One of my arms had gone numb. Outside was completely silent, at least from where I was laying. I groaned and fumbled for my phone on the coffee table, almost falling off the couch. 4:56.

Even falling asleep at midnight, this was the best I could do.

My several attempts to sit up were fruitless. There was no point, anyway; I didn't have classes for many, many hours. Jack probably hadn't woken up yet, and even if he had, it wasn't my job to greet him at the door with a smile and a cookie. I took a deep breath and fell back down onto the couch, hitting my head on an armrest.

"Shit—ow, actually, that really hurt!" I hunched my shoulders and hugged my knees, shivering. "...and now I'm talking to myself. Amazing. I'm having a great time."

I can't even think up a good sarcastic quip. This is definitely an off-day.

The front door started to creak open.

I sat up and shifted back, trying to make out a silhouette in the half-dark of morning.

"Jack...?"

The stupid guy let out a sigh of relief. I noticed he'd found his mask again, somehow. "I thought you went off to class, or something."

"It's 5:00. I'm not completely insane."

"I got possessed again, didn't I?"

How forward.

"...yeah."

I jumped in my spot when he made his way towards me, and quickly started praying that he wouldn't notice. No luck; he switched on the lights, lifted his mask and wiped an oncoming drop of tar from his eyelid, concern etched into his face. "Is everything okay? Did I do something?"

"N-no, it's fine. I'm just...recovering, I guess." I muttered the last part to myself, hoping he hadn't caught it all.

"From what?"

"...something. I-I just don't think you'd want to know—"

"Well, if it's not me, then why aren't you—?"

"You're not the only thing I have to deal with in my life! Get over yourself, would you?"

I almost flinched after saying that, all too aware of how mean it came out. He raised his eyebrows in a moment of pure surprise before glaring.

"Okay. So it's like that."

"Jack, I'm—trust me, that didn't come out how I meant it to."

"No, no, I get it. I mean, why feel concerned for you after being possessed and stripped of all rational thought for a night, right?"

"Come on, man, that's not—"

"You can take care of yourself just fine. Doctor Rafael, healer sensation, gets by on her own without anybody else!"

"I'm sorry. Hey, wait—!" I stood up and grabbed his arm as he started walking towards the front door. "Don't leave. I'm sorry, I really am. I shouldn't have said that, I just don't want you getting mixed up in stuff you shouldn't be."

"But it does have to do with me. Doesn't it? Hiding your feelings won't make this any better, you know that."

"I—yeah, I do, but this could really..." I lost my train of thought the moment I glanced down at his hand. More specifically, the tar on his hand. My eyebrows knit together in confusion.

"It was cold."

"...what?"

I sighed and let go of him, collapsing back onto the couch and effectively backing myself into a corner. "Last night," I muttered at the wall straight ahead, "while I was patching you up...actually, it was mostly after. Everything was set, I just had to get you to fall asleep. You kept trying to sit up, and I knew you were going to hurt yourself doing that, your wounds would've opened up again. But then you...um, I touched your face. Don't really know what led up to it. But the tar was cold. I-I don't know if it's because of the weather, or if that's just what happens when you get all messed up like that, I kind of pushed it to the back of my mind because then a bunch of even weirder things happened—"

"Like what?"

You'll definitely freak out if I tell you.

I closed my eyes. "It's not important. I just...well, do you know why? Why it started running cold? I was kind of scared to touch it again, I don't know how long it stayed like that."

Jack tilted his head and sat down next to me, shifting around like he was trying to find a way to get comfortable. The corners of his mouth were fixed in an awkward, embarrassed smile he couldn't seem to get rid of. I could almost feel his frustration in waves. Eventually he sighed and shook his head, hands curled into fists on the couch cushions. This is not good, everything screamed.

"Well?" I crossed my arms when he failed to respond for a solid minute. He raised his eyebrows and fiddled with the zipper on his sweater.

