I had been following her for a few minutes before she seemed to reach her destination. Luckily for me, it looked like somewhere useful. First, I was hit by a car within five minutes of arriving, then ran into a pseudo-predatory forest spirit and now I had been led to an establishment that was blatantly not intended for the majority of the population. I love being lucky.

I assumed it wasn’t intended for everyone, because the decorating sense was… unique. The building looked like they had started with one of those diners that were mass produced in the sixties and abandoned immediately afterwards. The structure was the same, but they had completely covered it in a truly excessive number of runic markings. Every inch was covered in occult symbols that I was vaguely aware were taken from a number of different primarily extinct cultures. They were all past my time, so I was relying on my blood knowledge to recognize them.

After that, they had hung skeletons all over it. These I could recognize. They were all daemons. Some of them were close to humans, but all had at least one feature that made it clear they weren’t. I noticed several different types of nymphs and what was definitely one form of hell hound or another. There were so many breeds of hell hound, so I couldn’t really tell what kind this was. What can I say, dogs are like that.

The doorway had an arch over it formed from the snake portion of a type of lamia, the body coming down to the right and up so that the human upper body was facing out like a sentinel. Someone had tied their dog to it.

I approached, causing the dog to stand to attention from its previously languid flop, growling at my unnatural presence. It had two rows of teeth and a scaled tail, but I wouldn’t put it past normal dogs to have a breed like that. Yeah, dogs.

I smiled at it, and the growl gave way to a submissive whimper and it fell back into a posture to match. Yeah, probably a daemon. Either that or I am scarier than I thought. It shuffled away from me as I passed, reaching the end of its chain. The more instinctual a daemon is the more they want to either fear me, worship me or both. One with human level intelligence would only be instinctually off put if I was deliberately projecting my presence, but a more animalistic daemon would know that I was something they shouldn’t mess with unless I really tried to hide it.

There hadn’t been an obvious sign, but there was a small plaque on the door that proclaimed this to be Blood and Bone; bar and grill. I suppose the skeletal bestiary encrusting the building made large signs a little redundant. The name was interesting, but I couldn’t really say if it was relevant to anything or just names being names.

Well, only one way to find out. I pushed the solid wooden door open and walked in. Luckily, I didn’t burst into flames, get kinetically thrown back or anything else noticeable. Those were legitimate worries, if the place had been warded correctly. However, it didn’t seem that I was specifically unwanted. Of course, that was more likely to mean that something like me wasn’t a consideration when people put up wards these days than me actually being welcome.

The inside was equally interesting to the outside. Much like the exterior, the interior was laid out like a diner. There was technically a bar, but it looked more like the sort of thing you used to serve seniors breakfast rather than a place to get alcohol. The booths had been left in place, and it even had the random mottled sheets of glass that they put between booths for no clear reason.

Once again, the differences started at the paint job. Everything was covered in the same mash of symbols from seemingly any culture that had become extinct enough to appear mystic. They were clearly far more detailed in here, intricate to a truly impressive extent. It had all been lacquered over, but they were still clearly visible.

I obeyed the sign and sat myself, ignoring the people watching me. It was still fairly early, the sun only having come up a few hours ago, and the place was nearly empty. That seemed rather odd, since I had figured this would be the sort of place that was busy in the morning. Of course, I was only basing that off it’s similarities to a breakfast diner, which probably couldn’t be trusted.

There was a bar tender, a woman theoretically serving drinks from an arrangement of clay jugs. Of course, the only person at the bar itself was a disheveled hippie looking man with a rainbow dread bag and one of the small jugs that seemed to make up a good portion of their glasses. I kind of doubted he was much of a work load, and her inactivity seemed to match that. There were only a handful of others, scattered throughout the booths and being waited on by one waitress that seemed to be the only employee even close to having a real workload.

Said waitress started towards my table, stopped, then continued over as if she hadn’t ever paused. However, she looked a lot more annoyed after the pause. “Marcus, do you have money?” I looked over to her, recognizing that she was addressing me. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Marcus must have been my body’s previous occupant, the one who left such a mess of the place.

I smiled at her, something that caused a visible reaction. My guess was that either Marcus wasn’t likely to smile or my smile didn’t seem like his. I considered activating my divine sight, but knew that a nephil’s would cause their eye color to change. That was something I didn’t really want to do while looking directly at someone. This form of divine senses sucked already.

“Yes, I do.” I said, proudly pulling out my basically blood stain free handful of bills. There were a few twenties and even a fifty in there, so I wasn’t quite broke. She looked between me and my crumpled money before finally handing over the menu.

“You pay before you eat.” Was all she said before leaving. Well, she was friendly. Either this place had an interesting customer service plan, or Marcus wasn’t popular here. Like, really, really, not popular.

I didn’t have any reason to care about it, but I was curious out of principle. What could he have done to that waitress to piss her off that much. Kill her parents? Break her heart? Vaporize her arm? Steal her one accidental curly fry? I had no way to know, but it was definitely something. Of course, it was also entirely possible that Marcus was just generally unliked or distrusted by everyone. That was made more likely by the question of whether I would pay. It seemed like Marcus might not be trusted to either have or hand over money.

