The mansion's lab was dark again, save for the blue glow of equipment. The metallic tang of cleaning chemicals mingled with a faint, unidentifiable odor—something organic yet wrong—that had been lingering since we brought back Thorne's samples. We still needed to examine those too. Fixing up Salem after our confrontation and warning Demonia about Thorne had taken priority. Salem hadn't even synthesized her immortality elixir with Thorne's harvest yet. Too many things needed doing and we just simply couldn't get it all done between the two of us.

  Demonia's purple hair and colorful tattoos looked wildly out of place among Salem's Victorian aesthetic, but after nearly getting killed by a cult member with magical powers, nobody was concerned about the exact style matching of different shades of black and corset style goth. Her hands trembled slightly as she handed Salem some q-tips—a detail she tried to hide by gripping the equipment more firmly than necessary. Eight hours ago, her biggest concern had been finishing her marine microplastics project. Now she was staring at something that shouldn't exist.

  A sample of the black substance that had oozed from Marissa Chen's wounds after Salem tried stabbing her. It seemed to be something like blood though not in a strictly conventional way. Even now it was shifting and moving aimlessly within itself like a swirling pool, which had been quite an annoyance for the two goth girls trying to study it.

  "Non-human cells," Salem stated coldly, adjusting the microscope.

  Not particularly shocking after what we'd witnessed, but I still felt my skin crawl. Salem grabbed a q-tip and dabbed at the black substance covering the tip and moved it beneath the microscope. "Atypical cells. Not prokaryotic or eukaryotic, but similar to both."

  Demonia practically leapt from her chair. "Holy shit. Atypical how?" Her voice carried an excitement that seemed inappropriate given the circumstances, but I recognized it as the thin veneer of scientific detachment keeping total panic at bay. She was clinging to the familiar—data, analysis, classification—while her world crumbled around her.

  Salem took a moment before answering. "No cell wall or plasmodesmata, but has chloroplast-like structures."

  "So whatever it is photosynthesizes?" Demonia asked, her eyes wide with a mixture of scientific fascination and horror. She took a shaky breath, then added, "This is impossible. Completely impossible. I've studied cellular biology for three years and—" She stopped herself, running a hand through her purple hair. "But I saw her. I saw Marissa."

  "Like chloroplast, not chloroplast," Salem continued as if Demonia hadn't spoken, her focus absolute. "No mitochondria."

  Hearing the word triggered a flashback to middle school, and I instinctively blurted out, "Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

  Demonia's face cycled through a series of expressions that could only be described as a visual "no shit," "is he serious?" and "how did this man land her?" before settling on bemused pity. Salem's expression remained blank for a three-count before she delivered a perfectly timed, surgical eye-roll. "Correct." Salem stated. "These cells lack a powerhouse."

  She peered through the microscope again. "Lysosomes also present. Cell shape unstable, changes rapidly."

  "Mhmm, lysosomes. What are lysosomes?"

  Again both women looked at me, and I suddenly felt very out of place in this lab. If this was the Animal Channel, David Attenborough's voice would have been saying something like "the male's odds of mating are slim" right about now, and I was married to one of them so that certainly added salt to the wound.

  Demonia answered, "Like a cell's digestive tract, breaks down and recycles biological polymers and cellular components." She paused, then laughed—a sound with a hysterical edge. "God, I can't believe I'm explaining basic cell biology while looking at... at whatever the hell this is. This shouldn't exist. Marissa shouldn't—" She cut herself off again, swallowing hard.

  "Emotional response understandable but currently counterproductive," Salem said, not unkindly. "Focus on data."

  "How are you so calm?" Demonia asked, something like accusation in her voice. "This changes everything we know about biology! About life itself! And Marissa—she was my friend, and now she's..." She trailed off, unable to finish the thought.

  Salem glanced up from the microscope. "Seen worse. Enables clear thinking."

  Demonia stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. "Clear thinking? Here I thought you two were just my weird friends, but now I'm wondering if you've seen this kind of thing before."

  Salem's face remained impassive, but I noticed the slight tightening around her eyes. "First encounter with non-human cellular structure." Not technically a lie, but far from the whole truth. "However, extensive experience with biological anomalies."

