“Are you OK?” called Carla from the other side of the room.
“Yeah,” he grunted. When he went to sit up, he found her standing before him, staring wide-eyed at his shoe.
Not his shoe, Jack realized, eyes landing on the blurry chalk outline beneath the twisted rug.
“Shit,” Carla whispered.
Together, they pulled up the edge of the rug.
Jack didn’t recognize the symbols there, but it didn’t matter. This was no child’s doodle, no strange sense of decorum. Just a glance left him thrumming with strange energy. It burrowed into him with the ease of a dagger, throbbed there like a splinter beneath his skin.
“Boris was right,” he whispered. “This looks… kind of bad.”
“Yeah,” said Carla, breathless. “Shit.”
“We’d better go,” Jack mumbled.
They rearranged the rug and fled.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
“It lookedlike something out of a movie,” Jack told Boris when he arrived back at the hotel just after midnight. “A circle and squiggly lines?—”
Through a mouthful of leftover pizza, Boris said, “Did you use the salt?”
“What? No.” In fact, he’d completely forgotten the handful of salt packets Boris thrust at him before he left.
“You were supposed to use the salt!”
“Well, nobody tried to curse me?—”
“Salt neutralizes demons,” Boris grumbled, finally swallowing. “It’s not for curses.”
“I know, but?—”
“Never mind,” Boris sighed. “You got out alive, and that’s what matters.”
“It is?”
“Yeah! I don’t know if you noticed, but people aren’t surviving this. If you get shot, I dunno, man. It might be curtains for you.” He dragged a finger across his throat, made a cutting noise.
Jack rolled his eyes. “Thanks for the concern, but I think Brenda came back from the dead.”
“Who the fuck is Brenda?”
“Doesn’t matter. She got shot.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Long story. Look, the point is, some people come back, and some don’t.”
“Huh.” Boris made a face of consternation. “That kinda changes things.”
Jack shrugged. Didn’t dare voice his worries—that there could be complications from dying that only came clearafterthe time loop ended—for fear of giving them legitimacy. If Boris echoed his concerns, that would make themreal.
So he just sat silently until Boris said, “Hey, can I use your bed again?”
