Page 76 of No Rest for the Wicked

Armin turned his head away, and in the brief lapse, I got a knee between us, and kicked him off. The wards activated, as though piercing my skull, and I stumbled backward, falling to the floor. Slowly, so slowly, my throat opened, and air fluttered in. I wheezed, fighting to stay conscious.

As my vision cleared, I counted a whole lot of gremlins. So many, in fact, there wasn’t any space between them. They clung to the walls too. And all their beady eyes were locked on Armin.

Armin hung back, sneering, “What the fuck is this?”

All the little gremlins had tiny grey boiler suits on, which would have been absurd enough, but jagged letters stitched into the backs of their suits read: Mentenants.

Maintenance?

Wait, did they work here now?

Jimmy, fluttering in the air between us, turned his gaze to me. Vengeance burned in his little eyes. Armin had taken his family. We both knew what came next.

I staggered to my feet, cleared the scratch in my throat and tilted my head, popping the muscles in my bruised neck. “I could have forgiven the bite in the chapel. What happened there was an accident. But nobody comes into this hotel meaning us harm. I will not stand for that.”

Armin snorted. “What are you going to do, with that SSD agent in the lobby, huh? What are you going to do, with wards protecting this place?” He flashed his ring. “I’m immune, courtesy of a friend of yours. Gideon Cain.”

I wasn’t even surprised Gideon was behind this. Of course he was. “You may have noticed, we have a gremlin problem. They aren’t usually vicious. Until a pixie gets involved. Did you know, wards don’t work on gremlins and pixies?”

Jimmy stuck his middle finger up at Armin.

“This is ridiculous,” Armin snorted. “You thwarted our plans to summon the queen. You came onto our land and murdered my kin. You took our queen’s head! This is more than justice! This is my right! And your end, Adam Vex. You and your weird vermin army.”

“I guess I should have waited until your queen had enslaved the entire human race and reduced this world to rubble, then taken her head?”

Armin’s eyes narrowed. His thoughts must have been whirring. Why wasn’t I terrified and begging for my life like a normal human? “Who are you?”

“Just Adam Vex.”

Jimmy nodded, I nodded back, and at Jimmy’s short, sharp whistle, the hotel’s new maintenance crew lunged.

The hoard of gremlins surged up Armin’s legs. He’d have screamed, if Jimmy hadn’t plunged into his mouth and yanked out his tongue. Little Jimmy waved that vampire tongue like a victory flag. Then ate it.

I’d seen what the gremlins could do to hotel walls, so it wasn’t really a surprise when they reduced a vampire to gristle and bone in under a minute. Unfortunately for my clothes, they were messy eaters.

After bits of Armin had been painted all over me and up the walls, the gremlins licked most of it all up, licked themselves clean—vampire insides were finger-lickin’ good—then gathered the bones, taking them away, leaving me standing in a spotless elevator, coated from head to toe in gore. The only evidence something untoward had happened was the state of my clothes, Armin’s discarded sunglasses, and the anti-ward GC ring.

I popped the ring into my pocket, and for no other reason than because I could, I crushed Armin’s sunglasses under my shoe. There. That was better. Finally, something had gone right. We’d toppled the vampire plot, dealt with our gremlin crisis, and destroyed Cain Technologies, all in a few days. Maybe we were like the Scooby gang, or the Spice Girls? Or maybe we were just SOS Hotel management, looking out for Lost Ones.

Screw the prophecy. This was my choice.

I smiled, and plucked a bit of indistinct gristle off my shirt. I had my demon, and my vampire, and we had the hotel. We’d find a way to deal with Agent Leomaris.

The elevator jolted into motion, then gave a worrying shudder.

I reached out and braced against the side.

Metal twanged. The elevator dropped, lifting me into freefall, then slammed to a sudden stop. Thankfully, it hadn’t fallen far. I scooped myself up off the buckled floor a second time and sighed. Okay, so . . . we definitely needed a new elevator.

A jolly ping signaled the elevator’s arrival in the lobby.

The doors rumbled apart but wedged halfway. I got my hands between them and screeched them open, inch by painful inch, until there was enough room to squeeze through.

Agent Leomaris, Madame Matase, and a few other guests, all witnessed my blood-covered re-emergence, their mouths open and faces the picture of confusion. There wasn’t really much to say, especially as there was no evidence anyone else had been in there with me. This wasn’t what it looked like? Gremlins did it? A vampire exploded?

I squelched out of the broken elevator, leaving a trail of bloody shoe prints behind. “I’m just gonna take the stairs.”