HAPPY BELATED HALLOWEEN, CUPCAKES!!! I AM CURRENTLY EATING TACO BELL. COULDN'T UPDATE ON THE 31ST BECAUSE OF COLLEGE BUT I WANTED TO GET SOMETHING UP! LOVE MY BABY CUPCAKES! <3

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            Since I left Ace's library, the feeling that I was being followed clung to my spine. It was uncomfortable but also electrifying in the sense I was now fully equipped to defend myself. I turned over my shoulder and sure enough, shadows by the hundreds were racing after me. They were a swarm, dashing between cars and civilians. They ran like dogs on their hands and feet and were cloaked with invisibility, but it flickered in and out like strobe lights, revealing a mix of beautiful faces, cold faces, pale, empty expressions and gapping mouths with yellow and black rotted teeth. They kept their distance behind me, never quite on my heels but close enough that I was running as fast as I could.

Death's demonsss.

I ran with my emotions and my heart could barely keep up. I felt betrayed and angry but that was as deep as my feelings went. That was as deep as a force within me would allow. I felt an inner turmoil between hating him and hurting him, and hating him and being hurt myself. The hate was being fed and whenever I resisted the hate, it grew stronger, like a plague with its own agenda.

Death had no right to rip away my memories of him and the supernatural world. It was heartless and cruel. He'd dropped me in the blink of an eye and left me alone and vulnerable instead of helping me get stronger. He could have trained me harder. Pushed to help me defend myself. He was a selfish bastard. I was just a possession to him. To him, I had no say in my own life, when to him, it was all his. But that was all just a sliver of the rage within me. The rest of it was raw and had no particular source.

I wasn't the only one who was mad. They were. The voice. The pendant.

I felt myself getting warmer with rage and sprinted in any direction. I decided to get off the ground and scale up a building by using a fire escape. I sprang onto a dumpster, pushed off, and hoisted myself up the fire escape like an acrobat. I scaled the fire escape with an upper body strength I once lacked. My arms burned, my fingers ached, and my heart hurt, resting the burst of energy within me. But my body kept adjusting, pushing forward, as if the barracuda around my bicep was feeding me an endless, impossible amount of strength. Strangely enough, the shadows didn't follow me up there. And, I noticed, when I looked down past the railing of the metal stairs, whatever shadows still lingered below, darted away into puffs of smoke, as a harsh wind blew my hair to the side and the moon bowed behind a large black cloud.

I turned and hurled myself up onto the roof from and dropped down from a short wall. My feet slapped against the tar material on the ground and I took off. Not out of fear, but out of a bizarre delight of being chased again. I ignored the tightness in my throat and the icy air burning my face and raced forward. I reached the end of a roof, climbed up onto the short brick wall on the other side, vaulted off it with adrenalin charged in my veins. I struck the concrete of the adjacent building's roof and rolled forward to soften the blow. My hands trembled and stung from the impact, bleeding from the pieces of skin had peeled back from my palms. They were healing at a leisure pace.

A distinct sound darted my gaze away from my hands. It was a low, taunting whistle.

I followed the noise and walked to the ledge of the roof, gripping the dagger that I'd stolen from Trixie's belt. I looked down into the ally below, a vicious grin rocking the corners of my lips.

There was another fire escape on the side of this apartment building. I dropped down onto the top grate of the escape route and leaned over the railing. I couldn't see much as rain misted my eyelashes and a haze curled over the pavement of the dimly lit ally below. Still, I could hear heavy footsteps echoing the rusty metal grates below. The steps were slow and meticulous, as if the person had all the time in the world. I had a feeling that they could have made no sound at all, akin to the sly grace of a cat slinking behind that dumpster to hook a mouse. And then, subsequent to own internal assumption, the footsteps made no sound at all, or maybe they'd just stopped moving all together.

