“Oh sorry mate,” the driver said, his voice dripping with insincerity. “Didn’t see you there.”
How cliché. Robyn was close by and was calling out to him. He had to do what he had been born to do. He had to kill. The temptation of the kill was yanking at him – one man, ready for the taking. Something to sate his hunger, perhaps. Murder, blood, life. The pull of nature was so strong. He snapped his eyes open and stared up. “You can’t kill me, mate,” he mocked. “Already dead.”
“What the hell..?”
“You may well ask. But I shan’t tell.” Mika braced himself for the effort and pushed the heavy vehicle off him, using a tremendous amount of strength and letting it crash onto its’ side.
“What the hell..?” the driver said again, probably too dumb-founded to even think of any words.
As a demon, he had a duty and an innate desire to change and to feed. But the memories of what he had done held him back. Mika flicked himself to his feet in one fluid move…
And ran.
The nameless driver was left staring after him, open-mouthed, wondering about the strange person who seemed to be immortal and had effectively destroyed his mayhem machine.
“Do you think we should have left her?”
Mika was brushing the long hair of his dead lover and smelling her intoxicating fragrance – a mix of vanilla and energy. It had always been the perfume of choice, and never failed to excite him.
“Where could she go?” he asked.
Robyn felt his gentle hand moving across her flat abdomen. “Mmm. You say the nicest things to me.” Robyn loved to hear his sweet talk; he knew exactly what to say or do to please her the most. She smiled as he circled both arms around her waist and rested his chin in the space between her shoulder blades. “Mika, what can we do now? That necklace is what we hunted her for. We risked it all for that, and now we have it, what do we do?”
“We torture her to your hearts content. We kill her, over as many days as is necessary.” And Mika thought it was going to take a very long time for her to die. Annie had stamina and would not die easily. The fighters were always the most fun. “Then, we can do whatever you want, where-ever you like, and to who-ever you choose.”
“Do you think we should feed her?”
“She’ll keep until morning.”
His fingers found the scratches along her stomach and she delighted in the jagged impulse it sent shooting to her brain. Mika traced each line with his forefinger, and wondered why Robyn had not allowed them to heal yet. Similarly, Robyn turned around and stroked the cut he had right down the side of his face, asking herself why he had left it. But both knew the answer – the pain turned them both on.
“I know exactly where to go after I get the necklace?”
“Where’s that?”
She twisted a lock of hair in her fingers, distracting herself from the present. The future had caught her attention for the moment. “But we’ll have to come back. We will be sorely needed. Everything will change, everyone will change too. Swapping sides. Everyone is swapping sides, even us.”
“Robyn! Baby! Fly back to me, little bird.” He shook her back into the real world and carried her over to the big bed. It had once belonged to a Mr and Mrs Rivers, who had had a rather unfortunate accident with one of their namesakes.
“I want to go to Paris. It’s a beautiful city, with beautiful people. And such pretty corpses they will make.” She looked at the man she loved and fingered the lace-edged bedspread she was lying on. “They all look pretty when they die. Peaceful, even.”
“You look better,” Mika decided. “None of that pesky mortality for us, my love.”
“No. That went away with the pixies. Pixies with their dancing and their foolish optimism. Mika, I want to kill me some pixies. And trolls, and elves, and goblins.”
“What about faeries?”
“Faeries have no voices. I won’t be able to hear them scream,” she sulked. Faeries just did not have the ability to vocalise their fear. Once, the tiny creatures had fascinated her, they were so fast and had such a wicked sense of fun. It had taken her a while to see their flitting movements, and it was much longer still to realise that they could speak but on such a high frequency that even her supernaturally enhanced hearing could not pick it up. “I want my pets to cry and scream. So full of hope and hopelessness, it makes my head ring.”
“How does that work, baby? How does a head ring?” Ears rang and heads spun. That was how the sayings went. Mika knew that Robyn had her own logic behind everything she said and he only barely understood part of her. “I thought ears were the only things which ring.”
