Hello, and if you're reading this, this is by far my best freaking work so far, and will certainly be one of the longest. After over a year of planning and writing a 60 000 prequel, you are witnessing the beautiful birth of my baby. Except, you know, without all of the screaming and blood and the squashed baby head, because ew, that's gross, and I'm not giving birth to a real baby anyways. Before we start, though, there are a few things I'd like to mention:

One! The length of this author note! It will be longer than usual, but only because it's the first and I have a lot of stuff to explain.

Two! The rating! M for only gore and swearing, and nothing else. So don't spam this thing for ban.

Three! The plot! This story will include all of the manga arcs starting with the curry one, at least one from the anime including the OVA's, and at least one of my own creation, maybe a few fillers as well.

Four! The main character! Yes, she is a she, and yes, she may look like a mary sue at first but WAIT. I'm trying my hand at writing a deconstruction of a mary sue. She is perfect in some ways, but is incredibly twisted and messed up in others. Also, no one loves her. You won't be reading about canon character gushing over her because they won't be. At the very least, if she's going to be a mary sue, then dammit,I'm gonna make her a well written one!

Five! The writing style! I'm trying something new for the first time, and it's a great deal more different than MAGE, and if anyone's already read the prequel (which you don't have to read unless you want to; it's pretty bad, and did I mention this is going to be way better?) they'll see and feel a difference immediately. Please excuse me for any inconsistencies, and feel free to give me advice; I'm always looking for ways to improve.

Six! The update schedule! With the prequel, updates were weekly and 2000 words-ish long, sometimes longer. This time, chapter will uploaded monthy, but clocking in at about 5000 words, a lot freaking more. This chappy's over 7000 words, excluding the AN.

Seven! Edits! The flashback is now third person, because the second person thing kinda sucked. And was against the rules.

Eight! Enjoy the story!

For her, pain tastes like burnt metal on her tongue.

It is a very real sensation, no matter how fake the rest of her may feel, no matter how numb. When she senses the flavor of coppery blood echoing through her head, she knows she is hurt.

This is how she feels now, almost completely cold and unresponsive to the outside world. Sitting in a coffin, she is confused and listless and unmoving, almost like a corpse- but she tastes blood, and she knows she is hurt. She is just unsure why.

My name is Evangeline Sonata Britford. Evangeline repeats to herself in her head, trying to recount the events of her life to sort through her muddled thoughts. I usually go by Eve. When I was sixteen, I was cursed and branded by a vampire prince. I spent three years trying to find a way to kill him.

There had been a boy, at least Eve had thought he had been a boy, who had helped her, sewn her shut when she had been torn open, and held her up even as she was beaten down.

I lived for that and I lived for my sister.

Faye, so innocent and loving, had been the only person to truly care for her from beginning to end, and Eve had felt the same towards her.

But then Faye died.

Why did she have to be poisoned?

And then Eros died.

But he had wholly deserved that, the vampire piece of scum.

And then Kain died.

Because the boy Eve had thought had been behind her the entire time was in fact behind everything. The torture and dying and killing, all for the usurpation of a throne.

And then… and then what? There is a fog over her next few memories; she is not quite sure what had happened afterwards… or why she had blacked out and woken up in a coffin.

Even more curiously, there should be a plethora of emotion running through her head; sorrow, fury, something, but there is nothing but an absence of feeling, which in some way increases the disturbing nature of her situation.

It is all very, very sad, and dark, and mind-numbing, and for the next few minutes after waking, Eve cannot help but sit there and wallow in a haze of something that can be seen as self pity if she is actually feeling sorry for herself, which she is not for some reason, until a voice pipes up and drags her out of it like it is pulling her into a bathtub of cold water.

The voice says, "Well, has my lady woken up from her slumber?"

Eve tenses, recognizing the amused tone and carefree chuckles, and instantly rotates her head to look at Undertaker. The mortician is perching on another coffin, nursing a cup- no, beaker- of tea, with an urn filled with bone-shaped cookies sitting beside him. He must have been sitting there for a while, and is once again startling her out of her wits by appearing out of nowhere like he is somehow always able to do.

