Jenny: The First Taste of Revenge

Oh, good God, what was this blurry darkness? His heart throbbed through his entire body. He felt as though he were chained to a rock, not his bed, subject to the lashings of a mighty sea whose waves were first boiling, then chilling cold. He heard Jason's voice as an indistinct roaring in his ears. He saw a flash, a glimmer, a spear of light above him, which he thought he ought to recognize, but could not; he tasted pain in his mouth. He felt something cinched about his waist, holding him fast to the rock - the bed, the bed, Artos, it is a bed! He dragged reality through his brain, trying to fight against the fever. The spear was lamplight on the Guttersnipe's earring. No. Was it? He knew in the back of his battered mind that it ought to be, that it had to be, but staring at it, it began to look like something else.

He started upward. The belt about his waist, holding him down, only served to further his panic. "Get that cat out of my room!" he cried, thrusting a hand at the doorway.

A black cat, half-domestic, stood on the threshold. It had its hackles up, hissing and spitting as though all of Otherworld were yanking sparks out of its fur at once. The little patch of white on its chest seemed to glow. A knife - an iron - anything! He groped for a thing to hurl at it, desperate, enraged as the hands in the blurry dark lunged at him, pushing him down. No one moved toward the cat. The voices roared in his ears. He clenched a fist and swung. He hit something. Something hit him back, and a world of stars exploded on his vision, and all plunged into hollow darkness.