Demon Contract

Geylang was already awake.

Even at six in the morning, the alleys buzzed — delivery bikes weaving through traffic, old men chain-smoking at the kopitiams, neon signs still flickering above shuttered massage parlours. This wasn't the skyline Singapore sold to tourists. This was the city's skin — weathered, sweating, stubbornly alive.

Then the fire came.

They said the blast could be seen from Tampines. A streak of blue light, like God had opened a vein across the sky. People thought it was a drone strike, a gas explosion, a terror attack. By the time SCDF units arrived, Paradise Hotel was already gone.

Not collapsed. Erased.

Fire engines boxed off the block. Yellow tape stretched between lamp posts and overturned bins. Riot barriers clattered into place. Uniforms swarmed the scene — firefighters in heat suits, civil defence crews, police tactical teams, drone operators tracking the air from above. A command truck idled half on the pavement, its antennae blinking with silent telemetry. Mandarin, Malay, and English orders cut through the airwaves in sharp, clipped bursts.

The building had been two storeys — red-tiled roof, peeling green sign, half a dozen hourly rooms squeezed between a motor workshop and a pawn shop. Now it was a hole. Twenty metres wide, charred down to bedrock.

The explosion hadn't touched the neighbouring shops. Not a broken window across the street. It was as if something had surgically carved the motel out of existence, leaving the rest of the block untouched.

But the heat was still rising.

Lieutenant Tan stepped to the lip of the crater, one arm raised against the glare. It didn't smoke like a fire. It steamed like breath. The concrete had slagged inward, pooling into molten ridges around the epicentre. A perfect circle, too precise for nature. Even the blast pattern looked deliberate — less like a detonation, more like a signature.

Something glowed at the centre.

"Confirming visual," Tan said into his mic. "Male subject. Mid-thirties. Still breathing."

They weren't supposed to move in yet. Hazard readings were off the charts — temperature spikes without a source, no chemical traces, no accelerants. The radiation monitor blinked red, then died altogether.

A firefighter dropped to one knee and raised his thermal scope. Max lay in the centre. Naked. Motionless. Arms spread, fingers curled inward. Skin blackened but unbroken. Steam drifted from his chest in slow, steady puffs, each one rising like winter breath. Beneath the char, faint blue veins pulsed with light.

Etched into the stone beneath him was a ring of symbols. Foreign. Fluid. Seared into the bedrock in strokes too clean to be carved. They didn't look drawn — they looked branded into the world itself.

"Sir…" one of the medics said quietly. "The symbols are moving."

No one answered.

A harness team clipped in and lowered themselves into the pit. Their boots crunched on vitrified stone, each step sending ripples of faint heat up their legs. The scanners strapped to their chests flashed in warning colours — heat, pressure, electromagnetic spikes — all rising. They crouched beside Max, slid gloved hands under his shoulders, and eased him onto a stretcher.

His skin hissed against the fabric.

No reaction.

Then his eyes opened. Just for a moment.

Something flickered there — not white, not red. Blue. A pulse of fire from somewhere deep, alive and aware.

Above, the sun was climbing behind Marina Bay, pale light spilling over the rooftops. The wind shifted. Ash scattered through side streets, catching in drain grates and settling beneath plastic chairs outside all-night food stalls. The air carried the burnt tang of incense, melted plastic, and something older that no one could name.

At the crater's heart, the last of the runes pulsed once.

Then went dark.

***

The room felt wrong.

It wasn't just the brightness — though the ceiling lights were a white that didn't exist anywhere outside hospitals, hard enough to sting even through closed lids. It was the quiet underneath the sound. The stillness that made every scrape of a chair leg or click of a pen seem too loud.

White walls faded into frosted glass, shapes moving behind it in watery blurs. Beyond, voices came in broken fragments through the fog in his head.

"…still no external injuries…"
"…but those burn scars — Jesus…"
"…old scarring. Years old. Look at the tissue. Not from the blast."
"…then how the hell did he walk out of a fireball without a scratch?"

Max drifted under it all. The words slid past without sticking, as though they belonged to another life. He felt weightless and heavy at the same time, like sinking into syrup. The air pressed against him with the same muffled density as deep water.

Somewhere close, an IV bag swayed from its hook. The soft creak of plastic and the faint tap of its drip echoed too long in his skull.

Then something shifted.

The heat came.

Fire.

Not from the room — the air was cool on his skin. This was deeper, behind the ribs. A dull, slow ache. At first it felt like pressure, as if someone had pushed a fist into his sternum and left it there. Then it quickened, matching his heartbeat. The beat sharpened into claws. The claws began to spread.

