8.16

CONTENT WARNING: This update contains detailed descriptions of violence, body horror, and gore.

Austin nearly drops the bread knife, his hand shaking badly around the handle. Abbott - or Crocell-Abbott - tilts their head to look further down on him, their eyes glittering with amusement.

“You - how -” Austin stammers, his teeth threatening to knock together, the room suddenly ten degrees colder than before. “You died. I saw you.”

Did you? Crocell-Abbott rotates their head all the way to one side. Well, looks can be deceiving. I don’t know that I would say that I was dead. A bit half-baked, maybe, but not quite dead.

“How did you -”

Only part of me, in here. A fragment. They laugh the same, insectoid laughter as before. Your…friends…scattered bits and pieces of me to the four winds - or, rather, the seven seas - when they destroyed what was left of my physical form. And one of those bits ended up here, while a certain someone was taking a walk along the docks. A happy accident, really.

Austin’s head is pounding, his chest rising and falling heavily with the promise of a future panic attack. He swallows hard, trying to stay focused. “Did you try to kill my brother?”

Oh, no. All of that was Abbott’s doing. I simply gave him a little push in the right direction here and there. Humans are very…malleable, if you know how to treat them. I couldn’t even properly take over the body until he died, so I must say, his initiative surprised me.

Crocell-Abbott’s tone is that of someone discussing a show dog, or a beloved riding horse. Austin feels boiling hot, his insides suddenly flooded with anger again after too short of a cooldown period, his muscles tensing with the need to do something to eliminate the threat. He doubts that stabbing Crocell-Abbott one more time will do the trick to kill them - they don’t seem affected at all by the dripping wound in their chest.

When in doubt, chop off the head, he thinks, trying to keep his ideas fleeting and quiet, in case Crocell-Abbott can listen in on them. But there’s nothing in here that’s big enough to -

Austin’s eyes stray towards the still-open door to the backyard. Crocell-Abbott is probably fast enough to stop him once they realize where he’s headed, but a decent enough distraction would give him the time he needs to make a break for it. And if Jacob and August haven’t drastically renovated the part of the yard closer to the guest house in the past few years, the wood pile for the fireplace should still be out there. As should the axe August uses for splitting the wood.

“Do you know where the rest of your…fragments…are?” Austin asks, mostly to distract Crocell-Abbott as he spins out more magic threads from himself, stretching across the room and towards the knives in the knife block.

This will be a trick he hasn’t tried before, and if it doesn’t work, the consequences will be brutal. He tries not to consider it too hard, instead making a small twisting motion with his hand, snapping off the ends of the magic thread attached to him and gathering them up in his fist. The knives, astoundingly, don’t vanish entirely, and Crocell-Abbott doesn’t seem to notice what’s going on. Maybe they can’t see magic, either because of the body they’re in or because they’re just a portion of the original Crocell.

No, Crocell-Abbott says, a little boredly. And either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to be the one who finally gets rid of you for good.

“Sure you are,” Austin says, tossing the magic thread-ends in his fist up at Crocell-Abbott. He tugs once, hard, on it before he lets it go, aiming to make the knives move linearly as opposed to teleporting.

It works, kind of. Several of the knives disappear and reappear stuck in the ceiling, handles quivering. One or two is dripping with viscous, black void goo. The rest of the knives do fly up and out of the knife block, launching themselves at Crocell-Abbott with an appropriate amount of speed and force, and a couple of them actually hit their mark. The damage might be negligible in the grand scheme of things, but Austin feels a distinct sense of satisfaction wash over him as he hears the distinct, meaty sound of a blade burying itself deep into flesh and muscle.

Crocell-Abbott opens their mouth for the first time, a guttural, pained howling noise bubbling up through it. Austin watches, transfixed, as they try to pull themself free from the knives and skitter away, only to find that several of the blades have passed all the way through them, pinning them to the ceiling like a taxidermied spider. They shriek again, this time more enraged than pained, and Austin takes it as his cue to leave.

Austin vaults over the kitchen counter, knocking the challah to the floor on his way over, breaking into a dead sprint as soon as his feet touch solid ground again. The sliding-glass door feels miles away, though it’s barely even a yard from the counter, and Crocell-Abbott’s howls ring in Austin’s ears, along with a horrible, meaty sound that he’s sure is them pulling themself free from the knives. The open door gets closer, wider, and then Austin is lunging through it, out onto the back porch.

Except, halfway through the lunge, there’s a laborious, grinding noise, and Austin finds himself unable to move. It isn’t until the pain hits, the familiar pain of being crushed, being pressed between two heavy objects, that Austin realizes what’s happened. Crocell-Abbott has beaten him across the kitchen, and trapped him between the sliding-glass door and its frame. If they wanted to, they could slam it shut - Austin’s sure they’re strong enough - and squish him like a bug.

Clever boy, Crocell-Abbott coos. But not clever enough.

Austin can feel their hot breath on the back of his neck. He squirms in the vice grip of the door, one of his arms stuck in a horribly irregular angle from the lunge. There’s a burning pain radiating from his shoulder down his upper arm that gets even worse as Austin tries to shift into a slightly more manageable position. He grits his teeth, tears streaming silently down his face. Dislocated. Shit.

