The Lance Brody Series: Books 3 and 4

by Robertson Jr, Michael

  The road became completely white, making it impossible to tell where the asphalt ended and the shoulder began. Lance moved further to his left, imagining he was now walking directly down the center of the road, wanting the reassurance of hard ground beneath him as to not twist an ankle in some unseen dip or hill or hole in the earth along the shoulder. Ahead of him, he’d be able to see headlights easily enough to avoid oncoming traffic. Behind him, he hoped for the same—a sound of a growling engine or the splash of his shadow across the ground as warm lights grew brighter. If a car came from behind, he’d stick out his thumb and hope for a ride.

  Because if nothing else, the prickling at the base of his skull back in the box truck had told Lance everything he needed to know—for now, that was. He was supposed to be walking this direction. Toward the town. And despite his near complete lack of understanding about how and why the Universe operated—especially when it came to his own abilities and inclinations—he had grown to trust it enough to believe he would make it to his destination.

  Unless the Universe was as awful at predicting the weather as your average meteorologist, and this snowstorm had come as a surprise. If that was the case, he might die of hypothermia. But he supposed there were worse ways to go.

  His mother had always loved snow. Fall was her favorite season—as it was his, too—but that didn’t stop her from marveling at the beauty of a fresh blanket of snow. He’d found her many mornings standing on their small back patio after a night of snowfall, wearing her warm winter robe and her snow boots, a mug of tea steaming in her hand, held closely to her lips. She’d stand motionless, save the occasional sips of tea, staring out at their backyard, taking in the wonder.

  “I love the sound,” she’d said to him once, when she’d caught him watching her from the opened patio sliding door.

  “The sound?” he’d asked, lowering his own mug of coffee.

  “The silence that comes with snow.” She turned and smiled at him. “It helps mute everything that’s not pure.”

  Pamela Brody said a lot of things that Lance wasn’t sure he ever understood fully. Including her dying words to him: “Go, Lance. It’s only what’s right. I love you.”

  And then she was gone. Her sacrifice complete. Leaving him to uphold his end of the terrible bargain.

  A vibration on Lance’s leg snapped him out of his memory and back to the bitter cold of the present. It pulsed a steady rhythm, paused, and then began to pulse again. He regrettably pulled one hand free from his hoodie’s pouch, the cold air stinging his bared fingers, and then stuffed his hand into the pocket of his shorts, pulling out his cell phone.

  The old flip phone’s tiny blue screen weakly displayed her name.

  Leah.

  They’d not spoken since earlier that morning, which now felt like a very long time ago, as Lance had just agreed to take Neil up on his offer of a ride. Which had only been a short couple of hours since that fateful showdown on the beach with his foes. Looking around him now, as Lance found himself caught in the middle of a snowstorm, it seemed impossible that twenty-four hours ago he’d been walking the streets of Sugar Beach and enjoying an unseasonably warm day. It was as if he’d entered another world. Another time.

  Droplets of snow peppered his phone’s screen, blotting out her name. He wiped at them with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and flipped the phone open, pressing it hard to his ear to help cut out the sound of the wind.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. A bit of dead air and the hiss of static.

  “Hello? Leah?”

  “Lance … are you…?”

  Lance stopped walking. Pressed the flat of his palm against his other ear. “Leah? Can you hear me?”

  “Can’t hear … driving … okay?”

  Lance pulled the phone away from his ear and checked the reception bars. Found only the single tiny one still present. The one that basically said, Screw you, we both know I’m worthless. But to make matters worse, his battery was nearly dead.

  He put the phone back to his ear and said, “Hey, I don’t know if you can hear me or not, but I’m okay. My phone’s about to die, but I want you to know I haven’t forgotten what I said earlier. I promise I’ll let you know as soon as—”

  There were three quick beeps in his ear and then silence.

  His phone had died.

  Lance said another bad word under his breath and then squinted his eyes and looked up to the ever-darkening sky, as if searching for some technology god he could blame for his phone’s shortcomings. All he ended up getting was snow in one of his nostrils.

  He sighed and shoved his now-dead cell phone back in his pocket. He wondered if Leah had heard anything at all of what he’d said. He hoped so, because he was serious.

  Earlier, before he’d joined Neil in the box truck, he’d told Leah that as soon as he knew where he was going, he’d tell her. And he would. He was ready. He’d come to the realization—not on his own, but with the help of friends (some living, some not) over the last couple of months—that it wasn’t his job to protect her. At least not in the sense that he’d thought it was. Life was too short to shield yourself from those you loved, from those who made life worth living. Leah was a headstrong woman who could make her own decisions, take her own risks. It was not Lance’s job, nor did he have the authority, to stop her.

  Plus, he missed her desperately. And the feeling seemed to be reciprocated.

  Despite a not-quite-dispelled feeling of uneasiness—because no matter what, Lance knew he was not done fighting the evil lurking in the shadows—he was excited to know that he wouldn’t have to continue on alone forever.

  There was her.

  There was him.

  And soon they would be them.

