by Sean Easley
Maybe not yet, but one day we’ll be back.
I place my other hand against the wall, reaching out for the Hotel sword with my thoughts. The dye flows through the Vesima’s roots—I can feel it as clearly as I feel the warmth in my veins.
With my will connected to the sword, my clothes dripping with dye, I focus my intent. It’s like controlling an icon, or my suit. Only, empowered with all these magics at once, I feel so much stronger. We will protect the Hotel’s secrets.
In my mind I gather the Hotel knockers scattered all over the world. The veils of the Nightvine too, intertwined with the roots of the Vesima. I bring them all together into one knotted bunch—one flowering cluster—and yank as though I’m ripping a weed from Oma’s garden.
The road shudders beneath us as the Hotel knockers pull free from the world to join with the Nightvine instead.
It’s done. Every knocker in the Hotel network has been re-bound. All, that is, except one. One last door, tucked away on the seventeenth floor, where the dye hadn’t quite reached yet. I couldn’t get to it to pull it free.
But I don’t tell the others that. Not yet.
“The Hotel is closed,” I tell them. “Let’s get out of here.”
• • •
The Nightvine has changed. The Blight spreads more quickly now, its rancid indigo blossoms choking out the Nightvine’s pale green ones. The cats of the vine race past, yowling and hissing at the dreadful blooms that have invaded their home. Even the emerald sky seems duller, drearier.
A little ways down the road, we find Rahki nursing a headache, back to her senses now that she’s out of the Hotel.
“My coin was leading me home, then suddenly it wanted to lead me everywhere,” she says.
“It’s good to have you back,” I tell her after explaining what I’ve done. “I’m sorry I broke my word.”
She frowns. After all that’s happened, I’m sure she’ll have a few words for me later, but right now it doesn’t seem quite that important.
The next veil we find lands us in a circle of ancient stones standing in a wide-open field. I hold the veil open for everyone to leave the green glow of the Nightvine behind and step out under the starry English sky.
The bluestones of Stonehenge seem to glow in the moonlight.
“How’d we end up back here?” Cass asks. “And why Stonehenge?”
“Djhut said these stones have a lot of old binding left in them,” I tell them. “When I reshaped the Hotel and the Nightvine together, I bound all of the leftover veils back to this place. That way we’d only have one final door to lock.” I only wish it had worked out that way.
I face the bluestone arch and pull out the Key of Lost Things.
The space in the arch ripples as a keyhole forms between the stones.
“Whoa,” Elizabeth says.
I focus my intent, hoping the magic will know what to do, and turn the key. The veil vanishes in a flash of green.
Nico waves a hand through the empty arch. “Is it . . . ?”
“It’s gone,” I say, and lean against the stone. “It’s over.”
Cass groans. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. We kept Stripe from getting what he wants. This is a win.”
I stare at the grass.
“Cameron,” Sana says, “what aren’t you telling us?”
“The dye didn’t reach everywhere like I’d hoped,” I say. “When it was time to reshape the pins, I . . . I couldn’t reach them all. There’s still one root—one door bound to the Hotel that Stripe can use to get inside.” I look up at Cass. “On the seventeenth floor.”
Her eyes glaze, and she clutches Gogo’s fur as she realizes what that means. “Oma’s house.”
“Are you sure?” Sev asks.
“I felt it. The Blight’s already using it to reach out to Stripe. It won’t take him long.”
“We should call her,” Sana says. “Anyone have a phone?”
“His Oma cannot simply unpin the door,” Sev agreed. “The plan only works if we eliminate all routes that Stripe could use to get into the Hotel. To unpin the door from this side would leave that pin in Oma’s possession. All it would take is for Stripe to take that pin from her, and the Blight will be there to welcome him in. The only way to be certain that Stripe cannot reach the Hotel is to use the admiral’s key on the last remaining entrance.” He groans. “Vidit oko, da zub neymyot.”
“Our solution is just out of reach,” Rahki interprets.
