Chapter Text
She lounged on the dark, leather, couch, one leg over the other, a lock of mahogany hair twirling around her slender finger. TV static echoed around the room, the darkness behind her hugging the sides of her face like a blanket. She cocked her head, squinting at the screen as she leaned forward, the screen casting an array of colors on her face. The TV flicked through channels, finally finding its home at #16.
"In the Charming Acres Retirement Community, you'll find the picture-perfect life that you've always wanted! Nothing ever happens here. It's perfectly safe" A smiling man in a jaunty straw hat said. The woman scoffed and raised an eyebrow, "Not likely." She muttered, turning off the TV and standing before turning around. When she did, she found herself before a wooden table filled with various occult objects, no longer in the black void. She reached for a silver flask and turned around, propping herself against the table nonchalantly. Now, she seemed to be in an abandoned warehouse, facing a man chained to a chair on top of a graffitied Devil's Trap.
The woman stepped forward, unscrewing the flask as she did, the man watching her hands carefully. "So disappointing." She said, sighing. "You really were going to kill me on our way to the restaurant? You weren't even going to buy me dinner first?" She asked, feigning hurt. The man glared at her, "You're going to drag this out aren't you, bitch." He spat. She smirked, "Yeah, I am." She splashed liquid from the flask onto the man's face, steam pouring from his skin as it made contact. His eyes turned solid black as he screamed in pain, revealing his true form: a demon.
The girl turned back to the table and hovered her hands over the objects, carefully choosing which she would use next. Her fingers stopped over a silver, three-sided, blade before picking it up and turning around. "It's such a shame too," She said, stepping into the pentacle as the man, skin still steaming, leaned back in an attempt to get away from her. "You really did charm me. You had to eat those babies huh." The demon looked up at her, gritting his teeth. "Get it over with."
The woman smirked and placed her hand on the back of the chair over his shoulder, pressing the tip of the blade against his heart. "Okay." She said, plunging it into his chest with all of her force. The demon screamed as his skeleton flashed orange, visible through the skin of his vessel as they both died.
She pulled the blade out of his chest with a yank and stumbled backward from the momentum before looking at the vessel's corpse, then back down at the blade. "Huh," She said, frowning. "Why did I do that?" She wondered aloud before turning around.
The woman jumped as she found herself standing in a long hallway, the warehouse gone as well as the blade and the corpse. "What the–" She muttered as she stared down the hall. At the very end, a small woman wearing all black, including a veil, watched her, muttering something that she couldn't hear. "Hello?" The girl called to her. Suddenly, with a gust of wind, the woman in black appeared directly in front of her and grabbed her arms. "Find me!" She whispered her voice like nails on a chalkboard.
The girl jumped backward, ripping herself out of the woman's grip, stumbling into a wall as the woman vanished before her eyes. She steadied herself and turned to try to find a way out when she spotted the tall silhouette of a man, standing at the other end of the hallway. He began to turn to face her, when fog poured into the hallway, surrounding them both, before everything went black.
The woman gasped and sat up, looking around her, taking in her surroundings. She blinked her bleary eyes as the room cleared. She was safe, in her motel; the entire thing had been a dream. She groaned and tussled her hair, rolling to her left to check her phone which sat on the pillow beside her. The time read 3 AM and she scrolled up to see a new message "Happy birthday SD! I'll see you when I get there! Love, Dad." She gave a small, at-ease, smile before falling back into her pillows. She rolled over onto her right side, her left shoulder visible above the blankets as she did, revealing a flaming pentacle, tattooed onto her skin.