A thread of warmth uncoiled upward, into his lungs. It burned without consuming, searching for space it couldn't find.

The pressure swelled.

It bloomed.

The warmth became heat. The heat became fire.

It roared inside his chest, sweeping down through his arms, curling up into his neck, shoving itself through every vein. Not the fire of the blast. Not the searing touch of open flame. This was alive. Coiled. Waiting.

Max's breath caught. His back arched, ribs straining.

The heart monitor to his left shrieked into a sharp, rapid beeping.

One of the nurses shot to her feet, chair legs squealing against the floor. "Doctor! Get in here, now!"

The door banged open. A man in blue scrubs and a surgical mask strode in, pulling on gloves. "Status?"

"Heart rate spiking. No obvious cause. Core temp climbing fast — this can't be right."

Another nurse pressed a thermometer to Max's temple. "Forty-three degrees. And still climbing."

The nurse's voice pitched higher. "Forty-three degrees… and the equipment's glitching. Look at the static on the monitor."

The doctor swore and leaned over him, penlight in hand. "Stay with me, sir. Do you know where you are?"

The ECG monitor popped and hissed, a line of static tearing across the screen. The fluorescent tube overhead flickered, its hum warping into a low, off-key vibration. The nurse's hand froze on the cuff. "It's not just heat," she muttered, voice thin. "It feels… like it's running a current."

The doctor pressed two fingers to Max's wrist, then yanked them back. "His skin… What the hell is this?"

Max opened his eyes. White ceiling. Blinding light. The doctor's voice was a thin thread behind the roar in his blood.

The fire didn't care where he was. It only cared that it was trapped.

The heat surged again, harder this time, as if testing the walls of its cage. He gasped. His skin prickled — not with sweat, but as though something underneath it was trying to push its way out.

"Get me a cooling blanket," the doctor barked. "And keep that IV line clear."

Max barely heard him. He pushed his palms against the bed, sitting up in a slow, shaking rise. Pain stabbed through his chest like a white-hot spike, but he held it.

The nurses tried to push him back down. "Sir, lie still—"

He ignored them. Forced himself upright, every muscle trembling with the effort.

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The heat snarled inside him. He clenched his jaw. Forced it down. Not out. Not yet.

The monitor's alarm cut off. The heart rate slowed. The room stilled again.

Max looked down. The scars were there — the same twisting rivers of ruined flesh across his chest and collarbone, warped reminders of another fire seven years gone. But now they shimmered faintly, edges pulsing with the glow of metal fresh from the forge.

And beneath them, thin gold veins moved in time with his heartbeat.

His hand rose, almost without thought, and pressed against the centre of his chest.

The Hellmark was gone from the surface. But deep inside — deeper than bone — he could feel it. A hook driven in and anchored tight. Aamon's hook. Still there. Still claiming him.

The door slammed open again. More footsteps. The security guard's voice joined the rest: "Sir, you need to—"

Max didn't move.

He was listening.

A whisper brushed the inside of his skull. Cold as glass, thin as smoke.

You'll burn them all eventually.

Max blinked and the voice was gone.

***

The bathroom felt too small the moment he stepped inside.

Not because of its size — it was the same sterile box every hospital used — but because the air was wrong. Too warm. Too close. Like the walls had moved an inch inward while he crossed the threshold.

He turned the lock with a sharp click. The noise felt loud in the tiled silence.

A single fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, its hum threading into the back of his skull. The light wasn't steady — it stuttered every few seconds, making the mirror flash from white to shadow and back again. The strobing made his skin look like it belonged to two different people.

Max gripped the sink with both hands, head low, breaths pulling deep from somewhere that hurt. His gown stuck to him, damp from sweat that wasn't entirely from exertion.

He had to get control.

The fire in his chest hadn't gone out. It had quieted, but it was still there — pressing against his ribs, flexing like an animal that hadn't decided whether to bite or sleep.

He didn't think. He just reached inward.

It wasn't magic, not exactly. More like finding a switch in a room he'd never been in before.

The pain bent. Not gone — it still clawed at him, still flared hot in the marrow — but dulled. Like sound under thick water. He exhaled, almost steady now, and realised the relief was temporary. The fire hadn't weakened. He'd only padded the walls of its cage.

Slowly, he lifted his head toward the mirror.

At first, the condensation blurred everything — his outline was just a pale figure under the faulty light. He wiped at the glass with the back of his hand. The smear cleared enough to see his face.

