The bus runs from Chicago to Detroit. There is little point in stopping at the smaller college city of Ann Arbor on the way, less than one hour from the destination. The bus has strict parameters and schedules to adhere to, schedules which it will not meet tonight.
There are fourteen passengers left on the bus that is supposedly headed to Detroit, but only two of them are awake. The bus driver does not think much about this, and in fact is privately grateful for the hours of peace. One of the two awake passengers has had his bright purple hood pulled over his face for most of the ride. As the sun sets, he pulls it back and lifts his head to look out the window, grinning as the highway stretches over a river below.
He is beautiful, with dark bangs that flop over his pale forehead and dark monolid eyes slanted in a state of near constant amusement. He looks to be at the very edge of youth, and yet utterly unwilling to take the leap beyond it. There's a porcelain boyishness to him fit only for pop stars, and perhaps he is one.
(He's not, currently, though he's done the one-hit wonder thing a few times. Had radio play in four different countries. It's nothing that would be recognizable now.)
If he is groggy at all from his rest, he doesn't show it. His eyes keenly rove about the bus, taking in the sleeping passengers before landing on the one passenger who is wide awake and seated in front of him. Her thick green hair surrounds her face, tilted down towards a sketch pad. She has a tote bag full of other sketch pads and a few books. She has been drawing for the past four hours, broken up occasionally by reading.
He leans over to look at her sketch. At first, it seems to be a tree, but only the most boring parts. Just the trunk running from top to toe of the page. The bark is intricately detailed, but the true artistry is in the detail that she places at the bottom of the tree: a tiny door. It has a tiny window in the center, a tiny knob at the side, and swirled etchings across the front. The door is wreathed by tiny blossoms, leaves, and berries. The stoop is littered with little chests and baubles, offerings.
"What are you drawing?" the young man asks, elbows propped on the top of her seat.
She looks up, startled. She, too, looks young, with with wide, romantic green eyes and a faint dusting of freckles. She flushes at the sight of him. "Fairy door." She answers, turning back to her drawing.
"They don't use those much anymore." He speaks as if he is an authority on the matter, but when she glances back up at him, he wears a sparkling grin. She laughs.
He swings himself over the top of the seats to fall into the space beside her. The girl barely has time to move her tote bag, and the bus driver has no time at all to tell him that leaping on the bus is not allowed. "I'm Phoenix." He sticks out a hand.
The girl giggles again and takes his hand. "Nice to meet you, Phoenix." She begins to shuffle her sketchpad away, welcoming the more interesting diversion.
He shakes his head. "You can draw. I won't bother you much."
But he does, or rather, he keeps her from drawing. The girl is hardly bothered by it as they fall into the easy flow of conversation.
"So what brings you to Detroit?" he asks.
"Ann Arbor, actually." She holds up a book entitled The Fairy Doors of Ann Arbor. She lays it flat on her lap and it opens to a picture of an unofficial "goblin door," with the head of a goblin engraved on a tiny headstone in front of the door. "This was just the closest route with the best timing that I could find."
His grin widens. "You're joking. I'm headed to see some friends in Ann Arbor. It's a secret, though, so don't tell them." He puts a finger to his lips and then leans his head back against the seat and shakes his head. "Wow. What a coincidence."
"I don't believe in coincidences," the girl says. His eyes slide towards her.
"There's actually going to be a party tonight," he says. "Kind of a hole-in-the-wall place with good music. Only people in the know know, but those are the best kind. You should come."
She blushes and looks down. "I wouldn't want to intrude on your friends.'"
"Sure you would." He waves a hand. "And they'd love to meet you."
"Maybe." She giggles and shrugs. "We'll see."
She does not mention what brings her to Ann Arbor. Perhaps she's an art student, drawn in by the fairy doors.
(It is not the fairy doors, though she would like to see them.)
