Then the fires faded away and I stood up. We stood there, angel and demon staring in utter shock at what had happened. I didn’t think it was possible for a demon to mark an angel, or the other way around. I had no idea where the symbol came from, but it was my mark. Everyone knew that without thinking about it.

One the inside of the right forearm was a black tattoo, about the size of my palm. Four lines were drawn so that their center points all intersected at the same spot. A circle was drawn around the center point. One line had triangles drawn at its ends, another had diamonds. The third line had pentagons, while the last line sported hexagons at its ends. I stood there looking the various women as they looked between me and the new marks on their arms.

“Well, that was unexpected,” I said quietly, it was still loud enough to break the silence that had permeated the room. My head was cloudy, like I was in a fog. It didn’t the same as just before I went crazy at the apartment. No, it was more like I was getting over a sickness. I felt full, plugged up in a way. Maybe there aren’t even words for what I was feeling.

“How is that even possible?” one of the angels uttered. I simply shrugged. Everybody else in this room had a better idea of what had happened than I did.

“How? How did you do that?” the voice was strong and melodious even to my demon tainted ears. I looked to the speaker. The angel was a woman of exquisite beauty, her hair hung well down her back and was the color of a summer sunset, shot through with oranges and reds.

For a response I could only shrug helplessly. There was no playbook that I was following. Nothing I had done while thinking about doing it compared to what I had done without knowing how or what I done it. If they thought an angel being marked was out of the realm of possibility, what had happened to me? All I saw were dots that I couldn’t begin to understand how to connect.

“I am way out of my league here. Less than a dozen hours before Marchenko captured me, I was a living man waiting to die for crimes I committed. None of that matters at the moment, I need to get out of this place and find somebody that can give me some answers. So, unless any of you can help with that, you can leave.”

The place I wanted to get out of was this room of Marchenko’s. It was a place where evil far nastier than anything I wanted to be associated with had been committed. The room was a discomforting place to be for me, I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to an angel that had been here far longer and undergone far worse acts than I had endured.

That statement drew shocked expressions from all of them. That was a move that they had not expected. None of the women made to go anywhere as if looking for the trap I had set for them. Only there was no trap being set by me.

One of the angels stepped forward, raising the arm that had my mark on it. “You are just going to let us leave after you did this? Why, just so you can snare us later? I’d rather you begin tormenting my sisters and I right now.”

“What are you talking about?” I was dumbfounded, and I know my face showed it. The top part of the walls started to dissolve into the darkness above us. I think it was starting to dissolve. Either that or the darkness was slowly descending into the room itself.

“Putting your mark on us is a way of claiming your property among demons. It marks us as yours, it can be used to control us and none of us including the demons can stop you. We can’t fight back, we can’t disobey,” Angel explained to me. “Among the angels it works a little bit differently, with them there is no ownership, more like the bearer of an angel’s mark has been chosen.”

“We don’t time to waste on this foolishness,” one of the angels piped up. “The room is coming apart around us.” All eyes turned and looked to where she was pointing. I had been correct in thinking the walls were dissolving. Then furniture started to fade out of sight. It turned a hazy transparent then ceased to be at all. The walls stopped existing just a couple of feet above our heads now. Then in a rush all the features of the room vanished, as if they hadn’t been here to begin with.

A loud chuckle echoed through the echoed through the space we were standing in as the last of the room disappeared. A chuckle that sent shivers down my spine and made the hairs stand up on my arms.

“Toy, do you think it would really be that easy?” the voice boomed all around us. “I control you as easily as I control them.”

I turned trying to find the source of the voice, but it was all emptiness around me. There was nobody there for me to see. Again, that loud chuckle echoed, this time it came from right beside my ear. My mind raced trying to work out what was happening, but I was way out of my depth. I was beyond lost and nowhere close to reaching an understanding. Then it struck me I was alone in that space. The angels and demons I had freed from Marchenko’s grasp were gone. They had vanished with no sound, no trace of them remained.

The walls of the space started moving closer together, shrinking the space. It was hardly noticeable at first, but they were moving in towards me. Inexorably the walls came onwards. The space grew smaller, I could feel the space being squeezed. The air grew heavy as the wall closed in.

Panic set in as I tried everything. I couldn’t pull on the energy demons used; I couldn’t pull on that fire that I had killed Marchenko with. There was nothing there when I reached out for it. It was if it never existed, or I had been cut off from reaching it somehow.

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“The little toy begins to understand now, and soon he will understand what its like to be entirely mine to control. Won’t he, Angel?” I heard Angel scream, or maybe I was allowed to hear her scream. It was primal scream of fear and agony that pierced the space I was in. Hearing those screams, I went mad throwing myself at the walls of my small prison. I cracked then ripped out my fingernails on the rock, blood trails followed my fingers as I tried to claw my way through the wall. I fell to the bottom of what I now knew to be my prison. There was barely enough room for me to fold my legs in front of me. I scraped my knees as I tried to reposition myself.

The laughter still rang in my ears, the sound of it driving me further into the despair that was setting in. I tried to cover my ears with my hands but that was no help. When that didn’t work, I began to smash my head off the walls. I smashed my nose and rubbed my forehead and cheeks almost to the bones on the walls. That brought the tang of blood to my nose, which brought the hunger to me.

