CHAPTER 19
Sydney
I ATE AND ATE, AND it was wonderful. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to so soon, but after a real night of good rest, my body seemed ready to start accepting what it needed. Hopper shared my giant breakfast, of course, and I was pleased to see he too looked a lot better.
I put on another of Adrian’s brightly colored shirt choices (teal this time) and debated going down to the casino to cheer him on. I knew he’d like seeing me out and about, but each time I thought about facing the crowd downstairs, something tensed within me. I longed to reenter the normal world, but I just wasn’t quite ready for some things. It was overwhelming enough to turn on the news and hear references to big events that had happened while I was in re-education. Journalists spoke about them like they were common knowledge to everyone—which they probably were, if you hadn’t just had four months of your life taken away.
I made catching up on the modern world my new goal, and after packing everything up, I settled on the couch with Hopper while I also pondered our next step. After this, we’d have to keep moving, and as much as I hated to admit it, our next task would have to be trading the Mustang for something less conspicuous. From there, we had to make the same choice that Moroi always made in strategizing how best to stay away from Strigoi: Go somewhere heavily populated or totally deserted? Each had its own pros and cons.
A knock at the door made me jump. Immediately, my eyes darted to the knob, verifying that the “Do Not Disturb” sign was gone. We’d hung it outside last night. I stayed frozen and waited to see if the knocker would recognize their error and go away. A few moments later, another knock came, this time with, “Housekeeping.” That sealed it. Room service would knock, despite the sign, if you’d placed an order, but hotel housekeeping almost never did. Nervously, I crept up to the chained door and dared a peek out the eyeglass. A young woman stood out there, smiling pleasantly and wearing a hotel uniform. She certainly looked innocuous, and I wondered if perhaps our sign had fallen down.
Just then, something in my peripheral vision caught my attention. A shadow off to her side—that didn’t belong to her. It shifted slightly, and I realized there was another person standing near her, out of the eyeglass’s site. Maybe more than one person. Quietly, I backed away and murmured the spell that turned Hopper into a statue before putting him into the shopping bag that held our clothes. I slung it and Ms. Terwilliger’s bag over my shoulder and began assessing my escape routes. The bedroom window wasn’t big enough to escape out of. The living room had a small glass sliding door that opened up to a Juliet balcony … on the third floor.
I stepped outside onto it and surveyed my options. There weren’t many. Our room overlooked the parking lot, and there was nothing on the ground to break my fall. Directly under my balcony was another, and I wondered if I was physically up to managing that climb. Six months ago, I would have said yes. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Before I could decide, a large black SUV pulled up, and two men in sunglasses got out, stationing themselves so that they could watch me. I could just barely make out an earpiece on one of them, and he looked like he was speaking softly.
It must have been to the group outside my room, because the knocking suddenly took on a much greater intensity. They also gave up on any pretenses of housekeeping: “Sydney, we know you’re in there. Don’t make this any harder than it is.” This was followed by the sound of a hotel keycard sliding in the lock, but when they tried to open the door, the chain caught it. I stepped back inside and saw an eye appear in the crack formed by the chain. “You have nowhere to go, Sydney.”
“Tell your guys outside they’re going to want to clear away from their car pretty quickly!” I yelled to her.
I stepped back to the balcony and took out one of the amulets Ms. Terwilliger had given me. With most of the work having gone into the amulet’s creation, it only required a small spell to activate. I spoke the words and hurled it toward the SUV, following up with a secondary air spell that propelled the amulet farther than I could on my own. Whether they realized the impending danger or had gotten a heads-up from their colleague, the men in sunglasses ran away, diving to the ground as the SUV exploded. I ducked as well, wincing at the heat and glad there was no one else out there who might have been injured.
Once the initial explosion passed, I wasted no time in getting up and climbing over the balcony’s edge. The bars and scrollwork in it provided lots of hand-and footholds, and I had no difficulty clinging to the outside. It was when I tried to climb down and swing myself onto my neighbor’s balcony that the results of four months of minimal physical activity showed. My upper body strength was nowhere near what it had been, and it suddenly became overwhelming to hang there, let alone swing myself onto the other balcony. I managed to climb down as far as I could, until my hands held the bottom parts of the balcony and my feet dangled only a few inches from the other one’s railing. Touching it would be easy if I dropped. Falling inside—instead of outside—would not be. The muscles in my arms screamed, and my grip started to slip.
“Sydney!”
I recognized Adrian’s voice but couldn’t see him. I could only tell that he was somewhere behind me, possibly near the SUV.
“Let go!” he yelled.
“I’ll fall,” I called back.
“No you won’t!”
