CHAPTER 5 – Dracula’s Courtyard

The bus doors hissed open.

Cold night air rushed in, metallic and damp, threaded with something sharp and coppery that made the back of my tongue prickle.

Nobody moved at first.

Then Grant pushed himself up with a grunt, slinging a battered backpack over one shoulder. “Showtime,” he muttered and stepped down into the dark.

One by one, the others followed.

I swallowed hard and stood, my bare feet already going numb on the grimy floor. The red glow from outside painted everything in sickly, blood‑washed tones.

The hybrid—Corvin, my brain supplied without permission, even though I didn’t know his name yet—didn’t look back. He just descended the steps, landing with predatory ease on the cobblestones outside.

I edged toward the door.

The moment I crossed the threshold, the world changed.

The bus’s stale, dead air was replaced by a raw, open chill. I stepped down onto uneven stone; the cold bit into my soles, prickling up my legs. Overhead, the **moon** hung impossibly huge and red, like an infected eye staring down at us.

We stood in a wide, circular courtyard of cracked cobblestone, ringed by jagged stone walls and wrought‑iron fences. Beyond the walls, black trees clawed at the sky, their bare branches reaching like fingers.

In the distance, a castle rose from the rock.

It looked like it had been grown from nightmares rather than built: towers leaning at impossible angles, spires like claws, a thousand narrow windows like watching eyes. Torches flickered along the walls, casting long, writhing shadows.

A wolf howled somewhere in the forest. Another answered, closer.

My skin crawled.

A few players huddled together, staring around with open horror.

One guy—late twenties, expensive hiking boots, expensive haircut, expensive bored expression—snorted. “Seriously? This is like a Halloween attraction. They couldn’t be more on‑the‑nose?”

His gaze flicked over me, from my bare feet to my thrift‑store shirt. His lip curled.

“Dead weight already,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Fantastic.”

The words shouldn’t have hurt. He didn’t know anything about me. He didn’t know how often Ethan had said similar things without saying them, how often my sister’s eyes had slid right over me like I wasn’t really there.

I flinched anyway.

Corvin’s head turned the barest fraction in the jerk’s direction. His eyes narrowed, just for a heartbeat, then he looked away.

My cheeks burned. Shame? Anger? Both, probably.

The courtyard stretched ahead to a pair of massive, closed iron gates at the far end. Between us and the gates, the stone was cracked and uneven, weeds pushing up through gaps.

“Objective: survive until dawn,” I muttered. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool.”

Grant came up beside me. “Stay with the group,” he said. “Don’t wander. Don’t break rules if you can help it.”

“What rules?” I said. “They just gave us ‘don’t die’ as a guideline.”

He grimaced. “Oh, princess, you have no idea—”

The stone under my foot shifted.

I looked down.

A hairline crack split the cobblestone between my toes. It widened with a faint grinding sound, then another line branched off, spider‑webbing through the courtyard.

“Uh,” I said. “Is this—”

The ground ruptured.

Hands—**rotting** hands, all bone and dried sinew—shot up from the cracks, clawing for ankles. Cold, skeletal fingers latched around my leg, icy touch burning like frostbite.

I screamed, stumbling.

The courtyard became a frenzy of motion and noise. People shouted, tripped, and kicked. Some kept their footing; others went down hard as more hands burst through, grabbing, pulling.

My mind went white. For a second, I was back on the street, headlights screaming toward me.

I froze.

The hand on my ankle tightened, nails digging into my skin. Another hand broke through the stone near my other foot, grasping blindly.

“Move!” Grant yelled somewhere to my left. “Don’t let them get both—”

Something crashed into my side.

An arm wrapped around my waist and hauled me off my feet just as a second skeletal hand snapped shut where my leg had been. Cold fingers scraped my heel and then missed as my body lifted.

I collided with a hard chest again, air knocked out of me.

The hybrid.

I knew it before I saw his face. His scent—cold, metallic, wild—hit my nose, and his grip was iron around my middle, holding me up as if I weighed nothing.

My world narrowed to the feel of his arm banded across my stomach and the rush of wind as he turned.

He set me down a step back, out of immediate reach of the clawing hands, but didn’t let go completely. His other leg snapped out in a vicious, efficient kick.

Bone snapped.

The skeletal arm that had grabbed me shattered under his boot, crumbling into dust that bled back into the crack in the stone. He pivoted, slammed his heel down on another wrist that had snagged someone else, grinding it to powder.

