Harbinger

11: BE OUR GUEST

Tommy had forgotten his phone in his new fancy bedroom, so he had to swing past the William Penn Hotel to pick it up. It felt weird walking into the lobby, knowing that he’d slept in the building the night before and would probably do it again until Bingo found them a new place to live. The lobby was a huge room with marble floors, massive crystal chandeliers, and lush seating. Weirder yet, everything was lit up and gleaming as if dozens of half-oni just completed an intensive deep clean to the space.

Trixie had always been one of Tommy’s favorite cousins. She cleaned up decently enough. Like most of the half-oni, she was painfully skinny after years of near starvation. She was, though, also painfully “sharp,” in all ways that the word could be applied to a female.

She was standing behind the counter in the hotel lobby, fiddling with the machine that coded the room keys. Instead of the tank top, capris, and ballerina flats that she normally wore, she had on a dark blazer jacket over a white button-down shirt and black slacks.

“What the hell is going on?” Tommy asked. “Did you guys clean the lobby? Why are the lights all on? Why are you dressed like that?”

Trixie smiled tightly. “Welcome to the William Penn Hotel. How can I help you?”

“We are not running a hotel,” Tommy growled.

Trixie shrugged. “We already have three guests.”

“What?”

“It turns out that Tinker’s fight with Malice took out half of the Wyndham Grand. Since all the hotels in the area were booked solid since the July Startup, the poor souls who had been staying at the Wyndham have been sleeping at their offices. When the ones in the Alcoa building noticed people coming and going from here, they strolled over to see if they could get a room.”

“You gave them rooms?” Tommy could guess the answer but hoped that he was wrong. Surely Trixie was smarter than that.

“I explained we’re not able to accept credit cards at this point in time, that they would need to pay cash up front. They went down to the bank and came back with oodles of cash.”

“You gave them rooms?” he repeated in a growl.

“We need a cash flow,” Trixie said. “I was hoping to make a nest egg at Oktoberfest but the oni crashed that party. I only made forty bucks before all the yelling and screaming started. We got lucky. We would have been in the middle of that mess if the tengu hadn’t suddenly swooped in, yelled for everyone to get out, and grabbed the bunnies.”

“They grabbed what?” Tommy missed something. “Rabbits?”

Trixie laughed. “You look like shit. How much sleep have you gotten lately?”

“Not enough.” Tommy scrubbed at his face, annoyed that the lack of sleep was showing. He’d planned on sleeping the entire day after being up two nights in row. Oilcan’s emergency planning session, however, had awakened him at the crack of dawn.

“Here.” Trixie produced a Red Bull from under the counter and tossed it to him. “I’ve been hoarding that but you need it if you don’t know who Babs Bunny is.”

Tommy groaned as he realized who she was talking about. Babs was part of a commune of women who all had half-elf kids, collectively known as the Bunnies. All the women were illegal immigrants who hoped that their children created a legal loophole for them staying on the planet. No one was sure that they were right, not even the Bunnies. Just in case they were wrong, the women all used the names of famous rabbit cartoon characters instead of their real names. Because Babs couldn’t go to the EIA or the elves without endangering herself, she was the only midwife in town that the half-oni had been able to trust with difficult births.

“Alita knows someone that works as a housekeeper at the Wyndham,” Trixie said. “The story checked out.”

Tommy nodded after he realized that Trixie had circled back to the men who asked for hotel rooms. Alita was one of Trixie’s younger sisters. She was a smart, tough cookie, but then most of Aunt Amy’s kids were. Tommy cracked the Red Bull open — he needed the caffeine.

Trixie continued, passing on her little sister’s information. “Someone was bright enough to evacuate all the guests into the basement before the attack helicopter and dragon sideswiped the Wyndham. All the guests are alive but the rooms are toast. Alita also got some ‘how to run a normal hotel’ tips off of her friend. We found where the housekeeper carts were stored. The teens gave the lobby a quick scrub and went up to the eighth floor to deep-clean the rooms. Alita says that the linens on the beds need to be top notch, so we tracked down the laundry room and where the clean linens are stored. We even found an entire closet of itty-bitty soaps and shampoos. The men wanted to know if we offered room service. That was an interesting conversation. Turns out ‘room service’ is what you call take-out food in a hotel and has nothing to do with sex. I gave some of the cash that the men forked over to Alita and Zippo so they could buy groceries.”

