Chapter 31
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The boy gestured to the Dumpster. “What were you
doing with that?”
I’m no good at lying on the spot, ry thought, and
looked at Jace, who, she hoped, would be excellent at
it.
He disappointed her immediately. “We were trying to get
into the hotel. We thought there might be a cer door
behind the trash bin.”
The boy’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Puta madre—why
would you want to do something like that?”
Jace shrugged. “For a prank, you know. Just a little fun.”
“You don’t understand. This ce is haunted, cursed.
Bad luck.” He shook his head vigorously and said
several things in Spanish that ry suspected had to do
with the stupidity of spoiled white kids in general and
their stupidity in particr. “Walk with me; I’ll take you to
the subway.”
“We know where the subway is,” said Jace.
The boyughed a soft, vibrantugh. “ro. Of course
you do, but if you go with me, no one will bother you.
You do not want trouble, do you?”
“That depends,” Jace said, and moved so that his jacket
opened slightly, showing the glint of the weapons thrust
through his belt. “How much are they paying you to
keep people away from the hotel?”
The boy nced behind him, and ry’s nerves
twanged as she imagined the narrow alley mouth filling
up with other shadowy figures, white-faced, red-
mouthed, the glint of fangs as sudden as metal striking
sparks from pavement. When he looked back at Jace,
his mouth was a thin line. “How much are who paying
me, chico?”
“The vampires. How much are they paying you? Or is it
something else—did they tell you they’d make you one
of them, offer you eternal life, no pain, no sickness, you
get to live forever? Because it’s not worth it. Life
stretches out very long when you never see the sunlight,
chico,” said Jace.
The boy was expressionless. “My name is Raphael. Not
chico.”
“But you know what we’re talking about. You know about
the vampires?” ry said.
Raphael turned his face to the side and spit. When he
looked back at them, his eyes were full of a glittering
hate. “Los vampiros, sí, the blood-drinking animals.
Even before the hotel was boarded up, there were
stories, theughterte at night, the small animals
disappearing, the sounds—” He stopped, shaking his
head. “Everyone in the neighborhood knows to stay
away, but what can you do? You cannot call the police
and tell them your problem is vampires.”
“Have you ever seen them?” Jace asked. “Or known
anyone who has?”
Raphael spoke slowly. “There were some boys, once, a
group of friends. They thought they had a good idea, to
go into the hotel and kill the monsters inside. They took
guns with them, knives too, all blessed by a priest. They
never came out. My aunt, she found their clothester,
in front of the house.”
“Your aunt’s house?” said Jace.
“Sí. One of the boys was my brother,” said Raphael
tly. “So now you know why I walk by here in the
middle of the night sometimes, on the way home from
my aunt’s house, and why I warned you away. If you go
in there, you will note out again.”
“My friend is in there,” said ry. “We came to get him.”
“Ah,” said Raphael, “then perhaps I cannot warn you
away.”
“No,” Jace said. “But don’t worry. What happened to
your friends won’t happen to us.” He took one of the
angel des from his belt and held it up; the faint light
emanating from it lit the hollows under his cheekbones,
shadowed his eyes. “I’ve killed plenty of vampires
before. Their hearts don’t beat, but they can still die.”
Raphael inhaled sharply and said something in Spanish
too low and rapid for ry to understand. He came
toward them, almost stumbling over a pile of crumpled
stic wrappers in his haste. “I know what you are—I
have heard about your kind, from the old padre at St.
Cecilia’s. I thought that was just a story.”
“All the stories are true,” ry said, but so quietly that
he didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking at Jace, his
fists clenched.
“I want to go with you,” he said.
Jace shook his head. “No. Absolutely not.”
“I can show you how to get inside,” Raphael said.
Jace wavered, temptation in on his face. “We can’t
bring you.”
“Fine.” Raphael stalked by him and kicked aside a heap
of trash piled against a wall. There was a metal grating
there, thin bars filmed with a brownish-red coating of
rust. He knelt down, took hold of the bars, and lifted the
grating away. “This is how my brother and his friends got
in. It goes down to the basement, I think.” He looked up
as Jace and ry joined him. ry half-held her breath;
the smell of the garbage was overwhelming, and even in
the darkness she could see the darting shapes of
cockroaches crawling over the piles.
