Holly sank onto the bed, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. What had she just done?
“Holly.” Bianca’s voice was soft. “What happened to Jack, in prison?”
“I don’t – you think I want to tell you?” Holly raised her head, blinking back furious tears. Those endless, countless years in Styx all flooded back in knife-edged fragments, stinging her almost physically. “I wasn’t even in Tartarus. Jack was. He didn’t leave that cell for a thousand years. A thousand. It burned, it burned, it burned, like the sun shrunken to a room, melting everything it touched, including sanity...” A hysterical little giggle bubbled up out of her throat. “Jack and I didn’t come quite right to this here town, and that cell didn’t help, no sir, it did not. Not the princessly heater in Styx or his royal quarters in Tartarus, they ain’t all they’s cracked up to be, especially when you’re cursed to be even more loony-tunes than you were already once you gets out!”
She cackled again, then felt sharp fingers biting into her forearms. “Holly!” Bianca hissed into her face. “Snap out of it!”
A hot wash coated Holly’s skin in ash. She screamed and dove onto the floor. “It’s raining fire!” she wailed, every little ash burning a dark mark onto her flesh. “Jack, make it stop! Jack, I need you, get out of that volcano, it’s burning, make it stop...”
She huddled on the floor, sobbing in pain. The freakish white volcano twisted high, higher than before, wrapping Jack’s still form in sheets of pale lava. It sizzled, and smoke choked the air as far as Holly could see. She sucked in a breath, coughed, pounded the floor. She had to get out...
“Deserve every second of it...” a voice came from the smog, driving like a nail through Holly’s senses. “But I suppose he wouldn’t be very happy if you died...”
Holly smacked the floor with her bleeding palm, half of the skin burned off from the fire all around her. Some of the lava wrapped around her head and neck, and she slumped to the ground.
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