I climbed back onto the roof and paced around it, waiting impatiently, grinding my teeth together. I wandered into the center of the roof and planted my feet. The rain curiously slowed. The hair on the back of my neck pricked and my breath came out in cold puffs. My fingers curled tighter around the dagger and I grinned again. Not even the voice in my head made a sound as I slowly turned my head to the side, peering out the corner of my eyes. A tall figure stood behind me.

"Cupcake."

"Death," I said.

I spun and hooked my blade as I turned. He was gone.

A quick movement made my eyes darted to the right. I found Death a dozen feet away, nonchalantly poking his tongue in and out the flame of his lighter. His tight, long-sleeved black cotton t-shirt and black leather pants hugged his well-built frame. His hair lacked any sort of styling with gel, leaving black curly hair untamed down the center of his skull. And his eyes, iridescent and narrowed with cynicism, were were two pistols aimed at me in the night. He soaked in my pajamas–which I'd completely forgotten I was wearing, and then remained fixated at my bicep, where the barracuda stained my skin. Then he looked at the pendant around my neck, with its snake tail embedded into my skin. By the time our gazes met again, I knew he knew too much already. He knew it all, perhaps.

Death flicked off his lighter. Finally, he asked, "Did you just try to kill me?"

"I tried to slit your throat," I clarified, running my finger along the edge of the blade.

Amusement danced in his feline eyes. "Flirting will get you nowhere with me."

"I'm not flirting."

"Whatever you say." He began to circle me from a distance, but I fell in step so that I was circling with him, countering his predator dance. "You've been a very bad girl, cupcake."

I arched a brow. "Have I?"

He narrowed his eyes. "I won't hold you accountable for your meeting with Ace, but it seems you've caused damage to his property. Word travels fast in the supernatural world. It's already been reported to the big H-E double hockey sticks that you've set his library on fire. Do you know what that means?"

"He's burnt to a crisp?" I jested with a smile.

His mouth twitched. No smile. Then he snarled a little. "It means I'm in a shit ton of trouble, pumpkin pie."

My fingers gripped my weapon with ferocity. I imagined carving his pretty face like a pumpkin. "Maybe you shouldn't have touched our memories then."

Our circling stopped. Death watched me more carefully than ever, especially my weapon and my whitening knuckles constricted around the handle. His head tilted to the side; too, as if he were listening to something, and suddenly, his gaze landed somewhere around me. I felt an odd twinge between my eyes and I winced ever so slightly.

Hurt him, the voice commanded within me. Wherever it had gone, it was back, and more demanding than ever before. Frightened, even. And that was something I had not expected at all.

"You're letting it take advantage of you," Death said. His shoulders were tenser; as if he had spotted something that he planned to pounce on. "I can see it feeding off of you. It's using you like puppet."

"It's trying to help me," I said with certainty, although I heard a sliver of doubt in voice.

He will ruin you, the voice reminded me. All he knows issss destruction. Don't let him suppress me. I am on your ssside.

"If there were a way to kill you," I said, "I'd commit to it now. But you really are an undying freak of a nature, aren't you?"

He flinched. He must have. I'd blinked to quick to catch it full. The reaction was quicker than a blink of my eye and then his features melted to stone. There was no way that a being as cold as him could be effected by a few damaging words, right? My pendent burned. Death clasped his wrist behind his back and stood with his feet shoulder width apart. Perhaps it would have intimidated me, as if I cared.

"Here's what's going to happen," Death said in a low, commanding voice. "I'm taking you back to hell. Then I'm going to rip off that little bitch around your neck that's filling your head with silly words. You can come willingly, or I can drag you kicking and screaming."

"Oh yeah?" I inquired, filing my nails.

"Yeah," he growled, furiously that I wasn't paying him any mind. "Where did you get that nail filer?"

I shrugged.

"We can have a discussion there," Death continued. "In Hell, in private, and away from the humans."

I looked up from my nails. "No."

