“Ow fuck!” I screeched. Mina’s voice was like five octaves higher than Kirby’s. And her hearing was better, too; made my screeching all the louder. “You hit me in the ear, goddammit. What the hell is your problem, Cherry-Lynne?”

“Caw! You smashed my head into soup, you little bitch!” She pecked at the side of my face, dangerously close to my eye.

Mina’s eye.

For a stupid bird she was strong as hell. Guess it probably had something to do with the raven having been her familiar for hundreds of years prior to becoming her head. Forced me to use both hands to grab and hold the squirmy little shit.

“That wasn’t me!” I shouted in the bird’s face. “I’m not actually Mina, you dork. It’s Kirby!”

“Impossible—caw!—Kirby Dufresne is in absolutely disgusting shape back in the cabin.”

“No, that’s Rivulon the Unraveler—you know what, forget it. I don’t have time for this.” I stuffed her into one of the many pockets on Mina’s leather jacket and quickly zipped it shut. “Sorry, Gates. You’ll understand once Handsome Alex sits you down later and tells you a new story.”

“Caw! Caw! Caw!”

“Well now you’re just throwing a fit.” It was really echoing down the corridor. “Hey! Shut your fucking beak before you blow my shit with these Bad Dickfor dorks. I’m working here!”

“What’s bad dick for?” she asked from my pocket, suddenly meek. “Cawcawcaw.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle like a dirty old man and it sounded super weird coming out of twenty-something Mina Diamond. “Seriously just shut up for a minute while I murder these nerds.”

“Who?”

“Bad Dickfor.”

“What’s bad—”

“Oh no we are not doing this who’s on first shit right now, okay? Jesus Christ you’re old.”

“Cawcawcaw,” she laughed.

I don’t know how long the boys in Bad Dickfor had been watching and listening to me bicker with this bird. I’d been so distracted by Lady Gates’s shenanigans that I hadn’t even noticed them take down the foil which had been covering their entire cabin window when I first got there. But now this dude on the other side of the glass with a dumb little baby mohawk and a bunch of face tattoos was pointing a snub-nosed pistol at my face.

Mina’s face.

He thumbed back the hammer and slid the door open. I felt sure that if I’d been in the Kirby vessel he already would have blown me away, but seeing Mina there made Face Tattoos too curious for murder.

He stuck his head out into the corridor and checked both ways. “Who were you talking to?”

“Look man, I’ll answer any questions you can come up with but do you mind getting that thing out of my face first? You look like you're all twacked out on space meth or some shit and I don’t trust your finger not to twitch. No offense.”

“What did you just say?” He turned the pistol horizontal and brought it closer to my head in a classic tv-gangster move. “Did you call me methy-looking?”

“She’s right.” One of the other Bad Dickfors appeared beside his skewmate. “Hey, you’re Mina Diamond, aren’t you? I’m Marky.” He pushed past Face Tattoos to shake my hand. “I saw you in Tokyo when you were still with Hypermagickal Girlz. Did something happen there; some kind of falling out? Seemed like you guys had real chemistry.”

The way I felt when he smiled at me—at Mina—made it obvious he was the frontman. In addition to superhuman presence, he had a stupid hipster haircut and multiple lip-piercings. Face Tattoos uncocked his gun and rolled his eyes as he slid back into the room until I couldn’t see him anymore. I had to assume the other two members of their skew were in there, too.

“Me and the Hypermackical Girlz just ran our course,” I said in response to Marky’s question. “And I wanted new challenges.”

“Cool, cool. Well, do you want to come in?” He leaned closer. “We’ve got some killer dope in here. It’s supposedly from another dimension. Not sure how much of that I believe but—”

“Yeah,” I said, cutting him off. “I’d love to come in.”

“Nice.” He moved to the side and did this big corny bow to entice me into the cabin. I smiled and stepped inside.

The other two Dickfors were obviously dead already, laying on the floor in the far corner, damned near all the way underneath the bench seat on that side. They had flies on their faces and I soaked in the sweet stink in that cabin. I almost reaped them right then; the spell was so hungry.

