"The Revenant" - Part II

Murray sipped at his coffee and grimaced in distaste at the lack of sugar. Everyone around him was busy though, so he just put the polystyrene cup on one of the empty restaurant's Formica tables.

"Anything?" he asked his partner as he crossed the room filled with police officers and members of the forensics team going back and forth from the back office to the door.

Randall shook his head as he leant against the wall near an aging Pac-Man machine that they'd turned off for the sake of decency. "I dunno why we keep getting these crackpot cases, Steve," he sighed, "This just looks like a random thing to me...if not for the way he got taken out..."

Murray stole a glance into the room where the corpse of the overweight restaurant owner was still sprawled exactly where one of his waitresses had found it that morning. Forensics were fussing over the body as he watched, trying to find what evidence they could. "Do you think this is connected to the one in Atlanta last month?"

Randall shrugged noncommittally. "If it is, then we're talking about an imitator, not the same guy, I think."

"Yeah?"

Randall nodded for Murray to follow him as he walked into the room. Still holding his own cup of coffee and seemingly unfazed by the decaying body at his feet, he pointed towards its neck. "See the puncture marks?"

Murray nodded.

"He bled pretty profusely because whoever did it pierced the carotid artery."

Murray didn't need to be told this as he could see the evidence of the ‘profuse bleeding' across the office's carpet, walls and desk, but he allowed his partner to continue.

"In the Atlanta murder, the wound was the same but the victim was missing all their blood - like it was sucked out or something."

Murray snorted. "What's your point?"

"Well, whatever the Atlanta guy used to do that wasn't used here - this was just a wound that caused him to bleed to death; hence why I say it's an imitator trying and failing to do the same thing."

"Makes sense," Murray conceded, "Now we just have to figure out who did this and why."

"If you ask me we're looking for some psycho into goth literature with a ruffled shirt and a bad black dye-job."

Murray laughed. "A wannabe vampire?"

Randall looked at his partner and smirked conspiratorially, "You can't tell me you didn't walk in here, take one look at his neck and wonder if the dead were walking..."

Murray chuckled quietly and turned towards the door. "I guess maybe it did cross my mind. C'mon, let's take a look at the CCTV and see what we can find out."

* * *

It took her a long time to get the blood off her hands. She examined herself in the bathroom mirror once she'd scrubbed her hands raw to check that she hadn't missed any that got on her face.

The worst thing about it was that, as soon as she satiated her hunger, she immediately realised how disgusting it was. Blood was not all that appetising, after all.

Mentally she corrected herself. That was not the worst thing about it. Not by a long shot.

Drying her eyes with a few coarse paper towels, Revenant looked over herself in the mirror again. She had always been skinny - in the environment she refused to ever think of as ‘home' she'd really had no choice - but even now there was a limit to what a five foot one girl could scavenge. Even one like her.

Revenant glanced down at the supplies she had stolen that were now hastily stuffed into a garbage bag and sitting in one corner of the public bathroom. She refused to feel guilty about taking it: she did what she had to do to survive.

Besides, she reflected, she had enough guilt to carry with her today.

Shading her sensitive eyes with one hand, she looked out of the small, stained window that let a tiny square of natural light into the room. Revenant perceived that twilight was on its way and breathed an internal sigh of relief. Travel in daylight was not impossible for her, but it made her uncomfortable enough that she would avoid it all costs.

The daytime was when she slept, hiding wherever she could. Most towns had places no one ever went that someone like Revenant could easily gain access to and she always slept with one eye open as the saying went.

After...she grimaced...feeding...on the man in the restaurant, she had been exhausted and sought out shelter in the moonlit night, finally chancing on an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the north Florida town. The revelation that it did not possess running water once she awoke was not a pleasant one and her sojourn through the harsh daylight in the mess she was had been terrifying.

Still, better that than spend one more second than necessary covered in the man's filth.

With another sigh she reached for her heavy jacket and shrugged herself into it. She reached for her most treasured possession - a bar of soap - and returned it to the small bag she kept in her pocket. She ran a hand through her hair and tried to do something presentable with it, but soon ran out of ideas. Style really wasn't her thing.

A childhood like Revenant's will do that to you.

Not that ‘childhood' was the word she'd use.

Blanking her mind as she'd long ago learnt to in order stop thoughts she didn't need sticking in her head, she turned to the restroom door and removed the piece of wood she'd lodged against the handle to stop anyone entering and seeing her cleaning herself up.

Survival left no time in Revenant's life for style, for thoughts of what she'd escaped or, she liked to pretend, for guilt. She knew that that last bit wasn't a choice she could make though.

It was what made her different. It was what caused her all her problems.

* * *

"Who is she?"

Randall shook his head blankly. "Some vagrant. She's been seen around the area for a few days now, here and there."

Murray looked at the slight figure on the CCTV screen in front of him. The girl was maybe five-one or five-two, skinny as hell and wearing a dark, military-style jacket obviously made for someone much larger.

"Thirteen? Fourteen?"

"A little older, maybe," Randall guessed. The detective had two kids unlike Murray who was unmarried.

"Caucasian?" It was hard to tell from the small, grainy images of her.

"Or Hispanic perhaps," Randall suggested. "Here, look, you can see her face a little better in this one - she definitely looks Spanish to me. Or maybe Greek."

"Yeah, except she's pretty pale. She looks ill."

"Well, she does seem to be homeless. She definitely looks underfed anyway."

Murray nodded and tapped his finger against his lips as he leant back in his chair. "So...on the night this guy gets killed, some teenage girl comes to his office just before 9 pm and leaves in a hurry roughly fifteen minutes later after grabbing as much food from the kitchen as she can carry."

"That's right."

"No visible weapons, though that coat is pretty big, but even so it's hard to see how a girl like that could kill a grown man."

"What about the twenty bucks next to an open wallet on his desk?"

Murray sighed and made a curious facial expression. "Well, not hard to put those pieces together. His wife says he told her he was working late, then some homeless chick turns up and is about to be paid twenty bucks for...something..."

"Well I'm not going to be the one to tell his family that story..."

"So either she just did it for the food, or perhaps to get back at this douchebag for what he made her do. Which would make this, I guess, a revenge attack gone wrong? Gone right?"

"Pretty plucky of her," Randall reflected, "But how'd she do it? And why imitate that Atlanta murder like this?"

Murray held his hands out, "No fucking clue. But she's the only lead we have. Even if all she did was discover the body, she's gotta be some help to us."

"Sounds good. Now all we have to do is track her down..."

"The Revenant" - Part III

The cars rumbled past her, none of them stopping despite her outstretched thumb. She winced in the blinding headlights, her eyes unused to the brightness and her skin tingling under the minimal UV radiation they emitted.

Revenant sighed heavily as she tramped dejectedly by the side of the freeway. She was largely unsurprised by the lack of people willing to pick up a hitchhiker - these were troubled times, and the general public feared strangers, even if they were just diminutive females looking damp and miserable by the side of a road.

The young girl had reached an impasse in her journeys. She was aware - painfully so - that she was being followed and that, whatever happened, she had to get as far away from her childhood home as she could as fast as she could. She was hampered, of course, by only being able to move at night but she knew her pursuers were limited in exactly the same fashion, if not more so. Sunlight just made Revenant uncomfortable; it made them die.

Still, she couldn't run forever. Moving from place to place, city to city, it wouldn't be long before she hit a wilderness, free of settlements and places to hide from the merciless daylight. Expecting to hitchhike at night was not realistic and she couldn't walk across a desert.

She needed food. She needed water. She needed something else too, but she didn't like to think about that.

Trudging through the long grass by the side of the road, she wondered where she would go next. She was near the Alabama border and far enough south that she could be in Mississippi within a few days, even if she was just walking.

Revenant had no plan though. When she had left the place in which she had grown up, there were more pressing concerns. Now that she hadn't seen her pursuers in several weeks, she'd had time to actually think.

Would she try to get a job? Only if it was a night shift and only if she could fabricate some actual documents. As far as she was aware, the world had no place for someone like her. That would have hurt if she'd given a damn about the world.

Fuck the world. It had never done anything but hurt her.

Revenant refused to give up and die though. That would have been letting him win, even after he'd died. She didn't know if she believed in spirits or an afterlife - she suspected it was probably bullshit, even after what Nancy had told her all those nights - but if he was still watching her, she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that, in some way, he'd finally killed her: ground her down into the nothing he wanted her to be before she finally gave up.

Fuck him. Fuck the world.

The screech of brakes brought her out of her reverie and she glanced up to see a car parked next to her, its engine running. Confused, she glanced down at her hand and saw that her thumb had still been extended.

"Want a ride?"

The voice sounded male, fairly young. That put her on her guard, but she knew she could handle herself. She nodded silently and walked over to the door of the car nearest her. The light came on as she opened it and she winced again, rearing back from it.

"You okay?"

She scowled. "Sure. Just used to the dark I guess."

"Then close the door and sit down." The man's voice wasn't malicious, he was just being flippant, but Revenant already had her guard up. Silently she slid into the passenger seat and drew the door closed with a bang.

The driver looked over at her and she returned his gaze, looking him over. He was probably in his mid-twenties, handsome but not the type who realised. His hair was tousled and it looked like he never bothered doing much with it.

"So what's your name?"

"Just call me Rev."

"Rev?"

She looked away from him and fixed her eyes on the road ahead. "Rev," she repeated.

"Is that short for something?"

"Yes."

The man waited a few moments before laughing and beginning to pull away from the kerb. "Okay then, ‘Rev'...whereabouts are you going?"

"Anywhere."

He laughed again. "Okay, okay. Tell you what, I'm headed for Mobile. Gotta be there by morning...heh...left too late again..."

He glanced at her, but when he saw she wasn't laughing at his self deprecation he turned back to the road. "So...uh, anyway...I'll just keep driving and if you see somewhere you want to stop, just tell me, okay?"

"Okay."

Revenant turned her face to the passenger window and watched the countryside fly by as it began to rain.

* * *

"She's moving. Fast."

Caliban looked at Baltic and frowned, his heavy brow creasing in confusion. "Fast?"

Baltic bared his fangs at his companion. "Yes, fast - how hard is that to understand?"

Caliban shrugged as he moved through the trees, looking this way and that. "I'm hungry," he growled after a few seconds, "Why are we walking around forests like this?"

Ignoring his companion, Baltic reached up to a nearby tee and pulled himself up onto a branch. He scuttled up through the boughs, trying to find a better vantage point. Eventually he saw what he sought across a stretch of wilderness.

"She's on that road," he called down, having now reconciled his visual senses with the part of his brain that could feel Revenant in the middle distance.

"In a car?"

"Obviously."

Baltic released his grip on the tree's trunk and back flipped down to earth in one smooth movement, landing on his feet in a low crouch. He moved his desiccated face back and forth for a few seconds, searching for Caliban. After a few seconds he spied the larger creature sitting near a stream. Silently he walked in his direction.

"What are you doing?"

"I told you," Caliban said without turning around as Baltic approached, "I'm hungry."

Baltic rolled his eyes at the terminology Caliban employed. Having lived since his siring entirely in the house where Baltic had found him, Caliban had never had the benefit of a elder's teachings in the ways of their people.

With something approaching revulsion, Baltic watched him reach into the dark water and pull out a wriggling fish.

"What are you doing?!"

"I'm hungry," Caliban repeated with a shrug.

"You can't drink fish blood!" Baltic snarled as he snatched the slippery animal from his companion's grasp and flung it back into the water.

Caliban gave Baltic a look of hatred before hauling his considerable bulk upright and moving off through the forest again. Baltic watched him leave, not concealing his contempt for the obese creature that he had been forced to work with.

It was a strange misfortune that had led him to Caliban and the weaklings that constituted the remnants of his hive in that house. He had only been there a few months before their leader had been slain and he judged only Caliban to be strong enough to accompany him in pursuit. The others could die for all he cared. Without the one they had adopted as their master to provide them with food, they would eventually go insane and kill one another before the survivor would either waste away or die from its injuries.

They were a stain on his race, those ones. Better that he separate the only one with any potential from his pitiful siblings.

Even so, Caliban was still a particularly weak example of their kind. Removed by countless generations from the Firstborn, he was little more than a walking corpse. Nonetheless, he was more than a match for the girl and with Baltic's leadership could become a formidable weapon some day.

First though, he had to be taught to kill. Being spoon-fed warm human carcasses was no way for a vampire to live. As Baltic loped off after Caliban he tried not to think of how pathetic his large ward's sirelings would be.

* * *

"Don't wanna talk, huh?"

She didn't look at him. "I don't have much to say," she replied.

"C'mon...I don't pick up hitchhikers without expecting a story - what are you doing out here at this time of night?"

She shrugged noncommittally, not offering him any kind of explanation.

"Okay, well...oh, hey, I never introduced myself - my name's Geoff."

"Nice to meet you."

Geoff laughed. "I'll bet. So I guess I'll talk then. I'm a college student, yeah? I know what you're thinking; I look kind of old, right?"

Revenant didn't reply.

"Right. Well I took a couple of years to travel, just see the world, you know? And then I came to FSU."

He looked at Revenant, but the girl was still looking away. If she knew anything about Florida State, she wasn't chiming in with it.

"At first I thought I wanted to be a politician or something, make a difference or something. I dunno. So I majored in political science." He chuckled to himself, "Boy was that a mistake."

Again, Geoff looked at Revenant with a smile, expecting her to join in his conspiratorial laugh at his own expense. She remained silent so he continued, "Anyway, I was failing for sure, so I got out of that. Man, my parents weren't happy at first, but I had a back up plan. I bummed around for a couple months and then reapplied to major in religious studies."

Revenant looked up with a frown, "Religious studies?"

Geoff laughed, "Glad you were paying attention, Red."

"It's Rev."

"Right right, sorry. Uh...yeah, so anyway I started doing that instead and it's like, wow, a breath of fresh air, you know?"

"Why did you pick religious studies?" Revenant asked.

Geoff shrugged, "I dunno, it's like, you know how you think you like one thing but really it's only a part of it that you really like?"

"Um...maybe..."

"Right, so I loved arguing ethics and all that shit, and it started with political stuff but after a while I realised I wanted to focus, you know?" As he said the word ‘focus' he took his hands off the wheel and made a ‘v' shape pointing away from him with them.

"On religion?"

"Yeah, religion, theology...all that stuff."

"And you like it?"

"Oh man," he tilted his head back, "It's amazing. You really get under people's skin when you talk about religion - you know how important that stuff is to, like, ninety percent of the world?"

Revenant shrugged, "I never really thought about it."

"You're not religious then?"

"I dunno...the..." she paused, searching for the right words, "...the woman who raised me was..."

"Oh yeah? What was she? Christian? Jewish?"

Revenant paused again. "I...I'm not sure..."

The truth was, she didn't know the difference. They were just words to her and Nancy's faith had been the only thing she'd had left before she died. Revenant didn't have the first idea of how to categorise it. As Geoff glanced from the road to her and back again, she flushed under his scrutiny.

"You're not sure?" he prompted.

"No...I...it's not really...I mean...."

"Are you okay?"

She turned away from him. She wasn't okay. It was no use her trying to act like she understood his world, that she could hold a conversation with a normal person. Her upbringing was something unimaginable to him; part of a world he didn't even think existed.

"S...stop the car...." She stammered.

"What? Hey, come on, what's the problem?"

"It's nothing...I...just let me out..."

Geoff's eyes radiated concern. "Hey, did I say something wrong? Look, it's cool, I'm sorry...don't..."

She tried to open the car door and flinched as he reached over and placed a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, I'm sorry, okay? I talk too much, everyone says that. You don't wanna talk...that's cool...we can just drive."

She didn't look at him. Just sat back down. "It's alright," she whispered, dabbing tears away from her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. "I've just been through some stuff recently. You can carry on."

Geoff glanced over at her again and gave her a reassuring smile. "You wanna talk about it? Your stuff, I mean."

She shook her head. "Just keep talking. Please."

As he slowly launched back into his life story, Revenant rested her head on the car seat. She was never going to be normal, she knew that, but while he talked she could pretend she was, just for tonight.

"The Revenant" - Part IV

Randall shook his head as he paced slowly around the crime scene. Here, right on the Alabama border, they'd reached the limits of their jurisdiction, but Murray was lobbying their superiors to let them carry on working on this case.

Cases, Randall corrected himself. Two murders, but they were clearly linked, there could be no doubt about that.

"So what do we know?" he asked as he approached his partner.

Murray sighed as he stood up and removed his latex gloves with a look of distaste. "His driver's licence says his name was Geoff Walker and, from the looks of his other possessions he went to school at Florida State."

Randall nodded. "Address?"

"Somewhere in Mobile."

"So he was on his way home...and ran into someone he shouldn't have..."

"Sure looks like it," Murray pointed at the dead young man's neck, "There's those puncture marks again and everything else is consistent with the guy in the restaurant last week."

Randall glanced over at the car that stood, now technically abandoned, by the side of the road in the grey morning. There were no real signs of a struggle.

"Witnesses?" Murray asked after a while.

"Too soon. We're putting out feelers...making some calls..."

Murray nodded silently and turned his gaze back to the pale face of the victim, frozen for all time in an expression of shock. There was no fear, which was odd, it was like he'd been turned to stone.

"This doesn't add up," Randall told his partner as his eyes followed his gaze. Randall had always been the quicker of the too, the first to spot patterns or inconsistencies but he also had a tendency to jump to conclusions.

"No kidding," Murray agreed, "But what are your thoughts?"

Randall pointed, "He bled to death, that much is obvious." Murray bobbed his head in agreement, "But if that's the case, why is he face like that?"

Murray frowned.

"Sure, you're gonna looked shocked when someone attacks you - especially if our little suspect was the one who did it - but who keeps their face like that as they bleed to death? He should have been writhing in pain, thrashing out, whatever..."

"So you think he died quickly?"

"I think he died instantly," Randall said ominously.

* * *

They didn't understand. They couldn't understand. No one could.

She felt sick to her stomach as she drew a heavy, dusty cloth over the small window of the cellar. Even the dull morning light hurt Revenant's eyes and she shied away from its harmful glow. She didn't dwell on her inability to go outside like other girls her age...there were too many other things that her heritage denied her for that to be anything worth caring about.

Tears still stung her eyes when she thought about what had happened. How she had held back the demon within for so long before she had no choice but to release it or die.

And Revenant would not die. She had vowed that and, while she may have been many unsavoury things, a liar was not one of them.

Turning from the window she made for the darkest corner of the abandoned room and crouched down. Cobwebs brushed against her cheek, but things like that had never bothered her. She was beyond revulsion, beyond terror of such inconveniences as dirt or poor hygiene.

Revenant knew that she had far more to fear from herself than from anything that might lurk in the shadows. She also knew that when people talked about things that went bump in the night, they were talking about her. Her and things like her, at any rate.

She could see perfectly in the dark, something she had never thought off as unusual though the reliance of the people she had met in her journey on light sources indicated that the ability was not universal. She recalled that Nancy hadn't been able to see in the dark as well as her anyway, though her eyes had eventually adapted fairly well to the perpetual gloom of the house in which she had been born and raised.

Humans are adaptable creatures and Revenant wondered just how much of that talent she had inherited. It seemed that the only benefit she'd gotten from her mother though was an all-consuming sense of guilt.

That was what made her strong though, she reminded herself. It was made her different from the predators that had made her their slave for most of her life. They couldn't feel guilt: their actions towards her and Nancy made that abundantly clear and though she couldn't deny her kinship with them and their kind, she knew that her mind was fundamentally different from theirs.

And yet...Revenant still had to kill like they did. She had still sunk her fangs into the neck of someone who had shown her nothing but kindness and watched the life instantly flicker out of his eyes.

Somewhere in Mobile, a mother was about to get a knock on her door and find a cop sadly telling her that her son's body had been found by the side of a lonely road. Revenant was the one who had caused that. He wasn't the first, or even the second, but she prayed that maybe somehow, someway, he could be the last.

As she buried her head in her arms and tried to blink away the tears, she knew he wouldn't be.

* * *

The forensic pathologist gestured at the photographs of Geoff's neck. "This is the only entry wound we could find. You can see from the bruising that whatever did it was wielded with a certain amount of force."

"And then he died from blood loss?" Randall prompted, knowing that the answer would be no, but not wanting to lead the pathologist down any particular road.

"I thought so at first too," the young Asian said, "But the amount of blood he lost really wouldn't be enough to kill him."

"The carotid artery wasn't pierced?" Murray asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Nope," the pathologist replied with a shake of his head, "There was a fair bit of blood, sure, but that wasn't what killed him."

"So...what was it...?"

The man grimaced and reached for another slide and placed it on the lit panel on the wall in front of them. It showed a scan of the dead man's brain.
"Look at this," he pointed at a dark patch on one lobe, "There's massive bruising here, evidence of internal haemorrhaging and whole clumps of tissue that are just...missing..."

"Missing?" Randall asked, looking confused and not a little disturbed by the way this discussion was leading.

The pathologist put the slide down and moved his hands in a circular motion as if trying to find the words to explain what he was about to tell them, "It's like...well...like some of the neurons in his brain just...exploded..."

"Exploded?" Murray asked.

"Which neurons?" Randall chimed in, trying to pierce to the heart of the issue as he saw it.

The young man shrugged, "We don't know enough about the brain to comment on something like that. The parts affected weren't uniform, but there's no pattern as far as I can tell. Something happened in his brain which removed entire sections of his mind though and just collapsed the whole organ."

"How do you mean?" Murray asked with a frown.

"Well, if you look here," he passed him the slide and pointed to one of the blotches, "It's kind of like a whole lump of tissue was somehow removed from the centre and then, like if you were carelessly digging out a mine, the roof collapsed, as it were. In short, when these ‘explosions' happened, they just caused his entire brain to fall in on itself."

Randall and Murray didn't say anything, just looked at the scan with glum expressions.

"That's not all though..."

They looked up at the pathologist.

"When we saw all this we had to take a closer look, and we found something pretty weird."

"Weirder than this?" Randall asked, one eyebrow arched quizzically.

"Yup." The pathologist took the slide back and put it up against the light again, "In the centre of each of the voids was something very unusual. You can't quite make it out on this scan, but the X-rays picked up something else - do you two know anything about crystallography?"

