Chapter Five

The human body contains approximately ten and a half pints of blood. It houses two hundred and six bones, with an incineration temperature of fourteen hundred to eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit.

After waking up in a pile of corpses, I chose to shower before attending to anything else. The body Dalton wore had leaked significantly once he left it, and even the plastic wrap around Zander’s vessel had failed to stand the test of our fuckfest. I didn’t care what anyone said. Waking up with your hand buried in entrails was not something that you could fix with a hand wash. Once I’d scrubbed, soaped, and rinsed myself into a better mood, I detached the pipe from the back of the oven and sighed as the scent of gas permeated the room. Bless whoever decided to install fully functioning kitchens in this hotel.

I’d be sure to leave a five star review.

Checking the clock, I slipped my filthy dress back over my head and double checked the exposed wiring on the back of the landline telephone. My wake up call was due in two minutes. I had to be long gone before that because if I’d done it right; it was going to go off with a bang. If it didn’t work, I’d be pissed.

I slipped out the door and hit the emergency stairwell at a run, my feet slapping on the concrete steps. At the ground floor, I slowed my pace and crossed the foyer at a walk, nodding to the front desk clerk, who scanned me slowly from head to foot. Just a Halloween costume, nothing to worry about here. Luckily, it was either too early for the bullshit of a confrontation, or I’d come across the one person in existence who knew how to mind their own fucking business because I made it out of the building without incident.

As I crossed the street outside, an explosion rocked the ground beneath my feet, and I felt the weirdest pull in my cheek as glass rained around me. Once I reached the sidewalk on the far side, I turned and took in the chaos. Screams echoed around the street as people left the building at a run. Crying, bloody faces blended into one as they stumbled over each other, one stepping out in front of a car only to fall beneath the tires in a comical flailing of limbs.

Two stories up, where my room had been, warm, orange light was visible through the window dancing beneath a dark cloud of smoke. I wondered if the bodies would reach a great enough temperature to combust, or if some firefighter would find the remains and wonder what brought four men to the same bed.

Sirens shrieked in the distance, and the scene before me suddenly seemed mundane. I took a last look as flames licked at a closed set of curtains on the first floor and turned away.

I had three hundred and sixty-four days until my men returned.

Jeremiah told me everything would change next Samhain.

And I was so going to be ready.

The End