* * * * *
Imagine tar. Nicotine tar, the kind you see swallowing the set of lungs in that disgusting poster you were forced to sit next to in Health class. Imagine that festering out of Freddy Kruger's skin. And blood. And shredded, blackened tissue.
Now imagine that it's not Freddy Kruger.
It's your boss.
Okay, sure. Your friend.
Fine. I'll admit it.
Your best friend.
My best friend is lying belly-up on a filthy bathroom floor, hardly recognizable under a layer of open, weeping sores―a layer of decay. For one awful, eternal moment, I am positive that he is dead. But the whispering rumble in my ears coincides with the jarring rise and fall of his chest, a movement which proves that he is not dead. Each time he draws a breath, the air in the room changes. It changes even within my own chest, avoiding the pull of my lungs.
His eyes lock onto me with definite recognition, but he doesn't speak and his face doesn't change. It is distorted, twisted into a picture of fury. He sucks the air between his teeth, which are bloody and grated forcefully together. The spidery wounds covering his skin have soaked his clothes through. His wrists are stripped and mangled, and an indiscernible mire circles his neck, like he's been throttled with barbed wire. A similar mess spreads from the corner of his mouth to his ear, leaking thick black ink. It is incomprehensible, nauseating―but I can't not look, because it's Jesse.
This is not the worst thing that I have seen. But it's an image that comes to mind more often than I would like: after a nightmare, before opening a door, or whenever I need a reminder of what the Hollows were capable of.
I hadn't moved a muscle. Someone had to nudge me sideways to get through the door. I was vaguely aware of other people sliding into the room behind me. Ghi closed the door and locked it. Corin leaped to shut the sink off, and Abe got straight to business.
He crouched to the floor beside Jesse, one arm already buried in his shoulder bag, digging through an arsenal of hypodermic syringes and bottles. Jesse kept looking at me, and I kept doing nothing. Ghi and Corin remained silent. Abe was doing the talking, fast and serious.
"Did they give you the Breath?" he asked. It was the most important question in the world.
Jesse's eyes swiveled away. He jerked his chin from side to side.
No. They hadn't.
Abe nodded. "Excellent. That's very good."
I'd been acquainted with Abe for maybe fifteen minutes, so I didn't pick up on the lack of enthusiasm in his voice. But I did notice the nervous way that Corin and Ghi looked at each other then.
A repetitive sound invaded my attention. Zipp! Ripp!―a sound like a zip-lock bag being slowly opened. My throat closed around the sting of bile. Jesse's skin was making that sound.
The wounds were moving.
They expanded―sometimes slowly, sometimes in surges―as if unseen hands were pulling apart the edges. More of the dark fluid came spilling out with every additional torn inch, mingling with the blood and the stagnant water which covered the floor.
"You have a lot of control here, Jesse. It's very important that you understand that," Abe was saying, placing himself in Jesse's line of vision. He sounded less like a doctor and more like someone about to diffuse a nuclear bomb.
"It spreads deeper and more quickly when you move, when your heart rate goes up, when you panic, understand? Help is coming, but you have to be still and focus. Keep it together, okay?"
Jesse nodded once but he looked no more together than before. That was Abe's cue. He didn't count or declare a warning, just swiftly plunged the first needle down.
I turned to face the wall, shaking. From cold, nausea, terror, but above all, anger. How was this real, and how was it allowed to happen? To Jesse? To any of them? I wanted to know just who exactly had decided that Jesse Cannon was a god. He so clearly wasn't. And now he was going to die here, very soon, in this ugly place, because someone had made a mistake. I could have told that someone―that diviner, that ghost, whoever it was―that Jesse doesn't think ahead. That he can't focus for more than ten seconds on anything other than a sheet of music or a nice ass. That he's allergic to mildew and most fabric softeners. That his left ankle needs daily attention, whether he wants it or not, or it will get stiff. I could have told them what a mistake they were making, and to leave him alone, to pick someone else.
When I turned back around, Abe was on his third or fourth syringe. Jesse's eyes were shut tightly. The air had stopped moving because he was holding his breath. I noticed Corin looking on, smoothing the bandages around his own wrist, anxious cynicism carving extra lines on his face. How many needles and little bottles had it taken to stop the death from eating away at just his arm alone?
Abe wouldn't be able to do enough. What was a finite number of little vials, compared to all that damage? It was like tossing two Tylenols down the neck of a beheaded man.
"Jesse," Ghi spoke up tentatively. He had to ask. "Can you tell us what happened to Jackson and Khan?"
Jesse opened his eyes.
"I don't know," he said, spitting the words through his teeth. His voice was raw and cracked. "There were more. In the stairs."
Everyone grew quiet while that sank in.
"More?" Ghi repeated. "How many more?"
The air pressure in the room began to change dramatically. I could feel it against my skin, and within the walls of my lungs. Jesse was losing it. I moved away from the wall, pushing past Ghi.
"Would you back off?" I snapped at him, lowering my knees to the slimy floor beside Jesse. "You're just making him panic."
Ghi closed his mouth mid-breath because I was absolutely right. Beside me, Abe discarded an empty vial and stood up, stepping over to Corin and motioning Ghi along with him. The three started speaking amongst themselves, running over one another with their words.
"We can't stay here."
