Andras

Andras

By D. Arnold








Preface.

         Before your world was created, before anything you know ever existed, there were two realms: Heaven and Hell. Ruled by Jehovah, the realm of heaven upheld the order and peace of the universe. In hell, lived the dark hearted king, Satan.  He and his minions upheld the chaos and war of the universe. These two opposing forces created life in its purest form, thus creating earth, an exact copy and blend of heaven and hell, with traits from both realms. The birth of this new realm caused a break between Heaven and Hell, and a war began. With demons fighting angels, a new force was created: evil. Evil was passed to the creatures of earth, thus creating humanity, and the very soul of our present universe. Whether we like it or not, evil is the dominant force in all living things, fueling desire, rage and even love.                                        
        The fighting has only worsened, and Jehovah had developed a fatal and incurable disease, and death closed in on him. Satan saw this as an advantage and moved to take Heaven, but the guard to the silver king was a well trained military force. The army of hell had to fall back and regroup. At the camp just outside the city of light, Oriax, General of Hell's army was briefing his soldiers on a revised strategy. Satan was home in the black city, enjoying his seemingly inevitable victory. He Felt the calm and peace of his coming glory and dropped his guard. This almost lead to his ruin, as Jehovah had sent a mercenary to kill Satan, but he was stopped by me: Andras, grand marquis of Hell, the sixty-third of the seventy-two soldiers of Solomon, assigned as personal body guard to the dark king himself. He gave me the ability to create hatred between my enemies by filling my blood has pathogens that turn angels, demons and humans alike into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. Under my direct command were thirty infernal warriors, master marksman and hand to hand specialists.                                        
          A day after the attempt on Satan's life, Hell's Japanese prime minister the shinigami by the name of Kurotori "chi no kuro" Matsumura came to the United States to help provide protection for our king. He brought three of his best men to guard his home. Satan called a meeting to give them specific orders, I didn't catch the exact details, but the meeting ended and Satan left to go to his office and make preparations to appear at the battlefront in Heaven. As the Shinigami and his three officers spoke, I overheard them saying something about their plan, and I managed to catch them saying something about a coup de tat. I don't know Japanese very well, but I knew something was up, so I rushed into the room drew my pistol and killed all four of them, Satan heard the shots and came to the room, and labeled me a traitor and threatened to kill me for my insolence, but instead he banished me to earth to live forever among the mortals of humanity.                                                                                                    
        I've been to earth for about a thousand years now, and just to clear up the confusion you're probably suffering from right now, I'll explain that since Heaven and Hell existed far longer ago than Earth, it’s a lot farther behind in timeline and events. I've not seen my home for a millennium.  It's the year 2009, and I have no idea of the progress on the war in the heavens, but I vowed from the day that I arrived on earth, that I'd have my revenge on Satan, and that I would have his head on a spike before my life ends.                                                            
          I've been through every war and fought in the service of many different countries. Mostly England, Scotland, some other places I’m not too proud of, and currently America…I think. I even might have created what the humans began to fear and hate: vampires. There's a war on earth between them and the humans, and it's been raging on the underground for a long time. I was trained mercenary for the pentagon, and I've killed a pretty good amount of people. I even ended the war on terror by killing every last one of the insurgents with my ‘hemo-biotics’. You could benefit from knowing that since I am from a different dimension, I have complete influence on the reality of my surroundings. I can literally do anything I want to, though depending on how much I alter the reality, I could be hurt more or less and maybe even killed. It will take its toll on my body.













         