“Not when I tear those ears off and let them ring in my mouth. Ooh, they jingle and make such a tune, Mika.” One day she would teach him these things. One day.
Shirt in tatters over his scratched and bruised torso, Mika peel the strips of cloth from his body and rolled over onto his back. He stared down at the trickle of blood that had squeezed from one scratch and collected the liquid on one finger. Robyn laughed as he teasingly trailed the finger over her lips. Why did he tease her so? She stared up at the healing cut on his face, seeing the blood congealing and the skin beginning to knit together. Maybe he wanted Annie to see him unblemished – to make her see that she could never cause damage to him or his people.
Robyn wanted something very different.
“Baby?” asked Mika, now lying on his back, intent on counting the cracks in the ceiling.
“Mmm?”
“Why do you want to kill in Paris? It’s full of French people.” They had gone on a killing spree there many years ago, a farming village a few miles out of the city. It had not ended well, though the flames and screams would have been a joy if they had not been emanating from them. “French people who want to kill us.”
“I do not need reminding, Mika.” Perhaps the French had forgotten all about the savage murders of dozens of innocent men and women by young creatures of evil. Well, not forgotten about the murders but, there was a chance that they would not be recognised. “Anyway, they will only be a threat to us if we fail to kill them first.”
A tired groan came from the other room.
“I think she’s awake,” Mika noted. “Let’s leave her.” Annie thought she was important here, wanted to be known to make a difference; surely, the ultimate mental torture for her was to be completely ignored.
“I have a better idea.” Robyn sat up on the bed, and pulled him up to sit directly in front of her. “Let’s make her suffer.” She leaned in close to him and took him in, touching his core of his nature, absorbing the pure evil that only a demon could know.
From two rooms, there cane three voices, moaning and groaning in the most literal interpretation of the pleasure/pain principle.
Her naked body covered only by a single cotton sheet, Robyn propped herself up with an elbow and stared down at Mika. He looked so young and sweet when he was asleep. Peaceful, even. No – peace was for the dead. But no-one could have guessed the secrets he hid when he looked this innocent. She ran her forefinger along the almost vanished cuts on his face, knowing that the tiny lightning bolts her touch sent through him would always wake him. “Mika?”
“Hey, baby.”
“I want to go play. She’s not making any noise and I really want her to make some noise.” The shrieks and sobs of a fallen Warrior were the sweetest sounds. No hope, nothing. The only nicer sound than that was the cry of a witch – their magic was strong but was never enough to keep them away. When there was so much strength and power around, Robyn liked to know that she was better than any mortal extremes.
“What are you so happy about?” He liked to see her happy and smiling, joy had been hard to come by in recent years. They always seemed to be fighting, more often than not with Annie, and it had been a while since they had been able to kill freely and bask in the afterglow… just because they could.
“Why are you smiling?”
“We’re in love. That means we hunt together.” Okay, that was enough of a reason for Robyn to be grinning insanely, but she wasn’t finished yet. “We do bad, bad things together. Shall we go and do them to the girl?”
“We’ll cut her and feed from her. We can make her death so slow and painful, sje won’t know what’s hit her.”
Robyn’s eyes brightened. “But you will hit her, won’t you?”
“If you want me to, love.” A moan came from the other room and he heard Annie heartbeat quicken slightly as she woke up and found herself tied to a solid wooden post. “Shut up, girl,” he snarled, angrily. Mika did not quite understand why a mere girl had made him angry, but he pushed the emotion away, becoming rather annoyed at her interruptions. “We’re plotting you’re endless torture here.” Tired and frightened whimpers replaced the fatigued moans.
“Endless is forever, only there’s not much point in it when she’s dead,” she objected. “Except the joy of getting rid of the body. All the fun of the fair.” Their was a gypsy carnival coming to town next week. Where better to dump a corpse? Who better to take the blame than travellers?
