Slowly waking from my slumber, I groggily yawned, causing pain to surge through my ornery red eye. Without thinking, I raised my hand to my bad eye only to be reminded by my bandages, which were actually just paper towels from the janitor's closet, to keep it away from my face. My left eye was monumentally swollen. I couldn't afford to irritate it anymore.
My one-eyed gaze glanced over at the other size of the bed. Resting her head at the far corner of it was my oldest friend, Willow. Her messy raven hair was all scrunched together against her pillow which the witchling had her arms wrapped around. Her snores were very quiet compared to the snores of the other witches in the room.
In the other bed, the twins were both fast asleep. Edric had his arm resting on top of Emira while his sister had the non-injured side of her head pressed deeply into the one pillow she had. She wasn't allowed to move her head very much and she wasn't allowed to lay on her back as she slept. Mrs. Noceda said that it would help keep her airways clear just in case she vomited.
"Good evening" said human greeted from the armchair in the corner.
"Evening? What time is it?". I looked over to the window. The barrier was, unfortunately, still there, but it was a darker red than it was when I fell asleep.
"It's almost six-thirty. You slept for quite a long time. How are you feeling, cariño?" Mrs. Noceda gently asked.
"My eye still really hurts, but I'm guessing it will for a while" I sighed. "All my other scratches feel fine though. Amity did a good job making sure I didn't get too many".
Guilt clumped in my throat. I still couldn't believe she saved me. After admitting to saying all those bad things about her, she not only forgave me right away, but she also protected me for most of the rat attack. I had already felt bad, but that just made me feel ten times worse.
Luz's mother apparently noticed my shame. She slightly sat forwards, the lines on her face darkening while her brown eyes reflected her sympathy.
"Did you talk to Amity about what happened upstairs?".
"Yeah, I told her, and she took it way too well! She said what I said, "was fair" and that it would make sense for Willow to kill her" I cried, quietly though, so I wouldn't wake anyone up.
"She seemed very… self-loathing when I talked to her earlier. I know she feels bad for being mean, but she's starting to concern me". Camila let out some of her worry with a deep breath. "Has somebody ever talked to her about that".
"Luz, Willow, and I just did last night. I made her promise not to put her life over any of ours. It seems like she still thinks mine is more important".
"Yours is important," Mrs. Noceda pressed. "And so is hers".
"Exactly" I muttered sadly. "How is Amity by the way?".
"The bruise on her side is healing nicely. She says it still hurts, but nowhere near as bad as last night. And none of the scratches she received during the kitchen raid were too concerning, though there's still a chance they'll get infected.
I had her and the other students take a dip in the pool earlier this afternoon. The chemicals in it should've killed a lot of the germs the rats had spread to them. But you can never be too careful with rat bites".
I looked closer at the three other witches in the room. Both Willow and Edric had damp hair and new clothes on, while Emira was wearing the same clothes she was in earlier that day. It seemed that Luz's mother didn't trust the concussed teen near the swimming pool.
"Do you want me to go in the pool too?".
"Definitely not," Mrs. Noceda said without any hesitation. "Just the fumes of the chlorine would irritate your eye even more than it already is".
Camila suddenly stood up. She walked over to the table with the "tee vee" on it and grabbed a roll of bandages and a few healing patches.
"That reminds me. We need to clean that scratch on your eye and change your dressing".
"Again?".
"I know, but we need to keep that wound clean at all costs. If your eye gets infected, they may have to remove it" Mrs. Noceda explained earnestly.
It's not as if it still worked anyways. Mrs. Noceda gave me a huge explanation earlier about how my lens was damaged and that my eye would have a problem sending the correct picture to my brain. She also talked about my hemorrhaging causing fluid to build up behind my retina for a little bit too. But the only thing that I got out of everything she said was that, because I didn't receive emergency medical attention right away, I would never be able to see from that eye again.
But I knew better than to argue with Luz's mom. She'd tamed a dust bunny, fought a savage horde of rats, and tended to the wounds of all of Hexide all in one day. I could only imagine what the human was like when she was angry.