Chapter 1


         Anyway, I've rambled on enough, my story begins in a dark alley I'm walking to an easy-mart at about nine-o-clock at night, and I have to admit that my appearance could easily frighten anybody. I don't wanna go into it but I don't look that great. I choose to take the hidden paths, and only show myself when necessary.                                                                      
          "'Afternoon" I said bluntly as I walked into the convenience store. The man behind the counter looked up from his "Revolver" magazine as he raised his pierced hairless brow, and saw my face. He quickly looked back to his magazine as if nothing was wrong.                              
          "Do you have any Cup Noodles?" I asked as I searched the Aisles.                              
          "What's that?" the man asked. I looked at him with a blank stare                              
          "You don't know what Cup Noodles are!?" I shouted in surprise.                              
          "Is that like some kinda' soup 'er sumthin'?" He asked looking at me with a slightly fearful face.                                                                                                                       
          "Never mind then." I finally found what I was looking for. I grabbed as many bags full of chicken and creamy chicken flavored noodles as I could, and got myself a few 24 packs of Coca-Cola. I brought it to the counter and pulled out a fat wallet and gave the guy a Benjamin.          "Fifty-one Ninety….." He stood there looking at me with his pierced mouth gaping open showing his metal covered tongue. He gave me my change and I stuffed it in my pocket and headed out the door as he stared after me like a four-year-old at the zoo. I passed a woman coming into the store with her little girl.                                                                       
            "Mommy, look at that guy, His eyes are red and black!" She exclaimed in excitement. Her mother pushed her ahead.                                                                                          
            "That's not polite." Her mother said                                                                      
            "But did you see his hair? It was sharp, and his nose was like a bat nose! He's funny!" She giggled. "HI BATMAN!" her mother pulled the little girl's waving hand down and rushed her into the store with a terrified look on her face and a shaky tone in her terrified voice.                                                                                 
            "Lock the door please, sir…" I overheard her say just before the door closed behind her. A few minutes later, as I walked down the empty, unlit street, I heard sirens. I turned into another alley and headed toward my apartment. I was about to come out the other end of the alley when I saw a girl walk by. She looked like she was in a hurry, so my curiosity peaked. I left my stuff in the alley where I’d remember it, and followed her.                                        
            "Hey!" I called, and she turned to look at me. She didn't look scared, as I had expected her to, but she did look angry. She was Asian, clearly, and was wearing a pair of faded grey jeans and a black tee shirt. Her converse made absolutely no noise as she marched along, and long Black hair came down to about the small of her back. And the strangest thing of all was that she was also wearing a mirror shard around her neck.                                                                                                                     
            "What?" she asked with a very harsh tone. I was almost caught off guard by the fact that this girl of maybe nineteen was walking around at about nine thirty at night, and wasn't afraid of me or being alone in an alley.                                                                      
            "W…Well…." I stammered. "What are you…why are you….It's the middle of the night and you're walking around, just begging to get kidnapped. Go home!" She walked toward me. I stood there, more confused than I'd been in a long time, as she tiptoed right up to my face and said:                                                                                                                        
            "Why are you out at this hour? What's with the trench coat?" She didn't seem to be fazed by my appearance, and definitely didn't show any signs of social recession. She just waltzed up to me and engaged a complete stranger in a mini-conversation. "I'm on my way to….the teen center." She looked around and then looked back at me.                                                                                                                                                   
            "Well, you could've gotten a ride from your parents you know." I was starting to get even more curious by the second. "You're not really on your way to the teen center are you?" She stepped back, turned and started running. I ran after her and shouted after her. "Hey! What the…What's going on?" She took off even faster. We dodged through dumpsters, out of the alley, into a park and back into another stale alley way, actually, more like a maze of alley ways. She turned and glared at me.                                                                                          
            "Whoa! You're fast!" I paused to pant a bit. "How did you,” I paused to pant for a second “…do that?" She grabbed the wall next to her and began climbing. My expression, if I had to guess, could only have been one of shock and awe.                                                   
            "Go away!" she scaled the wall with the grace and skill of a cat. I grew out my finger nails, hardened them and began crawling after her. I got to the roof, but she couldn't get any further, the building on which we stood was a very high one. She backed up to the edge and smiled. I'll never forget to this day the amount of surprise I felt when this next event unfolded in front of me, and I'm a demon, I've seen some pretty unbelievable things. She put one foot out behind her, off the edge, and before my eyes she became a little black cat and leapt from the rooftop. I ran to the edge and saw her land on a window ledge a few feet down. She kept hopping down to the lower ledges and just before she touched the ground, she turned back into a human and took off up the street. I swallowed my shock and jumped off the building. I became as a plume of black smoke and caught up to her and re-materialized.                              
              "What are you!?" I asked her, I was mad I must admit, but I was still curious.                       
              "I'm a neko-oni." She said. "You must be a demon. I could tell when I first saw you. Just stay out of my way, I’m getting ready for a mission, and I don't need interference.                    
              "You're a neko-oni?" I couldn't believe my ears. “I thought they were only legend.” I gasped with utter surprise.                                                                                                                                           
              "They sort of are. I'm the only one that ever existed." A lonely look came across her face, and she stopped breathing as hard as she had been a moment earlier.                               
              "What are you talking about? You're the only one?" A tear formed in her eye.                    