The man staring back didn't look like the one who'd drawn the circle in a hotel room.

The man in the glass was thirty-six, but his face carried a decade more. Grey-blond hair fell in uneven waves, the silver at his temples catching in the stuttered light. A beard framed his mouth and jaw, thick but unkempt, shadowing skin that had seen too little sleep. Broad shoulders and a corded frame hinted at strength, but it was the wrong kind; not the kind built in gyms, but in long nights and harder choices. He looked like a man who'd carried too much for too long, and was still carrying it.

And his veins.

They glimmered under the skin in branching threads, faint until his breath hitched or his jaw tightened — then they lit, gold lines pulsing at his throat, along his collarbones, down the backs of his hands. A memory hit — sharp, uninvited. The circle on the hotel floor. The smell of burning Sharpie ink and April's handwriting copied in black marker. Liz's face in the hospital bed, pale against the pillow. The pulse in his veins quickened, threads of gold racing toward his hands like they could reach her from here.

His eyes were worse.

His eyes, an icy, piercing blue, didn't belong to someone still anchored in the world. They were the eyes of a man who had stood too close to loss and never stepped back. The irises had shifted to a murky gold, but it wasn't the colour that stopped him. It was the movement — something restless in there, swirling just behind the glassy surface. Fire that didn't burn, watching him from inside.

Max's throat tasted faintly of smoke.

He flexed his right hand, just to see if he could.

At first — nothing. Then, a low thump in the palm, as though a second heartbeat had started there. A bloom of golden-blue fire curled into his hand, licking along his knuckles.

It wasn't hot in the way it should've been. It pulsed instead, alive and searching, climbing in thin strands up his wrist toward the elbow.

He panicked. "Stop."

The word rasped out, but the flame flared brighter, as if testing him.

Max slammed his fingers shut. Pain slammed back — pure and unfiltered, like he'd crushed molten iron in his fist. His knees dipped and the sink caught his weight. The fire recoiled, folding into itself, not gone but forced back.

The porcelain under his other hand gave way with a brittle snap. A crack spidered out from under his palm.

Strength. Reflexes. Everything sharper. But everything came with a cost — the same constant burn underneath.

And the truth settled in: the only reason he wasn't screaming was because his body had built something new to hold it back. Not armour. Not immunity. A cage.

Aamon's death hadn't ended the ritual. It had turned Max into the container. The Contract had worked in reverse, giving him the one thing he needed most: the ability to trap the fire instead of unleash it.

He was the prison now.

He leaned back from the mirror — and saw it.

A thin band of light above his head. Gold, but ragged at the edges, licking in small bursts like a dying torch. One side brighter, the other guttering. Not holy. Not clean. It shifted when he moved, as if tethered to something deeper than flesh.

His knees buckled. He dropped, palms skidding on the cold tile. His stomach lurched.

He gripped the sink, pulled himself up — and vomited.

Black. Tar-thick, spattered with clumps of ash. Streaked with red. It slid sluggishly toward the drain, leaving streaks like oil on glass.

Max hung there, breathing hard. The halo in the mirror still flickered above him, steadying now, almost patient.

He didn't look away.

Because the only question left was how long before it stopped waiting — and burned its way out.

***

The rooftop door clicked shut behind him, sealing the hospital's hum below.
Barefoot, Max stepped onto concrete slick from last night's rain. The surface still held the coolness of the storm, but the air was different here — high, thin, almost too clean. Not clean like the sea. Not wild. It was filtered, engineered, like someone had taken the sky apart and rebuilt it without the flaws.

He always sought out the heights. Even before the fire.

As a kid, it had been the rusted water tower outside his street. Later, rooftops in the city, steel frames on half-built sites. There was something about being above it all, where the noise turned to murmur and the streets became lines on a map. Somewhere the world couldn't touch him — and couldn't hear him break.

But Singapore didn't smell like home.

Not even close.

A shimmer warped the air along the rail, heat bending the skyline as if the city itself were seen through a sheet of fire. He blinked, and it was gone — but his palms stayed warm, too warm, against the metal.

He shut his eyes and tried anyway. For a heartbeat, he caught it — eucalyptus bending in a salt wind, the faint sting of smoke from the neighbour's grill. April's perfume in the hallway, lemon and cedar. Liz laughing in the driveway, chalk dust streaking her bare knees. He'd stepped on one of her dinosaurs barefoot, left a smudge of blue across the kitchen tiles.

That had been home — too small, too expensive, but loud with life.

