“I’m curious,” the voice of Sophia asks from right behind , “was this a simple lapse in judgnt caused by an overload of unfamiliar stimuli? Or do you always do whatever a pretty girl tells you? No, I suppose it can’t be the latter, or you would have blown your brains out like I asked.”
“You’re not Sophia!” I snap at the empty air, whirling around in search of any sign of the deimovore’s presence. There’s nothing but fog. “All you’re doing is pissing off!”
“Let’s put that to the test,” she purrs, her stolen voice like velvet.
Sophia—the deimovore—steps out of the gray, puts her hand on my gun, and nudges the muzzle to press against her forehead.
“How do I look?” she asks. Her smile is angelic. Her erald eyes sparkle with joy and mirth. She’s wearing a pristine white cardigan over a soft yellow blouse and a long pink skirt, and it looks wonderful on her. She’s beautiful. She’s perfect. I love her.
I pull the trigger.
The horrible simulacrum of Sophia crumples imdiately, blood and brain matter oozing down the side of her caved-in skull. She makes a wet, sickening crunch when she hits the ground. Her one intact eye stares blankly at nothing. Her body lies still on pavent. Red seeps into the white of her cardigan, stains her blouse, and pools beside the ruined ss of her head.
I know it’s not her. I know I didn’t just kill the woman I love—couldn’t have, not for good, not since she’s a magical girl—but I’m still looking at her corpse. The face of Sophia, mutilated because I shot it. The corpse of Sophia, stinking and bloody.
I throw up. Hey, Agatha, I’m in the club now. I laugh at my own stupid, pointless thought, and my laughter cos out deranged. The sight of Sophia’s death is stuck in my mind, playing on repeat. Her perfect, smiling face. Pulling the trigger. Sudden absence. Blood and gore.
My hands are shaking. I return the gun that killed Sophia—killed the copy—to fla. What good is it anyway, against a monster that never dies?
“What do you want?” I ask it, voice rasping and hollow. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“I’m impressed,” Ferromancer answers, cool and collected and not Ferromancer. “Takes guts to shoot your girlie like that, doll. You’ve got a real future in this business.”
Howl laughs. “I knew you were a monster, but damn, that’s cold. ‘Course, you know you’re gonna have nightmares about this for weeks, right? Years, if you live that long.”
“What do you want!?” I scream into the fog. “What do you fucking want!?”
Protheus roars with and I unleash it in imp after imp, forging them into existence and sending them into the endless mist to burn and explode. I send them in every direction, tossed at random, and the red fla washes over . Wherever we are, wherever the deimovore is hiding, I will make it feel my anger.
Sothing touches my shoulder and I jolt away from it. I throw another imp and watch fla disappear amid fog. No sign of the deimovore, but it’s still here, watching , probably laughing at . It’s enjoying this. It touches my shoulder again and this ti I just grit my teeth and wait.
“I want to hurt you,” Sophia whispers in my ear. “I want to break you down and see what yummy fears shine through when we strip away all your little lies and defenses. Show the real you, Rachel. Show that trembling heart.”
“It’s Archon,” I snarl. “You’re not dealing with just another human, you vicious shit. I’m a goddamn witch. You’re gonna have to try better than that to get running scared.”
“Archon?” asks my own voice. “No, I don’t think so.”
A droplet of water hits , then another. It starts to rain. The fog pulls back.
In the early days of the new world, when everywhere was still adapting to the idea that magic was real and so people could level cities—in the days before Vanguard and Coterie brought their sides in line and instituted the pact—there was a fight in Forks that got a lot of people killed. A witch opened a chasm that would have swallowed up the city if she hadn’t been stopped. Striga hunted her down three tis and executed her.
The chasm didn’t go away, and a lot of money was pouring into Forks, so a bridge was paid for and the magical girls helped fast-track its construction. An industrial bridge, a leviathan of concrete and steel. They called it the Owl Bridge for the woman who saved the city—after she refused more direct credit, of course. It’s the only bridge in town over a drop more substantial than a few feet into a gentle river.
The deimovore is standing by the edge, peering down into the black depths of the naless chasm. She’s wearing my face—Rachel’s face—dark hair slick with rain and hoodie getting soaked. She looks miserable.
“We were nineteen and our whole life was behind us,” she says solemnly, sadly, pathetically. “A prodigy when we were young, but that natural talent withered away in college and we realized that we’d never really been special, just sheltered. Our new peers were all that smart, and most of them had worked harder for it than we’d ever felt the need to. We fell behind, and the gap kept widening. While everyone else was looking at majors and plotting their careers we saw nothing but tragedy in our future. Better it be on our terms, not theirs, right?” She turns away from the abyss and smiles at , sad-eyed and sopping. “This is a good place to die, don’t you think?”
