Page 112 of An Invocation of Monsters

And not just any monster.

A creature of smoke and darkness, a slice of the night sky given flesh and form.

He was of the Other Side, a creature called V’uthli, a storm of claws and fangs… and she wanted him.

She was going to bear his child, become the vessel for his power.

My heart was in my throat, filling my mouth with the taste of blood as I read Joseph’s harsh words: the V’uthli had told her that their child would be a female, and her name was to be Ellerasha.

There were a number of blank pages after that.

And finally, a page full of sickening glee: Gillian had been shut out from the Void. She had served her purpose.

She would be permitted to cross over one last time, but the monster did not like her greed, her endless desire to conquer the lands and force them to give up their secrets.

Joseph laughed about it, then flipped back to fury as Gillian rejected him again, marrying the man named Benjamin Gray.

Benjamin had no idea his new wife had crossed into another world.

He had no idea ‘their’ baby was the spawn of a monster.

Joseph wrote about how much he despised Benjamin, an average man with no concept of what the Society had done.

He despised his ordinariness. He despised that he’d lost Gillian to him.

He wrote about her one last time: Gillian returned to the Lodge, and entered the Void.

She returned several days later, naked and covered in blood, an infant girl in her arms.

Gillian called her ‘Elle’, put her in Mary’s arms, and collapsed on the couch with her face in her hands.

Joseph’s outpouring of joy over that was like drinking poison, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the page.

He was glad Gillian had been broken.

All she had left of the monster she’d desired was a baby, one that would one day cross into the Void, taking everything her greedy mother had taken for granted.

Me. I was Ellerasha, daughter of a V’uthli, offspring of the human and inhuman.

For the first time, I considered my mother’s lack of affection in a new light. My birth had stolen this new world from her…

Or had it? I read between the lines, considering Joseph’s words.

Even at the beginning, in the throes of his lovesickness, Gillian came across as selfish and manipulative.

She had put not only her friends, but her teachers in danger; she’d taken artifacts from the Miskatonic that existed only to harm. If I’d understood Joseph’s hints correctly, she might even have been responsible for a death.

She’d admitted to wanting the V’uthli for his power, not because she loved him.

Then she’d married an average man because she feared what would happen to her, a woman cut off from the Void with nothing but a monstrous child to show for it.

I flipped the page, but it was empty.

All the rest of the book was blank.

But it didn’t matter. The meat of it had already been laid out in black and white.

My father was not Benjamin Gray; I was the child of a loveless union.

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