Days of New: The Complete Collection (Serials 1-5) (15 page)

“That’s a lie,” Clark said, defensively. “You didn’t fight. You stepped into the flames.”

“I fought!” Lucifer suddenly shouted, the sound echoing off the trees. There was no way Camille and Zarachiel hadn’t heard it. Clark hoped they ran from it, but he knew they would never leave him behind.

“You didn’t fight because you hated yourself and you hated Hell even more,” Clark said, hoping to distract Lucifer. “You weren’t a bad guy then. That’s why you didn’t fight. You were good enough that you wanted to die and un-become something you hated.”

“You don’t believe that,” Lucifer said, glaring at Clark. The conversation felt too personal, too intimate. As if they were lovers discussing their passions in front of a crowd.

“I did,” Clark said, quieter this time. “I liked you, Lucifer. Fate made you what you are, put you in that position. You told me once that it was everyone else who made you the devil, that you were just dealt a shitty hand. You played your part to an extent, but you heart wasn’t in it. You did just what you had to in order to keep up the pretenses of Hell and the fallen. You weren’t all bad back then.”

“And now?” Lucifer asked, smiling once again. “And now am I all bad?”

“Yes,” Clark answered simply.

“
Good
.”

The word was final, ending the conversation. Clark knew what it meant. He jerked forward, slashing at Lucifer with his knives, but the angel was already gone, faded into the night above their heads with a powerful gust of wind that rustled even the thickest of tree limbs around them.

Clark spun just in time to see the demon launching itself at Liam, latching onto the Keeper’s throat and sinking its jagged, crooked teeth into Liam’s flesh. Both of them screamed, the demon’s sound shrill in the night but filled with ecstasy. It sent goose bumps pricking along Clark’s arms as he raced over, his breath caught somewhere in the back of his throat. He launched himself into the fight, his knives chinking off the demon’s hard scales, while Liam tried to wrench himself free of its grasp.

Liam fell to the ground, dragging the demon and Clark down with him. They rolled a distance away, down the ridge, crashing through the brush with an almighty clamor. Clark held on tight, his hands slick with Liam’s warm blood. A small sapling snagged around his boot and tore his grip from the demon. Stumbling to his feet, he dove back down the ridge after them, letting his momentum carry him. Roots snagged on his boots, making him scramble the rest of the way on his knees. At the bottom, he pushed himself to his feet and tightened his grip on the blades. He spotted Liam easily enough through the thin trees; his body was laid out at odd, deformed angles from his hard tumble down the ridge. Clark hurried over, limping slightly, his eyes roving around Liam’s still form until they caught on the impossible bend in his neck. Liam’s eyes stared up into the sky, unblinking and unseeing.

The demon was gone.

Clark spun around, his eyes searching the darkness for signs of the creature.

Leaves rustled behind him. Thinking it was the demon, Clark spun back around, his knives hissing through the air. Instead, he met flesh and bone, slicing a thin gash across Liam’s chest, where he stood much too close to Clark.

Clark stumbled back. Horror crept up his toes, turning his legs to immobile weights binding him to the earth. His spine turned to a single column of ice.

“Dude…” he started, but the word dried out in his mouth when Liam looked up from the gash. His eyes were black like the demon’s. Long, curving fingers that looked nothing like Liam’s human hands reached up and touched the blood dripping from the cut. He brought his saturated fingers to his mouth, tasting them all too intimately.

“Holy shit,” Clark said, stepping back again. The demon had clearly possessed Liam somehow. What used to be the Keeper advanced, pushing Clark back up the ridge in retreat.

“H-holy shit,” Liam mimicked cocking his head as if he were testing out the words. His voice was different, higher pitched and scratchy, like an old record skipping. “H-holy shit. Hol-ly shit. Holy s-shit.”

