Chapter 1: The Marriage Bureau, 2:47 AM

Jarrin Jostar woke up with the taste of cheap champagne and whatever had been in the mini-bar sitting in his mouth like a hangover had filed a cease-and-desist letter. The ceiling above him was wrong. White, with a smoke detector that looked recently installed and a faint water stain in the shape of a question mark. Not his ceiling. His ceiling was beige and had a crack he'd been meaning to fix since last winter.

He shifted on the bed and discovered Jazz was there. Obviously she was there. She'd been there since last night, or the morning after that, or whenever they'd arrived at this hotel room. On her stomach, naked, one arm dangling off the mattress like she'd been caught mid-reach for something just before giving up. The dice choker sat against her throat where it always did, ivory and red, a little too tight and a little too loud.

He lay still for a moment. The room smelled like expensive candles and regret.

His phone was somewhere near his left ear. He found it, flipped it over. Seven percent battery. The last notification from something called The Chaperone glowed on the screen in white text against a dark background: You're married now. Have fun.

He stared at it, then turned the phone over to look at the nightstand.

A framed certificate sat propped against the lamp base, the kind hotels put there to make you feel like you've won something. His name and hers filled the center in that official script, with an officiant's signature that was less a signature and more a seizure had been in progress. Taped to the back of the frame, a receipt from the Las Vegas Marriage Bureau. 2:47 AM.

Seven percent battery. A marriage certificate. A hangover that felt like it had personal grudges.

The bed shifted. Jazz's face appeared in the peripheral of his vision, turned toward him with the expression of someone waking up in a new body. She blinked twice. Once, slowly. Then she lifted her head, looked at Jarrin, looked at the frame in his hand, and lifted her eyebrows in a way that could mean several things depending on the time of day and whether she'd had coffee yet.

"Elvis," she said.

"Elvis."

"I remember Elvis." Her voice had the cracked quality of someone who'd spent too many hours talking over bass-heavy music. "Two Elvises, actually. Different suits. One was yellow. One was..." She trailed off, searching. "Orange? Or red. I can't tell."

Jarrin held the frame up. "We're married."

"We got married." Jazz pushed herself up on her elbows, and the sheet pooled around her waist. "In a chapel. There were flowers. Cheap flowers, the kind that come in those little cellophane tubes at gas stations."

"And a drunk Elvis impersonator wearing a different suit both times."

"Three times, actually. He came back to the bathroom to get his shoes." She reached behind her, pulled something off the mattress that looked crumpled and slightly damp, and unfolded it. A tiara. Rhinestones, the cheap kind. An Elvis head had been glued to the front with what might have been hot glue or something equally industrial.

Jarrin snorted. "I got this from the bathroom door."

"I got the tiara from the bathroom door." Jazz laughed, a bright sound that didn't quite match the fact they were both half-naked in an unfamiliar room with a marriage certificate in a frame. She dropped back onto the pillows. "This is going to be a funny story."

"I hope so."

They stayed like that for a while. Jarrin on his back, Jazz on hers, the room spinning slowly in the particular way it spun when the hangover was still establishing its territory. Somewhere below them a cart rattled. Somewhere else a door slammed.

"Legally," Jarrin said, "Nevada marriages performed in chapels are binding."

Jazz propped herself up on one elbow. "How bound?"

"Like actually married. Legally married. Drunkenness isn't a legal loophole, just a legal aggravation. If we want out, we need an annulment. That means paperwork, lawyers, hearings. Could take a full day at minimum."

"One day." Jazz considered this. "We have twenty-four hours."

"Presumably."

"So we get breakfast first, then we figure it out."

"That sounds like the most responsible decision you've ever made."

"That sounds like the most responsible decision either of us has ever made." Jazz swung her legs off the bed. "I'm putting clothes on. Put clothes on too. We can be legally married and hangry at the same time, but it's not dignified."

Jazz found her black dress and red leather jacket in a pile on the floor, Jarrin's contribution to the heap. The fishnets went on without a single snag. Jarrin found his gray pants and black tank top under a chair that had taken three separate lumps from his body during the night. The tiara went on the bathroom counter where it sat like a small crown of poor decisions, and neither of them bothered to move it.

The hotel was quiet. The third-floor hallway had the particular sterility of a place that cleaned too well and too recently. Jarrin checked his phone again. Four percent. The marriage certificate receipt was open on the screen now, and he studied the license number like it might explain something. It didn't.

They took the stairs down. The elevator was for people who cared about their knees, and neither of them did. The lobby was half-full with the mid-morning crowd: tourists with maps, business travelers with laptops, and one guy in a Hawaiian shirt who looked like he'd given up on whatever he'd been planning for the day.

