Jay Devau

Between A Rock...

 

     Weight leaned to the rough blocks of stone composing the alcove that served as my temporary shelter from the blare of the streetlights; I watched the traffic of my kind. None of them moved within the yellowish white pools of luminance dotting the asphalt in uniform radiuses. They were too smart for all that. Most of them knew I was waiting, watching. All of them knew I was a traitor. A gaudy clamp of solid obsidian about my left wrist made that very clear.

     The politically correct term was ‘Skin Collector’. But much along the lines of the politically correct, it was usually lost among a slur of hissed profanity, phlegm splattered curses, and the occasional hex. After all, I was hunting my own breed for body parts.

    The shade enveloping me grew faintly deeper for just a moment before sighing back to its original hue of uneventful black. Next to the rogue tendrils of my ebon hair, the softest of sounds—a chuckle—breathed to life.

        “Been standing here a while, De.”

     “Bad night to be out in the open,” I growled back in a disinterested tenor. “The whole city is watching me work.” I slid my hands into the shallow mouth of a pocket on my dark jeans, grinding the heel of a boot to the ember kissed butt of a cigarette I hadn’t thrown down.

     Cocking my head in the direction of my guest at last, I put listless eyes on a creature that stood upright much in the form of a Human. It conveniently shared all the deception of one as well. Bright gold was the only spot of color on the androgynous monster at my side. The loose waves of its midnight mane blended a near perfect match to the gloom of the night. Dark tendrils framed eyes that glittered with enough mischief to make their owner a valid suspect of being singularly responsible for all the chaos in the world. Its full lips may have been curled in a smile on that perfect, Adonis face, but I was aware that no sense of kindly humor could be attributed to a Kreed. The Nightmare’s body was snaked into a languid ‘s’. Its arms folded over an ash colored button down, and its golden gaze did a lazy scan of the street before us.

     Clearly whatever was entertaining the beast meant bad luck for me.
     “What are you seeing, Fëll?”
     “Doesn’t it strike you as just a bit strange after all these years of servitude?”
     The monster dragged a fresh cigarette from its pockets. The bud was lit without mechanical assistance while simultaneously drawn to the part of the Nightmare’s lips. There it was skewered among a mouthful of needle teeth.

     “We all know what you do, De. But we’ve stopped getting in your way. Now everyone just waits to see who the Humans have sent you to pick off for the harvest.” A golden eye slurred toward me sidelong. “You’re one of what—sixteen left, now?”

     “Fourteen,” I corrected stiffly, knowing just last week a pack of Orphans had eaten the living flesh off of two Corps employed Nightmare that had strayed too far from the light.

     Another gentle chuckle broke the stagnant quiet of the motionless night air.
     “Well, I said we no longer got in your way. Not that we don’t fight back.”
     As our eyes met through the shade, Fëll exhaled a bellow of white smoke so that only Its

iridescent focus pierced the veil for a moment. “You’re going to want to duck, Skin Collector,” was the only warning I got before the atmosphere rushed to life ahead of us.

     Flashing through the line of streetlights, a fresh upheaval of solid concrete shrieked through the night toward us with no mercy spared on anything in the way of its bullet fast locomotion. I spent no time wondering what pissed off denizen of the moonlit black was making a move on me. Instead I threw himself to the ground at the loafer cradled feet of my company. A hole riddled cigarette butt landed by my face.

     “You’re a little too small and breakable to be so close to my heels, De,” Fëll reminded me over the explosive collision of the hurled chunk of street smacking the antique oak doors sealed at Its back.

     The Nightmare perked a brow at a line of pale debris that trickled onto its shoulder, then absently brushed away the dirt. As I pulled away from the rubble-littered ground, Fëll stepped back with another drug being lifted to Its mouth.

     “New problem, my squishy little slave,” It drawled as the shadows inhaled to consume its lithe form whole. When all that was left of the creature was its rolling hiss of a voice, the words he left me were not meant to inspire much promise of survival.

     “Hope you’re not still afraid of the dark.”

     The taunt only seemed to make the sheet of ebon that had replaced the night that much more intimidating. On my feet I surveyed the street with eyes born of the darkness. My view was clearer than I had perceived with the streetlights flooding my vision. The city sprawled before me filled with shaded figures that moved along the pathways coiling back from the main route to form alleyways. Ebon silhouettes scraped the twilight like the jagged teeth in a hellhounds’ mouth. But there was no extra time to spare in awe of the vista.

     Not when that awe could be redirected to something so much more deserving.

     Stepping into the slanted luminance of a disheveled streetlight, the deadliest ninety pounds I was likely to ever encounter glowered at me from the face of a furious goddess. I licked my lips eyeing a creature every fiber of my body remembered quite vividly in the form of multiple fractures, scrapes, and gashes that still bled through the scabs. Though female by principality, what faced me from the other end of the street was not gentle, emotional, or sed—

     Okay, maybe it was seductive.

     Blood colored scales curled up the wickedly long length of the Nightmare’s left leg before taking a sultry right to plate her groin in a tantalizing ‘V’. The armor glinted a beautiful crimson against the pitch-black flesh of the siren as she took another taunting step my way. Her practically nude body was nothing but lickable curves barely clad in the dark red plating I knew would make piercing that perfect skin impossible. Warily I eyed that tiara of razor-like horns pinning her ass- brushing length of scarlet hair back in an outrageously bright cascade. I had a special scar over my heart that reminded me of the dangers of getting head butted by that skull. She licked the corners of her mouth before baring a grin, the color of her irises white hot with unmistakably sadistic lust.

     “Succubus.” I clapped dirt collected from my fall off my palms. “And here I thought I’d been stood up,” I called to the fiend.