Page 140 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

“I mean, I am literally unable to tell you. If I try, my throat will catch fire and take a week to heal.”

Aemon stills, breathing heavily for a moment before he rolls his neck like something’s just given him a chill. He clenches his hands at his side, his eyes staring at nothing as he quiets his breathing. Lillith inhales to speak, but he puts up his hand to stop her. “Be silent if you don’t want to die,” he hisses.

Lillith’s face goes pale. Her mouth moves, but nothing comes out. She holds the column of her throat. He didn’t just tell her to shut up, he actually stole her voice away.

The roots holding me in place snap back into the ground with the ferocity of an angry serpent. The earth lurches beneath me, getting me back onto my feet.

“Take the girl and get back to the house,” Aemon commands, dispersing into mist. “Now. I’ll meet you there.”

The look in Aemon’s face is one of pure terror. That’s all the information I need—his terror. I don’t wait around to ask questions. I fucking listen.

Lifting Lillith into my arms, I tear into the darkened woods, running as fast as I possibly can. She holds herself as stable as she can while I sprint, seeming to smooth the ground before us as I go, preventing us from eating shit.

The temperature around us plummets until turning our hard breathing into tufts of white and pebbling our skin with goosebumps. Lillith’s arms tighten around the back of my neck as she looks behind us and lets out a little gasp.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says, but the words waver like a lie. “Just keep running.”

Her fingers curl against my back, and while I keep my eyes on the path to the car, I hear the earth opening behind us—the crackle of tree trunks splitting and the groan of each one falling—followed by the harsh whisper of foliage hitting the ground.

“Fuck,” Lillith whimpers in my ear, right before a force like a bus crashes into me sidelong. I do my best to cradle her against me and take the brunt of the fall, but it’s almost impossible to keep her in my arms without crushing her. I slide, woodchips and gravel imbedding themselves in my skin. I watch Lillith slide too, but she’s given a chance to catch her bearings before she starts levitating in midair.

At first, I think she’s doing it herself—that she’s got some weird hex-games mode she’s tapping into. But when I see the expression on her face, I realize I’m horribly, terrifyingly wrong.

Her eyelids stretch wider than I’ve ever seen before as she reaches for her throat. Her bare feet kick beneath her, looking for purchase. My mind almost can’t comprehend it—then, the reality snaps into place.

It’s dark in the forest—almost a new moon. But regardless of how dark it is, there looms something darker. A sort of wrongness in it. A shadow that looks like it escaped the lines of code constructing this world. There’s no cast to it, no bluish-violet. It’s just... void. Nothing. And it towers over her even as she hangs from its shadowy claws. The damned thing must be twelve feet tall. Lillith’s throat and the moth tattoo on her chest vanish under too-dark shadows.

It’s choking her out. Her lips take on a frightening blue tinge, her eyes roll back in her head. She starts convulsing.

And I’m totally powerless. I have no way to help her. All I can do is sit there and watch her struggle. She’s going to die and I can’t do a fucking. Thing.

Her long lashes flutter. Her clawing fingers going weak and falling limp at her sides. I already know I won’t be able to survive this pain. I can’t. And still, this is happening. This is reality. She’s going to be gone. Gone from the world. And I’m going to be lost. I’ll never recover. I’ll never—

Hot, blinding light. It sears my eyes.

It’s like someone threw a lasso around the sun and pulled it down into our orbit. It bakes the outermost layer of my skin. A sunburn in seconds flat. There’s a terrible sound, like the scream of thousands of people all at once.

A hard thud. Then silence.

“Gods, no,” Wren’s voice. “No, no, no.”

“She’s not breathing—” Bastion says

“Do something, Bash.”

“Healing is her forte, not mine, remember?” I’d be annoyed at him for being a snarky asshole if it wasn’t for the panic lacing his snipped words.

Big, fat black spots hinder my vision, but the scene in front of me comes into a haphazard focus. Lillith lies limp on the ground, her head cradled in Wren’s lap, her eyes open, but unfocused—pupils blown out so wide her eyes are almost black.

Deep, purple bruises mottle the delicate skin of her throat, and her blood vessels spiderweb from the hand-shaped marks there. I can’t figure out if the poor lighting is painting those little vessels black, or if that thing did something to her blood. Bastion has her wrist in his hands, pinching the pulse point all wrong.

Something clicks. Some distant memory of who I am beyond the terror of losing the one thing I love most in life.

I hurry to my feet and run over to her side. “Move over,” I say, taking Lillith’s wrist from his hand.

Bastion, for once, doesn’t retort something shitty. He just follows my instructions. Wren sobs. I think she might be in shock; she whispers and brushes Lillith’s hair out of her face. I press two fingers against the artery in Lillith’s neck, and wait a few precious seconds for it to thrum against my skin the way it did less than ten minutes ago. But it doesn’t. And her skin has already chilled in a way that just sits wrong in the back of my mind.