The front desk clerk was a young man named Kevin, according to the name tag. He was already there, already had a form in front of him, and had a printer ready. When Jarrin asked about a copy of the certificate, Kevin simply printed it without asking why.

"For tax purposes," Kevin said, handing over a fresh printout in a way that suggested this happened often enough to be routine.

"Right. Tax purposes." Jarrin pocketed the copy and asked for the room service receipt from the previous night.

The receptionist typed something into the system. The screen showed what Jarrin had suspected: two rooms that had never been checked in separately. One suite. A joint reservation made shortly after 2 AM.

"We were married on the hotel's dime," Jazz said.

Jarrin scrolled through the folio on his phone. The tiara. The Elvis officiant fee. A mini-bar tab. All itemized.

"So we're not even paying for this." Jazz pocketed the tiara. "That's either very flattering or very alarming."

"Both." Jarrin pocketed his phone. "I want to see the room."

"Already there?"

"Just confirming."

They went back up. The elevator was occupied. Jarrin took the stairs again. Room 314 sat between two closed doors, the kind that stayed closed for reasons. The room service cart had been left outside with a bag of breakfast items still in the basket, the kind nobody ever touched after midnight. The door was ajar.

A dripping sound came from behind the bathroom.

"Did you hear that?" Jazz stopped.

"Sounds like a leak."

"Dripping sounds like leaks." Jazz tilted her head. "Do you want to call the front desk?"

Kevin was still down at the desk. Jarrin could see him if he looked down at the stairwell, though the angle made him look like an ant at a picnic.

Jarrin knocked. Nothing. He pushed the door.

The bathroom had a bathtub. The tub was full of water that was dark in a way that water shouldn't be dark, even in a room with the lights off. The tiles around the tub had dark stains. Blood, probably. A man lay face-up in the water with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling like it owed him something. His shirt was red with it now.

Jazz stepped to the tub and pressed two fingers against the man's wrist. She waited. She checked the other wrist. The man's eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling.

"No pulse," Jazz said.

"No Stand either." Jarrin looked around. The bathroom was small, ordinary, with a shower curtain and a toilet and a towel that someone had folded with unnecessary care. No supernatural presence. No shimmering aura or visible energy distortion. Just a dead man and the smell of copper that had nothing to do with anything beyond its obvious meaning.

"Are we calling the police?" Jazz asked.

Jarrin thought about it for exactly as long as he always thought about things before arriving at exactly the answer he'd already wanted. They were a married couple, checked into a hotel suite at eleven in the morning. They had a marriage certificate in a pocket and a dead man in a bathtub twenty feet from the front desk. The police would ask questions. The questions would connect things. The things connected would include names, addresses, phone records, video footage, and a marriage certificate. Two people who didn't know why they were married would end up in a statement that made them look like they knew a lot more than they did.

"We walk out," Jarrin said. "We get coffee. We don't touch that door handle again."

Jazz didn't argue. She closed the bathroom door and they walked back down the hallway toward the elevator.

Jarrin watched the dead phone screen while Jazz pressed the down button. Three missed calls glowed in the notification panel. Ringo Star. The name meant nothing to him. All three calls had come last night, within minutes of each other, before whatever had happened in Room 314.

The elevator arrived. They stepped in. Jazz pressed the lobby button. The doors closed, and the floor dropped beneath them with a mechanical whir that felt absurdly normal.

Silence filled the box. Both of them understood that the plan to walk out without a scene had expired the moment they walked out. Jazz pulled out her deck of cards. She riffled them with her thumb, a clean mechanical sound that filled the space between floors. The cards moved in a blur, the edges catching the elevator light, and she caught them neatly against her thigh.

Jarrin pulled up the marriage certificate receipt on his dead phone, held it up to the light from the elevator's small window, and read the license number aloud. The digits had no particular significance to him. They were just numbers on a piece of paper that said something permanent had happened while he was too drunk to be certain he'd existed at all.

"0-3-7-4-1-9-8-6," he said.

Jazz watched the numbers appear. Then she went back to riffling her deck.

The elevator reached the lobby. Doors opened. Kevin looked up, saw them, looked back at his paperback. Jazz walked past the desk. Jarrin followed. The tiara sat in her jacket pocket like a small secret. The lobby smelled like carpet cleaner and over-brewed coffee.

Somewhere above them, on the third floor, the water in the bathtub kept dripping. Red water. Mixed with whatever else had been in that tub before it had become a tub again. The dead man's eyes hadn't moved from the ceiling. Whatever ceiling he'd been looking at.