Atropos

I looked squarely in the eyes of the scumbag in front of me and fantasized about the ways I could kill him in.

My target, Lawrence Delaney, was the type of person smart people wanted to stay away from. The man was a mercurial, perverted and trigger-happy scumbag. Unfortunately for him, he had tangled with the wrong people and they had hired me to help this douche stop breathing.

He must have pissed off someone badly since they were willing to pay me three million to kill him. Even though I did occasional pro-bono gigs, my expertise didn’t come cheap. I had a reputation to uphold after all.

What my client probably didn’t know was that Delaney was not human – far from it. Then again, neither was I.

What almost all the humans didn’t know was that unbeknownst to them, demons prowled the earth. And we were hardly the pointy-tailed, horned, ugly red freaks escaped from the bowels of a raging inferno people oh-so-affectionately called hell. We looked just like humans. The better to blend in.

A throat clearing brought my attention to the demon in front of me. Right, I had zoned out. To keep my cover, at least for now, I gave him a meek, submissive look. At that, the wanker in front of me looked mighty pleased with himself. Why, I didn’t know. A moment later, an invasive force brushed my mind.

Oh, goodie. He was using his ability on me.

I took him in again, wondering just what his ability could be. Not much information was available on him – he wasn’t important enough or popular enough among demons to warrant a lengthy tabloid article.

He certainly wasn’t much to look at. Delaney had an ashy skin tone, receding hairline, a permanently pinched expression – as if he had swallowed a lemon. Honestly, he reminded me of Harry Potter’s Peter Pettigrew – a sniveling snake. Now, I had nothing against any of the aforementioned attributes except the last. To each their own. I wasn’t one to judge someone by their appearance.

However, I did have something against drug dealers and human traffickers who fancied themselves mob bosses.

From what I had gathered by spying on this douche for five days, he treated women like shit – they were commodities to him. He treated everyone around him as inferior and thought of himself as the smartest person in the room. A big mistake. He was complacent and this made him sloppy.

Even though he was surrounded with guards wherever he went; here, in this building, the very headquarters of his drug cartel and trafficking ring, Delaney had comparatively lax security. Sloppy and foolish. This was the best place to assassinate him.

He visited this building on alternate days. So I had made sure that I got caught trying to break into the building when he was here. Since he was the leader, the guards would have brought me straight to him.

My plan worked like a charm. They caught me, just as I had wanted, and brought me straight to the ‘boss’.

If they hadn’t, well, let’s just say that I had no qualms about killing all the people in this building to reach my mark.

One of my hobbies was punishing bad men and women.

All those who weren’t hostages in the building knew what was going on, were a part of this ‘business’ and sold women and children to pedophiles and sadists and God only knew who else. In fact, even though I had been correct and the guards did bring me straight to Delaney, I fully intended to kill them.

I’d just be ridding the world of a few scumbags. Public. Service. And not to mention, a great deal of satisfaction for little ole moi.

But the minions would come later. Payday first.

I focused on my target. He was leering at yours truly. I had been tied to a chair in a non-descript room with no windows and only one door. A door which was currently being blocked by the man of the hour himself.

How cliché.

Except Delaney and me, there was no else in the room. He thought that he could scare me all by his little lonesome. He probably would have been successful had I been human. But I hadn’t been human in the twenty-eight years since I had been born.

I was slightly distracted when my scalp itched a little because of the hair dye. I had used a temporary spray and had dyed my hair an ugly shade of red – a far cry from my natural hair colour. The new colour called attention to my hair and away from my face and made me almost unrecognizable. It also looked completely hideous on my pale skin. I looked a carrot and an apricot had thrown up on my head.

One of the rules of disguising yourself – conceal your actual profile such that you were harder to describe. Besides the hair, I was also wearing black contacts. Some strategically applied makeup and I was a different person entirely – on the outside.

Nothing could change who I, Aeliana Storm, was on the inside – Atropos, the assassin. I had my scars to show for my journey. And I was damned proud of them too.

Delaney interrupted my monologue as he spoke in his high-pitched whine, “What was a pretty girl like you doing, trying to break in here?” He smirked as if he had said some great one-liner. I mentally rolled my eyes.

Of course, I could have broken in without getting caught and killed my target and disappeared without any trace. But that was too boring. To easy. My plan to get caught had been a risky one.

But I was a demon.

A Bellator – warrior – demon. I relished the risk. The fight. The thrill. The challenge. The adrenaline pumping through my blood. I thrived on it.

Then again, if I didn’t have a love for all things risky, I wouldn’t be an assassin today. Let alone one of the most feared ones. I would probably have been dead at my fifteenth birthday. Or locked up and being tortured by my parents in their dungeon.

I smiled inwardly. Fat chance of that now. I had killed my parents for the decade of physical and mental torture they had inflicted on me.

Mommy and Papa dearest were hopefully being toasted and roasted in burning hot oil in hell now. That’s what I liked to think, anyway. The visual was almost always enough to make me want to jump with joy like a giddy toddler.

