Ezekiel
I circle him because that's what you do when you're a predator, and the other animal refuses to move. You test the air, find the angles, pick through seam after seam like someone untying knots until one gives.
He stands where he stands: a blot on ruined tiles, everything else motion and smoke and the stuttering afterimages of my own speed. He doesn't brandish a blade or sling a lash. He simply breathes, and breathing becomes a presence heavy enough to press against my chest. Men and women have died in the corners; the pews are splintered, stained glass looks like cracked eyes. Candles gutter and restart like lungs. This place smells like old prayers and new blood.
I am the line. I am the strike. My heartbeat has learned to be a metronome of violence; my legs remember the equation of distance and momentum even before my mind catches up.
He tracks me the way the moon follows tides. No matter how fast I flit; no matter how many arcs I stitch across the light, his eyes follow. Blue. Bright, sea blue that looks at you as if you were a curiosity, and it had all the time in the world.
That unnerves me more than the posture should. Hunters know when prey looks back.
I start smaller: jabs, feints, little stitches of speed to read his reflex. He moves so little to make my muscles ache from wasted motion. He blocks what he wants to block, sidesteps what he chooses, or simply breathes, and my attack falls into the smallness of the space between his intention and his will.
I feel sweat travel, a cold bead sliding down the side of my neck. Okay. Okay. Think.
If he can look me in the eye at any speed, something about his perception—his gaze— ignores my motion. I've seen eyes like that before: trackers, lock-on systems. But this is no machine's aim. This is… presence.
I came up with an idea: deny him the gaze, obscure his vision, and buy myself a blind second to strike.
There's a pew nearby, oak and heavy, scored by a hurried worship. I pick it up with two hands and heave. It is clumsy, slow. It is also loud, too — that's the point. The pew sails like a rough prayer. I set my feet, wind the crowbar across my shoulder, and launch myself into a drop from the rafters: a crushing arc meant to finish the slow god.
For half a breath, I feel like I've tricked the world. The pew fills his field of vision; he blinks as a man interrupted. I fold the arc, the crowbar a pendulum, and I intend everything to end on a clean final note.
His hand catches the pew.
I don't mean "He grabs it." He intercepts it with a single flat palm as if the bench were a paper bird. The oak doesn't ricochet. He raises the pew and slides it up like a kite and uses it to shield himself from my crowbar.
Wood splinters. Shrapnel — bright, jagged teeth — fries the air. Splinters rain. I expect one to nick him, to rake, to pry. They fall like a hail of cheap rain, and he steps through them.
He doesn't step aside; he steps through them because he can see them all.
His hand — long, clawed at the tips like a history of taking — reaches for my face. The motion is theatrical, slow, and deliberately measured. He is toying. He wants me to feel the seconds between his fingers and my skin stretch like a noose.
I taste adrenaline and lightning in my mouth. I arc hard, redirecting with a quick flare of current that launches me back a breath. I widen the gap by a meter. My lungs burn with the speed.
His voice comes soft and dry, like a man speaking into a cathedral where everyone sighs. "You're… fast." He sounds genuinely indulgent, like someone inspecting a rare clock. "I can tell you're young. There's a rawness — a brightness. I like it."
My brain does the thing that always betrays me: it answers questions I don't mean to. "Why are you just standing there?" I snap, the crowbar still warm in my hands. "Why let me dance like this?"
He smiles a little. It's not a smile that shows teeth so much as it is a patient unfolding. "Because there is an art to watching," he says. "Because seeing the creature sniff at the world — that is entertainment. Also, because you are interesting. Because you sent friends rushing to a cathedral and they still died."
The words land like thrown stones. The cathedral. Dominic. The others. I can feel the edges of the old failure—like a blister reopening. My knuckles whiten.
"You were at the cathedral," he says, moving through my memory as if flipping pages. "You weren't there when he burned, Ezekiel. Why?"
My mouth fills with possibilities I can't swallow. Tell him I was late. Tell him I couldn't move. Tell him I was saving someone else. Tell him I watched and did nothing and measured the shape of my cowardice to see how it fit. None of it feels like an answer.
I say, short, to keep from arguing with the thing that watches, "I'm not a child of the cloth."
"Do you not believe?" he repeats, a question that is not an inquiry so much as a pendulum swinging toward a confession.
"I don't have faith. Religion works for other people," I say. "If there is a God, why does He let so many small lives be ruined? Why would a god make children hungry and mothers cry for no purpose?"
He tilts his head like that's the correct name for a painting and laughs — a sound without malice and therefore worse. "There is God," he says calmly. "There is God in a place you won't like imagining. But what you call suffering has purpose. Pain is a kind of refining. The poor are tempered. The broken are readied. We do not take for malice; we harvest for a design greater than your small sympathies."
The word "harvest" slides into me like a winter chill. He keeps talking, and I find myself losing ground with every syllable because his logic is not shouted; it is patient, architectural. "Every life yields a grain of spirit. Those grains—" he gestures somewhere behind him in the nave "—are milked, concentrated, woven together. The energy becomes a ladder. The ladder builds strength. Satan does not slaughter for sport. He designs. He uses the spill of men to refill a sky that leaked."
