The Blood Bracelets #3: Soul Scarred

Chapter One

"Innocence, once lost, can never be regained.

Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost."

- John Milton

Kael slammed the police officer against the wall, pressing his forearm warningly into the cop's neck with his ebony dagger pointed downward at his heart. The expression on the man's face showed panic and fear, the usual human emotions one showed when attacked in a secluded alleyway. There was only one difference though – the police officer wasn't human.

As if hearing Kael's thoughts, the cop's eyes rolled into the back of his head like marbles, but rather than only the whites of his eyes being visible they were black, a severe pitch-black like the cavernous hole that had opened in the library of the Immortal Halls, the same hole that had almost killed the angel Michael, that had almost released Lucifer himself.

'So apparently none of you know where your chief commissioner is hiding,' said Kael, tilting the dagger closer to the cop's heart. He felt the resistance as the tip of the dagger met flesh through the cop's uniform, but the cop – or the disguised wraith – didn't flinch. Yet. 'I'd be very appreciative if the knowledge suddenly came to you, though.'

'We're not like you,' the wraith jeered, its voice sounding like a snake might if it was gifted the ability to speak. 'We don't betray our own kind.'

'No, you only betray your own kind when they're not powerful Infernum,' said Kael. 'Then you're just scared of them.'

A strip of skin peeled away from the police officer's face like wet paper, which meant there was no hope for the human man whose body the wraith had hijacked.

'So I should assume you're not going to tell me anything?'

The wraith opened the cop's mouth and its tongue, no longer the pink of tender human muscle, slithered out like a burnt, deadened snake. Before it could touch Kael's face, he drove his dagger into the cop's heart. With the wraith still inside the entire body turned to stone from the inside out, and then as Kael stepped back the body tipped forward like an unbalanced statue – and shattered against the ground.

Kicking up the dust, Kael turned and walked out of the alley. He had questioned over ten police officers, all of which had been possessed by wraiths or replaced by some other type of disguised demon. He had yet to come across a police officer that was actually human and he had no idea how Asmodeus was getting away with it. Was he powerful enough to influence even those in government, to make them turn a blind eye to the city's slow descent into anarchy?

Kael hadn't seen when Asmodeus fled, but Julius had told him that it was right after Michael had sacrificed his sword into the pit Lucifer was rising from. Asmodeus had ran away, it seemed, yet the last Kael had seen Asmodeus he had been watching him – watching him take back Taryn.

Kael headed up the street, glancing toward a group of teenagers who were cackling to themselves. Behind one of them he saw a shadowy figure curling about the teenager's shoulders, but they were oblivious to it. A demon of some sort.

Kael didn't bother to ponder on it. He was seeing demons more frequently around the city, as if someone had just declared Open Season on the city and every demon had come to hunt. In the last two weeks five people had died in the centre of the city alone and though majority of them never made it to the news, in confidential reports the police had declared them heart attacks, suicides and other natural causes, but Kael knew differently. He had seen one of the bodies, seen how the heart had been ripped from its chest like a child snatching its favourite toy from a mountain of others, and leaving a mess in its haste.