Page 91 of All Hallows Game

I didn’t like calling her a monster now I’d seen her transform from woman to animal. It felt wrong, especially knowing Nightmare had done this to her. It wasn’t Elaina’s fault she was a creature. But I couldn’t avoid the memory of Caroline laid in the park, or the way the creature had crouched over the florist, eating her. My sympathy for Elaina hit a brick wall.

“Wooden box,” I panted, stumbling around the room, scanning every surface and shelf, bumping into the metal tables as I tried to move faster than my body would allow. Too slow, too slow, too slow, my mind panicked, the words a frantic heartbeat as I searched the computer desk, my hands shaking as I lifted papers and records, growing more desperate with every second that passed.

What if I took too long? What if Virgil was murdered while I was here, too far away to save him, failing to find the box he’d asked for?

I turned to the shelves full of vials of dark liquid I couldn’t call anything other than blood, peering behind the racks of them, crouching to search the bottom row, going onto my tiptoes to peer above and biting back a scream at the pain through my ankle and—

I found it. I exhaled a relieved sob and reached up to grab the mahogany box, biting the inside of my mouth until I drew blood, my shoulder blazing with sudden agony. Box in hand, I stumbled back, clutching it to my chest as tears spilled down my face. Fuck, it hurt. I wanted to curl up on the floor and cry, but Virgil needed me and I wouldn’t let him down. I wouldn’t lose him when I’d finally found him.

I rested the box on the edge of a shelf, prising open the top, the crescent moon burned into the top a darker shade than the rest of the box. Inside, as Virgil promised, were two dozen syringes of a luminescent yellow solution. It was almost gold in the dim green lighting. I grabbed three of them just to be safe, dumped the heavy box on the table behind me and—paused as something I’d seen finally registered to my conscious mind.

A ripple of unease made my belly clench as I turned back to face the shelves, syringes in hand. I hoped I was wrong. I hoped I’d misread the label of the vial. But no, there it was—WALLISON, CACTUS, 2024.

Nightmare had my blood. In a lab that was distilling an unknown liquid into something a completely different colour. The same colour as whatever was in these syringes. An antidote to whatever made Elaina monstrous, or something worse? I felt my pulse double in my throat as I stared at that vial labelled with my name.

She had my blood. Nightmare had my blood. The true monster, the goddess that made Byron into a murderer and made Miz kill my best friend. She had my blood.

Noise rang in my ears. I adjusted the syringes into one hand and eased the vial of my blood from the rack.

“Fuck you,” I whispered, and smashed the glass vial at my feet, the explosion of glass and blood across stone immensely satisfying. Revenge made my breathing quicken. I wanted to shatter every last one of these vials, but Virgil needed me. I would come back. When Elaina was subdued, when we were safe—I’d come back.

I shifted my weight to take a step, but I paused when I saw the blood splattered on the floor was smoking.

“God,” I whispered, backing up a step, but the sight of yellow smoke curling from where my blood had hit the floor entranced me. Fear held me in place. Why was my blood smoking?

I froze when streams of blood reached up from the ground, billowing like it was smoke itself, and I finally stumbled back another step. But the blood rose higher, dancing in the air like a living thing, yellow flashes within the rich crimson. My temperature spiked, the room humid.

Whatever substance Nightmare was distilling here… it was in my blood. Infecting it. Twisting it. Changing it into something terrifying.

I retreated another step, my hand sweaty around the syringes, the yellow liquid inside suddenly far more dangerous than it was minutes ago. Was this what made Elaina into a monster, into a nightmare herself?

Why did Virgil send me to get it if this thing made monsters and—

“Oh, god.” If it was in my blood, it was in every single vial on these shelves. Hundreds upon hundreds. Why? What did Nightmare stand to gain? I didn’t understand, and that made me want to scream. And then I really did scream as a drop of blood touched my hand, not just burning the backs of my fingers but scalding.

I scrambled to get away from the blood, the liquid too alive, too steeped with magic. The scent of it was everywhere, inescapable—copper and iron and bitterness. Sweat dripped off my upper lip. My foot caught on the table leg, panic making me clumsy, and I hit the floor on my knees so fast the fall was a blur.

My hand shot out to stop my head hitting the stone floor, the move pure instinct and no thought. Goosebumps covered my legs as my hand landed directly in the blood, slippery and hot. More blood hit my face, then my throbbing shoulder, my bare arms. The dress was flimsy protection and blood was everywhere.

All the places it touched burned like I'd been doused in acid.

I screamed, so guttural and raw that I didn’t recognise myself. Tears obscured my vision. I couldn’t think or feel or breathe. Blood burned and branded me.

Run, my darkness howled at me. Get up and run and don’t stop running until this cursed building is far behind you. Move, lioness!

I screamed louder as the pain crested, the syringes falling from my hands as I collapsed onto my side, gasping for shallow breaths. My vision swirled in shades of red like the pain scorching my skin. My chest was a bonfire, making every breath raze my lungs and throat. I couldn’t feel the pain in my head and ankle anymore because there was no part of me that didn’t scream in protest and torture.

Something was wrong with the blood in that vial. It wasn’t the first blood I’d had on my hands, and it had never burned like this before, had never—

I fell onto my back, my spine arching off the floor as the pain mounted, burning through my veins, tearing through every cell. I had to be sick, had to be infected. I wouldn’t entertain the darker thought in my mind, wouldn’t think about the yellow substance or the administrator who was now a monster.

Get out of there. Run or crawl or drag yourself by your fingernails—whatever it takes, get the hell out.

“I can’t,” I sobbed, my whole vision flashing back.

They’re coming, just hold on.

I tried, I really tried. But the next time my back arched, bones snapped, and the pain made me black out.

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