Love in a Murderous Place Chapter 2

Ashley had looked a cold, unknowable world of demons and death in the eye, and made it blink. This begged the question: why the fuck was she someone’s secretary? When she returned from that cabin, the music over, her dead boyfriend’s brains splattered over her favorite t-shirt, she returned to an ungrateful world. A world that didn’t realize she’d found her true calling in slaying the denizens of some hellish plane; a world which thought she was making the whole damn thing up. Still, Ashley always put on her best smile; she did her schoolwork; she nodded and said “Yes, sir” when her boss asked her for something, because Ashley was a nice girl, and that’s what nice girls did. She was also, near as she could tell, the revival of an ancient caste of demon-slaying warriors foretold within some forbidden scroll she’d found during her search for the Necronomicon. Perhaps most importantly, Ashley was perpetually close to not making rent, and offering one month at twenty-five percent off for any new subscribers who wanted to pay a recurring fee to watch videos of her jerking off.

This was, sadly, her hero’s reward for saving countless lives from what very well could have become a demonic army if nobody had been able to dispel the malicious spirits and sever the ties between her world and theirs. Disbelief, dismissal, and the expectation that she not bring up such topics in polite company, lest there be consequences. Many might, upon finding themselves in Ashley’s shoes, snap. They might shoot up their place of work, or perhaps secede from public life, join a cult, or maybe start their own. Ashley was not such a person. Ashley was a trans woman; she already had a wealth of experience being invalidated, ignored, gaslit, shunned and placed into little boxes of acceptable behaviors and expectations. So instead, she did what she always did: she put on a friendly face, and kept on with a normal life.

There was one caveat to that. A caveat which basically ensured Ashley couldn’t have a normal life at all. One of the very first things Ashley did after surviving that house, after slaying the demon-possessed bodies of her asshole boyfriend, his asshole frat brothers, and their sometimes less assholey girlfriends, was gather what trinkets and curios she could from the house, and find a buyer. It had been a surprisingly easy task, all in all. Ashley, being remarkably lucky that the light of morning had cleansed the house and everything in it of any evidence that any struggle had ever occurred within, was able to have her pick of the odd little baubles her boyfriend’s grandfather—the house’s late owner—had accumulated over his lifetime. Part of her wondered whether she was making a mistake selling strange antiques that came from a house where a demonic summoning tome had been located. The rest of her knew she had no other way of getting the money. And Ashley needed money.

Like the tide going in and out, Ashley amassed, then quickly spent a small fortune in preparation for her self-determined fate. Guns, ammunition, explosives, incense, a flamethrower, and then of course the custom modifications she’d made to her prosthetic arm. With an uneasy eagerness and a rapidly dwindling abundance of cash, Ashley prepared for what she saw as an inevitable second confrontation with the forces of evil. In the months that followed, her life more and more coalesced into two unlikely halves, like a strange misprinted coin: one side of Ashley had become some sort of prepper, a self-appointed soldier against the evils she had faced that night; the other side of her was just some girl. Most people would only look twice at Ashley in order to get a better look at the way her jeans hugged her ass.

By day, Ashley would go to work wearing a bright, friendly face; by night, she would dedicate herself wholly to the task she was so utterly convinced lay before her. She had found something in the attic of that house, an old scroll depicting a trio of armed women holding down and plunging a dagger into the heart of a demon. Beneath the illustration was an inscription, scrawled with the painstaking clarity of someone who felt it very important their handwriting be as utilitarian and legible as possible; it referred to a group known as the Ordo Cinereu, the Ashen Order. It had felt like fate; that scroll was one of the few important-looking things from the house Ashley had decided not to sell, along with a polished, though utilitarian, silver dagger. Despite hours of research for days on end, Ashley could find little about this Ashen Order; the name would crop up here and there in old texts, but they seemed more or less lost to time.

