[IC] Same old story since day one, but I've got no place to run. [bowels & Glaw]

[Glaw]

Since getting topside, Tzek had spent a good hour in that gas station bathroom, grinning at his grimy reflection. He'd run his fingers -- his fingers -- over his slightly smooth jaw, through short dark hair (stiff just like he remembered it), around the contours of his ears. He'd jammed his thumbs in his eyes and laughed at the bright spots and light shadows. He'd opened his mouth wide and felt every sharp tooth with his tongue; he'd swallowed and watched his throat bob in the spit-soiled mirror; he'd grasped the porcelain sink and leaned forward til his nose nearly touched the glass, and he'd watched his eyes turn black. Oh, yes, he was himself again, in his body, not sardined in the skull of some meth-head schizophrenic but alone, in control, powerful, alive. He'd trembled with glee, he'd breathed through his teeth and savored the chill, the dank pungent mold-urine stench of being reborn in a filmy toilet stall. If only he could remember his name, he could pretend he were human again. Human still. One day. This was a cruel and wonderful taste of what he could have, what he would have if he carried out his mission. He'd grinned wide, and the mirror cracked.

Find the girl.

For a day and a half he'd scavenged the streets, grabbed random women and pulled their hair experimentally while they screeched obscenities and called the cops. He'd got himself into a fistfight with two other guys, which ended in an ambulance siren and hands in his pockets as he sauntered off the scene. He'd devoured four stacks of pancakes and ten cups of coffee, left pocket lint for the bill and had found the cops waiting for him outside the diner. He'd let them give him a lift to the station, and that's when he smelled her.

He sat on a bench in an office buzzing with uniforms, crammed against a shouting spitting half-naked homeless lunatic, having been told to wait his turn for booking. Tzek quietly dropped his cuffs, let loose the lunatic, and stayed to watch the shouting and crashing and body-slamming for a bit before he slipped out the door into the chill night rain.

He was soaked by the time he found her. It was an easy thing, when there was so much screaming going on, to approach unnoticed, and -- what was that saying? Two birds with one stone?

Tzek sloshed into the alley, his jacket dripping, eyes black. "Here kitty kitty," he hissed at the demon's back; his voice was drowned by screaming and rain but he knew he'd been heard. Just to be certain he had the old woman's attention, though, he flung an arm through the air and caused her to spontaneously slam shoulder-first into the alley wall. He flashed a fangy grin. He liked to call that the Force.

[bowels]

Carly hadn’t heard his seething beckon, nor had she seen him come up behind her assailant, but the she-beast certainly had. Before it could twist around and give him a very primal and hungry sniff, he slammed into her, and she caterwauled as she fell into the brick. The long black talons which had reanimated in place of the once human nails had clipped Carly well, cutting straight through the meat of her shoulder and skimming the front of her chest for a superficial scratch. It’d sliced through her shirt, too.

“Shit!” Carly yelled in panic, her amber eyes wide and frenzied. Blood was coming from her shoulder in healthy amounts; not enough to kill her, but it’d make her dizzy soon enough.

The creature was at war with itself. It had two options: go after the prey, or go after the bastard who dared try to curtail her. After it spent a few seconds crouched on all fours, looking between them, it launched with an animalistic howl for Carly.

She locked up. Then, instinct encroached, and she grabbed her injured and gushing shoulder with her right hand, and with all her might she kicked a very heavy crate into the creature’s midsection. It fell back down with a savage cry.

The adrenaline oozed from her just as quickly as it came, and not only was her bum leg screaming, but now her foot was, too. She cursed to herself and hunched over, though she still tried to keep an eye on the ambitious she-bitch. She was seeing stars, overcome with some strange and unknown feeling that she couldn’t place. While all of this was incredibly fucked up and way out of the ordinary, part of it felt right, familiar. There was no word she could associate it with. It made accepting this a hell of a lot easier, though. Her eyes were crazy from all the action, and the bleeding mascara down her round cheeks gave her a much more alarming look, like a lab rat that’d grown aware of its cage.

[Glaw]

A smile crawled across Tzek's face, and with impressed approval he peered across the cold rain at Carly. She looked like something wild dragged feet-first out of a swamp. It was a good look for her.

His attention dropped to the furious demon gnashing and splashing in the puddles. Tzek ground a foot in her hair, fell to one knee, and clasped a firm rough hand around her throat. He leaned over her, curious and grinning and dark.

