The air in the kitchen was dense and stifling, as if the door of a broken oven had been flung open. The thermometers outside might have shown thirty degrees, but inside this room, it was much hotter, smelling of melting asphalt and burnt sugar.
Elara's fingers touched a cold, heavy piece of metal deep within the bag under the table. The pocketknife was in her hand, yes, but the sentence Mark—or that thing imitating Mark—had just uttered screamed that a simple knife wouldn't solve this.
*"I am better."*
This sentence swept away the last crumb of doubt in Elara's mind. The entity before her was a parasite wearing her husband's guise. And parasites did not leave when asked politely.
Instead of bringing the pocketknife into a defensive position, Elara took a strange gamble. She loosened her fingers.
The metal knife surrendered to gravity and glided downward.
In a normal world, that knife should have hit the hardwood floor and made a metallic *clink*. It would have been impossible for Mark, or even an athlete with the strongest reflexes, to catch that suddenly falling object from that distance. It took a certain number of milliseconds for the human brain to perceive, for the nerves to command the muscle, and for the muscle to move.
But this was not a normal world. And the thing before her was not human.
Mark's hand moved like a shadow. A blur so fast it couldn't be followed by the eye.
The knife didn't hit the floor. It sat in Mark's hand, suspended in the air, its blade pointed toward Elara.
That dull smile on the entity's face, looking as if it had jumped out of a photograph, widened further. The corners of his lips stretched as if they were about to tear toward his ears. This wasn't an anatomical smile; it was the pleasure of a predator feeding on its prey's fear.
"Your reflexes..." Elara said, her voice sounding calmer than she expected. Yet her heart was about to hammer through her ribcage. "...are as fast as a cat's."
Mark tilted his head to the other side with that same boneless, eerie softness. "I like cats, Elara. They have nine lives. Just like our memories."
Elara locked her other hand under the table onto her true safeguard in the hidden compartment of the bag: that old revolver inherited from her father.
"But cats have a problem, Mark," Elara said, without taking her eyes off those gelatinous, unblinking eyes. "Sometimes they succumb to their curiosity."
Mark took another step. The *squelch* sound his bare foot made every time it pressed against the hardwood was enough to turn one's stomach. A pink, slimy trail remained where he lifted his foot.
"What do you think I'm curious about?" the Entity asked. Its voice was now completely distorted, crackling like a static-filled broadcast from a broken radio.
"How far I can go," Elara said, and pulled the trigger.
The gunshot exploding in the narrow space of the kitchen echoed like deafening thunder. The smell of gunpowder immediately mingled with that dense scent of vanilla and rotten strawberries.
The bullet lodged right in the center of Mark's chest, where the sternum should have been.
A normal human would have been thrown back. They would go into shock. They would bleed.
But Mark only paused. Red, iron-scented blood did not gush from the hole in his chest. Instead, a thick, bright pink liquid began to flow in streams, like a burst bottle of syrup.
As the liquid hit the floor, it hissed, slightly melting the wooden parquet like acid.
Mark looked at the hole in his chest. There was no pain on his face, only a slight surprise and disappointment. It was as if his favorite shirt had been stained.
"This..." Mark said, spraying pink froth from his mouth. "...is very rude."
His body began to tremble. But this was not a death rattle. This was the breakdown of a dough losing its form. That perfect 180-centimeter height began to ripple and melt. His shoulders slumped, his arms lengthened and shortened.
"Mass..." the Entity growled. Its voice had now completely lost its humanity, turning into a high-pitched shriek. "Too... heavy..."
As Elara prepared to fire a second time, Mark did something unexpected. With a nauseating retching sound, he doubled over and vomited liters of pink liquid onto the kitchen floor like a waterfall.
This wasn't simple vomiting. He was shedding his biological mass. He was shrinking.
Within seconds, his body collapsed inward; his bones cracked and rearranged. Amidst that pile of pink sludge, what remained of the human form rapidly changed shape.
Elara stood frozen. What she saw pushed the limits of logic.
Mark made a dash for the window. But he was no longer Mark.
The thing that leapt onto the sill of the open window was a soaking wet black cat, its fur matted together. A pink stain glowed on the cat's chest.
The entity paused for a moment on the edge of the window. It looked at Elara one last time with those yellow, vertical pupils. There was no animal innocence in that gaze; there was the malice of a thousand-year hunger.
"See you, honey," said the cat. The voice was Mark's, but muffled, as if coming from a cat's throat.
Then it threw itself into the purple static of the night, into the arms of that stifling heat.
Elara ran to the window, gun still aimed at the target. Looking down, she expected to see a mangled human corpse on the concrete.
But the street was empty.
Only under a distant streetlight, a black cat with a slight limp in its hind leg vanished into the shadows.
The only trace it left behind was that sugary, pink drop trickling down the windowsill and slowly drying in the hot air.
The ice cream truck music outside stopped for a moment, then restarted in a louder, higher pitch.
Elara slammed the window shut, turned the lock, and collapsed to the floor, leaning her back against the wall. The kitchen resembled a butcher shop, yet there wasn't a single drop of blood-scent in the air.
Only a deadly, nauseating smell of vanilla.