Alexander Jones headed to his office, coffee in hand. His day’s work was almost finished; just a few more signatures, a quick glance at the next week’s schedule, and he’d be off into Friday night’s traffic. His corner office loomed at the end of the long hallway, away from the rest. He pushed the door open, holding his coffee in one hand and checking his phone with the other while he walked over to the desk. Setting the mug on the cluttered surface, he finished texting and looked up.

There was a headless man at his door.

All the blood drained from Alexander’s face, sucked away by terror. The phone dropped from his hand as he frantically tried to comprehend the reality before him.

The man was absolutely headless, the absence of his head a startling, surreal fact. He was dressed in a dark three-piece suit, the stump of his neck showing from the white collar of his shirt. The stump had bloody, jagged edges, but otherwise appeared cauterized over its surface. The apparition was silent, immobile.

Alexander’s heart pounded against his chest wall, his thoughts swirling, chaotic.

The headless creature stirred. Silent, it took a step forward, then another, and another; its movements jarring, robotic, yet decisive.

Alexander’s throat vibrated with a scream, but then a much quieter, different sound stood out, coming from his left. It was a low, rasping growl. Terrifying, it held the stench of death, the cold of the grave, the pain of torture. Grey with fear, he slowly turned his head toward it.

The sound was coming from a coal black shape in the corner. As Alexander looked at it, the shape spread out its limbs. It looked like a man crouching on all fours, his limbs unnaturally bent at the knees and elbows, but otherwise perpendicular to his body. The black figure slowly raised its head, facing him. There were no discernible features, except for tiny dog ear-like protrusions on the top of its head, and a very clearly snarling mouth full of black, needle-like teeth. Overall, the thing looked more like an arachnid, yet its body was that of a man, at least at first glance. The growl intensified, and the abomination began a slow forward crawl, moving its limbs in the manner of an insect.

Alexander screamed again, his mind adrift in horror. The four-legged creature was almost upon him when he found the strength to rush to the door, but there he barged into the headless man. These were not hallucinations, whatever they were! Bumping into the headless man had felt very solid indeed. He jumped back, stumbling over a chair, narrowly avoiding a fall. Much quicker than before, the four-legged creature scurried up the wall, then across the ceiling. It positioned itself directly above, ready to fall on its prey.

Alexander scrambled to his feet. The headless man made a quick grab for him, grazing the back of his jacket with his outstretched fingers.

Alexander made it a couple more steps before something got a hold of his foot. He yelped and looked down.
A hand! Dozens of human hands, coming out of the floor, bubbling up to the surface, the contours of their wrists merging into the carpet. He desperately kicked at the one holding him, his mind alight with survival instinct only, devoid of all thought.

The floor began to undulate all over, like a lazy sea. Then it split right open, down the middle, revealing heat and darkness. More hands now came at him, tugging at his pants, scratching and pulling his ankles, eager to drag him into the depths of the inferno. The abyss grew larger and larger, spreading the floor wider and wider. Alexander kicked and screamed and somehow managed to get free. In a desperate bid for salvation, he tumbled head over heels over his desk, landing on the other side, on the still solid ground next to the window.  The four-legged abomination trailed his escape from above, its insectoid jaws wide open, and the headless man was coming along, methodically moving his legs. Alexander was trapped.

He had but one direction left. He grabbed his chair, swung it around and smashed the window. A regular death seemed preferable to what the abominations had to have in store for him. The last thing he saw before he jumped were a pair of hands ripping into the open space in the middle of the room, coming out of thin air, like parting a curtain. Blue sparkles crackled all around the opening as the hands pushed back the boundaries, making a wider passage for whatever new horror was coming through.

Alexander Jones did not wait for it. He turned around and leapt from the twelfth floor into the cold winter night. A tiny part of him was hoping to just wake up, but either way, he had no choice. He wasn’t going to Hell.

For a second, he felt himself falling… then all movement stopped. With a strangled yelp, his heart racing near breaking point, he found himself suspended, face down, over the streets below. Then he was moving again.

He gasped and whimpered and mindlessly thrashed about as he was being slowly dragged back up. Unable to fathom the horrors that surely awaited him there, he thrashed harder, as death still seemed preferable, but the force that held him captive was impossible to shake. Soon he came level to the broken window. Suspended upright in the air, he faced the inside of his office once more.

