Page 38 of Envious Of Fire
“He’s at the hotel. We have a room, somewhere that way,” she says with an indirect gesture, “a hotel just outside Vegas, in Boulder City.”
Just then, Kyle picks up something with his Reach—a note of anxiety, then curiosity, then red-hot irritation. It’s confusing and shifts around restlessly, the way eyes flicker over the screen while watching a movie. But what strikes Kyle as the most odd is that these senses don’t come from anyone in this room.
Kyle gazes back at the living room, where a slim crack in the curtains lets in harsh sunlight, and through it, somehow, his eyes zero in on Jessica’s vehicle parked on the curb.
It’s then that Kyle realizes with amazement that he can see perfectly into the car, all the way from this spot by the table. In the passenger seat sits a teenager playing on his phone. A teen with familiar eyes and a familiar nose, which even scrunches up in precisely the same way as Brock’s did when he was frustrated. Kyle can hear his breaths and heartbeats, too. He even picks up a tension in the teen’s calves. Is he an athlete like his dad was?
How are Kyle’s senses suddenly so sharpened and precise again, like they were last night? Is Lazarus’s blood still at work inside him? Kyle assumed its effects had faded overnight.
Also, why did Jessica lie just now about her son being back at the hotel, when he is clearly waiting in the car?
“I don’t know what came over me,” she goes on, “to head off on this journey so late at night. Ash is going to miss a few days of school, I can already see it … my lovely Brock causing us all of this unnecessary headache. And for what? Why?” She lets out a sigh, appears to gather herself, then resets a smile on her face. “Anyway, back to the point, to the reason I’m here. Do either of you know where Brock headed off to next? Can you help me figure out where he might be?”
Kyle pulls his eyes from that front window, flustered. “I … I don’t know if I’m that much help, but …” She tracked Brock to this house. Kyle has to trust she knows where he went next. “He probably headed off to Las Vegas after leaving here.”
The moment the words leave his mouth, needles jab up the base of his spine to his shoulder blades, making him feel as if he could take flight from his chair completely unprovoked.
It’s a change in Jessica’s emotions Kyle has picked up—a sharp and unsettling change.
Her eyes narrow ever so slightly, as if the needles jab her in the back, too. “But … you went with him.”
Kyle’s lips stick together. “Sorry?”
“Why do you say he ‘probably’ headed to Vegas? You went with him, so of course you know. There’s no ‘probably’. I know you went with him, because I went to Vegas first before coming here. His last known location is his father’s suite at the Scarlet Sands Hotel & Casino. Mr. Hastings has many contacts at that place. They showed me footage from all the security cameras. You entered with him, then left alone.”
Kyle’s blood runs cold.
Of course she’d have gone there first. How could Kyle be so stupid to overlook that?
“I … w-well, yes,” he quickly pivots. “I was with him, with Brock. We went in the middle of the night after spending some time here catching up, and—”
“Why did you two go to Vegas together at such an hour?” she asks. There is a perceptible shift in the texture of her voice. Each word is hard and fringed with suspicion, yet still with that lofty, faux-friendly tone underneath, the same one she had when they were having simple conversation a second ago.
Before Kyle answers, Elias jumps in. “Oh, that’s easy. He was going there to find me.”
Her face snaps to Elias’s like a bird tracking prey. “You?”
“We had a bit of an argument the night before,” Elias says, his voice warm, overly casual, swimming with that unmistakably honeyed tone ofnothing-at-all-is-wrong. “I’d ran off back to my mom like a big baby. She operates the Scarlet Sands. It’s sort of a family business thing.” Jessica’s eyebrows lift, surprised by that, apparently. “And because Kyle doesn’t have a car himself, well, I guess Brock came dropping in on Kyle at exactly the right time. The two of them drove the few hours to the hotel, found me, Kyle and I made up, and that’s that.” Elias puts a hand on Kyle’s shoulder, gives it a squeeze and a rub, then faces Jessica again. “I bet your husband’s still there, sleeping off his bender in his father’s fancy suite. He was wasted when they arrived, from what I heard. Right, Kyle?”
Kyle swallows, still rattled, but manages a perfectly natural, “That’s right. Drunk as an elephant’s trunk.”
Jessica’s eyes don’t leave Elias’s for quite some time. All trace of sweetness is gone. No smile. Her face has become hard and unforgiving, showing her age, cracks in makeup, weariness.
Then: “I … wasn’t sure if it was you, Kyle, of course,” she goes on slowly, piecing the sentences together, “on the camera, the security camera … but I knew Brock came here to this town looking for you … after seeing that …disturbingvideo. What was that, by the way?” She turns her glassy eyes onto Kyle now. “Was it just for shock value? Part of some short film project? It seemed somewhat scripted to me. Ash thought it was real. I had to tellhim that of course it wasn’t real. Can’t believe everything you see on the internet. Even those heart-string-pulling videos showing a guy with a man-bun giving food to the homeless are faked, all for the views, the phony feel-good vibes and clicks …”
“That’s all it was,” Kyle agrees with a hasty nod. “Just a big fake thing. I didn’t want to do it. I hated doing it. I think most of the postings were taken down by now, actually.”
“I noticed that, too,” she admits, pursing her lips. “It was a shock to learn even my pastor had seen it. He believes in many things, you see, strange things that might make you laugh.” She lets out that choked noise again, shakes her head. “You aren’t avampireor some strange supernatural being, of course not, how absolutely ridiculous.” That choked noise becomes a full laugh. She brings a hand to her face, gazing off somewhere, lost in her mind, and the humor quickly evaporates. “Vampires are … are terrible abominations of nature. Unnatural and foul. Those are the parting words my pastor gave me before I left on this … oh, thispsychotic missionwe’ll call it, hunting down my husband, like I expect to find him dead, blood sucked out of him, or worse.”
Kyle drops his gaze to her glass of water, hardly touched, a single teardrop of condensation running down its side. He can’t be sure what he’s feeling, with Elias’s hot emotions surging in from one side, Jessica’s frosty, prickling suspicions on the other, and his own feelings suffocated by both of theirs, forgotten.
And a somewhat clueless teenager in a vehicle outside, his emotions bouncing to every extreme as he focuses on whatever game occupies his attention.
These aren’t insignificant facts that Jessica is sharing. Her congregation literally believes in his kind. Or at the very least her pastor does. Kyle is an “abomination of nature”. How many others believe in their existence? Did Kyle’s video have a more devastating impact than previously thought?
And worse: would word of this reach Lord Markadian?
“Oh.” Jessica peers down at the floor. “You have a cat.”
