Maleficar

   At long last,the signal went out to cleanse this wicked city of those who sold their souls for unnatural power. Room 47 there was a mage, with the paladin was gone they would purge the wicked with ease. With one single concerted strike they could not be allowed to interfere in their greatest victory. One nodded and unloaded an entire clip of his handgun into the unconscious devil. remove the head and burn the body and they could move onto the next objective.

The second member raised his hatchet. The dead man's eyes opened and then suddenly the man with the hatchet was missing the lower half of his arm and he fell backwards bisected.

Plink.

The man with the handgun scrambled to reload. 

Plink.

It could only be a demon from the deepest depths of the inferno. He was suddenly pinned to the wall by an unseen force.

His gun at his feet and his flashlight flickered.

Plink.

From bloodless wounds of the naked man he had gunned down fell bullets. Plink.Plink.Plink. 

His entire clip and there wasn't a single trace on the man's body that he had been shot. It went all dark...

    Rue looked at his alarm clock. He had slept two days it was barely morning. He hadn't heard his intruders.... Until one of them completely unloaded into him with a handgun.  For once his resistance to physical damage actually meant something. He might have gone a tad overkill. He had meant to disable... but instead he accidentally bisected the man with the hatchet. Rue was just glad he could soulmeld as fast as he did out of a dead sleep.

He was wide awake now and thoroughly pissed off. His wards protected him from detection and magical threats. He had neglected protection from physical intruders. He assumed he could handle anyone stupid enough to try it. In the future, He'd correct that assumption that could have two days prior ended in complete and total disaster. Small mercies. Considering, not many could boast about surviving an entire handgun clip at point blank range. The six shots hurt temporarily and it was definitely better than being dead.

He took a calming breath. He was going to calm down. The assailants wore rather a unusual piece of clothing. An over tunic a garment worn during the crusades.Which, meant a possible religious organization. Which, was fair considering his... nature if he wasn't wearing his necklace as anklet, Hatchet man was a mess. So that left the gun man who gunned him down in his own bed. That one was at least a clean kill with a soulmeld spear straight through his heart. He was pinned to the wall. Like a butterfly collector that suddenly decided to upgrade to a bigger species.

He gasped. The symbol was a bundle of sticks aflame. His werewolf ex once talked at length about a hate group that decided they were successors to the failed inquisitions. He wracked his brain. But, there was nothing else he could recall. Besides, the line about the inquisition for the modern age. Well, he was officially leaving.

His family had been born as a result of those tragedies. Most of the mages had departed to the safety of the shadowlands. Meaning only the weakest most unfortunate mages died.  The entirety of the casualties were just the unlucky normal people. The shadowlands ensured no pogrom against those with magic could ever succeed.

Most mages, never returned to this side of the shadowlands and never probably would.  His family was one of the few that entrenched itself with only a single outpost in the shadowlands.

His family decided long ago they was going to fight as savagely as it took to win in a world that was stacked against them.  In time they became one of the prominent dark families. The fact that these two belonged to to a group that was literally trying to bring that horror into the modern age was unspeakable. He dressed quickly and took the bad of magical items he had left. The holy candle had done its job. His closet felt clean and there would be no trace of his passing.

There was just one thing that bothered him. How could they have possibly have known? He pondered that question as he stepped outside his door for the last time. When the question was answered when the elevator dinged. For out stepped the landlady clad in combat attire wielding the nastiest flame thrower he had ever seen. She had a maddened glee in her eye. "Oh?Shit!" He exclaimed as it completely made sense now.

She took one look at him and pulled the trigger of her weapon of choice.

   Alan heard the commotion and he couldn't believe what he was hearing from inside his cell.  Bleakhaven was in chaos. Even a company of his order was stretched too thin. There was a sudden loud crash as something smashed itself into the warehouse where he resided under quarantine and detonated with a loud bang!

 Sending him to the floor. What in the inferno was going on?  He was gone a couple days and Bleakhaven just up and decides to go crazy. He felt insulted, He had done the best he could being the only paladin assigned to watch over a small city in the middle of nowhere.

It had been impossible to effectively watch both the magical and the mundane at the same time.... There was no way Burnt Stake could have infiltrated his city in such a small amount of time. They were a hate group hiding "almost" terrorists. Against all things even remotely magical....

For this chaos to happen in such a short amount of time. Meant only one unsettling conclusion. They had to have already been in Bleakhaven. That thought rocked him more than what he wanted to admit.

He had been too busy looking for supernatural threats when he should have been looking for the mundane ones. That was a sobering thought.

His locked door swung open. There was no movement outside of his door. As he took a single step outside the quarantine room and he half expected to be pounced on.

His quarantine would have to wait.