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“What?”

“I’m going to assume not, from your bemused expression. In which case, there appears to be a murder victim in my room.”

“Oh, that’s um . . .” I sniffed, and could smell the decay now, under the paint odors. “He’s not supposed to be here.”

“I imagine not, with your impenetrable wards. No guest can be harmed, isn’t that what you said?”

Oh mercy, this was bad, wasn’t it? Seconds slipped through my fingers. Reynard studied my face, reading every tiny twitch, his lips getting tighter and his eyes narrower. I needed to do something. Call the police? No, that was a terrible idea. This was my opening day. The last thing we needed was a dead body and police all over the place. Worse, someone had been killed here, inside the hotel, and the wards hadn’t activated or there would have been two bodies.

If the wards didn’t work, then all of this was for nothing.

But I couldn’t panic, not yet. It looked bad, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was suicide? The wards didn’t stop consensual actions. A guest couldn’t hurt another guest without consent, and suicide was consensual, as an act upon oneself. But where was the weapon? He wasn’t holding anything. Maybe it was hidden under him?

I inched closer to the deceased, crouched at his side and touched his cold, solid shoulder. I lifted him some, to get a look at his face. Grey skin and blue lips suggested he’d been dead for a while. Congealed blood fell like syrup from the savage slice from ear to ear. It was highly unlikely he’d cut his own throat. But that wasn’t the worst of it. As I heaved him over, the true horror revealed itself.

Big red letters on his shirt declared: “LOST ONES. GET LOST.”

“Oh no.”

The dead human was a protestor.

CHAPTER 2

“What the fuck?” Zee’s wings ticked as he stared down at the body. “What the fucking fuck, Adam?”

“I know!” I moaned, and paced by the end of the bed. I’d sent Reynard back down to the bar, then had the staff shake Zee free from his favorite hiding place in the attic, where he liked to brood.

Zee huffed. “The fucking carpet is ruined.”

The . . . carpet? “Yes, it is, but also—” I thrust both hands toward the dead guy.

“Oh, the dead human? They die so easily, like rabbits.” Zee poked the dead man’s leg with his pointed boot, as though to test if he might spring back to life. “Did the vampire do this?”

I kept pacing, my shoes thumping the carpet at the same rate as my heart pounded in my chest. “He was with me.”

“Seems suspicious though? He shows up, and ten minutes later there’s a corpse in his room.” He tapped his chin, purple nail polish glinting.

“We don’t know how long the dead guy has been here. The room was cleaned early yesterday. He could have gotten in sometime after then, while we were preparing for the opening.”

“How? He saunters in off the street, passes everyone working here, heads upstairs and inconveniently dies on our new carpet?” He flung both hands out toward the body. “Fucking expensive carpet, I might add. It’s wool, did you know that? Doesn’t burn the knees. This is a disaster!”

He seemed more concerned about the ruined carpet than the body. “I thought, maybe, we should call the police?”

“Fuck no.” And Zee started pacing, heels stabbing the thick carpet.

“But he’s human, so⁠—”

“A human who died in a Lost Ones hotel. They’ll blame you and me both, throw you behind bars, cut my wings and horns off, and dump my ass in the Mojave Desert. I’ll get eaten there, and not in a good way. I don’t do well in the heat. My skin . . . that dry air? Ugh. No. Just no. Okay, look . . . the vampire. What did he say when he saw this? Was he surprised?”

He hadn’t really been surprised, more . . . interested. “Uh . . .” I huffed, and planting my ass on the dresser-top, I folded my arms and tried to remember Reynard’s precise reaction. “He asked if it was a gift.”

“Vamps gift each other dead people? Christmas must be a fucking bloodbath.”

“Maybe I heard him wrong. Don’t you know?”

“What am I, the fucking Wilson’s Guide? I don’t know. I mean, they’re hot for blood play and la mort d’amour, but this guy was already dead when you got here. Not much fun to be had in a corpse, unless he’s into that—” He stopped pacing, and seemed to be considering it.

“La mort d’amour?”