Liam flashed forward, moving so fast that his edges here blurred. Clark didn’t stand a chance. Pain seared across his chest. Thinking he was done for, Clark fell to his knees, gasping as he went down and clutching at his chest. But upon looking down, Clark realized it was merely a scratch, placed in the exact same spot and length as where Clark had cut Liam. He looked up at the demon, who smiled down at him. The scratch burned like acid had been dripped into the cut. A silent scream filled Clark’s mouth as the pain mounted inside him, his blood boiling and his innards frying.

“What did you do?” Clark wheezed.

The demon craned Liam’s neck, cocking his head so far to the left that his neck bent and cracked. “What…did…you…do?”

Clark doubled forward, feigning weakness. He felt it sure enough, but he hoped adding a little extra drama would give him an advantage. The demon crouched down, folding Liam’s body into a tight ball. Clark took his chance, lurching forward and colliding with the demon at a full charged head ram. They catapulted end over end farther down the ridge. Clark hit trees as they crashed down, his body bending and breaking around them, but he held tight to Liam, his fingers digging into the skin that had once belonged to his friend.

When they stopped moving, Clark had the good luck of ending up sprawled across Liam’s massive chest. Scrambling, he set up, clutching both knives in his hands. He raised them above Liam, who remained unmoving beneath Clark. The demon’s excited black eyes stared up at Clark, a slow smirk spreading across its face.

“Holy shi-it,” it hissed, its voice skipping again.

“Clark!” Camille screamed from somewhere above him.

Clark didn’t dare look toward her voice. He wasn’t that stupid. He stared down at the demon and adjusted his grip on the knife. It would have to be a solid blow to get the blades past Liam’s sternum and ribs. He had no clue how to kill a demon, but stabbing Liam’s heart would be a start.

No
, Clark thought,
this isn’t Liam anymore. Liam is dead.

“Clark!” It was Zarachiel shouting this time. Clark heard their crashing approach, heard Camille in the air above him. “Don’t do it!”

“Don’t d-do it!” the demon mimicked, drawing its tongue across Liam’s lips. “D-don’t do it, Clark!” It sounded just like Liam, but Clark didn’t let himself falter.

“Stop!”

Clark didn’t. The scratch across his chest flared with heat and pain. He would pass out soon, and only he knew that Liam was possessed. So he drove the curving knives deep into Liam’s chest, and as the Keeper’s bright red blood spread across his chest, Clark fell forward, blackness closing in around his mind. But not before he saw Liam’s eyes return to their normal chocolate brown before becoming wide and unstaring.

Dead. Hopefully, for real this time.

“I had to,” Clark gurgled before passing out completely on top of Liam, feeling the pulsing heat inside his chest. A knock-knock came from inside him, like someone else was home. “I ha-had to.”

Chapter Ten

“C
lark!”

Clark woke, opening his eyes to a slinking darkness. But it wasn’t the room that was dark, he was. The inky, breathing blackness splintered and slunk back from his vision, clearing it so that he saw he was in a brightly lit cell inside the compound’s dungeon. He groaned through the soreness and pain.

“Clark! Look at me!”

Like his spine was a rusted rod of crumbling metal, Clark achingly turned his head on the slab of rock he laid on. Maya was crouched outside the door to his cell, her face split by large metal bars. “Maya?” he asked. A fog resided in his mind now, slowing his thoughts and causing Maya’s face to flicker from flesh to bone, revealing her skull underneath, and back again. He blinked to clear his vision, but it didn’t help to clear away the flickering images. She looked like a nightmare before him. “What’s happened to me?”

“You’re in jail for killing Liam.”

“But he was a demon…” Clark mumbled, trying to focus on the flesh version of Maya’s face.

“There weren’t any demons there, Clark. Zarachiel and Camille are searching all over as we speak, but they can’t find any sign that anything was out there.”

“Lucifer and a demon…the demon possessed Liam…I had to kill hi-him.”

“What are you saying? Are you sure it was Lucifer?” Maya sounded terrified, her voice rushed and whispered, as if she was worried someone would hear them. “You need to tell me what happened. Clark…” Maya leaned forward and gripped the bars. “Clark, they’re already talking about execution.”

“But the demon scratched me…on my chest.”

