Chapter 2 - The Fire That Lives

The door exploded inward in a rain of splinters.

Time slowed.

Max didn’t hear the crash so much as feel it, a deep percussion in his chest that snapped him from despair to raw, adrenal clarity. The air thickened. The candle flames around the ritual circle hissed and flared. Shadows stretched unnaturally as two shapes burst into the room.

He moved before thought. Years of emergency drills, of breaching burning buildings and navigating collapse, kicked in like muscle memory. His body didn’t wait for permission.

The younger attacker hit first – a blur of speed and violence, knife glinting in the yellow motel light. He came in fast, low, blade already swinging toward Max’s throat.

Max pivoted sideways, the blade slicing the air inches from his jugular. He threw himself forward, shoulder driving into the man’s ribs. They slammed into the small table beside the bed, sending the brass ritual bowl crashing to the floor. Whiskey and blood-scented candlewax scattered across the tiles.

They fell together, a tangle of limbs, furniture, and fury.

Max grunted as a knee smashed into his ribs. He tasted copper. The attacker was fast, trained, efficient but Max had size, weight, and desperation. He gripped the man’s knife wrist with both hands and twisted. Bones cracked. The blade clattered to the floor.

Then came the struggle. Elbows. Knees. Grunts of pain and exertion. The man tried to roll away, but Max grabbed him by the collar and yanked him down, pinning him against the floorboards.

The room was chaos. The overturned table lay splintered beneath them, one leg jutting into Max’s ribs. Candlewax slicked the tile, mixing with blood and pooling into slippery patches. Max's knee skidded against it as he shifted, and the movement sent a jolt of panic through his spine. He nearly lost his grip.

The candle flames – some still standing, others shattered and guttering – flickered wildly, casting monstrous shadows across the walls. The ritual circle had been smeared in the struggle, symbols broken, ash dragged in wide arcs beneath flailing limbs.

Max’s back slammed against the mattress. The attacker twisted violently beneath him, coughing blood, eyes wide with fury. They rolled again, locked in that frantic, animal tangle, until Max ended up on top. He pinned the man with one forearm and reached out, fingers brushing the hilt of the folding knife.

He grabbed it.

And then paused.

The man beneath him wasn’t some faceless monster. He was young. Barely older than Liz. Blood streamed from his lip where Max had elbowed him earlier. His face was pale, eyes unfocused—not with malice now, but with something close to fear.

Max hesitated. For one second.

That was all.

The man twisted, tried to push up, lips parting in a silent snarl. Max didn’t think. He brought the blade up in a wide, clumsy arc and drove it into soft flesh.

There was resistance. Then give.

The blade sank in just beneath the collarbone, angling up. The attacker jerked, mouth frozen in a gasp. Max felt hot blood burst across his knuckles.

A second stab – quick, messy, throat-level.

The younger man collapsed under Max’s weight, limbs twitching. A wheezing sound escaped his throat, then stopped.

Max didn’t move.

For a moment, there was only the sound of his own breathing – harsh, ragged, wrong. His arms trembled. Blood was everywhere. On the floor. On his hands. In his mouth.

His stomach twisted. He stumbled back, slipped, caught himself on the bedframe. The room spun. The stench hit him next – blood, piss, the acrid stink of fear.

He had killed a man.

Not in theory. Not in imagination.

He had killed a man, and the body was still warm.

Max staggered to the corner and retched, bile burning his throat. The room swam in nausea and noise. Somewhere in the chaos, the other man – Scar – was circling. Watching. Waiting.

But Max couldn’t think past the corpse at his feet.

He’d just murdered someone.

And it didn’t feel like survival.

It felt like the start of something much worse.

…………………

The room had gone quiet.

Max crouched near the dead man, breathing fast and shallow, head swimming. The flickering candlelight made the blood look black.

It dripped from the man’s throat in slow, syrupy threads, pooling beside his head, soaking into the cheap motel carpet. Max watched it fall. Drop by drop.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

…

Time stretching unnaturally around the motion. His eyes locked onto the man's face. The eyes were still open, glassy. A wet rasp escaped the lips – a final, involuntary breath wheezing past severed vocal cords.

Max flinched. The sound would haunt him.

His hand still clutched the knife. It was warm. Not from his grip, but from the blood. The handle slick, sticky. The blade coated in a gelatinous film of gore that ran down his wrist in slow dribbles. He let it fall. It landed with a dull clink against the broken tiles.

Max backed away, hands trembling. One heel slid in something wet, and he went down hard on one knee. His palm struck a shard of broken glass, slicing deep. He didn’t feel it. Not yet. Just the wetness.

The air smelled like meat. Not cooked but ruptured. The copper tang of blood mixed with the bitter chemical stink of candlewax and piss. Somewhere in that stew was the faint trace of whiskey, leaking from the overturned ritual bowl. The scent was thick enough to taste.

He gagged and stumbled toward the far wall, one hand bracing against the flaking wallpaper. His stomach turned over, and he bent double as vomit hit the floor. Acid and bile scorched his throat. It splashed across his shoes and splattered into a dark, oily puddle that mixed with the blood already soaking the carpet.

He wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. His skin felt wrong – clammy, crawling, like bugs moved beneath the surface. A fevered sweat soaked his clothes, making the fabric cling to him in places.

The shadows seemed to shift when he blinked. The corners of the room stretched. The candlelight danced across the walls in mocking patterns.

Something about the silence made it worse.

He wanted the man to get up. To curse him. To move. Anything. But the body stayed still.

Dead.

Max staggered back again, his spine pressing into the wall. His hands were stained up to the elbows, a gruesome gradient of red to brown. The blood had already begun to dry in places, turning sticky and flaking in others. He tried to wipe it off on his jeans, but it only smeared more deeply into the denim.

It was so quiet he could hear his own heartbeat. Too loud. Too fast.

His hands were shaking. Not from adrenaline now, but something colder. Something sinking. He pressed them to the floor to steady himself and realized they were slick with blood. He wiped them on his jeans, only smearing it deeper. The coppery scent was in his nostrils, his mouth, under his fingernails. It wouldn’t come out. It would never come out.

He leaned back, staring at the corpse like it might suddenly sit up again. His mind refused to accept what he'd done. This wasn’t who he was. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t... this.

His body felt disconnected, floating. Numb.

Max's breathing was loud in his own ears, thunderous. Too loud. Too alone.

His eyes flicked around the room, to the door, to the broken remains of the table, to the smear of the ritual circle. No movement. No sound. Just the corpse. Just the blood.

His instincts prickled.

He turned his head, expecting the other attacker – Scar – to come charging. But the man was gone.

Gone?

He looked back at the doorway. Nothing there. The hallway beyond was empty.

He was about to turn away when he felt it.

A shift in the air behind him. A breath. The faintest sound – leather brushing cloth, the scrape of a boot on tile.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

Max turned.

Too slow.

Behind him.

Pain.

White-hot and instantaneous. A blade driven deep, right beneath his rib cage. Not a slice. A puncture. Fast. Deliberate. Expert.

Max gasped, mouth opening, but no sound came.

He looked down, barely able to move his neck. Blood poured from the wound in thick pulses. His legs buckled. His knees hit the floor. Then his chest. Then his face.

He landed beside the corpse he’d just made.

Scar’s footsteps retreated. No words. No finishing blow. Just quiet steps into the night.

Max tried to scream, but his lungs didn’t work.

He had seconds. Maybe minutes.

And then it would all be over.

…………………

Something shifted.

At first, it was subtle. Max couldn’t tell if it was blood loss or something else. The light around the room dimmed – not like a power outage, but like shadows leaning in closer. The candle flames stretched upward, burning blue. The symbols drawn on the motel floor began to glow faintly, pulsing in rhythm with something he couldn’t hear.

Then came the sound.

A high, shrill whine. Tinnitus, he thought at first. The aftermath of trauma. The world narrowing into silence.

But it got louder.

A pressure bloomed behind his eyes, pushing inward. His head felt like it was filling with wet cement. The shrieking in his ears turned metallic, like knives screeching down glass. His vision blurred. The air thickened, compressing his chest. It wasn’t just pain.

It was presence.

Something enormous had noticed him.

The corpse beside him twitched.

Then again.

Limbs jerked, elbows snapping out at impossible angles. The head lolled back, then yanked upright with a crunch. The jaw unhinged. Something moved inside it. Fingers – thin, black, alien – pushed out through the lips, trembling in the air like antennae.

The corpse convulsed.

It spasmed like it was drowning. Limbs flailed in sudden, violent jerks, striking the floor with sickening cracks. Fingers curled into claws, then snapped backward with audible pops. The corpse's chest heaved upward, as if something inside was sucking in its first breath but the ribs didn’t rise. They rippled. Collapsing and reforming in waves, like a sack of bones stirred from within.

Its eyes – once vacant – bulged. Blood vessels burst in crimson blooms across the whites. The pupils twisted into vertical slits, then melted away entirely, replaced with darkness that glowed from somewhere beneath the skull.

Then the corpse began to resist itself.

The muscles spasmed as if trying to eject something, like the flesh was aware it was being hijacked. The jaw clenched. The throat vibrated with a scream that never came. But the thing inside wouldn’t stop. It pressed forward. A wet, wrenching sound split the air as the chest cracked open – not neatly, but with shreds of skin peeling back like paper soaked in acid.

The corpse didn’t just transform. It was being devoured from within.

Its abdomen swelled grotesquely, skin stretching, veins pulsing black under the surface. Bones cracked from within. The ribcage groaned. Something inside was rearranging the body, stretching it from the inside out like a puppet being forced into new strings.

Its stomach split open – not a clean cut, but a rupturing, like overboiled meat. Steam poured out, thick and foul. A long, jagged shape began to emerge, crawling its way up the throat, bulging the oesophagus outward until it tore.

A new sound joined the ringing of the dreadful tinnitus. A chorus of whispers layered over one another, speaking words that didn’t belong in any language Max knew. Not language. Not sound.

