Chapter 5: Sympathy for the Devil

Authors Note: After a nearly 2 year hiatus due to medical problems I'm trying to regain my footing. I know I've done a bad job of keeping everyone informed but really with my history of lacked story updates, I was a bit ashamed to show myself to the fiction press community again. I'm going to try to do a whole lot better! I'm out of school for the holidays, and Christmas is over, so I have until the 4th of January to do some hardcore writing and play catch up with a lot of my stories. After that, I'll see where it goes from there! So, I figured I'd start back off with a "Bang"! So Here you go, finally, Chapter 5 of If When I Fall. Love you guys and I hope your holidays were awesome!

"Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game"

~ The Rolling Stones

Smoke enveloped the space around the gun thick, dark gray, and heavy, it wrapped around his face like a helmet, bringing out the deep set green in his hazel eyes. As the smoke cleared he sneered, there was no screeching, human or creature, there was just empty space. Aedan's sneer turned into a hateful deep set rage as he slammed his fist into the space Farren had been holding Rylee, the place where Rylee had been and now was not.

Pao burst in, pulling out his compound bow he'd gone to get from his truck, and lowered it as he saw the room cleared. "Shit." He yelled and burst through the front door, leaving Aedan, with a fist sized hole in his wall, gritting his teeth, and pulling the lever to open his hidden gun safe.

"Hell just got real Rolling, let me introduce it to you personally." He collected his guns and bags, and gave Tala a look and then jerked his head towards the door. The usually playful dog stopped wagging her tail, curled her lips, her fur lifted and she let lose a vicious animalistic growl and followed Aedan through the doorway.

Rylee shook off her daze, her blurred vision clearing to form a migraine that beat into her skull. She was confused for only a moment as to what had happened and then as her eyes cleared as did her realization that she was no longer in Aedan's apartment. She looked around, her head throbbed as she took in her surroundings, she was in a cave, somewhere deep underground, she could hear the distant dripping of water from the surface world, and the reason she could see at all was due to candles and large torches surrounding her. She shivered and pulled, but realized she couldn't stand. Her arms and legs were tied tightly and then chained to the wall.

She had no weapons, no protection, and her clothes were torn leaving her cold and shivering in the damp darkness of the cave. She tried in vain to pull at her restraints but they only dug into the soft skin of her wrists. She looked around, hopelessly plotting escape, even if it was futile, she had to think, had to come up with something to escape.

She stopped as she heard a distant growling sound that consumed the cave and was followed by another, a grumbling mismatch of screeches and growls and grunts like a couple of ravens facing off to see who could make the loudest sound. Rylee cringed, she knew that sound. She knew that sound all too well, even before she saw their child sized bodies, more 34-21s. How many more children would have to be sacrificed like this? She squinted into the shadows trying to find any source, mostly Farren, and just as she thought of his name, a chuckle came from the corner as he eased out from the shadow and into the torch light.

"So good of you to join us Rylee."

"Farren, what the hell is this, what the hell are you?"

He chuckled and walked up to her steadily, "I am, how would you say, oh what was it you hunters called us, shadow wraiths was it?"

Rylee froze unable to utter the name. She had never confronted a shadow wraith. It was before her time of service, Aedan as a boy had gone on the last hunt with her father's group to destroy the last Ragir, the vampire lords who created shadow wraiths. Now it appeared, there was another? This only spelt bad for Rylee, ragirs were not only extremely powerful, but nearly impossible to kill. There was no way she could do it, especially not alone. "What does your master want from me?"

"Want? My dear, my master doesn't want or need, he takes. As simple as that, he reclaims what is rightfully his.'

"I belong to no one."

"On the contrary, you now belong to my master."

Rylee gritted her teeth, "Farren! Why? Why are you doing this? What's happened to you?"

Farren smirked "I'm immortal my dear, I get my freedom to do as I please. I'm finally free to ravish the land, destroy those that oppose me. Most importantly I can kill that bastard Torent!" He laughed and bled back into the shadows.

Rylee jerked at her restraints as fear clouded her eyes, he was going after Aedan, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do to stop him. "No!" She screamed, but all was in vain, and some tears tore at her eyes but she pulled them back, rivaling them with anger and rage as she pulled at her restraints.

There was laughter behind her, thick, hardy, unrecognizable laughter. She turned as best she could but a corner blocked her view, and then the laughter echoed, she couldn't tell where it was coming from. She looked around anxiously for its source, and then in a cloud of dusted smoke approached a figure, the figure's eyes were glowing pale yellow and the laughter shook her, as it pulled itself from the smoke, and stared at her right in the face.

It took the form of a man, but there was no way Rylee could be sure, she could tell from its eyes and face it was a demon, but she knew little of demons the ones she'd faced where mindless puppets. This one, had a mind of its own, it approached her with an air of arrogance and stopped just before her. It was tall and constantly smiling with twisted eyes and markings that arranged themselves like blood rivers dripping from its eyes. It wore clothes that were far older than this era, and by the looks of it, it must have been several hundred if not thousands of years old.

It chuckled deeply once more, "Rylee Blaire. How long has it been since your father tried to wipe out my whole kind?" he sneered and Rylee could see his elongated teeth, each came to a sharp point and glittered in the dim light.

She shivered. She could already tell his intentions before he had to explain them. She asked anyway, anything to stall for even a moment. "What do you want?"

He smirked, "Come now my girl, you know exactly what I want."

"Sorry, I don't."

He chuckled, "Even I know you aren't that stupid. You know well what your kind has done. You know well I crave my revenge. But what you don't know, is how I wish to obtain it."

Rylee bit her lip, "Then enlighten me."

"Now, now, if I gave up my plans for the past thousands of years, I wouldn't have made it this far, now would I?"

She knew there was no way of reasoning with a Ragir, like most demons, they were the essence of pure evil, and no amount of enlightenment or talk of peace could change their twisted sense of justice. "Why Torent? He was just on the last run; he never killed any of your kind!"

He chuckled yet again, "You know so little to be his lover. How he protects you."

She was irritated, she had tried so hard to not be branded with him, avoided him, rejected his advances, but still, she was seen as a weakness, and that really pissed her off. "We're not lovers! I don't need him to protect me!"

"Then why are you here?" He came close to her; she could smell the distinct smell of blood and corpses and the vile scent of what she came to know as pure evil. He pulled at her restraints and she shook him off.

She merely glared at him and sneered as if about to bare her teeth. He smirked again, a sickening twisted, inhuman smirk that stirred nausea in Rylee. He twisted into the shadows and she stood there, anger flooded her and she twisted in her restraints, realizing all was in vain, and as she slowly felt the pressure against her wrists she bowed her head and for the first time in a long while, she felt tears of helplessness slide down her cheeks. Each one stung her like hot coals, each one was a display of weakness she'd held back, and each one showed her just how much she did need Aedan Torent.

Aedan brandished a look of unaltered rage, armed to the teeth, and Tala, stiffened at his side, staring off into the distance, not a single sign of a playful puppy in her. She stood, watching, waiting, for any sign of change to warn for, to attack. Aedan waited, he knew what was coming, he was prepared to finish this, at all costs. He'd not warned the council for the simple reason that the council would have sent out more warriors, would have told him to not go alone. When this was something he could only do alone.

As blackness began to swirl in the shadows and Tala stood, fur ablaze and teeth bared, Aedan stood calmly, his finger on his gun at his side. He waited, as the crooked smile of that bastard Farren Rolling showed, he was ready. For anything.