A Hand in Hell

The throbbing in my head and body ebbed just a bit as I staggered out of the early afternoon sun and into the dimly lit interior of Furboy's bar. The man himself — the fuck was his name again? — was at his post behind the counter, chatting with the two lonely patrons off to one side, but when the door swung shut with a heavy thud he must've heard a thousand times before, he turned to me, and his eyes grew wide.

"Your horns," he said, nearly in awe. "And your hair."

I stumbled to the bar, my sweaty, blood-stickied palms smacking onto the countertop as I came to rest against it. "Do you know where she is?" I rasped, even as a thick strand of the snow-white hair he was so fascinated by fell into my face.

"Who?" he asked, eyes still gliding along my curling horns as he frowned. "What happened to you?"

I let out a soft snarl and squeezed my eyes shut. Worn from the battle as I was — what had even happened? I couldn't completely remember — it took some serious concentration to finish transitioning back into my human form, my horns retreating into my head with the feeling of a snake slithering into my skull and my white hair returning to its platinum blonde hue. I opened my eyes, and I was pleased to find that his attention was on my sunglasses and not my scalp.

"The human, you daft-ass fuck," I growled, slamming my palms down again, this time with purpose. "Lauren. Where is she?"

His eyes widened even as his brows furrowed in anger. "How the hell am I supposed to know? I don't keep track of your pets."

My hand darted across the counter before I could stop it, and I jerked him toward me with a fist tightly balled in his shirtfront. "You've been nothing but useless since this business with the Council started. If you want me to turn you back to normal, you pathetic sack of slug shit, you need to hold up your end of the bargain in some fucking way." I pulled him closer, dragging his body across the bar until his furry face was inches from my own. "I know you know something. You always do."

"All right, fine!" he shouted, seemingly exasperated, but I could smell the fear oozing through his mane. "She came in here earlier, all out of breath. Asked me what she could do to escape a demon." I dropped him back behind the counter, and he cleared his throat as he fixed the front of his shirt and settled back in to his post.

"And what did you tell her?" I urged him, grasping the edge of the counter in a white-knuckled grip.

"I told her the truth, that there's no way to escape a demon once its caught your scent, especially in your case." He rolled his eyes. "She went on about wanting to get away from the Council, wanting to go back to her family, blah, blah, blah, but my answer was the same, and she still went on and on and on. I finally gave her the address of a warehouse a couple of my old buddies have been stationed at as of late, professionals in the field of disappearing." He shrugged, hands resting on the counter, and his eyes followed his other patrons as they left the bar, the door swinging shut with that familiar thump behind them. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but they've probably offed her by now. They're no demons, but —"

"What?!" I shrieked, and my fingers finally broke through the bar, tearing out a hefty chunk of the counter. I clenched it tightly in my hands as I bared my teeth at him, but he wasn't cowering like he should've been. "What exactly did you send her to? What the fuck is wrong with you?!"

"They're just vampires," he said, averting his gaze uncomfortably. "They were staking out the area for a local coven that's been in need of a new hideout, and I thought they might need a nice meal." He met my eyes again, and my body grew so hot that I felt like I was taking an enraged nap on the sun. "I mean, technically, I did help her out with her problem. The only way to escape a demon is to die before they sink their claws into you."

I chucked the chunk of bar at his head on impulse, but he ducked it easily, and the scent of my favorite vice filled the air along with a cacophony of shattering bottles. "I should kill you myself, you piece of trash! Right here, right now!"

"You don't have time if you want any chance of recovering her alive," he said quickly. "They're probably saving some for tonight. I doubt they would kill her right off the bat."

"Where are they?" I ground out through gritted teeth.

"509 Railway Street. Old abandoned place in the bad part of town." He smiled sardonically. "Good luck."

Lying across the bar, I reached under the counter and pulled out the half-empty bottle of Jose Cuervo he always saved for me, then I turned and started toward the door, my limp long gone now that I had my anger back. "Well, you'd better find some vampires to ship yourself off to in the next half hour, because there's a demon who wants to sink her claws into your worthless hide, and I hear she's pretty fucking hard to outrun."

He laughed heartily, but said nothing else, and, already tearing the lid from the bottle, I burst into the sunlight with an odd feeling settling into the pit of my stomach.

Furboy never purposely antagonized me like this. And he certainly never laughed about it to my face.

Something stank here.

