Death of a Detective

Then, nearby, there was Yoko, her tail severed, her skin melted in places, but alive, holding the staff. "I could not make it work… but it seemed to protect us during the explosion…" she huffed, and threw it at me. Then came Remi, her silent, backward scream a wave of pure psychic force that paralyzed the creature and its spawn.

Lalika’s eyes were wide. "Yes! The scream collapses its position! The staff can collapse its momentum! It will make it a material thing!"

The three of us—Lalika, Xiao Ru, and I—focused on the staff. As we touched it to the mirror floor, a pulse of energy cascaded out, and Marvalyn’s various forms and positions froze. Ruru’s bow appeared. My pistol was raised. This was it.

But the gunshots that rang out were not mine. From a lower ledge of the crater, there she was. Mary. Her face half-torn away, an arm missing, but her eyes burning with a cold, dead fire. What manner of demon had she become to survive that…? Lest Yoko’s staff had sheltered her to some degree…

The first bullet struck me in the side, a hot, tearing pain. The second hit the staff, which shattered, a great splinter of its wood embedding itself deep in Xiao Ru’s chest. We all fell. I fired a single, wild shot at Marvalyn before my pistol was knocked from my hand. The blast made the creature reel, but it was not enough… no would anything truly be enough? Verily, I ought naught know.

I rushed to Xiao Ru, who was gasping on the ground. "Is there anything?" I pleaded to Lalika.

She shook her head. "Anything, please…" tears welling in my eyes.

"You could give her your lifeforce," Lalika said softly. "But… you would die in turn."

A smile, tired and true, touched my lips. "We will all die here, won't we? At least… at least Ruru can live a little longer."

"Ling… Ling…" Ruru managed, her hand clutching my jacket.

I leaned down and pressed my lips to hers. It was not a kiss of passion, but a final, desperate transfusion of the soul. I felt the last of my warmth, my life, my undeath, flow from me into her. As the kiss ended, I was paler than ever before. My heart, the dead thing in my chest, gave a final, stuttering beat and then stopped.

Xiao Ru blinked, sitting up, holding my cooling form. I looked into her eyes, the last sight I would ever see.

"Ciao, Ru," I whispered with a smile.

And if she shouted and cried I could not hear it, for in that moment, the sky roared, a deafening, final sound, and reality began to crease in on itself in plication. But high above, at the very apex of the implosion, I saw a flicker of purple, a stain upon the new genesis. Marvalyn… had been freed.

---

The roar was the last thing, and then—nothing. A perfect, silent white, a canvas wiped clean of all existence. Then, color began to bleed into the void. Glimmering, iridescent gradients, like an oil slick on still water, a promise of beauty in a place of non-being. It was the elevator… the passage between worlds.

"Ling Ling!"

The voice was a raw, desperate thing. A warmth, an excited pressure, enveloped me from behind. Xiao Ru. She clung to me, her tears a hot, real sensation against the cold fabric of my tattered jacket. I placed a hand over hers, a gesture that felt slow, disconnected.

"Ruru…" I murmured. "Where…?"

"Time is compressed," a serene voice answered. Lalika stood before us, her priestess robes unstained by the earlier chaos. "Contorted. It seems the Empress has involved herself."

The Empress. A sickness churned in my gut as I recalled her words. She would handle it. I became aware, then, of an unnerving stillness in my own chest, the agonizing silence where an agitated beat ought to be. Was I dead?

"You are alive," Lalika confirmed, as if hearing the thought. "She intervened in the moment before your soul's final departure. She is holding this entire universe in a single, sustained instant."

I managed a weak, incredulous sound. My gaze drifted. Everyone was here, scattered through the iridescent haze like frozen snow sculptures. Ashley and Serena, Yoko, Ami and Remi, Miyuki, Mana, Marissa, Melody, and even Mary. An entire cast of players, held in limbo.

Xiao Ru shifted her weight, burying her face in my shoulder. "You fool," she sobbed, her voice thick with a furious grief. "You beautiful, tragic fool, don't you ever do that again."

"But Ruru…"

"No!" she interrupted, her grip tightening. "Even if we were both to die, you cannot leave me. Not like that. You cannot." The sheer force of her love was a palpable thing, a fire in the endless white. I could do nothing but hold her.

"It seems my sister loves you a great deal," Lalika observed, her green eyes inquisitive. "That is not something I have seen before."

I could only nod with a smile, as the feeling felt mutual… but a question surfaced quickly through my daze. "Lalika… if you were the cat, what if I hadn't found Mary? What if you hadn't led me there?"

She looked away, a flicker of sorrow on her features. "Were that so, the robed men who followed you into the rift would have taken you. You would have been lost." She explained then how a fey witch had cursed her, how she had followed the witch's trail to my world, and how she had lurked near the cult, sensing the signatures of power. Xiao Ru had perked her ears at the strange word of "men" recalling it from my lips in what seemed so long ago, recoiling as if her ears had tasted poison.