The summer day had rolled in fast since he stepped into the hotel. Its stale air baked the stuffy upstairs, and Conner quickly worked up a sweat as he walked the room and tested the furniture. He slid the nightstand to one corner, dragged the dresser from the wall, and shoved the twin beds together at the room’s center, clearing 2A’s perimeter. One open palm stroked every surface—the walls, the electric fixtures, the dresser and nightstands. He moved both beds around to fully inspect the floor.

  Soft plaster and filthy carpet alike held firm beneath his fingers. He slit the carpet open with a boxcutter and peeled it back from the hard floor, looking for panels, hinges, but there was nothing to indicate secret passages under or between rooms.

  Like Emberly’s assailant had come from nowhere and returned there.

  “That makes no fucking sense,” Conner told the room.

  He switched from stroking the walls to knocking on them, first with his fist, and then with the butt of his shotgun. The plaster caved into valleys in some places. Elsewhere he beat dark holes into the walls, but no curious eyes peered from the blackness. Not even animal stares.

  Conner thought of serial killer houses, of plastic-wrapped skeletons hidden within wiring and insulation, their sockets glaring out through dust and time.

  There were disappearances, too, Emberly had said.

  Conner had no choice but to believe her. He had little knack for internet research and no patience for parsing through newspaper clippings. He worked best in the world of firm surfaces, vague scents, and an instinct for the right and wrong of a situation.

  Cranberry Cove could only distort his notions for so long before he cracked it apart.

  He left Room 2A and returned to the stairs, making a hurried climb to the third floor, and then the fourth, checking down their hallways for unlocked doors. Not one doorknob yielded to his touch. He expected the same elsewhere, and he wasn’t going to kill his back and thighs running up to the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors to find no entry.

  Cranberry Cove was shut up tight. There might be bodies hidden in these rooms, but without digging downstairs for keys, he had no way to know.

  And he doubted it mattered. Room 2A was the site of Duke’s attack and Emberly’s encounter. Even if Conner broke open one of these other rooms and found a secret passage to Room 2A, he should have been able to find the reverse route from within.

  He was humming again as he stormed back down to the second floor. The notes came forced through his lips in frustrated bursts. Likely the original song was not an angry one, but this was his rendition, the only kind he knew when he couldn’t remember the lyrics, the name, everything clinging to the edges of his mind in the same way an explanation for Cranberry Cove haunted the edges of reality.

  This place hid a mysterious intruder whose route seemed ghostlike and untraceable. It wasn’t right. Conner should have found something by now.

  “How’d you do it?” he muttered. “How do you get in and out, you bastard?”

  There had to be a method someone could tear apart or replicate. Something Kristof had missed, or a detail that Duke had lost in his traumatized confusion. Conner didn’t blame him. He used to remember picking savage fights in Penbrook Park, the giant teen boy thundering his fists into other teens’ faces and guts, leaving a trail of shiners, bloody noses, and cracked ribs. Only through counseling had he pieced together that these were moments of retaliation. That he hadn’t always been an adolescent giant, but a small creature with vengeance growing in his guts until it blossomed in later years.

  He was going to find vengeance now, stepping again into Room 2A, his shotgun ready for a figure to leap from the shadows. His humming turned shaky.

  Trauma only explained Duke’s experience. Conner was stronger than most, but he also trusted Emberly’s judgment. And his own eyes and ears. No one had come scuttling out of this room and into the second-floor hallway two days ago.

  If anyone had been here, they had another escape route.

  Conner paced along the walls again, digging his hands into the rotted insulation and unchewed wiring. These hands would flip the beds, tear away the dresser, unmake the bathroom. Somehow, in some way, Room 2A would give up its secrets. Conner would uncover the ladder to a Prohibition-era distillery, or the passages that turn-of-last-century innkeepers used to rob wealthy guests, or bits of body parts thrown down chutes in an ode to Chicago’s murder castle of old.

  No matter how ludicrous, Cranberry Cove would offer him a rational answer. It would tell him where to find the guy-thing who dared put hands on Emberly.

