Chapter 19:
– Raven –
The buffet hall of the cruise liner was a large space of polished brass fixtures and floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a panoramic view of the darkening Atlantic. Crystal chandeliers swayed gently with the motion of the ship, casting warm pools of light across the long tables laden with food from a dozen different cuisines. The air was thick with the mingled aromas of roasted meats, fresh bread, and something cloyingly sweet from the dessert station.
Raven sat rigidly in a velvet-upholstered chair, her blue cloak wrapped tightly around her shoulders like armor. Her hood was up, casting her face in familiar shadow, though she suspected even that couldn't hide the persistent flush that had taken up residence in her cheeks ever since... since.
Across the small table, Starfire was practically glowing. And not in the metaphorical sense. The Tamaranean's orange skin genuinely seemed to emit a faint, warm luminescence when she was in a particularly good mood. Her green eyes sparkled with an enthusiasm that Raven found deeply, profoundly unsettling given the context.
"Friend Raven," Starfire began, leaning forward on her elbows with her chin propped in her hands. The posture pushed her generous cleavage together in a way that drew glances from three separate tables. She seemed entirely oblivious. "I must ask you something of the personal nature."
Raven's stomach clenched. "Starfire, I really don't think—"
"Was that the first time?" Starfire interrupted, her voice carrying that musical, lilting quality that made even the most mortifying questions sound innocent. "The mating ritual with Friend Amara. Was it your first experience of the sexual intimacy?"
A waiter passing by with a tray of champagne flutes stumbled, nearly sending crystal flying across the carpet. Raven wished desperately that she could sink through the floor and into whatever maintenance deck lay beneath them.
"Starfire," she hissed, her voice dropping to an urgent whisper. "We are in public."
"I am being quiet!" Starfire protested, though her version of quiet was still approximately three times louder than Raven's normal speaking voice. "I am simply curious! You were making such wonderful sounds of the pleasure, and your face was doing the expressions I have never seen you make before!" She clasped her hands together, pressing them against her chest in a gesture of sincere delight. "It was truly an honor and a privilege to witness my best friend lose her virginity in such a passionate manner!"
The words hit Raven.
Best friend.
She stared at Starfire, momentarily forgetting her embarrassment in the face of genuine confusion. "Your... best friend?" she repeated slowly, as if testing foreign words on her tongue. "Starfire, we've barely spent time together outside of missions. We don't... we've never really..." She trailed off, uncertain how to articulate the distance that had always existed between them.
Starfire was sunshine and enthusiasm and tactile affection that made Raven's skin crawl. Raven was shadows and solitude and a desperate need for personal space that Starfire seemed constitutionally incapable of understanding. They were teammates, certainly. They had fought side by side, bled together, saved each other's lives more times than Raven could count.
But best friends?
Starfire's expression softened, some of the manic energy draining away to reveal something more vulnerable beneath. "I know that we have not done the hanging out as much as I would have liked," she admitted, her fingers tracing idle patterns on the tablecloth. "Especially after... after what happened with Dick." She paused, and for just a moment, a shadow passed across her luminous features. "I know that many of our friends have chosen sides. I know that you have been spending more time with him, helping him heal from me ruining our relationship."
Raven opened her mouth to say something, she wasn't sure what, but Starfire continued before she could form words.
"But you have never treated me with the coldness, Friend Raven. You have never looked at me with the judgment in your eyes, even when others did. You have always been... fair." Starfire's smile returned, though it was gentler now, tinged with a gratitude that made Raven's chest feel tight. "On Tamaran, that kind of loyalty is the foundation of the deepest friendships. You may not realize it, but you have always been my best friend. Even when we were not doing the hanging out!"
Raven didn't know what to say to that.
Before she could formulate a response, Starfire's expression shifted back to that familiar, teasing brightness. "But we are straying from the topic of importance!" she declared, slapping her palms on the table with enough force to rattle the silverware. "You have not answered my question! Was Friend Amara a talented lover? I must know the details!"
"Oh my god," Raven muttered, burying her face in her hands.
"The sounds you were making suggested she was very skilled with the tail," Starfire pressed on, utterly relentless. "It looked like you enjoyed yourself very much! Would you be open to sharing Amara with me? I would like to experience pleasure like that too!"
"Starfire, please."
"And when you both climaxed at the same time it was so beautiful!" Starfire's eyes went wide with remembered wonder.
"Can we talk about literally anything else?" Raven's voice came out strangled, her face burning so hot she was genuinely concerned she might spontaneously combust.
Across the buffet hall, she could see Beast Boy and Cyborg at the food stations. Beast Boy had shifted into a gorilla form and was using the extra strength while piling an improbable amount of tofu dishes onto his plate while simultaneously arguing with Cyborg about something, probably meat, knowing those two.
They were blissfully unaware of the mortifying interrogation happening at the corner table. Raven envied them with every fiber of her being.
