“Just tell us what’s going on, Mickey.”

The hunched over lump in the middle of the room made a high-pitched sob.

“Cmon Mickey… We won’t hurt ya,” a few low laughs came from the shadows.

Slowly, the lump in the chair started to lift up his head. You could tell how hard it was, his neck rolling stiffly and oddly. On the light, his face became a bas relief of pain: huge yellow and purple bumps decorated his face under stripes of drying blood and dark dirt.

“The cops… The cops only know about the shipments,” the lump called Mickey said, through clenched teeth and spraying blood.

“He’s lying,” came a voice from the corner. Or did it sound like two?

The lump called Mickeys eyes opened wide. He looked back at Tony wildly.

“N-n-no no, Tony, I’m not, I swear!”

Tony didnt even look towards where the voice – or voices – came from.

“She’s never wrong.”

Mickey began to cry, a sick, wet wailing sound. One of Tony’s men – Angelo or maybe Johnny – cocked his gun and pointed it right at Mickey’s temple.

“Say the word, Tony.”

Mickey’s wailing increased. He began kicking and thrashing in his seat, screaming two words over and over: please and no.

The room was silent save for Mickey’s screaming.

Tony’s eyes quickly looked into the corner, and then back down at Mickey.

“No, no killing,” he said, turning away from the scene.

The man holding up the gun got angry.

“What the– what’s happened to you, Tony? You’re letting this schmuck go, you didn’t let me kill that a-hole who was skimming the books at the car shop-“

Tony had turned back around and was staring at him so hard it had stopped him cold.

“You wanna run this thing?”

“I’m just sayin’… How you gonna let this guy go? All because of this bi-“

Before he could say the word, his body flew up towards the ceiling. His gun flew out of his hand. An invisible force held him completely flat, with the tightest part of its grip around his neck. His fingers flew to release it, but with nothing there, there was nothing to fight.

The rest of the men except Tony and the still incapitated Mickey backed away to the edges of the room.

There was a low, deep growl, and slowly, the shape in the corner walked out into the circle of light.

As she did, the men could see her face: young, pale, and marked by deep scars shaped like crosses that trailed down her neck. Her hair was pitch black and slick, as if it was wet. She wore an oversized black leather jacket that hung on her emaciated frame like she was just a clothes hanger.

“No killing,” she said.

“Ok, he gets it, let him go,” Tony said tiredly.

The man dropped from the ceiling onto the ground between Mickey and Tony’s feet, choking and touching his neck.

Mickey weeped softly.

Tony and the woman looked at each other knowingly.

“What’d ya want me to do?” He said, putting his hands up in front of him.

The woman paused, thinking, without taking her dark eyes off Tony’s face.

Finally, she walked around the chair and slowly crouched down in front of Mickey, who tried meekly to get away.

“In exchange for your life, you will tell these men everything you know. Then you will go to police and feed them incorrect information about the shipments. When they come for you because the information was wrong, you will confess to killing Alan Gunderson, and you will go to prison.”

He stared at her, breathing heavy. Finally, with difficulty, he shook his head yes.

“How you know he’s gonna do it?” Angelo or whoever said, rubbing his neck.

Without breaking her state with Mickey, she said, “Because this way, he will still live to see his children grow up.”

Mickey looked at her through his dirty hair hanging in his face. Tears started to collect at his eyes.

As slowly as she had crouched down, the woman now stood. She turned in her place and faced Tony.

He nodded and sighed, reaching into his pocket. He took out a wad of bills as thick as a beer can and handed it to her. Without saying anything else, she walked towards the door.

As she walked past one of the men, he whispered, “il giglio nero”.

She knew what this meant. She spoke many languages now, some that had been long forgotten, if they’d been known at all.

It was Italian for “the black lily,” but it also meant “the bad seed”.

Her head turned towards him, and kept turning almost all the way around as her body kept moving forwards.

He collapsed to the ground and began to pray as the heavy door shut behind her.

—

The city at night was one of Ramie’s favorite things. During the day, she was very noticeable, both in her appearance and in her demeanor. People moved away from her in fear and disgust. Then they would stare.

But at night, she blended in. New York at night had its own flavor, even after years of gentrification and tourism. To most people, she just looked like some kid trying to relive the city’s glory days as a haven for freaks and weirdoes. or maybe she was some graphic designer heading to a costume party, ready to show her friends from marketing and HR how well she’s pulled together the outfit from stuff in her closet.

She didn’t dwell on it. Sometimes she thought about slipping into the minds of people staring at her on the street, seeing their secrets and what they thought of her.

The thought was always fleeting: she didn’t care what they thought of her. They were irrelevant, inconsequential.

