Her mind could not understand what had just happened.
Only seconds before she had the damned she-wolf, that variant of herself with apparent delusions of grandeur (Volvau-what? Seriously, what the hell was that?) on the ropes and suddenly the nutcase starts laughing, as if having her hands almost reduced to ashes was the best joke in the world.
And then she declares herself an Addams?
The audacity, the insult!
Of course, she didn't have much time to feel insulted when the blade of a saber emerged from the chest of her enemy, who was practically glued to herself, and pierced her, completely ignoring her armor.
She immediately noticed the metallic taste of blood rising in her throat. It was warm, in contrast to the sharp coldness she felt in her chest. It all felt strangely familiar, though it had been a very long time since she had last been stabbed in a way that could cause her serious harm.
Never like now, though.
Wednesday Addams pulled out her saber as The Bright One released Enid's hands. With the blade out of her body, the armored figure took a couple of steps back, bringing her hands to her chest. From the center of the armor, from a crevice, blood gushed like a torrent, staining its whiteness with a dark red.
"Wha...?" she said, trying to speak. But her words turned into a choked gurgle as blood began to gush copiously from her mouth.
She fell to her knees, feeling everything around her spinning. Her hands were heavy and she couldn't feel her legs. The only thing that kept her from collapsing to the ground was her armor. The bulk of it kept her body on her knees even when every muscle in her was already inert and her cold blue eyes were already as dead on the outside as they were on the inside.
Meanwhile, Wednesday Addams had dropped the saber to the ground so that she could properly hold the now also inert Enid, who collapsed into her arms. Wednesday knelt down, slowly and carefully, until she finally positioned Enid on her lap, hugging the unconscious she-wolf. Her chest was also bathed in blood and a trickle of the precious liquid gushed from one corner of her lips.
"Enid...," Wednesday whispered, trying to keep her mind cool and despair at bay. She knew her beloved must be all right, after all...
Enid Addams.
She had taken the name. She had finally accepted who she was in all her fullness. Wednesday was sure Enid instinctively knew what she was planning, they both knew one absolute truth about the Addamses, after all.
An Addams can never really harm another Addams or put them to death, no matter how extreme the act.
But even knowing that, Wednesday couldn't help the tightness that squeezed her little black heart as she held her beloved in her arms, pale and motionless, her open eyes unfocused and glassy. She caressed Enid’s cheek, and with her thumb wiped away the blood that ran down her chin.
She'll be fine, variant of mine. Look at her.
I'm already looking at her, Wednesday thought back, her mind almost on autopilot.
No. Take a good look at her.
Wednesday tried to decipher what the hell Agent A was referring to. Enid was pale, a pallor that... No. It wasn't the paleness she should have from blood loss. It was cadaverous, yes, but not that of the recently dead. The werewolf's skin had turned an almost marbled white except for the pinkness of her old scars and the darkness that seemed to surround her now glowing sapphire blue eyes.
And the wound in her chest had closed, the only trace of her existence all the blood spilled that still stained the bare skin.
And at that moment, Enid Addams came back to consciousness. She drew in her breath abruptly, and gasped as if in an attempt to get up. Her tense body relaxed at once as soon as she recognized the arms and scent of the person holding her.
"Wednesday?" she asked, in a trembling voice, turning her head to look at the Addams.
"Mia lupa," Wednesday whispered, bending down and catching her beloved's lips in a smoldering kiss. She felt Enid's hands, at once cool and warm, caressing her face, drawing her even closer to herself. Wednesday noticed the iron taste of the blood that still stained her she-wolf's mouth, and found it an exquisite garnish. The intensity of the kiss intensified, as if they were trying to devour themselves.
When their lips parted, Enid had already sat up. The two were on the floor, holding each other, their foreheads pressed together and their gazes locked on one another.
"How are you feeling?" asked Wednesday.
Enid pulled a little further apart and brought one of her hands to where the wound had closed, "It hurt. It hurt like hell. But at the same time...," her pale cheeks flushed slightly, "Fuck, Weds, getting stabbed by a saber shouldn't feel so good!"
"How good?", The Addams asked, raising an eyebrow and allowing herself a half smirk.
"Well, it's not the first time you've impaled me with a toy, although this certainly was more intense than the twelve-inch d..."
Okay, too much information.
As if you and your two wives haven't done worse, Wednesday thought.
Touché.
"I mean," Enid continued, ignoring her paramour's mental chatter with the spirit dwelling within her, "I'm just saying that if I'm going to spontaneously develop new kinks, it would be nice to know beforehand. Especially if they involve bladed weapons..."
The werewolf was silent for a moment and with her gaze lost, as if absorbed in sudden thought. She put a hand to her mouth, breaking into a small smile.
"Spears," she said, almost licking her lips and in a breathy voice, "Oh, Weds, we have to try with..."
"Enid!"
Enid Addams turned suddenly to look at Wednesday. The Addams heiress was looking at her with an expression that to others would have seemed not unlike her always stern appearance, but in which Enid recognized certain tinges of genuine amusement.
And suddenly it was as if something clicked in the she-wolf's head. Her face reddened even more.
