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saintsofwarding · 1 year ago

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WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by @trout-scout

Chapter 22: A Dream of Sunlight

"Hey, Donna."

She stood in the candlelight. The candles were different; there were no flowers, no barren branches, no graves, but she stood the same way she always had, still and spectral, the black silk of her veil rustling with the almost imperceptible tilt of her head.

Heisenberg braced the head of his hammer on the ground, watching Donna Beneviento's back and shoulders.

"You're looking..." He gave her a slow once-over. "...not dead. Rose's work, I assume? Or did she get that meathead Redfield at the BSAA to dig your ass from the dirt?"

She said nothing.

Heisenberg lifted his eyebrows. "You listening to me?" he said, snapping his fingers. "Or you off in La-La-Land?"

"She doesn't want to talk to you," Angie hissed.

Heisenberg grimaced. "You always were a creepy little fucker, you know that?"

"She's a part of me, Karl," Donna said, her voice that familiar low, bittersweet rasp Heisenberg knew so well, knew like a bad dream, like the aching pain of a fresh bruise. It had been so long since he'd heard her speak, so many years of believing she was dead, dead with the rest, dead and gone. "You should know that by now."

"Yeah. Still creepy as shit. You're a dollmaker, right? Why not fix her up, give her a cuter face or something?"

"My father made her," Donna said, simply. "The last gift he gave me before he...was gone. I'm not changing her."

She looked round. Heisenberg glimpsed the glint of her single eye beneath her veil. "You understand, I think. Better than you pretend to."

Heisenberg let out a sigh, leaning on the handle of the hammer like it was a cane. "Listen," he said, hooking his finger toward Dimitrescu, Moreau, and Mia on the far side of the cave church. "I'm leaving. Wanted to say take care of the kid or else."

"Or else?" A rare glint of humor lit her voice. It had been years since she'd sounded that way, years since- everything. That had been rare, too. Her happiness. Her contentment. Her peace. Days in the garden, in the kind summer sunlight. Him, and Donna, and Claudia, the three of them fighting their quiet rebellion. His surety that nothing could break them apart.

Nothing but Miranda, of course, inevitably. Nothing but death.

Death, and the grief that came after, and Heisenberg had never been able to look Donna in the eye again, never able to face her after Claudia had died.

Selfish, cowardly. Drowning it under the weight of his work, his vengeance. More machine than man day by day. The more metal he welded to himself, the less of his human flesh would show.

Now his factory was gone. Now, the engines were silent. And now, as ever, he wanted more and more and more. Now, as ever, he yearned for the impossible. Not armies to lay waste to Miranda's years of murder and manipulation. Not bloodshed and vengeance. Not even power- his own, Rose's, whatever. Now, all he wanted was rest. Peace.

For all of them.

Even Alcina deserved that.

"Or else-" Heisenberg began. "Or else I'll bash your fuckin' skull in."

Donna laughed, the sound soft and silvery. "I understand. You care for her."

"Heh. The kid's not too bad."

"You have taken care of her for many years. Is that right?"

"Yeah."

A slight nod. "Good."

"Sure, sure, give me a halo and call me a saint. Donna- uh." He shifted, back and forth. "Sorry," he said. "About- fuck, about all of it. Your sister. What I did to you, to her..."

"That was Miranda, not you. I see that now."

"Can't blame everything on Miranda." He paused. "Well, yeah, I can, but- uh, you know what I mean..."

"I miss her," Donna said. She cradled Angie to her chest, her knuckles sharp through the delicate skin of her hands. "I miss her so much."

She meant Claudia. Of course. He ground his teeth together, half-turning away. He couldn't deal with this shit right now, not with everything, not with Rose the way she was. "Yeah. Me fuckin' too, Donna. Listen, good chat, but-"

"Karl."

He stopped.

A beat-

Then he turned.

