Issue 5 begins with Loo running screaming through the streets. Fortunately for my heart, we see she's playing with one of the neighbourhood boys, who's pretending to be a lurk. Loo, on the other hand, is playing "Mel" and stomps on the kid. She's championing her champion, telling him all about how Mel and Urkonn fought Icarus. The boy, on the other hand, is getting pretty tired of the whole stomping thing. He thinks the big monster guy probably just saved Mel so he could eat her himself, just like some lurk's gonna eat Loo. Jerk. Loo pretends he's not scaring her, but when he gets up and leaves, she's alone on the street. She tries to be brave for a moment, then she runs screaming for Mel.
Mel, though, is still with Harth. Her dead brother. Who's a vampire. Lovely. He still looks the same, but the leap he just made off that scaffolding leaves little room to doubt he's definitely a changed guy. Mel, of course, hasn't seen him since the day he died, but he's been watching her. And waiting until the right time, which is apparently now. Melaka is confused and thrown, so he offers to fill her in, starting with his death. It happened exactly as she remembers it, but she didn't see the end of the act. He died, but he didn't stay dead. As he tells her, "My throat torn open, the animal's teeth scraping bone it was so eager to suck out my blood. I just wanted it to stop. And it did. It faded, suddenly. I knew in that moment I was dying. And I knew with perfect, rigid clarity, what I had to do."
The question, then, is how did he know to do that? He says he knows just what he is now, what the lurks are. He knows what they will become. And he knows that Melaka doesn't dream. Not the dreams she was meant to have anyway...
"Always, before my earliest memories of the world, there were the dreams. There was the girl. She was different every time. But the same. A peasant, a priestess... hundreds of girls, from times we've forgotten, worlds we couldn't picture. She was me. She wasn't me. I loved her... I killed her."
Harth says he always felt like he and his twin were two halves of the same person, and it looks like he may have been right. Mel received the strength and skill of the Slayer, but Harth got the dreams and an understanding of their heritage. Unlike the other lurks around him, he's able to shift between human and vampiric features because he understands what he really is. Not only that, he understands the world and its history, and he's got big plans...
"This world belongs to the demons," he says. "They were banished, exiled by one of your ambitious predecessors. I still don't know how we came back. But we're here, a scattered few of us, and we will reclaim our world. I will open the gateway and bring the old ones back."
Harth is The One Who Will Lead, and he promises his sister that everyone she loves will die screaming. He tells Mel he loves her, that he's never felt closer to anyone, and she pleads with him..
Melaka: No, Harth... those memories you have are mine. They're part of... Harth, you only think those things because you're infected. My brother would never hurt anyone.
Harth: Then I guess you shouldn't have gotten me killed.
He unleashes and punches her in the gut, tells her again that he loves her, then slams her face into the ground. She's bleeding and gasping for breath, but he's cold and casual, still chatting as he beats her nearly senseless. He's been using her. Knowing her talents, he had Gunther sending her after the items needed to open the gateway. A beaten Mel tries to tell him she won't let him hurt anybody, but he mocks her. "Mel, Mel, you can't protect anyone. Haven't you learned that by now?" He throws her across the room, and she lands in a heap against the scaffolding tower. It comes crashing down, collapsing through the floor and leaving Melaka soaked and half-dead in the sewer below.
On the street above, Erin is making her way home. She got beaten pretty badly in the lurk attack last issue - she's got some wicked cuts and bruises, and her arm's in a sling. When she reaches her door, she notices it's already open. She enters carefully, gun drawn, to find Mel leaning against a table, soaking wet and about to fall apart. There's so much pain and anger between them, but when Mel slumps to the floor, Erin runs to her side and holds her sister as she cries.
A little later, as they sit on the sofa, Mel tries to explain what she's seen. Clearly, even the police don't know what the lurks really are because Erin's in disbelief. Her brother's alive, but he's dead. And it's him, but it's not him anymore. Not to mention the whole "Slayer" thing.
Mel tells her, "Harth, he... I don't think the Slayer's supposed to have a twin, and he got the memories, and the heritage... I just got the strength." But Erin's having trouble accepting what her sister's saying. Even if it didn't sound crazy, they've got a history of distrust to overcome. It seems, though, that Erin wants to give Mel the benefit of the doubt here, which is a step in the right direction between the two sisters. Even though Erin tried to arrest Mel earlier that night, she makes no effort to stop her from leaving. But before Mel walks out, she tells Erin, "Think about what I said. Think about police policy on lurks, why they can't control them. Why they've never really tried. I think we've got a war coming. And I can't win it."
Melaka heads for home and finds Urkonn waiting by the river. They head to her apartment, which has been completely tashed. Apparently Urkonn wasn't the only one looking for the Slayer.
The furniture's shredded and crushed, and everything's broken. Mel and Urkonn begin to clean up the broken pieces of furniture and surmise that Harth must have sent a group of lurks to find her. Urkonn figures they were obviously pretty angry not to find her there. Mel picks up an overturned table and... oh god. It's Loo. She's dead. They didn't even feed. They just snapped her tiny neck.
"He said it. He said I couldn't protect anyone. He was right. I'm not even a real Slayer.
All I can do is fight. So it's time I started fighting. Time I let them know I'm in this."
"Urkonn... let's make some war."
Thoughts:
Startling revelations aplenty in this issue.
Finally, we understand why Mel lacked the instincts and memories of the Slayer. Not to mention, finding out what the lurks are doing with the items Mel stole for Gunther. Plus, we know the identity of The One Who Will Lead, the threat that Urkonn was sent to prepare Mel to face. In typical Joss fashion, the pieces are all falling into place in ways that are wholly unexpected, yet they make perfect sense.
I was totally unprepared for how deeply I would be affected by this issue. Of course, I didn't know that poor Loo was about to be murdered. When the boy in the beginning said she'd probably die, I made a mental note to prepare myself for it, but then I was completely drawn into the story. Mel's reunion with her brother was fantastic. He was suitably creepy and Big Bad, taunting Mel as he beat her senseless. And it looked like this fight (actually not so much a "fight" since she mostly just got pounded) put more of a hurt on her than the fall from the building in issue 1! The implications are staggering. I've always wondered what would happen if a Slayer were turned, and that scenario played out in a recent arc of the Buffy comic. It was bad news. Here, the threat is the Slayer's twin. Amazing, to realise that Mel's timid brother is the one who's got a huge badass like Icarus willing to follow him.
I also really enjoyed the tentative reconciliation between Mel and her sister, Erin. They couldn't just hug and cry and make up - it wouldn't have been believable. Erin wouldn't have been so determined to stop Mel from stealing if she didn't love her sister, but with everything that's happened, all isn't forgotten with a good moment of sisterly bonding. It's clear that they care about each other, but they've got a lot to get past. Still, faced with everything that's going on, they're willing to try. They're going to have to work together, I suspect, to deal with what's coming.
Joss, I've got to say, is an expert at foreshadowing. Even when you see it coming, you're still not ready for it when it does. My husband was upstairs while I was reading this issue. I cringed when I saw Mel's trashed apartment. Then I turned the page, saw Loo, and just screamed. It took him all of 3 seconds to run downstairs, by which time I was a sobbing mess. I couldn't believe myself - bawling my eyes out over a comic book! But it was that affecting and well done. The artwork was painfully good here. Her twisted little body crumpled on the floor, milky white eye open and staring at nothing, with her tears still wet on her face. Damnit, she must have been so scared.
Mel's ready for war, and I say bring it on.