For the Hopeless

Tawny jerked upright in bed as the walls about her shook, a loud crash echoing through all the minds in the house to hit her tenfold. She was off of the bed and out the bedroom door before her disorientation had fully dissipated, and the sounds of her footfalls were another overwhelming echo in the minds of the house's many residents as she hurried down the stairs. She was expecting some terrible sight to await her in the living room, the results of some explosion or some horrible witch attack or some such tragedy; but when she reached the bottom, she saw only a room full of uninjured people, a cracked door hanging crooked on its hinges, and Bailey – red-skinned, red-eyed, winged and clawed Bailey.

Oh my God, Madeleine's soft, shocked thoughts filtered into her mind. Is that...Is that...? "Hayden!" The thought came at her from all directions, a scream cascading through a dozen minds until it finally reached Tawny. She staggered back a stair, tripping to land on her ass on the next one up, as the young girl rushed toward Bailey.

That was really her, bloody and limp and so very pale in Bailey's red arms. That was really Hayden.

Oh, God, came a whisper of Dameon's thoughts. She's...

"Dead," Tawny whispered. She stared from her spot on the steps, feeling cold but hot all over, wondering just how she should feel about this. Hayden had done a terrible, terrible thing, using Tawny to try to kill Bailey, but she was just a lost, frightened teenager. Did she really deserve this? Was this really what any of them had wanted?

Hayden was lying on the couch, now, and Madeleine was beside her, sobbing uncontrollably. Little wisps of confused thoughts drifted to Tawny's mind from the strangers that stood about the room, plates of eggs and toast in their dirty hands, but any contribution from Bailey was conspicuously absent.

Tawny turned from the spectacle in the living room and jumped, startled to find Bailey standing on the bottom landing of the stairs in front of her. She was naked, the telepath noticed now, and black bruises showed through the red of her skin and the red of the blood caking her flesh, but Tawny didn't have it in her to blush or to worry right now. The tears started before she could get a hold of herself, and she couldn't stop them after that.

"What did you do?" she whispered. "Bailey, what did you do?"

The devil bent down to place a gentle kiss on Tawny's lips, and a warm hand rested on the girl's cheek as Bailey lingered for a long moment. What had to be done, came the breath of her thoughts like a voice in Tawny's ear, sending a shiver down her spine and raising goosebumps along her arms and the back of her neck.

Bailey pulled away, but placed a second light kiss on Tawny's forehead before fully straightening. She turned from the girl, and Tawny caught sight of a glint of silver clenched in her hand – Hayden's cell phone.

"What are you doing?" Tawny asked, lurching to her feet as Bailey began to walk away. "What are you planning?"

Dameon stood only a foot from the couch, looking down at Hayden's corpse with an expression of raw shock on his face, and that was where Bailey went first. "I realized something while I was out," she whispered to him, the words of the half-guarded thought barely reaching Tawny's mind. The devil reached up, tangled a hand in Dameon's hair, and pulled his face to hers. Their lips met in a chaste kiss to mirror the one she had just shared with Tawny, one that Dameon accepted just as readily as Tawny had, and surprise and jealousy stabbed her through the chest simultaneously.

"Bailey," she breathed, but no one could hear her.

Their lips parted, but Bailey held Dameon's forehead to hers, and Tawny could see tears glistening in her eyes. "I need you both," she murmured.

Bailey, Dameon thought, though his lips didn't move. He gazed down at her for a moment, shock and love and longing forming one heavy emotion in his hazel eyes, until he finally pulled her lips to his again. This was nothing like the chaste kiss of before, their lips parting and tongues moving against each other – and Bailey was all for it.

"Is this really the time to be making out with your dead lover's brother?" Tawny muttered bitterly, fists clenched at her sides. The tears began to fall faster, and Hayden was quickly becoming a lost sadness at the back of her mind.

Bailey and Dameon parted after an eternity – or, rather, the few brief seconds that had felt like an eternity. Neither of them said a word, and the devil turned away and started toward the door.

"Where are you going?" Samara asked quietly from where she'd been standing beside the broken door. Her eyes flicked from Dameon, who looked wordlessly after the devil, to Tawny, who watched bitterly from the stairs, then, finally, to Bailey's passing form.

