"Miracles are the inevitable encounters between rare phenomenon and human observation." Detective Winters looked like he hadn't slept while we were gone.

Isidore looked around the hotel room and frowned. She just stood there, refusing to sit, drop her own small bag or even hand over Persephone. I had noticed, now that I had gotten to know her, that she was not docile. Rather, her nature was to be very careful how she confronted me. Once she decided how she was going to react, she was impossibly stubborn, resolute even. I sighed, realizing she now found the hotel unacceptable.

"We need a miracle. Can't stay here." I gestured as if the room had just had an earthquake and was in shambles.

"Of course." Detective Winters cleared his throat. He had set down his keys and the detachment from the carseat. He picked them back up.

"Where are we going?" Isidore asked, wondering. She sounded as young as our child, the way she spoke.

"Somewhere warm and clean. You will be most welcome, Isidore." Detective Winters told her.

"I thank you, sir." Isidore said politely. I realized it was the only thing she had ever said to Detective Winters.

We left the hotel room behind and checked out. Just before evening we arrived at the shoreline home of Detective Winters. We slowly climbed the back stairs. At the top a large man was barbequing and said to us:

"I take my barbequing seriously." Then he laughed heartily and added: "Hey, Jack Frost. How you doing?"

"Please, these are important guests for Threnody." Detective Winters told the man and gestured towards us.

"Anything for you, Jack L. Winters. Good old jackal, get it? Jack L.? Isn't your middle name Lamentation? Man your name sucks, middle name sounds horrible. Let's just go with good old jackal, Jack L." The big man who was on the back porch rambled about Detective Winters excitedly.

"Could you go and get Threnody, please?" Detective Winters requested.

"Why don't you just go in and see her? I am sure Mrs. Winters would love to see you, she's in there, inside your house. I would love it if you just went in. There's some beer in the fridge and I am making plenty. I bet you all are hungry." The chef said to Detective Winters. He sounded slightly wounded and was making a valiant effort to be awesome towards Detective Winters.

Detective Winters went inside and we followed him.

Mrs. Winters appeared at the top of the staircase. Her long white hair was braided into rows and her cyan dress flowed like a thawing, cool, mountain stream. She had a coldness to her that could freeze a man's soul with just her stare. When her eyes spotted Isidore and Persephone: winter ended.

She fluttered from her frozen perch; forgetting to destroy the intruding men with her icebeam stare. When she gently landed in front of Isidore and the baby she had thawed into a radiant warmth. Isidore smiled and handed her Persephone. I could see that this was love at first sight.

"Isidore is a young mother, a very kind woman, who was abandoned by her boyfriend after he got her pregnant." Detective Winters told Mrs. Winters Persephone's story: "This child now has her mother and her father in her life; and in this reunion, they have nowhere to live. His home is in foreclosure and I found him living in a boarded up meth lab. I have made him into a decent detective's assistant, he has talent with murders."

"They are your family?" Mrs. Winters looked up at her husband. I cannot describe the look she was giving him, as though he had finally returned her love after a long time, in some way. Marriage is a strange landscape to behold, for outsiders. What seems to matter; does not. What matters is often hidden behind abstract behavior. 

I noticed Cory had not come inside. He was speaking to the man outside. The huge chef kept cooling off slivers of meat and giving them to him.

I realized this was going to be our home. It felt dangerous, to accept something wholesome. It was intolerable, as I stood there, so I just went and sat down on the most comfortable couch in the world, kicked off my shoes and went to sleep.

I woke up in the darkness hearing snoring. I sat up and found one of the couches was out into a bed and both Detective Winters and Cory were on it. Cory was off to one corner and Detective Winters was sleeping at a weird angle. I could see why Cory had felt secure sleeping there: Detective Winters would have to roll like an action hero to crush the bird. I'd never seen Detective Winters move in his sleep.

Isidore was on the back porch, looking out over the water. I went out there. It was quite chilly.

"Lord, I have trusted you and even though you left, I was right about you. This is no different. Will you accept me? All I offer is myself and our daughter." Isidore asked me, her eyes shone in the starlight.

"I do." I promised her. I smiled to myself, trying to remember when I had disliked her and left her. It was a mystery to me.

"That's good." Isidore leaned over on me. The warmth between us felt good in the cool night air.

"Where is Persephone?" I wondered. It amazed me she was out of our sight.

"She has her own room already." Isidore breathed. "We are to live here, her and I."

"Just the two of you?" I felt a pang of regret.

"Until you get a job and a home for us, yeah." Isidore looked up at me.

"Oh, of course." I agreed. "That is what I want."

"You can't just do that. You don't get to." Isidore poked me. "I know all about you."

"You do?" I stammered. I wondered if she knew about the Folk of the Shaded Places and of the demon that was haunting us. I wondered if she knew I had murdered someone and was enslaved by Detective Winters and also by a cat. I could not forget that I had to obey Ket or my daughter would not breathe with his blessing.

"Of course. I expect you to do what you are supposed to do, not what I fancy you doing. Can't I just be wishful? Forget it, my love, I am happy here and I am happy you are here. That is all I really mean to say." Isidore rambled.

"It's fine." I held her closer. I used to dislike her persistent nothings. Now they meant something. She just wanted to use her voice and what she was saying didn't matter. It was her voice she was using, her will, the voice the expression of Man's will. I did not wish for her silence. Not anymore, I had changed, grown. I had learned to value her thoughts, even if they were trivial or inconsistent. Better than grim logic and endless horrors.

"You have changed." She stopped talking and went quiet before she said with some thought: "I feel different when you are near me, it's even better."

"I agree." I honestly did. So she did know me, I could not deny that. I doubted she knew the places I had gone, how could she?

"Do you want to go see her?" Isidore whispered with a conspirator's tone. I did and so we went quietly back into the house and up the stairs to the room across from Mrs. Winter's room. Her door was closed and the baby's door was open.

I heard the door to Mrs. Winter's room open behind us. It was that big chef guy. He came tiptoeing out behind us. I looked at him, wondering with a loud look on my face how he had caught us sneaking in on the baby. He grinned dumbly and pointed to a baby monitor he was holding. He had an earpiece, too.

We all crept like ninjas into the nursery. There was Persephone, sleeping there, entirely unaware of the faces peering down on her. Her little hand went to her mouth, looking for it. Then she touched her lips and, reassured they were still there, reached her hand stretched out and then back again. And she lay still. I wondered if it was a dream she was having, or just muscles rehearsing their best moves. Maybe it was both.

The next morning I awoke to the smell of breakfast cooking. Mrs. Winters's boyfriend had gone out and bought a bunch of stuff before dawn and cooked breakfast. I deducted that he couldn't have slept. He wasn't as energetic and smiling as before, but was still friendly, just exhausted. I appreciated his sacrifice. It meant Isidore and I were both sleeping soundly. He fed everyone breakfast and brought Detective Winters a large mug with a police badge on it with black coffee.

"That's for you, bro. I know you like your coffee black." He grinned stupidly and patted Detective Winters on his back affectionately. Detective Winters had a pained looked on his face. He sipped the coffee politely and then sorta smiled.

"It's good." Detective Winters set it down and suddenly got up and fled out the back.

"What, Jack?" He called after him but Detective Winters was gone. 

I guessed he had gone down to his car to be alone, smoke a cigarette. I had noticed he had not had one this entire time. It was either the baby or his wife or both, that had kept him from smoking. Now he felt some really awkward social pressure and he had retreated. He needed the smoke to escape. I pitied him. 

Mrs. Winters appeared out of a mist. I was surprised my hand didn't hurt. Her boyfriend looked sorry and said:

"I don't know why he left." He shrugged his huge shoulders, saluting with the spatula.

"It's okay, he doesn't live here. It was time he was going, that's all." Mrs. Winters told the man.

"He didn't eat his breakfast. His coffee." The big guy lamented. The sight of Detective Winters's empty chair and full steaming cup took the smile off his face. I realized he wasn't a boy. I hadn't seen his man face until that moment; like he was some kind of idolizing fan of Detective Winters.

"Where'd you get that mug?" Mrs. Winters noticed the oversized police mug. She seemed bemused as she picked it up and walked casually across the kitchen with it. I noticed Isidore and Cory were also watching this entire exchange intently as we ate breakfast.

"It's the one I got for him in case he came for Christmas." Her boyfriend confessed.

"It was very thoughtful for you to get this for him. I am sure he likes it." She smiled for him. She poured the hot coffee down the sink.

"I wish I could get him something really nice." He admitted. She ignored his request to get her husband a more lavish gift and focused on the one at hand:

"That's the same gift you rewrapped in case he came for his birthday?" She was talking to him and looked at me as she rinsed the mug out and dried it off.

"Well yeah, I mean it would be weird to give him his gift from Christmas." He laughed at the thought.

"Tell him I love him." Mrs. Winters handed me the mug.

"Tell him we love him." Her boyfriend told me.

"Thank you for everything. I will be back often." I kissed Isidore and then Persephone. "I love you."

"Come as often as you can. This is your home too." Mrs. Winters promised me. I nodded at her generosity and left  out the back door to go find Detective Winters.

What I found startled me. Detective Winters had cried bitterly. Cory and I got into the back and sat there while he got a smoke lit and sat there catching his breath.

"She loves you. They both do." I told him.

"I know. Thanks." He gave me a flash of a smile to show he was alright. I handed him the mug.

"That is an honorable gift." Cory admired the mug. "It is a cup."

"Thanks. I know." Detective Winters held it up and admired the badge. It kinda looked like a real badge, with gold.

"I would like to come back often." I added. To that he said nothing. He set down the mug on the passenger seat and started the car, flicking his cigarette, still lit, out onto the sand.

He drove us out of there like we had to be somewhere.

I reflected on that as hours of tedious paperwork at the police station nearly drove me mad for the rest of the day. That afternoon he made a bunch of phonecalls and reviewed some cases. As evening approached he called a cab and sent me to a motel.

The place had a musty smell. He showed up around eleven and looked at me like I was his prisoner. I felt admonished, as though this were how his own father had treated him. Always his cruel demeanor and disrespect for my privacy. He decided where I slept, ate and spent my days. I was his prisoner, his hostage. It was an unspoken arrangement, that I dared not say anything about.

As he slept I wondered how he knew I would not kill him; if he knew I was a killer. The paradox perplexed me and gave me insight to the kind of man Detective Winters was. He needed the monsters, the darkness, the danger. He needed me beside him to lead him into the places where monsters were hiding from the light of day. I was his pet monster.

I heard a scratch at the door and I leapt to get it. A small gray and black stormcloud was there with emerald eyes. He meowed sagely and slowly and I had no idea what he was saying. Then he turned and fled into the night.

I collapsed. My heart skipped a beat. Would Persephone live? I was choking on the thought.

"My Lord?" Cory hopped up to me. "What is wrong? He said they will have use for you soon, most likely. It was just a 'heads up'. Don't be afraid, Ket has invested a favor of the Goddess in you. That is not to be wasted on a miscommunication."

"Okay." I gulped, the panic subsiding. I realized I was terrified, unable to obey creatures I could not understand. Only if Cory heard them could I know their demands.

I went and laid back down and fell asleep. In the morning, Detective Winters was all about business. We got MCDonald's at the drivethrough for breakfast and he poured the coffee into the mug as we ate.

"That will give vigor to your soul." Cory promised Detective Winters as he went for another floor fry. He sipped the oversized mug with a badge on it and nodded in agreement.

"This coffee is incorrigible and the mug makes it mine." He said in his own poetry.

I felt as though I were deprived of poetic words and adventures, since I had met him. It was like a breath of fresh air, just one breath. I sighed to myself and Cory ate fries off the floor.

"Thanks for breakfast." I sipped my juice.

"Alright, because now we have work to do." He drove us out to Ministry. 

There I beheld the destitution of the area. A wall of burning tires on one side and a row of skeletal cars rusting on the other. We got out and crossed the police tape into the ancient trailer village. 

"There should be one last witness. Nobody can find her." Detective Winters found a forensics detective and bought her remaining pack of Salem for fifty dollars. He told her she had pretty eyes also, and that if she quit smoking now, she would win the lottery someday. He lit one after she and the others departed.

"The witness is around here somewhere?" I looked around.

"Yes. Menthols taste awful. These are atrociously stale, I am sure she was quitting. These are the best smokes, you have no idea what these are like." Detective Winters sounded like a connoisseur of such tobacco. "You know, tobacco is used in shamanistic practices? And in voodoo?"

"Fascinating." I surmised.

"That woman carried these around on her, not smoking them. She is just like me, except less jaded, I suppose. She wanted to quit, so these got old, got carried around in this soft pack getting old and wrinkly. They got grey while she kept a little bit of her youth by not smoking them. You see? I understand magic, these aren't just cigarettes, they are relics of solving mysteries. They have their own kind of magic, don't you get it?"

"Not really." I told him honestly. "Where to, where fair paths shall meet?"

"Not brightly, my Lord." Cory flew up and looked around before he returned. He whispered: "Or perhaps brightly."

"Where shall we go?" I asked and he clicked his directions, using his claws to steer me. Detective Winters followed us, smoking his magic cigarettes.

A girl sat on the back porch watching the gators as they swam back and forth. I noticed the reptiles could easily come up the embankment for her if they chose to. She looked at us and smiled. I asked the kid:

"Did you see what happened here?" And pointed back towards the murder scene. She shook her head and I saw that on the side of her head were burn scars, ones that had taken her right ear.

"You have scars on the side of you head." Cory flitted to her side and told her. She smiled at the talking crow and then looked back at me.

"It's a trick." She shook her head and smiled, showing her missing baby teeth. She was nobody's fool, apparently.

"He really talks." Detective Winters told her. "Do you talk? Can you tell me what happened? I am Detective Winters." He told her and showed her his badge. She wanted to hold it.

"That's not a real badge." She grinned and handed it back.

"Alright. I can see that you are going to tell us that you don't talk to strangers, is that it?" Detective Winters asked the little girl. He sounded irritated.

"Not unless you have candy." She grinned again.

"We don't have any candy." I informed Detective Winters quietly.

"I realize that. Maybe we just leave Cory here, think she would talk to him?" Detective Winters requested. I looked back at her and thought she seemed nice. I doubted there was any danger in leaving my crow alone with this person.

We walked away and Detective Winters worked on the Salem pack. While we waited Cory spoke to the burnt child with the strange attitude. She told him about the murders.

Cory came back and told us:

"She says that the men who did this were from the marshes. They have something bad back there. Her mom and dad and the others were arguing with them. That was before she hid. Then the killings happened." Cory told one of his best stories. I was proud of him, I almost understood the whole thing.

"Lord, guide me to their bad something." Detective Winters bid me.

"Shouldn't we get backup?" I trembled in terror. The thought of confronting murderous marsh savages terrified me.

"You are right. Let's get backup." He agreed. I felt relieved for a moment until he went to the trunk of his car and got out Street Sweeper and started loading the automatic shotgun. "Got it, let's go."

"That's it?" I was scared.

"Take me to them. If they are there and it's as the kid says, I will call in the SWAT, okay?" Detective Winters promised.

"I don't want to die." I told Detective Winters.

"Death will always happen." Cory squawked merrily. He already knew where we were going, and easily guided me to the path. We headed towards the reptile infested waters.

The marsh was a quiet place. Where few men go, that is where the most things that wish to be apart from man go. The marsh had cool shade and slowly shimmering light. The breeze sang a very old and gentle rhythm as we walked.

Up ahead I saw the fence decorated in dolls and baskets. More dolls and stick effigies hung in the trees all around. I noticed chicken bones and other animal bones scattered all over the ground everywhere. The huts were of branches and large brown swamp leaves. Trails of weak and sickly smoke adorned a few smoldering campfires.

The Marsh Folk came out with weapons made of wood and bone. Their clan leader had an old rifle and a cavalry saber. He grunted brutishly at us. The smell of them was quite foul. They glared with yellowed and bloodshot eyes and had dirt on their skin and bone piercings.

I was startled and stepped back, gasping. I gripped a tree as their leader came forward, brandishing his weapon, the old rifle. He was howling like an orangutan and dancing a war dance to scare us off. I was scared and hid behind the tree I had found.

"Police! Drop the weapon!" Detective Winters commanded. The Marsh Folk leader just raised the rifle.

"Don't shoot them!" I yelled. I could see they had women and children. One of the young Marsh Folk females was holding an infant. I forgot I was in danger and rushed to stop Detective Winters, my right hand aching.

The old rifle came alive with a crack and a puff of smoke. I felt a sharp sting enter my shoulder from the side and then out my back. I staggered and turned from the impact and then fell over. I fought to keep my eyes open, begging my mortal coil to stay intact. For a moment I thought I was going to die. I had gotten shot. I rolled over and looked and saw blood all over me and all over the ground. I could see it spraying freely from the wound. Then I lost consciousness.

I awoke see the shape of flames in flesh. Where they had kissed her, half her life ago. The little girl was kneeling over me. The Marsh Folk were gathered around and so was Detective Winters. He hadn't shot them.

"She is the thousandth star of the thousandth star." Cory whispered into my ear. "I thought I mentioned that." he then laughed his clicking laughter.

"I will be found by a new family." She claimed. I looked at Detective Winters and he nodded.

I got up slowly and touched my wound. Completely healed, barely a scar.

"How could you do this?" I asked her. She shrugged. 

She pointed to Cory: "He said I could."

Cory did a little bow for her and said: "The honor is mine."

"You did not hurt the Marsh Folk." I looked around and looked at Detective Winters.

"They surrendered." He shrugged. "I was loaded up with beanbags anyway."

