Noah grinned.“Adobo pork, but we got shrimp, carnitas, and barbacoa, too—”
“And chicken enchiladas,” Jace put in.“With green tomatillo salsa, but we also have red somewhere…”
He started looking through the boxes, but I held up the hand that wasn’t busy stuffing my face.“Feed everybody else first.I’m fine.”
But Noah just laughed.“We got enough for you and half the hotel.They had to shut down, ‘cause we literally bought ‘em out.You should have seen the guy behind the register when he asked what I wanted, and I said everything.”
“Like Ron Swanson,” Kimmie said, coming in carrying a couple of six packs of soda.“What?”Lee looked at her in confusion.
“You know, like onParks and Recreation.”
“What?”
“It’s a sitcom,” she explained patiently.“Or it used to be.It’s been off the air for a while.One of the guys on it really liked meat, and he was in this restaurant and ordered all the bacon and eggs they had.And then he told the waiter that he was worried that the man thought he had saida lotof bacon and eggs, when he’d actually saidallof the…” she sighed at Lee’s confused expression.“You know, it’s not funny if I have to explain it.”
“And how do you know that old show?”he demanded.
“I know all the old shows.I don’t sleep, remember?”
“That’s just freaky.”
Kimmie’s perfectly arched eyebrow raised.“Like going furry every full moon?”
“You know we don’t have to, and anyway, that’s not the same thing.There are plenty of Weres, but I never heard of anybody who just doesn’t sleep.Right, man?”
He looked at Jace for backup, but the younger man was busy unloading a mountain of food, including elote dripping with cotija cheese and Mexican spices and blistered from the grill, a truckload of rice and refried beans, and a couple of big serving-size bowls of arroz con leche, fragrant with cinnamon for dessert, assuming anybody still had room.And I guessed they did, because the dozen or so people in the room fell on the boxes like they were starving, and Dave and I barely made it out into the hall before the sounds of carnage erupted behind us.
Only to get almost run down there, too.Jen came speeding up, pushing a massive room service cart piled high with more greasy boxes, which all of the boys I knew and more that I didn’t were quickly denuding, carrying the haul into rooms on either side of the hall.And trying to do crowd control at the same time, while heavenly smells permeated the corridor, and famished heads poked out everywhere.
“Wait your turn!Wait your turn!”Sophie, who was somewhere in the mass of people behind Jen, was yelling.“There’s plenty to go around!Nobody’s gonna be left out, but we have to get down the hall!”
Dave, who had given up doing any more interviews until everybody was fed, and I cleared a path, and the cart surged ahead, only to be quickly emptied.But no sooner had we handed out the last boxes than another cart was coming this way, pushed by some of the creatures that staffed the hotel’s kitchens.And causing people to screech and jerk back into their rooms, because yeah.
Just… yeah.
They were some weird sort of fey—I guessed, as I’d never found the nerve to ask—and were snorting and screeching and making indescribable sounds somewhere between a choke and a death rattle that had me staring in consternation.
There were a lot of them, and even though most only came up to my waist, they weren’t people I wanted to piss off.Some had bat wings, others thick, dinosaur-type scaled tails, and most sported maws of teeth far too sharp for comfort, leading to Dave and me squashing ourselves against the wall as they boiled past with their cart.And finished serving everyone while we were still processing.
“That’s not something you get used to,” Dave said, blinking.
“You probably do around here,” I commented, “which is one reason we need to get everyone to Wolf’s Head.How many more do you have to check?”
“Many,” he sighed, squinting at the thick sheaf of papers on his clipboard.The light was dim in this section, with only a string of Christmas lights illuminating the dark puddles between working overheads.I took his glasses off his head and handed them to him, and he looked at them in surprise and then pleasure, before settling them on his nose.“Ah, that’s better.”
“Am I wrong?”I asked, as a gaggle of graybeards came by, stuffing down tacos.“Or are there more than three hundred people down here?”
“No, you’re not wrong.That’s part of what’s complicating things.We’ve been receiving van loads from Tartarus all afternoon—”
“How many?”I asked, feeling my gut tighten around the pork.
“That’s just it.I don’t know.We were focused more on helping the injured and sick and didn’t count them all—”
Great.
“—when they showed up.I stayed behind to try to do that tonight, but people keep moving around,” he watched in amused frustration as the same gaggle of kids thundered down the hall.“Plus, I’m afraid paperwork isn’t my forte.”
“I’d think that was a big part of therapy,” I said, kicking the kids’ ball back before it could bounce into a room.“Keeping notes on everyone.”
