[LNHY/ACRA] The Daily Super Short-Short Story #47

[Saxon Brenton]

The Daily Super Short-Short Story #47
 
A Devil Came Down to Georgia 29
 
Last time: Martin was lured into a trap by Lisa
 
     He knew it was counter-intuitive, but Martin found that being held 
up by the throat focused his mind amazingly.
     Delroy was dead, crushed to death from the looks of it - although 
that was now suspect - and he had forgotten it in a moment of lust. Lust!? 
He was supposed to be preparing to take vows, damn it! *How* could he have 
possibly been in such leave of his senses as to be overtaken with lust, 
of all things? Fortunately, supernatural intervention was a plausible 
explanation. It wasn't the first time that he'd had his mind mucked with, 
after all.
     He grabbed her own hand and began to crush it, hoping to loosen her 
grip about his windpipe before he lost consciousness. This did no good. 
Then a moment of inspiration hit him, and he realised that if he had 
control over his body shape, then he could create intake vents lower down 
on the back of his neck and pretend to be at her mercy. Slowly tuning 
blue might have been a nice touch as well, he thought as he began to feel 
revitalising air passing into his lungs again, but he had no idea how to 
carry that off subtly enough to make it credible.
     With an apparently weakening grip he gasped, "What did... you do... 
with Del?" As he did so, he allowed his attention to fuzz slightly, trying 
to recapture the impressions he was getting of the evil within her.
     "Killed him, of course," Lisa lied. "Broke him and then dumped some 
bricks on him to make it look like a wall collapsed." She shrugged. 
"Though why you're concerned about a human is beyond me."
     "Mutants and humans..." he began to protest. Hmmm, there seemed to be 
a... well, Martin was black and didn't really like terms like 'dark aura', 
but there was a definite pall of evil about her.
     "You're not a mutant, idiot," she said. "You're one of the Nightkind. 
Specifically, you're one of the Teenaged Giant Half-Breed Angels. Remember?"
     "Neph... lim?"
     "Ah, you remember," she said. "Yes, the Nephalim. Still in denial, are 
you? Look, you don't belong with the humans. The silly panics that they 
have about mutants is nothing compared to what they'd feel about entire 
races who are blood of their blood but are possessed of an alien soul. 
You especially wouldn't fit in one of their human religious groups. You 
wouldn't be happy, and when they discovered what you were, you wouldn't 
live for long. You belong with your own people; with us."
     He decided to fish for more information. "I'm not a..."
     "Tsk. You are in denial. Don't listen to the words then. Listen to 
your own dark soul." And then she reached out to him. Spiritually, that is.
     Martin whimpered as he felt it. It was an attraction to her. It was 
not, strictly speaking, sexual - although a young man in early post-
adolescence probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference and could be 
forgiven for interpreting it in those terms. It was more like the blind 
drive of migratory birds to fly halfway around the world, or of salmon to 
travel thousands of kilometres to spawn (and then die), or of millions of 
lemmings to rush over a cliff - and even those comparisons were too tied 
up in physical biology to be anything more than generalisations for the 
spiritual certainty that she sparked within him. This is what her pall of 
evil actually meant, in explicit terms - and it was a part of him as well.
     He wasn't human. He was a creature of the night. He felt a horrible, 
wonderful urge to simply embrace this darkness within him. A dreadful 
certainty gripped him: that if he hadn't already been told of his dual 
nature by St. Christopher (and had been occasionally worrying about the 
consequences ever since) he might have forsworn his humanity there and then.
     Instead he lashed out at her, knocking her away. She seemed to 
recover remarkably quickly.
     "Did you really think that another Nephalim wouldn't know about the 
trick of adjusting your body to bypass the pain from a point of attack?" 
she asked as she struck at him with a punch that would have severely dented 
a concrete wall. Martin dodged. "You're a fast learner, but I've been at 
this for a long time."
     Suddenly there was asian man standing there, looking casual. "Damian 
did warn you that he had a strong will, Lisa" said Kien, hands in pockets.
     "That he did," admitted Lisa, continuing to circle, looking for an 
opening to attack Martin with.
     Kien smiled, then lunged at Martin. Martin blocked and tried to 
counterattack, but his strike passed straight through the man.
     Lisa struck again, and again Martin blocked. This time his hand 
passed through her as well. Then he was struck from behind by something 
he couldn't see, and sent sprawling to the ground. He tried to think; what 
could he be up against? Invisibility? Intangibility? Telekinesis? Holograms?
Desperate for something to offset their adavantage, he tried using that 
'spirit sight' that he had been using to examine Lisa earlier.
     Ah! There she was! The young man looked insubstantial - and somehow 
Martin knew that he wasn't there. The woman was simply somewhere other 
than she seemed. Martin jumped up and formed a massive club with his arm, 
then took a wild swing that contrived to attack the illusion/hologram/thingy 
of her while at the same hitting the real Lisa as part of the carry through 
arc of the swing. She went flying.
     The asian man looked rueful but not particularly concerned. Martin 
was wondering how to deal with him when a generic ravening blast of 
coruscating energy hit him and sent him sprawling to the ground again. 
When he looked up, there was another of them.
     "Martin Martin Martin," said the newcomer, a caucasian man who 
Martin, with his attention still slightly fuzzed into spirit sight, had a 
vague sense of recognition about. "You really are a stubborn young man, 
aren't you?"
 
Tomorrow: More fight scene.
 
The Daily Super Short-Short Story series and the wondersocks created by 
Arthur Spitzer, and used with belated permission.
 
All main characters created by Saxon Brenton are Ask First Before Use 
for the duration of this storyline, then they'll probably go to Usable 
Without Permission.
 
-----
Saxon Brenton University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
     saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au
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