The Quimby Hotel | Novella

Five years ago, Cairo Quimby disappeared without a trace. His family has neglected to speak of him since, running the slightly strange but unassuming hotel he grew up in as if nothing ever happened. Until Cairo, a lone wanderer roaming a lost and dangerous world, has a run-in at a diner with mysterious strangers who are after his stepfather ⸻ as it turns out, Richard Quimby has been hiding something, and hiding something valuable. He's broken the viciously enforced code of In-Betweens by whatever his hotel is harboring, and against his better judgment, Cairo's loyalty takes him back. Back to his dreaded childhood home, back to the place to which he swore he'd never return.

Cairo's family is nothing ordinary. Strange things happen when they want them to, and impossible is a limit that simply does not exist in their plane of being. But it's this strangeness that he's been rejecting, that he's been trying to run from all these years. Unfortunately, whether he likes it or not, he must enlist the help of siblings who resent him to unveil the secrets behind the vendetta against his stepfather and fight the forces determined to tear his family apart. Oh, and of course, he has to participate in a race for inheritance privileges ⸻ something he never even wanted. Cairo's own past has come back to haunt him, tangled with everyone else's and a million times worse.

Time is ticking, and there are sins to atone for, blood to be spilled.

#ONC2024 - Prompt 13
Total Word Count: 40,310
#1 in #intrigue 2/24-3/21
© Ginger Beckett 2024