Tommy nodded at the wisdom of the pair going shopping. Zippo was one of Bingo’s little brothers. He was only sixteen but nearly the size of Babe. Plus Zippo was chill enough to listen to the smaller but smarter girl. Alita and Zippo made a good brain-and-brawn team. It was wise to send them out with enough money to buy in bulk while the stores still had food to buy.

It was the whole cleaning thing that bothered Tommy. “Did Bingo not tell you about moving?”

“Look, I know how hard you’ve worked to keep us all safe, but I think you’re making a mistake. We’ve had shitty lives and, for once, we’ve got something nice. We can make this work.”

“We’re at war.”

“Yeah, every day of our freaking lives. What else is new?”

Tommy couldn’t deny the truth of that.

Trixie scanned the lobby. “Where’s Spot?”

“Spot?”

Trixie put her hand down to hip level to measure off how tall Spot was to her. “Bingo said you left with Spot.”

“Oh shit!” He’d forgotten he’d dropped Spot at Oilcan’s. He had planned to see Jewel Tear when he picked the boy back up. “He should be okay. Blue Sky was there and he promised to keep Spot safe. I need to grab my phone.”

Trixie put her cupped hands to her head and wiggled them. “Your ears are showing too.”

Swearing, he felt his head. “Oh, yeah. I didn’t want the elves to think I was pretending to be human. I took off my bandana when I got to Poppymeadows.”

“What did Tinker want?”

“She’s worried about people falling between the cracks like Oilcan’s kids did. I made the mistake of telling her about the girls on Liberty Avenue disappearing. I need to put together a list of missing whores to give to the police.”

“Exactly how the hell did this end up as your responsibility?” Trixie asked.

“Do you really think Oilcan would know where to even look for a whore?”

Trixie burst out laughing. “No. All the girls he’s ever brought to the track were cute but nerdy smart. He’s into smart, strong females.”

Tommy had never noticed who Oilcan dated. Trixie ran the concession booths at the racetrack; she saw who came and went with whom. She also had a thing for smart, strong women. Maybe she was crushing on Oilcan’s girlfriends.

“I need to talk to Mokoto,” Tommy said. “What room is he in?”

“My family is on the seventeenth floor. We put him away from the kids since he sleeps during the day. He’s not going to be happy being woke up after two hours of sleep.”

“At the moment, I don’t care. Are those running yet?” Tommy pointed toward the elevators.

“The closest one is working but only up to the eighth floor. Alita programmed it so our customers can only get to the floor that their rooms are on. Alita said she’ll work on the others later so we can use our room keys to access our floors.”

Tommy sighed. It was better than he expected but it still meant he needed to climb nine floors.

The elevator stopped on the eighth floor as promised. What Tommy hadn’t expected was a half dozen carts in the hallway, each parked beside an open doorway. As Tommy stepped off the elevator, a head cautiously poked out of the nearest room. It was Kiki, the bravest of the teen girls.

“It’s just Tommy!” Kiki called out.

“Hi Tommy!” came a chorus of voices all up and down the hallway.

Kiki skipped out into the hall to show off the fact that she was wearing a gray dress. Kiki was Trixie’s little sister; she was a year younger than Alita. Unlike her older sisters, Kiki couldn’t pass as human. Her father had been a lesser blood; she had his wild mane of flame-red hair, short horns, and vivid red-brown eyes. Despite that, she was cute in a scary kind of way. “Look! We found housekeeping uniforms! Aren’t they cute?”

“Yeah, I see,” Tommy said.

It wasn’t particularly cute, just a gray tailored button-down dress with a white apron. Kiki was also one of the tallest girls, so it was more like a long shirt on her. The girls, however, rarely got anything new. Everything was handed down and usually stained and heavily patched. Kiki probably cared more that it was a new piece of clothing than how it fashionable it was.

