The bulk of the black cathedral had been reduced to little more than a burnt out husk. Here and there the most significant bones that had made up the structure's skeleton still remained mostly in-tact, though tumbled all atop one another like dying men, blackened and cracked. There was glass in plenty, and some stone.
Yet the basement remained, and an entrance to that basement. It was there that two men stood. The long, thin cigarette of the first man cut through the darkness like a tiny beacon. It would point outward as it took its turn in his mouth, and then make a slow, graceful arc down to point at the floor. The man who held the cigarette had, as it's said, a "lean and hungry look." Tall. Thin. Powerfully built. He wore a suit and somehow that suit did not seem out of place in the dust and char. His features were sharp. Well defined. His eyes: a shade of brown that appeared amber, or perhaps yellow. Midnight hair, slicked back from the skull. It should have appeared greasy. It did not.
A larger light cut a more hyperactive path through the air. This was a true flashlight, now, a big sturdy MagLite that could easily serve as a weapon if no other apparatus were available. The kid who sent that light in quick, broad strikes across the room looked no more than 19 or 20. His brown locks were a mess of waves and curls, tilting wildly about his head. He had an easy going air about him, a practiced way of moving that screamed that he didn't care about much of anything, and, in the act of screaming it, let any astute watcher know that he did, in fact, care very much. He wore jeans. He wore a black t-shirt advertising the punk band, Bad Religion. He hummed the lyrics to one of their songs as he sent the light around and around the room.
If you stand to reason, you're in the game. The rules may be elusive but the pieces are the same. And you know if one goes down they all go down as well. The balance is precarious as anyone can tell. This world's going to hell! Don't allow this mythologic hopeful monster to exact its price. Kyoto Now! We can't do nothing hoping someone else will make it right.
The first man hated the band but knew the words well enough. It kept the younger man quieter, if he was allowed to play his own CDs in the car. And at least the song the kid was fixated on was one of the less irritating ones; the one that, ironically summed up the first man's outlook, more or less, though he had a less longwinded way of stating that someone had to get up off their ass and do something about the pernicious beasts that stalked the world. Destroy evil. Instantly. What more needed to be said?
The man in the suit was Thomas Wolf. The simple minded would call him a demon hunter. Or, perhaps, a magician. He had a little magic, but he rather preferred the hunter's title. Mostly, Wolf identified with the animal that shared his name, and let other titles fall away. He did what he did. People who tried to put a name on it had watched too many movies.
The second man was his associate. Apprentice, if you will, or partner, if you will, or perhaps, as Wolf mostly thought of him, simply the annoying boy who followed him around and might actually grow to be useful someday. And for about a year, since his battle with the demon Astiroth, Wolf knew that Nick Sanos had always been like that, or at least had been like that in the last life they'd both lived.
Thinking that, in and of itself, was call for a fresh cigarette. Wolf let the butt of the first fall to the ground like a dying butterfly, the second already leaping to his fingers, the lighter out, the fire summoned, the drag taken. The first cigarette ended its meager life beneath Wolf's heel.
Why had Astiroth awoken the knowledge of his past lives? Why make that his final action, his parting spell before Wolf had sprung the trap?
Wolf had never taken much of an interest in his previous incarnations. They were previous. Done with. Souls made choices. Souls learned things. Souls moved on.
Thomas Wolf, 1969 to present. Saitoh Hajime, Tokugawa to Meiji Era, Japan (exact date uncertain, though Wolf knew he could find it in a history book if he really wanted to, Hajime was not an unknown figure). Lord William of Hathaway, sometime during the ninth century, or perhaps the tenth. Other names, other lives, stretching on, older still, into times where men didn't keep dates at all, into cultures that he couldn't recognize because they were never recorded by any historian. He'd always identified with the Wolf though. The Wolf of Mibu. His standard, as Hathaway, had been a wolf. Some native life had prayed to the Wolf-god as his totem. It pleased him that he now bore the name in this life.
Hajime had known Nick Sanos. Had known him as Sanosuke. Wolf wondered what choice Nick had made, to decide to be incarnated so close to him once more. What Nick was trying to learn.
The black cathedral had not been a real cathedral at all. Before it had burnt down a year ago (largely with Wolf's help), it had been called St. Belal's House of Mercy. The name alone had been a large indicator that something was wrong; there was not, to Wolf's knowledge, any St. Belal in the Catholic line-up.
His initial tour had nearly steered him away from the trail though. It had been cathedral shaped, but it had been stuffed full with books. Books of the old and yellowed and esoteric variety to be certain. Some fiction, mostly of authors who showed uncanny insight into the hellish underbelly of reality: the Lovecrafts, Kings, and Bradbury's of the world. But books just the same. No acolytes chanting hellish hymns to dark powers or sacrificing small children. Instead he'd found librarians, faithfully cataloguing the faint dust of worlds and powers.
