Run Little Lost Girl

Chapter Seventeen

Edited✔️✔️

Chapter 17

"Pixie Hollow," Tink said. "They're keeping Mia there. They drove all the Fairies into hiding. They killed Mab, and Titania..."

Tink began coughing and grasped her chest, interrupting her mindless and worried ranting. Pan walked over and helped escort her back down onto his bed that he was planning to let her have until she got well enough to stand without looking like she'd pass out at any second.

And by the unnatural thrumming in her veins that he felt when he'd touched her, he knew that it wouldn't be anytime soon.

"You've been infected," Pan told her, not taking the fairy by surprise in the slightest. She'd figured that out already but had been too scared and occupied by everything else to admit it.

"I'm dying," she corrected him and let out a pitiful cough that made a wave of pain rake slowly and torturously through her body.

Being infected by dark magic was rare and only a few beings have been known to have it and nonetheless to have survived it. It was called Magant, a disease that ate a person from the inside out. Everyone who got it, died a sufferable death that varied from lasting just a few hours to months at a time.

It usually spread through cuts that were deep enough so dark magic could wedge its way through the skin and settle inside the being's tissue like some sort of parasite. It would then proceed to damage the person's tissue and spread to their organs and eventually the heart and brain. But what made the infection very special was that—since dark magic (like any magic) is an energy—it attacked the person's very soul and typically put them in a zombie-like state in the last moments of his or her life.

"Is there any chance that you have it?" Pan asked, although he already knew the answer. He had only felt that horrendous thrumming of life clashing against death in a person's body once. There was no mistaking it.

Tink looked down at her still bleeding cut up arms and legs and gave Pan a hard look, as if asking "Really?"

"No..." she drawled sarcastically with as much bite as she could muster. "What made you come up with that assumption?"

Pan rolled his eyes. Even when dying, Tink's infuriating sense of humor stayed put. He ruffled his sandy blond hair and pinched the bridge of his nose. Frustration was starting to consume him as it did usually, but this time it was more urgent.

A horn echoed outside which caused a harmony of shouts of arguing boys and Pan groaned. "What now?" he asked aloud in annoyance and gave Tink a look that told her to stay where she was.

She have him a sarcastic thumbs up with a mocking smile before flipping him off. Pan growled under his breath and walked out. This is exactly why I don't help people, he thought.

"Andrew, what's going on?" Pan shouted as he marched to the center of camp. "Where's Thomas?"

The chubby boy looked frightened and taken aback by Pan's sudden presence. He was one out of only five of the boys not joining the large crowd who were verbally fighting one another.

"T-Thomas hasn't b-b-been here si-ince Tink arrived, sir," the red headed lost boy replied with a stutter, scared absolutely shitless of what his leader would do to him. "Three boys have been found dead, Pan-sir, near the creek!"

"What?" Pan snapped and the boy jumped back.

Pan could feel his anger rising and his ears began ringing. Thunder struck not too far from the camp, the Neversea's waves began clashing together much like his mangled thoughts, and the wind howled his rage.