Chapter 39
Tean kept a tight grip on the children’s hands—Milo on his right, Maeve on his left.
Milo, it turned out, was a wanderer; they’d barely walked a hundred yards after leaving the theater when Milo had disappeared.
He’d spotted a trophy case and gone to investigate, which was understandable enough.
He was a kid. And he was obviously curious.
When Maeve made a break for a fire exit, on the other hand, it was less understandable.
Years of babysitting nieces and nephews, including Glade with his incipient pyromania, had given Tean a kind of sixth sense.
Which meant he caught Maeve before she managed to reach the push bar and set off the alarm.
And he doubled back to Milo just in time to stop him from climbing on a bookcase so that he could get a better look at the antlers mounted overhead.
After that, they held hands as they walked, in spite of Milo’s tugging and Maeve’s dragging her feet, and her sprinting ahead, and her calculated stumbles.
If Tean had held any doubts about the two of them being related to Jem, they’d evaporated by the time they were approaching River’s room on the second floor of the lodge.
“Why are we here?” Milo asked.
Tean released his hand long enough to knock, then caught Milo’s sleeve before the boy could slip away to inspect a fire alarm pull station. “Because I need to talk to this woman.”
“This is stupid,” Maeve said. “I wish we were back with Brigitte.”
“Yeah,” Milo said, “I wish we were back with Brigitte.”
Tean knew—he knew—from years of babysitting that arguing with children was only going to make things worse. But he couldn’t help saying, “Then maybe you shouldn’t have threatened to run away again.”
Movement on the other side of the door drew his attention. Then River asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s Teancum Leon.”
He didn’t add, As you can obviously see through the peephole. But that voice in his head did sound quite a bit like Jem.
“And?” River asked.
“And two children who aren’t trying to harm you. This is Maeve, and this is Milo.”
The hallway hummed with the lodge’s ever-present background noise.
Then the swing bar rattled, and the deadbolt thumped, and the door swung open.
Bloodshot eyes. Full-body tension. Nervous glances left and right, as though someone else might have accompanied Tean and was trying to catch her off guard.
It had only been a day since Tean had seen River Jordan, but she looked ten years older and on the brink of a breakdown.
She retreated into the room, and Tean had to catch the door with his foot and usher the kids ahead of him.
The door thunked shut behind him as they moved further into the room.
While it had the standard hotel room layout, it was clearly at the lower end of the lodge’s price range.
There was no luggage. A few cosmetics were laid out on the bathroom counter, and the air was stale and smelled like damp towels and the lodge’s soap.
The only feature to set this room apart from any other mid-range hotel was the view.
Darkness hid the mountains and the pistes, but the window gave a view of the pool and one of the observation decks.
Transparent bubbles of light dotted the deck—Tean had read about them before they came up here.
They were called alpenglobes, and they were plastic shells with soft seating and tables and portable heaters; you could rent them for a meal or by the hour and enjoy sitting “outside” even on the coldest winter day or night.
River sat on the bed and looked at the children and then at Tean. She clasped her hands together. Then she planted them on the mattress. Then she twisted them together again.
“Are you all right?” Tean asked. “Did something happen?”
She made a croaking noise that, a moment later, he realized was supposed to be a laugh.
“I wish something would happen. It’s all this waiting.
Knowing they’re here, and…” She trailed off and turned to the window.
The glass held smoky copies of the four of them.
The wind picked up, howling as it ran around the lodge.
When River didn’t say anything more, Tean asked, “What did you want to show me? You said you know why they’re looking for you.”
River stayed where she was for another moment, still staring at her reflection. Then she nodded, as though coming back from somewhere. “It’s going to sound crazy—”
And then the power went off.
Darkness rushed into the room. For a single moment, the alpenglobes still glowed: warm spheres of yellow light out in the darkness. And then, one by one, they winked out, and everything was black.
River let out a delayed breath that sounded wet and shaky. Milo grabbed a handful of Tean’s jeans, and Maeve clutched his wrist.
