love bites

by roipecheur

Summary:

Jon and Martin have an encounter.

Notes:

• For lovetincture.

So, once upon a time in a discord server, lovetincture brought up the concept of Jon and Martin meeting Matt and Frank in the post-apocalypse world and backing away slowly, and I went "hmmm" and wrote this.

Warnings: This is fairly dark and graphic, but not moreso than TMA canon. Cannibalism, dismembered bodies that are still conscious, Matt and Frank literally try to kill each other and almost succeed. In short, I had fun!

No beta, please forgive any typos and dumb mistakes.

Leaves crunched under their feet as they walked. No matter how silently Martin tried to step as he ducked under clinging vines and swatted biting mosquitoes, they crackled and snapped like cellophane, a bag of crisps in a silent room. Jon carried on ahead through the dense-packed trees, the vegetation practically parting in anticipation of his passage, leading him onward, inviting him in. Of course it did, anything for the almighty Archivist and none to spare for the poor schmuck stumbling in his wake—oh, that wasn’t fair. Martin buried both his simmering resentment and curling guilt deep enough that he hoped it wouldn’t attract Jon’s all-knowing attention.

Around them, the trees towered up straight-trunked to an invisible sky, for all the world like they went on and on without end. Martin wiped sweat off his brow with his sleeve and considered they probably did, nightmare geography and all. An insect buzzed in his ear, followed by a sharp, biting pain on the side of his neck, and he slapped at it frantically. His distracted foot landed on a dry branch that snapped and broke like brittle bones.

“Shit!” Martin swore, loud, too loud, and resisted the urge to glance behind them. When he looked down, the branch shone back ivory in the dim light. He swallowed, looked back up.

“Martin!” Jon turning around, coming back. He stopped before him, asked, “Are you alright?”

God, it felt stupid now. “Yeah, just, you know, got bit by a bug, stepped on a branch. I’m fine, it just startled me.”

“Ok. So long as you’re alright.” Jon’s hand fell on his shoulder, swipe of his thumb over Martin’s shirt-covered collarbone. He leaned into the attention that made the rest of his hellscape bearable.

But it didn’t dilute the sensation on the back of his neck, hunching his shoulders up to his ears. “It’s just so loud,” he complained as they continued on, leaves crunch-crunch-crunching and telegraphing their presence in the otherwise silence. “I mean, we’re in some kind of bloody jungle, the air feels so humid I could drink it, why does the ground have to be so bloody dry that—”

“Martin.” Jon stopped again, turned, looked him in the face. “It’s ok. You’re not—”

“In any danger, I know,” he said irritably and immediately cringed. “I’m sorry, I just—” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I feel like we’re being followed.”

Jon’s lips quirked into a wry smile. “We are being followed. We’re in a domain of the Hunt. But you’re safe,” he said, calm and confident. “Nothing out here will hurt you as long as you’re with me.”

Well, that was something. Jon started off again, and Martin followed; it wasn’t as if there were anything else to do.

“We’re almost out of it,” Jon told him.

“Are we?” Martin asked, and, with some trepidation, “What’s next?”

It didn’t matter, really, each new place here unique in its own, nasty way but the same as all the rest. There would be fear, and pain, and suffering, and he’d stand in the quietest corner he could find while Jon went off and told the tape recorder all about it. He’d ignore the isolation and loneliness and the distant, screaming part of him choked in dread of what he’d do if Jon didn’t come back. Sometimes, Martin almost didn’t ask, flirting with a sick experiment to see if his efforts to mentally prepare himself really made any difference.

A little ways in front, Jon’s pace quickened, and Martin panted and hurried and scraped his way through a thorny bush to keep up.

“I’m not sure what’s next,” Jon said.

Martin almost stopped, but Jon wasn’t stopping and the ever-present eyes on his back told him that under no circumstances did he want to lose him.

“You’re not sure?” he repeated.

A sigh, and Jon said, “Not like Salesa’s. I’m still getting something, but it’s”—he ran a hand through his hair—“garbled. Like whatever’s up there is speaking a foreign language.”

“Can we go around?” Martin asked, hating the whining note he heard in the question as it left his mouth.

“Not a chance,” Jon laughed.

Because nothing attracted the omniscient better than a bloody mystery, no matter how dangerous it might be. Martin indulged in a stab of annoyance he didn’t try to hide. If Jon noticed, though, he didn’t so much as pause in his steps that only grew faster as they neared whatever lay ahead. A looping tree root caught Martin’s foot, and he tripped and knocked painfully against the trunk.

Only then did he notice the material beneath his hands no longer resembled living bark, but dead rock. “What is this, stone?” he asked. “Are they petrified?”

“Not stone. Concrete,” Jon said, and before Martin could inquire further, the jungle gave way to a clearing.

The shop sat on a street corner. Beyond it, the concrete trees still extended in all directions, but a sidewalk wrapped around the shop, and smooth asphalt pushed back against their feet. A one-floor building, plate-glass windows graced a section in front, bordered by the brick exterior and red front door. A sign above the window read: Butcher Shop.

“Are we going in there?” Martin blurted.

“I’m afraid so,” Jon said.

He crossed the stretch of asphalt, stepped up onto the sidewalk, and opened the door. Between the choice of going with and staying out here with a predatory, stalking thing, Martin whined in his throat and followed.

Martin’s first, stupid thought leapt right out of his mouth. “It’s like the TARDIS.”

“Beg pardon?” Jon said, somewhat absently. He didn’t look at Martin, but over the side of the metal walkway and into the gigantic, open floor of the meat processing plant the door to the small butcher shop had led to.

“You know, um, bigger on the inside,” Martin muttered. He coughed and fidgeted with the hem of his shirt. “Never mind.”

He needn’t have bothered. Jon wasn’t listening anymore, his face drifting dreamy and wide-eyed into the place the statements came from. “I need to—I’m sorry. I can’t hold it in much longer.”

“I know,” Martin said. He tried to sound brave, but it came out resigned.

“This way. There’s a room I can use.” Leading the way, he set off down the metal grating that shook slightly under their weight.

Below it, dismembered corpses hung on hooks. Legs followed by torso followed by arms followed by head, repeated in a macabre pattern as the conveyor moved. As Martin passed, the staring eyes in one of the decapitated heads swiveled up to regard him blankly. Shuddering, he hurried after Jon into the entrance of a dark hallway ahead that he tried to not to compare to a mouth.

A door broke the monotony of the long, metal hallway only a few feet in. “Wait here,” Jon said and pushed his way into the room behind without sparing a second for his response.

Martin leaned against the wall beside the door heavily. If he listened, he could just hear the murmur of John’s voice on the other side, a comfort only because he couldn’t make out the words. He rested his head on the cold metal and closed his eyes.

The prickling sensation came back a few minutes in, as best as he could figure time in a place where it didn’t properly exist. Like being watched. Slowly, Martin opened his eyes and looked down the hall in one direction, just in time to hear a soft growl coming from the other.

Hair raised on the back of his neck. He turned his head back by centimeters, no sudden movements, and saw the thing hanging one-handed from the empty, shining meat hooks lining the ceiling. If it had ever been human, it wasn’t any longer. Coarse, reddish hair covered it from head to toe, save for the all-black eyes and salivating mouth full of too many, very sharp teeth.

It roared and swung towards him.

He shouldn’t have run. Martin knew that; he was with the Archivist, for goodness’ sake, and the predator-thing might only chase you if you ran. That accounted for everything except for the primordial fear invoked by the sight of it charging him with deadly intent, and he was sprinting off down the hall before a second thought entered his mind.

A corner loomed ahead on his left, and in a split-second decision, he risked slowing to careen around it rather than running past. He couldn’t outrun that thing, the knowledge confirmed as it followed him down the corridor. Desperately, he cast about for a weapon to hold it off or some way to escape. Only smooth, unmarked hallway stretched ahead with those damnable hooks lining the ceiling. A growl followed too close behind; it was gaining on him. He didn’t dare look. Not even when it grew near enough that its ragged breaths reached his ears, and the breeze of its passing disturbed the air behind him as if it reached down with one horrible hand—

Bang. The noise shocked him still. At his back, the predator thing dropped to the floor with an audible thump, and Martin turned convinced he’d see it with claws and teeth raised to attack.

At first, he thought it had vanished, the corridor behind him empty. The metal hooks still swayed a little from their recent use. Then, he looked down. There, on the floor, the predator-thing lay motionless with a hole where its face used to be and a growing pool of dark, viscous liquid around its head.

Uncomprehending, he stared at the figure and resisted the idiotic urge to kick it and see if it moved. The back of his neck pricked again with the awful and now-familiar feeling of presence, and he spun back around to see the man walking towards him.

This one was a man, striding forward in a confident soldier’s gait that Martin recognized despite never serving nor being close with anyone who had. War simply surrounded him, draped over his shoulders like a shroud. His hands held a gleaming gun aloft before him, and the jumbled scene began to assemble into a kind of sense. The impossibly loud noise that still seemed to echo through the halls resolved into a gunshot, the predator-thing on the ground into a felled corpse.

Before Martin had the chance to move or speak, a fresh growl rumbled behind him. He knew even before he turned that it came from something different—and worse. Its anger sounded somehow targeted, possessed of an intelligence the predator-thing had lacked. Trapped between it and the man with the gun, Martin plastered his back to the wall of the corridor just as another man stalked past him and stood over the dead thing on the floor.

From his terrified vantage point, Martin got a good look at him and almost wished he hadn’t. This new man wore an incongruous business suit torn to tatters, its tie long gone, and the skin visible through the rips was an unnatural shade of red like a bad sunburn all the way up to his flame-colored hair. Twin horns the color of blood curled up from the corners of his forehead and extended a few inches above, and a crimson light shone from his eyes.

Ignoring Martin entirely, he snarled as the man with the gun approached. “I wasn’t finished yet!”

Americans? Martin thought, so bewildered that he momentarily forgot his fear.

“I’ve told you once, I told you a thousand times,” the man with the gun replied in the same broad, New York accent. “Stop playing with your food and fuckin’ eat it. You’ve been chasing this one for a week,” he said, pointing at the dead predator-thing with his gun.

