Melody’s eyes snapped open to an unfamiliar ceiling.
Not the apartment. Not a hospital. Not the smoky sky above Broadway. Just plain white plaster and a cheap ceiling fan that wobbled slightly with every rotation. The mattress under her was soft, the sheets tangled around her legs, and the air smelled faintly of laundry detergent and… someone else’s cologne?
She sat up too fast. The world tilted. Her hands flew to her chest—
And found soft, heavy, very real C-cups still exactly where they belonged.
A delighted, slightly unhinged laugh bubbled out of her.
“Oh thank God,” she whispered in that same sultry voice that still didn’t belong to Edward. “Still got the girls. Still hot. Still—”
The rest of the sentence died as a slow, molten heat bloomed low in her stomach. An apocalypse and a half happened and her body apparently decided to make up for lost time all at once. She was already wet. Achingly, embarrassingly wet. The thin cotton of her panties clung to her folds like they’d been painted on.
Melody bit her lip. Looked down at the familiar red-haired body she still somehow owned. Then, with zero hesitation and even less shame, she reached up with both hands, cupped her breasts, and squeezed.
“Ahh—!”
The inverted nipples popped free under her palms. A full-body shiver raced down her spine. She rolled one nipple between thumb and finger, gasping at how sensitive everything still was, how ‘good’ it felt after what her brain insisted had only been a day but her body felt had been a decade.
Her free hand slid south without asking permission.
Fingers slipped under the waistband of her panties, found the slick, swollen heat waiting for them, and pushed inside.
“Mmph—oh ‘fuck’—”
She curled them immediately, thumb finding her clit like it had never forgotten the way. Wet, obscene little sounds filled the quiet room. Her hips jerked. Another moan slipped out, higher and needier than she meant it to be. The pressure built fast—too fast—stress of almost dieing collapsing into one desperate, trembling climb—
A soft rustle of blankets across the room.
Melody’s eyes flew open.
On a second mattress shoved against the opposite wall, buried in a chaotic nest of pillows and blankets, sat a deeply traumatized, tomato-red Leo Jefferson.
Thirteen and brown messy hair. Scar across one eyebrow. And currently staring at her like he’d just witnessed the end of the world ‘and’ his own personal hentai at the same time.
“Gah!”
That was all he managed. His soul visibly left his body. If this were an anime the nosebleed would have painted the entire wall. Instead he just sat there, mouth open, eyes locked on the exact spot where Melody’s hand was still buried between her legs, and made a tiny dying noise.
Melody’s brain short-circuited.
“Damn… AHH! Leo I’m so sorry!”
She yanked her hand free, scrambled out of the bed in nothing but a black sports bra and matching panties (still very much soaked), and crossed the room in three long strides. Leo was already listing sideways like a felled tree. She grabbed his head with both hands and shook him.
“Leo! Leo wake up—oh my god I’m so sorry I didn’t know you were—hey!”
His eyes fluttered open.
All he saw were two very full, very close C-cup breasts bouncing right in front of his face as she shook him.
Leo’s eyes rolled back.
He passed out again.
Melody froze, still holding his head, breasts still inches from his nose, and stared at the ceiling like it might offer advice.
“…I can feel Melody glaring at me from the great beyond,” she muttered, staring toward the ceiling as if the original owner of the body might actually be up there judging every questionable decision Edward had made since waking up inside her.
Hours later, Melody and Leo sat across from each other at a small wooden kitchen table in almost complete silence. The house belonged to somebody else, that much was obvious from the life scattered around them. Family pictures covered most of the wall beside the kitchen, some professionally taken and others clearly printed from phones and shoved into whatever frames happened to be available. A husband and wife stood sunburned on a beach with two little girls between them in one. Another showed the same girls several years younger sitting beside an unbelievably fat golden retriever wearing a birthday hat. There were Christmas mornings, school portraits, a graduation, somebody proudly holding a fish that looked considerably less impressive than the expression on his face, and a refrigerator covered in magnets, takeout menus, coupons, and a spelling test with a bright red 96% written across the top. A whiteboard beside it still had Milk, eggs, cereal, dog food written in blue marker, normal things that yesterday probably meant somebody needed to stop at the store after work. Now Melody kept wondering where the people in the pictures were, and after the third time her mind started imagining answers, she decided she didn't want to know.
The house itself had grown strangely quiet sometime after she woke up. Whatever electricity had remained when Leo brought her inside had apparently died while they were recovering. The cheap ceiling fan no longer turned, the refrigerator had stopped humming, and none of the light switches did anything. The only illumination came through the curtains, daylight stained faintly orange by smoke hanging over the neighborhood. Every few minutes a siren drifted through the walls or some distant explosion rolled across the Bronx, but neither of them jumped anymore. New York had been making those sounds for hours, and somewhere along the way Melody had started distinguishing between close enough that we should probably move and somebody else's immediate problem.