"I am simply trying to understand!" Starfire protested, though her grin suggested she was enjoying Raven's discomfort far more than a true innocent would. "On Tamaran, it is customary to discuss sexual encounters in great detail with one's closest companions. It is how we learn and grow as lovers! I am only trying to help you process the experience!"
"I don't need help processing," Raven ground out through clenched teeth. "I need help forgetting that you watched the entire thing while covered in someone else's—" She cut herself off, unable to finish the sentence.
Starfire laughed, a bright, ringing sound that turned heads throughout the buffet. "You are so adorable when you are embarrassed, Friend Raven! Your grey skin turns the most lovely shade of purple! It matches your—" she dropped her voice to what she clearly thought was a conspiratorial whisper, "—your special intimate areas, yes?"
Raven seriously considered teleporting herself into the Atlantic Ocean. The worst part, Raven realized with mounting dread, was that this conversation was far from over.
She watched Beast Boy and Cyborg making their way back from the food stations, their plates piled high with competing philosophies of cuisine. Beast Boy had shifted back to his human form, though he was still gesturing emphatically with a fork loaded with something that looked like seasoned tofu. Cyborg was shaking his head, clearly in the middle of their eternal carnivore-versus-herbivore debate, a massive rack of barbecued ribs balanced precariously on his own plate.
They were heading straight for the table.
Starfire noticed them too, and her face lit up with an enthusiasm that made Raven's blood run cold. She knew that expression. That was the expression Starfire wore right before she shared information that absolutely should not be shared.
"Oh wonderful!" Starfire exclaimed, clapping her hands together. "Friends Cyborg and Beast Boy are returning! I cannot wait to tell them about Friend Raven's sexual awakening!"
"Starfire, I swear to Azar, if you say one word—" Raven was cut off.
"They will be so happy for you! Beast Boy has been saying for years that you needed to get the laid!"
Raven's eye twitched. She was going to murder Beast Boy. She was going to murder Starfire. She was going to teleport this entire cruise ship into a dimension of eternal silence where no one could ever speak again.
And then, of course, there was the other problem.
Amara and Bellatrix were supposed to be joining them any minute now. Raven had agreed to introduce Amara to the rest of the team, to try to build some kind of bridge between the beautiful chaos witch and the heroes who would normally be trying to arrest her. It had seemed like a reasonable idea at the time hours ago back when Raven's brain had been functioning properly, before Amara had done... things to her. Things that had apparently short-circuited whatever part of her mind was responsible for good decision-making.
Now she was going to have to sit at a table with her teammates, the woman she'd just lost her virginity to, and said woman's psychotic fake mother, while Starfire loudly narrated every detail of their encounter to anyone within earshot.
This was going to be a disaster of unprecedented proportions.
Beast Boy was almost at the table now, his green face split in a wide grin as he said something that made Cyborg laugh. Starfire was practically vibrating with barely contained gossip. Raven braced herself, already preparing the most withering glare in her arsenal—
The windows exploded!
The massive floor-to-ceiling panels that had offered such a beautiful view of the Atlantic shattered inward. Every single one of them. Simultaneously.
She threw up a shield instinctively, dark energy coalescing around herself and Starfire in a dome of black light. Shards of glass pinged harmlessly off the barrier, but beyond its protection, chaos was already erupting.
They came through the shattered windows in a tide of scales and fury.
The creatures were hideous. They were vaguely humanoid, but only in the loosest sense, their bodies twisted amalgamations of fish and nightmare. Their skin was a mottled grey-green, slick with seawater and what looked disturbingly like old blood. Webbed hands ended in claws that gleamed like dirty bone. Their faces were fish-like and distorted, with bulging yellow eyes and mouths crammed full of needle-sharp teeth that jutted at impossible angles.
They carried weapons. Rusty tridents, barnacle-encrusted spears, crude blades that looked like they'd been forged from shipwreck debris.
And there were dozens of them. They poured through the broken windows in an endless stream, their webbed feet slapping against the glass-strewn carpet, their mouths opening to release wet, rattling shrieks that sounded like drowning men screaming underwater.
Fuck, Raven thought, the word crystallizing in her mind with perfect clarity. These are the things that emptied that cruise ship.
The buffet hall had been packed with passengers enjoying their evening meal. Families with children. Elderly couples. Young honeymooners feeding each other dessert. All of them were now screaming, scrambling, trampling each other in their desperate attempts to reach the exits!
The creatures didn't discriminate.
The first kill happened before Raven could even drop her shield. One of the monsters—faster than its shambling gait suggested—lunged at a man in a Hawaiian shirt who had frozen in shock near the seafood station. Its claws raked across his throat in a spray of arterial crimson, and before his body had even hit the ground, the creature's mouth was on him, those needle teeth tearing into flesh with a wet, ripping sound that Raven knew would add to all the bad memories that haunted her nightmares.
It was eating him. Right there, in the middle of the buffet hall, surrounded by screaming humans and shattered glass, the creature was eating him.
"Titans, GO!" The words tore out of Raven's throat before she consciously decided to speak them.
