Inked

He covered my hand, and we stood unmoving. Just being with each other. As always when I was naked with Grant, he felt huge, permanent as a mountain, radiating heat as though lava burned beneath his skin. Immovable, resolute. I loved that feeling. I loved him.

Grant brushed my cheek with the back of his fingers, his touch impossibly gentle, and then did the same to my breast. I held still, savoring the ache that spread through me; taking pleasure in the fact that we were here now, together, when everything in our lives said we should not be.

“Be careful,” he said quietly.

I kissed his throat. “You have ten minutes to show me how careful you want me to be.”

The name of the hotel written on the plastic key was Hotel Vintage Park. A quick Internet search had revealed that it was a boutique establishment located in downtown. I took Grant’s Jeep and drove fast, listening to the Strictly Ballroom soundtrack version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”

Raw and Aaz sat in the passenger seat, legs dangling while they clutched teddy bear heads against their chests, white wispy stuffing trailing into their laps. Zee perched on my thigh, peering over the wheel at the road ahead of us. Dek and Mal, coiled around my shoulders, were busy singing a countermelody to the music on the CD player.

“So,” I said. “Who was Ernie?”

“Munchkin,” Zee rasped, placing his hands over mine to help me steer. “Little boy.”

Not so little now. Not so alive. “My grandmother knew him when he was a child?”

“War child,” replied the demon, leaning back against my chest to peer up at me with large red eyes. “Big bad war.”

World War Two. My grandmother had been in Hiroshima when the Americans dropped the bomb. Luckily for her, the blast had occurred during the day, while the boys slept on her skin. They had protected her until she could get free of the danger zone—just as they had protected me under similarly lethal circumstances. If I died, the boys would die—or so the family legend went. Ten thousand years of women, a single bloodline that Zee and his brothers had survived upon—and one that they had no intention of giving up.

“I doubt Ernie was in Japan when my grandmother knew him,” I said. “Germany? Israel?”

He picked at his sharp teeth with a long black claw. “China.”

I frowned. “How and why?”

“War,” he said again, simply, as though I should understand everything from that one word. Which I did not. Ernie Bernstein, I had guessed, was probably Jewish. And a Jewish child in China during World War Two did not add up. Not yet, anyway.

It was well into the middle of the night when I arrived, and the roads were almost empty as I drove up Spring Street past the angular glass behemoth that was the Seattle Public Library. At the Fifth Street intersection I saw the awning of the hotel on my left, next to the Tulio restaurant. No left turn. I had to circle two blocks before I found myself directly in front of the hotel, and parked across the street.

I sat staring at the front doors, thinking hard, and then patted everyone’s head. Their skin could slice through solid rock, but only if they wanted it to. I had free rein to touch them—as did Grant and several others.

I braided my hair and tucked it under the collar of my navy sweatshirt, oversized and borrowed from Grant. Grabbed a blond wig from a canvas tote bag on the floor and slid it over my head. It was an expensive piece of work, with real hair instead of the coarse synthetic stuff, but I hadn’t been especially careful with the thing, so it looked as though I had just rolled out of bed. I slapped a baseball cap on top, wrapped a pink scarf around my throat to partially obscure my chin, and then slid on a pair of heavy-framed glasses—lenses thick enough to blur my eyes, though they were nothing prescriptive. I stuffed chewing gum in my mouth, too, just to make my cheeks look puffier. Slid on a pair of pink knit gloves to hide the armor on my hand.

As disguises went, it was pretty awful, but if Ernie had used a credit card to stay here, then the police would track down his room sooner or later. Best not to be too obvious with my appearance. The boys could disable security cameras—out on the street and inside the hotel—but not eyewitnesses.

The front doors were locked, but I used the key card to get in and strode across the lobby with my shoulders slightly hunched, head ducked, a harried expression on my face. Apologetic, even. A young woman dressed in an ill-fitting brown suit ma

I held up the room key. “Sorry to bother you, but my grandfather is visiting and forgot his medication in his room. He gave me his key, but I can’t remember if he’s in 304 or 403.”

The woman smiled faintly, which eased the shadows under her eyes. “His name?”

“Ernie Bernstein.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, smile deepening as her short nails tapped the keyboard. “I like him. But it’s not either of those numbers. He’s in 610.”

“Thank you so much,” I said, and began to turn away. She stopped me, though, and dashed into a small room on her right. She was gone just for a moment, and when she returned there was a slender FedEx envelope in her hand, which she slid across the counter to me.

“This arrived for Ernie. And…could you tell him hi for me?” A pretty flush stained her cheeks, maybe because I was staring at her. “There was a…guest who was rude to me last night, just when Ernie was checking in, and he…you know, took up for me. I appreciated that.”

I smiled, throat aching. “Yes. He’s a…good man. He’ll be glad to hear from you.”

She beamed, which took years off her already young face, and made her look twelve years old; a kid who needed a hug and pigtails. Made me hurt for her, that Ernie was dead—made me hurt for Ernie, too, who seemed to have been a decent man.

I took the elevator up to the sixth floor, and found the hall quiet and still. The door to his room opened as I approached. Aaz peered out, giving me a toothy grin. A do not disturb sign hung on the brass knob.

There was nothing extraordinary about the room I entered, except that it was nicely decorated with cherry accents and a king-sized bed dressed in pale sunset-orange canopies. Covers rumpled, unmade. Curtains closed, all the lamps turned on, though the light felt stifled, strangled; like most hotel rooms. I had never been in one that felt truly well lit.

A briefcase lay on the desk. Behind me, the boys were prowling. Sniffing the floor and sheets, peering into the bathroom. I glanced over my shoulder and found Raw eating a bar of soap. I cleared my throat and he shrugged, also taking a bite out of the chrome dish it had been sitting in. He gave the rest to Aaz, who swallowed the metal without chewing, and licked his lips with a sigh.

“Maxine,” Zee rasped, poking at the contents of a small carry-on suitcase. He dragged out a stuffed black sock, which he sliced open with one claw. Several wads of cash tumbled out, each one as thick as my wrist. Nothing but one-hundred-dollar bills.

It was a tremendous amount of money. After some thought, I scooped up the rolled wads and tossed them into the canvas tote bag I had brought with me. I did not need the cash, but it was Ernie’s and if he had family somewhere, then they deserved to have the money sent back to them.

“You must know what this is about,” I said to Zee.

The spines of the little demon’s hair flexed, and he glanced at Raw and Aaz, now sprawled on the bed, rubbing their round little tummies. “Old hunt. Old work from our old mother.”

Old mother. My grandmother. I gave them all a hard look, and focused on the briefcase. It was an antique but well-made, and the locks were crafted from solid brass. Dek slithered from my hair, humming to himself, his snakelike body coiled around my upper arm while his small furred head tilted in careful scrutiny. He touched his long black tongue to the lock, and it began sizzling from the acid in his saliva.