The Kraken’s Claim (Bathhouse Beasts #12)

Chapter 1

The Kraken’s Claim: Zeke

The orange pill bottle rattled against the cup holder every time I hit a pothole, and Cedar Street had a lot of potholes.

I'd stopped taking the things three days ago.

They made my head feel like it was wrapped in cotton, but I hadn't gotten around to throwing them out.

Knowing me, I probably wouldn't. They'd just live there in the truck forever, a souvenir of the Tuesday I'd torn up my shoulder.

Six weeks off work. That's what the doctor had said, scribbling on his pad like he was writing me a winning lottery ticket and not a death sentence.

Soft tissue damage, partial rotator cuff tear, no lifting over ten pounds.

I'd nodded and smiled and walked out to my truck and sat there for fifteen minutes staring at the steering wheel because I genuinely had no idea what a man like me was supposed to do for six weeks.

I'm a framer. That's not a job, that's a personality.

You give me a slab and a stack of lumber and by sundown I'll give you a house.

My hands had calluses on top of calluses.

My back was a topographical map of every dumb thing I'd done since I was nineteen.

My idea of a vacation was a Sunday where I only worked half a day.

And now I was supposed to sit on my couch and heal, like I was some kind of houseplant.

The bottle rattled again. I scowled at it.

"Go to the bathhouse, dude." That's what Marco had said when I'd called him that morning, half out of my mind from another night of staring at the ceiling.

Marco had been my foreman for six years before he'd blown out his knee and gone into inspection.

He knew exactly what kind of crazy this was.

"Don't argue with me, Zeke. Just go. Hot water'll do more for that shoulder than any of those pills.

And the rest of it'll do more for the part of you that's losing its mind. "

"The rest of it," I'd repeated.

"You know what I'm saying."

I did know what he was saying. Marco had been the one who'd told me about the bathhouse in the first place, two years back, after a particularly brutal breakup with a guy who'd turned out to be married.

No strings, no names, no bullshit, Marco had said.

Just go take care of yourself. Trust me.

And I had trusted him. I'd been a handful of times since.

Not often, my work schedule didn't really allow for it, but enough to know he was right and enough to keep my membership active.

The bathhouse sat in the warehouse district, between a defunct printing company and a place that I think used to be a mattress factory.

From the outside it looked like absolutely nothing.

A flat metal facade, a metal door, a single bulb burning above the lintel.

You'd drive past it a hundred times and never know. That was the point.

I pulled around back and killed the engine.

For a long moment I just sat there with my good hand resting on the wheel, listening to the tick of the cooling motor and the distant sigh of traffic on the overpass.

My shoulder was throbbing in time with my heartbeat.

I'd taken the sling off before leaving the apartment because I didn't want to walk in there looking like a charity case, but now I was regretting it.

Even reaching down to grab my gym bag from the floorboard sent a hot wire of pain down through my chest.

"You're a mess, Zeke," I muttered to no one.

The reflection in the rearview agreed with me.

Dark hair that needed a cut, brown eyes ringed with the kind of shadows you only get from sleeping wrong for a week straight, three days of stubble that had crossed the line from rugged into derelict.

I looked like a man who'd lost a fight with a piece of plywood, which was more or less what had happened.

Six weeks. Six weeks of this.

"Fuck it," I said, and got out of the truck.

The metal door was heavy, and pulling it open with my good arm sent a sympathetic twinge through the bad one.

The lobby on the other side was exactly the way I remembered it, clean, plain, and lit by a row of fluorescents that buzzed faintly in the ceiling.

There were a couple of cheap waiting room chairs against one wall, and a potted snake plant that looked like it had been there since the Carter administration.

And behind the desk, the same silver-haired attendant who'd been there every other time I'd come in, reading a paperback with the spine cracked all the way back.

He didn't look up. "Membership card."