When he opened his eyes, the city waiting for him was steel and glass and calculation. Towers stacked like mirrored knives. Cranes clawing endlessly at the sky. Trees in glass boxes, grafted into balconies like someone had grown a forest in captivity. Even the sunrise over Marina Bay looked rehearsed — gold bleeding across the water in slow, careful strokes, like it had been approved by committee.

It made his teeth ache.

He moved to the railing. The streets were already waking — cars sliding in orderly lines, hawker stalls flickering on, the deep rumble of the MRT beneath the ground. All of it choreographed. No chaos. No grit. No place for someone like him.

Max dug into the waistband of his borrowed hospital trousers and drew out the photograph. It had been folded and unfolded so many times the edges had begun to fray — or maybe it was just the fire that had done that, one corner blackened completely. April still smiled from beneath a wide-brimmed sunhat, her eyes crinkled against the light. Liz sat pressed to her side, maybe five years old, one front tooth missing, cheeks sticky with mango. He'd taken the picture himself, badly framed. April had teased him about that. Her hand had rested on his shoulder, light and warm.

He couldn't remember what she'd said. Only the laugh that followed — soft, disbelieving, like she still wasn't sure how she'd found happiness in a man like him.

Now there was no warmth. Just fire.

He folded the photo, pressing it to his chest. His skin heat curled the edges.
"I should've died in that fire," he said. The words hit the air like ash.

But they didn't echo.

He stayed there, breathing in the morning. Watching the horizon. The photo warm against his chest.

Then—
"But I didn't."

It wasn't triumph. His blood still burned. His body still felt like it was trying to kill him from the inside. But Liz was alive. Somewhere below, she was still fighting. And that was enough to keep him standing.

Max gripped the railing, knuckles whitening, and let the light rise around him.

Letting it burn.

***

The elevator doors slid shut with a sigh, sealing him off from the rooftop light.
Max moved without hurry, but it wasn't the kind of calm that came from control. Every step was a negotiation — one foot telling him to keep walking, the other wanting to turn and run back.

Bare feet whispered over the sterilised tiles. The hospital gown clung in the wrong places, too thin to hide the tension in his frame. The corridor ahead felt longer than it should have been — white walls that seemed to stretch and bend, the faint antiseptic sting in the air pressing into his sinuses.

No one stopped him. Maybe they didn't see him. Or maybe they didn't want to.

The fluorescent tubes above gave a single, stuttering flicker. Shadows shifted. The air cooled in a way vents couldn't cause, as though something deep in the building had drawn a breath. Somewhere under the floor, a low hum rose and fell — slow enough to feel in his ribs, familiar in a way that made his jaw tighten.

He saw her door before he meant to.

Room 805.

Liz.

His pace faltered. For a moment, he was ready to cross the space, press a hand to the glass, just to see her breathing. To know she was still here.

But the heat under his skin climbed with each step toward that door. Not warm. Not human.

It felt like something waking.

And then it hit — not a memory, not a vision, but a flash, jagged and merciless: his palm pressed against her hand, her body arching as golden fire bled from his veins into hers, filling her eyes with the same restless light that now lived in his. Her breath gone. Her chest still.

The image vanished, but the sick weight it left didn't. From under the machines, under the voices — something else spoke. Not loud. Not human.

You'll burn her too.

The words slid under his skin like a needle, carrying heat.

He stayed in the hallway, watching the number on the frame instead of what lay beyond the glass. His chest tightened until he could feel his pulse in his teeth. His hands curled, then released.

Because what if it wasn't safe?

What if whatever this thing was — this fire, this pulse — couldn't tell the difference between healing and harm?

For a heartbeat, he almost let himself believe it would be fine — that whatever this was, he could hold it back. That if she woke, she'd want to see him first.

The thought flared hot. And just as quickly, he crushed it. He forced himself to keep moving.

At the corner, he stopped. The tiles behind him glowed for an instant — faint golden lines etching themselves into being. Sigils, sharp and deliberate, curling into patterns he didn't know but somehow recognised. Watching him. Judging him. Then they faded, leaving sterile white again.

Max braced a hand against the wall. Let the cold leach into his palm until the ache in his chest dulled enough to speak.

His foot shifted forward before he realised it, the pull toward her room as instinctive as breathing. The hum inside him changed pitch — higher, sharper — and for a second he swore the gold in his veins flared in answer.

"I need to know what I am," he said, low enough for the words to dissolve into the hum. "Before I face her."

Because Liz was still his daughter.

And he wouldn't risk her to find out the hard way.