Part One: The Bass Line Drops Out
Kidd played bass in Gay9, which meant he was used to being felt more than noticed.
That was the joke, anyway. He had heard it in interviews, rehearsal rooms, bad reviews, worse reviews, and from singers who thought rhythm sections came pre-installed with patience. Bass players were foundations. Bass players were pulse. Bass players made other people look airborne.
Kidd had built a career out of holding things together while louder people broke them.
Gay9 had once been called the future of glam-goth noise-pop, which was the kind of phrase magazines used when nobody had yet lost money. For three bright years they had been everywhere: black lipstick in daylight TV studios, leather jackets in airports, half-ironic occult branding, songs about dead cities and bad sex and Catholic statues crying glitter. Their debut album sold well enough to buy mistakes. Their second sold badly enough to create mythology. Their third was being recorded in fragments between arguments, sponsorship obligations, and shows nobody wanted to admit were underselling.
The tour was not collapsing dramatically.
It was fraying.
Small things first. A missed soundcheck in Bristol because Luka, the singer, refused to leave the bath. Drums delayed in Glasgow. A promoter in Leeds withholding payment over “contractual atmosphere issues.” Two interviews cancelled. One interview completed while all four members clearly hated each other. A lighting tech quit in Birmingham. Their tour manager, Shelley, had started using the phrase “manageable crisis” at least six times a day, which meant nothing was manageable and everything was crisis.
By the time they reached Antwerp, Kidd had stopped speaking unless the setlist required it.
He had his own rituals.
Tune. Check strap. Check DI. Warm left hand. Tape the blister. Count the drummer in with his eyes when the click failed. Watch Luka move too close to the front edge. Watch Caz on guitar miss cues when angry. Watch the crowd. Watch for the moment a song still lived despite the people playing it.
There were still moments.
That was the cruel part.
Onstage, Gay9 could still become the thing people believed in. Neon crosses, smoke, feedback, sweat, drums like a building falling down in time. Kidd’s bass moved under it all, dark and steady, making a floor for chaos. For forty-nine minutes, the band remembered its own body.
Then the lights came up.
Then the arguments returned.
The Antwerp show ended with no encore because Luka threw a microphone at the sidefill and Shelley pulled the plug before the venue did. Backstage, Caz called Luka a failed saint in sunglasses. Luka called Caz a session musician with eyeliner. The drummer, Finch, sat shirtless on a flight case eating crisps and watching them like a man evaluating weather from indoors.
Kidd packed his bass.
Nobody helped.
Nobody usually did.
At the hotel, Shelley gathered them in the lobby under a chandelier that looked as if it had survived several empires and resented pop music.
“Bus call is ten,” she said.
“Morning?” Finch asked.
“No, emotionally. Yes, morning.”
Luka was still wearing stage makeup, black tears half-smeared down one cheek.
“I’m not going to Cologne.”
Everyone went still.
Shelley closed her eyes.
“You are contractually going to Cologne.”
“I’m vocally unfit.”
“You shouted at a sandwich in the dressing room.”
“It was dry.”
Caz laughed once.
Luka turned on him.
Kidd walked away before the fight found a chorus.
No one stopped him.
That was not unusual.
His room was on the fourth floor: beige walls, narrow bed, desk, television mounted too high, window overlooking a side street wet with rain and yellow light. He put the bass case on the bed and stood beside it for a long time.
His hands hurt.
Not badly.
Just enough to make him aware of being made of parts.
He could hear the band arguing two floors below, not the words, only shapes. Luka’s high theatrical anger. Caz’s blade-flat replies. Shelley’s exhausted diplomacy. Finch’s laugh appearing at unhelpful intervals.
Kidd took off his jacket.
Put it back on.
Picked up his key card.
Left the room.
The bar was three streets from the hotel, below street level, reached by a narrow staircase painted red. Its sign read LE VEILLEUR, though half the letters had burned out, leaving LE V EUR, which seemed appropriate. Inside, the walls were black, the ceiling low, the music old and synthetic. Sisters of Mercy, Clan of Xymox, some Belgian coldwave track Kidd half recognised and did not need to. Candles in red glass. Cheap absinthe behind the bar. A mirror clouded by years of smoke.
It was not a tourist place.
Good.
He ordered whisky.
The bartender looked at his eyeliner, chipped black nails, band laminate still hanging from his pocket, and said in English, “You played tonight.”
Kidd removed the laminate and put it in his pocket.
“No.”
The bartender shrugged.
That was why Kidd liked him immediately.
He took a corner booth where the red candlelight barely reached, drank half the whisky too fast, and listened to other people not needing him.
He did not want company.
That was what he told himself until Marianne Dupois sat opposite him.
She did not ask.
She simply appeared with a glass of red wine, a black lace sleeve, and a small silver crucifix hanging upside down from one ear.
“You are Kidd,” she said.
Her accent was French, but not Paris. Softer. Northern, maybe. Her English was precise in the way people become precise when they enjoy choosing which rule to break.
Kidd looked at her.
She was perhaps twenty-five. Adult, self-possessed, and styled like a fan who had survived becoming one. Black bob, dark lipstick, pale foundation cracked slightly near the jaw, velvet coat damp from rain, boots with buckles, rings on every finger. Around her throat was a ribbon choker with a tiny enamel badge: Gay9’s old sigil from their first EP, before the label redesigned it into something cleaner.
He pointed at the badge.
“Vintage.”
“I bought it when I was nineteen.”
“That makes me feel antique.”
“You are not antique. You are neglected.”
He laughed despite himself.
That was her first successful strike.
Marianne smiled.
Not wide. Not predatory. Not yet.
“Your show was beautiful,” she said.
“It was a car crash.”
“Yes. Beautiful car crash.”
“Belgian criticism is generous.”
“I am French.”
“Then worse.”
She lifted her glass.
“Usually.”
He should have left.
There were rules about fans, though no one followed them consistently enough to call them rules. He had slept with fans before. Most touring musicians who claimed otherwise were either lying, sober, or too famous to admit logistics. It was rarely as glamorous as people thought. Mostly it involved exhaustion, hotel corridors, power imbalance, bad judgement, and someone asking for a photo afterwards while one or both parties felt smaller than before.
But Marianne did not ask for anything.
Not at first.
She talked about basslines.
Properly.
Not the usual “I love the deep sound” nonsense, but specific things: the drop under the second chorus of “Nine Black Engines,” the way he held a note too long in “Basilica Mouth,” the live version of “Salt Bride” where he used distortion like a second vocal.
“You listen to the left side,” he said.
“I listen underneath.”
The phrase stayed with him.
They drank.
Not much. Enough.
She asked him what it was like when a band died before it stopped touring.
He said, “Quiet.”
She asked if he was lonely.
He said, “That’s a lazy question.”
She said, “Yes. Answer it anyway.”
He did not.
She did not mind.
That was her second successful strike.
Around one, the bar emptied into deeper night. The bartender turned the music lower. Rain tapped at the small pavement-level windows. Kidd realised he had been talking for nearly an hour. Not about everything. Not about the band’s contracts or the label or Luka’s voice or Caz’s cruelty when frightened. But enough.
Marianne listened like someone collecting more than gossip.
“You should sleep,” she said.
“I’m supposed to be avoiding people who tell me what to do.”
“Then continue ruining yourself.”
“Better.”
She stood.
He stood too.
That was the moment the night could still have become ordinary.
A fan. A bar. A kiss outside under cold rain. A mistake. A memory. A small private thing to regret mildly on the bus.
Instead, she touched his wrist.
Her fingers were cold.
Kidd looked down.
Then up.
Marianne was watching his face with a concentration that made the room narrow.
“You are very tired,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Not only from music.”
“No.”
“Do you want to feel wanted?”
He should have laughed.
He did not.
That was her third successful strike, and the one that opened the skin without teeth.
Outside, the rain had softened. The streets shone black and gold. She kissed him against the wall beside the bar entrance, and the kiss was careful at first. Then not. Her mouth tasted of wine and clove cigarettes. His hands found the velvet of her coat, the cold line of her jaw. She made a small sound against him and he felt, with ridiculous force, that someone had finally heard the bass.
They went back to the hotel.
No one in the lobby stopped them.
Of course not.
Hotels were machines for pretending not to see.
In the lift, she looked at their reflections in the brass panel.
Kidd saw himself beside her: pale, tired, black hair falling into his eyes, eyeliner smudged, leather jacket creased, a man whose youth had become branding and then debt.
Marianne’s reflection was faint.
Not absent.
Faint.
He noticed.
He did not understand fast enough.
His room smelled of old heating and wet clothes. He put the key card on the desk. She touched the bass case on the bed.
“May I?”
He nodded.
She opened it gently.
That impressed him more than it should have.
Inside lay his black Fender Precision, scratched along the body, strings dulled from sweat, strap still attached. Marianne touched the edge of it with two fingers, reverent and sad.
“This is the faithful one,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“No.” She looked at him. “This is what you carried when you had no one to carry you.”
He hated her a little then.
For being right.