They were just humans. She hadn’t been human in awhile.

She walked through the sweaty crowds of people efficiently, smoothly, like water that’s following a well-worn path in the ground.

The streets were filled with people, and she reached out to them, letting her senses gently connect with as many of them as she could.

She could feel many things: heartache, love, annoyance, nostalgia, ambivalence, maturity, hunger.

The thing inside her loved this. She always thought that, if it could eat, this would be its food. It eagerly sought out the strongest emotions, the most passionate ones, and filled itself up.

Tonight was a particularly good night. It growled loudly, startling a couple at a cafe table Ramey was passing.

“Sorry,” she said, absentmindedly, without stopping or looking back, a force of habit.

She dipped into the side streets, the shadowy places that made it easy to hide or spy, as needed. These were also less populated areas, almost no people. If she could eat, this would be her food: compete solitude.

Her demon tumbled inside her. It wasn’t done feeding.

“Shut up,” she said to it out loud.

She made her way to the waterfront, and walked silently along it. She had long ago stopped feeling, well, anything, but something about the waterfront, with the reflection of the lights and the sound of water below her, made her almost feel something.

Her senses prickled. There had been this presence following her the last few days, but it was a presence in idea only. She could tell it was there because it was NOT there, a source of energy with no living creature attached to it.

She noticed something else: she was completely alone. The couples and families and weirdoes who normally dotted this stretch were gone, as were all the animals. She couldn’t even sense a cockroach.

The demon screamed. She could hear it inside her head, though outside, it sounded a bit like a high pitched whine.

It was trying to tell her something. She turned slowly, her hand on the knife on her belt.

As soon as she did, there was laughter in the distance. She looked to the side to see a drunk couple walking towards her. When she looked back, the non-presence was gone.

She stood there for one more moment. The drunk couple stumbled over to her.

“Is this way uptown?” The woman slurred.

With a growl – from her or from the demon, it was hard to tell – Ramey turned and walked away.

—

She stood in the shadows watching the young man from the grocery store drag the trash cans out the back door and empty them into the dumpster.

He was a good person, but not so good he was uncomfortable doing a little under the table work. That’s why she’d chosen him. He lived and worked far enough uptown, she could be assured they’d never run into each other. He and his family needed the money.

She stepped out of the shadows. He turned to grab the next can and jumped back in shock.

“Jesus – do you have to do that?”

“No,” she said without a smile.

He stared at her for a moment before grabbing the next bag of trans and tossing it over the edge of the dumpster.

“I can’t talk long, my boss is on my ass,” he said, grabbing another bag. “AND he’s getting suspicious about the money and the orders and stuff. So I don’t know if I can keep doing this–“

The remaining bags of trash flew over his head and landed in the dumpster.

He looked at he now empty trash cans appraisingly.

“Huh, that’s definitely faster.”

“This buys us time,” she said.

“Uh, I don’t think so, I still got to sweep and mop, and get all the dairy in the cases-“

“I wasn’t asking.”

He sighed. “Ok, ok. What is t this time?”

“Same as usual, with a little extra of the special stuff,” she said, handing him the bills.

Had she smiled a bit when she said it? Could she even smile?

“Yes, boss,” he said, taking the cash and doing an over the top salute.

Thinking they were done, she began to walk away, but he began talking again.

“One last question,” he said.

She turned and looked at him.

“What’s my name?”

She said nothing, just stood staring at him.

Then, all of a sudden, he heard a loud crash behind him. He spun around and saw all the empty trash cans moving into the back door of the grocery store. Without anyone pushing them.

When he turned back around, she was gone.

—

The next morning, at 6 am sharp, she watched as a grocery store delivery van pulled up to the St. ???? Community Center.

The driver hopped out and greeted an elderly nun at the gate. He handed her a clipboard and pen.

Ramie watched as the nun signed for the delivery, and the man began bringing to bags and boxes into the shelter.

“Extra ice cream this time, sister,” the delivery man said.

“No problem, We have lots of room in the new walk-in freezer,” a younger nun said before showing him the way.

Ramie didn’t stay to watch the whole delivery. She headed back to the warehouse.

—

He watched her. Her body moving like every other, almost as if she didn’t know the power she possessed.

Perhaps she didn’t. This little farce, this play with charity was such an obvious grasp for humanity, it almost hurt him.

If he could feel pain.

He would teach her. He would mold her. He would tear every last shred of that disgusting humanity out of her, and together, they would do what they had been called to do: lay waste to this earth and everyone in it, and start a new world.

The power inside him rippled with delight at the bought of it.

It was almost time to reveal himself to her.

