Runaway Devil

“Kara?” I pronounced the word carefully, tasting it on my tongue. It was a human word but close enough to her true name.

“Yeah, why are you looking for her?” The woman’s fear had left her, and a ferocity replaced it. “What do you want with her?”

“I want to take her home,” I said simply. “We need her.”

She looked at me for a few moments in silence. Thoughts were rolling around in her head, and she didn’t know what to think. I waited patiently. Humans didn’t take kindly to being rushed or pressured. They were delicate creatures and demanded their space. I huffed a breath out and raised my brow. “Who needs her?”

I debated how to word my careful answer. “Her family.” I do. “Her people.”

“Her people?”

“Do you always repeat everything?” I grew tired of her antics. I needed intel and I knew quite a few ways to get it.

“Look, Kara is my friend. She’s young and reckless...” She continued to describe the woman she thought she knew. She was completely unaware that Karau was years ahead of her.

“I know who she is. I just need to find her, she could be in danger,” I said. She still looked unconvinced. “Please?” Humans really liked that word. I overheard a woman speaking to a child once, and she called it the magic word. The woman’s eyes softened and I knew I had her.

“She left town a couple of days ago,” She ran her fingers through her thick black hair and sighed. “I don’t know where she was going. She ran into some trouble here, so she gonna lay low for a while, I’m sure.” Relief washed over me, quickly followed by powerless frustration. I had just missed her. But she was close, close enough for me to try and contact her.

I allowed myself a small smile. resting my hand on the woman’s shoulder, I looked her in the eye. “Thank you, truly.”

Her smile was shy and her cheeks ruddy when I left her.

Alec set his pack down on the bed, letting it bounce with the mattress. I had spotted the motel’s flickering sign, it was the only light for miles. No traffic lights shined in the darkness, only the faded white lines of the shitty highway that trailed across the state.

“We’ll rest here for the night and meet the connection tomorrow morning.” I nodded and set my own bag on the other bed. The comforters were old and smelled of mothballs. I tried not to think about what else lurked beneath the sheets, ranging from bodily fluids to bugs. I would feel more comfortable sleeping in a goddamn tree. Balan shook his head from his perch on the back on the chair. ”I know, I feel the same way," I spoke silently to him, keeping it between the two of us. I could imagine Alec throwing a bitch-fit if we showed the slightest dissatisfaction. And I was tired. I wanted to sleep and sleep deeply. We would be traveling for a couple of days before we got the next chance to sleep.

Both Demons and Angels could go days without sleep, just like I could go days without eating. But when we did lay our heads down, we needed as much as we could get. I sat down and heard the bed creak under my weight. I yanked my boots off and tossed them to the floor.

I could feel Alec’s eyes on me. “Aren’t military personnel supposed to be neat and clean? All disciplined?” I looked at him with the most unmoved and apathetic face I could muster. He smirked and held his hands up in mock surrender. “Alright, alright, nevermind.”

I rolled over, fully clothed, and above the covers. I was already half asleep before I pulled my hair tie out and dropped it off the side of the bed. I was gone before the lights were off.

The smell of fire was thick in the air, weighed down even more with blood. Embers flurried past me, the taste of them dry in my mouth. I felt them in the back of my throat, their smoke escaping through my lips.

I slipped through the streets of the small village, silent as the plumes of smoke in the sky. The ambush was unexpected and the attackers hit hard. I didn’t smell any angels, but the fires were meant to mask our senses. I was a foot soldier, one of the youngest in the brigade. Dusty was on the beta team, they were sweeping the village for survivors, while my team swept the premises for additional threats.

My palms were slick with sweat, my crescent knives tightly in my grasp. My short sword was in its sheath at my hip, silently brushing against my armored thigh. I crept around the corner of a demolished home and stopped in my tracks. I looked at what I had stepped on, what had made a crunching sound underfoot.

I lifted my foot, clad in thick leather boots, armored with metal woven throughout. A small white sock, soot soaked, was under my foot, but that wasn’t what crunched. The small foot still inside of it was what I had crushed. My young stomach turned as I swallowed past the disgust in my throat. I carefully stepped around it and pushed past the idea of the child it had once belonged to.