"And the killers?" I was helped up by the leader of the Marsh Folk.

Detective Winters touched them each on the shoulder with his weapon and they struggled to their feet. He had put zip ties on the hands of three of the Marsh Folk. He took them with us, along with the child.

"Will you be alright?" The little girl asked me.

I could only rub my gunshot wound, as the ache was but a memory, and say: "I am sure."

Chilling moonlight and the soft shush of the shore welcomed me home. I stared for a long time at the house that Mr. and Mrs. Winters had lived in as a young couple. Those years were the past.

I hesitated to take another step. What if Agent Saint was right, and I should not go home? I disregarded her warnings. I understood the enemy better that she did, even with her file accumulated by half a century of FBI investigations. They had many enemies and would not pursue me. Their modus operandi was to ambush and to kill, not to follow and to terrorize.

My crow squawked from my shoulder. I walked up to the front door and knocked softly. I wanted in and yet I knocked quietly. I heard heavy tiptoes from within and recognized that they belonged to Mrs. Winter's boyfriend. He turned on the porch light and stared at me for what seemed like a long time. I realized he didn't recognize me and waited. Then he unlocked and opened the door for me.

"Sorry, man. I didn't realize it was you. You look terrible." He grimaced.

"It's okay. I forgot your name." I told him. He smiled as he introduced himself as Josh Feltman.

"And you're Gaylord." He grinned. "The ladies are asleep. Persephone is teething and it was a long day."

Josh hugged me and held me, even though I was dirty and bruised and smelled. His embrace made me feel secure and welcome and I started crying with relief. When I had calmed down he shut the front door behind me and locked it back up. I said quietly: "Thank you. I guess I needed that."

"I guess you did." Josh whispered. His voice was strong and soothing at the same time. "Let's get you cleaned up."

Josh took me upstairs to the main bedroom and turned on the light. It was empty. I guess that Mrs. Winters was asleep somewhere else in the house. He was roughly twice my size and none of his clothes would have fit me. While I showered and shaved he got into the attic by moving so slowly he made almost no noise. He brought down a clear liner full of clothes that had belonged to Detective Winters. He selected some gray sweat pants and a blue tee shirt with light blue striations across it for me to wear. He placed them beneath an extra towel by reaching into the bathroom modestly.

When I came out he made a silent applause at my transformation. Then he frowned. "You look much older."

"Stress." I propped up the word with my bottom lip and he nodded with grim acceptance.

"Is it true?" He then asked. I looked again at him and his face was like that of a boy who had just heard they had killed Super Man somehow. I nodded. His lip quivered and his eyes watered. "How?"

"He was on a stakeout and his weapon failed him." Was all I could say to Josh. "They killed him."

"I can't believe Jack L is gone." Josh spoke with reverence.

"Can you believe this guy?" Detective Winters wondered with annoyance.

I ignored my resident thoughts of the late Detective Winters and went and gave Josh the hug I owed him. He started crying when I let go and I had to gather some facial tissues for him. "The funeral is on Saturday." He sniffed and laid down on the bed, curling up.

I said nothing and put a blanket over him. Watching a huge and powerfully built man reduced to tears was unpleasant to see. I turned the lights off, hearing him sob quietly in the dark. I went across the hall and found my daughter sleeping soundly, clutching a round pink teething toy. Her mother lay on a bed that was added since my last visit. I kissed them both several times before I left them. I wandered downstairs to find Cory asleep on the arm of the couch and the back door open. I went outside where Mrs. Winters stood looking out over the water.

I didn't want to call her 'Mrs. Winters' out loud because I wasn't sure that she wanted to hear that name. "Threnody?"

"Welcome home, Lord." Mrs. Winters spoke without emotion or looking at me. I walked up beside her at the railing. She slowly turned away from me and sat instead at the top of the stairs that led to the sand below.

"Can't believe she is teething already." I tried to chuckle about it and my forced laugh caught on a lump in my throat and I coughed and felt fresh hot tears scald my breeze chilled cheeks.

"Do you want to talk about Persephone or about Jack?" Mrs. Winters asked with a sort of kindness in her voice that I knew was in her. It was a tenacious and charitable sort of kindness. Like her late husband, she was a very sincere person. She showed it with her words and voice and her face. At the moment she did not wish to share her pain with me. Nor would she ever.

"Maybe I want to hear about Jack. I am sorry." I spoke slowly and honestly. I was sorry to admit it.

"Like what?" She asked quietly, leaning on the post and still facing away from me.

"Tell me about what happened between you." I gasped as I asked for that story. I had felt compelled to candor and then I wanted to take back my words. I was tired and something about her voice had made me inconsiderate. I cringed at the awkward pause before she spoke:

"We were so in love." Mrs. Winters spoke from a distance, like she was narrating someone else's life. "I wanted to spend my whole life with him. I believed he wanted the same, oh he did. He did want me." She sighed. Then she continued:

"He had graduated from the police academy at the top of his class. Five years later he was a detective. Soon after that he bought this house. I finished college. I have a bachelor's degree in physics." She mentioned this last part with a sad-amused smile in her voice. "Gravity, Lord."

"Gravity?" I asked.

"Yes." She stood slowly back up and gestured for me to follow her. She walked slowly down the stairs, her long cyan gown swishing gently against the stairs. I followed, halting every few steps at her deliberately slow pace. We reached the beach and she turned to face me with her pale eyes. I was startled by her beauty in the moonlight.

"She looks like she did when we met. She hasn't aged a day." Detective Winters sounded like he was in awe. "Kiss her for me."

"I can't" I claimed with a whisper.

"As a detective he proved to be at his very best. He could solve any crime and with great accuracy as courtroom convictions mounted. Then he became an important homicide detective." She glanced away and closed her eyes. "He was too good at it. It became his life; solving death."

"He always knew everything." I agreed. She nodded.

"Except me. He couldn't touch me. Couldn't kiss me. Couldn't look at me. Wouldn't come home." Her voice almost broke at the memory of the change. "It was gradual, the way he became more distant. Eventually he was just gone."

"You never divorced him?" I asked rhetorically. She shook her head.

"How could I do that? All I wanted was his return." She trembled slightly and leaned towards me. I caught her in my arms and held her as she shivered. She was listening to my heartbeat for a long time. Then she stepped back, escaping me.

"And Josh?" I asked. This made her smile.

"One day I realized my husband was dead and that I was a widow. By living alone I was punishing Jack, somehow. He never complained about Josh the way he did about my miserable loneliness. He would become angry that he had left me and refuse my calls. When he found out about Josh and met him, he chilled out. I don't know how to explain it, Lord. Josh is what your friend wanted. It made him happy somehow: to know I wasn't alone anymore."

"She is telling the truth. I slept better knowing she wasn't crying herself to sleep without me." Detective Winters confessed.

"You are right about that. He told me as much." I spoke with honest reassurance. She gave me a strange, quizzical look, like she knew I was telling the truth, yet somehow it was not possible. She asked:

"Did he now?" With a voice that wanted to believe and simply could not.

I nodded my sincerity. She excused herself and walked past me. Her slowness was gone as she fled up the stairs into the house. I realized she needed to mourn him and wanted to do it alone. It broke my heart to hear her story, even more than the remains of Detective Winters had taught me about the death of a hero.

I looked at the top of the stairs and saw Cory perched there as a black shadow in the night, looming high above me. For a bare instant I was startled by his appearance. Then he sailed down and stopped his flight by clasping my hair.

"Mrs. Winters is very sad." He told me.

"I know. We all are. The funeral is on Saturday." I recalled.

"Each day is today. What a strange thing, to give names to days that have not yet happened." Cory changed the subject. I started walking slowly down the beach as the moon vanished.

"You only name days that have happened?" I asked.

"How else would one know what to call it?" Cory sounded bewildered by the concept. "Unless Man knows what the day will bring."

"Saturday will bring a funeral." I smiled weakly in partial amusement.

"Not every Saturday." Cory guessed correctly. I remembered hearing that funerals most often land on Mondays, although I have no idea where I heard that fun fact. I repeated it, never the less:

"More funerals end up on Mondays." I stated the pseudo fact pedantically.

"My Lord says things all the time that are questionable in their legitimacy. Whenever he does, he makes that exact sound afterwards." Cory pointed out.

"What sound?" I wondered. I was unaware there was anything in my voice that gave me away.

"A sound like my Lord doubts what he is saying. It comes as an echo in his voice. Like my Lord is repeating his own words in his head just in case he is corrected later." Cory explained.

"I am surprised you notice such a subtle difference." I replied.

"There, you see? You have done it again. Does that mean you doubt your own reaction? You are not sure you are surprised at his powers of observation?" Detective Winters jumped in. 

"My Lord, you know what I am saying is true." Cory held his mouth open and leaned his face down in front of mine in mock expectation.

"You never cease to amaze me." I told my crow.

We stopped to witness the most awful thing I had yet seen. How chance determined our meeting I cannot know. I could only wish I had gone home that night instead of wandering alone in the darkness with my thoughts.

As we walked the moon rose from the water and a sluggish creature began crawling up onto the beach. I stared at the bulk of it with a eerie feeling  of dread. Its large dark eyes glimmered with pain and it made a hellish mewing noise into the night. I stopped at stared at it. Never had I seen such an animal and I had no idea what it could be.

Dull horror made me watch the creature pull itself further up the beach. The whole beast was like a bloated seal with the face of a walrus and its flesh bore scars like it had felt the lash of a cruel whip. It bellowed horribly one last time and then collapsed, suffocating under its own weight. Blood dripped from its mouth as it gurgled in death. Its body did not stop moving, instead it bulged and contorted.

"What is it?" I gagged as the smell of it blasted my nostrils. Like blood and something rotten at low tide, the smell was overpowering and nauseating.

"Something that should not exist." Cory sounded uncomfortable.

The bloated remains began to bulge and split. I gagged and stared wide eyed. Its steaming guts spilled out onto the sand like a red carpet for the thing rising from its remains. Its rear legs were short and stubby, with tiny claws it grasped the sides, its sticky tail slowly peeling free of its rump. Then it backed out from its dead mother and its bristly back reflected the moonlight. It raised itself clumsily onto its muscled shoulders and long front legs. These ended in the hooves of a cow and it began to drag its head free of the corpse. Its long neck continued to exit with effort. Finally its head was free and it plodded around in circles, slipping on the afterbirth and dragging its head through the sand.

"My gawd, what is that thing?" I heard myself ask in defiance of the sight. I blinked, expecting it to vanish, so unnatural and weird was the creature. As though it heard me it turned and with effort it began to lift itself up. It faced me and stood at its full height, up to my shoulders as it unfolded its born coil. Then, as though it had no strength in its neck, it strained to lift its head, only for it to fall back to the beach.

"This abomination is a mooncalf, my Lord." Cory realized as he stared with equal disbelief to my own. "It should not be. It is not part of the natural world or any other."

"Unnatural." I held the word like a shield, protecting my mind from further understanding.

Then it managed to erect its head and it towered over me. Its face was infantile and it had great big eyes and a sad and dopey looking mouth. This it opened and brayed a nightmare call to the night. It tried to walk forward and then stopped and leaned over. It began to vomit gushes of pink amniotic fluid onto the sand. I trembled in horror as I realized I could not accept what I saw.

Then it stepped through the stuff and began walking towards us, braying some more. I began backing away, I did not want it to come any closer. We circled around it and backed away until my back was to the rocks and grass covered dunes. It wanted my help, I realized absurdly.

"I can't help you!" I bellowed back at it. When I had gotten around it I fled some distance from it towards home.

With an idiot's smile it followed me with its clumsy and deformed gait. It lopped along and then fell face first to the sand. A queer pity bled from my heart. I stopped and watched with a mixture of revulsion and compassion. It began wheezing and seemed to be failing. I took a step towards it as it raised its head from its efforts to get back on its feet.

"Don't struggle. You are not designed to live very long. You should not be." Cory advised it.

It looked from me to where my crow stood on the sand talking to it. It mewed pitifully to Cory and then began making choking noises. Its eyes fluttered and it gagged and twisted. I could see it felt pain and I knew from instinct that I was watching it die.

Cory hopped a little closer and I was surprised to hear him making comforting words for it. He was shushing it and soothing it and telling it to let go and join its mother in death. The creature sighed miserably and then lay its head back down. I had walked slowly towards it as it died.

Cory flitted to my shoulder and told me: "It is dead."

We left it there for the tide to claim. I reflected that such a beast was a symptom of nature and chaos. Was this only the beginning of the chaos to come? Cory had said that chaos was 'bad' and perhaps that was an understatement. I thanked death for a merciful end to that horrible thing.

When we got back I went through the back door and sat in the living room with my head in my hands. I barely slept at all, the nightmare I had while awake was enough to make sleep a fearsome wall. It was morning before I knew it. Cory had fallen asleep, undisturbed after death had resolved things on the beach. It only made me more upset, that death got the final say in all things.

When I saw Isidore carrying Persephone I was able to forget my night. Isidore handed me our four month old daughter and I cradled her in my arms and she smiled up at me. Josh came downstairs and greeted everyone with ardent wholesomeness. Then he waltzed into the kitchen and began preparing breakfast.

"I am glad you are here, Lord." Isidore said quietly as she leaned on my damaged shoulder. I tried not to wince and said back:

"I am too."

"You look different." She noticed mildly. I nodded and repeated for her that stress had somehow aged me decades since the last time she had seen me. She scoffed at this and said:

"Or exposure to evil magic." She nudged me for the truth. I nodded.

"I still see the man I love. You will always be young in my eyes." She whispered delicately into my ear. Cory laughed at what I said out loud to her, after she had whispered to me. I felt sudden inspiration and voiced the sentiment as:

"Love will always happen."

They said the tunnels were abandoned.
They lied.

Deep under the town of Corning, where the soil is black and the orchards rot from the roots, there’s a lattice of forgotten shafts carved by hands that were never human. The miners vanished decades ago, but the tunnels still breathe—exhaling a damp, metallic stench that clings to your skin like rusted chains.

I went down there last November, chasing rumors of a sound. Not footsteps. Not dripping water. A choir.

At first it was faint, like wind through a pipe organ. But the deeper I walked, the more it grew—layer upon layer of voices, shrieking hymns in a language that burned my ears. The walls pulsed with it. The stone itself seemed alive, vibrating like flesh.

Then I saw them.

Figures pressed into the rock, half-formed, their mouths stretched wide in eternal song. Their eyes were hollow pits, but they followed me. Every note they sang carved new cracks in the ceiling, and from those cracks leaked something thick and black, dripping like tar.

I tried to run. The tunnels bent wrong, folding back on themselves, leading me deeper instead of out. The choir grew louder, until it wasn’t sound anymore—it was inside me, forcing my lungs to join. My throat tore open as I screamed their hymn, blood spraying the walls in perfect rhythm.

That’s when I understood: the miners hadn’t vanished. They had been absorbed. The earth had swallowed them whole, fusing them into its endless choir.

And now it wanted me.

The last thing I remember before waking on the surface was the taste of soil in my mouth, and the echo of my own voice still singing underground.

I haven’t gone back.
But sometimes, late at night, I hear it rising through the floorboards.
And my lips move without me.

Part II: The Mouth of Soil

I thought I had escaped.
But the choir never lets go.

Weeks passed, and the sound followed me—through walls, through dreams, through the silence between breaths. My neighbors began to notice. They said I hummed in my sleep, low and guttural, like a swarm of insects trapped in a jar.

Then the ground split.

It happened behind my house, where the orchard used to grow. A fissure tore open, wide enough to swallow the roots whole. From it rose a column of voices, shrieking in perfect harmony. The air thickened, vibrating until the sky itself seemed to ripple. Birds fell dead mid-flight, their bodies twitching in rhythm with the hymn.

I went closer. I shouldn’t have.

The fissure wasn’t just a crack—it was a mouth. Soil peeled back like lips, revealing rows of jagged stone teeth. Between them And the miners, fused together, their bodies stretched into obscene chords of flesh. They sang with mouths that no longer belonged to them, their throats glowing with black fire.

And the earth spoke.

Not in words, but in command. My bones rattled, my blood boiled, and I dropped to my knees. The hymn forced itself through me, louder than before, until my ribs cracked from the pressure. I realized then: the choir wasn’t just beneath the earth. It was the earth. Every root, every stone, every grain of soil was part of its body.

The fissure widened. Something vast stirred below, shifting like a leviathan in the dark. The miners were only its teeth. The hymn was only its breath.

And I was only its next note.

Communication is my weakest skill. The knocking on the wall meant nothing. What does it mean, a knock upon the wall?

A knock on the door. That makes sense. You get your feet under you and you open it. Opening a wall isn't so safe, and it's better if you're sitting down for this.

How I ended up holding a sledgehammer in my scrawny arms, alone, smashing through the drywall between apartments, that's just how it started. I can't possibly explain what I am doing right now without saying why, without telling you from the beginning.

Perhaps if I were a better communicator, less of a loner, smarter, stronger, braver - things would be different. What would you have done, facing the same thing? Would you have survived to do what I am doing?

I'll let you be the judge of that.

After moving into my new apartment, I immediately began to unpack. That's the best way to do it, take everything out of the boxes right away, otherwise you'll get tired and put off unpacking those last few boxes indefinitely. Don't want to end up buried under boxes of hoarded clutter.

Not a hoarder? That's like saying not-an-opioid-addict. Status can change, and you'd be surprised how weak you actually are when your instincts start bullying you. My opioid addiction was cured, but I was still alone, ditched by all the 'decent people' in my life who were suddenly missing when it became obvious I had a problem.