Beast Boy's half-finished plate of tofu clattered to the floor as his body rippled and expanded, green skin sprouting fur and muscle in a transformation so fast it was almost instantaneous. Where a lanky teenager had stood a moment before, now there was a massive green gorilla, eight hundred pounds of primate fury that roared with enough force to rattle the remaining glass in the window frames.
He launched himself at the nearest cluster of creatures, massive fists swinging. The first punch connected with a creature's skull and caved it in like a rotten melon, spraying purple-black ichor across the white tablecloths. The second punch sent another monster flying backward through the air to slam into the dessert station, its body crumpling around the impact point with a sound like snapping celery.
Cyborg was right behind him. His arm had already reconfigured into its cannon form, the sonic emitter humming with building charge.
"Booyah!" The blast caught three of the creatures in a line, the concentrated sound waves hitting them with enough force to liquify their internal organs. They dropped like marionettes with cut strings, purple blood leaking from their eyes and ears and the corners of their too-wide mouths.
Starfire rose into the air to get a better vantage, her eyes and hands blazing with crackling green energy. Then she opened fire. Starbolt after starbolt rained down into the buffet hall, each impact detonating with enough force to scatter creatures and furniture alike. The bolts punched through scaled bodies like they were made of wet paper, leaving smoking holes the size of dinner plates. Where groups of creatures clustered together, Starfire's attacks turned them into abstract paintings of viscera and flame.
"These are the monsters that devoured the people on the empty ship!" Starfire shouted, her voice carrying over the chaos. "Do not hold back! They are the enemies who must be destroyed!"
Raven immediately threw herself into the fight. A creature had cornered a woman near the salad bar—a middle-aged passenger in a floral sundress, her face a mask of terror as the monster advanced on her with its rusty trident raised. Raven reached out with her power, dark energy wrapping around the creature like tentacles of living shadow, and pulled.
The monster came apart.
It wasn't a clean death. Raven's magic tore it in half at the waist, the two pieces separating with a wet, sucking sound. The creature's yellow eyes went wide with what might have been surprise before the light faded from them, and both halves of its body collapsed to the floor in a spreading pool of purple-black blood.
The woman in the sundress stared at Raven with an expression that wasn't quite gratitude—more like she wasn't sure if she'd been saved or if she should be afraid of her savior too. But she was alive. That was what mattered.
"Run," Raven told her, her voice flat and cold. "Get to the interior of the ship. Now."
The woman ran.
Raven turned back to the chaos. The buffet hall had become a slaughterhouse. Bodies lay scattered among the overturned tables and shattered china—some of them passengers who hadn't been fast enough, others the twisted corpses of the sea creatures. The carpet squelched underfoot, saturated with blood both red and purple. The air stank of copper and brine and something else, something rotten and oceanic that made Raven's stomach turn.
More creatures were still pouring through the windows. For every one the Titans killed, two more seemed to take its place.
Where are they all coming from? Raven thought grimly, lashing out with another tendril of dark energy to catch a creature that had been about to sink its teeth into a screaming child's arm. She pulled the monster away and slammed it into the ceiling hard enough to crack the plaster, then let it drop. It didn't get back up.
The child's mother scooped her up and fled toward the exits, adding her screams to the cacophony.
Across the hall, Beast Boy had shifted again—now he was a massive green tiger, powerful muscle and claw and fang, tearing through the creatures with savage efficiency. Purple blood matted his fur, but he didn't slow down, didn't hesitate. He pounced on a creature that had been dragging a wounded man toward the windows, jaws closing around its throat with a crunch of cartilage.
Cyborg had switched to his arm-mounted laser, the red beam cutting through creatures like a hot knife through butter. "There's too many of them!" he shouted, firing again and again. "We need to—"
A creature lunged at him from behind. Before it could reach him, a starbolt vaporized its head, Starfire swooping down from above with murder in her glowing green eyes.
"We need to protect the civilians first!" Raven shouted back, catching another creature with her powers and crushing it against the wall. The purple-black splatter it left behind was almost artistic. "Get them out of here! Seal the exits once they're clear!"
She couldn't heal anyone. Not yet. Not with these monsters still flooding through the windows, still tearing into anyone too slow to escape. The injured would have to wait.
Amara, Raven thought suddenly, a spike of concern cutting through her battle focus. She and Bellatrix are supposed to be coming here.
She reached out with her empathic senses, searching for that familiar dark signature, and found it. Two floors up. And leaving a trail of death in its wake.
Well—
At least that was some good news…?
– Amara –
The corridor was a mess of violence and blood.
Bodies littered the carpet, some of them passengers who hadn't been fast enough, their vacation clothes soaked through with spreading crimson, their faces frozen in expressions of terminal surprise. But most of the corpses were the creatures. They lay in twisted heaps against the walls, draped over overturned luggage carts, crumpled in doorways they'd been trying to breach. Purple-black blood painted the walls in abstract patterns, pooling in the carpet until my boots squelched with every step.
