“So how come I’ve been doing all the talking here? Why aren’t we talking about you?”

“Because I know all about me already so I find the subject quite tedious.”

Justin laughed. “I see. So this is all about entertaining you, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.” He took a glance over at Charmian as they both walked along with their hands in their pockets – him in jeans and a shirt, her in a white tea dress and denim jacket. “But I don’t even get a little look in here?”

“If you must.”

“Heh.” Again he chuckled, eyes scrutinising her. Every second he spent with her she became more fascinating, alluring and yet frustrating to him. The mystique was both immensely attractive and extremely annoying. And this was only their first real date, if you could call it a date at all. “Come on, there’s all that cool stuff in your apartment. Looks like you travelled a lot.”

“So you had a good poke around, huh?”

“I had to stay up all night watching out for somebody’s drunk ass, I had to do something to fill the time.”

“Fine, it’s like that, okay.” Despite herself, Charmian laughed as she looked down at her feet. “Yeah, I travel a lot.”

“And…”

“And?”

“Where, when, why, what did you do, what did you see?”

“Work, mostly.” That wasn’t a lie. Killing demons took her all over the globe. “And… everywhere, all the time. I’ve been to Egypt, Ivory Coast, Rome, Budapest, Sicily, Canberra, Tianjin, Buenos Aires…”

“Wow. And I thought I’d been everywhere.”

“It’s a big old world. But… I don’t know, it’s not like I have any of these big stories.” None that she could tell him, anyway. She didn’t want him to run screaming after finding out precisely how many people she had killed by karma over the years. Technically, she could accurately be accused of genocide – though it wasn’t like it was her fault that an entire Amazon tribe had got themselves possessed. “I just… I go, I work, I don’t get to do much sight seeing.”

“And this is trying ingredients, yes?”

“Yes.”

Nate had warned her to come up with a cover story that allowed for lots of travelling, sudden absences and foreign languages. Zac had helpfully suggested that she pretend to be a food taster’s assistant. After living for thousands of years she’d tried pretty much every type of food there was, so she could fib fairly easily about it. It had also managed a loose association with Hollywood via event catering to explain her presence at all the industry parties where she’d kept running into him.

“Man. That’s like the dream job, just eating tons of food all the time.”

“Work can drag the pleasure out of pretty much anything.”

“True.” Justin’s eyes glanced up at her, wondering why she stared so resolutely at her feet. It wasn’t like she lacked confidence; maybe she was just watching where she was walking in her incredibly tall shoes. He had been pathetically happy when she called. It wasn’t much of a date, they’d met for dinner at a pretty shabby diner and then hadn’t eaten all that much. They were now strolling through the streets to her apartment and while they had talked a lot and she’d asked a lot of questions, she seemed to be keeping a sturdy wall between them. His attempts to spark any flirting had fallen flat.

Maybe he was just trying to kid himself to spare his ego, but he didn’t think it was for lack of desire. She didn’t want to let go for some reason.

“I just… like, you have all these books in all these languages and you’ve been everywhere and you’re so young. It’s incredible.”

“Eh. I was… I guess the equivalent of an army brat.” That wasn’t entirely false, in the sense that she’d been ordered to travel around a lot by her boss who was also moving around a lot. Immortals tended to be busy. “I had to live a lot of places and when you live somewhere you pick up the language. Kind of have to. And then since I travel I don’t stop using them long enough to get rusty. Really, your life’s much more interesting.”

“Heh. Sometimes I wish my life was less interesting to everybody,” he said with a heavy tinge of irony.

Charmian wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, she really did. The difference between her interest in his life and the tabloid media’s was pretty comical. She had simply wanted to know everything about him, everything about this strange new version of her beloved Michael. She drank in his words and stories like an alcoholic drank their first bottle of whiskey in ten years – feverishly, in somewhat of a daze. Her barrage of questions wasn’t purely to deflect attention from herself; she wanted to know everything he could tell her. She was slowly beginning to get used to the new looks and the newer mannerisms. Sometimes she swore that she could almost see the shadow of Michael’s features in his face, something about the cheekbones. Yet for all that, even knowing that they were the same soul, there was something different about Justin. Maybe it was the effect of success.