They gave him a blank look.

"Okay, well suffice it to say that we bounced a few X-rays around and what we found was something I've never seen the likes of before..."

"Go on," Randall urged, fascinated.

"In each of these voids where his brain tissue is missing, there was some kind of crystalline structure beginning to form."

"Like a tumour or something?" Murray hazarded.

"No, not at all, a tumour is just a lump of ordinary tissue cells that don't die when they should - this is something totally alien to human biology. I don't know what these things are, but they should not be there...not at all..."

"Well, what are they?" Randall asked.

"We want to run a few more tests - and hopefully get some of this data sent to someone who knows a bit more about it - but as far as I can make out they're small formations of calcium. The structure is kind of irregular though, they're still crystalline, but the patterning is off, like they're deformed or atrophied."

"I'm not exactly sure what you're suggesting," Murray said slowly.

"Whatever did this," the Asian man said, looking from one of his colleagues to the other, "Caused these crystals to start growing. It didn't work properly and his brain collapsed though...but from their location it's not a huge jump in logic to surmise that they were supposed to fill the voids created in his brain. As it was, he would have been brain-dead before he hit the ground."

"And if they'd kept growing?" Randall prompted.

"Your guess is as good as mine..."

"The Revenant" - Part V

His dark shape filled her vision, blotting out the weak light of the single bulb hanging from its frayed cord. Too small to defend herself, she could only sob weakly as he hauled her to her feet and pushed her across the room.

"I will never leave you," he told her, but he didn't mean it to be a comfort.

He had never actually said those words to her. They appeared only like this; in her nightmares of that time.

It was a strange mix off all the years in that place, all jumbled together in one moment of searing pain and depthless misery. The agony of an early childhood without a mother excepting the monster they had turned that woman into.

She knew it had been her mother - he had never missed an opportunity to tell her that - but the creature was necessarily bereft of maternal instincts, despite carrying her even after her Siring by whichever of the others had done it.

She never knew which one it was.

Revenant had a father somewhere, she supposed - a human one - but obviously he hadn't wanted her or her mother. That rejection, she assumed, had led them to this place and to what had happened.

Without a man to call father, she had to accept that one of the vampires was the closest thing she had to one. It had bitten her mother, changed her, and spread its taint to her unborn child; creating Revenant.

Not that she'd ever had a name while she was growing up.

She felt his hand across her face again, and tasted the blood on her lip. Vampires don't bleed, but she did, and the tang of her half-breed blood was repugnant to her; like putrid meat.

"I will never leave you..."

His too-large pupils filled her vision, the abyss of his eyes swallowing her into his hatred again. He couldn't feel love, affection, sympathy...guilt... He couldn't do, and do the things he did. Revenant was a hybrid, a creature that shouldn't even have been born, but she was more human than him.

He was like his slaves, the vampires who populated his squalid home. They obeyed him because they couldn't hurt him, not even with their bites. She had seen the scars over his body when she had gotten old enough for him to come up with a new way to torment her.

Bite marks...everywhere. They'd tried hard, she could see that, but somehow he was immune. She'd even tried herself, once she realised that she too had their dark power.

He had just laughed, and hit her again, wiping his bleeding hand across her mouth so she could taste the blood he would deny her for long enough that she would become a rabid animal again.

"I will never leave you..."

He never did. Every welt, every bruise, every denied scrap of humanity; she could never forget any of it.

But he wouldn't win.

She would not die.

"Give up," he spat, clawing at her eyes, wrenching her neck backwards as the thick sinews stood out on his arms, "You are nothing! You are worthless!"

But she had never given up. Nancy had let him destroy her, break her down to nothing, and only her faith had kept her mind in one piece. Revenant would later learn that it was something called ‘Stockholm Syndrome' - the victim identifying, sympathising and finally becoming psychologically dominated by the captor.

She could never forget the way Nancy hadn't even raised her hands as he had finally decided she had grown too old and weak to be useful to him.

As he had fed her to his slaves and laughed at the old woman's pitiful cries for mercy.

"I will never leave you..."

In fifteen years, he had not. But she would never let him win and, in the end, she had found the only way to survive that she could.

The door opened, and he filled the frame with his muscular bulk. She was waiting for him, waiting for him to inflict the torment on her that he referred to as ‘the completion of his destiny'. He held her wrists, but she was still too fast for him.

The nightmare denied her the satisfaction of seeing the rusty nail pierce his windpipe for the second time.

He just laughed this time. "I will never leave you," he repeated, and he was right.

Even beyond death, he haunted her dreams, making her the slave she had been forever, living in the shadow of his dominion for all time.

She never knew his name, if he even had one.

* * *

Baltic slammed the man into the wall, stunning him with the force of the throw. He wobbled forward, dropping his briefcase and trying to shield his face from the succession of kicks and punches that the vampire threw at him.

He was screaming. Baltic liked the sound, but it was growing tiresome. With a precision kick, he smashed out the human's teeth, turning his scream into a bloody gurgle.

Caliban watched the display with a childlike fascination. Spoon-fed half-dead victims since his Siring, the way of the true vampire was wholly new to him. He was hungry, but Baltic would not let him feed until he could do it properly.

The man was flagging, dropping down to one knee as Baltic shattered his shinbone and then his ankle with a one-two combination kick that was far too fast for the mortal to avoid. He tried to scream again, but blood filled his mouth as he fell to his hands and knees.

"Pl...please..." he rasped through the froth of spittle and blood on his lips.

"You would not know, Caliban," Baltic laughed, "But they die when you bite them - straight away, their souls are snuffed into inexistence. The strongest join our ranks, but most cannot take the neural shock."

Caliban nodded, his mind was slow but he was taking all the new information in.

"That is what feeds us: their deaths. The blood is just a side-effect, despite what that Void Child told you."

The man reached out and Baltic took his hand. He snapped three of his fingers without apparent effort.

"But where is the fun in instant death? That is why the way of the vampire is to torment the prey. Humans kill their cattle painlessly and call it mercy."

He looked at the man, now lying in a heap, moaning softly in pain.

"To think that we were once them...it disgusts me. They are hypocrites, Caliban. They pad their minds with guilt and let it cushion them from the harsh reality of the suffering and torture they inflict on weaker creatures. They seek to end suffering, but only one of them ever got it right..."

Baltic grabbed a handful of the man's hair and pulled his face up to his own, letting the man's half-closed eyes look into his own pinprick stare.

"Gautama Buddha said that to exist is to suffer. He never followed his thought in the right direction, if you ask me; he was ever the optimist, seeking to end suffering through forgoing desire, and not realising that to desire - and hence to suffer and cause suffering - is simply human nature."

He smiled, revealing long fangs.

"We are not human, Caliban, you and I. We are so much more. We are more because we are not held back by guilt, by hypocrisy. We understand what it is to suffer, for we have been prey ourselves, and now we must visit the same lesson on such weak animals as this one. We have no compunctions about causing them to suffer, to feel pain. We do not pretend to be anything but what we are; predators."

His tongue, coloured a strange blackish-blue from the necrosis that had claimed his body, flicked out, tasting the blood on the man's battered face.

"Predators and torturers. We torment them because we must: because they must understand that their pitiful lives are built on a lie; the lie of guilt and empathy. In us, they see their destiny, and their death."

Baltic's neck darted out as he released the broken man's hair from his grip, and his fangs sank deep into his throat.

He screamed as his mind was instantly blown apart by the psionic power of the bite, great holes blasted in the very tissue of his brain. The crystals formed, but he was too weak and they fragmented, leaving his brain a lump of wasted fat. Rapidly, every drop of blood in his body pulsed from his carotid artery.

Baltic discarded the corpse as the blood ran down his chin. He wiped it away and looked down at the exsanguinated carcass of what had once been a human being.

"If you beat them beforehand, they're far less likely to survive the process too," Baltic explained, "I want to eat, but I don't need another mewling infant of a vampire trailing after me."

Caliban looked almost hurt but Baltic ignored him and flicked his head in the direction of a fire escape up one building that hung over the alleyway. "Come on - your turn."

* * *

It was a strange city. The hurricane had been devastating a year ago, but it hadn't broken the place. Like Revenant herself, this city was a blend of different cultures and heritages and, like her, it had had its share of destructive influences.

It too remained strong in the face of adversity.

Her feet carried her randomly, through twisting streets and down strange, odd-smelling alleys. This place had a life of its own, an odd mysticism that only one like her could pick out. There were stories older than the buildings in which they had taken place and worlds beyond the sight of normal humans.

But she was trying to escape her nightmares tonight. She put the darkness out of her mind and sought the lights of the waterfront.

"Hey, little lady!"

Revenant turned and saw the group of men.

"I have nothing you can possibly take away," she told them as they approached.

"C'mon," one smirked, "Every girl has a cell phone, a little money...what say you hand it over and we don't ruin that pretty face, eh?"

She narrowed her eyes. Pretty? Revenant wasn't sure he meant that, and didn't much care. "I told you, I have nothing."

One of the men flicked a blade up and held it towards her, "You sure about that, little lady?"

She didn't cower from the weapon. There was nothing they could possibly do to her that was worse than she'd experienced before. "Very sure."

One of them grabbed her arms from behind.

No, there was nothing any human being could inflict on her that she feared...

But with a rusty nail she'd ended the part of her life where she'd let predators walk all over her six months ago.

Revenant let out a screech that caused the nearest men to cover their ears and cry out. Effortlessly, she hauled the man holding onto her off his feet and up over her head, dumping him hard on the concrete.

The knife swiped at her but she stepped back, dodging it easily. In one swift movement, she threw out a leg and kicked another assailant off his feet, driving him several feet backwards. They were wary now, but still couldn't reconcile the image of the skinny, dark-haired girl with her actions.

She took advantage of their indecision and leapt over their heads, right onto a wall. She perched on the vertical surface, using the minute handholds that her agility allowed her to. They continued to come after her, trying to reach up. She jumped down on the first, lashing out with a fist and feeling bone smash as she did so. He screamed and she threw herself at another, whirling in mid-air to dispatch him with two kicks delivered in quick succession as she cartwheeled.

Revenant didn't spot the knife hurtling towards her through the air, turning a split second too late. Inches away from her face, no human could have dodged it.

Her head jerked to one side and the knife sailed past, clattering harmlessly against the wall.

The only thug left standing took a step back, his breath coming fast. "W...what are you...?"

She bared her fangs, "The Revenant," she spat, "Now do yourself a favour a run home to mommy before I really fuck you up."

"The Revenant" - Part VI

"So, if we gloss over exactly why you approached her for now, why don't you tell us what happened?"

The young African-American man looked nervous. This was not his first time in a police interrogation room, but he was familiar with most of the New Orleans PD, and these guys were evidently new. Something about their bearing told him they weren't rookies, that was for sure.

"I dunno...it...it's tough to remember..."

Murray cocked an eyebrow. "A fifteen year old girl beats up you and your buddies and you don't remember it?"

The man shook his head, "No, I mean...well, yeah...I remember what happened, but what do you want me to say, man?"

Randall moved his hands in a circular motion, trying to encourage the thug, "Just explain what you saw happen."

It felt a little weird to be grilling a small-time criminal for information on a young girl who seemed to be responsible for a series of murders across three states, but that was the bizarre situation in which the two cops now found themselves.

Their witness looked uncomfortable, but tried to articulate to the officers what had happened in the brief and surprisingly conclusive brawl. "First she screamed..."

"Not unusual," Murray mused as he placed his rapidly cooling cup of coffee down on a desk, "There were quite a few of you."

"No, not like that - she wasn't scared, man...it was more like...uh...I dunno...hard to explain..."

"Try," Randall told him.

"Like," he moved his hands as he sought an explanation, "She was defending herself or somethin'...I dunno..."

"Defending herself?" It was Randall who spoke again, his keen mind again seeking a solution to the puzzling situation.

"Yeah, her scream...it was, like...we had to cover our ears."

"It was loud?" Murray asked as he frowned and folded his arms. Principally a man of action, he preferred to stand during interrogations while Randall sat close to the witness, pressing for information and speaking in a familiar fashion. Not exactly ‘good cop/bad cop' like on TV, but they found most people they brought in naturally thought of it that way. It suited their respective styles to let them carry on thinking that.

"No, more like...uh..." the young man didn't have the education to explain what he meant, so he fumbled to explain it, "Like, a whistle in your ears or somethin', more like that."

"You mean high pitched?" Randall guessed.

"Yeah, that's it," the witness nodded gratefully.

"So," Murray summarised, "You approached her - which we're not going to talk about - and she let out a high-pitched scream which made you cover your ears."

The thug nodded again.

"What then?"

"Then she picked Keysean up..."

"She what?!"

The thug looked sheepish, as if he didn't quite believe the story himself either. "She picked him up, like, over her head."

Murray crossed over to the desk where a number of photographs were arranged. He leafed through them until he found the one he sought: another black man, badly beaten with the name ‘Keysean Williams' underneath.

Murray held up the photograph and showed it to their witness. "This is Keysean, right?"

He nodded.

"Keysean Williams...born and grew up here in New Orleans...pretty successful high school basketball player at one point," he glanced at the man he'd just described's friend, "About six foot four, two hundred pounds?"

"Yeah...that's him..."

"And here's the girl we're looking for." Murray held up another photo, showing the slight figure of the focus of their investigations, in all her five foot two, hundred and ten pound glory.

The man looked sheepish again.

"She dead lifted him?" Randall pressed, "Just picked him up and lifted him over her head?"

"No, I mean...well...I guess Keysean had her arms and she threw him over from there..."

"Ah, now that makes more sense," Murray said with a grimace, "You were holding the little girl's arms behind her back and you guys bit off a little more than you could chew, right?"

"Steve..."

Murray ignored his partner and took a step towards the table, "Must've seemed pretty funny at first, trying to stop a kid from fighting back against a gang of tough dudes like you," he gave the uncomfortable looking man a sick smile, "Doesn't seem so funny now, does it?"

"Steve!"

Murray turned to his partner with a start. He seemed about to say something to defend himself but then thought better of it. Randall shot a look at the man they were interviewing, "Why don't we take a break? Go with the officer outside, get a glass of water, have a smoke or something, yeah?"

The young man nodded and left the room quickly.

A pregnant pause settled over the interview room once he'd left and Murray straightened as Randall gave him a cold look and flicked off the tape recorder in the centre of the table. "What the hell was that?" he asked after a few moments.

"C'mon, Tom...you can see what those creeps were trying to do to her..."

"Yeah, I can, but what does that have to do with anything?"

Murray slammed his hands down on the table. Randall didn't flinch. "We're treating this girl like the bad guy here, and she's lucky she didn't end up in a heap of garbage with her panties round her ankles the way things were going."

"She'd have to be pretty ‘lucky' to do what she did to those guys, Steve," Randall said, not rising to the challenge of his more emotional colleague.

"Either way, it's self defence and you know it. That creep said his buddy was holding her hands behind her back - can you blame her for kicking their asses?"

"No, I can't," Randall sighed, "But that's not why were trying to find her. In case you've forgotten, she may already be responsible for at least two murders, not to mention putting five guys twice her size in hospital."

"Yeah, but..."

"Steve, I can request you get taken off this case if you're letting personal feelings get in the way of your job..."

Murray looked at him, something dark in his eyes. Randall wouldn't ever mention it in a public place like this, but the daughter the more passionate man's ex-wife miscarried would have been about the age of the girl they were searching for now.

"She's just a kid, Tom," Murray replied hoarsely, "None of this makes sense."

"I know," Randall said, genuine sympathy radiating from him, "But she's the only lead we have and from the account we're being given, it looks like she's more than capable of being the murderer we're looking for."

"And all the stuff with the crystals and the exploding brains?"

It was Randall's turn to grimace now. "Whatever weapon she has that's doing that isn't something we want falling into the hands of some Al-Qaeda operative or something..."

"No," Murray agreed, "I guess our priority is just finding her and stopping her now, not building up a body of evidence or something."

"Right."

"Still, it's not all bad news with this crap."

Randall arched his brow, "No?"

Murray crossed over to the desk again and picked up a piece of paper, "You read the initial witness report yet?"

"Not all of it."

"Check out the end bit," he passed the document over to his partner, "It looks like our little murderess finally has a name..."

Randall frowned. "‘Revenant'? Sounds like something out of a comic book..."

"This whole case is starting to feel like that," Murray sighed as he sipped at his now-cold coffee.

* * *

Her feet had taken her all across the still-recovering Crescent City. Even after the hurricane, the city was still very much alive, though Revenant got a constant feeling of past glory blended with a stubborn survivor spirit that continued to remind her of herself.

She too was a diminished form of something better - or at least more powerful - that had been forced to learn to survive in the hostile world.

If New Orleans could grow back as strong or stronger than it had been, couldn't she?

Maybe.

She had followed the Delacroix Highway south out of the city as night fell, for no other reason than it had seemed an interesting way to go. Having finally reached New Orleans, a destination she had selected on a whim once she'd approached the Louisiana border, she really had no idea where else she could go. North? Go see New York, DC, Canada even? Carry on along the gulf coast and eventually to LA? Maybe she could be in movies or something...

Once again, Revenant was left bereft. Having had no meaningful experience of life for her first fifteen years of existence and knowing that she was surely being hunted, she only knew that she could never stop moving.

To stay alive she could have no home, no lasting effect on anywhere she visited for fear of being tracked.

Dejected, she once again reflected that the way of life she had necessarily adopted meant she must forbid herself from forming relationships, from having friends, maybe even lovers someday. Being who she was, all she could do was endanger anyone she might come to care about.

Like Geoff.

There was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach whenever she thought about the handsome, tousle-headed young man who was so kind to her and who she had ruthlessly slaughtered as her addiction had once again reached the critical point.

Every time she gave in to her dark side, she lost a little of her precious humanity. Unleashing the monster within her destroyed her piece-by-piece, swallowing up what little hope she clung to in her grim life with a blanket of guilt and despair.

Soon, she would be like them. Soon, the guilt would turn to numb pain as the numbers of innocent people she had killed deadened her emotional response to their brutal deaths and made her indifferent to the preciousness of human life.

For that reason, she hung onto the agonising remorse that burned within her. The pain she felt had to sustain her, reminding her that she was human after all.

Revenant's foot almost caught on a tree root as she walked and abruptly she looked up, realising she has unconsciously strayed from the road and had stumbled into the sweltering marshland to the south of the city, criss-crossed by bayous and man-made canals leading to an intricate network of lakes and inlets.

She spun around, trying to see the road behind her, but the vegetation was too dense and she quickly lost her bearings as she walked around, trying to find the route back.

She had to get back to the city before dawn...being caught outside in the sunlight would be more than unpleasant for her...

Beginning to panic, she stumbled through the undergrowth, stepping in puddles and caking her shell-toed sneakers in thick mud from the boggy earth below her. She had to find the road...get back to the city...be safe from the sun...

"The first rule when you get lost is to stay in one place, you know."

She whirled ‘round, eyes wide and fangs bared, trying to find the source of the voice. Her eyes, shifting from the ultraviolet to infrared spectrum as she sought out the stranger couldn't seem to locate anyone nearby.

"You won't be able to see me, mademoiselle; just like I can't see you."

"Then how do you know I'm here?" she asked, anger in her voice which sounded a lot more timid than she would have liked.

"Like you, I have senses that are beyond what humans would call...normal..."

Revenant's eyes widened. The voice had a soft tone to it, but there was something darker lurking there. The accent was strange - Revenant thought it sounded a little French, but she didn't know enough about New Orleans and its history to identify it as what it really was: Cajun.

"Humans? You...you say it like I'm something else..."

The chuckle from the forest was anything but reassuring. "Enfant, you may be able to deceive the witless people you meet everyday, but you can't hide what you are from me."

"W...what I am...?"

"Yes. To a man like me, you are something...or perhaps I should someone...very recognisable. There is no mistaking your identity."

Revenant couldn't speak, but her eyes began to make out something beginning to appear in the vegetation in front of her. As if he had always been there, a robed figure came into view. She stepped back, scared not only by his sudden manifestation, but also because he seemed to know so much about her. Revenant's deepest fear was discovery, especially by someone capable of the kind of things this guy seemed to be.

"I can see what you are, enfant," the figure intoned, "You...are the dhampyr."

"The...what...?"

The figure seemed to smile, "The half-vampire, the scion of the End Times. Your coming gives me both great joy and intense fear."

Revenant took another step back, her mouth wide. "The..." she couldn't form the words, terrified of how he could know - presumably at a glance - what she was. She settled for articulating the other burning question in her mind, "Who...who are you...that you could know that...?"

"My name," the man said, drawing back his hood and revealing the face of a tanned and gently smiling man who looked to be in his early sixties, but who somehow seemed to be much older and, most shockingly, had eyes that were featureless, milky-white orbs, "Is Jean Baptiste."

"The Revenant" - Part VII

Baltic sat hunched over, brooding at the edge of the stagnant water. Pale moonlight reflected off the still surface of the bayou, disturbed only by the occasional ripple of some night-time insect. His eyes, adjusted to the infrared spectrum in these conditions, picked up every trace of life moving in the dank, steaming undergrowth of the Louisiana marshes south of New Orleans.

The hurricane that had so efficiently swept aside human life in this region had left almost no lasting effect on its ecosystem. Nature was constantly balancing and re-balancing itself like a finely honed blade poised on its tip, spinning so fast as to never clatter to the floor.

Baltic was a single drop of diseased blood slowly sliding down that blade, disrupting its fragile equilibrium. A tropical storm was nothing compared to him. With a sick smile, he placed his hand against the moist earth below his desiccated feet and observed with fascination how the even the smallest vermin reacted to the fundamental wrongness of his being, fleeing from his very touch. Millipedes, ants and pill bugs wormed out of the earth in primal terror; twisted roots of trees seemed to recoil from him.

It was an odd sensation, for him at least. Knowing all too well how distinctive the signature of the calcite crystals in his brain were to one who knew what to sense for, he felt somehow vulnerable, as if he was naked and unshielded from the gaze of his enemies.

That was the human left in him though, he knew. Baltic had no enemies left - none that could do him harm, anyway. Those few that were strong enough to resist his kind were scattered and divided, turned against each other by the machinations of his masters.

