Chapter Eight
“Your gargoyle is hiding in the basement.”
Pax shrugged.
“He’s been whining.”
Pax flinched.
Raphe sniffed in triumph. “Get him back upstairs or I’ll chisel off an organ.”
“Wheeeew,” Denis said with admiration. “Creative. Evil but creative.”
The tenants’ association meeting over, the common area was empty except for the two stragglers. Pax had told Maddy to go to bed and he would finish putting away the folding chairs. She’d taken one last look at the dangling fluorescent lights, nodded, and left.
She missed the chandelier.
They all did.
Even Denis.
“I thought you didn’t like strawberry jam,” Denis said.
As he stood next to a folding table near the window, Raphe’s hand hovered over the bakery box, but his expression remained blank.
“I was checking to see how many were left,” the vampire lied.
Cinnamon scented the air and Raphe glared at the ceiling.
Number Five was allergic to lies.
“I didn’t know you liked sweets,” Pax said, not bothering to hide his amusement.
Pulling his lips back to expose the sharp points of his fangs, Raphe retracted his hand and brushed an invisible speck of dust from his lapel.
“I don’t like sweets,” Raphe said, sniffing as the cinnamon scent intensified.
Pax hadn’t needed the hint. The vampire had left the meeting twenty minutes early with an entire box of Bavarian cream donuts under his arm and returned with a sly grin.
“I am a deadly warrior,” the vampire said curtly. “Deadly warriors don’t like sweets. We steal them from children and rejoice in the sound of their subsequent tears.”
“Okay. Whatever you say.” Pax picked up his chair, folded it, then set it on a cart.
“You like them.”
Pax ignored the vampire’s comment while he folded and stacked more chairs. He knew Raphe wasn’t talking about donuts.
“It was a mistake, letting a pair of humans through the doors,” Denis remarked.
He’d been eyeing the donuts as well and had stayed after the meeting to see if any would be left over.
“Now you’ll have a guilty conscience no matter what.
You’ll feel bad if we kick them out and even worse when we slit their throats. ”
Pax kept his expression blank despite the acid burn of rage at Denis’s words. They were only words. Denis was all talk. “No one is slitting anyone’s throat.”
“Pussy.” The vampire who did not like sweets lifted the lid of the white cardboard box with one finger and examined the contents as he spoke.
“Ironic that The Butcher has a resistance to slitting throats. I’d thought after all your kills you might have figured out how to do it without worrying about the mess. ”
From a bucket beneath the snack table, Pax took a spray bottle and a microfiber cloth. Not as soothing as grooming his horse but he felt the same urge to instill order he often had after battles.
The meeting had been a battle of sorts.
Josie had fought to remain calm while the merits of the garden committee were “discussed.” Her smile hadn’t reached her eyes, and her gaze had volleyed between Amos, the pile of dirt outside, and Denis, who glared at her in return.
The tenants who sided with Pax and were amenable to having the humans among them now took the position a communal garden was an excellent idea.
Others had come up with alternate ideas.
The werewolf from the fourth floor wanted an orchard, the naiad on the first floor whose windows faced the courtyard wanted a water park, and a ghost in corporeal form suggested a dog run.
Maddy had done her best to remind everyone to be well-behaved humans, but the atmosphere had been tense.
Three more lights had burned out and the carpet had turned the greenish-yellow shade of bile.
Hopefully, Josie hadn’t noticed.
“This has nothing to do with liking or not liking them,” Pax said. “This won’t work if we make her uncomfortable. Number Five is changing—”
“A single vine turned green?” Denis scoffed.
Pax held up his spray bottle as though it were a sword. “A new stove,” he pointed out, “redecorated itself for the boy.”
“He is a liar, that boy,” Raphe remarked, sniffing the last of the powdered jelly donuts. “This isn’t strawberry.”
“Focus,” the gnome snapped. “We don’t know how time passes on this world.
The pigeons stopped coming and we don’t know what’s happening in our home worlds, either.
We need to get out of here and back to reality.
Remember, some of us have shit to do.” Denis frowned as Raphe bit into the donut. “Or asses we need to get kicked.”
Raphe ignored the barb, but the vampire coup had repercussions on dozens of worlds. Similar to the controversy over Josie and Amos, one faction of guests supported Raphe, and another, who benefited from the demise of the Vampire Kingdom, opposed him.
A handful from each group could be found in Number Five, but no fights had broken out, although a good deal of wagering took place out of Raphe’s earshot.
The vampire pretended to be too intrigued by the donuts to be baited. “This tastes like the fruit of a hoornegghi plant. They’re carnivorous, you know.” He licked his lips. “Delicious.”
