And then with a slow smile and a simple, savage twisting motion, He Who Walks Behind tore Stan the convenience store clerk into three pieces.

I’d seen death before, but not like that. Not terrible and swift and bloody. I spun back to Stan in time to see the three pieces fall to the ground. Blood went everywhere. One of his arms waved in frantic windmills, and his mouth opened as if to scream, but nothing came out except a vomiting gurgle and a gout of blood. Wide, terrified eyes stared at mine for a second, and I jerked my gaze away, desperate to avoid seeing Stan’s soul as he died.

Then he just sort of… changed. From a person in hideous pain and fear to an empty pile of… of meat. Parts. Soiled cloth.

I had never seen death come like that. As a humiliation, a reduction of a unique soul to nothing more than constituent matter. When the creature killed Stan, it didn’t simply end his life. It underscored the underlying futility, the ultimate insignificance of that life. It made a man, albeit a fairly unmotivated one, into less than nothing—something that had been a waste of the resources it had consumed. Something that had never had a choice in its own fate, never had a chance to be anything more.

I had involved Stan in this struggle. It hadn’t been his fight at all.

Granted, I had never intended to hurt the guy and never would have. Nonetheless, without my decision to stick up the convenience store, he would have still been loitering behind the counter, killing time until his next joint. He had been caught up in violence that he had done nothing to earn or expect—and it had killed him.

Something in my head went click.

That wasn’t right.

Stan shouldn’t have died like that. No one should. No one—man, beast, or otherwise—should get to decide, in a moment of malicious humor, that it got to end Stan’s life, to take away everything he was and everything he might ever be.

Stan hadn’t deserved it. He hadn’t been looking for it. And that creature, that demon, had murdered him.

I felt my jaw begin to ache as it clenched harder and harder. I could feel my rapid pulse beating behind my eyes. There was a terrible pressure inside my head and inside my chest, and with it came a rising wave of anger, and something darker and deadlier than anger that came welling up like a great wave from an unlit sea.

It.

Wasn’t.

Right.

No, it wasn’t. But the world wasn’t a fair place, was it? And I had more reason to know it than most people twice my age. The world wasn’t nice, and it wasn’t fair. People who didn’t deserve it suffered and died every single day.

So what? So somebody ought to do something about it.

My right arm and shoulder burned like fire as I felt my right hand slowly form a tight fist. The knuckles popped one by one. They hadn’t ever done that before.