“It’s okay,” Tean said. Without the constant murmur of the HVAC, the lodge was too quiet, and Tean’s voice was too loud. “It’s probably an issue with the generator. They’ll get it sorted out in a few minutes.”
“No,” River whispered. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“Tean?” Maeve said, and the ringleader was gone; in her place was a frightened little girl.
“We’re okay,” Tean said. He found Maeve’s arm in the dark and squeezed it. “We’re going to stay here until the lights come back on.”
Out in the hall, a high-pitched scraping noise began. It was faint at first, and then it grew louder as it moved toward them. Under it came the fall of heavy steps.
“No,” River said. Now she sounded angry. The sounds of movement in the dark, and the faint silhouette against the relative lightness of the window, told Tean she was getting to her feet. “No!”
“You need to calm down,” Tean said. “Everything’s all right—”
That scraping sound cut off abruptly.
No more footsteps.
Even the howling of the wind died.
And then something struck the door. The bang made Tean jump. Maeve screamed, and Milo cried, “I want my mom!”
Another bang echoed through the room. Wood splintered and crackled.
“No,” River moaned.
The next blow shook Tean out of his paralysis.
Ignoring Maeve’s cries and Milo’s whimpers, he pulled himself free and sprinted to the door.
The darkness made it difficult to see what was going on, but he could tell the door no longer fit properly in its frame—part of it appeared to have buckled.
Emergency lights in the hallway must have activated because a faint glow showed where something had been forced between the door and the jamb.
It appeared to be two metal forks, and as Tean watched, another blow drove them deeper into the room, and metal squealed.
Tean slammed the swing bar into place. “You need to leave right now,” he shouted through the door. “Hotel security is on their way.”
For a moment, there was nothing.
And then a man howled.
It was a copy of a wolf’s howl, and Tean recognized it immediately. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
He stumbled back a step and took out his phone. He still had service, and he placed a call to Jem. It rang.
The metal forks withdrew, but the door didn’t fall back into place; a glint of metal in the faint light from the hall showed something wedged between the door and the frame.
The phone was still ringing.
“We have to get out of here!” River was screaming. “We have to go!”
The phone clicked over to voicemail.
Metal grated on wood as the forks slid back through the opening they’d made.
This time, though, they were backward, and Tean understood—thought he understood.
The first part of the job had been to create a gap.
Now, the door was going to be popped out of its frame.
And it would take a matter of moments. The swing-bar lock wouldn’t stop them.
The door might as well have been paper. Hotels weren’t designed to withstand a planned invasion.
Maeve was screaming.
Milo was shouting, “I want to go home!”
Someone in the hall was howling.
It felt the way water looked high in the mountains just before it froze: crystalline. So clear you almost thought you could breathe it. The cold ran over Tean, a shock, and then nothing. Nothing but thought.
The bathroom.
No; they’d taken the room door down in a matter of moments. The bathroom door wouldn’t last five seconds.
The window.
“Get that window open,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Break it if you have to.”
River sounded like she was having a hard time breathing, but she said something in response that might have been acknowledgement.
Tean didn’t have time to check. He turned on his phone’s flashlight, yanked open the folding doors on the small closet, and grabbed the ironing board.
Angling it, he set the base against the jamb of the bathroom door.
The wedge-shaped end of the board he nosed up under the handle of the room door.
It wouldn’t last forever, but it might buy them an extra minute or two.
Glass shattered behind him. Icy wind swept into the room.
“Come on!” River shouted.
Tean made his way toward the window, but he paused to crouch next to Maeve and Milo. Maeve was shaking. Milo had wet his pants.
“We’re going to be okay,” Tean said, fighting to keep his voice even.
“You know how you’re good at hide-and-seek?
Remember how good you are at sneaking around, and the adults never see you?
That’s what we’re going to do right now.
We’re going to get out of here, and we’re going to play hide-and-seek, and as soon as I can, I’m going to get you back to your mom. Milo, did you hear me? Maeve?”
Milo nodded, blinking furiously against tears. Maeve was rubbing her eyes, but she said, “I’m scared.”
“I’m scared too,” Tean said. “But I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”