Around us, chaos. A player shrieked as hands dragged at their calves. Someone fell to their knees and was immediately seized by three, four arms, yanked down.

The jerk with the expensive hair tried to sprint across the courtyard, but he didn’t watch his footing. Two bony hands clamped around both his legs at once.

He went over hard, slammed chin‑first into the stone.

He had just enough time to scream, “Get them off me!” Before the hands pulled. His body jerked halfway down into the crack, stone rippling like mud around him.

“No!” he shrieked. “No, no, no—”

Grant lunged for him, but Corvin’s arm tightened around my waist—keeping me from trying the same stupid thing. I struggled against him anyway.

“We have to help him,” I gasped.

Corvin’s voice was flat. “We can’t.”

The jerk’s nails clawed bloody tracks into the cobblestone as he was dragged under. His eyes rolled white. One last scream, then he was gone. The crack sealed over him with a sound like grinding teeth.

Silence slammed down for a heartbeat. Just the low moan of wind through stone and the rattle of my own breathing.

Then the courtyard exhaled, almost in satisfaction.

Around us, other necrotic hands were already crumbling, sinking back into the cracks they’d emerged from. The cobblestones knit themselves together piece by piece, seams fading.

The Game had taken what it wanted.

Corvin finally loosened his grip. I realized I still had both hands locked on his forearm—hard muscle under my fingers, a faint vibration of restrained power in him, like he could tear the whole courtyard apart if he got annoyed enough.

“On your feet,” he said.

“I am on my feet,” I snapped, even though my knees shook.

He looked down at me properly, those ember eyes taking in my bare feet, my bruised pride, the way I was still glued to his arm. His mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but not entirely cold.

“You’re not the dead weight,” he said abruptly.

The words knocked the air out of me more thoroughly than the hands had.

He stepped back, leaving me standing on my own, heat lingering on my waist where his arm had been.

I stared at him, chest tight. “He—he just died.”

“No,” Grant wheezed from a few feet away, clutching his ribs. “He got… erased. There’s a difference.”

“Not to him,” I whispered.

“No,” Grant agreed. “Not to him.”

A heavy creaking sound pulled my attention away from the ruined cobbles.

The **castle’s gate**.

At the far end of the courtyard, the massive iron gates that had been closed a moment ago now groaned as they swung inward on their hinges. Beyond them, a wide stone staircase climbed toward two enormous wooden doors banded with black iron.

Torches flared to life along the walls, one after another, washing the stone in orange light.

I swallowed.

“Right,” Grant said hoarsely. “Rule one, Willa. Don’t linger where the game opens a door. It doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“Rule two?” I asked.

“Don’t piss off anything with fangs,” he said. “Come on.”

We moved as a group, the survivors crunching cautiously across the newly whole cobbles. My feet hurt now, each step sending little sparks of pain up my shins, but I kept going. My new death-ring on my finger still burned faintly, a red reminder.

As we approached the gates, the air felt thicker. Heavier. Like walking into an overcharged static field.

Corvin paced slightly ahead of me, shoulders loose, movements unconcerned. But his eyes never stopped moving; he was scanning everything—crenellations, shadows, and arrow slits.

Predator, my brain supplied again. Not ours. Just… here.

The iron gates yawned fully open.

The stairs beyond led up to a pair of towering double doors carved with reliefs of bats, wolves, and writhing figures I didn’t look at too closely. Old, faded banners hung limp on either side, marked with some sigil I couldn’t quite make out in the shifting torchlight.

My horror‑writer brain whispered: perfect opening image. Castle, gates, stairs, lambs to the slaughter.

“Stop it,” I muttered to myself. “You are not helping.”

We stopped at the foot of the stairs.

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the double doors **creaked** outward a few inches on their own. Warm, reddish light spilled out into the night, pooling on the top steps like liquid.

A voice drifted from the shadowed interior.

Deep. Velvet. Not human.

“Welcome,” it purred. “Little players.”

Every hair on my body stood on end.

“We hope,” the voice continued, “you will be… entertaining.”

Corvin’s hand brushed my elbow—barely there, a ghost of contact—as if a reflex to keep me from bolting.

I swallowed the scream, biting at the back of my throat.

Entertain them or die.

Some welcome party.

I lifted my chin, even though my knees still wanted to knock.

“Fine,” I whispered, more to myself than the Game. “Let’s see who gets entertained.”