The building spat them out like a bad meal.
One moment they were inside—dark, cold, wrong—and the next they were stumbling across the gravel lot, the first grey light of dawn bleeding over the horizon. The hotel loomed behind them, silent now. Not breathing. Just standing there, empty and incomplete, waiting for nothing.
David didn't look back.
His ribs ached. His knuckles were shredded, the green light long gone, leaving only raw flesh and dried blood. A cut above his eyebrow had stopped bleeding sometime in the last ten minutes, but the dried trail of it itched down his cheek. He was pretty sure his left ankle was sprained. Definitely sure his right shoulder was dislocated.
He was also pretty sure he was still holding the duffel bag.
How? He didn't know. Muscle memory, maybe. Or stubbornness. Or the quiet terror that if he dropped it, Ivie would make him pick it up again.
She walked beside him, silent, her blue gloves streaked with grey dust and darker things. She wasn't limping. Wasn't bleeding. Wasn't even breathing hard.
Showoff.
They reached the edge of the lot. The SUV was there, its headlights cutting through the dawn, the driver standing outside with his arms crossed and his expression unreadable.
David stopped.
"Why couldn't we keep him alive?"
Ivie turned. Her dark honey eyes studied him—not unkindly, but without softness.
"Kola." David's voice was hoarse. "Why couldn't we…"
"He deserved to die."
The words landed flat. Final. No anger. No hesitation.
"I'm not saying he didn't." David shifted the duffel to his other shoulder, wincing. "I'm asking why we got to decide that."
Ivie's eyebrow rose. Just slightly.
"You think if he had the upper hand, he'd have let you live?"
"That's not what…" David stopped. Rubbed his face with his free hand. Felt the dried blood flake off under his fingers. "I mean, thanks for saving my life. Obviously. But I just feel... heavy."
Ivie was quiet for a moment.
Then she sighed—a long, slow exhale, like she was letting go of something she'd been holding for years.
"Good."
David looked at her.
"The day you stop feeling that heaviness," she said, "is the day you die. Or worse. The day you become something that used to be human."
She looked back at the hotel. At the empty windows. At the dawn light that couldn't quite reach its entrance.
"Kola died the day he made that contract. Not physically. But... somewhere inside. The part that could feel? The part that could love? The part that could look at his brother and remember being a child together?" She shook her head. "Gone. He was just a soulless body walking around, waiting for someone to finish what he started."
"You've done this before." It wasn't a question.
"Too many times."
She started walking again. David fell in step beside her, the duffel bag digging into his shoulder.
"Hosts," Ivie said, her voice quieter now. "Humans who make contracts with Phobias. They're the worst thing I hate exorcising."
"Why?"
"Because it blurs the line." She glanced at him. "Between whether I'm a monster or just doing my job."
David didn't have an answer for that.
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
"DAVID!"
Praise's voice cut through the grey morning like a blade.
She was already out of the SUV, running toward him, her dark hair matted with dust and something darker. Blood ran from a cut above her right eye, tracing a thin line down her cheek. Her uniform was torn at the shoulder, the black fabric hanging loose over a bruise that was already deepening to purple.
But she was alive.
"You're alive," she said, grabbing his arms, her amber eyes scanning his face, his chest, his hands. "You're bleeding. You're…."
"I'm fine," David said. "Mostly. Ish."
"Your shoulder is dislocated."
"Ish."
She pulled him into a hug—quick, fierce, and absolutely uncompromising. David stood there, one arm pinned by the duffel bag, the other hanging useless at his side, and let himself be held.
"You scared me," she whispered.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
Jonathan was in the back seat.
His uniform was shredded across his chest, revealing a lattice of bruises and shallow cuts. His left arm was in a makeshift sling—Marcel's suit jacket, tied carefully. His face was pale, his jaw tight, his eyes half-closed.
But he was awake.
"Osayi," he said, his voice rough. "You look terrible."
"You look worse."
"Impossible." Jonathan replied instantly.
David almost laughed. Almost. The sound caught in his throat and came out as a cough instead.
Praise helped him into the seat beside Jonathan, taking the duffel bag and sliding it into the footwell. Ivie climbed into the front passenger seat, her blue gloves finally coming off, her hands pale beneath.
The driver started the engine.
"Barrier's coming down," he said. "Everyone ready?"
No one answered. They were all too tired.
The white dome flickered, then faded, revealing the full stretch of dawn—orange and pink and gold, the kind of sunrise that belonged in a painting, not at the end of a nightmare.
The SUV pulled away.
David watched the hotel shrink in the rear window. Twenty floors of exposed concrete and empty windows. Still incomplete. Still waiting.
But not for them.
"The Phobia just... dissolved," Praise said, dabbing at the cut above her eye with a cloth. "Mid-fight. One moment it was there, the next it was crumbling. Like it had forgotten how to hold itself together."
"The contract ended," Ivie said from the front. "No more anchor. No more reason to be there."
"So it's dead?" David asked.
"Phobias don't die. Not really." Ivie stared out the window. "It'll manifest again. Somewhere else. Maybe in a year . Maybe in a decade. Maybe in a building just like this one, with someone just like Kola, making the same mistake."
"That's..." David searched for the word. "Depressing."
"That's the job."
Praise finished cleaning her wound and turned to look at David. Her expression softened.
"You did good," she said. "You're doing way better than I expected."
"I didn't do much."
"You did enough." Jonathan's voice, rough but certain. "You'll learn to do more. But today? Enough was enough."
David leaned his head back against the seat. The ceiling of the SUV blurred above him.
"I have a date today," he said.
Praise blinked. "What?"
"A date. With a girl. At... I don't know, sometime this evening." He closed his eyes. "I'm going to show up looking like I got hit by a truck."
"You got hit by a building," Jonathan said.
"She doesn't need to know that."
Praise laughed—a real laugh, tired and warm. "You're impossible."
"So I've been told." David looking at his phone
The SUV carried them away from the hotel, away from the incomplete, away from the man who had stopped aging and the family he had sacrificed and the brother who would never know.
David slept before they reached the main road.
He dreamed of green and golden light and a hand reaching out of the floor.
When he woke, they were back in the city, the sun was high, and his phone said he had two hours to shower, bandage his wounds, and pretend to be a normal student with a normal life.
He wasn't sure he remembered how.
But he was going to try.