taunted me. I could smell blood that wasn¡¯t my own. The smell of that blood drove me into a frenzy. I beat on the walls of that cell in my frenzy, roaring with an awakened hunger. The owner of that voice laughed when he heard me roaring.


    Suddenly the walls of the cell disappeared and being off balance I toppled forward on to my face. Anger infused me as I pushed myself back to my feet. The room was familiar, larger than it had been before but nothing else had changed. People I thought I should recognize were strapped into various devices or hanging from chains. The smell of blood was overpowering now. The only that I could focus on was that smell. I needed to taste that blood, to feed on whoever that blood belonged to.


    Another person came into view. A man, his body horribly scared all over, with his clothes stained in blood. It was somebody else I should have been able to recognize but I didn¡¯t. There was only hunger.


    ¡°Look ladies, his breaking is almost complete. Not much longer, and you think what I have done to you was bad,¡± he trailed into a gasping laugh. It was that voice. That voice I hated. I didn¡¯t know why I hated that voice, just that I did.


    The hatred overcame me, and I rushed at the man. I just needed to get to him so I could feed both my hunger and my hatred of this man. Killing him might even end the torment I had been put through. All of that would be wins for me. Yet mere feet from him my charge stopped. I slammed into a wall I couldn¡¯t see.


    I staggered back from that wall, confused and angry. Slamming into whatever was there had hurt, but the pain was lost in the turbulence of the other emotions I felt. The pain couldn¡¯t overcome the anger, the hunger, the confusion over what had stopped me in my tracks.


    That man just stood there laughing at my futile effort to reach him. He drew all my focus, nothing in the rest of the room was as important as getting to him. Not even the stronger smell of blood would have an effect on me. I had found my prey and I was going to bring him down.


    ¡°Ah, so predictable, so consumed and driven by your basic needs to understand what is happening around you. I must commend you though, I haven¡¯t this much fun shattering someone¡¯s mind in ages,¡± he said gleefully. ¡°I can¡¯t wait to see what we can accomplish together once I am done.¡±


    The words made no sense to me. Talk was meaningless while I was engulfed in my hunger. I began to walk around the man, testing to see if I could find a hole or gap in that wall. There had to be one, there had to be a way to get to him and devour him. Whoever he was, he just kept turning to watch at me. His joy at seeing me fail again and again drove my anger to even higher levels. This man would die by my hand. I would rip out his throat. I HAD to rip out his throat. I had to make his taunting of me stop.


    The wall I couldn¡¯t see was still between us, and that man turned in place as I circled him. His taunting, his chuckling. This man needed to pay for what he had done to me. I kept moving looking for a weakness.


    I grabbed a random object, a knife he used on one of his victims and hurled it at him. The knife rebounded from the wall and clattered to the floor. All it did was draw another chuckle out of him. Then I found a spike in my hand, one that he had used to nail someone to a table. It was heavy and cold in my hand. The spike felt unnerving in my touch, as if my hand tried to recoil for that slug of metal. I threw it at the man with all the strength I could muster.


    The smile on his face turned to astonishment just before the spike impacted. I had picked up a second spike before the first hit. To my surprise his wall didn¡¯t stop the spike. He turned as the spike caught his shoulder with a meaty thunk. There wasn¡¯t enough force behind it to hurt him, but he was off guard, and I lunged.


    There was no wall to stop me this time and slammed into him with the force of a tidal wave. I drove him back a few feet before he slammed into the floor. Before he could react, I was driving the spike I held into his chest. Once, twice, three times. He screamed in agony as the blood flew. I took advantage of his open mouth and drove me spike deep into his mouth and out the back of his neck. The tip of the spike found the floor and I drove my weight onto the end of the spike.


    The man twitched on the floor, pinned there by the spike driven through his mouth. His eyes bulged as he looked at me in horror. The man¡¯s body spasmed as drove the spike I had thrown at him into one of his wrists. The twitching and spams were growing weaker, but I was not done yet.


    Kneeling beside him I raised my arm and grunted with effort as I brought it down into his chest. Rib bone shattered as I thrust my hand through them. When I had wrapped my fingers around my target I stood up, ripping the still beating heart out of his chest. I held it over my head and glared viciously down at my prey.


    As the heart beat its last beat in my hand, I knew that Marchenko was finally dead.

 8. What Am I

    After the heart went still in my hand, it crumbled to dust in my hand. Marchenko¡¯s corpse followed suit. There was no wind in the room, so the dust stayed where it fell. I turned over dumping the dust to the ground then slapped my hand against my leg a couple of times to get rid of any remaining dust. My head buzzed relentlessly like I had an itch all over just under my scalp. My held no moisture so my lips and tongue were shrunken and cracked.


    I lifted my head from the dust pile and look around. All of the others, the five angels and the five demons were there. All of them still bore the injuries that had been inflicted on them by Marchenko. They were covered in blood, some dry and some fresh, all had bruising from black to purple to yellow covering their bodies. The skin on their faces was sunken, their eyes hollow. Gone was the haughty beauty of the angels and the malicious perfection of the demons. What could do that to them? How long had we endured that torment?