As he looked in, his breath caught in his lungs and didn’t leave his parted lips.

A tall, slender woman in knee high boots and a long cognac colored coat stood in the middle of a veritable vortex of sizzling indigo sparkles that spun around her like fireflies. In contrast, her platinum blond hair undulated unnaturally slowly around her head, as if floating in a pond. One of her arms was aimed at him, fingers fanned out. Nothing could be seen coming out of her fingertips, but Alexander could tell that she was the one holding him captive. She exuded power; magnificent, surreal, mesmerizing power.

She suddenly thrust both arms to the front. The air immediately whooshed and roared with surges of intensely low vibrations, out of this world powerful and strange. The whole room grew supercharged and crackling with specks of blue light, and the abominations no longer looked fully corporeal.

She stumped her foot one time, amidst the multitude of hands that kept reaching from the abyss below. As her stiletto heel met what looked like gaping darkness, the regular floor reappeared all over the room, and the abyss was no more.

She’d never even looked down! Her beautiful face was unfazed, keeping a focused frown and slightly puckered lips. She glowed with the raw energy that surrounded her, encapsulated her, was her.

Hanging from the ceiling right above her, the four-legged demon slowly opened its mouth, wide enough to swallow a head. Its needle-like teeth moved forward, unnaturally black and horrifying.

The lady looked up. “Yikes, that’s gross!” she sneered, her voice young and pleasant, observing the abomination. It was in the process of twisting its body and its limbs to an impossible angle, about to fall on her, mouth first.
She shot out her arm and clenched her fist.

The four-legged demon fell down with a wet crunch, propelled to some distance away. Its supernatural growl now silenced, it was on its back, limbs moving, as if attempting to regain footing. The lady shook out her fingers before closing her fist again, and the thing immediately grabbed at its throat. It was being choked. Thick black paste poured out of its mouth, then exploded like a black thorn out of the side of its head.

“Holy crap, that is so gross,” the blonde lady exclaimed, still clenching her fist. Twisting and squirming, the abomination was being liquefied into a tar-like substance, pooling over the carpet. Bit by bit, it then evaporated, and soon vanished altogether.

Meanwhile, the headless man had not exactly been idle. He’d repeatedly tried to lunge at her, but each time, his efforts had been thwarted by an invisible force shield. A wall appeared to exist about two feet from the woman surrounding her like a cocoon. After a few more attempts, the headless demon began circling, its hands frantically searching for an opening, gliding over the invisible surface. The supernatural stranger paid no attention to his efforts, not until she had thoroughly liquified his four-legged companion.

Then she did turn to this remaining opponent, nonchalantly, as if finally deigning to notice. The headless demon stood right in front of her, as close as it could.

“Oh, don’t give me that look!” she sneered. Her lips parted in a wicked grin, she made a large slapping movement of her arm. The headless man was instantly thrown back against the desk. Judging by the awful crack, his spine had been broken on impact. Further blows jerked him forward and back against the desk again, and again, breaking his body in half.

Alexander caught his breath, but his relief was premature: the two parts kept on moving. The severed torso jumped down onto its arms and scurried toward him, while the legs and the pelvis lurched toward the lady, with the same robotic movements, one leg at a time.

The lady just rolled her eyes. Once again, she extended both arms to the front and translucent energy surged from her palms, visibly rippling the air. It incinerated both parts of the abomination, tearing off large chunks of flesh that immediately melted into thin air, soon leaving only a bloody skeleton, and even that continued to be blown away. In thirty seconds flat, the headless man was no more.

Alexander huffed out a whimper. Still suspended in front of the window, cold wind swiping at his skin, he hardly dared to move. Was any of this really happening?

The lady slowly pulled her arms apart and bent down her head, like a performer bowing to an audience. She stood there like that, seemingly for no reason, but Alexander could intuit that all her movements served a specific purpose. After a couple of seconds, she lifted her head, and finally looked at him.

Was she an angel? A fairy?

With a flicker of her flexed fingers, she made him levitate back into the room, and gently set him on the glass covered floor. He collapsed on his knees, then backed up against the side of his desk, making efforts to stop shaking. She walked over to his side, and he just stared at her, his mind still unable to formulate a thought, reeling from the horrors that drove him to jump to his death.

