Title: Deadwalk
Fandom: Angelique
Pairing: Clavis/Julious
Theme/Prompt: #34 'Concrete'
Rating: PG-15 for safety's sake.
Warnings: None
Summary: AU. There's something serious going down this end of the city and Clavis' premonitions of d00m are getting stronger and more frequent, so he goes to an old friend for help in interpreting the dreams. He's not going to like what he finds but luckily he's got people he can trust backing him all the way, however mismatched they seem.
Notes: Intro piece for the 'verse. I was thinking Devil May Cry a lot when I looked back over the first paragraph.
The city of Deadwalk.
It's more of a concrete labyrinth than a jungle; you'll find only the biggest monsters this end of the city and at the goal, you get Leviath who's set himself up here like the Minotaur, powerful and nigh untouchable. Now and again, he gets the odd challenger but there's really no competition, not when the guy covets this supernatural hotspot that's the city slums. Oh, and he uses his demons well, got some kind of contract with a big man in Hades, and works the humans in his employ, if there are still any that can be called that, until their souls are as corrupt and black as his own. There are a few good people that move to the city but they tend to acquire a thin patina of evil the same as the rest and it gets hard to escape after that because Leviath knows everybody with the taint.
Can't run, can't hide and if you've really pissed him off, death won't save you either.
But over the years, the city's grown bigger; floods of people rushing in, as Progress is made, and new rivals arrive too. Leviath's suddenly not the only one who's got connections to the real underworld and he doesn't like it one bit. Especially as with the competition, come people who hunt their type of evil for a living.
Professionals.
There are no bad hunters because if you're crap at this job, you're an ex-hunter. Ex-breather too. Magic-users, Seers, Nightwalkers; anyone who's no one is here, out for their share.
So suddenly Boss Man is hella worried and thinks to himself that reinforcements won't be such a bad idea; get everything back the way it was before and control the vermin overrunning 'his' city called the human species. Maybe even make a permanent conduit between this world and Hades for good measure.
Only perhaps a certain ritual doesn't go the way he planned and now his body is playing host to his boss and Hell is literally loose on Earth. The only humans who know of this are missing and half-dead, the schoolgirl, Rosalia, and Lumiale, the artist who has powerful friends.
Truth will eventually out though, but hope it's not too late. Clavis, the fortune-teller, is suffering from dreams he can't get away from as well as keeping his loved ones one step ahead of certain death.
It's more than enough to break a man.