by Vance, R. E.
I reached out to throttle him, but a giant clawed hand held back my arm. “He can’t help it.”
I swung around to see Penemue awake and holding me back. The previous night he had been all banged up—bloody nose, black eye, torn vest. And although his tweed vest was still torn, the rest of him was healed. He looked as good as new. Better than new, because somehow the years of self-abuse were washed away and he looked more like his former self. “He can’t help it,” Penemue repeated, eying the old man. I noticed that Penemue’s blue iris glistened behind an unescaped tear. “It is his nature. His innate ability.” The angel let me go and, putting a fist over his heart, bowed. “I thought you left with … them.”
“No,” the old man said. “I am no god. I am, however, a traveler seeking shelter.” Turning to me, the old man lowered his head slightly and said, “I understand your establishment is friendly to me and my kind.”
I nodded and from the corner of my eye I saw Penemue wipe away a milky white tear. Speaking in a language I did not understand, Penemue said something in a low tone. The old man turned to face Penemue, who immediately dropped to his knees, bowing his head in a gesture of contrition. The old man gave him a knowing smile and touched his head.
Penemue stood and, putting a fist over his heart, turned to me and did something that he never even came close to doing in the four years we’d known each other. He apologized. “Human Jean-Luc, for all the trouble I have caused you, I am sorry. It seems that we have a very special guest staying with us tonight. Please afford him all the hospitalities you have shown me.” With that, he unfurled his wings and said, “I shall be up in the attic contemplating my sins should either of you require anything from me.” Penemue took to the sky, leaving me alone with the old man.
Hellelujah!
↔
“Sorry about that,” I said, not really sure what I was sorry for. The drunk angel? Yelling at him outside? I suspect I was apologizing for a lot more. I took him over to the mess that passed as the hotel’s welcome desk. “We’ve got some issues here in Paradise Lot to work out, and …” I clicked a ballpoint pen open and handed him a check-in form.
“You’ve been hurt.” There was something about his tone that told me he wasn’t talking about bruises or broken bones. And, equally, there was something soothing about his words. Like he understood my pain and was sure that all would work out in the end.
“Stop it,” I said, looking at him. Deep wise wrinkles crawled out from the corners of his eyes that must have been forged by a lifetime of laughter and tears. He had heavy-set hazel eyes that rested under a silver brow, and he gave off an air of confidence that simultaneously conveyed strength and compassion. He wore a subtle smile that said he’d had more good times than bad ones, and his calloused hands told me that he knew what a hard day’s work felt like. Everything about this man was comforting and strong. Even his smell made me feel safe and secure. He smelled like … like … Old Spice and cigars?
Holy crap, this man smelled like my grandfather, PopPop. Hell, everything about him screamed “PopPop,” from the way he waved his hands, to his hunched shoulders that, for PopPop at least, was a result of gravity and arthritis slowly pushing down his spine.
PopPop was always my inspiration, someone who when I was growing up I desperately wanted to be. When he died, I cried for seven days straight, ready to die from misery—probably would have had Bella not been there to feed me. And now, this man—this Other——stood before me, reminding me of PopPop in the most visceral of ways.
Except he wasn’t PopPop. He just looked like him, smelled like him. Felt like him. “Stop making me feel better. It is not real. Innate ability or not, I don’t like feeling manipulated.”
“As you wish,” he said, and his eyes began to glow.
“What are you doing?” I said as my general irritability returned to me.
“Preventing myself from making you feel better.”
“How?” I said. It wasn’t just his eyes that glowed—his whole body became bioluminescent.
“How else? Magic.”
“What?” I said. “Are you burning time?”
He nodded. “A bit. It is the only way to stop making you feel better. As the angel mentioned, I cannot help who I am. My presence has always been a calming effect on those near me. I can no more change that part of me than you could change the color of your eyes.”
“Well, stop that!”
“What?”
“Stop burning time,” I ordered.
“But earlier …”
“It’s fine,” I sighed, still not happy with being made to feel happy. “I’ll deal with it. Just don’t burn any more time.”
“As you wish,” the old man said, and his skin stopped glowing.
“Thank you.”
Immediately the feeling of my PopPop came back and I felt … better. Safe. Almost content. I had heard of Others like this one before—Others who were the equivalent of emotional chameleons, camouflaging themselves in your feelings and desires to help or protect them. This innate ability was something that they had little control over, which meant I had to be careful around him. After all, you never see the knife in your back coming from the ones you love. But still, judging from Penemue’s reaction and taking into account who the angel was, I suspected that this Other’s intentions were less than nefarious, if not outright good. I reminded myself of something Bella used to say: One can survive without trust. But living means having faith in others and Others. Damn you, Bella.
“OK—fine,” I said, fighting back a smile. “Mister …?” I said, tapping the form.
“Joseph. Just Joseph. ‘Mister’ was my father.” He laughed at his joke. When I did not join him, he frowned and said, “Oh well, I am very funny in Valhalla.”
“I’m sure you are, Joseph,” I said, writing down his name as I suppressed a chuckle. “I’m sure you are.”