About half the menu turned out to be about as expected, consisting of the essentially identical menu of every diner. However, the second half was more distinctive. First of all, it had an inverted color scheme, white on black rather than black on white. It also had Lilin printed at the top. That told me exactly what it was, something reinforced by the contents.

The whole thing was a long series of drinks with fancy names, most of which had no apparent connection to their ingredients. Of course, it’s hard to come up with too many relevant names when your only ingredient was blood.

Well, if we were being technical, all the different ingredients were blood. Each drink had a little table below its description giving the percentage of each creature’s blood that made it up. It seemed like drinks with a lot of something like chicken or cow blood in it were dirt cheap, while things with either a lot of human or an unusual animal was more expensive. The costs really started skyrocketing when I got to the part with the drinks with something only listed as shapeshifter in them. They had their own section and seemed ridiculously expensive for their listed size.

Now, I was pretty sure I knew what this half was for, and not just because the word lilin was printed in huge letters at the top. Lilin were the oldest type of daemon, literally the first strain to be created. They were night spirits, meaning that they were naturally active at night and had been known for praying on travelers who continued into the dark. Of course, like all daemons, they had free will. They had all been human once, after all. While they did have a certain level of inbuilt instincts, they could adapt and change just as much as humans could.

Since they were the first, they were also one of the simplest. Unlike the daemons that came later, lilin have a very simple feeding method and life, or possibly unlife, cycle. Like all daemons, they live on primordial light, the power of the soul, rather than physical matter. Unlike most, they don’t have the complex structures necessary to draw it from around them, and because they start as humans without a divine backer they don’t have the power in themselves to function on their own. That’s why they have to take the magic of others to sustain themselves.

Mostly because of how simple they are, they can’t feed in the more advanced ways that other daemons do, so they just drink blood and live off the energy in that. It doesn’t take that much, mostly because they are relatively weak and are close to being able to live off the power of their own souls anyway. However, they will weaken and get very close to death without external supplements, even if they don’t ever actually die from it. This is, of course, something they try to avoid, since they go into a mad animalistic hunting spree if they truly starve.

They reproduce by killing humans with their bites, allowing the magic that makes them to grab onto the soul before it departs and use it as a power source for the new daemons body. They are commonly referred to as undead, which always struck me as kind of silly. All daemons are undead, either directly or generations ago. However, due to how rudimentary they are, a lilin’s nature is more obvious than most.

Of course, lilin reproduction isn’t certain. That isn’t to say it randomly fails, just that it only works if the soul had enough sin to go to The Underworld rather than one of the other heavens. After all, you can’t make a daemon out of someone who belongs to one of the other two.

I wasn’t surprised to see they were here. They were simplistic, but incredibly functional because of it, a lot like humans and cockroaches. They had their progenitor’s ability to be surprisingly hard to root out. Of course, Lilith was an individual, not a species. But, she was persistent enough that it could be hard to tell.

“Ready?” I was interrupted from my reflections by the still unnamed waitress. I assumed that Marcus would know her name, so I probably wasn’t going to get it easily.

“Steph, why did you let him in here?” And… scratch that, her name was Steph. Someone who might have been a waitress, but was giving me more of a hostess vibe stormed up and leveled a glare at me. I returned it with a friendly grin. Hey, at least I could be welcoming. “You.” She pointed at me, then the door. “Leave.”

I gave her a wide-eyed questioning frown. “Why?” I asked with a tone filled with hurt non-comprehension. She gave me a look that made her opinion of me clear, if not the reason for it.

“You know perfectly well why.” No, I really didn’t. Well, might as well go for the direct approach.

“What if I were to tell you that I woke up last night on the side of the road and have absolutely no idea who you or Marcus is?” I asked, making my expression as open and innocent as I could. She stopped. Steph stopped. The guy at the bar turned to look at me. The bar tender… continued to ignore us.

The angry woman was now looking at me as if she was trying to find the tiny shred of deceit that she knew had to be hiding somewhere in my expression. I gave her nothing but open honesty, projecting the mixture of confusion and fear that matched my story. “Are you telling me that you have amnesia?” She finally asked with suspicion.

I blinked in honest confusion. “Am I?”

She watched me for a few more long seconds. “So, I’m supposed to believe that you don’t remember who we are or who you are?” She sounded incredibly suspicious, but she wasn’t automatically discounting me.

“Yes, I think so? I don’t remember ever seeing you before, and I’ve never heard of this Marcus you think I am.” I wasn’t lying, but hopefully they would misunderstand.

“Then what do you remember?” I looked down at the table.

“I remember… eyes…” I trailed off for a few moments, before continuing. “There was someone with silver eyes.” I looked up again, my face returning to an obliviously friendly smile that was just a little too empty. They stared at me in horror that told me they had completely misunderstood my meaning and knew exactly what I was implying. The previously angry woman took Steph by the arm.

