Chapter 164 - Don't Hiss and Tell

Alice took a deep breath, looking at her hand, then closed her eyes and clenched a fist. The black veins along her arm receded slightly but

Alice took a deep breath, looking at her hand, then closed her eyes and clenched a fist. The black veins along her arm receded slightly but

Alice took a deep breath, looking at her hand, then closed her eyes and clenched a fist. The black veins along her arm receded slightly but were still present.

“Let’s go,” she said, and stepped out of the alleyway towards the apartment building with the massive snake winding through the top-story windows.

“Wait, are you going to be okay?” Morrigan asked, following after her.

“I’ll be fine.”

“No offense, but you don’t look fine.” Morrigan caught up to her. “Noir’s getting Death, so maybe we should wait. And there are probably some other reapers on their way as well, right?”

“Most likely.”

“Then why the rush?” Morrigan insisted. “Maybe we should take a minute to plan things out and—”

“And what if that one minute makes the difference in somebody's life?” Alice hissed, glaring at her through the corner of her eye. “If you’re so scared, then stay back and I’ll deal with this myself.”

“Hey! I didn’t say that.”

“Then stop complaining and get focused.” Alice slashed her hand in front of herself, a scythe forming in her grip by the end of the arc. Then, still walking, she grabbed onto the pole with both hands, looking like she was trying to break it in half.

Morrigan watched with a raised eyebrow as blue flame formed between her hands, and then she separated the scythe’s pole into two. After that, the bottom half began to form another only scythe blade until Alice was holding two miniature scythes with red glowing blades, one in each hand.

Morrigan blinked. “I… didn’t know that was possible. How did you do that?”

“I don’t have time to teach you, but why isn’t your own scythe out yet?”

“Oh… right.” Morrigan reached to the side and summoned her own scythe, which took on a red aura as well.

Arriving at the front of the apartment complex, Alice tried the door, but it didn’t budge. Morrigan fished her skeleton key out of her pocket, figuring Alice's hands were full. “Here, I got it.”

The key morphed into a credit card shape as she slid it through the slot, and the door clicked open. 

They then entered a quiet lobby devoid of life. The air inside felt... off. Morrigan breathed in through her nose. It was kind of like the air before a thunderstorm, but without the fresh scent, just an ominous pressure. 

“So… we just head on up?” Morrigan asked, nodding toward an elevator.

Alice glanced at it and frowned. “No. Taking the elevator would be idiotic,” she said, as blunt as ever. “It’s a confined space with only one exit. If the demon senses us and cuts the cables or traps us inside somehow, we’re done. We need room to fight and a route to flee if necessary.”

Morrigan grimaced. “Right. Yeah. Makes sense. I didn’t think of that.”

“Clearly not.” Alice pushed open the stairwell door, looking upward. The overhead light blinked rapidly with an audible static clicking sound.

“So what’s the plan once we get up there?” Morrigan whispered, feeling tense, and the flickers of total darkness in the stairwell weren’t helping.

“We attack. If we are lucky, it is unintelligent, and we can take it out quickly.”

“If we’re not lucky?” she asked, following Alice’s lead up the stairs.

“A crafty demon could lead us into a trap.”

“What are the chances of that?”

Alice’s lips parted slightly, showing a few teeth. “About fifty-fifty.”

Morrigan exhaled. “Great. That’s reassuring.”

The two climbed a few more flights, boots echoing softly on the concrete stairs. The higher they went, the more the air took on that heavy quality.

“What’s with the air?” Morrigan asked. “I felt it a little at the bottom… but…”

“Residual aura,” Alice muttered. “It’s been feeding here.”

Morrigan raised an eyebrow. “It’s been feeding?”

“Indeed,” Alice answered flatly, continuing upward. “There are dozens of units in this building. I’d expect to hear something by now. A television. A slammed door. A voice. Anything.”

Now that she said it, Morrigan realized she was right. No creaking floors, no barking dog, not even the dull hum of air conditioning.

“Do you think it… Already got them all?” Morrigan asked, her voice small.

“I hope not. But considering the emergency order has gone out, we can assume there have been at least a few victims already.”

They arrived at the ninth-floor landing, at the top of the stairwell a door to the hallway stood slightly ajar.

Alice approached, peering through the gap. The hallway beyond was dim. At first glance, it looked normal—carpeted floors, apartment doors lining each side, and an exit sign glowing faintly red at the far end.

As Morrigan tilted to see over Alice’s shoulder, she realized everything about this building was wrong. The hallway was warped, slightly twisting like a funhouse the further down it went, and it was way longer than the building had appeared from the outside.

“What the hell is this?”

Alice scoffed, cracking her neck. “It seems the situation is on the more dire end. I believe we’ve walked into a trap after all.”