"Luckily, I received over two months' worth of healing supplies from the hotel owner this afternoon. There should be enough for both you and Emira to share" Mrs. Noceda reassured as she began to take the wrappings off my face.
"Shouldn't that be saved for more life-threatening injuries?" I asked back. "I just have a hurt eye".
The gentle human put her hand on my shoulder. Her worry chipped through her calm demeanor.
"That's very sweet of you, Gus. But your injury is as serious as Emira's is, if not a little more. An injury to the eye is already at high risk for infection, but you were bitten by a rat who could be carrying a million diseases in their saliva alone".
I couldn't have heard that right. Was Mrs. Noceda really saying that my eye wound was just as life-threatening as Emira's head wound? But the witch could barely stand and, other than my one eye being super tender, I felt completely fine!
"Does that mean…". My rising anxiety stopped me from finishing my question.
"Cariño". Camila crouched down to where my eyes met hers. Her resolute look of certainty was strongly similar to that of her daughter's. "I will do anything and everything to make sure you make it through this, but that wound will get infected and, if we're not too careful, that infection could get into your bloodstream. Right now, joven, your wound is of top priority".
Despite the older human's promise, I felt even more scared than I did during the rat attack. My breath hitched as fear made my heartbeat like a drum. What little noise there was in the room was muffled by a growing ringing in my ear.
"Now, let's rinse your eye out with some saline solution, then we'll see what we can do with these "healing patches" Mrs. Noceda murmured, more talking to herself than she was to me.
Even though my torn-up eyelid was swollen shut, the lights in the bathroom already made my bad eye burn. Keeping my eye open long enough for Luz's mom to clean my wound was agonizing. It only took about fifteen minutes to tend to my injury, but it was the longest fifteen minutes of my life.
Willow began to stir after we walked out of the bathroom. As soon as I sat back down on the other side of the bed, the witch's green eyes squinted open. She slowly sat up, carefully stretched, and grabbed her round red glasses from the table.
"It's after six-thirty already?" my friend drowsily asked. "I didn't expect to nap that long".
"How are you feeling, Willow?".
Willow turned towards me with a tired smile. She started to answer my question when the awful sight of my eye made her waver. She tried to act like she wasn't bothered by it, but she failed miserably.
"Is it really that bad?" I pried.
"Well… It's not…um".
"It's okay, Willow. I already know that it is" I lamented. "Mrs. Noceda says I'll probably never see from it again".
At that, Luz's mother set the roll of bandages down on the bed and locked eyes with Willow to silently confirm what I'd said. Then the human grabbed both of my hands and tenderly pulled me into a small hug.
"I'm so sorry" she whispered, her unearned remorse threatening to burst. "You don't deserve this".
I sat there speechless for a moment. The desperate hopeless feeling radiating off the older human was painfully familiar. While sitting in her mother's arms, I had no doubt that Luz had gotten her strong desire to help others from Camila. It's just that, with Luz, there was always a stronger feeling of self-guilt involved.
A knocking at the door made Mrs. Noceda break away from the somber moment. She opened it, revealing her daughter and the youngest Blight standing on the other side. Both made sure to step in the room very quietly and speak very softly.
"Willow. Gus. You're finally awake" Luz faintly cheered.
"How are you guys feeling?" Amity added.
Willow stayed silent for a minute, giving me the opportunity to speak. When I didn't say anything, the witchling decided to answer first.
"My arm, chest, and back are all feeling much better," she began. "But my hand hurts every time I move it".
"That cut on your hand is the deepest one" Mrs. Noceda joined in. "And it's in a really nasty spot".
"I should've known better than to try to grab the killer's weapon, though my mind was kind of fuzzy at that moment".
"And you, Gus?" Amity continued. "How's your eye doing?".
I once again said nothing for a while. Hearing the news that I not only lost sight in the eye but that I was so susceptible to infection that I may have been worse off than Emira was was hard enough. But I had to tell my two friends something or they would just grow even more concerned than they already were.
