Raven needs a hospital. He needs a lot more than that, but right now that's all I can do for him. Nathan looks like he's been through a fire, Mary's covered in blood, and some other guy that Nathan refers to as Harry looks catatonic. Beatrice clearly has no more intention of leaving Raven right now than I do. So we all go.
The looks the A&E staff give us. I feel like we should be getting loyalty points or something. The others get whisked away, but there's no way I'm leaving Raven. The staff want us to leave but neither me or Beatrice have any intention of being separated from him. You don't go through hell for someone and then just walk away. Especially when I can't shake the feeling that this is all my fault. I don't know if it's Beatrice's stubbornness or the complete mess I must look right now, but they let us stay with him.
Then Beatrice notices the burn on her arm. It's bad. Really bad. Hellfire bad, I guess. I tell her to get it treated. I'll stay with Raven. And I do, up until they point where they want to put him in an MRI machine or something and I'm forced to wait on the seats outside. I sit hunched up, hugging my legs against my body. And that's when exhaustion catches up with me.
I'm back in hell. Back in the cathedral with the blood soaked altar, and this time there's a person sitting on it. Raven. Raven, but not quite how I know him, looking better with more muscle and short hair. And he speaks. He tells me being tortured has uncovered some memories. I want to ask him questions, but he insists that I should answer questions in return and I am done with this Hannibal Lector bullshit. So he tells me the one thing that I'm most afraid of. He holds up an arm and shows me something writhing beneath the skin, and tells me that I was too late.
Then he starts to twitch, the same way I saw Arachne do when he was wearing Damian's skin, and a moment later his mouth splits open and an arm emerges. I can't watch this. I have to get away. I run, but I hear the creature mocking me with Raven's voice, telling me how worthless I am and how useless it is to run.
I have to wake up, and all I can think of is the nightmare when I was about to kill Lily and the knife in my own throat woke me up and Raven was there to hold my hands and tell me I was OK. I only have to think it and the obsidian knife is in my hand. I need to be careful. I need to cause pain, not seriously injure myself.
And I wake up in the hospital with my leg spouting blood. I guess obsidian is sharper than I thought. Everything after that is a bit of a blur, but at least if you're going to cut an artery, a hospital is the place to do it. The next thing I really remember is being in A&E with my leg bandaged, and an absolutely furious Beatrice.
Of course she's angry with me, and my protestations that it was an accident and I did it in my sleep don't seem to be getting through. So I ask if Raven's awake yet. And that does get through. She tells me he's in a medically induced coma, and breaks down into sobs. I want to do the same, but I've never seen her cry like this before and one of us is going to have to be strong. She wants me to tell her that it didn't happen, that I fucked up the dosage with the LSD and we just had a bad acid trip. I wish I could, but I know she knows it's not true.
She's afraid. Afraid she made a mistake coming with me and was nothing but a liability when I know damn well I would never have got him out of there without her, and I tell her so. Afraid of the feeling of wanting to stab me. Afraid that we were too late. And after my dream, so am I. I tell her about it, and explain why I had to stab myself to wake up, and how sometimes things follow me from my dreams back into the waking world. In this case, an obsidian knife in my leg. Normally Raven's there to help me. He knows what to do when he hears me screaming.
But it occurs to me. The thing in the dream told me I was too late. But was I really? Or was it just using my dreams to torment me? There's been a lot of that kind of thing recently. Why should I believe what I was told by a nightmare creature that wants me to be scared?
Beatrice stares at me. Then she puts out a hand. Confused, I shake hands with her, and she introduces herself to me. Beatrice Andrews. So I do the same. Isabella May, ex cultist. And I tell her what's really going on with the old cult members who've been causing me trouble. Not harrassment or fraud or anything she was imagining. Demons wearing the skins of people I once knew in order to torment me. Would she have believed me if I'd told her the truth when she asked me the first time?
She laughs. Not what I'd call healthy laughter, but it's better than the sobs. More her. She's brought me a coffee. I promise to try to stay awake while she checks on Raven.
As I'm downing the coffee, which is terrible compared to what Beatrice sells, I hear a voice outside. Someone is talking to Beatrice, telling her she has to go, and initially she's arguing, but then there's a sudden change in tone and she's agreeing to whatever she's being told. I'm already scrambling to get out of bed when the door opens and a woman walks in.
