Mike tried not to, but his brother looked so furious and frustrated, he couldn’t hold back the laughter. Even as Sean gave him a dirty look, Mike held up one hand and tried to stop laughing. “Sorry, sorry.”
“How is this funny?” Sean demanded. “I’m trapped in an empty hotel with a crabby contractor and a mountain of snow outside the door.”
“Clearly,” Mike said finally, “it’s only funny from California. But have you got food, heat?”
“Yeah,” Sean said, then spoke to someone in the room with him. “Come here for a minute. Meet my brother.”
A second or two later, a woman popped onto the screen. Pretty, with a heart-shaped face and a wide mouth, she had black hair and eyes as blue as Sean’s. She was wearing a baseball cap pulled low on her forehead and what looked like a heavy green sweater.
“Hi, I’m Kate and you’re Mike,” she said, words tumbling over each other. “Nice to meet you, but we don’t have a lot of time to talk. There’s firewood outside, we need to bring it in before the rest of the storm hits. Don’t worry, though. There’s plenty of food since I make sure my crew is fed while they work and we’ve been out here this last week taking measurements and getting ideas about the work.”
“Okay.” Mike threw that word in fast, thinking he probably wouldn’t have another chance to speak. He was right.
“The storm’ll blow through in a day or two and the plows will have the pass cleared out pretty quickly, so you can have your brother back by the end of the week.”
“Okay...”
Sean grabbed the phone and told Kate, “I’ll be right there to help. Yeah. Okay.” When he looked back at Mike, he was shaking his head. “I was this close—” he held up two fingers just a breath apart “—from getting outta Dodge. Now I don’t know when I’ll get out. Tell Mom not to worry and don’t bother calling me. I’m going to shut off the cell phone, conserve power.”
“Okay.” In spite of the fact that he’d been amused only a few minutes ago by Sean’s situation, now Mike wondered. “You sure you’ll be all right?”
Sean laughed now. “I’m the outdoors guy, remember? There may not be any waves to surf out here, but I’ll be fine. I’ve been camping in worse situations than I’ve got here. At least we have a roof and plenty of beds to choose from. I’ll call when I can. Just keep a cappuccino hot for me because I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I will. And, Sean?” Mike added, “Don’t kill the contractor.”
Smirking, Sean said, “I make no promises.”
Two weeks later, Jenny was fighting a resilient flu that just refused to go away.
Every morning her stomach did an oily slide toward rebellion and every morning she fought it back. She was simply too busy to let some determined bug knock her flat. So she went to work, forced herself to eat and by evening was usually feeling if not great, at least better. Until the next day when it would all start again.
Hunched over her tablet, Jenny made notes on the hotel murals, then shifted files and added a few more finishing touches on the Wise Woman sketches for “The Wild Hunt.” The witch was great and the addition to the script had really given the game that extra punch.
She’d even played the beta game the day before herself just to see how difficult it really was to find the extra runes that would free the witch. It was a challenge. So she knew the hardcore gamers among their fans were going to love it.
Yawning, she shut down that program and called up the list of artists and painters she’d developed. She’d need to hire at least three or four people to help her with the murals and would have to check out their qualifications first.
Sunlight slanted in through the windows of the graphic arts department and all around her conversations and ripples of laughter rang out. Fingers hit keyboards, rock music played softly from one of the cubicles, and here and there in the room people bent their heads together to go over the work.
None of the distractions bothered her because Jenny was used to working with background noise. She’d never yet met an artist who did their best work in sterile silence. So while her friends and colleagues worked the games, Jenny went to artists’ websites.
She looked at portfolios, studied techniques, then checked the artists’ bios and read about their backgrounds. Artists were usually solitary people, but she needed those who could work with others and take instruction. That was the hard part and she knew it. Most artists treasured their own vision of whatever they were working on at the time and didn’t much care for someone else coming in and telling them what to do next.