    Then I saw the demon marks, that tattoo on their arms. Was this all part of some long nightmare that somebody was getting their kicks out of? I groaned as I thought about the chances of Marchenko appearing again to continue his fun with us. rage came back quicker than I ever felt it bubble over before. I stewed as I thought about Marchenko and what I had been through. What those poor women had endured didn¡¯t enter my mind.


    ¡°Are we done, or is there more coming? Huh Marchenko?¡± I yelled into the room around. The women flinched, or at least the ones I could see as my head swiveled did. I was met with nothing but the pained breathing of everybody in the room including myself. One of the others moved, it was nothing more than a shift of a foot. My head snapped around, and I snarled in the direction of the sound. My arms were out to the sides. I was ready to pounce.


    The demon that had shifted crumpled under my glare. Her arms came up to protect her face as she fell to the floor and curled into the fetal position. That made me stop and straighten up. The anger that had me seeing me red vanished as quickly as it came on. Her reaction confused me, they had never shown they were afraid of me. None of them had that reaction before. My head turned again slightly, and all the other women took a step back. They took defensive postures. There was no way this was a good sign. What had changed?


    I took a step back away from them. The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt them. Hell, I needed their help.


    ¡°I¡¯m not going to hurt any of you,¡± I kept my voice as neutral as possible. ¡°What did he do to you?¡±


    I could only imagine given what I could remember of my torture, but my words prompted no reactions from any of them.


    ¡°Not him. You did this to us. You did!¡± It was one of the demons and she was looking at me, there was tremor of fear in her body, but her voice was all hate and anger. It was little more than a raspy whisper; it surprised me that she was able to get that much force into her voice. It wasn¡¯t loud, but it struck me like a bolt of lightning.


    ¡°Me?¡± I was in disbelief. ¡°How could I have done this to you?¡±


    The same demon thrust her arm out to me. The arm with my mark.


    ¡°I hurt you through that?¡± I asked aloud. Inwardly I was burning with¡­curiosity? How could I have done that? Was it something I did subconsciously again?


    ¡°You drew on us to heal and sustain yourself,¡± she responded.


    ¡°Wait? What?¡± I was flabbergasted. I had done something similar to the angel in the city shortly after I first met Angel. Doing it wasn¡¯t the issue. My problem was that it happened while I was unaware. I wasn¡¯t in control. If it happened all the time, everyone would be dying around me. That didn¡¯t seem to bother me as much as I thought it should have, but I still wanted to control it. There was something enjoyable about being able to drain the energy from somebody all at once. Even if I knew it was wrong.


    ¡°Am I doing it to you now?¡± I asked. Inside I was wondering if I even cared if I was doing it. Was this Marchenko¡¯s parting gift to me, did he rip the last shreds of my empathy out of me?


    ¡°No, not anymore.¡± That was from Angel. Was I relieved that it had stopped or angry that I had stopped doing it? That was baffling. This shouldn¡¯t be something that unclear to me. Was this the way I had always felt towards other people? No, that wasn¡¯t quite what I wanted to ask. Had I always been like that to women?


    That was why I had marked them. I marked them because inside me, somewhere I knew what I could while they wore my mark. One question was answered. Why these women and why an equal number from both angels and demons though? I didn¡¯t think there was a connection between us when we were living. Except for Angel. I was convinced I knew her from before. Now I needed figure out how we knew each other.


    ¡°Tell me if I start doing it again.¡± It didn¡¯t come out as a question. She nodded meekly in response. I had my doubts any of them would speak up if it happened. All ten of them were far more defensive than they had been before. Something else had happened to them during that last round of captivity. Something I was certain I had done.


    Angel had hinted that as demons we were the worst part of what we had been in life, except amplified. That made their reaction make sense. All the clues I had garnered about who I had been before made me think I hadn¡¯t treated women well. Was I blocking out memories of me doing things to these women? Did I do things to Angel and the others with Marchenko¡¯s urging? Was I a willing participant in his twisted games?


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    ¡°Is that all I did to you?¡± In some respects, I didn¡¯t want to know if I did anything else to them, but I also wasn¡¯t sure if I even cared if I did more to them. Yet, I still needed them around. They had more awareness than I did about what I had become, and what was happening. I needed to try and be nice to them, at least until they had no more answers for me.


    ¡°Anything you wanted to,¡± one of the angels spit the words out. ¡°If you didn¡¯t do it, you laughed as Marchenko did it. You even gave him some ideas.¡±


    That last sentence hurt, it hurt more than I thought it should. After all, why I should I care what they endured? Then again, why shouldn¡¯t I care. I marked them, doesn¡¯t that make me somewhat responsible for their well being? This was a complication I didn¡¯t want to deal with, but I had no choice to accept the way things had played out.


