Then I’d come back home and spent three fruitless, grainy-eyed hours searching on the Internet only to find virtually nothing about any Order of the Guardians—other than a few vague allusions on a conspiracy theory message board—and way too many Blackwells in the St. Louis area.
Now what? I had no idea.
And Alona was furious with me. That couldn’t possibly end well. It wasn’t like her to be gone for this long, even if she was angry. Especially if she was angry. Her theory when it came to conflict was that it was only effective if the other person was made painfully aware of your perspective—emphasis on “pain”—until he or she had no choice but to surrender. And Alona was all about winning.
But right now, at a little after nine at night, it had been more than twelve hours since I’d seen her last.
“Do you maybe want to move on to a different table then?” Sam asked, drawing my attention back to the conversation at hand.
I looked down to find the once crumb-covered and syrup-sticky table gleaming and shiny wet. The booths on either side of me, which I swore had been full of people just a second ago, were now empty except for the piles of dirty dishes and balled up napkins for me to take away. How long had I been zoned out? I needed caffeine. Immediately. “Right,” I said. “Sorry. I just need some more sleep, I guess.”
Assuming Alona would let me. I envisioned a mob of angry ghosts gathering at my house—knowing Alona, in my freaking bedroom—right now.
“Well, go home, then.” Sam grinned. “You were due to clock out fifteen minutes ago anyway.”
“Oh.” Wake up, Will.
“I’m all for the extra help, but I think your mom’ll start getting nervous if you’re not home soon,” he said.
I nodded. He was right, as usual.
“Also”—he leaned a little closer—“just so you know, table sixteen has been staring holes through you for the last ten minutes.” His mouth quirked. “Whatever you did, I hope it was worth it.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked away.
For a second, my mind supplied the image of Alona glaring at me from the corner of booth, but I knew that wasn’t possible. Well, it was, but Sam wouldn’t have been able to see her.
I turned and counted tables until I reached the general vicinity of the teens. I still didn’t have the layout memorized, so I wasn’t entirely sure which one was sixteen.
Then again, it turned out not to matter because once I was close, I saw exactly who Sam was talking about. Mina. And “staring holes at me” was a polite way of phrasing it. It was more like if she could have set me on fire with a look, she would have done it and gleefully watched me burn.
What the hell? Like she had reason to be angry with me? That took nerve.
I dropped my washrag on the table and stalked across the restaurant to her booth.
“Thank God,” she said with an irritated sigh as I approached. “I was beginning to think I was going to need to rent a neon sign to get your attention.” She was still wearingthe clothes I’d seen her in last night, but she looked considerably more rumpled, and the faint stain of a bruise now darkened her left cheek. A half-empty cup of coffee sat on the table in front of her, surrounded by a half dozen empty sweetener packets.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “I thought you’d be home, celebrating your success and laughing at the dumbass you left behind to get caught.” Me, angry? No, of course not.
“Funny thing about that.” She smiled bitterly. “They were watching.”
“Who?” I reached for the knot at the back of my apron totake the thing off, so Rosalee, the lead server and technically my supervisor, wouldn’t interrupt us to bitch at me for “chatting” during work time. I hadn’t clocked out yet, but Rosalee would probably assume I had if I weren’t wearing the apron.
“Leadership.” Mina nodded tightly. “They said it was for my protection, but now…now I’m not so sure about that, considering they’re far more interested in you than theyare in the fact that I cheated.” She touched her cheek gingerly with an unhappy sounding laugh.
“I don’t understand,” I said slowly, and sat down on the opposite side of the table.
“It was a risk, one they couldn’t be sure would pay off, but it was only my life, my future at stake.” Mina shook her head.
“What are you talking about?”
She leaned forward across the table, her hair skimming the top of her coffee cup. “You should have told me who you were,” she hissed.
“I wasn’t the one who refused to give a name,” I argued back.
She laughed again. “Right. I should have just known. Sorry, but memorizing your family history has never been a top priority.”
I stared at her, baffled. Why would my family history be any priority at all? At some point between last night and now, one of us had stopped making sense. I was pretty sure it wasn’t me.
She cocked her head to one side. “You really don’t know, do you? You didn’t have to listen to endless tales of the infamous ‘book club’?”
He called it book club, though what kind of book club involves coming back exhausted and all banged up, I have no idea. My mom’s words echoed in my head, and I felt a chill.
“What book club?” I asked cautiously.
Mina made a disgusted noise and slapped a business card down on the table. “Be at this address in an hour. They want to meet you, see what you can do. Let them answer your questions.”
“Leadership?” I hazarded a guess.
She stood up. “You don’t deserve this.”
I didn’t even know what “this” was, but I sensed arguing with her about it now probably wasn’t a good idea.
“You know the thing that would scare the crap out of me, if I were you? If they’re willing to go this far to get you, what do you think they’ll do to keep you?”
I might have been more worried if I’d understood half of what she was talking about.