“Trap? What kind of trap?”

“Not sure. It’s unclear if it has noticed our presence or not.”

“Does that mean we can still—” Morrigan turned back to the stairwell, and looking down, her heart dropped as she remembered the last time she’d been lured into negative space. “Alice, look!”

The stairwell had been cut off after two stories and ended in a cosmic void. It was disorienting, like looking at NASA pictures of other galaxies, but it was below her. She got the impression that if she were pushed off this stairwell, she’d just fall eternally through the galactic void.

“Come on, let’s keep moving. When we are done here, I’ll have Nyx find an exit for us,” Alice said, walking into the hallway.

“Earlier, you said we should have an escape route.”

“Yes, it would be preferred. But it seems that is no longer an option.”

“What the hell! Why did we come in here without reinforcements, then?”

“Did I not already explain?” Alice glared over her shoulder. “Maybe you don’t care if a few extra deaths arise when they could have been prevented, but I do.”

“Hey! That’s not fair; that’s not what I said at—”

“Keep your damn voice down and follow me,” Alice ordered mirthlessly, not slowing her pace as she continued down the hall.

Morrigan did lower her voice, but she wasn’t done. “Get off your damn moral high horse. I do care; don’t just assume I don’t.”

“Sssssh,” Alice held a straight finger in front of her own lips, stopping. Morrigan stopped as well. It took a moment, but then she heard what had stopped Alice.

She heard crying—a baby crying.

“A baby?” Morrigan whispered.

Alice nodded, moving over to one of the apartment doors, placing her extra scythe into her other hand, and then taking out her own skeleton key. She opened it into a normal enough-looking apartment, but there was a man there just staring out a window with a blank look on his face. Outside the window was more of that vast cosmic expanse. However, it did not seem that this is where the baby’s cry was coming from.

“What’s wrong with him?” Morrigan whispered. He was standing so still she imagined if they were to poke him with something, he wouldn’t have reacted.

“A hypnosis spell, perhaps,” Alice murmured. “It seems the demon is saving them for later, when it’s ready to feed.”

She closed the door quietly and moved to the next. This time, an entire wall was missing inside the room. A mother and two children stood side by side, backs unnaturally straight, staring blankly into the cosmic void beyond the broken wall as pieces of building debris drifted slowly away.

Morrigan felt horrified, scared, and an unbelievable urge to grab them and shake them out of it, then lead them to safety, except she didn’t know where safety was at the moment.

“As long as we kill the demon,” Alice whispered, “they will all be fine. Come on, let's keep going.”

She softly closed the door again, and this time, when they turned a corner, Morrigan saw that at the far end of the hall, pieces of the wall were peeling away. At first, it was small squares just sinking through, but more and more tiny chunks peeled off and flew into the void, spinning and disappearing into the distance.

Alice kept moving, so Morrigan followed, turning another corner that again seemed to stretch too far for the size of the building.

“I see…” Alice muttered softly.

“You see what?” Morrigan asked, quickening her steps to keep pace over Alice’s shoulder. The sound of the baby crying was still a wobbly echo from far away, but growing louder.

“It is not drawing victims from one single area,” Alice continued. “Its domain has several entrances throughout our plane. Likely spaced miles apart or in different cities entirely. It did that to avoid too high a concentration of disappearances in one area. It was attempting to avoid detection.”

“Great, so that means it’s one of the smart demons after all… But when you say miles apart—”

“If we could escape again through our original entrance location, we’d come out of that same building. But on the other hand…” Alice nodded to a flickering exit sign. “That stairwell might exit to another city or even state.”

“So this place is like a wormhole?”

“Close enough.”

Once again, they continued down the hall until they saw it beginning to tear apart further down, at which point Alice led them down another turn.

“If all that’s true, then this demon’s probably pretty intelligent…” Morrigan said, thinking over her other experiences with demons.

The one in the forest was basically a wild beast. There was no intelligence to what it had been doing; it was just killing anything that got in its way and then making its victims a part of its body.

The changeling, before being reduced to a graft, had been manipulative, but Morrigan wouldn’t think it was necessarily intelligent. It was a sloppy imitation of whatever it wanted to be or thought it should try to be, but it was actually rather foolish and completely failed to consider its own long-term self-preservation.

This snake demon they were searching for seemed to be different.

Morrigan let her gaze fall down to Alice’s arm, the black veins still faintly visible under her skin.

“So how are you doing?” Morrigan asked.

“I’ll manage. And if I can’t, it will be up to you. Depending on the demon’s exact form, I’ll identify where its core most likely is, and we’ll try to attack it here.”

“Its core?” Morrigan murmured, remembering the demon in the woods. It had a ribcage-like structure that housed what looked like a giant eye.