She's familiar, but it takes me a moment to place her, because last time I saw her we were at Paradise Gardens and were running in terror from one of the flayed corpses. Janet, Mary's friend. Except now she's fashionably dressed and talking like a normal person. Or at least, a lucid person. There's nothing normal about what she's saying about healing my leg.
The pain is excruciating, and it's all I can do to keep my cries of pain suppressed to the point where I don't inadvertantly summon a bunch of nurses. But afterwards I can feel even under the bandages that the wound is gone. At least I don't have to convince her that we can't leave without Raven. She seems to have got that message loud and clear from Beatrice and I've already spent more time away from him than I intended.
She does something that stops people noticing us as we move through the hospital. We come to a locked door, and by some miracle my lockpicks are still in my pocket where I shoved them after breaking into Raven's flat. I'm on edge, and my first fumbling attempts fail. Janet is getting increasingly urgent, and there are some heavy footsteps heading our way. I focus everything I have on the task, and the lock clicks open just in time for us to dive through the door before two people in masks and tac gear looking like they just wandered out of some video game pass by. No time to think what on earth they're doing here.
Raven. He's there, hooked up to some kind of breathing apparatus, and while he's not intubated I can see he's going to need oxygen if I'm going to take him away from here. And I am going to take him. Wheelchair. Oxygen. A set of scrubs for me, so I look like a nurse instead of a blood soaked patient.
I used to be good at this kind of thing. Evading pursuers, moving unnoticed. Since my trip to hell, something seems to have changed. The skill is still there, but it's harder to focus on. And so when the lift doors open, the two masked people are standing right outside.
My first thought is to play it cool, and tell them to step aside as they're blocking the way. Instead one of them throws a punch at me. I duck it, take the extendible baton that Janet's offering me, and slam it into his crotch. Not much of a reaction. That and the smell of hot plastic tells me these are no normal opponents. I go for the head instead, hoping to knock him out as I drive the baton into his chin. He goes down, but the baton is knocked from my hand as I find myself facing the second. The urge rises, to leap, to grab his head and push. And as his head slams against the wall I land catlike on the ground, and Janet slowly claps.
Hell really has changed me. Time was, I didn't think I had it in me to really hurt someone. Now I know that's not true any more.
The path is clear. I get Raven out of the hospital, and Janet tells me to head back to the warehouse to meet the others. It's not long before she disappears from sight. Not much of a surprise at this point.
Mary lets us into the warehouse. Nathan and Beatrice are already there, and Beatrice is busy sharping the end of a broom handle into a spear. She pulls up a box for me to sit on, and parks Raven between the two of us. His hand feels cold and clammy when I take hold of it, but it helps to be able to feel he's there.
We need to figure out what we're going to do, and finally I've got something new to share. Mildred talked about me reminding me of her daughter. She might not have been Mary's mother, but she did have a daughter. So who was she? Mary suggests I use my phone. Of course, that's my first step in finding someone. Complicating things is the fact that Mildred Lawson died and was buried some time in the mid 90s. But there was more to the cult than just Mildred. There was Saklas himself, and the other three lieutenants, and then everyone below them. I search all the names I have. Mildred Lawson. Piper Philips. Gene Patterson. Landon Sampson. I remember that last one best. Nasty little shit. Pushed me down a staircase once. Not even a real shove. I was just in the space he wanted to walk through and so he kept on walking.
Missing, presumed dead, all of them. And Mildred did have a daughter, but I don't find a name. As I'm staring at the phone, thinking about my next move, the screen changes. Some kind of symbol appears. A triangle. And then a word. Cease.
The phone falls out of my hands and cracks as it hits the floor. Something is wrong with me. My lungs aren't working. I can't make myself breathe. Terror grips me, but I can't even scream. I feel Beatrice's fist against my back, trying to stop me choking, but there's nothing there. I'm going to suffocate, I realise as I fall to my knees, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Mary's telling me to fight it, telling me I'm stronger than that, but I'm losing this fight.
My perception shifts, and I'm somewhere else, and now I can breathe again, but when I do my lungs fill with thick black smoke. And then I'm back in the warehouse, coughing hard enough to break a rib but at least I'm breathing. And for a moment I see black tendrils reaching out from my phone before they disappear.
Then I hear a familiar voice, and when I look round at Raven his eyes are open and he's pulling the oxygen mask off his face to offer it to me.
