For the Hopeless

Bailey's shriek of pain faded in a sudden, gurgling cough. The devil's power flowed into her, pulsing through her neck like the powerful waves of an orgasm. The raw energy lulled her for a moment, threatened to take her in. Why would anyone deny this power, especially someone who'd been longing for it for so long? Why would anyone pass up this chance to become something to be feared and adored? To be a devil was to be feared and adored, after all, and she hadn't been a real devil for a long, long time. Why had she been fighting this? What was the point of being good when all of this power awaited her for being bad?

A quiet moan escaped her, a wordless plea for more, and the devil let loose an excited cackle. "I knew you would like it!" he cried, and the white-hot energy burning through her veins increased tenfold. She screamed again, but this time, it was a cry of joy instead of pain. She writhed against the wall, her nails digging ineffectually into the cracked cement. It felt so much better when she stopped fighting it...

"Any minute now, Bailey girl," he whispered in her ear, breath hot and reeking of sulfur. "Any minute now, you'll come back to us. Father will be so proud!"

These words put a snag in her acceptance like a rusty nail catching a silk scarf, and the pain returned with a searing heat like lava flowing through her body. She grunted in agony, but through her pain, she realized with horror what was happening to her. She was becoming like him, like every devil before him and beside him. She was becoming everything she'd been fighting for the past few decades.

The power felt good, yes, amazing, even, but was it worth it? She would be strong and imposing, powerful and tyrannical, but what good would that do her? She was never meant to be that way. She was never meant to be what nature had dictated. She had friends, now, some sort of family – people to love and protect. She had a world to save – race upon race to rescue from the humans. To give in now would be to give up on everything she'd won through her anti-devil lifestyle. To give in now would mean the destruction of the Novie who could not protect themselves.

And she'd never been one to give in.

A hard palm to the chest sent the devil sailing backward through the air, his fingers tearing from her neck to elicit a ragged cry from her raw, dry throat. Blood gushed from the fresh, gaping holes, and she fell to her knees on the floor as the devil's shoulder slammed into the cement several yards away. He slid until his body collided with that of a dead human male, and he sneered down at the corpse for a moment before turning his disdainful gaze to her.

"What is it you're trying to cling to in this world of yours?" he asked harshly as he got to his feet. "What is it that makes you reject me so?" His arm hung limply at his side, his shoulder broken or dislocated – she wasn't sure which – where it had hit the floor. Shouldn't it have been healing, though? She stared at it for a moment, but nothing changed. Had he lent so much of his power to her that he could no longer heal his own wounds? She frowned. His dedication to her was flattering; his ignorance of her true character was not.

"I'm not meant to be like you," she told him confidently, crawling her way to her feet with the help of the wall. She clamped a hand over the blood-spewing holes in her throat, and she could feel them slowly closing against her fingers. "I'm not my father's daughter; I don't think I was ever supposed to be."

"Nonsense!" he shouted, manic laughter adding a sharp edge to his voice. "You're a devil, and all devils are meant to be as I am."

She shook her head. "Not me," she told him, gently prodding her injuries to find them all fully healed. She straightened, her stance becoming more rigid, more imposing, her body positively oozing power as she scowled down at him. "Now, under different circumstances, I would have given you the choice to leave my life forever, but after that stunt you pulled, I have no choice but to kill you." Her tone was grim, her expression grimmer. He'd helped her so much before now; shouldn't that have meant something? But it couldn't mean anything. Not after he'd tried to take the precious gift that was her own sanity from her.

"Kill me?" He cackled again, a hint of hysteria hardening his tone. "You, the weak not-devil, intend to kill me?" He threw his head back and let loose another peal of bellowing laughter. Her eyes darted past him to where Tawny and Dameon lay together on the floor. She was so sure that they were dead – but had one of them just twitched? "How absurd!" the devil went on, slapping his thigh with his functioning hand to show her just how hilariously absurd all of this was to him.

"Not really," she said, smiling coldly at him as a ball of red mist formed to hover over the upturned palm of her hand. "Not when you think about it."

His smile faltered as he finally seemed to realize his fate. "This can't happen," he said so surely, so matter-of-factly, that she almost burst into laughter. "You can't kill me. I was studying you. I was going to save you. I was going to make you mine!"

