Alex waited quietly in the siting room, his neck damp with sweat and his heart racing with anticipation. “Sit here and do not touch anything” had been his instructions and he had followed them for forty minutes now. He glanced slowly around and studied the long shadows the setting sun cast from the only window in a room filled with strange and wondrous items. An antique table with the most grotesque looking legs that Alex had ever seen, appearing to have been carved to resemble muscle fibers being ripped and mauled. Sitting upon the table was a marble statue of an angel so breathtakingly pure that made Alex's heart leap into his throat when he set eyes upon it.

Strangest of all was the ornately carved wood paneling around the room. It was stained so dark as to nearly be black and a pure white light came out from the small gaps in the smooth finish . A chilling cacophony of sounds seemed to creep out with that pure light. Painful noises, horrible noises, noises that made the flesh crawl and the heart stop.

Alex glanced at his watch in apprehension. It was already well past six and the note had told him to be prompt. As he waited, his excitement slowly turned to anxiety. Had he done something wrong? Was the note not correct? He shook his head, dispelling the doubt from his mind. He knew what he had seen and done that lead him up to this point and he knew that this was where he needed to be. This was the final step in a journey of years.

Alex became an investigative reporter almost entirely to have an excuse to find the answers to the strange evens surrounding his sister's death. He knew that the “simple” murder report the police filed could not have been true. He was there. His twin sister, Sara, was ripped to shreds before his eyes by a monster, a creature that had no right to exist and that the mind screamed to forget about. Alex did not forget. He could feel his subconscious tugging at the memory, trying to make him believe the police report that stated it was simply a murderer with a knife, but Alex forced himself to remember. He made himself recall the ghastly scene over and over until his mind simply broke from the long years of programing society had instilled. It let him see ,for the first time, the world around him as it truly was.

With his new eyes, many things became obvious to him. That homeless beggar in the ally was not just a beggar Alex saw the flash of a bare, pink tail and the hint of rodent-like whiskers that posed as a man. He observed that the couple in the bar who appeared to simply be making out in a corner as something far more sinister and deadly. Maybe all those vampire authors were not writing complete fiction.

Shortly after the discovery of his newfound awareness, he discovered a crumpled folded note sitting on his desk as he arrived back from lunch on a Friday afternoon. It was written in rigid, precise print and read simply “1124 East Walker, Tuesday at 9 PM. Tell them Drax sent you.”

Alex asked around the office ,but no one had seen who had left the note. However, everyone he asked about it advised Alex that it was probably best if he ignored it. Of course, Alex could not ignore it. The though of what it all might mean gnawed at him all weekend. By Tuesday morning he was finding it hard to get any work done as his anticipation rivaled a child's on Christmas Eve. He took the afternoon off and forced himself to get a bit of sleep so that he might be wide awake and ready for whatever he was to experience.

As he approached the address listed, he could feel a change in the air, a feeling of the unknown and of a sinister darkness seemed to pull at his every breath. As he knocked on the nondescript wooden door set in a squat brick building, fear began to slowly sink its talons into his heart. When the door began to open, Alex held his breath and waited for the worse. Standing before him was a small man, balding, with his remaining hair hanging in greasy strings about his shoulders. He smelled as if he had not bathed in weeks and his body was covered in a grotesque layer of fat and grime that seemed to hang strangely on him, as if he was a small man wearing a larger man as a set of clothes.

“What'd ya want?” The little man asked, his voice like gravel scrapping across flesh.

“D.. Drax sent me” Alex stammered, unable to take his eyes off of the strange little man, despite fervently wishing he could.

The man simply grunted and shuffled back into the building, motioning Alex to follow with a wave of his fleshy arm.

The building was mostly empty,with only a skeleton of busted walls and parts of crumbling upper stories remaining. Here and there, a rat skittered by. Other than that the place seemed almost painfully empty.

Alex was lead to a steel door set in the floor of the gutted building. His guide pulled out a key from his grungy jeans a unlocked the padlock securing the chain around the handles of the door. As the little man opened the door, Alex saw that a set of stairs lead down into a misty darkness.

