Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights is made flesh in Catherine, she's ethereal, barely comprehensible and only one person can pull the whole thing off. Her mortal heritage flickers through reels of vignette, tea-tinted film with an audio track of disconcerting little girls serenading her in a lullaby promise of voodoo crescendo.

Her childhood was kept in the company of globsters, mushy masses scraped from the underbelly of the New Orleans’ docks. Globesters are wistful romantics and recite Ose-oriented, Ose god of insanity, poetry composed by their mer-lord Leviathan. There were also Battletoads, fuddy-duddy veterans which croak dramatic and patchy histories on Hippocamp and Hydra which Cathy would re-enact with a gang of decaying pumpkin-sculptured dolls and a handful of pecans who frequently fell into squabbles with a bouquet of cut, dry sugar cane.

By three she’d began encounters with a gnat claiming it was Morgan Le Fey reincarnate who Beelzebub had forwarded to her for sorcery one o one. For one of her early, witchlet ventures, she appeased a pecan, who felt it led a disadvantaged life, body swapping it with the child of a wealthy white man who once sneered at her unkindly.

Or so the pecan lied.

The pecan, now child, suffered a mental breakdown hitting its head against the walls of its bedroom until enough brain damage had been sustained for it to function bearably. The child, now pecan, mutated, engorging fifteen times its standard size. It developed an eyeball and bulbous, pustulating lips. It engaged in a lot of inarticulate screaming. Cathy was so jubilant she excitedly preserved, and then named, him Cezar.

Cezar is Cathy's Renfield fitted with a strapped leather harness of dog-ended stalk feathers on a twisted framework of glistening brass and copper wiring. These allow Cezar to fly short distances a little like a chicken imitating a very ugly cupid twitching its eye compulsively. In a mythical moment which changed history, Gremory fitted Cezar with the god Agares' left hoof. This was once a hand but along with Agares corporeal, within the earn of Solomon, it had warped submerged in the acids of Agares' self-despising bile.

Toddler Cathy attracted attention drawing ever bigger upward glances from the underworld. By four a war of custody had broken out between Beelzebub and Hecate Grecian goddess of the witches. Hecate had a right to Catherine’s soul but by the nineteenth century was near destitute in POOF. The crusade between the two deities endured three years and holds records for that of the least bloodshed and the most passive aggression.

During these years Catherine was spoiled and developed her, to date, persisting princess complex. For her fifth birthday Hecate sent her the Graeae, three gnarled sea hags who are the Pepsi to the Fates, Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis, Coca-Cola. The Graeae had once been all seeing, however at that time of God’s great epiphany on omnipotence their eyes dissolved striking them blind. The Graeae came to Cathy as three swans with gaping eye sockets framed in shrivelled flesh and let her play with their Magic Eye Ball an object of half sight bargained from the fates about the size and weight of a billiards ball and which receives censored news blasts the fates care to feed to it. Posed with a direct question it functions similar to a magic eight ball with three possible readings: Spiritwear out of date, please upgrade. In-App purchases 4 IC, please review billing details and Please contact CAL customer services. As Cathy played cataracts waxed her vision gifting her second sight which works as though switching between one tab on a browser and the Fate’s twitter feed on another.

For her sixth birthday, and in response to Hecate’s claim that Cathy needed a mother figure, Beelzebub commissioned Jinny Greenteeth relocating her from the UK’s shires to Louisiana. Jinny, a stagnant water hag, part reptilian part aquatic weed, on Beelzebub's instruction would drown children of no larger a size or greater an age than Catherine to allow her to practice necromancy. This served for two reasons, firstly it positioned Catherine as one of only twenty nine accomplished necromancers universally and secondly, as a necromancer, her allegiance was consolidated to Beelzebub.

Custody settled, as Catharine’s affinity for the deities of the damned grew, so too did it grow unhealthy. Her mind magnetised out across the universes following the trails of Beelzebub and Astaroth discarding her paralytic and wide eyed for days. She’d finally return to herself soiled, sunken cheeked, desperately thirsty and whimpering with hunger.

Exhausting, when they found her, Gremory and Marc saved Catherine's life. On the eve of her Debutante ball Gremory gifted her the full lower west wing of Chateau De Gaul.

Her bedroom opened out into the front gardens, greenery which in a falling autumn had frosted, mistily overlain in a shade of dove. Luxurious velvetines and glitter-touched silks of rich gemstone shades concaved in from their pins on the walls, the furniture wrought irons, mostly Italian, mostly Florence, some with Virgin Marys crudely scratched out.

