An aching gasp crawled up out of her - a vanguard parting the veil of sleep - and Pit lurched awake. She made one reflexive grasp at the sheets and then froze. Not her room. The dirty little studio she normally woke up in could be generously described as “lived-in” - the debris of everyday living, shed clothes and the like, collected in the corners like cobwebs -  but the room before her was entirely different. At first glance, as she sat up and blinked the sleep from her eyes, the place seemed to be carved out of marble. The room was utterly white, or it would be if it were lit by anything more than moonlight peeking through the blinds, and decorated with an unblemished modernesque soulless-ness that firmly disavowed any suspicion of regular occupation. The only immediately obvious color was the alarm clock resting by the bed, which displayed a steady 5:52 in sharp red light. As she glanced at it, it flicked up to 5:53. She had evidently slept like a dead thing: the sheets on the bed even still bore the crease from where they had been folded over, disturbed only by the single sharp kick she had given upon waking. There was a note on the door. She frowned, squinting. In eerily perfect handwriting, it read:

GOOD MORNING ♡

MAKE YRSELF @ HOME

BABY SLEEPING IN LVNG RM

-DR

Her own hands felt thick and unfeeling, and when she crossed one to the other to deal with an insistent plastic itch at the base of one finger, she discovered them wrapped quite expertly in gauze. She frowned harder, and the events of the previous evening began a dutiful procession through her mind, conducted by the lurking thing in the back of her mind. Long walk, suicide attempt, met Will, Will punched that guy, met Dahlia, chat about the thing, unconsciousness. She had always hated the way the thing seemed to filter her memories -  they bruised at its touch, becoming cropped and curated and strange. It even stitched her dreams onto the end of the memory-show, as if they were one and the same: the sensation of falling for the second time that evening, the sudden black, and then she was watching herself sharing a blanket and a cup of cocoa with her mother. The room she recognized from a storybook she’d had as a child, warm colors and velvet surfaces coming together to imitate her mental image of the perfect home, and her mother was a happy, pre-divorce version of herself that never really existed. They had come to a natural break in a very fulfilling conversation, she and her mother, and this comfortable silence seemed to stretch on for ethereal dream-minutes. Snow collected on the windowsill, slowly obscuring a view she recognized as belonging to Dahlia’s studio. Pit had sat up to noodle on a guitar she suddenly had, imagining that this was what it must feel like to actually get rested during sleep, but then she wasn’t holding a guitar anymore, it was a cocktail a friend had once bought her on New Year’s Eve. She was in a sunkissed cafe in a dress she couldn’t quite focus on, but she knew it looked great. She was seated alone, served by a waiter so handsome she strongly suspected he had been made in a lab. He confirmed that the dress looked great. Things seemed to skip and jumble from there on; there was a delicious meal that featured sweet potatoes prominently, and then she was having sex with the waiter on a beach, and then there was more than one waiter and they were all stunning and she was having to choose, and then the food was back but all the waitstaff was still there, and the two activities became messily intertwined...

The next clear dreamscape was a rather condescending bed of marshmallows and ice cream, upon which Dahlia was stretched out like some large arachnoid cat. Pit was pregnant. In the sky, thousands of angels clothed in black surrounded her. Some were cowled in robes, some wore heavy riot gear, others wore plain civilian clothes, but always their faces were obscured. Occasionally one made a low, arcing pass over them. Dahlia grinned, next to Pit now with something like an apology shining in her eyes. But it wasn’t an apology, not completely. There was curiosity there, and readiness, and hunger. She was holding a scalpel.

“You have to let me do this,” she said. Will was there, sword drawn, his back to them. He said nothing, but glanced once over his shoulder to nod. He slew an angel that flew too close, sending it crashing to one side in a spray of feathers and golden blood.

Pit could feel the presence of an Adversary, something white and enormous lurking just out of sight, its sixfold presence beating on her like the heat from an oven. It was the first unpleasant thing she’d felt in the dream. The second unpleasant thing she felt was Dahlia cutting her open, stem to stern in a single flick of her practiced wrist. It felt Good. The ground had become Schezuan beef at some point, thought that mattered little now as her guts spilled out onto it like so much wet laundry. Muscles and then bones followed, but she was surprised to find herself not dead, not even empty, but filled with something else, the thing she had been carrying to term, something alien and strange and far away. She felt herself being pushed aside, dissipating as the body that was once hers moved without her, stepping over the pile of meat that she used to be and then even Will as it rose to meet the Adversary. And then she was awake. She blinked. The thing in the back of her mind shifted, unsure, a dog confused by its owner’s displeasure over the dead bird they had been brought.

Pit was tired.

