A/N: Oh man, I feel so bad, it feels like forever since I've updated! Honestly, I've been sitting on half of this chapter for probably a week. Every time I tried to sit down and finish it, I just couldn't get into it. But it's done now! And I think it turned out alright.

So, a huge thanks to all the reviewers out there, I'm so glad people are enjoying this, though I'm also worried I may not live up to your expectations, haha. I'm also really glad people are thrown for a bit of a loop, I personally love it when something unexpected happens in something I'm reading, if it's well done.

Still something of a build up here and introducing a few of the other characters and some of their relations to each other, but hopefully It's enough of a fix for now, I'll probably be working on some other stuff next, though I have a chapter idea or two fairly planned out for this. What I really need to do, for all my stories, is sit down sometime and actually plot out specific events and stuff. I'm seriously just writing everything from...I was going to say instinct, haha.

Chapter 2 - Beginnings

Jennifer woke to a splitting headache. What the fuck, was I...drinking last night? she questioned herself. But this felt worse than the few hangovers she'd had before; just because she couldn't legally drink, didn't mean she didn't. It was too hard, she couldn't think much past the the pain in her skull. Groaning, she rolled onto her side - and came face-to-face with Gizmo. Or face to back, rather. She let out a scream of surprise, which caused him to jump and nearly fall out of his raised chair.

"What the fuck Mikr- Giz!? Why are you in my room!?" she yelled frantically, almost using his real name in her panic. Memories of the tantrum from last time made her correct herself, no matter how pissed or surprised she might be. Yelling and screaming was a bad idea though, since it made white sheets of pain travel across her eyes. Clutching her head, she barely heard Gizmo's reply.

"What, ya'd rather wake up to a big, stinkin' mammoth!?" he asked back loudly. "An' besides, what the crud do YA MEAN YOUR STINKIN' ROOM!? AND YOU ALMOST BLOODY SAID IT, DIDN'T YOU!" his voice getting louder by every word, he was practically screaming his head off by the end. Noticing Jennifer's pain, he trailed off into mutterings about 'crud-munchers' and 'scuzz-wads', too low for Jennifer to hear in her current state.

Sighing, Gizmo got up and headed over to the kitchen to get some pain killers and a glass of water for her. Bringing them back the short distance, he placed them on a table in front of Jennifer and told her, "Maybe you should double check your crud-guzzling surroundings before you go accusing people of breaking into your ruddy bedroom." Giving her time to adjust, he went back to his computers.

Leaning into a half-sitting position, not even reading the label on the pain killers, Jennifer grabbed a handful and threw them in her mouth, chugging them down with the water. With that task done, she finally moved her head around and gave some attention to her surroundings; One, she was on a couch, not her bed. Two, she was in a living/kitchen area, not her bedroom in her converted warehouse. And three, the entire length of the longest wall was covered in computer monitors and equipment, a still peeved Gizmo sitting there doing a hundred things that made Jennifer's already spinning head spin more. Fact: she was most certainly not in her bedroom. Fact: she was, in actuality, in Gizmo's apartment. Question: if she hadn't been drinking, why did her head hurt so much and why was she here?

"Hey, umm...sorry about freaking out, just before. I mean, it was just so unexpected, I was surprised...I should have noticed, I mean, I don't even own a computer! Haha..." she tried to explain herself softly, awkwardly laughing it off. Whatever those pain killers were, they seemed to be working alright, quickly too. Still hurt like a bitch, but it didn't matter if you were slowly rising above it on a cloud. Smiling stupidly at the back of Gizmo's head, she waited for a reply.

Silence.

Silence.

Then finally a soft grumbling, "...It's fine," followed by a shouted, "NOW STOP CRUDDING SMILING LIKE THAT, IT'S FRICKIN' CREEPY!"

"Eyes in the back of your head!?" Jennifer shockingly asked, only to get an instant shut down, "It's the reflection in the screen, stupid!" Laughing, she lay back down on the couch she'd woken up on and closed her eyes.

"So hey, hey," Jennifer asked Gizmo, not opening her eyes, "how come I'm here with such a killer headache? What happened Giz?"

