Chapter 95: BACK TO THE HOLE AGAIN

POV: Carly

The door opened and the smell hit her first.

Blood. Thick and metallic and everywhere, layered underneath the smoke and the music that was louder in here than it had seemed possible from outside. The lighting was low, almost deliberately so, casting everything in amber and shadow that made the room feel simultaneously larger and more claustrophobic than she remembered.

She had been here before.

This was not the same room.

The same building, the same floors, the same layout she could map from memory. But the energy was completely different. Like the same song played at the wrong speed in the wrong key. Everything slightly off in a way that her body registered before her brain caught up.

She moved in closer behind Mauricio and let the door fall shut behind Katy.

She saw it in pieces.

A vampire she didn't recognize near the entrance, mouth dark at the corners, feeding on a boy who sat slumped against the wall with his eyes open and completely empty, the threading already in place, his body cooperative and absent at the same time. The vampire didn't look up.

Against the far wall, two more. A girl who might have been a junior wrapped in the arms of someone Carly had seen in the vampire faction meetings, his face buried in her neck, her expression glassy and calm and entirely elsewhere.

On the floor near the speakers, a group of three, so tangled together that it took Carly a moment to sort out who was feeding and who was being fed from, blood decorating all of them like it meant nothing.

She stopped walking.

She had known, intellectually, what vampires did. She had known it since she was old enough to be warned about it. She had watched Niko in the library that first night, had seen the blood on his mouth and the cold certainty in his eyes and had been genuinely terrified of him. She had grown past that terror into something that sometimes forgot entirely what he was.

She was not forgetting right now.

There was so much blood.

Mauricio glanced back and found her frozen.

"Still with me?" He asked quietly.

She nodded, even though she wasn't entirely sure that was accurate.

"Just stay close." He said.

She stayed close.

They moved through the room and she kept her eyes mostly forward, cataloguing what she could handle and setting aside what she couldn't. She could handle the noise. She could handle the smell, barely, if she breathed through her mouth and focused on something else. She could handle the knowledge of what was happening even if the visual of it made her stomach turn.

What she couldn't handle was the idea that Niko was somewhere in this room doing the same thing and that he had chosen to come here instead of coming back to her.

"This is—" She started, and then stopped.

"Yeah." Mauricio said.

She didn't finish the sentence and he didn't ask her to.

Katy moved up beside her, close enough that their arms were almost touching. She wasn't saying anything. She had been quiet the entire walk over, quieter than Carly had ever heard her, and she was still quiet now. But she was there, and that was enough.

They made it to the other side of the ground floor. Mauricio paused.

"He's upstairs." He said. The way he said it carried something she didn't entirely like.

"Then let's go upstairs." She said.

He looked at her one more time.

She looked back and did not flinch.

They went up.

The second floor was quieter than the first. Fewer people, more rooms, most of the doors closed. The corridor was dim and the music from below was muffled up here, a low constant thrum instead of the overwhelming wall of noise downstairs.

Mauricio stopped outside a half-open door halfway down the corridor.

He didn't push it open.

She looked at him.

He looked at the door.

She stepped forward and pushed it herself.

The room came into focus in stages, the way things did when you were seeing something your brain was trying to slow down and process before it fully landed.

A couch. Low light. The music from below barely audible through the floor.

Niko was on the couch, still in his black banquet suit, the jacket gone, the shirt dark with blood that wasn't his. His face was buried in the neck of a girl she'd never seen before, a short-haired brunette who was entirely limp against him, the color draining from her face in the slow, steady way of someone losing too much too fast. His arm was locked around her waist, holding her in place, the grip of someone who wasn't entirely in control of his own strength right now.

Her throat. His mouth. Dark blood tracking down her neck and soaking into the collar of her shirt.

Horrifying. Real. Undeniable.

Not the reason Carly's stomach dropped to the floor.

Aurora was on the other side of the brunette.

Also feeding.

Her red hair pinned back, her mouth at the part of the girl's neck that Niko wasn't occupying, her expression somewhere between focused and satisfied. Her hand had moved from the girl's side and was traveling forward toward Niko's arm, fingertips brushing the back of his hand, sliding upward to his forearm. Slowly. Deliberately. Like she knew exactly what she was doing and had decided to do it anyway.

He didn't pull away.

Carly stood in the doorway and could not move.

This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real.

She said it inside her head, a mantra, waiting for it to do what mantras were supposed to do. It didn't do anything. The scene stayed exactly the same in every frame, the same images running on a loop that her brain could not organize into something that made sense.

He lied to her.

He promised he'd come back and instead he came here. To this. To her.

Aurora's fingers pressed further up his arm, her body shifting closer on the couch, the gap between them narrowing.

And he still didn't pull away.

Carly felt Mauricio's hand just barely touch her shoulder blade, the faintest contact, like he was bracing her without committing to it. She barely registered it.

She stumbled back a step.

Her shoulder hit the door frame.

The impact was louder than she intended.

Niko's head came up.

Fast and animal, the way it always did when something broke through whatever state he was in when he was feeding. His eyes were red and wide, pupils blown out, the dark veins she'd only ever glimpsed briefly tracking visibly beneath the skin around his eyes. Blood at both corners of his mouth. Fangs down.

He looked like what he was.

For a second neither of them moved.

Then his eyes found her face properly and something cracked open in his expression.

"Carly." He said. Very quietly. Her name from his mouth with blood still on his lips.

She looked at him.

She looked at Aurora, who was sitting back slowly, fangs retracting, a smear of dark blood on her lower lip that she made no move to wipe away, watching Carly with an expression that was not quite surprised.

She looked back at Niko.

She didn't say anything.

She turned around and walked back down the corridor and down the stairs and through the room and out the door and into the cold night air of Black River Falls and kept walking.

Author's Note:

She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She didn't say a single word. She just turned around and walked out and somehow that is so much worse than any of the alternatives.