Chapter Three
London’s coping mechanism involved getting a drink in the bar. Brian’s, working out in the hotel gym. Assuring them both I’d be fine, I shooed them out of the room. I still needed to find a place to stay, and I needed to get rid of a day’s worth of grime and stress.
Thirty minutes of steamy shower later, I felt halfway human again. I pulled on undies and my PJs—a faded t-shirt and Star Wars boxers—and set my laptop on the desk. I’d find a hotel and the number for a cab company, and then I’d worry about real clothes.
I had gotten about ten seconds into my hotel search when London let himself back into the room. “Find the bar?” I asked.
“It’s hard to miss,” he said, crossing the room to drop a key card on the desk beside me.
I nodded and tapped a new search into my web browser. For a minute or two the only sounds were the hum of air conditioning and the clicking of laptop keys. Another new search, even though I had a feeling I wouldn’t find much in my price range. “College student” is not a high-paying job.
“Hey,” London said, crouching down beside my chair so we were more or less at eye level.
I dragged my attention from the computer to look at him.
“Are you doing what it looks like you’re doing?” he asked.
“If it looks like I’m trying to find a place to sleep tonight, then yes.”
He reached up to brush a stray lock of wet hair back from my eyes. “There’s a perfectly good bed right behind you.”
“Yeaaah. I don’t think it’s big enough for the three of us.”
London eyeballed the bed. “I think it might be.”
“London.” He cut me off before I could say any more.
“It’s not some weird come-on. I just think we should all stick together tonight.”
“One of your feelings?”
“Partly. Mainly just common sense. And maybe a little paranoia.”
A smile tried to turn up the corners of my mouth, but it ended up as more of a tired twitch.
“If you really just can’t stay in here with us—and I’d kind of get that—then I’ll go down and see if I can get another room close to ours.”
It was a generous offer. I knew the Dolphin’s rooms didn’t come cheap. There was no way I was going to let someone foot a bill that size. Especially when I didn’t really want to be alone anyway.
“Only girl or not, I’m not sleeping in the middle,” I told him. “I get claustrophobic.”
“Duly noted,” London said, standing up.
I turned back toward my computer, not because I wanted to look at it but because I didn’t want to look at London. Or, well, because I wanted to not want to look at London. I managed to ignore him as he moved around the room, doing who knows what. When I heard the shower running, I knew it was safe to look up. I shut down the computer and crawled into bed. Sleep probably wouldn’t come any time soon, but maybe I could pretend well enough to avoid any more weirdness.
I’m something of an insomniac at the best of times, but it had been a long day. Worry and travel both take a lot out of a person. I faded into sleep before I could finish my bedtime prayers, and even though voices and other sounds dragged me near the surface a time or two, hours passed before I woke. I might have slept the night through if someone hadn’t stolen the duvet, but the room was colder than the walk-in cooler at my last job, and I woke shivering. The soft glow of a laptop showed me London sitting at the desk. That left Brian as the blanket thief. Sure enough, there he was, wrapped up like a human burrito. Dylan had the same annoying habit. The bedcover tug-of-war between those two would be epic.
Shivering, I climbed out of bed, hoping there might be a spare blanket stashed in the closet or the dresser. I lucked out, finding one on the closet shelf. London barely spared me a glance as I twirled the blanket around me like a cloak and headed back toward the bed. I stopped behind him, curious what had him up on his computer at this ungodly hour of day. The bluish light lit his face in an otherworldly glow.
Otherworldly.
Is that what London’s powers were? Or were they just another talent, like drawing or doing math in your head? I shook off the question and sat down on the end of the bed.
“Can’t sleep?” I asked.
“Haven’t tried. I wanted to try to figure out our next step.”
“Wouldn’t our next step be filing that missing person report tomorrow?”
London pushed back from the desk a little and turned the chair to face me. “About that. Turns out that the whole twenty-four hour waiting period thing is a myth. That’s the good news. The bad news is, we can’t file a missing person report.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Since Dylan lives in Dallas, the report would have to be filed there. In person.”
“Well, damn,” I said.
“Yeah,” London agreed turning back to the computer.
“So now what?” I asked, looking over his shoulder.
“I tracked down my old mentor,” he said, gesturing at a chat window with the mouse pointer. “Turns out insomnia is pretty common for us freaks.”
“You say ‘freak’ like it’s a bad thing.” I looked a little closer. “Can Shelley help us find Dylan?”
“Not directly,” he said, logging out and shutting down the browser. “But she knows a lot of...practitioners, is the word she uses. She’s gonna make some calls in the morning and get back to us.”
Patience is not my strong suit, but I knew that calling people in the dead of night wasn’t a good way to get them on your side. So we’d wait.
London swiveled the desk chair away from the desk, rubbing the back of his neck. “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” he said, his eyes on the Brian-burrito.
“Why do you think I’m awake at four in the morning?”
He just shook his head.
Twenty minutes later, he’d managed to get Brian awake enough to unass the duvet and we were all snuggled under its downy goodness, close but not touching. I turned my back to the boys and tried to sleep, but I just couldn’t shut down my brain. The first thin, grey light of dawn peeked in around the curtains before my jumbled thoughts gave way to even more jumbled dreams.