From their position in the woods, they could clearly see the thing no human eyes could have seen from there. A figure, cast in shadow by the moon and stars, stalked across the grounds. Stiff, determined, purposeful. The very scent of the moving body was simply intoxicating. A moving shadow. A shadow they recognised. What the figure was out for was obvious… because they had planned it that way. The figure was out for revenge.
If the figure was looking for a fight, Mika and Robyn were about to give it one.
In his office, Professor Wright glared at the red and black pens on his desk, then at the stack of papers and essays his first year group had just handed in. He really wasn’t looking forward to marking them and wondered why his students had not been considerate enough to abandon their studies when they had abandoned their sanity. There were bound to be a couple of outstanding assignments in the pile, countered by the promise of two or three that were worth less than the paper they were written, or printed, on. Sighing, he rested his chin on his fist as he took up his pen and drummed it on his desk as he stared at the first in his pile. It was as he had suspected – depressingly average. It had none of the controversial theories that had come about during discussion and was almost heart-breaking in its’ dullness. No doubt the student had thought it best to play it safe and guarantee himself a pass by discussing established theories, not daring to include the theories and hypotheses he had thought up alone. However, there was no reason why he should not give the student a failing grade for having the brass to submit this below-bog-standard essay, rather than taking a risk on his grade and handing in the assignment that showed his full potential. He sighed again,, cleared his throat and started to read the drivel before him.
A knock came at the door and he glanced up. Before he could say ‘come in’, the door flew off its’ hinges, splinters of wood and tiny pieces of the broken lock flew around and clanged to the floor. “Hey, Brainiac,” said the redheaded girl, who had just kicked the door open.
“Hi, Professor,” came the softer voice of her companion – a voice that sounded so familiar, and came from a face he recognised. She seemed different, though. “Guess who?”
“Carly? I thought you were sick.”
“I’m over that.” She glanced down and the tattered and muddy ends of her borrowed clothing, and made a face. “I can see how you might think that.” Scarred and marked from Mika and Robyn, pale and clammy skinned with impending illness, and sore from her mishaps in the sewers, Carly knew she was not looking her best. She did not feel top bad though.
“Do you know why we’re here?” asked Robyn. The professor shook his head and shrank back into his seat. “Do you want to know?”
“I don’t think I do. But I’m sure you’ll tell me anyway.”
Robyn looked at him, rarely suppressing the urge to feed, knowing it was only because of the waves of fear rolling from him. “There’s no need to be scared.”
Carly raised her eyebrows and glanced at him, then back at Robyn. The professor looked pretty calm to her, like he thought he was in control. “How do you know that he’s scared?” She asked the question not for her own benefit, but for that of Andrew.
“Because people smell so much more appetising when they’re scared. Fear is so appealing.” Robyn smiled and glanced from her razor sharp fingernails to the frightened man. A plan was forming in her mind and Carly had a horrible feeling that she knew what was coming. If the professor had not been scared before, he definitely was now. Robyn leaned over the desk and rested her middle finger over his cheekbone. “Relax. I just want to know you. I want to know you from the inside.”
“It’s best not to resist her,” Carly advised him. “It hurts less if you just let it go.”
Robyn dragged her finger across his cheek, slicing skin and drawing blood, noticing that his skin had seemed harder to break than Mika’s had. Perhaps because she was unused to tearing human skin with fingernails, perhaps because she was thinking about causing deliberate pain more than she had in a long time. Carly had not been about causing pain but getting information. The professor was about fun. Bloood sprang from the slash and Robyn collected it up with a quick flick of her hand by his fist. She looked at him, showing him his own blood then licked it from her finger. “You taste funny,” she grumbled.
Andrew saw a little more of his blood squeeze from the cut and roll down his face to drip onto the pages on the desk. “What are you doing?”
Carly moved forward. He saw no malice in the way she carried herself but was scared none the less. “You always bossed me around. When I was studying for my degree, and when I was your info girl, I did what you told me to. But now I’m in charge. We’re in charge. We ask the questions, you give us the answers we want or…” Carly looked meaningfully at Robyn. “She’ll hurt you. Bad. And I won’t stop her.”
“I have blood on my hands,” Robyn shrieked. “Blood of the damned.” Robyn refused to listen to the voices, but knew that she could not stop them channelling through her. There was no point in pretending the pleas of the dying stars were not part of her. “We’re dying and we have your selfish actions to thank for it.”
“Robyn.” Carly shook her gently. “We have work to do here.” They were helping the stars that Robyn claimed to be attuned to. If they could not see that, Carly had to wonder if she wasn’t making it all up or exaggerating it. “I know they’re dying and they need us to help. But we can’t do that if they don’t give us the time.”
“We don’t have time. The final hours of time are upon us.”
