Chapter Eighteen
The casino’s basement had undergone some changes.
The winding corridors had been a hodgepodge this morning, just a bunch of junk-filled rooms with white tile flooring, a maze of corridors branching out everywhere, and too bright fluorescents overhead.
Where they hadn’t burned out, that is, as maintenance was slipshod around here.
But now the storerooms filled with seasonal décor, housekeeping supplies, battered furniture, cans of paint and tarping, boxes of paper cups with the Dante’s logo, and old slot machines had given way to… I wasn’t sure. But at least I could see it.
Some of the fluorescents still worked, illuminating the corridor with bright puddles, and the dark spots had largely been filled in by the people who had colonized every square inch down here and found ways to light things up.
Hideous, hideous ways.
A life-sized hula dancer with a tattered grass skirt, a leering metal skull peeking out of a partially burnt away face, and witchy hair—some relic from Dante’s checkered past, I guessed—had been plugged back in, probably because of the lamp she held in one hand.
She was twitching up a storm in a mechanical parody of a dance, causing the lantern to tremble and throw shadows on the walls.
There were also fake torches that someone had found in a box somewhere and spliced into the electrical system, incongruous Christmas lights that had decked the halls, and illuminated Halloween decorations adding to the crazy.
And that was just what I could see from the elevator doors, with much of the rest obscured by bends in the hall and somebody’s wet clothes.
A lot of somebodies, who must have located the main hotel laundry, which might be down here for all I knew.
Because lines of damp bras, blankets, t-shirts, and jeans were flapping overhead on lines that crisscrossed the hallways, clutching at us with clammy, corpse-like hands.
I ducked under someone’s damp sleeping bag into a hall, and Cyrus followed, staring around at the décor, or maybe at the rooms full of people, because I don’t think it had hit him before exactly how many three hundred was.
Although it was looking like more at the moment.
A lot more, I thought worriedly, moving to the side as a bunch of kids came running by, laughing and kicking a soccer ball ahead of them.
“There are children?” Cyrus said, and I just shook my head.
I hadn’t seen any before, but we had ‘em. As well as some old people, including a guy in a wheelchair parked in the hall playing checkers on a folding table with another old timer wearing just a pair of jeans, although the hair on the latter’s back was thick enough to count as a pelt even in human form.
But most of the people were younger, and a good three-quarters of them were men.
But instead of causing trouble, they were helping people move in, squeezing by us carrying somebody’s worldly goods, or whatever of them could be rescued from Tartarus.
Or setting up camping cots in some of the rooms, which I guessed the Guardians had supplied, because I was ashamed to say I hadn’t thought of it.
Or following people in nurses’ scrubs who were attending to the wounded, while the young men looked on watchfully, or hefted their heavy backpacks full of medicine to the next room.
Seeing the state of many of the people, I was glad I’d donned some of the supplies Cyrus had sent the guys for, namely a pair of jeans, a red T-shirt, and a yellow hoodie. Because I guessed Fireborn had chosen our colors, after all. And damn was I grateful that I’d left the finery upstairs!
This was where I should have been all day, I thought, gazing around. This was what I should have been doing. As soon as I left Sebastian—
“Don’t,” Cyrus said, reading my face because I hadn’t said a word. “We’re here now.”
And yeah, we were. So we got to work, with him grabbing some of our boys to check on the food situation and me finding Dave, who was still here, clipboard in hand and a pencil stuck behind his ear.
It had joined the ever-growing number of items he had misplaced, I guess, because he was writing with a Dante’s pen and going room to room, peering into the darkness with his glasses still crowning his head, and trying to figure out who everybody was.
He wasn’t having much luck until I turned up, but as soon as I did, people started looking at me whenever he would ask them anything.
And when I nodded, they would answer, making me feel even worse, because I could have been saving him a lot of work all day.
And because they were treating me like their Lupa when I hadn’t done shit.
But it didn’t seem to matter. Everywhere I went, hands were reaching out to me, wanting to touch me, to thank me, to be near me. And whatever strange, altered state of mind I had been in earlier, when that had felt right and normal and expected, was long since gone.
All I felt now was guilt, because they were hurt and hungry, and I hadn’t been here. And afraid, because there were so goddamned many. And worried, because now that I was seeing them through clear eyes, my God.