"My eye injury is…serious, but I'm alive thanks to you". My response sounded a lot calmer than I felt.
My gratitude didn't make Amity feel any better. Her gaze fretfully skipped from me to Willow then to Mrs. Noceda. The latter, who went back to tending to my eye, decided to answer Amity's silent question, though she skimmed over certain details for my sake.
"Eye injuries can be rather problematic, especially if you don't see a doc… a healer straight away. He and I will have to pay close attention to it".
"But aren't you a healer?" Amity pressed.
"Even the top optometrists practicing wouldn't be able to do much without all the necessary equipment" Mrs. Noceda explained. "I wish I had better news for you, but I'm afraid a majority of the damage done to Gus's eye is irreversible".
"But he's gonna live, isn't he?" Luz squeaked.
"Yes, mija" Camila cooed. "As long as we're careful".
The five of us went quiet. While the others seemed to be haunted by a pity-filled anxiety, a feeling of relief began to blossom within me. Ever since Amity received the omen about a broken promise, I sort of just assumed that death would arrive for me at any moment. Despite the human who said it not being one hundred percent sure, it was nice to hear someone say that I wasn't going to die.
"So," I said in an attempt to break the silence. "Those fireworks came in handy, huh?".
"Gus, my dude. How many times am I gonna have to tell you they're flares?" Luz laughed.
The once gloomy conversation instantly took a lighter turn with the change of topic. For the next half an hour, we all started to talk about the human realm's uses for both flares and fireworks. Apparently, the place Luz lived in held a celebration every July where everyone had cookouts and shot off fireworks.
The two humans, and the basilisk who had since joined us, then tried to explain what everyone was celebrating about, but they kept using these weird terms that were foreign to the demon realm like "countries" and "states". From what I was able to gather, a bunch of humans living on an island moved to a much bigger island and decided they would no longer listen to their old king.
"So let me get this straight," Amity intervened. "Your ancestors wrote a fancy letter to a king that lived on an island thousands of miles away from them and that means you have to have a family barbeque every summer?".
"Well, you don't have to have a barbeque," Luz chuckled. "Mami and I usually order out from wherever's open on the fourth of July. Then we sit outside on the porch and watch all the fireworks the neighbors set off".
"They set a bunch off over the lake at summer camp last July" Vee added, her eyes suddenly filling with light. "I didn't really like the noise, but they were so pretty".
"Was that your first time seeing fireworks?" the basilisk's new sister asked excitedly.
Before Vee could respond, there was yet another knock at the door. As Amity went to answer it, I silently prayed to the Titan that it wasn't Boscha.
"What do you want, Boscha?" the youngest Blight huffed impatiently. I cursed under my breath.
"Is the human up?" the triclops scoffed.
"Which one?".
"The one whose ass you keep kissing. Who else would I be asking for?".
"Oh, I don't know," Amity sneered sarcastically. "You could've been referring to the other human who just so happens to be staying in this exact room".
"Is your dumbass girlfriend up or not?" Boscha snarled with what sounded like a stomp of her foot.
"You mean my super smart girlfriend who saved everyone's lives a couple of hours ago? Yeah, she's awake".
"Good. I need to talk to her and one-eye about what happened this morn–". Boscha interrupted herself with a surprised cry. The crisp sound of Amity's hand making contact with the bully's face could also be heard at that moment.
"If you ever call Gus "one-eye" again, I'll tear off the rest of your back" her ex-friend barked.
"What the hell, Amity?! It's not as if his eye won't heal!". There was a pause before Boscha continued, sounding a lot less aggressive. "His eye will heal, won't it?".
"Just say what you're gonna say then do us all a favor and piss off for the rest of the night" Amity gruffed before the two witchlings walked into the hotel room.
"Hey Boscha" Luz greeted while hiding a snicker. "How's the face feeling?".
"Okay, for everyone's sake, let's skip the small talk and just cut to the chase" my peer growled. "With what happened in the basement and the kitchen raid, we haven't had time to discuss what you and Agustus found upstairs".
"Well, you already know we found a human, a basilisk, and two of the three Blight children. What's there left to discuss?" I asked.