A thin smile had formed, just at the corners of Jace’s
mouth. He still had the angel de in his hand. The
witchlight that came from it lent his face a ghostly cast,
reminding her of the way Simon had held a shlight
under his chin while telling her horror stories when they
were both eleven. “Thanks,” he said to Raphael. “This
will work just fine.”
The other boy’s face was pale. “You go in there and do
for your friend what I could not do for my brother.”
Jace slipped the seraph de back into his belt and
nced at ry. “Follow me,” he said, and slid through
the grating in a single smooth move, feet first. She held
her breath, waiting for a shout of agony or amazement,
but there was only the soft thump of feetnding on
solid ground. “It’s fine,” he called up, his voice muffled.
“Jump down and I’ll catch you.”
She looked at Raphael. “Thanks for your help.”
He said nothing, only held out his hand. She used it to
steady herself while she maneuvered into position. His
fingers were cold. He let go as she dropped down
through the grating. It was only a second’s fall and Jace
caught her, her dress rucking up around her thighs and
his hand grazing her legs as she slid into his arms. He
let her go almost immediately. “You all right?”
She pulled her dress down, d he couldn’t see her in
the dark. “I’m fine.”
Jace pulled the dimly glowing angel de out of his belt
and lifted it, letting its growing illumination wash over
their surroundings. They were standing in a shallow,
low-ceilinged space with a cracked concrete floor.
Squares of dirt showed where the floor was broken, and
ry could see that ck vines had begun to twine up
the walls. A doorway, missing its door, opened onto
another room.
A loud thump made her start, and she turned to see
Raphaelnding, knees bent, just a few feet from her.
He had followed them through the grating. He
straightened up and grinned manically.
Jace looked furious. “I told you—”
“And I heard you.” Raphael waved a dismissive hand.
“What are you going to do about it? I can’t get back out
the way we came in, and you can’t just leave me here
for the dead to find … can you?”
“I’m thinking about it,” Jace said. He looked tired, ry
saw with some surprise, the shadows under his eyes
more pronounced.
Raphael pointed. “We must go that way, toward the
stairs. They are up on the higher floors of the hotel. You
will see.” He pushed past Jace and through the narrow
doorway. Jace looked after him, shaking his head.
“I’m really starting to hate mundanes,” he said.
* * *
The lower floor of the hotel was a warren of mazelike
corridors opening onto empty storage rooms, a deserted
laundry—moldy stacks of linen towels piled high in
rotted wicker baskets—even a ghostly kitchen, banks of
stainless-steel counters stretching away into the
shadows. Most of the staircases leading upstairs were
gone; not rotted but deliberately chopped away, reduced
to stacks of kindling shoved against walls, bits of once-
luxurious Persian carpet clinging to them like blossoms
of furry mold.
The missing stairs baffled ry. What did vampires
have against stairs? They finally found an unharmed
set, tucked away behind theundry. Maids must have
used it to carry linens up and down the stairs in the days
before elevators. Dusty thick on the steps now, like a
layer of powdery gray snow that made ry cough.
“Shh,” hissed Raphael. “They will hear you. We are
close to where they sleep.”
“How do you know?” she whispered back. He wasn’t
even supposed to be there. What gave him the right to
lecture her about noise?
“I can feel it.” The corner of his eye twitched, and she
saw that he was as scared as she was. “Can’t you?”
She shook her head. She felt nothing, other than
strangely cold; after the stifling heat of the night outside,
the chill inside the hotel was intense.
At the top of the stairs was a door on which the painted
word LOBBY was barely legible beneath years of
umted dirt. The door sprayed rust when Jace
pushed it open. ry braced herself—
But the room beyond was empty. They were in arge
foyer, its rotting carpeting torn back to show the
splintered floorboards beneath. Once the centerpiece of
this room had been a grand staircase, gracefully
curving, lined with gilt banisters and richly carpeted in
gold and scarlet. Now all that remained were the higher
steps, leading up into ckness. The remainder of the
staircase ended just above their heads, in midair. The
sight was as surreal as one of the abstract Magritte
paintings Jocelyn had loved. This one, ry thought,
would be called The Stairs to Nowhere.
