Chapter Ten
“Were you fixing the pipes or getting your pipe fixed in the little human’s apartment tonight?” Raphe asked.
Instead of walking down the front stairs, where he might encounter Amos and his grandparents, Pax had left Josie’s floor via the emergency staircase at the back of the building.
There, the surly vampire had ambushed him, jumping out from the shadow of the stairwell and tossing insinuations around like confetti.
Walking past Raphe, Pax opened the door to the basement, pretending to ignore him, but the vampire followed in his wake like a shadow. A shadow with a snarky attitude.
A shadow who knew too much.
“I thought paladins were eunuchs,” Raphe said.
“We remain celibate during our service,” Pax replied. “Celibacy is different from castration.”
“I don’t see how,” Raphe said.
“One is temporary.”
Instead of turning down the corridor to the left, which led to his lair, Raphe followed Pax through the door marked Boiler Room.
Inside the gray cement walls stood what looked like an eighteenth-century stove with pipes sprouting from all over it, some as thick as branches, others thin as adders.
The pipes attached themselves to the ceiling and the floor, throbbing in time with the low pulsing beat emanating from the belly of the stove.
“She doesn’t sound like she’s out of gas,” Raphe said.
“I don’t know if anyone other than Maddy and I can hear it,” Pax said quietly, “but she sounds…sad.”
“Sad?” Raphe echoed the word as he drew closer to the stove.
Waysides were comparable to complex structured cells. This stove was like a mitochondrion, the powerhouse to the whole. Ever since the elevator stopped working, something in this mitochondrion—or perhaps heart would be more accurate—had been diminished.
The golden needle on the hypsidoodle still rested on its side, pointing to zero.
For hours Pax had sat down here listening to the rhythm, trying to hear a hitch in the pulse, a drag, a whine—some hint of what ailed this magnificent creature. He would do anything for her.
Number Five had surrounded him with comfort and warmth, asking little in return.
Polishing the railings when they were tarnished, sweeping dust from her corners, and keeping her windows clean so light could blanket walls and floors—these were small favors in return for the first true home he’d ever known.
Paladins were chosen from orphanages. Girls and boys with no family, and sometimes without even a name, were recruited to the Army of Light.
It still struck Pax as a small miracle he now had a room of his own, a door to close when the world outside grew too loud, and a clean pillow and soft bedding cradling him when the nightmares came.
“Have you tried?” Raphe asked.
Rubbing his face, Pax regarded the other man warily. Not good to let his attention wander when in the company of a predator. Were they still speaking about Number Five?
What was Josie doing right now? Why had Amos thrown up?
Had the kiss affected her as much as it had affected him?
“Tried what?” he asked, shoving those questions out of his brain.
Raphe smiled, the low light of the stove’s flames reflecting off his pointed teeth. “Blood.”
That again.
“She doesn’t want blood. I would know if she did, and I’d give mine without question.” Pax sighed. “You’re wrong, Raphe. She might be looking for a sacrifice, but not the kind you’re thinking.”
“ ‘Reboot.’ What does that even mean?” Raphe muttered. “ ‘Reblood’ makes more sense.”
“ ‘Reboot.’ ‘Renew.’ ‘Restart.’ It doesn’t matter what lexicon we reference,” Pax said, cutting him off. “We’ve been doing things wrong. Somehow, we’ve drained her of what she needs to keep moving.”
Raphe scowled at the stove. “Yes, but what? What have we done wrong? How are we supposed to rectify this mistake if we don’t know what it is in the first place?”
When Manny had come to save Pax on the battlefield, he’d said something about the Waysides having changed.
No.
Travelers had changed in the way they treated the Waysides.
“Manny said Waysides used to be a gathering place,” Pax said.
Raphe squatted down and peered through an opening in the stove belly, gently tapping the glass over the golden needle as if he could wake it.
“Waysides are still the only places we can coexist without violence,” the vampire said. “ ‘Safe as a guest in a Wayside.’ Quite certain it’s a saying on every world in existence.”
“Except for this one,” Pax pointed out.
The men shared a glance.
“Do you think that’s why Number Five stopped on this world?” Raphe asked. “It has something to do with how little magic is here?”
“Maybe?” Pax shook his head. “She doesn’t speak to me directly.”
The vampire stood and stepped toward Pax; fists clenched. “How do you know she is against a blood sacrifice if she doesn’t speak to you?”