"You were up there to find signs of where the killer's hiding. Did you find any?".
Both Luz and I thought about it for a moment. The only things we'd found on the third floor, other than the people of course, were a bunch of random things from the human realm. A majority of it was junk, akin to the things Eda used to sell, though there were a few things that we thought would come in handy like the flares, some bottles with something called "medicine" in it, and somebody's wallet with authentic human currency inside.
Alright, alright. That last one wasn't very useful, two hundred "dollars" wouldn't buy you anything in a place that used snails, but it was too cool for us not to have taken it with us.
"We found a lot of weird things on the third floor but, I'm afraid, none of them pointed towards where the killer might be at" Luz finally sighed.
"And what about the second floor? You did check the second floor, didn't you?".
"We did," Luz hmphed defensively. "Unlike the third floor, all of the doors were locked".
"Not all of them" I corrected. "The laundry room door was open and when we looked inside, we saw that weird wire".
Honestly, I was surprised that I even remembered that. We didn't even spend five minutes on the second floor and that wire creeping into a crevice in the wall was nowhere near as interesting to all the cool stuff we found on the floor above. Yet it was the first strange thing we found, and, for a while, I thought it was the only thing we'd have to report when we went back downstairs.
"Oh yeah. We found an extension cord sharing the electrical socket with the washing machine. The other end was somewhere in the wall, or maybe somewhere on the other side. That may mean something, but I couldn't tell you what that is".
"Do you think he's using that wire to power the human surveillance system he has?" Willow suggested.
"Human surveillance system?" Mrs. Noceda echoed. "You mean those cameras all around the hotel actually still work?".
"Not only that, but the killer is constantly watching them. He knew exactly when Boscha and I were heading to the basement. He was able to beat us down there" the injured witch shuttered. Regret shimmered in her pain filled eyes as the mention of the basement left her stuck in her bad memories.
"He must have a monitor somewhere near the laundry room, which means he must be hiding somewhere near the laundry room!"Luz exclaimed before receiving a shush from everyone in the room.
"We don't know that for sure," Boscha warned. "But it's something we should look into. Human, Augustus, are you healthy enough to go back upstairs?".
"Wait. You mean like right now?" my human friend questioned as if the suggestion was crazy.
I mean, it was crazy. After being attacked by both a dust bunny and a swarm of rats earlier that day, Boscha wanted us to do even more snooping around upstairs?
"Yes, right now" Boscha snapped. "Do you think we have any time to waste? How severe are either of your injuries?".
"I just have a bunch of bites and scratches" Luz responded before everyone turned towards me. "What about you, Gus? How nasty is your eye exactly?".
My attention went straight to Mrs. Noceda. I searched her compassionate gaze for any sign of what to do, but the human seemed content with letting me answer. She knew I understood the severity of my injury.
"It's very prone to infection," I began. "But Mrs. Noceda was able to get the killer to give her more than enough healing supplies for both me and Emira to share, so it's wrapped up very well. I think it could handle a trip upstairs".
"Great" Boscha moved on, apparently satisfied with my answer. "Grab your weapons and meet me at the stairwell".
The tired witch began to head towards the door but was quickly stopped by Camila. Her stare was petrifyingly stern.
"I'm coming with you".
"What? But… Okay. Fine. Whatever. You can come too".
Before anyone else could say anything else, Boscha trudged out into the hallway. Once the door clicked close, Luz fearfully turned towards her mom. She opened her mouth to object, but one assertive look from her mother made her shut it again.
"I'm not letting you three kids run around upstairs on your own. Things have gotten way too dangerous around here" Mrs. Noceda explained while she grabbed her large wrench. "Now, let's get going".
…
Much like the third floor, the second floor was musty and weathered. Cobwebs laced the walls and covered every corner. The carpets were heavily stained, giant tears ran up and down the hallways. And, of course, there was plenty of dust.