The village was quiet, the beta team reported no survivors on the premises, but that didn’t mean that some had escaped. But by the look of everything, that was unlikely. Whoever had looted this village was willing to kill children, babies. An unruly thought surfaced, a ravager holding a baby by the ankle, sloppy blood dripping from where it’s head had once been. It was swung, its head hit the stone wall within that family’s home. My stomach knotted painfully and a deep frown pulled at my face.

"Anything?" Dusty asked from his retreated position. I pushed all other thoughts back, I didn’t want him to feel my dis-ease.

"Nothing yet. It’s quiet."

"Hm," He said, unbelievingly.

"I know." I had spoken too soon. The sound of metal on metal clashing broke the silence of the dead village. I abandoned the empty streets and ran towards the commotion. A ravager stood, his sword too heavy in his weak grip, blood dripping from recent wounds. He probably thought he was a goner before a second wind blew through him.

My fellow soldier stood in front of him. He was a whole head smaller than the ravager, who was clad in lightweight leathers and nothing else. Thick scars roped over his skin and his face was one of a fighter who would go down swinging. He knew he was dead, he didn’t have the strength to walk out of here alive, but he had just enough to take one of us with him. My brother gulped, not having fought a savage opponent yet. ”Stannis, back down." I did not outrank him, but we all knew full well you couldn’t go into a fight afraid. Walking into a battle already shaking with fear is a failure within itself, you had no hope of winning. His shaved head was slick with sweat, more from his nervousness than from the heat.

"Yeah, little Stannis, stand down like a good boy." The ravager spit at him. I growled under my breath. The last thing that needed to happen was taunting. It was well known that the Demons within the military hordes were proud creatures. Stannsis was no exception.

The boy charged. He was met with a rusted, knarled, bloody sword. I watched as the ravager used Stannis’s own weight and momentum to skewer my brother in arms. My silent scream suffocated me, my throat pulled tight, my eyes stinging from the spray of blood. He was so young, he had so much potential. He was on the smaller side, but he would have grown. He could have been a useful soldier.

The savage, bloodied smile on the ravager’s twisted face pulled me from my grief. I lunged like a wild animal, my roar, unlike anything that I had emitted before. It was deep and wild, bestial. My eyes flashed a brighter gold, reflected in the ravager’s sword. I watched as the satisfaction slowly bled to surprise in his eyes. I was roughly the same size as Stannis, but the ferocity I met him with was beyond his expectations. I flayed him, my arms moving faster than his eyes could track.

My crescent blades tasted his blood and were greedy for more. My face dripped with it, my tongue tasting his life. I climbed him like a mountainside, ripping and tearing as I went. His face was frozen in his eternal pain as he sank to his knees. I dropped my knives and rode him to the ground like a falling tree. I was breathing hard, my lungs pulling in air greedily.

The ravager was straining for his last breath. His chest spasmed as I knelt over him. My mind swam with red, I wanted his life under my belt. I wanted his death to be at my hands. I felt the overwhelming need to rip his last hope from him, to rip his life from his weakly grasping hands. I made sure he saw my sharpened fangs. His glassy eyes clouded as I sank them deep into his throat. As I punctured his arteries, a new gush of blood flowed, spilling from around my fangs, a river of life escaping. I crushed his windpipe with my molars, crunching, the sound resonating in my skull. I suddenly remembered that child’s foot, and how the crunch was surprisingly similar.

In death, we are all the same. We all bloat, rot, and disappear. Our bones break, splinter, and turn to dust. We would all crunch underfoot one day.

Dusty pushed at my mind. My head was still clouded, misty with the ravager’s lifeblood. I let him in and rode the high back down, letting the blood lust dissipate.

"I’m coming for you," He said. Something pulled at the corners of my consciousness. I blinked through the haze and stumbled to my feet. "I’m coming, Karau." I looked around me, searching for him. I turned in clumsy circles, my vision spinning as I looked for him. My hair, once in a tight braid against my back, was plastered to my sweaty face.

"Where are you?” I said it allowed. My world disintegrated into a mist, vague shapes all around me. Something was trying to tell me something. I knew Jareth was speaking to me, but a vague displacement made it not quite... right. He was speaking to me at a different time, in a different place, far from here. Everything turned on its side, my body laying still on the blood-soaked ground, but it felt like I was still falling. Everything spun.

“...coming,” I heard once more. Everything sank into darkness.