"To do what needs to be done," Bailey answered as she stepped out into the cold.

"That's such a cop-out," Tawny said loudly, her voice heavy with the hundreds of tears she had left to shed, with the rage she was so unaccustomed to showing, and the devil paused just shy of the doorway on the porch.

She offered Tawny a sad smile, and her lips never moved as she thought, I love you, Tawny. Never forget that. And then, she turned and continued on her way across the porch, soon disappearing as she took flight with her dragon-like wings.

Tawny turned toward the living room, and she and Dameon locked eyes across the people-filled space. Anger burned in her gaze, but his stare was sad and happy and just a little bit sorry, all at once.

She couldn't hate him, though she desperately wanted to. She had given Bailey up so that she could go to him, to someone who could protect her and understand her and take care of her like she needed. How could she be angry that things were going as she'd planned?

She went to where her shoes lay beside the broken door and slipped them on, pulled her coat from the coat rack, then headed out into the chill with a soft sniffle. She couldn't let her silly, girly emotions overwhelm her right now, not the ones stemming from Bailey's actions and not the ones caused by Hayden's maybe-good-maybe-bad death. Bailey was obviously up to something that would get her killed – that look in her eyes had told Tawny so – and if Dameon wasn't going to help her, Tawny sure as hell would.

"Tawny!" the werewolf called as she bolted off of the porch, but the girl didn't stop, and soon, she was swallowed up in the quickly falling snow.

-?-

Bailey alighted upon the roof of a small storage building not far from the house, her feet sinking into a thick blanket of snow, though she barely noticed the cold. She stared down at the cell phone in her hand, watching as the puffy flakes of snow landed on the screen and melted to leave wet spots. She'd bought this phone for Hayden when the witch had first moved into their little safe haven; she'd talked to the girl on it dozens of times. But never again...

She swallowed back the growing lump in her throat and flipped the phone open. The background was a picture of Hayden and Madeleine, arms around one another and broad grins on their faces. It came as a bit of a shock to her; Hayden had never seemed to like Madeleine, and Madeleine had never seemed too attached. Yet here was this wallpaper, and at home was Madeleine bent over Hayden's corpse, crying like the day her family had tried to hand her over to the humans.

Bailey had missed so much. They'd had a family, and she'd barely even noticed.

She ground her teeth as she tried to push the memories and the guilt and the current horrors from her mind, and she opened Hayden's contact list. It was bare, with only four names displayed, Bailey and Dameon and Tawny and...Lockley?

She called the number and put the phone to her ear. "Did you do it?" a deep voice asked after a few rings. "Is Bailey Killick dead?"

She felt a sudden rush of heat against her back like flames tickling her skin, and her devil stalker murmured in her ear, "I know exactly where he is. I know exactly where they all are."

"Hayden?" the voice at the other end of the phone line asked when Bailey didn't respond. She opened her mouth to speak, to interrogate the stranger as she'd been planning, but she soon settled with flipping the phone shut.

She turned to face the devil, who stood only inches from her. "Where?"

"Bailey!" came a sudden cry. She turned to find Tawny sprinting toward her perch through the snow, weaving her way through the maze of storage buildings that surrounded hers. Dameon was on her tail, clunking through the snow in a pair of black leather boots though he wore no coat.

"Why aren't the two of you at home taking care of things?" Bailey asked, eyes narrowed in an aggravated glare.

"The two of...?" Tawny mumbled, confused, until she looked back to see Dameon slowing to a walk in the path she'd created through the snow. "What are you doing here?" she asked bitterly. "Shouldn't you be at home with Aven?"

"And let you and Bailey run off to get yourselves killed somewhere?" Dameon asked incredulously. "Hell no. Whatever you guys are doing, I'm doing, too."

"I don't know what Tawny's doing, but I'm going to find the humans who caused this mess with Hayden, and I'm going to end them," Bailey said darkly.

"And I'm going to help," the male devil added pleasantly, snaking an arm around Bailey's waist beneath her folded wings. Something darkened in Dameon's face that couldn't seem to darken any further in Tawny's, and Bailey vaguely wondered what she and this other devil looked like to them.

"We're coming, too," Tawny said demandingly, her grayish-blue eyes locking with the devil's. Bailey looked between the pair, one smirking and the other glaring, and sighed.

