Marko pushed my wheelchair along behind David as we crossed the parking garage, and both of them argued in Russian the entire time. Meanwhile, I felt like I was about 80 years old, and I was starting to get a little pissed off about being forced to sit on the sidelines.

I’d spent the last few days getting stabbed, chased, dragged around, and patched back together afterward. At some point, I'd stopped feeling like a person and started feeling like a piece of luggage everyone kept arguing over. And if one more lunatic tried to wheel me somewhere without asking, I was going to commit a crime. 

“You’re going to love Hudson’s Bluff, Michael,” Marko chattered the entire time. “We got a game room with old-ass arcade games. You know? The stand-up kinds with joysticks? I keep beating Dwayne’s ass in Frogger. He fucking hates it.” And then he laughed his dumb laugh. 

“Marko,” David cut in. 

“Da, boss?” Marko answered immediately, bright as ever.

“Zamolchi,” David said in Russian. “Before I staple your mouth to your ass.”

“Hm,” Marko smirked, “sounds kinda kinky.”

I finally put my foot down, literally, and stopped the wheelchair before Marko could wheel me further. He kept pushing for half a second before he realized something had changed, the wheels straining uselessly against dead weight. 

“I’m done,” I said, and I moved to stand up. “I’m done with the wheelchair. All this babying. I’m done. And I sure as hell don’t want to go to Hudson’s Bluff.”

“Dude, what the fuck?” Marko laughed, “This is a system. A very clear system. Hospital, chair. Then Hudson’s Bluff. We get snacks, play some arcade games, and you get to witness the Frogger humiliation of Dwayne. Like you’re one of us, Michael.”

One of them.

Right. Over my dead body.

I didn’t sit back down or anything. I just stood there on shaking legs that absolutely hated me for it. “No,” I said again. “I’m not going with you guys to Hudson’s Bluff.”

David stepped forward, arms crossed, and looked me over once. “Why?” he asked, voice sharpening. “Do you have somewhere to be, Michael? A job? Family looking for you? Wife and kids?”

My mind went unhelpfully to a key under a doormat and a quiet message not demanded or anything, but spoken very softly, “If I’m not there, wait for me after work.”

Noah Riley. 

David watched me, one dark eyebrow lifting slightly in question, and tilted his head slightly. Like he was simultaneously saying, “Go on.” Without using any words. He already knew the shape of the answer; he just wanted me to stop circling it. 

“Noah,” I said, still holding onto the wheelchair with one hand. "He said I could come over once I got out of the hospital.”

Damn. It felt like the time I’d asked my stepdad if I could borrow his car to go to a drive-in theater with a “girl” when I was fourteen. Except back then, I’d been lying through my teeth, and the girl hadn’t been a girl at all, but some guy from junior high who didn’t know if he was gay yet but wanted to get handsy when no one was around. Dude had been a total jackass. 

David’s expression didn’t shift, but something in his eyes did. “Did he now?” He replied, voice smooth. And I knew he’d heard what Noah told me back in the hospital room. He was just playing it up. Acting dumb to throw me off. Or, who knows, maybe he was secretly pissed because I’d refused his invitation to join his gang yet again.

Marko, of course, leaned forward on the wheelchair and acted like this was suddenly the most interesting thing that had happened all morning and cackled like a fucking hyena. If I’d been anyone else, I knew I would have gotten stabbed right there on the spot. Probably both by David and Marko, like Julius Cesar or some shit. Et Tu, David?

But because David liked me, according to what Marko had said earlier, he wasn’t going to lay a hand on me.

At least that’s what I told myself when he stepped forward and got in my face.

“Michael,” he said, accent thicker now, the words low and deliberate, his eyes raking over me again, his lips inches from mine. “You do not need my permission to go anywhere. You are grown man. Not prisoner. Not recruit. Not responsibility. We are equals here.”

Marko opened his mouth.

“Except you, Marko.”

I saw David reach up as if he wanted to touch the cross hanging from my neck; his fingers hovered a second, then dropped. “But before you go, you should know. Noah is coming to the bluff tonight after work.”

For a second, my brain just stopped, and I heard a record-scratch sound in my head. “What?” 