Down the hall someone started to sing, “Be our guest! Be our guest! Our command is your request!”

Kiki twirled the skirt of her housekeeping uniform, showing off that she was wearing shorts under it, and danced off singing. “It’s been years since we’ve had anybody here and we’re obsessed!”

Tommy shook his head. How could they all be so happy scrubbing toilets? But he knew that it was a safer, saner way than how they used to live, where his father’s troops might idly beat, maim, rape, murder and even eat any one of them.

Tommy walked up the remaining flights, stewing over his growing problem.

He was the oldest of the half-oni. A few of the others, like Trixie, looked human enough to flee their home and find someplace safe in the city. Those who could, had. (Like Trixie, they’d trickled back after Lord Tomtom had been killed.) Tommy had been able to work outside the warren because he could cloud the minds of anyone looking too closely at him. With his bandana, he could pass as human if he was careful. Kiki — and many of the other kids whose fathers had been lesser bloods — hadn’t been able to leave the warren. Anyone who saw them would know that they weren’t human. The elves would have killed them on sight.

It left the children at the mercy of Lord Tomtom’s warriors. Not all survived the experience. Over the years, Tommy had quietly disposed of dozens of small bodies.

The restaurant had been a means to an end. Neither Lord Tomtom nor Lord Kajo had contributed money to keep the half-oni fed and clothed. His mother and her three younger sisters worked the front of the house as waiters. The kids could do prep work, cook, clean — anything that contributed but kept them out of sight of customers. The restaurant barely made enough to keep the family fed. Every nine or ten months, another mouth would be added. That was just his family. All across the city were other pockets of abused women and half-oni children slowly starving to death.

The oni didn’t trust human technology; they refused to use phones. Once Tommy got old enough to travel the city, his father used him as a messenger to network together all the hidden households. His mother would give Tommy food and money for those less fortunate. After Lord Tomtom killed her, Tommy did whatever he had to do to keep up her charity. Most of it was illegal. Shoplifting. Pickpocketing. His ability made it simple. If he had been caught, though, he could have brought the entire house of cards down.

He’d had several children adopted into his warren because they had no place else to go. Their mothers had been killed. They were too small to live alone. They couldn’t hide what they were. They didn’t know enough of the outside world to survive in it.

Tommy had started the racetrack as a way for the older kids who could pass as human to legally make money without fear. It did nothing for the children like Kiki. Nor was the racetrack a good, stable source of income. He needed teams to race. He needed an audience that had free time and the willingness to drive out into the countryside. He needed the weather to be fair. Winter ended the racing season; he’d learned the hard way that Pittsburghers wouldn’t come out to the open stadium past November.

His family needed some other way to make a living.

Damn Bingo for finding such a seductive trap. The big building offered everyone privacy that they never had before. Nice beds. Hot showers. No waiting to use the toilet. The kids who could pass as human could do the jobs like the front desk while the others like Kiki could stay hidden doing housekeeping.

Even if they were safe from attack, the unknowns were massive. How much did it cost to operate? How soon would they have to start forking over money or have the power shut off? If they lost power, they would have to drain all the water pipes to keep them from freezing and breaking. Without water, the toilets would fill with shit. Unlike their old warehouse warren, there was no way to jury-rig a wood stove. Living in the hotel required keeping the power on at a time when he wasn’t sure they could even buy food enough to keep from starving.

How many rooms would they need to fill to make a profit? How long would the off-worlders continue to pay for a room when they could simply go squat in one of Pittsburgh’s many abandoned houses? One answer was simple math but the other was impossible to know.

That was all assuming that the war with the oni went well and the oni mystery box didn’t unleash a killing blow to the elves. Judging by how nervous the tengu seemed at Poppymeadows, the box was a game changer. All his instincts were to run and hide while they had a chance.

It still felt unreal to open the door to a luxury suite and know by the scent that it was his. He had slept there. He had used the toilet. This was where all his things were.