  Twelve: Sex Magic

  Emberly sank so deeply into her thoughts that she almost sipped the coffee before remembering not to trust the drink, not even from this harmless-looking older woman in her gray hair and giant robe.

  A robe which likely belonged to a man named Grant. Same with the gargantuan chair where Angelica sat.

  Emberly cleared her throat and forced herself to speak. “You called Grant a sorcerer?” she asked. “That’s an unusual word for someone. And you met him at Cranberry Cove?”

  “Only reason I remember it,” Angelica said. Her eyes misted with memory. “Though that night, I couldn’t have known he’d become my heart. Nobody ever plans these changes of self. One minute, you’re out to have a good time, not a long time, no thoughts for the future, only the spark of right now. Men are plentiful, you chew through them like bubblegum.”

  Emberly’s failed date flitted through her mind. She gave a stern nod.

  Angelica nodded back as her lips spread in a knowing smile. “But then there’ll be an evening, and a certain man, and you’ll feel the safety of his arms and decide you want this forever. It’ll burst like fireworks inside you. And you’ll never forget the place, the night, the moment. Even when it feels like no big deal at the time, if it matters later, the source is apt to stick. I get it, we women are supposed to be independent and the like these days, but honestly, sometimes it feels good to be rescued.”

  Emberly kissed the coffee mug’s lip and thought of Conner’s concern. Had he returned to the hotel today for Ricard, or did he mean to protect Emberly from whatever lurked in Cranberry Cove?

  Such a boy for a man in his age. Such a knight for a man of Ricard’s crew.

  “But you want to know about that evening,” Angelica went on, dragging Emberly’s attention back across the coffee table. “Cranberry Cove, 1976.”

  Emberly set down her mug. “I do. For the paper.”

  “Grant was never much for academia.” Angelica took another sip of coffee and set down her mug, too. “More about the application of his arts. He had a few years on me. I was a nubile thing, and the gray had kissed his temples already.” She smoothed her hair over one ear. “But he was a big, soft man, like a guardian bear, and he dabbled in every domain held dear by the Princes of Darkness. The leather, the domination.”

  “The occult magic,” Emberly said.

  “Sex magic.” Angelica laughed, big and open-mouthed, setting a candlelit gleam across her teeth. “Better than a vibrator, you know? Better than dreams.”

  Emberly glanced to her bag, where her phone again lay hidden beside her handgun. Should she pretend to take notes, or would that distract Angelica? More than anything, Emberly wanted to search Cranberry Cove sex magic.

  But a firsthand source sat across from her. Whatever rose-colored glasses Angelica wore concerning her visit to the hotel, she had no problem spilling her secrets. Best to let her do it.

  “Did anything interesting happen, with that sex magic?” Emberly asked, her tone conspiratorial. “Between us girls.”

  “I bet you’d like one of Grant’s books,” Angelica said. “This is what you really came for, isn’t it? Not academia. You’re looking to become a practitioner.”

  “Well, you know.” Emberly swallowed, hoping an echo of Angelica’s speech would endear her.

  “The old ways never truly die. They sometimes fall out of fashion, but we’re in a nostalgic time. Ancient devils, new gods.” Angelica grinned again. She might have been attractive in a different way in her youth, but there was still a handsome woman tucked within Grant’s robe. Maybe her lover had used his magic to help her age gracefully.

  “What was the sex magic like that night?” Emberly asked. “At Cranberry Cove.”

  “Well.” Angelic crossed her legs, and then she crossed her wrists over one bony knee. “That was an odd one. I’d heard of Grant playing with this intention before, with other lovers, but I never really got to see it myself. Rumors had wings in our little club. These magicians, especially invoking chaos work, they’re never entirely sure what’s real or not, or if they can make a thing real through belief. Never even sure what’s going to work, you know?”

  Emberly gave a slight nod. She had no idea what Angelica meant.

  And Angelica seemed to know it. She leaned from the enormous seat, her teeth once more gleaming. There was a primality to her features, to the room surrounding her. The cluttered edges hugged closer to her, a council formed of an elderly woman and the unsorted junk.

