Chapter 39
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
Carla spent the night in Jack’s bed. Boris slept on the floor, wrapped in so many blankets that he resembled an overstuffed burrito. Jack woke only periodically to ensure that there weren’t any empty eye sockets staring at him.
But whatever haunted them last night didn’t return.
He missed the moment Carla vanished, blinking awake to find that he was alone. It was four a.m.
By sunup, Jack felt a little less hungover.
Had stopped throwing up, even if his head ached and his throat was still sore.
After the nine o’clock news, he dragged himself to the lobby, where Boris sat staring listlessly into space.
A book lay face down on the desk, its spine cracked. He startled when Jack appeared.
Three additional people disappeared in the night. A young couple and an elderly man. All three left behind massive blood stains and no other traces.
“At least it didn’t come after us,” Boris said, but his expression betrayed his worry. One uneventful night wasn’t exactly reassuring.
“We gotta figure out how to stop this,” Jack said. His voice was scratchy, but there was nothing outwardly wrong with him. No bruises, no cuts or scrapes. No vampire bites.
A part of him was afraid that he’d experience some sort of terrifying change, like in the movies, but that hadn’t happened.
So far, he was fine. Still eating and drinking and using the bathroom like normal.
All things Rainey’s vet would have enquired about if he’d brought her in for a mysterious bite.
A doctor probably wouldn’t have been helpful. Besides, Boris had a similar encounter, which meant that he’d probably been bitten, too, and he hadn’t sprouted any fangs or become inexplicably hairy.
Not yet, anyway.
But they didn’t know the effects of physical injury in the time loop. He shouldn’t ache for days afterward. Boris shouldn’t be so sickly (though he was looking far healthier now that he was sleeping and eating more regularly).
And anyone who died should have revived the next day.
Was the loop deteriorating? Were the rules changing? Why had Brenda, of all people, come back? Was it because she wasn’t killed by the vampire? Or was there something else at play?
“What if…” said Boris slowly, leaning forward in his chair, elbows planted on the counter so that he could rest his chin in his hands and stare at Jack with blue, blue eyes. “…it is Enzo?”
Jack’s heart flipped. He resolutely ignored it.
Now was not the time. “Maybe we can force him to reverse it,” he suggested, though he wasn’t entirely sure how one forced a member of the mob to do anything.
Maybe they could hold him hostage, try to intimidate him, but it wouldn’t matter.
Too many people would come looking for him. People with big guns.
He didn’t even want to think about that.
“Yeah,” said Boris slowly, refusing to break eye contact. “What if it is a curse? What if we… cut it off at the head?”
Jack reeled back, shocked. “You wanna kill him?”
“Hell no. I’m just saying, we might need to.”
“What if we kill him and it makes things worse?”
“I’m not saying we should kill him,” Boris barked, then lowered his voice like he’d suddenly realized that it was a bad idea to plot a murder in a hotel lobby at full volume.
“You might be right,” Jack mused. And then, because he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, he added, “I’m gonna go to the library. See what I can find.”
“Good idea,” said Boris, nodding. “I’m gonna go through the phone book. I think we need a witch. They might have some ideas for this Enzo guy.”
“You can just find witches in the phone book?”
“No, but you can find candle stores and curiosities shops and stuff. If you know where to look, you can find the right people.”
“Have you called a witch before?”
“I used to date one,” said Boris, suddenly fascinated by a scuff on the file cabinet. He refused to meet Jack’s eye. “But she changed her number. I don’t know how to get ahold of her anymore.”
“You dated a witch?” Jack blinked.
“Why is that surprising?”
“I thought you were kinda, um, maybe not that into women.”
Boris pulled his magazine from underneath the counter, held it up, and rolled his eyes. “This isn’t an act. I can like both. And men can be witches, too, just FYI.”
“Right,” said Jack. Heat flooded his face. “Good luck with the, uh, the witches. I’m gonna head out now.”
And he fled, out the door and down the street, feet carrying him away from the hotel as fast as they could without actually running.
