Silence.
Aftershock.
After a million years he sort of shook me out and propped me up on his chest and shoulder.
I cleared my throat. “Well. Okay, then.”
I watched Chloe pull herself together.
“You have a really nice neck,” I said, for something to say. The room seemed a lot quieter all of a sudden.
She looked calm. She picked up her suit jacket, which had fallen on the floor at some point, and shrugged into it.
“You okay?” I said.
“Fine,” she chirped. “So. Introduce me to the rest of your roommates.”
I blinked. Chloe was back in charge.
“Kama’s out,” I said, “and Veek is asleep.” I checked my watch. “Yeah. Probably. He works nine to five, the poor slob.” I didn’t mention Lido. I’d have something to say to him in private about interrupting me with a woman.
“Veek?”
“Slacker demon humor. His mother was New Orleans Creole, and his father was a French aristocrat. Veek’s some kind of French viscount. Veek pities us. He’s not technically a slacker.”
“What is it with this slacker thing?” she said, sitting down on the bed.
I felt antsy. Didn’t she want to get out of this room? It smelled in here.
Plus the bed was screaming for me to throw a naked brunette over it.
She did a double take. “Wait. Did I hear you say ‘slacker demon’? I thought you said you were sex demons.”
“We are. I suppose slack comes with the territory. Any angel will tell you that sex demons are the laziest critters in hell.”
Her brow furrowed. “I’m not getting this at all.”
“Skip it.” I waved a hand. “We call ourselves slacker demons because we’re allergic to work. We’ve been around a long time, and we hate this fucking administration, and we remember how it was, back when you could enjoy your work and not have all this friggin’ paperwork.”
“Paperwork.”
“Literally. Hell started it. You want to know how many carbon copies were on the requisition for me to get this body fixed? Ten. And then when I had that signed, I had to make out a purchase order, which also had ten carbons, and each one had to be matched to the purchase req—pink copy to pink copy, salmon copy to salmon copy, et cetera. And getting that signed was four times as hard, because two different guys had to sign off on it, and they hated each other.”
She blinked. “They don’t hate each other any more?”
“Oh, they still do. Only difference now is, hell went paperless in the nineteen eighties.” I shuddered. “You can only imagine.”
“Gee.” She looked sincerely sorry for me. “That sucks.”
“Yeah, well, not my problem. I mean, I have my supervisor in the Regional Office to deal with, but he never comes out in the field. I log in and fill out the forms online.”
“Archie, you’re babbling.”
“I’m complaining. I so seldom have a fresh ear to whine into.”
“Huh. So, slacker demons?”
I shrugged. “We just sort of found each other. I suppose it was inevitable. With our supervisors mired in procedural minutiae, it’s easy for us to, well, slide by.”
She looked around my room, which was as oh-dear-god as the kitchen. I wondered what it told her about me. Other than that I was an athletic, bookish slob with a high tolerance for natural odors.
“I see. Slacker demons.” She looked as if she really did understand something. What?
“Three of us are this close,” I said proudly, as I was later embarrassed to recall, and holding up finger and thumb, “to getting thrown out of hell.”
Archie seemed very pleased with himself.
“What happens if you get thrown out of hell, then?” I said irritably. Why was he backing off? I couldn’t believe he would kiss me like that and not just tear my clothes off. “They take away your merit badge sash?”
He seemed more relaxed, now that he was spinning his silly line again. “Something like that. Plus throw in a few years drowning in a lake of cat’s pee for punishment. We’re not really sure where we stand there, and I for one am not eager to find out.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Oh, they probably couldn’t pull the paperwork together for it anyway. This is why we’ve gotten away with this lifestyle so far. C’mon. I’ll go throw a bucket of water on Veek and introduce you to the responsible member of this team.”
Archie bolted out of his bedroom. I trailed after him, feeling pretty darned pissed off.
Inside my head, I was screaming at him.
You pretend you finally want to seduce me. You drag me out here at freakin’ midnight to this dump of a man-lair. You flirt with me, and you kiss me and make me mess in my pants, and then you push me away!
