Eidolon

Chapter 28: Sister of St. Mercy

Jay Kilner awoke to darkness and pain. His body felt stiff and achy, but it was nothing compared to the headache he had, or the swirling, half-remembered thoughts in his mind that might be memories or might be nightmares.

"Ungh..." he groaned, opening his eyes to find himself in the back seat of a vehicle. It was dark, but in the fleeting light of a streetlights that the car passed, he could see a girl in the seat across from him, sleeping with her head leaning against the window. She was small, with short brown hair, and she looked somehow familiar, but he was having too hard a time putting his head in order to recall exactly who she was.

"What should we do with the gun?" he heard another girl say from the driver's seat. He could only make out the back of her head, her long, raven-black hair only catching the faintest glints of light from the passing lights.

"Uh... keep it?" the girl in the front passenger seat suggested. She was much taller than the other two, with wavy blonde hair. "It could come in handy."

The realization slowly dawned on him that he knew the blonde, as well as the girl sitting across from him. His memories were fragmented, however, and didn't make a lot of sense. They were a strange jumble of mundane and bizarre, of a coffee shop and a police station, ghosts and monsters. Was it all real, or was he confusing dreams or hallucinations with things that had really taken place?

"What's going on?" he asked, and immediately regretted it. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, and echoed in his head. He lifted a hand to his temple, but it felt alien, as if the body were not his own.

"He's awake," the blonde said, looking back at him. Cynthia. Her name was Cynthia, he suddenly remembered. And the sleeping girl was Alex. They were...friends?

"How are you feeling, Jay?" the raven-haired girl asked, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. She seemed less familiar. He couldn't recall her name.

"Terrible," he replied. "What happened to me?"

There was silence from the front seat for a moment, and in the darkness he thought he could see the two girls exchange glances, as if trying to decide what to tell him.

"Don't worry about it," Cynthia said, finally. "You're going to be okay. We'll take care of everything from here." What did that mean? What was there to take care of?

"I don't understand. I can't... I can't remember..."

"Trust me, you're better off that way," the raven-haired girl said.

"I mean, I've got bits and pieces," he continued, flexing his hand as if trying to remember how it worked. "But none of them make any sense. Have I... been on something?" He had done something terrible. It wasn't entirely his fault, he knew, and yet...

"We're going to take you home," Cynthia said. "And you can just forget about all of this, okay? It'll be just a bad dream."

Jay said nothing, and they continued driving on in silence for some time. As they dropped him off at the entrance to the trailer park, he could just make out the raven-haired girl saying something to Cynthia in an angry whisper.

"We are not keeping the gun. It's evidence. We're throwing it in the Columbia River the first chance we get."

Jay knew he should be alarmed at that exchange, but for some reason, he instead felt relieved. It took him a moment to figure out why that was.

He had shot someone.

*     *     *

Alex awoke with a start, sitting up suddenly in a cold sweat. She had been dreaming a terrible dream in which she was spread out on an operating table, but her body was not her own. It was the hard, sleek, ivory body of her eidolon, her torso cracked open like a crab's shell, exposing her still-beating heart. Professor Richter leaned over her, but he was wearing the Plague Doctor's mask and digging around in her innards like he was gutting a thanksgiving turkey. She couldn't remember anything else—the details of the nightmare slipped away swiftly, like smoke through her fingers, but the image of the spectral operation was burned in her mind.