As I break down in tears, Beatrice puts her arms around me and puts the mask on my face. As the oxygen starts to take effect, Raven talks. He knows what happened with the phone. Technology is just one more method they can use to get to us. It happened to Nathan before. Except he just forgot everything he'd just read instead of being commanded to stop breathing. Raven heard a lot while he was being tortured by Mildred, and he remembers everything. He tells us we're all fucked. Yeah. I figured that.
Four of them, and they've all named themselves after demons. Lilith, Ajulutsikael, Behemoth, Abaddon. And they've been bickering about an accident, and the final three, while everyone else is bound or sword. Lilith - Mildred - was responsible for the accident. And there's the matter of the interloper. The return is coming, and they need everyone bound or sworn.
What does it all mean? The final three must mean us, but how does that fit in with knowing that Mary doesn't seem to have been part of the cult? Is Lily the interloper? Is the accident something to do with Mary, or Mildred's daughter?
Beatrice, understandably, wants an explanation. How do we even explain this? She's gone from knowing absolutely nothing about this to...well, all this, in the space of a day. Mary has a go. I'm not sure how much it helped.
So what are we going to do? What do we have? Mary pulls out the contract and pen she got from Mildred and puts them on the ground. Nathan, rather to my surprise, pulls out a severed hand made of plastic and throws that down.
What I need is my whiteboard. Then it occurs I'm in an abandoned warehouse. The whole damn floor is my whiteboard. I look for a piece of charcoal or something I can write with, but Raven hands me his quill pen. How he's managed to hang onto that all through this, I really don't know.
As I write words, draw shapes and connect them with lines, I can feel the shape of things starting to fit together. I've fought Mildred twice now. Twice she's dissolved into smoke, and come back again later. I am hurting her, and she's escaping. All this time, I've been feeling helpless, but I'm not. I've hurt her enough to make her run away. If we can stop them escaping, we can fight them.
I need to know more information, and I know one place I can get it. Raven's book, with all its annotations and cross-references. Where did he even find it? And what was he trying to do?
The bastard. He was trying to help me. All that time he spent sitting with me as I screamed in my sleep. He figured out there was more to it than regular nightmares. He got dragged into hell by a flayed corpse because he wanted me to be able to sleep.
And I can't even take the time to think about that, because we need to know about the books. He tells me he got the name from a web forum. Dreor Fyrngemynd, a pre-Christian book of magic, bound in leather. Nathan remembers that Saklas had a book bound in red leather. We really need Raven's notes.
What else can we do? Mary mentions Maiden, Mother and Crone, which means we have to explain to Raven that there's a bit more to the place than a gothic candle emporium. But Janet told her to stay away from them. So she brings up the possibility of summoning Lily again.
She promised she wouldn't do it again. But maybe it won't be so bad this time. If we're prepared. Raven knows a way to help. A symbol of protection that Mary can stand in. And we need to have our questions ready. We'll get three. I know that somehow. Mary won't be able to speak while Lily takes over her voice, so Nathan and me both need to be ready to ask.
What was the accident? How do we stop them from escaping? And neither of us can think of a third question, but Mary has been texting her brother repeatedly with no answer. So I guess that's our third question. Where is Gabriel Lawson?
I said Nathan had to be ready to speak as well as me in case I freaked out again, but as Mary draws the symbol, I realise I'm not going to. If anything, Nathan is the one who looks stressed out. Mary calls on Lily, and there she is, bloody and branded, and staring at Nathan with a look of pure hatred.
That's when I understand. For two decades I've been consumed by my search for her. Now I have my answers. She's dead, murdered by the cult, her skin used to torment me and her ghost living on haunting Mary. I know why Mary has memories of a cult she was never part of. And I know who Mildred's daughter was. Finally, I can let go. I'll always remember her as my friend, but she's not the most important person in my life any more. Because behind me are the man I went to hell to rescue, and the woman who walked beside me the whole way.
What was the accident? Lily's own death, a sacrifice to be used in a ritual, but something went wrong. Not her death, but what happened afterwards. Guilt and shame. She tells us how in her current form she's seen everything, and it's more terrible than we will ever know.
How do we stop them escaping? They are bound, to one stronger than us. Our strength must equal or exceed theirs. So we need to find more strength. Perhaps we could find a patron.
I prepare to ask the final question, but before I can speak, Nathan jumps in with a different question. How to heal himself without being bound? Lily looks at him with a smile that's scarier than the look she was giving him before. Heal his lungs? Or the bullet wound?
And then the sound of a rifle shot splits the air, and I can hear Harry's voice shouting as blood blossoms on Nathan's shirt.
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