Egypt, Cairo. Sun was partially clouded and those thirty seven degrees came upon the capital in a wave of humidity and little wind. Easily said, the moment a tourist would step out of its airport and properly into the city's world, they'd be overwhelmed with a beaded sweat and a heavy breath, asking them to stop under the nearest shadow.

Not only was Michael Morbius no longer subject to such a human thing as sweating, but he also had a far greater task to look after. Throughout the flight, his ears discreetly remained as close to those of a bat, getting used to Priscila's signature, her breathing pattern and the soundwaves of her tone, even if he was in the very back of the airplane, she was in the front and between them came a mass of chatting people. He had to prepare thoroughly, because once they were in the city, the chaos only doubled and he still needed to keep a certain distance between him and Clara's sister so she didn't recognize him, nor notice she was being followed.

But in a sea of tourists, Michael stood out a bit too obviously from above, where he was a moving black dot, a parasite. His only luck was that Priscila never turned around, too focused on following Google Maps to the location she's been given. At the edge of the heart of the city, towards Old Cairo, the building she approached was a monstrous modernity, a block of stone with spacious windows and columns, with statues of old Gods plastered only for decoration in front of its stairs which Priscila climbed quickly.

A man was waiting for her at the entrance. Michael had to stop at the shops in its vicinity and pretend to gaze at fabrics, though every once in a while his paled out eyes had another true focus.

Priscila had recognized her greeting party immediately. "Dr. Hayes," she smiled and couldn't properly contain her giddiness as she closed her phone's screen and dropped it back in her pocket. At that moment, Michael consciously doubled the strength of his sonar, so he could hear the soft laugh of the man and the sound of footsteps. There was no cane to accentuate them.

A proper welcoming was what Clara benefitted from as well, outside of the airport, where a man nicely cleaned up waited for them. Stuck to his tuxedo, high enough on his chest to be seen over the placard he was holding with Clara's name on it, was his nametag, saying nothing more or less than "Minion Triple Six".

"Is this your plus one, ma'am?" Triple Six looked friendly towards Clara, but had to give Marc a weary look. Since Paul had not been certain who exactly was her new, mysterious "friend", he just let his new valet know that she might be bringing someone along, with no other guidance whatsoever. Another worthwhile detail about Triple Six's presence was the desperation in his smile, topped with the way he smelt forcing just about anyone to form a generous radius around him to avoid getting intoxicating. He's been staying on that very spot since Paul ended the call with Clara, and the chase he's been trapped into too.

She confirmed to him, hardly phased, though deep within, Venom was pretty much twisting and turning from the bad scent he was far more sensitive to. "Is this Paul?" Marc leant to the side to question Clara quietly, though.

"No, just one of his soulless creations," she replied, already used to not having to give too much explanations about it, but one quick look up at Marc reminded her that though he was taking the news of demons very well, that didn't also imply that he knew all about them. "Paul is a demon who consumes souls in order to keep his powers up and running. A person without a soul is just a vessel, easy to control and therefore, willing to do anything for the demon who feeds on that inner energy."

"He manipulates people?" Of all the so-called friends Clara had, this one seemed the most deranged and he hadn't even properly met the guy, just walked behind his supposed minion, through the streets of the city of Casablanca.

"Lately just bad people though," she shrugged carelessly, then hurried to catch up with Triple Six just to give him a nudge. "What life did he pick you up from?"

"A Yakuza representative, invited to assist at Arthur Harrow's event during the New Moon," he answered, lacking any nuance in his tone and any expression on his face. Next to him, Marc suddenly looked like someone who had attended theater classes and had a genuine talent in showing emotion.

Clara let herself fall behind again, about to boast a little smile towards Spector, while obviously still feeling the little relief of knowing they were on the right track and now Michael with Priscila in Cairo. However, she was met with a frown. "I cannot bring out Moon Knight as efficiently during the New Moon," Marc said, not just serious, but concerned too. He did not like this alignment of events.

As if reading his mind, Clara immediately looked back ahead, "You think he knows you're coming for him? That's why he chose the time at which you're the weakest."

Marc hesitated for a second before humming in agreement. It dawned on him, in that very second that he hadn't had proper company during a mission... someone physical, someone who could actually be touched or touch him in return, since his short-lived days as a marine. Everything after that had been a solo battle in life: boxing on his own, learning on his own, hunting on his own. Heck, he even died alone! And after resurrection, he had only himself still, though fractured and conjoined with Khonshu's omnipresence.