David smirked a little. “Noah is coming to Hudson’s Bluff tonight. Trailer is too damaged to stay in; window is broken, rain has come in where your ass went through it last night.”

“Tonight?” I replied, my voice a little hoarse now. 

“Da.”

“Bullshit,” I said, immediately skeptical. “You’re just trying to get me to come over.”

David lifted a shoulder slightly in that half-shrug way of his, minimum effort. “That is where I was earlier, hanging up a tarp to keep the rain out. He will need to repair the trailer if he wants to live there again. I offered to buy all the materials; my boys will do the work. Takes time. Noah is stubborn and does not like to ask for help. He will need some strong convincing.” 

My pulse was suddenly doing weird things, which was fucking ridiculous. 

Noah was just Noah, right? The same Noah who had offered me a key to his place. The same Noah who’d sat beside my hospital bed. Whose stupid face had apparently taken up permanent residence in my thoughts. Except now there was a timeline.

Tonight.

I could see him tonight.

“Oh my fucking God,” Marko cackled from behind us. “Cornpop’s freaking out over his little boyfriend being there.”

“He is like little high school student going to prom for first time,” David said. “Michael, that is adorable. Hold still so I can take picture.”

“Fuck you,” I said flatly, and limped past him toward what I assumed was his car sitting nearby.

“Are you offering?” Marko called back. 

Behind me, both of them broke into laughter.

But I didn’t give a shit, because I was going to see Noah Riley tonight. Even if it meant going to David’s stupid secret lair and getting the full tour of the place, whether I liked it or not. 

—

David drove a Volvo, a sedan-looking type of car in jet black. It kind of reminded me of him, cold and controlled and built for purpose rather than comfort. Guy probably had a body cut up in the trunk. Maybe even five bodies.

I sat in the front seat with my arms crossed, staring out the windshield as we left the hospital. Marko sat in the back, and within like five minutes, he was asleep. I’m talking completely out cold. Like all the chaos he’d been generating for the past hour had finally looped back around and knocked him the fuck out.

David drove like an old lady, hands positioned on the steering wheel all proper and shit. The fingerless leather gloves he wore squeaked every time he tightened his hold or turned the wheel. 

I hadn’t really gotten a chance to get a good look at him alone. I mean, like, actually seated, not wanting to kill me or surrounded by his gang of hyenas. He looked good. All that dark hair falling almost over one eye. He wasn’t like Noah, all sweet and cute. He was sharper, like he could cut you if you looked at him the wrong way.

Outside, the world kept stretching out the farther away we drove from Astoria. The road signs got fewer, and the spaces between things got bigger. I saw more of the ocean than I had the night I got here, since David had to drive along the side of a mountain with a guardrail. 

“So,” I said finally, and reached down to turn on the radio. “How’s a guy like you end up in a town like Astoria?”

What I meant was, “How’s a guy who was part of a Russian experiment gone wrong end up in a town like Astoria, harboring an eldritch horror disguised as a book nerd?"

David snorted a little. “How anyone else ends up here,” he said, as if that explained everything. 

I decided to poke the bear a little. “What about your parents? You got an old lady? An old man?”

That got a reaction out of him. His shoulders went all tight, and he got this frustrated wrinkle between his eyebrows. “My mother was a prostitute from Kirov," he said. “Father got around well. Fucked women until he got a proper son to inherit his life’s work.”

I watched him for a moment, and then he reached over and opened the glove compartment by my knees. There was a gun in there, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter. “Here,” he said, and grabbed the pack, opening it with one hand, “help yourself.” 

I hesitated, then reached out and slipped one out. I didn’t recognize the brand; the box was in Russian. The lighter looked old, too. But it worked when I flicked it on and lit one up. 

It made me cough and gag right away. The smoke was all thick going down, and it almost had an acrid, minty aftertaste. 

“Da,” David chuckled, “Russian cigarettes. They are strong like our vodka.” 

“Fuck,” I wheezed into my fist. “You could have warned a guy. Shit tastes like rubber cement.”

“Only cigarettes, Michael,” David replied mysteriously. 

