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“They say that as long as it’s sealed, it’s perfectly safe.”

Tapping her nails against the heavy latch handle, she snorted.“Who says?”

“You did.”

Hard to argue with such an unquestionable source.“Just yell down the register,” she said, shoving open the furnace room door. “I’ll hear you.” She paused, one foot over the threshold. All things considered, it might be best to tie up loose ends before she went any farther. “Dean?”

“Yeah, Boss?”

“Thanks.”

Anyone else would’ve asked her what for, and then she’d have had to face Hell with a caustic comment still warming her lips. Anyone else.

He smiled.“You’re welcome.”

[Ęŕđňčíęŕ: img_5]

By mid-morning the hotel had warmed about ten degrees, Dean had discovered how the pieces of baseboard fit together, Austin had eaten breakfast, made his morning visit to Baby, and gone back to bed, and Claire had been forced to spend half an hour leaning over the dryer.

“I don’t understand,” Dean had said earnestly, checking out the machine after the third time it had shut off. “It’s never done this before.” After a moment’s rummaging behind the switch with a variety of screwdrivers, he’d replaced the cover and added, “There’s nothing wrong. Try again.”

The dryer had worked perfectly while they were there, but the moment Claire had stepped off the basement stairs and out into the first floor hall, it had stopped.“Never mind,” she’d grumbled as Dean moved back toward the stairs, “it’s my laundry and you’ve got things to do. I’ll just grab a cup of coffee and go watch it run.”

“And that’ll keep it going?”

“It should.”

And it had.

The imp had, no doubt, been switching off the dryer and, with her standing guard, had now gone off to find other ways to irritate, leaving behind no proof she could use. Weighing the alternatives while her clothes dried, Claire figured that the imp must’ve come through before Augustus Smythe. Or very soon after he arrived, before he began using up the seepage as it emerged.

She wished she knew how long it had taken, how many accidental uses, before it became habit. It would have been so much easier for him to use the seepage—power just lying around for the taking—than to reach into the narrow area of the possibilities that the Cousins could access.

How many excuses had it taken before he didn’t bother making excuses anymore? Before he used what he wanted. And every time he used it, it corrupted him a little more.

Which explained why Dean, who’d lived next to Hell for eight months, hadn’t been affected. He couldn’t use the power. At least Claire hoped he hadn’t been affected. “I shudder to think of what he must’ve been like if he’s this niceafter Hell’s been working on him.”

She’d cleared the seepage twice, and she’d only been there a week. They were admittedly low levels of seepage, nothing like the buzz she’d felt on her first night, but she’d still have to start being a lot more careful.

When her laundry was finally dry, she’d lost three socks and gained a child’s T-shirt. Claire would’ve liked to have placed the blame on Hell, but this particular irritant was the result of human error. Given the metaphysical design flaw inherent in clothes dryers, those in the know were fond of pointing out how the loss of an occasional sock was nothing to complain about considering the odds against everything else coming back.

[Ęŕđňčíęŕ: img_5]

“Jacques, get away from the window!” Running her blade along a piece of molding, Claire scraped off a long curl of medium green paint. The counter had probably never been that actual color—when scraping paint there always had to be a medium green layer. “Anyone walking by and looking up cansee right through you.”

“Perhaps they would not see me at all. The vampire-hunter, he did not see me.”

“He didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“I do not see why that should matter.”

“Neither do I, but it does.”

“If you gave me flesh, it would not happen,” he pointed out reasonably.

“Just move,” she told him without looking up.

Jacques glanced down toward the sidewalk, opened his mouth to say something, and shook his head. Floating closer, he sat down on the floor with his back against the outside wall.“So, if someone who believed walked by…?”

“They’d see the sunlight streaming right through you.”

“And that would be a problem because?”

“People who see ghosts seldom keep the information to themselves.” Carefully working stripper-soaked steel wool carefully along the grain of the wood, she wrinkled her nose at the smell. “And I don’t feel like dealing with tabloid reporters.”

“I know reporters, but what are tabloids?”

“Sleazy newspapers that deal in cheap sensationalism. Hundred-year-old woman has lizard baby, that sort of thing.”

“Is that not what Keepers deal in?”

“No.”

“Hole to Hell in basement?”

“It’s not the same.”

“Woman sleeps for fifty years?”

Shifting her weight back onto her heels, she turned and glared at him.“You know what your problem is? You never know when to quit!”