She tried to focus on something actionable. That was a concept a therapist had taught her in a complimentary session; find actionable items, the little daily things one needs to survive. Cleanliness was an easy place to start. There was one door - across from the door with the note - that was slightly ajar, and she could see tile and countertop, and suspected it was a bathroom. That sounded good. The idea of a shower occurred to her, and then it sounded even better: she could kind of smell herself, and the idea of someone else having to pick her up and carry her to the guest room and bandage her hand and possibly also smell her made her stomach do backflips, and the voice of the inkling grew ever sharper. She worked the medical tape with her teeth as she hauled herself to the edge of the bed. Compared to the twin-sized futon she had slept on since she was twelve, it felt like kind of a hike.

Underneath the bandage was a cross, stark and black against her skin. It was inverted, the stem pointing up towards her fingers, and a tiny three-pointed crown hovered over it. The other palm bore an identical mark. They weren’t cut or sore, or even raised like a scar, they simply were.

It wasn’t until her feet hit the floor that her brain realized how difficult calibrating a standing position would be now that it was working with markedly less blood, but it got by. Her back itched - she hatred sleeping in a bra. She was wearing her own jeans and socks, and she could see her shoes parked neatly at the foot of the bed, but in place of her old hoodie and tee was a gently-used effigy to one “Frank & Stein’s Long Pork BBQ”, size XL, emblazoned with a decaying cartoon pig giving a thumbs-up. It was short-sleeved, and though it was several sizes too large it still failed to cover the railroad track scars on her wrists. She felt exposed and nervous. She pulled the shirt off as she headed for the bathroom - the back said “WATCH OUT - I BITE!” in a drippy is-it-blood-or-is-it-barbeque-sauce font. Someone had placed a rosary around her neck, which she removed respectfully but finally.

The sallow-eyed woman in the mirror regarded her with a familiar empty recognition, tinged with total bafflement and a touch of bemused acceptance. They waved to each other vacantly.

“You,” she said to the woman in the mirror, “Ought to be dead already.” Pit wasn’t sure if this was a threat or not. They held each other’s gaze for a long time, and something passed between them. Then: “Okay. Okay. Shower. Breakfast. Call mom. Okay.”

Pit showed luxuriously, basking in the knowledge that she wouldn’t be paying for the resulting utility bill. The crosses on her palms did not wash off. In the gentle flourescent light of the bathroom, she could tell that they weren’t actually black but dark brown, like a mole. She clenched her fists until her knuckles turned white.

“Stigmata,” she said to a point in empty air about three feet in front of her, trying the word out in her mouth, running a finger over the mark. It seemed to pulse at her touch, pregnant with power and waiting for some unknown signal to begin some unknown disgorging. It made her skin crawl.

A stigmata, or a pair of stigmata? She wasn’t sure what the nomenclature would be. Will would know, so she let it go. The hot water emptied her mind, and though there was no soap (the bathroom was even without the forgotten amenities of previous guests), the whole experience left her feeling clean and safe and good. She dressed back into her day-old clothes, staring at herself in the mirror as she did. She gave a tight little smile, tugging at her sleeves.

Pit padded barefoot through the dark penthouse, examining the decor, slightly terrified of rounding a corner to find some mutilated servitor doing housework or whatever it was the poor soul was bound to do. Having a reanimated corpse wandering your house at night seemed like a nightmare to her, but she knew it wasn’t uncommon for wealthy orchestrators to have one or two hanging around. A hallway opened up into the living room, and her heart leapt into her throat when she first saw a human figure on the couch. It snored gently.

It was Will. He lay on on his side, facing away from the enormous ticking crucifix, sleeping so tensely he might as well have been awake - jaw clenched and fingers wrapped tightly around a worn Bible at his chest. Even his fetal position had a kind of combative, en garde quality. The sword stood silent vigil over him, unsheathed and leaning against one arm of the couch. He shifted, mouthing something.

The smoky sapphire light of predawn seemed to hang coiled against the picture windows of the living room, reluctant to fully enter but still present and glowing. Pit pulled a sliding glass door open just enough to slip out onto the balcony, gasping at the cold morning wind on her wet hair and feeling the bite of unworn concrete on her feet. Below, the city that never sleeps was waking up. Pit watched taillights move through the grey veins of the city, the single streaks of red seeming small and strange amid infrastructure built in busier days. It was a far cry from the views she remembered as a girl - solid lines of pickup trucks and moving vans loaded down with furniture, fleeing the city, bleeding it dry.

She grabbed the handrails and looked down. The drop had no pull on her today.

She found the kitchen next, and set about making coffee without turning on the lights. The simplicity of the commitment felt strange - she couldn’t remember the last time she had found the energy to prepare something for herself. She wondered if some kind of French press setup would have stopped her.

“Something actionable,” she chided herself, flipping the machine on. There was no milk, but plenty of sugar.

Next Chapter: IX - His-Will-Be-Done