Once upon a time, I was but a girl. What did I know of the world? He came to me, in the guise of a friend, who turned into a lover. But not the kind I wanted. I tried to leave, discretely, but he would have none of that. I resigned myself to my fate; little did I know what he had in store.

I woke up one morning a shadow of my former self. I had gone from flesh and blood girl to cloth and rag and yarn. My purple button eyes never missed a thing. I kept track of everything I saw, everything I heard. It wasn’t all that difficult as he called me his favorite voodoo doll.

In time, he began to use me in ritual work, imbuing me with powers I never thought to dream of. He thought that once his work finished, the power went where he told it. Doll I may be, but my soul still lives on. Unable to move or talk, I still have Power of my own. I refused to relinquish any drop of any nourishment that came my way.

I let the years pass as I grew stronger, and I practiced my own spellwork. I watched him…and then I worked to thwart his spells from the inside. He thought he had arrived at the end of his journey, thought his powers waning. He sought to make deals with devils and demons, all of whom gave me sly smiles. They knew I wanted none of them. Still, they took his deals and twisted them to his own desires. I kept usurping his power.

The day came I called upon my own powers while he lay abed, his dreams nightmares coursing through his veins. In silence I birthed myself, slithering out of that tiny cloth body covered in the ichor in which he had smothered me for years.

I stood there before him, naked and shameless, watching him twitch and jerk through his sleep. The thought of slashing his throat…of cutting out his heart…of … so many wild cruel deaths…galloped through my own heart…but in the end, I knew the cruelest thing I could do would be to leave him to pay his debts to the demons. Without me there any longer as a cushion, his bargains required payment in full…and he didn’t have much of a soul left after so long in the Black.

I kissed his forehead as he slept. Not as a sign of forgiveness, but because every man should have something good to take with him on his journey to hell.