Seven

Auros sighed as he knocked on the door in front of him, the bag heavy in his arm as he started his first job.

For a moment he wondered what was in the bag, but then decided he didn't need to know, didn't want to know.

Benny had her fingers in a lot of pies, everything from assassinations, small scale assaults to sandwich delivery. Her father would have been proud.

A small man wearing a pair of goggles came to the door, practically shaking with excitement.

"You Benny's boy," he asked.

Suppressing a shudder, Auros said, "Yup. Delivery boy extraordinaire. You got the money?"

The little man pulled out his phone and tapped it to Auros's, already out and ready. The screen lit up red, then blue, then finally green and fourteen hundred credits transferred to him.

"Thank you," he said as the door was slamming shut in Auros's face.

He sighed and looked at the stone and the second package at his feet. This package was marked with a black X...he knew what was in this bag.

Walking down the steps from the building, a man met him at the ground and waved his phone at Auros's waiting hand.

Ten thousand credits passed to him and he handed the bag to the new man, trying to turn away from what he knew was coming.

Whatever that little man was into must have been lucrative...probably didn't even realize it.

As he walked away, he heard the door smash open and then the screaming started.

Letting the shudder run through his body, he tried not to think about what he had just done...what he had done so many times before.

Benny was heartless, he thought darkly.

Then...if Benny was heartless...what did that make him?

He decided not to think about it...he knew exactly where those thoughts led.

Walking faster, he turned a corner and leaned against the wall, letting it root him to the ground for a moment.

The jobs Benny gave him...they paid well, very well, but they seemed like she was always trying to get something from him. Get him to cross some sort of line that maybe he hadn't known he even had.

Auros had done a lot of things he wasn't proud of, stolen things from people, planted falsified evidence on politicians, but he had never killed anyone. He hoped he would never need to.

He heard footsteps coming closer to him from around the corner he'd just come from and hid behind a dumpster nearby.

Fitting he supposed, trash by a dumpster.

A voice, deep and feminine, called out, "Auros, you come on out of there."

He didn't recognize the voice.

He stayed hidden.

The sound of wind suddenly assailed him, followed by intense heat, as though a blast furnace had opened up directly beside him.

The fire came afterward, blasting past him with enough force to push the dumpster, and him, back several feet.

"I didn't miss," the voice said, "you should just make this easy."

Thinking hard and fast, he put his hand on the building beside him and, with some effort, willed the material to shake itself apart into a hole just big enough for him to slip through. He wouldn't be able to cover his tracks, but he hoped he could get away before the person decided to come looking for him.

The house he'd tunneled into was nice, lots of crystal and gleaming stones covered every surface. Maybe a little gaudy for him, but it was clear that someone was trying to make the space luxurious.

It seemed empty, with lots of dust in some of the more out of the way spaces.

Lazy cleaners, he thought.

The heat from the hole grew more intense by the second, and a little singed hair was a good reminder that he was in some degree of trouble.

Looking around, he saw a staircase and ran for it, jumping over the banister and up the stairs, skipping steps as he heard the wall he'd cut through crumble under the power of the fire magic assailing it.

Hard laughter followed and without even looking, he gathered his energy into his palms and threw his hands behind him, using the strongest force spell he knew to launch himself through the first window he saw.

Covering his head as he passed through the glass, he rocketed across the street directly into the opposite window and mumbled, "Lucky."

A man in a leather mask and tattered robe stared in his direction in disbelief while Auros pushed himself off the floor.

"Don't mind me, trying not to die," he yelled as he ran down the hall the wall that would lead to the next house.

"Really hope nobody's behind these walls," he said as he focused his energy again.

When he was at his absolute limit, he put his hands on the wall and a long cylinder of magic erupted from his palms, widening until it could accommodate him, and cut straight through the walls of several buildings.

The magic was silent, a little trick he'd figured out when he was doing crimes for Benny, so he hoped that he could just sprint through and go unnoticed.

At the end of the line of holes he'd just cut, a man stood, unaffected by the remainder of Auros's magic.

Hooded and tall enough that he had to hunch just to stand in the building, the black clad man began walking through the holes toward Auros, each step radiating with energy that clawed into his mind, threatening to drop him to his knees.

He felt the seething hatred writhing inside him like maggots, crawling closer and closer to some part of him that he'd only just learned he had.

Then, another wave of energy, from the woman outside, burning excitement, like a drunk with a gun reeling with power.

The monster reached him, grabbing him with a metal gauntlet that moved like it was liquid, lifted him up and threw him through the window outside.