It didn’t feel like home. It felt like a trap. One his people wanted to stay in. One that he might not be able to get them out of.

He found a blue bandana and used it to hide his cat ears. The effect was far from perfect; it only worked because he could create the illusion in the mind of anyone he was talking to. He meant that he had to avoid crowds.

Still, it didn’t seem like it was him looking back in the mirror. Maybe because he had never before seen himself in such a massive mirror. It was four feet wide and three feet high. Behind him was a gleaming marble-lined shower. The male he was used to seeing wasn’t Beholden to any elf, wouldn’t walk around in front of elves without a bandana on, and wouldn’t care if a bunch of shit-for-brains human females had disappeared from Liberty Avenue. The male he usually saw in the mirror couldn’t care about anyone but his own family.

“What the hell are you doing?” Tommy whispered to his reflection.

Neither one of them knew for sure.

His phone rang, dragging him away from the mirror.

He didn’t recognize the number on the screen.

He answered it with a cautious “What?”

“Hey, Tommy, it’s Blue. Blue Sky Montana. Yeah, I thought I should call and tell you that we’re going out for ice cream, so Spot isn’t going to be at Sacred Heart for a while. He’s coming with us.”

“What? You’re taking him out? Who is going?”

Blue Sky was spunky but he was still just a little kid. If they ran into someone who wanted to hurt Spot, he probably wouldn’t be able to protect him.

“A bunch of us,” Blue Sky said. “Oilcan. Thorne. All of Oilcan’s kids. Guy, Andy, and Rebecca are coming too.”

It sounded like they were taking half the neighborhood with them. Spot would be safe in that crowd since half of them tended to be heavily armed.

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ll swing by later and pick him up.”

One less worry for the time being.

Mokoto hadn’t been in bed yet. He answered his door wearing a silk kimono tied loosely at his hips, threating to slide off his narrow shoulders. A cloth headband held back his hair from his face and all his sultry makeup was scrubbed off. It had been months since Tommy last saw Mokoto without his whore mask. He looked years younger and a little lost.

“What’s wrong?” Mokoto asked in a tone that indicated he was bracing for the worst.

“Nothing.” Tommy explained about Tinker taking interest in finding everyone who had fallen through the cracks throughout the entire city.

As he talked, Mokoto relaxed into a sexy lean against the doorframe. The kimono slid off one shoulder. He looked up Tommy with a wistful face. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, what are we going to do with you?” Mokoto took hold of Tommy’s T-shirt. “Don’t let them use you to take on the world. I’ll tell you who I think is missing, but you got to promise me to be careful. I’m not going to trade you for anyone else in this universe. You’re more important to us than any of them. You’re a good man. A knight in shining armor! But you’re our knight, not theirs. We’re the ones that love you, not them. We’ll be the ones crying ourselves to sleep years after you get yourself killed, not them.”

“I’m not going to get myself killed.”

“Promise?” Mokoto let go of Tommy’s shirt to offer up his little finger with its gem-crusted black nail polish. “Pinkie swear?”

Tommy, Bingo, and Mokoto were the oldest of the half-oni. Bingo would always do whatever Tommy told him to do. Mokoto needed promises made and religiously kept. He was a little thing, but fearless and cunning in his anger. If you made him mad, he wouldn’t hit you. He’d wait until you were asleep, tie you up, and then piss in your face. Tommy learned the hard way not to include “stick a needle in my eye” in any promise to Mokoto.

“I swear to be careful.” Tommy linked pinkies.

Mokoto tightened his grip on Tommy’s pinkie after the shake and used it to pull him into the room. “Come, come, come. This is going to take a while.”

“How many kids are missing?” Surely it wouldn’t take long to get a short list. Any more than a dozen and the police would have noticed.

“You know how it is. Some of the off-worlders start with one name and then realize how stupid it sounds, so they change to another. Plus they’ll lie to your face if they think you’re some scary-ass tranny that will go psycho on them or something.”

If Tommy could erase his presence from the mind of someone looking at him, Mokoto’s secret power seemed to be making strangers very aware of how dangerous he could be despite his small size.

