Jim fearfully observed the fire lick away at his hexagon shield he had summoned in the nick of time after his survival instincts had kicked in.
He furrowed his brows after a few seconds however, when he noticed that the fires were not harming his shield at all.
His confusion grew as the inferno suddenly retreated as he was chained to the podium and converged on where flickers of Alice kneeling down were visible through the flames, a bright red bubble surrounding her.
The fire eventually covered her completely, blocking her from his line of sight.
Jim looked past the ball of fire to see Harry Dogger, the private detective, walk towards the flames with his wooden staff held in the air.
Suddenly, a brown figure shot out from behind the detective and rushed over to him, sliding on her knees and arriving by his side.
“Katniss?” Jim asked, barely recognising the girl.
“What the hell, what the hell, what the hell,” the girl mumbled frantically as she grasped his chains with shaking hands.
Jim watched Harry converge the flames closer and closer on Alice’s shield, almost coating it with fire and creating an incredible density of flames.
He heard a click from behind him and the pull on his arms suddenly disappeared.
His hands, still enclasped in manacles, slammed onto the floor with a metallic thud as Katniss fussed over him.
He ignored her as she grasped at the manacles with her hands and started channelling mana into them, creating a series of clicks and clacks.
His entire focus was on Alice, or rather, her silhouette, as barely visible as it was through the red magic
It was only because he was paying attention that he saw what happened next. The shadow of the shapeshifter suddenly threw her hands outwards causing her shield to burst like a cracked egg, all of the shards flying out with a violent force.
A click resounded and one of Jim’s manacles rolled away at the same time, giving him just enough to grab Katniss by the back of her head and pull her on top of him, a new blue shield exploding outwards to cover the both of them again.
Shards of red magic slammed against the shield like the pitter patter of rain on glass, just thousands of times more violent.
Jim desperately kept his eyes open, looking beyond Katniss’ head to observe Alice as she stood, covered in flames, flesh slowly melting.
Harry had slammed his staff on the floor, creating a gust of wind that had thrown the shards coming at him off course.
A stinging pain in the hand covering Katniss’ head threatened to distract him, but Jim kept looking, refusing to blink, as Harry relaxed, looking at the shrivelling body in the flames.
“She’s not dead, you idiot!” Jim shouted as loud as he could through the crackling of the flames. “She’s an Oboroten!”
It was this warning that likely saved Harry, his flames having basically covered up the red glyph that had emerged beneath Alice’s feet, causing her to shoot towards the detective like a bolt of lightning, hand turning into a blade and extending straight to where his heart would have been a second ago.
Instead, the bladed hand was deflected by a swing of the staff, which promptly exploded upon impact, throwing the shrivelled up form of the Oboroten away from the detective, and rolling to the floor, eventually coming to a standstill.
What was clearly visible on the floor in that second of stillness had nothing to do with the beautiful woman that had been there previously. The true form was revealed, albeit a bit burnt.
A dense, sinewy, originally black and now charred silhouette with no features other than a gaping maw splitting the head horizontally.
A red glyph emerged on the floor beneath the figure, a second later the figure blurred towards Jim and Katniss who were still laying on the ground.
It was at this moment that Jim couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore and had to blink.
Simply because he was tired of keeping them open, not because he was scared or anything.
A second or so later, not feeling the pain he’d expected, Jim opened his eyes again to find himself sitting in a suddenly empty chamber.
He blinked, to verify the situation.
“Huh?” he wondered aloud.
“You can let go,” a small voice whispered from below his head, causing him to look down and see a head full of brown hair tickling his chin.
Then he saw his hand on the back of the head. His mangled hand, a deep stab running straight through and seeping blood on the girl in his arms.
He raised his other arm and pushed her away from himself, causing her to fall to the ground and roll three times until she came to a stop. He held his hand in front of his eyes to inspect the wound that ran through it.
“Thanks for protecting me!” Katniss exclaimed with teary eyes as she struggled to get up from the floor, before giving up and crawling over to him to also release him from the second manacle.
“It- I- I acted before I knew what I was doing,” Jim quickly explained himself. “It’s like my body moved on its own.”
“You’re losing a lot of blood,” Katniss said in a concerned voice, before decisively ripping off a large part of her brown cloak and bringing it to bind Jim’s wound.
Jim for his part pulled his hand back and warily looked at the strip of cloth. “Do you ever wash that?” he asked sceptically, before pausing and apologising. “Sorry, you probably can’t afford to. Use mine.”
“I wash all my clothes everyday,” Katniss said quietly with a sad smile as she gently took Jim’s mangled hand, spun the rag around it a few times before pulling it taut and tying it together with a knot. “But it’s old, last thing I have from my dad, no amount of washing can clean frayed fabric or remove the holes,” she finished explaining with a whisper, taking his other hand as well and looking at the stump of the finger which had been chewed off with what at the time had been human teeth. She pulled out more fabric and tied the stump up tightly to stop the blood flow.
“Where did they go, Alice and Harry?” Jim asked.
“Its name is Alice?” Katniss asked, focusing on the wrong thing, before shaking her head and getting back on topic. “It disappeared inside some kind of tunnel, Harry chased after it.”
Jim suddenly coughed, feeling all his bruised ribs from the previous beating he’d stoically endured.
“We have to get out of here,” he wheezed. “That idiot is probably just going to die again. Then she’ll be back.”
“If you’re worried about the shapeshifter, don’t worry anymore,” a male voice suddenly said further back from behind the podium Jim was leaning on.
Jim struggled to look behind him and saw the grim-faced detective covered in a black ichory liquid, staff gripped tightly in his hand and dragging an emaciated black sinewy body behind him by one long spindly leg.