As he did, he revealed the dark thing covering his chest—not a black tank top, as Martin had assumed, but something thicker and fused with his skin. Muscles moved seamlessly beneath it. A raised design on the front similarly wasn’t as it first appeared, but rather a bony protrusion in the shape of a skull that covered the front of his torso. Other than that, he appeared almost normal: dark-haired and a tanned, Mediterranean shade of white, a face so unremarkable that Martin couldn’t quite hold it in his head.

The devil-man hissed through bared teeth, but said nothing else as the skull-man squatted beside the predator-thing and set down his gun. He pulled a switchblade from his pocket and flicked it open, then cut the corpse from neck to navel.

“There’s more. There’s always more,” the skull-man said.

The incision complete, he broke through the ribs with a cracking sound and his hand disappeared into the body cavity. He fished around for a minute with furrowed concentration on his face that transformed into triumph as his hand came back gore-caked and clutching a bloody lump. He presented it with an open palm to the devil-man as he stood again, and Martin nearly gagged at the sight of the warm, steaming, human heart.

Offering it, the skull-man asked, “You want some or not?”

A tongue came out to lick the devil-man’s lips, and his nostrils flared as if he sniffed the air. He didn’t look at the heart, those crimson eyes unmoving and pointed somewhere over his companion’s shoulder. But his severe frown softened, mollified.

He stepped towards the mutilated corpse, blood-specked dress shoes nearly touching it. “After you.”

In fascinated revulsion, Martin watched as the skull-man bit into the heart and tore away a piece like a dog with a hunk of meat. Some still hung out of his mouth, and he leaned forward to meet the devil-man in the middle. They shared it over the predator-thing’s body in a bloody kiss.

Sudden nausea turned Martin’s stomach and threatened to crawl up his throat, even though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten and countless hours traversing a world remade by fear ought to have rendered him immune to this. He slapped a hand over his mouth to keep in the choked sound, but some of it still made it through.

A few meters away, the two men turned to face him in eerie unison. The skull-man’s gaze pinned him to the wall like the red dot of a laser sight, but the devil-man tilted his head as if listening, and his crimson eyes didn’t focus at all.

“What does he smell like?” the skull-man asked.

Licking his lips, the devil-man said, “Lonely.”

“Another one?”

A nod came in response.

“What did I tell you?” the skull man-asked rhetorically and stooped to pick up his gun without his eyes ever leaving Martin’s quaking form. “There’s always more.”

Softly, he began humming a tune barely audible as they cleaned themselves like cats, blood coming off their hands and faces with swipes of tongue and spit. Martin stood frozen as a statue with its feet encased in cement and cursed the fear and fascination that hadn’t let him run off while they were distracted.

If he were being honest, though, that almost certainly wouldn’t have worked.

And where the hell was Jon? Martin called to him mentally, willing him to appear. He wouldn’t run, this time, he wasn’t going to run—

The devil-man leapt forward. The Hunt lent him impossible strength, and he would’ve landed on Martin in that single pounce if he hadn’t jumped away. Clawed fingers screeched against the wall’s smooth metal where Martin had stood a second ago, and the devil-man bared his teeth in a salivating grin. In that moment, Martin knew nothing except the absolute certainly that if the devil-man caught him, he would kill him.

He ran.

No sounds of pursuit followed, but Martin wasn’t stupid enough to believe that meant there wasn’t one. A week, the skull-man had said, a week spent stalking that predator-thing, and that had to give Martin time, give Jon enough time to find him.

Jon, where are you? he thought desperately as he ran down metal halls, lacking the air to beg aloud. Please, please find me.

At the foot of a metal staircase, he finally stopped. Winded, Martin grabbed the railing and leaned against it as he tried to catch his wheezing breath. Distant machinery whirred and clicked, and between that and his pounding heart, it took Martin a minute to notice the humming.

It came from behind him—no, in front? Up the stairs above, or down the hall to his right or left? The same tune from the skull-man’s throat vibrated through the metal. The lyrics started so low at first he only heard the rough shape of the words. Then, they rose in volume and cleared like landscape from a parting mist:

“He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright,
He checked all his equipment and made sure his pack was tight;
He had to sit and listen to those awful engines roar,
You ain't gonna jump no more!”

Pulling in air through his parched, dry mouth, Martin started up the stairs. The climb sapped what strength remained in his limbs and lungs, and he had to keep pausing to breathe with his feet balanced precariously on the narrow steps. The singing grew louder and louder until it seemed to come from all around, forcing him on past the point of collapse.

He’d expected the staircase to extend past his ability to climb it, possibly into a fractaling, fragmenting nightmare of unreality, but after only three or four flights, it came to an abrupt end. Martin burst out onto a factory floor and halted half-blinded by the brightness.

Those meat hooks still traveled here, carrying their dismembered load. The workers in their white, bag-like uniforms, complete with matching face masks and elastic caps, didn’t look at him or interrupt their work. Busy as an anthill, they surrounded long tables and removed body parts from the meat hooks as the conveyor belt brought them down within arms’ reach. They weren’t parceling them out, though, weren’t separating cuts of meat into family-sized pieces and wrapping them in Styrofoam and plastic. Instead, they assembled the bodies, sorting heads and torsos, arms and legs. If they made the cut, the staple guns came out and made the bodies whole again with crude sutures.

For a certain definition of ‘whole’. The discarded pieces sat in an ever-growing pile of meat. Eyes stared out at him despairingly, accusingly, that Martin dared to witness this, that he could not help.

Back on the long table, the workers finished assembling a body and placed it on a wide, flat conveyor belt that carried it to the next station. The second set of workers lifted it and started grafting. Cutting open the skin of the forearm, one inserted the handle of a knife while the other burned it shut. The skin melted and reformed around the blade. On the other side, two more workers affixed a gun to the opposite arm with a length of barbed wire. They cut open its stomach next and tenderly, carefully placed a bomb and left a cord trailing out between the staples after they hid it again behind flesh. The corded ended in a trigger button led down and glued to the body’s palm. Throughout the whole process, it lay unresponsive and did not move or scream.

At the last and final table, the workers packaged it. They dressed the body in the camouflaged fatigues of the American military and then lifted an immense cattle brand that required four workers to carry. White hot, they plunged it into the body’s chest and left the mark behind, a skull like the one growing out of the skull-man’s chest.

With that, the body jerked to life. It slid off the table and stood blanked-faced, raised it arms to allow the workers to wrap it in a string of grenades like Christmas lights. Their work completed, they stood back white and silent as ghosts. The soldier did not look at them as it jerked forwards, heading to—

A set of double doors. Nondescript grey, they almost blended in with the wall save for the lines around their edges and the grimy, porthole windows too high and dirty to see through. And yet, the light coming through hinted at an outside, an exit. A new nightmare, but maybe it’d be easier for Jon to find him there; maybe the devil-man hunting him wouldn’t follow.

Martin bunched up his muscles, ready to sprint. The soldier raised hands bound to weapons and pushed the double doors wide open.

The war rolled out below.

Wind pushed Martin back and forced him to squint. Screams and gunshots carried up from the impossible distance of the ground, obscured by smoke-filled air and lit by the recurring blast of artillery. Without preamble or pause, the soldier stepped out and plummeted like a stone. The doors swung shut.

“I don’t think you want to go that way.”

In renewed alarm, Martin spun and backed away from the grinning devil-man who dropped into a stalking crouch. The skull-man stood close behind but didn’t speak, his mouth still occupied by singing. Other voices joined in as his voice carried as he carried the chorus—the workers, the hanging heads.

“Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,
Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,
He ain't gonna jump no more!”

From the other side of those double doors, Martin thought he heard the faintest sound of accompanying music. The horns and drums of a military band drifted on the breeze.

The devil-man sunk into his stance in preparation to pounce as he had the last time, and Martin took another wary step back and prepared to run.

“Martin! Martin!”

Jon—finally, fucking finally. Running across the floor, he stopped at Martin’s side, a stalwart force against his would-be killers.

“There you are!” Martin exclaimed. “Where have you been?”

“Where were you?” Jon retorted. “You’re safe as long as you’re with me, Martin, not the second you go tearing off while I’m making a statement.”

“Well, I’m sorry, while you were making a statement, I was running for my life from this carnivorous orangutan thing, and then he shot it and they ate its heart, its fucking heart, Jon, and then he started chasing me!” Martin said, indicating the skull-man and the devil-man in turn.

Seeming to notice them for the first time, Jon said, “Oh.”

“Yes. So can you, y’know, smite them? So we can move on? Jon?” Martin asked when he didn’t respond. “Jon?”

But Jon stared at the devil-man like he couldn’t look away. “He’s blind,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t get a good read on this place.”

“Blind?” Martin echoed.

“Yes. The Hunt allows him to see in other ways.”

Rising from his crouch, the devil-man stepped back to the skull-man’s side. The skull-man knocked their shoulders together and asked, “Is he another one?”

“He’s another one,” the devil-man confirmed.

The skull-man nodded. “How does he smell?”

“Like the Watcher. Strong,” the devil-man said, matter-of-fact, not afraid.

“The Eye in the Sky.” The skull-man raised an eyebrow as if impressed. “Can we kill them?”

“No.”

“Can he kill us?”

A muted growl passed through the devil-man’s teeth. “He’s the favorite. He can do whatever he wants.”

“What do we do, then?” the skull-man asked.

“We wait.”

Martin tugged impatiently at Jon’s shirt like a child in a queue. “Jon, can you please get on with it?”

To no avail—Jon didn’t budge. His face held that dreamy, distant look once more, and Martin knew there was nothing for it even as he asked, “Again? You just did one!”

“I know. You can go back into the hall. It’s safe there now,” Jon said.

“You thought it was safe when you left me there before.” Martin sniffed. “I’m not letting you out of my sight until we’re out of this place. Get it over with.”

So, Jon began.

*

“A man walked through the streets of New York.

“A man that was not a man walked through the streets of New York. His movements, stiff and spasming, could not even be properly called walking, and he stank not of flesh and blood, not of food and soap and detergent and all the other trappings of life, but of cold and clotted earth.

“On the rooftop above, the Devil sniffed the air and snarled. The thing that was not a man turned a corner, and the Devil leapt from one building to the next as neatly as a cat.

