FIFTEEN
“I’m not complaining—”
“Every time you say that, it’s a lie,” Marc said. “Every. Time.”
“—but what’s happening?”
It was two o’clock in the morning and for some reason, we were in our basement. The creepy, gigantic, horrible, right-out-of-every-horror-movie-ever basement. It wasn’t so much the hour as the fact that, again: basement. I’d been living here for years and could count on both hands how often I’d been down here. And frankly, I was annoyed I needed both.
Sinclair had strolled to the far end while Tina, Marc, and I tripped along in his wake. His dark suit was impeccable and, even more annoying, didn’t look out of place. Sinclair could wear a suit anywhere. Anywhere. Sometimes I forgot he started out as a farm boy who never wore shoes once the snow was gone for the year.
“The Wyndhams have requested a follow-up, Elizabeth.”
“Basement.”
“And then, in what I cannot imagine is a coincidence—”
“Basement?”
“The sensors tripped.”
“But why are we in the basement?”
“The ones at the dock.”
“So maybe we should be at the dock? And not the basement? Also, what dock? The biggest river in the universe is, what? Two miles from here? That same river comes with a zillion docks.”
“The Mississippi isn’t even the biggest river on this planet.”
“It’s still a bigass river, Marc! Why aren’t we out freezing our asses on it, instead of freezing our asses down here?” A measure of my consuming basement hatred: I’d rather be on the Mississippi River in early spring in total darkness for who knew how long, doing who knew what, than be in our basement.
DARLING.
“Ow!” I rubbed my temple. Sinclair’s exasperated thought had ripped through my brain like a fishhook.
“And obviously,” he continued out loud, “the Wyndhams are coming through the tunnel, the entrance and exit of which, you’ll recall, is in our basement.”
“None of that sounds right.”
The basement. The tunnel. Because there weren’t enough clichés in life, ours was a basement the psycho from Silence of the Lambs would envy and it came with a secret tunnel leading to a moonlit dock on the river. Because of course it did.
We’d had to use it only once, thank God, because at the time we were running to keep ahead of the angry vampires on their way to kill me.