She'd faced him. She'd removed her veil. Her fine-boned face was lit softly by the candlelight, her black hair mussed from being beneath her headgear, her single dark eye steady, set on him. He'd forgotten how beautiful she was under the veil.

"For a long time, I..." she began. "I think I was dead. Before...before Winters, I mean. I think I was dead but my body did not know it yet. A ghost trapped within a doll. And my true death, when Winters gave it to me, was a kind of relief. Locked in the Black God's dreams, I finally found rest. I felt nothing there. Do you understand?"

"Yeah," Heisenberg said, softly.

"And now...maybe. There is...life again. Or the beginnings of life. And I cannot help but be glad. And I am...I think..."

A faint smile touched her lips. "...Happy."

"Heh. It's a good look for you." He tilted his head, looking at her over the rim of his glasses. "Always knew you were tougher than most gave you credit for."

Donna nodded, her momentary smile fading.

"Claudia would be...proud of you," she said, halting, a little uncertain. "Of who you are. What you've done. And happy, too. That you remember her. That you're here now."

"That we both are, Donna," Heisenberg told his sister, as gently as he could bear.

And this time, Donna Beneviento's true smile- unseen for so long, missed and craved for so long- trembled on her face. Soft as the candlelight, rare and sweet as a mountain flower opening in the sun.

***

He hated goodbyes. So when he left to join Moreau and Dimitrescu, he didn't give one to Rose or Donna. He looked back at them both, standing together in the candlelit church, and gave them a nod.

"Don't fuck this up," he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Good luck to you, too," Rose called. He grinned at her, taking her in.

If this was-

Nah. Don't think that way. Only make you mushy. He turned, and away he strode, and didn't look back at them again.

"We good?" Mia asked him quietly as he grabbed her arm at the doorway leading from the church.

"Yeah. Ready to go and slice you open in the fish-man's hovel. Your lucky day, sweetheart."

She let out a shaky laugh. "Believe it or not," she said, "I've had worse."

"Wait," Rose called, from behind them. "...Mom."

Mia stopped with a slight wince. She caught Heisenberg's eye, then looked back, Heisenberg keeping his grip on her arm. Rose looked pale, but she faced Mia down, not looking away.

"Good luck to both of you," she said. "I...I mean that."

Mia gave her a small smile, a nod.

Then they moved on, and the church doors shuddered shut behind them, and Rose was gone at last.

Moreau waited down the passageway, at the shoreline of a flooded subterranean chamber, black water lapping inches from his slimy, pallid toes. Dimitrescu looked faintly nauseated, one hand propped on her prodigious hip, but Heisenberg pushed past her and toward their brother.

"What's good, freak?" he said.

"I..." Moreau pointed. "I have to go through...there."

"There? The fuckin' lake?"

"No! The passageway." One eye faced him, looking at him with a kind of baleful reproach. "The tunnels, Karl," he added, as if speaking to a particularly slow child.

"What tunnels? You finally cracked?"

"The underwater tunnels! There are hundreds and hundreds of them. You didn't know?"

"I- uh. No, guess not."

Dimitrescu let out a derisive snort. "That's the first time I've heard you admit your inadequacies, Heisenberg. Miraculous. Perhaps you've finally grown a sense of decorum after all."

"The day you grow a humble bone in your oversized body is gonna be the one for miracles," Heisenberg snorted. "Come on, then, Moreau, show us what you got."

Moreau dithered. "It's...um..."

Heisenberg leaned closer, tightening his grip on his hammer. His pulse threaded through his palm; the memory of helicopter blades churning the air filled his head. "What is it? Get a fuckin' move on. We don't have time to dick around."

"I...I'm h-h-having a hard time-"

"-Mutating?" Heisenberg let out a bark of laughter. "Don't we all fuckin' know that, fishstick."

"Oh, please," Dimitrescu muttered, rolling her eyes. "What a nightmare."

"Shut up, bloodbag," Heisenberg snapped. "Unless you got something useful to say, keep those fangs hidden-"

"Useful! As if you could know anything about usefulness!"

