Chapter 113: Stranger things
Outside an apartment building, atop a roof, Elena stood there with her arms behind her back.
"Rose... Rose... Rose," she purred taking in the chill of the morning that barely registered to her.
"You must think yourself to be always ahead, is that not? But you fail to realize that I am always going to be just around the corner, waiting..." With those words, Elena began to repeat a phrase.
"Encantra.. resonance ~ encantra ...resonance!!" She continued and from the darkness, a cluster of shadows materialized in front of her. Floating above her like a cloud on a rainy day. But this was no ordinary cloud. This cloud has two red glowing dots staring at Elena.
"Lilith...my faithful familiar. How long has it been since you were last summoned? Oh how I miss you. But...we will have time to catch up over tea. Right now, I want a favour from you. And it comes with a reward too.
I know you have been listening to my thoughts so go...go and do your master's bidding,"
With a graceful swirl, the shadowy form, named Lilith, responded to Elena's command. Effortlessly, it glided away. As it disappeared into the darkness, Elena's lips curled into a satisfied smirk, knowing that her trusted familiar would carry out her bidding without question.
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The night before the investigators planned to extract Carlos Jimenez for questioning, an unnatural chill seemed to permeate every corner of the young man's modest apartment.
Despite the thermostat being set to a comfortable level, Carlos found himself shivering beneath the thin blankets of his bed, some nameless dread causing him to toss and turn fitfully in the deepest hours before dawn. It was 3 am in the morning and every normal person including him was fast asleep.
His slumbering girlfriend Carmen didn't seem to register the unsettling ambience as she slept peacefully beside him as well.
Perhaps it was merely a subliminal premonition plucking at Carlos's subconscious, warning him of the darkness that would soon stalk into his unremarkable life and stratospheric beyond the mundane parameters he'd ever known.
When the first faint tendrils of shadowmist began coiling across the bedroom floor, inching over the perpetual clutter of discarded clothing and takeout containers, Carlos's eyelids began fluttering in response to that spectral disturbance. There was something seeping into his room. Something dark and unnatural if that made sense.
By the time the inky black vapors had amassed into a billowing sentient cloud that towered over the bed like some malignant storm wraith, the young man's eyes had snapped fully open in sheer atavistic terror.
However, he was too paralyzed to even scream, too stunned to react beyond futile whimpering, Carlos could only watch in dismay as the roiling shadowmass steadily coalesced into a distinctive silhouette, gradually solidifying into a terribly familiar form burned into his synapses from countless fever dreams and suppressed night terrors.
The figure of an elegant, statuesque woman rapidly took shape, fashioned from that same unholy darkness like blasphemous sorcery extracted from the void between realities. But boy, was this strange woman beautiful, perhaps too beautiful.
Gliding forward with predatory inevitability, her unmistakable porcelain features and raven tresses finally manifested in the ambient streetlight filtering through the curtains, swathed in shadows that seemed to drink in all illumination around her.
When her eyes found Carlos's, those haunting emerald orbs smoldered with eldritch power and something far crueler promised beneath – a sadistic malice that twisted her statuesque beauty into a horrific rictus. As if sensing his primal urge to scream, her painted lips contorted into a mocking smile, elongated canines glinting with reflected moonlight.
A creature of the night, born alongside terror and cradled with dread.
Carlos was staring at the hollow abyss of sure doom.
In the next eternal moment, she seemed to flow across the space separating them, moving with such impossible fluidity that it utterly bypassed the usual spatial differentials Carlos's conscious mind could rationalize or process coherently.
One moment, she loomed in baleful silhouette at the bedroom's far edge...only to materialize straddling the pitiful young man in the span of a mortal inhalation. Confusion and erection both overcame him at once. Was this a wet dream? But were wet dreams projected in 4k from the great beyond? How come it felt so real?
Surely the angel in charge of his dreams must have been having a bad day to have played him such Freddy Krueger, Chucky-ish, Johnny sins mash up!
Pinned to his mattress beneath the inhuman weight of her undulating torso, Carlos's attempts to summon any vocal protest emerged as a pathetic mewling as panic finally overtook any lingering reason.
But his preternatural attacker simply sneered down at his naked terror, reveling in his visceral dismay while something almost rapturous took possession of those limitless emerald depths.
"Shhhh, my child...no need for such hysterics," she cooed in that same melodious lilt, a dissonance of seductive velour cloaking unspeakable malice. "You yet grasp at fraying tendrils of conscious sentience now, but that final indignity shall be gratefully spared from you,"
He didn't particularly take interest in grammar class and now was starting to rue it. What in the Shakespeare was going on?
Her alabaster hands smoothed across his clammy brow with disturbing tenderness, cold talons combing away the sweaty strands of hair from his eyes even as he squirmed beneath her unearthly mass.
"There there, sweet vessel," the monstrous intruder croned, practically nuzzling his flushed cheek with a hollow facsimile of maternal comfort. "You need only remain still as the light of your feeble human anima finally...mercifully... _gutters_ into oblivion once more."
He gulped. Not because he understood the implications of what she had just said but the tone of the delivery sounded heavily toxic and promised nothing good.
As those blasphemous words lingered on the chilled air, Carlos understood with sudden visceral clarity that she fully intended to consume that singular spark of consciousness, swallow whatever residual luminance of individual identity yet remained from his previously unexceptional existence.
A single baleful tear traced down his cheek in the wake of that gut-wrenching revelation. Not out of fear for whatever fate she surely intended - in that regard, his sheer uncomprehending terror had crystallized into a blessed numbness.
The solitary droplet emerged as a mourning for the life that would be so cruelly rendered null...for the banal joys, hopes and dreams that had comprised his day-to-day experiences until all meaning evaporated in this unholy moment.