demons

The risk of her phone lighting up and ruining what she was developing hadn’t the only reason she’d left it out on the kitchen counter when she’d retreated to her dark room. She’d been tethered to it since the night they’d failed to kill the thing that had destroyed Christian’s life. The lines she’d thrown out to every contact she had, including the Winchesters and Bobby Singer, clutched in her hands for the faintest sign of a bite. Her gaze ticking to it a hundred times a day, thumb swiping the screen to see if she could finally turn the narrative from one of a painful failure to one of justice, of relief, of a shallow grave out in the woods and the right body going grey and cold into it.

Alix lifted the roll of film she’d just rinsed and added a clip to the end before she let it spool out. The lights in the room were on dimly now – she could’ve turned them on full blast, but she didn’t need them – just as she shouldn’t have needed to be taken care of that night. Her vision was strong enough now that she could’ve seen the shots of the old Fell’s church even in pitch darkness. Macro scale shots of the forest reclaiming the stone work, the bokeh softness of the verdant trees beyond, no visible imprint showing of what had supposedly happened there more than a century ago. If only they could avoid what had happened to Sofia imprinting on them in the same way. If she could stop it from carving scars any deeper into Christian.

She’d retreated in here as soon as he’d left that morning, working on the one thing that meant she wasn’t out there in the warehouse. No phone. No staring at the wall of photos and statements and maps. No trying to ignore the pit in her stomach that hit whenever she saw his scant belongings scattered across the warehouse. No tripping back into the memories of the way that she’d woken that morning - the immediate sting of the loss of that thing faded overnight and the feel of him warm against her before embarrassment over the night’s changes brought it sizzling back.

Her fingers curled into her palm for a moment, pushing the ghost sensation of laying her hand on scraped back again, of curling it around his puffy ankle to draw out the pain she could touch, away. Alix forced it all back down and clipped up the strip of negatives. Harking back to it wouldn’t do anything now, all they could do for Sofia was push forward and keep trying to find justice for her, and resolution for the man who hadn’t known who he was loving at the end.

Maybe tomorrow she’d make another circuit of the local hospitals. The vampire could’ve been halfway across the world now, but he’d been stupid enough to stick around once, maybe he’d do it again. Clinging to some tether they hadn’t found yet, one they might still find some sign of.

The faint grating of the heavy door of the door opening had her looking around for her phone to check the time, but it was outside and there was only one person it would’ve been anyway. Was he early? Alix frowned faintly, feeling the minute trace of unease that hit when the rhythm they’d fallen into since she’d brought him here, shattered and in need of somewhere that didn’t stink of blood and a marriage that had been torn apart in the worst way, shifted.

It felt too early, the shiver of emotion in the air that hit her the moment she slid open the door to her dark room proof that something was wrong. Christian was already on the couch, looking like the echoes of the past and their time on that sofa were rippling through him again. ”What’s happened?” Alix asked hoarsely as she sank down on the other end of the couch, immediately turning towards him, but not reaching for him yet. She would. They’d held each other together too many times now not to do it again, the polite distance she’d tried to hold between them since they’d spent the night together be damned.

Christian’s story started to tumble out and she was already inching closer. Lines springing up between her brows, that discordant feeling growing in the pit of her stomach like his words were plucking at out of tune strings. Sixteen years? It … it couldn’t have been. She’d been 19 when Ralphy had handed her over to the Dread Doctors, she wasn’t fast approaching forty now, even if felt it some days. Each night she’d spent sleeping upstairs, every cell in her body aware, and grateful, that she wasn’t alone here anymore and there hadn’t been that many yet. ”You were counselling her for that long and never put it together? They’d never been to see you before?” Of course they hadn’t, because those were faces scarred just as deeply into Christian’s heart and mind as his wife’s, as the faces of those his wife had killed at the end.

What had happened with the banshee’s wife – and her husband’s spirit – had been one of the first signs they’d had that the hit list was corrupt. Alix shook her head lightly, unsure if he was too far into his own guilt to see it. She shifted her weight, moving close enough to curl her hand lightly over his arm. ”You were made to believe that you were doing the right thing, being betrayed like that doesn’t go away in the blink of an eye,” she assured him. ”They … they probably didn’t know why it happened.” Just as they didn’t know how a man who had been dead was back, living, breathing, bringing the weight of Christian’s guilt crashing down on him again.

”Did you tell them about the list?” Alix asked. Knowing that someone had falsely accused you of murder for a pay day was going to be freezing cold comfort to a man who’d been stolen away from his pregnant wife, who’d almost watched her die too. Her frown was deepening, her hand sliding up to the crook of his elbow like she could draw him into looking at her. They’d seen the most broken parts of each other before Sofia had even died, there was no need to hide anything now.

Tagged: CHRISTIAN CALLAWAY * Word Count: 1073

He might’ve thought she was a complete bitch when they’d met – criticism could do that to you – but she’d seen the softness at the heart of him and Alix hadn’t wanted a loved one torn to pieces by the loss of an obviously good man. Christian hadn’t gone into all of this because he liked swinging a crossbow around like it was an extension of what dangled between his legs. His wife had been attacked and he’d lost a child. He’d gone out there to fight things like the creature who’d done it to try and stop others feeling the way he had. Whoever had created the list had played on all of those good intentions and now the shell of a man who’d lost his wife the same way he had his unborn child, had been torn apart again.

A hand on his back now would do nothing to draw the pain out. What radiated from him as he hunched forward wasn’t physical, it was emotional and she could feel it like a throb through her own body from where she sat. She breathed in slowly, letting his sense of guilt and regret seep into her. Maybe she couldn’t draw it out of him, but she could relieve the pressure of it inside of him by listening.