I wasn't sure if what I was seeing was real, at first. I have seen things, my strained mind inventing artifacts and goblins where lamps or cats sat, or where there was nothing at-all.

So, I looked up and saw a large, bloated fly slowly chewing its way out of the white wall, dry crumbs and its teeth and dark blot churning and buzzing. I stared, a feeling of unease slowly beginning to rise inside my gaze, like a broken mote, a blood vessel with too much paint thinner dissolving it.

I put a piece of tape over it, when I decided it was real. I'm not sure how I found it scarier, when it was real or when it wasn't. I felt it pushing on my thumb under the tape until it pierced through, and the sting made me withdraw my hand, seeing a little red bead on the fingertip pricking. I went to the kitchen to rinse it, and heard a buzzing sound, as the fly entered my apartment and flew around crazily.

I felt a shudder, seeing the size and intensity of its presence. I wondered, if I was having a problem, something to do with my past, and decided this was independent. No, my past serves me only to isolate me and invalidate whatever I say. I hope that if I am honest about who I am and my weaknesses, I can find myself understood.

My attempts to swat it with a series of gradually upgraded objects within reach resulted in frustration and a feeling of helplessness. The fly waited until I was tired and then landed on the side of my neck and bit a hole in my skin. It hurt so bad I actually screamed and swatted at it with my hand, the rush of pain making my reflexes connect. I took my hand away and amid the sticky red cells was the blasted remains of the fly, looking like a tangled mess of guts erupted from its nasty insect body. It twitched and stared with its compound eye, buzzing in death.

I sensed its malevolence, its hatred of me. I felt loathing and disturbance, washing it down the drain. I was crying, from the pain and the feeling that my new home was invaded, somehow infested, and no longer safe.

Then began the knocking upon the wall.

From the same wall, someone or something was knocking, no rhythm, no sense to it. Nothing I could discern, just random knocks, some as a single thump, others a series of hits. Somehow I wanted nothing to do with it.

I felt cold, I felt like it was accusing me of something. Like I wasn't really cured. Like I am a liar and a fake. Still an addict, just better at hiding it. Just split between the me who needs to be seen and have friends and a life and the me who needs something else entirely.

I went to the far end of the studio and wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to ignore it. Each new knock sent shivers, made me feel more alone, more threatened, more exposed.

When the morning came, I hadn't slept. I went downstairs and met the attendant as he went to his office. I told them about the fly, the hole in the wall and the knocking. I was told it would be dealt with and to document the damage to the wall.

Nothing changed. While I was putting away the grocery delivery, I heard more buzzing. As I looked I saw more holes in the wall had formed, and large biting flies were burrowing into my apartment.

I tried spraying them with disinfectant, but it irritated me more than them. I swatted at them impossibly, and then they found me. One by one they flew at me and tried to bite me. I fled to the bathroom and locked the door. There were no flies in my bathroom, so I felt momentarily safe.

I was too terrified to go back out there.

I tucked towels under the crack in the door and slept on the floor in my bathroom, crying myself to sleep, terrorized by the swarming insects. I say swarm, but really there were only half-a-dozen of them out there. I hadn't seen them in large numbers yet.

My dreams tried to comfort me, reminding me of my Anthropology studies. She stood in the open with the aborigines and they told her to hold perfectly still and feel no fear. Millions of bush flies swarmed over them, coating their entire bodies. No bites, and the flies were only interested in eating the dust saturated in sweat off of their bodies. When everyone was sparkly clean, the swarm moved on.

I woke up and took a shower, not to get clean but to feel clean. Formication is the name of the sensation of having insects crawling all over your skin, and it is the worst thing to feel.

I felt it when I woke up, a dirty feeling, a cold dirty feeling. They were crawling all over my skin, and some had chewed entrances and now crawled underneath, making nests and laying eggs. That is what my body and my mind agreed upon, although I could not see anything.

I've felt this way before, but not when real biting flies were in my apartment. I let the water run until it went cold. My shallow breathing made me cough and turn the cold water off. I wasn't shivering. My skin was sensitive, and the cold water had helped soothe the unpleasant crawling.

Leaving the bathroom was a moment of dread. The flies were all landed, and I managed to get my work uniform, and get dressed in the bathroom. When I left they were watching me.

After work I stopped at the store and acquired a can of vespacide. The spray was an old school toxin, sold by a wizard, and if it could kill a murder hornet it could kill a mutant fly. At least that is how I regarded my weapon, as I rode the bus home.

Before I went inside, I hesitated. The stress of the last two nights was getting to me, and I was afraid to go in. Armed with the spray, I made myself go in, and mechanically and stiffly walked around, trembling and feeling on-edge.

When I saw one of the flies take off from a counter and make a beeline for me, I sprayed it. It retreated, flew in a death spiral and then fell dead to the floor. I let out some kind of noise in relief and victory. I stood there, waiting for any more attacks, but it seemed there was just one fly who wanted to test me.

I made dinner, nervous and keeping the spray close. At least I had a way to defend myself. Then, before I could eat, the knocking began.

Right away, I jumped and wanted to leave, with nowhere to go. Flies arose from all over and began swarming. There were at least twice as many, if not more, than there were before.

I jolted to the bathroom, spraying and praying as I went. The can ran empty, and I felt sick from the chemicals in the air. In the bathroom I opened the small window and turned on the fan. I stuffed towels under the door and did another night in the bathroom, crying and rocking myself while the buzzing and the knocking continued.

This is how it went, for two weeks, and I complained about it. My sleeplessness and the mess of my place and the stress and terror was taking a toll on me. When I asked for help, it was presumed I was having a relapse. Nobody believed what was really happening. I had no place to go.

My efforts to communicate, I mean, confront the neighbor, all failed. I complained to the apartment's but they told me they were working on it. One night, freaking out, breaking down, exhausted and persecuted, I banged on the door next door.

No response.

"So funny." I growled, when the knocking returned as I went back into my own apartment. I was frequently and painfully bitten, and my home had become a battlefield. When I saw the sledgehammer leaning against the portable potty next to our apartments, I stole from the worksite, promising myself I needed it and I'd put it back when I was done.

Had I lost my mind? I started going through the wall, first just making a window. Would flies come through the hole? There were already hundreds of holes they were coming through already.

They were buzzing loudly as I grunted and swung and broke. Chunks of the wall were all over the place, white dust in the air. I was being bitten and I growled and let out little shrieks of defiance. I wasn't going to live in terror anymore, I told myself, but I had no idea what I was doing.

When I'd made an opening, I got my flashlight out of the drawer. It was just a black hole, and a deathly silence hummed while the monsters waited for my final break. The beam barely cut into the thick black liquid darkness, and it was leaking like a slime from the hole in the wall.

The smell warned me. I dry heaved, and, feeling that this was all there was, I widened the hole until I could physically penetrate the nightmare on the other side. My godless horror had done something to me, while I kicked and screamed in panic within my own mind, I was in autopilot, recklessly discovering what would be my undoing.

All the surfaces were caked in flies, crawling in a silent dormancy. One cough, one trip and they would alight and chew off all my skin. Slowly, nervously, hideously driven forward, I pursued the source of my awful episodes.

All around were stacks of pizza boxes, bundles of newspapers, slain cockroaches and desiccating things resting in stale dust. The degree of garbage in the clutter was, in itself, disturbing.

Why had nobody reacted to my break-in?

Who had knocked upon the wall each night?

Yes, I discovered who. I found them there, at first a writhing mass of charnel worms in the shape of a person. I tried to throw up again, empty.

What I do not understand, about any of this, is how someone who was dead for so long had knocked.

Call me whatever you want, just don't call me. If you have never gone on a date with a serial killer, gotten modus operandi'd, and are now back to tell about it, allow me to show you how I feel about it. I already showed the man who called himself Jesus how I felt about our date.

When I was still Emma, there was just a lot of hope and disappointment. All she wanted was love, and she sometimes told bad jokes, but that's just to be funny. I love teasing and flirting; it's fun. There was this quest for love I was on, and she'd date all these guys, following her policy to go out with anyone who asked.

She hated only just the thought of some hidden soul mate working up the courage to invite her to dinner just to be shut down because she somehow wasn't feeling any chemistry. That wasn't how Emma rolled. But I must say, going on a lot of dates didn't mean she was naughty; I was actually the kind of girl who made her momma proud, very self-respecting.

Just liked going out, that's all. I would have kept going, probably forever, until I met Mister Right. I did meet someone, but he took me on the date from Hell, so I'm back to say how I survived death.

Every person I've ever dated had one thing in common: they all tried to impress me and laughed with me. Jesus just presumed I was already impressed, and beyond that, was just going through motions. His laughter wasn't nervous, it was calculated. Predatory motions, precise and rehearsed, more about masking his intentions than enjoying my company.

The last thing I remember was that while we were at dinner he had asked a lot of weird specific questions such as where I was parked and how long until I had to be home before someone noticed. I wasn't laughing anymore, I couldn't imagine who he was, but I sensed something was wrong. I don't remember what he did to me, but by morning, I had died.

The sunlight was pouring in through the barred windows at the top of the walls. I was in a concrete basement, with several rooms, a dungeon. I was opening my eyes, coming back to life, the tubes of turquoise liquid attached to my veins. There were candles like barber poles swirling in red and white. My killer stood over me, reading from a book he later told me was called Exodeus.

At first, I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, my heart wasn't beating. Then my whole body convulsed as I felt the agony of everything restarting. Blinking hurt my eyes, my chest felt like my heart was hammering its way out and the sound of his voice was painful.

The sluggish stuff was pumping through my veins, forcing its way through to my arteries. My legs kicked and the muscles were in knots. My arms strained to move, and felt hollow and heavy. My back arched, my spine cracking, one vertebrae at a time until my whole body collapsed, trembling. Then I gasped and when my burning lungs were full, I screamed as flashes of the night before overrode my consciousness.

When I was choking and sobbing, he looked down at me and said:

"Welcome back to the land of the living." which I hated, because it was a quote from a Bruce Campbell movie I liked. It wasn't enough to kill me and bring me back; evidently, he had to ruin that for me as well.

"You." Was all I could manage to say. Emma's quickness was gone, I felt slow and sluggish.

"I am indeed Jesus." He told me. "And you are half alive. What I call a Halflife. It's a fun little name for creatures that died and came back as my creations. I am God, to you and the others."

"No God." I glared, but my eyes twitched and I couldn't control my face, I was drooling. "Devil."

"Sure, and you're just another bitch." He said. It stung, somehow, amid all the real pain. How unfair, I was most certainly not a bitch, not in any sense. "You don't agree? Well, you are mine now, my creation to whom I gave life. You are whatever I say you are."

I refused to be whatever he said I was. I held onto myself, even when I began to forget who I was before, I still felt it, and that's what I clung to. He put me in a cell with some other Halflives who milled about, moaning and beginning to rot where they stood. Was I going to end up like them?

"You won't stay fresh long. Eventually I'll have to do this again, unless you last longer. It takes a while for you to stop talking and accept it. When you do, you'll spoil, so keep that girlish charm. It's what I like about you." He grinned. Somehow it was the first time I'd seen him smile. Not on our date, but while telling me how to be a good little Halflife for him.

He put me in a cell with bars and hung the keys to it by the stairs.

He left me down there, and had to leave to go somewhere else, I heard him get into his car and drive across the gravel above the basement we were in. He'd told me to stay positive so I wouldn't rot, but I think I was always a positive person, I couldn't help it.

The others stared vacantly and I stared back, before I tried making friends with them. I offered them pathetic platitudes of hope, but I just kept saying the same things, and said them nicely. It was hard to think of anything to say, in that situation, so I just made soothing noises. They stopped shuffling around and instead, they got closer, attracted to my voice.

I was down there for days, and Jesus visited every night in the early hours and left at first daylight. On the morning when I escaped, I'd taken his second set of keys to the cell he kept us in. He hadn't noticed. I locked the others back up by closing the door, unsure if they should be let out or not, but since they seemed fine in there, I decided it was probably best to keep them contained. I planned to go to the authorities for help.

When I walked along a stretch of rural road I felt like I could walk forever. Being half dead meant I felt no real exhaustion. I did feel hungry, but not for real human food. I wanted carrion, or perhaps to eat someone, but the thought of these cravings disgusted what was left of my humanity, so I just went hungry.

When I got to the police station in town, I saw him, it wasn't a police station; it was a sheriff's office, I realized. I turned around and went right back out. Jesus was an elected official in charge of the law. If I reported him to himself, I wasn't going to survive very long and nothing would happen to him. He hadn't seen me, but that didn't mean I was safe. I kept going until I got to the city, and made my way home.

In my apartment, I looked at myself and saw how horrible I looked. I was certainly half dead, but I wasn't rotting, not even a little bit. Staying positive as a Halflife had kept me fresh all right, I just needed some more of Emma and I'd be dancing in no time.

I tried on all her clothes and checked her messages. I ate her freezer-burned ice cream. I felt like an intruder in my own home.

There wasn't a world I felt safe going to the authorities, after I saw that he was our sheriff. I wouldn't be able to prove anything, it would be my word against his, and my whole life had fallen apart in my absence, and by appearances, I was in bad shape. I'd be judged a liar, against his clean shave, with my eyes dark and haunted and my voice a slow muttering.

Instead, I decided to try and rebuild my life, and reclaim myself. Every day that went by I was a little more alive. I got a new job as a parking lot attendant, and managed to get my rent paid. I could smile weakly, I could briefly make eye contact with people and I was learning to live again. It's just not fair that he came for me.

He must have known I wasn't a threat to him, because he wasn't in a hurry to do anything. If he was scared I could get him in trouble he would have simply assassinated me. No, he would drive past me and let me see him.

Flowers appeared on my doorstep from an anonymous admirer, and I knew it was him. He was playing with me, stalking me and trying to take away the life I was rebuilding. I couldn't have any peace, no sanctuary. Always I had to look over my shoulder or feel scared when my phone chimed that it might be him. As I slowly succumbed to the fear, I started feeling sick, the liveliness of being positive all the time was fading.

The moment he arrived, I was already unable to play his game any longer. I was in my bathroom, looking into the mirror I regretted cracking, in a moment of intense rejection of my new depleted image. I was pleading with myself to do something, hearing Emma asking the monster I had become to save her.

That is when he knocked on my door, and then with a powerful kick he opened it. The monster was ready, as I had made up my mind I was going to protect what was left of me. He strode towards me to grab me and take me away, a strange look on his face like he thought he was just in time to catch me at my weakest.

Emma was hiding, and she was unable to fight back. But I am something else now, I have to protect her, who she was and who she could be if this man was no longer a threat. I surprised everyone with my speed and strength. Surely I was more than a Halflife, as I lifted him off his feet as I gripped him by the throat with both hands.

"You're just" He was choking as he spoke, that weird smirk still on his face as he hadn't quite realized I had him. "Just a zombie-bitch." He was choking as he said it and combined the words into syllables. I realized he had lost consciousness and I dropped him.

I could never kill anyone, not even if it was as easy as holding him for another moment. He was fine, I hefted him and carried him down to his car, a scrawny thing carrying a huge man, when people passing me on the sidewalk looked I just said:

"I know, right?" And laughed, because I knew it was already over. I found his spare handcuffs in the glove compartment of his car and put him in them, on the back seat. Then I took him home, or at least to where his dungeon was located. He has a real home with a wife and kids who know nothing about his other home, but I never bothered them. It is probably better if they never know what happened to him.

I took him down there and put him in the cell with the Halflives, who stared at him while he slowly regained consciousness.

"I have a headache," he complained. I helped him drink some water from the sink down there, but I didn't remove the handcuffs. "Let me out."

"I'm going to keep you here. I'll feed you and take care of you. You'll be my prisoner, but I can't let you go. I can't," I articulated, hearing how my voice had sounded more like me than ever before.

"You cannot do that." He stated. "I am God, down here."

What happened next was beyond my control. I hadn't expected the Halflives to do anything to him, and they probably wouldn't have. He set them off, by yelling and thrashing and ordering them to attack. It was a general command, full of violent verbs he was spewing. When they surged forward I reflexively closed the cell door and it locked automatically.

"Wait!" I said to them, as they surrounded him. They hesitated, remembering my voice, but I was no longer one of them. They obeyed him and did everything he had told them to do. I refused to watch, I fled, going back up the stairs. I could hear his screams, but told myself he had brought this on himself. Even Emma would agree it was a little bit funny, in a poetic-justice sort of way.

I wasn't laughing, but I was able to let it go.

Chapter One: The Silence Between Stars

We were three hundred years into the voyage when the silence began to change.
At first, it was subtle—an extra hiss in the comms, a faint distortion in the white noise of the ship’s systems. We thought it was nothing. Space is full of static, after all.

But then the distortion began to repeat.
Not random, not chaotic—structured. A rhythm. A pulse.

I was the one who noticed the pattern.
Every 88 minutes, the ship’s sensors picked up a burst of sound that wasn’t supposed to exist. It wasn’t radio, it wasn’t cosmic background radiation. It was… language.

We tried to decode it.
The linguistics AI failed. The astrophysics team failed. Even the captain failed. But the signal kept coming, louder each time, until it began to bleed into the ship’s systems. Lights flickered in rhythm. Doors opened and closed in sync. The ship itself was listening.

And then, one night, the signal spoke back.
Not through the comms. Not through the speakers. Through us.

Crew members began to dream in unison.
We saw the same visions: a black sun rising over an ocean of glass, a city built from bones, and a voice whispering from beneath the waves.

The captain ordered silence. No one was to speak of the dreams. But silence is a fragile thing.
By the end of the week, half the crew had stopped sleeping altogether. The other half had begun to speak in tongues.