"He might not expect you to have help though," Clara continued, once again impressing Marc. She was thinking the way he did, even without the whole picture. "While he probably thinks I'll ditch you to go to Cairo and check on my sister, he still definitely won't see Paul coming."

If this was Khonshu's plan, to have him get back up on a New Moon in order to take Harrow down, then Marc was starting to consider it the best thing that God had done for him since he saved him from the darkness of death.

There were many words which a tourist could use to describe Casablanca. Between the sandy stone walls, structures defying the roar of the ocean waves crashing into the tall-built shores and into the boats littering the harbor in color before it extended into a bridge of fish market, crowded with the diversity of scent, being and life. Chatter was loud enough to make the ground vibrate under the heat and the steps of people either hurried or too slow for the mass movement. They were imitating the waves.

Seagulls hurled the skies above the gate which formed the entrance to the part of the city where locals roamed and tourists scarcely visited for the experience of a fisherman restaurant and the little scent of walking paths famous for movies.

But if there was just a word left to describe Casablanca then that was "crowded".

Sellers left and right advertised in any language they assimilated spices, trinkets and bright materials. A certain pressure clogged the air and the warmth made it no easier to inhale the fine dust rising on these streets, outside the urban area. Hookahs formed smoke over the atmosphere of street corners where bars became frequent encounters, much like the architectural choice of round shapes and orange pigments.

"Hungry," Venom reminded Clara with a deep growl which immediately poke her own stomach too. He marked their transition from the bright streets to the covered ones, going into the depth of the neighborhoods. There, humidity picked up and the tiles underneath their feet became slippery and muddy too. The heat was still present, even in this striking shadow.

Triple Six led Clara and Marc onto the road they would have never followed anyone onto, were she to be saner and Marc to have been Steven.

At some point though, the minion of the demon stopped and turned to the back entrance, perfectly masked onto the stone wall to their left. It was a whole other world once it was opened and they stepped through. Designs were cleaner, brighter, and newer. The columns shone as prominently as the floors, each surface held reflections, either perfect or distorted by engraved lines and shapes. The house they entered through the back of was empty on this bottom floor, but going up the circular stairs started unraveling sounds: music was playing on the last floor, where a penthouse opened its balcony to a fugitive breeze dancing amongst colorful but light drapes, around a short man, far past his middle-age, in a fully black outfit and a glass of scotch in his hand.

"This ain't exactly the Moroccan Continental, but it does the trick for comfort and luxury." He spoke. The head of a Dobermann dog perked from the cushions laid on the floor for him, hearing not only his master's voice, but also catching the scent of the friend and the stranger. It growled lowly towards Marc.

"I see you got Good Boy safe," Clara voiced, immediately smiling towards the Hellhound looking banal. She waved him, stepping closer to Paul, who finally turned around and extended his arms for a hug which Marc was surprised to see the woman give so generously.

But the hug was short lived, no matter how careful Paul was about the cologne he wore, because once glancing over Clara's shoulder, he narrowed his eyes at Marc. "And who's this, Clarita? Boyfriend?"

"No," Venom's head appeared next to Clara's hissing at the very insinuation, while she simply rolled her eyes.

In that moment Marc couldn't help but wonder if it would have been Steven in his stead, would she have been just as careless? But he couldn't risk testing theories, nor show too much personal interest in this. Any second in which he'd lose his concentration, he'd simply make himself feel the amount of strain it takes to stay in control since Steven became mildly aware of things.

"Pet?" Paul took another guess and stepped closer to the stranger. His Dobermann, Good Boy, got up and jumped gracefully over the pillow. Its first stop was sniffing Clara's leg and earning a discreet strand of Venom scratching behind its chin, before joining his master.

"Just a partner," Clara was not in the right mood to watch Paul try to intimidate Marc, something she knew it could be done, at the cost of her and Venom hearing the ear-wrecking screech of Hell as Paul shows his real face. "He has a vendetta against Arthur Harrow so we decided to work together," she continued. There was no need to go into detail about an Egyptian God forcing them to cross paths, so she simply left that out. For that, just a bit of gratitude got seeded into Marc's eyes.

However, Paul was hardly stupid. He hadn't earned his detective position just because of G's connections, but also for his sharp understanding of a human character. He was as close to a shrink as their part-time team had and he had long profiled Clara as the "lone wolf". She didn't make friends, she hardly ever kept relations with anyone remotely normal, minus that annoyingly banal ex of hers.

