JV Hampton-VanSant

Even so, you grip the dagger and stand, hell-bent on going down fighting.

Too bad your leg has other ideas.

Jarred by your unstable weight, the sharp contents of your fleshbag calf shift and clatter.

Your entire leg cracks like a lightning bolt.

Shrieking, you spill sideways into the aisle, and the light shifts as your watcher springs across the theater.

He lands in the aisle above you with a feral grace, claws digging into the red carpet, embedding you both in a foggy wolfsbane meadow.

The legendary flower is lethal to shapeshifters, but something tells you the weapon you need doesn't reside in the world of unreality.

Time to dig deep, remember?

Freakin' literally.

You grip the dagger and start with the bottom stitch, near where your ankle bones used to live.

You pop your stitches, one by one.

Desperate, shaking, sanity swimming on the edge of blacking out.

Pop, pop, pop, from ankle to mid-thigh, until your flesh splits open like a rifle case.

You gasp.

Instead of bone, an arsenal of meat and metal spills out.

From this gut-twisting muck of hamburger and horror spills blades and crucifixes and tiny alchemy bottles.

No going back, your watcher crouches again, eager to finish you.

His shadow darkens over you, hooked hands, fingers like a skeletal forest preparing to tangle around you.

From the booth, the Rialto's projector light flick-flick-flickers.

The contents of your oozing legsack gleam.