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  The ruined state of the sign made him wonder if the place might’ve closed down years ago, but he found it a few miles further down the road. It was one of those long, narrow, single-story places—the sort of establishment you’d see in some movie from the 50s or 60s; like the Bates Motel in Psycho.

  Across the road from the hotel there was a used motorcycle dealership, and a Tattoo shop that, based on the signs in the window, also sold adult magazines and toys.

  Probably the seediest corner one could hope to find in this little town, thought Malcolm as he turned into the parking lot. And seedy was fine with him. Seedy was anonymous, and though he didn’t have any reason to suspect anyone was actively tracking them at the moment, it seemed prudent to assume the worst.

  The sun was peeking over the horizon by then, casting everything in a pale, bluish luminescence. There were only three cars parked outside the motel. The windows of the tiny registration office were alight, so he assumed someone was in there.

  He parked the van, left the engine running, and told Vivienne to wait while he went to book the room.

  “You can turn off the heat,” she said. “It’s stifling in here.”

  “Sure,” he said, and turned off the van engine as well.

  “Roll the windows down too.”

  He nodded, and did it, then asked, “Are you all right?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  She sounded angry, and he got the impression she didn’t want him to press the subject.

  Well bugger that.

  “Listen,” he said. “You’re going to have to give me some kind of explanation at some point.”

  Her eyes blazed. “Explanation? So you’re making demands now?”

  “I’m not demanding anything,” he said. “It’s just, I’m sure you can see, this is very confusing for me. I need to know why you’re here.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Why am I here? Because disaster is upon me, that’s why. What you’re looking at right now Mister Thackery is a nightmare come true. For me, anyway. What you should do right now, if you have any heart at all, is just leave me alone. Go get the room! Waste no time. And don’t worry, I’ll explain what little I can soon enough, you won’t have to endure the mystery for much longer.”

  She looked pointedly away from him. Clearly the conversation was over.

  He sighed and left her to stew.

  3 - The How and the Why

  Booking the room proved to be a simple affair.

  The man behind the desk was old and fat with huge thick eyeglasses, and he had a filterless cigarette hanging out of his mouth the whole time, which made it hard to understand what he was saying.

  Malcolm thought, from the man’s age and from his manner, that he was probably the owner. It was strange that he would be here himself this early in the morning, but perhaps he was just too much of a penny-pincher to hire anybody.

  Malcolm showed one of the fake ID’s he carried, and paid cash for a room with two beds. It cost a bit more than it should have, considering the quality of the establishment, and he had the feeling he was being gouged by a greedy man who sensed an easy mark, but it wasn’t worth debating under the circumstances.

  Back outside he found that Vivienne had her van door open, presumably to get more air. She looked pale and shaky sitting there, with her chin tucked tight.

  Her eyes were haunted, and it was easy to see her focus was firmly fixed inside herself. She barely looked up when he got back in with her.

  “Room eight,” he said.

  She nodded, seeming totally disinterested.

  He cranked the engine, and drove to the other end of the building, parking directly in front of their room.

  - - -

  The interior smelled strongly of mothballs, and looked about how Malcolm had expected—a puke-green carpet, yellow walls, and a big ugly chandelier with tacky bulbs made to look like candles.

  There were two twin beds, very close together, and a table between them with a wind-up alarm clock atop it, and a telephone that looked like it probably came from the 1990s.

  The other side of the room was furnished with a plain-looking bureau which supported a tiny TV set, and an even tinier coffee maker. The room had two doors, one leading to a bathroom, the other to a small closet.

  The place was no great shakes, but at least it was clean.

  Vivienne was still standing in the open doorway, staring in with a strange, maniacal expression on her face.

  “Are you coming?” he said.

  She took a deep breath, and nodded. “I guess.”

  He waited, and after a few more seconds she took two mincing steps, crossed the threshold, then just stood there.

  He went behind her, and closed the door.

  She was glancing around herself, very quick head movements. There was fear in her behavior, but no sign of the anger he’d seen briefly just a few minutes before.

  “You should be safe here for now,” he said. “I’ll run to Walmart in a few minutes and buy you something to wear.”

  Her face showed confusion, and a hint of frustration, like she hadn’t even comprehended his words, and wasn’t happy about it.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’ll need clothes, like you said.”

  “Oh… that’s right. But that can wait. You’re tired. I can feel it.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “You’ve been through worse than me. Tell me what size you wear, and I’ll be back in less than an hour with something for you to put on.”

  “Size?”

  “Yes, you know—your clothing size.”

  She took a deep breath, seemed to gather herself.

  “Okay,” she said. “Clothing sizes…”

  Her eyes glazed over for about 15 seconds. It was like whatever was inside her, whatever animated her, just went away. She could’ve been a doll standing there. Then suddenly her expression came to life again, and she said, “Yes, that’s right. I wear a size 10. And a medium in shirts, and size 7 shoes. But you don’t need to hurry. I’ll be fine.”

  “No,” he said. “It needs to be dealt with.”

