My Life is Horrific Chapter 24 — Hyde and Seek (Patreon)

As we drove away from her house I complained the entire way, which I felt every bit of it was justified. "I deserve a rest," I said, gripping the wheel while the last of the Addams manor's spooky treeline faded in my rearview mirror. "I deserve one single, solitary day where nothing tries to eat me, stab me, drain me, bury me, or force me into a duel. Is that too much to ask?"

Wednesday sat in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and her gaze fixed straight ahead through the windshield, offering no response whatsoever for the first several minutes of my monologue.

"You complain too much," she said finally, without turning her head.

"I'm SORRY," I said, my voice climbing an octave. "I'm sorry that I was TORN APART by a monster yesterday, and then BURIED ALIVE by you specifically, and then the very next morning got dragged into a SWORD FIGHT with your father because he apparently thinks I want to knock you up and raise you on a cul-de-sac. Forgive me for having a few complaints about my current quality of life."

"You lasted longer against my father than most people do," Wednesday said, and there was something in her flat delivery that might have been intended as a compliment, though with Wednesday it was genuinely impossible to tell, her words carrying all the warmth of a coroner's report. "He usually disarms his opponents within the first thirty seconds and you managed several minutes."

"Wow. Thanks. I'll put that on my resume."

She said nothing further, and I kept driving, the road narrowing and the houses thinning out around us until the neat grid of Derry's streets gave way to two-lane blacktop cutting through dense Maine forest on either side. After about forty minutes of silence I finally glanced over at her.

"Where the hell are we even going? We're leaving town."

"I tracked the Hyde's movement pattern to a cabin approximately six miles outside the town limits," Wednesday said, still staring straight ahead. 

"Why does this master even have a Hyde in the first place? What's the endgame?"

"Several residents of Derry have gone missing over the past few weeks," she replied. "The pattern of disappearances, combined with the specific nature of the creature responsible, strongly suggests the individual controlling it is a witch."

"A witch," I said flatly.

Wednesday nodded. "Witches frequently require organic material for ritual purposes. Fingers. Eyes. Teeth. Occasionally entire limbs, depending on the complexity of the working. A Hyde is an efficient method of harvesting such material without exposing the witch herself to direct risk."

I shivered, my hands tightening slightly on the wheel. "Okay. Fine. I'll help you deal with this. But after this, I'm out. I've got enough going on in my life without adding witch hunting to the list of hobbies."

Wednesday turned her head toward me for the first time since we had left the manor. "Elaborate," she said. "What exactly do you mean by that."

I glanced at her, feeling suddenly exposed under that unblinking stare and shifted my grip on the wheel. "Our town's kind of a mess. That's all I mean."

"I disagree," Wednesday said, turning back to face the road ahead. "Derry is, without exception, the most tedious place I have ever been forced to reside. The people are dull. The school is a soul-crushing exercise in mediocrity. Nothing of genuine interest has occurred since we arrived, with the singular exception of the recent appearance of a witch, which I consider a mild improvement to an otherwise bleak existence."

I laughed loudly and Wednesday's hand moved so fast I barely registered it before she had plucked the car's cigarette lighter from the dash and pressed the glowing coil directly against the back of my hand.

"OW! What the hell is your PROBLEM?!"

Wednesday said nothing. She simply set the lighter back in its cradle and crossed her arms again.

"Fine," I snapped, shaking my stinging hand against my thigh. "You want to know? You want the full picture of what dull, boring Derry is actually like? Let me lay it out for you. My friend's father is basically a spook for some kind of shadowy government who looks like he's one bad day away from disappearing me into a black site. We go to school with a girl who is one bad prom night away from telekinetically leveling this entire town. There's a serial killer living here who can make people explode just by touching them and who has a specific fetish for women's hands. And if none of that is exciting enough for you, there is an extra-dimensional monster living in the sewers beneath this town that takes the form of a clown, feeds on fear, and has been kidnapping and murdering children on a twenty-seven year cycle since before this country existed."

I took a breath.

"So yeah. That's what I have to deal with, on top of everything else. So forgive me if I don't have a lot of enthusiasm left over for your shit."

I let out a long, exhausted sigh and let the silence hang in the car for a few seconds.

Wednesday didn't say anything at first. When I glanced over, a small smile had crept onto her face, so subtle it might have been a trick of the light. 

"So this town is not boring at all," she said, with something that in anyone else would have been called delight.

"That is not the takeaway I was going for."

"You are going to show me all of it."

"Fuck no."

"I insist."

"I refuse."

Without warning she unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed directly into my lap, straddling my legs while I was actively driving sixty miles an hour down a two-lane road, the Mustang lurched hard to the right as I fought the wheel one-handed with her weight suddenly blocking half my view.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WE'RE GOING TO CRASH—"

"Take me to see them," Wednesday said, entirely unbothered, her face inches from mine while I wrestled the car back into the lane.