Whatever impatience the guests felt, Pax felt it ten times over. He was responsible for not only their fate but for Number Five itself. Now added to this weight was the fate of Josie and Amos.
It would be Pax’s fault if someone like Denis drove them away. He’d have to find them another place to live at the very least.
At the very worst…
Pax put his head down and set to cleaning the tables.
There wouldn’t be a worst. He’d promised Josie that Amos would be safe within the walls of Number Five and nothing on this world or any other would cause him to break that promise.
· · ·
Unlike the administration of the university where Josie worked, when Number Five’s tenants’ association undertook a project, things happened immediately. Sadly, much like the university, subsequent action was accompanied by paperwork.
The day after the TA meeting, Josie stood next to Pax amid a small group of tenants in the back courtyard, having been summoned by memos slipped under their doors, in their mailboxes, and pinned in the lobby informing TENANTS WHO WISH TO HAVE A SAY IN THE OUTCOME OF THE GIANT DIRT PILE were to report to said dirt pile at five thirty p.m. sharp.
The wind was bitter cold, and the hill of dirt now sported a snowcap.
“She’s like a steamroller with a clipboard,” Josie said, slightly awed and sincerely terrified as Maddy finished handing out the premeeting meeting agenda and argued about the order of items on it with the person in the purple tracksuit from last night who had made a fuss about the e’s.
Josie stared down at the premeeting agenda in her hand. She would have to make sure her boss and Maddy never met.
“She’s inexhaustible,” Pax confirmed. He had to lean down to speak quietly, and the puff of his breath tickled the edge of Josie’s ear while prickles of awareness pebbled the skin of her arms when his shoulder brushed against her. Warmth from his big body seeped from the top of his woolen peacoat.
If the world was a fair and kinder place, Josie would figure out a way to sneak her hands beneath his coat and put them flat against his chest.
For warmth, obviously.
Not like she would gratuitously feel him up.
Her hands were cold. That simple.
“Every time I’m tempted to tell her to cool it, she does something miraculous. Like save us money on recycling or tamper-proofing the fire alarms.”
Josie turned her face toward Pax’s, letting his breath stroke her cheek.
“Do a lot of tenants mess with the fire alarms?” she asked.
He frowned, looking as though he was trying to find the simplest explanation.
How hard could yes or no be?
“You would be surprised what some of the tenants mess with,” Pax said finally.
“…all I’m saying is fungi grow faster when they are part of a decomposition process. I didn’t mean anyone here should be decomposing.” Joey Z. held his hands up in a warding gesture. Poor kid, he had terrible psoriasis. “You don’t have to take everything literally, Denis.”
Denis.
“Now, Denis, I doubt anything he messed with would surprise me,” Josie said.
Pax’s silent laugh curled beneath Josie’s ear following the curve of her neck in a quick caress and she flushed. As if she could hear the pair of them from where she stood, Maddy looked over at Josie and frowned.
“C-A-K-E. I like cake and cake wikes me!” Amos squealed.
Pax chuckled at Josie’s reaction to the chant the cheerleaders were teaching Amos, complete with jumps, stamps, and an impressive number of backflips on the far side of the dirt hill.
He’d claimed not to know how the teens had found out about Amos’s love of cake, but she didn’t buy it.
The cheerleaders had caved to the cold and sported thick, fuzzy jackets and wide-hemmed sweatpants in a bizarre pink-and-yellow color scheme. Amos’s head in his duck hat bobbed up and down amid a sea of giant bows sparkling in the fading sun as they taught him the steps.
Maddy looked over at the noisy teens and frowned, then directed her disapproving stare over to Josie.
“I get the sense Maddy doesn’t like me,” Josie said quietly to Pax once Maddy’s attention shifted.
“Maddy likes you,” he assured her. “She has resting stone face. Deep down, she’s got a huge heart. Simply because she makes the tenants cry, she gets a bad rap.”
“Who did she make cry?” Josie asked, picturing Maddy tearing into the cheerleaders.
“Denis.”
Whatever Maddy was saying now to Joey Z. didn’t look warm and fluffy, either. The poor kid’s head hung so low it looked like it would fall off.
Wait.
“Didn’t you tell me Maddy was the person who decorated Amos’s room?”
Josie hadn’t meant to question him and might have been as surprised as Pax that she’d blurted this out now.
“It was her idea,” he said, turning his head to watch Amos so she couldn’t see his expression. “Not Pider-Man, specifically, but that we should find a novel way to welcome you.”
Josie considered his answer.