For the Hopeless

"What do you want from me?" Bailey rasped, leaning heavily against the wall of a video game store that made up the left side of the alley. She had no idea why she'd chosen this alley. It was a good mile away from her home, sure, but it was potentially a very public place, and she was wearing nothing but bandages. Plus, she was accompanied by an impossibly tall man with impossibly red skin and eyes that glowed with an impossible red light. What happened if someone saw them?

"Brave of you," he began with a quick survey of the alley, "to come to a place like this with me, all alone, in your current condition."

"If you wanted me dead, I would be dead." She shifted her stance, now resting her entire back against the wall instead of just one bony shoulder. The chill of the brick sent a shiver through her, though the cold of the air didn't bother her a bit. "So what is it you want?"

"I told you already," he said, his eyes taking another look about the area, slowly and boredly. The small clumps of snow on the ground seemed to be more entertaining than her at this point. "I merely wanted to see how you were doing."

"Why?" she asked, and he looked up to find himself pinned with a hard glare.

"Because I'm studying you," he answered, the annoyance to his tone suggesting that this were the most obvious thing in the world.

"Why are you studying me?" She, too, was growing annoyed, but her aggravation stemmed from suspicion instead of misunderstanding.

"Because you're a devil," he started, laughter adding an oddly pleasant lilt to his thunderously deep voice, "yet you have friends. Friends who aren't devils. Friends who trust you and care about you. I'm surprised you haven't been studied sooner!"

"So you're not going to hurt them?" she asked, suspicion no longer coloring her voice, though her brow was still furrowed skeptically. "And you're not going to hurt me?"

"Not unless you give me a reason to," he said, grinning in a way that made her most uncomfortable yet somehow made him seem more trustworthy. He was almost baring his fangs at her, but beneath it, there seemed to be a genuine hint of goodwill. He just seemed incapable of portraying the emotion properly.

"Will you help me with something, then?" she asked, her eyes fixed on the shark-like teeth in his creepy smile.

"Certainly, my lady," he said with a gallant bow. She could still see his mouth, though, and she couldn't look away. "You need only name it."

"The girl who did...this to me," Bailey began with a vague gesture at her bloodied bandages, "can you find her?"

The devil perked up immediately, eyes wide in childish excitement. "To kill her?"

"No, no," she hurried to say. "Nothing like that. I just need to know where she's hiding."

"So you can kill her?" He seemed thoroughly puzzled now, eyebrows drawn together in a confused frown. She sighed. And this was the epitome of her race...

"I don't know yet," she answered vaguely. "Can you find her for me or not?"

"But of course, my dear," he said with a devilish smirk, taking her hand in his and bending to place a gentle kiss upon her palm. Only then did she noticed that the crimson coloring had reached her shoulders and begun to spread up her neck and down her torso. She was looking more and more like a devil with each passing moment; just as he wanted, she suspected. "I'll return to you when I've located her."

"Just remember not to hurt her," she said, her eyes on the redness which looked so odd sneaking its way along her breasts; but the warmth left her hand suddenly, and she looked up to find that the man had gone. "This is stupid," she mumbled to herself, gazing at the spot in which he'd been standing only seconds ago. "I don't even know his name yet."

-?-

"Where did he take her?" Dameon nearly yelled, walking another angry circuit around the room, circling Tawny's chair which lay on its back in the middle of the floor. Tawny sat on the edge of the bed now, face empty of emotion, body slumped over and drained. She watched Dameon tiredly.

"He didn't take her," she said, exhaustion heavy in her tone, weighing down her usually featherlight voice just like it was weighing down on her eyelids. "She took him."

"What?" Dameon snapped, stopping dead in his tracks. He looked at her incredulously from across the fallen chair. "There's no way she did that. She didn't have the energy to. She didn't have a reason!"

"He was going to hurt you," the smaller girl sighed, somehow managing to slump even more. "You know how Bailey gets when people try to hurt the things she cares about." Aven made an odd noise from her spot inside the doorway, half cough and half whine, and Dameon turned to her, though Tawny's eyes fell on the overturned chair.

"What's wrong?" Dameon asked, frowning, and the elf immediately shook her head.

"Nothing," she squeaked, the redness of embarrassment briefly coloring her fair cheeks. "Just a...tickle in my throat." She cleared her throat to prove her point, and though it sounded nothing like the noise she'd made before, Dameon turned back to Tawny without comment.

"Where did she take him?" he asked, and Tawny sighed again. "We need to find her and help her."

