Hi, all! Annabelle Hawthorne back with the final installment of "I couldn't afford therapy so I wrote a sequel to a spinoff novel about sexy monster girls fighting religious vampires and demons!"
(I saved so much time avoiding self reflection, totally worth it)
New readers, welcome! This is the last chapter of Dead and Horny 2, so you're essentially about to sit through the last 40 minutes of Return of the King and will be all "Who's this short guy in the bed, did he have cancer, oh look, his friends are here, why is everyone bowing to him now?" But hey, the cinematography was gorgeous, so you do you, boo.
Returning readers, welcome back! I did it, I wrote another fucking novel, woohoo! I hope with this expansion of the Horny Monsters universe, I've added even more flavor to the things that are about to come. As a reminder, this chapter takes place a few months BEFORE Book 6 of HFHM.
I would like to thank everyone who supported this story along the way. Whether you were a beta reader, someone who left stars, comments, or even emailed me about how much fun you had. THANK YOU. I love being able to experience these things in real time, to read about your excitement and apprehension for the things to come. There will likely be a D&H 3 down the road somewhere, but it's time for me to turn my full attention back to Mike Radley and his magical home for a bit.
I've been writing in this universe for 6 years now, and it has changed my life. I look forward to sharing even more stories with you in the future, and want to remind anyone else who has dreamed big like I have that even the mightiest of fires often starts from just
A Little Spark
Lily cracked into Deacon's mind with ease, muting his frantic screams as she stacked his memories up like panes of glass to inspect them. Her essence tugged at his soul like a determined puppy, nibbling the sharp edges away and leaving behind a mottled mess. Souls didn't typically last long in this place, but she was keeping him preserved for now. While memories could sometimes be accessed later on, she didn't have the luxury of assuming Deacon's would remain intact as she digested him for eternity. The longer a soul sat in her metaphorical gut, the harder it became for them to remember anything regarding their personal lives. There were spirits inside her from her early days that only had a vague inkling that they had been alive once upon a time.
The pain of having his mind fragmented into pieces drove Deacon mad early on, the man now babbling between sobs, but Lily would just reassemble his essence later. Souls were very resilient that way, and his suffering didn't even faze her. The bastard had already committed hundreds if not thousands of people to a one-way trip to eternal damnation, so any regret she might feel was quickly subdued. Many of his memories weren't important enough to keep, so she tossed them to the other souls to do with what they wished.
Ravenous, her spiritual slaves entered the memories and began their own torment of Deacon. It was the one bit of freedom she allowed them, the opportunity to torture each other. Inside these memories, Deacon was forced to endure numerous methods of torture, humiliation, and even his own death, stuck in a loop as Lily sifted through the shards of his life.
"For a douchebag, his shit really is pretty clean." Mike stood next to her, contemplating an image of Deacon giving a sermon in Atlanta. The image in the glass moved in slow motion, but there wasn't any sound. "You usually find the good stuff early on."
"He's still hiding what I want to know." She took the Atlanta sermon from Mike and turned to face a scowling spirit who appeared at her whim. The tormented soul before her had been an arsonist that the Society had hired more than once. The idiot had decided to extort them for money, so they sent in Lily to take him out. "Make him relive this one, only the whole place burned down and he got trapped inside."
The arsonist nodded, then took the frame from her and melted into the picture. It hovered in the air for a few moments, then hairline fractures appeared on the glass as the image now depicted a screaming Deacon melting from the heat of the flames.
"You're being quite thorough." Mike hopped onto a stool that conjured itself from the aether. "I've never seen you do this before."
"I was quite the artist once upon a time." She smiled at Mike.
"You mean before I redeemed you?" Mike licked his lips and winked.
"Maybe." She smirked and then picked up another memory. "Here we go. These aren't in chronological order, which is weird. I'm guessing that's Legion's handiwork. But this one has his wife, and we know what he's hiding from us involves her somehow."
"Yeah, it does." Mike took the memory from her. "Maybe I should ask him what he's hiding. We could do a good-cop, bad-cop routine."
"And you're the good cop?"
Mike chuckled. "We could flip a coin for it. I'll hold him at gunpoint, you could set him on fire."
"That would be bad cop, worse cop. Are you even taking this seriously?"
"Nope. But because I'm not, you are." His features turned serious as he picked up another memory. "So I guess we go through these and sort out anything involving his wife and try to dig through them later."
The effort took only moments in the real world, but was hours inside of Lily's mind. She and Mike created three different categories for Deacon's memories. The first was anything involving his wife, and the second category was any memory they thought may contain a nugget of information they could use. The third category belonged to memories they knew had nothing of value, like his numerous televised sermons. Those went directly to the tormented souls living inside her essence. If she wanted to, she could have listened to Deacon's soul scream for mercy, but for whatever reason, she had lost the taste for it.
She was getting soft, but she knew the reason why. Looking at the tiny piece of Mike's soul standing in the corner and humming to himself, she knew that she was becoming soft for him. It wasn't because she had to, but because she wanted to. The thought made her feel warm inside. It was a very different warmth than she was used to.
"Hold on." Mike was holding a memory in his hands. "Have you ever heard that old saying that memories are just your brain recreating stuff?"
"Maybe." Lily moved to where Mike stood. "Why?"
"Since this is his soul and not his mind, then whatever we see should be accurate, correct?"
"For the most part. Humans delude themselves all the time, so I'll sometimes see stuff in their head that's clearly been overwritten. But once they're in here, I can scrape off the gunk. Why?"
Mike showed her the frame. It was a moving image of Deacon on a cot, clearly from his homeless days. He was holding a Bible in his hands, slowly turning through the pages. At his side, an old man spoke, his gnarled fingers picking at the skin of his face. The elderly figure was blurry, like a grease stain through paper. "This isn't what we saw before."
"Interesting." Lily took the memory and stretched it out wide enough to jump inside. She stood in the homeless shelter now, her gaze on the old man with Deacon. He was talking animatedly, but instead of a human voice, it was the buzzing of flies.
"I think we just found Legion." Mike circled the cot, then knelt down nearby. "This guy is sitting roughly where that enochian script was the last time we were in here. It can't be a coincidence. Is this memory still altered from before?"
"Not quite." Lily tapped the memory with a finger, and the world rippled. The buzzing sound faded away, and Legion's voice manifested, echoing oddly throughout the room.
