Ill Omen's Light (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 6: Waking with the Sun

Jinx snapped awake.

Her eyes darted about the space above her, searching, hunting.

Awake?

But there was only the ceiling above her. The familiar dingy metal livened up with spray-painted monkeys, chomper fish, angry alligators, and grinning sump rats.

That means I...

Her lair. A lair.

Not the old fan station under the Last Drop; Sevika concreted up all the entrances to that one. Oh, Jinx could still make a new way in, and thought about doing so just to spite them all and lurk right there, unseen, under their feet...

But all her memories of that place were poisoned. Nothing new could come of it. It bored her, so she'd moved on. There were always more dark places to put a Jinx.

She'd been gone, after all, all that time, without once leaving town.

And now she was home.

Home. A home. A place that was hers, anyway. Better than a trash-choked alley or a stinky gutter.

This one even had a bed! Jinx didn't even bother keeping a bed in most of her lairs, given how little she slept. Sometimes a hammock. But this one had a bed, and Jinx had slept in it.

Slept.

"Funny dream..." she mumbled to herself, "Huh."

Jinx caught her breath and tensed up in anticipation.

I slept. Prolly more than an hour. My brain actually shut up and let me sleep?

Jinx would have blinked. If she blinked. Silence, rest – that never happened! She was either itching with the hunger to move think do create act destroy...

Or the void would swell up in keening, devouring silence and everything would become white noise. She'd wake hours or days – she didn't even know – later with little memory of what she'd done.

Or if she'd done anything at all.

The void came more often since Jinx burned down her whole world a second time.

Amethyst eyes burned a hole into the ceiling and waited for it to come. Because it had to. Because last night – last night she'd done... something other than staring at the scribbles on her walls to try to remember what thinking was – She'd left her lair and gone out among the living and done...

...something?

...and that something had all felt good and surely...surely it would go wrong, wouldn't it?

Because everything did.

Jinx held the breath and waited.

Tick. Tock. The clock in her head, the click of her father's tongue as he tallied in his notebooks and his ledgers...

I slept. Hours. Hours! Like, normal person sleep. This never happens. This has to go wrong.

The nightmares didn't come.

It's going to go wrong...

Neither did the void.

Jinx let her breath out and narrowed her darting eyes at the neon monkey above.

Something was different.

The tangled covers were warm. Jinx ran very hot or very cold most of the time. But this was different. It wasn't just around her...