For vampires, blood meant life. To them there was no such thing as needless bloodshed. All blood was needed, all blood sacred.
“I am the hotel manager,” Pax insisted. “I know.”
“Pfft,” Raphe dismissed Pax’s protest with a wave of his fingers.
“You also know the sixth-floor guests can’t sleep indefinitely.
At some point you’ll have a floor full of the most powerful—and the most dangerous—beings in the universe up and around and hungry.
You know the Fate siblings will tire of staying in one place without meddling in folk’s affairs.
The Zombinos will give up on that vegan nonsense, and the shifters will lose control of their forms. This building is full of creatures existing only in myths for this world.
At some point, we will be found out. What do you know about our fate when that happens? ”
Nothing.
Pax knew nothing about what the future held except that he was responsible for the outcome.
· · ·
“Out with it.”
Josie looked up from her computer screen.
Shit. She did not have time for this today.
Jenna dragged a chair from the waiting room in front of Josie’s desk and sat herself down while Barb put the Closed for Lunch sign on the door out there, then joined her.
Ben’s office door was closed but the occasional buzz phrase could be heard from the weekly administrative Zoom meeting the provost scheduled during lunchtime.
“Is it cancer?” Barb asked.
“Barb,” Jenna admonished, rolling her eyes. “Always with the worst case.” She leaned over the desk and pushed Josie’s monitor to the side. “Are you safe in your home, honey? You can blink the answer if you think someone’s listening.”
Barb turned in her seat and stared at Jenna. “If she’s being recorded, they heard you tell her to blink her eyes.”
“Well, okay, smarty-pants. What should I have done?” Jenna snapped.
“You should have held this up.” Barb held up a sheet of paper with the words Are you safe in your home? written in orange Sharpie.
“I’m not in danger,” Josie said.
“That’s brilliant,” Jenna said admiringly to Barb. “I’m going to make a smaller sign and laminate it to carry in my purse.”
“I don’t have cancer,” Josie added.
“Ooooh, lamination. Genius,” Barb replied.
“I do have the summary of three different financial aid audits to finish before I can leave,” Josie said. “So, now we’re clear…” She pulled the monitor back in front of her face, only for Barb to pull it away again.
“We’re not clear,” Barb said. “Something is going on.”
Josie stared at the women. They stared back. The provost’s tinny voice came from the other side of Ben’s door, droning on about “synergy” and “team-building” and “platforming.”
“How do you know something is going on?” Josie asked, forfeiting the staring contest, knowing she would never win. Barb might give up, but Jenna was part lizard.
“You’ve had three students in a row come in and complain about their aid packages or work-study jobs,” said Jenna.
“When the first student complained ten was too early in the morning for them to be expected to show up for work, you told them their entitled lifestyle ended the minute they couldn’t pay for it. ”
Josie shrugged. “It’s true.”
“Of course, it’s true,” Barb said. “The point is you said that. To one of them. Out loud. Without backtracking or apologizing or giving them all the cash from your wallet.”
What the…?
“I don’t give students cash from my wallet,” Josie protested.
“No, you Venmo them,” Jenna said shortly. “When the second student sat there and said how the university should be paying them to be here instead of the other way around, you played a tiny violin for them, then told them to get back to class.”
“That was wrong of me,” Josie said.
“No, girl,” Barb held up a hand, palm out. “No, that was the right answer. The answer you should have been giving all this time.”
“We knew for sure something was going on when you told that boy who left that his parents weren’t emotionally blackmailing him when they emphasized how difficult college was to afford, what he felt was guilt and guilt was good for him.”
The boy had been outraged his parents had asked him to apply for financial aid now that he was twenty-three and still an undecided sophomore after six years of college.
“I shouldn’t have made him cry,” Josie said.
Jenna slapped her forehead with a palm. “Josephine, he was crying when he walked in here because he had to show his ID to come behind the front desk and felt violated by having to be perceived. You didn’t make him cry. His default is crying. You told him the truth.”
“Exactly,” Barb chimed in. “I’ve never seen you be so honest before. It’s as if Mary Poppins channeled Cruella de Vil.”
“Point is,” said Jenna, “you are not yourself. Who are you and what have you done with Polly Pleasant?”
Josie slapped her hands on the desk. “Is that what you guys call me behind my back? Polly Pleasant?”
Without even trying to look embarrassed, Barb and Jenna nodded.
“You two are the ones always telling me to be assertive!” Josie exclaimed. “Now you’re complaining?”