Nothing could stop them now. The age of the vampire would soon begin.

Baltic's moment of triumphal reflection was spoiled by the sight of his companion, the bloated and repulsive Caliban, shuffling into his field of vision. The pitiful creature alternated between grovelling fear and childlike devotion to Baltic, often terrified by his intelligence and ferocity he was also sickeningly grateful for the lessons the more powerful vampire imparted.

Baltic felt an odd sense of duty to the weakling vampire. Though their demonic heritage robbed the vampire race of the ability to feel empathy - the quality that defines humans - what had once been his martial pride when he was a man had now been transformed into a warped form of patriotism towards vampire-kind. He could not doubt the superiority of their species and their manifest destiny to rule over the weak living creatures of Earth, and so he did everything in his power to make certain that there would be no examples left to shame them.

Another vampire would have killed Caliban without question, but Baltic saw in him a strange potential: if even the weakest vampire could be made whole and mighty, then they would surely be all the more unstoppable.

It was a spiritual quest of sorts, Baltic admitted to himself when he was at his most reflective.

"Where is she?"

Caliban's oddly slurred speech made everything he said sound slovenly and unfocused, but Baltic knew it wasn't intentional. He acknowledged his companion's question by closing his eyes and tilting his head towards the sky in a gesture that had become familiar to the weakling vampire.

Baltic's mind opened up, feeling the world around him. It was always a disconcerting process since his Siring, like gasping for breath and finding one's mouth filled with sewage. His senses were warped by his own presence, twisted like he was looking through a kaleidoscope and subverted by primal instincts and knowledge that had supplanted his former human frame of reference.

Nonetheless, he could still feel her. Not so far away now, like she'd stopped again. That was foolish of her. So far, both she and her pursuers had moved by night, each incapable of acting during daylight hours but now she seemed to be stationary even while the moon was up.

"She's staying in one place. Just a few miles east of us."

"Why has she stopped?"

Baltic opened his eyes and gave Caliban a sharp look under which he wilted. "All I can do is locate her, not read her mind..."

Caliban shrugged away mournfully, reaching down into the water and dredging up a handful of rotting vegetation that he sniffed experimentally. "What will we do when we find her?" he asked after discarding the weeds with a look of disappointment.

Baltic considered the question for a few seconds. He had to admit that the query had been preying on his mind too ever since their hunt had begun. The house from which both Caliban and their quarry had come had been a squalid den of debasement and depravity, a solitary stronghold of independent Shadowspawn that Baltic had been sent to investigate.

What he had found there shocked him, but he had remained there for a time, gaining what knowledge of them that he could. The child had fascinated him. In almost every outward way she resembled a young human, but he saw in her eyes the hunger for blood that defined his own people. Her tears after they fed her the dying when she was at her most ravenous told her that she clung to her humanity though. It was a monstrous combination and the thought of how it had come about turned even his undead stomach.

She was an abomination against both human- and vampirekind.

"When we find her," he finally answered, displaying his long, gleaming fangs, "We'll kill her. And she'll suffer worse than any of the others..."

As he spoke, Caliban's eyes strayed up to the ragged canopy above them, from which were suspended a dozen mutilated corpses, their faces frozen in screams of terror and pain.

* * *

Their journey through the marshland was not a lengthy one, but the going was difficult. Revenant frequently stumbled over roots and vines, splashing in mud and several times finding herself calf-deep in mud and dank water, staining her baggy pants. She grimaced at the cold sensation and scowled hard at the man she was following.

Baptiste did not appear to be so troubled by the arduous trek, moving swiftly and apparently effortlessly through the fens despite his obvious handicap. Beneath the dark purplish robe he wore a fine looking suit that matched his carefully turned appearance and seemed to reflect the self-control that he radiated with every movement.

"So tell me about yourself," the elderly but vigorous man prompted as she stumbled behind him.

"Why? You seem to know everything already."

He chuckled dryly. "My knowledge is extensive, but it is limited in some respects. I may know who you are, but how you came to be is a mystery even to me."

"And how you can walk through a swamp without being able to see is a mystery to me."

This time his chuckle seemed more genuine, but he didn't turn around. "All your questions will be answered, mademoiselle, once you answer mine..."

"Why should I answers yours first?" she retorted, planting her feet in the muddy earth and letting a stubborn frown crease her brow.

This time Baptiste did turn around, his formerly sardonic look now replaced by something darker and more menacing. "I can leave you in this swamp if you wish it, enfant, but I doubt you would survive long against those who are seeking you."

Revenant's frown deepened, "Seeking me?"

Some of the humour returned to Baptiste's face, but it was laced with the earlier darkness. "Yes. There are two vampires hunting you. One is far more powerful than you can imagine. The other is weaker, but he would still make short work of you, I'm afraid."

Revenant visibly paled and took a step back, once more immersing one of her feet in mud. She cursed as she regained her composure, but still took the time to shoot Baptiste a look of scorn. "I can look after myself," she assured him.

"No doubt, but you may find it easier to avoid them behind the walls of my compound, dhampyr."

"I have a name you know."

"Of course, forgive me, mademoiselle," Baptiste replied, seemingly genuinely regretful that he had offended her. Despite his mysterious behaviour, Baptiste seemed to possess an urbane and gentlemanly nature that was not at odds with his aura of self-control. He was not easily ruffled, it was clear, but it was not to intimidate that he retained his composure, but out of a keen pride in himself.

A silence stretched between them and it occurred to Revenant that Baptiste was waiting for her to speak. "And your name is...?"

She coloured under his scrutiny, but once again he too seemed uncomfortable that she had been embarrassed. She surmised as she stammered out her answer that, just as she had perceived that the odd man was much older than he appeared, his values would be equally archaic. Baptiste did not like to see a woman - even one as young as Rev - be placed in an awkward position.

After a longer pause, Baptiste smiled again and gestured her forward. "Come, Revenant, it is not far now. We will talk in the safety of my home. I will answer some of your questions and I hope you will answer some of mine."

Revenant nodded quietly and took his hand, allowing him to lead her safely through the marshes.

* * *

The trees parted as they crested a short rise and a completely unexpected sight came into view. Standing tall in the cold moonlight was a solid concrete wall, maybe fifteen feet in height. Revenant's mouth opened wide as she looked up to the top of the fortifications, observing the rolls of razor wire that crested the battlements and the half-dozen men that shifted slowly in place behind it. They were big, with hard eyes and highly visible assault rifles in hand. She realised what Baptiste had meant now by ‘walls of his compound'.

"What is this place?"

"All will become clear in just a short time," Baptiste assured her as he reached inside his robes and produced a small mirror. He held it aloft and let it reflect the moonlight, flashing three times in quick succession. The nearest guard raised his arm in response and moved off.

"What do you do when the moon isn't out?" Revenant asked the old man.

"Stay inside."

Within a few moments, the two of them had walked around the compound to a heavily reinforced gate which was opened for them by two guards with their ever-present rifles. Baptiste exchanged nods, but it was clear that his relationship to the warriors was only professional. Revenant wondered how much he would have to pay men like these to live in a secret fortress in the midst of a swamp.

Within the mysterious compound were a series of low warehouse-like buildings. It didn't look especially homely, but it was clear that this place - on the outside at least - was not designed for comfort, but for security.

Swiftly, Baptiste lead her across the courtyard until they came to the largest of the buildings and ushered her in. Inside it was warmer than she expected and the entrance way had the appearance of a fine, upper-class home with an air of age and comfort. Revenant didn't recognise the style of architecture and décor, but if she had the place would have reminded her of the kind of home a southern gentleman in the early 1900s might have owned.

Once she had divested herself of her dirty, oversized jacket and dirty sneakers, she was shown through by an anonymous looking servant into a spacious and richly furnished sitting room. There was a blazing fire in the hearth and she sat herself on the chair closest to it, wrapping her arms around herself but wincing at the flames as she did so.

"I'm sorry, are your eyes sensitive to the light?" Baptiste asked as he entered, now feeling his way through the room like the blind man she had first taken him for. He wore just his suit now and looked comfortable in his surroundings. It was clear that this was his home and he had built and furnished it to his own specifications.

She nodded, but when he didn't react spoke instead. "I...yeah...they are..."

He reached over to the side of the hearth and fumbled towards a fireguard which he placed in front of the blaze. She watched his tentative movements and finally asked the question that had been hovering on her lips. "You didn't seem to have trouble finding your way around outside...how come...um...?"

"How come I'm suddenly a blind man again?" he finished for her, seating himself opposite.

"Yeah..."

He chuckled. "My senses are not so sharp indoors. One of the disadvantages of this fortress is that it cuts off my connection to the environment which is so vital to overcoming my handicap. Tea?"

His question caught her off guard, and she stammered a refusal.

"Something else then? I may have some cordial somewhere..."

"No, it's fine. I'm fine."

"Very well. You've asked a question and received a reply already, now perhaps you might be willing to answer one of mine?"

She shrugged. "Alright then."

"Your story, enfant. I wish to know how the dhampyr came to be."

"So you know what I am, but..."

He held up one withered hand. "I believe we've been through this. I know more than most about the ways of your kind - of both your kinds - and I am confused by how one such as you is even possible. It crossed my mind even that the prophecy could be a piece of clever wordplay, using the existence of a half-vampire as a way of saying that the events described will never come to pass."

"I don't have all the answers myself," Revenant replied slowly after a few moments in deep thought, "Only what Nancy told me."

"Your mother?"

"No. My mother was a vampire."

Baptiste cocked his head as he poured tea for himself. "So your father was human?"

"I..." she didn't know how best to explain what she thought was the truth of her existence, "My father...is...irrelevant..."

"How so?"

"I never knew him and I never will. My mother forgot him when she was turned into one of those things..."

"The correct term is ‘Sired', my dear."

"Whatever. She was one of them before I was born."

Baptiste started forward, splashing tea over the rim of his cup but apparently not noticing where the hot liquid hit his frail-looking hands. "She was Sired while pregnant? Of course!"

Revenant nodded. "Nancy said that my mother...or what was left of her...wanted to claw me out of herself, but the master forced her to keep me. He wanted to...to..."

Baptiste frowned as she trailed off, not noticing the tears that filled her eyes as she spoke. "He was obsessed with...with...the idea of...an....an heir...part-vampire, p...part human...part...him..."

"Him? He was not a vampire?"

She shook her head numbly, but when she realised he wouldn't be able to see that hoarsely croaked, "No..."

"Then what...?"

"Something else. Something they couldn't hurt. I remember the first time I was old enough to bite him, when I f...first realised what I could do..."

"You bit him?" Baptiste prompted, now engrossed in her story.

"On his arm. He just laughed and showed me where the others had tried to do the same. He controlled them with physical strength because they couldn't kill him like they did normal humans."

"Then he wasn't human," Baptiste mused, placing his un-drunk tea to one side and slowly stroking his short, grey beard as if in deep thought, "Was there anything else distinctive about him, besides his immunity to your bites?"

"His eyes," she answered automatically.

"Yes?"

"They were black. Like a moonless night. Like a pit."

"Or an abyss..."

Baptiste looked troubled and stood up, beginning to walk across the room slowly. "You say they were black - do you mean entirely?"

"No. He had no irises, but they were white in places."

Baptiste seemed relieved. "Then he is not pure. I feared that you had encountered a truestrain, though that is unlikely as I know of only one such."

"A...truestrain...?" Revenant asked, turning the unfamiliar word over in her mouth.

"The one you called your master," Baptiste told her in a dark tone, "Is a descendant of a race of beings known as the Faithless. They are extremely dangerous, as you have discovered to your cost. They were an experiment by dark and ancient gods many thousands of years ago to destroy mankind but it failed - the Faithless are repellent to most human beings and so they cannot breed...except by force..."

Revenant visibly blanched at his choice of words, and it was clear that he had understood her earlier meaning.

"Nonetheless, some still carry the taint of those ancient ones and they are a formidable weapon. The same power that makes them so repulsive also renders them immune to the bite of a vampire, the scent of the werekind and to demons they are totally invisible. The one you speak of may be a powerful ally to our foes in the coming war..."

"I wouldn't worry," Revevant replied, allowing herself a moment of triumph, "Last time I saw him he had a rusty nail lodged in his throat. I left him to die on the floor of the room where he kept me chained like an animal."

"Good," Baptiste replied grimly.

"The Revenant" - Part VIII

She stared around the expansive basement room, her eyes wide. Its contents and everything she had been told was a lot for her to take in in such a short period of time, especially when she was used to nothing much changing in her life for fifteen years.

"So...there are others like me?" Revenant asked.

Baptiste rested his hand on one of the display cabinets in the room and shook his head, "None exactly like you, no - you're unique, mon chéri, but if you're asking whether the world is replete with beings and creatures of your nature, then the answer is yes."

Revenant nodded as she continued to look around the macabre museum that sat below Baptiste's home in his impregnable compound. Skeletal remains, stuffed specimens and grisly trophies stood on every mantle, adorned every wall and decorated every surface. Though she had been raised amongst vampires and knew their kind all too well, in the months she had been free it had been made abundantly clear to her that her upbringing was not exactly...normal.

All her dealings with humans had led her to naturally believe that she was the only one and, at times, begin to question her sanity.

"What's that?" she asked, gesturing towards one huge skeleton standing on its hind-legs but hunched over like a predatory animal in a glass case.

"Canis Lupus Diabolus..."

She looked at him blankly.

"It's a warg - a wolf demon."

Revenant nodded, still not really understanding the creature.

Baptiste continued to explain as he looked at the monster's remains with his sightless eyes, "Over three-thousand years ago, a warlord in what is now Peloponnesus in Greece offended the storm god his people worshipped and was transformed into the first warg by Lucifer. The story survives as the myth of Lycaon, the first king of Arcadia - though his descendents know him as Ul'tath, the Wargsire."

"What did he do?" the girl asked.

"He was a cannibal. Ever since that time, his lupine offspring have been cursed with the Huger, an overwhelming lust to consume human flesh, as their ancestors did."

Revenant's stomach lurched at the way he described such an activity and how it could so easily be applied to her. She didn't yet know just how much Baptiste understood about her condition.

"So wargs...eat people...?"

"It's complicated. The descendents of Ul'tath are proud warriors who serve Lucifer and follow the task he set them upon their creation; they live to breed with humans and create werewolves."

"Werewolves?" Revenant asked, turning back to Baptiste with her eyes wide.

"Yes, a hybrid of man and warg produces a werewolf - a creature that looks like a normal human, but who can change into a wolf at will."

"I know what a werewolf is," Revenant replied with a grimace, "Just didn't think they were real..."

Baptiste barked a laugh and proceeded through the room before stopping and pointing at another case. In it was a dented iron mask. "This was once part of a specimen of the species Diabolus Gladii, commonly known as an Incubus."

"What are they?" she asked, staring at the scorched metallic surface of the object.

"Warrior demons. Pray you don't meet one - they dislike even those who are supposedly on the same side." His face twisted in an odd way, but he did not elaborate.

Slowly, Baptiste proceeded through the room, slowly feeling his way until he reached a heavy door at the far end. "But I didn't come here to show you the remains of your cousins, what I..."

"Hey, what?"

Baptiste frowned at her interruption but turned in her direction, his hand poised on the handle of the door, "What?"

"You called them my cousins...why?"

The old man straightened and a strange expression passed across his face. "Of course," he murmured, "You would not know..."

"Know what?" she asked, beginning to feel uncomfortable in the museum surrounded by skeletons and other remains.

"What you are. What you truly are."

"Huh?"

Baptiste tried to smile reassuringly as he walked away from the door he had been about to go through and instead disappeared down another corridor back the way they had come. Calling after him, Revenant jogged to keep up and, rounding a corner, found him in front of another door, fumbling a key from his pocket.

Though the portal was much like any other in the strange building, Revenant felt a strange sense of foreboding as she looked at it. "Wh...what's though there...?" she asked, a quiver in her voice.

"Something you need to see," the man replied.

Saying nothing more, he finally unlocked the door and let it swing slowly inwards, revealing a scene from some nightmare within.

The bare concrete walls were daubed with dark stains that every sense Revenant knew of told her was blood. Skulls and other clearly human remains littered the floor and, at the far end was a slab of stone decorated with strange objects. An empty pedestal stood in the centre with a small stand that looked like it had once held a glass or vial of something atop it. On the far wall, carved in relief and daubed with the same dark, old blood, was an inverted pentagram decorated with dozens of grotesque and disturbing images.

Revenant knew immediately that many people had died here in the past and that, most likely, many more would in the future.

"What the fuck is this?" she asked as she stepped through the door and stared around her.

"My Church," Baptiste told her simply.

"This isn't a church this is...this is..." she couldn't find the word, so instead turned to him, levelling an accusatory finger, "Just whose side are you on, mister?!" she demanded.

"Side?"

"Everything you've told me so far, all the things you've said, you made it sound like you were fighting against the kind of things I grew up with and now I find this...this..." she curled her small lower lip, displaying her pearly-white fangs, "...temple of...of..."

"Lucifer. It's a Temple of Lucifer."

"So this is all a trick then? All this mentor shit?" She clenched her small fists and furrowed her brow, fully prepared to fight her way out of this situation if she had to.

"Not at all, enfant," Baptiste said, a strange sense of sadness in his voice, "The world is simply far more complex than you know. Please, trust me just a little longer and I will explain everything."

Revenant looked hard at him and realised that she had no option but to trust him. Silently she vowed to herself, however, that if this turned out to be a trick of some kind, Baptiste would regret it for as long as he lived - which wouldn't be very long at all.

* * *

Randall spread the map out on the small table and placed the sheaf of print-outs next to it. Murray picked them up as he watched his partner and leafed through them quickly. "I take it you found what you were looking for then?"

Randall nodded and beckoned for one of the images, placing it near a certain point on the map and tracing his finger down a blue line that indicated a snaking bayou.

"So what am I looking at, Tom?"

Randall looked up and pointed at the small grey shape in the centre of the satellite photo. "A compound of some kind," he immediately returned to the map, "Now I just gotta figure out where it is..."

"It's out in the marshes?"

"Yup."

"And no one knows what the hell it is?"

Randall shook his head, not taking his eyes from the map, "If they do, they aren't telling me."

Murray sighed deeply and sipped at his ever-present Styrofoam coffee cup as he perused the images from the computer. They'd found a lead, surprisingly; some one saw a girl matching ‘Revenant's' description leaving the city by a tiny road that led out into the swamps and they were trying to figure out just where she might have been headed.

As far as anyone knew, there was nothing out there but dank marshes and stagnant bayous, but now Randall's lateral thinking had given them the next piece of the puzzle it seemed. There was nothing else out there that the girl could possible have been trying to find.

"So what do you think it is? Al Queda training base? Lex Luthor's secret lair?"

Randall snorted a laugh. "Fuck knows. But whatever it is, she's gotta be there."

Murray had to admit that this case was really starting to perplex him. They had followed this child hundreds of miles outside their jurisdiction and tried to piece together a picture of what was going on and, so far, almost nothing added up. Though he was a traditional and honest cop, the detective was beginning to think he was just more interested in solving the mystery rather than bringing anyone to justice. How and why had she done what she did, if indeed she had?

"Gotcha!"

Murray stepped over to the table and looked down at the map where Randall's finger had come to rest. "You found it?" he asked.

"Yeah, look," he held up the satellite image, "You can see that little pool in the corner..."

"The brown blob there?"

"Uh huh, and here it is on the map."

He looked at where his partner was pointing. The shape of the small lake was unmistakable but the map showed only blank terrain where their mysterious compound was.

"Doesn't appear on any maps, no one knows it's there - if I was a teenaged murderess in New Orleans, that's exactly where I'd go," Murray smiled.

"Ditto. So what now?"

"I think I have an idea..."

* * *

"The old lines have been blurred, Revenant - what was once black and white has now been smeared into shades of grey."

She nodded thoughtfully as he walked back through the morbid museum and returned to the door he had originally intended to open before she started asking awkward questions.

"You must understand, mon chéri, that I am numbered amongst the most evil men in this world - I have tortured, mutilated and murdered many, many people in the name of my Master, the First of the Fallen."

Revenant grimaced. She had begun to see the strange old man as a kind of surrogate grandfather in the short time she'd spent with him, but now she was discovering that he was anything but.

"In my quest for knowledge and power, I have crushed the life from hundreds and shed gallons of blood - but I did it because I knew that there would come a time when such a power must stand here in the swamps and resist a shadow darker than any I could cast."

"So you're noble after all?"

Baptiste laughed hoarsely, "Not even slightly - I am a selfish, bitter old man who fights because he wants to stay alive, nothing more. No, I leave the heroic sacrifice to my old enemies who now, in these dark times, I must call allies."

He finally opened the door and pushed it open, stepping through immediately and flicking a light switch on the inside wall. In contrast to the soft, muted lighting that pervaded in the rest of the building, this room was illuminated by harsh fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling. The floor and walls were bare concrete and there was no decoration of any kind.

However, every wall was covered in dozens of charts and blueprints and the room was filled with workbenches littered with mechanical parts and computer screens that were currently blank. If the last room was a museum, this was some kind of workshop or laboratory.

"I take it from your awed silence that this is an impressive sight? I wouldn't know, of course."

Revenant was indeed awed, staring at the bizarre machinery that stood in pieces all over the large room. There were weapons and vehicles in various states of either construction or disrepair (it was hard to tell which) as well as many dozens of more esoteric and unusual devices.

"What is all this for?" she finally asked after wandering around the room for a good three minutes.

"There is a war being fought, Revenant," Baptiste began, "On a hundred fronts across the planet by dozens of organisations and cults."

"Against who?"

"Against a new threat that has come from beyond what even the wise understand as reality. It assails us from every quarter, destroying and undermining even our mightiest allies."

"So," Revenant said, running all this new information through her head as she continued her circuit of the room, "You're a Satanist or something, and you're fighting against some bad guys..."

"That's a little simplistic. By traditional definitions, as I said, I'm..."

"Right, whatever. You're a bad guy but now there's worse ones, right?"

"Yes, that's one way to put it."

"So where are the good guys?"

Baptiste tilted his head and walked over to a chart by the wall, showing a map of the world with dozens of tiny symbols placed haphazardly across it.

