Dante's Angel (s) {Dmc Fanfiction #2}

Prologue

Dante's Angel(s)

Prologue

Their problem was solved so quickly that she could never forget it. It took them years of constant worrying, forever on their guard, waiting for something to happen. And that problem: it was solved in a day.

It started when her father came home in a rush, talking rubbish about seeing his boss as a demon. It had been the first time she had seen her father utterly terrified, and she, being a young child, hadn't understood what transpired that expression. As expected, her mother was equally worried, and she watched the myriad of expressions on their faces as they shouted and argued. She didn't understand a single word of what they were arguing about.

But she knew that things changed from that day onwards. Her house became decorated in crosses, and when she slept at night, her mother sprayed holy water over her. It continued for a few months, then a year, and it became a routine.

Endlessly, her father worried about the job. The demon that was his boss seemed to understand that her father wasn't letting the secret out, and left her father on a tight tether. Instead of killing him, the demon offered a pay rise that was very attractive. Pressured to support the family, her father had accepted the pay rise, and had to live with the fear of the demon visiting their family any day and killing them all.

Her parents knew they were living on borrowed time, but there was little that they could do. There were no such thing as demon-hunting services at that time. Those who knew of demon hunters were no-good, shady individuals. Then things got worse.

The invisible noose over their necks tightened when her father was stalked home by a demon. Positively terrified, they were seriously considering moving house. The stress of the welfare of their family did not bode well on her parent's mental strength, and her mother caught stress-induced illnesses easily.

Just when things seemed like they were going to end, her father returned home with an unfamiliar man one day. She remembered running down the stairs to meet her father with the usual bowl of holy water for him to cleanse himself, and stopping at the foot of the stairs when she saw her father invite the man in.

At first she thought the man was an angel, because he looked impossibly like one. In her storybooks, only angels had hair of different colours. Angels had many hair colours: red, green, blue, violet, and white. And the man had white hair -so he had to be an angel. And so, when she reached that conclusion, she immediately left aside the holy water, and followed her father and the man into their living room, where they sat on the couch. Her father ignored her presence, still engaged in a worried conversation with the man, but the man quickly caught sight of her standing at the doorway, openly staring at him in the innocent way only curious children do.

Whatever her father was trying to ask of the man, she didn't understand. But what she understood was that the man smiled when he saw her, and gestured for her to come over. With the excuse of interrupting their conversation now, she ran over to stand in front of the man, and looked at him up and down with her wide eyes.

Then, she hadn't been able to stop her words from coming out.

"Are you an angel, Mister?"

It was obvious that both her father and the man were taken by surprise by her question. Her father was surprised, because she had always been a shy little girl who didn't like to talk to stranger. Rather, she had always been rather scared of meeting new people -even new friends.