Even though the bar downstairs had been stripped of its goods by a bunch of lower classmen, it seemed the best place to go to clear her head. The door to the room at the end of the hall swung open so Tara could stagger outside. Her clothes had been hastily pulled on after what looked to be one hell of a tumbling session, and her hair was a telltale mess. Before Paige could be spotted, she bolted down the stairs.
Tara was a smoker. She was the kind of smoker who rolled her eyes at any talk of cancer, coughed up phlegm because she was an adult, and had every right to do what she pleased. Anyone who approached her with concerns about secondhand smoke were quickly made to wish they’d just shut their mouth and taken their chances with the carcinogens. Tara was also a screamer. Not in the way that Wes had surely just experienced, but in the way that almost shattered glass if she looked up to find someone standing there when she hadn’t been expecting them. It was all Paige could do to keep from giggling as she circled around the bar to the perfect hiding spot and hunkered down in the darkness to wait for the ideal time to jump out and scare the living shit out of a good friend.
She could hear Tara’s uneven footsteps coming down the stairs and could picture the bleary, dazed expression on her face. Once she got down the stairs to step outside for her smoke, she would be focused on the door and not expecting to get jumped from someone lurking behind the bar.
This was going to be great.
Something rustled in another part of the room. That was either Tara approaching the bottom step or someone else trying to find a quiet corner in the noisy building. Paige wasn’t familiar with all the little noises in the structure, so for all she knew, some of the abundant noise from above was just filtering down.
Then again, Tara might have found a window to puff her smoke through. She might have even broken her routine and lit her cigarette upstairs. The creaking could be anything, and the feet coming down the stairs might belong to anyone. Suddenly, the joy Paige felt at the prospect of scaring Tara out of her mind was dimmed by the possibility of being discovered crouched behind the bar like an idiot. Holding her breath, she placed her hands on the edge of the bar and eased herself up past a row of dusty empty bottles that had probably been sitting there since the last Super Bowl.
Her eyes drew level with the warped top of the bar, making all the broken peanut shells and dried chunks of pizza crust seem like boulders on a miniature alien landscape. A shadow wobbled within the enclosed stairwell, followed by a long sigh and, “Wes, aren’t you coming out here with me?”
Paige ducked under the bar, feeling every bit of dumb giddiness returning. The mood was heightened by the drinks she’d had in her, but was completely obliterated by the sight of the man chewing on Amy’s face.
He was a skinny collection of bones and saggy skin wrapped up in paint-spattered jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. The only reason she hadn’t seen him before was because he and Amy were completely under the bar where it formed a corner that pointed toward the front door of the building. Nestled in there, they might have gone undiscovered for hours. His arms were covered in thick tribal tattoos, and for a moment Paige thought he was Amy’s impromptu date for the evening. His mouth was wide open and pressed against the lower section of Amy’s jaw. Wide dark eyes glared out from the shadows, waiting to see if he’d truly been discovered.
Nervous fear flooded through her, starting off as something she might feel when walking in on someone else’s intimate moment and gradually turning into the mild dread of discovering a deranged homeless person following her down the block.
Then she saw the blood trickle from the man’s mouth.
Amy twitched, snapped her eyes open and tried to look over at Paige. When she reached out for her, Paige immediately grabbed her hand. The instant Amy’s leg scraped against the floor, she was pulled back by a bony arm that wrapped around her waist. Amy’s cry didn’t make it past her lips before the man tightened his grip on her.
For a moment Paige thought she’d gotten a hold on the other girl. Amy struggled to get away from the man under the bar, squirming in his grasp to expose the three sets of fangs buried in the side of her neck. Blood sprayed from the openings in her flesh, dimming the last bit of light in her eyes. The man holding her took it in with a wet sucking sound before adjusting his bite so the blood sprayed into his mouth.
Although it seemed she was forced to watch that for hours, only a few seconds had passed. Footsteps crossed in front of the bar, so Paige jumped up to catch Tara’s attention. She found herself looking into the face of yet another man with thick tribal tattoos.
“Who’s this?” asked a man who looked to be somewhere in his thirties. He had hair that lay flat against his scalp as if every strand had been glued into place. While most of his tattoos were concentrated at the front of his neck, some thinner strands crept up along a large pointed chin before tapering off just before reaching his lower lip.
Tara stood a few paces away from the bar. Judging by the look on her face, she was all but frozen there. Her skin had paled and was clammy. She kept her arms wrapped around her body as though covering herself after being caught in the shower. One man approached her from the left as Wes came in from the right,
The man with the pointed chin wore an expression that could hardly be called a grin. It was more of a curl of the lip to reveal two sets of fangs sprouting from his upper jaw when he asked, “Have you been holding out on us?”
Wes placed a hand on Tara’s shoulder to hold her in place. “There’s plenty of people on this campus, Evan. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“The least you could have done was invite us to the party.” Closing his eyes and concentrating on something that slithered past human senses, Evan hissed, “But it seems Hector has already found a party of his own.”
The man under the bar sank his teeth deeper into Amy’s neck. Paige knew if there had been any prayer of her helping Amy, it was gone now. She didn’t know what she could have done, but it made her feel just as bad as if she’d killed the other girl herself. When Hector pulled Amy in tight against his chest, his fangs tore her throat open wide enough for Paige to see the bloody fibers within her. Hector even squeezed Amy’s limp figure to force the last bit of fluid from her veins before the possibility of sharing her was broached.
“You’ve brought them into your confidence,” Evan said in words that built in intensity like a train car that had been cut loose and was rolling toward a house at the bottom of a hill. “You’ve got them coming to you, getting drunk, getting laid, getting unconscious. How the fuck could you not tell us about this party?”
Paige’s back was pressed against the wall. She didn’t want to be near Hector and Amy, but she also didn’t want to make herself any more visible to the others. The men’s tattoos were definitely moving now. The more Hector slurped from the dead husk in his grasp, the more the black markings fluttered beneath his skin. The sight of it hit her on the same nerve as watching a thousand newborn spiders flowing from the cracked thorax of their mother.