#azrael dc

[hanislaw]

going back to my roots honestly there is nothing i love more than the contrast between jpv and azrael

[saintpoe]

Saint Poe. You've been quiet since the second Knightfall trailer hit the web. You good?

Ive been beside myself. I literally cant function.

[the-shadows-request-candy-corn]

what’s the correct way to pronounce Valley and Dumas according to the Islamic origins? thank you :)

So, the surname 'Valley' is pronounced the same way as the geographical phenomenon. Just plain 'vall-EE''

The name 'Dumas'(doo-MA), interestingly enough, also has some abrahamic mythological influence. 'Doumah' or 'Dumah' has been referenced as either an alternative name for the devil, or as an angel of death in Islamic and Jewish literature. In either context, he oversees the punishment of the wicked dead, which are brought to him by the angel Azrael. I'm guessing that DC decided to put the silent 'S' at the end of 'Dumas' to make it sound more French or fancier.

Hope this helps!

[angelofreprisal]

NOCTURNAL TERRORS!

AZRAEL #32

Angel and the Monster Maker

Part Two:

WEREWOLF!

This is what Azrael didn’t know.

Six months ago, before the avenging angel had come to town and made the mystical rainforest known as Washington into her new home, before she had ventured out into the ice-cold and frigid wilderness of Switzerland, before the entire order of Saint Dumas had fallen down and crumbled away into nothing, before the angel had woken up in an altered body while floating upon the Alolan seas, born again into the horrid world as a scarred and ruined woman in a disastrous torrent of death and smoke, before love had found its way to the girl and been met with spurning and rejection, before all of that, before everything that had changed her entire life, before slumming it out in the west side, and before the mystery of the Vampire, there were others, dwelling within the area, others who were busy themselves, busy with conducting their own peculiar, particular experiments, all the while covered in a haunting blue light, making these two men into shapes of white and black and blue within the cool shadows of their dark, almost-comical laboratory. One of these men, the younger one, dressed in a neatly-pressed white lab coat and with his black hair slicked back in a professional manner, was at the moment busy with berating the everloving hell out of his female lab assistant for an error within the operation’s newest own experiment, the veins on his face threatening to burst with rage and kill himself from the emotional overload on display while his hands uselessly opened themselves out and grabbed in the air onto nothing.

“No, NO! Not THAT, you UTTER INCOMPETENT TROGLODYTE! Did you spend your whole life practicing the art of being utterly stupid, or was it just genetic?!”

“Well, you told me to put Peptin Hydrochloride—”, the staffer began, before the exasperated scientist cut her off and stepped a little bit away to complain to the only other person in the room, an old man with a moustache like Albert Einstein and the same white coat worn slightly looser, all while the various computers and grills and gears and pistons all continued to operate at their usual accepted parameters, and the lab continued to glow blue.

Unamused, the scientist yelled: “Father, did you see this incompetence?! I told her to put the Peptin Hydrochloride into the Forgione Centrifuges, like we had discussed not even twenty minutes prior to this! And what did she do instead of simply to obey my orders? She chooses to put the extraordinarily-volatile Hydrochloride — one very expensive and one very labour-intensive load of it — right into the synthesisers!”

As he said this, he pointed over to a rack of four giant green tubes, taller than about two human beings combined, connected to the larger network of mechanical technology through a complex system of snaking, bending metal tubes, and all of them filled with a peculiar slimy and viscous green fluid, a boiling substance that brought slight shivers to anyone who needed to get too close to it at any given time.

As he continued to yell out to his father from the other end of that particular lab alcove, he clenched the both of his fists into forceful balls and trembled with rage as his head and facial veins once more threatened to blow up from his unholy anger.

“And NOW, this TWAT also switched up the necessary ingredients for the next round of processing, and put the Peptin HIZOchloride into the Zakarian Machines instead of the properly-assigned centrifuges! THIS SETS US AT LEAST A WEEK BACK AT MINUMUM!”

“Now, calm down…”, began the old man in the baggy lab work uniform while he calmly swept his hair back and kept a level head in the blue light. “She hasn’t anywhere near the advantage of your superior education, sonny. And besides, you’ve got to remember, she’s always been this stupid.”

Resting his hand over his mouth and chin, he thought back at least several decades to the days before both himself and his son were busy with experiments against the boundaries of humankind and nature, while glancing towards the unwanted and unloved relative, who tried in vain to “correct” her mistake by tapping a few simple sequences onto the keys of the connected terminal. “She was raised on a diet of old films and white chocolate. It stunted her physical and mental growth to severe degrees. Surely you’ve got to take all that context into account.”

Following that, the old man shrugged, lifting both of his hands weakly and lazily into the air, and walking away to monitor the capacity of the newfound impurities in the genetic materials in the tanks closest to him. “But, at the end of the day, she is your cousin, and it’s only proper to give her work. If nothing else, it gets the rest of that pathetic family of ours out of our hair, now that we talk to at least one of them. Indeed she is very stupid, but it could still be worse.”

“Eugh; I know that,” started back the fuming mad man. “But, this project would still be going much better and faster if…”

As he looked up and tried to go back to work to make himself calm again, his dark golden eyes noticed an extreme unexpected change in the slime-filled tanks: once they were churning, resting stable and calmly inert. Now they were boiling, burning and bubbling in the glass as the dials upon their tops began to clearly show a rise in pressure within the once-stabilised, peaceful tubes.

“Oh my god—!”, screeched the well-dressed man as his pupils shrunk down and his hands flew back to his head. “The Hizochloride can’t safely bond with the Guarnaschelli polymers…!”

“Did I… Did I goof…?”, inquired the disgraced female assistant, raising a few fingers to touch her lips and stepping back a few paces, just as the glass walls of all four boiling green tubes began to form a web of hairline fractures, fractures which began to grow even more widespread at insane speeds, and, with the sounds of Hell itself opening up, all four at once, shattered. Instantly a tide of green fluid released from the immense pressure, a superheated wave of concentrated scientific progress pouring out from its former containment units, safely out of the blast radius of the two men in the room, but absolutely torrenting over the assistant, tiding over and enveloping her in her entirety, and releasing a pressurised airwave that knocked both of the experimenters into the walls and the patented Batali gear-grind machines, its aftereffects hiking up the temperature of the whole lab by at least ten degrees, and the blue glow of the scientific equipment being slowly overtaken by that nauseating, sickly shade of green.

“AAA-FGH!!”

“AAA-GFH!!”

By the time that the men had gotten up from impacting against the machines and the walls, they beheld the sight of a familial assistant reeling — predictably not alive, but somehow not dead, her formerly-life-filled skin bleached into something pale as the snow, her human ears grown and sharpened into fine points, her orange hair shortened by the acid and dyed darker by the chemical burns, and the very nature of her movements seeming baser, more erratic, and unsure of herself, almost needing to relearn her motions and her steps, holding her brand-new clawed hands over her newfound pale face as clumps of her hair fell off after being burned in acid, the rest of what was left now turned orange and short.

“Now she’s done it…”, muttered the younger one. “Six weeks of hard labour shot down to the Devil.”

“Maybe we should see if she’s hurt?”, inquired the slightly-less-dubious-with-morals old experimenter.

“Like I could possibly care.”

Irrespective of the other’s wishes, the moustachioed older man stretched out a weathered hand, before instinctively reeling it back once the former female lab assistant finally found her groove, getting up on her feet and taking her hands away to reveal her new face, pale as snow, or white as a corpse. Her ears were now pointed, her eyes had now gone red, and as she uttered just a few words, now her teeth had become fangs.

“Ay vant to drink your blood. Dum-Da-Dum-Dum.”

Then, upon seeing the living results right in front of him, the young man smiled.

“I think we may have opened up a new avenue of research.”

The present: Jeanne-Paula Valley was now cruising down the streets of old Websterville in a car that didn’t belong to her, speeding at least one mile over the speed limit, practically soaring over the ill-maintained roadway, paying no attention to the throwing and rattling of her solid mask between the shells and windows of her car as she continued her pattern of absolute haphazard speeding, all the while not even focused on the road ahead of her, but, rather, upon the all-knowing voice of the eternally-busy Oracle, herself busy with twirling her now-down red hair and occasionally tugging at her bright turquoise sweater to keep her mind paying attention to just one of her many problems in particular.

Paula, finding the time to look away from swerving at top reflexiveness to dodge what few cars were actually travelling inside the city, put her hand to the radio augmentation and shoved the receiver up to her ear to attempt to speak to the woman on the other end.

“Oracle? Me.”

“My favourite avenging angel.”, replied Barbara into her receiver, with a noticeable uptick in her emotiveness at just the sound of Paula’s tired voice coming through her headphones into her ears, extremely tired and extraordinarily scratchy. “You still at the shantytown?”

