Page 178 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

I look away from him instead of answering. He chuckles, the sound like hard knuckles rubbing against my sternum from the inside.

There is a sort of... wrongness... to his energy I can’t quite describe. It pebbles my skin with gooseflesh and screams at me to run. To hide. But it’s the sort of terror where I can’t bring myself to move—can’t bring myself to even speak.

The same thing happened in the hospital. When I saw Fletcher downed and bloody in the hallway, I couldn’t make myself flee. I should have fought. I should have done something. But I just sat there and stared at him like an idiot.

“There’s a reason for that,” he answers out loud. I flinch. Did he just...hear my thoughts?

“Yes,” he says, answering again. “I’ve been hearing them since you came out of that little gilded cage Aemon hurried you away to. That little ungrateful wretch...” His voice dips low and furious. So furious that I find myself trembling on the floor. He heaves out a put-upon breath. “Well, shall I test it then?”

I don’t know what he’s talking about, but my throat suddenly tightens nearly shut—like a slipknot sinching around my esophagus. I stare at him as my throat closes, air completely cut off.

He lowers himself into the wingback chair Aemon was sat in when I first met him. Then he pats his knee. Twice.

Black spots mottle my vision as I scramble to my feet. The closer I get to him, the less it feels like I’m being hanged. Still, I stop short of sitting on his lap. The idea of doing so is abhorrent. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do for him, but—

My throat abruptly closes again. I try to inhale, but it feels like my diaphragm won’t even move beneath my lungs. He glares up at me as I claw at my throat.

“Lillith Nightingale. I will tell you the same thing I told your mother,” he says, his voice cold and black with hate. “If I tell you to sit on my lap, you will obey. If I tell you to suck my cock. You will obey. If I tell you to get on your hand and knees so I can rut into you like you’re my brood mare. You. Will. Obey.”

I tremble. The tremor so strong in my body that I almost can’t stay standing.

“It’s not a question of training. It’s not a question of free will. You don’t have that anymore, thanks to that little band around your throat. By moonrise tonight, you will be my slave. Worse—my puppet. You will be no better than a marionette that I, alone, control.”

Tears slide down my cheek. The hopelessness of this moment settles in fully. And I realize there is no escape. There is no freedom. There is no happy ending.

I force myself to perch on his knee, and when I do, he grasps my chin and leans forward to lick the path of my tears. Moaning like it’s a meal I’ve prepared for him.

His tongue is disgustingly cold. His breath wafts across my face smelling of sulfur and soot. I’m grateful for my empty stomach, because I’m worried I might vomit all over him. And if he detests spit, he might actually kill me for the insult.

He leans back in his chair, shifting his hips with a satisfied groan. I do my best not to think about the stiffness pressing insistently against his pantleg—against the bend of my knee. His threats ring in the back of my mind, and I think death might be preferable.

He chuckles, the sound frigid.

“Oh, poor Little Bird—”

Rage burns through me so quickly that I can’t contain it before I snarl out, “Don’t call me that.” It’s the first thing I’ve uttered since he stole me away from the only person I want to ever refer to me by that name.

He grasps my chin and makes me look him in the pit of his black eyes. They’re depthless and dismal. They are the looming threat of purgatory. They are a black hole, pulling me in and wringing me out and slowing this time that has already slowed to the viscous ooze of black magma, destroying everything in its path. “Impudent little whore,” he sneers. “I will call you what I want, and you will thank me for it soon enough.”

My retort dies on my tongue as I tumble into the oubliette of those eyes.

I fall and fall and fall through a psychic trap of hopeless misery.

I cannot resurface.

ㅤ

Our escape from the hospital would have been almost funny if not for the absolute terror engulfing my soul. We ran out of there like we’d set off a bomb. I had to steal a hospital gown. Oren carried Fletcher piggyback, and Roxie and Wren had to wrangle Satoshi, who’s hovering somewhere between delirium and speaking in tongues.

Now we’re all sitting at the airport terminal. The soonest flight we could find back to California doesn’t leave for six hours. We’ve already been here for three, and the entire time we’ve been silent as death.

There is this sort of quiet that falls over people when tragedy strikes. I don’t see as much of it as actual doctors do, but I’ve seen it a few times when someone dies at the scene of an accident, or has an unexpected heart attack or stroke. This sort of feeling of well, what is there to say?

No amount of “I’m sorry,” or “It will be okay,” will ever be enough. Because what does it matter if you’re sorry? And because it won’t be okay.

Wren sleeps fitfully against Satoshi, who’s sitting on the floor against the wall. His arms look almost entirely better. I managed to suture up the gash on Fletcher’s head with the first aid kit in the rental. He said he got it in the fall after he was knocked out. Roxie hasn’t stopped crying: a steady, insistent stream, like the constant flow of a well-supplied creek.

Oren sits next to me, staring at the ceiling while I stare down at my hands.