The second edible bloomed inside Phoebe’s body and brain, the process of chemical release accelerated by precise modifications to the deimovore’s digestive system. What normally took nearly an hour was achieved in seconds. A dopey smile spread across Phoebe’s face as it walked into the Taco Bell it had been loitering outside.

“One of everything, please,” it said with a giggle. “I’ll take the whole menu.”

The girl behind the counter gave Phoebe a once-over, sighed, and said, “Yeah, we can do that, but I’m gonna need you to list off the specific items you want.”

Five minutes later, Phoebe spent $150 from a dead man’s credit card, filled up three drink cups, and sat down to wait for its food. All three cups were empty by the time food was served.

Phoebe dug into the spread with gusto. Tacos, burritos, quesadillas. Tortilla, beans, cheese, sauce, onions, lettuce, jalapeno, tomato, potato, steak, chicken, beef. Fat, cholesterol, sugar, salt, grease, protein, starch. It was a symphony of processed filth, amplified to incredible heights by the heady power of cannabis and the warm pulse of the emerald spark.

The deimovore ate like a raccoon, only less polite. It reveled in the unique squelching and crunching sounds made by each different item on the menu. The texture of each, the odor, the lowering temperatures as Phoebe made its way through the feast.

The girl at the counter watched in horror, her manager beside her, both visibly disturbed by the extravagant display of gluttony.

“Get ready to call an ambulance,” the manager muttered, his lip curled in disgust. “There’s no way a girl that skinny can eat all that food without having a heart attack.”

“Do you think she’s a magical girl?” the cashier whispered. “They could do something like that, right? I watched a stream with Kira and that new girl at Visage, Archon, and they totally pigged out together.”

“If she is, she better not bring any trouble to my store. Now get back to work.”

Phoebe kept eating. The two of them were being quiet enough that a normal person wouldn’t have been able to hear them, but the deimovore had shapeshifted the insides of its ears for better range and precision of hearing. It heard every rancid noise their bodies made.

I want to kill that man. I bet it would be really, really fun to make him scream for me and lick his eyes and pulverize his bones and drink the marrow and smear him across the asphalt. I want to drink his terror as I chase him into the woods. I’m so very, very hungry…

Phoebe finished its meal and belched loudly, enjoying the sloshing of chemicals in its stomach. Everything that it had eaten was being rapidly transmuted, made a part of the deimovore, repurposed. Muscles and bones were strengthened, enhanced, amplified.

Mundane food was incapable of truly sustaining the life force of a deimovore—it wasn’t fear, after all—but the raw materials were useful to Phoebe, bound as it was in a corporeal form. When it had first transformed in that bookstore, granted a body by Rachel’s magic, it had felt stretched and thin. Before, it could have taken any shape it liked without a care, but a real body demanded real mass.

The deimovore disposed of its meal’s assorted paper waste and left the building. Then, as soon as the two employees inside weren’t watching, it crept around out back and leaned against the wall next to the rear entrance and the dumpster.

Every part of the deimovore’s new body was organic and malleable. Even the clothing it wore was part of its body, and would rot to gray muck if taken too far from the central mass. Phoebe had experimented thoroughly with its limits soon after arriving on Earth, exploring new capabilities and working around the loss of old ones.

For Phoebe, shapeshifting was as natural as breathing. When it wanted to change, the impulse that drove the change couldn’t even be described as an exertion of will; it was automatic, reflexive, instinctual. The deimovore willed the change and it happened.

Clothes, hair, skin, and eyes were all papered over with a thin layer of chromatophores—color-changing cells that would disguise Phoebe’s presence to the casual observer through natural camouflage. In the World of Glass, it could have simply turned invisible or dispersed as mist, but with a body of meat and bone that was much more difficult.

For a winter evening in one of the quieter parts of Forks, chromatophores sufficed.

As it waited, the deimovore let itself slip into daydreams of prior victims. Back home, it had been a persistence predator; it selected its prey, drank their memories, and chased them across the shifting landscape of the World of Glass—haunting them at every turn with their own worst nightmares—until their heart gave out from exhaustion, overwork, and sheer fright.