And his line of BS kept getting lamer and lamer. Slacker-slash-sex demon, my size-twelve heinie.
Archie led me down the hall, past a beer can pyramid, to another door. He banged on it so hard, I thought the door would come off its hinges.
“Bring out your dead!” Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! He barged in, flipping on lights as he entered.
Someone in the bed moaned.
The room was neat as a Marine barracks. After the mess in the kitchen and Archie’s room, I was shocked. Rows of wingtip shoes lined up on shoetrees. A rack of white shirts, amber shirts, coral shirts, brown shirts, lined up in an organized rainbow. Against one wall, a couple dozen candles burned in glass jars around an array of things I couldn’t make out—a top hat? A skull?
“C’mon, your lordship, wake up. Want you to meet someone.” Archie smacked the lump under the blanket.
Quicker than thought, a black arm came out of the bedclothes, grabbed Archie by the wrist, and slung him across the room to slam high against the wall and slide headfirst onto the floor.
I ducked, but Archie caught me in the head with his elbow as he passed. So I toppled to the floor, too.
“Ow!” I said, holding my eye. “What the—”
Archie bounded up, leaped onto the bed, and began pummeling its occupant, who was tangled in blankets.
This looked like getting too hot for me.
I grew up with eight brothers. I knew enough to crawl to the doorway and slide out.
The door slammed shut on a gust of wind—wind? In a room with no windows? The beer can pyramid on the hall wall tottered and shivered.
I sat on the hall floor, my back to the wall, and nursed my eye while things banged and crashed in Veek’s room.
Baz came by holding a steaming mug. “May I offer you additional refreshment?”
I looked up, my hand over my eye. “You certainly may.”
A tremendous shattering crash shook the door beside me.
Baz looked at the door. “Excitable children.” He took my elbow with old-world courtliness and led me back to the kitchen. “So hard to take them seriously, isn’t it?” He poured hot water over a tea bag.
“Well, really.” I warmed my hands on the mug. Sleepytime tea. It smelled safe and normal and therefore kind of weird, under the circumstances. I’d never felt less sleepy at one in the morning. “Sex demons. Huh.”
Rhythmic banging came from down the hall.
“Clowns.” Baz sat and sipped his coffee.
I warmed my hands on my tea mug, and I felt my nerve endings begin to uncurl and settle down.
It seemed Baz had nothing further to add to his remark.
I tried to pull myself together. I was super tired. I had very few brain cells left after a long day at work, Reynolds dumping me via text at lunchtime, an evening watching Archie tend bar, and two brief-yet-eternal, disintegrating kisses in Archie’s slag pit of a bedroom. All the lies Archie had told me piled up to the point where they began to form a crazy kind of logic. I wanted to sit him down, tie him to a chair if necessary, and force him to talk sense.
I couldn’t have made up those kisses.
But maybe I’d imagined h
is interest in me. Was it all just, oh, Archie getting high or losing his marbles or something? Was I even on his radar?
“He never brings women here,” Baz said. “Whatever he said to you, that part is special.”
My neck prickled. “You’re reading my mind.”
“I’m reading the situation,” Baz said. “Whatever happened in there, before he decided to interrupt Veek’s beauty rest, it pushed him over the edge. He’s being an idiot. That’s not new for Archie, but you are.”
I sensed that Baz was curious, and just a little concerned.
“Does he really need his big brother’s help seducing me?” I jeered, feeling rattled.
“You tell me.”
I breathed a few long, slow ones. The smell of Sleepytime reassured me. “What about this victims’ compensation thing? The conspiracy to keep nice men out of Ravenswood Manor, and all that?”
Baz gave me a calculating look. Then he sighed and set down his mug. “What did Archie tell you?”
I thought, So I was right, it was all a line to get into my pants, but I wasn’t totally disappointed. Archie was interested in me! “He just said you got busted or your funding was cut or something, and now you have to fix it.”
