darker_london | Pierre - Reading Peter's diaries

After having talked with Deirdre and Evey for hours after returning home from their dinner outing, Pierre finally sat down in his room to examine Peter's diaries. Slink wasn't using them right now, so it was as good a time as any to start reading.

The case labelled "Number one" was a boy named Darren. Already, Pierre could see the parallels between Darren's experience, and what he had seen of Deirdre and heard of Josie. Increased strength, black eyes... The physical characteristics, at least, seemed to be the same across the board. As he got to the part about the police attempting to restrain the demon, he felt his heartrate increase a little. He couldn't help thinking back to the time that he had pulled Deirdre off Renee, having no idea back then what he was dealing with. If he hadn't had the element of surprise on his side... But even then, Deirdre had come to her senses. But this one had killed. And now they did have an advantage. They knew what they were dealing with. And most importantly, Deirdre wanted to be helped.

It was all so grizzly, like something out of a horror movie. It was a struggle just to keep reminding himself that is was real. It seemed far too easy to think of it as fiction. But doing that wouldn't help Deirdre. If anything, it would doom her to think, "Oh, but that would never really happen."

The second one, Samantha. Yet another demon power revealed here, that inhumanly loud scream. The force of it had almost knocked Pierre down when he had experienced it for himself just recently. Peter's speculations were interesting... genetic mutation, spirit possession... It drove home the fact that despite having a word for what they were, they really didn't know anything about where demons actually came from. And it wasn't as if they could just go and dissect one, either.

It was so sad to read about them doing such things so young, with eternal lives ahead of them. An eternity of being... what? Evil? There had to be more to it than that. Deirdre wasn't evil. These demons seemed to snap within a matter of weeks. Deirdre had been fighting for months now to keep control of herself. There was no way it could be so black and white under those circumstances.

Institutions, always institutions, and they did nothing. "Number three" was presumably still there. But what else could be done with them? An institution wouldn't help, but who could say what would? Pierre had to wonder if Deirdre was the only demon in existence who could actually be trusted at all to co-exist with the rest of humanity...

The other chilling thought, of course, was how much Caoilfhionn's cruelty reminded him of Tasha.

"Number four" was the first to be mentioned with wings. Peter never saw them himself, but the drawings couldn't be a coincidence. And on the mother, too... that couldn't be a coincidence, either. It made sense that a demon would have a demon child. Could that mean that they were further removed from humans genetically than they appeared? Or were they closer? Was that why a human and a demon could breed? Pierre could only assume that Ethan's father was human. It was clear that he was unable to fight off the boy's mother, and there were no drawings of the father with wings...

And this other sensation Peter described. The weakness, the disorientation, the black spots before his eyes. They were symptoms that Pierre recognised, symptoms that resulted from having a demon's unfavourable attention. It was what he had felt when Deirdre had found him asleep with Renee, and jumped to the conclusion that they'd had sex. He'd felt as though his very soul was being drained of life... Suddenly, a lot of things began to fall into place. Like that night with the sword. Her wound had healed instantly. Neither Pierre nor Renee had suffered any ill effects, but Remy had collapsed on his books that night, not waking up until the next morning. And then there was Katherine, Lydia's mother, who had inexplicably collapsed when he and Deirdre had taken Lydia from her... Deirdre had done that. There was no other explanation.

All of these powers, everything Peter described, was within Deirdre. There was more to her than Pierre could have imagined, even after all that he had seen.

Five and six were more of the same. Svetlana, of course, was the one who had had the greatest impact on Peter, the one who had started it all. She'd killed Peter's best friend. It tore Pierre's heart in two to read it, but he forced himself to get through to the end. He had to understand everything that he possibly could.

As he finished the last entry, he placed the diary down on his desk. So many people who couldn't be helped. Who couldn't help themselves. It was terrible to read. And some of them were still out there, doing god knows what. Where did such creatures hide, that the majority of the human race knew nothing about them, let alone understood?

It was an odd feeling, to be privy to something so earth-shattering. These were some of the world's most closely-guarded secrets, and they were in his possession now. His and Slink's. Renee was somewhat in the know, too, but she hadn't read the diaries yet...

And of course, there was always the question of Avery. He was something else again. Avery and his mother, Claire. Angels, Peter had called them. Well, it made sense. In a world with demons, why not angels? Peter hadn't elaborated on them, though. Did they have the same kinds of powers as demons? Pierre had seen Avery's wings. White and feathered, and glowing brilliantly. Not unlike the leathery bat-wings with the swirling darkness about them. Not like Deirdre's. What else could they do, though? Live forever, no doubt. That would explain how Avery kept on surviving these cataclysmic events. But the strange explosions at the Fitzwilliam house? The freezing room in the hospital where Avery was being kept? Were these to do with their angelic powers, too?

It was far too much information to deal with all at once. This was going to be the fuel of his contemplation for quite some time.