    ¡°Ah damn it,¡± I cursed aloud. It was more about the situation rather than any regret over what I had done. ¡°How do we get out of this place?¡±


    Angel lifted her arm and pointed off to one side. In the shadows of that corner, I could see a door. There was something off about the door. I couldn¡¯t tell what was off from here though. I wondered if it was something to do with Marchenko being a demon, or even something to do with me being a demon.


    I strode towards the door, becoming more aware of the condition of the women. The nature and severity of their injuries was far more apparent as I passed them. The biggest part of me was angry with myself that I had been part of the cause of those injuries. That I had even allowed it to happen to them. Was I a demon because I was a monster before, or was I monster because I was a demon. The whole chicken and egg conundrum.


    I grimaced as I passed the last of the women, I had caused their wounds, I needed to do something about those wounds. I began to reach for energy from around me but was careful to not draw anymore from the angels or demons. As I drew more of the energy into me my senses became more sensitive. I became more attuned to everything. The lack of air movement in the room, the dust covering the floor and furniture. I became more aware of the scents of the room¡ªthe tang of blood, the stink of bits of flesh rotting. I felt the presence of the angels and demons, felt where they were in the room in relation to me.


    When I felt myself full to bursting by the energy I was pulling in, I split the energy between the women. I poured it into them. I felt their response to the that energy as it coursed through them and heal their wounds. I felt the rest of my wounds being washed away in that flood of power. I still didn¡¯t understand what that power was or where it came from. Could I use that power because I was a demon now? More questions I didn¡¯t have the answers for. There was way too many of those on my mind still.


    I walked towards the door and thrust my hand at it. The door exploded outwards in a cloud of wood splinters. Something else I couldn¡¯t do when I thought about it. I was taken aback when I realized that we weren¡¯t in a building. It was something that I had expected without thinking of any other alternatives. The door opened onto a small space that was under a rock outcropping. It was night out there, and dark enough that I knew we weren¡¯t anywhere near a city of any size.


    ¡°Well¡­¡± I started to say but didn¡¯t have the words to finish. I just didn¡¯t know what to say. It just raised more questions. I was really starting to hate questions. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. After a couple of moments staring through the door waiting for something bad to happen, I took a cautious step through.


    Barren hills with no end in sight stretched in all directions. The outcropping that the door was sheltered by was near the top of one flat topped hill. The sky was clear, no clouds anywhere to be seen. It was a blend of pinks and oranges in color. It looked as if I was the only living thing on earth at that moment. A few quick steps took me to the top of the hill. I heard the crunch of footsteps coming out of the door behind me and I took some comfort in the fact that there was a handful of other people with me.


    As much as I was glad that I wasn¡¯t the only one here, I didn¡¯t want them around either. I needed to clear my head and try to get a handle on the situation. I wanted to be alone to work through my thoughts, but I needed the angels and demons nearby to be able to answer questions. If not all of them, at least one or two. It occurred to me that I was annoyed by the fact that I needed them around for me to hurl questions at. My previous self must have been a keep to himself and not rely on anyone else kind of person. Not knowing my past or my present selves bothered me.


    I could feel the frustration building. Every time I gained a bit of forward momentum and got a little bit closer to reaching some form of understanding about what I was there was something there to knock me backwards. In the grand scheme of things, I knew so very little. I knew I could do things that I couldn¡¯t before I had died. Things that defied belief, those same things that might have been called ¡¯magic¡¯ by some.


    ¡°I need one of you from each group to remain with me to answer questions I have. Otherwise, you are free to leave if you are able.¡± The words came out harsher than I intended. More of an order than a request. I could hear whispering as they worked out who would be the lucky ones that got to stay with me. The realization that none of them may want to stay near me had occurred to me, but it was something that didn¡¯t matter to me. If I knew which of the angels or demons had any of the answers I needed those would be the ones staying. For now, I gave them the freedom to choose the ones who remained.


    Seconds later the buzzing in my head dissipated. Not completely but there was a change. It seemed to me that the closer I got to anyone of the demons or angels the ¡®louder¡¯ their presence felt in my mind. I guessed that meant that the noise that they gave off that I was picking up on allowed me to find them no matter where it they were like I had put some sort of tracker on them. The tracker being the tattoo on their arms.


    ¡°I have too many questions, and I hope you have answers for me. Can either of you two tell me what has happened to me? What have I become?¡± I still hadn¡¯t turned around to see which of the were the ¡®lucky¡¯ ones to stay with me. I was met with a lasting silence that I took to mean that neither of them knew. I lowered my chin to my chest and pondered what this meant.


    ¡°You are part angel and part demon is my best guess,¡± one of the two behind me said. ¡°You seem to be able to do things that only angels or demons can do. I don¡¯t know how it happened though.¡±


    ¡°So, you¡¯re saying I am a freak?¡± I turned around. Angel was standing their looking downcast. It was the other woman that spoke. An angel of great beauty with long brown hair that flowed over her shoulders and hung nearly to her waist.


