Page 40 of Possession

The fog is starting to clear, but I’m still a bit slow. It’s bad, is all I can say.

Aris turns to Dominachion, searching for an explanation to our plight, and, of course, Dominachion misunderstands. “Great Lord!” he cries, falling to his knees.

A second later, there is a chorus of the phrase from the attendees. Aris glances at them, irritation flaring, and a hundred necks snap simultaneously in what is a cacophony of crushed bone. I think of the shell of a beetle cracking beneath a boot.

Dominachion stands quick, his eyes widening as he glances behind and around him. A few people are still alive—I can see them ducked and hiding, but just about everyone in a mask has met an untimely end.

“I-I don’t understand,” he says, shaking his head. “Why is this your will, Great One?”

“You hurt us.” Aris says this like Dominachion is foreign or four.

The leader’s brow wrinkles. Again, he shakes his head, as if to deny this turn of events. “I had to hurt her. She needs to die.”

“Why.” It isn’t a question; it’s a demand.

“You’re bound to her, constrained by the amulet. With her dead, you’ll be free. I want to help you!”

Aris stares at the man, the leader of his church. Behind him, people run for the exits out of the corners of our eyes, but Aris pays them no mind. “You have miscalculated,” he says.

“You don’t want her to die.” Understanding very slowly dawns on Dominachion. His eyes glitter with the understanding that he has made a grave error, though he doesn’t seem to fully grasp what he did wrong.

He glances behind him at the carnage, expression shifting. I don’t know much about magic, gods, or cults, but I do understand fear. He knows the consequences of his miscalculation, and who he faces now is not his god, but his murderer.

For as much as he claims to revere and worship Aris, there is horror in his eyes. He doesn’t see it as an honor to die by his master’s hands; he doesn’t see death as an honor at all.

As if he hears my thoughts and realizes he’s been found out, Dominachion suddenly disappears. He doesn’t run or hide; he’s there one moment and gone the next, as if the air swallowed him whole.

Did you do that? I ask.

I feel a rush of agitation and something deeper, more malicious—a predator denied his kill. No. The coward retreated to lick his wounds. Aris looks at our stomach and takes a breath to calm himself. Speaking of, how do I fix this?

The dress they put me in is thick, and, because of its dark color, it’s difficult to tell how much I’ve bled. I can’t see much red on me, only what’s on the stone and the floor. It’s a lot.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t know much about human bodies. I know that one is supposed to apply pressure to wounds such as these, but with the amount of blood I’ve lost, I don’t think that’s going to do much; it certainly isn’t going to close it.

The symptoms I felt are also gone, so I can’t gauge how bad it is. I figure that if I were in control, I surely would have passed out by now or gone into shock, but I don’t know what that means in the grand scheme of things. I don’t know how much time I have left.

Even lacking a body, lacking adrenaline or a beating heart, my nerves wind tight. I think back to Aris saying that all time is borrowed for humans. Can you heal it? I ask.

He scoffs, insulted. Can fire swim? Does water burn? You offend my nature.

Now is not the time to philosophize. I need a hospital.

He hesitates, and I’m not sure what he has to think about, but he takes his time. Maybe he’s wondering if it’s worth it to save me. Maybe he’s nervous himself.

Between blinks, the setting changes. It’s so abrupt and disconcerting that I struggle to come to grips with what’s just happened. We’ve never moved like this before. I didn’t even know Aris could do this, but here we are, apparently having teleported.

From a once extravagant ballroom, sullied by an altar, blood, and bodies, comes an operating room. We’re surrounded by machines I have no idea how to use, bright lights, surgical instruments, and five individuals. They’re all scrubbed up with gloves, masks, and special glasses, and two are currently hands-deep in a man’s chest cavity. There is a song from the nineties playing on the radio, which surprises me because I didn’t know doctors listened to music during surgeries. I soon can’t hear the music at all over the doctor’s startled cries and gasps.

One falls back, tipping over a metal tray of equipment, and the two working on the patient jerk in surprise, which quickly results in rapid beeping on a heart rate monitor. Years of training puts their focus back on the patient, though they’re shaking, while the other doctors, maybe just assisting, only stare at us in wide-eyed shock.

Their exclamations of confusion quickly turn to shouts of medical terminology as they look back at the patient, but Aris ignores them. He looks at the doctor who fell to the ground, and Aris grabs him by his scrubs, pulling him almost flush against our body.

“Fix her,” hisses Aris in the man’s ear, “or I stay out, and I am not nearly as pleasant.”

He pushes him, and the doctor slams against the far wall hard enough to crack the tile there. Aris then turns on the other doctors with a scowl. “Fix her,” he says again, louder this time and to the whole group.

The staff look at him in stupefaction, the surgery again paused, and then at each other, waiting to see who knows the protocol for this.

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