Sisters of Sodom

"God damn it," Eudora mumbled to herself as she walked out the door, leaving a half-finished cup of coffee behind her. She stepped out into the frosty urban air and her eyes landed squarely on the sliding front doors of the clothing store across the street.

Hailey could be seen lingering with her back turned, thumbing her way through an aisle of clothing. Disregarding the heavy traffic zooming by, she walked towards the place in a straight line, her heart starting to race.

"God damn it, god damn it," Eudora repeated as her legs picked up a speed that startled herself. This nameless craving soon overtook her, and she found herself pushing her way through the doors of an establishment she'd once mocked from afar.

She couldn't believe it—this was the kind of place she'd sooner throw a bottle of piss at, the kind of yuppie establishment frequented by the very conformist losers she felt the most superior to. And yet, there she was, crossing the large carpeted floor to approach Hailey by the footwear aisle.

"Oh, there you are!" Hailey said, her voice a bit louder, as if her confidence had doubled in that short time. "Which one would you pick, this one or this one?" She held up two pairs of socks. One was a boring set of earth-tone woolen socks; sure, they looked sturdier and probably better for the winter, but she immediately found the other pair in the girl's other hand irresistible, at least when she thought of Hailey wearing them.

They were very much in line with the girl's style, an eccentric orange-and-pink striped pair of designer cotton socks with black trim. Eudora did not respond, instead just shooting the girl a deadly glance, but Hailey read the desire behind her expression immediately.

"Ooh, I think I know which pair you like," she said knowingly, dangling the cotton socks in her right hand. She put the wool ones back on the rack and turned, again displaying her perky teenage butt as she walked nonchalantly towards the changing stall.

"Don't just stand there, Eudora, or people will think you're one of the mannequins!" she taunted as she disappeared behind one of the swinging doors at the far end.

Eudora shook her head, then grunted under her breath. She touched her chest, her heart thumping beneath her breastplate. It was clear to her that she was not in her right mind. And every logical part of her cried for her to leave this place with her dignity intact. But her legs moved again, and she felt herself too weak to the suggestion to resist their propulsion.

Stepping into the dark stall, she found Hailey removing her worn Vans. Underneath them were orange and blue-striped socks, and much as advertised, they were both soiled at the tips in sweat. Hailey peeled each sock off while still standing, revealing her petit unpainted toes.

She then waved one sock in front of Eudora's face. Immediately the smell rising from it assaulted the punk pythoness's nostrils.

It was a very piercing odor, very unlike what she'd experienced with Ayaka. Unlike that Japanese witch, this girl's feet had a downright acrid and funky smell to them, almost suggestive of lazy hygiene.

But even this felt pre-planned somehow, as Eudora could already inuit the subtle difference between truly unkempt feet and ones carefully curated to stoke her desires. All the same, she felt weak as the scent lit up her senses.

"I hear you're a real tough gal," Hailey whispered as she dangled the sock in front of Eudora's blushing, angry face. "Hard to believe what I've heard about you, to be honest..."

Suddenly Hailey stuffed the moist sock right between Eudora's trembling lips. It smeared her lipstick free on the fabric, and with a little poke, Hailey shoved a little portion deeper into Eudora's mouth, planting it there with a little laugh.

Eudora was absolutely furious now, but the flavor of the hipster girl's raw sweat seeping into her tastebuds was nothing short of kryptonite to her, and she found herself only grunting again, her body stiff to the point of cramping. She unthinkingly began to suck the bittersweet perspiration straight from the sock's tip, almost like a baby with its pacifier.

Her immense embarrassment mixed with her utter outrage to create more grunts, and then just the slightest hint of a whimper. Her wild eyes meeting the hipster girl's own, transmitting an enduring animus, but the hipster girl merely laughed at it all. The sight of the "baddest witch on the block" sucking her socks like the lowliest paraphiliac was truly hilarious for her to behold.

Hailey lifted up the new cotton socks, displaying them proudly, then she slipped each one on over her tiny feet and hiked them up to her smooth ankles. "Mm, so much nicer," she said quietly before slipping her Vans back on.

"I think this is a fair trade," she added, brushing past Eudora and exiting the stall quickly. Eudora had no idea what the girl meant until her hands instinctively flew to her bag, noticing that her notebook was missing. Eyes wide, she finally spit the sweaty pastel sock out of her mouth and shoved the stall door open.