"Then you should've gotten to know me better before enacting this half-cooked scheme of yours," she told him, icy smile still in place. "I'm too willful to be turned from my goals so easily." She rushed forward with the disturbing quickness of her race, that ball of red still cupped in her palm and now hurtling toward the devil's bare stomach.

But he caught her wrist and held it so tightly she swore it was bound to snap at any moment, leaning close to send his sulfur breath wafting over her face when he hissed, "I won't go down without a fight." And he tossed her across the room by that single arm, her body crashing into the bent and twisted remains of the catwalk. The mist vanished from her hand, all thought of it gone from her mind. Now, there was only the throbbing pain of her back, cut and bruising from the collision.

"Fight all you want," she growled through gritted teeth, pushing herself to her feet. A soft tingling wormed its way through her back, erasing the pain of her fresh wounds until she felt nothing. "But you won't be leaving here alive." Emboldened by the cessation of pain, strengthened by her own resolve, she rushed forward with all the speed and grace of her species.

The devil met her halfway with that same agility, catching her by her wrists when she reached for him, but she wouldn't let him use the same trick twice. She vanished from before him in a burst of warm, red mist, then engulfed him from behind in a rush of crimson heat. It was her body in the form of billions of red particles, searing and braising and tearing at his flesh, and it was an experience she hadn't had for decades. She was everywhere all at once; the sensation of boiling flesh bubbling against her, the sound of his shrieks of pain, the smell of burning flesh – all of it hit her over and over again, registering in her mind as a billion different incidences at ten, twenty, thirty times the strength. Logically, it should have been a painful experience; but in reality, it was like reaching one climax after another, the waves of an orgasm rippling through her nonstop. She wanted to moan, but she wasn't sure she had a mouth at this point, so she continued her assault in silence.

"Off, you demented shrew!" the devil cried in an impossibly deep snarl, a snarl so low that it was barely within human hearing. "Get. Off!" He threw her from his back with an explosion of his own raw power, and as it all sailed backward, the millions of particles of her body combined into one. She managed to flip in the air to land on her feet on the cement, panting from the strain of the rapid transformation.

She rushed forward once more, striking at his chest with an open palm. He knocked her hand aside with his forearm and spun, kicking out at her with a leg coated in bubbling red flesh. She blocked with ease, though it was hard enough to snap a normal human's arm in half and send them flying, and went for his face with another open-palmed blow. He tried to block it, but she'd put all of her strength behind it. His arm snapped with a disturbingly loud crack, and he was sent sprawling across the concrete, a loud growl of pain echoing off of the walls around them.

That growl was what drove her on; his pain was what coaxed her out of her goody-goody shell and tugged her across that line between humanity and insanity. She fell on him like a tiger falling on its prey, tearing into his throat with her over-sized fangs as her wings spread wide behind her to block the fluorescent light from above.

His blood was warm, fiery – it reminded her of hot, hot cinnamon, pleasantly searing her tongue and her esophagus as she swallowed. She ripped open his jugular and enjoyed the cinnamon for a moment, then she moved on, chewing through the rest of his neck like it was nothing more than a delicious apple danish. Steam began to rise from her mist-covered hands, resting on his chest, and she could feel the skin beginning to bubble beneath her fingers. He screamed, and she let out a soft purr of a moan.

His arms lashed out, fingers reaching for her own bared throat, but he didn't make it far. Her mist, all-powerful now that it was fueled by his own lent strength, pinned his arms down at the wrist like a pair of ever-moving red shackles, and no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn't free himself. Even his own miasma – what little he had left – tearing at the makeshift chains did nothing to move them. Again, he screamed, and again, she moaned.

"I told you that you wouldn't be leaving here alive," she told him as she leaned back, blood creating a sticky trail between her chin and his until she sat fully upright and it snapped, now dangling to slowly drip onto his chest. "You never should have doubted me."

He looked up at her with wide eyes, the fearful expression on his face one that she would never have expected a devil of his caliber to wear. The red glow to his irises was nothing compared to the horrific effulgence of hers. This isn't how it was supposed to end, he mouthed, as she'd already severed his vocal cords. This isn't what was supposed to happen.

