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The hellhound.

“ Hellhound : A four-legged demon resembling a massive wolf with black fur and fiery eyes. Different cultures around the world have depicted hellhounds, leading us to believe they may have crossed over to our plane, possibly summoned by powerful sorcerers. Often described as the servants of Hell, or the devil’s. Hellhounds are lower demons (class-five) with little intelligence. They offer enhanced strength, muscle mass, and speed to the hosts they inhabit. They are fairly easy to contain and exorcise, but beware of their bite. (See words of banishment on page 298-299).”

-Extract from the State Exorcist’s Manual , edition of 2047.

DEDHAM, MASSACHUSETTS 2041 / UPSTATE NEW YORK, 2041

Since that first night when he’d lent me a sliver of his power to kill Arthur, the connection between my devil and me only grew stronger. My possession was undeniable, but my experience was so different from what they talked about in the news.

My demon wasn’t on a rampage, but he often took over at night, and I stopped fighting him at every step of the way. Sometimes, I even woke him from his slumber to share some things with him. He loved storms. He liked to walk under heavy rain as lightning cleaved the sky. I had gathered that water was a scarcity in Hell. We would go back to the dorm, drenched and shivering, but I could feel his contentment.

He was a ruthless monster, but he was a familiar one. And, against all odds, my protector.

I was still the odd kid at school. But on the few occasions when other students tried to bully me, I put them back in their place swiftly with strength borrowed from my demon. They stopped after that. I had the dorm room to myself since Arthur’s death, as nobody wanted to share a space with me. Even the rich kids threatening to ruin my future as soon as I left school for the real world had no sway over me. I knew I had no future. In a few years, my demon would devour my soul, and I would disappear.

“ You will not be entirely gone ,” my demon said one night as I broached the issue.

I was in my room, watching a documentary about the great oceans. I had said that I might never get the chance to sail at sea before he took over forever.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“ I will devour your soul, and in doing so, you will nourish mine and I will absorb you. You will become a part of me until the day I die .”

I sat up in bed. That was new knowledge. He’d never admitted such a thing before.

“Will I be conscious?” I asked, bemused.

Forever stuck in the back of his mind? The thought was harrowing.

“ Not as you are now. You will not think outside my consciousness. But who you used to be will affect who I become. We are all one in the grand scheme of things. One great all, divided into beings who experience life across a multitude of worlds. In this life or the next, we always come back as one. ”

I laughed nervously. “Okay, you lost me there.”

“ All you need to know, little one, is that you do not have to fear what is coming. You will not disappear. Not really. And through me, you will live centuries more before death claims us, and we can rejoin the great all .”

I shook. This was something other than the bleak future I had painted for myself in recent years.

“The human souls you have devoured before me… are they in me, too?” I asked.

“ Yes. They are a part of me. They… changed me. Strengthened me. We, travelers of worlds, cannot stay unchanged. ”

I brought my hand to my chest, as if I could feel the other souls close to mine. I slept fitfully that night, terrified and yet awed by the idea.

The end of the year approached fast, and I made it through the exams. The school closed for summer break, and my father wondered what to do with his unwanted son once again.

The therapist at school had ruled me asocial and perturbed. My father used it as the perfect excuse to get me as far away as possible from him and his new family, and he sent me to summer camp for troubled teens.

Camp Second Chance was in a forest in upstate New York, far away from modern civilization. As soon as the bus arrived at the big wooden house that would be our home for the next six weeks, the camp counselors took all our phones and electronic devices away. They locked them up in a large safe in their office. As it was a camp for troubled teens, most didn’t accept their fate quietly. I walked around the property to distance myself from the ruckus. At fifteen, I was one of the oldest ones, except for a handful of other kids.

The house sat near a lake in the middle of the forest. And in the lake itself was a small island with what looked to be a ramshackle cabin and tents. The setting was actually great. They could ask me to move here forever, and I wouldn’t mind. The birds sang in the trees, and the smells of nature were refreshing after my brief stay in New York City. I was eager to explore, but the counselors called us to be sorted into the dorms.

