[16] THE EMPRESS 

Rhys

Bia Bautista was better at predicting the future than I was.

It wasn't just that she planned costumes in advance and had the forethought to pack them, but she had also divined my inseam and shoulder width infuriatingly accurately.

She had brought me everything in her duffle bag. Button-down, suspenders, tie. The forest green suit gave me a change of wardrobe perfect for avoiding immediate recognition, but that had to be far from Bia's original intent.

What she had in mind was likely closer to finding some campus party to drop in on. Somewhere she could use me as a begrudging wingman while she scoped out my classmates.

Hallowe'en wasn't meant to be actually life-threatening.

I turned away from my reflection in the Datsun's side mirror and tugged Bia's duffle bag open again. A piece of her carefully curated ensemble was missing an accessory. I was just somebody in a green suit. My fingers closed around a cool metal shape and I pulled it out to reveal a tarnished silver candlestick. A second deep dive I found the rough texture of something definitely not a lead pipe or wrench.

Revolvers and knives weren't exactly an option to carry openly, so what other choice did Bia have?

Still, pulling the manila rope from the depths of Bia's bag made my stomach twist.

I didn't have to be the Hanged Man if I just made up my mind. Of all of the options, I needed a square to check none of the above. Do not pass go, do not take $200. Take a right at The Tower and detour around the Ten of Wands.

Natalie gave me the ability to see the future and never told me how to change it.

˚˚˚˚˚˚

What the Hawthorne Hotel lacked in character on the outside, the interior made up for.

Red rugs made little islands in the sea of the green carpet, all of it patterned in tangles of intricate swirls. Built in bookshelves and wingback chairs were inviting instead of grandiose. The lobby made all the costumed guests look like time travelers gathered to one moment, too early for the party but maybe on their way to the hotel's dining room.

One history student in a green suit didn't stand out. Wilder costumes drew my eye, even while I watched for somebody else.

It felt too much like working at Cullfield's museum, watching people temporarily step into a painstakingly classic landscape, trying to remain in the background myself. People came and went from the altered reality, and I stayed. That had been part of a plan, once upon a time. It had been a ploy to make me care about the maintenance of a past that wouldn't stand up to scrutiny.

Hopefully the Hawthorne Hotel upheld a mariner's history and not just a murderer's.

The woman in the pencil skirt stood out as she entered less because of the business attire, but the business stride. She was somebody that hadn't come to soak in cobweb aesthetic for the weekend. She had a purpose, even when silent. The carpet cushioned her heels that should've clicked across the floor like an omen of her coming.

Her conversation with the front desk was quick and she turned away to the stride away from the easy chatter of the lobby. I followed at a distance uncomfortably similar to how Connors had followed me most of the morning and afternoon. One the elevator stopped her pointed, progress, the gold doors spitting back at her a gilded reflection.

It might have suited her to learn how to blend in. It was like she could pretend to be nothing else but what she was. Even Cam Blake could put up a front of innocence for years on end. Even I could. Cullfield bred a kind of talent for feigning innocence. Everybody in it could twist doubt in their favor, skilled in turning accusations around to gaslight anybody who questioned the motivations of it's most prized families.

The business woman unnerved me more. She didn't look nice. She couldn't convince me she only had the best intentions.

The elevator arrived, pulling her yellow mirror away. I watched for the number above the door and ducked into the stairwell to take the steps two at a time to beat her to the forth floor.

She stepped out from the sliding doors, swiping at a table, brow furrowed. She didn't look up to see me, or anybody else. Like fucking up our lives was nothing more than an inconvenient box to check off on her to do list.

I'd been in this position before, either accessory or collateral in an effort to reach somebody else. 

The last time nearly killed me in the slowest, most agonizing way and if Jane met the same fate as Hunter, I would still be tangled in the cause, guilty as I had ever been.

The woman looked up fro the tablet long enough to swipe a keycard into room 407 and disappeared inside.

Without noticing me, lurking in the shallow alcove of another door to another room. I only stepped back into the hall when the door to 407 closed firmly. If I could just put the same faith in that room number that I had in scattered visions. It had to be important to know it, useful in a way I couldn't see just yet.

The door at my back opened suddenly, faster than I could jump further out of the way and a middle-aged woman crashed into me.

She was a flurry of loose, black fabric, but not the clothes fit for a Hallowe'en party.

Her hands rose in apology, ignoring the fact that it had been me looming in her alcove. I had stood in front of the door to the room she actually paid for.

A radio contest only granted me so much and it wasn't enough for my own room.

Her gaze slid past me to something over my shoulder.

"So sorry," she said, expression softening into a sheepish smile. It should have been my apology, but I stepped back, prepared to make myself scarce.

She moved to slide past me, hesitant, turning back to look me over. Or to look through me, almost like a recognition and a wash of dread coursed through me like I had blown whatever stealth I had.

Even when she finally met my eye, her attention kept flicking beyond me.

"I'm sorry, but does a book mean something to you? Like a journal."

The color must've drained out of my face and that was answer enough for her.

Trying to be in the right place at the right time, and that was the question I stumbled into. For once, I wanted the universe to be wrong, to have fluked and this conversation wasn't meant for me at all. It couldn't be something that I needed to hear.

"Don't books mean something to a lot of people?" I said, eyebrow raised in a casual dismissal. All of it made fairly ineffectual by the way I couldn't stop myself from picking around my nails.

