Chapter Text
Eli’s finally able to catch a break just past noon. She meanders from her cubicle, rubbing at her wristwatch’s tight, silvery band, and makes her way to the break room, sliding cups and tupperware out of her way to her egg salad in the refrigerator. One of her coworkers, a nice Empath girl - a bit younger than Eli, not that she was looking, exactly - has her laptop open and is playing 2048 while watching Lolcat videos, a sandwich at her mouth as she smiles. Eli pulls out her phone.
Several rings - a scuffling noise, and then: “YOU'VE REACHED THE PHONE OF THE UNIVERSE'S NUMBER 1 NECROMANCER, NICONICONII!!! IF YOU NICONICONEED TO RAISE SOME DEAD, LEAVE A MESSAGE AFTER THE NICONICOBEEP!” An annoying, high pitched tone. Eli resists the urge to smack her own forehead, clears her throat, and speaks quietly.
“Nico, you don’t have the rank nor the license to raise the dead properly. That makes it illegal. Stop saying your own name into the phone. Anyway, I’m calling because-” The line beeps again, cutting her off. Lame.
When Eli looks up again, her coworker flicks her eyes away in the exact moment, clearly concealing a half smile behind an overlarge bite of sandwich. Eli resigns herself to a silent lunch.
**
She’s logging back into her work account - Magic Containment and Supervision Unit passcodes are irritatingly complex; it takes her three tries to get past the wall of capital letters and numerals - when she gets a call back from Nico. She connects it to her Bluetooth.
“Ayase Eli speaking.”
“Yo, Eli, will you help me out tonight?”
“Why does this sound uncomfortably like a booty call?”
“Stop joking,” Nico snaps into the phone, and if Eli weren’t four years acquainted with her, she’d say it was true annoyance. “I just need someone to do the camera work.”
Eli has to stop herself from the obvious response: kinky, and instead opens her assignment sheet on her laptop and drums her nails on the keyboard; one, two, three trills of short taps. “What for, Nico? You know I’m busy.”
“I’m finally doing it, Eli,” Nico says seriously. “I’m doing it... for the Vine.”
“I hate you, Nico,” Eli says, breezily, and taps through her tasks. Selecting one, she swiftly pulls up the eBay account and scrolls through potions for sale. All illegal - firebreathers, love potions, bombs - yes, this mage is not comporting himself according to alchemist law. She opens a new composition and begins drafting the confirmation to the Bureau that will strip him of his license..
“You know my old-ass neighbor,” Nico demands, which draws Eli’s attention back to the conversation at hand. “The one who invited us over one time and her hand, like, shook when she poured us lemonade? Because she was so old. Not like she was crying or anything.”
Eli stops typing long enough to laugh. “The one who told us we looked ‘okay’ together?”
“Yeahhh! She said we didn’t look like each other’s types. As if I’d be interested in some blonde model,” Nico sniffs.
“You flatter me.”
“Boo,” Nico says. “Anyway - she died.”
“Oh. OH. Oh no, you are not-”
“Sure am, Eli. I’m a necromancer, damn it, and I’m going to raise the dead... for the Vine. Plus I want to ask her if I can have some of her rose clippings from her garden. Nice flowers, those.”
Eli makes herself finish the licensure proposal before she puts her head in her hands, elbows scraping her desk. “Oh my God, Nico. Fine. Fine, I’ll be there. Say, 6 o’clock?”
“Make it 7,” Nico intones. “The witching hour calls...”
“Isn’t the witching hour midnight, Nico?” Eli asks, and she hears the weariness in her voice like the slow crumbling of concrete.
“Well, yes,” Nico hedges, “but the new episode of Top Chef is on at 6, plus I’ve gotta get up around seven the next morning to help out at the bakery.”
“How long do you think this is going to take?”
“Eli! Just come over and get ready to see something awesome and magical!”
“You have to pay for the pizza,” says Eli, and hangs up.
**
By the time she gets to the little house in the suburbs, the sun is on its way down, and Nico is setting up candles at critical points along an upsettingly rusty-colored pentagram spanning the backyard. “It’s not actually virgin blood,” she asserts carelessly. “There was a sale at the market on pig’s blood. It’ll work just fine.” Eli makes a point to step over the streaky lines, which as slowly browning as they dry. Ew. As she does, she catches a glimpse over the fence of the neighbor’s roses. They are quite fine.
Nico scrapes at the dirt in the center with an incense stick, squinting in the failing light at a crumbling tome in her hand. The cover looks uncomfortably like human skin. “I think this phrase has a hard a,” she says to herself. Eli busies herself downloading the Vine app.