The gun is back in my hand, resummoned on instinct, and I fire the whole magazine into the monster pretending to be . The Rachel copy jerks and staggers under the hail of gunfire, flesh ripping open and then lting back together just in ti for another deadly impact. I fire until the gun clicks empty, putting hole after hole in my doppelganger, and the only thing that stops from making a new gun to keep firing is that she starts laughing at .
“Was that cathartic?” the deimovore mocks in my voice, already fully healed from all the superficial damage I dealt it. “I an, wow, you finally got to kill yourself! Only, wait, I’m still standing, so I guess you failed again. Do you ever do anything right?”
“Why did you bring here?” I ask. My voice is too tight. My breathing is erratic. I never wanted to co back to this place. I didn’t want to rember this part of that night.
The deimovore ignores my question. The false Rachel tilts her head. “Do you know what it ans to devour soone’s mories? It ans that, in a very real sense… I’m you. It would explain why I feel such overwhelming loathing for you, right? I an, I rember everything you rember and I feel it like you felt it, so doesn’t that make Rachel? Just… with a more discerning palate.” She licks her lips. “Any animal can fear its own death, but humans have more abstract fears that are so rich and delectable. You convince yourselves to be afraid of entire worlds that might never co to pass.”
“I don’t need the philosophy rant,” I say through gritted teeth.
The other Rachel laughs. “Of course, we get it enough from our friends, right?”
I hear Femur sigh from out of sight. “Maybe if you’d paid attention more, you wouldn’t be in this situation. Did you even open the books I sent you?”
Mordacity snorts, just as invisible. “Don’t be ridiculous, she’s way too stupid to understand any of it. She stopped trying to understand anything the first ti she had to struggle, and look where it led her.”
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I flinch. The deimovore smiles.
“Let put this in more concrete terms,” it says with relish, adopting the pose and expression I wear when I’m about to spin a tale for Sophia. “Every year, you see your precious Sophia less and less. And you, delightful pattern-matching monkey that you are, make the connection that one year that sliver of ti will drop to zero, and Sophia will stop coming ho, and you will never see her again.”
No one lives forever. Everyone’s luck runs out. Even hers. So day, worn down from overwork, Sophia will miss sothing. She’ll make a mistake. Her back will bend from the weight of the world she’s holding on her shoulders, and she will die. To the Syndicate, to a Catastrophe, to so lucky new girl who never expected to win that pattern of three. It doesn’t matter how it happens. Nothing will matter anymore, because Sophia will be dead.
“I can stop that,” I say, and I hate how raw my voice sounds. “I’m going to save her.”
The deimovore shifts again. Hair and eyes change color, features lt and reform, and once again I’m staring at a perfect copy of Sophia. Her laugh is soft and warm.
“You’re going to save ? Cutie, I’m the one who saved you.” Comprehension dawns on her face, that bright-eyed expression of understanding that I’ve co to cherish and admire. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
That day on the bridge, the last dregs of sunlight still staining the evening sky, standing on the ledge and getting ready to jump. Sophia, running through the rain to grab my hand and pull away.
“Stay at my place tonight, okay?”
Back to her dorm, to slip out of our damp clothes and crawl into bed together, sharing our warmth beneath her blankets. I sobbed into her shoulder, her neck, her hair. She held as I shuddered and shivered and told her everything. And she told :
“I’d miss you if you were gone.”
And I fell in love.
The deimovore watches from behind Sophia’s face. It twists her mouth into a gentle smile. “I wonder,” she muses, the cruelty in her eyes betraying the light tone of her voice, “if she told you that because it was true… or because it’s what you needed to hear. Did she save you, or would she have done the sa for anyone? I think we both know the answer.”
Sophia. My angel, but not my angel. A thousand evenings waiting for her to co ho. A thousand canceled lunches. A thousand tis that sothing else was more important.
“She saw another stupid, wounded animal, and she did what she had to in order to keep it alive. But that’s all. Because if she cared, then she would make ti for you. If you really mattered to her, you wouldn’t be alone.”
The deimovore’s smile grows wicked, and I can’t bear to look at it contort my beloved’s face any longer. I turn away from it, but it’s right there behind , even closer now. It laughs.
Sophia murmurs, “You’re afraid that if you tell how you really feel, I’ll reject you. You’re afraid that I’ll hate you. Because you know, deep down, that I don’t love you back. You’re just another pity project.”
I can’t stop the wretched, broken sob that tears its way out of my throat. I dig my transformation-sharpened nails into my arms and carve bloody gouges. Hot red coats my skin and drips down to splatter against concrete and sizzle in the rain. I shut my eyes tight and concentrate on the pain—the physical pain, bright and hot and imdiate, pushing out the sensation of the wound in my heart.
This isn’t Sophia. It’s playing on my fears. Extracting every ounce of dread and anguish. It knows . It knows what I fear most. But it isn’t Sophia. It doesn’t know how she truly feels.
