Were she the kind to pray, this would be as good a time as any.

She had no bread to serve as communion host, but the wooden, prickly flavour of old whisky burning in her throat seemed a decent enough substitute for wine. Mother Superion had offered to keep him in their prayers, after all, and Jillian had not been able to refuse the gesture—if it meant nothing to her, it derived meaning from how significant it was to the nuns of the OCS and that soothed her.

Jillian took another generous sip, all alone under the light of a single lamp. The room was silent for once: all her computers had been turned off as all her work had turned futile, useless. Nightly shadow kept the machines from sight and the only thing visible to her, as she sat at her orderly work desk, was that black and white picture of Michael, as he was before. Young, alive, with a future ahead of him—if perhaps not a long one.

Amidst the chaos, they hadn’t thought of creating another keepsake. Jillian now held only the fading memory of her son in his short adulthood, nothing else—she had but the phantom feeling lingering in the arms that had hugged him, the fleeting image of a man she had never been too sure would ever reach adult age despite all her efforts towards it.

She took the portrait and traced the childish face with affection, with sadness, recalling his farewell.

He was right. A part of him would always be with her and she would always cherish the memory in spite of all the suffering. It had been worth it—it had to be worth it or she would have been the cause for wrecking both of their lives for no shred of reward. Time together had been sparse; for this very reason, it had been more valuable than anything…

A sound came from one of the dark corners of the spacious room, something like air being dislocated somehow.

Jillian looked up from the portrait towards the spot out of instinct more so than fear, trusting in the feeble peace and safety afforded by Adriel’s defeat. Moreover, no alarms had gone off and no signs denounced the presence of another human being, so there was no reason for disquiet. Kristian had disappeared, she had no sworn enemies to worry about, the nuns were back in their convent… All had been calm.

Still, uneasy because of the sound, Jillian eyed her half-empty glass of whisky and pushed it back a little. She had always held her alcohol very well, but perhaps the late hour and the circumstances—

“Not a single tear to spare, doctor Salvius? Have the devoted mother’s eyes dried up already?” A voice spoke from the shadows.

Jillian froze. She recognised its tone, its accent, but not so much its bite.

Her throat dried up at once, resenting the treatment it had received when last that voice had echoed along those very walls, when it had forced itself inside while a murderous grip had held her breath hostage.

“… Lilith?” Jillian asked, squinting into darkness, leaving both her glass and her son’s picture at the desk as she raised herself from her chair slowly, one hand slithering away to the inside of a pocket of her comfortable, tailored trousers.

No response came and nothing came into view.

She took two steps backwards, meaning to turn and run, but the strange sound repeated itself and Jillian bumped directly into a young woman’s body, hardened by hot, shining scales visible even in dimness, huffing flaming breath to melt her skin as poisonous as the hateful eyes locked into her own.

“I expected more.”

“Lilith, you scared me,” Jillian said, propping herself up with both hands against the desk that she now had at her back.

She was trapped between it and her unexpected, uninvited guest.

“And you didn’t? When you wanted me to walk back into that thing despite the hurt it caused me?”

Even in the ill-lit room, Jillian Salvius could not ignore the loud fluttering noise that rose around her as what seemed to be a pair of large wings sprung from Lilith’s back, stretching out then gathering near to form an odd sort of cocoon around them.

Now she was trapped indeed.

“Though I suppose I should thank you,” Lilith went on, admiring her own hellish appendages. “Who knows how long I would have taken in my evolution without that fateful push? It’s also thanks to you and your cruelty that I’m better now. Free.”

She leaned towards Jillian, who waited. She did not know how to reply or whether it was wiser to say nothing at all in close-quarters, confined as she was within that uncanny dome of translucent skin.

The demonic figure sniffed Jillian’s lips.

“Have you been drowning your sorrows in drink, doctor?” Lilith smiled. “How unbecoming. You should know, friends with the Church as you are now, that hardship builds character. Suffering buys you a place in Heaven.”

The smile turned to a scowl. “But perhaps all mothers are just the same. Selfish. False. Viewing their unfortunate children as a means to an end, things to be used for their own desires and nothing else.”

