He was still floating.
Not a metaphor. His body felt weightless—even though seconds ago, it had been broken on concrete and rubble. He couldn't open his eyes yet, but he was aware of himself. Aware of space. Aware of the two heartbeats in his chest, pulsing like signals across a dark field.
The pain was still there. It just wasn't the loudest thing anymore. Something else had taken its place.
Then the headache hit.
Full vertigo. The world spinning behind his eyes. Then it passed like a wave, and when it left, so did the pain. His ribs. His leg. The blood. Gone in an instant. He could breathe peacefully.
He opened his eyes.
Same building. Same rubble. The same column of light cutting through the hole in the wall.
He was standing.
At some point, he must have gotten up. He didn't remember doing it. His back still felt the scrape of pulling himself off the floor.
Two heartbeats. Still there. Loud now. Clear.
He looked through the broken window.
Now,... he could see it more clearly.
The bear-shape. Huge. Broad. Shoulders past the window frame. But the fur was wrong. Not like an animal. It was the kind of black that ate light, so the creature's edges weren't edges—just holes in the morning. Multiple arms dragged along the road. The top pair held its weight. Its face, if you could call it that, had two small crimson eyes.
Then it opened its mouth.
Billy hadn't seen it before. The fur hid everything. He had assumed the face was blank.
But the fur parted, and something shot out a limb, a tongue, something in between. Long, pale, bending too many times. Straight at him.
Billy moved out of instinct. No thought , no hesitation.
His body shifted left, fast and clean. The thing tore through the window behind him, glass exploding across the floor.
Whilst in mid-air; in a low crouch, he caught a glimpse of a shattered glass flying across him. A glimpse of his reflection.
The face looking back wasn't his.
Grey skin. Flat grey, like wet concrete. His eyes had lost their pupils entirely, replaced by a white blankness that glowed faintly, the way a screen glows when nothing is being displayed on it. His hair wasn't hair anymore. It was energy, standing up in every direction.
And the smile.
He wasn't smiling. He was certain of that. He felt confused, alert, a little frightened. But the reflection smiled anyway.
A wide, slow smile that kept widening past the point a human smile should reach, stretching toward the jaw, toward the ears, splitting the grey face open.
The teeth beneath it were wrong: too many, too sharp, catching the light the way broken glass does, from unexpected angles.
The reflection smiled at him like it was very glad he'd finally arrived.
He pulled his eyes away from it.
The demon's arm was pulling back into its mouth. The fur closed over it. The face went blank again. Red eyes. Patient.
"What—" His voice came out wrong. Lower, compressed, as though someone had placed a hand over the source of it. "What the fuck is happening? Mom—"
Not now. Beat it first. Then we talk.
Simple. No room in it for argument.
Billy looked back at the creature.
His blood was moving.
Too fast. Faster than it should. Faster than his body could explain.
The two heartbeats began to sync, rising together.
He closed his eyes for a second.
Silence.
The empty street. The still air. A place the world had forgotten.
Then—
He opened them.
The arm came again.
This time he went toward it. He cleared the broken window in one movement, landed outside in the grey light, and the arm was already mid-extension. He caught it under both feet, landed running, and ran along it.
He was fast. He registered this the way you register something impossible: by noting it, filing it, continuing. His feet found the arm beneath him and he was already six strides along it before the demon appeared to understand what was happening, before the red eyes tracked to him and something changed in the flat dark face. The surface closing the distance rapidly. Five metres. Three.
A hair shot out of the fur. He ducked under it without slowing. Another. He tilted sideways in mid-stride, felt it pass his jaw. A third. He stepped back once, planted, and jumped from the arm as it began retreating.
He landed on the road in a hard crouch, both palms down, and straightened.
The demon stared at him.
A long, flat moment. The red eyes unmoving.
'Besides improving my speed, my strength. The biggest of all is, l have lost a sense of fear. I don't feel it. Should l?'
Then the hairs came in a wave. A dozen at once, thick as rope, flying at him simultaneously from different points across the body, spreading out like a net.
Billy moved through them. Side-stepping, ducking, tilting his weight in the air between dodges.
'Is it instinct? It's like my body is acting on it's own. Like a hand jerking back from a hot stove before the brain knows it's burning.'
The hairs kept coming. He kept moving.
Then one caught his wrist. Then his leg. Then his thigh.
Then his neck. This one thickened immediately, the strand pulling tight and compressing, cutting off air.
He clenched his jaw. Pulled at the restraints on his arms. They held. The smile on his face didn't change—the reflection's smile, living on his skin now. He reached up toward his neck with both hands, trying to get fingers under the strand.
Billy. Touch it!
"What—" Shaggy, compressed, barely voice. "What?"
Touch the hair. Now.
No time. He pressed his hand against the strand on his neck.
Say these words: HellFire. Forged.
"Hell—" He choked on it. Air not making it through properly. "As in, the Hell—"
Say it!
"HellFire—" He lost the second word.
Forged.
"HellFire."
He breathed what air he could get.
"HellFire. Forged."
His heart exploded.
Not like a feeling. Like a bomb. One huge slam in his chest. His vision went black for a second, then a single flame appeared. Coal-black with a grey ring around it. Completely still.
His hands ignited.
Black flames wrapped around them, dense and heavy, swallowing light instead of casting it.
The flames weren't burning him but burning outward, the strand at his neck dissolving where the flame touched it, the restraints at his wrists and legs catching and unravelling in seconds.
The demon screamed. A high, cracked wail—like a kid who just got told something unfair. Echoing off the empty buildings.
Billy stood in the road. Looked at his burning hands.
"Alright."
He looked at the demon. The red eyes still watching.
The smile on his face was his own, this time. Actual.
"Let's end this."