The Black Garden: Ch 1 (Final)

Planet: Earth Instance 334-99-7B, Sol System

City: Seoul, South Korea (circa. 2012 A.D)

The club’s music throbbed in my teeth. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, a pulse beating against my skin and up through the soles of my feet, vibrating the tiles of the neon-lit bathroom. I bumped my hips in time with it, dabbing clear gloss over stained lips to get the perfect wet, translucent doll-mouthed look Koreans had made famous around the world.

“COMMS-Zealot: final cross-check before op.”

Digger’s voice purred into my head, professionally neutral, cutting through the music and the roar of the hand dryers blasting to my left.

“Zealot copy. Op is on track, ready for lights-out,” I thought back, popping my lips to smooth out the gel topcoat. I took a clip-on earring from the counter and attached it to one lobe.

“Roger that, Zealot. Get in touch as soon as you confirm target is down. SEER just reaffirmed the temporal trajectory of the mission… looks solid, but your odds have increased slightly.”

“How much?”

“0.3% variance from the predicative model read at the briefing.”

“Odd that the model variance has gone up. Still… under 0.5% risk of anything going pear-shaped. Good odds.”

“Good enough. Happy hunting, Zealot. COMMS out.”

Digger’s voice cut just as the distant beat dropped into a dark snarl of bass, breaking up the pounding rhythm. From now until the end of the op, I was severed from the rest of the Confluence.

“And off we go. Once more into the breach.” The rush of adrenaline had me already a little high on my own endorphins. I bobbed my head to the music as I clipped on a few more earrings. None of them were actual piercings—they’d come off easily in a fight without tearing me new, exotically placed orifices. The baby pink leather collar I wore was also snap-away. One day, some lucky demon would get lucky and zero me, but damned if I was gonna let them choke me to death with a rhinestone KITTEN.

The rest of my party outfit was deceptively practical. The boots had flat, flexible combat soles that could grip in water and on ice. The lace-up leggings and black leotard were made of carbon nanoweave, stab-proof against metals, ceramics, claws, and teeth. The t-shirt I wore over it wasn’t protective, but it was hilarious. I’d spotted it in a cheap clothing stand during my morning run through Dongdaemun. God’s Special Boy was splashed across the front in big yellow letters, with cartoon angel wings printed on the back. I’d cut it up so the neckline hung off one shoulder and the hem sat just under my sternum. I wasn’t worried about it cluing in the demon. They were a lot less clever than they thought they were.

Leaning back from the mirror, I critically assessed my makeup. I looked… cute. Younger. A sweating man came up beside me to wash his hands at the sink, and I caught him giving me the once-over while I lit a fresh cigarette. As he turned away, the back of his hand brushed the curve of my ass. He tried to catch my eye, but I didn’t look up or acknowledge the contact. I wasn’t interested, but the attention gave me a thrill of grim satisfaction. The outfit was a trap for a certain kind of pervert, apparently working as intended.

I grew up in Seoul on another Earth instance, a parallel world now long dead and ground to dust. I hated this city there, and I hate it now. For one thing, it sucks to be intersex and queer in South Korea. Not the fun kind of suck, either. Being gay is technically legal. Intersex people are treated like lab rats. Being either can easily cost you your job, your reputation, maybe even your life. I was both, and like so many people of all orientations here, I had lived a double life to get by. Seoul is about the only place you can even dare to be out, and even then, that’s mostly because of the coveted rainbow dollar: gay American tourists. And heaven forbid we not look progressive around the Americans.

The commercial queer scene is centered around the Itaewon district, in an area the locals call Homo Hill. Yes, really. There are hundreds of clubs, bars and lounges packed into that dense, neon-soaked corner of the city. Many are amazing, resilient centers of Korean LGBT identity. Others are little more than thinly veiled brothels for ‘straight’ men. In most of these nightclubs, if you don’t have your BYO trophy twink willing to let you snort lines off his ass, then Korean hypercapitalism has you covered, because you can actually just… rent a boyfriend for the night. These guys are called hosts. But there are hosts, and then there are hosts, if you catch my drift. They milk tourists for more than their cash.