"You know what?" he leans forward and whispers in her ear, brushing back a bit of her green hair. When she tilts her head, an edge of his teeth just barely scrapes against her skin. "I think this bus does stop in Ann Arbor after all."
"What do you mean?"
He glances to the front of the bus just as the driver shouts, "What the hell?" Because suddenly, smoke is rising from the bus, too much to even see the road ahead. The driver jerks the wheel and stops clumsily in the shoulder of the road.
Phoenix grins at the green haired girl as the others on the bus begin to groan. "Alright, everybody out!" The bus driver barks, and fourteen tired, disgruntled passengers shuffle off the bus to stand at the side of the road. Many have their phones out while others pester the clueless and harried driver with questions.
Phoenix's eyes land on a bright green sign which reads, "Ann Arbor 2 Miles." He begins to walk, the girl alongside him.
The bus driver calls out to him, cradling her cell phone between her shoulder and her chin. "I'm getting someone out to fix the bus, just hang tight!"
They both ignore this. The bus driver notes that Phoenix's hands have a fidgety, nervous nature to them, just before he shoves them in the pocket of his hoodie. The girl walks ahead, even though Phoenix was the one to point out the way. But the bus driver does not have time to ponder this, because she needs to figure out why the hood of the bus, which had seemed about to combust moments ago, now seems perfectly fine.
The two ex-passengers trudge along the highway past aspen trees that, in the twilight, begin to look like emaciated ghosts with heads aflame. The wind carries that smell of cold with it, rustling her hair and lashing his cheeks, swallowing them in a relative silence. It is a silence which Phoenix occasionally tries to punctuate with a wry comment and the girl sometimes responds with an indulgent chuckle, but those moments are sucked into the wind and forgotten.
When they reach the exit, Phoenix stops. “Are you actually coming tonight?”
She tilts her head and smiles. “Of course I am. You’ll be there. That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
His boyish, sly confidence is gone, replaced by a restlessness in his buried hands and a touch of horror to his eyes. But that doesn’t make sense. He is the thing that children check under their bed and inside their closets for. Who is she? She is simply herself.
That’s the problem.
She stares at him with a calm, waiting expression until he turns and starts down his path. He doesn’t know when he will see her next and he doesn’t know her plan. But whatever happens tonight, her hand will be in it. He could try to avoid it, could turn around, but it wouldn’t matter. She’ll have planned for that, too.
He sighs and takes out his phone, turning the camera to face him and grinning into the selfie. Thank camera phones for not using silver and letting him see his own face. He posts the picture with a caption that reads “Party Tonite at the Afterlite.” Because if he doesn’t have a choice in the matter, he might as well have fun.
When he glances over his shoulder, she’s already gone.
***
Anne-Marie placed seven vials of blood on the wooden reception counter. “Hi, I have a reservation for a seven night stay. Here’s the pay.”
The receptionist, wearing a sticker of a nameplate that read Eli wrinkled her nose as she looked up. Anne-Marie probably looked even more pale than usual, and she felt famished, but she doubted that was the issue. “You don’t have a reservation,” she said without glancing at her computer.
“I sure do.” Anne-Marie flashed a friendly smile. “It’s under Mullins. Anne-Marie, in case you’ve got two Mullins’s here.”
Eli’s fingers trudged across the ancient gray keyboard, never breaking eye contact with Anne-Marie. She looked to be about Anne-Marie’s age, with sharp brown eyes and nutmeg brown hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She glanced at the screen only briefly and her lips formed a thin, flat line. “Laurel!”
The vials of Anne-Marie’s blood rolled slightly and knocked into each other. Anne-Marie pushed them forward to keep them from falling off the desk. “Do you have a fridge or something for these? I don’t want them to go bad.”
Eli gave her a scathing look. “Just wait here.”
Anne-Marie shoved her hands into the pockets of her black hoodie and looked around, tapping her foot. At least from the entrance, the Afterlight Popup Music Hostel was not what she pictured. It was brightly lit, despite the lack of natural lighting, and…colorful. Well, at least no one could accuse them of playing into stereotypes.