—

Hector thought about the girl… Woman… Whatever she was. She’d come to him out of the blue last year, right after he’d started at the grocery store with a ton of money and a permanent scowl. Shit face his brother would have called it. Like she was always smelling shit.

Would have, if he was here.

The only thing was… He didn’t think she could smell. She met him every time by those dumpsters, which he knew hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly in maybe 20 years. They were the horrible, violent fragrance of old milk, rotting fruit, and rancid beer, among many other things. He wore a straight up gas mask looking thing when he dumped the garbage cans. She didn’t even flinch.

Another weird thing: he didn’t think she smelled. As in, she smelled like nothing. No perfume, laundry detergent, sweat… Nothing.

He laughed to himself: all that was unsettling, sure, but it was not creepiest thing about her. Not by far.

But he wasn’t afraid of her. At least, he didn’t register what he felt as fear. More like, admiration. She had a lot of power, clearly. And money. She had paid him what was now reaching thousands of dollars just to order groceries for some homeless shelter run by nuns over in central harlem.

He sighed loudly, stamping out his cigarette. This was the least of his problems. His mom was getting sicker, and his brother was still missing. The cops weren’t doing shit about finding him – when did they ever care about men like him and his brother? When he went to check up on his case, he raised his voice and one of the cops threatened to deport him.

“I’m from here, man!” He’d shouted before being escorted out.

As he made his way, back over to the freezers to keep stocking frozen foods, his boss Daniel stopped him.

“Good work yesterday, Hector,” he said, slapping him on the back.

Hector half heartedly smiled. “Thanks.”

“I got a couple extra hours available this weekend, if you want to come in, make a little extra cash.”

Hector had been looking forward to the time off. He was going to help his mom and his little sister, and maybe connect up with his friend Mario and shoot pool.

But he needed the money. His family needed the money.

“Ok, yeah,” he said, starting back to the freezers.

As he walked away, Daniel laughed and said, “what else you gonna do this weekend, right?”

Hector sighed and started unpacking the fish filets.

—

Ramey spent the days doing two things: reading and training. She no longer needed to eat, sleep, shower, or entertain herself, so she spent her time preparing. Learning.

The goal was, had always been, to keep the demon from taking over.

The bonus was it also kept her from thinking about how she got here.

Every few weeks, Tony would call with a job: delivery, pick up, lie detector, translator. He paid her well, and she’d take the money straight to the kid at the grocery store and send supplies to the shelter. After big jobs, she’d send him to order more than food: computers, appliances, clothes, toys, medications. Whatever she saw they needed.

It broke up the routine the exact amount she preferred. It left her plenty of time to be by herself.

She was reading a biography of Malcolm X in the abandoned warehouse she’d bought herself early on, when she first started working with Tony. It was all gray concrete, and almost nothing else, save for her weapons and a small stack of books. She also had small comforts – a mattress and a camping lamp – both pointless now, but felt important.

She wasn’t human, but she wasn’t the demon, either.

It was getting close to sunset, the time when she’d head out to do whatever she needed to do. Mostly just to quiet the demon inside her.

It began to tumble and groan inside her, a sensation not unlike butterflies, but with some of the sickness of nausea involved as well, a kind of hot swelling of anticipation, never realized.

It had been almost 7 years since she’d been possessed, around her 11th birthday. It had started like growing up always starts, with talking back to her parents and throwing tantrums and trying to grow up too fast.

Within weeks, however, her parents knew something was different.

Ramey had known, too. It was like she was watching the world around her happen, but couldn’t do anything about it. At first, she felt like she was just doing things without thinking, but quickly she realized she was no longer in control, a passenger in her own body.

Her parents had tried everything as she got sicker, more out of control: doctors, therapists, shock treatments, even herbal medicine.

It had been their neighbor, Ms. Johnson, who’d told them they needed a priest.

Ramey continued to read as the demon through a fit, pushing its demands through her body, unable to force her to move.

Finally, she closed the book, not even bothering to mark the page, and stood up.

She felt the demons waves of pleasure, of excitement, as she did. They felt not unlike its rage and restlessness.

Strapping on her favorite knife and her leather jacket, she rolled  up the metal door of the warehouse.

On the other side was the grocery store guy.

“This where you live?” He said, gesturing at the empty room.

It was weird to see him out of his uniform, just a regular person on the street.

Her street.

“How did you find me,” she said.

He looked down sheepishly and in bed the back of his neck.

“I, uh, I followed you. A couple months ago. I wanted to know what your deal was, you know?”

She reached out to him with her senses. He was not anything out of the ordinary. How had she not sensed him following her?

She crossed her arms over her chest.

Hector got the hint.

