...And Punishment
Doyle was on his tenth cigarette. He just couldn't get the demon's face out of his head, the crack in his voice as he begged for help. No matter how much he told himself it wasn't his business - he could still see it, still hear it, every time he shut his eyes. He hadn't been able to sleep - and so he chain smoked.
He was a monster, he told himself, furiously - over and over again, through the small hours of the night. His father was a rapist, and he was a car thief, and all that was fine because the pair of them were monsters. Creatures like him didn't help. Not even other creatures like him. That demon should have known better than to come to another monster looking for help. It just wasn't what monsters did.
But he knew Francis would have helped, the traitorous little voice inside his mind kept telling him so. And so would Harri. Francis wouldn't even have had to have believed he shared anything in common with someone who came to him, begging for help. He would just do it because it was the right thing to do. Because he believed in helping people, in making the world a better place for the people around him.
He drank to shut the voice up. He wasn't Francis, he argued back with himself. He never had been. He was Doyle, and Francis was a lie - had always been a lie. Doyle could cheat and steal and smoke and drink and gamble, because he was a half demon lowlife, who did half demon lowlife things. But he didn't help.
The hours passed by, the sun began to rise. But no matter how much - or how long - he told himself he had done the right thing, acted according to his nature, there was still a little part of his brain, where Francis still lived, that niggled away at him. Making him worry. Making him regret sending that demon away. Making him feel guilt. And so he chain smoked.
There was a knock at the door and he got up to answer it. BAM he was hit by a sudden migraine - out of nowhere, a searing, blinding pain in his head, like nothing he had ever felt before. It knocked him from his feet and he collapsed to the ground, clutching at his head as wave after wave of excruciating agony crashed against his skull. And then came the pictures. Just flashes of images behind his eyes.
He saw death. Slaughter and bloodshed. And he felt the panic and the fear and the pain of those being murdered, the heartbreak of watching loved ones die - unable to protect them - and the grim certainty of being next. It was just too much, it was overwhelming and just when he thought he was going to die from the agony … it was gone. Just like that. His head throbbed a little, he was sweating and breathing heavily, but the rest of it was gone … replaced with a cold sense of dread.
It was the demon he had seen - and his family, all of them brutally slaughtered and he suddenly needed to know if what he had seen was a dream or if it was real.