He stared at me for a long time. His eyes glimmered with anger. A million thoughts were swarming his brain and only one surfaced. "What exactly is your intention with all of this?" he demanded, motioning to the roof. "Drawing me up here. Surely the pendant knows of my immense strength and capabilities. And you know only one of us is undead. That leaves me with the question, who exactly am I really talking to right now? Faith, or the demon? Because Faith doesn't seem to be entirely here at the moment."

Hurt him, the voice whispered, awakened again. I flinched at the burst of heat that came from the pendant. Lisssten to me.

"What is your point?" I asked Death, focusing on him as if he would reveal something I couldn't quite understand.

"First, your demon tried to kill you in my training room." He arched a pierced eyebrow. "Now your demon is trying to get me to kill you. You can't hurt me with that weapon, Faith. Do you understand that?"

A part of me truly listened to him, but another part of me disposed of this information as if it were nonsense. Again, I felt at war with myself, but I could not hold on to the part of me that felt true.

"Then there must be the another way to hurt you," I concluded.

His beautifully constructed facade cracked a little. A mistake, on his part. I could feel the demon come alive within me, capturing Death's vulnerability. It stirred, and the pendant heated. Death caught his slip, smothered it, and spoke. "You don't mean that, Faith. This isn't you. Let me take you somewhere safe, where I can help you."

"My intention is to hurt you," I repeated.

"Very well, then. I see you're not snapping out of this yet. Kicking and screaming back to hell, it is." His head dipped down. He looked at me like a villain with a secret with his fangs flashing in the moonlight. Somehow, without him moving an inch, I felt his breath on the back of my neck, and his voice came with it, smooth and deep, like a dark melody that matched his rich laugh. My spine arch forward and my feet felt locked in place. "I'll play," he growled at my ear.

I spun again with my weapon, metal slicing into cold air. Gone. He was gone again but his scent lingered. He was wearing his normal cologne but tonight it was overpowering. My senses were sensitive. My vision pulsed in sync with my heartbeat. My chest heaved with each violent tug of air into my lungs. For the first time ever, Death had multiplied in my presence, just like Leo had. I'd heard Death's voice behind me, and yet there he was, standing in front of me.

Now they were both gone.

"Thank you, but once again, my beard doesn't need a trim, I just had one today," Death declared to my left. He leaned back against a fixture on the roof with his muscular arms crossed over his chest. "I would come willingly with me now. It will save you plenty of humiliation." When I didn't speak, he continued. "I've never seen you so vulnerable. To let a demon take advantage of your emotions is dangerous. This is why we have to practice your emotional restraint."

"It's always my fault, isn't it?" I sneered. "You don't even know what you're talking about. I don't feel any emotions except for anger. Anger towards you. I've never felt so free. Free from the leash you looped around my neck. You, Death, can go fuck yourself!"

He stared at me unblinking, mouth open a little, catlike eyes brightening ever so slightly. In that moment, they were his weapons. He breathed like the dead and took a step towards me, too. "I changed my mind. Let's settle this now."

I readied myself. "Let's."

I jumped into it first. He expected each attack, anticipated it faster than humanly possible, allowing each assault and then dodging them accordingly. My movements with my blade started to get faster and faster. I reached for another blade in Trixie's belt and twirled it around my hand as I pressed towards him on offence. We fell into a rhythm, a routine as if we'd fought like this many times before. But I was able to break it and aimed for his head, giving him little room to dodge.

Death lashed out with his arm and trapped both daggers in front of his face with massive, black claws that extended from his fingertips. They had shredded apart his leather gloves like they were made of tissue paper. We remained stuck in the air, my daggers aimed at his head and his claws keeping the blades from his face, staring at one another. He, for one, looked back at me with wide eyes. It was the most surprise I'd ever seen him display. He knew he was impossible for me to take him on as efficiently as I was, with the little training we had.

Then his eyes flicked to my bicep. "It is a barracuda," he speculated, and by the time he flicked his attention back to me, any trace of that rare panic was gone. "And to think I was almost stunned by your sudden skill."

