The Devil's Obsession

“Don’t come near me. Who are you?” I shouted as a stranger suddenly stumbled toward me.

The street was nearly empty. Cold wind moved through the dark roads like a living thing, and the only light came from distant street lamps that flickered as if they, too, were afraid. London at midnight has a way of swallowing sound—no birds, no cars, just the wet slap of my own heartbeat in my ears.

He came out of nowhere. One second, the alley was empty. The next, a figure lurched into the weak glow, one hand pressed to his chest, the other reaching for me like I was the last solid thing in a world tipping sideways.

I stepped back. Instinct. My fingers curled around the pepper spray in my coat pocket.

He looked young. Dark black hair fell across his forehead, tangled and damp with sweat. Tall—at least a head above me. Handsome, maybe. The kind of handsome that gets carved into old paintings and then forgotten until lightning strikes. But I couldn’t see his face clearly. The shadows loved him too much.

Then I noticed the ID card hanging from his neck, swinging with each labored breath.

Arav.

No last name. Just that word in bold letters beneath a logo I didn’t recognize. A silver serpent coiled into an infinity symbol.

“Arav,” I said, testing the name on my tongue. It felt heavier than it should have.

“Woman… please help me.” His voice was a whisper wrapped in gravel. He was struggling to breathe—each word cost him something visible.

“I don’t even know you.”

“Please…”

He nearly collapsed. His knees buckled, and for one terrible second, I saw the future split into two paths. Walk away. Go home. Pretend this never happened. That was the safe choice. The smart choice.

I don’t make smart choices.

I grabbed him before he hit the ground. His body was warm—too warm. Fever-hot through his thin black shirt. And he was lighter than he should have been, as if something inside him had already started leaving.

“Are you having breathing problems?” I asked, lowering him to sit against the wet brick wall.

“Yes… please…” His eyes fluttered. Dark irises, nearly black, but catching the distant streetlight like oil on water.

“Fine. Stay awake. Look at me. Stay awake.”

I pulled out my phone and dialed ambulance number with one hand while keeping the other pressed to his chest. His heartbeat was wrong. Too fast. Then too slow. Then skipping like a broken record.

The operator asked questions. I answered on autopilot. Location. Condition. No, he wasn’t conscious enough to give his own information. No, I didn’t know him. No, I wasn’t injured.

But when the operator asked, “Is he aggressive?” I looked down at Arav’s face.

His eyes were open now. Watching me. Not with pain or fear for himself.

With fear of me.

I’ve seen scared people before. I’ve been one. But this was different. This was the look of a man who had just recognized a ghost.

“No,” I said slowly, never breaking his gaze. “He’s not aggressive.”

The ambulance arrived seven minutes later. I stayed until the paramedics loaded him onto a stretcher. One of them asked if I was family. I said no. They asked if I wanted to come anyway.

I said no again.

Then I stood on the pavement, watching the red lights disappear around a corner, and realized my hands were shaking.

This was not my problem.

He was not my responsibility.

But somehow, twenty minutes later, I was sitting outside a hospital room on a plastic chair that smelled like bleach, wondering why a stranger’s eyes had looked at me like I was the most dangerous thing he’d ever seen.

By the time I returned to my aunt’s house, it was well past one in the morning. The key stuck in the lock—it always did—and I had to jiggle it three times before the door clicked open.

Zara was waiting in the hallway. Arms crossed. Chin lifted. Every inch the older cousin who had somehow decided she was also my warden.

“Why are you late?” she asked.

“Relax.”

“You broke the rules again.” Her eyes flicked to my jacket sleeve. I looked down. Blood. Not mine. Arav’s. It had smeared across the cuff like a dark accusation.

I threw a pillow from the nearby sofa toward her face. She caught it with irritating precision.

“Stop acting like an old woman,” I said, walking past her toward the stairs.

“Aira.”

I stopped. Didn’t turn around.

“Aunt Maya called,” Zara said quietly. “She’s staying an extra week in Edinburgh. She said to tell you…” A pause. “She said you don’t have to be alone here. That you can talk to us if you want.”

My jaw tightened. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not. You haven’t been fine since—”

“Since what, Zara? Since my parents died? Since I flew three thousand miles to live with relatives I barely know? Since I became the charity case of this family?” I turned around, and I could feel the anger rising like bile. “Spell it out. I dare you.”

She didn’t flinch. Zara never flinched. That was the problem with her—she was made of stone and good intentions, and neither one knew how to bleed.

“I was going to say,” she said softly, “since you stopped sleeping.”

The words landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there.

I didn’t answer. I climbed the stairs, closed my bedroom door, and leaned against it until my breathing evened out.

My name is Aira.

Last year, I came to my aunt’s house in London after losing the only family I had. A car accident. A wet road. A phone call at 3 AM that changed everything. I don’t talk about it. I don’t cry about it. I just carry it—a cold stone in my stomach that grows heavier every month.

People say this place became my home.

I disagree.

Because homes are supposed to feel complete. And something inside mine was missing. Not a person or a thing. A certainty. A sense that the ground beneath my feet would not suddenly open up and swallow me whole.

Zara isn’t really my sister. She’s my aunt’s daughter—older by two years, wiser by about twenty. We’re different in almost everything.

She follows rules. I break them.

She avoids problems. Problems usually find me.

She believes in safe choices. I believe that nothing is safe, so you might as well be reckless.

That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, and sleep refused to come. The blood on my sleeve had dried into a rust-colored stain. I should have thrown the jacket in the wash. Instead, I held it to my nose.

Smelled like iron. Like rain. Like something else—something sharp and unfamiliar. Cedar? Ozone? The scent that follows a lightning strike.

And I kept remembering one thing.

Not his voice. Not his face.

Only his eyes.

Because for a man struggling to breathe, for a man who had stumbled out of the darkness like a wounded animal looking for shelter…

He looked strangely terrified of me.

Not of dying. Not of the pain.

Of me.

And somehow, that scared me more than anything that had happened tonight.

Because it meant he knew something I didn’t.

Because it meant that whatever was happening—whatever had put that look in his eyes—I was already in the middle of it.

And I had no idea what was coming.

The next morning, I went back to the hospital.

I told myself it was to check if he was alive. Practical. Human decency. Nothing more.

But when I walked into his room—a private room, I noticed, which was strange for a man with no visible family and an ID card that looked more like a prop than official identification—he was already awake.

Sitting up. Staring at the window. His profile was sharper in daylight. High cheekbones. A mouth that might have smiled once, a long time ago.

He turned when I entered.

And the fear was still there.

Behind his eyes. Beneath his skin. A trembling wire stretched taut between us.

“You came back,” he said. His voice was stronger now. Deeper. It resonated in a way that made the small room feel smaller.

“I shouldn’t have,” I said. “You’re a stranger. You’re not my problem.”

“Then why are you here?”

I walked to the foot of his bed. Looked down at him. He didn’t blink.

“Because last night,” I said slowly, “you looked at me like you already knew my name. Like you’d seen my face before. And I want to know why.”

A long silence. The heart monitor beeped softly.

Then Arav smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who has just lost a game he didn’t know he was playing.

“Because I do know you, It felt like a warning.

To be continued......

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