"OMG! What the hell am I saying? It's like I've got every instinct revved up."
"Mia lupa, I'll be happy to do all kinds of private experiments with you when we get back home. But now you must relax, your mind is in pure effervescence and we must focus," Wednesday said, as she took Enid by the hand and helped her to her feet, "You're a full-fledged Addams now, and you've had your first real brush with death. Sadomasochism in varying degrees is a constant in our family, and it's clear that you're going to be of no lesser quality."
"I'm an Addams," muttered Enid.
"You're an Addams. I've always said you have been for a while now. You just had to accept it, wife."
"W-wife?"
Wednesday shrugged in an uncharacteristically casual gesture for her, "As far as I'm concerned, we're married. Any other ceremony or legal paperwork is a mere formality for later."
The smile that lit up Enid's face at those words was brighter than any magic conjured by The Bright One.
And its effect on Wednesday, far more direct. Enid noticed at once the flush in her beloved's cheeks, the dilation in her pupils, and how she took a deep breath.
"Weds?"
"Enid... your teeth..."
Enid tilted her head slightly, quizzical. She felt her teeth with her tongue and noticed it right away.
Ouch! What the..., she thought.
She put a hand to her open mouth and felt her teeth with her fingertips, under Wednesday's watchful eye. On Enid's denture the different types of teeth could still be distinguished: incisors, fangs, premolars, molars and so on. But they had all gained a sharp quality that was absent in a normal human mouth. It was not even common in untransformed lycanthropes. It was as if Enid's entire denture had become a row of perfect little ivory blades.
Wednesday had to resist a primal urge to ask Enid to bite her right there and then. Maybe even a little "Nngh" escaped her mouth but she would never admit it in a million years.
Enid couldn't help but laugh.
"Here I am, completely topless, and what's making you horny are my teeth."
"Oh, I'm perfectly aware of your partial and delectable nudity, but I've compartmentalized it so I can remain functional and not become a cheap facsimile of my father," Wednesday explained, "And about your teeth, it's interesting. Every Addams has one or more physical traits that are out of the ordinary..."
"Like your eleventh toe," Enid said.
"Exactly, or the cadaverous pallor of many of our members. The phenomenon also occurs among those adopted into the clan or who join the family by other means, such as marriage. But the process is usually more gradual. Yours has been abrupt, but I thought it had manifested itself only in your new paleness. Your teeth suggest a deeper change."
"Could it be because I am the Volvaugr?" asked Enid, "It already makes me strange by itself, I suppose some extra weirdness was to be expected."
"You still haven't explained to me exactly what that condition consists of, but we can't rule it out," said Wednesday.
"You also have to tell me why I saw Agent A's ghost next to you earlier," Enid said, "Or at least I think it was her ghost."
Tell her hello for me!
"She sends her regards. She's temporarily stowing away in my body. But we'd better save all that for later. I presume there's still work to be done."
Enid nodded, steeling her nerves and recent excitement and trying to focus. Sharpening her senses she could hear the battle outside raging on, "You're right. There are still plenty of Shadow Hyde to deal with and many counterparts of yours to free."
"I sent Needler to handle the pyramid, it was part of The Bright One's plan."
"What was this crazy nutcase trying to do, by the way?" asked Enid.
"Bring her Wednesday back from the dead at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of us in a quest to achieve a perfection that I believe only existed in her delusional memories and an obsession misconstrued as love," Wednesday explained, "She was blinded by an impossible ideal and a practically pathological sense of entitlement."
"Fuck," whispered Enid. She was sure she herself would be capable of doing truly monstrous things for Wednesday, but... To that extent? Taking the lives of innocents? No, never. Enid Addams may be a monster, but she wasn't that kind of monster. She couldn't put words to what she felt at that moment as she looked at the limp body of The Bright One. It wasn't pity, more like a strange sense of loss. Of disappointment. That woman wrapped in armor and devoured by her own madness could have been so much more. All that wasted potential...
Because there was brilliance there. Monstrous as it was, you don't become absolute master of your own dimension if you don't have some talent.
Enid shook her head. This was no place to waste time on ramblings.
"Well, let's get down there... What do we do with the body, leave it here?"
"Part of me is tempted to display her corpse before her army to demoralize it, but I'm not sure the Shadow Hyde can react that rationally," Wednesday said, "It's even possible that seeing their mistress's corpse will move them into a much more intense killing frenzy. Yes, it would be best to..."
"…Coff..."
Silence. Scarce, but at the same time endless seconds of silence.
"Enid, mia cara lupa, please tell me it's you who just coughed."
"No..."
The Bright One's body began to convulse in between coughs, catching her breath again, and spreading more blood as she leaned forward resting her hands on the ground.
"Aaaaagh, shit!" she exclaimed.
In a matter of a split second, Enid shifted into her full lycanthropic form. Her claws extended with a resounding noise as a growl began to form in her throat.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," she snarled, her lupine face wearing an expression of irritation and alarm.
Wednesday had picked her saber back up off the ground. She watched The Bright One without bothering to disguise the disbelief in her expression.
