hello, darkness, my old friend.
The thing they don't tell you about demons on TV is here in reality, they aren't blue with horns or pretty boys in suits, at their core. You roll up expecting a mace through the neck will do the trick, and you end up watching your soul get sucked out through a straw; our tangible world of point A to point B is one they contort at will.
These are concepts wearing flesh, and without flesh, they'll still exist. Vice doesn't need a body.
It's helpful, though, when skin is so very important to humans.
The thing in front of her looks like an ordinary man, with ruddy suntanned skin and dark-straw hair, dressed in a blue uniform with a belt. His gun holster is empty. He has a knife, though, from someone's kitchen, and she has nothing but blood on her face, more dripping down one thigh from a rude meeting with a beer bottle before she fought her way in here. He's turning the knife over in his hand, listening with a funny little smile on his face. There's a crowd outside, screaming and banging into the ground when they fall, and she can see the shapes of strangers darting past the holes in the wall of the barn. It's midday and the world is alive and rioting right next door, but all she can think of is the man in front of her, and what's wearing him.
When he comes toward her it's sudden and faster than that soft doughy man-shaped body of his ought to be, but she still has time to bring her knee up into his stomach, so he huffs and laughs. "Stupid," he tells her, and she's already bringing the flat of her palm against the bridge of his nose when he rushes her flat against the interior wall, big enough to toss her hundred-pound frame around as he likes.
He thinks. She can wait, because the thing that is true about vices is how they indulge in their own: lust is ruined by lust, pride is subject to pride. Right now she supposes he's indulging in a mix of the two, when he leans the knife against her throat and breathes in her ear.
"What are you, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?"
The knife curls up to cross over her neck, and he presses harder against her just to watch the revulsion in her expression. From here, he knows her. From here he can see the places she keeps hidden from the rest of the world, the midnight twist of her spine when no one else is around to watch, the new and unsettling appreciation for a certain set of hands traveling up from her inner thighs to her hips and back again.
So he mimics it, except when his fingers bruise her all they're building is fury, not desire.
"Older," he decides, "Much more so, at least on the inside."
One of his hand curls around her wrist, big enough to encircle it with room to spare.
"Should I find out? What you're like inside?"
No.
And before she can do anything other than meet his eyes with cold resignation, he breaks her right wrist like glass and watches her scream, crumple, and then force herself back up with tears tracing their way over her cheeks. She won't lean on him he doesn't deserve it she will not break no matter how much of this body is harmed --
She breathes out, and with a hasty shove gives herself just enough room to slip away from him, but the knife still traces its heated way down one bare arm while she flees. It's almost like he let her go on purpose.
'Almost.'
She thinks that's exactly what happened. They circle each other like fencing partners, and she wonders what used to live in that skin, if that man had always been weak or if he corrupted a real innocent. They say that's impossible, but she knows better. Nothing is impossible, least of all a fall from grace.
This time when he comes at her, it's from the side and she thinks that's stupid, too, curling her good hand around his wrist and driving her elbow right into his throat, eliciting a gurgling sound and a few seconds of mute shock. They forget, sometimes, how delicate these human bodies are, even as they pursue them, even as they covet them. From there, she can take the knife, and back up with her broken wrist held gingerly at one side. That's a nasty fracture, she can feel already, despite the heady course of adrenaline in her veins.
He doesn't talk, and she knows she's to blame for that. Real human pain is something his type loves, except when it's deterring them from actually achieving their goal. There will be no more games today.
This is life-or-death. This is what she does every day of her life, but this is a new scale.
She doesn't anticipate what he does next, because of how he responded to the earlier attacks; one second he's staring at her with those vacant blue eyes and the next he's rushing directly at her, heedless of the knife. For something so insidious, he's like an attack dog, big hands like claws with blunt dirty nails and sharp teeth. She slams the knife into the flesh of his bicep with a wet ripping sound, tendons tearing, but if he's not responding to pain she doesn't know what to do except keep backing up.
It would be so much easier if she could just kill the damn thing, but that's not how this works. If it were that easy, she would have been out of here weeks ago.
A barrel on the dirt-packed ground disrupts her course, and he takes advantage of it to knock her to the ground with one swift backhand. Her recovery time is good, but he follows that up with pressing his boot to her ribs. There's no knowing smile when she yelps and tries to roll away, not this time. Bones crunching render nothing but satisfaction, the sad parody of joy he's come up with since the Lord turned His back to him.
She comes to a crawl against the barn wall, sunlight casting over half of her face, mostly-illuminated. When her face is twisted in a grimace of pain like this, she feels soft and pathetic and human, but the hard truth in her head that she's not the pathetic one here. He is. And he has been for eons. This is the most powerful demon she's ever seen, and she's seen thirty, forty, watched them chase her while she chased them back. He took a town. He would have taken a state.