"Hm. Uh, I...don't think you're ready to hear the answer."

"What? Now I want to know even more! Come on!" I leaned forward to catch his gaze as he turned further and further away from me like an angry toddler. After a few more incessant pleas, he snapped back around and pointed at me accusingly. He was practically bristling.

"See?! Now you know how it feels!"

My eyes widened. "Now you know how it feels to have somebody pester you for answers! Look, we can play the blame game all day, but you know what that whole tar situation was about, and I can't even begin to describe what happened—"

"Stop! Stop talking, just..." He rubbed his hands together like he was washing them, pushing his hair back and patting it down again, taking a few deep, whistle-like breaths. A tiny black drop started trailing down his face from the nose, and he sniffed once in an attempt to stop it.

"Let's drop this. Just forget anything ever happened. Okay?"

Whatever happened to the "don't hide your feelings, Sawyer" guy?

"I don't think either of us are going to be real good at that," I muttered. Jack coughed into a hand and glared at nothing.

"Well, if we don't try, we'll just end up at each other's throats again. We both get to keep our secrets, at least, until one of us"—he shot me a pointed look—"decides to open up."

I scoffed. "You think this will matter in a week? You're going to remember last night eventually, anyway. I'm the one who'll never find out..." A tiny smile found its way to me as I realized exactly what was going to be replaying in his head soon. "Oh, just wait until it comes back to you. So embarrassing. It's not even my problem at this point."

All of a sudden, the beginnings of a smirk crossed his face. "Sure, it isn't. I'll bet whatever I did, you were as soft and gentle as you always are with me." He leaned over to flick me on the nose, smugly watching as I shifted back and tried to come up with a response to that. My ears started burning and my gaze snapped to the floor, the walls, anywhere other than him. After a minute, just when I thought I might develop a stutter, he broke out in soft laughter.

"Oh, I'm sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?"

You dick! This was supposed to be the other way around! I pressed a hand to my cheek. Was I always this warm?

"You're not funny," I said through gritted teeth. His laughter subsided and he wiped a black tear away with his pinkie.

"I think I am. Either way, your face definitely had it covered."

"You asshole!" I launched a torn-up throw pillow at his face, secretly relieved that this meant we were still friends.

Just try not to make things weird once you see what you did...

—

"Are you really sure? Like, 100%? It just snowed a ton out there."

"I'll be fine. Trust me, I need to get back."

"Do you?"

Jack fixed me with a funny look. Usually, I'd ask that question to one of my friends as a teasing, psychological trick. But right now I couldn't be sure whether he was telling the truth or if something else was afoot. What that "something else" could possibly be, I had no clue. I just knew that nobody, under any circumstances, should go out in jeans and a hoodie right after a sudden whiteout the night before—especially if they'd suffered severe trauma to the chest and just got patched up. Jack fiddled with a sleeve, a look of panic flashing across his face when he found no vast array of surgical tools strapped to his arm. He sighed.

"What do you mean? Of course I do. My boss'll kill me if I don't."

I folded my arms and narrowed my eyes. "And the cold will kill you if you do. Look, I get that you didn't want to end up here in the first place. Something happened, you got possessed, you...got hurt, one way or another. So I had to help. But..." I trailed off and sank into the couch, unsure of what I was trying to say. Or rather, how I could say it without sounding like an entitled dick. "I want to spend more time with the real you"? "It's rude to just leave like that after I treat you, like you're just some stranger of a patient"?

"...I don't want this to only be about me healing you. I—God, that sounds weird. But it's the truth. You happy? Not gonna get on my back for 'hiding my feelings' anymore?" I wiggled my fingers mockingly in the air, my mission to not sound mean turning counterproductive. Jack raised an eyebrow, looking sheepish.

"Uh...yeah, actually. I am happy." His face turned stony just as quickly, though, and he looked to the window. "I want to stay here longer. Really. But I know that if I don't get back, he'll blame me for slacking off, or whatever. Even if I got held up by all the snow. Even if it's not my fault."