    ¡°Yes,¡± her voice held a bit of fear. She was likely thinking I was about to punish her for speaking the truth. Well, the truth as she understood it. That was far from what was on my mind.


    ¡°What name would you prefer I call you by?¡± She was caught off guard by the question.


    ¡°I am Vashti,¡± she replied with a slight incline of her head. Angel gave her a quizzical look that appeared and disappeared so fast I wasn¡¯t sure if it happened.


    ¡°Alright, Vashti it is. The first thing we need to figure out is just what kind of freak am I?¡±

 9. Hybrid

    I waited for either of them to respond. The silence as I waited to hear what their answers would be seemed to stretch on for hours. I drummed the fingers of one hand on my other arm and shifted my weight from foot to foot. I was getting impatient wondering why it was taking one of them so long to answer. When the silence was broken it was Angel that spoke.


    ¡°Close your eyes, reach out with your mind. What do you see?¡± she said. It wasn¡¯t quite and order, but it felt like one. I was beginning to boil over, then remembered that they were supposed to be the ones to answer my questions. Drowning out my anger for the moment, I closed my eyes. After a couple of deep breaths, I just tried to be aware of what was around me. The earth, the terrain around me, the people around me. This ¡®reach out with your mind¡¯ bit was on the vague side of description.


    The response in my head was impressive. It didn¡¯t take long. I had a vague sense of everything around me and its position relative to me. I could feel the two women, but there was no other living thing within easily a thousand yards of me.


    The vision though, with my eyes closed, I could still see everything I normally could. That and so much more. Beyond the more vivid coloration of everything, I could see wisps of¡­fog? There was nothing else I could have called it. Some of that fog was a bright white, some of that fog was a deep jet black.


    ¡°I see the strangest fog. They are like hazy ribbons of black and white fog drifting around,¡± I doubt I was able to keep my bewilderment out of my eyes.


    ¡°Turn around slowly. If you go too fast, you¡¯ll get dizzy. Now what do you see? Angel spoke once more.


    That turn took a long time to make. That first step I took though was a big one. It didn¡¯t take me long to find out why I was told to go slow. The whole world started to spin and tilt, and I felt like I was going to vomit all over myself. I thrust my arms out to my side to help steady myself. No idea if it did anything because it still took a while for the world to stop moving. The rest of the turn was completed much slower than I started out. The dizziness became less violent with each tiny step.


    Facing the two women I could see them clearly. Both looked apprehensive as they watched me. Surrounding each of them an aura of light. Angel¡¯s aura was jet black, Vashti¡¯s was as bright a white as the fog.


    ¡°I see your auras,¡± again that was the only word that fit.


    Angel nodded at Vashti and they both started to draw on that fog. I was dumbfounded to see that it was Vashti drawing the black fog into herself, while Angel pulled the white fog to herself. My jaw must have dropped open because I saw the hint of a smile on their faces.


    ¡°There is no common name for that mist among the demons or angels. Neither do we know what it is, but it is connected to the cosmos somehow. We don¡¯t need to be instructed on how to use it, its instinctive. Something to do with how we are born or created¡ªwhichever you prefer,¡± Vashti said. The speech wasn¡¯t quite a lecture, but it still irked me.


    ¡°Now, look at yourself then draw on the power. Keep focused on what you are seeing too,¡± Angel said.


    I brought my hand up in front of my face, damned fell over from shock. There was an aura around me as well. Mine was a grey, as if white and black had mixed together perfectly. Then I drew on the power around me. I kept looking at my hand as I pulled both the black and white fog into me. I was a dazzling, hypnotic mix of mist coming at me. The closer it got to me the faster it seemed to go. I could feel my well inside filling up, the grey around my hand got brighter.


    ¡°This is what you mean by hybrid?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Yes,¡± said Vashti. ¡°Nothing like you has ever been encountered by an angel.¡±


    ¡°We demons also think you are a freak,¡± Angel said with an impish smile. I wanted to wipe that smile off her face. I wanted to teach her a lesson. The angrier I got with her, the more my inner vision faded. To be fair, I didn¡¯t think of opening my eyes, but I did pull back that anger again. Again, these two women were bloody annoying when they wanted to be. I couldn¡¯t wait to tell them to get away from me and go somewhere else. Part of me knew, that there would always be something of them in my head. Something of all ten of them.


    ¡°When I was condemned to die, this was not what I thought was going to happen to me.¡± It was an overstatement.


    ¡°Demons can¡¯t draw on the black energy., or even see it. We need to draw on the white. It has something to do with the transformation from human to dead to dead. There is no explanation that we have found,¡± Angel explained.


    ¡°Angels have to draw on the black energy. We can¡¯t see the white. Again, its not known why this is,¡± Vashti added.