"GET OFF, I CAN'T SEE THE ROAD—"

"Say you will show me."

"WEDNESDAY—"

"Say it."

"FINE! FINE, I'LL SHOW YOU, JUST GET OFF ME BEFORE WE DIE—"

She slid back into the passenger seat buckling her belt as calmly as if none of that had just happened, while I hauled the wheel straight and got the Mustang back under control, my heart hammering against my ribs.

"You are insane," I said, my voice cracking slightly.

"Stop being such a baby," Wednesday replied, examining her nails. "Had the car crashed, it is statistically unlikely either of us would have died. You possess a healing factor, and I am considerably more durable than I appear."

"I'm not worried about us, I'm worried about my car!"

Wednesday rolled her eyes, the closest thing to genuine exasperation I had seen from her yet, and said nothing further.

The rest of the drive passed without major incident, though I did not let up complaining once we left the paved road entirely and started bouncing along a rutted dirt track that cut deeper into the woods, my beautiful Mustang groaning in protest with every branch that scraped along its flanks and every splash of mud that kicked up onto the paint.

"This car is going to need a full detail after this," I muttered. "You know that, right? A full detail. Mud in the wheel wells, scratches on the—"

"We have arrived," Wednesday said, cutting through my complaint without acknowledging it at all.

I pulled the Mustang to a stop in a small clearing and killed the engine. Through the windshield, half-swallowed by overgrown brush and leaning trees, sat a house that looked like it had been built specifically to appear in the opening scene of a horror movie.

"Is this the right place?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

"It is."

"I was afraid you'd say that."

I reached across Wednesday, popped the glove box, and pulled out the compact pistol I kept there, checking the magazine before tucking it into my waistband.

"Alright," I said. "Let's get this over with."

We climbed out of the car and moved carefully across the clearing toward the house. "Do you know what this witch is capable of?" I asked under my breath.

"Illusion magic, most likely," Wednesday said calmly. "Possibly curses transmitted through touch or eye contact. Some witches can compel obedience with a spoken word. Others can rot flesh from a distance simply by wishing it. A few have been known to steal voices, memories, or years of life. I would advise against speaking to her directly, looking directly into her eyes, or accepting anything she offers you."

I swallowed hard. "Cool. Cool cool cool."

We reached the front door, and I pulled the Sonic Screwdriver from my jacket, aiming it at the lock and thumbing it on.

Wednesday's dark eyes flicked to the device with open curiosity. "What is that."

"It's just a thing I made," I said, tucking it back into my jacket. "Helps with locked doors."

She looked at me for a moment with an expression that made it very clear she did not believe a single word of that explanation, but she said nothing further, and we pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The interior was exactly what you'd expect from a witch's cabin in the middle of the woods, if you'd spent any time at all watching horror movies in your previous life. Dried herbs hung in bundles from the ceiling beams, jars lined every shelf containing things I did not want to look at too closely, a large cauldron sat in the fireplace, and strange symbols had been burned or carved into the wooden floorboards in patterns that made my eyes want to slide away from them.

We drifted apart to look around, Wednesday examining a shelf of jars while I picked my way through the clutter with significantly more caution.

"This place is a shithole," I muttered, nudging aside a pile of what looked like animal bones with my foot.

"Do not touch anything," Wednesday said sharply, without looking up from the jar she was studying. "Several of these objects could easily be cursed."

I froze mid-reach toward a small wooden box on the mantelpiece and slowly withdrew my hand, opting instead to just look at things from a respectful distance.

"Is she even here?" I asked, glancing around the empty room.

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

Wednesday turned and fixed me with an unimpressed stare. "How exactly would I know the witch's current location?"

"I thought you'd have a plan!" I hissed back at her.

She said nothing and simply looked at me.

"Don't tell me you have no plan at all." I said. 

Wednesday crossed her arms. "I did not require one."

"You dragged me out here, into the middle of the woods, to fight a witch with no plan?"

"Planning implies uncertainty about outcomes," Wednesday said. "I was not uncertain."

"That is not how plans WORK—"

"A plan would not have helped you dearies," came a new voice threading through the room from every direction at once. 

I spun toward the sound, gun already coming up, and found a woman standing in the doorway to the kitchen who had not been there a second before, tall with grey matted hair and eyes that were yellow.

"You should not have come here," the witch said, her cracked lips pulling back into something that might have once been a smile. "But since you have, I find I am not entirely displeased. I can feel the power radiating from both of you." Her yellow eyes drifted first to Wednesday, lingering with a hunger that made my skin crawl. "Your eyes will do nicely." Then they slid to me, and her smile widened. "And you. All of you, I think. Your whole body will—"

I started shooting mid-sentence.

