Sorry to keep you waiting

But since my idiot brother took the advice that alcohol would defeat rampant paranoia and general directionless terror to heart, it seems I'm still in charge of telling everybody what happened.

We stayed in one place too long again, and I've finally realised what I was so stupidly missing that meant The New Girl was always catching up with us. The Operator Symbol skews the time it takes for whatever part of Him that directs her to find us, and I'm incapable of drawing one without bringing Him down upon us. But that's another story.

We were both asleep, right at about five am where it overlaps for a couple of hours before Ben gets up at seven or so, when The New Girl kicked the door to our room in - which is, incidentally, the first point I've found in favour of staying in more expensive hotels. Ben was a whole lot closer to awake than I was, and jumped right up, but he tells me she just pushed him aside and into a wall and lunged at me. Needless to say, I wasn't quite capable of getting from half-awake to defending myself quick enough, and she had a knife of her own. I was tangled up in the sheets, and she was absolutely insane and I couldn't get my blade to flick out without getting stabbed in the eye or something.

I don't know how long we fought, but there was so much blood all over me, and my arms felt like they were being torn apart. Eventually she wasn't even using the knife. She just tore at the cuts until her hands were covered with blood and I was starting to feel lightheaded from struggling so much and losing all that blood. And then she stopped, and for a moment I thought maybe she'd proved a point about how her threats were real and was leaving.

But then I felt it. I felt Him coming. I struggled out of the tangle of sheets, bleeding everywhere as I got to my feet and saw my brother writhing around on the floor in apparent agony, which I'm told was a result of a rather underhanded kick to a rather vulnerable area, if you catch my drift.

She was drawing The Operator Symbol from my blood, laughing maniacally as she did. It was a full on, completely deranged slasher flick laugh like you've never heard before, and it was all made worse by that paradoxical feeling of creeping dread and growing calm that meant He was coming. The symbol she was drawing wasn't very big, and it was awfully streaky, but it was obvious what it was and that's apparently enough.

I tried to stop her, but the sheets were all over the ground and I was bleeding everywhere and woozy as shit from the blood loss and I fell over like the useless idiot I am. And then she collapsed right in front of me and started groaning in agony like she always does when He shows up. And He was just there. He was so tall, towering above the three of us lying there in various states of agony and He was in my head and all I could see was Ben dying, over and over again. The blood all over me was his, not mine and I was responsible or I hadn't tried hard enough to save him or he'd killed himself because of me. The pain was gone from my arms and the wounds weren't real anymore but there was just so much agony. I couldn't breathe. My heart wanted to escape my chest and there was something shifting in the back of my head.

And then there was bliss. Pure, unadulterated bliss. I couldn't hear my brother shouting at me to run, I couldn't see him scramble across the bed to try to pick me up and get me away from that thing that is He, I couldn't feel the agony of countless open wounds all over my arms. I could hear the singing, though, the beautiful choir of souls caught in rapture. I could see Him, though, towering over us all from His seat on high. I could feel the loving warmth radiating from His heart to envelope the world. I just wanted to go home, back to those warm, loving arms.

I don't know how long it took for me to come back to myself, but I do know the first thing I did was vomit, and since I hadn't eaten for ages because I'd been alseep, it was mostly just stomach acid - and that shit burns. I mean, I still want to throw up.

He hadn't even noticed I'd vomited all over the floor of the car, he was that caught up in himself. I scared the hell out of him when I called his name, though, because apparently I'd been ranting and raving about the light of my God and a whole score of other crazy shit while he'd tried to get me away, and then once he'd gotten me into the car and done his best with my first aid kit in the boot and actually escaped the damned hotel I just fainted.

So once we'd figured out I probably wasn't going to die from the blood loss, on account of the fact I was awake again, we went back to the hotel and got all of our shit out of the room before we ran into another fiasco with the cops all over us again and cleared the hell out of there. We're getting the hell out of the state before we head to a hospital though, because as much as the bandages stop the bleeding and the neurofen kills some of the pain, I think I need stitches if these cuts are ever going to heal. Like, badly.

That took far too long and I need to change my bandages again because I'm bleeding everywhere. On that note, Ben'll probably be in charge of updating from now on, because writing fucking hurts.