Chapter Two
The tips of Pax’s fingers had tingled with the urge to pull out his sword and pin the pasty-faced man to the wall of the elevator.
What stopped him wasn’t fear of retribution for breaking the no-kill oath. It was a disinclination to clean something like that up since, after two hundred years’ service, the hotel’s housekeeping staff had quit the day after Denis checked in.
Pax knew the Waysides never did anything by accident. Number Five stranded itself on this particular world for a reason. Rebooting meant starting fresh. What could that mean other than allowing a human inside Number Five’s walls?
A new resident. A fresh start.
At least, that’s what they hoped.
Maddy had put out an advertisement. They were looking for a single, quiet tenant with impeccable references and the ability to pay three months’ rent up front.
The kind of tenant who wouldn’t be home often or ask too many questions.
What would happen to the tenant once Number Five recovered and was on its way through the universe was a question for another day.
Pasty-Face had been the fifth human to come look at the apartment and Pax had decided he would be the last.
There was a reason this world was unvisited.
These people were assholes.
As soon as Pax thought this, the elevator doors had opened, and she was standing there.
The new tenant.
It wasn’t her face that decided him, although she was lovely in a quiet way. Short—the top of her head barely reaching his chin—with straight brown hair parted in the middle, smooth white skin, high cheekbones, and serious gray eyes.
With her presence came a silence Pax hadn’t experienced since becoming a soldier. The roar in his head of angry men and dying beasts had been such a constant he didn’t notice it until it stopped.
She smelled like the rikkonberry pancakes the children in the orphanage got as a special treat on high holy days. Pax was taken aback by this and couldn’t form a proper sentence at first.
“Who are you?” she’d asked.
Sweet-smelling or no, she was a woman alone with a large man in a foreign place. His instincts as a paladin told him to step away from the space around her, keep his movements slow and his voice even.
Pax couldn’t risk scaring her.
The faery princesses had already done enough damage teasing Pasty-Face.
There was so little magic on this world, the tenants had agreed they would not reveal their identities or purposes. The most human-looking among them volunteered to interact with the outside world until Number Five started up again.
Unfortunately, the faery princesses’ idea of “interaction” was a lot different from what Pax or Maddy had envisioned.
While Pasty-Face was wrong about the building being haunted, he was correct to fear teenagers.
Adolescents were universal terrors.
Not that it mattered, because the new tenant was right here. Pax gestured for her to follow him and led her up the staircase.
She reached out and trailed a finger along the banister. “When was this built? I can’t identify the ironwork. It’s certainly prewar, but other than that, all I know is it’s beautiful.”
Pax stopped on the landing and looked beyond her. Where she’d rested her hand, the decorative vines had gone from black to green.
“What is your name, if I may ask?” he said.
“You may,” she said, a dimple appearing right next to her mouth. When Pax said nothing, the dimple smoothed out and a faint blush traveled up her neck to her cheek. Had she said something funny? Pax was a lost cause when it came to jokes.
“I mean, sorry. My name is Josephine. Josie.”
“Josie,” he repeated. No bells rang and the dust on the side table didn’t disappear, but the vine on the banister stayed green.
Was that enough?
A hundred years of responsibility for thousands of soldiers’ lives had shaped Pax.
Even if no ogre hordes waited to descend upon them, the fate of every living being in Number Five Wayside was in Pax’s hands.
This kept him up at night wondering if the job had truly been meant as a reward, or if he’d failed somehow along the way.
If failure was to be his fate.
Turning away, Pax trudged up the second flight of stairs, turned left, and kept going until he stopped at the door of apartment 3C.
“This is it,” he said as he slid the key into the lock and opened the door. “I hope you will like it.”
· · ·
Holy hell in a handbag, this apartment was perfect.
Josie should have turned around and left as soon as Just-Pax opened the door. She could see from the hallway the place was huge and bright. For a woman trying to make sensible decisions, Josie sure liked to test herself.
So she followed him into the apartment, not really caring if he was a serial killer. On second thought, now was a good time to text Barbara.
