Sweet Death [boyxboy]

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty (Vladimir)

The air was cold. The night was bitter.

The sky was a blanket of inky darkness with not a single glinting star. No moon hung in the sky to watch over us. It was a darkness like no other. Not even the lights of the city could ease the gloom that hung thick in the air. The snow came down very gently, in small fluffy white flakes that while the rest of us were accustomed to it, Daimonas was not.

He stood outside, staring up at the sky in a child-like awe. He held his hands up to the sky, trying to catch them, but they melted on his warm palms. He reminded me of Storm when he was a child, the way they were so fascinated by the world around them, even after having witnessed so much death and so much destruction.

And it fascinated me how someone like Daimonas could find any beauty in the world after having seen almost all of the ugly it had to offer. He'd seen people die. Bodies piling up around him and he'd been treated like nothing, but a common lab rat and his body had been used. He still managed to smile faintly up at the velvet black sky, reaching out to the white snow flakes that fell down on his pink cheeks and nose.

I leaned against my car, a cigarette resting between my lips, smoking curling up in tendrils toward the blackness overhead. We waited in silence as Kipp, Julian, Adam, and Seth went into the hospital. The rest of us waited outside. Xed stood just a couple feet away from me while Newell sat on the hood of my car, holding an ice pack to his bruised cheek. His tongue had managed to rebuild itself after having been cut out, but he still didn't talk too much.

Hunter sat in his car with the heat cranked up and his music making the mirrors and windows tremble. He wore a bitter cold expression, his eyes empty and soulless, like they always had been.

Peter was standing nearby, hands shoved into the pockets of his brother's heavy leather jacket. Walter stood beside him, expression dull and stoic as he looked at Peter. It was very obvious that there was something between them. While Peter seemed hurt for a while there, Walter had only taken his hand in his, squeezing tightly. Even from here, I could hear the skip in Peter's heartbeat as he followed Walter's hand up and looked into his face. Walter looked back at him with eyes that oozed apology and guilt. Peter studied his face for a while and then stepped closer, pressing his face against Walter's chest. Walter wrapped his arms around Peter and pulled him close.

My eyes shifted back to Daimonas, who was standing in the middle of the parking lot, staring up at the sky before he came trotting back over to me. My eyes followed him the entire time, without blinking. I didn't want to miss a single moment of something I'm sure I'd never see again.

"Iss Sseth going to be okay?" He asked me, his lisp improving after he'd gotten rid of his second tongue and all his sharp teeth. I nodded, already knowing what Voltaire had told me deep within my mind. He'd known from the beginning that Seth wouldn't die. I had known he wouldn't. He was far too stubborn to let something like this bring him down.

"Will you kill Anoki?" He asked me, looking up at me now with twinkling reptilian eyes. I studied those eyes for a while, debating it.

That had been my intention all along.

From the moment I had discovered there were more demons back in Detroit. The reason I hadn't let Alexander leave to rescue Julian. I had kept Alexander with me because I knew what was going to happen that day in the church and, though my conscious told me to do something about it, logic won me over and I forced Alexander to stay with me as we found the files on the extra demons that Julian and Adam had stumbled upon in their search for Zephyra.

My intention had been to search for the demons and wipe them out.

Wipe out the source of what had caused all this trouble, but the moment I had walked in on Daimonas and those members of Zephyra, something had struck me then. Daimonas was reacting the way any person would react. He was scared. He was in pain. He wanted help. I had heard him when he called out for Julian to come save him, but Julian wasn't there for him. The way he scrambled to get away when I had killed them and his reaction to the deaths of the people who'd hurt him, he was still scared when he saw their corpses, not satisfied like most people would be.