“Here.” She pulled the disruptor from her pants pocket. “Just remember, this”—she tapped her finger on the open end with the exposed wires jutting out slightly—“is the dangerous end.”
She tossed it at me, and I caught it with fumbling fingers.
“And then I guess we’ll see if you’re worth everything they think you are.” She gave me a mocking smile and then walked away.
Well. That didn’t sound good.
“Yep, should be fun. Don’t wait up.” I juggled the phone between my ear and my shoulder and tried to check building numbers as I drove by. This area of town—one of the oldest sections of Decatur—was not the greatest, and the lighting was sketchy at best. This had once been a bustling downtown area and now consisted mainly of empty and papered-over storefronts like blind eyes staring out at me.
“Have fun, sweetie,” my mom said. “I’m so glad you’re out having a good time. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
My mother, unused to me having much of a social life, had been astonishingly easy to lie to, something I already felt guilty about. She was so eager for me to have friends that my story of bumping into some buddies from school who wanted to see a late movie didn’t raise a single red flag, when it should have hoisted several.
“Okay. Good night.” I waited for her response, then closed my phone and chucked it onto the passenger seat.
I could have gone home. I probably should have gone home instead of coming out here on what was probably at best a wild goose chase and at worst some other scheme Mina had cooked up that would get me into trouble.
But there were two things that bothered me about that conversation with Mina that I couldn’t quite dismiss: First, how much she really, really did not want me to come down here for whatever meeting this was. Given Mina’s previous lack of interest in my health and well-being, I was intrigued by what would cause such concern. In fact, I suspected she was more worried for herself than for me.
Second, could it really just be chance that both my mom and Mina had referenced a book club, one that clearly had no
thing to do with reading, in the last twenty-four hours? I doubted it. And what was all that about my “family history”?
I had no idea what that meant, other than something to do with my dad. It was all too much to pin on coincidence. If all of this had something to do with him, I wanted…no, needed to know about it.
I squinted at the scrawled address—2600 Lincoln Avenue—on the back of the business card Mina had left for me. The front of the card was simply an 800 number. I hadn’t yet attempted to call it, but I might have to if I didn’t find the address soon.
I was on Lincoln Avenue already, and the numbers were descending the farther east I headed, so I should have been in the right area.…
There. At the corner ahead of me, a huge billboard announced new loft-style condos at 2601 Lincoln Avenue, and directly across the street…the boarded up remains of the Archway Theater.
Crap. I braked hard. Fortunately, no one was behind me.
The Archway Theater topped my list of places (along with Ground Zero in New York) to never, ever visit. It was legend.
It had been built in the twenties, before the Great Depression. In theory, it had cultural significance for Decatur as one of the few former stage theaters converted to a movie theater still in existence, though it had been closed for decades. The historical society kept trying to bring it back to life, butpeople kept getting hurt or dying during the various renovation attempts over the years. Workers fell to their deaths from the old stage, had unforeseen heart attacks, or were electrocuted when the power was supposed to be off.
It was always written off as superstition and coincidence, but in truth, there was something fundamentally wrong with the Archway that any idiot could recognize and no architect or contractor could repair. Back in the twenties, when the plans for the theater were approved, some genius got the idea to build it on some prime abandoned real estate in the center of town…right on top of an old hotel that had burned down in the middle of the night a decade before.
Sixty-some people had died in that hotel fire, and some of the bodies had never been recovered. Then, less than ten years later, construction crews started tearing at the ground to build the theater. Not to go all Poltergeist on you, but you have to be a special kind of stupid to do something like that.
That kind of mass event, so many violent deaths all atone time in one place, created a unique energy of its own. Myguess was that the theater was caught in a reenactment loopof the hotel fire, the same events cycling over and over againand playing out just as they had that night. From what I’d read online, Gettysburg had a couple of big loops like that. Battalions of soldiers still fought for their lives there, evenafter they’d been dead for more than a century and a half.
Every year, some group of stupid kids dared each other to break in and spend the night on Halloween, and almost all of them came out scared, sometimes hurt pretty badly, and refusing to talk about their experiences.
And yet, here I was.
I shook my head. Why would a bunch of ghost-talkers want to meet at the most haunted location in town, possibly even the whole state?
Someone honked behind me, and I jumped. I let my foot off the brake and turned down Springfield to get a closer look at the building. The theater sat on the corner with entrances on both sides, though everything looked dark and boarded up tightly. Thankfully. I really had no interest in going inside.
Then as I was driving past, a flash of red caught my attention. A banner, hanging where the old marquee had been, read: NOW UNDER RENOVATION. OPENING SOON!
Great. Well, that explained it. Assuming Mina had been telling the truth at least some of the time last night, this Order organization was involved with the Decatur Governance and Development Committee. I didn’t know anything about what that committee did—something about permits or permission or something?—but if someone on it was concerned about “cleaning” the Gibley property before the parking garage was built, then it would make sense that same person might be interested in making sure the theater was equally untainted before opening day.
