NOVEL NEXT v2 CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE: In which anger and loss commingle before a cycle of futile deaths is cut short.
Una Belmont sat up in a familiar bed that she hadn’t lain in for decades: Michael’s dorm room, lit only by the streetlights that gleamed from below. Her head rang with the anguish of trauma renewed, painful memories that had been mentally papered over countless times by prayer, experience, and time—torn free again by the body of the Mesembrine, which must be surrounding her physical form even now.
She groaned and clutched the sides of her imaginary head, then looked around, blinking in confusion. Una wore striped cotton pajamas, a pair she recalled from her seminary years—but the desk and bookshelves were bare, devoid of Michael Belmont’s belongings.
Something moved in the shadows at the end of the bed. A dripping sound came from that corner of the room, followed by a faint footstep. Oh, she thought with cold certainty. I know this scene. It’s that nightmare… again.
The corpse of Andrew Bajorek moved forward and leaned against the footboard. Water and blood saturated his hair; once blonde and bouncy, now it hung in clumpy strands around its pale face. His eyes had sunken in their sockets, and only showed bloodshot sclera. Long, ragged scars marred his wrists where he’d cut them open. The dead student opened its mouth wide, as if to speak, and a gurgle of fluid emerged, splattering onto the floor.
“I didn’t kill you,” Una said in a monotone, but her words were barely audible. “I wasn’t there. And I couldn’t have stopped you by then, even if I’d been able to kick that door in.”
Andrew reached his left arm out, trailing water onto the bedsheets, and motioned for his friend to come closer.
“Stop beckoning me,” Una said. “I thought we were done with this nightmare. I decided not to follow you down that path. Why are you back again, Andy?” Her voice cracked, ending in a squeak.
The dead man’s mouth gaped again in reply. A flood of water and blood gushed forth, spilling across the floor. It gestured to its mouth, as if trying to speak, but no intelligible noise emerged. Una felt a surge of frustration, fear, and pity.
“I’m sorry, Andy. I know you’re only here because I’ve gotten myself into a mess. But I have to say this to you: you fucked your life up yourself, man. You got angry, you drove everyone away—me, your boyfriend, your clueless parents—and then you made one terrible choice.” Una clenched her fists, feeling her temper rise, though she kept her voice low.
“I didn’t know how to help you back then, didn’t know what to say. I was scared and confused, and still trying to figure out my feelings about my own sexuality, and then the school was pressuring me… fuck. We can blame them, blame homophobia, blame the world. But you still had to fight your own battle against despair, once you sent everyone else away, and you lost.”
Andrew Bajorek looked confused for a moment, then shook his head and pointed at his former friend. The gesture was accusatory, and Una felt anger flare within her. She stood up from the bed and stepped towards the dead man. “What do you want from me?” Una shouted, throwing up her hands as tears streamed down her cheeks. “You want repentance? You want a friend to join you in death? I can’t give you either.”
“You’re nothing but a shadow now.” The succubus advanced towards the corpse, which seemed to recede. “If you’re trying to awaken my guilt or self-loathing for not being there for you… you failed yourself and all of us that day, Andrew! I’m so fucking sorry you killed yourself, but I didn’t kill you. You killed Andrew Bajorek.” She poked him in the chest, and her talon sank into his skin and muscle as if they were gelatin. He staggered backward, then fell to his knees, staring up at her with a look of pleading in his eyes.
“You’re a ghost now, or less than a ghost. And I miss you, I cry for you… but I’m mad at you too, dumbass.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her scarlet hand. “The best I can do is to shrive you.”
Una sank to her knees and rested her arms on the sodden figure’s shoulders. He stunk of blood and mildew, and her fingers grazed the slimy texture of his skin. He felt far too real to her touch; despite the horrifying sensations, she wanted nothing more than to pull him into her arms and hold him. She resisted, closed her yellow eyes, and took a deep, shuddering breath.
“Through this holy unction…” Una’s voice cracked again, and she sobbed once. “Through this holy unction may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed.” Una opened one eye and looked directly into the dead man’s face. A tear rolled down her cheek and splashed onto the body. It hissed on contact and left a smoking mark, then burst into flame.
Una stiffened in shock, but then two feelings too pure and primal to deny surged up in her again: grief and fury. She wrapped her arms around her friend and pulled his corpse against her chest, squeezing tight. The dead man let out a wheeze of escaping air.
“Fuck you,” the succubus snarled between clenched teeth. “Andrew, you were a wonderful human being, and you destroyed your whole life in one blow. Damn the ones who pushed you to this point, and those who turned away. And me, even though I tried.” She screamed without opening her mouth, the sound echoing through her jaw and skull.