A tall and full shoe-rack rested upon the exposed brick of the entrance hall, with a few horns and smaller instruments hanging on the wall above. and around the corner, Anne-Marie could see the edges of a warm orange sectional, a colorful patterned rug, and a rainbow mural on the wall, accented by musical notes. A record player spun atop a sleek wooden table, playing something upbeat and synthesized.
Her cursory inspection of the atmosphere was cut short by the entrance of the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.
Laurel, as she assumed the woman was, was tall and fat, but she also carried a presence that seemed to pull all the attention in the room. She had South Asian features — Indian, perhaps? — With golden brown skin, vast brown eyes, a heart-shaped face, and thick black hair that cascaded in smooth waves over her shoulders and halfway down her back. Bright red lipstick shone on her lips, and the hand that extended out of her leather bomber jacket and landed on the wooden counter had yellow painted nails.
She glanced between the receptionist and and Anne-Marie and smiled easily, the sort of smile that made Anne-Marie want to melt on the spot. “Hi. What’s going on?” She had an accent Anne-Marie couldn’t quite place, faded British mixed with other things.
The receptionist pointed at Anne-Marie. “She says she has a reservation.”
Eli definitely knew. Anne-Marie wasn’t sure how. Maybe it was the blood. But she knew exactly who she was. Laurel, however, kept her easygoing smile plastered to her face. “Are you sure you have the right place? There’s another hostel we get confused with all the time…”
“Nope. Afterlight Popup Music Hostel. It’s a pretty hard name to confuse with anything else. That’s where I’m supposed to be.”
It was a moment of agonizing silence, glancing between Eli and Anne-Marie, before Laurel recovered. “It’s just…our reservations are a little particular…”
“Oh, I know,” Anne-Marie said. “For one thing, y’all have this neat little rule where I’m pretty sure if I booked a stay with your hostel, you’re contractually bound to honor it. What with your particular co-owner?”
Laurel laughed, but there was panic in her laughter. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Hmm, not you, then.” If Laurel was the one, she wouldn’t have been able to lie about it. “Well, could I talk to them? See if they can clear up the whole…booking confusion.”
Laurel’s smile froze and then shattered like glass after a pebble. She opened her mouth and closed it. For just a moment, her deep brown eyes took on a brighter hue, then disappeared back to brown. She turned to Eli. “What did she say the name was?”
“Anne-Marie Mullins,” Anne-Marie supplied brightly.
Laurel’s jaw twitched but she kept her eyes on Eli and the desk. “Private room?”
Eli nodded before Anne-Marie could answer for herself.
“Thank fuck.” Laurel gave a sigh of relief. To Anne-Marie, she said only a brittle, “This way,” and turned on heel to lead her.
The patrons of the Afterlight spread throughout the lounge and adjoining kitchen bar looked up as Laurel blazed an icy trail to the back and Anne-Marie trotted to keep up. How many of them could tell what she was — or rather, what she wasn’t? A young man who seemed as ordinary as her, for instance, glanced up for only a moment and then resumed his conversation with a chalk pale, slow-moving teenage girl who blinked sleepily.
But others leered, leaning forward on the kitchen island and even attempting to follow. Laurel flicked up one hand and they stopped. Anne-Marie picked up her step to stick closer to Laurel.
“I like the decor in here,” she said, trying to pierce through the tense silence. “Especially the windows.” There were windows, she noted, but they weren’t really windows. Window frames held paintings of landscapes: a floor to ceiling field of flowers at the north wall of the lounge, a smaller window to the east depicting a beach, distant mountains perched over the kitchen sink. All of them were pictured in the sunlight, bright and cheery.
Laurel said nothing as she pushed open the back door and turned to the narrow metal stairwell. She did not respond to Anne-Marie’s huffing comments about all the flights of stairs and being out of shape. Nor did she notice when Anne-Marie stopped at the doorway as they reached the third floor.