As Lilith leaned closer, Jillian tried to distance herself as she could, pushing her weight atop the desk, offended by the words but unwilling to play the game, especially at close-range. To dispute any of those accusations would be to acknowledge them and follow a path she did not wish to tread, not while being so close to someone who had already nearly killed her before. Jillian was the brain and the face of a controversial company that created and sold controversial products. She was well-acquainted with word games and the necessity of coming out on top when a journalist tried to trick her and weave her into some unsavoury story—even if discursive combat with demons was still a rather new skill to be added to her vast curriculum.

“What are you doing here, Lilith? What do you want?” Jillian cut to the heart of it.

Lilith smiled again, very civil. A chill shook Jillian Salvius’ spine.

“Why, I’m here to assure you get your rightful place in Heaven, doctor.”

There was barely a second for Jillian to interpret that ominous claim as a vicious punch hit her over the head and sent her stumbling along her desk. Michael’s portrait fell to the floor in the commotion.

She could not look upon Lilith again as another blow was dealt to her face, stronger now, causing her to spin around, lose her balance and fall. Only from the ground and from between her already torn and bleeding lips did she manage to let out a horrified “why?!”

A bat-like wing swatted her away with force and all her body was violently twisted as she was propelled a metre or two backwards.

“All that talk about your son and what you really wanted was to know more about the other side. How long was I there for you, do you remember?”

Lilith calmly marched towards a contorted, pained Jillian. Her speech conveyed toxic resentment but the attitude was that of a cat, hungry and yet not above playing with its food for a good while, tossing it this way and that between its paws, letting it try to escape only to catch it again and break every bone in the mouse’s body one by one until it got bored and tore its head off.

The scientist scrambled around, trying to get back on her feet and avoid getting hit again.

Lilith was too quick. A boot connected to Jillian’s head.

“One hundred and seven minutes, doctor Salvius. One hundred and seven minutes of torment, being scalded alive, burned so deep that even faith evaporates away and leaves you with nothing but despair to hang on to.”

“I could not help you without some insight on the place where your mutations originated,” Jillian replied with a groan, pulling herself up as she could, keeping her cool in words so as to conceal the trembling in her limbs. She recalled how Lilith’s brain activity had been unstable and she deduced how much worse it might have gotten since, how just about anything might be able to set off an extreme reaction…

She also calculated her meagre chances to survive the encounter as a result.

“It is a place of pain! That is all there is to know!”

The demon disappeared from where she stood only to reappear at Jillian’s throat, crouching to reach her but raising herself just as she raised her captive from the floor, choking her in the process.

“But here’s a lesson from the other side just for you: pain makes no distinctions. It’s for everyone.”

Lilith hurled her away.

Jillian’s body crashed against the desk, toppling along with it all that had been set atop it: documents, pens, a computer screen, the glass of whisky she had left unfinished. This shattered as it hit the floor, spilling its contents. In trying to regain her footing after the crash, Jillian cut the palm of her hands upon the shards and pain shot up her arms, heightened by the sting of alcohol seeping into the wounds. Some portion of her observant conscience noted that at least that pain might be useful, keeping the cuts clean.

She looked upon Lilith, who studied her, seeming almost indifferent. When Jillian began attempting to pull out the pieces of glass that had found their way inside her skin, Lilith’s blank expression turned grim.

“I’m well aware of what pain can do,” Jillian said, wincing but staring her opponent down regardless as her fingers collected a sharp, bloody fragment of glass from out of her flesh and let it fall upon the floor.

“I don’t think you are, doctor… But not to worry, I’ll enlighten you in some one hundred and seven minutes of our own.” She stared at her claws while wiggling her fingers playfully. “Then we shall see if your tears have truly dried—if you’re as heartless as all mothers are.”

She took a few steps. Jillian responded by taking her own backwards, though she knew there would be no opportunity for escape. Even if she could outrun Lilith, her muscles ached and her head would not stop spinning from the blows she had received. She need not try to estimate with which speed Lilith would react even if her tired legs could run, for she knew she would be caught anyway; it would take that interdimensional being but a leap, one simple effort to jump through the fabric of their reality and block her way, catch her, slit her throat.

One of those wings advanced in the air and pierced one of the objects that lay on the ground. It conveyed it to its mistress’ hands and Jillian Salvius could only watch as she understood it was Michael’s portrait Lilith now held and examined.

“Did they at least have the decency to tell you how he died…?”

“He died trying to do the right thing,” Jillian answered, suddenly confident and energised to face the creature in front of her who she had trouble recalling as just a scared, proud girl come back from the dead and brimming with divinium within.

