## Leslie POV The tiger was on top of me the moment I stepped through the door. I heard Jonny shout something I couldn’t quite process, and then the floor gave way and I was falling. I couldn’t say what happened next. All I knew was that feeling— the one I’d tried to avoid at all costs back in those days. Caught at the mercy of some stupid beast. I *hate* animals; no reason, no flattery, no quid pro quo, no language I can speak that they’ll understand. Just muscle and teeth and the smell of fear. That’s a fight I know I’m always going to lose, and they always, *always* know it too. I don’t know how long the beast dragged me through the jungle (*jungle?*) before I snapped back to my wits enough to do something — kick at its belly and claw at its muzzle, try to pry its teeth from my shoulder — but of course there was no fucking point. It only clamped down harder. I heard myself scream. I heard the approaching roar of rushing water. And then Jonny came barrelling down from above, full-force onto the tiger’s head. It dropped me on impact, and I could hardly parse the image of my roommate wrestling the beast to the ground before I was underwater. The water was cold, churning. The gash in my shoulder burned like hellfire. I clawed my way up and came up gasping. I blinked away the water, and blinked again. I could have sworn we’d been headed for a waterfall, but there was no waterfall now. Even the jungle had vanished; in its place was a cave, stacked high with crates against the mist-slick walls, and I was in a spring at the base of a roaring geyser. The water was warm. And she was there, paws dangling from the edge of a crate, grinning at me. She was… smaller than I’d remembered. It was an odd first thought; I could have sworn that in my memory I was always looking up at her. But I suppose I was looking up at her now, too, perched up high as she was— I wondered if she did that sort of thing on purpose, to feel larger, or if it was just thieves’ habit to always want a cats’ eye view. If it was on purpose, I don’t know why she bothered. She already filled the space of any room she entered, just as I now felt the force of her presence the moment her eyes met mine. She’d always been that way. It was why I’d folded into myself the first time we met, with *his* hand on the small of my back, urging me forward— and why I’d stood up as straight as I could the second time when we were alone, looked her far too dead in the eye until she broke down laughing and asked what the hell I was so scared of. (I just wilted and chuckled back. I wasn’t sure myself.) She was *more* than me in every way. Shoulders squarer, fingers quicker, claws and wit sharper. In a contest between us, she should have won every time. She looked expectant. She was waiting for me to say something. I tried to remember what I’d been doing. This was— a dream, right? A dream. I was caught in the fog of Pris’ magic, and I was dreaming. The beast wasn’t real, the gash wasn’t real, surely the Jonny that fell from the sky hadn’t been real. And this wasn’t real either. When I failed to speak, she hopped down from her perch, stripped to her skin, and came padding toward the water. She fixed me with a look of challenge. “You coming, Fox? Too scared for this?” Before I could think twice, I’d already tossed back an indignant “Of course not\!”, and then I was pulling off my shirt. There were other voices, somewhere in my head. They scolded me: this was wrong, or it was stupid. Both equal reason to *stop*, ignore the vision and get moving; I’m not sure which I would have agreed with, had I bothered to listen to either. But I said something inane on blind social instinct — something about knowing now what those guards *weren’t into* when she claimed it was a botched seduction that earned me the wound in my shoulder, and I knew that wasn’t true, but now, in the space of this dream, maybe it was — and she cackled loud and unabashed, and suddenly I couldn’t hear them anymore. All that mattered was that urgent, familiar impulse: *keep talking.* Match her tempo, make her laugh, make her smile. As long as they’re smiling, I’m doing it right. …But I couldn’t. Again and again. We swam, and we talked, and I tried to return to those rhythms I’d known so well, but something was wrong. She’d ask me a question and laugh in a soft, sorry sort of way when I gave the wrong answer— reach for me and falter when I couldn’t read the gesture, didn’t reach back fast enough. She’d come in blazing with all that familiar fire, but it was dying now in my hands, and everything I could think to say only smothered it faster. It wasn’t like this back then, was it? I remembered this place, sort of, as hazily as I remembered most of our… our dates. Whiskey and adrenaline weren’t always kind to the details, but this was a happy memory, I was certain. This wasn’t how it had gone. This wasn’t how it was meant to go. Gloriosa was a demon of the Wastes. Could that animal part of her smell my fear? “Y’know, not bad for a third date, if you’d call it that,” she said with a smile. Then it dropped for a moment, a flinch like she’d regretted the words the moment they left her. She backtracked. “Sorry, I— didn’t