“How was your TV show?” Eli wants to know, and Nico snorts while lighting candles.
“They don’t know the finer applications of garlic,” she says, dismissively. “Nothing like the joys of your train ride home, probably. Anyway... do you have a fire-protection charm on you?”
Eli pats her pockets, slightly too warm in her grey blazer. Her hair is sticking to her neck. She comes up with a luck amulet - still glowing a faint green; active, then - and several coins. “I’ve got one somewhere at my place.”
Still fiddling with the pentagram, Nico tosses a gilt pendant to Eli, who catches it one handed and tucks it into a pocket. “Why are you so athletic?” Eli barely hears Nico’s mutter. “So! Should we get this party rolling?”
“I’m still holding you to pizza as a reward for this.”
They take their places - Eli raising her phone, the yard illuminated by the solar-powered lights as the sun sets slowly behind them, and Nico standing just outside her diagram, book open wide across her work-rough palms. “Spirit that has crossed,” she begins. Eli zooms in, unsure of where to focus the camera.
Nico’s thin voice echoes over the grass, magically enhanced: “If you hear me, I request that you rise. If you-” The back of Eli’s neck is really sweaty; she’s so hot, what is going on? Her hands spasm, the feeling like a jolt of electricity through her nerves, and the phone drops. Nico turns, blinking, mouth still half-chanting, and Eli grabs at nothing, at the air, falling.
Her side is burning - Nico is beside her now, all questioning bright eyes and worry. Eli scrapes at the pockets of her blazer. Both the luck amulet and the fire protection pendant have melted, molten metallic substances searing through her clothes into her side like an oil spill - Nico gasps. “You’re being cursed, Eli. It’s melting your protective magic!”
“Call someone,” Eli rasps, and the heat is pressing into her throat now, crawling like flames through her skin. She props herself up by an elbow, aching, and Nico frantically rips at her own jacket, pulling out a pink phone with a neko case. Eli closes her eyes.
**
Nishikino Maki’s forehead is much too close when Eli wakes up. She gets an eyeful of the young lawyer’s teeth as Nico yells incoherently in the background. Something is wrong, really wrong - it’s in the way the darkness is so light; in the curl of Eli’s toes. There’s something odd with the way Eli is really craving a cheeseburger... or maybe a sushi platter. Dairy? She’s starving, God.
“What’s happening?”
Nico and Maki engage in a brief shoving war, shoulders and elbows in a wild collision as they swoop down to comfort Eli first. Their voices overlap.
“You’re fine, I prom-”
“Jesus, Eli, you look like you went through-”
“Stop it Maki! She’s definit-”
“At least she’s ali- Oh my God, you are not going to put this on your Snap story-”
“SO!” Nico wins; Maki falls back. Eli take the proffered hand gingerly and sits up - it feels like she’s been run over by a lawnmower. Every joint and bone complains; a slow pounding ache to the beat of her pulse... her pulse. She has a pulse. She’s alive?
“What the hell happened to me?”
“Ummmm,” says Nico, wringing her hands. “So I don’t know how exactly to put this,”
“You were killed by an alchemist’s far-reaching curse,” says Maki matter-of-factly, shaking out Eli’s dusty blazer before handing it back. “Nico raised you immediately, something she is not technically insured or licensed for.”
“Oh my,” says Eli, who is distracted by the pounding pain in her body. It’s creeping forward, no, inward, localizing itself to her stomach... she’s so hungry. She stands. Maki and Nico both start at her smooth movements. “I know I just died, but do you have any snacks?”
**
“I panicked,” Nico tells the police, abashed. Eli leans against the wooden table in the Yazawa home, taking miniscule bites from the apple Nico’s thrust at her.
“I guess you’ll be asked to testify when the hunter mages get a hold of the alchemist who paid for the curse,” Maki says quietly as the police take pictures of the scene. Eli holds her apple awkwardly, wincing as the fruit goes down her throat. It’s so uncomfortable, like the sensation of biting into wet chalk.
“Makes sense. I just...” Eli feels indescribably lame, as though being revenge-murdered by an alchemist she’d recently stripped of his license is her fault. It’s not. She’s just embarrassed, and the police are here, and she’s still so hungry. Really, she just wants to go home to her cat and listen to some classical music.
“You were the victim in an attempted murder. Also, it’s probably within your rights to sue Nico for unauthorized use of magic on you, even if it was posthumous.”