"Will you do something for me?" she said softly, looking up at the devil.

He looked surprised that she was making any request at all, but he nodded. "Whatever you wish, my love."

"Will you keep them safe?"

Now he was so surprised that his eyes were about to pop out of his skull. "You're going to allow them to join us?"

"They have just as much of a right to face these men as I do," she said with a shrug, guiltily averting her gaze. She knew she could be ending their lives with this very request, but she could have been ending her own, too. "I'd like to know that they're taken care of."

Without hesitation, he took a step back and fell into a deep, sweeping bow before the woman. "As you wish." But his eyes flicked to her from beneath wisps of dark hair, and the typical mischievousness of a devil shined through. "On one condition."

"What?" she asked in a wary sigh.

"You must let me return you to your full power."

She was dumbfounded, and it showed in her slack jaw and wide eyes. "You can't do that."

His smirk grew. "Oh, but I can." He straightened from his bow and took a slow step toward her, a hand brushing a strand of dark hair from her face with surprising gentleness. "I can do anything."

"But you shouldn't," she said quickly, and she squirmed beneath his gaze.

"Why?" he asked in a whisper, his fingers trailing slowly down her temple and cheek. "Because you're afraid of having that kind of power again? Because you're afraid it'll feel so good you'll never want to turn back to humanity?" Dumbly, she nodded. "Don't be," he murmured in her ear, then moved his hand from her jaw to plunge it into her stomach.

She let out a gurgling cry, blood spilling from her mouth, and began to struggle to free herself from his painful hold on her insides; but he held her tightly all the while, a serene smile on his face. A red glow started in his fingers, a glow so bright that Tawny and Dameon could both see it through Bailey's dark skin.

"What are you doing to her?" Dameon bellowed, teeth bared and much more sharp than they should've been. "Stop it!"

But the devil didn't acknowledge the werewolf or his angry words. He hummed a song like a dirge but smiled like it was a wedding march, watching happily as the glow of Bailey's wide, teary eyes brightened tenfold. The cell phone slipped from her grip to land in the snow, and her wings spread wide, flapping futilely in the air behind her, but the male continued as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and his funereal song continued.

By the time he released Bailey, the snow in every direction was stained with the red of her blood, and the sharp coppery scent of it filled the air. She staggered back a couple of steps, a hand over the gaping hole in her stomach, and the devil watched her with an airy smile.

"There we go," he murmured to her, beginning to slowly lick her blood from his fingers. "All better now."

Bailey watched the wound heal beneath her fingers, closing in a matter of seconds and not even leaving a scar. "What did you...?" She trailed off and gawked at the man, awe in her vibrantly glowing eyes.

"I'm sharing my power with you, my love," he told her, a cruel grin full of sharky teeth stealing away his pleasant smile. "Do you like it?"

A smile grew on her face to match his. "I would kiss you, but you disgust me."

He let loose a deep, throaty laugh and cried joyously, "I wouldn't have it any other way!"

She leaped from the roof of the building to land before Dameon and Tawny, both of whom could only gape at her. "Shall we?" she asked, holding her hands out to them. They glanced at each other, wondering just what they'd gotten themselves in to, then gave the devil their hands.

The male jumped down and put a hand on Bailey's shoulder. "And we're off!" came another cheerful cry, and they were all swept up in a mass of warm red mist.

-?-

"Here we are!" the devil announced ecstatically, spreading his arms wide to incorporate the whole room in his greeting. "Let the killing begin!" The room appeared to be the lower floor of a garage, and they stood upon a scuffed white table covered with sheaves of paper, and their every move sent a pitcher onto its side or a pen rolling off of the table.

Dameon glanced around him, taking in the astonished faces of the police officers and military personnel who sat around the table. All but two of them were male, and all but one of them appeared to be human. A vampire sat off to the side in a chair of his own, fangs peeking over his lip as he gawked at the strangers.

"Which one of you is Lockley?" Bailey snarled, red eyes scanning the room like a predator searching for her desired prey. A squeak of fear escaped the vampire, and she was on him in a heartbeat. A cloud of red miasma swelled about her, and Dameon couldn't tell what she was doing with it.