The corridor at the bottom of the stairs had a fog that hung about knee high on Alex. His guide had removed and lit an old oil lantern that hung on a peg at the foot of the stairs to light their way, but it's light barely seemed to fight back the darkness.

After a short walk, they came to another steel door and his guide turned to face him and said “No makin' any noise until I relock dis door. Ya scream, ya die. Ya gasp, ya die. ya breath too heavy, ya die. Am I be'in understood??”

Alex took a deep breath and nodded. Satisfied, the small man unlocked the door, opened it and waved Alex in.

The interior of the room seemed to stretch beyond the limits of Alex's vision. The whole area seemed to be lit by a fungus that covered parts of the floor and glowed an eerie blueish light that made the haze in the air seemed to glow. As his eyes adjusted to the light in the room, he began to make out a shape in the distance. He moved slowly closer to it, noting at the same time that his guide had not followed him into the room.

As he approached the object he saw it was a figure sitting at a table. It was roughly man shaped and looked to be about six feet tall if it stood. Its form was large as if it were powerfully muscled and it wore a tattered, hooded brown robe that obscured nearly all of its features. As Alex creeped quietly closer to the figure, it seemed to not notice him but instead concentrated on something at the table. As he continued to approach he noticed that the being was eating from a plate. Curiosity outweighing the knot of fear forming in his stomach, Alex edged closer still.

When he was close enough to identify the contents of the form's plate, he could not help but gasp at what he saw. The figure was eating remains of what looked to be a child. The Creature instantly looked up from it's meal and glanced around revealingly it's face to Alex. It had a vaguely human face though it's eyes looked to be stitched shut. Blood ran from the stitchings as if they were still fresh, the creature's nose looked to have been shorn off and only a gaping bloody hole remained. It stood and moved its head around, sniffing the air with it's bloody nasal hole as Alex stood paralyzed fear.

The creature began to walk slowly around the table and towards Alex and a strange clacking sound came from it. Alex quickly noticed was a lobster like claw the creature was clacking that hung where the monster left hand should be. The other appendage ended in a clawed hand that was covered in the gore of its hellish meal.

Alex took a step towards the distant exit as the creature moved closer, then another. The nightmarish creature seemed to detect the movement because it turned directly towards Alex and let a might roar showing its rows of needle like teeth. Alex broke into a run towards the door at that point as the monster harried his every foot step. Just as he was about to exit the room he felt an awful pain at his back and stumbled onto the floor of the corridor to the surface. While Alex lay on the ground, gasping in pain and fear, he heard his guide slam close the steel door and quickly put the lock back in place.

As diminutive man shuffled back down the hall he looked back over his shoulder and said “I warned ya, idiot. And ye best not be goin' to the hospital for that. They be asking to many questions.”

Alex did not respond as he painfully rose to his feet and followed after his dwarfed guide.

Alex was unable to sleep that night. The horror he had witness combined with the burning pain in his back kept him awake. The next day at work, his back troubled him and the lack of sleep combined with a newfound fear kept him unable to concentrate. His boss noticed and told Alex to take the week off to recuperate from what he though was simple case of an overworked employee.

It was Thursday night before Alex's mind let him go to sleep. Friday morning there was a package at his door. It was addressed “Mr. Washington, 1900 S. Wicker St. Apt. 201”. There was no postmarking and the address was written in the same handwriting as the note.

Alex brought the package into the kitchen and set it on his dining room table where he stood staring at it for over an hour. The curiosity of what new discovery it might uncover was tempered by the fear of what horrible thing he might see and endure.

Eventually his curiosity won out and he opened it. Inside were a series of photographs depicting a young man with long golden hair assisting people in need and doing other good works. While there seemed nothing strange about the person depicted,save for his overabundance of generosity in an uncaring and hostile world, but at the same time he did not seem to fit in with the photos. It was as if he was to clean, to much unlike the others depicted around him, to truly be there. The final picture was of this young man wearing blazingly silver armor and wielding a sword of fire. From his back two huge feathered wings hung in bleeding tatters. The foe this beautiful young man was fighting was pure horror. An inky blackness bristling with wicked looking talons and fanged, dripping maws.