This potent cocktail of glamor, shame, desire, and stigma—plus the nearby U.S. military base—make Itaewon prime hunting grounds for certain kinds of demon. And recently, some of the latter kind of hosts had been going missing on this version of Earth, a non-magical planet on the fringes of the Terran Abyssal Incursion.  The zeroed boys were all young, all male, all victims of a five-dimensional war they knew nothing about and had no reason to believe in. They vanished, a few days would pass, and then their bodies turn up in alleyways and dumpsters around the city. The corpses look physically perfect—no exterior decay other than the eyes and genital-anal region. Those organs, along with their brains and nervous systems, are completely necrotized. I was unsurprised to read that the cause of death was rhabdomyolysis: kidney failure and cardiac arrest, typically caused by extreme exhaustion and dehydration.

Oh, and while the bodies don’t rot, everything around them does. A coroner, his assistants, five cops, and a team of doctors were all hospitalized after interacting with the dead men. Rapid-onset dementia, followed by necrosis. Some of them died. Others would be brain-damaged for the rest of their lives.

Demons, man. Not even once.

The detective in charge of the case was so freaked out that he called a shaman. And the shaman—Mu-sul—happens to be a Confluence informant, one of the few enlightened people on this Earth. She convinced the cops to burn the bodies, then reached out to us in a panic.

All signs all point to the arrival of a succubus. In the Abyssal Response Fleet, we called these demons ‘Violators’. Violators are the advance scouts of Abyssal invasions. Their job is corrupt an area of the local reality to create a small Abyssal breach, which allows more Violators in, who make more demons. If this cycle gets out of control, a world can fall in a matter of weeks, and then my people have to roll up and launch orbital strikes on the writhing nests of... yeah. It's bad. So we try to head them off early when we can.

 Violators grow aggressively, feeding on the life energy of living things. To the disappointment of many CEIDR Hunter recruits, they are not, in fact, well-endowed ladies with horns and devil wings. But as I explain to those recruits, the association between real Violators and mythological succubi and incubi exists for a reason. On worlds where sentient populations reproduce sexually, Violators use sex as a weapon. More annoyingly, they’re exquisitely sensitive to energy fluctuations—like the tether that between my Confluence wetwear and the CEIDR branchship discreetly orbiting Earth. Thanks to this wonderful ability, violators have to be hunted in the dark. But even though I was disconnected from the network, I was not alone.

I reached the exit to the dance floor and stopped. It rolled like the ocean, black waves of bodies writhing and bouncing, lit by pink and purple lights that glanced off hands and faces and shattered veils of smoke. Above the undulating crowd, oiled men in gold shorts swayed against poles and in cages. The DJ, a tiny woman in a baseball cap and a bikini top, bounced from side to side in deep trance as she worked the deck.

The Violator was among them, somewhere. I gripped the edge of the door, closed my eyes, and folded inward.

“Tsariel,” I whispered the name slowly, deliberately, framing each syllable with my lips to give it shape and form in three-dimensional space. “Lady of the Healing Knife; of the Balanced Blade. It’s me, ya boy. Min-joon.”

As I invoked Tsariel’s Name, I felt the angel’s normally diffuse attention sharpen and sync with mine.

The angel replied without words. We hear you, Hunter.

“The violator’s spoor led to my current location,” I thought back. “I need to find it.”

She already knew what I had been about to ask for, but it was a formality the angels honored, a nod to our illusory sense of self-determination. Then Tsariel’s sixth-dimensional omniscience forced itself into every part of me at once and shattered that perspective entirely. She filled my head, my skin, my bones. I saw her like an afterimage against the inside of my eyelids: a diaphanous, vaguely feminine hyperbeing of flesh, blood, energy, galaxies, universes—all of it radiating a harsh, brilliant light that, even at a distance, began to peel my mind out of my body.

My eyes snapped open.

