The moment those dead, gray eyes begin to twitch, haze escapes pinhole exits in the vine’s hollow thorns. It amasses as a blanket, almost solid atop the addict, only thinning into the room’s still air when his muscles reel from the thorns’ tearing. The white gas drifts from his bed to the shadows in the corners, rays of amber from a candle dancing through it till its end.

  But one shadow cannot wait for the fog to roll in and emerges like a glitch from its hide of deep darkness. Still shaking from the bitter chill, a black stain upon the candlelight, she is a shadow, alive, with a certain beauty to her voice. Her first breath in the fog paints the scene of a small, fading man, his white button-down drenched in blackened crimson. Ruby sees him too, as it is through his mind’s eye that the shadow now perceives the one he calls Sari.

  Her breaths between tense, reverberating notes bring a glimpse of dying screams to life in her vision, their wet violent nature becoming more and more vivid the closer she creeps to room 93’s bed. Straight from the fog’s source, she takes her next sip, carving a hole through the milky blanket to Ruby’s vine-wrapped face beneath. “Is it these nightmares, dear cruelty, that made you so averse to sleep?” signee whispers before she steals another drink and ends up in a forest… in a car, backwards in the driver’s seat…

  __________

  …where Ruby’s young heart pumped despair through his veins. Eyes wide open or closed so tight it hurt, his gaze straight forward or shunned the opposite direction, Sari’s life, bleeding away atop black leather, was burnt in red behind his vision. The labored cries of the kid were hard to hear beneath the storm Markus was cursing, and even the fiend’s tongue of poison sounded like it were shouting beneath an ocean. Nothing could be done to escape the pocket of hell Ruby’d created until a set of lights appeared, flashing on the dark horizon.

  First, his stomach dropped, staring at them through the rear window. It should have been impossible to spot his car in such darkness so distant. Yet a ranger was approaching, bright but in silence, and relief cooled Ruby’s mind during his words next spoken. “Thank god…” he said in a choked whisper “…Sari has a chance.”

  He reached for his door’s handle and Markus reached for his shoulder, nails digging into flesh as he barked, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “They could help him,” Ruby answered the very next second, but Markus met the hope and fear in his eyes with a frustrated sigh. “Look,” spoke the fiend riding shotgun in a parked car, “I’ve known you for a long, long time Ruby… and every time *you think* your life is over, it’s not. But this. It really would be the final nail in the coffin.” He held his tongue only to swipe the pack of cigarettes from the center console and press it against Ruby’s chest, irked by the buzzing of Sari’s wet breaths that broke up the silence. “Just think for a moment. Think about what they’d find. Imagine his brother’s case… reopened.”

  “You think I need some ‘grand deliberation’ to figure out all that, Markus?!” Ruby spat the fiend’s name with venom, took the box of cigs, and, with immediate regret, crushed it. “I’ve made my decision.”

  “Then it’s a fucking selfish decision that you don’t just get to make by yourself! What about me?” Markus returned, taking a couple exasperated breaths before he continued, “everything that *you* quit… *I* stuck with. Six months from now, I’ll finally graduate and get the hell away from my needy fucking family… and you want to burn down my whole life just so you can *believe* you tried to save one pathetic fuck who doesn’t even have a chance?!”

  Grabbing the fiend’s hand off his shoulder and threatening to break it with the tiniest bit more pressure, Ruby’s eyes bore the same psychotic look he’d come to be known for in his gym’s ratty, little octagon. “So, Sari has to die for what? To save *your* future?”

  “HE’D DIE WITH YOUR PAST.”

  “The fuck kind of satanic, sacrificial thinking is that? Even if you’ve never had respect… never had even the slightest bit of care for the kid, I didn’t think you so fucking self-absorbed to turn a blind eye while he withers away.” Throwing aside Markus’s hand, Ruby yanked at the handle of his door and added, “and you call *me* selfish?” The door swung open with the wind, possessing his hair like fire. “Fuck off, man, I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Fuck him! It’s you, Ruby,” Markus shouted with desperation, slapping himself violently and repeatedly in the head. “It’s *you* that I care about. It’s *your life* that I respect. Just how many have you lost at this point? And who’s been there for you every. single. time. Who else but me has bothered to show you so much god damn respect?! I am the best fucking friend you have… and just like all those lost… all those watching from beyond, I don’t want to see you rot behind bars for the rest of your life. They’re not gonna go easy on you. Not just because of one final, decent act.”

