Chapter 17
Just as they said they would, the Airbnb owners—a rich, bohemian gay couple named Andrew and Tony—arrived the next day in the afternoon.
They must have knocked a hundred times before they finally let themselves in, and were promptly startled to find their rented apartment in potentially the most egregious shape they’d ever seen since beginning their journey as hosts.
It wasn’t that it was messy, exactly—but more so that it had been completely renovated, redecorated, and refurbished. New drapes had been installed, over a dozen large potted plants distributed around the place, like some kind of Rainforest Cafe.
If you squinted hard enough, you could see that all of Tony and Andrew’s original furniture was still there, kind of—the faux-leather couch, the mahogany kitchen table—but that it had either been covered in an insane amount of blankets and tapestries—all colored purple—or pushed into a corner to make room for a more expensive looking variation of the same thing.
Practically, it was horrific. They would be fining their guests into oblivion.
But aesthetically, Tony would admit, it was deeply impressive.
If their guests hadn’t become, well, squatters, Tony might have asked if they would be interested in doing the interior decoration on their next place.
They surely had the eye for it. Maybe with a tad less purple.
“Hello?” he shouted, when the guests failed to greet them. “Ms. Garcia?”
They’d left the key under the mat earlier that month, so they’d never actually met the guests.
Something that didn’t seem like a bad idea at the start, since Aster Garcia had quite favorable reviews on Airbnb—five stars, somehow, which very few tenants have.
All they knew was that Ms. Garcia was a friendly-looking, tan-skinned woman who worked, apparently, at the local blood donation center.
And that she wore a “I like plants more than people” t-shirt in her profile.
“All green flags,” Andrew had said. Tony had agreed.
But only after several minutes of knocking and shouting at the bedroom door did one of the squatters reveal themselves, a woman who was notably not Aster Garcia, but someone Aster had mentioned off-handedly in her application as her apparent “live-in business associate.”
It was a very strange way to describe someone, but Andrew wasn’t in the business of questioning people’s lifestyles. So he’d let his eyes skim over it.
But now he was wishing he’d been a bit more judgmental.
“What do you want?” the live-in business associate drawled, looking displeased to see them, as if she was not the one illegally overstaying in their residence. The woman was wearing nothing but a robe, nearly naked, her eyes lidded like she’d just been woken up from deep sleep.
But it was already three o’ clock in the afternoon.
Andrew looked anxiously at Tony. Neither of them were confrontational people. Occasionally they’d gotten into a dispute with a guest, but it was usually over a cleaning fee, not their right to stay in the building permanently.
“Didn’t you get our messages?” Andrew said, trying to sound assertive, but mostly failing.
The woman, even half-asleep, was very intimidating.
“We’re here to get the keys back. And, er, you need to leave.
” He peered into the room, and saw that it had also been entirely redecorated.
Was that a gigantic DVD collection? “And all your stuff needs to leave, too.”
The woman blinked at him a few times, then groaned.
“This room’s closed. Try the other one.”
And then she slammed the door in their faces.
Andrew looked at Tony in disbelief. “Do something,” he whispered.
“What am I going to do?” Tony whisper-shouted back. “We should just call the police.”
“I don’t want to call the police.”
“Well, I don’t want two random women living in our apartment until the end of time.”
They stared at each other for a long minute before they both deflated.
“Let’s just try the second room.”
So, with a great amount of humiliation, they dragged themselves across the apartment to the other bedroom.
Luckily, Aster Garcia was already walking out of the door.
She looked absolutely exhausted, her hair in a bird’s nest of a bun, but unlike her business partner, who had barely blinked at their existence, she startled like a bunny, her eyes going wide.
“Sylvia,” she said, chewing her lip nervously as she kept her eyes pinned on them. “There are random men in our apartment.”
Tony laughed incredulously. “Random men—ma’am, we own this apartment.”
The other woman shouted from inside her still-closed bedroom, “Ugh, Aster, I told you they were coming, remember? Just do your—your thing. I’m choosing my funeral outfit. Actually, speaking of—dress or suit?”
A light pink sprouted on Aster’s cheeks, and she bit her lip.
“Suit,” she said eventually.
The other woman cackled. “I knew you would. You like me in one, don’t you?”
