The slinking black car slipped up the driveway fifteen minutes late. Drake had been knocking his knees together with the rhythmic pulses of a cuckoo clock when he caught sight of Chauffeur.
The drive home was empty. Drake snapped his fingers. One-two-three-four. Over and over. Chauffeur didn't mind. He was glowless.
Drake pulled up the small knob under the car window and leaped out, dashing to the door and up the stairs, ignoring the Ayi's lined-up helloing.
He rushed into his room, feeling something poke at his head. A gentle vibrating, and then as he neared the cupboard where he'd put the rock, it wasn't as gentle. He swung it open, and suddenly his mind was a swarm of wasps, flying, stinging. Drake cringed, but he could feel the wasps fighting the goldfish – or, at least, covering it up with the blistering pain they were causing.
There it was. The rock. He stared into its mirrored surface, the shell they'd filled with molten silver and set to dry. His own face, blithely pale, and two crevices they called eyes. Dark hair, sagging into his eyebrows. He made a face, and the mirrored surface responded slowly, an oily exaggeration of his movements.
Slowly, it appeared. First a dash of swimming-pool turquoise by his left earlobe, and then slowly some orange and watery ginger weaving through his hair. As the mind-wasps found his temple and stabbed at it repeatedly, the rest of his glow blossomed like droplets of food-coloring into water, except they didn't mix into an indeterminable brown.
Drake focused, chasing the colors. Gentle grey? No. He forgot where that was from. A blossoming candy-red? No, perhaps not. His eyes wavered, an uncertain note at the end of a flurry.
Blue? No. Purple? Barely. Up and down, up and down, circles, circles, and then he saw it. By his left cheek, a blinking glimmer that faded into the others. A wine-like maroon.
Biting his lower lip, he pressed his index finger onto the glassy surface of the rock, right where the maroon floated. There was a soft hiss and Drake cried out quietly. The wasps congregated and swarmed at once, shooting down his spine and into his finger. It was so red, yet so blue, as if ice was secretly not frozen but scalding with seventeen suns. Drake's finger yearned to move.
"No," Drake said firmly, wrapping his fingers around his wrist to keep his hand in place. He could feel the wasps coming to the front of the mind and the goldfish slowly retreating back. He could hold it for a second more. And then that'd be plenty for today.
However, to his surprise, the wine-like spasm started to struggle under his finger as if it were tangible. His finger started to develop its own heartbeat. The thin trail of smoke fizzing out from below his finger gave a sudden puff.
(It was then when he realized that though the wasps stung enough, there hadn't been any hissing voices in his head today.)
He looked down again, feeling sweat bead from his hands. And then he gasped and pulled his finger away. The fact that now his index finger was blistering red and emitting small puffs of smoke hardly bothered him. He looked back at the mirrored rock. Sure enough, there wasn't a single trace of maroon. It was gone. The other colors mingled around, filling up the space where it was. But it was gone.
He then turned his hand over, palm-up. From the smoke-red of his index finger, there was a pulse of wine. And then that wine dripped down quickly, illuminating his veins, before giving one last pulse of denial and slipping out of sight.