"Stop," Moreau moaned, clutching his head as he swung back and forth and back and forth in anxiety. Mia was staring at Heisenberg with a kind of appalled look. "Please...stop...I don't...I don't want to fight anymore..."

"Hey," Mia whispered. Heisenberg cut off his next retort as she knelt by Moreau's side, her hand on his shoulder. She began to stroke his arm, slow and soothing, her sweater sleeve pulled up over her hand to protect it from his acidic discharge. "Hey...Moreau, it's gonna be all right. You need to calm down. Okay? Listen to my voice."

"I-I-I-I'm gonna disappoint everyone, like always, I want Moppet, she can help me, where's Moppet!"

"She's, uh, not here right now. But I'm here. Breathe for me. Can you breathe? It looks like..." She glanced up at his hunchback, pulsating so wildly it looked like basketballs in a waterbed. "It seems like your Cadou is connected to you in such a way that any emotional strain puts extreme stress on it, threatens to overload its mycelial connections to you. That's probably why you have such a hard time with it."

Heisenberg settled back, eyebrows lifted. Even Dimitrescu had dispensed with her permanent resting bitch face to watch what Mia was doing.

"You...you know what's wrong?" Moreau stammered. The pulsating began to slow.

Mia nodded. "I know, it's got to hurt. Just keep doing what you're doing. You can control this, Mr. Moreau."

"Can I?" Moreau whispered wetly.

"You can."

"I can," Moreau echoed, his voice thick with wonderment. "I can!"

Mia stepped back as Moreau tottered forward, as he lifted his arms, as he tipped off the lip of the subterranean lake and hit the black water with a great plash.

He sank in a plume of bubbles.

"Shit," Heisenberg said, peering down after him. "Either you just worked some kind of miracle, or we lost him forever."

"Yes, well, the arguing was going great, so." Mia glanced up at Heisenberg. "...When I worked for the Connections, part of my job was, um..."

He tipped down his glasses. "Yeah?"

She drew a short breath. "I would imprint on the BOWs. Part of that involved establishing an emotional connection I could exploit to control them, if they began to rebel against their genetic programming. It didn't work with Eveline in the end, but I guess old training dies slow."

"Guess it does-"

The lake vibrated.

Heisenberg looked up, cutting off his next words. So did Mia. Even Dimitrescu stood straighter, the glistening razor tips of her claws sliding from her fingertips. Another vibration hummed from the lake, so strong he felt it in his boot soles through the rock at his feet. The black water slopped at the lake shore. Waves broke out across its surface, choppy as the sea in storm.

Something huge was heaving down there, something pale, something rising.

The water glassed into a vast swell; Mia stumbled back, but Heisenberg stayed where he was, watching it grow and grow-

The swell burst, and a roar filled the cavern, echoing off its distant ceiling. A wave of icy water drenched Heisenberg to the skin; he lifted his dripping hair from his eyes as great jaws snapped at the air, gnashing, tooth-lined, sweeping back and back into a body covered with a pelt of rolling, tumorous eyes.

"-And thank fuck for that!" Heisenberg said, with a laugh at the shocked look on Mia's face.

Heisenberg had only seen Moreau's mutant form a few times- he didn't make it a habit to go down to his reservoir except the time or two Miranda had forced him to go fix the sluice gate's operating mechanism, and, once, during a period of almost unendurable boredom, when he'd gone to borrow some of Moreau's movies. Now, as it reared before him, a mutant lungfish from hell, he couldn't help but stifle a dickish grin.

"Moreau, Moreau," he said, with appreciation. "You sexy beast. I know it's hardly the time and place, but I gotta say, you never looked better."

"Play nice," Mia whispered, giving him a little slap on the arm.

"Come on!" The jaws split wide; within, nestled like the stamen inside a particularly fucked-up flower, was a pallid, twisted humanoid torso with Moreau's familiar snaggleteeth. It flapped its hands in an excited gesture. "There's room for everyone! Get in! Get in!"

