Page 381 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

Her fingers lengthen as the bones inside them soften, separate and reset, loud and wet. The transformation travels up into her wrists with a chain of dense cracks, then higher, rearranging her elbows beneath the skin. Kade’s breath is locked inside his lungs.

He’s never seen anything like it.

Her shoulders dislocate with a delicate pop and the hands that are pressed against Lachlan’s bare skin underwater are barely recognisable as human hands. Misshapen and strange, they form to resemble fleshy octopus tentacles. Lee is sweating, eyes closed with the intensity of her focus. The bones inside her arms are constantly popping and breaking. She seems to be localising the change in her hands or trying to.

Lachlan jolts beneath, struggling at first but then genuinely fighting to break the surface. His hands clamp around Kade’s wrists, brutally strong.

His heels strike the bottom of the bath.

‘He’s feeling it,’ she whispers. ‘Hold him down.’

It’s so inherently wrong.

Kade has to shore up every scrap of determination he has to do what she’s telling him, reminds himself Lachlan is immortal, he can’t die this way, but he just keeps thinking of the way he flinched in this same bathtub when Kade poured the water, what he told him about being waterboarded.

Lee’s hands are grotesquely fascinating and she’s surprisingly strong as she helps to hold Lachlan down, the former bodyguard screaming beneath the water so loud it vibrates in the copper.

Under the thrashing water, Kade sees black threads appear beneath the skin around Lachlan’s side. They spread across his chest like veins of rot, crawling towards his heart and throat.

Kade leans over him, using all his weight. ‘It’s gonna be OK,’ he tells him, voice shaking. ‘I’m here. I won’t let go of you.’

The black threads reach Lachlan’s throat.

His body convulses. He stops fighting. Goes still.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Don’t move.’

‘Is he OK?’

‘Kade. Don’t move,’ she warns, eyes tightly shut.

The water begins to tremble.

Ripples in the bathwater spread as the black webs crawl beneath Lachlan’s skin, seemingly panicked.

Lee exhales slowly.

Lachlan’s body spasms. The black webs skitter around, desperately circling his heart, but they cannot get inside.

That’s where Kade’s hand is pressing down.

He stares at the poison.

‘You can’t have him.’

The bathwater vibrates, droplets bouncing up off the surface.

‘Almost.’

Kade presses harder, trusts Lachlan won’t die.

He wouldn’t let him.

Lachlan jolts again. It nudges Kade’s hand away from his heart and the black poison takes its chance, slips inside, burrows into his heart.

‘No, no, no!’