And yet...
The idiot threw what equated to a cosmic temper tantrum and got kicked out of Dad's house. Who's the foolish one here?
So she laughs at him, even though her ribs and wrist are busted and she's covered in bruises, because he deserves it.
In retrospect, maybe not the best decision.
He pulls her up by her hair, dragging her to the center of the room even as she digs in her heels and squirms. The knife is in his hand again, and while she wishes she had her holy gun, it might be best its sanctity isn't at risk here. He pulls the blade along the back of her neck, blood sliding down the small of her back, staining her dirt-smudged white tank top. She bites her lip so this time she doesn't make a sound.
No more satisfaction, either. He has the knife at her throat, and she knows what's coming. Thirty-five years (several more than he estimated, but she always has looked young, hasn't she) will almost certainly be all she has, and someone will call her mother hopefully to let the family know. Enfys will be angry, because that's how she reacts, and hopefully she'll tell Martel, and he'll...no, she doesn't know what he'll do.
These are facts she recognizes, but they don't make her decide to go down easy. Last in her class to be kissed, to let anyone touch her, the quietest girl who at some point after sixteen just stopped letting anyone ever make her do anything she didn't want to do.
And Candice doesn't want to die.
The edge of the knife slices into her skin, but she jerks at just the right moment and it's the wrong place, she's not dead, there is no spray of human viscera in front of her to mark the end of her life. She digs both heels into the wall and pushes back with all her weight, bringing both bodies hard against a bale of hay. In any other circumstance she'd laugh at the straw stuck in his clothes, but instead she's rolling away to wrap one hand firmly around a plank of wood that will probably leave slivers in her fingers. It doesn't matter right now.
While he's regaining his balance, she's rolling back toward him, fast, for the momentum she'll need when she slams the two by four into his face.
Twice.
The second time is mostly because he tried to cut her damn jugular open with a kitchen knife.
He looks knocked out, but it won't last, so she has to pull herself up with a dull, pained noise and get to work. The rope she needed was already set up, but she has to string it through a steel loop on the wall and tie it tight, which takes a few minutes with one hand out and the general disorientation of the day. Not to mention all that bleeding, which is distracting if only due to the discomfort.
He's starting to rouse already when she comes back, so she kicks him sharply in the head and tries to ignore the whoosh of breathless pain that causes in her ribs. With one hand, Candice drags him back to the center of the room and ties him around the torso and feet. Rope attached to the pulley nearby, she can suspend him upside down from the barn ceiling with relative ease, leaving his head about half a foot below hers when standing.
Last, but not least, the knife.
He has to be awake for that, so she sets up an empty feed bucket underneath him and waits, turning the butcher knife over in her hand, examining the edge. Sharper than she thought. When he wakes up, it's with a start, a hoarse noise that's followed by something like a whimper because his throat probably still hurts from earlier. Human bodies. They'll never understand.
She wipes blood away from her mouth with the back of the hand holding the knife, and sucks in a soft breath.
"Please." He's begging. He sounds like a twelve-year-old boy who's been kicked between the legs, but he's begging. "I'm still in here, I'm still here, please don't do this, please just get it out of me oh G--"
Candice slits his throat from behind before he has time to take his old Lord's name in vain.
He's still alive, she thinks, watching the bloodspray trickle down to a steady drip over his nose and forehead. She gashes his wrists, too, and then binds them with more rope from the empty stall nearby. He watches her with unblinking eyes, and she leans against the wall to watch him bleed out.
In that hour, the screaming outside dies down to the occasional upstart of sound. The rioters don't cross the threshold, and she's grateful for that, because there would be no explaining this to law enforcement. She and the demon losing his borrowed strength don't speak, but they get to know each other very well.
Once you start on this path, there is no turning back. They know you, now, in Hell.
Candice is sort of lucky. She gets to know them, too.
Earlier, she hid a bottle of olive oil in one of the feedbags. Now when she takes it up, he twitches violently with awareness, and she feels sympathetic enough that when she crouches down to administer the Last Rites, she lets him see her flinch. They both hurt. It's just not enough to stop her.
"Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit," she tells him, pressing trembling oil-covered fingertips to his forehead, "May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up."
His hands are covered in blood, so she presses down hard to make sure the olive oil touches his skin. When he starts smoking and trembling and chattering in a language she's heard only a time or two before, she understands that it hurts, but she's not sorry. Flames lick up the side of his body, smoldering and spreading. Won't be long, now, until the barn starts on fire. Won't be anything left of it, either.
You can't kill human weakness. You can't cage it, or contain it, or forget about it. It is a part of us as much as our angels. If you fight, though, maybe you can send it back to the God who created it. It will necessitate a hospital stay later, and she doesn't know how much further she can actually walk, but the damage to the shell that houses her spirit doesn't matter.