  Except it wasn’t junk. The symbols on the walls and papers, the unknown contents of the boxes—this house might overflow with the needed makings of Grant’s chaos magic.

  The candlelight flickered as Angelica spoke. “Sometimes it’s about how badly you want it. We don’t know our hearts as much as we think.” Her grin shoved at her sharp cheekbones. “We went upstairs, and Grant wanted to call a third into the hotel room. Someone who’d touch him while he touched me. The more, the merrier.”

  Emberly pursed her lips. She didn’t want to ask what kind of call Angelica meant. If the conversation died here, Emberly could invent her own ending to the story. That on the fateful night in Cranberry Cove, Grant had picked up the phone of whichever hotel room he and Angelica had holed up in and sent word downstairs to the Princes of Darkness convention that they would welcome one more into their bed. An eager third might have left the club and hurried upstairs to join the fun with Grant and his princess.

  But Emberly hadn’t heard Grant by the title of rotary dialer. She’d heard him by the title of summoner.

  “Grant called him a kind of homunculus,” Angelica said. “He was trying to make it make sense to me, and I’ll be first to admit, I could be kind of a ditz when it came to the magic side with the Princes of Darkness. I was in it more for the companionship.”

  “A homunculus,” Emberly said, and she forced out a tittering laugh. “I guess I’m a ditz about it, too. What does that mean?”

  “It was like a vessel of willpower and magic,” Angelica went on. “Those chaos sorcerers, they summon these things from—well, wherever they come from, you know? Beneath the world’s skin. But it was shaped like a man, with the parts you’d expect from most men.”

  Emberly could have introduced Angelica to men of a different sort, but she kept her lips pursed so hard they hurt.

  “And most importantly, he would do like you’d expect a man to do.” Angelica winked, and a shadow of decay crossed her face, as if she could only maintain flesh over her bones while Emberly sat fixed beneath twin blue eyes. “Spell-work is complicated, bits of wax and blood, intent and herbs. We spilled so much wax over that bed, but the hotel never charged us. Isn’t that funny?”

  Emberly flashed a wan smile.

  “Mixing magics is like mixing drugs,” Angelica said. “Never know what you’re going to get out of it. An academic would want to test every possibility into an unquestionable graph, but it’d be pointless. Besides, where’s the fun in that? Taking a wild thing like magic and taming it in a textbook. That’s what I mean when I say, Grant was about the practice. Intent is sacred.”

  Emberly knew that much. In magic, and in many things.

  “But there are constants, too,” Angelica went on. “For a summoning, you got to have darkness. We had to douse the light in part of the room to give our man a way in, let him tear through from the underside. You need mystery for these sorts of things, shadows where the world’s not so certain—how did Grant put it?” She snapped her fingers, her eyes brightening. “A liminality. Uncertainty and intent make the magic happen. And then the vessel can reach his fingers through the darkness and spread the world open, coming from his side to ours.”

  Angelica pressed open palms to either side of her, as if parting invisible curtains.

  Emberly’s fingers twitched for her bag, but she willed her hands to press down on her legs. Conner had somehow turned the electricity on at Cranberry Cove. If Angelica’s ramblings had anything to do with the hotel and the guy-thing, at least Conner would be safe so long as the lights kept out the shadows.

  Thirteen: Blink

  The ceiling light flickered over Room 2A, and Conner glanced to the window. Daylight had nudged through Cranberry Cove’s glass in a gray haze, but it would make little difference against the room’s dimness were the electricity to fail altogether.

  Conner needed to move faster. He couldn’t expect these lightbulbs to function for long. Unused as they might be, they were maybe a decade his senior. He wasn’t going to think about the unnatural preservation of this place, as if the dust were an agent of cursed immortality that let the hotel age but never die. His arm-pasted nicotine patch itched, but he didn’t want to rub it.

  More than anything, he wanted a cigar. Badly. Probably his hardest craving in ten months. One sweet-smoked puff through his lips would make everything better. He resumed humming to give his mouth something to do.

