Dark Places

36 | luz was never here

❝'cause i've been scared of crowded places;
come with me, i'll take you home.❞

☽

I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS. I can't hear Drake or Larina; I can only hear the pulse of a thundering heartbeat, rushing and rising, echoing, echoing... echoing... between my ears violently. Dissociation. I'm swaying, swimming, sleepwalking forward, reaching for a torn strip of paper to stare at the details—gaunt, inhuman figures, sketched raw and messy, stained by streaks of dried blood, haunted by three fucking letters.

LUZ LUZ LUZ

Drake hooks an arm around my waist, snaps something in Spanish, yanks me away from Corey Davis, and as I hit his chest, ripped out of the reverie, I plummet into everything.

Larina is choking on a sob, gagging, gasping for clean air, untainted by decaying tissue, rotten flesh, old blood, and Drake is hissing, cursing, asking for something, something, something. I'm blinking numbly, breathing quickening, pulse spiking, head spinning, and I'm thrashing, and I'm hyperventilating, and I'm unfurling my fingers to find the crumpled sketch, designed to be the perfectly haunting threat.

LUZ LUZ LUZ

What the fuck? Who the fuck?

THE OLD ORDER IS GONE
AND A NEW BEING IS THERE TO SEE

"It's... it's..." I can't breathe. "I..."

Biblical?

Suddenly, I lurch out of his grip, twisting and twisting and twisting, struck by the sinister fragments of my own fucking name, copied over and over and over... and... over... bled dry across pale-white pieces of paper. It's everywhere, and I know, I know, I know that I'm fucked.

"It's my name." I'm dizzy, lightheaded, so fucking scared that I don't know what to do. They know. They know me. They're watching, listening, following. "It's my fucking name, Drake! I—"

—but Drake Medina is already moving, shoving past me, diving for another eerie sketch. "Fuck, no, no, no," he hisses, tearing and clawing at each individual sketch tacked around the corpse, fisting them frantically. Letters slew and break apart. His movements, jerky and sharp, never faltering. "Ay, grab anything that has your name on it." His gaze flits around, over, and through me in a wild panic. "Quick, Melo."

I don't argue.

Instead, I fall into autopilot, dropping to my knees to gather and scrape a cocktail of shreds of paper from the floor. LUZ LUZ LUZ. It flickers between my fingers, a spatter of blood flashing in a bright, beautiful shade of red. LUZ LUZ LUZ. It hides beneath rusty, squeaking wheels of a chair, in pockets of darkness beneath a desk, between stacked sheets of paper, piles of files, pencils, pens, Sharpies, in a pool of blood beneath Corey, perfectly camouflaged to never be found. LUZ LUZ LUZ.

It doesn't end. I'm here, in this office, this tomb, this coffin... with him.

Drake leans back, jamming a million sketches into his sweatshirt, his sweatshirt pockets, his jeans pockets, his waistband, and I draw a sharp breath as I watch him fumble, struggling to not smear stains of blood across dry denim. LUZ, stamped in a barely-there imprint. LUZ. Faint. Nothing. I blink, bleary-eyed, echoing his motions desperately. He straightens and stills, narrowing his eyes, and then, in another stinging blink, Drake is behind the desk, across from me, snatching a jacket from a chair, digging into an inner pocket shakily, wrenching it out sharply.