The second and third floor existed as circular balconies hanging over a courtyard. That the courtyard existed was not strange, but its lushness was. It was a wild paradise — all creeping vines and tall grasses, fully grown trees, stepping stones, and even a little babbling pond. Three cypress trees surrounded a wooden platform or stage, the one clearly constructed part of the garden.
It was alive and vibrant, without a single ray of sunlight to nourish it. A solid white ceiling above. No windows below. That was the strange thing.
Laurel grabbed Anne-Marie’s wrist and pulled her forward with an iron grip. She dragged Anne-Marie in through a round door clearly designed to look like a fairy door, the numbers “312” etched in the wood. Anne-Marie’s back hit the wall as Laurel pinned her there with her arm, kicking the door closed.
Anne-Marie swallowed, her pulse racing. She willed it not to race. That would make this even worse. She squeezed out a choked smile as her hands flailed to her pockets. “Is this part of the service?” Her shaking fingers wrapped around a purchase.
“What do you know?” Laurel seethed. “And who told you?”
Not much. But it was clearly more than Laurel wanted her to know. “Believe me, I wish someone would tell me anything. But I have been able to figure a few things out on my own through sheer stubbornness.” And she gently pressed the stake in her hand against Laurel’s stomach.
Laurel stiffened, not quite afraid but aware. It was the best Anne-Marie could hope for. She was not an imposing person, especially not compared to Laurel. “So you’re a hunter.”
Anne-Marie tilted her head, as much as she could with Laurel’s arm pressed against her neck. “More of an amateur investigator. But I can protect myself.”
It was a bluff, and a dangerous one given all her other bluffs had fallen through. She knew the lore of wooden stakes to the heart, and Laurel’s reaction told her there was something to it. She’d never had to use one before.
Laurel’s eyes turned an unmistakable bloody red. This was the glimpse of what Anne-Marie had caught in the reception. “If you stake me, you’ll have all the monsters in this place on you before you pull it out.” Her accent came through rougher now, a northern England variety of some sort. That must have been her original accent. “I might have to honor your reservation, but you have to honor our rules. No. Weapons.”
It was a little funny, considering most everyone here was a weapon. But Anne-Marie wasn’t about to argue with a red-eyed, surprisingly strong woman with an arm to her throat. “Alright.” She tried to keep her voice even. She loosed her hold on the stake just a little. “You don’t prick me, maybe let me off the wall, and I don’t prick you. How’s that sound?”
It should not have worked. She knew the disadvantage she was at, a child in a pen with a tiger. But Laurel let go. Her eyes did not change their color, which worked in favor of the glare she scathing glare she shot Anne-Marie. “What do you want, amateur investigator?”
“Mostly, I just wanna look around.” Anne-Marie shrugged. When she had gotten the idea in her head, she felt so clever. A hostel for the supernatural, co-owned by someone who had no choice but to honor their word. She would get in before anyone knew she wasn’t one of them, and then they would have to let her stay. But now that she was here, staring down a…vampire, she supposed, if the stake was a problem…now she wished she had come up with more of a plan than just “get in, profit.”
Like a plan to not get killed.
Or at least to answer the question of what she wanted rather than the vague but honest truth of it. She wanted. To know? To prove she was right? Even those things were two specific. She just wanted.
“I do have some questions for that fairy co-owner of yours,” she added, because that was true at least. “But beyond that…just get to know everybody, I guess. Learn what’s real, what’s fake. I don’t know if you know this, but us humans have some pretty wacky beliefs about vampires and werewolves.”
Once again, Laurel was not amused by Anne-Marie’s nervous attempts at humor. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Save us from curious idiots,” she muttered. “First of all, don’t call Sam a fairy. Ever.”
Anne-Marie winced. She should have known better. “So that one’s real. Got it. What should I call him? Good fellow? Fae?”