I opened the window to let the salty air in and let some of the smoke out while we coasted around the bend, towards what I assumed was Hudson’s Bluff. 

“There was earthquake here in 1906,” David told me after a long moment of us not saying anything, just listening to Bob Dylan on the radio. “Killed nearly 3,000 people. Bodies and fires were everywhere. They said the ground opened up as if it were swallowing Astoria and everything around it.” 

I kept smoking, but I listened, wondering where he was going with this. 

“There was a hotel on the edge of Hudson’s Bluff,” David said, hands tightening on the wheel again. “The Atlantis Hotel. It crumbled when the earthquake split through the middle. Completely collapsed it, swallowed half of it, and left the ruins.”

I choked a little on my cigarette. “So what?” I rasped, “You’re not…we’re not going there, right?”

David smiled a little. “When hotel fell, it dropped into a cave system of sorts. It is nice; you will like it. Original wallpaper. There is a ballroom and original suites. Noah lived there for a while.”

Holy shit. 

“What happened?” I scoffed, “Bat guano and your weird, pervy attitude chase him away?”

David shrugged a little. “He wanted to live a normal life even before we broke up. Get a normal job and go to college. I asked him, “Are you sure? The world is dangerous place. But he insisted. Like I said, very stubborn little squid.”

The car slowed as the road dipped, and the landscape shifted. There was a chain-link fence and a bunch of half-ripped caution tape all around, fluttering in the wind. And beyond that, nothing but rocks and overgrown grass. I thought it was some kind of joke. And then I wondered if David had brought me out here to shoot and kill me and bury my body where nobody would find me. 

David stopped the car just in front of the chain-link fence. “Do you want to know what happened to my father, Michael?”

Shit. Fuck. I threw my cigarette out the window. “Sure, I guess.”

“He traded places with Noah,” David said, without looking at me. “But R'lyeh will not give something up without getting something back. And that night, my father desperately wanted to see his life’s work come to harvest. Noah could handle the transition, but my father…fell into what was essentially a pit of rotating razor blades and was pulled through the other side.”

I swallowed hard, nicotine taste sitting thick in my mouth.

“There were things,” he added, voice lower. “Creatures. They used bone of his spine like bridge to cross into our world while he was impossibly still alive, screams filling the air as he was torn apart. I felt his blood on my face. I still feel his blood on my face at night."

“Jesus,” I said. 

David cut the engine and stared down at the dashboard. “We took everything from Noah, Michael,” he said. “My father. The scientists. Even I, when I was child, had hand in bringing him here. Forcing him into shell so he can exist in our small, insignificant world.”

He laughed a little, tilting his head back against the seat. But it was a sad kind of disbelieving laugh. Like he couldn’t believe he was telling me this. “And yet,” he said, “he is more human than all of us put together.”

His voice softened slightly.

“He loves hamburgers. Fries with extra ketchup. Reading books. Rain.”

Another pause.

“He does not have ounce of hatred in him.”

I stared out at the empty field now and thought I saw something like a metal door opening up in the ground, then a figure poked its head out.

“I know you love him,” he said. “It is only two days, but still…you love him. That is Noah,” he said. “Is hard not to love him.”

I started to realize something then, as David kept talking. Telling me all about Noah like he was the sun and moon and the stars that rocked his weird little Russian socks off. How David seemed so closed off and bossy when Noah was around. 

David still loved Noah Riley.

Which was a real big fucking problem, because I loved Noah Riley, too.

A knock came from the driver’s side of the window, and I jumped almost a mile out of my seat when a long-haired guy appeared, peering in at us. 

“Dwayne,” David muttered, and he rolled down the window, grumbling under his breath. “Shto?”

“Hey, boss,” Dwayne said, glancing over at me, then back at David. “Trixie brought pizza. You down, or are you going to chill up here a little longer?”

“God, it’s good to be home!” Marko announced from the backseat and punched the door open. “Dwayne, babyyy! Guess how many security guards I took down earlier?!”

I just stared out past them. Past the car.

Past the gravel.

Out toward the empty stretch of field.

Nothing there.

And wondered where the hell this mysterious hotel was supposed to be.