What a terrible night to be sent to hell.

How else could Apollo think it? With the chaos outside, the helicopters and police cars zooming past their little room in the apartment complex. How else could he think about, as he took his eyes off drawn curtains and the window and put them on Aenea. Seeing her was enough to annoy him. To make him afraid, too. It was a weird feeling, almost like disgust but not quite.

She was riding up the walls.

Crawling on them. Her body slammed against the side of a wall, then took two steps up, stopped to bang itself again, then went all the way to the ceiling. Her neck should have snapped with how hard she hit the ceiling.

It didn’t. Or maybe it didn’t matter that it did. When she was done hitting her head against the walls, she started floating. That was about the time Apollo began to get the chills. It was about the time, that all around him, he was beginning to see the small auxiliaries again. That was the way he described this new strange phenomenon of his, hell-seeing. Because that’s what it was.

He saw small imps, and tiny insectoids. He saw slug or rather, the jelly-like serpents that resembled slugs floating in the air. He saw hell, the creatures of hell, manifest around him.

They weren’t real. Though he still nodded his head and slapped his temples to make sure.

They weren’t real, he confirmed, when he tried touching one of these creatures and his palm fazed through.

Aenea was still floating. Her body turned and twitched with torque and speed that should have snapped her spine and bones.

This was about the time when Apollo began to feel the chills. She stopped twitching for a moment. She took a deep breath. The small monsters around Apollo disappeared, he looked for a moment, it was all too fast. Then she slammed her head against the carpet floor. Again. Again. Again. Like machine gun fire. He rushed to her, trying to grab her by the neck. She broke his grip (and he was putting that inhumane force, to boot). He tried again. Nothing. She kept going, until her skull was cracked open and her teeth rearranged. The floor pooled her blood in a crater left by her self-harm.

He noticed she wasn’t even awake. Her eyes were closed.

“Cut it out, you fucking idiot,” He moved his arms to hold her own. She hit him with the back of her head, the force on the center of his head was enough to launch him to the wall. Another dent. This one was shaped to his own body.

“Holy shit,” He said. She started rolling, stopping, and bashing her head in even intervals.

And Apollo, still weak, famished, struggled to stand up. His blurred vision took time to realign itself. She was going everywhere, jumping everywhere. The cross in the hotel room flipped upside down, then flew out the window. The holy bible in the drawers near each bed burned to a crisp. He didn’t care to help her anymore; instead, he made sure to walk into the kitchen and walk around the room (as she was flying, which made it harder than he wanted it to be) and grab every knife and blunt object away from her.

Her eyes opened wide. They were green and jumping wildly from each degree of vision. Then they rolled back, not before she flipped herself and slammed her body face-forward into the side of a wall. The hung picture frames fell.

“Jesus Christ,” The words made Aenea scream. The scream made him jump. “Well, fuck,” Apollo said.

He tried calling the Leper. He tried calling Dion. Both were busy.

“I don’t know how to help you,” He said. She wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even awake. She levitated, off a few inches from the floor, before her body moved straight to the ceiling. Then she laid up there, like a bat clung to the cave walls.

He stood up on the bed and raised his hands and tried prying her off the popcorn ceiling. He felt his shoulders strain, felt the muscles in him flex and the burn enlarge and engorge around his trapezius. He sweat and huffed. His wrists began to hurt, and he yelled, as if he was trying to move a fucking mountain.

And all of a sudden she fell.

He let go, it threw him off balance, and he fell off the bed.

She landed straight onto the mattress with a thud, face down. The blood was all across her face, she bled from her mouth and her nose and a little on her eye. He stood and leaned over her. Apollo put his ear against her mouth.

Aenea breathed. Gently.

“Holy fuck,” Apollo said. “Or, shit, I guess unholy fuck,”

And then he heard his cell phone ring.

In the shock, while his face still carried that expression of curious horror, he almost ignored the call. When he came back to it, he shook his head.

“Don’t hang up,” He took off his coat. He scoured his pockets and fumbled the phone and answered it, with cupped hands as if the very word of Christ himself was being delivered unto him.

“You could have been quicker on the dial, you know that?” Apollo said.

"Mmm, I apologize," The Leper said. His voice was muddled with static and judging by how the leper screamed, it must have been across a room. Though he sounded…amused. Behind him, something else yelled with a voice indiscernible from animal or human. Or even demon.

"She's sick," Apollo said.

"Who?" The Leper asked. "The girl?"

"You should remember her name, you’re the one who brought her to me," Apollo walked back and forth. "Aenea, yeah. She's sick. The type of sick that only people like her can get, you catch my drift?"

"Oh my, so she's awoken. Is she in the middle of it?" He asked.

Apollo leaned over the side of the bed where Aenea lay hunched over. Blood dripped down her mouth, he wiped it off with a small cloth.

"More like she just got out of it. She’s unconscious now,” Apollo said. “It’s really hard to deal with someone in the middle of being possessed. Really, really hard. You could have warned me or given me some proper procedure, you know that? Exorcisms don’t really work on witches.”

“Because exorcisms only work on people who actually want the demon banished,” The Leper said. “Instead, witches welcome them,”

"She didn’t look like she welcomed shit,” Apollo said.

"So she’s through it, at least?"

“As far as I can tell,” Apollo said.

"Good, she’ll be asleep for a while.” The Leper said. “So kill her,”

"What?" Apollo rose from the bedside.

"Kill her," He repeated. The same creature screamed in The Leper’s background. It sounded like a dying groan, guttural and terrified. "She's become a liability. She was good when she was still human, but now she's just more trouble,"

"Kill her?" Apollo asked. "Why?"

