Burning Fire

Chapter 4 - Smoke Screen

I took an involuntary step back from the man who has hell in his eyes

“What are exactly are you?” I mumbled, my feet stumbling back another few feet.

It was my father who replied. “We're demons.” he said calmly. “And as my daughter, you are too.”

Shock! Such a small word that often failed to described the bone-shaking feeling. Humans, for all our sophistication and wordsmiths, we often find ourselves short of finding words that described what we were feeling.

Perhaps that’s not the failings of our words but a tribute for the complicated nature of the human emotion.

I examined and re-examined the man who stood before me, searching for a sign that would reveal our relation, something to tell me that I belonged, but I found none.

While I was a pale red haired and rather skinny eighteen-year-old, he was a GOD. You know, the rock 'n' roll type that made women drop their panties at first glance.

The ultimate sex symbol.

But the man who stood before me was much like his name, a walking contradiction. His 'angelic' beauty was matched with the hellish predator that leapt out of his eyes. The man who would kill without a second thought. The man who would kill me without a glance. The killer . . . the Demon.

Perhaps the women that slept with him chose to ignore the killer behind the mask or were even turned on by it, but now as he stared down at me with clear anger I knew I was closer to hell than I ever been before.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth, L'Enfer?” I scrambled backwards, not out of fear but because I preferred to speak to this man face to face rather than looking up at him sprawled on the floor. Not that my five-foot frame reached anywhere near his over-six-foot body.

“You don’t but I have- no we have waited for too long for your arrival and some will wait no longer. I realize that your human mind will refuse to believe what you see, perhaps it will even reject it, but to make our lives easier I insist you get on with what you were born to do. After all it is your destiny.”

His words sparked in me anger like nothing I've ever felt before. 'Destiny' echoed in my head and all fear inspired by his outburst dispersed. “Listen up here, Gabriel,” I emphasized his name “I don’t care who you are- no one tells me what to do.”

“I am your father!” he shouted like he had the right to me because I was the product of his affair with an unstable woman. May I say that I now know what Luke Skywalker felt like? To be told your father was an evil demon really brings life into perspective

“Maybe you should have acted like it when I needed you. Where were you when I was raising myself ha? Where were you when I fed myself, when I had to look after my mother who you left broken? Do you know how long it took her to recover after you? Fifteen years. She would not sleep at night. She would not eat, she drank. All because you decided to have a quick affair with a woman who was not even stable. You should have realised what you were doing to her L'Enfer.”

Anger seized my whole body.

“You think that you can go around shagging people with no consequence . . . how many people have you fathered and left?” I tried to clear my head by shaking it some more.

“I can't do this Gabriel, you and them,” I pointed at the seven demons that had sat looking at us with utter silence. “I can't handle this shit. I am leaving.”

The moment I made up my mind my body was gripped with the same sensation as before. I was raised into the air, my body shattering once again. Before I knew it I was back on a similar pavement, topside. I was not back in Gabriel's house, but rather close to the apartment me and my mother had shared.