Page 191 of Jinxes and Drumsticks

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.