wanna push that. You don’t have to call it a date.” Covered herself with a chuckle. “I’m just jokin’ with you, y’know how it is.” “No— no, it was—” I fumbled, searched for a memory of what I might have said back then. “—not the sort of third date I’d imagined, but… certainly much more exciting than anything I’d have come up with.” I smiled hopefully. Vague on purpose; I didn’t know *what* it was we’d just done within the gaps of this memory, but no matter the details, I could be quite sure that was true. She nodded. Seemed to think it over. In a moment of quiet, then, she leaned in closer to me, moved with a hesitance I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen before to rest her head on my shoulder. A gesture of trust; I’d said the right thing, and she chose to believe I meant it. I leaned my head against hers, a promise that I did. And I did. And then I heard Solomon’s voice calling my name, and saw two familiar silhouettes approaching through the column of water. I didn’t *mean* to push her away. I recoiled on instinct, wanting only to put space between us before the others could see— see and ask *who this is* and *how I know her*, any distance another inch of plausible deniability. But immediately I regretted it, because sadness flickered over her face for only a moment before her smile returned just a little more practiced, preemptive forgiveness before I could even stammer out a line about somebody coming. “…Okay,” she said with a shrug. “If you need to head out, just— kiss me goodbye, at least?” I looked at the water, at the figures approaching. I looked back at her. I waited a moment too long, we both knew. And then I leaned in for a kiss. Even before she turned her head, I knew from her look of apology that the fire was already out. But I still felt the death of something when my lips met the soft flat of her cheek. And then there was something in my throat. I lurched back, retching. I braced myself to vomit, but felt a hot swell of panic when something *else* came up instead, flooded cold and foreign over my tongue and spilled at my feet with a ringing clatter. I cracked open bleary eyes, looked: silver coins, glinting against the stone floor. Stone? I looked up, and found a blindfold staring back. The image dawned on me as if through fog: stone brick, the flicker of torchlight, chains. The face of my partner smothered in cloth and metal, fangs bared behind the iron grate of a muzzle clamped over her gnashing mouth. Claws mitted, limbs bound, and two, four, eight hands on her— stone-faced guards at her sides holding her fast. *What?* I stumbled back until I hit a wall, pressed myself flat against it. This— this wasn’t a memory. What was—? The guards wrenched her back and away from me, started down the dark hallway that now yawned into the distance ahead. I then registered, dimly, that I had company. Solomon and Jonny had appeared at my side, were speaking to me. If I answered, I can’t remember it now. Solomon was still a child, and Jonny was scuffed and bloody as if he really *had* wrestled a tiger. But I couldn’t tear my eyes from her, my feet fixed to the floor. She was writhing in her binds, snarling, scrabbling for traction against unforgiving stone. Failing. The guards paid her no mind. Distantly, I could hear Jonny peppering me with questions; I wasn’t listening. I don’t know how much time passed before I snapped from my stupor enough to stumble forward, call out after them: “Wait— where are you taking her?” “Treachery,” a guard called back, expression unchanging. It was nothing to him, and neither was she. I opened my mouth to say more; closed it. Slowed to a halt as they kept their unyielding pace. I felt suddenly numb. I just watched their receding forms disappear at the end of the hall, the body in their grasp thrashing and straining until it vanished from sight. Slowly, Jonny’s voice swam into focus. “—is a dream, you need to get out of here. I don’t know what was up with that tiger, but it’s gone now. We can leave.” “And how are you— how’s your *shoulder?*” Solomon asked, aghast. I looked; through the still-torn linen of my shirt (back on, I processed dimly, from where I’d discarded it by the spring), I could see that it had changed. No longer rent open and bleeding, it looked shot through with something terrible beneath the skin— streaks of dark, angry purple like a spreading poison. When I failed to say anything at all, Jonny just took my other arm, tugged at it. Tried to guide me down the hall the way they’d come, where the geyser had been. Away from the place where she’d vanished. I nodded, slowly at first, coming back to myself. Right… what was it Pris had said? These dreams came from us. This wasn’t a memory of mine, so it could only be an invention, a delusion. It wasn’t true. There was no reason to think that it was. The tiger was gone now; I could leave. I let Jonny lead the way back. Somehow, we returned to the diner. It looked nearly normal, the last stray vines of that feverish jungle receding. In the kitchen, with everyone but the absent Aurelian gathered, there was talk of a plan. Emil was in bad shape and couldn't cook anymore; I didn’t know why, didn’t