“The Devil wore a red suit the color of day-old blood and a mask to match, horns curling up from the temples. When he began, he’d worn all black with a scarf tied tight around his face; he hadn’t thought of costumes or themes or anything save the close, slavering jaws of his god. It was the people below who named him the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, named him with a hush of fear tinged with awe in their voices. So he changed his suit, and his prey ran from him, and his god was pleased.

“No light reached his eyes, but he didn’t need them in pursuit of the thing he stalked. He’d lost them to the long-ago traffic accident that stole his sight and plunged him forever in darkness, the burning, chemical spill that filled his Catholic childhood with nightmares of hellfire and brimstone. But then the god came. The god that had chosen his father first, his father the amateur boxer and single parent that towered over the Devil like a god himself in his earliest memories. The god his father had fed too well when he won a fight he was supposed to throw, when he gave into that thing that made his eyes go flat and put his opponents in the hospital. His sacrifice a little to sweet, the god came back hungrier and ate him, too. Already blind, the Devil groped for him through the locker room in the echo of gunshots and held his hand until well after it went limp.

“That was the first time the god touched him, a breath across his forehead like benediction, a touch of air. In the orphanage, it found him when the other boys, bullies and tormentors who didn’t like that he hit back, forced him into the catacombs beneath the church and left him with the stone and silence and the rats. Oh, the rats. The skittering, crawling, squeaking rats that filled him with a shuddering revulsion. Then the god spoke again, the god could not give him his eyes back, but it opened his ears and nose and tongue and every inch of his skin. New in illumination, the world returned to him in shining lines, the Devil learned how to track the rats. How to hunt them into terrified corners. How to strike fast and kill.

“When they found him, the nuns shrieked and blamed the boys who put him there. The Devil bit his tongue bloody to keep from laughing aloud.

“He had his god, then, not the God of the church but the god of stalking and devouring, the god that makes hearts beat fast in fear. A constant companion, it held his hand and perched on his shoulder and whispered into his ear. It grew bored and sick of rats; he gave it the possums and raccoons in the dumpster outside and the occasional feral cat. Not someone’s beloved pet that could be lured to wind around his ankles and would let him strangle it dumbly for the promise of treats—no. The god only wanted what ran, what could be chased.

“It grew bored again; he moved on to humans. Reward came in senses honed like the fine blade of a knife, the beating heart heard a dozen blocks away, the smell of meat cooking in a downstairs kitchen. He didn’t even have to kill them so long as he hunted, so long as their breaths came ragged and their hearts beat fast and they never stopped looking over their shoulder. The Devil met this discovery with quiet relief as he thought of the other God, the God of the Church he still visited that had very particular things to say about murder. This makes him unusual among our kind, but it is not in the end so strange that he loved a God who would let him eat it.

“The Devil had his regulars: the drug dealers lounging in doorways and on street corners, the arms smuggler who supplied the gangs with their weapons of war. He’d followed a woman once, walking home alone at night with her fear in the air heady like wine, but only until she threw her purse on the ground after a mere five minutes and begged him to leave her alone. Recoiled like a meal gone bad, the Devil shrunk back and vanished into the night.

“Criminals, though, criminals ran and were used to running. From the police, from each other, from the Devil once he became known to them as something to equally fear. Anger rolled off them first, like boiling steam, gave way to disbelief, gave way to panicked fleeing like a rabbit from the white, snapping teeth of a wolf. The end came too soon, always too soon when he beat them bloody and handed them over to the police, but he needed to end it to keep them afraid. They’d cycle through the system like water, and someday, he’d chase them again.

“After the orphanage, after the college and law school he attended with the obscene money his father won in that last, fatal match, the Devil worked as a prosecuting attorney and played the judges and juries like well-tuned instruments. The Web might have ensnared him for the silk-spun arguments he wove, or the Eye might have held him in its gaze for the secrets he knew and the way he watched and followed, but the Eye is too literal and could not glean anything from his blindness. Even the Stranger might have danced with him for the double life he led and the mask he wore. But it was the Hunt he loved first and the Hunt he loved best, and the Hunt he fed when the verdict came back guilty and the fear swam up and drowned the defendant as the handcuffs clicked around their wrists.

“If they got out—well. The Devil kept his smile small and polite. He’d just have to hunt them all over again.

“The Devil hunted; the god ate. The god’s gifts let him read people like a book: when a woman or a man at the bar he frequented showed interest, when someone was lying. And, occasionally, it gave him a greater gift in something better to hunt, a real monster. Something he could attack in all his flying strength without holding back. Vampires, first, with their strange, dusty smell, the first revealing itself in a victim’s bloody death while he stalked too far behind to stop it.

“In a month, he’d cleared them from New York. He’d remembered the words of the blind man who used to visit him in the orphanage, at last carted away for child endangerment and his involvement in a series of murders: ‘Watch out for bloodsuckers, but remember, they burn.’ And, too, the words of the woman he’d dated in college, the one like him, swift and sharp: ‘Someday, you will have to learn to kill things.’

“Vampires, sometimes, grown up again like a fungus. Hollow people with only cobwebs beneath their skin. Once, a mannequin that moved on its own. And now, the thing that was not a man lurching down alleys and around corners, smelling of damp underground and forgotten places. Something different. Something new.

“The thing that was not a man pulled its ungainly limbs to an office building in the center of town and fished a keycard out of its pocket between thick fingers. Before the Devil could close the distance, the door swung shut and the electronic lock sealed with a subsonic buzz. Frustration gnashed his teeth, but the cadence of the wind and the gifts of his god showed him an open window a few floors up. The Devil grinned pointed teeth and retrieved his club from its holster. A special model of his own invention, it hid a cord inside that allowed him to swing from point to point when the gap between buildings became too wide to jump.

“A neat toss wrapped it around a fire escape. He jumped off the roof and swung his way inside.

“The smell was stronger in here, the damp, earthy smell that wanted to crawl in through his nostrils and smother his lungs. In the stairwell, the increasing reek of it as he descended threatened suffocation, but the Hunt in his blood sang stronger and pushed him on. The Devil reached the door to the basement and stopped, his senses mapping out what lay beyond.

“Deep, dark, down, the pit cradled in the building’s foundations extended too far into the earth for him to feel in the currents of air or hear in the echoes of movement where the bottom lay. And there was movement, human-shaped and inhuman, mud-filled bodies packed in close to the pit. Their murmurs sounded like prayers, to the dirt, to the place below, to narrow choking spaces. Sheer numbers meant the Devil could not kill them all before they caught him and threw him into that seemingly bottomless hole, and as he hovered there poised on the edge of motion and considered what to do, one of the bodies stepped into the pit.

“If the rest reacted, it wasn’t in a way the Devil could understand. No heartbeats animated their bodies, but a quiet rushing sound came like sand over stone. The Devil did not know what would happen if they all jumped, but he knew they had invaded his city, his hunting ground, and an insistent, creeping suspicion that felt like his god said they were going to ruin it. Rage bared his teeth. He called on his god, and heard in his memory the way his grandmother spoke of his father’s fights in her trembling, papery voice: he let the devil out.

“The rope in the Devil’s club aided him. He flicked it around two at the back of the crowd and yanked them through the door where he sliced them from neck to navel with the sharp tips of his gloved fingers. Mud spilled out and they sagged like deflated balloons, unable to stand again. They neither screamed nor struggled, and the Devil didn’t know what to make of it, if this meant victory or that he was already too late. More and more he captured, until they blocked the stairs behind him and he waded through mud and corpses up to his knees, but yet more jumped into the pit. Though no subway lines ran near, the ground beneath him started shaking.

“An explosion tore through like a rending. It shook dust from the ceiling and nearly knocked the Devil off his feet. For a moment, he froze in wide, spiraling disbelief that this meant the mud-filled things had accomplished their goal, that he’d lost, and then he heard the groaning on the other side of the door. Sad, mourning sounds from dirt-clogged throats.

“Cracking the door open, the Devil sniffed and through the thrown-up dust sensed the gaping hole in the side of the building that exposed the pit to the night sky. The mud-filled things that were not people struggled away from it with moans of despair.

“And there, in the aperture, a man stood. A real man, with a real heartbeat, and a real semi-automatic rifle that he put to good use shooting the things lying on the ground, blasting heads from necks and bringing them to sudden stillness. A minute of noise, then shocking silence, and then the man snapped the magazine out of his gun and exchanged it for another. His head moved as if sweeping the basement for any stragglers, any sign of movement, and then he grunted in surprise as he saw the other man watching him from across the pit.

“In the remains of the Buried’s failed ritual, the Devil met the Skull.”

*

“Light from the open door of the stairwell highlighted the Devil in the settling dust, mud-caked hands and the bodies piled behind him like the entrance to Hell. The Skull didn’t hesitate. He raised his rifle and fired a single shot.

“Even from here, he could see the Devil’s grin as he moved and let the bullet fly past him. As he ran, loping gait and unnatural speed around the narrow edge of the pit, dodging the continued gunfire as he drew close. Closer. The Skull’s gun clicked empty, and he saw the clawed tips of the Devil’s fingers, his spit-shining teeth, and didn’t want to let either touch him. He threw a grenade and ran.

“Here the trail of the mud people ended, the trail he’d picked up in the red rock of Arizona and followed back north and east. It hadn’t brought him to the sprawling earth of the Great Plains or Appalachia’s ancient depths, but here to the straight-backed buildings and narrow streets. Maybe they’d hidden whatever they’d planned on doing here in the hopes it wouldn’t be found; maybe he’d driven them to it with his pursuit across the country in their slow, lumbering path; maybe they’d possessed a greater intelligence than he’d thought and came here to ward him off specifically, supposing he’d avoid the place where his family died. Maybe it didn’t matter, the mud people destroyed, now, and a worse monster charging him from the pile of their corpses.

“The relative safety of his van waited at the curb ahead. Approaching it so fast he nearly collided with the metal, the Skull’s fingers skimmed for and then pulled the door handle, letting himself inside. He spared a glance for the rearview as he drove away. Where, in the hole he’d left in the side of that building, the Devil emerged from the smoke like his very own namesake.

“Not dead. Not yet, anyway, but the Skull would return tomorrow night with a better ordinance and finish the job. It was what he did, to every disgusting, inhuman thing he could find.

“It’d taken him too long to notice them, the monsters in the shadows, the threat in the edges of the world. He’d written off the earlier signs as exhaustion or imagination or to either side of the flipped coin of luck, never saw them sneaking closer until they’d taken everything he loved.

