“Thoren, meet Dec. He’s our new butler!” Mr. Staiano exclaims, grabbing our wrists and bringing our hands together like we need prompting to shake hands.
Thoren’s hand is warm and dry, and he barely squeezes mine before releasing me. “Good. We’ve been in need of help since we lost Arcan. When do you start?” He doesn’t sound thrilled tomeet me, but I guess that’s expected. I’m just a domestic servant; I’m not here to become friends, and I am not disappointed about that.
I did have the impression that some families consider their domestic servants as a part of their wider family, but clearly that is not how Thoren plans to treat me. That’s fine. I will probably do better with limited exposure to... all of that.
“We’re going to let him get settled in today, and tomorrow he will start with Maggie,” Mr. Staiano replies for me, clapping my back with a heavy, almost painful hand. Considering that he doesn’t look much bigger than me, the painful hit surprises me. I will have to be careful about getting within range of his, uh, affection. He turns the hit into a shaking side-hug, smiling so happily that I forgive the pain from his hit. “We are so glad to have you, Dec. You’re going to fit right in.”
“Thank you,” I stumble out, letting him shake my brain with his hug because he suddenly reminds me of my uncle again, and that makes me like him more than I already did.
Thoren arches a brow at me, and yeah, I understand, Dec isn’t a common name. “Dec? Is that short for something?”
I give him a professional smile because there’s no way I’m going to tell him my name unless absolutely necessary. “Of course it is.”
He waits, expecting me to expound, but when I don’t after too long, he almost smiles. “What is it short for?”
I blink at him, for some unknown reason feeling confident about defying him to his face even though that isnota personality trait I generally possess. “My mom was dyslexic and fumbled her chance to call me Cedric,” I deadpan.
Mr. Staiano laughs at the blatant lie. “Come now, Thoren, Dec doesn’t owe you his name. Come along, my boy, let me show you to your rooms. The kitchen is on the way; we can petition the chef for a snack.”
I stifle a grin at Thoren’s narrow-eyed glare and follow Mr. Staiano into the house proper.
Chapter two
Thoren
(That’s not what we’re doing)
Uncle Maxime pulls meinto his train room after he takes the new butler to his apartment. The house doesn’t have a lot of staff, but the few positions we do keep filled are necessary to keep this place from descending into chaos. The problem with Dec is that he looks like he’s going to add to the chaos, not help with it. I don’t know what it is about him. Blonds just seem like chaos engines. Butlers are supposed to have dark hair. They’re supposed to be tall, not short like Dec, and they’re supposed to have elegance and grace—Dec looks like he trips over air, and when Uncle led him away, he did.
“That human is all wrong for us,” I start as soon as the door to the train room closes.
Uncle holds up his hand, cutting off my complaint. “You’re wrong. He graduated top of his class from Cavenaugh’s, and he spent time interning with them, proving himself more than capable of buttling. You’re just mad because he’s not Arcan. It’s ok to miss your favorite butler, but don’t take it out on Dec. He’swonderful.” He gets a starry, far off look in his gray eyes, and his smile turns nostalgic. “He reminds me of someone I used to know. You remember that friend I spent a decade running around Europe with about fifty years ago? He was called home when his father passed, but I loved that man. Dec reminds me of him. They have the same earnestness. It’s beautiful to see again.”
Well, that seals it. Even if I don’t think Dec is going to fit in with us, he’s staying; Uncle is already attached.
“What do you want, Uncle? What’s going on?” I question, dropping onto the guest sofa.
Uncle has filled this room with a multilayered table for his model trains, and all around the room, there are elevated tracks for the trains that don’t fit on the table. It would be impressive if the room was small, but it’s the mansion’s ballroom that he’s converted into his train room. It’s the biggest room in the mansion, and the table at the center is six meters in diameter. There’s only one safe place for visitors, and that’s on this tiny, two-seater sofa.
Uncle pshaws me, hitting a button to start his trains moving. He ducks under the table and comes up in the center of it. “There’s a situation in Phoenix that requires your attention. A shelak spawned in an empty house on the Gila River. There’s been three murders in as many days. I sent Hawthorn, but I lost contact with him yesterday. Go save that idiot and kill the demon.”
I sigh from the depths of my beleaguered soul, heaving myself up from the sofa.
Shelaks are insatiable spirits that spawn from emptiness. They possess the bodies of people with weak wills in order to use the body to fill the emptiness. They use sensation to fill the void, and that usually ends up killing the host, because the void is endless but a body is finite. Shelaks love to eat, but they can never eat enough, and a body can only consume so much beforeit becomes a problem. So the shelak eats. And eats. And eats more. They will eat everything until the body they’re in dies. Or if their first sensation is pain, then they will hurt and hurt and hurt until they kill the body they’re in. I’ve never known a shelak to exercise any kind of restraint because it has no comprehension of temperance.
“Why am I not surprised that Hawthorn ended up possessed?” I grumble, heading out the door.
Before I get the door closed, I hear Uncle shout, “We don’t know for sure he’s been possessed!”
I roll my eyes, shutting the door. If there are murders and he’s gone incommunicado, that moron got himself possessed, no doubt about it. I love the guy, but this is the kind of thing he’d do just to be able to say he did it.
I stomp to the elevator and take it up to the roof access. I take the ten steps from the elevator up to the access door and squint as the eye-searing sunlight blinds me before my nictitating membrane slides into place to protect my eyes from the brightness. On the ledge of the roof, one of my brothers, Faulkes, rests in his stone form with a flock of chrylich cuddling him.
The chrylich are smaller versions of my species, the karkoyl. They’re non-native to Earth but migrated here tens of thousands of years ago and consider themselves Earthlings. In their stone forms, they blend in with the grotesques that were inspired by them that humans use to decorate and ward off spirits in temples all over the world. Humans called some of the guardians “gargoyles” after the sound that the ones that function as gutter drains make, and the chrylich have adopted the word for themselves. They call my family “the big gargoyles” and we call them “the little gargoyles.” We get along well and enjoy spending our days resting together like this.
I sigh as Ethan lands on the roof and takes his stone form. A group of chrylich surround him immediately. I’m a creature of darkness; I’m supposed to be asleep right now too. Unfortunately humans are not typically nocturnal, and they expect most people to be awake when the sun is in the sky. Even more unfortunately, as the eldest of seven, I’ve taken on the duty of maintaining the illusion of being human with the inhabitants of this planet.
I push off the facade of my human form, shedding it like an itchy, too tight sweater. I don’t hate my human skin, but it’s not my natural form, and I can only live in it for a few hours at a time before it becomes uncomfortable. I had to train my body to take on this form, and even after fifty years of expertise with the form shift, it still feels ill-fitting.
