At least three of those things were here, right outside their room.
A long talon tapped the wood of the door. Another tapped at the bars on the window.
Hiss.
Instinct told Ethan what was happening: those things were debating if their prey might be inside.
He heard another tap, this one against the wood of the back door.There hadn’t been time to barricade that door. Nothing held it closed but a dead bolt and chain.
The creature outside tapped again.
Again.
Again.
Ethan didn’t breathe. Didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound. Hunter was just as silent. They waited, their ears straining. Ethan’s senses had become so sharp he could count every fiber of his denim sleeve just from touch, feel the weight of the atmosphere on his every individual hair.
The taps stopped. The hissing. Ethan heard steps move up the porch. When there was another hiss, it sounded like it came from outside room 8 next door.
The creatures were moving on. Ethan almost—almost—risked a sigh of relief.
And then he heard a new noise, much closer. It was a wet rattle, a warning: a carburetor gasping for air. With a rush of cold sweat, Ethan knew what that sound was. It was coming from Hunter’s lungs.
Hunter tensed against Ethan’s back. As softly as he could, he took one hand off the shotgun and thumped his chest.
The hissing outside stopped.
A creak of wood from the porch, another: they were coming back.
Hunter tried to hold his breath. Ethan felt the man thump his chest again, desperate now.
A hiss, directly outside the door.
Hunter coughed.
SHRIEKScame up from every direction, so loud Ethan’s mind clenched up.
And then, through the cough, he heard Hunter say, “Run.”
KYLA
She was freezing. It had taken every ounce of willpower in her body, but Kyla had opened the room’s back door. She’d cracked the front door, too, left it ajar. If her plan was going to work, she needed her room to look empty. Needed it to look like she’d flown through the front door and gone straight out the back.
It was a long shot, but it seemed smarter than bolting both doors from the inside. If she did that, she might as well put a sign out front:HIDING, COME FIND ME.
Kyla didn’t understand who this Jack Allen was—she certainly didn’t understand what in the fuck he’d been talking about when he spoke of a cursed mountain and Apache braves and a wandering lake—but it seemed pretty obvious that whatever he wanted with Kyla and the rest of the guests, it wasn’t good.
At least she’d figured out a decent hiding spot. Kyla had realized, a moment ago, that although the soffit paneling around the base of the armoire made it look like the armoire’s interior should run straight to the floor, the bottom shelf actually rested several feet off the ground. When she’d pulled the armoire away from the wall—easier said than done; the thing seemed to weigh about as much as Kyla herself—she’d found a cavity in the paneling, a gap between the bottom shelf and the floor that was barely big enough to hide inside, provided she curled her body into the tiniest possible ball.
By pressing out with her arms and lifting with her back, she was just able to muscle the armoire over herself a moment before the lights around the motel died. She got the armoire most of the way to the wall. Close enough to look convincing. Hopefully.
When the generator cut out, she heard a soft rush of feet outside, an eerie rhythmic hiss. The darkness of the armoire’s cavity became darker. It was far, far tighter than she’d expected. Wood penned her in from all sides. Kyla hadn’t thought, until this moment, that she could ever be claustrophobic, but as the panels of the armoire dug into her elbows and the shelf crushed her back, shealmost convinced herself that the space was growing smaller, that it was running out of oxygen, that she couldn’t breathe. She almost convinced herself—
Footsteps creaked on the porch outside, coming from the direction of the motel’s cafe. The steps were calm, thoroughly unhurried. So calm, indeed, they could only belong to one man. The man from the office. The man from her dream.
Jack Allen, who would have audience once more.
His footsteps stopped on the back porch. They stopped right behind Kyla’s room.
