Noah left Raph burning alive. He first went into the gas station's store to possess the clerk and chase him off.
The second act of this plan would be deadly for any human.
After setting the other gas pumps to leak, he found Isaac standing over Raph's charred body. The small bathroom was enveloped by a heavy silence that made the mobster look smaller than usual.
Noah walked into the store, announcing his presence with his footsteps. He grabbed a matchstick left on top of a sink, playing with it as Isaac turned.
A wraith.
A powerful one too, its entire head consumed by those black flames. Noah could see the slow realization building in Isaac's eyes.
Isaac trembled like he was in pain, his mouth opened to say something, but instead he settled for a yell.
"Dammit!"
BANG!
His fist slammed through a bathroom stall like it was cardboard. He grabbed his head and started pacing and murmuring to himself, clutching the strands of his curly brown hair like he would rip it.
Noah couldn't help but chuckle at the display. The sound was low and sinister in the silent bathroom.
Isaac turned to him; there was madness in those blue eyes.
"Is something funny?!" he roared at the spirit.
The silence lingered between them for a moment. Noah's amused smile grew wider before he spoke, slowly and deliberately.
"I just find it impressive that you can feel guilt or disgust. Come on, Isaac. This isn't the first corpse you've seen burnt; you've done worse with your own hands."
"Shut the fuck up! DAMMIT!" Isaac screamed, slamming his fist into the tiled walls. The force made all the mirrors on the wall shatter as the stone caved in.
Once again, they both grew silent. Isaac stared at the ground, shaking terribly, while Noah walked over to a stall, twirling the matchstick in his hand.
When Isaac spoke again, his voice was low and barely restrained.
"Who sent you?"
Noah frowned. It was a good question.
Wraiths weren't born naturally; someone had to call them up to destroy people that wronged both the wraith and summoner.
At least that was what he had learned from Isaac.
"I wasn't sent by anyone," he said after a long time. "I really thought about whether I should come here. There was a small part of me that said once I kill you, it changes everything."
Isaac was breathing hard, his fists tightened as Noah spoke. There was a red glow emerging from deep inside his blue eyes.
"But when I entered your shitbag friend's apartment," Noah continued, "when I saw the memories of you ripping those people apart… I just said fuck it."
Raph dreamt of one day being as powerful as Isaac. And Noah kept wondering how something like that would look.
How much suffering and pain someone like Raph would be able to bring into the world.
"I can't understand my own hatred. And maybe I am just a sociopath like the rest of you. But as long as there's still one of you fuckers alive, I can't rest. I don't feel at peace. My hatred reignites itself every day."
Isaac had heard enough. The tiles under his feet cracked as he lunged forward. His left fist tore through the air hard enough to make the air whistle.
The punch blasted through several stalls, but Noah disappeared just before it got to him. Isaac turned back and froze.
All the stalls were filled with yellow barrels of flammable material. Noah reappeared and struck the match against Raph's matchbox. He smiled at Isaac before throwing the match at the leaking barrel.
Isaac barely had a second to open his mouth before the world was engulfed in flames.
Noah went fully intangible in that second, sinking through the earth for a brief moment of silence.
He won't die from that. Whatever he has become is immensely powerful. But the defenses he has against possession should be weakened by the explosion.
I'll possess him and rip out Georgie's location from his skull.
He released his breath and the earth shot him back up. The explosion was just a billowing of flames when he rose from the earth.
The heat rolled over his skin for a moment before he rose higher into the air. Soon he was high enough to see the entire gas station.
Fire and brimstone was all that was left of the gas station. The forest surrounding the station glowed in the light of the fire. All living creatures retreated deeper into the trees.
The night had come alive again.
Gravity began to act on his body, and Noah was falling back to the earth. But he didn't pay much attention to the hundred-story drop.
He was still searching for Isaac's body.
Something black crawled out of the fire, easily noticeable as the only living thing in the carnage.