"The hunters should have been here by now."
"Will they even be able to do anything―?"
I blocked them out and watched Jesse's mauled face, trying stupidly to think of something encouraging to say and coming up with nothing. I wanted so badly to apologize for doubting him, to tell him that I wished I'd never found that phone. More than anything, I wanted to tell him that I would withdraw my two weeks' notice and work for him through retirement, would never complain again about a single demand, would even get that stupid haircut he'd been begging me to try, anything at all, if he would just keep breathing long enough for help to come. I couldn't force a single word out, though, which is just as well. Jesse beat me to it.
"Oh, girl," he said. "You look awful."
I blinked.
Jesse, I reminded myself. Still Jesse.
"You've looked better yourself," I said.
The slightest smile caused the side of his face to split open further, and he clenched his jaw ruefully.
"―we'll just have to move him," Ghi was saying.
"Only if it's necessary."
"I'd say it's necessary," Corin balked. "We can't just wait in here for them to tear us all to pieces."
"I'm going to go check the stairwell." Ghi again. If anything was said after that, I didn't catch it. Jesse found one of my hands and gripped it tightly, his fingers digging into my palm.
"Go," he ordered.
"What?" I stared cluelessly at the terror beginning to swirl behind his eyes. "Where? With Ghi?"
"Anywhere," he heaved. "Everybody. Out."
The pressure in the room plummeted. I felt something like a pulse rippling against my skin. An impossible wind began to pick up, circling the small space in an ominous, quickening pattern.
Like a predator.
"Go," said Jesse.
"Okay, okay. Wait." I started to pull away, but Jesse's grip suddenly tightened down like a bear trap around my fingers. He inhaled sharply, ceaselessly, and the air circling the room became a violent gale. The hem of Jesse's shirt turned a darker shade of red, blooming with blood. The others pushe
d in around me, looming above us.
"You're not focusing," Abe warned over the moaning airstreams. "You're panicking."
Of course he's panicking, I wanted to scream. He's rotting alive.
And dying. And taking us all with him.
I looked down again and felt my face go hot with horror. Jesse hadn't left the floor, but he wasn't exactly touching it either. The tiles beneath him were all visible in murky, ghost-like detail. I realized, with a shock more powerful than a physical slap, that I could see through him.
Jesse's eyes flashed wide at the ceiling, his mouth gaping open in frantic astonishment. The wind was blasting down with almost enough strength to topple me over.
"What's happening to him?" I pleaded for an explanation. His hand ... I could no longer feel it, even though one look convinced me that I was still holding it with my own. I grasped it harder, bracing against the wind. Jesse's fingers evaporated into a trail of suntanned smoke.
No, no, no, no.
"How do we stop that?" Corin was livid, too loud. "Is this how it happens? Is he―?
"Becoming?" Ghi finished the question.
I watched that dreamy wisp of color, a fragment of my honest-to-god dearest friend, vanish into a swift stream of air. My jaw locked in an open position, my only breath was trapped somewhere in the top of my throat.
This is not happening.
Abe began moving slowly, very carefully, toward the door. "It's best for now that we exit ...."
Like hell.
"No one's leaving! No one! How could you leave?" I shouted, filling the hallways with shrill echoes. To my credit, I was suffering from gangrene by that point, had an estimated fever of 103 degrees, and had just watched someone's hand vaporize. My capacity for good sense does have its limits.
"Jordan―" Corin gripped my shoulder as if to pull me off the floor. I flung his hand away and bellowed the basest of four-letter words at him before crouching closer to Jesse.
"Goddamnit! Stop this right now, Jesse!" I grappled at his phantom arm. His elbow billowed and swirled out of my grasp, dissipating. "STOP IT!"
Ghi snatched me off the floor, smothering me completely with the inside of his elbow. And suddenly it was Jesse screaming and not me. The air in the room burst outward as if from a bomb, coiling and rolling like a wild animal, crushing us against the walls and shaking the locked metal door in its frame. It howled in a frightening harmony with Jesse's wailing, which never paused for an inhale. If we stuck around much longer, we were going to end up looking like those Hollows out in the hallway. Even I understood that.
"Hurry it up!" Ghi shouted over the top of my head at Abe, who was fumbling to unlock the door. I twisted and kicked unsuccessfully, trying to get back down to the floor, but Ghi locked his arms around me so tightly in response that I could feel his rapid heartbeat through all his sweaters. "Can you move him?" he asked Corin over the crying wind.
Corin glared up from the floor, his hands hovering uselessly over what was left of Jesse. How do you move air? Especially when it's mad as hell and about to die?
"I don't think that would be a good idea right now!" he shouted back.
The unlocked door blew open with a loud, resounding crack, straining against its hinges. Abe tumbled out into the bloodied hallway like a man lost in a storm, and Ghi paused with me against the wall, stalled by the obvious conflict. Abandoning Jesse was unthinkable, but staying near him―staying in this building at all―could likely mean death.
Corin made no move to follow us. He remained on the floor, doing all he could to pin Jesse to reality―which wasn't much. Ghi didn't have to say that he would come back once he got Abe and myself outside. The two of them may as well have been in that Manhattan alley again, boiling every uncertainty down to trust. Corin nodded, and we left without him.
Vessel, Book I: The Advent Page 61