“Their name?” Laurel retorted. “If you call them anything at all, which I’m not inclined to let you do.” She knelt down and picked up the stake. Anne Marie, still leaning against the wall, went rigid. She wasn’t a vampire, but she was deeply, embarrassingly mortal as this whole thing made evident. With enough pressure, a wooden stake would kill her, too.
But Laurel shoved it into the pocket of her jacket, paced a couple steps, and then glared at Anne-Marie again. “And once you ‘get to know everybody,’” she formed air quotes and mimicked — poorly — Anne-Marie’s own Macon drawl, “what exactly are you planning to do with that information?”
“What, alert the press? Write a thinkpiece about how I stayed at a magically moving hostel full of the background characters from a mid-aughts YA novel?” Anne-Marie scoffed. “Yeah, I know no one’s gonna believe me. This is more of a personal quest.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
I don’t know yet didn’t seem like the thing to say to the prowling vampire lady. “Look, I promise, I don’t mean any harm to anyone here. I’m not gonna…I don’t know, subject them to experiments or anything. And I don’t have anyone I can tell that takes me seriously, even if I wanted to. Just…treat me like any other guest.”
Laurel stared at her incredulously, and then she did laugh. Anne-Marie felt a little miffed that it was the one time she hadn’t actually made a joke.
“If you want me to make some sort of deal with someone that I won’t say anything…”
“A deal?” Laurel rubbed a hand over her face. “Do you have any idea how stupid it was to come here? You’ve got nothing! Not a fucking thing against anyone here, and half of them are going to see you as a free snack just wafting about. How did you even find this place?”
“Google?” Anne-Marie answered. Laurel laughed again, a wild thing half choked in her throat. “Well, not the first page or anything. I was at it for a while. Found a bunch of kink sites and a couple roleplay forums first.”
Laurel walked to the wardrobe and pressed her forehead to it, taking a deep breath that she probably didn’t need before turning back to Anne-Marie. “I can’t force you to leave. But I am not taking responsibility for what happens to you when you’re here.”
She crossed to her in two quick strides and leaned over her. “And if you hurt anyone here,” she hissed, “or cause harm to any of my guests, I promise you, there is nothing in the terms of your stay that says what state you have to be in by the end of it.”
When Laurel’s lips parted, she let her fangs show, sharp as Anne-Marie’s stake had been. Sharper. Anne-Marie shivered, unable to look away from them. Unable to stop imagining how sharp they were and how quickly they could kill her.
Laurel backed away with a huff of frustrated resignation. She grabbed the door handle. “And for your own sake, just tell everyone you’re a witch, alright? Fuck’s sake.”
She slammed the door behind her. Anne-Marie laughed to herself because she didn’t know what else to do with how much she was shaking. Then she slid down to a seat in the room that she had scarcely been aware of through the whole conversation.
***
“I do think you went a bit far threatening her.”
Sam was in their courtyard, lying in the grass. Encouraging it, they liked to call the lazy stroke of their hands over the blades. The courtyard needed a lot of encouragement, so when Sam wasn’t in their office, they were almost always in the courtyard. They had taken on an androgynous look today, the edges of their flamelike hair tickling their jaw and a touch of glitter across their pale face. They dressed in their usual attire of a vest over a t-shirt and a pair of jeans.
Laurel rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. She’s threatened herself far more than I did.” She nudged Sam with her foot. They peeked open one green eye, but did not sit up. “Not to mention the threat she poses to us.”
“How the hell did she find this place on Google?” Eli asked, perched on a rock next to the pond. Her phone was already out to answer her own question. “I know there’s a website, but it has probably the worst SEO known to man.”
Sam smiled. “O mighty vampire, predator of the night, afraid of one little human.”
Laurel nudged them a little harder. “One little human could send this entire place crashing down if she keeps stumbling about without thinking. Why aren’t you worried about this?”
