by Greg Dragon
“Who made this for you, CeeCee?” he asked as he handed it back to her.
“Chaos. It was melted down and forged to suit my skillset, and as you saw from the design on the blade, it is now a Knight family sword, through and through.”
The sword had been fashioned into that of an old Japanese katana, but at the base of the blade was a bit of artwork that depicted an ethereal woman, reaching down to touch an armored warrior that looked very much like Alysia.
“I take it, that’s your mother?” James asked with a smile, and Alysia nodded and sheathed the sword.
“This is Isobel, Koko, and Jasmine,” she said, and each of the girls waved as she said their names. Tracy and Jaime were still in shock but they waved back to the girls. Tracy then went back into the bathroom, and Jaime sat down at the desk. “I know that this will take you all some time to process,” Alysia said. “But now we know why they have been coming for me, and why it has been more than luck keeping me alive. All that we love and cherish that was material to this world is gone, and all we have left is one another. I am still Alysia, still the girl who loves swords and video games. I would hate for you all to stop trusting me, or loving me, just because of what happened.”
“So, what kind of powers do you have now, CeeCee?” Jaime asked as he rubbed his head and stared at her with a look of excitement in his eyes. She noticed that he had shaved his hair off, and smiled to herself at the influence that her father had had on him. The baldhead made his green eyes stand out more than when he had a crop of hair, and she found that she liked it quite a bit.
“Well, I am faster in everything I do. I can make myself lighter when I jump; I have better balance, I can sense danger, and I can heal like the demons … it will take a lot for them to kill me,” she said.
“Could you, like, give me some of that power?” Jaime asked. “I want to be a badass half-demon too. Do you bite us and drink our blood, or is there a ritual we have to undergo?”
Alysia thought about his question and then looked at each one of the girls. They had been given the same sort of powers when they joined Chaos, but hers was enhanced by the Twilight Sword and the essence of Xatas. Was the power transferrable? Could they pull her father into the other realm to undergo the trials? She had no doubt that he could pass them and be on her level, but she didn’t know if she was allowed to recruit them into the order.
“Isobel, are we able to create more like me?” she asked the dark-haired girl, but she shook her in earnest.
“Only challengers to the champion are permitted the trials, CeeCee. Your friends would have to be chosen by Chaos, lord, and then brought to the underground chamber. That is the only access point to the world of Yalem, and the Bloody Garot trials.”
Alysia felt a wave of depression come over her when Isobel said this. She had always suspected that it would be this way, but a part of her hoped—albeit selfishly—that her father could be cursed to fight in the other world so that they would stay together once it was all over. She looked at Jaime, shrugged, and apologized.
“Oh, it’s all good, CeeCee, I figured I’d at least try. So, I have another question,” he said, this time getting up to sit next to her. “See, I’m not afraid of you, like Tracy over there.”
Tracy shot him a glance that could cut a diamond, then took a seat on the other side of her and hugged her close. “You can be a real pain in the ass, do you know that, Jaime?” she said. “I’m glad you’re back, CeeCee. You had us all worried.”
Alysia returned the hug and smelled her hair; it smelled of shampoo and something else she couldn’t put her finger on. The transformation had given her heightened senses, but she ignored it, letting her love and comfort pass through via the hug to a friend she had almost lost.
“So, CeeCee, how does this master demon expect you to save the world? Do you have to fight for 100 years to kill every last demon? Or do you convert people into demons, like the girl we fought? Seems like an impossible mission to me,” Jaime said.
“I would love to kill them all, Jaime, for what they did to my mother, but the truth, is we only need to take out their leaders. Six masters from the demon world will be summoned to the earth, and once we kill them the rest will return, and that will be the end of it,” she said.
“You make it all seem so easy,” Tracy said. “I imagine these masters will probably be a big deal.”
“They will most likely come with an army of demons and giants to protect them, plus a few other things that we haven’t run into yet,” Alysia said, smiling confidently.
“How do you know where these Generals are?” James asked. “I highly doubt they are all here in New York, much less the United States, for that matter.”
“With the change, I am connected to them,” Alysia said. “I can see them when they try to hide amongst us, I can hear them when they are close, and when Chaos learns of the location of a master, he will tell me, and then we can hunt it down.”
“At least we have some direction now,” Jaime said. He got up and bounced around happily. “We can help you, get more people on our side, and take back the earth from these things, and then we’ll be world heroes, or something like that.”
James Knight shook his head at Jaime’s shortsightedness, but he forced a smile in celebration of his daughter’s return. “You keep on getting lost, then returning to me,” he said to Alysia. “I’m just happy that you’re here. I don’t like that you made a deal with the devil, or whomever this Chaos is, but I am here for you, baby girl. Just promise me that you will never leave us behind again, if it is up to you.”
“I promise, Dad,” she said to him, and then got up to give him a hug.
~ * ~ * ~
Sleep did not come easily to the members of the Bloody Garot, and this was one of many side effects that Isobel had neglected to tell Alysia. She stood in the moonlight on the top of the motel roof and observed the lost demons running here and there along the streets. She found that she had a newfound hate for them, a growing ire that spawned from the tale her father had told her of how the demon huntress took over the young girl’s body.
