A Hand in Hell

My face fell. The leader stood before me in the same dignified repose, the same casual stance, that he'd been in since the battle had begun, but now, he was complete with ink-black skin, artfully curling horns, and nearly seven feet of height.

He was pretty much me.

"Now, Vera dear," he began, an air of seduction to his tone that I'd never heard before, not even in his most playful of moods, "you didn't expect me to lower myself to your level, did you?" He took a couple of slow steps toward me, taunting me with his sultry gaze, and if I hadn't been covered in blood and in need of a skin graft, I might have thought that he wanted to get me into bed with him. But hell, maybe he did. "You're wasting so much potential by refusing to take your true form. And why is that?" he asked, and suddenly, he was behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders. I tensed. I hadn't even seen him move. "Why have you kept this silly human skin for so long? Even when you faced certain death at the hands of Oltoigar, even when my own dearest daughter threatened to cripple your brain, you continued on this way." He leaned close to my ear, and his breath washed over my neck and cheek as he whispered, "Why. Is. That?"

I couldn't answer him, for I had no answer. My eyes flicked to Lauren, wide eyed and trembling beneath her demonic chains, and I marveled at my own ineptitude. Had she been the cause of this? It should have been obvious, even natural, for me to access the full power offered by my true form, but something…something had held me back.

"Oh, I see," he said in a conspiratory whisper, bending so close to me that I could feel his heat along my back. "It's all her doing, isn't it? Just like everything else you've failed to do since her arrival."

She looked absolutely mortified, but I could offer her no comfort by refuting it — because he was right. She'd run when my true self had been let free. She'd fled when she'd seen the true monster within me, when she'd finally gotten an eyeful of what it was she'd so willingly submitted herself to.

She'd run from me, and some part of me, some silly part given life by all those years spent as a human, didn't want to face that again. I couldn't bear to frighten her away, not with the end of our struggles so close at hand. I couldn't bear to frighten her…at all.

"Your silence speaks volumes, my dear Vera," the demon continued in that same whisper. "You don't want your present quarry to turn her hateful gaze upon you again." He chuckled, and his warmth left me as he leaned back, coming to stand in front of me, to block my view of her with his own broad torso. "How far you have fallen, Vera."

A massive fist to the chest sent me sailing through the air suddenly, and I met the wall between two tall windows with a grunt and a crash. I could taste blood as I slipped from the cracked brick, and I fell to my knees, coughing violently. Crimson spattered my hand and the concrete beyond, and I turned my gaze to the leader with a weary glare.

"Tell me your name," I said, my confidence unshaken even by such a blow as that.

"My name is unimportant," he said, suddenly appearing in front of me, "and you likely wouldn't know me, anyway." He took me by the throat and lifted me until I was dangling feet above the floor, and all of my pain came back to me in a rush — the sense of loss in my half-grown liver, the burning of damaged synapses in my head, the relentless twinging of every bodily injury I'd sustained that day. My mana was gone, I realized. He'd completely stoppered the flow of it without breaking a sweat!

"It's such a shame that my little band of humans was never able to get their hands on you," he went on with a sad sigh, and I envied the ease with which he breathed as his fingers tightened around my throat. "I trained them to kill our kind but not to properly hunt them. A mistake on my part, I'll admit. It would've been entertaining to watch their attempts at ending you and your attempts at stopping them."

He further tightened his hold until I couldn't draw in even a pinch of air, and I gripped his wrist, forcing my claws out and through his forearm. He didn't even flinch, merely watching boredly as blood dripped to the floor at his feet. "You know what you have to do," he said, meeting my eyes again. "You know what you've needed to do for the past twenty minutes. If frightening that inconsequential human matters more to you than saving your own life, I—"

I tore my claws from his flesh and planted my foot in his chest on impulse, and I wasn't sure if he let me go because I'd knocked him back, or if he'd fallen back because he pitied me in my weakness. I landed on my feet in a crouch, and I felt my mana beginning to sing through my cells once more. It was moving slowly, only a fraction of what I'd started with, but it was something. I directed the bulk of it to my liver as I stood. I needed to heal everything I could before he got a hold of me again.