“Oh, you brought her with you,” Jim grumbled. “I guess it's good, maybe she can pay off her debt to me with her skin. She did say it was valuable, or something.”
The figure suddenly spasmed, giving a gurgle, before falling still again.
“You didn’t kill it?” Jim asked accusingly.
“I don’t kill, kid,” Harry replied with a shake of the head, a grimace on his stubbled face.
Jim stared at the man, completely aghast, before pausing. “I see, it did say something about the flaying having to happen while it was still alive,” he muttered.
The figure lurched again, twitching wildly. Its mouth gave a gurgle, which slowly transitioned into human speech. “I. Won’t. Give. You. The. Satisfaction.” Alice said with a tone of profound sadness.
Suddenly without any preamble, the mawed head of the creature liquified, followed by the rest of its body. Soon, the only thing left behind was a black puddle on the floor.
“It better really be dead,” Jim commented in a pained voice, thinking about the money he’d just missed out on.
Harry meanwhile, looked down at his stained palm with a shocked look on his face.
“It seems, that if nothing else, this matter is resolved for now,” the detective eventually said.
“Wait!” Jim suddenly exclaimed. “About the person, the person who was holding my chains when you came in, what happened to them?”
Harry furrowed his brows. “I was more focused on the girl eating your fingers like a pack of corndogs.”
“It was a cowled figure, they used the same escape tunnel as Alice the moment we came in,” Katniss suddenly spoke up.
“Nobody important then,” Jim muttered. “Someone powerful would have stayed to fight.” He shook his head. “Regardless, Harry, thanks for coming, I dare say you could have waited for a more opportune moment, I had the situation well in hand and was just about to turn the tables on them, but your help is appreciated none the less.”
Harry stared at him, gave a wheezing laugh, before nodding to Katniss. “Thank the girl, she’s the one that came to find me.”
Jim turned towards Katniss and tilted his head.
The girl blushed. “I- I wanted to repay you so when I saw you in the industrial district I followed you from a distance, saw you get taken in the alley. Asked around, found out who the office that you were knocking on belonged to and found Harry.”
“More like I found her,” Harry grumbled. “She was asking literally everyone in the district after me, and my pigeon eventually overheard one of her attempts.”
“So that’s how you found me!” Katniss suddenly exclaimed with wide eyes. “I knew that bird was acting weirdly.”
“You, you came to help me?” Jim asked the girl, confused.
“Of course!” Katniss exclaimed. “Even if you’re a bit of a cad, I owe, and regardless nobody deserves to get kidnapped off the street like that! At most, maybe you can steal their valuables… cough, anyway, yeah, I did. We’re quits now, I hate owing favours!”
Jim stared at the girl incomprehensibly.
“I’m going to pass out now, get me to a healer, or something,” he suddenly decided as the fatigue in his body finally caught up to him and the black spots in his vision grew.
Everything faded to nothing.
-/-
Jim came too, once again, not in the cabin of a ship, but in a hospital bed. At least that’s what he assumed the white surroundings and the many other, albeit empty beds in the ward, symbolised.
“You’re awake, good,” a voice suddenly came from beside his bed and he turned his head to see a middle-aged man in a white robe and a red cross sorting a few small vials on the night stand next to his bed. “Not often I get a student here before the semester even started.”
“I am exceptional, in all things,” Jim simply said with a nod, receiving a deadpan look from what must have been the school healer.
“Well, you’re definitely exceptionally lucky. Haven’t seen a body this beaten in a while,” he pointed to the vials on the nightstand. “Drink these in order of proximity to the bed. Start in thirty minutes, one hour intervals between each vial.”
“I’ll take some wine instead, thank you,” Jim replied with a shake of his head. His head hurt and his body ached, what he needed was a bath, not some weird coloured liquids.
The healer glared at him. “These are potions you nimrod, and they have to be ingested on a completely empty stomach.” He pointed at the vials in turn.
“Blood-replenishing, regenerative, calming.” He looked at Jim. “Drink it, or I’ll chop off your other fingers as well.”
Jim sighed and rolled his eyes. “If I have to,” he grumbled.
The healer threw up his hands, turned around and left.
Jim laid back down, before suddenly remembering that he had a meeting with Decorus tonight.
He furrowed his brows, then heard quiet footsteps approaching his bed. He immediately went for the first potion and chugged it down. It tasted like shit.
“What’s with the face?” Katniss asked as she arrived at his bedside.
“Oh,” Jim said, turning his head to look at the girl who looked more tattered than ever. “It’s you.”
“How do you feel?” Katniss asked. “You slept for twelve hours, the healer said you’d be fine.”
Jim focused inwardly, feeling the pain, the bruises, the raw emotions. “I feel fine,” he said. “By the way, where’s Harry, I need him for something tonight.”
Katniss nodded. “That’s good, as for Harry, he left Sredina this morning, said the head of the operation is gone and that he has to go get some friends from Mitelos because there’s bigger issues on the horizon. He didn’t explain to me but said you’d know what he meant.”
Jim nodded along, before pausing. “Shit, I needed him.” Then he suddenly looked Katniss up and down. “Wait, you did say you owed me a favour, right?” he asked.
Katniss grimaced. “I almost died trying to save you,” she pointed out.
Jim waved her off. “Yeah, but I don’t remember asking you to do that, this is something I actually need.”
Katniss paused, sighed, shrugged. “Fine, but in return you have to tell me what’s going on. What was the creature planning, why did it kidnap you?”
“Come with me tonight and I’ll tell you,” Jim decided, before fishing out a few coins from his inner pocket. “But go buy yourself some new clothes first, you look like a homeless person.”