Making Deals With the Devil

[rhiannon_lee]

Rhiannon wasn’t sure if summoning worked this way; she only knew where Elfleda had appeared to her before, so that is where she headed after leaving Cian’s cabin near the lake.

She drove back to Searchlight, back to where she’d rented a cheap room after riding in a stale bus for days. She parked her car in the lot of the gas station where she’d gone to make a long-distance call with a pocket full of quarters. She walked past the bank of payphones and out into the desert, far enough to escape the glow from the light posts, so far she could barely see her shoes. Her flashlight picked out plants to avoid and, once, the striped tail of a snake under a rock. When she came to a clearing, she dropped her pack and crouched beside it with the flashlight in her teeth.

The black stone was in her pants pocket. Sometimes it seemed to burn her like a coal. Other times, it felt as innocuous as an ordinary rock. She took it out and studied it in the glow of the flashlight. In that yellow-tinged motel room, it had taken Rhiannon a few minutes of looking to realize what was so odd about it; it was polished smooth yet reflected no light.

Rhiannon switched off the flashlight and put it inside the pack. She stood up and ran her thumb across it. Then she closed her eyes. Clearing her mind was a challenge. She could faintly smell Cian’s soapy scent and she could hear trucks making good time on the highway. It was freezing out. Her sweatshirt wasn’t thick enough. Beyond all that, her stomach felt like a loosely coiled wire that jerked and sparked periodically. Maybe her anger would help serve as a beacon to Elfleda, who seemed to get off on that kind of thing. Rhiannon thought about that woman now. She pictured her gaunt face and black dress and how it felt to be touched by her.

‘Come on, please… Please.’

[Thread]

Comments

[lady_elfleda]

It did.

Amplifying the Slayer's signature aura, it anchored Rhiannon's thoughts of the Corruptress to a time and place far beyond this one. Somewhere in that great abyss of aching loneliness, oppressive carnage and terrors to melt the imagination, something sparked within the darkness of Elfleda's consciousness.

It was a great hall. A chest-like container without an imprisoning top, within which an inky blackness swirled, suddenly flexing in on itself, fluidly, as the young woman's plea was ignited with that base need to witness... To summon.

She was desired.

On the Earthly plane, a steady chorus of insect calls began to quieten, as if drowned by a blanket of nothingness. The same nothingness which caused one's own animal instincts to heighten with alarm, instinctively knowing something ill and malevolent was stalking the air. Was watching. A Slayer, though... Especially one who had been keyed to before, would also feel something else. That same distant strangeness... A simultaneous feeling of a spiritual home being represented.

An ambassadorial mother in damnation.

"I had only to wait, precious thing..."

And there she was. The face from before, having just spoken over shoulder. A smile most impish being cast Rhiannon's way.