Hey y’all, for 600 followers here is some weird urban magic.

He blinked at the tiled ceiling, crossing into wakefulness from something…not.  There was a clamor of noise buffeting him, just outside the half-drawn curtain hiding him—a tiny besieged encampment against a hurricane in the hall.  The sheets crackled hard against his hands, more like paper than cloth, a sharp smell making the bone between his eyes ache, and it took a long moment before he could sort out the overload and look around. From where he sat, he could see two more beds, one in the room across the hall, curtain half-closed like his own, and one in his own room—a hospital, maybe.  He didn’t entirely recall what the word entailed.  Didn’t recall much of anything, now that he thought about it. He blinked away the concern and propped himself up on one hand to get a look around at the other residents. Kids, he noted.  Very young.  Younger than him?  He wasn’t sure.  

Across the hall was a boy, smooth-cheeked and round-eyed. He had one arm exposed to the shoulder, one sleeve cut away entirely, and halfway down his upper arm, the flesh turned abruptly into brass.  The metal threaded itself into the higher tissue, and the boy clutched his arm across his chest in numb shock.  The girl in the next bed over was sobbing, the blank sound of someone crying in an effort to soothe themselves, tears leaving glistening trails down the glossy porcelain of her cheeks.  Her eyes, when she blinked, were bright and lively, her black hair tumbling in thin dreadlocks around her face, but there was a chink as a bracelet knocked against porcelain—her hand, rubbing across her eyes.

He raised his fingers to touch his own face, but there was no metal or porcelain there, only the warm give of skin.  A touch of stubble on his jaw—older than these soft, scared children, then, but no lines, so still young enough—and chapped lips, but all living, perfectly human.  He looked down at his arms, sweeping fingers up from the thin skin at his wrists to the curve of his shoulders where they met the paper of a hospital gown.  He kicked away the sheet and performed a similar check, up the sinew-and-bone line of his legs, then tugged the hospital gown away from his neck and looked down.  All skin over muscle, blood racing at the crease of his elbow and the hollow of his throat.

Far from simply being entirely human, there didn’t seem to be a mark on him.  He wondered why he was here.  Hospitals were places for the terribly ill or grievously injured, that much he was sure of, and he didn’t seem to be either one.  If the noise outside was any indication, they hardly had the staff to spare for him.

He was still pushing his fingers through his hair—dark, curly, overlong, didn’t he ever cut it?—when the curtain was tucked back and a nurse, looking harried, strode into the room.  

She paused by the little girl, crouching down to wipe away the tears from the porcelain and murmur something reassuring.  Only when the little girl had hiccupped out a laugh, nodding, did the nurse turn away and cross the room to his side.

“Hey,” she said, a slow smile creasing her tired eyes.  She wore blue scrubs, fresh and clean in a way that suggested she had recently had to change, and her hair was scooped haphazardly away from her face into a bun, but her hands were quick and confident when she reached out to take his wrist.  “Sleeping Beauty wakes.”

“Have I been asleep?” he asked vaguely, watching the movement of her lips as she counted his pulse.  The machine beside him beeped in time, wires tugging gently at the electrodes on his chest.  “Doesn’t the machine do that?”

“Yeah, but I get a better feel for it if I do it by hand,” the nurse said, as if it was a common question.  “Can you tell me your name?”

“I, uh.”  He frowned. He was reasonably sure that he should be able to answer that question, firmly and without doubt, but there didn’t seem to be anything there.  His head was empty, ringing like a bell with each thought that passed through it. “No,” he said slowly.  “I can’t.”

“Okay,” she said, releasing his wrist.  Her eye-creasing smile was gone, now, lips thinner and turned down, and she picked up a chart from the end of his bed, flicking a look over the first page.  “How about your age?”

“Older than them,” he offered, halfway serious, “and younger than you.”

“Do you know where we are?”                                                                              

“A hospital?”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling at him again, but it didn’t make her eyes crinkle this time.  “Do you remember anything at all?”

“Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again,” he said at once, as if the words had been hidden under his tongue, waiting for him to open his mouth and set them loose.  They were chalky on his tongue, sour—the taste of panic, he thought.  He didn’t remember what panic should feel like, save for a vague impression of tight muscles and smoke-thickness in his throat, but something deep in his chest knew the flavor, and laughed.

“Do you know what that means?”  He shook his head, the muscles protesting as if the admission took tremendous effort, and she nodded, still steady and professional.  “All right.  Can I leave you alone for a minute to bring back the doctor?”

“Yeah,” he murmured, and she left, hooking the chart over the foot of his bed as she passed.  It left him alone in the room, with the quiet sniffing of the porcelain-faced girl and the ringing terror of the inside of his own head.  He closed his eyes, trying to find some trace of information in his memory, and opened them almost at once, recoiling.  There was nothing, only darkness as complete as a sky without stars—or, more accurately, a sky past the edge of stars.  Cold and—hungry—empty, with shadow-on-shadow movement that he didn’t want to see.

It was a relief when the doctor walked in, escorted by the same nurse as before.  She offered him a small smile and left to check on the boy with the brass arm, and the doctor walked inside.

“My name is Doctor Hamada,” she said, looking almost as weary as the nurse had.  “How are you feeling?”

“I’m–” hungry “—fine.”  Nothing hurt, and he didn’t seem to have any strangeness like the boy with the brass arm or the girl with the porcelain face.  He was—hungry—just sort of hollow, as if something scooped out all the soft parts from his belly and chest and left his ribcage empty.  He couldn’t hear his heartbeat, but he could see the green line on the monitor as it kept track.  Spike-drop-pause, spike-drop-pause, steady and hypnotic, up and down.  Watching it, he found himself mouthing the sentence, the only words he could find in his echoing empty skull—it seemed to fit well with the beat of the heart on the screen.  Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again.

“Melissa, the nurse you spoke to, she said that you don’t remember anything?” Doctor Hamada asked, leaning close and producing a penlight from her pocket.  “I’m just going to check your pupils,” she said, soothing, and he let her, shining the light into his eyes and leaving blue spots in his vision.  “Do you remember anything at all?”

“Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again,” he said, and she nodded, picking up his chart.  “But I don’t know what it means.”

“We usually call it Faust’s Law of Magic—you know, never summon power you can’t control,” she said, frowning.  “Every kid learns it in school.  Is that all you know?”

“Yeah.”  He paused, swallowed, forced himself to open his mouth again.  “Do you know my name?  Why am I here?”

She sighed, setting the chart down, and rested a hand on the rail of the bed, looking at him.  “We know your first name—it’s Jake.  Jacob.  A little boy recognized you and told us.”

“Someone here knows me?” he asked, starting to push himself up, and she caught his shoulder—kill her.

“No,” she said.  “I’m sorry.”  She sounded sincere, her voice heavy and her eyes sad.  “He passed away—over eighty percent of his lung tissue was transmuted into asphalt.  He didn’t survive long after telling us.”

He dropped back onto the bed with a thud, something heavy settling in the hollow arch of his ribcage as he shut his eyes and felt tears catch on his lashes.  “What’s happening?”

He felt Doctor Hamada shift—the darkness behind his eyes stretched and muttered hungry, and he opened his eyes.

“There was an explosion,” she said, soft and serious. “Foreign magic.  We’ve never seen anything like it.  Everyone who was caught in the blast seems to have been transmuted by the shrapnel—we have a boy whose heart is made of steel, and a woman whose hands are made of glass, and a man whose skin is nothing but paper.  You were at the center, but at first we thought you were fine.”

“I’m not fine?”  He didn’t think he was hurt, he was just—hungry—hallucinating.  He gave his head a shake, hoping to clear the dark voice from the emptiness of his skull. It wasn’t a knife in the dark, it was worse, a knife in an empty room without doors, where there were no options besides the blade.  It was a black thought.

