A/N: Thanks all who gave me critiques and advice, Dhuaine (as always!) and Silvan since I couldn't reply to your review, thanks a lot!
If anyone would have asked her how she could betray her own race, she would have laughed in their face.
She almost does laugh now as she sits outside the café and watches the masses of the ordinary pass by her. She can look into the eyes of anyone she meets and feel no remorse that she could be orchestrating their death even as she sits, aware they could be affected by the creeping sickness coming upon the city and unfazed by it.
In her mind they're already sick. Dull, brainless, banal creatures moving through the pathetic road they call a life. When she feels her rage rise at how trite the world around her is, she envisions it empty and still, populated only by corpses. It always calms and pleases her to think of the streets and buildings falling apart. Wood rotting, metal rusting, all over the decomposing bodies, which will turn into bones, which will turn into dust. Beautiful.
She takes a sip of coffee and stretches. Well, she can't kill all the people of the world, but sowing the seeds of chaos is almost as good. Especially since she'd come across this force she now…well, serves she supposes. She feels almost proud to be part of it no matter how small that part may be.
Because this force, this presence, is something she has no name for. And if she can't even think of a way to describe it then regular sheep most certainly won't be able to. That's its true beauty. Unknown, unknowable. A mindless, formless parasite that weaves itself around the unsuspecting of the world, bending reality however it wishes. Even those supposedly well versed in the unseen world would be hard pressed to categorize such a thing. She glances in the direction she senses the manuscript is in, rising from her seat and moving down the sidewalk.
It just goes to show how useless planning is in these things. She had waited and watched for years after she'd placed the tome as a cult had built up around it. It had fed off the cult members bit by bit, spreading the power hidden behind those words. In just a few more years the numbers of souls corrupted and the number of people touched by it would have been enough. That power had created a web of itself through the people that had touched it, latching onto the cult members, spreading from them to the people they came in contact with in their normal lives and spreading from those people to other people, until there were very few in the entire city who didn't at least have some mark of it on them. There was no where it couldn't touch, no where it couldn't reach out to in some form.
But then along came that white hair beast in human skin. The carefully cultivated flock of worshippers had been wiped out in minutes and the book taken from its spot. An interference, but what an interference! Instead of a slow build up of dread as the power started to take over the city, changing reality bit by bit, it feasted greedily on this half demon, this Dante…and honestly she doesn't now know what it will do. Destroy the half demon eventually, of course, but with the mixture of simple human energy and demon energy from all the half demon has met who knows what the chaotic power will do now. Destroy the world maybe.
The thought pleases her.
She watches him now as he comes from a nice building, moving from a back door and striding down the street, tense and on edge. And who can blame him, she can only imagine what he's just seen. He's quite handsome, she notes, she won't mind seducing him if the need arises. She doesn't follow Dante; she knows where he's going. Instead she turns her attention to the building he's just left. Obviously he went to see somebody and she's curious who they are and what affect his visit has had. She's not disappointed. So many people in that building he might have passed by on his way in and out…
An ambulance screeches up to a halt in front of the building but even as it does, whoever it came to pick up isn't the only one that needs help. Glass smashes from far above their heads as someone throws a chair through one of the windows. A woman dressed in a business suit climbs through and leaps off the sill. People below scream as she sails down, laughing hysterically, and smashes into the ground with the sound of screeching metal and crushed glass. As she dies, more screams erupt, tell tale flickering in one of the windows indicate a fire starting even before the fire alarms start going off. And then the whole building erupts into chaos so fast she can't keep track of everything at once. Someone runs out of the building screaming about being covered in spiders, struggling against the people holding onto him, trying to reassure him there's nothing on him even as bite marks appear all over his body and bleed. The entire floor at the top, where Dante spent the most time, seems to ripple, blood filling up the windows and leaking through the seals so each window becomes a waterfall of thick red, dripping down the body to patter down on the crowd below like rain. Whatever sense of calm people have been trying to maintain up until this point dissolves.
As people flee the scene, inadvertently doing their part to spread the chaos, the woman can't control herself anymore, the laughter rising from her throat to mix with the screams in the air.