Faded

Her eyes could chill the marrow of your bones with one long, glacial glare.
Solid orbs of silvery spite. Freezing you over from the inside out with their steely gleam and a flash of the malice that lurked within the depths beyond her dark pupils. The pale, creased flesh of her aged face sank in below the sockets of her eyes and the bones of her cheeks, giving her a scarce appearance, her nose small yet widened at the nostrils. She could illicit more than just shivers, more than just a shortening of shaky breath with the cruel bend to her ashen brow, which arched with an air that may as well have been a dare to any to approach. Yet the woman's mouth was a contrast to the dreadful gauntness of her face. Deceitful in nature with lips that appeared oddly more youthful than anything else about this decrepit madam; evenly shaped, supple, and a pink blooming in a land of faded color. How they did foil with a face grisly with the wear of time's relentless fingers.
But, unknown to most, they were lips that smiled around a soft, gravelly voice and wicked words that betrayed any pre-conceived thoughts and impressions on her character.
This was a vile woman. Simply put; and with a heart darker than the most ruthless of murderers. And although she never misled most with a pretense of being the commonly sweet, elderly lady, it was never suspected that she treaded in the shadiest of shadows. In fact, she could be called a shadow herself, for there was no sliver of good light to be found in her.
She was as old as Evil. She was the mother, the sister; the lesser half of Sin.
Laugh in the face of the boogeyman now, as you've just met his superior. This was the woman whose footsteps were the very bumps made in the night. This was Lillith de Valen, more than just a nightmare incarnate.
And Lillith had never been just a Halloween haunt.
~~

Jonathan Bentley. Twenty-one years of age. Dead.
Yet his body still roamed. It roamed the cities and it roamed the towns; dark hair brushed back and tucked beneath an old, burgundy baseball cap. It was glimpsed often as it roamed, never seen long enough for it to be considered anything else than just a glimpse; and when it was seen, it was with a small upward tilt to the lips - possibly meant to be a smile - that seemed to be more of a grimace. There was a somber cast to the eyes; eyes that flitted from one spot or object to another, as if in search but finding only failure.
The face of the wandering body was considered attractive once upon a time. But the aura projected by the walking corpse held a gloom that repelled instead. The look in those fleeting, gloomy eyes had a repressed, eerie air that kept most away.
When he, the body, roamed, it was generally in the night. He walked roads in the dark where cars passed by, the headlights illuminating the faded clothes he wore - those baggy jeans that looked more white than light blue. The thin material of the crimson sweatshirt that billowed around his slight body sometimes in strong winds.
White, red, and more white is what the passengers in the cars would see, his ghostly skin and worn clothes blurred together with the blackness of the night as a backdrop as they sped past.
While his feet, the worn soles of the soiled converses barely holding onto the rest of the shoe, continued to entreat dust to rise as he steadily walked along.
It wasn't by his own will that he forever trotted down darkened highways and through lively cities. But he never fought to stop, either. Even though he suffered, suffered indeed, through this glum fate by pure force. He, or rather it, knew this was not punishment. This was enslavement; but he truly didn't have the strength to fight the hold had on him.
Or rather, it.
This came with the territory of the soulless (of being soulless). All the power of the self is gone - all will, thought, emotion is seceded into the light that is death with the life that possessed it; and eternally out of reach from the shell left behind.
And so, the dead are notoriously powerless. Vulnerable to the desires of the corrupted living. As was poor Jonathan's body.
Now, in this very moment, the wind blows in the quiet of night only days before that holiday which feeds on the horrors of the world: Halloween. Jonathan's body, risen just hours before at the reddened sky of dusk as daylight died again, strides down sidewalks alongside those who still breathed and whose hearts still kept a rhythm.
In other places, his body would have seemed very out of place amoung others, as worn and pale as it appeared. But in a city....
It's all loud around him, but he doesn't notice. Car horns, rumbling engines, the squealing of tires around street corners, and noisy people with obnoxious company that walked on by; the usual soundtrack of a city. But his ears may as well have been deaf.
It is bright, too. Light spilling from stores with open display windows, still open if but for a few more hours; restaurants with a multitude of candlelit tables seating couples or families and friends; electronic signs with flashing, neon lights, hanging from cement and brick walls; firelight from the trash bins in varying dark alleys being used for warmth by the homeless and other unfortunates.
But his eyes stayed forward, set on a point in the distance. His focus was unbreakable tonight.
Mmm...I can smell her. A voice said from the useless organ locked inside his skull. It couldn't have been his own. The soulless have no thoughts.
Faster, my Jonathan. You must go faster. Her end is soon...
His footsteps hasten at the beckoning.
~~
She would be nameless by midnight. Just another one lost to this world.
But for now, her name was Erica. Erica Faulkner.
Brown, almond-shaped eyes, with hair as black as an ocean's depths.
She was young. She wanted to live. At eighteen, the world was hers to rule and she'd believed for a long time that nothing would stop her. Erica believed that the young truly were invincible, life would be theirs forever. And this may have been true - just not for her.
Tonight, she was to die. Tonight, Erica was to become another of the world's tragically short-lived, because this was how it was meant to end for her all along. The only thing free of the will of fate was whose hands, when she takes her final, shaky breath, would her soul fall into.
~~
Laughter echoed through the air with a haunting resonance. If sound could be seen, the music of these four young people's joy would've been born with a lovely, pink hue, and died in a somber, depressing blue as it disappeared into the night. It was time. Hours had passed after the merry-making of Erica's group as they'd made their way down the street.
Since then, screams had crept their way from the depths of a few people’s cores. Many saddened eyes were robbed of the moisture that sat, ready for the taking, on the rims of their eyelids. Flashing red and blue lights hit the walls of the buildings that stood around the
scene of Erica's demise.
It was a very tragic accident that had lead to her dying form being taken from the street where she'd lain broken, to the hospital where she was declared irreparable and death bound, and to the small, white room with a bed shrouded by a thin, blue curtain, where she now breaths air upon the precipice of the End...and stares up at a man she's never seen before in her short time 'round.
He stares back, though, as he stands at that bed by her side. His faded green eyes boring into the fading color of her own. Her breath is coming shorter, her chest heaving to maintain what life her body struggles to keep, but her eyes stay steady with his deadened ones.
Something in her knew what he was here for, and that same something made her feel the need to fight. It was futile but this was her last stand. Everything she'd hoped for had been stripped away in a matter of seconds - how dare this...thing, ask for more.
She put her all; her ferocity, her anger, her pain, her devastation, into the glare as her last breath approached. And all he did was lean forward; lean in so close that she could smell the rottening that didn't show, could smell the cold of him while his face hovered above hers as if for a kiss, as she exhaled breath for the final time...
and he sucked it in.
Jonathan's body then leans up afterwards, and exits the room, and later, the hospital. He begins his way back into the dark.
But he is not alone. As Jonathan begins again his trek lead by the piercing, disembodied voice's call, his footfalls are twined. Prints in the dust of highway and interstate shoulders, the only evidence of this being who was dead yet alive, were joined with another pair. An unwelcome pair.
Gabriel's. The very same Gabriel who collected the spirits of those deceased.
He trudged behind the walking body, the air shimmering around his human vessel with a fury only attainable by those deemed Devine.