Chapter Twenty-One – Ryder

 

“How did I never notice before?” Stephanie asked as she straightened herself up from the picture. The look of betrayal on her face, and the complete idiocy I felt, were enough for me to forget that I’d been about to tell her about being a shifter.

The feel of her lips still tingling on mine, I stepped back from the framed image, from my reflection in the glass. Tingling. That was it. “The protective circle we were in earlier,” I said. “That must have broken whatever spell was on us.”

“A spell?” Stephanie asked. “Is that how she stayed hidden? Esther’s been here almost as long as I can remember, always working at that hotel, day and night.”

“How else would she keep people from connecting her to her ancestor? She must have been plotting this for years, Stephanie, and needed to stay undercover while she was doing it. Magic’s the only way she could have stayed hidden in plain sight the way she has.”

“When, though? Where? Does she cast it on all of us overnight? What about people who come into town unexpectedly, like you?”

“A spell on the city limits, maybe? Think about it, how many roads are there in and out of town?”

She looked to the ceiling for a moment, closed her eyes as if she were trying to mentally picture the local layout. “Two,” she said. “And we all have to leave town for one reason or another, every so often.”

“Two spells,” I said, holding up my fingers. “Two. One on each road is all she’d need to keep her cover hidden. Periodically, she just pours more into it.”

“God,” she said, the word nearly a groan, “I feel so fucking stupid. I can’t believe she’s been here in the our midst the whole time.”

“Hey,” I said, my word sharp. “Don’t.”

She turned to me as I touched her cheek.

“Just don’t,” I said. “This isn’t your fault. No one could have known who she was, not if she was casting a spell as simple as that on everyone. Even I fell for it, didn’t I? And I know what I’m doing.”

She nodded, took a deep breath. “I know,” she said. “But, still, I just feel so fucking stupid.”

“It’s okay,” I said with a nod. “There’s nothing you could have done.”

Lips pinched tight again, she looked up at me. She was trying to cover up the hurt as best she could, but I could see it leaking through. “What now?”

“Now? Sounds like we’re off to see the witch of Camelot.”

My almost-confession forgotten, it seemed by both of us, I put my ear against the door of the guest room where we had put Chad. He was sleeping soundly, his breathing normal and heavy. And rightly so. Even if he didn’t remember what had happened overnight, his body hadn’t gotten a moment’s rest.

The only question was, how did we keep him from getting out? The door opened inwards, towards the bed, so the chair underneath the door handle wouldn’t work the way it had on the closet door.

“He asleep?” Stephanie asked, her words no louder than a breeze as I drew my ear from the door.

I nodded, my thoughts going to something Matthew Murdoch, our resident wolf shifter, had taught me years ago. “Have any change on you?”

She patted her pockets, shook her head. “Sorry.” She paused for a moment, and a bulb seemed to go off over her head. “Christina and Andy have a change jar downstairs.”

“Pennies,” I said. “Bring me about twenty pennies.”

Silently, she darted off down the stairs. She was back minutes later, still barely making a sound as she lightly padded up the steps. She dumped the collection of change into my palm.

“What’re you doing?” she asked as I began to feed pennies between the door and the frame without unlatching it first.

“Prank one of the guys at the office taught me. Turns out it’s pretty useful in the field, too. A doorknob operates on the idea that the latch inside the assembly holds it in place, right?” As I spoke, I fed about half the pennies into the half of the door above the doorknob. “You need a good, smooth connection between the inner latch and the plate, though, or else everything starts to go awry. Friction is the enemy of doors. So, if you want to keep a door shut, you just create some friction.”

I finished putting in the rest on the bottom half.

She gave me a skeptical look. “That works?”

Of all the things she could be skeptical about, this was it? “Go ahead,” I said. “Try it.”

She tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. “Holy shit.”

“I know, right?” I asked with a grin.

“How do you get him out again?”

“Just slip out the pennies.”

“Now what? Are we just going to leave him like that?”

“It’s either that, or we let him go running all over town with his friends around,” I said. “We go back to the High Street Hotel, and see if we can’t have a nice little conversation with our friend Esther. Maybe there’s still time to stop whatever the hell she’s got planned, or at least mitigate some of the damage.”

Together, Stephanie and I made our way downstairs. I stopped off in the kitchen, grabbing the shotgun still loaded with salt, and we headed into the backyard. We locked up the door behind us and slipped out into the trees through the back gate. Whether it was daylight or not, the woods were still the most direct route back to the bar, and to the hotel.