"Reducto!" Bellatrix's curse caught a creature mid-lunge, the spell hitting it square in the chest. The thing didn't just die—it detonated, chunks of grey-green flesh and shattered bone spraying across the corridor in a wet explosion that painted the brass light fixtures purple. She laughed and spun to face another monster that had been trying to flank us. "Avada Kedavra!" The green light flashed. The creature dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, dead before it hit the ground.
I raised my own wand, feeling the familiar warmth of my soul-bound weapon humming against my palm. Two more of the things were shambling toward us from a maintenance corridor, their yellow eyes gleaming with hunger, their mouths hanging open to reveal those rows of needle teeth.
"Burn," I commanded, and my fire answered.
They shrieked, their bodies thrashing as the flames consumed them from the outside in. I watched their scales blister and split, watched the flesh beneath bubble and char, watched their yellow eyes burst from the heat before they finally, mercifully, collapsed into smoking ruins on the carpet.
"Oh, this is cathartic," Bellatrix crooned, stepping over the still-smoldering corpses with the casual grace of a woman who was long used to scenes like this. "I do so love a good massacre, daughter. It's been far too long since I've had the opportunity to truly let loose." She punctuated the statement by flicking her wand at a creature that had been lurking behind an ice machine. The Cruciatus Curse hit it, and the thing writhed on the floor, keening in agony, before she ended its suffering with a casual Killing Curse. "But," she continued, her nose wrinkling in distaste as we rounded another corner, "I must admit, this feels rather... goody-goody for my tastes." She said the words like they were something foul she'd found on the bottom of her shoe. "Playing hero. Saving MUGGLE lives...Ugh…"
As if to illustrate her point, a cabin door burst open just ahead of us, and a family of four came tumbling out—a father in a bathrobe, a mother clutching a toddler to her chest, and a boy of maybe eight or nine with tears streaming down his face. They'd clearly been hiding, and just as clearly, they'd chosen the wrong moment to make a break for it.
A creature was right behind them, its webbed claws reaching for the mother's back.
"Confringo!" I shouted, and the Blasting Curse caught the monster in the side of the head. The explosion of bone and brain matter sprayed across the corridor wall, and the headless body crumpled sideways.
The family stared at me—at my wand, at the dead creature, at the destruction surrounding us. The mother's face cycled through shock, terror, and something that might have been gratitude before settling on a kind of primal, animal fear that had nothing to do with the monsters and everything to do with me.
"Run," I told them, my voice flat.
They ran.
The father grabbed his son's hand and practically dragged the family down the corridor, not looking back, not saying thank you. Just fleeing, like I was every bit as dangerous as the things that had been trying to eat them.
Which, to be fair, I was worse.
Bellatrix watched them go with undisguised contempt. "Muggles," she spat, like the word itself was an insult. "Ungrateful, worthless creatures. We save their pathetic lives and they look at us like we're the monsters." She snorted, flicking a glob of purple blood off her wand.
I didn't respond. I was too busy wrestling with the complicated knot of emotions tangling in my chest.
Part of me agreed with her. The dark, hungry part that fed on lust and reveled in violence and didn't give a single fuck about the lives of strangers. That part looked at the fleeing family and felt nothing but cold indifference.
Why should I care?
But there was another part of me too. Smaller now, quieter, but still there—buried beneath the demonic blood and the dark magic. The part that remembered being Heather Potter, unwanted and alone, desperately hoping someone would save her from the endless grey misery of her existence. The part that remembered what it felt like to be helpless, to be prey, to know that no one was coming to rescue you.
That part felt something when I saved those people. Not satisfaction, exactly. Not the warm glow of righteousness that heroes probably felt. But... something. A faint echo of the person I used to be, still trying to claw her way to the surface.
I was broken. I knew that. The combination of succubus blood and dark magic and trauma had twisted me into something that would never fit neatly into categories like "hero" or "villain." I didn't save people because it was the right thing to do. I didn't feel joy when innocents escaped harm. The moral compass that should have guided me had been shattered somewhere along the way, and I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to piece it back together.
'...Sirius would have been proud of me.' The thought surfaced, and I grabbed onto it like a lifeline.
And Raven.
And Kara.
And Dick.
And maybe Daphne and Astoria?
I wasn't doing this to be a hero. I would never be a hero. The concept felt foreign to me now, like a language I'd once spoken fluently but had since forgotten. But I could do this to make them happy. I could hold onto that feeling. Hold on to the knowledge that the people I cared about would be proud of me, and use it to fuel my actions. It wasn't noble. It wasn't selfless. It was entirely, pathetically about my own emotional needs.
But it was something I could work with.
"Come on," I said to Bellatrix, pushing the complicated feelings down into the pit of my stomach where they couldn't distract me. "We need to find Raven and the others…"
We fought our way through two more corridors, leaving a trail of charred and cursed corpses in our wake. The creatures kept coming—through doorways, around corners, occasionally bursting through walls with enough force to shower us with splinters of wood and plaster. Bellatrix killed with gleeful abandon, her repertoire of dark curses seemingly endless. I killed with cold efficiency, my fire burning hot and hungry, consuming everything it touched.