“Check. I’m camped out here in the forest, and I’m going to stay camped out here until I can find out any explanation for what was up with the Vampire. Or who was behind her. Speaking of which, I need some more business info That information I asked you to get–”

“You don’t give me the easy ones, do you?”, smirked the redhead while her fingers worked her keyboard into another round of submission, and the blueness of her eyes reflected back records upon records of lists and indexes and information as her fingers kept scrolling down and down and zoomed across webpages and records of the incident. “I haven’t got much on the spectacle, but here it is. First; I have learned total zilch-zippo about the bloodsucker that was menacing you and that little girl. But, as for the rest; the book-printing factory that employed everyone in town abruptly closed up two months ago. No explanation from the higher-ups, no questioning or coverage from the nearby towns and media. Everyone seemed to collectively agree to forget that Websterville had ever existed. It was cursed, forgotten, condemned. Then, the worker’s reps from the unions found out that the money in every single worker’s savings plans and pension funds was all gone. Then came the really nasty part. The company that owned and operated the factory held unpaid mortgages on the houses of almost all of its employees. I’m sure you can guess what happened from there.”

“I presume they foreclosed?”, Paula asked her while basking in the freshened air after yet another soothing Washington rain, haphazardly skirting the road’s edges and only passably staying within the proper lanes. “They probably foreclosed. No, they definitely foreclosed. I’m right, right? Please tell me I’m right about something.”

“You nailed it, sport. Six hundred honest whole wage-slaves suddenly kicked out of life and left without their jobs or their homes. A businessman’s wet dream.”

“Is that legal?”

“Probably not,” admitted Oracle while fiddling with several of the dials and operations from her wheelchair within her customised tower computation setup. “But homeless people don’t exactly have the monetary wherewithal to hire any lawyers for themselves. And lawyers do have a particular habit of wanting to be paid. Now, as for who’s responsible…”

Performing another ballet with her dexteritous fingertips against the well-used plastic keyboard from within the darkness of her clockshackle home, Barbara pulled up a new display on the small green of her box-shaped side monitor, which quickly brought forth the first display, one of a thin old man with a bushy white moustache and eyebrows, his hair balding and already having claimed all the hair from his wrinkled forehead, his face contorted into a classical public relations smile, the kind that pained him to even think about attempting to do, the exact same principle going for his too-clean corporate business suit.

Name:

Hiram Nadir

Age:

62

Marital Status:

Widower

Height:

5’8”

Weight:

140 Lbs

Occupation:

Entrepreneur

Criminal Record:

N.A.

Citizenship:

U.S.

Known Relatives:

Nadir, Otto

“The plant’s sole owner is a fellow named Hiram Nadir. Second generation millionaire. Generally disliked. By all accounts, an especially lousy boss. But, he was still the only game in town.”

Checking back with the display, the Oracle switched the records to the only other one available, an image of a younger man in the same kind of black suit and tie, standing and staring into the lens of the camera that had photographed him, looking completely dissatisfied and utterly bored with all the mysteries of the very concept of life at the moment.

Name:

Otto Nadir

Age:

26

Marital Status:

Single

Height:

5’11”

Weight:

150 Lbs

Occupation:

Student

Criminal Record:

N.A.

Citizenship:

U.S.

Known Relatives:

Nadir, Hiram

“His closest living relative is his son, Otto Nadir. Ivy League educated biochemist, genius I.Q., with all the social skills of a very charming flock of pond scum. Any of this get any closer to helping you out?”

Paula just had to sigh, slumping over a little bit in the driver’s seat of “her” car and fiddling with the receiving end of her headphones.

“Too early to say. But it might give me a place to start. I… I need another favour… Find out if the Nadirs have been buying anything associated with any unusual persuasions lately… Computers, scientific equipment, whatever. I’m gonna need that info on it.”

“Hey, you’re beginning to sound like a true detective.”, the young woman on the other end said while brightening her smile. “Good luck out there. Actually, I’ve got another question. You got a girlfriend yet, Sherlock?”

Somehow an audible slumping down even further in the driver’s side was heard from the other end all the way across the country.

“I wish.”

Barbara pulled back in her wheelchair a little bit, closed her eyes, and leaned upon one hand with a single sigh escaping from her lips.

“Yeah… Me, too…”

The black car sped off into the distance, leaving a trail of trash and paper and exhaust within the angel’s wake, as she made a sharp left turn and headed off for the silhouetted dark forest leading unto the hills.

“Positively cannot thank you enough…”, were the words of a young, bulky, well-built dusty blonde-haired woman, smiling ear to ear like she had won the Seven Star Lottery and positively walking on sunshine as she beheld the reworked innerworkings of the thought-dead factory she had once pledged her allegiance to. Bits and pieces of technology had been added and augmented in the span of several months since that most unfortunate day, motherboards and apparatuses of dark, smoky blues and purples, tubes of mysterious green liquids encased in tall, thick tubes of glass that only seemed to hint at the marvelous mysteries within, computers that looked like they had been brought right out of the ages when computational scientific devices took up the spans of multiple secretive rooms, and, right across from the two men, an old restored cathode ray tube television, standing atop a cheap fold-out and out-folded metal table, and connected to an equally-antiquated but extraordinarily-dependable combination of a video cassette recorder and a tried-and-true and trusty video home system, a tape that was compatible with which in the moment being rewound by the elderly individual in the white lab coat, while his identically-dressed son was busy with preparing some kind of injector in his corner of the room, the dim blue light doing no favours for the deathly paleness of his shut-in skin. “‘s’Just so awfully swell of you to hire me back, Mister Nadir, Sir.”

While the woman sat down upon a fold-out metal chair, Hiram Nadir powered on the television, which began to fill the immediate area with its sickening green glow, and the static upon the screen fading out into oblivion when inserted into its connecting slot was a videotape dubbed Lupine: The Menace Within, which began to play in its sepia-toned alive and ancient glory.

“But, uh, are you sure that you just want me to do nothing but look at all these old monster pitchers? At this point I musta seen every last one ‘uv them ever made…”

“Only the ones about Werewolves.”, Otto responded, while smirking a little bit while his back was turned to the other two, and the woman shrugged her caramel-coloured jacket off onto the chair and sat down to absorb the film.

Hours passed by, crawling at a molasses-esque pace for the outside world, but filled with passion and wonder for the worker in front of the screen. She viewed a story of Werewolves, of senseless violence imposed upon defenceless villagers by a beastly, furry oppressor, pencilled with dual flurry and savagery and inked with a coarse blend of primal mutilation and an accompanying rush of uncompassionate savageness, signed with deadly sharp claws and written in with the dark flow of Human blood. Then, while the Werewolf began to attack once more, Otto’s black dress shoes Clik-Clik-Clikkked across the grated metal floor, his pale, clammy hands gripped the woman’s head to hold it firmly in place, and with a simple pulling of the trigger, the needle of the injector did its thing, slowly injecting a sample of the green fluid right into the flow of her veins, causing them to momentarily bulge to prominence before settling back down and prompting a nauseous “OWEUGHA…!” from his first proper test subject. Following that, the pain subsided, and the experimenter stepped back to join his father in the observation phase.

“It should only take a few moments.”, muttered the younger man, while the creature upon the colour TV screen turned its gaze straight towards the camera. The woman felt some kind of connection to it; some kind of pull, one that overtook the whole entirety of her attention for about a minute or two, before her brain faded back and out to reality, prompting her to turn her head back to the observation team of two and inquire to them if she had done something wrong.

“Seemingly nothing on your end…”, Otto muttered, slightly louder than he had been before.

“I mean, I could look at another pitcher if you want–”

Otto simply handed a wad of dollar bills to the solitary employee and went back to his various sheets of notes as she stood up and got up to leave, grabbing her jacket from off the back of the used and banged-up chair, muttering in various forms of insular and internal scientific lingo, before then capping it off with: “Not now. Just go to bed. Get your bedrest. I must have miscalculated the Deoxyribonucleic Acid Valences. We’ll try it again tomorrow.”

“Well… Alright then…”, said a now-sheepish woman on her way out the door, out of the factory, and into the outside world. “Well… G’night.”

About one minute later, the woman had pulled her jacket close to her chest for warmth and protection against the coldness of the Washington forest rain, which, although oppressive and on occasion completely overwhelming, was nonetheless a fount of renewal and a primal and wet source of nurture. The moon was in its full phase in the skies above the forest-dwelling factory, its very presence seeming to part the rainclouds above to let its monumental presence be witnessed by everyone in its haunting vicinity. She couldn’t help but call it a “Real nice moon…”, seeming almost hypnotised by its ghostly beauty.

The moon…

So beautiful…

Hauntingly beautiful…

“I feel… I feel..”

Irrespective of seemingly nothing, her whole body began to shake and shake and shake, her very bones vibrating, her blood boiling, and all of the energy within herself practically begging to overflow. She didn’t stop staring, she couldn't stop staring, the moon was just so beautiful… So completely, utterly beautiful… Then, her vision began to fade, to blur. Her eyes started to warp, altering, distorting being reshaped and remoulded, recalibrated, refitted into something completely different, a nauseating sensation that caused her to drop to her knees.

