Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(23)

‘Somewhere safe?’ Aaron said.

‘I don’t know,’ Joan admitted. ‘But probably safer than here.’

It turned out to be a longer walk than Joan had remembered. By the time she found the right street, her teeth were chattering again, and Aaron was looking over his shoulder more than he was watching the way ahead.

The streetlights were broken here—and recently. Glass was spattered on the ground. Aaron walked around the shards with fastidious care. ‘Isn’t this nice,’ he said. ‘You’ve managed to home in on the one piece of slum around here. Trust a Hunt.’

Joan wished she’d paid more attention when she’d come here with Gran. All the houses on the row looked the same. She went up to one of the doors with more confidence than she felt.

To her relief, the door wasn’t locked, and the foyer was familiar—a tiny reception area the size of Gran’s bathroom. The smell was familiar too. Ancient cigarettes and damp. The carpet stuck to Joan’s socks, adding brown furry muck to the mud and grass.

Joan rang the bell at the desk. A woman emerged from the staff door. She had grey hair and cat-eye glasses, and she didn’t blink at Joan and Aaron’s mismatched clothes. Her name tag said Vera.

‘Room for two, please,’ Joan said.

Vera pointed at a handwritten sign taped to the counter. Cash only. Hourly and nightly rates. Payment up front.

‘That’s you,’ Joan said to Aaron.

Aaron looked sour. His expression was as clear as a thought bubble: he couldn’t believe that he was here in this foyer, with Joan and Vera.

‘Two beds,’ Aaron said.

‘Two beds?’ Vera seemed far more surprised at that than at the contrast between Joan’s muddy socks and Aaron’s Savile Row suit.

Joan felt her face heating up. Aaron seemed flustered too, for the first time since Joan had met him. ‘I trust you can accommodate,’ he said. He pulled a wallet from his back pocket. Joan glimpsed strange banknotes. Old-fashioned notes. Transparent notes. He thumbed through them and then pulled out two recognisable twenties.

Vera shrugged. She slid a numbered key under the glass and pointed at the fire door. ‘Lift’s broken.’

‘I’d have preferred sleeping under a bridge,’ Aaron told Joan as they tromped up the stairs. Cockroaches scuttered alongside them.

‘Nick won’t look for us here,’ Joan said.

‘Nick.’ Aaron looked at her sideways.

‘I—I knew him before tonight,’ she said.

She looked away from Aaron’s sharpening gaze. ‘We were—’ She stopped at the stab of pain in her chest, harsher and sharper than the pain in her side. She’d kissed Nick just before all this. She’d wanted it so much. ‘I knew him,’ she managed.

Aaron was still looking at her. Joan had the unsettling impression that he was seeing more than he should have. Then his eyes dropped to a yellow stain on the fraying carpet and he grimaced. ‘Well, of course he won’t look for us here. No one would come here. Rats wouldn’t. Health inspectors clearly haven’t.’

He was back to his annoying superiority, but for just a second Joan had seen something underneath that careless exterior: something more insightful and intelligent than she’d realised, and more alien. It occurred to her that he wasn’t human. And that, for all that she was half-monster herself, she didn’t really know what a monster was.

The stairs ended in a long corridor with peeling wallpaper that showed layers of older patterns underneath: blue paisley and sallow orange. The edges of the carpet were nibbled to threads—Aaron had been wrong about the rats.

Joan found their door number and then leaned against the wall while Aaron struggled with the stiff lock. The pain from the sword wound was starting to get to her. She touched her side underneath Aaron’s jacket and found fresh blood on her fingertips. Shit.

Aaron reached inside. There was a click. A single dim bulb illuminated the room. Two beds. A private bathroom with an uncurtained shower and a toilet. Everything they needed. Better than Joan had expected.

‘Oh, this is unmitigated hell,’ Aaron said. The view through the window was the dark glass of an office building. He stared at it grimly and then snapped the curtain shut.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Joan said.

Aaron pointed at the ceiling. There was a cloudlike brown stain on it. ‘What’s that?’

‘A fresco,’ Joan said. As Aaron wandered into the bathroom, she considered their situation. The lock might have been stiff, but the door was as thin as her finger. There was a single flimsy bolt.

She shrugged off Aaron’s jacket and squeezed herself between the two beds. Then she shoved the nearest one. It didn’t want to go at first. She forced it, inch by grinding inch, until it was up against the door. With any luck, that would slow down anyone trying to kick the thing in. The jolt of pain hit her belatedly. She leaned on the bed and breathed. Goddamn Lucien.

‘Here,’ someone said, right beside her, and Joan flinched. For a second, all she could see were Edmund’s cruel grey eyes. The round muzzle of the gun.

She raised her hand instinctively to push him away.

‘Fine. Do it yourself, then,’ he said, and Joan’s vision cleared. It was Aaron, his mouth disdainful. He dumped a first-aid kit on the bed along with a hand towel and a bowl of soapy water. ‘What kind of hotel has a first-aid kit in the bathroom, and no robes?’ he said. ‘Nice place you’ve brought us to.’