In The Dark Of Night

Chapter Twenty Seven - Ruined

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ruined

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

~William Shakespeare

Santino was alive during the first Rioting.

He had been a mere babe then in 1963, still suckling at his mother, his little fingers clawing for her calloused palms as she pressed him tight to her chest, sweat careening down her arms and legs, the frantic 'thud-thud' of her heart like a drum in his ears.

He still remembered every detail - the bomb shelter that his paranoid recluse of a father had built beneath their home just before he'd taken his own life at the hands of a poisonous potion; the way his mother had hidden herself away inside it, singing that old ballad that he could never seem to forget, stroking his hair with one hand and toying with his little toes with the next; he remembered the screaming and the stifling heat of rouge fires and the cries of the dying and wounded; and he would never forget the smells of decayed and rotting flesh that seemed to hang in the air, immovable for days and days on end. 

The first years of his life - soaked in blood.

Maybe that was why he'd never quite taken to many people. 

As hard as it seemed for the people who knew him now to believe, Santino Garcia did not like visitors. 

In fact, he took after his father in the way that he too had become a recluse; from the time he was seventeen - and actually seventeen, in real years instead of just his immortal appearance - ten years after the Rioting had finally subsided in 1970 when the Order, new and in control, had returned from another dimension and taking their world back, he had begun to realize he did not enjoy human or Abnormal company as much as he probably should have. 

And so he'd left his mother's home and put up shop on his own, far from any other supernatural creature in the most unlikely place for any sort of self-respecting warlock - a suburban neighbourhood in Brooklyn - shielding his home from unwanted attention by placing a few spells over its threshold and disappearing within it for months on end without seeing another human soul.

He was twenty-one when he heard of his mother's untimely demise. 

She'd been a hundred and sixty-seven, but hadn't looked a day over twenty. 

According to the Order member who'd reported it to him, she had been in perfect health. 

Santino did not cry - he did not even attend the funeral.

He didn't quite know why, but he blamed her for dying - for trusting. He didn't know who exactly had killed her, but he knew that if she had been a little less gullible, a little less promiscuous and a little less reckless and fiery, that maybe she would have seen it coming. 

The Order representative had been a mere sixteen years old, with dark - almost midnight black hair, and grey, piercing eyes that seemed to rip Santino apart, watching him for any sort of reaction when he'd told him of his mother's death. 

The warlock did not give the boy the satisfaction.

This, for some reason, seemed to please him.

He'd introduced himself as Damien Alcork, a junior member of the Order who'd been given the task of finding Santino and delivering the news - a ploy to get him out of the lab and around other people, because they thought he was spending a tad too much time with his books, regardless of the fact that he still remained one of the most popular people in his youthful class.