“I’m curious,” the voice of Sophia asks from right behind me, “was this a simple lapse in judgment caused by an overload of unfamiliar stimuli? Or do you always do whatever a pretty girl tells you? No, I suppose it can’t be the latter, or you would have blown your brains out like I asked.” Fresh chapters posted on 𝕟𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕝•𝖿𝗂𝗋𝖾•𝘯𝘦𝘵 “You’re not Sophia!” I snap at the empty air, whirling around in search of any sign of the deimovore’s presence. There’s nothing but fog. “All you’re doing is pissing me off!” “Let’s put that to the test,” she purrs, her stolen voice like velvet. Sophia—the deimovore—steps out of the gray, puts her hand on my gun, and nudges the muzzle to press against her forehead. “How do I look?” she asks. Her smile is angelic. Her emerald eyes sparkle with joy and mirth. She’s wearing a pristine white cardigan over a soft yellow blouse and a long pink skirt, and it looks wonderful on her. She’s beautiful. She’s perfect. I love her. The horrible simulacrum of Sophia crumples immediately, blood and brain matter oozing down the side of her caved-in skull. She makes a wet, sickening crunch when she hits the ground. Her one intact eye stares blankly at nothing. Her body lies still on pavement. Red seeps into the white of her cardigan, stains her blouse, and pools beside the ruined mess of her head. I know it’s not her. I know I didn’t just kill the woman I love—couldn’t have, not for good, not since she’s a magical girl—but I’m still looking at her corpse. The face of Sophia, mutilated because I shot it. The corpse of Sophia, stinking and bloody. I throw up. Hey, Agatha, I’m in the club now. I laugh at my own stupid, pointless thought, and my laughter comes out deranged. The sight of Sophia’s death is stuck in my mind, playing on repeat. Her perfect, smiling face. Pulling the trigger. Sudden absence. Blood and gore. My hands are shaking. I return the gun that killed Sophia—killed the copy—to flame. What good is it anyway, against a monster that never dies? “What do you want?” I ask it, voice rasping and hollow. “I’m not afraid of you.” “I’m impressed,” Ferromancer answers, cool and collected and not Ferromancer. “Takes guts to shoot your girlie like that, doll. You’ve got a real future in this business.” Howl laughs. “I knew you were a monster, but damn, that’s cold. ‘Course, you know you’re gonna have nightmares about this for weeks, right? Years, if you live that long.” “What do you want!?” I scream into the fog. “What do you fucking want!?” Prometheus roars with me and I unleash it in imp after imp, forging them into existence and sending them into the endless mist to burn and explode. I send them in every direction, tossed at random, and the red flame washes over me. Wherever we are, wherever the deimovore is hiding, I will make it feel my anger. Something touches my shoulder and I jolt away from it. I throw another imp and watch flame disappear amid fog. No sign of the deimovore, but it’s still here, watching me, probably laughing at me. It’s enjoying this. It touches my shoulder again and this time I just grit my teeth and wait. “I want to hurt you,” Sophia whispers in my ear. “I want to break you down and see what yummy fears shine through when we strip away all your little lies and defenses. Show me the real you, Rachel. Show me that trembling heart.” “It’s Archon,” I snarl. “You’re not dealing with just another human, you vicious shit. I’m a goddamn witch. You’re gonna have to try better than that to get me running scared.” “Archon?” asks my own voice. “No, I don’t think so.” A droplet of water hits me, then another. It starts to rain. The fog pulls back. In the early days of the new world, when everywhere was still adapting to the idea that magic was real and some people could level cities—in the days before Vanguard and Coterie brought their sides in line and instituted the pact—there was a fight in Forks that got a lot of people killed. A witch opened a chasm that would have swallowed up the city if she hadn’t been stopped. Striga hunted her down three times and executed her. The chasm didn’t go away, and a lot of money was pouring into Forks, so a bridge was paid for and the magical girls helped fast-track its construction. An industrial bridge, a leviathan of concrete and steel. They called it the Owl Bridge for the woman who saved the city—after she refused more direct credit, of course. It’s the only bridge in town over a drop more substantial than a few feet into a gentle river. The deimovore is standing by the edge, peering down into the black depths of the nameless chasm. She’s wearing my face—Rachel’s face—dark hair slick with rain and hoodie getting soaked. She looks miserable. “We were nineteen and our whole life was behind us,” she says solemnly, sadly, pathetically. “A prodigy when we were young, but that natural talent withered away in college and we realized that we’d never really been special, just sheltered. Our new peers were all that smart, and most of them had worked harder for it than we’d ever felt the need to. We fell behind, and the gap kept widening. While everyone else was looking at majors and plotting their careers we saw nothing but tragedy in our future. Better it be on our terms, not theirs, right?” She turns away from the abyss and smiles at me, sad-eyed and sopping. “This is a good place to die, don’t you think?” The gun is back in my hand, resummoned on instinct, and I fire the whole magazine into the monster pretending to be