“Different… Really different…”

Yet, her eyes did not leave the embrace of the moon, its hold on her was absolute, authoritative, essential, indispensable. But, as she was reeling in pain as her vision continued to change, she did not pay attention to the rest of her body, which was not only beginning to convulse with pain as it continued to be reconfigured, but was only now beginning to grow even bigger, the structure of her bones expanding to carry the incoming increase in weight, which came on like an unexpected symptom of disease, causing her internal muscle mass to expand onto her warping skeletal structure, which was now causing her hands to grow into merciless shredding machines, fingers growing and nails sharpening into deadly claws built and bringing ruin to the innocent. The warping woman shredded her jacket off as she attempted to stand, followed by every other one of her clothes as her flesh grew too large for her garments to contain, and every single square inch of her skin now began to sprout a thickened mane of canine, lupine fur, crowned by her skull expanding outwards, her mouth shaping into a wolfin snout, her fittingly-named canine teeth sharpening and expanding, lengthening into shredders built for ripping raw human meat for her nutrition, and what had once been her bouncy blonde hair made its presence inside her fur, leaving streaks of dark gold within the brand-new pelt upon herself. Unknown to the Mister inside the manufacturing plant, the first proper experiment was a success. The transformation was complete, The Werewolf had been born. In triumph and primal ecstasy, the beast stood, stretching her claws back and unleashing her animalistic fury unto what had given it life.

“HOWLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!”

This base display of untamed wrath was heard by the elfin ears of a certain Jeanne-Paula Valley, who had at that time just pulled up into the poorly-maintained and illy-paved road leading up to the hill approaching the grounds of the factory, and now having stopped before the final drive up to the compound to drink a cheap can of tea and get a visual assessment of the situation before her, but had ben broken out of the rhythm by the unexpected noise of a howling wild wolf somewhere close by.

“What was that?”, she asked confusedly to nobody in particular, looking out the open window and beholding a black silhouetted figure in the darkness behind the outdated metal fencing, dropping to all fours and running off into the distance. Couldn’t be anything good. Probably more on the edge of bad. Might as well give it a look. Could be connected to whatever was in that factory.

“So, wha’ did the lawyer-man say?”, asked a red-shirted member of the city’s forever-impoverished and eternally-homeless population while tossing a bundle of outdated newspapers containing deliberately falsified information about every single thing in the political zeitgeist into the trashfire that he had been sharing the use of with two additional unemployed drifters by the brick bases of the old north bridge wherein the Vampire had been subjugated to the sun just a few days before the night at present.

“Nothun’ good.”, responded a bald man in a brown jacket while holding out his hands to the flame. “Old Man Nadir’s got the best legal talent this side of New York and Gotham on his side, an’ we gotta total chump twenny minutes outta diet college. Graduated last in his class–”

The third man suddenly noticed something from out the corner of his eye, but, before he could get a good look at it, it was gone, just as quickly as it had come into view.

“The Hell…?”

Before the homeless man was able to finish, suddenly was set upon him a large black shape, striking swiftly and savagely, and enveloping him in a flurry of ferocious ferocity, knocking him down to the trash-filled ground and opening up a massive maw, drooling with living anticipation for its first feast.

Fortunately for the remaining two men under the bridge – though regrettably not fortunate at all for the man who had just gotten his whole face chewed off in between being pounced upon and what was about to happen after – an equally-swift red silhouette suddenly streaked into the scene, a bright red trail slamming into the creature with the full force of an offensive impact, and causing the beast to spend a few precious seconds getting up, letting a now-masked azrael finally get a good look at the menace of the moonlight through the clearing upturned dust.

“Are you…?”, she began to ask, but was quickly answered without even needing to finish, as the light of the garbage pit fire now shined its rancid, dirty light upon the shape of the new enemy, her form cast in the flames of the downtrodden as an emissary from the bowels of Hell itself, a human being warped into a lupine body, with all of its deadliness and savage potential cranked up to as far as the evolutionary dial could go. The creature kept its mouth open as it chewed upon even more of the dead man, mangling even more of the cadaver’s former face, and even shaking it around like a wet dog’s fur, just to rub it in.

“A Werewolf…?”

“RGRRR!!!”

Only by just a hair’s breadth was the angel of vengeance able to dodge the oncoming strike of the grey beast, barreling toward her at a speed fast enough to turn out to be a detriment, as, upon the avenger avoiding its full-frontal assault, the literal she-wolf was now unable to steer herself away from a devastating impact straight with a solid brick wall, striking a direct blow to her own head and flopping over to the ground.

“Guess so.”, Azrael muttered aloud while realising that the movement through the air had caused her hood to fly off. “Any of you men see–?”

“Behind you!”, screamed one of the remaining homeless, just as the wolf-thing regained consciousness and pulled the angelic one into her vise-like embrace. With a single twist of her tree-trunk-thick arms the furry being threw the both of them around and around, tumbling the both of them to the dirty ground, and kicking the dust up as she kept on bludgeoning her and attempting to overwhelm her with sheer force of might.

“We gotta help–!”, yelled out the other one of the still-alive Webstervillians, attempting to strike the she-beast with a lead pipe, but to no avail, as a single punch from the creature knocked him off his rocker, before another one dispatched his compatriot off into knockout mountain, sure to not wake up for a good and long while. Pleased, the creature grinned as much as a wolf could grin, before her murder-fingers picked the unconscious man up by his gone-limp arms and she gleefully opened her salivating sharp mouth to start chowing down.

“Over here, thing.”

The mountain of fur and fangs turned her yellow-eyed head over to behind the trash piles and saw an angel still perfectly un-devestated, posing with both of her fists out in front of her, posted up in front of one of the bridge’s pillar walls, and thirsty for wrathful vengeance. Immediately the wolf attacked the much more interesting opponent, throwing the knocked-out man at her, clawing at her with her shredders, wailing upon her with blow after blow after blow after blow, and all the while not even letting her get a moment to herself, to act, or even to breathe, as fist after clawed fist kept hacking away at her.

THUNCH! THUNCH!

THUNCH! THUNCH!

THUNCH! THUNCH!

THUNCH! THUNCH!

THUNCH! THUNCH!

THUNCH! THUNCH!

THUNCH! THUNCH!

THUNCH! THUNCH!

This strategy surprisingly found surprising success, knocking the angel for a loop and rendering her powerless to escape as the night-dwelling beast brought its mighty jaws down upon her mask, clamping down on her. Hard. Slowly the fangs of the oppressor started to deal some damage, driving themselves down further and further into the dense defence of her mask, which was thankfully enough to buy her some time. Not enough time to escape or fight back against the onslaught of the assaulter, but enough time to be rescued from the affliction of the wild urge to kill and eat by a force not from this Earth.

“R-GHARR…?”

A familiar kind of light had arisen from beyond the forest, the light of the star of life, that faint but glowing shine of the incoming morning had now come to Websterville once again. Azrael could see it, and she could see it clearly. The sun had just begun to rise over the East, and the beast of Websterville had instantly snapped her head and her attention over to observe it. Her eyes began to quiver, and by instinct the benign knew that she must flee, that she must find shelter for defence. It would not do to be left powerless by the light of the sun. She must flee. But, before she did, she made sure to get her teeth out of Azrael’s mask, pick her up by the head, and shove her into the nearby pillar, before tossing her into the side of a garbage dumpster and running away like a dog at the beck and call of a master’s whistle, seeking any place to hide from another fight.

Azrael tried to stand up, but quickly fell to her knees.

“Werewolves… One…”

She slumped over into the mountains of discarded packages and boxes and bags and wrappers by the bridge, and was unable to get herself up.

“And… Angels… Zero…”

The world went black.

Two hours later, an in-the-moment-hazy-visioned, bulked-out, and especially tired working woman, having dropped out of consciousness once the sun had risen in its entirety, her now-human-again human eyes having gone back to blue, and currently sprawled out by the side of a wire metal fence, had just come back to full lucidity. Well, not complete lucidity, but just enough lucidity to pass for being fully conscious once again.

“Huhnh?”, she mumbled as the world came back into her immediate field of vision.

“I musta fell asleep.”, her once-more-human mind and brain reasoned. “Yeah… Had the dangdest dream… Like I was Lassie. Or Benji. Or Arcanine. Or Lycanroc. Or some kind’o’ Lupa-type-thing. Or those Wookies from ol’ Space Pitchers… Come to think of it… I really could go for a big ol’ dog biscuit right ‘bowt now…”

Then, following that, a bit more lucidity came over her and into her, and she looked around and realised the new present reality.

“What the heck happint’ ‘tuh my clothes?”

Rising up from the filthy streets, the worker started to head back on the road to the factory, the Pitter-Patter Pitter-Patter of her bare-footed body slapping against the street leaving slight injuries to her feet as she started to pick up her pace as she ran off into the forest.

“Ugh. Maybe Mister Nadir whill lend me some clothes…”

“...A great many bruises and a mild concussion…”, spoke the old woman to the angel in human form, the one with hair of stone grey having swapped her hooded dark-green going-out raincoat for a now short-sleeved and equally-green practical working dress, which now revealed that the wrinkles upon her face – the same kind that bore a similar appearance to fissures within stone, were also prominent upon her hands and arms. “...But I have applied the proper herbs and spices. You should be back to feeling as angelic as can be within a few hours.”

