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Ulysses recovered quite well over the next few days and caused quite a spur at the first show he appeared in. He stepped into the spot light more out of curiosity that of my trying to convince him, and the shows he could put on with his fire breath would give 4th of July fireworks a run for their money. He could make anything from white sparks to blue firestorms like someone made the sun angry. The turnout for the shows once Ulysses got involved was absolutely massive, Antony said that we were making so much money that after Iraq we might not have to do a show for a while. As good as things were, I couldn't help but notice how Ulysses acted around Antony. Whenever he would get close, Ulysses would turn in his direction and get this look in his eye, like he knew something was wrong, but everytime I asked about it, Ulysses pretended not to have any idea what I was talking about. Antony had been acting weird over the past week as well. His skin, which was normally a tan color, was taking on this blackish blue tint and the veins in his hands, which normally would show up as a faint blue, were now clearly visible and turning black. Everyone knew something was wrong with him, and he had gotten checked out by Iraqi specialists more than a few times, but they couldn't quite pin what it was. Barron thought it might be flesh eating bacteria at first, seeing as he had contracted it when he was in the British Army, but then came to the conclusion that everyone including the animals would be infected with it. It left us shaking our heads, but none the less the shows carried on.

Then on Saturday, I woke up and knew right off that something...something was different. The sun was out, I could hear the normal, distant gunfire and the cars on the highway right beside the tracks our train had been sitting on.

"Nothing out of place here", I said rising from my bed, "so why does everything feel so...heavy?"

I couldn't help but notice a strange, heavy feeling atmosphere that seemed to be suffocating the entire train. What was off? What was I not seeing? I sighed, dressed in a white shirt and jeans, pulled my boots on and then walked out from my train car to the dusty Iraqi desert. Instantly, the unmistakable smell of blood overtook my senses and about forced me to my knees. My heart began racing, there was only one place I could think of where enough blood could be found to turn the air red.

"My animal tent", I whispered to myself.

I found myself standing there for a minute, then running back inside my train car for my shotgun. I pulled the wooden army crate that Barron had given me for it out from underneath my bed, opened the pad lock and pulled it out. I filled the tube with slugs, chambered a shell and then ran from the train car back to the animal tent.

What I found...it will haunt the darkest corners of my worst nightmares for the rest of my days.

My animals had been slaughtered like cattle. The cages were little more than twisted hunks of metal, the bars looking like they torn off the inch thick cage pads by brute force. The bars ended and sharp edges and some of them held the dead bodies of some of the sweetest animals I had. Lemmy the Ferret, Clover, his Parrot friend and Dagger, A wolf Barron has rescued while he was in service, were sharing the same rod. The Lion Stitch had one of the bars shoved through his neck that disappeared inside his body and Luke, the only one still breathing, was laying on his side with four huge gashes out of his hide. All of them had bite marks on their necks that had two rows of three teeth each and most of them had been ripped to pieces as well and for a reason I didn't want to think about, I didn't see Ulysses around. There was more blood and gore on the ground than I had ever seen and I felt my knees shaking from the rage and the sadness. I clutched the shotgun tightly in my hands. Somehow, I didn't think it was going to help me much against what ever had come in here, managed to tear open these cages and tear through two Lions and two tigers. I carefully stepped over the bodies of my friends and walked up to Luke, who was trying to stand up, but failing miserably.

"Easy boy", I said slinging my shotgun over my shoulder, "your hurt pretty badly."

Luke whimpered and tried to lick my hand.

"Who did this to you?", I asked myself as I looked over Luke's wounds.

I was trying to figure out how to even begin to try and save the old Tiger's life when I heard Alison scream from the main circus tent. I sprang up, stepped over the bodies of the animals, grabbed my gun from my back and ran for the main tent. I had closed about half the distance when these black...things materialized in front of me. Without thinking about it, I let one of the slugs go and it buried itself in a pop of black goo into one of the creature's heads. It let out an earsplittingly loud high pitched wail and faded away as if it were just gas. The other creatures hissed at me and came charging as Allison screamed again.

"HOLD ON ALLI I'M COMING!", I shouted as I forced my way through what....I could only assume were demons. When I finally made it to the main circus tent, what I found....was pure terror. My circus mates were all laying on the ground. Their skin was dry, yellow and shriveled bone tight, their eyes were gone, nothing but black, bloodless holes where they'd once been. The acrobats were closest to the tent, looking like they had been attacked from behind. The knife jugglers looked like they had tried to fight back, as a few of their wicked looking blades were near their bodies. The trapeze artists were dismembered, their arms and legs looking as if they had been chewed off their bodies, the stumps dry of blood and the bone came to a sharp edge where the meet had been chewed off. Barron was laying the furthest away, he had his rifle in his hand, which was now a worthless, twisted piece of metal.

Then I saw Antony. He was still alive. His blue jeans had turned deep red with blood and his bloody shirt was torn, revealing gashes that had been taken out of his chest and stomach, my guess, Luke's doing. His skin was nearly black now and his eyes were nothing more than dark pits. His mouth was wide open, showing me his six, long fang like teeth.

He was also holding Allie in his clutches. Her skin was dark yellow, damn near brown. Her eyes were sunken in and her body was shriveled up, her clothes were torn and stained with the blood that was dripping of of Antony's body. When he took note of me, he tossed my little sister aside like a piece of garbage and stared at me.

"I'm gonna kill you for this!", I cried, tears streaming down my face, "die you fucking murderer!!!"