Just in case.
Josie once had a vivid dream where she and Amos had been sitting at the kitchen table when the waters of the river outside began to rise. The two of them lived on that table from then on, floating past the dangers around them while playing patty-cake and eating fried bologna sandwiches.
She’d figured out the dream was a metaphor for how she felt when her partner, Dan, died of an aneurism while she was pregnant with Amos. Alone but not alone. Endangered but safe enough as long as she kept moving.
The kitchen of this apartment came furnished with a round wooden table like the one from her dream. Josie stopped in her tracks and stared, forgetting she didn’t have enough money for a place like this, forgetting medical bills for her son were slowly bankrupting her, forgetting her lonely nights.
Atop the kitchen table sat a jelly jar filled with cabbage roses that looked as though they’d just been picked. A few peach-colored petals had fallen to the table and Josie focused on those while she got herself together.
“You do not like the table?” Pax asked.
“Oh, no,” she said, tearing her gaze from the roses. “I do. It’s lovely. All this is lovely.”
“Lovely” was an understatement. The ceilings were high and the corners where they met the wall were free of any webs or dust. The floors were linoleum tile in the kitchen and hardwood in the rest of the space.
The windows were large and had wrought iron flower holders, and the living and dining areas were joined by an archway.
Not until they reached the first bedroom did Josie want to cry.
This room was made for Amos: full of light from the southern-facing windows fronted by a cushioned window seat, beneath which sat two bookshelves and a row of cubbies. The walls were a soothing moss green, and the curtains were the yellow of sunflowers.
“Hmmm.” Pax walked past her into the room and examined the bookshelves, running his hand over the back of his neck while tilting his head. “I have not seen these before.” He glanced at her. “This is a child’s room.”
Was that a question?
Her toes already at the edge of a gravelly slope down to the canyon of depression, Josie had to leave before she saw any more.
“I have to go now,” Josie said, horrified she’d had to force the words through her constricted throat.
She would not cry. She would not.
Instead, she would squeeze her feelings into a tiny ball and swallow them alongside every other strong emotion she’d had in the past four years.
“You have children?” he asked.
“A boy.”
“Ah. This is his room.” Pax pulled the pair of curtains apart to let in more light.
“I can’t afford this apartment,” Josie said. “Or any apartment in this building. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”
He frowned at the floor for a moment as if listening for something.
“I haven’t told you the monthly rent yet,” he said when his gaze returned to hers. “How can you know?”
They faced each other, Pax’s hand on the curtains while she leaned against the doorframe, hesitant to fully enter the space.
He didn’t move other than the steady rise and fall of his chest. No fidgeting, no jokes to break the silence.
The gaze resting on her was light, unencumbered by anything other than patience.
What a gift.
She told him her rent—before her dick landlord jacked it up—and waited for Pax to usher her out. Instead, he shrugged.
“That’s more than I would ask. We have no cleaning staff,” he said, looking up at the lighting fixture of colored bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “The railings are wobbly, the exit lights don’t always work, and a bag of wet cats is more amiable than our tenants’ association meetings.”
Josie clasped a hand to her heart.
“The elevator is…temperamental and there is a man named Denis on the fourth floor with a foul mouth and IBS who has no respect for personal boundaries. The laundry room has only two washers and a recalcitrant dryer. Our residents have gotten on each other’s nerves ever since…
er, the pandemic, and the most socializing anyone does is the Thursday afternoon Scrabble competition in the games room.
Even that is over with since someone stole the e’s. ”
Josie stared. “Nothing you said makes this place any less appealing.”
“Hmph.” Pax moved past her out into the hallway. “You are the first person who has said this.” He turned on his heel. “The internets are weak here. If your existence is predicated on 5G, like the man before you, you will not be happy.”
That feeling in her stomach, the one Josie had when she stood on the stoop, was the same swooping sensation she’d had when she’d met Dan. When she’d found out she was pregnant. When, twelve years ago, she’d gotten on a Greyhound and never looked back.
“Is heat included?”