The girl hadn’t been to see Christian, because she was a good kid from a good family, not one of the next generation of monstrous little shits who thought that what they were gave them the right to tear apart the good people around them. Would it have been better for him if she had been? A little proof that he hadn’t done something entirely monstrous when he’d killed her father and had tried to kill her mom and an unborn child. ”And then her parents needed to be there,” Alix said lightly. Maybe if her parents had blown off the meeting he’d never have known and in a few months’ time the girl would’ve gone to college, none of them any the wiser about how close she’d been to the man who’d devastated her parents’ lives.

At each step of this he’d been blindfolded – by the list, then by the lack of trouble a kid had gotten herself into. It wasn’t going to be any sort of comfort that he couldn’t have known on either occasion. Hindsight was merciless, especially on a soul already rubbed raw by tragedy.

”Maybe,” she murmured as he looked up at her. It would reveal the target still possibly on their backs and hearing that they were still vulnerable from the hunter who’d come after them in the first place would tear at them. It would also give them knowledge to protect themselves though. The list seemed to have faded into the background of all the other nightmares going on here right around the time they’d withdrawn from it, but it didn’t mean they were entirely free of it. ”They should hear it from someone though, they should know that what happened wasn’t your choice. Someone else targeted them.” It wasn’t you, it wasn’t your fault. More platitudes that would probably do little for the guilt tearing him apart.

Alix shifted closer, drawing herself in with the anchor of his hand over hers. Her brows were drawing together. She’d thought maybe the shock had toyed with his memory, but it hadn’t been that long since she’d found him out in the woods that first time, let alone since he’d turned up at her door here, shaking with the horror of what he’d almost done. ”Two years,” she adjusted. ”It’s been two years since you came here to tell me about what happened with his wife. Are you sure it wasn’t the baby they have now?” But that sounded just as ludicrous as it having been sixteen years.

Her other hand rose, settling on his cheek, her thumb brushing the tail of one dark brow as though she could wipe his confusion away. ”You’ll have bank records, some proof of when the money was sent. It couldn’t have been sixteen years ago, I wasn’t even allowed to hunt alone then. I hadn’t left my family…” She’d been 19 when she’d left her family, she was 30 now, the math just didn’t fit, not even in a town where everything was fucked up.

Tagged: CHRISTIAN CALLAWAY * Word Count: 725

Tragedy could make time move strangely – those first days after she’d run from her family had all seemed to pass by so fast, her eyes constantly on the rear view mirror, the miles she clocked up driving away from them never seeming like they would be enough to put her at a safe distance. She knew it had to have been the same for Christian after he’d killed Sofia. Maybe some days it felt like it had just been yesterday that he’d shoved that stake through her heart, others duller, as though decades had dimmed the memory of it all. It wasn’t either, not really, but in the fog of shock maybe it felt that way.

Alix pressed her lips together and nodded, even though her wasn’t looking at her. She could get a calendar up on her phone if he needed the proof, technology recorded a timeline of everything these days. Text messages, meta data on photos, web searches, all those bytes of data evidence that was hard to argue with. ”They might’ve had another. Maybe the other kid was at home. It’s not impossible.” Her parents had kids with regularity, just a couple of years between each pregnancy, but that might not’ve been the same way for everybody. There was a huge jump between Hazel and the baby who’d been brought along to the meeting, but then there was already another pregnancy brewing.

Concern added weight to her gaze as Christian met his eye. Had that been twisting in the back of his mind too? The pregnancy that he’d almost ended the same way that vampire had Sofia’s? ”I’m thirty,” Alix murmured, as though she needed to cut through the confusion that was furrowing Christian’s brows. ”If it had been sixteen years, I wouldn’t have been anywhere near Mystic Falls. I would’ve still been human.” That change had been the catalyst for her whole life changing.

”Christian … it can’t be,” she pushed. Now she was frowning too, her brain running at a thousand frames a minute behind her eyes. Was she the one not seeing something here? The Dread Doctors had taken so much from her, leaving a big blank spot in her memory that covered over whatever they’d do to her, but that had been eleven years ago. There hadn’t been anything like that since, she was sure of it. Alix shook her head, certain she was right, but now feeling the confusion bleeding to her like it was travelling through osmosis by her touch. ”Something’s wrong. I just don’t know what yet.” Or how to get to the bottom of it. For once having her family’s resources might’ve been a help.

Softening to accept the press of Christian’s weight, like two puzzle pieces adjusting to fit together, Alix dropped her hand lightly to the back of his neck. Her thumb pressed lightly into the hollow beneath his ear, massaging gently like it could work away all this stress. It stilled as he leaned in further, his brow resting on hers. His eyes were closed, thin lids hiding the dark eyes that she’d seen fill with such confusion and pain. Each breath she took felt like it was drinking it in from him, the same way she’d drawn warmth from him.

Her hand squeezed the back of his neck gently as his eyes opened and fixed on hers again. God, she wished she had all the answers. There were no simple ones, just more miseries, the feeling of being tied up in more knots, slowly being pulled apart by it all. ”Maybe,” she whispered, her lips so close to his now. ”Whatever it is, we’ll work it out together. You’re not alone with this.” Each time the bedrock of their lives was pulled apart, they ended up back here, slowly growing closer, as though it was all that was keeping either one of them upright.

”Are you sure it’s just the memories? What if it’s something else at work. The Dread Doctors can change people, could they be they doing else? Could they have done something to the girl?” It was easier believing that then thinking that someone had tinkered around inside of Christian’s head, manipulating his memories until he was half out of his mind about it all. ”You said you had memories of the time between? Of what? What do you think happened?” Her thumb pressed lightly against the tender spot below his ear again, like she could squeeze what was real out of his mind with a single touch.

Tagged: CHRISTIAN CALLAWAY * Word Count: 756