Mokoto was in a big two-room suite like Tommy. He’d pulled the curtains shut on all the windows to block out the daylight. In the big dark space, he’d put up strands of white Christmas lights. In a corner of the sitting room, he had a big plastic bottle filled with elf shines that drifted about, gleaming. A candle flickered on one of the nightstands, filling the space with a musk scent. Some piece of small electronics was playing piano music softly but Tommy couldn’t spot it among the clutter. Mokoto’s huggy blanket — the newer one, not the one that been worn to tatters — was on the big bed along with all his cat plushies. His beloved books were scattered everywhere, including the bed.

As Tommy suspected, Mokoto dragged him past the two armchairs to the big bed. Mokoto liked to cuddle as much as possible, hence the huggy blanket and all the stuffed cats. He’d been that way since they were little. Tommy had made the mistake of vaguely promising Mokoto that they’d talk without specifying where and how much. He should have known better.

“If I fall asleep,” Tommy said, “You need to wake me up.”

“Pft.” Mokoto made it clear that he wasn’t promising anything.

When they were very little, their mothers had converted the restaurant’s attic space into a small bedroom with ridiculously low ceilings. Even tiny Aunt Flo needed to stoop. Only later in life had Tommy realized it had been to protect them from the oni, who couldn’t fit through the trapdoor. Tommy and Mokoto and Bingo and Babe shared a futon mattress that had been wedged up through the hole in the floor. They slept together like a litter of puppies until Bingo got stuck in the trapdoor.

By then they were old enough to find separate quarters in the buildings surrounding the restaurant. They’d knocked holes into the walls to create a proper warren. Tommy liked sleeping alone; it released him from the responsibility of being the oldest. Mokoto hated it. He tended to read until he drifted off.

Mokoto grabbed his books off the bed. One was a paperback romance featuring a half-naked man. The other was a hardcover titled Hotel Administration on Hospitality. Between the Christmas lights and the business guide filled with bookmarks, Mokoto was clearly in the “stay at the William Penn Hotel” camp.

Tommy flopped onto the bed, landing on one of Mokoto’s many homemade stuffed cats. It released a cloud of lavender scent that threatened to make Tommy sneeze. He pulled the toy out from under him. Like its many brothers, the stuffed cat was crudely made of scraps of bright colored cloth, decorated with derpy eyes and a crude heart stitched onto its flank.

“Why only cats?” Tommy tossed the cats one by one at the bedside chair. “Why no dogs?”

Bingo’s father had been a lesser blood with a little dog in him. Bingo could pass as a human as long as he had clothes on.

“Cats are braver than dogs.” Mokoto curled up beside him, head on Tommy’s chest. Mokoto liked to listen to his heartbeat.

Tommy was currently twenty-eight to Mokoto’s twenty-seven and Bingo’s twenty-six. When they were little, twenty-four months didn’t seem like much. He knew now there was a world of difference between a four-year-old and a toddler. “Doesn’t seem fair to Bingo.”

“Fear and love are not logical constructs.”

Tommy thought of his stupid, illogical love of Jewel Tear. He couldn’t argue with that. “Tell me about these missing kids.”

“Seven girls, three boys,” Mokoto said. “I know the boys better than the girls, for obvious reasons. They went by the names…” He sighed deeply. His voice cracked a little as he continued. “Bad me. Counting them as dead already. They use the names Knickknack, Toad, and Joyboy.”

Ah, this was true reason they were in bed; Mokoto was hurting over the disappearances. It put the entire family in danger if someone developed feelings for an outsider. They’d all gone through it when they were young and stupid. They’d all had to deal with walking away from someone because it was impossible to keep secrets from them. It made Tommy feel guilty that he’d been sneaking around with Jewel Tear.

“Knickknack?” Tommy guessed which one meant the most to Mokoto. He’d mentioned Knickknack first.