  The light flickered again. Conner marched toward the door and flipped the wall switch up and down, forcing a dance of yellow bulbs and sun-broken shadow. Nothing breached those flashes of darkness to climb from under the beds or to reach through the holes Conner had broken in the walls. He quit flipping the switch, and the lightbulbs burned steady through the bedroom.

  But not the bathroom. He had stepped in and out again, but he hadn’t left its light on. The bathroom hung black and untouched.

  Conner reached a hand around the corner and flipped the cold light switch.

  On—a cramped bathroom of crumbly tiles and a too-fresh shower curtain. Maybe a recent visitor had brought it here with plans to squat in abandoned Cranberry Cove, only to disappear down the hotel’s throat while midway through redecorating.

  Off—absolute blackness filled the doorway and swallowed the end of Conner’s arm.

  On—Room 2A’s bathroom again, ordinary and unimposing.

  The frazzled sound of dying electricity caught Conner’s ear. He leaned away from the bathroom and into the second-floor hall, keeping his shotgun hidden behind the doorframe from any fellow intruders who might have come fucking with the lights.

  A bulb had gone dark in the hallway ceiling between Room 2G and Room 2H. The far end of the second-floor hall now hid in shadows, carving a line across the ratty carpet as if opening a space between two worlds.

  “Em, you there?” Conner asked. “You’re under orders to keep away from here.”

  No answer.

  “Em? That you?” Conner switched off the shotgun’s safety and eased his finger toward the trigger guard. “Anybody else?”

  Still no answer. Conner’s ears twitched at the silence. The hotel’s stagnant air seemed to push out all sound, even the distance noises of town or natural airy ambience, as if the world beyond its walls had died since dawn.

  Conner started humming again, and then his lips moved to half-remembered lyrics. Yes, he knew this song, had nodded along to it when it thumped from his car radio this morning. “Somebody’s Watching Me.” Like a deep root in Conner’s mind meant to warn him about Cranberry Cove, and it was right to try.

  He eased back into Room 2A and watched the ceiling light again for a flicker, a blink, any chance it might look at him wrong. The bulbs burned pale and endless. He reached for his phone and texted Emberly again. She would want to know he was okay.

  But was he okay? He liked to think so, but there was no certainty in this miserable hotel.

  He tested the bathroom’s light one more time—it held steady—and then he marched inside and rammed his shotgun’s stock against the wall with a harsh crack.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Conner sang. Maybe his instinct sensed ghosts, maybe unwanted eyes.

  But either way, he had the feeling he wasn’t alone.

  Fourteen: Magic Man

  Emberly’s bag thrummed. Another text from Conner, she guessed, but she couldn’t check her phone now.

  She lifted her coffee mug and pretended again to sip. “If I’m understanding right,” she said. “The Princes of Darkness named you princess that night at Cranberry Cove. Which meant everyone wanted you, and Grant was special.”

  “Oh yeah, that night he was like a sorcerer king to the rest,” Angelica said.

  “You went upstairs to have a good time,” Emberly went on. “And Grant wanted to have a better time, so he started this—” She swallowed hard, needing the right word. “Grant summoned more company. So, why do you say you never really got to see it? The—” She almost said guy-thing, and the rest of her question floundered on her tongue.

  Angelica slipped in. “The sex magic vessel?” She let out a wistful sigh. “I would’ve loved to. Grant had fun plans in mind for himself, me, and our magic man. But Hob, or Bob, whichever he was—the one who wanted me? He somehow got the key to our room and muscled in on us. That man was such a jealous prick, you know? Wouldn’t have remembered him if it weren’t the night I met Grant, but yeah, the two of them started brawling right there in the room.”

  “Over you?” Emberly tapped her lips. “I don’t mean you wouldn’t be worth it, but it’s so—juvenile?”

  “It was absolutely juvenile!” Angelica cackled, and her grin returned. “And pathetic too. For all that commotion, Hob-Bob lost the fight.”

  Emberly forced herself to smile back. “But I don’t understand. Why didn’t you get to see Grant’s magic man?”

 

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