--==Chapter 66: Tough Love--==

I took the gun off Denis's corpse, my anger refusing to share space in my head with the distaste I'd felt while looting Jon's body. I checked his pockets, too, ostensibly for more gun clips but mostly because I'd decided he didn't deserve respect even in death.

It wasn't my proudest moment. The looting needed to be done, but vindictive corpse looting was awfully petty, even for the role of demon they'd cast me in. Then I found the Benzo syringe he'd used on me, and I relived the feeling of my chest and limbs getting heavy while feeling like I was slowly being set on fire. Denis wasn't exactly innocent. The syringe was empty, and he had nothing else worth taking, so I moved on.

I didn't know how many bullets either of my stolen pistols had left. If movies could be believed, I should be able to remove the clip and check, but I worried I'd jam the gun or something if I tried.

If Kay was the same jittering shadow creature that attacked me on my stone ship, I doubted I'd have much luck shooting her anyway; that lagging Shadow had been way too hard to predict.

Not that I had much of a backup plan, or really any plan at all. How could I? Every time I turned around, my understanding of the world was overturned.

I closed and locked the door to the chapel, trapping myself inside with an almost overpowering smell of blood and awful. Hands was undoubtedly aware something was happening just down the hall from his pool. I doubted Sori could mask the Shadow if Hands's men were actually looking at it. Hopefully, they'd dismiss the gun battle as a falling out among the cultists, at least enough that they wouldn't break down the locked door to investigate.

I checked on Jessica and Maebe next. Neither had been accidentally shot or anything. They seemed to be breathing normally, but I couldn't glean much from either except that they were both catatonic.

I wondered if Hands would be able to do anything with them. He'd brought me into his Dreamland, but then I wasn't sure there was enough going on behind their eyes to bring in.

Next, I checked on Alice. She was lying on a gurney, her head and shoulders disappearing into the still-writhing Shadow as though it were a portal. She was breathing and had a weak, flickering aura. I considered pulling out the gurney, but I worried about the damage I might do while ignorant. I imagined pulling back the gurney to reveal the same clean cut I'd seen in videos of people touching the vortex.

The fact that the bed was still being supported on the other side of the Shadow entrance suggested that wasn't the case, but I still poked the portal with a gun before braving it myself.

Life had become impossibly surreal, and I was perpetually reeling at new situations. At the same time, the blurred lines and uncertainty weren't wholly unfamiliar. I'd lived most of my life beyond what too many people were willing to understand, and I refused to shy away from truth just because it was new to me.

Satisfied that the Shadow portal was safe, I stepped through. I immediately gagged at what waited for me.

Alice's skull was open, and bloody tools sat on a tray table next to her.

I'd always planned to try leaving the Shadow right away, but the unexpected sight of her exposed brain had me retreating before I could think about it.

I might be growing more inured to gore and death, but caught off guard like that, I was still at the mercy of my instincts and reflexes. I barely made it a few feet out of the Shadow before I gagged and vomited.

I leaned on the gurney for support while my stomach heaved, and, to my horror, the bed rolled backward.

My empty stomach ejected only bile as I tried to stop the bed's movement. Flustered, I glanced over my shoulder to check the result. I was already regretting it as I did, but things were happening quick, and I acted before I thought.

Alice was entirely out of the Shadow but fully intact, to my utter disbelief.

Stunned, I touched her forehead, where her skull had been missing a moment ago. She was fine. Whole.

I was so baffled that I didn't immediately notice the other change. Her aura was gone. She was breathing, and her pulse was fine, but her eyes were unfocused, just like Jessica's and Maebe's.

It was another piece of the puzzle and another example of my unending ignorance.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I'd known Kay was using the Shadow to make drones, but I hadn't known how. I still didn't, but my suspicions were growing. Alice had talked about pulling a crystal from Mr. Peterson's brain. From what I could tell, her patient was the original drone. I doubted it was a coincidence that her brain had been similarly exposed.

I still had questions, like why was she whole on this side of the Shadow portal? I wondered what would happen if I pushed her back into the Shadow, but not enough to try. I didn't want to see that, and, on the off chance she was aware in there, I didn't want to put her through it.