  “Oh come on,” she said, suddenly irritated, her voice full of intense condemnation. “Don’t think you can fool me. You want to leave me alone don’t you? Are you planning to run out on me? Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid of what I might force you to do?”

  “Afraid? Are you joking? It’s nothing like that.”

  “Then what is it? Why would you insist on immediately jumping back into that disgusting, stinking box you call a van, and spending an hour in some hellish department store, shopping for women’s clothes? Are you a fool Malcolm Thackery? Or are you a coward?”

  “Um… Hopefully, I’m neither… The reason I need to take care of this now is because we may have to grab our things and leave at any time. The drones are attempting to track the ogre woman for me. When they find her, there may not be much time to wait around. Of course, now that you’re here, I suppose you can just tell me where she is.”

  Vivienne tilted her head to the side, and closed her eyes concentrating. “Ogre…” she said. “You’re talking about the woman called Myra, right?”

  Malcolm nodded. “Yes, that’s her.”

  “I have no idea where she is, nor do I know what she’s doing. I do have certain information about her, certain facts, because she’s important to our mission, but my information about her is all quite abstract.”

  “What about Simone? Do you know where she is?”

  “Not at all. I know a great deal about her life; who she is, why she’s important to you and me. And for some reason I have a deep feeling of personal connection to her, but I probably know less than you in terms of where she might be. And that’s the problem.”

  “Problem?”

  “There’s plenty that I don’t know—or to put it more plainly, there’s plenty that I don’t remember. And from the look on your face, it’s clear that you don’t understand.”

  “No, I suppose I don�
��t.”

  “That’s because you’re working under a false assumption.”

  “What false assumption?”

  “You think I’m just like before; that I’m the same as the last time we met… We did meet, right? At an airport?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I thought so. Some things are starting to come back to me now, becoming much more real in my mind…” She looked him in the eyes for a long moment, her expression suddenly softening. Then she smiled very slightly in an almost mocking fashion. “I have the strong sense that I know you very, very well for some reason.”

  He shrugged. “Our meeting at the airport is the only time I’ve ever actually seen you, until now. I certainly wouldn’t say we know each other all that well.”

  “We might know each other better than you think. Maybe in another time or in some place beyond this reality. Or maybe I know you, or some aspect of me knows you, but you don’t know me, or you don’t realize who I actually am.”

  “A lot of possibilities.”

  “Yes.”

  “If it’s not rude to say,” he added. “I have to mention that it seems you’re a bit confused on the question yourself.”

  “Yes… But I’m confused about everything, so that doesn’t really mean much.” Her expression darkened again and she said, “But, back to the main topic… What I have done today—and I’m not sure yet why I chose to do it—has a great deal of significance. This,” she gestured towards herself. “This sack of meat, is not really me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Becoming a physical creature, in a permanent biological way, isn’t easy for Celestial beings. I had to leave most of my essence behind in the higher realms in order to put this tiny portion of my soul into this body. Think back to the last time you and I met in person, at the airport. If I’m remembering correctly, I gave you one of the Keys of Heaven, for safe keeping.”

  He nodded. “Yes, you wanted me to give it to Simone, assuming I ever manage to find her. I have it in the van, a white box with some sort of magic that seals it shut.”

  “Yes, well, the method that allowed me to appear before you that day was an entirely different thing than the dark and dangerous magic you and I performed this morning. The body we made for me at the airport, that was just a construct. I was playing little games with The Stream of reality to give myself a temporary vessel, like a projection… This is different. I have bones, blood. I have to eat and drink. I'm stuck, and I can't do anything cheap or easy, like committing suicide, to put an end to it. There are oaths involved in making something like this happen; oaths I'd never be willing to break. Which means I'm stuck here for whatever lifespan destiny sticks me with, and meanwhile, I’m compelled to honor this body and the dark miracle that brought it to fruition.”

  She sat down on the edge of one of the beds, propped her elbows on her knees, and put her head in her hands.

  “Basically,” she said. “I’m just a fragment of myself. Like a puzzle piece taken away from the puzzle and tossed into the garbage.”

  He sat down on the other bed, and scratched at the newly grown stubble on his chin, considering her words in silence for a moment.

  “Honestly,” he said. “I can see why you’re so out of sorts about it. Sounds like a terrible thing to go through.”

  She sighed. “It is, but it’s really nothing new. I’ve lived hundreds of mortal lives. Sometimes I have two or three mortal existences going concurrently. There might even be a few different versions of me living out there right now, probably totally unaware that they have a piece of my soul animating their bodies. Gods slice themselves up all the time, divide their essences, in all sorts of different ways. Usually when I do this I’m born into the world as a tiny mindless baby, which is easier, because I don’t have to know where I came from, and don’t have to know what I’m losing. This time, I’ve chosen, for some reason, to incarnate this piece of myself as a full-grown adult, and bring very specific knowledge with me. So this is some sort of major emergency I guess. But it feels like I’ve just crawled into hell.”

  Malcolm spent a moment trying to put himself into her shoes, and found that what she was describing was basically impossible to comprehend.

