He was gone.
Pausing only long enough to pull on my dirty clothes and boots, I raced out into the hallway, unnerved by the silence of the empty floor. There was already something creepy about having an entire floor of the hotel to myself, the agents my only company. Yet as I looked around I realized that the usual contingent of agents was absent except for a single man standing at bored attention beside the elevator. I vaguely recognized him as I approached, but couldn’t remember if I’d ever heard his name mentioned.
These guys need to come with nametags or something.
His dark eyes narrowed at my approach, regarding me with professional disinterest.
“Have you seen Loki?” I asked, my hands trembling as I fought off the impending panic attack.
“Who?” asked the agent who I thought might have been called Jacobs or Jackson, frowning down at me.
“Loki. My cat.”
My anger flared when he began to smirk, the roll of his eyes letting me know just how much of a silly little girl he thought I was. Seeing the snarl curling my lip back from my teeth he schooled his expression back into one of professional detachment, but the derision remained clear.
“No, ma’am. I have not seen your cat.”
“What about the other agents? Where is everyone? Maybe someone saw something.”
“They’re in a strategy meeting.”
I thought it was an odd time for a meeting, but then again, I’d never had what you’d consider a real job, so what the hell did I know?
“Well, can you ask if anyone saw anything out of the ordinary?”
“Sorry, ma’am, I’m not permitted to leave my post.”
Riled by his refusal to be of any assistance, my hands clenched into fists, but I resisted the urge to acquaint them with his clean-shaven face.
“Thanks so much for your help,” I spat before I spun on my heel and stormed back to my room, slamming the door shut behind me with enough force to make it rattle in the door frame.
Making a beeline for my backpack, I upended it over the bed, searching through its contents for Holbrook’s business card.
“Come on, where the hell is it?” I muttered as I sifted through half empty tubes of chapstick, pens, sticks of gum that were hard as a rock, and a handful of crumpled tissues. A jolt of relief stabbed into my chest when my fingers closed around the bent card. Retrieving the phone from where I had dropped it on the floor, I punched in his cell number and waited, tapping my foot on the floor, as it rang. And rang. And rang.
Growling in frustration when his warm, drawling voice clicked on in the prerecorded message, I waited for him to finish saying “Please leave me a message.”
“Where the hell are you? Loki is missing and there’s no one around. I’m seriously losing my shit here. You guys are supposed to be protecting me so where the fuck is everyone? I…I have to go. I have to find him.”
My hand shook when I set the phone down in the cradle, resisting the urge to throw it across the room. “Well, I guess it’s just you and me, Wolfie.”
Stuffing one of the room keys into the back pocket of my jeans, I sucked in a deep breath, making sure that I could pick up Loki’s familiar essence. He smelled of warm sunshine and lush green things. The scent strengthened as I drew on the wolf’s energy, solidifying into an almost physical thread that I could wrap my fingers around and follow. Sure now that I had a firm grasp on his trail, I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.
Loki’s scent led me in the opposite direction of the elevators and the surly guard, towards the stairs.
Where the hell is he going? I wondered as I tracked him to the fire door leading into the stairwell.
I was nearly blind with panic, but still had the wherewithal to question how he’d gotten out of my room and why he would have gone to the stairwell. Driven forward by a visceral need to make sure that my best friend was safe, I hit the door at a jog, slamming my hands into the release bar and pushing it open. I stood on the landing long enough to be sure that his scent led downwards before propelling myself after him. My heartbeat thundered in my ears, drowning out the sound of my footsteps as I pounded down the concrete steps.
How did he even get in here?