me. The Rachel copy jerks and staggers under the hail of gunfire, flesh ripping open and then melting back together just in time for another deadly impact. I fire until the gun clicks empty, putting hole after hole in my doppelganger, and the only thing that stops me from making a new gun to keep firing is that she starts laughing at me. “Was that cathartic?” the deimovore mocks in my voice, already fully healed from all the superficial damage I dealt it. “I mean, wow, you finally got to kill yourself! Only, wait, I’m still standing, so I guess you failed again. Do you ever do anything right?” “Why did you bring me here?” I ask. My voice is too tight. My breathing is erratic. I never wanted to come back to this place. I didn’t want to remember this part of that night. The deimovore ignores my question. The false Rachel tilts her head. “Do you know what it means to devour someone’s memories? It means that, in a very real sense… I’m you. It would explain why I feel such overwhelming loathing for you, right? I mean, I remember everything you remember and I feel it like you felt it, so doesn’t that make me Rachel? Just… with a more discerning palate.” She licks her lips. “Any animal can fear its own death, but humans have more abstract fears that are so rich and delectable. You convince yourselves to be afraid of entire worlds that might never come to pass.” “I don’t need the philosophy rant,” I say through gritted teeth. The other Rachel laughs. “Of course, we get it enough from our friends, right?” I hear Femur sigh from out of sight. “Maybe if you’d paid attention more, you wouldn’t be in this situation. Did you even open the books I sent you?” Mordacity snorts, just as invisible. “Don’t be ridiculous, she’s way too stupid to understand any of it. She stopped trying to understand anything the first time she had to struggle, and look where it led her.” The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I flinch. The deimovore smiles. “Let me put this in more concrete terms,” it says with relish, adopting the pose and expression I wear when I’m about to spin a tale for Sophia. “Every year, you see your precious Sophia less and less. And you, delightful pattern-matching monkey that you are, make the connection that one year that sliver of time will drop to zero, and Sophia will stop coming home, and you will never see her again.” No one lives forever. Everyone’s luck runs out. Even hers. Some day, worn down from overwork, Sophia will miss something. She’ll make a mistake. Her back will bend from the weight of the world she’s holding on her shoulders, and she will die. To the Syndicate, to a Catastrophe, to some lucky new girl who never expected to win that pattern of three. It doesn’t matter how it happens. Nothing will matter anymore, because Sophia will be dead. “I can stop that,” I say, and I hate how raw my voice sounds. “I’m going to save her.” The deimovore shifts again. Hair and eyes change color, features melt and reform, and once again I’m staring at a perfect copy of Sophia. Her laugh is soft and warm. “You’re going to save me? Cutie, I’m the one who saved you.” Comprehension dawns on her face, that bright-eyed expression of understanding that I’ve come to cherish and admire. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” That day on the bridge, the last dregs of sunlight still staining the evening sky, standing on the ledge and getting ready to jump. Sophia, running through the rain to grab my hand and pull me away. “Stay at my place tonight, okay?” Back to her dorm, to slip out of our damp clothes and crawl into bed together, sharing our warmth beneath her blankets. I sobbed into her shoulder, her neck, her hair. She held me as I shuddered and shivered and told her everything. And she told me: “I’d miss you if you were gone.” The deimovore watches me from behind Sophia’s face. It twists her mouth into a gentle smile. “I wonder,” she muses, the cruelty in her eyes betraying the light tone of her voice, “if she told you that because it was true… or because it’s what you needed to hear. Did she save you, or would she have done the same for anyone? I think we both know the answer.” Sophia. My angel, but not my angel. A thousand evenings waiting for her to come home. A thousand canceled lunches. A thousand times that something else was more important. “She saw another stupid, wounded animal, and she did what she had to in order to keep it alive. But that’s all. Because if she cared, then she would make time for you. If you really mattered to her, you wouldn’t be alone.” The deimovore’s smile grows wicked, and I can’t bear to look at it contort my beloved’s face any longer. I turn away from it, but it’s right there behind me, even closer now. It laughs. Sophia murmurs, “You’re afraid that if you tell me how you really feel, I’ll reject you. You’re afraid that I’ll hate you. Because you know, deep down, that I don’t love you back. You’re just another pity project.” I can’t stop the wretched, broken sob that tears its way out of my throat. I dig my transformation-sharpened nails into my arms and carve bloody gouges. Hot red coats my skin and drips down to splatter against concrete and sizzle in the rain. I shut my eyes tight and concentrate on the pain—the physical pain, bright and hot and immediate, pushing out the sensation of the wound in my heart. This isn’t Sophia. It’s playing on my fears. Extracting every ounce of dread and anguish. It knows me. It knows what I fear most. But it isn’t Sophia. It doesn’t know