Trailing behind Dick and Franky, Viktor wrung his hands nervously, head full of emptiness. He started to panic once they had passed their van, their key to going home. “Umm…is it time to go now?” he mumbled.

“Not yet, honey. Didn’t you hear Ted? We have to kill the other demons,” Dick said. 

“You…you want to kill them?” Viktor’s eyes went wide. “With what?”

Dick and Franky held their daggers in their hands, previously hidden by their pockets. Dick reached into his and took out another one, and handed it to Viktor. It was smaller and a bit more rugged than theirs, but no matter what it was, he didn’t want to wield a weapon in the streets. “You have one too,” Dick said. Viktor looked at it hopelessly. 

Franky seemed to skip, smiling and humming, thinking of the horrible yet beautiful creature he’d seen in the Sacrosanct. Seeing Satan rise from a pool of blood and fire deep in the earth was enough to keep him happy. Though he would rather collect the organs of a human to use for his own selfish gain (which he proudly acknowledged) the idea of studying the body of a demon seemed interesting as well. But it didn’t seem like Dick was out to study demons, he wanted to kill them, and so Franky wanted to kill them too.

They passed the crusty gas station, not usually occupied at midnight, but sometimes visited by tired fathers coming home from the night shift or road-trippers stopping for gas. One lone teenager sat inside, and they could see him through the windows of the building. Dick paused, then gestured towards it, and his roommates followed him in. 

The boy at the counter looked like he was on the verge of dying out of exhaustion, but he wasn’t asleep. He stared vacantly ahead of him, holding an energy drink limply in one hand and his head in the other. A worn beanie was slipping off of his head, as well as a too-big flannel that was falling off of his shoulders. 

Dick patted Viktor’s shoulder, pointing to the freezers. “Get us some ice cream, will you?” he said. As Viktor went to pick out a box, Dick went to the counter to talk to the clerk. “Hey, you didn’t happen to see anything weird around here tonight, did you?” he said to him. The cashier barely looked up at him while he was talking. “No strange people, or…creatures…with weird horse legs and horns…eight feet tall type guys…?”

“Nope,” the boy muttered. He took a swig of his soda. Dick crossed his arms and leaned against the wall adjacent to the counter, letting out a shallow sigh.

“Well, you’re a lot of help,” Dick said. “Maybe if you took a look around and did your job you’d be able to help us kill a ruthless demon, so…”

The cashier rolled his eyes. “I’m not a security guard,” he said. 

“Well, when you work at a gas station in the middle of the night, you kind of are,” Dick said. He took a close look at the boy’s name tag, barely able to pronounce the print on it. “Spiel-eller-cence--”

“Spence,” the boy sighed. “My name’s Spence.”

“Spence. So…why isn’t your full name Spencer?”

“My dad was a piece of shit.”

Viktor came back and placed a box of frozen fudge on the counter for Spence to ring up. “Is this all for you?” he said, facing the register. Dick began to bag the box himself.

“Yep. Don’t bother with the money thing. I’m…not paying,” Dick said.

“Oh. Okay.” Spence shrugged. “You know, we have, like, CCTVs and stuff.”

“I know. You see, I have, like, a knife. So you can try and stop me or whatever but I could shank you if I wanted.” Dick held his knife at Spence as if he were threatening him with it. Spence didn’t seem amused, or even concerned at all. He seemed more concerned about Dick getting caught.

“Well, thanks for giving me an excuse to do nothing,” Spence said. He rolled his eyes again. “You might as well just kill me while you’re at it.”

Dick put his knife away--terror and crime was all about doing the opposite of what was expected--it was all about expectations. From what Dick had seen, it was unusual for someone to seek out a fatal stab wound--so if Spence was doing just that, then the defiance of such was the thing that caused the suffering. As Dick walked towards the door with his partners, leaving Spence alive and well at the counter, he felt like such a genius for figuring the formula out.