*No blood on the knives.*
Zelaine turned that over quickly as she moved. If they had gotten to Mavine first the knives would have shown it. Which meant Mavine had not gone out through the door. And the window on her side had already been open before everything started.
She had a strong suspicion about where that led.
The white light, the trance, the timing of it all. Mavine had likely gone out the window, pulled by whatever the light was doing to unprotected minds. Which meant she was somewhere on the farm.
"Mavine! Mavine!"
Her voice tore through the silent night and the silence swallowed it whole. No answer came back.
She moved fast toward the pens, the crystal pulsing in her fist with a rhythm that had grown more insistent since she landed outside. She reached the enclosure and stopped.
Nothing extraordinary at first glance. No destruction, no mess beyond the ordinary disorder of animals in close quarters at night.
Then she looked more carefully.
Every animal in the pen was standing completely still. Not sleeping, not shifting the way animals shift in the dark. Standing, heads slightly lowered, eyes open and vacant. Hanging in place like statues, like something had simply paused them mid-movement and walked away.
A trance. All of them.
"Mavine! Mavine!"
She swept the entire farm, section by section, the fish ponds, the rice rows, the outer edges of the property where the light thinned out. No footprints she could follow.
No trace of the girl anywhere.
She stopped in the middle of it all and opened her hand.
The crystal was glowing.
Then she heard it and looked up in the same motion, barrier already snapping into place around her.
Caw! Caw!
They were everywhere above her, dozens of them, the same grotesque perversion as the one inside the room, wheeling in slow circles against the dark sky, taloned legs hanging loose beneath their bodies, intestines swaying. Every set of hollow eyes fixed on her.
"Cube bullets."
She gestured and the cubes materialized and launched, hitting the swarm at a hundred kilometers per hour, the impacts wet and heavy and satisfying. Several dropped instantly, split apart mid-air, raining black ichor onto the dirt below.
Caw! Caw!
The rest grew frantic. They broke formation and dove, a wave of rotting flesh and grinding shrieks angling straight down at her, and the hatred in their empty eyes was vivid and specific in a way that made no biological sense for creatures that should not have been capable of it.
"Cube bullets. Barrier."
She fired and reinforced simultaneously, splitting her focus clean down the middle. Her cubes tore through the front line of the dive while the barrier shimmered and rebuilt itself in rotating layers.
She remembered how easily the first one's beak had passed through. She was not running because running would not help her. The barrier would not save her when they reached it and she knew that, had already accepted it and moved past it.
She reached into her pocket and closed her fingers around the crystal there.
Ten seconds before they hit her barrier. Maybe less.
She crushed it in one clean motion.
"Tornado!"
The cubes she had fired did not fall.
They curved back mid-flight, reversing direction without slowing, sweeping back up into the swarm from below.
But they were not going for direct impacts this time. They pulled in close, surrounding the crows in a loose swirling formation, and then they began to come apart.
The internal friction built faster than the eye could follow. The composition she had spent years designing for exactly this kind of output, the rotational speed, the structural configuration, all of it converting kinetic energy into heat at a rate that had no business being possible in an object that small.
The cubes crumbled and melted simultaneously, and what hit the air around the swarm was not cube fragments but boiling lava, suspended and moving.
Two seconds.
The lava caught the updraft and twisted, pulling itself into an inverted cone that swallowed the swarm whole. The heat alone was enough. The crows did not even have time to shriek.
They came apart in the thermal column, melting into the mass of it, until there was nothing left above her but a slowly rotating spire of cooling lava and dark smoke against the night sky.
Zelaine stood inside her heat resistant barrier and watched it settle.
It would cool on its own. Nothing out here was going to reignite it.
She turned back toward the farmhouse.
She had searched the pens, the rice rows, the fish ponds, the outer edges of the property. She had covered the entire farm and come back empty.
She had not searched inside the house.
She moved toward the door.
'Where the hell is that girl. After all this commotion she has not made a single sound.'
"Mavine! Mavine!"
She went through the house fast and methodical. Kitchen. Living room. She called the name into every corner and got nothing back.
The washroom door she simply broke down rather than waste time with the handle, half expecting to find the girl curled up behind it, scared and confused.
Empty.
Nine rooms in the house. She checked all nine with the kind of thoroughness that left no comfortable uncertainty behind.
Under beds, inside wardrobes, behind furniture pushed against walls.
Nothing.
At last she turned toward the one room she had left for last. The one where she had bound Mark and Ellamele. Maybe they had regained their senses. Maybe they could tell her something.
She opened the door and stepped inside and stopped.
Mavine stood over the bed.
She was seven years old and she was holding the blade and the sheets beneath her were soaked through in deep dark red.
Mark and Ellamele lay still, stabbed multiple times, the kind of stillness that did not leave room for interpretation.
Mavine had not moved at the sound of the door. She was not looking at Zelaine.
She was looking at her parents with her hands still trembling around the handle, her gaze fixed and vacant, like something behind her eyes had simply gone offline.
