Muffin's Evil Things

Disclaimer: NSFW. The pilot story for my currently-on-hold episodic horror-adventure series, Evil Things. Read if you like! Fair warning, plenty of delightful horror and violence within.

Content/Kink Warnings: Horror, Supernatural Horror, Body Horror, Magical Realism, Blood, Violence, Corpses, Alcohol, Psychopathy, Gore, Descriptions of Graphic Imagery

Raindrops, wide and heavy, pelted the smooth asphalt streets of Pleiku as Weaver strode away from the immolating shrine, the oppressive sound of rainfall on metal roofing conveniently drowning out the squalling of the parking garage-turned-brood nest he left ablaze in his wake. He sighed, slipping his hand free of the springblade glove and stowing it gingerly in the inner pocket of his long coat. What few pedestrians and drivers that were around him, populating the late evening streets, would be too occupied by escaping the sudden downpour to notice, but he always preferred to err on the side of paranoia. 

Stepping under the awning of a closed convenience store, Weaver took a moment to collect himself, checking for injuries he’d been too busy to let himself feel, rips in his clothing he’d need to mend, the usual fare. The Key was quiet around his neck, so he knew his job in this city had been completed to the Web’s satisfaction, meaning now was one of the brief moments he was permitted to indulge in a little rest and aftercare. 

In the end, he found no injuries other than a few bumps and scrapes he was already aware of, no meaningful damage to his clothing, and a business card stuck to his shoe.

Oh, joy, he couldn’t help himself but to think. Puffing a soft sigh of resignation out to mist in the chill air, he stooped down and plucked the rain-ruined slip from the bottom of his high combat boot. It was practically mulching in his hand from the wet, all text completely illegible save for two words, which not a droplet of rain had seemed to touch.

New Orleans. 

“A touch vague, no?” he groaned at nothing, “Bloody hell…”

It wasn’t long before a cab rolled lazily down the street, allowing Weaver to hail it and duck inside, out of the rain. He’d gotten his last phone broken a few hours prior, crushed under the legs of a rather overgrown millipede, but naturally, a prior pickup of this taxi seemed to have mistakenly left theirs sitting on the backseat. 

“The airport, please,” he said, just as the rain began to slow.

~~~

The third consecutive phone call sounding off in harsh chirps from her bedside table told Melody Walsh two things: first, that no amount of rolling over would be getting her back to sleep at this point, and second, that her boss had once again neglected to check the staff schedule for the day.

Modi li...

Groaning softly to herself and dragging a bedraggled hand over her sleep-bagged face, Melody kicked her feet up in the air to propel herself out of bed and winced at the harsh light coming off her buzzing phone screen. Henri, the caller ID confirmed. It wasn't like Melody never took time off from the shop, yet whenever she wasn't already grease-smeared and sweaty under the belly of a sputtering SUV by the time Henri turned up in the morning at nine sharp, she'd always end up with a tetchy phone call demanding to know where she was. Sometimes even on weekends. 

She must think I don't have anything fuckin' better to do wit’ my time, Melody grumbled inwardly and pointedly muffled her still-ringing phone under her pillow, But today's gonna be different. Finally, today's gonna be fuckin' different. 

Melody smacked her lips with a frown, the morning breath from last night's A.M. energy drinks sour on her tongue. Henri would eventually stop calling and actually bother to check the schedule, she always did. Melody had taken the morning off, citing familial obligations.

A crock 'a shit big enough for even Henri to smell, Melody chuckled and shook her head, But what's she gonna do? Bitch about it to me when I show? As if she isn't gonna find a dozen other reasons to do that between now and then anyhow.

She sighed, dragging a hand through her bed-tousled scarlet hair and glancing around the room, only half of which could be referred to as her actual “bedroom”. The far wall was populated by a set of counters, a neglected stove, a fridge with a broken hinge on the top freezer door, and a small table with a chair on each end. Her own portion of the room, subdivided by a well-maintained line of masking tape on the floor, featured her springy single bed, her bedside table, a small bed-foot chest, and a claustrophobic closet. Her housemates gave her a certain degree of lip on the daily for how many of her clothes wound up occupying space as wrinkled masses on the floor around her bed, but to be absolutely fair to her, it wasn’t as though she had room for them anywhere else. 

What was important at that moment, though, was the small black plastic baggie stuffed between her mattress and the peeling wall, which she quickly dug out and popped open, letting its paper-scrap contents fall out onto the bed in front of her. 

‘Man found dead in Little Woods’. ‘Little girl missing on Wright Rd’. ‘Police investigating two more deaths in Little Woods: Homicide?’. ‘Strange homicides plague suburbs’. ‘Serial Killer in New Orleans?’.

These, and a half-dozen other newspaper clippings and printed online articles that Melody had spent the prior night snapping up and compiling were her real reason for why today was so special. It had been six days since the last. She had the pattern, she had the location, and she had the scent. 

Tonight, Melody was going hunting.

New Orleans, Louisiana, the city Melody had never known a day outside of, was hardly the safest of cities, in terms of sheer crime rate statistics, she knew. Muggings, assault, that sort of thing were relatively commonplace; not everything that happened in the city ever even made the newspapers, as there was just so much going on for any given publishing day. But what had been going on in Little Woods, the quaint suburban district to the east, just off Lake Pontchartrain, was different. The papers knew it, and more than that, Melody could feel it in the air. Limbs torn free from bodies, nowhere to be seen and no evidence of what happened other than unidentifiable serration marks left behind on the stumps. Puncture wounds found on the inside of the esophaguses of the victims, but not reaching the outside of the neck, as though something barbed had snaked its way down their throats before they died. Eyes liquefied in their sockets, despite no wounds or marks identifiable anywhere around them. 

And what’s more, if you counted a few thus-far-unattributed disappearances from the area, it was regular. Once every six nights precisely, one body found mangled the next morning by passers-by, or one poor night-owl fool nowhere to be found in the morning. The police were calling it unrelated homicides. The papers were calling it serial murder. The people were reluctant to call it anything, too busy cowering behind the well-maintained border walls of their small, dull lives. 

Melody didn’t know what it was. But something about it made something in the back of her mind, something she hadn’t felt in a long time, start to smolder to life again. And, she supposed, she wasn’t quite sensible or well-adjusted enough yet to ignore that feeling.

Click!

Oh, right. Just past nine. Amy’s home. 

The small chain of bells affixed to the rain-stained front door jingled in warning as Amy stepped through, trudging into the cramped front room of the house and kicking off her work shoes as though they were biting her ankles; A long-haired brunette on the light side of heavy, not enough distress to have earned the black denim she sported head to toe, and a pair of novelty pink star sunglasses with duct tape holding the ridge together, she trudged in with a slump in her posture and bags under her eyes.

Melody couldn’t help but chuckle to herself as her housemate somehow managed to make it halfway into Melody’s room/the kitchen (albeit, with the size of the shotgun house they shared with one other housemate, it was only five steps or so) without even noticing Melody standing there. In fact, it was only as Amy had jostled the fridge open and had rummaged into the back, reaching for the iced coffee tin specifically labelled as Dustin’s, that she finally blinked in drowsy surprise and turned back to peer interrogatively at Melody.

“Why are you here?” Amy asked bluntly, popping the lid on the coffee and rummaging through the dishrack for a glass.  Melody smiled. Amy routinely worked the graveyard at a karaoke bar, and when her customer service mode finally got dropped after a shift, it dropped hard.

“Took the mornin’ off,” Melody stuck her chin out, “I was up late last night.”

Amy just grunted at that, not bothering to make further conversation and instead beginning to pick around the cupboards for something to eat. 

At least her after-work moodiness keeps her terse, Melody supposed, quickly packing her newspaper clipping leads back into their bag, and setting about her morning workout routine.

“We need milk,” Amy noted after a little while, breaking Melody’s push-up rhythm, “Can you grab some on your way home from work?”

Melody sighed, then frowned in realization, “Doesn’t Dustin make the groceries this week? Text him.”

“Yeah,” Amy rolled her eyes, speaking over her shoulder as she strolled back out of the room, “But he won’t be back for a couple of hours after you, soooo…”

Melody’s mouth dropped open in objection, but by the time she’d glanced over, the door to Amy and Dustin’s shared bedroom (theirs had actual doors, hers was only separated by a set of diaphanous curtains) had slammed shut. Melody groaned and silently mouthed a colourful array of profanity in English, French, and Creole at the door, before finishing up her routine and getting dressed. It was late September, and in Louisiana, that tended to mean the worst of summer had passed, and the breezes from the Mississippi river would take the remaining sun’s edge off, so she just slipped on a practical set of cargo pants and a faded Led Zeppelin tee she’d stolen from an ex. 

Figure I've got anywhere from ten minutes to ten seconds before the noise of that fuckin' hyperpop bullshit she blares is gonna drive me outta here anyway, Melody sighed, shoving her phone, wallet, and brass knuckles into her pockets. She stuffed her scarlet bedhead into her favourite beanie rather than trying to tame it, as was her standard, and rolled into the morning outside. After brief consideration, she selected Black Sabbath to drown out the world through her earbuds today; good metal always got her riled up enough to stare it down. 

The lines on her arms were itchy today. She rubbed at them, grimacing. It was almost like they were just as impatient as she was for the night to come again. 

Heading on foot out and away from the South Seventh Ward, where she’d lived for the past eight months or so, finally ending her multi-year couch-surfing streak to start renting, Melody hopped onto a passing streetcar. As she did every morning, she rode it up to the Broadmoor stop in Uptown, where she always got breakfast and worked. Further away in the city from Little Woods.

The lines itched worse. And higher. Melody stuffed her hands into her pockets, resisting the urge to scratch at the black glyph on the back of her neck. The last time she’d felt this kind of itch had been years ago. That only told her that she must be right. There was something worth finding in those suburbs. She could smell it. 

But that would have to wait for tonight. Right now, the lines weren’t complaining nearly as loudly as her stomach. 

“Yo, Bappie!”

At the sound of her call, the stout sea-blue sandwich cart on the nearby streetcorner abruptly bumped and jostled, a spurt-bottle of mayonnaise tumbling off and splatting open on the pavement below. There was a muffled string of French profanity, before a swarthy, portly man with tied-back dreads, an abrasively yellow t-shirt, and patchy stubble populating his long chin popped up from behind it, clutching a forming bump on the top of his head..

“Fireball!” Baptiste exclaimed, “Mère Marie, you scared me!” 

“I could tell,” Melody chortled at the vendor’s frazzled face and retrieved the loose bottle for him, “Ya run outta the good stuff yet?”

Baptiste chuckled wryly right back at her, “As if I ever get enough action to. I’d sell better in the French Quarter, but all the good spots get taken there so quickly every day!”

“Oh, fuck off, don’t do that to me,” Melody shook her head, “Ya know you’re about the only good part of ma’ mornin’, right?”

The man twisted his lips with a good-natured sigh, slipping a pair of plastic gloves over his fuzz-haired hands and setting to assembling her usual sandwich. Melody slipped her earbuds out of her ears and scratched idly at her arms, unable to keep her gaze from drifting eastward. Maybe getting something into her stomach would give the mounting fire she felt something to burn through other than her patience, for a time. 

“Shrimp po-boy, dressed, with a cold drink,” Baptiste finally proclaimed with a grin, wrapping her sandwich in wax paper and handing it to her alongside her drink, “As always.”

“Mèsi,” Melody thanked him, moving to lean against a nearby wall to enjoy her breakfast. This wasn’t a particularly touristy part of town, and especially not at this time of year, so the street was mostly deserted. Evidently seeing no prospective customers around at a glance, Baptiste slipped off his gloves, tossed them in a nearby bin, and posted up beside Melody. 

Guess he’s chatty today, Melody surmised with an amused shake of her head, Alright by me. Bappie’s not as boring as most people, and that’s all I care about. 

“I was beginning to think you’d been fired,” Baptiste cracked, swiping a hand over his head to smooth his dreads, “Sleep in late by mistake, Fireball?”

Melody snorted, “Not half as late as I woulda liked. I took the mornin’ off, but I got a rude awakening.”

Baptiste clicked his tongue in commiseration, “Sure that’s a good idea? Not to say you can’t do what you like with your time, but hell, sometimes I can hear that boss lady of yours shouting you out from here. And the shop isn’t less than three blocks away.”

“Yeah,” Melody rolled her eyes, pointedly taking another large bite of her po-boy before continuing, mouth full, “Henri’s not gonna fuckin’ fire me. I’m the best fuckin’ pair ‘a hands she has, no matter if it’d kill her to admit it. She just hates that I don’t cower. Bitch is ex-military, thinks of herself like she’s still a sarge.”

Baptiste didn’t respond to that immediately, his face taking on a strange, almost forlorn look as he cast his gaze to the side. Melody frowned, her eyebrow quirking up at the unexpected reaction, and slowed her chewing to give him time. 

“You haven’t brought anybody else around here with you in a good while,” Baptiste finally sloughed out, eyes glancing back up to hers while his chin remained downturned, “What happened to that young guy, with the freckles?”

Melody frowned flatly, finishing her sandwich and starting in on her drink, “Arlon. Stopped calling me after I wouldn’t put out while I crashed at his place.”

Baptiste frowned, “And that girl with the pink bit in her hair?”

“Haddie. Haven’t talked to her in months. Can’t really remember why.”

“The tall blond one?”

Melody waved a dismissive hand, “Wanted me to meet his ma and ‘em way too fast. Ya got a reason for this interrogation, Bappie?”

Baptiste visibly recoiled as Melody’s gaze grew sharper, his hands moving up between them in surrender. He probably had something like a foot on her, in terms of height, yet whatever he must see in her green eyes made him flinch back all the same. 

“Just wondering,” he said placatingly, before stuffing his hands in his pockets and turning away, “I mean… you know what I mean.”

Melody finished her drink and fell into a pointed silence, a faint flicker of annoyance beginning to alight in her breast. 

Sure, I know. But if it’s so fuckin’ hard to say, I’m damn well gonna make him sit in it until he’s forced to.

“You’re… unsustainable, Fireball,” Baptiste finally finished, turning back to her with a pillowy look creasing his eyes. Melody let that one hang for a while, her gaze flickering to her shoes as she crushed the empty can in her hand. 

Of course I am, she thought, her fingers idly trailing up her arms to scratch at the itch again, This world isn’t made to sustain something like me.

“Well, if it makes ya feel any better,” she finally responded, a blithe chortle underlining her words as she tossed the crumpled can into the bin from a distance, “There’s a non-zero chance I’ll be dead tomorrow morning, so hey! Bon temps, pas longtemps, yeah?”

Baptiste offered a cheap chuckle at that, brightening for only an instant, before he made eye contact with her once again, and his face dropped like a noose. Melody hadn’t the faintest idea what he could possibly have seen on her face for that.

There were no more words between the pair of them that day. Melody fished a tenner out of her wallet and handed it off to him, gesturing for the change to be kept as always, before trudging off down the street. She could still feel Baptiste’s hollowed gaze boring into the back of her skull all the way until she turned the corner, but she never looked back. 

It was nearly eleven by the time she showed up to the shop. Addo Auto Clinic, cited the sun-weathered sign in faded red block font. There weren’t any vehicles in the garage currently - it was fucking New Orleans, any mechanic shop was lucky if they had one drive-in gas change daily - which meant that today would just be organization and tool maintenance, maybe some inventory, until they got something in. The jackets hung on the far wooden rack told her that it was a full team today: herself and Henri, along with Micheal and Mitchell, two brothers fresh from college that she didn’t know very well, nor cared to get to know better. 

On the subject of Henri, Melody had only just finished punching in for the day when the side door to the main office swung open, revealing a hefty mid-40s woman in orange overalls, sporting space buns, a cleft chin, and a near-permanent sneer on her thick-skinned face.

“Not much for picking up your phone, are you?” Henri asked, leaning against the doorframe and folding her arms, tilting her chin up at the shorter woman. 

“I was sleeping,” Melody shot back, brushing past where Henri stood to start heading for the parts inventory room, “Next time, could ya think to check the schedule before buggin’ me in my personal life?”

Henri hummed dully, trailing along behind Melody, before holding up a paper copy of that very same schedule. She squinted at it, almost certainly for dramatics alone, before continuing, “Familial obligations. Really? I didn’t know you’d spoken to your parents in the past half-decade.”

Melody bristled, her hand tightening around the doorknob. The itch was incessant, now. The heat. She had to be grateful she wasn’t currently holding anything heavy, if only for the sake of her continued employment and lack of incarceration for second-degree.

After a few moments of sitting mired in that silence, not even allowing Henri the gratification of being able to see her face twisted in annoyance, the older woman seemed to finally get bored of the moment. 

“There’s an appointment to get an engine replacement coming in at one,” Henri said, turning away and speaking over her shoulder as she walked back to her office, “The boys can do inventory today. You can take care of that.”

The door swung shut once again, and Melody was alone in the hallway at last.

The itch throbbed. It wasn’t just her arms, it was all of the lines. All over her body, it was as though she could feel them twisting her flesh into tense, brittle sheets. 

When she finally opened the door to the inventory room, she accidentally pushed it so hard that the inner doorknob made a crack in the drywall it impacted. Melody sighed, slipped her earbuds back in, and glared up at the high wall-mounted clock. 

Today’s gonna be different, she reminded herself with a deep, resigned breath, Finally, today’s gonna be fuckin’ different.

~~~

“Are you accusin’ me of something?” Uma’s eyebrow twitched, strong hands planting themselves firmly at her hips, eyeing Weaver with a curl of annoyance to her lips.

“Erm… I wasn’t meaning to?” Weaver immediately held up his hands reassuringly, shrinking back a little as he desperately searched for which of his words might have accidentally come off as censorious.

The High Priestess eyed him from head to toe silently, her face only further furrowing in displeasure as her gaze flitted back up to meet his. Weaver couldn’t help but gulp, glancing desperately to the side, eyes sweeping across the expanse of Congo Square for any possible assistance, but what few people were around only seemed to be glancing over at him with faces of faint amusement.

Uma Greene had been a hard woman to come by. Weaver couldn’t be certain if it was his status as a stranger alone, or perhaps the sight and knowledge of the Key around his neck, that had dissuaded so many people from telling him how to find her, but in the end, he’d managed to glean enough to track her down here. Granted, he recognized, interrupting a High Priestess in the middle of sacred prayer might not have led to the best immediate impression, but having been in New Orleans for almost a week at this point, he was direly sore for leads, and if anyone would be able to give him one…

Do I bow? He found himself thinking, almost feeling himself shrink beneath the prying gaze of the tall woman, Or would that come off as patronizing, since I clearly don’t practice her spirituality? I don’t want to chance offending her, though it seems I’ve incidentally already done that, which, well, shit, but still, I-

Uma cleared her throat pointedly. Weaver gulped again, pushing his thoughts aside as best he could and forcing his tongue to clumsily conjure some words, at least.

“Please,” he strangled out, settling on a slight respectful tilt of his chin, rather than a full salute, “I’m only trying to fulfill my duty in this city. I just wasn’t told where to begin, this time… and I had figured, if anyone would be able to give me a direction to walk, it would be someone of your station.”

Uma remained silent, but her features softened a little as she glanced to the side in thought. A tentative rush of relief crashed over Weaver, but he maintained his deferential posture. Partially due to social propriety, and partially due to the fact that the woman in front of him was 6 foot 5 at least, with musculature about her that he could even notice through her loose sea-blue dashiki. 

“Please,” he prodded again after a moment’s hesitation. Uma sighed, but seemed to lose most of the tension in her shoulders, and nodded after a long moment of consideration.

“Some of my family run with the Society and the Orbis on the side,” the priestess began, motioning to a steel-mesh bench nearby, which Weaver quickly joined her at, “I’ve heard of a few… spots of chaos in the city. More than usual, anyway. But I was given the impression it was handled, for the most part.”

“I have no doubt that the things they have encountered have been put away in order,” Weaver nodded slowly, “But I have been monitoring the local news since I arrived. New Orleans is a hotspot of sorts, at the moment, even more than usual. The Society and the Orbis are good at putting out fires, certainly, but I’m looking for the matchbox.”

Uma was silent again for a while. Not a silence of frustration this time, though, at least so far as Weaver could tell. She scratched at her durag with a many-ringed hand for a few moments, eyes soft and pensive as they examined the intricate cobblestones beneath them, before she sniffed determinedly and turned back to him. 

“That key around your neck isn’t a replica, is it?”

It wasn’t a question. 

“I really am quite afraid it isn’t,” Weaver answered anyway, offering her a commiserative tilt of his head and a nod. 

“Right…” Uma sighed loudly, standing up from the bench and stretching her back, before continuing, “If I were you, I’d check the suburbs to the east. None of my people have told me about anything happening there, but I was there a few days ago, and something felt… wrong, to me. In my way of feeling things.”

“A blocked connection?” Weaver guessed, standing up alongside her and nodding, “To your spirits?”

“No,” the priestess shook her head, looking concerned, “The opposite. Too much connection. I can always feel ‘em watching over my shoulder, but over there… I swear I could almost hear ‘em. All of ‘em at once. All the time.”

Weaver was silent for a few moments, considering, before he nodded.

“Thank you,” he bowed his head to her again, “I’ll see what I can find.”

Uma nodded and promptly walked away, moving towards another nearby bench, populated by those who had been amused by Weaver’s discomfort moments prior. After a few steps, she paused, tilting her head back at him with her lips split into a wry smirk.

“I’d wish you auspicious guidance on your way, but…” she chuckled, trailing off and continuing away. Weaver sighed and nodded resolutely to himself, turning and beginning to make his way out of the park.

There’s a little too much guidance in my life already, he agreed with the words that need not have been said to be heard.

~~~

Melody didn’t know if she had taken the monkey wrench more out of practicality or principle. More to the point, she didn’t much care either. 

Henri’s own fault for always leavin’ a half hour before she’s supposed to, Melody thought, chuckling as she finally walked free of the shop for the day, jumbo monkey wrench hefted up over her shoulder, Can’t say no to my request paperwork to take it home if she never sees it get filed.

Melody cracked her neck, allowing some of the aches and pains of the long day wash away in the early twilight that filtered through the Broadmoor streets. In the end, she’d been kept significantly later than her shift was supposed to last - Henri had a way of finding four-hour tasks that needed to be done “urgently” when there were two hours left in the workday. By this point, she was used to it. 

It wasn’t frustration that was currently making the thin hairs on her neck stand on end. It was something else. And the fact that Melody couldn’t quite identify what it was only excited her all the more.

Her heartbeat was steady, but she could still feel it pumping in her chest. A scent wafted through her nostrils, the scent of an alley, a brick, a release, a gleeful cackle, god, she knew that smell. Her gaze drifted eastward once again, and her eyes inadvertently narrowed at the sight of the moon beginning to crest over Lake Pontchartrain. 

Finally.

The streetcar was on its last run of the day, and what few late-night passengers joined her on the ride were either too absorbed in their own lives or too nervous to question the sight of a five-foot-three young woman hefting about a monkey wrench almost half her height on public transit. Melody could feel the itch pervading her flesh, urging her to stay on, go right to Little Woods, the hunting grounds, she could feel it, right away. 

Nah, she had to reaffirm to herself, squeezing a fist tightly in her pocket, averting her gaze from the other passengers in the streetcar as her nostrils flared indignantly, No sense rushing in completely unprepared. I already have a weapon, but I still gotta grab some shit from home, and change. 

If I’m gonna die tonight, I’m at least gonna be damn fuckin’ sure I’m fit to put up a fight.

Melody reached the house just as the gloaming ambience seeped onto its street like rolling mist, and she nudged open the door with her shoulder, still holding the heavy wrench aloft. The only light in the main living room, which the door opened immediately onto, came from the bright flatscreen to the far wall. The playback of some shitty streaming sitcom illuminated the form of Dustin, slouched on the couch, shirtless as he ever was while he was home, with smudges of cheese dust sprinkling down his overspilling gut. He simply kept staring at the TV, slightly slack-jawed, not even blinking in recognition of Melody arriving home. 

Whatever, Melody thought with a grimace and a glance aside, moving around behind the couch and making for her ‘room’, Just hope Amy isn’t-

“Hey there,” Amy abruptly came into view around the corner, directly between Melody and the curtain to her room, “Did you get the milk like I asked?”

Melody’s gaze flattened dully as the brunette quite pointedly raised a tall glass of milk to her lips, taking a long swig, maintaining eye contact the whole time. 

The arm that was holding the heavy wrench twitched inadvertently. Melody stopped it instinctively, then immediately wondered why she had bothered. 

“Guess not,” Amy’s nasally voice affected a whine, glancing down at Melody’s hands and frowning at the wrench, “What the heck is that thing for, anyway? You going to unscrew the sink or something?”

Rather than giving her the dignity of a response, Melody muscled past the taller girl, their shoulders glancing together at her determined gait, causing Amy to spin around and balk. 

“What the fuck?” Amy spat as Melody whisked the curtain shut behind her, before mumbling barely within earshot, “...touchy bitch, wow…”

I wonder if she’d still be able to give me shit without a lower jaw, Melody wondered. That thought made her smile, and she decided to revel in it for a time, as she set to getting herself ready. 

The baggy band tee was quickly replaced with a practical sports binder, followed by a crop-top and cropped jacket littered with pins and buttons. The cargo pants were difficult to run in, meaning they ended up replaced with a pair of shorts with pockets over a set of ripped tights. She kept the beanie, as she was scarcely without it, and quickly strapped on her joint pads and her weight braces over her wrists and ankles. She found that an extra ten pounds of weight behind her fists was simply practical, most of the time. Lastly, she tied a baggy red plaid flannel around her waist, just to protect her legs from the chilled winds coming off the lake, before hefting the wrench over her shoulder again and making for the door.

“Where are you goin’?” Dustin’s clearly-intoxicated voice slurred from the couch, his eyes peeking almost sheepishly over the seat back as Melody’s hand fell on the doorknob. Blessedly, Amy had taken to fuming in her room alone, as she tended to do.

Melody considered for a moment. If she did actually find what she was looking for, which she had a strange amount of confidence that she would, she realized that whatever she said next may be the last words she ever said to the pudgy man she shared a house with. 

The door swung shut behind her. 

No, she thought with a granite smile, I’m through wit’ it. I’m through wit’ everything. Except this. 

There were no streetcars left to catch, and Little Woods was nearly half the city away. Quite an imposing walk for this late into the evening.

Flexing her fingers firmly around the tape-wrapped wrench in her hand, Melody slipped in her earbuds, clicked on some Teminite, and took off running. 

~~~

Little Woods reeked. 

It was the first thing that Melody noticed, as she finally crossed the intercutting 10 Highway that signified she had arrived in the district. The salty air was heavy in her nostrils, almost coated with slick, murky anxiety. She stopped running for a moment, glancing to the side to peer across into the window of a brick bungalow with well-trimmed hedges, only for someone inside to quickly shut the curtains and turn out the lights, leaving the light around their home shaded in blue dusk once again. 

Probably smart, Melody forced herself to think. The thought she had imposed that over had been ‘Cowards.’.

Melody shook her head and carried on through the late-evening streets as the first stars began to flicker into view overhead. Thinking back to all those newspaper clippings she had practically memorized the night prior, Melody recalled that each of the strange deaths and disappearances tended to happen in a certain rough radius nearby, where she quickly redirected and headed for the core of. 

Making up for her lack of concrete knowledge of where precisely she ought to be headed was the now-incessant itching of the etchings across her body, keeping her tense. Keeping her ready. Senses piqued, like a wildcat, holding every muscle at the ready for the pounce. The hefty wrench felt lighter in her hands, now, her eyes flashing in the night as she raced between lengthening shadows.

Come on, then, she willed into the dark, I don’t got all fuckin’ night. And you, whatever ya are, definitely don’t.

The streets were mostly empty as she passed by, her gait slowing as she entered the domain in which the prior attacks had been reported. She spied a few lone, hunched pedestrians here and there, her vision narrowing as she surveyed them. Each was moving quickly, and with their heads bowed. If she really was after a banal serial killer, perhaps she ought to trail after them, but the radiating stench of sweat and nerves that each and every poor soul on the sidewalk seemed to waft with turned her off. So, she watched them from a distance, predatorial eyes tracing them until they turned out of view or entered their homes to safety, before moving on.

And then, she rounded a corner, identifying a large empty parking lot, lit by occasional streetlights, belonging to a sporting equipment store to her left.

A sharp, heavy smell invaded her nostrils, and she could swear she could feel the fire nipping her back again. When she looked down at herself, before she blinked the image away, she could swear the thing in her hand was a red-slathered brick, rather than a wrench. 

Her lips curled up into a sneer, and she licked her teeth in anticipation, her canines sharp and bright amid the dark. 

Blood in the water. I knew it.

Melody’s eyes darted around, eventually settling on a crumpled form lying near a tall pair of weathered green dumpsters in the parking lot, barely out of the light cast by the nearest streetlamp. From this distance, it hardly looked like anything more than a crumpled garbage bag, or perhaps a wad of clothes if one squinted, but that stench of blood and decaying fear was unmistakable. 