  Well, that’s probably because I’m not a god.

  Which was just as well.

  “Anyway,” she said. “We have a job to do, you and I, and we must do it to the best of our abilities. I'm really counting on you to help. After what I've given up, it would be really rotten of you to abandon me.”

  "I'm not necessarily intending to abandon you. At least not right away."

  “Not intending? If you abandon me, you need to know, I'll be very angry with you! Honestly, I’d rather not even have to deal with it. Hopefully I have some sort of ironclad leverage on you, to keep your ass in line… I feel like I do, but I'm not sure what it is…”

  Is she insane? he wondered.

  It seemed likely, but probably only slightly insane.

  Still, it was very much less then ideal to be stuck in the company of a mentally deranged goddess. Perhaps she would improve when she got more comfortable here. He supposed it was all he could hope for.

  He was about to slip away and run to Walmart while she was distracted, when another major question occurred to him. “You forgot to tell me something,” he said.

  “I’m sure I forgot all sorts of things.”

  “Well this one is pretty important.”

  “What is it?”

  “You haven’t bothered to explain why you’d do this to yourself. What do you hope to achieve here? Is this all just to save Simone Copeland?”

  She laughed. “Absolutely not. This isn’t about her at all. This is all about the beast that has victimized her—the powerful dragon attempting to use her. This is about vengeance, about promises I made long, long ago. About justice… You know of the word Darklord, right?”

  “I know the word.”

  “Well, it’s a word that’s been perverted over time. There are no Darklords anymore, not really, and there never were many. Most people throughout history who called themselves Darklords were really just well trained pets that the Titans used in the same way a witch will use a house-cat. Those so-called Darklords were little more than tools of convenience. They made it possible for the beasts of the Mirror World to extend their wills out into the societies of men. An actual Darklord, one worthy of the title, is an entirely different thing. A Darklord lays the Titan low, and assumes power over it. Darklords are the masters. The beasts are their pets. And Simone Copeland can be a true Darklord. She has that much potential. It is my goal, ultimately—and it may take me a very long time—to see that she achieves that title. Because the dragon that has taken her, known as Apep, is a menace beyond your understanding, and he must be taken down. He has terrible goals, and millions of tendrils of influence that have stretched throughout all the worlds of men, spreading his evil like a disease. I will stop him. And you WILL help me!”

  “I will?”

  “Yes, you will. It’ll be challenging work, but if we stick together, and keep a positive attitude it should be achievable… Now if I can just remember what sort of leverage I have to make sure you stay on task… Maybe if I can just rest a little bit, It’ll come back to me…”

  He nodded. “I imagine you’ll remember eventually. And while you’re thinking on it, I’ll head on down to the store, and get you something to wear.”

  “What? That again? I thought we decided to put that off.”

  “Nothing’s changed. You’ll need clothes. I can fetch them for you in no time flat. Let me get that chore out of the way.”

  She looked up, caught his eye. “You’re too sleepy to drive,” she said.

  “No I’m not.”

  “Can’t you feel it?” she said, and then he noticed a very faint white mist begin to rise up from the carpet.

  She stood and faced him.

  He took a step back from her. “What’re you doing?”

&nbs
p; “You’re awfully tired,” she said. “I can feel it, and you can feel it, and we all feel all the things that we feel when we feel them. Don’t we?”

  Her voice echoed as if from a great distance and his field of vision began to narrow. Suddenly he was unsteady on his feet.

  She walked over to him, helped him down to the bed, “Just rest,” she said. “Rest those tired bones of yours, rest them well, and rest that heart, and those big old eyes…”

  She reached down, and gently closed his eyes with her hands, as if he were dead.

  And then, though he didn’t want to, Malcolm slept for a while.

  It was a good and peaceful sleep, badly needed. His body thanked him for it.

  PART 3 - CAUGHT IN A WEB

  1 - Full

  Myra, as always, ate the livers first, from all three of the dead bodies surrounding the fire. Then she ate the hearts.

  And after that she was pretty full—her stomach wasn’t a bottomless pit, after all, and she’d put an awful lot of rich meat into it already, enough to leave her feeling quite bloated.

  But she knew she needed extra nourishment because of her injuries, so she tore off the fat boy’s arm at the elbow, and forced down most of the forearm flesh. It was chewy and nearly tasteless, but she made herself eat it anyway, and as she did so, it occurred to her that this was the sort of meat that she might’ve taken the time to actually prepare on a normal day back home. A bit of seasoning and some roasting in an oven would’ve made it much more delicious, but the current situation didn’t allow her any time for such luxuries. Fatty meat like this could be made tender enough to fall off the bone if cooked slowly at a low temperature.

  When she finished eating, she spent some time sitting on the ground, cross-legged, the early morning sun casting dappled shadows on the ground around her.

  Tobias would show up some time in the next few hours. She’d told him to meet her on the old logging road, and to bring some mercenaries with him so they could handle the vehicles parked out there. She’d intended to go straight there and wait for him after her meal, but now that she had a full belly, and her mind was clearing up, a new plan had begun forming.