VARIABLES

  “Four’s really not enough?”

  Agent Tabitha Hale looked up from her coffee at her partner, Agent Issac Harris, sitting across the table from her. She lifted an eyebrow as her eyes dropped to the can of sardines sitting in front of him. “You sure you want to get into each other’s dining habits, again?” Her eyes rose to meet his. He looked equally tired of and pleased by her reaction. “You remember what happened last time? You cried.”

  “Oh, come on,” he protested, rolling his eyes at the slight. “I didn’t cry!”

  Tabitha laughed at him. “I remember a tearful tribute to your dead father and his obsession with tins of putrid fish.”

  “You remember shit,” he laughed. “He ate them every single day of his life.”

  “And now, you do, too,” she told him, as she began looking for the waitress. “To my great dismay.” When her eyes landed on Missy, the otherwise empty diner’s lone server, she called her over with a smile and raised hand. Then she returned to glaring at Agent Harris. “And to answer your question, no, four is not enough. Always five.”

  “Raw or not, that’s a lot of sugar.”

  Tabitha knew he was right. And while she could not admit it to him, she admitted it to herself each time she took a sip of her five-sugar black coffee. She had grown to hate the taste of the childhood ritual. But that is what it was: a ritual. It was something she would have trouble explaining to anyone, much less an old man. Agent Harris was older than her, by at least twenty years, she figured, if graying hair and wrinkles were anything to go by. For her, that meant he was well practiced at turning every difference between them into a matter of generations. Gen Z, Gen X, Millennial, she was from whatever generation crossed his mind first, whenever it came up. The truth of it was, at twenty-eight years old, she was neither young or old enough to care. Everyone’s gotta cope somehow, she reminded herself.

  “You know I’ve gotta have my constant,” she told him. “Black with five sugars. How else am I supposed to stay alert enough to watch your back all night?”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works,” Agent Harris told her, shaking his head at her with a chuckle.

  “Not how what works?”

  Before he could respond, Missy reached their table. She was taller than even Tabitha, towering over them in their booth with a tired kind of beauty and gentle eyes. Her face spoke to a charmed life, before late nights and odd hours spent tending to the diner had stolen her shine. Still, her tableside smile radiated a pleasant warmth.

  “Everything good, y’all? How can I help?”

  “Can you find me one more?” Tabitha pointed to the torn packets placed neatly beside her cup. She tried to mirror Missy’s expression. “Sugar in the Raw, if you could.”

  With a sigh, all of the mustered pep drained out of the waitress, and was replaced by disappointment. “Oh, shoot, hon. Someone was just asking about that stuff earlier,” she told Tabitha. “That right there’s all we got. I already checked the back and everything.”

  Tabitha gritted her teeth, looking around the diner for any sign of hope. “What about the other tables?”

  “Of course, she checked the other tables,” Agent Harris said, chuckling at her. He turned to Missy, with a charmer’s smile. “Bet you checked those first, didn’t ya, hon?”

  “Yep, I most certainly did, but you’re welcome to give it another…,” the sour look creeping across Tabitha’s face made her think better of her suggestion, “…or I can give it another look-see, if you’d like, but I don’t—”

  “If you could,” Tabitha interrupted, “I’d really appreciate it.”

  Missy gave the four empty packets a hard look, before confusion gave way to a patient smile. “Course, hon,” she told her, as she walked away. “Gimme one sec.”

  Agent Harris shook his head in disbelief. “Like I was saying, I don’t think it works like that.”

  A moment passed in silence, while he waited for a reply.

  Tabitha only glared at him.

  “Your constant looks an awful lot like a variable, I mean.” Agent Harris shifted awkwardly in his seat, before continuing. “And it’s not the sugar that’s going to keep you awake to ‘watch my back.’ That’s just something you millennials made up to justify dumping a bunch of sugar in your coffee.”

  Tabitha rolled her eyes at him. “It’s a constant for me. I need it.”

  “Your need for control’s the constant, but the sugar’s a variable,” he paused to point at his tin of sardines, “unless you bring your own.”