For making it sound beautiful.
For saying the thing too directly.
He kissed her again because it was easier than answering.
The rest became heat, rain against glass, the low hum of the hotel, her hands under his shirt, his mouth at her throat, her laugh when he knocked the television remote off the bed, the absurd intimacy of boots kicked into a corner.
Then her mouth found his neck.
He felt teeth.
Not sharp at first.
A suggestion.
He froze.
“Marianne.”
She whispered something in French.
Not an apology.
Not a spell.
Maybe a prayer.
The bite opened.
Pain. Then pleasure. Then a terrible relief, enormous and soft, spreading through him as if the last years of fatigue had finally found an exit. His body arched. His hands closed in the sheets. The room blurred red at the edges.
He should have pushed her away.
He did not.
She drank.
At first he thought: all right.
Then: enough.
Then he could not form either word.
Marianne held him with impossible gentleness while taking too much.
The ceiling moved farther away.
The rain became applause.
The bassline dropped out.
Somewhere, a door slammed in the corridor.
Someone laughed.
The band, perhaps. Leaving. Fighting. Existing without him.
Kidd tried to say his own name.
Only breath came.
Marianne lifted her head at last.
Her mouth was dark.
Her eyes were full of tears.
“I am sorry,” she said.
Then she bit her own wrist and pressed it to his lips.
Blood entered him.
Not enough.
Too much.
Wrong.
He choked.
She stroked his hair.
“Sleep, bass boy,” she whispered. “Please survive me.”
Kidd fell into the dark.
When he woke, the room was daylight-bright behind closed curtains.
His tongue felt like paper.
His body was cold.
His neck hurt.
His hands looked wrong on the sheet: grey, thin, veins dark beneath skin. He tried to sit and failed. Something inside him had been emptied and badly refilled. Hunger moved through him, not like appetite, but like a second skeleton unfolding.
The clock beside the bed read 14:07.
His phone was dead.
His bass case was closed.
Marianne was gone.
So was the band.
Kidd lay in the hotel room for a long time before he understood that he had not merely been abandoned.
He had been left alive.
Barely.
And the difference was going to become everyone’s problem.
Gay9: Blood Hotel
Part Two: Room Service
Kidd spent the first hour awake learning the new body.
It was a poor instrument.
That was his first thought, and because he was still himself enough to think in instruments, he took that as evidence of survival.
His hands shook when he raised them. The fingers looked too long, too dry, skin pulled tight over knuckles as if someone had tuned him past safe tension. His forearms were grey. Not pale. Grey. The veins beneath them moved darkly, with a sluggish insistence that suggested blood remained in him only as a rumour.
His mouth was worse.
His tongue stuck to his teeth. His gums ached. There was a taste at the back of his throat like old copper, wine, and hotel dust. Every swallow hurt. His stomach cramped, though the pain was higher than hunger had any right to be. Not food hunger. Not thirst. Something older than appetite and more humiliating than desire.
He rolled onto his side and vomited.
Nothing came up except a thread of blackish saliva.
He lay there afterwards with his cheek against the carpet, breathing because the body remembered how, not because it needed to. The carpet smelled of detergent, shoes, dust, and Marianne.
Marianne.
The name opened the room.
Her velvet coat. Her silver crucifix. Her mouth at his throat. Her saying sorry after the damage was done. Her wrist against his lips. Please survive me.
He touched his neck.
Two wounds, closed but tender. Around them the skin felt bruised from the inside. He pressed harder. Pain answered. Good. Pain was honest. Pain did not ask for admiration.
He dragged himself to the bedside table and reached for his phone.
Dead.
Of course.
He fumbled for the charger. Missed. Tried again. Plugged it in with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb through gloves. The screen lit after several seconds.
Thirty-six missed calls.
Shelley. Finch. Unknown number. Shelley again. Caz. Hotel reception. Luka at 03:12, which was never good. A string of messages.
where are you
bus call ten
not funny kidd
we are leaving in fifteen
answer your phone
seriously answer
venue says load in 3
you better not be dead
That one from Finch.
Then, later:
we had to go. call shelley when alive.
Then nothing.
Kidd stared at the screen.
When alive.
He laughed once, and the sound tore through his throat like paper.
The band had gone to Cologne.
Maybe farther by now.
The tour machine had continued because machines did. Replaceable parts were only tragic if the machine stopped long enough to notice their shape.
He tried calling Shelley.
The phone rang twice and went to voicemail.
Her recorded voice was bright, professional, unrecognisable from tour reality.
“Hi, this is Shelley. Leave a message.”
Kidd opened his mouth.
No words came.
He hung up.
He called Finch.
No answer.
Caz.
No answer.
Luka.
It rang longer.
Then Luka answered.
Noise behind him. A venue, perhaps. Someone shouting in German. Guitar line through a monitor. Life happening in another room.
“Kidd?”
Kidd tried to speak.
A dry click.
“Kidd, where the hell are you?”
He swallowed.
Pain.
“Kidd?”
“Antwerp,” he managed.
Silence.
Then Luka, quieter. “Jesus.”
Kidd closed his eyes.
“I’m sick.”
“You’re sick?”
“Yes.”
“You vanished for two days.”
Two days.
He knew it but hearing it made the room tilt.
“I know.”
“Shelley called the hotel. They said you had the room on do-not-disturb. We thought—”
“What?”
Another silence.
Luka did not say overdose.
That was almost kind.
Kidd said, “I need help.”
The words came out thin, almost childish.
In the background, someone shouted Luka’s name.
Luka covered the phone badly.
“Give me a minute!”
Then back to Kidd.
“We’re in Cologne. We’re on in forty.”
“Come back.”
The silence this time was worse.
“Kidd.”
He knew before Luka continued.
“We can’t.”
The hunger inside Kidd shifted.
Not anger yet.
Worse.
Understanding.
Bands were families until logistics disagreed. Then they were businesses wearing bruised affection. Trucks, contracts, crew, venues, deposits, insurance, tickets, fans, lighting, visas, hotels. A missing bassist was a crisis. A found bassist was a complication.
Luka said, “Shelley can get someone to you.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. After the show. Tomorrow maybe.”
Tomorrow.
The hunger listened to the word and did not recognise it as possible.
“I’m empty,” Kidd said.
“What does that mean?”
He looked at his hand.
The nails had darkened.
The veins beneath his skin twitched.
“I don’t know.”
“Kidd, did you take something?”
The question landed with a dull familiar ugliness.
He almost said yes because it would be easier for both of them.
Instead he said, “No.”
“Then what happened?”
Marianne’s mouth. Wine. Teeth. Relief. Apology.
“I met someone.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
There it was.
Not cruelty.
Exhaustion.
The reflexive contempt bands reserve for each other’s private disasters.
Kidd’s grip tightened around the phone until the plastic creaked.
Luka heard it, perhaps.
His voice softened.
“Sorry. I’m sorry. Are you safe?”
Kidd looked around the room.
Curtains closed. Bed ruined. Bass case on the floor. A glass with dried lipstick near the sink. Room service menu. His jacket in a heap. No blood. No Marianne. No band.
“No.”
The word was true enough to frighten both of them.
“I’ll call Shelley,” Luka said.
“You said—”
“I’ll call her now. Stay in the room.”
Stay in the room.
Kidd looked at the door.
Beyond it, the hotel existed.
Pulses.
He could hear them now.
Not clearly at first. Then all at once.
A heartbeat in the room next door, slow and sleeping. Two floors below, a cleaner moving with a trolley, pulse steady, breath slightly wheezed. At the lift, a child laughing, high pulse, small body. At reception, a man arguing softly into a phone. In the plumbing, water. In the walls, wires. In the world, blood everywhere.
His mouth filled with saliva.
“Kidd?” Luka said.
He dropped the phone.
The hunger rose.
Not like wanting.
Like command dressed as anatomy.
He crawled to the bathroom and turned on the cold tap. Put his mouth under it. Drank. Water hit his tongue and became nothing. Worse than nothing. It mocked thirst by failing to answer it. He gagged, smashed the tap off, and stared at himself in the mirror.
He had a reflection.
Barely.
Not absent. Not cinematic. Just wrong. Delayed somehow, as if the mirror disliked the new contract. His face looked hollow, cheeks drawn, eyes too dark, lips cracked. The eyeliner from two nights ago had smudged into bruises. He looked like a rock star in the final frame of a documentary people would later describe as inevitable.
“No,” he said.
The reflection mouthed it half a second late.
He covered the mirror with a towel.
Then the knock came.
Housekeeping.
Three light taps.
“Housekeeping?”
A woman’s voice. Flemish accent. Tired. Professional.
Kidd froze.
Her pulse stood on the other side of the door like a red light.
He backed away.
“Later,” he tried to say.
It came out as a whisper.
The door opened.
Of course. Do-not-disturb had expired. Checkout had passed. The hotel had tried calling. Now the system had sent a human being with towels into the room of a starving thing.
The housekeeper entered pushing the door with her hip, looking down at the clipboard.
“Monsieur? You are still—”
She stopped.
