I felt like I was on fire. My blood was flaming, the blue-white fire licking at my bones, burning me from the inside out.

"You can't get away from me," said the man. His head was a spidery mass of hair and eyes, and his voice was annoyingly calm. "I'll get what I want, little wind, and I'll get it now."

"No," I choked out. "No, no, no..."

He chuckled. "You think you can stop me?" he laughed. "Good luck with that, little wind."

Though I was livid, I was also in pain. How could he speak like this? It's one thing to turn down the creepy spider-headed freak, but another entirely to have him bite you and send you into poisoned agony. The venom, his venom, ran through me, burning, killing...

"Brisa!"

The voice filled me with more fear than the pain did. No, McKenna, Go, leave, get out of here! I warned telepathically. But she didn't hear me. My throat was too dry to speak. She'd never hear me in time.

"Brisa! Get away from her, freak!"

"Hm," he said. "I must have left two by mistake. I could have sworn you were the last one I let live."

"No," I squeezed out of my compressed and swelling throat. Spots were forming before my eyes. Let me see, I begged the spots, Let me see.

"Leave her–"

There was no mistaking the almost blue hair that swept into my limited sight. The black-haired beauty. The only one of my friends left.

Her voice subsided and I felt her scream more than I heard it. Apparently, he wasn't going to torture her, like he was going to torture me. A quick death.

My limbs began jerking about wildly.

Suddenly, the venom inside me turned icy cold, a new pain, different from the fire. This one hurt so much more.

Someone's warm hand touched my arm. At that point, I couldn't see. My vision was black. Why, then, was I not relieved of this pain through death? Why couldn't I die already?

Teeth, human teeth, just barely touched where he had bitten me.

McKenna was going to suck out the venom.

I tried to tell her no. The hole in her tooth, the hole in her tooth, I thought frantically. The poison will go straight to her head...

Tiny bit by tiny bit, the poison left me. The intense ice that had flowed through me now subsided reluctantly into McKenna, its new host and victim. My body lay still, trying to recover from the overtake of the near-death experience.

McKenna jerked once beside me. My vision returned to me and I watched as her gorgeous, innocent, protective face twitched uncontrollably until finally, she lay still.

"McKenna," I sobbed. The tears felt odd in my throat after the burning dryness. My body's watery reaction to my aloneness sent a wave of comfortable warmth through my now-relaxed body. I curled up beside the corpse. "McKenna."

My first reaction was to sit bolt upright in the bed, but my spine wouldn't allow it. Instead, my cold sweat had soaked the sheets and my arms flailed crazily, smacking the bed iron hard enough to give me bruises. The air around whirled about like a tornado. Papers and small machinery went flying around the room.

"Brisa!" Beast Boy's frantic voice shouted through the wind. "Calm down!" He grabbed my hand. "I'm here, I'm right here, it's okay!"

The wind ceased abruptly, making the small object land and break. Beast Boy's hand did not loosen.

"What's wrong?" he asked me. "What is it?"

I should not be thinking of that, I should not be thinking of that...