Bianca dragged herself off the corpse and dragged her arm across her mouth. Her head whined. She blinked slowly. What happened? She shook her head and stumbled, fell, and collapsed onto the floor. Then she vomited, coughing until her tongue was raw and her stomach heaved halfway up her throat. Blood splattered onto the tiles, mixing in with the growing pool of red spilling out from the body’s torn open neck. Oh God. She stared at the body. Oh God. Bianca fell backward and dragged herself away, then her eyes locked onto Katie, lying there in a pool of dark red.

She started panting as her head began whining with noise. Bianca froze, then she looked at her fingers, at the blood that made them shine under the fluorescent lights. Her pink work shirt was soaked. Her arms were covered in the stuff. The throat wasn’t the only thing ripped open. The body’s head wasn’t even attached to the rest of it anymore. Their neck was a stump sputtering blood onto the floor, veins and arteries and spine laid out messily.

The worst part was that Bianca couldn’t see the head anywhere around her. Where it should have been was an explosion of blood and gore and cracked tiles. Her knuckles ached as she flexed her fingers, trying to wipe her hands clean on her jeans as she stumbled onto her feet. What happened? She backed against the sinks. What the fuck just happened! She ran a hand through her hair and slicked her curls onto her scalp, then the door opened.

Charlie stood in the doorway, and it felt like an eternity staring at her standing there. She dropped the mascot head on the ground and slapped a hand over her mouth. Maybe not to scream, maybe not to vomit, but it didn’t really matter. There wasn’t anything Bianca could say. What the fuck could she say? She started breathing harder, making her gut flare with pain and her heart race even faster, because Katie still wasn’t getting up, even though she should, shouldn’t she? It’s a fucking Tuesday. For some reason, that’s what stuck with her. That’s what kept circling through her mind as Victoria appeared beside Charlie, and for once, her facial expression shifted.

“Fuck,” Vic said, then pulled out her phone and dialed a number.

Bianca, still feeling like everything was moving in frames, like she was in a slideshow, was suddenly right in front of her, Vic’s wrist in her hand. Charlie yelped and stepped back, and Vic only blinked. “No…no police.”

But the cops should be here, right? I just fucking killed someone, right?!

Vic tensed her jaw, then planted a fist into the side of her jaw. Bianca crumpled to her knees, dazed like a dog that’s just gotten its brain whacked against its skull. “Sit down and chill out, or I’m gonna have to use force.”

“What the fuck?!” Charlie yelled. Vic slammed the bathroom door shut, keeping the smells and stenches and grisly sights for only them to see. “Oh my God, oh my God! Is that a dead body?! IS THAT MARK’S HEAD?!”

“Hey,” Victoria barked at her. “I’m gonna use force on you, too, if you also don’t relax.”

Bianca, still on her knees, now holding herself, looked at her. “Help Katie,” she whimpered. It was a sad, pathetic little voice that escaped her lips. The voice of the kid who’s watched her big brother get buried as she held her mother’s hand and pretended that her father wasn’t crying behind his sunglasses. “Please,” she said again, rocking back and forth, agony in her stomach feeling like a shard of ice in her guts. “Please, Vic. You’re a Supe, please, please just help her.” She only stopped talking because her crying halted the rest of her sentence, breaking it apart into shards she was left swallowing and gasping for, cutting up her throat until all she could do was wince.

“We’re gonna get out of here, is what we’ll do,” she said, putting the phone to her ear before she turned to Charlie, grabbed her wrist, and said, “I need you to tell everyone to go home. Now. Unless you want kids to end up looking like ground beef patties soon.” Charlie didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Vic shoved her out of the bathroom and crouched in front of Bianca. She dragged her eyes off the floor, the tears sitting on her eyelids making her face blurry and misshapen. “B, I need you to focus on me right now. Just me. Not Katie. Not anything else. If you feel anything…weird in your belly, tell me, because I’ll probably have to use force, and that could get really ugly.”

“Who’re you calling?” Bianca said, trying very, very hard to gather herself.

But how could she? Her aunt was lying dead in a pool of her own fucking organs.

Ben and now Katie. What the hell are you even good for?

“Somebody,” Vic said. “They’ll clean this up.”

“What about—”

“Katie’s dead, Bianca.” The word hit her just as hard as Vic’s fist had. Bianca’s mouth snapped shut, and now all she could taste was blood sitting on her tongue and stuck between her teeth. “And a lot of people are going to be dead soon if you don’t stand up right now and get your act together. Let’s get out of here, for your own good.”

She offered Bianca a hand up.

Bianca, instead, glanced over her shoulder, past the dead body, past the cratered ceramic, and toward the body slumped against the furthest wall. Katie’s eyes were empty, glassy, and her skin was papery white. She kept staring at her. Kept thinking that…that…that she’d somehow get back up again, because that same day Ben went under, she squeezed Bianca’s shoulder and said, I’ll protect you. I didn’t protect him, but I’ll protect you. Always.

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But Katie wasn’t getting up this time. She’d kept her promise, but she wasn’t getting up this time.

There wasn’t anybody left to hold her hand anymore.

And suddenly, she was cold all the way through.

Bianca turned away, clenching her jaw so hard she thought she’d crack a tooth, because she wanted to start crying again, or maybe scream for Katie until she had no other option but to get up and tell Bianca to stop being so afraid and start getting her legs underneath her. And that’s what she did. That’s what she forced herself to do, taking Vic’s forearm and stumbling onto her feet. Vic didn’t offer her a smile or a pat on the back, because she was already on the phone, the dial tone echoing in the foul silence of the bathroom. Bianca glanced into the mirrors beside her.

