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I grind my teeth as the elevator jerks to a halt. Walking out into the lobby, I check my surroundings for rogue Bellua brothers and other trouble. I’m grateful to see that Robert is busy with other guests, and the boisterous couple from earlier has moved on. Freddie’s nowhere to be seen.Good.I want to be able to do my work without being noticed.
I pretend to be admiring the decor as I move around the lobby, dropping crystals into the potted plants and sliding one beneath the cushions in the lounge area. I head to the restaurant and drop one beside the buffet tables, nudging it beneath the valance with my toe.
The Bellua brothers have all the tools of the Vault at their disposal for their hunts. But I’m freelance. I have to find my own ways of catching monsters.
And that’s where Becka comes in. My friend’s mom may have been an infamous fraud psychic, but Becka’s magic is the real deal. These crystals act like a magical security network. They sense supernatural activity in the vicinity, and the large crystal I carry around with me will glow different colors if a threat moves within the stone’s energy field.
The crystal network will alert me if our ghostly friend moves out of the room into other areas of the hotel, or if it’s attracted any other kind of monster.
I’m assuming that the Bellua brothers have the same intel I have, since it’s published on the hotel’s website. A bride murdered her groom in the honeymoon suite in the sixties so she could run away with his money and best man. The groomhas haunted the hotel ever since, although only in the last few months, since the grand reopening, has he become violent.
If the ghost is increasing the frequency and horror of his attacks, then he’d soon be able to move from the honeymoon suite to other areas of the hotel he visited while he was alive, causing chaos and mayhem in his wake.
If that happens, I’ll know about it.
After I place as many stones as I think prudent in the lobby and restaurant area, I walk down the hallway to the spa and wellness center. The groom and his wife would have spent time here, so it’s another area I want to monitor.
The doors fly open, and my breath catches as the modern opulence slaps me across the face. While the rest of the hotel has retained its period features, the owners have spared no expense in upgrading the spa area to be over-the-top and worthy of the ‘gram.
My boots clack across a marble floor so shiny I could lick it. Grand columns extend to the ceiling, twisted with carved vines and arching over rows of modern gym equipment. Hmmm, I’ve always wanted to work out inside a palace, complete with wait staff moving between machines and offering orange energy shakes and perfumed towels on silver trays.
To my left, fruity, calming scents invite me to indulge in the array of spa treatments. Guests wander all around, dressed in workout gear, swimming togs, and fluffy robes. On the other side of the gym, through a glass partition, a steaming waterfall cascades over a wall of slate and tumbles into a series of hot tubs.
My heart pangs.
The thought slaps me across the face before I can shove it away.
Jackson will love this place.
Jackson was a football star in high school. All three of the Bellua brothers are fit, but he worked at it. Still does, by thelooks of him. Sometimes I’d hang out with him at the gym after school, and he’d try to teach me how to lift weights. Every time his hands wrapped around my body to improve my form, I’d be attacked by a swarm of bees buzzing in my veins. I was always dropping weights on his toes or, once—totally by accident, I swear—on his crotch. He never complained, even when he walked funny for a week.
I can see the two of us splashing each other in the pools or me trying in vain to bench press more than he can…
No. I can’t. Those days are gone now.
A young couple walks past, laughing as the woman tugs playfully at the strap on her boyfriend’s robe. The pang in my chest turns into a full-blown ache. Iwantthis. I want to be a normal couple and have a normal job and come to places like this on vacation with someone I love, not to chase ghosts and shapeshifters and things that go bump in the night…
I shake my head. That life isn’t for me. My dreams of college and a career in science and a husband and two point five kids died after I saw what monsters did to my parents.
I step into the gym, sliding one of my crystals into the bottom of a heaped basket of fresh gym towels. I drop one into the mechanisms of a machine that looks more like a medieval torture device than something you use to get fit.
I pass Freddie, his face a little red with frustration as he explains to the older couple from earlier that the “relaxation rooms” aren’t for rekindling their marital bliss.
“You can’t do those sorts of things in areas that are shared with other guests, ma’am—”
I give him a wave as I stride past, ignoring his “please help me” look. I lie down on a weight bench on the far wall and look for a spot to discretely stash my stone when—
“Excuse me, ma’am. Don’t mind me. I need to tighten some of these nuts. Ain’t nothing worse in the world than loose nuts floating around. You could put someone’s eye out.”
I jump at the voice and whirl around. An unfortunate move, since I end up with a face full of Old Man Rodney’s crotch. He stands over me, spanner in hand, as he wiggles his hips, letting me see a pair of rather loose nuts waggling around in his short shorts.
“Argh!” I scramble away.
“Pardon me, Rodney,” a voice calls out in a posh British accent. “I need your help over here. I got my hand jammed.”
Rodney skips over to help a guy sitting on another torture device, who’s frowning at his hand, which is wedged in between the weight rack and the bar. Rodney practically straddles the guy to get to his hand.
I breathe a sigh of relief as I drop a crystal into a container of microfiber cloths.