The dorms for the boys were cabins with bunk beds separated from the main house, where the girls stayed. There would be no mingling at night. As expected, they put me with the other older boys. Two were sixteen. We eyed each other, wary, wondering who might pose a threat. I wasn’t very tall for my age, and so they automatically disregarded me. I didn’t care, as long as they kept out of my way.

My demon was dormant. He’d let me deal with the squabbles of children, as he much preferred to sow discord with the adults. I knew that by the end of the summer camp, most counselors would come to regret spending weeks cooped up in the forest with us.

By the very first night, one boy tried to steal my pillow and blanket. He thought I would just accept my fate quietly. I dragged him out of bed by the ankle with ease and he flopped on the floor. When he tried to get back up to fight me, I rolled him on his belly and put a foot down between his shoulder blades. No matter how hard he tried to get up, he couldn’t. The others laughed but didn’t intervene. I let him go once he had calmed enough. Later that night, he tried to punch me in the face while I slept. But my demon took over long enough to kick him in the balls. The boy whimpered in the dark for ten minutes. After that, they all left me alone.

The idea of the camp was to keep us busy doing things in nature long enough to ‘tame the beast in all of us’, as the chief councilor liked to say. It worked well enough for the other kids. But he didn’t know that no one could tame my beast. During the day, we had different activities, like building wooden bridges over the river, making stairs out of stones, and lighting fires to warm our survival shelters in the forest. By nightfall, we were meant to be too exhausted to do anything but fall asleep early. And, mostly, it was the case.

Except the teenagers had an unhealthy obsession with demons and Hell. It was with growing discomfort that I realized it early on during summer camp. They discussed the videos they saw and the exorcists who were becoming famous before going to bed. They argued about what attributes a demon could give them while I stood nearby. Apparently, people had found a way to contain demons in their hosts.

One of the oldest kids said he knew it could be done. He’d seen a cousin tattoo the symbols on someone’s skin. And after being possessed, they’d grown stronger and quicker—unstoppable.

I listened with one ear but dismissed all their talks for children’s antics.

Until it wasn’t.

The other kids in my dorm had taken the habit of sneaking out at night to reach the island on the lake, where they traded stories while sharing snacks, cigarettes, and booze they’d stolen from the adults.

It’s during one of these nights that my demon woke me up.

“ I smell Hell. ”

I had been sleeping but came awake as soon as I heard him.

“Wh—what?” I mumbled in the dark.

The cabin was empty except for me.

“ There is the faint aroma of my world in the air .”

My heart hammered against my rib cage and a cold sweat covered my body as I recognized that smell from the night my mother had tried to kill me. I could taste it on my tongue. Sulfur, I would come to learn years later. The atmosphere in Hell is choking with it.

“What does it mean?” I asked, panicking.

My demon hummed. “ It means someone opened a passage to Hell nearby .”

Just like my mother did years ago. Who knew what would crawl out of Hell this time and set up residency in another kid? I ran out of the cabin without taking time to put my shoes on.

The island was at the other end of the lake, far enough that the councilors slept peacefully in the main house, unaware that some teenagers were up to no good.

As I reached the shore, I realized that they’d taken the old boat, and the canoes were chained on the shore. I didn’t hesitate; I jumped into the lake with my clothes on. The water was freezing for a warm summer night.

I swam as fast as I could and reached the island in a minute. I dragged myself out of the water through mud and reeds.

Three of my bunkmates stood around the fire, screaming nonsensically as the fourth one sank his teeth into the last kid’s shoulder.

It took me a second to take in the scene. There was a rough circle made of salt, crisscrossed by a giant pentagram and other symbols. In the center was a dead animal. I recognized it as the camp’s cat, Panther. He was supposed to manage the mice, but we all fed him scraps in secret and he got lazy. His black fur shone in the firelight. Sorrow pulled at the strings of my bruised heart. He’d been the unwilling sacrifice, just as I had been the night of the House Shaw Massacre.

The boy being attacked was the oldest—the one who had tried to steal my pillow and blanket on the first day. He had strange markings on his arms and face. Fake tattoos written in sharpie. He’d done the ritual to summon a demon, but it looked like he wasn’t the one who got possessed in the end.