Morrigan exhaled. “I’d just like to state for the record again, I’ve never actually beaten a demon myself before. The one time I did, I had a lot of backup.” She didn’t go into detail that it was actually her own shoulder demon that ended things when they were faced with that amalgamation of dead forest creatures.

“At the very least, while it is distracted with us, it will be taking no more victims,” Alice said, “and other reapers, including Master, are certainly on their way.”

“Will they be able to find us?”

“Of course, their voidlings can easily lead them into the negative space.”

They took another turn in the hallway, and Alice stopped in her tracks.

All the way at the end, there was a woman huddled in a corner, long dark hair veiling her face, and holding a wailing bundle protectively to her chest. It was a baby.

“H-Hey! Are you—” Morrigan began, but Alice barred her path with an extended arm, her mini scythe held in her hand.

“Stop.”

Morrigan raised an eyebrow at Alice, then looked more carefully at the woman and whispered. “Is that… the demon?”

“I’m not convinced it is human. So proceed carefully.”

The woman shifted, and Morrigan realized she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Her face turned in their direction, though all but her lips were veiled by her long black hair as the baby continued wailing in her arms.

“Please,” she said in a shaking voice. “Please… my baby.”

Morrigan’s hands tensed on her own scythe. She agreed with Alice’s assessment that the woman herself didn’t seem to be human. The baby, however, sounded like any screaming child, and Morrigan feared that it would be the demon’s next victim.

“Set down the child and come towards us,” Alice said.

If Morrigan had any doubts, they were diminished as the woman’s lips curled into a smile. “Won’t you help me?” the woman asked with unnatural calm.

“What do we do?” Morrigan whispered. “We can’t attack while it’s holding a baby!”

“I’m thinking…” Alice said, looking around the hall.

Meanwhile, the woman continued to smile, bare thighs folded under herself, though her posture had become much straighter and attentive. Like she was no longer trying to make herself look weak. Though now that Morrigan was looking closer, she realized how bony the woman was; her elbows and knees were like unnatural lumps under her skin.

“How about this,” Alice said, stepping forward. “There’s no need to play games with each other. Let one of us take the child, and you’ll only have to fight one of us at a time.”

The woman’s head tilted sideways, still smiling unnaturally.

“What do you say?” Alice continued. “You seem intelligent enough to understand me, and I’m sure you know what we are. I don’t have anything to offer in exchange for the child’s safety, except for better odds at defeating us.”

The woman remained seated, just staring and smiling.

Alice tried again. “One of us will have to carry the child to safety, so naturally that would leave just one behind to battle you. However, if you harm that child, there is no reason we both wouldn’t attack you at once. Do you understand?”

Her lips curled back further, showing snake-like fangs behind them as she smiled wider. Then, she extended her arms, holding out the wailing baby unsupportively in her grasp.

Her black hair parted just enough for two glowing red eyes to peer through.

“So we have a deal,” Alice said, showing her scythes and tossing them into the air where they disappeared in blue flame. She then started walking forward.

“Alice!” Morrigan said with alarm.

“Stay back. If it makes any form of attack against me, I want you to strike without hesitation. Once I have the child, I’ll bring it back to you and stay behind while I battle the demon myself.”

“Are you sure about this?” Morrigan asked.

Alice looked over her shoulder with a glare, a reminder that they really were not friends, but Morrigan remembered what she had said earlier. At the very least, they could keep the demon busy and save some lives while other reapers arrived. Morrigan felt a twinge of guilt, realizing Alice’s intention was to sacrifice herself if that were necessary. All for the sake of saving other people.

Morrigan couldn’t help but wonder if she really did have Alice wrong this whole time. Despite everything she’s done, Morrigan was seeing a new side of her firsthand.

The demon remained seated, the baby held out, waiting for Alice to take it.

Then, one of the apartment doors exploded open, a blur of motion as a giant snake tail came through. Alice jumped back, summoning her scythes, one into each hand, but the snake tail whipped across her body, throwing her towards another door that opened just in time to catch her, and she disappeared out of sight.

“Alice!” Morrigan yelled, starting to move forward, but as the snake tail receded behind its door and the one Alice had been knocked through slammed shut, Morrigan caught eyes with the demon.

It was rising to a stand—no, not to a stand, just rising, as it didn’t have legs. The floor beneath it faded away; the thick, scaly body of a snake met the naked woman’s midsection. The baby was held under her arm like undelicate luggage now. Her black hair still softly veiled her red eyes and covered her chest as her mouth opened and hissed like a proper snake.

Morrigan ran towards her, scythe raised as she instinctively channeled some magic to the seal on her back and let the changeling free.

Chapter 165 - Choking Hazard