  "What kind of anomalies?" Demonia pressed, her scientific curiosity momentarily overriding her horror.

  "Various. Mostly human." Salem redirected smoothly. "Current specimen more evolutionarily divergent than previous observations."

  I caught Salem's eye across the lab, a silent warning passing between us. She was skirting dangerously close to revealing more than she should about her background.

  Demonia didn't seem to notice our exchange, already turning her gaze to the black substance. "The way these cells move... it's like they're searching for something." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Like a parasite. Or an infection."

  "Breeding program," I reminded them both. "That was our theory, right? They're turning women into vessels. You could just both stand at the edge of the room and see if it seems to respond."

  "There is not a good damn chance I'm doing that. I don't need slime trying to get in my pants." Demonia's hands began to tremble again. "Vessels for what? What could possibly—" She stopped suddenly, pressing her palms flat against the lab table. "I could have been next. If you hadn't warned me about Harmon's seminar, that could be me right now."

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Salem stepped away from the microscope, massaging her temples. "Scientific implications immense. Much research needed." She looked at me. "The laptop data. Need it."

  "Yeah, it's upstairs... why, you think it'll help you understand that goop?" I clicked the last piece of my gun into place, satisfied with my cleaning job.

  Salem looked at me. "No. No cell data expected. Need follow-up on Thorne. Keeps you useful."

  "Fiiiiine, but only because you're pretty." I pushed myself off the wall as I started heading upstairs. Salem watched me leave, a faint pink flush barely visible on her pale cheeks before she turned back to her work. After two years of marriage, I'd learned that compliments affected her even when she pretended they didn't.

  As I reached the doorway, I heard Demonia ask Salem, "So how did you two meet, anyway? You seem... different."

  I paused, curious to hear Salem's clinical retelling of our bizarre first encounter. Her voice drifted up from the lab, precise as ever. "Tinder. Similar taste in music."

  "That's it?" Demonia sounded disappointed. "That's surprisingly... normal."

  "Normal beginning. Subsequent events less conventional."

  I smiled to myself as I continued up the stairs. That was definitely not how we met. But that was a story for another time.

  Still though, I had a laptop to crack and a technical gap in knowledge that needed fixing. I picked up my phone and scrolled through my contacts until I reached "xXKuntKrusher2Xx" (real name Ryan Geasley), my old Xbox Live buddy from the early 2010s when those xXXx names were all the rage, who now worked in cybersecurity. If anyone could crack Thorne's laptop without asking too many questions, it was him.

  I got my own laptop out and set it on the kitchen table, then placed Thorne's beside it and booted up both. The second my laptop turned on, my calendar app decided to pop up a notification that Drowning in Light was booked to play the "Beatdown Cancer 2025" Charity event tonight. Because of course my band would be booked for a show I'd feel bad backing out of exactly when ancient cosmic horror decided to make an appearance in our lives.

  "Shit," I muttered, staring at the notification. Three months of practice and promotion down the drain if I bailed, not to mention the whole "beating cancer" thing that made canceling feel like I was personally giving a thumbs-up to malignant tumors. I closed the notification with a sigh and called Ryan.

  He answered on the second ring. "Heyyo what's good dawg?"

  A familiar chanting could be heard from his end of the line as I answered. "Just calling about that laptop that I locked myself out of."

  "Yeah yeah, right 'locked yourself out of,'" he snickered. "And I'm—" he cut off mid-sentence. The chanting stopped as I heard him address someone else. "No, the Adobe license is enterprise-wide, you don't need to—whatever, I'll email you."

  "Sorry man, at work," he said, returning to me. "Anyways, about the laptop you're selling for meth money."

  I rolled my eyes. "I'm not on meth."

  The unmistakable sound of machine gun fire erupted from his end of the line before he responded. "Yeah yeah, what kind of computer is it?"

  "Uh, Windows 11?" I double-checked the logo on Thorne's sleek black laptop. "Alienware running Windows 11."

  "Double Kill!" boomed a familiar announcer voice from his end.

  "Are you playing Halo at work?"

  "What are you? The Feds?" His voice turned defensive. "Stop asking incriminating questions." A rocket explosion nearly drowned out his words. "Just boot into the recovery environment, open a command prompt and replace c:\\windows\\system32\\sethc.exe with a copy of cmd. Then go back into windows, and spam the shift key until it gives you a system level command prompt. Then use that to reset the password."

