Disclaimer: All characters originally created and owned by Sunao Yoshida; borrowed and manipulated by me.
Prompt: Children
"Sister Marietta... You said there was no such thing as monsters."
The woman wrapped an arm around the trembling young boy--cowering in the corner with the other surviving residents of the St. Joseph Orphanage--as she stared in horror across the room, where a wall displaying the children's artwork had stood just moments ago.
"I was wrong," she whispered.
There was no other word for the thing that stood amidst the rubble, watching them with eyes that burned like hellfire. A smile spread slowly across its sharp features and it folded its immense black wings as it stepped toward them, glass and stone crunching beneath its boots.
With a shaking hand, Marietta made the sign of the cross and whispered a hurried prayer. She held her breath as the demon gazed down at her--still smiling--and raised its bloody scythe.
"And Jesus said, 'Suffer all the children...'"
A/N: This is the one that was holding things up. It went through about three different incarnations (one of which exploded into a full-on one-shot that I have yet to finish up...) before I finally settled on this one. I've been playing with Armageddon-era evil!Abel (okay, post-Armageddon, pre-Lilith!death if you wanna get really technical...) quite a bit lately, so he's likely to pop up again in all his (hopefully) skeery glory.