Young Writers Society

Charlie was silent for a moment.

It had been hard to tell before the boy with the fiddle got his memories back, but Charlie was beginning to suspect that he was more like the people Charlie would have met if he had been born in the right world - and that Charlie was actually the youngest person here.

"You're older than you look, aren't you?" he finally said.

"We're dead, aren't we?" Jay replied. "Why wouldn't they be here?"

Kazimir looked down at the ground. He supposed... this could be the afterlife. Or an afterlife of sorts. That would make sense of things. He wasn't sure what he believed about death and what happens after, but maybe this was it.

He was quiet for a moment. He hadn't seen Megan for a very long time. He wondered if she would be disappointed in him, for how things ended up; him, in jail. And Bo... well... Bo turned out alright. But Kazimir didn't think he could take credit for that.

He gave a gruff nod.

"Let's look at the other rooms, then," he said, starting to walk back towards the window. It would be father than walking all the way around the building to the other side. "See if we can find them."

The fiddler nodded to the boy, "I lived for many hundreds of thousands of years, that I can remember. There are gaps," he chuckled. "You may borrow me a name if you're bothered by my lack of one, though."

Charlie had only overheard snippets of Kazimir and Jay's conversations, but he doubted they would find any of their loved ones in the motel's rooms. If anything, he just wanted to find the shadowy figure again. He had so many questions he wanted to ask - and no idea if the shadow would even answer them.

"I'm not," Charlie said, giving the boy a tired smile. "If you don't have a name and don't want one, I'll respect that."

He chuckled, "You quite misunderstand. My name was freely given, I will grant that, but I typically do prefer to have something to be referred to by when I'm going to be somewhere specific for a while."

Kazimir didn't wait as he hopped through the window and darted through the dirty, littered motel room. The motel was very small. There were about 20 rooms total, but there was no way of knowing which room had anything important in them. He sighed once he was out the door, looking down the L-shaped building. How long was this going to take?

As soon as he asked that question in his head, writing began to appear on the ground as if being written by an invisible finger - again, in blood, that came out of nowhere.

It was a big "26."

Room 26. He guessed whatever the shadow man had prepared for them there, they'd have to face it sooner or later, and he wanted to do it sooner. With a grunt, he sprung forward into a sprint down the building, passing 8, 12, 15, 20...

It was the last room, at the end of the building. Of course it was. But Kazimir slowed as he saw what looked like blood pooling at the bottom of the door, bubbling out, thick and dark. He paused, stepping into the unavoidable puddle as he put his hand on the door handle.

Even the handle was wet and sticky. He really hoped all of this blood was for show. Suddenly, the hope of finding any of his family faded. He wouldn't want to find Megan here. He didn't want her to be caught up in all of this.

He turned the knob and pushed the unlocked door inward. The room was dark, and Kazimir couldn't see further than a foot or two inside, which only revealed a small hallway with carpet soaked-through.

It smelled disgusting.

Charlie thought for a moment.

"How about..."

He thought for a moment, mulling over who the boy reminded him of. Before Alex had died, she had gotten him to catch up on the Percy Jackson series he read when he was younger - including the Trials of Apollo series. And the boy did seem attached to his music...

"Apollo?" Charlie finally offered. He was going to wait for a response, but then he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Kazimir had gone running back towards the motel. He had thought that he would wait, but Charlie realized he was just being optimistic - waiting didn't seem to be something that Kazimir did.

Charlie gestured in the direction of the hotel.

"I'm going to go join him," he said. "It's probably a good idea to stick together even if we know most of what happened to us..."

He gave Jay a glance before following Kazimir.

When he finally caught up to him, he was standing by a room that had blood in the doorway. Charlie stared at the blood for the moment, doing his best to block out memories of James and everything he had seen through the visions he had gotten growing up. Blood wasn't anything he was afraid of anymore.

But it didn't make him any less worried about where the blood was coming from.

The boy smiled at the name he was given - so unlike any of the others he'd been borrowed in centuries past - but that smile quickly faded as the others darted away. Looking for family. In a place like this, he doubted such people would be present.

Still, he trailed after.

He came to a sudden halt many paces back from impulsive, violent man who stood within a puddle of what could only be blood. He reached for the handle, and the boy - Appolo, as he was dubbed - felt ill.

Whose blood is that?

Jay followed along beside the others, and he too noticed the blood. Whoever had done this made such a mess. That was why he'd strangled Simon to death. The boy had squirmed but at. least there had been no blood.

He stood back hesitantly.

Kazimir stepped in slowly, hearing the squelch of wet carpet under his shoes. There wasn't really a way to walk in quietly, was there?

He pulled his gun again. He knew it would do nothing against the shadow, but he didn't know if something else would be lurking in the dark.

As he stepped in, he was shrouded in complete darkness. There was no light, not even light leaking in from the outside. If there were windows in the room, they were covered. And if there was anything around him, he couldn't make any of it out - at least, not just yet.

He brushed his fingers along the wall to keep the wall as a frame of reference. He didn't run into anything for what felt like a little too long, but his eyes were adjusting.

The room looked like it was empty. The only noticeable figure was a big, looming rectangle on the opposite wall. He couldn't tell if it was a TV or a picture frame, but the more he stared the more his eyes just felt strained.

It was then that he remembered the others might've been following him, or waiting for him as he went in.

"There isn't a lot in here," he said.

"It's dark."

Charlie had followed Kazimir in, just like he followed him into every other place he chose to enter. He had no way of knowing how hard it was for Kazimir to see, but he was struggling just as much to make out anything in the room. He couldn't even find the source of the blood - the only noticeable thing about the room besides it was the giant rectangle in its back.

He looked down at his feet.

Was the blood fake, then?

"...Do you see where the blood is coming from?" he asked. He wasn't sure who he was asking the question to.

The boy who hadn't yet gotten used to calling himself Apollo stayed outside of the room. That much blood...it wasn't a place he wanted to be.

He inched a little closer to the tall man who, while he didn't look like a fighter, was probably still more physically capable than the dainty musician, even if he did have a crude sense of social etiquette.

"Well," Jay said, once he was in the room. He was about as clueless as the others were in finding out the source of the blood, but he knew he couldn't let the others know that.

He too stared at the rectangle. It looked like a TV, though he'd never seen a TV like this. Wait, he had. In his last ten years, they'd gotten TVs like that in prison.

But maybe it wasn't a TV.

As the man behind whom he'd taken cover walked into the room, hardly glancing at the blood, the boy began to wonder if he was hallucinating. How was he the only one bothered by it?

He tried to go into the room, then gagged and turned away.

"I'll stay out here," he called to the others without looking back at the gore.