So maybe they, the mysterious Leadership Mina kept talking about, really were around here somewhere.
I reached the end of the block and pulled a U-turn to double back. This time, I noticed the open lot at the back of the theater, where a building had obviously just been torn down. Amid the still-standing piles of rubble, a half dozen cars were parked haphazardly. But they were all pointed toward the chain-link fence between the empty lot and the back of the theater. And one of them, though it was hard to be certain in the reduced light, I thought might be Mina’s beat-up Malibu.
I backed up and pulled into the open lot, gritting my teeth as my poor Dodge rattled and thumped over the uneven ground. I parked next to a pile of bricks, tucked the card Mina had given me into my pocket, grabbed my phone from the passenger seat, and got out.
The sound of my door closing echoed in the surrounding silence. Even the crunch of my shoes on the uneven gravel sounded absurdly loud.
What are you doing, Will? You should not be here. My common sense decided to make an appearance, late as usual.
Just shut up for a second. Let me see if I’m even in the right place.
I made my way through the cars, half-expecting someone to jump out at me, until I reached the one that I thought was Mina’s.
I peered in through the window, finding fast-food wrappers and trash on the passenger-side floor, and zombie office-worker dolls glued to her dash, just as I remembered.
It was definitely her car. I was in the right place.
But now what?
“Hello?” I called quietly, and immediately kicked myself for it. Everybody knows that’s one sure way to make yourself an easy target. Also, if this were a horror movie and I’d said “Is anyone there?” I’d be dead by now, dragged kicking and screaming under one of the cars by a multiclawed creature of some type.
I supposed I could, in theory, wait right out here. They couldn’t leave without their cars, right? But that felt almost disrespectful, like one step short of turning down the invitation to meet them. Not a great tactic to use with people you were hoping to pump for information.
I headed to the fence and found a place where the links had been cut, the freshly exposed metal gleaming in the blindingly bright security light positioned on the roof of the theater.
Holding the fencing aside, I slipped through and onto the theater property. This had probably once been part of the hotel. I’d need to start paying more attention, and not just for signs of people from this world.
The back of the theater didn’t look like much, just a short, nondescript building made of crumbling brick with a couple of construction Dumpsters neatly in a row. It certainly did not scream, “Most Haunted Place in the City!”
The security light overhead focused its beam on a door, the only one that wasn’t bricked or boarded up. It was a rusty metal with green flaking paint and looked like it would give you tetanus if you just glanced at it, let alone actually touched it. The handle was missing; an open and sharp-looking hole in the metal remained where it had once been.
The door was also open about a foot, and kept that way by a cinder block at the base.
And still, no sign of anyone else around.
Damn. This whole thing smelled of a trap. Or a test. Or something equally unpleasant as either of those two alternatives. Mina had said they’d wanted to meet me, to see what I could do. I was beginning to suspect that this was going to be far less small talk and far more survival of the fittest than I’d anticipated.
Then again, all the people those cars belonged to had to be around here somewhere, right? Maybe they were already inside. They didn’t seem much like the coddling sort, again based on Mina’s information, so I had a hard time imagining them leaving someone out here just to greet me.
Just turn around, and go home, common sense suggested.Whatever you find out cannot be worth the living nightmare inside that building.
And then what? Lose track of th
em forever? Miss my chance to meet other people like me? Never know if Mina had been talking about my dad?
I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up on those potential answers just because I was afraid. I mean, I was right to be afraid. The ghosts inside this building could kill me. They’d killed people who weren’t ghost-talkers.
So, it was a risk. A big one.
But maybe that was the point. It was a test. To see if I was worthy. They’d allowed, no, encouraged Mina to take a chance on containing Mrs. Ruiz alone. So, if that were true, then this would not be so out of character for them at all.
I stood there, fifteen feet from the door, trying to weigh my options.
I had Mina’s disruptor in my jeans pocket, if I could figure out how to use it. There were several buttons on top, and I hadn’t yet figured out the right combination to make the blue beam appear, even though I’d tried a couple of times in the diner parking lot.
I had my cell phone, too. And if things got really bad, I could summon Alona. She would be furious, even more than before, but she’d have no choice but to come when I called. That was the way the system worked.
However, she was not required to help me, and I was guessing, based on her earlier mood, she would not. Plus, who knew how well Mina or any of the others watching might take her arrival?
Still debating, I shifted my weight uneasily, my heart beating too, too fast.
That’s when I felt it, this sudden sense of being watched. I looked around, but still saw no one. Not that that necessarily meant anything. There were dozens of places to hide in the shadows, not to mention the fact that every building surrounding the theater was several stories taller, allowing for a variety of easy-viewing positions.
If they’d watched Mina and me at the Gibley Mansion, what was to say that they weren’t watching me now?
And even though I couldn’t hear a clock ticking, I could almost feel the seconds slipping away. At some point, if I just stood here, my chance would be over before it even began. The door might, literally, close on this opportunity.