"Silly boy," she whispered, leaning close until the warm stickiness of her lips was flush against his ear. "This is exactly how it was supposed to end." She plunged a mist-engulfed hand through what remained of his throat, fully separating his head from the rest of his sizzling body. His arms and lips gave one final twitch, then he was still.

She stood, licking the remnants of his blood and seared skin from her fingers, and watched with half-hooded eyes as the devil's own power ate him from the inside out. The boiling of flesh that she had caused was nothing in comparison to this. By the time the process was complete, the air reeking of burnt flesh, the devil's head and body were two separate piles of crimson-and-pink goo on the floor, and all that remained intact was his heart, resting in the midst of the larger puddle.

She picked it up with a single bloodied hand and held it at eye level, carefully studying it. "I've always wondered why this happened," she said to the two bodies she felt approaching at her back. "Why their hearts and nothing else?"

"Because living devil's eat the hearts of the dead?" Tawny suggested in her soft voice, and a thrill of joy ran through Bailey. She was alive. She was really alive.

"That just explains what we do with them," she said in a thoughtful tone, none of her happiness showing through her contemplation, "not why they stay behind."

"Are you all right?" It was Dameon's voice now, hesitant and husky, and she couldn't help smiling to herself.

Finally, she turned to face them, her smile still in place and the heart still in her hand. "Very," she answered. "Much better than the two of you." Her mist engulfed them both, swallowing their bodies whole it seemed, but it vanished just as they'd begun to cry out. "There. That should do it."

Dameon reached back to feel his back where he had been stabbed, and a look of shock swept across his scruffy face. "It's gone," he gasped. "I didn't know you were able to heal." Tawny nodded her agreement, eyes wide in awe.

"I've never had the strength to before," Bailey admitted with a shrug, her voice calm though her smile faltered. "I left all of this behind a long time ago." Her eyes flicked to the heart, casting a deep crimson glow across it, and she smirked to herself. "But I'm not making that mistake again." She bit into the heart, her massive fangs sliding almost all the way through to the other side. As she gulped the spicy blood down, she sent a wave of miasma across the room, and it swallowed up every single body that still littered the floor. They became piles of blood and melted flesh and bones and whole organs, nothing like the neat mass the devil's body had become when it had self-destructed.

"Bailey, what do you...what do you mean by that?" Tawny asked hesitantly as her eyes followed the spreading destruction of the mist.

"Just what it sounds like," Bailey responded once she'd withdrawn her teeth from the heart, which now sat bloodless upon her palm. "I'm not losing this power again." She tossed the drained heart aside, and the mist began to scoop up puddles of blood at her command like fiery helping hands.

"You don't mean..." But Tawny's whisper died away, her eyes widening and her pink lips parting in a gasp.

"I'm going to do what I should've done to begin with," Bailey said cheerfully, a wicked grin spreading over her face as she watched her mist do its job. Bailey was here was soon scrawled across the wall nearest to them in the blood of the many that had died there that day, and she let out a soft, demonic chuckle.

"What are you talking about?" Dameon asked, eying the woman skeptically. He wasn't frightened, but it was obvious that he didn't like what was happening one bit. It was almost disappointing, though Bailey's elation wouldn't be crushed so soon.

"Well, my dear friends, lovers, comrades," Bailey said in that overly pleasant tone, throwing her arms around their shoulders and continuing to grin up at her name scrolled upon the wall, "I'm waging war with the humans now – real war. Not a single supporter of the humans will be living through the night!" She threw her head back and let loose a maniacal cackle, completely unaware of how like a devil she was acting. "And by the end of it all, I'll be more powerful than any devil in the fiery depths of Hell. I'll be more powerful than Satan himself!"

"Bailey," Tawny whispered, obviously frightened.

"Are you sure this is such a good idea?" Dameon asked, expression tight but still unafraid.

Bailey gave the naked man a wry smile. "If I get my evil power from noble acts, why wouldn't it be?" Her arms slid from around the pair, and she started toward the door with a very uncharacteristic skip to her step. "Come, now, my fellow Guardians. We've got some humans to fight." And I've got some power to gain.

The thought made Tawny shudder and wrap her arms around herself in a tight hug, but Bailey paid no mind. As long as Tawny's footsteps accompanied Dameon's toward the door, she was happy. Hell, even if her footsteps didn't follow, she was happy.

Nothing could stop her now. Not even the people she loved.