“You’re not hurt. There isn’t a scratch on you.”

Clark looked down, his fingers slowly moving to his chest. His clothes were coated in dried mud and leaves. The memories of tonight were already fuzzy and confusing. Had he killed Liam or the demon? It was all slipping away from him. Or was being
pulled
away.

He pushed aside the material of his shirt, looking down at his pale, unscratched chest. There was nothing there, yet he burned. His chest felt like a bomb had gone off inside it, his skin too sore even to breathe deeply. Something clicked in his brain.

“Ho-holy shit.” He looked over at Maya, fear mingling with the fog in his mind. He only saw her skull and the pulsing blood vessels over it. “I think it’s in me now.”

“What?” the skull asked, the holes where its eyes should have been went wide. “What do you mean, Clark?”

“The de-demon. It’s in me now. Get…” Clark struggled with each word, his thoughts vaporizing into a dark void with snarling, gnashing teeth. The dark—the dark inside him—was alive and taking him over. Before he sank away, he forced the words up his throat and over a tongue that he could barely control.

“Get he-help. Hu-hurry.”

FULL OF THE DEVIL

A DAYS OF NEW SERIAL

VOLUME II

MEG COLLETT

Chapter One

B
eing possessed by a demon wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Clark curled up on the rock slab in his cell deep in the Descendants’ dungeon, where water plunk-plunked into shallow metal basins and rats tended to scurry to and fro in the shadows. His cell was two long paces wide and three long. He’d counted. Hundreds of times. The ledge he slept on had one threadbare blanket for when the nights were extra drafty. In the corner was a short latrine that needed a ton of bleach dumped over it. Clark wanted to think he’d been in a worse place, but, well, he honestly hadn’t.

His body ached, especially in his chest, where the little demon bastard had taken up residence and was roasting marshmallows over a flaming bonfire. Being possessed was like heartburn, only ten million times worse. There was a fire inside Clark that fevered his insides but made him chill on the outside, shivering beneath his thin Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt and tattered jeans. His teeth chattered even with the measly blanket wrapped tightly around his quaking body. He wore no socks; there was nothing to soften the icy bite of the stone floor. It had been only a week since his arrest, but he felt a hollow, quivering hunger in the pit of his belly that he’d never experienced before. Sweat dotted his brow; his eyes watered from the aches; his lips cracked and bled.

It was hell. And Clark had never hated Lucifer so much.

The demon stirred, stretching inside Clark until his ribs bowed and cracked. He tossed over onto his other side, scraping his sensitive skin on the gritty rock. He groaned and cursed, clenched his teeth, and tried to ride it out. But the demon wiggled inside him, churning his stomach with nausea. The shivering stopped abruptly, and sweat dripped into his eyes. His fingers twitched, but he hadn’t wanted to move them. A laugh bubbled up in his throat, but Clark had nothing to laugh about.

“N-no,” Clark said, but the sound was more like a whimper. The demon was right there, right next to Clark, and it was a battle of wills to see who would take control now.

Yes
, the demon answered. “Y-yes.”

Clark clamped his mouth shut, but it was too late. He’d lost the battle, and the guard had heard. He shifted on his stool and looked over his shoulder into the cell. He was an older Descendant with not much fight left in him, judging from the anxious hand on his gun and the tremble in his double chins. His gut was paunchy and pressing against the weak buttons of his special police force uniform.

When the guard saw that Clark was awake, he jumped to his feet and shouted, “Bailey! Someone get Bailey!”

“Sh-shut u-up.”

The blackness splintered into the demon’s vision, coloring the edges of its eyes so that it only saw a pinprick of light in front of it, signaling that it finally had full control of the angel mutt’s body. The demon stretched its arms and legs with a heady moan. The guard backed away from the cell as he pulled his gun and pointed the trembling barrel at the demon, who stalked off the slab and slithered up to the cell’s door. It wrapped its hands around the bars and raked its fingernails down the metal.

The guard flinched away from the excruciating sound, and the demon laughed.