              "A while back, During the Tokugawa era in Japan, my sister and I lived alone. Our parents had died from a sickness that was spreading through our village. We were devastated, so decided that we'd have our parents back no matter what, so we went to the witch who was said to live deep in the woods, just outside our town. I knew it would be risky, but I didn't care, so I got my sister to come with me and we set off. At first we thought we were lost, but when night fell we eventually came to a small house with a single, dim light in the window. We slowly approached the hut and knocked on the door." I listened intently, determined to discover the origins of her strange 'situation'.          "A moment later," She continued "an old woman opened the door. She didn't look like a witch, and didn't even look old. She was probably only in her fifty's at least. She asked us what we wanted and we told her about our parents. She was actually a very nice woman, and didn't come across as scary, that is, until she told us that she could bring our parents back. She told us to move back to the far wall of her one room house. The witch drew a pentagram on the floor in the middle of the room, and wrote our parents' names inside it. She pulled a goat from a pen at the back of the room. She said that she learned this from the son of a Christian missionary, and that he said it was a form of European dark magic called 'séance'. She went for a rusty knife on the table that was situated next to the pen. She held the goat steady and slowly drew the blade across its throat.  As the blood spilled onto the pentagram, our parents' names began to rise off of the ground and turn to smoke, they whirled together and a figure started forming. A man appeared. He looked around, kinda' confused. He spoke in a deep voice, and said: ‘What is this?’ and he didn’t sound happy either” She laughed. “We all stared at him, it was scary! We didn't know what was happening. He came up to me and asked what this place was. I spoke to him, but he obviously couldn't understand and he grew angry. The old woman spoke to him in a strange tongue I'd never heard before. The strange apparition put his hand on my head for a second then spoke to me in clear Japanese. He asked me what our business was, taking him to such a strange place, and that he'd kill us if we didn't return him immediately. I told him that I had lost my parents, and he glared at me and thought for a while. He must have really been in a good mood, because he said he'd spare me, and that I wasn’t worth killing. He put my face in his hands and I could feel a burning sensation flow from his hands to my cheeks, which spread to the rest of my body. He told me that I had become a demon, and that He would send me to one of his officers to help him bring his enemy to its knees. He told me his name and asked mine. Once we were introduced, he told me to say goodbye to my sister, who didn’t want me to go at all, obviously. I went with him to the center of the pentagram and we were taken back to Hell.” She finished and wiped some tears from her eyes.                                                                                
              "Uuh, so…you're a demon too?" I asked, barely hanging on to the story.                                                                                                                                         
              "Yep. Neko-oni. That means cat demon in Japanese." She held up her hand and it changed slowly into a cat’s paw, the fur growing out, and the fingers shortening into paws. I stared in awe, as she changed it back. Giggling, she turned to walk away.                               
              “Well, goodbye.” She smiled as she smugly sauntered away.                                                                                                                                         
              "HEY! You can't just walk away!" I yelled after her.                                                   
              "And just why is that?" She asked in an annoyingly playful voice.                                   
              "Well, I don't even know your name, plus, I think I can help you." I had realized that it was Satan who had turned her into her demon form, and she obviously got screwed by her curse. I had made my decision. I drew ‘baby’, the fifty caliber desert eagle from her holster. I fired a shot and there was a fiery plume of blood as it passed through her back, and punched through her chest. She collapsed onto the ground and lay there with blood forming a slowly growing puddle around her. I walked toward her, and she began moving. She turned and looked at me, and then she started to convulse upon the ground.  Foam built up in her mouth like a rabid dog. Her eyes rolled back into her head.                                                            
              She stopped and clutched her stomach. She began to shake again and started to scream. She then arched her back and her screaming grew louder, I looked on as all her teeth grew into sharp points. Her lips began to bleed as she bit them in pain. Her wide terrified eyes opened even wider as her pupils narrowed and turned into slits, and the whites of her eyes turned as black as night. She stopped screaming and it looked like she was dead, she just lay there, but then she slowly picked herself up. As she stood with her eyes closed, breathing heavily, blood trickling from her lips, she slowly raised her head and opened her eyes, to show that both her iris had turned blood red.                                                                                
              "What did you do to me?" She asked in a harsh whisper. "What is this?" She started to get louder. "Why am I like this?" The wounds on her lips closed and the blood evaporated.                                                                                                               
              "I made you stronger." I said to her. "My blood can make you immortal, ageless, a vampire in almost every respect." I explained. "My bullets are hollow. I fill them with my blood, and put an explosive tip on the front. When it hits you, it bursts and your blood will fuse with mine, thus making you a vampire." She took the shard necklace from around her neck and looked at her reflection. She smiled, and looked at me.                                                            
              "So, I'm already immortal." She gave a small laugh, and looked at me. "Well, since I don't really feel like going anywhere right now, I'll stick with you. My name is Yuki Takeda, but you can call me Shard if you want, you don’t have to." She continued to examine her reflection.                                                                                                   
                 "Why Shard?" I asked.                                                                                 
                 "Because, this shard was part of a rear view mirror from a car that had been in a four car pile-up a few years back. Every single person involved died at the scene, and I thought, 'hey, that's pretty unlucky, I'll take that', so I grabbed it and took it with me, and I've had it ever since. My victims would sometimes get on the news and describe me and how strange it is that I'd wear a mirror shard around my neck. That eventually became my pseudonym."                         
                 "So, bad luck, black cat demon, you're a gremlin. You just make life miserable for people; you can't kill with that kind of power. You weren't that powerful before I gave you this gift. That man who made you a demon was Satan himself."          
                   “Duh, I know that.” She said with a small snicker.                                                       
                 “You know. I happen to have it out for him, and he took a lot from you, if you help me to kill him, I'll see if I can pull some strings to get your mortality and your family back, so you can start a new and normal life." She looked at the ground, and a smile formed on her pale lips.                                                                                     
                "That sounds good." She said. “I really don’t like not being able to die with the ones I love. It’s really painful. I’d love it if you could give that ability back to me.” She looked up from the ground and smiled at me. I smiled back at her. This was my first taste of friendship; however the silence was broken by Yuki's roaring stomach. She clutched her belly and gave a small humiliated smile.                                                                                
                   "Um, let's go eat…" We walked back to the alley where I first saw her and I picked up my food,                                                                                          
                   "Yeah, all this food is good for one sitting for me. Let's go get you something, so we set out to look for a place to steal some food from.