Ekron

Saturn - 7

Maria put the flask containing Macsk blood in a back pocket of her overall and sat inside the circle of blood at her workroom. She called for Dolora and the spectral witch appeared sitting in front of her.

"Do you have it with you?"

"Yes, now take me to your place."

"Of course," Dolora made a pause and added, "I haven't done this in a century."

Then Dolora stabbed her right-hand's nails in Maria's left forearm, piercing through her clothes. Maria cried out and her workroom disappeared, then she found herself in some sort of bunkhouse. Dolora removed her nails from Maria's flesh, who grabbed her arm in pain and fell to her left side. The spectral witch stood up and put the palm of her right hand on Maria's forehead. Lights of different colors blinked across her forearm as she read María's brain. Then she took the flask from Maria's back pocket and headed to a wide wooden table on the center of the room.

"What have you done to me?!"

"Now you're one of us, it was the easiest way to get you through the portal."

Maria rolled up her sleeve and looked at the wounds left by Dolora's nails; a light-green blur was growing by the second around them. She started to feel numb and feverish. She stood up and saw that she was on a circle drawn with blood with an eight-pointed star inside. She stepped out of the circle, to be sure that her transference was effective and looked around. The place had bunks and was mildly illuminated. Maria saw only old women there. Some of them seemed as emaciated as Dolora, and all of them had the same jellyfish hair. She looked at the table in the center of the dormitory and saw Agatha's corpse laid on it. Dolora was by its side with the flask in her hand. Thick wires made their way from an electric panel to the table. Maria saw a door to her right, close enough to go through it before anybody would notice. Anyway, nobody seemed to care if she stayed or left.

She had so many questions but knew immediately that she couldn't trust any answer from those specters and didn't wanted to stay and behold the resurrection of the Saint of Halych, not in her current state. So, she walked through the door and found a dark lonely passage, there was no one in the streets, apparently everybody in that section was congregated inside the bunkhouse. Her arm started to hurt more than before, and fever made her stagger as she walked. The blur covered her entire arm and became transparent. Her veins were becoming visible and little wires pierced her flesh in a painful process. She saw an air duct entrance big enough for her and got inside it, crawled for a minute until she found a turn and hid on the other side of it.

Laid down inside the duct, she began to gain sensitivity from her hair; it felt liquid. She looked at her left forearm, circuitry was forming in the place where Dolora had pierced her nails; the same three stigmas showed by the spectral witch had appeared in her flesh. Then she passed out from the fever, in the deep guts of Nineveh.

Dolora had not only followed Maria's instructions regarding Agatha, but she had also cut the corpse's hair to her feet, as it had continued to grow after her death, a century before. She washed her, cut her toenails, put leather boots on her feet and cleansed her black lace dress. She even polished her mechanical limbs. Of course, Agatha's wounds were carefully stitched up, as well as the lacy clothing that had been cut with them. Having read Maria's mind, Dolora knew the required procedure in detail and didn't need the cat girl to complete it.

By her side, another spectral witch was assisting her. They opened Agatha's eyelids to have access to her eyes. In the left one, Dolora drenched the blue iris with Macsk blood from the flask, then spread the blood with circular movements of her finger. Iris and pupil dissolved becoming an unregular light-blue stain with white blurs scattered on it, mixing with the sclera. The same process was applied to the right eye. With her fingers, Dolora closed Agatha's eyelids afterwards.

The remaining Macsk blood was poured into Agatha's mouth, lifting her head to carefully make sure that it could reach her stomach. Then, with a knife, Dolora made incisions through clothing and flesh in Agatha's shoulders and thighs. Inside them she plugged the naked ends of thick electric wires, connected to the bunkhouse electrical panel.

Then Dolora clapped her hands twice and everybody in the room acquired a solemn attitude. She knelt down and all the spectral witches knelt down with her. They prayed for about a minute, some of them poured black tears from their eyes and fell into a trance. When Dolora stood up, those that had cried black tears had to be touched by another witch to come out of the trance and stand up again. Dolora made a sign, and her assistant connected the electric power to the wires.

Agatha's body shook and convulsed for twenty seconds, power went off and the room got completely dark for a moment. Then backup power turned on, and red lights illuminated all that level of Nineveh. On the table, Agatha opened her white eyes. The witches in the room, felt a warm pain on their backs, and pairs of black lace wings came out of them.

"We've been transformed into angels!" exclaimed Dolora.

The slim tentacles in their heads became thicker, their arms became black and split each one in two longitudinally, acquiring an arthropod exoskeleton. Their waists liquated separating lower body from torso, and they fell to the ground on their new four legs made from their arms, resting their new cephalopod tentacles on the floor, made from their jellyfish hair. Their faces acquired an indifferent expression as they had become a distorted version of what was in Agatha's mind at that moment: an Osmógreh.

Agatha sat on the table, took off the wires stabbed in her flesh, slowly stepped on the floor by her side and stood up. She advanced towards the same door through which Maria had escaped, followed by her spectral cephalopods.