“Underneath the engine’s rumble, the sound of distant music played, always at the edge of his hearing and just waiting for him to listen. If he tried, he could draw it closer. Like he had in the desert, in the too-long war where he’d spent too much of his life. He should’ve known then. Should’ve seen the dead-eyed look of his friend the lieutenant, like the Skull was a lieutenant, both in the marines, both promoted in Iraq on one deployment before being sent back to Afghanistan the next.

“It came like a military band, trumpets lilting on the breeze, the drum like the repetitive rhythm of the bolt gun his cousin had shown him once in the slaughterhouse. A show-off with a bit of a mean streak, the Skull’s cousin snuck him onto the killing floor. It hadn’t bothered him then, much to his cousin’s disappointment, but he remembered it later between the sand and vast sky as he looked down at a body with a neat bullet hole between its eyes. How easily living things turned to meat.

“They trained him as a sniper, and he was good at it, better than most. Good enough for special missions, black ops and burnt paper trails. He’d been trapped in dead ends and foxholes, hemmed in with fewer bullets than people to kill if he wanted to get out of there alive, and then the music played and covered everything with a syrupy haze. His targets moved slow; light hung in the air. The Skull lined them up, two, three at a time and shot his bullets through with perfect precision better than talent or luck.

“Once, thanks to bad orders that he still had to follow, the Skull used up his ammunition and that of two incapacitated soldiers trapped with him behind a rocky outcrop. He killed over fifty men that night. The government gave him a medal. When they pinned it on him, he’d wanted to laugh—kill fifty people in any other circumstances, and they’d lock you up and throw away the key. He remembered this after, and he did laugh, laughed until his stomach ached and tears rolled from his eyes.

“He left the carnage on that side of the ocean and trusted it to stay there. Stupid, so stupid. It slithered in like a venomous snake and sunk its teeth into the wife waiting for him, into the daughter and son he felt like he was just getting to know after his last deployment, after he left the marines and finally went home. The monsters came for them not in the cold grip of midnight, but in warm noon with the sun shining. His daughter’s birthday.

“They were in the park with paper plates and cake and soda, and he was shooing away ants and smiling even though it felt more like gritting his teeth. Exhaustion hid behind mirrored sunglasses. It had dropped onto his shoulders like a waiting enemy as he arrived home, paradoxically kept him up at night. But this was his daughter’s birthday, his baby girl, and she didn’t need it ruined by his inability to sleep. She smiled at him and waved from her horse at the carousel, and he managed a real one back.

“Then, the air broke. In his mind, the events exist only in fragments. The world tilting. His wife and children laying on the ground like—

“Waking up in the hospital. The news, the impossible, unbearable news that the war had followed him here. Gangs, they told him. A drug deal gone bad. Wrong place at the wrong time. And yet he’d heard that music under it all, that strange, distant tune. The drive of the bolt gun into his skull. That face a split-second before it happened, the too-familiar face that could’ve been an intrusion of memory from the war, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. He should’ve known then. He should’ve known when they showed him the ghostly x-ray of his own skull marred by the dark shadow of the bullet that hadn’t killed him, the bullet he’d carried with ever since. He’d crossed the threshold of something else.

“The gangs went first. Easy pickings, low-hanging fruit. He used what he learned in the marines: how to leave no survivors, how to leave just one as messenger and message and unwitting informant to follow to the next target, how to kill his way up the ranks. Where the gangs stopped, his old unit began. His old friend the lieutenant had done well for himself after he left the war, gotten into contract work that sold weapons and mercenaries to the government and provided an excellent cover for the heroin they smuggled into the country. The Skull never found out what he did to make them think he knew about any of this, to make them doubt his loyalty and the Semper Fidelis on his lips as he pounded his chest with the others.

“In the end, he didn’t care. What was done was done. His family lay in the ground, and he’d put every goddamn person responsible right there with them. The Skull tore through men he’d once called friends and brothers like paper targets. Everything else fell away in the tunnel vision of his revenge. He ignored the cardboard cutouts in the obstacle courses his old friend the lieutenant ran as training grounds for law enforcement, the ones that seemed to shift slightly as if to follow him as he walked.

“In a shack in the woods, he caught up with his old colonel and blew the side of his head clean off, but even then he felt like something was watching him, like he wasn’t alone. Turning, he met the eyes of the taxidermy animals lined up on a shelf against the wall. He could’ve sworn for just a second that the bobcat frozen in an eternal snarl looked back.

“Still, he ignored it. Just his imagination, just brain damage from the bullet like the music he kept hearing even with no source to be found. So he told himself and so he continued, until he at last tracked down his old friend the lieutenant in the cheap motel room he’d run to as if it would keep him safe. He tried to speak, but the Skull didn’t wait to hear what he said. He shot him in the center of his mass.

“Sawdust leaked out of the wound in place of blood. His old friend laughed. The Skull shot again and again, movement without thought, until the body lost enough of its innards to fold down onto the floor and could not stop him from lighting the match.

“‘It’s in you,’ his former friend, the former lieutenant, said. ‘It’s in you.’

“The Skull didn’t ask what he meant. He thought of the desert, the music. The drive of the bolt gun and the trigger under his finger as he fired and fired and killed men like an assembly line. That’s what war was—a factory that fattened them up in boot camp and herded them onto the killing floor. He dropped the match and pulled the fire alarm on the way out.

“In the desert, his friend had bled. The Skull sat in his van and wondered when he’d stopped, if the person he’d loved had died a long time ago, or if that was only the natural evolution of the self-centered, arrogant man he’d always been. Then, he stopped wondering. He looked at the road ahead and knew where it would take him. To the sick, unnatural things he could no longer deny, the things that had taken his family. He would find them. He would slaughter them until none remained.

“Something landed on the roof. The Skull snapped back to now, to the streets of New York. Through the roof the van, he fired three warning shots and swerved.

“On his feet to avoid the gunfire and prevent a smaller target, the sudden jerk took the Devil unaware. He flew off and crashed into the windshield of a parked car hard enough to crack the glass. Groaning, coughing, he rolled off and stumbled into the alley before the police arrived, drawn by the noise. If not for the pain in his ribs, he would have screamed and beat the wall in frustration.

“That night, the Devil limped home to lick his wounds and could barely sleep for his rage. The Skull drove his van back the converted warehouse in New Jersey where he lived. Climbing out, he passed his fingers across the bullet holes on the roof like the raised marks of braille.”

*

“The sun rose; the sun set. The Devil won in court and went to the bar after work vicious, unsatisfied. Waiting for the night to grow late enough, he sat at a booth to hide his impatient, bouncing leg and drank the single beer he allowed himself before patrol. A second body approached—the lawyer he’d beaten in court that day. They’d been friends, once, roommates in college, had even talked about opening a firm together. But for the Devil to defend the criminals he caught would have insulted his god, blasphemy and anathema.

“His friend had forgiven him for his career path. He’d forgiven him for doing his job that day, but could not forgive the flushed impatience on the Devil’s face that he mistook for excitement. Though not unfairly; it had been excitement before, the thrill of a successful hunt that his friend found crass and uncaring.

“After one drink, the Devil’s friend set his glass down hard enough to send a vibration through the tabletop. ‘There is something wrong with you,’ he said, and he put on his coat, and he left.

“The words sank into him strangely as he returned home that night, to his top-floor walk-up, as he dressed in his devil suit and crouched on the roof. There was something wrong with him. Like there was something wrong with the blind man who visited him in the orphanage and the woman he’d loved in college. Like the man he hunted that night, listening for the metronomic beat of his heart among the city’s noise. The need to chase him burned in his gut like the hunger of a predator that must kill or die, like a dog chasing cars with no idea what he’d do if he caught one. The joy came in pursuit, came when he could hold still no longer and forded the city’s rooftops in a restless, running circuit.

“Down in the streets below, the Skull waited. He stepped out of his van and into the alley, closing the door on the crackling static of the police scanner that hadn’t leaked any useful information. The night air pressed in cold, and his breath misted out under the streetlights. A pistol rested in the holster beneath his jacket. The Skull put his hand on it, wondered if a shot would suffice to draw the Devil out, or only the police called by the noise. He thought of the Devil dodging his bullets the night before, the unnatural speed of something unbound by human constraints.

“He tested it. ‘You want me?’ he asked aloud. ‘Come get me.’

“A dozen blocks away, the Devil spun in reverse so quickly he almost fell off the roof. Righting himself, he grinned like a jackal, loped towards the source of those words and the heartbeat beneath.

“The Skull’s gamble paid off. A minute later, a shadow passed over the edge of the roof, and he smiled thinly. His skin itched with the anticipation of parting the Devil’s flesh with blade or bullet, another monster that needed killing. The pistol jumped to his hand, and he took aim and fired.

“As he had the night before, the Devil dodged easily, drawing closer, drawing in for the kill. Again and again, the Skull fired—a sharpshooter, he usually didn’t miss, but the Devil seemed to elude the bullets like he knew where they’d land. The gun clicked empty, became a useless hunk of metal. The Skull dropped it and brought his guard up like a boxer, brass-knuckled fingers. They came together in blows.

“Feint of the Skull’s fist, and he caught the Devil across the jaw. A tooth cracked, but his god would fix it. The Devil swiped back without pause, pointed fingers painting the Skull’s neck with long, shallow cuts. The scent of blood in the air renewed him like drugs in a junkie’s veins. Separating, joining again, they spun around each other like a dance, evenly matched.

“The Devil laughed at the free-fall of it, at the hunt, at the challenge. The Skull laughed too, dark and sneering, and drove his brass-knuckled fingers hard into the Devil’s ribs. Doubled over, gasping, the Devil still ducked under the next punch and kicked out the Skull’s knee. Closed in on him and—

“Froze before his fist could connect. There, in the distance. Someone had heard the gunshots, called the police screaming here with their sirens and flashing lights. The Devil tilted his head towards the sound, then felt it snap back and the belated bloom of pain as the Skull’s brass knuckles impacted his nose, blood pouring. Turning him in presented the obvious solution; the beat cops liked the Devil, liked the criminals he laid out like offerings and rolled their eyes over their coffee whenever some higher-up or city politician insisted they crack down on his vigilantism and said, Hasn’t anyone heard of a citizen’s arrest?

