The Demon by Olga Tepliuk

The rain battered the windows of the sprawling mansion,

standing like a rotting tomb beside the swollen river. Exactly a year had passed since a week of gruesome slaughter eradicated the Baron's family, and now the Baron himself lay dead in the suffocating silence of his own home. Before his demise, the desperate man had signed a contract in blood with a demon, bartering his very soul for vengeance upon the serial killer who had ruined his bloodline. The mortal police had officially ruled the previous tragedies as suicides, blinded by the killer's meticulous style. The Baron's wife had been found hanging from an iron trellis in their garden. Shortly after, his son vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a severed pinky finger that washed up on the muddy riverbank four days later. But the Baron harbored a darker truth: his wife and son were murdered simply because the couple was expecting a new baby. The demon manifested in the study precisely an hour after the Baron's heart stopped, finding the body undiscovered. The creature knew the unholy terms of its contract; the Baron's trapped soul would forever belong to the abyss, provided the demon dragged the killer to hell.

The infernal entity glided toward the grand mahogany desk, its gaze fixed on the dark, congealing trail of blood leaking from the Baron's nose—a crude, mortal sign of poisoning. The police would foolishly assume the man took his own life, broken by a business deal doomed to leave him bankrupt.

"But I taste the truth in the crimson," the demon whispered, possessing the supernatural power to detect spilled blood on any surface, identify its owner, and witness the agonizing final minutes of their life.

It pressed a pale, clawed finger into the stain on the desk.

"I see through your dying eyes, mortal."

The vision overtook the room. After a grueling day, the Baron arrived at his cabinet to review the paperwork for a new business deal one last time. He poured a glass of whiskey, leaving it resting on the cabinet, but after drinking it, a sickening dizziness took hold. He dismissed the poison as mere overwork, checked his documents, and fell asleep at his grand desk. Suddenly, he awoke to the sharp creak of the cabinet doors. It was deeply strange, as only close family members held keys to those heavy doors. Disoriented, his vision violently blurring, the Baron watched a shadowy stranger approach.

"As the darkness consumes your sight, I see what you saw," the demon murmured, watching a hand slam onto the desk, conspicuously missing a pinky finger.

The final, sneering words the Baron heard echoed in the demon's mind:

"Goodnight, father."

The vision shattered, leaving the demon with an inescapable conclusion: the murderer was the son all along.

"I know the killer's face, but I need his blood to trace his cowardly path," the demon mused in the shadows.

Four rain-soaked days later, the former servant of the estate was found dead in her desolate home. Unseen by mortal eyes, the demon slipped onto the crime scene. The police had already taken it as a suicide, assuming the young girl fell into despair after losing her only job opportunity with the Baron's demise. She, too, bled heavily from the nose.

"Yet, the scent here is layered," the demon realized, sensing another bloodline scattered in the room.

The victim had fought back, her frantic nails scratching her murderer. Though it was strange that she had let him inside willingly, the blood trapped beneath her fingernails hummed with a familiar, familial resonance—it was the blood of the Baron's son.

The demon traced the glowing crimson thread back to the mansion, straight into the sprawling shadows of the garage. There stood the son, frantically packing his belongings into the new Baron's Ford. As the freezing, demonic presence materialized, terror and rage shattered the young man's mind, and he collapsed against the car, the sinister truth spilling from his trembling lips in a desperate, angry tirade.

"You think I am the monster?" the son spat, his voice trembling with a frantic, desperate rage as he glared into the shadows. "I had no choice! A year ago, I begged that old fool not to agree on that deal with those so-called drug barons!"

He let out a sharp, breathless laugh, his face contorting with disgust.

"Any idiot could see there is no such thing as easy money," he sneered. "It was a straight path to bankruptcy!"

"But he was utterly blinded by his own pathetic greed," the son hissed, his eyes wide and unblinking. "Do you know what he told me? He mocked my 'high morals' and said he'd have a new son soon enough. He was going to cut me out entirely!"

"I needed that heritage," he cried out, his voice cracking with twisted devotion. "I was counting on it to pull my beloved servant out of her miserable poverty, to finally take her as my wife!"

"So, I took matters into my own hands," he whispered, a sinister, unhinged smile creeping across his pale face. "I got rid of the unborn brat and faked my own death. I knew my father; I knew he would understand the ruthless logic of it all."

"And I was right!" he screamed, slamming his fist against the Ford. "A year later, he was drowning in debt, just as I predicted! I had to return and poison him before he signed that final deal. The plan was flawless—I would reappear, tell the world I had escaped the murderer, inherit my rightful fortune, and live happily with my woman."

"But when I went to her, when I told her everything I had done for us..." his voice dissolved into a ragged, desperate sob. "She looked at me with pure terror! She told me not to get near her!"

"I sacrificed so much to secure her future, and that was her gratitude?" he roared, his desperation morphing into a cold, murderous hatred. "So I killed her, too! If she wouldn't take the life I bled for, she wouldn't have one at all!"

But the demon detective remained completely cold, indifferent to the pathetic, bloody drama of humans. It knew only the unyielding terms of its contract. Without a sliver of mercy, the creature seized the Baron's screaming son and dragged him down into the roaring fires of hell, where he would meet the doomed soul of his father once more. 

Later, the police would make a final grim discovery. The Baron's son was found slumped in the mansion, poisoned behind that very same grand desk. A bitter cycle of greed and bloodshed reached its inevitable conclusion, the family line entirely destroyed by the very family itself.