Tears poured from her eyes and sizzled against the cold, unmoving flesh of her friend. Flames spread over his body, burning away the blood and water, the scars, the wounds in a pyre of grief. The fire grew, enveloping her as well, and yet Una’s flesh and hair seemed unharmed.
Una’s scream continued for a long moment, then trailed off as both of the figures at the heart of the blaze vanished in the smoke and waves of heat.
***
Like a snake trying to swallow an egg or a rat, the Mesembrine barely moved when it had captured large prey. Its form wavered and drooped near the shore of the small, leaf-strewn body of water known as Azalea Pond. Inside the miasma of its aura and the gelatinous horror of its body, a single form hung suspended. The Mesembrine had enveloped Una completely, covering her body from head to toe with its slick substance.
It had erred somehow. This prey smelled mortal at first but was not. The prey was some sort of demon, perhaps a minor deity in its own right—the Mesembrine couldn’t tell, but that was hardly important. It had devoured others of its own kind before, after all. Time was all; it simply took time to dissolve the strange, dense flesh of a demon, with so much energy laced with whatever body this one had found. The prey had struggled at first, but now it hung motionless, and the Mesembrine waited as its energy gradually ebbed.
Bodies were what all the other demons wanted, the Mesembrine reflected in the slow, hazy static of its consciousness—they always had, and they always would, for reasons beyond the grasp of its mind. Had it possessed a body once? Maybe it had. It couldn’t remember. Perhaps it had, once. Perhaps it was just a fragment of an entity who had, once upon a time.
It remembered the taste of flesh, though: the soft, warm bodies of animals; birds, fish, and humans. They all dissolved so nicely and became part of the Mesembrine, the only body it needed composed of the bits left behind as the prey collapsed. Bodies made those demons into prey; bodies came with emotion, and experience, and others. Grief and abandonment. And though it might have once possessed a body, now it was only the end of them: the destruction of mind and self, the cessation of pain and sorrow, the moment a candle guttered and died. Where had those words come from?
Something shifted inside of it, and a bubble formed within the Mesembrine’s mass, then another. The bubbles forced their way to the upper surface of its body, bursting free in an eruption of steam. The Mesembrine felt something—pain, and of course pain was preferable to nothingness—but this pain really hurt.
At the shoreward side of its heaped body, the Mesembrine bubbled like grease on a hot stove, then split open in a tremendous gush of steam and smoke. It felt itself flowing apart, an entire half of itself losing cohesion and structure as something burned its way out from inside.
The figure of its prey, wreathed in tongues of orange flame that licked at its body and seared through the slime, lay curled on its side. The prey had its hands wrapped around its legs. It shuddered and vomited a gout of black liquid, then coughed and sat up, the vomit followed by a hoarse scream.
A naked succubus rose to her knees, her flesh of deep scarlet marred and pitted with dark marks of acidic corrosion. Between the twin arcs of her ridged horns, sparks of lightning crackled as the air in that gap crackled and popped. Tears streamed down her face, but her eyes shone with a fierce glow of rage.
One sluggish part of what passed for the Mesembrine’s mind reacted instinctively, lashing out with two pseudopods to recapture its prey. Another center of thoughts recoiled, shifting part of its mass away from the source of pain towards deeper water.
Una seized each tendril with a claw-tipped hand, her grip burning into the slime with intense heat, her fingers making the protoplasm of the thing hiss and bubble.
“Send you… back to hell!” she roared, then squeezed her fists. The steaming mass of slime flowed around her hands and enveloped them, but the radiant body of the furious demoness proved too hot; the Mesembrine’s flesh boiled away even as it etched her skin with its acid.
A look of wrathful determination on her features, Una rose and pulled herself towards the other demon’s bulk, pursuing it. “You…” she began. “If anything under heaven is to blame, it’s you and things like you. Driving the vulnerable and the suffering to the breaking point.” The Mesembrine tried to flow faster, away from its attacker, but Una’s pace increased as well. Her body shone like a red ember in the dusk of Central Park; her eyes gleamed like two golden stars in a boiling crimson sky.
“I’m sick of it! Sick of people who are so afraid of their desires, so disgusted by themselves, that they destroy their lives and leave the mess for others to clean up, rather than accept what and who they are!” Una’s voice rose to a scream, and the Mesembrine’s body rippled and bubbled in agony, unable to escape despite the movements of its formless substance.