“I am. This is what I’m like when I’m worried.”
Sam couldn’t lie, even to poke fun at her. She ground her teeth. It was at best a little unnerving how untroubled they seemed by things that should have been deeply troubling. At worst, it was infuriating.
Sam patted the grass beside them. Laurel sighed and sat down. Sam pulled themself up and rested a head on Laurel’s shoulder. “You could always just convince her not to remember anything at the end of it all if you’re worried.”
This quelled Laurel somewhat. In her panic, she hadn’t thought of it, but it wasn’t the worst plan. “Assuming she doesn’t send us into a catastrophe first,” she grumbled. Sam’s chest rumbled as they laughed.
“Page 47,” Eli said out of nowhere. Laurel looked up. “The Afterlight Popup Music Hostel is on page 47 of Google’s search results for ‘hotel vampires werewolves’ no quotes. Not sure if that’s what she used. How are there 47 pages?”
“We set some up just to push us down further,” Sam said.
Laurel shook her head. “I knew having a website was a mistake. We should at least take down the option to book online before something like this happens again.”
Eli snorted. “I don’t know who else is going to go through 47 pages of a lot of online junk for that.”
Laurel frowned. She would have liked many more pages in between her hostel and the human world. Guests had been asking since they opened when they would get a website, extolling the virtues of having a website and how much easier it would make it. Only when Eli had agreed that it was kind of foolish to run any sort of business — even a covert business for creatures of the night — without a website in 2014 had Laurel agreed.
Mostly she had wanted to impress her.
She smiled wryly at Eli. “Having any doubts about agreeing to that date with me yet?”
Eli’s light brown skin darkened, a cute blush that crept up whenever she was asked about anything to do with feelings. She stared hard at her phone. “I already knew you were crazy.” Her voice was so quiet, which made it more adorable.
Then Laurel groaned. There was also the date. “Maybe we should wait until after this week. You know, with the human here. I just want to make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble…”
She hated to even suggest it. Laurel was often so busy running the hostel, and she and Eli had such vastly different schedules, only really awake at the same time for a few hours each evening. Part of what had taken them so long to start dating was simply that.
But this was also their home. And if the human was a threat to that…
Eli glanced up just a little and nodded. “That’s fine.”
Was she disappointed? Or maybe she just wasn’t as invested in it as Laurel was. Laurel shoved the thought away. She could only deal with one thing at a time.
Keep everyone at the hostel safe. Keep them from acting stupid, and keep the human from acting stupider. Those were her priorities. She’d done alright at the first one for five years. Now, if they could just get through this week, they could get through anything.
***
Anne-Marie studied every detail of her room. There was not much to study. Compared to the space downstairs, and the courtyard, it was a very boring room.
It was cramped. There was just enough room for her bed, a wardrobe, a mini fridge, and for her to walk between them all. Barely. The walls were mint green. The “window” depicted creeping wisteria plants all around it. The bed was a bunk bed: thoughtful, in case there were two guests, with a bit of blue paint chipping off the leg. The comforter was quilted but plain off-white.
This was not what she had come to the Afterlight for. This was not what she had dropped out of grad school — no, sorry, “taken a gap year” from grad school — for. To take in the interior decorating.
But the thought of standing up made her knees knock again. She wished her body and her heart were as brave as her mind was prone to trouble. She would have been breaking into rooms, interviewing guests, doing…well, bold investigative things. When she imagined herself here, she had not imagined herself cowering in her bedroom.
Well, look at the facts. She had met a vampire. Hell, she had been nearly attacked by a vampire. Gotten a flash of fangs and all. No one could rationalize that away from her, tell her it was her imagination or that she’d just had a bad dream. Maybe she could just spend the rest of the week in her room. Or leave. There was nothing that said she had to honor the reservation, she thought. And maybe that would be enough.
It wouldn’t. She knew it wouldn’t.