His attacker was the youngest of the group, a fourteen-year-old boy called Harrison. He must have been the most saddened by the cat’s death. The barbaric act had created a soul wound just deep enough to have called a class-five demon.

It’d been sheer luck they managed to summon one at all with their clumsy attempt at a ritual.

The oldest boy—I think his name was Kylan—twitched in the dirt. Harrison had finally let him go when I shouted to get his attention. His childish face distorted as he looked up at me. There was blood on his lips and chin, dripping onto his clothes. He let out a crazed laugh, almost like a hyena.

“ A hellhound ,” my demon said. “ Mindless beast. A lot of brute strength, but no brain. ”

I had no time to mull over the information as the possessed attacked. I dodged to the side, barely. Luckily, the other boys were escaping to the cabin.

“Take over!” I shouted to my demon as I ran away from the beast in human skin.

He hummed. “ No. This will be a little experiment. To speed up the mutations. Borrow my power and deal with it yourself .”

“You must be kidding me!” I said, crawling away from the hellhound who was trying to rip my calves to shreds with his nails.

Strength surged through my body as my demon shared some of his power with me. It was getting easier day after day to handle it; I was growing into the perfect host. Outwardly, I appeared as an average—if not sickly—teenager. My mutations were discreet, except for the horns that I had to file every two weeks. But inwardly, I was getting tough as the Devil. Strong, with thick skin, and faster healing abilities.

And so, when the beast came at me for the third time, I was ready to reciprocate. I grabbed a burning log in the fire and swung it at the demon. It took the hit head on and fell away from me. The hellhound growled with its borrowed voice.

“ You will have to kill it to send it back to Hell ,” my demon said. “ It will sever the connection between the host and the creature. ”

“Fuck…!” I breathed out, getting to my feet.

I couldn’t kill again, or it would turn into a habit!

Was this my life?

First, I killed my mother and brothers, then Arthur… I had blood on my hands, and I couldn’t blame it all on my demon.

Arthur… whose body they found in the river…

An idea came to me.

The hellhound wearing the skin of a boy rushed at me again, on all fours this time, and I allowed its momentum to take us both to the water.

I grabbed Harrison into a chokehold—one I had learned during wrestling classes at school—and put his head into the lake. He thrashed. He was strong, but I was stronger thanks to my mutations. I drowned the demon and the host alongside it.

“When… do I know… that the demon has returned… to Hell?” I asked between clenched teeth as the hellhound flayed in the water.

“ When they stop moving ,” my devil said.

The possessed stopped fighting back—or doing anything altogether.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said, dragging Harrison’s lifeless body out of the water.

I remembered that the brain could survive without oxygen for a couple of minutes at best before the damage was irrevocable. I dropped Harrison on his back and started chest compression, with only a vague idea of what to do. We’d learned how to administer CPR at school. His small chest felt warm under my hands, even with his clothes drenched in mud and lake water. He was burning up; Hell had left a thermal signature after the ritual.

I did mouth-to-mouth just as the other kids got out of the cabin.

“Get help!” I shouted.

Out of the three, only one of them ran to the boat. Kylan was still on the ground near the fire, losing blood at an alarming rate.

I kept on doing CPR until, at last, Harrison vomited water and coughed. I sat on my heels, relieved. The remaining two teenagers kept their distance, even as their friend came back to life. I couldn’t blame them. They’d just witnessed him tear a piece of flesh from Kylan’s neck.

The fire burned low, and the dead cat’s fur shone no more.

Kylan had stopped twitching.

“Fucking idiots…” I said, exhausted and wet to the bone.

Kylan didn’t make it. He was long dead by the time the counselors rushed to the island. Harrison survived. The paramedics, who arrived an hour later, took him to the hospital.

The police asked us questions. I told them the truth, minus the involvement of my demon. There was no point in lying; there were too many witnesses.

The next day, the camp closed, and we were all sent home. Journalists tried to reach me, but I was confined to my father’s new home in New York City. He took my phone away. Not that I cared; I had no friends.

But despite my father’s efforts to keep the whole thing under wraps, the State Exorcists came to find me by the end of the week.