“Then think of the Keeper’s safety. When you are here she must protect you all the time. Her attention it is divided.”
“I can protect myself!”
“How?”
“His strength is the strength of ten,” Austin muttered, dropping his chin onto his paws, “because his heart is pure.”
Nose-to-nose, both men ignored him.
“If Claire allows me a body…”
“If Claire what?” Dean interrupted.
The cat looked up. “It’s an incubus kind of a thing. Not generally approved of by the lineage, but there have been exceptions.”
“And I have been already excepted,” Jacques announced smugly, and disappeared.
“I hate it when they do that,” Austin said, dropping his head again. “You never know when they’re really gone.” As Dean turned toward him, eyes wide behind the lenses of his glasses, he added, “I know, of course, but you don’t.”
“Is he gone?”
“Yes.” Claire answered as she came into the dining room brushing cobwebs off her shoulders. “He’s upstairs investigating the rest of the hotel. I spread the stuff from the room he died in as widely as possible.”
“In my apartment?”
“Of course not. I didn’t put anything in the basement at all.”
Dean folded his arms. “Is it true what he said?”
“That depends. What did he say?”
“That you…” She lifted an eyebrow and Dean suddenly found it difficult to continue. “That you gave him a body.”
“He said I gave him a body?”
Her tone lowered the temperature in the room about ten degrees. His crossed arms now a barricade, Dean couldn’t stop himself from stepping back. “Not exactly.”
“What exactly did he say?”
It wasn’t a request. Moistening dry lips, Dean repeated the conversation.
Claire sighed and lifted her right hand into the air, fingers flicking off the points. “First according to my mother and my cat, you don’t need my protection and, as things stand right now, there’s nothing to protect you from. Second, I need you to run this place. Jacques certainly isn’t going to be cooking, cleaning, or unclogging toilets. Third, I didn’t make the exception for him, she did.”
Feeling both foolish and reassured. Dean watched his finger rub along the edge of the tabletop. “Will you?” The silence drew his gaze back to Claire’s face. “Uh, never mind.”
“Wise choice,” Austin muttered.
Claire sighed again. Her life used to be so simple. “Look, Dean, I realize Jacques made it sound like he and I, that we…” She paused, wondering why she was so embarrassed about something that hadn’t happened. Maybe because somewhere deep in the back of her mind she’d considered it? Clearing her throat, she started again. “Put yourself in his place, trapped between life and death, trapped alone in that attic for decades.”
“Okay. I guess I feel sort of sorry for him,” Dean allowed reluctantly. “But every ghost story I’ve ever heard says he’ll be a nuisance at best.”
The can of furniture polish crashed suddenly to the floor.
“See?”
“That was Austin.”
A cupboard door opened and one of the plastic salt shakers put out for guests flung itself halfway across the room.
“That was Jacques.”
“Just meeting expectations.” He materialized by Claire’s side, grinning wickedly.
“Ground rules,” Claire told him, folding her arms and trying not to smile. “First, no throwing things.”
“He started it.” Jacques nodded at the cat.
“If he took poison, would you?”
“What would be the point?”
She had to admit that under the circumstances it was a stupid question. Actually, under most circumstances it was a stupid question. “Second, when you’re in a room with either Dean, or me, or both of us, you must be visible.”
“And thirdly? There is always a thirdly, yes?”
“Thirdly, if we’re all going to live together for a while, let’s make an effort to get along.”
“I cannot go down there with you.” Jacques squatted at the top of the stairs to better watch Claire descend. “Why not?”
“Because there’s nothing of yours in the basement.”
“Is it because he lives in the basement and you keep us from fighting over who is most important in your life?”
“Something like that.” Claire smiled as she moved out of his line of sight. For the moment, it was surprisingly entertaining being the center of someone’s universe.
“Cleaning is woman’s work.” Sprawled on the bed, the ghost peered around the room.
Dean very carefully coiled the vacuum cleaner cord around the back of the machine. “Is it?”
“Oui. Any man would know.”
“Like you know it?” He picked up his divided bucket of cleaning supplies.
“Oui.”
“Why don’t you tell Claire?”
“That cleaning is woman’s work?”
“Yeah.”
“I cannot. She is in the basement.”
Dean mourned the missed opportunity. Even after only three days he had a fairly good idea of Claire’s response to a declaration of that type.
“I think you need to rub harder.”
“Don’t you have something to do?” Dean growled, scowling up at the ghost. While searching for paint for the sign, he’d come across a can of paint remover and, although the dining room was still a catastrophe, Claire had decided he should spend the rest of the afternoon stripping the front counter.
Sitting on the countertop, Jacques thought about it, soundlessly drumming his heels. “No,” he said cheerfully after a moment. “I will remain here and watch you.”
“Don’t”
“Dean.”
He leaned around the flailing legs. “Yeah, Boss?”
Carrying a second box of triple-X videos from the sitting room, Claire pushed her hair up off her face with the back of her hand. “Jacques isn’t hurting anything. He’d help if he could.”
“I would,” Jacques agreed cheerfully. “Truly I would help if I could.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Until this point, Dean had always been able to give any new acquaintance the benefit of the doubt. Until this point they’d all been alive, but if he disliked Jacques solely because he was dead, didn’t that make him as much of a bigot as if he disliked him because he was French Canadian? Now, if he disliked him because of the way he acted around Claire, that opened a whole…
He threw his weight behind the