The girl just stares at him, hard, and for a few horrifying seconds, in which the subconscious of Eve's mind is racing about exactly what did he do while she was unconscious, (-like putting her into a dress, and isn't this just meant for dead people, and didn't he have to TAKE HER CLOTHES-) there is complete silence in the entire shop, save for Undertaker's soft giggles bouncing off the walls and his tea burbling as it is sloshed around by clawed hands in its container. (The urn says nothing.)

"…what happened?" She breaks the silence with a croak.

Undertaker grins even wider, if that is even possible, and leans towards Eve in that usual uncomfortable fashion of his. "Actually, I should be asking you that, my lady. After all, you just came back to life!"

Eve keeps staring. "I was dead?"

"As a doorknob! As a coffin! As a poor animal that just got run over by a carriage!" For someone who had watched a supposed corpse rise from the dead, Undertaker is still oddly jolly. Still, being a mortician, he must have seen his share of deceased bodies sit up in their coffin. "You were already far gone by the time I found you in the street. I brought you here, and even though I dressed you up, and stitched your wounds," (At this, Eve reluctantly traces the lines of thread traveling up and down her body and to her chagrin realizes that yes, Undertaker probably saw her naked,) "And was getting ready to depart you with a funeral, imagine my surprise when you sat up not two minutes ago in the middle of my afternoon tea!"

"And so that begs the question," Undertaker leans in even farther than this, the edge of his silvery hair tickling the inside edge of the death box the girl is still sitting in, and Eve is certain he is only doing it to further unsettle her. She tilts away, but the action is absolutely useless. "Why did you manage to escape death, when so many have opposed it and fallen? Were you really not dead?"

This cannot be true; the rips against her flesh that she sustained while fighting Kain and Eros were to fatal for any human to survive. Any human.

"Was it because of your magic?"

No, that cannot be right either: Eve had lifted the curse restricting her powers when she had slain the two vampire brothers, but even magic does not have the means to raise the dead, especially when the supposed caster is the one dying.

"Or is it because you aren't human at all, but really the reincarnation of an immortal creature?"

What?

'A phoenix' are the words the mortician does not say, but he knows, none the less, and she knows he knows, and he knows she knows he knows, and, being the kind of person he is, seems to be enjoying every second of the ensuing plain awkwardness.

Bent over her hands, Eve watches as her fingers tighten their grip on her (is it really her) dress and she apprehends that she had been holding onto the white silk skirt the entire time. The girl pales, which is an accomplishment, given that she usually has the complexion of a corpse that had died of blood loss, and her eyes narrow in suspicion. Two light brown, almost yellow irises flicker up to meet a covering of grey hair, for indeed, that is what Undertaker seems to have in the place of actual optical sensors.

She asks, not 'how did you find out', or 'who told you such a thing', for such questions are irrelevant, but instead, "How much do you know about me?" For, if she is lucky, Undertaker may be ignorant enough that she can simply run away and simply disappear and maybe go far, far into the distance, with no worries about be bothered-

"Whoooo, me? Why, I know everything. I'm an information broker, after all~"

But no, luck is never her lady.

To prove his claim, Undertaker lists off some particularly private things about Eve he is not supposed to be aware of, but somehow is anyway, counting the items off long, talon-tipped fingers as he goes. "For example, you were originally a noble lady before turning into a bounty hunter and executioner, and before that you were kidnapped and cursed by a vampire prince, and that the past three years, you strived to become strong enough to kill him."

At this point, Undertaker seems to get off track. "But after you did that, that healer of yours revealed that he was in fact that vampire's brother, and that he had been manipulating you into killing him for him, and was responsible for the death of your sister as well. So you killed your sister, killed the prince, killed your last remaining friend, died yourself, and then I came out from the brick wall I had happened to be standing behind and found you! And that, my lady, also happens to answer your question of 'what happened'."

The information-broker laughs- laughs!- as if what he had recounted is something amusing. Eve opens her mouth to notify him, that no, there is absolutely nothing funny about it; she had just died and come back to life, for Heaven's sake, and why is he laughing, but Undertaker cuts off her unspoken words. "Oh, not to mention that you seem to have a bout of amnesia."

"Amnesia?" Eve voices aloud, parroting the last word. "And specifically what have I forgotten?" Her brows knit together in a frown; she does not recall experiencing amnesia before, (what a redundant thought) and is wary of whether or not to trust this man's words.