I fished it out of my wallet and slid it across the counter. He took it without breaking eye contact with his book, ran it under the scanner, and slid it back. The whole transaction took maybe four seconds. I'd had longer conversations with the self-checkout at the grocery store.

"Locker thirty-six," he said, finally glancing up.

His eyes flicked down to my shoulder, where the bruise was starting to crawl out from under my t-shirt collar in a yellow-purple stain.

He didn't comment. He just reached under the desk and came up with a plastic wristband with a key on it, plus a folded towel, and pushed both across to me. "Take it easy in there, son."

"That's the plan."

"Stick to the main bath," he added, and now he was looking at me directly, those pale eyes weirdly sharp under the silver brows. "Hot water'll be good for that. Skip the cold plunge."

"Got it."

He nodded once and went back to his paperback.

The locker room was empty, which I was grateful for.

Then again, it was the middle of the day.

Not quite the prime time I was used to. I'm not body-shy because you don't last in construction if you're body-shy, half the guys I worked with would change in a parking lot in February without thinking twice.

Or take a piss in the bushes next to heavy traffic without blinking.

But undressing one-handed with a busted shoulder is the kind of thing nobody needs an audience for.

I worked my t-shirt off carefully, hissing through my teeth when I had to lift my arm to get it over my head. The bruise was uglier than I'd realized. It bloomed across the front of my shoulder and down toward my pec, a thunderhead of color that made me look like I'd been hit by a car.

Maybe Marco had a point. Maybe I needed this more than I'd been willing to admit.

I stripped the rest of the way down, stowed everything in locker thirty-six, and wrapped the towel around my waist. The wristband key clicked against my hip when I moved.

The standard bathhouse uniform was nothing but skin and a strip of terrycloth with the understanding that you were here to leave the outside world outside.

No names, no job titles, just steam, sex, and mutual understanding.

The shower room was bigger than I remembered, a long open space tiled in pale gray, with columns of showerheads rising up from the floor in pairs.

There were maybe five other guys in there at this hour, all of them in various stages of rinsing off.

They consisted of a couple of humans, a guy with the bluish skin and feathery gills of some kind of ocean-creature lineage, and what I was pretty sure was a satyr with short horns and the dark thatch of fur on his thighs giving way to neat little hooves.

Nobody paid me any particular attention as I walked in, which was the way it was supposed to be. The bathhouse was a place where you got to just be for a while.

I dropped my towel on a hook and stepped under the spray.

The first hit of hot water against my back was almost enough to make my knees buckle.

God. I braced my good hand against the tile and just breathed through it, letting the heat sluice down over me in a slow, steady wave.

The knot of muscle around my injury was wound up so tight it felt like a fist clenched permanently under the skin, and the water was finally starting to coax it loose.

I stood there with my eyes closed and my head bowed and let it happen.

Three days of bad sleep and bad mood and bad self-pity began to slide off me and pool around the drain.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that the satyr finished his shower and left. Long enough that another guy took his spot at the showerhead next to mine, gave me a polite nod, and let me have my space. Long enough that the throbbing in my shoulder downshifted from a yell to a mumble.

When I finally turned the water off, I felt almost human again.

I toweled off carefully, knotted the towel back around my waist, and pushed through the heavy frosted-glass door at the far end of the shower room.

Steam hit me in the face like a warm hand.

The main bath was the showpiece of the whole place, and even now, on my fifth or sixth visit, it took a second to adjust to it.

The room was huge with a vaulted ceiling, arched alcoves, and the whole thing was tiled in deep blue and gold mosaic that Marco had once described as "what you'd get if a Roman emperor sponsored a gay porno. "

He wasn't wrong. The bath itself was sunken into the floor, an enormous oval easily sixty feet across, with stone ledges built into the perimeter at varying depths so you could sit anywhere from waist-deep to neck-deep depending on what your body wanted.

Soft red lights glowed under the waterline, throwing rippling gold patterns up onto the walls.

The air was thick with steam and the faint, clean smell of mineral salts.