by Daniel Price
No . . .
She lay in a void of pure whiteness. The air chilled her to the bone. A brown-haired woman eclipsed Hannah’s view. She was a fearsome beauty with coal-black eyes and a fiendishly crooked grin. The actress struggled to move but she was held in place by something cold. Not ice but—
“No. No tempis. Get it off me. Please!”
Esis raised an alabaster hand. “Hush, child. You’re mended now. Sleep.”
Her palm flashed white, and Hannah disappeared into a dreamless oblivion. Once her brain rebooted, she found herself awake in strange quarters. Someplace beige. Someplace warm.
—
Bleary thoughts floated through her head like dandelion puffs as she registered her new surroundings. The room smelled like paint and was devoid of all furniture except her bed. A familiar mop of shaggy blond hair poked out from the covers next to her.
Hannah traced a fumbling path through her memory. All she could see were the hazy images of a very bad brunch. Now she was in bed with a sixteen-year-old boy who—God help her—she wasn’t above seducing.
“David?”
He rolled onto his back and blinked in sleepy half awareness. His eyes popped open and he launched to a sitting position.
“Hannah! You’re awake! Wow, that’s . . . Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you feeling?”
She held the blanket in front of her chest as if she were topless. “Confused. What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain, but let me get Amanda first.”
“Wait!”
He paused at the edge of the bed. As she studied the wrinkles in his T-shirt, she waded through a tangled patch of queries and stopped at the thorniest one.
“How mad is she?”
“Who? Amanda?”
“Yeah. You were there this morning. You saw the way I acted.”
David eyed her in dim, blinking stupor. “Okay. Huh. Well, the good news is that she isn’t mad at all.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“Not bad news. Just . . .” He checked his wristwatch. “You’ve been unconscious for twenty-two and a half hours. That whole thing happened yesterday.”
“What?”
“Let me get Amanda.”
Baffled, she traced a finger along her forehead bandage and removed the blood-soaked hand towel that rested against the back of her skull. Despite all evidence of injury, she felt perfectly fine.
David soon returned with Mia and Amanda. Hannah was stunned by her sister’s dismal appearance. She looked like she’d gained ten years and lost two more husbands.
Amanda wrapped Hannah in a tight embrace. “Oh thank God. I was so worried.”
“I’m okay. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right. It’s not your fault. How are you feeling? Are you in pain?”
“Not even a little.” Hannah glanced at her bloody towel. “What happened to me? Did I fall?”
Amanda’s expression grew cloudy and dark. Hannah saw David and Mia trade an anxious glance.
“Okay, someone needs to tell me what’s going on.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Amanda asked her.
“You sat on Zack’s lap. Then I got all bitchy at you. I said horrible things. I think I threw a glass at the floor.”
Hannah blanched at the sight of Amanda’s brow bandages. “Oh my God. Did I do that to you?”
“It’s not your fault. You were drugged.”
“Drugged? How?”
David filled her in on everything she missed—the spiked mimosas, the tempic hand, the rushed escape to Suite 1255.
Hannah listened quietly, staring down at the bedspread with increasing agitation. By the time he finished, her eyes were filled with wet, seething rage.
“He needs to die.”
“We’ll worry about Evan later,” Amanda insisted. She hugged Hannah again. “I’m just so glad you’re okay.”
She suddenly caught the scent of shampoo in Hannah’s hair, an odd smell for a woman who hadn’t showered since yesterday. She ran her fingers along the back of Hannah’s scalp.
“You checking my wound?”
“Yeah.”
“Must not be too bad if I can’t feel it.”
It bothered Amanda that she couldn’t feel it either. No broken skin. No scabs. Not even dried blood in her hair.
Hannah peeked into the empty living room. “Where’s Zack?”
“He’s in the other bedroom,” Mia replied. “He just had a long phone call with Evan.”
The news surprised David as much as Hannah. “He did? What did he say?”
“I don’t know. He just went straight to his room. I’m worried about him.”
“He’ll be all right,” Amanda said, unconvincingly. Still mystified by Hannah’s condition, she looked to David. “Did anything strange happen here last night?”
“Strange how?”
“I don’t know. Anything.”
He shrugged in drowsy detachment. “I slept like a stone. If anything happened, I missed it. Why?”
Amanda shook her head, dismissing the issue. For all she knew, accelerated healing was a new aspect of her sister’s weirdness. There were certainly worse problems to have.
As the fog slowly cleared from Hannah’s thoughts, she suddenly remembered her other recent drama. She looked into the living room again.
“Where’s Theo?”
—
Twenty-four hours after Amanda flexed her great tempic arm, the incident continued to plague the Piranda Five Towers. The property bustled with law enforcers and news reporters, plus an ever-increasing influx of fanatical Gotham-seekers.
Theo felt like a rock star in disguise as he crossed the crowded lobby. He lowered his baseball cap, adjusted his sunglasses, and cast his eyes down at his shopping bag.
Sometime during his food run, management had called in the cavalry. Security guards blocked the path to all stairs and elevators now, refusing entry to civilian nonresidents.