"Once, there was a group called the Shadow Slayers," he pointed at a small green circle with a white winged sword on it that sat on Rome, "Hunters of demons and vampires, but they too have been undone by the enemy. They are the closest thing to ‘good guys' that we had left."

Revenant looked at the map, taking in the strange symbols. One that was in northern Italy but looked like it had been moved around a lot drew her eye. "How about them?" she asked, pointing, "They friends of yours?"

Baptiste frowned, "Is it an inverted pentagram like the one in my temple?"

"Uh huh."

"That's...complicated."

Revenant stepped back from the map and looked around the workshop again. "So there's a war...and you're building weapons and stuff for it?"

"It's only a matter of time before it ceases to be covert and I have little confidence that our current representatives can do the job required of them without..."

He trailed off without finishing his sentence.

"Without what?" she prompted him.

"Nothing. That's a conversation for another time."

He said nothing more and Revenant continued to look around the room, picking up half-finished machines here and there and looking at them with interest. Some of the schematics on the wall also drew her eye.

"What does ‘E. O. G. ' stand for?" she asked, looking at one blueprint of a gun with interest.

"It's a codename, nothing more," Baptiste replied shortly as he felt his way across the benches until he found a weapon he had apparently been working on before, "Most of these designs - including that one - are for things that cannot be built with today's technology."

"Huh?"

"In the future that our enemies have in mind for us, it may be that we have to fight a guerrilla war. I have little hope that skills of innovation or invention will survive such a trial by fire, and so I made sure to stockpile a number of designs for future generations to use once I am gone."

"So E.O.G. isn't going to be killing bad guys anytime soon?"

"Not unless someone discovers time travel," Baptiste smiled as he seated himself and continued to work on the gun in his hands.

The peaceful ambience of the cluttered workshop was suddenly interrupted by a dull rumble that knocked mechanical parts from work benches and sent both Revenant and Baptiste stumbling.

"What the hell was that?" she demanded.

"I have no idea," Baptiste said, turning visibly pale. It was clear that he was not used to not being in control of a situation.

Hurriedly, the mismatched pair rushed upstairs and into the building proper. In Baptiste's luxurious sitting room there stood a guard with a troubled look on his face.

"James, what is it?" Baptiste asked.

"We're under attack...it's..."

The elderly man pushed passed him and rushed out into the compound followed by Revenant and James. "We're too late!" Baptiste called as he saw his guards drawing weapons and rushing to the walls, "The attack has come already!"

James shook his head, "No, sir, this isn't servants of the Abysmal Ones - it's the goddamn cops!"

Mouths agape, Baptiste and Revenant both looked up at the night sky where the unmistakable sight of a police helicopter coming into view over the treetops told them that their problems were only just beginning.

"The Revenant" - Part IX

"What do we do?"

Baptiste turned to her slightly. She sensed that whatever ability it was that allowed him to sightlessly navigate was being disrupted by the chaos around him, making him unable to fixate on her properly . For a second she saw the mantle of self-control and assurance that Baptiste always wore slip, revealing for just a moment the pale, worn face of an old, old man.

"I..." he stood motionless, but then something in him switched on and he whirled around violently, turning his head this way and that as if to zero in on the movements of his guards and the attacking force of police. "Hide," he told her, the rigid steel of control returning to his voice.

"What's going on?" Revenant asked him, her feet still rooted to the spot.

"I don't know," he admitted, his voice now wavering as she had just seen his face do as if confessing his powerlessness caused him physical pain, "Few enough should know this place even exists, and those that have found out know better than to come calling. No this is the work of a..."

He paused.

"What?"

"A...variable. An unknown element..."

His face was turned towards her, and Revenant stepped back under his sightless scrutiny. The implication in his tone was clear.

"You are in great danger," he told her, moving as he spoke, "You must hide."

"I can defend myself," she protested, "And even if they do stop me, there's nothing they could do that's worse than what I've been through already..."

Baptiste paused and his face hardened. "What will you do, enfant? Bite the officers who come to you? Kill them as I know you have killed others?"

Revenant's heart lurched in her chest at his words. Things she had forgotten surged back into her mind - the dead eyes of Geoff as he lay slumped in the driver's seat. She'd never forget the frozen scream of terror on his face as she, rabid with bloodlust, had lunged at him. She had been like an animal after so long without the blood she craved.

Baptiste, she realised, knew perfectly well that she must have prayed on the innocent. She supposed she had rationalised his lack of condemnation because she thought he understood her and her unique condition. Now, having seen his vile temple and his morbid display cases, she understood that this man simply did not care about what she had done - he had committed acts far more vile. Baptiste was not like her.

"If I tell them...if I explain...they'll understand..."

They must.

"No." His response was flat. "They will not. They cannot. You come from a world that is unimaginable to them. In being forced to confront it, you would destroy them."

"What do you care?" Revenant challenged.

"I care...I care..." he drew himself up. Around them the sound of sirens outside the compound blared along with announcements over loud hailers that thundered through the night, but Baptiste ignored it all for this moment. "I care because the second our world meets theirs, all hope of victory is gone. If this War - the War to End All Wars - became something that the teeming, ignorant masses of humanity became aware of, they would be divided. How many do you think would choose to side with our foes? It is bad enough to contest with the Elder Gods and their servants themselves, but would those humans who have the sense to side with us be willing to pull the triggers on and thrust the blades into their own brothers and sisters with delusions of grandeur? There are countless millions who would fight with all their power for the destruction of their world, unwittingly or not. Mankind is not ready for this battle, and they never will be. This is a War that must be fought between those of us who have grown to understand the true nature of the world."

Revenant had no reply for him. He shook his head. "Hide. They're coming for you, Revenant. Because of those you killed on your way here. I will protect you as long as I can."

"Why?"

"Because I do not trust my fellow humans to save the world, but I trust you. You must live, or all is lost."

* * *

Penetrating the marshes had not been easy. Cars had gotten wheels stuck in thick, stagnant mud, mosquitoes had plagued all of them with incessant bites and the hot, fetid air was making everyone irritable. It was as if the land itself resisted them.

Murray cursed as he looked up at the walls of the compound. This place was the real deal, it seemed. They hadn't come prepared for a siege. The chopper hovered in the air, casting its searchlight around as Randall fumbled a megaphone out and held the speaker to his mouth.

He paused.

"What the hell am I supposed to say?" he asked his partner.

Murray shrugged, "What do you normally say?"

"‘We have this place surrounded; come out with your hands up' - that kinda thing..."

"So what's the problem?"

"We're not arresting anyone, Steve, at least not yet. He could have a goddamn army in there for all we know."

Murray glanced up at the walls and saw the grey-uniformed figures moving into place, assault rifles at the ready. "Just...just say we know the girl is in there and to send her out...or something..."

Randall shrugged and raised the device to his lips again. "Attention," he began, his voice amplified above the noise of the squad cars' sirens, "We know the girl is in there...send her out, unarmed, and there'll be no more trouble..."

They had a license to search this place, but both cops knew it would take more than that to force entry into the compound. Murray sighed as he buckled on his bullet-proof jacket and eased his Smith and Wesson from its holster. He still hoped, deep down, that he wouldn't be forced to hurt this girl; part of him felt, very strongly, that this was all some kind of mistake, that she was as innocent and pure as she looked on the CCTV footage.

He wondered if, when it came down to it, he would make the right choice if Randall pulled his own weapon on her.

* * *

Baptiste moved swiftly across the compound, his wits now fully recovered. James looked up at him from his position near the gates. Baptiste could not see the man's expression, but he could feel his anxiety. His job was supposed to be an easy one - a cushy number in the middle of nowhere where he wouldn't have to ever fire a bullet in anger. But now he was about to find himself maybe gunning down cops. No job was worth the trouble that could land him in.

"Orders, boss?" he asked.

"You're the guard, James, not me," Baptiste replied, "You know this fortress better even than me. Tell me how you'd defend it."

"Against cops? With a chopper? I wouldn't."

Baptiste actually laughed at the bluntness of the man's reply, but waved his hand to prompt a serious reply from his head of security.

"Well...they can land officers in here at will. Plus if they get desperate the National Guard are just a phone call away. We can take quite a pounding, but not for long. These walls were designed to keep out casual, roving Shadowspawn and to make sure passers-by didn't ask questions, not repel an organised assault."

"But we can hold out...?"

"For a few hours...maybe..."

Baptiste stood, his finger on his lips as he considered their options. James interrupted his thoughts, "Boss, with all due respect, they're saying they want the girl..."

"I know that."

"Don't you think it would be prudent to maybe do what they ask? The longer the stay here, the harder it gets to keep what we have here under wraps. If we can give them what they want, they'll leave."

"Not an option."

"Yes, but..."

"Not an option," Baptiste repeated, the volume of his voice increasing with anger.

"Then smuggle her out. We can hold out long enough to do that."

Baptiste considered his security chief's words. "That may be the best option," he admitted. He nodded to the walls, "Hold the line until I return; I'll get Revenant to safety."

James nodded as his employer moved off back to the buildings to save the girl he had taken in. Maybe things would work out after all.

* * *

"Nothing's happening," Murray spat, "Maybe she isn't in there...?"

"She's there," Randall said, his eyes still fixed on the compound, "I know it."

Around them, members of the New Orleans PD were arming up, loading rifles and taking up positions in front of the concrete wall that loomed above them. The chopper still circled above like a vulture waiting to feed.

"We should call in the National Guard," Murray suggested, "We're not exactly experts on siege warfare..."

"No. She's our suspect..."

So this is how far they'd come. What had started as an odd fascination for the two of them had now become an obsession that threatened to divide the old friends. Randall had become entranced by the strange twists and turns this case had taken, and was determined to reach the bottom of it. As for Murray, this girl - Revenant - had become romanticised in his mind, turned into some kind of new-age Robin Hood. The first man she killed had been a paedophile, Geoff Walker was some deadbeat drug-addicted student and the gang were probably going to mug and rape her. Murray couldn't endorse her vigilantism, but years of dealing with that kind of scum and wishing he had the guts and drive to do something about them - really do something about them - meant he couldn't help but sympathise with the young girl.

"Hey, look..."

Randall's voice broke him out of his reverie and he looked where his partner was pointing. The gates of the compound were open and a lone figure stood in the light that poured from within. The sirens died down as he stepped forward.

Next to Randall, one officer raised his rifle. "Let him speak," the detective whispered.

"I'm the chief of security for this instillation," the uniformed figure called out, his voice carrying over the swamp, "I'll take you to the girl you're looking for..."

"The Revenant" - Part X

Revenant hurried through the luxurious, oddly-antiquated living quarters of Baptiste's compound. The look in the elderly man's sightless eyes had told her not to question his words as he'd told her to hide one last time. She was still struggling with the implications of his dire prophecy. All that dhampyr stuff was all very well, but even if she had grown up knowing that the supernatural underbelly of the world was a very real fact of reality, her approach to it was necessarily pragmatic.

One could believe in vampires, but accepting that there was something...magical...or religious...about them was a totally different proposition. Revenant didn't believe in God - seeing what happened to Nancy despite her faith had taught her that no matter how many times you prayed, no one was ever going to come and save you. Prayers hadn't stopped her tormentor literally ripping Nancy apart bit-by-bit, letting his vampires feed from her while she still screamed in terror and pain.

Strange that she'd still been afraid after so long.

Revenant put thoughts of the only person - up ‘till three months ago - that had ever showed her any kindness out of her mind. No time to dwell on the past now...no time...

Of course, she had never considered that the police would catch up with her. She had lived her whole life isolated and sheltered in that monstrous place; how could she have known how such things worked? She had only killed those people when the hunger had driven her to the point of bestial uncontrollability. Though her guilt had driven her slowly mad, it simply hadn't occurred to her that her victims would be missed.

Being missed wasn't something she understood.

Stumbling as she ran, she fell into the basement room she thought of as ‘the museum'. Ignoring the macabre exhibits, she fled to the armoury-cum-workshop, figuring that it was the best place to be if the compound was under attack. As she shut the heavy door behind her and quickly flicked on the fluorescent lights - more out of habit than because she actually needed them to see - the young girl paused to take stock.

The vast arsenal lining every surface awed her once more as she looked this way and that. She wasn't quite sure if trying to fight her way out of this situation was a good plan, but she really had no idea what to do.

It didn't help that, after so long without feeding, she could feel the hunger begin to build up deep in the pit of her stomach. It was like a rising tide that she knew would soon submerge her. If that happened, all the good plans in the world weren't going to save these cops.

In which case, should it come to it, she'd rather rely on weapons than her teeth. At least that way she might be able to bargain her way out or just wound someone. Revenant's eyes alighted on something as she scanned the room.

"Hmmm..."

* * *

Baptiste threw himself against a wall. Something was wrong. In the commotion he couldn't rely on the Sense he used to navigate, the ability he and his brother had learnt all those years ago in a life that seemed...well, come to think of it, it probably was a hundred years ago now.

People rushing everywhere...panic...terror...and something else...

He heard the hammer of a Smith and Wesson being pulled back far too close for comfort.

"You want to show us where the girl is, old man?"

He shook his head. "I think you know the answer to that."

Now he sensed a grim smile. There was no satisfaction in it, just a kind of determination. "I have a warrant to search these premises," the stranger paused and spoke the rest in a quiet voice that only Baptiste could hear, "And no one's going to miss one old guy living in a place that isn't even supposed to exist now, are they?"

Baptiste allowed himself a small smile. "Don't be so sure of that, my boy...but I'll take you to her..."

He stood and checked that the police officer, as the armed man presumably was, was following. Silently he walked towards the warehouses in which he made his home. His Sense returned as the commotion died down and he realised the fighting was over. He also realised that he had been betrayed; probably by James.

No matter.

Nothing mattered now.

* * *

The door opened. She turned and cocked her head. Baptiste stood there with a man she didn't recognise in a bullet proof vest. He was middle-aged, with sandy hair, a greying moustache and a face with a few many cares than his years would suggest. For some reason he looked relieved to see her.

"Hi...Revenant...right?"

She frowned. "Yeah. Who the hell are you?"

"My name's Steve." His smile got a little tighter, like she should have known or something. "Now...I just want you to come with me and we can talk about all this..."

"Talk?" Revenant curled her lip. Her eyes flicked to Baptiste who was standing close to the newcomer. Her eyes flicked low and she just caught the glint of a metallic surface pressed close to his pristine clothes. Her eyes narrowed. "I'll talk when you put that gun away, mister...."

There was a pained expression in his eyes. "It's...not for you..."

She was having difficulty fathoming what this Steve guy was all about. He was acting like they shared some kind of connection, and that he had some kind of expectations of her that she wasn't conforming to.

"I really hope you aren't my father," she said slowly, "Because that would be a ridiculous coincidence..."

Steve looked confused for a moment. She could see he was considered the possibilities, like there was some kind of chance he really could be. She was one hundred percent sure he wasn't though.

"Did your wife get abducted by vampires fifteen years ago?"

"What? Vampires?"

She bared her teeth at him. "Don't you watch movies, old man?"

He took a step back, shocked. She knew from experience that her teeth didn't look like the kind people expected to see in any movie or TV show; they elicited a far more visceral reaction that told all humans she was a predator to be feared. Instinctively, people knew she was for real.

"H...hey...now..." Steve stammered, "Let's not...not..."

"Okay," Revenant interrupted, finding sudden confidence as she faced down this stranger. He was on her turf now; a human standing in the lair of things he wasn't meant to know about. "I'm tired of this. I don't know who you are, but I'm not going with you."

"But..."

"This ends here." She brought up her arms in two wide arcs and, as she did so, the two metal bands she had recently placed on her wrists produced two seamless steel blades like sickles wrapped around her fists. Steve backed up a little further. Shakily, he tried to bring his pistol up to defend himself, but she was too fast, bounding across the room and slashing furiously at him, leaving him with a shallow cut across his face which slowly began to bleed.

To her left, Baptiste moved with equal precision, striking out with the palm of his hand, driving it into Steve's sternum and forcing him back against the wide doorframe.

"What's happened?" she asked Baptiste as she darted past.

"We've been betrayed. The police are in the compound."

Her stomach lurched with fear. "What do I do?"

"Run away...you..."

He trailed off. Revenant couldn't see anyone, but a few moments later another man stepped around the corner into the museum room. He was younger than Steve, a hard-faced African-American. Like the other stranger he wore a bullet proof vest but, unlike him, his pistol was raised and pointing in their direction.

"Put the blades down," he ordered, his voice confident and commanding.

"And who are you?" Rev spat.

"I'm the law, little lady," he grimaced, "And you'll do as I say or I'll put a bullet through you."

"I can't let you do that, Tom..."

She turned to see Steve struggling to his feet, his own weapon now pointed at the black man he had identified as Tom.

"What the fuck, Steve?" Tom looked outraged and determined to have his way, but there was no surprise in his eyes.

"She's just a kid, Tom..." his voice was hoarse and there were tears in his eyes. Revenant had no idea what was going on or why he had these bizarre preconceived notions about her, but the two men were clearly at odds.

"You're letting personal feelings get in the way of this case, Steve," Tom continued, advancing on the three of them that were still stood in the doorway, "I don't know what the hell is going on in your head - I hope to God it's just a fucking midlife crisis or something - but it's time to put your gun down and do your fucking job."

"No..." Tears were streaming down his cheeks now, mingling with the blood from the cut Revenant had made, but the grip on his sidearm was unwavering.

"This is all some huge mistake, Steve. I don't know why she's got to you like this, and I don't know why this is happening, but you need to put the gun down. You need to listen to me and..."

Steve pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Tom looked hard at the man who was evidently his colleague. "No ammo, Steve? That's ‘cos I took it out before we left the station. I've seen the way you've been acting and I took precautions. Now stand aside and we'll end all this, alright?"

Steve shook his head. Without blinking he reached behind him and pulled a second pistol from where it had been tucked into his belt and instantly drove a bullet through Tom's head.

The black detective stood motionless for a second, a look of stunned incomprehension frozen on his now-lifeless face, before slumping to the floor.

Steve looked equally stunned, and Revenant tried to process what had happened. One man now lay dead because of some strange fixation on her by this cop. It made no sense. Baptiste acted fast, turning to Steve and slamming him up against the wall again. Quickly he disarmed the shocked man and patted him down for further weaponry. Finding none, he pressed two fingers against his temple and stood in deep concentration for a few moments.

"It's as I thought," he murmured.

"What?"

Baptiste cocked his head at Revenant's question. "Vampires are able to dominate the wills of weaker creatures, psychically imprinting them with unbending devotion to them. It is how they create their cults and is connected to the link they forge with their Sirelings. This man has somehow become the victim of a similar effect regarding you."

"What? How? I've never seen him before in my life..."

"All bets are off with someone like you, enfant," Baptiste said in a quiet voice, "It may have only taken a grainy CCTV image. But I suspect he was more susceptible than most anyway. The way he looked when you talked as if he could be your father suggests he may have lost a girl close to your age. Or perhaps his interest was sexual in nature. There's no way of knowing."

Revenant curled her lip in disgust at the latter possibility then looked at the one called Steve. His eyes were still wide in shock, his facial expression identical to how it had been the moment after he'd killed his partner.

"What's wrong with him?" she asked.

"He's been broken. His last shred of humanity was tied up with his job and friendship with his late colleague over there I assume. Now that he has passed through that barrier he has nothing left but you."

"I don't want him to be that way..."

"Nonetheless, he is your creature now."

She shook her head. "Then make him go away. I don't want any of this."

"It is your heritage, Revenant," Baptiste said darkly, "As with your hunger for blood and aversion to light. It makes you what you are."

Tears shone in her eyes. "It'll always be the same, won't it? I'll always be running, going from murder to murder, eaten alive by the guilt. No one will ever understand. You were the only one who could help me but now there's cops swarming all over the place so I can't stay here."

"No," Baptiste replied sadly.

"So what else is left for me? I just run forever, do I?"

Baptiste titled his head for a moment as if considering. "There is one who would understand...one who would help and protect you, I think..."

"Who?"

Baptiste began to walk fast, leaving Steve still standing rigid against the wall. Revenant fell into step beside him as he began to speak. "There is not enough time, enfant - in seconds the rest of these men's colleagues will be here. I will show you the way out and tell you all that I can - which is little enough."

He led her though passages, following a route only he knew, constantly flicking his head this way and that, presumably to keep tabs on the police who were flooding through the compound. Finally they reached a discreet back door that led out to the swamp, protected by a keypad. Baptiste quickly entered the code and ushered her out into the night.

"I wish I had time to give you more advice, Revenant," he said, taking her hands as he spoke, "But things are confusing even for me - I do not have the information to give you myself."

"Why can't you just come with me?"

The old man drew himself up. "My place is here. I will endure, if that is to be the way of it, and I will resist while I can. But my power is tied to this place: out there, in the world, I would only be a hindrance to you."

"So what should I do?"

"Run...always run...but look for the one who can help you..."

"And that person is...?"

"Look for The Man Who Walks Alone, Revenant - your destiny lies with him."

"What?" she looked at him with anger in her eyes, "That's it? You can't be more specific?"

"You'll know him when you see him, enfant...stay safe..." He twisted his head again, and seemed to be getting agitated. "I have to go...I must protect what I can...all hope lies with you, dhampyr. Find the one I spoke of."

Saying nothing more, he closed the door.

* * *

Less than a minute later he was in the temple he had shown Revenant. They would come and find everything, the police. He expected he would go to prison for his crimes but, as he had told her, he would endure.

"It will take more than the State can do to stop Jean Baptiste," he vowed to himself as he moved around the small room, dismantling blasphemous edifies and rubbing out heretical runes with his foot. It would not do to have such power fall into the hands of enemies.

Something suddenly disturbed his concentration. The commotion above in the compound as the police ransacked his home had almost distracted him, but the two soul-signatures behind him were unmistakable.

"I'm afraid the girl is gone," Baptiste said as he straightened.

A hoarse voice chuckled behind him. "We'll find her...don't worry..."

"Ah." He paused. "Can your kind sense her then? I had no idea it would work like..."

"Oh no," the voice said, and Baptiste felt its owner slide around to his side. Its companion signal did likewise so that they flanked him. "Just me."