Dope from another dimension, Marky had said. Looked like we weren’t done dealing with the Drix Consortium after all. Overdoses were always the most common cause of death among Cacophony participants—excluding all the performance-related fatalities, of course—but it was weird that these Dickfor’s didn’t even seem to notice that their pals were dead and stinking up the joint.

Seeing that, the addict in me definitely wanted to try whatever the Drix were peddling. I mean, just a taste. For science.

“It’s a pill. You just swallow it.” Marky held a glowing green capsule between his thumb and forefinger. “I mean I guess you could crush and snort it maybe if you wanted to but you don’t have to.”

“You’re just gonna give her that for free?” Face Tattoos pouted.

They started arguing; I don’t know the details, I was barely listening. I couldn’t take my eyes off those fresh dead bodies. I couldn’t stop thinking about penetrating their souls and sucking out the gooey essences waiting for me inside.

This obsession – it was because of the Mina vessel, I suddenly realized. For some reason it was unusually synergized with my Reap spell.

Or no, wait. That wasn’t it. It was her; it was Mina, herself. She was still in here with me, after all. It wasn’t like with the Kirby vessel where I’d killed him before I ever began puppeting his big-bootied body around. I was merely suppressing Mina, basically shoving her down into the backseat while I performed a soul-jacking.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

But I could feel her influence, couldn’t I? It was like she was teaming up with the Reap spell to—

“Caw! Caw! Caw!” Lady Gates was suddenly crowing with rare and extra-raspy fury.

I heard Mina laugh. But I wasn’t laughing. Goddamn she was sinister. Gave me chills.

I’d lost some time. Only a few seconds, maybe. But apparently enough time that I had taken Lady Gates out of my pocket and I was throttling the super-tough Raven with both hands. All the while I was letting out these twisted little Mina Diamond giggles.

And at the same time, I saw Marky and Face Tattoos wrestling over the gun. And I realized Reap had activated and I was just finishing up my harvest of the two dorks who had already been overdosed when I first walked in:

>Harvest Results. Timothy Fumbuckle.

>>>5 Stamina, and 3 Agility essences.

>>>206 Bone, 171 Blood, and 112 Tissue essences.

>>>[Slide Guitar] framework has been collected.

>Harvest Results. Sam France.

>>>7 Stamina, 7 Strength, 9 Intellect, and 2 Agility Essences

>>>206 Bone, 212 Blood, and 145 Tissue essences.

>>>[Jazz Shuffle] framework has been collected.

I wasn’t happy about having my bodily autonomy compromised but I couldn’t complain too loudly because we really needed these basic essences in order to repair the Kirby vessel.

Plus, it was just like everything else with Mina Diamond — she was something truly special. Listen, I’ve been doing this—possessing people’s souls—for over one thousand years, and in that time I can count on one hand the number of times a victim has managed to resist me for even a single second.

And in every case we’re talking about the people who are absolutely the most secure in their faiths, like specifically I’m talking about a couple popes and dalai lamas here. Sometimes those dudes could push through long enough to moan for help or crap their pants but that’s it.

But Mina, she’d been driving just now. She’d souljacked her soul back, even if only for a second.

These two dumbass Dickfors kept fighting over Face Tattoo’s gun until it went off and removed some of that ink from the center of his forehead. He went cross-eyed and a dark trickle of blood pushed out of the wound but the fucking dude just stood there and refused to die.

“Oh my god!” Marky cried. He had the gun now. “Dude! I’m sorry! Dude! I shot you! Dude!”

I was just about to hit them both with a quick Putrefaction so I could finish the harvest and get the fuck out of there when instead Marky fired another round into Face Tattoo’s chest and then quicker than shit he put the barrel to his own temple and pulled the trigger. Both the Dickfors fell and then slumped forward against one another and they died just like that; like they were slow-dancing on their knees.

A completely predictable pair of laughs puffed out of me and Mina at the same time.

*****

“Caw!” Lady Gates was perched on top of Handsome Alex’s skull. I was back in the Kirby vessel. Rivulon was—

Well that was going to take a minute to explain. First, we had to deal with Mina.

“Cawcaw! So what you’re saying is she’s a succubus?”

