Into Many Worlds - A Collection of Short Stories

The Halfling

"I mean..." he laughs. "I told you to come alone, but I didn't expect you to come alone."

He continues laughing while everyone around him is silent. In a tight circle around him and his hostage, men with enormous guns stand around, staring.

"I'm usually not this obedient," she spits, blood rolling out of her mouth from when he clocked her. "But something about you just brings it out of me."

He kneels down in front of her, squeezes her cheeks between his two hands, and smiles. She stares into his dead eyes, black irises pooling into white pupils. The rest of his eyeballs are yellow. Some would mistake it for jaundice, but professionals knew it was the beginning stages of Demon possession.

"But I was looking forward to killing those friends of yours," He pokes his lips out, pretending to be put out. "All these men that I hired expecting a proper fight. You let me down, Seraphina."

Seraphina made sure that the girls wouldn't come. She said some horrible things to them to make sure they'd never come to her rescue or work with her ever again. Seraphina had gotten them into this mess. She wouldn't let anyone else die for her.

He removes his hands from her face and smiles at her, his teeth sharpened so roughly and yet still sharp enough to pierce the inside of his bottom lip. They are stained red and she doesn't think that it was all his blood that color them.

"Do you know why you're here?" He asks her.

Seraphina looks at him and smiles back, sure that her teeth are blood-stained too and teeth knocked loose.

"I have an idea, but I'm sure you'll tell me, anyway. It's about time for your supervillain monologue."

Her head snaps to the side, her body swaying and only staying up because of the foundation pole he loosely tied her to. It took a few seconds to feel the pain and realize that he smacked her.

Colored dots swim in her vision, making the world look like a pointillism painting. She can feel hands clasp her arms and right her body until she's looking at a blurry man.

"Black blood runs in my family. There has been generation after generation of Dark Priests. I never believed in that kind of thing, though. There was never anything that came of it. No one had their prayers answered, no eternal life, and no supernatural powers. I thought it was just a stupid organized religion. However, my parents raised me up in the Dark Church, and I was a filial child. The only thing that interested me was a prophecy—one that I thought was just a story. It said that one day a child would be born, a child of an Angel and a Demon hidden on earth, and after each death, they were reincarnated. How cool is that?! That's what I wanted to be. Not a child from my family but something... extraordinary," He laughs, his voice ringing throughout the abandoned church, sending the birds flying.

"Cool story, bro. Any chance you're getting to the end?" Seraphina smirks.

He grabs her chin between his thumbs and fingers. He squeezes so hard that her mouth opens and her jaw pops.

"Patience," he smiles, "This is the last thing you'll hear before you die."

He throws her face and away, and she can't help but stretch out her mouth even though it hurts.

"Imagine my shock when my late Nainai's amulet glowed, and then vibrated, and then burned. I had always worn that pendant and never had it done that before. Nainai said it would let me know when the reincarnated halfling was near."

"Still don't know why you need me."

He sighs, putting his hands on his knees and standing up. She has to stretch her neck to look up at him.

"So impatient," he says. "They excommunicated me from the Dark Church. You'd think that someone has to be horrible to be excommunicated from a Dark Church. Nope! I was too good for them. You, my dear, prophesied halfling, is my ticket back. But first, we'll wait for your friends to come and rescue you. We'll kill them for fun and then take you to my Nainai."

She can see the faces her sisters made at her, after the evil things she said to them. She disgusted them. It saddened them. They hated her. There was no way they save her, especially when she intentionally left to give herself up without knowing why. This was the only way to save them. They didn't know that she held their lives in her hand, protecting them from this evil man. And she decided that they never would.

"They won't come," Seraphina says, "Not for me. You're wasting their time."

He smiles at her, and it brings a chill over her entire body.

"No. Orphaned girls raised together and taught how to fight. Your adoptive mother taught you how to shoot guns, how to protect yourself, and how to fight the men who lurked in the dark. A tight-knit group like the eight of you—or I'm sorry the five of you. I killed a few... they'll come for you. They're your sisters."

Loud sounds ring through the air, coming from the outside of the abandoned church. She knows what the sound is: gunshots. And since she doesn't think the men posted outside are shooting each other, she only had to hope that they were playing around and not that the man in front of her was right. Her little sisters can't be here.

Sure enough, the doors burst open, and there stand three of her family members.

"Shit," She whispers.

They don't hesitate. They don't pause. There's no more room for monologues. They fire into the crowd of armed mercenaries, each one falling to the ground with red bruises on their head. Non-lethal rounds: the only way they fought.

When every man around them has fallen, they aim their guns at the man standing in front of her.

"I told you'd they come. I'd didn't expect them to be so efficient—"

He didn't get to say anything else as a shot rings from behind her. This one wasn't non-lethal. And as he falls, blood seeps out of him.

She watches him for an entire minute and nothing happens as the silence closes in on them.

"Well, that was anticlimactic," Seraphina says. She looks behind her to find the second eldest sister.

"You're only supposed to use non-lethal rounds and then we drag them to the police," Seraphina scolds.

"Do you really think I'd let a man bring you to a Dark Church to be a sacrifice or something," her sister complains, looking annoyed. "We all know you said those things to make us mad, and we know you wouldn't willingly walk into a situation unless you had to. He threatened our lives didn't he?"

Seraphina stares at her, trying to hold back the tears.

"Could you just untie me?" She asks. "Let's get the mercenaries to the police station before they wake up. Then we'll figure out what to do with him."

After being untied, she rubs her wrist and stands up. Her sisters and her walk away, careful not to step in the blood as they join her other sisters.

"Ouch," comes a voice, "That kind of hurt."

Seraphina freezes, slowly turning to look at him.

He sits up, brushing the blood out of his face.

"Fun fact," he smiles at them, the white irises flooding his eyes. "Every time I die... I come back even stronger."

Seraphina looks to her sisters and then back to the reanimated man in the middle of the church as the debris on the floor floats around him.

"Shit."