So, the next thoughtful glance he cast towards Marc was decisive on a fact: he surely must be bonkers to last long enough to be called a work partner of hers.

"Arthur Harrow," Paul repeated instead with a great dosage of spite. He downed the remaining alcohol from his glass and tossed it across the room, into a pillar, where it shattered into a thousand shards. The detective turned around, "What a cunt he is..."

As he moved away, his hellhound followed. Letting the stranger be meant one thing for Good Boy and that was to not worry about this harmless addition to the team.

Paul gazed back at the curtain blown up by the Casablanca breeze, "This bitch is trying to summon some sort of creature that will purge the Earth of sinners overnight."

"He's been trying to summon the Goddess Ammit, the Personification of Divine Retribution, for years now," Marc joined the conversation. It was Clara's turn to be mildly impressed that he was talking about things she knew almost too little about, for being once a child who enjoyed reading about mythologies. "There's no way he can reach Ammit's tomb, because I stopped him once, so what has changed?"

"The bastard found a rite," Paul nodded along, "a couple ancient scripts which he can perform with those artifacts he's been granted by the Goddess' spirit."

"Again, that's not new," Marc was getting more comfortable actually conversing about this situation the more he talked. "Harrow used scripts he dug up in Egypt five years ago to get his tattoo, which became a brand for his followers, those who pass the judgment anyway."

"What's with that tattoo?" Clara interrupted with a slightly confused question she was fully aware Paul was probably going to ignore. She was not the brains of the Horsemen operative, but rather just the muscle.

"It's a fragment of Ammit's power," Marc answered her question though, not minding even for a second that he had to explain. "Through it, he becomes her conduct and is able to tell which soul is lighter than a feather and which is not."

Clara recalled the question: Would you say you are a good sister? Do you want to know for certain?

Hearing her thoughts and seeing them too, Venom asked his own question as well, "And what happens if the soul's heavy?"

"He's going to kill the whole fucking world and leave our kind starving, that's what he's bloody planning," Paul snapped, looking at Clara and Venom, but not at Marc, because then he would have notice this newbie tried to answer even the symbiote's question.

"I don't see how this connects with O.M.N.I.U.M. though, because no offense but I am pretty sure saving the world is not what we agreed to sign up for." Clara stated that but only after a single inhale of thought, she sighed out, "Apart from Marc, I guess. He's some sort of superhero."

"I am not a superhero," Marc argued, flatly.

"You wear a cape," Venom reminded, narrowing his white eyes.

"He does?" Paul tried not to laugh too visibly, but failed gloriously, letting out a devilish snicker.

Clara mirrored with her own little chuckle, "The whitest cape I have ever seen."

"It wasn't my wardrobe choice," Marc argued back, in pure disbelief that the conversation seriously faded towards dissing his Moon Knight outfit. "It's a ceremonial suit, Khonshu made it."

"Gods should leave fashion design to humans," Venom growled.

Paul pointed towards the symbiote, "And that comes from an alien who hates human designs."

Over this mess, Good Boy barked a bark which finally made the distinction between a hellhound and a proper Dobermann: its jaw opened twice its size, revealing blue hellfire from within its body, crawling up its throat and bringing to its bark a roar louder than the echoed thunders over a savannah. The shards of the glass Paul threw turned to dust and Venom's whole symbiote form shivered, black fiber diffusing, until he made himself small, attached to Clara's back of the neck.

Then Good Boy closed its jaw and licked its nose, batting eyes innocently up so the humans may return on the right track of discussion.

"Thanks for the reminder, Good Boy," Paul nodded, rejoicing in seeing a priceless grimace of confusion on the newbie's face. However, he didn't linger in his demonic pleasure of seeing fear plastered on humane faces, but rather looked back towards Clara, "Arthur is a fanatic, an extremist. And yet, he's agreeing to give shelter to sponsors from his grand scheme of things. The Hand, Anchor, and even smaller gangs have been invited to this party during the New Moon to assist at the play titled Resurrections. It won't be a play at all though. And it also doesn't fit the narrative that someone like Arthur would consider sparing some of the most sinful people on this forsaken planet."

"You're right," Marc agreed, finally crossing his arms at his chest, meaning that he gave up on his stern, military posture, "it doesn't make sense."