“You seemed to be, when the paramedics found you,” Doctor Hamada said, an encouraging note in her voice.  Then it faded and she was solemn again.  “But you didn’t seem to understand what anyone was saying to you. You were responsive, engaged with the world, someone would speak and you would look at them, someone would point and you could follow, but you didn’t seem to actually comprehend.  The paras assumed you had suffered a head injury, justified given the size of the explosion—it even destroyed your clothes.  It’s a near-miracle you’re even alive, a little brain damage wouldn’t have been a shock.”

“So I don’t have brain damage,” he said, skeptical.  “I just, what, set my memory down somewhere and walked away from it?”

That won him a small smile, a quick flash of teeth between thin lips, before she continued, quiet and serious.  “You suffered a massive seizure in the ambulance.  Five full minutes of convulsions, and you didn’t regain consciousness—nothing to sneeze at,” she added when he didn’t react. “We performed an MRI when you arrived. We expected to find a subdural bleed, which would have been manageable.”

The long pause made something in his chest seize up. Panic, maybe.  The dark voice grumbled, unsatisfied.  “But?”

“We didn’t find anything,” Doctor Hamada said.  “Your brain was lit up like a Christmas tree, don’t get me wrong, far more active than we usually see in unconscious patients, but there’s no damage.  We’ve kept you under observation until something changed, hoping we’d get answers when you improved or worsened, but you weren’t in any evident distress. You’ve been more or less comatose for the best part of an hour, and we’re not sure what the cause is.”

“So you…you have no idea why I can’t remember,” he said, pressing his lips together and trying not to let his hands shake.  He took a deep breath, pressing down the—hunger—fear.  He needed to focus, he needed answers—he needed the dark voice to leave him alone. He was reasonably sure that the emptiness in his head would be less concerning if he was the only one there.

My body, my mind, the dark voice said, almost bemused, and he scowled.

“We don’t know yet,” Doctor Hamada was saying kindly when he returned to reality from the cold and starless black, leaving the voice to mutter in the darkest corners.  “We’re trying to find your family, but without a last name, that’s proving difficult in our current chaos.  With your consent, we’d like to run some more tests—a blood test, to see if we can find any medications or drugs in your system, and another MRI, to see if anything’s changed.”

“Sure,” he said.  “I don’t know what it’ll help, but whatever you want.”

“Jake,” she said, and reached out to take his hand in hers. The point of contact was warm, her palm dry and slightly powdery from exam gloves, and he closed his eyes as a brief war raged through his body.  Part of him—all of him, really—wanted to clutch her hand until his knuckles ached, and maybe cry, cling to the point of human contact like it was all that was holding him to earth.  But in the black of his mind, the dark voice coiled forward, hungry hungry hungry, kill her, scare her, feed us, and the hollowness in his chest ached like an open wound.

He pulled his hand back, and the black voice snarled.  On the wall, in the corner of his eye, his shadow splintered into a thing, all long arms and tentacle and writhing motion—when he looked straight on, it was solid, tame.

“Jake,” Doctor Hamada repeated, gentle, unoffended by his retreat. The girl with the porcelain face was watching them, her eyes wide, and they flickered nervously to the wall behind his shoulder.  He tried not to notice, tried to put it out of his mind—my mind.  “I know this must be terrifying for you.  I can’t imagine what you’re going through.  But we’re going to help you, and we’ll find someone who knows you. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said—barely a murmur.  He tugged his hands closer and balled them into fists, until pain sparkled up his nerves from where his nails bit into the skin.  It reminded him that his body was his own, even if he didn’t particularly remember it.  

It is not, the dark voice parried, calm and cold.  He was pretty sure it was a bad sign that the voice was becoming clearer, that the press of the starless black was becoming a headache as the hollowness in his chest dragged at his ribs and heart.  Mine, my body, my mind, hungry.

