[1]
Once she felt the boys and their animated emotions further descend towards the Tower grounds, Raven allowed herself a sigh of relief. She could still feel Garfield's aura wafting around her, her insides buzzed with humiliated joy.
A quick stretch of fire stole Raven's attention to the balcony where she knew Kori and Karen still lounged. If not for the billowing light helping to trace their dark silhouettes, she might not be able to detect them through the kitchen's glare against the glass.
A pang of nerves dropped her stomach, praying to Azar that neither of them witnessed the awkward display of Beast Boy scorching his hand while trying to kiss her. As she replenished her tea with hot water, Raven calculated those odds as slim but made for the balcony anyway.
But when she reached the couch, Raven paused at the strange, distorted buzz of Dick's voice shaking her name. It sounded faint and detached, like faraway echoes coming from all sides. Her feet tingled with numbness as a bizarre fever crawled beneath her skin, leaving a trail of goosebumps rushing to her center.
Raven clutched the cool leather of the sofa when her ears filled with a static that would then leak into her vision.
Raven!
This time, his voice was so loud that the hairs within her ears tickled. Blood dripping onto her lips, her tongue was steeped with the distinct taste of metal; her narrowing vision darkened.
RAVEN!
Her eyes refocused, and she was no longer in the common-room, but in some place of ruin, it's insides seared and exposed to the blackening skies above. A warped cityscape across cloudy waters told her she stood on the collapsing remnants of Titan's Tower.
The smell of brimstone swelled within her lungs, and Raven exhaled a great force of energy that shook the very foundation on which she stood. Even as an air of deja vu seeped into her senses, its sharpness all made Raven doubt its memory. It hadn't happened, but none of it felt new.
Raven turned her head at the sound of quiet grunting to find Robin, his wings twisted, body mangled with profound wounds.
"This...this isn't you," Robin managed through gritted teeth. When she stooped to hold his head in her crimson palm, his eyes weakened, "stop this."
"Aw, come on Dick," Raven said, her voice deep and boundless, "it was a matter of time."
"Don't do this." With sharp, grating puffs through his nostrils, he growled. "He'll never forgive you."
Raven's lips pucker into a mocking pout before quickly cracking into a cruel smile. "How could you still believe I cared?" She dropped his skull to the charred pavement and stood.
"Raven," he persisted, "plea-"
With a quick flick of her wrist, Raven heard the small snap of his neck and found the silence she yearned for. She then spotted a growing speck of green in her peripheral, and a wicked smile crept along her black lips.
Even though the alien came for her with the might of a collapsing star, Raven remained stiff and impatient. She held out one hand towards her impending teammate but hesitated when she spied a different body of green mounting a distant wall of charred brick. Beast Boy perched momentarily as he also tracked Starfire's movements through the sky.
As Raven willed it, the Beast jumped a few dozen feet to intercede the alien's offense, landing before her with Starfire in his clutches. She could barely squeal his name before Beast Boy tore her into her torso with massive claws, tossing her limbs aside when he was finished.
When the Beast faced Raven, four red eyes regarded her for further instruction, and Raven proudly smiled with outstretched arms. In the distance, she heard a strange cawing.
As he shifted back into himself, the Beast's demonic scowl remained on her, and in a darkly warped voice, he asked her if it was done.
The cawing grew louder.
"Almost," Raven told him, tenderly wiping the blood from his chin with her thumb.
An icy breeze brushed over them, bringing with it the whirring shadows of a woman. Her skin gleamed like the cold winter moon, her eyes deep pools of blood. With long, skeletal fingers, she lightly touched the Beast's shoulder, closing the second pair of red eyes from his glare.
Confusion warped to awareness as Beast Boy remembered himself, his eyes glossed over with horror. The metallic taste on his tongue was strong enough to nauseate him but no more than the cognizance of what he had done. When he glanced over at the mauled bodies of his teammates, his breath quickened, and with the woman's hand still on his shoulder, he fell to his knees.
Raven's glower then found the woman, though she was unable to look at her eye to eye. So, she instead focused on the laugh that grew across the woman's vicious lips.
"I said be free, girl," she said to Raven before shifting into a red-eyed crow beneath a dark umbrage.
When Beast Boy's hand lightly brushed her leg, panic fluttered in her chest, his touch a memento of her former self. With a fantasy of compassion, Raven bowed to bring her hand to his cheek, but he then flinched from her. In this quick moment of rejection, Raven's rage reached out and tore his throat with ease.
Dick call out her name again, and with the same desperation, and she cranked her neck to where his corpse lay. There she saw the red-eyed crow perched on Robin's cheek, pecking at his eyes.
Raven!
