Winter Lost

I frowned at him, and his eyes warmed. “All right, Mercy, what don’t you want to tell me?”

I bounced on the bed next to him and put my head on his shoulder. “You’re going to make me talk.” I sighed.

“Yes,” he said.

I heaved another sigh. “That ghost shouldn’t have given me any trouble. It shouldn’t have been able to trap me. I shouldn’t have needed someone else to destroy it.”

Adam kissed the top of my head and let the silence continue, because he was good at interrogations.

“I don’t think it belonged here at the lodge,” I told him. “The spider said the hungry ghost sensed me and traveled here to enjoy a meal. Apparently, something the Soul Taker did made me a good snack for hungry ghosts and probably other things that feed that way.” I paused. “I’m pretty sure that I didn’t help matters when I fixed Jack.”

Adam’s muscles were tense against me. “Whatever the Soul Taker did to you, it’s not getting better,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I shrugged. “Comes and goes, mostly.”

“How often do you have a headache?”

Busted. I shrugged. “Nothing too bad.”

“Mercy.”

“I think I need to go look for help,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Where?”

“That’s the eighty-four-thousand-dollar question,” I said. “And that’s the reason I haven’t looked for help before this.”

“Sixty-four,” he corrected.

“Inflation,” I offered. More seriously, I said, “There’s Sherwood.”

Adam shook his head. “I asked him. He says he can tell there’s something wrong with your magic, but it’s deeper than that. He is afraid that if he tries to mess with it, he’ll only make it worse for you.”

I lifted my head so I could see his face. “You’ve been going behind my back?”

“You weren’t doing anything about it,” he said without shame or remorse. “We’ve all been worried.”

When I attempted a fierce stare, he said dryly, “You’d have done the same thing for me.”

“Fair enough,” I had to admit, resettling myself until I was lying next to him, my head on his thigh. My head did hurt, and the warmth of his body was soothing. “I assume you’ve talked to Zee?”

“He’s been looking since October,” Adam said. “He told me he has something he is pursuing, but he has that sour expression when he talks about it. I don’t think we should count on Zee pulling your fat out of the fire.”

“Well,” I said after a minute, “there’s my brother. But any help he can give is stuck in the world of ‘There’s a Hole in My Bucket’ territory. We need to fix him before he can help. And to fix him we have to find the harp that looks like a lyre.”

Neither of us mentioned my father. But both of us thought about it. Coyote’s methods of fixing something were terrifying.

“I think I smell food cooking,” I said. “And, dear Liza, the sooner we get out and meet these people, the sooner we can find the artifact and get my brother free.”

Adam took a deep breath and said, “I suppose we go look for some straw, then, dear Henry.” He hummed a few bars of the song as we headed out.

—

The reception desk was still unmanned, and Adam’s half-written note was undisturbed. Adam popped into the office to finish writing the note and added an addendum about the bedding and umbrella we’d destroyed. He didn’t say what had happened to them.

When he was finished, we followed the scent of breakfast down the long hall to the opposite side of the hotel. We walked by a wall of smoked glass that protected a speakeasy-style room with a dozen small tables and two large ones. A sign proclaimed that The Gunner’s Moll was closed for the season.

According to Elyna, Looking Glass Hot Springs closed down on Labor Day weekend and reopened on Memorial Day. The restaurant was a separate business that was open for the regular season. The resort opened in December every year on a limited basis for weddings.

During December, the hotel staff cooked breakfast and made sack lunches for guests. The guests were encouraged to take themselves off to one of the local communities for dinner—or hire a caterer or chef who could use the kitchen facilities. The groom’s family had planned on bringing their own cook, but like most of the party, he had been scheduled to arrive yesterday.

We passed the door leading outside to the hot tub area and took a left through a short corridor and into a dining hall still (according to the signage) awaiting renovations.

The plank pine floor had seen better days, and there were water stains on the dropped ceiling tiles. Five out of the eight fluorescent light fixtures worked—and those were better suited to my garage than a hostelry of any kind. But the music piped into the room—presumably generator powered, because the kitchen was—came from a decent sound system. Elyna had told us the lodge had fuel enough to keep the generators going for a couple of weeks. I hoped that we could resolve the cause of the storm before the fuel supply was put to the test.