“They’d trust the Devil if he said the man attacked him, if he accused him of breaking and entering and blowing a hole in the side of the building the night before. They’d parcel him into handcuffs and the back of a police cruiser and the cell door slamming shut like a sprung trap, and the Devil would meet him again in court and build a noose from the charges of attempted murder and domestic terrorism and hang him with it. Where the man would sit, still and silent next to his court-appointed attorney, the taunting smell of a meal the Devil’s hungry stomach couldn’t eat.

“Someday, when the chase went on long enough, he would settle for that. But not now. The next time the Skull’s fist flew, the Devil caught it and spat out the warning, ‘Cops.’

“The Skull balked in surprise, made him sluggish and let the Devil run halfway up the fire escape before he could react. The anger of a locked door curled his lip, a tree in the road, an obstacle in his path. Before he could reload and shoot, the Devil would be gone, vanished into the night.

“Instead, the Devil stopped. He leaned over the fire escape, and his smile was almost playful. Like a teenage girl, the Skull thought, hanging out her bedroom window and giggling as she shooed her boyfriend away.

“‘Same time tomorrow?’ the Devil asked.

“‘I’ll kill you tomorrow,’ the Skull replied.

“And the Devil smiled wide enough that he could see it, even three floors down, even in the dark. ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ he said, gone up the fire escape and vanished like smoke.

“Back in his warehouse, the Skull unwrapped his brass knuckles from their cloth and wiped them down. Some of the Devil’s blood stained his fingers. He rubbed it between the pad of his finger and thumb until it flaked off like red mist. Blood, not mud or sawdust or a horde of crawling insects, when the Skull cut him. Blood like he was still human, still human enough to kill.

“A week of nights. They fought and danced across the rooftops and alleys of the city. A dozen times, the Devil could have seized an opening and knocked the Skull unconscious or gone farther and snapped his neck, but no chase had ever made him feel as alive as this. A dozen times, the Skull could have shot the Devil dead, but a strange fascination stayed his hand when Devil spoke, so jarringly human, as the nights passed and his movements grew wide and sloppy with exhaustion, like he worked some nine-to-five and had to sacrifice sleep for this. Every night, the arrival of the police or their injured bodies forced them to stop with snarled promises to come back tomorrow, retreating to separate corners to lick their wounds.

“The Devil called in sick to work twice, but the demands of his job and his god both couldn’t let that continue, and even in the daytime, the anticipation of the night and the hunt would not let him sleep. He never wanted it to end; he would have to end it before it ended him. He tracked the Skull and found him in a park, off the main paths in a tight circle of rustling trees. The Devil knew him now, the way he’d move, the way he’d bluff with a punch and follow it up with a kick to the ribs; the Skull liked going for his ribs, and the Devil would press his fingers against the bruises as he lay awake in bed.

“They kept quiet, only harsh pulls of breath as they circled each other, a mutual desire to preserve their privacy and clash uninterrupted. The Devil could’ve ended it there. But when he threw his club in a boomerang arc, smacking against the back of the Skull’s head, he used only enough force to disorient, not to kill.

“By the time the Skull blinked away the pain and white spots in his vision, the Devil had disappeared into the night. He swore softly under his breath and rubbed at the back of his head. The strange music played in the distance again, growing steadily towards a crescendo, a breaking point. The Skull listened as he walked and kept a hand on his gun, but he knew the hour and the pattern; the Devil wouldn’t come back tonight. Disappointment tasted like grease at the back of his throat—ridiculous. He quashed it as he reached the van and let himself inside.

“Where, folded in the back between boxes of ammunition and gear, hidden under a tarp, the Devil lay in wait, barely daring to breathe.

“The van moved, the particular rattle of its engine that the Devil heard the second it entered his neighborhood, heard also in his sparse dreams. Out of the city and onto the highway. The damp smell of the river floated up as they passed over the bridge and crossed the state line. The Devil counted seconds up to minutes, and after half an hour, the van pulled into some kind of structure and stopped.

“The rattle of the engine cut off into silence. In the driver’s seat, the Skull stretched and popped his neck, got out and shut the door behind him. Still hiding in the back, the Devil braced for the sound of his footsteps approaching the back of the van, doors thrown open to reveal him, the gasp of the Skull’s alarm and the fight to follow. Instead, the footsteps carried him away deeper into the structure, its smell of old wood and concrete permeating the stale air inside the van. Some kind of warehouse.

“In the echoes of the Skull’s movements, he mapped it. Stairs as he walked up a flight, a living area with a bed and table and the hum of a refrigerator, separated from the rest by a free-standing wall. The smart thing would’ve been to capture or kill him while he drove, while he couldn’t fight back, but the Devil had wanted this more. To hit him where he lived.

“Lightly, the Devil crept to the van’s doors and opened them a hair a time, tensed for creaking or anything that would betray his presence. None came, and he dropped silently onto the floor. Using his club and the rope hidden inside, the Devil latched it around the upper landing’s railing and pulled his body to it. On the other side of the wall stood the Skull. He moved with the same certainty he did in the streets, his guns set on the table and then his Kevlar vest the Devil had pounded his fists against, night after night. A long, weary sigh escaped him, and he stood leaning over the table, palms pressed against its surface and back to where the Devil stood. The Devil stepped around the wall, the club in his hand ready to break the Skull’s flesh and bones, ready to make that calm, measured heart finally beat feaster in fear, to make sure he never felt safe again.

“The Skull spun in a sudden disturbance of air, threw a knife that missed the Devil by an inch as he dodged. A split-second of distraction and the Skull was already running, and the Devil growled and gave chase. Along the landing, up another flight of stairs, back down on the other side and he couldn’t get a good angle for his club, and the Skull couldn’t run forever, but neither could he.

“He rounded a corner and felt the rush of air, heard the clang of metal against concrete. Touched the bars of the cage he was now in, then shook them, then threw himself against them frantically with the mindless rage of a rabid animal. Just on the other side, the Skull stood mockingly close. The Devil smelled something on him, something like glass and rubber.

“A gas mask. The realization entered his mind just as the cloying smell of gas hit hit nose. The Devil held his breath. He felt around the bars for a way out, but the gas made his eyes burn, and his heart still pounded from the chase, using up precious oxygen.

“His lungs made the decision for him, sucked in air and breathed gas instead, coughed it out but that was enough. The world around him faded, the shining lines of his god falling into darkness as his body collapsed to the floor.”

*

“Cold. The Devil crawled back to consciousness stiff-limbed on a flat surface, his skin sticking to it—his skin, exposed. He jerked fully awake, sitting up to shooting pains in his pounding head, pushed hands to his face and body that felt skin, skin, skin, no armor or mask to cover him. Only his underwear like some meaningless concession to modesty, or like the man who put him here didn’t want to get an eyeful. There, on the other side of the bars to what the Devil was rapidly coming to realize was his cell, that heart beat out its steady, mocking rhythm. He turned towards it with bared teeth.

“The Skull watched him fascinated, like his children had watched animals at the zoo, their faces pressed the to glass of their enclosures until he or his wife had pulled them back. What he did now was far more dangerous. This thing growling at him, this thing coming up in a low crouch and stalking towards the bars as if he intended to go right through them, needed death, not capture or observation or whatever the fuck he was doing. And yet...without his mask, the Devil was beautiful. It had given him pause when he’d taken off his mask the night before, stripped him of his armor, his weapons. It shouldn’t have. His friend the lieutenant had been beautiful, and he’d been a monster all the same.

“Setting down his coffee mug, the Skull stood and tossed clothing through the bars. ‘Get dressed.’

“‘Why am I alive?’ the Devil asked instead, did not move.

“‘Because I didn’t kill you,’ the Skull said. Stupid, but the only answer he had. ‘You want to stay alive, do what I say. Get dressed.’

“The Devil felt slowly towards the cloth objects a few feet away. Sweatpants and a t-shirt. They smelled like the Skull, and he snatched them up with the intention of throwing them back through the bars. But his entire body was gooseflesh, and he suppressed a shiver, pulled the clothes on roughly and sat back on the floor.

“‘Hungry?’ the Skull asked.

“‘Are you going to poison me?’

“The Skull laughed like he’d said something funny. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

“A tray of food passed through a small opening in the bars: oatmeal and eggs, plain black coffee. The Devil sniffed it for the synthetic stink of drugs, found none, and summarily began shoveling the breakfast into his mouth like running a race. He’d need the energy to escape.

“Finished, he brought the tray back to the bars and held it over at arm’s length. Still, the Skull reached for it warily. ‘Bite me and I’ll shoot you.’

“But the Devil only snorted in disdain, and the Skull retrieved the tray unharmed. He sat on a stool, knees bent and feet braced on the lower rungs, and watched the Devil explore his cell. Even without his mask and suit, even when he wasn’t fighting, he moved strangely, always strangely. His hands skimmed over the bars and concrete walls, the sink and toilet in one corner, the cot opposite. Like a prison cell, designed after the one the Skull had landed in out in Omaha after a bad stint and only escaped by the skin of his teeth.

“‘Hey,’ the Skull said, and the Devil spun to face him, but his eyes still didn’t look. They remained unfocused, the pupils undilating.

“‘What?’ the Devil snapped.

“The Skull squinted at him. ‘Why don’t you look at me?’

“He laughed like a jackal. ‘I’m blind. I don’t look at anything.’

“‘Blind?’ the Skull echoed, disbelieving. ‘How does that work?’

“‘The same way it works for you. I have a god, and I feed it.’

“This time, the Skull laughed, dry chuckle like rustling leaves. ‘Long time since I been to mass.’

“‘You should,’ the Devil told him, intrigued in spite of himself at this additional similarity. ‘It’s good for the soul.’

“If God cared about the Skull’s soul, he thought, he wouldn’t have to wake every day with dreams of his family’s death still burning in his mind. ‘So, what you can do. You’re telling me it’s a gift from God?”

“‘Not that God,’ the Devil said dismissively. ‘The other god. The one that needs to eat.’

“‘You’re crazy,’ the Skull surmised. A little disappointed; he’d hoped for something better.

“‘Am I?’ the Devil countered. ‘I’m blind, but I can see. I can hear your heart beating and smell your sweat a mile away. I can taste the residue of the gas you used last night in the air and the bologna sandwich you had for dinner.’

