Page 56 of Winter Lost

I rubbed my face with cold hands. If I wasn’t going to use my gloves, I should have just left them at home. I remembered that I’d intended to grab our luggage, but I couldn’t make myself turn my back on the hot springs. Something out there was watching us. I squinted, but I couldn’t see anything.

I put my hip against the quarter panel of the SUV for the connection to Adam—it felt like it was taking him forever to change. In the dark, with the SUV’s tinted windows, I couldn’t see him, but the subtle rocking of the vehicle told me he was in there.

I pulled out my phone, but was unsurprised to see that I still had no reception. I couldn’t look this place up on the Internet. Or contact Honey or Mary Jo to check on Gary. We weren’t cut off, I reminded myself. We could use Adam’s sat phone.

Cold seeped up from the damp legs of my jeans and into my bones.

Eventually the door behind me opened and shut. Safely back in his human body, Adam nudged my shoulder with his own.

“Let’s get you out of the cold,” he said.

He grabbed his duffel and my backpack and took the lead on the way to the main entrance. I was braver with him, so I could take my attention off the lake and look at his backside instead. The jeans he wore weren’t as good as the ones he’d destroyed, but the view was still nice. I trekked behind him, in the path through the drifts that he made, humming an old carol softly to myself.

He laughed. “Not a king or a saint,” he said. “No heat lingers in the very sod where I tread.”

“But the winter bites less coldly,” I said. “You make a pretty good windbreak.” And keeping my eyes on him meant I didn’t have to notice the ghosts. Hopefully, they wouldn’t notice me, either.

As we got to the entrance, I saw that there were Christmas lights strung all over the bare trusses that used to bear the roof of the wraparound porch that clearly, now that I had a closer view, was an original feature. They’d have looked pretty all lit up, but unlit, they only contributed to the bleakness of the place.

I’d thought the door might be locked for the night, but Adam had no trouble opening it. Sleigh bells on the door’s Christmas wreath gaily announced our arrival as a wave of warmth engulfed us. We stepped out of the storm and straight into the first half of the twentieth century. Here, inside, and unexpected given the grimness of the exterior of the building, was the expensive elegance I’d have expected from a resort where billionaires get married.

“Huh,” I said. “I guess you really can’t judge a book by its cover.”

The reception area was small for a building this size, but that made it look more expensive rather than less, a kind of “good things come in small packages” experience. There was room for an elegant couch and a couple of chairs. Two original oil paintings hung on the wall. I would have bet money that they were worth a small fortune. I couldn’t name the artists, but they had the look of art that should be displayed in a museum and not a lodge in the Cabinet Mountains.

Rather than a reception desk, there was an open window into a small office. The counter was figured oak, presumably original to the building from the wear and tear carefully preserved in the varnished surface.

The whole reception area and the parts of the office I could see were immersed in Art Deco design, down to the vase filled with five or six peacock feathers and the burled walnut paneling on the walls. Even the Christmas wreath on the door was done with the sort of spare elegance of the late flapper era.

Adam said, “I feel like I’m a passenger on the Titanic.”

“Or walking onto a movie set,” I agreed, not bothering to correct him. The Titanic sank in 1912, a decade or two earlier than the Art Deco period.

I surveyed him and then looked down at my own travel-stained wet clothes.

“Both of us are terribly underdressed, dear sir.” I borrowed my posh English accent from the one our English werewolf used. I knew I’d gotten it right when Adam grinned at me.

The only touch that was out of place was the pair of plastic battery-operated lanterns illuminating the room. One of them sat on the beautiful counter and the other on the floor beside the couch.

Adam leaned over the counter and grunted. He dropped our baggage and hopped over the barrier and into the office without so much as disturbing the little paper tent that announced that the office was closed for the night.

“Yep,” he said from the other room. “They still use keys. Assuming that the rooms with three keys available are not in use—and the ones that have three keys bound together with a zip tie are rooms that aren’t ready—that means the entire third floor and most of the second are out of commission or occupied. Are you okay with ground floor?”

“Sure,” I said.

If Adam hadn’t been with me, I’d likely have bedded down on a couch, though hopefully there was one somewhere that would be more comfortable than the one in this lobby. But he was right. In a storm like this, no one would begrudge us helping ourselves. We could pay for our room in the morning, assuming there was an employee to pay. Adam took a key and then found a piece of paper and a pen, doubtless to record our absconding with the key and use of the room.

There was a light switch just to the right of the counter. I flipped it, but nothing happened. “I wonder why it’s so warm in here if the electricity is off.”

“There is a generator,” a woman’s voice said from the narrow opening between the reception room and the dark hallway beyond.

I was startled. I’d had no inkling there was anyone around. She must have been standing there in the dark when we’d come in. I would have heard someone moving.

She continued in a friendly, informative manner that was very much at odds with her having been lurking in a hallway, watching us. “It’s confined to essential services—the kitchen and the walk-in freezer, as well as the water pump for the well and to keep the hot spring water circulating in the pipes and radiators. The building can run—without lights, of course—on minimal electricity.”

I wouldn’t have thought Adam could see her, either, but something galvanized him. Maybe he was more upset about her lurking than I was. He dropped the pen and abandoned his half-written note. Key in hand, he vaulted the counter again, landing lightly between me and the dark opening that led to the hallway beyond, as if to put himself between me and an enemy.

“Good to know,” I answered.

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