Andrew sat up, wiping the cut on his cheek, wincing at the sting, and frowned. He had a spooky feeling he now knew what the two women were here for. And they had it all wrong. This was not the end of time. Well, it was but only for a moment until it started again in the new pure world.
“You’re not the angels.”
Robyn grinned and perched herself on the very corner of the oak desk, swinging her legs and balancing perfectly. “Mm. About that…”
SEVENTEEN
“I know you’re there. I know who you are. I know what you want.”
“Do you, indeed?”
Mika and Robyn stepped out of the shadows of the trees, only torn clothing and fresh blood stains to reveal their inhuman natures, and stared down the girl who had come looking for them. Hunting them. As much as they hated to admit it, this girl – not fearsome to look at – was the only thing either of them knew of that could hold power of them.
The girl turned cold grey eyes on them and faced them fearlessly. “You want me for a fight. You want to hurt me. Well, congratulations, you did a great job of it. You monsters killed the closest thing I had to a friend since I came home, and you’ll pay for that.”
Mika looked his opponent over, finding it hard to believe that this slip of a woman could strike fear into the heart of every demon that still walked the Earth. But, he knew, appearances could be deceptive. For nobody could have guessed that Robyn held even a fraction of the strength and ability that she did just by looking. “We had to let you know of our arrival… and what better way to do it than with a dead body.”
“Especially of some-one you had forged an attachment to. That just makes it so much sweeter.” Robyn cracked her knuckles like she was preparing for a fight but Mika put a restraining hand on her chest. “And now you’re angry. Your thirst for vengeance screams out. But I want something from you. And soon enough, you won’t be avenging his death.”
“You’ll be fighting for your life.”
Annie narrowed her eyes and bit her bottom lip – instincts telling her just to pile in for the fight, her brain telling her to hold back and wait for them to make a move. “Do you just make threats, or do you fight as well? Because if you want this necklace-“
Robyn’s eyes lit up and she murmured in anticipation.
“It’s what she wants, and I’ll get it for her.”
“
If you want it,” Annie said again. ”Don’t expect me to give it up when you kill every friend I make.”
“That was not part of the plan but it might be a fun way to pass the time. Maybe we’ll make you watch as we kill them all… one by one.”
“You won’t get this chain from me while there’s still breath in my body.” Mika decided that they would take that breath away, and was about to say as much when Robyn smiled at him, latching on to his train of thought, and Annie spoke again. “And I’m not ready to die yet. So we can fight, we can make this hurt, but you will not take this away from me.”
Robyn had heard the stories about the necklace holding certain powers, and she had to wonder if these stories were not true. There had to be something special about it if Annie was willing to protect it with her very life. Robyn mainly wanted the necklace because it was pretty and unusual – forged in times before even her birth, an ancient amulet of supposed strength which would be around forever.
“Is it special?” she asked, hoping that she would be caught off guard by the straight-forward question. Her hopes only half came true.
“Robyn, baby,” said Mika. ”Of course it’s special. Otherwise, why would our little Warrior be willing to die for it? You are willing to die for it?”
“Of course I am. I risk my life every night hunting and obliterating your kind. I am given over to the protection of innocents. People or blessed amulets. It matters not for I shall protect them from your sort of darkness.”
Robyn giggled with mirth. There was only one sort of darkness. And not even the Warrior of Night could protect them from what was already inside them. The fact the she still deluded herself that she could prevent them from getting what they wanted amused Robyn. “Do you think you can stop us?”
“Maybe I can’t, but I have to try.”
“You will die trying,” Mika told her, a degree of certainty in his voice. If the necklace would make his Robyn happy, she would have it. If keeping the girl alive in chains so Robyn could find pleasure in the screams she would hear, then he would not deny her that.
“So, they weren’t angels at all but the worst kind of demons?”
“Apocalypse demons,” Robyn repeated, a gleam of mischief playing in her eyes. She liked to scare people. “That’s what you thought to unleash on this poor, poor world.”
Everything clicked now and she backed away. It all fell into place with a unexpected bang. Why he seemed so scared at her arrival. Why he looked so confused. Because he did not know himself the reality of what was really going on. He was still under the illusion that he had summoned good demons to keep peace until this New World came into being. Where there would be no pain or misery, and everyone would live happily ever after.
“We have some things to tell you. So you need to listen. Then, we have some questions that you will answer, or…”
Carly winced and sucked air in through her teeth as she slid the badly fitting top from her shoulder to reveal the angry red mark where a hot poker had been pushed through her shoulder. The pain came flooding back as she touched it but she tried to let it wash over her. “Or, we’ll match,” she finished. Carly dared not show the numerous other burns and healing injuries she had sustained for fear of scaring him into silence. He already looked petrified at just the possible fate in store for him, and Carly was shocked to find that she felt nothing at her own cruelty. She told herself it was not nasty, just stating the facts, and felt a little better at frightening the man. “See, we know what’s happening out there. What’s really happening.” She covered her shoulder up again and folded her arms as she talked, keeping one eye on Robyn, who she thought might express her love of violence again at any moment and half a mind on Mika who she wished she could keep an eye on in case he hurt himself again.