The in-coming breeze wiped the stark, North African scarlet and emerald voiles folded loosely over their curtain rail with a soothing, rustling sound and cut the tent-like claustrophobia. Dust coated, stubby candles huddled in thickets inside fuchsia, sapphire and amethyst tonal-glass lanterns and the floorboards were smudged with overlapping baby pink and flowering lilac chalk of rituals past. Nude female sculpture held globes of painted glass or peeked from beneath discarded clothing and nineteenth century paintings of medievalism fairy tales decorated the walls.

Catherine was sitting at her vanity table wearing the distance-entranced, cadaverous stare of pre-raphaelite Ophelia draped, for the feel of the fabric, in semi-translucent silks. Beads, brimming with grimy oil and flaking chipped paint, coiled thin plaits in her ebony ringlets and her skin smelt thickly of baby's breath and a murky brew of occult ankle deep in swampland. She was sitting on a square, in-ornate stool her bare back lit by the high-pitched half-light creeping into her den of orange-golds and ambers, the shape of a centuries prolonged, corset-formed hourglass so macabrely narrowed her wealthy upper half looked like a precariously balanced spinning top.

Like two, vertically rectangular television screens two people played in live feed on the chipped and tarnished mirror planes of an emerald-framed Venetian mirror. Gremory and Marc.

As Marc and Gremory's joint effort offspring she could always feel them. Talk to them if they all thought solidly enough. Unless aiming for an outburst of incensed and clawing insanity Catherine couldn't withstand a moment without seeing them. Somewhere. Anywhere.

Dyslexic to the point of frustratedly blind and fragility-telling tears Cathy couldn't read or repeat the first step of any instruction in a Grimoire on Divine Mechanics. Whereas she couldn't transform the mirror's surfaces, however, she could demand they just do it for her.

Cathy paused to take a sip from a Martini glass of warmed blood which left a flecked pink residue up the sides once it settled. It wasn't sustaining but she liked to do a lot of different things at once if she had to be in the present moment. She gazed at them pink in the cheeks. They were so pretty. Cathy'd have to take care of clumsy, and very naughty, Faith now, who seemed to have forgotten she was a witch in favour of pretending she was a boy.

She bent very slightly. Gremory, greater to her than any god, had ingrained an etiquette on posture which she'd more readily excavate a limb than thwart. In the small, spout standing mirror she could see the crumbly, brushed up banners of her eyebrows. In a sharp kohl eyeliner pencil she drew house Gremory's sigil between them at her third eye. Cathy didn't know why it was called that she'd checked a few hundred times now, there was definitely only two. Sometimes she drew Morax's sigil on her cleavage or tiny at her cheekbones. This made Marc smile at her which made her feel fuzzy under the ribs, like helium had been pumped under the muscles of her shoulders and very, very pleased with herself.

She adjusted the mirror and between her middle finger and thumb tensed the plump pink tissues of her upper lip's right hand corner, a thin, pre-filled syringe of dermal filler and lidocaine balanced between her fingers at the angle of a ballpoint. Her emerald, slit pupiled eyes glanced impishly up beneath lashes thickly clumped with mascara. Trapping her breath with a barely murmured ouch she gazed at them as she sank the needle tip in, it's bulbing outline visible beneath the border change of lip color.

It pained them.

They'd be furious for whole minutes.

Silly. It was for them. A little for her. A lot for Faith. She wanted to look her best.

Cathy, as beauty's ideals flipped through the pouch of coppers as the ages passed, had developed a fretful and miserably self-hating preoccupation with the chase of whatever beauty was for now. It had begun to take up so much room for thought it steadied her in the present. Sometimes interrupted meditations. The opening of circle castings.

When she was younger the only thoughts she'd had about it were her own. These days it didn't take anyone telling you, it was flashed at her, in beautiful, perfect images even sharper to the eye than her own reflection. With the invention of the internet her mind had gone skidding through servers eating up visuals like a pacman. And then data. Butts and thighs and abdominal muscles she didn't know she had dropping in the millions down, knocking at their base and falling out like Tetris.

Her round arms, button belly, heavy thighs and short legs, the epitome of the Italian renaissance, now felt like sharp legged critters were scratching under the soft pads of flesh making her body sore and uncomfortable to live in. Sometimes, if she'd been thinking about it, she winced apologetically when Gremory or Marc touched her.

Once she'd thought nothing of being around crowds but now her thoughts bounced from face to face mentally narrating their negative and sly comments on her not being good enough. A few decades back when things had just begun and Gremory and Marc hadn't yet been aware of the problem her breasts unfashionable she'd tried to cut them off. She'd never seen her daddy's so scared. Never seen them scared at all. The memory of the looks on their faces still made her wince.

Pressing the plunger steadily whilst withdrawing the needle she thought of Faith. Sister. Little Sister. Little witchlets, should, not, drink. The needle tip came free and Cathy rolled her lips together smearing them with the ruby droplet weeping from the incision. Faith was more than the little sister she'd always wanted in the sense she hadn't known she'd wanted one at all until she had one.