“I need your help, is why I’m here,” he walked towards her with some newspaper clippings. She did not take them, so he awkwardly positioned himself next to her so she could read them.

“A bunch of people went missing from my neighborhood awhile ago,” he said, shuffling not through the papers. “My brother was one of them.”

He pulled a piece of paper from the back of the stack, a handmade missing persons poster. In the center was a black and white picture of smiling man with cropped close hair and a small mustache. He was a strong complement to Hector, alike but not.

She looked back up at him. She could sense his sadness. His pain. She saw the flashes passing through his mind of good memories: Coney Island, roughhousing, holidays, watching tv.

Then something darker: the two of them exchanging words before his brother disappeared.

The demon made a noise, like a huff. This was not sustenance, but it was something else it wanted.

Hector met her eyes, not knowing how much she now knew.

“I don’t help people,” she said, walking out the metal door and onto the sidewalk.

Hector followed. “That’s not true though!” Ramey pulled down the metal door.

“You help those people at that shelter all the time.”

She started walking, not looking at him as he trotted behind her.

“You owe me!”

This time, Ramey was the one who growled, echoed by the demon.

She turned and began to walk slowly towards him, forcing him to walk backwards.

“I pay you, and it is exceptional money,” she said, a deep voice echoing her own. “I do not owe you anything.”

She could feel the anger rising inside her, and the demon with it. She was so outraged this, this person, this human was trying to manipulate her, she almost lost control. Her feet started to lift of the ground and the wind picked up on the street. A streetlight popped over head, showering sparks over them.

Hectors eyes filled with fear. He kept the clippings in his hand, but they began to rip with the pressure of his grip. He put his hand up to stop her, but before she reached him, he flew backwards, tripping over a fire hydrant.

Ramey pulled herself back, pushed the demon down, regaining control again.

She had almost lost control. She had almost been a passenger again.

She’d spent years controlling her emotions, and all it took was one single moment to lose it all.

She looked down at Hector. His hand was still up, but it didn’t cover his face. He was scared, which the demon liked, but he still looked at her right in her face.

She reached down and yanked the papers from his other hand.

Then she walked away and did not look back.

—

He looked out the window at the almost minuscule Central Park below him. He took in its lushness, how alive it looked, even from all the way up here.

Behind him, he could hear the sound of the penthouse owner’s muffled cries.

“Patience, Mr. Orsterbekke,” he said, letting the mans fear flow into him. “It will be your time soon enough.”

Turning away from the window and keeping his hands firmly clasped behind his back, he strolled down the short set of stairs and meandered towards the man tied up on the floor next to the dining room set.

“Do you have big dreams, Mr. Orsterbekke? To perhaps summit Mount Everest? Or eat fresh puffin?”

The man began to scream through the  gag in his mouth.

He clucked his tongue. “Now, now, Mr. Orsterbekke… What’s the point of all that noise? No one can hear you all the way up here. Isn’t that what you wanted.”

Christian Orsterbekke screamed once more before breaking down in tears. Across the floor, next to the couch, his wife Camilla lay in an ever growing pool of her own blood. Their two children, Nicolas and Tommy, sat on the couch, mute but shaking with fear.

“I have big dreams, Mr. Orsterbekke. I want to rule the world,” with this, he unclasped his hands and threw them up in the air, as if he was addressing his kingdom.

Slowly, he brought them down as his face went from smiling to a small frown.

“But I can’t do it without the right tools… The right people.”

Christian felt helpless. This insane man wanted something but he didn’t know what, or why he thought Christian had it.

And now his wife was dead. And he would be soon. He could only pray that his sons died too.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Orsterbekke,” the priest said, reading his mind, “They will be coming with me.”

Christian closed his eyes and bit down on the gag in his mouth and cried.

“See? You did have something I wanted after all!”

And With a white hot slash of pain, Everything went black.

—

Ramey stashed the papers in the inside pocket of her jacket as walked.

She was still angry, still ashamed.

But there was something else. A feeling. Something stirring inside her.

A good feeling.

The demon did its version of purring, something that sounded like air bubbles in mud to Ramey.

Since she’d been possessed, it had been a difficult and often painful process to keep herself separate from the thing inside her. Allowing it to feed, so to speak, was their compromise. If she kept it satiated, it kept away from her.

It was why she hated being around people. And people in general. She couldn’t control what the demon fed on, and she couldn’t control herself when she was pushed past her limits.

For Ramey, the way she lived – alone, giving her money away, helping people – it wasn’t by choice. It was for safety. Her own, and other people’s.

She had known using the guy at the grocery store would backfire. One way or another, humans could not be trusted.

And she couldn’t be trusted with humans.