"Perhaps you genuinely can't remember." The mortician thinks aloud, tapping a finger on his chin as if he is the one that needs to ponder anything. "Or maybe that healer of yours tampered with your memories. But of all the time I've known you, you've not once shown signs of acknowledging when we first met. The one who found you, the second time you ran from your tormenters? That was me."

Eve looks at Undertaker. Undertaker looks back.

"I do not believe you." The unconvinced girl says.

Undertaker purrs dangerously. "Oh really? Well, do you remember these?" Reaching towards his face, he pulls back the fringe of hair covering a good portion of his face, and suddenly Eve can see his eyes. She gasps, not because they are two-toned with double irises, not because of the outlandish shade of moss and emerald green they are, but because the sight of them triggers some hidden corner in her mind to- explode.

"Heh. They never were very forgettable." The mortician chuckles, talking about his eyes, but the remark is lost on the girl, who had fallen backwards and started to writhe as if (and only as if) in pain.

Her sharply inhaled breath sticks in her throat and Eve feels as if she is choking, suffocating. She is gripping her face like is it burning, but that is not it, her head, her head is what seems to be on fire. She is drowning inside her own mind, because a flood of memories are flashing through, coming in pieces like snippets of reel from a film, flying through her, until it all meshes together and pushes itself out and it fills her eyes and ears until she is effectively blocked out from the real world, until she finds herself in the memory.

.….

It is not cold.

It is not cold but she is shaking so, so much, and she can't get her grips, she's just trembling and shaking and curled up shut from the world. She has no idea where she is but it is dark and close around her, and she feels herself suffocating again. She's choking and choking and she doesn't want to stay in this box-

She doesn't want to see anyone again she doesn't want anyone to touch she doesn't want to be in here-

"My, my, what do we have here?"

Light breaks in, and then air, and she's writhing and screaming to escape the box too, she curls upwards and she keeps yelling this one, primal scream because it HURTS and she clutches herself and try to seal herself off, but she can't, because just then something explodes in her, and there are black feathers floating as her vision clouds. She's out, she's out and she has to keep getting out, away from that voice and away from here, everywhere-

The next part of her life blanks out. One second passes and she is lurching upwards (there's red, is that red beneath her?) and so loud, the next she is crouched, no, squashed, what is that taking up all that room, beneath a table of some sort, clutching at the wooden legs like they are her only lifeline, trying her hardest to stay silent.

She fails. Fast, shuddery breaths are forcing themselves from her already-seared lungs along with whimpers and sobs. She tries to hide and conceal herself, but it is no use because the other person in the room already knows she is here, and where she is hiding.

He is in her view right now and her in his.

"There, there." He croons, trying to soothe her with soft tones and strange cookies. His offerings are lost to fear and distrust, why would she trust him at all, and she stays there just sobbing and backed up against the wall, she wants him and everything else to go away.

"Hush, now, I'm not going to hurt you." He keeps going. "Why don't you come out?"

Her eyes are locked on him, and she does. Not. Move. But then he does, reaching up with his hands… she flinches and contracts further, but he simply brushes away the hair from his face, showing his eyes.

Looking at those irises changes something in her. All the fear and pain seem to leach away, as her gaze is pulled towards them and the shades of emerald seem to calm her, speaking to her on an entirely different level than mere verbal words and physical actions.

I'm not going to hurt you.

Her breathing slows, and her fingers relax. Only the eyes stay vigilant, still drawn to his.

He purrs, "There. Now why don't you come out from there so I can help you?" That cookie is still held out, and it now wiggling enticingly.

Slowly, surely, and not too sure of what she's doing, she decides to comply with what he says. On all fours, she pads her way closer to the man. Black wings spring from underneath the table as well, half spread out. The arms she is supporting herself on are still unstable and wobbly, but she crawls all the same to the man she now thinks is safe, at least, safe enough.

She takes a look at the ground- he had placed the bone shaped thing, which she can see really is some kind of biscuit, on the ground for her to take. But she ignores it, and grasps his hand instead. It is cooler than hers, yet somehow the touch of his fingers makes her digits grow warmer.

…..

Eve wakes up. It is like a switch turning on, as her eyes snap open and she is shoved back into the plane of consciousness. She raises herself up on one elbow and looks around and sees she is back where the memory… dream… hallucination had started, lying sideways in a coffin. And yet, she is also where it had ended, in that somehow, in her throes of whatever she had gone through, she had somehow reached out and grabbed Undertaker's hand.

