and they set about their little project. Once finished, Mistrial got ahead of herself and lit one of the fingers, "what we gonna open?" She wagged the candle-hand at Heath. “I think it’s going to go out before we can think of anything good to use it on. Guess it’s just a wasted charge.” “Maybe I’ll open,” Mistrial examined the hand thoughtfully, “you!” And splapped it on Heathcliff and to both their surprise, the hand passed into Heath's dark interior and Mistrial fell in with it. She passed through her organs, into the memories of the body and weird patterns of days gone by. Through the grueling agony of the merciless surgery she herself had performed, every wrenched tooth, the bleak sky of a cursed freedom only days before, before the crash through the treetops during the escape from the cruel cult that left her diminished and lost in body and mind, crawling through the swamp. Lost enough to find her way to Kate's Big House. “Mistrial,” Heath’s voice quivered from all about this strange space of organ meat and memory and sinew and impression, "what's goin on?" “I think, uh. I think I'm in your guts and your memories,” Mistrial said, forging through the sensuous organic forms that slid across her like a hundred tongues, "it's kinda sexy in here." “Not really sure, not really sure I want you hangin' round in there.” But the chance to get under the skin of her obsession was too much for Mistrial to resist and she felt, once again, the power over another thrill her. She wriggled around under Heath's skin until Heath fit her like a glove, then licked through Heath's lips. Licked her teeth and her tongue. "I'm scared," Heath whispered, but Mistrial pushed her hand up through Heath's suprasternal notch, up her neck, across her jawline and pressed her finger up to her mouth, shushing her, then dipped her finger in so both their pairs of lips were sucking, one pair behind the other, shifting up and down one another. "Let me take care of you," she ran her hands down Heath's body, "we only have a little time until the candle burns out." Then slipped her fingers down around the bladder, past the pubic bone, and out the vaginal opening, spreading the labia and tucking the clitoris firmly between them. She had her. She had Heath's entire focus and attention on a single point between her fingers, and began smoothly rocking her fingers back and forth, in and out, the pads of her fingers groping for that perfect purchase on Heath's pussy while the body around her eased, and eased, and eased, until it guided her to where they needed to be. There she glided and slipped until her fingers were too much for Heath, then entirely flipped her body around inside Heath's and brought her lips directly to the opening and licked up and out, lapping at the clit, diving deeper into its rushing, swelling pulsation that was in her control, narrowing down Heath's breathing until her body all around shuddered and knocked and the stars flung out for the one without and the one within shared them, rising back up through the chakras like a snake up into the head and locked in behind Heath's eyes, exalting in the abounding darkness. Then Heathcliff went to sleep. Mistrial continued on into dark corridors of Heath’s past, through the fear and loneliness and rejection of her secret heart. Through long tunnels of childhood abuse and neglect, stayed a while with her younger self for those long hours of entrapment and alienation and the arbitrary brutality of her peers, and together faced the torment of that bronze bull: the derangement of Vermilla. Vermilla, who had taught all her girls to fly by tossing them off a cliff with their broom and letting them sort the matter out. The expectations without assistance, without access. Then a cave on high, on the peaks of Lith. And as Mistrial approached it she felt waves of guilt and shame borne out over the shore of a memory perfected in its countless visitations. A memory of young Heathcliff cutting away at the little pale body for the broom ceremony, where the soul of an innocent is imbued into its wood handle, trapped it forever. And the broom bled tightly under her hands and feet as she escaped the coven, and the blood of the innocent oozed up from its grain, and Heath racked herself awake, and the small voice of the broom called out, "sister!" Together they saw, fear intermingling between them, they saw as though they were looking up from the bottom of the world, Vermilla. "Interrogations of the self," Vermilla said, her voice resonating through the chambers of the skull and stirred the cauldron wide, "interrogations of the self," and poured in handfuls of dead bees and snails with their shells cracked by children. "Be careful what you open up, and what you open yourself up to. You might find nothing at all. And that is my domain. That is where you will find me," then, unlike all the other figures Mistrial had seen in the visions, Vermilla turned to look at her. At them both. And her eyes shined with light from the other side. Then slowly, the figure of Vermilla swept forward, as though from a great distance, and with every step she was larger until she was larger than the open sky, and even then she continued to grow and Heathcliff peed herself and Mistrial was suddenly taken over with a huge regret that she had stepped into this. She took it upon herself to recede into the snug warmth of the body and wait things out and she quieted her breathing and tried to be very still. Then the alarm permeated, first all at once, and then rising in charge and penetration, and the paralysis took over, and a sharp edge tapped Mistrial's front tooth and dragged up into the seam of her gum-line, and clumsily gouged the soft flesh, and a great sinuous weight wrapped around her neck. Too late the urge to fight rose in her bosom. She found herself now trapped in Heath like a wet sack, and her kicks sunk into her friend, and her clawing drew inflamed marks across Heath's skin. The sharp wedge in her gums pressed on, harder and harder, she tried to keep it out until, unyielding, it snapped her tooth into the back of her throat. Then, her mouth open wide, the nail, its rough finger, crept across her tongue, feeling its way down the back of her throat, and slid down into her esophagus. Into her belly. Down the tracts of her abdomen into her bowels and tapped a button. This button recorded every groove of the fingerprint in her memory. She went totally still, feeling herself at the divide of some pain that was alien and never meant to be discovered by the human animal. If she could beg, she would have. Then the candle went out.