My hand shakes. I thought this would be easier if I just hit until something broke. There is a wrongness to his logic, the way an arithmetic of murder tries to assert itself as benevolence.
"You mean to say he's building a heaven from corpses?" I say. The words taste like bile.
"He is building order," the demon corrects. "You call it paradise; I call it restoration. Look—" From yards away he raises a hand infront of me, and suddenly my vision is smeared with images, not from my eyes but like a film pressed into my head: a tide of pale lights drawn into a pulsing incubator, souls like fish funneling through a throat, a throne that drank and became larger, a sky rewoven with the thread of stolen spirit.
The pictures are not gentle. They are clinical. They are the demon's private slideshow of a census, and the result is monstrous: a world remade by the calculus of loss.
"If his machine reorders the cosmos," I say, trying to tear the picture in two, "he's committing genocide to get to his arithmetic."
"He is committing mercy," he says as though that were punctuation. "This is the mercy of those who decide the unworthy must be removed so the worthy may survive. A hard mercy. Beautiful in its certainty."
Beautiful. The word licks at something soft inside me, and the memory of hands I never reached is a live wire. The demon continues, steady as a metronome: "All will be reborn. Souls given another shape, another chance. Isn't it better than slow rot? Isn't it better than starving and screaming? At least this way there is purpose."
I want to punch. I want to rip the head from his shoulders and chain it to the rafters. But my hands are busy being hands that remember the time I could not save someone who needed me. I think of Dominic in the cathedral's blood, and my throat closes on itself.
"Your mercy is theft," I say. "It steals the right to choose. It crowns murder with a false name."
He laughs softly and low. "Choice is expensive. Choice requires resources. What is an unworthy choice but a drain on what could be better?"
His next words are a blade wrapped in velvet. "You killed people," he says quietly. "Why did you kill them?"
The accusation drops into the middle of me and sits like a stone.
I don't answer. I can feel the truth of every small sin — the things I did, the blood that stains my hands even when I didn't mean to take it — and the pressure of being judged by a creature whose job it is to pretend the world is fine cracks something open.
"You had reasons," he offers, as if he were tutoring me through a test. "You had pain. You had fear. You had orders. You had what you believed the world deserved. You took their lives and made the cosmos better."
"No," I say, and the one syllable is a landing. "There is no reason that counts for ripping a life away from someone else. Nothing can justify it. Not your plans, not God's scheme, not necessity."
He regards me like a farmer looking at an unruly sprout. "But what if every life you stole was accounted for? What if the souls you robbed went to feed a shape that would save others? Would your hands be clean then?"
I want to vomit. The argument smells like clay and old money. It reduces people to currency, and my stomach turns with the need to crush it.
"You reduce lives to ledger entries," I say. "You make murder into bookkeeping. That's vile."
He smiles, and his smile is nothing so much as a calendar flipping: inevitable. "Call it what you will. I call it mercy. I call it efficiency. He will remake a world where the hungry don't hunger because their hunger has fed the greater good. The ends will be a heaven of sorts. And you — with your gifts, your speed, your lightning— could stand at its gate."
At its gate. The offer is not hidden: power in exchange for complicity. The inhale of it is hot.
The demon's gaze is still fixed. Calm as a man at a winter window, he says, "You should want to grow into the kind of being who can accept that. You have the potential. You could be glorious. Imagine an ordered sky where no children die. Imagine your strength used to usher in that order."
I can feel something inside me wobble; sympathy is a shape of hunger. My own life has been a collection of small wrong solutions. But I think of a child's fingers in my hand the night before the cathedral and how that child's small thumb was warm and trusting. I think of Dominic's laugh. You cannot build heaven by erasing the very hands that will remember it.
"You're asking me to betray everything I can't unsee," I say slowly. "To trade the people I failed for a lie of comfort. No."
He nods, satisfied with the friction he's created. "Then break me."
So I do.
I slam the lightning into myself and let it be my engine. I move because refusal alone is not a weapon. Speed is muscle memory. Anger is the fresh oil. I launch.
He watches me with the same casual amusement and raises not a hand but a thought. The room bends, perception slows; his stillness becomes the fulcrum. I am a comet, and he is the gravity well that tries to catch me. I strike, I slash, I try to find the seam where his philosophy is flesh.
He takes none of it as force. He absorbs, pivots, lets blows slide like rain off a robe. I rage, and the pew trick, the crowbar, the shard-spray all become a ritual of missed chances until I am the one who feels like the missed thing.
At the end of the run — breath ragged, skin burning with electrical taste — I pause. My chest is a drum. My crowbar thuds against the marble. He still stands, limned in blue, like a stain on a clean cloth.
"It won't make you kind," he says finally. "It will make the world efficient."
It tastes like ash. I charge again.
There is no epiphany in that renewed motion. Only a promise: I will not become his accountant of souls. I will not be the man who weighs human life and signs away the poor. If the world must be broken to be remade, then I will be the wedge that tries to tear the machine rather than grease it.