Pre\\lude

A young man walks down the pavement sidewalk on a summer afternoon. His destination is an abandoned library, the site of a grisly murder two years prior. A camera slung around his neck bounced slightly off his chest with every step. The boy’s name: Ashton Phillips.

“Ash? What are you doing here?” Brooklyn, a girl around his age, sitting on a bench outside the library, says. She tilts her head up from a stack of photos on her lap as Ashton approaches.

“I’m coming to take a few pictures, and you?”

[ cut ]

“Help me! Somebody help me!” Ashton repeatedly slammed himself into the library door. He jumps backward as the door is pushed open from the other side.

“What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

[ cut ]

“Ash, can you give me back my camera?”

The two teenagers stood outside on the front porch of Ashton’s home.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

“Ash, there’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

“How long has there been blood on my hands?”

[ cut ]

“What happened to your VR headset?” Claire, Ashton’s sister, asked.

Ashton and Claire sat across from one-another at the dinner table. Claire was sipping on-and-off from a cup of coffee.

“I sort of… spilled soda on it.”

“Was it on when that happened?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, that probably means the circuits are fried. You should be able to get it repaired, but it might take a while,” Claire suggested. “You might want to take it into the repair shop now, I can pick it up on the way back from work.”

“How late are you going to be in today?”

“I have an appointment at 9 and I’m on call from lunch break until 4.” Claire’s job at an insurance company paid the bills, but Ashton knew that she strived for more. She didn’t go to law school so that she could work behind a desk all day.

“It’s a 30-minute walk to the repair shop at the mall, so I’ll have to leave pretty soon if I want to make it over there.”

“I can drop you off,” Claire offered.

“Thanks.”

“It’s on the way into town, just remember to stay safe during your walk home,” Claire advised. “Don’t wander into any dark alleyways.”

“I won’t, let me go pack up my things.”

[ cut ]

On the way to the mall, Ashton sat in the passenger seat silently as he felt the road’s bumps and bruises pass by beneath him.

“My arm’s been aching since yesterday, maybe I should get it checked out,” Ashton took off one arm of his jacket and barely rolled up his sleeve. Scrawled across a small section of his arm are letters forming words.

Claire glanced over before grabbing his arm and pulling the car over. “Where did this happen?! Where were you yesterday?!”

“I went over to the abandoned library to take a few photos, why? What’s going on?”

“You didn’t go inside, did you?!”

Ashton glanced out the window. “Y- yeah, I did.”

Claire immediately pulled the car off of the curb and U-turned into the other lane before punching the gas. “Hold on and look out for the police, it might be a while before you get that headset fixed.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to the library to fix this,” Claire explained. “You must have come into contact with a demon of some kind. If we do nothing you’ll die in less than a week.”

“How do you know about the library?”

Claire stalled her breath for a moment. “I don’t just work at an insurance company. There’s another job I’ve been doing since the incident two years ago, one that I can’t really talk about.”

[ cut ]

When we arrived, Claire pulled a flashlight out of the glove compartment and popped open the center console. At the bottom of the console was a key slot, into which she inserted a small, brass key, clearly not a car key. This opened a hatch containing a revolver pistol. Claire took the pistol and spun the barrel. The gun looked to be a combination of old and replaced parts, consisting of both a steel-colored barrel and a black gunmetal frame. It wasn’t like any of the guns that Ashton had seen on TV or in videogames before, it looked almost like something out of a sci-fi film. Claire slipped the gun into the interior pocket of her coat and stepped out of the car.

Claire and Ashton walked over to the door; she pulled it open. On the interior of the door were a dozen bloody handprints. Claire put her hand up to one of them and turned to Ashton.

“These are yours, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, how can you tell?” Ashton asked.

“A mix of experience and intuition.”

Claire was lying.

The two stepped foot further into the library, Claire’s flashlight illuminating what Ashton had once seen as a darkened blur.

“Oh, here,” Claire whispered, pulling out a pair of glasses from a pocket in her coat. “You’ll want to wear these, they’ll let you see a little more of what’s going on.”

“How did you get these?”

“I made them myself. I can’t waste time explaining.”

