Chapter 1 - Damned - September 1948

It was the still time of morning, just before dawn. The night sounds had abated, preparing to surrender their stage to the cheerful songs of morning -- songs that had not yet begun. So the world, for this short time, was filled with a pregnant silence, softened and intensified by the thick fog.
Suddenly, the echo of footsteps on cobble broke through the pre-dawn reverie. A tall, lean figure quickly crossed the empty street and disappeared into the warmth of a nearby tenement. The streets fell silent again.

Inside, the man removed his jacket which was old and frayed around the cuffs and collar - and sat himself at the one piece of furniture in the room : a pine desk piled high with used books. One violent sweep of his hand showed clearly that he was not in the mood for reading. Letting the books lie where they fell, he lowered his head miserably to the desk, burying it beneath his clenched hands.

It had been a difficult night for Jasper Whitlock. Yes, he had seen plenty of these in his years, but for some reason they seemed to get harder, not easier.

His shoulders began to shake, in a way that a human might identify as sobbing. And indeed, the emotions involved were the same - despair, horror, misery - but they were not, in fact, Jasper's own. They were emotions he had ingested with the very lifeblood that was necessary for his survival. It was like this every time. It always had been. With the kill he drank in the misery and horror of his victims. Drinking death and the terrifying emotions that accompanied it was an intimate and intense experience of the most horrific type imaginable. Jasper likened it to drinking the very fires of hell. After a quick high of physical satisfaction came the crash or "detox", as Jasper called it; a side-effect of his ability. And Jasper knew that the emotions would destroy him if they were not released in the one way possible - by he himself reliving them.

And that was what he did, sitting hunched over at the bare pine desk in the still solitude of early morning. For nearly an hour, his shoulders shook and his body trembled as he died yet again, a death he suffered so that he could live. It was a cruel irony, and one that Jasper appreciated in his more lucid moments; that in doing what was required of him for survival, he came closer to feeling death than he ever would.

But now, he felt only the pain.

In some dark part of him was a voice that embraced it. It was a pain he deserved, a warranted punishment, although no earthly pain could come close to cleansing his damnéd soul. It was payback to a monster who lived by destroying life: that he himself would die a thousand deaths yet never find the peace and rest his victims found after the deed was done.

For God, Jasper believed, was a human God. Mortal souls, no matter how tarnished, could always find redemption in the afterlife. There was no God for monsters. There would be no peace for Jasper, no rest. And hell was played out around him every day.

In time the shaking stopped, but his shoulders did not relax. The worst part was still to come. He could see the aura around his eyes already. After the detox came what in its kinder and gentler version might have been a severe migraine headache. It happened after he detoxed from any negative emotion, even if there was no death involved, but it was exponentially worse if there had been. Strangely, neither detox nor migraines followed positive emotions , but he had experienced painfully few of those in the last century

By early evening, Jasper felt himself again. The sounds of Philadelphia, of the life just outside his shuttered window, no longer were a jackhammer to his consciousness.

It was over, for now at least. There was no need to feed for at least a week now. He often tried to push it for far longer, although he rarely succeeded. Jasper hated hunting - for what it cost him personally and for what it meant objectively. He had been raised both a devout Christian and a gentleman. Being a monstrous killer was a slap in the face of both. And yet, he found that the only way he could keep himself from feeding far more frequently than he did was to distance himself from humans entirely. He could not live near them, among them, for if he did, he could not find the strength within him to resist. So he would lock himself away with his books, feeding himself with knowledge and happy endings until the thirst became too much to bear. Then the cycle would begin again.

This was his life, and had been since he had escaped Maria.

Jasper shuddered at even the thought of that name. Even here, thousands of miles from her reach, it sent icy tentacles of fear coursing through him...

He shook his head, attempting to dispel the old nightmares.

Later.

He would deal with that later, when perhaps he was not quite so vulnerable as he was after a detox.

Night fell, the normal progression of day, and Jasper turned out all the lights in his room and opened the shutters just enough for him to be able to see out into the night. It was clear tonight, no sign of the fog that had marred the night before. The moon glittered brightly overhead, and he could make out a sky of stars through the city's glow.

A children's ditty popped into his head, from so long ago he could not know if it was a memory or something he had read.

Star Light, Star Bright,
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have this wish I wish tonight.

Something in Jasper's heart clenched at the words, at the idea of wishing on a star, at hope, at dreaming that perhaps there was something beyond the nightmare that he lived every day. Such dreams were chimeras and would cause nothing but pain. There was no hope for a creature such as himself. There was only survival. And more death. And never any freedom from the circle of misery. Dante had been right in some ways - damnation was eternal, and inescapable. Only it was not a fiery seven-ringed pit, but a never-ending life of loneliness and shame, a life in which to survival could only come at the loss of humanity, a life in which all the joy of living was gone : a living death.

He closed the shutters almost violently, turning back to the spartan chamber where he had spent the last few weeks. Perhaps it was time to leave Philadelphia, if he was becoming so weak that he would think of ihope/i.

Soon, he would move on.