For the Hopeless

Prying the back door of the DSW open turned out to be much easier than Bailey had expected, considering it wasn't even locked. The heavy metal swung aside with a soft, grating creak, then with a louder one as it shut with a thump behind them. It was pitch black inside.

"They must be here, then," Bailey said softly to Dameon, cautiously walking between a couple of shoe-littered shelves. She was glad she had such good night vision. Things would've been much more complicated otherwise. "The door would only be left open if people were using it."

"Or someone just forgot to lock the door," Dameon suggested, following her with quiet footsteps. "That does happen sometimes, you know."

"At a store that sells ridiculously overpriced shoes?" Bailey asked, glancing back at him as she rounded a corner. "That kind of thing would get somebody fired. No one would forget." She made an abrupt left, nearly leading Dameon to crash directly into the wall of shelves ahead. Luckily, he managed to stop himself before causing a massive, noisy accident, grunting in annoyance. She'd probably done that on purpose.

Bailey continued on for a few seconds, rounding another corner and making her way through the maze of shelves. She stopped dead after a moment, however, frozen in the center of the aisle. Dameon barely managed to keep from bumping into her. She'd probably done that on purpose, too.

"Do you hear that?" she asked in a whisper, her head tilting slowly to the right as she tried to better hear the sound.

"What is it?" he asked, mimicking her movements as if it would help. Surprisingly, it did.

Deep voices, the voices of men. Faint, distant, possibly below them. A human wouldn't have heard them, but a werewolf and a devil...

"Does this place have a basement?" Bailey asked, glancing back at Dameon.

"I didn't think so," he answered, "but it wouldn't surprise me if they built one." She nodded in agreement and continued forward on tiptoe. Silence was even more important now.

It took nearly a full minute to reach the opposite wall, being as careful and quiet as they were. She felt along it, expecting to have to search for the door to the lower level, but it took her only seconds to reach a door knob. She opened it slowly, cautiously, and started carefully into the brightly lit passage below.

The voices were louder here, covering the occasional soft creak of the stairs. Straight ahead, there was only a wall; but peering to the right, Bailey saw what she'd been looking for: cages lined the blindingly white walls, stretching as far as the eye could see. Each small cage held one person too large for it, sitting with legs crossed or knees pulled up to their chests, miserable. In the center of the room, their backs to the stairs, stood two men, hunched over a pair of clipboards and speaking to one another.

"Specimen 203 is showing no signs of change," one of the men said, shifting as he flipped a page on his clipboard. His white lab coat swayed about his knees. "Cold, heat, water, fire...Nothing is having any effect."

The other man nodded. "Specimen 212 is behaving in exactly the same way. You can burn her, submerge her, try to roast her, but all she does is stare at you through the glass." He visibly shuddered, and his companion laughed.

"It's all right, Ben," he said with a smile. "She can't hurt you. The one thing we're sure of is that none of them can break through the glass." He patted his friend heartily on the shoulder, and the man smiled in return.

"I suppose you're right," he said, and then turned his attention to his clipboard. "How about our 300's?" he asked, flipping another page. "Has anything been shown to effect them?"

"Sunlight, just as the myths say," the other man replied. "Holy water, too. But the stake-to-the-heart thing is bull. You have to behead them, or they just laugh at you."

Suddenly, without warning, Bailey and Dameon were shoved down the stairs by a sudden gust of wind. Helplessly, they tumbled to the bottom, but they didn't stay there long. Bailey was on her feet in an instant, Dameon following a second later. At the top of the stairs, just behind where they'd been crouched, stood a single man, a cocky smirk on his face. His skin was fair, as was his hair, but his eyes were a dark, dark brown.

"You two are dumber than you look," he said as he began to descend the stairs, his arms casually crossed. "Did you really expect a place like this to have no security?" The two men in lab coats were silent now, watching the exchange so calmly that it was almost sickening. They persecuted nonhumans, yet they felt so safe with a nonhuman defending them...