"Come back here, you little creep!" she shouted, creating quite a scene in the department store. A concerned female security guard attempted to engage her, but she merely shoved the stocky woman out of the way and marched over to the cashier.

"Did some little brunette college cunt with glasses just buy a pair of socks?!" Eudora shouted at the completely disheveled kid behind the counter.

"Uh, no..." the boy simply said, his droopy eyes blinking at the beautiful but enraged punk girl yelling at him.

"You mean you didn't see a girl just walk out wearing new socks from this place? Without paying?" Eudora continued, slamming her fists on the desk.

She felt the security guard's hand touch her shoulder, and in a fit of anger she spun around and punched the woman square in the face.

The impact was so loud, and so powerful, that the minute her fist landed she knew the woman would not survive. She felt skull shatter beneath her fist, the results of a unharnessed ancient power coming into collision with mere mortal flesh.

Eudora pulled away from the immediate horror show that she'd created. Even as the ear-piercing screams filled her ears, she felt no remorse, but she did feel fear. With her bloodied hands now glowing with malicious energy, she was making quite a spectacle. There was only one thing left to do.

"Aüjin Fai-Ēquoi!" she yelled, welling up every last ounce of her mystic energy.

She felt an intense burning build up around her, and suddenly she felt her body being hurtled like a rag doll in a cyclone, through a blinding tunnel of light.

Intense pain shot through every nerve of her body, then just as quickly resolved. A moment later, she found herself back in her hotel room, on the floor of the kitchen, with her clothes smoldering.

"Shit, shit shit!" she screamed over and over, tearing her clothes free and tossing them in a pile in the bathtub. She turned on the water and sprayed the flaming clothes until they simmered.

Naked, she leapt up on the toilet seat and ripped the smoke detector out of the wall, tossing it in the wastepaper basket. Trembling still, she sunk down to the floor. The cold tiles braced her aching body. What was once a queer form of sexual excitement was now a raging bloodlust.

"I will kill that hipster bitch," she said to her self, laying flat on the floor. "I'll kill her!"

The peaks of her perfectly peachy breasts were still tight, and there was a telltale glaze dotting her inner thighs. She was too tired to move now. All she could do was sleep, and hope that no law enforcement would know where to find her for the next 48 hours...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FLIGHT OR FIGHT

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"What? Yeah, they're boarding now. No, Gary. Just make sure that transfer goes through, got it? Kiss kiss."

Eudora pocketed her phone began walking aggressively towards Gate 19. As she stormed across the vast concourse, her heels clacked on the floor loudly, a sound forbidding all who might get in her way.

As usual, heads turned. In her black velvet catsuit, fingerless gloves and paratrooper boots, she certainly stood out. But in truth she'd stand out no matter what she wore. That massive cloud of black hair hovering over her spotless face was hard to miss, as were those nearly impossible curves she so proudly flaunted.

She whisked past the gawkers, shooting an occasional smoldering glare their way. The only time she slowed the speed of her trajectory was when a small child ambled too closely, and even then she seemed ready to punt the little bastard at a moment's notice.

Today she was particularly on edge. The indignities of the airport security rigamarole could've been easily bypassed with a little teleportation magic, had she not blown most of it during yesterday's fiasco. The mere thought of those cheap x-rays exposing the intimate details of her perfect body to those lowly guards filled her with a seething annoyance.

She darted past the second-class aisle, nearly holding her breath until she reached first class. Spotting her deluxe seating arrangement near the front of the plane, her lips finally unclenched.

"Hmm, good going Gary ol' boy. I guess you're good for something," she said to herself as she got settled in her plush enclosure.

Not that she'd ever been hard up for cash, but wasting someone else's money was much preferable to her, and she found herself reclining in the seat in an absolutely guilt-free state of momentary relief. She was sleepier than she'd originally realized, and she found herself dozing off before the plane even took off the ground.

She awoke to the sound of a voice over the loudspeaker.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now crossing over the Atlantic to the Norskehavet, otherwise known as the Norwegian Sea..."

Slightly startled by the mundane announcement, she shot up in her seat, then checked the time.