"Because she's a witch bedding with a demon and you're a demon hunter? What else must be said of a man and his duty," He said. "She turned. I thought she wouldn’t, she didn’t seem gifted enough for it. But she did."

“Didn’t the Vatican watch over the old man? We can do that again,”

“And watching over him was trouble enough,” The Leper said. “If she’s awoken I’m going to guess that so have the others, right?”

He didn’t want to answer. “…Yeah, as far as I can tell, yes, they have. All of them now,”

“That’s too much trouble. That’s six times the trouble the church wants,”

“Are you speaking for them? I didn’t know you were their lawyer,” Apollo said.

“As far as you’re concerned, I might as well be God,” The Leper said. “Kill her, then kill the rest. Wipe them out.”

“Have you forgotten I still need her. She’s got influence that I can use to make sure mine and Dion’s head stay firmly on our necks,”

“If you can wipe them all off, that might be good enough for the council,” The Leper said.

“I’m not doing that,” He nodded his head and wagged his finger to the imagination of the Leper that was in his head. “I'm not fucking killing her. There’s no reason to,”

“I expected that of Dion, but of you?” He said. “Aren’t you the mad dog of Havenbrook? Aren’t you the man more interested in finishing a mission rather than the methods used to finish it? What’s going on? Did your vigor run out already?”

“You’re not exactly compelling,” Apollo said. “So what if she’s awoken? So what? I’ve dealt with worse, and I don’t think she’s the type of person that would-”

“What type of person is she? She shares her father's blood. She is that of which is touched by Mammon, Devil of Greed. She’s power hungry, isn’t she? She’s a company owner by her own right. Her will seems to imply that she too, is of that nature that makes men mad. That ambitious nature,” He said. “She’ll go insane with blood lust, just like any hungry Vicar does. But she won’t stop when she gets it, like most Vicars do. It’s a degenerate temperament that witches have and she seems to tick every box that makes that temperament worse. I’m telling you from experience, she should be killed.

"And I’m telling you from experience that sometimes people change," He said. “And if they don’t change, they at least realize some goodness in them,”

“Are you sure you’re not Dion,”

“Go fuck yourself,” Apollo yelled. He wanted to hang up, he had his finger hovered over the button. Then he sighed. He put the phone begrudgingly over his ear and whispered. “Just…please, give me some help here. Advice, how does this end, for everyone?”

"With tragedy, I’m assuming,” The Leper laughed. It made his blood boil. “The reality is, the more Wolfe's you kill, the stronger the pack becomes until there is one. Only one. There is nothing else to, take from that what you will," The Leper said.

Apollo rubbed his hair. He moved it behind his ears.

"When did you gain some sense of morality, anyway?" The Leper mused. “Don’t tell me. You found god-!”

Apollo hung up the phone. He threw it onto the chair and looked onto the bed, where Aenea was face down, sleeping soundly on the torn mattress. The blood had stopped. She was already healing, a healing factor akin to his own. Unnatural.

Where’s the nobility in killing you in your sleep?

Nobility. That was a word he never used. That was a word belonging to the other half in his head, the vernacular of that man, Astyanax.

He shook his head.

Where’s the nobility in taking your chance to live? To make a choice? To fight.

He waited on the bedside, looking at Aenea, biting his nails. He had taken some sheets laying on the floor and put them over her. He took one, in particular, and looped it into a knot that he used to tie her left leg to the bedpost. Fetishism aside, it wasn't a bad plan. It looked bad (a little creepy, to be honest), but wasn't so bad at all. It stopped her from floating as much like a tie hot-air balloon. It stopped her from bashing her head, and for a while, he thought things were good. His coat was on the floor, his sleeves were up to his elbows, and he bit his fingernails and watched Aenea closely from a safe distance.

It had been a while since the last outbreak of her crazy-shit antics. It was the type of waiting that was almost as bad as times of maddening chaos, because waiting can often be maddening in itself. However, she hadn’t moved. Not. An. Inch.

Until now.

Until she jiggled a bit, she started shaking left to the right. It looked like she was in the middle of a nightmare, a normal one this time around.

Then she breathed out heavily. Her eyes wide open. She breathed, the sweat came pouring afterwords. Then came the crying, not emotional by any means, but pained-driven crying. She gasped with sharp breaths in and out, like a boxer in the ring.

Apollo ran to her side and cut her bondages with a knife. She curled into a ball.

"Are you okay now?" He asked.

A stupid question. She was writhing in pain. Though he had no means to help her and no means to take it away.

She went into a state of chills, her body could not stop shaking.

"Hey, you can't fucking die on me." It wasn't as selfless as it sounded. He very much needed her alive.

She rolled the other way, still balled up. She yelped, at last, in agony.

Her muscles tensed, the large vein engorged itself on her neck. Then it was over. She leaned back, mouth open, sweating.

She grabbed the sheets and brought them up to her nose-line.

She looked to Apollo, he looked to her. And her eyes faded back to their corners, she sank back to sleep. Normal sleep, if there was such a thing to these people.

It’s done?

Apollo scanned her, carefully going from her face, to her feet. He stopped, midway, at her waistline. A spot of red appeared. Then another, like rain hitting clothes. And like rain, it began to pool.

Her blanket was sticky, the adhesive was bright red and coming from her stomach.

She wasn’t giving birth. It wasn't anything that holy.

"What happened?" He asked her.

But it was too late. She could not talk, could not even muster the strength to think about talking.

She sighed and breathed in even strokes and fell to sleep. Deep, good, sleep.

And he looked her, she almost appeared happy. And her sleep almost resembled death.