Elysium Dreams

Four

We ate dinner at a small diner. They had a decent menu with exotic fare such as bear burgers. I wasn't brave enough to eat a bear burger, so I settled for a Philly Steak with Cheese. Lucas was brave enough and ordered the exotic fare cooked medium and slathered with condiments.

After dinner, we went to the motel. There was an interior hallway, but it was only used by staff. All the rooms had double entrances and the exterior door that opened onto the parking lot showed the most use. The key card reader was tarnished, dented, and scratched. The knob had a slight jiggle to it. The paint was peeling from the frame.

Inside there were adjoining doors. Knowing how I felt about adjoining doors, Gabriel had been nice enough to put Lucas and Xavier in that room. Gabriel and Michael had the room on the other side of me. Being a girl, the only girl, gave me the advantage of almost always getting my own room. The rare occasions when I couldn't get my own room, I bunked with Lucas and Xavier, and Lucas made sure that Xavier stayed in line.

Not that Xavier needed to be kept in line. He was a flirt and a tease, nothing more. His rude and inappropriate comments were meant to be playful. He was only a danger to himself, when a woman mistook his playful nature and gave him a good tongue lashing or a hard slap for his comments.

Despite the fact that Lucas and I both understood Xavier was only teasing, Lucas seemed to have made it his mission in life to protect me from it. When Xavier stepped over some invisible vulgarity boundary, Lucas quickly put him back in his place. All he had to do was look at the smaller man and Xavier would be out with an apology; a second or two later, the tension would drain from the room. Xavier would go back to being Xavier, and the rest of us would go back to enjoying his company.

On the other hand, Xavier had developed a bit of a crush on my cousin Nyleena. He was very polite and gentlemanly around her, never a vulgar comment to be found. I had made it very clear to Xavier that if he and Nyleena ever hooked up, I would probably kill him. She had enough problems in her life with just me, she didn't need the complications of adding another serial killer chaser to it.

In reality, that meant that if Nyleena came to me and told me she had a thing for Xavier, I'd be planning their wedding. But for now, she didn't and since she didn't, I made it seem like I was the bad guy intent on stopping Xavier from having his prize.

My room was small with a single full size bed, a dresser that half the drawers didn't open on and a TV mounted with brackets sitting on top of it, to keep it from getting stolen. A nightstand with a drawer that did open contained a Bible. The other side of the bed had a nightstand with no drawer and a lamp. There was a small, mostly clean, bathroom. The shower curtain looked like it had been in existence since the 1940's and had dark spots near the bottom that were either built up dirt or mold, but they seemed to be on the side between the shower curtain and the tub, so I could shower in safety. If it really creeped me out, I could always use one of the other showers in our little three room block.

Finally, there was a table that looked like it had been built by IKEA during the Dark Ages. It was cheap and scarred; the top had been replaced by a slab of real wood that was sealed to keep things from seeping into it. No one had bothered to stain it. It appeared to be pine or some other type of evergreen. It also appeared to have come from a really old tree as the three foot circumference of the table top was made from a single slice of aged timber. Around the table were three chairs, which was weird, as there were normally only two.

Of course, we would still need another chair or two. I had strict rules about Xavier sitting on my motel beds after leaving the morgue. I actually had that rule for everyone. If you've been to the morgue, you were banned from sitting on the bed I intended to sleep in unless you had changed your clothes and showered. The morgues always had their own unique smell that was carried from place to place to infect other locations with the sickly smells of death and something darker.