He’s got me hoping again, craving the taste of something I thought I’d gotten over.
Startled, my eyes pop open, and I look down at my chest incredulously. I thought we had an understanding, and yet here my heart goes beating a little faster, scrambling my butterflies until they’re a fluttering frenzy, and making me feel all light and buoyant.
I think I want these men.
Part of me would like to keep pretending that’s not true, but what’s the point?
It would be so easy to fall into this den and let them catch me.
Maybe, just this once, I could try.
Swept up in my thoughts, I’m caught off guard by the ding of the elevator. I follow Karen and Perth out into the hall and then slam into a hard back. I open my mouth to apologize, but I quickly register that both Perth and Karen have become tense statues in the hallway, and instantly an alarm starts blaring in my head.
“What is it?” Karen asks in a low tone. She must have stopped because Perth did, and her eyes scan the hallway as though she expects something to come charging down it at any moment.
“It smells wrong,” he mutters so quietly I’m not sure Karen can hear him.
But then she nods and the two of them exchange a look before slowly putting their bags and boxes on the ground and straightening.
I inhale and I’m shocked when I can smell what he’s talking about too. It’s not a particular aroma that gives it away, but a strange lack of odor that raises the hair on my arms. The hallway typically smells like wood polish and the powder they put on the carpets before they vacuum them. Since I’ve taken up residence, I can always catch a hint of Ruger, Ellery, Perth, and even Gannon lingering in the corridor, but now it’s all gone. The air smells stale, old, and wrong.
Karen turns back to me, her heavily lined eyes more serious than I’ve ever seen them. Expression tight, she whispers, “Stay here. I don’t want you going down the elevator in case it’s a trap to get you alone.”
Fear drapes over me like a spiderweb, and I shiver under its gauzy veil. I nod.
Karen moves her gaze over to Perth. “Stay with her,” she orders. Then, she pulls a crystal from an inside pocket on her vest. The thin purple stone glows, lighting her face eerily. That’s when I glance at the window and realize that the world outside has gotten darker. Storm clouds have rolled in and shadows are pouring across the rooftops, coating the town in dusky gray tones.
Fuck you, universe. This doesn’t need to be scarier.
Karen holds out a hand, and it takes me a full second to realize she’s waiting for me to hand her the key card. My heartbeat is thudding so loudly in my ears that it makes it hard to think. When I hand it to her, she turns and moves stealthily down the hall, crystal poised just like a human officer would point a gun.
Perth presses a hand to the small of my back and pulls me closer. Worry rushes through me like river rapids, and my heart shudders inside my chest. My fingers curl into my palms, clutching the bags in my hands tighter as Karen stalks closer to the unknown.
“Ellery’s on his way,” Perth reassures me in my mind.
But the mindspeak thing is still so new to me that I startle where I stand and then immediately curse myself, wondering if I made a noise or gave us away somehow.
Karen reaches my door and I hold my breath.
Fuck, is the key card sliding into the lock going to give her away? Is she in danger? My tension and fear ramp up, but right alongside them is a burning hot surge of anger. It’s something I never would have felt as a human, but the heat of it quickly overtakes the other more frigid, more fragile feelings.
On my next exhale, a low sound erupts from my lips, the shadow of a growl.
Perth wraps his arm around my shoulders just as Karen pushes the door open. She freezes, for a second, glancing around the opening, and then she disappears inside.
The seconds tick by with agonizing slowness. Perth and I seem to breathe in unison as we hold silent vigil, tense, waiting, ready for anything. Nightmare visions dance in my head as I wonder what the fuck could be lurking in my room.
“All clear,” Karen calls out.
I startle again before heaving a massive sigh of relief that I can feel all the way down to my kneecaps.
Thank fuck.
“This shit is too damn stressful,” I mindspeak.
“You’re telling me,” Perth replies.
“You can come in,” Karen’s voice instructs from inside my room. Perth bends and gathers up the abandoned boxes and garment bags and then leads the way. But he stops mid-step in the doorway.
This time I avoid crashing into him, and I lean to the side to try and see what’s going on.
“Shit, what is it?” I ask, when all I see is Karen running her crystal around the windows in the room.
Perth steps to the side and lets me pass, and I instantly know what the problem is. Just like the hallway, the entire room is absent of any fragrance. It’s like it’s all been erased somehow. Nothing has a smell to it. Not the couch, not the sheets, not the curtains billowing in front of a window that’s been left cracked open.
The only thing is, I haven’t opened the windows in this room. Not once. It’s been too cool outside for that.
“What the fuck?” I croak.
“Someone was definitely in here,” Karen states flatly.
“Someone with magic,” Perth adds. “If they’ve wiped the smell, they’ve probably wiped all other traces of themselves.”
When I glance over, he’s fuming, and somehow his outrage helps to settle mine.
Karen gives him a grim nod, and then her head jerks toward the open window. “Guessing that’s how they got in or how they left.”
And just like that, my safe haven is ripped away.
Stepping deeper into the room, I look around. My eyes land on the bench at the foot of the bed, on the spot where I know I left my pajamas. They’re not there. I scan the ground, looking to see if maybe they fell, but my gut is screaming that I won’t find them.
“They took my clothes,” I rasp, vacillating between the urge to throw open all the drawers and closet to check if anything else is missing, and the aversion to touching anything because now it’s fucking tainted.
Ellery comes rushing in and I squeal in surprise.
“Fucking shit!” I gasp, not sure if I’m cursing the surge of adrenaline that just shot through me or this whole fucked-up situation in general.
I take one look at Ellery and freeze. His eyes are zeroed right on me. His expression is tense, but it’s not because of the room.
“What happened?” I ask, his somber face and irate gaze making eight-legged fear crawl down my spine and leave a chill in its wake.
“I just got word from the station. Your car’s been found.”
21
NOAH