“Thanks.”, Jeanne-Paula muttered, while clutching the fresh, new bandage straps covering the whole entirety of her chest, and hunching over to wallow in the pain, while seated atop a wooden crate and smelling the odd but nonetheless-very-pleasant smell of fragrant healing, that — when it entered her nostrils and circulated throughout her body — made her feel like the past several years of aging and combat had finally caught up to her. Not on the outside, but most definitely on her spiritual welfare. She took a bit of a look around, seeing that the entire top half of her suit had been stored upon a few more stacks of crates, its face dented by the fangs of the savage wolf, but only just a few cracks in the facade; some fractures in the surface; down but not out. “You… You’re Glinda?”

“Yes.”, replied the old one while working a couple of ground-up forest leaves into a soothing and refreshing knead over several gashing wounds upon the angel’s back, which caused her to reel around for a few seconds before the mystery blending took effect. “We first met just yesterday.”

“I’m not sure what happened…”, Paula admitted in an air of shame. “I… I couldn't beat her. I thought that beast was going to rip me into bloody red pieces for sure–”

“And she would have.”, glibly Glinda answered. “Had not the clouds hidden the power of the moon and the tyranny of the sun begun to rise. As I told you earlier, creatures of darkness do not like sunlight. But, some do ultimately enjoy it than less would others. That creature in particular was as wise as it could have been. The sun’s wrath is to disable the Werewolf from its power. Only the moon can uncage the murderous spirit.”

Paula slowly rose back up to her still-suited feet, and inched on over to the crate in the corner, before collapsing at its feet and begrudgingly inching her way back up, zipping up the rest of her bodysuit and shrugging the scratched and dented heavy armour back on over her chest. “Neither Vampires nor Werewolves will ever need much tanning lotion then, huh, I presume?”

“Well, for our little Werewolf problem, perhaps we would only need to administer to her a bit of flea powder. As for tanning lotion, absolutely never.”

Emerging together from the door to her ramshackle cabin and beholding the light of day, Glinda shrugged her coat back on and Azrael, restored to the front, did her best to respectfully keep pace with the woman using a cane to get around the seeming endlessness of the trash zone. The sky had become a pleasant yellow, a misty backdrop for the boxed-in, dead-end, destroyed, ruined little town.

“Again, I remind you of what you have already heard. I am merely an old woman, who has been to many places in my years, and has learned much of the nature of the darkest evils of both this world and beyond this world.”

“And I’m just a would-be angel who is so far out of her depth that I could not be pulled out of it with the strongest magnetic force there is. I need Help, with a capital ‘H’.”

Glinda paused in her words to think about what the one in red had just said, and made an earnest attempt to reach out to her question with another question.

“When you say that, you most likely think that you mean your issues with the nature of your two identities. But, beyond that level, would it be more accurate to say that, herein the moment, your more pressing problems originate with the Oracle and the Bat, eh? Especially the Bat.”

The extreme level of surprise in Azrael’s responding question was almost bordered on comedic.

“How do you know any of that? You told me that you aren’t a Witch!”

Something of amused by the avenger’s over-the-top response and the pose that she had struck when learning of that knowledge, Glinda’s dark brown eyes filled with a little bit more life in them and her mouth ended up in a mix of past memories and a small, wistful smile.

“I merely said that I do not practice Wicca now. Not that I never have before in my whole life.”

“Old habits die hard?”

“On some level. Rather, old skills persist.”

“Well, I suppose you’re right. The Oracle and the Bat – especially the Bat. I’ve been focusing just on how I've been dealing with them, at least for the past few weeks. Come to think of it, I should probably call them right now – to tell them about the Werewolf. Let me go back to the car phone–”

Except, once the last remaining brown brick corner had been rounded, and the car had come into view, Azrael and Glinda were greeted with the unfortunate sight of a Wayne vehicle in total ruins; smashed up for at least an hour while Paula had been unconscious by the dumpsters in the trash zone. The windshields were cracked up into a plate glass web. The front end and fender had been battered into itself, tires deflated and cut up, headlights caved in at the end of hammers, seating yoinked out, gear shit gutted for parts, even the doors and the car alarm had all been pilfered while their user had been too unconscious to take any notice of it.

“Oh, no…”

“The thieves you once chased away have returned and have gained their vengeance.”

“–And reduced a hundred-thousand-dollar machine into nothing but scrap metal.”, Azrael uttered in great misery and great disappointment, half-heartedly throwing her arms halfway up into the air, but having not the passion or the spirit to emote all that much about it, before kneeling over to peer into the ruin of the car through the window, only confirming her previous suspicions even harder. “Looks like they took everything worth taking. Including the phone.”

“You have no other ways of communicating with the Bat and the Oracle?”

“I have – or rather I had – a small satellite unit built into my costume…”

Getting back up from looking into the destroyed transportation, and pressing down on one of the panels of her greebled golden gloves with two of her fair-skinned fingers, and it opened up to reveal a collection of busted and ruined scraps, barely held together by several fizzed electrical wires, useless things, which Azrael just violently shook out of her suit and trampled upon with a red-soled heel.

“...That I was supposed to use in emergencies. Then it got wrecked when the Werewolf threw me around. Useless after a single hurl. Just like me, really. I guess I’d better catch a ride to the nearest payphone… Or walk to it.”

“That is not wise.”, remarked Glinda. “Remember, Angel: ‘The time favoured by creatures of darkness.’ The sun will be well down before you could possibly return. And you would not have anywhere to go when the terrors of the night come for you.”

Azrael turned her face and started walking off anyway, before turning her gaze back to the woman in the dark green. “Meaning the beast might come back while I’m gone? Have a few of your useless, no-good neighbours for dinner? If it happens, then it happens. I’ll be sorry for sure, but I won’t blame myself for anything, no matter what you say, because there's nothing I can do about it.”

“Is there not?”

Azrael stopped, then she raised up a defencive hand while unsure her voice responded. “Listen, Glinda. Last time, that thing beat me silly. Next time, there won’t be left enough of me for you to put any of your herbs on. Besides, these people mean nothing to me. They abuse each other, they abuse their children, attacked me, stole my equipment, destroyed my car, and now another one of them left my face in cracks.”

“You claim to be seeking a way to redeem your spirit. And yet you ignore the opportunity given you.”, Glinda scowled, her face consumed in shadow as she walked away upon her wooden cane. “If you do not wish to better yourself, then go and join a circus. You are more clown than you are angel.”

Krunch. Krunch. Krunch. Krunch. Krunch-KrunchKrunchKrunch.

Maybe she shouldn’t have done that.

And Glinda was right. She knew she was right. About everything to her she had said.

“Okay. But I’m not just going to sit here and wait for her to show up and have me for her next appetiser. So, how do I find her?”

Glinda drew in a breath, let it out, and opened her eyes.

“You could probably begin by looking.”

“...So let’s say that Georgina really did turn into a Werewolf, just like your cousin turned into a Vampire…”, began the senior Mister Nadir while still holed up in the dismal blueness of the former factory laboratory, cleaning off a modified six-shot with a thin tube cleaner with a brushed attached to the end and his son kept on operating the keys and knobs and buttons of a nearby tube-connected device and recording whatever appeared on the dark green dials. “Then I’ve got two questions. One: How did it happen? And then Two: How do we make a quick buck from it?”

“You’d need at least six years of grad work to understand it, Father.”, Otto mumbled while feverishly sketching down multiple wavelengths and numbers into a paper pad. “It has to do with the fact that the mind and the body are intrinsically linked. The serum formula that we’ve created apparently makes permanent alterations to the human body’s Deoxyribonucleic Acid in order to compel it to conform to certain mental images imposed both upon it from within and without. Perhaps the root cause is rooted in the patterns behind the central tenets of multiple Jungian archetypes–”

“Whoa! You’re right. I don’t get it. And for the money part? I spent every single Dollar and Cent that I could beg, borrow, and steal to finance every part of your research. I even put myself and my whole entire factory out of business doing it. Where's the return? What’s the payoff? You planning to go into the Halloween costume racket? Genetic modification to order for a nominal fee? Replacing the Human race with perfect genetic specimens? Pawning it off to those loaded engineers at the animal suit conventions? License the stuff out to Ridley Scott and call it a day?”

“All of those seem like very pleasing ideas to me. We could do all that. Any one of them. Or all of them. Either that, or, we could just skip the legal paperwork and get ourselves an enhanced army to take over all of the West Side.”

“That wouldn't be bad.”, remarked the man in the moustache, while finishing up with the polishing and shining of his weapon, and tucking the glock into the snug area inbetween his pristine button-up white shirt and his baggy black overalls. “Not bad at all.”

“Mister Nadir, sir…”, moaned the worker Georgina, having wandered back into their area of the lab after a few hours of stepping around in utter boredom, and now clothed in a spare brown worker’s coverall uniform found in the obscure back sections of the factory after both men had wholeheartedly refused to hand over any of their clothes to her. “I’m still hungry again...”

“AGAIN?!”, yelled Hiram from across the room. “I gave you a whole entire T-Bone steak just a few hours ago!”

“But it was COOKED!”, whined the Werewolf. “Too cooked! No flavour in it! Too useless to me!”

“Now, now, there, it’s almost nightfall,” Otto began, slinging his arm over her bare shoulder and proceeding to walk her out of the side door into the main lot of the fallen factory. “Let’s just go outside and wait for the moon to rise. You’ll get your meat, and you’ll get to be a meaty and unthinking animal soon enough, I assure you.”