And here I was thinkin’ I’d have to be out all night, Melody chuckled to herself, starting forwards and raising her wrench anticipatively, Lucky me. 

As Melody approached, casting wary glances in all directions around her to try and spot the culprit, she identified the corpse as having belonged to a man. Tanned Latin skin, prickly greying facial hair, medium build, polo shirt and khaki slacks now stained in his blood. There was  an expensive-looking watch and a wedding band on his left arm. His right arm was missing, leaking a wide puddle of blood onto the dirty pavement around him. Melody frowned, leaning down to inspect the body closer, identifying the same kind of strange serration marks near the shoulder stump as had been detailed in the newspaper clippings and police reports. Curiously, there didn’t seem to be any injuries to the torso, causing Melody to tilt her head in confusion.

“Why didn’t ya scream…?” She murmured to herself, frowning, before glancing back up at the body’s face, angled away from her. She reached over and tilted the man’s chin towards her, finding a thick glut of blood spilling out from his throat onto her hand.

Puncture wounds in the throat, she recalled from the papers, So that tears it, then, this fucker definitely got killed by–

The man let out a weak, gurgling cough. The blood sprayed into Melody’s face, causing her to recoil in surprise. 

It was warm. 

Recent. Very.

Move.

Melody obeyed the searing, atavistic impulse without thought, sending her leaping to the side, wrench in hand, just as something impacted down where she had just been poised. She felt a slight jerk as her waist-tied flannel was caught beneath whatever it was, but she wrenched herself free, the fabric tearing. The force seemingly ruptured the man’s abdomen and sent viscera flying out. Melody rolled into a standing position and whipped around, wrench extended in a ready position and heart pounding in her chest, eyes narrowed and ready in the dim light. 

For a few moments, the shadow before her was little more than a shapeless mass in the dark, a deep black against the night air, inscrutable to her even as she felt the adrenaline dumping into her system sharpen her senses. Heartbeats ticked by in the dozens as something was retracted from the corpse’s now-destroyed stomach, lifting the entire body up a half-foot before it fell limply to the ground again.

Then, the wings unfurled. 

Melody only caught a flash as it leapt for her. A tongue made of nails and hooks. Thin-skinned wings giving a powerful beat against the air as it whipped at her. A pair of sunken, flashing green eyes inset into a face of split grey flesh and exposed bone. A five-hooked claw, extending straight for her throat, mere inches away by the time her eyes could register it.

She swung.

Crack!

The predator, the monster, the thing before her let out a throaty, wet cry, like a brake-drifting car muffled through a water balloon, as Melody felt something give beneath the weight of the wrench. It reeled back, rearing up to a height that seemed to dwarf her, backlit by the streetlamp she now realized it must have been hiding perched atop, clutching its too-long arm against its chest. 

The impact had seemingly shattered the forearm of the creature. Melody could see a fragment of jaundiced bone poking through the flesh near the elbow.

The scent of its blood hit her right behind the eyes.

Hunt, she heard in her mind, and her face split into a grin. 

The creature beat its wings, bleated wetly at her once more, and took flight away, deeper into the suburbs. 

“Oh, hell, no,” Melody laughed through gritted teeth, gave the ebon blood that now stained the edge of her wrench another gleeful huff, and dashed off through the hungry streets in pursuit. 

Finally. Laissez les bon temps roulez.

~~~

On the dead-end street with the circular plaza at its tip. The third house clockwise, the only one in sight with a second storey. Slate-grey dappled bricks, solar panels installed along the edges of the synthetic spackled roof tiles, white gutters and floral vases framing the inset front door. 

Weaver could only wonder why anyone else on the street hadn’t cocked their eyebrows at it before now. It seemed obvious enough to him, even at first glance. No cars in the driveway all day. No welcome mat outside the front door, no lights in the windows, no ‘for sale’ sign on the lawn to even provide a reason for the disuse. That house was a funhouse mirror in a home decor store, it just oughtn’t be.

Meaning, of course, that it was where he, inevitably, ought to be. 

The night was beginning to show some mist hanging in the air as Weaver retraced his steps through the darkened neighborhood of Little Woods, following the landmarks he’d taken note of in his mind as he’d spent his day scoping out this entire suburban stretch of the city. 

It’s surprising, he couldn’t help but complain at the empty sky. Normally, I get an indication a little more specific than just the name of a city, or a wise woman pointing me towards an entire third of its square kilometrage. 

Weaver let out a resigned sigh, reaching into his pocket to grab the last corner of the prepackaged convenience store sandwich he’d pinched, groaning at the somehow-already-stale flavour of the egg salad. Contrary to some stories he’d heard about himself over the years, he did actually need to eat, not that he commonly found himself with the funds or opportunity for anything particularly enjoyable. After having spent the better part of nine hours wandering around square streets, peering about for any visible abnormalities, and after finally finding what he figured he was looking for, he’d resolved to allow himself a brief trip back into the inner city to rest before returning under cover of night. 

As he turned onto the secluded dead-end street, the house in question coming into view at last, Weaver finished his “meal” and surveyed his surroundings inquisitively. No prying eyes as far as he could see, checking the spaces between houses and fences, as well as the hexagonal attic windows of the adjoining houses. 

Good, he hummed to himself. I’d rather not have to answer any severe questions from concerned neighbors or local authorities should I end up having to bust the door dow–

Weaver’s train of thought and gait of step grinded to an abrupt, chilled halt as he reached the plaza at the end of the street, eyes settling back on that ever-so-wrong house.

The door is busted down. 

A flash came into his view, just for an instant. A line, suspended in midair, of effulgent rose, flashing from the bow of the skeleton key hanging from his neck, travelling on a wafting, alacritous trajectory forwards and through the smashed-in, splintered front door. 

A thread. An actually visible thread. The novelty would have chuffed him, if it weren’t for all the sudden, pesky deluge of overwhelming dread. 

“Bloody hell,” Weaver hissed, floundering in his pockets to pull out his bladed glove, strapping it on as his eyes traced over the structure, searching for other discrepancies from how he had seen it a mere hour and a half prior at most. To his dismay, a second-storey window, small, seeming like a bathroom, had also been smashed, featuring a concerning amount of scrape and scuff marks on the brickwork around it. At a glance at the shrubbery below, the distinct dearth of glass shards informed him that it had clearly been broken by something outside going in.

Oh, joy.

Loath to waste another moment, Weaver adjusted his long scarf around his face, released the pin on his glove to allow the blade to spring forth, and rushed into the house through the bashed-through lower door. Thankful for the soft soles of his boots, allowing him to move across the lacquered wood floor quietly, he glanced around. There was a set of semispiralling stairs to his immediate left within the dark foyer, as well as an empty coatrack and similar shoe tray. Glancing through the entryway to a living room, he spotted a pair of plush couches, a television on a mahogany bookshelf, and a matching coffee table topped with a bowl of fake fruit. The air felt stale, and the furniture all held a thick layer of dust. At a crane of his neck, Weaver could spy a mass of plastic sheets piled in the corner of the living room.

A rich family’s second, or perhaps winter, home, he figured, frowning, Probably exactly as it was purchased however long ago, with those plastic sheets having just been discarded to the side as an unsightly annoyance, but the furniture never used. Actually, I’d wager nobody has spent any extended time here for years, going by the dust. 

Another thread shot out from the Key, this time flashing in an almost jaunty wave up the spiralling stairs.

Blooming impatient with me this time, are you? 

Weaver bit his tongue on a hiss of trepidation, beginning up the stairs at a measured pace, before wincing as the fourth step up let out a loud, shrill complaint at his weight. The sound, coupled with an inadvertent groan of consternation that escaped his lips unbidden, seemed to echo all throughout the stagnant house.

Something shifted on the floorboards upstairs. Not a lot, but enough to at least be perceptible to piqued ears amid the oppressive quiet. Weaver gritted his teeth, held his bladed arm aloft in front of him, and continued up the stairs. 

The upstairs hallway was still and inconspicuous, no homely furniture or art to dot the polyester-carpeted floors or flat navy walls with signs of life. The windows, the curtains of each pulled taught, allowed in just barely enough moonlight to guide his eyes, casting the entire space into a gloaming gloom. 

The first room, through a white door to Weaver’s left as he crept his way along, was a bedroom. Or, the right size for one, anyway. It was empty other than a large roll of wallpaper and plastic sheeting in the far corner. Unimportant.

The second room, through another white door on his left, was a bathroom, though not the one he had seen from the outside, as it faced the opposite direction and was windowless. There was about two human heads’ worth of hair spackled to the walls and ceiling in the shower, and there was a strange mass of mottled meat in the sink. Weaver paused.

More interesting, he acknowledged, before continuing on, But probably not what I’m here for, exactly.

Through the third door was a sudden blur, and a blunted pain in his chin.

“Augh!” Weaver exclaimed as his head whipped back from the impact, sending him staggering backwards. His foot accidentally scrunched up a wad of carpet beneath him, tripping him up and launching him back, where his head slammed against the drywall and slid dumbly downwards into a collapsed slouch.

Ungloved hand whipping to his chin to massage the pain, he groaned and blinked his eyes blearily open, glancing up to identify the former blur as a Converse sneaker-clad leg. One specifically attached to a short caucasian young woman with a head of wild scarlet hair, who wobbled on her single foot for a moment before regaining her footing and staring down at him.

“Who in’a the fuck are you!?” the girl demanded, eyes flashing wildly over his crumpled form, arms shooting up to a boxing posture in front of her.

“Who am I!?” Weaver couldn’t help but complain, wincing at the feeling of a new clicking noise in his jaw as he spoke, “Who are you!? And what do you mean, ‘who are you’!? You just go around kicking people in the face before they’ve even introduced themselves!?”

“You–” the redhead balked, seemingly taken off guard for a second, before gesturing to his arm, “You’re holdin’ a knife! Or… wearin’ it, anyway!”

“And have I stabbed you recently!?”

She paused again.

“...I don’t… think?”

“Then, excuses, excuses!” Weaver finished snappily, pushing himself back up to his feet and nursing the back of his head. Thankfully, his hair, fluffy and long as was, had cushioned the worst of the impact. With a groan, he identified the slight dislodging of his jaw, and pushed it back into place with a grunt and a click, only thankful that it hadn’t broken the bone. The girl’s eyes were still darting back and forth between his face and the extended glove blade at his side, and after a brief moment of consideration, he retracted it. She didn’t look like something he’d be here for, though he supposed looks had deceived him in the past. 

That idea was only strengthened as, with the hectic moment passing, and both of them seeming to relax slightly in posture, he got a chance to actually register what looked like black, sludgy blood marring the side of her face and clothing. 

“Are you a cop?” the girl asked, pointing her finger up at him accusatorily, “Ya live here, or something? The fuck is goin’ on?”

“...Not in memory,” Weaver droned out, “But give it a moment, you might have knocked a few things loose up there.”

The girl just rolled her eyes, but finally, her posture seemed to settle. Her shoulders untensed, and one of her hands fell on her hip as the other dropped to her side. She seemed to make one more sweep of him, toe to tip, before her critical expression lost its edge.

“Erm… you have blood on you,” Weaver tried, “If you weren’t aware.”

“Of course I know that!” She gestured dramatically, “How the fuck would I not be aware ‘a that!?”

“Right,” Weaver nodded quickly, “And… would you mind telling me why, precisely, you have blood on you? If it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

A beat of silence passed between them then, seeming to echo throughout the entire house. The girl’s expression became conflicted, casting a wary glance back into the yet-unseen room behind her, before turning back to him, eyebrow quirked.

“You said you aren’t a cop,” she hissed, “You know ya gotta tell me if you’re a cop, right?”

“Actually, that’s a myth,” Weaver corrected offhandedly, before immediately holding his hands up defensively as her expression furrowed once again, “No, bloody hell, I’m not with any form of police! I mean…”

Weaver found himself trailing off, the words “I mean you no harm” seeming to fall dead in his throat. If he was being completely honest with himself, he still wasn’t entirely sure. The presence of a seemingly normal, if a touch, well, touchy, young woman in a place like this had really thrown him for a loop.

“I’m not police,” he affirmed again, choosing his words carefully, “But… I am an… investigator. Of sorts. It could be said. It’s been said, I mean. By people. Real ones.”

Her eyebrow shot up again, “What kinda investigator?”

Weaver winced, finding himself caving beneath her prying gaze, responding weakly, “The… paranatural kind? Sort of?”

Her eyes twitched at that. But not in the way that he’d seen many expressions falter in the past. He pursed his lips, surprised, as a long pause invaded the moment, capturing his breath from his lips as it grew awkward.

The girl snorted.

“Yeah,” she chuckled to herself, shaking her head at the ground and rolling her eyes, “You are definitely not a cop. And what, ya think there’s some sorta monster in this house, or some shit?”

Weaver cocked his head curiously at her. Her tone was all sarcasm, but there wasn’t quite the real edge to back it up.

“That is… more or less the case, yes?” he tried, all of a sudden very curious to see what laid beyond the doorway her small but strong frame was still blocking.

“Well,” the girl at last smiled broadly, even seeming proud, at him as she stood aside, “I can guarantee ya there ain’t no monsters, demons, ghoulies, or whatever the fuck kinda thing kickin’ around here. Not anymore, anyway.”

Weaver frowned at her as she leaned confidently against the doorframe, folding her arms and crossing her shoes in a relaxed posture, smirking. He took the unspoken invitation to at last brush past her, crossing the doorway and entering what seemed to be the master bedroom of the house. To his left was the door to an ensuite bathroom, window broken, clearly the room he had seen smashed into from the outside. And to his left, the far wall bore the the only real decoration he’d seen in the entire house so far: a large brown vellum wall hanging covered with text and frenetically-scrawled imagery in a jaundice-yellow paint. To the foot of the wall were a few wooden statuettes, the head of one of which appeared to have been bitten in half, in the middle of a small row of hardened wax puddles that had once been candles. There were a few other objects and trinkets of some mild interest, but really, it was difficult to pay terribly close attention to all that, what with the corpse being in the way and all. 

If he had to guess, the engorged body was the crumpled form of a thickset middle-aged woman, bone-white skin semitranslucent from malnutrition, revealing protruding blue veins beneath the flesh. Her clothing was ripped and torn, revealing a large pair of fleshy, bulbous chiropteran wings at her back and a small tail trailing down from her tailbone, each excrescence seeming to have stretched the existing skin unnaturally rather than create more skin as they grew. Her abdomen was swollen as well, bloated unnaturally as though her stomach had been overfilled to the point of near bursting. There were areas over her entire body where the extensive stretching of her flesh appeared to have ripped it entirely, revealing long sheets of white carapice where muscle clusters ought to have been. 

Of course, again, he was only guessing at the age and gender of the individual, as the entire front half of the head had been smashed in. The mottled corpse was laid prostrate on its back, with what appeared to be a mechanic’s monkey wrench smashed through the front of its skull, collapsing the facial structure from the nose up entirely. Sludgy black blood and grey matter splattered out from where the blow had been struck, spraying across the floor and even sullying the nearby walls somewhat from the evident force of the impact. 

Blimey, the smell, he groaned inwardly, draping his scarf up over his nose to serve as a makeshift mask. It only somewhat worked to stave off the stench of mildew and death. 

“I took care ‘a it,” the girl spoke again, striding up beside him to gaze out at her evident handiwork proudly, “If you’re the kinda ‘investigator’ who tries to ask a lotta questions, sorry, but I don’t think this thing’s gonna be answering a lot of ‘em.”

“I’m… really not, actually,” Weaver began, turning incredulously to his side to meet her proud, almost approval-seeking gaze, “You… actually seem to have done my main job for me. Which is… new.”

The girl barked out a laugh at that. Her hand reached up to slap him amicably on the side of the shoulder as she chuckled. In fact, all of her previous aggression seemed to have drained away in an instant. All of a sudden, she seemed… cheery.

“Damn!” she hooted boisterously, stepping up to the body to stoop down and wiggle the apparently-stuck wrench, “You were here to kill this thing too, huh? You get paid for this type ‘a shit? Where do I sign?”

“I… don’t,” Weaver answered, half-honestly at best, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly, “I… apologise. This doesn’t… normally… happen.”

The girl just whooped out another oddly friendly laugh at that, turning back to face him with a cocky smirk, “Heh, what? Was I supposed to just be another neighborhood schmuck waiting to get eaten by this demon bitch, or something? Come on, this is fuckin’ N’Walins, weird shit happens here, we deal with it on our own. Speakin’ of, you’re a long way from home, sounds like. Not enough monsters for your liking in England?”

Stunned by her brashness into silence, Weaver could simply meet her eyes and shrug.

I… I don’t… his thoughts floundered, but even as his mouth sagged open, none of them saw fit to resolve themselves into concrete words. 

They… they’re never just… dead.  

There was no shortage of evil things in the world, Weaver was certainly no stranger to that fact. He was equally under no illusions that he would somehow be the person arranged to deal with every single evil thing that ever cropped up anywhere. After all, there were any number of dedicated organizations, governmental and independent, not to mention a bounty of particularly driven individuals with the right incentive and slight suicidal ideation it took to hunt them down. But, at the very least, whenever the Web tugged him along someplace, it was always because there was at least some kind of problem there that nobody and nothing but he and the Key could solve.

And yet, this creature, whatever precisely it was, he couldn’t yet say, had already been handled before he had even arrived. By a particularly brash young woman with a rowdy New Orleans accent and a monkey wrench.

So… what exactly am… what, then… what?

“I found the fucker feedin’ on some poor bastard a few blocks over,” the girl laughed from behind him, drawing his gaze incredulously back to her, “It made a go for me, too, but I broke its arm, and it bailed. I wasn’t about to just let it fuck off, though, so I followed it back here. It came in that window, I broke through the front.”

Weaver’s forehead creased at that. His part in this conversation was really beginning to feel like a freefall without a parachute.

“I’m… sorry,” He finally strangled out, “I don’t believe… I caught your name. Who exactly… are you?”

The girl cocked an eyebrow at him, lips tugging into a smirk once again at the flabberghasted tone in his voice. She strode back over, planting one fist on her hip and grabbing his still-gloved hand in her other to shake.

“Melody,” she introduced herself, “Melody Walsh. But my friends call me Melly.”

“They… do?” Weaver cocked his head and frowned, lip curling upwards in distaste.

“They might if I had any,” Melody responded with a chuckle and a casual shrug, now planting both hands on her hips, “And you? Wanna sacrifice some of that ‘mysterious stranger’ vibe ya got goin’ on there and introduce yourself?”

“I don’t–” Weaver began, before just sighing as her smile only broadened at his reaction to her prodding. He reached up to massage the ridge of his nose weakly, caving, “... Weaver. Call me Weaver.”

“Not gonna give me a last name? Aight, cagey,” Melody prodded cheekily.

“No last name to give,” Weaver shot back. Melody seemed to study him for a moment, before shrugging and turning back to the revolting corpse in front of the pair. 

“Alright, Weaver,” she began, kicking the remnants of the body’s destroyed skull for emphasis, “Since you’re the investigator, why don’t ya get to investigating? Maybe figure out for me what the fuck this ugly motherfucker was, and what the hell it’s doin’ in my city?”

“I… erm… right…” the words tumbled from his lips awkwardly, legs staggering forward on their own as his mind continued to reel, their only real impetus the sheer force of the tangle-headed redhead’s character. Those shaky steps carried him forwards to kneel in front of the corpse, scanning over its brutalised form.

“Well…” he began slowly, “Other than these protrusions and growths, the body seems human… more or less. What did the face look like, before…?”

“Eh, mostly just like a normal lady, once I got her in some decent lighting,” Melody shrugged, “‘cept her mouth was wide, her teeth were spiky, and her tongue was really long. And also spiky. Oh, and I think her eyes were, like, green or something. Not normal green, though. Fucked-up green.”

“Fucked-up green. Right…” Weaver hummed, stroking his chin in thought as his eyes traced over the horrific corpse in the gloom. Whilst ‘investigator’ was at least a convenient term for what he went about the world doing, he wasn’t actually very used to discerning the real origins or nature of whatever he was sent off to handle. Many such things didn’t even have conventional or rational explanations to begin with.

Still, though, something about the sensation of Melody’s gaze on his back, expectant and impatient, yet also strangely fraternal, egged him on to at least find some kind of answer for her.

“Could you try the lights?” he gestured to the switch on the wall behind him, “It’s really very doubtful this place would have power, but it can’t hurt to try, and it would behoove us to have a little more light.”

Melody’s smirk returned at that, chuckling and muttering an echo of the word ‘behoove’ under her breath as though it were somehow amusing, but she complied, striding over to the switch and giving it a flick. To Weaver’s surprise, the overhead light bulb inset into the popcorn ceiling did actually flicker on after a few moments, prompting him to glance over to meet Melody’s eyes in shared surprise.

Oh. That’s… well, that’s odd.

It wasn’t anything about the body, or the surrounding bizarre paraphernalia still clustered to the far wall, that caught his eye first as the new influx of light came down. Rather, his eyes remained fixed on his new apparent acquaintance, tracing over the exposed skin of her body as he noticed something he’d previously dismissed as tricks of the gloom.

Are those… tattoos?

Melody’s skin, almost everywhere but the face that he could see, bore a strange pattern of… lines. They weren’t smooth, or necessarily many, but they formed an odd interconnecting pattern that seemed to run and spiral down along her limbs and torso. The only ends to the lines he could see cut off halfway up her throat, even the lines reaching down to her fingertips on each hand only wrapped back around and in on themselves.

“What?” Melody’s impatient prompt whipped Weaver’s eyes back up to hers, and he immediately span on a heel, mortified for his wandering eyes. She didn’t make comment on it further, though, and before Weaver could apologize, something else caught his eye, newly visible in the light. 

“That’s interesting,” he hummed, gesturing over the body to the small pile of junk in the corner, under the vellum hanging and scrawled scripture. Melody followed his point, and both of their eyes fell on the strange, misty cloud of smoke around that entire corner of the room, which hadn’t been visible in the lower light, but which the overhead now filtered through. 

“Is this place burnin’ down, now?” Melody asked incredulously as Weaver gingerly stepped over the body, careful not to trod in any of the bloodspray. He shook his head and frowned inquisitively, sniffing at the air as he knelt down to examine the various items. He didn’t recognize the characters of the scripture, nor the figures depicted in the wood-carved effigies, and none of those seemed to be alight. None of the candles, varied in colour and height, were lit either, though some of them seemed to have melt–

Weaver blinked in surprise, his eyes settling on the small wafts of smoke that were drifting off the wick of a blue candle, tucked towards the back of the clutter. Well, candle was being quite generous; it was really more of a messy pile of melted wax at this point, sinking into and ruining the wood floor. The wick still burned, however, only the faintest blue cinder visible in the wick as it continued to spew smoke. 

Ah. 

Too much connection, Uma Greene had said, when she’d sent him to check out this part of the city. She’d said it was as though she could feel the spirits of her faith even when she wasn’t trying. Now, it finally made sense. 

“Last I checked, fire isn’t meant to be blue,” Melody’s voice came from immediately beside him, causing him to jolt. Apparently, she’d knelt down beside him at some point.

“It isn’t,” Weaver sighed, stilling his heart, “But this, I believe, is a special sort of candle.”

Melody cocked her head at him, expression signalling for him to continue.

“They’re used all over the world, and in all sorts of religious and spiritual systems,” Weaver explained, “Part of various rituals and whatnot to contact spirits.”

“Like… vodou?” Melody frowned, glancing back down across the assorted, seemingly occult, paraphernalia at their feet.

“Like, yes, I suppose,” Weaver shook his head, noting with inward surprise her use of the proper term, “But this isn’t that, this is something else. Not exactly sure what.”

“Okay…” the redhead gestured impatiently, “So, how do we go from weird-spirit-candle-thing to demon vampire bat lady? Was this somethin’ that somebody summoned, or some shit?”

“Oh, no, no,” Weaver found himself chuckling, shaking his head, “Nothing like that at all, no. I mean, points for creative thinking, though.”

Melody regarded him flatly, unimpressed.

“You’re supposed to extinguish these candles immediately after you finish using them,” Weaver explained with a sheepish smile under her gaze, holding his hands up in front of him once again, “They open a window to the ethereal plane, after all. All sorts of things trying to get out of there all the time. Best guess, whoever that used to be…”

Weaver gestured pointedly over to the malformed corpse, which was still occasionally leaking new spurts of tar-black blood from its caved-in skull.

“...did some ritual of some sort here, tied to some faith, I’m not sure which. She got done whatever business she was trying to do, perhaps contacting some specific spiritual being or ancestor, but then she forgot to extinguish the candle, and thus, the connection.”

“So then… somethin’ else came outta it, and… did that to her,” Melody hummed, nodding along in dawning understanding.

“Well, more specifically, I’d say something went into her,” Weaver nodded, “But yes, essentially. Best guess, anyway.”

Melody frowned, cocking an eyebrow at him, “Best guess?”

“All you’re likely to get, really. But, from the sounds of things around this city recently, and the amount of smoke in this room, that pesky little candle has been maintaining an open door to the ethereal for weeks, at this point.”

Melody glanced from Weaver, back down to the still-smoking candle, back to Weaver, and back down again. Then, with a determined lift of her shoe, she stomped down on the melted wad of wicked wax, grinding it into the ground with a triumphant grin, before pausing and glancing around.

“I didn’t feel anything happen,” she furrowed her brow, glancing back to Weaver.

“You wouldn’t,” Weaver chuckled at her expression, “You’re still alive. But, if it makes you feel better, you did probably just kill a few dozen ghosts that had scattered from here around the city just then.”

Melody seemed to consider for a moment, before her face broke out in a grin. Evidently, she had decided that that did, in fact, make her feel better. Weaver broke out into an inadvertent smile in turn, before lucidity smacked him upside the head harder than Melody’s kick had earlier. 

What… the fuck am I doing? He caught himself, eyes widening, Why the precise hell am I just expounding all of this to her face!? Who is this woman!? The only thing she’s told me thus far is her name! She’s a civilian! An innocent! She’s been putting up a tough exterior, certainly, fending off and slaying a creature such as this was not a task achievable by the frail of heart, but this is all information that would shatter the worldview of nearly anyone! I’ve made an error, I must have, what could I possibly have been thinking? I ought to just leave now, perhaps return later once she’s left and figure out the answers to all my own questions like I’m supposed to, I’m not supposed to–

“Cool,” Melody finally hummed, turning back to face him with a frankly horrifyingly neutral expression on her face.

An earsplitting beat of silence rang out throughout the dark house. Then another. And another.

“...c- cool!?” Weaver  couldn’t help but exclaim in incredulity, “Is that all you have to say!?”

The redhead seemed to actually have to think for a moment, before shrugging, “Yeah. Why? Something else I oughta be saying?”

“I…” he began, a distressed cold sweat beginning to dot the back of his neck as the heat of the burning questions in his mind at last melted through the wall of propriety holding them back, “Who… are you? Did you already know about this sort of thing before coming here? And why are you here, anyway!? Did you happen into this creature, or did you hunt it down intentionally!? How are you calmer than I am, at the moment!?”

Melody’s lips split into an entertained snicker at Weaver’s utter incredulity, which only immiserated into a hooting, breathy guffaw as she took a step back, holding a hand to her gut whilst using the other hand to point at his slackened expression as she laughed uproariously.

“Ha- HA!” she giggled, seeming to have to make a concerted effort to calm her laughter down enough to speak, “Fuckin’ chill a bit, dude! You look like you’re about to bust a vein, heh - haha!”

Weaver could only stare on in dumbfounded silence, eyes unable to keep from glancing back and forth from the mottled monstrous corpse to the utter anachronism that was apparently Melody Walsh, as she regained control of herself once again.

“No, man, I didn’t know any ‘a this bullshit,” she finally spoke, the odd giggle still peppering itself in between her words, “Heh… but I hear about this kinda shit all the damn time, around here! My fuckin’ ma and pa, people at the shop, whatever, it’s all over the place! I mean, I didn’t figure it was all real, but hey, fuck if it is, eh? Don’t bother me all that much, so why do you look so fuckin’ pressed about it?”

Weaver coughed in surprise, spluttering his way through his words, “Y-your… parents are occultists?”

“Eh, I got no idea what they did for a livin’,” Melody rolled her eyes and waved his question away with an ink-lined hand, “‘specially since they haven’t been livin’ since I was a damn tyke anyhow. But I got a whole box of this kinda crap from ‘em kickin’ around.”

Silence. Deathly silence. Which, frankly, only seemed to entertain Melody more, as her lips split into a grin once again at his sheer appallment.

“I played a hunch,” she chuckled, rolling her eyes long and high, though smiling all the way, “I’ve been checkin’ the papers recently, for the kinda shit going down in this part of town. It doesn’t end up on TV, really, so I guess nobody else caught onto the pattern, but how this thing, I guess, was killin’ people…  it sounded kinda similar to some of the shit I’ve heard, so I figured, hey. Worst case scenario, I don’t see shit. Best case, I get to kill a real-ass fuckin’ demon or somethin’! And what do you know, lookie loo over here what my fuckin’ shop wrench is rammed through the skull of! I dunno why you look so tight, man, this night’s been great for me!”

As if to accent her point, Melody proceeded to gleefully grab hold of the handle of the wrench and give it a firm tug. It didn’t give way for a few good pulls, being lodged quite fast in the shattered remains of the creature’s skull, but it finally same free on her fifth try with a spray of half-coagulated blood and a wet crunching sound. She then proudly hefted the wrench up onto her shoulder, either not noticing or not caring that this only sprayed her face and front with even more blood, before turning back to face Weaver with the proud expression of a child who had just won a particularly enjoyable game. 

And to make it all the worse, exactly as she did, a thread shot forth from the Key for the third time that night. It didn’t even so much as twitch in the direction of the felled corpse, or the now-extinguished offending candle, as Weaver might have presumed or expected. Instead, it had the utter audacity to flash directly to the centre of Melody’s black-bloodstained top, buzzing brightly in his vision as if in teasing before flickering away once more.

Weaver gulped. 

Bloody hell.

He wasn’t here because of the monster. He wasn’t even here because of the candle.

He was here because of Melody Walsh.

Weaver was fairly certain, by that point, he was even paler than the fucking bled-out corpse. 

