HEY

SUP

HI

YO

~There is something I see in you. It might kill me. I want it to be true.

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*imagine everything past this point is in Italics because Wattpad hates me lololol*

I was lying down on a hospital bed, but there were no bandages on my exposed arms. Everything was blurry, spinning. I couldn't move and my panic lodged in my throat. I was unable to speak. Barely able to breathe. Everything inch of my body felt so weak and heavy.

"YOU DID WHAT?"

A golden haired man with crystal blue eyes appeared at the far end of the room in a fiery blaze that he strode out of. Devin. Death appeared too, hot on Devin's tail–literally, since there was a tail like an arrowhead on fire swinging in the air behind Devin. Devin's features were a little sharper than usual, like he were carved of stone, and it was clear he was losing control of his true form.

Devin's jaw tightened when he saw me, and his features hardened into a scowl almost worse than Death's.

"You MORON!" Devin spun around and grabbed Death by the throat. "I should cage you for the rest of the century! Do you have any idea what a hex of that capacity could have done to her?"

"She is my property." Death said this around lengthening fangs, visibly straining, even though Devin was somewhat smaller than him in stature. Death's neck began to smoke, burning where Devin's fingers curled around it. The smell of burned flesh permeated the room. "And I made the decision... for her," Death continued. "There's nothing...nothing you can do about it. She signed... the Order. She's not your...pet. She's mine..."

Devin dropped Death and shoved him away. Along the edges of his clothes, a halo of fire had formed. "You really have lost your damn mind. You've given her too much of your soul for this!" His features were reddening as he turned back to me. He showed Death his back and ran his hands over his face. "Right when we've discovered what she is, you are giving her up. And for what?"

"To protect her," Death answered, and Devin only glared scathingly. Death adjusted his leather jacket, which had been shifted by his struggle with Devin, and fixed a strand of wavy hair that had abandoned his unkempt fohawk. "I'm not giving her up. For now, this is the best option for her. Now if I leave to find Ahrimad by myself, she will not find a way to follow me."

"That's not a good enough motivation to do what you did to her. Look at her. Her eyes are open and she can't move." He glanced over my frame. "She's shaking. She has a fever, too."

"As if you care." Death narrowed his mismatched eyes at the florescent lights above him and they dimmed significantly. "You despise the mortals more than anyone I know. The only reason you even interacted with her in the first place was to make sure we had her trust."

"She's an amusing little thing," Devin justified. "It's feasible that she's grown on me."

"Yeah, sure. Anyway, she's strong, she will get through the side effects," Death said. "This was a risk I needed to take. Soon the hex will fully settle in and she will be back to normal. It is in her nature to interfere. And with more of my soul within her, she could be even more defiant than usual. Taming that part of my soul in her will take some tweaking in her every day life. You know that."

"The warlock said it himself, she supposed to go through the portal with you," Devin reminded him, boiling at the surface. "You might not succeed if you do not match that fate. And then what? And, not to mention, Faith will no longer be under your protection in the human world. She will be under Leo's, or another Reaper. They could fail to protect her. Could you bear that?"

"She would also be watched by hundreds of demons and a powerful ward," Death answered, crossing the room to my bed. He lifted has hand as if to run the tips of his gloved hand down my cheek, but dropped it. "She will never be alone wherever she goes."

Devin crossed his thick arms over his chest. Silence stretched. "What happened to her that lead to you making such a rash decision?"

A muscle ticked in Death's jaw. "I released an apparition into the gym to test her abilities. Then I left. I didn't like the outcome." He crossed his arms, mirroring Devin's position, and said nothing more.

"Next time don't give me a novel for an explanation," Devin said sarcastically. "If it were anyone else who has ostracized a mortal in my territory, without my permission, they'd be punished beyond your darkest dreams."

"Yikes," Death muttered.

"Lengthen the novel," Devin growled.

"I wanted to see how Faith would react to a fabrication of my father and Ahrimad," Death reluctantly continued. "Since we have reason to believe they are working together, it seemed like the worst scenario she would ever encounter in the other world. Every passing day is a day to their advantage. I wanted to speed up her lessons."

"Right," Devin said faintly. "Atticus was the one who sent your soul to Limbo and freed Ahrimad. Surely that was Malphas' bidding, since Atticus is practically his slave. Now explain the injuries on Faith."