Kidd stood by the bed, one hand on the bass case, grey-faced, shaking, eyes fixed on her throat.
She was in her fifties, maybe. Compact, tired, hair under a headscarf, blue hotel tunic, latex gloves. Her name badge said ANIKA. There was a small plaster on one finger.
The plaster ruined him.
One tiny white strip over one tiny wound.
Blood under it.
Warm.
Recent.
He took one step.
She saw something in his face and backed towards the door.
“Monsieur?”
“Leave.”
It was supposed to be warning.
It sounded like invitation.
She reached for the trolley.
Maybe for a phone.
Maybe for the door.
Kidd crossed the room.
New speed arrived before intention. One second he was by the bed. The next his hand was on the door above her head, slamming it shut. Anika gasped. The trolley rattled. Clean towels slid onto the floor.
Kidd stared at his own arm, braced against the door.
Too fast.
Wrong.
Anika whispered something in Dutch.
He did not understand the words.
He understood fear.
Fear changed the blood.
Made it sharper.
Made it call.
His mouth opened.
She looked at his teeth and began to cry without sound.
That stopped him.
Not enough.
But stopped.
Kidd pressed his forehead to the door beside her and clenched his jaw so hard he felt something crack.
“Go,” he said.
She did not move.
“Go.”
“I cannot,” she whispered.
His arm blocked the door.
He moved it.
Slowly.
As if moving a loaded weapon.
Anika opened the door with shaking hands and backed into the corridor. She left the trolley. Left the towels. Left the clipboard. She did not run until she was ten feet away.
Then she ran.
Kidd closed the door.
Locked it.
Put the chain on.
Then the hunger punished him for mercy.
It folded him to the floor.
He shook there, curled against the abandoned housekeeping trolley, teeth buried in his own sleeve, trying not to scream. The sleeve tore. His teeth cut skin. His own blood welled black and thin.
He sucked at it.
Nothing.
Less than nothing.
Self-cannibalism was not a feeding plan.
He laughed again.
It became a sob.
For the first time since waking, Kidd understood he might not be the kind of person who survived this without making someone else pay.
By evening, the hotel knew something was wrong with room 417.
Not the truth.
Hotels almost never know the truth. They know symptoms.
Housekeeper frightened. Guest unwell. Late checkout ignored. Possible drug use. Possible celebrity problem. Room damage likely. Management nervous because the card on file belonged to the tour company and the tour company was no longer in the country.
Kidd heard them outside.
Two staff. Then three. A manager, male, nervous authority. Anika speaking low and fast. Someone saying doctor. Someone saying police. Someone saying privacy.
Police would bring pulses.
Doctor would bring pulse.
Every solution brought blood to the door.
Kidd sat in the bathtub with the shower curtain pulled around him, bass across his knees like a shield. He had plugged his phone into the bathroom socket and watched messages arrive.
Shelley:
I’m trying to arrange someone local. Stay put. Are you in danger?
Finch:
bro what happened. seriously.
Caz:
this is not sustainable. call.
Luka:
we are offstage. call me. please.
Kidd stared at the word please until the letters lost shape.
Then typed with shaking thumbs:
do not send anyone to room. i am dangerous.
He deleted it.
Typed:
need hospital maybe
Deleted.
Typed:
marianne dupois
Stopped.
He searched her name.
Too many results. Marianne Dupois, photographer. Marianne Dupois, student. Marianne Dupois, no profile photo. Marianne DuPois with capital P. Marianne D. Gothic fan accounts. A tagged photo from the bar maybe, blurred, six years old. A comment under a Gay9 live clip: the bass is the bloodline.
He stared.
Was it her?
His phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
He answered before sense could object.
For two seconds, only room tone.
Then her voice.
“Kidd.”
Every part of him went still.
Marianne.
Not in the room. Not outside. Somewhere else. Close in the way voices become close when they have been inside your blood.
He could not speak.
“You survived,” she said.
He laughed once, dry and horrible.
“Barely.”
“I gave you enough.”
“No.”
“I gave you all I could without killing myself.”
“You drank me dry.”
Silence.
Then, softer: “Yes.”
The admission did not help.
It made her more real.
“Why?”
Another silence.
“I was hungry.”
The simplest answer.
The worst.
He closed his eyes.
“That’s it?”
“No. But all the other answers are decoration around that one.”
He gripped the edge of the bass.
“I’m starving.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Not far.”
“Come here.”
“I should not.”
“Come here.”
“If I come, you will want to kill me.”
“I want to kill everyone.”
“I know.”
His breath shook.
“Help me.”
There.
Again.
The words he had said to Luka, but now the person on the line understood their shape.
Marianne’s voice broke slightly.
“I did not mean to make you like this.”
“You bit me.”
“I meant to take less.”
“You bit me.”
“I know.”
Outside the bathroom, someone knocked on the room door again.
Manager this time.
“Monsieur Kidd? We need to check you are safe.”
Kidd turned his head towards the sound.
Pulse. Two of them. Three. Corridor full of concern.
Concern smelled like warm skin.
Marianne said, “Do not open.”
“I know.”
“Listen to me. There is a minibar.”
He almost laughed.
“What?”
“Small bottles. Break one. Cut your palm.”
“My blood doesn’t work.”
“Not for feeding. For focus. Pain will give you seconds.”
“I need more than seconds.”
“Use the seconds to get to the service stairs. Basement. Laundry level. There may be meat deliveries, staff food, something animal.”
“Animal?”
“It will be disgusting.”
“Will it work?”
“Enough to think.”
The manager knocked again.
“Monsieur?”
Kidd looked at the bathroom mirror, covered with towel.
“Why should I trust you?”
“You should not. But I am the only one who knows the first night.”
“The first night?”
“After being made.”
Made.
Not born.
Not turned.
Made.
A thing done to him, not with him.
He looked down at his bass. Black body. Four strings. Familiar weight. The only faithful one.
Marianne said, “Kidd. Pain. Service stairs. Basement. Avoid children. Avoid the elderly. Avoid anyone kind if you can.”
A laugh tore out of him.
“That’s your moral system?”
“No. That is emergency triage.”
The knocking became harder.
A key card beeped at the door.
The manager was opening it.
Kidd stood.
The hunger stood with him.
He took a miniature gin bottle from the minibar, smashed it against the sink, and drove the broken glass into his palm.
Pain flashed clean.
For two seconds, he was not hunger.
He was Kidd.
Bass player.
Left hand strong. Right hand steady. Stage dark. Count in.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
The room door opened.
Kidd left the bathroom at speed.
The manager saw him and shouted.
Kidd did not attack him.
That was the first victory.
He hit the door instead, shoulder through the gap, knocking the manager backwards into the corridor wall without stopping. Anika screamed. A security guard grabbed for him. Kidd slipped, not gracefully, not intentionally, simply too fast and too empty to hold. He hit the opposite wall, bounced, found the service door, and threw himself through it.
Stairs.
Concrete.
Down.
The hotel became sound: shouts above, radio crackle, lift ding, pulse behind doors, the thud of his own feet too light on steps.
Third floor.
Second.
First.
Ground.
Basement.
He crashed through a door marked PERSONNEL ONLY and entered the service corridor under the hotel.
Laundry heat. Detergent. Pipes. Old stone. Food waste. Staff lockers. A dumbwaiter shaft. Somewhere, a walk-in refrigerator.
He followed smell.
Not human.
Meat.
Cold. Wrapped. Dead. Poor substitute. Beautiful.
He found the kitchen delivery fridge and tore the handle hard enough to bend it. Inside: crates, vacuum packs, breakfast bacon, steaks for the restaurant, chicken portions, tubs of something unidentifiable and beige.
He fell onto the meat like an animal.
Plastic tore under his teeth. Cold beef hit his mouth. It was wrong. Dead. Flat. Bloodless by comparison. But there was enough trace iron, enough animal memory, enough protein and red leakage to drag the hunger down from murder to disgust.
He ate until he could think.
Then he sat on the fridge floor among torn packaging, shaking, crying, and laughing so quietly no one upstairs heard.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Marianne again.
He answered.
“I’m in the basement,” he said.
“Good.”
“I ate raw hotel steak.”
“That is better than concierge.”
“Barely.”
“You can survive the next hour.”
“The band left.”
“I know.”
“Of course you know.”
“I saw the bus go.”
He closed his eyes.
“You watched?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t stop them.”
“What would I have said?”
He had no answer.
From somewhere beyond the fridge door came footsteps.
Staff, maybe. Security. Police soon.
“Kidd,” Marianne said. “You cannot stay there.”
“I have nowhere.”
“I have a room.”
He laughed.
“No.”
“I know.”
“You nearly killed me.”
“Yes.”
“And you want me to come to your room.”
“No. I want you to choose the least dangerous option before hunger chooses for you.”
He looked at the torn meat.
At his bloody palm.
At the phone.
At the door.
Loss moved through him then, wide and sudden. Not only blood loss. Band loss. Tour loss. Self loss. The realisation that nobody was coming in the way he needed because nobody could understand what room 417 had become.
