Categories > Cartoons > Class of the Titans

Devil in the Wishing Well

by Demenior 4 reviews

"So then Atlanta learns the trouble of making a wish on a cursed wishing well, even though she thought it was a joke. She was going to wish that she could go home to the city, but knew that would n...

Category: Class of the Titans - Rating: PG-13 - Genres: Angst,Fantasy,Romance - Warnings: [!] [V] [X] [R] - Published: 2008-03-22 - Updated: 2008-03-23 - 2712 words

0Unrated
The boys, as that was what they appeared to be, were walking along together, and people moved out of their way because there was just something different about them, something that made you step aside. One of the older, with a mop of brown hair and blue eyes, shoved his hands deep into his pockets.

“Anyone else really bored? I’m sick and tired of acting all good for the Leader, I mean, if Legend is coming, he’d have come already!” the boy complained. A few nodded.

“Well if we want to follow in our ancestors’ footprints, we have to obey when ordered,” a younger quoted from their many lessons.

“Oh shush you,” a blonde boy rolled his eyes. The boy who had first spoken suddenly gained a devilish look in his eyes,

“Anybody for some roof-jumping? I need a good stretch.”

“But it’s daylight! And we’re supposed to have a supervisor! You know how much trouble we’d be in if we were caught!” the younger cried.

The bored boy rolled his eyes, “You stick too closely to traditions. Remember Legend’s story? He had to disobey rules, besides, me and Jeff are the oldest, so we’ll take responsibility and supervise you.”

Jeff, the blonde, slapped a hand on the two youngest, “Whaddaya say, kiddos? Ready for some fun?”

“Sure,” the youngest of the group, Trent, agreed. He had bright green eyes.

“I-I won’t. It’s wrong. I’m going home,” the other youngling snapped. He brushed chestnut hair out of his eyes and turned on his heels and strode home. The rest of the boys stuck their tongues out at him.

The boys disappeared into an alleyway, and after listening and smelling with senses that weren’t entirely human, were sure no one would see them. They sprang into the air and pushed off the sides of the buildings, giddy with adrenaline and the thought of doing something forbidden.

Very soon they were leaping from rooftop to rooftop, laughing and cheering as they attempted stunts and maneuvers that their supervisors had always deemed ‘too dangerous’ or ‘silly’. The sheer joy of appreciating their special blood was exhilarating.

Trent came out of his flip, laughing, and pushed off the edge of the building under him. It was a fairly large gap between the buildings, and he felt a little nauseous at the thought of falling from so high up. But he lifted his knees, put his back into the jump as he’d been taught and landed properly, but the edge he came down on wasn’t as solid as he’d thought it was, and it crumbled under his foot.

He screamed as he started falling, trying to twist to get his feet under him. He’d never been good at landing, and they’d never been taught to land from a dead fall! The other boys had seen what had happened and were landing and shouting after him. No one knew what to do.

Someone slammed into Trent, and he felt strong arms wrap around him as the older used his powerful momentum to propel himself forwards and into the next building. He ricocheted off and landed nimbly beside the group of awe-struck boys. The stranger smelled calm, though calmly furious, and Trent was unsure why there was also a sent of tenderness in the smell.

The newcomer was tall and still very fit. He must still be working, Trent thought to himself. There was something about his eyes that made him seem even older then Leader, if that was possible. He still had thick brown hair and strong shoulders. There was a scar across his face, and suddenly all the descriptions from the stories ran through Trent’s mind. He gasped in shock.

“What are you kids doing up here? The humans can hear you from the street, and even with their eyes they’ll see you now,” the scarred man snarled, “are any of you actually supervising this?” he turned to the boy who had first suggested the idea, “how old are you boy? You can hardly be a day over thirty, and you think you’re old enough for any of this? You nearly had this boy killed!”

Legend had sent Trent down, and Trent was very aware of the fact others were getting in trouble because he was too curious and adventurous. At fifteen, he should only be exploring the lands around Home, not out learning the traditions and art of the job. Most say he took too much after his father. The other boys were trying to sink into their shoes.