At times I was struck by blows that weren’t there. Whip-like tendrils of black flame snapped across my torso and legs. Pain burned through my veins as chunks of my flesh were torn away. Vague nightmares of being placed in an iron maiden and having those spikes get driven through me, or stretched out a rack until my joints were ripped apart.

There was always screaming. I couldn’t tell if it was just me screaming or there were others as well. My bouts of yelling myself hoarse flipped between the fear of being trapped here and anger at the hunger I couldn’t satisfy.

I tried to climb the inside of prison, and all I managed to do accomplish was scrape the skin of my arms and legs. That fresh smell of blood drove me into that ravenous rage. I needed to feed; I needed to bask in the emotions the act of feeding brought out in prey when they knew they couldn’t run another step. The terror, but most of all the pain that they felt as I fed on them.

My teeth gnashed and I growled. More screaming, it might have been again, or it could have been someone else.

A voice. It was a voice I knew that I hated. It was a voice that I needed to destroy.

“Are you ready for your next meal?” that voice taunted me. I could smell blood that wasn’t my own. The smell of that blood drove me into a frenzy. I beat on the walls of that cell in my frenzy, roaring with an awakened hunger. The owner of that voice laughed when he heard me roaring.

Suddenly the walls of the cell disappeared and being off balance I toppled forward on to my face. Anger infused me as I pushed myself back to my feet. The room was familiar, larger than it had been before but nothing else had changed. People I thought I should recognize were strapped into various devices or hanging from chains. The smell of blood was overpowering now. The only that I could focus on was that smell. I needed to taste that blood, to feed on whoever that blood belonged to.

Another person came into view. A man, his body horribly scared all over, with his clothes stained in blood. It was somebody else I should have been able to recognize but I didn’t. There was only hunger.

“Look ladies, his breaking is almost complete. Not much longer, and you think what I have done to you was bad,” he trailed into a gasping laugh. It was that voice. That voice I hated. I didn’t know why I hated that voice, just that I did.

The hatred overcame me, and I rushed at the man. I just needed to get to him so I could feed both my hunger and my hatred of this man. Killing him might even end the torment I had been put through. All of that would be wins for me. Yet mere feet from him my charge stopped. I slammed into a wall I couldn’t see.

I staggered back from that wall, confused and angry. Slamming into whatever was there had hurt, but the pain was lost in the turbulence of the other emotions I felt. The pain couldn’t overcome the anger, the hunger, the confusion over what had stopped me in my tracks.

That man just stood there laughing at my futile effort to reach him. He drew all my focus, nothing in the rest of the room was as important as getting to him. Not even the stronger smell of blood would have an effect on me. I had found my prey and I was going to bring him down.

“Ah, so predictable, so consumed and driven by your basic needs to understand what is happening around you. I must commend you though, I haven’t this much fun shattering someone’s mind in ages,” he said gleefully. “I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish together once I am done.”

The words made no sense to me. Talk was meaningless while I was engulfed in my hunger. I began to walk around the man, testing to see if I could find a hole or gap in that wall. There had to be one, there had to be a way to get to him and devour him. Whoever he was, he just kept turning to watch at me. His joy at seeing me fail again and again drove my anger to even higher levels. This man would die by my hand. I would rip out his throat. I HAD to rip out his throat. I had to make his taunting of me stop.

The wall I couldn’t see was still between us, and that man turned in place as I circled him. His taunting, his chuckling. This man needed to pay for what he had done to me. I kept moving looking for a weakness.

I grabbed a random object, a knife he used on one of his victims and hurled it at him. The knife rebounded from the wall and clattered to the floor. All it did was draw another chuckle out of him. Then I found a spike in my hand, one that he had used to nail someone to a table. It was heavy and cold in my hand. The spike felt unnerving in my touch, as if my hand tried to recoil for that slug of metal. I threw it at the man with all the strength I could muster.

The smile on his face turned to astonishment just before the spike impacted. I had picked up a second spike before the first hit. To my surprise his wall didn’t stop the spike. He turned as the spike caught his shoulder with a meaty thunk. There wasn’t enough force behind it to hurt him, but he was off guard, and I lunged.

There was no wall to stop me this time and slammed into him with the force of a tidal wave. I drove him back a few feet before he slammed into the floor. Before he could react, I was driving the spike I held into his chest. Once, twice, three times. He screamed in agony as the blood flew. I took advantage of his open mouth and drove me spike deep into his mouth and out the back of his neck. The tip of the spike found the floor and I drove my weight onto the end of the spike.

The man twitched on the floor, pinned there by the spike driven through his mouth. His eyes bulged as he looked at me in horror. The man’s body spasmed as drove the spike I had thrown at him into one of his wrists. The twitching and spams were growing weaker, but I was not done yet.

Kneeling beside him I raised my arm and grunted with effort as I brought it down into his chest. Rib bone shattered as I thrust my hand through them. When I had wrapped my fingers around my target I stood up, ripping the still beating heart out of his chest. I held it over my head and glared viciously down at my prey.

As the heart beat its last beat in my hand, I knew that Marchenko was finally dead.