I handed over the room key and Joseph eyed me suspiciously. “Aren’t you going to ask me more questions?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“My purpose for staying—”
“None of my business,” I said.
“A deposit?”
“You’ll pay when you check out. Or you won’t. I figure those who can afford to pay, do. Those who can’t—well I’m just happy to offer them a few nights here.”
“Are you really?” he asked.
“No,” I mused, “but I made this promise, and …” I stopped fighting the mojo again.
He nodded like he understood and said, “How about what kind of Other I am?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh,” the Other said, widening his eyes. “Why not? In my short time as a mortal, it seems the question most asked by humans.”
“It’s like asking what your religion is—or was—or how much money you got in your bank account or if you’re straight or gay. Leaves too much room for profiling, and I’d rather judge you on what I see than what I believe.”
Joseph nodded, slowly eying me up and down. A small smile crept over his face and he said in a slow and deliberate tone, “When I heard of your little haven, I didn’t believe it. But now … like you said—what you see …”
He stood there for a long moment, not moving, like he was trying to unravel something he didn’t understand. “Well,” I said, breaking the silence, “if that’s it, I’ll be …”
“Your name?”
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Your name—you never told me your name.”
“Oh, right. Jean,” I said, straightening my collarless jacket. “Jean-Luc Matthias.”
“Ahh,” he said, smiling, “you’re just missing the ‘Mark.’ ” Again, he chuckled at his own joke.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“John, Luke, Matthew and Mark.”
“Oh yeah—right,” I said. “My mom was a devout Catholic and apparently the day I was born she wanted to spread the good news.” I lifted my hands in a half-hearted gesture of Surprise!
> “And did she? Spread the news, that is?”
“No. She died giving birth to me, kind of killing the good news aspect and any faith I might have had, and …” I said, and as the words came out of my mouth, I put down my pen in frustration. His mojo was loosening my lips, and I hated it. “I’ve only told that story to one other person and she’s dead. Your innate ability, or whatever it is, is throwing me off. I just met you. I don’t even know if I trust you. So what do you say if we call it quits on the questions?”
“I am sorry,” he said, his expression momentarily sad. But as quickly as his smile left his face it returned, and he said, “Would it help if I told you a secret?”
“Not really,” I said, still annoyed at falling under his spell yet again.
“But it would make us even.” He gave me a hopeful look.
I sighed. “OK, fine.” I’d played these kinds of games with Others before. Secrets, riddles, Guess-my-name … it always ended the same. They’d say something ridiculous and look at you like they just laid out the secrets of the Universe.
He produced a plain wooden box no bigger than a Rubik’s Cube from his pocket. He opened it and showed me its hollowed, empty innards. “I stole this three thousand years ago, always planning on giving it back. But then they left, and now there is no one to give it back to.”
See? Told you. I gave him the same expression one gives a cat when presented with a dead bird.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“It’s a box,” I said.
“Yes … and no.” He paused, waiting expectantly.
“OK, fine—what is it?” I said.
“A lot of things, and nothing at all,” he said with a deadly serious expression. Oh brother, give me a break! A smile crept on his face, and he started laughing. “It’s a box. Just a box. You should have seen your face. ‘A lot of things, and nothing at all’ … Really, Mister Matthias, lighten up.”
“Oh?” I said, returning his smile.
“But I will tell you this—the box has belonged to some very interesting mortals over the ages. Pharaohs, prophets, would-be gods. And all of them thought that if they could just fill it up with the right kind of—what did you call it?—mojo, they’d change the world. Not always for the better, mind you.” He handed me the box.
I examined the plain wooden thing that looked like it was constructed by the slow kid in wood shop. The thing hadn’t even been sanded down, and slivers of wood splintered from the edges. Holding it, I felt nothing. I tried to hand it back, but he refused.
“No, you keep it,” he said. “Maybe you will be able to do more good with it than they ever managed to.”
“I can’t accept this,” I said.
“Please, I insist.”
What I didn’t say was But it’s a piece of useless crap, opting for a more cordial, but empty, “Thank you.” I opened my top drawer and put it inside.
He smiled. “Think nothing of it. Should the fates smile upon us, maybe we will find time for me to regale you with tales about those who thought they could change the world with a plain wooden box.”
“I’d like that,” I found myself saying. What was strange was that—mojo or not—I meant it. I really would like to hear this odd creature’s stories.
Damn—it was proving very difficult not to like this Other.
Chapter 10
Home Is Where Your Heart Is
The One Spire Hotel was seven rooms, plus an attic and cellar. Currently five guests resided here—six if you included the fairy that lived in Castle Grayskull. In less than twenty-four hours, my world went from crushing debt, a prostitute succubus’s constant orgies, a pissed-off ghost of a mother-in-law and drunk fallen angel, to all of the above plus a Fanatical Other in town, homicidal gangbangers hell bent on destroying my hotel, a soothing Other that—despite Penemue’s reaction to him—I didn’t fully trust and a pissed-off archangel of a cop.
And I would go on a month-long trek to the Himalayas with all of them if it meant I didn’t have to bake.
I hated baking.
