Chapter 107: Sinners and Saints

POV: Carly

The dress was black.

Not the safe kind of black that disappeared into a crowd. The kind that made a statement before you opened your mouth. Floor length with a slit that hit mid-thigh on the right side, thin straps, a low back that had made Katy say something unprintable when Carly first tried it on two weeks ago. She had bought it in September specifically for tonight and had not let herself second guess it since.

She stood in front of the mirror at six forty five and looked at herself.

Her hair was up, loose pieces falling around her face the way Katy had worked on for forty minutes with a curling iron and approximately eight hundred pins and the kind of focused intensity usually reserved for surgical procedures. Gold earrings. A single bracelet. The lip was dark red, deeper than she usually went, and it was exactly right.

She looked like herself.

The version of herself she had been working toward all semester. Not the performed version. Not the one who had been running committees and managing coven politics and keeping everyone around her comfortable. Just Carly. Dressed for something she had built and was proud of and was going to walk into with her head up regardless of everything else that was currently happening in her life.

Katy appeared in the mirror behind her.

She was in deep green, halter neck, hair down and straight. She looked extraordinary and she knew it and was completely unbothered about knowing it.

"Ready?" Katy said.

Carly picked up her small bag from the nightstand. She caught sight of Whitney's note beside it and paused for exactly a second.

"Ready." She said.

They walked out together.

The gymnasium doors opened at seven and Carly was already inside, already moving, already doing the ten last things that needed doing before anyone arrived. She checked the lighting with the venue coordinator. She checked the catering table. She fixed a centerpiece that had shifted in transport and straightened two chairs that were slightly out of alignment with their tables.

She was running on the specific energy of an event that was about to happen and was going to go well and she could feel it. The particular hum of a room on the verge of being exactly what it was supposed to be.

Students started arriving at seven fifteen.

They came in dressed for the theme in a way that made her genuinely proud of the student body for about thirty seconds. Witches in white with silver accessories, leaning into the saint imagery with halos and pale gowns. Vampires in dark jewel tones, deep reds and blacks, one or two with theatrical capes that were either ironic or completely sincere and either way worked. Werewolves in the kind of effortless dark casual that said I didn't think too hard about this but everything I own looks good. Sirens in blues and greens that caught the red uplighting in ways she hadn't anticipated and looked even better for it.

The room was filling.

The DJ found the right tempo around seven twenty and the floor started moving.

She watched it all from near the stage, clipboard in hand but not really looking at it anymore, just holding it because it gave her hands something to do.

"Excuse me." A voice at her elbow. "Are you the one responsible for this?"

She turned.

A junior she didn't know well, a witch named Priya who sat three rows behind her in advanced spellistry, was looking at the room with wide eyes and something close to genuine reverence on her face.

"It's incredible." Priya said. "I've been to three homecomings at this school and nothing has ever looked like this."

Carly felt the specific warmth of that. "Thank you. The committee worked really hard."

"You worked really hard." Priya said. "Everyone knows that." She smiled and moved toward the dance floor.

Carly looked at the room.

She had done this.

Even with everything that had happened over the past months, all the chaos and the drama and the nights she had spent crying into her pillow instead of sleeping, she had still done this. She had built something that three hundred people were currently walking into with their faces open and their shoulders loose and the specific ease of being somewhere that felt exactly right.

She held that for a moment.

Katy appeared at her side. "Stop standing here looking proud. Go dance."

"I'm working." Carly said.

"You have been working since September." Katy said. "For exactly tonight. It is tonight and the work is done." She tilted her head. "Go. Dance. You earned the floor."

Carly looked at the dance floor.

She looked at her clipboard.

She handed the clipboard to Katy.

Katy looked at it like she'd been handed a live animal.

Carly was already moving toward the floor.

POV: Enzo

He arrived twenty minutes late because Mauricio had lost his tie and they had spent fifteen minutes looking for it before discovering it was on Mauricio's own neck.

He did not know what to do with Mauricio sometimes.

He pushed through the gymnasium doors and stopped just inside to take in the room.

He stood there for a moment with his hands in his pockets.

He had been to a lot of events in his life. An objectively embarrassing number of events over an objectively embarrassing number of years. He had been to balls and galas and masked parties and events that had no name because naming them would have required acknowledging what they were. He had been to things that cost more money than most people saw in a lifetime and things that cost nothing and took place in empty buildings with stolen music.

This was a high school homecoming in a gymnasium in Black River Falls Washington.

It was also, genuinely, one of the better rooms he had walked into in recent memory.

The lighting was doing something that shouldn't have been possible with a standard school event budget. The whole space felt larger than it was and intimate at the same time, which was a contradiction in terms that Carly McPherson had apparently resolved through the specific application of red uplighting and gold draping and sheer force of will.

He found Niko by the wall near the far exit.

Of course by the wall near the far exit.

He had dressed for it at least, which was a low bar but one that Niko historically did not always clear for events he was attending under duress. Dark jacket, white shirt, hair pushed back instead of the usual curls-everywhere situation. He looked uncomfortable in the specific way of someone trying not to look uncomfortable and not fully succeeding.

He was looking at the dance floor.

Enzo followed his eyeline.

Carly was on the floor with a group of coven girls he didn't know, moving to whatever the DJ had found, her hair coming slightly loose already and her dress catching the red light and her face doing the thing it did when she wasn't performing for anyone.

He looked back at Niko.

Niko was looking at her the way he always looked at her when he thought nobody was paying attention, which was the way that told you everything you needed to know about how this was going to end even if neither of them had figured it out yet.

Enzo stopped beside him.

"You look terrible." He said pleasantly.

"Thank you." Niko said without looking away from the floor.

"Are you going to stand here all night."

"Possibly."

"She's going to leave before you manage to walk across the room at this rate."

"I know." He said. He finally looked at Enzo. "I'm giving her space."

"There is space and there is cowardice." Enzo said. "And there is also a very clear line between the two which you are currently standing on the wrong side of."

Niko looked back at the floor.

"She built this." He said. Quietly. Like he was saying it to himself. "All of it. Even while everything else was falling apart. She still built this."

Enzo looked at the room.

Then back at him.

"Yes." He said. "She did." He paused. "Which is what she does. Which is who she is. Which is, I assume, a large part of the problem you are currently having with yourself."

Niko said nothing.

"Go and talk to her." Enzo said. "The worst she can do is walk away and you already know what that feels like so it can't be worse than right now."

Niko exhaled.

He straightened up.

He took one more look at the dance floor.

He walked toward it.

Enzo watched him go and thought that this was either going to be one of the better things he'd witnessed or one of the more catastrophic, and either way it was considerably more interesting than standing by the wall.

He went to find the drinks table.