"How is that? Are you linked to her? The one who Sired her mother?"

"No...you're way off, old man..."

Baptiste shrugged. "You might as well tell me then. I assume you're going to kill me anyway."

He felt the speaker smile. He could even Sense the fangs he bared at him. "I guess you can't see my tattoo, eh?"

Baptiste frowned, but then felt a desiccated hand shoot out and grasp his own. He shuddered as his fingers were forced to probe a bicep revealed by the pulling up of a ragged shirt sleeve. His fingers perceived the texture of tattooed flesh, distinct from the dry, dead skin of the vampire. The design was distinct; a series of undulating rings wrapping around the muscle in a way that made a tribal design.

"Ah..."

"Gregor Baltic," the being hissed as he pulled Baptiste closer, "Like you, Jean, I used to be a Shadow Slayer, but those days are long gone now..."

"Has the rot settled so deep in your Order, Baltic?"

"Not my Order anymore, Jean." He moved the old man's hand, now to his chest where the blind man traced another tattoo, a sinuous reptilian creature, like a serpent or...

"Now I'm loyal to the Ordo Draco," Baltic whispered, "Like every other vampire. You lived in fear of the day we'd unite under one Lord...."

"No..."

Baltic smiled and nodded to Caliban who crouched behind the old man who had now began to go limp, his legs finally failing him.

"Feed, Caliban."

The End

Fire consumes the world.

A million burning corpses, a million broken and forgotten dreams, a million eyes that will never look upon a world not destroyed by hatred.

This is the Final Battle.

These are the End Times.

The flickering glow of a single brazier illuminated the face of the old man who gazed into the flames. One side of his face was a mass of twisted scar-tissue, entirely covering the place where his left eye should be in ruined flesh. His remaining eye was dark, buried deep in a socket bound by wrinkled, worn, paper-thin skin. The fire looked like it would consume him like dry tinder if he moved any closer to it. As he watched, his calm expression of resigned acceptance never changing, images began to flicker in the flames.

Two silver coins spun and became one of gold.

A white serpent with glowing red eyes beat its wings over a burning landscape.

A dark man with scars over his eyes walked through the chaos around him, his steps never faltering.

A young girl, terrified and alone, but with a will like steel, ran through a distant swamp.

Wolves howled over the horizon. A second girl answered their call.

A warrior wrote six letters on the white tape that bound his wrists: ‘HFC' on one hand, ‘WMD' on the other.

A figure in white toyed with a gold crucifix in his hand while a red pentagram on a black field hung behind him.

A man, his handsome face shadowed by a low hat, looked behind him to see a shadow looming.

The shadow was the only thing they all had in common. It loomed behind all of them, blacker than night, but comprised of a million swirling shapes. More images.

Fangs. Thousands of them, once moving at different speeds, attacking as many targets as there were fangs, but suddenly cohesive, moving with one rhythm; aimed at one foe.

A being of flies laughing madly at the slaughter he had begun.

Wolves hunting in the night.

A nondescript man with entirely black eyes.

A hulking figure in black with sunken eyes and a tattoo of a dragon on his chest.

A woman.

The woman.

The other images in the shadow were all a part of her, and yet the earlier images - those that had been bright in the fire - also seemed to make up her mocking countenance.

So...

She was the final piece. That first betrayal now returned to plague mankind. Her match, a man in brazen armour with a neatly-trimmed goatee stood to one side. Without her he was nothing. Two halves of the same whole.

A second gold coin hung in the air at that thought.

If they were to unite as the silver ones had...?

The flames shaped themselves into a ring, all the images pulsing along the surface of the band of light in an endless succession. An endless game of give and take; push and pull.

Eyes of shattered glass.

A single red eye and silver gauntlets.

A nameless warrior.

Blue-skinned, scarred husks that had once been human.

All a part of this great cycle. All component parts of the ring of fire.

"Of the Promethean Ring," the old man said to no one but the two ravens that flapped their wings on their perches behind him as he spoke.

At his words, the fire changed. The images disappeared and the flames coalesced into an unbroken golden surface.

A shadowy hand reached out to take it, this time not manufactured by the fire, but coming from the darkness that lay beyond it. She would try to take it, even as the spectral hand now came to take the image of it. It shattered into a thousand pieces at the dark touch, each sliver of gold becoming a dying ember that settled in the brazier, plunging the room into blackness.

The old man, his weathered face now illuminated only by faint moonlight that shone weakly through a little-cleaned window pane made a ‘hrumph' noise at the change in his surroundings.

"She walks the Earth that she might secure it," he murmured, "But already her enemies move against her. Already she is discovered. It will not be long before I too am discovered..."

His one good eye glanced towards the window. Outside, fast winds blew the clouds across the dark sky and the moonlight revealed the rugged land outside; forested hills and forgotten valleys overlooking a gleaming strip of sea in the distance.

"And then the game will truly begin."

*Tick*

*Tock*

*Tick*

*Tock*

The seconds drag by like hours and every day is a painless horror filled with sappy smiles, dishonest smiles and meaningless "get better" wishes, it's as if they didn't understand what the phrase fractured neck means or are too afraid to show any real emotion, for every friends I have seen a dozen foes who came to visit me before they left Germany for the UK, Stern assured me that she would get back to me at a better to sort out the practical issues .Not that she really understood or wanted to admit that with my condition there is no better time and no getting better, just the rest of my life in a void with no feeling and no hope. Even direct enemies such as Hammer and Jabbar paid me a visit, Hammer still looked a fair bit trouble about our trip to hell together.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that we hadn't really been dead, this wasn't the time or the place to do that.

*Tick*

*Tock*

*Tick*

*Tock*

The phone call from Freya was a nice break from the monotony of being a vegetable. She apologized that she hadn't come to see me as she hated hospitals, I told her that it was OK and that I would see her when I got out...another lie in my parade of dishonesty, I don't think I'll ever get out of hospital or even close to home. Lies like that hurt, especially as I like Freya a great deal, she is in some way the sister I never had, she has in many ways the same attitude as I do, she's more honest but compared to me that's not hard to be at all but she has the fire. I feel like shrugging again but my shoulders are like stone unmoving. I never really accepted this after all, not even before Drakus made his visit and his threats, but after his unwelcome visit my situation turned worse, loneliness and boredom are the tag team partners of depression and I felt my heart slide even deeper into that by the day, each day that dawned after another sleepless night was as grey as the one before...each night as filled with hopes of an end I could no longer bring about myself.

As these feelings of deep depression started to take it's toll on me and drag my demeanour down with it, the door opened and another in the line of familiar faces entered, this one was very unexpected.

"Hello Jason." The cheery voice said leaving no clue that it was hiding any remorse or sadness at all.

I nodded as best I could and replied "Hello Bruce" in my strange raspy toneless voice.

*****
Fist met the canvas of the punching bag in a steady and angered tempo, the large man was sending his fists into the punching bag as if it was the cause of the attack and injury to the man he had called his friend since their first day in college together, the man who had hired him as the supervisor at Dante MediTech had greeted him with the phrase "I hope you like beer dude!" when the rooms had been split up. It had taken him about a month to get his room mate and his odd behaviour but once that had passed, they had become the best of friends. Together they were the hell raisers on campus always targeting new girls for their parties and not seldom waking up in either a co-ed's bed or as Dante had done once in one of the female teacher's. That had taken some explaining to clear up but the grades that Dante had gotten told them that the teacher a Miss. Hartmann had liked the night.

Despite the smiles these fun memories of a carefree time of the past always brought to his face, it didn't help this time, his best friend the man who had yelled at the landlord who had wanted to evict his family until he had given up and given the his family a year without having to pay rent had been attacked and was now paralysed in a hospital bed in Cologne, Germany. Jason had asked him to come to Germany both to supervise his transport to Sheffield but also because Dante wanted to ask him for a favour, a favour that made him both terrified and expectant, Darkness had once told him that he didn't like the concept of revenge.

As his taped fists met the punching bag once more, he smiled.

Unlike Darkness, James Ecks had no qualms about going for revenge at all.

*****

Bruce paused as he saw the man who had once joined him and the Bleeder in the Hellfire Club as a rookie, he had been full of potential both as a wrestler and as a member of the club, unfortunately Dante hadn't seen the meaning and the point in what they had done to Lance Canada and thus he had rebelled against the men who had brought him into the larger world. Bruce shook those thoughts out of his system, that was the past and he didn't feel comfortable meddling with it, not even by thinking about it any more, the present was his time now, not the past or the future from which he had once come.

The voice of his former partner in crime trouble him a great deal, he had been prepared for the raspy quality and the weakness but not for the unending amount of despair and anguish that was hidden in it. When Drakus had snapped Jason Dante's neck, he had Bruce concluded broken the albino's soul too. He walked up to the bed and looked at Jason.

"I could say you look good, but..." Bruce laughed in an attempt to ease the tension. "...you really look like shit Jason."

Dante looked at him and the colourless eyes seemed only to barely register his presence.

"That could be because I feel like shit."

"Yeah, I'd say so."

A long and silent pause followed.

"You know..." Bruce began. "I wasn't sure why I came here initially, I had a reason but it seemed cheap and stupid..."

Dante arched an eyebrow.

"I do feel a bit guilty about this...or did fel a bit guilty, you know if anyone could have warned you it would have been me..."

"Bruce, if your here to give me some confession, spare me the bother...your not the kind of guy to go "Bless me father for I have sinned." at all...you have a reason for coming here, so spit it out already."

The tone in the albino's voice had gotten tense and unfriendly.

Bruce smirked.

"I tried to remember if I had seen this happening before and if I could have prevented it in anyway, but and this is what bothers me...I hadn't seen it before."

Dante arched his eyebrow again.

"Remember when I showed you a portion of your future when you joined the club?"

"Yeah, I do."

"Well you being in bed for the rest of your life wasn't part of that plan."

"Things change..."

"Yeah, they do but not like this."

Again Dante arched his eyebrow.

"Well, you see some events are immutable they have to happen and...I diod explain this to you, didn't I?"

"Six of seven times I think...you were actually sober about half of the times I think."

"Ha...ha"

"The thing is, this would have been huge on that scale in your future, I mean being crippled is a huge part and it just wasn't there."

Dante looked at Bruce.

"Bruce, I'm not about what you want to say with this, not at all. But if this is your way to wash your hands clean, then you've come to the wrong place to do that."

Bruce looked at Dante and tried to think of a way to make this easy for his former partner but found no such way. Instead he opened the bag he had brought with him and took out a file wrapped in brownish cardboard. He opened it up and flipped through a few of the pages within and then put it in front of Dante and simply said "Read". Dante looked at at and found that he couldn't fathom what it said so he read it again out loud.

"The subject [Drakus] has been found to suffer from a sever case of paranoid Psychopathic disorder and is at best in limited control of his own actions, the Psychiatric evaluation suggests that we should avoid having this person as a member of the 411federation and that his contract should be rendered void due to previously undisclosed circumstances..."
Dante read it again and slowly it begun to dawn on him.

"Drakus is a psychopath?"

"Yes."

"A real live card carrying psychopath?"

"As real as they get."

Dante said nothing, he understood what Bruce wanted to tell him. He had to blink to keep tears from forming in his eyes as a huge and massive weight fell from his shoulders.

"So..." he said in a voice that was hard to keep under control. "...no matter what I did, he would have become like this and maybe even done this."

Bruce nodded.

"The disorder he suffers from makes him unable to feel remorse or even have basic empathy...for all we know he could have done this to you because he didn't like the shirt you wore one day."

Dante made a faint gesture that was supposed to be a nod.

"This white washes the both of us I guess."

"Yeah it does. Sure we triggered his rage but we could have done that anyway by simply waking up one day...in a way we saved the federation from him."

"You knew this when you told me to take Drakus out?"

"No."

"So it was just a plan to see how far I would go to join the HFC?"

"Yeah."

"I see."

"Well, no you don't...you lie here and has acted like the world lived or died with Jason Dante, you are a big deal for sure but your not God, hell your not even A God...A lack of real perspective can kill you..."

"...or send you crippled to a hospital bed." Dante concluded.

Bruce simply nodded in reply.

"I'll see what i can do with Drakus" Bruce said "Stern loved how this peaked the ratings and "generated interest", she seems unwilling to do anything against Drakus unless he goes further with his rampage..."

Dante gave another faint nod.

A nurse entered the room and informed Bruce that visiting hours were over and that he had to leave, he nodded and left Dante to his own devices.

As the door close behind Bruce and his thoughts began to turn again, Dante realised that he had based the whole outlook on a false premise, he thought he had been the one to send Drakus over the edge but it wasn't that act back when he was a rookie that had sent the large tattooed man over the edge, Drakus had spent his life teetering on the brink on insanity an a world dominated by rage.

Dante cursed his paralysed limbs and his inability to do something about this monster himself. Then it dawned on him. As the nurse was about leave he asked her if she could arrange a phone call for him, a phone call to Atlanta, Georgia in the US.

Sleep continued to evade Darkness as he turned fitfully in the lumpy hotel bed. He could afford better, but he'd always been kind of careful with his money - at least according to another of Misfit's recent admonishments. Having a full-time tag partner was actually rather an eye-opening experience. He'd spent long years with Ben as a constant companion in his secret war, but he supposed that the one he'd called ‘brother' shared too many of his own foibles to notice them. Or maybe the politeness of his fellow Englishman meant he didn't constantly draw attention to every possible character flaw in the manner that Gideon Flint did.

"Whoa...what is that? Like a five percent tip?"

Darkness had regarded Misfit with a flat look as he mentally went over the bill for their meal from the greasy-spoon cafeteria. "I suppose it is...yes..." he paused. "Do you think I should leave more?"

"Fifteen percent is...normal...polite...decent..." Misfit raised his eyebrows as he spoke.

"Really? I don't eat out a lot." He'd scrabbled in the pocket of his ever-present grey jeans and produced a few more pound coins. "I don't think waiting staff here have the same...uh...expectations as they do in America, you know," he had protested weakly as he placed the money down on the Formica table.

"Yeah, well I do. It's fifteen percent or I pull my hand away next time you want to make a tag, okay?"

The memory of what had happened at the house show was much fresher in his mind then, of course. The blow from the steel chair had stunned him and given Drakus the chance to take control of the situation. That mattered little to Darkness, of course. After what Drakus had done to Dante he'd felt a burning anger within him that he sought to suppress, despite the words of Freya and the Titanium Insomniac the previous month. Now that he had realised that Pryce and Drakus were more involved in his business than he could have possibly imagined a cold determination had taken the place of that anger. His mind had slipped back into a familiar gear from a decade of fighting the demonic at every turn. Drakus was an enemy, just like every cultist, half-breed, and vampire that he had annihilated in his life.

But still...sleep would not come.

It wasn't Infinity that bothered him. Though Pryce's words led him to believe that his enemies may be using them against him - or, worse, for some darker purpose - he had little concern. He had heard the Insomniac being referred to as Infinity's ‘blunt object', well if that was the case then Darkness had already proved that he was the New Hellfire Club's living siege engine. If they wanted to get in his way, whatever their motivations, he would destroy them as he had before.

No, the thing that currently obsessed his mind was something far more personal. Darkness knew that people thought him cold and calculating, and he knew that they were correct. What other man could so calmly continue with his life when his daughter was in the hands of a psychopath who served some terrible force from before the dawn of creation? Yet, Darkness knew that Seth had spoken truly when he had told her she was safe. He had revealed his plans to him on the mesa, relying on the surprise attack from Dragon to defeat him. Well he had failed, and Darkness was left with the knowledge that, without Krissy still alive, Seth's forces had no leverage over him. They needed him alive; his experience when Drakus had put him in a coma with the soul-snakes had made that clear. The Shadowman serum had, he suspected, been intended to serve the same purpose.

He had to stay alive. But ever since returning to the UK, long-suppressed thoughts and feelings had begun to resurface. Questions he had avoided asking himself pounded through his brain and, for some reason, the ring of flame he had seen in front of his eyes when Misfit had told him where this show was being held had seemingly become burnt into his retina. He pulled himself up in bed and looked around the dark room.

"I didn't come here by accident," he said aloud.

Darkness had begun to suspect, of course, that nothing he ever did these days happened by accident. So much serendipity...so many coincidences. Why was Shogun taken to Hell so soon after they'd met? Why did John Doe, the only man who could have gotten him to the mesa to fight Abbadon, run into him in an alleyway? How was it that Acolyte had met Dragon almost fifteen years ago? Too many coincidences can make a man begin to question his sanity, but if Darkness was insane, then the whole world had gone insane with him.

Quickly, his eyes flicked to the bedside clock to find the date. He still had a few days before the show, and he knew he had to find whatever he had been brought here to find. He would begin where everything had begun, in a small university town on the Welsh coast.

* * *

Seth's black eyes roved around the dimly-lit council chamber far below the heaving crowds that thronged the streets of Istanbul. The Elect of Apophis were reduced in number since last they had convened, and no one wished to dwell on the reasons for that. Just beyond the flickering candlelight that marked the borders of their meeting place, shadows flitted back and forth, seemingly guarding the entrances to the catacombs that led from the high-vaulted room. No one spoke of them either.

"Seth..." General Zheng now used the man's name without hesitation, causing a flash of irritation to cross his pale features. Seth's skin had always appeared deathly white, like a fish's belly, but now his flesh had a sallow quality to it and he seemed to have aged a decade in less than six months. His hair didn't help; where once there was smooth, jet black, he now sported flecks of grey peppered throughout. Just like the strange shadows and the missing members of their group, no one mentioned the change in his appearance.

"What?" Seth finally asked, not bothering to conceal his disdain.

"We must...we must have guidance..." the general didn't seem sure what he was asking, but he pressed on anyway, "my contacts bring changing news to me every day, of creatures stalking the night that may be ours, or may be some new foe..."

"The Slayer," Torre interrupted, "still walks, and I don't need to tell you how awry your plans have gone, Archmagus."

"No, you do not." The elderly man, at least, retained his respectful mode of address. "But, General, you are correct. All of you deserve to be told where our plans now stand since it has been so long since we convened." He paused, letting his disturbing eyes settle on each of those that remained in the council. He alone knew for certain where the missing ones were, and whom they served.

"Though we knew the identity of Darkness, I failed to take into account the full repercussions of it, and missed the most obvious piece of the puzzle..."

"Then it is true?" Torre's milky eyes were wide as he leant over the table. His fists clenched against the dark mahogany betrayed the tension he felt.

"It is. Darkness...Azrael...is the Destroyer. When I received this information it caused me to re-evaluate many ancient texts and now I am embarrassed I did not see it earlier. But no matter. Our plan of action remains the same: he must be neutralised, but not killed. Already my servants have moved against him since the disaster on the mesa and we have come close to completing our mission."

"But Dante got involved, didn't he?" Senator Windham's contemptuous gaze carried even more hatred than Zheng's. It was she who had questioned their ability to keep Darkness and Dante at one another's throats, and the revelation that he was the prophesised ‘Earthborn' who was, and always had been, inextricably linked to the Destroyer, had confirmed her dire warnings.

"He did." Seth smiled at her, a facial expression that appeared unnerving combined with his blank, dead eyes. "But you needn't fret any further...Lucifer's Son has been incapacitated."

The senator narrowed her eyes sceptically. "Incapacitated?"

"Crippled. Broken." Seth's mouth twisted into a smirk. "He is paralysed from the neck down, courtesy of the brute you were so disparaging of when I placed him in the wrestling promotion."

She raised her eyebrows, obviously unconcerned with concealing her surprise. "Can he still speak?"

"Yes, but he cannot make the gestures that his abilities require. He will not find a cure. Not in time, at any rate."

"I also hear strange news from New Orleans..." Windham pressed, but a shadow fell across the wide table and caused the words to catch in her throat.

"I can field that one," Dragon smiled as he slid into one of the unoccupied chairs. The dark street clothes he had once worn were now replaced with ornate, lacquered plate mail in reflective back trimmed with ruddy gold.

"You must introduce me to your tailor, Dragon," Seth murmured. It had been some months since he had seen his servant, and it appeared he had been busy. The mysterious shadows began to resolve themselves into forms that matched Dragon, both in complexion and attire. A dozen or more vampires encircled the council, all wearing the same strange armour. Some carried blades, but most were confident enough with just their teeth and claws.

"Ladies...gentlemen...meet my latest acquisition..."

Seth stood up, throwing his heavy chair backwards to land on the flagstones with a loud clatter. No one moved. Seth remembered well the words he had Dragon had exchanged before the battle on the mesa, and it was evident from the rumours and the evidence before his eyes that he had been disobeyed. "Are these the beginning of the army I forbade you to create, Dragon?"

Dragon smiled, showing his gleaming canines. "Of course not - you think I'd come here with this paltry honour-guard and allow you to cut me off at the knees before I'd even begun? My army is already complete, Seth, and even now they follow my orders across the globe." He turned to Senator Windham, who looked like she was about to be sick every time her eyes flicked to one of the vampires standing near to her. "Two of my servants were involved in the destruction of Jean Baptiste's compound outside New Orleans. He is dead and his influence in that region has been eradicated forever."

"You have no right to..." Seth began, but Dragon quickly cut him off.

"I deliver an entire State into your hands and you talk of ‘rights'? How quickly you forget the only ‘right' that really matters." The vampire sat forward from where he had been lounging in the ornate chair and held out his rotten, decaying hand. Slowly, he clenched it into a fist and General Zheng, sitting to his right, winced as his claws dug into the dry palm. "Might makes right, Seth. Your wargs are dead, destroyed by Darkness and his Incubi - whatever power you have as the appointed Herald of Apophis is purely theoretical in nature, since you no longer have any troops."

"There are still men who..."

"Wrong!" Dragon bared his teeth as he surged to his feet, fists clenched and pressed against the council table's surface. "All who were loyal to you now serve me. Assassins, informers, cultists, even Shadow Slayers and Vindicators, now number in the ranks of the Ordo Draco." He pounded one fist against his lacquered breastplate, "They are loyal to me. I have the army that can lead us to victory...with my vampire legions we can swallow the Earth in a tide of blood and prepare it for the coming of the Elder Gods!"

Around the table, the other members of the council all looked as ill as Windham. It was one thing to talk about the downfall of nations by covert means, but none of them were prepared to sanction open warfare.

