Page 54 of Housesitter

What the hell was going on?

Chapter Thirteen

Hell House Client Brief: The shadows move sometimes. Pretend to be spooked, it makes their day.

The key to being a New Yorker was dwelling on what you liked about the city.

Shepherd stood at the counter in the bodega and rubbed the ginger cat behind the ears. It enjoyed the attention for a while, and then turned around to present its furry ass for a scratch. While Shepherd obliged, he drank his bougie coffee—whipped cherry matcha espresso—and watched the cook slice pastrami into tissue-thin slices.

On the corner. That was the sort of convenience small towns couldn’t offer.

Shepherd got the bagel and sandwich, paid, and left. The brown paper bag rustled under his arm as he stepped over the homeless guy sleeping under the window. Catcalls followed him down the road from the half-hearted gang of kids on the corner. They lost enthusiasm as he got closer to his current home base, making excuses as they skulked back to their own territory.

A drag queen on her way somewhere took a last drag on her cigarette and tossed it into the gutter before she tumbled into an Uber. A fat and shit-grease-shiny rat squeezed out of the gutter to grab the butt and take a drag. Beady black eyes caught Shepherd’s attention on it, and it bared human teeth in a rodent mouth before it disappeared back into the sewers.

OK, so the familiars interbreeding with the local wildlife was more of an ecological disaster than something to appreciate. Still not something you’d get in Ye Olde “Marble Falls”.

Shepherd held the paper bag between his teeth as he unlocked the big, heavy metal fire door. He threw his shoulder against it to shift it, the metal-shod corner scraping along the old groove in the concrete as it reluctantly opened.

Appreciate the New York of all that, and the fact that every godforsaken supernatural entity in New York lived in a tunnel or an unventilated, illegal basement flat didn’t seem so bad.

Eventually.

That was the theory.

Shepherd wrestled the door shut and padded down the worn, slick concrete stairs to the barren room at the bottom. Shithead was on the bed where he’d left her. The smell of damp wool and old wood hung in the air.

“...oh nice,” Shepherd said. “Trying to end it all in a blaze of glory? I suppose it’s my fault the tenement didn’t burn down.”

He set the bag down on the desk and shrugged his jacket off, hanging it on the meat hook next to the door.

“For crying out loud, the house wasn’t your only friend,” he said, rubbing his hand through his hair in exasperation. “And you can make new friends. I saw three hideous abominations of nature between here and the bodega. And…yeah, OK…they aren’t ‘objects,’ but I’m not living with a prejudiced doll. So get over that.”

He unwrapped the sandwich and took it over to her, setting it down on the damp circle of charred wool.

“It’s pastrami on rye,” he said. “Your favorite.”

The corners of the meat didn’t even curl or assume a green cast. Shepherd took a deep breath and refused to get drawn in. He left the sandwich on the bed as he grabbed the bagel, unwrapped it, and headed down the hall to the cell.

“At least someone is going to appreciate the effort I went to,” he threw over his shoulder.

Halfway there, he heard his phone ring and had to backtrack. The glow of it through his jacket pocket made it easy to find. He fished it out, checked the caller was someone he wanted to talk to—Renfield’s so…sort of—and answered.

“Shepherd,” he said curtly.

“Hold on a second,” a vaguely familiar voice said. It took a moment for Shepherd to identify the carefully flat, middle-American voice as the client manager on the Madden account. He grimaced and threw himself down in the office chair. It creaked and swivelled under his weight, spinning him around to take in the glorious view of mold-wet walls and dried skins.

His current client was a ghoul. It was the lowest-tier job. Ghouls were basically just one step above serial killers. Some people (not Shepherd) would say that it wasn’t even a whole step.

And OK, he’d known he’d have to work off leaving Marble Hall before the contract was officially up. Still…a ghoul. All Shepherd was doing was feeding whatever was in the cells. There was no skill involved.

He was willing to do it, but not and get reamed out again.

“OK,” Ben said. “I wanted to—”

“I already explained that I left the Madden job because it was untenable,” Shepherd interrupted. “Ask any of the client managers I usually work with. I’m fine with threats to life, limb, and loved ones. But I will not be owned. I—”

“No, that’s fine,” Ben interrupted. “That’s all resolved now. The original client is back onto our books, so—”