WHO: Kaden WHEN: Saturday 19th and earlier WHERE: The Enodia WHAT: Life after dark WARNINGS: None
During the long daylight hours as the world tilted towards midsummer, the Enodia seemed more or less like a normal hotel. As far as Kaden knew, anyway. He’d never stayed in one, he had no idea.
There were long hallways on every floor, long lush carpets that were soft against bare feet. Walls were pale and decorated sporadically with art. Most of the pictures were nature themed, but there was one particular piece in the ninth floor common room that was strange and abstract; swirly soft shapes that he changed his mind about each time he saw them. Were they figures dancing in moonlight? Were they distant galaxies? Were they honestly only smears of thick paint, that, if you stopped to look closer, seemed like their texture would be super satisfyingly to touch?
There was room service and cleaning staff he was learning to recognise. There were fire exit plans near the elevator shaft telling him which floor he was on and which way to run, and seats and little tables by each window in case people wanted to hang out in corridors – seats that were almost always in use. There were kids downstairs who raced up and down the corridors, there was a small gym he pretended wasn’t there, and a room with free computers that was never empty. One of the places he spent a lot of time was a big room that had been used as a ballroom once but now held an open-all-hours simple buffet, and a big TV, and couches and books, a pool table, a few others games. Families tended to gather here and Kaden tended to sit in the corner behind a book and watch them, watch kids ride their parents shoulders, watch brothers fight over the best seat on the couch, watch a mom listen intently to her kid while she drank coffee.
It hurt, watching this world he wasn’t part of. It hurt but he couldn’t stop.
Down on the ground floor there was a restaurant, with tall windows that looked out onto the street where you could watch the city passing by at eye level. It took him more than a week to feel brave enough to eat there, and even then, he never sat by the window, in case someone he knew walked past and looked in. The food though – it was amazing, not just in a tasty sense but in a way that everything he ate made him feel a certain kind of way. He didn’t know how to explain it, but it was never just food.
He could have apricot tartlets and poppy seed bagels smeared with herb cream cheese and topped with maple bacon for breakfast if he wanted to feel like he was living a whole new life, an uncomfortable sensation he couldn’t stop poking, full of thoughts like this isn’t real and I don’t deserve this and Tragos would never eat weird herby cream cheese and me eating it now is a kind of betrayal but also apricots in tarts are delicious. Or on days when he couldn’t handle the guilt of being alive there was the option of eating hotdogs for breakfast and lunch and dinner.
More often than not, though, he and Marcie just ordered cheap pizza (or burgers or ramen or rotisserie chicken) and ate it in front of the TV like they were hanging out at her apartment and no one they loved was dead.
It was at night that the Enodia changed. Or he did. He never left the hotel so how could he tell which weirdness he carried with him and which weirdness was embedded in the walls?
At night, the moon would appear in windows it had no right to appear in, like it was following him down the hall, around corners. Up in his room he found that water poured from the container in the fridge would glow, very faintly, in the glass. There was a similar kind of subtle glow around the mirrors and sigils Hecate had hung around the windows, a glow that pulsed a little brighter when he lifted his hand to almost touch them. Fascinated, he watched as his skin glowed faintly, like the lights were speaking to each other, but as his eyes trailed up his arm he realised that his scars stayed dark, as though they sucked all the light deep into them. It made him pull his sleeves down hard over his hands, and he never tried touching the sigils again.
Sometimes he could hear voices in the hall, or running feet, but if he opened the door, there was no one out there. Once he swore he heard a dog walking about in the ceiling, and another time he caught a glimpse of a boy standing in the roof courtyard watching him through the French doors, a boy who passed through the deck chairs and disappeared into the wall.
None of this scared him, though (aside from the shadows in his scars, which he refused to think about.) None of this was as frightening as the drive across the country had been, or the vast horrors he knew were waiting for him in the holes in his memory, or in his dreams. He’d rather keep his eyes open and see a ghost boy than he would close them and risk nightmares.
Unless the ghost was someone he knew, which would be the worst thing of all. How could he explain himself, if it was Tragos haunting him? Where could he hide if it was Cy?
So… some dead stranger through the window? Sure, whatever. Live and let live or… whatever.
Kaden lay awake, most nights, waiting to see what else his re-made eyes might see, what other magic the Enodia might distract him with. It was a better reason than others to lie awake. He hadn’t stopped racking his brain over the empty spaces in his memory and he hadn’t stopped turning the things he did remember over and over and over in his head. He did try to sleep, because Marcie slept, but it was rarely that easy, so when he couldn’t handle lying there any longer, he’d get up instead.