  “Shut up, Harris.”

  ~~~

  “I’m just saying,” Agent Harris said, on the walk back to their car. “You didn’t have to yell at her.”

  Tabitha scoffed, and pulled her pea coat closed by the pockets, in a futile attempt to keep the accusation and cold off her. “I didn’t yell at her,” she said, “I yelled near her.”

  “You were looking right at her,” he rebutted. A chuckle softened the accusation. “And all because of your sweet tooth.”

  “Not a sweet tooth.”

  “Whatever you wanna call it, you definitely yelled at her.”

  At the car, the agents took their usual positions, with Agent Harris on the driver’s side, and Tabitha riding shotgun. It was a standard issue black Crown Vic assigned to all Blackwell field agents. The kind that came with no electronic key fob, and required you to unlock it manually on one side in order to press the button on the inside of the door to open the others. It was painfully slow, especially for someone who was painfully cold and woefully impatient. Tabitha clicked her tongue, while she watched Agent Harris fumble with the keys.

  “Looks like a new tip came in,” he said, nodding at the blinking red light on the car’s dashboard.

  It was an ominous indicator, and an effective one at that. There was no way to know exactly what it would be, until she checked the bulletin board, but the job was always dangerous. With each lead, the level of peril varied. And even with the scale in place – 1 being the worst, completely out of their league and better left to a Security & Containment Team(SecCon), and 5 being something akin to town gossip about a ghost – it was always a crapshoot. No matter what, the light was always red.

  ~~~

  On the road, Tabitha sat with the old car’s contrasting state-of-the-art computer system in her lap. Both the monitor and keyboard were on individual arms, stretching out from the center console. She had pulled them both as close to her as possible, so she could carefully read the file displayed on it, over and over, as she scrolled from top to bottom.

  The Blackwell Bulletin Board gave all field agents in a given area access to active leads in need of investigation. Whether they be private phone calls, emails, news segments, or a stray rumor, the system used a laundry list of keywords to parse all obtainable information for signs of variant activity. The more urgent the lead, the more likely it was to be assigned automatically to the nearest appropriate agents. That was how Variant Case 924, or VC-924, happened across Agent Hale and Agent Harris’s mobile desk. They just so happened to be an hour from Hume, Virginia, where a supposed cult had setup shop.

  “I don’t like this,” Tabitha said under her breath. On the one night I don’t have five sugars.

  “Come on,” Agent Harris returned. “It’s just a cult, right? Or maybe just a group of weirdos up to weird shit? Not that there’s a difference. Nothing we haven’t dealt with before.”

  “A cult they’ve given us practically no information on.” She pointed at the screen, running her finger along it, as she read it aloud. “Hazard Level 3… unknown, unattributed, but presumed, cult activity…reports of disappearances, animal mutilation, grave robbing, rampant patricide in a twenty mile radius…partially substantiated rumors of mind control, spontaneous delirium, and quote ‘people flying through the sky at night.’ It’s all over the place.” A quick breath, then a sigh, before she continued, her voice thick with frustration. “There’s no telling which of them it is. We could be walking right into a Church of Hema ritual, or worse, Sanctus Sanguis. Imagine that nightmare.”

  “Or it could be the Ascension Institute, again, with the whole flying thing. That was fun,” he told her. “But hey, it’s a Level 3. That means we get to break out the FIVs. That’s fun, huh?”

  “Fun?” Tabitha’s face contorted in bewilderment. “Was what happened in Penance fun? That was Level 3, when we went in. And what’d it actually end up being?” She gave him the briefest moment to answer, before doing it for him. “Level 1! One! We should have never been there.”

  “SecCon had a field day, though, on the clean up, didn’t they?” He tried laughing off her furrowed brow.

  Rolling her eyes, Tabitha let out a hard sigh. “And I even had my coffee that night. With five sugars.”

  “Oh god! You shoulda just had your coffee then,” he groaned. “That’s on you.”