She was her daughter really.

She trailed the pad of a fingertip over the cylindrical surface of a small, cloudy vile. It was hanging from a silver chain over the mirror and had inside the last remaining pecan inclined against the glass "been remembering my first time. Can’t remember the word. Words. Said. Hurt. I remember the blood, like liquid rubies all warm at my thighs. Tasted like the fish market in August. Torn insides, took their time to grow, all heaped" she winced twice "Rose bushes of feed for Beelzebub's babies. Picked well. Tore new space all the way through. Nasty trick that Gusoyn. They did look lovely melting in the flames. Lucifer. House of Lucifer. Suck the pleasure from the earthworms they would. Men” she raised a dainty hand to the image of Faith.

“I never asked if the DocV gave you trouble” Marc commented both telepathically in Catherine's mind and on the mirror.

Catherine plucked her glass admiring the swish of ruby hanging loosely in her grip “Plenty. Transmogrified the beastly botanist, forced to think of a new specie that fit his nastiness. Bovine Labrador. Quiet especially proud of the udder. Surpassingly flappy. Ooh and its lactose tastes of damp labradoodle”

She felt Gremory scowl before hearing his elegant French accent in her mind “You didn't tell me this, Catherine”

Unseeing Catherine produced a massive smile “you did not ask”

Marc swallowed his appreciation of Cathy's new found naughtiness “And the trouble was?”

Catherine announced with a smack of lips “Terrible tipper”

Mentally Marc and Gremory turned to each other.

“The idea was to pay him, Cathy” Marc said with a certain dark amusement

Beneath the dressing table Catherine extended a crystal encrusted slipper catlike rocking it on her big toe “Horrid idea. We should catch it! Find the fiend ‘fore it infects the pulses”

It was a trick to tell when Cathy was being illegible on purpose or whether she simply was being bizarre. She had in recent decades clued up a little and liked to exasperate her show of insanity to try and tease the men of the family.

Gremory sighed “Catherine, mon cher, we discussed this. It is the principle of trade, you remember, oui?”

“Oui. I didn’t like it" Catherine chirped giggling.

There was a thundering reverberation as De Gaul shuddered.

"Ma-aaarrr-c" Cathy's torso contorted staring excitedly behind her as De Gaul fought to contain the ritual she'd cast several minutes ago choking plaster, paint and cement in the effort. In the quacking, fabric draped cadavernous half-light Cazar, his harness of battered wings beating violently and its eye pivoted forward to the ground in the effort, was dragging a four by six framed blank canvas on three buttery black thongs towards Cathy. The canvas' coarse taupe surface was shimmering with the golden rimmed, inky silhouette of a map.

Cathy eyes wide with excitement turned back to her vanity mirror clutching the sides of the table "I found her!"

Catherine pushed back from the dressing table, gracefully straightened, and then clawed the air in a cat-like swipe drawing an oblong clear crystal quartz. It was unclear why she did this, the crystal had no purpose in the ritual. Rippling, raw power scratched at her eardrums. Something was attempting to inhibit the scry to source Faith's precise location. Cathy calmly rubbed her knuckles, which was confusing because it was her ears which hurt, pouting "Beeze-e, sto-ohp. I can feel that. I need powdered sulphur."

Cathy doubled over a prolapsed Cezar making circling gestures with her finger around the portrait in her vision "to encircle it. Be-elze-bub. Please stop. You're hurting the château"

The canvas surface had began to inflate, bubbling with map lines. Cathy let out an uncertain hissing sound. Forgetting the sulphur for a moment she turned to the dressing table throwing open a draw and retrieving a silver-plated steak knife. Falling to her knees in a wave of silk she raised the knife in a stabbing gesture above Cezar swinging and then meeting him with a starchy, vegetable crunch. Cezar wailed like an elephant with tiny vocal cords.

"Shh, s'-oh-k. S'-oh-k" Catherine crooned trying to restrain Cezar "I'm just getting rid of the ba-ah-dd bits. It needs a sacrfice" Catherine straightened holding a grey-blue hoof severed by fleshy glistening tangerine strings. Cathy lobbed it on top of the canvass where it pooled with an odd smell of stale tea leaves. The puddle popped volatile its surface tension spreading. Cathy gazed at it, down at the sobbing Cezar which she pulled into her lap and began petting, to the ceiling where her candelabra had fallen loose and was dangling by its wiring.

Gunpowder snapped.

Cathy leant back on her knees waving a flattened hand absently as a cloud of grey-green smoke spat.

De Gaul stilled with a final, puffing hiccup.

Catherine clapped her palms together excitedly "Got it! I know where little sister is"