From Tsariel’s perspective, the air of the club was a dense temporal fluid, echoing into the past and future. Time funnels stretched in all directions like a pool of spilled oil—forward, backward, inward, outward. My eyes swept the room, fever overtaking me as the angel briefly overclocked my brain to the very limits of its processing power. My body reacted in confusion to the sudden spike in temperature. For a moment, every face and every fate was mine to see, every individual facet of the collective revealed. I searched for the place where reality was wounded.

The anti-presence of the violator’s husk in this intensely alive place was easy to spot: in the gaussian liquid of spacetime, it was a fathomless black drain that absorbed the light and sickened everything around it.

Tsariel and I thought together, as one being. ‘There you are, motherfucker.’

As I pinpointed it, the husk paused mid-sentence and lifted its head like a startled deer. Tsariel snapped the connection in a split second. I dropped back into three-dimensional perception, grounding myself with the cold solidity of the doorway beneath my fingers.

Across the room, in front of the bar, a tall, good-looking man turned his head to glance back over his shoulder, searching for the power it had sensed. He could have been cut from the pages of an American men’s health magazine: sharp jaw, aggressively handsome features, a thin, severe mouth. Well-developed muscles shifted under a perfectly tailored suit. He had dark, wavy hair pulled back into a ponytail at his nape and fashionably dark stubble along his jawline. Possibly Italian. Maybe Greek. The poor bastard had probably been a tourist—or maybe even a fashion model—partying it up in Itaewon before the Violator got to him. When he couldn’t find me, he blinked, smoke trailing lazily from his lips, then frowned and turned back to the young drag queen in front of him. The next intended victim.

I suppressed the fever with a thought, and with another, I reabsorbed the sweat pouring across my skin. Only once I was fully back in my own dimension did I release the doorway, leaving behind four deep, claw-like indentations in the metal. I snagged an abandoned bottle of water from the back of a booth on my way past, chugging it.

The pretty little twink was dressed like Jessica Rabbit, but in blue and without the curves. Like the others, he was delicate and beautiful. He hold a cigarette in a long cigarette holder, the end of it sagging with a long tail of ash. The poor son of a bitch was utterly transfixed by the violator’s lure, intoxicated on liquor, hormones, and attention. The husk, meanwhile, was doing a decent job at mimicking a living human. From a distance, there was something a little too poised about him, a little too marionette-like. The body had belonged to one of the Violator’s early victims: whoever he had been, he had died weeks or months ago when the demon had literally sucked his soul out his ass and reengineered him into a walking anglerfish lure. It performed its function by tapping into the most primal, powerful urge any organism possessed: reproduction.

Neither of them noticed me until I sidled up to the bar on the husk’s other side, trailing a cloud of rapidly synthesized pheromones. The husk’s face swiveled toward me as if sniffing, and I felt a sickly, corrosive sensation churn in the pit of my stomach. Even the passing attention of a demon brought the toxic, sucking sensation of the Abyss with it. When the bigger guy stopped talking, the twink stiffened fractionally. His fingers tightened around the cigarette, knocking the ash from it.

“Well, hellooo handsome,” I said to the husk, switching to English and raising my voice to cut through the ocean of sound. “Aren’t you a tall drink of water? Enjoying your night here in beautiful Itaewon?”

The twink curled his lip, like someone catching a whiff of roadkill. His gaze darted over my outfit, lingering on the collar. He also spoke English, though not fluently. “He’s with me, and we do not need more company. Fuck off.”

“I’m trying.” I grinned across at him. “To get fucked, that is.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “We don’t need what you’re selling, whore.”

“Oh, but honey, you really do.” I let the venom flow, grin widening. “I’m not a hooker, but I AM a plastic surgeon.”

The husk forced out a fake, hollow laugh, while the twink’s mouth opened and closed with apoplectic rage. His face reddened as he swelled in place. The high-keyed cattiness wasn't entirely his fault - the husk’s sweat was loaded with excitotoxins, hormones and pheromones. I couldn't hold it against him.

“A plastic surgeon named Kitten?” the husk boomed over the music, gesturing lazily at my collar with his cigarette.

