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Vox fought to keep his hands steady and his pace casual as he slipped through the throng of packed pedestrians up ahead. His quick and habitual “scuse me’s” were met with scoffs and shoves and one particularly contemptuous “fuck you”. But after existing the crowd, Vox came away with two wallets, a wrist watch, and a nice pair of sunglasses that he habitually moved to slip onto his face before remembering his unfortunate head situation since waking up in literal Hell last week.
He pocketed them anyways, just in case the pawn shop owner –no doubt suspicious of Vox’s frequent visits, but too smart, or greedy, to comment on it—deemed them worthy of some coin.
Down the street he continued, bumping into a man who was looming over a lady with a serrated grin and nabbing the butterfly knife in the back pocket of his jeans. And judging by the piercing shriek that echoed behind Vox, the young lady had had enough and retaliated against her, weaponless, assailant.
Vox hummed the melody of a Sinatra song as he strolled down the streets and idly twirled his new bladed toy.
“Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away,” Vox sidestepped an unconscious druggie propped against the brickwork and skipped the last few feet towards the intersection ahead.
“If you can use some exotic booze there's a bar in far Bombay!”
Vox did a neat little spin to the left as he turned right and saw a flash of bloody red before colliding directly into a solid body.
He barely caught himself from falling over, and it was made all the more difficult by the sudden pressure in the air around him. Like the resonant boom of a thunderclap, Vox could feel something pressing down against his skin, a sensation made all the stranger by the lack of accompanying sound.
No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. There was no sound that his receivers were taking in, rather there was a sound echoing within his own cranium. Not unlike the warbling tone of a radio signal focusing to a station, Vox could hear that sound in the same way one could hear their thoughts.
“Well now, that’s interesting,” he heard, and this time truly heard, a voice say in a perfectly accented transatlantic drawl.
The signal in Vox’s head softened into something like a background hum of a diode, and he was able to shift focus to the man he’d run into.
Red upon red upon red greeted Vox. A sinner roughly his height stared Vox down with ruby eyes as he adjusted the cuffs of his scarlet suit and drummed his bloody claws atop the crimson top of his cane. He canted his head sideways, his eyes narrowing into considering slits, as he examined Vox.
And his smile didn’t diminish one bit.
“You appear to be…stuck, in something?”
The sheer hesitancy in his tone coaxed a laugh from Vox’s throat, unbidden, as he shook his new head. The once familiar gesture was made clumsy and fumbling with his unfamiliar weight, and he bit back the embarrassment of nearly falling over again, this time all on his own.
“No, I, this is how I came down here.”
“Fascinating,” the man hummed as he reached out with both hands, the cane inexplicably gone, and latched onto the sides of Vox’s head, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sinner reborn as a machine.”
Vox felt another laugh bubble up from his chest, this one a more nervous laugh due to the unexpected handsiness and proximity of this stranger.
The somewhat awkward atmosphere was only compounded by the extended silence that stretched between them as the sinner twisted and contorted Vox’s head this way and that to study it from all angles.
Ever the showman, Vox instinctively spoke to smother that quiet. “Well, I’m not a machine, not fully anyways.”
His head was jerked back forward, and he was eye to eye with a man bearing a smile that suddenly seemed a tad more manic than before.
“So you bleed then?” His voice was bright and eager, borderline breathless in his excitement.
Vox felt his heart inexplicably skip a beat.
“Y-yeah, I do.”
“Most peculiar.”
The hands holding his head wandered. One slid towards his face, the pressure of his grip causing faint ripples of distortion across the screen. There was also a strange tingle where the pads of his fingers pressed, a buzzing static concentrated at the points in which they touched.
The other hand moved down, slowly caressing the contours of Vox's throat. Deft fingers traced the outline of his trachea, and a sharp fingertip gently scraped along the long line of his jugular.
Vox couldn't suppress the faint shudder that rippled down his spine as that wandering hand slowly wrapped its long fingers around his neck, the thumb pressing against his windpipe just enough for Vox to feel it, but he did at least manage to swallow down the whimper.
That soothing hum from before began to build upon itself. Bigger. Louder. Soon, it was like the second coming of the eighth plague of Egypt the way the static swarmed and consumed him.
The man's eyes were an endless abyss of darkness with nothing but a single glowing ember of radio dials. His teeth, sharpened like thousands of needles, fought for space in his smile.
The hands touching Vox were as cold as a corpse, but the skin left in their wake burned as though branded by their very touch. His heart pounded. His stomach fluttered. He couldn't think. He could hardly breathe.
The static was physically pressing against Vox, pinning him in place and squeezing him in a terminal embrace.
That cavernous maw of a mouth opened, and those thousands of needles for teeth pointed directly at Vox.
They came closer.
Closer.
There was a sudden screech, a piercing shriek of sound that Vox wasn't sure came from the man or himself, but he used the distraction to gather what little strength he had left in his trembling arms and shoved himself away.
