Chapter Fifty-Three • Anoxic • Damien
?
Alright. So.
Not my best idea.
Yes, they told me to stay back.
No, I didn’t listen.
Yes, plummeting through a black void was easily the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced.
No, I have no idea where the fuck I am now.
The whole place feels strange and wrong in the same way it does when the ocean pulls sand from under your feet. A sense of moving backwards, even when you’re standing still. It makes my neck prickle and goosebumps break out with the fervor of anaphylactic hives.
I don’t know how I came to a soft landing. The panic was so intense as we plummeted I couldn’t think straight. But now I’m on my feet, I can take in my surroundings.
It’s like I’ve been transported into some kind of fucked up video game.
I don’t spend much time waiting for things to get clear, though. I just start walking. Presumably, Lillith is somewhere in this maze. And I’m going to find her if it costs me my life.
Frustration flashes hot and bright, tightening my gut. Because, fuck. She was right fucking there. She couldn’t see me. But I saw her.
Those silvery eyes were so bright against the black of her natural hair color.
The plum colored dress that made her pallor look even more frightening.
Lillith was so exhausted—almost dull, compared to her normal shimmer.
But she was still the most beautiful woman in the world.
The relief I felt at seeing her alive, compared to the whiplash of immediately losing her, was painful.
Also painful? The absolute shock in her expression when she realized we’d come to save her.
Did she really think we’d just give up? Leave her here? In this horrific place?
I turn at a two-way corridor. I try to remember the trick they always talk about. Was it the inner wall or the outer wall you’re supposed to keep your hand on to find the center? Or should I be trying to find the exit?
Is there an exit?
I turn around abruptly, stopping.
I think... I’m being watched. I feel it like a film on my skin.
God, this place is fucking weird. I try to shake the feeling of it out of my hands, like it’s just stage fright I can shrug off. Of course, it’s not. We’re in the belly of the beast. And I’m alone. I have no one with actual, useful magic to help me.
I take a deep breath and let it out. Think, Damien. Slow down and think.
Alright, what do I know from the conversation before Wren opened the portal? The guy’s basically OP, but he still can’t just steal power without consent or without a subjugation spell—like the one that Lillith had on her.
He’s also... bound to this realm. Kind of.
Aemon called it a vivarium. He can leave his enclosure for brief stints, but any longer than that, and the wrongness of him rubs against the natural order.
Of course we don’t know why that is, but—okay, maybe thinking isn’t the answer. I don’t know shit about shit.
Maybe the best option is just to stay put and let the capable people come and find me? They know I made it through the portal, because they were fucking pissed at me for it. But you know what? I’m not fucking sorry. Not even a little.
A glow catches my eye, and I almost yelp out when I realize the light is coming from my own wrist. For a panicked moment, I think it’s the creature clapping a magical manacle on me.
But after the initial shock, I realize that’s not it at all.
It’s Lillith’s mark—the one she placed on me to keep me safe in The Buried City.
But why is it glowing? Is she in trouble? Is she calling me?
I’m still staring at it when I start walking again, absentmindedly.
The light emanating from my wrist flickers, then fades. I start, looking around.
“Sweetheart?” I call out. “Lillith?”
I turn toward the direction I came from. The mark glows again.
Huh.
Wait.
“Oh. I think I get it. I think I get it! I’m coming!
” I say to well... no one. I run, spent Converse squeaking on the marble floor as I stare down at my wrist. I think it’s a game of hot and cold.
The closer I get to my friends, the brighter the mark glows.
If I take a wrong turn, it flickers. When I correct it, it pulses and brightens.
Before long, the light from my wrist glows so brightly that illuminates the gloomy corridors ahead of me, bathing the marble and dark stained wood in ominous red light.
I don’t care how scary it looks, my friends are leading me to them—hopefully to Lillith.
And I’m going to hold that girl so tightly I just absorb her into my soul like some kind of Carpenter-esque horror monster.
I’m still just staring down at my wrist, heart soaring as I run.
Then I slip in something thick.
The viscous fluid squelches beneath my soles as I come to a clumsy stop.
I cringe as I lift my foot. It smells like...
expired blood. Weird to know what that smells like, I know, but—let’s just say that hospital employees play some fucked up pranks with the unused blood bags.
This is different, though. It’s almost black and syrupy like molasses.
It spiderwebs between the bottom of my shoe and the marble
Then it... tugs?
No, it wrenches, snapping my foot back to the floor and climbing up and over my shoe, wrapping around my ankle.
“What the fuck?”
Movement. Shadows moving in the red light.
