He gave her a direct look. “You say you don’t know why you trust me, you just do? Well, I don’t know why I think it, but I believe it’s going to keep killing until we stop it. It may not be able to help itself. It may be the very nature of the thing, to kill… like a form of nourishment.”
Looking away from him, she stared through his dusty windshield, without seeming to see it. Then she exhaled again, nodding.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I agree.”
For a moment they just sat there.
Then, as if by silent agreement, they both opened their respective doors and left the car, Steve McQueen jumping out behind them.
Asia broke out in a huge smile when she saw the two of them.
Well, she seemed to see Dags first, even though he’d hung back, letting Phoenix walk ahead of him to the outdoor patio of the coffee shop. Dags had Steve McQueen on the leash now, and was relieved when the dog behaved well, walking between the tables without getting overly distracted by the smells of food and sweet drinks on either side.
Asia met his gaze and grinned, right before her eyes found Phoenix, who by then had already reached her table. Asia had staked out the coveted space in the patio’s corner, right next to the wall of planters that separated the patio from the main street.
“Are you all right?” Phoenix said, worry in her voice. “You weren’t answering your phone.”
“I’m fine,” Asia assured her. “We just ended up reshooting a scene. No phones.” Asia looked past her to Dags, smirking a little. “I see you’ve got the angel with you still. Can’t say that’s a big shock.” Pausing, she seemed to be trying to look past Dags, scanning faces in the crowd. “Did you see Karver on your way in?”
Phoenix gave Dags a bare glance.
“No,” she said, looking back at Asia. “He’s here? He’s out of the hospital?”
“He was… and he is. He had to run and meet someone. He just stopped by to check in and say hi. He said he was going to call you. Didn’t he call you?”
Phoenix pulled out her phone, staring down at it.
The screen was dark.
“I think it’s dead,” she admitted.
Shoving it into her back pocket, she sat down on the wooden bench next to Asia.
“Can you come home?” she said. “I’d feel better if you were with me and Dags.”
Asia’s smile widened. “Ah, it’s you and Dags now, is it?” She laughed when Phoenix swatted her arm. “Are you going back to the Malibu house?” Asia said next, frowning as if alarmed at the thought. “I don’t really want to go back there.”
“We thought a hotel,” Phoenix said. “The Roosevelt, maybe.”
Dags frowned.
They hadn’t discussed anything of the kind.
He’d mentioned a hotel. She hadn’t answered him.
Still, a hotel made a certain kind of sense.
When he glanced at Asia, he saw her looking at him knowingly.
“Ah,” she said only. “I see.” Smiling a little mischievously, she said, “So you two are, like… what? Business partners now? Dual detectives?”
Dags looked at Phoenix.
Phoenix looked at him.
After a silence, where neither of them changed expression, Asia burst out in a laugh.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, that knowing look again verging on a smirk.
Chapter 23
The Roosevelt
Dags walked into the suite first, looking around the open space, glancing at the bottle of champagne sitting in an ice bucket next to a giant bouquet of flowers and an only slightly-smaller basket of fresh fruit.
He felt like he’d just walked onto a movie set.
He felt it even more keenly than he had at the studio, a few hours earlier.
Phoenix walked in behind him with Asia, holding her friend lightly around the waist.
They both looked nervous, Asia even more than Phoenix.
Phoenix seemed to see some of that on his face.
“She’ll be okay,” she said, her voice a warning.
He nodded, but continued to study Asia’s aura, his lips in a harder frown.
“Give me a minute,” he said. “Keep her by the door.”
Steve McQueen walked past the two of them, his black nose in the air as he checked out the smells in the two-story suite with the modern glass bauble chandeliers and the animal-skin rugs scattered around the hardwood floors.
Dags made a hand-motion to the dog, unthinking.
“Steve McQueen… stay,” he said. “Guard them. Okay? Guard them while I’m gone.”
Steve McQueen seemed to understand.
Walking back to where Phoenix stood with Asia, he sat down on his haunches on a rug that looked like real cow skin, white with black spots. Steve McQueen looked at Dags expectantly, ears perked, like he was already waiting for him to get back.
Dags grunted.
Walking away from the three of them, he crossed down the length of the hotel room, taking in the décor and the placement of furniture along with the layout. He glanced up at the vaulted ceilings, eyes scanning the row of windows behind a long, orange leather, minimalist couch, a black lounge chair, and another couch, that one made of brown leather but roughly the same minimalist style.
Reaching the end of the room, he climbed the stairs to the second floor, finding a bedroom with a king-sized bed, white sheets and another of those round glass chandeliers.
That room was empty.
The large, green-tiled bathroom was empty.
He explored all of it, and found the door out to the roof.
When he walked back downstairs, Phoenix had already brought Asia to the couch, and the actress was curled up there, her head on a faux-fur white pillow that reminded Dags of the blanket Asia had been curled up in the night before.
Phoenix was looking through one of the long windows.
