THE THING STARED at me, its sulfur-yellow iris leering at me. It pulsed, black veins running into Daniel’s skin, melted and fused to the bottom of the ugly, malignant mass. Prickly waves of angry magick radiated from it.
Daniel’s muscles gave out in a chain reaction that left him spent and loose on the floor.
Do something, do something, DO something.
I slid off the bed and crouched beside him. My hand fell on the Knife of Abraham, sliding it off the table.
The tumor’s eye widened.
I shoved my thumb into it.
The surface was slimy and firm, resisting, fighting the intrusion of my digit, then suddenly bursting around my nail and opening to my knuckle in a squelch of egg yolk, runny and aqueous. My hand became a claw. I dug in and pulled up, stretching the diseased parcel against its mooring. The thing felt rubbery, slick with its own fluid. Daniel made a noise, a grinding, choking moan from the back of his clenched throat.
Stomach churning, I laid the gleaming edge of the knife on the seam of corrupted flesh. The edges of the lids around my thumb turned sharp, the eyelashes turning into needles. They jabbed my skin, stabbing through to pierce tendon and bone. The eye gnawed at my thumb as I screamed and pulled the knife hard. Flesh parted like water against the razor edge, a brackish jelly leaking from the wound and filling the air with the stench of meat gone spoiled. I yanked on the tumor, hacked with the knife, and peeled the rotten nodule from Daniel’s body.
As the last tendril split under the knife edge, his jaw unlocked, releasing the howl of suffering held captive in his mouth. Though it only lasted a second, it was the worst sound I had ever heard.
The tumor acted like a landed fish in my hand, flopping and flapping, trying to slip the hook. Needle-lashes raked my thumb in diabolical acupuncture as the lids chewed and sucked. Dripping jelly hung in strings from the cut end, solidifying, skin forming over their length, turning them into grasping tentacles that wrapped my wrist in clammy wet circles. Stretching and contracting, it tried to pull itself over my hand, the evil essence of the thing trying to bond with me, skin to diseased skin and bone to jelly.
I don’t think so, you little bastard.
Magick rushed from below my stomach, from the pit of my pelvis, sweeping in a twisted whirl through my body, a tornado of energy up and out to my hand.
BURN.
The remnant of Yar Shogura began to sizzle in my palm.
I felt no heat, no flame, but my hand began to glow, sunset orange like the electric eye of a stove, and smoke curled off the scrap of elder god as it shook. The purple-gray membrane that covered it like a decomposing sausage began to fissure, miniature flames flickering, licking along its surface in a wildfire chain reaction.
In seconds it was reduced to a handful of ash.
I shook it off, wiping my palm on my pants and turning to Daniel.
He was pale as a ghost, skin so cold tiny wisps of white curled from it to dissipate into the warmth of the room. The patch where I had excised the tumor was raw and bloody, the meat of him exposed to my eyes. I touched him just to make sure he was still breathing.
He was.
Barely.
My heart locked, frozen between one beat and the next.
No. No, I can’t lose him. I’ll do anything.
Anything.
And I meant it.
Carefully, as gently as I could, I pressed the symbol on my palm against the bloody patch on his back.