his bedroom. He shut the door behind him.
There wasn’t much to it, just an old queen bed with a squeaky brass frame he’d picked up at a block sale and a dresser from somebody’s attic. The dresser and the walls were painted in institutional shades of beige and the only pop of color was the quilted bedspread, a flowered monstrosity from the mid-1970s. He kept telling himself he was going to have to replace it once he started dating again. He just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
Someday.
He glanced down at the treasure cupped to his chest. The framed photograph. Him, and June, and little Megan, one week after they came home from the hospital together. He set it on the dresser. A memory of better days, when the world was bright and boundless.
Not really a memory, though. He couldn’t actually recall when the picture had been taken; it just existed, an artifact that had been with him for years, carrying the hazy aftermath of emotions more than concrete recollection. His actual memories of his wife and daughter had all been distilled into a single hour on a single day in the high summer heat, five years ago.
He looked to the bed, his limbs leaden, feeling heavy and numb as he unbuttoned his shirt. He’d be back there soon enough, remembering it all, reliving it all over again. Just like every other night.
18.
Seelie lay on a strange couch, in a strange apartment, in the pitch darkness. It was okay.
There was a mindset for couch-surfing. It was tricky at first, awkward, but she’d mastered the sleight-of-brain trick with practice and time. You just had to give up the idea of “home” being anything but where you were in that given moment. No attachments but you and your backpack. Traveling light, no expectations, no hopes, gliding along with the flow of the day. You just had to be comfortable in your skin.
That part she still had trouble with. But she was getting there.
She had a good feeling about Tyler. Feelings could lie, but she’d honed her survival instincts like a prehistoric hunter with a flint-tipped spear. Meet enough creeps, you started picking up their scent. Tyler felt like one of the good guys. Too good. The kind of guy who could get himself rolled if he opened his heart and his nest to the wrong person, and sooner or later he probably would.
He had Nell, though, and Seelie had the impression Nell would go off like a cannon on anybody who messed with her friends. Hell, she didn’t even know Seelie, and she’d still gotten up close and personal with a hit man to protect her—
Not a hit man, though. With Amber. Who was apparently working for the missionary, doing his dirty work.
It didn’t make any sense. More than anything she’d seen and learned in the last day, that was the one stumbling block that threw Seelie off her stride, making her shift and turn on the couch while sleep danced just out of her grasp. Why would the missionary murder Ducky, then turn around and recruit his girlfriend? Why would Amber say yes? She kept thinking Stockholm syndrome, or that Amber was too scared to say no.
But she’d heard Amber’s voice behind her, in the cinema, and Amber didn’t sound scared at all. Not one bit. And when Seelie turned, there was a piano wire in her grip. Ready to strangle her, just like the woman dying on the silver screen.
The image replayed itself behind Seelie’s eyelids. She curled tight under the fluffy blanket, sofa cushions rustling beneath her. Exhaustion made her thoughts drift. They took on the garish hues of an ’80s noir movie, sex and knives and Technicolor, as she searched for the missing piece that would explain everything.
Without finding it, she tumbled into dreaming.
* * *
Seelie’s feet carried her up a short, groaning staircase. Bent and broken nails jutted from one step, another leaning so far it threatened to slide loose beneath her. Fat black roaches scurried along the rotten wallboards, the hallway crooked and so tight she had to turn sideways to pass. Doorways without doors opened into smoky warrens of rooms, one lit by a lantern draped under gauzy red silk. The stifling air smelled like cheap gin and woodsmoke and vomit.
Bottles clinked somewhere beneath her feet, and wooden cups thumped on tables and braying voices half sang, half shouted a drinking song: “Some say women are like the seas, some the waves, and some the