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It takes her a long time to realize she is no longer human.
She worries at first that it’s Amaru infesting her again, some part of her clinging onto Kate’s soul and dragging her down to hell. But no; the queen had been left to shrivel and die at the gates of Xibalba.
(Sometimes Kate can hear those doors calling for her, lonely, aching for a crown, but it’s always at a distance. Never from within.)
Once she steps back into the lives of the Gecko brothers, leaving Amaru and soulless corpses and liquid fire behind, she assumes she’s back to being… Kate. Breakable, stubborn, human Kate. And when she gets shot halfway through a bank heist, she thinks, This is it. Victim to another bullet through the stomach, as if fate came to claim her the same way it tried before.
Richie’s a mess, hands shaking against her, trying to press her insides back in as he mutters obscenities. Seth’s no better in the driver’s seat, shouting orders that fall onto useless ears. Her boys, having to watch her bleed out, and she tries to tell them, It’s okay, but every word dissolves on her tongue.
The motel bed they lay her on should be her tomb. She feels it in her bones.
Instead, she lives.
Her healing is slower—a lot slower—than when she was Amaru (or Amaru was her), but—she heals. She survives. And when the wound closes in three days without a scar to prove it existed at all, something ancient starts to stir within her yet again.
They don’t talk about it. Instead, they watch her uselessly scrub bleach into the motel sheets, trying to erase her own bloodstains. That’s the last time they set foot in that town.
-
The other changes come soon after that.
Her dreams shift first. In the span of a few nights after her semi-resurrection, images of dismembered bodies and red eyes leave her completely. As if they’d never haunted her in the first place. Instead, her dreams turn to light—hot, pleasant, all-encompassing. Her mind unfurls in the arms of it, embraced more wholly than she ever thought possible, and it’s intoxicating. Though the vividness of the sensation fades during the day, the memory of it stays with her, filling each step with more certainty, more vibrancy.
Naturally, she doesn’t tell Seth and Richie. Even if she had an explanation, words to give description to it, they’d think she was fucking insane. Or maybe possessed by something else this time. They walk around eggshells with her enough as it is.
So she keeps it to herself. Or she tries to, at least.
One morning, she rouses to Seth’s hand insistent on her shoulder, his eyes glazed over in worry.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, groggy but quickly coming to. Seth doesn’t get that look very often.
“You’re burning up, princess.”
“What?” Red sunlight bleeds through the misty curtains of their motel room; none of his words are processing. “I’m what?”
“Fever. Hot flash. I don’t fucking know, but you’re like a fucking oven.” Unnerved, Seth puts his hand on her cheek, shaking his head. “I was sweating just sitting here next to you.”
“I mean, I feel fine—”
“You’re sick. I’ll go to the store and grab something.”
“Really, Seth, it’s—“
He just looks at her in the way that brokers no argument, and she sighs.
“Fine. But you’re wasting your time.”
He comes back less than 10 minutes later with a bottle of fever suppressants and three different brands of cold & flu medicine. She dutifully takes her fill of them, to put Seth’s mind at ease, but really, it’s useless—she knows it’s not sickness. Not anything bad or wrong. It’s just—her something.
A something that does not yet have a name.
When she lies down to sleep again that night, Seth and Richie on either side of her, she swears she can feel the soft thrum of the earth all the way down to her toes.
-
Richie starts to smell it on her eventually. Among other things.
“Fuck, Richie,” she breathes, hands tangled tightly in his hair. His answering moan vibrates all the way from her cunt to her toes, making her arch up against his mouth.
Two of his fingers push into her slow and torturous, curling inside of her the way she likes it. Richie knows these details intimately, now; revels in them, memorizes them like his own personal gospel.
She gasps again, starts to squirm with her impending orgasm, and can’t help but think of herself as an altar, worshipped to the point between pain and pleasure. He groans again, flattens his tongue against her clit, and she falls apart just like that. A prayer. A call to God.
When she opens her eyes after a while, feeling boneless, she finds him hovering over her with an odd look on his face.
“What?” she asks, a little self-conscious.
Instead of answering, he simply puts his fingers to his mouth, sucking on the tips of them. They glisten obscenely, wet with her slick and his saliva. She blushes at the sight.
After a moment, he shakes his head, hand falling back down to the bed. “You taste like pure sunshine, Kate. Like fucking… clouds and rainbows and sunsets.”
