The mansion felt different now. More alive. More aware of us. The walls seemed to watch our progress, and I swore the paintings' eyes followed our movement. The air smelled like old wood and dust and something else—something organic and wrong that I couldn't identify. Like meat left out too long in summer heat.
It took us nearly fifteen minutes to retrace our steps, every second feeling like an hour. The hallways stretched and contracted in my peripheral vision, never quite the same twice. Finally, we turned a corner and saw it—the doorway to the room where it had all started.
The warm lamplight still glowed from inside, golden and inviting, completely at odds with what we knew waited there. That scratchy jazz melody still played on the gramophone, tinny and cheerful. The fire still crackled. Like the room was performing normalcy, pretending nothing had happened within its walls.
We hesitated at the threshold, our feet refusing to carry us forward.
"I can't," Zara whispered. "I can't go in there."
"We have to," Priya said, but even her voice had lost some of its certainty. Her usual confidence had developed cracks.
Diego went first, raising the candlestick like a weapon, his knuckles white around the brass. We followed, bunched together like children afraid of the dark, and the scene that greeted us made my stomach lurch.
The room looked exactly the same—the fireplace still crackling with flames that cast dancing shadows across the walls, the gramophone still playing that scratchy jazz melody, the elegant furniture arranged just so, as if waiting for guests who would never arrive. The tea service lay shattered across the floor, porcelain shards catching the firelight like broken stars.
But the floor. God, the floor.
Blood. So much blood. Kai's blood, pooled and splattered across the white marble in abstract patterns that looked almost deliberate, like some sick artist's canvas. My blood mixed with it from where the angel-thing had clawed me, creating swirls of different shades of red—fresh and drying, bright and dark. The pool near where Kai had been sitting was enormous, spreading out in fingers that reached toward the walls.
But no body. No Kai. Just the blood, still wet and glistening in the firelight.
I imagined that creature returning, hungrily consuming Kai piece by piece while we just ran.
'That could be us,' I thought, staring at the crimson pools. 'Any one of us. That's how fast it happens. One moment you're alive, making jokes, leading a hiking trip. The next you're just blood on the floor and an empty space where you used to be.'
"He didn't deserve to die," Zara said beside me, her voice shaking. I could see tears forming in her eyes, though she kept blinking them back.
"Neither did Levi," Priya said quietly, but the words came out sharp. Accusatory. Like she was reminding us of our complicity, our collective guilt.
The silence that followed was heavy with things we couldn't say. That we'd voted for Levi to die. That we'd chosen him because he was weak, because he was awkward, because in that moment of terror we'd decided his life mattered less than ours.
"None of us deserve to die," Diego said finally, though he sounded like he wasn't sure that was true anymore. His voice was hollow, defeated. "We just need to do everything we can to survive. Find a way out of here."
"A way out?" Amara's voice rose sharply, making us all flinch. She'd been so quiet until now, barely speaking since Levi's sacrifice, that I'd almost forgotten she was there. Now her words came out in a torrent. "Didn't you hear what that creepy man said? There's no way out of here! We're trapped in this place, and some other monster is probably going to rip us to pieces before this day even ends!"
The room fell silent except for the crackling fire and that damned cheerful jazz. Because what could we say to that? She was right. Zadkiel had been clear. The mansion doesn't let anyone leave. We had no magic, no weapons that could hurt these things, no understanding of how this place worked or what we were up against.
Every minute here could be our last.
"Aren't we all going to die anyway?" I heard myself say. A laugh forced its way out of my throat, bitter and wrong. It turned into a cough that sent a spike of pain through my bandaged arm.
"What do you mean, Ethan?" Priya turned to look at me, brows furrowed.
"I mean, our lives weren't exactly guaranteed back in the real world either." The words felt hollow even as I said them, but I kept going. "Sure, it was safer. But things could still kill us. Car accidents. Disease. We were all going to die eventually anyway, right? Of old age, if we were lucky."
I turned back to the pool of blood that used to be Kai and felt something twist in my chest. "Two of us are already dead. If we can't leave, then we just have to fight for our survival as long as possible. Make every day count. It's the only way we can honor them now."
"I guess you're right." Diego's voice was tired, resigned. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a water bottle, the plastic crinkling in the quiet. "It's what Kai would've wanted."
He walked toward the pool of blood, his footsteps making wet, sticky sounds that turned my stomach. When he reached the edge of that dark red expanse, he stopped. Opened the bottle. Began to pour.
The water hit the blood with a soft splash, spreading in clear ripples that slowly turned pink. Diego watched it for a moment, then stopped himself, suddenly aware that we needed to conserve everything we had. He'd only poured out a mouthful, maybe two.
Zara took the bottle from him with both hands, cradling it like something precious. She let a single drop fall into the blood. Just one. "For Kai," she whispered, then passed it to Amara.
Amara's hands shook so badly she nearly dropped it. Water sloshed inside the bottle as she struggled to keep her grip. Finally, she managed to tip it, letting three drops fall before pulling it back against her chest like she was afraid it might escape. Her lips moved but no sound came out.
