Chapter 13: The House at the edge of Town (13)
Evan woke up screaming.
Not the heroic kind, no words, no warning, just a raw, panicked sound torn straight out of his chest as he bolted upright, lungs burning like he’d been underwater too long.
His head slammed into something solid.
“Ow- what the hell-”
“GET OFF ME!”
Mark came awake at the same time, flailing, elbows and knees colliding with Evan’s ribs in a chaotic tangle of limbs. The two of them shouted over each other, half-blind and disoriented, until Mark finally managed to scramble backward and fell clean off the bed.
He hit the floor with a dull thump.
They stared at each other.
Both breathing hard.
Both soaked in cold sweat.
Both very much alive.
“…Okay,” Mark said hoarsely.
“Either we’re dead and this is hell, or you just kneed me in the spine.”
Evan blinked rapidly, trying to get his vision to focus.
“You, why were you on top of me?”
“You were on top of me!”
“That’s not-” Evan stopped mid-sentence.
The room came into focus.
They were lying in a circle.
Not metaphorical. Not “it kind of looks like one.”
An actual, unmistakable circle of salt surrounded the bed, thick and unbroken, its edges sharp and deliberate. Strange symbols, faded now, barely visible in the morning light, ringed the outside, etched into the floor in uneven strokes that made Evan’s skin crawl just looking at them.
Mark followed his gaze.
“Oh,” he said weakly.
“Oh, that’s… that’s bad.”
Evan looked down at himself.
His clothes were still on. Torn. Filthy. Caked with dried mud and something dark that might’ve been blood but didn’t feel like it belonged to him. His arms were covered in bruises he definitely did not remember earning.
He looked back at Mark.
Mark looked worse.
“You brought her home,” Evan said.
Mark stared at him. “I brought her home?”
“Yes!” Evan shouted. “You said she was ‘interesting’!”
“You said she was ‘hot’!”
“That does not mean ‘invite her to sacrifice our souls’!”
Mark scrambled to his feet, pointing wildly at the salt circle. “THIS is your fault! I wanted to leave after the diner!”
“You wanted to impress her!”
“I wanted coffee!”
Evan dragged his hands through his hair. “Oh my god. Oh my god. We’re dead. We’re absolutely dead. This is hell and you’re my punishment.”
Mark stared at the symbols again.
“Do demons do… circles?”
“I don’t know!” Evan snapped. “I didn’t major in occult ritual layouts!”
They stood there, yelling over each other, voices echoing off the walls in a way that made the room feel too small.
Accusations flew.
“You flirted back!”
“You took the cigarette!”
“You jumped on the bat that one time, wait, wrong trauma!”
“You let the goth girl sit next to you!”
“She sat next to you!”
Finally, Mark threw his hands up.
“Okay. Fine. Fine. Let’s just, let’s confirm whether we’re alive or not.”
He pinched his own arm hard.
“Ow.”
Evan did the same. “Ow.”
They stared at each other again.
“…So,” Mark said slowly.
“Alive.”
“For now,” Evan muttered.
“That just means the devil’s taking his time.”
They carefully stepped out of the salt circle.
Nothing happened.
No lightning.
No screaming void.
No sudden possession.
Mark exhaled shakily.
“Okay. Maybe, maybe it was just… weird goth stuff?”
Evan shot him a look. “You don’t draw glowing symbols with just weird goth stuff.”
“Hey, you don’t know her hobbies!”
They moved toward the door.
Evan hesitated with his hand on the knob.
“If I open this and there’s a pentagram carved into the hallway floor, I’m burning the house down.”
Mark nodded.
“Fair.”
Evan opened the door.
The hallway looked… normal.
Too normal.
They stepped out cautiously.
“Okay,” Mark said. “So maybe she was just-”
They reached the stairs.
Or rather, where the stairs used to lead.
Because the house… didn’t.
Not all of it.
Evan walked forward slowly, dread pooling in his stomach with each step.
The air felt wrong, too open.
Too much light.
He reached the end of the hallway.
And stopped.
Half the house was gone.
Just, gone.
The entire living room side had been obliterated. No wall. No roof. No floor. Just jagged remains of framing, snapped beams, and a wide open view of the outside world like the house had been bitten in half by something unimaginably large.
Sunlight poured in through the open wound.
Birds chirped.
A light breeze stirred the curtains that no longer had a wall to hang from.
Mark walked up beside Evan.
They stood there in silence.
For a long time.
“…So,” Mark said finally. “On the bright side.”
Evan didn’t look at him. “Don’t.”
“We don’t have to worry about the lease.”
***
The night hadn’t quite decided what it wanted to be yet.
It hovered in that uncomfortable in-between state, too dark to be morning, too quiet to still feel like crisis.
The smoke was thinning. The pressure that had crushed the clearing moments ago had ebbed into something merely unpleasant, like the aftertaste of a bad decision.