ask. The others could do it for him, they said. There was talk of Pris, and of Sandra, and of which of them wanted which meal and of what we ought to do about that… something I’d had an opinion on, and should have had one still. I didn’t. I’m not sure if anyone heard me excuse myself. I didn’t wait for an answer. Stomach churning, shoulder still throbbing, and every voice in my head gone suddenly mute, I walked myself quietly to the employee bathroom, shut the door behind me as softly as I could, dropped to my knees at the foot of the toilet, and spilled my guts into the bowl. ## Emil POV There I was, panting, nauseated, barely holding myself up by the edge of the operating table, feeling like a vaguely humanoid pile of grounded meat. And there he was, too, on the floor. Dead. Cold and stiff. Blood coagulating into menacing patterns on the tiles beneath him. I took a minute to process how I had ended up here. We were making a sandwich for Pris, a devil possessing the body of a human woman named Sandra. We needed hellvulture meat for the sandwich. I went into the freezer in search of the meat. The inside of the freezer was distorted by Pris’s magick into a building compound in a snowfield, the locale of one of my past missions—one that went badly, yet I couldn’t help but be drawn to it. As I approached the compound from a hill, I spotted an identical hill mirrored on the other side of the compound, and a figure slithering down that other hill. Thinking back, that must be it—my doppelganger, emerging out of nothingness, from where the darkness of the night sky met the bluish glow of snow on the hillside. I marched on towards certain doom. I was almost there when Jonny came up from behind me, tried to talk me out of my current endeavor and, upon my rejection, offered to accompany me. I told him off rather sternly for his efforts. Even then, he didn’t give up easily; I ignored him and dove deeper. That was when the snowfield and the buildings morphed into a completely different scene. Warm, humid air, smelling faintly of exhaust and city waste; night breeze blowing unhurriedly in the direction of the Pacific Ocean. That hospital building. Its silhouette against the night sky so familiar to my eyes. The long hours spent in that parking lot, curled up against the steering wheel of his car, waiting for his shift to end; he always worked overtime. Just one more patient he *had* to take care of. Because the other doctors were not as competent as him… I pushed the glass doors open and went inside. The torment I experienced in there dwarfed any punishment I had received in hell. It was not a memory, that much was clear; I had never gone beyond the reception area of that hospital, but in this dream, I went deeper, and deeper, following a trail of bloody footprints that kept going, and going, past corpses upon corpses, in the hallways, in the stairwell— This—was this what I had always been? This machine, this hound. Efficient, merciless. Detached. Unfeeling. No, I… I never wanted that. I was made into that. I didn’t have a choice. —Did I? At the end of that dreamscape was an operating room on the top floor of the hospital. I numbly nudged away the dead body lying in the doorway with my foot, and walked inside. There was another me, lying still on the operating table. And then there was him. Busying himself trying to resuscitate what appeared to be a dead body. I was too captivated by him, this mirage of him, and too consumed by everything I had wanted to say, but never got the chance to say to the real him, to sense the danger. Quietly, hungrily, my other self rose up from the operating table. It was not a fight that I could ever have won. And so—that was that. I failed to protect him. From myself. And let myself get backstabbed by myself. In a dream. Maybe I was just as weak and pathetic as myself had said. Tears welled up in my eyes; I tried to choke them back. Strength drained from my legs, and I let myself slip down, sitting heavily onto the floor with my back against the operating table. That was when I felt the familiar touch of his hands on me. My eyes snapped open, half in horror, half in glee. There was a serene, knowing look on his bloodless face, as he gathered me into a cold embrace and mechanically attempted to bandage my wounds. As if his corpse became autonomous purely based on muscle memory. I… did this to him. Knowing me must have been the worst thing to ever happen to him. I miss him so much, it hurts to exist. If only my death was real and final. It took me a second to register that tears were rolling down my face, and my shoulders twitched from how hard I was weeping. I wrapped my arms around him and placed my chin on his shoulder. I had no idea there was so much water within me waiting to be shed as tears. I didn’t even know when it was the last time I had cried. It was as if time had come to a standstill. Everything was forever, and forgetting was impossible. But before I was willing to let the moment go, the dream shifted once more around me, and the body in my arms morphed into a different shape. I opened my eyes, perplexed. Gentle snow was falling from a blue-gray sky. The phantom of a town I once