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"It's the principle of things." My righteousness came out all wrong spoken around a mouthful of cheesy goodness.

He handed me the Snickers with a twitch of his lips which did stupid things to my internal organs. His fingers brushed my palm and he snatched them back as if I'd burnt him. I'd started keeping track of things like that somewhere around lunchtime but didn't remark on it… yet.

The light went out of the sky around four-thirty, the way it does in November, without so much as a warning that it's getting dark. One minute the fields were gold and dead and the next they were just dead. I turned the headlights on and drove into the gloom with the sun going down somewhere behind my left shoulder. It was becoming obvious that I was going to have to stop soon, and that when I stopped we were going to need to find a room.

Together.

I'd been doing my best not to think about that since about ten in the morning.

The place I finally pulled into was called the Starlite Motor Inn, and the E was burnt out and dangling sideways on the sign so it announced itself as the STARLIT, which I thought was an improvement.

It sat right off the highway exit with a truck stop on one side and a Dairy Queen on the other, which was the entire point of choosing it. Fourteen units in a row greeted us with their doors painted a green shade nobody has chosen on purpose since the Ford administration. Six cars were in the lot already and a semi was idling down at the far end with its running lights on, all of it adding to the pathetic turn my life had taken. The one saving grace was the pop machine humming under the office window, a light inside it making the whole front of the building look like it was underwater.

Nobody memorizes a face at a place like that. People stop there because it's the nearest bed to the exit ramp, and they leave at six. By eight the woman at the desk couldn't pick a single one of them out of a lineup if you paid her.

Which, on reflection, suited me just fine. I should have done this a long time ago. Back when I blew up the cursed library.

The woman at the desk had a paperback split open on the counter and did not want to have anything to do with us, which was the single most beautiful quality a person has ever possessed.

"Two nights," I told her breezily.

"Cash or card." She rasped it without bothering to unglue her peepers from the book she was reading. Curiosity got the better of me and I craned my neck to see if I could read a sentence or two and find out whether it was something smutty.

It was.

"Cash." I smirked at the top of her head.

She reached behind her without stopping the reading and grabbed a random keychain dangling from a pocket in the wall. Goddess bless the Starlit Motor Inn. River slipped her the cash, I snatched the key.

The room had two beds. I let out the breath I'd been holding since the parking lot. I want that on the record, because I had been building a whole architecture of dread around the possibility that it would be one bed.

Brown carpet with weird stains was bunched up around the edges of the room. A painting of a lighthouse was bolted to the wall, which told you something about the clientele and something about the management. A lighthouse, in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, protected from theft. A TV from a decade when they still built them heavy was perched on a credenza that had seen better days.

Then the smell hit me. That particular cocktail of bleach, old menthol cigarettes and the ghost of somebody else's shampoo. It smacked me in the face so hard it cleared the rising panic and brought some semblance of normality back into my head.

River set the bags down inside the door and stood there like a man who didn't know which part of the room he was allowed to occupy.

"You can sit," I choked out. "On the furniture. It's permitted."

"I'm aware." His lips were twisting in distaste while his eyes roamed the room.

"You're standing there like the carpet's lava, Blackman." My snickering earned me a long look down his nose. "You can't be that bougie."

That got him moving. He sat on the end of the far bed and put his hands on his knees after fidgeting with them for a second. I had a more dignified entrance, which means I almost sprinted into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Placing both palms flat on either side of the sink I stared at myself for a while.

The mirror had a crack in one corner and somebody had drawn a heart with their finger a long time ago. It ghosted back every time my breath fogged up the glass, winking at me. Who were they? Whatever happened to them?

My face looked like somebody else was blinking back at me.

There was a piece of a demon still stuck in my hairline, too. My nose had stopped bleeding somewhere around noon and left a rust-colored smear from nostril to jaw that I hadn't noticed and had presumably shown to a gas station attendant, a desk clerk, and a vending machine. My shoulder had gone the color of a thundercloud too when I lifted my shirt to look at it. And my feet, when I finally made myself take the borrowed shoes off to check, were an absolute horror show.

I'd run on gravel. I'd fought on gravel. I'd knelt on it, and then I'd got up and walked around on it for another two hours. Then I'd driven all day without taking my shoes off, and that combination had turned the soles of both feet into something you'd cross the road to avoid looking at. There was grit in the cuts. Some of it had been in there long enough to start being part of me.

I used to get pedicures on a regular basis. Whatever happened to that person?

I sat down on the edge of the tub and tried to get some of it out by scraping it with my chipped nails. It hurt like a bitch and I made a sound that brought River through the door in half a second. I knew that lock was flimsy at best. It stood no chance against him.

"I'm fine." I grumbled to my feet without daring to lift my head and look at him.