Even if Gay9 came back, what would they find?
A bassist?
A liability?
A monster with a laminate?
“What am I?” he whispered.
Marianne’s answer came after a long pause.
“New.”
He hated her for that.
He also held onto it.
Footsteps approached the fridge.
Kidd stood.
“Where?”
She gave him an address.
A guesthouse near the old docks.
“Back entrance,” she said. “No lobby. No children. I have blood.”
His mouth filled with hunger.
“What kind?”
“Mine. Some animal. Some bought.”
“Bought from who?”
“You are not ready for that answer.”
“No more glamour.”
“I did not glamour you.”
“Do not split hairs while I’m covered in steak juice.”
A strange sound came through the phone.
Almost a laugh.
Then she said, “No glamour. No feeding from you unless you ask. No biting unless you ask. Door unlocked. You may leave.”
“Why?”
“Because I did not give you that before.”
The fridge handle moved.
Kidd looked at it.
“Marianne.”
“Yes?”
“If this is a trap, I’ll kill you.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
Another pause.
Then: “I hope you do, if I make it one.”
The fridge door opened.
A young kitchen porter stared in.
He was seventeen, maybe eighteen, holding a crate of lettuce, earbuds in, pulse bright with shock.
Kidd looked at him.
The boy looked at the torn meat, the blood on Kidd’s mouth, the smashed packaging, the grey skin, the black eyes.
For one second, the hunger considered.
Kidd gripped the broken gin glass still embedded in his palm and twisted.
Pain.
Seconds.
“Run,” Kidd said.
The boy ran.
Kidd ran the other way.
Gay9: Blood Hotel
Part Three: The Guesthouse Near the Docks
Kidd reached the guesthouse by moving through the parts of Antwerp that did not care what a man looked like if he kept his head down.
Service alleys. Delivery yards. Wet backstreets behind restaurants. A tunnel under the railway where old posters peeled in strips from the tiles. A row of shuttered shops selling phone repairs, cigarettes, fake perfume, and nothing anyone needed at three in the morning except cover.
He wore a kitchen porter’s stolen hoodie over his stage shirt.
Stolen was too strong.
Borrowed from a staff peg while fleeing a hotel basement after eating sixty euros of raw steak and terrifying a teenager. In the old life, Kidd would have called that a low point. The new life had made the phrase feel ambitious. The hoodie smelled of fryer oil, laundry powder, and someone else’s honest sweat. It helped cover the blood on his collar. It did not cover his face.
Every reflective window showed him wrong.
He avoided them.
His phone had 12% battery and Marianne’s address open in a message thread he did not trust. Shelley had called twice more. Finch had sent a voice note. Luka had written:
police called hotel. what the fuck is happening. please answer.
Kidd did not answer.
Not because he did not want to.
Because every possible answer broke reality in a different direction.
Hi, I’ve been exsanguinated by a goth fan and may have become a touring liability with teeth.
Hi, I ate the hotel’s meat stock and fled.
Hi, I nearly attacked a housekeeper but didn’t, which is apparently the moral highlight of my week.
Hi, I need you to come back, but if you come back I might kill you.
He put the phone away.
The hunger had receded from catastrophic to conversational. That was not comfort. It sat beside his thoughts and commented on every passing body.
Man at cashpoint. Drunk. Slow. Easy.
Woman smoking under awning. Tired. Warm. Alone.
Couple arguing by taxi. Too much attention. Avoid.
Cyclist with headphones. Fast pulse. Bad angle.
Kidd clenched his injured palm until glass shifted in the cut. Pain cleared the margins.
Not command.
That phrase came from nowhere.
No, not nowhere. From some article he had once read at four in the morning after a tour doctor told him his insomnia looked “behavioural.” Urge was not command. Craving was not command. He had thought it sounded smug then. Now it sounded like a bassline: simple, repetitive, necessary.
At the docks, the streets widened and emptied.
Old warehouses stood along the water, some converted into expensive flats, others waiting for money to become interested. Sodium lamps reflected in black water. A crane loomed above the quay like the skeleton of an animal that had forgotten work. Wind came in cold from the river and moved through the stolen hoodie.
The guesthouse was three storeys, narrow, brick, with green shutters and no sign except a brass number by the door. Too clean for cheap lodging. Too dark for ordinary business. The curtains were drawn on every floor. A black van sat across the street with no plates visible.
Kidd stopped.
Trap, said the old mind.
Shelter, said the hunger.
Neither was reliable.
He went around the back as instructed.
The rear gate was unlatched. Beyond it, a small courtyard contained bins, dead plants in terracotta pots, a bicycle frame with no wheels, and a basement door with peeling blue paint. A light burned above it.
The door was unlocked.
He stood before it for nearly a minute.
Then knocked.
Marianne opened it.
No velvet coat now. No fan-girl armour. No black lace. She wore a grey jumper too large for her, black trousers, bare feet, hair pinned back badly. Without makeup, or with less of it, she looked older and younger at once. Her mouth was pale. Her eyes were ringed dark. On one wrist was a bandage.
Kidd hated the relief he felt at seeing her.
She saw it.
That made him hate her more.
“You came,” she said.
“I didn’t have a lot of doors.”
“No.”
They stood on opposite sides of the threshold.
She stepped back.
“Come in if you choose.”
The wording mattered.
He noticed.
That irritated him too.
The basement room was warmer than the courtyard and lit by two lamps turned low. It had a narrow bed, a table, two chairs, blackout curtains over a small high window, and a second door at the back. On the table were three glass bottles filled with dark liquid, two plastic tubs of animal blood, gauze, antiseptic, a packet of disposable gloves, a phone charger, and a bowl lined with a clean towel.
“Practical,” Kidd said.
“I hoped you would live long enough to be sarcastic.”
“I’m considering it temporary.”
Marianne did not smile.
Good.
He did not want her charming.
He wanted facts, blood, and maybe revenge, not necessarily in that order.
She gestured to the table.
“Animal first. Then mine if needed.”
The word mine entered him wrong.
His eyes went to her bandaged wrist.
She did not hide it.
“I cut, you drink from cup,” she said. “No mouth to skin unless you ask. No biting.”
“What if I don’t stop?”
“Then I leave the room before I start.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then you should not be here.”
He almost laughed.
“You invited me.”
“I gave you an option.”
“After making me this.”
Her face tightened.
“Yes.”
The room held the word.
Kidd crossed to the table, picked up one of the plastic tubs, opened it, and drank cold animal blood without ceremony. Pig, perhaps. Or cow. It tasted dead, flat, better than steak, worse than survival should. He drank too fast, gagged, forced himself slower.
Marianne sat across from him but not too close.
Smart.
Cowardly.
Kind.
He finished the first tub and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Is this what you live on?”
“When I can.”
“And when you can’t?”
She looked at the table.
“That is where trouble begins.”
He opened the second tub.
His hands shook less after half of it. His vision steadied. The room stopped pulsing at the edges. Marianne remained sharp, painfully sharp, but no longer the only object in the world.
“Talk,” he said.
She nodded.
Not theatrically. Not like a villain beginning confession. Like someone who had rehearsed and discarded every elegant version.
“My full name is Marianne Dupois. I am thirty-one. I was made nine years ago in Lille by a man called Étienne Roche, though he has used other names. I was a fan before that. Not of you. Of another band. Different city, same structure.”
Kidd stared.
“You were attacked by a musician?”
“No. By someone who followed musicians. Fed on people around them. Fans, staff, afterparty girls, boys who wanted access, photographers, opening acts. He liked scenes because scenes produce loneliness in public.”
Kidd looked away.
That phrase landed.
Loneliness in public.
That was touring. That was clubs. That was green rooms after bad shows. That was being loved in aggregate and unseen in detail.
“What happened?”
“He drank me nearly empty and gave me blood badly. Not enough instruction. Enough dependence. Then he left before dawn. I spent my first night in a hostel shower drinking from my own hand because I did not understand why it failed.”
Kidd’s injured palm throbbed.
He said nothing.
“I survived badly,” she continued. “I hurt people. Some lived. One maybe did not. I still do not know.”
“Convenient.”
“Yes.”
She accepted the hit without defence.
That made it less satisfying.
“I learned circuits. Bars. Clubs. Where people are willing to disappear for a night. Where no one asks if a girl looks ill because everyone looks ill under red light. I learned to take enough, then less. I learned animal blood. I learned paid donors. I learned not to confuse fandom with permission.”
“You learned that last one before or after me?”
Her mouth tightened.
“After failing it.”
He stood so abruptly the chair scraped hard against stone.
Marianne did not move.
Good.
Bad.
He paced to the blackout curtain and stopped before touching it. The idea of daylight on the other side made his skin contract though it was night. Some new animal inside him already understood the sun as creditor.
“You sat opposite me,” he said. “You talked about my basslines.”
“Yes.”
“You made me feel seen.”
“Yes.”
“Was any of that real?”
Marianne closed her eyes.
“Yes.”
“That’s worse.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. If it was fake, I could hate you cleanly.”