Zelaine's pocket pulsed.
She looked down. The crystal was glowing stronger than it had all night, its rhythm slow and steady, perfectly synchronized with the rise and fall of Mavine's small chest.
****
"So you did it the whole night!"
Leishna's voice carried that particular brightness she reserved for moments she knew would land badly. "She is the real deal right."
Atiya's expression flared with annoyance and something underneath the annoyance that was sharper and less comfortable. The words had found something and he did not particularly appreciate that.
'Is Zelaine like that too,' he thought despite himself. 'Though she is at least considerate when it comes to that.'
"How was it."
He looked at her.
"I will be discharged in the evening," he said flatly. "Let's talk when I come back."
Leishna, demonstrating her usual relationship with things Atiya said, ignored this completely and held out a bundle of papers.
He took them out of reflex and stared at them.
'Why is she giving me this.'
It was the pornographic drawings he had made. The original ones. But there were additional pages now, pages he had not drawn, tucked in among his own work with no explanation.
'Is she trying to tell me something.'
Leishna reached over and pointed at the first page without a word.
He looked at it. An obscene scene, a woman drawn in the act of swallowing a man's, and the man's dialogue bubble reading: *don't spit until I go out.*
He stared at it.
He had never drawn that page.
He opened his mouth to say so and Leishna kissed him.
He felt the metallic object transfer from her mouth to his the moment it happened and understood immediately why she had pointed at the drawing.
'Oh.'
"Oh my."
Screja, positioned to the side of the room, snickered behind her hand.
A few moments later Leishna was heading out, Screja moving alongside her to see her off, and Atiya sat alone on the bed holding the papers with a small hard object sitting under his tongue.
The moment they were gone Atiya spat the object into his palm and tucked it into his boot without looking at it, then turned his attention to the papers.
He skimmed fast, flipping through his own drawings until he found the page that did not belong. Dense text this time, no illustration. A continuation of the story, written in Leishna's hand.
He read it.
Luna had finally found someone who was not smitten by Rakel, and through that person she had found the way to meet her. It happened inside a hotel, arranged carefully and kept entirely hidden from Rakel.
Luna went through with it, slipped away, and left carrying Rakel's diary, a family heirloom passed down from his mother, something irreplaceable to him. And in doing so Luna finally cut herself free.
Atiya lowered the papers slowly.
He mapped it out.
Luna was not the protagonist of the story he had drawn. She was a side character, one who had been under the hypnotic pull of the actual main character Rakel, devoted to him in the obsessive way that hypnotism produced.
But Leishna had reframed her as the protagonist and carried her story forward.
Luna was Atiya. The someone not smitten by Rakel was a survivor of the sacrificial ritual. The heirloom, the diary, was the sculpture the demon had given him.
Leishna was telling him to escape. Use the sculpture as leverage. Hold it as hostage against the village and walk out.
He stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
It was a workable plan. More than workable. It was clean and it accounted for variables he had been turning over for days.
But something else was sitting at the back of his mind and would not move.
Leishna could have waited until evening. He had told her himself, 'I will be discharged then, we can talk.'
She could have simply said it to his face in plain words once Screja was out of the room.
Instead she had done all of this. The drawing, the kiss, the metal object, the papers, the coded continuation of a fictional story.
An elaborate roundabout method that required him to decode it layer by layer.
'Why.'
Outside Screja's residence.
"Is there something going on between you two."
Screja asked it with the particular tone of someone who already suspected the answer and wanted to watch the confirmation arrive.
Leishna just smiled.
"Oh my." Screja placed a hand against her chest in mock sympathy. "I hate to say it but I will have to break your heart."
"We will see about that," Leishna said pleasantly. "But first, Fredo asked me to tell you something."
Screja's expression shifted into something more attentive.
"The ritual will begin in seven days. The demon itself came to him in a dream and said the boy this time is special."
The words landed and Screja went still. It was a ridiculous claim on its surface. Dreams were dreams. But Fredo was the source and Fredo did not relay things he was not certain of. She turned it over once and felt the weight of it settle.
"The demon wants to shorten the timeline," she murmured.
Leishna reached into her coat and produced a small pouch, holding it out.
"There is a special type of aphrodisiac inside. Fredo said to tell you to keep the boy inside the village by all means necessary."
Screja took the pouch slowly and looked at it. Then looked at Leishna.
It was the first time Fredo had ever asked something like this of her. She frowned despite herself.
Leishna's smile had taken on an edge that even Screja found uncomfortable.
Meanwhile inside, Atiya had found the final page tucked among the others.
'Drink whatever is inside the metal object. It will protect your mind from being brainwashed.'
He sat with the small metal container in his palm and turned it over. A faint green color was visible through the seam of it.
He hesitated.
Then the door opened and Screja stepped inside, and the look on her face and the particular way she was carrying herself told him everything he needed to know about what the next several hours were going to look like.
He drank the green liquid in one motion.
It went down clean and left something faintly bitter at the back of his throat.
'I have a bad feeling about this.'