Jack exhaled. “I’m sorry, OK? He didn’t give me a chance to talk.”
“Yeah, I know,” Carla said. “What else did you find?”
He glared down at his sandwich, only half-eaten and now less than appealing, and passed her his notes. Carla frowned at them while he forced down mouthfuls of food. This was his only reliable meal for the day, and he knew better than to squander it, no matter how frustrated he might be. “Recognize any of those symbols?”
She shook her head, still frowning. “No. But I can go back and look.”
Jack thought of the cloying darkness within the cramped janitor’s closet and shuddered.
“You don’t have to come,” she said, reaching to touch his hand. “I can go tonight and meet you at the hotel later.”
Jack mulled over this as he chewed. Whatifsome of the symbols matched? Would that tell them anything useful? “We should call Boris,” he decided. “See if he managed to track down a witch.”
“I’m sorry,what?”
“I found a witch,”said Boris.
Jack returned to the hotel alone, shaking in his shoes. Carla had gone to the social club, and he was half-out of his mind with nerves.Everything was fine, he told himself. Carla knew what she was doing. More than that, shebelongedthere. Nobody would find it strange when Ronnie’s girlfriend stopped by to visit him, even if they weren’t especially thrilled about it.
“Only one?” asked Jack, scraping the mud from his shoe on an especially rough patch of carpet.
Boris raised a critical eyebrow. “Normally, I’d be mad about that, but I’m gonna let it go because it’ll disappear at 3:47 a.m. anyway.”
“3:47 a.m. exactly?”
“Yeah. That’s when it reset with, you know, the vampire thing.”
Jack’s lips quirked up. “The vampire thing?”
“Yeah,” said Boris, his sharp-edged grin softening into something almost fond. “You know what I’m talking about.”
Jack dragged a chair over to the counter from the lobby and sat down. “Yeah, I remember. Thanks for rescuing me.”
“Wasn’t me. The reset saved you.”
“Yeah, but you tried.”
“Yeah, I did,” Boris admitted. His gaze lingered just a moment too long. Long enough to send a little thrill down Jack’s spine, a squirm of glee in his chest. Something about Boris’s attention was addictive, all-encompassing. Even worried about Carla, he took a moment to bask in it, to imagine what might have been. “Anyway, I found a witch.”
“Oh.” Jack had a lot of questions about that but decided now wasn’t the time to ask. He could gain a better understanding of witchcraft later. “Can she help?”
“I mean, maybe. She’s in the city, but she said I could call her with anything I found.” He shrugged. “Not that she’ll remember.”
“We can convince her again.”
“Sure thing,” said Boris. He slouched forward and caught a loose staple beneath his fingertip, dragged it across the surface of the desk and started scratching patterns into the laminate.
“Yeah,” said Jack. “Hey, listen. Remember the guy I told you about? The one with the yellow eyes? I ran into him earlier.”
“No shit?” Boris sat up, staple forgotten. “What happened?”
“He, uh, disappeared before I could ask him anything.”
“That motherfucker.”
Jack breathed a sigh of relief. Boris wasn’t angry. Wasn’t even disappointed. Just kind of contemplative, like this was a mild inconvenience, no worse than realizing that they needed to fill up the car before a trip or stop at the grocery store on the way home for a forgotten ingredient.
“Think you’ll see him again?” Boris tapped his fingers against the counter in a steady rhythm.