I balled my fists beside my cheeks and struck a poster-perfect idol pose. “Me-ow! That’s right! But only for tonight!”

The husk faked another laugh. The twink turned an ugly shade of red, took the nearest drink off the bar, and threw it at me. Then he hurled the glass. The drink soaked my shirt, the glass bounced harmlessly off my chest, and I just stood there, grinning. The husk stepped back as the twink boiled up on me, his face livid with rage.

“You fucking low-class slut!” he hissed in Korean. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to!? I’m Kim In-Geul! Each one of my rings is worth more than your entire outfit, you—”

While he ranted on about his brother who managed a media production company and his fleet of thugs for hire, I let a thread of bated energy expand, coiling into my eyes. The heat radiated there, gathering in the void of my pupils. For a fraction of a second, anyone paying close attention would have seen them kindle with points of intense green light, a color distinct from the club’s neon glow.

My expression shut down, gaze momentarily level and calm. “You really need to go now.”

“Don’t you DARE fucking talk down to me!” In-Geul screamed, spittle flying—only to double over as his guts seized. “I'll call... urrgh…”

I was a reality manipulator specialist before I’d become an angelhost. My specialty is Life magic, Biomancy. And when I tell someone they need to go, they go. On the spot, if they can’t run to the nearest bathroom.

“Ugh, you… I’ll be back for you!” In-Geul spat like a snake as he staggered away, walking awkwardly like a colt. “Bitch!”

“Disappointing. I wanted to see a cat-fight.” The husk moved back to the bar as he took a long drag from his cigarette. He turned back to me, sizing me up with interest. “Seems like I’m popular tonight. Must be the suit.”

“Must be.” I tapped a cigarette from a slim silver case, and put it to my lips. I was fumbling for my lighter when I felt the husk’s hand approach my face, an elegant silver lighter ready to go.

I smiled prettily at him, flicking my gaze up to meet his. “Ooh, a gentleman. Not too gentle, I hope.”

“Might be too rough for you.” The humor was awkward, forced, tinged with aggression. What wasn’t feigned was the palpable aura of physical magnetism that hung around him like a floating veil. Violator husks didn’t have to be witty to succeed in their tasks. They compelled through sheer animal magnetism. “That collar of yours is deceptive.”

“It’s actually a private joke.” I blepped my tongue at him and shifted my weight onto one leg, morphing from masculine to feminine and back again.

“What kind of joke?”

“It’s a secret.” I winked at him. “Lean in close, and I’ll tell you.”

Smirking, he made a show of leaning in. I whispered the reason against his ear. His eyebrows arched just before a mirthless grin spread across his mouth, revealing rows of big white teeth.

“Both?” he asked, to clarify.

“Mhm. Born that way.” I took a long, languid drag of smoke. “I’m not to everyone’s taste, but if you’re feeling adventurous…?”

I kept a careful eye on the husk while he pretended to think about it. His skin was flushing, body warming. I knew that little organic factories inside his throat, skin and gonads would soon start churning out ungodly quantities of drugs. Paralytics, mostly, and aphrodisiacs. I didn’t dare use my Lifesight directly on him – that pesky energy sensitivity thing again – but I knew that his body was arming up in preparation to subdue me. It was a normal part of the hunt, a controlled surrender that would lull him into a false sense of security. He would take me back to his lair, I would wake up around the time we reached the entrance, and I’d kill the husk and his demon mommy. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

The husk smiled languidly. “…I would call myself ‘adventurous’.”

“In that case, if you want to go somewhere quieter…” I cocked my head at him. “You could buy me a drink. We could talk…?”

The man kept smiling, but the life and color drained from his eyes as he suddenly leaned in and caught my mouth with his. I gasped: confusion, because we were still in public, in a crowded location. It was too soon.

“No talking required,” he ground the words against my lips, his voice a subtly distorted basso snarl. “We have been waiting. Hunter.”

Ah.

Oops.

Next chapter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/black-garden-2-118203581