~~~

When, and also how, exactly, Melody had fallen asleep the prior night, she had absolutely no idea. Still, at the shrill chirping of her familiar bedside alarm, her eyes shot open into consciousness, her hand slammed down on her phone to silence the noise, and almost frantically tossing the covers off of herself, she took a quick mental stock of her surroundings. 

Still wearing the dirty shirt… she acknowledged, glancing down at herself, before turning her gaze to the foot of her bed. Just as she’d hoped, her wrench was still sitting where she had set it to lean the previous night, still coated in a thin film of that very same rank, sanguine black sludge of the woman-turned-thing in Little Woods. In the surreality of the night, she’d neglected to wash it off, as she was only just now registering.

Not a dream. Not a dream. Holy motherfuckin’ dick shit, not a dream.

When she and that ‘Weaver’ guy had parted ways, soon after departing from that abandoned house that had apparently been some kind of freaky magic crime scene, or whatever, she’d returned home on foot the exact same way she had come. For the life of her, though, she could barely remember a single moment from the night after Weaver had waved her goodbye in his awkward, stiff way and sauntered off away. Even now, her mind was completely stuck on it, clutching to the memory of the night like a gold coin in the hands of a beggar. 

Fuck! She realized suddenly, smacking herself on the forehead, Why the fuck didn’t I get his phone number!? Or ask where I could find him, at least!? Shit!

Melody let out a long, beleaguered groan as she flopped back onto her pillow face-down, muffling the sound as it morphed into a howl of frustration at her own apparent mental hiccup. 

What the fuck am I supposed to do now? She wondered with a sigh, begrudgingly craning her neck to look around at the same old crumby half-kitchen room that she’d woken up in every morning for eight entire months, Just… fuckin’... go back to work? Ugh… I mean, I dunno what the hell I was expecting, but…

Her thoughts trailed off. She searched inwardly for the words to describe the sensation clouding up her chest, but if they existed at all, she didn’t have them. 

It just felt different, now. Somehow. There was energy in her that hadn’t been there even just 24, no, even 12 hours earlier. Only now, she realized with horror, all her precious little newspaper scraps were useless. The problem was over. The monster dead. The night survived, the new day won.

What a fuckin’ drag… that Weaver guy seemed… I dunno, fuckin’... fun, I guess…

Eventually, each step feeling like a damned Herculean labour, Melody eventually pulled herself out of the springy single bed yet again, went through her rote exercise routine, dragged herself into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and got dressed. She knew she ought to toss the bloodstained shirt into the wash load, but some errant impulse stopped her as she looked at it draped atop her in the mirror once more, bringing back the memory of that first bone-cracking swing of the wrench in that moonlit parking lot. In the end, she doffed the shirt and tucked it protectively under her pillow, before pulling on a black sports bra and light red jacket. 

The wrench, of course, was another story. That one, she did not want to have to explain to Henri. So, into the sink it went.

Good thing Amy’s still at her night shift this early, Melody sighed as she carted the dirty dishes out of the sink to make room for the bloodied head of her wrench. Dustin didn’t have work today, but a glance into the living room told her that he was passed out on the couch in the exact same posture she’d last seen him in the prior evening, and he wasn’t likely to wake up anytime soon. The black blood on the end of the wrench unfortunately hadn’t dried like normal human blood might have, instead having coagulated into a denser, tar-adjacent sludge that gummed up the tightening mechanism. As such, it took a while, but with enough soap and scrubbing, she got all the noticeable bits off the metal.

“Ah, shit,” Melody hissed as she pulled the wrench out of the sink to dry off, realizing that a not-insignificant amount of the blood had actually made it onto the tape-wrapped handle, having soaked into the material in a way that would be impossible to get out. She knew she could just replace the tape, but it was a specific kind of grip tape that she didn’t have at home. There was a roll in the shop, of course, but that would mean she’d have to get there early to replace it before Henri arrived to see. After all, if Melody was going to still be alive after the prior night, she recognized that at least on a logical level, she probably shouldn’t let her boss see the wrench she had surreptitiously borrowed from the shop get returned with a bloody handle without explanation.

I could just never go back, and keep it, she found herself considering wildly, but quickly shook her head and sighed in resignation. Henri would be all too happy to call the cops on her for that kind of theft, and that would just lead to more questions. Not to mention the loss of income.

It felt somehow profoundly, existentially incorrect to be headed out the door almost an hour before normal, bright and early at seven in the fucking morning, just to head into work before her boss would be there, especially on the morning after the night she had just awoken from. Yet, with a long groan and a solemn shake of her head, that was precisely what Melody did, stuffing her things into her pockets and hefting the wrench over her shoulder once again. 

Henri was one thing, but at the least, if any of the other passengers on the early streetcar Melody hopped even took notice of the black-blood-covered wrench in her hand, none of them bothered to cast her even so much as a wary glance. Melody glanced over each of them in turn, some eating breakfast on the go, some absorbed in their phones, a few reading books in their laps to occupy them for the ride. Most undoubtedly on the way to work, as she was. Some, perhaps on the way home. Some to visit friends. One blond young man looked dressed up and nervous enough to be on the way to a date. Melody regarded him with a particularly withering glance.

It was all ordinary.

So… fuckin’... ordinary. 

So fuckin’ boring.

Last night hadn’t been boring. Weaver hadn’t been.

Melody sighed, kicking herself internally again. How could she have just let him traipse away like that?

There had been an age to that guy, she’d noticed. He didn’t look at all significantly older than her, early twenties, but something about the way he carried himself made him seem… aged, if not experienced, in a way that made sense in her mind, but didn’t quite make sense on paper. Tall and poised, bearing tell-tale streaks of grey in his long fluffy blond hair. The blade at his wrist, meaning he was prepared. Accustomed.

And his eyes. They’d been magenta. She’d restrained herself from commenting on it, as it had been frankly the least weird of the many weird things about him, but they stuck out to her now. Now, she wished she’d asked. Now, she wished she’d asked a lot more things. 

Baptiste wasn’t at his usual corner, when Melody turned onto the street after disembarking the streetcar. She frowned, feeling an agitated rumble in her stomach, remembering at last the fact that the po-boy she’d had for breakfast the previous day had actually been the last thing she’d eaten at all. 

Weird, she thought, glancing up and down the street for any sign of him, but finding none, I thought he was out at the crack ‘a dawn, most days. Guess he slept in.

Melody walked a few more steps, before blinking in surprise, and glanced up and down the street once more.

…and… so did everybody else, I guess, she frowned. Even squinting into the distance, she couldn’t see a single person on the road. All of Broadmoor was quiet.

That was strange. Nowhere in New Orleans was ever this quiet.

For a moment, just a fleeting instant, Melody thought she could smell something funny.

Come on, she shook her head to clear it, continuing on her way down the street, Enough. Ya fucked up last night, and you’re reaching at straws, now, Melly. Get over it.

Her face scrunched up in disgust for a moment. Yeah, that really was an awful nickname, Weaver had been right. 

Eventually, making her way through the empty streets, the sight of Addo Auto Clinic came into view, almost seeming alien in the early-morning light that Melody was so unaccustomed to. Her heart sank, however, as she spotted an unfortunately-familiar forest green Silverado in the adjacent parking lot. 

Henri was already here. Of course Henri would already be here. 

“Shit,” Melody hissed, trailing off into a protracted groan as she made it to the shop. The garage wasn’t open yet, so she couldn’t just walk right in and access the storage room unnoticed. She did have an employee key for the front door, which she dug begrudgingly out of her pocket, but she supposed she’d just have to hope Henri was too busy holed up in her office with… whatever she was doing this early in the morning to notice. 

Click!

Henri hadn’t even turned the main room lights on, Melody noticed as she softly crept inside. Odd, but convenient, she supposed, as she tiptoed past the closed door of Henri’s office, heading gingerly for the–

“Who the hell is there!?”

Aw… fuck.

Melody quickly spun around as the sound of clomping booted footsteps sounded from Henri’s office, hiding the wrench behind her back as best she could. Of course, it wasn’t easy, as the wrench was actually larger than her entire torso, but all she could do was try to appear casual. 

Maybe she didn’t even notice I took it, maybe she didn’t notice the paperwork on her desk, I did put it off to the side a lil’ bit, Melody rationalized frantically, cursing under her breath. Damn it, the fuck is she doing here this early!?

The latch turned, and the door swung open violently to reveal Henri, towering and testy, whose face immediately scrunched up in irritation as her eyes fell on the shorter woman. Melody tried her best to keep a straight face, but couldn’t help a slight wince of disgust as she noticed that Henri was wearing the exact same clothes as she had been yesterday, down to the grease marks and sweat stains that were innate to their sort of work.

Has she been here all fuckin’ night? Melody wondered, giving her irate boss a quick once-over and frowning, What the hell for?

“Walsh,” Henri fumed, folding her broad forearms with her chin upturned to stare down at the redhead, “How many goddamn times do I have to have this stupid conversation with you?”

Melody lacked the self-control it took to keep from rolling her eyes, “Oh, come on. It ain’t like I borrow shit from the shop that often, and I always bring it back. Look, one of my housemates screwed up the septic system, and I just needed to screw on a few pipe fitters. And here ya go, I brought it right back, see?”

Melody gestured to the wrench instead of proffering it, still making sure to hide the bloodied handle behind her back as much as was possible whilst still seeming natural. Henri’s eyes drifted down to the tool, all of a sudden looking oddly bewildered, before she glanced back up at Melody and reformed her scrunched expression.

“No,” Henri said quickly, shaking her head, “I mean, you’re late. Again. Like, hell, Walsh, would it kill you to show up to your damn job on time? The boys and I aren’t gettin’ paid to sit ‘round and wait for ya like a damn princess, you know! I don’t give a shit how handy you are, I swear on god, I will kick your ass to the curb if you keep tryin’ my patience!”

Melody’s mouth dropped open in outrage, a litany of testy responses already aligning themselves in her mind. The sheer commonality of this kind of argument, given her confessedly-less-than-punctual track record, meant she practically had a pre-prepped arsenal of things she could throw back at the supercilious older woman. Just before she spoke, though, she faltered, as the strange dissonance finally occurred to her.

But… I’m not late.

“What the hell are ya on about!?” Melody fumed, pointing an accusatory finger at Henri and taking a step forward, “I’m not late, I’m way early! Is your head on right!?”

Just as it had before, all of the force seemed to abruptly drop out of Henri’s face, her features instead taking on a sense of bland bewilderment. She blinked slowly, glanced between Melody and the high wall-mounted clock a few times, and quickly resumed her previous posture and affectation as though nothing had happened. Melody recoiled slightly, suddenly quite bewildered herself at the bizarre behaviour. 

There that scent was again. Something in the air definitely smelled funny, and this time, she was sure it wasn’t just desperate reaching on her part. The hairs on her neck began to pique themselves upwards, and her shoulders hunched, casting instinctive glances around at the nearby exits, her grip on the wrench still hidden behind her tensing and flexing. 

“Whatever,” Henri almost seemed to say too quickly, shaking her head and dragging Melody’s full attention back to her. She span on her booted heel, gesturing towards her office, “I need to talk to you, anyway. In there, alone.”

Melody frowned, cocking her head at the woman, “...why in there? We are alone, aren’t we?”

Henri scowled, now holding the door to her office open and glaring impatiently at Melody, “In. Here. Now.” 

Melody gritted her teeth, the strange smell in the air, growing heavier by the second, giving her pause to do much of anything, really. She couldn’t place an origin to it, though, as she’d been able to smell the stench of Little Woods from across the entire city yesterday. It was just in the air around her, like she was standing in a cloud of carbon monoxide, but was only catching trace whiffs of the ozone it created.

“Alright…” she began warily, taking a step to the side and beginning to head down the hallway to the tool storage room, “I’ll be right with ya, sheesh… just gonna put this thing aw–”

A firm hand fell on Melody’s shoulder, attempting to jerk her back.

The lines flailed.

Melody firmed her stance, preventing Henri’s meaty hand from pulling her backwards towards her despite her smaller frame, and quickly tore her shoulder away with an urgent jerk. Instincts screaming at her, she didn’t even bother casting a glance back at the woman, instead just surging forward to the tool room door. She whipped it open as Henri let out a roar of frustration and indignance behind her, Melody quickly turning to slam the door in her face, turning the deadbolt and pushing her back up against it.

Henri thankfully didn’t have any more words of frustration to offer, as the door behind Melody soon began to slam outwards with the force of her seeming to try to break it down. 

What the fuck!? Melody’s mind raced, the fetid scent of danger suddenly ripe and rancid in her nose. Henri’s a great twitchy bitch on the best of days, but what the hell is goin’ on!?

“Oh, hey, Melody.”

The sound of another voice in the room with her, anachronistically calm, pleasant, and familiar, sent a jolt through Melody’s spine. The lights weren’t on, and keeping her back against the pounding door, she quickly floundered to her side for the light switch with the arm that wasn’t clutching the handle of the wrench. 

“Mitchell!?” Melody placed the voice of her coworker in her mind at last, her fingers finally finding the switch on the wall and flicking it on, “What the fuck is–”

Her heartbeat blared in her ears as Mitchell’s face, apparently mere inches away from her own, was illuminated in front of her.

Except, it wasn’t Mitchell’s face.

His nose was about three inches too low, splitting his mouth in two, bisecting the toothy grin that he offered her. 

The wrench practically moved on its own. 

Melody let out a loud cry of shock and exertion as she brought the end of the wrench across Mitchell’s misshapen face, clipping the temple as she weaved out of the way, ducking and rolling around his taller frame to a more open part of the room. Rather than the loud, bony crack she had been expecting from the impact, however, the hit produced a disquietingly wet slapping sound, and his head exploded into the wall.

There was no red, even as Mitchell’s body, over half his head obliterated by the impact, slumped to the ground. The chunks that had flown off at the strike, splattering against the wall, some with hair attached, one even bearing half a torn eyeball that didn’t seem to burst with fluid, was all just a gooey flesh-coloured paste. As though his entire body had been made of plasticine. 

“What the FUCK!?” Melody cried, wrench aloft and heart pounding as she stared down at the ‘body’. The pounding at the door seemed to have ceased, for some reason, but at the moment, that was honestly the least of her concerns.

“Oh, come on!” another voice sounded from across the room. Melody whipped her head to the side to see Micheal, Mitchell’s brother and the final coworker of hers, standing by the maintenance cart and gesturing to her with what seemed like mild disapproval, “He wasn’t even done putting his face on yet! Now that’s just sad!”

Before Melody’s very eyes, then, Micheal reached a grimy hand up to his own eyeball, before pushing the entire retinal socket up a few inches on his face, where it remained as he glanced back at her, his two eyes now levelled at dramatically different heights on his skull.

“What do you think?” he asked her, sounding genuinely concerned, “Still too low on the left?”

Melody, balking, her mind aflame, staggered an inadvertent step back at the sight. It was enough, however, for her ankle to catch on something rigid, sending her collapsing backwards, crying out in surprise as she scrambled back, eyes whipping down only momentarily from the not-Micheal thing in the room with her to see what she had fallen over.

It was Micheal. 

Not the Micheal still musing about his face to himself about ten feet to her front, however, now beginning to adjust the length and sharpness of his chin as though molding clay. This Micheal’s body had felt real, actually firm, beneath her ankle as she’d tripped.

Which made the fact that this Micheal had no face at all, the entire surface of his face seeming to be a mass of raw pink flesh shrinkwrapped to the contours of his skull without features, all the more concerning. At a frantic glance to the side, Melody saw another Mitchell collapsed in a sitting position to a corner, a hacksaw limply held in his hand, face just as harrowingly missing as the Micheal she had tripped over. 

“Oh, yeah,” Not-Micheal droned, practically sounding bored as Melody’s gaze whipped back up to him, “Don’t worry about those. We didn’t leave anything worth keeping behind, really.”

The wildfire in Melody’s mind blazed to an inferno behind her eyes. 

“Shut the hell up!” She exclaimed, leaping to the side from her crouched position to grab a screwdriver off a nearby bench, twirling around to throw it end-first at the thing that wore her coworker’s face. It impacted right in the center of its chest, right where she had thrown it, sinking in up to the hilt from the force, but Not-Micheal just seemed to glance down at it like it was a mosquito, if even that much an annoyance. 

Behind.

The lines twisted. Melody felt the urge, the instinct, the command, shoot throughout her entire body in an instant, just as it had in the parking lot the night prior, when the long-tongued thing had pounced. This time, however, as she made to spin around, wrench toted and swinging, it seemed to have come too late.

An arm, greasy and cold, wrapped itself around her entire upper body, bending unnaturally as though it was jointless. Another arm reached around her head, encompassing its entire circumference and locking it in place as she felt herself hoisted aloft and held against the tall, clammy body of whatever held her. 

A wet gurgling sound came from just beside her own face, and craning her eyes as she couldn’t move her neck, she identified Not-Mitchell as the one who had snuck up, apparently not so down for the count as she might have thought, by half his head being splattered against the wall. In fact, as he turned his face to “smile” over at her, she saw that he seemed to have haphazardly shoved the splattered material back onto where it had come off, but hadn’t paid attention or care to any kind of placement, making half of his entire head a stomach-turning mess of mottled, plasticky flesh. 

Let me go, you fucking freak! She thought, as her airway was too choked by the surprising strength of Not-Mitchell’s arm to speak. She attempted to bite at the limb to free herself, but all she earned for her trouble was a mouthful of sharp-tasting, play-doh-like mulch that she immediately spat out, coughing what little air she had away as her head began to grow light. 

“You shouldn’t try to talk to her without a mouth, it’s bad manners,” Not-Micheal said, seemingly addressing Not-Mitchell in a conversationally disparaging, almost ribbing, tone, as he approached leisurely. He pulled the screwdriver out of his chest, pinching around the hole to re-seal it, before leaning in close to Melody’s face, meeting her struggling, desperate grimace with an affable smile. 

“I always did think you had a pretty face,” Not-Micheal hummed, seeming to survey her features as she struggled, before turning to Not-Mitchell, “You don’t mind if I take hers into me, do you? I mean, you aren’t really in a state to, bro.”

Not-Mitchell just made another wet gurgling noise at that. Not-Micheal chuckled politely, as if he was humoring a not-actually-very-funny joke, before turning back to Melody.

FUCK YOU! She wanted to cry, arms flailing at her sides, trying to force their way through the hold, lungs screaming for air, I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking fuck! I’ll toss both of you freaks in the fucking shredding machine, see if you survive that! I’ll-

Her desperate, light-headed, near-delirious thoughts went cold as Not-Micheal leaned in, his features suddenly beginning to shift around on his face.

“Don’t worry, Melody,” he said amicably, as she watched in horror his face beginning to collapse inward into his head, “It feels so much better in here with me, I promise.”

Not-Micheal’s facial features flattened out, leaving nothing but a mass of pink, claylike flesh that pushed inward as he moved closer to her. 

Melody strained against Not-Mitchell’s grip once more, feeling the tightening of the lines all over her body writhing in defiance and desperation, only to be met with a renewed firmness and a determined gurgle from the thing restraining her. 

Not-Micheal’s head began to resemble a bowl, the empty expanse directly facing Melody, only inches away.

No, she realized with an icicle of terror stabbing into her heart. Not a bowl.

A suction cup. 

The edges of the revoltingly oily flesh brushed against Melody’s hair. Pathetically, she found her eyes squeezing shut, as whatever was coming inexorably approached. 

The door, the cessation of the pounding on which was practically a distant memory at this point, suddenly burst open. 

There was a deep cry of exertion to the side, followed immediately by the sensation of proximity of Not-Micheal vanishing alongside a clattering noise. 

Not-Mitchell’s grip on Melody seemed to laxen in surprise, and something inside of Melody exploded. 

She felt the patchwork head of the thing holding her explode as she drove her own skull back against it, sending chunks of broken flesh scattering all over the wall and floor. Her eyes flashed open, arms ripping entirely through the arm restraining her torso as its grip relaxed, spinning with wrench in hand to obliterate Not-Mitchell’s claylike torso beneath a powerful strike as well. 

For just a moment, as whatever he was made of splashed against her in thick, wet dollops, Melody was a little disappointed that whatever these things were, they didn’t bleed. 

She spun around again, searching for the bowl-headed sight of Not-Micheal as well, teeth gritted as her mind alighted with mania. Instead, her eyes fell on a strikingly familiar tall, masculine figure in a long purple coat and flowing indigo scarf, glove blade outstretched with a determined look on his face.

“Are you alri–” Weaver began urgently, whipping around to address Melody, only for all that determination in his face to collapse like a tower of cards the instant their gazes met each other’s.

A single beat of incredulous silence passed. Then another, only broken up by the shifting sound of Not-Micheal, apparently having been launched into the tool-rack wall, beginning to stagger to his feet.

“What the fuck are you doing here!?” Melody and Weaver exclaimed at each other, each holding an accusatory finger to the other’s face.

Yet another beat of silence rang out, as they both seemed to compute what the other had said as audacious.

“I’m working!” they shouted at each other. Once again, in perfect unison. If she hadn’t felt as though a preponderance of the blood in her body had been replaced by boiling hot adrenaline at that point, Melody would have been tempted to bark out a laugh at the sunken, disbelieving, idiotic expression on Weaver’s face.

“Oh, bloody hell, you work here!?” Weaver groaned, slapping a hand to his face as he stared at her, seemingly dumbstruck. 

“Fuck yeah, I work here!” Melody gestured wildly to the faceless bodies of the real Mitchell and Micheal on the floor beside her, now joined by the pulverised flesh and flailing lower body of Not-Mitchell beside them, “Those are my fuckin’ coworkers!”

“Oh…” Weaver frowned, before tilting his eyebrows at her and shrugging, “I’m… sorry for your loss?”

Melody found herself bleating out a wild, potentially delirious laugh as she hefted her wrench once again, “Not really my loss, actually. DOWN!”

Weaver let out a small ‘gulp’ noise as he immediately moved as instructed, ducking beneath the overhead swing of Melody’s wrench, which clipped and thusly exploded the gelatinous head of Not-Micheal, who had gotten to his feet, reestablished his face, and approached Weaver from behind in the time they had been talking. The body, now headless, flipped in the air and crashed against the wall, but not more than five seconds later, it had righted itself, beginning to approach on foot again.

“Ugh, mèd,” Melody groaned, taking a step forward to stand beside Weaver, who seemed to be spluttering for complaints at her for the lack of advance warning, but he didn’t get anything out.

“How the hell do we kill these fuckin’ things!?” Melody groaned, impatient fire alighting in her gut, “They’re really fuckin’ persistent!”

Weaver sighed, shaking his head and cleaning off a few trace globs of oily flesh from the edge of his glove blade, before responding, “Would you happen to smoke, by chance?”

Melody paused for a moment, caught off guard by the question, before turning to Weaver, “uh… sometimes? Why?”

“Do you have a lighter on you?”

“Erm… no?”

“Of course not…” Weaver rolled his eyes overdramatically, planting a frontal kick to the sternum of Not-Micheal, which sent him flying right back to the spot of the floor he’d fallen on before, “Whatever they’re made of, they’re flammable. Very flammable. Is there anything you have around here that could produce a flame? Welding torch, forge crucible, anything?”

Melody shook her head, mind racing, “Not that kinda shop, but… oh, shit! Cover me!”

“What!?” Weaver let out a cry of complaint once again as Melody suddenly dove to the side, leaving him alone to continue fending off the headless Not-Micheal as she scrambled over to the body of the real Micheal. Out of the corner of her eye as she began digging around in his pockets, she watched him lop off the thing’s right hand with a swipe of his glove, only to immediately get socked in the face by the other arm as the damage did nothing to slow it down.

Come on, come on… Melody groaned inwardly, occasionally having to duck out of the way of a flailing kick from Not-Mitchell’s legs, which still scrambled to right themselves without the rest of the body intact, like a beetle that had been flipped on its back, Ya better not have left it in your other fuckin’ pants… a-HA!

At last, Melody’s fingers closed around the cold metal of a zippo lighter in Micheal’s pocket, having remembered his aggravating habit of lighting up around customers, and Henri’s even more aggravating habit of not giving him nearly as much shit for it as she knew that she would receive for the same offence. Melody yanked it out and whipped it in Weaver’s direction, where it by chance struck the encroaching Not-Micheal in the stomach, driving him back a foot or two, before bouncing directly into Weaver’s outstretched hand. 

Weaver flicked it open, the flame beneath its cap flickering to life, and held it up against Not-Micheal’s chest at the end of another blind swing. The flame caught, and within less than a second, as though the lighter had been tossed into gasoline, Not-Micheal was a fireball that cast the entire room in a violent orange haze. 

There wasn’t a mouth, just as there wasn’t an intact head at all, so there was no guttural scream as one might expect from a burning man. However, Melody honestly wasn’t even certain there would have been, even if he could still speak. The body continued to ambulate while ablaze, not even seeming to notice that it was melting and blackening as it moved, advancing on Weaver, who had to duck out of the way of two more whole swings of its immolating arm before its structural integrity finally gave out. The entire body collapsed into a black, crispened pile of formless gray goop on the floor, which burned for a moment or two more before extinguishing itself, emitting puffs of smoke from pockets as it continued to melt and flatten into the floor. 

There was a long pause shared between Melody and Weaver then, as both met each other’s eyes and caught their breaths. Not-Mitchell’s legs wriggled impatiently once again, and with a flat look from it back to each other, Weaver tossed Melody the lighter, and she wasted no time in burning what remained of that double to a melted, gooey crisp as well. 

“That’s gross,” Melody remarked, a wild smile breaking across her features as she turned back to Weaver, shouldering her wrench, “...but also fuckin’ cool. Nice lookin’ out, by the way.”

The tall man gaped at her for a few moments, before puffing out a delirious laugh and shaking his head, “Oughtn’t that be my line? Correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve only been at this for ten hours or so, in total.”

“And yet, I make it look so, so natural,” Melody laughed, striding over to clap Weaver on the shoulder. 

The pair shared a stupid smile, and even though Weaver shared in the light laugh that came after it, Melody found herself quieting herself and forcing the grin from her features.

I really hope he doesn’t know how fuckin’ relieving it is to see him again. Here I was thinkin’ I’d lost my shot at all this forever.

“How’d ya even get in?” Melody found herself asking, lucidity finally reentering her mind as she glanced over at Weaver, “I thought I locked the door.”

“You did,” Weaver nodded, before gesturing to the large skeleton key pendant hanging on a leather cord from his neck and chuckling, “Universal access. It’s convenient.”

“Oh, sick,” Melody hummed with an approving nod, “And what did ya do ‘bout Henri?”

Weaver blinked, cocking his head, “Henri?”

“Big lady, buff, mean streak, space buns?”

“Oh, that one,” Weaver nodded, gesturing offhandedly, “Well, I didn’t have any fire, so I just locked that one in a clos–EEET!”

Weaver’s words turned abruptly into a wail as he was tackled from behind with a dull thud, Henri’s powerful arms locking his arms to his sides as they both fell to the floor about five feet away from Melody. Shock shot through her entire body as her companion went down, especially at the sight of Henri’s, or rather, Not-Henri’s, face concave inwards just as Not-Micheal’s had moments before. 

“Oh, bloody BOLLOCK–” was all that made it out of Weaver’s mouth before Not-Henri’s suction cup-like face slammed down onto his, latching firm. 

Melody’s wrench collided with the thing atop her friend before she even had time to register the fact that it was moving. 

Not-Henri’s body was propelled back by the force of the impact, spinning in the air and hitting the ground at an awkward angle. There was a visceral wet popping noise as her head detached from Weaver’s face, who at a glance looked distressed and perturbed, but thankfully still had all of his facial features in the right place. 

