Page 7

“You know, the frilly, romantic term for death sex.” His fingers flicked, tossing the facts out there.

“Death . . . sex?”

“Fuck yeah. One guy paid me to fuck him to death. He had a terminal illness, or something. Wanted to go out on his terms.” Zee’s pupils swelled, and a few little purple sparks lit his wing membranes, making them glow. “That trick fed me for weeks.”

“People want that?”

“Adam, you’re sweet.” He snapped his fingers. “But focus.”

“Right. Focus. Of course. The dead guy. Well, he’s very dead, but that’s not the problem, is it?”

“It’s a problem for him.”

“No, I mean, he’s dead, and whoever did it isn’t lying here beside him. The wards didn’t work.” I whispered that last part. Sometimes walls had ears. Gremlins could be bribed to run notes back and forth between the walls, and we definitely had a gremlin problem.

“Oh fuck,” Zee said, only now understanding the real reason I was pacing a track in the carpet.

“Yes.”

“Oh fuck!”

We needed the wards to work, or else the SOS Hotel would soon turn into a slaughterhouse, not least because, if you put all the different Lost Ones under the same roof, someone was going to try and bite someone they shouldn’t. Without the wards, managing the hotel would be like managing a herd of cats. Vicious, powerful, short-tempered cannibal cats. And there was my own little problem, that Zee didn’t know about. I personally needed those wards to hold.

“Have you asked Madame Matase?” Zee said. “They’re her wards.”

“Not yet. Only you and Reynard know about this. I didn’t want to tell anyone else yet.”

“Alright, so maybe there’s a loophole? Consent is one of them, right? If this guy wanted his throat cut, then the wards wouldn’t stop it happening.”

Technically, true. But who wanted their throat cut? And this didn’t look like a death-sex scenario. He had all his clothes on, for one.

“Well, there’s an easy way to test how deep this fuck-up goes.” He spun on his heel and came at me, wings spread, teeth glinting in a broad smile. His claw-tipped hand swung back, and because it was Zee—because we’d worked together for six months and he’d never once attempted to hurt me—I didn’t see the blow coming until his hand came down. I flinched, reflexes kicking in too late, but the slap never came.

Zee barked a cry—reeled, clutching his head—and stumbled against the dresser.

“Looks like they still work,” I said. “Also, you’re an asshole.”

“You think?” He took a few seconds to blink the pain from his skull and straightened, clutching the dresser for support. “Okay.” He shook his head, ruffling his two-tone hair about his horns. “So . . . the wards are still locked in. Which means, we either got ourselves a stupid human with a death kink”—he pulled an it’s-possible face—”or he was killed somewhere else and dumped here.”

I glanced at the door. It had been locked. “There’s no blood anywhere else. No trail. Nothing from the door or window.”

“I’m just going to throw this out there . . . You know who likes to kill humans and can move real fast?”

“Who?”

“Vampires.” He shrugged. “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck⁠—”

“It’s a vampire duck?”

“Sometimes, the correct answer is the one that’s right in front of you wearing a huge neon sign that says: I KILL PEOPLE FOR KICKS.”

“When? He was with me . . .” Reynard hadn’t been with me the whole time. There had been a few minutes between him entering the hotel and my finding him in the bar, when he could technically have killed a protestor, traversed the outside of the hotel, climbed in the window, dumped the body, climbed out again, then sat his perfect ass down on a bar stool without a strand of hair out of place. But even a fast-moving vampire would struggle to do all that in those few minutes, especially in broad daylight, in front of a crowd. “Hm, I don’t know, I don’t see it. And the body was all . . . stiff, when we found it, so I don’t think it was Reynard.”

Zee poked his tongue out, swept it across his lips, and this time when he came at me with his wings out, his intention was very different. He’d gone from cool hard steel, to warm liquid honey, and when he stopped just outside my personal space, his tail ventured around my hand and slipped up my sleeve. “Because you want to ride his cock so hard you can taste it?”

“What? No.” Heat flooded my face. “That’s not⁠—”

“Kitten.” He leaned in, parted his lips, and touched the tip of his tongue to his sharp teeth. “Lust demon. Don’t try and tell me you’re not hot for Vampire Daddy when you’re oozing pheromones.”