"That attack went through your defenses. It penetrated your heart, all the way through it. And you've been dead for the last few minutes."
She tried to ignore an irritatingly familiar Tyler Galpin-like voice shouting "Cockroach!" in the back of her mind. Wednesday didn't like to think of accidental parallels to her opponent.
The Bright One merely laughed, though her laughter sounded more like an exhausted hiss. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on a cavernous tone that seemed to progressively intensify.
"Straight through the heart, indeed" she said, "Bold of you to assume that I still have a heart. Or that I only have oNe. Or that this bODy is subject tO the rULeS of Mere mOrTalS..."
The Bright One coughed again, with a grimace of immense pain. Instead of blood, she had begun to spit up a black, steaming bile, like burning tar. With a sickening crunch accompanied by a cry of agony, her left arm began to contort at more angles than was natural as her muscle mass seemed to bulge, bursting the pieces of white armor. A similar phenomenon was occurring throughout the rest of The Bright One's body: the sound of torn flesh, swollen muscle, broken bone and fragmented armor falling apart as its owner rose to her feet.
"She's transforming!" exclaimed Enid.
"But it can't be into a werewolf," Wednesday observed, "She told me she sacrificed the spirit of the wolf sleeping in her to become a magic user."
"She did what?!" exclaimed Enid, but her outburst was cut short by a scream turned into a roar.
Standing upright, The Bright One's body seemed to have become a cancerous mass of shifting shapes. Fur, feathers and scales emerged and disappeared under lumps of flesh, as the inside and outside of the body seemed to swap places. The pieces of armor that had not fallen detached were being absorbed into the body or becoming embedded in the surrounding flesh like grotesque plating. The gruesome spectacle lasted only a few seconds and by the time it was over, the creature standing before Wednesday and Enid was unlike anything they had ever seen before.
She was bipedal, and of humanoid but unbalanced proportions. She was easily nine feet tall. Her left leg resembled that of a goat while the right leg looked like something more befitting a bird or reptile. From her lower back emerged something that looked like the tail of a gigantic scorpion.
The hip and waist area was abnormally thin in comparison to an abnormally large and muscular hypertrophied and deformed upper torso. All the rest of the body was covered with black fur, or feathers of the same color, or dark gray scales. Occasionally spikes. All of it shifting, as if the organism had not yet decided what to settle on. And of course, pieces of white armor splattered with blood and black bile embedded in the flesh that grew around them.
The right arm was freakishly oversized and muscled, causing the entire body to hunch slightly to that side. It was similar to that of a Hyde, with long claws and dragging its knuckles along the ground. There was no left arm but rather three slimy-looking black tentacles, covered in transparent mucus and reddish barbs that kept twitching and contorting with each other.
The head was a fleshless skull, a skinless face similar to the abnormally elongated skull of a deer, with three pairs of eyes that were more like empty sockets in which glowed small fatuous fires of orange light. It was crowned by a moving mane of something that looked like deformed snakes or worms, some without mouths, others with two heads. It also sported not one but two distinct antlers. One similar to that of a billy goat, the other like the antlers of an elk.
And let's not talk about the odor.
The creature that had been The Bright One leaned back, roaring triumphantly, looking upward, and then hunched forward again. With the sound of ripping flesh, a pair of bony, fleshless wings emerged from her back.
The being straightened up and stretched out her arms, as if displaying herself.
"I toOk the poWeR Of EVeRy wITch, wArLoCK, OutCast aNd maGiCAl bEIng of My woRld iNTo ME," she said, in a voice that sounded like a rock dragged through gravel, "ThEir entIRe esSEnCe is MINE by riGHt of cONquesT. I aM aLL of tHem aNd All tHAt is LeFt of tHeM is mE. I am LeGIon, fOR I am mANy!"
"Shit, please tell me this isn't going to get biblical," complained Enid.
"I think she's simply being metaphorical, il mio sole," Wednesday clarified.
"SILENCE!" exclaimed The Bright One, pinning her six eyes on the two women in front of her. Despite the expressionlessness of her cranial face, you could tell she was scowling somehow, "So muCh for yOUr inSOlenCe. You hAVe foRced me tO tHis, to beCOme ThiS aBerraTIon. For knoW thaT nOw yoU Will pAy for IT. It is tHe tiMe of thE eNd! It is The...!"
She said no more, her words silenced by the resounding "CLANG!" of the object that pierced the air at breakneck speed, passing between Wednesday and Enid and impacting The Bright One directly in the face.
The force of the blow was such that Enid would swear she saw a bubble of air displaced by the sonic wave of the impact for a few moments. But, more importantly, it caused the newly transformed Bright One to fall backwards to the ground in an admittedly humiliating manner.
The monstrous creature sat up, dazed, and from its place on the ground glared all of her six eyes at the object that had attacked and knocked her down. And she could not believe what she saw.
"A shOveL...?"
NOTES
After the intensity of the previous chapters, this one starts off serious but immediately becomes a bit more light-hearted, heartfelt, maybe even adorable and a little horny (ok, maybe too horny) before diving headlong into Nightmare Fuel again.
Heh, did you really believe that she was already finished? Cockroach, indeed.
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