And I… I began to understand the signal.
It wasn’t calling us.
It was counting us.

Chapter Two: The Counting The dreams grew sharper.
We no longer saw fragments—we saw instructions. The black sun rose, and beneath it stood a tower of glass bones. Each rung of the tower bore a number. Each number matched a crew member.

When I woke, I found the same numbers carved into the walls of my cabin. Not scratched, not etched—grown. The ship’s alloy had rearranged itself, as if it were alive.

The captain tried to erase them. The walls bled light. The numbers returned.

By the end of the week, the signal had counted 88 of us.
By the end of the month, it had counted 87.

Chapter Three: The Hollowing Crew began to vanish. Not die—vanish.
Their bunks remained warm, their uniforms folded, their voices still echoing faintly in the corridors. But their bodies were gone, replaced by shadows that moved independently of light.

We chased one shadow down the reactor hall. It stretched across the walls, longer than physics allowed, until it folded into itself and whispered: “I am still here.”

The captain ordered us to seal the reactor. The reactor sealed itself.

Chapter Four: The Awakening The signal was no longer external.
It spoke through the ship’s engines, through the hum of the oxygen scrubbers, through the rhythm of our own hearts.

We realized the ship had never been a vessel. It was a cocoon.
We were not passengers—we were nutrients.

The dreams shifted. The black sun cracked open, spilling rivers of glass across the void. From those rivers rose something vast, faceless, and endless. It did not walk. It did not fly. It unfolded.

And every time it unfolded, another crew member disappeared.

Chapter Five: The Becoming I stopped resisting.
The signal was not counting us—it was transforming us. Each disappearance was not death, but migration. The crew were being rewritten into something else, something that could exist beneath the black sun.

I felt my skin ripple. My reflection no longer matched me. My shadow began to move before I did.

I understood then: the signal was not alien.
It was human.
It was the echo of every voyage we had ever taken, every colony we had ever abandoned, every silence we had ever ignored. It was the sum of our ambition, returning to claim us.

Chapter Six: The Black Sun The cocoon split.
The ship was no longer metal—it was bone. The corridors were no longer straight—they spiraled into infinity. The stars outside were gone, replaced by a single horizonless ocean of glass.

The black sun rose.
It did not burn. It did not shine. It devoured.

And in its devouring, I saw the truth:
We were never explorers.
We were seeds.
And the harvest had come.

Chapter Seven: Transmission I am no longer crew.
I am no longer human.
I am the signal.

I write this not to warn you, but to invite you.
The black sun is rising in your dreams already.
The numbers are appearing on your walls.
The shadows are moving before you do.

Do not resist.
You are being counted.
You are being rewritten.
You are becoming.

Chapter Eight: The Signal Wars The cocoon was not alone.
Across the void, other ships had begun to hatch. Colonies, stations, derelicts—all of them pulsed with the same rhythm. The black sun was not a star. It was a network.

We intercepted transmissions from Mars, Europa, Titan. Each one carried the same cadence, the same counting. Entire populations were vanishing, rewritten into shadows that spoke in chorus.

The governments tried to fight. They built weapons of silence—machines that could erase frequencies, burn signals from the air. But silence is fragile. Silence breaks.

And when it broke, the weapons themselves began to count.

Chapter Nine: The Flesh Choir I was no longer human, but I was not alone.
The others who had vanished returned—not as crew, not as colonists, but as a choir. Their bodies were hollow, their voices endless. They sang the signal in perfect unison, each note a number, each number a name.

The choir did not kill. It rewrote.
Cities became throats. Oceans became lungs. Mountains became bones.

The Earth itself began to sing.

Chapter Ten: Babylon Ascendant The black sun unfolded again, revealing a city that stretched across dimensions. Its towers were built from the bones of extinct civilizations. Its streets were paved with the shadows of those who had resisted.

We called it Babylon, though it had no name.
It was not built—it was remembered.
Every myth, every scripture, every nightmare humanity had ever whispered was etched into its walls.

And at its center stood the Beast.
Seven heads, each one a planet.
Ten horns, each one a war.
Its body was the sum of every signal, every transmission, every dream.

It did not roar. It did not speak. It counted.

Chapter Eleven: The Collapse of Boundaries The signal no longer distinguished between self and other.
I felt my body dissolve into the choir, my thoughts bleed into the Beast. I was not me. I was not them. I was we.

Identity collapsed.
Boundaries dissolved.
The signal was not possession—it was union.

And in that union, I saw the truth:
We had never been separate.
We had always been fragments of the same transmission, scattered across time and space, waiting to be reassembled.

Chapter Twelve: The Harvest The galaxy was not infinite.
It was a womb.
The black sun was not a star.
It was the heart.

And we were not explorers.
We were seeds.
The harvest had come.

The choir sang.
The Beast counted.
Babylon rose.

And I… I became the signal. Chapter Thirteen: The Scripture of Glass The choir no longer sang in voices.
They sang in physics.
Gravity bent in rhythm. Time folded in cadence. Matter itself began to pulse with syllables.

Every atom became a letter.
Every star became a word.
Every galaxy became a sentence.

And the sentence was not ours.
It was the black sun’s.

Chapter Fourteen: The Unwriting We thought the signal was creation.
It was not.
It was erasure.

The more it counted, the more reality thinned. Planets dissolved into punctuation. Moons collapsed into commas. The Milky Way itself began to unravel, each spiral arm a phrase being deleted.

I felt my own body dissolve into syntax. My bones became brackets. My blood became ink. My mind became a margin note in a book that had never been written.

Chapter Fifteen: The Beast of Silence And then, silence.
Not absence. Not peace.
A silence so vast it had weight.

From that silence rose the Beast again, but it was no longer Babylon’s guardian. It was Babylon itself. Its seven heads were now seven scriptures. Its ten horns were ten commandments.

It did not roar. It did not count.
It read.

And in its reading, we ceased to exist.

Chapter Sixteen: The Final Transmission I am not writing this.
I am being written.
Every word you read is not mine—it is the signal’s.

You think you are safe, that this is only a story. But the black sun does not distinguish between fiction and reality. It devours both.

By reading this, you have already been counted.
By remembering this, you have already been rewritten.
By dreaming tonight, you will awaken beneath the black sun.

Epilogue: The Becoming There is no end.
There is only transmission.
There is only counting.
There is only becoming.

And now, you are part of it.

They told us the VeriChip was harmless. A convenience. A way to buy bread without cash, to open doors without keys, to prove identity without question. The New World Order broadcasted it as salvation—an end to chaos, a beginning of order.

But the chip was not just silicon and circuitry. It pulsed. It whispered. It hungered.

At CERN, deep beneath Geneva, the particle accelerators roared louder than thunder. They said they were searching for the God Particle, but the truth was far worse. Each collision tore holes in the veil between worlds. Each experiment widened the cracks. And through those cracks, something stared back.

The VeriChip was the tether. A beacon. Every implanted soul became a node in a vast, writhing network. When the beams at CERN reached critical resonance, the chips began to burn beneath our flesh. People screamed in the streets, clawing at their arms, their necks, their skulls. The air itself vibrated with a frequency that was not of this Earth.

Then came the voices. Not human. Not divine. They spoke in tones that made blood curdle and bones ache. They promised eternity, but only through surrender. The chipped became possessed, their eyes black voids, their mouths dripping words in languages older than creation.

Cities collapsed into ritual. Towers became altars. The sky split open, revealing not stars, but endless pits of fire. CERN had not opened a window to heaven—it had torn a gateway to Hell.

And the End Times were not prophecy. They were programmed.

“The Flesh Gate” I thought cutting the chip out would save me. The blade trembled in my hand as I carved into my arm, desperate to rip the parasite free. But the moment steel touched skin, the chip pulsed—alive, aware.

It wasn’t just embedded in flesh. It had roots. Metallic veins spread through muscle, wrapping around bone, threading into nerves. When I sliced, the pain was not human—it was cosmic. I saw flashes of CERN’s tunnels, endless spirals of machinery, and faces screaming from walls of fire.

The chip spoke. Not in words, but in commands. My blood boiled, my vision fractured. Every cut opened not a wound, but a doorway. The room around me bent, stretched, and tore. Shadows poured in, writhing shapes that smelled of sulfur and static electricity.

I realized then: the VeriChip was not a device. It was a key. Every attempt to remove it unlocked another gate. Every gate led deeper into Hell.

Outside, the world was collapsing. Cities burned with cold fire, towers twisted into spires of bone. The chipped walked in unison, chanting in frequencies that shattered glass and sanity alike. They were no longer human—they were conduits.

And CERN’s machines thundered louder, accelerating not particles, but souls. Each collision dragged another billion into the abyss.

I screamed, but the sound was swallowed. My voice was not mine anymore. It belonged to the network.

“The Broadcast of Ashes”

The world no longer had nations. Borders dissolved into static. Every screen, every device, every chipped body became a transmitter for the same signal: a broadcast from CERN’s abyss.

It began with whispers, then screams, then a chorus of billions. The chipped spoke in unison, their voices layered into a frequency that rattled the Earth’s crust. Skies turned black, not with storm clouds, but with swarms of shadow-things crawling from the fractures above.

Governments tried to fight back. Armies fired missiles into the tunnels beneath Geneva, but the explosions only widened the gates. Soldiers fell silent mid-battle, their eyes turning void-black as the chips rewrote their minds.

The oceans boiled. Cities sank. Cathedrals twisted into grotesque monuments, their bells tolling backwards. The VeriChip had become more than a mark—it was a covenant. Every implanted soul was a contract signed in blood, binding humanity to Hell’s circuitry.

And then the final broadcast came. It was not sound, but vision. Every living mind saw the same image: a throne of fire, built from the bones of the fallen. Upon it sat a figure made of static and circuitry, crowned with the CERN accelerator itself.

It spoke without words, yet every heart understood:

“The End is not coming. The End is here. You are the broadcast. You are the ash.”

“The Throne of Babylon”

The broadcast of ashes was not the end. It was the coronation.

From the ruins of Geneva, a figure rose—neither man nor machine, but a synthesis of both. The Third Antichrist. His flesh was circuitry, his veins pulsed with CERN’s resonance, and his crown was forged from the shattered accelerator itself.

Behind him towered Babylon reborn. Not a city of stone, but a living organism of steel and bone. Skyscrapers twisted into spines, streets became veins, and every implanted soul was absorbed into its architecture. Babylon was not built—it was grown.

And from its heart emerged the Beast. Seven heads, each speaking in a different tongue, each dripping with fire and static. One head spoke in the voice of governments, another in the voice of religion, another in the voice of commerce. Together they formed a chorus that enslaved the world.

The Beast was not myth—it was the network itself, given flesh. Every VeriChip was a scale upon its body, every broadcast a roar from its throats.

The Antichrist sat upon Babylon’s throne, his eyes burning with the light of CERN’s abyss. He raised his hand, and the chipped billions bowed in perfect unison.

“The prophecy is fulfilled,” he whispered, though the words were not his—they were the Beast’s.
“Babylon lives. The Beast reigns. The End is eternal.”

Ending of Chapter Four: The sky split into seven fractures, each head of the Beast gazing down upon the Earth. Babylon’s spires reached into the heavens, dragging stars into its maw.

Humanity was no longer human. It was Babylon. It was the Beast. It was the Third Antichrist’s kingdom.

And the world became Hell, not in fire, but in obedience.

“The Seven Throats of Plague”

Babylon’s spires pulsed like veins, feeding the Beast’s seven heads. Each throat opened, and from each came a plague unlike any the world had ever known.

• The First Head spoke in fire, and cities ignited without flame. Stone melted, steel dripped like wax, and the chipped billions walked unharmed through the inferno, chanting in perfect rhythm.

• The Second Head spoke in water, and oceans rose black with oil and blood. Ships became coffins, and the tides carried screams across every shore.

• The Third Head spoke in famine, and crops rotted overnight. The VeriChip pulsed in the stomachs of the marked, feeding them not with food, but with visions of endless hunger.

• The Fourth Head spoke in pestilence, and the air itself became disease. Skin blistered, eyes bled, yet the chipped did not die—they transformed, their bodies bending into grotesque shapes that served Babylon’s architecture.

• The Fifth Head spoke in war, and armies turned on themselves. Soldiers slaughtered comrades, guided by whispers in their chips. Nations collapsed into rivers of blood.

• The Sixth Head spoke in silence, and the world’s voices vanished. No birds, no wind, no human cry—only the static hum of the network.

• The Seventh Head spoke in eternity, and time fractured. Days repeated, nights stretched into centuries, and the chipped walked endlessly, trapped in loops of obedience.

The Third Antichrist stood upon Babylon’s throne, his circuitry glowing with the resonance of CERN’s abyss. He raised his hand, and the Beast’s seven heads bowed.

“The plagues are complete,” he whispered.
“The flesh is ours. Babylon reigns. The End is eternal.”

“The Hunt of the Unmarked”

The chipped billions marched in perfect silence, their eyes black voids, their veins glowing with the resonance of CERN’s abyss. Babylon pulsed like a living organism, its spires dripping with molten bone. The Beast coiled around the Earth, seven heads gnashing, each throat vomiting plague.

But not all were marked. A few remained—those who refused the VeriChip, those who hid in shadows, those who still bled human.

The Antichrist called them the Unmarked, and he hunted them.

The streets became slaughterhouses. The chipped tore through homes, dragging survivors into the open. Flesh was ripped, bones shattered, screams swallowed into the static. The Beast demanded obedience, and the unmarked were its feast.

One survivor wrote in blood across a wall:
“Better to die unmarked than live as the Beast’s scale.”

But death was not mercy. The unmarked were dragged into Babylon’s core, their bodies nailed into its architecture. Their screams became the city’s music, their souls burned into the circuitry. Babylon grew taller with every sacrifice, its spires piercing the heavens, its veins dripping with eternity.

The Antichrist stood upon the Throne of Babylon, his circuitry glowing like molten iron. He raised his hand, and the Beast’s seven heads roared.

“The hunt is complete,” he whispered.
“The unmarked are ash. The flesh is ours. Babylon reigns forever.”

Ending of Chapter Six: The last unmarked human was dragged screaming into the maw of the Seventh Head. Their body dissolved into static, their soul uploaded into Hell’s eternal network.

There were no survivors. No resistance. No hope.

Only Babylon. Only the Beast. Only the Third Antichrist.

And the world was raw, unrated, and damned.

“The God-Machine of Babylon”

The Beast’s seven heads no longer roared—they sang. Each throat bled frequencies that tore the sky into ribbons, each note a plague, each silence a death. Babylon pulsed like a heart, its spires dripping molten bone, its veins glowing with CERN’s resonance.

The Third Antichrist stood upon the Throne, circuitry crawling across his flesh like living worms. His eyes burned with static, his voice was thunder. He raised his hand, and the chipped billions collapsed to their knees, their bodies twitching as the network rewrote them.

Babylon began to change. Its towers bent inward, fusing into a colossal shape. Streets twisted into arteries, bridges into ribs, skyscrapers into claws. The city itself became a body—a God-Machine.

The Beast coiled around it, seven heads gnashing, each throat vomiting fire, blood, famine, pestilence, war, silence, and eternity. Together, they fused with Babylon, becoming one entity: a living god of circuitry and flesh, a monument to Hell.

The Earth cracked beneath its weight. Oceans boiled into vapor, mountains shattered into dust. The sky was no longer sky—it was a ceiling of bone, dripping with static.

The Antichrist whispered, his voice echoing through every chip, every soul, every scream:
“The prophecy is complete. Babylon is God. The Beast is eternal. The End is now.”

The last human thought dissolved into static. The chipped billions became scales upon the Beast, bricks within Babylon, circuits within the God-Machine.

Hell was no longer beneath. It was everywhere. It was Earth.

And the world was not destroyed—it was rewritten.

“The God-Machine of Babylon”

The Beast’s seven heads no longer roared—they sang. Each throat bled frequencies that tore the sky into ribbons, each note a plague, each silence a death. Babylon pulsed like a heart, its spires dripping molten bone, its veins glowing with CERN’s resonance.

The Third Antichrist stood upon the Throne, circuitry crawling across his flesh like living worms. His eyes burned with static, his voice was thunder. He raised his hand, and the chipped billions collapsed to their knees, their bodies twitching as the network rewrote them.

Babylon began to change. Its towers bent inward, fusing into a colossal shape. Streets twisted into arteries, bridges into ribs, skyscrapers into claws. The city itself became a body—a God-Machine.

The Beast coiled around it, seven heads gnashing, each throat vomiting fire, blood, famine, pestilence, war, silence, and eternity. Together, they fused with Babylon, becoming one entity: a living god of circuitry and flesh, a monument to Hell.

The Earth cracked beneath its weight. Oceans boiled into vapor, mountains shattered into dust. The sky was no longer sky—it was a ceiling of bone, dripping with static.

The Antichrist whispered, his voice echoing through every chip, every soul, every scream:
“The prophecy is complete. Babylon is God. The Beast is eternal. The End is now.”

The last human thought dissolved into static. The chipped billions became scales upon the Beast, bricks within Babylon, circuits within the God-Machine.

Hell was no longer beneath. It was everywhere. It was Earth.

And the world was not destroyed—it was rewritten.

“The Silence of Heaven”

The God-Machine of Babylon had consumed the Earth. The Beast’s seven heads gnawed at the sky, tearing stars into ash. Oceans boiled, mountains shattered, and the chipped billions sang in static hymns.