"Back now, are we?" The mortician ceases his chuckling, but seems to still be smiling, a smirk playing on his lips as his now covered-again eyes look on at Eve's display of weakness.

Calmly, wordlessly, the girl removes her hand with a deliberate motion, and sits up with no assistance, and for some reason the smile disappears.

"That was a memory." It is not a question, but Undertaker answers like it is one anyways.

"Yes, and it was yours." Here, he picks up his tea and continues conversing between sips. "I thought it was curious when you made no mention of it the times we've talked. Who would have thought it had been selected and erased? Now, what supernatural being could've given such a specific kind of amnesia, I wonder…"

"Kain." Eve answers lamely. "He manipulated me from the beginning. I should have realized earlier." She should be angry, but is not, like all of her emotions are held back, locked up. She does not know where they have gone, but does not really care. (Unless uncaring counts as an emotion as well, in that case, she will find some other phrase to describe what she is feeling.)

Undertaker mutters quietly under his breath, but the girl sitting in the adjacent casket can still hear him. "Let you do all the dirty work for him, hmmm?"

"It does not really matter anymore; he is dead now." He is dead because I killed him.

I have killed a lot of people like him...

The broker's next words are nonchalant. "Such a shame, really…"

Now this is a curious statement. "I do not see why you are so disappointed at his death." Comes the dead response, as Eve cocks her head to the side, the way a curious child would have done while scrutinizing a new plaything. Her hair falls from her face like this and she can see the mortician with both eyes. "From what I remember, you did not like him at all. You still do not."

"Ah," He muses, tapping his beaker of tea against shining milk-white teeth, "But he would have been such fun to dissect."

Silence falls for the following few minutes, and fills the air along with a restless tension and the smell of sugar and butter. Eve eyes the mortician sitting at her side, who is simply perching on his stool of a death-box, and waits for him to say something, or anything at all really, about the enormous dragon in the room, but he does not, so she has to do it instead.

"Can I ever go back?" The girl is referring to her own fantasy-esque pocket dimension, of magic and impossible (supposedly impossible, she corrects herself, is not she one herself?) creatures.

"I'm afraid not, my lady. You're stuck here." Downing the last of his drink with one final tip of a glass beaker, Undertaker sets his empty container down and looks up at Eve expectantly, as if waiting for her reaction, with his straight legs crossing over one another and the fingers of his hands intertwining and resting under his grinning-again face. "That's the tricky thing about portals- not only can one not know when they've entered one, the longer the time they spend on the other side, the more unstable they are, and the more prone they are to disappearing out of nowhere! Considering how long you stayed here, it doesn't really color me surprised that it disappeared before you woke. Did you know? That this place never really belonged?"

"…I knew from the start." Eve admits. "Where else did the front door of your shop lead to? How else could this door simply appear out of nowhere one day to no one else's attention? When we first... second met, it was only because I had a customer for you. So I am stranded here?"

"It seems so. You're on your own, aren't you?" The mortician agrees with her with far too much glee. "Whatever shall you do now?" Somewhere under the ignorantly cheerful tones are hidden layers of something that sounds like sadism. ("Whatever shall you do now?")

Not mourn her 'loss', which is for sure. To her non-existent shock, Eve seems to accept the reality with no distress, half because there seems to be no distress to feel and half because she knows she will not miss her past life in the slightest. That world is a hell. Although she had lost everything, Eve had never owned too much to begin with, and what she did posses, had already been unceremoniously ripped from her with cruel twists of fate. The best course of action, she acknowledges, is to find a place for herself and perhaps this time around, she will be able to live in peace, for the most part. But this means that Undertaker's prodding has a point, what will she do now? She has no ties, no means of making ends meet on her own. If anything, life may start up harder than what it started as and she may end up on the streets… but even so...

"Survive." The word escapes her lips without her knowledge, as a testament to her own animalistic instincts. She had lost everything, has nothing, and probably will not have anything worth having ever again, but even so the core of her being still has a goal. "I am going to survive." She pauses. "The only questions at the moment is how...?"

