“It sucks,” she said. “They’re family, but it sucks.”
“Do you know where we can find Zane?” Connor asked.
“No. She was telling the truth—he does disappear. Sometimes they go up or down the shore. Like she said, he gets obsessed with things. Some idea or hobby or whatever. He’s been secretive lately, which is a new one for him. He usually likes to talk.” Her voice was dry. “I had the sense he’d fallen into some new project. I don’t know what—’cause secretive. But when he was here, he was on his screen more than usual, said he was doing his ‘research.’”
“What about his friends?”
“John, Beyo, and Marcus,” she said. “His own little gang.”
“He was in charge?” I asked, reading her tone.
“Oh yeah. Zane doesn’t take instruction well; he decides. And the others are basically zeta males. They’d do whatever Zane said.”
Connor looked away for a moment, gazed at the water, brow furrowed as if considering . . . or deciding, before shifting his gaze back to her. “Evelyn, I’m going to level with you—I think your brother is involved in the attacks on Loren and on the bonfire. We need to find him before anyone else is hurt.”
She just looked at him, expression blank. “I can’t say I’m surprised. But I honestly don’t know where he is. You could ask his friends, but even if they knew, they wouldn’t tell you.”
And presuming they were here, I thought, and not with Zane. Given the attack had involved multiple creatures, the latter seemed more likely.
“Do you think your mom would let us look through his room?” I asked.
“Oh. Um, she probably wouldn’t.” Evelyn smiled, and there was nothing happy about it. “But I pay the rent, and I will.”
* * *
* * *
“Zane borrowed something of mine,” Evelyn threw out as we passed her mother, still on the couch, now with a beer in one hand and a screen in the other.
We followed her down the hallway, passing a small bathroom cluttered with knickknacks to a bedroom on the left. She opened the door, and the smell of unwashed sheets and stale beer wafted out.
“He’s classy,” Evelyn said, surveying the carnage.
I’d have said it looked like someone had tossed the room, except that I suspected that was its normal state. There were a small bed, a bureau, a nightstand, a desk. An entertainment screen and a closet with two sliding doors. There were clothes everywhere—socks on the floor, jeans across the bed, a pile of shirts in a laundry basket, a pile of everything spilling out from the closet floor. Empty beer bottles stood in groups in the few empty spaces not covered with clothes, like bowling pins waiting for the roll.
This was a far cry from Georgia’s cabin or ours, from the house Marian and Arne shared. And farther still from the Pack’s Chicago HQ.
“I’ll wait outside,” Evelyn said, and left us alone.
“Thoughts?” I asked. “Hazmat suits?”
“What a fucking mess,” Connor muttered, and I had the sense he wasn’t just talking about the debris field.
“Yeah.” Giving up any hope that I’d walk out of this room without needing a shower, I dived in.
The bureau was closest, so I went there first, picked through the detritus with a fingertip. There were coins and credit tokens, pieces of gum, pens, peanut shells, and crumbs (assorted). No wallet, no notepad with scribbled secrets, no magic potion.
“He’s a pig,” I said.
“No argument.” Connor flipped back the blankets on the bed, throwing discarded clothes and funk into the air.
I opened a few drawers, found them mostly empty but for a random T-shirt here and there. Not surprising, given most of the clothes were on the floor.
While Connor kicked through the stuff on the floor, I walked over to the desk. Here, there were glimmers of the boy Zane had been. A small yellow car, a baseball, a scouting pin, all of it scattered with the same garbage as the bureau.
I unwadded a ball of paper, scanned an old-fashioned receipt, the kind handwritten on a carbon paper pad. The store’s name was printed on the receipt, the amount listed but the items identified only as “Misc.”
“Have you ever been to the Crystal Inferno?” I asked him.
“Not that I’m aware of. What is it?”
“Looks like a store in town. A few weeks ago, Zane spent four hundred bucks there. Or he has the receipt of someone else who did.”
Frowning, Connor came around the bed, glanced at the receipt I held out. “What the hell does this guy want with crystals?”
“Maybe that’s his latest obsession,” I said. “But if he bought crystals, where are they?”
“That’s a very good question,” Connor said, glancing around. “You find anything else?”
“No. But I haven’t gone into the closet. I’m not brave enough.”
He chuckled. “Let’s start with the receipt and see how far we go.”
We walked back into the living room. “Have you ever been to the Crystal Inferno?” Connor asked Jude.
She snorted. “I’m not wasting money on hippie crystals and herbs. We’re already magic. Don’t need any of that nonsense.”
I guessed she wasn’t aware her son’s feelings were different.
“Then we’ll thank you for your time and get out of your hair.”
“Sure, chief,” she said, and lifted her bottle in salute.
* * *
* * *
We met Alexei in a plot of green between the Williams house and our cabin.
“Anything?” Connor asked.
Alexei shook his head. “Gone. Cabin’s a mess, small for the three of them, and needed airing out. It was disgusting, but they haven’t been there in a few days. Smelled musty. Milk’s spoiled. I dug around, didn’t find anything that indicated where they might be or how they’re making the transformation. You find anything?”
“Nothing about where they are or what they’re doing,” Connor said. “Zane’s a punk—and not in the charming way I was a punk,” he added for my benefit. “Family confirms he’s a troublemaker, gets fixated on things, and leads the others around.”
“We did find this,” I said, and offered him the receipt.
Alexei’s brows lifted. “Who spends four hundred bucks at a place called the Crystal Inferno?”
“Someone buying magic supplies?” Connor offered.