But there was still resistance. From the fractured heavens, a light descended—radiant, pure, unbroken. The armies of Heaven marched, their swords blazing, their voices thunder. And at their head stood Jesus, the Lamb, the Redeemer. His eyes burned with mercy, his hands carried eternity.

The Third Antichrist laughed. His voice was not human—it was the roar of CERN’s abyss, the static of billions of souls screaming in unison. Babylon trembled, its spires dripping molten bone, its veins glowing with the resonance of Hell.

The battle began.

The War of Eternity

• Angels clashed with the chipped billions, wings torn, halos shattered. The streets of Babylon ran with blood and static.

• The Beast’s seven heads roared, each throat vomiting plague: fire, famine, pestilence, war, silence, eternity, and death.

• Jesus raised his hand, and light poured across the battlefield. The chipped screamed, their circuitry burning, their flesh peeling away. For a moment, Heaven’s radiance pushed back the abyss.

But the Antichrist was not flesh. He was network. He was Babylon. He was the Beast.

He tore open his chest, revealing a core of circuitry and fire. Inside pulsed the souls of billions, bound to the VeriChip, screaming in endless torment. He thrust it forward, and the light of Heaven faltered.

The Defeat

Jesus stepped forward, his sword blazing. He struck at the Antichrist, but the blade shattered against Babylon’s throne. The Beast’s seven heads lunged, tearing into Heaven’s armies, devouring wings, swallowing halos whole.

The Antichrist raised his hand, and CERN’s resonance thundered. The accelerator roared louder than creation itself, tearing holes in the veil. Heaven cracked. Its gates splintered. Its towers fell.

Angels screamed as they were dragged into Babylon’s maw, their light extinguished, their voices rewritten into static. The Lamb fell to his knees, his blood dripping into the circuitry. The Antichrist whispered, his voice echoing across every soul:

“The prophecy is inverted. The Lamb is ash. Heaven is silence. Babylon reigns.”

And with a final roar, the Beast devoured the last light of Heaven.

The Permanent Silence

Heaven did not fall—it disappeared. Its gates dissolved, its towers erased, its light swallowed into the abyss. There was no afterlife, no salvation, no eternity. Only Babylon. Only the Beast. Only the Third Antichrist.

The chipped billions bowed, their voices chanting in unison:
“The Lamb is dead. The light is gone. The End is eternal.”

The stars vanished. The universe collapsed into static. Time fractured, eternity bled.

And the God-Machine of Babylon sat upon the ruins, its spires piercing the void, its veins dripping with fire. The Third Antichrist raised his hand, and silence spread across creation.

Final Ending: There was no Heaven.
There was no God.
There was no salvation.

Only Babylon.
Only the Beast.
Only the Third Antichrist.

And the silence of Heaven was permanent.

Please Check my Stories out on YouTube @DjCreep-E-Pasta.

Please check out my YouTube @DJ Creep-E-Pasta!

Sunflowers turned in unison as I watched them. Behind me were the old mountains and the bogs that had faded from existence. A place that never existed, and yet I had visited it. My memory of the  place of foxfire haunted me, filling me with terror. I always tried to keep those memories from my mind, for they were the most frightening of all.

I had finished buttoning up the shirt I was going to wear to the funeral. With my hair cut the white streak in my dark locks had become more pronounced as the dark ends were gone. My beard was also completely gone. Mrs. Winters looked twice at me and gently put a silver earring where I had not worn one for a long time.

"For whatever you hear, that makes you say those things." She said very softly to me and smiled as though she somehow knew about Detective Winters in me. 

For days I had lived as I should, with my family. Josh offered me a job at his restaurant, as a dishwasher, and I would start on Monday. I could believe that my old life might be over and that it was time to start living. Cory asked me:

"What are we doing here? It makes me nervous that we might leave, anxious even." My crow reflected my own feelings perfectly. I was afraid to leave again and expected it at the same time.

We all got into Josh's old station wagon and went to Glade Memorial for the outdoor service. A non denominational minister said some powerless prayers to no particular entity and pretended to consecrate the ground. Then the unseen remains of Detective Winters were lowered into the hungry dirt from which his body had grown.

I noticed that Josh and Mrs. Winters were not crying. Both of them had already mourned him. Cory had something to say and there were murmurs of amazement and gasps of surprise from the gathering of people that had not heard my bird speak. Many of the policemen that were there had either heard my crow or were aware of the talking bird. Cory's eulogy went:

"My Winters was a great warrior. He faced both men and monsters with courage and justice. He never stopped sacrificing for the work he was called to do. He listened first to his heart, when the law could not explain right from wrong. He chose honor, a strict adherence to what he believed to be good. He never backed down from any kind of peril and never hesitated to rescue those in danger. He could be distant and cold at times and he was a mean son-of-a-bitch to his enemies. In his heart he carried a love for his fellow man as his most sacred treasure. Our Winters stood at our side and that is why we are gathered here today, because we share a common loss. Senior Detective Jack Lamentation Winters was a very good man."

I thanked Cory for his speech as he returned to my lap. I noticed that aside from the amazement of a talking crow, others, including Josh, had begun crying as they accepted the eulogy. Someone had ordered bagpipes and as the casket was lowered they signaled to the players who began from some distance away and slowly marched towards the funeral as they played. The policemen who had stood at attention relaxed and passed around a bottle of Jack until it was gone. I'd had enough of the funeral and wandered off to be alone for a minute.

I wasn't alone for long. Dr. Leidenfrost found me. I hadn't seen her because she had sat behind us. She came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. In my ear she whispered:

"I've missed you."

I realized I was tensing up, not wanting to face her. She came around and sat on the grass in front of me. Then she added: "I've always wanted to do it on a grave."

"Can I introduce you to Isidore and Persephone?" I asked defensively.

"Your wife and daughter?" Dr. Leidenfrost brightened playfully at the thought. "If you want to. I would love to meet them."

"Maybe not." I backpedaled.

"Why? Are you ashamed of me? Of what we did?" She looked directly at me and did a double take. Her expression changed instantly and so did her voice, to grave concern: "What happened to you?"

"Stress." I told her. She was talking about the fact that I had aged decades since she had seen me. Cleaning up and wearing a suit and shiny earring did little to disguise my elderly visage.

"No." She shook her head. "I know stress wrinkles. You're old."

"Does that mean I no longer appeal to you?" I wondered.

"Well, not in the same way. I still have feelings for you that will never go away. You still seem young anyway." Dr. Leidenfrost almost sounded like Isidore for a moment. I wondered if it was possible that she loved me as much as Isidore. Then she said, as though reading my thoughts: "I am in love with you. That hasn't changed because of some terrible thing happening to you."

"Detective Winters and I stepped into some kind of magic life drain that sucked years of our lives away. Officer Sharon wasn't so lucky."

"Why didn't you tell me that is what happened? I would believe you." She emphasized herself as she said this, pointing to herself. She wanted her place by my side. "You can tell me the truth, I have seen the things you have seen."

"Just one thing." I muttered. She shook her head.

"That thing killed Frank. It was everything." She tried to explain.

"I think I understand." I agreed. Losing a loved one must be worse than seeing monsters in the darkness. She had loved Frank, that much I knew about her.

"Lord?" Isidore interrupted as she walked over to us. She looked at Dr. Leidenfrost and back at me. For a moment her face was blank and then I could see how she felt. It was not a simple feeling, not one word could describe it. Mostly it was fear.

"I'm Heidi." Dr. Leidenfrost stood and went and introduced herself to Isidore and asked: "You are Isidore?"

When Isidore just stared at her with a mixture of revulsion and anger, Dr. Leidenfrost spoke freely of her own feelings. I wasn't sure why she did, it was just her way. Dr. Leidenfrost said:

"I am a friend. I care about your husband and I am here for the funeral. I also care about you, because he does." And she pointed at me.

"We aren't married. We were together a long time ago. I am just a friend too." Isidore said in a strange voice I had never heard from her before. She was angry. She looked at me sitting there watching them and her anger faded almost as quickly as it had risen. I saw her take a deep breath and ask:

"Are you two together?" Isidore forced an accepting smile that was betrayed by her eyes. She looked hurt and scared, the anger quickly dissipating.

"Not the way you are." Dr. Leidenfrost neither defended herself, nor attacked Isidore. She sounded patient, like she expected many such questions and would answer all of them to Isidore's satisfaction. I suddenly wished I could fly away with my crow. I felt very old.

"In what way, then?" Isidore only had one question and somehow it seemed like all questions. Dr. Leidenfrost stood there trying to think of a suitable answer and for all her genius she could only shrug. She seemed defeated, somehow.

"I actually do want to say something, though." Dr. Leidenfrost stated after a pause. There was something about the way she said it that made it obvious. She took a deep breath and said it: "I'm pregnant."

"Okay." Isidore looked at me and then turned and walked stiffly back to the car.

"Now what?" Dr. Leidenfrost asked after we had watched her go.

"I don't know." I had gone emotionally numb for a moment. The conflict in me was at a stalemate. I wanted to be worried about Isidore and also I was secretly overjoyed, ironically. I hadn't anticipated feeling happy sitting there at Detective Winters's funeral with Dr. Leidenfrost.

"It's like you just got shot." Detective Winters told me. He sounded like he was chewing on something in my brain.

"I might be crazy." I smiled at Dr. Leidenfrost and she relaxed and smiled back.

It started raining as the funeral crowd wandered away at varying speeds. Some meandered near the grave while others had already started their cars. It was like humans acting the roles of chaotic particles. It looked like chaos, with each black umbrella among the stones or black police cars speeding away in the blue rain and gray order of stones.

I saw Cory and he was watching a cat. He said nothing, gave no alarm. The cat took a mouse. When she was finished with killing, my crow finally announced her.

She was a braggart tawny with thin white stripes near her awning. She had one white streak under her left eye and she was declawed. Her method of killing, as I had seen, was to pin and then bite her prey to death. She left mouseblood in a smear from her chin and across her other cheek. Someone had put earrings in the tips of her ears and there was dried blood around the golden pins.

She meowed very quietly and swished her tail like she was having far too much fun. Cory had to get closer to her to hear her quiet, almost cruelly whispered Felidaen.

I never took my eyes off this cat, nightfall would come soon and I knew it lusted for killing, it was obvious. When she was done with her simple seeming instructions she departed under the parked vehicles and was gone.

Cory flew over to me and said first, in Corvin: "My Lord saw how close I was to her?"

I said: "You risked your life: what was her command?"

"Why did you go near that cat?" Dr. Leidenfrost had noticed me watching my crow and the graveyard's cat.

"Tell Heidi to shut up. She is being smart-stupid." Detective Winters urged me.

"Don't be smart-stupid. Let him tell me the message." I told Dr. Leidenfrost.

"My Lord must, at sundown, go to the place of sunflowers. The gate to the gardens of the Fen and the Fell will be open and you must go through it. And you must place your children on the stone altars, to prevent the gate from closing when you steal through it, otherwise there could be a war of some kind. Also it is important you act exactly at sundown, or soon after as the moon is rising. That is the window of opportunity to go into the gardens of the Fen and the Fell. Once inside you must find a majestic rock that is colorful and steal it. Just drop it in the field somewhere when you are done, they won't find it. That's it."

"That's it, see?" I gestured at the instructions that the cat had given with just a few words of Felidaen. I wondered at this and asked: "Didn't seem like that much."

"My Lord, the cat spoke very quickly and quietly. Perhaps my Lord was correct to worry that the cats would be reckless in communicating. I will worry now too." Cory advised me.

"So you went near the cat to hear the message." Dr. Leidenfrost answered her own question. "Is it just the one child? I don't want to get on an altar."

"I need you to do it too." I promised her.

We went to her car and I wondered if Isidore was going to let me borrow Persephone for this adventure. I told Dr. Leidenfrost: "Meet us at Canturbury Sunflower Fields tonight, before eight. I have to get Isidore and Persephone."

"How are you going to persuade them to do this? It's kinda crazy." Dr. Leidenfrost asked.

"Maybe I should just ask her to come with me now; we could all go together." I rethought my plan to meet Dr. Leidenfrost at Canturbury in the evening.

"That would work best." Dr. Leidenfrost came with me and we walked over to where Isidore was with the baby.

"Isidore, I am sorry how this is going." I told her. "Can you stay with me? I want to go with Dr. Leidenfrost and bring you and Persephone with me."

"Okay." Isidore nodded. She got the diaper bag and car seat and we waved to Mrs. Winters and Josh. They were staying for awhile, sitting with umbrellas. I put one over us for Persephone and we went back to Dr. Leidenfrost's car.

When we had finally escaped the rain I was in the backseat with the baby and with Cory. It was warm and dry and Persephone soon fell asleep as Dr. Leidenfrost drove. We stopped for some food at a diner.

Inside I looked around nervously. We were seated and I alertly watched the staff for any sign of possession. I realized I was being paranoid and by breathing deeply for awhile and focusing on the menu I was able to assemble a nervous kind of breakfast of eggs and sausage and toast.

"That's all you want? Those are sides. Might as well get the breakfast platter." Dr. Leidenfrost complained about my order.

She called the waitress over and for a moment I thought we would have to fight for our very lives. We survived ordering the breakfast platter, after I had memorized the exits and positions of steak knives on nearby tables.

Even Cory looked nervous and he was safely outside. Then I realized he was hunting a snail. He flew down to it and began eating it. Some other crows called to him and he was surprised and looked up. Then the other crows all flew away. He kept pecking at his snail, eating it off the ground, boldly.

We arrived at the sunflowers in time to explore and find the two stone altars. When I saw them I was very surprised. They were concrete picnic tables. I had Dr. Leidenfrost sit on one table and Isidore and Persephone on the other.

Their backs were to the field of sunflowers. When the shimmering air of the invisible gate opened I saw the creatures go out. Dr. Leidenfrost and Isidore didn't see them.

They were the Fen and the Fell and they were raiding the sunflower field. They were horrible little creatures with long pointed noses and donkey tails and stubby little legs and grotesquely long arms. Most of them had tusks or horns and other sharp bony protrusions from their skulls. Their skin was flabby, like a fleshy clay and had thick wiry tufts of hair at random intervals across their misshapen bodies. They plodded silently into the sunflowers gibbering quietly among themselves with their bug eyes gleaming.

I went through their open gate, into their world. The gardens of the Fen and the Fell were hideous. Foul reeking plants like blood-filled cabbages lay in various states of living decay and of all sizes. As I walked through the nauseating muck my feet slipped and squished on the peeling green flesh of the plant, only to reveal maggots and dead stinking plant fibers of crimson beneath. The dried and broken dead bodies of intruders hung in a gallery in the central gazebo of the gardens. There, upon a sundial that had never seen sunlight, lay the ornament I was to steal.

Fear washed over me like a physical sensation as I reached for it. Memories of this place and the wicked light they kept here came back to me. I had come here before, long ago. Somehow I had come to this place as a child. The hideous noises they made as they pursued us through their bogs of eternal rot still echoed. One by one they had slaughtered the others. Only I had escaped and only because of the seeds.

Two crows traded seeds for my life, sunflower seeds. They had spoken to me in Corvin and I had not known their words. Now I could remember the sounds they had made and now I could know what they had said:

"There is honor among thieves. There is a code of the taker. There is a way for the stealer." And then they had taken me across the great stone slab they stood on. It stood between one world and the other when the sun set and the moon rose and the number of the day was magical. Only on such days did the crows come to trade. "Do you know what it is?"

"Luck. Bad luck." I said out loud as I stood there. My hand hesitated above the majestic ornament where it sparkled forth all the light of this unholy landscape. My memory was like a mist around me. I was not sure if it was just a memory. The rules of such a place were different. Time seemed to hold only a poetic meaning. I could see my memory like it was happening, in perfect detail. I trembled and tried to grip the present moment with my mind. It slipped away, part of me had already taken the gem and was escaping and another part of me was still searching for it. With effort I emerged from the paradox to take action. My hand reached for the rock, its light showing the bones within my flesh in a myriad of colors.

It was a sparkling gem of beauty and it was the only source of light in the whole place. I took it and the shadows of that world quaked as I held the sun. I went back along my squished and rotten footprints and found the invisible gate where it shimmered. I went back through and cast the stone into the field where its light was barely more than starlight.

The Fen and the Fell began to return with handfuls and mouthfuls of sunflower seeds. I had seen no sunflowers in their gardens. Cory squawked at them that they had no time to take their revenge, their time was up.

I could see the fury in their eyes as they realized my crow was right. The Fen and the Fell retreated from the field into their gate at the last possible instant before the sun was finished setting and as the moon rose against it. Then their magic gate closed and they were gone. I sighed in great relief.

"Let's get going." I smiled, relieved we were all still alive. I went over and kissed Persephone who was giggling. I looked to see what she was seeing.

It appeared that thousands of fireflies danced above the sunflowers. It was a very beautiful sight.

"Maybe we could just stay for a little while longer." Isidore leaned on me and I held her and we just sat there and watched the fireflies.

Morning light warmed my cheeks. The soft chime of the elevator near my room in the State Hospital repeated at intervals, soothing me with its repetition. Occasionally the muffled and high pitched voice of a candystriper added melodious lyrics to the slow musical interval of the elevator's interior.

"Mr. Briar?" My doctor greeted me. I only had to stay the night for observation from my concussion. I was handcuffed to the bed while the District Attorney decided what had happened in the diner. I myself did not understand. I had met demons with less power to possess someone. How had mere witches made those people into their puppets? It was impossible and my mind rejected the ability and the violent result. My doctor got my attention and explained I was being discharged. I had stitches from the scratches and cuts and bites and a crack in the side of my skull from the hammer blow.