  Releasing some guttural, bothered noise, Ruby froze in place. “What if I don’t care? What if I’ve already considered and accepted the consequence? I appreciate it, Markus – trying to look out for me if that’s really even your angle, but I’ll gladly take whatever I’ve got coming if it means I’ll finally be able to intervene-”

  “You’ll ‘gladly’ trade two? To save one?”

  Both men fell silent for a moment, and Ruby searched beneath the howling wind until he could hear Sari’s struggled breaths. “No trades. We’re all going to fuckin’ live.”

  “I don’t know about that one, Rube. You were sure no rangers would show tonight… yet here they are, no doubt shaky as ever driving down this stretch. Shit end of the stick. The shortest straw. *That’s* what it means to get stuck with this patrol… and we’ve got a gruesome fucking sight waiting for them.”

  “Don’t skew it. I’ve got a dying friend who could use their help.”

  “Help?! You’ve got a better chance meeting some spooked son of a bitch’s bullets than the tweaker’s got at living,” Markus argued, taking a deep breath and shifting to a tone more sincere. “Just imagine how they’ll tremble… watching you make the last mistake you’ll ever make… not the ranger, but Emb’ and the-”

  Ruby turned on him in a heartbeat, gripped the collar of his jacket and pulled the fiend close enough to smell the stench of smoke on his words. “DON’T YOU USE HER NAME AGAINST ME.”

  “I’M NOT…” Markus said while he wiped the chain-smoker’s spit from his face. He tried to pull away, but Ruby wouldn’t budge. “It’s just a shame. There’s a lot I never got the chance to tell you… about Emb’.”

  “You don’t have a damn clue why she-”

  “But I do, Ruby,” Markus interrupted with conviction, and placing his own hand atop the smoker’s, he could feel the man’s pulse beating through his knuckles. “I know her reasons… the closure you’d never reach on your own. Not rotting away in some cell. Not in the grave that ranger’ll send you to if you up and run out that door.”

  “Then tell me… before I go,” said Ruby, but at the same time, they heard the ranger’s voice amplified into the night – something about laying face down in the road. He was parked, Ruby noticed in the rear-view mirror, standing, guarded, behind his door and no doubt staring at the smoker’s plateless trunk.

  “TELL ME, MARKUS,” demanded Ruby once more, but the fiend shook his head in disbelief and distress. So too was Markus inclined to stalk the ranger in the mirror. He watched the bastard draw his weapon and begin to approach their car. “There’s not a chance I’ll spend my final moments trying to explain it all to you… not when you can still make things right.”

  “JUST TELL ME WHY SHE DID IT,” Ruby screamed, tightening his grip.

  “THEN DRIVE,” Markus countered. “YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW?... then drive…” he let the word fade into a pained, melancholic breath. “Get us the hell out of dodge, and I’ll give you the closure you’re after.”

  Ruby pulled him even closer for a second, his eyes stained with malice, his nostrils flared and his front teeth bitten down below his bottom lip. In the next, he threw Markus against the passenger-side door and battled with the wind to slam shut his own…

  __________

  … but its echo still rings in the shadow’s mind as she expels the vine’s gas from her unstable body. “Emb’ and the what, dear cruelty? ‘Ruby’? Why’d you *have* to cut him off before I could find out?” she whispers to the addict out cold, the curtain fa?ade of his memory rising to reveal room 93. Beneath the white haze, his bed-top body does not struggle even though the thorny vines carve spiraling valleys through his flesh. His face instead emits focus, concentrated mainly in his open, unconscious eyes, and signee takes a couple breaths – just enough and no more to understand why. For in his dream he drives, off-road through the forest, every near collision with a trunk critiqued with a curse from Markus. As insufferable as it must be for Ruby, it’s twice as much for signee, and so she exhales every ounce of fog from her system, seals her lips and conjures a more enjoyable vision.

