Beda's Tale: Part Two

By: Rachel DeFausse

It had been three weeks.

It had been three weeks since I was put through that hellish ritual by the Petrovics. A ritual that opened gates to another world. A world where darkness isn't just the absence of light, but a living thing in its own right. A thing that flows like water, taking any shape it needs to feed itself. A thing that constantly seeks nothing more than its next prey.

It had been three weeks since I woke up with a portion of that darkness inside me, diluted through every fiber of my being. I could feel it everywhere. It was in my heart, making my blood pump faster in anticipation of hunting something to feed it. It was in my eyes, allowing me to see in the night as clearly as a great cat in the dark jungles. It was in my lungs, allowing me to use the air I breathed more efficiently so I would have the stamina to take down whatever prey I singled out for it.

Worst of all, it was in my head, lurking there every moment of every day. It was making me into the perfect predator and it was in my very mind prodding at me to use the abilities it was granting me to hunt for it. All the while it seemed frustrated that it had to prod in such a manner. It seemed to know that I was holding it back, that IT could be the controlling intelligence if it pushed hard enough and long enough. It seemed to sense that all it needed was a single moment of weakness, a moment in which it could force my mind to the background and bring itself to the front.

It had been three weeks since I lashed out at my former paramour, Skelter, with the powers that the darkness had granted me as its host. I had allowed the shadow powers to rip at his life to feed itself. I had allowed it to manifest as bolts of semisolid darkness as I hurled it at the man I had spent the previous half a year using as my personal protector within the ranks of the Skulls.

I had lashed at Skelter that night, not only with the hunger of the darkness that he had been there to see put in me, but also with a rage that he had been a part of letting that happen. Worse yet, that he had gone through it himself and KNEW what was going to happen to me.

As a "Bone Daddy" leader of the Skulls street-gang, Skelter had the same darkness harbored within him that I now had dwelling as a parasite within me. He had the same power to conjure it up as a weapon as I did. Truth is he probably had far more ability to do so than I did. Not only had he been at it longer, but he didn't try to resist it as I had.

Long ago, Skelter had either lost the battle against the darkness or, more likely, had given himself over to it willingly. I was still mostly me, my personality, my like my dislikes, but with the darkness lurking deep within while Skelter was almost fully the darkness, stripped of most emotion and feeling but with just enough of the hosts personality left over to allow that darkness an understanding of how out world worked and what ways would be best to feed itself.

I have little doubt that Skelter could have summoned up the darkness within him that night and killed me without so much as batting an eye if I hadn't caught him off guard with my assault.

In the three weeks since that night, I had begun to learn some of the many ways that being host to this darkness was altering me. I no longer slept more than two hours a night, for example, and my appearance had been changing as well.

While my hair had always been raven black, now it seemed to take on a different luster, like the deep black of well polished onyx jewelry. My skin was softer and hadn't the slightest blemish on it anywhere. My eyelashes were fuller, my lips a shade redder and even my bearing seemed to have improved. I walked taller and with the subtle grace of the hunter that it was trying to make me into.

Part of me, the part that was closest to the darkness in my mind, understood why it was doing this. The darkness wanted me to be more appealing, it wanted me to look as attractive as possible, and it wanted my looks to be so alluring that my very presence would serve as bait for the unsuspecting people on which it wanted to feed.

With the Bone Daddies of the Skulls the darkness seemed to create a look designed specifically to intimidate prey into submission, but with me it sought to attract its meals to their fates and disarm them from realizing there was any danger at all.

It had also given me the ability to live without needing food. Truth was, not only did I not need food any longer; I was physically incapable of eating regular meals anymore. I had tried, and while it looked and smelled good on my plate, the second the cheeseburger reached my lips the darkness in me touched it. The first bite rotted as it touched my tongue and had tasted as if it had spent a month sitting out on a counter gathering mold. I learned that the darkness had control over my actions in this respect at least. I think, perhaps, it didn't want me distracted from its hunger by hunger of my own.

And its hunger was strong. I had fought it back for these past three weeks and felt it grow all the while. I had felt the darkness in me look at the people I passed on the street like a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I even felt my mouth water a little once in reaction to its hunger within me, and it was then that I became a hermit in the truest sense.

I could not afford to lose control out on the streets where the darkness could lash out at anyone who happened to be convenient for it, so I went to the west side of King's Row. I knew from my time with the Skulls that the area held several abandoned warehouses, places the Skulls often used as safe houses. I also knew that the police had raided one about three months back and it would take quite a while before any of the local gangs would use it again.

Avoiding the warehouse was a pointless gesture in my opinion. My logic was the Paragon Police Department would know nobody would move back into it that quickly after a bust and I thought it highly unlikely that they would take an interest in it so soon after clearing it out either.

I went to the basement of the warehouse and reached out with the dark powers to collapse the ceiling over the doorway. I had shut myself in and planned to die there in my solitude, no doubt driven slowly mad by the darkness in me.

It was four days ago that I had sealed myself into that basement, and it was last night that I got out of it.