  With a fresh burst of feel-good adrenaline, Lance pushed ahead through the snow. After what felt like an hour but was likely only twenty minutes, the sky was nearly black and another inch of snow had fallen—maybe more—and Lance’s mood began to falter again. How far away was the town still? And could he make it there in the pitch black of the early night? Worse, if he were to freeze to death on the side of this road—or even in the middle of it—how long would it be before somebody found him?

  And how would Leah ever know?

  It was this last thought alone that propelled him faster. He tucked his head down against the wind and willed his legs to work harder. He wasn’t in as good of shape as when he’d been a high school basketball star, but he still had some stamina to give.

  This would not be the end. He knew that, deep down, even if the evidence seemed to suggest the contrary.

  Ahead, fifty yards, maybe a bit more, the road curved to the right, disappearing around an outcropping of trees. With his head down the way it was, Lance hadn’t noticed that the woods had been encroaching in, closer and closer to the road. Beyond the trees that filled out the curve in the road, there was the faint glow of yellow light.

  Lance Brody, like a moth to a flame, nearly sprinted all the way to it. He rounded the bend in the road and stopped in his tracks, sneakers skidding in the snow.

  He stared ahead, breathing hard, white plumes puffing from his mouth with each breath and vanishing into the night.

  He’d found a motel.

  2

  It was full dark when Lance rounded the corner and found the motel. A black and starless sky above and the dull white of the snow-covered ground below.

  The motel itself, a long single-story strip of building that resembled a discarded cigarette carton, ran parallel to the road, set back far enough to allow for a small parking lot that was just big enough for guests to nose their vehicles up to the front of their rooms—If there’d been any guests, that was. The parking lot was empty, a river of undisturbed snow that glowed almost yellow under the dim lights of the motel’s overhang that ran along its front, giving potential guests protection from the elements as they ushered their bags to and from their vehicles. There were six rooms in total. Six closed doors. Six dark windows. At the fa
r end of the building, beneath a tall utility pole with a makeshift spotlight shining down—this had been the light Lance had seen from the opposite side of the bend—was another room with an all-glass door and a bigger window than the rest. Behind this door and window, there was light. Warm and pleasant. In the window, a red neon sign read: OFFICE. A Coke machine hummed just outside the office door, in between it and the first of the rooms for rent.

  Lance stood in the middle of the road and took this all in, letting his eyes slide over the building from a distance as the snow continued to fall. A weathered marquee sign sat unevenly on the outskirts of the lot, just inside the cone of light cast by the spotlight. Plain black letters spelled: VACANCY.

  Lance wondered when the last time somebody had needed to add the word NO to the sign had been. He took another look at the building, then up and down the forgotten road he was standing on, and assumed it had been a very, very long time.

  Despite the glow of the lights, the sudden beacon presented to him on his unknown path, Lance’s eyes kept searching the darkness that stretched in both directions on either side of him. He looked up and beyond the motel’s roof, barely able to make out the tops of the trees, their branches swaying in the wind that still gusted and rushed at him.

  There was a feeling of isolation that seemed all at once unnerving. But there was something else in the air, too. Something heavier. Something more akin to … desperation.

  It seemed to reach out from the row of darkened rooms and try to grab him, pull him in with an icy grip.

  But maybe that was just the wind.

  Maybe it wasn’t.

  Lance took a step closer to the motel, and when he felt the tingle at the base of his skull, the slight buzz that crept up his neck, he knew with great clarity that he’d been mistaken. It was not the town he was supposed to reach this evening. It was this place.

  This motel.

  The cold had chilled him to his bones, and the snow was only getting deeper. Without even the slightest concern as to why he was needed here, Lance Brody walked toward the motel’s office. He could start to figure out the rest once he was warm again. He would pay large amounts of money for some coffee right now.

  His sneakers shuffled through the snow as he crossed the last few feet of road, and then he stepped into the motel’s parking lot and—

  He woke up lying on his side with half his face buried in the snow. He sat up, gasping and spitting snow, brushing it from his face and neck and hair. His ears were ringing, almost painfully, as if they’d just popped after a huge elevation change, and his heart was thumping in his chest as if he’d had not just one cup of coffee but several pots. The motel was before him, blurred and swaying left and right, almost as if it were spinning. The individual lights recessed in the overhang heliographed and twinkled like stars.

  A rush of nausea overcame him, and Lance closed his eyes tight and swallowed down sour bile rising in the back of his throat. He tried to calm himself, taking deep breaths of cold air and holding it in his lungs for a five count before exhaling and repeating.

  Focus, Lance. Focus.

  He focused on the clean air, the coldness of the snow beneath him, the sound of his own heart beating in his chest. He continued with his deep breathing and slowly the ringing in his ears subsided, the nausea passed. Finally, he opened his eyes and saw the motel had stopped moving and come back into focus.

  The Coke machine still hummed, and all the windows except for the office were still dark.

  Lance stood, slowly, and adjusted his backpack on his shoulders. Brushed the snow off the rest of him and then looked down at the half-assed snow-angel he’d managed to make when he’d collapsed.

  What happened?

