“You want to know how I stayed alive all this time?”
Jacob brought up the gun.
“People,” Jem said.“I know people.So, what I think is funny, is that we’re beating the shit out of each other while she’s running away with the briefcase.”
Jacob’s eyes widened.He spun back toward the room.
Jem lunged forward and threw an elbow against the side of Jacob’s head.Jacob staggered, and Jem jumped on his back.He drove his elbow into Jacob’s head again, and this time, Jacob fell.Jem rode him down to the floor.He got the gun first, twisting it out of Jacob’s limp hand.A quick pat-down turned up a gravity knife and a keycard.Jem pocketed both of them and stuck the gun behind his waistband.
When he got to his feet, Brigitte was still standing there, staring at him.She hadn’t moved during the fight, not once.Not that it mattered.Because Jem had learned a long time ago that people would believe anything if they were afraid it was true.
“There’s not one fucking thing in that briefcase about you,” Jem said.“Have a look.And then forget about it, because the police are going to need it to prove Mckell killed Gerald.”
“Jeremiah, I didn’t— I wouldn’t have let him—”
“That’s not my name,” Jem said as he limped past her—the best he could manage, with the hallway still tilting around him.“My name is Jem.”
And then the lights went out.
39
Tean kept a tight grip on the children’s hands—Milo on his right, Maeve on his left.Milo, it turned out, was a wanderer; they’d barely walked a hundred yards after leaving the theater when Milo had disappeared.He’d spotted a trophy case and gone to investigate, which was understandable enough.He was a kid.And he was obviously curious.
When Maeve made a break for a fire exit, on the other hand, it waslessunderstandable.
Years of babysitting nieces and nephews, including Glade with his incipient pyromania, had given Tean a kind of sixth sense.Which meant he caught Maeve before she managed to reach the push bar and set off the alarm.And he doubled back to Milo just in time to stop him from climbing on a bookcase so that he could get a better look at the antlers mounted overhead.
After that, they held hands as they walked, in spite of Milo’s tugging and Maeve’s dragging her feet, and her sprinting ahead, and her calculated stumbles.
If Tean had held any doubts about the two of them being related to Jem, they’d evaporated by the time they were approaching River’s room on the second floor of the lodge.
“Why are we here?”Milo asked.
Tean released his hand long enough to knock, then caught Milo’s sleeve before the boy could slip away to inspect a fire alarm pull station.“Because I need to talk to this woman.”
“This is stupid,” Maeve said.“I wish we were back with Brigitte.”
“Yeah,” Milo said, “I wish we were back with Brigitte.”
Tean knew—heknew—from years of babysitting that arguing with children was only going to make things worse.But he couldn’t help saying, “Then maybe you shouldn’t have threatened to run away again.”
Movement on the other side of the door drew his attention.Then River asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s Teancum Leon.”
He didn’t add,As you can obviously see through the peephole.But that voice in his headdidsound quite a bit like Jem.
“And?”River asked.
“And two children who aren’t trying to harm you.This is Maeve, and this is Milo.”
The hallway hummed with the lodge’s ever-present background noise.
Then the swing bar rattled, and the deadbolt thumped, and the door swung open.
Bloodshot eyes.Full-body tension.Nervous glances left and right, as though someone else might have accompanied Tean and was trying to catch her off guard.It had only been a day since Tean had seen River Jordan, but she looked ten years older and on the brink of a breakdown.She retreated into the room, and Tean had to catch the door with his foot and usher the kids ahead of him.
The door thunked shut behind him as they moved further into the room.While it had the standard hotel room layout, it was clearly at the lower end of the lodge’s price range.There was no luggage.A few cosmetics were laid out on the bathroom counter, and the air was stale and smelled like damp towels and the lodge’s soap.The only feature to set this room apart from any other mid-range hotel was the view.Darkness hid the mountains and the pistes, but the window gave a view of the pool and one of the observation decks.Transparent bubbles of light dotted the deck—Tean had read about them before they came up here.They were called alpenglobes, and they were plastic shells with soft seating and tables and portable heaters; you could rent them for a meal or by the hour and enjoy sitting “outside” even on the coldest winter day or night.
