The demon sat back on its haunches and watched, fascinated by this whole birthing process. The ritual it had begun had been interrupted by the two intruders, but that was no matter. It could finish the ritual later, as soon as the baby was born. It wouldn’t work to complete it until the victim was ready, so it would be better to wait. This baby didn’t look like it was in any great hurry to be born. Actually, given the details of where it was about to begin its life, the decision to come late was a rather good one for the baby’s sake.
The baby would sure have a quick entry and exit from the world. It would take its innocence immediately, before it had the chance to become corrupted by earthly sin. Taking a blameless, innocent soul was always a victory, and he felt about to be victorious now. The blood of an innocent was sure to sharpen any spell and take it to the limits. The trouble was, there weren’t many innocents left in the world. His colleagues on the sin team had been victims of their own success. Now the pure material, needed for only the most powerful spells, was very scarce, almost extinct.
But this one would do very nicely. It might even bring her up to the altar stone itself and kill her. It could do it right here, of course, but something about returning to the original scene just seemed so damned poetic.
He wasn’t an expert on human births by any means, but this one seemed to be going particularly slow. And he was getting impatient. He could remove the child forcibly-but that would end the innocence. But if something was wrong and the baby killed her mother, that would destroy the innocence as well. He’d just have to be patient and watch very closely, he thought. It wouldn’t be unlike the mother to try to trick him again. Of course she was probably in too much pain and under too much stress to even think of a plan, let alone use it. But still, something told him not to ever trust this woman.
He watched as the woman screamed in pain and tried to control her agony with some sort of regular breathing method, which her son was coaxing her through. It was almost comical. He wondered why these people feared hell at all-there seemed to already be so much pain and suffering on the earth that there really didn’t need to be a hell, in its humble opinion. No, take that back, it thought. Humility was definitely not one of its trademarks. And neither was patience, for that matter.
Fortunately, fascination was one of his strong suits, and he had to admit he was fascinated by this birth concept. He’d seen and had taken part in the end of countless numbers of lives. But this was the first time in all of these millennia that he had ever seen a new life being born. This was something different, worthy of study.
No, he wouldn’t rip the infant from the womb, though he was quite capable of doing so. Instead he would wait this thing out and see how it went. He expected that as an added bonus, she’d learn about suffering as well. The mother would surely suffer when her newborn was killed. She might be able to keep it together until she learned that the demon was going to steal her son’s body, and that she would have to take him home and care for him as her own child.
That moment would show what she was made of. She might react in any of a few different ways. She might just blank the entire incident from her mind and pretend her son was normal, and that none of this had happened. She might refuse to accept the boy as her son, or try to put up a fight, in which case he’d simply kill her and be done with it. Or she might just lose her mind, which might make for an interesting scenario of its own.
It really didn’t matter how she reacted. It would all work out the way the demon wanted it to. It would be able to inhabit the body of this boy for as long as it wanted, and return to the earth. When it became tired of being human, it could return to its demonic form again and pick up exactly where it had left off. Now that the meddlers were permanently trapped here in hell’s waiting room, it had nothing left to worry about.
Now all it had to do was wait for the baby to be born. And from the looks of it, the wait wouldn’t be long.