Mokoto nodded. “Knickknack hates his real name. He thinks it’s boring. He went by Knickknack even before he started working Liberty Avenue. He goes to Pitt. He’s going to be a senior this fall. Every other summer, he’s gone home. This time he decided to stay the summer. He’d asked his parents for money to make it through to fall, but they didn’t want him to stay, so they didn’t send him any. He suspects it’s because they think he’ll try to get a job on Elfhome and stay forever. They were against him going off-world to start with.”

This was a lot more detail than Tommy expected. “How long have you known him?”

“Three years,” Mokoto whispered and laughed brokenly. “We met at the library, of all places. He thought I was hot and asked me out for pizza. We ended up fucking in his dorm room. It was great sex. He’s very attentive and likes to cuddle. But afterward, everything he had in his room, all his little tech toys and the places he’d been and the things he’d seen and the stuff he bitched about missing while on Elfhome… We were both there, in his room, but it was like we were in two different universes.”

Tommy understood. It been one thing to have sex with Jewel Tear out in the woods, but then to see her at the enclave, cleaned up and surrounded by other elves, he’d felt to his core how much they lived in different worlds.

“I shouldn’t have seen him again,” Mokoto said. “But I did. It wasn’t just the sex. It was talking about books, and seeing movies that didn’t have guns in them, and cool music.” He waved a hand toward whatever he had softly playing music. “We would have these discussions that seemed so deep and meaningful. It was like I could be someone that wasn’t pulling tricks on Liberty to keep his family alive.”

The pain was knowing that this kid, who meant so much to Mokoto, was probably dead. The other kids might be in hiding, but Knickknack probably wouldn’t have disappeared without getting word to Mokoto. If the oni grabbed all the whores, they would keep only the girls alive. The boys they would have killed and maybe eaten.

“I knew I was being greedy,” Mokoto said. “I should have just cut him off — but I always felt so thin when he wasn’t around. Like I was just a shadow of what I could be. I liked myself more when he was around.”

Mokoto was too tough to cry. Bingo would be bawling his head off at this point.

“I never told Knickknack anything,” Mokoto said. “Not about the family. Not about the restaurant. Not about what I did in the evenings. He figured out that I lived in Oakland from things I let slip, like how I planned to walk home from his dorm room. When he decided to stay the summer, he asked if he could stay with me. He thought it would be romantic. I told him I didn’t have space; my room was too small. That made him want to see where I lived. So I told him that my pimp wouldn’t let me bring home tricks.”

That went south fast. The kid must have backed off quick because Mokoto would have probably knifed him otherwise.

“What does this Knickknack look like?” Tommy had been down to Liberty Avenue a couple of times this summer but he’d left most of the night crew management to Mokoto and Babe. They usually only called him in when they couldn’t kick the shit out of whoever was bothering their people. During those times, Tommy’s focus wasn’t on the other whores working the street.

“I’ve got pictures of them all.” Mokoto reached over to the nightstand to grab his phone. “I’m not sure why. I just had this feeling that one day I would need something to help identify them.”

Mokoto secretly took pictures of almost everyone he knew, which wasn’t hard since most of his family didn’t realize some phones had cameras. The first few were of Babe, alternating being his dorky lovable self with the family and full-on angry enforcer mode at some stranger.

Mokoto growled with irritation and swiped at the phone’s surface and got a grid of photos. He leafed through the pages and pages of thumbnails. Apparently Mokoto liked to take pictures of Tommy when he wasn’t paying attention too.

“This is Knickknack.” Mokoto held out his phone for inspection. The picture was the two of them together. The boy was taller than Tommy expected. He seemed unexpectedly sunny, but that impression might be based on his yellow hair, blue eyes, and huge smile of white straight teeth. Nothing said off-worlder more than perfect teeth.

“This is Toad.” The boy seemed surprisingly ugly to be a whore. He had the teeth of an off-worlder but nothing else appealing about him. “He’s actually been on Elfhome for a couple of years and works Liberty Avenue only when he hits a rocky period. He’s very bold and funny. He can usually talk himself into and out of any sort of trouble. I didn’t think I had to worry about him.”