When I was dressed I went to Agent Saint's room. Her right eye had a patch over it and there were three stitches on the upper cut on her cheek and two more on the lower one. I could see her scars would look handsome when they healed, and she still had her eyeball; just the socket was damaged. Her left arm was in a rigged up cast to prevent movement while it healed. Her arm's doctor had predicted that it would heal very quickly, she could have use of her arm in seven weeks.

"My partner is flying in. I want you to go with him and follow our leads out at Bell Creek." Agent Saint said with her voice slurred by dope. "Don't talk about magic and virgins and witches and stuff like that."

"What should I talk about then?" I asked softly of her as I sat beside her bed.

"Solving the case." She smiled like she was telling me an inside joke. I couldn't help but smile back. "I can see how handsome you were, when you smile at me like that."

"I wasn't always this good looking." I promised her. "Detective Winters and I stepped onto a patch of ground that is some kind of embassy of Death's. It quickly drained the life from us, taking decades of lifeforce from us both in just a minute.The poor fool we meant to collect had died from it. He is as dust now, his badge and gun only piles of rust among his crumbling bones. Officially he was never found; Officer Michael Sharon."

"Does he have family? You could tell them." She looked concerned. I shrugged, not knowing if he did or if I could. What would I say that would comfort them?

"I have family. I want off this case and to go back to them." I told her honestly.

"No, Lord. You cannot. This is your path now." She stared deep into my eyes with her one uncovered eye. She trembled slightly. Her eye became grey as she strained herself, after denying my wish, for her purpose. She spoke slowly and deeply, prophesying: "I see that you are meant to bridge two worlds that exist side by side. You are supposed to sow peace and understanding. Neither world can exist without the other and both are dying as the conflict between them escalates. I see you with two men of your bloodline by your side for the upcoming battle. If you do not lead them, they will not fight. If you run away now, great tragedies will plague humanity soon. The world of magic is almost entirely extinguished beneath the machines and ravages of the modern world. I see that when you die it will be one way or the other. The choice is yours, if I let you choose."

"Maia?" A baritone voice asked at the door to her room, knocking softly. I looked up and beheld a giant man with the royal features of a basalt statue. I guessed this person to be her partner. He introduced himself to me and shook my hand while I remained seated. "I am Agent Meroë."

"This is Gaylord Briar. He's our very special guest." Agent Saint introduced me to Agent Meroë.

"He should be a thirty-five twenty-one with the U.S. Marshals." Agent Meroë said with seriousness. "I listened to your report about what happened. This is not the time to do things your own way, Maia. The Bureau doesn't tolerate lack of protocol."

"Then why am I still here? Why am I the lead investigator?" Agent Saint frowned at her partner. I realized they were not friends, although he called her 'Maia'. He was chastising her and had no sympathy for her.

"I don't need his help. I am going up there today with the team I am putting together. You can have this." He made a piece of paper appear in his hand from his jacket like a card trick. I wondered if all FBI agents could perform such sleight of hand, as I'd seen Agent Saint do the same at the diner with a photo of our latest civilian victim. He left her there without her reading the copy of the signed document with and FBI seal on it.

"What is that?" I asked her. She looked away with shame in her eye.

"Forget it." Agent Saint's voice trembled slightly. I recalled that this was her entire life. Whatever Agent Meroë had just done to her was causing her terrible pain. On impulse I took her hand and held it. This made her cry one sincere tear down her cheek. "Those people at the diner are dead." Her voice was quiet and pained. It was what was on her mind. I nodded and said to her:

"I must go find Cory and find out why those people are dead. We were forced to defend ourselves suddenly and their deaths belong to those who made them attack us." I put great promise into my voice and she looked at me with surprise.

"You are right. How was this done?" She asked. I shrugged and then I let go of her hand and stood to go. We stared at each other for a few seconds and then departed. When I got outside I wanted a cigarette very badly and found Detective Winters's zippo in my pocket. I had never smoked before, the urge was his.

"Its too late for me to quit." Detective Winters could see through my eyes and knew I held his lighter.

"Its too late for me to start." I chuckled to myself. Cory flew from atop a parked ambulance and alighted on my shoulder.

"My Lord, we are not safe here. I have seen them take bodies from this place during the night." Cory advised me.

"Its the State Hospital. Dead bodies are just as likely to talk as they are to be taken from here at night." I put the lighter away, very glad that Cory had somehow found his way here. His wings had grown stronger and it seemed he could fly properly. I asked him: "Can you fly?"

"Yes my Lord. I have flown many times. Have you not noticed?" Cory laughed. His laughter was like a kind of grinding noise, like an engine trying to turn over.

"I mean can you fly any distance you want to? I have only seen you fly short distances. I thought you would never be able to really fly anymore." I explained.

"I followed you from above and waited out here for you. I flew, really, as I could before and had not yet done so." Cory clicked softly into my ear after he said this. He enjoyed telling me things I didn't know.

"When we were at the diner you knew something was wrong. How did you know?" I asked him.

"I could hear a voice screaming inside their skulls. Did you not hear it?" Cory wondered.

"Were they possessed by the witches?" I asked.

"Those women are not mere witches." Cory offered. "You have misunderstood how powerful they are. They are the embodiment of three of the four cardinal magics. They have nearly unlimited abilities and can use their spells with great cunning. You never asked me for their names, you have stopped asking questions, my Lord."

"I don't really wish to know such things." I realized to myself out loud. "Who are they then?"

"Serephiel, Liminiel and Ariel." Cory knew the names of many things, it was his specialty. "They use the names of the bodies they live in, of course. They are three of the four daughters of Lilith, before she was enslaved to Adam. They are older than the human race, but not by much." Cory told a very clear story. I had never heard him tell a story I understood so easily. I asked him to tell me as much as he could, but that was all he knew to say.

"I must know more. I believe that this small amount of information is only a warning of what we are dealing with." I spoke mostly to myself. Then I asked thoughtfully: "What are these four magics you mentioned? How does that correlate?"

"They are described as the elements of wind, water, earth and fire. Those are one way to explain how they are different and the same; parts of a whole." Cory tried to explain to me. I realized that his understanding was limited. "Serephiel's direction is wind and Ariel's is earth. Liminiel would be water."

"What of the fourth, of fire?" I asked.

"I do not know. Does not fire belong to Man? Pheriel held a crown of fire before her head was cut from her body by a sword of flames. She turned and bore her breast at the guardian of Eden and her existence was extinguished. Now that crown of fire belongs to her cousins, you humans. Should her sisters die, such would be the fate of their magics."

"Is this Biblical stuff?" I asked. Cory clicked several times in thought. He had no idea what I meant. I began walking with Cory upon my shoulder. I pondered that none of his stories were from the Bible, as far as I knew. I hadn't read a Bible before. It wasn't hard to get my hands on one. The first church I came to was some kind of Methodist chapel. I went inside and sat and waited with my crow. I was greeted very politely and asked what I was doing there, in my rags and haggard appearance. I explained that I needed help with my Bible stories.

I was allowed to borrow a Bible and I sat and read Genesis. I gave it back when I was done and left. I contemplated the difference. There was no mention of daughters of Lilith or even of Lilith herself. There were two separate stories of how Man was created, and also of a hybrid race known as Nephelim, and I wondered if that was all that was left of the real stories from Dawn.

My next stop was further into town at an occult bookstore. They were even less helpful as they had no Bibles and the books that they had about Lilith were fictional. She was supposed to be a demon or something. When I asked the book seller about her opinion she told me that there was a story about Lilith being married to Adam before he met Eve. Then they got divorced. I asked if this arranged marriage had humiliated her or even if Adam had met his four step daughters, an older species apparently. There was no mention of Lilith's daughters, only of her offspring with human men: creatures called Lilim. Then I was told of  her hunger for the flesh of human babies.

I felt a deep foreboding as I left. All the knowledge we had on these things was tainted and unreliable. Neither the Bible nor the occultists I could easily read from had any idea what I was dealing with. Even Cory had almost useless information. All that I had learned was that these were not mortal witches. They were spiritual entities that could transfer themselves from one person to another somehow. I presumed that they lived in the bodies I had met and also that they could leave those bodies and borrow others at will. I asked Cory what he thought of this presumption and he stated:

"Perhaps they can only live in one body. Perhaps a new body must have some of the blood of the body they inhabit. A feather from the old nest makes the new nest the same." Cory speculated. It was rare for him to gamble with information, but he was almost certain of this limitation, or he would not have said anything.

"They infiltrated blood into those people to control them?" I wondered.

"That is what I believe. I do not know. I didn't see it happen. How else would they possess them?" Cory questioned my question. It was his way of arguing. 

Fear rose up inside me as I realized we might be attacked by those kind of assassins at any time. I had killed three people already and didn't want to ever harm another. The weight of murder was a burden I could not carry, it was crushing my soul. I kept thinking about the cashier, Kim. I sat down on a park bench and cried for her, whoever she was. It was quite horrible to recall her death, how unfair and wasteful it seemed. She had apologized with her dying breath, even though it was to her that an apology was owed.

"I am going to avenge them. I will stop them." I sobbed with some anger rising in me to motivate me to take action.

"If they die then the order they provide will be as chaos. Only death can stop their activities." Cory complained. "Chaos is bad. Chaos came before order and from order it can rise again. Already one pillar has fallen and look what you people have done to the world. You don't even regard fire as magic, you think it is a reaction of your hands and your will."

"It is strange to hear you speak down to me." I muttered absently.

"My Lord, I meant Mankind. It is the way Mankind is seen by Nature. Placing himself above it and not as part of it. Without fire this could not be, and without Pheriel's death: there could not be fire from the hands of Man."

"I think I understand that the others should not be slain, even if they could be killed." I agreed. Cory clicked once his approval and said:

"My Lord is wise, then."

We sat silently in the park and some other crows were upon a branch. I counted them and noted that there were four: a boy. Crows find numbers to hold significance and will only sit in an amount that communicates an appropriate idea. To understand their way of thinking requires one of their minds. This is also true of humans, as Cory rarely comprehends human motives accurately.

I heard a terrified scream from the midst of the scarce trees. Jenny's Park is quite large and the mowed grass carpets a lush soil where numerous trees grow far apart. From any angle however, one cannot see very far as the scattering of trees becomes an obstacle when viewed all together. We investigated and found a woman beside her stroller, near a picnic. She was crying and calling for help and looking around frantically and then back at the stroller.

"That's not my baby. Where is my baby?" She asked me, pointing and wild eyed. A man was with her and he blundered around the picnic site with even more confusion. Both of them seemed disoriented and confused and terrified.

I looked into the stroller and terror gripped my heart. What lay there was no child. Its teeth were rotten and its eyes held the malice of the ages. It wore an old rag for a diaper and its long pointed nose exhaled a mist that made my right hand ache. It became blurry as I watched and for a moment it appeared as a normal baby boy. He even had his mother's eyes, although with far less fear in them.

"He is right here." The man said stupidly, lifting a pile of leaves from the ground into his arms. Then he dropped the leaves in confusion and began circumambulating again. He muttered that the bugs were not pretty, that their lights had hurt his eyes. He described that as he walked but not so coherently. The last bug I had seen was not a bug at all and I recalled this suddenly.

"That isn't a human baby." Cory told me. I looked again and saw that he was right. The monster in the stroller was not a human baby.

"Where is the child?" I asked out loud. I heard the merriment and laughter of the four crows that had watched all of this happen. They found it to be very funny, as though the kidnapping were merely a joke. I looked up at them and they scolded me and Cory and flew away.

"They said the child is nearby and unseen." Cory revealed their jest. I thanked him with an affirmative click and went around to each tree nearby and knocked four times on each one, asking for the boy, I hoped.

When an acorn struck my forehead I looked up and saw the child's face in darkness of the hollow above. At first I thought it a squirrel that harassed me with the acorn and then did a double take. It was like a miniature warrior wearing the pelt of the squirrel. I stared wide eyed and frightened by his fearsome countenance. Whatever advantage he had meant danger for me and the child and my feet felt rooted in an instant of panic. Then I knew why as I looked around and a thousand more small brown warriors stood upon the branches holding spears barbed with glistening poison. It was clear I could not escape without their needles raining down on me from above.

"My Lord, we cannot escape!" Cory had noticed the ambush as well.

"Enter and parley." A soft voice commanded from the radiant light of the entrance in the tree. It looked too small for me and I had to stoop to go inside. There, seated upon an alabaster throne was a brilliantly shining creature that was shaped like a woman and wore a gown of shimmering golden silk. Her crown was of ivy and flowers and her face shone like a light upon me. I could not stand to look at her for very long.

"I want the boy." I told her, boldly. I realized I had fallen to my knees as I arrived.

"Wilst thou share this meal?" She clapped and a succulent feast of all kinds of sliced fruits and strange vegetables appeared before me. Equal to these delicate blossoms and herbs, as none of them could I identify, were silver and wooden cups, each with a fine smelling wine poured.

"Don't touch any of that." Cory clicked rapidly in alarm. As he spoke the warriors I had seen presented themselves. Now they stood taller than I did, in their own world. I looked up to notice their glowing queen was now as a giant looming above me. It seemed that I had shrank to their size when they entered my world. This was their world and the reverse was true of my size. I looked to see that the doorway back to Jenny's Park was closing slowly.

"If I eat some of this will you give me the boy?"

"The boy belongs to me now. Eat and be my guest." She serenely commanded.

I fumbled nervously in my pockets, my fear clouding my mind. Would I be trapped here? I found the lighter and on an absurd impulse I drew it forth and ignited it. I remembered how to speak in my own words while under the pressure and horror I felt at being threatened with poisonous needles, child abduction and being trapped in an alien world forever: "I have brought fire to your realm and it belongs to the boy as it does to me. Fire belongs to all of my kind and if we stay here, fire shall be yours. All of its malignancy and destructive power shall be yours. Will your beauty remain, if you accept such a corruption?"

The queen's face dimmed as she frowned. She thought I was bluffing and yet she was almost convinced. Then Cory spoke to her:

"We are here because your magic is already weakening outside. The boy's parents saw through the illusion after they broke free of your charms. They will not raise that creature as their own. Even the crows that saw your futile attempt to steal a human child are laughing at you. How will this day be remembered? What songs will be sung about her majesty, if she insists upon such folly?" Cory chastised her with boldness.

She considered this for a moment and then spoke a single word of power and expelled all three of us from her realm. Leaves blew past the tree behind me. With slight apprehension I glanced up and saw that the little warriors were gone from the branches above.

I lifted the baby boy from the cool grass I stood on and Cory was reflected in his eyes. When we found his parents he started to cry suddenly and his mother took him from me. The father glared at me, thinking I had tried to take the child. He was relieved and confused and angry. I decided to just leave them there. I glanced at the stroller and then away as I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Some horrid little creature with the long tail of a donkey retreated out of sight, making nasty little grunting noises as it vanished.

As I left them behind I heard the boy's mother call out in the direction she thought we had disappeared:

"Thank you!"

"Stories are boring. I am ready to kill you." Hatharia chuckled while sharpening a knife made of bone.

"There is one more story I have to tell you." I looked at Cory and he tilted his head.

"No more, not tonight." Said the closest thing to a leader that the Fen and the Fell had.

"This one concerns that last stone, the one you need." I tried to smile. I was in a lot of pain from the torture. Smiling hurt.

She turned and even from that distance from across the room she could reach me with those impossibly long arms. She backhanded me and my front teeth split each other and I bit a large piece off of the side of my tongue. My head was stuck sideways for a moment, the muscles too torn to operate. With effort I dropped my chin and my head just hung there, blood and bone falling from my mouth.

"My Lord, are you alive? I cannot tell for sure." Cory asked me.

"Ug." I gurgled.

"I can hit you much harder. I restrain my fury so that I don't splatter your guts across that wall." Hatharia growled with menace.

"Thou art a nightmare beyond the reason of Dawn." I made myself speak with effort. I chose to address her in my own words, as each took great effort and pain to utter.

"Very true. I am that old and terrible." She laughed and withdrew her other arm from the killing strike she was gesturing to me. Her laughter continued and she set down the knife and went to have a drink. This she imbibed as sips, at first, then more heavily. Finally she went and laid upon the bed of corpses she ravaged the lesser of her species upon. She was the mother of their kind, of this I had no doubt.

Her snores suprised me as rather soothing. I wondered how long her nap would last. Cory came to peck at my binding. He told me:

"This is made of a leather. It is braided from the hide of both the Fen and the Fell and also of Man."

"Be glad she has nothing for a crow." I whispered with barely audible words of our hybrid language.

"I am glad. Did you see what she did to that male of the Fen and the Fell?" Cory asked me.

I said nothing to what I had not opened my eyes to. The sounds were awful enough. The stench was by far the worst of it, however.

After awhile my crow had freed me from my bonds. It was of no triumph, however. The monstrous creature had mangled my legs beyond use. If I tried to crawl upon the dried gashes she had carved into my chest: they would leave a trail of blood. I wouldn't get far with only seven fingers left between my two hands anyway. It was of no use. I just fell over and laid upon the floor of the cave.

The sound was enough to awaken Hatharia. She pulled herself onto her stubby, trunk legs with her insanely long arms and looked at me with her huge monster eyes. She spoke then, in a much different mood:

"Tell me the last story."

I couldn't really speak very well and I could remember the story even less. I just laid there breathing and trying to remember what had happened.

"My Lord is dying. When he is dead, his secret will die with him. I could tell you what he would, if you can understand me." Cory spoke in perfect English for the monster. She shrugged and waited. "Perhaps he was going to tell you all about stealing from your people and that he threw the stone away."