Alex’s eyes flared. “I am saying no such thing. I do not know for certain what she truly is. As far as I am aware she is uniquely talented.”

“But she was trying to eat Mr. Dufresne’s soul—caw!—wasn’t she? That’s a succubus in my book.”

“Hey, Cherry-lynne, just speaking as an ancient and immortal seed of evil blah blah blah, I really gotta say — what you’re describing sounds an awful lot like your own internalized misogyny. Like, what if Mina was a dude?”

She made this nasty bird sound from the depths of her throat, like rocks grinding together.

“It is not accurate to say Ms. Diamond was attempting to eat Kirby’s soul.” Handsome Alex paused uncharacteristically. I could tell he was struggling with this. “Nor was she attempting to seduce it. Rather, she, um—”

“She penetrated me.” I stood from where I’d been having a cigarette on the bench. “Quit pussy-footing around and let’s just say it out loud, already. Mina poked me in my soul hole.”

“Ossick, for the love of all that is unholy—”

“Cawcawcawcawcaw!”

So after the Bad Dickfors were all reaped, Mina did something I’d never even heard of before. She took control of her body again while the harvest had me all distracted in the throes of ecstasy and whatnot and then she turned inward. She violated me. Even as I was violating her. It might have been the most romantic moment of my long, lonely undeath.

Specifically, she had somehow ruptured the lining of my soul and proceeded to insinuate herself inside. I mean it, I might be the only entity in the galaxy who could have fought her off. I staggered back to the cabin with a lot of help from Lady Gates because I couldn’t fully operate the vessel anymore.

Mina had started some process that couldn’t be reversed. She was either going to absorb my soul—not eat it, per se—or she was going to die trying. Both bad options.

So that’s where Rivulon comes into it. When I got back to the cabin, Handsome Alex could sense what was happening. He quickly zapped me out of Mina and back into his head, which was super disorienting.

Then he did something I didn’t see coming at all. He fed Rivulon to Mina Diamond.

And that’s what we’d been up to for the past three hours. While Alex wove the Kirby vessel back together using the essences I’d scored off Bad Dickfor, Mina was absorbing the soul of an Old God.

It had really fucked her up. She was now occupying most of the cabin over by the window, having transformed over the hours into a throbbing mass of flesh and black ooze and flesh so rotten it was weeping black ooze. Utterly disgusting; definitely felt like she was trying to seduce me.

“I believe,” Alex began, “she is what I might call a Soul Mimic.”

“Okay,” I calmly replied. “Two questions; one, what the fuck is that? And two, how could you miss something that major? You spent months scoping her out.”

“I believe it is possible that the Mina Diamond I attempted to lure onto the train—the true Mina—in fact never arrived at all, and was instead replaced en route by the pulsating blob we see today. As for what she—or it—is, I believe she is a creature who possesses the ability to precisely reproduce souls.” His eyes flared dramatically. “From what we’ve observed, she seems to absorb souls and is in turn capable of shifting from one to another, as we see with this unfortunate Rivulon tumor-cocoon.” The blob burped out a brown cloud that hung in the air.

“So this is what Rivulon’s true form looks like or something? Pretty gross. I actually probably preferred looking at Mina, to be perfectly honest.”

Handsome Alex started going into an explanation about why she looked so disgusting now but I couldn’t hear him. I could only sense his excitement.

And it scared the shit out of me. It didn’t take an immortal seed of evil genius to recognize the efficacy of mimicking souls. She could become literally anyone: me; Alex; Rivulon or even fucking Hawijimi.

He didn’t need me anymore. What she did was better than my alchemy. It was cleaner and more comprehensive. That’s what I felt in his voice:

My obsolescence.

All Alex had to do was come up with a Compelling Narrative and she’d become his forever-minion.

I looked at the throbbing mass of rotten guts and ooze. An Old God; our guitar player; a complete fucking stranger.

Not Mina Diamond, after all. Not ever.

“I’m sorry,” I said real low so Handsome Alex wouldn’t have time for it to register. Just being dramatic, in all honesty.

And then I started cycling Putrefaction as fast as I could.