“This body is mine,” he snapped aloud.  Doctor Hamada didn’t bat an eye, merely arched an eyebrow as if asking if he was done. His cheeks burned—he must be an easy blusher, he thought dimly, filing the information away—and he stared down at his fists so that he didn’t have to look at her.  He hadn’t meant to answer the voice aloud, hadn’t meant to give it the satisfaction.  

Across the room, the girl’s face wasn’t very expressive—logical reasons humans weren’t meant to be made from porcelain, he supposed—but he could almost feel the fear coiling off her skin.  He could feel it, like something that clung to his fingers and cloyed on his tongue, sweet and bitter.  It eased the hollowness, drove back the blackness minutely, and the voice moaned—not enough.  In the corner of his eye, he could see his shadow.  Shatter, freeze, shatter, freeze, in time with the beeping of his heart rate.

“I’ll send Melissa, the nurse from before, to take some blood, all right?” Doctor Hamada asked, and he nodded.  He didn’t watch her leave the room, looking down at the tendons standing out on the backs of his hands and trying not to see his shadow or the little girl in his periphery.

Then she spoke, and he looked up automatically.  “Your shadow is moving, and you’re not,” she said, voice thin and faint.  It vibrated strangely between porcelain lips.  “What are you doing to it?”

He tried to find something reassuring to say, but all he could do was whisper back, “I don’t know.”  Shatter, freeze.  Spike-drop-pause.  “I’m not doing it.”

Hungry.

The nurse—Melissa, he reminded himself—returned almost at once, the same worn smile on her face as before.  She carried a small tray, arrayed with a syringe, a rubber tie, and a contained needle, and set it down beside his bed with businesslike efficiency.

“Hi, Jake,” she said.  “Normally we’d send you to the lab to get blood drawn, but given the givens, we thought it might be better to keep you here in the ICU until we know you won’t seize again.”

“Wouldn’t want to scare the lab techs,” he muttered, distracted, and eyed the needle, expecting to feel some trepidation at the look of it. There wasn’t a flicker of nerves, just a feeling of…condescension.  It was the voice, he thought, amused at the idea that a needle could be a genuine threat.

“Exactly,” Melissa said with a laugh, pulling on a fresh pair of gloves and tying the rubber strip around his arm a few inches above the elbow. That part was a little nervewracking, the foreign feeling of rubber on skin, of—how dare she restrain us—compression too tight for comfort.  “Can you make a fist for me a few times?”  He did, feeling the ache of trapped blood set in almost immediately as the vessels in his forearm stood out, and she nodded, approving.  

Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again, he repeated to himself, reciting the rule like a mantra as the voice pressed forward.  Something to think about, that was what he needed, something that would let him focus and hold back the tide of starless black.

Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again.

Spike-drop-pause.  Shatter, freeze.

Melissa carefully affixed the needle to the syringe and tore open a packet that smelled strongly of alcohol, astringent and sharp in his nose.

Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again.

Spike-drop-pause.  Shatter, freeze.

The alcohol wipe was freezing against his skin, but nothing in comparison to the pressing, crushing weight of the cold presence behind his eyes.

Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again.

Spike-drop-pause.  Shatter, freeze.

“This shouldn’t hurt much,” Melissa said quietly.  She smiled at him, trying to coax one out of him in return.  “I’m good at this part.”  He didn’t dare twitch, just in case the focus it would take to smile through the roar of the voice was the last straw.

Melissa touched the needle to his skin, a point of cold pressure.

His shadow fractured, exploding up the wall like splashing black paint, and took the whole world with it.

Never raise anything up—

The needle pressing at his skin—

Hungry, hungry, HUNGRY—

He blinked up at cloud-striped blue sky, and stood up without a thought, joints popping stiffly but not giving him any real trouble. There was a clatter, and he—Jake, his name was Jake—looked down for the source of the sound.  Bits of plaster rained down from his shoulders and hair, a fine white dust coating his hands and drifting around his feet like a miniature blizzard.