"You'll want to hold still, now," he said conversationally, even as he looked into those rows of putrid needle-teeth. "You come quietly, or he'll send the hounds next." He raised his chin while keeping his eyes on the demon bitch's face, and he waited for the realization to sink in: the horror of being torn limb from limb, fingers and feet twisted off by mongrel teeth, bones crushing and sinew breaking, over and over again into eternity. Eternity was a long time, even by demon standards.

She could scratch and claw into him all she liked, but his fierce grip never slackened. He leaned on her throat as he leaned forward, his shark-mouth open wide, and he sucked the demon out of the human body. It was only a glimmer of thick black at first, trembling at the corner of bitch's lips -- but then she began to choke on herself, and Tzek sneered and doubled his efforts, his fingers crushing purple bruises into her neck.

A shadow bubbled up out of her throat, wet and somehow gaseous, and in an unbroken stream Tzek inhaled it. For half a minute the black greasy darkness retched upward, yanked out of her mouth and into his, until the tail of it slithered down his throat. He swallowed and loosened his fingers from the woman's throat.

The rain hissed all around them. Tzek rocked back on his heels and rose to his feet; he took a step back, his hands naturally finding their way to his jacket pockets, and he glanced over at Carly with a tip of his head. His human eyes were dull green. "You don't want to be here when she wakes up," he informed her naturally. "Questions are a nasty business." He gestured with his chin at the path that led on through the alley. "Go on home, Miss Carletta."

[bowels]

Carly didn’t take advantage of the averted attention, she didn’t try to run away with her bum leg and gushing shoulder and forget what she’d found, or what had found her; she remained in the alleyway, watching as the strangest thing unraveled before her. Her free hand, the one not holding her bleeding wound, grabbed at the brick wall.

Questions are a nasty business. It was ironic, because she had a million—undoubtedly more than the woman on the ground did. Whatever had possessed her was far gone now, and her fingernails were very human again, though the chipped polish had been completely erased.

“Home?” she choked, stuffed with her own astonishment. It was a lot to take in, and it would’ve been easier to get a cab and head to the hospital and run from it all, but she couldn’t. The familiarity kept her grounded, interested. The use of her legal name stupefied her even more, too.

Given a moment, she opened her eyes wide and shook her head in a large gesture, waiting for any of it to wash away. When she focused on the man, though, he was still there and so was she, hurt.

“Who are you? What is this?” she asked, occasionally looking down at the unconscious woman. She did agree that it’d be best to clear out before she came to.

[Glaw]

He stood with his weight on one leg in the rain, and he watched her. Blood was running diluted off her blouse and into the garbage puddles. She'd been sliced up pretty good -- but it didn't occur to him that this was a problem. Centuries of being surrounded by screaming breaking popping bleeding twisting fire inclined him to file such a wound as Carletta's into the laughably minor category. Especially given her heritage.

So he didn't answer. Not right away. He sniffed, drew his hand out of his jacket pocket and with it a pack of Camels he'd swiped off some guy at the gas station. He lit up with a Hello Kitty lighter (stolen off some homeless guy on the shop corner), his face glowed orange with the spark and he let his lungs fill with familiar smoke. He exhaled before he spoke.

"I'm your salvation." He grinned. He'd always wanted to say that. "This is a lady no longer possessed by a denizen of Hell." He gestured with the cigarette at the crumpled woman, and he stepped over her. The smoke was between his lips again and his hands in his pockets while he approached Carly.

"So you don't want to go home, how bout -- what's it -- the hospital?" He walked on, intending to pass her. "Hospital's this way, right? They'll fix your papercut. If you got insurance. I got insurance, no worries. Hurry up."

[bowels]

“Salvation?” she felt like a broken record. Then again, there wasn’t much else that she felt she could say. He also did a lot of talking for her, too, so that was taken care of. Considering the strange circumstances, he was particularly chatty. While she didn’t exactly like people, she couldn’t place whether or not it made her like his presence any more or less. Her brain was just so loud it was hard to hear much of anything.

“Uh, yeah, this way,” she muttered, her voice somewhat a growl. The fact that her shoulder was bleeding quite a bit made her seem even shorter, what with her hunched over to try and compensate for the rush of the flow. Her leg, stinted, made her seem even stockier than before, the way she hobbled over to the mystery man. Despite the ailments, she was very dogged, determined to move forward without assistance. Her eyebrows knitted together and the mascara began to dry on her cheeks as the rain died down.