Candice picks up the bucket of blood, and leaves the barn to burn. It's done.
These are concepts wearing flesh, and without flesh, they'll still exist. Vice doesn't need a body.
It's helpful, though, when skin is so very important to humans.
The thing in front of her looks like an ordinary man, with ruddy suntanned skin and dark-straw hair, dressed in a blue uniform with a belt. His gun holster is empty. He has a knife, though, from someone's kitchen, and she has nothing but blood on her face, more dripping down one thigh from a rude meeting with a beer bottle before she fought her way in here. He's turning the knife over in his hand, listening with a funny little smile on his face. There's a crowd outside, screaming and banging into the ground when they fall, and she can see the shapes of strangers darting past the holes in the wall of the barn. It's midday and the world is alive and rioting right next door, but all she can think of is the man in front of her, and what's wearing him.
When he comes toward her it's sudden and faster than that soft doughy man-shaped body of his ought to be, but she still has time to bring her knee up into his stomach, so he huffs and laughs. "Stupid," he tells her, and she's already bringing the flat of her palm against the bridge of his nose when he rushes her flat against the interior wall, big enough to toss her hundred-pound frame around as he likes.
He thinks. She can wait, because the thing that is true about vices is how they indulge in their own: lust is ruined by lust, pride is subject to pride. Right now she supposes he's indulging in a mix of the two, when he leans the knife against her throat and breathes in her ear.
"What are you, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?"
The knife curls up to cross over her neck, and he presses harder against her just to watch the revulsion in her expression. From here, he knows her. From here he can see the places she keeps hidden from the rest of the world, the midnight twist of her spine when no one else is around to watch, the new and unsettling appreciation for a certain set of hands traveling up from her inner thighs to her hips and back again.
So he mimics it, except when his fingers bruise her all they're building is fury, not desire.
"Older," he decides, "Much more so, at least on the inside."
One of his hand curls around her wrist, big enough to encircle it with room to spare.
"Should I find out? What you're like inside?"
No.
And before she can do anything other than meet his eyes with cold resignation, he breaks her right wrist like glass and watches her scream, crumple, and then force herself back up with tears tracing their way over her cheeks. She won't lean on him he doesn't deserve it she will not break no matter how much of this body is harmed --
She breathes out, and with a hasty shove gives herself just enough room to slip away from him, but the knife still traces its heated way down one bare arm while she flees. It's almost like he let her go on purpose.
'Almost.'
She thinks that's exactly what happened. They circle each other like fencing partners, and she wonders what used to live in that skin, if that man had always been weak or if he corrupted a real innocent. They say that's impossible, but she knows better. Nothing is impossible, least of all a fall from grace.
This time when he comes at her, it's from the side and she thinks that's stupid, too, curling her good hand around his wrist and driving her elbow right into his throat, eliciting a gurgling sound and a few seconds of mute shock. They forget, sometimes, how delicate these human bodies are, even as they pursue them, even as they covet them. From there, she can take the knife, and back up with her broken wrist held gingerly at one side. That's a nasty fracture, she can feel already, despite the heady course of adrenaline in her veins.
He doesn't talk, and she knows she's to blame for that. Real human pain is something his type loves, except when it's deterring them from actually achieving their goal. There will be no more games today.
This is life-or-death. This is what she does every day of her life, but this is a new scale.
She doesn't anticipate what he does next, because of how he responded to the earlier attacks; one second he's staring at her with those vacant blue eyes and the next he's rushing directly at her, heedless of the knife. For something so insidious, he's like an attack dog, big hands like claws with blunt dirty nails and sharp teeth. She slams the knife into the flesh of his bicep with a wet ripping sound, tendons tearing, but if he's not responding to pain she doesn't know what to do except keep backing up.
It would be so much easier if she could just kill the damn thing, but that's not how this works. If it were that easy, she would have been out of here weeks ago.
A barrel on the dirt-packed ground disrupts her course, and he takes advantage of it to knock her to the ground with one swift backhand. Her recovery time is good, but he follows that up with pressing his boot to her ribs. There's no knowing smile when she yelps and tries to roll away, not this time. Bones crunching render nothing but satisfaction, the sad parody of joy he's come up with since the Lord turned His back to him.
She comes to a crawl against the barn wall, sunlight casting over half of her face, mostly-illuminated. When her face is twisted in a grimace of pain like this, she feels soft and pathetic and human, but the hard truth in her head that she's not the pathetic one here. He is. And he has been for eons. This is the most powerful demon she's ever seen, and she's seen thirty, forty, watched them chase her while she chased them back. He took a town. He would have taken a state.
And yet...
The idiot threw what equated to a cosmic temper tantrum and got kicked out of Dad's house. Who's the foolish one here?