Nevertheless, Ashley saw purpose in the order’s apparent goal: to drive a dagger into the heart of every last monstrous being called forth from whatever horrible void they resided in. At the end of the day, though, that didn’t particularly matter. According to the rest of the world, stories of malicious spirits and otherworldly evils were just that, and Ashley had neither the resources, nor the knowledge to act alone. Instead, she waited, always ready and never needed. That didn’t matter, though, as long as she was able, she wouldn’t let anyone else go through what she had. That had been the plan, at least. Time wore on, but for the first time since before she’d transitioned, Ashley stagnated. She’d committed herself to a purpose beyond herself, one she had no real means of pursuing. Part of her wondered, if the time ever really did come, would she have it in her to do what she’d set out to?

After months of letting the world leave her behind as she dove into her new obsession, Ashley awoke one day to find herself alone. She had exhausted her friends’ pity, been nearly sectioned by her therapist, and completely ruined her sleep schedule. The last straw came when Ashley found herself uncomfortably close to being fired when her boss caught her researching demonology on the job. After a solid half hour of being mercilessly chewed out by her boss, Ashley realized that time had come for her to accept a harsh truth: she needed to change. She had been single, lonely, and out of touch with the world around her for months on end as she fixated on saving a world that at best tolerated her existence from a threat that was so rare people didn’t even think it was real.

It was then that, begrudgingly, she admitted to herself she needed change. The problem was, she didn’t know how. She’d grown distant, withdrawn from the people around her. What was she to do? Ashley could not simply walk up to her friends, smile and say “Hey guys, it’s me. Remember how I used to be obsessed with killing demons, a thing which you believe to be some trauma-induced delusion surrounding my boyfriend’s death? Well, don’t worry, I’m totally over that now. Wanna do shots? Also, by the way, I’m actually not over it at all; I’m just pretending I’m over it so you’ll like me, but as soon as this is over I’m getting right back to it.”

As luck would have it, around the time Ashley was struggling for a way back into some semblance of normality, her older brother had reached out to her—probably on request from her mother, who was far too passive-aggressive to just come right out and say ‘You need help.’ Jeremy was some relatively important director or something at this cruise ship company, Opal Cruise Lines. He did a passable enough job over the phone playing his role of the concerned brother, and, after about ten minutes of stiff conversation, he unceremoniously got to the point of his calling: he was offering her a free ticket to some singles cruise that he’d just ‘happened upon’ due to his position in the company.

Part of Ashley had wanted to reject the offer outright; going on a cruise sounded frivolous and counterproductive to her goals. Also, she was hardly the target demographic for such things. Still, at the end of the day, she could see the offer for what it was, a not so transparent show of concern from her family. Despite the ups and downs, Ashley did value them, and didn’t want them to worry over her, so she accepted. Besides, she couldn’t deny the fact that, at the end of the day, going on vacation would get her away from the whole obsession with supernatural evil thing. She’d packed enough guns to take over a mid-sized American town, just to be safe. Finding a way to get everything aboard had proven challenging, but Ashley was resourceful, and had anticipated in advance that one day she might need to sneak weapons onto a plane or otherwise secure location. A portion of her money had already been well-spent for this exact purpose.

As such, one bright Saturday morning, she found herself boarding the Horizon Sapphire, feeling a mixture of nervous apprehension, and surprisingly, a bit of excitement. A part of Ashely even considered whether she might meet someone nice—that was, however, the nice to trans people kind of nice, not the normal, much easier to find kind of nice that cis people got to settle for. She entered into an opulent hall that overlooked a round central plaza in the middle of the massive ship. Overhead, a delicate and complex crystalline chandelier filled the entire plaza and surrounding halls with warm light; glancing over the railing, Ashley could glimpse a small band playing upbeat music atop a stage on the base floor of the plaza. Above and below was floor after floor of identical hallways circling the room. Guests filed past, laughing and chatting casually as they oohed and ahed at the sights around them.

