The stench of mold permeated the cramped old motel room. The rain would seep in through the cracks in the window sill, dripping down the wall, leaving swollen tracks in the ancient drywall. There was only an old couch and a mattress. No table, not even a box frame for the bed. Dani sat on the worn cushions of the couch, staring out the rain-streaked window. Jared had been out for hours. She tried not to worry, but ever since they met up after the Sirens of Spring incident, they were all each other had.
She scrolled through the listings online, trying to find another spot for them to stay. They’d been on the run since Nikola died and left chaos in his wake, motel hopping every week or so to avoid becoming too familiar in one place, though their current accommodations were abandoned and used by other squatters. Sighing as she glanced up at the door yet again, she put her phone down and rubbed her hands down her face.
I need to do something. Anything. Sitting here waiting is torture. What is he doing anyway? Why couldn’t I have gone along?
Someone passed by the window and Dani flinched, even though the curtains were drawn and there was no way for them to see through the gauzy layer. She swallowed, trying not to think about the blood running through that person’s veins. They’d previously tried to store blood in cheap Tupperware containers. It was pointless though; after about an hour, the blood no longer satisfied, like drinking metallic-flavored water.
Her mouth was dry, and she got a glass of water from the sink. Not enough to fill, just enough to quench. They went out and hunted for blood at nights – fast, quiet, unseen. They gave themselves rules to follow: feed lightly, never revisit the same place twice, and never draw attention.
So far, it had kept them safe. She glanced down at the notebook beside her. Logging their feedings – the date, time, how much – helped her feel some semblance of control over their survival.
Two knocks. A pause. Two more knocks.
Dani breathed a sigh of relief. The door swung open to reveal a wet, grumpy Jared, holding a bag of takeout. She stood, taking the bag from him and setting the containers out on a blanket on the floor. He shrugged out of his rain-heavy coat, hanging it on the door handle to dry before taking off his shoes and walking over to where Dani had set food up on the blanket.
He grabbed his phone, turning on the news and letting it play while they ate. When the missing persons section began, Dani grabbed her notebook, flipping to the most recent feedings and checking her own information with that of the people who’d turned up missing.
“Come on, not while we’re eating, Dani,” Jared groaned.
She reluctantly set it aside until after they had finished eating, but it was obvious throughout the segment that she was trying to think back to the list. Eating quickly but not much, she sat on the ground next to her laptop. Flipping the notebook back open, she began going through the unfortunately long list of missing persons. She studied each of the victims’ faces, scanning through her memories as much as the notebook.
After making it through a considerable chunk of the list, she gave a cautiously hopeful smile. There was a fragile, almost pleading brightness to her voice as she said, “None of the people we’ve fed from have gone missing or ended up dead. See? We’re not killers,” she emphasized with a finger tapping on her list like she were presenting evidence in court.
Jared’s body went completely still, but he didn’t look up. After a moments pause, his shoulders slumped and he muttered, “What’s it matter anyway.” His voice was flat – not cruel, just tired. It was the tone of someone who stopped hoping a long time ago. In the silence, he refused to meet Dani’s gaze.
She had frozen at his words, pen hovering mid-air, like his words were a quiet blow to her soul. She wanted to argue with him, to insist that she was right, but the weight in his voice made her throat tighten.
The distance between them felt like another person in the room, making it smaller. Dani sat on the edge of the mattress, laptop balanced on her knees and casting a white-blue glow on her face. Jared was perched on the couch – not all that far away, but the gap felt wider than the room.
He set down his mug quietly as if afraid of breaking something. Dani clicked through another report, checking her notes and nodding periodically. She did it more out of stubbornness than optimism. Light scratching in the walls reminded them both of their current living conditions, little more than squatters in this run-down motel.
She needed absolution – some assurance they could still be forgiven. He had stopped believing forgiveness meant anything in a world this arbitrary. Neither spoke. Each felt, without naming it, that the other was standing on different ground. Rain and the occasional clicking of keys filled the silence. Dani drew in a breath, continuing to work. She refused to give in, to give up simply because of the need for others’ blood to live.
Jared watched her, wishing he could take his words back. He knew for all his monstrous qualities, she was a good person. She deserved better than what they currently had, what they’d been living in for some time now. He felt guilty making her sleep on the couch, but his frame was much too large to fit on it. Hopefully, the next place would be a step up from this dump.
Jared almost flinched when Dani heaved a sigh out of nowhere and rubbed her hands on her face. He couldn’t tell if it was frustration, exhaustion, or something else.
She set her laptop off to the side, staring toward the screen but seeing nothing. Her focus turned to Jared and she asked, “Do you think they’re still looking, or do you think the hysteria verdict means we’re safe?” Her voice was small, dampened by the room’s damp acoustics.
He couldn’t stand the hope in her voice, that inkling that life could go back to any semblance of normal now. Leaning back, the couch groaned beneath him. He debated for a minute how to answer her. Ultimately, he decided to tell her what he really thought. “No one forgets a nightmare.” He turned away from her. “They just wait for it to come back.” He couldn’t stand the look on her face, the disappointment.
Dani’s own gaze drifted from Jared to his duffel bag. The worn black shirt with white block letters saying “BOUNCER” was neatly folded, and atop it sat his old access badge. The plastic was scratched and cracked, but he still had it. He kept them around like relics – pieces of a past life where he kept danger out instead of being it.
Dani thought back to the incident at the Sirens of Spring. It was a blur of bloodlust and frenzied feeding, and even afterward she had needed to drink blood from a young man who had offered to help her. His face haunted her – she didn’t know whether she had killed him or not but he was a permanent specter in her mind. She constantly feared hurting others again, of losing control again.
