End: So Many Lights

Ahead of her, blue lights flickered in the darkness. Little ghostly blue flames that sparked into life just above the ground. Once again, Lois Lane thought of the Potter's Field—and remembered, with sudden clarity, an article she had read from long ago, about how stillbirths were interred there as well.

Unborn souls. Like the ghost in her apartment.

The flames began to float toward her, and Lois felt a twinge in her middle. She took a step back, the hairs raising on her neck and arms...and then her feet seemed frozen in place. Something gripped her with a paralysis...like when she woke up late at night from a nightmare, and for a few moments couldn't move. The reporter felt herself panting, excited, apprehensive, unable to process her emotions...

There were so many lights. At least a dozen. Maybe two dozen. Moving faster now.

Her leg muscles tensed, frozen in place as they drifted toward her like ghostly lanterns carried on a black stream...flowing in one direction...with one purpose.

Lois Lane's womb.

One by one, the ghostly flames touch the reporter's abdomen. Passing beneath the flesh, the skin briefly lit from within...and then disappeared. Lois Lane felt that strange terrible excitement of a good horror film. The tingling in her fingers, the seaty palms, nipples hard. Body caught in a fight-or-flight-or-fuck response, quivering on edge as the lights continued to flow...and Lois couldn't stop them. Couldn't run, couldn't stop them...and perhaps strangely enough not sure she even wanted to.

Because the horror was mingled with excitement. Her breath came in tight gasps. The night crowded around her as each blue flame disappeared into her, and Lois wondered if it was just some psychosomatic effect that gave her a sense of fullness inside of her. At that time, it seemed very possible that each flame was an unborn soul, and Lois wondered how pregnant a woman could get.

As a trickle of juice ran down her inner thigh, the reporter thought she was about to find out.

The last pale blue light pressed into Lois, just a few inches beneath her navel. For a moment, she seemed enshrouded in darkness....and then the spell was broken. The reporter staggered. The sounds and sights of Metropolis came back to her. She hurried from the park toward the pharmacy, the unnatural brightness and mundanity within making the episode in the park seem unreal.

She walked home without incident, the box of pregnancy tests clutched tight. Wondering if she even needed them. A strange, terrible certainty filled her now...and Lois Lane wondered how soon she could get a doctor's appointment, to confirm her terrible suspicions.

Elsewhere in the city, the demon Blaze laughed to herself. Her scarlet fingers stirred the waters of her scrying pool, zooming in on Lois Lane's uterus. At the fertilized eggs that even now were attaching themselves, busily working their way toward dividing and multiplying. The Daily Planet's Greatest Reporter was now more pregnant than any woman had ever been...and the scarlet succubus was amused at what consequences Lois Lane's curiousity had led to, on her night out.

"That should keep you occupied," Blaze whispered. "And what will Superman think of you now?"