Excerpt: The Belt of Sol

Jael stared coldly into the eyes of pure evil. And neither were afraid of the other.

"How can you do it?" He asked quietly, not blinking. Sweat rolled out of his hair and into his eyes, and his wrists felt as if they were bleeding, the cold steel of the handcuffs biting hard into him as several splinters began to lodge themselves in his arms.

"I'm guessing you're asking how I kill innocent people? People tend to throw that one at me," the monster told him. It only looked human, but it couldn't be. It had done to much. Ruined to much. Destroyed too much. Those red eyes held the blood of a thousand innocent human lives, freed from the hell of the belt before they had a chance to save the others. "I savor it, that's how. I savor every drop of plasma that leaks from the corpse of every victim I slaughter. You can understand because you want to gut me right now, for a thousand reasons. But most importantly because I ruined your one chance at happiness in this worthless world, and you're selfish enough you're willing to kill to get me back for it."

"I'd kill you to keep it from happening again."

"Don't lie to yourself, you'd kill me because I shot you're little girlfriend, because she was the only thing that made your life mean anything more than the average child sent off by their parents to do mining work. And it doesn't help any that you know very well that I loved every moment of it. That I thoroughly enjoyed pulling the trigger, and watching that little girl with the pretty black hair crumple to the floor, that expression that runs through your head every moment of your life plastered to her face, as the last bits of life were sucked out of her by a single piece of metal."

"Yeah, I guess that's right. But isn't that reason enough?"

"Of course it is, and that's why I love what I do so much. So many people hate me. So many people want to kill me. The raw emotion of it all is overwhelming. It's amazing."