Austin strains to see to the right of him, at the door itself. He can’t see Crocell-Abbott. They aren’t grasping the handle, so they must have slammed it as tight as they could, and let go. If Austin can throw all his weight against the door, it might open just enough for him to be able to squeeze the rest of the way through, out into the yard. But he’ll have to throw all the weight on his dislocated shoulder, too.

I think I’m going to savor you, Crocell-Abbott says thoughtfully. Austin feels something brush against his head and painstakingly tilts his head up, to see them slipping their skeletal body through the gap in the door, six arms and two legs working together with delicate precision. I haven’t had a human in so long.

They climb up and out of Austin’s range of sight, somewhere above him, on the side of the house. Austin starts gearing up to push the door open, clenching his teeth and squeezing himself towards the door frame, trying to make use of every inch available. Just as he’s prepared to shove the door back, Crocell-Abbott’s face appears in front of his, upside-down and grinning, making his heart jump in panic.

I wonder, they say, stroking a few bony fingers down the side of Austin’s face, if you could still see me without that ghost eye of yours.

“Don’t,” Austin grunts. His chest feels constricted by the door, his lungs struggling to fully inflate.

You make a compelling argument, Crocell-Abbott says, tittering out another little laugh. A long tongue snakes out of their mouth, more a proboscis than anything else, and slithers through the air between them, towards Austin’s face.

Austin’s fight or flight rockets into high gear. He bends himself diagonally, shifting his head and torso off to the left and slamming his hip and leg into the door. The door wobbles on its track - there’s a sickening pop, though Austin can’t tell exactly what it’s from (the glass breaking? his shoulder realigning?) through the haze of panic - and slides a few inches back towards the right. Austin barely takes the time to register it. All he knows is that there’s space enough to run, and so he runs, tripping over his own feet, his whole body a white-hot ball of pain.

The source of the popping sound makes itself known almost instantly. Austin makes it a few steps off the porch, falls, and vomits into the grass. Something warm and thick is sliding down the right side of his face, mingling with the tears, and half his vision is gone. The pain is unbearable - worse than having a knife driven through his hand, worse than his organs slowly rupturing under rock. Austin winces as he raises his right hand, a jolt of pain shooting through his still-dislocated shoulder, and feels around the edge of his newly empty eye socket, coating his fingers in blood.

Hm, Crocell-Abbott says, from behind him. Wrong eye, but an eye nonetheless. Let’s try again, shall we?

Austin can hear them moving along the side of the house, and struggles to stay upright on his hands and knees. His vision is blurry, his head spinning as he fights against his body to maintain consciousness. There’s a shape just outside the guest house, a few yards away, that has to be the wood pile. If only he can somehow make it there before Crocell-Abbott takes out his other eye.

Careful not to put too much weight on his bad shoulder, Austin begins to drag himself across the lawn, towards the wood pile. There’s a shuffling in the grass that he’s sure is Crocell-Abbott pursuing him, but he doesn’t turn his head to check. He can imagine it well enough - Abbott’s brutally twisted body crawling on its long, pale limbs, shoes cast off and forgotten elsewhere, fingernails caked with dirt.

There’s no cavalry coming to your rescue, Austin. A cold hand wraps around Austin’s ankle, dragging him backwards with barely any effort at all. Not this time. And once I kill you, I’ll finish what Abbott started, and kill your brother. Then maybe I’ll go visit Landis in Antlers.

Austin blinks the tears from his eye and looks straight out in front of him, desperately searching for any sign of the axe near the woodpile. He finds it just as Crocell-Abbott releases him, leaving him lying on his stomach in the grass. A thin, rounded handle, just barely visible behind the pile, but sticking perfectly upright in the air. An easy target. Austin focuses on the handle as hard as he possibly can, the porch light and moon above him blotted out as Crocell-Abbott crawls over him.

He tries to envision a strand of magic reaching out towards the axe handle, working to regulate his breath, sinking his fingers into the earth. The first strand wavers, turns pale, and dissipates within seconds after stretching a few inches. The second makes it halfway to the handle before Austin loses focus, crying out as Crocell-Abbott presses on his injured shoulder and pushes him face-down into the dirt.

Maybe I should just eat you all in one piece, they muse. But it is such fun to play cat and mouse.

One more try, for the axe. That’s all he has in him. Austin raises his head as much as he can, and stares down the handle, forcing himself to take his time. He breathes deeply, in and out, letting everything around him slow to a crawl. Austin imagines that the only things left on the earth are the axe and his broken body, and stretches out the hand of his good arm in front of him, open, palm-up, a plea.

What are you doing? Crocell-Abbott asks, sounding amused. You look like a -

“Shut up,” Austin growls, rolling just as the axe handle pops into his hands, driving the blade into Crocell-Abbott’s chest.

They fly off of him, landing on their back on the lawn. Using the axe as a crutch, Austin stands, and limps over to them. The grass is soaked with blood. Crocell-Abbott is already trying to crawl away, so he hits them again with the axe.

Then a third time.

Then a fourth.