His chest wasn’t hollow anymore.  In fact, he felt…sparkling, like he’d drunk four espressos and was standing on a mountain top, energized and clear and fresh.

Jake looked around at the rubble surrounding him, bemused, and froze.

There she was.  The little girl from his room.  Half the ceiling had come down on her, and she hadn’t been nearly so fortunate as he was. Her porcelain face had a fault line cracking from the forehead all the way to the jaw, down through her eye and cheek, shards broken out of her lips and chin.  Blood seeped from the crack, deep enough to pass through to the tissue still left under the transmuted skin, blazing red against the smooth white. The eye within the crack stared, with no eyelid to cover it, and the other was closed.  What was left intact of her face was twisted into genuine terror, so blindingly obvious that even the inexpressive porcelain couldn’t hide it.

There was a precarious moment where Jake thought he might be sick on the spot.  His vision wavered, a desperate lurch of nausea as his stomach hurled itself at his ribs and tried to crawl up his throat.

He looked down to steady himself and saw, sprawled at his feet, Melissa.  She was mostly clear of rubble—impressive, he thought numbly, it looked like two stories of hospital and patients had been brought down wholesale—but she was broken, joints yanked apart until they had dislocated altogether.  She looked like she’d been put on the rack, or toyed with by something immensely strong and enormous.  The needle was jammed into the soft skin at the hollow of her throat, blood spilled across her skin, and the rubber tie had fluttered down to cover her dead eyes like a blindfold.

Whirling away, Jake retched, doubling over and coughing up thin, sour bile.  There was nothing in his system to be thrown up, but the convulsions left him with tears on his cheeks and shakes in his hands.  Or maybe that was the destroyed hospital.  Maybe it was everything.

In the corner of his eye as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, Jake could see Doctor Hamada, killed by a falling steel beam. He hoped it had been quick.

His shadow, sprawled on the ground, was quiescent, his own shape rather than the tentacle-laden nightmare that had exploded across the wall.  His mind was still cold and dark, but the cold was distant, and the dark manageable. The voice was quiet, nearly purring with satisfaction—feast, what a feast, all their fear—and Jake was alone in the wreck of a hospital that had been destroyed by the monster that shared his body.

This was nothing a human could do, even the most deranged magic user.  There was something else in his mind, a demon—rude—or an old god—better—something that fed on terror and was under the impression that Jake shouldn’t be in his own head anymore.  That did explain a few things about the magical explosion, he supposed. Jake, or whoever he had been before, had bitten off more than he could chew and invited that…thing into his head. By mistake or design, it hardly mattered.

“Never raise anything up that you can’t lay down again,” he said aloud, his abused throat turning his voice raspy.

Lay me down, then, human, the voice said, almost chortled, ice touching Jake’s spine at the dare.  

“Go to hell.”  He didn’t get a response that time, only another cruel wave of sensation not unlike a dismissive sneer.

Jake stood there for another long moment, trying not to see the brass arm flung out from under a pile of debris, before a realization rose up through the fog filling his brain.  He couldn’t stand here forever.  More to the point, he was a danger to anyone who tried to take him in by force.  He didn’t know what the voice, the monster—old god—could do if pressed.  It had annihilated a hospital along with everyone inside just for a meal.  He was pretty sure the single most dangerous thing the police could do was try to imprison him, and that meant he needed to not be here when they arrived.

That meant he needed clothes.  Real clothes, not the tattered paper hospital gown.

Jake found what he could, jackets and scrubs without bloodstains, and tried not to be sick again at the idea of wearing the clothes of people he’d killed.  Once he was dressed—for a given value thereof—he tugged the hood of his stolen jacket up over his face and shoved both hands deep into his pockets, pretending that it would let him hide.

The sirens arrived just as Jake picked his way out of the last of the debris and slipped into the gathering crowd.

Good, the voice mused.  Find more people, more fear, more power.

Jake hunched his shoulders and walked faster, leaving the ruined hospital behind him.