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swallowed and glanced up as Pandora turned off the main road toward the hotel where her friends were staying.
    And eventually, everyone’s going to find out
.
    A jaunty wooden sign greeted them a few yards down the gravelly road. THE HAPPY SPRUCE INN , it said. Cartoon trees with googly eyes and idiotically smiling faces grinned down at the Stiff as it pulled into the driveway of a large, boxy building with all the charm of a haunted mental institution.
    “What a lovely setting,” Driggs said. “For
murder
.”
    “Okay, Lex,” Uncle Mort said as Pandora put the car into park some distance away from the front door. “You’re going in. Now—”
    “Wait,
I’m
going in? Why not you?”
    “Because I’m deriving far too much enjoyment from the Stiff’s leaky fumes. Now just go in, tell the person at the front desk your Uncle Mort sent you, and find the rest of the Juniors. It shouldn’t be hard. You seem to have a knack for attracting large groups of angry people.”
    She cringed. “You think they’ll be angry?”
    “No time like the present to find out. Now go.”
    “By myself? What about—” She looked at her other choices. Pandora was picking her teeth in the rearview mirror. Grotton was Grotton. And Driggs’s hand was still stuck.
    “Sorry,” he said to her, giving his wrist another futile tug. “The old arm-in-the-seat dilemma.”
    Lex haughtily unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. “You are the worst band of fugitives
ever
,” she said, slamming the door.
    The cold, stark lobby was just as disturbing as the sign out front. Kilda could do wonders with this place, with her lavish rugs and beloved potpourri bowls.
    If Kilda was still alive. Lex had no idea.
    She made her way to the front desk to find a corpulent, angry-looking woman simmering in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke and wearing, in an ironic twist, a shirt commemorating last summer’s Lung Cancer Fun Run.
    “Help you?” the woman barked, hacking up a wet cough.
    “Um—” Lex vaguely gestured down the hallway where she thought the rooms might be. “I’m looking for my friends.” They were probably the only ones staying there, by the looks of the place. “My uncle—”
    “Eh?” The woman leaned closer.
    “My uncle sent me,” Lex said, pronouncing every syllable.
    She snorted. “Who’s your uncle?”
    Lex gritted her teeth. Even though this war had barely begun, she had already grown quite impatient with it. “Mort.”
    The woman froze. The cigarette fell out of her mouth but caught at the last second, so that it dangled from the very tip of her lip. “Mort, you say?” she said, the cigarette dancing as she spoke.
    “That is what I said.”
    The woman’s eyes darted off to the left. Lex tried to follow what she was looking at, but then she started hacking up another lung. “Mort?” she choked between coughs.
    “Yeah, I—”
    “Mort?” she was shouting. “You were sent by
Mort?
”
    Lex was just about to face pl Cut retteant the woman’s head into the ashtray when it dawned on her: she’d heard Lex perfectly fine. She was yelling to get someone’s attention. Someone who’d been waiting specifically for Lex.
    And it was at that moment that she heard something that sounded a hell of a lot like the cocking of a gun.
    “Ah, crapspackle,” Lex said.
    She backed away from the desk and toward the hallway just as Norwood emerged from the back office and fired off two wide shots.
    Whoa!
Lex screamed inside her head.
How’d he get here so fast?
    But she answered herself immediately: he Crashed. When she’d transferred to him her ability to Damn, the ability to Crash had gone right along with it, a package deal.
    “I’m just the gift that keeps on giving, aren’t I?” she muttered.
    Lex ran down the hallway and started banging on all the doors, but none opened. A stairwell door lay at the end of the hall, so she grabbed for the handle and quickly glanced back. Norwood was on top of her—
    Until someone