Ill Omen's Light (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 17: Foundlings Lost

Ekko hadn't stopped screaming.

It drowned out every distant caw of a crow or mysterious scrape and scratch in the tunnels as they made a slow, grim crawl up from the Sump. It left the whole group gritting their teeth and watching every shadow.

The stains spreading on the wrapped bundle Scar carried clung to the back of their minds. The Wrath may not have been hunting them anymore, but something else still might be.

Ekko's cries alerted everyone and everything around them. If those awful sounds didn't drive the curious and the hungry fleeing from their path, however, the sight of their well-armed group invited few opportunists.

Of her arsenal, Jinx had only retrieved Pow-Pow. She visibly itched to reclaim the rest of her toys. Lux sensed that coiled anticipation in Jinx's spine and shoulders, a snake waiting to strike. Her heart lingered somewhere near her throat each time Jinx brushed near one of the Firelights.

For their part, the masked vigilantes kept a brooding silence. Kew and Jemka, Scar and Meela, each took turns to guard and scout their flanks. Ahead, her staff glowing gently, Lux lit the way. Behind her, Jinx dragged the makeshift stretcher they'd been forced to bind their leader to. They hadn't wanted to trust her with it, but if he got loose, she was the only one strong enough to restrain him.

The crystals hadn't been enough, the first time. He'd burst them and nearly strangled Scar, his face twisted in blank rage, his veins swollen and eyes glowing pink.

"First-timers always have it hardest," Jinx had said, when he was finally subdued, thrashing futilely against layers of crystal that kept his arms up to the shoulders and his legs to the ankle, "Heh...Yer lucky it's Little Man. Usually they're a lot more violent."

"...We know," Scar was still breathing heavy, his eyes narrow under his sharp white mask, "Most of us are survivors of your daddy flooding the Lanes."

Still glaring at her, he turned his forearm, displaying old needle scars near his inner elbow.

"We remember."

Jinx smirked at him.

"Good for you! So you'd know how the pink juice lets out all the pent-up hate and rage yer hidin'."

Jinx looked back at Ekko and chewed her lip. A hint of something frail and painful flickered behind the amethyst blaze.

"Guess he wasn't hidin' much."

She shrugged as she turned away.

"...or maybe he just lost too much blood."

Lux shuddered at the word.

Jinx studied the flexing of her fingers, the fresh scar on the arm she'd opened to pour her own blood out for Ekko. Into his wounds, into his mouth. Lux would never forget the look on Jinx's face.

Blood. Jinx's blood. The sight and scent of it, spilled over and over again, swam in Lux's senses. Splashing on the grated floor, splattered on the Wolf's claws...

No. No, none of that happened, it's inside of her, where it belongs.

Most of it.

The price of Jinx's deed was only a scar now, a jagged river of knotted tissue across her arm. Soon it would be a faded line of silver-white like all her others. Just like the savage marks of Warwick's talons on Ekko's chest, and the internal damage beneath. Lux had witnessed the twisting and squelching from ruination into the form of the healthy organs they should have been –

His survival seemed both miraculous and monstrous. Shimmer still crawled in Ekko's veins, burning under his eyelids, running in phosphorescent tears from the corners of his eyes. Lux hadn't heard screams like that since her visits to the Mageseeker prison, where petricite potions burned the magic out of people from the inside out.