“Y-yes, sir,” the accused boy stammered, “I-I know w-we’re young, b-but we were j-just bored. We-we like d-danger, l-like you!”

“Danger?” Legend laughed bitterly, “you think you know danger?”

Jeff’s eyes lit up, “W-will you tell us a story, M-Mr. Legend?”

Trent brushed orange hair out of his eyes, “Yes please, sir! Tell us one of your adventures! I bet there’s lots of blood!”

“Demon’s blood, right? Lots of hunting!” another one fo the boys, previously silent, shouted.

“And women!” another cried.

Legend hardly looked amused, but he glanced at Trent with an arched eyebrow as if to ask why he should put up with such children, and Trent could only smile and blush.

Legend shook his head, muttering to himself, “My story is probably more perilous then what you children could ever dream up. In fact, one can hardly begin to describe it without starting with one word…”

The boys were wide-eyed, grins forming on their faces. Legend lifted his head to look at the blue sky above them. They were all straining forwards to catch the significant word. Power, money, women, blood? What was it?

And old Legend lowered his gaze and seemed to look at all of them at the same time, without really looking at anyone, and the one word that described his grand story, was

“Love.”


00oo00oo

The car bumped and rocked worse then the pony ride at her ninth birthday party, the one where she’d thrown up all over mom’s best roses and from then on called then Rose-Barfs. She slammed her head against the roof of the car and bit back a curse, just shouting instead, to keep out of even more trouble. Her parent’s heads swung side-to-side and rocked with the car, and their ancient music, but they actually seemed to be enjoying it.

Well of course they were. It was their hair-brained idea to tear her away from her comfortable life, pardon her, their term was ‘get some new roots and experiences, broaden our horizons’ so that meant moving from the town she’d always grown up in to this little place so small there was no word for it. And no possible way of knowing it existed unless you knew it existed. It was so small she was sure it didn’t have a name and didn’t bother learning the name. It was probably something like ‘Human Callback Zone Number 72’, and that name was probably bigger then the… collection of houses, huts or caves or whatever they lived in. She bet they all hunted for food and were still domesticating chickens.

She would have laughed harder, had her father not hit a pothole of epic proportions that smashed her face against the window so hard she cursed loudly, and the boxes already precariously stacked beside her fell over and crushed her lithe body. Her mother turned to comment on her language, but her father said something about ‘let her sulk’ and her mother turned to face the front and started singing along with the songs again.

She didn’t bother to shove the boxes off of her, even though they were digging into her sides and probably crushing her ribs and breaking veins and arteries. A stroke would be a better experience then coming to live in the Middle of Nowhere.

The house her parents had decided to buy had three floors, apparently, plus a basement. It was supposed to be on a plot of land so big it could be a small country, and apparently there were old buildings and even a small lake. Big whoop. She’d liked her life in the town she’d been born and raised in, sure it hadn’t been so big, but she’d had friends, a social life, and if there was one thing she did worse then anything- it was making friends. She’d lived in the same house all her life, gone to the same school, the same store, the same pool (when she had enough confidence and was sure none of the pretty girls would be there) and the same park all her life. And she loved it. Or had loved it. Now she was going to go to a school that was smaller then her new house, from what she’d been told, and it was built in the middle of the forest where the country was downtown. She wanted to cry, and already had most of the ride down, but more then anything she wanted to wake up and find out this was a horrible dream. Or a really mean joke. She wanted to go home.

The town was so small they actually didn’t go through it on the way to the house. But it took forever after her father said ‘this is the start of our property’ to finally reach the dirt path that was completely hidden to her eyes that her father claimed was the driveway. It actually took long to drive down the driveway. That should not happen. Unless you were crazy rich, which they were not.

It was so green around them her eyes actually started to hurt, and the setting sun didn’t help as it was cutting through the branches every now and then and blinding her. She gave up trying to gauge when to squint and just hissed at the sun every time it burned out her retinas. The house they came up to was old. And huge. And her first thought was ‘this is a place where people die’. That didn’t help much.

