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Our Lady of the Passion intensely, furiously regrets every life choice that landed her here. Here on the backward, miserable, fucking freezing rock her Aunty died on, thumb up her arse, while the zombies fix their pet lich. Stuck in the cunt end of the universe waiting for Aim’s fucking dog to pick the perfect patch of slimy cave wall to fucking piss on.
“‘He’s an old man, Pash. It’s either you or me, Pash.’ I’m not your fucking dog walker.”
Aim has no answer to this complaint, because they’re back in the truck full of necromancers, having a leisurely chat with the nosiest biddy Pash has ever had the misfortune to meet. The mum of the ghost in the fucking shell, according to her. Even less than, since Hect and her hanger-on got melted together like slices of cheese in a toastie. Fucking zombies! All grown in tubes anyway. Family are the ones who mourn you.
"Pick a spot, will you?" Pash spits at the dog, loud in the creepy quiet, the oppressive dark. "My fingers are falling off here."
Noodle doesn't give a shit about her numb fingers, or that she's boiling internally with impotent rage. The dog's used to her by now. Its dingy fur almost glows, that’s how dark this place is, just the weak and watery floodlights flickering high overhead; the truck’s headlights are off now, saving power—as if there’s anywhere to drive—and the empty front seats blink red and yellow from the dashboard.
Pash is looking back, eyes fixed on the cracked windshield, straining for a glimpse of Aim’s profile among the shadowed figures crowded in the rear, and so she doesn’t notice straight away the dog’s sudden stillness, the way the hackles rise. Doesn’t turn until it starts up growling, buzzy and uncertain, and a shiver runs through all its limbs and up the lead into Pash’s hand.
There’s a figure ahead. As pale and glowing as the dog in the piss-poor light, a weapon—probably a fucking sword—gripped in one hand. It’s moving toward her, and the movement pings a strobing wrong wrong wrong! in Pash’s hindbrain.
“Fuck!” she startles, and reaches reflexively for her gun—remembers she left it in the truck so she doesn’t kill herself with a fucking ricochet—no electrics on her either—snarls and fumbles a machete from the holster on her thigh to point at the thing now emerging from the black mouth of the tunnel ahead.
It looks—
Pash just doesn't know any other way to describe it.
It looks like a doll. A doll that's been fucked around with by the nastiest brat to ever fuck around. Grotesquely tall—seven feet at least—but soaking wet and limned with frost, with hair that might have once been blond hanging lank and tangled down to its knees. Barely covered by a ragged white dress that flakes away in tiny bits of dust as the thing approaches, revealing an hourglass body that doesn't leave proper room for a ribcage; skin that’s smooth the way airbrushed magazines are smooth, the way plastic is smooth, or porcelain, unnaturally even and unblemished.
Something is deeply wrong with its stretched, pale limbs, with the way the joints bend, like it was put together by an idiot who thought they knew better than millions of years of human evolution. And for the faintest instant Pash thinks part of its terrible form has actually been carved away down the chest, like a bite taken out of a sandwich—but no, this monster is carrying a slumped body over its shoulder, so dark it blends with the stone all around. Tiny and limp.
Troia cell’s little pet, bundled in black, slung like a sack of potatoes.
The inhuman hand that holds the slumped girl in place is painted with tacky, drying blood. So is the other hand, and the longsword it carelessly holds, and the bare feet, weirdly arched. But in spite of the blood, the joints, the everything…the face is the worst. Too smooth, too perfectly oval, too plumped in the cheeks and the lips, snub-nosed and big-eyed. And the fucking eyes—
Fight and flight activate simultaneously and tangle into freeze when those eyes meet hers. They are the least human of all. More forcefully alive than any living thing Pash has ever witnessed. Aunty once took her to see an active volcano, on a planet she'd said was a little bit like the one they'd all lost, and standing on the edge of the caldera enduring the heat of that god’s sleeping rage gave Pash something like the feeling she has now.
Then the dog—the fucking dog—barks. Once, sharp. A warning.
The monster blinks, and looks down at the dog, and somehow…something changes. Eases, just a little. Pash can't even articulate what it is, because this creature is still the worst and most horrifically wrong thing she's seen in her entire blighted life.
"I have forgotten the King of Dogs for a second time," the monster says—annoyed, like Aim when they didn't set the timer on the coffeemaker, but in a voice so evilly reverberative that Pash almost pisses herself—and it folds to its knees.
Noodle, all two feet of scruffy fur and scrabbling legs, twists out of the collar like nothing—has this dog been humoring her the whole time?—and darts up the ramp of the monster’s thighs to sniff frantically between its despicable face and the unconscious bent head of the lich, licking both with confused, mother-hennish urgency. “This place is perilous cold,” says the monster to the dog, chiding, “and thou hast neither coat nor booties.”
“What the fuck?” says Pash, machete still halfheartedly extended, the empty leash dangling from her other hand.
The monster’s eyes rise to look at her again.
Panic. The immediate, animal response to a threat so large as to be incomprehensible. Pash’s body locks once more without her say-so, perfectly still, as if this creature will forget she’s standing a meter away if she just doesn’t move.
“Our Lady of the Passion.” The monster’s head tilts, just a little, studying her the same way the creepy baby lyctor studied her after eating two of Pash’s bullets, like it’s reading her DNA. Then, weirdly sad: “‘Thy own soul a sword shall pierce.’ It may be that it hath already.”
Even though the voice is fucking apocalyptic and Pash might be about to die painfully on this uberzombie’s gory blade, the frozen panic subsides enough for her heart to ease out of her throat. “The fuck are you talking about, freak?”
The mouth—blue with cold, a perfect bow—doesn’t move, but somehow the face still gives the impression of a smile; the terrible eyes glitter. “Thou art still fierce, and handsome; honey and milk are under thy tongue. It is good. There are almost no beautiful things left.” Then the creature stands, with the dog trotting around its fucked-up feet, with the lich—who might be dead, with how covered in blood she is now that Pash can see her up close—still slung over its shoulder.
Then it takes a step, backward this time, and the monster and the maybe-dead lyctor girl just—
Fucking…vanish.
The frigid air bends around them, dimpling, like the dent in the flat surface of a lake when something big and fast is moving underneath. Then Pash is alone again, in the dark and icy cold, heart thudding so hard in her chest it could crack her ribs.
“Was that thing fucking hitting on me?” she asks, bewildered.
The dog, calm as anything, sniffs a circle around the spot where the monster just was—and then tip-taps back to Pash, and fucking pisses on her boot.