  Per usual, she imagines a dragonfly from the perspective of a spider, only this time they’re in the stomach of the very swallow that once saved her. Its opaque, veiny lining is bloated to be the size of a bull’s more than a bird’s, an expansive red cavern with a lake of acid in its basin. There, the dragonfly drowns and burns without motion. Gases rise from its carcass to the spider, high above, on the ceiling. She ignores for a time the distractions carried in the gas – the glimpse of trees through a windshield… the ill-fated feeling of driving under the influence. Having endured enough motion sickness in the struggle to get Ruby to his room, she’d rather give her full attention to the gorgeous lacing in the web she is weaving. A large, ornate chandelier acts as inspiration for her threads. The fixture hangs from the top of the swallow’s stomach, burning so brightly it illuminates its entirety.

  But beyond her mind’s construct of a stomach bathed in light and without the scenes of Ruby’s dreams that lurk in the gas she breathes, signee’s eyes soon wander back to reality in room 93. The chandelier she so admired is nothing but its candle, and the gorgeous web she wove in its image, its beauty lives on in her song. Assured are her notes as she basks in that tiny candle’s light, for despite 93’s uncountable toll of wretched guests, its flame and its warmth still manage to cling to life. And with another generous sip from the dense, milky fog right atop Ruby, she names the flame “Sari”…

  __________

  … after the kid who died a little more with each bump in the road. Not far ahead, Ruby’s high beams illuminated a break in the trees, and beyond, a trail for which he had been desperately searching. They’d only ever hiked this last stretch through the woods, always leaving the car hidden under a fallen tree that blocked the route connecting the forest’s main highway to the path they were after. The old sedan’s worn tires and shoddy suspension had seen to it every night prior, and yet somehow, in tonight’s off-road escape, Ruby felt not one of its tires give out. He thanked god, but for just whose sake, he did not know.

  Each time he checked on Sari in the rear-view mirror, he could tell that, even though the blood streaming from his neck was beginning to pool atop the black, leather seats, the kid still drew breath. It’ll be a bitch to clean… if possible at all, Ruby thought, shaking his head in shame of the sentiment as a curse from Markus pulled his eyes back to the road.

  Just barely, he managed to swerve past the trunk of a fir before shoving the pack of cigarettes he crushed earlier towards the fiend. “Find me one worth smoking,” he said, glaring at him out of the corner of his eye. Markus was in the middle of cooking a bowl of crystal, his brow furrowed by the sound of Ruby’s voice. But still, he took the pack as soon as he was finished and began to dig through its broken filters and loose tobacco.

  “Good enough,” the fiend muttered to an only slightly torn cigarette when their car finally broke from the densely wooded incline. It spent half a second in the air about a foot off the ground before crashing on a flat and familiar dirt road. In the impact, the cry that left Sari was wet and horrific, Ruby cracked a molar and Markus lost sight of the one decent cigarette he had only just found. At least, after the dust cleared, there was no sign of a ranger and no tracks in the dirt but old footprints left behind by the three in the car.

  Before it was cut off by a large, fallen fir, this road provided vehicle access to a campground about a mile up the way. No one ever bothered to clear the fallen tree because no one in their right mind had camped there in years. The forest’s surge of violent crime cursed it to abandonment, and so Ruby figured it would be the best place to hide out from the law.

  A strange rattle followed his car when he continued up the road, gravel crunching beneath his wheels, the winds raging through the tops of trees. Inside, the scent of heavy iron, flowing from the back seat to the front, had melded with crystal fumes and an old carpet soaked in rum. “Think I’ll be smoking anytime soon?” Ruby asked of Markus, frustrated and nauseous as he prodded his throbbing molar with his tongue.

  “Shut the hell up,” the fiend responded, his voice muffled and his body hunched. He had just hit his head against the glovebox, mid-search of the cigarette he lost. “Were you a better driver, you’d have more to smoke,” he said, emerging from his filthy floor mat with the treasure. The cig, once merely torn, had snapped in half when it was dropped, and Markus, collecting a small blowtorch, put it to his own lips to get it lit. But the same second, it was gone, Ruby’s right arm a blur as he lunged to steal it, his driving a bit less shaky after finishing it in a couple of hits.

  Not far ahead was their usual spot – an old park bench on the side of the road. The wooden planks of its seat were warped and splintered, and its curled, iron legs were brown with rust. Beside it stood a lamp post whose chipping, black finish revealed iron even older than that of the bench. Its lantern caged an orange, incandescent bulb that, with only a slight, irregular flicker, broke through the night with brutality. The reach of its warmth and light was harsh, almost horrific amidst the organic darkness of the forest, and even though Ruby had once searched it from top to bottom, he had never figured out what fed the lamp electricity.

