burn down this house of memories
Beige wings. That’s what the flaps of his trenchcoat were as they caught the wind, the fall from the ten-story factory levels above billowing the fabric around in melodramatic fanfare. Glass caught the edges of his face and sliced ribbons of red like desperate tendrils still trying to anchor him to the earth.
Above him, in the window, he could see Naoki. Standing stockstill with a brandy glass still in hand, ramrod straight and high-cheekboned, his face silhouetted in moonlight. The impassive expression on his master’s face was positively stoic; a statue in Armani swaddled soft in the shadows. He raised the glass a millimeter higher than it prior had been—a silent toast to things gone wrong and the inevitable death of their connection.
Newt welcomed it, in a way.
He’d welcomed it the same way he welcomed all torment, with the hopes of darkness and silence instead of the neverending cycle of Earth-to-Hell and back again, like a droplet of water caught in the endless flow of precipitation.
It was the rending of the shroud that ripped him back into reality, the sharp contrast of his sudden drop into the cold streets of Brooklyn offsetting the grayish, lukewarm fog he’d been in following his most recent entrapment. One moment he’d been standing, bespelled and armed, an automated rifle in hand and a hat on his head, a look of determination and drive on an otherwise blank face. He’d tore into the walls the open halo sores of bullets, scattered their remains across concrete floors, and etched a broken web of shattered glass into the walls. He’d tasted cigarette smoke and yesterday’s whiskey, felt the weight of invisible hands on his shoulders squeezing bruises from the night before.
And now here he was, himself again.
He was falling, yes, there was that. There wasn’t much further to go, now. He’d followed Naoki out of obedience to the warehouse that night, to come to an agreement with the hunters who ran this block in town. The Jacksons were infamous, the blood on their name tracing its ancestry back to the Dark Ages. Or something along those lines. They hunted and devastated time and again, like forest fires. They rose without expectation and dragged their quarry to ash. Flame after flame, Hell found them respectable. Admirable, even.
Which is exactly why Naoki found them expendable. But also why he came to the conclusion that perhaps a bargain could be struck between the ventures of himself and the hunters.
And, for a while, it had worked.
Naoki struck bargains with sinners and snuffed out their lights. Every match he ignited wisped to smoke before it could reach fruition. The hunters had less work to do with less monsters made, and empty shells of men went back to work a little more broken than before, but somehow more useful in the cogs of the great commercial machine that was capitalistic America.
Tonight was to be a settlement regarding who got the ghosts, however. Who would decide whether souls could be condemned to Hell or devoured; or exorcised properly in a very particular, routine way. Naoki (who balked with distaste at the thought of the e-word; exorcism) was disinclined to give up such an easy, unwrapped prey. It was wasteful, he said, to allow anything to be simply thrown away.
Newt, for his part, remained the placid observer. The servant whose desperate cries for help were stifled with a simple; irritated “stop talking, Penderghast” tried to keep himself afloat. It was difficult, when the proximity to a demon greater than himself occluded his better judgment. He was made to serve, after all—he was built up from the ashes of the angels for the sole twisted purpose of serving his betters; the true Fallen and the archdemons and all the company of Hell.
To be near Naoki was to be his, in Newt’s situation. And so he was Naoki’s, plain and simple, little by little losing himself and his sense of person to the creeping black cloud of submission and forgetfulness. He moved mechanically through his daily devices. He fetched mail. He made coffee. He strangled evasive debtors trying to skip town. He shined the Rolls. He rolled the money. He burned and he squandered and drank and he destroyed, because that is what he was made to do.
And that night; this night, tonight, he’d followed Naoki to the factory on 5th to look for answers. His shell, his thin form that barely held enough humanity to make him passably mortal, had trickled in through the crack that was the door, and reformed in the dusky innards of the gutted war machine-maker to join its master.
Everything had gone smoothly, up unto a point. The point being that Naoki bored easily, humans had happy trigger fingers, and Newt came armed to his bloodied teeth with every weapon Naoki saw fit to equip him with (and then some).