Unfortunately, the only key Theo possessed belonged to the hotel’s most infamous suite. He counted the cash in his pocket. He had $653, enough to rent a basic room.
He approached the reception desk. The small blond clerk studied Theo skeptically.
“No luggage, sir?”
“It’s in the car.”
She slitted her eyes at him. “If you’re only here to investigate the disturbance—”
“I’m not,” Theo insisted. “I swear it.”
The glass doors swung open to heavy-footed bustle. Theo anxiously studied the large cadre of men who’d just arrived. They wore the same navy blue windbreaker with a golden eagle logo on the breast. Giant yellow letters were stitched on the back.
DP-9.
Theo froze in place as the Deps moved his way. Four of them lugged tall metal towers on dollies—ominous black obelisks that could have come straight from the Death Star.
Ghost drills, Theo realized. Shit.
He took his new room key and joined the line at the security checkpoint, lowering his gaze as the agents brushed past him. His heart jumped when he noticed the lone female in the group—dark skinned, with finger-thick dreadlocks that sprouted from her head like fireworks. Though Theo could only glimpse her from a rear angle, he knew she was the woman he’d seen on lumivision last night, the one who’d filled him with a prophetic sense of familiarity, a préjà vu.
Now she passed close enough for him to hear her strong voice and exotic accent. His recognition was so powerful that he could practically taste her name. It rolled around his thoughts like childspeak. Missah Massah. Missah Massah.
Theo swallowed his panic as it became his turn to pass them. He pulled down the lip of his baseball cap and made a sharp left at the elevators, all the while battling his urge to p
eek at this woman, this Missah Massah. For all his strange new intimacy, he had yet to see her face.
It was extreme luck on Theo’s part that Melissa had yet to see his.
She sighed patiently into her handphone. “Sir, I understand your concerns, but if you limit our ghosting area, we’ll have a much more difficult . . . Yes, sir. I’ll hold.”
Howard Hairston watched her scowl. He was a young and freckly redhead, one of the few agents on the team who didn’t resent Melissa for her recently announced promotion. If anything, she’d make a better boss than Andy Cahill, who treated everyone under thirty like a high school intern.
“No luck with the judge?” he asked her.
She covered the phone. “No. He doesn’t want us scanning outside the crime scene.”
“Lovely. Why not make us wear blindfolds too?”
Melissa did a double take at the fast-moving Asian who slipped into the stairwell. She’d lived and breathed the fugitives for two weeks now, studying their ghosts from every angle. She knew their bodies, their postures, their gaits. That man moved a hell of a lot like Theo Maranan.
Can’t be, she thought. The fugitives should have been three states away by now. They certainly weren’t crazy enough to linger here at the crime scene. Were they?
She shelved the debate when the judge returned to the line. While Melissa continued her plea for a more expansive ghost warrant, she bandied Theo’s name in her thoughts. She never guessed for a moment that he was doing the same with her.
—
David barely had time to answer the coded knock at the door before Theo swept past him in a flushed and winded huff.
“We have to go.”
“Why? What did you see?”
“Exactly what you were afraid of.”
David closed the door. “Ghost drills. Marvelous. I knew it wouldn’t take forty-eight hours.”
“We can’t wait for Hannah to wake up. We’ll have to move her somehow.”
“Move me where?”
Theo nearly dropped his bag at the unexpected sight of Hannah. She looked so spry and healthy that for a moment he thought he was hallucinating.
“Hannah. Wow. You’re up. When did . . . ?”
She eyed him through a cool squint. For all her miraculous recovery, Theo could see that she had yet to forgive him.
“Yeah. I’m fine. Why are you freaking out? What did you see?”
“The Deps. They’re going to start ghosting any minute now. We can’t—”
A bedroom door creaked open. Zack stepped outside. His skin was pallid. His face was racked with grief. Now Hannah knew exactly why Mia was worried about him.
He offered her a feeble hint of his old smirk. “Hey. Welcome back.”
Hannah rushed toward him in gushing empathy. Amanda raised a palm. “Don’t hug him. He has broken ribs.”
She took his hands instead. “Oh God, Zack . . .”
“I appreciate the pity, but I’m all right.”
“It’s not pity, you schmuck. I know what you did. I know you tried to reason with that psycho.”
“Yeah, well, it didn’t work.”
“I didn’t think it would. But I love you for trying.”
Unnerved by Theo’s urgency, Mia looked to the door. “I really think we should go.”
They gathered their bags and masked themselves as best they could. While the men hid under hats and shades, the women fixed their hair in ways that were previously anathema to them. Hannah sported a ponytail for the first time since she played Sandy Olsson in a high school production of Grease.
The group split up into innocuous pairs and took three different routes to the parking structure. Hannah rode the service elevator with Zack. Even with painkillers, the cartoonist was in no condition to take the stairs.
He gazed at the doors through dark sunglasses, his face a dismal mask. Hannah caressed his wrist.
“He really did a number on you, didn’t he?”