  “You passed it, retard. Turn around,” demanded Markus, scowling as he watched the orange glow in his mirror.

  “Just a bit further… can’t stop ‘til the camp,” Ruby argued, his right hand on the wheel while his left sifted through a grey, hard-shelled backpack wedged between his calf and the door. From it, he pulled another pack of cigarettes. There was only one left – the one he had flipped upside-down when he first bought the pack – and handing it to Markus so that the fiend might get it lit, Ruby continued, “the lamp would give us up and not think twice about it – ‘they’re right here, officer, hiding in the only spot that isn’t damn near pitch black.’ If you suddenly *want* to get caught, then fine… all the better. But you’re gonna tell me what you know about Em-” his dead, gray eyes were tortured and desperate, “you’re gonna tell me what it is I should know, first.”

  Markus shook his head, took the lucky cigarette to the blowtorch and shoved it back towards Ruby. “There wouldn’t *be* a reason to hide if we’d just gone there in the first place.” He glanced at the bloody heap in the back just long enough for his face to contort with disgust. “You freaked the kid out, parking where you-”

  “I fucking realize, Markus.”

  The last half mile was driven in silence, Ruby sucking down smoke without restraint while Markus pretended to find interest in the passing firs. Neither could stomach another look at Sari, but they could tell by his… noises, that the devil had yet to take him.

  It felt like an hour passed them by though it was really under a minute before Ruby parked his car along the edge of the camp. Circular in shape, the clearing was like a window to the sky, wind rushing in rapids over its hundred-foot-wide opening in the canopy while barely a whisper of a breeze could reach the base of its trees. Small, fallen branches, thick tufts of grass and oversized weeds littered its expanse. They only refused to grow atop five plots of compact dirt which circled the perimeter at equidistant intervals. And now, all that once grew within the camp was dry, brown and dead as if the surrounding wall of firs had stolen every drop of life the soil had left.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Killing the lights, Ruby stepped into the night’s freezing air, slammed the door shut and stretched off the drive. Please let him live… please God, don’t take him. Please don’t you fucking take him, he repeated to himself, adrenaline staving off the cold as he wrapped around the car, and wavering while he pulled the rear-right door open, he watched Sari’s eyes roll back to greet him.

  “Get out, and help me carry him,” he demanded of Markus, his tone initially blunt, methodical, almost calm. But the man didn’t move an inch, and so Ruby growled, “I am not fucking kidding dude,” slapping the fiend’s headrest with the back of his hand. “Get the hell out of my car, and help me lift Sari.”

  “What’s the fucking point-you got a shovel?” Markus contested, still refusing to turn even the slightest bit towards him.

  Ruby snarled like a dog, clenching his right fist. “I won’t need a damn shovel.”

  “Then what?” asked Markus, “you’ll dump the body out in the open? For the first depraved freak who wanders through to have his way with? Where a search party would find it within the first hour?”

  “You really think I’d just leave him to bleed out in the cold?”

  “I know you would.” Markus finally twisted between the two front seats to meet Ruby eye to eye, his hand held out in front of him to block the sight of Sari. “But this isn’t like it was with the brother. You can’t just dump him wherever you please. They saw your *god damn* car, Ruby. Better to keep the body for now and figure out where it’s going later.”

  His face flushed with rage, Ruby wanted to break the fiend’s nose. He told him, “*you don’t* understand what happened then and *you don’t* understand what’s happening now,” but the same moment he cocked his right arm to strike Markus, he noticed Sari’s head fall limply on its side. Immediately, he abandoned his aggression, tucked his cigarette between his lips, and then, alone, dragged Sari off the bloody, leather seats.

  Lifting him behind the knees and around the top of his torso, Ruby carried the kid about two meters from the car and gently laid him down on a flat plot of dirt – one of five individual campsites that circled the forest clearing. Before kneeling beside his friend, he removed his own shirt, pulled a boxcutter from his pocket and cut off one of the sleeves. With the bulk, he made a pillow and placed it beneath Sari’s head. With the rest, he applied pressure to the gash in the kid’s neck. His pulse was slow, almost nonexistent, yet his eyes still carried life. It just seemed like they were distant, staring through a different reality than Ruby. Terrified. In pain. But not at all alone.