Her voice sounded as dry as the dust that coated
everything. “What do vampires have against stairs?”
“Nothing,” said Jace. “They just don’t need to use them.”
“It is a way of showing that this ce is one of theirs.”
Raphael’s eyes were bright. He seemed almost excited.
Jace nced at him sideways.
“Have you ever actually seen a vampire, Raphael?” he
asked.
Raphael nced at him almost absently. “I know what
they look like. They are paler, thinner, than human
beings, but very strong. They walk like cats and spring
with the swiftness of serpents. They are beautiful and
terrible. Like this hotel.”
“You think it’s beautiful?” ry asked, surprised.
“You can see where it was, years ago. Like an old
woman who was once beautiful, but time has taken her
beauty away. You must imagine this staircase the way it
was once, with the gasmps burning all up and down
the steps, like fireflies in the dark, and the balconies full
of people. Not the way it is now, so—” He broke off,
searching for a word.
“Truncated?” Jace suggested dryly.
Raphael looked almost startled, as if Jace had broken
him out of a reverie. Heughed shakily and turned
away.
ry turned to Jace. “Where are they, anyway? The
vampires, I mean.”
“Upstairs, probably. They like to be high up when they
sleep, like bats. And it’s nearly sunrise.”
Like puppets with their heads attached to strings, ry
and Raphael both looked up at the same time. There
was nothing above them but the frescoed ceiling,
cracked and ck in ces as if it had been burned in a
fire. An archway to their left led farther into darkness;
the pirs on either side were engraved with a motif of
leaves and flowers. As Raphael nced back down, a
scar at the base of his throat, very white against his
brown skin, shed like a winking eye. She wondered
how he’d gotten it.
“I think we should go back to the servants’ stairs,” she
whispered. “I feel too exposed out here.”
Jace nodded. “You realize, once we get there, you’ll
have to call out for Simon and hope he can hear you?”
She wondered if the fear she felt showed on her face. “I
—”
Her words were cut short by a bloodcurdling scream.
ry whirled.
Raphael. He was gone, no marks in the dust showing
where he might have walked—or been dragged. She
reached for Jace, reflexively, but he was already
moving, running toward the gaping arch in the far wall
and the shadows beyond. She couldn’t see him but
followed the darting witchlight he carried, like a traveler
being led through a swamp by a treacherous will-o’-the-
wisp.
Beyond the arch was what had once been a grand
ballroom. The ruined floor was white marble, now so
badly cracked that it resembled a sea of floating arctic
ice. Curved balconies ran along the walls, their railings
veiled in rust. Gold-framed mirrors hung at intervals
between them, each crowned with a gilded cupid’s
head. Spiderwebs drifted in the mmy air like ancient
wedding veils.
Raphael was standing in the center of the room, his
arms at his sides. ry ran to him, Jace following more
slowly behind her. “Are you all right?” she asked
breathlessly.
He nodded slowly. “I thought I saw a movement in the
shadows. It was nothing.”
“We’ve decided to head back to the servants’ stairs,”
Jace said. “There’s nothing on this floor.”
Raphael nodded. “Good idea.”
He headed for the door, not looking to see if they
followed. He had gotten only a few steps when Jace
said, “Raphael?”
Raphael turned, eyes widening inquisitively, and Jace
threw his knife.
Raphael’s reflexes were quick, but not quick enough.
The de struck home, the force of the impact knocking
him over. His feet went out from under him and he fell
heavily to the cracked marble floor. In the dim witchlight
his blood looked ck.
“Jace,” ry hissed in disbelief, shock pounding
through her. He’d said he hated mundanes, but he’d
never—
As she turned to go to Raphael, Jace shoved her
brutally aside. He flung himself on the other boy and
grabbed for the knife sticking out of Raphael’s chest.
But Raphael was faster. He seized the knife, then
screamed as his hand came in contact with the cross-
shaped hilt. It ttered to the marble floor, de
smeared ck. Jace had one hand fisted in the material
of Raphael’s shirt, Sanvi in the other. It was glowing with
such a bright light that ry could see colors again: the
peeling royal blue of the wallpaper, the gold flecks in the
marble floor, the red stain spreading across Raphael’s
chest.
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