Gizmo looked back at her in surprise. She doesn't frackin' remember? he thought to himself. Maybe that bump on her head was worse than it had looked. "I was hopin' you could frazzin' tell me! One bloody minute I'm sittin' here minding my own snotting business, shit-posting on some forum, then the next there's these scuzz-buckets in the building screaming their heads off and crying so loud I can hear 'em through the walls!" Gizmo was getting into his story now, hands gesticulating wildly as he explained what went down last night.

"The power started fickin' fluctuating too, so then I can't go risking my beauties, can I, and I have to turn everything off! A frazzin' disaster I tell you," he sighed with remembered despair, "so anyway, what the hell can I do with the power on the fritz and neighbors screaming about shadows and nightmares? Can't use my computers, can't sleep with the noise, so I figure 'Stuff it! I'll go outside and have a bloody smoke', and don't go giving me That Look," Gizmo scowled at the now glaring Jennifer, "you know I hardly ever do it! ANYWAY! So all that scuzzing shit's going down, I head down the street a ways to grab a packet of ciggies, stop to have one on the way back when I hear this frazzing moanin' and groanin' going on down some side alley. 'Shit,' I think to myself, 'is there really some snot-brain going at it down there?', but it doesn't sound right, you know, so I drop my half finished smoke, head down there...and find you lying in the middle of the place, totally out of it!"

As Gizmo's story neared the end, it started coming back to Jennifer in fits and starts, flashes of memory appearing before her minds eye. When he reached the end, it all came back to her fully, her plan and then the ritual to summon something otherworldly. The supposed failure, then the appearance of the...demon! "SHIT!" she yelled, frantically trying to sit up, but didn't make it far before she clutched her head and fell back down again. "Fuckfuckfuck," Jennifer muttered to herself as she curled into a ball, Gizmo looking on, equal parts concerned and confused.

"So I'm guessing you remember what frazzing happened then," he guessed, waiting expectantly for an answer. After finding her knocked out in an alley after midnight and getting Baran to bring her back, he felt he had a right to know what she'd gotten into. Besides, though she was pretty reserved a lot of the time, Baran and himself considered her a friend, someone they could trust and rely on in this shitty world.

"What time is it!?" Jennifer asked, still in a panic, ignoring Gizmo's expectant look. She could see sunlight coming in through the windows, so it was a long while after her...encounter last night. Why am I still alive!? No, wait... calming down a little, she remembered the demon speaking into her mind before everything went black; 'As thanks for your hard efforts, my gift to you is your life'. There was more, too, something about training her power and a name? It hurt too much to remember, like fire igniting along her synapses. Gizmo and the question she'd asked completely out of her mind, she groaned and tried to escape into oblivion again.

"What the toe-jamming hell has gotten into you!?" Gizmo asked, noticing how weird Jennifer was acting. "Calm down for a scruffing second and explain, will you!? And it's like, ten or eleven in the morning, I dunno. Lucky it's not a school day for you," he finished in a murmur.

Ten or eleven in the morning, so almost twelve hours since she'd been left alive? Crap, what the hell did you get yourself into Jennifer! she yelled to herself silently, tears leaking out of her eyes. You fucked up again girl! Why do you even try?! Silently, she continued berating herself until Gizmo interrupted her thoughts.

"Ah damn it, Jen, I didn't mean to make you cry," he muttered, awkward, "me and Baran, we're just concerned, you know?" Not a single curse in his sentence, he was trying hard.

"You guys shouldn't, you know..." Jennifer sniffed, "care about me, that is. You'll just get hurt like everyone else." Would the demon she summoned go after them? They were the only people she was really close to at the moment. Weren't demons all about torturing people and stuff? Mentally, emotionally, physically? The truth was, Jennifer had no idea what it was after, what it's goals would be, and that was probably worse. She liked Gizmo and Baran, she didn't want anything to happen to them. Should I try and explain what happened...? Jennifer didn't know. Would they even believe her?

"Hey, hey, what the scrazzing hell are you talking about!?" Gizmo almost yelled. "We're your friends you know, of course we care! What happened the other night, damn it?"

His concern warmed her, but Jennifer couldn't deal with this right now. Her head still hurt, she was worried about last night and what might happen to her friends in the future because of her screw-up. She had to think, to try and figure this out. Standing up, she staggered her way over to the door, Gizmo protesting the entire time. Jennifer ignored him until she got to the door, then when she opened it, she half turned her head and interrupted him mid protest, "I'll come back later, just...you and Baran be careful, alright? Watch yourselves."