He spun, knocking a glass to the floor with a shatter, when a door burst open and smacked the wall with the clang of metal on stone. An entire pack of transformed werewolves rushed in, at least ten of them, and chairs fell to the floor as the humans around the table lurched to their feet and drew their guns simultaneously. A creak from above alerted Dameon to the presence of a catwalk overhead, and a pair of fanged women snarled down at him. They were surrounded, but he hadn't expected anything less, and he was sure that there was more to come.

"Have fun, kids," the devil told Dameon and Tawny pleasantly, the wind of his wings tousling their hair as he took flight. "And remember, Uncle Espixilon will be watching you!" He landed on the catwalk above and began to fight the vampire women, but Dameon didn't have time to gawk. One of the werewolves tackled Tawny right off of the table, and a human fired his gun at Dameon to stop him from rushing to the girl's aid.

Dameon dropped to lie flat against the tabletop to avoid the bullet, then rushed at the man who had fired the gun with a snarl. He transformed in mid-air, starting his attack as a hazel-eyed man but ending it as an amber-eyed, over-sized wolf. The man fell through his overturned chair and onto the floor atop the splinters. He tried to press the muzzle of his pistol to Dameon's own muzzle, but the wolf knocked the weapon aside with a heavy paw and didn't hesitate to sink his massive fangs into the man's throat. He heard several shots being fired, likely at him, but none of the bullets ever reached him. The human shrieked and writhed for only a moment, then went still, and Dameon stepped over him to survey the room.

Bailey's red mist had gone wild, spreading to encapsulate the entire conference table and the humans who still surrounded it. The bullets hung in it like chunks of fruit in a Jell-O mold, and the pistols were soon jerked out of it entirely, flung across the room to clatter across the concrete floor. All at once, the men began to scream, blood oozing from every orifice as the mist began to constrict around their bodies. A joyous but evil cackle from Bailey sent a chill down the werewolf's spine, and he quickly turned his attention to more important matters than the playthings of a devil.

Tawny stood yards away from the spectacle, surrounded by wolves roughly the size of SUVs. She kicked and punched and leaped about with a skill he was surprised such a small, sweet girl could possess, but the sight of blood dripping from several gashes and puncture wounds along her arms and legs and torso told him that she wasn't holding her own quite as well as he'd thought. He started toward them at a quick lope, fully intending to hurtle into the mass of furry bodies and begin wreaking havoc, but he never got the chance to.

The entire catwalk suddenly buckled above him, and the metal rained down about him like over-sized hail. He dashed out from beneath the falling debris, but a massive metal bar suddenly slammed against his side and sent him flying with a yelp. He hit the floor and slid, but quickly got to his feet and spun to face his attacker.

He was a large man, heavily muscled with broad shoulders and bulging arms. But his muscles weren't what he was using. The metal bar hung in the air between them, bobbing up and down languidly – the man was a telekinetic.

Dameon barked at him angrily, then rushed toward him. The bar spun in the air, attempting to crush Dameon beneath it, but he dodged it with a quick leap forward. He jumped at the man, preparing to tackle him, but the bar was suddenly beside him, swinging like a baseball bat to send Dameon flying once again.

He struggled to his feet with an aggravated huff. He could taste blood in his mouth, feel it caking the fur beneath his nose, and it was not making him happy. He rushed forward again, moving as quickly as his wolfish legs would carry him. He leaped over the metal bar when it sought to use him as a baseball again, then pounced on the man while simultaneously sinking his fangs into the soft skin of his throat. The metal bar was coming back; he could tell by the whooshing sound behind him. Swiftly, he released the man's neck and rolled to the side like a dog doing a trick. The bar sailed right over him, then fell to the floor with a clatter.

He crawled to his feet and turned to find the human lying dead on the ground, his eyes vacant and half shut. That hadn't taken long at all.

Without pausing to survey the scene as he had before, he started toward where Tawny had been wrestling with the pack of werewolves, kicking himself for having left her alone in the first place. He reached the spot they'd been in, finding Tawny bloody and unconscious in the midst of a circle of werewolves, each of them dangling in the air in a cloud of mist. Their bodies contorted grossly, bones bending in ways they weren't supposed to, and the few living ones whimpered and cried in a way that made Dameon feel immensely sorry for them in spite of the fact that they'd tried to kill his friend.