Leo sat opposite her with his elbows resting on the table and his hands clasped awkwardly together. He had cleaned himself up somewhat. Most of the blood and grime were gone from his face now, revealing the little scar through one eyebrow Melody hadn't noticed earlier, but dried blood still remained beneath his fingernails and inside the seams of his clothes. His brown hair was an absolute disaster, sticking up in several directions, and he seemed determined not to look directly at her. Whenever his eyes accidentally wandered toward Melody, they immediately discovered something fascinating somewhere else. The family pictures had received some attention. So had the refrigerator magnets. At the moment, the salt shaker appeared to be the most interesting object Leo had ever encountered.
Melody finally sighed and folded her arms on the table. “You know this is only going to get weirder the longer we both pretend nothing happened.”
Leo continued studying the salt shaker as though there might be answers engraved beneath it. “I'm fine pretending. Actually, I think pretending is a really good idea, and we should keep doing that forever.”
“That doesn't sound emotionally healthy.”
“I don't care.”
“Fair.”
The silence returned, but this one felt slightly less hostile. Melody shifted in the oversized gray T-shirt she had found upstairs. It belonged to an adult man and hung nearly to the middle of her thighs, while the sweatpants she had stolen from the same dresser were so large she had pulled the drawstring almost as tight as it could go just to keep them around her waist. Her Crownwell uniform was beyond saving, apparently something Leo had discovered before she ever woke up.
After she collapsed from absorbing the snake's mana, Leo had stayed beside her until the strange light finally stopped pouring into her body. Then, because apparently the kid had decided one impossible task that day wasn't enough, he had somehow gotten her away from Broadway before anything else came looking for them. According to him, he tried carrying her first. Melody imagined that had lasted approximately twelve heroic seconds before physics reminded a thirteen-year-old boy that an unconscious adult woman was heavier than anime made them look. Eventually he had hooked his arms beneath her shoulders and dragged her until he found a townhouse with a damaged front door.
Melody had mixed feelings about this information. “So you actually dragged me all the way here?”
Leo finally looked at her, immediately defensive. “You were unconscious. What was I supposed to do?”
“I know. I'm grateful. I'm just thinking about my hair.”
His expression flattened so completely that Melody almost laughed before he even answered. “There were monsters outside.”
“I have a lot of hair and I quite like it.”
“I thought you were dying!”
Melody lifted both hands. “I know, I know. You did the right thing. I'm just saying I can appreciate you saving my life while also mourning whatever happened to the ends of my hair while you dragged me across half the Bronx. Humans are capable of holding multiple emotions at once.”
Leo stared at her for another few seconds before deciding there was no worthwhile response to that. He looked away again, but Melody caught the tiny movement at the corner of his mouth before he did. He was getting easier to read. That was nice. Weird considering she'd known him for less than a day, but nice.
Dragging her through the street had only been the beginning. Once Leo got her inside, he realized most of Melody's clothing was still wet with the snake's blood. The acid had already eaten holes through her blazer, blouse, stockings, and parts of the skirt, and leaving whatever remained pressed against her burns seemed like an excellent way to let the monster finish killing her after death. Leo had cut away the ruined outer layers where the material had fused together, kept her covered with a blanket as much as possible, and tried cleaning the exposed burns.
Unfortunately, the taps weren't working. Leo had searched the kitchen, checked the refrigerator, opened cupboards, and eventually resorted to the only remotely clean water he could immediately find.
Melody rested her chin on one hand and stared at him. “So just to confirm this part because I still haven't emotionally processed it. You washed monster acid off me with water from a dog bowl.”
Leo's face immediately turned red again. “There wasn't anything else! The sink wasn't working, the bottles in the fridge were empty, and you were covered in that stuff. I wasn't just going to leave it there.”
“There was a toilet.”
Leo stared at her.
Melody considered what she had just suggested, pictured the alternative, and slowly nodded. “Actually, no. Dog water was the correct decision. Forget I said that.”
“I made sure the bowl didn’t have stuff floating in it.”
“Oh, excellent. Five-star medical treatment, then. Very sanitary.”
“I was trying to help you!” He said, her teasing seeming to do to much damage.
“I know.” Her voice softened enough that Leo stopped picking at the table.
Melody looked at him properly this time. “Thank you, Leo.”
He didn't answer, and that was probably for the best because Melody suddenly didn't have another joke ready. She had been making them because joking about dog water, ruined hair, and Leo's improvised medical care was much easier than acknowledging what the kid had actually done. Leo had watched her collapse after the snake died without knowing whether the mana was healing her, killing her, or turning her into something else entirely. He had no idea if another monster was coming. His mother, father, and little sister had died that same morning, and instead of deciding he had already done enough for one day, he stayed. He checked that Melody was breathing, got her somewhere sheltered, cleaned corrosive blood from her injuries, covered her, and waited to see if she would wake up.