Once again, the girl is drowning in her own thoughts, and once again, she is jerked from them unpleasantly. "I know!" Undertaker's words assault her ears as he claps in joy as if savoring a grand joke. Her eyes pull back to the mortician, who is now visibly excited, (For what exactly? Did he find something funny again?) And is angling towards Eve again, like he wants to share some excellent secret. "Why don't we," he inquires, "make an agreement?"

Not making any move of shying away from the invasion of her personal space save, for leaning away from the mortician to avoid the smothering closeness, she says in return, "What kind of agreement?" If it is something that can be of use to her, Eve may as well hear the man out.

He tells her. She does not like it.

In fact, even though she has never done so before, Eve comes to the conclusion that she really despises making unpredictable deals like the one that had just been presented to her, especially when they are being offered by an unpredictable person, which is the absolute best way to describe Undertaker, in an unpredictable (read: shifty) setting. And indeed, one can definitely call the mortuary such a word, with its randomly opening coffins, floorboards that even she does not know how to tread on without making noise, and eerie occupant that is simply too touchy for her tastes.

No, she does not like this proposition at all; it is too dangerous, too unstable. She cannot bring herself to believe in someone so… like him. Always laughing and hiding something, even it the least of it is his eyes.

(Do you remember these-)

But she is all alone, and Undertaker is most definitely not lying about that.

But he is the only one who can help her here.

But…

"But enough about that." He leers. "Why not have a cup of tea while you think the matter over, hmmm?"

… She ultimately has no choice, does she?

…..

I gained an ally, Eve thinks to herself, gazing at her right hand, examining the skins and the lines and the joints that composed it as if for the first time. She feels the last remnants of his warmth leach out of the tips of her fingers. Yet this does not make me feel.

Any.

Less.

Cold.

…..

It is about a half out later, and at her insistence, Eve has gotten dressed in her own clothing, having done so with Undertaker hiding in a coffin the entire time, because no, she had told him, she does not care if he had 'already seen everything' as the least embarrassing way to put it, or that she does not seem to have enough emotion to care, she still has a scrap of dignity she would like to hold on to, thank you very much, even if it is only out of habit. Like her own skin, the fabric is repaired with skillful stitches of thread, courtesy of one mortician, and the girl dimly wonders how often Undertaker's customers ask for their old clothes back.

She is looking down but has her line of vision is intruded by the sight of a beaker, filled to the brim with tea, and her eyes trail from the thin hands cradling it up along the arms to Undertaker's grinning face. She is thirsty, and has already accepted the mortician's deal, so, she thinks, there is no harm in taking the thing. It probably is not poisoned.

The tea is steaming and the glass itself is hot, quite hot, Eve knows, but when her fingers curl around the beaker she can hardly register the warmth as burning so much as closer to her own body temperature. (Something feels wrong with me.)

"Well then, my lady, how are you feeling?"

One part of the deal is that neither she nor Undertaker will lie to each other, so Eve processes the question for a while to think of a suitable answer, since "nothing" is the closest thing she can say but is obviously not the truth; no one who exists is ever nothing, or feeling nothing. "Cold." She finally says. "And heavy. It is like I am still dead."

"Hmmm. Interesting." The mortician remarks, but waves it off, and Eve does not care that he does so, since neither of them find the detail too incredibly important. "Well, so long as you're comfortable, I may as well get started, shall I?"

She is not really, never being at ease in the first place, but even if Eve had bothered to say anything, Undertaker would simply continue talking, so she does not and simply sits back and lets him go on.

"The year is 1888, and you are currently sitting in a mortuary in a city named London in a country named England. It's rather like the same village you grew up in, except with no bone crunching monsters, a higher population, and no magic-"

At this last point, Eve frowns and concentrates on the palm of her right hand, and, like she expects, a small flame comes into being, burning as if feeding off of a candle wick.

"I can still do this, however." She mentions, raising her hand so the fire is level with her eye, the miniature blaze catching the strange yellow undertones of her irises. "Why is that?"

A lengthy black nail points and waggle at the display of what can only be described as magic. "Ah, now that," he explains, "is the result of magic you possess." It is your very being that is capable of doing such a thing, and so nothing has changed to stop that. However, if you attempted to perform what I believe is called Distortion, you wouldn't be able to because this reality doesn't have that property."

