Helldancer

Chapter 1

Demons are born to be evil.

Everyone knows that, especially me. You'll never meet a nice demon. I am a demon, and the first one who managed to get into the world of the humans, kill a few, and then walk around in the open like nothing at all happened, without being suspected. However, I'm a special case.

I'd already seen some blonde, makeup-plastered, sweaty news reporter blabbing about the massacre at the crime scene. I don't know how humans perceived people like that as beautiful. She looked plain weird with all that powder on her face and drawn-on eyebrows. After she finished talking, she went off to flirt with the cameraman. He was ugly too, some bucktoothed acne-scarred barely-adult, maybe nineteen years old, gangly and unhealthy looking.

Cameras from all the different news stations and their trucks and employees were steadily showing up every few minutes, each eye-candy reporter repeating the exact same story with slightly different wording. The news would spread from newspaper to T.V. station quickly, and the people would write more and more, attempting different angles on it until they absolutely beat it to death and no one cared anymore. That was the way that news worked in the human world.

Fun times, really. The people I had killed were some family in Chicago, where I am now. It was summertime, around noon, and the sun was beating down on my pale-ish skin. I knew I probably would end up getting sunburned, but that couldn’t be helped. I don’t tan, I just turn a pinkish color that gets darker and darker until it’s bright red, skin peeling and everything. Yuck.

I wouldn’t call what I had done murder, not exactly. I was just having a nice little meal, like any other royal demon. An easy meal, served right up rare, while they were holed up unsuspecting in their quaint cottage.

Those killings were nothing but an experiment to cause chaos in the human region (though I was hungry), as the orders had said, but somehow, despite the brilliance that I lacked to become successful, here I am, in a public park, sitting in a swing like another bored teenager, which was true enough.

My sharp, inhuman teeth glinted in the sunlight as I watched the small humans at play, climbing up and down multiple metal structures. One cried as its ice cream melted and fell to the floor, splatting all over the pavement.

I hissed in pain as its magnified wails reached my slightly pointed ears. My hearing had only gotten better as I had come to the other world, and it was one hell of a noisy place, that was for sure.

It was taking an excessive amount of my strength not to rush over and slit the loud, dirty child’s throat, like a knife through butter. Their mortality was unfortunate; delicate humans were killed far too easily to dominate the earth, but they reproduced so quickly that they had managed to do just that. It disgusted me.

Oh, how my biological parents would enjoy the thought of me murdering a child, even though I already had before. Mother and Father were not demons, however. They had been gods, and here I was, a demon, the very opposite of them.

I couldn't see how it was cruel to kill someone so annoying. Men go to wars to kill people, but in the end they are all just sons and fathers, uncles, brothers, all the same, bloodthirsty. They praise people for going to war, give them medals, but I know the reality. Killing someone is a rush, an adrenaline high. It's not praiseworthy.

I had originally been born as a god, true, but I became fed up of the fancy airs they had to hold up. My parents always had to be good, they always had to do everything for other people, as they were the king and queen of the gods. No selfishness, you have to be kind. No this, no that. Serve the people. Might as well balance a book on your head and take princess lessons.