“Alright, alright,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You already made me come, don’t have to lay it on thick.”
Too fast to follow, Richie bends down to put his nose to her neck, trapping her against him. It’s Richie everywhere—dick hard against her thigh, hand caressing her hip, his mouth and nose pressed to her skin.
“Amazing,” he says quietly. She can hear something like awe in his voice, or desperation.
He kisses her there, right at her pulse point, before moving down to her collarbone, her stomach, her thighs. She shakes her head.
“Richie, I can’t—”
But then his tongue’s already dipping into her, pulling a strangled moan from her throat. And she doesn’t bother stopping him after that.
-
It’s a church, eventually, that reveals the truth of it. Her. Whatever.
The irony isn’t lost on her.
To note, it’s not a voluntary visit by any means. After a grocery store hold-up goes terribly wrong—undercover cops really are a fucking pain in the ass—the three of them are forced to flee on foot, leaving their stolen car in the street and bolting for the nearest city border.
They make it a good handful of miles out before they find a dinky-looking church in the middle of the desert. Seth shrugs, tells them it’s a good enough spot for a hideout as any. His blasé tone doesn’t quite fit with the urgency of his steps, the quick glances behind his back. All of them are on edge. The last time a job had gone wrong, Kate almost died.
(Almost, of course, being the operative word.)
They stumble inside clumsily, out of breath and a little desperate. Seth quickly checks the pews and back office for signs of life.
“Nada,” he calls out, giving Richie the signal to lock up.
While the boys work in tandem, Kate sprawls out on one of the worn benches, sweaty and hot and pissed off. She really hates this side of their life—the fear, always standing on the edge of imminent danger.
“Why couldn’t you guys be like, dentists or something?” she says, loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to keep their cover.
“Then we’d lose all of our criminal charm, princess.”
Kate throws a middle finger into the air, directionally vague but clearly intended for Seth. His laugh makes her smile a bit, despite herself.
After a moment, she notices that she feels very warm. It’s only a little uncomfortable, but more than that, it feels somehow un-Kate in a way that scares her. She opens her mouth to say something, but no words come out.
“Once we catch our breath and figure something out, we’re leaving,” Seth says from somewhere behind her. His voice feels far, far away.
“I don’t know, brother. Might be worth camping out here tonight and leaving tomorrow at sunset,” Richie says. “We can manage to stay out of sight for that long.”
“No way in hell. If the cops find this place, we’ll be fucked.”
“They’re podunk fucking hicks, Seth. They wouldn’t know how to find us if you went up and smacked one in the face.”
“Well, that podunk fucking hick’s probably pissed enough to sniff us out, considering we shot his partner in the fucking head.”
“Staying here is the safer option. Don’t let your—” Richie cuts himself off, but it’s too late. Seth bites.
“Don’t let my fucking what, Richard? Huh?”
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“No, tell me what you were gonna—”
It’s around this point that Kate’s vision starts to go. She’d been focused on the church’s expanse of stained glass above her—really nice, honestly, for a small-town, half-abandoned church—trying to get herself to speak, to say something about the wrongness, and she thinks, It’s a shame I can’t see this during the day.
And then there’s light, peeking through the glass. She should be a bit more confused, maybe, because it’s dark out, has been dark out, and there shouldn’t be any light. Shouldn’t be anything at all. But Kate can feel it and see it as clearly as if the sun were shining, right there, giving her a brilliant show of sparkling reds and greens and blues. She can’t believe Seth and Richie haven’t noticed the strange, beautiful miracle of it, haven’t even given it a second glance.
But quickly it’s too much. Too bright, too hot, too close. The colors turn to a sheer, blinding white, and Kate thinks to scream in pain, in fear, but something else sings inside of her; something separate from her body, her mind.
Your soul is clean, Kate Fuller. And you will be more.
The voice cradles her close, helps her shut her eyes to the impossible light. And in between seconds, she is Kate and no one and that something all at once.
-
Her memory comes and goes after that. She remembers the blackness chasing away the pain, remembers the image of the church’s cross burned into the dark like a brand.
At some point, she registers arms holding her up, a confusing muddle of voices coming through as if she were underwater.
“Burning up—”
“Don’t know—”
“Could die—”
A flutter of fingers on her cheek, a touch against her forehead, and the voices start to become clearer.
“You’re gonna wake up, princess.”