11:40 am. About 2 hours left. She groggily wiped her eyes and looked around. A lone female flight attendant was looming nearby, whispering to a passenger.

Immediately annoyance rose in Eudora; she usually hated the serene plasticity of those stewardesses, and couldn't believe such a boring job could ever satisfy a fully sentient being.

When the stewardess finally came up to Eudora, the punk pythoness was ready to flash her usual prohibitive stare. But the face of the girl was shockingly familiar. At first Eudora could not tell exactly how, but when she blinked her eyes, she suddenly was certain who this girl was.

Even with the workaday blue dress and cap on, this girl oozed some very deeply considered form of meta-irony. Nothing about her seemed even remotely sincere, and yet in equal measures she was sickeningly adorable with her oversized glasses, childlike bangs and visible Pokémon tattoo peeking out from beneath one cuff of her freshly-pressed coat.

Hailey.

Eudora saw red.

"How in the hell—" she started, her voice already embarrassingly loud.

"Shh," Hailey responded with a tiny finger pressed her lips. She straightened the glasses on her little doll-nose and did a little curtsy. "Use your 'inside voice,' Eudora. Remember, you're not running wild out in the forests of Scandanavia just yet..."

Eudora thought to murder the girl right then and there, but the question of how Hailey had managed to track her like this, and with such elaborate deception no less, needed to be answered first. And then there was the matter of her stolen notebook...soon her paranoid mind was flooding with more puzzling thoughts.

"Tell me who sent you," Eudora demanded, her sharp eyes locking with the girl's own doe-eyed stare. "Or I will kill you," she added plainly, lowering her voice just enough to not cause a scene.

"Gosh, you sure aren't one for diplomacy are you babe?" Hailey taunted. "I'll tell you everything you want to know, but...well, we should talk in private. Cabin's crew lounge is empty right now. You could follow me in there...or you could just keep sitting here pouting, it's up to you!" She said, spinning on her heels and superficially shifting her attention to the passenger in front of Eudora.

"It's your funeral. Lead the way, cunt," Eudora said through gritted teeth, which alarmed a few passengers within earshot. Hailey just rolled her eyes and grinned apologetically at the onlookers. "I'm sorry everyone, some people just get so cranky when they're in the air! I'll be right back with your orders, okay?" She said to them, then shimmied down the aisle towards the secure staff lounge.

Eudora slowly rose from her seat, her eyes focused solely on the retreating form disappearing down the aisle. That petite, elfin, catalogue model form...wearing what? She squinted and looked at the girl's feet. She wasn't wearing normal stewardess shoes. Instead, she still wore that same pair of beat-up old Vans, the laces loose and flopping with each step.

How in the hell did she manage to fool the staff with that...oversight? Eudora wondered, her mind racing. Whatever the explanation, she knew full well that this "oversight" was actually the most premeditated aspect of Hailey's entire getup.

No. I'm not going to fall for this again, Eudora said to herself even as she found herself slowly walking down the aisle. Though her magic was too depleted to safeguard her against her worst urges, she knew that she was still far from powerless.

When she entered the attendant's lounge, the door slammed shut and locked behind her as if blown by a powerful wind.

Inside, Eudora was treated to a grotesque scene. A room full of massacred staff members lay in piles on the floor—she quickly counted three stewardesses, four stewards, and about a dozen other assorted crew members laying in neat parallel rows with their heads caved in.

"Oops! I forgot you witchy types commune with the dead and stuff. You probably consider this a packed house, huh? And here I thought I was giving us some privacy!" Hailey joked in a cheery tone, stepping over a gaping corpse dressed in a powder-blue uniform.

Eudora was not so much shocked by the sight as taken aback by the fact that this weak-looking girl seemingly caused all this carnage. "Anyways, Eudora. So you were feeling curious, huh?"

Eudora struggled to know what the right course of action was. She could very easily bring herself to add Hailey to the collection of mysteriously battered bodies laying lifeless on the floor, but her head was teaming with questions. The foremost one in her mind compelled her to insist again, "Tell me who sent you!"

"The illustrious Mistress Ayaka," The hipster girl said with some reverence, taking a seat on top of a still-twitching stewardess whose decimated face was gushing a fountain of blood.

"Gesundheit," Eudora retorted, the name not ringing familiar to her.