It was indeed three stories, remarkably huge, and looked like a Victorian mansion, to her at least. The paint was peeling, the wood looked like it might be rotting and a lot of the windows were boarded up or nonexistent. The curtains in the largest windows- half boarded and half open- were crooked and looked moth eaten and tattered. And her father, as the icing on the cake, stepped out of the car and exclaimed “It’s even better in real life!”

00oo00oo00oo

Unpacking was almost as unpleasant as the ride out, and she didn’t bother taking anything out of the boxes, nor guess which were hers, which were her grandmothers and which belonged to some old lady whose luggage had gotten mixed with theirs. She helped lug them all into the giant room that was apparently the living room and then decided to go find where all the bodies were hidden.

The whole lower floor was just… open. There were really no walls, only extensions to make you think there were rooms. The rotting floors switched up too, sneaky things. The staircase seemed to have some fog coming down from it. It made her shiver and her toes curl up. She wanted to go to her bed and curl up and wait for morning. Good lord, if this was going to be her house, she was going to end up wetting her bed every night. The open windows suddenly seemed even scarier. The mist (which she was still trying to decide if it was in her imagination or not) got thicker around her ankles as she went up to the second floor.

It was a long and narrow hallway lined with doors. Somehow, while she watched, it seemed to stretch further and further until she had to squint to see the foreboding stairs shrouded in mist at the end. She wished she had something useful in her pockets besides her five dollars and a piece of gum, something like a blowtorch. That would teach any nasty thing behind any one of those billion doors to mess with her.

Cautiously she opened the first door, preparing her vocals to shriek when the rotting corpses, or even the killer, leapt out at her. Nothing. Save for the slap of dust that had her coughing and choking. There was a chair in the room, covered with a white sheet, and what looked like a table broken in the middle. Also covered in a white sheet, like dead bodies. Covered in a thick layer of dust, like she was going to be when she died here.

She ran most of the way down the hallway before opening another door. When she did, she groaned in exasperation. It opened to another hallway of doors. This house was a maze! She was going to get so lost.

She also wondered where her parents were going to take for a bedroom, because she was taking the room right next to theirs and kicking down the wall.

She ran the rest of the way down the hallway, all those miles, and tried not to imagine the claw marks of the now deceased on the walls. The staircase was a spiraling staircase, if anything, and most of the steps looked too frail to walk on or had fallen out already. Good thing she’d always been so skinny. The stairs creaked and groaned their own orchestra while she climbed up to the third floor.

It was actually the attic, she realized, when her head was floor-level and the ceiling was the roof. Instead of coming off the stairs she jumped up and swung her legs out and found herself sitting in a giant room. It was so dark around that she couldn’t see any of the walls, nor the corners, and she was sure there was a killer hiding in one of those with a giant knife and a grin on his face. There was a broken skylight on the roof, the glass covered the floor in front of her, and at the very far end she was pretty sure she could see another window. Which meant a wall. Wow! It was even bigger then she thought! Like a giant apartment, except filled with zombies and psychopaths. She heard feet rushing up the stairs behind her and she screamed as she whipped around. It was only her parents.

“Great find, Hunny!” her mother exclaimed, looking around.

Her father had a flashlight and was shining it around. There actually was nothing up in the attic, completely bare and empty. There was a small room to one side, and while her father went closer, and she closed her eyes and waited for his bloodcurdling scream, he actually called them over.

“Golly, sweetie, it’s your own private bathroom! And a giant room for you too- it’s just perfect, isn’t it?” her father grinned, clapping a hand on her shoulder. She was wondering if she could trade the devil her soul for a ticket home. Life here, in the House of Death, the actual Middle of Nowhere, was going to be hell.

00oo00oo


I know. Why on earth am I starting another one? The plot is like completely developed already, for this one, so I think I can write it up faster/easier without having to make up stuff as I go, hahaha.

Anyways, this story is another Alternate Universe type, so the whole Greek ancestry doesn’t apply or anything. I’m only using the characters. We’ll find out who our lucky heroine is in the next chapter, but for now feel sad for her in her lonely home.

Other characters and relations will be explained later in the story. I promise you all seven will be in this story, but some in bigger roles than others.

And we’ll also find out just what the heck those boys were in the beginning, and why they can/could do the things they do.

Demenior
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