Melody cursed under her breath as Not-Henri quickly made to her feet, face reforming and poking back out, still curled up in a familiar, mocking sneer. The texture of this one, she had felt clearly beneath the impact, had been different to the boys. More rigid, more cemented. Not quite so easy to pulverise, as the single small indent on the side where she had been struck indicated. 

“Always more trouble than you’re worth,” Not-Henri spat, pinching her side to pop out the indent, eyes flaring with wrath, “I shoulda known you’d be no good to me the second I heard more ‘an one set ‘a parents didn’t want you.”

With that, the double clutched her fists firmly and launched herself forward, bearing down on Melody like a beast. Clearly, there wasn’t going to be any bother with face-sucking from her. Melody knew a shot made to kill rendered in someone’s eyes when she saw it, even when the thing was only pretending to be human. 

Time seemed to slow in that moment, as the looming figure, burly and wrathful, encroached with a roar of spite. Weaver on the floor, still struggling to regain his footing amid his disorientation. The bubbling remnants of Not-Micheal and Not-Mitchell littering the floor around them. A small bead of drool whipping out from the corner of Not-Henri’s mouth as she grew closer. Four feet away. Three feet. Two. 

Melody could feel the fire in her flesh again. 

One foot. 

Her lips broke into a wild, manic grin as she succumbed to it, eagerly and excitedly.

A powerful fist aimed at her head. Ten inches away. Five. Two. 

Two pieces of worthy prey in as many days? It must be fuckin’ Christmas.

Melody whooped out a wild laugh as she duck-spun to the side, feeling the displaced wind from Not-Henri’s narrowly-evaded hook as she swerved under her elbow, throwing the massive weight she had placed into her swing off-balance as her purchase was lost. Melody’s wrench moved like an extension of herself, her body spinning in a full circle to build up its deadly inertia, only to heft it up and send it cracking into Not-Henri’s firmly clenched jaw, causing the lower half of her face to completely collapse upwards into itself. 

Not-Henri staggered back, but not quite far enough for what Melody wanted. Thankfully, in the milliseconds it took for her to right her sturdy footing, Melody had already whipped up close, closing the distance, and slammed her wrench against the broad chest of her opponent, sending her staggering once again. That alone wasn’t enough to bring her down, but that hadn’t been the point. It wasn’t the force that mattered, really, the force was just extra fun. What mattered was the location, and Melody’s eyes shone with savage delight as Not-Henri’s massive combat boots at last fell exactly where she wanted them to, and one look at the disoriented eyes widening in surprise told her that Not-Henri realized her mistake just a precious moment too late. 

Not-Henri slipped in melted Not-Micheal. And Melody was on her before she could even hit the ground. 

“How’s this for no-good, you imperious BITCH!?” Melody laughed uproariously as she brought her wrench down against Not-Henri’s chest again and again, chunks of flesh spraying out from the increasing divot, “Huh!? Maybe now, you’ll finally learn to shut the FUCK UP!”

Not-Henri was making loud, wet gurgling noises, much akin to those that Not-Mitchell had been groaning in her ear earlier, sounding dismayed as she held up her hands against the falls of Melody’s wrench. With the force of the downward swings, however, Melody continued to laugh maniacally as the claylike flesh of the arms was only compacted downwards into the very chest they attempted to protect, leaving her prey defenseless as she continued her delectable onslaught.

“You always thought ya fuckin’ knew me,” Melody hissed through her teeth, foregoing her wrench to instead grab a fistful of Not-Henri’s flesh in her grip, tearing it away and tossing it aside, ripping her apart piece by piece, “Bet ya never knew this was gonna happen, eh!? Bet ya never knew how many times I fuckin’ DREAMED of this!? HAH! I’ve fuckin’ HAD IT!”

The upper body was ripped to pieces, doughy flesh sprayed all over the room and floor as Melody gleefully continued to tear and rip, happily losing herself to the haze of the chaos in her mind. The legs kicked uselessly beneath her until she finally ripped each of them off in turn, smashing them into gelatinous chunks against the floor like a rockstar smashing a guitar.

At last, only the head remained. Not-Henri’s eyes still stared up at her, wide and hollow, as Melody grabbed her wrench once again. The laughter in her throat at last stilled, and she permitted herself to revel in the long moment of drawing the heavy tool above her head, holding it there as she met those overbearing, overlording eyes one last time, and broadened her smile at the sight of the fear in them.

“You’re nothing but a god-damned pest,” Melody sneered, “And now, finally, you get to be put down like one.”

With that, the blunt end of the wrench struck home one last time, the sound of it squelching through the clay flesh to clang against the poured-concrete floor reverberating throughout the entire shop. 

Nothing left of you but grime under my feet, Melody spat in her mind, huffing as her excited heart finally stilled and hefting the greasy wrench back over her shoulder, Just like you’ve always been. 

A muffled cough sounded from behind her. Suddenly reminded that she wasn’t exactly alone in the room, Melody quickly spun around on her heel, fixing Weaver with a satisfied smile, which immediately turned into a stifled guffaw at the sight of him. Apparently, in her bout of feral assault, he’d gotten… splashed, a bit. 

“Your enthusiasm is appreciated, I suppose?” Weaver offered with a grimace of disgust as he pulled a few gooey strands of Not-Henri from his long hair, before brushing down the front of his shirt and long coat, “You… do know that isn’t actually her, right? The real corpse is sitting faceless in the main office down the hall.”

“Well, ya don’t have to spoil the fun about it,” Melody rolled her eyes, brushing some of the worst of the caked flesh off of herself as well. 

Weaver offered a cheap, awkward laugh at that, though Melody noticed he was somewhat averting his gaze. Her smile diminished a little as a black spot appeared in her gut, and she sighed, checking down at herself to make sure nothing was still moving where it shouldn’t be.

It was polite, she supposed, how he was neglecting to mention that the lines on her skin had been wriggling with delight across her flesh. 

“So,” she began with a cough after a too-long silence, “What the fuck were these fuckin’ things? Doppelgangers, or something?”

“In… definition, I suppose,” Weaver shrugged, “I’m not entirely sure what they are. I just know they’re here.”

Melody regarded him with a flat, amused look, “You know, ya don’t seem all that knowledgeable for somebody who does this a lot.”

“I’m plenty knowledgeable!” the blond objected, frowning and folding his arms over his chest defensively, “I’ve just only had this brain a few years, I’m still feeling out the space I have to work with.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Melody waved him off with a laugh, before inquiring, “So, what, are there any more ‘a these things? Or were these the only three?”

“Oh, plenty more,” Weaver sighed, moving to exit the storeroom and motioning for her to walk with him, which she eagerly did, “They’re all over Broadmoor, they have been for hours. There are a few more substantial organizations mopping up the majority of them before there are too many civilian casualties, I was just in the city, and figured I had ought to lend a hand, at least.”

“Fuckin’ hell,” Melody shook her head, though her smile broadened at the prospect of the hunt not being quite over yet, “I thought we sealed up all the supernatural shit in the city when we stomped out that candle last night!”

“Well… not exactly,” Weaver shook his head with a grimace, “Think of it like a toxic waste spill in the wild. We fixed the leak, and cleaned up the spill itself, but…”

“...there’s a whole mess ‘a other problems it caused while it was goin’ on,” Melody finished, “Like a buncha Play-Doh-ass fuckin’ doppelgangers stealin’ faces all ‘round Broadmoor.”

“Like that, yes,” Weaver nodded with a soft chuckle, “I’ll… probably be in the city for a while, cleaning up these messes, come to think of it… I suppose that explains a few things…”

Melody went quiet for a long moment then. 

Gonna be in the city a long while… guess he moves around a lot. Tracks, I guess, but… if he’s here for a while, maybe I can–

Her thoughts abruptly stopped dead as his words sounded in her mind again. 

All over Broadmoor, they have been for hours.

Civilian casualties. 

The walk here. How she’d noticed how empty the streets were.

“Oh, fuck,” Melody slapped a hand to her forehead in realization, just as the pair of them had stepped out from the front door of the shop into the mid-morning sun, “Bappie!”

Weaver stared at her, eyes confused, for a moment.

“...What’s a Bappie?”

“Bappie!” Melody reaffirmed, clutching her wrench in her grip tightly and glancing wildly down the street, “I was thinkin’ it was weird he was missing this morning, he’s my–”

Melody cut off abruptly, her tongue not quite relinquishing the word ‘friend’. That wasn’t really honest, if she was being real about it. But she felt the sudden urgent tug one might expect all the same.

“He makes po-boys at a stand a few blocks back,” she finished quickly, grabbing Weaver by the arm and beginning to drag him down the street at a violent pace, “We gotta go, now!”

“What!?” Weaver exclaimed in protest, “But they’re all over, I can’t just divert myself entirely for a single–”

Melody fixed him with a withering stare over her shoulder, gesturing pointedly with the hefty wrench she still carried. Weaver flinched, seemed to get distracted for a moment with the key hanging around his neck, and at last sighed, getting his pace under him to match hers, and permitting her to lead the way. 

~~~

Melody had never been to Baptiste’s place before, but thankfully, she at least knew the building that his family’s unit was in. He’d complained to her on more than a few occasions about how tourism jacking up housing prices had meant that he’d been unable to keep a place in the French Quarter, where most of his extended family still held land. Instead, there was a quaint little 3-unit complex on Fontainebleau that he’d had to cram himself, his wife, and his daughter into. And despite the fact that she’d never stopped by, Melody knew that so long as it was somewhere in her city, she knew she could find her way there.

The streets of Broadmoor remained, as they had been that morning, relatively empty, even throughout the boxy side-street shortcuts that Melody led Weaver down, who seemed to be allowing himself to be dragged along with much more expressional complaint than verbal, which worked perfectly fine for her. What few people they did run across appeared either scared and uncertain, or as competent and hurried as the pair of them, meaning that whatever ‘organizations’ Weaver had mentioned were keeping the streets clear of these things, they were doing a decent job so far, at least. 

“That one,” Melody finally pointed at a tall beige slate building as it came into view around the corner. Weaver nodded, following suit as the pair of them leapt up the steps to the front door. There was a buzzer system mounted to the side of the front door, on which Melody identified Baptiste’s unit as the topmost one on the third floor by his last name, Moise. 

“Bappie!” Melody shouted impatiently into it as she buzzed, “It’s me! Tryin’ ‘a make sure you’re not dead, or whatever! Kinda important!”

“I… think they have to answer the buzz before they can hear you,” Weaver tried awkwardly, just to quickly falter as Melody shot him a frustrated look. Taking notice that he was right, though, she kept pressing the buzzer repeatedly, the frustration in her face mounting as more seconds ticked by.

“Shit…” she hissed, before turning to her companion and hefting the wrench over her shoulder, “Don’t guess you’d have a sense of if those things coulda reached here yet?”

“Not exactly?” Weaver relinquished with a shrug, “I’m not even certain where they all came from. Tell you the truth, all I was doing this morning was trying to get breakfast in the area, and I walked in on the cash lady at the Chicken Jack’s getting her face stolen by a ‘valued customer’. It’s just been running around madly for a few hours since then, until I ran into you, I haven’t exactly made time to stop for a conversation with one of the things!”

“Ugh, modi li,” Melody hissed, ringing the buzzer to Baptiste’s apartment a few more times, before groaning, “Right, that’s it. He ain’t at his spot on the street, which means he’s either makin’ dodo or dead. Either way, I’m gettin’ in there. Outta the way!”

Weaver yelped and leapt aside as Melody hefted her wrench aloft, bringing it cracking down on the brass-bolted doorknob of the front door. In one good swing, the soft metal shattered at the core and broke off, clattering to the ground at their feet amid a shower of wood chips and sawdust, allowing the door to swing open.

“Bloody hell!” Weaver complained, waving his hands in appallment at her, “I literally told you I have a universal Key on me ten minutes ago!”

“Not the time, not my vibe!” Melody bellowed back, before grabbing him by the very same key around his neck and yanking him forward to join her as she beelined for the stairs. Taking the steps two and three at a time, they leapt up the several flights past the lower two units. Out of the corner of her eye, Melody could see Weaver constantly keeping his head swivelling, magenta eyes darting to the corners of ceilings and picking up details. That was a small relief; so long as he was sweating the small stuff, she wouldn’t have to bother herself with it. 

“Oi!” Melody shouted at last as they reached the top landing, raising a fist to bang loudly on the door labelled ‘03 - Moise’, “Bappie! Open the fuckin’ door if you’re not fuckin’ dead! Or if you’re somethin’ that killed him, ya better fuckin’ open up anyway! Nice, tasty faces to slurp on! Totally not gonna tear ya’ plastic ass to pieces!”

The echoes of her shout filled the tight space of the narrow landing, only to die out in the five, then ten, then fifteen seconds of silence that followed. There wasn’t even so much as a soft sound of shuffling from behind the door to indicate a sign of life, at the least. Weaver cast a wary glance at Melody, which she exchanged for a grimace of determination aimed his way. He gestured pointedly between his key and the silver steel doorknob, but Melody gritted her teeth in an ironclad grin and hefted her wrench aloft again, prompting Weaver to groan into his hand and take a step back.

“Last chance…” Melody spoke again, raising the wrench high over her head, aiming once again for the doorknob, “Ya got until three, Bappie! One… two–”

The door flew open, and Melody’s final word died on the tip of her tongue as the glinting muzzle of a shotgun was levelled inches from her face. Her entire body stiffened in an instant, face dropping slack as the barrels shoved themselves forwards.

Weaver was not so stupefied.

Melody cried out in surprise as a purple blur to her left suddenly crashed into her side, sending her off her feet before skidding to the floor against a nearby wall. She shook her head, quickly recovering just in time to catch the sight of Baptiste’s shocked face as Weaver slammed a wild arm down on the barrel of the shotgun in his hand, popping the barrel open. Weaver’s gloved fist, blade thankfully retracted for the moment, raised behind his head to strike forward, only for him to hesitate as he glanced down at the weapon he had just rendered inoperable. 

No shells had come flying out of the barrel once the cartridges were exposed. The gun hadn’t been loaded. 

“What the FUCK!?” All three of them exclaimed, their voices overlapping and echoing against each other as they all cast wild glances between each other.

“Fireball!?” Baptiste shouted incredulously, his eyes falling on Melody on the floor, who quickly made to her feet to glare up at him.

“Yeah, me!” Melody fumed, striding forward and gesturing wildly with her wrench, “Why the fuck didn’t ya open the fuckin’ door!? I was about ta’ bust it down and take your fuckin’ head off! And since when do you own a shotgun!?”

“We… are in the American South,” Weaver reminded politely. Melody made to smack him on the shoulder, but this time, he stepped to one side in time to avoid it. 

“There– there are–” Baptiste spluttered, gaze vacillating between Weaver and Melody at an intensive rate, a bead of sweat trickling down from his unkempt locks, “There are… things, I– wait, are you–”

“Made of clay?” Weaver prompted. At the sheer sound of his voice, Baptiste wheeled the shotgun on him instinctively again, despite everyone now knowing it wasn’t loaded, causing a perturbed-looking Weaver to simply push it out of his face with a muttered “Criminy…”

“We aren’t,” Melody groaned, taking another step forward, “How do ya know about that? You killed any of the fuckers already?”

Baptiste hesitated, still just glancing between the two of them worriedly, taking a retreating step backwards into his apartment. As his eyes swept over the pair of them, however, they settled quickly on Weaver, eyes widening at the sight of something at the tall man’s chest. 

“Is… that…?” he murmured, eyes sinking in shock and dread.

Weaver glanced down at himself, initially confused, as Melody followed Baptiste’s gaze to the key that Weaver wore. Weaver’s exasperated expression turned cautious, as he looked back up to Baptiste, “...now just how do you know what this is?”

“You’re–” Baptiste stammered breathily.

“Obviously you already know I am,” Weaver tilted his head curiously, “But the better question is, just how do you know of me?”

Baptiste sat in silent shock for a moment, before his eyes flitted over to Melody, gaze inquisitive and unbelieving. When she just shrugged offhandedly at him, confusion burning in her gut, he clumsily tossed the empty shotgun to the side, straightened his posture, and slapped his hand up to his forehead in a clumsy, awkward salute to Weaver.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake–” Weaver rolled his eyes, before promptly being cut off.

“My name is Jean-Baptiste Gerard Moise, sir!” Baptiste shouted rigidly, entire body stiff, “Set of the Seven Trees, Bronze Ring, New Orleans West! I’m sorry for pointing a weapon at you, sir!”

A drone of silence rang out as Baptiste held the position of the salute, his face screwing up oddly. Melody, utterly dumbfounded and a little bit slack-jawed, turned to eye Weaver inquisitively. He, shoulders slouched and arms folded, met her gaze with a wan look and a halfhearted shrug.

“You’re an Orbis agent?” Weaver sighed, turning back to Baptiste, who finally let his salute drop as he was addressed, “What are you doing at home? I’d thought every one of you in the city had been called to come out in force.”

“We were, sir!” Baptiste shouted again, causing Weaver to wince awkwardly back, “I left my station when–”

“Stop,” Weaver groaned, “With the ‘sir’. Your organization isn’t designed militantly, don’t feel the need to make it so for my sake. It distresses me immensely.”

You sure as shit aren’t the only one, bud, Melody groaned inside her head, folding her arms impatiently and really just waiting for whatever this was to finish up.

“I…” Baptiste faltered, his rigid posture beginning to fidget beneath Weaver’s flattened gaze. He glanced towards Melody, prompting her to cock an expectant eyebrow at him, before he gulped and gestured for them to approach.

“Come in,” he ushered the pair of them into his apartment quickly, shutting the door behind them and securing it shut with both a deadbolt and a chain. “I’m sorry, just… I can’t think of a more surprising sight to show up at my doorstep at a time like this, je m’excuse…”

Melody frowned, hefting the wrench over her shoulder again and regarding both men with a renewed befuddlement as she made her way into Baptiste’s place. He motioned them towards the living room, a floor-depressed space with a pair of coal-black couches, a coffee table, and a lot of shape art hung from the walls. A small kitchen sat adjacent to it, where Baptiste stashed his shotgun in a lower cupboard quickly, before joining them and motioning for them all to sit down. 

Sandwich guys don’t own shotguns, unloaded or otherwise, Melody frowned, squinting her eyes at the dreadlocked man, Just what the fuck is an ‘Orbis agent’? And how the fuck does he know Weaver? Just who is Weaver, really? Whoever he is, he seemed to convince Bappie we weren’t doppelgangers without even tryin’...

“We were all called out early in the morning,” Baptiste began, seating himself across from the couch that Weaver and Melody had stationed themselves on, pressing his hands together in his lap, “It was like a punch in the face, finding out all this was happening so near to my home. I met up with my Set, but… we were overrun. I don’t know what happened to the others, we got separated, I…”

Baptiste took a moment, glancing to the side to compose himself.

“I came back home,” He finished finally, eyes hitting the carpeted floor, “I wanted to protect my family, my Ruth, my Carinne, but…”

“Where are they?” Melody realized, eyes flitting around the apartment for signs of Baptiste’s family. She’d never met them, she wasn’t sure what they would look like, but there didn’t seem to be anyone else around.

“They were here when I left,” Baptiste replied weakly, “They were gone when I got back, I don’t… I was about to go looking, when…”

“Oh, dear,” Weaver rolled his eyes as consternation began to leak from Baptiste’s, “Those are about to be a great many emotions that we have neither the time nor ability to provide for. Mr. Moise, I need you to tell me exactly all that you know of these creatures. Even the slightest detail may help us glean their nature, which I promise we’ll need to know if you’d like to find your family.”

Baptiste gave a hard sniff at that, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand and nodding quickly, reforming his firm expression and glancing back up to meet Weaver’s eye. He gathered his thoughts for a moment before speaking again.

“They’re made of… something,” he began slowly, “It looks and feels like clammy flesh, but it behaves like–”

“Play-Doh, or some modelling compound shit,” Melody nodded, gesturing with a proud sneer at her wrench, “We’ve taken out a trio ‘a the fuckers already this mornin’. They burn up real easy, apparently.”

“Right, Fireball,” Baptiste nodded quickly, “And they copy the appearances of the people they absorb the faces of. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think there’s one to match every person around, though, I don’t think there are very many in all. I’ve seen a single one take as many as six faces, and swap between them, even mix and match pieces of the faces and forms they steal.”

Melody screwed up her face in revulsion and vitriol. The lines twitched yet again, as that sickly smell that had pervaded the entire neighborhood all morning wafted into her nose again. 

“I don’t think they copy memories, though,” Baptiste continued offhandedly.

“Wait, what?” Melody cocked her head, confused, “But the one that was pretendin’ to be my boss definitely knew who I was. And definitely had a good grasp ‘a how she acted.”

“Right, they– your boss?” Baptiste frowned, before quickly shaking his head and retracking himself, “They don’t copy memories, at least as far as any of us could tell. But I think what they do copy is… patterns. Repeated behaviours, that kind of thing.”

“Ah…” Weaver hummed, leaning back in his seat and nodding, “That makes a sort of sense… clever, really…”

“Clever?” Melody turned her befuddled frown towards Weaver beside her, “What do ya mean by that?”

“They don’t need to copy the entire memories of the people they imitate in order to be convincing,” Weaver noted, gesturing for emphasis with his bandaged hand, “And being convincing seems to be their modus operandi. But, who needs memories to imitate a human being when you have their patterns? Patterns of speech, patterns of behaviour. What someone has for breakfast every morning, the people you say good morning to, the gait of your walk, your route to work every day… the average day of any human’s life is actually quite predictable, and memorizing all of those patterns would require a lot less information capacity than perfectly absorbing someone’s memory.”

Melody bit her cheek, folding her arms and pondering what exactly that might look like. As she did, though, her memory flashed back to a moment of confusion from earlier, and something clicked into place in her head.

The thing that was pretendin’ to be Henri, she realized, It tried to start shit with me for bein’ ‘late’, even though I was, like, an hour early for work. It must have just seen me, known that Henri always gives me shit for bein’ late practically everyday, and tried to imitate that pattern. It didn’t know I was there early, because it didn’t actually know what time work starts, it just knew that when I show up, it’s usually late, and Henri usually gives me a hard time. Well, gave. She’s dead. Right.

Melody glanced back up to Weaver, something else in his words giving her pause all of a sudden as she considered them once again.

…and just why does he talk about ‘humans’ like a group ‘a people he’s not a part of?

“They seem like they get smarter as they stay in the same form for a while,” Baptiste was saying, bringing Melody’s attention back to the conversation, “And firmer. When they’re changing and getting the shape right, they’re a lot more vulnerable than the ones who have settled on a shape for a long while.”

“We noticed the same,” Weaver nodded along, “Handy that they’re still flammable, though. I know the Orbis keeps its agents well-stocked… would you happen to have any weapons on hand that can create fire? Propane torches, incendiary grenades, even a lighter and hairspray would work a treat.”

Baptiste’s expression slackened, the man seeming pensive for a time as he glanced between the pair of them opposite him on the couch. After a brief pause, he nodded, and gestured to the side at a wooden doorway that led off from the kitchen.

“In me and Ruth’s bedroom, there’s a lockbox by the bed,” he nodded at Weaver, “I think I might have some things in there, if you want to have a look.”

Weaver blinked, glancing over at Melody.

Don’t think I really have a spot to interject here even if I wanted to, cher, she thought with a subtle eyeroll, before gesturing in agreement. Weaver shrugged, standing and making his way out of the living room and through the doorway. The door swung shut behind him with a soft click, and the very instant it did, Baptiste’s posture immediately relaxed, and the man let out a long, weary sigh as he leaned back on the couch. 

“Mes dieux chers,” Baptiste groaned into his hand, shaking his head and turning to Melody, “What a day…”

Melody snorted at that, shaking her head in turn, “Tell me about it. I had a hell of a night last night, too, hardly slept before this at all.”

“When did you get wrapped up with that thing?” Baptiste gestured to the door through which Weaver had departed, “Sight of it nearly wore my heart out right there…”

Melody frowned, cocking her head at his word choice. 

“Last night,” she responded slowly, “Then we… I guess bumped into each other again this mornin’. Just luck, I guess.”

Baptiste sighed long and loud, planting a wearied hand over his mouth to mumble something inscrutable into his palm, before looking back to Melody, resolving his expression into a smile, and standing.

“Can I get you your regular, anyway?” he asked, “You look like you need it, Fireball.”

Melody cocked an eyebrow at that, smirking, “...I’d love it, but ya don’t exactly have your cart with ya, Bappie.”

Baptiste seemed to hesitate for just a moment at that. He quickly glanced back at the kitchen behind him, before turning back to her, “I think I can make it here?”

The offer, and the reminder of her lack of food since yesterday’s breakfast, suddenly brought Melody’s diverted attention straight back to the uncomfortable tightness of hunger in her gut. 

We do gotta get moving soon, if we wanna track down his family, she figured, cocking her head at Baptiste’s relaxed expression, assuming it must be forced, But hey, if he’s offerin’...

“What the hell, I’m hungry enough,” Melody shrugged. Baptiste’s smile broadened, and he quickly turned around, stepping into the kitchen adjacent to the living room and pulling some shrimp out of the fridge. He flicked on an element of the gas stove inset into the polished-slate countertop, set a pan atop the licking blue flames, spurted a squirt bottle of cooking oil into it, and then set the shrimp to fry. 

The familiar, enticing scent hit her nose, and Melody quickly found herself standing, antsy legs and an empty belly prompting her to hover closer to Baptiste as he worked. 

“Better have all the stuff to make it dressed,” she cracked, leaning against a counter as Baptiste worked his familiar magic with practised hands, “I ain’t no heathen, after all.”

Baptiste’s tongue clicked in a good-natured sigh, fishing a tomato and a pickle from the fridge and setting to them with a sharp kitchen knife, “Nothing but the best for you, Fireball…”

Melody let out a small laugh, swiping sweat-slicked bangs out of her face, “Heh, right… not sure now’s really the time for cute nicknames like that, but I appreciate it, Bappie.”

“What nickname?” Baptiste asked offhandedly, not even looking up from his cooking.

Melody paused, frowning. 

“...Fireball?” she prompted slowly.

“That’s not a nickname, that’s your name,” Baptiste responded, again casually, as he worked. Not a glance her way, not a nervous jitter in his fingers as he worked his well-practised cooking expertise by rote. Just as he had every day she’d ever stopped by his cart for breakfast before work, something going on two years, at this point.

He… knows my name is Melody. Fireball was a nickname he came up with, because of my hair and history.

Melody’s grip on her own folded arms stiffened as she watched the man work, tossing the fried shrimp atop the bread, garnishing with heaping helpings of lettuce, tomato, and pickle.

He only ever calls me Fireball, though. I don’t think he’s called me Melody in… years. It’s like a term ‘a endearment to him, now.

With a magician’s flair, the sort that he always employed to garner tips from easy-to-win-over pedestrians at his cart, Baptiste finished out the po-boy with a long smear of mayonnaise straight from a squirt bottle, before loading it all onto a paper plate, and holding it out to her with a broad smile. 

They don’t copy memories. They copy patterns. Who needs memories to imitate a human being when you have patterns? Weaver said that. 

Melody glanced down at the sandwich on the familiar paper plate held out in front of her. They were in his kitchen, he could have used a normal plate, but he’d specifically fished out a paper one from a bottom drawer where they must be stored. 

Melody’s gut froze over as she beheld the exact same sandwich that she’d received nearly five days a week, every week, for two entire years of her life. Down to the number of slices of pickles, down to the width of the cuts, down to the very milliliter of the mayonnaise. 

There that smell was again. Hidden beneath the scent of the cooking, but still there. That miasma that had covered every inch of the neighborhood of Broadmoor. She hadn’t noticed before, but no windows were open to let it in. 

Melody glanced back up, meeting the man’s eyes with a strained gaze. His eyes shone familiarly. As did his smile. All perfectly the same. Every pattern perfectly emulated.

But my name isn’t Fireball.

“Go on,” Not-Baptiste prompted, wiggling the paper plate in front of her in offer, furrowing his bushy brow in confusion at her hesitance, “Eat up. Aren’t you hungry, Fireball?”

A thoughtless instant later, his head was whipping back to slam against the cupboards behind him, the sandwich and its contents spilling out onto the floor. 

Melody blinked. She hadn’t even realized she’d punched him. 

She’d hit his nose dead-on. But it hadn’t broken. Beneath her bony fist, the soft flesh had simply pressed, flattening itself against the dense skin of the rest of his head.

“Oh,” Not-Baptiste sighed, his voice nasally as both of his nostrils had been flattened, “It was the name, wasn’t it? I went and forgot your name.”

Melody could feel fire blaze to life at the edges of her eyes. Her teeth gritted, the lines quivered, and she lunged.

“FUCK YOU!” she exclaimed, surging forward and slamming Not-Baptiste back against the counter by the collar, raising her fist to drive hook after hook into his slowly-denting fleshy head, “You didn’t ‘forget’ shit, you ugly plastic piece of SHIT! Where the fuck is Bappie!? I’ll fucking kill you!”

“I’m here, Fireball,” Not-Baptiste’s voice came off eerily calm despite the fact that she was still busy with caving the side of his head in, “I don’t think you understand that. It is me. It’s all of us.”

“Fuck that,” Melody fumed, before roaring, “YOU’RE JUST SOME FUCKING THING! WHERE IS HE!? WHAT DID YOU DO!?”

“All that aggression,” Not-Baptiste sighed, his voice now starting to gurgle slightly in his throat as his head deformed beneath her repeated punches, “Don’t you see, this is a good thing! I really think it would be good for you to join me, Fireball. Like this, I’ve gotten rid of all my anger, my regrets… really, this is much more peaceful.”

Don’t worry, Melody, Not-Micheal had said, It feels so much better in here with me.

You’re unsustainable, Fireball, Baptiste had said. The real Baptiste.

Wherever he was, lying faceless and dead.

Melody felt sick to her stomach. Thankfully, that didn’t make her burn any less.

“I’ll fucking gut you,” She hissed, before tossing the ‘man’ from her grip down onto the ground, knocking the wind out of his lungs, if he even had those. She’d left her wrench on the couch in the other room, but her fists felt like more than enough to tear this thing apart. 

Bappie… she thought, mounting up astride the monster that had killed the man and raising her fist high, I’m sorry, but I–

Melody felt a sharp, sudden pain in her side. All of the strength fell from her tensed, manic muscles in an instant. 

The fire was gone. In fact, all of a sudden, she felt quite cold. 

She looked down.

The kitchen knife he’d been using to prepare her sandwich was buried hilt-deep in her gut. She hadn’t even seen him grab it off the countertop in her fury.

Oh… well… that’s…

…oh, fuck.

Melody coughed weakly, all the breath in her lungs seeming to have evaporated in an instant, as she fell back. The knife slid out, still clutched in Not-Baptiste’s hand, as she fell, leaving a wound that immediately began gushing blood down her hip and thigh as she scrambled back, heart pumping and adrenaline raging.

“Now, see,” Not-Baptiste mused calmly, making to his feet and rearranging his face with his hands enough so that he could look down at her with both eyes again, “I didn’t want to do that, but it’s not like you gave me much choice.”

Fuck you to hell, Melody wanted to say. All she could do was cough again, though. Every movement seemed to be immiserating the bloodflow.

“Wea–” she finally strangled out, casting a weak glance towards the door through which Weaver had disappeared, “Weav–ugh-! Fuck!”

“Oh, the bedroom is soundproof,” Not-Baptiste hummed, setting the bloody knife gently back in the wooden slot rack on the counter, before stepping forward leisurely towards her, “I assume Ruth and I didn’t want Carinne to hear us when we… well, I’m sure you can picture, hah. Speaking of Ruth and Carinne, I’m sure they’ve already introduced themselves to him, in there. So, no point calling out, really.”

The tips of Melody’s fingers were starting to grow frigid and sluggish. She coughed weakly again, straining her neck desperately for the door anyway, but it never opened. The strength in her legs gave out, and she fell back against the floor, the warm blood spilling from her body beginning to trace through the rivulets in the tile flooring beneath her. 

Not-Baptiste sighed, shaking his head disapprovingly at her, before kneeling down. Melody tried, wanted desperately to hit him away, but her arms weren’t responding, and her head was getting foggy. Not-Baptiste grabbed each of her wrists, pinning her to the floor beneath him, face only inches away from hers as black spots started to appear in her vision.

“I have always thought there was too much chaos in you, Fireball,” Not-Baptiste sighed as his face started collapsing into itself, “I promise, it’ll feel better without it, in here with me.”

With that, his mouth disappeared, as did the rest of the features of his once-kind face as it formed the familiar shape of the suction cup. Melody struggled weakly, cursing her muscles for failing her, cursing her blood for leaving her, cursing her vision for blacking, cursing her life for ending. 

The last of the light of the room around her became blotted out, both by the black spots forming in her vision, and by the form of the flesh enclosing itself around her head.

I have always thought there was too much chaos in you, Fireball.

There was too much chaos in you, Fireball.

Too much chaos in you, Fireball. 

Chaos in you, Fireball. 

Melody’s eyes drifted shut at last.

The lines screamed.

Fireball.

Melody’s arms tore through the restraining hands of Not-Baptiste, the broken flesh raining down around them as the fleshy, faceless creature recoiled, freeing her face for just a moment out of sheer surprise. 

Kill.

She could feel them reaching her eyes, now. 

And just who the fuck would I be to disagree?

Melody let out a barbarous roar as she kicked the fleshy creature off of her with both legs, sending it skidding ten whole feet across the floor in an instant, where it flew back into the kitchen and slammed harshly against a row of drawers, the handles embedding themselves in its back from the force. Despite that, she found herself back upon it in an instant, her fingers sinking and tearing into its flesh as she hoisted it aloft.

Kill. 

The command came again.

Melody’s face split into a wide, feral grin. The face of Baptiste slowly began to reform on the creature’s fleshy head, eyes wide with surprise and, deliciously, a touch of fear that invaded her sinuses with its delectable aroma. 

“You’re right,” Melody said through gritted teeth, “There is chaos in me. A whole lot of it. Too much, really. But you know something?”

Before Not-Baptiste had formed enough of its jaw back to respond, her hands reached around its claylike teeth and ripped the lower jaw clean off the face. It gurgled in surprise, seeming to splutter out the air behind whatever reply it might have had, but it all reached deaf ears on Melody, who could only hear her heart beating, and the fire burning.

With a single hand, she hoisted the fleshy thing that killed Baptiste atop the gas stove, holding it down with her hands as its eyes widened helplessly in realization. 

“That chaos?” Melody giggled, her voice ragged and delighted, “I like it.”

With that, and a whooping laugh that echoed throughout the entire apartment, she flicked all four elements on the gas stove alight. Not-Baptiste’s greasy, claylike body caught ablaze in licking blue flame in an instant. Melody took a slow step back, small guffaws still escaping her throat unbidden every few moments, as she watched him melt. 

It was only when all that remained was a bubbling, tarlike black mess that seeped into the cracks of the stovetop and spilled out over the floor, all remnants of what once had looked like the friendly man gone, that the manic grin finally faded from her face, the flames died out against her skin, and she remembered to turn the elements back off with a resigned sigh. 

There was a moment, perhaps two, of Melody Walsh breathing heavily amidst the empty kitchen, watching the black, melted remnants of Not-Baptiste spill over the dropped po-boy sandwich on the ground, ruining it, before the door to the bedroom at last burst open. 

Weaver was covered in shredded plasticky flesh. His glove blade was clogged with the stuff, and he was breathing just as heavily as she was, eyes flitting wildly to where they had all been sitting at the couches, to the kitchen where Melody stood, to the melted mess that Not-Baptiste had become in his absence.

“...ah,” he blinked in surprise, slowly sliding out of his defensive posture and wiping his blade on his coat idly, “...I see I didn’t need to rush as much as I did.”

Melody snorted at that, shaking her head with a sigh. At a glance, she could see a rivulet of blood leaking down from Weaver’s head, where something seemed to have hit him bluntly and torn a bit of flesh. The doppelgangers didn’t bleed, of course, so clearly it was him.

“Ya get ambushed in there?” Melody chuckled, stepping out from the kitchen and striding up to meet him, “How’d ya deal with it without fire?”

“Quite,” Weaver sighed, offering her a wry chuckle, “I, er… took a lesson from your work earlier with the large one. No need to burn them if the pieces left are too small to move around on their own anyway.”

“Hah, nice,” Melody cracked. At last seeming to come down from the high of exertion, she just slapped Weaver on the shoulder dully before stepping over to the couch to retrieve her wrench. She thought for a moment, before turning back to him and gesturing hesitantly towards the bedroom again, “Is he… in there?”

Weaver’s expression fell a little, but he nodded.

“All three of them are,” he sighed.

Melody nodded dully at him.

“...right.”

“I’m… sorry,” Weaver tried, taking a step towards her and placing a hand on her shoulder gently, “Do you want to see the real him, in there? He was your friend, after all.”

Melody puffed out a long sigh, casting a long glance towards the cracked-open bedroom door, before turning back to the melted remnants of Not-Baptiste that still continued to ruin the kitchen floor even further. 

Eventually, as Weaver’s hand remained on her shoulder, Melody gently leaned her cheek against it appreciatively for a moment, before shaking her head.

“Nah,” she said finally, “He was just good at makin’ sandwiches.”

Weaver raised his brow, looking confused for a moment, but seemed to have the good sense to not push it. Eventually, Melody stepped away from his hand, and the pair began to make for the door back outside.

“Should probably get movin’,” Melody noted, hefting her wrench over her shoulder once again, “Who knows how many more ‘a these things we gotta clean up, huh?”

“I’d imagine the worst of it has been taken care of by now,” Weaver replied, plucking a few stray pieces of claylike flesh off of his outfit, “If you’d like to go home, you can. Or, actually…”

Melody glanced back over her shoulder as Weaver trailed off, looking back into the apartment and looking perturbed. Melody turned her gaze to follow his, finding it settled on the large pool of blood on the floor, as well as the smeared trail leading up to it that she’d left behind as she’d dragged herself along.

“Are you alright?” Weaver asked, turning to her with a scrunched, concerned expression. Melody hummed in thought. She’d honestly forgotten about that, in the heat of the moment. 

Glancing down at herself, she found the place where the knife had plunged itself deep into her. 

It was red. A little black, too. As though the flesh around it had been burned.

No. Cauterized.

“I’m good,” Melody shrugged, before grabbing him by the key pendant again and dragging him along, “Come on, cher. I know a joint we can score some cheap lunch after we’re done huntin’.”

Weaver sighed, let out a chuckle that she found herself matching, and left the smoking remains behind alongside her.

