Page 57
“This is fine,” Zee muttered. “I just fuckin’ love being in tiny metal cages.”
“How’s your juice?”
“Still juicy.” Easing off the reins to his power, his purple glow returned.
“Nice. But you know, I guess we should be careful in future . . . in the bedroom I mean. We don’t want to overdo it.” Powering him up too often could hurt him in the long term. We still didn’t really know how this all worked.
“And I don’t like leaving Spicy Fangs out of our trio.”
I definitely did not want Victor feeling neglected. “Do you think he’d get a power-up too?”
“Have you and he fucked without me lately?”
“We were going to, back before my brother arrived at the SOS Hotel, but then the roadtrip happened, and no . . . I guess we haven’t really been together.”
“Then maybe he’d get a boost too. What if his superpower is building furniture faster?”
I chuckled. “If anything, it’s more likely to be his voice.” A thrilling shiver spilled down my spine. Victor’s voice talent was both hot and morally questionable. Like him.
The elevator groaned, clanged, and jolted to a final stop. Through the grated metal door, rows and stacks of storage boxes created a maze into the dark. I heaved open the door. Zee’s glow was all the light we needed.
We ambled through the hotel’s crates and boxes until we found a roughly six-foot-high something with a sheet draped over it and a pool of water running off into a nearby drain.
Zee grabbed the sheet and tugged it off. Clouds of dust puffed into the air, then settled on a huge, rough-cut block of ice. The photo hadn’t been clear, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d expected some kind of romantic trapped-in-ice statue, but the reality was breathtakingly horrible.
The man’s face had shrunk and contorted around his bones. His body, too, was bent and buckled, perhaps broken by the ice?
“Ick. That’s cold.”
Leaning closer, I studied the man’s face. His final moments had been frozen for centuries. “I think he trapped her here. The picture said, ‘My beloved. My traitor.’ He knew what she was, and he stopped her as best he could. Maybe she keeps him here as punishment.”
“True love is truly fucked up.”
The man, her lover, was probably the one originally responsible for the clues, as a way to get to her should her prison begin to fail. Those clues had likely been altered and updated over time, but he’d been the first to try and stop her . . . and only half succeeded. He’d maybe still loved her to the end. Sometimes loving people meant you had to do what was right to keep them safe, and that wasn’t always what they wanted too.
Sometimes love meant doing bad things.
“You grab the top bit and I’ll take his legs,” Zee said. “Let’s make the ice bitch face her past.”
I stepped behind the ice sculpture, and tried to get my arms around the slippery, melting block of ice. All we had to do was get it into the elevator and up to the foyer where there was more room to maneuver. While we were doing this, the guests were hopefully evacuating the hotel, but we needed to hurry. Stephanie could find us at any moment.
“He’s a slippery one.” My grip slipped. “Hold up, I haven’t got—”
“Wait, Kitten, I just—”
“Back a bit!”
“I haven’t got—”
The weight slid forward, tilting all of the block into Zee’s arms. He yelped, his wings popped out, and he poofed backward to avoid getting crushed.
The ice sculpture with its frosted occupant hit the floor and shattered into a million pieces. All of it—the ice, the man—exploded. Stephanie’s beloved was now ice cubes.
“Oh dear.”
Zee tucked his tail around his right leg. “I said I didn’t have it.”
“Okay, uhm . . .” I straightened and propped my hands on my hips. “Well, it’s done now. You know what, it doesn’t matter. We just have to get her in one place—”