She still smiled softly, almost sympathetically. Her patience was something I didn't deserve, but she gave it anyway.

"I ask because—"

"I know why and unless she's going to tell me something I don't already know—"

I cut myself short. It couldn't be Natalie's lot in the afterlife to hang around. She couldn't be doomed to watch us forever.

"You've seen her before." The woman said it as a statement. It wasn't a question, a tone that prohibited me from lying through my teeth, if that had been my plan.

"Once."

Once, as something of a ghost. Maybe I had never truly seen Natalie before then. Maybe the first time I had seen any of them as people other than my classmates, a realization that proved I was not the only person in Cullfield holding a secret so close to my chest it bruised. Silent suffering worn in all the different ways it could be.

She seemed to understand this too well, wearing an expression that slipped into something a little too much like pity.

"Oh, a spirit who shared something," she said, nodding like this was commonplace, a rite of passage, "it's so hard to tell in places like this. There are the deeply spiritual using tools to guide them and there are those like us who've come too close to another world."

A chill ran up my spine and she took one of my hands between both of herself to stop my nails digging into my skin.

"What do you mean, 'like us'?" I asked.

"Sometimes when there's just a thin veil, contact with someone beyond it, it's difficult not to come back with a piece of it. Awareness beyond what we had before," she said.

Not just me. Not just Natalie, but a phenomenon bearing markers consistent enough that a stranger could peg me as having a near-death experience and a chat with a ghost.

"This has happened to other people?" I asked, a stupid question because she applied it to me on sight, or maybe Natalie helped her along to the conclusion.

Before she could answer, the door to her room swung open, revealing a woman in a full face of make-up. Dark circles swallowed her eyes in a rose-adorned skull.

"Elaine, we have to get going," the skeletal friend said in the exasperated fashion of somebody who had interrupted more than one of these kinds of exchanges.

"Good luck to you," the woman swathed in black said before stepping back.

A protest was on the tip of my tongue, questions I couldn't form fast enough to ask urgently.

"We have to eat before the session," the friend persisted.

My phone vibrated in the suit pocket, a distraction away from any more enlightenment I could've asked for and the two women drifted toward the elevator.

The vibrating didn't stop and when I pulled my phone out, Bia's name bannered across the screen.

"Hello?" I answered.

My chest tightened around the idea that it wouldn't be Bia's voice on the end of the line. It would be Connors, proving that he didn't need me to find the girls and getting away from him hadn't saved them. Elaine and her hotel roommate had fully disappeared and, left standing alone in the empty hotel hall, it felt like the perfect setting to hear some more sinister news.

I could answer to nothing but static on the other end of the line, for one.

"Bia?"

"Sorry I missed your call earlier, Paulo," Bia said.

I rubbed a hand over my face. There was nobody else it could've been. The pressure in my ribcage eased into a less recognizable shape than dread. Still, room 407 loomed a little too close and I shouldered my phone against my ear to push open the door to the stairwell.

"Are you—"

"I'm just hanging out with Jane and Lucas. Remember Lucas? Lives upstairs?"

I stopped on the stairs, leaning against the wall to take in her casual response. They must have been there too, but she was playing the conversation off as something they wouldn't suspect.

"You found Lucas?" I asked.

There went my lead time. Lucas could make up whatever excuse he wanted for why he had found himself in holding.

He had to know it was me who called the cops on him, but Lucas wasn't going to tell them that. He'd have to explain what reasons I could have to stall him. Jane wouldn't believe I was just paranoid. She couldn't. Not after everything.

How they found him probably wasn't something Bia could explain during a phone call that was supposed to be to her brother or cousin or whoever Paulo was supposed to be.

"Yeah. Rhys is around here somewhere, too," she said, "I know he's white as a ghost, but we like him. He worships Jane."

That wasn't for anybody else's benefit but mine.

I took a few more steps down the stairs, putting more distance between myself and the hotel room I couldn't get in anyway.

"I'm at the Hawthorne," I said. I actually went where I said I meant to. Assuming Jane wouldn't get herself anywhere of consequence had been a mistake. An obvious one, staking my confidence on my competence instead of hers.

"We're going to meet him. Just at some Hallowe'en party. No big deal," Bia said, tone like a nonchalant shrug. Now every conversation she'd had on our behalf made sense. It was impossible to read her voice as anything but conversational. Neither her true feelings nor her intent came out while she kept me on the line.

"It's a trap, Bia. Incendiary is here and they need Jane for something."

There was no doubt she could read me, phone or not. If I sounded just short of pleading, it was because I was. Finding Lucas just launched them into a warp speed straight for trouble.

"No kidding," she deadpanned, "well, trick or treat, though, right? Even if it's trick."

"Did Lucas tell you to come?"

"I don't know. He found some tickets last minute. You know how these things are."

Sure. Fate could be alarmingly convenient, and even more so when in league with the local kidnappers.

"I have an inkling who might've passed them along," I said.

Bia hummed a moment into the receiver, the closest thing giving away her thoughts that she'd come in the whole conversation.

"I'll keep that in mind," she said, "anyway, I've got to run. I'll see you when I can."

She hung up before I could say anything more, beg a question I hadn't thought of yet. Convince her to persuade them out of it. But then, lies or not, what could convince Jane not to face problems head on?

All I could do was wait, watching two trains speeding toward each other on a single track.