Edward thought about himself at thirteen and tried imagining that version of him doing any of this. Thirteen-year-old Edward probably would have found the nearest closet, called his mother, and refused to come out until an adult solved the problem.
“You did good,” Melody said after a while. When Leo only shrugged and kept looking down, she leaned forward. “No, seriously. You did really good. I was unconscious in the middle of a street, covered in monster blood after we killed something large enough to use cars as furniture. You could have run. Nobody would have blamed you, especially me considering I wasn't exactly available to complain.”
Leo rubbed his thumb back and forth over a small gouge in the tabletop. “I couldn't.”
Melody's expression changed. “Why?”
He was quiet long enough that she realized she had probably stepped into something deeper than she intended. Outside, another siren rose somewhere several blocks away and faded again. Leo kept tracing the little mark in the wood until finally he whispered, “I thought you were dead too.”
Whatever joke Melody might have reached for disappeared before it formed.
Leo stared down at his hands while he continued. “When all that light started coming out of the snake, you looked happy at first. You said something about leveling up, and then there was more and more of it. You started shaking and fell over. I kept saying your name, but you weren't answering me.” His mouth twitched faintly at the memory of the leveling comment, though it never became a smile. “I checked if you were breathing because I've seen people do that in movies. You were, but it was really slow, and I kept thinking...” He stopped and swallowed before forcing the words out. “I kept thinking somebody else was gonna leave me.”
Melody felt her chest tighten.
He hadn't become some impossibly hardened apocalypse survivor in a few hours. He wasn't fearless and he definitely hadn't somehow finished grieving. He simply couldn't handle leaving behind another body. His parents were gone. Lilly was gone. Then Melody had collapsed in front of him, and somewhere inside that frightened thirteen-year-old brain he had apparently decided that one more person was not dying if he could do anything about it.
Melody reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. Leo stiffened slightly at the contact but didn't pull away, so she left it there. “You didn't have to leave me. You got me out.”
Leo finally looked up.
Melody didn't say anything else.
For once she let the silence handle the part she wasn't equipped to fix. There wasn't a joke that could bring Leo's family back, and there wasn't some perfect older-person sentence that would suddenly make everything okay. She wasn't even sure everything would be okay. The sky had cracked open, monsters were roaming New York, and she was hiding inside a stranger's house with a kid she'd known for only several hours while wearing somebody else's sweatpants.
So she squeezed his hand.
After a moment, Leo squeezed hers back.
It was such a small response that Melody almost missed it, but something about it settled strangely inside her. She had known the kid for less than a day, yet somewhere between finding him clutching Lilly in that pizza shop, watching him stand shaking in front of the snake just to pull it away from her, and waking up to discover he had refused to leave her unconscious on Broadway, her brain had started treating him differently. Not as some random child she had accidentally picked up during the apocalypse. Not even entirely as a responsibility anymore.
He felt a little like a younger brother.
An irritating, traumatized, surprisingly brave little brother.
The realization made Melody oddly proud of him.
It was ridiculous if she thought about it too carefully. Edward had been twenty-four. Melody's body was twenty-two. Leo was thirteen, and they'd met today. Apparently the end of civilization did wonderful things for relationship pacing.
“You know,” Melody said eventually, withdrawing her hand and leaning back in the chair, “the dagger throw was actually pretty cool.”
Leo's eyes lifted. “I hit it. Right?”
“You did. Right in the neck too. Honestly, the throw itself was impressive.”
A tiny bit of pride returned to his face. “I thought I got it.”
Melody nodded seriously. “For about half a second, so did I. Then it bounced off like you'd thrown a spoon at a tank.”
Leo's expression dropped immediately. “You caught it, though.”
“Technically I picked it up off the pavement.”
“At least, you killed the snake with it.”
“That is true, which means by the sacred laws of assisted kills, you absolutely contributed.”
Leo considered that with more seriousness than the statement deserved. “So, I helped kill it?”
“Absolutely. I probably don't get close enough to grab that dagger without you distracting it, and you threw it where I could reach it. Terrible damage, excellent utility.”
He clearly had no idea what that last part meant, but it didn't matter. Leo's eyes dropped toward the table again, and this time the expression there wasn't empty. It wasn't happiness either. Nothing could make what happened happy, but there was something quieter in the way his shoulders loosened.
The thing that killed Lilly was dead.
The thing that killed his mother and father was dead.
And Leo had helped kill it.
Melody let him keep that.