"I don't have all the answers, Dameon," she said, shaking her head and refusing to lift her eyes from the chair. "I don't know where she went, how she did it, or what the outcome could be. I'm not in her head at all times."

"I don't think he's going to hurt her," Samara remarked, and Dameon turned to look at her now. He could barely make out her short form beyond Aven's arm in the hallway. "I mean, he would have done so before if he'd wanted to, right?"

Dameon sighed, putting a hand over his eyes as he paused to think. What the girl said was probably true. It was unlikely that any harm was going to come to Bailey – at least, at the hands of the devil. He seemed to have some form of infatuation, too, so even if some outside party decided to try to hurt her, he was more likely to help than to leave her on her own. As much as he hated to admit it, she was probably safer with the devil than she ever could have been here, with Dameon. He had no reason to worry.

"All right," he said after a brief silence, uncovering his eyes. "We should all get downstairs and take care of the survivors that Bailey rescued. They're starting to wake up now, and they're going to need a lot more help than she does."

"Would it be all right if I just...slept?" Tawny asked, and Dameon looked at her. He frowned, realizing for the first time how drained the girl looked.

"Of course," he told her, offering her a sympathetic smile. "Sleep for as long as you need. Let me know if you need anything."

She didn't even bother to force a smile in return. She just nodded and fell onto her side on the bed, her head falling to rest upon Bailey's pillow.

Dameon frowned at her for a moment longer, but soon forced his attention to where Aven and the other girls stood watching him from the doorway, along with the man who had helped him get into the room during the original incident. "Come on," he said, forcing the very smile he'd expected Tawny to force. "We were just getting ready to make eggs earlier. Who wants to help?"

-?-

Hayden spun at the sound of footsteps, of the soles of shoes scraping against the crumbling cement and snow behind her, but no matter how hard she squinted into the darkness, she couldn't find the source. She finally let out the breath she'd been holding and leaned against the cold stone wall of the alley, a hand to her chest to feel the insanely rapid beating of her heart.

She was just imagining it. She had to be.

She took a moment to calm herself, telling herself how silly she was being, how no one was there and no one would be there, then pushed herself away from the wall and continued her quiet stroll down the alley.

Snow had begun to fall again, just little flurries trickling down from the gray sky, and that offered her an odd comfort as the fluffy flakes perched themselves upon the strands of tangled hair hanging about her face. It was almost Christmas; that was what the snow told her. It was supposed to be a pleasant, cheery time of year, and though she had little to be happy about, she couldn't shake the warm feeling.

"O holy night," she began softly, the notes just as pure and clean and lovely as any she had sung during a spell. "The stars are brightly shining. It is the night of our dear savior's birth." Again, the scraping of footsteps behind her; she looked over her shoulder, eyes wildly searching the darkness, but she continued on. "Long lay the world, in sin and error pining, 'til he appeared and the soul felt its worth." Nothing there, just as she'd expected. A sigh came out with the next notes as she began to turn her attention to the alleyway ahead. "A thrill of ho-" She came face to face with a broad, red-skinned torso, and she stopped with a scream of terror.

It's Bailey, she thought, turning to flee without bothering to take a closer look. She's come to kill me! She hadn't even taken a full step when the devil grabbed her by the arms and slammed her against the stone wall, front first.

"You do have a pretty voice," a masculine voice mocked, breath warm against her ear. "I'll give you that."

That's not Bailey, she realized. She tried to twist around in the devil's grip, wanting to see his face, but he shook her roughly, slamming her front against the wall once again. Her head hit the stone, too, and for a moment, she was too dazed to try to look at him anymore.

"Bailey wants you," the devil continued in a sing-song voice, "and I don't think she's too happy." A familiar red mist began to envelope Hayden slowly, as if this man were taunting her helplessness by giving her the opportunity to escape when they both knew that she couldn't; but before it could finish encapsulating her, something sprang out of the shadows and onto the devil. He was knocked to the side, his mist vanishing in a rush of cold air, and she fell to the snowy ground with him, her cheek scraping against the rough stone as she went down.

The warmth of the devil's hard body left her almost the moment they'd reached the ground. She could hear a skirmish behind her, grunts and growls and thuds, but she was still in such a daze that she couldn't turn to look, couldn't figure out what was going on. She felt blood begin to ooze from her cheek, and she ran her trembling fingers through it slowly. Holding her sticky, red-tipped fingers in front of her face, she tried to remember when this had happened. She couldn't seem to remember.

