Avriel Kaplan: Well dressed, well groomed, beautifully handsome, quiet and brooding and exactly the kind of man Ariel Declan doesn't need to know. But, that is not for her to decide.
Alexander Kirk: wickedly handsome, well known and well liked, egot...
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The moon rose full over the dirty streets as the boy walked along, careful to pick up his feet every step of the way. Its light filtered down through the clouds and reflected blue and silver off the small pools of water that collected on the sidewalk. The boy navigated around each puddle, careful not to get his blue and white shoes dirty. The moon's light glinted off the dull zipper of his blue hoodie and the silver earring in his ear. His pants were altogether too damn baggy, barely covering his ass and narrowly held up by the heavy belt he wore. You could almost fit two of him in those jeans. Yet they were very nice jeans with decorative stitching on the back pockets and such. They were still, way too big for him and bunched around his ankles. An old blue and white bandana hung from the back pocket of the jeans. And from the waistband, the grip of his gun peeked.
Avoiding the puddles gracefully as he was, his walk looked rather sly, perhaps a bit cocky and crooked. His arms swung loosely at his sides and he leaned just a touch to his left, a casual onlooker wouldn't have even noticed many of the finer details of his dress or gait. But the eyes that watched him weren't the eyes of a casual onlooker. They were the eyes of a being interested in far more than the boy's clothing and gait. They watched, and they saw, and they knew.
The boy kept walking, moving as is if he hadn't noticed that he was not as alone as he thought he was. He felt a tingling sensation as the hairs on the back of his neck rose and gooseflesh broke out on his arms. He kept on walking. He was safe in his own territory, secure in his ability to fight off whatever troubles might come his way. He felt like he was being watched, and if he was being watched then he needed to make sure that he was representing. He straightened his back as he walked down the sidewalk. His destination was clear in his mind. He walked on.
The boy arrived at his destination and was greeted by all his friends. Strange yellow eyes watched, interested. The being behind those eyes scanned the gathering of boys and men and wondered why they behaved the way they did. They were making all kinds of noise saying words it didn't understand. Theirs was a strange vernacular.
They had gathered on a rectangular hardened patch of ground, concrete. Trampled down grass grew in the spaces where the ground was damaged and cracked. Odd faded markings that resembled a semicircle were crudely painted on either end of the rectangle. One end boasted a thick rusty tree shaped like a cane growing out of the surface. On the other end another cane grew from the ground but on the end of that cane grew a vertical flat square structure with a hoop horizontal to the ground sticking out of it.
One of the men had what it had discovered was a ball and was bouncing it against the hard surface. It would always return to his hands like it was magically drawn there, but it could not feel any magic at work. He could only sense cold indifference and a competitive compulsion to be the best at whatever it was they were doing. The games of men didn't interest him, only the games they played.
It searched and searched, always returning to the boy it had followed, for one, just one. It was harder than it typically was to select one. That particular batch of humans didn't have a speck of innocence between its collective souls, not even the boy. Every one of them had taken a life, some many more than one. Every one of them hated themselves for what they had become, most of them hated society for what it had done to them, none of them had any appreciation for the other, yet they were all bonded, each to the other. It found selecting among them to be abundantly difficult.
As it listened it heard it. The whisper of self-doubt and a misaligned heartbeat. Instantly, it made its choice. The trick was, always, to get the job done with as little bloodshed as possible and to avoid detection, so it set into motion the things necessary to make that happen. It gathered its will and its strength, searched the man's mind and heart and analyzed what needed to be done in a matter of seconds. Then it began its slow ritualistic attack. It was a simple thing to play on the man's ego and pride, even simpler to attack than the being behind those sickly yellow eyes had imagined.
Though the human looked big and strong, inside he was weak and feeble. It was time to see what kind of fight the man had, what he was really made of, to determine if his energy would be enough. It started simple, just a little push to get his competitive drive pushing him harder than his body could reasonably sustain over any period of time.
Then there were the things he'd done, making him see the faces of his victims in the faces of his friends. At first, it was just a flash here and a flash there, then it escalated the assault and added in the voices of the dead and wounded, uttering the last words that they spoke to him. The cry of the woman he had abandoned, the sound of his child's tears, the tears, cries, and sobs of the countless victims that one man had taken, those eyes pushed them, one after another in rapid succession at the man.
The man's behavior became erratic, unpredictable. He started screaming at the people he called friends, slapping his head and shaking it violently. He stuttered and stammered and said things that didn't make any sense. He cried and threw himself about. One name. One name repeatedly fell from his lips. 'Yolanda'. It didn't know the face that went with that name. The man's panic, fear, guilt, and shame flew off him like blood from a centrifugal force and the being behind those eyes absorbed every bit of the delicious energy the man was feeding him.
The cries of the women the man had raped and beaten and the same from the act of dominating the men he had filled the man's head and images of the acts and crimes were flung at him from his memory. He scrambled, and he scrapped. He whimpered, and he cried. His heart was racing in his chest as his mind rebelled against the idea that the dead were not dead, that his friends, of whom he could not see, were indeed the embodiment of his victims, the people he'd raped, tortured and murdered over the course of his career as a drug lord gang leader. He pulled his gun on his right-hand man and screamed. "You're dead man, you're dead. I killed you, Marcus man, you're dead. I watched you die, killed you myself." His hands shook with his voice as tears and snot mixed and ran down his face. His eyes bulged in his head, just as much from his rising blood pressure as from the tears that streamed out of them. His voice was a hoarse cry as his nonsense spilled from his loose and swollen lips. His friends looked on in horror, mortified. They thought to console him, coach and guide him, but the gun in his hand being waved around wildly dictated that they all act in favor of self-preservation. And so, they did. They all backed away with their hands up, genuine fear wafting off them in a fetid collective stink that smelled bitter and sweet to the owner of those eyes and so delicious.
It pulled in the energy and channeled it back into the push, siphoning most of it to fuel itself. The man's heart was beating beyond its capabilities. It had been for far too long. He could feel this but was powerless to stop it. He feared for his own life, agonized over his shame and collapsed under the weight of his guilt. His heart beat in ragged raging fear and denial one last time before the last of the energy that fueled it was stripped away from his body. His life passed into the void as his body expired cold and alone in the middle of the hardened rectangle, the ball slowly bounced away as if all its magic were gone.
Satiated for the night, the yellow-eyed being walked away, leaving the cooling lump of what used to be a man lying on the cold hard ground of the only basketball court the projects would ever have.
