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“She’s too—” The word Tean wanted to use was dangerous, so he said, instead, “—tired. I’ll just knock on the door and tell her how to get it running.”
Jem didn’t sigh. He didn’t frown. He nodded, squeezed Tean’s shoulders in that one-armed hug, and hit the button to send them up again.
When they got to their room, Tean knocked.
No one answered.
He tried again, and, after another moment, he used his keycard. When he opened the door an inch, the steady hiss of the shower filtered out to him. He caught a hint of the hotel soap.
“Sounds like she figured it out,” Jem said. “Come on.”
“Missy?” Tean called into the room. “It’s Tean. Did you figure out the hot water?”
“I know you want to make sure she’s ok,” Jem said, “but she needs some time alone.”
The air shifted, and the smell of the lake came in. Tean frowned and nudged the door open another inch. “Missy? Jem, the slider’s open.”
“So?”
“So maybe she—” He didn’t want to finish that sentence either. He leaned into the door, ignoring the way Jem hooked a belt loop. “Missy? Hey, it’s Tean. Can you hear me? Jem!”
Missy’s suitcases lay on the floor, overturned. Clothes and personal items—a hair dryer, a lone Chuck high-top, a mesh bag, the kind you wash delicates in. On the other side of the room, the curtains drifted on currents of hot, swampy air seeping into the room.
“Maybe it felt good,” Jem said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Maybe she wanted to throw things around. Maybe she wanted fresh air after all those days in a cell.”
“Missy?”
Tean advanced into the room. His imagination went to work, delivering possible scenarios: Missy opening the door, totally naked, and Tean having to resign from his job and never work in any veterinary fields again, and possibly move to one of those islands where they used to send rebellious monks. But another scenario: Missy on the floor. A stroke. Or she slipped and fell.
“Hello,” Tean called again. “Missy, we’re worried about you. Can you please say something?”
Jem’s hand tightened around Tean’s arm, fingers biting into his flesh. He stopped Tean. Then he shouldered past him and gave Tean a push toward the hall.
“What—” Tean began.
But Jem already had the paracord in one hand, the dark metal of the hex nut swinging at the end of the loop. He reached the bathroom door. The only sound was the spray. Then, after some internal decision, he threw the door open.
The first thing Tean noticed was that the shower curtain needed to be replaced. There were holes in it. Then he noticed the shadow bunched up along the side of the tub. Then the arm and hand that protruded from under the curtain and lay on the tile.
Jem cleared the room, checking corners as he talked. “Get an ambulance, hotel security, the police—”
But Tean had already pushed past him. The curtain rattled back under his touch. Missy lay on her side in the tub, naked, the cold spray needling her face. She had been shot twice.
25
“You need to leave,” Emery said. “We’ll handle this.”
It wasn’t a war council; that sounded too much like The Chronicles of Narnia, which Jem was plodding through (between volumes ofGoosebumps). Still, the air in Emery and John-Henry’s hotel room had a charge—an energy that Jem couldn’t dismiss. The others felt it too: Theo with an arm around Auggie, who pressed into him; the unfamiliar gravity drawing down the lines of Shaw’s face, and the darker mirror in North’s expression; John-Henry’s guy-next-door smile was gone; Emery was a thundercloud. Tean, though, was a tempest of emotions that wouldn’t settle, making it impossible for Jem to get a read. Every time he thought he had it—grief—those psychic winds would pick up again, and the turmoil in Tean’s features erased Jem’s certainty.
Jem checked the part in his hair; the gesture was automatic, reassuring. “They were trying to kill me.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” John-Henry said.
That was putting it mildly. Chief Cassidy had been...well, enraged came close. And that anger had found its outlet in Jem and Tean. Hours of waiting. Hours of questioning. And now this, here. The midnight hours, with this midnight council, in a borrowed room. The curtains over the sliding door were drawn back, and on the other side of the glass, the shape of the reservoir was the rumpled irregularity of the mouth of a sack being cinched. Stars filled up the water until it looked miles deep, and the distant red of the aircraft warning light was like a signal from another world. It all sounded dramatic, a detached part of Jem observed. But also, somehow, right.
“Those pieces of shit broke into our hotel room and tried to kill me. Us.” Jem glanced over; for a moment, fury blazed in Tean’s expression, and then storm winds carried it away. “They wanted to kill both of us. Somehow they knew we were going up to our room. Somehow those fuckers knew.”
“Rod said they had people in the resort,” Tean said. The words were neutral, with a drained-battery quality. “Rod said this—this group, whoever they are, he said they’re paying people to watch us.”