Why?

There was a perfectly good hole that didn't have shards of glass.

Oh wait.

They're trying to kill me, he remembered.

He landed on the road, skin peeling off as he slid.

His head was pounding from the mana of his attackers, his body screaming at him in agony.

A third person dragged a body behind him, the man he'd given the gun to, and dropped him beside Auros.

His eyes were glassed over, his face locked in an expression of pain beyond Auros's ability to understand.

Another him put his cheek on the dead man, making a mocking expression and laughing hysterically.

At least someone was having fun.

All three of his attackers now stood in a triangle around him, blocking his escape and the giant blocking the sunlight.

Though their mana had receded, the pain kept increasing, growing and burning right behind his eyes.

"So this is the Council's Guardian," the woman said, her pink and blue hair blowing in the wind as she raised her hand.

Sparks lit in her palm as she put it directly to Auros's head, burning him, though he barely felt it.

Right as she was about to cast her spell, end his life in a blazing explosion, the pain stopped...and so did everything around him.

A wind howled through the street, neither cold nor hot, some feeling he didn't know how to describe.

It cut through some part of him, peeling away something raw and vital.

Something human.

He saw her watching him from the stairs nearby, her white hair blowing with the wind, her eyes glowing so bright red he could barely look at them.

Her face seemed to be shifting from joy to anger to sadness to fear to excitement all at once, practically a blur if he wasn't looking directly at her...but when he did...when he forced himself to see her, to accept her into his vision, she was static, smiling softly at him.

On the surface, she was a girl, thin and tall, attractive...but that was skin deep.

Below that skin lay power beyond what he thought was possible to exist, greater than every mage in the city, maybe even the world.

Then...like a flash she was gone, and he felt a rush of something that terrified him.

Excitement.

Exhilarating and wild, a manic race of energy from his toes to his fingers to his head, making the world spin around him.

Another Auros caught him, held him steady and said, "The Gold and the Silver, their eyes are keys to the door!"

He didn't even process it, he couldn't think, he couldn't focus, the power...the power and the sudden craving he had.

The world crawled around him now, moving so slowly he might be able to count all the hairs on the fire mage's head before she had time to react.

He touched her and the world raced back into place as she flew, head over heels, slamming into the building behind her so hard she destroyed the wall and kept going.

The other two attackers looked at him and stepped back from him, sudden confusion and fear overwhelming them, invigorating Auros with new confidence.

Smirking coldly, he stepped forward, fast enough that the giant couldn't react, and gestured with his fingers upward.

The air around them congealed into a solid mass and cut straight through the giant's left arm. Before the arm fell to the ground, Auros looked at the third person, and the solid air cut through his leg at the knee.

Three seconds.

Three seconds had passed from when he'd stood, from when he'd moved.

Three seconds had been all it took to reduce these powerful people to nothing.

Auros's eyes flashed bright red and the light from his eyes covered the street, casting a crimson glow along the road and painting the buildings sickly ruby.

What had he done?

What was he?

Who was he?

A soft hand pressed gently on his head and cold water put out the fire raging in his soul.

A voice he thought he knew from somewhere far away said, "Auros...please."

From beyond the touch, the calm, he felt wind kicking up, as though massive wings were beating around him.

He reached out, terror at his nightmarish power racing through his mind, only for a second hand to take his and hold it.

"Do...don't...I don't want to hurt you...I don't want to hurt anyone," he sobbed, panicked and afraid.

"Auros, you could never hurt me...you're my Guardian, remember?"

"Yohai...Yohai...what...what did I do...what did I do," he asked, barely able to get the words past his tears.

"You took a step away from the person you were, darling," she responded, her mana traveling along her voice and into his heart.

It was cold, like ice on a burn, and it stopped the fear, and the panic.

"I hurt them," he whispered.

"You did," she said firmly.

"Did I...did I…"

"They're alive," she said. "They're not happy...but they're alive."

The light changed, sunlight beat back the burning light from his eyes as they slowly faded to black.

Soon the street was quiet again, an unnatural calm filling the very ground around them.

Auros clutched at his head with his free hand, feeling like he was going to pull the power out of him, rip the nightmare away, even if it killed him.

Yohai sat down beside him and pulled him closer to her, leaning and gently kissing his forehead.

His eyes began to close as his energy fell, exhaustion setting in.

He managed to look up at Yohai's face as he dropped into sleep, and he could swear her eyes were glowing a faint silver.

Silver eyes?

A door?

Had he opened the door?

Or had another him done it for him?