Finally, we burst through a set of double doors and emerged onto the open deck.
The night air hit me, cold and salt-laden, whipping my hair around my face. I walked to the railing and looked over the side of the ship.
The ocean was wrong. It should have been dark water stretching to the horizon, maybe some whitecaps from the ship's passage, nothing more. Instead, the surface churned and roiled like a pot of water coming to a boil. Shapes moved beneath the waves—hundreds of them, thousands of them, a writhing mass of grey-green bodies that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction.
And they were climbing.
The hull of the cruise ship was covered in them. They scaled the metal surface like insects, their webbed claws finding purchase in every seam and rivet, their yellow eyes gleaming in the reflected light from the ship's windows. For every one we'd killed inside, there were dozens more ascending from the depths. Hundreds more. An army pulling themselves out of the black water to feast on the floating buffet of human flesh above.
"Mother of Merlin," Bellatrix breathed beside me, and for the first time since I'd met her, I heard something other than manic confidence in her voice.
I turned to look at her. Her pale face had gone even paler, her dark eyes wide as they tracked the endless tide of creatures swarming up the ship's hull. Her wand hand trembled almost imperceptibly before she steadied it through sheer force of will.
"I..." She swallowed hard, her throat bobbing. "I don't know if I have enough magic to kill that many, Amara. Even at my peak, even before Azkaban..." She shook her head, a laugh escaping her that was more hysteria than humor. "There are limits. Even for me."
I stared back out at the churning ocean, at the thousands of monsters that wanted to tear everyone on this ship apart and devour them piece by piece.
My magical core felt strong. Stronger than it ever had, actually, thanks to sleeping with Raven. I could feel the expanded capacity humming through my veins like liquid fire. But even so, even with my enhanced power...
That was a lot of fucking fish people.
"Yeah," I agreed quietly, watching another wave of creatures crest the railing fifty feet down the deck. "That's going to be a problem…"
…We picked up the pace, jogging through corridors that grew progressively more destroyed the closer we got to the main dining area. Scorch marks on the walls—Starfire's work, probably. Claw gouges in the metal fixtures. A section of ceiling that had collapsed entirely, forcing us to climb over debris that shifted treacherously underfoot.
Finally, we reached the massive double doors that led to the buffet hall.
"Ready?" I asked Bellatrix.
She flashed me a feral grin. "Always."
I raised my boot and kicked the doors open. They swung inward with a dramatic bang that turned every head in the room toward us. It was, admittedly, a bit theatrical, but I'd learned from Morgana that entrances mattered. The way you presented yourself in the first three seconds shaped how people perceived you for the rest of the encounter. Of course, Morgana's lesson hadn't accounted for the possibility that I'd be walking into a room full of traumatized superheroes who already had reasons to associate my face with villainy.
The buffet hall was devastated.
Overturned tables lay scattered like fallen dominoes, their white tablecloths stained with food and blood in equal measure. Shattered china crunched underfoot. The massive floor-to-ceiling windows that had once offered a panoramic view of the Atlantic were simply gone, nothing but jagged glass teeth remaining in the frames. Salt wind howled through the openings, carrying the stench of the ocean and something worse—the coppery-sweet smell of mass death.
Bodies of the creatures littered every surface. They draped over buffet stations, crumpled against walls, lay in heaps near the broken windows where they'd fallen trying to breach the room. Purple-black blood painted everything, pooling between tiles, dripping from light fixtures, splattered across the ceiling in patterns that suggested explosive violence.
But there were human casualties too. Passengers who hadn't been fast enough, crew members who'd tried to help. Some were clearly dead, their bodies torn and savaged. Others were injured, clustered in groups around the perimeter of the room, being tended to by Raven.
She knelt beside a man whose arm had been nearly severed at the elbow, her hands glowing with soft dark energy as she worked to knit flesh and bone back together. Her blue cloak was splattered with gore—both colors—and her hood had fallen back to reveal her face, tight with concentration.
As if sensing my presence, she lifted her head.
Our eyes met across the ruined hall. Something passed between us in that moment, recognition, relief, and beneath it all, the memory of what we'd done together just hours ago. Her violet eyes widened slightly, her pale cheeks flushing with color that had nothing to do with exertion.
I felt my own lips curl into a small, private smile. Hello again, little bird.
"MORGANA!" The shout shattered the moment like a brick through glass.
My head snapped toward the source—a massive figure of gleaming metal and dark skin, his human eye blazing with fury while his mechanical one flashed an aggressive red. Cyborg. I'd seen him at the pool earlier, doing cannonballs with Beast Boy, laughing like he didn't have a care in the world.
He wasn't laughing now. "It's the witch!" he roared, his arm already reconfiguring with a whir of servos and clicking of metal plates. The limb elongated, components shifting and locking into place until a cannon barrel emerged where his hand had been. "She's behind this attack! She led them here!"
