A wave of despair crashed into me. I was tempted to let it pull me under… but no. There was a deep well of helplessness that was ready to undo me, to just have me say “fuck it” and let events unfold. To that I said “Fuck YOU” and instead turned to the fires of anger within me. I banked it, stoked it, and let it consume whatever it hit. I had expected to explode in a sulfurous amount of swearing but instead I just began to shake.

“Colm?” Ida’s eyes were wide as she took a couple steps away from me.

I felt my eyes shift back into the pits of void they had been back on the ship. The Limbs of the Other Side began to crawl higher up my arms and legs, touching my torso. Two more tentacles sprouted from my back in painful bursts of non-flesh. A slight panic managed to poke into the rage I was feeling and I bent my mind to the task of stopping the transformations, which stopped with surprising ease. Suspiciously easy. Something I just didn’t have time to ponder about right now. I took a deep breath and calmed myself, but kept my anger banked and ready.

With a mental shove I made my eyes come back, but it took more effort than it had before. Great. Add it to the list of things I needed to worry about if I survived

“How’s the evacuation—?” I asked, cutting off the final syllable in surprise. My voice had a weird double harmonic that tickled my throat. I coughed into my fist and tried again.

“The evacuation?” I asked, relief flooding through me when my voice returned to normal.

Ida’s eyes were very wide as she replied cautiously. “It is going slowly,” she said, picking up speed when I nodded along. “Whatever you did has knocked all but a handful of people out and we’re having to carry them on wheelbarrows and makeshift stretchers. The good news is that there are several boats…” She paused and searched my face. “What are we going to do about Alice?”

I took a moment to look behind me, towards the ziggurat. “We’re going to do nothing,” I said turning back to her. She began to protest but I spoke over her. “I’m going back to get her while you get back to the ship. With the wards down, you should be able to find a radio that works and call the coast guard. The ship is now a couple weeks off course and I doubt it has enough fuel to get anywhere. Once you have gotten as many people as possible on that ship, you need to sabatoge all the boats on the dock and that fucking battleship they have before people start waking up.”

Ida was nodding along until I got to the last part. “We don’t have to worry too much about retribution… At least on part of the regular crew. As soon as the backlash hit my squad—“ she winced and ran a hand through her pony-tail. “They…”

“Got revenge,” I finished for her.

She nodded. “It’s why we’re not as far ahead as I had hoped.”

I nodded. “Do all that other shit then,” I said. “I’m going to do something stupid.”

Ida gave me a small, ruefully sad smile. “What’s new?”

Having no rebuttal, I gave her what I hoped was a comforting smile before turning and running. I was caught up, however, when her surprisingly strong hand clamped onto my wrist. I pulled up short before I ended up dragging her along. “What?”

She started patting her pockets, pulling out a Sharpie. Then she made a frustrated noise when she couldn’t find anything to write on. She finally pulled a spare magazine for her pistol and wrote a series of numbers on it. What the hell is that? Some sort of code—oh it’s a European phone number. She’s French, remember, Colm?

“This is my mother’s home number,” Ida said, slapping the magazine into my hand. “I don’t know what happens after tonight, but you had better live. Call her, and if you somehow do it before I do, let her know that both of us live and how to contact you. If you don’t I swear to God I will kill you.”

Then she, to my complete surprise, grabbed the sides of my head, pulled me down and planted a kiss on my cheek. “For luck,” she said, then shoved me. She turned and ran back into the burning town.

I was frozen for a heartbeat, a bunch of emotions running through me. Finally, I let out a small laugh. “Another thing to worry about if I lived,” I said through a chuckle. Does her mom even speak English? I hope so.

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I stuffed the magazine in my pocket and hoped it remained there for the rest of the night. I once again turned and ran away from town, my eyes scanning around me. A few dozen yards from the town I found what I needed, a relatively smooth clearing. I spent a few moments sweeping the trash away and yanking the odd weed with my tentacles before smoothing the dirt over.

As I began to write out mystic symbols and other magical crap, a scream tore across the island with the same force as Terrance’s bellow from earlier. The scream, however, was from a very familiar voice.