"I stole it," I said with delight, as if, for a moment, I was not mad at him, or influenced by the pendant, and was trying to please him. "From Ace. Then, as you've heard, I lit his palm reading room on fire."

Death rolled his eyes. "Give a girl a toothpick and a freaky bracelet, and she thinks she can roast a warlock like a marshmallow. Ace isn't flammable, you know. Believe me, I've tried. Anyway."

Death shoved me back and the fight began again. Where I was furious and motivated, he was irritatingly relaxed. Suddenly, he began to fight back and took me down with one quick, hard hit to my neck with the side of his hand. I collapsed to the ground, wheezing for air.

The next time I was up, Death was mine. I struck him hard in the solar complex, and managed a deep sliced into his arm with my dagger. He stumbled back a few feet. I think his shock that I'd hit got caught him off guard, and even though he didn't have to breathe, he must have been fixed in the routine of it, because he'd actually wheezed.

"Need a break?" I asked, flipping a piece of hair out of my face and bringing my fists up to my face. "You can go get another nose piercing and then come back."

"Or I can just give you one right now." He lifted two fingers, inclined them towards himself, and gnashed his fangs together. "Come here, cupcake."

I did. I charged. He threw up his forearms like an offensive lineman blocking a defensive back. We were close to the edge of the roof. I took my left hand, and held onto one of his arms. Then, I used my right right hand to strike his elbow joint, and then his neck, as he'd struck mine. I slipped to the side, pushed his elbow down and away, caught his head, and used my strength to drop my weight, flip his weight over, and roll us both back onto the ground. This left us with him beneath me and me on top.

But that didn't last long. Death expertly moved out from beneath me enfolded me in his massive arms. My weapon was gone again. He crushed me against him and held me down with his weight, his hips digging into mine. My immediate instinct was to wrap my legs around him and squeezed him with my thighs hard as I could. From an outside perspective, it would have looked like we were hugging. But I could feel my ribs cracking one by one and his laughs were choked out in small gasps of discomfort that most likely didn't bother him at all.

The barracuda took over. I wiggled beneath him, elbowing until I had room, and then pulled out one of my legs from beneath him and kicked him hard in the balls.

He washed-out like a ghost and crippled. I used my impossible strength to shove his heavy weight off of me, reached for my weapon on the ground, and wrestled him onto his back. Our faces were close. He looked down at his chest and so did I, where my fingers were white knuckle against the hilt of Trixie's dagger. The dagger that was now wedged deep into Death's heart.

"If only," he whispered. Suddenly his muscles tightened and his head thrashed back against the roof and the muscles in his neck strained. His were rapidly dilating, and then his irises burned greater than ever before, two shades of green. The black, intricate lines around his snaked further around his sharp featured, growing more prominent and darker as his skin stained black as night. "Fuck, I can't stop it, get off!" he growled and pushed me away. "Run!"

Adrenalin pumped feverously my veins. Death was writhing in his own skin, laughing, joints were popping, his clothes stretched and his features became even more polished. I scrambled to get onto my feet, but made the mistake of looking back. Whatever was in Death's place were much more exotic and terrifying than he ever was. He wasn't completely transformed, so some of his face was splotchy with a mixture of tan and coal black skin. The monster stared at me and then lunged forward and grasped my ankle, talons digging into my flesh. I was yanked onto the ground. He slinked on top of me like a big, muscular cat. I couldn't see Death in his eyes, just like when his body had been taken over by Ahrimad.

Except this time, nobody was taking over Death's body. This time, he was just weaker than the monster within him.

I slammed my fist into Death's concrete features. My hand must have shattered because my breath caught in my throat in a choked sob, but I was able to ignore it because of the adrenalin thriving in my veins. I opened my hand and bones in my fingers that had broken slid back into place. Death's skin began to rid of the black discolorations, as if he were snapping out of it, but then the blackness returned, and his mismatched eyes became firestorms. I hit him again. He pinned me down and roared into my face with a mouthful of fangs. This wasn't Death. I found my fear, abandoned at the bottom of my soul, and it came back at full force. He would kill me.

