A cycle of pain

     "Some how, I'm not really surprised," Kane sighed, "If they turned up here, then why not her too?"

     "Kane, what are you talking about?" Misha frowned, "What do you mean, 'her too'?"

     "Never mind," Max rubbed his arm, as she'd finally let go.

     "In answer to you question, child," the dragon raised his hand, "We shall just have to show you."

     "Great, even they don't know," Kane rolled his eyes.

     The other two demons had raised theirs as well, tempting Max, in a mad, suicidal manner, to call them students in a class. Before he could do more than think such a thought, the hands were connected by arcs of light that were actually, somehow, black. The black arcs formed a triangle, then met each other in the middle of the triangle. Each of the three smaller triangles began to fill in with more of the black light. The triangle nearest the black-clothed man quickly filled, and Delvin's eyes shifted to pitch black, as he began to laugh as any small child would be expected to. High pitched and somewhat tinny. In a short amount of time, the child's energy filtered out of his body and flowed in to the triangle. The energy was silver, but soon faded to black, to match the arcs.

     A few seconds after the triangle filled in completely, the child fell to the ground, in a boneless heap. Looking to the other two, Max noticed that they were more slowly filling in, and that he was beginning to feel a type of exhaustion that he'd never felt before. He realized that the demons were draining them of their energy, and stepped back. Or tried to. He found he couldn't move any more than his eyes, and shocked shout revealed that Kane had learned the same thing.

     "What is this?" Kane's voice sounded weaker, and further away than it should, "What's this got to do with who's power-claimed?"

     "You children will know your roles as soon as you are absorbed," the dragon-man bared his teeth, "And at that point, the girl will become of use to us, in binding the power of these boys to our own."

     "NO!," Mishaela screamed, "I won't allow it!"

     Her evident intent was to preempt their sacrifice of her life, but the demons weren't total idiots, as they froze her in a transparent crystal that somehow allowed her to continue breathing.

     "We need you alive," the wild-haired man looked back to the two weakening teens, "But the boys, I'm sure would not mind your sacrifice. After all, it would only mean that we would hunt down three more children, in another time, and another girl."

     "Perhaps this time," the dragon-man hissed, "we would have access to all of them from the beginning of their spans."

     Just before he lost consciousness, Max felt a sliver of sadness from Wolf, and from the remains of Delvin. When the blackness enveloped him, he no longer thought about what it meant, but he did know that somehow, he'd gotten himself locked into a rather nasty cycle, that felt painfully close to suicide twice over.

That's it folks. Sorry about it being sad, but then again, I didn't really have a clue that was going to happen until about chapter fourteen, and when I wrote it out, it just didn't feel right trying to add on to it to make the ending happy.