"You're kidding," Annie muttered to herself, staring down into the calm waters of the tank. Now, upon closer inspection, she spotted the royal blue claw of a strangely calm-looking lobster, which had pushed itself into one corner of the tank.

"'fraid not," the voice said, still echoing inside her brain.

"So, how's this go?" Annie asked, keeping her voice at a harsh whisper so as not to draw attention to the unusual circumstances. "I find some melted butter and crack you open?"

"That's bloody hellacious, girl," the lobster replied, seemingly in horror at the mere suggestion. "No, you bust me out of here. This is all too convenient for me."

Convenient? That was one of those words -- those sort of clues -- that, over the last six months of traveling with an Elder God, Annie had learned to associate with purposeful planning. Mystica always had a plan, a plot, or some sort of purpose behind everything he did. But this one seemed almost too convenient for this psychic crustacean. The banquet was meant to be "the big stage" for Mystica to prove to Jessica that he was capable of giving her whatever she desired. And what the poor redheaded stepchild of the Vanderbilt family name wanted was vengeance against the flesh and blood that had betrayed her and caused her to end up in a mental hospital against her will.

Annie had thought the whole ordeal would be open and shut -- one of those easy cases. Just step in, murder the lot of them in Mystica's usual flashy way, and step right back out, with a pyromaniac in tow. The last thing Annie expected was to be retrieving a blue-clawed, mind-melding lobster in the middle of a crowded dining hall.

"Alright," Annie sighed with a roll of the eyes. "So how exactly am I getting you out of there?"

"I can swim, dammit," the lobster replied, begrudgingly floating to the top of the tank and bobbing gently near the surface. "Pluck me out of here."

"What, just reach in and pull you out?"

Annie glanced over her shoulder at the busy room. Still buzzing with excited energy, no one seemed to care or even notice that she ha spent the last few minutes arguing quietly with the lobster tank. With a sigh, she quickly reached in, closed her hand around the disconcertingly rough exoskeleton of the lobster, and pulled it out of the water.

"What now?" she asked in desperation, leaning over slightly to hide the crustacean's squirming form from the occupants of the dining hall.

"Your clutch, fool," the lobster answered. "Put me in your bloody purse!"

Following its instructions, Annie popped open the seal of her purse and dropped the creature inside. Hesitantly, as if fearing to find someone staring at her, Annie stole a glance over her shoulder. All clear. The room moved about as usual, busy bees buzzing to other bees. But before she could even give a silent sigh of relief, her unexpected passenger viciously slaughtered any sense of calm.

"Now, bring me to your traitorous master."

---

“What do you mean by that? Apprentice?"


"I mean that I have been raised from birth to be your assistant."

---

Somewhere West of White Palm, Florida

7:36 P.M.

With the dust settling up around his head like a coarse brown cloud, he slammed the door of the still-running pickup. The engine’s chuffing, clockwork pistons echoed in the early evening air, breaking little holes in the patterns of the dirt and dust all around him. He could almost see the little fragments of his life – those little particles of rock and sand and soil -- all dancing along the wind tides as the breath of the nearby mountains rained down on the beaten dirt road. He tried to take in a deep breath, but the little bits of his life’s dust clogged up his throat, and he coughed harshly into the sleeve of his white woolen coat, much to his own disdain. It was his favourite coat, purchased from a small secondhand shoppe back in Redditch, and the damned dust was going to stain it; Elizabeth had teased him over and over on the walk home about how very “twink” it looked, but he hadn’t minded it in the slightest. It was something he could call his own – a rare quality in those long-forgotten days. He could still recall her voice as it had been: that lilting, almost songlike quality it had in the mid-tones; the carefree harmonies that he heard so subtly, juxtaposed against the hurt welling up in her throat.

He coughed again, much more hoarsely this time. David Martin was a frail sort of man: pale as the moon and just as prolific in his ghostly stature, standing just over six feet tall but just a bit taller if he ever rose from the masochistic spinal self-abuse his usual slouching posture offered. Elizabeth had been a bit shorter, and it struck David how common that had been along the family line. The Martin men were tall creatures, while the women were much more demure, like a fine crystal – oh-so fragile, but gleaming like the glow of candles across the glass beer bottles lined up along the mantle. And the women, like the bottles, shattered with the right angle of a fist across the cheeks, until their former glorious shapes were little more than shards of once-beautiful creatures, now huddled in the corner and shattered all across the floor simultaneously. That was how he had left her – not of his own doing, but abandoned nonetheless to gather up her own shattered pieces.

After a moment, the dust that had been shot up from beneath the tires of the rusted truck began to settle back into its bed of earth below, and David could breathe free once more. With tired eyes from a sleepless night piled atop another sleepless night welling up with tears from the tiny bits of sediment that had crawled their way past his lashes, he stared down the winding road. A few yards away, the dirt road narrowed into a needle-slit path. The truck would never be able to continue down this trail. The wheezing monolith jettisoned from side to side beside David’s nearly emaciated form, bouncing to and fro with the motion of the cogs inside the seizing engine, gently rocking the poor girl inside in an almost parental rhythm. It was gently lulling her into a false sense of comfort. David could sense her permanently blinded eyes shifting behind the bandages wrapped around her head. They were partially for medical sterilization, and partially for the sake of those who might behold her wan, unfortunate face. No one wanted to see the bloody sockets that once held a piece of her. They had been closed forevermore, sewn shut, and the soul inside had withered away and died like an abandoned rose in the hot afternoon sun of a backwoods trail.

The silence finally got to her, and she turned her head uncertainly in his general direction.

“Is everything alright?” she asked, warm breath sending a film of fog across the cracked rear-view mirror. For a moment, David hesitated before responding, his own eyes locked on the brief ghost of life atop polished glass. His voice came out in that confident tenor he knew so well from recordings.

“Nothing is alright for right now,” he said, “but it will be. Soon. Once I find him.”

He sputtered for a moment, and quickly corrected himself.

“It.”