Noah kept his eyes on Isaac even as the ground grew closer. At the last moment, he held his breath and his falling body phased into the ground.
Not even a second later, he flew back out of the ground, soaring over the flames and landing close to Isaac's half-alive body.
He cringed at the sight. Isaac's skin boiled and popped like black soup. Yet it struggled to stay together, drooping from his bones in some places like wax.
There wasn't any time, though; he brushed his disgust aside and jumped into Isaac's body, phasing through his blackened skin.
Isaac shuddered for a moment, eyes rolling up then flashing green as Noah possessed him.
The moment he got in, Noah plowed through Isaac's memories of the mob. Scenes flashed in front of his eyes like a movie going at two times speed.
In one memory, it was night, and Isaac was kneeling in front of a dead body, surrounded on all sides by hooded men in black cloaks.
They all waited silently as Isaac collected the blood of the man's body into a horn. He was badly beaten and bruised, but strangely he was crying for the dead man in front of him.
He took the horn to his lips and drank the blood, then the memory faded suddenly.
Something happened after that, but even Isaac didn't remember.
He found the next memory. It was Isaac shivering in a dark room. There were shadowy men sitting in a half-circle around him, pronouncing his fate.
"You survived the trial, young man. You have taken on the mantle of the Chained Bull," one man said in a reverent voice
Another man leaned forward, and Noah shivered as Georgie's voice slithered from the shadows.
"Do as you please, Isaac. Do not let anyone bar your desires. That is the essence of the Chained bull."
Noah squinted, doing his best to even find a glimpse of the faces of those men.
Their locations, even their names, were all absent from Isaac's memories. The mob were beyond cautious in this world.
How can you hold together the mob without it feeling like a home to those who didn't fit into society?
The way Georgie ran the place was like it was a cult.
He found another memory; this was of Georgie giving out orders to Isaac.
"They reside in the Sherfield Forest," Georgie said from the shadows of the room. The two of them were alone. "You're the only one I trust with this. Find the girl and kill her. Tell no one of why you went there and what you did.."
Noah went through the scenes of the fight after that, shocked by the display of power. Isaac had gone into the forest to fulfill Georgie's commands.
There he fought three werewolves.
At least that was the only thing he could describe the terrors as. They were each eight feet tall, covered in black fur and rippling muscles, snouts filled with teeth as long as daggers.
Their eyes glowed yellow in the night, but one wolf in had silver eyes.
Each of the three were so devastatingly powerful that Noah had no doubt they could massacre a thousand humans in seconds.
Their bodies whipped around like black blurs, vicious claws reaching for Isaac's throat, shrugging off bullets like they were nothing.
As a desperate last resort, after all his men were slaughtered, Isaac released the Phantasm inside him.
The battle between the supernatural beasts was enough to make any man feel hopeless. Watching Isaac rip the gigantic creatures in half was enough to scare the coldest killers.
But his immense power wasn't enough. The silver-eyed werewolf sent Isaac running, covered in devastating injuries.
The next morning, Isaac woke up in a woman's house. She had nursed him to health after finding him half-dead in the forest.
He had planned to just leave when she slept, but then he found out the woman had a daughter with similar features to the one Georgie sent him to kill.
He brought her head to the boss of the Ironfield Mob and declared his mission a success.
A lie. But a necessary one.
Isaac's memories made Noah feel like he was running mad. Possessing the man, living through his memories, seeing all the destruction.
His heart felt like it would explode if he stayed any longer.
Thankfully, Isaac's Phantasm grew tired of his intrusion. Noah felt a heavy push before he shot out of Isaac's body and returned to the fiery remains of the gas station.
He felt his heart still pounding as he rose from the ground, turning to Isaac's body.
It was changing with a series of horrifying snaps. His muscles and bones ballooned and stretched. He grew taller as short black fur covered his burnt skin and a pair of horns tore out of his skull.
The Chained Bull had decided to take matters into its hands.