Was I supposed to know the name?
“Tech billionaire? Reynard Technologies?”
“Oh.” No, still no idea. I didn’t really do digital. Didn’t own a phone. Hid from the internet. Most advanced tech didn’t work inside the hotel wards anyway, only Tom Collins, the fae-bought AI bartender.
“Vampire baron?” Noreen prompted.
“Oh, right. Sure. Yeah. Of course.” That explained the umbrella then. I still had no idea who he was, but his being of the vampire persuasion at least explained why he might be prettying up my hotel steps.
“Is Lord Reynard staying here?” Noreen asked me, looking doubtful.
Zodiac snorted. “You think he needs to stay here? Look at him. He sweats cash—if he sweats at all. What’s he need to stay in a shithole like ours for?”
Oh my stars, why didn’t demons come with filters? “What Zodiac means is, we’d be delighted to host Lord Reynard.” A man like him, arriving on the first day, could legitimize the hotel overnight. But there was no way he’d want to stay. “Our hotel doesn’t look like much, but it’s a work in progress.” We all glanced up at the hotel’s tired façade, cracked windows, and the hotel sign that I’d fixed, but had—sometime in the night—decided to break itself again. “Of course, there’s still someways to go—”
“Kitten,” Zodiac purred, in that voice that meant he wanted something or was about to school me in the ways of demons. “The back windows are held in with tape, and when I turned on the faucet in my room a gremlin crawled out.”
Zodiac needed to stop being helpful. And I needed to greet our potential first guest. But I also couldn’t leave Zodiac with Noreen without risking her publishing how the SOS Hotel was a sleazy whorehouse run by a sex demon and his hapless human hanger-on.
“I’ll go,” Zodiac said, sensing my irritation from my less-than-subtle glare, and sashayed his way over to Lord Reynard. Whatever was said between them, I didn’t hear, since the crowd had started to call for Lord Reynard to take selfies with them, or sign their shirts. They exchanged a few words. Zodiac’s smile cracked and fell away, and for a moment it seemed he might drop the reserved business-partner act, and go full-wings-out. Whatever Reynard had said, Zodiac wasn’t pleased. And instead of returning to me he climbed the steps, heels clicking and tail lashing, vanished into the hotel, and let the door swing shut behind him.
Zodiac’s moods swung like a clock pendulum, but Reynard had managed to piss him off in just a few seconds. Impressive.
He lifted his chin, then among the shouts for him to notice the humans in the crowd, he tilted his head and turned his piercing gaze on me. A shiver spilled down my spine, not unlike the shiver Zodiac’s touch had ignited earlier. But Zodiac wielded lust as easily as breathing. The lust that snatched my breath away now was all homemade.
Holy Hell.
Under the shadow of his umbrella, he climbed the steps, and entered my little run-down hotel.
“So, uh . . .” I glanced at Noreen and swallowed to moisten my suddenly dry throat. “If you uh . . . call me, later, I’ll go into those questions in more depth. But as you can see, we have a guest, and I really need to be inside, so . . .” I flashed her what I hoped to be a charming grin, and backed up the steps. “Call me.”
She didn’t look impressed to be ditched for a vampire, and would probably write a horrible report about the SOS Hotel, but what had I expected? It was always going to play out like this. Nobody wanted us here. They’d all made up their minds. The protestors and religious contingent alike echoed much of the San Francisco sentiment, and that from around the world.
I hurried into the lobby, grateful when the doors closed on the chanting for “Freaks” to “Go Home.” They didn’t care for the little details, such as the fact the Lost Ones couldn’t go home. Not since the hole in the veil had sealed itself.
But I wasn’t about to let them ruin our opening day. We had a guest. Our first. A billionaire tech mogul. This was going to be great! Just so long as nothing screwed it up.
Reynard wasn’t in the lobby, where he should have been.
“Where’s uh . . . where’s our guest?” I asked Madame Matase, the receptionist. Matase appeared to be a young woman of Romani origin, with long dark hair and soft, sympathetic dark eyes. But in truth, she wasn’t any of those things. She looked up from her knitting. “Hello, darling.” And nodded toward the closed bar doors. “He said he’d wait for you in the bar.”
The bar?! Why did he have to wait in there?
Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Perhaps he hadn’t interacted with Tom Collins yet?
Reynard’s arrival could be a PR godsend, if Tom Collins hasn’t told him to go fluff himself.
I headed for the bar, mentally cursing myself for buying an AI off a fae. At least Tom would distract from Zodiac’s flirting, assuming he was also inside the bar. I really needed to hire a concierge who wouldn’t simultaneously try and get every single guest into bed, or be brutally honest about their clothing and swear at them.
Reynard was at the bar, his tailored ass perched on a stool. Not that I was looking. I wasn’t. But Zodiac was nowhere in sight, which was good news, at least.
“Hello, there!” I laughed. Why did I laugh? Nothing about any of this was funny.
Even Tom looked at me as though I’d lost my mind.
I thrust out my hand. “I’m Adam, Hotel Owner and Manager. Welcome to the SOS Hotel.”
Reynard sipped his drink and licked his lips of a thick, dark substance that looked a lot like blood. Where had Tom gotten blood? Was it human? Never mind, I’d worry about that later. Reynard slowly set the glass down, leaving my hand sticking out for several painfully awkward seconds, then turned on the stool and wrapped my hand in his.
