"Hey, you remember what I said last year, right? We're Zombie Boy and Ghost Boy. I'm not ever gonna leave you."
"Promise?"
"One hundred percent."
***
In which Alistair fights the monster that possessed his friend alongside his friends, while trying...
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Chapter Eighty-Six: When It's Cold I'd Like To Die
(The Piggyback, Pt. 6)
***
Eddie was dying.
Alistair didn't want to believe it, everything inside him screaming in denial, but he could feel the pain of phantom bites in his body, the feeling of his blood slowly draining out—the bites in Eddie's body, the blood leaking out of him, and it was so much worse than any other death Alistair had felt because it was Eddie dying, and it couldn't be, Eddie couldn't be dying even as Alistair felt every slow, agonising second of it, he and Dustin had to move faster, they needed to save Eddie, he needed to save Eddie, Alistair couldn't lose Eddie, he couldn't lose his older brother in all but blood.
He couldn't lose Eddie when he might have lost Max as well.
"Eddie!" Dustin yelled as they half-stumbled, half-ran, to the fallen metalhead. "Eddie!"
It's even worse now that they were here.
There has to be a dozen bites littering Eddie's torso, chunks of flesh ripped out and blood pouring out of him and into the ground, staining the Hellfire Club shirt in a crimson that had Alistair's stomach turn with the memory of his blood-drenched shirt. A bloody bite had been torn from Eddie's cheek, and dark red blood was staining the ground, steadily leaking out of Eddie and there was so much blood, as much as the blood under Alistair at Starcourt, the blood that kept pouring out and out when it wasn't filling his lungs and his throat and staining his chin, and he could hear the gurgle of blood in his ears, and—
No. He couldn't think of his first death. Not when Eddie was bleeding out in front of him. Not when Eddie was dying.
"Oh God! Oh God, Eddie," Dustin cried as he pulled away from Alistair, immediately pulling Eddie into his arms as Alistair rushed to his side, the ashy rot of the Upside Down's soil and Eddie's blood staining his jeans, but he didn't care. It didn't matter when Eddie was dying in front of him and he felt helpless to stop it.
"Bad, huh?" Eddie croaked out, and Alistair could hear the gargle of blood in his voice, could now see the red dribbling out of Eddie's mouth, staining his chin, and Alistair's heart dropped further at seeing it.
"No. You're gonna be fine," Dustin assured, sounding like he was also trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Eddie. That Alistair was trying to believe it when he knew it was a lie, that his powers proved it, and he hated it, he hated that he was watching and feeling Eddie die and he could do nothing to save him, that once again he could do nothing to save someone he cared about.
Maybe... maybe not nothing.
It was a risk—a huge risk—but if he could do it to Hugin, if he had the time, then maybe until the others arrived, until Rowan could cauterise those bites. Maybe...