After the first night, the huge bed had split magically (well, in a hotel kind of magic) into two, because after that first night Kaden couldn’t handle the idea of sleeping in the same bed as Marcie. Her presence so close made him wide awake, hyper aware of any movement he might make that might touch her, or disturb her. And worse – more embarrassingly – the urge to cling to her was so strong, as was the urge to cry into her like a pillow. He couldn’t deal with it, it was too much.
With two beds it was better, all he had to worry about was snoring or, worse, waking up from one of his nightmares. Nightmares that he was being chased, that some monster was ripping out his heart with its teeth, that a car smashed into the side of his and men in dark hoods took Lil T away, that Cy was just outside the bedroom door banging it down, that Barak was waiting for him getting more impatient every moment. That Tragos’ dead body was lying cold and bloody beside him, eyes half open.
He had a lot of nightmares to choose from; sleep wasn’t kind.
Some nights all he did was slip out of the bedroom and exist in the living room, quiet and alone. Or he’d stand on the roof courtyard staring at the sky, rubbing a leaf from the little olive tree between his fingers, listening to the sounds of the city and wondering if the ghost might show up while he was out here. Sometimes he inspecting the dangling sigils to see which ones were glowing harder than others – he was sure it changed, night by night. He didn't try touching them, but he liked knowing they were there.
Most nights he just fired up the playstation, though, or fell asleep in front of the TV.
But more and more lately, he left the room and wandered the halls, which was how he learned that he wasn’t the only stray who lived up here.
Up on the ninth floor there were nine rooms in total. They were bigger rooms than down on the floors below, built to hold more of a person’s life than a simple, ordinary hotel room.
There was an angry woman with one leg who got around with a cane, whose white hair was all shorn off and who had a sharp, frightening look about her. She’d only spoken to him once, to yell at him when he barreled past her on the stairs one evening. Kaden had yelled right back that she should use the goddamn elevator if she was so delicate and since then, all they did was scowl at each other. And slam doors. She was in the room opposite his, and Kaden thought she was a freak.
Round the corner was Kyos, a younger woman, though she was probably still twice as old as Kaden. Kyos was beautiful with her olive skin and thick black hair, but she was heavily pregnant, and it made him panic so much he couldn’t think. Just saw her belly one night and couldn’t see anyone other than Melpomene. Couldn’t stop thinking about picking her up from her sister’s stoop that winter night, about taking her to McDonalds on the way home, about the way she looked at him like she wanted to really see him, to hear everything he had to say. About how special he’d felt, back then, how terrible he felt now for feeling that way.
Kaden could not handle thinking about Melpomene and babies so he bolted whenever he saw Kyos, bolted right back to his room. He avoided her even more thoroughly than he avoided the woman with the cane.
He quite liked Hazel, though. Hazel was a bit older than he was, but maybe only by a couple of years. First time he’d seen her he’d been wandering around down on the fifth floor with Hecuba, getting lost on purpose. It was a surprisingly easy hotel to get lost in, the layout of each of the floors was a little different, and the twists of corridors easily turned him around. Where the corridor turned right there was a potted plant, something with wide green leaves that was climbing up three arms of a trellis, and kneeling beside the pot was Hazel. She had tiny shorts covered in daisies and chubby legs and she looked up at him in deep suspicion.
“What?” he said, immediately on the defensive, even though he towered over her in a hoodie with a giant beast of a dog at his heels and cast a way more threatening figure than she did. Yet still he bristled.
Hazel looked up at him for what felt like a long time and then – betrayal – Hecuba plodded over to sit beside her, and put her wet nose deep into the plant. Hazel gave Hecuba’s back a pat while Kaden struggled to cope. “Leaves chill me out,” Hazel shrugged, and poked her finger through one of the holes in the leaves. “You ever see a Swiss cheese plant blooming indoors before?”
“Fuck off,” Kaden stuttered, folding his arms but craning his neck a little closer. “That’s never its name.”
“Suit yourself, hoodie,” Hazel said, turning her attention back to the leaf in her hand which she inspected with a magnifying tool that hooked over the camera of her phone.
The way she turned away made him want to do something to get her attention again, but after a moment he just scoffed like he couldn’t care less, and moved on, feeling very off-put by Hecuba’s clear friendship with the girl. Later he’d found himself googling Swiss cheese plants. She was right, it was unusual for them to bloom indoors, and somehow this annoyed him even more.
Two nights later he saw her again, this time up in the small common area on the top floor, a place that was only accessible to people with rooms on the top floor. By then he’d worked out that all these people were Hecate’s rescues, which made him feel a little guilty for continuing to think of the woman with the cane as a freak, but not guilty enough to apologise to someone who kept slamming her door whenever he walked past it.
Hazel was looking at plants again, this time at the cascading leaves of a dark purple vine that fell from a hanging basket. It was after three in the morning and she looked up at him with wary eyes but when he asked, she told him about different properties of some of the different plants in the room. It helped that Hecuba wasn’t there to pick a favourite, Kaden didn’t think he could handle the sting of rejection twice.
