The silence in the small alcove was a living thing.
It pressed in on Jinx from all sides, heavier than the tons of rock and river water above them.
The only sound was the soft, rhythmic drip of water somewhere in the darkness, a lonely, maddening metronome counting down the seconds of their borrowed time.
DRIP.
PLOP.
DRIP.
She watched the kid.
Michael.
He wasn't looking at her.
He wasn't looking at the sonic alarms she was meticulously placing at the mouths of their small cave.
His gaze was fixed, locked onto the metallic corpse of the Cable Hound they had dragged out of the way.
It was a look she had seen before.
She had seen it in the eyes of starving scavengers looking at a fresh kill.
She had seen it in the eyes of desperate gamblers staring at their last chip.
But this was different.
This was colder.
There was a stillness to him that was deeply unnatural, a predatory focus that made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
He was tired.
She could see it in the slump of his shoulders, in the pale, dust-caked exhaustion on his face.
The fight with the hounds, the collapse, the run from the Ghosts… it had drained him completely.
She knew what it felt like to be running on empty, with monsters in the dark and no power left in the tank.
It was a feeling that made you do stupid things.
Desperate things.
"Hey, kid," she said, her voice a low rasp, trying to break the spell. "Snap out of it."
He didn't seem to hear her.
His eyes, wide and dark, were glued to the dead thing.
She saw his hand, the one that wasn't bandaged, begin to tremble slightly.
He was fighting something inside himself.
A part of her, the cynical, pragmatic part that had kept her alive for five years, screamed at her to just let it happen.
He needed to be strong if they were going to make it to Red Hook.
His power was their only real weapon against whatever else was crawling around in these pits.
If he had a way to 'recharge', even a weird one, she should let him.
It was just business, after all. A simple transaction.
Her life for his safe passage. His power for her expertise.
But another part of her, a smaller, older part she thought had died with the Rust Dogs, felt a prickle of genuine fear.
This wasn't like a Hunter absorbing mana from a core.
That was a clean process. A transfer of energy.
This felt… dirty.
She saw it in the way the very air around him seemed to grow colder, the way the faint, fungal light of the cavern seemed to dim, as if being sucked towards him.
"Michael," she said again, her voice sharper this time, louder.
He flinched, but his gaze didn't waver.
The hunger in his eyes won the fight.
He raised his hand slowly, almost reverently, towards the dead Cable Hound.
And Jinx watched in absolute, frozen horror as reality itself began to break around his palm.
It started as a small eddy, a swirl of purple-black nothingness that seemed to punch a hole right through the world.
It wasn't a flame.
It wasn't a ball of energy.
It was a vortex. A tiny, silent hurricane of pure, soul-eating darkness.
The air in the alcove dropped ten degrees in a second.
Jinx shivered, a violent, uncontrollable spasm, as a wave of unnatural cold washed over her, a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature.
It was the cold of a tomb.
The cold of a place where life was not welcome.
She saw Michael's face contort.
His jaw clenched, and a thin sheen of sweat beaded on his forehead.
Then he flinched.
He flinched hard, his whole body jerking as if he'd been struck.
His other hand shot up to his head, his fingers digging into his hair.
His eyes squeezed shut in agony.
Jinx strained her ears, listening for a sound, any sound, that could have caused it.
There was nothing.
Only the drip, drip, drip of the water.
But he was hearing something.
She could see it on his face. He was enduring a scream that she couldn't hear, a psychic shriek that was scraping against the inside of his soul.
The vortex in his palm pulsed, and a faint, ethereal light, the color of a dying, bruised twilight, began to pull free from the corpse of the Cable Hound.
It wasn't mana.
It wasn't energy.
It looked like a ghost, a screaming, struggling phantom of the creature's dying rage, being forcibly ripped from its metal shell.
The light spiraled into the vortex, and the thing in his hand grew darker, more solid.
It was a process of consumption.
He wasn't just taking its power.
He was eating its very essence.
The last of her cynical pragmatism died right there.
This wasn't a power.
It was a curse.
The Hunters she had known, even the ruthless ones, wielded fire and lightning. They commanded steel and force.
They fought monsters.
They didn't become them.
The kid, Michael, was wielding something else entirely.
Something ancient.
Something forbidden.
Something predatory.
The light from the hound faded completely, sucked into the black hole in his hand.
The vortex collapsed in on itself, vanishing with a faint, silent pop.
A small, obsidian-black monster core, pulsing with a faint, dark light, rested in his palm.
He looked at it for a long moment, then clenched his fist, and the core dissolved into his skin.
A wave of energy washed over him.
Jinx could feel it even from across the alcove.
It was a wave of pure, cold power.
The exhaustion vanished from his frame.
He stood up straighter, the weariness replaced by a dangerous, humming vitality.
He was whole again.
He was strong again.
He turned to look at her, and the expression in his eyes made her blood run cold.
There was a flicker of something in them that hadn't been there before.
A sliver of the hound's predatory emptiness.
A chilling, inhuman stillness.
Then it was gone, replaced by the familiar look of a scared, determined kid.
But she had seen it.
She knew what was under the surface now.
Her hand drifted down, her fingers brushing against the cold, reassuring grip of her energy pistol.
The deal had changed.
She was no longer escorting a meal ticket.
She was no longer guiding a lost puppy with a strange power.
She was walking through the darkest place on earth, side-by-side with a monster that was just learning how to hunt.
And she was terrified he would eventually decide that she was his next meal.