Adam slowly swam back up toward consciousness. As his eyes opened, he had vague memories of dark things while he was out, but the visions began to fade as he took notice of his surroundings.

The first thing he noticed was that he was on his back on top of something. The second thing he noticed was that he was restrained... At which point he remembered the dark shapes rushing up on him as he walked to his car.

He turned his head, the only thing he could move, to take in his surroundings. It appeared he was trapped in an abandoned warehouse. Abandoned by the legitimate owners, at any rate... It looked like it was being used by some sort of occult group. There were candles and shapes drawn on the floor with chalk, as well as a table with some stuff on it that he could see just well enough to get a very, very bad feeling.

Suddenly, the seriousness of his situation hit Adam. He was tied down, on his back, in an empty warehouse filled with occult paraphernalia. Stories and rumors of Satanists torturing, and even sacrificing, innocent people filled his thoughts.

And I thought it couldn’t get any worse! Adam started to panic, thrashing against his restraints. Nothing he did made any difference. At all. He was trapped.

~ * ~

After exhausting himself, Adam finally stopped struggling, feeling defeated. Whatever was going to happen, there was not a single thing he could do to stop it.

After a while, Adam heard voices from the far side of the warehouse. They sounded deep, masculine, but Adam couldn’t make out what they were saying. He couldn't tell if it was because they were too far away, or if they were speaking a language he didn't know.

The voices drew nearer, the conversation fading to silence as they approached. The speakers finally came within reach of the light around Adam... he saw twelve figures in ominous black robes. They quickly started chalking new lines on the floor and placing candles around him.

Adam's fear started rising rapidly, as the belief that they were going to sacrifice him in some sort of ritual grew stronger. It didn’t take long before they seemed to finish what they were doing. He could see that there was a five-pointed star inside a circle, with a candle at each point of the star and four more equally spaced around the circle.

The robed figures started to form a circle of their own just outside of the one on the floor, spacing themselves out equally around it. There was a small sound that caused him to look sharply around. That was when he noticed a new, smaller, figure slipping through the circle of larger beings to stand on his left side, inside all of the occult symbols.

The smaller figure stood silently as the others raised their hands over their heads and began chanting in a language that Adam didn’t understand. The chanting rose and fell, and before long, the flames of the candles started rising and falling with it, growing a little taller and a little brighter with each passing moment.

The figure standing near Adam’s head remained still and silent at first. As the chanting continued and the candle flames grew higher, he saw the part of the robe covering the torso of this smaller figure begin to shift in odd and incredibly disturbing ways.

The figure suddenly reached up and threw back its hood. Under the hood was a woman of stunning beauty, but her expression was the opposite of beautiful. The chanting rose and fell around them, and as the intensity of the flames grew, so did the shifting in the robes of the newly revealed woman.

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Adam watched the woman shrug off her robe, dropping it to the floor. She stood there, nude and unmoving. At least her limbs were unmoving… He could now see that the shifting had been under her skin, not just her robe. It was moving as if there were something serpentine slithering around her just beneath the surface, pressing her skin out in a nausea inducing display.

Suddenly the woman threw back her head and let out an unnatural noise, sounding like multiple throats keening in a terrible disharmony. It sounded entirely demonic, causing Adam's panic to flare even higher. The chanting around them rose to a fever pitch.

The woman slowly lowered her head to look right into Adam’s eyes. He saw that her eyes were now black... not just the iris, but the entire eye. It was a darkness that radiated, almost like light, but this glow had a feeling of overwhelming darkness and evil.

He looked into those eyes, unable to look away, until new movement drew his attention to her shoulders. Large, black, feathered wings sprouted from her back, growing swiftly until they nearly reached both sides of the circle on the floor. She looked like nothing so much as a fallen angel.

The thing that had seemed to be a woman reached for Adam with her left hand. The hand caressed his skin, leaving behind a feeling as if someone had managed to get slime on the core of who he was, his true soul.

Then her hand passed through his skin. Her insidious touch was now inside Adam.

Adam had believed in God, and the Devil, but in a sort of remote way. It had been a long time since he had been to church, or even looked at a Bible, but suddenly his entire soul focused on one thing. His entire life and being aligned at this one moment, and he reached in a direction he hadn’t known existed a second earlier.

He encountered resistance, but with the intensity and sharpness of his focus, he tore through the barrier and connected. Sudden strength flooded through him, both physical and spiritual.

Adam’s bonds fell away. He sat up, the dark angel’s hand still inside his body. She tried to pull back and hissed angrily as she couldn’t withdraw her hand. As she looked up into his eyes, her expression changed from anger to terror.

The chanting faltered... this was not how the ritual was supposed to go. They could feel Adam’s presence, grown suddenly overwhelming, bearing down on them with a pressure that required all of their strength to resist, to remain standing.

Adam turned his full attention on the dark thing, the vile fallen angel that stood trapped before him. His eyes had turned golden, glowing with a blinding brightness from within. It was the polar opposite of the eyes of the thing, but completely overwhelming them in power.

Adam spoke over the faltering chanting. He said only two words: “Be gone.”

With those words, there was a terrible, unnatural howling, and the angel aspect left the woman, the howling fading out as the thing fled. The now entirely human woman's hand slid limply out of Adam’s body. The woman slumped to the floor, unconscious.

Adam turned his now unbearable gaze on the dark figures around him, who's features were entirely concealed under their black robes. He focused on the biggest of them. As he saw that one, it began to seem less and less substantial, until it began to grow translucent. There was a howl as the figure became thinner and thinner. Finally it was no longer there at all.

As Adam began to turn his gaze to the next figure, the circle now broken, the rest turned and fled in terror.

Adam looked at what he had been laying upon. It was an altar, and there were old bloodstains on it. He saw the altar, and it, like the dark figure before it, could not bear the incredible weight of his gaze, fading from reality.

Adam erased the figures drawn on the floor with his foot, and put out all of the candles. Then, standing where the altar had been in the center of the star and circle, he turned away from the direction he had reached in his moment of need, and the glow faded from his eyes.