"Wait—" Raven started, her healing magic flickering as her concentration broke. She scrambled to her feet, one hand outstretched. "Cyborg, stop! That's not—"
But he wasn't listening. His targeting system had already locked on, the cannon humming with building charge, and I could see from the look in his human eye that he'd already made his decision. In his mind, Morgana le Fay had somehow orchestrated an army of sea monsters to attack a cruise ship, and now she was standing in the doorway surveying the carnage she'd caused.
To be fair, it wasn't an unreasonable conclusion.
To be less fair, he was about to shoot me in the face.
The cannon fired. Blue-white energy screamed toward us, a beam of concentrated sonic force that would have punched a hole through a tank. I had maybe half a second to react.
My hand shot out, grabbing Bellatrix's arm in a grip tight enough to bruise. At the same time, I reached for the new ability coiled in my core, the gift I'd received from my System after taking Raven's virginity. Shadow Travel. I'd never used it before. I didn't even know exactly how it worked.
But apparently, my body did.
The shadows beneath our feet reached up.
It was the only way I could describe it. One moment we were standing in the doorway with a deadly energy beam milliseconds from impact. The next, darkness surged up around us like we were sinking into black water, swallowing us whole just as the blast screamed through the space where we'd been standing.
And then I was somewhere else.
The Shadow Realm.
It was... nothing like I'd expected.
Cold. That was the first thing I registered. A bone-deep, soul-penetrating cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of empty spaces, of voids between stars, of the darkness that existed before light was ever conceived. It wrapped around me like a living thing, pressing against my skin, seeping into my lungs with every breath.
But it didn't hurt. If anything, it felt... welcoming. The darkness recognized something in me. My demonic heritage, maybe, or the corruption that had seeped into my soul from months of dark magic. It didn't fight my presence. It embraced it, curling around me like a cat greeting its owner.
You belong here, the shadows seemed to whisper. You are one of us.
I could see, somehow, despite the absolute absence of light. The space around me was vast and empty, an infinite expanse of shifting darkness that moved with its own alien purpose. Far in the distance—or maybe very close, distance was meaningless here—I could see shapes. Doorways. Exit points back to the mortal world, each one a thin sliver of light cutting through the void.
I picked one on the far side of the buffet hall and pushed.
We erupted from the shadows on the opposite end of the room, stumbling slightly as reality reasserted itself around us. The transition was jarring, one moment surrounded by welcoming darkness, the next standing on blood-slicked tile with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
Beside me, Bellatrix gasped like someone who'd been held underwater finally breaking the surface. She doubled over, one hand clutching her chest, her face gone from pale to actually grey. Her other hand squeezed mine so hard I felt bones grind together.
"Bella—Mother!" I corrected myself hastily, crouching beside her. "Are you okay? What happened?"
"Couldn't—" She sucked in another wheezing breath, her dark eyes wild. "Couldn't breathe in there. Like the air itself had been removed. Like something was crushing my chest from the inside out."
My eyes widened. I hadn't experienced anything like that. The Shadow Realm had been cold and strange, yes, but I'd been able to breathe just fine. The darkness had welcomed me, not tried to suffocate me.
Because you're half demon, I realized with a chill that had nothing to do with the lingering cold. Because the shadows recognize you as kin. But for a normal human—even a powerful witch—that place is poison.
"I'm sorry," I said quickly, helping her straighten up. "I didn't know it would affect you like that. I've never used that ability before, I didn't think—"
Bellatrix cut me off with a laugh—still slightly breathless, but genuinely amused. She straightened her spine with visible effort, smoothing down her robes and tossing her wild dark hair over one shoulder. "Don't apologize, daughter," she said, and there was pride in her voice, her dark eyes gleaming with something like wonder. "That was magnificent. A realm of pure, concentrated darkness. I could feel the power in that place, even as it crushed the life from my lungs. Such glorious dark magic!" She reached up to cup my cheek, her palm still trembling slightly. "Mummy was simply overwhelmed, that's all. My little girl, commanding shadows like a queen of the night..."
I didn't have time to process her disturbing enthusiasm, because the Titans had found us again.
"What the—" Beast Boy's voice cracked with disbelief. He'd shifted back to his human form at some point, though his green skin was matted with drying purple blood. "How did she do that? She just—she copied Raven's power! That's Raven's thing!"
Cyborg had already retrained his cannon on us, the barrel tracking our new position with mechanical precision. His human eye was narrowed with suspicion. "Don't move, Morgana. I don't know what game you're playing, but—"
"Cyborg." Raven's voice cut through the chaos, sharp and commanding. She'd crossed the room while everyone was distracted, and now she stood between us and her teammates, her cloak spread slightly like she was shielding me from their aggression. "Stand down. Now."
"Raven, what are you doing?" Beast Boy demanded. "That's Morgana le Fay! She's a wanted criminal! She—"
"Is not Morgana." Starfire's voice floated down from above. She'd been hovering near the ceiling, probably keeping watch for more creatures, but now she descended gracefully to land beside Raven. Her expression was one of genuine puzzlement, her head tilted to the side like a confused puppy. "I am most confused," she announced, looking between the tense standoff with those large, guileless green eyes. "Why are our friends attacking Raven's lover?"
