The chill seeped through my thin clothes. I had only been wearing a pair of cheap, black dress pants from Target, a copper button down, and a tie, all of which were at the time ripped and spotted and striped with blood that wasn't my own. My eyes...Even when I opened them, there was darkness. I had been blindfolded. My arms had been secured tight to my sides, my wrists and ankles lashed down to what felt like wood...A dull throbbing had pulsed on the back of my head. This was too much like the situation I was stuck in before. Not even my top-notch training could have gotten me out of that mess, and I had feared the same for this predicament. I tried to steady my breathing and I strained my ears, turning my head ever so slowly to try to pick up any slight noise from all directions...And I had never before been so afraid of silence.

My full name is Vaughn Miles Whitacre. Legally, but not by birth. James Stephenson by birth. But Stephenson died in a "car accident". I used to work for the CIA, mainly as a translator, but I have arms training [my rookie nickname being "Bullseye"] and martial arts under my belt. My fluency in Russian had me sent to the country with two others to investigate a drug ring. I don't know which of my colleagues spilled, but we were all caught, and I found myself blindfolded, much like I had been more recently. The consequences I suffered were the worst, as I had been then most convincing fake Russian. I'll spare you the gruesome details. In short, I was castrated...Without any anesthetics or fancy numbing agents. It was me, a pair of cold hands, and a dull blade. I'm lucky they didn't take the entire package. We were rescued by the FBI, who had tracked us via one of my colleague's mobile phones. The ring was busted, we were safe, but I was never the same after that. I resigned shortly after returning to the States. I was sick of laying my neck on a butcher's block.

After my CIA run, I found myself scrambling for a job. My interpretation and translation skills brought me into Gotham City, infamous for its sky-rocketing crime rate. Wayne Enterprises hired be as a working interpreter, and I was in the conference rooms as often as they held conferences, and often sat in front of a word processor, turning English into Russian and Mandarin, and vice-versa. One day in the office, I received a strange phone call. Somebody knew I was ex-CIA. How they got this information, I wasn't so sure...But there was 250,000 dollars in the offer. My job was to pick off a drug lord and his right hand man dwelling somewhere in the Narrows. Being foolish and greedy, I agreed. I was sent a package of photographs and information from an anonymous who called himself "Astaroth"...One of the princes of Hell who was known to make men invisible. This Astaroth's way of making a man invisible was sweeping him off the face of the Earth...Permanently.

So, I did the job. I got my 250 grand. And I was asked to do a second job. A third one.

I turned into a hitman.

You know, I never really liked guns. There was never a sense of power or glory that came with shooting somebody. There's always an adrenaline rush, but it's one that makes you sick...Sort of like when playing a game of hide and seek as a child. You're terrified when you're spotted and make a mad dash, adrenaline pulsing through your limbs to give you that burst of speed that makes you to home base. It's nerve-wracking and nauseating. But the gun also sends a grime through your pores...It gets lodged in the crevices in the grooves of your fingertips that makes your fingerprints, and no matter how many times you try to scrub it out with the Brillo pad, you never feel clean.

I'll be tainted forever.

I quit my job at Wayne Enterprises. My reason? I was going to become a musician. That's what I told them, anyway. I has piano lessons from the age of four up until I was about 16 years old, and I was the top tenor in the state my senior year of high school. I took those skills and brought them into the local bars, performing. Sometimes by myself, sometimes with a quick, throw-together band. We never hit it big. We hadn't been trying. It was only a cover.

One night, in the elevator in my apartment building, after a particularly difficult and messy "job", a man with long hair and wearing a trench coat stuck me in the neck with a needle. I managed to palm him in the nose, but I couldn't do much else before I saw darkness.

So, there I was, in that cold room, tied down to a chair, deafened by silence.

There was somebody else in there, and I knew it. It's always easy to tell when somebody's in the same room...Humans have that sort of sixth sense. "Hello?" my voice cracked, still hazed with lingering sedatives. In response, the blindfold was ripped from my face and a stale, white light burned my dilated pupils. It took me a few blinks to be able to see anything but white, but a quick survey around and I found myself in a room with immaculate, white-washed walls and matching, shining tile. It was like something out of a horror movie. Too clean to be real. Too quiet to be real. My heart was pounding hard against my ribcage, and I swear I could hear it echo in the room. "Hello?" I repeated, trying to spin the chair around. I threw my weight back and landed hard against the floor, craning my head upwards.

There was nobody in the room...But then how did my blindfold come off?
Of course, I know the trick now, and it still freaks me out.

"Hello?!" I squealed pathetically, on the verge of tears. It was more traumatizing than getting my testicles sawed off.

A lone speaker in the ceiling spewed radio-static and then a bass purr that I recognized. Astaroth. "Hello, Mr. Stephenson. I have a proposition for you that will be too good to refuse. Your job for me will be the same. You will have my full protection. My full funding. Technology. This will be your chance to get back at the same kind of mongrels who unjustly took away from you your ability to pass on your genes..."

