He stowed the thought and headed down the alley, tracking the sour funk and the faint sound of claws clicking against cement. There was an eerie layer of fog, like dry ice, that settled speciously on cue as he stepped deeper into the shadows of the busted city lights. Facetiously, he half expected a zombiefied, younger version of Michael Jackson to breakdance his way through the brick wall beside him. He imagined him in a red leather jacket, hosting an army of little boy-zombies, pop-locking to that Thriller song he did back when he was still cool. That is, before he actually was an expired pop-zombie, soulfully dancing to tunes from beyond the grave…
He shook the image from his head to stay focused, gun hung to his side, shoulders slightly rolled. Every step he took felt like five more from the street behind. He looked back, just to make sure it was still there, and found that the bum he’d insulted had decidedly uncoupled himself from his curb, leaving him more alone than he expected to be. …Suddenly the change in his pocket seemed like a fair price to pay for a moment of shallow companionship.
Between the stereotypical, ominous layer of fog and the dramatically flickering lights that sparsely illuminated practically nothing, he strained to find patterns in the dark. He thought he could almost see a figure scuttling in the distance, but couldn’t be sure. He may’ve just been picking up random shapes in shadows that his eyes were trying to wrap his brain around… But then his nose and upper lip twitched at a familiar, rancid smell that coated the back of his throat, and he knew he had to be getting close.
He followed his nose and ears until the dog’s claws stopped clicking long enough to be replaced by a rustling sound – like the sound of a medium-sized sack of smaller, weighed-out bags of meth being fucking eaten by a stray animal…
He held fast a few yards from the alley’s end, examining the obscurity of the dark concealing his prey. Hoping the first thing that sprang to mind was a simple, yet effective solution to his bind, he decided on starting with the most obvious option…
So, he yelled at it.
“HEY!!”
No such luck.
His own echo startled him…but the elusive mutt didn’t bother to budge.
He’d hoped to have frightened it; chased it away from his stash before it sniffed up and spilled out whatever was left. But the animal responded with a low growl instead, shrouded in shade.
He struggled to see through the cloak of night and thought he could almost make something out if he filled in the blanks. It looked crouched between a dumpster and a darkened corner, conveniently avoiding the dim lights flickering behind him. Its snout faced the wall: its back rounded, waves of motion rolling over ragged, black fur. He couldn’t make out the head, but the growling resounded vexingly with the rustling of his bag, irritating an already irritable junkie to the point of near combustion…
Then it got deeper, choppier, like it was chuckling at him – or snorting a fat fucking rail and choking on it – until it grew violent in its pitch as he stood in limbo and watched, transfixed by its silhouette in the dark.
With his eyes glued to the veil, the ruckus went from sadistic to grievous in hurry. It was as if the mutt had met its match against the demon in the bag, and Smoke’s twisted sense of justice took a dip into ultimate retribution, thinking it was overdosing and dying in pain…
Then, like ants eating a spider, the dark consumed the scene along with his moment of triumph. It coalesced wherever he’d focus, entirely erasing the animal and its groans from his perception.
He leaned forward cautiously, squinting. Standing perfectly still, he stared intensely at a blank canvas of shadows…until he jolted in shock of a pair of yellow eyes ripping open two holes in the black to stare back.
Surprise steeled his spine, and the once absent growling crept back into his ears just before the dog’s soul-chilling eyes broke away from his.
From a growl to a snarl, painful dry-heaves and intense groans crawled from the shadows next. Feral noises of anger and violence wrestled just beyond his ability to see. It sounded like something big broke through Hell’s jagged gates and was stripped bare of its flesh in the process. It was a sound that was driving his mind wild trying to make out what exactly was happening…
He could hardly stand to bear the uncertainty…but didn’t have to wait long before his thirsty eyes were quenched by an emerging sight.