“Kate, baby, c’mon.”
She tries to tell them that she’s not dying, not even close; that something is making her bigger, stronger, hotter, brighter. But she cannot speak yet. Can only twitch her fingers, bow her back just slightly, before she’s lost to the world again.
The next time she comes to, though, it’s real.
Wake, sister, she thinks, or is thought to. The darkness and brightness are cleaved in half, and she can suddenly feel herself wholly again, from her head all the way down to her toes. It’s as simple as opening her eyes.
“Kate.”
The sound is a sigh of relief, a breath held a little too long, and she reaches out toward it instinctively, feels a rough, familiar hand hold her own.
“Richie,” she says, the weight of his name more delicious than ever. “I’m—”
“Princess, Jesus Christ,” Seth cuts in. He’s there, too, on her other side, and she blinks a few more times. Smiles up at him. "You scared the shit out of us."
“Seth.” A pause, and she slowly lifts her head from the pillow its resting on, surveying her surroundings. They’ve left the church, of course, but she already knows that. Knows too that where they’ve ended up is not a bad place, though it’s unfamiliar.
“Where are we?” she asks, her voice clear, strong.
“We didn’t know what to do, when you were…” Richie sighs. “We didn’t know where to go. So I called Freddie.”
“Freddie.” She tests the name on her mouth, in this new Kate-way, and smiles again. “That’s good.”
She misses the look that Richie and Seth share, and Seth’s hand moves around her wrist gently, as if to ground her. “Are you okay?”
“I feel…”
She trails off, looking up at plain, white ceiling—as if the light will come back again. But she understands now that it comes from within, too, from the soles of her feet and the inside of her eyelids. It is her, as much as she is Kate Fuller, and as much as her and the Geckos belong to each other.
“Great,” she says, simply, for lack of a better description.
She moves to stand from the bed she’s in, wanting to feel her own strength. Richie takes her elbow to help, leaning in close, and his nostrils flair with the scent of her.
He glances at Seth, eyebrows raised. She doesn’t miss it this time.
“Really, I’m fine. I promise. I’ve never felt better in my life.”
“Okay, princess, you’re fucking Wonder Woman,” Seth says, no bite to his words. “Let’s still get you checked out. Make sure the fever didn’t turn your brain into mush.”
Kate blinks. “I had a fever? That bad?”
The grim line in Seth’s mouth answers her question. So she hadn’t just imagined the burning.
“Freddie’s called a doctor to look at you. Someone with discretion,” Richie says, skirting past it. Kate frowns.
“I’m telling you, though, I don’t need—”
“Just let her look at you. It can’t hurt anything.”
After a beat, Kate sighs, waves her hand in acquiescence. “If it’ll make you feel better.”
The doctor, of course, finds nothing. She’s a kind woman with lines around her eyes, soft hands that feel exceptionally cool against her skin. Kate’s temperature is still running hot, but not enough for concern. Just enough to make Seth’s hands tighten around the back of a chair as he watches.
Eventually, when both Richie and Seth are satisfied that Kate’s well and good and not dying, they pile into an acquired car—Freddie’s mastered the art of looking the other way—and head… somewhere.
“Where are we going?” Kate asks when they pull onto the highway, her forehead pressed against the glass of the window.
“Figure out what happened to you,” Richie murmurs from behind the wheel. “Get some answers.”
“Guys, the doctor said I’m fine. I feel fine.”
Seth looks at her from the rearview mirror, eyes dark and unreadable. “You weren’t when we dragged you out of that church.”
She frowns. Doesn’t say anything else, because even though she does feel great, strong, whole, she knows that something’s happened to her. Knows that’s why they’re scared.
Maybe she should be scared, too, but all she feels now is awake.
-
They don’t find anything to explain what happened to Kate. Or, at the very least, none of their contacts have a clue.
She’s unsurprised by this, tries to reassure them with every new dead end. Her body remembers the feeling of Amaru, the infestation of it—a never-ending violation. Possession didn’t feel like this.
Her hunger starts to slowly go, until she realizes she's going days without eating, then weeks. She fakes it for the boys as much as she can, taking tiny bites of food and moving bits around her plate, but they notice after a while. They notice now too that the nightmares have stopped—that Kate doesn’t sleep much at all. A few hours here and there, if she can settle long enough.