Then it was my turn. My right arm throbbed with every heartbeat, useless and bandaged, so I took the bottle in my left hand. The plastic was warm from passing through so many hands. I held it over the blood and let a single drop fall, watching it disappear into the red.
Here we were, pouring out water like drinks on a grave we'd never have.
I passed the bottle to Priya. She held it for a long moment, just staring at the blood. Then she poured out a single drop. "For Kai," she said. A pause. "And Levi."
The addition of Levi's name felt like an accusation. A reminder. We'd killed him as surely as that angel-thing had killed Kai. Different methods, same result.
"Let's move," Priya said once the moment passed, her voice returning to that familiar efficient tone. "We can't waste any more time out here."
"Agreed," I muttered.
Then my chest seized.
It started as a tickle, like a feather brushing the inside of my lungs. Then it intensified, spreading like fire through my chest cavity. I bent forward as the cough tore its way out of me, hard enough to make my eyes water.
I coughed into my left hand, trying to muffle the sound. When I pulled my hand away, I saw it.
Blood. Dark red droplets spattered across my palm.
'No. No, no, no.'
I'd never coughed up blood before. This wasn't normal. This wasn't from the claw marks on my arm—those wounds were external, bandaged, contained. This was something else. Something internal. Something wrong.
"Yo, Ethan, are you alright?" Diego's voice cut through my rising panic, concern written across his face.
"Fine," I managed to say, though it came out strangled. "Just the arm. I'm fine."
I tried to wipe the blood on my jeans discreetly, smearing it into the denim where it would just look like a shadow. But even as I did, I felt another cough building in my chest like a wave.
"There." Diego pointed across the room, mercifully distracted. "Kai's backpack."
It sat against the far wall where he'd left it, perfectly organized and untouched. So normal. So mundane. Like its owner might come back any second to pick it up and continue the hike.
We moved toward it carefully, navigating around the blood. Our shoes made soft, wet sounds against the floor where we couldn't avoid it entirely. The sound was wrong—too sticky, too thick. Like walking through something that wanted to hold us there.
Priya reached the backpack first and knelt beside it. Her hands hovered over the zippers for a moment, hesitating in a way that was unlike her. Then she opened it and started pulling items out with mechanical efficiency. "First-aid kit. Power bank. Water bottles. Flashlight. Granola bars."
Her voice was steady and controlled, but I could see her hands shaking as she carried the materials. She stared at it for a second too long before setting it aside.
"He really was prepared for everything," she said quietly.
"Except a woman with the face of a monster ripping his head off," I said. The words came out harsher than I meant them to, bitter and angry.
Then the cough hit again.
This time it was worse—deeper, more violent. It doubled me over, and I couldn't stop it, couldn't control it. My chest felt like it was being crushed from the inside. I coughed and coughed, and with each convulsion I felt something warm and wet spray through my fingers.
When the fit finally subsided, both my hands were covered in blood. Not spots or droplets this time. Actual blood, dark and viscous, dripping between my fingers onto the floor where it mixed with Kai's.
"Shit! You are not okay, man." Zara grabbed my shoulder as my knees started to buckle.
"I'm fine," I tried to say, but it came out as a wheeze. My chest was on fire. Every breath felt like inhaling broken glass. "We just... we have to..."
Another cough seized me, harder than before. I pounded my chest with my good hand, trying to dislodge whatever was stuck there, whatever was wrong. My nose started running too, mucus mixing with blood, and I could taste copper in the back of my throat.
'But I was fine before we came here,' I thought desperately. 'Perfectly healthy. No cold, no flu, nothing.'
Something clicked in my mind. The mansion. It had to be the mansion doing this to me. But why? Why me? Was it because of the injury?
"Ethan." Priya's voice cut through my spiraling thoughts. She'd grabbed the first-aid kit and was moving toward me. "Let me see."
"I'm fine," I insisted again, even as another cough bubbled up in my chest. "Not really, but—we need to get to safety first. Whatever that means here. Then we can worry about this."
It was a lie and we both knew it. There was no safety in this place. But what else could we do? Stand in this blood-soaked room and watch me slowly fall apart?
Zara nodded nervously, her eyes wide with fear. Fear for me, or fear that whatever was happening to me might happen to them too? Probably both.
We had what we came for. Kai's supplies. His careful preparations that might buy us a few more hours, a few more days of survival in this nightmare.
The question was: would I live long enough to use them?
I wiped the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand and straightened up as much as I could. The room spun slightly, but I forced myself to stay upright.
"Let's go," I said, my voice rough and wet.
We left the room with its cheerful fire and jazz music and pools of blood, stepping back into the cold hallways of Enoch's mansion. Behind us, the gramophone continued to play, that scratchy melody following us like a ghost.
And with every step, I could feel something growing worse inside me. Spreading through my lungs like roots, making each breath a little harder than the last.