Luz and I led the way to the laundry room, despite everyone already knowing it was near the elevator, while Boscha and Mrs. Noceda followed closely behind. We all walked quickly, constantly scanning our surroundings for any sign of danger. Fortunately, the only thing we ever found was our own shadows trailing behind us.
Luz trotted up the far-right corner of the laundry room and crouched in front of this large, odd looking, white hollow box with a circular window in the middle. According to Luz, it was called a washing machine and humans used it to wash their clothes before putting them in a similar looking box to dry them.
"Here it is," my friend shouted while pointing at a cleft in the wall behind her.
Both Mrs. Noceda and Boscha approached the wall. The latter began to lightly pound the wall to look for any weaker spots while the former inspected the white cord creeping into it. As I waited for them, I stood by the door and kept my good eye on both the inside of the laundry room and the hallway.
The more I looked around the more I realized how stupid it was to let the partially blind witch keep watch. Some pretty weird stuff started happening to my vision. The room gradually grew brighter, or at least parts of the room did. All of the shadows in the room slowly turned pitch black. Like a pile of poisonous snakes, they contorted and wiggled around until they began to morph into these strange witch looking figures.
I kept closing and rubbing my good eyes, trying my hardest to make my vision go back to normal. But, no matter how many times I looked away, the shadows kept moving around like they had a mind of their own.
Wait. Maybe that's what was happening. The weird things I was seeing weren't the product of my one-eyed sight. It was the product of a potion, a product of the killer!
Just as I started to realize what was going on, one of the shadow figures crept up to Luz and reached for her hand. I instantly sprang into action. While crying out a shrill, "watch out!" I raced up to it and swung at the creature's face with the mini hand shovel I was armed with.
My weapon flew right through the shadow and jammed itself into the nearby wall. All the while, my target leapt towards Luz and trapped her in its grasp. She furiously jabbed at her captor's side with her elbow, but, just like my weapon, it phased through the shadow and hit the air around her.
Camila and Boscha were caught just as quickly by two more shadow figures. The more the two of them struggled the looser their hold on their weapons became, and soon both Camila's wrench and Boscha's hammer dropped to the ground.
I could only back away as I watched the others helplessly wriggle around. Once the shadows felt they had a good enough hold of the two humans and the witchling, they dragged them all out into the hallway. As they passed by, one of the shadow creatures glanced over at me. The eyeless being looked me over, before simply continuing what it was doing.
My confusion pushed my fear to the side. Were the shadows not interested in capturing me? Were they just gonna let me walk away without any struggle whatsoever?
Walking away is what I should have done. Those weird creatures had handed me my chance to escape like it was a birthday present. Yet I instead picked up the weapons Camila and Boscha dropped and started to follow them.
I had to! To me, there was no other option! I wasn't going to just go back downstairs while my friends (and Boscha) were carried off to who knows where!
There may not have been a lot I could do. I couldn't stop them from harming Luz, Mrs. Noceda, and Boscha. But, If I followed the shadows, I'd know where the three of them would be taken too, and maybe I could help them find a way to escape.
"Gus?" Luz gasped when she spotted me pacing besides her and her subduer. "What are you still doing here? You need to run!".
"No, Luz. I'm not gonna just leave you guys to fend for yourselves" I argued.
"Oh. So, you're just gonna die with us instead!" Boscha snapped from ahead.
"What happened to not sacrificing yourself for the rest of us?" Luz went on. "Gus, you promised?".
Luz's pleading filled me with a guilty type of unsurity. It made my heart pause while it sent my brain whirling.
It hadn't even been a day since I had forced my best friends to promise not to do anything too dangerous, and there I was, following a bunch of shadowy figures into uncertain death. I won't deny it. I was doing exactly what I had begged Luz, Willow, and Amity not to. I was throwing away my own safety in order to help someone else.
But just before we all made that promise, I gave the speech of my life to both the killer and all of Hexide. I stressed that, if my peers and I were to survive, we would need to stick together. I meant what I said that night, which meant that abandoning any of my fellow banshees was out of the question.
"I'm sorry, Luz" I mumbled, refusing to meet Luz's terror-filled gaze. "But I'm breaking my promise".