  VC-924… four… not five, she ruminated. Why tonight of all nights?

  ~~~

  Off of Route 66, and down a two lane road, cutting through dark, hilly farmland, the agents found themselves in the small town of Hume. It was mostly cattle farms, barns on the edge of grazing land, and aging homes placed sparsely across huge swaths of rolling green fields. At its center, a crossroads, with little more than an old tavern and post office to speak about.

  Through the crossroads, then down a back road, they traveled, until eventually, two lanes gave way to one, and then asphalt to dirt.

  Agent Harris rolled his window down, and stuck his nose out of it, taking in a long, dramatic breath of the night air. “Smell that? That sweet country smell? Goddamn, it’s good to be out of the city.”

  “It smells like shit,” Tabitha told him, pulling her coat’s collar over her nose.

  “It is,” he told her, smiling. “It’s cow shit!”

  That nearly broke her. She fought back the laughter with her anxiety. Four, not five. It never felt right to laugh so close to danger, but joking was how Agent Harris coped. The differences between them might have been charming, she thought, if not for the fact that it often annoyed her.

  “Close the damn window!”

  “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” he said. “Just gotta let that fresh air in!”

  He took another exaggerated whiff, before he obliged her by rolling the window back up.

  Ahead of them, a mailbox decorated in reflectors glinted on the side of the road. Across from it, a sign was posted next to an opening in the split rail fence running along most of Hume’s property lines. Through the break in the fence a driveway gently rose up into darkness. As they drew closer, the headlights of the car illuminated the sign just enough for it to be read.

  “Cander Ranch?” Agent Harris said, straining to read it in the darkness.

  “Gander Ranch,” Tabitha corrected. “That’s the place. Pull over.”

  And so he did, pulling the car into the driveway, and turning perpendicular to it, blocking others from entering or leaving.

  “You ready?” he asked, as he turned the car off.

  “As ever,” Tabitha told him. Rolling her eyes at his obnoxious smile, she popped the door open, exited, and shut the door in quick succession.

  A moment later, Agent Harris met her at the back of the car, key in hand.

  “Exciting,” he told her as Tabitha produced her own key.

  “Shut up, Harris.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Agent Harris chuckled, sliding his key into the trunk’s lock in an overly eager manner. When he turned it, a panel popped open beneath it, revealing a second lock. He stepped aside, bowing to present it to Tabitha, like a butler might present a banquet. “Madam.”

  She groaned, and unenthusiastically slid the key in, before turning it twice. After the second turn, there was the hiss and click of hydraulic locks releasing, followed by the trunk opening.

  Inside the trunk of most Blackwell Foundation field vehicles, as mandated by the Standards & Ethics Council, you will find what are known as Foundation Issued Variants(FIVs). A variant, or Variance Irradiated Object(VIO), is any object presenting with abnormal properties gained through direct contact with variant radiation. These anomalous traits can range from benign to beneficial to all levels of dangerous. Imagine a light bulb which emits light that slowly erases anything it illuminates from existence, or an ancient sword that turns anyone that holds it into a bloodthirsty warrior. It is because of the often random, and rather precarious nature of a field agent’s job investigating reports of these objects, that VIOs designated beneficial to their user had been cleared for use in the field. And even then, only on leads with a hazard rank of Level 3 or higher.

  Agent Harris leaned into the trunk, and opened the briefcase within. Inside of it, two objects sat, waiting for their assigned agents.

  For him, it was a gold antique flip-top lighter, VIO-893, or the Ciga-Redux. A prototype design made by Luciano’s Manufacturing Company, engraved with Quitters Never Quit, which had come in handy more times than either cared to admit over the few years they had worked together. With it, came a regular, everyday ashtray to be used in tandem with the lighter.

  For Tabitha, it was VIO-071, also known as Kirk’s Sublime Ring. It was a ring made of iridescent crystal. Said to once belong to Gaelic folklorist Robert Kirk, given to him by the Pixie Queen Nicnevin, before he was stolen away to join her court. The ring and the finger it belonged to were found in the grass on Doon Hill, hundreds of years before it found its way into Blackwell’s collection. As Tabitha slid it on the middle finger of her left hand, it thrummed with magic, filling her mind with the ethereal hum of a vague but familiar tune.

  The bliss of donned power brought with it renewed confidence. It was quickly tempered by the ever-present thought that, perhaps, after that night, someone else would find the ring, and only her finger with it, atop the hill she was about to climb. Not five, but four, she reminded herself.