Hazel didn’t let him touch her phone, but the next night she let him borrow the microscope which attached over his phone’s camera, and Hecuba had deigned to let them both look at her fur all close up.
Plus, after he pushed his hoodie back, Hazel saw the scars around his neck, and after a moment, she told him his hair was a mess. Kaden breathed a deep sigh. He liked that she wasn’t trying to be kind, it meant he didn’t have to navigate the weird threat of kindness from strangers, and the relief made him want to be her best friend.
She didn’t get to be his best friend, though; that was Marcie, only Marcie.
There were five other rooms upstairs that people moved in an out of, but none of them were as interesting as Hazel. They were usually women, but not always, and sometimes Kaden couldn’t tell. Some only stayed a night, some two or three. Only Kaden, Hazel, Kyos and the woman with the cane seemed to be semi-permanent fixtures. He had no idea how long any of them had been here because he didn’t ask Hazel that kind of question, and Hecate didn’t offer it as information on the times he’d see her in the hallways after dark, and there was no way he was going to talk to the other two to figure it out.
It didn’t take a genius to guess they were all hiding from something, like him.
He wondered if it was gods. Wondered which gods they might have been. Who’d taken the old woman’s leg? Who’d given Kyos that baby? What was Hazel’s deal? She didn’t wear her damage on her skin like the others. Like he did. As the days passed he got more curious, and as the days passed he wondered how he’d answer if she asked him what had happened to him.
Maybe there was a certain kind of kindness in the way she didn’t ask.
The though occurred to him one night while he was looking out the window at the half full moon, and made him immediately uncomfortable.
It was a funny sort of night – he couldn’t tell how he was feeling. Kinda like he’d stepped out of the world entirely. He felt suspended not just in space, but in time as well. The rest of the world carried on, he could see people down on the street even now, he could see cars moving toward unknown destinations, he could see lights on in neighboring buildings from other insomniacs or late-night-early-morning workers, could see planes traveling overhead. Kaden pressed his hand against the window and was absolutely certain that even if someone looked directly at this window, they wouldn’t see him.
It was a strange kind of feeling, this invisibility, added to by the knowledge that pretty much everyone who ever knew him thought he was dead. All the Warmoths, Kami and the boys and everyone else from school. Four and a half thousand followers on TikTok all left to wonder why he hadn’t updated.
Ares. Melpomene. Apollo. Lil T.
Would a baby even remember him. Way way deep down, when he grew up, would Lil T remember… anything? He was a child of gods and that meant he was more than human, right? And there’d been times when Kaden could have sworn then Lil T looked at him he was trying to communicate something, and if he was smart enough to do that maybe he was smart enough to remember.
He wished he could tell Lil T he wasn’t dead. How stupid was that?
Kaden pressed his knuckles into the window frame till it hurt. Was Hecate watching over Lil T? Kaden was too scared to ask. He was too scared to bring up anything to do with the baby, because if he did, he thought he might lose his mind. He steered his mind away the same way he tried to steer it away from all thoughts of Tragos. He couldn’t live, and think about Tragos or Lil T. He just couldn’t.
– Didn’t Hazel care how he’d gotten his scars, was that it? Were plants all she gave a shit about?
He stomped across the empty common room toward the communal fridge, which glowed viciously when he yanked it open. The light it cast over the water and juices and milks and sodas was almost too bright for the hour. Downstairs the restaurant asked for room numbers before you could eat but up in this space, you took what you needed.
This was an alien fridge, in an alien place. Kaden stood with the door hanging open for a long time. The light from the fridge hit the edge of the weird painting, right at the edge of his peripheral vision. No dancing figures or galaxies now – tonight it looked more like something breathing in its sleep.
Some nights he was convinced every part of this was a trick, that his punishment was still coming, that every sweet thing that happened to him was going to make the bad thing that was coming so much worse.
Some nights he was convinced he was dead, and this was purgatory.
Some nights he missed his real home in the Hole. He’d understood things, there.
He glared at a cranberry juice. Why the shit hadn’t Hazel asked him how he got his scars? They were fucking weird looking!
Kaden slammed the fridge door shut without choosing anything. What he wanted was cold pepperoni pizza, something the fridge did not provide. Deliveries would, sure, but ugh.
He didn’t want to contact anyone who lived in the world outside the hotel; he wanted to know why Hazel didn’t ask him about his scars! With a rough tug, he pulled off his hoodie and knotted it around his waist, leaving his arms bare, his neck too. In the soft golden lamplight, they looked like someone had spilled dark wine over his skin; you couldn’t really see the dents in his flesh. Kaden ran his fingers over them, though, to prove to himself they were real.
It was like a compulsion, touching them, sometimes, even though it made him feel sick and scared and broken.
