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Martin had reached the point where he thought he might be able to sleep, even through the knocking and the terror and the paranoia, just because he was too exhausted not to. He had to sleep--he couldn't keep going like this, sitting in the kitchen with the one candle he owned, Theodora trembling in his lap, trying to read from The Complete Works of Shakespeare in the shuddering darkness. He couldn't even remember which play he was trying to read; every other line that soft knocking would come and Theo would flinch against him and he'd jolt in his seat and lose his place.
The thing was the vent in his bedroom, right over the bed. He had pinned towels over it, but the thought of lying beneath it made his breath come in panicky gasps. There was the couch, a cheap, uncomfortable thing that he got from a second-hand store, but that was right by the door.
In the end he rearranged the entire living room, then took all the blankets from his bed and made a tent over the couch, as if hiding under it would keep him safer than just being out in the open air. He and Theo curled up on the couch, boxed themselves in with pillows, and shoved the coffee table up against the door. His daemon huddled with him in their makeshift blanket fort and for a while, they slept. It was fitful and full of unpleasant dreams, but it had been so long, and Martin was willing to take what he could get--until he awoke to find Theo gone from her place by his head, and he sat bolt upright with a heaving gasp to look frantically around for her.
His rabbit daemon was sitting at the door, nose and ears twitching, and Martin barreled over the back of the couch to scoop her up and scramble away.
"Martin," Theo said, and it was the first sound either of them had made since Prentiss had started knocking on their door. "Martin, she says--she says she doesn't have a daemon anymore."
"Wh-what?" His heart was pounding in his chest, blood rushing in his ears. He thought he must have misheard her, though he couldn't remember ever having done so before.
"She says the Hive--she says they ate him, Martin!"
Theo was trembling in his arms, her eyes wide and earnest and Martin could feel it, feel the horrified sympathy she felt, the terror warring with the urge to comfort the thing outside, that claimed to have no daemon of her own. "That...that can't be true," Martin said weakly, sinking to the floor with his back against the couch. Theo's ears twitched and rotated towards the door, as if she heard something.
"She says his name was Jaska, and he was a polecat, and that..." Theo buried her head in Martin's chest. "She says she misses him."
"Well she can't have you," Martin hissed, with a vehemence that took him slightly by surprise.
For a moment there was only silence, broken occasionally by knocking; sometimes Theo's ears twitched like Prentiss was whispering to her again. Then, very quietly, Theo murmured, "I wish we could help her."
"We can't," Martin said, but he felt it, too. She says the Hive ate him. He's seen the pictures, read the reports. Prentiss had been brought to the hospital with a daemon, and he had been every inch as infected as she had been, and when she walked out of there, she had carried him, limp and unresponsive, in her arms. Eventually sightings of her stopped mentioning her daemon entirely.
Jon had said she was the daughter of a witch, so Martin had assumed her daemon was off doing whatever the infected daemon of a witch might do--infect other daemons, maybe. But--but what if he was just--just gone? Eaten?
The knock came again and Martin shuddered, holding Theo closer to his chest. He could wait it out. He had to.
Nearly two weeks later, he stumbled out of his flat for the first time, and clutched his daemon to him as he ran all the way to the Institute.
Jane Prentiss was the daughter of a witch. The distinction, in her case, was an important one; in almost every other case, saying one was the daughter of a witch would imply that she herself was a witch. This was not the case with Jane Prentiss, and this gnawed at her.
Her mother was not unkind, but she was distant, and Jane would go years without seeing her; she wondered if her mother simply forgot, sometimes, that Jane did not have her longevity. When she and Jaska were younger, they would make up elaborate stories about the adventures her mother must be on, adventures that she would surely take them on someday, when they were older. Jaska would become a raven, a falcon, a goose, and would take to the skies, straining against the limits of their range until Jane would cry out for him to come back and he would come barreling into her arms. Always under the pretense that someday, they would know how to do it for real; that they would grow to be a witch and her daemon, capable at last of taking their place in their mother's clan.
The day did not come, and when Jane moved to her flat on Prospero Road, she didn't leave her mother an address, and she never saw her again.
When the Hive first sang to her, it sang of her beauty, and it sang of making her perfect, and it sang of belonging. When Jaska pressed that first hesitant paw to the surface of the Hive, it sent a thrill of warmth through them both, like he was touching the daemon of their true love. The Hive sang, not of starlight or the Northern Lights or the crystalline cold of the arctic, but of things warm and soft and squirming, and some days Jaska would coil himself around it and some days he would cower behind Jane's ankles as she stared at it.
Once Jaska had settled, and not as anything avian, they had abandoned the thought that they might be destined for something. The Hive reignited all those childish dreams of destiny and greatness--it sang that they could finally fulfill that gaping need in their heart, and become a part of something great, something beyond even the mysterious affairs of their mother. They could be consumed, and finally slot out a place of their own.
The hospital was a bit of a blur. There was death and blood and screaming, but Jane walked among it with an iron calm. She lifted Jaska from the twitching grasp of a dying nurse's daemon; she took no care not to touch her, and the nurse spasmed and gagged on the floor, taking his hand away from his emptied eye sockets to reach blindly for his daemon. Jane kicked her towards him and left them to die.
Jaska was limp in her arms, though his eyes shone brightly and he whispered to her, a low litany of love and exaltation. Soon he would be gone, vanished, consumed entirely by the Hive, and he yearned for it. "We will be transformed," he whispered, and Jane pulled him close, pressed her lips to his fur the way she had when she was young and lonely. The worms that inhabited them both squirmed between them. "Jane, you'll be so beautiful. So perfect. And I will be with you forever, inside you and around you and we'll never be apart."
"Never," Jane whispered back. How foolish she had been, to think the witches and their daemons knew anything. To think she had wanted that separation, that distance, when now Jaska would make his home in her bones and blood. Oh, how horrified her mother would be to see her now. Jane smiled at the thought. "Never."