Wolf took a moment to vaguely regret that fire. The loss of the books was rather a calamity.
Astiroth had been at the library's helm, though; the arch-demon who considered himself a scholar. He'd been preparing to do something with Time, or perhaps to Time. Wolf could not even begin to fathom the disaster that a demon having true command over Time would hold. Demons seemed to come in all shape and size and ability, with all manner of agendas, so many that he'd never been able to really pin down who they were or what they wanted. But he'd never met a demon yet with anything but the worst of intentions for humankind. That was what had started Wolf on his road years ago. He'd learned how many human miseries were caused by these entities, by this silent, unseen war. He had no care for that which his race brought down upon itself. But he ruthlessly rooted out what was caused by this Other against whom most had absolutely no defense. Perhaps, without their meddling (or was it war, after all?) humans could at last get about the quest of resolving the dark and the light within their own souls.
Here, in the basement of St. Belal's burnt husk, were four pillars, inscribed with all manner of runes and inscriptions, most of which Wolf actually couldn't read. A faint buzzing field whisked between the pillars. They were impossible to pass through. The pillars had been central to Astiroth's work. They were now his prison. Wolf was not good enough to destroy an arch-demon. Wolf was not sure any one human, or even a group of humans, was that good. No matter that Astiroth had chosen to appear as a tall, skinny blonde man with wire rimmed glasses and a glass jaw to match. So instead of trying to destroy Astiroth, Wolf had trapped him in his own pillars, phased a few seconds just outside of Time.
And as his last act in reality, Astiroth had reached inside of Wolf's mind, calling forth all those other lives to sift through them, to know them. The scholar-demon used his last free moments to become a PhD in the subject of Thomas Wolf's soul. It bothered Wolf. The action had made no sense, even if it had been painful, disorienting, even if it had sent him stumbling into an oil lamp, breaking it, sending its flames to engulf the cathedral and destroy all within, nearly taking Wolf with it.
Astiroth had his followers. Traitors to the human race, but dangerous. Astiroth should not have been able to communicate with them. Homage would be useless, and the ruin was not particularly stable. They knew that. Yet Wolf had a hunch, a hunch that brought him back here a year later. Wolf listened to his hunches. They were a part of the small magics he claimed.
He'd had a hunch that someone had bridged the gap. Someone had come. Someone had walked away, perhaps with instructions. He needed confirmation.
While he mused, Nick Sanos found the confirmation. He held up a blackened husk of a book and frowned. "Hey, Boss? Check this out."
A burnt book in a burnt library shouldn't have been much concern, but Wolf waved his hand at Sanos, letting him know to bring it over. Sanos had opened the book up, carefully, to the publication page. He put the light over the page. Wolf picked up on it immediately.
Publication year: 2004. That year. Which meant that it had hardly been part of the original holdings of a library that had burned in 2003.
"Why burn it?" Nick complained. "I thought Astiroth liked books."
"He does." Wolf considered the book, the problem that it represented. He had to fall back on legends, mythology, the twisted logic of magicians everywhere. He came to his answer: "The smoke of the fire rose and thus the knowledge held by the book was carried to Astiroth. It was an offering. Symbolic, though. No need to reduce it to ash. Leave a fragment of the book on earth and form a connection. A point between worlds. One of Astiroth's followers is very smart. He got some instructions from his master." He thumbed the pages, ignoring the ash and char that came off on his hands. As best he could tell, it was a physics textbook, telling of some of science's most recent developments in that area. Yes, Astiroth would have liked that. Magic and modern physics were intertwined...and much of modern physics was all about Time.
Absently, Wolf rubbed the strange flittering ache in his chest. That had been there ever since he'd imprisoned Astiroth, though what it was or what connection it had to the problem it had he could not say. The ache did grow stronger here, though, mere inches away from the pillars.
"Maybe we can get some fingerprints off of it," Wolf told Sanos. He dropped the second cigarette butt. This one he crushed out between thumb and forefinger, letting it burn and stain his fingers. He started walking, up the rickety staircase, gingerly across glass and debris, out to his car, an unassuming black sedan. There was nothing more to be found here.
Author's Notes: So this fic is a little bit out on a limb. I know many AU/Modern day fics are big on keeping the exact same name and appearances. But that never made sense to me as if someone reincarnates, they're not going to look or talk or have the same name's as their old lives...and the fact that they don't, after all, comes into play. Doesn't seem like this fic is getting a lot of readers yet, but I always like to acknowledge those who review me. With that in mind:
Chibi Banasu-chan: Thanks! I tried for a little extra length this time. =>