But as I looked away to hide my expression, my gaze fell once more upon the tub. Immediately, my bubble of hope collapsed back into the nothingness of despair. I was deluding myself.

Stupid, stupid girl. Riley was gone. If ever I’d possessed his heart, that time was also gone. If Riley’s heart really was the key to Epistola getting what she wanted, she would be denied her desire as surely as I had been denied mine. It was the coldest of comforts.

“You’re wrong,” I sniffled. “I don’t have his heart. He doesn’t want me.” My voice splintered into a thousand shards. “I’m useless to him. Which I guess means I’m useless to you, too.”

Epistola looked thoughtful for a moment.

“No… no. Useless generally, yes, but not to me. Dead Cthulhu did not resist my call, did not turn his back on ultimate fulfillment of his destiny, to simply cast you aside immediately after. Even constructed as you are for single-use, like a Kleenex.” She shook her head in firm denial. “No, you are the holder of The Heart. You will act as the conduit. You will die, thrashing, screaming, submerged. And I, Scarlett Louise Epistola, will bring cosmic negation raining righteously down upon this world and all others!” Her cackling rose to the rafters. “It will be a night to remember.”

I barely heard her as the tub gaped at me, seemed to stretch to unimaginable size, the murky water within it rippling threateningly.

“And to think,” Epistola was still talking, “all these years I’ve spent worshipping the Priest All-High! Only to discover that he is nothing more than a hormonal child, so captivated by the first homely young strumpet he meets who’s not a squirming mass of eyeballs, that he abandons his sacred duty. A pity. But! Let us not dwell.”

She slowly lifted the knife from the table, caressing it gently, moving her long fingers dancingly from the tip to the base of the blade. The look upon her face was one of hunger, and there was a droplet of moisture at the corner of her crimson mouth. With great relish, she pricked the inside of one of her wrists, drawing a bead of blood to the surface. She pressed the wrist to my forehead. I gagged and tried to escape my skin, but to no avail.

“You are now anointed, you pallid little addlepate. The Heart of Cthulhu.”

“Orr’e Cthulhu!” the dark cultists echoed around her.

Epistola turned to address the rows upon rows of empty seats. She lifted her arms in a Y-shape, a look of animal ecstasy upon her face. “Oh, at last! The humiliation I’ve endured. The trials I’ve overcome. The scorn which I have carried like a white-hot coal in the pit of my being for all these iniquitous years! All shall be revenged!”

Her minions accompanied her proclamation with a wild alien cry.