    In a strange way that made sense to me. Demons are angry, pain-inflicting jerks. Angels are the opposite. They already have the black or white energy they need. To do things with the power they need the opposite of their nature. I nodded my understanding of that line of reasoning. There didn¡¯t need to be a ¡®why¡¯ to questions about it. In this case the answer was ¡®it just is this way¡¯.


    ¡°You are able to draw on both because you are a hybrid, you somehow have both the making of an angel and a demon in you,¡± Vashti said.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know of anyone that can hold that much power in them with killing themselves,¡± Angel quickly added. I looked at myself and the power was still rushing towards me. My well was still filling up and I felt like I had a longways to go before I was full. I stopped drawing and just let go of all the energy I had gathered. It flew out of me in a whirlwind. Both of the women flinched back from that outwards burst of energy.


    ¡°Sorry,¡± I muttered. Wait, what? Why was I apologizing to them? I jerked my thoughts back to the present.


    ¡°I think that is why you were able to mark all of us. You can use both sides of the energy. Your energy is a perfect mix of that energy, both halves, so you can affect either group with it.¡± Angel said. Again, it made sense to me.


    I opened my eyes and was disoriented with double vision. I could see with both my eyes and my inner eye at the same time. The two were not quite aligned correctly. They were off just enough from each other to create a blurriness where they merged. After a couple of minutes, the two visions aligned. It was still disorientating but I guessed that would settle down as I got used to it.


    ¡°So, I am a fulcrum between two natures. I am a balance. If no angel or demon has ever seen a balance before, am I THE balance?¡± It seemed like a weird question, but it made sense. The unpredictability of my thoughts fell into place. I had thoughts that would align with each of those natures. That left me wondering if I needed to learn to balance my thoughts. Angel and demon could only look at each other and shrug their shoulders. Maybe it was a question they hadn¡¯t considered yet.


    ¡°Okay, so now that leads me to the ¡®why¡¯,¡± I asked. This time there was a reason why I became this mix. Something changed for it to have happened.


    ¡°What do you remember?¡± Vashti asked.


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    ¡°Well, I remember dying. Then I was in a void that seemed endless. There were two voices talking to me about something, then I¡¯m not sure what happened then I found myself in a strange city. Apparently, I fed on some people. Angel and I had a talk, then Marchenko showed up,¡± I summed up my experience as this balance.


    ¡°The voices, do you remember anything about them?¡± Vashti asked, and it didn¡¯t feel like she was being condescending about it. She legitimately wanted to know.


    ¡°They weren¡¯t human, they were more¡­¡± my voice trailed off as I searched for the word. ¡°Immense. Overpowering, everywhere all at once. One felt worse than Marchenko, the other one felt so inviting. I don¡¯t remember what they said.¡±


    Words failed me again. Then a thought occurred to me.


    ¡°Can either of you sense me in your head?¡± I had a train of thought, and it was pulling me along. Both nodded, they wondered about my dumb question. It was written all over their faces, but I let it go.


    ¡°From the moment I arrived in the city, I could feel a presence like that. I have no clue what it points to, but it feels different than an angel or demon. I don¡¯t feel it right now though,¡± My wheels were turning trying to find the end of this thread, but I wasn¡¯t sure I could. I was missing some pieces of the thread still.


    ¡°Just one presence?¡± this was from Angel. I nodded in response, as I tried to chase down the thought that was at the edge of my thinking.


    ¡°Well then, it doesn¡¯t belong to one of the presences. If you are a hybrid, maybe what ever you are feeling is a hybrid too,¡± Angel said. That jogged my memory.


    ¡°Something was stolen. I get the impression I am to find it for some reason,¡± I blurted out as soon as I thought of it. I was like an excited kid in a candy store for a moment. Both of them looked at me in surprise. Not so much as what I had said as how I had said it. Up until this point the only emotion, I had shown anybody since I died was anger. Now I was excited about something. It was a different feeling for me, and there was something nice about it.


    ¡°Alright, that brings up two more questions. First, what was stolen? Second, who stole it?¡± Angel said. She seemed to be genuinely curious about all this now. The thoughtful look on her face teased at my memory. Angel stood there; arms crossed over her chest as she thought over everything that had been said. There was something familiar about her posture, about her face.


    I stepped into her view. This needed to be brought into the open. Angel and I had met, we had known each other while I was a living human. The memories of our interactions stayed lost to me even as I looked at her.


    ¡°You knew me before I died, didn¡¯t you?¡± I asked. There was no accusation in my tone. I wanted to know, more like I needed to know what that relationship was. There was a brief flicker of fear and guilt on her face that was gone as fast as it showed up. ¡°I¡¯d rather you tell me willingly; I think it might be connected to what is happening.¡±


    Angel knew I could compel her to tell. She was the one that told me I could do that. Vashti was caught completely off guard as she looked between the two of us. The demon¡¯s eyes dropped to the ground as I waited for her response. Was that guilt or regret on her face? Was she only feeling that way because I had found her out, or did she feel remorse not telling me sooner.