  Before they ascended the driveway, Agent Harris produced a pack of cigarettes issued alongside the variant lighter. He placed one in his mouth, then handed the other to Tabitha. They were specially made in house to burn as long as possible, using any method Blackwell researchers could find to prolong burning without altering them beyond the definition of a cigarette. Lasting upwards of twenty minutes, even in a torrential downpour, Tabitha thought they tasted like burnt rubber and ass, and was certain she would never pick up smoking because of them.

  Agent Harris flipped open the lighter, and lit each of their cigarettes himself. First his, then Tabitha’s. They both made sure to take a drag, Tabitha forcing herself to take five.

  Better than one or four, she thought, trying to calm herself.

  Agent Harris slammed the trunk shut, bringing Tabitha back to the moment. He sat the ashtray down on the back of the car, and they both left their cigarettes in it.

  “Fifteen minute timer,” he said, as he fidgeted with the watch on his wrist. Then he smiled at her. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “And what do you say, before you use that thing?” Tabitha asked, nodding at the lighter, as Agent Harris put it in his pocket. “Shout, I mean. I don’t want a repeat of Matinicus.”

  “Bologna.”

  She sighed. “Not a time for jokes, Harris.”

  “Haven. I say, ‘haven,’ before using it. Jesus, Hale.”

  “Shout it.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her off.

  The two set off on foot up the dirt path, service weapons drawn. There was enough light coming from the waning moon to navigate without the attached flashlights. Once her eyes adjusted to the midnight darkness, Tabitha could see just past the treeline entwined fence on either side of them. There, contrasting with the grass, she saw black mounds scattered throughout the fields. The further up the driveway they went, the more silhouettes she saw littering the pasture. Whatever they were, they laid there, silent and still, and unknown to her.

  Then a breeze cut across them, and the smell hit.

  It was not the permanent, musty fragrance of cattle that permeated the area. Not the kind you might grow used to after enough time spent living in it. This was the type of smell that you cannot help but react to, as some primitive piece of you, past even the monkey part of your brain, is set on full, screaming alert. It was the sickly-sweet smell of death on top of the metallic sting of blood, all ammonia and methane and iron. The kind of thing that does not just simply cling to your nose and throat to suffocate you, but sticks in your mind and claws at your psyche to disturb and addle.

  In the same moment it struck, Tabitha was retching.

  “Oh g—,” she gagged into her hand.

  “Holy shit,” Agent Harris coughed, automatically pulling his coat over his face when it caught him. His head was suddenly on a swivel, and his voice fell to a harsh whisper. “Where is it coming from? Ring picking anything up?”

  If the ring she wore began taking on more than ambient variant radiation, Tabitha would know from the sound it made as the crystal grew; the feel of it, as it vibrated up her arm. First it was a thrum, then it was a buzz, and then the hum would become a near deafening drone. She often compared it to listening to someone, or fifty someones, run their fingers along crystal wine glasses. But the ring had become nothing more than a faint pulse running from her finger to her head.

  Worried she might vomit if she opened her mouth, Tabitha could not bring herself to respond.

  “Hey! Do you see anything?!”

  There was little to see in so much darkness, but Tabitha knew where to look. Left hand still covering her face, she lifted the gun in her right, and its unlit flashlight, toward the fence. A switch on the side of her modified Glock sent a beam of white light cutting across the field, illuminating the source of the oppressive scent.

  A shallow breath of rancid air caught in Tabitha’s throat.

  “Jesus,” Agent Harris said. He followed suit, and switched his flashlight on, sweeping it across the gruesome scene. “Cows?”

  In the light, each dark mass Tabitha had seen in the field as they passed by became the bloated corpse of the ranch’s herd of cattle. Most looked like black leather balloons, ready to pop. While others had already burst to ooze forth fetid liquids, and fill the air with the choking miasma. They had been left in neat rows, patches and shapes. From her position, it was impossible to tell what the symbols meant. Only someone looking down on the scene would be able to discern the message, but the intention was clear. A ritual?

  “Hematites?” Agent Harris asked through his coat. “Sanguists, maybe? But they don’t—”

  “They don’t sacrifice animals,” she said through watering eyes. “Only people.”

  “Well…”

  Agent Harris had turned to shine his flashlight up the driveway. Not far from where they stood, a body laid, dressed in bloody clothes. “Shit.”

  Tabitha aimed her own light beyond that. As her eyes slid down the path, she found that his discovery was the first in a long trail of bodies lining the fence. Her heart sank, as she counted them, until counting them seemed pointless. Way more than five, she thought.