“Why are you doing this to me?” whined Annie from the other room. “You could have killed me right away last night. Why must you draw it out like this?”
They made a point of not answering her question, but had she been able to see their reactions, the answer was written right over their faces.. it was almost sickening to see. Torturing people to death was their idea of a good time. Even worse than this, most horrific, truth was the fact that neither of them could see anything wrong with it. Mika had only just got to grips with the concept of making a murder slow and unbearable or the victim rather than simply snapping a neck or draining a body, but Robyn had been right. It was just as satisfying, if not more so in some circumstances. Why did most people think that this was more horrific than a sudden death? Also, why did all humans insist on struggling against them when they always knew they were going to lose?
“You’re an evil, insane bitch!”
Robyn bridled slightly with an anger she knew shouldn’t be there. She looked at Andrew with flashing eyes, dancing sparks of fire therein. “You call me that one more time and I’ll gouge your eyes out. Then I shall use them as marbles,” she threatened.
Andrew Wright was scared by her announcement, and the certainty that she really meant it. He made no further comment that might get him in her bad books – from the looks of the bedraggled, and now visibly flagging, Carly. Robyn’s bad books were evidently a very bad place to be.
Robyn lifted her head and snuffled the air like a puppy picking up a familiar scent. A smell she recognised; one she had longed for, and had now come unhidden. “I can smell your fear,” she informed him. “I knew you couldn’t keep it veiled by false bravado for long.”
“Remind me – why is it good to scare him?”
“Because, he won’t dare to wrong us. The things I could do to a man who betrays me… it doesn’t bear thinking about.” Robyn spent the next few moments doing nothing but that – thinking of it. “No man gets away with doing me over.”
“Have you ever heard about there being nothing so bad as a woman scorned?” Carly said to Andrew, trailing behind him in the sludgy sewer that Robyn seemed to prefer to the ground. “The wrath of a wronged Robyn is so much worse.”
“The scary thing is I actually believe you. When you two came to my office today, I thought you were just two little girls who’d come up with some cock and bull story about how this was the end of everything. You looked like kids with big fantasies, and were just frightened about this. Now, I’m beginning to get you. You’re two young-“ Robyn snorted but offered no explanation for it, and broke into a smile for no apparent reason. “Young, powerful women with a strong grip on reality. I know this is wrong and stupid but I know you can make it right.” He hoped that sounded as if he had complete faith in them.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” said Robyn, trying her hand at playing the tough chick who still liked girly clichés.
“Flattery can also get you a bit dead,” shot back Carly, looking down a side tunnel as she passed. Death was pretty much a non-starter for Robyn, but she was there to protect them as well as turn the frighteners on. “Uh – Robyn? Demon.”
Andrew looked down the tunnel on instinct but instantly knew exactly what he was seeing, and wished he had not. Because there, at the corner, stood a monster. The white and blue ice-cream colours of its body glowed eerily in the dim night light coming through the grating. Eyes that seemed to glow red stared backed at him. This monster was one of the supposed angels he had called down. The girls had called them apocalypse demons and he just knew that they were right. “Oh great, the sun hasn’t killed me yet, so that thing’ll do it instead.” Trading one horrible, unnatural fate for another – wasn’t he lucky?
The eyes of the Alvareshnik opened a little wider as footsteps thundered up behind it, and the universal language of screams was once again as it fell to its’ knees. Robyn grinned, Andrew looked shocked, and Carly was just relieved as the creature fell silent and crashed to the tunnel floor following a sudden crack of bone, leaving no doubt as to what had happened. But, while it waited the few seconds it took for death to claim the demon, it groaned and writhed in agony. Sharp claws sprang out from webbed fingers as the demon lost control and its’ muscles tensed; a broken spine arched reflexively. Death transcended the physical constraints of pain and injury.
It screamed as it went stiff and limp. The words were alien to the four, but the sound – it was always the same.