knew in my youth; a traveling carnival, with various tents and stalls, temporarily pitched in the town square. I was holding a girl—well, not exactly a girl anymore; a young woman—in my arms; she peeked up at me with searching eyes. I barely recognized her from how different she looked. But the creases around her nose, when she made that confused and slightly disgusted face, were still the same as ever. “Why are you crying?” Isha asked, “Are you good?” I mumbled that this wasn’t anything she needed to be concerned about. “No, you’re like—this is—are you okay?” the frown on her brow deepened; she turned away from me, motioning to address someone else a little ways away. The words that came out of her mouth in the next moment simultaneously froze me to the spot and send butterflies fluttering in my stomach: “Ey, Dmitriy, come here\! Your man is crying.” And there he was, handsome, radiant, and perfectly at home, sauntering towards us with a cane in one hand and a slight limp in his gait. I knew that this… version of him was not real, as far as I could remember. But in that dream, he was real to me. How could he not be real? The feel of his fingers on my hair and my shoulder. The feathery softness of his black hair. His body heat, pressed against me, permeating the layers of clothes between us. The intensity of his eyes, looking into mine, demanding that I stay. Respond. Answer to him. What a cruel joke. Showing me this version of him that I could never have had, now that I had lost him forever. How I wanted to never wake up from this dream. But he saw right through this selfish, escapist wish. Just like the real him would have. After we sat down on a bench, and Isha—inexplicably, she completed this picture like a once-missing piece of a puzzle—wandered a few steps away, he pressed me on what I had just seen. And, like a good dog, now, I answered truthfully: that I tried to stop an alternate version of myself from killing him, but failed. “Yes,” he replied with an easy air, as if *all that* was nothing, nothing at all, “it did hurt a lot when you killed me.” I froze, and looked at him. So he knew. He knew all along. “I’m sorry that was the kind of animal I was,” I blurted, tears threatening to sting my eyes again. He smiled a resigned smile at me. “You were quite the lone wolf, I guess,” he said, a little sadly, “going out, leaving the pack to go hunt. All the time.” I blinked, not knowing what to say. My lament of myself as an animal came from a place of deep humiliation; of being stripped of autonomy and basic empathy for human lives, reduced into a debased and bestial existence. Yet he seemed to see it as a form of… protectiveness? Something almost noble? He looked out at the rest of the dream, with a keen awareness that felt ill-fitting for a mere figment of magick and distorted memories. “You know, you don’t need to do this all alone,” he continued, “Jonny was trying to come with you.” I affirmed him that it was all a result of my own hubris, while internally blushing at the recollection that Jonny had actually spoken to the real him about me. But he was not about to give me the space to be distracted. “The other Emil,” he changed the topic, fixing me with a gaze that said *you know what to do*, “I saw him walk over that way. He’s making his way towards the exit of the freezer right now.” All my regrets and self-pity instantly evaporated from my mind. I did know what to do. “Do try to bring someone with you this time,” he said, at last, before beckoning Isha over. I wished I could keep that spark of sarcasm alight within my chest forever. The snow and winds picked up, obscuring the two of them from my view, before wiping them away from this dreamscape, along with the rest of the carnival crowd. I stalked the empty fairground like a hound on the hunt, until I found a way out, and followed the trail of my doppelganger until I found him prying at the freezer doors, with two girls on the other side—Cherry and the real Isha—straining to contain him. What followed wasn’t a pretty fight, but together, we took him down. I would have liked to keep the girls out of this, but since I had just been advised to not “do this all alone”, I did not overly berate myself for being unable to keep them out of harm’s way. Besides, both of them were no joke: Cherry picked up the knife my other self had dropped, and plunged it into his back; Isha tackled him like a jaguar provoked into aggression. Words could not describe the relief I felt upon seeing my doppelganger dissolve into dream foam. Yet, as the three of us freed ourselves from the freezer, the space that unfolded before us was not that of the familiar kitchen, but the backstage of a theater or runway of some kind, with a lineup of extravagantly dressed little girls—much too young for these costumes—posing in front of a big audience. I glanced at Cherry, who had a blank, shivering look on her face. Dream magick had changed her waitstaff uniform into a gown, just like what the other girls had on. Actually, it was not just Cherry. Isha, and even myself, were now clothed in long, kitschy dresses that showed too much skin. I sighed inwardly. What a long dream this had been.