As we walked through the trees, I kept an ear open for any sign of us being trailed by the man-cats. Other than that, and the looming battle with Esther, my thoughts wandered back to the pressing concern that had been pushed to the back burner by our discovery of the witch.

How was I going to tell Stephanie what I really was? That I was a creature almost like what we were trying to avoid? I gripped the stock of my shotgun more tightly as I carried it in front of me, my finger safely away from even the trigger guard.

Beside me, Stephanie navigated the trail with perfect ease. With the sun up this time around, there was no stumbling or tripping, no matter how much I wanted her in my arms again. No matter how much I knew she’d never accept me after I’d told her the truth.

That one kiss, though? Had it been worth it, to feel her body pressed so perfectly into mine? Even though I knew she’d never accept me once she knew the truth?

Beside me, Stephanie said something, brought me out of my thoughts.

I shook my head, clearing the worry from my head.

“Ryder?” she asked. “You okay?”

“Yeah, fine. What were you saying?”

“Any idea what we’re going to do when we find her?”

“First, we need to get in there. Second, we need to make sure she can’t hurt us.”

“How do we do that?” she asked. “You’re not going to shoot her or anything, are you?”

“Not with my sidearm, if that’s what you mean. But I’m not exactly averse to putting a load of rock salt in her chest.”

Her face twisted a little, and she gave me a wincing cringe. “Really? I mean, she’s just Esther.”

“Well, just Esther has had you under a spell for as long as you can remember, too. Don’t forget that.”

We climbed up the incline towards the back of Stan & Sons, to the little alleyway that cut through the buildings. In the daylight, it looked even sadder and more rundown back here than without the sun. A small town in Pennsylvania that had been nearly forgotten by the modern world. One that was forced to make up stories about itself to remain relevant.

Stories which, in the end, finally came true.

Through the small alley, on the other side of the street, we caught our first look at the Camelot High Street Hotel. Just like the back of Stan & Sons, it looked decrepit and neglected in the bright truth of the overhead sun.

Beside me, Stephanie came to a gravel-crunching halt. “What the hell?”

“What?”

Her face twisted up horribly, like she’d just taken a bite out of a lemon, but was horrified by how it was actually putrid and even more bitter than she’d expected.

“Stephanie?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“The hotel,” she said, pointing at it as she shook her head. “It’s what’s wrong. Look at it! The paint’s peeling, the shutters are hanging off. It’s just…it’s awful!”

Now that she mentioned it, the place did look worse than I remembered. At first, I’d just chalked it up to the bright light of day. But this was more than that. This place looked one step above abandoned, like it was about to fall in on itself, with the roof sagging near the middle and several of the shutters completely gone off the top windows. I should have known the hotel was too nice for a small town in the middle of nowhere.

“The spell,” I said. “It must have been more than just Esther that it was masking. Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

The streets of Camelot were empty as we crossed over Main. Not a single car’s tires sounded on asphalt anywhere within the city limits as far as I could tell. Even the thing-cats had disappeared from the town. Maybe they’d just called it quits for the night? Or they’d relocated to the event space, the most logical of places? Hell, maybe Esther was there with them as their ringleader, and we were on another wild goose chase.

Something told me that last part was wrong, though. That this wasn’t a wild goose chase at all. That, whether or not Esther was here, somewhere inside that hotel hid the next clue we needed to unravel this whole mystery. Buried within it, we were going to find the piece of the puzzle we needed to undo all of this.

We stepped through the parking lot, with its luxury cars that seemed even more out of place than the night before, and tramped up to the front entrance, with its carved head of Janus staring both into the future and into the past.

As our feet touched the front landing, my heart began to race, and my mouth went dry. This might be it. This might be the moment when we ended this whole thing. I gripped the shotgun more tightly.

“Ready?” I whispered to Stephanie as she came up behind me.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice low, but shaking. She swallowed, the sound audible in the quiet of the deserted town. “I’m ready.”

I glanced back to her, smiling a little.

At the gesture, the color drained from Stephanie’s face. “Ryder?” she squeaked, her voice barely audible. There wasn’t something behind me, was there?

I looked behind me, at the still closed door. Nope, it was clear. “What’s wrong?” I asked as I turned back to her.

She reached out and clamped a hand down on my wrist, her fingers digging into my flesh. “Your eyes, Ryder. Your eyes.”

Confused, I reached up to touch my face.

“They changed, Ryder. I saw them change. They were cat eyes.”