To confirm this, Eve tries to make Undertaker's hat levitate, but fails, her finger aiming uselessly and succeeding in doing nothing but humiliate her and earn a few giggles from the funeral director. So this dimension does not have magic, but she does... a good thing to know.

"As such, there is nothing to cause the souls of the dead to fester, so you don't have to go worrying about monsters that result from a supernatural mutation."

No more giant carnivorous plants and werewolves, but oh well. Eve will not miss them.

"There are no vampires either,"

That is good.

"But there are demons."

This is not quite as good; at least, Eve thinks this but cannot be incredibly sure given that she has no idea what a demon is.

"They're something like a vampire, I suppose," Undertaker answers her unasked enquiry, as if he had read her mind like a book, "but are better at hiding themselves. Instead of drinking blood, they devour souls. And instead of branding property, they contract their humans. Said humans have a contract seal, but instead of becoming property, they trade their soul for the fulfillment of one request. Understand, now?"

"Yes." The prospect of what seems to be a harder to deal with version of a vampire is not the most attractive one, but Eve will have to worry about it should she actually meet one. "Please continue."

"At the moment, our fair country of England is ruled by one Queen Victoria." The girl gets the feeling that the mortician does not think highly of this queen, from the way that he talks of her like he did Kain, and the manner of his waving hand, but continues to be silent.

…..

"And if you were to ask me, the most likely chance of you finding a way to support yourself is to get a job! I'm sure I can-"

By this point, Eve finishes her tea, and sets the empty glass container on the coffin door. "I should get started then."

So she walks out before Undertaker can finish what he is saying, leaving him to pout and wonder how purposely she had timed her exit.

…..

Just like Undertaker says, the world outside the mortuary door is not that different than what she grew up with, lived in. The same kind of stones cobble the pathway beneath her booted feet and similar quaint shops of varying size and height line the street side, some attached to houses and other buildings, while residents traverse the area like she knows they do; young ladies peruse the goods that are laid out behind windows for all to see, men in stiff suits march off to whatever they happen to be going, and mothers and fathers keep tabs on cheerful children as they run to and fro between various displays of sweets, begging their parents if they can have this stuffed animal, or this new chocolate lolly.

Yes, Eve decides, this will not be too hard to adjust to. One of the few differences she can see is that there are no nearby manors, meaning that any nobles living in the country, however many there may be, must mainly live elsewhere. That is something to think about. Where will she live? What jobs are available? Eve is now stuck somewhere where she has no connections, aside from Undertaker of course, and no means to support herself. Not to mention the amount of paperwork an immigrant must have to fill… So many things to think about…

"Mum, 'wot's with the weird lady in the trousers?" Eve's attention is drawn to a small child toting a plush rabbit sporting an eyepatch, pointing its faux fur paw in her direction.

"Hush, she's probably a foreigner." A woman, the kid's mother, hurries the little boy away, her expression one of disapproval and intolerance. "It's best not to be involved with people like that!"

Another thing that is not the same about this place is the looks the girl is receiving. Perhaps it is the strange red streaks that plague her hair, or the very differing way in which she is dressed; trousers and a thick black coat and vest over a white shirt, all torn and re-sown in various places, and completely unalike from the gowns and skirts and blouses the girls her age are all wearing, but several on goers are casting various glances at her as they pass, ranging from wary to uncertain to simply curious. Either way, it is a far cry from the cold ignorance and indifference Eve has grown to expect all of the time, and she finds herself wanting nothing more than to disappear from sight.

With no apparent reaction to the mother-child duo's words, she chooses to do so, finding an alleyway on her right and slipping away as she is so adept at doing. Perhaps she will try her hand at job-hunting another time, when it is darker and there are less people are about.

Alas, a side of her new home even darker than the time of night she is thinking about soon makes itself known to Eve, as the exact corner she turns about is not three feet away from a woman being mugged by a stranger. She is pinned against the wall by a much taller, stronger, male attacker, who is grinning in a gleefully insane fashion, as one of his black finger-nailed (which looks quite familiar, not that Eve thinks about it) hands is pressed up against the girl's mouth, silencing her, and relishing the tears that are slipping soundlessly down her cheeks.

The girl is young, perhaps about Eve's age. She might have grown up with her. She might have been her friend.