"You can't be serious," Dimitrescu said.

"Alcina, you bathe in blood," Heisenberg said.

"Blood," she told him, "is delicious."

"Whatever," Heisenberg said. "Sick of this stupid conversation anyway."

His hammer was off his shoulders in a heartbeat. Before she could protest, react, stop him, he'd smacked it full-force into her lower back; she stumbled forward with a scream, straight into Moreau's jaws.

"Better hustle," he told Mia, holding out his arm. She grabbed his hand, and as they hurried after Dimitrescu, Moreau's jaws closed over them in a snap, trapping them in warm, wet, stinking darkness.

During the long, lightless, airless journey, she never once let go.

***

Moreau spat them onto the reservoir shore in a truly astoundingly-vile spray of filthy water, saliva, acid, and bile.

Heisenberg sailed through the air and crashed to the shore, soaked trench coat slapping against his body. Seconds later his hammer thudded to the damp ground, inches from his head. He rolled over, blinking away the worst of Moreau's slime. Mia was sprawled a few feet away, looking like a Barbie who'd been dunked in a septic tank by some psychopathic toddler.

"You alive, Winters?" Heisenberg said.

"I...I think so-" She climbed to her hands and knees, then grimaced as she shook a dead fish from her hair. "Ugh- this is gonna take like twenty showers to scrub off, isn't it-"

Enraged shouts filled the air; he looked up to see Dimitrescu stalking toward him, her long black hair now matted with Moreau-vomit.

"You-" she cried, voice shaking so hard she could scarcely get whole words out. "You- vile, you- traitorous, wretched-"

"Alci, Alci, can't we just be friends?"

Her hand snapped out; her claws slid free. "I would rather die again."

Fuck this. Fuck her. They could pull this without the world's biggest bitch interfering. "That can be arranged-"

"Stop it!"

The wail cut between them, a howl of such unprecedented force Alcina actually did stop, and Heisenberg too, the both of them turning in shock to the sight of Moreau, quivering, crawling from the water in his humanoid form once more, clad only in a pair of ragged trousers. Mia crouched by his side, helping haul him onto the icy shore.

"Stop it," he said again. "You...ruin everything, both of you! You made Mother mad. You made us all so uncomfortable. You need to stop now. And if you don't..."

His voice dropped, deep as a well and nearly as sinister. "I'm...I'm gonna transform, and when I eat you this time...I'm not gonna spit you out."

Heisenberg began to laugh. Dimitrescu gave him a flat look, but he didn't stop, bracing his hands on his knees, doubled over as the laughs turned to ugly hacking coughs, spewing excess water over the shore.

"Fuck," he managed, between coughs. "Heh...little Sal's grown himself some roe."

"We need to go." Moreau shambled toward him, pushing him aside with a sassy little shoulder-clock. "Hurry, hurry."

Heisenberg watched him and Mia go, then glanced up at Alcina, removed his hat, and shook his head like a soaked lycan, making sure to get as much slime-water on her as possible.

They hiked up the snowy hillside. Below stretched the reservoir, its great sluice-gate standing like a triumphal arch through the blizzard. Spotlights speared the snow, illuminating dizzying flurries of white; Heisenberg sent out his awareness as the helicopter roared past, lights grazing the snow, the powerful beam barely missing their group, but the machine was too far off; his power brushed it, and then it was gone.

"Hunting us down," Heisenberg muttered. He glanced at Dimitrescu. "Makes for a change, don't it?"

"It's right up here." Moreau pointed as he scrambled up a narrow path cut into the hillside. "Right-"

His words crumpled into a gasp as one bare foot crunched down on crystal. Heisenberg joined him, silent as he surveyed the hillside before them. Mist rolled away, exposing not a clean expanse of snow and rock, but a killing field.

Lycans. Dozens of them. Each and every one of them: dead. By now, they were little more than crumbling heaps of crystal, ribs gaping open to the sky, the remnants of great fanged skulls pocked with crater-like bullet holes.

