'Fuck…fuck…FUCK!'
Kairo's grip on Eli tightened, iron around the boy's fragile frame as the pull of the water clawed harder at his legs.
The weight was unnatural. Wrong.
Too many hands. Too many bodies. Slick, clammy—like the corpses of drowned things, all desperate to drag him down into the black.
His jaw locked, teeth grinding as his black eyes cut into the swirl beneath them.
'Again. This is happening again.'
The memory seared hot in his mind—the leeches, the swarm, the drowning pull of things that shouldn't exist.
And now it was happening all over. He was being dragged under like a fool.
Because he hadn't listened.
Eli's voice rang back in his skull, brittle and weak, but clearer now than it had been before.
"Stop. Don't go there."
He'd thought it was just madness. Just another trick of the octopus twisting the boy's head. But no—Eli had warned him. And Kairo had ignored it.
The taste of that realization was jagged, bitter, like chewing on glass.
