Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

figure out what was going on, maybe I could help both of us. I was sure of one thing: she was the only lead I had.
    Jenna wasn’t in her wedding dress when she opened the door, but her beauty remained. She had changed out of her white satin into blue jeans and black boots. Her jeans hugged her body in all the right places and dragged my eyes downward. I knew it was rude to ogle her—she was a bride or possibly a recent widow—but I couldn’t help myself.
    “What do you know?” she asked at the door.
    “Can I come in?”
    She hesitated, then turned around and walked back into her room. I caught the heavy door before it could shut and followed her. We both sat in hotel chairs around a hotel table and faced each other. I looked around the place, noticing it was a full suite. There was a half-sized fridge and a king-sized bed. The bed wasn’t in the shape of a heart—but the Jacuzzi was. I could just see it through the archway leading into the bathroom. It would have been worth a joke if it hadn’t been further evidence of her tragic circumstances. I looked back at her and hoped the poor bastard she had married had at least gotten to enjoy his wedding night.
    Jenna reached down and pulled up a rattling bucket of coins. She pushed them toward me, sliding them over the table.
    “I suppose you are waiting to get this back. It’s all there, you can count it.”
    “I trust you,” I said. I took the pistol out of the bucket and put it into my pocket.
    She shook her head. “Well, that makes one of us. Why did you give me that gun, anyway?”
    “I didn’t want them to have me arrested. You can’t carry a pistol into a casino, and I don’t have a permit for it, in any case.”
    Jenna eyed me warily. “Why the hell are you doing this? How did you get caught up in my life? I’m not going to give you anything—if that’s what you’re hoping for.”
    “Did you get a chance to look me up on the Internet?”
    “Yeah. The crackpot website. Stories about monsters and stuff.”
    “That’s all real,” I said. “You told me yourself that your husband vanished. Where did it happen?”
    She pointed toward the bathroom. “In there, just last night. He was wearing his tux still. We’d just gotten back from the wedding. No family. I wish now we’d flown out my mom, but we didn’t. She’s a pain—it just comes naturally to her. So we got married in private, and dressed up all the way for the pictures. I wanted to send them home and make it look real to everyone back there.”
    I thought about asking her where “back there” was, but it didn’t really matter. Besides, she was gushing now, telling me her story all at once. I didn’t want to interrupt and slow her down. I wanted to hear it all.
    Jenna stood up and headed with halting steps toward the bathroom. I followed her discreetly. It was as if shedidn’t even see me. “Right here, see this scorch mark on the floor?” she asked. “That’s the spot where it touched down.”
    “Touched down?”
    “Yeah. A weird thing—a small, quiet tornado. But it wasn’t windy, really. It was as if part of the room itself was twisting—as if the colors and shapes were all bending and blending. I don’t know. It was like this spot touched some other spot in another place. Two places blurred together. The air moved and rippled like water going down a drain.”
    “OK,” I said, trying to envision it. “Did something come through, or go out?”
    “Just Robert. He was here one second, and then the room shifted around him and warped as that tornado shape began to form around him. I was sitting on the bed, adjusting my shoes. I was still in my wedding dress. We were going to make love in these rentals—you know, for a memory.”
    “Sure,” I said, thinking that Robert had been thoroughly ripped off. I wasn’t sure if he was dead or not, but he certainly hadn’t gotten the chance to bed his bride, just as I had suspected. The thought made me angry for some reason, even though I’d never met the guy.
    “He had the strangest look on his face. It hurts me, just to think about it. He tried to shout something at me, I think, but the sound was muffled, as if he was already behind a door or a wall. Then he was sucked away as if that quiet tornado had
inhaled
him.”
    “Was anything left behind? Besides the scorch mark?”
    “Yeah. This one shoe.”
    She showed it to me. It was black, shiny. Polished with that permanent glossy surface that never seems to fade. The