"It was just supposed to be a test," Death explained. "According to Glenn, she just fucking stood there as the apparition appeared. She just stood there in shock. And the apparition.... was somehow able to hurt her. As you are well aware, apparitions cannot physically touch someone. And yet she was attacked as if my father was really there. But there was no scent of him. No trace of him. Only magic. Black magic. Which means someone conjured up magic and made the apparitions trickeries real. Someone tried to hurt her."

"And did you trace who it was conjured by?" Devin inquired, his eyes sliding to me.

"I didn't have to." Death ground his fangs and then pointed at my chest, where I was still held motionless on the bed. "It was that thing trapped in the pendant. I know it. The pendant was glowing when I found her, burning to life as if it were thrilled she was dying. If I could get a hold of that demon inside, I would crunch its essence between my fangs."

"It's been feeding off of her," Devin guessed.

"That could be the price of its protection," Death agreed. "All I know for sure is that it wanted her dead." I'd never seen Death look so furious that sections of his tanned face were blackening, refining him into a creature with shaped features too perfect and exotic to be human.

"I expect the demon knew of Ace's so called prophecy," Death continued. "It must have heard that we would use the pendant to assist us. If Faith had died wearing the pendant, the demon would have escaped. Until I figure out how to remove the pendant from her, until I figure out how to control it...she stays away from our world. With more of my soul in her, and in hell of all places– a magnet for demonic power, I fear she would let the pendant control her more. This is the only option I see fit."

Devin nodded, looked back at the door from which they came, and then stalked around my hospital bed to stand close to Death. "You can only bring a human back so many times before there are other consequences that you haven't factored in," he said in a low voice. "You know they're always watching us. Especially the girl."

"What's your point?" Death grated out.

"My point is," Devin began in a frightening voice, clearly tired of Death's attitude, "that the Elders could begin influencing her if you are not careful. They will want someone with her strength on their side. And I won't be happy if that happens, or if the Elders contact me because another one of your poorly thought out actions. I behaved for a long time to get my two hours on earth every day. Regardless of our alliance, you'd be smart not to fuck that up for me. Do you understand?"

Death's jaw clenched. "Don't threaten me, old man."

"Don't give me a reason to, Alex." Devin glanced over at me before stepping back away from us. "I really hope you know what you're doing–"

INTERRUPTION: *imagine everything past this point is NOT in Italics, we are out of the memories. Sorry, Wattpad's format hates me and wouldn't allow italics.*

I felt yanked back. Everything whirled around me in a jumble of colors and sounds that vanished at once.

My entire body jolted forward a little, as if I'd been thrown back into my body, and I snapped back into the present. There I was, crouched over Ace's body with my fingers like hooks curled tightly around his throat. White glowed from my fingers, burning into Ace's flesh. Ace's expression was trapped somewhere between terror and fury as he strained to get me off of him. If my mind were at a deadlock between what I wanted to do and what I didn't, perhaps I would have let go of his throat.

We know what we want, a voice said to me.

I smiled. My muscles tensed as I gripped Ace's throat harder. I felt so powerful. I couldn't possibly let it go.

"Faith," Ace choked out, helpless beneath me. "This isn't....you!"

"I want to know how to destroy Death," I demanded and my voice sounded too seductive to be my own. "You will tell me how to destroy him, or I will find a way to destroy you."

"Even I don't know how to destroy a creature of his competence."

"Then you know how to wound him!" I poured more energy into him. "Tell me, or else I'll cut your throat open!"

"Ma cherie..."

This was Ace. Ace was a friend...and I was torturing him. How had I even gotten there, strangling him? One moment, I'd been sitting in that chair and he'd given me the concoction... And then the memories. Death. Death. That bastard had taken away my memories.

He doesn't care about usss. He uses us. Everyone uses ussss.

"Everyone uses me," I grit out. "He uses me. You used me..."

Behind you.

My attention split to a new in the room to an outwardly undetected enemy in the shadows. Trixie. Ace's bodyguard looking chick with wild hair and a pixie face. Time seemed to slow as she reached for something at her side, but surely she was moving faster than any normal person could have comprehended. Her fingers expertly flung something sharp and jagged in my direction. It split into four smaller weapons that seemed to momentarily transform into small steel creatures in the air.