-?-

I slammed the door so hard that the car shook for several seconds afterward, and I struggled to reign myself in as I walked up the cracked, overgrown sidewalk that lead to the building. It was smaller than I'd expected, barely big enough to be considered a warehouse, and that did nothing to ease the tension that had built up in my every muscle. I could already feel that something was wrong here, something more than the drugs and the violence that flitted freely through this end of town, more than the vampires Furboy had told me would be in this place.

My eyes were fixed on the rusty metal door set into the crumbling brick at the front of the building, half hidden by a thick bush, and I knew I was walking into a trap. The bartender's laugh echoed through my mind, more sinister than I remembered. It would be demons. It would always be demons. And that would never slow me down.

Lauren…

I took a final, hearty pull from the bottle of tequila, then tossed the empty container aside to thunk heavily in the grass and wiped hastily at my alcohol-basted lips. I shoved the branches of the bush aside, tightly gripped the door handle, and pulled the door open with enough force to elicit a shriek of pain from the old hinges.

"Vera!" She caught my eye the moment I passed through the door — straining against the shimmering, ethereal chains that kept her kneeling on the cold concrete floor, struggling to get free from their deep purple grasp — struggling to get to me, though she'd run away only hours ago.

I left the door hanging from its bent hinges and rushed to her side, forgetting to take a look around me, forgetting to remember the danger that I knew lurked here. "Lauren!" I cried, falling to my knees a foot from her and sliding the rest of the way on bare skin. I tore at her bonds, but they only seared my hands, unmoving no matter how hard I pulled — the work of a demon.

"Odd," came a familiar drawl from behind me, and I spun on heel and bended knee to bare my teeth at the source, just as my gut demanded. It was the leader, of course, perched tall and proud atop a stack of dusty, moldy old boxes with one leg crossed over the other, and he looked legitimately perplexed. "I never expected you to become so attached to the human, certainly not in such a short time. How long has it been? Two days? Three? It's been a matter of hours, and yet…" He trailed off, his crimson eyes lingering on mine through the lenses of my sunglasses, and my resolve faltered.

He was right. He was completely, totally, undeniably fucking right. That silly girl and I had been together for 72 hours at the absolute most, but here I was, my palms still raw from tugging at chains I'd known were made of pure, unaltered energy, staring down a man who had already nearly killed me once — but no, wait. He hadn't almost killed me that day. It had been my own fault, the fault of my unreasonable desire to save her.

The jingle of the bell on her collar echoed through my mind, the past mingling with the present as she raged against her confines and the bell raged with her. She'd put it back on — of her own accord. And she wore it now — of her own accord. She'd fled from me in fear, she'd feared me from the start, yet she still wore that symbol of possession that I'd placed upon her — all of her own accord.

What were we doing? What was wrong with us? What was wrong with me?

"Vera, you need to go!" Lauren cried, and I turned toward her once again. A bruise was forming on her cheek, I noticed, and the heat of anger began to bleed through my self-deprecating confusion. "It's not just him!"

A loud thud echoed through the empty warehouse, and the leader now stood at his full height at the base of the stack of boxes, brushing dust from his backside with an eerie smile upon his lips. "She's right, you know, and my companions aren't the vampires from that blindingly obvious story I helped the flea-ridden bartender to cook up for you." A man and a woman appeared from thin air to flank him, standing like soldiers with their chests puffed out and their hands behind their backs. They stared at me with blank faces and empty eyes, lacking the personality and passion that tended to drive my kind, and I felt a growl tickling at the back of my throat. "Zerakeina and Skorlacht," the leader announced, almost sounding…proud. The names tugged at a vague memory, tucked away at the very back of my mind, but the mere fact that I knew of them was enough to set my teeth on edge.

He chuckled. "You know them, I suppose? You've spent quite a bit of time on the surface, away from your kind, but even you can't be oblivious to these two." He spread his arms wide, as if to Vanna White the pair as they stood still behind him. "My children, as much as a demon can be a child. I've raised them as blank slates, burning away every fear, every flaw, every feeling. They have no blood lust, but a desire to kill. They do as I ask, and they do it cleanly, quickly, perfectly." His proud smile grew into an unabashed grin, and he laughed giddily. "You may have beaten the others, but I'm afraid you won't make it out of this battle alive."