Without waiting for an answer, she walked out of Gizmo's apartment and left the building. Gizmo, standing in his doorway looking after her, muttering to himself "What the hell did that girl get herself into...", couldn't help but feel a shiver down his spine. Jennifer, oblivious, made her way home, intent on protecting the people closest to her, for once in her life. If she couldn't find out what she needed herself, she'd find someone who could help.

The world was bathed in a sea of crimson, steel and concrete buildings soaring into the sky, moon hanging there like a giant eye, tinted red in her vision. She was in the centre of the city, looking up at the sky, streamers of colour floating through the night air, forming beautiful patterns and interrupting the red with technicolour images. Her field of view slowly lowered and panned to the left and right, like she was looking around, but not in control, a mute passenger along for the ride.

No one seemed to be in the streets, it was just her, some cars, the buildings and the dim illumination from street lights, leaving circles of light on the ground like pools of blood. Hands moved up in front of her, reaching just behind her and pulling a hood up over their head, before lowering again. Whoever she was with started moving after that, head down and hands in pockets, eyes shifting left and right as they seemed to move randomly around the centre of the city. Looking for something maybe? Though she couldn't control the body, she could choose what she was focusing on, so she wasn't paying too much to her surroundings, instead being entranced by the different coloured lines of light and knots of colour in the buildings, ground and air, everywhere around her. Which is why she noticed that the body she was riding in seemed to be following one pattern in particular.

It was hard to notice amongst the myriads of purples, blues, greens and browns surrounding her, but she would occasionally catch glimpses of a small, twisted tangle of sickly yellow and dark red, like the colour of a bruise and dried blood. The body followed it down streets large and small, between buildings and over fences, pattern appearing more regularly until it was more a trail in the air then the occasional sign post. Finally, the body followed it into a dead end between houses. It was quite an expensive area, so the houses were large and multi-storied, towering over her, closing the area in and making it a separate world. Step by slow step, the body she was in made it's way further into the into the separate reality behind houses, the physical world getting darker around her while the unnatural colours grew brighter. She heard a small sound below her at the next step and her vision tilted down, whoever she was riding with obviously as curious as she. It was a small pool of something that they'd stepped in, something dark with a faint metallic scent coming off of it. It glowed a deep, vivid crimson in her new vision, and she knew what it was - blood. She'd smelled that smell countless times before, on her own body, tasted it enough to know it intimately. She was glad she was just a disembodied passenger right now. There was more blood on the ground here than she'd ever seen in one place, an irregular circle at least three hand-spans in diameter. She wondered, had those actually been pools of blood she'd seen earlier in the night, under those lights? Is this what whoever she was with was searching for, the person whose blood this belonged to?

The body she had no control over crouched down, staring intently at the blood on the ground, absorbing every detail of it. Slowly a hand reached out, finger extended and gently it was pressed into the pool of liquid life before her, before being retracted - and brought to their mouth. Had she a stomach of her own right now, she would have been nauseous. As it was, she could do nothing as she felt the tongue swirl around the single digit covered in blood, the metallic taste thick and cloying - yet somehow it was the sweetest thing she'd ever tasted. The vision she was sharing...tightened, was the only way she could describe it. Everything came into painfully sharp focus, and it suddenly seemed like layers of the world peeled back and she could see everything, from the clouds that particular wind would bring the next day, to the minuscule cracks in the cement she was standing on that would one day be the reason one of these houses collapsed, seeing all the way down to the very building blocks of life itself.

