The Next Floor

Jose hits the curb anyway. Mary doesn’t even look up.

“West hall,” Aria says from two seats back. “Connecting stair on the left. They were on four last night.”

Grant is already standing. “Eve, Paige, with me. Mary, you take the stairwell so nobody comes down behind us. Ashlyn, bus.”

Ashlyn’s mouth opens. She shuts it and nods.

The dorm lobby is trash and taped-up flyers. A shoe in the elevator door. They take the stairs. Paige’s lip is still fat. She doesn’t complain.

Four is a long hallway and one closed suite door, just like Aria said. Somebody inside rearranging things. Grant can hear them: more than two voices, trying to be quiet and failing.

He knocks.

“Don’t,” a girl says through the door. “We have a fire axe.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’m Grant. I’m not breaking down the door. You can stay in there until somebody else finds you, or you can come out and we do this in the hall.”

“Go away.”

Mary, from the stairs: “They’re not going to open it. I wouldn’t either.”

A second voice, shakier: “There’s a bunch of them. I can hear the bus.”

Then the axe hits the inside of the door anyway. Not hard enough to come through. Hard enough to mean it.

“Back off! We’re warning you!” One of the girls screams in the most intimidating voice she can do.

Grant turns the knob, easily overriding the cheap lock, opens the door a few inches, and then the deadbolt breaks just as easily. Next, the dresser screeches and falls over making a loud thud. With no more resistance, the door flies opens wide. The shocked girls inside try to run the other way toward a window that does not open far enough.

Five of them.

The first one swings the axe too high. Grant catches it mid-swing and the girl with it. She kicks, screams, tries to twist out of reach when Grant grabs her wrist.

“Name.”

“No—”

“I claim you.”

She stops like a switch. The axe is already gone. She stares at him and the loyalty is just there, complete.

“Mira,” she says at once. “I’m Mira. What do you need?”

“Hold the others. Don’t hurt them.”

“Yes, Grant.”

Forty-eight. Nothing in his body changes.

The second girl makes it three steps down the hall before Paige trips her. She crawls, then bites Paige’s sleeve, then tries to smash her own wrist against the wall so he can’t get a grip.

He gets it anyway.

“I claim you.”

Same instant drop. She sits up like she has been waiting to be useful.

“Jules. Sorry. I live in 412. Keys are in my left pocket if you want the other rooms.”

Forty-nine.

The third one is in the suite bathroom with the door locked. Jaycee talks through it once. The girl doesn’t answer. Jaycee gets it open. The girl comes out with a broken piece of a curling iron and goes for Grant’s face. He catches her arm, careful on purpose.

“I claim you.”

She gasps, drops the metal, and presses her forehead to his chest.

“Wren. I’m yours. Sorry about that.”

Fifty.

Grant feels that one.

The strength comes first. Worse than twenty. Wren is light in a way that scares him; he has to open his hand so he doesn’t leave marks. The dresser he just shoved might as well be empty. He can hear the grain in the doorframe when his sleeve brushes it.

Then the speed. His next step toward the window arrives early. Paige’s turn looks late. The girl by the window has not even finished grabbing the frame.

And the rest of it hits all at once.

The hallway is too loud. He hears Jose mutter on the bus. He hears a faucet drip two rooms over. He smells old pizza, bleach from a bathroom, Paige’s blood on her lip, five different kinds of fear-sweat. The window glare is sharp enough to hurt. He can feel the cheap carpet under his shoes like it has a texture chart.

Then the map changes.

Not just his women. Blank spots. Unclaimed. Direction and distance, no names, but their faces and bodies are clear. One at the window. One still twisting in Eve’s hands. And farther out — several hundred feet away — two more, lower in the building. Stairwell side. Moving.

He is already at the window girl. He gets her wrist while she is still pulling.

“Don’t— don’t you dare—”

“I claim you.”

She folds into it at once.

“I’m Lani. Tell me what to do.”

Fifty-one. The window blank fades off the new map and becomes his instead.

The last one is the point in Eve’s hands. She thrashes until he closes his fingers.

“I claim you.”

Instant. All the way.

“Sable. I’m sorry I climbed. I’ll make it right.”

Fifty-two.

The two blanks lower in the building are still there. One just paused. One is coming up. One is an athletic Latina, and the other is a small pretty Asian woman.

Grant lets go of Sable and has to look at his own hands to make sure he didn’t bruise her. He didn’t. He came close.

Mary hits the landing and stops when she sees his face.

“What?”

“Faster. Stronger than twenty.” He blinks against the light. “And I can hear too much. Smell too much. There’s two more downstairs. Not ours. Moving.”

Mary doesn’t ask how he knows.

“Unclaimed?”

“Yes. Inside a few hundred feet. I couldn’t do that before.”

Jules is already holding out keys.

“412 through 418. I can open them.”

“Later,” Grant says. “Stairs first. Quiet.”

He has to shorten his stride so he doesn’t leave Eve behind. The stairwell is a problem now. Every shoe scrape is huge. He hears the two blanks: one in the second-floor hall, one on the landing between two and three, coming up fast and trying not to.

He looks at Mary and points down, two fingers, then one.

She nods.

They don’t get a speech this time. The Latina girl on the landing sees them, turns around, and runs. Grant is on the landing before she finishes the turn. He hates how easy it is. He catches her wrist, waits out the “no,” and claims her.

“Eiza. I live on two. I’m yours.”

Fifty-three.

The last blank is the tiny Asian girl. She tries a fire door on two. Paige gets there because Grant points and she doesn’t ask questions. He claims that one against the push bar.

“Yuki. Please no mad I run. I exchange student from Japan. Now I yours.” She says in a heavy accent with her eyes downcast and her head bowed at him.

Fifty-four.

Both downstairs blanks are gone. His. The map out to the edge of his range is empty of holes except the campus beyond the dorm, too far to read.

Grant stands in the second-floor hall and waits for the headache. It doesn’t come. The senses stay up. He can hear Ashlyn on the bus ask Jose why it’s taking so long.

“That’s five up here and two on two,” Mary says. “You good?”

“It’s loud,” he says. “In my head. I need a minute before we do a whole dorm.”

“Then we don’t do a whole dorm. We take what we have and we leave before you walk into a wall because a bird landed on the roof.” She smirks.

He almost smiles. It comes out thin.

“Bus. If Jules’s keys matter, we come back.”

They take the stairs. Grant keeps one hand on the rail so he doesn’t take them three at a time by accident. Mira, Jules, Wren, Lani, Sable, Eiza, Yuki stay on him like that’s the only direction left in the building.

On the bus, Aria makes room. Cait watches the new ones and recognizes the look. Jose cranes around.

“We full or what?”

“Not full,” Grant says. “Circle once. If nobody else is standing in the lot, we check 12th.”

The bus pulls off the curb it already hit.

Grant sits. He has to. If he stands he is going to pace at the wrong speed. He can hear someone’s pulse two seats away. He can tell which of the new girls is still shaking. He can feel every claimed woman on the bus and, when he lets the range open, the empty stretch of campus around them.

Mary drops into the seat across from him.

“How much faster?”

“Enough that the window girl didn’t finish her sentence.”

“And the strength.”

“Don’t let me hold anybody careless.”

She looks at his hands, then at his eyes.

“And the hearing.”

“All of it. Not just hearing.”

Mary nods once.

“Then we get you away from concrete stairwells before it makes you crazy.”

West hall shrinks behind them.

He still does not say fifty out loud.

He counts fifty-four anyway, and the two he pulled off the stairs feel like proof that the map just got teeth.