“Maki! I’m not going to sue Nico. I’m lucky she was here, or I’d be gone forever.” Eli watches as the police wrap up their interview, shaking their heads. What happens now? Maki goes over to Nico and the police, acting as the family lawyer. Eli unlocks her phone and thumbs uselessly through the apps, unsure if she should approach the legal matters. Nico has her resurrection on her Snap story. Ah. Eli’s hair looks awful, even with that filter; blonde tendrils of it just slapped over her face like a wet rag. Well, she was dead at the time, so that’s okay. Probably.
“How are you feeling?” asks Nico meekly as the police depart. Maki spins a finger in her own hair, looking impatient.
Part of Eli wants to make a joke. Her brain says “Dead,” but what comes out of her mouth is “Hungry.”
**
“So,” says the doctor, long fingers prodding at Eli’s bare stomach, purportedly searching for bumps or bruises. “Your sense of hunger hasn’t abated for thirty-two hours, despite your above-average food intake levels?” Eli holds her breath, trying not to snicker. It tickles, those cold hands, and she curses Maki internally, that ever-practical lawyer-figure, for making her go to the clinic.
But something is wrong, something that manifests in Eli coughing back up whatever she eats, and the disturbing, constant gnaw of her stomach. “I’ve tried a bit of everything in my refrigerator,” she confesses as Dr. Sonoda allows her to roll her shirt back over her torso. “If I can get over the strange, powdery taste of whatever I’m eating, it just comes back.”
“You mean vomiting, correct?” asks Sonoda, scribbling with her back to Eli. Dr. Sonoda Umi has a purple pin with faint horizontal grey stripes stuck to her lab coat, just over the breast pocket - Eli wracks her brain for the significance of that particular marker.
“Right.”
“You’ve got a necromancer’s aura on you,” says the doctor, brushing back the flood of black hair so shiny it’s almost a raven-feather blue, “I can See it plainly from here, but I’m going to turn on a mage light and try to puzzle out exactly what kinds of magic you have on you, since what you’re describing doesn’t indicate any physical ailments, considering your peak condition. This might take a moment - do you want any water?”
“Ah, no thanks.” Eli watches as Sonoda smiles, then turns and bustles around the room, pulling out an intimidatingly large machine on wheels from behind a curtain, hitting buttons and continuously checking Eli’s chart.
She remembers what the pin colors mean. Sonoda has the Sight - not a prerequisite for mage medical professionals, but certainly an advantageous one. The mage light begins to buzz, a gentle drone of white noise like rapid rainfall. “Close your eyes,” says Sonoda softly, and as Eli does so a brackish red glow descends over the clinic room.
She’s not sure how long she sits in the light, but her head is starting to pound from exhaustion when Sonoda finally dims the brightness, and the red fades from Eli’s eyelids. She blinks out the greenish afterimages and finds her doctor very close to her.
“You’re a succubus,” Sonoda says clearly.
“What?”
“Besides death magic, necromancer aura, exorcist aura, and the new succubus aura, your brief death gave you a magical cleanse. I couldn’t see any evidence of anti-illness spells or charms, though it says on your chart you’re up-to-date on your medications. You’ll probably need some vaccinations, and a follow-up with a DMS; a demonic magic specialist, to confirm your feeding schedule and sexual health following your transition into mage status.”
Sonoda is being remarkably calm - Eli is choking on her own spit. “I’m a succubus?”
Sonoda squints. “Let me call in your designated driver.”
**
Maki squints almost as hard as Dr. Sonoda when she hears the news, but she leafs through the So Now You’re A Sexual Being (Literally) pamphlet with lightning-strike focus, eyes darting through the explanatory paragraphs and clearly-staged photos of other new-succubi smiling and laughing. Dr. Sonoda, experienced with delivering bad news, fetches them all some water, and they sit in a moment of silence.
Eli can’t believe being poorly-raised from the dead and developing demonic powers is common enough to warrant a pamphlet - Maki makes her read it anyway. Eli decides to dedicate herself to the section headed When Your Life Is Suddenly All ‘Jennifer’s Body’.
“So,” says Maki slowly. “You can only gain sustenance from sexual energy now. We’ll have to... find you someone to... get some?” she suggests, awkwardly. Her hand is in her hair again, twirling fast.
“Um. Apparently.” Eli feels her entire self curling into a ball of mortification built of repulsion, apprehension, and the utter shame of admittance. “Except I’m a virgin.”
For the first time, Dr. Sonoda looks uncomfortable.