  One after another, like a trail of grim candy to tempt them, the dead wandered off into the distance toward the suggestion of a house. The one to which all the land and all the horror surrounding them belonged.

  “Should we go back and report it?” Agent Harris asked.

  It was impossible to know what awaited them off in the dim, reaching light, but she knew it was their job to find out. If not them, it would be another pair of agents, likely far less capable than her and Agent Harris. Or worse: more of the town could fall victim to whatever was going on here. None of it sat right with Tabitha, least of all, the way forward. Why tonight of all nights? But she was a Hale. Hers was a different kind of stubbornness and pride, an inherited one. The kind of stubbornness that fed the pride, and the kind of pride that fed the stubbornness. A snake eating its own tail. The ouroboros. It was an image her family had so proudly taken for a crest. For her, it would be easier to live with death than it would be with the shame.

  Agent Harris pulled his coat away from his face to repeat himself. “Hale, should we—”

  “And report what?” she snapped, before continuing through her coat, in a stern but calm tone. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Dead bodies on a farm? Why wouldn’t the locals be able to handle that? Haven’t even ascertained cause of death. No sigils, or marks to report. Which group is it, if any? What exactly would we be reporting? Other than our inability to do our job.”

  As if on cue, another breeze passed, bringing with it fresh air and a new scene. A flicker of their flashlights, and the meandering driveway shrank. Suddenly, the agents were standing in the yard of the three story ranch house they had been slowly approaching.

  All Tabitha could manage was a gasp at the shock of it. She spun around to see an impossibly long road had unfurled itself behind them.

  “What the hell was that?” Agent Harris asked, swinging his gun and light around for bearings. “A spell?”

  Turning her attention back to what was in front of her, Tabitha brought her own flashlight up toward the house. Before that night, it may have been a sight to behold, something built with care and attention, then well-kept with love and affection over time. Surely, it was once well-lit and whole and welcoming, as it stood stalwartly atop the soft hill. But tonight, as she stood before it, there was no warmth to be found within or emanating from the dilapidated home. There was nothing but ruin from the ground up. Rutted, bloody earth at its feet, a cracked foundation, rising to chipping paint, and a warped wrap-around porch, covered in broken glass and jutting rusty nails. The walls were rotted and the windows smashed. Worst of all, the roof had been cleaved open from the inside, leaving shingles and splintered wood strewn about the grounds.

  “Hale!” Agent Harris took a step toward Tabitha. “Hey! Is the ring—”

  “The door,” she said quietly, as she nodded in the direction her gun was pointed.

  In the center of her beam of light, scrawled crudely on the front door of the house, was a symbol both agents were familiar with.

  Five vertical lines, with one long slash through them, and an eye resting just above.

  At first glance, one might confuse it for a poorly drawn cyclopean smiley face, or some other meaningless graffiti. A trained eye knew what it really signified. Five vertical lines for five bodies, with one long cut through each of their throats, and their twisted idea of a god looking on.

  The irony was not lost on Tabitha. There’s your five, she thought to herself, as she stifled an internal laugh. After years of wielding the number, using it as an incantation to stave off creeping, clinging agita, it now threatened to undo her. Somehow, she had wound up on the wrong side of her own ritual. Why tonight?

  “Cullers?” Agent Harris’s voice was a whisper, again. “What the hell are they doing in Virginia?” He began frantically shining his flashlight at every window, then beneath the porch. Twisting around to check behind them, he eyed the driveway. The sight of it twisting off into the dark caused him to start breathing heavily. He reached into his pocket to fish out the golden lighter. “We’ve gotta get out of here, Hale.”

  A chill ran through Tabitha.

  “Wait…,” she said, not meaning it so much for her partner, but herself.

  “Wait?!” Agent Harris asked, dumbfounded. “Wait for what?!”

  Another tremor worked its way up her arm. The low hum that she had become used to, until she had all but forgotten it, was suddenly a thrumming pulse. She turned her hands over, clasped as they were around her gun, to get a better view of the ring.

  Watching the iridescent crystal grow along her finger, the sensation became the sound of alarm bells in Tabitha’s mind.

  The marked door of the house flung open with a crash.

  Beyond its threshold, only darkness could be seen. The light from their flashlights, guns fixed on the maw, was swallowed by the nothingness.