"So why not make it your fault, if it doesn't matter?"

He took a moment to process that, seeming to weigh the options in his head before a tiny smile broke through on his face. He let out a sigh, as if giving in to some devilish temptation. In a way, he sort of was.

"Fine. I guess. But you're not keeping me locked up here for the rest of the day," he said, messing up the front of my hair with a smirk. I patted it back down and stuck my tongue out at him.

"Hey, just until it's safe to go outside like a normal person! I've got classes later, anyway...unless I keep you prisoner in the basement until I get back?" I bit back a laugh, grabbing his arms and holding them behind his back in an iron grip. He was able to throw me off, anyway, and pointed accusingly at me with a gasp.

"Who's the monster now?!"

We both burst into quiet laughter, and once it subsided I headed upstairs to retrieve my textbooks.

There was a profound silence as we sat, huddled around the coffee table in concentration—well, all that was mostly me. Jack, on the other hand, was standing on the other side, nowhere near as fixated as he was confused. It seemed like he was trying not to let it show, but an expectant look ended up seeping out into his face. I glanced up, unable to fight a smile.

"What? I don't have all these laying around for nothing."

He shook his head. "I don't get you. You were so desperate to hang out, and all we're doing is...this? Not that I'm judging," he added hastily. I let out a chuckle.

"Well, what did you have in mind?"

He held up his hands and raised his eyebrows. "Nothing! I was just expecting it to be more like, 'coffee and cheesy stories over your kitchen table' time? Y'know, like we usually do."

I sighed. "Not today, kidney-boy. USMLE's going to kick my ass in a couple months if I don't get myself together. Studying time."

"US-what now?"

"Nevermind. I'm just...swamped, I guess is how people my age should put it. Though I feel like going batshit insane with stress would be more accurate. Take your pick."

Jack scoffed and sat down next to me, grazing one of the textbook pages with a fingertip. "Consider yourself lucky I'm letting you get away with calling me kidney-boy."

"Consider that considered," I shot back. I could almost make out a smile on his face before he cleared his throat.

"W-well, I suppose now that I'm here, I could...y'know. Help. If that's even possible."

His sudden nervousness managed to pierce through my rocky exterior and tug at my heartstrings. "Aw, so we're study-buddies now?" I rolled a pencil back and forth on the table, then rested my head in laced fingers. "If only you understood any of what I was talking about."

"Rude."

"I'm just saying! I don't know, are you sure you want to? It's kind of...oh, what was that thing I said to Leigh yesterday...?" I tapped the pencil on my chin in thought. Jack hesitated the slightest bit, as if unsure that he was remembering it right.

"Tough shit for circus peanuts?"

I snapped my fingers. "That's it. Well, a medical degree isn't exactly what I'd call peanuts, but you know what I mean."

He shrugged. "Eh. It might make the time go by faster, at least while some of the snow melts." He took a glance out the window with a shocked frown. "Jesus, I was really going to go out into that mess? How'd I even manage to get here last night?"

"It was a whiteout. Nobody really expected it, I think you came by just as it started."

He clicked his tongue with a quick raise of the eyebrow. "Good thing I was all numb then, I guess." Turning his attention back to the various books stacked on the table, he seemed to get into a zone I'd only seen accessed by stressed-out freshmen at the end of the first marking period. His little...comment about college debt last night suddenly made a whole lot more sense; he used to be just a regular student like me, right?

"So, what are we looking at here?" he asked in a mutter. I sucked in a breath and stole a glance at the top book's cover.

"I suppose our cramming session's gonna start with neuroanatomy. Nerves, the brain, all that junk."

Jack nodded gravely. "Maybe you can use your newfound knowledge to rewire my brain, and stop me from getting all loopy like that." At my lack of a response, he tilted his head subtly in my direction and held out his hands. "I'm joking."

"Oh, okay."