This shady mass, grim and formless, contorted and twisted in front of him, absorbing the surrounding blackness and leaching off his fear of the unknown. It thrashed about like a fish being hacked to pieces out of water, its own bones fracturing in the process, snapping and popping, struggling to find footing while banging against the dumpster. It appeared through the confusion of the gloom as if it were twice its original size, face-down, with bony, pointed elbows protruding from the fur on its back.
He tried backing away, but the shadows didn’t get any further from his feet. The blacktop crunched under the tension of this thing’s transformation and the night masked the fractures as they spread, reaching out and climbing the walls.
After seconds that dragged on like minutes of terrible unknowns, the snarling finally settled into a primal hum. He could hear its thick, heavy breathing, but its eyes were the only thing visible in the dark – yellow, bloodshot eyes surrounded by a swelling, blackened shape that dined on shadows, absorbing them like sustenance.
For a time, his heart rate slowed and his breathing leveled out. There was a tranquil feel to the moment – like the eye of a storm – where he went so far as to think he might be imagining the whole thing. Maybe he smoked one too many pipe loads and was having some kind of drugged-up panic attack… But that moment didn’t last, as the yellow, demon eyes again locked with his and inched closer with every breath he took, tethered to his rising anxieties, breathing in his fear.
It suddenly occurred to him he should be running like hell for hallowed grounds and/or screaming like a woman for help, but the warmth on his face and the stench of its breath paralyzed him, and its heavy breathing assembled in his mind like dark, grunting whispers that were…trying to say something…
This…thing… Its deep, gruff respiring cutting through the nervousness and fear clouding his mind entwined groans with soft words in its breath. He couldn’t hear them, but he…he could understand them. Like the words were buried under the warmth and the smell and were in his head instead of his ears. And above it all, he felt as if he were floating. Like the grumbling from its throat was vibrating his entire body, numbing his senses so he couldn’t feel the walls around him or the ground below, but only the heat, and the smell, and the terror of this monster’s presence.
Dizziness and nausea were a sick prelude to the taste of blood and vomit rising in his throat. He tried swallowing his fear and taking a breath, but choked on his tongue and couldn’t get his voice to push past the tumor in his windpipe far enough to scream…
He struggled for air in between the adrenaline stuttering his heart while blood and bile filled his mouth and dripped from his chin. This thing’s savage eyes and giant teeth were so close now he couldn’t see anything else. And the sound beneath its huffing was like a voice from a distant memory or nightmare… And it sounded…familiar. A woman’s voice that spoke to him directly and……this woman knew his name…
It was a soft whisper buried behind animal breath and fangs and demon eyes that bled. The smell was like raw meat and blood on a dead animal that’d been roasting on the side of a desert road. But this thing wasn’t dead. Its hot breath was very much alive, and its hands – its claws – he could feel them gripping his throat with his feet dangling above ground, unable to find his footing.
The whisper behind the monster’s grumbling was becoming clearer now. The words were long and drawn out – ghostly – and the voice so familiar it almost frightened him more than the fact that he couldn’t breathe or that he was very likely going to die.
She spoke to him in
a tone that reeked of doom, and his eyes widened and pupils dilated at the ghastly sound of her sigh…
“Jaaaaaaacccceeennnnn……”
…No one ever called him Jacen anymore… No one even knew his real name! No one…but his…dead……sister……
And he swore he could see her in the reflection of the demon’s eyes…reaching for him… Her fingers thin and frail as she wheezed with pain bleeding through her hollowed words…
“……Joinnn………usssssss………innn………hhellllllllll…”
2
The sound of her voice in his mind stopped his heart and iced his soul. He hadn’t thought about his sister’s murder in over a year. Being so belligerently spunned so often clouded his memories and stunted the guilt and dejection he should’ve had to live with.
The man he’d killed the year before was a drug pusher he’d been “professionally” associated with. His sister met this dealer through him and had a “thing” that basically involved sex for drugs. She’d gotten tired of buying her supply from her older brother, so he put her to work to carry her own weight, cutting and bagging coke and meth to earn her fix. She’d work all day and, toward the end the night, would eventually give herself over to him whenever she’d get so high her personal self-worth and reserve formally diminished into a haze of gratuitous opiates.