Zack jerked a listless shrug. He wasn’t even remotely ready to talk about it.
Hannah rested her head on his shoulder. “We’re going to make it through this, Zack. All of them. The assholes in our lives will fall away one by one, and the six of us will find a nice quiet place to settle down.”
“You really believe that?”
Strangely enough, she did. Her new optimism surprised them both. Yesterday, she was a muddled wreck. Now her thoughts were clear and bright. If she’d known a concussion would do her so much good, she would have cracked her skull a long time ago.
Soon the Silvers reunited at the Royal Seeker. While Amanda drove a slow and careful path down the driveway, the others kept their wide eyes peeled for flashing lights. No one followed them.
The moment they crossed the front gate, they let out a collective exhale. Amanda peered back at the shrinking glass towers. This was the second time her tempis had brought the law down on them, the second time they’d been saved by luck and Theo Maranan. Though she wasn’t an augur like him, she couldn’t shake the inevitability of handcuffs in their future. Sooner or later, the Deps would find them. Their wrists seemed all but destined to carry the weight of silver bracelets.
TWENTY-FIVE
On a wet Thursday morning in a tiny lakeside village, Mia Farisi’s weirdness got a little bit weirder.
The sisters had gone to Main Street on a grocery errand, with the two youngest Silvers in tow. Once Hannah and Amanda disappeared inside a barn-size market, David and Mia explored the quaint surroundings. Nemeth was a rustic hamlet in the southeast corner of Ohio, home to 188 people. It graced the lip of a thousand-acre lake that teemed with striped bass and walleyes. Half the wooden shop-signs included some reference to bait or tackle.
Mia loved everything about Nemeth. In saner times, she’d dreamed of becoming a big-name author who retreated to the quiet country whenever she needed to finish her latest magnum opus. The fantasy included a posh lake cabin, two dogs, and a miraculously compliant husband who only appeared when she needed him.
She felt the edge of a high girlish cackle when David put his arm around her, even though she knew it was merely a gesture of purpose. Holding her under their shared umbrella, he led her to a two-story building that served as both post office and town hall. A sprawling twelve-month calendar graced the front window.
David counted the squares from Armageddon to now. “Wow. It’s been sixty-one days.”
“Which way are you surprised?”
“Feels like longer. Hell, it feels like a month since we came to Nemeth.”
Mia cringed at the scorn in his voice. The lake-house layover had been her idea. David wasn’t shy in voicing his opposition. In the four days since settling into their secluded retreat, he took numerous opportunities to remind everyone that Brooklyn was just 488 miles away. A one-day drive. A single battery charge.
“Look, when Zack gets better—”
“I know,” he replied. “I’m not angry.”
“You’re impatient.”
“I’m concerned. Let’s just leave it at that.”
He leaned in to study the dozens of handwritten notations on the calendar. “Huh. Look at all those birthdays. I bet this thing lists the birthday of every person in town.”
“That’s so sweet. See, this is why I love the country.”
“Yes, it’s all sweetness and light until they spot a minority in their midst.”
Mia batted his hand. “That’s not always true.”
“It is. I’ve seen it all over. Small towns create small mind-sets.”
“Yeah, isn’t it terrible the way they generalize?”
Her jibe evoked a laugh and an affectionate squeeze from David. Amidst the flurry in her thoughts, she felt a twinge of an impending portal.
She nervously glanced around. “Crap. Here we go again.”
A bright white bead materialized in front of her chest like a penlight. Fortunately, the rain obscured the floating breach from the few townsfolk straggling about.
David hunched forward and leered at the anomaly. “Wow. My father would have given an arm to study one of these.”
“I’d give an arm to stop getting them in public.”
“Are you receiving or sending?”
“It’s a delivery.”
After the incident in Ramona, in which she was caught off guard by a past portal, Mia kept a shoulder bag with her at all times. It contained her journal and an assortment of colored pads and pens. Hannah called it the Emergency Paradox Prevention Kit.
A rolled-up note slowly emerged from the breach. Mia cupped her hands to catch it, then experienced an unpleasant new twitch, as if a shady stranger had violated her personal space. Suddenly the note combusted in angry flames.
Mia blinked in bewilderment as smoldering black flakes snowed down on her palms.
“What . . . ? David, what just happened?”
“Not a clue. You ever see that before?”
“No.”
She wiped the ash from her hands, trying hard to shake the feeling of sabotage. “God. I hope the message wasn’t important.”
“Oh, I’m sure it was just a warning about me and my sweeping generalizations.”
Mia fought a grin. “I already knew about that.”
“Right. No big loss then.”
Amanda and Hannah emerged from the grocery store. They made a clumsy dash through the rain and loaded their shopping bags into the Seeker. David lost his humor and sighed with resignation.
“Guess we’re going home.”
—
Mia had found the lake house in a booklet of vacation rentals. The photos could have been ripped straight from her fantasies, from the cedar walls to the stone hearth fireplace to the windows and skylights and patios galore. Better yet, it was buffered by nature in every direction. The nearest human neighbor was half a mile away.