"Security?" Bailey scoffed. "You don't look like much security. Wind elementalists aren't very impressive these days."

The man cocked an eyebrow, stopping on the last stair. "Oh, really?" He smirked, and that was the only warning she and Dameon had before an even stronger gust of air than before hit them. Dameon was knocked back, but Bailey remained on her feet. Her devilish red haze had filled the air around her, barely even rippling in the hurricane-level breeze.

"Yeah," she said with a smirk of her own. "Really." She glanced behind her, red eyes glowing. "Are you all right, Dameon?" The man lay crumpled on the floor, leaning against the wall. He was unconscious. "Well, fuck," Bailey mumbled, turning back to her opponent. She nearly jumped upon finding him inches away from her, a hand snaking slowly through the red mist hanging in the air.

"Interesting," he murmured, watching as the skin of his hand began to sizzle. His eyes flicked to her, and he removed his hand from the haze. "What are you?" The lab men had resumed their talking, watching Bailey with wide, awe-filled eyes. She was one of their specimen now. She couldn't help a shiver.

The man seized her chin suddenly, jerking her head so that her glowing red eyes locked with his. His entire forearm was in the mist, now, sizzling in the heat. "What are you?" he asked again, louder now. "I've never seen something like this before."

"No one knows what I am," she said, her eyes narrowing in a glare. "I'm not some common breed that you can just throw in a cage and play with." She lashed out, her red haze engulfing the man entirely. He tried to force it away using his own wind powers, but still, even the strongest breezes barely rippled the mist. He could only shriek as the heat increased all around him, the haze more like flames than a harmless mist now. Every inch of bare skin was boiling, his clothes were burning away, his throat was on fire. In a matter of seconds, he would be done.

But suddenly, she felt a small pain in the side of her neck, no more than a needle prick. A third lab man had appeared, ready to subdue her. She shoved him away and jerked the needle from her neck, ramming it down his throat. A sickening gurgle escaped his mouth, and he collapsed, clawing at his throat until he finally fell silent and went limp.

There was a slight tingling in her fingers now, but besides that, whatever the man had injected her with was having no effect on her. She spun back to her original prey, finding that his skin had been burned away and blood was pooling on the floor around him. She revoked her miasma then, letting the man fall to the floor and writhe in agony. He would bleed to death soon.

She turned her attention to the two original lab men, finding that they were now flanked by a pair of women. She let more of her devilish mist leak into the room, deeming the two women as highly threatening. They weren't likely to bring in something as weak as an elementalist, considering what she'd done to the first one. They would have to step up their game.

Leaving some of the haze behind to hover near Dameon, just in case, she started toward the two men and their new protectors. The way the men were watching her made her sick. She may not have been in a cage, but she was surely one of their experiments. She would have to get rid of them.

The women walked around the humans, their pace languid. Bailey stopped a few feet away from them, watching them, waiting for them to attack first. She needed to know what they were if she were going to get them out of the way quickly.

One of the women took the bait, lunging at her with a soft battle cry. She swung, but Bailey ducked, throwing her haze forward simultaneously. It engulfed the woman, but she vanished before it could do any harm. She was behind Bailey a split second later, a kick aimed at her back. Bailey rolled to the side just in time to avoid the attack, once against thrusting her miasma toward the woman. It snagged her hand, but again, the woman disappeared.

The second woman was on her way toward Bailey now, allowing only half of her attention to go to tracking the first woman. The second of the pair attempted several rapid punches, forcing Bailey to take several steps back to avoid being hit. She bumped into the first woman, who wrapped her arms around her and held her in a death grip. She could barely breathe. The second woman landed one punch to her face before Bailey decided on a new strategy.

She vanished just as the first woman had been doing, leaving only the vaguest red fog in the woman's arms. She reappeared behind the two lab men, engulfing them in redness. They, unlike her opponents, couldn't escape it. They were bound to suffer the same fate as the elementalist. Their clipboards caught fire, their skin beginning to sizzle, and she disappeared again, feeling the two woman approaching her from behind.