I should have been paying more attention to what was in front of me. If I had been, I would have seen what I just ran headlong into like some kind of idiot. I was stupid to think that Wren or Bastion were the only ones able to manipulate the magic Lillith had given me.
So fucking stupid.
The shadows shift again, and in their depths, a sickly white face appears.
The same black fluid pours out of his mouth, his teeth stained with it. He’s lost one of his antlers and his torso sags to one side like he can’t support the weight of the remaining one.
“Give it to me,” he spews before coughing wetly. The crackle of this fluid in his lungs is a familiar horror. A death rattle. Like the breaths of a dying man as his body fails to keep fluids where they belong in his body. Congestive heart failure.
And dying men are desperate men.
“Give what to you?”
“The magic. The last little morsel,” he begs. “I can seal the wound with it.”
I look at my wrist, my hands trembling with adrenaline as another tendril of the putrid slime climbs up my other leg, slipping into my jeans where they’re ripped at the knee.
“No,” I say. “This belongs to Lillith.”
He snarls like a dying animal. “IT BELONGS TO ME, YOU FUCKING RODENT.”
He reaches out with a clawed hand and clenches it. More pain than I’ve ever felt in my life explodes from my wrist, carving a searing line up the length of my arm. It’s like someone has gathered my veins and arteries in a hand and pulled them taut.
Then there’s pressure. Overwhelming pressure. In my chest.
I gulp down an ineffective breath, clenching over my sternum with my free hand.
“Sentimental,” the monster spews. “Foolish girl. Tying the magic to your heart.”
He vomits thick globules of ichor, but the magic tearing me apart doesn’t ebb.
It only pulls tauter. Then—something that I know spells disaster.
A tearing sensation in my chest. Not the muscles of my torso, but deeper.
Beneath my sternum. A sharp pain that grows unbelievably sharper. I feel it in my shoulders, in my neck.
Aortic dissection.
He’s literally ripping my heart in half.
I gasp; the air enters my lungs, but that’s all it does. There’s nothing to pump oxygenated blood through my body. The light in my wrist jolts to the tips of my fingers. I don’t know why, but I make a weak attempt at closing my hand.
“No,” I wheeze out with the last breath I have. “It’s mine.”
There’s a moment of satisfaction. A look of fear and surprise on the monster’s face when it works.
I can do this. I can protect this little sliver of magic.
I can keep it and give it back to Lillith.
It might be the last thing I do, but I can give her this little piece of herself back, and then just give her the entirety of myself, too.
The fucker lets out a pathetic sob, the blackish blood pouring out of his eyes now. “Give it to me! Give it to me!” he cries. He sounds like a shitnosed kid.
I laugh, but my vision flickers.
I blink, smile falling.
God, my hand is so tired.
What’s wrong with me again? What was I doing? Where am I?
It’s a nightmare? No. No. Lillith. I’m holding onto Lillith’s magic.
Tearing pain in my chest. I can’t breathe, that’s right. Aortic... I...
Slime climbs up my body from a different place. Within my body, but outside of it as well. Then a burst of euphoria, reasonless and confusing.
In a last burst of clarity, I realize.
My brain is going anoxic. There’s no oxygen in my blood. I’m dying. I’m dying and my body is flooding me with a flush of feel-good drugs, so I can die peacefully and comfortably. But I can’t die. I have to give Lillith’s magic back to her.
The putrid fluid lifts and arcs back like a furious asp. It bobs like it’s ready to strike, making my flickering vision swim.
It snaps out, slipping past my lips and taking up all the space in my throat. The taste is metallic and rotted. There’s terror. Genuine, shattering terror.
And then it’s gone.
DMT floods my nervous system, and when I close my eyes, behind my eyelids, I find Lillith sitting on a blanket with Gloam.
Her pewter eyes crinkle up at me, speckled in the dappled, warm sunlight of a summer afternoon.
She is a calm night against the most verdant of green grasses.
Outside of her house. Free. With me. Right. Here.
Thank god. She’s here.
What was I so worried about? She’s right here. I feel so silly that I ever...
That I ever what?
Nothing is righter than this. This euphoria is my past, my present, my forever.
I sigh as I drop onto the blanket next to her, pulling her tightly against my chest.
“God, I missed you,” I say, burying my nose into her neck and inhaling deeply.
“We haven’t been apart that long,” she says, laughing. She cups the side of my face and I look at her. She’s so beautiful. Her white hair soothes some deep fear in me. I can’t remember what it is, though. So, I kiss her.
I kiss her and kiss her and kiss her.