I don't know how I got out. I had nodded off for the bliss of those two hours a night that I can still sleep. Two hours a night that I could escape the hunger, even if it was only to the refuge of recurring nightmares.

The worst of my nightmares brought made me relive my worst memories of the recent past. In one, for example, I come out of the ritual of darkness without any part of my soul remaining and strike at Skelter from hunger rather than anger. As I raise my hand to deliver the final blow that would kill him the Hellion that I had killed to get the jacket that got me into the Skulls appears behind me and whispers that I should kill Skelter, that it's in my nature now and a killer is what I truly am.

It was from that dream that I awoke to find I was outside of my little self-made prison and kneeling on the landing of the fire-escape that ran up the side of my old apartment building. I was staring in a dirty window at sleeping form of my former upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Foster.

Mrs. Foster was an eighty-seven year old widow. Her daughter had married and moved away to raise children somewhere in the Midwest, Nebraska I think she said, and the son who had been taking care of her in her old age had been one of the many civilian casualties of the Circle of Thorns cult.

A part of me knew her as the sweet old lady who made sugar-cookies every Christmas for the whole building, but the other part saw her as a safe meal. She was a person with no connections close enough to force an investigation into what happened to her, and somehow I was sure that the darkness could kill her in a way that would have any but the most astute eye assuming that her age had simply gotten the better of her.

I found myself rationalizing it. I told myself that it would be ok to take a victim this old. That it wouldn't be as bad because she didn't have as much time left in her life as a younger target. I even remembered her arthritis and thought that I would be putting her out of her misery and doing her a favor.

All the while a thin string of drool was dribbling from the corner of my mouth and clouds of darkness were forming around me like the fog created by dry-ice at Halloween parties.

A small tendril of darkness reached towards the window and began to ooze through the gap between the lower pane and the skill. I saw it reaching for Mrs. Foster as she slept and I caught myself just in time, whipping it back into me as if it were a tight drawn rubber band that someone had released the other end of.

I ran most of that night and cried at the thought of what I had almost done. I thought I was running aimlessly, but I think part of me was seeking the safety of the little cell I had spent the last couple days in.

I got there just before dawn, but the door was still securely shut. The cave collapsed rubble on the other side prevented me from even cracking the door open. Somehow, while I slept, the darkness had taken me from my cell and put me where I could find it the nourishment it so craved.

Only later would I come to realize that the darkness had circumvented my barrier by moving me through its own realm instead of the normal dimension in which I lived. I would learn to harness that ability for my own needs in time, but this was the first time I had teleported.

The ramifications of this hit me immediately. I didn't know how the darkness had gotten me out of a fully sealed room, but knew if it could do that then there was no where on the whole planet I could go that this darkness could not drag me back from to find it a victim. There was nothing I could do; I had to give in and feed the darkness.

Now, three weeks to the day since I got this cursed life forced on me by the Peratovics, I stalked the streets and alleys of King's Row looking every bit as dark as the shadows I sought to feed.

A black leather trench-coat made a tiny whisper of sound as it moved about my calves when I walked. I could not feel the cold of the October night air, but the coat made it look like I was as uncomfortable as all the normal people on the street around me, and it allowed me to blend with the shadows in a normal everyday way that didn't require harnessing the dreaded darkness within me.

I turned down one ally and finally found what I was looking for. There in the dark and filthy back street stood one of the Vahzilok "surgeons" that abducted people off the streets of Paragon City.

The followers of Dr. Vahzilok are twisted medical men who believe that by harvesting the limbs and organs of the living they can perform transplants that will allow them to unlock the keys to immortality. They call themselves the 'Reapers' in their desire to think that they can control death and the one I found in the alley this night was typical of the Vahzilok followers in his appearance, with his long rubber gloves and gore stained apron as he waved a blood caked, rusted saw at the young woman he had trapped against the wall of the building.

"Think of it as early organ donation," the reaper laughed as he closed in on the woman.

I stepped further into the ally and smiled uneasily. I meant it to be intimidating, I knew that I was the one with the power here, but at the same time I was nervous about willingly stepping into danger and I was certain that nervousness showed despite my efforts to hide it. "I don't think she's interested in being quite that charitable today," I glared at the psychopath and, as he looked to see who had spoken, his intended victim slipped a little further out of his reach.

"Oh good. More is always better," The reaper smiled a yellow-toothed smile and took a step in my direction, "And I so love volunteers."

I let the darkness out and as I did I tried to will it into a form I had seen Skelter use once.

A tide of shadow erupted from both my hands and races along the asphalt of the alley towards the reaper. When it reached his feet it shot upwards in what looked like a dozen, four foot long, coal black octopus tentacles that wrapped around the reapers legs up to his waist.

The tentacles held him rooted to the spot on which he stood as they began to pull the life from him in tiny bits, piece by agonizing piece.

I turned my attention to the reaper's original target. "Run," I stated in a flat voice, keeping a careful control over my hunger. She stood there thanking me and trying to tell me how wonderful it was that I had come just in the nick of time. I simply repeated the one word command a second time.

