Page 54 of An Academy for Liars

She commanded the elevator to appear, and when she did she felt something tear open within herself, as she dragged and struggled and grasped for the strength she needed to pull the elevator from the ether. Her nose began to bleed and her eyes soon after, so that she saw the whole scene—Dante facedown on the ground, the monstrous entity prowling nearer—through a blurry red filter.

And then, when she was ready, Lennon cast out a hand.

There was the trill of a bell and an elevator cabin crashed down through the brothel storefront, its windows imploding in a storm of glass. Its doors parted open. On the ground, inches from Lennon, Dante’s eyes fluttered open, and he gasped as if he’d been held underwater for some time. He locked eyes with Lennon:“Run!”

Dante, Lennon, and the aberration feet from them broke toward the elevator in tandem. Lennon stumbled through the doors first, Dante behind her, the aberration at his heels. Lennon pressed theDoor Closebutton just as Dante slipped sideways between them. Theysnapped shut on the boy’s outstretched hand, crushing it with a sickening crack. His fingers twitched, caught between the doors for the briefest moment, and then he ripped them away with a shriek. Lennon punched another button on the control panel at random. The lights flickered. The music died. The cabin plunged into free fall.

The elevator fellfor what seemed like an eternity, condensed down to the span of a few sickening seconds, and then stopped so abruptly it threw both Lennon and Dante off their feet and against the wall. The buttons on the control panel glowed dully, then flickered out, plunging the cabin into total darkness. The doors remained tightly closed.

“Motherfucker,” said Dante, and he gave the doors a vicious kick. He hadn’t looked scared facing down that entity in Amsterdam, but he did now. Lennon could’ve laughed. Dante—unflappable, taciturn, and entirely composed—wasclaustrophobic? After all they’d faced in Amsterdam, this was his Achilles’ heel?

Dante slit his fingertips into the crack between the doors and pried them apart with brute force. Lennon squeezed her eyes shut against the sunlight flooding into the cabin. Dante stepped out of the elevator, and Lennon staggered after him, making it only two steps before she broke to her knees, bent double, and vomited violently into the dust.

“Easy,” said Dante, and he stopped by her side. Put a hand on her back to steady her. “You’re all right.”

Lennon wiped her mouth clean on the back of her hand. Spit into the dirt. “I amnot.”

“I told you not to come.”

“You didn’t tell me we were going to be fucking attacked.”

“I didn’t know. That’s kind of what makes the ambush, you know, anambush.”

Lennon pushed, rather unsteadily, to her feet and wheeled to face the elevator they’d just emerged from, only to discover that it wasn’t an elevator at all, just some sort of industrial shaft jutting up from the dust.

“Mining shaft,” said Dante, squinting at it. “Didn’t even know these were still in use. How the hell did you conjure this?”

“I don’t know,” said Lennon, suddenly defensive. “I just knew you were either going to die or kill everyone else—all those girls in the windows—if we stayed. What was that?”

“I pushed myself too hard,” said Dante, in the tone of an apology, but he stopped short of offering one. “We should go.”

Lennon turned to look around. “Go where?”

Apart from the mining shaft—and the industrial wreckage, old gates, and rust-chewed machinery—as far as the eye could see there was nothing but flat dust. To the east the sky was a stark and startling blue. On the western horizon, a shelf of storm clouds so dark they were very nearly black. A two-lane road stretched out in front of them, but there were no cars in sight.

Dante fished his phone from the pocket of his jeans, but it was dead. The screen shattered. Another casualty of the ambush at the club. “Shit.”

In the distance, a threatening peal of thunder. “We should get going before that storm catches up to us.”

“It won’t give us trouble,” said Dante, as if the storm knew better than to test his patience. He started down the road, and Lennon followed after him. They walked for several miles in silence, heading away from the storm. Dante dragged himself along at a steady pace. He was still bleeding and clearly in pain but too prideful to lean on Lennon. It was just as well; he needed more help than what she could offer him then. A hospital—an ambulance, even—if he didn’t stop bleeding from his mouth. But when Lennon suggested that he wait by the roadside, let her find help and circle back, he merely waved her off and kept walking.

The storm caught up to them quickly, bringing with it the kind of wind that rips at your clothes and hair, a harsh deluge of cold rain. As they approached the town, nearly an hour after they’d started walking, they heard the whine of what Lennon could only assume were tornado sirens. They picked up the pace, passing an auto shop, and an accompanying gas station, until they reached a run-down by-the-hour motel with a cracked and empty parking lot. Dante staggered up to its doors, opened them for Lennon—a gentlemen even at his worst—and she went through ahead of him.

The girl at the front desk pasted on a smile. “Welcome to Chambers Inn. How can I—”

“Where are we?” Dante asked, limping up to the front desk.

“Um…Idaho?”

“Wonderful,” Dante muttered, and he wiped away some of the blood collecting in the corners of his mouth. He fished for his wallet, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. “Is this enough for the night?”

“Thenight?” Lennon demanded. “No. We’re getting you to a hospital. Now—”

The clerk’s wide-eyed gaze slid from Dante to Lennon, then back to Dante.

“Is it enough?” he asked again, eyes on the clerk, not looking at Lennon.

Mouth agape, the girl nodded, took the money, and gave him change and a room key. Dante snatched both and nabbed a couple of first aid kits from the shelves of the sundry shop on his way out of the lobby. He limped down the hall to their shared motel room, unlocked the door, and Lennon, at a total loss for words, followed.

---