Another boy, much cuter than Toad, followed. “Joyboy — but he’s full of himself, so not much of a joy to be around. I’ve figured that he would be the first to die; he’s such a drama queen. There’s been times I’ve been tempted to stab him just to shut him up.”

The girls were named Bambi, Candy, Chardonnay, Nevaeh, Peanut Butter Pie, Red, and Tawny. They all looked about twenty, except Red.

Tommy pointed at Red’s photo. “I just saw her. She cut some deal with Forest Moss. She’s got an entire troop of royal marines following her around like puppy dogs. The elves are acting like she’s equal to Tinker.”

“Really?” Mokoto said surprise and amazement. “Wow! Okay. I can see that. Red’s not like the other girls. She showed up about a month ago, at least two weeks after the last Shutdown. She didn’t come to Pittsburgh because of elves and magic and fairy tales. Something nasty happened to her on Earth. Other girls would talk about where they were from and why they were in Pittsburgh, but not Red. She kept walls up around her. Massive stone fortress walls. Nobody got in. She would walk with Peanut Butter Pie and Candy but at the end of the night, she’d head in the direction of Station Square. I think she had a squat on Mount Washington.”

“Where did Knickknack squat? Oakland?”

Mokoto flinched at the question. “They closed his dorms and he couldn’t find any place to squat in Oakland. Toad has a big place somewhere on the North Side that he calls Toad Hall. From what they’ve told me, it’s like a warren, taking up part of a block. Joyboy moved in first, and then Knickknack, and then when everything started to go south, most of the girls. The girls started to jokingly call Toad their pimp, but I know that he didn’t carry any weapons.”

“They all disappeared at once?”

Mokoto shrugged. “A couple of girls had been killed on Liberty Avenue. One died when Tinker’s fight with Malice went through Downtown and dropped an entire building’s worth of broken glass on the girl. Another whore was killed across from the train station. Red disappeared. None of that seemed related. Then one night all the rest of the Undefended stopped coming to work.”

“Did you go to the squat?”

Mokoto curled tight and shook his head. “The elves hit our warren, you took off, and we had to find someplace safe to move everyone to. I couldn’t take off to go find this Toad Hall — not with all the shit going down. It’s not like the Undefended are children; they’re all adults. They’re human. They decided to work without protection. They signed up for all this shit. Our little ones who don’t pass for human are the ones that need me. I was hoping that the Undefended got smart and just decided it was too dangerous to go out. I was hoping that they would be out on Liberty last night. None of them showed up. Whatever happened to them, happened days ago. There was no point of leaving Babe alone to protect our people.”

“Do you know the address?” Tommy asked.

“No,” Mokoto whispered. “I didn’t want to fight with Knickknack. If I didn’t ask him where he lived, then he couldn’t ask me where I lived. Things weren’t going well between us. He was starting to realize that he didn’t know me at all. He did share these pictures with me. I think he was trying to get me to ask him where it was.”

Tommy studied the photo of Knickknack standing in an open doorway of a brick town house. “This looks like the Mexican War Streets district. It shouldn’t be too hard to find it.”

“Really?” Mokoto’s voice was full of doubt.

Tommy realized that his work as his father’s messenger meant that he’d learned the city better than his other cousins. Mokoto only left Oakland to work Downtown on Liberty Avenue. The North Side had been heavily infested with true-blood oni until the royal marines stacked their dead bodies on the sidewalks. Mokoto would have avoided the area.

“I’ll find out what happened to Knickknack and the others,” Tommy promised.

Mokoto rolled suddenly to pin Tommy down. “Remember that you promised to be careful. We all need you, Tommy, so don’t even think of going off and getting killed.” And his voice broke again as he added, “I don’t want to be the oldest. I can’t do that. I can’t.”

“Hey, hey, I promised.”

There were two men in business suits sitting and chatting in the lobby. Tommy could smell bourbon in the lowball glasses on the cocktail table between them. A small mountain of luggage surrounded them. He counted ten pieces of wheeled suitcases — all different sizes.

Tommy could easily control what one person saw, but with each additional person it became more difficult. Luckily the two were sitting so that only one of them could see the counter where Trixie and Quinn were standing.