"RUN," I snapped at her. I wasn't worried about losing to this idiot Vahzilok hurting her, I had him well under control, I was concerned about what I might do to her if the darkness got out of control while I was feeding it.

She seemed to get the message that time and ran out of the alley as quickly as possible.

I turned back towards the would-be predator that was now my prey just in time to feel the sting in my side.

He couldn't reach me with the saw he was carrying, my tendrils of darkness held him too far way for that, but I had forgotten that the Vahzilok often carried little one hand crossbows.

The poison was working quick, designed no to kill but to dull the senses and slow reflexes, leaving the mad doctor's victims completely at their nonexistent mercy. My head was reeling and I stumbled against a trash dumpster.

The tendrils I had summoned up dissolved into nothing and the reaper came at me, brandishing the poison bearing crossbow in one hand and that menacing, bloody saw in the other. I put both my hands up in a gesture meant to protect my face as the saw arced at me in a swing that might well have taken my head off at the neck, but the darkness within reacted to my desire for safety. It reached out and pulled life from the reaper in a way I hadn't done with it before. Rather than a slow siphoning of life force that I had grown accustomed to from the darkness, the shadows within me took a large bite of the reaper's life force and redirected it into aiding me rather than feeding itself.

I felt my head clearing and, as I reached down to pull the small crossbow bolt from my side, I saw the wound sealing itself shut.

I casually dropped the bolt to the ground and stepped towards the reaper, who in turn was beginning to cower. "What are you?" he stammered out.

I was now the type of monster I sought protection from when I joined the Skulls. I was less than human. I was a foul creature that stalked the night, feeding on the life energies of others.

Dana Carols was as good as dead, of that much Skelter had been correct. Sure I was still me, minus a few lost memories of my youth, but I was a completely different me. I was a hunter, not a timid girl trying to avoid being hunted.

"I am Beda," I said as I reached towards him, choosing to use the name Skelter had called me by that night I awoke to being the new me. As my hand closed on his neck his life began flowing into my body and I could see the veins in my arm bulge and turn black under the skin,

I was a monster, but there were at least two things left that I could control about being this thing I had become:

First: While I had come to understand that I needed to feed the darkness in me if I had any hope of keeping it in check, I could at least pick what my prey would be. If I was going to be forced into life as a monster then so be it, but I would be the monster that made all the other monsters in King's Row tremble in fear, and it would only be the other threats of the city that I would allow myself to feed on, like this reaper. Besides, it seemed as if the darkness found the stronger prey more satisfying anyways.

Second: I could control how much I took from my prey. I could feel that the darkness wanted to drain my victims dry and leave nothing but a lifeless husk behind me, but, as the reaper sank into unconsciousness, I reigned in the shadows by sheer force of will, much as I had done with Skelter. I would feed the beast within me, but I would NOT kill.

Instead I left the reaper tied by his smock to the bottom of a street light and made an anonymous call to Paragon Police.

I would be a beast in King's Row, but I would be a beast on MY terms.

*********

Little did I know at that time, that while I was learning to live with being one of King's Row's night monsters, elsewhere in the Row another monster was hunting me.

"What do you mean you can't find her?" Skelter screamed as he unleashed a torrent of darkness that sent one of the lower ranked Skulls against the hood of a nearby car, "I want her head on a spike for what she did to me. Do you understand?"

The gravedigger pulled himself off the car and staggered to stand up right while Skelter continues his tirade, "I don't know what hole she has crawled in to hide, but she can't go on without feeding for long. She has to surface eventually, and when she does we are going to be there. Am I making myself clear?"

"Yes sir," the gravedigger answered through a drop of blood at the corner of his mouth along with six of his fellows that stood by watching the exchange, then the all dispersed into the night in an effort to find information on where their former member might be.

Skelter stepped over to the car he had hurled the lower ranked Skull against and ran his hand over the dent the gravedigger's body had made in the hood.

He understood the constant hunger that came with the dark powers the Peratovic brothers granted their trusted bosses. He remembered trying to fight it at first, but that only lasted about five minutes before the darkness had ripped away enough of his soul that, rather than resist it, he embraced it for the power that it brought him.

What Skelter didn't understand was how the woman he now hunted could have resisted the lure of the darkness enough to attack him instead of the easy prey he had brought her. Nor could he understand how she was able to resist killing him when her surprise barrage had left him unconscious and helpless.

The Bone Daddy was curious about these things, but in the end he didn't consider them very relevant. The bottom line to Skelter was that he didn't stand for being knocked around like that by anyone. One way or another, he was going to find her, and he would take his revenge on her for that insult. Next time he wouldn't be caught off guard.

Skelter had his cell of the Skulls checking everywhere for attacks on people that held the trademark signs of a Bone Daddy attacks. It had been a fruitless three weeks, but Skelter knew she would have to strike eventually, and that when he found an attack that that showed the signs of harnessing darkness like he could, but wasn't a Skulls operation, then he would have his trail and the hunt could begin in earnest.