He sniffed at Tawny's face and nudged her with his bloody nose, but she didn't stir. He wasn't even sure if she was breathing. He shifted back to his human form, finding the room to be harshly cold to his naked body, and reached down to check her pulse. A smooth, pale white hand caught his wrist before he could detect a pulse, however, and pulled his hand away from Tawny's throat. Bailey smiled down at him, looking more human than devil, and she pulled him to his feet.

"There's no need to worry about her," she told him cheerfully. "She's perfectly fine." A hand tangled in his hair, and she pulled his face to hers, kissing him deeply. It came as a bit of a shock – shouldn't they have been fighting or taking care of Tawny or something? – but he'd never been one to contradict Bailey. He returned the kiss just as passionately as she'd given it, an arm slipping around her waist to pull her body closer. Her flannel shirt was rough against his skin, but he – wait, what? Shirt? Flannel?

He'd just begun to pull back when a knife was lodged into his back, sliding neatly in between a pair of ribs. Blood spilled from his mouth, a sharp, unrelenting pain coursing through his body, and the woman cocked an eyebrow at him.

"Are you really that stupid?" she asked in a voice that wasn't Bailey's as her body shifted into one that was much thicker and shorter than the one he knew. "Do you never watch movies? This exact thing happens all the time." He fell to his knees and reached back, his arm stretching to reach the knife, but he just couldn't seem to grip it. She sighed, hands on hips that were obviously wider than Bailey's, and stared down at him with judging brown eyes. "What an idiot." She knocked him onto his side with a light nudge of her foot, then turned and walked away.

Blackness consumed him.

-?-

"Dameon!" Bailey cried, sprinting to his side and slicing the strange woman who had stolen her face to pieces as she passed her. She fell to her knees beside the man and quickly pulled the knife from his back. She discovered that it was a rather ornate black dagger, and some twisted part of her wondered if she should keep it, but she soon tossed it aside and pulled Dameon onto her lap. "Dameon," she said again, squeezing his face in an attempt to rouse him. "Dameon!" She slapped him now – hard – but he didn't stir. Her eyes flicked to Tawny lying only feet away, and she wondered if she shared the same fate. Was her chest moving? Was she breathing?

"You!" she bellowed, lowering Dameon to the floor and thrusting an arm out to point at the other devil. "You let this happen!" She lurched to her feet, shoulders rising and falling rapidly with each labored breath. It was hard to breathe when she was this angry, hard to function with so much unfamiliar power flowing through her body.

The devil stopped circling the room and landed on the floor before her, smiling carelessly. "Relax, my love," he told her. "I was just experimenting."

"Don't call me that!" she shrieked in a voice that was much deeper, much more monstrous, than it should have been. She appeared in front of him suddenly, lashing out with a hard punch that knocked him clear across the large garage. But he flipped in the air, slowing his momentum with a flap of his wings, then landed carefully on the cool cement floor, laughing all the while.

"Relax, my love," he said again, a mischievous glow to his red eyes. "You had no need for them, anyway." Again, she appeared in front of him, but this time, he was prepared to block her punch and the swift kick that followed.

"Why did you let this happen?" she snarled, putting her hands firmly on his shoulders and slamming him back into the wall that was only inches away. The cement cracked beneath the collision, but the devil only laughed. "You promised me that you would help them if I let you do this to me!" Her shoulders still rose and fell with each laborious breath, and she was beginning to feel lightheaded beneath her own rage, heavy and merciless like a boulder sent to crush her.

"I did, indeed," he admitted, smirking, as he gently rested his large hands atop hers on his shoulders. "But I never intended to let you revert to your previous state. When I'm done with you," he began in a dreamy sigh, a hand gently stroking her cheek, "you won't care that I didn't obey our agreement. You won't care that your friends are dead."

She let out a raspy cry as his hand began to glow against her cheek, searing her flesh with its growing heat. "Stop," she pleaded, trying to push herself away though he maintained a tight grip on her forearm, keeping her hand on his shoulder. "Please, don't do this." There was fear in her eyes, and it made him giggle with joy.

"Don't worry, my love," he told her in a whisper, half taunting and half loving. He plunged his glowing fingers into the side of her throat, blood spurting to accompany her shriek of pain. "This will only hurt for a second, then you'll be our father's daughter once more."