Somewhere nearby, voices talked, murmuring in low voices far beyond his ability to make out. His thoughts were a foggy blur, slowly ascending through the void and back toward reality.
A squeak. A lurch. The rocking came to a stop—and the sound of voices around him crescendoed.
Daniel twitched. As though remembering it existed, his leg twinged, igniting in a hundred fires spreading up toward his side. He groaned, shifting.
A hand pressed against his shoulder. “Y-You’re finally awake. Good.” A woman, her soft voice tight with anxiety. “Try not to move, okay?”
“Well, that makes it easier,” someone rumbled from ahead of him. It was getting easier and easier to make out the words as the fog cleared. “I was thinking we’d have to carry them.”
The warmth pressing against his head shifted, and he heard someone yawn. Leon.
Right. They were...in Maya’s car. The doors to his mental palace opened like they had so many times before. When keeping a relationship alive meant remembering details across months or years jammed into the middle of his life, well. He’d gotten good at finding ways to preserve them.
And he’d only been gone for a handful of hours. Maybe a day. He could remember it all—going to find his friends. The house. The park. And…
His legs shifted. Someone was moving. The motion sent daggers of agony through his calf, and he hissed, tensing.
“Hey,” Leon snapped. “Don’t-”
“I’m sorry,” a woman whispered. “I’m trying.”
Olivia.
The first sparks of hope smothered to cinders. Right. Olivia was here. He...could remember that, too.
Fighting against eyelids that felt like they weighed a hundred pounds, Daniel opened his eyes.
Figures moved around the windows of the car. James. And Maya. He stiffened, trying to sit up. Couldn’t be lying around. Had to pull himself together, before-
“Take it slow,” Leon said. His fingers dug into Daniel’s shoulder. “You’re hurt still.”
The door opened before Daniel could retort. He winced, blinking away the heavy, hot sunlight. He’d charged over to Leon’s house at the crack of dawn, and most of their escape had taken place in the quiet murk of morning, but now...now, the sun hung high overhead, filling the air around them with warmth. He couldn’t quite keep the confusion from his expression.
“W-Where are we?” Leon mumbled, and Daniel could see him scrubbing at his eyes. “How long were we-”
“I took us as far as I could,” Maya said, with an apologetic look toward Daniel. “We started to think that, uh.”
“You’re losing a lot of blood,” James muttered, when she stopped. His tone was brusque, but lacked the abrasive edge it so often had. “Kinda need to take care of that, we thought.”
“It’s been a few hours, though,” Maya said with a tiny, hesitant smile and a shrug. “We should be good.”
“I haven’t seen them following,” Olivia whispered.
Oh, Daniel didn’t miss the looks they shot her way. “Right,” Maya said. “Anyway. Um. We...We have a room. Can you walk, mister Owl?”
James turned away, wrinkling his nose. “I’m not carrying him.” His skin was pale, though, inching toward green.
Daniel fought down a laugh. Have a soft stomach, did he? Well...he glanced down, eyeing the fabric that had been hastily wrapped around his leg while he slept. A sweater, it looked like—or it had been a sweater at one point. There was rather too much blood soaked through the fabric to ever fulfill that role again. “I’m fine,” he rasped, squirming toward the open door. “I-I’ll-”
“Help him out, would you?” Leon said, vanishing from the other side of the door. “Don’t just stand there.”
Maya rolled her eyes, but pulled Olivia out of the way, reaching toward Owl a moment later. Olivia skittered to the side, her arms poised defensively in front of her chest. Her eyes were distant, unfocused.
That would be a problem. He couldn’t afford for any of them to panic—least of all the woman who had ins with their enemies. She needed to keep her head screwed on straight.
Trying to tell her that would get them nowhere, he knew. And so he let Leon and Maya sandwich him between them, hauling him upright.
As they stumbled forward, Daniel glanced around at last. It had to be at least noon, if not later, and...his eyes scanned across empty asphalt, broken-down concrete bollards, and the saddest-looking motel he’d ever seen. Shingles hung from the corners of the eaves. Cobwebs filled the cracks between the bricks—cracks that were made all the larger by the mortar that seemed perilously sparse.
Something jingled around his neck. Daniel’s mind went blank. What? That sounded like-
When his eyes dropped, falling to his chest, he saw a narrow golden chain bouncing with every lurch.
A tiny pendant of a book swayed at its end.
Alexandria. He stared at the necklace, confused. The necklace only appeared when he asked for it, which he certainly hadn’t done. Why? Why was it here now, then?
When he narrowed his eyes, willing it away, the smooth golden metal of its surface only twinkled merrily in the flickering light. It should have turned to dust at a thought. Again, it hadn’t.
He was just tired. That was all. Once he rested, he could-
Dry, rusted hinges creaked, bringing his thoughts to a stop. Ahead of them, James pushed a door to one of the rooms open, stepping inside. His expression went carefully blank after that, but not before Daniel saw his nose wrinkle. “Seriously?” he mumbled.
“Get out of the way,” Maya said. With Daniel’s arm around her shoulders and her lips all but up against his ear, the words were deafening.
James trudged out of the way, though, making his way deeper into the motel room. Unhappily.
When he lumbered across the threshold, fighting against a leg that didn’t seem to want to listen to him, Daniel...realized he couldn’t blame James.
The spiders had been every bit as industrious inside as out. This time, their handiwork served to adorn the sort of peeling, green-and-orange wallpaper that had been safely out of fashion four decades prior. Another