She remembered the night when they had her captured: their strange ritual, the oil they placed on her body, and the corpse she found of the girl who had become what they wanted her to become. There was a time when she viewed them as mere animals, savages that carried out rituals that were passed on to them by their elders.
Ugly, twisted men who snatched up women to turn them into one of their own; that was what they were. But she killed this thought process when she thought of Debdan. They turned young, innocent girls into demon-making, predators. There was no room for pity or understanding when it came to their kind, and she relished the thought of helping Chaos wipe them out forever.
“You do that quite a bit, you know?” Isobel said as she pulled herself up unto the rooftop and walked over to Alysia. It was still hard to accept that she wasn’t a child, and Alysia took her hand and stood with her, looking out on to the streets.
“What do I do ‘quite a bit,’ little one?” she asked.
“You like to stand by yourself, like this,” she said, and took on a pose where her hands rested on the hilt of her sword and a serious expression crossed on her face. She stood like that without moving for a time, and Alysia found it amusing.
“What? Nobody likes to meditate where you’re from?” she asked, and Isobel looked up at her and smiled.
“Of course we do. Just not as much as you, though. Every time Jasmine says, ‘Has anyone seen Alysia?’ I know that all I have to do is to find the most private area around and you will be there, standing the way you always do.”
“If you knew the weight that I have on my shoulders, you would be standing the same way too, Isobel,” Alysia said.
“We have all had our share of loss, Alysia Knight. We have all lost family, friends, our way of life … our souls. We know the weight you bear and I won’t pretend that it is any less than you make it. I just don’t like seeing you sad, so I do th
ings to make you laugh,” Isobel said. She walked to the edge and sat down so that her feet were dangling off of it.
Alysia walked over and sat next to her, unfazed by the height of the building and the fall they would suffer if they weren’t careful.
“Chaos chose you to become one of us, CeeCee. You did not volunteer to become the champion of your world. Tell your friends and father that it was not up to you. We broke your form and made you into our image. They should not treat you differently for it,” Isobel said in her animated way, and Alysia touched her shoulder to keep her steady.
“Have there been many girls that you’ve had to train, Isobel?” she asked and the tiny girl nodded and sighed.
“Many trained, many died, and some became sisters,” she said.
“How do you keep your sanity?” Alysia asked, trying to imagine the emotional baggage that Isobel carried.
“Who is to say that I am sane?” she replied and smiled, showing her fanged teeth, which gleamed white beneath the hunter’s moon.
“We’re going to win—” Alysia started to say, but her voice was cut off by a blaring alarm that seemed to come from everywhere. Not knowing what to think, she rolled backwards and stood up in one motion, and then pulled Isobel up to join her. They hopped down onto the staircase that sat behind the building and then rushed inside to find the others.
“That alarm is a warning for something major!” James said. “We need to get underground, and we need to hurry.”
Without objecting or asking questions, they gathered their supplies and descended the stairs. James took point and began to sprint, and they followed closely behind, keeping an eye out for demons and kreples.
“The alarm is warning of something massive incoming. It could be the bomb that we were supposed to wait out in the bunker for.” he said.
“Why don’t we get to the closest one, now?” Tracy asked.
“The closest one is ten miles away,” he replied, and they all grew quiet once again, hoping he had a good plan.
When they reached the edge of the city, James took them into the subway underground and began running on the tracks. “Get to this level and keep your heads,” he ordered, and they all hopped down and followed him into the darkness.
They kept on running with no end in sight. Alysia, who would normally be frightened and in a slight panic over the bomb, was surprised by how calm she felt. Her legs were moving rapidly and she slowed down just enough to stay behind her father, but Koko, Isobel, and Jasmine were ahead of him, swapping places and playing around like children at recess.
“Demons are fast,” Jaime remarked between labored breaths, and Alysia looked at him and nodded her head in agreement. “Can you move that fast?” he asked and she once again nodded, causing him to laugh and shake his fist in approval.
The deeper they got into the tunnel, the darker it seemed to grow, and before long James had to use his watch to light the way. They stopped when they got to a parked subway train and James found a way to get the door open. He motioned for them to get inside. The train had seen better days, and like the system that ran below the city, it hadn’t seen much use since the invention of hover-tech.
“We need lights,” Tracy said, and they all made their own grunts of approval. “I wonder how long this has sat here,” she said after a while and James got up and switched on his watch.
“That’s a really good question,” he said. He stood up and shone the light on their faces. “Stay put while I go see if we’re really alone on this train. I’ll take CeeCee with me, just in case. But we should be back in about fifteen minutes.”
Alysia and James walked the length of the train and then forced open the door that led to the adjoining car. It was pitch black, but Alysia found that she could see the shapes of the seats and her father next to her. James fiddled with his watch and the light came on, and he touched his daughter’s arm to get her attention.
“We’re wasting our time; there’s nothing in here. If there was, they would need light to get in and out, and I don’t see anything to tell me that anybody has been in here,” he said.
“But we need to be in here, Dad. That’s the thing. We’re going to need a source of light, and we’re going to need supplies,” Alysia said.