Her vision again narrowed, blurred and fuzzy, and amid the distortion, she began to mark in frantic flashes the sight of an old shed. Its wooden exterior was rotting and overgrown with ivy and clover, hidden in the muggy umbrae of tall coastal redwoods. She did not know this strange place, but she could smell the unique dampness of the soil, like the dew dropping from the canopies after a dawning rain. There was a looming dread that thickened the air around that shed, a coldness calling from the murky seclusion of its opening door.
Raven!
[2]
While Karen tried to figure out how to reduce the flames that Vic had worked so diligently to strengthen, she regretted ever mentioning
the brief excavation of Dr. Palmer's starship. What followed was Koriand' r's long-winded account regarding the happy accident of landing on Earth all those years ago, when she originally meant to rewire the Gordanian escape pod to take her Tamaran.
It wasn't that her stories were dull by any means, but Kori had a bad habit of rambling through them, from a particular language barrier or undiagnosed alien ADHD, Karen wasn't sure.
"To be honest, I did not truly understand the command mechanisms, but I think I was so nervous about being caught, I launched several buttons at random until the pod locked on a destination."
"And now you're here," Karen said cordially, careful to disguise her dry tone behind kind words, "and our planet has been brighter ever since."
Kori beamed sincerely, "I am so happy to have you here, Karen. It is nice to have another female energy to engage with. Do not mistake me, for I very much enjoy Raven, but she can sometimes, be, um..."
"Apathetic?"
Kori giggled, "Aggressively so, at times."
"Ah, her ears must be ringing," Karen laughed as she spotted Raven crossing the common-room with a mug in hand.
It didn't take Kori long to recognize the concern in Raven's cast. Her gait turned wobbly, and she propped her hand against the back of the couch for apparent stability. Koriand' r stood and called Raven's name when she saw two dark streams fall from her nose and rushed when the mug fell
onto the ground.
Karen hurried to the kitchen for a rag as Kori rested Raven against the couch. While her eyes were open and glowing, Raven was unresponsive to Koriand' r's signals. By the time Karen reached the sofa with a damp rag, the cambion's eyes were clear but glassy.
Kori begged for an explanation as Raven peered around the room with great concern, trying to catch up with herself.
"Shit," Raven finally uttered with a weary look in her eyes. She thanked Karen for the rag that was now blotched with her blood.
"Girl, what the hell?" Karen remarked, holding a clean corner of the rag between cautious fingers, "Do you need medical attention?"
Raven wiped her nose with a sleeve and shook her head, "I'm fine."
"It was the crow again?" Kori asked while wiping a spot of blood from Raven's neck that the cambion had missed.
Raven seemed almost stoned in how she took her time processing sensory information, "Yes."
"Well?" Karen urged after Raven fell quiet, "what was it?"
"Just...uh, more of the same."
"What more creepy birth control chanting?"
Raven exchanged looks with both women before shaking the fuzz from her mind. "I don't know how to explain it right now," she stood up slowly, minding her headrush.
"What happened to your mind-fortress?" Karen asked as she watched Raven go to the kitchen for a fresh dishtowel from the drawer. "Wasn't that the whole point for your all-nighter?"
"Yeah, well, it didn't work, obviously, " Raven shrugged as she came back to where she dropped her mug, dropped the towel beneath her foot to dab the wet carpet.
"If you cannot keep this creature out," Koriand' r theorized, "then we must be prepared to fight it."
Karen almost laughed, "How?"
"I don't know."
Raven agreed with Kori quickly enough, but the image of the alien's contorted corpse gave her significant pause.
A wave of desperate anger pulled at her sternum when she thought of Garfield's grief, his repulsed downcast over the alien's body. Suddenly, she felt the Magistrate standing above her, his words of consequences resounding between her ears. You don't want that little bird, do you?
"It starts with me," Raven told them, "I know her power."
Koriand' r gave her a nervous look, "Trigon?"
"I think so," Raven said, "he's wrapped up in this somehow."
"Cool," Karen said and rubbed her face, "and your dad's that interdimensional demon overlord that tried to destroy the planet, yeah?"
"That's the one."
"Are you okay, Raven?" Koriand' r asked, saddened with how the cambion shrugged her shoulders. "It is alright to be afraid."
"It's just, on the roof, it had me...I was defenseless. If she comes back and I haven't figured out how to keep her from doing that, who knows what it could do to us. Or get me to do," Raven said softly, grief hiding poorly within her voice, "I can't let it come to that."
"We can figure this thing out," Karen told her with surprising confidence. "I couldn't begin to tell you how, but we will."
Raven faintly smiled.
"Yes," Kori agreed, "it has lost the element of surprise. That is something we can work with."
"Exactly," Karen nodded before patting Raven softly on the shoulder, "so, how can we help, Raven?"
"Can we go outside?" Raven asked, wiping the last of dried blood from her nostrils, "I could use some fresh air."
Koriand' r nodded and led the way, while Karen headed for the kitchen.
"Would you like some wine with that air? Because I would."