That didn’t work in the city. Sure, the forest was a short walk away, but preying on hikers was so lacking. Any ordinary woodland bear could terrorize a hiker. There weren’t even any hallucinogenic swamps to drive people into. Besides, the trek there and back would give Phoebe less time to sample the mortal delights of Forks.

The hunt would be far, far more interesting with a little twist. Before, Phoebe had always been limited by its inability to harm or physically restrain its victims. Now, with a real body, there were so many new and exciting possibilities available to explore. So many ways it could pin someone down, trap them in a concrete box, and hurt them.

Phoebe had killed its first victim in his own home. He’d been a divorced man living in the suburbs, his family having left him after a long pattern of abuse. History of alcoholism, DUI, the works, all of it learned after a chance encounter behind the 7-Eleven where he went for his weekly booze haul. In the dead of night, the man in a drunken stupor, Phoebe tormented him with the faces of his ex-wife and their kids. It was child’s play to make itself stronger than him and keep him trapped inside the house every time he tried to run away. When dawn came, he begged for the nightmare to end. Phoebe obliged.

The sound of the back door opening drew the deimovore from its recollection. It peeled back the chromatophores over its eyes and saw the manager from before stepping out for a late night smoke break. Nobody else was around. Perfect.

The chemicals responsible for Phoebe’s high could be converted like anything else. In an instant its brain was purged of cannabinoids and flushed with adrenaline. It lunged for the man in uniform, snaked a hand over his mouth, and injected him with a dozen paralytic needles extruded from its flesh. Before he’d even realized what was happening, he was frozen and helpless before the deimovore. Rachel’s spell hummed in Phoebe’s soul, singing in harmony with Phoebe’s hunger at the sudden scent of fear.

“Let’s see what juicy memories you have for me,” it cooed. Its canines lengthened and it bit down on its victims neck, teeth gliding easily through skin. Before, that process would have been bloodless; with Rachel’s gift, flesh was torn, though it would heal quickly.

Phoebe’s mind was uniquely suited to processing vast quantities of information in the blink of an eye. The moment contact was made, it devoured all of its victim’s memories and could begin sifting through them as needed. For prey like Rachel, it had immediately started integrating memories as fast as possible in preparation for their next encounter. For something like this lowly worm, it took a shallow, leisurely approach.

Phoebe dropped the human—still paralyzed—and drank in the texture of his being. First, always, was the deimovore’s food. It learned that he was afraid of spiders, his own mortality, and clowns; a rather trite selection, but more workable than his vivid night terror of being trapped on the International Space Station with only bean burritos to eat.

More disappointing was the information that Phoebe searched for next: there were people who would miss this man if he was gone. Friends, family, a loving partner, the whole disgusting spectrum. They would search if he vanished, press the police if he was murdered, maybe even escalate to the magical girls if Phoebe couldn’t hide its tracks properly.

Still, that didn’t make it impossible. There were probably better targets, but Phoebe was so damn hungry. With Echidna around, disappearances were easily explained away.

But as Phoebe considered that course of action and reached down to grab the man again, a terrible emptiness cut through its soul. A thought, unbidden, that Sophia Lane would not condone removing that man from the world. Too normal, too innocent, too undeserving of the kind of suffering that the deimovore longed to inflict. It was a stupid, pointless, irritating thought, but the spark in her chest that gave her form—in its chest, that gave it form—wouldn’t let Phoebe escape the irrational fear of disappointing Sophia.

Phoebe snarled and stalked away from the man, leaving him crumpled on the ground. Unlike those bastard mantled, an ordinary human had no protections against deimovore toxin, so his brain would cook for a few more minutes until the amnestic properties kicked in and he forgot ever seeing Phoebe.

It wished it could turn into a bird and fly again, but it would have to vomit up all the mass it had just spent an evening integrating. It wanted to kill. It wanted to rampage. It wanted to find a family of four and paint their home red with the blood of the innocent.

But that wasn’t what Rachel would do. That wasn’t compatible with being the kind of person that Sophia Lane could love.

Phoebe screamed into the night and clawed at her—its, goddammit—hair. The deimovore had made a mistake and now it was paying the price. It had never had a reason to bite someone a second time, never filled itself with two sets of memories from the same person, and it couldn’t have predicted what effect that would have on the ritual—a ritual that had only ever been performed once before that.

