The cold

Blackwoods

Blackwoods was a good place, a really good place if you were looking for a place to shoot a classic horror movie without needing many props. It was like the place had a life of it's own, a life that severely disliked "Neil's". Neil scowled as a branch smacked him in the face for the fifth time, spitting out a terrible leaf or two that lodged itself into his mouth. Okay! Lesson learned. There would be no more fighting with Damien when he's told to stay behind, he'd happily stay back and talk to a ghost or two,Mrs. Twinkie Toes did have a few hilarious tales to tell like how she  added a few ugly frogs to her husband's broth because he went all "listen to the man of house "on her . Of course her husband did  give in when he got wonderfully disgusting food for the next few days. She did confess to adding a toe bone to his food once, a mysterious big toe bone she had found in her garden ,when they had a particularly bad tiff. How Neil wished he could wind back time and stay back, it wasn't like he could make an army of ghosts and help them anyway, hmm, it was something he could try out later, some ghosts were quite telepathic. 

Neil heard Nerezza laugh when he tripped on a root, falling flat on his face, eating a bit of loose yucky mud in the process. He groaned, this was getting a bit too much, and now his face was covered with sticky wet mud, his clothes almost brown, and worse, he was the only one in the group the place seemed to have something against, all others perfectly fine and dandy. He quickly breathed a sigh of relief when Nerezza did some spell thingy that made him squeaky clean, it did also make him feel a bit stiff in  the face, but he  supposed he could deal.

Andrew stopped walking, pointing at a mediocre building that was quite far off, "master's" house. The building itself didn't have anything much different about it, it was as normal as any other for that matter, and it was creepy to find a normal house in blackwoods, like how a house made of cake would be. Damien told both Neil and Andrew to stay there, wait for them till they're back and to just, not wander off. Neil huffed at that, he may not be the most brainy person in the bunch but he wasn't that stupid. 

Nerezza walked towards the building, adrenaline pumping in her veins, giving her the old familiar rush before a kill. While the outside of the house was ordinary, the inside most definitely wasn't. The moment they stepped into the house they could feel a change in the atmosphere, the air felt heavy and dark. There were bits and pieces of old rotten kills on the floor, a summoning circle in the middle, the smell of dead decaying flesh hanging heavily in the air. Nerezza scowled, didn't the man know how to clean up? Well , it's too late for him to learn now and there was no point, he'd be just another body lost in the mess that was his own house by the time she was done with him. She chuckled at the thought, her smile growing wider when the soon to be dead man announced his presence by dropping a sack on the floor.

Nerezza felt a wide grin creeping up her face at the mans reaction, the man was a pudgy man, with a big ugly face and big haughty look,he actually thought he stood a chance just because he destroyed a village. The man tried to throw a decaedium spell at them, a spell that was supposed to freeze them, he probably thought he could kill them when they couldn't hit back , dumb move, did he actually think it would work? The spell bounced back in fact, right back at the man,his haughty look frozen on his face. That was Alaster's specialty in fact, he wasn't called a mirror demon for a joke, it was something that made him pretty much invisible. "Can we put his teeth in a jar after we're done, it looks nice, all white and sparkly, pretty please, Nerz?" Alaster asked in a whiny voice making Nerezza chuckle and Damien's face turn a light shade of green.

They dragged the frozen man to a rather bloody chair, using twine flames to tie the man up. It was Nerezza's favorite, while it was relatively harmless now, it was excruciatingly painful when it got into direct contact with blood, something easy enough to arrange, a few cuts in strategic places would do the job.  

The man woke up to his screams , or perhaps it was the other way round, did he scream after he woke up? Nerezza figured it didn't really matter, the screams were music to her ears anyway. It was just too bad he stopped screaming , gritting his teeth at the pain but alas, it did give Nerezza quite a bit of satisfaction to see the man pale at the sight of the knife in her hand, a knife currently decorated with his blood,  a knife she held extremely close to his eye. "I think you know what you need to do" Nerezza said, slowly moving the knife towards his ears from his eye, pressing just enough to draw a neat curve joining the two, before pressing it at the ear, leaving half of the ear hanging loosely ,just a bit of flesh keeping it still there, before taking it back, twirling the knife playfully in her arms. Nerezza figured it was a pretty good start, she wondered if the man could hear through the hanging ear? Probably not, he was screaming pretty loud anyway.

Damien cleared his throat, he didn't want Nerezza to get too carried away, he didn't want the man to die of shock or something before giving out anything useful, dead ends didn't exactly look appealing at this point. Nerezza moved towards the man's left side and pulled his head back by his hair. "You know what we want to know" she whispered to his good ear, knife still in hand and a wicked glint in her eye.