He’d popped blood vessels; grapes of wrath exploding red in the darkness as he blasted a line of carnage through those who’d come to oppose them. He’d managed to kill three of the five hunters when the fourth [a blond woman with eyes like ice chips and the scent of death on her freckly skin] finished loading her sawed-off shotgun and blew him through the octagonal window overlooking the road below.
He could see it now, in the fragments of moonlight and glass. His birth in the 7th Circle; his rise from the ashes of the angels. A sooty being; terrified, covered in offal and refuse from a war he was an orphan of. It came and went in glistening images, flickering and turning around him; a disassembled chandelier—a carousel of light. He could see the shifting robes of silk cascading down his shoulder. Drowning himself in gin and absinthe by the mouthful. Champagne fountains and fireworks becoming tridents roasted in the coals of the 3rd Circle, spinning in and out of his blurring, unfocused vision. He used to be a vision; a towering visage of rippling white flame: an inferno with the shape of a man and beast alike, a dancing tongue of fire that leapt, snapped, and crackled. He was lightning barely contained by thought. Or he wished he could’ve been.
He wished he could’ve been a lot of things.
Free, for instance. Alive, for one. An angel.
His back hit the pavement with a sickening crack and his mind flew apart. His vision blackened, the sky above reeling in a downpour of shards and snide remarks—no, gunfire, he realized distantly. Newt tried to breathe and felt the pressure of bones misplaced close in around his heaving lungs. Liquid bubbled up in the back of his throat, a frothy, toxic brew he couldn’t quite taste as it hit the back of his mouth and trickled through his chattering teeth.
His hand rose, vague and detached, then fell. The haze he’d been in before bled away, seeping through the cracks in the sidewalk. His tommy gun clattered somewhere nearby. The gutter, maybe. He heard the distant screams and booms of something going wrong, tried to speak, and failed. The pain was unfamiliar; yet constant. It was something he was used to, regardless of where or how it happened, though, and it was oddly comforting to find the numbness falling away to reveal its true form: a well-orchestrated agony of splintered bone and tattered flesh.
He careened in and out of consciousness, wondering why death was taking his time in claiming him. It’d always been relatively quick before: a blink and he was back in Hell, slithering in filth and clawing his way out of the worst of the worst, being torn apart and rebuilt again. Drowning in ice that burned and digging himself out of his own grave, over and over again in the hopes it’d break him down. It never did. Or maybe it had.
After all, how else would he have wound up here?
Why can’t I go as myself? His memory played tricks on him, making the old conversation new again. As a salamander. I’ll strike fear into their hearts. I’ll burn them to cinders.
My dear Newt, the laughter rose, not his own, but someone else’s. Someone whose velveteen existence masked the sharpness of the knife under the guise. A chuckle that was as much a caress as it was a backhand, like the fingers that found his face and bit semicolon sentiment in black and blue across his skin. The day anyone fears you is the day I die of laughter. The tightening hand. Do you want me to die? You can answer me truthfully.
His dumb tongue; heavy in his mouth, managing only: I would never.
Never be truthful? Blood was drawn. He could feel it slipping down his neck, mingling with sweat and cologne he’d stolen for himself. To try and better himself. To try and be a man and not a monster, for if he couldn’t be an angel, then for Heaven’s sake, he’d try to be human…
That sounds a lot like you. His mouth moved; silent and useless. Everything was falling apart as he lay on the tarmac, gathering refuse in gusts of wind and falling debris. He tried to move and failed, sliding once more into memories.
A waltz. Hands held tight; too tight to be comfortable. The grand old Edwardian era, with his hair cut short and kept clean, his nails the same, his coattails long and his face likewise. His joy at release, at a brief moment of light and life. His gallivanting around in Sussex leading him to party after party. Being limitless, being weightless and wondrous and…there. Simply there. A time of peace just before all hell broke loose again. War was abated for the time being, her matters elsewhere. He’d never known her, not personally, and he intended to keep it that way. His entire self aglow with radiance and posture; poised to live and laugh and be.