Tommy focused on the man facing Trixie. The man was in good spirits, thinking of nothing but good food, a hot shower, and a big, clean, soft bed. Tommy blurred himself out as he walked to the counter.

Quinn was one of the teenage boys who could pass as human. He sported the same black blazer over a white button-down shirt combination as Trixie. Instead of black slacks, though, Quinn wore a pair of worn but clean blue jeans. Several room service menus lay on the counter in front of Quinn — apparently “borrowed” from other hotels in the area — along with a supermarket receipt showing the purchase of rice, a long list of fruits and vegetables, and fresh fish.

“They all feature ‘a special selection of international cheeses with crackers’ called All Hands On Deck,” Quinn whispered to Trixie as Tommy walked up. “What’s this fascination with cheese and why haven’t I heard of it before?”

Quinn sounded like his mother, Aunt Flo.

“We’re Chinese; we don’t believe in cheese,” Trixie answered while counting out hundred-dollar bills. “If the other hotels are all offering it, then we should get some too. We’ll send Alita and Zippo back out since they probably didn’t look in the dairy section. You can make up a new menu if they find any. For now, figure out what we can make with what they already bought and what the price point should be.”

“What the hell?” Tommy whispered, waving toward the businessmen. “Why are they just sitting there?”

“The first three guys had to go back and get their things,” Trixie murmured. “Those guys called these two. They work for different companies but they all know each other. Since these two were told that we had rooms, they just brought their luggage with them. I told them that the teens — housekeeping — weren’t finished cleaning and offered them free drinks if they sat and waited.”

Trixie wrote down a total for the hundred-dollar bills. She had six thousand dollars in her hand.

“How much are you charging them?” Tommie said.

“I told the first guys that it was two hundred a night, one week minimum, paid up front. I thought that would discourage them. All five paid for a week. I gave Alita and Zippo a thousand to buy all the groceries that they could find; food is only going to get scarcer. These two made noises that if they liked what they get for the money, they’d want to stay for at least a month. A month would be six grand each. Who the hell has six grand to fork over like it’s nothing?”

“Apparently these guys,” Tommy said.

“We should get into whatever business these guys do,” Quinn whispered.

Tommy silenced him with a hard look. They were already in way over their heads with this hotel idea. He didn’t need his people larking off on other crazy ideas.

“These guys also called other people that had been at the Wyndham.” Trixie seemed torn between being annoyed and pleased. Her initial response had been to discourage them but the seven thousand in cash obviously shifted her thinking. “I told housekeeping to move up to the ninth floor after they finish with the eighth. Right now they’re waiting on the laundry room to finish drying the bed linen.”

She tucked the hundred-dollar bills into a cash box.

“This is frustrating,” Quinn said. “The other hotels have what I think is ‘American comfort food’ of pizza, hamburgers, macaroni and cheese, and chicken nuggets. There’s no other way to explain why they all have this really basic food. The problem is, we either don’t know how to make them — like pizza — or can’t get the ingredients in bulk — like hamburger patties. One thing that we have a lot of and can do well is hot dogs with a choice of onion and relish or sauerkraut.”

“Yeah, we do those for the racetrack,” Trixie said. “People love them.”

“Why are we doing food at all?” Tommy asked.

“Because it’s part of being a four-star hotel,” Quinn said while Trixie gave Tommy a “how stupid can you get” look that only she dared to do. “For appetizers we can do spring rolls, hot and sour soup, or wonton soup for twelve dollars.”

“Twelve?” Tommy said. “We only charged six at the restaurant.”

“That’s what the others are charging for soup.” Quinn tapped the menus before him. “They seem to double all the prices because it gets delivered to the rooms.”

Tommy turned to Trixie. “I thought you said it’s take-out?”

“Take-out we deliver to the room as if we were taking it to a table.” Trixie mimed carrying a loaded tray. “Room service: as in service to the room. We take them the food on a plate with silverware instead of inside a box.”

It was like trying to stop a train. Tommy shook his head. “Whatever. I’ll be back later.”