~~~

“So,” Melody puffed, releasing the smoke from her long, satisfied drag of her cigarette into the variegated light of the bar, before turning and asking, “What exactly the fuck are you, anyways?”

Weaver chuckled at the bluntness of the question, sighing softly into his hand before moving it up to massage the ridge of his nose. His second Old Fashioned of the night was empty in his hand, which he glanced down at bemusedly, then reached for the bottle of bourbon to his right to fill it again. 

“I,” Weaver eventually replied, waggling his refilled glass at his companion cheekily, “Am drunk.”

Melody snorted out a laugh as Weaver took a swig, downing half the glass in a single gulp before setting it back on the coaster. The redhead was seated on the barstool beside him, arms leaned backwards up on the bar so that her hands hung down smugly, staring out at their recent handiwork. The bar, specifically the Bar Lylou, in Mid-City, had been essentially torn to pieces in the recent struggle. Wooden chairs and tables were upturned and crushed, a roughly Weaver-shaped section of the bottle wall behind the bar had been smashed from impact, and the vacant performers’ stage to the left had had its boards partially torn up and splintered. To top it off, the life-size doll that had been its bartender laid in a crumpled heap amid the ruined tables and chairs, the cracks and breaks in its porcelain body leaking blood and revealing the human biological parts beneath.

“Come on,” Melody prompted eventually, lifting her third sazerac to her lips and throwing back a glug, “Ya know that isn’t what I mean.”

“How am I meant to know what you mean?” he asked back, “English isn’t my first language.”

Melody narrowed her eyes at him, “...dude, you’re, like… the most English British dude I’ve ever heard speak.”

“Moi accen’ dun’ mean annyfin,” Weaver shot back with a smirk, intentionally changing his accent from his usual posh to an abrasive cockney drawl, only immiserated by the alcohol-slickened slur of his words, “Y’don’ know annyfin’ ‘bout meh.”

Melody punched him on the arm, barking out a laugh at the terrible affectation, “I know you’re an ass when you’re drunk, cher. Come on, it’s a simple question, what are you?”

Ah, simple questions, Weaver thought, shaking his head softly, What unicorns they are.

Weaver let out another dry laugh, eventually nodding as he rested his chin on his forearms against the bar in front of him. He glanced up, bleary eyes fuzzing against the festooned lighting, as he considered how exactly to respond. 

It was a question that, under any normal circumstances, he would happily dodge and never address again. But, then, well, absolutely nothing of his experiences with Melody Walsh so far could even begin to approach what he’d call ‘normal circumstances’.

By this point, he’d been in New Orleans for nearly a month, making the night he’d first run into Melody in that dusty den in Little Woods almost three weeks prior, now. It was longer than he’d ever managed to stay in one place without being called away, at least in this lifetime, as well as in those recent enough to remember. Until now, there had always been a summons somewhere else coming quickly down the pipeline after his most recent endeavour, sending him scarpering off somewhere else in the wide, dark world, but not here. He’d been putting out fires in this city alone for so long, he was practically starting to get attached.

Well, he acknowledged, glancing back over at the short redhead beside him as she took another drag of her cigarette, before snuffing out the butt directly against the sign on the wall that read ‘No Smoking Inside Please’, …I suppose I can’t really take all the credit.

Melody had arrived to that den in Little Woods long before him, having gone out hunting the thing that had started New Orleans’ recent string of paranatural problems all on her own, with Weaver only arriving to the scene to find the offending candle and snuff it out long after Melody had dispatched the winged monster without any aid. The following morning, when the horde of clay face-stealers had cropped up around Broadmoor, he’d happened into her once again almost immediately, and then she’d spent the entire rest of the day tagging along with him (or really, he’d been tagging along with her, it had felt more like) to clean up the last of the stragglers. When an avatar of something old, lost, and hungry had touched down in City Park, she’d appeared from the thicket hot on his heels to help send it back to its corner of the realms beyond, claiming all the while to have ‘just been in the area’. When the acolyte in Musician’s Village had begun carving his lyrics into his flesh in shifting, non-euclidean characters, she’d gotten there hours before him, and was already busy stuffing whatever from the dead man’s house looked pawnable into a backpack by the time he’d at last burst through the door. And so on, and so on, and on, and on, and on. 

At a certain point, he supposed, the pair of them had just begun to expect to see each other, whenever there was something nasty in the city that needed killing. They hadn’t even bothered to exchange greetings when they’d arrived simultaneously at this bar, each individually following up on rumours of the drinks here rendering the patrons into states of glossolalia-filled catatonia. 

The “bartender”, evidently a living porcelain doll of unknown make and origin, complete with hinge joints hidden beneath the clothes, was smashed open and bloody on the floor ten feet away, now. All thanks to Melody, his own blade hadn’t been able to cut through its outer shell. 

She really is handy with that monkey wrench, Weaver chuckled inwardly, eyeing the tool in question where it leaned, still dripping blood, against the bar beside Melody’s stool. Based on the new scratchings on its metal surface that looked like they’d been done with the edge of a coin, it looked like she was starting to keep tally of her kills. 

The drumming of her fingers on the bartop brought his eyes sluggishly back up to hers, being met with an impatient tilt of her head and a cocked eyebrow. He sighed, nodded slowly, and unconsciously fiddled with the Key as he considered how to begin.

“Would it be terribly insulting to begin with ‘you’re not going to believe me’?” he chuckled, turning to his companion, who rolled her eyes with a blithe smirk.

“At this point?” Melody snorted, “Yeah. Yeah, a bit.”

“Right then,” Weaver nodded, before shrugging, “I’m immortal.”

Melody paused, her eyebrows shooting up as she seemed to glance him up and down, before leaning in to study his features for a moment. Eventually, she just chuckled, then giggled, then began to guffaw, lifting her chin to the ceiling and hooting out an exaggerated, drunken laugh.

“Hah… ha… yeah…” she finally managed as the laughter in her throat died down, “Right… sure. Yeah, you’re fuckin’ immortal. Why wouldn’t you be?”

“I’m serious!” Weaver shot back, taking his turn to roll his eyes, “See, I knew you wouldn’t believe me!”

“No…” Melody shook her head, glancing down at the floor and sighing resignedly, “It ain’t that I don’t believe ya. I’m just realizin’ how not-impossible that sounds to me, now. Sorta makes some stuff make sense, somehow, actually, heh… freaky.”

“Yes, well, I’ve been told I’m that, too,” Weaver quipped, earning another silly guffaw from Melody, and continued, “It’s not really how you probably think, though. It’s not like I can’t die. In fact, I have. Many, many times.”

“So ya just don’t stay dead when you kick it, then?”

Weaver stifled a tired groan into his palm and nodded, pushing his drink to the side for now and spinning his barstool to more directly face the blood-covered redhead. Over the course of this past month and a half of serendipitous repeated companionship, he’d long since stopped attempting to obscure from her what he might from any other normal people. 

I suppose it’s been a while since I’ve had the privilege of introducing myself to someone, really, He acknowledged with a soft smile as she batted her lashes expectantly at him, Well… at least she makes for amicable company.

“This body is the latest in a long line of bodies I’ve possessed,” Weaver shrugged at last, blinking the tired blear out of his eyes and gesturing to himself openly, “Every so often, when the time is right to reincarnate, I will somehow perish, and reawaken in a new body soon after. Usually somewhat nearby to where I died the last time.”

“Huh,” Melody frowned, swirling her sazerac in her hand thoughtfully, “Like, some new body just magically gets put together for ya? Sounds annoying.”

“It is,” He admitted, but shook his head, “Though I’m fairly certain it’s not a new body that’s being created. No matter what, when I ‘reincarnate’, I always have the Key around my neck. It’s become evident, especially with the advent of the idea to carry around identifying documents, that my ‘reincarnation’ is simply someone else finding the Key, picking it up, and putting it around their neck. I then, well, seem to… overwrite that individual.”

Melody’s face scrunched up in displeasure at that, her eyes drifting down scornfully to the Key dangling at my neck.

Which is fair, Weaver acknowledged with a mordant chuckle, I can’t exactly say I’m too chuffed with it either. But it isn’t as though I get much of a say in the matter.

“Fucked up, kinda,” she grumbled, taking a sip of her drink.

“Quite,” he nodded softly, “I seem to retain… some of who the person I overwrote was, whenever I begin anew. Gender, for instance. Taste preferences, some mannerisms, that sort of thing. But no memories. The only ones of those I have are my own.”

A gentle silence followed his words, allowing him to gladly finish the contents of his cup, the spicy alcohol burning the back of his throat as he let out a sigh. Glancing back to the side, Melody appeared almost uncharacteristically pensive, cheek rested on an open palm as her gaze swept over him, seeming to take stock. If he wasn’t so drunk, he might have flinched or recoiled in embarrassment, but as he was, he simply let her think as she might. 

“What happens if you take it off?” she finally prompted. 

Weaver pursed his lips, frowning at her in confusion. She gestured to the Key inquisitively, which only made his mordant smile return even broader, and the bags under his eyes seem to weigh heavier.

“I can’t,” he chuckled softly, shrugging his shoulders, “It doesn’t come off.”

“What?” Melody frowned, “Just… lift it off your fuckin’ head, cher.”

Weaver smirked and fiddled with the Key for a moment, twirling it between his fingers, “If I was to try to take this Key off of my head, I guarantee, it would not end up happening. It’s by no means fused to my flesh, or anything of the sort, but…”

“But…?” Melody prompted, leaning in a little too far with a little too wide of a smile.

She’s drunk, Weaver confirmed with a silent laugh, Well, hell. So am I.

“Well,” He threw his hands up in the air dramatically, “Perhaps one of those boards in the ceiling is loose, and when I tried to take the Key off, it would just so happen to fall loose and knock me unconscious before I could. Perhaps, the instant it’s about to leave my neck, New Orleans suddenly experiences a particularly hairy natural disaster, and I’m suddenly too distracted to follow through. Perhaps even, if you were to try to remove it from me, you would suddenly experience a medically inexplicable brain aneurysm. The Key simply cannot be removed. It just will not allow itself to be.”

“Huh…” Melody frowned, not seeming entirely satisfied with that explanation, but thankfully, she let the issue drop without trying her hand anyway.

That’s good. I had actually been a little concerned she was about to, it certainly wouldn’t have been out of character.

“Well… do ya remember everything, then?” she asked after a few beats of silence, “Like, all the lives you ever lived? All the way back to whenever-the-fuck-you-were-born?”

Weaver sighed, giving up on the pretense of the cocktails and reaching for the bottle of bourbon, taking a long swig before responding, “It gets foggier as time goes on. The life just before this one, I can recall with roughly the lucidity of a dream after just waking. The life before that, more like trying to remember a dream I had a week in the past. And so on, and so forth.”

“Hah, really…” Melody shook her head and smirked at that, evidently following his lead and neglecting the rest of her sazerac in favour of snatching the bourbon out of his hand and swigging herself, “So what were you, before you were this… beanpole posh limey dude?”

Weaver let out a cheeky snicker, “Among other things? African-American.”

“Damn, really? For how long?”

“I lasted about seventy years.”

“You were black in the fuckin’ fifties?”

“Female, too, actually.”

“How was that?”

“Peachy.”

“Seriously?”

“No.”

Melody hooted out a loud laugh at that, holding a hand up to her gut and leaning over the bartop so that she could belt out her chuckles into the muffling crook of her arm. Watching her, Weaver slowly found himself beginning to chuckle as well, her laughter evidently contagious, and he set the bourbon bottle back down in between them as they shared in the light moment together. 

“Ah, fuckin’ hell,” Melody finally managed to force words in through her drunken giggling, “No wonder you always look so fuckin’ bug-eyed…”

“Bug-eyed!?” Weaver complained jokingly, “You need to find better insults, Melody Walsh! What I wouldn’t give for an insect’s compound eyes, sometimes, they really would come in handy…”

Rather than respond to his joke, Melody hopped up from her stool and gave her back a long, satisfied stretch as she smiled.

“Heh…” she chuckled, winding her way around to the other side of the bar to lean over closely into his face, “And, what, you just prance around the globe wherever the fuck you want, killing shit? Seriously? Do you even get paid?”

“Actually,” Weaver shook his head at last, pointing an accusatory finger at the redhead, “I believe you’ve asked your fair share of questions. Now it’s my turn.”

“Eh?” Melody frowned down at him momentarily, before leaning back against the wall, dripping with inebriated confidence, “Alright then, shoot, Mr. Immortal. Whatcha got for little ol’ me?”

Weaver rolled his eyes hard and laughed into his hand at the gesture. In a way, he supposed he was glad that the both of them had elected to celebrate their night’s victory by getting so absolutely sloshed as they had; otherwise, he knew he likely wouldn’t have dared bring up one of the more pressing curiosities about the girl before him, harboured silently in the back of his mind from the very night they had met.

“Those,” He finally said, waggling his finger accusatorily at her, “What on earth are those, and why do you have them?”

Melody cocked her head at him, before following his gaze down at the rough center of her torso, where he had at least roughly been gesturing. 

“My… boobs?” She raised an eyebrow and smirked at him, “Weaver, cher, if you’ve somehow made it through human history all the way to 2022 without knowin’ what boobs are, I’d be happy to give you a hands-on lesson in a few more drinks’ time.”

“Not that,” Weaver shook his head sharply, his nose curling up in disgust as Melody cackled at his blush, “I do not mean that, I have never, and will never, mean that.”

Melody’s laugh only heightened in pitch with every subsequent assurance from him, her arms now wrapped around her guffawing stomach and her head kicking cartoonishly in the air as she howled. After a few moments of his immediate embarrassed fluster dying down, Weaver got it, and let out an exasperated, if good-natured, groan. 

“Yes, yes, fine, very funny,” he rolled his eyes, snapping his fingers in front of her face to refocus her, “The tattoos, Melody. The lines all over your body. Why do you have those? I’ve been wondering, I’ve just never seen any sort of design like that before. “

“Ohh…” Melody droned histrionically, glancing down at her hands to observe the strange black striping herself, before giving a little spin to further demonstrate the extent of them, “No clue. Had ‘em for as long as I can remember.”

Weaver’s gaze sharpened, frowning, “Really? What do you mean? You didn’t choose to get them on your own?”

“Why would anybody choose this on their own? It’s just a buncha weird lines all over my body. Nah, they musta been put on me as a young kid.”

“Children… cannot legally get tattoos in this country. Certainly not ones so extensive.”

“Well, fuck, man, guess you better go back in time and arrest who did it. They’re on me, Weaver, the fuck you want me to say to that?”

Weaver paused, steepling his fingers in thought. 

“And you have… no idea what they’re for, or what they mean?” He tried. 

“Nope.” Melody shook her head simply. 

“You’ve never even thought to ask?”

“Nobody to ask. Birth parents kicked the fuckin’ bucket early on, remember?”

“And nothing on the internet?”

“Nope. They’re just lines, dude. Nothin’ else to ‘em.”

Weaver paused again, craning an eyebrow at her.

“Well…” he poked carefully, “...save for the fact that they… move.”

Melody grunted and tilted her head in, in his mind, somewhat startlingly blasé acknowledgement.

So she does know about that, he confirmed inwardly, recalling all the times when he’d seen the lines spread across her body seeming to wriggle along her flesh during her moments of utmost exhilaration during their hunts together.

A moment of silence pushed itself between them as he pondered, prompting Melody to glance back up at Weaver with an eyebrow cocked, as if waiting to see what his reaction to that would be. 

Not even he was entirely sure what to make of that, however, so, he eventually settled on what came easiest.

“Cool,” Weaver chuckled, shrugging and taking another sip of bourbon. Melody burst out laughing again at that, and chuckles once again rose in his throat to match. 

I suppose I like Melody Walsh, he resolved inwardly, the same strange sense of intrigue he’d felt in her from the moment they’d met feeling stronger than ever in his chest, I suppose, even, that as far as the definition can serve, she’s my friend. 

I suppose that’s something that’s new to me.

Even from the moment that Weaver had first seen the thread connecting her to him glinting in the dusk that night, he had never intended for Melody Walsh to become such a fixture in his life. Whenever the Key actually bothered to show him one of its threads, which was really quite rarely in the grand scheme, it was always for one of three very specific reasons: he was meant to destroy the thing it was attached to, he was meant to save the thing it was attached to, or he was meant to solve the thing it was attached to. 

Melody Walsh certainly didn’t fit the profile of the usual thing he ran around destroying, that was for certain. And anyone could see she didn’t need saving. As for solving, whilst he admitted he’d clocked at least one or two potentially less-than-natural things about her in the time that he’d had the pleasure of knowing her, such as the etched lines running across her flesh, and her… zealous capacity for sustaining injury and remaining on her feet, he really wasn’t sure there was anything all that special about it.

Save, really, for the fact that she just kept showing up.

And now, despite himself, every subsequent time she appeared, he found himself wanting less and less for her to leave.

“But really, I wanna know,” Melody’s inquisitive voice pulled his attention gladly out of his reverie and back to her, “Do ya really just, like… wander around? And do this all the time? Sounds like a helluva life, cher.”

“Well, ‘wandering’ makes it sound aimless,” Weaver chuckled, “Whenever I finish my work somewhere, sooner or later, wherever I ought to go next will reveal itself to me. Sometimes a contact of mine reaches out and tells me about something that’s come up, sometimes I’ll hear something second-hand that piques my interest, sometimes I’ll just receive a direction that sticks out to me, through whatever means. Then, almost infallibly, when I get there, I’ll eventually run afoul of something that I find would really be better off dead, destroyed, or otherwise neutralized.”

Melody cocked her head curiously, “A direction that… sticks out to ya? What does that mean?”

“Well,” Weaver shrugged, “A month ago, I was in Vietnam, when a New Orleans business card happened to get stuck to my shoe. That’s how I figured to come here.”

Melody’s eyes narrowed, struck silent in surprise for a few moments as she leaned back over the bar to study his expression closer.

“Is that really all it takes?” She eventually asked.

“More than I’ve gotten in the past, actually,” Weaver nodded, “Though I do at least normally get a more specific indicator than just the name of a major city. But, well, I suppose there’s been a lot for me to do here, and all over the city, so the generality makes sense in hindsight.”

“So, what, it’s, like, a… fate kinda thing?”

“If you’d like to think of it that way, sure. Most people do. Serendipity, luck, fate, that sort of thing. Some scholar a millennium ago compared it to a spiderweb of all three, connecting me to different things in the world, and I’ve mostly ran with that description.”

“How do you, like… pay for stuff, though? Do ya get paid by anything?”

“No,” Weaver waved his hands dismissively, “What I do is really just a conceit of my nature. It’s what I’ve always done. There are records dating back millennia of people who I can’t remember being, but who I suppose must have been me, doing just as I do now. When I need money, though, I usually tend to… find it, soon before needing it, as it were.”

Melody gave him a sly smile at that, wiggling her eyebrows knowingly. Weaver scoffed, waving a dismissive hand at her and hiding his broadening smile with his hand.

“I don’t always steal it!” he insisted anyway, “Occasionally, I’ll just end up winning a lottery!”

Melody chortled again at that, though as she turned to the middle distance, her expression morphed into a pensive, wistful moue. She slowly rounded the bar again, plucking her wrench from beside her stool and sat back down, beginning to fidget with it in her lap.