"Dragon...we cannot..." Seth started to say, but he got no further than last time.

"What choice do you have, Seth?" Dragon bared his fangs again, and the vampires in the chamber moved in towards the council. "I control our forces now, and unless you want more of your Elect turned into my thralls..."

Torre's eyes went wide and he stood up quickly from his chair, trying to flee, only for one of the vampires to clamp a pallid hand on his shoulder and force him back into his seat. Seth shook his head at his former servant. "So...this is a power grab? An attempted coup? Need I remind you that, without me, you'd be nothing? It was I who arranged your freedom from the hive that enslaved you - just like I freed Drakus from his prison cell. Both of you are nothing but weapons for me to wield."

"I don't think so..." Dragon spat, but this time it was Seth who spoke over him.

"You know I'm right. If not for my guidance you'd have gone after Darkness straight away and you'd have been destroyed. You really think you can stand up to the Antichrist himself?"

"I nearly killed him on the mesa," the vampire growled.

"Only for Jason Dante to return the favour. I see you still bear his mark..."

Dragon's hand strayed to the side of his face where the faint impression of Dante's hand still marred his semi-decayed cheek.

"Face it; against the Nightwalker and the Earthborn combined, none of us have any chance. You could send a thousand of your...Ordo Draco...against them, and they'd still survive. Dante stands poised to take Dis at his leisure, and Darkness already controls Hades. No, this is not a battle we can win by force of arms; that is why I obtained the girl. That is why I attempted to destroy the succubus. If it were as simple as throwing troops at them, do you not think I would have called upon General Zheng to do more than sit here and get ideas above his station?"

Zheng seemed about to protest, but he quickly saw he was out of his depth as Dragon and Seth continued to stare daggers at one another. The vampire's blue-black tongue flicked across his teeth and, for a second, he looked about to raise another point, but a new voice floated across the chamber and caused the heads of everyone present to swivel around.

"Boys...boys...can we stop the bickering? I thought we were all supposed to be on the same side here..."

Seth's eyes went wide as the woman's sensuous form swayed into the dim light of the chamber, but then his brow creased in barely-suppressed fury. "You..." he said in a dangerously low voice.

Her dark eyes were playful as her full red lips curved into a smile. She approached one of Dragon's armoured vampires and ran a finger over one ornate shoulder-guard. "Very nice, Dragon - I didn't think you had it in you to arrange something like this."

"Do I know you?" the former Shadow Slayer asked, straightening.

"You were a man once, Dragon," she smiled, "and all men know me. I am Lilith; the Eternal Woman."

"Oh." Dragon turned to Seth, "And she's on our side, is she?"

"When it suits her," Seth said darkly.

Lilith smiled at the two of them and walked over to the table. She ran her hands across the smooth surface before looking back up at Seth. "We all have our private aims, Seth...even you..." the Herald of the Abysmal Ones opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again when Lilith continued to speak. "But that is of no consequence now. Seth, you are correct about our two foes - a direct assault will never avail us, even if one of them is paralysed."

"How can he aid the Nightwalker if he is a cripple?" Zheng protested, finally finding his voice. The man couldn't take his eyes away from Lilith whose dark dress clung to her body so tightly that it hid almost nothing.

"They have other allies now. A werewolf, another wrestler and more to come soon, I expect. Even now I am moving their enemies in this wrestling organisation against them to conform to our aims, but this...New Hellfire Club, as they call themselves...grows stronger by the day."

Dragon smirked. "If the Shadow Slayers could not stand against us..."

"The Shadow Slayers were undone by ignorance, vampire," Lilith interrupted, "they didn't understand the nature of the threat arrayed against them. Thanks to your carelessness, Seth," she turned to him and sneered, "Darkness and Dante are only too aware of our plans and whom we serve."

"Nonetheless, we still have his daughter," Seth reminded her, "and Drakus has proved a far more valuable weapon than I had anticipated...even if Pryce does seem to forget just who he serves sometimes..."

Lilith tried to smile sweetly, but only made herself look more predatory. "I thought I told you we were all on the same side, Seth."

"Well quite. Obviously there was a reason for you coming here, Lilith. Unless you really did show up just to poke fun at us and remind everyone of how useless you too have been to our war effort."

The demonness smiled coldly. "Useless? I was the one who kidnapped Selenia and almost destroyed the Earthborn, remember?"

"‘Almost' being the operative word - that debacle cost our masters Dis and now Asmodeus lies decapitated on the cobbles, being picked apart by his own misfits. What happens when Dante takes up his throne there?"

"He won't."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because of this..."

Lilith held up one pale hand, and slowly an image formed above her flesh. A ring of fire coalesced and began to rotate, slowly changing into an unbroken band of gold.

"Have you found Sauron?" Windham snorted, "Should we watch out for Darkness and Dante joining forces with hobbits?"

The Queen of Succubi laughed, but shook her head. "No, but you may be closer than you imagine. This is the Promethean Ring."

"The what?" Dragon looked confused.

"It's a...device...of ancient origin. Very ancient origin." It was Seth who replied. His eyes were fixed on the image in Lilith's hand.

"Correct," she smiled, "it is the oldest of all rings, and it has the power to bring Earth into the hands of our masters, if we use it correctly."

"The ring is lost," Seth said slowly, "no records of it exist since the seventh century. Others have sought it, and all have failed."

"Also correct. However none of those were me." Lilith looked at the faces of each of the Elect of Apophis, "I can find it," she told them, "and with it...our victory is guaranteed..."

* * *

It was a long journey, but Darkness knew the routes to avoid the traffic, and it was late enough that most commuters were long in bed. He wheeled his bike skilfully down road after road until he lost count of them. Semi-familiar countryside flicked past him for hour after hour, until he began to see things he definitely recognised.

"Creoso Cymru", the sign by the road boasted. ‘Welcome to Wales', more or less. It heartened him as he accelerated down the narrow road and began to recognise the shape of the landscape. Hills reared up around him and a world he hadn't seen in twenty years returned. It was like watching an old home movie, and for the next hour and a half, Darkness immersed himself in familiar feelings from what seemed like another life. He still didn't know what he was looking for, but he hoped he would find it in Aberystwyth, or at least a clue that would help him locate whatever it was.

His old hometown crept closer as he raced down empty mountain roads. He plunged down into valleys and over steep rises, with only bewildered sheep at the roadside for company. He approached a rock he hadn't seen in years, inexplicably bearing the word "ELVIS" in white paint. He smiled as it neared, but suddenly found the world spinning around him, and before he could reconcile events in his head he hit the road and had the wind blasted from his lungs.

It took Darkness a few moments to get his bearings back and, slowly, he climbed to his feet, wincing at the newfound ache in his bones. He walked over to the bike, which had skidded several yards down the road towards the graffiti'd rock. With a scowl, he righted it, but also noted the slight flattening of the front tire that indicated a puncture. There was no sign of any obstruction in the road that had caused the accident and Darkness narrowed his eyes. He took out the phone John Doe had given him and activated it with a press of the red button. The bars that indicated signal were all gone, which was unsurprising in this part of the country. He looked at the landscape around him, the brooding hills that concealed uninhabited valleys. There was no town within thirty miles, but he knew there was a farm or two across the hills. He wouldn't get far on his motorcycle with a flat tire and, bereft of a phone, he'd need to find someone to help.

Silently he cursed his misfortune - at this rate he was unlikely to reach Aber in time to return for Havoc. Sighing, he wheeled the Kawasaki off the road and tried to conceal it as best he could in some undergrowth. There was only one road in this region, and no turning off for several miles in either direction, so he had no option but to go cross-country and find some sign of habitation over the hill.

The route was not easy, even with Darkness's excellent night vision and incomparable conditioning. He scaled the rise slowly, ignoring the pain in his muscles from his earlier fall. He finally reached the top and frowned as he looked down into the valley below. He could see a light, but he knew the area and he'd never seen a building marked on a map here. He had expected to have to climb a few more hills yet. Curious about the discontinuity, but conceding that it had been twenty years since he'd been in this part of the country he made for the dim light.

The building was strange. Contrary to his tentative conclusion, it was not new, but looked extremely old. The roof was thatched, and the construction was all on one storey. The design was simple from what Darkness could tell in the gradually strengthening dawn light; just a simple rectangle, longer than it was wide. He frowned, wondering why such a simplistic building seemed so familiar.

"It's a longhouse," he murmured after a few seconds. The crude wooden walls confirmed it, though when he placed his hand on the only door he could feel intricate carving on the surface that spoke of something grander than just a strange replica of a Viking dwelling. To his surprise, the door opened at his touch, and he tentatively moved inside.

Darkness stepped all the way in and looked around him. The interior was exactly what the exterior suggested, with wooden walls and straw underfoot. It was empty, and only the dark red glow of a fading fire pit in the centre of the wide space indicated any habitation.

"Welcome..."

His head shot up, and he perceived the shape of a figure in the dim glow, seated in a large wooden chair.

"Hello," he said, expecting his voice to echo, but finding it didn't.

"Approach, Antichrist."

Darkness raised an eyebrow. "I don't like it when men I don't recognise call me things like that."

"What would you prefer? Azrael? Tyr? Destroyer? Aries? Aterius Angelus? Weapon of Destiny? Hand of Fate? The Thunder? The Storm? The New Man? Eternal Champion? Angel of Death? Shadow Slayer? Truthbringer? Nightwalker? Shadowman? Darkness? Or how about plan old D..."

Darkness raised a hand. "Anything but that. I think the one before would be best."

"Tyr?"

"No, Darkness."

"Shame, Tyr was always my favourite."

Darkness walked towards the shadowy figure that was addressing him. "I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, but I sense it isn't a coincidence that I'm here, is it?"

The figure titled his head. "No...no it isn't. Come...sit. Take the tongs from the fire pit and bring a coal to light this brazier, if you would."

Darkness did as he was bidden, and took a seat opposite the strange man. As the brazier began to glow he watched his host. He was an elderly man, with skin that looked like dried paper. Where his left eye should have been was a patch of scar tissue, but the other eye shone bright, reflecting the orange light of the low fire between them. Only a scattering of white hair clung to his head, and his flesh was so sparse as to reveal the shape of his skull beneath his worn skin. He had a beard, but it was clearly the remnants of what had once been far grander tresses.

"Nice scar," Darkness told him, mostly just for something to say.

"Not as nice as yours," the old man replied, though they were covered by Darkness's trademark face paint.

"From battle?" he hazarded.

"Not exactly. I took it willingly."

"In return for what?"

"Understanding. Wisdom. Knowledge. Foresight."

Darkness titled his head. "I feel like I know you."

"You do. You just don't realise it yet."

Behind him, a flapping noise caught the former Shadow Slayer's attention, and a raven suddenly flew into the small circle of warm firelight and alighted on the arm of the strange man's chair. He drew one finger down its plumage with obvious affection.

"I used to know a guy with a raven..."

"Yes. This is its great-great-great-great-great grandfather."

"Are you serious?"

"Almost always."

"How is it possible that the only two ravens I've ever encountered are related?"

The old man shrugged. "Coincidence?"

"I don't believe in coincidence," Darkness countered.

"Would you prefer I said ‘destiny'?"

"Not really. But I suppose that's what it is."

"Almost always."

"So," Darkness looked at the raven again, "what's his name?"

"Thought."

Darkness gave a short laugh, "Do you have another one called Memory?"

Right on cue, a second bird alighted on the other arm of the man's chair. "How did you guess?"

Darkness sat back in his chair and held out his hands. "So...are you going to tell me what's going on here?"

"Here? The same as everywhere else: Ragnarok. Armageddon. The Apocalypse. The Endgame. Choose the one you like best."

"And you're...you're Odin..."

"Odin. Merlin. A few others you may not have heard of. But that's the general idea, yes."

Darkness nodded to himself. "I guess I found what I was looking for. Would you mind explaining why you brought me here?"

"Because that's my job, Darkness. I am tasked with advising you. Since the dawn of time I have stood beside the Eternal Warrior and guided his path."

"So you wait till I'm forty-one to show up? And... ‘Eternal Warrior'...?"

Odin leaned forward, "You're the Eternal Warrior, I'm the Eternal Mentor. You and I have existed since the dawn of time, preparing for the Last Battle, each doing our bit, piece by tiny piece, until we reach this place."

"That still doesn't explain why, if you're supposed to guide me, I've never seen you before."

"Because you, Darkness, are the Last. If you succeed in your Destiny, there will be no more Warriors."

"And if I fail?"

"There will be no more anything."

Darkness shook his head and laughed. "I knew that already." He stood up, "I appreciate your information, Odin - or whoever you are - but I need to find somewhere with a phone," he gestured around him at the longhouse, "and I don't think you have one in here."

"That much is true. You aren't interested in how to win your war once and for all then?"

Darkness stopped and turned to Odin, frowning at the ancient deity. "Once and for all? Are you implying that there's some way I can end all this...soon..."

"But of course." Odin smiled as he lifted his hands and the fire in the brazier leapt up and formed a ring. It spun, and became an unbroken band of gold. "Behold the Promethean Ring."

"What is it?"

"It's the key to the Gates of Hell..."

"I can already go to Hell at will..."

"Who said anything about opening them?" Odin smiled.

Rage...The hardest of all emotions to control. There is of course a reason why Wrath is one of the deadly sins, the inability to control the blind desire for revenge and the lust for blood and vengeance it creates makes it the worst of the classical deadly sins. To a man Like Jason Dante who right now is bound to his bed, rage is even worse. Imagine wanting to thrash the world and only being able to spit at it, imagine wanting to choke the breath out of Highone and Desean Blackwell and only be able to say it.

Imagine all the physical trauma coming to a head as anger eats you alive, then multiply that by 1000 times and you'll get nowhere near the frustration that is causing Dante to spit curses in four different languages, one of which isn't spoken by any human.

"Jas...You know I'll take care of that kung-fu fucker...He'll bleed like a stuck pig when I'm done with him." Jay Ecks says to try to calm his long-time friend down.

This only earns him an enraged glance from his friend.

"Jason, you have to listen to Jay...he and the rest of us will do everything to ensure that they get what they..." Freya gets cut off.

"Bullshit! Fucking Bullshit Freya! Highone stalked me, he acted like a fucking Jackal and waited until I was defence less to beat me down and steal the titles." Dante spits with his raspy voice as globs of spit fly from his mouth and leave small burn marks on the fabric of his clothes.

"Look Mr. Dante I don't know my way around this yet, but you can trust me when I say that we will all do everything to give these palookas what they have coming."

Dante turns his enraged gaze to Stephen Hawthorne, the man he once knew as Deadzone doesn't recoil from the red gaze Dante gives him and the albino calms down slightly.

"You just don't get this do you?" Selenia says. She had been cooped up in the hotel but had against Dante's wishes joined the rest of the club as she saw the attack on TV.

"Jason is angry because he wants to get his own revenge..."

"And this broken fucking neck is keeping me back." Dante says as his voice nearly breaks as he mentions his fractured neck and severed spinal chord.

The argument continues for a few minutes more while Darkness' irritation reaches fever pitch as he hears the NHFCers try to calm Dante down and as he hears his friend dig deeper into his own personal depression and pit of self pity. The long haired man gets up and stares at Dante and speaks.

"You're just going to give up? Back down?"

Dante rolled his colourless eyes in Darkness's direction. The infernal lustre, the spark of red that marked the dispossessed World Champion out as one of an exclusive and powerful group, had all but faded.

"If you felt like I feel now...you'd understand..."

Darkness placed his hands on his hips and looked down at his stable mate. "And maybe if you felt like I feel, you'd understand."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Do you remember the coins we had, Jason? Do you remember what we went through on the mesa? Black and white, Jason...combined into a shade of grey..."

"You're starting to sound like the Titanium Insomniac," Dante observed.

"How about we try a new direction?"

"What direction?"

"This one."

Darkness's hand shot out, snake quick, and pressed against Dante's temple.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"I don't think we need Selenia as a link anymore..."

Dante turned around, and then blinked. He looked down at himself, and saw that he was wearing a loose white gi. "Great...now I look like Highone..."

"Know thine enemy, Jason."

Dante looked up and saw that Darkness was wearing a similar gi, but his was black. He looked around him and took in their peculiar surroundings. They were in a shadowy dojo, complete with paper walls and a reed mat on the floor. Suddenly, it occurred to Dante that he was moving. He swung his arms around and then hopped from one foot to the other.

"I can move..." he said, wonder in his voice.

"Your mind isn't paralysed, Jason," Darkness explained. "In here, you can still move."

"Ah. I see." Dante's dour expression returned. "I like my mind better than I liked yours. There's fewer burning buildings."

"Plus you're not as scaly."

Dante laughed, remembering the extraordinary way in which he had pulled Darkness from his comatose state after Drakus's attack. It began to dawn on him what his friend was attempting to do.

"I see what this is, Darkness," he said as he slouched away from the combat area, "but it won't work the same way as it did with you. You were being assaulted by those snake things...your ailment was supernatural once they struck, but mine is just physical. You can do whatever you want in here," he tapped his head with one pale finger, "but it's not going to put my shattered vertebrae back together."

"When did you start giving up so easily, Jason?"

"Easily?" Dante looked incredulous. "You think this is ‘easily'? It took me being driven into a concrete floor, and then having my titles stolen by some retard who's almost certainly overcompensating for a lot of pent-up homosexuality for me to get to this point, alright?"

"How the mighty have fallen," Darkness smirked.

"Fallen? Yeah, why not. Like father like son, right? Only difference is that he fell because of his pride, and I fell because of meaningless grudges."

"I bet Lucifer would say the same thing."

"Are you saying this is my fault?" Dante was standing tall now, a flash of anger in his eyes.

"There was a time, Jason Dante," Darkness said softly as he crossed the mat and looked hard at the World Champion, "when you stared down demons and laughed in their faces. There was a time when you fought your way across the Nevada desert just so you could get your revenge."

"I thought you didn't believe in revenge..."

"I don't."

"So what's your point?" Dante was beginning to lose patience with his cryptic partner.

"My point is that if you're surrendering like this, then you truly have fallen. I may not believe in vengeance, but I do believe in never giving up. In the past, you never gave up in the pursuit of your goals."

"Yeah, well you were the one who taught me that there are more important things in life than selfish desires, Darkness." Dante's fists were rapidly clenching and unclenching now.

"Maybe I went too far..."

"Come again?"

"Maybe I softened you too much. Maybe I accidentally turned you into as big a coward as the one who took those belts from you..."

"Fuck you." Dante's voice was dangerously low.

"Even at your most deceitful and wicked, you were always prepared to defend what was yours, Dante. Even when your motives were self-centred, depraved, and disgusting, you fought harder than anyone to defend your interests."

"And now it's different, is that what you're saying?"

"You beat me, Dante. One...two...three...in the middle of the ring. Fair and square. You know how many men can say they've done that?"

"Drakus can," Dante spat.

"Damn right he can. And he can say he broke Jason Dante too. He can say he's <i>better</i> than you."

"He's not better than me."

"Well he's better than me."

"Like fuck he is. You know he got lucky."

"What? Like you did at Endgame?" Darkness's eyes were flashing fire now.

"You said I beat you fair and square..."

"You did. And you won the World Titles because of that. But now they're gone. So maybe it was a fluke after all."

"It wasn't a fucking fluke, Darkness." Dante suddenly realised that the two of them were standing nose-to-nose in the spectral dojo.

"Prove it."

With a roar, Dante drove his fist into Darkness's abdomen, doubling the former Slayer over. He kneed him straight in the face and sent him stumbling over onto his back. Without a moment's pause, Darkness kipped up to his feet.

"That's it? That's all the 411fed and ECF World's Heavyweight Champion has?"

"Damn straight I'm the fucking champ!" Dante bellowed, "I beat you! I can beat you again!"

"So fucking prove it!"

"Fuck you!"

Dante hurled himself at Darkness, spinning his leg out in a wide arc. Darkness caught it without apparent effort and sneered at the albino. "What are you? A black belt now? Save the martial arts for the ones who know what they're doing alright?"

Before Dante could react, Darkness swept his leg out from under him and drove him to the floor. The former Shadow Slayer dropped to his knees, driving his fist into Dante's gut and pushing the air out of his lungs. Darkness straightened as Dante rolled over onto his stomach. "Are you giving up?"

"Fuck...off..." Dante pushed himself upright and swung a fist at Darkness, but his winding slowed him down, and Darkness easily side-stepped. Before spinning around and slamming an elbow into his stable mate's back. Dante dropped to his knees and Darkness twisted again, sending Dante pirouetting through the air with a roundhouse.

"You were better than this at Endgame."

"Oh...yeah...?"

"Yeah. If you were fighting then like you are now, I'd have beaten you in five minutes."

Dante grunted and pulled himself to his feet, before charging into Darkness. His friend met the assault and grabbed him around the waist, heaving him into the air and hurling him unceremoniously to the floor.

"I could beat you anytime I choose, Dante. You have no fight left in you."

Dante said nothing, merely staggering back up, and attempting a flurry of quick punches. Darkness blocked every one and then yanking Dante's head close to his own and delivering a swift head butt. The champion staggered back and touched a hand to his nose, feeling blood. He gritted his teeth and prepared a counter-attack, but Darkness simply drove his knee up between Dante's legs, instantly flooring him.

"That's...a...low...blow..." he gasped.

"My fight; my rules."

Darkness jumped at Dante, and then back-flipped away in mid-air, catching Dante's chin with a kick that forced him back up to a standing position and then over onto his back.

"This is embarrassing. You're a shadow of your former self."

The albino rolled upright and, panting, looked at Darkness. His supposed friend had not even broken a sweat. "You know, for someone who's supposed to be a good guy, you can be a real dick."

"Yeah, but at least I remember how to fight."

Dante snorted and raced towards Darkness. He swung at him again, but Darkness dodged and caught him in a front-facelock. He reached for the back of Dante's pants and then began to swing him around.

"This is where I knock you unconscious," Dante could hear Darkness shout as he was propelled through the air.

"I don't..." Dante pushed on the black-clad warrior's abdomen and freed himself from his grip, rolling to the floor, "...think so!"

His voice was thunderous and his eyes were blazing. "No more games!"

