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We drove past the place where Lucas’s enormous hotel Rain had once stood, the place he had died. The place Morgan had almost killed me. A park was in its place, with a building that housed a memorial to all those who had died during the necromancer assault on the city.
Lucas stared at it as we went by, the trees adorned with lights and a fountain trickling in the middle.
The last time he’d been here, it had been a luxury hotel, and it had been on fire.
I had no way to imagine what was going through his mind right now.
“Whose idea was the park?” he asked quietly, after we were past it.
“Mine,” Desmond replied.
“Would have been a better investment to build a new hotel,” Lucas countered.
Desmond smiled softly at him. “No one wants to stay at a cursed hotel, buddy.”
“Everyone wants to stay at a cursed hotel, are you kidding me?” He glanced over at Desmond. “Did you fuck up the Columbia, too?”
“No, it’s still one of the top-rated hotels in the city, calm down.”
“Just want to make sure I left my empire in good hands.”
“I sold the Red Sox,” Desmond admitted.
“Yankees-loving traitor, I should have known.”
“I made sure they built a memorial beer porch at Fenway with your name on it, though, so you’re welcome.”
Lucas thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “I guess that’s good enough.”
“You two are fucking weirdos,” Secret declared.
The car pulled to a stop in front of her apartment before any of us could reply, and Dominick was able to secure a place out front, which made me believe he must have sold his soul to a demon at some point, because no one alive could find street parking here that easily on the first try.
A light shone from the lower window of the little yellow apartment building.
Secret stood in front of the place for a moment, taking it in. I had to wonder how often she made trips out here to visit Sutherland. Based on the way she was looking at the building, I had to assume it wasn’t all that often.
She made her way to the little gate that blocked the basement steps from the street and she stood on her tiptoes to move a brick from the steps up to the main floor apartment, where she removed a key.
“He forgets his all the time,” she explained. “We had to hide one outside.”
After letting herself into the entry door, she put the key back where she found it, then showed us in. There was a small foyer between the outside door and the one into the apartment, but the apartment door had been left unlocked, which I suspect she’d known it would be.
Secret knocked lightly before letting herself in. “Sutherland, it’s Secret, I’m coming in with some people, okay?”
Inside the apartment, a lamp had been left on, but there was no one sitting in the living room, and aside from the hum of the fridge in the tiny kitchen, the whole place was utterly silent.
It looked different from what I remembered. The walls were still painted a soft, buttery yellow, Secret’s favorite color, but it had definitely been redecorated to suit Sutherland’s more eclectic style.
The walls, which had once been sparsely adorned in paintings of sunflowers, had since been replaced with posters of movies that were only popular—if they were ever popular—in the mid-eighties. Big Trouble in Little China next to Dreamscape beside Romancing the Stone and Star Wars. Rather than having these framed, they’d just been stuck to the wall with Scotch tape.
Where a normal lazy teen might have stacks of dishes left around the place, Sutherland was at least a bit tidier. There were no glasses of dried blood on t
he coffee table, thankfully, but there were clothes draped over the back of the loveseat, and a stack of BluRay discs had been left next to the TV, which was on and showing a Netflix home screen.
Secret automatically started to pick up the dirty clothes, kicking a pair of sneakers back towards the front door.
“Sutherland,” she called out. “It’s Secret.”