“Ah, hell,” she murmured, “Sounds like one hell of a way to live a life. Beats gettin’ worked off the bone at a mechanic joint, anyway.”

Weaver frowned softly at her tone, but raised an eyebrow in confusion, “You… still work at the mechanics’? I had thought your direct superior was… you know–”

“Iced and faceless?” Melody finished with a snicker, shaking her head, “Oh, yeah, nah, I’m out of a job. But hey, since literally everybody else ‘cept me who owned a key to the place died, I did sneak back in there a couple nights later and swipe a bunch of the tools and parts. Sold ‘em all off to somebody on the internet for a couple grand, to tide me over.”

Weaver spluttered, “And you were about to give me a hard time about stealing!?”

“I wasn’t gonna give ya a hard time!” Melody rolled her eyes and leaned back, grinning, “I think it’s dope as hell!”

Weaver let out an incredulous chuckle, allowing a soft repose to fall between them as the laugh in Melody’s voice died down, and her expression softened again. After a few moments, she stood up again from her stool, walked over to the smashed porcelain barmaid doll to the side, and planted her foot pensively against its brutalized head, tilting it to let a dollop of blood and grey matter slide out onto the floor beneath. 

“I don’t get why you always look so damn down, Weaver,” Melody’s voice came softly, though Weaver couldn’t see her face, “This month has been the most fun I’ve had in years, ya know.”

Weaver’s brow twitched. He paused for a moment, relaxed smile sliding off his face as he considered her words.

I could tell, he wrestled, That’s another reason why I find you so strange, Melody Walsh.

“Yes, well…” he spoke carefully, setting the bottle of bourbon aside, “You and I have somewhat different stances on it. Of course, I won’t deny your natural talent, though. Were it only that our positions were reversed…”

He trailed off, observing his friend curiously, finding himself somewhat of two minds.

She really is good at this, he admitted, And I certainly can’t say I’ve begrudged the company… but I worry, when I leave, as I inevitably will, that I’ll have put too many ideas into her head…

Melody, who had stood silently as he had thought, seeming to mull his words over in her mind, eventually let out a soft scoff. She shook her head, painted on a smirk, and shouldered her wrench, before glancing back at him. 

“So when are you gonna be shippin’ outta here?” she asked, striding confidently back over to rejoin Weaver at the bar, “No offense, but you still kickin’ around does supposedly mean there’s still evil shit to mop up around my city, so long as everything works the way you say it does.”

Weaver nodded softly, before shrugging, “I can’t really be sure. I’ve never been in one place this long in my memory, which goes back as far as two lifetimes ago, so I admit it’s abnormal…”

“That damn candle really did a number on the place, huh?” Melody inquired, hand on her hip as she sat back down on her stool.

“Really did, yes. I suppose I’ll be called off to wherever the next hunt is when I’m finished here.”

Melody sighed and nodded, before glancing off to the side for a few seconds. As Weaver watched, her expression tightened in conflict, eyes flitting between himself, the wrench at her lap, and a spot on the floor. Eventually, though, after her gaze had lingered on the edge of the wrench for a few moments, she squeezed her eyes shut, and nodded once again, this time to herself. 

“Well, hell,” she spoke again, turning back to Weaver and cutting off any curious or inquisitive thoughts he might have had, “Until that happens, we’ll just keep knockin’ ‘em down as long as N’Walins keeps setting ‘em up, yeah?”

“Now that,” Weaver chuckled, reaching behind him for the bottle of bourbon once again, “I will drink t–”

The bottle hit the counter strangely as he made to bring it to his lips, and it abruptly shattered in his hands, soaking his lap with shards of glass and sharp-smelling alcohol.

“Oh, blooming–,” Weaver complained, taken aback as he made to wipe some of the excess alcohol off of the front of his trousers before it soaked in completely. 

“Holy shit, dude,” Melody cracked up, crossing her legs atop her stool and rocking back and forth in delight, “You are drunk.”

“Oh, please,” Weaver shot back, motioning to her three empty cocktail glasses on the bar beside her, which only made her smile grow more cheeky.

“Hah, yeah, yeah,” Melody nodded overdramatically, “Guess it’s a night for the both of us. Is your hand even okay, dude?”

Weaver grunted, standing up from his stool to shake off the fragments of glass and droplets of alcohol from his front with an annoyed groan. At Melody’s words, he glanced down at the hand that had been holding the bottle when it broke. In hindsight, perhaps the tightly-wound bandages he kept around that hand had probably protected it from being accidentally lacerated.

Doubly more so, he realized, when he glanced down and found a shard of the glass bottle nestled in the palm of that hand, sharp edges caught up in the thick fabric of the gauze. It seemed, upon breaking, that the plastic label of the bourbon had torn along the same edges, leaving a single gold-embossed sentence imprinted on the shard in his palm. 

Bottled in Merritt, British Columbia.

…ah.

“Weaver?” Melody’s voice came again from behind him, shaking him out of the moment and bringing his gaze back to her. Their eyes met, and she seemed to frown at whatever his expression was, tilting her head to the side and raising a brow, “...you alright, cher? Need stitches, or something?”

Weaver didn’t respond immediately. He wasn’t quite sure how to, if he was honest. He wasn’t sure what the sudden tightness in his abdomen was.

“Weaver?” Melody asked again. The word echoed through his head, as though she had shouted it down to him at the bottom of an empty well. 

Weaver glanced down at the shard in his hand once again, confirming by some unknown impulse that it was real, and he had indeed seen it. He then glanced down to the floor, let out a long sigh in a vain effort to breathe out the sudden stiffness he felt in his joints, ran his unsullied hand over his chin uncomfortably, and finally sat back down beside the redhead. Melody continued to look at him, wide-eyed, arms leaned on the bar and looking confused, perhaps even a little alarmed.

“Well,” he finally puffed out, gingerly setting the fragment down on the bartop between them, “I suppose your city is safe at last, Melody.”

Melody blinked, eyes widening at him, before glancing down to read the gold text embossed on the glass fragment. She then glanced back at him, then back at the fragment, and again a few times over, each time her eyes moving a hair’s much quicker and more urgently. When her gaze finally came to rest on him, Weaver sighed, nodded, and sank a little into his stool where he sat beneath her stare.

“That’s it?” she finally asked, her voice sounding a little strange, “That’s a call? Seriously? A fuckin’ credit on a bottle of booze we were drinkin’, that makes up a call away?”

“It’s hardly the strangest way I’ve found my directions,” Weaver nodded dully, “Once, I found a lottery ticket had stuck to my rear after I had sat on it on an underground metro. The winning numbers wound up translating to coordinates, and the winning amount was just enough to pay for a one-way redeye straight there, leaving from the nearest airport in mere hours.”

Melody regarded him silently for a time, glancing once again from the label and back a few times, seeming to sober up some herself to match his own diminishing inebriation. She then sighed, staring out away from the bar at the ruined tables and felled corpse of the porcelain creature, before at last nodding to herself again, reaching for her final sazerac, and downing the rest in a single sip.

“That’s on the opposite corner of the damn continent,” she noted, turning back to me, “Probably somethin’ like a two-day drive. Hope you ain’t planning to walk.”

“I’m sure some method of convenient transport will make itself available to me,” Weaver shrugged, planting his cheek against his palm and sinking against it on the bar, “Something of the sort usually does. If not, for intra-continental travel, at least, I generally default to hitchhiking.”

Melody’s face screwed up in a frown, and she seemed to hiss something under her breath too quietly for Weaver to overhear. 

As I thought, he noted glumly, watching his friend’s features scrunch up in frustration before his very eyes, I’ve gotten her too attached… I leave, I always leave, I know that, I shouldn’t have let her…

His thoughts trailed off as all the force behind them died. Acute awareness of the deceit within them tended to do that.

Right, he corrected himself, gritting his teeth with a sigh, She’s hardly the one who was ‘allowed’ to get too attached. 

“You aren’t, like… leavin’ tonight, though, right?” Melody asked, turning back to him and bringing him up from the slough of his thoughts, “It’s, like… almost midnight, you wouldn’t be able to catch much hitchhikin’ fare at this time of night.”

Weaver pursed his lips dully, “It isn’t really a matter of ‘likeliness’, Melody. I’m sure I will find something, don’t worry.”

“But–” Melody blurted, throwing her hands up in the air frustratedly, “We just finished killing this fuckin’ thing! Don’t you need to, like, rest first?”

“I’ll rest on the road,” Weaver sighed, shaking his head, “My prepaid tenure at the hostel I’ve been staying at ended last night. Which, in hindsight, makes sense, I suppose. I don’t even have anywhere to stay the night tonight. I was going to extend my stay there, but I suppose I have no need to now.”

“Then—” Melody stammered, eyes a touch wild as she gestured at him, “Fuckin’... I’ll put you up for a night! There’s a couch at my place, and fuck what my housemates say about it, they bring people over all the time without askin’ me!”

“Melody–” Weaver began, holding up a forceful hand as he crammed as much desperate pertinence into his voice as it would carry, but both his words and every drop of the strength behind them died out in his throat as something flickered into his vision once again.

The thread. Violet and shining, tracing an urgent, striking path through the air, from the bow of the Key at his chest, leading directly into the clavicle of Melody Walsh, whose gaze was practically forlorn as she stared at him, wide-eyed and waiting. 

What the hell do you want from me!? Weaver all but shouted, glancing down to eye the Key irately, You just told me to leave, now– what do you want me to do!?

The Key did nothing in response. It had never responded to anything he’d ever asked it, of course. From the very beginning of all history of human life, the only thing the Key had ever done was tell him what to do. 

“Come on, Weaver,” Melody’s voice came again, almost uncharacteristically gentle, prompting him to look up at her incredulously. She laid a gloved hand on his shoulder, which only made the tight little ball in his gut screw up further, and continued, “Just take it easy in the Big Fuckin’ Easy for one more night, cher. We’ll get ya sorted to leave tomorrow morning. Can’t ya do that, at least?”

Weaver searched his mind for the words to deny her, but whatever they might have been, they didn’t come. The thread didn’t need to reappear, he felt its pull all the same. He sighed softly, tearing his eyes away from his friend’s gaze for a moment to stare away, trying to make the pieces all slot together in his mind. 

The Key only ever points to three things. Things I need to destroy, things I need to save, and things I need to solve.

Melody Walsh doesn’t need saving. And she certainly doesn’t need destroying.

Have I… solved her, though?

It was a paltry excuse for a rationalization, he knew. But then again, he couldn’t understand what was being asked of him, if not that. He admitted, he’d spent all this time getting to know Melody Walsh, that he’d taken to enjoying the pleasure of her presence more than he’d put any effort into understanding what the Key wanted him to really do with her.

Why did she have those etched lines all over her body? And why did they move, on occasion, in situations of danger and delight?

Why did he find that he cared so much about her? So much more than any other humans he’d ever encountered within his vast memory?

“Alright,” the word tumbled out from his lips like a rush of air from a cracked tomb, before he could even think to stop it, “Just for this night, though. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

The grin that split Melody’s face was wider than any he had ever worn himself. And despite himself, he almost immediately found his own lips curling upwards as well as the sight. 

“Alright!” Melody declared, standing up from her stool proudly and hoisting her wrench over her shoulder, clearly squashing any room he might have had to renege last-minute, “It’s a comfy couch, I promise. Come on! I think we can still grab the midnight streetcar to South Seventh!”

Before Weaver could even respond, Melody had whipped past him towards the door of the wrecked Mid-City bar, ink-lined hand wrapping around his bandaged forearm to drag him out into the night after her. 

He followed her, simply. He’d found he enjoyed following Melody Walsh much more than anything else, anyway. 

~~~

“What is he, your boyfriend?” asked the brown-haired young woman that Melody had briefly addressed as ‘Amy’. Amy leaned against the door to the kitchen of Melody’s shotgun house unit, arms folded and glaring at the pair with a hint of disgust reflected in the sneer of her lip.

“No, he ain’t,” Melody droned in response, rolling her eyes and shoving forward past the brunette, who span out of the way of the shoulder-check with a huff and a teeth-bearing glare. Weaver awkwardly brushed past to follow Melody, casting Amy an attempt at an apologetic look, for which all he received was a middle finger. 

“You better not be her boyfriend,” Amy hissed, “I don’t want my morning coffee tomorrow morning to have to be spent looking at–”

“Shut it, Amy,” Melody’s voice sounded gravelly as she tossed her wrench aside to a cot set up to the side of the room, “He’s just a friend of mine who’s gonna sleep on the couch tonight, he’ll prolly be outta your hair before ya even get up tomorrow. He’s not my fuckin’ boyfriend, you know I don’t fuckin’ date.”

“She’s telling the truth,” Weaver tried helpfully, adjusting the strap of his night bag over his shoulder uncomfortably beneath Amy’s withering stare, “I am certainly not her boyfriend. Friend, yes. Boy, only currently, as of recent, and likely not permanently.”

Amy’s stare lost a slight touch of its impact, her eyebrow quirking in bewilderment. Which, frankly, only made Weaver feel more awkward. Eventually, she scoffed, rolled her eyes, and spun away from the pair, striding away to a different side door off of the main living room.

“Come on, Dustin,” Amy harshed, gesturing to the young shirtless gentleman, apparently Melody’s other housemate. The young curly-haired man had been stood in the center of the small entranceway, mouth agape and cheeks reddened at Weaver since the moment he’d walked through the door. Eventually, Amy seemed to have to grab him by the arm and drag him through the door to break his practically unblinking gawk.

The door swung shut behind Melody’s housemates at last. After a few seconds of silence, during which Melody made pointed eye contact with Weaver and began counting down on her fingers, a muffled cacophony of vaguely rhythmic nature began to pump out from behind the door through which they had disappeared.

“What… is that racket?” Weaver asked with a frown, turning to Melody and raising an eyebrow.

“Got me,” Melody shrugged with a grumble, “I don’t think she actually listens to any artists whose handles aren’t written in fuckin’ Leetspeak or some shit…”

Weaver tilted his head in confusion at that, but sensing Melody was already breezing past the issue, he resolved to just hum and awkwardly cough into his hand, all of a sudden feeling incredibly displaced within the cramped house. 

“I hope I didn’t say anything to offend,” He murmured, casting a glance back at the doorway to what he assumed must be Amy and Dustin’s room, “I could always–”

“You didn’t,” Melody shook her head and slapped him on the shoulder, “Amy was always gonna be offended by ya no matter what you said. It’s how the bitch is.”

Weaver gulped. 

How… incredibly reassuring. 

“Anyway,” Melody clapped her hands, snapping Weaver’s attention back to her and off of the issue of his propriety, “The couch is in the living room. You can use the blanket draped over the back, and if ya need extra pillows, I can grab ‘em. This is my room, I’ll be in here.”

Weaver blinked, glancing back down to where Melody was gesturing. The cot on which she had tossed her wrench was surrounded by a few small items of furniture, a bedside table and a chest at the foot. There was a closet that seemed a touch small and cramped, resulting in the cot and surrounding floor being populated by several articles of women’s clothing lying neglected and unfolded. As Weaver took a step back, he noticed that the mess was only subdivided from the rest of the kitchen by a thin line of masking tape on the floor. It looked fresh - he figured that it must be replaced or maintained often.

“This is… your ‘room’?” he asked hesitantly, not wanting to offend with his curiosity, “It’s… homey.”

“It’s tiny, pathetic, and sad,” Melody laughed, shaking her head and puffing out her single pillow, “Go on, drop your shit off.”

“...your self-awareness refreshes, as ever,” Weaver puffed awkwardly, taking a few steps backwards and out of the kitchen before turning to deposit his single bag beside the couch. They had picked it up from where he’d stashed it after leaving his hostel on the way over from Bar Lylou. It didn’t really have much other than a couple of changes of clothes, some grooming products, his journal, and a few other essentials, so it wasn’t even a full-size duffel. 

“Thank you again,” he noted to Melody as she joined him in the living room again, leaning over the back of the couch, “It will be nice to get night’s sleep before going on the road, I suppose. It’s a rarity, for me, actually.”

Melody smiled brightly at that, glancing away for a moment in an expression Weaver was uncertain of, before she clapped him on the shoulder merrily yet again.

“Don’t mention it,” she chuckled smarmily, “I mean, it’s an overpriced, cramped fuckin’ dump of a place, but I owe ya one. Well, we’ve already lost track ‘a who’s saved whose skin more, but let’s go ahead and assume I owe ya one.”

“Fair enough,” Weaver smiled back at her. Melody stuck her tongue out cheekily at him and reached up to ruffle the hair atop his head. It was a strange gesture, but it made something nestled at his very core that he hadn’t even known was cold seem to warm up. 

“Bathroom’s through the kitchen,” Melody then noted, moving from her stance behind the couch to exit the room again, talking over her shoulder, “Then you’re in the room Dustin uses to store his arcade machine collection. It’s the right door off that room, between Mrs. PAC-Man and House of the Dead 2. I’m takin’ first shower, you should probably get one in too, we smell like shit.”

“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed,” Weaver dared to crack the small joke. Melody cackled loudly at him as she walked away, remaining audible even after she’d left through the door in the kitchen and was being drowned out by the sound of Amy’s ‘music’.

Almost the instant he heard the faint hissing of a shower starting up, the dam of his politeness-repressed curiosity ruptured, and he found his legs shooting up from underneath him as he stood.

I suppose… would it be terribly rude if I…?

There wasn’t much point in the lingering thoughts, of course. If Weaver really was meant to ‘solve’ Melody Walsh, then there was only one thing to do; he ought to get to understand her as best as he could, in what little time he had. And the only real way to get to know who someone was, in his experience, was to go rummaging through their shit while they weren’t looking. 

On lightened feet, he moved back into the kitchen, approaching the taped-off corner that comprised Melody’s bedroom cautiously. The cot was small and cramped, with plain bedsheets and pillows, but then again, Melody wasn’t exactly a large woman in terms of height or frame. The familiar wrench laid on it, against the wall. Ever since the incident in Broadmoor which had robbed her of her mechanical job, she’d apparently just considered it hers. Certainly, more practical weapons existed, but she always did seem more satisfied when swinging the large wrench around. There were scuff marks around its heavy end already, from the long list of things it had bludgeoned to smithereens over the course of the time the two of them had known each other already. 

Weaver shook his head, tearing his eyes away and forcing himself to keep moving. His decency forced him to be careful about trodding on any of her clothing strewn about the floor, so he cautiously approached the small bedside table. Her phone was left there, as were the earbuds that she always had either draped around her neck or in her ear. A tap on the home button demonstrated that her lock screen wallpaper was a small picture of a stereotypical UFO in neon green against a black background, she current song that she had paused midway through on her earbuds was Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd, and she had no other notifications of any kind. The only other objects on her bedside table were a few empty tall-size cans of Nytros Cherry Energy Soda, a tissue box, and a half-completed punchcard for $10 off at a local all-you-can-eat crawfish restaurant. 

There’s no… Weaver frowned, glancing around the bedside table for a possible drawer, but finding none, …there’s no… hobby paraphernalia, no interest reading, no… bloody nick-nacks, I mean… how does anyone make it to young adulthood without anything of sentimental value?

He hadn’t been initially intending on investigating the large chest at the foot of the bed. It was padlocked, and he’d thought that that would be too much a breach of privacy, even in the pursuit of whatever duty the Key actually wanted him to see about with her. 

As curiosity overwhelmed him, though, he sighed, made sure everything on the table was put back just where it was meant to go, and knelt down in front of the chest. The keyway of the padlock engorged as the Key approached it, allowing the Key to be slotted in and turn, popping the shackle and allowing Weaver to unloop it. On a quick double-check, he verified that the shower was, indeed, still going, and he hefted the lid of the chest aloft to gaze down into it. 

Collected in the chest were a pair of scuffed-looking steel brass knuckles, a ratty binder of legal identification documents, a grass-stained baseball, an empty camouflage backpack, a framed high-school graduation certificate with cracked glass, a set of wrist and ankle weights, and what appeared to be a mason jar full of sewing supplies. 

Weaver frowned, furrowed his brow, and set the lid of the chest back down, relatching the lock and sitting back on his hands with a soft hum of confusion.

…is that… it?

There was at least more there. The baseball indicated she’d played at one point, and elected to hold onto that specific ball for some reason or another. The graduation certificate told him that she was an alumnus of Warren Easton Charter High School, class of 2018, with a respectable GPA. The series of legal documents had told him that she didn’t actually have a middle name, for whatever reason. And the sewing supplies told him that, well… she could sew. 

Am I supposed to do something with that? Weaver wondered, standing and casting another glance around the ‘bedroom’, an odd glum feeling seeming to sink into him, Why would the thread be so insistent I take her up on her offer if I wasn’t meant to find something here? I mean, I understand that, given as little space as she has here, she wouldn’t have much spare room for extra possessions, but this is just…

He shook his head, not allowing the final word of that internal remark to jostle free. 

No, he castigated himself, gritting his teeth and flexing his fingers regretfully at his sides, She’s your friend, and you’ve already invaded her privacy enough. You’ve no space to judge.

The door clicked open abruptly, causing Weaver to practically jump back in surprise, quickly stepping away and back over the tape line on the floor by a few paces. He’d been so caught up in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard the water stop. 

“Yo,” Melody greeted with a small wave, seeming completely unsurprised and unsuspicious. She’d changed into loungewear, a cropped tank top and loose sweatpants, and was carrying her former clothing in an unfolded heap under her arm. But more striking than that…

“Melody?” Weaver blinked, taken slightly aback by what he saw, “It hasn’t been… several years since you went to have your shower, has it?”

Melody frowned up at him in confusion, tossing her clothes onto her bed haphazardly, “Uh… no? Y’all there still, cher?”

“Well, it’s…” Weaver stammered, tilting his head in bewilderment, “Your… hair. It’s longer.”

“Oh,” Melody hummed, reaching a hand back to idly fiddle with her hair, which now suddenly seemed to reach all the way down to practically her middle back, despite having seemed cropped short only minutes prior, “Yeah. I stuff it up in my beanie. I’m too lazy to cut anything but the bangs, too cheap to get it cut by a pro, and too me to try to style it. The hat’s convenient.”

“Ah…” Weaver hummed, eyebrow twitching in consideration. He kept his own long hair tied back in a tight tail for similar reasons. He didn’t often find himself with the free time to get it cut professionally, and he didn’t trust himself to be able to cut it well enough not to call attention to his shoddy work. 

“It is sorta a pain in the fuckin’ ass to untangle sometimes, though,” the redhead remarked offhandedly, giving a little spin to flip her hair up in demonstration, “I know I oughta get it shorn off, I just keep puttin’ it off.”

Weaver blinked, not quite having actually processed what his friend had said. When she’d flipped her hair up, her upper back beneath the tank top had been exposed, and something had caught his eye that immediately piqued his curiosity again.

“Do they lead to something?” he blurted out impulsively, immediately wincing at his own tone as it left his throat.

Melody tilted her head, frowning, “The… tangles in my hair?”

“No,” Weaver corrected quickly, waving a diffusive hand, “The lines. Your tattoos. Sorry, it may be rude to ask, I just saw your back, and…”

“Oh,” Melody grunted bluntly, seeming almost disinterested, “Yeah, no, they do. Hold on.”

The redhead turned around again, sweeping a hand under her long mop of hair and holding it to the side, tilting her head down to allow Weaver to see the fullness of her back. The tank top she wore now didn’t cover nearly as much as her usual jackets did, and he could see the confluence of what seemed like every single bizarre etched line on her body. They snaked up her back, joining and splitting like rivers, all leading all the way up to the back of her neck.

Where a strange symbol was waiting to be seen, in just the same faded black ink as the rest of the lines that had spread across her skin.

What the hell? Weaver frowned immediately, leaning in to peer closer at the strange character on the back of Melody’s neck, How did I never see that before?

“I kinda keep it hidden beneath some hair on purpose,” Melody mumbled, as though reading his mind, “I got just about as much clue about what it is or means as the rest of the things, but I caught some flack for it in kiddie school. Teachers not likin’ me showing up to class with some weird occult thing or whatever showin’ off. I just keep it covered outta habit, now.”

Weaver took a deep breath, absorbing that information and, with some difficulty, pushing aside his utter bewilderment at his friend’s seeming complete lack of interest in the strange symbology populating her flesh. 

“Well,” he began slowly, peering down still at the odd, swirling character, “Speaking as perhaps the world’s foremost authority on ‘weird occult things’, I can say, even I can’t tell you exactly what this is. It’s not a character in any current human language, certainly… I don’t recognize it as anything Akkadian, Sumerian, Euphratean or Mesopotamean… or anything else linguistic, for that matter… if it’s something meant for iconographic thaumaturgy, I can’t say I recognize it as a sigil, either…”

Melody coughed impatiently, letting her hair fall back over to obscure the view again and turning back around to raise an eyebrow at him, “Yeeeeah… sure. So basically, you got about as much an idea about it as anybody else, eh?”

Weaver took an awkward step back, realizing the discomfort he might have inadvertently been causing like a cold shock of water, and nodded.

“Sorry,” he sighed, bowing his head to her, “Though… how can you even be sure it’s of the occult? For all we know, it could be a… brand logo, or something of the sort. A brand logo for babies? Blimey, that sounds like something capitalism would do.”

Melody offered a cheap chuckle of affirmation and a shrug, moving to lounge on her bed and kicking her feet up, “All I know is, my bio parents were all into that kinda shit, and that symbol was on a bunch of other stuff they had. I couldn’t read any of the rest of it, and I never bothered to find anybody who could, so.

Weaver blinked, finding his mind whirring all of a sudden. Melody had mentioned that her parents were deceased since she was young, and that they’d been some sort of undefined occultists, but she hadn’t gone into details. If they had left her anything, though, he hadn’t found any of it in his little snoop while she’d been in the shower.

“I… may be able to read it,” he mused aloud, planting a hand to his chin thoughtfully. Melody propped herself up on her arms to crane her neck at him, a bewildered expression on her face.

“Why do you care?” she asked, frowning, “I mean, last I checked, you were fixin’ to get outta N’Walins as soon as ya could, why the sudden interrogation into my life?”

“Erm…” Weaver considered his words, uncertain if or not he should really get into the threads he’d seen connecting to her, or the blossoming sense of strange care he’d begun to feel, “...call it a sense of professional curiosity. Aren’t you even the least bit interested to find out what it, and maybe also the rest of your tattoos, mean?”

Melody scrunched up her face for a few moments, seeming to stare up at the ceiling in consideration as Weaver waited, breath slow and deliberately calmed. Eventually, she let out a soft puff of a sigh and pushed herself up into a seated position at the edge of the bed, folding her arms in her lap.

“I guess,” she mused softly, before shaking her head, “22 years of no leads whatsoever does kinda train ya to stop bothering to ask, though.”

Weaver took a step forward, seating himself down on her bed beside her and placing a hand on her shoulder gently. Melody glanced up at him, confused, as he let out a light sigh of his own, gathering his words.

“I don’t have the pleasure of making friends all that often, Melody Walsh,” he mused softly, “Nor do I have the skill to make them easily. I know you’re disappointed that I’ll be leaving, but since you have been my friend, while I’ve been in your city… if you have something I’d be able to help you with before I leave, even if it’s just providing some small answers to a few questions you have, I’d be more than happy to do that for you. If you’d like.”

Melody glanced to the side, away from him for a moment, expression unreadable. Weaver glanced down at her lap, where she was scratching the lines on one of her forearms idly with her other hand, seemingly caught up in thought. He allowed her her silence, and after a short time, she turned back to him, a small smirk tugging her lips upwards and a determined look in her eyes.

“Alright,” she nodded, “So long as ya don’t mind getting stuck around here for at least a little bit of tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Weaver nodded back with a smile, “Where are these… items, you mentioned? The ones from your parents?”

“They’re at my parents’ place.”

Weaver blinked, “It… hasn’t been… moved into since they died?”

“No, no,” Melody laughed, shaking her head, “When I got found after my bio parents kicked it, I got passed around the system for a while, and then I got adopted. There’s a box of the stuff tucked up in the attic of my adoptive parents’ place, the state gave it to me when I got out of the system. Apparently, it was all the effects they could salvage outta my bio parents’ place.”

“All they could… salvage?” Weaver questioned.

“It burned down,” Melody grunted simply, neglecting all further elaboration when Weaver tilted his head at her. 

“Anyway,” the redhead said quickly, “Me and my folks aren’t… really on speakin’ terms, per se… I wasn’t intending to go bug ‘em again before… well, anyway. They should both be working tomorrow, we can sneak in.”

“Erm… sure?” Weaver mumbled, confused at her tone. Melody simply laughed, seeming to find his expression funny, and abruptly pushed him off of her bed and towards the door.

“Great!” she quipped, “We’ll do that in the morning. Now go shower, cher, ya still stink of sweat.”

Weaver scoffed in mock affront, which made Melody laugh once again, which made him smile. He quickly grabbed a pair of comfortable sleep clothes from his bag and made his way into the bathroom as directed to shower.

Even though he didn’t spy any threads snaking out of it, he could swear he could feel the cool metal of the Key thrumming impatiently against his skin as the hot water hit it.

Be patient, for once, he scolded, the bizarre sense of recalcitrance making him feel a strange soaring sensation in his chest, You wanted me to solve her. She’s my friend now, that’s your fault. Whatever else your Web has in store can wait for that. 

I’ve been doing as I’m told for as long as I can remember. Longer, even.

You owe me this, by now. You owe me a bloody friend.

What Weaver didn’t see that night, as Melody had already shut off the lights and started to pretend to be asleep by the time he got out of the shower, was the backpack he’d seen in the chest having been filled up and tucked securely under Melody’s bed, out of sight.

She didn’t have much to take. And she wouldn’t miss what she left behind.