“It’s a touch,” Nico says. “We’ll take a sliver back to the Museum, and we can get to your house from there. I lost my sliver in the Hotel, but I’m sure Bee still has hers.”
Bee shakes her head. “That maid lady took mine.”
“No more talk of slivers,” Rahki says, glowering. “They are forbidden.”
Silence falls over our motley bunch. That’s it. All that work, and Stripe is still going to get in.
I look them over, each in turn. Nico in my suit, leaning on the MC’s sword. Cass in Gogo’s arms, Sev in her wheelchair. Rahki and Orban, Sana, Elizabeth, even Bee—they all did everything they were supposed to, and still . . .
Sev rolls forward. “Cameron, do you have the pin I made for you last year?”
A pin? The pin! The one Sev bound to my bedroom. It’s not Hotel-bound, so I didn’t even think about it.
I feel for my pin-sleeves, but they’re not there. Of course not, because Nico’s wearing my suit. I grab him by the lapels and yank him to the side—Nico yelps in surprise—and see the row of pin-sleeves in place of a normal breast pocket. Right on top sits the pin that leads to my bedroom.
“Here!” I say, holding it high and ignoring Nico’s grumbling. But a second revelation sucks the air out of my lungs. We’re standing in a field of giant rocks in the middle of nowhere. There’s not a hinge around for miles.
“Give it to me,” Sev says.
I do as he asks, and watch as he carefully removes a whittling knife from his pocket.
“I had Rahki bring my kit when I woke in the Apothecarium. I was bored,” he says with a shrug, and begins shaving off bits of the pin with his knife.
“What are you doing?” I shout as Sev utterly ruins the perfectly formed pin. “We need that.”
“Trust me.” A few more scrapes shave the tip down to a fine point, and he holds it out to me. “Here.”
I take the pin in my palm. It’s sharp, like the one Dad had. “What did you do to it?”
Bee scoffs. “You don’t know a sliver when you see one?”
A . . . sliver?
“Slivers are cruder and less predictable than pins,” Sev says. “That also makes them easier to craft.”
“No!” Rahki says, and snatches it from me.
“Careful!”
“He can’t use this!” she snaps. “It’s forbidden. Absolutely not allowed.”
Orban shrugs. “Why not? It’s not like the Hotel’s in any position to argue.”
Nico agrees. “I’m pretty sure the rules got a little more flexible when Cam stuck a sword into the Hotel’s heart.”
“But it’s a sliver!” Rahki shouts. “It’s in our contracts. If Cam uses that sliver, he breaks his bond of Law with the Hotel.”
Nico tosses up his arms in frustration. “The Hotel is dead!”
“You don’t know that for sure. I didn’t see what you did in there, but the Hotel has survived a lot over the years. We won’t know what happened until more time has passed, and that means you can’t break that contract, Cameron.”
“I did,” Cass says, shrugging. “I used Bee’s sliver, and the Hotel let me back in just fine. Besides, our options are kinda running out.”
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Rahki crosses her arms. “There are some lines we should never cross.”
“Rahki,” I say, “I already broke my word to you, and I don’t want to do that again. I respect your opinion. I trust you. But . . . we have one shot to make this right.”
She glares at m
e for a long moment. “I am not the bad guy here. You all try to make me out to be the bad guy because I like rules, but I’m not. I only want to do what’s right.”
“I know,” I tell her, “and most of the time we need that, but sometimes . . . sometimes you have to break the rules to do what’s right.”
Rahki exhales, long and slow. “This is a terrible idea.” She bunches up her lips in frustration. “Fine. But only this time. Never again.”
“Great.” I clap my hands together, a little shocked by how happy I am to do something that’s by all accounts awful. “Now, how does it work?”
33
The Shape of Things to Come
My world explodes in a riot of color and sound.
I expect to feel some kind of compression as my body is folded up into the tip of the sliver, but the reality of it is so much more. Weight and wind press into me from all sides. Everything aches and burns, and the light is so bright. I scream—not from pain necessarily but from the ahhhhh!-ness of it all. I’m nowhere. I’m everywhere. I’m zipping across the sky and slipping through cracks underground and bouncing across the surface of water, all at once.
