The Tenants of 7C (2 page)

Outside in the snow in the grubby alley, it occurred to Clare that her reaction to the bakery’s wares had been a little strange. Cakes didn’t normally get her so excited; and the way that she had felt sure that those cakes would be better than
any others in the world
had been decidedly peculiar. She also realized she hadn’t paid nearly as much attention to the bakery’s customers as she should have; she could barely call to mind anything about them, although she knew that the place had been full. She slid her phone out of her pocket and thumbed it on. Sure enough, the app was back up, showing the map screen with the blue triangle.

Something inside the bakery must have been jamming the signal as well as interfering with her sense of smell. And that might mean that something more was being hidden there than just one unfriendly Russian vampire. Perhaps she had stumbled upon a whole nest, like the one Jake and Laurence were always boastingly reminiscing about at the office. No, not
stumbled upon
, she thought. Ferreted out. Hunted down. She clenched her teeth as she thought of the months spent listening to Jake and Laurence talk about their hunts, thinking,
How silly, like teenagers reminiscing about a roleplaying game
, before she’d been unofficially given the security clearance to learn that not all of the “urban adventures” her company organized were fake.

She noticed something now that she hadn’t seen on the way into the bakery. In the window, among the faded newspapers, was a hand-written sign, equally faded:
Room for Rent—Contact Rose
.

On the left side of the bakery, where it was not connected to an adjoining house, a flight of wooden stairs led up to a side door, presumably of a second-storey apartment. That must be where the
Room for Rent
was, Clare thought. Probably the sign was long out of date, and someone had already taken the room. Still, it was worth a try. If she could get above the bakery, maybe her phone could get a reading. She looked down at her clothes, wondering whether there was anything she could do to make herself look like the sort of person who might actually want to live in a place like this. No, she decided. No one who might consider calling a rented room in a Kensington Market back alley home could have afforded her boots. But it wasn’t likely anyone here would suspect her motives, either. Thinking ahead, she put her phone in her jeans’ pocket, so she would have it on her even if she took off her coat, and climbed the wooden stairs.

The door at the top was labelled, inexplicably, 7C. There was no sign of a doorbell or even a knocker, so Clare hammered soundly with a gloved fist. After a few moments she heard movement inside, then a bolt being drawn back. The door opened and a blond boy stood looking at her with surprise.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Clare. I’m here about the room?”

“Oh!” The boy’s face filled with relief. “Sure. Rose sent you, right? Come in.”

He held the door open, and Clare stepped past him into a poky entryway crowded with straggly potted plants.

“So, um … ” The boy was looking at her with a kind of nervous admiration. “Welcome to Seven C. Did Rose tell you very much about the apartment?”

“No, she was kind of busy.” Was Rose the frumpy pregnant woman? Clare wondered. And did this boy live here with his parents? He didn’t look quite old enough be living on his own.

“Well, it’s kind of different—oh, you can leave your boots anywhere, it’s all right. Um—can I take your coat?”

Clare pushed her boots into a corner and handed over her coat. The boy took Clare’s coat gingerly, as if he was afraid he might damage it, and opened two different doors before he found the coat closet.

“The plants are supposed to stop that happening,” he mumbled apologetically, to Clare’s complete puzzlement. “I’m Nick, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Nick.”

It wasn’t, really. Nick was a pale, bony teenager who wore striped pyjama pants with flip-flops, and a greyish T-shirt with
New Moon Soy Sauce
written in red lettering across the chest. His streaky blond hair was longer than it needed to be, and had a tendency to fall in his eyes.

“Well, I’ll show you around.”

“Sure.”

Clare took a surreptitious sniff at the entryway as the boy turned away from her. It was worse than the bakery. The potted plants smelled of nothing in the ordinary way, but when Clare concentrated all she got was a startling blast of green. That made even less sense than the baking smells downstairs.

“The kitchen is always through here,” the boy was saying, bizarrely. “It’s one thing you can count on.”

Clare forced a slight laugh, as this was probably meant to be some sort of joke. Nick gave her a worried look.

“No, really,” he said. “The kitchen is the only room that’s always in the same place. It’s sort of like the anchor. Everything else moves around.”