“I slew him,” Lilith stated plainly, throwing the picture away with a flick of her wrist, letting the frame break into even smaller pieces somewhere in the dark. “With this very hand. I wrenched his heart out from his body like I’d pull the plug on an appliance. He bled to death without honour, without accomplishing a single thing he had set out to do. He died doing not a good thing or a bad thing, but nothing at all.”

“Why are you saying these things?! What do you want from me? To break me? Kill me?” She would not play the game.

She would not indulge in the subject, she would not ask for confirmation or seek to know whether there was any truth to what was said. To play was to lose and Jillian was at a disadvantage already. She could not afford to be distracted by these lies, she could not afford to be riled up and forced to commit a mistake when the likelihood of her surviving this ordeal was low enough as it was.

“I tell you this in friendship and I receive not a single tear…? No feelings whatsoever about your precious boy being killed as easily as you’d step on an ant?”

Lilith disappeared.

Jillian braced herself, looking around for a sign of where the next attack would come from despite knowing any attempt at prediction was pointless.

The savage slash came from behind, digging deep as Lilith reappeared at her back and ripped off a large chunk of her shirt while she sliced at the flesh of her shoulders. Jillian couldn’t even shriek in pain, being pushed, made to face her enemy only to meet those hungry talons once more, cutting at her visage. A kick to the stomach bent her and knocked her down, breathless.

Jillian raised one of her bloody, trembling hands.

“This is madness, Lilith! Please!”

“Madness?”

The word only inflamed her further. She kicked again, so that Jillian would lay flat on the floor, and mounted her, holding her down with her own weight, covering her mouth with a hand so the scientist could not speak.

“It is you who are mad, you who are monstrous!” Lilith exclaimed, leaning closer. “How wicked must you be to force life on someone who did not ask for it and then later turn around and ask them to give it back up for you?”

She released Jillian, but with breath came a new punch.

Her nose might have been broken then. If she hadn’t gained a concussion yet it was bound to happen soon. Everything hurt. Her entire face burned and she could both smell and taste the blood seeping out of the cuts carved by those claws over her cheeks, her forehead, her chin, her lips. Her knowledge of the limitations of the human body, against which she had so stubbornly fought in trying to save Michael, told her she would die there if her message had not gone through.

There was almost too much pain for Jillian to understand what Lilith said next.

“I’d rip your heart out too, if only you had one.”

Another punch came. It easily broke through the feeble defence Jillian had tried to build in raising her aching arms to her face. Her vision faltered.

She felt rather than saw her aggressor raise herself and walk a little distance away, leaving her to squirm and groan in a puddle of her own blood, feeling a good part of her hair drenched in it just as her clothes were as she turned to cough more droplets out.

“But that would be too quick,” Lilith said. “You made me wander in that hell for one hundred and seven minutes, I repeat. So, for one hundred and seven minutes of your own, you’ll wander in yours.”

“Vengeance…? That’s your noble motivation here?” Jillian retorted, rolling on the floor with effort until she managed to get on her knees. She spat out a large amount of saliva mixed with yet more blood. “It’s not really me you’re angry with, is it? As awful as I might have been to you.”

It couldn’t be. Even amidst the fog of blood loss, the aching in her bones and the ringing in her dizzy head, Jillian could not avoid analysing the situation, adding two and two together, recognising patterns, seeking solutions. Tears, mourning, guilt, children, life, death… What Lilith reproached in her she might as well reproach in another woman—in another mother, to be exact.

“You would have sacrificed me without a second thought,” Lilith snarled.

“Like your mother did?” Jillian spat back.

She did not enjoy gambling but she had grown used to it, knowing when to make an aggressive bet against a particularly clever player or another in some interview or press conference.

At last, those words gave Lilith pause.

“You don’t know anything,” she muttered.

“I know you feel a lot of hate or else you would not have come to hurt me. What’s next? You go and kill her too?”

Jillian once more did not see the blow coming. Lilith teleported and delivered another brutal kick to her face, perhaps the worst of all she had by now suffered. Jillian collapsed.

“I already have!”

She would not last much longer, not like this. She tasted, smelled and saw only red. They had not come.

To Hell with it, then.