“Why do you know my name?” she asked. “Scratch that—don’t ever call me Carletta again, ever. That’s more important.”

She looked up at him and felt the air rush out of her chest again from bewilderment. “Please don’t tell me I call you ‘salvation.’”

[Glaw]

"Okay, Gimpy." He tipped his head back to stare placidly at the rolling sky, then was distracted for a moment by his reflection in a dark shop window, where something wild and sharp-toothed shimmered dimly at his shoulders. That other demon was roiling sharp and fast in his stomach, and there was a screaming and snarling echo in his head, raw as a chalkboard -- but it was nothing he couldn't fall asleep to. The damp cigarette dropped into a puddle and he loped on, his sharp eyes straight ahead.

"I'm Tzek." His name escaped his teeth like a convict. He grinned. "Not really a name but that's all I've got, can't remember what I was before I was that." He shrugged and let his shoulders drop. "So you can call me Tzek, or you could call me Charlie. I like Charlie, I wouldn't mind it."

He'd walked a good few yards ahead of her before he stopped and thought to look back. She was scuffling along under the dripping streetlights like she'd been hit by a truck. For awhile he simply stared.

"Y'know, if I carry you, we might get to the hospital before you bleed out and die a slow and horrific death." He was completely and utterly serious, in that he doubted very much that she had as much time to kill as she apparently thought she had. "Or I could just wait til you pass out and then carry you, but I don't know where the hell I'm going, so."

[bowels]

Carly scowled but didn’t bother correcting him. Instead, she hobbled onward, her eyes trained on the wet cement beneath her. Every step brought her more fatigue and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from panting. She didn’t want to be in distress; she wanted this to all go away, Tzek included.

But then, he made an offer she couldn’t resist. Just as she’d gone to take another jilting shuffle forward, he made a valid point, and after looking up at him very slowly and licking her lips, she groaned huffily.

“Fuck,” she muttered beneath her breath and shook her head. “Alright. You have a point. Let’s go, then.”

Before he could move toward her, she hastened herself and crossed the meager distance between them, then awkwardly stood. There was a stiff moment and she cleared her throat, then at his leisure she helped climb into his grasp, and wrapped one of her arms around his neck. The other remained over her chest, where her hand grappled at her wound. Going up into his arms made her dizzy and things spun. She shook her head quickly.

“Keep going down this road, and on 4th take a right. Stay on that road, and the hospital should be around. You’ll see it.” She was winded.

[Glaw]

He gave her a dull look -- but eventually he withdrew his hands from his jacket pockets, leaned down, and grudgingly pulled her into his arms. Objectively he knew she was heavy, that maybe a rude and inappropriate comment was in order, but an advantage of being a little less than human was a little more strength and balance. Blood was already seeping into his shirt, they still had a few blocks to go and the look on her face wasn't exactly in good humor -- so, perhaps for the first time in his life, he kept his mouth shut.

But not for very long. "You know I've been lookin' for you for two days. Which isn't exactly what the plan was supposed to be. Obviously the others are looking for you too, and I'm shocked you haven't been dragged down by your hair by now." He thought a moment, about whose daughter this really was, and about that demon that now roiled in his belly. "Well, no, I'm not really. You were born for the hunt. I know you felt it."

He stared up at the stars while he walked, only looking forward to ensure he didn't trip on a curb or make a wrong turn. He was determined to make out the stars through the murk and fluorescent town. He'd forgotten what stars looked like. "You have no idea what I'm talking about." A sly grin twitched uncomfortably on his face. "Your parents never told you."

Down the road he could see the hospital rising up over a lawyer's office and a cafe, and he cut across the parking lot and round another wing to the emergency room door.

[bowels]

She was in a complete stranger’s arms, but she took a load off. Carly breathed slow and released her muscles from their suspension. Save her hand against the gouge in the meat of her shoulder, she loosened entirely, and found eerie comfort in the damp warmth of his chest and his words, which flew around in circles above her head. She indulged in the strange familiarity that he brought.

Carly was faint, and she’d pushed most of what he’d said aside until he said something very, very true: she’d felt it. She didn’t need him to elaborate to know he was telling the truth, because she had. It’d beckoned her like an old friend, and it made her feel at home when everything was falling apart. Most of all, it filled her with a primitive hunger and misplaced adrenaline.

They were nearing the emergency wing. “What was it?” she asked. Her voice was soft, malleable, and her amber eyes, once wicked and wild now half-lidded and tamed, stared up at him. “What did I--?”