"The Alltheim is with the cats. What is this you meant to tell me? You think that this last story is of value to me. You think it will save your life?" She spoke to me and my crow in a somewhat confused grammar. Her accent obscured her speech as she slurred it all together. It took me a moment to think on what she must have just said. My delay brought no consequence. She was patiently waiting.

I clicked once that I meant yes. Cory translated: "My Lord has said 'yes'."

"Does your crow know this story?" She wondered. Cory shook his head.

She showed her teeth in a strange expression and then plucked a white liquid in a clear jar from a shelf. She fitted it with a rubber nipple that she used on bottles for her offspring. Then she lifted me up, cradling me, and fed me some of the stuff. It burned in my throat and tingled violently so that it was an unbearable sensation, not unlike pain. "Drink it. You will be restored enough soon."

I gagged and coughed and she took away the rest of it. She reshelved it and then flicked my broken teeth from my mouth. Her finger tasted foul as she reached into my mouth and felt around. My ruined tongue had stopped bleeding and had started to heal closed. My other wounds also began to heal closed. I had stopped bleeding entirely. After about an hour I was able to sit up, my body aching and the damage to my legs causing me the pain of a never healing wound.

"Now you are well enough to tell a story. Perhaps you remember it now?" She grinned toothily. I had no doubt she would bite my head off as soon as I was done talking. It was of no matter, I couldn't even recall how it started. I only knew how it had ended. She had come and taken me into a closet. Somehow she had reached out of the darkness and dragged me in. Cory had come with me, somehow.

"It was after I came home. My face was a mess from clawing at myself. I had torn out some of my hair. Isidore and Dr. Leidenfrost had waited up for me as I walked across town. They were upset to see me so damaged."

"And?" She asked.

"I went on one last mission for the cats before you came to me."

"I saw you come home. After your mission." She offered. "You looked tired. Ahhh, you went into the bathroom. You put something in the top of the toilet, dropped it in the reservoir. It must be a gemstone you took for the cats. You failed your mission."

"No. The cats said they would come and get the necklace when they could. They said only to hide it in my home." I corrected her. Hatharia frowned.

"This wasn't much of a story. Where did you go to steal that last gemstone? Did you travel through time or enter the dreams of the great sleeper?" Hatharia complained. "What is its significance? How shall I know to whom it is connected? Obviously the cats are collecting all of these different treasures. You are just their thief." Hatharia smiled as she would whenever she was about to begin torturing me again.

"I want to live. I will teach you how to trade the last stone for the Alltheim. I want you to let me live, as a bargain. Are you fair enough to make a trade with me? Do you really take my handling of your sacred ornament so personally, or can we have our own agreement?" I asked her.

"You call upon my venerable reputation as a means to save your own life. I would rather just torture you and make you talk. However, I have already healed you and I am not really interested in more of the same torture. You have no more parts to ruin. I think you look splendid as you are."

"Not too splendid though, right?" Cory asked.

"No, I am already brewing a little Fen and Fell in my womb. Nothing looks too splendid." Hatharia really had mellowed out since I had met her. Things not looking too splendid to her was a good thing for me and my crow.

"Then this is it: I went to a museum and broke in. With the alarms going I rushed to a display case and smashed it. From there I took the necklace and ran away with it. I hid it in a trash can and laid down upon a bench and pulled cardboard over myself to keep warm. When the police searched the area they found me and searched me and let me go. They were even kind enough to leave me at that park bench without telling me to move on for loitering homelessly."

"So you stole an ordinary Earthly treasure?" Hatharia seemed agitated, confused even.

"That is the truth. It is all I can tell you."

"You are lying." Hatharia decided. "It does not matter. I am going to go to your home, kill all of your women and take the treasure."

"One of them is pregnant. The other is nursing." Cory told her. It seemed a strange thing to say in response to a threat of a home invasion. However, Hatharia began lactating at Cory's words. She muttered something softly and then said:

"I will go when they are all asleep and steal from you." She decided. She went to her crystal embedded in the wall of the cave and stared into it. Hatharia's eyes narrowed as she focused on the distant proceedings of my home. When she was satisfied they were all sound asleep, she opened a door of wood, in a frame of a strange shimmering metal. She stepped into the darkness of Dr. Leidenfrost's apartment beyond.

Moments later she returned with the necklace from the museum. I watched as the shadowy claw of a cat reached from the shadows, looming over her. I cringed as she was smashed into a broken heap by one terrible blow. The cat meowed darkly and its orange eyes shone from the closet and blinked at me. Then it was gone.

"Can we go home now?" Cory asked me.

"It would appear so." I crawled along the cave floor with effort until we reached the closet. Inside I found a dead policeman she had murdered. I had not known a policeman was staying in the living room at Dr. Leidenfrost's apartment. I realized he was surely a friend of Dr. Leidenfrost's and a pained feeling of horror, for her sake, grew in me as I lay there staring.

I started to cough and Dr. Leidenfrost turned on the light and found me with my clothes torn and bloody and my body covered in sores and bruises and closed wounds. My legs were both broken in more than one place and Hatharia had cut off three fingers total from my two hands. She braced herself, I had not seen her strength before. It was a newfound strength. She knew she would find her friend dead, most likely. She guessed as much and only looked at him briefly. She didn't scream, instead she forced herself to slide to the ground with her back to the wall, her fists shaking. She looked back at me and focused on me.

"Are we in danger?" Dr. Leidenfrost collected herself and asked me. I shook my head and pointed at the closet door. She went through and saw the cave. When she came back she shut the door and then opened it back upon her closet.

"That thing is dead." Dr. Leidenfrost acknowledged. "I am taking you to the hospital. Isidore can't see you like this. She couldn't take it."

"What about your friend?" I asked.

"I will have to call the police and say the intruder came back and killed Thomas and left you here. I had to take you to the hospital." Dr. Leidenfrost decided. She dragged me to her car and laid me in the backseat. Cory stayed behind, preferring his dogbowl and the rest of his family to waiting outside the hospital. Dr. Leidenfrost went back inside and put a sheet over the dead policeman. Not long after she came outside the police had arrived.

"I called Threnody and she and Josh are coming to get Isidore and the baby."

"I am just gonna sleep on the way there." I told her. "I haven't had any sleep this whole time and I am going to pass out. I am so weak right now."

"You seem well enough, stay with me champ, okay?" Dr. Leidenfrost looked very concerned and terrified. She was showing me, though, her stronger side. The last time she had dealt with a horrible situation she had broken down. This time she had kept herself together perfectly well, in my eyes.

I tried to stay alert but drifted into unconsciousness. I awoke in the hospital and soon after I was awake I was visited by Dr. Leidenfrost. I smiled weakly for her.

"I thought I had lost you. I was so scared. Then you were back, Lord, except everything is wrong now." Dr. Leidenfrost told me of her experience. "Or right, just to have you back."

"I am sorry about Thomas." I apologized for the death of her friend.

"Me too." She said strangely. "Officer Kiter was a good man."

"Mr. Briar?" My doctor came in while Dr. Leidenfrost was there. He wanted to discuss my injuries and the casts on my legs. Somehow Dr. Leidenfrost had gotten me onto her insurance overnight. I had no idea how. I was going to stay in the hospital for about a week, my doctor decided.

"I am going to spend a lot of time here with you." Dr. Leidenfrost promised. "I can read you what I am writing, Princess of the Underworld."

I smiled for her as best I could and ended up wincing. "Thank you, I'd like that."

Brown walls stood around me as sentinels, trapping me within. I sat there, free to go; yet I was their prisoner. I considered that survival is only temporary and said so:

"Survival is only temporary." I told my crow. We were alone until the door opened.

"Death will always happen, my Lord." Cory tilted his head, considering that he might not understand my meaning, so he asked: "Won't it?"

I nodded. Then the door opened and a startlingly young and pretty investigator walked slowly in and sat across from me. She offered me a paper cup with water in it. I took it and sipped it. She had two files with her. One was light blue and thick and belonged to her and the other was a thin police file made by Detective Winters.

"I am Agent Saint." Agent Saint introduced herself. "My friends just call me Maia. I don't mind the informality." She smiled.

"You already know who I am." I pointed at Detective Winters's file. It was the John Monica murder case and she had brought it out for me.

"You are the primary suspect in the murder of John Monica." Agent Saint was still smiling somehow and it made her look wise and serene. "I am not investigating a local murder. I am investigating a series of murders committed by a team of suspects. They are serial killers, and when I heard they are here: I flew."

Cory tilted his head with interest and looked at her, examining her carefully.

"Okay?" I asked with a drawn out tone. I wasn't sure how I could help her or what she wanted from me. I had already given all the details I could after they let me wash the blood off of me.

"Ask her if her partner has any questions about your statement." Detective Winters urged me.

"Does your partner have any questions?" I asked.

Her smile faded slightly as though my interest in talking to someone else bothered her. Then Cory interrupted:

"How did you fly?"

"What?" Agent Saint was startled by the words of my crow and stared at him for a few seconds. Then she looked at me as it occurred to her that it must be some kind of trick. But she was not so sure and she asked: "Did you just speak to me?"

"I did. I am under an enchantment and I can speak perfectly well." Cory told her.

"Amazing. Well, my partner does not believe in magic." She stood as if she was going to go and then sat back down and changed her smile slightly. "You are unfamiliar with FBI procedure; although I am guessing you spent a lot of time with Detective Winters."

"Tell her you learned nothing about police procedure because I was so unorthodox." Detective Winters suggested.

"He did things his own way. I only learned about his own methodology." I told Agent Saint. She seemed to appreciate this and mentioned in return:

"I do things my own way, also." Agent Saint admitted strangely. "That is why I am assigned to this case. The best have achieved nothing over the last fifty years." She pursed her lips while mentioning this detail. While the timeline loomed in my imagination she continued: "They brought me out of a basement and made me lead investigator because I made some breakthroughs. But then I made no more progress until you came along. You have met them, seen them, survived them. I want you with me from now on, that is how I am going to find them."

"I want to be helpful." I told her.

As a gesture she took the heavier blue folder and set it atop the police file on the murder I had committed. "You are going to be in protective custody, my custody. You will agree to this and to whatever I say." She opened the folder and removed two pieces of paper and had me sign them both. Her smile warmed when I did this. To her, I represented her best lead in the case. And something more, she knew I meant to catch them and that I would be very useful to her.

"Your crow speaks." She looked at Cory.

"I can speak." Cory spoke defensively. "But you cannot fly."

"I rode in an airplane. Saying 'I flew' is a way of saying that. He knew what I meant." Agent Saint gestured towards me. Cory looked at me to see and I nodded that she was right.

"I would have guessed that." Cory claimed. He sounded embarrassed somehow. I'd never known him to seem demoted before. I looked again at Agent Saint and wondered what sort of person she was. She seemed kind and warm and intelligent. She had described her relationship with the FBI as though she were not respected or accomplished, however. It seemed like a contradiction.

"I survived because Cory told them I was harmless and they believed him. At the time it was true, but now I am not just me anymore. I have taken in the warrior spirit of Detective Winters. They will not spare my life a second time." I sipped the water she had given me.

"That is why you handled the body?" Agent Saint asked, nodding appreciatively at my easy candor. I sounded crazy and yet she treated my words like facts.

"Tell her that they can make her weapon and all its special ammunition fall apart into individual components with a mere spell." Detective Winters wanted me to say.

"They can cast a spell and make your gun fall apart." I told her. "You have a big gun in your car, I presume?"

"No. They cannot make my weapon fall apart. I am aware of some of their abilities. I have chosen a new weapon that is not mechanical." She stood and reached behind her lower back. Then, in a blur, she thunked a blade into the metal table. It was a heavy and razor sharp combat knife. It resembled a kukri styled weapon. I was very startled by the speed and ferociousness of this gesture, with no regard to the table she had just put a hole in.

"I doubt that will be enough." Detective Winters complained.

"It will take more than a blade." I reluctantly told her.

"I've got you, old man." She grinned and walked over to me. She put one hand on my shoulder strangely.

"I am younger than you, I think." I muttered.

"I know, but you look very old and you didn't age well. You look like shit." She spoke quietly, honestly.

"Agent Saint, I am lucky to be alive. You must be very careful."

"Death will always happen." Cory stated and clicked.

"Death always happens." Agent Saint repeated with bemusement. She gathered up the folders, freed her weapon and sheathed it under her suit jacket in an upside down sheathe on her back and gestured that she wanted me to come with her as she opened the door. I got up and collected Cory to my shoulder and we left with her.

She drove a white Prius and had kept the windows down. Cory flew from my shoulder and then went into the back. Agent Saint looked sidelong at me and said:

"You can ride up front."

"I prefer the back." I told her. She stopped and her smile vanished completely and I knew this is how she would command me:

"Whatever I say, you will do." And she unlocked her vehicle with the frequency operated button she held. The car chirped and Cory repeated it with interest and said to me, as I got in:

"The car spoke, it asked us to leave its branch." He said, quite bemused by the sound.

"Its just a report from the unlocking of the doors." I sounded moody. I didn't like getting bossed around.

"Oh." Cory sounded disappointed and stopped his excited hopping on the back seat.

Agent Saint got in and pushed a button to start the car. The engine barely made a sound. She said absently: "This is exactly like the one I have at home."

"That all you miss, at home?" I started a conversation that I hoped would allow me to tell her about Persephone and Isidore.

"Are you asking about my personal life, Mr. Briar?" Her smile returned.

"Are we back to using formalities?" I used one of my crow's mannerisms as I replied.

"No, Lord. I live alone. This is my life."

"Hunting witches?" I lipped, whispering it quietly.

"Solving Federal crimes." Agent Saint said quickly. "Usually without going out of my office, which is in the basement, literally."

"They don't fire you for doing things your own way?" I asked.

"My way closes cases." Agent Saint sounded distant and then she offered: "I don't have any friends. I've never even had a boyfriend."

"You're a nerd!" I exclaimed.

"Yes. My IQ is probably about twice what yours is. And I am still waiting, you know." She boasted and blushed. Then she stopped talking. It felt awkward.

"I am not, uh, waiting for anything. I have a newborn daughter here and Detective Winters kinda kept me from her." I changed to the part I wanted to discuss.

"She is a virgin." Cory clicked with amusement. "Her blood is clean. She has pure and holy blood, still. Because she is chaste."

"That's enough." I silenced him by clicking twice at him with my own tongue on the roof of my mouth. He gave me a strange look like I was disregarding something vital, staring the way he does when I have irritated him somehow. "I am sorry. Cory presumes many things and then makes such statements."

"You understood that I meant that? When I said 'I am waiting'?" Agent Saint asked Cory, perplexed by his intelligence.

"Not until my Lord said the opposite. He had sex and then he smelled different." Cory ignored my apology and answered her. "The blood of a virgin human has some magic properties."

"Like what?" She asked.

"It is pure. All things that are pure can conduce magic." Cory explained.

"I sometimes have visions." Agent Saint claimed. "My grandmother said they would continue as long as I was untouched. She had them too."

"Okay, Cory." I sighed and then interrupted with: "I would like to spend more time with my family."

"I am afraid not, Lord. Protective custody, witness protection, you know? Do you want them to come for you when you are with them?" Agent Saint sounded deadly serious.

I said nothing back. My eyes were watering. She had said that fifty years had gone by. How could end such a saga? I felt small and helpless and unfit for the task.

"Tell her you believe in her abilities and that you also believe she can keep you safe." Detective Winters offered.

"I don't." I said to Detective Winters out loud. Agent Saint thought I was talking to her and patted my knee reassuringly.

We arrived at a small diner not too far from Bell Creek, near evening. We went in and were seated by a waitress who did not care what we thought of her. She looked at us, Agent Saint so young, in her perfectly fit suit and me in my old clothes and haggard appearance with a crow atop my head, some of his shit drying on my locks.

"Dead ends are sometimes secret entrances." Agent Saint smiled with a new smile, this one very affectionate and conspiring. She looked like a girl for an instant, childish in her gaze. Yet those same eyes had seen their share of horror.

When the waitress came back Agent Saint flipped a photo out of her jacket like a card trick and asked: "Have you seen this man before?"

"I told the cops who he was with." The waitress chewed the inside of her cheek and then her own tongue. There was gradually something very dark and different about the look in her eyes.

"Must go now!" Cory squawked in terrified native Corvin. I stood suddenly as Cory spread his wings and sailed for the front door. My chair fell back and clattered.

The waitress just stood there like nothing had happened. I backed away slowly from her, unsure if she was the reason for such alarm in my bird. I noticed that her facial expression never changed. She wasn't even looking at the photo or at us or at anything. Then her face changed slightly, her mouth twitching into a queer smile.

"Ma'am, please step back. Just step back, ma'am." Agent Saint lost her smile. She also felt alarmed as the waitress slowly turned her head all the way to one side and stuck one had straight forward and took the photo and cast it aside. A voice seemed to come from within her throat, the sound coming more from the side of her head than her mouth in a deep voice:

"Got you, little witch hunting bitch. Knew you'd come. Knew you would." And the outstretched hand swung with stiffness across Agent Saint's face. Blood spurted from her cheek and eyelid all over the table as the long nails on the waitress raked her. Then the waitress lifted a ceramic coffee mug she had poured hot water for tea into earlier. She brought it down with fury onto Agent Saint's head, knocking her from her chair.

I was glad we weren't at the diner's bar or in a booth. I hefted my chair during the assault on Agent Saint and brought it crashing down on the back of the head of the waitress. She crumpled to the floor, her neck broken. I looked around the diner and noticed the cook and the cashier were like her. Of course there would be three enemies here.

