Dragon Soul (Dragon Falls, #3)(11)
“Spirits, of course.” She toddled into the bathroom and returned with a roll of toilet paper.
“Of course. How silly of me. Whatever was I thinking?” I took a couple of seconds to stifle the urge to giggle somewhat hysterically, and said, “I wouldn’t know how to even begin to find someone who could conduct a séance for us—”
“Across the street,” she interrupted, moving to the mirror to examine herself. She patted her fluffy white hair and brushed off an imaginary speck of dirt from her sleeve. “The tearoom. They have séances every afternoon. Quickly, gel, or we won’t get my favorite table.”
I thought of pointing out that I hadn’t remembered seeing a tearoom across the street from the hotel—assuming they had tearooms in Munich (it sounded like an awfully British establishment)—and that even if one existed, just because they had them in the past, when Mrs. P was last in Munich, it didn’t follow that they continued to have such a thing in this day and age of relative enlightenment. All of that went through my head in a very short space of time, but I decided it was too convoluted to speak aloud, and instead duly rose.
“Change your shoes,” Mrs. P said helpfully as she opened the door to the hall.
“The only other pair I brought with me are my tennis shoes, in case I have the chance to walk through one of the Cairo museums before I fly home, and they aren’t at all fashionable,” I pointed out. “Certainly not something one would wear to a tea shop.”
“I just hope you don’t hurt yourself running,” she said in the manner of one imparting a dire warning, and sailed through the door.
“I’ll take that chance,” I said with a little roll of my eyes and followed her out of the room.
“You going out?” Hansel asked when the odd little elevator grumbled and lurched its way down to the ground floor with us in its steely clutches. I had to admit that I rather enjoyed the two wrought iron doors that you had to close before punching a button and pulling a crank to get the elevator to move, but the noises that emanated while it did so made me wonder when the last elevator safety examination had been held.
“Yes, we thought we’d take a look around outside,” I said, following Mrs. P when she headed toward the front door.
“You must leave your key here,” Hansel said, his hand outstretched. “It is the policy of the hotel.”
“But we’re just going—oh, whatever.” I trotted over to the desk and laid the big black key on his hand, pausing long enough to add, “You do know that those keys are pretty old, and not that secure, right?”
He pursed his lips. “What are you saying? You don’t like the key?”
“Not at all, they’re very art nouveau, but that’s probably because they’re at least a hundred years old, which means your door locks are the same age. I took a course in lock picking a year ago,” I said by way of explanation. “The instructor had a passion for old padlocks, and he said that a lot of locks shared keys. I was just pointing out that your keys might fall under that description.”
He lifted his eye patch to give me a long, pointed look, then lowered it again, and picked up his book. “The patrons at the Hotel Ocelot do not sleep in fear.”
Which was an odd sort of thing to say, when you think about it. And I did, for about as long as it took me to escort Mrs. P outside, and across the street, where we found a small ethnic grocery store, a brightly lit electronics store that blared Middle-Eastern music… and a tea shop.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, staring at the front of the small shop with faded curtains shading the lower half of the windows, no doubt to screen the customers sitting there.
“I hope not. Not in those shoes, anyway,” Mrs. P said with another derisive glance at my feet.
“Ponyhof?” I asked, reading the sign that said Das Leben ist kein Ponyhof. “That’s something to do with a pony, isn’t it?
“It means ‘life isn’t a place for riding ponies.’ You will take your shoes off to enter.”
“Really, what is your obsession with my choice of footwear—oh.” I read the small sign that lurked at knee level, and stated in three different languages that shoes were to be deposited at the entrance.
We entered, and immediately it felt as if I’d been swept back a hundred years. The room was lit by small shaded lamps perched in the center of tiny round tables, each of which was covered by a colorful paisley shawl. The lamps dripped with jet beads, while the room was dotted with large potted plants. The whole ambiance of the place reeked late Victorian/early Edwardian, and was oddly comforting.
That is, until I bent down to pluck off one of my shoes (and admittedly looked forward to it since even the most comfortable pair of heels has limits) when I caught sight of the two men sitting at the table half screened by a large potted palm.
One of them was a stranger, but the second was the man from the plane—the one who had tried to knife Mrs. P.
Except the handsome Rowan had said that it wasn’t a knife.
“My favorite table,” Mrs. P said, bustling forward barefoot and plopping herself down in a chair at a table that was already occupied by a man and woman, both of whom watched her in surprise.
I stopped frowning at the man from the plane, removed my shoes, and hurried after my charge.
“Er… hello,” the woman said to Mrs. P. She had a short black bob, the sort that flappers used to have in the 1920s, while her companion had dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail, latte-colored skin, and the most brilliant gray eyes I’d ever seen.