She shrugged off her backpack — God, she still had her backpack on, braced herself on the wall and pulled herself up. If she was going to leave the room, she would go to the courtyard. She wasn’t much of an outdoor girl, but well, it wasn’t exactly outdoors. And it was an open space, which made her feel a little safer. Witnesses and all that. She wasn’t sure if that was actually helpful in this context, but it made her internal biases feel a little better. And once she got a little more confident, the discovery could begin.
She opened the door and made it out into the hallway. It was empty, which made her uneasier than if it had not been. But below in the courtyard, she could see Laurel, Eli, and someone else chatting.
So probably not the courtyard.
She took a deep breath. She was out of her room now. No going back. Not yet. She would go to the lounge area. That was a normal thing for a hostel guest to do just after settling in. And there were even more witnesses down there.
She was almost to the stairwell when she heard a door creak open and realized that there were footsteps behind her. She did not look back. She kept her eyes focused ahead like it were her Orphean task, only she would be the one doomed if she looked back. Which was ridiculous. It was a hostel, after all. Plenty of guests going to and from their rooms.
She reached the landing between the third and second floor at a jog when the stairwell door opened above her. Again, totally normal behavior. It didn’t have anything to do with her.
The leering voice behind her that crooned, “What’s the rush, little human?” did, though.
“I’m a witch, actually,” she lied through the tightness in her throat, bounding down to the next landing.
But the footsteps were faster. By the next set of steps, he was next to her, not behind. “That so. I’ve been looking for a witch.” He looked to be in his sixties or so, but beautiful in a too-polished sort of way. The wrinkles and lines that showed across his skin looked intentional. His eyes did not go red, and he did not flash any fangs. But when he leaned over her, she felt as small as Laurel had made her. “Need some help with a ritual a friend of mine wants to try.”
“Huh.” Anne-Marie laughed. “Well, I’m not very good at it, so…” She scooted around him and kept walking. He did not stop her, but he followed close behind, and somehow that was worse.
She counted her steps to the door. One, two, three…
“Well, come on now. Don’t be modest.”
Four five six. Seveneightnine. “No, really. Unless you want your ritual to blow up in your face, you probably want another witch.”
She grabbed the cool metal of the door handle. Thank god. She opened it.
He followed her into the kitchen, close behind, laughing. “Well, maybe that’s what I want my ritual to do.”
Anne-Marie spied the young man and the slow-moving teenage girl and made a beeline for them, the people who seemed the least interested in her.
“Come on, little witchy human girl,” her pursuer called. “Let’s see you do a spell?”
The pale girl looked up in her sluggish way. “Is there a problem?” The guy she was talking to, who looked perfectly ordinary in the way almost everyone here did but at least was tall enough to be a shield, turned towards Anne-Marie’s follower.
But the rest of the room looked at Anne-Marie. Some of them rose from their seats, with leering eyes much like his.
Then a shout across the entrance stopped them all.
“GUESS WHOOOOOO’S BACK?”
The answer, it seemed, was a young guy wearing a pair of sunglasses even inside a windowless room at night, dressed in a bright purple hoodie. Behind him, and hanging off of him, was a throng of people, such that they blocked the path from the lounge to the door.
“Is that fucking Phoenix?” somebody asked from the kitchen. The name spread across the open space like a ripple.
Laurel pushed her way through the crowd , flanked by the redhead and Eli, and stared at the newcomer with even more vitriol than she had extended towards Anne-Marie. She said nothing, her jaw stone.
“Well, it looks like it’s fallen to me once again to bring the party.” Phoenix lowered his sunglasses, revealing red eyes, and grinned a wide, fanged grin.
Thanks for reading! I hope this first chapter was an entertaining end to the spooky season for you, and a beginning to the Seven Nights at the Afterlight era. If you're interested in early access to chapters or want to create your own denizen of the Afterlight, consider subscribing to my Ko-fi membership!
