Mimi's Demons

Chapter 38: The Fear Demon

Deep down in a section of the basement beneath the garages, tucked away so carefully Mimi would never find it, was a room that served as both a basic medical room and surgery theater. It was only a door away from another room used for torture. Both had sterilizing, sound proofing steel walls and floors. Both had bleaching bright lights. And both had a tabled that could fold up into a chair with restraints at a moment's notice.

But when Duke stepped into the medical room, expecting to see an unconscious, horned bat boy strapped to the chair for his purview, he instead saw the back of spread wings over the huddled form of one of his personal doctors.

Even as Omen's man stepped forward, gun drawn, Duke caught the sight of a clawed, gray hand scooping at the air above the terrified doctor to bring it to the teenager's mouth.

Ice flooded his system along with an echo of Mimi's voice.

They eat suffering...

"Back away!" barked Omen's man.

Duke strode past him, taking out his own gun, even as green eyes turned to peer at him over the bat wings that shouldn't be real. They glowed, even through the bright light of the surgery theater. Duke couldn't even make out where the gunshot wound was.

Just as he cocked his pistol, the wings shrunk in, somehow fitting into the small space of the boy's back. The kid pivoted around, arms raised.

"I-I meant no harm," he said.

The trembling doctor on the floor with wet pants said otherwise.

Duke raised an eyebrow at the doctor. The man whimpered.

"Back away!" Omen's men barked again.

The kid did so, all the way to the other side of the room until he bumped into the cupboards. His odd, gray skin looked even stranger beneath the harsh light.

While Omen's man kept the batman pinned beneath the sight of his barrel, joined by a second who had followed from behind, Duke approached the doctor.

"Well?"

The doctor sucked in a harsh breath through his teeth. It wasn't much comfort to be saved from one monster just to face another.

"H-h-he—I-I-I—"

At Duke's hardening glare, the doctor gulped.

"He's real. I-I-I don't know how, but he's—"

"I don't care. Where's the blood?"

"H-he, um, he didn't have any."

Duke frowned. He knew for a fact he shot the weirdo. Saw the hole and everything.

The doctor threw up his hands, as though afraid Duke would hit him—and he just might.

"I swear, sir! There—I saw the gun wound through the lower plexis, it went straight through the back, no blood at all, just—so I started disinfecting—"

"Did you bother to check if it was flesh or mechanics?"

"Flesh! I mean, it definitely felt like normal flesh. It even had a reddish hue inside like blood, but still, no bleeding—"

"That's ridiculous."

"But that's not it, sir! He woke up when I started to disinfect and...and..." the doctor gave a loud gulp, not quite hiding his whimper.

"What the hell could some bad movie remake do to scare you? He's half your size. What, did he puff up like a peacock and it actually worked?"

The doctor just looked at him tearfully, as no grown man should, and Duke pressed his eyes closed so he could press his forefinger and thumb into his eyeballs until he saw stars. Maybe that would make this start making sense. He didn't hire wimps. No one who scared easily would think to be hired by the mafia, for heaven's sake, and definitely not a doctor who had to deal with the whole collage of gory wounds and torture regime.