The succubus’ voice, twisted in a cry of rage and grief, reverberated in the trees around the pond. “You don’t get to take anyone else with you! It’s selfish and cowardly and wrong!” She leaned over the Mesembrine, which was trying to melt away into the water; hot, angry tears fell from her cheeks and hissed on its surface. “You don’t get to keep going by ending them!”
Where her tears contacted the Mesembrine, the ooze of its body rippled in concentric circles. Each circle spread and deepened, as if hardening the shapeless protoplasm. Something else took shape within the gelatinous mass, and Una tensed herself, ready to leap away at any sign of attack.
Instead, the form within the slime started to resemble a face—a human face, though with features that initially seemed blurred, indistinct or incomplete. The Mesembrine shuddered, seemingly in pain, as its form tried to solidify into something more definite. The face slowly gained clarity, as if seen through a shroud of tears. Una saw the face of an older man, with a creased brow, deep-set eyes and a long, thin nose
. His mouth, formed like the rest of him from dirt-speckled, translucent slime, cracked apart in a soundless gasp.Una blinked, disoriented, as other memories assaulted her; memories that belonged not to decades past but to spans of time unfathomable to mortal reckoning.
“Qeteb?” The name filtered up through millennia of memory. Another ancient being, another long-forgotten enemy of Yael’s. A lord of destruction, now… this. “What… what did they do to you…?” Una asked the question without knowing why, and stared down at the bodiless face. The mouth formed soundless phonemes at her.
“Fuck… fuck all of this.” She squeezed her eyes shut, but more tears escaped from between the lids. She pressed one hand against her face and let the tears trickle across it. “This world, these memories…”
“I’m sorry,” said Una, and she reached down and placed her palm against what might pass for Qeteb’s forehead. She felt a pulse, like a heartbeat, pass through the rippling mass as her tear-stained hand stroked it.
“I forgive you, Qeteb,” said Una, and a great shudder passed through the slime, followed by an exhalation of gas, like a sigh. “At least for today's trespasses. I don’t know all that you’ve done, but I am not the one who may judge you or hold your pain in contempt.” She still cried, and her tears ran down her cheeks and splashed onto the face in the slime. Of course, she knew, the sorrow this thing inflicted on others had once been wrought on itself, on whoever Qeteb had once been, this being she’d forgotten: the grief of abandonment, the loss and loneliness at the end of all things.
The Mesembrine shuddered, and the face convulsed. From deep within what might have been its throat, a spurt of dark liquid erupted, splattering against Una’s bare chest. She recoiled momentarily, her tail twitching behind her—but the substance wasn’t acidic, just cold and foul-smelling, coating her torso in a layer of black ichor. She felt the larger mass of the formless demon flow away from her, back towards the water of the pond, as if it could no longer tolerate proximity to her radiant heat.
Una staggered for a moment as a fresh wave of horror and hopelessness washed over her—now that she’d lost the vicious edge of her anger? Or because the Mesembrine’s profound despair had renewed itself? She stepped forward, reaching out.
“Wait,” she said, but then something fell from above with a nearly silent rush of air. A small object glinted in the near-darkness as it flew into the Mesembrine’s body and embedded itself in the center of the dissolving, once-proud face. Una stared in confusion: it was a spike or dart, all metal with fins on the rear end. That tip abruptly burst into brilliant white flame, so bright that Una flinched away. She felt an immense heat emanating from the dart.
“What the—” she said, shielding her eyes from the glare and trying to look up through the gloom.
Fwip. Fwip fwip fwip. Before Una could utter another word, four more of the projectiles embedded themselves in the Mesembrine, tracing a neat, linear path across its body. White light blossomed again, and the slime writhed and bubbled away from the heat, the Mesembrine’s body slowly ripping apart. Una, stung by the pungent heat and light even as her own body continued steaming, rose to her hooves and swung her gaze across the trees.
There, dangling from a branch of the tallest oak tree and silhouetted against the dim sky, was a figure clad in dark leathers and carrying a long, thin device. It hung suspended from some kind of harness; as Una watched, it lifted the rifle—what else could it be?—and sighted again. Above the rifle’s length, Una saw a shock of wild, ash-gray hair.
“Cassandra! What are you doing? You can’t just—”
With a series of muffled thumps, the rifle spat more of the long, thin darts into the shuddering form of the Mesembrine. The answer to Una’s question was glaringly obvious: the demon hunter was methodically destroying a demonic threat from a safe distance—quite unlike the reckless succubus who’d run at it headlong—and using incendiary armaments designed to tear a mass of slime into pieces.
Una stared, helpless horror mingling with guilty relief, as the Mesembrine convulsed and burned. White, acrid smoke poured upwards from its gaping wounds.