"I thought you wanted me alive," I said, more annoyed than anything, and I absently took Lauren's hand in mine when she let out a worried whimper. She'd run from me, fled in fear, but now, she held my hand in a death grip, and I marveled at human fickleness — or was it simply the love that conquered all, even fear, in the end?

His lower lip jutted out in a feigned pout. "I regret to inform you that your services are no longer needed. You've given me all the entertainment you have to offer, and your contract will now be terminated."

A sudden hand at my back knocked me to the floor, leaving me sprawled on my front with a mouthful of stale dust. I coughed and pushed myself to my hands and knees, twisting to see the red-skinned demon that grinned at me with a saber-toothed cat's fangs from Lauren's side. His muscled arm slipped around her shoulders, and he seemed oblivious to her desperate struggle to escape as she strained harder against her ethereal bonds. I bared my own teeth at him, the pathetic teeth of a human, but his horns gave me pause. They extended nearly a foot upward from the top of his skull, a pair of gently curving arches shining bone white in the late day's light streaming through the tall windows that lined the walls. They were nothing compared to mine, but they hinted at a greater power than what I'd faced as of late.

And I was sure his strength hadn't been tainted by mingling with humans for decades, as mine had.

"Oh, don't worry about him," the leader went on in his usual drawl. "He's only here to clean up the mess."

The singeing tingle of warning crept up my spine, and I spun around just in time to take a fist to the jaw. I slammed into the concrete and slid through the dust once more, and before I could catch myself, before I could even stop my slow journey across the floor, I felt a weight on my front.

The female demon's knees dug into the floor, kicking up an even bigger cloud of dust than my body alone had as her weight forced me to a stop. One hand gripped my throat while the other landed one blow to my cheek, then another, and another. My head spun, bashing into the floor time and time again, and blood rose to create a near-toxic mix with the alcohol that still lingered on my tongue. Was she just going to punch me to death? Was this all that Daddy Dearest had in mind for his precious psycho-killer children?

Pathetic.

I caught her fist before she could land the fourth punch, her clenched fist landing against my palm with a loud smack, and I forced her onto her back with a shove of my body and of my mind. I landed on top of her, her fist still clutched tightly in mine, and her free hand almost instantly found my stomach. The blow knocked the air from my lungs, but I wouldn't be stopped, not now. I whipped my head back and forward again, and my forehead throbbed as her nose cracked and gave way beneath the force of my skull. I had to give her credit, though. She didn't make a sound, not even when I headbutted her a second time and shattered the cheek bone to one side of her nose.

Blood spattered across my face as I leaned back, and I could feel its sticky heat smeared across my forehead already. I was just starting to laugh when the woman's head came up and slammed into mine, hard enough to both crush my nose and set my head spinning once again. It was child's play for her to knock me off of her and regain the upper hand, and I wasn't proud of it.

My mind steadied as the ground was pulled out from under me, my feet dangling a foot above the floor as the demon lifted me into the air by my throat. Her gaze was steady, empty. It hadn't changed since I'd seen her at Daddy's side, not even now that blood gushed from her crooked nose.

I tried to laugh around her grip, but it came out as a sad wheeze. "You're one bad bitch, aren't you?" Her hold abruptly tightened, going from zero to trachea-crushing in a split second, and something like a squawk burst from my mouth. Oh, hell no. I directed my mana down my arm with enough force to send blood-red sparks dripping from my fingertips and slammed my palm into her forehead hard enough to knock her head backward, my fingers taking her skull in the same death grip she had on my throat, tangling in her tightly bound hair with purpose.

My fingers glowed with a pale, pinkish light as I let loose every ounce of the power I'd unraveled and drawn from my core, and finally, she made a sound — a low grunt, just the barest hint of pain present, but plenty enough for me. Her fingers seized, and I slipped from her grip to land neatly on my feet, though I didn't allow my hold on her skull to loosen even a hair. Ceaselessly, I urged the energy through every inch of neural tissue, every synapse, every fiber of her mental being that I could possibly reach. Steam began to rise from the top of her head as my fierce, fiery grip burned its way into her skin.

Color me surprised when a clenched fist lashed out and caught me full force in the stomach, right below the ribs and into the diaphragm with perfect accuracy. Pain bounded through me; I couldn't catch my breath. My hand fell from her head as I fought for air, the energy in my fist dissipating, but she didn't pause. Razor sharp claws tore into my middle with near-surgical precision, piercing my flesh in a head-on attack, and her fingers wrapped slowly, carefully, almost gently, around something on the inside.