I can’t hide from my fear. I’m terrified of losing Sophia, either to magical violence or a heartfelt conversation gone horribly wrong. I’m a coward, and that’s why I’ve never told her that I love her. But I can’t keep running forever. I can’t let it rule . And I can’t fail here, not when I’m inches away from eting Strix Striga as a peer—as a fellow conspirator.
When I do, I’ll tell her everything. I’ll tell her that I’m Rachel, and that I know she’s Sophia, and that I love her. And then I’ll save her.
I open my eyes and stare down the deimovore. The monster licks its lips, its face lit up with the rapture of a filling al. It’s devouring my fear, and I can’t stop that from happening—I can’t stop the fear in my heart, even if I know it might be completely irrational—but there must be a way to beat this thing. Fear will not rule . This is just another puzzle to solve.
Everything that’s magic is bound by certain rules. The fla I use for transformation and creation has a finite quantity. Pocketspaces are highly limited in their function, and the best user of pocketspaces had to sacrifice everything else to attain that mastery. Magical girls and witches are immortal to regular humans, but they die to the rule of three against other magic users. The Jovians are more restricted than any of us, bound to the doctrine of “empower and guide.”
I don’t believe that the deimovore is an exception. So random monster that our hunter expert didn’t even sound that worried about at first can’t be the one magic user to have unconditional immortality, so what the hell is its condition? Co on, Rachel, think this through.
In the woods, when it was chasing , it shrugged off every attack. It rotted its way out of the foam I tried to encase it in, and then it ambushed and stabbed and got its lamprey mouth around my neck. And then—
I shift my gaze to my bloodied arms, rapidly healing from the injuries I inflicted. Healing quickly, but still noticeably healing. And I didn’t see that in my first round against this bastard.
When the deimovore had pinned, it lanced my limbs to keep stuck and bit down hard on my neck. But when Agatha knocked it off , I was fine; no wound on my neck, nor anywhere else. No sign it had actually hurt . I thought it knocked down, but did it really knock down, or did I just fall from surprise?
This whole ti, this whole conversation, the deimovore hasn’t attacked once. It’s been toying with my mind and goading into shooting it, but it hasn’t done anything like it did in the woods before it knew what made tick. Sure, it said it prefers the “abstract” fears, but surely it’d have an easier ti extracting those fears if it cut off my hands so I couldn’t even try to fight back. So why hasn’t it?
It’s ti to take another gamble.
I look back up at the deimovore, still wearing my beloved Sophia. Slowly, with effort, I push away the fear and force myself to smile. “Hey, deimovore. I figured you out.”
Sophia’s face twitches, an almost imperceptible crack in the mask—but I know her face better than I know my own, and I see it. Victory. “Have you, now?” Dismissive, indulgent, patronizing. But the crack is there.
“Your immortality,” I say, “it’s conditional. And the condition is this: I can’t hurt you… but you can’t hurt . You’re all psychic attacks and manipulation, but you can’t actually injure .” I pause for effect, and then I spread my arms wide. “Feel free to prove wrong, though. I promise I won’t dodge.” My grin gets cockier, practically goading the deimovore to attack .
For a mont, I think it actually will, and that I’ve lost the gamble. The deimovore twitches, hands becoming claws and then back to normal, its shadow flickering. It wants to rip apart and make scream.
But it doesn’t.
Hatred burns across the monster’s face, across my sweet Sophia, and it hisses in rage. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you? But I don’t need violence to hurt you.”
“That’s true,” I admit, “but more importantly: you can’t keep here. Sure, you can do your little fog trick and keep harassing with the voices of all my friends and peers, but I’m just gonna keep walking. And eventually, I’m sure, my teammates will find . I bet they’re already closing in.”
To prove my point, I pick one end of the bridge at random and start walking toward it, not even bothering to fly. Another insult for the deimovore.
Sophia appears in front of again, and as I walk past her she says, “Sophia Lane, 1431 Jasper Hale Avenue, Unit 209. The na and ho address of Strix Striga, the nesis of the Syndicate. How do you think Delilah would like that information?”
I pause, but only for a mont. “I’m sure Delilah would be thrilled to have her magic turned against her by the oath she swore to the Morrigan. Fuck off, fear-eater. Find easier prey.”
The copy of Sophia snarls defiance, her lips pulling back further and further—teeth sharpening into needles—eyes bulging and bulging and then popping, worms pouring from the empty sockets—arms and legs elongating, spider-like limbs bursting from her back—she lunges at with claws and teeth and fury—
—and she’s gone. The fog clears, the rain stops, and the night sky shines overhead. I take a deep breath and let out a mountain of tension.
“Good work,” Howl congratulates , leaning against the bridge railing.
I jump at her sudden appearance, and then I shout at her, “Why the hell didn’t you tell the deimovore can’t hurt !?”
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