"Get up, witch," a familiar voice drawled, and she was suddenly jerked to her feet by a hand that too tightly gripped her arm. "We have to go."

"Lockley?" she groaned, just barely managing to balance herself on her own two feet. The vampire towered over her, as dark and intimidating as he'd been the night she'd first met him outside that bar. Unlike that night, however, his features were twisted in an unpleasant snarl, nothing like that persuasive smile she'd first seen. "What are you doing here?"

"The higher-ups told me to come get you," he grumbled, and she could hear the begrudging edge to his tone. "Said you might be useful. Wouldn't listen when I said that you would just get in the way."

"Oh," she murmured, her eyes on the ground. Bailey thought she was useless, this man thought she was useless; only her enemy, the humans, thought otherwise. What a great life she lived.

"Let's go," the vampire growled as he began to drag her along, his grip on her arm still much too tight, but she didn't bother to struggle, knowing that he would easily overpower her. They walked past the devil, locked in combat with a pack of over-sized wolves, and she couldn't help but stare. There was a smile on that handsome red face, a cruel grin, and every time a wolf bit or clawed at him, the smile only grew. He had the upper hand, and he knew it.

She turned from the horribly one-sided battle with a shudder, quickening her pace to better keep up with Lockley. The devil was letting her get away.

A car waited at the end of the alleyway, a black sedan with heavily tinted windows, and Lockley hurried into the back seat as if he were afraid that rays of sunlight might mysteriously appear from the heavily clouded skies and fry him where he stood. She glanced back at the fight, spotting corpses upon the ground now, then hurried after the vampire with another shiver. She didn't much like the man, but being trapped in the back seat of a car with him sounded much better than being trapped in a dark alley with the devil.

-?-

It doesn't look like there's anyone around here, Bailey thought to herself as she peered around the corner of a building and into the street. The snow had begun to fall more quickly, and a fluffy blanket of white had covered the ground. There wasn't a car or a person in sight, not even any tracks in the snow.

Cautiously, she made her way into the empty street, an arm over her bare chest and a hand over her groin just in case anyone happened to come by. The word "Open" flashed in bright green and pink lights in a window across the road, and the door to the right of the sign was her current target. Beyond the glass, she could see racks of clothes, brightly lit by the ugly florescent bulbs above. She didn't see anyone within the small shop, not even behind the cash register, so she ventured in as quietly as she could.

A bell jingled above the door, and she paused for a moment, waiting for someone to come, but no one ever did. She continued on, toward the closest rack, and began to go through the clothes. She realized soon enough that she'd picked the wrong store, finding only dress after dress on the rack. She looked around the store and sighed, finding that every other rack was the same. Formal wear, all of it.

"God damn it," she mumbled, letting a particularly silky garment slip through her fingers.

"Is there anything I can help you with?" a voice said suddenly from her left, and she turned to find a man behind the register, face wrinkled and smiling. She hadn't heard him come out. Was she really that off her game?

"You seem rather calm," she said coolly, "for someone whose store is currently occupied by a naked woman with a red torso." She wished desperately that she could turn her arms and her back and her chest back to their normal pale coloring, but she knew better than to try. She didn't have the energy – she'd wasted what little she'd had left trying to teleport herself back to the house and failing miserably – and the devil probably intended for her to keep the coloring for a while. She was surprised it hadn't spread any further than this.

The old man laughed heartily, the sound high and airy, and he slapped a palm against the ugly green counter. "Oh, ho, ho!" he cackled. "I know what you are, m' dear, and you're more than welcome to spend some time in my store. Naked or otherwise." A wiggle of his bushy white eyebrows took the innocence out of his words, and Bailey pulled the skirt of a blue dress over her chest under the pretense of studying the cloth, sliding casually behind the rack of clothes to hide the rest of her naked body.

"Thank you, then," she said with a small smile. "Do you help the Novie often?" She pulled a silky dress from a hanger, one that closely matched the red skin of her torso, and slipped it on. It was a bit shorter than she'd expected, coming only to her mid-thigh and hanging loosely there, and the neck dipped between her breasts in a tastelessly deep V, but it would have to do for now.

"When they make themselves known to me, sure," he said with a shrug, eyeing her new attire approvingly. "Not many come around these days, though, and none show themselves as you are. Do you have a death wish, by chance?"

