Page 33 of Brimstone and Broomsticks
Chapter 11
Cassandra
“Well, housekeeping services here leave a lot to be desired,” Lucien announced cheerfully as he urged me forward into the trashed room.
“What happened?” I stared open-mouthed at the wreckage. The mattress had been slashed, foam and torn springs littering the floor. The mirror was smashed as was the television. All the drawers in the dresser had been pulled out and crushed. The lamp was bent, as if someone had use it to bludgeon a granite statue.
Lucien shrugged. “Party? Hell if I know.” He came around the front of me, drawing me into his arms.
I pushed him off. “Did you do this? Was it like this when you left?”
“No. No. I don’t care. I’ve slept in worse. Now about that kiss…”
I held out a hand to stay him and stared at the very wet and very red stain on the carpet. “That’s blood.”
“Yep. Sure looks like it.”
It was a lot of blood. As in, a volume of blood the loss of which would be fatal to a human, and most likely severely debilitating to a supernatural being. Why wasn’t Lucien bothered about this? His hotel room was torn to bits, someone had possibly bled out on his floor, and he was acting as though this was not only commonplace, but a non-issue.
Oh. Demon. A dude with leathery wings who made his home in hell and had a job involving torturing and punishing condemned souls wasn’t likely to be shocked by what appeared to be a crime scene.
But I was no demon.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed. “I’ve got to call this in. If you didn’t trash this hotel room, then someone else did. And I’m not feeling like we should ignore the fact that there’s a huge blood stain on the rug here.”
I dialed the Sherriff’s office, not really wanting to call 911 when as far as I could tell there was no one requiring immediate medical attention. Unless…
“Lucien, can you check in the bathroom and on the other side of the beds. Oh, and in the closet? Just in case there’s some guy bleeding out still here?”
His lips twitched. I’m glad he found my stoic indifference amusing because most guys didn’t. Marcus didn’t care as long as I was sleeping with him and giving him all my emotional attention. The fact that I wasn’t screaming and shaking over a huge blood stain or panicked over the thought of a possible dead body somewhere in the room was exactly the sort of “emotional distance” that had bothered any human boyfriend I’d ever had.
I chalked it up to being raised in a town full of supernatural beings for whom “bleeding out” wasn’t necessarily fatal, and most of whom would have been making jokes right now.
“No dead guy. Or injured guy,” Lucien cheerfully informed me. “Now get off the phone so I can have my kiss. Although I’m not relishing the thought of spending the night in this mess. Perhaps I should take this as an occasion to renegotiate our deal.”
“I’m not spending the night with you,” I told him before turning my attention back to the phone. “No, not you Fred. I was talking to someone else. Yes, Hollister’s Hotel. Room six. No, I haven’t identified what kind of blood it is.”
I hung up, then dialed the one person whocouldidentify what sort of being this stain had belonged to. Yes, I could do it, but it would take a whole lot of components that I didn’t carry around on me. And I didn’t practice magic. Unless I could help it anyway.
“Ophelia? Can you come over to the hotel, room six?”
My sister sighed. “Should I bring my medical bag? Did you knife someone, Cassie? What did this one do, pull your braids in first grade or something?”
Did I mention my sister was a paramedic, probably trying to catch a few winks on a cot at the firehouse between calls? You’d think a town full of supernaturals wouldn’t require much in the way of emergency medical help, but we were just a day away from the full moon, and things did get rather messy around here at that time of the month.
“I just need a quick divination,” I told her.
“You do know I’m on tonight, right?”
“Quick, I promise. There’s a blood stain on the carpet here and I need to know who might be dead.”
She sighed and I heard a noise as if she were putting her pants on. “If I’m lucky I can tell you ‘what’. The ‘who’ is beyond my ability.”
“I’ll take it.” I hung up just as Sheriff Oakes came through the door, followed by Bronwyn.
“Christ, Cassie. I figured you’d just decided to screw the guy, but then the cops show up and I’m worried that maybe you set his pants on fire. Or set something else on fire.”
“We screw and this whole hotel is burning down, I promise you that,” Lucien told her with a grin.