So she laughs at him, even though her ribs and wrist are busted and she's covered in bruises, because he deserves it.
In retrospect, maybe not the best decision.
He pulls her up by her hair, dragging her to the center of the room even as she digs in her heels and squirms. The knife is in his hand again, and while she wishes she had her holy gun, it might be best its sanctity isn't at risk here. He pulls the blade along the back of her neck, blood sliding down the small of her back, staining her dirt-smudged white tank top. She bites her lip so this time she doesn't make a sound.
No more satisfaction, either. He has the knife at her throat, and she knows what's coming. Thirty-five years (several more than he estimated, but she always has looked young, hasn't she) will almost certainly be all she has, and someone will call her mother hopefully to let the family know. Enfys will be angry, because that's how she reacts, and hopefully she'll tell Martel, and he'll...no, she doesn't know what he'll do.
These are facts she recognizes, but they don't make her decide to go down easy. Last in her class to be kissed, to let anyone touch her, the quietest girl who at some point after sixteen just stopped letting anyone ever make her do anything she didn't want to do.
And Candice doesn't want to die.
The edge of the knife slices into her skin, but she jerks at just the right moment and it's the wrong place, she's not dead, there is no spray of human viscera in front of her to mark the end of her life. She digs both heels into the wall and pushes back with all her weight, bringing both bodies hard against a bale of hay. In any other circumstance she'd laugh at the straw stuck in his clothes, but instead she's rolling away to wrap one hand firmly around a plank of wood that will probably leave slivers in her fingers. It doesn't matter right now.
While he's regaining his balance, she's rolling back toward him, fast, for the momentum she'll need when she slams the two by four into his face.
Twice.
The second time is mostly because he tried to cut her damn jugular open with a kitchen knife.
He looks knocked out, but it won't last, so she has to pull herself up with a dull, pained noise and get to work. The rope she needed was already set up, but she has to string it through a steel loop on the wall and tie it tight, which takes a few minutes with one hand out and the general disorientation of the day. Not to mention all that bleeding, which is distracting if only due to the discomfort.
He's starting to rouse already when she comes back, so she kicks him sharply in the head and tries to ignore the whoosh of breathless pain that causes in her ribs. With one hand, Candice drags him back to the center of the room and ties him around the torso and feet. Rope attached to the pulley nearby, she can suspend him upside down from the barn ceiling with relative ease, leaving his head about half a foot below hers when standing.
Last, but not least, the knife.
He has to be awake for that, so she sets up an empty feed bucket underneath him and waits, turning the butcher knife over in her hand, examining the edge. Sharper than she thought. When he wakes up, it's with a start, a hoarse noise that's followed by something like a whimper because his throat probably still hurts from earlier. Human bodies. They'll never understand.
She wipes blood away from her mouth with the back of the hand holding the knife, and sucks in a soft breath.
"Please." He's begging. He sounds like a twelve-year-old boy who's been kicked between the legs, but he's begging. "I'm still in here, I'm still here, please don't do this, please just get it out of me oh G--"
Candice slits his throat from behind before he has time to take his old Lord's name in vain.
He's still alive, she thinks, watching the bloodspray trickle down to a steady drip over his nose and forehead. She gashes his wrists, too, and then binds them with more rope from the empty stall nearby. He watches her with unblinking eyes, and she leans against the wall to watch him bleed out.
In that hour, the screaming outside dies down to the occasional upstart of sound. The rioters don't cross the threshold, and she's grateful for that, because there would be no explaining this to law enforcement. She and the demon losing his borrowed strength don't speak, but they get to know each other very well.
Once you start on this path, there is no turning back. They know you, now, in Hell.
Candice is sort of lucky. She gets to know them, too.
Earlier, she hid a bottle of olive oil in one of the feedbags. Now when she takes it up, he twitches violently with awareness, and she feels sympathetic enough that when she crouches down to administer the Last Rites, she lets him see her flinch. They both hurt. It's just not enough to stop her.
"Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit," she tells him, pressing trembling oil-covered fingertips to his forehead, "May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up."
His hands are covered in blood, so she presses down hard to make sure the olive oil touches his skin. When he starts smoking and trembling and chattering in a language she's heard only a time or two before, she understands that it hurts, but she's not sorry. Flames lick up the side of his body, smoldering and spreading. Won't be long, now, until the barn starts on fire. Won't be anything left of it, either.
You can't kill human weakness. You can't cage it, or contain it, or forget about it. It is a part of us as much as our angels. If you fight, though, maybe you can send it back to the God who created it. It will necessitate a hospital stay later, and she doesn't know how much further she can actually walk, but the damage to the shell that houses her spirit doesn't matter.
Candice picks up the bucket of blood, and leaves the barn to burn. It's done.