Hunter smiled. Ethan realized it might have been only the second time he’d ever seen him truly smile. “You’d be surprised how much a guy can change, knowing a guy like you.”
A sudden bout of coughing made Hunter choke. He released Ethan’s ankles, thumped his chest, covered his mouth. He gasped for air.
Freed, Ethan pushed himself a few feet away, only to freeze when the room’s lights flickered. A wave ofSHRIEKSwashed over the hotel, sounding closer than ever. Hunter caught his breath. He wiped his palm on the carpet. Ethan saw blood on the man’s lips.
“Please, Ethan,” Hunter said. “Help me get the bed over the window. We can barricade the doors with the nightstands and the dresser.”
When Ethan still didn’t move, Hunter pointed to something on the floor nearby. Carefully, Ethan followed his finger and saw their guns resting not a foot away.
“You can have whichever one you want. Take both, I don’t care. We just need to get busy. If he’s smart, Jack Allen’s going to take out the generator, and then where will we be?”
Ethan hesitated a moment longer. He looked from the guns to the tears in Hunter’s eyes to the mattress half slewed to the floor. He wondered if he could ever trust Hunter. He wondered if he could ever trusthimselfafter being such a fool.
This man is going to get you into the sort of trouble you cain’t never get out of.
Hunter never looked away from Ethan’s face, even as he spat a wad of blood and phlegm toward the trash can. “Maybe Iama monster, Ethan. But have you considered that could be exactly what you need right now?”
Ethan dragged himself to his feet. He didn’t like their odds, he didn’t like Hunter, but his mother hadn’t raised a quitter. “Where do we start?”
KYLA
She, too, was on the floor of her room, curled into a ball, alone.It’ll pass, she tried to tell herself.It’s just another dream.
But of course it wasn’t. Kyla wasn’t asleep. The night wasn’t that kind.
Fernanda was dead. Again and again, Kyla heard that wet squelch as the fountain pen buried itself in Fernanda’s brain. It didn’t feel possible. It didn’t feelfair.Fernanda was too calm and poised to die. Too careful. She couldn’t be dead.
She couldn’t have left Kyla to handle this alone.
Kyla rose to her feet, barely thinking. She started for the front door, thinking that she should go find Ethan—he was the closest thing she had left to a friend here—but then she remembered that Ethan would be with Hunter, and Kyla had been right about that man from the start: Hunter was exactly the sort of specialist Frank O’Shea liked to hire.
Going to find Ethan would also involve going outside. When the lamp on Kyla’s nightstand flickered and a chorus ofSHRIEKSechoed around the motel, Kyla knew that going outside was a very bad idea.
Think, Kyla. Think.
She took an inventory of her situation. She hadn’t thought to grab Fernanda’s gun off the woman’s corpse back in the office. Like an idiot, she’d even dropped her own weapon in the scramble to escape the thing behind the walnut door. Kyla was four foot nine, weighed barely a hundred pounds, and she was unarmed. She didn’t like her chances.
As she turned to look at the heavy lamp on her nightstand, her eyes passed over the room’s tall armoire. Stopped. Moved back. She approached the armoire, studied it from several angles, gave the soffit at the bottom a soft kick.
She might not have liked her chances, but maybe being small had its advantages.
ETHAN
The power died right as they got the long dresser pushed against the front door. There wasn’t time to barricade the back. With a hiss and a click, the lamp on their nightstand went out, followed an instant later by the lights outside. This time, it all felt final. There was no faint half-light. No gloaming.
Darkness came over the motel, thick and permanent.
“He killed the generator,” Hunter whispered. As if Ethan couldn’t guess.
Hunter pressed something cold and metal into Ethan’s hand. The Python he’d stolen from the diner in Turner. Hunter held the shotgun they’d brought from Ellersby. He was wheezing hard.
He whispered, “Watch the back door.”
Ethan had expected the darkness to bring a new wave ofSHRIEKS, but when the lights went out for good, he heard instead something far worse: a soft rush of feet, a great rustle of many wings, a strange animal hiss that started in the parking lot and echoed around the motel. The hiss felt coordinated, steady, almost rhythmic. It made Ethan think of the pulse of sonar, or the whistle of deer hunters circling their prey.
His eyes had adjusted well enough to the dark for Ethan to make out the shape of the back door. Hunter pressed his back to Ethan’s. He was barely breathing.
Ethan heard a creak of wood behind him, directly outside their front door. He heard a long, sustained hiss. It was echoed by another hiss, a third.