I threw myself off of Ace and dodged most of the weapons, except for one, which curved towards me like it had a tracker and sliced a huge chunk of my thick black hair. I clutched the missing hair with a gasp.

"You...bitch!" I shrieked.

I rolled onto the balls of my feet and faced off with her. For a sliver of a second, she stared at me in shock before she finally pulled her gun. But I was quicker and maneuvered outside of her aim again, lunged for one Ace's shelves, and hurled one of Ace's potions her way. The bottle shattered mid air as Trixie cracked another bullet. The flask of dark liquid burst with a hiss, crackling like pop rocks as it hit her skin. She dropped the gun. Her skin erupted into small welts. As she screamed, I kept moving. I vaulted over a piece of furniture, got a foot up on Ace's palm reading table, leapt, rotated in mid-air, and slammed my foot into the side of Trixie's head so hard that I heard something crack. I landed like a cat in front of her, grabbed Trixie's dagger from her belt, and dug it to her throat enough to draw blood. She froze.

Kill her. Yesss. My teeth ground together. Kill her! Do it now!

No. This wasn't right. This wasn't me. In that moment, I was aware that my conscious had diverged into two sides. One side didn't want to hurt anyone, and the other side did. It really, really did.

"You attacked me as you were recovering your memories," Ace announced behind me. In one fluid moment, I grabbed another blade from Trixie's belt and turned back over my shoulder to point it at Ace, keeping the other blade to Trixie's throat.

"Your pendant," Ace continued rather calmly. "It used you to attack me. For the barracuda. It wants you to be strong to protect it. Let me take it from you, Faith. It will feed on you like a leech."

There were slashes all over Ace's clothes that I could vaguely remember putting there in fractions. I felt like Ace was in the here and now and I was hours behind, trying to catch up.

"It is using you right now," Ace said slowly, as if things would click within me.

In a moment of clarity, I found myself hyper aware of the necklace, scolding hot against my chest. There was a cobra wrapped around the pendant. Its tail was embedded into my skin, and I felt it merged with my blood. Suddenly every inch of me was a live wire ready to release my fury. A rage moved thickly in my blood. It blotched my vision with black dots. Ace wasn't the one I wanted to hurt. Neither was Trixie. No, I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt Death for what he did to me. I wanted to find him.

Find him. Find Death. Thiss warlock will not hurt you. He is ssscared of you.

I looked back up at Ace. "Take one step closer and I'll gut you. I'm leaving this place. And you're not going to follow me. And this pendant...it's mine."

"I think I liked you better when you were unaware of Death's soul in yours." Ace's features sharpened to anger. "That is not how this works, ma cherie. You cannot steal from me. Nobody steals from me. We had a deal. Your memories, for your pendant."

"Well, things have changed." I stared him down. "I've changed."

I didn't will it to come but suddenly it poured from me, lighting my veins like glow sticks and then shelling outwards in a blast past the blade pointed at Ace. The light blinded me, but I heard his body crash somewhere at the opposite side of the room.

Why stop there? The voice chided. You can do sssso much more damage to him.

My hand suddenly shook. It took everything in me to pull it back and let the energy disappear. I heard a scream. In my peripheral vision, Trixie had moved towards me, manic. I fought her off as if I'd predicted every one of her attacks, flipped her onto her back with all of my weight, and put her in a skilled headlock. Slowly, she went unconscious.

Sweat drained from my pores. I dropped Trixie and stood, finally peeling my eyes away from the tattoo. Ace's palm-reading room was in flames, from me, and Ace was nowhere in sight. I would leave Trixie and take her weapon belt.

White-hot pain jolted me into awareness. The barracuda around my bicep. It had disappeared. Now it was mere tattoo around my bicep. It was red and raw. Lions with daggers through their skulls. I felt nothing.

It was then that I stumbled back a little, disordered, and failing to catch my breath. Once again, I felt I had diverged into two different people and one side was dominating. Something was wrong. No, nothing was wrong.

We are being tracked. Find Death.

I tightened the weapon belt around my waist. Adrenaline danced in my veins.

"I'm sure he'll find me first," I said.

I took one last look at the burning room before fleeting into the dark streets of Chicago.

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