Neon Blue by E Frost (best big ereader .TXT) 📕

could come from a child, but the cry of a lost, tormented soul. A damned soul.

I’m coming.

I batter my hands against the shower wall. Bang my forehead against it until the smack of flesh against plastic sounds loud even over the wailing that’s still filling my ears.

The white plastic wall flexes, stretches under my fists. A misshapen hand reaches out of it. A monstrous, spined arm. Not his arm. Something else has found its way through the Hellhole and into my shower. I draw back, choking on screams I still can’t stop. I reach. Close my fingers around a cool handle. It doesn’t feel the way it should, and when I pull it out, it’s not my kama that emerges. It’s a black, wavy blade as long as my arm. Blue flames lick gently along the curving edge.

“Beti, beti, no, that’s a demon blade—” My grandmother’s voice. I ignore the ghost and point the burning sword at the thing emerging from my shower wall.

The white plastic hand flexes in mid-air. The palm is huge. The fingers uneven. No claws at least. But the spines ridging the back of the arm look deadly enough. The hand stretches, reaches across the tub and grips the far rim.

I lift the blade over my head.

You cut off my arm and we’re really gonna throw down, sweet meat. No fucking around.

The thought pierces my haze of fear and confusion and loss. I hesitate. The muscles of my arms begin to shake, unused to the weight of the blade. I lower it between my knees.

The white plastic peels back, one finger at a time, revealing blackened stumps. They flex on the bathtub’s rim. Black blood drips down the ceramic to sizzle in the cold water pooling around my knees. I recoil as much as I can, pressing my back against the curve of the tub.

The plastic peels back further and further. A muscled forearm emerges. No spines. Then a shoulder and the firm lines of neck and side bulge out of the wall. The cold water steams and hisses on golden skin. Jou’s familiar ginger and smoke scent.

“Beti,” my grandmother’s ghost whispers. “Now. Before he regains our world. Cut off his head.”

I glance up. There’s a trio of ghosts clustered around my toilet. They’re only partially manifested. My grandmother’s torso. Billigoat’s head. Rupa no more than a faint outline distinguished by her absent arm.

I look down at the blade cutting into my shower mat.

I can’t connect anything. The demon hauling himself through my shower wall. The blade in my hands. None of it makes any sense.

“Beti . . . Tsara, now. Now!”

I haven’t heard my grandmother use my given name in so long that I look up at her in dumb surprise.

She’s leaning forward over my toilet, exhorting me to do something. What? What does she want from me?

I let the sword’s handle slide through my hands, its razor edge cutting a furrow in my bath mat.

With a roar, the demon shoves his head through my shower wall, shucking white plastic from his horns and dreadlocks like a snake shedding its skin. He grabs the tub rim with his other hand and pulls himself through, landing heavily in the tub. The blade cuts into his calf and he yanks it away from me with another roar. “What the fuck is this?”

I shake my head wordlessly, staring and clutching at myself.

He shoves the blade back through the shower wall. “Eat that!”

“Beng,” my grandmother hisses.

“Fuck off!” Jou lashes out with his mutilated hand, spattering blood across my knees, the tub and the tile floor. The dark drops tear through the tight cluster of ghosts, dissolving them into a wet splash of ectoplasm.

“Sweetness?” He wipes his blood off my skin, then puts his arms around me and gathers me into his warmth. “You okay?”

Jou—

“Fuck, you’re frozen.”

Jou—

“Why are you sitting in this freezing shower?” He reaches behind me and turns off the water. Rubs his hand up and down my legs. “That was a bad transition, but you’re okay.”

I cough, my throat raw from screaming, choked with mucus and tears. “You weren’t here—”

“Easy, sweetness.” He coaxes my arms around his neck with one hand. Pushes my wet face into his neck. “What, d’you think I wasn’t comin’? I manifested fully to take care of a little business. Took me a while to get back.”

“I thought you’d sent me back alone.” I snuffle into his neck.

“You think I’d let you go after that? The Ass of Hell gave me a hard time comin’ back up without a summons. That’s all.” He brushes hair back from my face with a bloody palm. “Ow, fuck, that hurts. How ‘bout you show me how glad you are t’see me by healin’ this?” He holds his mutilated hand up in front of my eyes.

“What happened to you?” It comes out in a horrified wail, not sounding like my voice. Still stretched and strained by the touch of magics completely outside the realm of anything I’ve known before.

“I cut ‘em off.” He wiggles the bloody, blackened stumps of his fingers. “Needed somethin’ to send to Ercie an’ the Hellroarer an’ a couple others. So they can get to the Hill if they need to.”

He cut off his own fingers. “But-but—”

“Yeah, I know. I hate handin’ anyone the keys to the Hill, but leavin’ our friends out in the cold is the way to have no friends at all—”

“Jou, your fingers!”

“Oh, yeah, well, they’ll grow back. Faster if you’d heal ‘em.”

I stare at them for a long moment, blinking through the tears still standing in my eyes. Swallow hard. I’m not sure if I can put those terrible, bloody, burned stumps in my mouth. But my mouth healed him last time, and I don’t know if any of my healing potions will work.

Slowly, I close my hands around his wrist and raise his injured hand to my mouth. I try to think of something else, anything else, other than sticking the mutilated stumps of his fingers in my mouth.