Q U A R T E R    T W O

	The words died in Jack's ear, fading to electronic distance as he slammed the phone down in bitter defiance. The thick leather collar caught his hooked fingers and he hefted the jacket through the air, shrugging one shoulder after another until the black weight settled on him contentedly. A razor-honed one-piece banged his solid ribs on the way out, cold steel with which to face the cold air. His apartment door was locked behind him, his face locked in a mask, legs locked in a rythmic pace. Back out here he was, the sky an ashen hue; somber eyes witnessed the life that he knew.
	Concrete and gravel pounded his soles, whispers and yells pummeled his ears; times and events mauled his mind. The scenes he tried to avoid leapt into focus with a voice thick with gin and decay. "Have you anything you could spare?" Jack unlidded his eyes, say the grey world, met the squinted blackened gaze, bought passage with a quarter arcing through the air. Eyes caught the once-white streetlight, flashing to follow him, ruined lips exposing ruined teeth and lemonrind words. "At a quarter t'two, I would not be you, when the Behemoth calls for his brew."
	Looking back, jerkedly, nervously, Jack rounded the corner, eyes as ever on the past. Impacting at the shoulder, his eyes snapped around to lock with the white-faced smirk of the man being forced out of his way. Long and black, the hair and the trenchcoat; mascera-shaded eyes that glinted in the scintillating light of a chain. Attitude upon attitude--he swung, pivoted, the skeleton blade dropping into his eager palm. One kick, an elbow at the swinging arm, and he was through the chain, was drawing the blood of the man with a long arcing split up the chest. Hard black shoulders hit the ground upon a pillow of black hair; the white face did smile, bitingly white; the dark eyes did pierce, the scarlet lips broke form. "Though this day I did rue, I'm glad I am through, 'fore the Lord of Flies calls for his brew."
	Shivashiver shake, the cold wind biting and howling, endless concrete suddenly icy through his rubber soles. A hand Jack ran through his bristly brown hair, beading teardrops of foreign blood in the thorned jungle of his scalp. Warmth, he sought drearily, for the tongue and the soul. A tavern slow and quiet fit his mood like a glove; the wooden panelling surprised him a few pints down. Thinned blood streamed faster, pounding, recklessly speeding through interior bottlenecks, harnessing a four-chamber engine to tear madly through his system. Jack smiled, then stopped, then felt that he knew. The clock snapped into vision, reading half past one, and those in the bar were few.
	Sour mash rode the two-finger express down his throat as Jack blurred the reality before him, the past loping and lurching to catch up. Wind roared through the urban maze as if into a vacuum, while overhead the stars stretched into arcing platinum wires; the goldenglow bar blinked in its mock candlelight, empty glasses in the palms of the patrons. Roaring, distant and steady like the sea, replaced the jukebox and the girl on the next stool turned to smile at Jack from behind her soot-black hair, tongue flashing the blood color of wine. Chill bit the air, thickening to a blue-black hue leaking sullenly from the shadowed corners. His eyes darted about, then around, then froze on the clock, its hand stopped at the nine. White diamond papers whirling in the maelstrom, catching on hungry steel teeth, soaked the pinot-noir color of the night. The sea, then a lull, now a roar, cresting and swirling in a sunken core of matter that pulsed silently in the collapsing floor. Brown hair darted, lunged; wide white eyes shot to scarlet blinked through the room in vain. Wave and pulse reached a violent crescendo among yearning soulless eyes, vibrations beyond frequency, ultrapsionic talons tearing the tenuous fabric of spacetime through.

	And Beelzebub called for his brew.