She opened her eyes.
“You can still hate me.”
“I’m trying.”
“Good.”
“Stop saying good.”
She almost smiled, then wisely did not.
Kidd turned on her.
“Why me?”
Her answer came too fast, which meant it was the one she had feared most.
“Because you were alone.”
The room narrowed.
He laughed once.
“Lots of people are alone.”
“Yes.”
“So why me?”
“Because I knew your music. Because I had imagined you before meeting you. Because when you sat in the bar, you looked like someone everyone had used for structure and no one had asked whether the structure was tired. Because I was hungry. Because I wanted to be close to the thing that had once helped me survive. Because I am not as disciplined as I pretend.”
He stared at her.
That was too much truth.
Not enough.
“You fed on gratitude.”
“Yes.”
“On fandom.”
“Yes.”
“On me.”
“Yes.”
He wanted her to deny something.
She refused him that comfort.
“Did you mean to turn me?”
“No.”
“Do you know that?”
“No.”
Good.
There.
A crack.
She did not know. Hunger, desire, admiration, loneliness, apology — all of it tangled. She had not planned it like murder. She had not avoided it like someone safe.
Kidd returned to the table, picked up one of the glass bottles, and sniffed.
Human.
His whole body changed.
Marianne saw.
“That is bought donor blood. Screened. Consenting.”
“Bought from who?”
“A clinic that is not a clinic.”
“Helpful.”
“It is expensive. Drink slowly.”
He looked at the bottle.
Human blood under glass. Permission in liquid form, if she was telling the truth. He had no way to know. His moral life now depended on supply chains he did not understand.
Rock and roll, he thought.
He drank.
Warm enough. Human enough. The effect was immediate and humiliating. Relief spread through him like sound through a subwoofer, low and total. His knees weakened. He gripped the table. Marianne looked away, giving him privacy he resented needing.
He drank half before stopping.
Stopping felt like tearing cloth.
But he stopped.
That was the second victory.
He set the bottle down.
“Is this what you should have given me after?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I panicked. I was weak. I stayed too long at your throat and had little left. I gave you my wrist, but I did not stay through waking. I thought if you died, I had killed you; if you lived, you would hate me; if I stayed, I would feed again.”
“So you left.”
“Yes.”
“Then watched the band leave.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was outside the hotel all day. I could not enter. Daylight. Lobby. Staff. I watched the tour bus because I thought maybe one of them would stay.”
He barked a laugh.
“My band? Stay?”
“I did not know them.”
“You knew enough.”
She looked down.
“I knew you were the one who held them together.”
“Past tense.”
“No.”
He gripped the bottle.
“They left.”
“They did not know.”
“I told Luka I needed help.”
“After.”
“After what?”
“After they had already decided which version of you fit the facts.”
That hurt because it was true.
The band had not abandoned a vampire. They had abandoned a missing musician who looked like relapse, breakdown, irresponsibility, another tour disaster. They had abandoned the version of Kidd they could understand because the alternative was impossible.
That did not make him less alone.
He sat.
The room quieted.
Outside, water lapped somewhere against dock stone. A vehicle passed. Footsteps overhead. In the building, one slow heartbeat, maybe human, maybe not. Marianne’s was faint, irregular, almost hidden. Kidd could hear it now that he was fed.
“What happens next?” he asked.
“You learn not to kill.”
“Then?”
“You learn how much of your old life can survive the new one.”
“That sounds like less than I want.”
“It is.”
He looked at his phone. 4%.
He plugged it into the charger on the table.
Messages multiplied as soon as it woke.
Shelley:
local police say you fled hotel. I need you to call me NOW.
Finch:
I’m scared man
Luka:
we cancelled tonight. tell me where you are
Kidd stared at the last one.
Cancelled.
A band could continue without him, until it could not.
A laugh broke out of him before he could stop it.
Marianne watched.
“They cancelled?”
“Apparently I have achieved logistical significance.”
“Do you want to call?”
“No.”
“Do you want not to?”
“No.”
Both were true.
He opened Luka’s message. Typed:
alive. not safe. don’t come yet.
He hesitated.
Then sent.
The reply came quickly.
what happened
Kidd looked at Marianne.
She looked back.
He typed:
fan attacked me. blood loss. infection maybe. sounds insane because it is.
He did not send.
Deleted.
Typed:
medical crisis. not drugs. need time.
Sent.
Luka replied:
where are you
Kidd stared.
Marianne said, “Do not bring them here.”
“I know.”
“They are your people.”
“Were.”
“If they come before you can control hunger, they become food or witnesses. Both are dangerous.”
“I know.”
He typed:
will call when I can speak. tell them not to send anyone. please.
Sent.
Then he turned the phone face down.
The word please remained in his head.
He had spent years being the reliable one. The bass. The foundation. The low end beneath everyone else’s crisis. Asking for stillness from them felt like sending a note to a collapsing stage: hold.
Marianne poured more animal blood into a cup and pushed it towards him.
He looked at it.
“I can’t do this forever.”
“No.”
“You’re supposed to say it gets easier.”
“It gets structured.”
“That’s worse.”
“It is the only version I trust.”
He drank.
Dawn approached without entering.
Kidd felt it before Marianne said anything. A pressure in the bones, a grey alarm at the edge of the skin. The basement room had no direct sunlight, but some new instinct tracked the sky through brick and curtain.
Marianne stood.
“There is a sleeping room through there.”
She pointed to the rear door.
“No windows. Lock inside. I will stay out here.”
“What if I sleep two more days?”
“You may.”
“What if I wake worse?”
“You may.”
“What if I wake and you’re gone?”
She did not answer quickly.
He appreciated that.
“I will be here when you wake,” she said. “Unless you ask me to leave before you sleep.”
“Would you?”
“Yes.”
“Even if I need help?”
“Yes. Choice matters most when need makes it inconvenient.”
He hated how rehearsed that sounded.
He also needed it.
He stood, unsteady but less ruined. The sleeping room was small, almost cell-like, with a mattress on the floor, blankets, a lamp, and a bolt on the inside of the door. No mirror. No window. A bucket in one corner, which was both practical and bleak.
He turned back before entering.
“Marianne.”
“Yes?”
“Did you care about me before you bit me?”
Her face changed.
“I cared about the idea of you.”
He nodded.
Good answer.
Cruel. Honest.
“And now?”
“Now I am beginning to know the damage.”
“That’s not care.”
“No. It may become responsibility.”
He considered that.
Responsibility was not love.
It might be more useful.
He stepped into the room and closed the door.
Bolted it.
Sat on the mattress.
From the other side, Marianne did not move.
He could hear her settle in the chair near the table. Heard glass. Cloth. A small suppressed sound that might have been pain, might have been crying, might have been nothing.
Kidd took out his phone one last time.
Luka had sent:
we are here. we can wait.
Kidd put the phone on the floor.
Not answered.
Not erased.
He lay down in the dark, one hand curled as if around a bass neck, thumb finding invisible position markers along the edge of the blanket.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
The count carried him under.
This time the sleep was not death.
Not quite.
Gay9: Blood Hotel
Part Four: The Low End Returns
Kidd woke to the sound of his bass.
Not loud.
Not amplified.
One note, played softly through the wall.
Open E.
Let ring.
Silence.
Again.
Open E.
Let ring.
He opened his eyes in the dark room and did not know where he was for several seconds. That was becoming normal, which was not comforting. He lay on the mattress, one hand curled in the blanket, mouth dry, body heavy, hunger present but no longer screaming.
The note came again.
E.
Then A.
Then D.
Then G.
Tuning.
Someone was tuning his bass.
Kidd sat up too fast and almost blacked out. The room lurched. He gripped the mattress until the dizziness passed. He had no idea how long he had slept. Hours, probably. Not days. The hunger would have told him if days had passed. Hunger had become the clock that hated him.
The bass sounded again.
This time a line from “Basilica Mouth.”
Wrong rhythm.
Wrong touch.
Careful, reverent, but wrong.
Kidd stood.
His legs worked badly but worked. He unbolted the door and opened it.
Marianne sat at the table with his Fender across her lap.
She had one hand over the strings, stopping them the moment she saw him. His phone lay beside her, charging. Three glass bottles stood empty. One fresh bottle remained unopened. Her bandaged wrist had bled through again.
For a second, neither spoke.
Then Kidd said, “You’re playing it wrong.”
Something like relief crossed her face.
“I know.”
“Then stop.”
She began to lift the strap over her head.
He stepped forward faster than he meant to.
She froze.
So did he.
His eyes went to her throat.
Her pulse was faint, but there.
Not enough to flood the room. Enough.
He stepped back.
“Put it on the chair.”
She did.
Slowly.
No sudden movements. No apology gesture. No softening herself into victimhood. He appreciated that more than he wanted to.
“What time?”
“Nearly seven in the evening.”
“One day?”
“Fourteen hours.”
He nodded.
His phone lit on the table.
Messages.
Many.
Marianne saw his eyes move.
“They are in Antwerp.”
Kidd looked at her.
“The band?”