I better understood Anderson's anger at Denis and Kay after seeing this. Kay might not be Alice's mom— actually, I doubted she was even a decade older than Alice—but they were still family.

It would be bad enough treating a stranger or a coworker that way, but family? Then again, I already knew Bogey-Kay had tried to kill her own biological daughter, so this was just one more confirmation that she needed to be stopped. And since I doubted that Kay had been the one to cut open Alice's head, Denis was probably responsible for that.

If I got through this, I might have to think up a way to stop him from causing any more harm. Maybe I could use a trapped memory crystal to set his spawn point in a locked room, or on the roof or something. I was willing to give him a pass for his behavior toward me—well, somewhat willing anyway—but if he had helped do this to Maebe, Jessica, and Alice, he'd have exhausted any compassion I'd willingly extend.

Spitting the remnants of bile from my mouth as best as I could with a canine tongue, I clenched my jaw and walked back into the Shadow. If Kay had been around when I first walked in, she'd had plenty of time to prepare an ambush. If she had one planned, though, it was further in than the entryway.

Inside the Shadow had the same feel as the ether. There was a slight hum of energy in the air and a taste on the wind like a combination between salty spray and licking a battery.

I'd expected that this place was connected to my ship, partly because Sori had claimed as much, and partly because I'd been attacked by a Shadow person on it. I didn't recognize the dark corridor in front of me, or the shelves that lined it, but I was doubly sure it was part of the same space.

"You are an abomination before the Lord," a voice said from the blackness around me.

I didn't jump in surprise; I'd been expecting more than just a disembodied voice. "You attacked and mutilated your own family," I responded. "You sicked your cult on Nia and tried to kill her."

"And you besmirch the children of God. His wrath will surely follow." Kay answered.

I slowly walked forward, peering into the shadows around and behind the shelves. Most of the shelves were empty. I was looking for signs of movement between them or shadows too dark to pierce, so I almost missed that the last row of shelves held half a dozen softly glowing crystals.

They looked like the memory crystals I'd found in Slender Hopper and the like, but their glow was much dimmer. The crystals themselves looked almost like dark glass with streamers or ribbons of green light at their hearts, almost like an aurora.

One of the crystals hummed when I looked at it. It was glowing softer than the rest, and a closer look showed me that the light in its depths was blue. It called to me, and, more than anything, I wanted to pop it into my mouth.

"I saw her memory of it, you know. Nia's, I mean." I said into the dark.

"I'm not surprised." Kay's voice responded, "That girl was steeped in evil. That she would choose to consort with a spawn of Satan is no shock. What's your real identity? Belial? Abaddon?"

Try as I might, I couldn't figure out where her voice was coming from.

"I don't think I've ever seen so much lust for blood in a person's eyes, and I'm running around a monster movie as one of the monsters. I don't believe in your demons any more than I do your god, but a mother who would attack her own child? I don't need to look any further than that to know evil."

"'Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son, Isaac.' There is no salvation without sacrifice. When my King speaks, I listen as his faithful servant. I will be rewarded in full."

I couldn't help but snort despite being closer to furious than amused. "Sacrifice? I thought you had a guy for that. Wasn't that the whole point? When exactly do you people start extending that 'grace' I've heard so much about?"

"Blasphemer, prince of lies, your words are empty."

"And yet they aren't my words. Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is love." I spat in response. A lifetime of facing this kind of self-righteousness made her words strike too close to home.

"It is because of my love that my daughters must be cleansed of your filth."

"'Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for another.' isn't that how it goes? When does that start? So far, all I've seen from people like you is condemnation, vitriol, and violence toward those you disagree with. And people like you always call it 'tough love.' Fuck all of you, fuck your whole holier-than-though religion. You have no idea what love is."

I knew my words were wasted. I wasn't talking to a rational being, and the anger wasn't really for her anyway. There was a reason I'd hung out with Jon and his fundamental Christian parents: they were less judgmental than my own—or at least less hateful.

I was wasting time. Unless I wanted to go through my whole assault again in the next loop, I needed to end this. Kay was almost certainly masked in Shadow, so she had the advantage in this shadowed space.

Leaving the shelf of memories behind, I loped toward the light. I'd deal with Bogey-Kay first and then return for them when I had time to examine them more closely.

--==