The silence that followed was so absolute I could hear the wind whistling through the shattered windows.
Cyborg's cannon arm actually lowered slightly, the targeting light flickering. His human eye went very, very wide.
Beast Boy made a sound like a cat being stepped on. "Her—her what?"
"Raven's lover," Starfire repeated helpfully, apparently oblivious to the bomb she'd just detonated. "Friend Amara. They engaged in the mating ritual earlier this evening. It was most beautiful to witness! Raven made such wonderful sounds of the pleasure—"
"STARFIRE." Raven's voice came out strangled, her face flooding with color so intense her grey skin turned a vivid shade of purple. She yanked her hood back up, but it was far too late. I could see the blush spreading down her neck, disappearing beneath the collar of her leotard.
"What?" Starfire blinked innocently. "Was I not supposed to mention the sexual encounter? On Tamaran, it is customary to celebrate such—"
"Oh my god." Beast Boy's voice had gone very high. His green face was doing something complicated, cycling through shock, betrayal, confusion, and what might have been reluctant intrigue. "Raven? You—with her? The villain? The one who—" He gestured wildly at me, apparently unable to find words for exactly what I was supposed to have done.
Cyborg's cannon had fully retracted now, his arm reforming into its standard configuration. He looked like someone had hit him over the head with a very large fish. "I... what... Raven, is this true?"
Raven made a sound that was halfway between a groan and a whimper. She pressed both hands over her face, her shoulders hunching with mortification.
"She's not Morgana," she said, her voice muffled by her palms. "Her name is Amara Black. She's Morgana's apprentice. They look similar because—because they just do, I don't know why, probably some dark magic thing." She dropped her hands, glaring at her teammates with eyes that promised violence. "And my personal life is none of your business."
"You slept with the apprentice of a supervillain!" Beast Boy's voice cracked again. "That's—that's definitely team business! There are protocols! Background checks!"
I started laughing! The laughter bubbled up from somewhere deep in my chest, dark and genuine, completely inappropriate for our current situation. I couldn't help it. Here we were—standing in the ruins of a buffet hall that looked like a slaughterhouse had mated with a seafood restaurant, surrounded by the corpses of nightmare fish-people, with thousands more of the things climbing the hull outside, and these heroes were losing their minds over the fact that their teammate had gotten laid.
"As hilarious as this is," I managed, wiping a tear from the corner of my eye, "and believe me, watching you all short-circuit over Raven's sex life is genuinely the funniest thing I've seen all week—we have a slightly more pressing problem."
Beast Boy's green face scrunched in indignation. "More pressing than—"
"Thousands of those creatures are swarming the ship right now," I cut him off, my voice going flat and serious. The laughter died in my throat as the reality of our situation reasserted itself. "Bellatrix and I saw them from the upper deck. The ocean is crawling with them. They're scaling the hull like insects, pouring out of the water in waves. For every one we killed getting here, there are hundreds more climbing up to take their place."
The color drained from Beast Boy's face, an impressive feat given that his skin was already green. "Wait. Wait wait wait." He held up both hands, shaking his head rapidly. "These things are merpeople? Like, actual merpeople? That's impossible. Atlantis would never—" He looked to Cyborg for support, his expression desperate. "Dude, tell her. Atlantis wouldn't do this. Kaldur'ahm is our friend. He's a cool guy! He brought that amazing seaweed dip to the Tower Christmas party!"
"BB's right," Cyborg said, though his voice carried less conviction than his words. His mechanical eye whirred as it scanned me, probably running some kind of threat assessment. "The Atlanteans are allies. Their king is a member of the Justice League! There's no way they'd sanction an attack on a civilian vessel."
I opened my mouth to argue, but Raven beat me to it.
"They're not from Atlantis." Her voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of certainty. She'd pushed her hood back again, apparently giving up on hiding her still-flushed cheeks, and her violet eyes were distant, remembering something. "Kaldur'ahm told me about a place once," she continued, her brow furrowing. "When we were discussing the geography of the ocean kingdoms. He called it the Trench."
The name hung in the air, somehow ominous despite being just a word.
"The Trench?" Beast Boy repeated uncertainly.
Raven nodded slowly. "He said it was... a wound in the ocean floor. A chasm so deep that no one in Atlantis has ever seen the bottom. They don't know how far down it goes—tens of miles, maybe. Hundreds of miles? The pressure at those depths should be enough to crush anything living into paste except the creatures born there for some reason. Kaldur called them 'the monsters of the deep.' Creatures so savage, so endless in number, that Atlantis has to station soldiers at the Trench's edge around the clock, every hour of every day, just to keep them from spilling out into the ocean."
Way to go Dumbledore, letting creatures like that live near Hogwarts… I thought to myself sarcastically.
"Holy shit," Beast Boy breathed.