Her vision moved suddenly and she was staring deep into the dead-end they was just barely inside of, and there she finally noticed something, a hunched figure, all but collapsed against the large brick wall of an estate that blocked the way forward. She couldn't make out much detail in the darkness they were cowering in, but she could make out the glint of their eyes as they looked towards where the body she was in crouched, over what was probably their own blood. So this was what it had been searching the city for? It seemed likely. She felt a sharp smile take over the mouth and saw the figure at the other end shudder, then moan in pain as whatever wound they had was aggravated. In a flash, too quick for even thought, this body she was riding was standing before the person at the other end. How had they moved that fast? Before that thought could fully materialise, just as the man - for she now saw that it was an older man, with a lined face and a dark beard going to grey and matted with blood, clutching a wound in his side - was widening his eyes and tensing to try and move, a hand, the same one from just moments earlier, was flying towards his chest, fingers rigid. Just like before, the movement was inhumanly quick and the man stood no chance. Everything went into slow motion as she felt the tips of the fingers slam into the man's chest, just above his heart...and not slow down. The nails parted his skin easily and the fingers followed smoothly, widening the initial wounds and tearing apart skin and muscle as they continued their inexorable journey inside him. She felt ribs being ruthlessly shattered or pushed aside as the rest of the hand followed, sprays of blood, shards of bone and pieces of muscle flying out in beautiful arcs as the hand ploughed deep inside this stranger and finally curled around his still beating heart.

The smile this body wore never altered a fraction during all of this, as time snapped back to its proper momentum. She found herself staring directly into the unknown man's eyes, a deep blue, widened and glazed in pain, coughing blood but unable to make another sound. She felt the arm and hand not inside him curl around his body, supporting him in a macabre imitation of an intimate embrace. The heart that had been racing a hundred miles an hour under the now gently curled fingers was slowing it's pace as this man, who's name she didn't even know, had his life taken from him. She felt the smile this body was wearing widen and the lips part as it gazed deeply into the eyes that were swiftly growing cloudy as the man gasped his final breaths. Unable to look away, those dying eyes larger than life in her vision, they reflected the world around her and she finally saw the face of the person she was inside - it was herself, face covered in blood and gore, eyes wide in rapture, with irises burning a fiery red and her mouth stretched into a large, sadistic smile. The man's life finally ended and she was left gazing into her own burning eyes.

Rachel woke from the dream screaming. She was completely blind with terror for several minutes, unable to stop herself. When she finally came to her senses, her first thought was that she was glad she'd been screaming into her pillow and it had muffled the noise. Who knows what Father would have done otherwise, she thought. Her second was to wonder how she'd came to be in her room. The last moments she remembered, she'd been lost in thought in 'her' park. Rachel had no recollection of leaving there and making her way home, but clearly she must have. Maybe she'd been more tired than she thought? She didn't hurt either, so her Father mustn't have caught her coming back. Her thoughts went back to her dream and she shuddered. It was already slipping away from her, as dreams did. Only fragments remained and even they were disappearing, but they were enough to make Rachel glad she didn't remember more. She realised she was covered in sweat, the smell of fear wafting around her. Shower, then I can deal with the world, Rachel thought firmly.

She looked around her room, taking in the familiar sights - her bookshelf along one wall, closet along another, vanity stand next to her bed, mirror in a frame of ravens in flight, various bric-a-brac lying on shelves around the room, small things that had caught her interest over the years - mind calming at the normality of it. She was surprised to see it was early afternoon and that no one had awakened her. It was still the weekend, or her alarm would have been set, but usually if she lazed about all day someone would come and drag her out. Well, I'll find out soon, she shrugged to herself and then grabbed a set of casual clothes from her closet and headed to the bathroom.

She walked down the hall on the second floor, past her parents room, door open and room unoccupied. She continued past it and then the stairs and made her way to the two doors at the far end, one a linen closet and the other her goal. Rachel opened the door and stepped inside, closing and locking it behind herself. The house seemed quiet, but she was in intensely private person and there was no sense taking chances. She would have liked a long bath, but it was already pretty late in the day, so she turned the shower on to heat up and slowly stripped off the dark blue pyjamas she'd woken up in and didn't remember putting on. Steam was coming out of the shower by the time she was done and she stepped in, the water scalding hot. Rachel didn't mind, she always took her showers hot, especially if her Father was in one of his moods. After a day or so, they helped bruises fade. Shaking off such thoughts, she waited for the initial discomfit to pass and slowly her muscles started to relax as the heat soaked into them. Rachel sighed and started to clean the sweat from her body.

