Young Writers Society

James flinched when the girl who'd run off early popped up, but composed himself quickly. Carter still lingered in the back of his mind. He was only separated by a door.

He fought to throw his mind back into his previous focus. He did not want to appear, nor actually be, so easily shaken.

"What's your name?" he questioned the girl with long, long hair.

Queenie's gaze flicked between the girl and the guy, assessing them. The girl was eating...something. Was that blood she smelled?

Queenie gave a little shake of her head, pulling a strand of her hair over her shoulder to twist. A false nervous tick. "Queenie," she answered. The guy looked...off, like he was ready to drop into a power nap at a moment's notice.

Benji wished he had been the one pulled out of the room. He knew he needed to leave. Staying near Daniel was dangerous. But his legs refused to listen to his brain; he was stuck between fight and flight. Benji didn't want to fight. He just wanted to run.

His legs, apparently, hadn't gotten the message.

"You should go with them," Daniel said. "It'll make the hunt more fun."

Benji didn't move.

Daniel frowned. "You're being boring, Benjamin Frost. You're supposed to go with them so I can chase after you!"

"Why can't you leave me alone?" Benji whispered.

The comment seemed to amuse him.

"Because it's fun to hunt you," he said. "Now, come on, Benji! I don't have all day. If you're not going to go after them yourself, I'll have to make things..."

Daniel glanced over towards the door.

"...a little more...interesting."

He gave another chilling smile.

A pit growing in his stomach, Benji finally found the strength to move. He rushed towards the door - knowing that Daniel was going to hurt Alyss and Genevieve if he didn't beat him there - and joined the other two in the hallway.

But when he glanced back into the room, Daniel was gone.

James hummed, logging the name in his mind.

"James." He gestured loosely to Kate. "Kate. We're checking this floor for anything that might tell us who or what brought us here and why."

He didn't really want to extend an invitation but felt the obligation to. He'd rather just stay with Kate, but they were, so they said, all in this together.

"Care to join?"

Kate watched as the bumbling blonde nodded, her piles of hair swaying hypnotically around her thighs. "I guess it would be better to go with a group."

"You weren't thinking that earlier," Kate pointed out with her mouth full of bloody cool whip.

Queenie - what a pretentious name - shrugged, "I thought I could find whoever owns this place, and everyone else was busy. I didn't want to bother any of you."

"And now you're fine with being a bother."

Queenie frowned, "I can go if you don't want me around."

James hadn’t thought much of Queenie at first besides being mildly suspicious of her for sneaking off alone, but had he been in her shoes, and someone else had taken charge, he would’ve done the same.

But something about her responses rung as insincere. It could’ve been the sudden rush of paranoia after just seeing Carter, but he didn’t like her. She reminded him too much of Carter at the moment, and he didn’t have words to articulate why.

“Let’s go, Kate,” he said, walking off towards the next door in the hall. “Queenie, you make your own decision. I could care less what you do.”

Queenie watched as Kate followed the guy down the hall. She sighed. It was pointless to go with them if they didn't even want her around. The only reason for being with a group was to get rid of some suspicion she'd probably earned when she just vanished like that, but Kate struck her as the type to hold that little stunt over her head until the day she died if it was possible.

So, instead, she headed in the opposite direction.

It didn't take her long to find the others, looking spooked, one of them still clutching a shard of glass like her life depended on it.

James watched in the corner of his eye as Queenie started off in the opposite direction. Either he and Kate had driven her off by not being particularly warm or welcoming, or she never really wanted to join a group in the first place.

He took to the next door and it opened up into a library. From the ceiling to the floor, the walls were lined with books, and there were several cushioned chairs and a few small side-tables in the center on a fluffy white rug. A window faced the front of the mansion, but all it looked to reveal was the night sky.

If James's mind hadn't been so twisted up at the moment, he would've been happy to see a room so full of books, but he kept their context in mind. They were looking for answers.

That was when he noticed someone in a chair facing away from the door. He was only able to view the top of their head poking out from it.

Kate was finishing off the last of her snack when she walked into the library. She'd never really liked libraries. Big, musty places that somehow managed to feel cramped and echoey at the same time no matter what the space actually looked like. It wasn't like she had any particular use for books, either. She had her own problems to deal with, fictional ones were a suitcase of lead she didn't need to add to her luggage.

She was in the process of putting her empty bowl on an empty space on one of the shelves near the door when the awful, awkward shuffle-halt-screech of wood on polished wood assaulted her ears.

She whirled around to see a long-limbed spider of a boy dressed in the flamboyant colors of a toxic frog trying to dramatically turn his chair around to face the door. Even as he failed most miserably at this than a fish trying to scale a tree, he had the suggest, most punchable look on his punchable fucking face.

"What an awful surprise it is to see you here, oh, corpse-of-Katherine."

"That's not my name. That was never my name."

The boy stood, unperturbed by her words as he shook his head with sympathy, or mock-sympathy. Kate didn't think he even knew if he was acting or not.

She hadn't seen Connery in a good long while - time was odd on Neverland, so it was difficult to count the glorious days free of his indecent whining - but now here he was, strutting toward her, his slimy gaze on James.

"Get away from that foul creature before in her untimely wrath, she infects you with her vicious bite!" Connery warned with far more gesturing than was strictly necessary.

"Ignore the glitter-licking theatre brat," she growled in James's general direction, the glow of her eyes growing rapidly brighter like a lightbulb fed too much power.

James stared as the boy dressed in a disgusting shade of green screeched the chair around on the wood floor. He wanted to leave the room the moment the unholy sound pierced through his ears.

And the more the fellow spoke the more James didn't like him. If James had met one of his least favorite people, this had to be Kate's. He could see why.

As the guy approached, James leaned back ever so slightly, looking at him in mild disgust. But at Kate's comment, he returned his expression to neutral and looked past the man.

"What brat?" he said. "This room's practically empty. Let's move on."

Connery's face twisted into some comedic fusion of repulsion and offense as he spluttered out some indignant syllables that may have been parts of something ear-bleedingly pretentious, but Kate was delighted to never be sure.

Her delight ended the moment he found his words. He snatched James's arm and with a force of strength someone of his twig-like figure should never have had access to, he pulled Kate's new companion away from her.

Connery leveled a glare at Kate. "You've poisoned his thoughts with your vampiric mind tricks!" he accused accusatorily, "You fiend! You undead leech on the living! How dare you use the tricks of your awful kind against an innocent! How dare you!"

Kate's glare went lethal. "Glue your rotten teeth together and starve to death, Connery."

James had been content with ignoring the nuisance until Connery grabbed his arm and pulled him away from Kate. Where his mind stopped his body took over.

He ripped his arm out of Connery's hands and punched the skinny man square in the gut. He pulled away and shook his hand, still refusing to look at Connery directly.

"Hm. Strangest thing came over me," he said to Kate in monotone. "Just needed to release some tension. Sorry for punching the air."

Connery gave an undignified squeak, like he'd tried to scream but couldn't breathe, and collapsed to his knees.

Kate snorted, holding back gleeful laughter, and walked with James out the door. She made sure to close it before Connery could figure out how to talk again.

"What an asshole," she muttered, going to push a table holding a heavy marble bust of some generic old guy in front of the doors.

James assisted in pushing the bust in front of the door.

"I'm glad that ended quickly." As much as he would've wanted access to the library, if that man was in there it was better to block it off.