novelzi Chapter 113: Stranger things
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.
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.