  His gaze darted back and forth between mere shadows and open air while his blood on Ruby’s hand made the night grow much colder, adrenaline and alcohol losing their warmth within his veins. The bleeding had slowed considerably from the passage of time alone, as Sari had already lost most the blood that could be bled. It slowed even more under the pressure of Ruby’s hand, but it was far from what he needed to keep his friend breathing. Even if it turned out that there was nothing that could be done, this time… at least once, he needed to believe there was.

  Looking back towards his car, he took a deep breath of smoke, then turned towards Sari once more, and, picking up the kid’s left hand, pressed it against the cloth stemming the blood. “Hold it there for me… tight as you can,” Ruby told him as he began to stand up, but the only thing Sari grabbed hold of was the chain-smoker’s wrist. “Please don’t do me anymore favors,” he managed in a drowning whisper, yet his eyes begged for Ruby to stay by his side.

  It killed the man within. He had seen that look before, and dropping back down to his knees, he continued to cradle the wound. “MARKUS,” he shouted over his left shoulder, meeting the fiend eye to eye through the passenger-side window. “Will you please just…” he started before Markus turned away, slightly shook his head and raised a pipe to his mouth. “Will you please just help me fix this?!”

  But the fiend just tuned him out, and, tucking his cigarette between his lips, Ruby searched the dirt beneath him for a stone with some decent weight. He shot it towards the car and shattered the outer mirror, Markus’s face startled in the fragmented reflection. “I need you to grab my black duffel from the trunk,” Ruby demanded after his cigarette returned to his right hand. “Please Markus, that’s all I’ll ask. I just… I can’t leave his side.”

  To the surprise of even the wind rushing high above the forest, Markus stepped out of the car not five breaths later, stumbling through knots of dead brush to reach the trunk. The fiend pried it open as a gale dove into the clearing, slammed it back down and stole the cigarette from Ruby’s hand. He watched it drift into the night while shards of the shattered mirror peppered his back, its orange end like a firefly dying in the darkness. It was gone. It was the last one, and it was gone. The feeling was far worse than sharp silver in his skin. A lost, unlucky, backwards cigarette.

  The air was still a moment later, a haze of dust and dead leaves, the blood streaming from Ruby’s wounds thickened to a crawl by gray debris. He was quick to renew its flow, his left hand on Sari’s neck while his right dug out the glass buried in his own back. The pain couldn’t reach him, thoughts of nothing but the quarter of a cigarette he lost as he pulled out the last shard without so much as a wince. And then he heard Markus, rummaging through his trunk. It brought him peace, however faint. The pain did surge in, but in that moment, he felt like he wouldn’t have to save Sari alone.

  Markus, however, went straight for a cooler. The hunk he pulled out was wrapped in tin foil. When he tore it open, its smell hit him and his nose didn’t agree, his face sour and confused as the hunk hit the floor. The next thing he grabbed was a fresh bottle of rum, breaking the seal and taking a swig that he had to swallow twice.

  Ruby watched on with contempt, unable to find the right curse or threat, his muscles beginning to tighten around Sari’s neck. He was blind at first, to everything but the fiend’s pillaging. He didn’t realize how much control his rage had stolen, how his left hand squeezed out the very blood he meant to save. A sharpness struck his chest when he did, yet as he loosened his grip and turned back towards the kid, his body froze in place halfway. It wasn’t Sari Ruby saw in the corner of his eye, but something inhuman, wrapped around him, staring back with a smile. Its gray flesh and snaking spine were all too familiar – the selfsame demon he had seen before Sari lost his mind. Please don’t let it take him, bounced between the walls of Ruby’s skull as he pulled away from the demon and stepped towards his car.

  “One thing, Markus,” Ruby shouted with disappointment, repeatedly clenching, unclenching and clenching his fists again so that his nails, blackened with Sari’s and his own blood, dug into his palms.

  Markus flinched at his voice as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone.