“How about you just wait here, and we’ll be right back.” I smiled at her.

“Sounds good.” They moved far enough away that they probably thought I couldn’t hear them. They were completely wrong, but at least it made them feel good.

“I knew this would happen if he kept messing with those things.” Drifted to my rather acute ears.

“I know, but what do we do about it now? I swear, when I went to his table, he looked at me like a complete stranger. We need to talk to The Guild.” I could hear the capitals Steph put on The Guild from across the room. The unnamed woman’s response was a whisper I had to strain to hear.

“He is a non-Guild witch who has been working with them. Do you know what happens to people anywhere near something like that?” They were looking at me, though I only knew that because I was staring absently at the space about four feet to the left of them.

Now, that was interesting. It sounded as if Marcus had been a witch, which I would assume meant nephilim. While there are strictly other creatures that could sort of match the abilities associated with the word witch, the half elohim half humans were the only ones that were a near perfect match. Of course, any modern nephil would have to be a lot more human than not, but that wouldn’t stop their abilities from working. The nephilim are physically human, having biology that worked like any normal life form.

The only real difference between a normal human and a nephil is that nephilim have the ability to use magic… sort of. Technically, they have the same sort of abilities I would have if I had a couple hundred times my current power. They could direct the primordial light that their souls produced into other forms of energy. It was a heck of a lot more complex than that, but what it added up to was that they could use the excess divine power that went to waste in mundane humans to create physical effects. This sounded good, until you realize just how complex that process was.

It was one thing for me, a creature designed with the mental structure to consciously process it, to manipulate my excess power into a structure that would add exactly the right amounts of the exact type of energy necessary in exactly the right place to do what I wanted. I was built for it. They… were not.

The physical world is made up of a lot of different forms of energy, all of which are in constant interaction. To do what I would consider magic, you have to understand everything about the part of the universe you are trying to effect and the exact things you must add on an incredibly small scale to do it. Well, technically, I only really considered chaos magic real magic, but that might be because I’m the best at it. Sure, it might work on a… different method, and is probably a threat to the sanctity of the cosmos, but I still think it’s better.

The problem with nephilim is that they are working with a human meat brain. Their subconscious could sort of do the work for them, but it was still extremely limited. Sure, they could do little simple stuff, and bigger stuff if they did it in a lot of little parts. But, they had to go to great effort to construct anything that you could really call magic.

In fact, I was pretty sure the artwork all over the walls was some sort of spell. It was an old nephilim trick. They design a larger spell that they normally couldn’t create, but break it into a bunch of tiny parts. They then denote symbols linked to each part in their mind. They could do the same thing with almost any ritual, allowing for somewhat impressive effects.

Considering all that, plus what I was pretty sure witch meant, and I felt comfortable assuming that witch meant nephil. The only oddity was that I really shouldn’t have ended up in a nephil. I supposed it was strictly possible, but their significantly stronger souls should have kept it from happening. I had entered this body because, out of everyone on the planet, Marcus’ soul had left his body the fastest. At the moment I tried, this was the body that was the closest to being alive with its soul detached. I had basically used the departing soul as a bridge to the body it was vacating.

I had figured that it was just random chance, which made sense if we were looking at a bunch of functionally similar humans. But, nephilim should take far longer to leave their bodies. It seems pretty unlikely that, out of everyone dying at that exact moment, it was a nephil who left their body the fastest. Well, unless Marcus had some external help.

I started humming as the two women returned to my table, vapidly bobbing my head. I had started the brain damaged act because I thought it would sell the amnesia thing, but was starting to suspect that it would match whatever was going on here. I still wasn’t sure what that was, but it seemed like my reference to the fallen ones had proven a remarkably lucky guess. I had only said it because I was hoping that they would know something about demons, but it seemed like I had hit onto something. I love being lucky.

They both had identical postures that clearly said they didn’t know what to do with me now. “You were going to tell me something, right?” I asked to start the conversation, giving off the impression that I didn’t remember what we had been talking about.

Steph glanced at her companion. “Would you like to come with us?”

I smiled up at them. “Yeah, that sounds good.” I stood, making sure to do it in a slightly absent way. I wasn’t sure what they thought had happened to me, but was hoping that they didn’t have a clear idea either.

They led me into the back, guiding me through the door past the bathroom. The room beyond seemed to be storage, and only had two exits. The first was the door we had just come through and the second appeared to be to the basement. Well, this was probably the part where they tried to knock me out and/or kill me. The smart move at this point would, of course, be to turn around now. In fact, it would have been even smarter to do that at the booth when I first thought of it.

The woman whose name I still didn’t know opened the door and led the way into the dimly lit basement. Now, following her down there was definitely a bad idea. It was the perfect place to be attacked or trapped. If I wanted to play it safe, or sane, I wouldn’t go down there. I started my way down the stairs. What was the worst that could happen?