“Yes.”
“They came back?”
“They came back.”
His first feeling was anger.
That surprised him.
Not gratitude. Not relief. Anger so sudden it had teeth of its own.
They came back too late. They left. They had to be asked by catastrophe to return. They would see him like this. They would make him explain. They would make him become the problem in the room.
Then another feeling moved beneath it.
They came back.
He sat down before either feeling could knock him over.
“Where?”
“The hotel first. Then the police told them you had fled after attacking the kitchen stock.”
“I did attack the kitchen stock.”
“Your drummer found that funny and then cried.”
Kidd closed his eyes.
“Finch.”
“Yes.”
“Luka?”
“Called this phone sixteen times.”
“You answered?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Then he came here.”
Kidd opened his eyes.
Marianne continued quickly.
“He did not come inside. I spoke through the door.”
“You what?”
“He found the address from your phone location before I turned it off. He was outside with the tour manager and the guitarist.”
Kidd stood.
Hunger rose with the movement.
Marianne stayed seated, hands visible.
“They are gone,” she said. “Temporarily. I told them you were alive, physically unstable, and not safe to approach without your permission.”
Kidd laughed once.
“You told my band I’m not safe?”
“Yes.”
“And they just left?”
“No. They shouted for twenty minutes. Your singer threatened me with a microphone stand he did not possess. Your guitarist called me several things in English and one in French, incorrectly gendered. Your tour manager asked the right questions.”
“Shelley would.”
“She wanted to call an ambulance.”
“Did you stop her?”
“I said ordinary hospital staff would be in danger if they entered blindly. I gave her enough to wait. Not enough to understand.”
Kidd stared at her.
“You managed my crisis.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t get to do that.”
“No.”
They sat with that.
Marianne folded her hands together.
“I am not claiming authority. I am telling you what I did. You can hate it. You can correct it.”
He wanted to. He wanted to tear into every decision she had made while he slept. But underneath the anger lay the bleak fact that she had been right about at least one thing: if Gay9 had walked into the room while he was hungry, frightened, and half-made, love would not have saved them from his teeth.
“Where are they now?” he asked.
“Hotel across the docks. Shelley’s number is on paper beside your phone. I wrote the address.”
He looked at the note.
Shelley’s handwriting had been added beneath Marianne’s.
Kidd — we are nearby. We wait until you say. Not leaving. S.
Not leaving.
He read it again.
The hunger did not understand those words.
The human part did and nearly broke.
He picked up the last bottle.
Human blood.
He looked at Marianne.
“Consenting?”
“Yes.”
“Name?”
She hesitated.
Good.
He had learned to distrust seamless supply.
“Alain,” she said. “Paid donor. Former scene medic. Knows what we are. Does not know you.”
“Can I verify?”
“Yes. Not tonight, if you can avoid it. But yes.”
He nodded and drank.
Slowly.
The relief remained obscene, but less overwhelming than before. He stopped at half the bottle. Stop became possible faster now. Not easy. Possible.
Marianne watched the table, not him.
When he set the bottle down, she spoke.
“I should tell you the rest.”
“There’s more?”
“There is always more. That is the punishment for surviving scenes.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
She continued.
“Étienne did not only turn me. He kept me close for a year. Fed me when I behaved. Starved me when I became inconvenient. Sent me to clubs to bring people. Fans, mostly. People who wanted to be near music, near beauty, near whatever they thought would transform their lives.”
Kidd’s face tightened.
“I don’t want your tragic backstory to become an excuse.”
“It is not an excuse.”
“Then why tell me?”
“So you know I recognised the machine and still reproduced it.”
That stopped him.
She looked at him directly.
“I knew the shape. Lonely artist. Devoted fan. Late bar. Hotel room. Hunger wearing intimacy. I did not intend to become him. I did not intend to make you me. But intention did not protect you.”
The room quieted.
Kidd looked at his bass on the chair.
“You said you cared about the idea of me.”
“Yes.”
“Did he care about the idea of you?”
“He cared about being adored.”
“And you?”
She took a long time.
“I cared about being close to something that made my old loneliness feel meaningful.”
“That’s fandom.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not evil.”
“No.”
“But you fed on it.”
“Yes.”
He touched the edge of the table. His fingers were steadier now.
“Gay9 fed on it too.”
Marianne did not answer.
He looked up.
“We did. Different way. Tickets. merch. aftershow passes. meet-and-greets. Sad songs sold back to sad people. We made loneliness aesthetic and then complained when lonely people believed us.”
“That is not the same as what I did.”
“No.”
He looked at her mouth. The mouth that had kissed him. The mouth that had opened him. The mouth that had said sorry after all useful timing had ended.
“But it’s in the same town,” he said.
She nodded once.
“Yes.”
His phone buzzed.
Luka.
Kidd did not answer.
Not yet.
“Do I turn fully?” he asked.
Marianne’s face tightened.
“You are already turned.”
“No. I mean, do I become you?”
“No one becomes exactly.”
“Do I stop being able to tour?”
“I do not know.”
“Sunlight?”
“Dangerous. Manageable with planning, not denial.”
“Food?”
“Mostly irrelevant. Sometimes emotionally useful. Blood necessary.”
“Sex?”
She looked away.
“Possible. Complicated. Hunger confuses every form of wanting until you build discipline.”
He laughed bitterly.
“Good. Rock music needed more complications.”
She did not smile.
“Do I age?”
“Slowly, perhaps. Differently. It depends on feeding, sire line, damage. I do not know your exact condition because I did this badly.”
He heard the self-loathing in that.
It would have been easy to comfort her.
That frightened him almost as much as the hunger.
“No,” he said.
She looked at him.
“I am not taking care of your guilt.”
Her eyes filled, but she nodded.
“Good.”
“Stop saying good.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop saying sorry unless it is attached to something useful.”
She swallowed.
“What would be useful?”
He looked at the phone.
“A meeting. Controlled. With the band. No feeding risk.”
Marianne sat straighter.
“We can arrange that.”
“We?”
“I mean, I can help arrange it if you want help.”
“Better.”
She got paper, because apparently vampires in crisis preferred analogue. They made a plan.
Not a dramatic plan.
A practical one.
Kidd would feed before the meeting. Human donor blood, half bottle, then animal backup. Marianne would not be in the same room at first; the band would not handle that yet, and Kidd did not want her there when he explained. The meeting would happen in the guesthouse courtyard after dark, open air, no enclosed room, no touching unless Kidd initiated, no exposed wounds, no alcohol, no shouting if possible, though that last one was aspirational given Luka.
Shelley would come first.
Then Finch.
Then Caz and Luka if Kidd agreed.
Marianne wrote it down.
“Why Shelley first?” she asked.
“Because she knows how to hear disaster without making it about her.”
“And the others?”
“Finch will cry. Caz will get cruel if scared. Luka will make it theatre unless stopped.”
“You know them well.”
“I thought I did.”
“That is grief speaking.”
“No. It’s bass.”
For the first time, she smiled properly.
Small.
Gone quickly.
He did not hate it.
That was inconvenient.
At nine, Shelley came through the back gate alone.
She wore black jeans, boots, a tour jacket, no makeup, and the expression of a woman who had not slept for two nights and had converted worry into logistics to keep from screaming. Her hair was tied back. Her hands were empty. She stopped when she saw Kidd standing under the courtyard light.
For a second, her professional face vanished.
“Kidd.”
He must have looked worse than he thought.
Grey under borrowed hoodie. Neck wounds visible above the collar. Eyes too dark. Thin in the cheeks. His stage glamour gone, replaced by something stripped and predatory.
“Don’t come closer,” he said.
She stopped immediately.
That was why Shelley first.
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I know enough to stop.”
They stood ten feet apart in the courtyard. Marianne waited inside, unseen. Kidd could hear her faintly behind the door. He could also hear Shelley’s pulse.
Fast.
Frightened.
Controlled.
He dug one thumbnail into his injured palm.
“Are you on drugs?” Shelley asked.
He almost laughed.
“No.”
“Was it assault?”
“Yes.”
“Sexual?”
The question landed carefully, professionally, without flinch.
Kidd looked away.
“Yes. Not only. I don’t know. It started consensual. Then it wasn’t. Then something else happened.”
Shelley’s face changed, but she kept her voice steady.
“Okay.”
“One word doing heavy lifting.”
“Yes.”
“I was bitten.”
She did not dismiss it.
Another reason Shelley first.
“By Marianne?”
“Yes.”
“Is she inside?”
“Yes.”
Shelley looked towards the basement door.
“I want to hate her.”
“Reasonable.”
“Do you?”
Kidd took a long breath.
“Yes. No. Wrong question.”
“Understood.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No. But I’m trying not to pretend I do.”
That helped.
He looked at her.
“I’m dangerous now.”
“In what way?”
“I need blood.”
Shelley’s face tightened.
She had managed bands through overdose, psychosis, panic, assault, stalkers, visa arrests, one drummer with a poultry phobia, and three record-label collapses. Vampirism was new, but the structure of crisis was apparently transferable.