At the bottom of the box, under the pictures was a note, this time typed, and attached to a lock of gold hair tied with a bright blue ribbon. The lock was still damp with a bright red blood.

“One less defender of the downtrodden.” Alex read the note aloud, as if it might make it easier to accept. “This one the last one known, and he was destroyed three weeks ago.” Alex took a breath and tried to make is mind understand what this all meant. After a moment in contemplation, he continued.

“I know this might be difficult to believe but just remember what you have already seen. Telling others would be an act of futility, as you probably already have guessed. The most probable outcome of telling others would be your eventual commitment to an institution. However, over the next bit of time we will be sending you scraps of information. Eventually, when we feel you are ready, we will make ourselves known.”

Alex stumbled back into a chair as a thousand questions ran through his thoughts. Was the apocalypse happening all around him? Does this prove the existence of a supreme being of good even though the note says the side of good is losing? And why is all this information coming to him anyway?

Alex called in to work that day and sat at home, alternately crying or simply in starting at the wall in a catatonic state as those few images depicted in the photographs burned themselves into his soul.

For the next two months, Alex received no packages or notes. He placed the pictures of the so called angel in his personal safe and tried to pretend that it was all just a bad dream, even though in the back of his mind he knew it was to late to erase what he had seen. He even tried drowning his memories in alcohol and women, staying late out at bars and bringing home a differently woman every night, but he knew nothing would assuage the fear and questions he had, nothing save more knowledge.

When another strange note appeared on his desk early one Monday morning, he was half tempted to throw it away. In the end, however, he sighed and sat down to began to read.

It was a chill Wednesday morning as Alex stood quietly hiding behind the specified crates at the harbor. San-Francisco harbor was, as harbors go, fairly clean. Though it still smelled to much of fish and waste for a person to find it pleasant. The note had instructed him to arrive at three-thirty am and wait facing east behind crate 43-542, and he had done so. It was now four thirty and Alex's teeth were beginning to chatter in the cool January morning.

“Screw this, I am freezing my balls off out here,” Alex muttered planing to walk back to his car to warm up when an unmarked delivery truck pulled up a short distance away. In the dim illumination that the wharf lights put off, Alex could see two men dressed in suit exit the front of the vehicle and open the back. They then began loading strange black bags into the water. Alex immediately suspected them to be corpses. However, Alex's heart rose to his throat when one of the bags twitched and was instantly beat back immovability by the men.

Changing his vantage point slightly as the men threw the last of the bags into the water, Alex scanned the surface for signs of movement. At first it was a slight ripple, but it slowly turned into a crescendo of whirling watter as gray forms with ripping teeth fought over every morsel of flesh. Alex watched in silent fascination as the frenzy subsided.

Most horrifying of all was what took place after the meal. A strange figure that appeared to be part shark, part man leaped from the water onto the concrete of the docks a mere fifteen feet from the men. The men, rather than run, knelt and chanted some ritualized sounding greeting that Alex could not make out. The Shark creature then put out a webbed hand to each of the men's heads, as if to praise them both, then turned and dove back into the dark waters.

On his way home later that morning, as Alex exited his car he was approached by a elderly man wearing what appeared to be old and tattered priests vestments.

He tottered towards Alex and said in a hushed, conspiratorial tone “He knows you have seen the darkness, Alex.”

“Who?” Alex asked, not really thinking.

“Him,” the priest responded. “He who is and who was and who will be.”

“Oh,” Alex said, laughing slightly, “You mean God. Well I am sure the creator has better things to do that look after me.”

The old man smiled and said “You would think that wouldn't you. Just remember that the choices we make now will affect the life we lead then. Sometimes we only get one chance, Alex, one chance to make the world a better place.”

Alex chuckled and said “I will remember that,” as he moved around the man and towards his apartment.

A letter sat on his dinning room table as he entered the house. Alex read it and smiled. He would finally get to meet his informants.