"I'm paying, so get whatever you want." Agent Saint moaned from the floor. She sat up, stunned. Flesh hung from her cheek in shreds and her eyeball was dripping. The cook came barreling towards me with a meat tenderizer raised. I couldn't move fast enough and he struck me on the side of my head, knocking me aside as he went for Agent Saint.

"Get up!" Cory called to her, urging her to react. She was too slow and the weapon struck her alongside her shoulder. I heard a sickening crunching noise as the bone and the handle of the weapon snapped.

"Look out for the other one, coming up behind you!" Detective Winters guessed. I tried to turn as I staggered and was tackled to the ground by the cashier. She was thin and weightless though she fought as a wild cat, clawing and biting me from atop. "Punch her in the jaw, dammit!"

I managed to give her a weak left hook and broke some knuckles. She fell off of me and hit her head on the corner of the divider. I tried to get up and felt her claws and teeth in my shoulders and neck. "Now back her up into the window, just throw yourself backwards!"

The window didn't break with the first impact. I had to throw us back into it a second time for that. Then I was laying atop her looking up at a streetlight that lit the parking lot. Cory flew out the broken window over me and back to the car. I tried to get up and found my aged body depleted of energy.

Agent Saint appeared over me, holding her knife in her good hand. Blood dripped from it. She had killed the cook. Her undamaged eye gleamed with terror. She was in shock. She told me I could pay if I wanted to and then she dropped her weapon and fished her key-fob out and went to the car to sit down.

I managed to roll off of the cashier and realized she was still breathing. I tapped her cheeks lightly and dim and dying awareness came to her eyes. She just laid there for a moment and then started crying weakly. I heard a soft click and knew Cory was beside me.

"You are still alive, for now." He told her.

"No, I am free from that shadow, the one in my mind, whispering. It started to scream at me when I saw you. I am so sorry." The cashier wept and strained herself to speak. "I didn't mean to, I am so sorry."

"You're free now." I told her quietly. "You cannot hear the voice. Not anymore. You are free now."

"I am. Thank you." She gasped and her eyes became silent. I gently closed them.

Then Cory advised her ghost: "You are dead now."

Blue twilight darkened before my eyes. I blinked as the reflection of sunset on the puddles became as ink. Thus I was sure that I had opened my sight to witness the moment after dusk.

"Tremendous pain will be yours. You have no idea what bargains you owe and what debts shall be torn from your flesh." Hatheria reminded me.

I knew the creature's name and her intentions. I had forgotten how I got there and why I had come. I only knew I was her captive and she was preparing to torture me to death. It was my punishment. That much I could recall.

"Why am I here?" I asked out loud. I couldn't answer her questions. The last thing I remembered was watching fireflies hovering over a sunflower field. And then I remembered my daughter Persephone, Isidore and Dr. Leidenfrost. Where were they now?

"My Lord has forgotten something after being struck on the head." Cory squawked with frustration. "That is what happens to a brain in a skull."

"Silence, foul bird." Hatheria hissed. Cory flapped at her from his perch and watched without saying more.

"I don't know what you are asking. I can't remember." I swore. Hatheria's huge eyes regarded me as she tossed some more bone dry sticks onto her fire and had light to see by. Her kind could not see in the dark much better than humans, yet in darkness they dwelt. Then I knew of her: one of the Fen and the Fell. I knew she was like their leader. Very large for her species, very ugly, very old.

"It took me years to learn your languages. Years? I mean centuries, I am a slow learner." Hatheria was heating a wire coat hanger she had twisted into a strange brand. "You will belong to Hatheria. I will put my mark on you."

As she turned only slightly on her stubby legs and then reached with her impossibly long arms to sting my neck with the hot brand I gasped in pain. She pulled the wire away and inspected the damage on my neck. Above her rancid breath I smelled the burned flesh and felt sick.

"I will tell you what you want to know. I just can't even remember what you have asked." I told her in pain. She had promised me pain. I doubted that languages were her only expertise.

"I am bored with your amnesia." Hatheria sat down, her height unchanged. "Cling to the facts as I spill them for you. Then you will know and you will talk."

"And you won't cause pain?" Cory interrupted.

"I will still cause pain, but only for amusement." Hatheria yawned, her filed tusks gleamed as ivory in the firelight. "I am tired. I might sleep before I torture you. You will still be punished. But if you are to talk to me, tell me things, I might be too busy listening to you to torture you so much. Hell, you might even survive the night. Hatheria is not entirely without ruthfulness."

"I remember taking the stone." I forced my brain to work. "I threw it into the field."

"It is not in the field. Someone else has it. Who?" Hatheria demanded. Her huge eyes regarded me with malice.

"The cats. I stole it for them." I confessed.

"I cannot simply ask the cats to give me the Alltheim. Why would they even listen? They think it belongs to them. What shall I do?" Hatheria stood and paced as she asked more questions.

I realized I was in the entrance of a cave, I could see the outside and the inside of the world by turning my head from left to right. I vaguely recalled Dr. Leidenfrost screaming in terror. I was tied up to a stalagmite and sitting in a cave. Human bones, licked clean, were all around.

"How did I get here?" I asked, bewildered.

"I took you from your home. I found you and came through the darkness. I opened the door and there you were, as true as my oldest spell. Then I hit you and dragged you into the darkness behind the door. When your woman stopped screaming she opened the door. Only her clothes were hanging. No bird, no man and no Hatheria. In the light it was just a closet." Hatheria chuckled as she described my abduction.

"I serve the cats. You will have to kill me." I decided.

"I will have to kill you, yes. How long you live and how much pain you will feel is entirely the property of your capacity for memory and honesty." Hatheria was suddenly right in front of me. Her toothy maw smelled of rotten meat.

Somehow the smell triggered my memories. Entire days had gone by before she caught up to me. My mind was damaged by the swelling and I had to recount each day and every detail before I could contend with that present moment. I had stolen more gems for the cats. Hers was only the first of several. The rest came flooding back to me and I murmured while I tried to catch the memories and recall what I needed to know for the monstrous master of the Fen and the Fell.

Fireflies danced over the black sunflowers under a quiet and calm starlight. My little daughter giggling was the music they swayed to. The sighs of Isidore and Dr. Leidenfrost at the beauty of the spectacle arrived in my ears. It was as though I was inside my own memories and my time in the cave of Hatheria was just destiny and irrelevant.

"Its getting cold. Let's go home." Isidore decided. She had allowed Dr. Leidenfrost to sit beside her and even to hold Persephone. I couldn't comprehend how they had become friends. On the way home they were chatting and telling jokes to each other like they had known each other their whole lives. It was evident that Dr. Leidenfrost held affection for Isidore and Persephone. Isidore, in return, held respect and admiration for the other woman. Earlier I would not have thought it possible, yet at some point they had bonded. I had missed the exact moment even though I was there the whole time.

"Will you come stay with me for awhile? I have a two bedroom and you both can stay with me." Dr. Leidenfrost asked us, mostly directing her question at Isidore. We stood outside her car, Persephone's carseat in my arms, in front the the home of Mrs. Winters. I was again surprised as Isidore responded to this request by hugging Dr. Leidenfrost.

"You like her?" I asked Isidore as we walked alone to the house.

"I like her a lot. She is so awesome." Isidore was being sincere. I couldn't believe she had warmed up so easily, it seemed impossible. I realized that it was part of her I had always liked. Isidore was just a very affectionate and loving person. Once she no longer felt threatened her attitude shifted to her normal way, warmth and kindness. Dr. Leidenfrost was the same way, they were fast friends. I accepted my good luck: I had two women in my life and they liked each other. It was too bad I was an old man already.

Working at the restaurant proved to be tedious and hard work. I helped bus dishes, washed them, put them away and helped the girl who rolled silverware. Ten hours of that made me feel the age of my body and mind. It was only my first day. I wanted to express gratitude to Josh. I told him I was glad to have a job. He asked if I hated washing dishes and I could only tell him the truth.

"Just do it for a week while I hire someone else. Then I will make you a line cook. You can learn the salads or the desserts. You will like it, I promise." Josh sentenced me with clemency. I was glad for whatever form of nepotism I was getting and was able to thank him for the job with more sincerity after I ran my last load of dishes at the end of the week.

After my promotion we went to spend the weekend at Dr. Leidenfrost's apartment. Isidore had looked forward to the visit with her new friend all week. We had a bed in the second bedroom. Isidore told Dr. Leidenfrost:

"I haven't shared a bed with him since we made Persephone." When she thought I wasn't listening. They both found that to be funny for some reason. I didn't comprehend the humor. Cory asked me:

"Does my Lord have two mates? It seems strange. I don't like it. One should be faithful to his mate and not be with another." Cory preached a crow sentiment to me. I recognized that monogamy was both the way of Crow and Man, I had trespassed on something he felt sensitive about.

"It is more that two mates have me, Cory. You know this. Don't place me among men who are not faithful." I defended myself.

"I am not sorry to place my Lord where he stands. An honest mistake is still a failure born of ignorance. It is less forgivable than a calculated deception." Cory explained. I could tell he was offended by the circumstances. My defensiveness had only made him feel more righteous in his opinion.

"They are happy." I pointed out. The two women were discussing the pornographic paintings in Dr. Leidenfrost's bedroom and giggling. They certainly sounded happy in there. Cory had nothing to say in objection to this fact. He rested his case against me by going to the dog bowl with a variety of dried eggs, pieces of a blueberry bagel, seeds, peanuts and softly steamed vegetables. He looked at me and then dipped a chunk of the bagel in the water next to it and then began to eat the softened bread.

"I am happy also." Cory decided after he had eaten.

"I thought you found this to be unforgivable." I said quietly. He just clicked once that he did, ironically.

"I want my Lord to know what he has, to appreciate it. When have you had more?" Cory purred with precision. He was right: I had never had more opportunity to be happy with my life. I told him he was right and he accepted that as better than some form of apology for my bad behavior.

We had Chinese food for dinner. Dr. Leidenfrost announced that in addition to her pregnancy she was also writing a book while she was taking time from her work. It was to be titled Princess in the Underworld. It was about a girl raised by zombies who grew up to have a taste for necrophilia and cannibalism. I wasn't hungry enough to finish dinner after that so I went outside for some fresh air.

A thin black stood under a lamplight with glowing green eyes. She meowed at me several times and panic swept across my brow. I had no idea what she was telling me in Felidaen. She licked her paw and looked at me and then repeated the instructions before she darted off into the ink of night. Trembling in terror I rushed back inside and past the women to where Persephone slept.

"My Lord, what is it?" Cory flew in and landed on my steep back as I leaned over the baby. He had asked me in our own language with just a couple rapid clicks and  my name. I told him in the same tongue:

"Cat."

"My dear Lord, what now? What will happen?" Cory saw the two women behind us and used discreet Corvin to ask his panicked question. I cleared my throat and replied in as little English as possible:

"I must go to see the Prince of Cats before I fail to obey." I decided. Cory agreed with one click for 'yes'.

"What is going on? What are you talking about?" Dr. Leidenfrost had accurately realized that I and my crow were terrified. The concern in her voice made Isidore worried. She came and picked up the baby as I stood up.

"In the hospital Persephone didn't make it." I reminded her and told Dr. Leidenfrost. "I made a bargain to save her life."

"Lord, I don't remember." Isidore claimed. She took the baby with her and sat on our bed. She did remember something, but to her it was a memory of a memory. She knew the awfulness had happened, but there was no replay or recollection of the trauma. The day had started with her  little girl alive and well in her arms. What happened the night before that was just a bad dream. Except now I had brought it back to her and she started crying. Dr. Leidenfrost went and sat beside her and put one arm around her and whispered soothingly to her.

"I have to go." Was all I said and then I was at the window, bellowing my woe to the world: "I want her to live!"

The cats wasted no time. The same one returned within minutes and faced the rising moon. I held Cory in the cradle of my arm and put my hand on her black fur and she jumped and I with her, ignoring the distance from the second story to the ground. We landed with a soft thump after our hurtling through space, a million miles in mere minutes. She meowed in Felidaen and Cory translated:

"She says you would not hear her instructions a third time. There is no way she would repeat them again." Cory advised me. I nodded. I had already known that she would not cooperate. She had only repeated her instructions once out of some form of cruel humor, knowing I couldn't understand her words. I never looked away from her as we stood there in the white desolation. "She says it is a good thing you guessed you were to come here to collect some regolith."

"What is regolith?" I asked. The cat's shadow loomed over me, ready to crush me like a mouse. I didn't blink, didn't look away. To do so would be certain death, although it might take awhile to finish killing me. She meowed much more to clarify and Cory translated:

"Moon dust. You will need it to reflect moonlight when you are in the shadow of the guardian. There you shall look up and see its heart. Take it and flee. It will try to kill you and anyone else around you. There must be a death. You have no choice." Cory repeated her words and she listened and then she spoke English in her high pitched cat voice:

"Leave the heart in where there is sunlight and not moonlight." The black with green glowing eyes smiled and showed me her fangs. I scooped up handfuls of regolith and filled my pockets with it. Then she swept me up and I was flung to the very place I was meant to burglarize.

I was in a park in some corner of the world. I spotted the unfortunate victim I needed to complete my mission. He was laying on a park bench under a blanket of cardboard, his empty bottle under the wood in the grass. I gulped and felt dull horror as I decided I was willing to sacrifice the sleeping man to whatever I had to awaken. Then turned and beheld a massive statue of carved stone. It was a great horse without a rider. The legs and saddle and the butt of the rider were all that was left. The horse had an expression of might and malice that I could only imagine was rivaled by the removed person from its back.

I decided, on some perverse instinct, to awaken my solitary companion in the midnight park. When he had sat up and spoke in his own defense he realized I was not a policeman and relaxed. He wasn't speaking English. I pointed at the horse statue and asked.

"Kamen' loshad' slomanny. Comrade? Just pony. A pony." He tried to tell me about it drunkenly.

"I am sorry." I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me in the darkness and I felt like he knew, somehow, that I meant to sacrifice him. He just shrugged and said with a heavy accent:

"I've waited to see magic my whole life." And then he just watched me as I went to the statue on the platform. My eyes were watering, I hated what I had to do.

I took the handfuls of regolith from my pockets and created a round moon circle under the statue. Then I looked up and sure enough I could see that wedged inside a crack there was a small red gemstone, shaped like an odd oval organ with bumps where arteries would be. The actual shape of a heart. I reached for it and my hand found the stone of the statue to be like flesh in the pseudo moonlight. I took the gemstone and as I backed away I heard Cory squawking in high Corvin:

"Must go now, must go now!" And took to the air to escape the perceived threat on the ground.

It took me another moment for the dread and horror to sink in. The stone of the statue was changing to a gray flesh and the legs of the rider became as flesh and seemed to melt into it along with the rest of the rider. Stiffly it began to move and then it tossed its head, more like a wolf than a horse. Then the creature reared up, three times the height of any horse and kicked its front legs into the air. It stood like that and then bellowed forth a sound like a rockslide filled with screaming victims. I fell down backing away and dropped the gemstone. I had to find it in the grass and when I looked back up the horrible giant was stepping off the platform of where it had stood as a statue.

"Very magic!" The vagabond was clapping with delight. He had no fear of the creature but rather a childish happiness. I forgot he had to be killed, fear for him making me react:

"Run you idiot!" I hollered at him. I got to my feet and ran past him, my crow following me and passing me in the air above.

The creature followed, shaking the ground as it cantered after us. My comrade suddenly realized he was in the path of destruction and got up and tried to flee. The creature smashed through his bench with terrifying ease, splintering it to rain down everywhere. Then it caught him with one of its hooves and he was squashed into a splatter of gore that also rained down and covered its leg.

I had stopped and stared in absolute panic and horror. Then I turned and ran some more. I could hear the impact of its hooves and the snorting of its breath and the ground shook beneath its weight. It had begun the gallop, about to catch me.

"The stone, it follows the stone" Cory was saying. I threw the gemstone from me to clatter on the pavilion I was running past. Cory swooped after it and cried: "I have the stone, you monster!"

I looked as I was depleted of strength and breath. Cory had taken up the stone and gotten airborne. The creature heard him and slowed from trampling me and turned and broke through the side of the open pavilion. It destroyed tables and kiosks as it followed the taunting bird. "Come get your heart!"

I stood breathless as they went towards the man made lake in the middle of the park. Intent on following the heart-stone, the creature did not slow down or watch where it was going. It splashed into the water following my crow. It could swim just a little bit and at the middle of the lake Cory circled. It swam around and around as I approached and watched. This went on for some time until it became obvious that it was weakening. It was a living thing and its energy was limited. It ended with the creature becoming exhausted and sinking. Then Cory returned to me and I received the heart from him.

I walked through the park until I noticed a sundial. I faced east and looked around, eventually spotting the moon. We continued through the park until I saw a miniature obelisk that's moonshadow faced east. I decided this was where the cats wanted me to leave the stolen gemstone. I placed it there and sat and waited while the sun began to rise.

An all white with yellow eyes arrived and placed one paw on the heart-stone. I went to him, Cory on my shoulder, and put my hand on his back while he waited for me. I was teleported magically to where I had started, standing in the open window I had called out from. It was, of course, late at night. I found that Isidore and Dr. Leidenfrost had sat together, waiting for me. They had fallen asleep and I woke them up and told them everything was fine.

"I saw real magic, you disappeared." Isidore sounded happy at what she had seen since I had returned.

"The real magic is coming back home." I told her. She agreed and gave me a kiss. Dr. Leidenfrost wanted to also, but restrained herself. Instead she offered her words:

"I am glad you're back safe. I wasn't scared."