“Pretty night, huh?” She changed the subject, staring up at the stars. Despite her age, she still got a kick out of the humans thinking that immortals or angels or whatever they wanted to call them lived in the sky. They lived in houses and apartments like everybody else.

“Eh. Where I come from, without all the city air and smog and stuff, it’s so much clearer and brighter. I guess city nights don’t move me much.”

Charmian glanced at his face, smiling softly. That was an incredibly Michael thing to say. When he had been a Parisian socialite, he had often complained that the city was tedious and he far preferred his family’s country estates. In his poetic phase (before he’d met Byron and got more involved with wenching than writing) he’d written entire odes to the countryside.

“When you put it like that…”

“Hey, watch it!” Justin was too busy looking annoyed at the man who had barged between them without so much as an ‘excuse me,’ but Charmian’s face had immediately drained of blood and her hands were trembling.

This could not be happening. Not here, not now, the first time she’d taken Justin out. The last thing she needed was some guy to brush up against her and feel the cold ice in her stomach which told her she’d been touched by a demon. And not just her usual demon, the type of demon that truly possessed people. The type she couldn’t beat without a knock down, drag out fight to the death. The type she hated because she had to kill the innocent human being it had possessed in order to destroy it. The type she was going to have an extremely hard time explaining.

Unfortunately for her, there was no avoiding it. Even if it hadn’t been against her sacred duty to suffer such an abomination to live, the minute they touched it too would have recognised what she was. This type of demon was a lot stronger and had far more powers, so unlike its lesser relatives it could recognise an avenger as well as an avenger could recognise it. And even if she could have walked away, it certainly wouldn’t.

This was the trouble with mortal enemies; they always wanted to kill you.

“Avenger.” Its teeth curled up in cruel scorn, and Charmian wanted to cry. “What a pleasant surprise.”

“I see somebody’s had a few tokes tonight.” Justin rolled his eyes, took Charmian’s arm and pulled her as if to leave, but instead her response was to push him back behind her.

“Huh? Charmian, what the…”

“Stay behind me, Justin.” Her voice rang low, vibrating heavily.

“What the fuck? You don’t need to have a Mexican stand off, he’s just some ass with no manners.”

“Oh, he doesn’t know.” The smirk got wider and became a grin. Charmian uttered a silent apology to the soul that she knew would be watching from inside the eyes, powerless to stop its own body betraying it. “Well this’ll be fun. First I’ll kill you, then I’ll educate him.”

“Kill?” Justin sounded panicked. “Char…” he tried to pull away, obviously trying to be a gentleman and put himself between her and harm, but he was stunned to be shoved forcefully back into the doorway of the adjacent building.

“Stay. Behind me.”

“Yeah. Because that’ll save his ass.”

Charmian made the first hit, a swift judo kick to the stomach that the demon parried and followed with a sound right hook to her cheek. He then tried to get her in the solar plexus, but she retaliated with a swift uppercut that sent his head flying backwards.

 Justin could only watch in horror – he’d been about to charge in between them and get her out of there but he was quickly realising that he’d only get his face flattened. The sheer speed with which they were moving was frightening, it look like the kind of professional kung fu scene they’d film for a movie and then play back speeded up to make it look faster. Only this was real. The little woman he’d just had fries with, who was extremely slim and doll like, was pounding the crap out of and being beaten herself by a guy who had threatened to kill them both and he had no idea why. He felt his stomach cramp up when he saw Charmian get thrown into a pile of trash cans, terrified. He didn’t understand it, the guy was dressed in an inexpensive suit with a tie and he looked like he was just coming home from the office, your typical nine to five. What was happening?

“Ready to die, bitch?” The demon spat out, flecks of blood and saliva hurtling from his mouth. It looked like she’d taken out some teeth.

Justin understood even less when Charmian stood up, eyes narrowed in a manner which he could only liken to some kind of cobra before it made its deadly strike, and suddenly began to transform. Transform, instantaneously, in the street, within a split second. One moment she was standing there in her girly dress and jacket, the next she was some post-apocalyptic gladiator. In head to toe black, leather gauntlets covered her arms with a strange silver crest glinting at her wrists. She had a sword in her hand.

An actual sword.

A sword that was burning brightly in the dark night.

