Deception

Chapter 7: Orphanage, Part 2

"Are you losing it again, man?" Kan said, anticipating an answer. My eyes darted around the room, trying to find it. This was no normal demon, I could sense it around us, yet there was only the wind outside and the smell of dry leaves inside. The glass that shattered did not shatter, the sofa that toppled returned unscathed, and yet I could sense something was misplaced.

I turned to Kan, my black transformation reflected in his pupils, "this is no ordinary demon... it's a Chnsin," I scanned the room again, playing a mental 'Find the Difference' game. The moonlight shifted, casting banded beams through the window.

"Kan, whatever you do... Stay the hell away from those lights," I whispered, stepping back, one creaking step at a time, my back against the sweating walls. Kan followed, matching my movements.

The moon was looking for us.

"Don't you know what kind of Chnsin this is?" Kan asked, eyeing the beams refracting through the windows.

"No... There is almost no record of Chnsin demons... Most of us don't survive to tell the tale."

"Damn it... am too young to die like this,"

Then it happened again, I grabbed Kan's hoodie and threw him through the door out of the living room as I blinked, in a split second, I saw the demon rampage through the wall, causing the wood to crumble down, then the room came back to a halt, the wind whistled outside, and the dry leaves danced inside. And I took a deep breath at the sight of my chopped right hand, the cut was imperfect, the bone and marrow out, and a lot of gushing blood to coat the floor. The sound of dribbling blood added to the whistles of dry leaves.

"...Are you okay?" Kan called from the doorway.

"Yeah... I'll be fine," I replied, watching as my blood slowly regenerated the flesh around the bones

"How do we deal with hallucinations? Can't you like, do some weird magic and get us out?"

"If I could, I would've left you here to rot," I said, as I sensed it again. I ran forward to the doorframe, and grabbed Kan as I looked behind me. The room went chaotic, the huge headless horse, the size of a mini truck, began kicking and tackling everything, the old framed pictures broke into pieces, the coffee table became one with the floor, the walls turned into dust as its neck looked at us. And with one blink, it was all as if it was not.

"It does not see nor hear. Yet it looks for us through..." My eyes darted around the foyer, then landed on our reflection in a distorted family picture on the shelf. The light from a crack in the main entrance slowly aligned with it.

I pushed Kan towards the stairs as I jumped towards him, and then it happened again.

"...Dude..." Kan said, as my blood gushed into his hands...

"You sure you're... Okay this time?" He muttered. I took a deep breath, focusing all my blood on the chunks that horse bastard just chopped, my right arm was butchered, the cut wasn't clean as the bones were left out cracked and broken in the cold breeze of the cottage, my ribs were missing while my liver was half chopped and intestines were dangling out, spasming. My right leg was no use, as half of my thigh was chopped off as if it was bitten by an alligator. I stood on one foot, with the support of Kan's shoulders, as I slowly fell on the wooden steps of the stairs. My blood drenched the floor and the wood, killing some of the moss and leaves that grew out of the woods.

"I've been... in worse, gah... fucking hell" I groaned, coughing off a puke of blood, "That fuck uses the moon's light and our reflections to see..."

Kan carried my almost corpse of a body upstairs. He tiptoed and side stepped all light coming from the holes in the ceiling as he kicked open a door to his left. It was a bedroom with a queen size bed, broken wardrobes, but clean cabinets, and the bed was split between being the cleanest bed ready for sale, and the nastiest filth there was. The window was curtained covering us, but Kan did not like it. He placed me next to the cabinet and flipped the bed to cover the window and some of the holes next to it, causing the entire room to darken.