When they came inside, they got attention. The nurse at the front desk pressed something, then people flooded in. To Carly, it seemed like hundreds, but in reality it was only a few people in scrubs with a stretcher. Once she was laid down, she reached out at Tzek and pointed her finger. Her eyebrows knitted together tiredly.

“Hey!” she said, her voice lame, “Tell me! What did I feel?”

And then, her head lolled to the side, almost in a drunken state, and she submitted to unconsciousness.

[Glaw]

Tzich only smiled at her with crooked satisfaction until the gurney was wheeled out through double doors and Carly along with it. Hunger was the word she'd been looking for. He got the jitters just thinking about those stories he'd heard of the devil's daughter: how her ruthlessness was unmatched, her strength was insurmountable, and her will alone was enough to make the Titans quake in their cells.

She was going to make a beautiful fiend.

Paperwork on a clipboard was shoved into his hands, and a trail of concerned questions received answers like "Jane Fonda" and "crazy bitch with an axe." Eventually the nurses decided it best to point out the signature line, to which Tzich applied a grandiose scriggle before the clipboard was rudely taken away. So he amused himself instead by peeling pages out of the magazines and folding airplanes and hats out of them. He found a pen and wrote a few lines of a Tennyson poem on the wall before a nurse took it away from him. When asked to sit down he sat on the floor and stared at a woman across the room who was sobbing like she had a stomachful of toads. He would have gone to comfort her (really he would) except he couldn't be bothered, and where had they taken Gimpy?

She was in surgery, he was told -- but they didn't tell him where surgery was, only that it was past the locked door that only the nurses could get through. Tzich begged a stick of gum off the receptionist, and he chewed and eyed the policemen that gawdled about the front desk. It'd be no use to get himself arrested. He supposed he could go deposit this demon into its proper place, but he couldn't afford to lose track of Carly.

So he sat, and he watched the sobbing toad-lady, and he waited.

[bowels]

After three hours of blood transfusions, tamed anesthetics and stitching, Carly hobbled out of the doors she’d come in. A nurse had been kind enough to lend her a washcloth to wipe off the streaked cosmetics, and they’d disinfected and wrapped her bum leg. She got a rabies shot on the house, too, and watching a long needle sink into her belly was just the icing on the shit cake.

Overall, she looked more relaxed, but that was courtesy of the drugs still pulling through her veins. Dazed, she looked across the waiting room, then found Tzich. Even with the fog of anesthesia, she formed a stern glare and nodded at him with iron will.

“You,” her voice was hoarse and tired, and she pointed with her thumb to the exit behind her, “come with me.”

Once he was up and following her, and she’d signed her paperwork (and endured the inexplicably rude glowers of the nurses at the front desk), she went out the door.

Outside she sighed and stuffed her hands into her pockets. She raised her eyebrows to Tzich.

“Alright, I’m pretty lost and damn tired. Tell me what I need to know?” Most of the spunk had been knocked out of her.

[Glaw]

Until Carly was ready to go, Tzich lazed sideways across a waiting room seat, flipping through the pictures and credit cards of a wallet he'd happened to find in an old man's coat. At the devil-daughter's beckon, he hopped to his feet, crammed the cash in his jeans pocket and dropped the wallet on a chair.

He followed her easily outside into the cool dark, and he stretched and breathed in luxuriously. How could Carly be so miserable on a clear, after-rain night like this? She was no longer dying. She should be thrilled to be among the lucky ones.

At her question he drew in a hissing breath. His gum had long ago lost its flavor. "You need to know that Hell exists." He dropped his hands into his jacket pockets and stared up at the clouds beyond the hospital lights. "You need to know that the thing that attacked you is a demon, and so am I." A grin flashed across his thin face. "You need to know that you have a powerful heritage and a terrible purpose." He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, his face still turned toward the moon. "The demons are scared of you and fascinated by you," he breathed with a voice like wonder. "They'll clamor to get at you, just for a taste. You're the forbidden fruit." He snorted a small laugh. "But I'm not much for riddles. Your parents made a deal with Lucifer to conceive: they traded your adulthood for a child. Now that you're 21, you belong to him, according to contract." He shrugged. "Not a bad deal."

