Vaguely unsettled, Julien called out again. “I’ve had some car trouble!” Silence. A bed was starting to look unlikely. He walked toward the open door at the back of the lobby and peered into the darkness. He opened his mouth to call out again, but something stopped him. Julien took a few steps into the hall, squinting into the gloom. There was an open door on the right and he peered around the corner. “Is someone there?”

A pair of reflective inhuman eyes stared back at him and Julien yelled out, stumbling backward. The eyes jumped to the ground with a soft thud and a cat darted between his ankles and scurried into the lobby.

“Fuck.” Julien exhaled and laughed at himself. Thank goodness there really wasn’t any such thing as monsters, if feline theatrics launched his heart into outer space. He felt ridiculous and frankly a little embarrassed, but also reluctant to wander farther into the building. Because it’d be rude, and not because his heart had thus far only sunk back down to the general vicinity of his throat, of course. All he needed was a working phone, anyway. Or power. Surely no one would mind that. Julien walked quickly back into the lobby and, with only a second’s hesitation, helped himself behind the reception desk. The sooner he could make a call, the sooner he’d be out of here.

There was no landline. But crouching, he found the outlet the desk lamp was plugged into, deep at the back of a low shelf, and quickly got his charger out of his duffel and his cell hooked up. As he stood, the Sweet Pea card deck fell from his pocket and bounced under the bottom shelf. Julien knelt to retrieve it, gasping at the sudden pain that lanced through his chest when he stretched out his arm. Obviously, the adrenaline that had numbed the bumps and bruises was fading fast. He should—

“If you’re down there looking for a bed that’s just right, Goldilocks, mine’s upstairs.”

A man’s voice. Behind him. Julien shot up to his knees so quickly he would have smashed his head into the desk’s top ledge, if not for the warm, soft hand suddenly cupping his crown just long enough to act as a buffer between his skull and the wood, then gone. The only proof it had been there at all was a faint tingle where he’d been touched and the distinct absence of a painful head. “Thanks. Hell, you sca-scared me,” Julien stuttered. For half a second it looked like the man standing over him had blank, colorless eyes, as flat as the cat’s. But then he shifted his weight and Julien could see it was just a trick of the light. They were a perfectly conventional gray. Nice-looking, even, though perhaps a little washed-out in a pale face framed by black hair. Slightly less conventional was the dangerously short, peacock blue, silk dressing gown he wore over, Christ, nothing at all, if the cling of that fabric wasn’t lying.