Georgina liked that. After Otto had explained it all to her, anyway. Being just Human was boring, messy, too caged by the restrictions of actually living life. Being wolfin was something else entirely. It meant being more than just some no-name mortal doomed to the grey flannel life all day and all night long forever. It meant being more than just a faceless cog in the poor-oiled machine. It meant freedom from the chains of staleness and the doorway drug into something much, much more. It meant being special. It was beauty to be such a monster, to let all restrictions and responsibilities go away and emerge from the fallen sun as a savage beast, a body meant for shredding and tearing and mutilating, mauling those less powerful than the edge of her brutal claws with grim satisfaction, all for the howl of ugly joy. The beauty of the moon waited for her. And it couldn't come fast enough.

Azrael had immediately booked it on foot to the factory like her life depended on it once she had remembered that that particular location had supposedly served as the source of all the broken town’s recent woes. She simply reasoned that, by process of Angel’s Razor, the big scary factory hidden in the distance had to have something to do with the menaces plaguing the town that seemed to have come straight out of the set of a mystic cultic film studio. The smell of the sure oncoming rains was a pleasant enough thing for her once the dusk had come and the clouds had formed into their comforting shapes and taken their prime proper places over the wooded sea of green, though strangely enough there seemed to be a presence within the moon itself that hung over it all, something intrinsic to it that actively demanded that the clouds part like a dark sea just below the heavens, an untraceable something that made her extremely uneasy. But that was above, and her one way forward was below. A flashlight that she had found in one of the abandoned business worked for her well enough that she was able to find a curious trail of imprints within the darkened grass and dirt: Deep indents pressed into the dirt in a hurry, canine — no, lupine in nature — four-clawed, big-heeled, and much too large to belong to the original animal. No, this had to be something extremely far from the genuine article. And they only led in one direction, and it certainly wasn’t away from the big dark factory in the rapidly-approaching beyond.

“The ground was soft last night… And soon enough it’s going to be soft again tonight… These ought to be… Well, I think these are the tracks of the beast… They lead up the slope to…”

Happening upon the barrier of a single layer of diamond fencing, the girl was able to see through the wire perimeter to behold a foundry left wholly unused, a dark silhouette against a mere lack of light surrounding its parameters, brick buildings without exploitable slaves, chimneys without smokestacks.

“The obvious place. The abandoned factory. Why am I even talking to myself? Did Nancy Drew ever talk to herself? No, she always talked to Helen, Bess, and Georgia. Or George. I guess. Or maybe she didn’t. I can’t remember anything in my life anymore.”

The girl in red leapt the fence in a single bound, landing in the courtyard with a sizeable audible impact, the only complication being a few shreds of her softened mantle being torn off by the multiple lines of barbed wire, but nothing all too meaningful.

“Perhaps I should get myself a Helen. Or maybe I should just shut up. I wish I could activate the powers that the order gave me. But I’ve never learned how. Still talking to myself. It’s quiet. Too quiet.”

Then, she noticed the reason why. Footprints. Even more of them. Much fresher than the previous set. And all leading away from the nearby side entrance and wrapping around to: “On the other side of the building!”

As if to corroborate her statement of amateur detective work, the previous opponent made itself known from just across the washed-out red border between the two of them.

“HOWL-LLL-LLL!!!!!!!!!!”

Sure enough, just as Azrael had mobilised and gotten just ten feet further towards her newfound goal, who should drop, seemingly from out of the fallen sky, but a living, breathing Werewolf, claws primed, fur reeking of wet dog, eyes yellowed and dilated, tongue drenched in saliva, and whole body panting for blood. This time, however, Azrael swallowed a taste of copper back and rose to the challenge. This was her chance. A chance to make it right. A chance to actually listen to the words of the old woman. A chance to be the hero and take down the big bad wolf. A chance to be special.

“We maliciously meet again, you pound-town pacific pulveriser. I bet you think you’re so big and scary after throwing me against a trash can or two. Well, not anymore, you warrantatious ward-scum wolfsbane. This tumultuous time won’t be like the last lurking. This tremendous time is properly poised to be sufficiently special.”

With her magnificently-misplaced childish conceited cultivated confidence at an unearned high, Azrael’s eyes narrowed under the heated confines of her full-face mask, and she prepared for a repeat round of the first barren bullish brawny burly bloody brutal battle.

“And I can feel the inhuman side of me growing. The special side. It feels good. Real good.”

“RRRR—!”

Ducking a soaring opening slash from an equally-arrogant bulky bruiser brimming with a matching sixth sense of red-blooded resistance to the cheerful concept of peaceful pacifism, the adaptable angel retaliated with a springing snapping kick clear up to the jaw, easily dodging a swishing swiping move from the overgrown hunting mutt, and knocking her back into a nearby wall of old factory pipes with another kick of equal measure and increased force, this time letting the other metaphorical shoe drop.

“RWOFFF!!!!”

For, evidently, an added change of greenery in the scenery, a thirst for redemption to a mental new wound, and a good several hours of mental preparation, if not a barely-changed and even possibly-worse condition of physical health, were all of the ingredients an avenging angel needed to bring about a swift end to the second problem to effect the Webstervillians in the span of a single week.

“R-WOOO…”

“This was not as difficult as I feared. In fact, this time you were easier than I expected.”

Not as difficult in the circumstances, yes. But, sometimes life does not keep the circumstances in one’s favour long enough for such a good fortune to ultimately matter.

Click—!

“Father?”, cued Otto, now standing next to Old Man Hiram from the porch of the earlier side exit, brushing a little bit of the creases from off of his waist-length white button-up labcoat, and not seeming anywhere even close to a state of panic. Rather, both him and his father were just observing the entire spectacle, standing right there and looking very impressed with their creation. So impressed, in fact, with what she had become at their hands, that the more elderly gentleman had now pulled back the hammer of his trusty .442 Webley six-shooter revolver and taken aim directly at Azrael’s head, aiming less so to penetrate her armour and end her — though such an outcome would have doubtless been a bonus — and moreso for a more self-oriented goal.

“Yeah, I get it. Protect our investment.”

BAYANG!!!!!!

A bullet striking the protected side of her armoured head, while reflected onto the ground, was more than enough to disorient Azrael long enough for the creature called Georgina to recover from being knocked away, and take advantage of the swinging pendulum of fortune to cold-clop her away with the back of her furry hand, knocking her down, completely defenceless, and ripe for a murderois beast to feast.

CONTINUED

[angelofreprisal]

DARK FORCES

AZRAEL #31

Angel and the Monster Maker

VAMPIRE!

Special thanks to

Roger Robinson

“My Guardian Angel in Heaven above, project my with thy holy love–”, began the uneasy prayer of a tiny, pale, poor little girl, who had hair of orange, tied into a braid at her side, a good amount of scars and burns across her arms and her back and the rest of her body, mixed in with the unsanitary dirt of an impoverished existence, and a very pretty – almost antiquated – dress, as quaint as the weave of diligent hands and as blue as the saturated sky, while the darkened light of a singular white wax candle illuminated her face just enough to show her distress – the distress of a hopeful child who remained a living glimmer of the desire for something greater in the midst of the horrid situations all around her, the destiny of her home having been succumbed by force to both literal and figurative darkness, the same darkness that now surrounded everything but her,and all she could do was to pray every night and every day. She had done this every day without fail ever since the tragedy had befallen everyone, and she would continue to do it every single rotation of the moon and the sun above her head, until the beseech deliverance came. Regrettably, the girl’s hopeful attitude was not shared by the one who came into their run-down house through the impromptu entrance curtain, cloaked in the shadows of the neverending night, who, as usual, was always angry, with everyone, and everything.

“How many times I gotta tell ya – There ain’t no angels.”, yelled the girl’s unpleasant father, a grizzly man with unkempt hair, plenty of wrinkles, and at least one tooth missing, continuing to be extraordinarily unpleasant as he scolded the innocent child for simply making her wishes.

“But Mommy said–”

“Can’t ya git it thruh yer thick little skull?”, he continued while angrily pointing his finger and continuing to rage at his own daughter. “Yer Mother’s dead. Ya hear me? Dead. So nothing she told you counts.”

“A-All right, Daddy.”, was the nervous reply of the sufficiently-frightened little girl.

The horrible man adjusted his patchy and ripped coat and turned to leave the small, run-down dwelling. “Go to bed. An’ no more prayin! I’m outta here.”

“W-When will you be back?”

“When you see me, that’s when. Obviously. Maybe not even then. Dum’ little kid.”

Smoking on a lit cigarette, naturally toxic and choking in its effects, the unpleasant father left the home, a square structure of corrugated metal in the trash-filled land under the bridges, where the homeless dwelled and congregated, huddled next to their ruins of abandoned cars and human-sized piles of useless scrap and huddled for warmth next to their literal trash can fires. Beyond the trash and the bridge, the entire sky was coloured with a nauseating brown, the consequence of such permanent smoke across the town’s centuries of dependence upon its now-gutted industrial factories and plants. A cursed town, it was, and now its people were paying for the damage done to it over so much time by breathing poisoned air and dwelling in a town with more scrap and garbage in it than living people.