There’s something else in the chaos with me. A presence. I remember sensing this once before, that first week in the Hotel—a darkness hiding in the abyss between the doors. It wants something, but I can’t tell what.
Then the light brightens, pain flares, and all of a sudden, the swirling vortex of loudness stops. The world is quiet, save for a single, screaming voice.
My voice.
I close my mouth and breathe in the smell of my bedroom, which still bears a whiff of eau de cat—or is that me and these stinky clothes?
When I check my limbs to make sure everything’s still in place, I notice the small pinprick of blood on the muscle at the bottom of my thumb. I’m okay.
Now, to stop Stripe.
I race for the living room, but Oma stops me in the hall. “Cammy, I heard shouting. I thought—”
“Out!” I shout. “Get out of the house. Go, now!”
Oma grabs her purse from her bedroom, peppering me with questions, which I dutifully ignore.
Another pained yawp emanates from my room, and Nico comes running out soon after.
“Couldn’t let you do this alone,” he says, winking as though he didn’t just get squished and ripped across the globe to get here. He’s followed by a third shout, and Sana stumbles into the hall after him.
When we reach the front of the house, Oma’s running around the living room grabbing photo albums.
“We’ve got to go!” I urge.
Another cry. Cass’s voice. “Hurry, Gogo! Oh, come on. . . . She can’t fit through the door!” We should have thought of that before slivering Cass and her icon-beast across the Atlantic.
Oma’s still gathering her things when I peek through the curtains next to the front door.
My breath catches. Stripe’s already here, standing in the street, leaning on his rope-shaped cane; his pin-striped suit is perfectly pressed, and his red-banded boater hat is on his head. I thought we’d have more time.
I lock the dead bolt.
Nico peeks through the window with me, the MC’s sword tucked under his arm. “Great.”
“If it isn’t my two favorite urchins,” Stripe calls from the porch, just beyond the door now. “When my old friend said it had a gift for me, I never expected that the gift would involve the two of you. My House made it sound like it has broken free of Nico’s control. Is that true, Mr. Flores? Did you let my House go?”
Nico growls. There’s something else in his look too. Something he’s remembering, maybe, or a question he doesn’t like the answer to.
Stripe raps his cane against the door. “Little pig, little pig, let me come in.”
“Not on your life,” Nico shouts.
“Ah, ‘life.’ You’re all so worried about protecting things like Life and Nature and Law. I can show you a world without those limitations. The bonds were created, and that means they can be destroyed. Once I break these chains, I’ll make you both kings. All you have to do is let me in. Help me claim the deed to the Hotel, and we’ll unlock its mysteries together.”
He still thinks the deed to the Hotel is inside it. At least we have that going for us.
Stripe knocks again. “Come on, Nico. Make a deal with me. Think of all the good times we had. You want more than this world has to offer you—you always have. There are things that only I can give you.”
Nico leans his back against the door, staring blankly at the couch. He’s never told me what his life was like before the Hotel. Not the whole truth, anyway. Stripe raised him, taught him. In all the ways that matter, Mr. Stripe is Nico’s father. But Nico betrayed him to save us.
Which gets me thinking—the Blight never did try to influence me directly. I kept expecting it to because of what happened to Nico, but nothing ever happened. It tricked me, sure, but it never had any form of control. Just like our contract with Stripe said.
Why was it able to influence Nico? Was it because he was locked in that drupe with it for so long? Or was it something else?
Oma steps up beside me and places a hand on my arm. “Cammy—”
“I know what I’m doing, Oma,” I tell her, and for once I mean it. I pull the Key of Lost Things from my pocket. Everyone’s here now. I need to finish this. And this time I won’t leave any back doors open.
“Sorry, Stripe,” I proclaim as loudly as I can. “We’re not accepting reservations at this time. The Hotel’s closed for repairs.”
I insert the key into the door and turn.