  “I asked you for one fucking thing, and instead you…” he looked at the foil the fiend tossed on the ground. It was the other half of a sandwich he’d eaten for lunch, a sandwich he liked so much he hid it in his cooler and locked it in his trunk so his roommates couldn’t touch it. “Instead, you chose to feed my dinner to the weeds?!”

  “I wasn’t hungry,” Markus blurted, his eyes on the defense, accusing Ruby of being crazy for suggesting he should eat it. Maintaining eye-contact, he brought the bottle of rum to his lips and spilled it down his jacket as he took his drink.

  The shirtless, blood-painted chain-smoker was stumped, shivering with a demented look on his face. Three times, he tried to speak but nothing came out before he finally asked Markus, “are you stupid?!” And grabbing the bottle from his hand, he pushed the fiend to the ground, leaving a red print on the front of his jacket.

  “Your duffel, I know,” Markus started, a sudden sobriety in his voice, his eyes void of anger as he looked up at his friend. “But Ruby, nothing in there will… there’s nothing you can do to-” another force of wind dove into the clearing to cut him off.

  It was so strong it knocked Ruby off balance and brought him to a knee at eye-level with Markus. It was a tall task to save Sari… easier to write him off as dead. Convince himself later there was nothing he could’ve done. Numb it. It wasn’t as though he killed him, after all. He did it to himself. Did it to himself. Did it… himself. Ruby knew the fiend’s approach made more sense – that anything but avoidance meant pouring effort and meaning into a task that was doomed from the start. He knew as well that his assault on the fiend was misguided. Provoked but lacking control or perspective. He knew it could kill his chance to learn whatever Markus knew about Emb, and that by conceding to him now, he might reverse the damage dealt. Above all else, he needed to know *why* Emb did was she did, or at least, he thought he did until he found himself trading the rum for his duffel.

  When he turned towards Sari with the bag in his hand, the edges of his vision burned orange. This time, the gale had not just come and gone, leaving the camp’s air still while the sky raged on. Instead, it persisted as a dry, violent wind – as a fire bleeding into the clearing from Ruby’s lost cigarette. Embers, leaves and dust danced around him as he rushed to Sari’s side and tore open his bag.

  The gray devil wrapped around him had vanished from Ruby’s mind, invisible to the eye, imperceptible to touch, just a memory of dread left behind. It almost felt like a warning that somewhere deep inside Sari was a foreign and vindictive energy lying dormant. Any second, Ruby feared he might spring to life and attack as he carefully peeled away the cloth stemming the gash in Sari’s neck. Then, pulling a large roll of gauze from his duffel, he stuffed the wound tight… only the wound he was stuffing was no longer gushing. A trickle remained which he sealed off with tape, but the kid’s body had already gone cold. Sari was no longer breathing. His heart was no longer beating. Ruby steeled himself to resuscitate the kid, but there was something wrapped around him in the way.

  *It* was back, and with it, all the pain Ruby’s body had been hiding. A cracked molar alerted every nerve in his jaw while coarse blades of the wind stung his shredded back. Eyes crazed, unblinking and burning in the fire’s radiance, his face feigned to stare down the demon, yet inside, he slipped into an abyss void of light. “YOU CAN’T TAKE HIM,” he roared, drawing a boxcutter from his pocket and gripping it for dear life like it were the edge of a cliff.

  Blindly, he swung forward and felt the blade tear through devils’ flesh. The feeling pulled him back from the void, repainting each detail in the devil’s face. Only, this time, something was different. Maybe it had always been that way. He recognized those features… those eyes.

  Behind a mask of decay and a fresh gash from ear to ear, the devil was no devil, but Sari’s dead brother, Ray. The lower half of his body looked like a rotten boa wrapping Sari, gray fleshed legs with bones like jelly that tore in a hundred different places as they flexed. Conversely, his spine was locked straight from neck to waste, creating a ninety-degree angle perpendicular to Sari’s chest. His shoulders were square with Ruby’s, and extending a crooked arm, Ray whispered, “watch,” in ten voices at once before he grazed the man’s forehead with a single finger. Upon contact, Ruby saw himself in third person, his body left behind, his soul dragged to the tops of the trees, shown the forest floor from high above – just a ghostly spec, locked in the sky, staring down the hole in the firs.