“You hear that, Avery?” Terrance shouted over the island, pausing to elicit another scream from Alice. “I’m going to cut this bitch until you show up!”

“Get out, Colm!” Alice said quickly. “This limp dick—“ she was interrupted by a crack and another scream.

I had only paused in writing for a moment before I figured out what was happening. It took every bit of self-discipline I had to not rush the formulae and symbols, to make no mistakes. The circle had to take up much more room because the tentacles I was using to write with created thick lines and dirt was a really shitty surface with which to channel energy. It was great at absorbing it, but not directing it, as any electrician can tell you.

Terrance began taunting me more but I was doing my best to block it out. The aloof mastermind persona he’d maintained up until now was gone, and now he sounded like a college dudebro who lost a bet and was taking it badly.

I finished my work, gave it a cursory once-over. Spotting no mistakes I slashed my hand with my claws, only to have the LotOS prevent the penetration.

“God-fucking-damn-it,” I said, slashing my chin and letting blood drip into my palm before flinging it into the circle.

“Get out here you hateful bitch,” I said.

Unlike previous times, where Trix had appeared almost as if she had always been here, this time she appeared with fire and fury.

“YOU DARE—“ She said, having appeared as a truly horrifying, Geiger-esque tits and dicks everywhere monstrosity that filled every inch of the circle to the point that I felt the weight on the protections built within it. Before she could get more than two words out, however, I cut in.

“They have Alice,” I said.

Trix, who I was sure was about to regale me with the many punishments she was going to put me through, drew up short. It was hard to tell what her expression was, as her face was composed of two female torsos with eyes between the pairs of tits, the corners of her mouth the two belly buttons. Between the two navels was a mouth with disturbingly supple lips. The heads on the torsos also had eyes, but no mouths, and they stared unblinkingly at me. If I wasn’t already so pissed and exhausted, I probably would have been properly terrified.

“Yeah,” I continued. “The assholes who want to sacrifice me to the Doorman currently have Alice. Do you give a shit? Or do I send you back?”

Trix’s demeanor changed and her weird, between-boobs-eyes narrowed at me in suspicion. That had to interfere with her peripheral vision, right? “If you think you can barter her life to get you out of your contract—“

I interrupted her again. “I’m going to go try and save her no matter what,” I said. “But I’m running on fumes—“ I paused as another of Alice’s screams split the night. “—and going after a warlock in his place of power, and they’ll be expecting me. So I was hoping you’d activate Article 0 so I’d have more than a pocket full of a gumption and moxie to fight with.”

Trix had a good poker face. She rarely let me see anything that she didn’t intend. That said, the scream had unsettled her. So much so that even her weird monster face was easy for me to read. She looked like she was having an internal debate.

“Trix!” I yelled. “Kind of on the clock right now!”

“Fine!” She said, and only the built-in protections of the circle kept her shout from deafening me. A familiar document appeared in front of one of her many hands—not the ones near the front that I had been expecting. A pen appeared in her hand and she signed off on the special clause I had put in that she had humorously allowed.

Simply put, she can consider the contract fulfilled at any time should she wish.

As soon as the pen left the page, pain, horrible, burning pain filled my mind, pulling a scream from me. It lasted several seconds, each second feeling like an eternity.

Then it was gone.

I found myself on the ground, breathing heavily. I shakily got to my feet. “That… was different.”

“Did you think the price of the souls was arbitrary?” Trix asked. “They serve many purposes, one being a smooth transition of power. Now go save my granddaughter before the power wanes.”

I nodded, turned, then paused when I caught on to something. “Wanes? What?”

“There’s a reason the price was so high,” Trix explained. “With only two souls to fuel the bond, it will diminish until it finds equilibrium. Now go!”

There were many more questions I had, but she was right. I turned and forced my body into a jog. After a bit, I realized I had six tentacles now. I repeated the trick that I had done on the ship when I was injured, using them to pick myself off the ground, and started a scuttling “run” with my eldritch appendages. They didn’t seem to get tired and, while I could run faster on my own feet, I’d arrive at the ziggurat exhausted. While this was slightly slower, it wasn’t that much.

“Hold on Alice,” I muttered as the ziggurat became larger in my vision. “I’m coming, and I got a new toy to share.”