Rays of green light burst from the keyhole, pass over the house, and ripple over the walls and furniture like a curtain opening for a play. The glow intensifies, lime-green particles wafting in the air around my friends.
At last the key vanishes from my hand and the floor drops out beneath us before everything goes dark.
• • •
I find myself gazing up into a cloudless Texas sky.
Our home is gone. The whole house just vanished, leaving us exactly where we were, but without a floor beneath our feet. The door, the walls, everything from the roof to the foundation of Oma’s house is . . . lost, and with it our last point of entry into The Hotel Between.
“Are you okay?” I ask Oma as she stands up in the wet clay earth where the house’s foundation once lay. I can see the neighbors’ houses just over the edge of the dirt wall that surrounds us. Thankfully it was only Oma’s house that disappeared.
“I’m fine,” Oma says, attempting to brush the mud off her capris—smearing it, really. She stops mid-smear to stare past me.
At Stripe, who’s glaring a fiery hole through my skull.
Rage radiates off the man in the pin-striped suit as he looms over us from his place on the edge of the earthen wall. My heart pounds, right next to the deed in the inner pocket of my vest. He’s standing right there, on the raised porch that was left behind when the house vanished. Close enough to touch. Close enough to take the deed away from me.
The last time I saw him this close, he threatened to beat me to death with that cane of his. Mom protected me then, but she’s not here now. I don’t even know if she’s anywhere, anymore.
Stripe raises his hands, and I stand and back away, bracing for some kind of attack—some world-splitting act of rage that will wipe us out.
But instead he claps. Slowly at first, then faster. He laughs, too—a mocking sound that makes my neck itch.
“Well done,” he says, popping his cane up into his gloved hand. “The Hotel remains out of my reach, for now.” His tone darkens. “But you haven’t stopped me, boy. What’s lost can always be found.”
His eyes dart to something behind me.
I turn to find Nico gritting his teeth, the MC’s sword leveled at Mr. Stripe.
“Don’t you have somewhere better to be?” Nico asks, jaw set in anger. How could I ever have doubted him?
Stripe’s smile widens
. “Marvelous. Very impressive.” He looks back to me. “It’s a race, then. You and your little band of hoteliers versus me and my . . . resources. We’ll see who arrives at the Hotel first.” He squats and leans over the drop-off, close enough for me to smell his rancid breath. “And this time it’ll be winner take all.”
He tips his hat and turns to leave.
We should stop him, go after him, something to keep him from going back out there into the world, but what can we do? He’s a magic, and we’re just people.
Stripe pauses when he reaches the sidewalk “Oh, and, Nico, don’t presume that I don’t know where you stand, boy. Keep pretending, and you might fool yourself, but you’ll never fool me. Not again.”
We watch as Mr. Stripe disappears around the street corner, whistling a show tune.
I look over at my blood-brother, and he locks eyes with me. There’s always something he’s not saying; always more to his story. Like how the Blight got so much influence over him, or what he meant when he said that he and I could be powerful.
But he proved himself again by helping us protect the Hotel, didn’t he? It’s Stripe who’s trying to manipulate and deceive us.
“That’s . . . not good,” Orban says after Stripe is gone.
“We were going to have to find our way back to the Hotel anyway,” I say. “To save the people we left behind, like Dad.”
“We need to find Agapios, too,” Sev adds. “We must secure the deed so that Mr. Stripe never gets his hands on it.”
Elizabeth meets my gaze. She’s the only one left who knows that Agapios gave the deed to me. I hope she understands how much we need to keep that a secret. The more people who know, the more likely it is that Stripe will figure out we have it and come after us. After me. Elizabeth’s not the best at keeping secrets, though, and like Sev always says, “A chatterbox is a treasure for a spy.”
“Then it’s decided,” I say. “We’ll search for a way to clear the Blight, find the Hotel, and make sure Stripe never sets foot through its doors.”
“Can we eat first?” Nico says. “It’s been two months since I’ve had real food. I’m literally starving.”