The effort to raise herself was great. Jillian’s entire body was heavy, weakened, sore, torn open by claws and smashed by ferocious assaults. Still did she persevere, knowing Lilith watched her, guessing that her stubbornness in getting back up every time likely angered her more, challenging her illegitimate claim to control through brutality.

“And did that bring you any relief?” Jillian asked, daring to look Lilith in the eye through her own half-closed ones.

The younger woman averted her gaze.

“Yes.”

“Liar. You wouldn’t be here if that were the case.”

“Killing you is another sort of pleasure—”

“No, it isn’t. Killing me is an excuse.”

A hand found its way to her throat again, threatening to crush it once and for all.

“Shut up.”

“Did your mother… Never cradle you… When you cried? Is that it?”

Lilith headbutted her. She fell again, silent, emptied of the strength even to cry or whine in pain.

“I told you to shut up!”

Lying on the floor, bleeding, Jillian slowly tried to rise again. Her limbs did not respond, but her sharp tongue carried on.

“The tears you want to see… Are for yourself. Compensation for the ones you shed as a shunned child.”

“That’s not true!”

For once, Lilith’s violence manifested against the floor. She stomped as a spoiled little girl might, both hands turned into fists held tight with frustration.

Jillian had found the nerve. All she needed to do now was pull on it, careful not to break it lest she lose the only advantage she could possibly have against a creature such as the one Lilith had become—not what she truly was at heart, Jillian had to force herself to remember; it was this very humanity and an appeal to it, however provocative, that might save her life still.

“She could not love you for some reason. For that, blaming you for her own inability, she destroyed you, didn’t she?”

The scientist was able to pull herself into a sitting position at last. It nearly made her faint and only with difficulty was she able to hear her own voice as she continued to speak, cutting through the thick layer of pain that mediated her every interaction with the world around and within her. Regardless, even as she fell apart, as she faded, Jillian went on with much less opposition now that she had found a crack into which to infiltrate herself.

“You were not what she wanted and so she reduced you to nothing.”

“I did my very best and it was never enough!” Lilith roared.

It did not escape the keen researcher doctor Salvius was that now it was her adversary's eyes that began to redden, gathering tears.

“No, it wasn’t. She didn’t love you—”

“She would never love me.”

“—and you couldn’t love her, either.”

The stare she received was deadly.

The stare she received was defeat.

She had not raised a finger, she had not thrown a single punch or retaliated with any physical violence all the abuse she had endured; she had been beaten, bruised, cut open, taunted, broken and she bled out faster than would be safe, but Jillian Salvius suddenly saw that the match could be won. Her words and their implications pierced deeper into that hellish armour of Lilith’s than any of those attacks she had suffered; Lilith was a lost little girl with a temper and a dozen knives at her disposal—but a lost little girl nevertheless.

Lilith shook her head.

“No…”

“So you did to her what she did to you.”

“No, don’t—”

“You couldn’t love her yourself, so you destroyed her too.”

Lilith lunged at her.

Jillian was in no shape to evade the new bout of force thrown at her—she didn’t have to. Lilith missed all by herself, tripping, losing her footing by stepping and slipping on a splatter of Jillian’s blood upon the floor.

She fell right beside the intended victim, who willed herself to scuttle away from her attacker as best she could, finding new reasons to focus on getting back on her feet.

“I’m nothing like my mother,” Lilith protested as she tried wiping off some of Jillian’s blood from her hands and face but only smearing more of it upon herself instead. “I would never do to someone else what she did to me.”

“This attempt at taking my life is a show of affection, then?”

“It has nothing to do with her!”

“It has everything to do with your mother and with yourself. Your heritage was cruelty and though it sickens you and hurts you, that is what you are giving out yourself.” Jillian spoke quickly, countering the hits she had received with rapid, unforgiving fire even as she did not quite understand the ammunition she wielded. “In rejecting your mother, you have become her, yet you somehow blame me because I was willing to do whatever it took for my son.”

Lilith was now the one unable to rise, gritting her teeth, sinking her impish nails into the palms of her hands, breathing with difficulty through the tears and the mucus she tried to repress; Jillian slowly stood taller and taller, wincing but triumphant even while her clothes and her skin were torn and dirty with blood.

“You brought him into the world for selfish—”

“And you ripped him out of it by your own admission,” Jillian hissed. “You want tears? You want to talk about selfishness? What I did to you was wrong, I’ll admit that, but I would do it again if I had to, without hesitation.”