Claire turned her light up to the body hanging from the ceiling. Ashton’s guess was right, it was the student who disappeared. Covering his skin were inscribed letters, Ashton couldn’t make them out at this distance.

“It matches the description I got from Blaise,” Claire said. “Be on the lookout for anything unusual.”

“There’s the on-hold section, I saw something there earlier.”

“On-hold?” Claire turned her flashlight towards the place where Ashton had seen the book yesterday.

Blanketing the area was thick, black smoke that neither of the two could see through. Ashton pushed up the glasses that his sister had given him to see with his own eyes. With the glasses off, he could see into the area normally.

“What’s going on over there?” Ashton asked.

“That’s a demon,” Claire said quietly. “It’s watching us, be careful.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve met one before, years ago, before the incident. Notice that I can see it without those glasses,” Claire explained.

“You can see it?”

“Yeah, you couldn’t see it earlier when you came here, but it was certainly still there,” Claire said. “Demons aren’t visible to the naked eye unless you fulfil one of two conditions: either have special eyes or make a pact with another demon.”

Claire didn’t care to explain which of those she had done.

“Special eyes?” Ashton asked.

“Don’t worry, it’s not your problem.”

Claire pulled out the gun from before.

“I need you to get behind something, something that would make it nearly impossible to shoot you from where I’m standing,” Claire said. “I’m going to fire this gun, if it ricochets, you are going to die; if it doesn’t, that’s the only way you can live.”

“How does that work?” Ashton asked.

“Just listen before we both get killed, that thing could attack us at any moment.”

“Okay, I trust you,” Ashton slowly walked over to the checkout counter and ducked behind it.

Claire steadied her aim on the center of the cloud and breathed deeply in and out. When she pulled the trigger, someone in the room was going to die. That was a risk she was going to have to take.

She pulled back the lever at the base of the gun and the bullet took off. It was too fast for her to see, but she heard one impact, then another. The bullet had ricocheted, it was a miss. Claire panicked; her heartbeat grew stifled. Who was going to die? What had she done?

The bullet flew past her and landed. The sound of a bloody explosion rung out from behind her. Ashton was behind the checkout counter, in front of her. Someone, no, something else had been here the entire time. A second demon.

“Ashton! Get out! Run!”

Ashton bolted for the open doorway into the sorting room behind the counter. The demon in the on-hold section roared to life and charged for Claire. She threw her flashlight at it, but the device simply passed right through it. Claire had a plan, she had one chance to survive. She sprinted past the demon and over to the place where Ashton had hidden once before, vaulting over the counter and into the doorframe beyond. She fired her weapon again and slammed the door behind her.

”Good, you’re alive, that seems to have worked,” Claire said pulling out her phone to act as a second light. Ashton was standing right in front of her, still breathing.

“What was that?! What’s going on here?! Why did you keep me in the dark about all of this?!” Ashton shouted. He was angry, angry that he had been lied to.

“There’s a lot that I haven’t been able to tell you, Ashton. You wouldn’t understand any of it, anyway.”

“No, I don’t understand it because you never told me!”

Claire was still breathing heavily, she tried to calm down. “Fine, I’ll tell you everything, you have a right to know.”

[ cut ]

“I’m not your sister,” Claire said as she and Ashton drove back to their home. “Your real sister died in the Pentagram Killings, two years ago.”

“What?”

“I work for an organization called DEED, the Department of Extraterrestrial and Extradimensional Defense, we operate under the CIA,” Claire explained. “I was recruited because I was part of the investigation team that tried to stop the killings, alongside your sister, my friend.”

“So you’ve been pretending to be my sister since my parents died?”

“Since a little bit after that.”

The car ride was mostly silent for about a minute.

“How well did you know her?” Ashton asked.

“I… I knew her pretty well,” Claire said, stumbling on her words. “She and I… we… I…”

“I think I understand,” Ashton said.

[ cut ]

“Two years ago, me and your sister were involved in an investigation to solve the Pentagram Killings. Just before the fifth murder, your sister was revealed to be a vessel for the demon behind the killings. There was nothing else we could do, the responsibility of taking her out fell to me. I couldn’t do it in the end, but one of our allies managed to make it to the scene in time and he tried to sever Claire’s connection with the demon that was possessing her. In one desperate attempt to see us fail, the demon forced Claire to take her own life,” Claire explained.