“He’ll be alright,” Robyn said as if knowing what was going through Carly’s mind. Carly did not question it, now just about getting to grips with this unique ability of Robyn’s to read people with unsettling accuracy. “He can’t hurt himself. He told me that you can’t hurt yourself in a dream.”
Carly wondered if Robyn had been a fool to let herself believe that dreams never hurt worse because they were not real, or whether it was just her reliance on Mika to be her provider that had let her believe in him. She pushed the thought to the back of her mind, turning her attention back to the frightened professor.
“It’s actually a shame and I feel sorry for this whole world.” Robyn locked her elbows as she gripped the desk. “Because they don’t know, you don’t know. You’ll get your New World. But you shan’t be here to see it.”
“I’m pure; incapable of hurting another human being.” Andrew Wright lied; he was not incapable, just unwilling. “If I don’t give in to the anger and don’t hurt anyone, I’ll be okay. I’ll get through it if I stay strong. Those people out there – hurting one another for no reason at all. They’re weak. They have no place in our Paradise.”
“They have no place,” repeated Robyn, rolling the phrase around her mouth. It felt strangely good to know that human beings were not the top of the evolutionary chain though, of course, she had known that for a long time. But it left a bitter after taste of guilt and helplessness… and the weirdest hint of familiarity. Familiarity that she would be condemned to an eternity of pain in the fires of Hell? That image suddenly held even less appeal that ever before. “Because you don’t have the courage or the knowledge to tell them what they’re supposed to be fighting.” She hopped down off the desk, still only millimetres from the shafts of evening sunlight spilling through the blinds.
Andrew looked distinctly unimpressed by the speeches and cloaked threats and, though he was trying to hide his fear Robyn and Carly could both see it in the way he sat with his shoulders, he picked his pen up and retook the pretence of marking papers. “I’m a bad man. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
Now Carly, not Robyn, was pissed off. She strode over to him and wrenched his pen away, throwing it angrily across the room. Robyn watched in amusement but did not try to stop her. Carly knew she didn’t have the ability to make people feel utter despair in a few words the way Robyn could, but she would make the professor regret his arrogance if it took her an hour to do it. “You brainless, stupid little man!
“Those people out there are scared. They don’t know what they’re scared of but they are. And you… you couldn’t even tell them what was going on – that everything was gonna be okay. You didn’t even know enough about this to tell them that, that one beautiful lie. You’re just foolish and ignorant and… and…”
“I think the word you’re searching for is obnoxious. Or possibly arrogant.”
How gare he correct her like she was still a student? “I was about to say up your own arse. But if it makes you feel better to use pretentious words then I really mean up your own arse. You went headlong into this spiralling apocalypse situation without knowing that everyone would die and go to Hell, regardless of whether they had hurt people or not. You called down these demons that you foolishly thought could be good.”
“No demon in this dimension or any other could be good,” added Robyn. “They all have the same inborn desire to create total destruction where-ever they go. It’s part of our nature.” She smiled a little as she said our. Carly thought that it was now more of a mask to cover her new-found sense of disloyalty to her kind, that simple pride – though she could not discount that likelihood.
“You didn’t even consider the possibility of there being such dire consequences to what you were doing. You didn’t even wonder why you had never heard of these supposed angel-demons. You were – are – stupid and full of it. And now you’re gonna pay the price for your mistakes.”
Robyn clapped, an insane smile plastered over her face, feeling a surge of pride for the girl. Mika would have been proud of her, how intimidating even a hman could be. But Robyn, even a Robyn who was just as lethal as Mika, her cha
mpion, was looking at this girl who had just been incredibly scary and could see how much potential she showed. If only she chose to nurture it, make it grow… “You scared him,” she noted. “You are scared?”
Andrew kept an indifferent, impassive expression but he could not hide hiss fear hidden from Robyn. His pen drummed furiously on his desk. He said nothing but thoughts were whirring around his head. So what if he was doing something that might be considered evil? Was it not better to give the human race a chance to start all over again in a world that was clean and pure? Though, each thought he had, each question he raised his head, was paired with what if. What if these two strange women were right to accuse him of being foolish.
“See, maybe this pure, untouched world might come into being. But no-one’s going to be around to see it. Not you, not me, not any-one.” Robyn was in the flow now and had to put it bluntly. If she tried to make it fluffy and less real, how would he really understand what he had done. “Even if you know enough to fight it, it will still kill you in the end. It will still send you to Hell with the rest. Because you don’t know that by setting this up, you condemned us. And now, the only thing standing between the world as it was and its’ obliteration is us.”