"If you want to end this, then fight like the man that you are!" Darkness challenged, his own fiery gaze matching Dante's

"You want to fight?! You really want to fight?!"

"DO YOU?!"

Dante roared with fury, and spun his fists together. From thin air, a column of flame erupted and, as it coalesced, Stormbringer was in his hands.

"Nice trick."

"I thought so."

"Notice you didn't have to say any words or do any gestures?" Darkness's voice was calm now.

"What?" The blade suddenly dissipated and Dante's eyes went wide.

"You want to fight again? You want to be whole again? You want the power that you had back?"

"Y...yeah..."

Darkness held out his hand and clenched it before Dante's eyes. "THEN TAKE IT."

The dojo faded and the real world returned with all it's pain and it's frustrations.

Dante looked at Darkness and the two men held this glare for a long time while remaining silent.

Dante looked at his friend and Darkness' cool calm gaze did something to him...or rather it provoked him into doing something...slowly he felt the strange tingle at the back of his head return, he felt the strange itch creep back up his spine, he felt his world sway and his vision darken...then the pain came, it felt as if boiling acid was being poured down his spine and as if claws were pulling his neck apart, his body twisted in spasms in the bed, spasms the grew more and more violent and uncontrollable.

Selenia just stared at him.

Hawthorne tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

Freya like Selenia stared.

Misfit looked for a nurse or a doctor or failing that a way to stop this shit.

Acolyte had already left to find a doctor.

Ecks extended his hand and tried to push a button that would alert the nurses, but Darkness' hand restrained him, kept his hand back.

The spasms that wrecked Dante's body threw him off the bed and down onto the cold floor, there his muscles kept twitching in an uncontrollable fashion and his back arched like it was trying to break itself. The it stopped as quickly and as unexpectedly as it had begun.

Dante's breath was quick and seemed to indicate that his body was desperate for the oxygen it didn't really need any more, but slowly it slowed down and regained it's calm, it slowed down to a trickle and Dante seemed to return to his previous state, laying still on the floor.

Darkness watched him and a feeling of disgust began to well up inside him...all this energy, all this pain and still he didn't get it.

Dante took a deep breath, but still he didn't move and he didn't say a word. Darkness walked up to his side and bent down as he was about to speak a hand grabbed him by the throat and it squeezed.

Darkness couldn't restrain himself from smiling even though this choke hold was quite painful. He looked down on the arm that was connected to the hand around his throat, he saw how it was connected to a shoulder that was part of an upper body, an upper body completely devoid of skin pigmentation. He looked at the man who not 5 minutes ago had been on the verge of giving up and who was prepared to spend the rest of his life as a vegetable in a bed feeling sorry for himself...he looked down as the hand let go and the man rose up and let the legs that had been useless for weeks carry him, Darkness watched as the hands that had hung uselessly at the man's side for the same number of weeks move, and Darkness saw the neck that had been broken was now carrying the head to which it was attached without shame and without self-pity. Darkness smiled and asked.

"You are you?"

The man replied: "I'm Jason Dante."

"What are you?"

"I'm the son of Lucifer, Firstborn of hell and the god of fucking hellfire!"

Darkness' smile grew wider as he asked the third question.

"Can you defeat me?"

Dante turned his face with his eyes still closed towards Darkness. He paused for a few seconds before he answered.

"Yes...I can."

Then he opened his eyes and the fire was burning in them again.


*****

Hours later...

Dante felt the reed rug beneath his feet, he felt his naked feet touch the floor of this real dojo. He had told Darkness he had something to prove both to Darkness and to himself. Darkness had just nodded and they had left for this place.

Dante took a deep breath and let his mind clear out all the frustrations that his paralysis had left him with from his body...He repeated a sentence that he had heard somewhere before.

"Pain is a delusion of the body, despair is a delusion of the mind."

"Interesting motto." Darkness said.

"It works..." Dante replied.

"Did we come here to listen to you preach your philosophy or to fight?" Darkness asked.

"Neither..." Dante replied.

"Oh really?"

"Yes, really."

"Then why are we here?"

"We are here so I can learn..."

"Very well what do you want to learn?"

"What I have forgotten."

"And that is?"

"I don't know, I told you I had forgotten it." Dante replied with a laugh.

Darkness had to fight the urge to roll his eyes. Dante took another breath and replied for real this time.

"How I beat you Darkness..."

Darkness nodded.

"I beat you fair and square...no tights pulled, no chair shots, no bribes and no crocked referees..."

Darkness nodded again.

"I beat you doing what I had never done in my entire life...by fighting fairly."

"Yes you did, you attacked me using my own methods, fought me on my own turf and you won."

"But that doesn't make me superior to you Darkness."

"It doesn't?"

"No...it makes you and I equals."

"Yes...it did, so is this when we start to fight?"

"No...we don't need to."

"And why not?

"Because, that's the pledge we made last year..."

Darkness nodded, Dante was prepared to honour that pledge, it told him that the broken neck was gone, the coward was dead and the Demon had fallen.

Dante shook himself to rid himself of the tension this place had caused him.

"So do you have a plan?" Darkness asked.

"Yeah, I do...and unlike you Darkness...I believe in revenge...so much in fact that I will extend it to both Highone, Blackwell and Drakus."

The two men left the old dojo behind, not one blow had landed, not one punch thrown...but one man had been reborn, he had fallen and was no stronger then ever.

On his way back to the car, Dante passed by a poster promoting the PPV and the match he had with Highone, a plan took shape in Dante's mind and as it was complete he spat at the poster and hit the picture of Highone right in the face. As the albino champion left the dojo, the saliva from the half-demon's mouth had eaten Highone's face away, revealing the cold empty brick beneath it.

*****

"Sometimes the most obvious is the least understandable, sometimes the truth is hidden deep behind the lies, sometimes fooling yourself hurts only you. I fooled myself into thinking that I could get away from this, that I could quit by becoming a deprressed cripple...I welcomed Drakus breaking my neck as I thought this would free me from my "curse"...I tried to escape, I was wrong, I was a fool. Once more I know that the demon and Jason Dante are one and the same, I know that there is no part of me trying to take over the whole...and what is more important, I now fully accept it.

The cure wasn't technical or part of the medicine, it was part of no science or folklore...the cure was as simple as giving in and accepting who I am...Bend me, break me and I'll rebuild myself again...you can never hurt me!"

"I am Jason Dante...Half-demonic son of Lucifer...First-born of hell...White King of the New Hellfire Club...Fear me, fear me for I am Omega and the end!"

"Children of the Dragon" - Part I

Skaar spun the blade deftly in his hand, carving a wide arc of silver steel through the air like some deadly gyroscope. He grunted with satisfaction at the lightness of the weapon, which he had only recently acquired. It was a good sword. Throughout his unnaturally long life, Skaar had wielded hundreds of blades across hundreds of battlefields, along with axes, glaives, spears, mauls, and halberds: there were few hand-to-hand combat weapons conceived by the murderous ingenuity of mankind of which he was not master.

His pale eyes scanned the Cambodian sky, which was rent by distant storms high in the atmosphere. Low peals of thunder sounded across the turbulent night sky and, Skaar's keen eyes perceived, flashes of lightning burst within distant cloud formations. There was no rain, only a warm tropical wind that scoured the plateau on which he stood. Ruins that were now half-buried by soil deposits and tropical undergrowth gave the impression of being grown from the surface of the plateau itself and the guttering torches that cast their flickering light across the carvings that adorned them lent the scene an otherworldly atmosphere.

Of course, it was otherworldly enough thanks to Skaar himself. His desiccated countenance concealed none of the shrewd wisdom of his eyes that were almost entirely white but for the pinprick pupil. His eyes, when they were human, had spent a lifetime watching over deserts that had long since been consumed by savannah, then jungle, and had now once again reverted to deserts. The geography of his youth had been swallowed up by centuries of climate change, erosion and natural disaster. It was as well that the hallmarks of his human existence had been destroyed, for his own experiences since his Siring had made them obsolete, even hateful.

Skaar was one of the most ancient of all vampires, Sired at the height of the Firstborn's power. He had stood at the gates of the temple of Anshar, in what had once been his home city - Akshak, watching as the dread legions of the vampire kings swept through the streets. He and his temple guard were the last line of defence, an elite force of veteran warriors garbed in ceremonial armour and carrying heavy spears. The temple, in the form of a huge, squat ziggurat, was at the heart of the city, a focal point for the entire population. Generations of his people had been born, had lived, and had died beneath its brooding shadow. It had outlived millions, and so it would continue to do, for every one of those that worshipped Anshar would die before his temple was desecrated by the unliving.

He was the captain, the foremost warrior of his people. His spear-arm was renowned throughout the Akkadian Empire and, upon his death, he would have been entombed alongside the heroes of old, honoured by his descendants for eternity. The beasts cut their way through the dusty alleys and thoroughfares, slaughtering innocents, taking no mercy. They fed upon the strongest, and so grew in power even as they advanced. But still Skaar - of course, then known by another name, which he had long forgotten - held his position. It was his duty to defend these gates, or to die trying, and he steeled his heart against the massacre of the common people of Akshak.

When they thundered up the steps, he and his guard advanced to meet them. They cut a swathe through the monsters' dry flesh, felling dozens, but still they came. Such things did not understand fear, at least not when their masters drove them forward. Some of the vampires carried weapons, but others fought with only teeth and claws, and were no less deadly for that. His warriors chanted a holy dirge as they struggled to hold back the tide of undead bodies, but eventually they were doomed to be overwhelmed. They were the forlorn hope, these few last guards of this holy place, fighting in the sight of their god without hope of victory, but simply because they must resist while the burning desert air that gave them life was still in their lungs.

The memory of that life was faded now, after more than four millennia, but he still remembered the sharp pain of the moment when he had at last been overcome, borne down by the weight of slain foes and those that still hungered for his blood. His spear had been knocked from his hands, snapped into a dozen pieces and cast upon the steps of the ziggurat. He saw the dead eyes of the beast fixate on him, and saw his predatory fangs widen to devour him. He felt the kiss of the vampire and screamed as he knew his life was ended.

And yet...it did not end...

There was no sweet oblivion for the brave captain of the temple guard. He was too strong. His will, which had driven him to great feats of valour in life, now betrayed him in death and sealed his fate forever.

It was a time when the power of vampires was at its greatest, and the Firstborn led their armies across the shifting sands, turning the great cities of that age into tombs. Their legions were vast, counting a thousand generations of vampires in their ranks, for with each victory, each undead warrior sired a hundred more. So was the power of the Firstborn diluted in their armies, eventually to burn out and die upon the sands. Skaar was fated always to be of a lesser kindred of his kind, Sired by a low and unimpressive specimen of vampire, one who had merely been fortunate enough to Sire him at the right moment.

He, who had been first amongst his own people, was a lesser order of vampire, a thrall among tens of thousands of thralls.

And yet, he still remembered the skills of his former life. He had not the raw strength or inhuman speed of his hive brothers, but he still fought with a ferocity and expertise of a temple guard. He knew the deserts, for he had fought across them all when he was a man, and alone of his generation of vampires, he survived till the end of the Great War. When the Firstborn finally expended all their power and fell upon each other, Skaar had the experience to pick the right faction and the tenacity to survive the terrible battles of the Vampire War.

Skaar outlived all those who were Sired in Akshak. He was a lesser vampire, but his skills only improved beyond death. He served in more wars, both covert and public. He travelled the world, and slew thousands...Sired fewer, for the power in his veins was diluted and thin, and he fought few who he considered worthy.

The ages passed, and Skaar continued, fighting and killing for his masters, until they too died. He forgot who he had been, and turned himself into a weapon. No warrior on Earth was as finely honed as Skaar; in life he had been a hero, but in death he was simply unstoppable.

Then Dragon had found him.

Skaar stepped between the torches that illuminated the plateau. The orange fire reflected off the smooth surface of his black lacquered armour as he continued to spin his new sword in his hand. Dragon told him it had once been the Slayer Weapon of a man called Kahn, who had been the First of his Order. It was an appropriate gift for one such as Skaar, who had been named as Dragon's lieutenant, his Second in the Ordo Draco.

The other vampire on the plateau looked less at-ease with the sword in his hand. No wonder, for this one was freshly-Sired, and he had not been a warrior of any distinction in life.

"Do you know how the vampires came to be, thrall?" Skaar asked as he advanced, his accent no-doubt sounding strange to his companion's ears.

"No, master."

"I numbered amongst the living when the Firstborn rose in the lands that are now called Iraq."

"Where did they come from?" the other vampire's curiosity was insatiable, Skaar had come to learn, and it pleased the ancient warrior to tell tales of their venerable race.

"They were men once too, evil men who feared death because they knew what it would bring."

"Damnation?"

"Indeed. For their vile acts, there could be only one reward in the afterlife. So they conspired to cheat death and strike a pact with those that were imprisoned beyond the reach of time and decay."

"The Gods of the Abyss," the novice intoned with something like reverence.

"Yes." Skaar lifted his sword and brought it down against his student, who met his stroke with one of his own. Skaar continued without pause, for his undead constitution did not require breath to sustain it, "Through dark arts they spoke to Apophis and his mighty brethren, and he took their souls into his terrible being and made them one with him. There are those who number the vampire with the demon, but they are not entirely right for we have always been creatures of the Abyss."

The other vampire had matched Skaar stroke for stroke so far, but now the elder vampire redoubled his efforts, pressing harder on the younger creature, and causing him to work harder and harder.

"Because of the power of the Void that runs through our veins," Skaar continued, "we do not die, and our bodies are held together by the dark force of our fathers. We are sustained by the suffering of humans, like demons, but we also are anathema to the Spawn of Hell, and oppose them with our very existence. They represent selfishness, greed, and hatred, while we represent simply death."

The student was losing his footing now as Skaar pressed him back towards the edge of the plateau. His pinprick eyes darted back and forth, trying to find an opening in his perfect attack forms, but there was none.

"We exist to destroy. Our immortality is a gift and a curse. A gift, because we may live - in our strange fashion - through the long ages of man, and a curse because it is our burden to multiply and spread our contagion across the human race. We are the predators that stand above humanity in the food chain, bringing to them an exquisite suffering they would not otherwise have the pleasure of experiencing."

Skaar's hand flicked out, slamming the hilt of his sword into the skull of the other vampire, who staggered backwards and fell down, rolling to the edge of the precipice. His claws dug into the rock as he tried to avoid tumbling the thousands of feet down into the jungle below.

"But what use to us are the weak? The Ordo Draco is the first vampire army to arise in over three millennia, and we have learnt from the mistakes of the past. No longer will we Sire recklessly, for to do so is to invite our destruction. The power of the vampire is not destined to be diluted any longer, but strengthened by the wars we will fight."

"W...what are you talking about...?" the younger vampire asked Skaar, his eyes wide with terror inherited from his weak human heritage. This one was a child, and he had proved himself unfit.

"Life is a struggle, and only the strong survive. That is the motto of our Order, young one, and it is one that has proved to be your undoing."

"You can't mean..."

Skaar said no more, but simply sliced with his sword, cutting of the vampire's arm at the wrist, and sending him tumbling screaming towards the canopy far below. Even with his vampiric constitution he wouldn't survive the fall, and that was for the best. The Ordo Draco was to be strong, not simply numerous. Those were Dragon's commands, and Skaar was the perfect creature to execute them.

"An impressive story," said a voice from the shadows across the plateau that caused Skaar's head to shoot up, "but you forgot the last bit..."

Skaar smiled, revealing his deadly fangs. He was not strong in terms of his vampire abilities, but he had enough power to know that the one who spoke was not one of his kind. "Oh yes? And what is that?"

"You prey on mankind...but just who preys on you?"

"There are no such creatures," Skaar laughed, "none that still live, at any rate."

"That's where you're wrong..."

The man stepped out of the shadows, and Skaar frowned at him. His skin was dark, like the savage tribes that had lived south of the Egyptians in his lifetime, but he knew from the human's accent that he hailed from America. His garb was dark but, like Skaar, he was armoured and moved as a warrior. He too carried a weapon.

"Who are you, child?" Skaar asked as he walked slowly closer, swinging his sword into an overhand grip once again.

"I am the First."

"The first? Of whom? Or of what?"

"Has your kind so quickly forgotten the Order of the Shadow Slayers?" the man challenged.

Skaar threw his head back and laughed a dry, rustling laugh in his decayed throat. He held up the sword in his hand. "The Slayers are dead. This is the weapon of their First, clawed from the hand of the one you called Kahn by Dragon himself."

The strange man flinched at the name of Skaar's master and hefted his own weapon. It was a hammer, like a smith's tool, but covered in holy symbols that seemed to writhe beneath his gaze.

"Do you know who I am?" the man said, his voice low and threatening.

"No. But you have heard me tell one story, warrior, so perhaps you should return the favour. Who are you, and why do you come here with such bold words?"

"I am the First, and the Last. The Destroyer, he whose coming is prophesised. The Weapon of Destiny and the Hand of Fate. The Thunder and the Storm. The Light and the Darkness."

Skaar frowned. "Is that so?"

"Yes." He held up the hammer in his hand and thunder pealed above him. "I hold the weapon of Aterius Angelus, the Hammer with which he smote the Children of Abbadon eight centuries ago. I am the Last of the Shadow Slayers, and in my name will the New Order be founded."

"Your name?" Skaar smiled as he prepared to fight this brave one, "Perhaps you would care to share it before I defeat you and enslave you with my bite if you prove worthy?"

The storm broke above them, and rain began to lash the plateau. Lightning arced overhead and illuminated the grim expression on the Shadow Slayer's face. "I..." he thundered along with the storm, "am Nathaniel Bolas."

"Children of the Dragon" - Part II

A jeep ride and a short walk through the woods from Sen Monorom in Cambodia, a figure sat brooding in the crumbling ruins of what had once been a temple. It had not served its purpose for millennia, its foundations and walls infiltrated by vegetation from the surrounding rainforest, pulling it slowly apart to match its fallen gods. The plants were gone, crumbled like the stonework in order to flee the aura of the things that had taken residence in the vast central chamber.

The stone floor was littered with dry, rotten remains from over a decade ago that no one had ever seen fit to remove. Why would they? This was now a shrine to decay, and it was fitting that the remnants of its last occupants would lie unattended on the dead stones.

Cold, hard eyes roved across the dark, cavernous space. It was night, and there was no need to lurk in the shadows, but Dragon still crouched in the darkness near the broken sarcophagus on the dais opposite the wide doorway to the complex. It was separated from the temple proper by a deep chasm, a yawning abyss that suited the vampire's mood.

A low growl sounded in his desiccated throat as he sensed the approach of another of his kind. He watched the temple's entrance as a huge shape shouldered its way through the gap and strode across the floor. The warrior's dark armour had nothing to reflect in the darkness, and he simply appeared as a vast, baroque shadow.

"Is he dead?"

The shadow paused and seemed to consider the question. "I don't know." Skaar's accent, impossible to place since no one had spoken with such a dialect in four thousand years, tinged his words and made everything he said sound like a threat.

Dragon considered his lieutenant's answer. "You don't know?"

"No."

A warrior like Skaar wouldn't give a response like that unless he had good reason. Dragon crept forward, unconsciously falling into a bestial method of locomotion, crouched low against the stone, pawing forward with his clawed hands until he reached the edge of the precipice. "Tell me what happened..."

Skaar stood as still as the dead stone around him, and began speaking slowly. He had spent four thousand years giving reports to superiors, and he knew exactly how a warlord wished to hear the facts.

"He announced himself, letting me know the nature of my foe. His first mistake, for I was not on my guard after destroying the child."

Dragon nodded. He had ordered the newly Sired vampire be tested, and Skaar knew that such a command meant that, if his charge should be found wanting, the unfortunate would meet destruction.

"He came at me with a warhammer which he identified as a relic of his Order. It was apparent that he expected it to do me unusual harm, but the blood of the Abyss is strong enough in me that it was no more lethal than any weapon of such size and weight."

"You fought?"

"He was possessed of great ferocity and power. A large man...as you know...but not so large as I, Lord. We were matched for a time, but he tires and I do not, and so I gained the upper hand."

Dragon leaned across the gap, his eyes piercing the shadows to try and read Skaar's expression. "But that didn't last?"

"It lasted. I fought him to the edge of the cliff and cast him down."

"Then why so unsure as to his fate?" Dragon pressed.

"I did not see his body."

Dragon smiled, showing his fangs. "Then you will not allow yourself to be sure?"

"Once I was thought dead, but I rose. I have fought too many wars to be sure of anything but a broken corpse on my sword."

"Do you believe he lives?"

Skaar shrugged. "If he does, he fell far. He is dead, or crippled. If he survives to fight, he will be diminished and I will be certain to kill him the second time."

Dragon nodded his assent as he seemed to realise his animalistic stance on the dais and straightened somewhat self-consciously. With a grunt, he bounded across the gap as he had done over twelve years before in the opposite direction. In his armour such a feat of agility would not have been possible but now, unlike Skaar, Dragon wore only a pair of ragged, dark pants. As a vampire, he had no real conception of modesty, and that which was vulnerable in a man was not so in him, but he still disliked exposing himself more than was necessary. Certain elements of his...decay...were still sometimes disturbing even to him.

"Tell me," the vampire lord asked as he approached Skaar, "what did he say when he appeared in the storm?"

Skaar's dry, decomposed features were impassive as his eyes flicked towards the much smaller figure of Dragon at his side. "He spoke with great power."

"I didn't ask how he said, I asked what he said, Skaar..."

"He spoke of the thunder and the storm."

"The thunder and also the storm, or ‘the thunder and the storm'?"

Skaar seemed to consider the question. "The second...I think..."

"You think?" Dragon's voice was calm, but he felt a twinge of anger.

"His accent was strange to me, Lord. I was not able to decipher the meaning of his intonation."

"Did he say anything else?"

"He said he was the light. Also the darkness. The first, and then the last. He spoke of weapons and hands."

"Sounds familiar..." Dragon mused as he walked around the hulking form of his lieutenant. "Tell me...what did you make of it?"

"His speech was riddled with contradictions. I found it hard to follow his voice, for he spoke slowly and his words were slurred - even more so than yours, Lord."

Skaar did not need to say ‘no offence' afterwards, nor would it matter if he did mean any offence.

