“Shit, get off. What the fuck?” The panic in his voice rises to match his flavour. It tastes herbal and savoury on my tongue and I crave more. I am losing what little grip on this realm I have left, but I need to stay awake. I will not leave my mate.
23
Joanna
“Augustine,” I scream.
He’s not moving. The dark sands around my lover are lifeless, and my body aches to touch him, comfort him, pull him back together so he won’t leave me. My bond mark burns like it’s being erased from my skin, my very soul being cut off from his.
Lance scrapes at the golden sand wrapped around his wrist, but it keeps wrapping around him. With every wave of the gun in his hand, I flinch. He’s going to shoot me next. I know it. Whatever has happened to him, his mind is broken. The Lance who used to sit next to my desk and tell me bad jokes about hard hats is gone. He isn’t my friend any more. He hasn’t been my friend for months, maybe years.
“I had it all, the wife, the money. God the money! It was so easy until you had to go sticking your nose in places it didn’t belong.”
His words echo in my head over and over again. Lance has been embezzling money from the company. That was why my budgets never came up right. That was why he was always so willing to help and review my work. He needed to make sure I didn’t see it. It’s why Patrick was furious with me. Fuck knows how much he has taken. Who fucking cares at this point?
And it still wasn’t enough for his ex-wife to stay with him. They left him, and he thinks more money, a longer life, and magic will save their relationship? Greed isn’t going to fix his wife leaving him.
I know what it is like to be left behind. He is trying to desperately hold onto something that he will never be able to get back.
After everything he has done, there is no going back to how things used to be. He can’t buy his wife’s love back; he can’t forget all the hurt he has caused. Whatever he was going to do with those pins– keep them to live longer or sell them to the highest bidder, it’s pointless. They are as lost as Lance’s sanity.
I am barely able to breathe, the tape constricting my body too tightly. My pulse pounds in my skull and my muscles ache. I am losing feeling in my fingers, everywhere. That part of me that hasn’t been alive for years is consuming my every thought.
I am going to die.
Tears cloud my vision as my thoughts spiral further and further into the darkness, the loneliness, the fear. My gut aches with a bottomless pit consuming my insides. I pull at the tape, the sticky bonds yanking the hair from my arms. They twist and twist, but I can’t rip them. I am not strong enough. The broken chair digs into my back as a sob racks through my body.
Another sob echoes around the office. This one is deeper, filled with anguish.
“Fuck,” Lance cries. “Oh god. What’s wrong with me? What have you done?”
His ruddy face looks at me so openly, eyes wide with tears staining his cheeks. Fluttery gold sands creep across his neck. I am transfixed as the man before me sobs. He falls to his knees, shoving the heel of his palms into his eye sockets.
The gun is still in his hand, dangling across his face, and I can’t take my eyes off it. I can’t. That stupid thing is what stands between me living, saving Augustine from whatever the fuck is happening to him and dying right in this fucking hell site.
“Joanna,” Lance moans. “I feel so empty, why am I so empty? Do I even deserve to live?”
My gaze flicks to the black sands surrounding Augustine; they haven’t moved. There is a line of it trying to reach me. I can just make that out through my tears, but they aren’t reaching for Lance. The only thing touching Lance is the gold sands. The grains seep into his ear the longer I stare at him. My stomach rolls at the sight and Lance gags. He grabs his stomach and wretches like he has lost control of himself.
The acrid smell makes me want to throw up all the more and as my stomach and chest riot, I feel like I am choking all over again. Even as he vomits across the floor, Lance claws at his chest, his throat. His fingers slip through the sands like water and he can’t stop gagging.
His shaking, weeping form matches my own. As I struggle to breathe, to stay present enough to see Augustine’s fingers twitch and his chest slowly rises up, Lance breaks down between us. Golden sands drip from his eyes and mouth, coated in tears. They look almost like honey. He can’t stop it. Every swipe at his face he makes only smears it across his skin until he is glittering gold.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he cries over and over again, smashing the side of the gun into his temple. More of the gold sand leaks from his mouth, but now blood drips from his temples. The sense of unease that ripples through me is so whole and violent.
“Lance, you have to calm down,” I say, voice straining as my lungs fight for air. “Please, let me help you for once. I- I- I will find the pins or find you something new. I have a lot of friends.”
“NO, no, no you won’t, you won’t, you won’t. Joanna.” He draws out my name in such a long whine that it turns into a blood-curdling scream.
I want to cover my ears, to run away, but there is nothing I can do to escape his wailing. The tortured sounds that rip from his throat sicken me, make the nausea buzzing around my insides ratchet up higher. Lance shakes as he continues to scrub at the mess falling from his lips and slithering back up his body. The golden sands that leak from him cycle through his body endlessly, uncontrollably, and the more I stare at the horror of it, the more hypnotised I become by the sight of it.
Finally, when I look away, I turn to my boogeyman, my lover. Augustine’s chest is barely moving, but his sands have started to come back to him. The mess of black around his body is shrinking the longer he lies there. His ichor stains his clothes and the floor beneath him as the sands disappear. I need him. I need him to survive and wake up, even if it is just long enough for us to run away. I look at him again, how his chest shudders as it rises and the bee pinned to his lapel catches the light.
“LANCE!” I shout his name as loud as I can, my voice straining and echoing around the room. “It’s there.”
For a moment, he stops shaking, even as the gold sands nearly coat his body.
“It’s there. It’s- his- pin on his-” My words are frantic as my jumbled-together plan tries to spew from my lips. Fuck, I just need him to believe this lie, hope that his brain will fucking understand what I am saying. Lance looks up and I see gold sands covering all of his eyes now. Something like hope flashes over his features before he scrambles to Augustine. The gun is tossed across the room, the metal scraping across the linoleum, setting my teeth on edge.
