Chapter Five
Myka collapsed on the bed with an exhaustion she hadn't felt in months – so tired was she that she swore she felt her brain yawn. Her lips quirked into a grin, it was thoughts like that which usually resulted in Helena laughing at her gently, smoothing back Myka's curls and calling her adorable, or a similar word which had Myka objecting strongly. But there would be no gentle teasing tonight, no smiles or stolen hugs (for, much to Pete's constant amusement, the two women – both entirely capable of kicking his smirky butt single-handedly – were undeniable cuddlers). Helena was not with her. It had not felt entirely appropriate to invite the woman to join her for a night in a seedy hotel after knocking her unconscious. Myka didn't want to go giving the wrong idea, after all.
Myka blew an errant curl off her forehead with a frustrated huff. She was not a fan of hotels at the best of times, spending far too many hours in them as it was with her job. But at least then she had Pete or (rarely, but enjoyably) Helena for company. And Artie, finicky though he was, usually sprung for something a little better than this. Univille was, unsurprisingly light on its accommodation options. Then again, she had just fired upon the people she cared most about in the whole world, it wasn't like she deserved the Ritz or anything.
Starting to feel her mood settle in for the long haul, Myka pulled herself upright to sit against the bed head, pulling pen and paper from her bag as she gave herself a strict talking to. The voice in her head sounded eerily like Mrs. Frederic but she pushed that consideration aside.
"Come on Bering," she told herself firmly. "Snap out of it. Observe and analyse. What are the facts? The facts don't lie."
Scribbling on the paper in front of her, Myka started to fill in the time line of her day in an attempt to figure out what exactly had turned her friends into violent lunatics.
Everything had been fine that morning, Myka had decided, scrawling '7am – woke as usual' across the top of her page, rolling her eyes when she found herself following it with 'Myka and HG's cuddle hour". Claudia's support of their partnership was touching, if a little too public for their liking. But yes, everything had been normal. They had risen, eaten breakfast (Pete had stuffed four croissants into his mouth – Myka jotted this down just in case), and they had all bid her farewell in a usual enough fashion.
She had driven her car down the same streets as always without encountering anything out of the ordinary. She had pulled into a roadside station for gas and Twizzlers at 9:30 and paid with the twenty dollar bill she had found sticking between the cushions of the passenger seat (thank you Pete!). She had arrived at the optometrist and had picked up her glasses by 10:13. Her doctor had certainly not treated her any differently than was warranted considering her previous visit.
From there she had browsed in a bookstore for an hour or so – but given that it was a chain, full of pristine books and completely devoid of any kind of charm, Myka highly doubted that she had encountered anything 'artifacty' there. She had had a coffee and a turkey sandwich on wholemeal bread in a cafe from 11:45 to 12:17. And then she had headed home.
Where all hell had apparently broken loose.
By her reckoning, Myka had interacted with no fewer than twelve people over the course of the day – thirteen if you included the young man she had bumped shoulders with leaving the bookstore – and she was fairly certain that not a single one of them had felt the need to draw a weapon on her.
Which only meant one thing, Myka reasoned logically, something had happened at the B&B while she had been gone. Something bad. And it was up to her to save her friends before it was too late.