ELEVEN

Six stops.

Sola and her grandmother made six stops on the fourteen-hundred-mile, thirty-six-hour-long trip. Other than that, they had steadily moved north on the highway system, through the never-gonna-frickin’-end, long-and-thin of Florida, into Georgia and the Carolinas, and finally up to the almost-theres of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

The idea that they could have come in to Caldwell’s zip code at ten in the morning had been craziness. Especially given that, after some thirteen hours of driving, she’d had to get out from behind the wheel and grab a crash of about six hours at a La Quinta. But then they’d kept right on going after her sleep, and man, she’d enjoyed a shot of thank you, Jesus triumph as they’d finally passed into New York State. Talk about your premature celebrations. There had still been hours to go at that point, and by the time she’d battled through Manhattan traffic to shoot out the other side, she had reached the cold-storage suffering part of any long trip.

It Was Never Going To Be Over.

Like all things, however, the rule of beginning, middle, and end applied to their travel and signs for Caldwell had started to appear, like the lights of a rescue plane to someone who had been Tom Hanks–stranded for the longest time.

“We are here,” her vovó said as the Northway made a turn and the city’s bridge over the Hudson River appeared like the promised land.

Or, at least, the land of less-likely-to-get-a-DVT-blood-clot-in-your-leg-because-you-can-finally-get-out-the-car.

“Yes, we made it.”

There was only a moment of relief, however, that balm to her aching neck and stiff shoulders immediately replaced with an OMG. She had no idea what was going to happen when they got to Assail’s: For one, they were not expected. His cousins hadn’t left her with a way of getting in touch. And then there was the unknown of Assail’s condition and the shock of seeing him after a year.

Why hadn’t she thought to get a phone number from Ehric? Then again, she hadn’t seen this turn of northbound events, had she.

As she took herself and her grandmother over the bridge to Caldwell’s quieter side, she looked to the left, searching for Assail’s glowing glass house on its peninsula. She couldn’t see anything but tiny clusters of lights on the shore, and God knew, his big place lit up like the Kennedy Space Center at night.

Maybe he was at a hospital? She had no idea where he was being treated.

After they came off the bridge, she took the first exit and then the turnoff for the peninsula’s road was a split from a curve that narrowed things down considerably. Finally, she passed that little hunting cabin, which was the last structure before Assail’s mansion.

Now her heart began to beat hard, the beautiful, transparent house appearing like the bird’s nest of a Swarovski finch.

But yup, everything was dark inside, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Although at least, as she rolled around to the garages in back, there were lights on in the kitchen and someone was standing at the sink.

“You stay here,” she ordered her grandmother as she stopped the car and ran a check of her gun.

Nine times out of ten, she deferred to her elder. Okay, fine, nine and nine-tenths out of ten. But when it came to physical safety, she was always going to be in charge and her grandmother recognized those instances.

“Lock up,” Sola said as she got out and shut the door.

She waited until there was a thunk sound that meant the car was secure. Then she walked over to the rear entrance of the mansion, her running shoes squeaking in the snowpack, her breath coming out in puffs of white, her sinuses humming and her ears tingling.

Ah, January in upstate New York. You might as well have been on the arctic circle.

Especially when you’d been living in Miami.

Before she could knock or otherwise make herself known, the back door opened and she gasped. The dark-haired man standing before her was half the size Assail had been, with the arms and legs of someone who was starving to death. Or dying.

“Assail…” she whispered.

“May I help you?” a voice she didn’t recognize asked.

Wait—what? Okay, no, that was not Assail—which was a relief. “I’m a—I’m a friend of Assail’s. This is still his house, right?”

“Yes.”

When nothing more was offered, she cleared her throat. “May I see him?”

“He is not here.”

“Where is he?”

“Who are you again?”

Sola glanced back at the road-grime-covered car and saw her grandmother sitting there, buckled into the passenger seat, her pocketbook clutched to her bosom. Thirty-six hours. Sola had driven that poor old woman thirty-six hours in a car that had the shock absorbers of a cardboard box and a heater that smelled like an electrical fire if they were going over sixty miles an hour.

All that for, Who are you again?

Ehric and Evale had come down, hadn’t they? She and her grandmother couldn’t possibly have had an identical bizarre dream.

“If Assail’s not here, are his cousins available,” she said, her voice growing strident.

“They have just departed.”

“Can you reach them?”

The man shook his head, and he took a step back, as if he were uncomfortable keeping the door open and not just because it was letting cold air into the house. “No. They are—it is private business. Please come back another time—”

She caught the heavy panel with a strong hand and looked the guy right in the eye. “You get on your phone, right now, and you tell Ehric I’m here. And then I’m going to help my grandmother out of that car and escort her in here. She’s eighty damn years old, we’ve been on the road for a day and a half, and she’s not staying in there one goddamn minute longer. Are we clear?”

And if he didn’t do what she said? She was going to pull her gun on him. She was done with the games and utterly over being polite.

Not that she and Emily Post had ever been besties, anyway.