The Four Dimensions of Corey Emerson

The Black Cat

        Entrails of the poet were all over Emerson’s desk. If it wasn’t for the fact I’d just puked, I would have vomited all over the classroom. My stomach was empty but I put my hand over my mouth just in case.

            “Bran,” I managed, removing my hand for a brief moment, “what are you doing…”

            Bran laughed and nuzzled his beak under his left wing, attempting to wipe off the dripping blood. “What I’ve waited hundreds of years on earth but whole millennia in these Dimensions to do!”

            “I- I thought Edgar Allan Poe was-!” I began, but then recalled to the conversation I had with Sir Justin. “He-… he wasn’t dead…”

            “Now he is!” Another voice cackled from behind me. I turned around to see Syve, practically half cat, with long fierce claws. Her eyes pierced mine and I could practically feel the hatred screaming out of her.

            Bran squawked, regaining my attention.

            “Why did you kill him?!” I shouted, running over to see if the invincible writer was alive; deducing that because of the darkened heart pulled apart on Emerson’s chair, Edgar Allan Poe did not have a heartbeat.

            “Because he damned us!” Syve screamed in a way I had never heard before. I had heard her annoyed but never angered. “Writing about us, with the help of Gare, he made us immortal! He made me a Shifter!”

            “WHAT?!” I was so overwhelmed and again thanked God for already giving me an empty stomach. “OKAY, I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW I GOT HERE!”

            Syve held up her pointer finger and walked back out of the classroom to wash the blood out beneath her claws. When arriving back in the room, she sat at a student’s desk. I looked at the desk and saw a dark binder covered in a messy scrawl: it was the binder Emerson was drawing on, before Elwyn started chasing us… I grabbed the binder as the cat seated herself, and I tried to make out the picture. Doing a double take with the raven in front of me, I saw that Mr. Emerson had drawn Bran. I smiled but dropped the binder.

            “Sit,” Syve smiled, gesturing to a chair by Emerson’s desk. The stench of Poe’s freshly rotting corpse made me hack, so I sat down on the other side of Syve; that was a little better. “Edgar Allan Poe had a very special ability… like you-.”

            “-Should I tell the story, Syve?”

            Syve rolled her bright yellow eyes and tapped her claws against the cheap desk. She then crossed her arms and gave a sigh as Bran flew down and landed on the desk.

            Bran cleared his throat and gave a small squawk. “When Edgar Allan Poe was born, the Vampirian Parliament sensed him immediately. They say that Poe was so deranged and his mind and soul were so demented, that it was soon classified as a sort of ‘magic’. Like your ability to wield water. But this evil that had manifested into Poe’s mind was too powerful for a mortal human, that as a child, that the Wizard Council had stolen him as an infant for one Earth night. This amount of time in the Dimensions probably equaled out to fifty  years.”

            I gasped.

            “Oh, it’s not always to that ratio; it depends on the will of the person Running back and forth. It varies… anyway… during this time, the Wizard Council tried to raise the baby Poe as their own, and keep him from the Vampirian Parliament. This failed and within the first ten years, vampires came and took Poe. The Council couldn’t get him back. This is when the Rein of Darkness fell upon the Dimensions. This is where the need for you first germinated.