Her mind wandered over last night and the dream she'd had, though now all that remained of it were vague feelings of distress, confusion, wonder, terror and underlying it all...power. What the hell kind of dreams am I starting to have? she wondered to herself as she unconsciously scrubbed herself harder. She still hadn't come up with anything about how she'd gotten herself home either, or into her bed, seemingly undetected. She stopped her movements and leaned her head against the glass side of the shower, closing her eyes and just breathing steadily. Rachel decided it didn't matter. Maybe she had just been tired and blessed with some rare good luck when she'd gotten home. She opened her eyes and her throat closed as a scream tried to work it's way out. The water running down the sides of the shower had turned the crimson of fresh blood and was flowing slowly past her reflection, a reflection staring back at her with red eyes and a sadistic smile, face covered in the freely flowing blood. Just as quickly as it appeared it was gone again and Rachel was left in a perfectly normal shower, breathing like she'd run a marathon. She slammed the water off and jumped out, completely unnerved by whatever had just happened.

When she'd calmed down enough to berate herself for her lapse in rationality, she grabbed her towel from the rack and dried herself off, before getting dressed and leaving the room. Still, she was in more of a hurry than usual and she couldn't bring herself to look in the mirror at all.

The house still seemed too quiet. Is anyone even home? Rachel wondered to herself. She hoped not, and decided to explore and see if anyone was home. She'd find out one way or another, so might as well make it on her terms. She was soon to be disappointed though, as she could hear faint noises coming from the kitchen as she walked down the stairs and entered the living room to her left. Sighing, she made her way through the living room to the connecting entrance to the kitchen. At least it's probably just mother, she thought. Entering the kitchen proper, she discovered that she'd been right, it was just her mother, preparing dinner by the looks of things. She must have made a noise as she entered, for Arella turned around with a smile and said, "Awake at last Rachel? I thought you'd sleep all day!".

Looked like she was in a rare, exuberant mood today. Rachel wondered if something good had happened, but she doubted it. Maybe she was just living in the past again? She did that sometimes.

"Umm, yeah, I guess yesterday must have tired me out more than I thought, or something," Rachel replied quietly to her mother. She didn't volunteer that she'd been out until the early hours of morning. If she didn't know, it was better to keep quiet about her late night excursion.

"Oh, did something happen?" her mother asked in concern. Rachel was shocked, but didn't let it show on her face. She realised her mother probably wasn't talking about...that. She seemed to take a 'see no evil' approach to her Father these days, hiding behind walls in her mind. Well, in a sense, Rachel did the same, so she couldn't cast stones.

"No, nothing in particular really," she replied, both to the asked and unasked question. It had been a surprisingly quiet week on that regard. She would even go so far as to say that her Father had been in a good mood, for the most part. Maybe that's why she's in such a good mood, Rachel wondered, as her mother beamed at her and turned back to her cooking preparations, humming under her breath. She wandered over and started helping her mother by washing and peeling some vegetables.

Arella glanced sideways at her daughter with a smile and said, "I was thinking of working on the garden today, if you wanted to help with that as well?". Rachel was unable to hide her shock at that news. Her mother hadn't touched those gardens in...she couldn't even remember how long.

"No need to look so surprised dear," Arella said to Rachel, "of course I'd appreciate your help! Besides, it's been so long since we did anything together."

Of course, her mother completely misinterpreted her expression. That last sentence didn't help either. Of course they never did anything together these days, her mother was basically a ghost. Even looking at her now, in her good mood, she was still thin and pale, almost gaunt. It just made her current mood all the harder to bear.

"Where's Father?" Rachel asked, ignoring the garden comments for now. Not home, she'd guess. A shadow passed over Arella's expression at her question, but it was just for a moment and then she answered her daughter.

"He got a call very early this morning, something work related. He said it was urgent and had to leave right away," Arella said in a quiet voice, but still smiling. Like it could hold the world at bay if she did it enough.

There was a murmur at the back of her mind at the news, but she didn't notice it. Maybe that's how I got back inside without Him noticing? Rachel wondered. He might have already gone by the time I got back. She frowned, wondering what had come up at such a time, and on a weekend too. As far as she knew, her Father worked at a rather unimportant branch of a large company, some kind of team leader somewhere down the chain. She'd never asked, nor wanted to know, specifics. She just knew that He worked long hours sometimes and was occasionally sent to other branches and out of the city for training or meetings of some kind. Blessed times of peace, usually.

"Did He say when He would be back?" Rachel asked her mother in a dead-pan voice.

"No, but he said he might not be back tonight and to just cook whatever and leave some in the fridge," she told her daughter. In the silence of their minds, both of them hoped that was true.