Baz frowned. “Roughly speaking. Anyway, it was a mistake. We got ambitious. Stupid thing to do. We don’t do ambitious well.”
“Slackers.”
“We’re good at lazy. When we try to get fancy, we screw up. Plus, with our terrible track record, the, ah, project had a target painted on it,” he said smoothly. “So when audit time came around, it looked like an easy program to sacrifice.”
“It all sounds so corporate,” I marveled. As disorganized as they seemed, at least Baz and Archie had their lies lined up. Although I noticed he had slid away from explaining the victims’ compensation part.
Baz grunted. “They pay us. And that pays for this lair.”
I glanced around the kitchen. My reaction must have showed in my face.
“Hey, it took us months to get it this squalid,” he said.
“It looks like the Red Lectroid installation,” I said frankly.
“Thanks.” He stood up and poured more hot water into my mug. “We like it.”
Noises came from down the hallway like rocket launchers going off: zizz, whistle, whump!
I said, trying to ignore them and remembering my brothers, “All it needs is a few dozen marijuana plants under a grow light.”
Baz slapped his forehead. “Where are my manners? Would you like some weed?” I shook my head. “No? It’s homegrown. Okay.”
The longer we talked, the more I realized Baz was just a little bit worried about the fight in the other room, and he was vamping to cover that up.
I sensed affection for Archie in this oddball stoner rocker. I could have hugged Baz right then.
Suddenly I knew it was too late to be sensible. I was hopelessly stuck on my bartender.
Who might or might not be a sex demon.
Who was in trouble with his employer in hell.
Who had just kissed me till I came standing, then rejected me, supposedly because of this administrative cock-up, which he and Baz both talked of so seriously.
The only solid things in the whole evening, in fact, were that he wanted me and he thought he couldn’t have me.
Oh, and this: I wanted him so much, I wasn’t willing to settle for a one-night shag.
While I was staring at Baz without seeing him, the noises in the next room quieted. I heard men’s voices: Archie’s and another, richer, irritable voice.
I realized that if I wanted this to work my way, I would have to take action.
Someone whistled in the stairwell downstairs, and I heard a basketball bouncing. The whistling and bouncing came nearer. Then a guy pranced into the kitchen, busting funky Meadowlark moves. He had on a Bulls jersey, a slick black hoodie with gold dollar signs and diamonds printed all over it, oversize ghetto shorts, and huge shiny orange sneakers encrusted with bling. He was whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown.” He wasn’t white, but he wasn’t African-American. I thought he might be from India.
His whirling brought him to face me. “Whoa!” He let the basketball fall and roll under the kitchen table. His big brown eyes bugged out, sweet and playful and innocent. “Hel-lo, beautiful. I’m Kama.”
He put his hand out, and such was his personal magnetism that I took it before I thought. “Uh, hi,” I said.
“You. You’re something else.” He stroked my hand and gazed deep into my eyes.
Archie said from the door, “Give it a rest, Kamadeva.” I turned as he limped into the kitchen, dabbing at the corner of his mouth. His white beater was a mess, torn, spattered with blood, and marked with what looked like gory bare footprints.
“He walked all over you,” Baz said with a straight face.
“Shut up,” Archie said. He pulled some ice cubes out of one of the four freezers, wrapped them in a paper towel, and held them to his jaw. “I see you’ve met Kama,” he said to me, pointedly ignoring Kama’s grip on my hand.
I was still pretty mad at Archie for abandoning me to pick a fight with his roommate. “We were just getting acquainted.”
Kama petted my hand in a not-unpleasant way.
I had reached the stage of tiredness where I was floating along, pretty sure I could handle whatever came at me next. I turned to Kama. “Are you a sex demon too?”
“Ever heard of the Kama Sutra? I wrote it.”
I flicked a glance at Archie, just to make sure this was annoying him. Then I smiled at Kama. “Prove it.”
Kama giggled. “Haven’t you seen the temple carvings dedicated to me? All the naked people doing it?”
“Uh.”