They stopped dead, tensing as they slowly looked around, trying to locate her. She appeared behind the first woman, gently tangling a hand in her long, wavy blonde hair. Her other hand went to the woman's stomach, sliding beneath her green tank top with the touch of a lover. She immediately relaxed against Bailey, filled with trust by the softness of her touch...and a little bit of that red haze.

"Come, now," she murmured, turning the woman's head to lock eyes with her. The woman melted in her arms. "You don't want to do this. I'm not your enemy." She leaned in, her eyes slipping shut, and the woman was helpless to do anything but mimic her. But before their lips could lock, before Bailey could deliver the final blow that this particular tactic called for, the other woman interfered.

She tried to shove her away from her companion, but Bailey vanished before she could be touched. The woman she'd been holding collapsed, having fully given in to Bailey, and her friend caught her, glaring at where Bailey reappeared across the room.

"You just have to be difficult, don't you?" Bailey said with a sigh, crossing her arms. Her eyes flicked to where the lab men had been, finding them to be nothing more than a pile of mushy, bloody flesh and bones. Her haze faded away.

"Go," the woman who had a hold of her half-conscious friend snapped, her voice overly harsh. "Just get out of here."

"So you can tell the humans what you've seen?" Bailey retorted, calmly approaching the pair. "I'm sorry, but I can't do that." She smiled coldly, kicking the barely conscious woman from her new prey's arms. She fell to the floor with a groan, her eyes half open. She would be back on her feet soon. Bailey had to hurry.

She grabbed the woman by the front of her shirt and jerked her forward, forcing the woman's body against hers. She began to vanish, to escape Bailey's grasp, but Bailey wasn't about to let that happen again. In a split second, when only a sliver of the woman was left, Bailey kissed her. In a rush, the woman's body reappeared, her eyes wide and her arms already pushing at Bailey, trying to get her away. It was too late, though. Through the woman's lips, Bailey forced a flood of fire-hot red, giving the woman no choice but to swallow it.

When Bailey finally pulled away, the woman was shrieking, clawing at her throat, her stomach, everywhere that had been filled with that hellish miasma. She fell to her knees just as her partner sat bolt upright on the floor beside her, wide eyed.

"Jay?!" she cried, scrambling to her knees to clutch her friend's shoulders. "Jay, what's happening?!" She was so distracted by her companion's peril that she didn't notice Bailey standing behind her, looming over her with a twisted smirk on her face. Jay tried to warn her, pointing to Bailey with a violently trembling hand, but it was too late. The sole of Bailey's boot collided with the back of the woman's head hard enough to send her sprawling across the ground, unconscious. A second kick to the head, and a third, and a fourth, even a fifth, had the woman's skull cracked open, blood pouring over the glistening white tile. If she lived through that, Bailey would've been amazed.

She turned her glowing gaze to the other half of the pair, locking eyes with her for a brief moment. That was the last thing she saw before finally falling onto her side on the floor, her brown eyes wide and vacant. Bailey had won.

Slowly, she glanced around the room, at the Novie-filled cages lining the walls. All of them were watching in silence, either frightened or awestruck. Bailey couldn't tell. What was left of her slowly fading haze snaked along the bars of the small cages, melting them away to free the nonhumans trapped within. She was halfway around the room when she felt a sharp pain in the side of her neck, enough to make her cry out in surprise.

When she turned, she found another man in a white lab coat standing before her, trembling and afraid. In his hand, he held no less than ten hypodermic needles, all empty now. "How did you...?" But she never got to finish the question. This time, she felt more than just a tingle in her fingers, and her vision began to blur. "Well, fuck." The last thing she saw before falling to the floor was Dameon rushing toward her assailant, wolfy teeth bared and rage in his amber eyes...