Lena walked with her hands shoved deep into her jacket pockets, boots crunching rhythmically along the cracked road that led away from what used to be a house.
Behind her, a length of improvised restraint, wire, cloth, and something that looked suspiciously like ritual cord, dragged along the asphalt.
At the other end of it bounced the entity.
Or rather… what was left of it.
It had shrunk.
Not metaphorically.
Not symbolically.
Physically.
Where once there had been writhing silk and impossible mass, there was now something roughly the size of a house cat, curled in on itself like a scorched tumbleweed.
The black silk had collapsed inward, compressed into a dense, matted shell that faintly pulsed with residual wrongness.
Burnt little limbs, no longer human enough to be disturbing, but not animal enough to be comforting, twitched occasionally as it dragged along the ground.
It was very unconscious.
Gorchov strolled beside Lena, hands clasped behind his back, posture relaxed to the point of insult.
He looked… fine.
Too fine.
Not a mark on him.
No blood.
No sign that minutes earlier he’d been a bone-armored god-dragon exhaling annihilation.
He hummed softly.
Lena did not.
She walked for a full thirty seconds in simmering silence before she snapped.
“You could’ve mentioned that.”
Gorchov glanced at her. “Mentioned what?”
“That,” she said sharply, jerking a thumb over her shoulder without looking back.
“That.”
He followed the gesture, eyes landing on the bound, shrunken anomaly being dragged behind them. It bumped over a crack in the road and made a faint, pathetic thump.
“Oh,” he said.
“That part.”
“Yes. That part.”
He shrugged.
“It wasn’t relevant until it was.”
Lena stopped walking.
The restraint went taut.
The cocoon-thing skidded forward a foot and flopped onto its side.
She turned to face him slowly.
“You turned into a bone dragon,” she said, voice dangerously level. “A dragon. With bones. On the outside.”
“Yes.”
“And you did not think- at any point- ‘maybe I should give my partner a heads-up’?”
He considered this seriously.
“No.”
She stared at him.
He stared back.
Somewhere in the distance, something nocturnal chirped and immediately regretted it.
“You know what?” Lena said finally, resuming her walk with jerky steps.
“Fine. Fine. That’s on me. That’s what I get for assuming basic disclosure policies apply to you.”
Gorchov smiled faintly and fell back into step beside her.
“For the record,” he said, “you handled it admirably.”
“I used a car as a blunt instrument.”
“Yes.”
“It exploded.”
“Eventually.”
“And I almost got my spine inverted.”
“But you didn’t.”
She shot him a look.
“That is not the praise you think it is.”
They walked on, boots echoing softly on empty pavement.
The road curved gently, lined by trees that leaned inward like they were eavesdropping.
The moon hung low, pale and uninterested.
The entity dragged along behind them, bumping over stones, occasionally emitting a faint, disgruntled hrrk noise that sounded like a cat coughing up something it shouldn’t have eaten.
Lena glanced back at it despite herself.
“…It’s really that small now.”
“Yes,” Gorchov said.
“Compression tends to do that.”
She frowned.
“You didn’t kill it.”
“No.”
“You could have.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something she couldn’t hear.
“Because it’s still useful.”
She grimaced.
“I hate when you say that.”
“You hate when anyone says that.”
“That’s because it’s always bad news.”
They walked another stretch in silence.
Then Lena sighed, long, tired, scraped-out-of-her.
“You enjoyed it,” she said.
He didn’t deny it.
“Marginally.”
She rubbed her face.
“You went full mythic tyrant on it. You monologued.”
“I had authorization.”
“That does not make the monologue mandatory.”
“Disagree.”
She stopped again, pointing at him.
“You said ‘Great Dragon Emperor.’”
He brightened slightly.
“I did.”
“You said ‘Bone-Clad God.’”
“Yes.”
“And ‘Sovereign of Marrow.’”
“Very proud of that one.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose.
She dropped her hand and glared. “Because else someone has to make sure you don’t escalate everything into a folklore incident.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t escalate everything.”
She gestured vaguely behind them. “That thing was living under a rental property.”
“And now it isn’t.”
“Because you nuked it with bad-breath.”
He shrugged.
The road dipped slightly. The trees thinned. Somewhere ahead, faint light glowed, distant, artificial, promising grease and caffeine.
They didn’t acknowledge it.
Lena adjusted her grip on the restraint and felt a faint tug as the cocoon twitched again.
“Don’t,” she muttered to it.
It went still.
She sighed. “You know, most people would’ve led with the ‘ancient dragon god’ thing.”
“Most people,” Gorchov replied mildly, “don’t stick around after finding out.”
She snorted.
“That’s not a defense.”
“It’s an explanation.”
They walked on.
The night seemed quieter now, like it had accepted that whatever argument it had been having with reality had ended, for tonight, at least.
Behind them, the ruined house was already fading into memory.
Ahead of them, the diner lights waited.
And between them dragged the remains of something that had thought it could get away with breaking the rules.
