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One by one, in quick succession, every door into the dining room slams shut, seemingly of their own volition. Bang bang BANG BANG. And now we’re all locked in. The din of casual conversation twists into frightened murmurs and gasps.
Then the lights cut out and everybody screams.
Terror, pungent as a skunk, threads the crowd. In the dark, they fumble past one another in no particular direction. Behind my own alarm blaring at the forefront of my thoughts, I muse that movement creates the illusion of agency in situations like this. When there’s nothing you can do, nowhere you can go, at least you can move your own body. And that’s something, I guess.
Red balls of plasmatic magic rise up from the spastic crowd. Their light catches everyone at their most terrified and they pause suddenly, gripped by self-consciousness. Beneath each basketball-sized light rise the arms of a Blood Mage. When people make this connection, laughter chases away their fright, as though they’ve all just been made the butt of a joke they’ve chosen to be gracious about. They look around in anticipation of another Blood Mage magic show, but I know there’ll be no more benign entertainment tonight.
Because I see the looks on the faces of our hosts, terror-stricken and dazed. They know as much as the rest of them.
And I know more.
Even though he hasn’t revealed himself, I sense his presence.
Simon.
Or, rather, the thing that has consumed my brother.
“Do we…?” Max whispers beside me.
I shake my head. “Let’s see it play out.”
We can’t battle Simon and the Blood Mages. As much as I want to get in there before any innocents can get hurt, I remember what Max said. We need to live. We need to walk away from this. We need that house and that family. And letting them fight first is the best way to do that.
“Are y–ou ok-ay?” Braxton sounds off in my ear.
“We’re alright, but he might be here.” I don’t know if my words get through to them, but I do hope they stay away from this room. “Just keep looking for my people.”
A young Blood Mage dressed in a black suit with his blond hair slicked back and an overconfident air lifts out of the crowd like he’s attached to an invisible crane. He begins thrashing wildly, disabusing the attendees of the notion this is part of another neat trick. No, something is wrong, and now everyone knows it.
“Help me!” he shouts to the other Blood Mages.
Confidently, arrogantly even, they lift their free hands to him, but nothing happens but some seemingly useless sparks of light, and fear comes over their faces in an instant. That’s right, this is magic, magic more powerful than what you possess.
When the young mage screams, it cues the audience to scream in kind, a chorus of acute fear at intolerable volume. While his legs kick fruitlessly, as if in search of the ground they’ve been separated from, his hands reach for his throat, fingers clawing at his Adam's apple. He’s choking, face darkening from white to red to plum purple.
They say choking happens quickly. It doesn’t this time. It’s slow and horrible, made even worse by his desperate movements, and the way he shreds his throat. If this man wasn’t a Blood Mage, I might even feel sorry for him.
Then he stills, and the crowd grows silent.
Whatever puppeteering magic holds him aloft has swung him towards one of the light spheres so that we might all get a good look at his death face. The whites of his eyes have turned red, his tongue is distended and protruding out of his mouth, and his throat is scratched bloody to the point of exposing muscle.
He drops, and the crowd clears a space for his dead body to fall.
“Simon,” Max says, almost like a curse, which I confirm with the solemnity of my gaze.
As though summoned by the malediction of his name, the spindles of Simon’s pitch-like mass slither forth from the shadows. Before the crowd can react, the black tentacles penetrate the mass in a hunt for their next victim. They seize a second Blood Mage, a redheaded woman whose pitiful attempt at defense amounts to a half-charged blast of magic that misfires, ricochets off the ceiling, and zings back into the crowd, consuming an innocent warlock in a blaze of fire.
Simon’s tentacles pick the mage off her feet, indifferent to her protest. They ensnare her limbs and encircle her face, muffling her screams. With the sadism and ease of a child plucking the legs from a spider’s body, Simon tears each of her limbs off before crushing her skull. Blood showers over the table before the dismembered pieces of the Blood Mage’s body fall into the punch bowls.
A crush of bodies presses outward towards the walls in a bid to escape the hideous monster, but there’s no way out. I see his magic, like black curtains hanging before the doors. None are strong enough to peel it back, to wrest control from the unforgiving blob gurgling in the corner of the room, its many squid-like arms poised above their heads.
“Whatschrzzzgoingchrzzz,” comes Braxton’s voice through my earpiece, but the signal is made fuzzy, probably by Simon’s magic enclosing the room.
Much clearer is the sonorous voice emitting from the monster. “What a splendid reunion! Your screams remind me of my own, and the terrified cries of my packmates. Oh, the nostalgia. Memories of that dark, dank dungeon. Let’s replicate it to the best of our abilities.”
Inky tentacles launch at each of the suspended orbs, piercing them like balloons and cloaking the room in darkness once again. I struggle to make sense of the movement, silhouettes of heads and limbs everywhere, like some nightmarish beast fusing a hundred human bodies into one. But I’m not as concerned with them as I am with making sure they don’t go anywhere near Max and I.
I have to be at the ready. At all times. The cost of doing otherwise would be too great.