They needed everything.
But if Cyrus was feeling the same, you couldn’t tell.
He was soon meeting and greeting and laughing with them, and half an hour or so after Dave and I got to work, he came into the latest storeroom-turned-dormitory with Noah, Jace, and Lee behind him.
Each of them was carrying a cardboard box that had been turned into a tray overflowing with what looked like the entire menu from Guac and Rock, a local hole-in-the-wall with Tijuana-style tacos, vividly colored murals, and Mexican rock and roll blaring from a dozen speakers.
The guys loved it, and it looked like when Cyrus had said a feast, they’d taken him at his word.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at something dripping in sauce, and was gifted a package of whatever the hell. It was still warm and greasy enough that a line of liquified fat was immediately coursing down my arm, while my stomach woke up to make demands. Loud ones.
Noah grinned. “Adobo pork, but we got shrimp, carnitas, and barbacoa, too—”
“And chicken enchiladas,” Jace put in. “With green tomatillo salsa, but we also have red somewhere…”
He started looking through the boxes, but I held up the hand that wasn’t busy stuffing my face. “Feed everybody else first. I’m fine.”
But Noah just laughed. “We got enough for you and half the hotel. They had to shut down, ‘cause we literally bought ‘em out. You should have seen the guy behind the register when he asked what I wanted, and I said everything.”
“Like Ron Swanson,” Kimmie said, coming in carrying a couple of six packs of soda. “What?” Lee looked at her in confusion.
“You know, like on Parks and Recreation.”
“What?”
“It’s a sitcom,” she explained patiently.
“Or it used to be. It’s been off the air for a while.
One of the guys on it really liked meat, and he was in this restaurant and ordered all the bacon and eggs they had.
And then he told the waiter that he was worried that the man thought he had said a lot of bacon and eggs, when he’d actually said all of the…
” she sighed at Lee’s confused expression.
“You know, it’s not funny if I have to explain it. ”
“And how do you know that old show?” he demanded.
“I know all the old shows. I don’t sleep, remember?”
“That’s just freaky.”
Kimmie’s perfectly arched eyebrow raised. “Like going furry every full moon?”
“You know we don’t have to, and anyway, that’s not the same thing. There are plenty of Weres, but I never heard of anybody who just doesn’t sleep. Right, man?”
He looked at Jace for backup, but the younger man was busy unloading a mountain of food, including elote dripping with cotija cheese and Mexican spices and blistered from the grill, a truckload of rice and refried beans, and a couple of big serving-size bowls of arroz con leche, fragrant with cinnamon for dessert, assuming anybody still had room.
And I guessed they did, because the dozen or so people in the room fell on the boxes like they were starving, and Dave and I barely made it out into the hall before the sounds of carnage erupted behind us.
Only to get almost run down there, too. Jen came speeding up, pushing a massive room service cart piled high with more greasy boxes, which all of the boys I knew and more that I didn’t were quickly denuding, carrying the haul into rooms on either side of the hall.
And trying to do crowd control at the same time, while heavenly smells permeated the corridor, and famished heads poked out everywhere.
“Wait your turn! Wait your turn!” Sophie, who was somewhere in the mass of people behind Jen, was yelling. “There’s plenty to go around! Nobody’s gonna be left out, but we have to get down the hall!”
Dave, who had given up doing any more interviews until everybody was fed, and I cleared a path, and the cart surged ahead, only to be quickly emptied.
But no sooner had we handed out the last boxes than another cart was coming this way, pushed by some of the creatures that staffed the hotel’s kitchens.
And causing people to screech and jerk back into their rooms, because yeah.
Just… yeah.
They were some weird sort of fey—I guessed, as I’d never found the nerve to ask—and were snorting and screeching and making indescribable sounds somewhere between a choke and a death rattle that had me staring in consternation.
There were a lot of them, and even though most only came up to my waist, they weren’t people I wanted to piss off.
Some had bat wings, others thick, dinosaur-type scaled tails, and most sported maws of teeth far too sharp for comfort, leading to Dave and me squashing ourselves against the wall as they boiled past with their cart.
And finished serving everyone while we were still processing.