No matter how hard I mixed, how vigorously I beat or how committed I was to stirring, my batter was still lumpier than the poxes on a Capulet’s ass. Despite carefully measuring, no two cookies were the same size, and in spite of my precise timing, every single batch of the chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookies came out rock hard. And what’s more—it took me the whole day to whip up the monstrosity of cookie hell I planned on feeding my guests.
Welcome to mortality. Lesson one: not all cookies were created equal.
Hellelujah!
↔
After the cookies were baked, I put on my black collarless coat and set about to make the One Spire Hotel’s little dining room suitable for a seminar, which meant covering the three tables with freshly laundered sheets and lining up all the chairs to face the front.
As my pièce de résistance, I displayed my burnt cookies on two silver trays and placed an old metal music stand in front of the room to act as a speaker’s podium.
Then I took a step back and surveyed what “making the most of what I got” meant. Insufficient lighting, a cramped space and burnt cookies.
Way to make them feel wanted, Jean-Luc.
“What did you expect me to do?” I found myself saying to a Miral yet to arrive. “Lay out fresh flowers, maybe put on a little Kenny G in the background for musical accompaniment? Remember, I didn’t want to do this in the first place.” I was practicing. If you knew Miral, you would too.
“Actually, this exceeds all expectation,” Miral said as she walked in, her flawlessly white wings wrapped around her shoulders like some kind of superhero cape. Little rain droplets ran down her wings like water on a duck’s back. “Not a hard feat when you have none.”
I swear to the GoneGods that I was a man of extreme military training who was always acutely aware of my surroundings. At any given time, I could size up a room, tell you how many exits there were, the number of possible combatants, where the surveillance equipment was hidden, and I had abnormally wide peripheral vision. Beyond that—there’s a friggin’ bell above the front door. None of my alarms—internal or otherwise—went off. “How the hell did you do that?”
“Hell,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “is exactly why I learned to do that.”
She surveyed the room while practicing mortal techniques at diplomacy. In other words, compliment the good things, gloss over the bad. She didn’t do a good job. I guess when you had the word of God on your side, tact wasn’t one of the skills you needed to develop. “Not exactly the heavenly halls, but I guess you tried. Given who you are and what you are capable of, I should be happy that you remembered the cookies.” She picked one up, bit into it and spit it out. “Or perhaps not,” she scowled.
I looked at my watch. Five minutes until the time on the flyer. Five minutes and so far it was just me and Miral. Not that it meant anything. The concept of time was one of the many things Others struggled with.
“Have faith,” she said, taking her place behind the podium.
“You already said that.”
“Then,” she said, with a smile, “you should listen,” and nodded to someone standing behind me.
I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes, but in walked my mother-in-law and current poltergeist Judith, side by side with Penemue. Judith gave me her requisite scowl but didn’t say anything. Once-upon-a-time she was a staunch Catholic—I guess being in the presence of a couple of angels resulted in best behavior. She held the arm of an unusually sober and well-groomed Penemue, who guided her to seats in the front. He nodded at Miral with an unearthly reverence and sat next to Judith. I got to hand it to the big guy, I don’t know if I could be so cordial with the one who stood at the gates of Heaven while I was being cast down to the pits of Hell. Then again, the gods leaving meant that Miral was an outcast too, and I suspected his nod carried with it a silent empathy for her.
The front door bell rang and a famil
iar hand touched my shoulder. I turned to see a rough-looking woman of about five-foot-nothing, wearing an old Victorian dress with a hat that had lost so much of its vibrant color that it was practically sepia. She looked like an old photo.
She folded her old Victorian umbrella that was so filled with holes it was more a showpiece than anything of use and, pulling out a handkerchief, wiped away some of the rain from her brow.
“Sandy,” I said. “Good of you to join us.”
“Jean, there is not much time and we must dispense with pleasantries,” Sandy barked. But when she saw Miral across the room, her tone became far more affable as she walked over to greet her. “Miral, darling—how are you?”
Once-upon-a-time, when Bella ran the One Spire Hotel with a hell of a lot more success than I did, Miral and Sandy were her first employees. Both had moved onto bigger and brighter things—Miral using her preternatural brain to complete medical school in three years, and Sandy using her cooking skills and former werewolf nature to open the Stalker Steakhouse. As the two conversed, looking over the place, I couldn’t help but feel self-conscious. There was no doubt that I was barely holding Bella’s dream together.
When the pleasantries that she apparently did not have time for ended, Sandy returned to me and in a curt voice said, “Is my cell ready?” As a once-upon-a-time werewolf, Sandy never got used to the fact that she no longer transformed with the Moon. I guess after years of running on all fours for three days a month, she couldn’t let go. So once a month Sandy came to the One Spire Hotel to be locked away in the basement where she sat there, not changing. I had to admire the little woman—she’d been locking herself up every full moon for over three hundred years because she wanted to make sure she wouldn’t hurt anyone, and she wasn’t going to stop now.
“Everything is ready down there. Even got the combination lock like you asked. But, Sandy, you don’t need to lock yourself up. Not anymore …” I started.
The teeny-tiny woman snarled, “Not a word, Jean-Luc, I am here to be locked away. It is, after all, that time of the month.”