  The spark of his lost cigarette had grown into a sea of fire, devouring everything in the clearing but the outline of a star. He focused first on its dark, uniform lines, not just unlit but carved into the inferno with liquid shadow to connect all five patches of barren dirt circling the clearing. Years ago, these patches served as camps where families gathered and children played. Tonight, they were the points of a pentagram nearly a hundred feet in length.

  On the left foot of the star, closest to the car and the clearing’s entrance, Ruby saw his own body kneeling before Sari’s. It looked stiff, clutching the boxcutter yet absent and wide open had the thing wearing Ray’s face still been anywhere nearby. Instead, the devil was crawling towards the right foot of the star – a black slug amongst the flames, withering away without a care. Adjacent to its destination at a distance of twenty meters, a newborn baby squirmed in the pentagram’s right hand. It was caked, head to toe, in afterbirth and dust, and its wailing carried across the flames to a young woman upon the star’s left hand. She stared back with pure disgust while the wind whipped through her hair, black strands turned maroon in the savage fire’s glare.

  The only ancient camp still missing a guest was at the very tip of the pentagram’s head, and from it escaped a sour frequency that grabbed hold of Ruby’s soul. Even from the sky, he could feel its infrasound melodies scream of a predatory world’s invitation, and his soul – a dread-shocked bag of shadow – began to plummet through the hole in the firs. Passing a million branches in just half a second to join Sari, Ray, the young woman and the baby, he was the fifth and final offering to the clearing-wide pentagram, mere inches away from its head.

  And then something grabbed his shoulder. Ruby was back in his body on the forest floor, gasping like he’d just clawed his way out the depths of an ocean. His head rocking back and forth, not a single thought inside, he swung his boxcutter behind him, stabbing the demon that grabbed him in the thigh. It yelped, but before he could carve the blade further down its leg, a blunt force cracked against the back of his skull.

  Everything went black, and when he woke, he was being dragged – a shirtless, dazed, blood-stained arsonist still gripping his weapon like it were grafted to his hand while kindling for the growing fire scraped beneath his pants. In his wake was the rum Markus had stolen from his cooler, the rum he could’ve sworn he put back when he grabbed his duffel. The glass bottle, nearly full, captured the inferno’s dance within, shimmering right in front of Sari’s corpse.

  “He can’t be left behind. He’ll burn. He’ll burn alive. He’ll burn to death… with his brother,” Ruby pleaded to his captor, his voice quiet and hoarse. And though he tried to swing his rusty blade once more, his muscles refused to accept the command.

  It was Markus who answered, “you’re lost.” He wore a cold, emotionless expression as he sat his friend against the mat-black sedan, blood marring his right thigh and spreading more with every movement. The fire, whose absorbed light painted the stain on his jeans black, was starting to climb the firs surrounding the clearing, and sounds of cracking wood haunted the dry, frigid air.

  “I… I thought,” Ruby started, trembling. His gaze darted briefly to the red of his blade and then to the hole he punctured in Markus. “I thought you were-”

  “Just save it, Ruby. You tried. I don’t understand how you thought you could fix this or at exactly what point you lost your damn mind, but this time… you seriously fucking tried. I saw it, Ruby, I *see* you.” After swinging open the passenger-side door, Markus squatted in front of Ruby and pried the boxcutter from his grasp. Throwing the nasty, old thing in the car, he stood up and offered its owner a hand. “But now, it’s time to go.”

  “Then we’ll leave,” agreed Ruby, though the only move he made was to fix his eyes back on Sari and the bottle of rum lying before him. “I think we’ve spent long enough… waiting out the ranger. There’s nothing else I can do. I… tried, but he needs a doctor.”

  “Oh, come the fuck on! He’s dead!” Markus roared, his cold composure shattered to confusion and frustration. “He was dead the moment he stuck that glass in his neck. You’re just so fuckin’ deluded you thought he had a chance. You thought *you* would bring him back with whatever piss-poor, ringside first aid you could remember? Wake the hell up, Ruby. We’re done here. He’s gone and the fire’ll take care of the evidence.”

