I ran my forefinger down the seem in the center of my chest. I could feel the heat seeping through the eternal wound. I snagged the flesh with that probing finger and pulled at the intersecting edges of skin. The red and angry scar would never fully heal. It tore apart easily, exposing the inferno within. Fire leapt from the open cavity, jumping out lustily, gasping at the air beyond the walls of rib and muscle in which it was contained. Blackened bones and charred organs sizzled and smoked, not being consumed, but constantly screaming in agony from the gnawing of the hungry flame. I felt my strength flowing out of me as the heat escaped, and I quickly resealed the burning compartment. Immediately strength rushed through my limbs and I breathed out a sigh that rippled the air with its heat.
I was cursed, a killer of men who had wantonly taken the lives of others until, finally, I held my knife to the throat of my own father. I remembered his eyes as they stared up at me in that moment I thought would be his last. They had been full of fear, but not for himself, for me. I had seen looks of fear before. Murder could be euphoric. Power. There is no statement of power more grand than when you look upon another life and know that its continuation is entirely in your hands. Denying that continuity is a rush like no other, and I fed on that exhilaration, but when my father looked up into my eyes, his brand of fear was an alien expression to me.
“Why did it have to be you?” He'd said, his voice a whisper, and at that point I said exactly what I'd planned to say to him. His words had been a wake up call, and for a moment I forgot his strange flavor of fear. After all, fear was fear no matter how you looked at it. I had searched too long, and fought my way up the ranks of killers for too many years to let a strange expression scare me off.
“You were no father to me. You're just one in a long line of men who had my mother.” I said, and I pulled the knife across his throat. Fire exploded forth from him, and I was blown back, my arms and torso consumed in terrible heat. The exterior layers of my upper half were gone in a flash, but for some small pieces of my face saved at the cost of my arms. The pain was beyond anything I'd felt before. My father stood up. He came to his feet, fire bleeding from his neck and searing the ground in front of him. He walked directly to me.
“You're worthless, boy. You've never been good for anyone, not your mother, and not your friends, but you're my son. I won't let you die here now, but you may wish I had.” His words were frightening as he spoke them, gurgling and rolling with the flame that seeped from his wound. He was a demon. For the first time in my life, I knew fear. I knew what it was to have someone standing over me with all the power in the world at their disposal. The pain and the fear took me away then. I lost my grip on reality.
I woke hours later. The smell of roasted meat filled the air, and my body was filled with terrible agony. I crawled to my hands and knees and came face to face with the burnt out remains of what I took to be my father. It was difficult to tell since little remained of his body other than a blackened skeleton and few charred pieces of meat. In one hand he clenched a slender silver knife. The blade seemed to gleam to my sight, though no light struck it in the small house to which I'd tracked the old man. That knife was the exact article my employers had asked me to recover, and so I took it. I staggered the rest of the way to my feet. Nausea swept through me, and I fell back down to my knees and vomited, though it was not my supper I lost. Molten flame spilled from my lips and hit the wood planking of the floor before me. It burned through the boards in seconds, smoke sizzling up into the air.
Terror gripped me. What had happened the night before? I realized my clothes were mostly gone, burned away, and I suddenly recalled the exact events of my confrontation with my father. I ran my hands over my body, looking for some indication of the damage that should have been there. That is when I found the wound on my chest. It was fresh then, unsealed. I ran my finger along it, and the flesh parted, showing me the storm of fire that had taken up residence in my chest. I had become the demon my father had been.