"Oh, I guess you forgot already? Or maybe two were never formally introduced? You know her. She's a powerful witchy woman, like yourself...and it just so happens made her very, very angry. I'm just her helpful little messenger, is all. At least for now..."

"I've made a lot of these crazy pythoness cunts angry," Eudora said with a forced little overconfident smirk, calming herself. "In fact, I've lost count. So you'll have to be more specific."

"Hmm, It's not my fault you're so self-obsessed that you don't remember meeting her. But you'll always remember me, won't you sweetie?" Hailey said, swiping some blood from a nearby corpse and drawing her name on the wall: H A I L E Y, punctuated with a little heart.

"Give me back my notebook. I know you took it," Eudora grunted.

"Hmm, that'd be kinda hard considering I gave it to Ayaka," Hailey responded casually, wiping her finger dry on her dirty shoes.

"Then if you have no more information for me, your life no longer has value," Eudora said, taking an ominous step towards the girl. She felt her hands grow hot with magical energy; even in its diminished state, she believed it was more than enough to tear this little hipster bitch to shreds.

"Tut tut, Eudora. You know what happens when you get all emotional...you start acting out, and the next thing you know there's a big mess, and you've got law enforcement all over you. You know it's only a matter of time before they find you, right? For what you did the other day..."

"And you don't think they'll find you, for this?" Eudora yelled, shaking her head and angrily pointing at the bodies littered about.

"The difference between you and me, Eudora, is that there's no me for them to find. I blend in. I have no form other than what people want to see. I am exactly what you want to see, am I not? Maybe even...the girl of your dreams? Heheh."

Eudora straightened her posture and spat on the floor. "Don't flatter yourself, bitch. You're too much of a trendy cliché for me to even take seriously. I'm sure there are a bunch of Instagram pedophiles out there who think you're adorable for all the wrong reasons. But when I look at you, all I see is a little rat," she said, though the minute she mouthed the words she knew they weren't exactly truthful.

"Ha! Not a frog? Well, you just named another animal I love—the rat! So I'm a rat, so what? Rats are smart, and they'll probably survive even a nuclear holocaust. Rats adapt, rats survive...but what are you, Eudora? You're all ego and bluster, and you stick out like a sore thumb. So unique and against the grain, aren't you? But uniqueness comes with a hefty price. You can't blend in. And that's a weakness, Eudora."

"And your weakness is that you aren't fireproof," Eudora said with a snarl, her hands growing bright orange with heat. Hailey simply snickered.

"Oh, you're gonna fry me with some of that fancy witch magic you have? How about shooting laser beams from your eyes instead? That would be so boss!"

"Phei Ēquoi!" Eudora yelled. Two large blue flames began to rise from her palms, called forth from her pure inner rage. She raised her hands and aimed them at the hipster bitch, ready to turn her into a human barbecue.

Hailey simply crossed her skinny little legs, fanned herself dramatically and continued to chuckle. Her eyes rolled up and down Eudora's imposing figure, and her tone became mock-concerned.

"My, you're really fired up about this, aren't you? It's sad, really. Those old tired symbols of rebellion you cling to—lip piercings and military boots, really? Anyone can buy that in a cheap mall, the kind my dad owns...maybe I could get you a discount?"

"Fuck you!"

"No, Eudora. There'll be no fucking, not here. But if you don't like that offer, maybe I can give you a different kind of discount? Even a successful girl like you could use to save a little cash, yes? Normally I would charge a lot for this, but for you, I'll just take a little bit of your dignity as collateral..."

She lifted her foot, slipping her grimy sneaker of to reveal an absolutely filthy cotton sock. Its original color appeared to have been cream white, but it was so layered with muck that it was more of a deep greenish-gray color. Its raw scent was so strong that Eudora could smell it even from her standing position some feet away.

She gasped, the fire in her hands flickering, wavering, and finally extinguishing. The nasal, chirpy laughter that then filled her ears was almost unbearable to withstand.

"Now don't just stand there, Eudora. Get on your knees...and beg me for that discount."

Eudora felt a malignant kind of anxiety balloon within her, one that she realized had been growing ever since her first encounter with Hailey.

It was gradually devouring her ego like a flesh-eating bacteria, and would stop at nothing short of reducing her to a neurotic mess. If she wanted to counteract it, she knew she had to react fast.