"Unless he's working for someone who is dictating the flow of his work," Paul grinned. If Marc didn't know better, he'd think this man was gaining personal pleasure from uncovering fucked up details. Clara knew for certain that was the case for her dramatic teammate who loved taking his time with getting to the point.

"There comes O.M.N.I.U.M.," Paul nodded. "The day you two called..."

Marc stiffened. He didn't remember calling Paul. Noticing that briefly, Clara nudged him to look down at her and mouthed 'with Jake'.

Clueless to these two, Paul continued regardless, "... I was working on infiltrating Arthur's inner circle. Though I have been using my detective jurisdiction left and right to even get as far as having an inside job in his event team and welcoming sponsors to the hotel in which he prepares, he's not a wanted man. I couldn't go guns blazing and I sure as hell couldn't find anything to arrest him for because the artifacts he had stolen have never been registered and as a leader to his followers, he really is a surprisingly nice and calm guy. So, undercover all the way, until I managed to pass into one of the meetings with his close followers. My goal was to get close enough to steal back the parchments with the rites."

"Didn't work out?"

"Of course it didn't," Paul frowned.

"They found you or..."

"What did you say?" Clara interrupted Marc's genuine question with a smirk of her own.

Paul knew her question was better worded than Marc's, because unlike him, she was aware of how the demon acted, with zero self control over his mouth and words. He therefore shrugged. "Might have called bullshit in the middle of the ceremony in which he judges a person and they dramatically and slowly die in his arms. But," and Paul's voice raised, his tone pitched, "it's not my fault my extracting of souls is faster and I proved that cunt right there and then."

Clara knowingly looked back at Minion Triple Six, now understanding how he came to be. Unlike her, Marc was absolutely stunned that Paul could have been so stupidly impulsive. His glare returned, mercilessly judging.

"Shocked with my true power, Arthur used that cane of his to get a couple of jackals out on my ass. Good Boy fought valiantly, but the jackals are bigger than hellhounds and apparently, tossing people in their way to save my skin doesn't do much," Paul shrugged. "But why do I think O.M.N.I.U.M. is behind Arthur, backing his ideas? One out of three of the followers had branded those letters onto a part of their body when they found out I was a mole."

"How long do we have until the New Moon?" Marc asked, starting to get the shiver of a tingle to do something about this madness. He should have found a way to kill Arthur the last time he stopped his plans.

"We won't be waiting until the New Moon," Clara shook her head. "Can the ritual work without Arthur?"

"Well, no?" Both men answered, rather confused.

"Then we get to Arthur and rip him to shreds," Venom grinned a toothy smile and Clara nodded along.

"Though before we kill him, we need to find out where O.M.N.I.U.M. is," she made a statement pointing that out.

"Easier said than done, dove," Paul sighed. "My escapade made security tight. We have Anchor arsenal-"

"Need I remind you I broke into Anchor before?" Clara spoke over him.

"The Hand is also there and mercenaries all over the place, not to mention the jackals which you would not be able to see," the detective's tone accelerated to not allow her to interrupt again. Marc wanted to point out that he could handle the jackals, since he did technically fight these helpers of Arthur's before, however, Paul continued with something which piqued his interest. "I have a plan though. One that will work."

Paul? Refusing immediate violence? That was an immediate giveaway for both Clara and Venom to realize something else was at stake for the demon. While the symbiote only sighed, exasperated, his host rolled her eyes. "You want the parchments for yourself. If we kill Arthur first, he might have hidden the rites and you won't be able to find them, so you want those stupid spells first. Why? Is this about Mephisto again?"

"Who?"

"Higher demon," Clara returned the favor and immediately answered Marc, though she made sure to keep an eye on Paul's reaction of flushing red in the cheeks. "Paul's not here just because he loves the human race," she continued sarcastically towards the end. "He possessed this body back in the medieval times to escape a debt he had to Mephisto and he's been in hiding ever since."

"Well, sue me for wanting to seal off the Hell dimension forever and the reverse of Arthur's rites might just be the key!"

"Neither of you care about the fate of the world," Marc mumbled to himself, suddenly understanding why Khonshu wanted him to team up with Clara. Her and her team actually stood a chance, they could help him get close enough to Arthur and end this years-worth quarrel, make sure Khonshu's enemy won't rise from the dead in full form. And while he was at it, he could do well to remind them that apart from personal goals, they were doing this to save the world.