And realized that each and every one of them was cracked beyond belief, nothing life before.

There was a gap in her memory between sinking her teeth into a throat and when she got off their dead body, and a numb, distant, and very far away part of her figured that yeah, the mirrors, the cracked tiles, the doors that hang off their hinges and the shattered ceramic toilets are all because of her. When she’d gone and killed them.

God, what the hell am I?

“There would only be one reason why I’m calling,” Vic was saying, a hand on her hip and her Cleopatra thigh-high boots tapping against the tiles. The blood hadn’t reached the door yet, but had worked itself along the cracks of the ceramic, spreading like some kind of sickness. Another pang of ice cold pain rang through her gut. “She’s somewhat fine. Shaken and in shock. I think she’ll puke at some point when the adrenaline is done with her body. No. Nothing yet.” Vic glanced at her, and Bianca stared back. “I’d be more sure if they had a head I could see, but she made sure there’s nothing left…no…no, I’m not sure if the thing ate it or she just destroyed it. Think it’s them. Nobody else walks around dressed like that.” Then Vic walked toward the corpse and rolled it onto its back, pulling off their armor piece by piece as she wedged her phone between her ear and shoulder until she reached their back. Bianca stared over her shoulder as Vic pulled up their spandex under shirt, revealing a spiraling flock of birds tattooed along her spine. Victoria muttered under her breath as she stood again. “Yeah, it’s them. They’re here.”

“Who’s here?” Bianca whispered numbly, tugging at Vic’s short cape. “Hey.”

“We’ll be there in ten. Yes, I’ll make sure of it.” Then she paused, shut her eyes, and nodded. “Not knowing where someone like that is doesn’t help right now. If we bump into her, Talon isn’t going to play that kind of game.”

Bianca heard the voice crystal clear from the other end of the phone: “She’s an asset. We respected her wish for privacy unless she started thinking of us as untrustworthy. If you do meet her, inform her directly and clearly, but not without some hesitation. She’s not had a pleasant time as of late, and news like this wouldn’t help her cause.” A brief pause on the line, one that lasted way too long in the silence, and then: “We cannot afford to lose Olympia, Victoria. Get here quickly. Don’t spare neither an arrow head nor a dagger. Primary protocol, worse case scenario.”

“Got it,” Vic said, sighing as she cut the call, then threw the phone at her feet and crushed it.

“Who was that?” Bianca asked quietly, her head feeling even more woozy. “Who are you?”

And what’s this got to do with Olympia?

Charlie entered back into the bathroom, now out of her ridiculous costume. Back in shorts and a t-shirt, her orange curly hair and freckles pale under the lights, or maybe because she just finished puking. “Gone,” she said.

“Good,” Vic answered, grabbing Bianca’s wrist, pausing, then picking up the sword that had stabbed Katie through the gut. Bianca stared at the long silver blade, at the worn white handle and the blood dripping off the impossibly sharp edge. Then she looked at Bianca, mouth pulling into a thin line as she forced it into her hand.

She would have dropped it on the floor if Vic didn’t tightly wrap her fingers around it.

“Keep it,” she said. “You’re gonna need it.”

“But….I don’t…I need to call my mom.” It sprung out of her so fast that it paused Vic, stopping her from getting to the door. “I need to call my mom and dad first. I don’t…Vic I don’t know…God, fuck, I feel like—”

Then she hurled, and all that came out of her mouth was chewed throat meat.

Bianca remained hunched over, her gut aching a storm and her skin crawling. She retched again, her throat filling with bile that crawled out of her mouth like the vile, tiny little frantic tentacles of the Kaiju Adam killed.

“My aunt was right,” Charlie whispered. “I shoulda just gone to college.”

She dropped the blade, letting it smack against the tiles. Bianca clutched onto her stomach, digging her fingernails hard into her ribs until she fell onto her knees. Vic was saying something, shaking her shoulder. Charlie was beside her, in her ear, pulling hair out of her face. Sweat dripped off her brow, trickled down her forehead and got into her eyes, making them sting, making her blind, as the tentacles filled her throat and made her face burn hot with heat as she clawed her throat for oxygen. Her head whined like a burning kettle, getting louder and louder until all she could do was get on all fours and slam her skull against the floor. Again. And again. Her body moving on its own until Vic grabbed her wrist, but her arm jerked out, wrapped her fingers around Vic’s throat, and threw her hard against the bathroom mirrors. Charlie got up, stumbled back, and got a fist to her gut that laid her out cold onto the floor. Then Bianca stood motionless, her stomach loosening and her skin not itching like it just had.

There was silence, and there was warmth, and then there was noise coming from her right.

She watched as Vic groaned and pressed a heavy knuckle to the floor as she got up, her braids loosening to glare at her.

A sword of light erupted from her hand, making Bianca wince with pain as her skin flared and her blood tingled just underneath her skin. Something’s wrong. The thought came after she planted her foot into Vic’s nose, smacking her head against the wall underneath the busted sinks. The sword vanished. Her body slumped to the floor, and Bianca stood there, staring down at Vic, tilting her head, not really there, not really thinking as she took a step toward Katie and gathered her close to her chest and lifted her up off the floor. Then she walked out of the bathroom, death in her arms and bodies on the floor, not really knowing what was happening, or why her body felt so odd, so weird, like her blood was burning and her skin was itching, but none of that really mattered, did it?

Because she was going to save Katie.

It wouldn’t be the first time death had stolen her. C’mon, Kates, Ben thought…no, right, different body.

And another chance at this to make things right.

Bianca left the burger mart and stepped into the rainy night, planning to barter for a soul.

She just needed to find a witch first.