how she truly feels. I can’t hide from my fear. I’m terrified of losing Sophia, either to magical violence or a heartfelt conversation gone horribly wrong. I’m a coward, and that’s why I’ve never told her that I love her. But I can’t keep running forever. I can’t let it rule me. And I can’t fail here, not when I’m inches away from meeting Strix Striga as a peer—as a fellow conspirator. When I do, I’ll tell her everything. I’ll tell her that I’m Rachel, and that I know she’s Sophia, and that I love her. And then I’ll save her. I open my eyes and stare down the deimovore. The monster licks its lips, its face lit up with the rapture of a filling meal. It’s devouring my fear, and I can’t stop that from happening—I can’t stop the fear in my heart, even if I know it might be completely irrational—but there must be a way to beat this thing. Fear will not rule me. This is just another puzzle to solve. Everything that’s magic is bound by certain rules. The flame I use for transformation and creation has a finite quantity. Pocketspaces are highly limited in their function, and the best user of pocketspaces had to sacrifice everything else to attain that mastery. Magical girls and witches are immortal to regular humans, but they die to the rule of three against other magic users. The Jovians are more restricted than any of us, bound to the doctrine of “empower and guide.” I don’t believe that the deimovore is an exception. Some random monster that our hunter expert didn’t even sound that worried about at first can’t be the one magic user to have unconditional immortality, so what the hell is its condition? Come on, Rachel, think this through. In the woods, when it was chasing me, it shrugged off every attack. It rotted its way out of the foam I tried to encase it in, and then it ambushed me and stabbed me and got its lamprey mouth around my neck. And then— I shift my gaze to my bloodied arms, rapidly healing from the injuries I inflicted. Healing quickly, but still noticeably healing. And I didn’t see that in my first round against this bastard. When the deimovore had me pinned, it lanced my limbs to keep me stuck and bit down hard on my neck. But when Agatha knocked it off me, I was fine; no wound on my neck, nor anywhere else. No sign it had actually hurt me. I thought it knocked me down, but did it really knock me down, or did I just fall from surprise? This whole time, this whole conversation, the deimovore hasn’t attacked me once. It’s been toying with my mind and goading me into shooting it, but it hasn’t done anything like it did in the woods before it knew what made me tick. Sure, it said it prefers the “abstract” fears, but surely it’d have an easier time extracting those fears if it cut off my hands so I couldn’t even try to fight back. So why hasn’t it? It’s time to take another gamble. I look back up at the deimovore, still wearing my beloved Sophia. Slowly, with effort, I push away the fear and force myself to smile. “Hey, deimovore. I figured you out.” Sophia’s face twitches, an almost imperceptible crack in the mask—but I know her face better than I know my own, and I see it. Victory. “Have you, now?” Dismissive, indulgent, patronizing. But the crack is there. “Your immortality,” I say, “it’s conditional. And the condition is this: I can’t hurt you… but you can’t hurt me. You’re all psychic attacks and manipulation, but you can’t actually injure me.” I pause for effect, and then I spread my arms wide. “Feel free to prove me wrong, though. I promise I won’t dodge.” My grin gets cockier, practically goading the deimovore to attack me. For a moment, I think it actually will, and that I’ve lost the gamble. The deimovore twitches, hands becoming claws and then back to normal, its shadow flickering. It wants to rip me apart and make me scream. Hatred burns across the monster’s face, across my sweet Sophia, and it hisses in rage. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you? But I don’t need violence to hurt you.” “That’s true,” I admit, “but more importantly: you can’t keep me here. Sure, you can do your little fog trick and keep harassing me with the voices of all my friends and peers, but I’m just gonna keep walking. And eventually, I’m sure, my teammates will find me. I bet they’re already closing in.” To prove my point, I pick one end of the bridge at random and start walking toward it, not even bothering to fly. Another insult for the deimovore. Sophia appears in front of me again, and as I walk past her she says, “Sophia Lane, 1431 Jasper Hale Avenue, Unit 209. The name and home address of Strix Striga, the nemesis of the Syndicate. How do you think Delilah would like that information?” I pause, but only for a moment. “I’m sure Delilah would be thrilled to have her magic turned against her by the oath she swore to the Morrigan. Fuck off, fear-eater. Find easier prey.” The copy of Sophia snarls defiance, her lips pulling back further and further—teeth sharpening into needles—eyes bulging and bulging and then popping, worms pouring from the empty sockets—arms and legs elongating, spider-like limbs bursting from her back—she lunges at me with claws and teeth and fury— —and she’s gone. The fog clears, the rain stops, and the night sky shines overhead. I take a deep breath and let out a mountain of tension. “Good work,” Howl congratulates me, leaning against the bridge railing. I jump at her sudden appearance, and then I shout at her, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me the deimovore can’t hurt me!?”