A glance of disgust and loathing made its way to her, but Jillian only lowered her voice to enhance what she said next, refusing to let herself be intimidated any longer.

“Had you been my daughter instead, I would have done it for you, too.”

Her determination was all that kept Jillian standing.

Bit by bit, she witnessed Lilith break, her fury dissolve; she watched as Lilith began to sob at Jillian’s feet.

The wings retracted, dissipating into the air like ash. Lilith buried her face into her hands and wept.

This would be a good moment to flee, but Jillian just could not move, paralysed by pain. She merely surveyed the scene around her in the dark—the upturned desk, the cracked computer screen, the shattered glass that had contained her drink as well as the pieces of what had been the picture frame that housed the now damaged portrait of her son; and she saw the blood, the droplets, puddles and trails of blood plastered all over the floor where she had been tortured. Amidst the destruction of what looked like a low-budget slasher movie set, there she stood and there Lilith crumbled, crying as the child who had strayed too far away from her mama to find her way back.

Jillian could almost pity that child if she did not detest the demon so. Only her empathy for the former impeded her from even considering to exact justice on the latter after that obscene confession about Michael’s death.

There was sudden movement outside the room, she could tell. Lilith did not perceive any of it, sobbing and muttering unintelligible speech into her hands; upon closer inspection, Jillian noticed that Lilith, too, was bleeding—in her anguish, she sank her claws into her cheeks as if to pull out the scales that covered them.

The door was opened and the lights were turned on before Jillian could react. Her eyes met those of Mother Superion, sisters Camila, Yasmine and Dora.

They, too, could not even begin to acknowledge the carnage before them in that ravaged room, darkening those two wretched persons who occupied it, for Lilith at last woke from her trance of self-destruction, all bloody and raw, to find her sisters of yore staring at her diminished frame.

She looked upon doctor Salvius one last time, more disoriented than ever, and simply carried her shame away with her by vanishing without another word.

Jillian’s legs gave out as soon as the threat was gone. The nuns rushed towards her.

They banded around her as Superion cradled her head and they all helped to steady her into a more comfortable position until she could be taken to a hospital.

“Took you long enough,” Jillian said, unable to keep some teasing from reaching her teeth, all yellowed with the blood that still sprouted from the inside of a cut cheek.

“Your hideout is a bit far from the convent, we came as soon as we saw the signal—once we understood it was a signal and not malfunctioning,” Mother Superion explained, too focused on keeping Jillian still to find any true comfort in the fact that she was still capable of using a dash of humour despite having been bludgeoned to near death.

“We weren’t even aware that you had kept Lilith’s pendant,” Camila added, pretending like no one could hear the melancholy in her voice. “Or else we might have been able to come sooner.”

Yasmine was ordered to dial for help. Dora searched the premises for any signs of trouble in case Lilith decided to return.

Camila and Superion remained at Jillian’s side, watching as she weakly pulled a thin chain from out of her pocket and, with it, the OCS pendant that continued to blink ever since she had activated it through touch alone.

“You might want this back…”

“It’s yours now, seeing as it served you well. We’ll only have to teach you how to use it.”

“I think I’ll be stuck in a hospital bed for a good amount of weeks. There will be no shortage of time for that.”

“What happened, doctor?”

Jillian paused. Whatever pain she felt was doubled with the ebbing of adrenaline. She intended to smile, but the cuts that had shredded her face into four or five sections burned.

“… Mistakes,” she said. “Aplenty.”

“We’re going to get you well.”

She stared up at those women around her, frightened at her situation—she could count the injuries she had suffered and the amount of blood she had lost from their worried expressions alone—but confident in her recovery. She wondered what aspect her own currently disfigured face had, then, as she had towered over an all but conquered Lilith.

It was done, now, whatever it was.

Were Jillian the kind of woman to pray, she might have offered Heaven thanks for coming out alive.

She was not.

Her eyes closed, overcome with fatigue, as she entrusted herself to her friends. How strange, if their god were real, that she could be lying here in relative safety while others only sank deeper into their misery, pulling others along even while trying to escape their private black pit. Who would mourn Lilith? Did anyone save any prayers for her or, indeed, cry for what she had become?

In her pain and in the nearing torpor that spread throughout her body, feeling only the scar on her forearm itch, Jillian concluded someone should…