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The silence drew out for another few seconds, and then came a heavy thump and the sound of running steps.
“Open it,” Jem snapped.
Daisy stared at him.
“The key!”
She inserted her key into the card reader. The light flashed green. Tean reached for the handle, but Jem got there first, pressing into the room. He released Tean’s hand and reached into his pocket where, no doubt, he was carrying some of his weapons. Some things never changed.
“Hey,” Jem shouted, “stop right there—”
Then he ducked as something came flying across the room. A can of spray paint. It landed on the floor, and Jem rushed forward again.
“Go get security,” Tean said, pushing Daisy toward the elevators. Then he moved into the room after Jem.
As soon as he cleared the threshold, a mixture of foul smells reached him: paint, feces, urine, overheated body. It was a standard hotel room, with a king bed, a dresser, a TV, a desk. A sliding glass door led to a balcony. It looked out on a strip of grass and then dark water. The Lake of the Ozarks, maybe. Or the reservoir. Tean had gotten turned around, and he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He only had a moment to process the sight of the water—the saw-teeth of light rippling in the dark, his brain suggesting the reflection of hotel lights; farther and higher, a flash of red, probably an aircraft warning light on the other side. Then his attention narrowed to the woman crawling over the balcony railing.
She was tall, olive skinned, with dark hair and dramatic sideburns. He recognized her: this was the woman who’d been screaming as security hauled her bodily from the resort. Between her teeth, she was holding an envelope. For a moment, their eyes met, and Tean looked into a wild, unseeing energy that made him suspect this woman was mentally ill. Then she released the rail and dropped.
“Jesus Christ!” Jem shouted and sprinted toward the balcony.
Tean hesitated, taking in the rest of the room. The dresser and desk had clearly been rifled, with drawers hanging open and clothes and papers scattered across the floor. On the walls, spray-painted words read, LIAR and TELL US THE TRUTH and, the letters jagged with the same trembling energy Tean had seen in the woman’s eyes, BIRDS AREN’T REAL. The coverlet on the bed was darkly wet, and a heap of feces marked the center of the mattress.
“Son of a bitch,” Jem said as he poked his head back into the room. He made a face and put his hand under his nose. “She’s alive, in case you’re wondering. It’s not that far of a fall. She must be half gazelle because she bounded away.”
Tean nodded. Then he took out his phone and started recording. He took in the walls, then the dresser and desk, then the bed. Jem crossed to the bathroom. The door was open, and he stuck his head inside. When he pulled back, he gave a single shake.
Then Jem’s head came up, and he moved toward the door that led to the hall. As he passed Tean, he gave him a push that sent him toward the balcony, and he drew the paracord from around his neck.
“—magically unlocked by my magic,” a voice said in the hall.
The door swung open, and a blond man stepped into the room—big, muscular, wearing the same landscaping tee that Tean had seen when he’d sat next to him in the Santaland bar earlier. He hadn’t noticed Tean and Jem because he was turned back toward the hall, saying, “It wasn’t magically anything. It was open when we got here, which you’d know if you weren’t playing bait-and-tackle in a public hallway.”
The second man Tean remembered from the bar, the slender one with the bun of chestnut-colored hair, drifted into the room while hitching up his purple tights. “Oh, bait-and-tackle sounds amazing. I could be a simple, uh, carp, and you could be the rough-around-the-edges fisherman, and you’d have these callused hands because you’ve spent so much of your life alone and jerking off—”
“I have calluses because I work for a living, pansy-ass. Jesus fucking Christ. Not that you’d know—”
“And then one day the carp and the fisherman meet, and the carp doesn’t mind that the fisherman’s hands are gross and knobby and sometimes it feels like he’s using sandpaper to, um, twist—”
“Shaw,” the blond man said when he saw Tean and Jem.
“Well, you do a lot of twisting, which is fine, but sometimes the carp would like to be stroked—”
“Shaw!”
The slender man’s head came up, and he took them in. Then he beamed. “North, you’re not going to believe this, but you know how my magic magically unlocked the door?”
“Who the fuck are you?” the blond man—North—asked.
“Who the fuck are you?” Jem asked.
“I’m King fucking Kong,” North said. “What the fuck does it look like? Answer my fucking question.”
“Donkey Kong,” Jem said with an edge in his voice Tean hadn’t heard in a long time—and, if he wasn’t wrong, the hint of suppressed excitement. “I played that.”
“Why don’t we all calm down—” Tean began.
“That’s my psychic.” The slender man—Shaw—grabbed North’s arm. “The one I was telling you about. The one who connected me to the puppy even though it was long distance and there were all those extra charges. And it was worth it, North, because the puppy told me that if we would stop feeding him so much cheese, the evil spirit that makes him bark right in my ear when I’m trying to sleep after, um, meditating—”