  “You’re too late,” a hollow voice called out from within. It sounded like dozens of people talking in perfect unison. “The party’s already over.”

  They both looked on, frozen, as something even darker than black stepped through the door. It was a figure not unlike a person, but only the suggestion of one. Instead of illuminating it, the light from their guns curved around the shadow, deepening it through contrast.

  “One by one, then two by two, they went,” it said. “They were once many, and then many were one.”

  “Stop!” Agent Harris commanded. He moved to stand between it and Tabitha. “Stay there!”

  But the void paid him no mind. It reached the shattered steps of the porch, and began its descent. “Bred in twos, those finks for feed, lined in five, then left to bleed.”

  “Freeze!” This time, Agent Harris took a step back. “I said fucking freeze!”

  Tabitha struggled to look directly at the being. Staring too long made her head hurt. It was like looking down into a bottomless pit. Her eyes danced around its edges, and each time her vision slipped, it felt like she was falling into it.

  The only thing that kept Tabitha from being utterly lost to the moment was the ring. For as long as it had been issued to her, she had never seen it grow more than a few centimeters in size. Now, in the presence of the shadow, it was spreading like wildfire. Once it was done with her finger, it had begun crawling up her hand, fanning out to other digits. And where it did not grow out, it grew in. The pain of stinging bits of crystal digging and tearing deep into her skin allowed her to center herself.

  Then adrenaline took hold.

  When she heard the clink of Agent Harris’s lighter, Tabitha looked over his shoulder to see it being held out in front of him, next to his gun. His thumb hovered over the flint, and he kept his eyes locked on his target, turning his head just enough to yell over his shoulder.

  “Haven?!” he yelled, hoping for any kind of reply to break Tabitha’s silence. “Kid?! Haven?!”

  “Wait,” she said, watching the void reach the bottom of the stairs, “I have to—”

  Suddenly, their flashlights flickered, and the being was no longer in front of them.

  Both agents spun around, searching the night for its own avatar.

  Tabitha found the shadow first, just off to her side, and closing in.

  “Don’t I know you?” the hollow voice asked her.

  In reply, Tabitha pulled her left hand away from her gun, taking aim at the man-shaped void with her crystallized fist.

  Unlike most variant objects, the effect of VIO-071, Kirk’s Sublime Ring, was twofold. The first effect being the constant, uninterruptible absorption of nearby variant radiation, most commonly in the form of whatever magic it was being used for. A spell is flung at you, and it strikes the ring. As a passive effect, it required little more training than: keep the ring between you and the variant. The more variant radiation absorbed, the more the crystal grew. In order to prevent the crystal from becoming too large, the ring’s secondary effect had to be utilized. This effect allowed the ring to discharge built up variant radiation in whatever form it was absorbed. A spell strikes the ring, and then you fling it back. Fireball goes in, fireball comes out. All the wearer had to do was say the magic word.

  “Release!” Tabitha shouted.

  Only, the ring had not absorbed a spell. It had absorbed the shapeless potential that formed one. There was no telling, through any experience of her own, what would come next. All she knew was that it needed to hurt. Not one, or two, or three, or four, Tabitha thought, but five.

  All at once, with a thunderous crack, the shimmering crystal creeping up her forearm vanished, and out from the ring burst a dazzling, opalescent light, that momentarily turned night into day. Just as the iridescent beam gave way to a rapidly coalescing orb, Tabitha turned to Agent Harris, and screamed at the top of her lungs.

  “Haven!”

  A simple flick of the golden lighter’s flint wheel saw the two agents back at the end of the driveway, standing behind their Crown Vic, with unburnt cigarettes in their mouths. It happened so quickly they could still see the brilliant glow of whatever it was that Tabitha had released from the ring off in the distance.

  Then it vanished.

  From behind them, Tabitha heard a hollow voice.

  “I think you dropped this,” the void said, sending another chill up her spine.

  “Shit!” Agent Harris yelled. “Tabitha! Move!”

  Spinning around on her heels, Tabitha faced down what she thought must be the sun. Blind and dazed, she had just enough sense to raise her left hand against the cascade of light, before it struck.

  Suddenly, every nerve in her arm was screaming as a ruinous wave of resonance ripped through it. Shattering cracks and pops, like a glacier calving, echoed through her mind. And just when she thought, or hoped, she would crumble beneath the agony, Tabitha felt a new pain, in the shape of a needle, pierce her eye. It drove deep into her skull, screaming into her as she cried out.

  Then, as quickly as it had overcome her, the cacophonous light gave way to oblivion.