At least, that was what most of the guests were doing. At one end of the hall, Ashley glimpsed a mid-sized mob growing around a set of tables manned by ship staff. There was shouting, pushing, demands of refunds, threats of litigation, the whole deal, all while some poor girl with a microphone shouted over everyone, saying something about certain key staff just not showing up for work that day. For a moment, Ashley considered investigating, but decided against it; she was there to relax, not get herself even more worked up. With a light shake of her head, Ashley cleared her mind, and decided the first order of business would be to check out her cabin, then maybe grab lunch afterward.

She set off down the hall, finding an elevator to take her to the lower floors where her cabin was—fourth floor, to be specific. In the elevator, she overheard a conversation between two guests, a man and a woman. Apparently both were traveling alone, though they hadn’t intended to. Their friends had gotten suddenly sick the day before the cruise. How sad, Ashley thought, now they were stuck on going on a week-long cruise all by themselves—wait, shit. The elevator made its stop at her floor, and before she knew it, Ashley had arrived at her cabin. In a word, it was small. Little more than a bed, a closet, a little table with two chairs, a TV, a mini-fridge, and a bathroom. Admittedly, most hotel rooms could be described similarly, though typically they weren’t as tightly packed. Still, it was cozy, and Ashley had little reason to be in her room save to sleep.  She took a quick moment to confirm her luggage—including her contraband—was all there, then set out to enjoy herself.

The first day was slow, but nice. Ashley ate and drank her fill, watched the coast grow ever more distant from the deck, and attended some special opening night party. Apparently the guy who was supposed to run the thing didn’t show, and his replacement was a total creep. Not an ounce of charisma on the man; he almost seemed angry the entire time. The whole event was, frankly, quite uncomfortable. Ashley, at the very least, took solace in the fact that she would have been uncomfortable at this sort of event regardless, and found the tension in the air at least a little bit funny. Besides, the man's awkward, growling attempts at hosting didn’t seem to keep people from hooking up. A few different men had even approached her; she’d rebuffed all of them, not her type. They were a little too, well, each one of them looked like the kind of man who would backpedal the moment he realized he’d need to tell his friends and family the girl he was dating had a dick bigger than his own. It was energy, one Ashley had learned to detect from a mile away. Sadly, the ship was crawling with men of that sort, so her radar was a bit cluttered.

Either way, a late night begot a late morning, and Ashley began day two around noon. Stretching lethargically in her bed, Ashley actually felt pretty good about that. That was the first time she’d slept past eight in some time. She sat up from bed, rubbed her eyes, and promptly had a small crisis upon realizing that she had seven entire days of this to look forward to. And, to be clear, she had enjoyed day one. But she was locked in now, and seven more days of that all by herself, marked only with little day-long excursions here and there sounded—well, it sounded incredibly boring.

Hoping she might find something to cut through the dread that was bordering on a full-on anxiety episode if she wandered the ship, Ashley got dressed, and departed from her room. Just as she stepped into the hall, she saw two men carrying a large sack over their shoulders enter the room next to her own. It was strange, she could have sworn she’d seen that room’s occupant yesterday, and she’d been a tiny little cis girl. Perhaps she was about to get lucky and share two new conquests, perhaps it was something else entirely; Ashley was on a mission to relax, not investigate every little oddity she encountered on the ship. She shrugged, and continued down the hall, only to find the nearest bank of elevators seemed to be locked down. A member of the ship’s security stood in front of the alcove waving her along. “Sorry, miss,” he drawled. “One of the guests got sick in the elevator. We’ll have this available as soon as it’s clean.”

“Right,” she nodded, “gosh, people are already getting seasick, hmm?”

The guard shrugged. “Get used to it, miss. Captain says there might be stormy seas tonight.” He seemed to be looking past her.

“Right, well, I’ll be going now.”

“Enjoy your stay, miss.” He flashed her an unsettling tight-lipped smile.

“Fuck’s sake,” Ashley muttered under her breath. “I need a goddamn drink.”