Death Valley
November 1st, 1am
Trapped.
I looked at the stark landscape, which was
bathed in bright white light from the full moon.
It had come to this, then, the final standoff
and battle that I had sought to avoid the entire time. Despite my urgent need to remain in the here
and now, I could not help but think wistfully of a month ago, when everything
had seemed so bright and perfect. I
wished that I could return to that time and live it over again. I would have made very different choices. I could have been spending time with Gwen,
sipping wine and reveling in her company, but for that matter, I would rather
be anywhere else than here, trapped in Death Valley.
Apropos name, that.
Alas, time is a one-way street.
My thin jacket was not able to keep off the
desert night air, and I faintly shivered as I looked at my executioners. For the longest time, as we had grappled and
fought at a distance, I had given them aliases to keep them straight, and I
still thought about them in those terms.
It had seemed like a game at the time, and I never believed that it
would have ever come to anything like this. For that matter, I hadn't even been
sure that it was real at all.
I stared at them, and they looked back,
varying degrees of amusement and satisfaction on their faces. Snide stood in front of me, gently fingering
the ring on his left hand. Demon was to
my right, his hair slightly mussed from the faint breezes, grinning
maniacally. Serene was on my left, her
radiant beauty marred by the fact that I knew that she was going to kill me in
the next few minutes.
My curse tried to get my attention. Click, click, click. I ignored it for now, as it had done me no
good so far.