"Tell me your name," I said again.

He chuckled and turned from me, his eyes drifting over the corpses of the demons that littered the floor. "Beautiful how the blood glimmers in the sunlight, no? Majestic how their eyes, though open, will never see again…" He trailed off, a halcyon smile on his coal-black lips.

"No name," I blurted even as it dawned on me. "You have no name."

His eyes darted to me, intent and pleased. "Yes, my dear, you've finally caught on. Unlike my children, I never had a parent to train me, to raise me, even to name me — and I, unlike my nameless brethren, never felt the need to name myself. I am an entity, not an identity. My power defines me, nothing more, nothing less."

My lip curled. "Your arrogance is astounding."

Heading away from me, he chuckled again. "And yours isn't?" He squatted at Lauren's side, and I went rigid as she shrank away from him. "How are you doing?" he asked her in a murmur, and I took a threatening step forward that he ignored. "Does my form frighten you? If I recall correctly, your friend Vera and I share a similar lineage, and we look very similar." He leaned closer, a hand stretching toward her. She struggled to cower even further back, and I could bear to watch her shimmering bonds cutting into her flesh for only a moment before I lunged.

I grabbed him by his shoulders and jerked him back, but he caught me by the throat before I could throw him aside as I so desperately longed to. Instantly, a deluge of fresh pain washed away the soothing comfort of my mana, and a grunt caught in my throat as his grip tightened.

"Turn," he hissed. "Reveal your true self. Either you show yourself to me and fight at your full strength so that this fight might be at least a little bit entertaining, or you die at this very moment with the undignified cause of a broken neck. Make your choice."

As I struggled to inhale, I allowed my gaze to flick to Lauren. God, she looked so broken, so battered, so scared. The foreign feeling of guilt dug into me. But when she met my eyes, all of her fear left her. She drew herself up as tall as she could in her chains, puffing out her chest, and she clenched her jaw. A single nod told me everything I needed to know, cemented the instruction in her steadfast glare, and I grinned so broadly that my cheeks stung.

I could've kissed her, that brave, unwavering, silly girl. I wished I could.

A curtain of heat drifted along the length of my body, and nearly two feet of added height had my feet resting safely on the floor once more. My mana was safely coursing through me before the demon had released my throat, and I smirked as his hand fell away.

He took a step back — to better survey me, I guessed — and he soon met my eyes with a smirk of his own. "Ebony skin, tremendous height, over-sized fangs, beautiful, beautiful horns…If your hair was as dark as the rest of you, we'd nearly pass as twins, you and I." His fingers were running through the hair that hung against my cheek before I'd even detected his movement, but I only smiled. "The white is plenty comely as it is, of course. Very rare. Your ancestry must outshine even mine." His hand continued gently through my hair until its very end, where his fingers rested on my hip. It felt…right, somehow. Natural. But I quickly forced the thought from my mind. "If only you had never stooped so low as to mingle with the humans. The years have dulled your edge, my dear Vera — but thankfully, not your beauty."

I knocked his hand aside and scoffed. "That'll make your death at my hands just that much more pathetic, then, won't it?"

His smile held such an edge of seduction that I nearly felt overwhelmed, and I took a cautious step back. "Are you sure that's the path you want to take? Are you sure a fight to the death is really what the two of us are fated for?"

I crossed my arms and sighed, unamused. "If you're suggesting that we gallop off into the sunset, slip into a grimy motel room, and start making babies together, I think I would strongly prefer the fight to the death. Sounds cleaner, and the outcome will be about a thousand times better for me." He laughed heartily and opened his mouth to speak, likely with some witty retort all prepared, but I punched him full force in the jaw before he could get out a syllable.