A jerk of her arm. Pain shrieked through me. The start of a scream made it out of my mouth before I could grit my teeth against it.

I staggered back a step, grunting out my agony as I clamped a hand over the hole in my abdomen gushing blood. She held it out before me, dangling in front of my face, an air of triumph dancing around her though her expression never changed — my liver, my gallbladder hanging from it, all of it still dripping blood and mysterious fluids.

"My liver?" I tried to say, but there was only a raspy squeak where my voice had once been. I dropped to my knees and held my hand tighter over the wound, but nothing could be done to staunch the blood that swelled around my fingers. Desperately, I tried to focus my energy into forming a new one, but my mind was swirling helplessly, caught up in the blood loss and the pain and the odd emptiness within me.

I'd dealt with organ damage before. I'd never dealt with complete organ removal.

"You've become quite the drinker these days, he tells me," the woman said, and I forced my eyes to focus on her face as she crouched before me. Her voice was smooth, calm, comforting. If my liver hadn't been lying across her knee half forgotten, I might have let its rich tendrils take hold of me. "I've always wanted to see the failing liver of an alcoholic."

"I'm not an alcoholic." But there was no vigor behind it, and I felt myself easing into the abyss, my vision dimming until she was all that I saw, all tanned skin and black hair. Her thin, blood-reddened fingers drifted through the air toward me, and I didn't fight her as she pulled my sunglasses carefully from my face. Out here, in the land beyond my tinted lenses, the sun was brighter, the blood redder, the glow of her eyes so much more alluring.

"You've been so dulled by this human land that you don't even have the will to fight anymore," she went on gently. "You've become just like them — weak, self-pitying, reliant on unhealthy substances and even unhealthier activities. You were feared once, years ago, in the Underworld. You were a force to be reckoned with. But what are you now, Verapaini?" My vision darkened further, and I could barely make out the outline of her figure, barely feel the warmth of her bloodied fingers sliding along my cheek. "What are you but an alcohol-dependent bully who fears her own demonic form?"

A figure suddenly appeared beside hers, and a massive hand to the cheek launched me into the air and sent me sailing across the room. My back bounced off of an old metal shelving unit with a clang, and I could barely muster a grunt as my body met the dusty floor once more. As I lay there on the cold concrete, my entire body throbbing, my vision all but black, bile rising with blood to clog my throat, I couldn't help but wonder in my own vague way — was she right?

I tried to push myself to my knees, but I collapsed after rising an inch off of the floor. A presence moved toward me, I could sense it, powerful and every inch the demon I should've been. I groped with pure mana fingers at the hole where my insides should've been, trying to force a new liver to emerge from the gaping maws of its surrounding organs — but nothing came. I tried to rise again, but this time, it was the demonic energy drifting toward me that forced me back down, helpless.

She was right, wasn't she? I'd ruled the land once, way back when. I'd piqued the interest of Satan himself when I was but a baby demon just making my way into the world. I'd battled a member of nearly all of the sentient species that had walked this Earth, the land below it, the land above, and all the worlds in between, and I'd always emerged the victor. I'd been a legend, in this world of humans and beyond.

But here I was, lying limply upon the floor of an old warehouse, at the mercy of my own kind, having been lured into a trap so obvious that even I'd known it going in — and I'd willfully ignored it, all for her sake. For her.

The humans had wrecked me. She had wrecked me.

"Vera!" I heard her shrill voice cry, and I wondered if she was what had been tickling the very back of my mind all this time. "Get up, Vera! Run! Get out! Don't let them get you!" Her little bell jingled. She still writhed against her chains, the weak little human with no hope of escape, while I fucking laid here on the Goddamn floor.

I pushed myself upright with a low growl, flooding my insides with every ounce of power I could spare. I felt the fiery tingle of a new liver budding within me, the swell of fresh new blood filling my veins, and my vision finally returned. My eyes focused on the demon hovering over me, his eyes empty but his stance cocksure, expectant.

"Vera, please! Get up! Go! Save yourself!"

I rose to my feet with more grace than I'd expected of myself, but I didn't run. I'd never run before, and I sure as hell wasn't going to start now.

I grinned at the leader's son and cracked my knuckles, one at a time, my eyes drifting up and down his broad frame in a slow-moving taunt.

Alcohol-dependent bully afraid of her own demonic form?

Not quite.