“A twitch, an intake of breath. Involuntary and almost invisible. The Devil smiled.

“‘I broke your nose two nights ago,’ he said. ‘It’s better now.’

“The Skull grunted. ‘It healed.’

“‘No one heals that fast,’ the Devil said. ‘You feed your god, and it cares for you.’

“Bullshit, the Skull thought. ‘How?’ he asked

“‘When you chase me. When you fight me. When you kill them,’ the Devil replied as he sauntered up to the bars. ‘How many have you killed?’

“‘Not enough.’

“And the Devil smiled, too wide, too sharp. ‘Will it ever be enough?’

“The Skull drank his coffee, didn’t answer. ‘How many have you killed?’

“‘I don’t. I don’t kill.’

“‘Why not?’

“The Devil shrugged, said, ‘I still go to mass.’

“The coffee nearly went down the wrong way, and the Skull coughed, surprised by his own laugh. The Devil smiled—like he shared the joke, now, not like he wanted to eat him. Like the spark of something, a rogue ember that would start a wildfire.

“Upstairs, the Skull washed the dishes, cleaned his guns. Watched the Devil on the surveillance feed out of the corner of his eye and learned nothing more than he had that morning. His mind ran in circles around gods and feeding them and the truths he’d avoided. How quickly his body healed, how he survived things he shouldn’t, how he always knew where to go next.

“Over lunch, he tried again. ‘What’s your god called?’

“The Devil snapped up the last bite of his sandwich and chugged the rest of his water with his head thrown back. The Skull watched him, the movement of his throat, the back of his hand wiping his mouth. ‘It doesn’t have a name,’ he said.

“‘You said I feed it by killing.’ The Skull ran a knife through a sharpener; he’d brought a set down with him, more because it needed doing than any poor attempt at intimidation. ‘And you said you don’t kill.’

“‘I don’t need to. I hunt, I chase. It likes that,’ the Devil said. ‘The end of it, when I lose someone I know I won’t get back, that feels the worst. How does it feel to you?’

“Like the arterial spray, the last breath sighing out, like exultation. ‘Like the only thing that matters.’

“And the Devil thought of the woman he’d loved in college, the blades she’d carried and the warm, stinging smell of pleasure and adrenaline as she used them. ‘It manifests differently,’ he said.

“Another knife scraped through the sharpener, its blade fine enough to shave hair. ‘How did it manifest for you?’

“‘You know, when I get out of here, I’m going to kill you,’ the Devil said mildly.

“The Skull smiled faintly. ‘Then there’s no reason not to tell me.’

“Caution and habit stopped the Devil’s words in his throat. He knew what would happen if the Skull found his name, exposed him to the world—at best, he’d lose the courtroom and half of the Hunt that sustained him and live the rest of his life as a fugitive; at worst, he’d wither away in a cell like this one, unable to feed his god. But he’d met so few like him, and he’d been alone for a very long time.

“‘It likes the hunt,’ he said. ‘The chase, the fear. I’ve only killed animals; I think I needed to because their fear is simpler and they would not remember me to fear me. I don’t need to kill people so long as I keep them afraid. I’ve met—others. They do need to kill.’

‘Others?’ the Skull asked.

The answer burned on his tongue, but he wouldn’t let it out. ‘Have you met any others like us?’ he asked.

“‘No,’ the Skull admitted. ‘Not exactly.’

“The knives were done, as sharp as they could get. The Skull set them down and spoke more freely. He didn’t hide, not his name or his face; he lived no double-life that needed protecting, so he gave it all to the Devil like a field report. Simple and bare-bones as a clean-picked corpse. The slaughterhouse and the bolt-gun and the song in the desert, pull of the trigger like the bolt driving home and the effortless way he reduced life to death, people to meat. If that was a god, it had followed him, too, had taken his family when he stopped feeding it and pointed him down the path, showed him his mistake in thinking he could ever leave the war, ever stop killing. His hands shook if they went too long without touching a trigger, itched like ants beneath the skin.

“As he spoke, the Devil drew closer like the words reeled him in, ended with his hands curled around the bars. ‘We’re the same,’ he said.

“‘Hm,’ the Skull sniffed. ‘Do you still want to kill me?’

“‘I don’t know,’ the Devil said, surprising himself with honesty. ‘Do you want to kill me?’

“‘I should.’

“The Devil huffed, a toss of his head. ‘If I deserve to die, then how are you any different? At least I don’t kill them.’

“‘You think that’s better?’ the Skull asked incredulously. ‘Never said I was different.’

“‘So what’s the plan?’ The Devil cocked his head, listening to the Skull’s heart, his breath. ‘You kill every monster in the world and then yourself?’

“‘Seems better than what you’re doing.’

“Letting go of the bars, the Devil turned and walked to his cot, laid on it with his back to the Skull like he intended to sleep. ‘Let me know how that works for you,’ he said.

“The Skull stared at his back a minute longer, the red spill of his hair. Then, he gathered up his knives and left the Devil alone. But the Devil wouldn’t leave him alone, following him around his head like an unwelcome guest. The surveillance feed didn’t do him justice, his form pixelated in gritty black and white. As he rolled over, his shirt rode up, and he ran his fingers over the last, fading bruises the Skull had left on his ribs.

“Swallowing, the Skull returned his attention to the guns laid out on his table for cleaning and kept the Devil only in his periphery.

“Three days. Nine meals. The Devil counted their regular intervals, the heat of the sun changing in relative position to the building, the temperature drop at night. His captor ate with him and stayed after, more often than not, cleaning his weaponry or clicking through something on his laptop that he wouldn’t expose, its sounds muted to prevent any hints from notifications. Once, he spray-painted something in steady, practiced arcs, the chemical smell of paint thick and clogging the Devil’s nose.

“He approached the bars anyway, asked, ‘What are you painting?’

“‘Kevlar,’ the Skull said, his voice muffled by a respirator mask.

“If the Devil’s eyes worked, he might have rolled them. ‘What do you put on it?’ he asked. He’d smelled the paint before, wondered idly.

“‘Oh,’ the Skull said in realization. ‘That’s right, you can’t—it’s a skull.’

“The Devil cocked his head, curious. ‘Why a skull?’

“So, the Skull told him about the x-ray and the bullet in his head. He told him more, too, sharing stories of his family and the wars he’d fought like an homage to their memory. Slowly, haltingly, the Devil met him in kind: his father, the catacombs, the rats. All sheared carefully away from the identifying details he still held close. In a city of eight million, he thought, he could disappear, and the Skull would have the task of sifting through sand for diamonds to find him.

“It was only then that he held the image of the Skull, his sound and smell and taste, the feel of him as he moved through the air, held that life in his head and knew he didn’t want to end it.

“In the marines, the Skull learned interrogation—not a lot, not enough to make a career out of it, but the basics, what worked and what didn’t. Torture got you nothing except a steady stream of bullshit, anything to stop the pain, so he didn’t tie the Devil up by his feet and leave him hanging upside-down to use as a punching bag, no matter how much the thought of blooming bruises on his body appealed.

“Strip a man of everything, take his clothes and possessions, take him out of his life and stick him in a box, and his needs become simple. Food, water, shelter. Companionship. The Skull talked, modeling the behavior he wanted to see and watched the Devil turn towards him like a plant following the sun, watched him fight the impulse and fail. He gave up more and more, little things adding pieces to the puzzle. Most of it still missing, but he’d get there, the Skull told himself as he brought the Devil dinner. Their hands touched for just a second as he passed over the tray, and the Devil smiled. The sparks along his skin, the way he felt the Devil’s touch long after he retreated to his stool didn’t matter, was besides the point. He’d get there.

“On the fourth night, he took a risk. ‘What do you do?’ he asked. ‘For a living.’

“The Devil’s face did not raise from the plate across his lap, but he went very still. ‘Who says I do anything for a living?’

“‘I’ve seen you. You get tired sometimes. Sloppy,’ the Skull told him. ‘You got a job, don’t you? Something you gotta do during the day.’

“Abruptly, bitterly, the Devil laughed. ‘No-call, no-show,’ he said. ‘I’ve probably been fired by now.’

“Not then, nor at any time since, could the Skull say exactly what that changed for him, what force made him stand and reach for the gun in his holster, the pistol he always carried. The Devil’s head tilted because he must’ve heard it, the shape of metal against fabric, the way the air moved. But he’d heard it before, heard the Skull clean his guns before enough for the false sense of security to extend right up to the second when the safety clicked off.

“His head snapped up, but it was already too late, had been too late for him from the second the Skull trapped him and locked him here. The first shot tore through his shoulder, dark stain of blood almost invisible against the black t-shirt the Skull had given him today. Scrambling to his feet, the tray and half-eaten meal falling to the floor, the Devil backed up with his hand clutching the wound.

“And the Skull followed him; the Skull’s gun followed him; the next bullet snapped his tibia, knocking him to the ground again. Rage bared the Devil’s teeth. His chest rose and fell in rapid time with his shallow breaths, his face painted in shock and anger and just a hint of betrayal, and beneath even that, the tiniest grain of fear. The Skull took a minute to revel in it, to ache for it.

“He wanted to kill him, wanted to shoot him until he couldn’t move and hold him down as he struggled, as he eventually went limp, wanted to kiss his mouth and breathe in his last exhale. He wanted to keep him here forever even if that meant he was dead, wanted to own and possess him in a way he’d never felt in the pure, gentle love he’d felt for his wife.

“In his cell, the Devil dragged himself to the bars, blood smeared behind them. He used them painfully, futilely to stand, even now trying to reach him.

“The Skull might have never loved someone so much.

“He raised his gun a final time and fired. It hit the Devil’s stomach, a choking sound and a collapse. Pain and blood loss felled him, and he finally lay still.”

*

“They pulled him out of the river, naked and hypothermic, his sluggishly bleeding wounds coloring the water around him like rust. Somehow, he’d made it to the shallows and lay belly-up like a dead fish until a passing boat found him, hauled his body onto deck, called for help.

“Slivers came back to him. The water, the boat. The ambulance and the prick in his arm that brought blessed darkness and left him floating somewhere else, without pain. It was a goddamn miracle, the doctor told him, that he wasn’t dead.