Thumping loudly across the common room, he sat down on a chair in front of a bookcase, and the light above it turned on. Maybe it was activated by a motion sensor, maybe it was magic, Kaden honestly didn’t know. But it lit the books, and he scanned through, no more sure what he wanted to find than he was sure what kind of night it was. Just something to pass the time with till Hazel showed up, like she had every night since the night with the dog hair; she didn’t sleep well either.
There were a lot of books about healing, up here. About meditation and tuning into emotions and crap like that. Kaden regarded them all with suspicion, though he had flicked through one a couple of nights ago, finding a chapter about being a lesbian and a survivor and reading the woman’s story with a kind of dark fascination. Mixed among those books were novels, and a handful of zines.
He pushed one off the shelf, and it hit the floor with a satisfying thump. He didn’t feel aggressive, just… frustrated, destructive. The second book landed pleasingly open, the third bashed it with its weight. The zines scattered nicely, all of them hitting the floor at once.
But sitting on the bookcase, behind where the books had been, something glowed faintly, like the water, like the sigils. It disturbed his frustration like a stone dropped into water breaks up a reflection, and he reached in toward it.
It was a tarot deck, a little battered around the edges. He ran his thumb over the pattern on the back of the cards, as darkly fascinated with this as he has been with stories of lesbians from the 80s. They felt softer than normal playing cards, pleasing to touch. From TV, he knew you were supposed to shuffle them around and pick a card that felt right, and though Kaden of a few months ago would have thought they were bullshit, Kaden of today was sitting on the top floor of a magic hotel after being entirely reconstructed by witches and a wizard so… he shuffled till he stopped, and turned the card over.
There were three swords on the card, each of them stabbing through a heart in the centre. Kaden’s discomfort twisted his face, and he slid the card back into the deck and shuffled it around a bit more, trying to be a bit flash with it. As he fanned them out with his hands, the three of swords fell out again, and he regarded it with a wary suspicion.
“You gonna do a reading?” Hazel asked from the doorway, and Kaden scooped the cards back up into his hands, immediately embarrassed by the mess of books on the floor, and annoyed about his embarrassment.
“Sure,” he shrugged, dragging a book toward him with his foot so he could stick it back onto the shelf. He threw himself into a different persona, pulled his hood back over his head, letting the body of his hoodie drape down his back like a cape, hoping the hood casting a mystical shadow over his face. “Sit your ass down,” he said, mystically, and shuffled the cards with a flourish again. “What do you want to know?”
“If you’ve ever done this before?” Hazel asked, though she was bored enough to sit, to play along. “Okay, go on hoodie, tell me my future.”
“The fuuuture of Haaazel,” Kaden droned, shuffling the cards and then blinking, hard, as his eyes struggled to focus for a moment, like the lighting in the room had changed. He was probably just tired - exhaustion pulled dryly at the corner of his eyes. Ignoring it, he flipped over three cards. “Shit,” he said, trying to sound like the stabbed heart showing up again wasn’t freaking him out. “So you’re gonna be stabbed through the heart a bunch, then you get to be stabbed through the back with like, nine swords while you’re trying to have a cry in bed, and to top it all off you fall out of a tower. Bad luck. Guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
“You’re supposed to let me choose them, you know,” Hazel said, leaning back in her chair with a roll of her eyes. “Otherwise you’re just gonna get cards that are meant for you. Also,” she pointed out. “That spread is like, everyone here. Ruin and nightmares and trauma? No shit.”
“So what’s yours?” Kaden swept the offending cards back into the deck and abandoned them on the edge of the table, wiping his hands on his jeans like some film clung to his skin.
She looked at him with narrowed eyes, not suspicious, not angry, but highly guarded, and heavily thoughtful. “You’re alright, y’know, hoodie," she said, her voice carefully controlled. "But I’m not telling you that.”
“Oh - Whatever,” Kaden shrugged, shifting on the seat, his eyes down on the scars of his arm.
“No one who ever says whatever like that actually means whatever,” Hazel said. “Just… protip. And protip part two, if you wanna talk damage with someone, Saffron’s got some great hookups with different therapists. Not me. That’s not my job.”
Kaden didn’t know what to say, so he sank further down in the seat, scowling. He didn’t want a therapist, he wasn’t asking her to be a therapist, he just thought they were friends, or whatever two people saved by the same goddess might call each other, after so many insomniatic nights crossing paths inside a weird magic haunted hotel.
She got up and left and he couldn’t even blame her.
The table made a really unsatisfying, dull thump when he kicked it over, and the cards fanned out in a mess across the floor. He sank down to lie on the floor among them, in the worlds quietest, most miserable tantrum. Around his head, he could swear several cards were glowing, and across the room, the thick paint in the frame shifted, as if something was waking up.