Ekron

Maria's Cats - 4

"I remember the day I arrived here; is easy to convince regular people that I'm a Crom, that my eyes are a mutation of that same type, but with scientists is a totally different story, they all looked at me with distrust, until you stood up and said that it was possible that my RNA would carry, blah, blah, blah and they all swallowed it, after all, you are the expert in chemistry. But I know that you knew it wasn't true, so, why did you help me?"

"What is happening?"

"Come on, you can ask me something better than that."

"Fine... what are you and what are those things?"

Theresa was tied to an armchair and Maria was behind her, combing her red curly hair with her fingers, as if she would be playing with a new doll.

"My mother was a witch and a scientist, we always loved cats and these eyes were given to me by one of them. I've tried to be more scientist than witch, but the limit is just a blur for me now. About my cats, I can only answer what they were originally: simple animals that had a form of spiritual transmutation embedded in their ordinary life cycle, but now they are changing, impossible to know what they will become, because they should have never been taken away from their home. A sin that will spawn a million of sins."

"What... what will happen to me?"

María stopped playing with Theresa's hair and stood in front of her.

She looked at Theresa's beautiful green eyes, adjusted her eyeglasses that were a little tilted, and said, "You'll not have to suffer anymore."

Theresa's face made a sour grin and she cried in silence, lowered her head while tears stained her eyeglasses.

She looked up again and said to Maria in a sob, "More soldiers will come, please don't kill me, we can just be victims of the attack."

"It's unlikely they'll send anyone up here; the war is over, the Emperor is dead, and as far as I know, the new Empress is craziest than Caligula."

"Another Crom?"

"Unfortunately, yes."

"They scare me, more than your cats, and I studied in Saint Agatha's..."

Theresa laughed for a moment through the red congestion of her face, and then regained the sad expression that she had before, "How will you do it?"

"I will prepare you, gradually, and I promise that you won't suffer at all. In the meantime, I will feed them..."

Maria rolled up her sleeve and showed Theresa her right arm, it was full of bruises and fang marks. Theresa's eyes opened so wide that her glasses almost fell, then she looked back at Maria's face, calm and insane, and swallowed the accumulated saliva in her mouth.

In an improvised operating room that she implemented in her lab, Maria removed half of Theresa's brain replacing it with electronic circuitry and hydraulic hoses, connecting her to a small mainframe following her mother's notes and illustrations. Those specifications needed some specific animal to be connected to the mainframe as well, but that served an entirely different purpose and Maria only needed Theresa's blood to acquire superior healing properties as well as a different cellular structure, one that would allow her body to feed on electric power.

After some testing, the Macsks started to feed on Theresa's arms, and the results were almost immediate; their fur got shiny and lighter, they grew to reach three feet of stature standing in two legs, and their horns got smaller and thinner.