Page 177 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

I’m not sure how to respond. “Did you even look at my chart, dude?”

He blinks and it’s... weird. It’s off. Lillith starts to tremble in my arms.

I glance down at her to find her looking past the doctor. Her pupils have constricted into little pin pricks. I follow the line of her gaze to the hallway.

There’s... blood. A lot of it. And fletcher’s wrist is lax, draped across the floor. I recognize the wristband he’s wearing from here.

I look back up at the ‘doctor’, and he’s staring down at my girlfriend with a grin that curls just a little too much at the corners

“Found you,” he says, his voice far lower than seems natural for a normal human being.

My brain stalls for too long, because just when my body finally tells me to move—to get in front of Lillith and protect her from this creep—the pressure in the room peaks as if I’m sharing the space with the world’s largest subwoofer.

I tighten my arms around her even as my ears click and pop. Hot liquid pours out of my ears, then every large window in my hospital room shatters outward, like a blast has detonated right next to my bed.

The creature tears Lillith out of my arms. I try to follow her, my IV pulling out of my arm and spurting blood across the wall as the fucker leaps onto the window ledge, cloven feet crushing the shattered glass still clinking to the pane.

Lillith’s terrified expression as she reaches for me slices into me. I reach for her just as the monster leaps out of the window. Her blood-curdling scream reaches me even past my busted eardrums. I slip in my own blood as I hurry to look out the window for her. But I realize with nauseating clarity that she’s already gone.

They’ve vanished into thin air.

ㅤ

Isquint as the ground swallows me and my captor whole. I squeeze my eyes shut, preparing for how awful it was the first time, when Aemon sent us through the portal, but this experience is completely different.

It feels more like sinking into a mud bath than being buried alive.

The soil is finer, warmer.

But we’re also moving much slower through the silt.

Before long, my lungs burn for air. I grip the arm of the Aberrant, pushing against his vice-like hold around my middle. His arm only constricts tighter, a python tightening around me and threatening to snap my spine in half.

My head swims, the absence of oxygen and the shock of my abduction coalescing into yet another aura. The last thing I want to do around this thing is seize. The last thing I want to do at all is seize for the second time in a single day. But just as the feeling builds, hot and nauseating in my skin, we burst through the silt, The Aberrant landing hard on his cloven feet—the shockwave of our impact almost as hard as hitting stone.

I cough and sputter, spitting mud and dirt out of my mouth for the second time in as many hours.

There’s a disgusted click of his tongue. Before I can open my eyes, I do hit the ground. Hard. A shock of pain shoots through my pelvis and my elbow, which have taken the brunt of the impact.

“What are you? A slobbering beast?” he sneers.

I blink, smearing mud out of my eyes, trying to take in my surroundings. It takes a little while for my tears to clear the left over particulates from my eyes, but when they do, I find myself somewhere familiar.

It’s the same study Aemon conjured up when he destroyed the Nightingale Pearl. Or—well—when the Nightingale Pearl self-destructed. I probe the room with my magic, checking for the seams of a glamour or illusory spellwork.

“I can feel that, you know,” my captor says.

He’s wandered over to a bar cart and has taken to pouring a black liquid over ice from a crystal decanter that appears empty to me. He takes a sip of it, hissing as if it burns going down, then continues speaking while inspecting his drink. “That’s how I found you. Tricky little thing that you are. Like your mother,” he says.

I’m depleted from healing Damien, but even if I wasn’t, the density of The Aberrant’s energy is almost suffocating. Way more powerful than Bastion and Wren and I combined. I force myself to sit up, crossing my legs on the cold black and white marble floors. “Ah, but you didn’t care for her, did you?” he asks, finally looking at me.

His eyes are obsidian. Marbles set in the handsome face he wears like a grotesque silicon mask. Velveteen black antlers slowly crack through the skin and bone of his brow. I watch with horror as they grow increasingly larger and more clawlike. They extend past the sheath of the black velvet, the downy softness splitting like a caribou’s and revealing bloody bone below the draping remnants of viscera.

His silvery hair grows longer, shifting and curling past his collar bone and then to his chest.

His lips curve into that sharp grin, only this time his canines are elongated, and his mask ripples and creases like it doesn’t quite fit.

“Glorious, aren’t I?” he asks, holding his arms out from his body. A demented, self-proclaimed Adonis.