I didn't hesitate to raise my shotgun and let a round fly at his head. At the very last second, he went up in a puff of smoke like the things outside had. For a split second, I assumed I had gotten him, but then he reappeared not two inches in front of me and swatted my gun away from me as if I weren't even holding onto it. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt and lifted me high off the ground, tossing me back behind him as if I were nothing. With some luck, I managed to grab one of the jugglers knives before Antony picked me up again. I swung my arm at his head with the blade out, landing a slash on his neck that sprayed blood all over me. Antony let me go and held his hand up to his neck, looking at the blood on his hand like it was just a minor cut. In those short two seconds, I had a hold of his neck and dug my thumb into the gash. I flipped the knife around in my hand and shoved it through his skull with everything I had.

In the second after the blade poked through the other side of his skull. The black left his skin, his eyes returned, his three teeth became normal human teeth once again. His blue eyes were wide for a brief second as they met my own. They quickly glazed over as his blood poured from his head onto my hands and his life left him. I pulled the blade out and slowly set him down. I pulled my hands out from underneath him and looked at the blood.

"What...wha....WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!?!?!?", I whimpered, "this can't be real! This has to be a bad dream!"

My hands were now shaking, my entire body was cold as I began to hear faint screams, the cries of my friends who had been so brutally murdered. The shrieks and wails of my animals as the fangs of whatever had possessed my best friend's body and used it for it's own purposes. I could see flashes of Antony's final moments, he was screaming, begging, "get out of my head!" "Give me my body back!" and another, sinister, evil voice taunting him, "only after the task has been completed." The voice laughed evilly and then I felt something behind me.

"Won't you turn around circus tamer?", a deep, dark voice asked, sounding like it had come out of the deepest gates in hell.

I swallowed hard, mustered what little sanity I had left, and turned around. Standing, or more floating, was a gory, red, half skeleton dressed in a ripped ans shredded black cloak with a hood over it's bare, cracked skull. The thing had rusty chains around it's wrists and a few of it's ribs were cracked. It seemed to be smiling at me, but due to it's lack of flesh and facial features in general, I wasn't sure.

"What..", I asked, "what in...."

"I am Siazach", it laughed, "but you may know me as "Bone Eater".

"You killed my friends!", I shouted, "why!"

"Correction", it answered, "you killed your friends, well, that last one at least."

I growled at him and looked back at my shotgun which was laying a few feet from where I was, I could easily reach over and grab it.

"Your shotgun will not work against me girl", it said seriously.

"Worked against your buddies outside", I answered clenching my hands into fists.

"Ghasts are but mere mortals such as yourself and your rich friends", the demon sighed, "a shame really, I would have preferred to possess you, but then you got involved with that fucker Ulysses. OH! Speaking of."

The demon raised his hands and Ulysses appeared out of nowhere, seemingly unable to move.

"So it's come down to you and me huh?", Ulysses hissed, "it's about time we meet face to face you son of a bitch!"

"Such an attitude", the demon said, "I'd have thought that 25 thousand years on this Earth might have cured you of such, but alas, seems it was not to be."

"You should have left Emelia and her friends out of this!", Ulysses snapped, "they are good people! They had nothing to do with this!"

"Wrong", the demon said, "they became part of it when they made the mistake of helping you recover from your encounter with a passenger jet. Emelia, that's your name? Emelia, has Ulysses told you that he is really a the last of a blood line of hunters that has hunted me for the past million years? Or that he is really nearly 26 thousand years old?"

"Don't believe a thing this liar tells you!", Ulysses roared, "he's from HELL!"

I looked at Ulysses, helpless in his enemies grasp, and then at the floating hell skeleton.

"Go back to hell where you belong!", I said grabbing up the shotgun and firing straight at the demon's face. But, as he had told me, the shell had no effect, simply phasing through his head like it wasn't there.

"Mistake after mistake young lady", the demon said pointing it's bony finger at me, "and now, as for you, Ulysses, twenty five thousand years of running from you and your clan is fucking long enough!"

The demon placed his hands together and then turned him so that the backs of them were touching. He then separated them. There was a horrible braking sound like someone was braking branches off of live Oak trees, the sound of ripping aluminum foil, and then Ulysses' split down the middle as if someone had un zipped him. The demon then pulled his entrails out through the hole, crushed them into a cube of meat and swallowed the bloody chunk before tossing Ulysses aside, his eyes, wide with terror, anger and regret quickly glazing over. The demon then grabbed hold of me and lifted me off the ground, his grip feeling as if someone had grabbed me by the neck and the worst part was that I was so cold from his presence that I could hardly move.

"Now", he said tapping the side of his skull with his bony finger, "I could certainly kill you as easily as I have your friends, but I wont, when I leave, you'll do that for me, so to teach you a lesson about selflessness, I will give you ten Tarot cards. Each card contains a bit of the soul of the person it represents, people you will meet quite soon actually. You have a year's time to decode and place all ten cards. Fail to do this and I will claim the person. Oh, and to make sure you don't go off and commit suicide on them, I shall trap you in a dragon's skin, similar to your friend Ulysses. Once the year's time is up, and all the people have died, or all ten cards have been placed, the curse will wear off and you may kill yourself as you see fit. You think your generous Emelia, that your a good person, kind, loving and caring. Let me be the first to tell you, your not."

With that, there was a flash of black. The demon was gone, the bodies disappeared. At first, I thought I had snapped back to reality. Then, a twisting pain in my stomach drove me to my knees. I could feel the skin tearing, or at least I thought. I tore my shirt off and I could see the twisting skin on my stomach, like the tornado in the sink whenever I pulled the drain plug. Then the twisting started on my back, then spread to my neck. Soon my arms began to deform, my legs began to shrink and reshape. I could feel the bone that made up my skull splitting apart and fracturing like sandstone or shale. The skin tore itself off of my stomach, chest and back, disappearing into my exposed muscle. The front of my face began to crack and elongate. I could feel horns growing out of the top of my head and spines and wing bones from my back. I fell to my stomach, my legs too weak to support me anymore and soon after that, I blacked out.