“Of course, the Devil thought, did not say. Gods perform miracles.

“Despite his failure, his had not abandoned him. It brought the words of the doctors speaking quietly down the hall to his ears, discussing his prognosis; it let him smell the stinging antiseptic and synthetic medications, the wet, oceanic saline flowing from the IV bag into his veins. When death came to the rooms around him, he tasted the fetid stench on his tongue. The fragments of his muscles and bones yearned towards wholeness, and he felt the growth of every agonizing cell.

“A second miracle, they called it. How quickly he healed. The Devil smiled and indicated his healthy habits, his luck. Their hearts skipped when he did, perhaps at the way he sat so unnaturally still, perhaps at the inhumanly sharp ends of his teeth. Even they could sense the rage that fueled him, that burned like a fire and pushed him past the pain and the immobility and to the single, consuming goal of sinking his teeth into the Skull’s throat and tearing it free.

“It simmered throughout his imprisonment in the hospital’s sterile walls, the well-meaning visits of friends and colleagues who he could feel gawking at him like a museum display, the cloyingly cheerful encouragement of his physical therapist. In moments of weakness, he could smell the arousal on her, her attraction to him, and felt nothing despite her soft hands and body. All his desire aimed like an arrow towards the Skull, the target’s vanishing point of concentric circles. He dreamed of the painted Kevlar beneath his fingers, mapping out the skull and the man who wore it.

“He was out there, somewhere. In those streets the Devil could not reach, not yet. Once, he thought he heard that steady heartbeat just on the other side of his window in the street below, close, so close and completely untouchable. Anger and frustration reached their boiling point, and he cried until the nurse came summoned by his heart monitor and he lied and told her it had been just the pain, just a nightmare, just something normal and nothing to worry about. And he bottled it up again, held it down and suppressed it until his rage flowed only like magma beneath the surface of the earth.

“Six weeks later, they let him out, and he erupted into the streets. The D.A.’s office had given him a leave of absence, a sympathetic take as long as you need, a collection that paid his medical bills and at least a few months’ rent. The Devil slept days like the determined dead, shored up energy for scouring the streets at night. For hunting.

“The Skull eluded him. He was not gone, not departed from the city though his warehouse lay empty and picked bare when the Devil checked, though he did not seek him out or meet him when the Devil searched. His scent lingered in alleys, the taste of his sweat in the air. In the distance, the engine of his van rattled so faintly it might have been his imagination, or just another vehicle. The Devil pushed his body to its limits; he stretched his senses until his nose bled; he ran all night. Always, the Skull managed to slip away before he could pin him down. The chase thrilled and infuriated him in turns.

“In the warmth of daylight, in the Devil’s bed, that metronomic heart followed him to sleep and would not let him rest. He snapped awake at noon, board-stiff and adrenaline-high. That heartbeat. It still sounded in his ears, in his waking mind and the Devil jumped out of bed as the rest of his senses confirmed it, the smell the taste, the feel of him as he disturbed the still air of his apartment. The Skull was here.

“Without caution, without thought, the Devil burst out of his bedroom and brought them face to face. The Skull a mere dozen feet away stood implacably, said nothing.

“A growl started in the Devil’s chest and rumbled past his throat. The Skull’s stance shifted slightly as he prepared for the attack, for a redux, for their traded blows and the Devil’s broken furniture, for the ending that would allow them to retreat, come together again.

“Part of the Devil missed that, wanted it, wanted to feel the Skull’s fists and hear his grunts of pain.

“Too much had changed.

“In a blur of movement, in the space of a second that left no room for reaction, the Devil threw the knife. It stuck embedded in the Skull’s shoulder, matching and mirror to the bullet hole since scarred on the Devil’s own. He didn’t cry out, didn’t scream or swear in pain, but his quiet gasp of surprise reached the Devil’s ears like music. The Skull hadn’t been expecting it, couldn’t have expected it after weeks of the Devil’s fists and blunt instruments, and he stumbled back just half a step, just enough.

“The Devil smiled. Even with a knife in his shoulder, the Skull smiled back.

“Then, the Devil was on him with a speed fueled by his god, faster than any ordinary human. A second knife appeared in his hand, a third joining it in his other. He preferred his clubs, but he knew how to use these, and proved it—the Kevlar fell in a few slashes to the straps holding it together, leaving the Skull in a thin t-shirt that offered no protection; another pass sliced ribbons of blood in his arm, in his chest.

“The Skull fought back, caught the Devil in the jaw, kicked him in the groin and the ribs and left him with some new bruises, but the Devil had the advantage and pressed it mercilessly. He cut the Skull’s flesh until his head swam with the copper smell of blood, swept his feet from under him and knocked him to his knees, grabbed what was left of his shirt collar to hold him up and beat his face until it swelled into a different shape.

“When he let go, the Skull collapsed to the floor, unconscious and defeated.

“Triumphant, the Devil raised the blood-slicked knife. He held it over the Skull’s throat and imagined the sweet gushing of his blood, of his life draining out. He stood there unmoving, for long enough that his ragged breaths evened out and the sun changed positions in the sky.

“The Skull woke on a soft surface. Hands touched his skin, pushed into it something small and sharp, something rough and dragging. Cracking open the eye that wasn’t swollen shut, he saw the Devil sewing stitches into his stomach and humming tunelessly under his breath. He closed his eye again. As the Devil tied off the last stitch, he bent his head and kissed the wound.

“The Devil lay down next to him content and burrowed into the soft sheets of his bed. He ran his hands over the Skull’s body, over his handiwork. Cuts and stitches, the puncture wound in his shoulder, the cracked ribs and bruised bones. He hadn’t broken any, though he still wanted to feel that sharp snapping as they gave way under pressure, to hear the sound the Skull made and to pay him back for the bullet and the broken leg. But that would have necessitated hospitalization, letting someone else touch what was for him and only him, and the Devil could not stand the thought.

“The next day, the Devil went back to work. His coworkers chalked the spring in his step up to a new lease on life, and he let them, let the daring ones go quiet and serious and nervously ask, ‘Do the police have any leads yet? Any idea who did this?’

“‘Nothing yet,’ he said, and in a bold, bald-faced lie, ‘No idea who did this.’

“The city streets called him again for the first time in months, his regular patrol that felt like a book read in childhood, comfortable and familiar but almost boring when revisited as an adult. No monsters reached his senses, no vampires or moving corpses filled with mud, so the Devil went back to lowlife criminals and fulfilled his desire for brutality and broken bones. No one cared about them, least of all the police who carted them off for drug possession or the theft of change from unlocked cars, who saluted the darkness where they assumed the Devil to be, for making their jobs easier.

“The Devil swung from rooftops in death-defying contortions; he flew through his caseload at work like a firebrand, buoyed along by his secret. No one, not his coworkers nor the police nor the criminals he hunted and prosecuted knew of the man locked in his apartment, injured and bedridden, beaten so badly he could barely stand without help. In the evenings, he came home from work beaming and giddy, his whole day building with anticipation. He loved to sit Skull up in bed and feed him dinner and help him brush his teeth, to hold him as a captive audience and tell him about his day. He wanted the Skull to feel what he’d felt, the forced dependence on him, the trapped helplessness of the cage.

“Placidly, the Skull accepted it with a passiveness that enraged him. The Skull had suffered it all already, gunshots and shrapnel in the desert, a broken leg from a collapsed roof and weeks in the military hospital where they’d repair and ship him out again like the valuable equipment he was. The dependence, the helplessness, the humiliation of needing care like a child were old friends to him, and he craved the Devil’s attention, the ferocity of his attack, the gentleness of his hands. When the Devil left in the mornings for work or in the evenings to hunt, he wanted only his return, the painful progress of his healing body an afterthought.

“In the small hours of the night and late weekend mornings, the Devil curled close to the Skull and slept, a hairs’ breadth away from touching. He liked to press his nose close to the Skull’s neck, liked the smell of him there, even and especially when he went a few days without showering before the Devil could drag or carry him to the shower and sponge him off. He liked, too, the white-knuckled threat of it, the unspoken certainty that no matter how hurt the Skull was, he could still reach over and snap the Devil’s neck in his sleep.

“If the Skull wanted to hurt him, wanted to expose him to the world and take the Devil away from his god and everything that mattered, he would have already, would have hit him there instead of leaving him half-drowned and bleeding out. So, laying there in bed, stretched out on his back or curled on his side and right in the Skull’s ear, the Devil told him everything, everything. Every bit of his childhood, the parts that mattered and the parts that didn’t, the way his father looked in the ring. The closed-off boredom of the orphanage and stretching his new senses past those walls to the city beyond. The others like them: the blind man who visited him as a child, the woman he’d loved in college. How they’d found him again just in time to turn on each other like rabid animals, how they’d died each with a katana in hand and in each other’s stomachs, holding them up in an eternal embrace.

“‘Do we always end up killing each other?’ the Skull asked, startling the Devil because he rarely asked anything.

“‘Do you see any other way?’

“The Skull hummed in his throat and did not answer. But he painted for the Devil bright moments of his family, his unit, his friend the lieutenant in the years before he’d gone bad. He would wait until he thought the Devil was sleeping and run fingers through his red hair.

“And the Devil wondered: would they kill each other? Was that the fated end, the finish line they’d always cross? He thought of the vampires and mud-filled things, the moving mannequins and not-people with sawdust for blood that the Skull described. If there were more. Quite by accident, if anything truly happens by accident to those touched by gods, he found Robert Smirke’s name at the bottom of a stack of vampire books that the Skull read to him long-suffering and trapped in bed. Ignited, the Devil tore off down this new path and through every scrap of information on Smirke he could find. It led finally to scanned documents provided by the Usher Foundation in response to his many breathless phone calls, to the description of Smirke’s fourteen like blank spots in a manuscript, illuminating it with sense.

“‘Sounds like a load of bullshit to me,’ the Skull said, deeply distrustful.

“This sent them into a vehement argument where the Devil called him a small-minded idiot and the Skull in turn called him a delusional conspiracy theorist, and even when he had to retreat to his kitchen and stand there fuming to calm down, the Devil loved every second. That the Skull would fight with him, though he could not manage so much a punch without pulling his stitches.