[bowels]

It explained everything: the eeriness of her parents that morning, the horrible day, and certainly the nightmarish creature that’d mauled and restored the (assumedly) innocent woman hours ago. And the somewhat bizarre, or more or less suppressed, itch that had come to play. It’d be a lie to say that she’d never felt that hunger. However, she’d also been a teenager, rampant with hormones and an undeniable thirst for status, but in reality power. The nature of this famine had evolved.

Still, considering she’d come to a realization about her life and the world, it didn’t elicit much of a reaction. Carly was quiet, and if she were to be jabbed by a finger she would’ve stiffly rocked back, much like a board.

“My parents sold me off?” she summarized, skipping over the important lines, like ‘powerful heritage’ and ‘clamor.’ “They asked the devil to create me so they could sell me back later? That’s stupid. What a shit deal. Not for me, even, but—“

That’s right. She hadn’t made the deal. She’d been stitched into all of this, and that meant there were terms of this agreement she’d yet to be aware of. When dealing with the devil, how much was enough? Was there ever enough?

“Alright,” she breathed in and out, “so there’s me. Now that my parents’ end of the deal is through, where does that leave me? Does the fucking devil have my soul?”

[Glaw]

"The fucking devil is your dad," Tzich said in a lazy sigh, "and he likes you. You're his masterpiece, you're the eagle on the totem pole of hellbound souls. But your soul doesn't belong to him until you die, if you die too soon."

He was mildly surprised that she seemed to not only understand but to accept this as fact. The expression on her face, the realization in her posture, was that of someone just given the answer to a question she'd been asking all her life. That thrill of anticipation tingled in his spine. He turned toward her fully; his eyes were the deep black of emptiness, and his mouth was sharp and grim.

"That's if you don't work off your debt. You were born to hunt demons. You've got a hunger, a strength and a power -- but I don't have to tell you that, do I?" He grinned like daggers. "The world's infested with renegade demons like that one in the alley, and it's your job to twist and break them, make them beg for mercy, and send them back home where your dad can adjust their loyalties. You're a bounty hunter, the most feared of all. I'm only here to show you how to live up to your reputation."

[bowels]

The rest wasn’t so easy to swallow. Carly’s eyes grew wide, but they weren’t crazed like they had been before. Fear lingered beneath the amber of her eyes. Her heart thudded lonesome in her chest. Everything spun for a second.

“No,” she murmured, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. I have parents. I have a dad. His name’s Hector.”

Tzich knew how she’d felt before—the thrum in her joints, the acid adrenaline that had pulsed in her heart and burned. But he couldn’t know this much. She wasn’t a monster—she wasn’t the legitimate spawn of Satan. Because if she was, it explained too much of her life in a haunting, gut-wrenching way.

“No,” she groaned again. This time she fell back against the railing and rested there, her hands smoothing back her thick and wild black hair from her face. She shook her head.

“I’m not. I can’t. It—“ It made perfect sense. She’d always been demanding, commanding, and always the leader. She never played nice. When crowds had been easy and manipulative, they always followed. If she wanted a one night stand, she didn’t have a problem roping people in (even if the quality wasn’t always best).

Maybe she wanted to cry. Or, no—beat something bloody. Or both. She breathed shakily.

“I don’t want to. No thank you. Goodbye.”

[Glaw]

Tzich huffed, he peered up at the moon and ran his tongue over his sharpened teeth. "You don't want to hunt," he began, and he grinned. "Or you don't want to be what you are? Or maybe you don't want to have existed at all. Or you don't want to think about it, because you've had a long day and you're high on painkillers and who's to say what you're really understanding right now."

She had to know by now that he wasn't simply going to turn her loose, just forget it because she said so, because she was the devil's daughter. She stood for everything that he had ever wanted, everything he thought he could never have again. She had to know that goodbye was not an option. He would continue to breathe this air, feel the sunlight and look up at the moon -- to stand above the smoke and sulfur and black blood flames -- if he had to sacrifice everything and everyone to keep it. Surely she knew.

His eyes were human again, and so were his teeth, when he looked at her. "So I won't press you tonight. You're not in a sound mind to be making decisions. Just look at me, and tell me if I'm lying when I tell you that if you refuse, you won't have to wait til you die to see hell. It'll be me, it'll be some other demon or the devil himself, but there'll always be someone turning every decision against you. Everything and everyone you ever loved will be torn apart, and you will be broken down piece by piece until you accept your fate, because this is fate, and fate can't be changed."

He remained still, with his back to the pillar and his hands folded behind him. "I'm not threatening you. I'm warning you. Lucifer has a plan, and you can't turn your back. Go home, and think about it."