And he danced with him now, hand in hand, improper and in the shadows, out of where people’d see them and sneer. Because it seemed romantic; that way. A twisted amount of dedication going into the act of a dance that doomed him to where he lay now, broken and bleeding in the streets of some no-name New York square.
“You look lovely tonight,” his captor said, smiling with all sharp edges and insincerity. The cold prickle of dread dancing across the back of his neck and shimmying down his spine, curling his toes in fine shoes. Trying to flee. Trying to run ahead of himself or out of his skin, wanting to dart out of the line of fire that was the unexpected and unmeant compliments. “I almost didn’t know it was you.” Almost.
Just as he was not enough.
Blood pattered his face like rain. He could feel it, distant and damp, a reminder of life. A remainder. He opened his mouth to it, to protest it or welcome it, he wasn’t sure. It was not so much the blood as it was the soul that slipped out of the dead man hanging above him, swallowed by a parched throat and crushed between a pulverized windpipe and torn vocal chords. He lay on the pavement in a heap, all limbs askew, his back bent at an angle to shame an acute parallelogram.
“Get up,” the musical, bored voice said above him beyond the thunder of a passing night train and the smattering of reddish water. Newt blinked hazily, inhaled a soul that smelled of peppermint and tobacco, and retched, coughing. “Get up,” insisted the voice, and Newt’s body obeyed wherein the rest of him failed to do so, his marionette frame jittering upward. Head lolling forward, he found himself compelled to push himself to his feet, staggering and swaying. His spine realigned with a series of pops and snaps, fingers stretching, splayed with crooked pain.
Naoki stood before him, no longer above him in the window, not a hair out of place, an expression of mild annoyance on his pointed features.
“I finished them off,” he commented, not offering Newt a hand as the remnants of his servant cricked back into vertical position. “As usual, it came down to me having to do everything myself. I trust that won’t happen again.” Now that the fog of prostration had cleared, Newt froze, his eyes shadowed from lack of sleep and haunted fear. His gaze met Naoki’s own, then glanced away; quickly. The less broken of the two lost his faint smirk with a twitch of pale lips, and the tepid air dropped in temperature. The tinkling-clack of crumbling cement and other rubble filled the gaping void between them, the silence serenaded with the echoes destruction. In momentary madness, Newt swore he heard the panting of unseen dogs. Hellhounds or those of War, he could not be certain.
“I had to sacrifice a soul for you,” Naoki said softly. Newt’s hair stood on end, and the salamander, still shakily reforming, began to tremble. “You know what that costs me?” Newt flinched as Naoki raised a hand, but he only did so to open a pad of paper, running a long, lean finger down the lines of his ledger.
“Approximately a quarter of a million dollars in numeric, fiscal terms,” said his master. “Less financially, I’m going to get a wrinkle because of this. I can feel it.” He touched a couple of digits to the corner of one dark eye, his stare drifting toward the ground. Newt swallowed, wringing blood, grime, and gunpowder out of the sleeve of his trench.
“You’re what?” Naoki turned to look at him again, snapping out of whatever daydream he’d drifted off into. “Spit it out. And don’t keep me waiting. The night’s been long enough already and I’ve other matters to attend to.”
“Sorry,” Newt whispered, and shut his eyes. Already he could feel the hold Naoki had over him seeping back under his skin, coiling invisible and hungry circlets of power around his wrists—pulling him imperceptibly closer to the magnetic force of a demon above him in all but height. Naoki smiled; a very faint, brittle little smile, the kind a tiger had prior to showing all its teeth at once.
“I’m sure you are, darling. Now—go back to the hotel and gather our things. We leave tomorrow for Chicago.” The fingers that touched his cheek were butterfly-light, and underneath them, Newt could feel the current of a hurricane. It pushed him back so hard he stumbled, turned, and ran—just as Naoki intended—down the darkened street.
Naoki watched him leave; his possession, until the figure turned to fire, gone in a flash. Turning up the collar of his coat, Naoki snapped his fingers—his own variant of flame leaping eagerly into the open space that had once been a factory to consume it whole—and in the same fluid gesture, vanished like smoke upon the breeze.
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