Paul's plan was well put together though, well structured for a team of three, but it had to be done in the night before the party to work. Until then, it was all about preparation, and while he had to go procure the necessary maps, he tasked Clara and Marc with getting used with the surroundings of the hotel where the heist and crimes will happen, not before getting an actual bath so they stop smelling like an airplane though.

That's how Marc ended up, surrounded by steam, aftermath of a good and well deserved bath, staring into the mirror and not believing that it was Steven staring back at him. This was the very last thing he had expected by being into his room, by exiting the bathroom with a towel around his waist. It was new and he was sure he didn't like it, feeling this deep rooted guilt of looking at his other self.

At first, Steven got his attention with confused questions, with cries, with hugging himself and breathing heavily, but soon, he revealed with his next inquiries that he's been aware all throughout the day. "... and Clara's a monster," Steven finished his cried list of things which he did not understand.

Marc listened quietly until then. "She's not a monster."

"I don't understand what's happening!" Steven yelled at him in return. From his perspective, he woke up in a mirror, watching himself from outside his body how he talked differently, behaved differently towards Clara, who also acted like a whole other person with an alien attached to her body. "If this is a dream, I want to wake up now."

Marc knew he could have started explaining, there and then, clearing things out. But no matter how much he wanted to open his mouth, he simply couldn't let those words out. How would he explain? No, there was no explaining, not yet. He wasn't ready to have that talk.

"I don't have time for this," his gaze dropped and he turned his back on the mirror. Just then, Clara knocked on his door. He spent enough time conversing with himself to run especially late to the hour they set for going out and starting to plan escape routes if anything did go south during their plan before the event.

"I want to wake up," Steven insisted from the mirror. He was growing desperate, from the panic he lived into for a day already. And though he thought he was in full control, Marc felt reality slip from his grasp in an instant. Usually, Khonshu was there to moderate these discrepancies, make sure the personalities didn't crash over each other too chaotically, so as not to disturb their missions. But ever since Marc argued with him before the flight, his mind had been silent.

Has God abandoned him?

It sure felt like it once his knees hit the ground and his palms grasped the carpet.

Clara heard the loud thud and since she's never quite learnt the concept of privacy or of closed doors -a little gift left behind by her father who taught her to barge in with every loud sound which might threaten her sister's safety-, she burst into his room. Marc was on the ground, almost convulsing over, barely gasping and hardly breathing. Without a second of hesitation, she knelt down in front of him and caught his shoulders, carefully, trying to understand if it was a panic attack or something of another nature.

He was fighting himself, but she couldn't have possibly been able to tell.

However, she knew her touch on his bare skin did something, because his inhale got a notch deeper for a moment, before his hands raised and clung to her arms too. Marc's head was bowed, his hair disheveled and sweat was forming on his skin, though he had just left the bath.

"It's okay," Clara muttered. "I'm here." It felt natural to whisper that as a response to his desperate grip on her.

"Clara?" Seeing her from the mirror's perspective shattered Steven's whole motivation. It broke his determination and drowned him back into a helplessness of remembering their date, the last moment of being sane, and anchored, and safe. Safe... That word echoed again and again and just for a single fracture of a second, he thought he felt what this stranger in his body did. It was the same safety. The ghost of her touch helped Steven take a deep breath in. Marc exhaled.

Clara watched as his breathing pattern became regular again, then followed his gaze turned to the side, glancing in the mirror.

"She can't see me...," Steven sighed, though he had calmed down and even managed to smile too, at the illusion that she might have looked at him, not at this person hijacking his body.

Marc shook his head to answer Steven, but Clara took no notice of it. She saw nothing strange in the mirror, no cause to whatever Marc just went through and now that it was over, she took her hands off of him. Perhaps it was then that she first realized he was hardly dressed. A towel doesn't count as proper attire.

"You're doing the human thing," Venom pointed out in her mind, making her quickly look away and get up, offering her hand to Marc too. He was still looking at the mirror though, because finally, he started seeing his reflection, the face of a tired man, and not Steven's fear. A final deep breath was Marc's reassurance that he wasn't being pushed back in the back of his mind again.

However, once he looked up, past Clara's hand, behind her entirely, he finally saw Khonshu.

"The punishment for your insolence has been fulfilled. We need to talk."

author's note:    TURNED THE GIF INTO A SCENEEEEEE

and since i am very very anxious about this chapter, what do you think about the action side of this book? does it make sense? is it intriguing?

i am confident the psychological and growth side is okay, but ahhhh, i am really scared that imma fuck it up with the action side 😭