“Now we’ve done it.” Kutkha was the one speaking aloud here, slinking down a narrow corridor like an avian dinosaur shadow. He was neither bird or reptile, bipedal and sleek, his body made of clustering, freezing darkness. In this place, this space, I was the ghost in Kutkha’s machine. “You call this Yesod, the plane of dreams and visions. And I do not know why you are here.”
I could do nothing except go along for the ride. Water was rushing down the length of a progressively smaller and more constrictive corridor, flowing like blood from a wound where the demon had struck. Kutkha waded forward, and just before it narrowed into a doorway, we reached a sigil burnt into the wall, a single Hebrew letter. Chet. The letter was filled with mercury that swam and swirled as we approached. Beyond that point, the space was nebulous and indistinct, a cacophony of sound, shade, and color.
“I will not go beyond here.” My Neshamah pulled back and turned, coalescing into his raven form. On wings of shadow, he glided back down the very tangible corridors of this other reality. “Our job is done, but… that is Ocean. We are in the Drink. This is already far too dange—”
The astral matter beyond the cliff’s edge of my psyche began to resolve into points of light. I heard a dim buzz, like insects—the sound of their mandibles and legs rubbing together, and Kutkha swelled in size, his face sharpening to a bladed muzzle as he swiveled his head back to face the doorway. We watched a honeybee crawl onto the edge of the portal, and then another: ten, a hundred, a million. Their wings whined with a building shrill, and behind them came a looming figure, blazing like a torch in a cave.
“This isn’t an angel. You said they don’t exist,” I said, dragged back with Kutkha into the black stone passage. Fear hammered my intuition into overdrive. “What the hell is it?”
The bees could not get past the sigil, and they crawled out over the empty doorway as if it were a plate of glass. Each one shone like a tiny sun. The water stopped flowing along the floor as the bees covered the entire threshold, and there was a push, like a hot knife lancing through my insubstantial being.
“Fight it.” Kutkha’s body lifted up with a bristling layer of spines. “It’s attacking you. Fight it!”
I struggled for focus as the penetration deepened, fought to ward back the heat, but it was slippery, and it felt its way in through the cracks of my psyche with inexorable, incredible force. To my horror, I realized that I could not stop the invasion. “I can’t!”
“You must!”
Through the film of insects, a figure emerged: tall and thin, radiant, and remarkably, impossibly beautiful. It dragged along sheets of light as a garment, and as it emerged, a flush of heat as soft as sunlight spilled across us. My breath caught, and Kutkha stopped, eyes widening as light flooded the labyrinth hall. The pushing stopped. The angel-faced being was comforting, like a needy embrace that I had never been able to stand but somehow always craved. So close, so hot, that it might have been able to get into my skin, and I would never be alone again.
Alone. God help me, but I was sick of it.
Unwittingly, I yearned towards it, and Kutkha took a halting step forward. The tall figure reached out its hands. It sung a Solar song, pure and bittersweet, a silent bow that played the violin of my repressed emotions and coaxed me to run in, grasp it, hide my face—
“It’s a DOG!” Kutkha snarled. “Do you want to die? Do you want Vassily to die?”
As Kutkha and I struggled to gain control over the other, the being opened its eyes, rolling them down from the back of its sockets to stare down at us. They were as bright and heartless as jewels: endlessly needy, greedy green eyes. The angelic thing smiled beatifically and spread its long arms open like an old friend. An old, false friend.
I knew the look of false friendship well, and as it fixed on us, I bared my teeth. Kutkha’s hackles rippled, and he grew fangs of glass as he shrieked defiance, a thing of bright flashing claws, shadow, and ice.
The green-eyed being was fighting in its own way, wheedling its way under the skin into the channels of fatigue and pain, chipping at the hard shell that made me what I was. With a jolt of terror, I felt it trying to replace my ego with itself. It was everything I could need or want, a sympathetic virus. The creature didn’t judge me for my longings, for all the people I’d killed or the lies I’d told. It only wanted me. To possess me—to consume me.
United in desperation with Kutkha, we became a bestial thing. Lips peeled back from double rows of razor-sharp teeth, and we snarled, filling the corridor with a freezing, boiling presence. This time, the command to leave was wordless, a spear of pure will and intent. Like a caul, shadow encapsulated the penetrating radiance and pushed it back. For a moment, the pressure wavered, the siren call replaced by a quarterback rush of energies as the other magus rallied behind their countermagic, pushing against my fierce and sudden will.
And then I realized something. This thing, this viral, deceptive thing—it wasn’t a demon. It was someone else’s Neshamah.
With a roar of defiance, we charged in a surge of spines and shade and salt mist towards it. The other Neshamah’s smile split its face in two to bear rows of long, needle-sharp fangs, and it screeched at us as the dark coldness shoved it away. Screaming, spitting, it was inexorably pushed back from where it had come, and when we battled it past the threshold, the gaping energetic wound it had left sealed up and threw us back into earthly reality.
I came to with the point of my onyx knife pressed up under my breastbone, the blade grasped in shaking hands. Gasping for air, bathed in crystallizing sweat, I was bent backwards over my own heels in grand mal, my hair brushing the ground. My knees ached viciously where they had hit the floor.
“Not… not Carmine.” I gasped. I threw the knife aside and then carefully, slowly collapsed my body to the side. “That was not Carmine.”
“No,” Kutkha replied softly, a ruffled presence of shadowy plumage and bright, nervous eyes. “It was not Carmine.”
I groaned and managed to slowly bend forward into a normal human shape. The muscles of my back were so tight they threatened to snap. Lying on my side and wracked with spasms, I felt like a honeybee after it had stung something, half-dead, its entrails embedded in its target as it slowly suffocated under the cold creep of death.
When I was able to pick myself up, I wearily surveyed the contents of the circle, wiping at a thin trail of blood oozing down from my sternum. The tin cup had splattered, liquefied, forming a spindly arc into the air where it had frozen solid. It had taken the dim shape of a tormented figure straining for release, clawing at itself in a contortion of agony.
It wasn’t Carmine. I had looked into his eyes and known that his Neshamah was canine. The Hellhounds were his soul. When I thought back to Vincent’s mansion, man and hounds had had the exact same colored eyes, just like me and Kutkha. At least it meant I knew who I had to kill, because I knew only one green-eyed mage. Lev Moskalysk.
As I recovered in the circle, exhausted, confused, and vaguely triumphant, I heard the tinny shrill of the phone from my office. My jaw worked, clenching tightly enough I felt the muscles of my face all the way up to my temples. After that bit of arcana, whoever was calling was not going to be anyone I wanted to talk to.
A sense of simmering dread deepened on the way from the bedroom to my office. When the phone stopped ringing, the answering machine clicked, but didn’t record anything else. The phone hesitated only a second before the ringing started again. I switched on the light and watched the handset vibrate in its cradle before reaching out.