The shots cracked through the small room in rapid succession, and the witch cackled and her body dissolved into a mass of black birds that scattered through the cabin in every direction.

"I was hoping that would work," I muttered, lowering the gun.

"You idiot," Wednesday said. "The only reliable method of killing a witch is strangulation. Bullets are almost entirely ineffective against them."

"You could have said that BEFORE I wasted four rounds!"

"You did not ask."

"I shouldn't HAVE to ask that, that seems like fairly essential informat—"

A shuffling footstep from the kitchen doorway cut both of us off mid-argument, and we turned in unison to find a naked man standing there staring at us with a blank expression.

We both looked at him for a second.

Then his skin began to ripple, and his shoulders cracked and widened, and his face split apart and reformed into a familiar nightmare of grey-blue flesh and shark teeth and pale eyes.

"Run," I said to Wednesday, and we both bolted for the front door.

Except the door was gone replaced by solid wall where the entrance had been just moments before, and I skidded to a stop so hard I nearly fell.

"FUCK!" I shouted, ducking under a clawed swipe that would have taken my head off, before grabbing Wednesday's sleeve and hauling both of us into a side corridor that hadn't been there when we walked in.

The house was changing around us.

The corridor stretched longer than it should have, the walls lined with doors that multiplied the further we ran, and every time I glanced back the hallway behind us seemed to have grown by another twenty feet, the witch's influence bending the architecture into something that defied the modest little cabin we had walked into.

"She's manipulating the house!" Wednesday shouted over the pounding footsteps of the Hyde behind us. "Extending the internal dimensions beyond the physical structure! It's a common defensive working among practitioners of her tradition!"

"That's GREAT, how do we get her to STOP?!"

"I don't know!"

"You said you didn't need a PLAN!"

We burst through a door thet opened into another identical stretch of hallway, more doors lining both sides, the Hyde's heavy footfalls closing in behind us. I yanked the Sonic Screwdriver from my jacket as we ran, thumbing through its settings in a blind panic, remembering trivia from my old life about the show it came from, something about the time lords being able to manipulate dimensional fields, spatial anomalies, pocket realities, so maybe the sonic screwdriver could disrupt them.

"What are you doing?!" Wednesday demanded, glancing sideways at the device in my hand while we sprinted.

"I don't know, trying something, shut up and keep running!"

I extended the screwdriver's tip with a flick of my thumb, cycling through a series of settings that clicked and whirred under my fingers, each one producing a slightly different tone, and I scrolled through them as fast as I could while my lungs burned and the Hyde's snarling breath grew louder behind us.

"THERE!" I shouted, my thumb catching on a setting that made the device vibrate hard enough to sting my palm, and I spun on my heel, pointed it back down the length of the impossible corridor, and thumbed the activation.

The screwdriver let out a whine that built rapidly into a single burst, and the hallway around us shuddered, the walls flexing inward like a held breath finally released, the multiplying doors collapsing back into a single ordinary hallway barely twenty feet long.

The Hyde, no longer given the extended runway the witch's magic had provided, crashed directly into the now much-closer wall at the end of the corridor with a splintering impact that brought down a shower of plaster and lath.

"Go!" I shouted at Wednesday, slapping both palms against the exposed wooden wall beside us and pulling the material across my body. "Find the witch, I'll handle him!"

"James—"

"GO!"

I didn't wait for her response. I lowered my armored shoulder and drove myself into the Hyde as it wrenched itself free of the wreckage, the impact sending both of us crashing through the already weakened wall into the room beyond, and I grabbed a fistful of its shoulder before it could reorient, giving Wednesday the opening she needed to bolt past us and disappear down the hall in search of the witch.

Then it was just me and the Hyde.

It came at me immediately, claws raking across my chest in a swipe that gouged deep furrows in the wood armor, and I answered with a rapid combination, driving three strikes into its exposed ribs, each blow landing before the last had finished registering. 

It grabbed for my arm and I redirected the grab with an inward parry, spinning it half a step off balance before driving an elbow into the side of its jaw, chaining immediately into a rising knee that folded it forward at the waist.

It recovered faster than I thought, snapping back upright and catching my next punch mid-swing with one clawed hand, crushing my knuckles together hard enough that I felt something crack even through the wood armor, and it used the grip to haul me forward directly into a wall before slamming me into a wardrobe. 

I kicked off him and staggered back, shook my head to clear it, and barely got my guard up in time to block a follow-up slash that would have opened my throat, the impact still strong enough to crack the armor along my forearm into fragments that fell away in chunks.

I was losing ground fast, the wood plating chipping and splintering with every exchange, and in a burst of raw desperation I reached for the telekinesis and I pushed everything I had into a single unfocused scream of will.