It shouldn’t be weird. He liked Boris. He was into Boris. He’d slept with other men before. And even if he didn’t know where he stood with Carla, he shouldn’t be so embarrassed, so nervous to have such a basic discussion.
Maybe it was because he didn’t usually talk to people about their sexuality.
When he was in certain clubs, there was no need to.
Outside, he dated women almost exclusively.
That way, there was no need to explain things to anyone.
People always wanted some sort of explanation, some balm to soothe their discomfort, their confusion, their disapproval. It was exhausting. Endless.
But it didn’t matter. The time loop would end, and Jack would go back home to his miserable job and never see Boris or Carla again.
Or the loop wouldn’t end and he’d die at the hands of that thing.
Both options filled him with dread.
The library had only a few books on the occult. Jack scanned every shelf just in case.
Carla was right. There were only ten shelves total, though they reached nearly from the floor to the ceiling and were wider than he was tall.
The librarian gave him a glare so severe that it was amazing the thick, plastic rims of her glasses didn’t melt, then returned to sorting through a cart of returns.
There was only one other person, an exhausted-looking old man who sat in one of the armchairs by a greasy window overlooking the downtown strip, a dog-eared crime novel propped on his gut. Jack waved; the man ignored him.
There has to be something, he told himself as he examined the shelves. But there were few options. A book on hauntings. Another about demonology. One about alien encounters. A tarot guide.
The book of demonology was the most useless.
Jack copied down all the symbols he could find and recorded their meanings, but he doubted Carla would recognize any of them.
(He certainly didn’t.) The book contained absolutely nothing about actually summoning demons—it only listed off their characteristics.
None of them closely matched the creature.
Regardless, he scrawled a few distant possibilities.
The tarot guide seemed irrelevant; Jack placed it back on the shelf after only a cursory flip through its pages. The book of hauntings was only marginally more helpful, detailing encounters with succubi—beautiful demons who stole the life forces from their victims, typically appearing in dreams.
Jack wasn’t fully convinced that this was what had attacked him (a part of him thought that whatever it was probably more closely resembled a vampire) but he filed away the information anyway.
Whatever happened to him was undeniably pleasurable, but Boris claimed that Jack bled profusely from his neck.
Which probably meant that he was bitten, even if he couldn’t remember it. And succubi weren’t known for biting.
Ignoring the librarian’s probing stare, he turned to the alien abduction book.
While chronicles of bright lights and lost time were certainly interesting, it seemed the abductees didn’t suffer time loops, just memory loss.
Besides, there were no flashing lights over Hidden Cove, no strange entities other than the vampire.
After a long time wandering through the library, examining each shelf for anything that might be even the tiniest bit helpful and dodging the librarian, Jack admitted defeat. It was well after lunchtime. If he left now, he’d reach the house on Castle Drive by mid-afternoon.
Maybe there was something he hadn’t thought of. Some notion that his scribbled notes would trigger when Carla looked over them.
There was always hope, Jack told himself, even if it felt like a lie. Like something his grandmother would have told herself during the Great Depression. A sentiment she’d scoff at now that her sanity didn’t depend on delusion.
He passed the front doors, stepped onto the sidewalk, dodged a spotted banana peel, and nearly collided with a man in a sleek black suit.
“Oh, sorry,” Jack began, taking a step back. Then he realized who he was looking at.
Pale hair. Yellow eyes. A knowing smirk.
Jack staggered backwards, clutching the strap of his bag. “It’s you!”
An eyebrow quirked. “Is it?”
“You-you—”
The man looked him up and down, a spark of amusement in his eye, like Jack was no more notable than a terrier barking at his heels. “I have places to be. Goodbye!”
“Wait!” Jack choked, but he was already gone, quite literally vanishing between two elderly women carrying shopping bags. It was as if he’d turned to dust. There one moment, gone the next.
One of the women turned at the sound of Jack’s voice, shook her head, and hurried away without a word.
“Fuck,” Jack whispered.