"C'mon, I wouldn't try and make you do that."

"I know. I was just going to say, none of this stuff is really 'newfound,'" I said, waving my pencil in a circle around the table. "I'm probably just going to write stuff down that hasn't stuck yet, make sure I've got all the procedures down—hell, maybe make flash cards if it comes to that."

I didn't wait for a definitive "go" from either of us to start writing from the book. There was one chapter in particular that kept tripping me up as the hour went by; I probably hadn't reviewed it too much earlier this year, and on top of that, it was one of the most complicated, most precise of subjects I'd read about. Looking at my notebook after I was done with that section gave me a headache. Jack was up to quiz me on whatever he could, insistent that it was totally fine even though he screwed up his face in utter confusion every ten seconds from the stuff he was reading aloud—at one point, I could've sworn he whispered "what the fuck?" under his breath, immediately glancing up to make sure I hadn't heard.

"Um. Yeah, I think I'm gonna take a break, if you want to come along," he said after a few minutes of complete silence between us. I nodded, rubbing one of my eyes and looking past him at the wall about 10 feet away. I'd been staring at my books and notes for so long, I needed to readjust my vision.

"Yeah. Let's go."

We both headed to the kitchen by instinct, with me grabbing an oat snack bar from the cabinet and him digging through shelves to find a glass. He filled it up with water from the tap, and almost immediately my mind flashed to what had happened last night when I dragged him here. I had to stop myself from smacking the glass out of his hand, instead rushing around the table to grab his wrist as he raised it to his mouth.

"What are you doing?"

He took a step back in surprise, widening his eyelids before looking at the glass, uncertain.

"Um...drinking? What, is it poisoned?"

"You—you can't. It burns you. Doesn't it?" My voice was shaking for some reason. Jack tilted his head with a concerned expression, nodding slowly and removing my hand from his wrist.

"I think I can, Shot-Nerves McGee."

"...you can...how?" I winced in dreaded anticipation as he downed the whole glass without so much as a blink, shrugging as if he hadn't noticed my tiny jolt of anxiety.

"Maybe 'cause I'm not fully demon, you know? That kind of 'purity melts evil' bullshit only works on real ones." A smile crossed his face as he snapped his fingers in realization. "Like the boss! Oh, next opportunity I get, I'm collecting buckets of this stuff."

"But when you were—"

"Possessed? Yeah, that's different. I'm pretty sure whatever kind of tar or smoke's in me when that happens, it's..." He waved a hand vaguely in the air, as if trying to find the right word. "Essence? Yeah, demon essence, leftover from dear old boss himself. Kinda gross, come to think of it. But I was able to take a shower without dissolving like that witch from Oz, remember?"

I folded my arms close to my chest, nodding and looking at the floor. "...yeah. You were. I just—sorry, I overreacted."

"Don't be sorry. It's not that big of a deal. Like...at all." He wiped his mouth, leaned against the counter and grinned deviously. "In fact, I'd say it's cute that you care about me."

Every ounce of embarrassment I'd been feeling completely shriveled up within the second. "Oh, my god, this again!"

"Sawyer's got a heart," he singsonged, lightly patting me on the head as he made his way out of the kitchen. I groaned and fought the urge to either tackle him to the ground or rip out several locks of my hair.

"Come on, it's not even...of course I care about you, dude, what do you take me for? Besides, I'm not trying to start my day off by mopping up a bunch of half-demon goop on the floor if that all went sideways."

I heard a few chuckles from the living room. "Okay, okay, if you say so..."

—

Another couple hours passed between then and the next complaint, to my surprise. After all that "Sawyer has a heart" business, we both didn't have a lot of places to go from there. We mainly sat in silence, Jack fiddling with anything non lethal nearby as a half-assed attempt to cure his boredom, and me continuing to numb my mind with pages and pages of neurology. I realized the irony of it all after those few hours and felt the urge to slap my forehead creep up on me.