She stepped from behind the rack, her smile growing wider now. "I get asked that too often to say no. If you don't mind my asking, what are you? And how have you managed to escape discovery?" Thoughts of Dameon, of Tawny, of Madeleine and Samara and Talon, flitted through her mind, and she realized that she needed to get back as soon as possible. She just needed to figure out what this guy's deal was first, just in case he wasn't really on her side.

"Oh, I'm nothing special," he said with a broad, toothless grin. "Nothing like you. And that's how I've managed to avoid being discovered."

"Can I pay you back for this later?" she asked with a quick gesture at the red dress.

"Oh, no need for that," he answered with a dismissive wave of his wrinkled old hand. "Honestly, you've paid me enough already." Another wiggle of his caterpillar-brows accompanied the words, and she did her best to keep a grimace from her face.

"All right, then." She started for the door, the silk of the dress's skirt brushing against her thighs with every step. "Just don't sell me out, old man, or I'll come back for you."

"Oh, ho, ho!" he cackled, and the bell jingled as she pushed the door open. "They won't hear a thing from me, m' dear!"

"They'd better not," she mumbled to herself, but by then, she was out on the street, far out of the old timer's hearing. She could still hear him guffawing to himself through the glass, and that only served to make her a bit more suspicious. "Maybe he's just a really weird old man," she said, shrugging her bony shoulders as she started down the snowy sidewalk. The glittery flakes still fell from the sky, landing to make wet, chilly blots upon her devil-red skin. "Then again, maybe not." But she continued on without a second glance at the shop window. If he was going to betray her, so be it. She could handle whatever the humans had to throw at her.

At least, she hoped she could.

-?-

"This is the witch, then?" a man asked as Lockley led Hayden into an almost painfully brightly lit room, his grip on her arm too-tight, as usual. The vampire nodded, and the man smiled, getting to his feet behind the long table in the center of the room. Several other men sat around the table, and it looked like they'd been holding a conference before Hayden and Lockley had entered the chamber. Laptops and pens and pads of paper were strewn about the pale white surface, and all but the man who had spoken wore grim expressions. "Good, good. You've arrived at the perfect time. We've just decided what we're going to do with you."

"What you're...going to do with me?" She swallowed, half hiding behind Lockley's lean body, though he quickly jerked her out into the open with a growl of aggravation.

"Killick has been spotted downtown," the mysterious man told her, still wearing that beaming smile, as if he'd just won some great victory and she'd been the cause. "She's greatly weakened, even more so than before. If you can find her now, I'm certain you can kill her."

"But I don't have my spell books," she said quickly, eyes wide. "I don't have any spells strong enough to-"

"You'll find a way," the man said, and his smile mocked her now. "You have to, or you'll die."

At her hands or yours? Hayden wondered to herself, and she heard a chuckle behind her that was quickly stifled. She resisted the urge to turn back, wondering vaguely if there was a telepath in the room, and said aloud, "Will I...Will someone take me to her?"

"Lockley will accompany you to where she was last seen," the man said, straightening his navy blue jacket. She hadn't realized it before, but he was wearing the usual police officer's garb. "Once you're there, you're on your own." He smirked. "Unless Lockley wants to continue helping you, of course."

The vampire scoffed. "Fat fucking chance!"

Coward, she thought bitterly, scowling up at him, and another snicker behind her finally brought her head around. But of the small group of men and women gathered around the doorway behind her, none of them looked amused. Whoever was reading her mind was doing a good job of hiding it.

"Well, then, there you go," the man said, and his glowing smile returned to replace his smirk. "You leave immediately. And if you fail this time, don't bother coming back." She was dragged out the door before she could tell him what an asshole he was, which was probably for the best; she couldn't seem to quell the rage that was swelling to ease her fear.

"You're a coward, you know," she muttered to Lockley once they were outside of the building, one that she now recognized as her high school. It towered over her like a brick monster, the lights glowing through the glass front doors like a fire in the beast's belly.

The vampire chuckled as he slid into the back seat of the car. "I never said I wouldn't go because I was afraid. I just don't want to go because I honestly don't care what happens to either of you."

"I still think you're a coward," she mumbled, sliding across the seat, and the door was shut quietly behind her.

"Think what you want," he said with a shrug, a smirk on his pale lips that was equal parts condescending and sexy. "You won't be alive to think it much longer."

She shuddered at the truth she knew lurked beneath his mocking words, turning her gaze to the window instead of his coldly smirking face. The slowly falling snow was much more comforting than he was; warmer, too.