[ghost]: 200.Stories.Death for Hire.Chapter 1

     There's just something about weapons. Something that excites the mind with a titillating power offered nowhere else. The mechanics of war, the art of battle, the test of skill, and the beauty of carnage was but a happy afterseasoning to the discipline and power that was the meat that stole my hunger. I've always held weapons in all their forms in a somewhat arbitrarily high regard. I have long been bound to a fascination for projectiles, traps, explosives, chemicals, and vehicles that have been utilized into instruments of death, as precision innovations or crude ingenuity, and everything in between. But nothing, of all the countless universes I have entered, of all the nameless faces I have erased, nothing has ever drawn such passion and emotion from my soul as the arts of melee.
     The red drained slowly from my blade and dripped softly from its gleaming edge to join its masters puddle before me. The blue tinted sword was clean long before I moved to wipe away the blood, but still I wiped its cold, hard arm of steel; it seemed to me that the ritual served as something of a confirmation, a realization of the events, as if the mere act of wiping the blade clean meant the difference between fact and fiction - reality and imagination.
     I smiled. It had been a good hit. Swift, clean, efficient. By the time he had noticed I was even there he was too dead to care anymore. I wondered if he now could see the art in his death, the beauty of it. Now that he was no longer the unwitting subject of the cruel and fickle life and the physical binding that held his eyes securely within his own head and that allowed him no passage but where his feet could carry him. He was free of all that now. Could he now understand, or even see the workings behinds his masterful demise? Could he appreciate now the minute details, the gentle changes, the subtle flourish of the wistful scent that silently staggered forward as a mad dog, the sheer work that I had invested in his masterpiece?
     I left him there, bathed in his final glory, his body lying like a heap of stones, solid in stature but precariously formed. My escape was a simple matter of pulling blinds and closing doors. I walked almost leisurely from my subject,the rythm of my gait further reinforced by the confident knowledge of the truth. He would not be discovered for hours to come, all the while his slumped brazen figure etching itself into the ever flowing liquor of time. The power was intoxicating.
     I had learned through time and nerve-wracking experince the danger of claiming victory too hastily, but even so, I knew I had done well, and as the hallways drifted past me, each passing door served only to strengthen my confidence. It had been the perfect hit, and I was proud.
     "They know." A shantily clad old man interrupted my thoughts as I walked across the impressive front yard. My curiosity overpowered my obscurity, and I turned toward him inquiringly.
     "They know, and they won't stand for it. And they're coming." The mans voice bounced through tones and intonations, each word spoken fast and fleeting, as if he had to catch the words before they slipped through his grasp and beyond his reach forever. His eyes flittered around behind his leathery face so rapidly that it was a wonder he saw anything at all. Perhaps he didn't, but he knew that demons chased him, and he could hear them drawing closer, until he was screaming to hear himself - or hesitating, when he spoke scarcely above a whisper for fear of reminding them of their prey.
     "They're coming." His wild eyes seemed to see nothing as they ceased their tireless flight and rested into an eerily silent tone. He moved on after a time to disturb a lady and her dog. She greeted him with unmasked reproach, and I dismissed him as a madman, some poor sod groping fruitlessly for his very sanity, having fallen into the crack between reality and imagination.