He was faced with a beautiful young woman. She had the most amazing eyes he had ever seen; large and perfectly shaped, of an unusual shade of green, they were framed with smudged eyeliner, the eyelids shimmering a golden burgundy. Mile long eyelashes blinked at him…blinked at him impatiently, he suddenly realized.

She had asked him a question and he’d heard none of it.

“Okay, Mr.…” she picked up his office ID badge from the desk. “Mr. Alexander Jones, Assistant District Attorney! Hello there. Everything is fine, you’re safe. Please try to focus. Who’s after you? Somebody seriously wants you dead, who might that be?”

Alexander cleared his throat, but no sound came out. Her hands in the pockets of her coat, she was staring down at him. “These things, yeah, I know, very gross, very scary, but don’t worry about them, okay? They’re gone. Think of them as not real, like a bad nightmare. The real problem is to figure out who sent them after you. Think hard! I’m not gonna be your bodyguard forever, so think!”

“I can’t think!” he raised his voice, and it came out raspy and panicked. “I’ve just been attacked by some demon shit, and you’re acting like this is normal!” He grabbed at his head and rocked himself back and forth, sobbing and gritting his teeth, while his rescuer fell silent.

Did she disappear? He jerked his head up.

She was still standing in front of him, tall and beautiful, hands in the pockets of her coat, but looking to the side, as if disgusted by his weakness. The thought made him frown and get a grip. He’d been through some tough shit before! He needed to get a grip. He pulled himself to a sitting position, and her eyes came back to him, streaming compassion and annoyance at the same time.

“Can you think of someone who wants you dead?” she insisted, in a softer tone of voice.

He focused, but he still didn’t know. “I’m the ADA, I piss people off on a regular basis,” he answered.

The lady sighed, as if resigned, and pulled up a chair for herself. She then proceeded to look around for a spot for her furry bag, and finally set it on her knees.

Alexander made an effort and stood up, tugging at his jacket, fighting to regain composure, but still shaking all over. He grasped the edge of the desk with his fingers and leaned against it. Try as he might, his limbs were treacherously shaking.

“I am the Sentinel 10,” said the lady, by way of introduction. “What can I say… My powers are especially effective against supernatural crap, like what you’ve just seen, but I can kick human ass too. All I’m asking is for you to point me in the right direction! Who’s doing this to you? Trust me, it’s not that difficult: think of current cases, not past ones; who are you pissing off now?”

One name occurred to him. “Sebastian Healey-Morin! I’m about to indict him for money laundering and fraud. He’s a corporate attorney with Morin and Rosenthall.”

She nodded. “Good. I know about that firm, and it makes perfect sense.” She got up and brushed back a long glossy lock. “Don’t go home. Get a hotel room and stay there until you hear from me. It shouldn’t be long, a day or two at most. And be careful, in the meantime.”

She nodded goodbye and headed out.

“Wait!”

She turned around and waited for him to come within arm’s reach. She was stunningly beautiful up close and smelled of vanilla beans and sandalwood. He swallowed hard. “How will you send me a message?”

“Give me your number,” she sighed, a hint of a smile on her rosy lips.

He rushed back to scribble on a piece of paper from his desk. “There. Thank you! I want you to know that without you, two little boys would have lost their father tonight.” He offered his hand. “You are an angel. Thank you.”

She shook his hand, looking at him with misty eyes. He suddenly had an overwhelming urge to hug her, but of course he didn’t.

“Are they home with you?” she asked.

His kids. He swallowed again. “No, they’re with my ex, I only have them on weekends. But not this weekend.”

“Good. Don’t go home, Mr. Jones. Don’t go to your kids, either, not until I’ve dealt with this. Get a hotel room and stay there until you hear from me.”

She headed to the door, but he called after her again. “If you ever need help, I’ll be sure to return the favor! Unless it’s illegal, of course.”

She didn’t turn around this time, just agitated her hand in a quick goodbye while walking out. “Take care Mr. Jones. Wait till you hear from me.”

The door shut behind her and her stiletto heels made no noise in the carpeted hallway.

Alexander was alone. The supernatural stranger was gone, taking her magnificent powers and her magnificent self away, as if she had never been there at all. Did he dream this? Hallucinate it? Did he insidiously go insane from the long hours at the office? But the cold wind from the broken window bit into his skin and tugged at his clothes, reminding him that it had been real – all of it.