Her focus was brought back to the present as Jared got up from the couch. Walking over to his duffel, he carefully set the shirt aside, deliberately continuing to move despite his mind’s focus on the uniform. He’d been a bouncer for the club for nearly a decade, and out of nowhere they just replaced him with someone else.
And to top off that horrible day he’d been fired, Nikola had found him, turned him, and kept him compelled for weeks until he forced him to turn on innocent people. He was supposed to be a guardian, a protector – yet Nikola had taken him and turned him into a monster, into the kind of person he used to kick out of the club, that he used to protect others from whenever he could. Now, he was powerless, purposeless, in a state of perpetual waiting, with no sense of what he was waiting for. He grabbed the folded map and went back to the couch.
The room seemed to shrink around them as their separate anxieties silently clashed. It already wasn’t a large room, and Jared’s muscular build filled the space on a normal day. Right now, his feelings seemed to seep through his pores and radiate out into the world, filling the room with his quiet despair.
A lone car pulled into the parking lot of the motel, and both of the vampires stopped breathing entirely. They continued to hold their breath as the car used the empty lot to turn around and get back onto the road, not breathing until the red tail lights were barely a smudge through the wet glass.
Once they were sure there was no one around, Dani drew the thicker layer of curtain nearly closed, leaving just enough to let in a bit of daylight through the gauzy layer. She walked over to the couch, sitting next to hulking man. She hadn’t had reason to fear him yet, and she felt that it was time to have a conversation she’d been thinking about for a while.
“We can’t keep running like this. Not only is it not sustainable, there has to be others around here like us. Others who got turned into… vampires. God, that still sounds so wrong but what else would you call us?”
“It doesn’t matter what we are called. But you’re right, there are others like us.” He looked back at her from where he hunched forward. “I’ve been tracking signs. There’ve been unexplained disappearances in scattered patterns across the city.”
He opened the map he’d retrieved from his bag, and Dani saw little red marks. Handing it to her, he explained, “The circles are where I’m certain of vampire activity. The X’s… they are where suspicious deaths have been reported, deaths that I believe were caused by a vampire.”
She studied it. There were at least a dozen X-marks on it – a dozen too many. Looking up at him with wide eyes, she asked softly, “So what do we do?”
Her trust twisted his guts. He didn’t deserve any of her trust. But he drove forward anyway, telling her the basis of his plan. “Whatever Nikola was, he wasn’t the last of it. We can’t just pretend this stops on its own. If nobody’s paying attention, it’ll continue to spiral.” His voice had a fraction of conviction, but the words didn’t carry far, as though he didn’t expect them to change anything.
Dani’s brows knit in concern. “So what do you suggest?”
“Rules. Just enough to keep people from losing control.” He ran a hand wearily through his hair. “I don’t care what it’s called. I just don’t want it getting worse.”
She studied him in silence. Always a smart woman, she read the words he didn’t say. Fear settled under her ribs – not of him, but of the sense that there was nothing anchoring him anymore. Needing movement, Dani stood and walked over to the window, closing it the rest of the way before turning on the wall sconce. The light flickered to life, the filament buzzing louder as it warmed. The room felt tense, charged, waiting.
Jared looked at the map that Dani had handed back to him. Specifically at two X’s. He knew those were vampire killings without a shadow of a doubt, but he’d never tell Dani why. Never tell her that he was the reason those two X’s were there at all. They were accidents, hunts gone too far. Intentions had blurred with hunger, and before he knew what he was doing, they were dead. One of those marks had only just been made before coming back to the room.
Dani shifted, her eyes narrowing. “What is that? On your collar?” It looked like something had dripped onto it, something that dried a reddish brown. Her lips thinned and she almost more demanded than asked, “What happened.” She was a woman, she knew what bloodstains looked like.
Jared tugged his shirt away so he could see what she was talking about. Seeing the spots, his own face grew stoney. He walked toward his duffel, saying quickly. “Just fed. Don’t ask.” He grabbed a clean shirt and walked to the bathroom. Before he closed the door, Dani said, “Rinse it under cold water. It’ll help make sure the stains don’t set.” He said nothing but nodded before closing the door.
Dani looked at the notebook sitting on top of the mattress, her jaw tight. Guilt, fear, and denial blended within her. She wanted to believe him, she needed to believe him, but couldn’t. Grabbing the notebook and laptop, she moved to the couch, continuing her own search. When Jared came out of the bathroom, he draped the damp shirt over the back of the couch. Dani did her best to ignore its presence, what it meant.
Jared curled up on the mattress with a blanket they’d found left behind that wasn’t too moldy. Only a few feet apart, yet they were separated by everything they weren’t saying. The rain intensified, drowning the silence.
Hours later, fog clung low to the ground in the broken parking lot. The rain had finally stopped but the humidity was still high. Weak, morning light seeped through the crack in the curtains. Dani had fallen asleep on the couch curled up next to her notebook, the laptop set on the ground. She still had a pen in hand, as if she fell asleep while writing. Even in sleep, her expression was troubled.
Jared stood at the window, fingers resting on the rotten sill. He watched the empty road and the abandoned lot, the fog rolling in as abruptly as the rain had stopped. Turning toward the room, his eye caught on the bouncer’s shirt that he’d needed to move to get to other things in his duffel sitting on the floor. His last reminder of the man who once guarded doors instead of breaking them.
He looked out the window again, catching his faint reflection in the glass. It was distorted, half-human in the fog-streaked pane. He wasn’t sure which half he recognized more.
Behind him, Dani groaned, rolling over and dropping her pen. The notebook slipped to the floor, but the small thud didn’t wake her. Jared turned back toward the room, carrying a purpose that felt heavier than hope.