Reality bent.

The thing inside the corpse forced itself through muscle and bone, like it was unfolding an abomination carved from human skin. Dark blue flame poured from its eye sockets. Flesh sizzled. The teeth shattered and were replaced by rows of jagged spines. The hands curled into claws, and the skin flaked off in burning pieces, revealing something charred and monstrous beneath.

Max couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.

The air had become iron.

The creature stood fully now, its new body twitching and stretching, reshaped by something ancient and wrong.

Max tried to crawl backward, but his limbs refused. His body no longer belonged to him.

The creature turned to look at him.

It didn’t blink.

It didn’t breathe.

And then Max said the only word he could manage.

"No..."

…………………

It slithered forward.

Not like a man walking, but something approximating the shape. Its upper half still bore the remnants of human musculature – broad shoulders and corded arms – but the green flesh was charred, cracked, glowing faintly from within. Four arms, impossibly jointed, flexed in unnatural harmony. Each hand ended in claws long enough to pierce bone. Blue fire bled from its knuckles.

The face had only hints of human anatomy left. A muzzle stretched forward into a warped, wolf-like snout filled with jagged, mismatched fangs. The eyes were glowing pits, burning a searing blue that made Max’s skin blister just to look at them. Black horns curved back across its skull like bone scythes.

From the waist down, the body twisted into something serpentine. Thick coils of scaled flesh slithered across the floor, pushing furniture aside like paper. Wherever it moved, the tiles blackened, warped, peeled upward in heat-blistered waves.

Its mouth opened – and Hellfire poured out, slow and steady, leaking from between its teeth like breath from a furnace.

Max screamed inside. But his body only trembled.

The heat hit him. Not in waves, but like a wall collapsing. Every nerve in his body screamed. Fire.

The motel room dissolved.

He wasn’t here anymore.

He was back in the hallway of their home. The wallpaper was peeling, blackened by smoke. He could hear the beams above him groaning as they warped in the heat. Firelight painted everything in a chaotic orange. Walls bleeding colour, shadows twitching like they were alive.

April was still inside.

“Max!” she had screamed, her voice hoarse and breaking. Somewhere beyond the kitchen. Trapped. She hadn’t sounded afraid for herself. She sounded afraid for Liz.

He remembered the smell first – the unmistakable chemical mix of burning drywall, melted plastic, and seared skin. Then the sound: the low, steady roar of fire consuming everything, drowning out thought. He ran headlong into it, through the collapsing doorway. Flames licked up his arms, peeling the skin from his forearms as he dove.

He found her behind the toppled bookcase.

April was half-conscious, coughing blood. Her left leg was pinned beneath the smouldering beam. He gripped it, screamed, lifted. He remembered her face: red, blistered, eyes locked on him.

“Get Liz,” she whispered.

But he didn’t leave. He wouldn’t.

He wrapped his arms around her. Her skin stuck to his. Her hair ignited.

The floor buckled.

The memory snapped away.

He never let go.

They had to pull him out with a crowbar.

He woke in the hospital three weeks later.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. The trauma wrapped around him like wet ash.

Max jerked violently in the present. The knife wound forgotten. The pressure. The heat. The flames around this thing. All of it screamed at his nervous system to shut down. The demon's heat ignited every pain nerve in his body. The old burns on his arms flared alive as if they'd never healed. His skin broke into blisters on contact with the air, flesh crackling, sweat evaporating instantly.

He could smell it – himself – burning again.

Blue flames radiated off the demon’s breath, scalding the floor in arcs. His blood bubbled at the wound in his side. His mouth tasted of smoke. He couldn’t scream. His throat had closed.

His eyes locked on the creature looming over him—this fusion of wolf and serpent, fire and darkness, radiating a power that did not belong in the world. A presence born of another realm.

And yet, it knew him.

Then the alien voice came.

It didn’t come from the creature’s mouth.

It came from inside Max’s skull.

A spear of thought, not made of sound but of force, tore through the marrow of his mind. Every memory spasmed. Every neuron caught fire. His ears didn’t ring – they collapsed. His vision blurred, his body spasmed like he’d been struck by lightning.

“Max. Jaeger.”

The name landed like a branding iron. He could feel it seared into his spine, carved into his ribs, echoed in the roots of his teeth. Something ancient had spoken it – not like it had learned the name, but like it owned it. Had always owned it.

Max screamed. At least, he thought he did. His mouth opened, but no noise came. Blood trickled from his nose. His right eye burst a vessel and turned red.

That was when he realized something was inside him. Not a presence in the room but inside him. Something massive. Something intelligent. Watching. Counting his heartbeats. Measuring his soul like a slab of meat on a scale.

Aamon.

The creature didn’t speak again with words. It didn’t have to.

Its clawed hand hovered above Max’s face, dripping heat, and the blue flames that coiled around it pulsed blue as if recognizing him. The serpent-coils of its body tightened. Smoke poured from its back like wings.

The voice violated his mind again.

“Your Contract will be fulfilled. Your soul is mine.”