1. #4
“The skins get overzealous sometimes,” he continued, something greenish seeping between those sharp teeth, his breath like carrion.
“They want a piece of the divinity they were denied. You all want that, I think. Humans crave and revile godhood in equal measure. You all want to know what exists beyond you.”
“Shit.” For the first time since Claire had woken up, Dierdre looked something other than bored. She hit the floor on her knees, kneeling in the mess leaking from Claire’s ruined side, mindless of her pretty spring-wedding-guest dress.
Beside her, Audrey did the same, discarding her cigarette in the pool of bile. “Our Lord, you shouldn’t be in human form again so soon, the energy required to move—”
“Shut up, Audrey,” Not-Elias said, not looking at his mother.
She followed his order.
“Elias.” His name felt weird in Claire’s mouth, the incongruity between the man she’d known—loved, as stupid as it turned out to be—and the monster leaning over her making the sounds feel foreign to her tongue. “It’s not… This isn’t…”
“Me? Him?” He cocked his monstrous head.
“No, it’s not him, Claire. He’s just a mask I wear, an attempt to become something that could walk among you.
A failed attempt, obviously. He wasn’t empty enough for me.
” He raised a hand with webbed fingers, gestured at his eye, his teeth.
“That’s where you come in, love. Elias was supposed to bring you to me sooner, but he failed, and I needed a new body.
Josephine’s was no longer working, though it held for a while.
A true sacrifice. Wellington loved her dearly. ”
On the floor, Audrey’s lips drew into a thin line.
“So I took Elias, to remind them all of how much worse it could be. Killed him, and the Ashburys had him brought here, his body thrown into the sea for me. A stopgap, really. I knew he wouldn’t last long, especially since he was already dead when I entered.
” The yellow eye seemed to pulse in its socket, inching its way out, growing larger as it freed itself from the confines of an ill-fitting skull.
“Because I was waiting for you, love. My bride, my Eternal Skin. Exactly what I need.”
And she was. A hollow vessel, begging for someone to fill it. A husk of a woman with everything scooped out, ready to be remade in a divine image.
The eye was fully freed now, and it slithered out of the socket on a long stalk, arching over Elias’s forehead and hanging like a light over a surgeon’s table.
It shone down at Claire, bright enough to hurt her eyes, and she tried to turn from it, tried to cringe away from him.
But the seaweed ropes binding her at ankle and wrist were too strong, and when he kissed her, a slice of needle teeth across her cheek, she couldn’t get away.
And she was still dying. The light of his eye was all she could see. There was no pain anymore, just numbness. Even moving her head an inch was a monumental effort.
“Ash’s bride, technically,” he hissed, a cold tongue lapping at the pearls of blood his teeth brought to the surface of her cheek.
She could barely hear him, her head full of white noise.
“Like how it was always supposed to be. But it will be the two of us who are one, the two of us who are together forever. Just like you wanted. Something to live for, someone to be.”
And wasn’t that what Elias had promised, too? To give her an identity. Root her in the world. She didn’t know how to be real on her own.
“You’ll be it,” Elias whispered against her ear. “Yours will be the face I wear, the body in which I walk the earth. You’ve been made perfect for me, by the sea, by your own will. Hollow. Waiting to be filled.”
His hand covered the wound in her side, and the pain of it knitting back together was almost as awful as the pain of it ripping open.
Her hazing vision cleared, her consciousness flung back into her body as her intestine regrew, as flesh surged to cover the wound.
Claire shrieked, bucking against the seaweed that held her down.
Her middle burned as whatever the god was doing flushed out the first clumped cells of sepsis, made her good as new.
“It seems to work best with Ashburys,” the god murmured through Elias’s mouth, easily heard through her screaming.
“Since they made the initial bargain. We want to make sure everything goes off without a hitch.” A slimy tongue flicked out from between sharp teeth, lapped once at her neck.
“Even if the skin I’m wearing now doesn’t like the idea of you marrying his brother.
He’s loud in here, Claire. Even dead. He loved you, in his way.
Like a pet. A pig you name before the slaughter. ”
The door at the back of the sanctuary opened. Shouted curses, the deadened sounds of fists meeting flesh. Ash had arrived.
“You remember what you did? Out there in the waves? I’m the god that got to you first, my most devout worshipper.” She felt the rubbery slide of Elias’s lips as he smiled. “See you tomorrow, baby. Fourth Station. Ascension.”
Then he was gone, and it was time for her to get married.