This dealer was bad news. Smoke knew that…but so was he. At the time, he was too thoroughly lit on a daily basis to feel any real concern for his sister’s wellbeing. Apathy toward women was no stranger to him until that day he found her body naked in a cold metal dumpster. The sight of his dead sibling beaten to death, lying in a pile of discarded filth, was just enough to finally flip the switch in his brain from money and drugs to bloody-fucking-murder.
The dealer had pumped her full of dope, sniffed a couple lines, forgotten he’d just shot her up, then dosed her again. They were in this second-rate hotel, three stories up with a window big enough to push a dead girl’s body through conveniently positioned over an open dumpster in the alley. She was practically comatose after the second hit and he was in about mid-climax when she pissed herself on the bed he fucked her to death in. He flipped his lid at the sight of the mess and started punching the girl squarely in the face, so stoned himself that he hadn’t realized she was already unconscious and nearly dead.
When he was done ravishing and beating her, he lifted his piss splattered self up – fists swollen and dripping blood – and left her lying naked in a pool of fluids to die.
Afterward, he systematically lit a cigarette and cracked open a cheap fifth of whiskey, leisurely celebrating his sexual prowess with a shot and a drag. Minutes passed before he finally realized what he’d done. And when he did, he impetuously wrapped her up in blood and urine soaked sheets to maneuver her expiring carcass through the inviting mouth of an open window.
Three stories down and around the corner, Smoke was finalizing something of a frivolous “transaction” (as most of them were) when he heard the thud he’d never forget come from the alley behind him.
His indifferent stare explored the adjacent path, only passively curious, and glimpsed a naked foot peeking from the dumpster twenty yards away. He looked up at the open window above, casually making that connection between the sound and the view.
His mind slowly put together these random pieces, but he wouldn’t allow the uninvited thought to take shape. Cautiously, he started toward the body, and as the wheels of reasoning quickened their pace, his heart pounded so hard it hurt him to breathe.
As he got closer, he realized the naked foot protruding from the trash was sickeningly still twitching; a rapid, soft, thumping noise tapping against the dumpster’s metal frame…
She was still alive…but wouldn’t be for long.
He stepped up to stare into the dumpster at the body of this dying girl and wouldn’t allow himself to see his sister behind the bloody and beaten frame of her face. He didn’t want to look at all, but knew he had to get close enough to see what his brain had already figured out but his heart wouldn’t allow him to grasp.
Following some sort of automated response, he reached into the dumpster and wiped the blood-soaked hair from the girl’s swollen cheeks, looking in closely at the body of his kin while she convulsed and lay dying. He couldn’t react in any normal way, by calling out her name or clutching her body in his arms, or even by removing her from the pile of garbage that so ironically symbolized the end of her life. Instead, he just stared…watching her last moments slip away as she ceased to exist before his eyes.
The moment dragged on like hours, but only seconds passed when the time came that the thumping stopped, and his blank stare turned frigged and riddled with hate, glaring at the lifeless body of what he thought was his only living family.
For a moment, he didn’t see the bloodied corpse of a dead junkie in the dumpster, but the sweet face of his little sister smiling back at him when she was at her most innocent – the tender age of four or five. She was regarding him with unconditional love and an unworldly bliss that had filled his heart with warmth at one point in his life, which now felt like only days before. In truth, it’d been over a decade since he’d seen that look in her eyes, and he’d never fully realized how invigorating a sibling’s trust was until now that it was gone forever.
The child’s face in his thoughts turned to that of the dealer’s grimace over his sister’s dying body as he fucked her and beat her for his amusement. He saw a pleasure in the eyes of the man in his mind that in reality was only a clueless expression, but to Smoke, was the epitome of all things evil and disgusting in the world. The night around him turned red and his veins flushed hot with hate. He knew then only one thing: that he had to dispose of the fucking pig that raped and murdered his baby sister essentially right under his powdered nose.