Ashton and Claire had traveled to an underground facility, DEED Headquarters. Accompanying them was Eden, Claire’s boss. The three of them sat around a table in what looked to be an interrogation room.

“So if you’re not my sister, who are you?” Ashton asked.

“Claire told me that if she ever died, she wanted me to take care of you. I faked my death and threw away the life I had before. Eden erased my memories, most of them anyway, and supplanted some of your sister's in their place. She used to call me Alex if I remember right,” Claire answered. “All I know is that I’ve had the ability to manipulate my body like blood since I was a kid, when I was visited by a man named Fr. Joseph.”

“Who’s Fr. Joseph?” Ashton asked.

“He’s an exorcist who supposedly discovered a technique to subdue demons and force them into a one-sided pact,” Eden said. “We’ve all met him at one point or another, but he seems to appear and disappear at the drop of a hat, only showing up when he’s most needed. I assume the situation for Mr. Alex was similar, but for me, I made a pact with a demon when I was younger, and Fr. Joseph visited out of the blue, uninvited, and helped me renegotiate the contract. Even after all that, I still have to wear gloves to keep my ability in check.”

“Why didn’t Fr. Joseph show up to help my sister?”

The room was silent.

“We don’t know,” Claire said. “It’s possible that he never knew, either that or he couldn’t have done anything about it anyway.”

“That’s… That’s not fair. Why do you two get to live while my sister doesn’t?” Ashton said. “This is why I hate this miserable, rotten world. It’s not that someone’s out to get me, it’s that life is only full of tragedy and death. That’s what fucked up your lives, that’s what fucked up mine.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Claire said. “I guess we just have to push onward until we inevitably die too.”

“What?” Ashton looked genuinely surprised.

“I don’t know if I felt this way or your sister did, but I don’t disagree with you,” Claire replied.

“You’re both being too short-sighted,” Eden said. “Just because life sucks now doesn’t mean the future can’t be better.”

“Look where hoping for a better future got us now,” Claire said. “Both Claire Phillips and Alex may as well be dead, I’m just wearing their face and body until I end up like them.”

“You’re not allowed say that,” Ashton said.

“Huh?” Claire said.

“That’s not what my sister would have said,” Ashton was tearing up. “If you want to be Claire, then you have to act like it. Don’t give up on the world, she would never do that!”

“I… I’m sorry…” Claire said.

[ cut ]

“I just got a text from Brooklyn,” Ashton said. It was early morning. He and Claire had stayed overnight at DEED HQ. “She says she wants to meet me at the farmer’s market.”

“Brooklyn is most likely the demon’s new host, especially considering the circumstances of her birth. She wasn’t alive two years ago, which means her body has rapidly matured since then, likely due to the influence of the same demon that possessed your sister,” Claire explained.

“I haven’t told either of you about what we’ve been holding here in this facility, have I?” Eden said.

“What do you mean?” Claire asked.

“I’ll show you, a team from the East Branch dug it up in Egypt.”

[ cut ]

Floating in a tube of liquid was a body, a woman. Well, one could call her a woman, but a doll might be more apt a term to describe her. While her head and face both appeared to be flesh, everything else was a mechanical facsimile of the human body. No, her head and face too were fake, it was just harder to tell. Her skin was a pale hue, almost ceramic white. She looked familiar to Ashton, her features were nearly identical to that of Brooklyn, all except for her hair: a pastel rose in color. She was missing several limbs and her torso had multiple deep gashes in it.

“It’s… That looks like Brooklyn,” Ashton said. “Who is she?”

“She’s clearly not human, but she’s alive, somehow, just catatonic” Eden explained. “The East Branch scanned her with their most advanced machines, they determined that she was missing something. They aren’t sure what, but it’s not just her arm and legs. I asked them to hand her over to us when I heard how old she was, over three thousand years.”

“That’s biblical times, right?” Claire asked.

“Correct,” Eden said. “This could very well be an angel of some kind. That lines up with what Ronin said two years ago, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, scarily so,” Claire said. “This might be the body of the angel of death.”

[ cut ]