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Pressing myself against the door, I plan to edge it open and check no one is outside before making an escape. But instead, it opens for me.
I stumble forward with a small cry of alarm, colliding hard with the person on the other side. The impact sends me stumbling backward, falling hard and graceless onto my ass.
My pulse is immediately racing a mile a minute. The shock is a little disorienting, and it feels like I managed to hit my face against the door. Or something. My cheek stings.
“Sorry!” I blurt. “I’m sorry, the door was open. I didn’t mean to interrupt—”
I look up, and my heart catches in my throat, words drying up on my lips.God, if the ground could swallow me up right now.
The situation is so much worse than simple chagrin.
No—
Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought. Only it doesn’t seem like the sort of injury to make someone hallucinate. On the other hand, it feels like this must be a hallucination because I’m neither that lucky nor unlucky, depending on perspective.
There’s no way that Caelan, as inGoëticaCaelan, is staring down through the open doorway, looking as perplexed to see me as I am him.
Actually, no, that’s a lie. Nothing could come close to how utterly lost I am right now. Perhaps that’s the only thing saving me from making even more of an idiot of myself, being too shocked to react at all.
He looks exactly like he did on stage. The special effects, the prosthetics, thecharacter.All of it. He looks every inch inhuman, and my eyes widen.
He’s holding a dagger. I recognize it from the videos, and I think it’s the same one he had last night too. It’s a weapon he regularly uses. There is blood on the blade, and I crashed headfirst into him. I really, really hope I didn’t piss him off.
I gulp in a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize anyone was in here. I mean, I did assume there was since the door was unlocked, but I thought there might have been a show on or something, and I was curious, so…”
My rambling is thankfully interrupted by the door opening wider and another figure appearing.
“What’s the problem, Caelan?” he asks.
Fuck, my stomach flips. That’s, that’s him, isn’t it? Elias. Both of them are here.
Elias is the same. Exactly like his persona, like the videos, shadows crawling subtly against his skin. That’s not possible. That shouldn’t be possible. What the hell is even happening?
Elias drags his eyes down to where I’m still sprawled on the floor. His expression turns tight. Then he immediately clips Caelan around the back of the head. “What do you think you’redoing?” Elias barks coldly.
“Oi! Cut it out, ya prick! It was an accident. I opened the door, and she was just there. It ain’t my fault.”
I shake myself, realizing I’m still staring like a gaping idiot. My hands are trembling, but I can’t deal with that now. Pushing the shock aside to handle later, I speak up properly, “I’m okay. He’s right. It was an accident. I was standing right at the door. It’s my fault.”
Elias casts a suspicious glance at Caelan but apparently decides to give him the benefit of the doubt. He steps forward and comes to kneel in front of me instead. “Are you all right?”
The butterflies in my stomach are creating a goddamn whirlwind.What am I meant to make of this?
Just running into them would be enough of a surprise. But they’rethem, like on stage or in the videos. The special effects—except it can’t be special effects. Not here, not like this. There’s no editing in real life that could make them look like that.
There’s a sense of power about them, of somethingother, something that doesn’t fit into the real world quite right. To be fair, the effects aren’t as exaggerated as on video or at the concert. But there’s a faint, glitching electrical energy around Caelan, and the aura of darkness surrounding Elias, though far more subtle now. The world seems to warp ever so slightly as I look at them, as if it doesn’t quite want to accept their existence here.
The personas they act as on stage suddenly don’t seem like an act at all.
Itcan’tbe, but the evidence before my eyes says otherwise. Otherworldly entities. Demons. That was what their ‘personas’ were. They definitely don’t appear human.
If they are demons, if they’re in any way like in their music videos, they are not exactly the nicest of people to be running into.
I respect them. Their creativity and confidence is inspiring. And the way I felt at the concert yesterday was… something. Their narrative was captivating for what Ithoughtit was. Fictional. But suddenly, the image is incredibly clear in my mind. Caelan has used that dagger to split open a victim’s skin and toy with the blood that welled to the surface for the sake of aesthetic for the camera.
They’re morally gray at best.
They are dangerous.