I released my hold, and for half a heartbeat, there was nothing to stop me from falling to the ground. Then, an unseen force pushed me hard on the back, and I went tumbling over the balcony’s edge, landing ungracefully—but safely—in it. I was confused about what had saved me until I turned toward Adrian, where he stood in the parking lot a healthy distance from the burning SUV. The Alchemists in sunglasses were coming toward him, and he fixed his gaze on them, knocking them over with an invisible wall of power, just like he’d used on me. I winced at that kind of telekinetic work, knowing it took an incredible amount of spirit and that he couldn’t do it all day.
“Is the door open?” he called.
I tried it and nodded.
“Meet me at the place I forgot to go last night. Go!”
The Alchemists were starting to get to their feet, and he took off into the parking lot, running behind the flaming car. Sirens sounded in the distance, and gawkers were starting to come out. I hurried into the hotel room I’d landed outside of, relieved to see it was unoccupied. I cut through it and emerged into a second floor hallway and pondered my next move. Meet me at the place I forgot to go last night.
It made sense we wouldn’t go to the car. The Alchemists undoubtedly had that staked out. But where did he mean? A moment later, I knew. To one side, the hall led to an emergency exit. To the other, the stairs and elevator led down to the lobby and casino. I tried to think like an Alchemist and went with the stairs to the lobby. An obscure back exit would be monitored for sure.
Downstairs, on the main floor, I found chaos, which was just what I needed. Everyone had heard the car outside, but no one knew exactly what had happened. Some people were trying to evacuate, while others, hearing the fire was outside, wanted to stay in. Hotel security seemed to be waffling on what to do, though one guard finally decided it would be safe to let people out of an exit door on the side opposite the SUV fire. I quickly joined the people gathering there and tried to determine if there were any Alchemists to look out for. I’d have no idea who they were if they were in hotel uniforms or even regular clothes. My biggest clue that someone was safe was if they were pushing past me, far more concerned with themselves than me.
I’d nearly reached the door when I made eye contact with a man in a tropical-print shirt who was definitely more interested in me. He began pushing his way through to me, and I had the good fortune of a security guard standing nearby, overseeing the evacuation. “My room faces the SUV that blew up,” I told the guard. “And I saw that man there by it just before it happened!”
A claim like that might have normally been discounted, except that I think details of what had happened were still so fresh that me specifically mentioning the SUV lent credibility. Plus, the guard was young and had the eager look of someone who wanted to distinguish himself. He stepped past me, blocking the man in the Hawaiian shirt, who was only a couple people away now.
“Sir,” said the guard, “can I talk to you?”
The man, impatient and fixated on me, made the mistake of trying to get past the guard, who shoved him back and began calling for backup.
“Let go of me!” yelled the Alchemist. “I need to get through!”
“Sir, get down on the ground!”
I didn’t stick around to see what happened. I let them fight it out and finally slipped through the door. There, another well-meaning guard was trying to keep all the evacuees in an orderly group. I ignored him and immediately broke off from the others, trying to get my bearings. We’d actually come out near the front of the hotel, and across a busy boulevard, I could see the shopping center Adrian had been to last night. I began running toward it, wishing we were in a much busier city—like Las Vegas—where I’d have a crowd to lose myself in. As it was, I was pretty conspicuous, and I soon heard shouts. Glancing back, I saw two more people in sunglasses charging toward me. I was more exhausted from my earlier climb than I’d expected, and that type of physical exhaustion translated to difficulty with magic use.
I was nearing a crosswalk that would take me across to the shopping center, and I began to slow down. Frantically, I wondered what on earth they really expected to do. We were in public, in broad daylight. Did they think they could just grab me off the street? Yes, I realized, that’s exactly what they’d do, and they’d find a way to justify it later and write it off to any witnesses. They did it all the time with supernatural phenomena. How much harder could it be with a human abduction?
The light changed, and I sprinted across the street, moving as fast as my out-of-shape muscles would carry me. It wasn’t enough, though. The Alchemists were gaining. I reached the shopping complex’s parking lot and headed straight into the superstore my clothes had come from. Without looking back to see how close my pursuers were, I darted straight into an aisle of stationery and murmured the weak invisibility spell. I felt the magic settle around me, and then I hurried out into another aisle in case they’d seen my original destination. No one immediately came after me, and I took a roundabout way through some other aisles to finally circle back and get a vantage on the store’s entrance. One of the Alchemists was stationed at the door, and I had to assume the other was searching the store. With them actively looking and expecting to see me, the spell wouldn’t hold if we crossed paths. There was a much more powerful invisibility amulet in my bag, but I hated to waste it when I was so close to meeting up with Adrian. I either had to find another way out of here—without running into the roaming Alchemist—or distract the one by the door.