    ¡°Yes,¡± the answer didn¡¯t surprise me, but it still rocked me. This was another piece of the puzzle that was my existence now. ¡°I was sent to tempt you and cause your downfall. You knew me as Yvonne when you were alive.¡±


    Now that sent shockwaves through my body. Vague memories of spending time with a red-haired beauty named Yvonne. A lot of time. I could remember doing things for her, little things at first. The first couple of tasks were simple and innocent looking. Now, though, I could see the path that led to me being sentenced to die for crimes I committed. The path that led me to being a demon.


    ¡°Who sent you? Was it Marchenko?¡± I demanded. There was only a little bit of heat in my words. Surprisingly I wasn¡¯t all that angry with her. Either as the Yvonne I could barely remember or the Angel I barely knew. No, I wasn¡¯t angry, but I was unnerved. With what she had said already somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to get me to this point. Was me putting my mark on her part of the plan? This had to have been in the works for a long time. I spent a decade on death row, after the trial and more before that before I was arrested.


    ¡°No. Marchenko knew nothing about it. Meeting him when we did was bad luck. I was compelled to do it, but I am not sure who did the compelling,¡± Angel said, she was still avoiding my gaze. That didn¡¯t tell me much, although I did get the sense that she wasn¡¯t lying about it.


    ¡°I was Bangkok, hiding out from Marchenko when I had a vision. That¡¯s the only word that fits. It was like looking at images that you only see for a second or so. I didn¡¯t remember anything afterwards, but I had a need to go search for somebody. I knew roughly where to find you, but I didn¡¯t know until I saw you who you were. Once I saw you, the compulsion made me tempt you.¡±


    ¡°So, someone chose you to seek him out and make him fall?¡± Vashti summed it up nicely. Angel nodded in response.


    ¡°If you were the one that made me into a demon, why didn¡¯t you find me in the in-between and complete the job?¡± I asked the next logical question that came to my mind.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t know you had actually died. I wasn¡¯t able to track you once you were condemned.¡± Now she was looking at me. ¡°My compulsion was dissolved when you were condemned. Normally, there is a connection between a demon or angel and the person that they have chosen. That is how they know that their target has died and that they can go collect the soul. That connection wasn¡¯t there between us. Meeting you in the trees back in the city was just luck like I told you before.¡±


    Again, I got the feeling she wasn¡¯t lying about this. That left still more unanswered questions that we needed to find the answers for. This thread that I was part of was getting more tangled by the minute.


    ¡°Do you think the owners of the voices that you heard in the in-between were the ones that laid the compulsion on her?¡± Vashti asked. She had given voice to the question I had been thinking off.


    ¡°That makes sense. I can¡¯t prove it, but I think they were waiting for me to appear there. That tells me that they were the ones to have created me as a hybrid. Was it some sort of super demon and a super angel working together?¡± I asked dubiously. Angels and demons don¡¯t work together. I looked from Vashti to Angel and back again. Angels and demons don¡¯t work together under normal circumstances. This situation was anything but normal.


    ¡°I know of nothing like that in the lore that angels. I¡¯d have to do some research, maybe there is some hints in the lore that I haven¡¯t found,¡± Vashti said. She looked like she wanted to leave and start that research right this moment.


    Getting the research done was okay with me, but I didn¡¯t trust myself to be alone with Angel. There was an added tension there now, and I didn¡¯t want to take it out on her. She said she was compelled, and I believed her. She didn¡¯t have a choice in what happened. I did though. I had agreed to commit the crimes she asked me to. That much I knew, so if there was fault to be had, my current situation was all on me. There was no regret, no remorse. The acts had been done and I had carried on as if nothing had happened.


    ¡°Do you know of anything like that among the demons?¡± I asked. For some reason I didn¡¯t think that was something that demons would share willingly but I had to ask the question.


    ¡°I haven¡¯t heard of anything like a demon overlord.¡± Her response was somewhat expected. ¡°I know a couple of people I can ask though.¡±


    Angel had a thoughtful look on her face. I still didn¡¯t know how much demons cooperated with other demons. Any bit of knowledge was worth checking into.


    ¡°Alright. You two go see what information you can find out. Will it be hard for you to find me if you learn something?¡± The first part of that came out as an order, and I wasn¡¯t sure if I meant it that way or not.


    ¡°Not at all,¡± Angel smiled. It was a devilish smile I had seen quite often.


    Both Angel and Vashti disappeared. The sense of them faded in my head, but a quick test told me I could pick them out from the background noise of the all the others. Surprisingly, it was quite easy for me to be able to focus on one specific angel or demon. There was no emotion transferred in whatever bond that was between me and all of them. That was something I was grateful for; my own emotions were giving me enough trouble currently.


    I cursed out loud when I realized that I had sent away my sources of knowledge on my abilities before learning how or if I could go to another location. Maybe it was time for me to do some testing on my own. This way I would be the only one here if something went way off the rails. It wasn¡¯t so much as not wanting others to get hurt, it was more about not wanting others to see my mistakes and failures.