His informants had still not shown themselves fifteen minutes later and Alex was about to rise and go looking for his host himself when the door to the room opened and a tall man dressed in expensive looking but simply adorned clothing strode into the room. He was striking in his appearance, a Mediterranean look mixed with a hint of an ethnicity that Alex could not place. He had a strong confidence in his step as he made his way into the room and took a seat across from Alex. He sat there for a few moments just looking at Alex before he spoke.

“So you chose to continue our friendship?” The man Alex assumed was Drax asked, his accent as unplaceable as his features, though just as intriguing.

“Yes,” Alex responded, his voice cracking slightly.

Drax smiled and said “Then I need you to understand a few things before we continue. Come with me. “

Drax stood and waited for Alex to rise before exiting the room and entering a plushly appointed office a short way down the hall. Drax gestured for Alex to sit in the chair that faced a large, black marble desk.

As Drax sat down being his desk he said “First some introductions are in order I think. I am agent Drax, in charge of observing and documenting the supernatural in this area of the world and I would like to join my organization.”

“You work for the US government?” Alex exclaimed, shocked by the implications.

Drax simply laughed and said “You DO have a lot to learn. No, my dear boy, I work for the WORLD government. Despite what the common man is aware of, the world has been ruled under one government for over fifty years. All the so called local governments are simply branches we have established to lead and fool the common populous.”

Alex sat stunned at this revelation, his moth hanging slack in wonder. His mind began to put all the little clues together, though, and it seemed to almost make sense.

“So what you are saying,” Alex began, “Is that you lead the supernatural investigations in this area for a government who rules the world and you want me to join you in your operations?”

Drax chuckled saying “I am fairly sure that is what I just said.” He then dug around in a drawer and pulled out a small folder and offered it to Alex.

“This is your first assignment as well as a location to requisition any gear you might need including a small hand gun we developed that could stop a charging rhino. Also included in your initial equipment requisition will be an operations and procedures guide. It is not long, only about five pages, but they are the five most important bits of text you will probably ever memorize.”

Alex nodded taking full note of the emphasis on memorizing the manual and replied “I will get right on top of that. Do I quit my other job, does this pay or what?”

Drax smiled and said “Americans. It always comes down to the bottom dollar. Yes, you will be compensated for your work and there will be information about your questions regarding this in some of the supplemental information you will be provided. I look forward to your good performance here with us.”

Alex knew a dismal when he heard it so he rose and walked towards the door which was opened for him by the butler waiting outside and Alex was led from the house.

For the next few days, Alex spent most of his time reading and absorbing the information he received from his equipment contact. He did not worry about work anymore. Even if he did submit sub-par articles that never got published or simply did not show up for work for weeks at a time, he would still have a job at the paper simply as a cover to what his real job was now, or so the information told him.

Alex noticed that the organization that he joined placed a lot of emphasis on noninterference. It seemed to Alex that elimination would be a good answer but as he read the profiles of some of the more populous creatures that inhabited the world, he was amazed to realize that some of them were in very high positions of power withing the unified world government. There were also references to some truly powerfully creatures that could potently wipe out entire cities if their ire were to be provoked.

Strangest of all though, was the lack of any truly solid information about any of these creatures. Where they came from, what they are truly capable of, what their agenda seems to be were all left to the speculation of the reader. Some of the information presented even seemed to contradict itself. When Alex questioned Drax at about it at a follow up meeting, he was told those were some of the reasons why his organization was formed.

“While it is only six years old,” Drax said, “We have made many gains in the area of data about the strange events that happen.”

Alex's first assignment was to simply watch a particular person for sings of aberrant behavior that would identify the subject as what would commonly be called a vampire. It was quickly made clear that the subject was indeed or at the very least believed himself to be such a creature. What surprised Alex the most was the fact that his subject was running for senator in the state of California.

“It is not uncommon,” Drax told Alex when the subject was brought up.

Though despite Alex's further questions, Drax refused to comment further. “Internal issues, Alex. Remember we are here to watch, not to act.”