“What about your girls? Do you think that they can help?”
“They’re like little girls, Dad. They’re handy, but they don’t know the city. I fear that they would get in trouble if I let them out.”
James looked around for an answer. He had led them into the underground subway to avoid the bomb, but he hadn’t thought about it in depth. He had to find a way for them to get light inside of the train.
“Let’s keep moving till we get to the engine,” he said. “Maybe there’s something there, or we may luck out and find there’s still some power left to light this bad boy up.”
Alysia took the initiative, and pushed ahead to the next car. They traveled through six more cars before they arrived at the engine. When they got to it, Alysia reached over and quickly touched her dad’s watch to turn off the light.
“Don’t move,” she whispered, and stood still with her hand on the hilt of her sword. There were a host of red eyes outside of the train, and one of them was in the engine. She knew that it was due to her powers that she could see them, because if James Knight had seen them, he would have stopped on his own volition.
The demon saw her behind him and charged the door in order to alert his brethren. Alysia leapt forward and cut off the hand that reached for the door. She elbowed him back against the wall and then ran him through with the Twilight Sword. The creature froze when the blade hit home and then its body fell to the ground as it disintegrated.
Alysia knelt down and ran her hand through the remains and the light flaky texture reminded her of ashes. The Twilight Sword incinerates them, she thought to herself. This is going to be very convenient. She stood up and looked back outside at the other demons who all seemed frozen in time as they stood there, blinking but doing nothing else. They hadn’t heard their comrade die, so she whispered a quiet prayer of thanks. There were simply too many of them out in the tunnel, and even with the Twilight Sword burning them, they could swarm her, and that would not be good.
“We’re in trouble, Dad. I think they are living down here,” she whispered to a stoic James Knight, who had been standing there asking her what was happening while she killed the demon.
“They, who? What are you seeing CeeCee? There’s nothing but blackness from what I can see.”
“Oh! I am sorry, I keep forgetting. Demons, Daddy, like before, but they are down here. Hundreds of them. Even if we try to fight them all, we will be overrun,” Alysia said.
“What was all that noise just now?” he asked.
“One was inside the engine. I had to kill it, or it could have attacked and followed us back.”
“Okay, so we need to hurry back,” James said, and fumbled back the way he had come.
When they got back to the rest of the party, they found them in good spirits. Tracy was telling a ghost story, and the rest were sitting on the benches, quietly listening to it.
“We need to get out of the tunnels as soon as possible,” James said when the light from his watch brought them around.
“What did you guys find in here?” Tracy asked, scrambling to her feet and grabbing her gun.
“Hundreds of demons are on the other side of the train,” Alysia said. “We need to find somewhere else, just in case they decide to go for a walk and find us.”
Tracy was about to object when a high-pitched noise forced her to put her hands to her ears. They all had to do it in hopes of saving their eardrums, and then the sound of thunder replaced the ear-splitting screech. The world around Alysia’s party began to shake erratically, and the debris from the top of the tunnel rained down loudly onto the roof. The noises that came from all around them were alien and frightening, and James’s light went out, leaving them to experience it all in darkness.
A few seconds into the terror and it felt as if the train had become a part of a rollercoaster. To Tracy, it felt as if the earth gave out from below her and then collapsed to the floor. When she was airborne again, she grabbed onto one of the poles to keep from flying into a wall. Loud noises became their reality, and it went on for about ten minutes before it got quiet and the train settled down and stopped moving.
A cold mist settled over everything and drifted into the tunnels where the seven survivors tried their best to regain their composure. It made them sleepy and lethargic, and no matter what they tried, the sleep turned out to be stronger. Before long, all of them were on the ground, bruised, battered, asleep, but alive.
~ * ~ * ~
When Alysia opened her eyes, she noticed there was now light inside of the subway. She thought that it was part of her power—some untapped sight from becoming unconscious. She looked back at the other cab and there was a gaping hole in the ceiling. It wasn’t her power that allowed her to see; the light from the sky was peeking through a deluge of debris.
She got up and checked to make sure t everyone was okay. They all were asleep, with the exception of Jaime and Isobel.
“Are you two alright?” she asked, spitting the dust from out of her mouth.
“Yeah, but my head is spinning,” Jaime said. “What the hell was that? It felt like we got hit by another train.”
Alysia woke the rest of the party up and then walked over to the collapsed hole and peered up. There were screams and cries coming from the streets above, and the smell of sulfur was once again strong in the atmosphere.
“We need to get out, fast!” she yelled at her party, and she scurried through the hole and up the landslide to what turned into the ruins of what used to be the city. She helped to pull Isobel up, then Koko, then Jasmine, and finally Jaime. Tracy came out next, and then James, who looked mad enough to hit someone.
“That was a bombing,” James said. “But that wasn’t our technology. Somebody did that on their own, and I bet they killed a whole lot of innocent people in the city. Look at this mess!” he said, and spun around slowly with his arms outstretched. “Who thought this was a good idea? I mean, the entire city had to feel that impact and everybody who was above ground – I don’t even know. I can put money on it that the demons are still running around here too, alive and well. Count on one fool in the government to make a bad call like that and speed up the extinction of the human race.”