  Standing in the parking lot, he turned and looked behind him, back to the road. He saw his own footprints in the snow, barely filled in at all, leading right to the place where he’d collapsed.

  I wasn’t out long, he thought. Not if I can still see the prints so clearly.

  To further validate this thought, in a matter of seconds, he watched as the footprints began to vanish before his eyes, the heavily falling snow doing its best to erase all memory of Lance’s travel.

  He tried to think, tried to replay the last few moments in his memory and make sense of it. But there was nothing. One moment he’d started walking toward the motel’s office, and the next he was on the ground.

  A normal person—one without Lance’s gifts and abilities—would probably become concerned about their own health, worry and fret about what sort of medical ailment they were suffering that would cause such a sudden collapse. But Lance did not ponder his heart or his brain or anything else, because he’d experienced these certain types of physical anomalies before in his lifetime—reactions to the Universe and spirit world sending him signals, issuing warnings.

  The buzzing at the base of his skull was the most basic example of this.

  But what had just happened … it was different.

  Powerful.

  Lance had no idea what it meant, what he’d just been offered. But, as he looked down at the snow and watched as his footprints completely disappeared, he would be willing to bet his collapse had occurred at the exact moment he’d stepped off the road and touched the motel’s parking lot.

  Part of him wanted to walk back, cross the parking lot’s threshold and step back onto the road. But another part of him was not ready for another blast of whatever had just knocked him down for the count. And another part—a smaller part that was lurking deeper down, hiding behind the rest—was afraid to try for another reason.

  What if he wasn’t allowed to leave? What if something stopped him?

  High on a dose of curiosity and fascination, while trying to ignore the bite of fear that accompanied it, Lance Brody turned and walked across the parking lot toward the office.

  The marquee promised there was a vacancy, after all.

  3

  By the time he reached the door to the motel’s office, Lance felt mostly normal again. The effects of his temporary blackout had faded away and he was able to suppress the coldness in the air from taking a front seat in his consciousness—not the cold from the snow and wind, mind you, but the coldness that seemed to radiate from the motel itself, the feeling that there was something here that needed him … or wanted him. There was a difference, though both could be dangerous.

  He stepped up onto the concrete walkway that ran along the front of the motel’s rooms and stamped some of the snow from his shoes. Underneath the overhang, the snow was not as deep yet, but the wind was doing its best to blow the stuff in to remedy the situation, even things out. Lance passed the humming Coke machine and stood in front of the office door, taking a quick second to peer in through the glass.

  For a moment, he flashed back to his first day in Westhaven, the day after his mother had died. It felt like a long time ago now. A very long time. That had been the first day of the rest of his life. An overused phrase, but accurate. The beginning of his journey that had no defined ending or purpose—none that he was aware of, that is. He’d walked along the sidewalks and roads of Westhaven that first day and had found himself in a very similar situation to this: finding a small motel, feeling its pull, walking into the office with no sense of expectation.

  And he’d found Leah.

  It was one of the worst days of his life, but also one of the best.

  He’d lost so much, but he’d found something amazing.

  How he missed her.

  Lance shook the snow from his hoodie, pushed open the door, and walked inside the motel’s office, ready to see what he’d find this time.

  * * *

  An old-fashioned bell hung above the office door and gave off a startling jingle when Lance pushed through it. Already on edge after the parking lot incident, Lance jumped at the noise and felt his heart slide up into his throat. In his anxiousness, he stepped directly over the floor mat just inside the threshold and his wet sneaker slid on the linoleum, causing him to
do a bit of a half-split before he managed to reach out and grab the door and stop himself from getting a pulled groin. He righted himself, stood up fully, adjusted his backpack, and looked around to apologize to whoever might have witnessed his clumsiness.

  But there was nobody there to see.

  An L-shaped counter took up the entire left side of the room, with a ledger book, a banker’s lamp, a small bell, and stacks of assorted pamphlets and papers organized neatly across it. A bowl of peppermint candies was half-empty—the only thing that looked alive on the counter aside from the glowing bulb in the small lamp. On the wall behind the counter were a framed business license, and a large calendar—a Norman Rockwell-esque painting of a family sitting down to what looked like Thanksgiving dinner above the November days and weeks. Somebody had been using a red marker to X off each day that had passed. To the right of the calendar was a wooden pegboard with six brass hooks in need of a good polishing. Keys hung from each hook, attached to large plastic key chains labeled with faded black numbers. Numbers one through six. A key for each room. All keys were accounted for. Past the pegboard, there was a closed door leading to a back room with the word PRIVATE painted in black.

  On the back wall was an open door leading into a dark hole in which Lance could just make out the silhouette of a toilet and sink, and along the right, opposite the counter, were a watercooler, the jug atop also half-full, just like the bowl of candies, and a row of metal folding chairs that could have been brand-new or a hundred years old—the same ambiguous kind you find at every church potluck or grade-school assembly in rural America. The wood paneling on the walls and the peeling linoleum flooring told the story of how long it’d been since the place had been remodeled.

  But it was not an altogether unpleasant space. It smelled clean, if not without a hint of mildew, and the baseboard heating hummed and choked along well enough to keep it warm.