He arced through the air and came crashing to the floor feet away, just barely managing to execute a graceful backward roll onto his feet. I offered him a saccharine smile. "Oh, darn. I'm so sorry about that. I sometimes forget just how strong I am in this form." I'd barely finished speaking when he appeared in front of me, and I just barely managed to catch his fist when he tried to punch me. The other hand came out of nowhere, however, his fingers digging into my throat as he grabbed it, lifted me into the air for the briefest of moments, and then slammed my body into the floor.

The air rushed from my lungs, replaced by the millions of tiny tendrils of pain that now sought refuge throughout my body, and bits of concrete scattered around me from the fresh cracks in the floor. My mana slowed to a crawl, but he didn't have the power to stop it completely, not while I was like this; and before I even tried to take in a fresh breath, I made sure to continue the steady flow of energy to my liver. The last thing I needed right now was organ failure.

His hold tightened further as he bent over me, his face growing ever closer to mine, and a cough I could never indulge in tickled at the back of my throat, caught up like the air I longed to regain. I gripped his wrist and allowed my claws to pierce his arm once more, blood spattering us both, but he still didn't recoil. "I'll ask you once more," he said lowly. "Are you sure this is the path you want to take?"

He loosened his grip just enough to allow me to speak, and I rasped out, "For someone who was so set on killing me a few minutes ago, you sure do seem intent on keeping me alive to bang me."

He smiled, both flirtatious and mirthful. "I've had time to rethink my stance on your worthiness. You're much stronger than I'd expected you to be — cutting through several high-level demons in a matter of minutes is quite a feat, after all, not to mention the two you took out last night — and I'd honestly never expected to be so taken by your demonic body." His free hand trailed along my cheek, my shoulder, my chest — the featherlight touch of the hopelessly intrigued. "I've seen you from afar, but never up close. You're a wonderful specimen, Verapaini. Your strength may not match my own, but time spent among your own kind would cure that problem." His hand rested on my thigh, his touch heavy, hard to ignore, and I felt my body grow rigid. "We could be equals. We could do much together."

"Vera, don't listen to him!" Lauren cried. "You don't need him. You don't need any of his kind!"

His kind is my kind, I thought darkly, but I said nothing aloud. I only smiled up at the leader…and wrapped my legs around his neck and pulled, ramming him into the cement beside me.

I was quick to roll on top of him, and as he reached for me, I slapped my palms against his bare chest and flooded him with mana while I still had access to it. A gasp left him, his hands spreading wide and seeming to seize as they fell to the floor at his sides, and I wasn't lying this time when I said, shouting to be heard over his cry of pain, "Sorry, No-Name. I sometimes forget just how strong I am in this form." So much energy flowed from me that I felt my own palms beginning to burn, the skin beginning to turn to a half-liquid, half-solid monstrosity, but I pressed on. His eyes rolled back into his head as I urged the attack into a more concentrated area, white-hot mana coiling through his brain more than his body — my specialty.

He jerked and spasmed beneath me, all control of his own body seeming to have left him. Imagine my surprise when his fingers curled around my wrists and tightened with such force, both of mind and body, that my bones shattered before I'd even had the split-second of time that I would've needed to react, to save myself, to safely withdraw. A soft, guttural cry burst forth from my lips, then a scream that ripped my throat raw as his power flew into me.

He was in my veins, in my glands, in my pores — burning me, crushing me, full-on annihilating me from the inside out. Everything I'd faced until now was mere child's play, a little tiny fucking tickle, a love tap. Frantically, I tried to pull free of his grip, but I wasn't even sure where he was anymore. I wasn't even sure where I was. I could see only blackness, feel only pain, hear only the bubbling and merciless tearing as mana ran rampant through me. It was more than I'd ever held. It was more than any demon should've been able to hold.

But here it was, all inside of me, all cycling through me to batter my heart and my brain and my insides over and over and over again — and I was sure he had more to spare.

I was going to die. God, I wanted to die.