    So, I chose the first place that came to mind, and focused on it. I focused on being in that place I wanted to be. There was a pulse of energy. A weird numbness all over me. Pins and needles like my whole body had gone to sleep. I could see the place I had selected start to materialize around me and the barren hills I had been in started to fade away. I jerked backwards and bounced a couple of times. There was no description for what I was bouncing between, I was a yo-yo on a string.


    I rolled across the ground. I vomited as I got to all fours. This yo-yo was all sorts of messed up. Then the realization hit me. Something or someone was keeping me from getting to where I wanted to go. Couldn¡¯t one thing be easy in this afterlife of mine?

 10. Trapped

    At least my luck was holding, just when I thought it couldn¡¯t get any worse, things got worse. Something about the hills had changed. Some hills had gained significant height and could be considered mountains. Some hills had been flattened out. The colors of the rocks were made up of became more varied. There were blacks, greens, blues, yellow, whites and greys. It was a dazzling array of colors blanketing the landscape. It didn¡¯t seem to be the same place as I had been when talking to Angel and Vashti.


    I could still feel them inside my head. All ten of them were there, and that other thing that I had felt after I had arrived in the city. I couldn¡¯t see anyone near me, so I reached out with my senses. It didn¡¯t take long. There was someone approaching. Someone with an aura that was one of the darkest I had seen yet. An aura so black it made Marchenko look like a choir boy.


    A man appeared. He wore a blue business suit, with a white shirt and a tie the color of blood. His eyes were a dark crimson flashing with lightning. He walked towards me with hands clasped behind his back.


    ¡°I see your plan worked, my friend.¡± I had expected some sort of gloating or challenge from this guy, but not this greeting. There was something about the way he said ¡®friend¡¯ as well that set me on edge. He had known me before yet didn¡¯t consider me a friend. Had we been enemies? The meaning of the words he spoke was baffling to me. I had no idea what he was talking about and was now on the defensive in this conversation.


    ¡°You think?¡± I retorted. It partly came from being surprised by his words as much as it did from me being fed up with all the unknowns involving my present state.


    ¡°I admit, when you first came to me with your plan, I was sure you were baiting a trap for me. To be frank, I still am because there wasn¡¯t much hope you would make it this far. Now look at you,¡± he said with a false smile. ¡°Snagging a handful of angels to have fun with later was just genius. Was that something you had planned from the start?¡±


    ¡°Yes, look at me. I made it this far, and one step closer,¡± I responded with what seemed to fit with what he was expecting. This made the man laugh. It was a deep belly laugh.


    ¡°You¡¯re not even sure what you are one step closer to are you?¡± he smiled that fake smile again. ¡°You don¡¯t even know who you are¡ªor were. The amount of planning and effort you put into getting this far, all of it lost on you now. See, I knew you lied to me when you laid out your plan the first time. Oh, the plan was pure genius, I¡¯ll give you that. It would be far too risky for me to attempt a stunt like you have done. I don¡¯t know of any other demon that could have pulled it off. In my head though, I knew there was no way you, the greatest of all the demon lords were going to share any of that power with me.¡±


    I had been a demon lord? Could that be why some of the things I had done happened instinctively? My subconscious remembered even if I couldn¡¯t. That was implying this guy was telling me the truth and not feeding me a line crap. I didn¡¯t pick up on any little telltale signs that he had lie, that didn¡¯t mean they didn¡¯t happen just that I wasn¡¯t aware of them.


    ¡°This is a better result than I could have hoped for though,¡± the man laughed again. ¡°Your plan worked so well you outplayed yourself. I know where you hid it, so for me to come out of this game ahead all I have to do is move it somewhere else. The vultures are already circling what you abandoned, which means lots of opportunities for me.¡±


    His smile spread across his face. There was nothing real about that smile. We stood there, staring at each other, sizing each other up a dozen paces apart. I wasn¡¯t prepared for another fight this soon, not when I was at such a disadvantage. This guy oozed more power than Marchenko possessed, and I didn¡¯t come out of those fights very far ahead of the loser.


    ¡°What makes you think my plan failed?¡± I wanted to try and get as much information out of this guy as I could before we started throwing punches at each other.


    He waved one finger at me in admonishment. ¡°You already know the answer to that.¡±


    I thought over what he had said. I had apparently been a powerful demon, came up with a plan to get more power that involved me somehow temporarily losing my memories and power. He had also said that I had come to him with my plan for his assistance, that I agreed to share some of the power I gained with him. This guy knew who I was and knew some details of that plan. There was something I had hidden which was the key to all of that power and he knew where it was. None of this jogged anything in my head. Apparently, he was right. Whatever I had done didn¡¯t seem to have worked out the way I had thought it would. That was again, if I had been told the unvarnished truth.


