Vincent barked into the phone again. “That’s a terrible idea. The police will make a mess of it, and I’m not making any public appearances right now. I need this gone without drawing attention to the school. I’m a busy man, Peaslee. I’ve told you what needs to happen. Just get it—”
“What are you doing?” A voice behind me demanded.
The bellhop peered down at me from behind a stack of towels. I jumped. My shoulder slammed into the door. Inside the room, Vincent Bloomberg swore. The phone clattered on its cradle.
Panic sliced through me. I opened my mouth to make an excuse, but there was nothing I could say. The bellhop must’ve noticed my deer-in-the-headlights expression, or maybe he’d just had an earful of Vincent Bloomberg bossing him around. He pointed down the hall. “There’s a fire exit on the right. Go. I’ll distract him.”
You don’t have to tell me twice.Heart hammering, I fled down the hall and shoved open the fire exit just as Vincent’s door slammed open and he started shouting that he’d have the bellhop fired.
Chapter Six
I hit the woods on the edge of the town and accepted their sheltered embrace, moving between the trees as I headed out along the main road.
Why didn’t you burn him?
I turned the question over and over in my mind as the fire blazed beneath my skin, flaring up and dying away as my anger at Vincent, at my own actions, waxed and waned. When that bellhop startled me, the fire dropped its possession of me. I took his offer of escape without hesitation because he was innocent, and I didn’t think I could set Vincent alight without hurting others inside the hotel.
Controlling the fire was more than just pointing it in a direction. I had to master my emotions or more innocent people would be hurt.
But is anyone truly innocent?The fire bit back at me. I didn’t have an answer for that. All I knew was that Vincent Bloomberg was still alive, for now, and that meant I was still in danger.
No cars passed me as the road narrowed and started its climb up the peninsula, but I didn’t step out from the trees until I came to a sign that read, “Arkham Camping and RV Park.”Hopefully, this is the place.
A path sloped down toward a small stream surrounded by a few dilapidated RVs and a couple of tents. A woman slumped in a beach chair in front of her tent, her eyes vacant as she peered down into the stream, a limp fishing line fixed between her legs. The place was eerily quiet, apart from the faint sound of David Bowie singing from behind one of the locked RV doors.
As I passed by the David Bowie RV, I noticed a small Turkish flag in the window of a battered Airstream parked under a bent oak. My heart skipped.This must be it.Not knowing what I’d find on the other side of the door, I knocked.
No one answered.
I cupped my hands against the glass window and peered inside. Everything looked dark and static. The shadows remained silent and still. “Zehra?” I called, knocking again. “Are you in there?”
Nothing. My chest tightened. I remembered the cave-in, the way the ground rumbled as a rock shelf collapsed, blocking the cave entrance. Zehra was supposed to be there, but she wasn’t. Did she just not show up, or was she trapped behind the stones, or had something else happened to her…
“Zehra, it’s Hazel. I need to talk to you. I need to know what happened at the cave—”
“She’s gone, kid.”
I whirled around. The fishing woman stood behind me, leaning against a cane made of driftwood. Green eyes swept over me, no longer vacant but sparked with intelligence. “She hasn’t been back to that RV in several weeks.”
Several weeks? My heart plunged further. I knew why. I’d waited and called for her after I discovered the cave-in, but Zehra hadn’t come… because she’d been there already, in the cave, waiting for me. I’d kept myself awake all night hoping Zehra had been delayed somehow, that she’d escaped deeper into the tunnels and found a way out. But if she hadn’t come back here…
Finding her RV had been a long shot, but I pinned so much hope on it. Zehra was the only one who could do something with the information I had. The keys we’d cast for Ms. West’s laboratory were probably long gone. I’d left them in the lockbox on the cave – I supposed I could go back to look for them, but not right now. Fuck that. If I could have spoken to Zehra and found out the name of the woman she’d contacted, then we might have had a chance…
If the Eldritch Club hadn’t killed her in that cave-in.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the rage to simmer down. Burning down Zehra’s RV wouldn’t help bring her back. And there might be something here that could help me.
How long was I inside the Dunwich Institute? What had happened at the school since then? Were Greg and Andre okay? What about Trey and Quinn and Ayaz? I needed to know.
Angry tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. Zehra didn’t deserve to die like that. She had been on the run since she was a teenager, because she was the only student to ever escape Derleth. She’d only just found her brother. She was a fucking cool person and I’d wanted her as a friend. I’d never had a girlfriend before. And now I never would.
Yet another innocent person, dead because of me.
I shouldn’t have come here.
No. Don’t do that. Don’t wallow in self-pity. You didn’t kill her. Vincent Bloomberg did, somehow.
I didn’t believe for a single moment that cave-in was an accident. I left the phone on the coffee table in Trey’s room. On it, the text message I sent to Zehra, telling her to meet me and when. Maybe they had that trap laid for years. Maybe the god was the one who shook the earth and made the stones fall, or maybe Vincent had dynamite. But either way, they’d killed Ayaz’s sister to stop her getting the information I had.