“But the Skull was healing, every day healing, every day too fast under the protection of his god. The Devil came home from work one drowsy afternoon to find the Skull up and dressed, the swelling in his face gone, his bruises faded, his stitches out and the wounds they’d covered reduced to scars.

“For a long series of seconds, they faced each other like territorial wolves.

“The Devil moved first, launched himself at the Skull and tackled him to the hard, wooden floorboards of his living room. The Skull went with it, lay there with the Devil’s hands circled around his wrists and didn’t fight him, didn’t fight, and the Devil shook with rage.

“‘So,’ the Skull said. ‘What happens now?’

“‘You’ll run again,’ the Devil said, like he could make it true. ‘I’ll chase you again.’

“Beneath him, the Skull rubbed his thumb across the Devil’s hand, softly in spite of the bruising pressure. ‘What if I don’t want to run?’

“‘Then fight me. Finish this,’ the Devil ordered him—ordered, didn’t beg.

“‘And if I won’t fight you?’

“Horrible, incomprehensible. The Devil took no pleasure in something that didn’t run, didn’t fight, something meaningless and invisible to his god. His body ran hot with rejection, his face burned.

“‘Hey,’ the Skull said, seeing and understanding it. ‘Do you love me?’

“‘I—’ the Devil had not thought about it before. He nodded. ‘Yes.’

“Without warning, the Skull flipped them over, pinned the Devil to the floor. ‘I love you. I’ll love you even more if you kill me,’ he said, and right against the Devil’s mouth, ‘I can run for you sometimes.’

“It is a joy, to find someone who understands you so completely. Healed, the Skull joined the Devil on the Hunt and together, they fed their gods. The Devil still loved only the chase and hated killing, hated the end of it and the sudden cessation of fear, but the Skull needed it, that death and finality. He followed the Devil, would spy him from a sniper’s nest past the point where his senses reached, would slip into the courtroom and watch the other way he fed his god. When the prey would not be caught, could not be handled by the law and threatened them with the failure of escape, the Skull found them, tracked them to where they lived, pulled the trigger and ended it in the way they Devil couldn’t.

“Years and years. They lived like this in that perfect joy and contentment that most people only dream of. The Devil hunted, and the Skull slaughtered. They shared a bed and never left each other’s skin free of bruises, a presence even in absence. They smelled always of blood.

“In another decade, in another century, they might have gone on this way forever, until their gods finally ate them. Only the stalling of the police saved them from wasting away in separate cells. The Devil heard them talking in their cars, discussing the warrant with his name on it, and dropped his coffee on the sidewalk like a collapse of a man’s skull.

“There are eyes everywhere. Another god had found them, and it had not intended harm insofar as gods intend anything, but it is in the Eye’s nature to watch, to expose secrets. A hidden camera removed any plausible deniability the Devil might have hoped his blindness to grant. Blind or not, it had been his hand, his club that had broken a man’s jaw and dropped him right into the Skull’s path. It had been the Devil who smiled as the Skull shot the man neatly between the eyes and dropped him dead to the ground, the Devil who took his mask off and went to the Skull and kissed him like a reward.

“In panicked haste, most of their lives and possessions abandoned, they ran out of town. They became the hunted. It rankled, and the Devil hated it, the miasma of it, the stink it left on his skin. He hated the Skull’s reassurances that they’d get out of this, that they could disappear together and everything would be fine. The Devil snapped at him until they drove in silence, the rattle of the engine and the glide of the tires over tarmac on the highway.

“The roadblock appeared too suddenly for either to avoid it, for the Devil to extend his senses for a route that would lead them around. As they skidded to a stop, more police cars pulled up behind, penning them in like animals in a net.

“Reaching out, the Devil took the Skull’s hand and kissed him. Though they had never planned for this, they said nothing. They stood in the open mouths of their gods, and there was nothing left to do except feed them.

“Together, they stepped out of the Skull’s van.

“The world changed.

“At first, they knew only that the police hadn’t shot them yet. The Skull noticed the sky overhead changing suddenly to a sickly, green hue; the Devil noticed the silence and absence of cars on the highway.

“It was never clear to them what exactly happened to the police. The closest either could describe when they discussed it after, in their ride back to New York, was that their cars had eaten them.

“New York was no longer there, at least not the New York they remembered. Where the city had grown up among the rivers and inlets was now a vast forest of humid, tightly-packed trees. To the Skull’s ears, it seemed as if nothing ever had or would disturb the stillness, but the Devil smiled, the Devil laughed and told him what he heard: the distant, beautiful screams of fear.

“They fell to their knees and gave thanks in a consuming, religious ecstasy.

“It did not take long for the Devil to reclaim the forest from the other things that hunted there. They avoid him, now, leave him to his hunting ground, and especially avoid the middle of it, the epicenter where the slaughterhouse lies. There the Skull lives and welcomes the Devil home, where they make a den in some abandoned corner no one else will ever find and share the meat of their kills. Outside, the plane flies over the battlefield, and the Skull’s army stitch soldiers together like clockwork dolls and send them out there to the war, to worst part of every war that was every fought, where the music grows into a crescendo and shatters eardrums just as the war shatters your body, by sword or machine gun, by bomb or gas that corrodes you from the inside out.

“They fit in this world, as in the old world they only did with each other. That world grows fainter every day, farther away and vanishing in unimportance. Even the old pain of loss no longer touches them. The Devil thinks this would have destroyed his father if he had lived; the Skull is grateful for the brief happiness of his family’s lives. That they died quickly, without much pain, and they did not live only to end up in the never-ending torture of this apocalypse. He cannot imagine his wife and children touched by gods, only another life where he’d try and fail to protect them from horrors.

“Now, he touches the burning-hot surface of the Devil’s horns and skin, and the Devil runs his hands over the Skull’s Kevlar fused with flesh, the skull-shaped bones growing out of his torso.

“Their gods are with them.

“They have never been happier.”

*

A long, shuddering exhale left Jon’s body. The statement ended, at fucking last the statement ended, but the tape recorder in his pocket spun on relentlessly.

Martin had nearly forgotten what it looked like, the early days when Jon’s statements left him drained and exhausted rather than the thing that fed him and kept him alive. The circles under his eyes, the way he breathed heavy, how he sagged as if about to collapse.

“Jon?” Martin asked quietly.

“It’s ok,” Jon said. “I’m ok.”

Across from them, the devil-man leaned against the skull-man’s shoulder. They both smiled as if listening to the most beautiful music they’d ever heard, contented as if they’d just eaten a full meal and would soon lay down to rest.

The skull-man kissed the top of the devil-man’s head. Then, he turned lazily to the assembly line.

“Linus,” he called, waving one to one of the aproned figures. “Would you give our guests some party favors?”

Silently, a stout man clothed in white peeled off from the rest and disappeared behind the twitching pile of body parts, and Martin tensed in preparation for something awful. But when Linus emerged, he carried only two clean backpacks that did not manifest into any disgusting, crawling horror as he waddled slowly over and lay them at his and Jon’s feet before returning to his spot in the assembly line.

Jon picked one up and explained, “Parachutes.”

“Oh,” Martin said, glancing at the doors the soldier had gone through. “Oh. Is that the only way out?”

“At least we don’t have to jump without one,” Jon told him as he buckled the pack around his chest.

With no other option, Martin quickly followed suit. He followed Jon over to the doors and counted his breaths to forestall hyperventilation. It’d be bad down there, but everything was bad, Martin told himself. It only differed in flavor.

This was not a place for looking back. Martin remembered this as he did anyway in reflexive paranoia, stupid and useless with Jon at his side. Behind them, the devil-man and skull-man wove around each other like they meant to mate like animals right there on the factory floor. Quickly, his cheeks flaming, Martin turned back to the doors ahead.

“What happened back there?” he asked in an undertone.

Jon’s mouth pressed thin, like he’d been hoping Martin wouldn’t ask. “I gave it back to them,” he said.

“What?” Martin shook his head. “What do you mean, you gave it back to them?”

“Statements usually make me stronger. I gather you noticed this one didn’t,” Jon said. “Avatars are creatures made of fear, and if I feed on their fear, I feed on their strength to supplement my own. This time, I didn’t.” He sighed. “I gave it back.”’

Martin spluttered, shades of outrage and disbelief. “You—why?” he asked desperately. “You’re the Archivist, you could smite those things, and you thought it was a better idea to make them stronger?”

“You know it doesn’t matter if I smite them or not,” Jon said. “Martin, they hunt avatars. How can I kill them?”

“They’re nothing like us,” Martin told him flatly, countering the part Jon hadn’t said aloud.

“I know,” Jon said. “I just—Martin, if we lose—”

“Jon,” Martin said, defeated and so fucking tired, and if they went down that track he might lay down here and give up and let whatever eldritch horrors roamed around take him.

But Jon, stubborn as ever, wouldn’t hear him. “They hunt avatars. I wanted to give them something, just in case. I wanted to leave something of us behind.”

With that, he pushed open the doors, letting the stinging air whip past their ears and drown out any other attempts at speech. Martin gripped the straps of his parachute bag and prepared for the jump. He didn’t look at Jon, didn’t want to see the same thing in his face that he felt buried in his own chest at the easy, seamlessly way the devil-man and skull-man existed in this world, with each other.

If Jon, like him, was just a little bit jealous.

***

Notes:

Thanks for going on this weird journey with me. I struggled with Jon's narration a lot and at one point deleted about 8k of this and rewrote it (otherwise this would have been EVEN LONGER), but there is something satisfying about figuring out what's wrong and fixing it! So I don't regret it (that much). I will take the advice of the namesake and voice actor of Jonathan Sims when asked what his least favorite episodes of TMA were and say that I will not tell you what parts I don't like, because I don't want you to notice them. ;)

I chose not to use Frank's and Matt's names in this because I wanted to give the impression of how enmeshed they are in their fears, but referring to them as "Daredevil" and "The Punisher" also didn't seem right. Matt is of course referred to as the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, and Frank does get called the Skull in some comics, so I hope what I picked fits.

Matt is pretty strictly the Hunt, but Frank is somewhere at the intersection of the Slaughter, the Flesh, and the End, with a dash of Hunt thrown in. Imo, Frank seems like the one to buck those kinds of labels and neat categories, and the Flesh and the Slaughter are very close together already. (There is literally a Flesh episode set in a slaughterhouse.)