[bowels]

Carly looked up at Tzich slowly. His words haunted her—nested in her ear and gnawed on her brain. Her head stung and she felt the threat of tears rise, pricking her tear ducts and making her throat weak.

When she felt too vulnerable she looked away, jerking her head almost violently in the other direction. No, it wasn’t a threat—a warning, more than likely a promise. Because fate was permanent, and it’d already encroached. There was no looking away now. It was present and demanded attention.

Rather than agreeing, or maybe trying to reconcile with him, Carly said nothing. She got up from the concrete steps rigidly, then walked down the sidewalk. She held her red leather jacket, cut at the shoulder, tight against her and she didn’t look back. She cried while she walked until she reached the front door of her house, which she opened to find empty.

Tiredly, she climbed the stairs and took shelter in her room, and after shedding her khakis and the damp polo she’d worn underneath her now tattered jacket she wriggled underneath her sheets and tried to wrap herself up, and to ward off the assailing thoughts that Tzich had planted. Sooner or later, the pain meds worked her over well and she was dead to the world.

[Glaw]

He followed her, of course. Hands in his pockets, loping through the pothole-puddles, keeping a few streetlights' distance between them. Her tears shimmered tracks like the wet dark road, like diamond dreams leaking, he thought. She was volatile, now. Tzich grinned to himself.

He broke into her house, naturally. The window was easy enough to crack open, and he fumbled through a bush to throw his long leg over the sill. Books and magazines tumbled quietly from a table with his boot on it. He picked up a potted plant, peered at his reflection in the TV, surveyed the pictures on the wall like a high-nosed curator. He left wet muddy tracks in the carpet. He ate the leftover chicken in the fridge, and he carried a leg around the house, chewing, digging in closets and sniffing every box and jar he found.

Eventually, with the chicken bones left in the bathroom trash, he knelt in front of the toilet and swirled the water with a finger, muttering in a language countless churches had named forbidden. The bowl turned black like blood, and he leaned over it and retched. Slammed the heel of his palm into his stomach. Gagged and coughed. Choked. Until that wormy leech of a demon wriggled out against its will. He sank his fingernails into the rubbery flesh, yanked, dropped it with a dull dark plop into the toilet, and flushed. He found a toothbrush on the sink and gave his tongue a good scrub. He washed his hands and whistled.

He found some clothes and jackets in a ground-floor back room, and he spent the rest of the night trying them on and surveying the tunics and trousers and dresses with a critical eye.

Eventually he ventured up the stairs and looked in on Gimpy sleeping -- but, not caring to be present when she woke up, he slipped back down to the kitchen and gleefully began making an omelet. A big, butter-burnt omelet with beans and mushrooms and fish pieces and ketchup. Breakfast of kings. She didn't know how good she had it.

[bowels]

It felt like she had a hangover. A dull sting resonated in the cavities of her skull and her body was sore. Everything was too bright, the leather blinds pulled up high on her windows, and something was burning. She couldn’t tell whether or not the ache in her stomach was hunger pains or sickness, but the overdone smell had filled her room up to the ceiling and made her nausea do somersaults. Groggily, she sat up, slumped over the edge of the bed for a minute, and got up. She pulled on a previously worn turquoise v-neck and didn’t opt for pants.

Last night’s events weren’t at the forefront of her mind, but they hadn’t been forgotten. They nestled tight behind her eyeballs, biting, but not necessarily bringing anything to the surface.

Walking down the stairs all bruised up wasn’t an easy job, what with her awkward and stiff gait, but she grabbed onto the recently polished wooden railings and made her way down. When she hit the small square of tile at the bottom, the odor forced itself up her nostrils, and she frowned, confused.

“Mom?” she called out skeptically. Her mother never burned anything—and on the rare occasion in which she did, it smelled a hell of a lot spicier. This wasn’t necessarily a bland smell, but it wasn’t her mother’s. She found herself analyzing the stink like an array of colors, almost primitively, and once she caught herself she bit her tongue and pushed it off.

In the kitchen, Tzich stood—most things splattered across the counter, and a murder of incongruous ingredients spilt across the stove and floor in front of it. Her eyebrows narrowed and an outburst brewed on the horizon of her expression.

“I told you to get lost!” she crowed. “What did you do to my kitchen? Christ, what are you making?”

Whatever it was, it cackled and hissed at her, and she groaned dramatically at it.