It was enticing, yes. He went on to tell me that everything would be paid for me. I would get a better apartment, a nicer wardrobe, a nicer car...And for what price? To kill people for him...And he would be providing me with the equipment I needed to do so. I was still foolish. Vengeance sounded so sweet at the time.

"Perfect, Mr. Stephenson. Your new name is Vaughn Whitacre. Mr. Stephenson was found in a mangled car off the side of the road about an hour ago..." he went on to tell me that my fingerprints had been erased by scalding my fingertips. I had entered myself into a society of "chosen ones". I had eight "brothers" now. We were never to speak of our jobs above ground. If one of us turned our backs on Astaroth, we would find ourselves dying a slow, excruciating death. One by one, eight others strode into the room, their footfalls silent, even against the tile.

"Your brothers. Dantanian, Lix Tetrax, Ipos, Belphegor, Baraqijal, Naberius, Valefar, and Seir."

The last one, Seir...He stood at about six feet two inches, about four inches taller than me, with broad shoulders, jet-black hair standing at attention in spikes, dressed from head to toe in black, with the frostiest emeralf eyes I'd ever seen. He stepped forward and I expected a kick to the ribs or to the mouth, but instead a hot searing flashed across my palm and my blood was swept across a document.

"Our Father in Heaven," he began in a clear baritone voice that sliced cleanly through the air. Seven other voices joined him:
"Hallowed be thy lies
My flesh for someone
My will be done
So just give us Heaven on Earth now
And forgive us for all our desires
Now lead us into temptation
And deliver us to all that is evil."I squirmed on the floor, frightened by all of this. Ipos, the same man who tranquilized me in the elevator, unbound me from the chair and lifted me to my feet. "Welcome, brother."

The speaker on the ceiling growled:
"Ornias..."

I still wonder how I got myself tangled amongst these guys. What made me...Psycho? I mean, I never head any problems growing up. Sure, I was a little bit of a chubby know-it-all, but I never meant anybody harm. I lost the baby fat by high school, graduated as Salutatorian...Went on to Princeton U and slaved over my studies there...Worked for the CIA. Where did I go wrong? I never partied hard, never smoked, never got drunk off my ass. But I guess the saying holds true, that it's always the quiet ones that you have to look out for. It's strange though, I wasn't enthralled in my "wrong doing" enough to not realize that it was...Wrong.

I feel like I've watched myself work. I feel like I've stepped outside of my body a few times and just watched myself be some super-predator. I've seen myself strike, make a kill, leave the body, but leave no trace whatsoever. I'd use a gun stolen from a drug dealer, courtesy of Valefar -- who seems to be some "drug lord" but only sits in that position to benefit our small, "pure" society -- pop a bullet or two into my target, chuck the gun somewhere around the crime scene. Police would find it, trace the gun back to a drug dealer, and ta! It's done. Quick and...Well, I'd say neat and easy, but it's usually neither of the two.

We called ourselves the Sancti Inferorum, the "Saints of Hell". Each of us bore the name of a demon or a fallen angel which suited our role. I, Ornias, was (and am still, I suppose) known as "the pesky one". Pesky not as in annoying, but pesky because people were dropping like flies in Gotham and not a single soul was able to figure out what the Hell was happening. Most dismissed it as a heightened crime rate after the bounty on a certain Batman's head and the Joker being locked away in Arkham. (For the latter, there were apparently no "scary enough criminals" to scare the rest of us. For the record, I'd make the Joker a piece of Swiss cheese before he could lick his damn lips.) Those being blamed for the murders, chiefly the druggies, know better. Ipos, who "knows everything past, present, and future" passed word that Jim Gordon, Commissioner, is starting to suspect that it isn't the work of the drug lords/dealers. He'd never have enough evidence to prove it...Or so were my thoughts when I first came across the information.

As a new member of the Sancti, I was the lowest in the pecking order, and remained so, despite being their only real "go get 'em" guy. I was the one picking people off. I was the one putting my ass on the line. And why? How was this any different than the things I'd been doing for the CIA? The hard, cold reality was that it wasn't different, but I was hoping there would be some kind of redemption for what had happened to me in Russia. I was a half-skeptic amongst the group, but I never let them know...I would've been annihilated easily...Or would I have been?

It's funny, really...
Because now I'm the only standing member of the Sancti to date.

----------------------------
Disclaimers:
I don't own Gotham City...

Or Batman, even though I didn't even use him yet.

I also don't own the whole "Our Father in Heaven" thing. That's taken from a song. "Gott ist ein Popstar" by OOMPH!

I DO own Vaughn and the Sancti, but I didn't make up their Sancti names.

Note: This story will be mixed first person/third person chapters.