Clare looked around the kitchen. It was a large, airy room, with windows in places that didn’t make sense, considering where they must have been in the house. But everything else about it seemed ordinary: old-looking appliances, cracked flooring, mismatched tea towels, dishes piled in the sink. A big, plain wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a clutter of what looked like math homework spread out on it.

There was a burst of clicking footsteps, like someone scurrying in high heels, and the door on the other side of the kitchen opened and a small head looked warily in. It was a little boy’s head, with dark, curly hair and big brown eyes in an olive-skinned face. It also had a pair of stubby horns.

“Nick?” it said, in a small voice.

“Hey, Yiannis, what’s up? Look, this is Clare—she’s, um … She might be our new roommate.”
 

The rest of the boy came around the door. He was wearing shorts, but he was clearly a goat from the waist down, with black, knobby legs that bent in two places and ended in dainty hooves. He also had a little tuft of a tail, which he pulled at nervously while he stood looking up at Clare.

“Hi,” said Clare, faintly.

She wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to take this. Frankly, she was dumbfounded. They had never briefed her on … satyrs? Was that what you called them? She wasn’t even sure if anyone in the office knew such a thing existed. As far as she knew, Stake dealt strictly with vampires. But the older boy seemed to expect her to take this in stride, the same way he had expected her to take what he said about the kitchen literally.

“Nick, have you seen Susan?” the satyr boy asked, still looking nervously at Clare out of the corner of his eye.

“Uh, which one is Susan?”

“Susan! My yellow-haired doll. How come you can’t remember?”

“You’ve got so many of them, Yiannis. I don’t know where she is. Maybe you put her somewhere and then it got changed around. Why don’t you ask Tacky? He can find things.”

“He’s watching cartoons.”

“Well—tell him to stop and help you find your doll. Honestly. He’s supposed to look after you.”

Yiannis tugged discontentedly on his tail a moment longer, then turned around and clicked back out of the kitchen.

“I’m going to go play on your computer!” he sang out from the hall.

“Don’t you dare!” Nick shouted after him. He looked back at Clare and smiled wanly. “He’s actually cute, but … he’s kind of bored most of the time, because he can’t really go out. He’s just living here temporarily—Rose is trying to find proper foster-parents for him. It actually
is
Tacky’s job to look after him, but he’s basically useless, so … Um, I should show you the other rooms. Oh, I should mention—you don’t have a problem with sunlight, do you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s just that the spare room has a big window, and sometimes it’s on the front of the house and sometimes it’s on the back, so you can’t really tell whether you’re going to get sun in the morning or in the afternoon. Cristina had that room before, and it used to make her crazy—she couldn’t even open the blinds at night in the summer. Right—I’m an idiot. You just came in from outside on a sunny day, so … ”

“I’m not a vampire.” It was not something Clare had ever expected to hear herself saying.

Nick smiled. “You totally don’t have to say, Clare. That’s like … Rose’s thing, kind of. You just don’t have to say. It’s all good.”

He looked at her a moment longer, with an almost reassuring expression, as if he expected her to be comforted by what he had just said. Obviously he was himself. This, to Clare, was the most shocking thing yet. He thought she was some kind of … some kind of what? A monster, anyway. But it was “all good.” He used to live with a vampire; he lived with an orphaned satyr now. He clearly thought Clare had been referred here by Rose because she was some unnatural creature that could find no other place to live. What, Clare wondered, was
he
?

He had gone out through the door Yiannis had come in by, into the hallway beyond, before Clare had a chance to try catching any scent off him. She followed hastily. The hallway was lined with closed doors on both sides, with a last door at the far end. The doors were oddly close together, but even so the hallway looked too long to fit inside one of the narrow row houses that Clare had seen from the alley. It was possible that the apartment might have taken up the second storeys of two houses—but somehow she had a feeling that wasn’t what was going on.

“It’s bigger on the inside,” said Nick, grinning over his shoulder at her. “Do you watch
Doctor Who
?”

“Sorry?”