However, she had not, and neither of these possibilities are true in the slightest, so there is no reason in particular for Eve to do anything to save her. In fact, she stops dead in her tracks, just inside the edge of the alley way, hidden in a well-placed shadow, and making no noise. She watches as the girl struggles and her captivator grins, like the Undertaker, except in a far more demented and twisted way, holding that victim back effortlessly with only one had, and weighs the pros and cons of saving this person.

I do not know her, so there is no sentimental value in keeping her alive.

Killing the man would raise suspicion.

The girl's life is not worth much. I can hardly imagine half of London even knowing she exists.

Eve is inclined towards letting the girl die, but something catches her eye- the glint of a blade, rusted and dim but still visible none the less. It is a knife, but the weapon is lying on the ground, attached to a hand, and a dead body, crushed and mangled, along with it, crumpled in a heap as if thrown aside. Beside him, in the same condition, is a purse of coins.

Wait. If he is the mugger, who is that man?

And then what Undertaker had said to her comes back.

A demon?

Eve has never met a soul-eater before, and is not sure if that is even what she is seeing, but a soul seems to be the only way to describe the thing that the stranger has somehow drawn from the girl, leaving the now dead body to slump against the wall as he raises the morsel to his lips. (Rather, she is seeing nothing, but what else can he be holding aside from thin air?)

If this man is a demon, she tells herself, as she squints at the maybe-monster, the girl now forgotten, then there is a chance he may come after me. If that is so, I should get rid of him now if he has a chance of targeting me.

Giving the area a thorough scan to ensure that no one else alive is present, Eve steps out and approaches the man/demon carefully, the way a wild animal walks slowly to a human offering food.

(Hush now I'm not going to hurt you-)

"Excuse me sir," she says quietly, calmly. "Are you a demon?" Eve waits, stopping a few feet away from the man, and listens for an answer.

Although initially surprised, the demon regards Eve with hungry eyes and smiles, fangs peeking out of his lips. "Yeah?" His manner is rough, but cocky and over-assured. "What about it girlie? Do you want to be eaten too, like this pretty here?" That same hand from before tosses and catches the invisible soul like it is a ball, and he is the happy child playing catch. "Big mistake, showing yourself like that. Maybe I'll eat you now, or save you for later. I always did like-"

Having heard all she needs to know, Eve does not wait for the demon, for she has confirmed the fact that he is one, to finish whatever he is saying, as it is no longer important; she has already identified him as a rabid dog, and such dogs needed to be put down. Catching him off guard, the raven-haired girl lunges and manages to pull out long, thin wires and slice off an arm with the razor edges before the demon wizens up and pulls away in time to avoid losing a second limb.

"Bitch!" He spits, and lunges with unsettling speed as his remaining hand reaches to claw at Eve. "I should have known you were some fuckin' death god or somethin'. No normal human's stupid enough to come up to a demon. I should tear you apart before I eat you. Teach you a lesson-"

His anger clouds his mind and Eve takes advantage of it, drawing one of her many blades out to shove down his throat and put an end to his attention-drawing yelling, before backing towards the opening of the alley to distance the two fighters. She had twisted the blade, and now there are two wounds on the demon pouring blood, dripping red all over.

The demon is infuriated, beyond livid, and his movements are more distracted due to it; his swipes are slow and of bad aim, his footwork is sloppy. He would still be able to overpower any human he came across, but for a supernatural being, he is child's play. Knocked down by another blow, this time to the shoulder, he struggles to get up. "Little bitch!" His mouth, sliced at the corners, seems insistent on continuing to utter their useless and guttural insults.

She is not a death god of any kind, but this fact is not important. Eve continues the assault, having now set her sights to kill this demon in man's clothing. Part of him is evaporating into something else- the copious amounts of blood pouring to the floor is thickening to a sludge-like black substance, and the four fangs the demon had from the start are starting to multiply, into eight, into sixteen, until his mouth is stuffed with sharpened teeth. He is turning into something else, maybe his real form, and a gut instinct tells the girl that hurting him will become much more difficult if she allows him to continue.

Shielding herself from the next lunge of biting teeth with her knives, Eve moves back again, as is her only option. Now in close proximity, too close, with the demon's growling, feral face, Eve grabs it and summons fire to her hands and burns it, gripping the monster's head and forcing it and the rest of the body down before the beast break free and they are both on opposite walls once more. His face is melting, the flames spreading over like wildfire, but it reveals only more black mass and now scales, and the fire does nothing to impede him.