“Blood as metaphor,” she said, “or blood as medical supply?”
“Blood as blood.”
She absorbed it.
Her eyes went to his teeth.
He saw the moment she believed enough to become properly afraid.
Good.
Fear was information.
“I nearly attacked a housekeeper,” he said. “I didn’t. I ate raw meat in the hotel basement. I scared a kitchen porter. I ran here. Marianne has donor blood. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I can play. I don’t know if I can be near you.”
Shelley’s eyes filled.
She did not cry.
“Thank you for telling me.”
He laughed once.
“That’s your response?”
“For now. Later I will produce many forms.”
He closed his eyes.
“Tour manager to the end.”
“Former tour manager if needed. The label is already circling.”
“The tour?”
“Paused.”
“Cancelled?”
“Paused publicly. Internally, disaster ballet.”
“Money?”
“Bad.”
“Band?”
“Worse.”
“That bad?”
“Kidd, you disappeared, the singer realised he cares, Caz realised guilt makes him an arsehole, Finch has eaten nothing but crisps and fear, and I have spent eighteen hours explaining to men in suits that ‘medical emergency’ does not become less real because the bassist looks gothic.”
Despite everything, Kidd smiled.
Then it cracked.
“They left.”
Shelley’s face tightened.
“Yes.”
He waited for justification.
She did not offer it.
“We left,” she said. “I made the call. You were missing, not answering, hotel said do-not-disturb, no obvious emergency, venue pressure, money pressure. I made the call to move. I can explain every reason. It still means we left.”
The honesty hurt less than defence would have.
“I was dying.”
“I know that now.”
“I needed you.”
“I know.”
The space between them filled with all the kinds of love that logistics cannot carry fast enough.
Shelley wiped her face once, angry at the tear that escaped.
“What do you need now?”
Kidd looked back at the door.
Then at his hands.
“Time. Blood supply. No hospital unless controlled. No police narrative I can’t survive. The band not in my face all at once. My bass.”
Shelley nodded.
“Done, in principle. Difficult in practice.”
“Very you.”
“Can Finch see you?”
Kidd thought about Finch’s pulse, Finch’s open face, Finch crying and then pretending not to, Finch who counted in too fast when nervous.
“Across the courtyard. No touching.”
Shelley texted.
Finch came five minutes later.
He stopped at the gate and made a sound like someone had struck him.
Kidd held up one hand.
“No closer.”
Finch nodded hard, already crying.
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Like, antique shit.”
“Specific.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“So did I.”
“I’m sorry we left.”
Kidd looked away.
Finch continued, words tumbling.
“I said we should wait but then I didn’t, not properly, and Shelley was doing maths and Luka was being Luka and Caz was saying you’d done this before but not like that, not like he meant, but like people vanish sometimes, and I should have—”
“Finch.”
“What?”
“Breathe.”
“I am breathing.”
“You’re hyperventilating.”
Finch bent over, hands on knees.
“Right.”
Kidd smiled despite himself.
Hunger stirred at the movement.
He stepped back.
Finch saw.
Fear crossed his face.
Then he stepped back too.
Not running.
Making space.
Good.
They talked for seven minutes. About nothing useful at first. Broken hotel fridge. Antwerp police. Whether the raw steak incident would become band folklore. Then Finch said, “Can you still hear rhythm?”
Kidd looked at him.
“What?”
“If everything’s different. Can you still hear it?”
Kidd listened.
City hum. Distant traffic. River slap. Shelley’s controlled pulse near the gate. Finch’s nervous one. Marianne behind the door. His own strange low hunger beneath it all.
“Yes,” he said. “Too much.”
Finch nodded.
“Then you’re still in.”
Kidd did not know what to do with that.
Caz came next and ruined the tenderness almost immediately.
He stood by the gate in sunglasses at night because Caz had spent fifteen years refusing vulnerability through accessories.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“So I hear.”
“You scared the life out of everyone.”
“Working on a reversal.”
Caz’s mouth tightened.
“I said some things.”
“Yes?”
“Before we knew.”
“About drugs?”
“Yes.”
“About reliability?”
“Yes.”
“About me always making quiet look noble while judging everyone?”
Kidd had not known he remembered that until he said it.
Caz removed his sunglasses.
His eyes were red.
“That one I stand by, but with regret.”
Kidd laughed.
For one second, the courtyard felt almost like a dressing room.
Then Caz saw his teeth.
The laughter died.
He stepped back involuntarily.
Kidd’s face hardened.
Caz said, quickly, “Sorry.”
“No. That’s useful. Don’t pretend.”
Caz nodded.
“Right. I’m scared.”
“Good.”
“Are you going to keep saying that?”
“Apparently it’s catching.”
Caz looked past him towards the door.
“She in there?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to hate her?”
“No.”
“Do you want me not to?”
“No.”
“Useful.”
“Exactly.”
Caz put his sunglasses back on.
“To be clear, if there is a revenge errand later, I want appropriate notice.”
Kidd looked at him.
“That’s the nicest toxic thing you’ve said.”
“I contain growth.”
Luka came last.
Of course.
Not because he had been told last. Because he had waited at the gate, Kidd could hear him, pacing, smoking, rehearsing. Luka never entered a room without arranging himself first. Even now. Especially now.
When he finally stepped into the courtyard, he looked stripped of stage magic. No sunglasses. Hair unwashed. Makeup gone. Just Luka: too beautiful, too thin, too aware of being looked at and too frightened when not.
“Kidd,” he said.
Kidd stood by the courtyard wall, arms folded, hunger managed but alert.
“Luka.”
That was all.
Luka’s face crumpled for half a second. Then control returned.
“I thought you’d overdosed.”
“I know.”
“I thought you’d done something stupid and selfish and tragic.”
“I know.”
“I was angry.”
“I know.”
“I’m still angry.”
Kidd nodded.
“That’s allowed.”
Luka swallowed.
“Don’t be gracious. It’s unbearable.”
“I’m not gracious. I’m exhausted.”
“Good.”
They almost smiled.
Almost.
Luka looked at his neck.
Then away.
Then back, forcing himself to look properly.
“Who did this?”
Kidd glanced at the basement door.
“Marianne.”
Luka’s expression sharpened.
“The fan?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll kill her.”
The door opened behind Kidd.
Marianne stepped into the courtyard.
Everyone went still.
She had changed again. Black coat. Hair tied back. Face pale. No dramatic makeup. No seduction. No fan badge. Hands visible at her sides. She looked at Luka, then Shelley, Finch, Caz, and finally Kidd.
“No,” she said. “You won’t.”
Luka moved forward.
Kidd was between them before either understood he had crossed the space.
“Don’t.”
Luka stared at him.
Fear. Hurt. Fury.
“You’re protecting her?”
“I’m preventing a feeding incident.”
Marianne said, “And I am not asking protection.”
“Shut up,” Kidd and Luka said together.
Caz muttered, “Band’s back.”
Shelley shot him a look.
Marianne remained by the door.
“I harmed him,” she said. “I am responsible. I will give statement, money, supply contacts, whatever he asks that I can give. I will not pretend romance made it harmless. I will not pretend hunger made it unavoidable. I will not claim him.”
Luka laughed bitterly.
“How noble.”
“No,” Marianne said. “Late.”
That word landed.
Late.
Everything in the courtyard was late.
The band coming back. Marianne’s honesty. Kidd’s warning. Shelley’s caution. Luka’s grief. All of it late. Not useless. Late.
Kidd turned to Marianne.
“Tell them what I am.”
She looked at him.
“Are you sure?”
“No. Do it anyway.”
So she did.
Plainly.
Turned. Blood-dependent. Sun-sensitive. Newly made. Unstable hunger. Not dead, not safe, not lost. Needing training, supply, consent boundaries, and time. No sudden proximity. No open wounds. No enclosed spaces until control improved. No alcohol around him for now. No dramatic reunion hugs. No ordinary hospital unless someone in the network could brief staff.
Finch sat down halfway through.
On the ground.
Shelley took notes.
Caz whispered, “This is the worst album rollout imaginable.”
Luka said nothing.
Kidd watched them absorb the impossible.
Not all at once. Not cleanly. Belief came in ugly waves. Denial. Anger. Practical questions. Horror. Bad jokes. Silence.
Finally Luka looked at Kidd.
“Can you still play?”
Everyone turned on him.
Luka flinched.
“I don’t mean tour. I mean—Kidd, can you still play?”
Kidd looked at his bass inside the basement room.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to?”
That was the question.
Not can the tour be salvaged.
Not can the brand survive.
Not can they make a gothic miracle out of trauma and sell it as authenticity.
Do you want to?
Kidd looked at Marianne.
She held his gaze.
No glamour.
No claim.
No answer offered.
He looked at the band.
His band, perhaps. Not unchanged. Not forgiven. Not safe. But present.
“I want to know,” he said.
They brought the bass into the courtyard.
No amp at first.
Kidd sat on the low wall. Finch tapped a rhythm softly on his knees. Caz leaned against the gate, arms folded. Luka stood near Shelley, silent. Marianne stayed by the door, far enough away that Kidd could forget her pulse if he tried.