“Never mind. I just meant—we’re still in the same house, but there’s more on the inside than the outside. Plus the doors look closer together in the hall than they do inside the rooms. Oh, and it’s no good trying to put a sign on your door, or anything. It’s not the
doors
that move around.”

“Oh,” said Clare.

He began opening doors. “Okay … linen closet … Yiannis’s room … bathroom—you really have to remember to lock the door.”

“I usually do.”

“Yeah! I guess that’s normal. It’s just because … people don’t always know it’s the bathroom. Some of the doors don’t have locks, either, so when the bathroom ends up behind one of those, you have to just shove the laundry hamper in front of it and hope for the best.” He opened another door. “Okay, that’s Yiannis’s room again.”

“It’s in both places?” In spite of herself, Clare was becoming a little bit curious about how this worked.

“No, it just moved. See, they only move when no one’s in them. One time, when I was late for school, I kept getting the linen closet behind every door, and I literally couldn’t get to my bedroom. I had to go to school wearing my pyjama pants. It was brutal.”

“Wow.”

“That doesn’t usually happen, though. Plus, Tacky can
kind of
control it. I don’t know, he talks to the house, or something.” He shrugged dismissively. “Anyway, this is the living room.” He opened the door at the end of the hall. “It’s always here, too, like the kitchen—it’s just not always the same.”

The living room looked like something out of the
Arabian Nights
, or maybe the 60s: overlapping, threadbare carpets on the floor, heaps of cushions spilling off awkwardly low couches, hanging coloured-glass lanterns and shelves and shelves of books, with vases and statuettes and candlesticks wedged in among them. There was a television, with a DVD player and a game console, sitting on a coffee table with their cords trailing away behind them to the wall. Draped along one of the low couches in front of the television was a beautiful Asian teenager in jeans and a black V-neck sweater, lazily eating rice crackers out of a Tupperware container with long, slender fingers. It took Clare a moment to determine that he was a boy.

“So the TV is supposed to be for everyone, but if you actually want to watch anything … ” Nick gestured towards the couch. “Good luck shifting this bastard.”

The boy on the couch waved a remote irritably at the television and pushed himself up onto one elbow. He had silky, waist-length hair that slithered down around his shoulders as he sat up.

“Hi,” said Clare, smiling, and then feeling a little foolish. He was obviously much too young for her; but he was just so
pretty
!

He frowned at Clare. “Who is that?” he asked, looking at Nick. He had an incongruously deep voice, and an accent. Oh,
swoon
, thought Clare.

“This is Clare. Clare might be our new roommate. Clare, this is Takehiko. Only, he actually really likes it if you call him Tacky.” This was obviously not true.

“Takehiko,” Clare repeated. “Nice to meet you. Is that Japanese?”

“Is what Japanese?” He was still giving her a very perplexed look.

“Uh—your name? I just wondered.”

Before Takehiko had a chance to answer, Nick, who had walked further into room to look at the television, burst out: “You asshole! Is this a new episode?”

“Yes. Why will I be watching an old episode?”

“You’re not supposed to watch any more without me! I thought you promised! Why don’t you watch your stupid samurai mecha thing instead?”

“It’s finished. I watched all of it.”

“Well—couldn’t you have waited?”

“No. I like to watch it now. You are busy doing your alchemy homework.”

“Algebra, you retard, not alchemy. Aargh! I bet Koga’s in this one, too. Koga’s my favourite character.”

“Excuse me, Stupid—what is she here doing, again?” Takehiko pointed at Clare, who was still standing in the doorway.

“I was interested in renting the spare bedroom,” Clare supplied cheerfully.

“Renting?” Takehiko repeated. (When he said it, it sounded more like “Lenting?”)

“She means she’s thinking of moving in with us,” Nick said hastily. “She doesn’t literally mean
renting
.”

“You have talked to Lo-se?”

“Who?”

“Rose. He means.” Nick looked smug. “Hey, Tacky, if she does move in here, you’re going to have real fun trying to say her name.
Culll-ay-rrrr.
”

“Please shut up. Rose”—he pronounced the “r” with an exquisite little growl—“did not tell me someone was coming.”

“Yeah, well?” Nick countered. “So what? She’s busy.”

“She would have told me.”