Heisenberg bent to pluck a tooth from the snow, a single curved cuspid the length of a dagger. He bounced it in his palm. A varcolac tooth. There had to be three or four skeletons big enough to be varcolac out here. Ouroboros had mowed them down, had used their fancy anti-mutant rounds on them. Had blasted them into nothingness, ancient beasts bristling with boyars' spears. Consigned them to the dirt.

Ouroboros must have cleared this hillside in their initial sweep of the place, and the lycans, being lycans, had neither the brains nor a hive leader to command them to fall back. So they'd died, every last one of them.

He flicked the tooth to the snow. Stupid things.

"Humanity," Dimitrescu murmured, her voice dripping with scorn, and something else. Sorrow, Heisenberg thought. Strange. Every time she'd been forced to interact with lycans before, she'd dismissed them as brutish beasts beneath her notice. "A plague. All-consuming. What else do they do but destroy, to assure themselves they are not monstrous, to conquer their own fears of the dark."

Mia lowered her head, her gaze hard.

"They aren't all daughter-killers, Dimitrescu," Heisenberg said. "Don't you remember being human?"

She curled her lip. "I remember my weakness, my mortal frailty. I remember my own blood poisoning me, even as I clung so desperately to life and all its...infinite pleasures. Miranda's gift was salvation. And despite..."

She paused, then gave an elegant little toss of her head. "Mm. No matter. The mortals are beneath me. Prey. Nothing more."

"Miranda would have killed you, Alci, you and your daughters. That was her plan, y'know. Bump us all off to awaken the megamycete. She didn't want any failed experiments hanging on her apron strings to deal with once she got little Eva back. It was gonna be just her and her kid. No room in that picture-perfect life for you."

"Miranda gave me everything," Dimitrescu snapped.

"Oh, c'mon, you can't believe that. I saw the inside of your twisted little mind, remember. Miranda would have taken everything, too. Was your castle worth that?"

Her eyes were bright, gold flaring to fire, but she said nothing. She didn't hit him, either, which Heisenberg took as a victory.

He stepped over the next lycan corpse as Moreau shambled on. Before he got too far, Dimitrescu's voice, softer than he'd ever heard it save when she'd addressed her daughters, stopped him in his tracks.

"'We shall be monsters, cut off from the world,'" she said. He turned to look back at her in the dancing snow. "'But on that account we shall be more attached to one another.'"

Heisenberg nodded. "'Oh, my creator,'" he muttered, bitter as old blood. "'Make me happy.'"

Alcina's eyes found his.

"It was worth it, Heisenberg," she told him. "To me."

"Hm." He shifted his stance, propping his hammer on the opposite shoulder. "Is it still?"

She gave a sniff. "I'm merely surprised you can read."

He grinned. "The movie was better," he said, just to see the exquisite look of disgust on her face.

Moreau headed up a hillside, covered in a dense forest of pine and scrub. Below stretched the dry part of the lake, the reservoir drained of its water, exposing the decomposed remnants of an old flank of the village, a fishing town long-since drowned to make Miranda's power station. The old windmills, once used for wind power, stood still and slumping into ruin, sails reduced to bare scaffolding.

The place had been a shithole before, but now it was just sad, no longer given even the barest efforts of maintenance. Heisenberg couldn't really blame Moreau for moving into the castle; given his old digs, almost anything was an improvement.

"It's here! It's here!" Moreau raked aside a wall of overgrown briars and tree branches to reveal a small clearing atop the hill.

A collection of shacks stood in the clearing. Moreau's 'clinic'. Heisenberg hadn't bothered coming here more than was necessary. The experiments Moreau conducted here were pathetic. He could make lycans, sure, and the varcolac had been inspired, but watching ghouls pop like rotten fruit more often than not just wasn't his style. Waste of a perfectly good corpse.