Elsewhere, entirely on the opposite end of the country, underneath the mansion of billionaire Bruce Wayne, deep within the depths of what was known to a selected chosen few as the Batcave, an eternal prodigal had returned from her recent escapades in the coldness of the winter wonderland known as Switzerland, the warm heat of the land of Mexico, and the hustle and bustle of none other than New York, simply standing there upon one of the platforms adjacent to the batcomputer, soaking in the dark ambience of the headquarters of the most dangerous man in the country, and hearing the distant noise of a swarm of bats flying close to the ceiling of the most powerful man’s lair.

“I thought that you might have something for me to do.”

“Why could you possibly think that?”, asked an extremely-un-interested Batman, seated with his back to her and observing the readings on the display of the giant computer, wanting for nothing more than for the nuisance begging at his heels to just go away.

Azrael took off her hood and mask to reveal a changed face hid in the shadows, standing in front of one of Batman’s most prized and remarkable treasures; an exquisite, authentic 1939 giant penny, taken back as a treasure from his encounter with the Penny Plunderer in the early days of his career. A massive decorative and commemorative coin the size of nearly 200 human beings, and, even further behind which, upon a dedicated circular metal platform, stood the Batmobile, ready for yet another escapade into the city of darkness and danger. As her golden-gauntleted hands lifted her mask away, Jeanne-Paula Valley’s face revealed the same state as her health within her mind: dark circles around her eyes from never receiving sleep in a week, mild scars and burn marks from standing within the flames caused by the spirit of Surtr in the New York condominiums, bruises upon her once-soft and pure skin, now toughened by seemingly-nonstop violent encounters, and her hair having now grown even to beyond its previous limitations, wild and stringy and now restrained in a long low ponytail that now reached down about one-third of the way down her spine. Resting a moment after wincing and stiffening from the mild pain of interacting with her face, which still had yet to heal, she just stammered out a confused justification for why she would bother to come back at all.

“Well, you always seem so busy…”

“Yeah, busy. Busy with important work and business that you could never even begin to understand.”, Batman retorted as he swivelled around in his bat-themed swivel chair, the blueness of his cloak swishing and swinging as he moved, all while the various attached devices and monitors of the mass of the central computer continued to keep on displaying and updating their displays behind him; stock market trends, surges in uprisings in the lower levels of the seedy underbelly of the city, updates from the patrols of his close circle of colleagues, and a running laundry list of escaped costumed rogues and villains, which, considering the run-down-ness of Gotham, seemed to be everyone, everywhere, and committing everything. “I take it your business with the Order Of Saint Dumas is now finished?”

“Yeah. Sure. I guess it is.”, she weakly responded while looking up the dais of steps to the man in the suit of the bat, grey-bodied and blue-faced, and so utterly proud of himself, while Alfred, the trusted butler, made his way back into the central chamber of the room, carrying a tray of tea, still steaming in the midst of steeping, and gently urging for her to move forward in her explanation.

“Perhaps you would care to explain what you’ve been through?”

“Well…”, the girl in red began to stammer out an explanation, as images began to circulate in her head, the shadows from her past, vignettes in noir and in black and white; a once-grand castle crumbling into ruined rubble, the seeming downfall of an evil institution so corrupt and yet so powerful that its annihilation brought even changes to the whole world’s weather, a false kidnapping in a faraway land by the sea, staged by a woman seeking a third chance at affection, the kiss of a reluctant demoness, a ring upon her finger, and a visit to the east with a titan of fire, working together to the prevent a densely-populated city from the complete destruction of the wrathful inferno…

“...We destroyed the order’s home base – the Ice Cathedral, it was called – Then Brian and Lilhy… Lilhy said that we should finish the order’s leftover business… But something happened to her… She got really interested in money and clothes and power and stuff. Started smoking, drinking, and she got… I don’t know – bossy. Sort of… nasty. Really nasty. Then… she went to Paris and met this guy named Luc. Yeh, Luc, that was his name… They got friendly… Really friendly. Like boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“Genes and hormones will have their day.”, the bearded butler muttered almost-entirely to himself, while setting a mug of tea down upon the desk of the man unto whom he was employed.

“Then she started sending me on errands–”

“And that’s when you met Ra’s Al Ghul’s daughter, Talia.”, finished Batman, who rose from his chair and stood atop the raised corrugated metal platform, folding his blue-gauntleted arms and basking in the blotted-out atmosphere in and of his cave.

“Yes.”, Paula admitted, while she once again closed her eyes and hung her head. “Talia, she staged a false kidnapping of herself, wanted to see if I could prove my worth to the League Of Assassins, said that she wanted me to marry her, wanted me to work for her to further her goals, and I told her that I’m not completely human… I… I rejected her. Told her that I couldn’t be her woman. I went back to Lilhy…”

Then, one more image resurfaced to plague her mind: Lilhy, Sister Lilhy, in the arms of the man from Mexico. Holding him. Kissing him. From out of nowhere. Just like that.

“But I decided not to stay. So I left for New York, after you tried to frame me for arson. I met another hero, someone who had a way with fires… We found a deranged professor… Trying to use a child to burn down buildings for his own sick, twisted revenge. We parted ways after the professor died, and then… I came here.”

As she finally finished with her speech, and, while safe in the shadows, away from the man’s full sight, tears began to fall from her eyes.

“Because I didn’t know anywhere else to go.”

Paula sighed again, and then just said: “I was hoping I could be useful.”

Batman sighed, and turned away, before the tone of his delivery became less outright antagonistic and more exasperated, but with a greater level of understanding.

“Jeanne-Paula, look. I work alone. Except for Robin, and sometimes Nightwing and Batwoman. There is just no place for another person in my operation.”

Then, Bruce Wayne, the Batman, said something that it looked like it physically pained him to say. “I’m sorry.”

After he had finished saying that, Alfred coughed.

“Ahem.”

“What is it, Alfred?”

“Master Bruce, there is that Vampire business going around the news lately. Perhaps you could have our Azrael here look into that, instead of just letting her loose without giving her any direction. After all, you took young Master Damian under your wings to prevent him from losing his way any further, and you’ve had great success with him. Why shouldn’t you extend the same kindness to someone who goes through even further torment?”

“Those reports being circulated on 666 News?”, asked a confused Dark Knight, almost doubting if his butler was being serious with him, or if he had simply been pulling a prank. “But those are three thousand miles from here.”

“Precisely. It will give Miss Valley a new quest that she can devote herself to.”

“I see what you mean, Alfred.”, the Batman agreed, before turning his gaze and attention away to look down the railings and address Azrael’s civilian form directly. “Jeanne-Paula, we’ve gotten word that a Vampire has been praying on a group of homeless people, residents of the shantytown formerly known as Websterville, Washington.”

“Vampire?”, inquired the girl while stepping further into the light, revealing in full her changed and weary self to Batman. “You mean like Carmilla?”

Batman pointed with his right hand over to the stairway exit, gesturing towards the light up at the end of the tunnel, and further addressing the damaged, hopeless girl. “Something like that. Or possibly something like Dracula. Probably nothing to it, I’ll admit it. But… You might find something good or interesting if you travel to the forest and check it out. Take a flight over there. A long one. Hell, I’ll even tap Alfred to give you a VIP ride to the airport.”

“Yeah. The forest. Vampire. Sure. I can do that.”

She started to almost run off towards the winding stairs up to the tunnel, before pausing, doubling back, and giving him a simple thanks.

“Thanks. I’ll give you a report as soon as I learn anything. ‘Bye.”

Seven hours had passed, and Alfred had just arrived back into the manor, finding Bruce in his study, sitting outside of his Batman costume, simply staring off into the distance of his lit fireplace, his nose perched upon his folded hands, lost in sense, deep in thought.

“Before You say anything, Master Bruce…”, began the man who had been the Batman’s father figure for every single day of his life after the tragedy that had fallen upon his parents, while noticing that he had indeed slowly but surely drinking the tea that he had left for him earlier, which was only now about halfway full. “Please allow me to quote from the American poet Robert Frost.”

“If you must.”

“‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’”

“Maybe Mr. Frost believed that. I’m not sure I do.”, Bruce responded with a noticeable scowl. “Besides, we didn’t take her in, Alfred. We sent her off on a wild Goose chase.”

“A wild Vampire chase.”

“Whatever.”

“You know she does want to be useful, Master Bruce.”, the butler said, while proceeding to calmly and casually begin to dust off the nearby bookshelves, while also taking a look at the newspaper upon Bruce’s coffee table, which read MURDER At The Stock Exchange: NO SUSPECTS. “Surely you could give her credit for that. I can’t help believing that a real hero lurks in that lass. Perhaps, in pursuing a Vampire – real or not – she’ll find a place for herself.”

Bruce had no response, and simply picked up a radio caller, telling Alfred that: “I’ve got work to do.”, and activating the communicator to go back to what he did best.

“Commissioner, about that Stock Exchange killing… You had better start to look for someone wearing plastic shoes.”

“Hey, Sadie.”, said the terrible father of the poor little girl, back down in the trash heaps bordered by seemingly-endless brick buildings known as Websterville, to a large homeless woman with blonde curly hair and a dark grey coat and knit cap, who reflexively huddled into herself to protect the bottle of wine in her knit-gloved hand. “Wait up a second, gal. You got some’a that wine?”