Jack furrowed his eyebrows once we'd reached a certain double-page spread in A Comprehensive Review of Neurology, and tapped the diagram's head.

"Oh. There are pictures now."

I leaned down to fold my arms on the table. "So you weren't paying attention for the last, like, 200 pages?"

"Well, no, but I can actually kind of understand this one." He shifted in his seat to get a better look at our lovely model—a body with all its skin, muscle, and other tissue stripped away to reveal all of the neural pathways. "These nerves in the arms...that one is connected to the funny bone. That's the one you see on the surface, when you first cut into someone..." He pointed at the forearm, muttering to himself as if desperately trying to get a grip on this subject through anything he already knew. Well, that's kind of what all of us are doing, isn't it.

"...yeah, if any of these get cut, you're as good as dead," he said as he placed a finger on each of ten different nerves all across the body. I let out an appreciative hum.

"'Enough to get you by,' huh? I guess you weren't lying to me."

Jack glanced up. "What?"

"October. You came by my house, gave me my book back, said you knew 'enough to get you by.' About the body, organs, bones, all that."

He fixed me with a funny look. "How do you remember that?"

I opened my mouth to answer, quickly realizing I'd just backed myself into a corner. Why did I remember that?

"Eh. Steel trap of a mind, I suppose. I mean, I kind of have to be. Who knows what'd happen if I forgot a medical procedure, or which tools fit with which sort of operation, or...you know." While I blew up a small portion of my bangs, Jack frowned and tilted his head.

"What's the point of all that preparation, anyway? You can't just...do some digging, find out what's wrong and put it back together?" He awkwardly linked his fingers as if to prove his point, and I laughed.

"I mean, okay. I guess this is a cannibal I'm talking to, you haven't really had to sort this stuff out. You just eat what you can and go."

Jack narrowed his eyelids. "It's a lot more complicated than that, you know."

"Well, so is this," I said, closing the book and drumming my fingers along its spine. "You can't just 'do some digging,' as you so eloquently put it. If I even thought of being that careless during an operation, then beeeeep!" I tilted my head to the side, widening my eyes dramatically. "That's a dead patient."

"Oh, come on, you can admit it around me. Most of this is just trivial human bullshit," he said, gesturing to the contents of my coffee table as if it were a heap of flaming garbage. "You guys really love making things more complicated for yourselves, don't you?"

I gave in to the temptation and groaned, flopping back onto my seat.

"It's so stupid, right? I mean, if you've got shaky hands, or your vision's a little off, you might as well be out of a job here! Too bad medicine and magic don't really go hand-in-hand, there might be somebody I could go to for that." I twirled my pencil between my fingers and tossed a knowing look his way. "You know, like one of those 'live, laugh, love' soccer moms who believe their crystals will take care of all that business."

"Oh, no, there is."

"...what?"

He shrugged like he didn't expect me to think anything of it. "There are magical healers. Professionals, even. I'm not the only weird, supernatural thing out there, you know."

I let that sink in and then turned to Jack, grabbing him by the sides of his hood and pulling him over so we were face-to-face.

"Take me to them."

He frowned after a short minute, something shifting in the color of his face. It was subtle, but I was close enough to notice. "...oh. Uh, I really don't think you'd want that—"

"Jack, if there's somebody out there who can make this all go faster, no shit would I want to meet them!"

"I just—I don't know about it! You probably wouldn't be welcome there, it's not a nice place. And it's kind of personal this time. You'd have to get used to a lot of new things, and most of them won't seem so great and I have a feeling you're not going to take it well—"

"That's absurd, when have I not taken anything well?"

Jack fixed me with a tired look before raising a finger. I got the feeling he had a heap of answers to that, but was keeping his mouth shut for both of our sanity's sake.

"Fine. But we're going to have to go back."

"Back...where?"

"To the park. The forest trail, the fake one." He sighed, put the mask on, and pulled his hood over his head. "We're going to the demon realm."