Robyn was leading the way to the house of the shaman by following the magickal signatures each of his spells had left in the air. She had linked arms with Mika after he had joined them and even he could see the traces. Often, these signatures were too slight to be picked up, but as these spells had required so much energy, they were plainly visible to them. It was strange to think how long Robyn and Mika had been rooted in the supernatural and how much they still did not know. There was no need for them to understand witches, goblins, and the like; all they needed to know, indeed all they wanted to know, was there trade. And their trade was evil. Just that somewhere along the way, the line had blurred and shifted.
After snapping the neck of the Alvareshnik, Mika had dropped to the floor and asked himself why he had done that, even before it had presented any real danger to his girls? He liked that – girls – as in more than one. He had cried out for Robyn to help him, but he was positive that both of them had helped him up. It was nice that Carly was willing to help the bloke who had killed her boyfriend and held her captive for days. He sensed doubt in Carly, a hint of uncertainty. But, he needed the kind of help that only Robyn could give him.
Carly fought back the urge to sing her own version of We’re off to see the wizard with a smile and a muffled giggle. It really was quite absurd to find anything truly funny in this situation, though Carly thought that this was the only thing keeping her sane at the moment.
“How do they know where to go?” Andrew whispered to her. “We could be going round in circles for all they know. All this looks the same.”
Carly shook her head and wondered why he was whispering, as Mika and Robyn could still hear him as well as if he had been talking normally. “No, we’re not going in circles. All the incantations or charms or whatever he uses leave a tiny trace of supernatural energy behind it. They’ve trained themselves to follow that trail. It helps them track people,” she added.
“Track people? Why on earth would they need to track people?”
“When they hunt,” explained Carly, mildly surprised that her alleged personality change meant that this fact no longer registered as unnatural. They were hunters, they couldn’t help being what they were. “They might see some-one that takes their eye and they follow their scent, or some kind of trace. It’s just
part of their whole demon thing.”
“But they’re using it to do something good? In a way.” Andrew still could not get his head around this concept of him being responsible for the end of the world. How was it possible for a scientist and a shaman to bring about the apocalypse? Okay, they’d been aided by monsters he admitted he hadn’t even wanted to consider might be bad, but… it took a lot of believing.
“I don’t quite get it myself, but I think they just want to be around forever.”
Mika grew concerned by the amount of talk behind him, and turned to them. “do you mind? This isn’t easy to do.” It took a lot of concentration to follow a trail of this kind. The intensity of the clouds made it much easier to follow than usual, but it still took a lot more focus than it did to chase a simple scent.
Robyn gripped his hand more tightly, alerting him to a result, leaving tiny moon-shaped marks in his hand.
“What is it, Robyn?”
“Before us. We’re close, I know it. The end is in sight.” She saw faint glimmers of pink light curling up, near the end of the sewer, leading up a rusty metal ladder, and headed for it. Only Mika matched the quickness and quietness of her steps, though at the foot of the ladder he paused to help Andrew and the girls up. Well, it was the gentlemanly thing to –
“That creature you killed earlier. It was one of the ones that we called down from another dimension, wasn’t it?” Part of him wanted to ask this strange, often silent man why he had killed it, but that same part knew that he wouldn’t get an answer he felt comfortable hearing. Besides which, Andrew was just glad that he had done so, and didn’t particularly want to know why. “When I saw it, I just knew that it shouldn’t be here. It belonged somewhere else.”
“It belonged in a body bag,” he replied, low and dangerous. “Which is where you’ll belong if you don’t get a move on.”
“Mika! There will be no bloodshed,” Robyn scolded. “Yet.”
“I can kill people without bloodshed,” he reminded. Certainly, they could both kill in so many ways with spilling a drop blood… but open wounds could provide so much more entertainment. The kind you couldn’t pay for with a credit card. Mika wanted to see blood – it would make all this real again. Blood was all he had; it was what he and Robyn shared; it was what tied him to his very nature. So, why had he run away from a perfectly good kill and meal earlier?