Page 557 of Flirting with Darkness

“He’s grown,” she warned, brushing past whatever look Ghost wore on his face. “In power. In darkness. He’s grown… even from when I knew him. Won’t be so easy now. But all the more important. All the moreclearwhat must be done.”

Ghost stared at her.

“Must be?” He laid his hands on the table. “What does that mean?Whatmust be done?”

“You must take it. You must take it from him, and walk the path. You walk the path and ye’ll keep him from doing great evil, darling. Ye’ll keep the world from a greater evil than even him… more evil than any of us can manage.”

She smirked.

“…Even you, bright eyes.”

Ghost felt his jaw harden.

For some reason, he fought a tightening in his throat, too.

He opened his mouth, about to speak, but she cut him off.

“…always dark, that one,” she muttered, clucking her tongue. “Always dark. Born bad, he was. Born bad, through and through. His father poisoned his blood, his soul, before he took his first breath, free of his mother’s waters…”

“But what––”

She was already setting down a fourth card.

She was already speaking past him.

“No time, child. No time. Listen. Listen andthink.Or this’ll be you one day…”

She tapped the center of the fourth card she’d set down on the cloth in front of him. She tapped the center of it with one perfect-seeming, pearl-white nail.

Ghost let his eyes shift towards the image there.

A man stood in the center, this time looking out.

It appeared to be the same man depicted in the third image, only now most of his flesh and muscle had wasted away. Glowing red eyes peered out from behind a bone-like mask. His skin looked sallow, hanging on protruding bones. Those sunken eyes stared out at Ghost, devoid of life. In his hands, dark flames flickered and burned.

Below those wasted, painted white hands, fire licked over the pages of an enormous book spread out before him.

The fire seemed almost to move inside the painted image.

Then Ghost saw it… that same, blue-faced clock, which now hung around the magician’s neck on a thick, iron chain. The portal behind him opened to fire, an opening rent seemingly in the fabric of reality. Twisted bodies lived inside that light.

Writhing, fighting to get out.

They would get out.

Looking down at that image, Ghost fought a wave of dizziness.

He couldn’t have said why exactly. He had seen far more grisly things in his life, and at a much closer distance. He’d seen the dead bodies of friends, young and old. He’d seen the wasted, disease-ridden corpse of his own mother. But something in that painted card’s image disturbed him in a way he couldn’t fully describe to himself.

It pulled at him. The pull there made him feel sick.

It made him grimace and recoil.

It brought forth a dread in his being unlike anything he’d ever felt.

Death, but not only that.

Sickness. Dismemberment. Rotted flesh.

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