  I stared blankly at Thorne's laptop. "Can you maybe... like, walk me through that a little slower?"

  "Yeah yeah just— sonofabitch you can't t-bag me!"

  The next thirty minutes consisted of trying to follow Ryan's instructions between his competitive gaming outbursts. "Don't mess with the Cunt Crusher!" and "This lag is fucking bullshit!" punctuated technical directions that I struggled to follow. Salem and Demonia's voices drifted up from the basement lab occasionally—fragments of scientific terminology that might as well have been a foreign language.

  "Right-click on C drive, not left-click, you absolute noob," Ryan sighed after my third failed attempt.

  "Sorry, some of us have better things to do than IT all day," I muttered.

  "Like what? Trying to look cool with your little emo band?" He laughed, but there was no real malice in it. We'd been insulting each other since Halo 3.

  Finally, I managed to get into Thorne's laptop, the lock screen giving way to a desktop background of what appeared to be an ancient stone tablet covered in symbols that made my eyes hurt if I looked at them too long.

  "I'm in," I told Ryan. "Thanks, man."

  "No problem. That'll be fifty bucks or your firstborn child, whichever comes first."

  "I'll Venmo you a thank you gif."

  "Eat shit. Gotta go—boss incoming."

  After he hung up, I started digging through Thorne's files. The man had been obsessed with Lovecraft—every story, essay, and letter the author ever wrote seemed to be saved as both PDF and EPUB, with meticulous notes and highlights throughout. It would take weeks to read through all of Thorne's commentary, but certain phrases jumped out: "biological implementation possible" and "vessel preparation techniques" appeared with disturbing frequency. Apparently no one had informed Thorne that Lovecraft wrote fiction.

  I clicked around some more and found his stock portfolio. I was never really a finance guy, but even I recognized the pattern—green lines up, red lines down, all the typical corporations you'd expect: Coca-Cola, Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Volkswagen.

  But there was a subfolder labeled "Investments - Special Projects." I clicked it to find transfers to something called "Esoteric Maritime Holdings" and "Innsmouth Genetic Research, LLC." The names seemed cliche and made up, but the amounts were staggering—hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing out monthly, with no visible returns.

  I leaned back in my chair, the implications sinking in. This wasn't just one psycho with a Lovecraft fetish. This was organized, funded, and far bigger than we realized.

  From the basement, I heard Salem's voice call up, "Any progress on the financial data?"

  "Yeah," I called back, my mouth suddenly dry. "And you're not going to like it."

  I glanced at the time. Four hours until my band was supposed to hit the stage at the charity event. I had a sinking feeling the universe had a really sick sense of humor.

  I heard steps as Salem and Demonia came up the stairs, Salem wasting no time to step across the room and lean over my shoulder. "Names made up."

  "Yeah, that's what I figured. 'Esoteric Maritime Holdings' sounds like a real company that real people work for." I smirked. "Like calling a rocket company Zoom Boom Unlimited."

  "Exactly." Her eyes narrowed. "Transactions must be real. Names are personal euphemisms. We'll find the actual recipients."

  I started to glide my hand from Thorne's laptop to my own. "So this is bad timing but—"

  "Cancer Beatdown 2025." Salem turned and looked at me. "Attendance advised."

  "Oh... thought you might say we're too busy."

  "Timing is not optimal, but cause is worthwhile." She pecked my cheek. "I must get ready. Suspicious if I stand out."

  Demonia shifted uncomfortably. "I'll just go home and see you two tomorrow then."

  Salem looked back at her. "Unwise. Cult has targeted you. Safety in numbers. Come with."

  "You want me to go to a concert? When there are people who might want to turn me into... whatever Marissa is now?" Demonia folded her arms.

  "Do you feel safer around the two people that stopped Marissa from... whatever she was doing, or do you wanna take your chances with locked windows?" I turned back to face her. "Because I wouldn't trust a window to not get smashed in."

  "Fine, whatever. If I go to your stupid show and then come back here with you two, where would I sleep?"

  "Mansion is sizable. Many guest rooms. Choose one." Salem answered decisively.