"He spoke as one motivated by a higher calling," Skaar continued, "and fought with the same conviction. He was a formidable opponent. He would have been worthy."

Dragon did not need to have Skaar explain what he meant by that. The undead knight hungered for the blood of humans as much as any of their kind, but he had learnt to survive for longer than any vampire that Dragon had seen before without feeding. Skaar did not hunt like Dragon, taking weak humans where he could, instead he fought, and only those he decided were worthy received his bite. He Sired almost every time as a result of this selective attitude.

"You know," the vampire lord said as he continued to circle Skaar, "there is another man who speaks as he did..."

"By his intonation, it seemed like he felt he was alone in his calling..."

"I don't doubt that he did. Strange, isn't it, how much a protégé reflects his mentor?"

Skaar frowned. "Lord?"

"Once," Dragon said softly as he turned to the dais and looked at the shattered sarcophagus in which one of the Firstborn had once sheltered from the sunlight, "I would have taken the place of the Destroyer, and now Nate seeks to do the same. Sadly, I think he shall prove as unsuccessful as I was..."

"You believe he has survived?"

"I did not expect you to prevail against him, Skaar. But prevail you did. Know this though: Nathaniel Bolas will return, and he will be stronger than before, not weaker. I do not think that he is who he thinks he is, but he was the First, and he was trained by me. His will is strong."

"I will defeat him." For the first time, Skaar's voice carried a hint of emotion.

"No."

"No? You doubt me?"

"Against one such as him? Yes." Dragon turned around and looked up, meeting Skaar's eyes. "You are the greatest warrior that li..." he paused, realising what he had been about to say. "That...exists...but you do not know him as I do. He will fall to me, and become my protégé again..."

Skaar's expression was blank, but he understood the implication in his master's words.

"So what would you have me do?"

Dragon smiled. "I have another task for you, great warrior, but I'm afraid you must put aside your dislike of the drawling, slurred speech of the Americans..."

Skaar tilted his head, but his face did not change. "I go where you command, Lord."

NOTE: None of the below has happened yet in the war in hell storyline and chances are it never will, this is simply my version of a Earth-2 or Elseworld story. //Magnus

Five...

The night is cold, hell eastern Europe always seems fucking cold to me...a damp and dark cold that seeps into your body draining you of will until all you want to do is go inside and take a shower to flush the cold away.

Five of them...

How long have I've been hunting now? Ten years? 20 years? One one years? As the saying goes in Latin, Tempus Fugit, time flies. I still remember a hot and hellish day in a desert half a world away, a desert where death gave way to a new life and a new understanding. A day when my destiny was laid clear before me, a day when the old me died and clawed as it tried to hold on to a body it had poisoned for nearly 30 years. Strange how life is at it's strongest in the shadow of death.


Five of them...against one of me...

I hurl myself into the battle I have chosen as mine, cutting and thrusting as if I was some kind of infernal swashbuckler, I dodge their attacks and move in on the first of them.

An aeon ago it had a name, a name it loved an cherished...a name that was loved and seen as a saving grace...the name of an angel. Now all it has is ages of empty bloodshed and torture, millennia of pain hand hatred, an eternity of self loathing...and still it complains as I let my blade drink deep of his demonic vitae.

Four left...

The second one assaults me not only with her physical attack but with features as beautiful that it makes the heart stop, her graces are beautiful bur her soul full of putrid muck. Her name was once Tessa, her parents pride and joy...they didn't see her decline and her corruption until she stabbed them in their sleep, a disturbed girl stolen by him...Her attacks are powerful and her grip on the demonic magic at her disposal formidable, but against my blade she is nothing.

To my surprise her eyes well up in tears as the weapon glides into her chest robbing her of the corrupting soul that has sustained her, her last words are a whispered "Thank you" that will haunt me for years.

Three left...

The next one is the last ones younger brother, he was the troubled child of the family, the black sheep if you will. Always getting in trouble always being brought home drunk by the cops...and yet he was the one who tried to save his parents when his sister struck...tried, failed and became her puppet. Siblings intertwined in a incestuous demonic relationship. His anger at the loss of his sister is what drives this demon on, he was unloved, hated and reviled, the only comfort he found at the side of his demonic sister, now he wants to extract his revenge on me for taking her away, a quick slash with my blade later and his last words bubble out in a curse...unlike his sister, he doesn't see his crimes or that he went wrong...as with so many problem children...he blames the world.

Two left...

The last two seem to be the smarter ones of the bunch, not that this is saying anything at all, the larger of the two attack while the other waits. The large one, a humanoid juggernaut charges me with froth at his mouth and claws extended towards me, I know nothing about this one and I couldn't care less, his charge was a failed one as Storm Caller cuts out and his body charges on while his severed head bounces off the cold hard ground a few times.

One left...

This one I know, the withered skin and the truly demonic visage is all too familiar. This one carries a lot of crimes on his back, then greatest of which is the murder of a friend of mine, my friend thought he could take this one down, he thought this withered monster was his to kill, his vessel of revenge...I couldn't save him and this monster ripped his head loose and dangled it in front of me with the spine hanging from the head as a taunting challenge. I pause...I realise that the monster, the one with an angel's name and the siblings were only decoys, only ways for this one to taunt me and to bring me to a point where he could once more play his games with me. I stare at him as his disgusting mouth forms into a twisted smile.

"Greetings Earth-born..."

My mood gets all the more sullen as I hear "his" venom loaded happiness. This one has been my target for years, ever since Darkness and I fought the Gods of the Abyss I have been wanting to end this one...he has been a open sore, a festering wart and itch I have as of yet been unable to scratch.

"Spyne..."

My mouth feels dry, hatred wells up in me as I look at this monster of a demon, a serial killer in life and a torturer and tormentor after it was ended...I realise that my life at this point is only driven by the wish to see Spyne get his punishment. He smirks and nods his head to me, and at this point me entire being gives up years of discipline and I charge, I raise Storm Caller to strike Spyne down and as I bring the weapon that had just east the souls of his fodder demons he laughs as he disappears from this world.

Alone...

The night is drawing to a close and I watch as the demonic bodies of the four I slew slowly turn to dust and fade away into oblivion. I look at them and feel their memories or what was left of their memories fade away, I sense the ease of the girl, she has learned and her punishment will be painful but swift...I feel the anger of the boy and know that hell just got another confused shade, I feel the cries of the one with the angel's name...that one will learn...and the monster...nothing...void...oblivion.

I look up at the sky as dawn approaches and I think that there are times when I would like to get my hands on God.

I walk on, as much as this pains me it's my legacy, my task and my calling. I'm not some angelic avenger or a righteous man looking to defeat hell, I am Jason Dante and I am Lucifer's son...and this is my Aftermath.

"Children of the Dragon" - Part III

Revenant's eyes were wide as she held her hand out, letting her skin feel the sun for the first time in her life.

"Feels good, doesn't it?"

She looked at the smiling green eyes of her companion and nodded silently as her gaze returned to her undamaged flesh. "I've never been able to do this before," she whispered with a kind of reverence, "the sun burns my skin - I get covered in blisters within a couple of seconds..."

"The power in your veins is growing stronger," the dark man whispered. His shaggy brown hair hung down over brooding eyes, which were all the more disarming with their strange inner-luminescence. He was darkly handsome, lithe and somehow wild looking, but his presence was strangely reassuring, and Revenant felt a kinship with him. He was a part of her world, she instinctively realised.

"But vampires burn worse than I do," she said with a frown, "if I'm growing more powerful, shouldn't that make me more vulnerable to sunlight?"

"No, you misunderstand..." his voice was low in his throat, always sounding like it was on the edge of a growl. He was toying with the wooden talisman on the thong around his neck again. "The power you have is linked to an older, more primal order; as the days darken, the veil that keeps that power from encroaching on this world is growing weaker. Your vulnerabilities - which are connected to your presence in a world in which you don't belong - will begin to fade."

"Will I stop needing to..." she grimaced, the words catching in her throat, "...feed...?"

Her companion chuckled, and even that sounded feral. "That part of you is a product of your demon side. I think your cravings will only get stronger."

Revenant nodded grimly. She'd thought as much, though hearing it from someone else made her heart pound faster anyway.

"Why do you care so much?" the man asked, shifting his position in the shadow of the lean-to in which they were sheltering. The two of them had been travelling together for several days now, crossing the sweltering expanse of the southern United States. She hadn't told him where she was going or what she was looking for, and in truth she had no clear idea herself, but assumed that she'd know when she saw it. What other option did she have?

"Why do I care about what?" she asked, still watching her pale hand in the sun, when he repeated his question.

"About them. Human beings."

She looked at him sharply. "Do I need a reason?"

"Everything needs a reason. Nothing just...is..."

"Well I care about them. I can't help that. They're part of who I am."

"And they're not part of who I am?" he grinned, showing elongated canines. The effect was subtly different from Revenant's vampiric maw, but the feeling of kinship reared its head again.

"Was one of your parents human?"

"No...they were both like me, actually...but even if one had been, I'd have been born the same."

"And you have human blood in your ancestry..." Revenant reminded him. Baptiste had explained how his kind bred and multiplied, and the monstrous creatures to which they owed their origins. The memory of the huge bestial skeleton was still fresh.

He nodded, conceding the point. "You and I are so much more than them though, Rev - humans don't fret about their cattle do they? If their pets die, they bury them in the garden and move on with their lives. They're...less...than us...weaker, frailer...slower...stupider..."

"You're talking about my mother..." Revenant said sharply, twisting her lip at him. She still hadn't decided if she liked the strange man, but his company was better than none and, since she had left Baptiste behind, her loneliness had begun to affect her far more strongly than it had before.

"I thought she was a vampire?"

"She got turned into one," Revenant said, straightening and gazing out over the flat red expanse of eastern Texas that sat in front of them. "Do you think we should try moving by day?"

The man shrugged and stood up beside her. He was a head taller than her, but his menacing presence seemed to give him the quality of constantly being hunched over, like a predator ready to pounce.

"If you want to outrun the ones looking for you, it might be better to start moving by day, yeah," he said, "but it makes no odds to me - I'm not the one who doesn't like the sun."

Revenant looked at him with a frown. "The cops who were after me are dead...or...as good as..." she told him.

He smiled his wolf's grin at her. "I meant the other two."

"What are you talking about?"

"You...you didn't know...?" his surprise seemed genuine, but it was hard to tell. There was always something dark in his eyes that made it look like he was laughing at her expense.

"Know what?" her eyes were wide now with a dull fear she hadn't felt since she left the place in which she had grown up; the building she would never call ‘home'.

"Revenant, there are two vampires following you. I saw them two days before I met you." He held out one lean but muscular arm and pointed to a row of shallow scars in his flesh. "The big slow one did this - it was pretty nasty, but I can regenerate, so no worries."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Her voice was deathly calm, the fear like a block of ice sitting in her stomach.

"I told you - I thought you knew. It's okay, Rev...the one who attacked me was pretty weak. I think there was something wrong with him..."

"Wrong?"

"Yeah, he was fat...I've never seen a fat vamp before."

Revenant stumbled back, her hand gripping the corrugated iron of their shelter for support. "Caliban..." she whispered.

"Caliban?"

"His name is Caliban. He's a monster - the other ones used to treat him badly."

"That makes sense I guess. Look, there's no problem, I think we can..."

"Who was he with?"

"What?"

Revenant had no time for games. She advanced on the man, her eyes fixed on his emerald gaze. "You said there were two. What was the other one like?"

"Just...I dunno...just a vampire...kind of tall. I only saw him from a distance."

"Did he have any kind of...um...nervous twitch?"

"Yeah - he kept tilting his head like he was listening to something."

"Fuck." Revenant reached for her bag and slung it over her shoulder. The weapons she had gotten from Baptiste's lab were in there, along with her heavy coat which she had discarded in the heat. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck," she whispered under her breath as she squinted at the desert before them. It looked like she was going to have to test her newfound invulnerability to sunlight sooner than she would have liked.

"What's wrong, Rev?"

"We have to go."

"Do you think that's wise?"

She stepped out of the shadow, flinching involuntarily at the warmth of the sun. It prickled her skin, but there was no pain like there used to be.

"Bronson," she said, "You might think you're tough, but you're nothing compared to this guy, alright?"

He looked angry for a second, but then grinned disarmingly. "Alright, Rev," he smiled, "you're the boss."

Together, the two of them set out across the baking earth.

* * *

Caliban lurked in the shadows of the warehouse in which they were sheltering. Here, on the edge of civilisation, they had reached an impasse. Baltic would not lead them across the desert where there was no shelter from the destructive energies of the sun, but that was the direction Revenant had gone, and so they had to wait until a suitable opportunity arose, Baltic had said.

Caliban regarded the abandoned warehouse floor with a mournful expression. There was nothing to eat here and, even if he had been able to see any rats, he knew Baltic would just get angry with him again. Vampires were not supposed to eat animals, the more powerful vampire had explained many times.

Still, he wanted blood, and any blood would do, really. Baltic said that a vampire draining the blood of a rat or a stray dog was like a human eating from the garbage, but what else was he supposed to do? Even when they found a human, Baltic had all these ideas about how they should be killed that took hours and hours - the only time he let him just kill someone was the old man in the weird fortress. Baltic always said he tortured his victims so they'd be weak and wouldn't get Sired, and he'd looked pretty disappointed when the old man had just died.

Caliban heaved himself up and moved slowly in his slouching gait across the wide space, trailing his bloated, decaying hands across the floor, searching for something to eat. A millipede crawled from a crack in the concrete floor at his unnatural aura and he made a surprisingly deft grab for it, yanking it out of its nest and lifting it up before his squinting face.

Suddenly, everything went black and Caliban felt a pain in his skull. He was on his back, confused and sprawling. His first thought was that Baltic had returned and this was his way of punishing him, but the shadow that loomed over him was not his companion's. He felt a pair of hands lifting him by his ragged clothing, and then he was propelled across the room to land in a heap of sobbing agony.

"Pathetic creature," a voice bellowed in a strange accent Caliban didn't recognise, "you disgrace your race with your very existence."

Caliban tried to pick himself up, pawing at the wall that had broken his fall but his assailant had already crossed the intervening space and now slammed him up against the wall again. Black lacquered armour trimmed in burnished gold filled his vision, and then a pair of pinprick eyes regarded him from a decayed, hate-filled face. Caliban flinched as he heard the sound of a sword being unsheathed, and then tried to pull himself into the wall as the blade pressed against his throat.

"Hey!"

The monster turned to where Baltic now stood, a look of confused rage on his face.

"Is this yours?" the stranger asked, flicking his head at Caliban.

"I...no...I didn't Sire him. He's in my care though."

"Your care?"

"I'm...responsible for him. For his growth..." Baltic seemed unsure of how to articulate the relationship he shared with Caliban.

"Then you are doing a poor job, Gregor."

"You know me?" Baltic's attention was now focused wholly on the armoured behemoth rather than the creature he held up without effort against the wall.

"I have heard of you. You are a rare specimen - a former Slayer who has retained many of his powers. You are a valuable member of our Order."

Baltic nodded. "I still have my Slayer Sense. You're Skaar aren't you?"

Skaar released Caliban, letting him slump down to the floor, holding his throat protectively. He continued to sob feebly. "I am Skaar, Second of the Ordo Draco."

"Is Dragon using you as a messenger now?"

"Lord Dragon sends his greetings, that is the only message I have. My purpose here is to aid your mission to obtain the girl."

"My mission was to kill her," Baltic pointed out.

"Then it has changed. She is to be brought to the First."

"Very well. But what makes you think we need any help?"

Skaar smirked at the former Slayer, his half-rotted face twisting unattractively. "Every day she remains free brings her closer to those who would use her against us. You have taken too long, and the Lord Dragon grows tired of your procrastination."

"Fine. But I suggest you leave Caliban alone or..."

Skaar had squared up to Baltic in the blink of an eye, his huge armoured form looming over the smaller vampire. "I tolerate you," he growled in a low voice, "because you have a skill that is useful to me - you alone can find the one who calls herself Revenant. Your pet is offensive to me; he and his kind are a cancer on our people and, were it up to me, he would be dead already. Keep him out of my sight, or I will find an excuse to kill you too. Understand?"

Baltic nodded fractionally as Skaar grunted and stalked away, sheathing his sword again. Across the room, Caliban continued to whimper quietly.

The Promethean Ring I: Prometheus

Darkness balanced the beer mat on the edge of the table before flipping it upwards with the back of his hand and then deftly catching it in the air.

"Can you do it with no hands though?" Dante asked with a small smile. Darkness only returned the half-grin by way of reply and sat back in the leather chair. He sat at a table in their hotel bar, accompanied by Dante and Selenia. Having come straight from his bizarre dinner date with half of Infinity and the mysterious Joyride, he still wore his black suit, though he had discarded the tie which was now rolled up and sitting on the table next to a half-empty pint of Guinness.

"Did Joyride say anything else?" Selenia pressed. The intoxicating woman was dressed comparatively demurely in a white sweater and a knee-length skirt while Dante eschewed his usual pale colour palette in favour of a grey suit with a black shirt open at the collar. Just for tonight, the New Hellfire Club could have passed for ordinary people on the street.

"No," Darkness shook his head and flipped the beer mat again, "just the line about humanity and then everything went quiet. We thought it was best to make a sharp exit."

"Well, I guess after you tipped over the table dinner was over anyway," Dante chuckled. The albino was surprisingly chipper after everything that had happened with Highone. Darkness and Dante's involvement with Rachelle's situation had brought their morality - and the fact that sometimes they were only too human - into sharp focus. The problem of Lilith and her newfound connection to Highone was one they were not confronting yet.

Still, Darkness could not help feeling that his own enraged outburst in the restaurant, as well as his earlier assault on Ghetto Fire were part of the same issue. In finding his humanity, was he beginning to lose the hero? He glanced at Misfit, who was on the other side of the bar playing a game of pool with Acolyte, Freya, and Hawthorne. It looked like a doubles game, the tag combination of the werewolf and the strange man who claimed to be from the 1940s against the mismatched duo of Aco and Misfit, united only by a common faith.

"What are you thinking about?" Selenia asked. Out of politeness, she didn't enter Darkness's mind without his permission in the way she did with her lover.

"A lot of things," Darkness said, returning his gaze to the beer mat which he now began ripping at with one nail.

"Yeah?" Dante pressed.

"I can't help feeling that it's...connected somehow...all of it..."

"All of what?" Selenia asked with a frown creasing her pretty brow.

Darkness sighed and tapped out a meaningless rhythm on the table. "Every time I think about everything that's happened with us all recently, I get this fiery circle on my retina like before I went to England."

"You mean the Promethean Ring?" Dante said, leaning forward now that his curiosity was piqued. Darkness had told his stable-mates about his strange encounter with the man who called himself Odin.

"Maybe. It seems like when I think about the things Joyride said - about humanity - and Titanium Insomniac's endless rhetoric about my anger...and then Lucifer too..."

Dante grunted. He still harboured a great deal of resentment towards his father and news of his encounter with Darkness in his hotel suite had not been well received by the World Champion.

"It's the same flash of that ring on my vision," Darkness continued, "like they're all connected somehow."

"I still don't understand this ‘Promethean Ring' concept," said Selenia, "is it a physical object?"

"I assume so," Darkness shrugged, "but my knowledge of Prometheus is more-or-less non-existent."

"He stole the secret of fire from the gods, didn't he?" Dante said before taking a sip of his own Guinness, which had been almost untouched up till now. "Beyond that...I know about as much as you..."

"Well I know the story," Selenia said suddenly, "I didn't realise that was an issue - I was just curious about the ring itself..."

Darkness spread his hands helplessly. "If you know something, please tell me," he urged her.

"Prometheus was a Titan - one of the generation of beings that came before the Olympian Gods. Some myths say he had some role in creating mankind in the first place and, after the war with the Titans, he remained close to them."

"Weren't the Titans killed or punished after the war though?" Darkness asked.

"Prometheus sided with the Olympians," she explained, "so survived, but he was angry that Zeus kept the secret of fire from men, so he travelled to Olympus and stole it."

"Okay...so men could set alight to stuff," Darkness shrugged, "what's the big deal?"

Selenia rolled her eyes. "It's a metaphor. Fire represents knowledge; understanding of the world. Prometheus opened mankind's eyes and the Golden Age was over."

"Kind of like Eve picking the apple in the Garden of Eden," Dante observed.

"I just got that ring flashing in my eyes again," Darkness said with a grimace, "can you carry on with the story?"

"Well," Selenia went on, "Zeus found out and was angry. That's where Pandora's Box comes in - he introduced Pandora, the metaphorical ‘womankind' who unleashed the evils of the world and men had to labour in the fields to feed their wives, and women got childbirth and so on and so forth."

"Right. And what happened to Prometheus?"

"Zeus chained him to Mount Caucasus and had a vulture pick out his liver for all time."

"Nice," Darkness murmured.

"Yes," Selenia agreed, "and he stayed there until Hercules found him."

"Argh...that damn ring again..." Darkness shook his head in a vain attempt to shake the image from his retina.

"Hercules broke the chains that bound him, but that made Zeus break his word, since Prometheus was supposed to be imprisoned forever. So, to cover his own ass..." Dante smiled slightly at the American slang Selenia was beginning to pick up through her psionic communication with him and the telepathic link they shared, "...he took one of the broken links and turned it into a ring for Prometheus to wear, so that he'd always be chained forever. Metaphorically."

Darkness leaned back again, steepling his fingers as he thought through the story. "And what happened to the ring then?"

"Nothing," the succubus said, "that's where the myth ends."

"So we have to find Prometheus?"

Dante rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Didn't Odin say that the ring crops up throughout human history?"

"He said something like that, yes."

"Then Prometheus must have lost it, or given it away or something, because he never shows up again."

Darkness nodded, "Sure. But how do we find out what happened to it?"

"Look for a ring," Dante suggested, "there must be more ring-related stories if it's this important."

The former Slayer sighed. "Okay. I think I'm still missing something though - it's like I have all the pieces of the puzzle, but I can't see the picture on the box. There's just...something...I'm not seeing yet..."

Dante and Selenia could offer no more advice and so he reached for his Guinness and silently sipped.