The noninterference policy began to bother Alex as time went on. In his sixth month of service he was sure he could have saved the life of a family if he had simply used his gun to stop or at least distract a pyrokineticist who was driven insane from the power he wielded. Yet another time he sat by and watched a vampire kill night after night, even though he was positive on how to stop the murders.

“It gets easier with time, Alex,” Drax assured Alex when he voiced his concerns at a weekly briefing. “It is sad to say, but to truly study a monster, sometimes you might have to make choices that seem monstrous themselves but help the whole in the long run.”

On his way home to his apartment one night after another debriefing with Drax, he encountered the old priest again. The elderly man looked as he had the first time they had met, his vestments in the same condition, his face still cracked with the lines and wrinkles of age, his blue eyes still seemed to stir Alex's soul in a way that none of the creatures he had ever seen be they benevolent or malicious.

“Work causing you trouble, Alex?” The old man said by way of greeting.

Alex stopped and looked carefully at the priest for a moment before asking “Who ARE you? How do you know my name and what is your need to know that you have to question me?”

The old man smiled slightly and said “I am simply what I appear to be, and my goal is to guide the flock towards the light of the Lord, Alex. I ask because I can see that you are troubled by the choices you feel you had to make but remember that every choice has at least two answers. Just because someone tells you what the right answer is, does that make the person who told you correct? You trained your self to see beyond, then you blind yourself when you are most in need of that special skill.”

“Look here old man...” Alex began to protest but was interrupted by the aged priest.

“Calm down my son” the priest said, holding up a hand and gesturing for a pause. “I am not he to tell you what to do. I am only here to remind you to look in yourself for the answers to the whats and whys of life and the world around you.”

Before Alex could respond further, the priest had already began to wander off. Alex sighed and entered his apartment more unsure of himself than he had been in a long time.

Three days after his second encounter with the strange priest, Alex was assigned to watch a neighborhood that was reportedly stalked by a creature of unknown origin. For over a week there was no sign of anything strange and Alex had begun to think it was another case of misinformation when he saw a manhole cover slowly slide open and a hunched figure climb out. The form was clothed in a dirty sheet that was draped over it's frame, hiding any of it's more distinguishing features, though it was easy to tell that it was at least seven feet tall. It's figure was decidedly lithe and it move with a strange motion that made it appear to glide along the ground.

As Alex followed the creature from a distance, it seemed to simply wander around with not though to direction or destination. It was late and this was an underpopulated neighborhood in a quiet suburb town so there were few people to question who or what was out so late.

Eventually the creature found something that interested it. A teenager walked quietly through the streets, obviously sneaking in well past curfew, he was to wish he had listened to his parents as the draped creature began to head straight for him. Before the boy could even scream, the creature leaped to attack and a single shot was heard in the night. The creature was hit in mid-leap and thrown to the ground ten feet away from the force of the bullet Alex's gun carried. As the boy ran home and the creature bleed its life away, Alex stood still, gun still out, unsure of what had just happened.

While he stood there contemplation his actions, his cellphone began to vibrate. It was some minutes before Alex regained his senses enough to answer.

“You made a wrong choice Alex,” Came Drax's voice from the phone as Alex lifted it to his ear. “I warned you and now I am afraid that all connections must be cut. We have observed you talking to the wrong people and now believe you to be contaminated.”

“What people and how could I just let that monster stalk and kill whoever it wanted?”Alex protested.

“We are in charge here Alex, not you. Your kind will always be prey and we will always rule the earth. I thought you would come to that conclusion with enough assignments, though that you might make a good servant to spy on my enemies but it seems you have decided to defy me and therefore I must remove you from the equation. Start running Alex, because I have labeled you a rouge. If I don't get you, one of us still will.”

Alex dropped his cell phone onto the cool evening grass and walked calmly to his car. He quickly cataloged in his mind what he would need to get from his house before he begin a new phase in his life. He knew that he could never return to the Alex who worked a nine to five job and went home every night to an empty life He knew that he would have to keep moving to live to see the next day. Most of all though, he knew that for once in his life he had made the right choice,that the world would be a better place for humanity thanks to the actions he took. The world can be changed and sometimes it just takes one person making the right choice.