While Vox was trying to sort through the flood of weird and confusing sensations ricocheting throughout his trembling body, he noticed the stranger blink, as though startled, and shake his head slightly. The man brought a hand up to his head and his coat shifted from the motion. Vox caught the way one side seemed to be weighed down by something heavy, something valuable.
Vox took a deep breath. He tried to compose himself, but he still felt fuzzy in the head and sluggish in the limbs.
The stranger looked at him, his head cocked to the side in a manner that seemed maybe too far for a normal neck to bend. His eyes were back to a warm scarlet, his teeth back to a slightly more normal razor edge.
He still smiled brightly, like nothing had ever happened. He even had the gall to laugh.
"Hahaha. You really quite a surprising little fellow, aren't you?"
Vox felt as though he should feel more demeaned, but the man said it with such earnestness that he couldn't help but feel strangely proud. And he also couldn't help the urge to say something clever, something to make the memory of him stick.
"Yeah, well, there's more where that came from."
Somehow the man's face made more room for that endless smile to grow. "Then I suppose I'll have to stay tuned, won't I?"
Vox's body flushed hot as those red eyes roved up and down his person. Hunger resided in this man's every look, and Vox wasn't entirely sure how he was to play a part in satisfying it.
But he had some idea.
"Well," he said, his voice barely escaping from his choked up throat, "I suppose you will. I'll, uh, I'll see you around then."
And Vox made as though to walk by the other, only to "accidentally " misjudge the spacing and bump into the man's left side. He teetered and exaggerated the overbalance of his body head. The stranger surprised Vox by reaching out, his movements quick as a whip and frankly startling in their speed and strength, and assisted Vox in righting himself.
Which made it all the easier for Vox to slip his hand in and out, just like that, and make off with his prize.
Though, his heart did stop cold when the stranger called out to him when he'd only managed to take three steps away.
"Oh, it seems you've dropped something, my good man," the stranger said, his voice bright and enthusiastic as ever.
Vox turned to see a pair of sunglasses perched between long elegant fingers tipped with red claws sharpened to a deadly point. The stranger offered them to Vox with a pleasant grin.
"Thanks," Vox felt himself reply, not really thinking about it.
He saw the man's grin sharpen at the corners.
Vox's hand froze in midair for a moment, outstretched towards "his" sunglasses. Sunglasses much to small to fit his Hell-given head.
The man's eyes gleamed with satisfaction. He stepped forward and reached out with his free hand for Vox's coat. He held the fabric betwixt his claws carefully, tucking the sunglasses into an inner pocket.
He didn't break eye contact with Vox for a single moment.
The man released Vox's coat and sidestepped to Vox's right. He twirled a cane that seemed to appear from nowhere as he hummed short, jazzy tune.
"Well then, best of luck out there, chum. I trust I'll be seeing you again very soon."
His words alone were kind, but the manner in which he spoke them was an indulgent purr not unlike a lion greeting his prey before a hunt.
The man continued in the direct he had been heading before Vox had run into him, his long coat swishing back and forth in a hypnotic sway that matched the clack of his shoe heel and the melody he hummed. Vox waited with bated breath until he was well out of sight before extricating his prize from his pants pocket.
It was a drinking flask, silver by the gleam of its shine. An elegant rendering of the letter A was stamped on the bottom but seemed otherwise unadorned. Regardless, the weight of the metal suggested it to be of excellent quality.
Vox unscrewed the cap and took a sniff of the contents, only to recall his sense of smell was more or less nonexistent now. And it was only after he took a sip --smokey and bitter with the faintest of hints of salt and honey-- that he realized another man's lips had been against this flask.
That man's lips.
Lips that had twisted and pulled to house the wide, serrated grin of its owner.
Lips that had shaped its words so carefully, so delicately.
Lips that had come so very close to his own.
Vox felt his knees slightly tremble again, and his hands shook just a little as he tucked the flask away into one of his pockets right beside his wallet...which wasn't there.
Confused, Vox checked his other pocket. A wallet. But not his. Just one of the few he'd snatched that morning. And not in either of his pants pockets either, only the pocketknife from earlier and a watch.
And that was when Vox realized that his left wrist was actually feeling a little lighter than usual.
Fuck! Did that guy just seriously...but when? How had he even...you know what, whatever. His wallet had maybe twenty bucks in it and no one even carried licenses down in Hell anyways. Not like there were cops to pull anyone over, and even if there were, not like anyone was actually going to listen to them. And sure, the watch stung a bit, but only because it was surprisingly difficult to find one that wasn't garishly over decorated and, more importantly, actually worked.
Vox trudged back to his shithole of an apartment, too exhausted from his run in with that strange man to visit his usual pawnshop that afternoon. He climbed the steps to the building's front door, each step a little personal summit he had to scale, and thoughtlessly dug into his back pocket for his keys...
Only to find them empty.
"God Dammit!"