  “HE COULD STILL-” the arsonist was interrupted by bursting glass – the bottle before Sari succumbing to the fire’s heat and soaking the patch of dirt beneath it in rum. At once, flames jumped from the brush to the liquor, then to Sari’s clothes and black duffel at his side. “MARKUS, HE’S STILL-” Ruby jolted forward, but only about an inch. He’s… Sari is… he’s already dead. He had to be. Right then and there, in the same breath the kid’s body was consumed by the inferno, Ruby forced himself to believe that Markus was right. He had to be, even if he wasn’t. He had to be, because Ruby couldn’t stomach the alternative. He had to be… Sari was dead.

  And Markus couldn’t bear to meet the pain in Ruby’s eyes. He was shaking, that demented chain-smoker, watching his friend turn to ash, the kid’s roasting meat molesting his nose, the sea of fire quickly closing in on himself. “He’s not even there to feel it, you moron. He was gone already, before it reached him.” The words rolled off the fiend’s tongue with the slightest shred of doubt that if Ruby had noticed, he chose to ignore, offering little resistance as Markus helped him into the car.

  Yet inside, Ruby was still just a few meters from Sari, the kid’s melting corpse unrelenting in his mind. Did it have meaning? His effort? His Intention? Did it make him more than a failure with another death on his hands? More than a killer with no one to blame but himself? It wasn’t just Sari he left behind, burning on the left foot of that pentagram, but Ray on its right… the woman and the baby in its hands. Apparitions of the dead assigning guilt for their deaths, the younger brother, Emb and their… their…

  … something clicked. A silver lining. Critical information his brain was hiding. A consolation prize that mattered more to him than Sari. “I think you owe me something, Markus,” airily spilled out of Ruby’s mouth, and suddenly, he was strapped into the passenger seat of his sedan, having a hard time getting his breathing under control. In the rearview mirror, with a couple hundred feet of road and increasing now between them, he saw hell fire spewing from the clearing’s entrance like a massive, orange eye peering into the pitch-black tunnel of firs.

  Markus, who was driving, stared daggers at the fool. “Isn’t that backwards?! You fuckin’ stabbed me, you psycho. And… aren’t *you* supposed to be our designated driver?”

  “About *Emb*, Markus.” Ruby’s breathing was only getting worse. He was trying to find a smoke, but there were none left he hadn’t crushed into a clump of broken filters and loose tobacco. “Why… did she do it? You said you knew… said you’d tell me. That was the deal, if I got us away from the ranger. You gave me your word, Markus, you said you’d tell me why.”

  The fiend’s eyes twitched and his face went pale. There was a shakiness to his driving that wasn’t there before. “I KNOW. I know what I said. Just… fuck off… for a second.” Squinting, he saw the orange eye grow in the rearview mirror even though, thus far, he’d been doing nothing but building distance. Now, about to pass the bench and the lamp they’d seen on their way in, the fire no longer seemed to be getting farther away. To beat their pace, a gale force must have been cascading into the clearing and then shooting through the largest opening in the firs it could find.

  “It was a lie, then?” barked Ruby. “Sari’s life for your future… for what you know about Emb that you never bothered to tell me?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you… about that. I just don’t think-”

  “THEN SPIT IT THE FUCK OUT. *Why* would *Emb* kill herself?!”

  “YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW… ALRIGHT? Not right now, at least.” Markus looked at him as if he wished he could cry on his behalf. “It wouldn’t end well, Ruby. You’re not in your right mind.”

  Maybe he was right, but with the flames just inches behind them, the heat now palpable within their metal coffin, Ruby couldn’t think of anything more wrong. All for nothing. I gave everything. But Emb, I… He gasped for breath after breath that didn’t quite reach his lungs, and blotches of hazy black began to populate his vision. The spaces left between, like shrinking pieces of reality, were painted orange by the sea of fire washing over the windshield. Ember… I’ll see you soon… just maybe…

  But with a loud, cracking roar that reduced his hearing to noxious ringing, the light of the fire vanished from the forest. It was as if somewhere nearby, the earth had opened its jaws and swallowed, leaving not a single ember or remnant of smoke in the air. And whatever it was must have grabbed hold of him too, killing his vision altogether in a painless moment of unpleasant moisture…

  __________

  … that ends only with the boom of doors slammed shut and an addict atop the floor of a hotel lobby, centuries due for a thorough mopping.

  Descend with Me. I hope you've enjoyed the journey thus far, but you're now caught up with my finalized material. Every chapter, as well as original artwork depicting various scenes from the story, is also available for free on my Patreon.