Still, the whole operation had worked great for Miranda. There was never any shortage of dead bodies in her town, and cutting losses had been worth it, given the amount of shock troops Moreau's clinic churned out for her. Glory to Mother Miranda, and all that shit. Almost romantic; why give a dame a rose when you could give her an army of putrefying wolf-men instead?

Now, though, he couldn't help but feel a certain poetic bemusement. To think. This shitty hovel, this sad little workshop, was about to save their collective asses. Who knew.

"I hope it's still here," Moreau was mumbling. He didn't head for the shacks themselves, but began nosing about in the snow. "Ohhh...I hope the lycans didn't dig it up..."

"You lose a penny or something?" Heisenberg called.

"No, no...oh!" Moreau straightened, an inspired look in his eyes. "Karl, would you...would you please...look? With your special powers?"

"Yeah, Karl," Mia said, a hand over her mouth like that might stifle her snort of laughter. "Look with your special powers."

"I'm gonna break your neck after all," Heisenberg muttered. "Fine, fishstick."

He let out his breath and reached out with his abilities. A ripple thrummed across the snow, a faint blue haze appearing around his body. Almost instantly, he found it: a rectangular shape bound in strips of metal. With a flick of his finger, it burst from the snow, showering clods of dark earth. The large wooden seaman's chest dropped to the snow with a rattle of rusted hinges.

Moreau pawed around in his clothes for an equally rusted key.

"My medicines!" He pulled open the chest. Inside glinted glass bottles, cakes of dried herbs bound in paper and twine, medical supplies of a distinctly more-modern bent, even a mummified Cadou in a stoppered jar. "Good. We can do it with this."

"Yes, we can." Heisenberg examined a bottle of chemicals. "You bury all this by yourself, fishstick?"

"Yes." Moreau's eyes darted back and forth, as if Heisenberg was about to make some kind of crack at his expense.

Tempting, but Heisenberg really needed all this stuff. "Nice going." He looked at Mia, standing in the snow.

"Now," he said, "it's time for Operation Kill That Bitch, attempt two."

***

Inside the dank, decaying, freezing confines of Moreau's Clinic, the only light came from the faint filter of moonlight through the gaps in the roof, and the high beam of Heisenberg's flashlight. He kept it floating around the level of his shoulder, aimed down on Mia as she lay back on the table.

They'd cleaned it as best they could, had lain down an old tarp Moreau had produced from somewhere, but even so, Mia shivered where she lay, stripped down once more to her underclothes, her skin exposed to the cold.

An IV tube bled chemicals into her arm; once again Heisenberg, his coat slung over a nearby chair, his sleeves rolled to his biceps, watched her closely as the painkillers hit her bloodstream, as she began that slow, gradual slump into numbness.

Moreau limped around the shack, muttering, arranging the tarp, while Dimitrescu sat in a corner, her eyes glowing like a cat's in the semidarkness. Heisenberg was silent, Mia silent, though she watched him all the while.

He caught her eye. "Here we go again, Winters."

"Better luck this time?"

"Heh. Don't jinx it." He leaned on the table, over her. "You got any dark depths of the soul to reveal this time? Any revelations? Or shall we get to it?"

"Just one thing, Heisenberg."

"Yeah? Make sure it's not too mushy. The smell of this place is making me sick enough already."

"There wasn't ever any necrotoxin," she told him. "That stuff I injected you with? Just a sedative."

"No shit."

"I..." She frowned. "Wait. Did you...did you know?"

"After the first couple days and I didn't feel any worse? Yeah, Mia, doesn't take a fuckin' genius to figure out you slipped me the sugar pills."

"Damn," Mia said. "Waste of good sedative, then."

Heisenberg burst into laughter. "Mia, Mia," he said. "You crack me up. But I gotta say, you had me there for a minute, y'know?"

She gave him a dry smile. "I know."

"Hey, you can make it up to me. If you survive this-"

"Not helping, Heisenberg."