They sat quietly for another minute before Melody shifted in her chair and noticed something strange. There was no pain. Not less pain. None. Her ribs didn't ache from being smashed into cars, her shoulder didn't hurt from the pavement, and the arm the snake had sliced open felt perfectly normal. She remembered its blood burning across her cheek badly enough that she had been certain the damage would leave scars, but when she raised her fingers to her face all she found was smooth skin.
Leo noticed the change in her expression. “What?”
“I think I'm checking whether I should be dead.”
Melody rolled one shoulder, then the other, before twisting carefully at the waist. Her body moved without protest. There wasn't even the dull muscular soreness she would have expected after running for miles, fighting a giant snake, being thrown into vehicles, crashing through a bus shelter, and somehow becoming a human bullet that traveled directly through a monster's neck. She stood, bent slightly to one side and then the other, pressed both hands against her ribs, and eventually walked over to the microwave to use its darkened door as a mirror.
Her reflection stared back at her.
Nothing remained.
The burns were gone from her cheek. The cut on her arm had vanished. There wasn't a scar, a patch of redness, or even slight discoloration where the acidic blood had eaten into her skin.
Melody leaned closer to the microwave. “That is really freaking broken.”
Leo turned in his chair to look at her. “The burns were really bad before.”
Melody glanced back. “How bad?”
He pulled a face that immediately made her regret asking. “Gross. I could see...”
“Stop. Whatever word comes after that sentence, keep it inside your head.”
“You asked.”
“And I formally rescind the question. You provided enough information.”
Melody returned her attention to the reflection and pulled up one sleeve of the oversized shirt. Her skin looked untouched, but healing wasn't the only difference. She felt different again, the same way she had after absorbing the winged cat, except amplified. The original Melody had apparently been in excellent shape even before Edward appeared inside her. That much had become obvious during the stairs, the running, and the fact that her body generally seemed to have been maintained by someone who didn't treat exercise like an optional downloadable expansion.
After absorbing the cat, that healthy body became noticeably stronger.
After absorbing the snake, something had changed again.
Melody slowly closed one hand into a fist. There was a density behind the motion that she couldn't properly describe. Her muscles didn't suddenly bulge or make her look like a bodybuilder, but they felt loaded, like the amount of force her brain considered normal no longer matched the amount of force her body could actually produce. She experimentally bounced once on the balls of her feet.
The wooden floor creaked beneath her.
Melody immediately stopped.
Leo raised one eyebrow. “Were you about to jump?”
“No.”
“You were thinking about jumping.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Inside a house?”
Melody looked toward the ceiling and remembered what happened the last time her legs decided to demonstrate their new capabilities. “Good point. I'd rather not explain to whoever owns this place why there's suddenly a Melody-shaped hole in the second floor.”
Leo actually gave her a small smile at that.
Melody returned to the kitchen table and noticed the dagger sitting on the counter beside a wooden block of ordinary kitchen knives. Against the cheap stainless steel and black plastic handles, the weapon looked almost absurdly out of place. Its curved fang blade had returned to its pale ivory color, but the strange dark veins remained visible beneath the surface, while the black handle seemed to drink in some of the weak orange daylight coming through the curtains.
“You grabbed that too?” Melody asked.
Leo looked genuinely offended by the question. “Obviously. Why would I leave it there?”
“I'm starting to think you're considerably better at apocalypse survival than I thought.”
Leo suddenly froze.
His expression changed.
“Wait.”
Melody raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“That reminds me!”
He practically launched himself out of the chair and disappeared down the hallway before Melody could ask what exactly she had reminded him of. She heard a door open somewhere upstairs, followed by several hurried footsteps, something falling over, and Leo muttering what sounded suspiciously like an apology to an inanimate object.
A moment later he came running back into the kitchen carrying something much too large to hide behind his back.
“You had this too.”
Melody's mouth fell open.
Leo carefully placed a sword across the table.
It was curved, somewhere between a saber and an oversized hunting blade, with a dark scaled pommel and a twisting finger guard that curled protectively around the grip. The material looked immediately familiar. Metallic green and charcoal scales ran along parts of the handle, while the blade itself curved forward in almost exactly the same shape as one of the enormous pincers attached to the snake's jaw.
Only smaller.
Human-sized.
Melody slowly reached toward it.
“It appeared when all the light disappeared,” Leo explained. “You were already falling over, but you were holding it. I thought it was important, so I grabbed it before I dragged you away.”
Melody wrapped her fingers around the grip.
It fit perfectly.
Of course it did.
A stupid grin started spreading across her face.
Yesterday had begun with her discovering she'd died, somehow become an anime villainess, and apparently inherited that woman's life. Several hours later New York was being invaded by monsters, gotten a supernatural dagger made from a flying armored cat, and now apparently a sword forged from the pincer of a giant snake.
Edward's old life had never once given him a magical weapon.
“This is so awesome.”