He finally let go my hand. In one standing jump, he leaped seven feet straight up to the top of the nearest freezer-refrigerator—and landed on one hand. His elbow bent slowly, and somehow he twisted his neck so he looked at me right-side up, not upside-down. Holding my gaze, he slowly twisted his body into a pretzel.
Then his clothes disappeared.
He wasn’t bulky and muscley like Archie. He was sinuous and smooth and faintly dusky and shiny, just like one of those carvings he’d been talking about. And his oversize schlong practically glowed.
“Take off your clothes and come over here,” he said in a silky, lilting Indian accent, “and I’ll show you the female position that goes with this.”
Something white snapped out and wrapped around his wrist, and then he was tumbling off the top of the freezer.
“Hey!” Kama yelled.
Archie retrieved his wife-beater. “Mine,” he said briefly. His bare chest was all over scratches and blooming bruises.
“Well, what did you bring her here for, then?” Kama grumbled, picking himself up. He was dressed again. He fussed over his clothes, brushing off bits of lint and whatever unspeakable crumbs they’d picked up on the kitchen floor.
“Archie wants me to know which guys to avoid,” I said. “When it starts raining men.”
They all looked at each other. That wasn’t good.
“Or was that a lie?” I said calmly.
“No,” Archie said finally.
“Which part is, then? You’re not slackers from hell? You aren’t in danger of a thousand years of torment for slacking off? You didn’t conspire to keep all the decent men out of Ravenswood Manor, coincidentally and just by the way condemning me to a year of crap dates?” My voice tightened and rose a little, and I forced it down into a calmer tone. “You didn’t get caught in an accounts reconciliation between heaven and hell? You didn’t get ordered to rain men on me—decent men—to compensate me for all my mental anguish and suffering?”
Kama stared at me with his jaw dropping.
“Not so much accounts reconciliation as an interdepartmental fight,” Baz said helpfully. I could swear I saw him wink at Kama. “Our funding was pulled.”
“With wrinkles,” Kama said, recovering. “There’s a certain amount of official
dudgeon.”
“Impatience,” Baz corrected.
“Impending doom,” said a round, brown, fussy voice from the doorway to the bedroom hall. “When is a man to sleep if it is party time all—whoa.” The newcomer looked me up and down, his small, wise eyes widening. Veek, I guessed. He didn’t sound Caribbean. He sounded French—uptight boarding-school French at that.
“That’s what I said,” Kamadeva said, wiggling eyebrows in my direction.
Veek wore a crisp white linen shirt, pleated khakis, and brown wingtips. His tiny gold hoop earring didn’t dispel the impression that he probably had on starched undershorts. It just made him look gay. He was dark brown, he had a boxer’s cauliflower ear, and his throat, where the shirt collar was unbuttoned, was heavily tattooed.
Archie would rather fight with this guy than kiss me.
Wouldn’t you know it?
“You’re gay,” I accused Archie.
Four male voices burst into protest, or laughter, or both.
I adored Archie’s look of outrage and confusion. After two years of mooning over him, I had the upper hand.
“And what is it with you, always getting the tar beat out of yourself by black guys?” I added.
He shrugged dismissively. “It’s a Greek thing. I have to.”
“He has a death wish,” Veek sniffed. “So you are Chloe?” He sent a gotcha glance at Archie and smiled. “Very good.”
Veek gave the impression that in other circumstances he’d be happy to bang me against a wall, but since I was off-limits, oh well. It was very subtle. Suddenly I believed that this buttoned-down guy could be a sex demon too.
And he sure as hell wasn’t gay.
He clicked his heels and bent a half-bow toward me. “Vicomte Clarence Gide Sans-Souci du Turbin Montmorency,” he said in his French accent.
“Chloe Danvers,” I said faintly. “Pleased to meet you.”
Clarence put out his hand very gently, palm up. I put my hand in it.
“But you can call me Veek.”
“Vicomte…you have a title?”
“My father married to disoblige his family.” Veek released my hand and turned a scornful eye on his roommates. “Since I am not to get any more sleep, I will leave you to your revels.”
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