Azrael

Fifteen

Another wail cut through the air and this time it was accompanied by a blast so heavy it rattled the building down to its foundations. A troll burst through the door, bloody and bruised. He must have been one of those in the fight ring from the state his clothes and body were in.

"Wraith demon!" he shouted.

None of the creatures inside even batted an eye. It was almost as if they were too drunk to care, but Lisa knew better. The mention of the presence of a wraith demon would be enough to send shivers up the spines of anyone. Drunk or not. And even when the troll collapsed to the ground in a bloody heap, there was no reaction.

Lisa crossed the room to where Roman sat. "Don't you hear what's going on outside?"

"I'm not going outside." Roman's words slurred as he spoke. Lisa pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. Not that there was something the two of them could have done against a wraith demon, but there were civilians to be moved out of danger.

Lisa snapped her fingers before Roman's face. "Hey. Snap out of it."

"He can't help you."

The Mage across the table was looking somberly down at his own glass. He tapped its side. "It's all in the drink. No one here would even realise it if the world was ending outside."

"Okay." Lisa sat. "I'm Lisa."

"Dominic." The mage raised his glass to his lips and drained it.

"So why is it that you're not affected?"

"I've been drinking this stuff since the day this bar opened. I guess I'm kinda immune now. It's for their own protection anyway."

Lisa winced and rubbed her forehead. The pain from the chaos was growing in intensity, and she felt like her head was splitting open.

"You okay there?" Dominic asked, raising an eyebrow at her.

"I'm fine," Lisa replied with gritted teeth. "Won't the whole place come down on them then?"

"No. The wards around this place could hold through a nuclear explosion. Maybe."

The next scream that came was humanlike, and it prompted Lisa to race out of the bar. She stood frozen when she saw the battle going on above her.

Wraith demons were not only some of the worst of their kind but also the biggest. A full-grown one, like the one Lisa was seeing, could stand up to ten feet tall. Meanwhile, the distance from one wingtip to the other was as wide as twenty feet. This wraith demon flew high above the bar, and with each beat of its leathery wings, Lisa was almost pushed back by the buffeting wind. The building opposite had been levelled, and in its centre was a gaping hole where the demon had risen from the ground. What held Lisa's attention more was what the demon was fighting.

Wraith demons were rare, but Seraphim were even rarer. There were two of them, circling the wraith, majestic and deadly as birds of prey. Even Jupyter's extensive supernatural creature databases held only smidgets of information about these creatures. But one thing was certain, no other class of supernatural could match these creatures in agility or prowess.

Lisa could feel the wraith's anger and frustration, violating all her senses. Nothing else there, no fear, and no pain, even when one of the seraphs sliced through the air with its wings and cut through the demon's side.

"Help!"

The call wrenched her attention away from the sky and Lisa ran across the road to where she had heard it. Lisa pushed an emergency code into her watch which would alert Command to the situation. A building had collapsed over the location of the fight ring, trapping several underneath the rubble. She counted seventeen motionless bodies as she navigated her way to the caller, at the same time edging closer to that abyss the demon had come out from. Lisa kept her distance from it, making a wide arc to get to the injured creature. Her empathetic abilities sensed nothing in the vicinity, even when she reached the werewolf.

Lisa could tell it was a werewolf because he had somehow been caught mid-Change. The lower half of his body was a dark brown end of a werewolf whereas they were human from the chest up. The point where the two sides met just below his ribs was twisting and turning on the inside. It was as though he was trying to shift but something was blocking the Change over and over again.

It looked horribly painful.

"I can't shift," the werewolf huffed, grabbing a hold of Lisa's jacket and squeezing it. "Why can't I fully shift?" The werewolf didn't appear to be in any pain, only sounding confused. He had probably only screamed because he had been surprised by what his body had become.

Lisa was suddenly pushed onto her back by an unseen force, and a large chunk of rubble crashed into just where she had been. She hit her head on the pavement and her vision blurred, but only for a second.

Dominic slid down the rubble and helped her up. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

In her time with the werewolf, the wraith had been forced to the ground, one of its wings bearing large gashes and the other missing completely. Dominic stopped moving her when they were on flat ground once more, some distance from the wraith. "What were you doing there?"

"I was helping," Lisa replied, yanking her arm out of Dominic's grip.

He laughed as he wiped the sweat from his brow. "Do you even know what that is?" He pointed to the hole from which the demon had come. "That goes straight down to Hell."

"Hell? Are you kidding me?"

"Call it what you want. The world of the dead. Isn't that what you humans call it?" Dominic stared at her, now obviously confused. "You are human, aren't you?"

"I'm not," Lisa argued as she turned her focus back to the fight. The wraith was trying to crawl back into the hole but one of the seraphs was pulling back on its tail. "Why does it want to go back?"

"Greater demons do that when they weaken," Dominic explained. "Once they realise they are going to die. If it goes back in, it will heal and live to fight another day."

"There are people alive there!" Lisa tried to go but Dominic held her back.

"Anyone who was close when that pit opened is bound for death. Their minds are gone. Nothing you can do will help them." Dominic sounded truthful, and Lisa felt no dishonesty from him.

She went and stood by him. "How do you know all this?"

"It's not the first time I've seen one of these. But that," he pointed to the seraph who was currently raining down a wave of steel slices from a sword into the wraith. It was still crawling towards the hole. "Seraphim. I didn't even think those were real."

One more scream erupted from the wraith, and it fell still. The approaching sirens of ambulances and police cars rang through the air. Lisa felt a slight breeze at her side and when she looked, Dominic was gone. The earth rumbled, so hard that Lisa had to hold onto a nearby sign to keep her balance. One of the Seraphim stood by the corpse of the wraith and watched as the hole closed until there was nothing left but solid ground. It then started making its way towards Lisa.