Descent

Behind these eyes a demon sleeps
A monster of my own creation,
Within my mind's dark caverns creeps
Needing but a moment's fury to awaken.

I lock it away within myself,
In those dark caverns it knows so well.
Bind it down in its dark larder
Locked in chains of purest will.

I walk the world with innocent face,
Never showing the conflict behind my guise.
Ever fearing what might come to pass,
Should anything wake the demon
Behind these eyes.

Castle's mind flashed with memories both recent and long ago, many concrete and some shrouded in a dream like haze he had no firm frame of reference for.

Kate being shot at Motgomery's funeral in front of his eyes

An SUV running him off the road

Setting up a video camera

Screams

Fire

blinding rage

Maniacal laughter

Gunshots

The bullet from Caleb Brown's gun punching through his chest.

Kate dragging her broken body to his side as she was bleeding out.

Silence

Castle startled awake to the sound of a heart monitor, his lips parted in a silent scream. His head snapped upward from the side of Kate's bed dragging him sluggishly back to the present. Though he could clearly remember the bullet from Caleb Brown's gun hitting him in the chest which had sent him sprawling, not even the ER doctors could fathom how he had so quickly recovered once the bullet had been removed.

The memory sent his hand to the center of his chest where the bullet had struck him which should have shredded his heart, but the skin under his loose fitting shirt was as smooth as it had been before. There wasn't even a hint of a scar. It had baffled everyone.

Kate, however had not been so fortunate.

She had taken down Caleb Brown - for real this time - but had taken two bullets in the exchange of fire with Brown: one in the shoulder and the other in the abdomen. She had lost so much blood that the doctors had induced a coma to allow her body to repair itself. He gently brushed a lock of hair away from Kate's face, but his guilt-ridden reflection was interrupted by a television that he faintly recalled he'd left on for noise before he'd fallen asleep.

"Breaking news on the NYPD raid on a Federal headquarters building. The prime suspect in the kidnapping of famed author Richard Castle, known only as Mason Wood, disappeared from Federal custody early this morning his whereabouts are currently unknown..."

Castle's interrogation by Mason Wood after his man Flynn had drugged him flooded back.

"Who knows about me?" Wood had asked him in his gruff, grandfatherly tone as he'd gone through the list of everyone he loved. He'd fought so hard, ground his teeth and struggled., tears pouring down his cheeks, but could not fight the compulsion to answer. He knew now that Kate, Alexis, his mother, nor anyone else he cared about would ever be safe so long as Mason Wood lived.

Castle rose from his seat at Kate's bedside, brushed a lingering kiss to Kate's pale forehead before he turned and left the private hospital room. Something needed to be done. He knew that now. The truth serum had shaken something loose from the empty chasm that had been his two missing months from the year before. Flashes mostly. Images he'd thought could only have come from the dark imaginings of Stephen King or H.R. Giger.

As he walked out of the hospital into the darkening night a line of verse wafted up from the disconnected flashes of his tortured memory. Words he barely realized he was speaking aloud.

"Change! Change! O' form of man!
Free the prince forever damned!
Free the might from fleshy mire!
Boil the blood in the heart for fire!
Gone! Gone! O form of man
And rise the demon Etrigan!"

Naught but a black alley cat bore witness as the very air around Richard Castle shimmered and shifted until a much larger, barely humanoid yellow skinned creature with, horns, red eyes, and pointed, webbed ears replaced him. The cat arched her back, hissed and spat before she bounded from her perch atop a dumpster and fled as the demon bellowed into the night.

"Mortals are so weak-willed," Etrigan muttered to himself. He was unable to fathom how the humans of the modern world could simply block out that which they were unwilling – or unable – to accept.

The one named Mason Wood and his minions thought that they could control him by binding him to the mortal, Richard Castle. They thought he would submit.

They had thought wrong.

Clearly men who no longer believed in demons or magic were woefully inept at the spells necessary to bind him to their will. He'd torn the fools apart that very night, laughing with maniacal glee, shown them the utter foolishness of their mistake. He had only relented his place in the mortal plane back to Richard Castle when his rage was spent. But he had always been lurking in the periphery of Castle's mind, stalking the dark recesses of Castle's subconscious waiting for the moment when he would be called upon to break free.

Now he had, Castle had called him forth from purgatory willingly. Though he was not fond of the soft writer with whom he was now forced to share existence on this plane, he would acquiesce to the final plea that had accompanied the utterance of the spell that had summoned him.

Etrigan would hunt this Mason Wood with extreme prejudice. He thought he was the hunter, but now he and all of his minions would be the prey. Etrigan, son of the demon Belial would not be reasoned with, would not be bargained with and he simply would not be stopped until they were all dead.

** Author's Note** Etrigan the Demon is a comic book superhero/antihero created by Jack Kirby for DC Comics, originally inspired by the comic strip "Prince Valiant" in which the eponymous character dressed as a demon. Kirby gave his creation the same appearance as Valiant's mask.

Etrigan is a demon from Hell whom, despite his violent tendencies, usually found himself fighting for the forces of good, due to the alliance between the heroic characters of the DC Universe and Jason Blood a Gotham City Police Dept. consultant on matters of the occult and former Knight Errant of the Arthurian round table to whom Etrigan was bound by his half-brother Merlin the Magician.

His Gotham PD connection lead to numerous team-ups with Batman.

Yes, my love of obscure fiction knows no bounds.