He left the body where she laid and instinctively fingered his waistline for the six-shooter he carried. He stormed past a few vagrants outside the hotel, entered the tattered building and drew his weapon to his side. Through a doorway to the right, the lobbyist saw his gun and hastily picked up the phone. The police would be there soon, but not soon enough to save the bastard who had no idea how bad he had it coming.
If that godless, parasite of a man had any brains left in his half-baked skull, he would’ve already been on his way to Cancun by then, but when Smoke kicked open the door, gun in hand, he was still there, bent over a table, snorting a line of blow.
Smoke hesitated, but only to give the prick a chance to see what it was his fate had in store.
The dealer looked up plainly, as if he didn’t know what all the commotion was about and started to speak, voice muffled under the hand that tendered his reddened nostrils.
“What the fuck, Smo—?”
BLAMM!!!
He pulled the trigger from ten feet away and hit the dealer in the shirtless chest. The blast knocked his torso back into the easy chair before he looked down at the small hole in his body that almost instantly poured blood. He looked like he might’ve been trying to say something when Smoke stepped closer, gun positioned five inches from the soon-to-be dead man’s face.
No other words were exchanged. No “you killed my sister, I’ll see you in hell” one-liners the avenging hero in Hollywood movies ritualistically spouted before finishing off the scum of the century. Just sparks, smoke, a loud bang, and brains splattering the walls behind the recently deceased.
Smoke stood for a moment and stared at the open skull of his victim, silently discovering an overwhelming sense of guilt squirming inside…
He raised the gun to his head.
He saw his sister’s twitching, bloody and dying body in his mind and, without another second passed, pulled the trigger…
Empty.
FUCK!!!
He squeezed it a few more times before giving up and letting it fall to his side. He wished to God he had one mo
re bullet left in the chamber, but shook it off as a sick twist of fate, tucked the gun in his waist, then pulled the hood of his jacket over his head.
He left the building in a daze – his face as unshakable as granite – feeling more alone now than ever before.
3
“Jess…”
Smoke tried whispering his sister’s name, but only wheezed out the last bit of air from his lungs that had kept him conscious.
The demon’s grip on his throat was so strong that it alone made him feel more weak and insignificant than he’d ever had.
He heard a thump over the sound of himself choking, like something heavy – a body maybe – hitting the ground below. The strangest sensation came over him when his vision started to fade and he realized the sound he’d just heard was that of his own headless corpse falling to the alley floor. In his last moment of awareness, he thought to himself, maybe Hell wouldn’t be so bad if he’d get to see his sister again… And in that instant, he renounced his struggle for life and allowed the darkness to consume.
This thing that stood over Smoke’s body with his head in its grip, stared into its victim’s dead eyes as if searching for a glimpse of something buried behind them. It dripped saliva and blood from its snout while its yellow pupils glowed in a diabolical display – a deep, fiery yellow that swirled with darkness and power so fierce it could’ve only come from a place such as Hell.
The demon was called Tessura. She was a creature born from the depths of the Underworld and a soul collector for the one who summoned her and gave her her time on this plane. She was an enchantress embodying a wolf who could change the way she was perceived at will. Tessura was not what folklore would call a “werewolf” specifically because she was not now, nor had ever been human. She could appear as nearly anything, such as a man or woman, dog or tree. She could appear as a snake, or a bucket of bolts if she pleased, but without ever actually having changed form. She was an illusionist who could telepathically project images, and even voices, to a handful of people at a time, but she couldn’t actually speak. She was, in fact, an animal. Her only solid form was that of a jet-black canine or the eight-foot tall, savage, snarling beast that was neither dog nor man, but something with an abundance of the worst of both.
Blood Magik- A Cold Day In Hell Page 4
