When I reach the edge, I freeze. No one here waits to be saved. The vines don’t just hold them in place—they weave under their skin, piercing through chest and limb. Blood dribbles down anywhere the skin breaks. And the vines, some two inches thick, pierce everywhere. Smaller, thread-thin ones weave around the eyelids and lips, giving them the appearance of gruesome, hand-stitched dolls.

I stand in front of a brown-haired girl with a vine weaving in and out of her still-pulsing throat. Her mouth dangles open, and a red rose blooms between her lips. I touch a petal. My finger comes back red with blood.

I turn and heave, fighting my raging stomach.

“What the hell is this?” I brace my hands on my knees in case I hurl again.

Roman’s eyes glaze as he looks at me. “Haven’t you wondered why there’s so much magic here? How it lives outside of us, controlling the very shape of the building?” He turns his head toward the carnage before us. When he looks back, his eyes are sharp again. “We feed it. And these…” He lifts his wrist where he wears a simple black band with one of the same red stones every other member of this society wears embedded in the middle of it. “I bet they fed you a story about how one magician’s blood sacrifice created these stones with the immortality spell, and now we can feed the spell with our performances instead of blood.” I don’t even have to nod. He knows. “That’s a half-truth at best. Their performances make them strong, but the immortality? It still takes blood to make that spell work.” He waves his hand toward the garden, where droplets of blood slowly drip like morning dew, then waves down at his feet. “He linked the stones.”

The ground is covered in pebbles coated in blood. There’s so much red that at first I don’t even notice the sparkle as the mess shifts under my feet, but it’s not just pebbles. Red jewels matching the one in Roman’s cuff soak in the blood as well. The same jewels I’ve seen woven into the decor of the house. They’re all fed here—everything is linked to this horror.

“Society magicians don’t have to consume the blood themselves because they feed the magic blood out of sight. They get all of the benefits and none of the curse. He never found a way around the constant need for blood to feed immortality. He only found a way to make it prettier—at least for the immortals themselves.”

“Then they’re all vampires,” I say.

He doesn’t refute it. The magicians live off blood just the same as he does.

I shake my head. “No, they’re worse than vampires. They go out and kill vampires and pretend they’re not just as bad.”

He looks sick. “I agree.”