Ethan Cain: Ending Twilight

Chapter 1

     Ethan laid there on his mat for most of the night staring at the ceiling. Tonight, sleep didn't come for him like most nights. How he wished for a peaceful night of sleep without the nightmares, without the screaming. He glanced at the G-Shock watch he picked off a passerby in the tunnels. The watch stated it was 4:30 in the morning, too early to pick pocket anyone and far too little people to feed off of.

Ethan was on the streets living day to day by thieving off the unsuspecting people in the subway tunnels. It was easy, especially when you have invisible tentacles doing most of the snatching. Ethan would be pickpocketing a person at one end of the station while his twenty plus tentacles were doing the same thing everywhere else. At the end of the day, Ethan would make out like a bandit, literally, and go back down the tunnels that were off limits to everyone else due to construction, repairs, or abandoned. He liked the abandoned tunnels the most. Other homeless folk were there trying to stake their claim in various closets, nooks, and crannies.

When he escaped the Institute, they welcomed him and tried to get Ethan clothes and a spot to sleep. Throughout the three and a half years, these were his people; people he could trust. Eventually, Ethan found a spot deep into the tunnels that no one could reach because there was a sizable hole no one could cross but him. On the other side was a room large enough to fit a family of four. There were no windows but a functioning bathroom and a cleaning closet. Ethan was able to clean the closet out and make a makeshift, standing shower. Another plus was there were functioning lights, well, two lamps. He had made this place a small one-bedroom apartment for himself and lived as discreetly as possible; he needed to.

He knew that after he escaped from the Institute, they would send the guardians, the angels and for him specifically, he would have had attracted the attention of the archangels. The angels and archangels were augmented, cybernetic humans created to be the guards of the Institute. They were beyond cruel as they view the "patients" of the Institute as diseased or corrupted creatures that deserve only pain, torment, and if lucky, death.

Ethan was classified as a Level 5 corruption; meaning he was assigned an archangel as a personal torturer. Why? Ethan was cursed with having the ability to harvest fear from people and convert it to either raw energy or create almost anything from the energy gathered. Only an archangel was strong enough to counter him. That was proven when Ethan was able to get an inhibitor off and use his power. He successfully was able to destroy dozens of angels and single handedly cost the Institute over forty million dollars in equipment. The Archangel assigned to him called herself Twilight.

The misery she inflicted on Ethan was one of the reasons he couldn't sleep at night. Twilight would constantly rip limbs off him and force him to reattach the limb with a time limit. If he didn't complete the task before the time was up, the archangel would fire a beam of white energy, from her hand, and scorch Ethan's skin to unimaginable degrees. When Ethan escaped, Twilight was humiliated and left with a nasty scar. For seventeen and a half years, Ethan had to endure all of that.

This little slum of a home was paradise for him.

Ethan finally got up out of his mattress and got dressed. He needed to hit the laundry mat and wash his pile of dirty clothes that lay all over the place. He wasn't perfect. Gathering up all of the clothes and stuffing them into a backpack, Ethan walked out the door and four tentacles immediately slithered out from his back, growing as long as they needed to cross the chasm and set his feet on the other side. The homeless town wasn't awake yet, but there were a few that were. Some making love, others shooting up, but Ethan made it a point to stop by one tent that belonged to Wally. It wasn't his real name, but Wally didn't know his real name, so Wally it was.

"Hey Wally?"

There came a shuffle from the tent and a hand jerked the flap of the tent open from the inside. A scruffy, hairy, old man filled the opening holding out a knife. Ethan flashed a light on himself. Once Wally focused his tired eyes, realized it was Ethan, he put his knife away and groaned.