"These things must have escaped somehow," Raven concluded. "Broken through the Atlantean guard line, or found another way up. Which raises the question of why Atlantis hasn't already responded. They should have noticed a breach this massive. They should be here."
"Unless they're dealing with something worse down below," Cyborg muttered, his expression grim. "If these things got out in enough numbers to attack a cruise ship and overwhelm the Atlantean defenses..."
"We can speculate about Atlantean border security later," I said, bringing the conversation back to the immediate crisis. "Right now, I need to know the plan." I gestured at the shattered windows, beyond which I could hear the wet slapping sounds of webbed feet on metal, the rattling shrieks of creatures finding new points of entry. "I have a lot of fire magic at my disposal, but I can't burn all of these things without torching half the ship in the process. And somehow I don't think 'accidentally incinerating three thousand civilians while saving them from fish monsters' is the most productive way of helping."
Raven's lips twitched, almost a smile, quickly suppressed. She turned in a slow circle, surveying the devastated buffet hall with calculating eyes. The survivors were huddled in clusters throughout the room, maybe sixty or seventy people, mostly passengers but a few crew members mixed in. Some were injured, clutching wounds that Raven hadn't had time to fully heal. Others were simply shell-shocked, staring at nothing with the glassy expressions of people whose minds had temporarily checked out to avoid processing trauma.
"A lot of people ran when the attack started," Raven said slowly, thinking out loud. "Hopefully most of them went toward the center of the ship. The casino level, the interior corridors—anywhere far from the windows and the water."
I snorted. "People don't exactly make rational choices while they're panicking. Half of them probably ran straight into dead ends or locked themselves in bathrooms."
"Maybe," Raven acknowledged, "but it's our best hope. The ship's interior is more defensible than these open spaces. Fewer access points, narrower corridors that limit how many creatures can attack at once. If we can evacuate these survivors to a central location and establish a perimeter..."
"We hold position and wait for backup," Cyborg finished, nodding along with her reasoning. His cannon arm had fully retracted, replaced by what looked like a sophisticated communications array. "The League should have already been here, actually. I sent out a distress signal the second those things came through the windows." He frowned, tapping at a holographic keyboard that materialized above his forearm. Lines of code scrolled past, interspersed with error messages that made his frown deepen. "Something's jamming my long-range comms," he said, frustration bleeding into his voice. "I'm getting interference on every frequency. Can't reach the Watchtower, can't reach the League's emergency channels, can't even ping Titans Tower." More typing, more error messages. "But I should be able to punch through eventually. The jamming's strong, but it's not sophisticated. More like brute-force static than targeted disruption. Give me 15 minutes and I'll have a signal out."
"15 minutes," I repeated flatly. "While thousands of monsters continue to board the ship."
"You got a better idea, witch?" Cyborg shot back at me, his human eye narrowing.
"This witch didn't have to stick around and help save people," I pointed out. "I could have just left with Bellatrix!"
"We still could!" Bellatrix agreed with me.
Cyborg grimaced for a second before nodding his head. "...You're right. I'm sorry for attacking you out of nowhere and treating you like the enemy. It's not like we haven't worked with villains in the past. It's just—" he hesitated for a second and looked around at all the bodies. "We've never been on a mission that went this bad with this much death."
"This is fucked up," Beast Boy added.
"Well, put on your fucking big boy pants—and yes I know you don't where pants," I said with a snort to Cyborg. "...because this shit is just getting started!"
"She's right," Raven cut in before the tension could escalate further. "We need to move. Now. Every second we spend arguing is another second those things have to spread through the ship."
She turned to address the huddled survivors, her voice shifting into something more commanding, more authoritative. It seemed that without Nightwing with them she was the second in command. It was hot to see her take charge!
"Everyone who can walk, get up. We're moving to the ship's interior—the casino level. Stay together, stay quiet, and do exactly what we tell you. Anyone who's too injured to move on their own, call out now and we'll carry you."
A few weak voices responded. Starfire was already moving among the survivors, her natural warmth and gentle strength somehow reassuring despite the gore splattered across her costume. She helped an elderly man to his feet, supporting his weight with effortless grace.
"Friend Beast Boy," she called out, "perhaps you could become a creature of burden? Some of these people cannot walk."
Beast Boy nodded, his earlier shock about Raven's love life apparently shelved in favor of the crisis at hand. His body rippled and expanded, green fur sprouting as he transformed into something that looked like a cross between a horse and a very large dog—sturdy enough to carry passengers, but compact enough to fit through ship corridors.
"Climb on," he said, his voice coming out slightly distorted through his animal mouth. "I can take three or four at a time."
Cyborg was already moving toward the main doors, his cannon arm reforming as he took point. "I'll clear the path and make sure we're not walking into an ambush." He was basically the walking tank out of everyone.
I caught Raven's eye as we prepared to move out. She was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read, gratitude, maybe, mixed with something more complicated. Something that made my chest feel tight in a way that had nothing to do with the situation.
Later, I promised silently. We'll figure out whatever this is later.
She nodded slightly, as if she'd heard me, and pulled her hood back up.
XXX
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