Status: and the angel of death

Montag's back in the pool room, even though she'd rather perish than be in the pool room. Hey, at least she'll get paid for this - though she doesn't know how much financial compensation could truly make up for the past couple weeks of disparate, boring suffocation in this place. She wonders how much real time has passed. A day? A year? There's no way to know.

The pool is not a pool. It's a large rectangular hole cut out of the floor to make room for the ocean. The air reeks like chlorine, but it's just a veneer; beneath the sour chemicals, the room is rich with the scent of the sea, the salt and brine. There really isn't much effort in the illusion at all. No towel racks, no diving board at the deep end, and the plastic lounge chairs buckle like wet cardboard if you actually touch them, reforming themselves once you relieve pressure. And the moon above the courtyard hasn't changed since Montag first came in here, even though it's been in wane out above the road.

She hasn't decided if this was all a deliberate design choice - a signature of sorts, like the church is - or if it's because of the body.

The body in the pool is what had alarmed them more than anything else in that first post about the hotel. There were other glaring red flags, of course, like the trains ("his blood") that pointed directly toward a certain someone, but nothing else that truly struck a panic chord. It could've just been an odd piece of fiction, or even a real anomaly that they could put on the back burner as a low-effort investigation once they had more time and humanpower. One of them might've archived the blog to study later, and they would mention it in passing, and that would be that. Except for the body.

Corpse. It's a corpse. Montag needs to keep reminding herself of that. This person is dead. At least, this physical iteration of her is dead.

It's what she's praying for, anyway, and she hasn't prayed since she was fourteen. But just looking at the body, at the wet slump of the dress hugging the bones, the fractured web of white-blonde hair coiled across the surface like milk or smoke, makes Montag's knees turn to jelly. She's facedown, but it doesn't matter. Montag sees that face every other time she blinks. There's a leather thread around the corpse's hips. Montag's dagger used to hang from that chord, on this body.

It's sitting across her thigh now. It looks out of place in the hotel, with its ruby crescent-shaped hilt, and the iridescent blade that used to be an incisor in the mouth of a dragon. It belongs to a different dream.

If Montag is honest, this isn't really about Naomi. Not at all. Naomi just had the misfortune of being here. Montag just can't let what happened to her happen again to someone else. She can't let this girl be destroyed the way she was. So they'd come.

Montag was supposed to be examining the body, but she thinks if she even looks at it for too long she might vomit so hard she blacks out. And there's no touching that body without going into the ocean, and the ocean almost certainly leads back to the dream. Or somewhere even worse. No, thanks. So she's just been sitting here on the floor, mist dampening her dark jeans. When she gets bored of not looking at the body, she stares blandly up at the unchanging moon instead.

Her lower back is killing her, though, and the humidity is making her head sticky. It's time to go waste time somewhere else. Montag is just easing up onto her haunches when the door glides open with a soft whir. She whips around, dagger gripped firm in her palm.

A young woman stands in the entryway. She has orangey-pink hair pinned up in loose space buns. Her navy gingham pants are covered in viscera, an ugly splatter of red and fleshy pink. There's something flat and hard in her dark eyes, like she's not quite present. It's a look Montag has seen on most of the faces she's seen recently. But she knows very well that this girl is lucid. Montag lowers her blade.

Naomi is clutching her bloody baseball bat in one fist, and a crumpled piece of paper in the other, so tight that her tawny knuckles have turned white and her forearm trembles. "Do you know what the fuck is going on here?" she says through gritted teeth, chin tucked almost to her chest. She looks ready to charge like a bull.

"Unfortunately, I think I have a pretty good idea," Montag replies. "Would you mind telling me who you just killed?"

"A silly rabbit. Are you with the other chick? The pirate?"

"Agent Blake? Yes, I'm with her."

"You're fucking - you're agents?" Naomi swings the bat wide, and Montag takes a careful sidestep to get out of its range. "I was mostly kidding about the nightmare FBI thing, but-"

Montag holds her palms up flat, a peace offering. "We aren't a government agency. The Ashrose Society is a fragmented set of teams who hunt and contain paranormal phenomena. We don't work for anyone or report to anyone but ourselves, and we do this because we want to keep people safe. We're here because something very dangerous is-"

"Yeah, I gathered that part, except it didn't start feeling all that dangerous until you two showed up. Or is there more than two of you?" Naomi's teeth are bared, eyes twisted up in an animal sneer. She's backed against the edge of the doorway, bat held straight out like a gun. Clumps of blood and gore, deep red, drip-drip-drip off its sides and onto the already damp floor. The coppery tang of blood mingled with the ocean scent makes Montag want to pass out, but she tries to keep her spine tall and her face calm.

"You just killed a demon, right? One that you've killed before, because it's been following you for years. Is that not dangerous?" When Naomi doesn't respond, Montag continues, "Is the fact that there's an unknown entity tampering with your blog not dangerous? Is the corpse behind me not dangerous?"

"You tell me," Naomi hisses, a challenge and a plea rolled into one. Montag realizes, then, that the young woman is terrified. Her chest is heaving like she just ran a lap, and she's physically put herself in a corner, a wounded animal.

"Okay. I will. I'm in room 818, why don't we-"

In a blink, Naomi is gone.

Montag buries her face in her hands. God, she fucking hates dreams.

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Alright. If it wasn't somewhat obvious to you up until this point, we've been committing a sin of omission. We didn't just stumble across these exclusive files, and we don't have insider knowledge by dumb luck. We know these things because we were there. We've been watching since the beginning.

In this specific case we're also not a "we," strictly speaking. I've been given the lovely task of putting this all together by myself. If I gain anything out of this, it will be a new birth control method: they won't let you go out into the field when you're pregnant, which means you get all of the tedious office tasks. Yay! My son can't come soon enough!

From here forward, all of our editor's notes will be correctly specified as Agent Martinez's notes. Sorry for the smoke and mirrors, I honestly just wanted to seem cool.

Once again, I don't know who wrote the Montag posts. Agent Montag herself is, shall we say, out of the office at the moment, and won't answer my calls or questions regarding this. Given how personal they are, she might've written them herself, though not necessarily consciously.