A flaming sword.

Which had appeared from nowhere.

A flaming sword.

‘My fucking date has a flaming fucking sword in her fucking hand,’ he thought deliriously as Charmian’s lip curled up in a furious sneer. The rage was emanating from her almost like heat from a fire. Then finally she spoke.

“After you, bitch.”

The demon began ducking and diving, but for the first time doubt began to fill its eyes as it realised its disadvantage. She was armed, it wasn’t. It grabbed a trash can lid and attempted to use it as a shield, but that quickly showed itself to be futile when one touch of the sword made it disintegrate in his hands.

After what seemed like an eternity to her Charmian finally managed to make her strike, straight through the heart. Normally at this stage she’d be looking at the eyes, trying to mouth some final words of comfort to the dying soul within, but immediately she’d twisted back to see Justin’s horrified face. His mouth dropped open in panic and dread as the sword’s fire engulfed the body and started turning it to ash.

With a final flash both flame and demon were gone, no trace of either left in the street. She started to move towards Justin, who by this point was on his feet, but immediately he scrambled backwards.

“Stay the hell away from me.”

“Justin...”

“Fuck you!”

“Please…”

“Get the fuck away from me!”

He started to sprint in the other direction, but before he’d got more than about 20 yards she had appeared back in front of him. He nearly tripped over his own feet trying to stop.

“What the hell are you?”

“Justin, I can…”

“No, get the fuck away from me!” He tried to run again, but again she managed to put herself back in front of him at superhuman speed.

“Justin, please don’t make me do this, please just come with me.”

“You fucking freak, get the hell away from me!”

“Lucas!” She screamed silently inside her head, heart cleaving in two with the cruel name.

Within a split second, Justin found himself surrounded not only by Lucas but by Zachariah, Carmel and Nathaniel.

“We all heard you.” Carmel’s voice sounded grimly in her head, and the looks on her friends’ faces were enough to tell her that they had deduced what had happened. Charmian had only meant to call Lucas, but in her pain she’d accidentally sent the message out to all of them. It had been like a siren going off in their ears.

“What the FUCK is this? Who the fuck are you people?!” Justin’s head whipped around wildly, trying to see a way out but finding none. He had seen what Charmian was capable of and clearly whoever these people were, they were the same.

Seeing the distress on Charmian’s face, knowing she was choking back tears, Lucas decided that as her deputy he needed to take charge momentarily. “You know as well as I do that there’s no point running, Justin, we won’t even break sweat. You can make it easy or hard for yourself.”

“Who do you think you are, the damn Corleones? Who are you, how’d you know my name?” Justin asked in disbelief, breathing heavily and trying not to have a panic attack. “What’s she going to do, kill me too? Or are you all here to do it for her?”

“Silly boy,” Carmel said sadly, softly. “We’re here precisely because she doesn’t want to hurt you.”

It was true – Carmel as usual had her all figured out. Charmian had called Lucas because she couldn’t bring herself to take Justin against his will. She was hoping that if he saw himself outnumbered he’d figure it within his best interests to come quietly.

Justin was confused, overwhelmed, frightened and quite possibly about to wet his pants in sheer terror. He could see that Charmian looked desperately sad and had lost all that usual mysterious composure that he found so attractive, but it wasn’t much comfort when you were surrounded by a group of magic super heroes who were quite possibly going to make you burn up in a ball of smoke.

“Justin,” Nate put on his preacher voice, the soft and calm one he used for distressed visitors to the confession box. “As hard as it may be to believe, we’re not the ones you should be afraid of. Come with us, we’ll explain everything. But you need to come with us because you’re not safe out in the open here.”

“Clearly not,” he spluttered, looking frantically from face to face but not seeing any escape options. God, and to think five minutes earlier the only thing on his mind had been whether he could loosen her up enough to get a goodnight kiss out of her.

“Believe me, we know how big this is and I understand why you’re freaked, but you got to trust us,” Lucas continued. “There’s more where that demon come from and we can’t protect you if you don’t let us.”

“D-d-d-demon?” Justin stuttered in a whisper.

“We’ll explain everything,” Carmel replied, watching out of the corner of her eye as a tear slipped down Charmian’s cheek. “Just come with us.”