But then, suddenly, I returned to myself. I was lying on the floor on my side, just the echoes of the pain I'd endured enough to set me trembling. Tears streaked my face, heat scoured my body, and I was glad for the chill of the cement against my skin. I tried to take in a deep breath, but the stretching of my flesh hurt so badly that I had to settle with panting. I couldn't even blink without pain.

God, I was in my full-demon form. What more could I do to beat him?!

"Either you've been severely underestimating me since our first meeting," the leader murmured, crouching before me, and I could barely move my eyes to his face, "or you've not yet realized just how much this world has dulled you, my dear Vera." His fingers brushed against my cheek, the epitome of gentleness, but my breath left me in a low hiss of pain. He pulled back, his fingertips covered in blood — my blood. What had he done to me? "I'm amazed you managed to make it this far in your battle versus my Council, if you so easily succumb to an attack such as that."

He stood, tsking softly, and I swallowed — painfully — and rushed to gather my wits. Did I return to healing the liver, or did I guide what mana I had left to the damage done to my brain? The damage done to my other organs? The damage to my outside that made every movement hurt?

The violent jingling of a bell. A hopeless wail.

No, I decided as I let my eyes follow his rise to his full height. Use it on him. All of it. One last try.

For her.

"I know I said I would ask only once more," the demon purred, "but I honestly expected much more of a fight from you. Join me, Verapaini, back in the Underworld. Gather your strength. Regain your proper station. Rise to power with me."

I pushed myself to my hands and knees, my broken wrists half-mended, ignoring the screams and pleading cries of my every aching muscle. "I thought…you would deem me too weak for such an honor…now," I panted, craning my neck to keep his face in my waning focus. I could see little else but the Hellish red of his pupils, burning all the brighter with the light of his self-satisfaction, and I used my indignation at his arrogance — arrogance directed toward me — to spur me on. I drew every bit of mana that I could scrape together into my chest, where my heart still beat by some miracle that only Satan Himself could have bestowed upon me.

The demon knelt before me, taking my face oh-so gently in his massive hands, hands that threw off such a soothing warmth that I longed to sink into his touch. "Don't mistake my request for a sign of compassion or favoritism," he said softly. "I offer not in order to help you, but to help myself, though aiding you in the long run will not bother me in the least."

I sent all of my energy to converge in one clenched fist as I rocked back onto my knees, smiling bitterly up at him. "You're just every woman's dreamboat, aren't you?" I said dryly, then plunged my fist into his chest, the searing strength of my knuckles burning through his flesh and sinking into his body before he could fall back.

Hurriedly, he gripped at my wrist, but the surge of mana knocked his fingers away. My entire arm burned with a stinging pain of my own creation, but I wouldn't be deterred, not now, not again. I guided the power through every fiber of his being in a concentrated outpour, draining my own power until I was sagging with my free hand resting on the floor, propping me up, my strength ebbing as I let my own life force begin to siphon away.

I dug through his chest, pushing his liquefying heart and lungs aside in favor of reaching deeper, and my fingers wrapped around his spinal column in an iron grip. My lips curved in that same, bitter smile as I took in the expression of pure agony on his pitch-black face, his eyes and mouth wide open but without sight or sound. "While your soul rots in Hell, remember that it was an alcohol-dependent bully who was afraid of her own demonic form, who has spent countless years allowing her powers to dull among the humans, who fell in love with one of them and who did everything in her power to avoid frightening her, who did everything in her power to protect her from an army of pricks that never deserved to lay eyes on her, who finally sent you there, you arrogant prick." With a jerk and a gruesome snap, I pulled his spine out through the hole in his chest, and his body flopped back like a boneless fish.

As I panted, my vision dimming, I took in the sight of his half-melted skin, the blood leaking from his orifices, the indescribable red and pink goo that oozed from the gaping hole I'd made, then I turned to Lauren, free from her chains but still crouched in place, and met her tear-filled, wide eyes.

"You're free, Lauren," I whispered, smiling. "You can go back to where you belong now."

The last thing I heard as I finally collapsed, as darkness finally swallowed me, was a scream of my name — and the jingling of a tiny bell.