~~~

They still hadn’t gotten around to rebuilding the lot at the very end of the street. The one seated at practically the closest point to the more touristy French Quarter without actually leaving the adjacent faubourg of Maringy. Like a boil on the face of it, sticking out where aimless tourists who wandered too far off Bourbon Street could happen upon it. 

Melody took a second to remember the last time she’d laid eyes on that now-vacant lot as she and Weaver turned onto the all-too-familiar street. Her friend glanced at her strangely, seeming uncertain as to why she was holding up. 

She was a little confused at herself, too, come to think of it. 

C’mon, Melody shook her head abruptly to clear it and resumed her gait. Weaver was a lot taller than she was, but on the streets of her city, he didn’t need to slow his roll for her sake. Even with so much trepidation as she suddenly felt clawing its way up her gut, so long as Melody Walsh was in New Orleans, Louisiana, she would move with purpose.

“This is the road, it’s not much farther,” she said over her shoulder to Weaver, who was tagging closely along behind her. 

“This is a nice neighborhood,” Weaver commented idly, his eyes tracing over all the brightly-coloured houses with their uniform white trims and white-potted plants as they strolled by.

“It’s a suburb,” Melody shrugged with the single arm that wasn’t holding her wrench, “It looks like every other suburb.”

“I like suburbs,” Weaver nodded along, “The people who live in them are never anything like you’d think they’d be from the looks of their houses. You get to be my age, sometimes you like to be left guessing.”

“I guess,” Melody snorted at the look of the bizarrely wistful expression on her companion’s face. 

“Why did you bring those?” Weaver then asked, gesturing to the wrench in her hand and bag slung over her other shoulder, “Aren’t we just going to be sneaking into your parents’ house?”

“This is full of break-in shit we might need!” Melody responded quickly, wiggling the backpack for emphasis, “And as for the wrench, I ain’t gonna claim to know what the fuck we might run into on the way! Especially since you’re here! Ya just told me last night you’re practically a destiny magnet for evil shit! And you brought your glove, anyway!”

Weaver held up his hands, eyes widened, looking a little taken aback. Melody gritted her teeth and quickly glanced away, cursing inwardly at her own nerves. 

It had been almost five whole years since she’d even seen the place. She’d never visited. She’d always figured she’d be driven out with pointy things if she had. 

“I suppose that’s fair,” Weaver mumbled defensively, adjusting the strap of his own duffel awkwardly, “Though, given that I’m at least not currently planning to stab either of your adoptive parents, I’m not sporting my glove at the moment…”

“Real reassurin’,” Melody laughed, attempting to exhale as much of her internal tension as possible as she did so, “But honestly, having seen ya scrap, I’m not sure they’d be the ones I would be…”

Her voice trailed off, and all efforts to mitigate the tightness of anxiety in her chest proved worthless as the place finally came into view.

It’s… different.

It took Melody a few seconds of searching her memory to pinpoint all the differences that the past five years had apparently made. The narrow 2.5 storey house was the same colour of bright sky blue it had always been, with the same white trim and columns, the same deeper sea blue gables beneath the rims of the asphalt shingle roof. It looked as though it had been painted, though; the worst of the scrapes and sun-bleaching that she remembered wasn’t visible anymore. The plants that decorated the porch and stoop had been changed out, and the three wooden steps that led up to said porch appeared to have been rebuilt at some point. There was a new Pride flag hung from an upstairs window, fluttering in the light breeze. 

And there was a new sign. 

Joseph Home Conjure Shop was open, as said the chalkboard sign out by the sidewalk. Peering in, Melody could see a few people milling about in the front room even now. 

The shop is still open after all, Melody thought, a strange feeling of relief coming over her that soothed anxieties she hadn’t even detected until their absence, Good. And it looks like there’s even business in right now…

“A conjure shop?” Weaver asked, stepping up beside Melody and glancing over at her, piquing his brow.

“The shop is just the front room,” Melody nodded, “We–They live in the other half of the ground floor and the second floor. Then there’s the attic, which is just storage.”

“But… do they work in the front room, then?” Weaver questioned, sounding a little more nervous now, “I thought you said they would be gone!”

“Well, I said they would be at work,” Melody smiled with a sigh and a shrug, “If it works the same as it did back when, then Pascal will be workin’ at the Jazz Museum, and Dorian will be mindin’ the shop. Don’t worry, looks like she’ll be busy.”

Weaver shot her a somewhat incredulous look, but didn’t voice any more complaints. 

Good thing he’s letting me take the lead, Melody sighed in her mind, Now here’s just hopin’ to high hell I’m right…

“Come on, let’s hop the fence,” she directed, leading Weaver to the small side alley that would lead them around back of the house, “We can get in through the backyard.”

“There are backyards in this neighborhood?” Weaver frowned, peering around at the incredibly proximal placement of all the boxy houses around.

“There’s, like… six square feet of herb garden and a smoking corner,” Melody shrugged, “We always just called it the backyard. Just come on, cher.”

Melody rounded the corner of the alley, Weaver quickly in tow, and settled her eyes on the backyard, separated by a high wrought-iron gate inset into a thick concrete wall. With a running start, she planted her converse-clad foot squarely atop a horizontal bar in the gate, before launching herself upwards and to the side, where she swept her legs up to the right where they would clear the concrete. With a deft three-point landing, she glanced back up with a satisfied smirk at the eight-foot height she had just cleared, before glancing back at Weaver through the bars of the gate expectantly.

Weaver raised his eyebrow at her, walked forward, inserted his Key into the lock of the gate, and twisted it. The gate swung open immediately, and he gently closed it behind him before walking up to join her.

“You are so joyless sometimes,” Melody sniped, smiling exasperatedly and jabbing an elbow into his side.

“Modern slang is always so hard to keep up with,” Weaver shot back with a smirk, “Just to be clear, you were complimenting my sense of practicality and reason, yes?”

Melody stuck out her tongue in mock disgust, before gesturing towards the back door of the house, “Alright, smartass, get us in.”

Weaver cocked his brow in amusement, “Oh? Didn’t you say that unlocking doors normally ‘wasn’t your vibe’?”

“I’m not gonna break down the back door of my fuckin’ parents’ house, Weaver,” Melody made to gesture dramatically with both hands, before she remembered that she was still carrying her heavy wrench in one, and promptly hid it behind her back with a sly chuckle. Weaver rolled his eyes and stepped forward, bending down to slot the key into the keyhole of the doorknob. As Melody watched, the keyhole seemed to grow and reformat itself to fit the shape of Weaver’s Key as it approached, only to return to its usual shape as soon as the door had been unlocked and the key removed.

“After you, then,” Weaver motioned, opening the door a crack and standing to the side to allow Melody through. 

Melody made to step forward, realized that her legs hadn’t moved, gritted her teeth and growled at them to get back in line, and then stepped forward back into her old home at last. 

The dual-purpose dining room and kitchen, which the back door led directly into, had actually changed quite a bit since Melody had last seen it. The table was on a different end of the space, the cabinets had been repainted to a matcha green, and the floor appeared to have been re-tiled at some point. That was honestly a lot more in line with what she had been expecting.

They were never too stingy about changing things up, Melody thought, motioning Weaver in and being careful about her footing, recalling all the specific areas where the floor would squeak under her feet late at night growing up, They probably just kept the shopfront lookin’ the same for the sake of local iconicity. I doubt much of anything else is gonna be exactly how I remember.

“...’ll be 15.79, can I give you a bag for that? Okay, you have a lovely…”

The muffled voice, familiar but startling, came through the wall, causing every muscle in Melody’s body to stiffen. 

Right. There’s only a three-inch-thick wall between us and the back of the counter, where she’ll be.

Despite herself, despite everything, Melody allowed herself to imagine what it might be like if they were to get caught. 

Not what it would be like. What it might be like. That was a much more comfortable thing to imagine.

“Melody?” Weaver asked, thankfully having the good sense to keep his voice just barely above a whisper. Melody firmed fists at her sides to jolt herself back to reality, nodded to her companion briefly, and began moving towards the nearby staircase. 

The stairwell up to the second floor was carpeted, a change that Melody was thankful to see, for the added noise dampening. Weaver followed her lead on which squeaky steps to skip, and the pair emerged into the upstairs hallway. The doors to Melody’s immediate left and right would be the guest room and the upstairs bathroom, so long as the layout hadn’t changed. The way to the attic was a pull-down ladder inset into the ceiling to the far end of the hall, right in between the master bedroom, where Dorian and Pascal slept, and…

…my room, Melody remembered like a hailstone to the gut, staring at the familiar closed door, Or, well. Whatever the fuck they woulda made it into, after I left.

“Is that you?” Weaver asked from somewhere behind her. Melody turned, thankful for the chance to tear her eyes away, only to take another hit right in the same place as she saw what he was gesturing to.

They had taken the picture that hung on the wall in 2014. It had been her first day of high school, barrelling straight for the ninth grade in a brand-new school after only barely making it through middle school, having been one disciplinary action away from expulsion for the latter half of her final year. Pascal had insisted he take a picture of the family, and had set up the old camera on a tripod and a timer. He’d set the timer too short, though, so his face had ended up blurred in the final picture, as he’d been rushing to get into place. They hadn’t retaken it because Melody, no older than 14, gawky and thin with acne dotting her chin, baby blue blouse and green pleated skirt that Dorian had forced her into for the occasion, had refused to allow more than one take. 

Something burned inside Melody at the sight of the picture, and it wasn’t her fire. 

“Come on,” she said softly, turning away and feeling Weaver’s inquisitive gaze on her as she pointedly continued down the hallway, “You’re taller than me, you gotta reach the string to pull the ladder down.”

Weaver followed along silently for all of five steps. More than Melody had expected, actually; she’d been able to smell the reek of his curiosity radiating off of him all morning, and it had only intensified the instant they’d set foot in this house.

“Which one of these is your room?” he asked, glancing around as he stepped underneath the string.

“That one,” Melody motioned with her chin, but fixed him with a stare, “But that doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t you want to see it?” Weaver asked, taking an errant step towards the door.

“Weaver-” Melody said just a touch too loudly in warning, her hand whipping out to try to stop her friend, but he had already whisked just out of reach of where she was standing, and the door clicked open beneath his palm. 

Melody gaped, dread and treacherous curiosity beginning to curdle in her stomach, as the door’s loose hinges prompted it to swing open the rest of the way unbidden. Weaver let out a soft, neutral hum, before stepping aside, no longer blocking Melody’s view inside.

It…

It’s…

…exactly the same.

Her boxboard-based double bed was made to pristinity, tucked up in the corner against the chipping celadon walls. The entire wall adjacent to the bed was still covered footboard to ceiling in posters, photos, stickers, clippings, and concert ticket stubs. Her old schoolbag still hung from the hook by the door. The knick-knack shelf she had salvaged from a neighbor’s garbage was still nailed to the wall and covered with all the useless little things her teenage self could never bring herself to throw away. There were still all the DVD movies she’d seen a billion times each, stacked messily next to the bed, practically acting like a second bedside table with their height. 

There wasn’t a thing out of place. It was as though five years hadn’t even touched it. 

“Why…” Melody murmured, the words seeming to slip out unbidden, “...why the fuck would they keep all this crap…?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Melody could just barely make out Weaver cast her a flat, apprehensive look as her eyes remained fixed on the looming doorway. 

“On a guess,” Weaver’s voice came, practically sounding muffled amid the cacophony echoing in Melody’s mind, “I would wager because… you’re their daughter?”

Melody turned at last to look at her friend. She hadn’t the faintest idea what expression she wore on her face in that moment, but whatever it was, it was enough to make him recoil slightly, eyes widening. 

She checked her cheeks for tears. Thankful to find none, she cast one more forlorn glance into the room she’d known, and felt the heat on her back once again.

“What have you done, you… you… monster child!?”

Melody gritted her teeth, stepped forwards, and gently closed the door to her old room once again.

“Let’s just get the fuckin’ box, cher,” she murmured dully. This time, Weaver obeyed without issue.

Melody caught the ladder as it descended after Weaver tugged down the string to the hatch, careful to not let it bang on the floor, before handing off her wrench to Weaver. There weren’t any lights in the attic, which was used almost exclusively for storage, so Melody dug out her phone to flick the flashlight on and began to climb up the rickety rungs.

“It’s a pretty low ceiling up there,” she murmured to Weaver, “You’d have to duck, I’ll be fine. Keep watch down here. If ya hear any doors open downstairs, real quick tuck the hatch back up and find someplace to hide.”

“You’ll be alright to carry the box down on your own?” he queried hesitantly.

“Of course!” Melody slapped him on the shoulder, “Come on, ya got no room to pull the gentleman card now, cher.”

With that, and a soft chuckle of self-imposed levity at Weaver’s exasperated expression, Melody headed up the ladder and into the attic. There was a great deal of spare furniture and boxes stored up there, as the Josephs had inherited a lot of their extended family’s excess junk over the years, so she quickly set to moving some things out of the way as quietly as possible to allow her to traverse.

The last time I saw that box was, like… I dunno, more than a decade ago, she frowned, brushing a thick cobweb out of the way with her hand and shining her phone-light around, But if I remember right, should be… about the size of a moving box, made of orange wood… buckles and metal corners, and some writing on the front… ah.

It was just as Melody shoved an old green armchair with a destroyed seat out of the way that she found it. Nestled deep into the triangular corner of the steeped-roof attic, behind everything else where it could be left forgotten. Melody remembered only now that she’d found it there that this was exactly where she’d put it away all those years ago, as if hiding it away behind a wall of boxes and furniture that would never be used again meant it would never come back.

Guess I was wrong. Maybe, for once, some good will come outta that.

Thankfully, the box was a lot lighter than Melody remembered it being; Her being almost twelve years older and significantly more muscular likely contributed to that. She hefted it up by the two iron handles to the sides, toting it back over to the ladder, through which light continued to stream.

“Eyes up, I’m comin’ down,” she hissed down to Weaver, who she could see was assuming a ready stance at the bottom of the ladder to catch her, just in case. She rolled her eyes and scoffed at that, almost haughtily taking the rungs down, even with carrying the chest meant she was left inherently off-balance, just to–

Snap!

One of the rungs splintered off beneath the combined weight of her and the hefty box. 

Melody let out a sharp, involuntary yelp as she suddenly fell backwards, the box tumbling directly out of her hands to clatter loudly on the floor. Weaver caught her, hands under her arms, muttering a sharp curse under his breath as Melody breathed heavily, momentarily delirious from the sudden shock.

A door suddenly slammed open on the ground floor, the sound of harsh bootsteps echoing up the stairs. 

“Oh, mèd,” Melody growled, shaking herself out of her shock and scrambling for the box, “Weaver, window!”

“Win– what!?” Weaver exclaimed at her, appalled, “What the bloody hell do you mean, window!? It’s just your mother, I’m not going to–”

“Damn fuckin’ right it’s just her!” Melody screeched, “That’s exactly what– ohhh, fuck.”

Melody trailed off into a growl of frustration and dread as the bootsteps suddenly began to take the stairs two at a time. She found herself shrinking back, nearly trying to hide behind the box out of instinct, as Weaver stared at her incredulously, only for his eyes to widen as he looked back at the top of the stairwell as the figure ascended into view.

Dorian Joseph was a taller Haitian woman, around five foot eight, with an enormous head of curly hair cinched up atop her head in a loose, frizzy bun. She wore striking black leather boots, loose green sweatpants designed to disguise as jeans, and a loose-flowing black shirt. Her hoop earrings were enormous, her glasses were pushed up intensely against her freckled, weathered face, and between both arms she probably bore upwards of thirty bracelets and ten rings. 

She was also holding a Colima machete aloft, her gaze whipping wildly between where Melody sat hunched on the floor, and where Weaver stood beside the still-lowered ladder, Melody’s wrench in hand, and appalled expression on his face.

A buzz of electric silence passed as Dorian seemed to scan Melody first, mind clearly whirring rapidly and confusedly before moving to Weaver, where her eyes settled and flashed with hot fire at the sight of the Key hanging at his chest.

“Uhm… nice to meet you?” Weaver broached innocently. He didn’t know Dorian like Melody did. He didn’t know that look. He didn’t know.