Her phone was plugged into a charger on the glass coffee table.
“I told you to wait by the door,” he said, his voice holding a hint of accusation.
Phoenix craned her head, looking up at him. “What are you expecting to find? That thing… I don’t think you could see it, if it was here. Do you?”
Dags thought about that.
“I was looking for people,” he said. “I’m assuming it’s in someone else now.”
She winced. He saw her jaw tighten, a kind of frustrated determination in her eyes, like she wasn’t going to let this get to her. Dags was about to speak, tell her it was okay if she was struggling with all of this, when her phone buzzed on the glass table.
It must have charged enough for the messages to come through.
Phoenix glanced at it and frowned.
“Karver?” Dags said.
She leaned over the glass table, reaching for the phone, the fingers of her other hand still stroking Asia’s long hair.
“Yes,” she said, sighing a little. “I meant to call him⏤”
“Don’t,” Dags said, warning. “Please.”
She stared at the phone, blinked, then looked up at Dags. “Why not?”
“It’s better if he doesn’t know where you are,” Dags said. “In fact, we should probably take the battery out of your phone. At least until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“What?” Asia spoke that time, looking up from where her head rested half on the furry pillow and half on Phoenix’s lap. “Why?”
Dags looked between their faces.
“Last night,” he growled, seeing the puzzlement there. “We don’t know if that thing can hop into any of us. But we do know it can hop into Karver. Do you really think it’s a good idea, telling him where we are? At least until we’ve figured out how that thing moves around?”
Phoenix winced again at his words.
Again, he saw the part of her that was trying to reconcile this with her previous views of reality and how things worked. Watching her chew through everything he said, then gradually accept the logic of his words, he realized h
e was impressed.
She was dealing with weird a lot better than he had, when he first went through the Change. He more or less spent the first three months of that drunk. Eventually, he was forced to stop, given how badly his new Change powers mixed with alcohol.
Kind of like how badly they mixed with guns.
Grimacing, he motioned with his head towards the stairs.
“They said there’s a rooftop patio,” he said. “I’m going up there.”
Phoenix nodded.
He watched as she picked up her phone. She flipped it over while he watched, prying off the back. He watched her take out the battery and set it on the glass table.
“Asia’s, too,” Dags said, heading back up the stairs. “I’ll be back soon.”
“What about your phone, Angel-guy?” Asia asked from Phoenix’s lap.
Her voice sounded sleepy now.
Hesitating at her question, he realized it was fair.
Pulling his own phone out of his pocket, he tossed it to Phoenix, unthinking.
He probably should have said something, warned her it was coming, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter. She caught it, mid-air, like it was the simplest thing in the world. Turning it over, she started prying off the black metal backing.
Dags quirked an eyebrow, but didn’t comment.
Pushing it out of his mind, he went back to exploring the suite, making sure he saw all of it this time, including the roof patio under the famous neon sign on top of the hotel.
He’d figure out the puzzle of Phoenix X some other time.
When Dags descended back from the roof, which was also empty, apart from some white-fabric sun chairs, a white couch, and several sun shades, tropical plants, and small tables, he found Phoenix in the suite’s kitchen.
By now, Dags had explored every inch of the suite.
He was pretty sure it was larger than his entire apartment.
That even included the hidden spaces behind the walls in Dags’ place.
“Where’s Asia?” he asked, glancing past Phoenix towards the orange leather couch.
The couch was empty now.
What looked like a real zebra skin lay on the hardwood floor below it, a little rumpled under the glass coffee table, which now held three cell phones, all of them with their batteries removed.
“People can still track phones, even without the batteries, you know,” Phoenix remarked, pulling one of the complimentary bottles of wine off the counter and reading the label on front. A faint frown hovered on her lips and in her brows, like she was trying to decide if the winemaker and year made it worth opening.
She must have decided it was.
She opened drawers, rifling through until she found a corkscrew opener.
“Where’s Asia?” Dags said again.
“I put her in one of the beds,” Phoenix said, smiling triumphantly when she found the corkscrew. “She needs to sleep. We all do, but she actually can sleep. Unlike me.”
Dags frowned, leaning a hand on the counter.
He watched her open the bottle of wine, which was something red.
He hadn’t been much of a wine connoisseur, even back when he drank.
“Can you keep an eye on her?” he said, watching her set down the open bottle, opening cabinets until she found a wine glass.
She stopped what she was doing, turning.
“Where are you going?” She sounded alarmed. “Don’t go anywhere, Dags. You promised. You said you’d stay with me… with us. Until we knew⏤”
He held up a calming hand.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he assured her. “But I was going to try something.” Gazing out one of the tall, arched windows, he frowned. “Sometimes it works.”
There was a silence.
Phoenix laughed.
“Well, that was… cryptic.”
He looked at her, fighting discomfort as he met her gaze.