“Get lost, Benny.”, said the woman to the deadbeat, while stepping just a little closer to her oil barrel bonfire, the very act of her speaking exposing the missing tooth in her mouth as well while she spat her words back to him.

“I just want a little tas’e. Is tha’so harmful?”

“So’s y’u kin git drunk an’ beat me up yit again?”

The rotten, wretched, vicious, wicked man simply pulled harder on the brim of his cherry red fishing cap and shrugged his arms, while the fire, the only light round for several hundred feet, made him into a shadow with only half of the face above and including his eyes being illuminated in the wilting warmth. “Aw, Sadie, I dinn’in’n’t mean no harm. I was only playin’ wit’ch’a.”

“Playin’ don’t break three bones, which is what you done. Now take a hike. Go back to yer kid. She needs you.”

“No. She don’t. She don’t need me. She needs her mother. But she doesn’t have her mother. Not anymore. The slut had to go and die on us. And now the kid doesn’t have the person that she needs. Not anymore.”

Following that, he turned to go, passing through the walls of bricks with shattered glass windows and collapsed, rotten wooden framing, sending a parting shot right back at her before she could counter anything he had said.

“Ah’ll rememburr this, Sadie. You’re even worse’n the bloodsuckers that closed the mill and stole our pension money. I ain’t gunna be yer friend no more.”

“Yah, I wish. Now git away frum me.”

Following the man’s withdrawal into the shadows, the woman was finally gifted a moment of peace, removing the bottle of Madhouse Cheap Grape Wine from under the shelter of her coat, taking an initial swig to warm up, and then chugging down the whole thing in grateful quietness, before then she felt an air of disturbance within the zone, as, out from the darkness behind her, an unknown figure became illuminated, a silhouette in the red light, dressed in a long and pressed dress coat, moving in a manner entirely cast off and divorced from human, and whose eyes shone with a dulled white, as it moved from the shadows and toward the turning woman.

“Git back–”

But her protest was entirely, and somewhat predictably, futile, for, as if triggered on cue by the auditory exclamations of the defenceless homeless woman, the shape in the shadow leapt out of its almost-stupored movements and suddenly and viciously attacked, rending what was once a living person with aspirations, hopes, and dreams, and a whole life she had lived, into a pile of blood upon the ground, the same colour as the spilled remnants of her wine, still leaking from its bottle and joining the drops of blood spilling from the woman’s corpse, as the creature bit down upon its neck even harder to feed on its living death.

Upon whetting its appetite for the moment, the creature rose up, still with plenty of fresh blood upon its face, and smiled, bare fangs and all.

“This was the story of the Vampire getting the bag lady.”

Kicking the dead body away, it left to turn back for the alleyway.

“Dee-Dee-Da-Dee!”

Meanwhile, up in the entrance to the city, just on the streets after the old metal and blue brick bridge that the townspeople had once looked up to as a point of pride, a landmark, a black and red Buick with a totem of the bat expressed in a simplified shield upon the front end fender, a repurposed former utility car for the Waynes and the Pennyworths, now having been given a bat-themed overhaul and repurposed for Jeanne-Paula’s very own brand of highly-destructive utility, suddenly zoomed right into town, haphazardly controlled by its angelic occupant, and suddenly came to a screeching halt, braking by the curb of a rotted, ruined former street that had once housed a reasonable variety of shops built into the endless brick, and attracting the attention of the usual hooligans that were typical to the ruined towns like this, punks who crowded near the lightpost next to the vehicle, and with mild, uncharacteristic, and unusual curiosity, started to watch and monitor the shadowy occupant of the car, who suddenly tucked her hair into the golden neck of her suit, slapped a mask on over her head, and over it all threw a hood, as she came crawling out of the front side of the driver’s end door.

“Hey, mister!”, yelled one of the punks, trying to get her attention. “Hey, you are a mister, ain’t’cha?”

“Hard ta tell in that funny suit.”, muttered another hooligan.

Still another one was less focused on the occupant and more upon the vehicle. “Hey, that whip is bussin’ lit. That cool black ride is absolutely positively phat, yo!”

“Yo, maybe we shouldn’t oughtta do this? What if he’s actually… you know… the Vampire?”

“The Vampire?”

“Naw. It can’t be him. He ain’t all dressed in black, and, look, he ain’t no bat, man.”

Following that, one of the thugs stepped on over to the open transportative vehicle and began in the action of harassing an unexpected new stranger just like the usual routine of vermin hassling those perceived as easy targets.

“Hey, lemme borrow your ride, see…”, began the unholy hooligan through slurred words.

“We’ll bring it right back.”, continued another one of the certified no-good spindellers. “I promise.”

“Sure. Right back.”

KRACK!

THUNCH!

WHUHMMP!

A rocket-punch from Azrael’s fist squared one thug’s jaw right down to the ground, followed by a second punch to another jaw that knocked the second one into a pole, and, finally, unleashed was a devastating kick that caused the ensuing flying punk to break one of the few glass still-standing windows. A fourth thug, who had been standing over a ways next to the other road, wisely declined to rush the angelic being, and ran away.

“That was nicely done, angel.”

Azrael’s ears perked up at the presence of a new and unknown voice, a voice that sounded like old and cracked stone and instantly commanded attention, as if the physical embodiment of a weathered spirit of many, many years, who spoke to her in a gravelly but interested registry, standing peacefully behind her by the drowned-out red light of a wrought old lamppost.

“You know that I’m an angel?”

“I know that is what you call yourself…”, answered the voice’s owner, a quite short and very old woman, dressed in a long hooded green coat, what little of her face was visible being covered in wrinkles so set in age that they resembled fissures in a canyon’s rock, her eyes and half of her nose encloaked in shadows, and a ragged dark grey ponytail of hair tired down behind her. “And what, above all else in the world, you would like to be. You are not exactly a human. and not exactly an angel, no. At least, not yet.”

Azrael, confused, tilted her head and asked a question to the complete, total stranger. “Have we met?”

“Not until this moment.”, the elderly woman of mystery responded. “I am Glinda.”

“And I’m Jea… No, not like this. Like this, I’m actually Azrael.”

“An angel of vengeance, no less.”, commented Glinda, while resting one of her long-nailed, very wrinkled hands upon a simple wooden walking cane, and coming into Azrael’s own direct line of sight.

“Have you seen any Vampires around here?”

“Seen? No. Not with my eyes. But one who fancies itself to be a vampire is near. She has taken a life tonight, and by her very nature she will be driven to take more.”

“You said that this person ‘fancies’ herself to be a Vampire. What’s the deal about that?”

“What was formerly a woman is now to Vampires as you are to angels.”

“Could you explain?”

“No.”

As the woman began to walk away, Azrael instincually picked up her pace to follow her in her footsteps, stopping to walk at a much more reasonable pace when she caught up beside her, raising an open hand out of habit as she kept the conversation going. “Perchance, are you a fortune teller? A wit… A seer?”

The woman stopped, and gave some thought to the question, before bowing her head and leaing on her short cane a little bit heavier. “You started to say ‘Witch’. I am not that, nor fortune teller, nor seer. I have not practiced Wicca for a great many years. I am merely now a very old woman who has been to a great many places, seen a great many things from all walks of life and all corners of the globe, and learned a wealth of knowledge concerning what and who is evil.”

“And Vampires?”, asked an Azrael rendered even more confused. “What else can you possibly tell me about Vampires?”

A single dark brown eye was illuminated by a nearby street lamp as the two of them continued to trot on the sidewalk while having their special little chin-wag, a single, knowledgeable eye from Glinda’s shdowed face almost glowed with the reflecton that hinted at the wealth that lied within. “Not a great deal. Those beings of the living dead, corpses who prey upon the lives of the living, those who puncture veins and arteries and drink to steal the fluid of life – of these, regrettably, I know little.”

She turned to her then, while the two of them came upon the ruins of the rest of the former tow, the homeless encampments and corrugates steel shelters, built into the surroundings as the last remnants of the population spent their nights and days there attempting to turn their insignficant human lives into something more meaningful.

“Angel, only this can I say to you – When you answer the prayer of a child, then you will meet her.”

“That’s all?”, asked Azrael, as she stood still long enough for Glinda to outpace her once again and lose her in the shadows.

“That is enough. If you wish to prove your worth to the angel which you aspire for, then, in the end, it will have to be enough. Farewell, and good hunting.”

“This is going to be the story of the Vampire and the Hoodlum.”, gleefully mumbled the embodiment of undeath, dressed in the former skin of a pale young woman with short orange hair, adjusting her long blue coat as she walked the streets, revelling in the cooling Pacific Northwest night air, the climate eternally soaked in the endless refreshing and renewing rain providing the perfect nesting ground for one who favoured the night so much that her whole unlife depended on it. The creature, walking around hungry at the time, just so happened to be walking upon the same street as the once-fleed thug, who was busy with talking to himself in a world of his own.

“I coulda taken him…”, began the hoodlum, thug, and hooligan, for such a lowlife was all of those things at the same time. “Could kicked his ass, that’s fur sure. But, hell, it wasn’t worth my time. I got important stuff to do.”

