Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
“Of course,” says Kyle quickly. “It was a long time ago. I’ve made my peace with it.”
“I nearly forgot the reason I came here at all.” She lets out another of her strange, choked laughs. “I could barely see the road, driving so late at night as I did, lost my way twice or so … was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. Poor Ash … tired and bored and just wanting to be back home. I don’t blame him.”
“Ash?”
Jessica peers at Kyle in wonder. “Yes, Ash, our son. Asher. Didn’t Brock mention our son when the two of you spoke?”
“Oh, yes, of course he did,” says Kyle. “I just … don’t think he mentioned his name.”
“He’s at the hotel. We have a room, somewhere that way,” she says with an indirect gesture, “a hotel just outside Vegas, in Boulder City.”
Just then, Kyle picks up something with his Reach—a note of anxiety, then curiosity, then red-hot irritation. It’s confusing and shifts around restlessly, the way eyes flicker over the screen while watching a movie. But what strikes Kyle as the most odd is that these senses don’t come from anyone in this room.
Kyle gazes back at the living room, where a slim crack in the curtains lets in harsh sunlight, and through it, somehow, his eyes zero in on Jessica’s vehicle parked on the curb.
It’s then that Kyle realizes with amazement that he can see perfectly into the car, all the way from this spot by the table. In the passenger seat sits a teenager playing on his phone. A teen with familiar eyes and a familiar nose, which even scrunches up in precisely the same way as Brock’s did when he was frustrated. Kyle can hear his breaths and heartbeats, too. He even picks up a tension in the teen’s calves. Is he an athlete like his dad was?
How are Kyle’s senses suddenly so sharpened and precise again, like they were last night? Is Lazarus’s blood still at work inside him? Kyle assumed its effects had faded overnight.
Also, why did Jessica lie just now about her son being back at the hotel, when he is clearly waiting in the car?
“I don’t know what came over me,” she goes on, “to head off on this journey so late at night. Ash is going to miss a few days of school, I can already see it … my lovely Brock causing us all of this unnecessary headache. And for what? Why?” She lets out a sigh, appears to gather herself, then resets a smile on her face. “Anyway, back to the point, to the reason I’m here. Do either of you know where Brock headed off to next? Can you help me figure out where he might be?”
Kyle pulls his eyes from that front window, flustered. “I … I don’t know if I’m that much help, but …” She tracked Brock to this house. Kyle has to trust she knows where he went next. “He probably headed off to Las Vegas after leaving here.”
The moment the words leave his mouth, needles jab up the base of his spine to his shoulder blades, making him feel as if he could take flight from his chair completely unprovoked.
It’s a change in Jessica’s emotions Kyle has picked up—a sharp and unsettling change.
Her eyes narrow ever so slightly, as if the needles jab her in the back, too. “But … you went with him.”
Kyle’s lips stick together. “Sorry?”
“Why do you say he ‘probably’ headed to Vegas? You went with him, so of course you know. There’s no ‘probably’. I know you went with him, because I went to Vegas first before coming here. His last known location is his father’s suite at the Scarlet Sands Hotel & Casino. Mr. Hastings has many contacts at that place. They showed me footage from all the security cameras. You entered with him, then left alone.”
Kyle’s blood runs cold.
Of course she’d have gone there first. How could Kyle be so stupid to overlook that?
“I … w-well, yes,” he quickly pivots. “I was with him, with Brock. We went in the middle of the night after spending some time here catching up, and—”
“Why did you two go to Vegas together at such an hour?” she asks. There is a perceptible shift in the texture of her voice. Each word is hard and fringed with suspicion, yet still with that lofty, faux-friendly tone underneath, the same one she had when they were having simple conversation a second ago.
Before Kyle answers, Elias jumps in. “Oh, that’s easy. He was going there to find me.”
Her face snaps to Elias’s like a bird tracking prey. “You?”
“We had a bit of an argument the night before,” Elias says, his voice warm, overly casual, swimming with that unmistakably honeyed tone of nothing-at-all-is-wrong. “I’d ran off back to my mom like a big baby. She operates the Scarlet Sands. It’s sort of a family business thing.” Jessica’s eyebrows lift, surprised by that, apparently. “And because Kyle doesn’t have a car himself, well, I guess Brock came dropping in on Kyle at exactly the right time. The two of them drove the few hours to the hotel, found me, Kyle and I made up, and that’s that.” Elias puts a hand on Kyle’s shoulder, gives it a squeeze and a rub, then faces Jessica again. “I bet your husband’s still there, sleeping off his bender in his father’s fancy suite. He was wasted when they arrived, from what I heard. Right, Kyle?”