Disgusted with herself for feeling any amount of pleasure from attacking him like that, she decided she would find his brother. Bring him peace.

And then leave him alone.

—

When they asked her to recall what happened later, Lt. Reynolds was not sure how to explain it.

At midnight, a woman walked into the 76th precinct. She was young – maybe not even 18? – and she was rail thin. How she could stand up under the weight of her over sized  leather jacket, Reynolds didn’t know.

The woman asked for a case file. When Reynolds informed her they did not give out case files to civilians… Well, that’s where she started to have trouble explaining what happened.

She heard the voice of her grandmother, singing the lullaby she used to sing to Reynolds when she was a child.

Except… She didn’t just hear it. The woman was singing it. In her grandmother’s voice.

Reynolds froze, pulled back to her childhood. Then get grandmother’s voice told her she loved her, and asked for forgiveness for how she treated Reynolds the last time they spoke.

She’d told her grandmother she was a lesbian. Her grandmother cursed her in Italian, her eyes dark with anger, and she told her never to speak to her again because she was dirty. Evil.

Her grandmother died 6 months later, refusing to see Reynolds the entire time. To her dying die, just as she promised.

But here was her grandmother – or, no, this woman, but she WAS her grandmother – or … ?

Reynolds broke down in tears. That’s where her partner Lt. Dukes had found her, with no young woman in sight, and no case file for missing person Alex Herrera.

Reviews of the security tapes showed nothing but static.

—

Ramey opened the folder. There was almost nothing in it – a lot of paper, but all of it saying the same thing: The grocery store man’s brother had vanished without a trace. The cops didn’t seem to think too much of the whole thing, theorizing it was drugs or just someone who wanted to run away from his problems. His mom was sick, and they were in debt for medical bills.  He had a job driving for a package delivery service, but it looked like he’d been gambling, too, to try and make ends meet.

She closed the folder, placing it neatly next to her stack of books, and picked up a book by James Baldwin.

She hadn’t been reading long when the demon snarled, flushing her body with adrenaline. Something was about to happen.

Then she heard it: a long, slow scraping sound, like something was being dragged across the warehouse door.

She reached out with her senses, but even though the sound continued, she felt nothing.

Then, it stopped.

Getting up slowly, she unsnapped the knife from her belt and held it, ready to fight.

She stood to the side, and used her power to push the door up quickly.

There was nothing there.

Carefully, she checked both sides of the street, and above, even swinging herself up on the roof to look around.

No one.

She turned to face the building. Putting the knife back into its holster, she began to roll down.

Before she could even see what had been jaggedly scratched into it, the demon was screaming its rage.

It was one word:

H E L L O

—

Hector slammed the dumpster lid shut with his full strength. He’d agreed to work a few extra hours this weekend, but for what, really? Maybe $20, $30 extra bucks in his paycheck? Maybe a promotion to cashier?

His brother had always known what to do. And he’d always worked extra hours to help make ends meet.

He’d come home late at night after driving one of the overnight routes, and he’d wake Hector up to show him how much he’d made.

“Hey, little brother, look at this!” He’d say. “Now we don’t have to worry.”

Hector wasn’t as optimistic.

“Mom’s bills are more than this, Alex, what does this get us?”

Most nights, his brother would laugh it off. But the night before he disappeared, he didn’t.

Instead, he’d exploded at Hector, screamed about how he was an ungrateful little shit, lazy, and never did anything for their family.

He’d thrown the money into Hectors face and stormed out of the house.

That was the last he’d seen Alex.

Hector pushed the mask off his face and lit a cigarette. Titling his head back, he closed his eyes and listened to the distant sounds of the city, all the cars and people and dog and machines.

He was listening so deeply, he heard the rustle of the weird woman as she stood next to him, a sound he was almost sure she made as a courtesy to him.

Without opening his eyes, he said, “yeah?”

“Your brother was a gambler.”

His heart started to beat a little faster. Ramey could sense this was new information to him, exciting somehow, even though he kept his face neutral.

Hector took a drag of his cigarette. “Yeah, so what?”

“I thought maybe you’d know where.”

He did. Alex had pointed it out to him many times. He could see it clearly in his mind: the rusted red door, and small navy blue sign next to it.

Oak Room – Members Only

No trespassing

“I know it,” he said, pulling off his apron and his gloves and tossing them on a stack of wooden pallets. “And in coming with you.”

—

Ramey was uncomfortable, to say the least. Embarrassment and awkward tension was not good food for the demon, so it was pretty unhappy, too.

The club – The Oak Room – was only a few minutes away. But somehow, the walked seemed to stretch into hours.

She tried not to make it to read people too often.