Let him, the voice said.

I panicked. Suddenly, there was a clear disconnect between the voice and myself. I didn't want to die. I never wanted to die. Death was right about the pendant. "No!" I cried out.

Yess, the voice encouraged.

Death's monster form stared down my pendant. He seemed to be listening to it, too. Unexpectedly, he swiped at it with his claws. Blood sprayed out.

Stop him!

"STOP!" I shouted.

Death's half-monster form stared at me. Blinked. Then he swiped at the pendant again. This time, he cut the tip of the snake pendant free from my skin, and something shifted within me.

The voice roared in my skull. KILL HIM!

My body was a pawn. I was a warrior again and wrestled the monster off of claws, fangs, all, and ripped the dagger from his chest to hurt him again. He was more powerful and disarmed me almost immediately. The pendant triggered my power; my light shot him directly in the leg and the monster cried out. Then he grabbed me in a way that left me defenseless, his fingers crushing my bones, and tossed me like a rag doll. I hit the small wall at the edge of the roof with a sickening smack and rolled over it, off the ledge, dropping, dropping, luckily, but painfully, landing onto the top grate of the fire escape. White-hot pain sparked from my back, shoulder, my arm, and my wrist, which was bent at an awkward angle beneath me. Bile threatened to rise up in my throat. I was certain my arm was broken, my shoulder had popped out, and my wrist had broken like a toothpick. I clamped down on my bottom lip with my teeth. I tasted blood. Suddenly, the grate shifted. I stiffened. Something had broken loose from the old, rusted fire escape.

My body slid down as the grate shifted some more, until the fingers of my left hand, my good arm, latched into the gaps in the metal grate and held on. My legs dangled over the side of the fire escape. I screamed for help until my throat ran dry but the rain and thunder was louder than my cries.

I heard a growl over the torrent of water and cringed my neck to look up above me. Death was perched at the edge of the roof, staring down at me with those wicked eyes as if he were contemplating dropping down to eat me. He was transformed into something else, but wasn't completely in his beast mode, like he was in the D & S ballroom. Still, he looked more like a creature than a fallen or a faultless human, and his disposition was that of a jaguar's.

The monster watched me about to die like he was an impatient little bastard, talons tapped along the edge of the roof. He opened his mouth and hissed down at me.

"Feel free to snap out of it at any moment!" I shouted up to him.

It was pointless to ask for help. That wasn't Death. I looked down at the rusted, metal grate and a droplet of water hung to my nose. It was raining again. I was healing. I was healing, but I didn't have the strength to pull myself up. This was me. I was back. The pendant was no longer embedded into my skin, but it still hung around my neck. It was scolding hot. I was afraid to move. Tears filled my eyes. Mostly out of frustration. I wasn't afraid of dying. I'd done it before, and there was no way in hell I was dying by dropping off a rusted fire escape. The whole situation was so cliché and pathetic. I mean, come on!

Thirty seconds passed, and then a forty, and then a minute, and finally the pain started to pull back like the tide going out. I held on for dear life. My fingers were bleeding and my arm was beyond tired at this point. That was when the fire escape dipped to the left and tilted significantly. I was forced to swing my injured arm up from its awkward position and latch onto the grate. To say I screamed out in pain was an understatement. I felt like my arm had been ripped out of the socket and someone was jackhammering my shoulder blade and my wrist.

"Jesus...Christ!"

Two marked hands smacked down the grate in front of my face and the fire escape hit the point of no return. The grate let loose from the wall and I fell down into the alleyway. The ground came at me at full speed, but I never hit the pavement. I was caught around the waist and cradled to a strong chest. The hefty combat boots of my unlikely savior hit the pulverized a puddle in the alleyway. I looked up into two mismatched green eyes. He wasn't all there. The night was still washing away from his beautiful features.

"Wrong," he finally said. 

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