Chapter 40
CHAPTER
FORTY
Jack met Carla at the castle for lunch and broke the news.
“You saw him again and you didn’t even talk to him?” She demanded, hands on her hips. Her plate sat before her, untouched. Tomato goop bled from her sandwich, stained its way across the white plate.
“It wasn’t like he gave me a choice!” Jack protested, throwing his arms wide.
“You have to make people listen to you, Jack! You have to be assertive!”
“He just disappeared! What was I supposed to do about that?”
“If you’d gotten his attention—”
“He said he was busy!”
“That’s no excuse!”
“What was I supposed to do? Just turn into a bat and follow him?”
“I-No,” Carla sighed, throwing her hair over her shoulder. “Alright, alright, I get it. Fine. I can’t believe you saw him and barely spoke to him.”
“You can’t?” Jack raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t want to believe it, how about that?”
Jack exhaled. “I’m sorry, OK? He didn’t give me a chance to talk.”
“Yeah, I know,” Carla said. “What else did you find?”
He glared down at his sandwich, only half-eaten and now less than appealing, and passed her his notes.
Carla frowned at them while he forced down mouthfuls of food.
This was his only reliable meal for the day, and he knew better than to squander it, no matter how frustrated he might be. “Recognize any of those symbols?”
She shook her head, still frowning. “No. But I can go back and look.”
Jack thought of the cloying darkness within the cramped janitor’s closet and shuddered.
“You don’t have to come,” she said, reaching to touch his hand. “I can go tonight and meet you at the hotel later.”
Jack mulled over this as he chewed. What if some of the symbols matched? Would that tell them anything useful? “We should call Boris,” he decided. “See if he managed to track down a witch.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I found a witch,” said Boris.
Jack returned to the hotel alone, shaking in his shoes.
Carla had gone to the social club, and he was half-out of his mind with nerves.
Everything was fine, he told himself. Carla knew what she was doing.
More than that, she belonged there. Nobody would find it strange when Ronnie’s girlfriend stopped by to visit him, even if they weren’t especially thrilled about it.
“Only one?” asked Jack, scraping the mud from his shoe on an especially rough patch of carpet.
Boris raised a critical eyebrow. “Normally, I’d be mad about that, but I’m gonna let it go because it’ll disappear at 3:47 a.m. anyway.”
“3:47 a.m. exactly?”
“Yeah. That’s when it reset with, you know, the vampire thing.”
Jack’s lips quirked up. “The vampire thing?”
“Yeah,” said Boris, his sharp-edged grin softening into something almost fond. “You know what I’m talking about.”
Jack dragged a chair over to the counter from the lobby and sat down. “Yeah, I remember. Thanks for rescuing me.”
“Wasn’t me. The reset saved you.”
“Yeah, but you tried.”
“Yeah, I did,” Boris admitted. His gaze lingered just a moment too long.
Long enough to send a little thrill down Jack’s spine, a squirm of glee in his chest. Something about Boris’s attention was addictive, all-encompassing.
Even worried about Carla, he took a moment to bask in it, to imagine what might have been. “Anyway, I found a witch.”
“Oh.” Jack had a lot of questions about that but decided now wasn’t the time to ask. He could gain a better understanding of witchcraft later. “Can she help?”
“I mean, maybe. She’s in the city, but she said I could call her with anything I found.” He shrugged. “Not that she’ll remember.”
“We can convince her again.”
“Sure thing,” said Boris. He slouched forward and caught a loose staple beneath his fingertip, dragged it across the surface of the desk and started scratching patterns into the laminate.
“Yeah,” said Jack. “Hey, listen. Remember the guy I told you about? The one with the yellow eyes? I ran into him earlier.”
“No shit?” Boris sat up, staple forgotten. “What happened?”
“He, uh, disappeared before I could ask him anything.”
“That motherfucker.”
Jack breathed a sigh of relief. Boris wasn’t angry. Wasn’t even disappointed. Just kind of contemplative, like this was a mild inconvenience, no worse than realizing that they needed to fill up the car before a trip or stop at the grocery store on the way home for a forgotten ingredient.
“Think you’ll see him again?” Boris tapped his fingers against the counter in a steady rhythm.
“I hope so,” Jack grumbled, adjusting in his chair. “I have questions for him.”
“You said he literally disappears, right? Like into dust?”
“Well, once he just got into a car and drove away, but yeah, he just sorta… evaporated.”
“Wild.”
Minutes passed in silence. Jack couldn’t stop tapping his foot, afraid that Carla wouldn’t arrive. That something had gone wrong. That Enzo would catch on and make good on his threats to “do something” about her.
Boris procured a deck of cards from one of the drawers and set them beside the bottle of whisky. “Quit worrying. She’s going to be fine. Trust me, she’s scary.”
“I know,” said Jack earnestly. Like a black widow, she was beautiful, lethal, terrifying.
For all that he adored her, he had no doubt that she could and would kill him if she needed to.
Would bury him in the woods somewhere and only think of him occasionally when she ashed her cigarette or had one too many martinis. “I can’t help it.”
Two hours and several rounds of cards later, Carla stomped her way into the hotel, clutching Jack’s pages to her chest. “Whatever the fuck they summoned isn’t on this list.”
Disappointment struck him like a hammer. He’d hoped it was a lead. A real, proper contribution, unlike everything else he’d done so far.
She slammed a sheet of paper on the desk, covering the cards. Boris shot her a dirty look, but said nothing, bowing his head to examine the drawing. Jack followed suit.
“I don’t recognize any of this,” he said. “These aren’t—the book talked about, um, mostly Goetic demons.”
Boris and Carla just stared at him.
“They were already in Hell. I think they’re like, uh, nobility,” Jack explained. “Anyway, I don’t think any of these symbols are associated with that kind of demon summoning.”
“So they summoned something else,” said Carla, chewing her lip.
“Or they’re planning a Halloween party,” said Boris, shrugging.
“With this much attention to detail?” Carla put her hands on her hips, drew her lips back in a sneer.
“Look, we don’t even know if it’s real—”
“It’s Enzo,” she said. “I’m sure of it. He’s always doing weird shit.”
Jack chewed his lip. Thought back to his earlier conversation with Boris. What if they cut the head off at the source?
Maybe they could threaten him into reversing the spell, if it was indeed somehow related to the loop.
“How do we handle Enzo?” he said, taking a deep breath.
The bell above the door tinkled.
Jack turned, scowling at the interruption. Then he nearly fell out of his chair, because the man staring back at him was tall, pale, well-dressed, and horribly familiar.
“Hello,” said the yellow-eyed man.
Boris caught the expression on Jack’s face and choked on a swig of whisky.