Back to the job at hand. I had been here long enough. No need to prolong this. I would kill Delaney, then my assignment completed, I would kill his associates and rescue the women and children they had imprisoned in this damned building’s basement. Have I mentioned that I don’t like basements and dungeons?

I looked at him from beneath my eyelashes and asked, “Tell me Lawrence, do you know whom you have captured?”

I paused dramatically before answering, “No. You obviously don’t.” I smiled coldly and discreetly palmed my twin knives, placed carefully under the sleeves of my jacket. My hands were tied behind me, at the back of the chair. It was too easy. The guards were so dumb and sexist that they had not even checked me for weapons. Not that I needed them to kill.

I had a few tricks up my sleeve – other than my knives – that no one except me knew of. The weapons were just back-up I always took with me on a gig.

Lawrence squinted at me. Probably wondering how I wasn’t terrified and crying because of the fear he had been trying to fill me with. After all, Delaney was a century old and had the ability to induce terror in others. But he was not powerful enough. I had sensed his ability and power level just a minute ago when he started his little game.

I particularly disliked the demons like Delaney. He reminded of my father in some ways. The latter had loved to use his gift on five-year-old me. Then, I had learned by myself to form powerful, impenetrable mental shields when I was just seven after two years of constantly living in terror. It was that or spend my nights feeling the mind-numbing fear my ‘father’ filled me with using his gift.

Needless to mention, I would hardly fall for Delaney’s little tricks.

Even more, it was one of the laws of power – always seem dumber, less powerful than your mark. The more you are underestimated, the better your odds. So, before entering the building, I had pulled in all my power, giving the impression of being human.

The idiot in front of me thought that he was oh-so-clever and was facing a human. I always kept a mental shield in place – a habit since childhood. But Delaney didn’t know that. He thought he could make me cower using his gift. Well, he had nothing on my father’s power. That man had been half a millennium old and had twice the amount of power Delaney had.

And I had faced him multiple times in these mind games and won.

This time I smirked at Delaney and threw his own power at him with a brutal psychic blow, imagining my mental shield bouncing off his power towards him like a trampoline would.

He physically staggered back and his eyes widened in shock.

Didn’t expect that, did you?

Satisfying. But this was just the beginning.

Had I been human, I would probably not have been able to free my hands from the rope binding them. But I wasn’t human.

In a motion too fast to see, I snapped the rope binding my hands and threw both my knives at him – all while sitting in the chair.

There was a loud shriek from him as my knives hit their target and embedded themselves in Delaney’s eyes. The metallic smell of blood filled the air.

Before Delaney could do much more than clutch his bloody eyes, I called upon my gift and slashed both my hands in the air in a violent motion. Two brutal gashes appeared on his body – one at his neck and the other at his midsection. Another shriek.

I could hear footsteps coming in the direction of this room now. At least the door was locked. That would give me enough time to deal with him.

This time, Delaney didn’t waste time by clutching at his wounds. He blindly moved and tried to grab me.

Before his hands could come near me, I stood and spun away from the chair. In a single, fluid motion, I touched his back – placing my hand directly above his heart – and fisted it, pushing my power into him.

Delaney’s whole body jerked once as his heart was crushed by my power and then, the life drained out of him. As if in slow motion, Delaney’s body toppled over, falling on the floor with a thud, bleeding heavily from the wounds. Lifeless.

Since demons had advanced healing, crushing the heart would ensure that he stayed dead. It worked on everyone – human or demon – no matter how black their hearts were. Even the most powerful necromancer demon would not be able to raise a dead body with its heart or brain crushed. Or with the head cut off.

I retrieved my knives and kicked open the door.

Now that I had completed my job, I would also end these sadists who were a part of the trafficking business. This would be for me – some more scumbags wiped off the face of earth.

A few less scumbags might not make a dent in the total scumbag population, but it would certainly give me a hell of satisfaction.

And, according to me, a job that satisfies is a job well done.

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I rescued the women and children who had been trapped in the basement. I broke into the room where Delaney kept a large amount of money in the building – I had come across it while killing the few demons and the humans who were a part of all this – and I distributed all the money among those victims. No, not victims. They were survivors.

They were so grateful to escape this hellhole. I just knew that – cold and black-hearted or not – I would always remember their faces when I told them that their captors were all dead and they were free now.

It was the look of a person who had found hope in a previously hopeless situation – a look that got to me every damn time.

Sucker, thy name is Aeliana Storm.

Before leaving the site of murder, I made sure that no one alive was in the building and I cheerfully burned it to the ground. No evidence was left except for ashes. Since the building was in the middle of nowhere Arizona desert, I doubted that the ashes would survive the desert winds.

Finally, my work done, I went to the hotel I was staying at and changed out of my bloody clothes – black didn’t show blood but that didn’t mean that no one would spot it if they looked closely enough.

I pulled a cap over my hair, put on shades and grabbed my luggage – a duffel bag which had a set of clothes, money and my weapons in it – and checked out of the hotel.

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