The Hyde was hurled backward off its feet and slammed into the far wall hard enough to crater the wood around it, pinned there for one brief second before the force dissipated and it dropped to the floor in a crouch.

I tried to reach for that same well of power again, tried to summon another blast, and found nothing there, leaving me with nothing but my fists.

"Okay let's do this the old fashion way," I panted. 

The Hyde surged back to its feet and came at me again, and we traded blows across the wrecked room, my strikes landing but not slowing it, its claws finding gaps in my crumbling armor and opening thin lines across my ribs and shoulder that stung and bled and began, slowly, to knit shut even as fresh wounds opened elsewhere. 

I caught one wrist and twisted, using the leverage to redirect its momentum into a nearby dresser that splintered under the impact, and used the half-second opening to focus everything I had left into the Osmosian shaping ability, willing what remained of the wood coating on both my forearms to stretch and taper and harden into two long, wicked spikes jutting eighteen inches past my knuckles.

It lunged at me one final time, claws extended for my throat, and I met it head on, driving both wooden spikes forward with everything my legs and hips could contribute, and I felt them punch through its chest with a wet crunch that buried them to the hilt.

The Hyde froze.

Then it screeched, a high, agonized wail that rattled the windows and sent a spray of dark blood across the ruined floorboards, and it wrenched itself backward off the spikes with a violence that tore through what little armor I had left, my remaining wood plating shattering into splinters that scattered across the room.

It swung one massive clawed hand, catching me dead center with the full force of its strength, which sent me flying into the wall where I felt my arm snap in half. 

The Hyde staggered back, clutching at its own head with both hands, and let out another shriek, this one different, higher, more human, and I watched through a haze of pain as its grey-blue skin rippled and receded, the massive frame shrinking and softening back into the shape of an ordinary man, who turned and bolted from the room, crashing through what remained of the doorway and disappearing into the house.

I knelt there in the wreckage, cradling my broken arm against my chest breathing in short gasps.

A few moments later Wednesday appeared in the doorway, stepping over debris and crossed the room to crouch beside me.

"You look terrible," she observed.

"Thanks," I wheezed. "Did you, did you get the witch?"

"She was considerably easier to handle once you disrupted her working with that device of yours," Wednesday said. "Without the extended architecture to hide within, she had nowhere left to retreat."

I let out a long breath of relief.

Then Wednesday grabbed my broken forearm with both hands and snapped it back into alignment with a sharp, practiced twist.

"AAAAAGH! What the FUCK, Wednesday, some  warning next time—"

"It needed to be reset before it healed incorrectly," she said, entirely unbothered by my screaming. "You're welcome."

I sat there gritting my teeth while the pain radiated up into my shoulder, and after a few seconds I forced my breathing to slow. "It'll take maybe an hour to heal properly," I muttered, more to myself than to her.

I looked over at Wednesday.

She was still staring at me, her eyes fixed on my face with an intensity that hadn't been there a moment ago.

"What?" I asked.

Without answering, Wednesday climbed into my lap, straddling my legs the same way she had in the car, and this time there was no wheel to hide behind, no road to focus on, nothing but her body settling over me while she reached up and took my face in both hands, turning it slightly from side to side as though studying a piece of art. Then, to my genuine confusion, she leaned in and inhaled slowly near my neck and jaw, the way someone might smell a candle.

"You make my chest hurt," she said in a flat voice. "A tight, burning sensation, here." She pressed two fingers briefly against her own sternum. "It is deeply irritating. It should not be possible for a person to produce this reaction in me. And yet you do, perhaps it is because you wre without question, the single most interesting individual I have encountered in this town, possibly in my entire life, and that fact makes the irritation considerably worse."

I laughed nervously. "Okay, ha, that's, that's a great, maybe we should, maybe we should head out, get you home—"

Wednesday's hand shot up and gripped my jaw, tilting my head back and bringing her face down close to mine, close enough that I could feel her breath against my skin.

"It is infuriating," she murmured, "that I find even your scent pleasant."

Despite Wednesday slightly terrifying me she was still incredibly beautiful so the moment she ground her body against me of course I got an erection. 

Wednesday's eyes held mine for a long moment.

Then she rolled her hips down against my erection, and I felt her whole body go rigid, her fingers tightening against my jaw as her breath caught.

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but no words came out.

Wednesday pulled back, released my face, and rose off my lap, straightening her dress before turning and walking out through the ruined doorway without another word, leaving me sitting alone in the wreckage of a witch's collapsed magic house with a broken arm slowly knitting itself back together and absolutely no idea what had just happened.

I sat there for a long moment in the settling dust and let out a long, exhausted breath.

"Crazy women," I muttered to no one. "I am surrounded by crazy, crazy women."

(AN: So yeah Wednesday finds herself with a little crush on the MC but I can't just do it normally. This is Wednesday after all so she definitely won't handle this a normal way. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)