There was too much Rachel floating in its brain when the spark made contact. Too many arguments about how alike they were, too many comparisons drawn to the empty hunger in both of them. The spark knew that Phoebe wanted to terrorize and revel, but the spark also thought that Phoebe wanted what Rachel wanted: Sophia.

Just thinking about Sophia brought a perverse warmth to the deimovore; neurons firing, lust and need and desperation rising up from the depths of Rachel’s stolen memories. The desire to taste her and the need to save her had been immortalized by the emerald spark’s transforming influence.

“I’m not a person!” Phoebe hissed at the spell. “I’m not Rachel, I don’t love Sophia, and I don’t love, period, because I! Am not! Human! Don’t you dare paint me as one of those disgusting freaks. Stop it!”

There was a kind of twisted, condescending benevolence to the nature of the spark. The spell acted on what the recipient wanted, but a thinking mind is full of too many conflicting desires for all to be treated equally. The spark had seized on a model that elevated Phoebe’s hungers and Rachel’s hungers over the noise of everything else.

When Phoebe acted in accordance with that model, it was bombarded with positive reinforcement to keep it acting that way—a constant glow of warm, pleasant reassurance that everything was right in the world. In those precious moments of highest synchronicity, the spark felt better than any meal, any high, any sex.

And when Phoebe went against that model, all those good feelings vanished. The sudden absence was like stepping through the ice and plunging into the depths of a frozen lake. There was a hole where everything wonderful used to burn bright, and it was so obvious how to get those good feelings back. Just go along. Keep acting like you’re supposed to act.

The deimovore laughed to itself. “You created a real monster, bitch. Good job.”

The body was still worth what Phoebe had paid, even with the added tangle. The spark could be beaten, Phoebe was sure of that, and until then, it could be managed. Phoebe just had to keep throwing itself into the right hungers and eventually, surely, the spell would realize how it had gotten her personality wrong.

Phoebe found the nearest bar, drank until it couldn’t think anymore, and passed out at the end of an alley.

Phoebe woke to a Forks that was completely empty. No people, no birds, no bugs. The streets seemed to stretch forever. The signs on the buildings were all illegible. Above, the sky was endless black filled with thin, barely-visible white lines in the shape of a giant spiderweb.

“I’m dreaming,” the deimovore realized immediately.

Then a wizard hit Phoebe in the face with a baseball bat. “Round eight, let’s go!” Mordacity cheered as the deimovore fell over, hit the ground hard, and rolled.

“What the fuck!?” Phoebe picked itself up, rubbing its head and wondering why that felt so familiar. “What is your problem, you psycho!?” The deimovore morphed claws and raised its arms defensively, but Mordacity didn’t approach.

The wizard grinned and twirled her bat. “My problem is that you are an annoying little bitch. I’ve spent the past week trying to infiltrate your dreams and it’s not fuckin’ working. What is it with you Pandemonium freaks and being such good lucid dreamers? All you have to do is let me in and we can finally make some real progress.”

“I don’t want you in my dreams,” Phoebe snarled. “Get out of my head, Mallory.”

Mordacity’s mouth twitched. “Y’know, taunting me ‘cause you know the name on my papers was pretty weak the first time you did it, so it’s really out of bite by the eighth. If you wanted the low blow, shoulda used my deadname. But I tell you that every time, don’t I?”

Phoebe went for the throat. Predictably, Mordacity vanished the second before the deimovore’s claws connected, and then a boot from behind sent Phoebe sprawling.

“Got a message from Rachel,” the wizard said. “Sure you don’t wanna hear it?”

“She can tell me herself,” the deimovore spat as it rose to its feet once more. “Get out of my fucking head!”

“Nah,” said the wizard, and then she flicked her wrist and dropped a building on Phoebe—or rather, the building began to fall, but a flick of Phoebe’s wrist suspended the structure in midair. Mordacity sighed. “See, this is why I find lucid dreamers so annoying; they know how to fight back.”

“Why can’t you just give me her message and leave?” Phoebe demanded.

“Because we’ve done this song and dance seven times and you haven’t remembered it once,” Mordacity said coldly. “Because you won’t remember it until you let me in.”

“Bullshit. You just want in my head like you got in Rachel’s and everyone else’s.”

The wizard grinned again. “Guilty. And new girl, if there’s one thing you gotta learn, it’s that I’m really, really good at getting what I want.”