The boys hate it. Grow antsy and irritated with each other while she changes in front of them, morphs into something else, Kate-adjacent.
She wants to give them answers, wants them to believe her when she says she’s fucking fine. The pieces of her put together won’t break like this, she’s sure, but they can’t see it. Won’t see it.
After a long, tense car ride to their next town, Seth hits the local bar, drowning himself in everything else but the changing of Kate Fuller.
Kate, hungry and restless, pulls Richie to bed, tearing off his clothes and riding him with all the vigor her new strength has given her. He comes before she does, watching her move above him in awe, and she grins down at him with her teeth bared.
Wake, sister.
-
Seth barely touches her now, she notices. Pulls away when she leans in for a kiss, murmurs an excuse when she corners him in the bathroom.
“Does he not—” Kate asks one day, unable to finish the sentence. Her and Richie watch as Seth walks in the gas station, cap down low.
“He’s afraid, Kate,” Richie replies, knowing. Always knowing. “I am, too.”
She sighs. “You shouldn’t be.”
“You’re different. Taste different. Act different. What’re we supposed to think?”
“That I’m here,” she says, looking over to meet his eye. “That I’m alive.”
Richie stares back, silent. There’s something unspoken between them, a question too big to ask aloud.
Wake, sister.
Later, she curls up next to Seth in bed and whispers, “I’m sorry.”
Startled, Seth flinches back, eyebrows raised. “Sorry about what?”
“For being this,” Kate whispers. “For not being who I used to be.”
“Princess—”
Starved, Seth holds her face in his hands and kisses her, all teeth and tongue and need. She moans into his mouth, lets him devour her until he pulls back to breathe.
“Don’t ever apologize to me,” he says, gripping her so hard it almost hurts. “Not when this is all my fault. Our fault.”
She shakes her head. “There’s no one at fault. This isn’t Amaru again.”
He frowns. “We don’t know what it is.”
“Maybe we do.”
“What?”
This time, he pulls all the way back, letting her go so he can prop himself up on the bed.
“Maybe we do know,” Kate repeats, cheek resting against the pillow.
“Know what?”
With a sigh, Kate closes her eyes, imagining the light again. Quietly, she confesses: “I think I might be an angel.”
-
They take it about as well as she thought. Seth juggles with laughing at the suggestion and furiously denying the inevitable. Richie says nothing when Seth throws it at him like an insult, and simply stares at Kate—through Kate—instead.
“Well, she’s not human, brother.”
“Christ, you two are fucking incredible,” Seth says. “She’s not a fucking angel, dipshit.”
“Why not?” Richie asks, still looking at her.
Seth splutters. “Because— because—”
“I’m still Kate,” she says. “I’m just also something… else.”
Seth storms out a bit after that, grabbing a bottle of tequila and his gun. They let him go, to give him time to breathe, process, and Kate says: “I wanna swim.”
It’s hot when they make their way out to the motel pool, darkness casting a long shadow over the water. Kate thinks back to floating, Richie standing over her, the thought of red filling her brain and spilling over. She sighs and goes to sit at the edge.
“So, what, you can grow wings now and shit?” Richie says, coming to sit beside her.
“It’s not like that,” she replies, matter-of-fact. “It’s more… spiritual, I guess.”
Her foot dips down, moving slowly through the water. The cool silkiness of it envelops her toes, her ankle, her calf, while the ripples disrupt the pool’s reflection of the moon. Gently, a warm breeze filters sand through the air—even at night, the world likes to burn as hell does.
Richie tilts his head, slides his thumb slowly down her spine, reveling in the skin her bikini exposes. “You can’t die.”
The words hurt, somewhere deep down, in the only place she was able to hide from Amaru. Innocence entangled with bitter nostalgia, right at the core of her, begging to be that quiet girl from Bethel instead of a forgotten half-queen.
But the rest of her only nods along, humming with the truth of it.
Richie presses his mouth to her shoulder, nostrils flaring with the scent of her blood pulsing in time to her ever-slowing heartbeat. His hand reaches around her torso to splay his fingers across her stomach, possessive, encompassing her in him. Kate keeps her foot in the pool, tracing patterns in fading ripples.
“Who would’ve fucking thought?” he mutters, kissing up to her neck, cold against the shimmering warmth of her.
She shivers, silent. Lets Richie pull her inside of him until she’s everything, nothing, clear as the blackness of the sky.