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Wait, bacon was a vegetable? That was a discussion for another time. “So where is he?”
“Where all dead bodies go,” Zee said, then shoveled more bacon between his lips. “Ihn the closhet.”
“Oh. Okay.” I sat back. “Uhm . . . This is not good.”
“I know! Thersh no maple shrrup.”
Victor sat in silence, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Zodiac, must you eat at this precise moment?”
Zee rolled his eyes and wiped a napkin over his mouth. “I’m not allowed on my socials, so yeah. Unless you wanna head back up to the hotel room and fuck my brains out, then imma eat.”
Victor held Zee’s glare. “That can easily be arranged.”
Zee gulped. “Fuck.” He choked on a cough. Sexual tension sizzled between them, and Zee’s pupils swelled, probably some other parts of him too. “I mean, with a dead guy in the closet? I guess that’s like an average Saturday for suckers. Kink unlocked. For the record, I am not saying no, I’m just internally working through some hang-ups while deciding—”
“Not with a body in the closet,” I interrupted, before their combined sexual tension spontaneously combusted our table.
“Right, yeah.” Zee rolled his eyes. “Not with a body in the closet. Eew, Fancy Fangs. What were you thinking? Suckers are so weird.”
This wasn’t the SOS Hotel. We couldn’t just shove a body into a portal and forget about it. Or have the gremlins eat it. Or bury it in the flower beds. “We need to deal with him.”
Maybe Zee’s new chef friend could chop him up and put him in tiny sandwiches?
Unlikely.
“We have to go back to the room and figure out what to do with the dead guy.”
After charging the breakfast to our room, we headed upstairs. Victor swiped the room card, unlocked the door, and in we all went. Everything appeared as it should. I spotted the camera in the corner, still smeared in hair wax—it wouldn’t have seen or heard anything—there weren’t any blood stains or signs of a struggle, and the air smelled of clean linen and Zee’s shampoo.
“You ready?” Zee approached the closet, one of four built-ins meant for guests’ suits and dresses.
“Yup.” I’d seen more corpses than was probably normal. Eaten a few too. Like Zee, dragons needed a lot of fuel to dragon, and sometimes that meant eating whatever was around . . . but I mostly ate small ones. I could technically eat this big guy, but it would be time consuming and real messy.
Zee opened the closet door to reveal—
An empty closet.
“The fuck—” He rummaged through a fallen pile of those zip-up suit bag things, then opened the next closet, then the next, until all four were open and not a body in sight.
“This is unexpected,” Victor said from behind me.
“Yah think?” Zee stomped back to the first cupboard. “He was right there, Kitten. We squished him inside, which wasn’t easy. He was not fuckin’ small.”
I approached the cupboard and got a good look inside. No blood. No scuffs. Nothing. It didn’t even smell like it would if a dead guy had been inside it. “Are you sure you guys put a dead body in here?”
“As sure as my wings are the best.” Zee threw his hands open at Victor, inviting him to explain, but Victor just stood back, arms folded, rubbing his chin in thought. “Hello, Fancy Fangs? You wanna chime in here?”
“It appears the body has been removed.”
“Wow, thank you for that enlightening fuckin’ assessment. We are so glad you’re the clever one.”
“But by who?” I asked. Crouching, I poked through the suit zip-bags Zee had thrown around. If the body had been removed and the closet cleaned, we’d smell cleaning spray. I believed them—they weren’t likely to mistake a body—but its sudden absence didn’t make sense. Neither did its sudden arrival.
What was going on here?
A clunk sounded as something heavy clanged against the bottom of the closet. Digging the bags out revealed an old metal key lying on the cupboard floor—one of those big dramatic-looking skeleton keys. We had a few like it that unlocked the oldest and probably haunted parts of the SOS Hotel.
“What’s that?” Zee leaned over my shoulder as I picked up the key. On its thick middle part, scratches gleamed. I brushed a thumb over the marks, clearing off the dust and lint. Not scratches . . . engravings.
