(Story order: 1. Hell's Napkin 2. Uncomfortably Green 3. Leviticus Sandbox 4. Something Wrong 5. Black Eye Perplexity; also Azrael Drabbles: short stories from my universe)
When someone is dying, the mind does some pretty odd things. If you're a human, you usually don't have much time to contemplate what image your brain conjures. However, if you're a demon, since you're not really going to die anyway, you have more time to wonder just what the hell your brain is doing. And, as it were, a song was stuck in Azrael's brain. An annoying little ditty that went:
Oh, I hate the government
More than you and me
The government stole my goldfish
And unplugged my tv
He'd heard it once in the Pit of all places. For unexplainable reasons that's what was in his mind as he looked around, trying to remember what had just happened. It was dark outside, the middle of the night. There were no stars, no moon; all the streetlights were off. But, he could easily see. Only in the deepest and most dreaded section of Hell was there a darkness he couldn't see in. He was sitting on the sidewalk outside a large building. A church. It was behind him, but he knew that it was a church back there. A large one. The cement under his ass was wet. It must have rained.
His head was swimming. He didn't feel right at all. His hat was lying, upturned, a few feet away. He started to stand in order to retrieve it, but a sudden sharp pain in his back prevented him from doing so. He sat down with an 'umph' noise. He wasn't used to pain and this really hurt. He reached behind himself to find a knife buried up to the handle in his lower back. It must have been blessed because not only did it hurt terribly, but he was also pouring blood. He looked down, that's what he'd been sitting in. A pool of his own blood, black as the night that surrounded him. He looked at his hand. The blood on his fingers was black from where he'd touched the knife handle, but the blood on the palms on both of his hands was more of a reddish tint.
He looked around, trying to find the owner of the red blood. He spotted a figure lying on the ground in the distance. He squinted, trying to make out who it was. It could have been one of several people, or some stranger. He couldn't remember. He couldn't see that far either. Demons have notoriously bad vision. He stood again, this time completely onto his feet. The pain in his back had become dull. He managed to walk maybe two steps before he wobbled.
"Oh, fuck…" was the last thing he said before he fell over dead. Not the good kind of dead, just the painful sent back to Hell kind.