Then, seeing the dark stranger approaching him on the other end of the sidewalk, the hoodlum devillishly smiled and walked up to her.

“Yo, gee. You got any money I can borrow four tomorrow?”

The creature flashed a single fanged smile, and its emotion reconigured intosomething almost like glee. “And so, the story begins.”

“Eyy, I’m talkin’ too yuu!”, yelled out the thug as he stopped the creature, showing a hand on her shoulder. “I ast you if you got any money–”

In her swift response, the creature just slapped his hand off and picked his whole body up by the neck.

“Aw, no… You ain’t the Vamp–”

“Oh, but I am.”, the undead being retorted, while smiling even harder, beyond normal human limitations.

Throwing his entire body into the nearby brick wall with a loud and crashing KRASH!, the silhouette of the being was simply seen as a moving, living shadow, coming up on the bleeding hooligan, and, with a smile of joy, she attacked.

Exhaling with a breath of joy as its mouth was once more covered in blood, the Vampire gobbled up the remainder of the blood drawn from the lowlife mangled corpse, and clapped her pale, clammy hands together in twisted happiness.

“Now, that’s the end of that story. It was a dull story. Besides the food, I didn’t enjoy it. But the next story… That will be about the Vampire and the little girl.”

As, a few hundred feet away, the rotten father reentered into his run-down, cobbled-together home, the creature of the night smiled – authentically this time.

“I know I’ll like that one. Dee-Dee-Da-Deee~!”

“My Guardian Angel in Heaven above, protect me with thy holy love…”, once again began the little girl from within her squalid and horrid shack, kneeling down before a white lit candle, oblivious to the arrival of her unpleasant excuse for a father through the thin curtain behind her.

“Shed upon me thy holy light, to guide me through this darkest night—”

“I TOLD Y’U NO PRAYIN’!”, screeched the man in the cap and coat, reflected upon by the flame in a hellish red light, as he slapped the frail little girl right in the face, knocking her back several feet onto the dirty and earthen floor. “IT DIDN’T DO YU NO GOOD WHEN YER MOTHER WAS SICK, IT DIDN’T DO JACKWAGON WHEN THEY CLOSED THE MILL DOWN, AND IT AIN’T GUNNAH DO YEUW NO GOOD NOW!”

From the outside, twenty feet away, Azrael could swear she heard the sound of a child squeaking, and saw a rip and tear in the opening curtain that seemed uninvited beyond all measurements.

Inside, the father slapped the child yet again, drawing blood from her cheek as she once again hit the floor, and causing her to squeak even louder, before he picked up the candle and hurled it outside through one of the crude open windows, causing it to land upon one of the many piles of trash, roll a little a ways, rocking in the too-wild and yet too-mild wind, and igniting the whole pile in a matter of mere moments.

“AIN’T NOBODY GOIN’ TU ANSWER NO GODDAMN PRAYERS!”

Azrael couldn’t help herself but to think out loud into the rest of the universe. “Wonder what’s going on in there… Probably a private matter. Probably none of my business. Probably not something that has anything to do with…”

“The Vampire strikes!”, a dark-coated creature hissed out in celebration, while holding up the terrible, horrible man effortlessly in her left hand, and enclosing her long, black-nailed, papery-pale fingers around his throat, while a frightened little child cowered in the corner, hoping and praying that the being who used to be a living woman didn’t take notice of her in a violent, killing way.

“Dee-Dee-Di-Dee!”

“Pleaze don’t — Guh — kill me… Guh… Gurglle…”, was the weak plea of the rotten parent.

Not knowing any better, the little girl rose from the wall and from the floor, hit the being with both of her softened, useless fists, and spoke out loud through teary eyes, yelling to the living dead with all the self-preservation of a sizzling Catfish served unto the upper echelons in the finest dining establishment on the California coast.

“Stop it! Stop hurting my daddy!”

“Is that so? Well, who am I to refuse the cries of such a helpless, scared little child?”, asked the Vampire mockingly, while hurling the deadbeat into the nearby food shelf with the wrecking force of a total KRACCK!!

“How about I hurt you instead? Isn't that the Vampire being poetically compliant, little girly?”

The girl and the Vampire had become seen as shapes in the red darkness, surrounded by the hellfire brought upon them from the outside, and enclosed in a darkened space with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nothing with which to resist the invader, and no way to receive any possible help. Gripping onto the child's arm, and stretching her smile even further, the dead being, adorned in the radiant nightmarish red inside the shack, screeched in a madness that had no longer been controlled.

“Young blood… Fresh blood… Innocent blood! A sweet and succulent little girl’s blood! Oh, my favourite~!”

But, just as the creature’s sharpened fangs were just about to sink themselves into the little girl’s neck, an entire wall was knocked out and down by the lightning-quick kick of a red foot that belonged to the angel backlit by a starless sky, its black edges swiftly beginning to fade away and bring the mystical dawn of the twilight.

“Get yourself off that girl, bloodsucker!”

The fire quickly spread to the inside of the ramshackle residence, turning up the dial of the infernal heat and making the ruin brighter, and, almost invigorated by the presence of the wretched fire, Azrael braced herself and wound up her fists to prepare for an ensuing presumed confrontation.

“Put her down.”

The Vampire proceeded to hurl the child right into the waiting arms of the avenging angel, who just barely managed to catch her, and turn her back to absorb the attack from the unliving creature who screamed at her that she would bring an end to: “The foolish intruder!”, tearing several shreds off of Azrael’s red angelic mantle and causing her stature to sway.

SLASH!

In response, the angelic fist of the righteous one rocketed right into the Vampire’s pale ginger face with all the programmed and mechanical force of an industrial piston, drawing visible fresh human blood from within her revitalised veins as the rocket-punch connected.

CRACK!

Following that movement and maneuver, in a truly impressive combative combination, Azrael transferred the little orange-haired girl into her other arm and sent a flying knuckle sandwich towards the predator stone cold to the jaw, visibly breaking multiple jaw bones and skyrocketing her to the ceiling, right after she dropped down and left herself vulnerable to an ensuing kick, sprung out of the angel’s energy like the snapping and crackle of a primed and proper horse whip.

FWAKK!

THWACK!

While she was finally safe, held in the arms of the red-suited vigilantic figure, the little girl, her eyes once more filled with faith and hope and wonder, gripped onto the rescuer’s muscles a little tighter, her tears having dried in the hellish heat, and a cheerful, hopeful smile back on her face.

“My Guardian Angel…”

The previous kick from an Azrael who was not amused had broken down yet another wall in the ruins of the flaming shanty shack, sending the orange-haired Vampire flying right out of the shelter of the wall and landing her right onto the ill-maintained roads of the city pavement to eat hard asphalt and dirt…

…Right into the pavement of a ruined Websterville, currently lying under a rising sky, crowned by the usual arrival of the life-giving sun, over the beautiful, beautiful twilight, that came into the city through the hordes of dark evergreen trees, and, with it, bringing in the sweet and satisfying smell of the misty Washington morning dew. Beautiful to the living… Nightmare to the dead.

“The Vampire is in big trouble…”, the creature hissed, as her blood-red eyes beheld the incoming arrival of the enemy of her very being, digging into the paleness of her long-dead skin with claws designed for piercing the flesh of her prey and enemies, as the undead being began to hiss and smoke, carrying with it the unpleasant aroma of misty burning flesh.

“OOOHHHAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!”

In due time the entirety of what once had been her body was consumed in the morning light, dissipated into the smoke of a body that had long since overstayed its welcome. Azrael could not help but be confused, nervous stepping outside with a grateful child at her side, and wondering out loud as she stomped her red-bodysuited foot over the charred blue coat lying burned out there in the middle of the road to inspect the damage.

“It didn’t burn. She just… dissolved. Dissolved. How could fire do that?”

From out of the shadows, previously standing under the bridge, in the cool, in the shade, Glinda pulled her hood a little bit closer to adjust her eyes to the incoming brightness of the sun, and rested her hand on her cane as she mused to the small girl and the angel.

“Perhaps fire had nothing to do with it.”

As she sighed out loud, the light revealed her own face, old, wrinkled, and weathered with time, but still filled with the freshness of one who still had all intentions to continue living and keep experiencing all that there was to living as a human being.

“Creatures of darkness do not like sunlight.”

“…And that about finishes my report.”, continued Azrael, later on in the day, while talking into the receiver of a portable radio phone, standing posted next to her car, while basking in the shade in the shadow of yet another brick building.

“The danger’s passed, but there’s still a lot of questions… Like, who was the killer? Was she a real Vampire, or just some maniac? And exactly what did happen to her? I don’t have any answers. But I’d like to go and get some. So, I know you probably won’t mind when I’ll tell you I want to stay here for a while. I have no place to go. I have nothing better to do. So, until further notice, I’ll consider this to be my home.”

Next Issue: NIGHT TERRORS

[astracaedes]

Y O U N G F U M B L E R

[goldcrisp]

I’m having a ball.

Another WIP

After this you’ll never see these two again. My fixations changes fast.

Also I forgot how tall they are next to eachother sorry not sorry

[muzzleguppy]