“Salaud de bâtard de tisserand!” Dorian’s heavy voice bellowed, and raising the machete aloft, she lunged.

~~~

Weaver let out a long, suffering sigh, sinking into his chair and pressing the ice pack closer against the purpling welt forming just above his left temple. 

I’d ask them to keep it down, for the sake of my headache, he mused glumly, glancing over at the source of the racket filling the kitchen he was now seated in, If I didn’t think it would only earn me another bump and bruise or two…

“Five years!” Dorian Joseph was shouting, her voice carrying the confident force of someone who wore their Creole accent like a badge of honour, “Five years! Ya don’ visit, ya don’ even call the phone, I don’ see you for half a decade, and the first time I do, you’re breakin’ inna my house!? Like a burglar!?”

“I wasn’t gonna steal anything!” Melody exclaimed in return from where she was seated on the counter, making Dorian scoff and pace a few steps back, seeming to need to vent steam through the movement, “That box was mine anyway, it ain’t like–”

“That’s not the point!” Dorian wheeled back on Melody, pointing an accusatory ringed finger and making the redhead flinch in a way Weaver had never seen before, “Do ya think I care about that stupid box!? I care that ya felt ya had to break inna my house to get at it, when I wasn’t around! Ya’d rather break an’ enter than see your mother, huh!? Really!?”

Melody spluttered, looking shocked, “But I thought–”

“Don’t ya say that word to me, ya weren’t ‘thinking’ at all, young lady!” Dorian stepped up close to Melody, staring down at her and pointing her finger directly in her face, before spinning back around to point at Weaver, “And bringin’ this one in wit’ ya! A stranger, and this stranger, no less, in my house, all because ya just couldn’t come in the god-damn front and say hello to your mother!”

“Oi,” Weaver grumbled, holding up his free hand in surrender, “Don’t fire at the bloody medical tent, you keep your war over there…”

“Dorian-” Melody began, seeming bewildered, though she immediately recoiled as the older woman’s blazing ire only whipped directly back onto her.

“Dorian!?” Dorian seemed to emphasize each syllable of her own name in a searing, disbelieving way, “Ya call me ‘Dorian’ in my own house!? To my face, girl!? I am your mother, ya better call me as much, at least so long as I got ya under my roof again!”

Melody’s eyes widened at that, and her eyebrows practically shot to the ceiling. Whilst she’d been fairly loud and argumentative thus far in the debate, so far as Weaver had witnessed after his brief stint of unconsciousness, matching her mother’s temper, Melody now seemed to need a few moments to collect herself.

“...Ma,” Melody eventually croaked out, face twisted up as though the word itself tasted sharp on her tongue, “I thought ya didn’t want to see me. I sorta got left off with a pretty clear message about that the last time I saw ya.”

“And in five years, ya never thought to check back in to see if that had changed!?” Dorian fumed back, planting her many-ringed hands on her hips and looming titanically over Melody.

“Why would I have!?” Melody threw up her hands in frustration, “It ain’t like you ever reached out to me, either!”

“And why should ya expect your mother with a bum hip to walk all the way to wherever-ya-live!?” Dorian shook her head sternly, “It wouldn’t have killed ya to at least leave a message on the phone, now would it!?”

“You don’t even know how to use the answering machine!”

“It’s been half a god-damn decade, I learned!”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know that!?”

“Don’t you swear like that in my house, Melody! Just because ya’ve been gone doesn’t mean the rules have changed!”

“Fuck off, I’m a fuckin’ adult! I’ll swear all the fuckin’ time, if I want!”

Some element of Weaver’s long, pained eyeroll must have been audible, as despite Dorian’s mouth curling open on the verge of another, likely even louder retort, both women abruptly spun back on him, near identical silencing glares resplendent on each of their faces, prompting him to reel back in fear.

“You look like ya got somethin’ to say,” Dorian growled, pacing towards him confrontationally, “Go on, Weaver, do ya got somethin’ to say to me?”

“I-I–” Weaver stammered, allowing the ice pack to fall from his head so as to hold both hands up between them disarmingly, “I was just thinking… I suppose that, well… I mean…”

He gulped. Both Melody and Dorian’s unblinking gazes remained burning into him, robbing him of his breath as his brain raced to find some combination of elusive words that would rescue him.

“I suppose…” he finally gasped out, feeling sweat pooling at his back, “I just… understand where Melody gets it from now…?”

The ensuing silence was somehow even more deafening than the thunderous row between the women had been just moments before. After a too-long moment, Melody rolled her eyes long and high, whilst Dorian fixed Weaver with a deeply unimpressed look and scoffed.

“How do ya know who he is, anyway?” Melody asked, hopping down from the counter and striding over, turning back to Dorian. Weaver felt a rush of relief as their gazes both finally left him, and he scooped up the ice pack from the floor to press back against his head.

“How?” Dorian scoffed, folding her arms and leaning to the side against a cupboard, “Please. Every old wise woman worth their weight in shit has heard of the Weaver.”

Melody frowned, “You’re… not old. You’re, like… what, 55, or something, right?”

“Always with the ‘The’,” Weaver grumbled under his breath, rolling his eyes once again, “I hate the bloody ‘The’, just call me Weaver, please…”

Dorian looked back over at him, her face still scrunched up in disapproval, though at least a bit less scathing than it had been. She scoffed, tearing her eyes away just as quickly, and seemed to stare down at the floor, stiff in her posture as she picked out words from her mind. 

“Ma’ gigi,” the older woman finally said, turning back to Weaver with a frown, “She ran inna you in ‘17. The last time you were in Louisiana. Looked around afterwards, figured out what and who ya were, and she passed the story down. That’s the first place I ever heard of ya.”

Melody blinked, turning back to Weaver, “You were in Louisiana in 1917?”

“I… suppose?” Weaver frowned, shaking his head, “That would have been… well, I think I can still remember bits and pieces of that lifetime, but it’s foggy, now…”

“Was that when you were the black lady?” Melody inquired.

“No,” Weaver shook his head again, “The one before that… I was Russian then, actually. I recall it being difficult to socially navigate the time periods of both World Wars with that accent… I recall that I was in America for a while back then, but I’m afraid I don’t recall many specifics…”

“I don’t know what ya were huntin’,” Dorian shook her head, “Either ma’ gigi didn’t know either, or she just didn’t pass that part down. What I do know is, whatever it was, it got her first husband before ya got it. That’s the story I knew that Key from, never thought I’d really have to run into ya, though…”

Weaver sighed, nodding softly as he absorbed that information, feeling the expectant stare of Dorian sinking into his scalp as he gazed down at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he tightened his lips and met the older woman’s gaze at last, setting the ice pack on the table and lacing his fingers earnestly on the table in front of him, “It’s a rarity that I eliminate a threat before it harms anyone. But I promise, this time, I’m not here because there’s any kind of threat to you or your family.”

Dorian cocked a thick brow at him, tilting her chin up to stare down at where he sat.

“Then just what are ya here for, then?” she asked slowly and cautiously, voice low, “Because I don’t remember ever hearin’ of ya settin’ foot somewhere there was nothing to kill.”

“He’s my friend, ma,” Melody cut in abruptly, spinning round to stand straight between Weaver and her mother, “He’s been stickin’ by me for a while, now. He’s here because I told him about that box and what was in it, and about my tattoos, and all the rest I know about it. He’s just here ‘cause he wanted to see if he could help, that’s all.”

Dorian blinked, eyebrows raising in surprise, deep brown eyes glancing incredulously between Weaver and Melody’s faces for a few moments. 

“You’re the one he’s been goin’ around with?” she finally asked, surprise replacing the gruff suspicion of her voice as she stared at her daughter, taken aback.

Melody folded her arms, “What do ya mean by that? You knew he was around?”

Dorian nodded slowly, casting a pointed look at Weaver’s bewildered face before responding, “Uma Greene, the High Priestess, put out the info he was in the city about a month back. We’ve all been hearin’ and sharin’ reports about where he is and what he’s been up to since, because wherever he goes is normally a good place to stay clear of. I heard a few people say there was somebody goin’ around with him, and I thought that was strange, but…”

“Well, that was me,” Melody affirmed, grabbing her wrench from where it was sitting on the table by Weaver and hefting it over her shoulder for emphasis, presenting proudly to her mother with her other hand on her hip, “We’ve been cleanin’ up this whole damn city, practically just the two ‘a us, for weeks. I finally told him about all this stuff, and he just wanted to help out. Lay off him, ma.”

Dorian blinked, seeming taken aback yet again at Melody’s strong stance and firm tone. 

Don’t bloody look at me, Weaver grumbled inwardly as the woman’s eyes once again drifted to him, as though searching for some additional reason to maintain the assault past its expiration date, Practically nothing I’ve said since I entered this house has gone well for me, I think I’ve about learned my lesson to be quiet now…

As Dorian glanced back to Melody, only to receive another pointed look and a reaffirmation of her stance between her mother and Weaver, the older woman scoffed, shrugged, and pushed herself away from the counter where she had been leaning. She strode over to the box itself, where it had been sitting almost forgotten on the opposite counter beside the stove, hefted it up, and set it down in front of Weaver with a scoffing sigh.

“You still should have just come in and asked,” she grumbled to Melody, who just rolled her eyes and pulled out the seat opposite Weaver at the three-seat table to sit down backwards on it, arms propped up on the back of the seat and under her chin. Dorian grumbled something incoherent, but in a clearly resigned tone, and she pulled out the third chair to their side to slump down in it, glancing between the pair with a flat, tired look. 

“That’s… it?” Weaver asked hesitantly, before immediately cursing his curious impulse for poking the bear.

“Yeah?” Dorian shrugged at him, “Like Melody said, it’s her shit, not mine. I don’t care about it. I practice the real faith, I don’t want anythin’ to do with this satanic nonsense, or whatever it is. I just wish my daughter had been able to come in and say hello, that’s it.”

Melody’s eyebrow twitched once again in irritation, but thankfully, she seemed to have finally caught up to Weaver in his realization of the futility of argument with this woman. 

Well, then… Weaver mused internally, thankful to at last be on to what he’d actually come here to do, turning to survey the box, At last, let’s see about this…

The box was small, somewhat flat, and constructed of orange-stained banded wood with iron and brass accents and hardware. There was a central spot where a lock could theoretically be installed, but none was present, meaning the only thing closing it was a pair of hook hasps, which he slid out of place. Curiously, on the front lip of the lid was some lettering, scrawled in thin, haphazard black paint.

“‘Materials for Amarra’?” Weaver asked, reading aloud the painted words and glancing between the two women at the table with him, “Was ‘Amarra’ Melody’s original name under her birth parents, or something?”

Dorian shook her head and shrugged, “I doubt it. We named her Melody, yeah, but I don’t think this box was supposed to be left to her. She just inherited it because it was one ‘a the only things her birth parents owned in the house they were found in.”

Weaver frowned and tilted his head, a couple dozen questions immediately springing to his mind, but he pushed them away to get back on track. He pushed the lid open and peered down at the contents, uncertain as to what to expect but only hoping he’d be able to illuminate some things for Melody as he’d promised he’d try. He felt like he owed her that, by this point, even with the fact that he’d sustained a head injury for her sake today.

Inside of the box were a number of trinkets and objects, as well as a few sheets of what seemed to be high-quality paper, covered in scrawlings and sketchings, all of which Weaver removed. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly notable about the inside or outside of the wooden box itself on a careful once-over, so he set it aside to focus on picking through the materials he’d extracted from inside.

On impulse, his hand went to the papers first. Impulse, and the fact that he could immediately see a scribbled, ink-faded copy of the symbol he’d seen tattooed on the back of Melody’s neck directly at the top of the first page, surrounded by scrawling in a bizarre, hectic script he couldn’t interpret. 

“That’s the one,” Melody nodded, reading the look on his face to guess his thoughts, “I never could figure out what language that’s all written in. Nothin’ on Google, to be sure. Do you recognize it?”

“I… don’t,” Weaver shook his head after a hesitant moment, frowning, earning him a serrated look from Dorian.

“Ya don’t?” the older woman folded her arms, “All the stories say that the Weaver is supposed to know every language that humans speak.”

“I do,” Weaver defended, “As well as most of the languages humans don’t speak anymore, and a number of languages that humans have never spoken. The issue is, I’m fairly certain this isn’t a language. Look, see? There’s punctuation, but no spaces.”

Weaver turned the page over, showing it to the women helpfully. They shared a confused glance, before turning it back to him, and he sighed, considering how to phrase his words.

“The only languages these days that don’t use spaces are morphemic or syllabic languages,” he explained, “Chinese, Japanese Kanji, Thai, et cetera. Those languages all use symbols to represent either syllables, entire words, or fundamental units of language, rather than individual letters. Those languages also tend to have other ways of indicating the end and beginning of a sentence without need for punctuation. Languages that do have punctuation, like the text here does, also usually need to have spaces, since they don’t have built-in ways to demonstrate the end of a word and the beginning of another.”

“But some of those ‘sentences’ are only, like… three letters long,” Melody shook her head, pointing at the sheet in Weaver’s hand, “Couldn’t that mean there’s some other kinda system?”

“It could if it was letters,” Weaver nodded along, before clarifying, “But look elsewhere; the average number of characters per sentence, going by the punctuation, is between ten and twenty. That’s roughly the average word count of an English sentence. If we assume each symbol is meant to represent an English word, rather than being a cipher for a letter, the lack of spaces but presence of punctuation makes sense.”

“Okay, so it’s just a cipher, then,” Dorian grunted, sounding yet unimpressed, “Can you translate it back to English, if that’s what it’s actually a cipher for?”

Weaver winced, before shaking his head, “Unfortunately… not. If the symbols were code for letters, then anyone could decipher it with enough brute force. But if this cipher has assigned a unique symbol to every single word in the English dictionary, then it would be impossible to crack without knowing at least a starting point. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, Weaver,” Melody shook her head, bringing his attention back to her and away from the sudden, clawing compunction he felt, “Can ya make sense of anything else in there, anyway?”

Weaver gulped, setting his jaw to firm himself again, trying his best to shake off the pressure, and set the first page aside. There wasn’t anything on it other than the cipher and the symbol he’d already seen and already not been able to make sense of, anyway. 

The second of three pages was just a wall of entirely ciphered text. Weaver grumbled at that, turning it over in vain to see if there was anything, an image, a sketch, even a doodle that he could make sense of, but there was nothing but that same strange, striking cipher. He set the second page aside.

The third page was a rough, faceless diagram of a toddler, covered head to toe in drawn-on lines, with that same symbol sketched onto the back of its neck.

“Bloody hell,” Weaver shook his head, “I suppose that explains those, then…”

Dorian made a grumbling noise to his right. Thankfully, for once, though, her anger didn’t seem to be directed towards himself or Melody.

“Yeah,” Melody nodded, “I don’t have all of ‘em, though. Check it out, they’re numbered on the thing.”

Weaver blinked at her, before looking down to examine the diagram more closely. There were, indeed, numbers listed next to every line drawn over the sketched toddler’s body, the numbers seeming to jump around in an unintuitive pattern rather than continuing linearly. 

“Is it an… instruction order?” he wondered aloud, glancing back at Melody with a cocked eyebrow.

“As well as I could ever figure it, yeah,” Melody shrugged, “I only have up to number 39, though. Never known why I don’t have the rest. Figure they must have gotten interrupted or somethin’.

Weaver glanced down at the page. It was difficult to tell, as the lines on the toddler were much thicker than the lines on Melody’s body - they must have shrunk proportionally as her skin had grown and stretched throughout maturity - but there were significantly more of them twisting around the sketched figure’s flesh than the redhead toted. The highest number he could find on the page was 63, meaning that Melody was missing a good third of what the page indicated was the total amount.

Incredulous and uncertain, seeing that there was no additional information he could glean from the pages alone, Weaver glanced over at the assorted paraphernalia that had also been in the chest, hoping desperately that at least something might click together, and feeling a deepening sense of clawing ineptitude begin creeping its way up his oesophagus as he searched. 

A tattoo gun cartridge, rusty with age and disuse. A meat tenderizer, looking scuffed and well-worn. A clear glass vial of what seemed to just be ashy, powdered residue of something else. A black, opaque glass mask, which would cover the bottom half of the wearer’s face.

She certainly wasn’t exaggerating when she proclaimed her birth parents occultists…

Weaver, just by chance, happened to pick the mask up, turning it around in his hand to see if there was something, anything, he knew of, that he could recognize, whatever he could find that could help him actually be useful to Melody, as he’d hoped. 

A glimmer of something golden caught his eye. Not on the glass mask, but from underneath it. If he hadn’t thought to pick it up, he might have missed it entirely, it was so small. Weaver picked it up and turned it over in his hands, eyes widening in a sudden overwhelming sense of distant familiarity.

It was a small golden pin, as one might wear on their lapel. It was circular, with the simple engraving of an odd thorny plant.

Deja vu seared into Weaver’s mind like hot oil hissing when poured over ice.

Where have I seen this before!? He thought desperately, searching his admittedly fallible memory for where on earth he recognized the simple little pin. He reached a hand up to his face, fingernails clawing at his own scalp unconsciously, as though trying to dig the memory free viscerally from his brain.

Come on, he gritted his teeth, shaking his head violently in a vain effort to jostle some long-lost memory free, You useless thing. You promised. You told her you would do whatever you could, you promised her some kind of answer. You can’t read the words, you don’t know the symbol, but you do know this. From somewhere, some long time ago. Come on, you ancient bastard, for Melody’s sake, for once in your too-bloody-long life, actually–

“Weaver?” Melody asked softly, snapping him free abruptly of his frustrated reverie. A small, vain, pitiful part of himself wanted to imagine that something he’d been on the verge of slipped away as his focus was broken. The rest of him knew the truth.

Nothing, he sighed, I can’t remember. I can’t bloody remember.

“I’m sorry,” he shook his head glumly, unable to meet his friend’s eyes as he tossed the pin halfheartedly back into the box to his side, “I’m not sure I know anything about any of this. Without the cipher key, I’m afraid I don’t have any answers for you… I’m sorry.”

Melody nodded softly at that, an odd expression screwing up her face as she looked at him. Weaver fought every impulse in his body to curl up as he felt her gaze flick across his skin, only able to imagine the disappointed expression that must be reflected in her eyes, which he dared not meet. 

A hand slapped his shoulder, and the sound of a lighthearted, airy sigh brought his surprised gaze back up, despite himself.

“Don’t worry about it,” Melody shook her head with a smile, having stood up and leaned over the table to place her hand on his shoulder firmly, “Like I said last night, I’ve just learned to stop askin’. Who the hell knows what my birth folks were up to, or why the fuck these lines are here, or why they do what they do, or whatever.”

Weaver blinked, mouth falling agape as he searched for the disappointment hidden beneath her voice. He didn’t find any, and that was somehow the most singularly flooring thing he’d experienced all day.

“I’m good, cher,” Melody smiled down at him, “Really. Don’t beat yourself up.”

Weaver gulped. He hadn’t even realized he’d let slip a tear until the moment he felt it slide off his chin to drop down onto Melody’s hand at his shoulder.

“I’m… sorry…” he mumbled awkwardly, his tongue seeming to stumble numbly over the words as he quickly wiped the trail of water from his cheek.

Melody’s grip on his shoulder just tightened wordlessly for a moment, waiting in place for him to collect himself. Once he finally had, and he’d wrenched as much of his focus back up from the swirling black pit in the back of his mind as possible, Melody sat back down, still smiling in her trademark way at him.

Dorian rolled her eyes, scoffed, quickly scooped up all the materials from the box back into it, and shut it pointedly.

“It’s just satanic nonsense, like I said,” the older woman growled, standing up and striding away to the counter again,  “Cruel people, givin’ the rest of us a bad name. Nothing worth givin’ a rat’s ass about.”

“I don’t think it was specifically satanic,” Weaver shook his head softly, “The optics are the same, certainly, but it didn’t have a few specific hallmarks… you’re certainly right about the bad name part, though.”

Weaver and Dorian shared a grim, knowing glance at that. Melody tilted her head at the pair, confused.

“The whole reason our faith gets such a bad name is exactly because of these types infestin’ our city,” Dorian grumbled, shaking her head, “They get carted in and paid for by the Vatican, ya know. They turn a blind eye to what the people they pay are doing, as long as they do it in our city, where stupid people will think it’s us doin’ it.”

“Wait, really?” Melody scrunched up her face in disgust, “That fuckin’ sucks. The Vatican sponsors occult bullshit just to give real Vodou a bad name?”

“You should see how much money they dump into Hollywood for similar ends,” Weaver shrugged, forcing down the last of the consternation for now with a grit of his teeth, “Anyway. I’m just sorry I couldn’t give you any more answers. I know I promised, but…”

“It was a long shot,” Melody nodded, “Seriously, Weaver. It’s fine.”

“Exactly,” Dorian said quickly, cutting in strongly before Weaver could have a chance to sink any further back into himself, “No matter about it now. I still think it’s a shame it took a reason as stupid as this to bring my daughter home for a visit, but I suppose I’m glad you two dropped in after all.”

Weaver and Melody shot each other an exasperated look at that.

Couldn’t have come to that conclusion before the head trauma, could you? Weaver grumbled internally, but got the distinct sense it wouldn’t work out well for him if he spoke it aloud.

“I’m going to go put on some coffee,” Dorian proclaimed, turning away from the table to approach a kettle on the counter, “I don’t have sugar or creamer or anythin’ fancy like that, so don’t ask. Now that you’re here, I’m gonna take this chance to talk to my daughter about her life, finally. Baptiste was never willin’ to get into specifics with me.”

Melody balked at her mother abruptly, “Wait, the fuck!? You knew Bappie!? You talked to Bappie!?”

“I know everyone that’s worth knowin’ in this city!” Dorian shot back with a cocky smile splitting her weathered lips, “Baptiste was definitely worth knowin’. Nobody could sling a decent po-boy like that man, I tell you.”

The shock slid from Melody’s face, leaving a downturned, solemn glance and a wistful smile in its place, “Yeah… he was, I guess…”

Dorian’s expression softened to match Melody’s as she silently set the kettle to boil. There was a pause for a few moments as the older woman seemed to think of what to say, striding over to sit back down between the pair at the table.

“When I heard he died, the first thing I thought was that I was worried about ya,” Dorian sighed, reaching over to rest her hand on Melody’s bicep, shaking her head solemnly, “He’d told me ya weren’t really in the habit of keepin’ friends.”

Melody was silent for a few moments, before nodding softly, “Well… you know me, ma…”

“I do,” Dorian sighed, before casting a pointed look at Weaver, “And it’s because I know ya that I can’t really say I’m surprised ya wound up findin’ your way to this one.”

Weaver frowned at her strong tone, a little uncertain as to if or not he was meant to feel attacked by that or not. Dorian continued soon after, though, cutting past any interjection he might have made.

“I didn’t want ya mixed up in all… that side of the world,” Dorian sighed, turning back to her daughter, “That damn symbol branded on ya was enough for one life, I’d hoped… and when I saw ya in here, and saw him with ya, I got scared for ya all over again…”

Dorian glanced back at Weaver, meeting his gaze with a fixed stare.

“But I guess, so long as he is a good friend to ya, and he seems to be for now,” she spoke, still addressing Melody despite her gaze locking with Weaver’s pointedly, “Then… I guess that’s alright.”

Melody nodded softly as Weaver found himself forced to tear his eyes away, staring glumly down at the floor between his feet and stuffing his hands into his pockets shamefully.

That would be all well and good, he sighed to himself, If I wasn’t about to leave her, too.

“What about Dad?” Melody asked, the sheer hope filling her voice enough to bring Weaver’s eyes back to her as she leaned forward eagerly,  “Is he…”

Dorian sighed, was silent for a moment as her daughter stared inquisitively up at her, before she finally shook her head solemnly.

“Pascal is… well…” Dorian squeezed Melody’s arm and looked to the floor, “Pascal isn’t… as ready to forgive some things as I am.”

Melody’s face crumbled before Weaver’s eyes, and he felt a sharp pang at the loss of that flicker of light in her eyes. She didn’t shed any tears, though. She simply slumped back in her chair and nodded. 

“Well…” Melody sighed, a soft, forced chuckle undercutting her tone, “Heh… not like I was plannin’ on moving back in, or anything, so…”

Dorian’s eyes softened as a brief silence descended at that. She exchanged a glance with Weaver as Melody continued to examine the floor, and Weaver knew that his own thoughts were echoed in her mind as their eyes met.

She knows who I am, he surmised, lips tightening into a mournful pout, She knows I have to go.

The silence remained like a thick, stifling blanket surrounding all three of them for a short while, broken only by the sound of the kettle coming to boil, then subsequently shutting off. Dorian turned back to Melody, expression going unreadable for a few moments more as she seemed to turn something over in her mind. She glanced back to Weaver for just a moment, before her eyes settled back down on the familiar wrench, tally marks engraved into its metal, where it sat on the far side of the table next to Melody.

Something changed in the light in Dorian’s eyes. Though Weaver didn’t quite have the angle on her face in that moment to judge what it was.

“Weaver,” the woman spoke softly, her gaze not leaving the wrench, “Could I have a little time alone with my daughter, please?”

Weaver nodded wordlessly. He understood. How could he not?

Melody cast a glance at him, uncertain, as he stood up from the table and brushed past her.

“I’ll just be waiting on the porch,” he said gently to her, offering her as much of a smile as he could, before departing, shutting the door behind him gingerly, so as not to disturb them further.

It wasn’t fear he felt, as he stepped out onto the front porch of the now-closed Joseph Home Conjure Shop. Nor was it dread. Nor was it even acceptance.

All he felt was the familiar, brisk spray of the wind on his face as he stood alone.

~~~

It was over a half an hour before the door finally swung open behind him again. Weaver didn’t mind. Even under these circumstances, he was at least somewhat thankful for any opportunity to stand still, for a time. 

At the sound of two pairs of footsteps joining him on the porch, Weaver nodded to the open air, summoned up what dregs of internal resolve he could muster, and turned around. Melody was standing directly before him, wrench tucked between her back and her camouflage backpack, smiling up at him. Dorian, on the other hand, was leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded, observing the pair from a short distance with a neutral, indistinct expression.

“Here,” Melody proffered, holding up Weaver’s duffel bag and presenting it to him, “Ya left this inside.”

“Ah,” Weaver hummed, returning his friend’s smile softly and taking it off her hands, slinging it haphazardly over one shoulder. As he glanced down, he noticed that Melody had apparently acquired another bag at some point, a dark grey duffel of her own, which she carried at her side. He cocked his head oddly at it, but didn’t bother to question it as he glanced back up to meet her eyes.

“I’m sorry again that I couldn’t give you any answers, long shot or no,” he spoke delicately, each word smooth and fragile as he turned to Dorian, “And I’m sorry once again for all the trouble. I, er… hope the rung on the attic ladder won’t be hard to repair.”

Dorian grunted, expression still unreadable. Melody shook her head, her smile growing, and slapped him on the shoulder in her own unique way. 

“Don’t worry about it, Weaver,” she said again.

“I won’t,” he lied with a nod.

The wind rustled its way through the narrow street, and Weaver watched in silence as it hit the girl in front of him. How her scarlet red hair that stuck out in strange waves from the hat it was all stuffed up in was prickled by the breeze. How her clothing ruffled and moved in the breeze. How she shifted herself to accommodate the autumnal seaborne chill, but didn’t shiver.

I won’t be able to keep the memory of her forever, he knew, I never can. Maybe I’ve had friends before. I don’t remember them. But she’s the only friend I know. And I want to remember her, as well and as accurately as I can, for as long as I can. 

“So,” Melody spoke at last, glancing away from him and off into the distance, as though reading his mind once again, “British Columbia, right?”

Weaver brought in a large inhale, following her gaze to where the road turned off and disappeared around the corner, before replying, “...yes. Merritt, British Columbia. It’s a small farming city. I did some research this morning, before we left your house.”

Melody took a deep breath of her own, turning back to meet his eye, “Canada’s a long way north ‘a here. This time of year, it’ll probably be cold.”

Weaver nodded with a soft chuckle, “It could be. It’s still only late September, and global warming being what it is, it shouldn’t be too bad yet. I’m not that fragile, you know.”

Melody returned his chuckle, smiling almost cheekily up at him, “Yeah, yeah, cher. I know that.”

A lump formed in Weaver’s throat at the sound of the endearment, and at the sight of the familiar look on her face. He coughed into his hand awkwardly, in a vain attempt to clear it out.

“Melody, I–”

“I’m just thinkin’,” Melody abruptly cut him off, her cheeky smile widening into a splitting grin, “I’m glad I packed my coat. Just in case, ya know.”

Weaver glanced down at her, confusion at the sight of her broad smile causing her words to sink through his mind slowly, almost sounding murky as they slotted together.

As soon as they did, and he heard them play back in his mind again, staticky electricity ripped through every inch of his body in a single, searing jolt. 

“I-I’m sorry!?” he stammered, stumbling a step backwards inadvertently, mind reeling from the apparent misunderstanding, “Melody, I… I wasn’t– I didn’t–”

Melody stood there, not moving an inch but to allow her expression to grow smugger and more amused as he floundered.

“I-I mean–” Weaver spluttered, before finally forcing out, “I wasn’t thinking to bring you with me, Melody! I-I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear, I don’t–”

“Oh, it was clear,” Melody rolled her eyes and took a step forward to reach up and shake him a little, smirking, “And I thought that I just made it pretty fuckin’ clear you were wrong about that, cher.”

A beat of silence passed between them, as it felt to Weaver as though his entire neck and head had suddenly caught afire.

“You… well, you can’t, just… tag along!” he stammered incredulously, balking wide at her unflinching expression, “That isn’t how that works at all!”

“Why not?” Melody shrugged with a smile, “I got nothin’ better to do.”

“But… you have… a life!”

“Says who? I definitely don’t remember sayin’ that.”

“Wha–” Weaver stammered, “But… ever since we met, you’ve always been calling this city ‘your’ city, and all that! You have your work–”

“Everybody from my work is dead,” Melody reminded helpfully.

“Your housem–”

“Housemates are assholes, my rent is paid until the end of the month, I left a note sayin’ I was fuckin’ off when we left this morning, and literally everything I own is in these two bags.”

Weaver’s mouth hung agape, eyes flitting from Melody’s increasingly-amused face to the two bags she carried: one slung over her back, the other held hanging from her hand.

She told me that bag was full of contingencies for the break-in! His mind screamed, electrified, What the hell is– has she been–

“Dorian!?” he exclaimed, voice probably coming out far too loud and harsh as he turned towards the older woman loitering in the doorway, watching the two of them squabble with faint entertainment in her eyes.

Dorian shrugged lightly, shaking her head at him, “I’ve spent my whole damn life tryna’ stop this one from doin’ whatever the hell she pleases. Didn’ work out for me once, and I’m her mother. If ya know what’s good for ya, I don’t think ya should try too hard, either.”

“Ya know…” Melody mused heartily, whipping Weaver’s attention back to her as her face grew into a mock-thoughtful, cheeky hum, “What’s all that stuff you keep saying controls your life? Fate, destiny, convenient luck streaks, that kinda thing? Isn’t it a little weird how, in the month since I met ya, literally everything tyin’ me down to N’Walins has up and vanished on me? I mean, my job’s gone, Bappie’s dead, I just got done making shit right with my ma, and now…”

The redhead trailed off pointedly, smiling up at him and slinging her other bag over her shoulder. 

Weaver opened his mouth to respond, but whatever words were possibly lining up to tumble out awkwardly, possibly in further protest, possibly not, he couldn’t be sure, died and rotted in his throat as he saw it flash into his vision once again.

The thread. Shooting light, visible only to his striking magenta eyes, stretching from the Key around his neck and flitting forward to connect straight into Melody Walsh’s chest. Her heart.

The Key’s threads only ever point to three things. Things I need to destroy, things I need to save, and things I need to solve.

Melody Walsh doesn’t need saving. And she certainly doesn’t need destroying. And now, I have failed to solve her. 

Weaver swore he could feel the Key glance irritatedly against his chest as, a single tear rolling down his face as he stared at his friend.

Threads, of course, don’t only point one way, I suppose. How has it taken me this long to realize that?

“Weaver,” the words sent a quake through his body, threatening to collapse him where he stood, blameless of the cold autumnal air, “Who the fuck, except you, ever said that you aren’t allowed to have a fuckin’ friend?”

Melody Walsh tilted her head at him, her smile having diminished from the brazen grin to a smaller, more genuine tilt of her lip. Weaver met her eyes, considered warning her of the dangers of his life, considered telling her how he couldn’t guarantee her safety forever, glanced back up at the tally-marked monkey wrench at her back, remembered the many nights of the pair of them in this city over the past month, and felt the breeze again. 

And smiled. 

“Cool,” he sighed at last, a smile breaking across his face to mirror hers. Stars alighted in Melody’s eyes, and she broke out in a laugh, which he couldn’t help himself but to share in.

“Cool!?” she teased, sharing in his indulgence of the memory, “Is that all you have to say?”

“Yes,” Weaver concluded with a smile, “Is there something else I should be saying?”

Melody shook her head, before stepping forward. She let the bag she held in her hand fall to the ground, allowing her to wrap her arms around his torso in a firm, friendly embrace. He hesitated for just a moment, unused to the warmth, before bending down to return it.

“Nah,” she muffled against his jacket, “Nah, you better not.”

After a few seconds, or perhaps minutes, that felt too sacred for Weaver to examine at all more thoroughly, their embrace was broken by the sound of a door closing nearby. He glanced up and looked around, confused, before finding that Dorian had disappeared back into the shop, having shut the door behind her and leaving them out on the porch alone.

“Did you…” he began slowly, turning back to Melody as she stepped back from him again, retrieving her second bag from the ground.

“We said our goodbyes,” Melody nodded, before holding the bag up, “She even gave me a sample pack from the shop, in case we need some stuff, for free! Oh, and, I packed up a few of my old things from my room. I’m gonna keep in touch, this time.”

Weaver nodded down at her, a gesture she returned with a smile and a clasp on the shoulder. She turned back for just a moment, eyes drifting across the front of her old home for a few seconds, and took a deep breath in through her nose, before releasing it as a puff of mist into the cooling air and promptly setting off down the steps. Weaver chuckled, shook his head at himself incredulously, before bounding down the stairs behind her to catch up.

“So, what now?” Melody asked, glancing up at him as the pair fell into step, leaving Joseph Home Conjure Shop in the distance behind them.

Weaver considered for a moment, staring off into the distance as it approached on hasty wings.

“Now…” he murmured, “Now, I suppose… we go hunting.”

Melody laughed at that.

And Weaver did too.

~~~

Melody’s neck let out a satisfying crack as she stretched it, straining to the side to give her cramping back some relief, before slumping back down into the driver’s seat, head bobbing along to the Machine Head blaring in her earbuds. The Camry they had stolen back in New Orleans had come with a full tank, and pretty limited mileage, especially considering they had basically just chosen the first parked car they happened upon with an exposed lock that Weaver could get through. 

One of the perks of the universe leading you exactly where you needed to go, she supposed. 

That’s gonna be something I gotta get used to, she thought with a private smirk, Things goin’ my way, and all.

On the long stretch of vacant highway, Melody allowed herself a glance to the side, to see Weaver’s sleeping form passed out, head leaned against the window of the passenger’s seat, breathing gently. He didn’t snore. She knew that she did. He hadn’t complained about it when he’d woken her up for her turn to drive a few hours back, when they had crossed the Colorado-Wyoming border.

It’s funny, she mused, turning back to the road, I’m a day and a half outta N’Walins, now. First time I’ve ever been out of my city. And yet…

Melody glanced up at the little bobbing cloth bag, which she had hung from the rearview. A Gris-Gris, of her mother’s make and blessing. For luck and prosperity, she’d said as she’d pressed it into her hands. 

As if I need more good luck right about now, Melody laughed to herself. 

On a whim, she rolled down her window. Just a crack, enough to let the wind in. 

They were in the middle of nowhere, in the center of Wyoming, barrelling down the 25 highway, still only halfway to their destination. They’d booked an AirBnB for a night in Casper, intending to rest up and refuel when they got there a few more hours down the road. Realistically, Merritt was still almost two whole days away.

But she could smell it. 

Melody could smell the hunt. 

She felt the fire licking its way up her back once more, and Melody Walsh couldn’t ever remember being happier.

Laissez les bon temps mother-fuckin’ roulez.

~~~

The fire, crackling and warm behind the iron gate, was the only illumination amid the spacious, bookshelf-lined study, save the moonlight streaming in from the large picture window behind the desk. The man who owned the fireplace, and the window, and the study, and the mansion, and most of the view of the rolling Tuscan countryside, stood behind his chair. Suited in brown corduroy, pushing into the later end of his fifties in a forcedly distinguished way, wearing his decimated hairline unimpeded as a statement, he breathed softly. Something about the flickering of the fire, and the smell of the smoke as it rose, made the aches and pains in his joints from his lifelong weak constitution fade off into the background of his mind. 

The seconds ticked by on his watch. He counted them down in his mind. His people were efficient and timely, he made sure of that. He liked people he could set his watch by. And he had the resources to pick and choose them however he liked. 

Exactly on schedule, a knock sounded, gentle and unintrusive, at the large mahogany door at the far end of the study.

“Enter,” the man called over his shoulder, before turning back to the window.

The clicking of heels on the wooden floor, as well as the pause for the inevitable bow of respect, told him it was, as expected, the new servant staff girl. The one with the mole on the left side of her nose. He didn’t turn to look, but he smiled to himself at his own ability to choose his people perfectly.

“Mr. Copeland,” the girl’s voice came, “Mr. Basak is here to see you, as expected.”

“Send him in,” the man waved a dismissive hand. There was another pause as the girl bowed again behind him, before the clicking receded, and the door closed. 

The man counted twenty-two seconds exactly before the door opened again, and the tall man stepped through, adjusting his tie awkwardly with a clipboard in his other hand. 

“Hello, Zafer,” the man at the window greeted his lanky Turkish associate, gesturing for him to approach, “How was the flight over?”

“Hadrian,” Zafer greeted in return, stepping forward, “It was, uh… well–”

“Do you have it?” Hadrian asked, raising a withered eyebrow at the younger-looking man.

“Yes,” Zafer nodded quickly, bowing his head somewhat, “The deal went through, just like you said it would. The extractor is being shipped by trusted hands to Minho’s doorstep as we speak.”

“Good,” Hadrian nodded slowly, before turning back to the window, “There’s a guest room set up for you in the opposite wing, and you’ll be brought breakfast by the staff in the morning. I myself will be flying to China momentarily, and you can–”

“Are you sure it’ll actually work this time?”

Hadrian’s lip curled up at the interruption. He slowly turned on his heel, staring down the tall man, who seemed to wither before the gaze despite his higher stature, eyes flitting down behind his thick spectacles. 

“If you must go into details, you could at least put on your pin,” Hadrian noted cooly, tapping his own lapel, where his own beacon of membership shone bright in the firelight, “Without it, who knows who could be listening in on us.”

“Right, I– sorry,” Zafer nodded quickly, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment and wincing. He rifled around in his inner suit pocket for a few too many seconds, before finally retrieving his clip and pinning it on. 

Gold-circled, thorny flowers resplendent on both of their lapels, Hadrian hummed in thought. He’d noticed that flinch, as Zafer’s hand had grazed the back of his neck.

He’s running low, he surmised, He’d be in much worse shape if he was out entirely. He must be rationing it. Now, him making the trouble to come all the way here to tell me in person makes more sense. 

“What are you so worried about?” Hadrian asked calmly, clasping his hands behind his back, “You agreed to this plan in the last roundtable, after all.”

“I did,” Zafer acknowledged breathily, “It’s just–”

“Zafer. The Weaver hasn’t bothered us since Amarra.”

Zafer gulped. Hadrian had to grit his teeth as silently as possible, thankful for the low light that was likely obscuring his features, as it took all he had in him not to roll his eyes.

“I assure you, I have my sources keeping track of that one,” he stated simply, “If it happens to pop up by surprise anywhere near our current endeavours, we have precautions. You know that.”

“I… do,” Zafer nodded softly, “I just… I don’t want it to catch us by surprise again.”

Hadrian let the silence drag on. Zafer withered once again before his eyes, and he reached up to rub at the back of his neck again. 

“Don’t worry,” he finally said, shaking his head, and turning away once again, “This time, the Weaver will be playing its game just the way we want it to.”

Zafer, after a few moments of silence, took the wordless dismissal for what it was, and set off back towards the study door with a stilted, uncomfortable gait.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Hadrian called over his shoulder just as he heard the door about to close, “The girls will be by some time tonight to top you up. I wouldn’t have you anything less than well-kept on my own property, after all.”

A delicious beat of silence passed.

“Thank you,” Zafer’s weak voice barely carried the distance of the study, and the door closed shut behind him. 

Hadrian Copeland stared out at the moonlight again, and wondered impassively if the moon would still shine in the sky like this when he was done.

-END-

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