He put the strap over his shoulder.
The bass felt heavier than before.
Or he was weaker.
Both.
His left hand found the neck. Fingers on frets. Old calluses torn by new healing. Right hand over strings.
Open E.
Let ring.
The note moved through the courtyard.
Low.
Plain.
Alive.
Kidd closed his eyes.
For the first time since waking in room 417, his body made sense.
Not fully.
But enough.
He played the line from “Salt Bride.”
Slow.
Then again.
Finch joined, tapping the backbeat. Caz hummed the guitar part under his breath before noticing and stopping. Luka, after a long moment, sang one line so softly it barely existed:
“Love is the room where the red light dies.”
Kidd stopped.
Everyone froze.
Then he laughed.
The laugh broke and became something else. He bent over the bass, shaking, not from hunger now but grief. Finch cried openly. Luka covered his face. Caz looked at the sky as if negotiating with weather. Shelley wrote nothing.
Marianne remained still.
Kidd wiped his face with his sleeve.
“I can play,” he said.
Shelley nodded.
“Yes.”
“Not tour.”
“No.”
“Not yet.”
“No.”
“Maybe never like before.”
“No.”
He looked at Marianne.
“We need to talk.”
She nodded.
“Now?”
“After they go.”
Luka started to object.
Shelley stopped him with one look.
The band left reluctantly, messily, humanly. Finch wanted to hug him and did not. Caz offered a fist bump from too close, then backed up and saluted instead, embarrassed. Shelley gave him a written schedule: calls, safe check-ins, practical contacts, no pressure. Luka lingered last.
“I’m sorry we left,” he said.
Kidd looked at him.
“I know.”
“Is that forgiveness?”
“No.”
Luka nodded.
“Can it become?”
“Maybe.”
“Good.”
Kidd smiled faintly.
“Stop saying that.”
Luka almost laughed.
Then he left.
The courtyard emptied.
Only Kidd and Marianne remained, the bass across Kidd’s knees, the night damp around them, the door open behind her, warm yellow light spilling from the basement room.
For a while, they listened to the river.
Finally Kidd said, “I don’t know what reconciliation means here.”
Marianne folded her arms around herself.
“Nor do I.”
“It does not mean romance.”
“No.”
“It does not mean I forgive you.”
“No.”
“It does not mean you get to be my maker in some beautiful tragic way.”
Her face tightened.
“No.”
“It does not mean I don’t hate you.”
“I know.”
He looked at her.
“But I don’t only hate you.”
She closed her eyes.
That hurt her more.
Good. Not because he wanted pain from her. Because truth should land somewhere.
“You kept me alive after making me,” he said.
“Late.”
“Yes. Late.”
“I will spend a long time being late.”
“Probably.”
“What do you want from me?”
He looked down at the bass strings.
No one had asked him that cleanly enough.
“Facts. Supply. Training. Names. No lies that make you look better. No disappearing because guilt gets uncomfortable. No touching me unless I ask. No feeding from me. No turning anyone near me. No fan games. No making my loneliness into a religion.”
She nodded after each one.
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“What do I want?”
“Yes.”
She seemed afraid of the question.
Good.
“I want not to be alone with what I did,” she said. “That is selfish.”
“Yes.”
“I want to help you survive me.”
“That sounds better. Still selfish.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to know that when I listened to your music, it helped. Before I ever met you. That was real. I corrupted it, but I did not invent it.”
Kidd looked away.
That one was harder to hold.
After a moment, he said, “You owe me a bassline.”
She blinked.
“What?”
“In the bar, you said you listened underneath. Then you played ‘Basilica Mouth’ wrong. You owe me one correct bassline.”
For the first time, she looked properly confused.
“That is what you want?”
“For tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. Reconciliation is too big. Tonight is smaller.”
She nodded slowly.
“Tonight, then.”
He handed her the bass.
Not without fear.
Not without anger.
He placed it across the space between them like an instrument and a boundary at once.
Marianne took it with both hands.
Kidd showed her the line.
Fret by fret.
Slow.
“No. Behind the beat. Stop trying to make it pretty.”
“I am not.”
“You are. Again.”
She played.
Wrong.
Again.
Less wrong.
Again.
There.
The low line moved through the courtyard, uncertain but recognisable. Kidd corrected her hand position without touching her skin, using the end of a pencil. She accepted the indignity without comment.
By the fifth attempt, she found the pocket.
Not his pocket.
Hers, perhaps.
A small one.
Enough for a beginning.
Kidd leaned back against the wall.
“Better.”
Marianne let the note ring.
“Still wrong?”
“Yes.”
“But better.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him.
He looked back.
The night did not absolve them.
The hunger remained. The band remained broken. The tour was gone. Kidd’s old life had not returned and would not. Marianne’s guilt did not become clean because she had stayed. His loneliness did not vanish because witnesses had gathered around it.
But the bass note was still in the air.
Low.
Damaged.
Sustained.
Kidd took the instrument back.
Marianne stepped away before he had to ask.
Good.
He played the line once, correctly.
Then again, slower, leaving room under it for something new to enter later if it earned the right.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we make a list.”
“Of what?”
“Everything I need to know. Everyone you know who can help. Everyone dangerous. Everyone you hurt if you know their names.”
Marianne swallowed.
“Yes.”
“And then I call Shelley.”
“Yes.”
“And then maybe Luka.”
“Yes.”
“And then we find out if Gay9 can survive a bassist who drinks blood.”
Marianne almost smiled.
“That may improve the reviews.”
“Do not make vampire jokes yet.”
“Too soon?”
“Extremely.”
She nodded.
“Noted.”
Kidd looked towards the east. Dawn was still hours away, but he could feel its existence like a threat written beyond the horizon.
He stood, bass in hand.
“I need to sleep before sunrise.”
“The room is ready.”
“Door bolts from inside?”
“Yes.”
“You stay outside?”
“Yes.”
“No playing my bass while I sleep.”
“Yes.”
He walked past her into the basement room.
At the door, he stopped.
“Marianne.”
She turned.
“I am glad you were here when I woke.”
The words surprised them both.
He continued before they could become softer than intended.
“I hate that too.”
Her eyes shone.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No,” she said. “But I will stay long enough to learn what I am allowed to know.”
That was not forgiveness.
That was not love.
It was not enough.
It was, however, a note held carefully in the dark without resolving too early.
Kidd nodded once and closed the door.
Inside the sleeping room, he bolted it from his side, set the bass on the floor beside the mattress, and lay down with one hand resting on the body of the instrument.
Through the wall, he heard Marianne sit in the chair.
Not close.
Not gone.
His phone buzzed once.
Shelley:
We wait.
Kidd read it.
Then typed back:
I know.
He set the phone down.
In the dark before dawn, the hunger moved in him, still present, still dangerous, no longer the only rhythm.
Kidd counted himself under.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
This time, when sleep came, it had a bassline.
Afterword: The Bassist and the Fan
This story is not really about rock glamour. It is about what happens when loneliness becomes part of an economy.
Kidd is the bass player: the one who holds the band together, the low frequency beneath everyone else’s drama. He is useful, steady, overlooked, and exhausted. His tragedy is not only that Marianne drains him. It is that she recognises the existing wound before she opens the new one. He is already being consumed by the band, the tour, the audience, the industry, and the role of being the reliable one. Marianne simply makes the metaphor literal.
Marianne is not written as a simple predator, though she is certainly guilty. She is a fan, a survivor, and an abuser in the same body. She was once consumed by a similar scene: music, desire, access, hunger, and loneliness disguised as intimacy. When she finds Kidd, she repeats the structure that damaged her. That does not excuse her. It makes her more dangerous, because she understands enough to know better and still fails.
The hotel matters because hotels are places where private damage is temporarily hidden. Bands pass through them. Fans wait outside them. Staff clean up after them. People vanish into rooms and emerge changed, or not at all. Room 417 becomes a stage, sickroom, crime scene, and birthplace. Kidd wakes in the ruins of a night that began as escape and becomes survival.
The band’s abandonment is also complicated. Gay9 leaves Kidd because, from their point of view, he has vanished during a collapsing tour in a pattern they can explain through ordinary crisis: drugs, breakdown, irresponsibility, burnout. They are wrong, but not cartoonishly wrong. The reconciliation begins only when they return and accept that the story is larger than the version that made them comfortable.
The final meeting in the courtyard is deliberately not romantic closure. Kidd and Marianne do not become lovers. He does not forgive her. She does not earn absolution by feeling guilty. Their reconciliation is smaller and harder: boundaries, facts, blood supply, accountability, and the refusal to let either hunger or fandom write the next chapter alone.
The bassline becomes the story’s surviving pulse. Kidd may be changed, damaged, dangerous, and no longer able to live as he did before, but he can still play. That does not restore the old life. It proves that something remains underneath the loss. In a story full of glamour, teeth, stages, and ruined intimacy, the most honest thing left is a low note held in the dark without resolving too soon.