In a dark room somewhere in the city, two men sat across from each other at a table, a single low illumination bulb lighting a small circle around them. One of the men, hair and beard prematurely white, with a single eye calmly absorbing every detail around him and the other covered by an eye patch, folded his hands in front of him and observed the man across from him.

That man was tall, broad shouldered and heavily built. He wasn't young, nor entirely in his prime, but his health and body were well maintained and the first man knew that he was a deadly fighter. He was also a father and husband. He had dark brown hair still, though it was greying at the temples, he was also clean shaven and had frown lines etched into his face. In fact, he was scowling right now, as he wiped his bloody hands on a cloth and tossed it on the table.

"So," the one-eyed man started, "what did you think? A message?"

"I'm not sure," the other man said sourly, spots of blood still on his hands. "It could be. It was certainly brutal enough."

"Hmm, if it isn't, then it is certainly one very large coincidence. We start a hostile takeover, complete it in a matter of days, and then one of ours turns up dead in such a fashion?" the one-eyed man questions. "And in such an area too. Our man seems to have fled quite a distance from whoever did that to him. Thankfully his connection to us wasn't much of a loose end, whether this was deliberate or not. Easily removed."

"Indeed, we can be thankful he was far outside the circle," the scowling one said. "Either whoever did it doesn't know much about us, or they're working their way up from the bottom. I got nothing out of his handler. Well, besides this," he said, pointing to the cloth from earlier.

"Or, it was pure coincidence. Simply an ordinary killing. Though, perhaps 'ordinary' doesn't really fit in this case. "

"Or it was coincidence," he agreed verbally, but his tone said he didn't really believe it, just like the one-eyed man.

"Well, then," the one-eyed man said, calm through this entire discussion. "Well. We have one lowly trafficker, heart seemingly ripped from his chest and a hole in his side, a terrified rictus frozen on his face, found behind some houses in a rather high-profile area. No clues, no signs, a veritable mystery. You arrived before anyone found him and reported the body, nothing of interest?"

The other man spat in disgust before answering. "Yeah, just like you said. Absolutely nothing else there, just his body and some trails of blood, minus a heart. If they left anything to say who did it or why, I couldn't see it."

"I wonder if there is, perhaps, a new player in town," the one-eyed man said with a sigh. "Truly, how troublesome, after all our hard efforts over the years. Well, one must expect these kinds of things, in this business. I'm sure some of our predecessors considered us in the same light."

The other man gave a snort and a grim smile stretched his mouth as he said, "They didn't think it for long."

"Indeed not," was the reply he got, with a low chuckle. "Either way, we have a potential encroachment on our territory, or else a rather extreme killer roaming the streets. Thoughts, my friend?"

The other man considered for a few moments, scowl from earlier turning into a thoughtful frown as he rubbed his chin. "Well, Mr. Wilson. Since we have no leads, we can't really go after whoever it is. So, assuming this is no coincidence, all we can really do is wait for their next move, or for the authorities to, miracle of miracles, find a killer. I'd suggest we inform our most important people of the danger, in one form or another, but leave those easily cut off out of the loop. Being watched, of course."

"Ah," there was a glint in the man's single eye as his smile widened, "leave them out as bait and see what we catch, my own thinking precisely. As for it being a killer and being caught, I received some information that a rather secretive person is entering the town shortly. I'm sure they'll take care of our problem for us...or perhaps our problem will take care of them? So many opportunities all of a sudden. Perhaps this wasn't such a bad thing to happen after all, Mr. Roth. But please, you know there is no need for such formality between the two of us! In private, at any rate."

As the other man, Rachel's father, laughed heartily, Slade Wilson asked him with a smile, "By the way, how is your daughter doing these days?"

A/N: Oh, to that one reviewer who mentioned it was nice to see other characters, I'll pretty much be bringing all of the main ones into this, though mostly they won't be vanilla human. With the exception of Robin, who will also come into it in the next chapter or two.

Anyway, reading through this as I edited, I found myself really enjoying the Jinx/Gizmo part, it made me smile. Doing his cursing and swearing was a little tricky though, let me know what you all think. And about the rest of course too. I also listen to a very strange mixture of music when I'm writing...

Missing hearts and nefarious meetings between evil-doers, whatever is happening!