Mordacity clapped her hands and the world broke.

—plummeting through the air from a thousand feet up, the ground rushing—

—plunging into the mire, light vanishing, muckwater pouring into lungs—

—deep in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by fire and rock—

—coughing up soil in a shallow grave, the coffin lid being lowered—

—and planting face-first into the sand. Crabs and gulls gathering to watch. The push and pull of the tide. The sun, blazing overhead. A cloudless blue sky. White thread lacing a web.

“I tried the carrot a few times,” the wizard claimed. She was sitting on a folding chair beneath a solitary palm tree, a cooler full of beer at her side. “Offered freedom, power, the works, but you didn’t bite. This time it’s just the stick. Look around, kid, ‘cause this is your future if you keep telling me no.”

They were on a small island. One tree, a stretch of sand, nothing else. There wasn’t any other land in sight, just endless blue waves for all around. “You wouldn’t.”

Mordacity cackled. “Bitch, you know me as well as Rachel does. I absolutely would, and I’d have a blast doing it. So let me in, or I teleport you to a deserted island in a random ocean and you can starve alone until I get what I want.”

For the first time, Phoebe hesitated. “Rachel would know where I was. She’d wonder what happened. She’d figure out you were responsible—that you messed with one of her projects instead of helping.”

The wizard gasped and smushed her cheeks in with her hands. “Oh gosh, you think so? I mean, wow, that’s a really interesting theory. If only I had years of experience telling her what she wants to hear! If only she trusted me implicitly, while you’re the random fucking monster she picked up on a whim! Man, that would really suck for you, wouldn’t it? But, hey, enjoy your tropical vacation to Bumfuck, Nowhere. How’s the hunger treatin’ ya, Pheebs?”

The hunger gnawed relentlessly, exacerbated by the denial of its last meal. If the wizard trapped it on an island, the hunger would get worse and worse until the deimovore reverted to the mindset of its less refined cousins—an animal, driven by base instincts and incapable of higher thought. A mere beast.

She’d do it. She’d torture me until I lacked the will to resist her, and then she’d snare me anyway. I don’t have a choice here, do I?

Phoebe glared at Mordacity with undisguised hate. “I hope the King in Yellow pops you like a rotten grape. Fine, you vicious shit. You’re invited in, like the wannabe vampire you are.”

“Finally.” The web overhead thickened, tightened, stretched taut, and a single strand fell from the sky. White thread lashed to Phoebe’s neck and encircled it, the other end floating gently into Mordacity’s outstretched hand. The wizard smirked. “Y’know, my web is good for spying, but actually controlling people? That’s tricky. You, though… you’re gonna be a little easier to pull around by the hooks and keep an eye on while you’re awake. Benefits of being a dream creature, yeah?”

“You bastard!” Phoebe snarled. “I don’t know why Rachel trusts you, but she’s wrong.”

“Because I’ve spent a decade working on her,” Mordacity chuckled. “Pushed her boundaries until the act of pushing felt normal, teased her by talking around what I knew, made her expect the unexpected and roll with it. Rachel’s pretty easy to figure out, really. Keep the banter flowing, keep tossing new ideas at her, and all those little defense mechanisms will take over and she’ll try to social mirror her way into some conversational advantage even when the correct response is to stop talking and start punching.”

Phoebe curled its lip. “You’re a real piece of shit, Tom.”

Mordacity snorted. “Well, I suppose that one’s on me for giving you the idea in the first place. Still.” She coiled the spidersilk leash around her hand and yanked on it with enough force to send the deimovore to its hands and knees, coughing and sputtering in the sand. “Call me that again and you won’t like what happens next. Do we have an understanding?”

Through gritted teeth, Phoebe hissed, “Yes, we do.”

“Wonderful! In that case… there’s work to be done, my dearest deimovore. You’re going to help me move a few more pieces into place before the big event. Let’s make sure this Valentine’s is one for the ages.”

[commentary]

It was really funny reading reactions to the Mordacity reveal chapter and having a few people complain about Rachel getting a really powerful ally out of nowhere. I’d thought the friction point would be people getting upset with Rachel trusting Mordacity too easily, not people trusting Mordacity too easily.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 8th of February.

[/commentary]