    Then the thought occurred to me, that he didn¡¯t know exactly what I remembered from before. Having come talk to me like this was a way for him to test me, to test what I knew. He didn¡¯t know how much of my power I had command of at my fingertips at the moment. I wasn¡¯t as strong as I had been before, at least according to him. He wasn¡¯t sure if I was still the stronger of the two of us. I needed to find a way to turn the table against this guy.


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    I suspected that that the first feeling of something being in my head when I arrived in the city was whatever the key to the power was. That meant I knew where it was. Sort of. More correctly, I knew the direction of where it was hidden, and I knew that it was far away from my present location¡ªwherever that was. He didn¡¯t know that fact.


    Time to up the ante in this game a bit. I turned away from him and strode a half dozen paces away. With my back turned to him, I stared out at the landscape spread out in front of me. I stared without seeing. Nothing out there concerned me at the moment. There was no way I knew that, but this demon didn¡¯t need to know that. Turning your back on a potential enemy was a sign of extreme stupidity or extreme confidence. The act told that enemy that you had taken measure of them and weren¡¯t afraid of them. If the enemy held all the right cards, you were a goner, but this guy was missing some cards.


    Time ticked away as I stood motionless. I waited for the other demon to cry chicken first. As far as I knew, there was no need for me to hurry to find the key. The only way time would be of the essence in getting to it would be if there were others who had knowledge of the key and its location. Nothing about what had been said between us here in the hills had led me to believe that to be true. Wondering why he had come to see me in the first place nagged at me. Had he come to see what state I was in, what memories or power I had remembered, or had he just come to laugh at me?


    There was a feeling of power being used. I whirled to face the other demon to find that he had vanished. I reached out to feel for him. There was nothing detected nearby, so I pushed my senses out further and further. I don¡¯t know how far I had reached before finding something. It was an object, not another demon, and it didn¡¯t feel close to me.


    I studied the object with my senses. I could only tell that it was a nexus of power. It reacted to the power of my senses like I had somehow turned on its power. I focused more intently on the object. To get to where it was, I needed to know where to find it. As I thought about the object¡¯s location and trying to find it there was a transfer of power. I didn¡¯t push power into it. The power move. One second, I held the power in my mind. The next, I could see that power inside the object. That realization jolted me somewhat, and I returned to myself. Off in the distance, I could see a rhythmic pulsing light. I had put a pointer on the object I had sensed. I was seeing that pointer in the form of that flashing light.


    With a shrug I started jogging towards the light. It wasn¡¯t a bounding jog, but each pace I took was far longer than I had believed possibly. It felt natural to be jogging like this; I felt no stress on my body in the activity. I realized I was crossing the ground at a dizzying speed. The ground flashed by me as I ran, no footfall was out of place as I charged on. It took me a half hour to get to the source of the power I had felt earlier. The trip must have been over forty miles as I looked back over the ground I had covered. The feat of endurance only held my attention for a moment.


    The object I had detected was a stone, an ordinary looking chunk of limestone that stood around eight feet high. The rock was old and had stood here for a long time. Mosses and lichens covered much of its shape. There were no carvings, or markings on it that I could find. It didn¡¯t appear to have a recognizable shape to it. Based on the ground around the stone I suspected that more of it might be hidden below the ground.


    It seemed to be a column of limestone that had stood in this location for a long time but was reactive to power used in its vicinity. As soon as I started to pull in the energy I could see and feel around me the stone began to hum. It wasn¡¯t anything close to the sound a human humming made though I could both hear it and feel it throughout my body. The more energy I pulled into myself the more intense the humming of the stone became. I began to feel my body vibrating as the intensity of the humming grew. The sensation quickly grew to the point that the sound began to hurt my ears, nausea overcame me. As I started to tumble forward, I reached out and grabbed the stone without thinking in an attempt to keep my balance. I released the pent-up energy at the same, that energy poured down my arm and through my arm into the stone.


    Everything around me jumped or it seemed like it. My ears popped. My eyes started to roll back up into my head. My stomach jumped into my throat as the ground came out from under me. I fell to all fours. Water lapped at my legs and my forearms. I could feel the muck underneath my hands and between my fingers as I fell. The stench of rotting vegetation and stagnant water assaulted my nose. The droning of insects and frogs mixed with the calls of birds.


    I stood up and tried to wipe my hands clean on my pants as I looked around. This swamp looked familiar. All I saw were dead trees, stripped of bark and bleached by the sun, and cattails. Something about the about the place told me I had been here before; it was something I knew but had nothing to go on to prove that to myself.


    Walking was a test of endurance and balance. Each step I had to pull one foot free from the much as the other foot sank deeper from supporting all my weight. Trying to use a tree for support didn¡¯t seem like the best idea. The thing would likely break, and I¡¯d end up face first in the water or sitting in the thigh deep stuff.


    A yell of frustration escaped from my mouth. My hands were balled into tight fists as I vented to the swamp around me. Silence was my answer. Even the insects seemed to have stopped. The creepy silence seemed to stretch on forever then the noise came crashing back in. The world around me had decided I was nothing to be concerned with.