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Which was almost cruel, given how little time I got to spend in it.
The front hall opened into a huge open-concept loft, with floor-to-ceiling windows giving me a perfect view of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier in the background, a crown of mist encircling its peak. I’d seen apartments on other floors and knew this had once been several one-bedroom units that were converted into a single, giant space. There was a balcony that gave me uninterrupted glimpses of everything from the Space Needle to Puget Sound. It was the kind of place a millionaire would sell both kidneys for.
I got to sleep here about sixty nights a year.
The walls were painted a soft glacier blue meant to mimic the early light of morning, and the furniture and fixtures were clean and modern. Sido had decorated the place for me when I moved out of the temple, and I’d left most of it exactly as she’d set it up. The only thing I had changed was the art, which was all photographs I’d bought during my trips crisscrossing the country. Portraits, landscapes, postcards from one-stoplight towns. There was a little bit of everywhere I’d been displayed on the walls.
Hanging on one wall was a neon sign I’d bought for fifty dollars from a motel that had been undergoing renovations when I stayed there. They were going to throw the old sign out, and I couldn’t bear the idea of the thing just becoming garbage. I had an affinity for motels with the dumbest, kitschiest names. Which was how a blue-and-orange sign for Rest for the Wicked Inn had come to find a home on my living room wall.
It had been turned into a Motel 6.
Rain was falling steadily outside, turning the skyline a slate-gray color to match the water.
I climbed over the low back of my charcoal sofa in a daze and pulled a knit blanket onto myself. A small chirrup sound came from the folds of the soft material, and a little canine head with enormous ears popped out. Fenrir, my fennec familiar, squinted at me with bleary eyes. He yawned wide, showing off his needlelike teeth.
“Sorry, Sleeping Beauty, did I interrupt your hard work?”
He snuffed, then curled up in the crook of space behind my knees. Clearly napping was more important to him than making a big stink. I couldn’t blame him.
I stared at the coffeemaker on my counter, wondering what mattered more to me: caffeine or sleep. Neither was going to blot out everything I’d been through today, but a nap would help me ignore it awhile longer. Coffee would pull everything into laser focus, and I wasn’t sure I was prepared for that.
Alcohol would be great right about now, but it wasn’t even ten, way too early for me to be pouring myself a drink. I buried my face in the couch cushions and closed my eyes, focusing on the slight rise and fall of Fen’s little body.
All I could see was the girl lying dead and pale on the rocks. All I could feel was the throbbing in my head and ribs.
Growling, I tossed the blanket onto the floor, eliciting an angry yip from the fennec, who went to the other end of the couch and curled up on one of the throw cushions. Good to know one of us could still rest.
I stomped into the kitchen and poured some of the lukewarm coffee I had brewed but not been able to enjoy earlier into a mug from a place in Wisconsin called Diner n’ Hash. I think they’d been going for a cute play on dine and dash, but I really just bought it because I liked the cartoon biscuit on the front.
My stomach rumbled. I’d gone out to meet Stowe without eating first, which was a dangerous move in and of itself. I got a little grouchy when I didn’t eat, and that was probably putting it politely. I didn’t spend a lot of time around other people, but I imagined I wasn’t buckets of fun to socialize with when I had an empty tummy. Now that I’d been running around and fighting, I was extra hungry.
I didn’t bother checking the fridge. I’d only been home two days since a weeklong trip to Missouri, and going out to the store hadn’t been high on my list of priorities. There was a bag of moldy bagels on the counter, which I sneered at but made no move to toss in the garbage. Cereal was pointless without milk. I peeked into the cupboard at my knees and found a half-eaten bag of chili Doritos and dumped them into a mixing bowl.
Room temperature coffee and spicy chips.
The Tallulah Corentine diet.
I made my way back to the couch, prepared to watch at least three straight hours of whatever was marathoning on HBO before letting myself think about Prescott. Then I noticed the red light of my answering machine blinking at me.
I’d briefly tried to have voicemail, like people who live in the twenty-first century, but since I spent weeks away and often didn’t bother to check my messages from the road, I kept hitting my message limit. With an old-school machine I was able to store more calls for some reason.
Yes. I still use a landline. I also had a cell phone, of course, but I was supposed to keep it strictly for professional use. Not that that really happened. But the temple would often review my call logs, which they never bothered to do with my home line.
The physical machine also made it less likely for the temple to snoop on my calls, which they could do with voicemail a lot more easily.
I put my coffee cup down but held on to my chips, my stomach rumbling louder now, and padded over to the machine to see what calls I’d missed since leaving the house that morning. My gut churned, half-expecting one of them to be from Prescott himself having realized I was on to him.
“You have two new messages,” the machine informed me. Great.
“Tallulah?” The woman’s voice sounded unsure, as if it thought I might just be screening my calls. Smart person, whoever it was. A long pause was followed with, “Shit.” The recording ended there.
Um, okay. That definitely qualified as weird. Coupled with everything else, it gave me a nauseous, uneasy feeling in my belly.
The next message started to play, and the same voice said, “Tallulah, it’s Deedee.” My gut clenched. I hadn’t heard from Deedee in almost a year, and the panic in her tone told me she wasn’t reaching out to me to gossip about
old times. “Can you…um…” Another long pause. “I can’t leave this on your machine. I’ll call you back.”
Silence hung in the air once the message finished playing.