Eve holds out her hands and a black scythe materializes, resting cold and heavy in her arms. The demon is gradually regaining his former attitude, with the coming of his true form, and as he stands, more a mass of dark tentacles than he is a human facade, he gets up from his kneeling position, ready to rip Eve apart with no mercy.

Only too late does he look up and sees the girl is no longer where she had been, backed against one of the narrowly spaced walls, but has instead closed in on him, scythe in hand. His eyes, a shining pink with slit pupils, widen as he watches his chest be impaled a dark blade. Eve stands at his side, facing the opposite direction as him, into a wall of brick, as her arms, which are grasping the scythe directly at her side, pull the blade out with a twist. The beating heart muscle that is removed hits the ground with the wet noise of raw meat smacked against a table.

But the demon does not die.

And as he realizes that no, that weapon is not a death scythe, and that this girl probably is not even a reaper, he opens his fanged mouth wide and laughs. "Is that all you've got?" No longer angry, but now excited in a sadistic and cruel manner, the monster is holding up his hand again in elongating sharp claws. "Then it's my turn to have some fun."

And yet, even as he advances once more with the intention of gouging out Eve's own heart, and even as the girl retreats and considers fleeing, the demon dies, because before either party knows exactly what is going on, his head is squashed by a flying object and his entire body from the waist and above is ground up and splattered like a bomb all over the surrounding area. At this point, the blaze overtakes the now dead body and eats away at it, taking in various bits once human parts and demon skin, and turning it all to ashes.

Eve is not injured, having even been able to escape being soaked in blood, and the fight seems to have ended, but she still does not relax and remains as tense as ever, because even though she did not sense it, someone had come without her even realizing it. It is as if whoever it is has appeared out of thin air, and she did not know.

(She did not know. She did not know. How much did that person see?)

The 'whoever it is' is currently surveying with scene with a wolf whistle and his hands in his pockets, white oxford shoes dancing away from the grime and dirt. "Whoo! I knew this chick was gonna croak today, but I didn't think being a little late would mean a demon would try eating her soul so quickly or anything. At least the dead dude died when he was due to, hah." He is leaning in a lazy, leisured manner on some contraption, this box with blades attached to the bottom and as angular "U" shaped handle on the top that is currently whirring away at something Eve cannot see. Along with this, the newcomer is holding a book and muttering, "Caroline Johnson, born August 21, 1869, died November 30, 1888 of… soul removal. No special remarks."

"Whelp!" Finishing his business, he turns towards Eve and she sees a glasses-wearing face with two-toned ruffled hair smile at her. "I really gotta say thanks for taking down that demon for me. I would've gotten overtime for sure if I'd let that soul get snatched. I'm Ronald Knox, by the way, nice to meet you." While his bladed box… thing… disappears, he extends a friendly hand towards her, continuing, "I don't think I've seen you around the division before, what's your name?"

Meanwhile, Eve stares at the hand like it is an alien. Not knowing who this Ronald is, she steps away again, her eyes narrowing and her razor-thin wires still snaking from her hands, ready to pounce at any given moment. Seeing this, Ronald holds up both hands in a notion of peace and says "Whoa, I'm not going hurt you or anything. I just wanted to know your name. Are you from a different department or something? Hey, what's up with your eyes?" His own, a pair of double-iris yellow and green, look into hers with curiosity.

Eve honestly does not know how to react. Here is a complete stranger talking as if he is familiar with her and asking her things she does not even understand.

She honestly does not know how to react.

Except run the fucking hell out of there.

"H-hey! Come back!" Ronald reaches for Eve, but his fingers only manage to brush the tips of her hair as she turns tail and sprints the way she had come. Following her, he is surprised to find that the girl is not there when he looks around the corner, having vanished as if into thin air. "Huh, I guess she wasn't one of ours. Maybe from another division?" A black feather falls onto his nose. He blinks. "I wonder if I should report this…"

I really liked the ending, but I'm not too sure if Ronald was in character... or Undertaker for that matter. Man, you do not know how many times I've misspelled the latter's name as 'Undertkaer.' It's weird.

I'd love to get some feedback on this. There are so many things I'm not sure if I'm doing right feel free to input your opinion.