He nodded despite himself. He wasn’t sure what to believe. Possibilities ripped through his mind. The only solid, indomitable fact was that Garrison was dead, and if his brother had in fact killed him, then Hades himself would have hell to pay.

He would make sure of it.

25 MORGAN

The orange film canister stared up at her from the shallow depths of her purse, a reptilian eye waiting in its cave. Or perhaps it was more of an uncharacteristic sunburst, a splash of color Morgan wouldn’t normally have in her possession. The only bright shade she liked was red, like the Duff hat that nested on her head and the lava lamp that currently sat shotgun. She’d buckled it so it wouldn’t roll onto the floor. Globules of red paraffin wax collected at the top.

Once more, her eyes scanned the handwritten M.R. initials on the canister’s curved body. She closed the flap of her purse, then, like tucking an unwanted message away in an envelope.

“My Ruin” was what Bern had called her. No one else. But for all of Morgan’s spelunking into the caverns of her mind, she could not recall her aunt’s handwriting. Had her u’s always had the perfect symmetry of a hook at the beginning and end of the stroke? The n was the same, a precise transposition of the u that preceded it. If the canister belonged to Bern, what was it doing among Eleanor’s things?

There was only one way to find out.

She had to develop it.

She peered through the windshield at Exos Labs. It was a sprawling campus planted just off the highway. In the center was a glass tower she assumed was the main office building. The way the other buildings stretched out brought to mind bacteria under a microscope, spreading, spreading, until it took over all the wooded area and fields that bordered it.

Morgan slammed the car door. Her boots clicked on the snow-blown walkway toward the glass building’s entrance. It looked like a fortress, somewhere a villain would stand on the top floor and look out at what lands he was about to conquer. Or like a contemporary Mount Crumpit from The Grinch.

But Christopher Reynolds was no grinch. He’d been jolly both times she met him, once as Santa Claus and once as himself at Eleanor’s. She wondered if he would be at the cabin later this week.

The lobby was a rotunda, wherein sat a receptionist with sideswept hair. He wore a charcoal sweater over a collared shirt. Morgan pegged him as an intern, probably a college kid earning a few paychecks during Christmas break.

“Who are you here for?” he asked, hardly looking up from the book he was reading.