Aster’s cheeks got even redder, her throat bobbing, and she looked at Andrew and Tony with an expression that said god help me.
Tony was baffled. They were going to a funeral?
What? And—weren’t they business partners?
Why were they flirting? Also, was that blood on the floor of Aster’s room?
Yes, that was a giant bloodstain. Several giant blood stains.
He was starting to go insane. These people were making him insane.
He started getting the uncanny six sense that you developed growing up in NYC that told him someone crazy was about to try and kill him.
He grabbed his boyfriend’s hand. “Andrew, I think we should leave.”
Andrew spluttered, “What? But they’re still—”
“We’re leaving.” He headed for the door. “Bye girls! Have a good time at the funeral!”
“Thank you!” the one named Sylvia sing-song’d from her room.
Once the door to the apartment was firmly shut behind them, Tony dragged a hand across his face, groaned, then turned to Andrew, dropping his voice into a whisper.
“You win. We’re talking to the police.” Andrew geared up to say I told you so, but Tony cut him off with, “I think they might have murdered someone in our bed.”
Andrew’s smile dropped.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
***
“Wow,” Sylvia said, genuinely impressed as she waltzed into the living room, and noted the absence of two extremely nervous homosexuals. “You’re getting really good at Suggestion.”
Aster glanced up at her from the couch, which she was splayed over, one leg on the armrest, the other dragging onto the floor.
She had her own suit on, a blazing white to match Sylvia’s dark blue.
When she looked up and saw the other woman in her outfit, gorgeous curls cascading over an open-breasted blazer, it took everything inside her not to push her up against the wall and kiss the daylights out of her.
Unfortunately, besides Sylvia’s stupid rule, they had bigger problems. So she refrained.
“I didn’t get a chance to use Suggestion,” Aster said, pressing her lips together in a straight line. “So they’re probably pissing themselves halfway to the Brooklyn police station. Well, not probably. They are. I heard them talking about it in the hallway.”
Sylvia looked her up and down—which, oh—then licked across her lips.
“Hm,” she said. “That’s not great.”
“Nope.”
Sylvia grinned. “Wanna chase them and see who gets there first? Like old times?”
Aster barked out a laugh. “You’re a child.”
“Is that a no?”
Aster bit down on her lip. Considered it.
“Should we take our clothes off first?”
Sylvia gave her a particularly animalistic grin. Aster grimaced at her own choice of words.
“I mean—like—should we change back into our regular clothes?” she corrected.
Sylvia shrugged, heading for the window, and unlatching it.
“If you want to lose, sure.” She stuck her leg out the window and onto the fire escape, then her head, and the roaring gusts blew her gorgeous curls into a frenzy. Still, she gave Aster a shit-eating grin through the fogged-up glass. “Time starts—oh, well, now.”
Aster clambered off the couch. “Sylvia, what the fuck are you—”
By the time she reached the window, the other vampire was already mid-air. Sylvia had jumped from the railing of the fire escape, soared ten feet, and then landed on the roof of a building, walking leisurely on the parapets. In heels.
“Oh my god.”
She was in love with an idiot.
A very sexy, powerful idiot.
She shook her head, then sighed, stepping out into the wind. “Game fucking on.”
***
“Sylvia! Slow down, you cheater!”
Sylvia cackled in the distance. “No chance in hell, baby!”
It had been ten minutes of an all-out marathon, and Aster was so focused on not falling that she couldn’t even enjoy the pet name falling so easily off Sylvia’s lips.
With a grunt, she lurched off another rooftop, landing clumsily on the next before breaking out in a full sprint again—dodging exposed piping, tripping over uneven brick.
The wind whipped her hair and the full brunt of the dusking sun bore down on her painfully, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t felt adrenaline like this since they were kids.
Twenty years old and haunting the streets of London like a couple of goons, chasing men in the middle of night and making them leap into the river.
Sometimes you get old and you forget you can still be as free as you were at nineteen.
With a small, nostalgic smile on her face, she continued to run—and watched as the silhouette of the police station began to rise through the fog.
Sylvia had a couple dozen meters on her still—she’d gotten a hell of a head start—but Aster was faster. She’d just have to keep her eyes on the prize, and…
Sylvia dropped out of view.