“It’s kind of like meditation,” he explained. Fighting an uncomfortable realization that he’d already told her more about his “condition” than he had anyone, even his closest friends, he cleared his throat. “…I thought I’d go to the roof. Out of your way.”
“Shouldn’t someone keep an eye on you?” she said. “While you do it?”
He stared at her.
“No,” he said, blunt.
“Why not?”
He frowned, confused by this, and not sure how to answer. “You should stay down here. Keep an eye on Asia. Make sure she’s okay.”
“She’s asleep,” Phoenix said, exasperated. “Why wouldn’t she be okay? And the dog is sleeping with her. I’d rather go with you.”
“To the roof?” he said, still frowning.
“Yes. To the roof.”
Turning her back on him, she put one of the two wine glasses she’d pulled out back into the cupboard. Then, grabbing the bottle of wine by the neck and the wine glass in her other hand, she motioned for Dags to go, making it clear she fully intended to follow.
Dags just stood there for a few seconds, ignoring her urging.
Then, seeing the determined look on her face, he gave in.
That seemed to be happening a lot with the two of them, he realized.
The thought was both uncomfortable and strangely, inexplicably familiar.
Chapter 24
The Vision
Dags had never done this in front of another person.
Never.
But then, today had been a day of a lot of firsts.
He’d more or less admitted some element of his “strangeness,” and to someone he barely knew. He’d taken that same someone to his apartment⏤willingly. He’d brought her with him while he went out investigating. He adopted a dog.
Now this.
The vision thing, he’d always done alone.
He usually did it at home, on the tile floor of his apartment.
It had never occurred to him to even tell anyone else about it, much less to do it right in front of them. He found himself watching surreptitiously as the apparently-famous movie star stretched out on a sun lounger not far from where he sat.
Setting her bottle and glass down on a small round table next to her lounger, which came with its own dark-blue sun shade, she picked the bottle back up long enough to pour herself half a glass of the dark red wine, then re-cork the bottle.
Picking up the glass, she nodded to him, adjusting her back on the lounger.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I won’t bug you.”
Dags felt his teeth clench.
Just her being here “bugged” him, but probably not in the way she meant.
He’d already dragged a rug from the bedroom and one of the throw pillows to an empty segment of the cement roof, under one of the dark-blue shades.
It was easier sitting on the floor.
He didn’t know why. He also didn’t much care.
Sitting down cross-legged on the cushion, he exhaled, shoving aside how odd this felt, doing this in front of her, trying his damnedest not to feel self-conscious about it.
Forcing his mind as blank as he could…
He closed his eyes.
It still surprised him, how it happened.
How fast it happened.
He normally sat for a few seconds, settling himself, preparing himself in some vague, semi-conscious way before he let himself go there. He didn’t really do that this time, probably because Phoenix was making him nervous.
That, or maybe he was just wrung out, had barely slept, and felt like he’d been running on adrenaline for almost twenty-four hours.
He closed his eyes.
He placed the barest push of intention on what he wanted. It was the lightest of shoves, a bare whisper of what he did with the blue-green light to help himself in the physical world.
This was more like relaxing that fist in his mind the tiniest bit, then sending out a bare breath of intention where he wanted it to go.
He shot straight up, like a rocket.
Not his body
.
Well… not his physical body.
It felt like being yanked up through his body and out through the crown of his head. He rode a narrow line of light up to the sky, moving so fast he couldn’t see anything around him as he made the transition.
The landscape, the sky, the view, all blurred.
The sheer speed of it still surprised him, even now, after years of doing it. There was even a quasi-physiological element to that surprise, like how his body and gut reacted to that first hill on a really big roller coaster. It definitely felt more like a rollercoaster than some gentle, floaty sensation he’d heard a lot of people describe in the few mediation classes he’d dragged himself to since the Change happened.
He’d gone looking for answers, and left feeling even more like an alien.
Most of what they described didn’t resemble Dags’ experiences at all.
What he experienced was closer to bungee-jumping, only in reverse.
All of that ran through his mind as he was shooting straight up, leaving his body so fast he lagged a few beats on adjusting to the lack of air, the lack of breathing and heart beat and just general aliveness.
He was in that other place.
It never looked the same.
Dags had no idea who painted the pictures that appeared on that canvas, if it was something his own mind did, to translate information came to him via some subconscious part of his psyche, or if the images came from somewhere else… or something else.
Or hell, someone else.
All he knew was, every time, it was different.
This time, he floated in a deep blue sky.
It was daylight, and clear, like the sky he’d been looking at from below, from the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel. Now it felt more like looking at that sky from within it, or maybe above it. He slid through clouds⏤or maybe they slid through him. He rose higher, until he was hovering over Hollywood itself.
He found himself looking down at the Hollywood sign.
He tried to look back, at the Roosevelt Hotel, at Phoenix siting there, drinking wine from a thin-stemmed glass, legs crossed on the sun lounger while Dags’ body sat cross-legged on the roof… but all of that was already too far away.
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