"-I was, uh, pretty intrigued by those reports of you from Dulvey...chainsaw, was it? Not bad, not bad. Wanna show me sometime?"

"In your dreams."

He winked. "Already there, sweetheart. You ready?"

Her fingers twitched, brushing his hand on the table. He felt the heat of her skin, even through his gloves.

"I'm ready, Karl," she told him. "Do it."

So he did.

She opened up like a purse. Moreau's scalpels were decent enough once he'd honed them sharp with his power, and as he began his examination he slipped once more into his old routine- examine, assess, maintain, repair. Mia's blood soon coated his gloves and scarred forearms, matting his arm hair to a gory tangle, the smell of mold and blood filling the shack like a warm, metallic exhale. Just like old times.

Dimitrescu's pupils narrowed to pinpoints. Heisenberg could tell how starved she was: the hollows in her cheeks, the faint cracks appearing on her skin, exposed now that she wasn't slathering herself in a thick layer of lead-based makeup, gave her away.

Still, she held herself back, and simply watched, her stare somewhere between hunger and yearning.

"You look good on the inside," Heisenberg said, with a chuckle. "Nice healthy muscle tone. Heh heh."

Mia didn't answer. She'd gone paper-white, her bruised eyelids squeezed shut, her lips fluttering. Even with the suppressants, her healing factor made this difficult; veins and tendons kept worming around his hands, trying to reconnect and pull her open chest cavity back together.

"Have you found it?" Moreau pressed his hands to the tabletop, leaning over to peer into the mess.

"No. Shut up and back off."

"Hurry," Mia whispered.

"Huh?"

"Something's...I think...something's wrong..."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"I...I hear her..." Her lips fluttered; her hands curled on the table, spackled with blood and mutagen; it pooled around her, dripping in rivulets to the filthy floor. "She's...she's..."

"Fight it, Mia. Hold it the fuck together."

Her eyes snapped open, bright with tears. "She's happy," Mia whispered. "This is exactly what she wanted."

Heisenberg's hands met something foreign. Not an organ, not bone or cartilage. He spun the scalpel into his hand and sliced in; the thing came free with a slick crackle, trailing long, whipping tendrils that grasped and thrashed at his hand and wrist.

A Cadou. But a sickly one; its pinkish surface was spotted with dark blots, its bulbous head dented and deflated.

No, not sickly, exactly. Half-grown.

She reached inside, Mia had said. Pulled out her heart.

This was a chunk of Miranda's Cadou. Like he'd once given a chunk of his own to Teodora, had inflicted the Black God's gift on her to save her life. The thing squealed and writhed in his hand as Mia lay beneath him, gasping for breath, her wound already beginning to heal up.

If it's not Miranda here-

Understanding came like a lash of lightning through him, so strong his own Cadou gave an unsettled twist. No. No.

"You were the experiment," he heard himself rasp. "It was never you harboring Miranda's consciousness at all."

Compatibility, Miranda had told Mia, but Mia was the mother, wasn't she, the mother of the body, the vessel, the genetics unassailable.

He'd gotten it wrong.

The ceremony was not over yet.

Even now, even now, Miranda had the upper hand, the final word. Even now she had lashed out and got him in the heart.

"It was never you," Heisenberg said again. "It was always her. Always Rose."

With a hum of his power, a crackle of blue-white sparks, the misshapen Cadou burst in a shower of gore. The scalpel streaked away and impaled itself in a wall.

Another slash of his power, hard enough to shake the entire building. The shack door burst open and he strode out into the snow, surrounded by a whirring storm of metal objects, nails yanked from the shack, medical detritus, all of it pulled along in his wake.

The cold lashed at him. He didn't feel it. He went to the hillside, looking out toward the mountain, the great waterfall thundering down from some hidden source at its peak.

He couldn't see House Beneviento at this distance, but Rose and Donna had to be nearly there by now.

And when they were-

And when Rose looked too deep-

All he could do, for all his power, was watch her die.