“Like hell I’m taking it back,” Roy said. “I almost ruptured something lugging all of them up here.”
“Lugging them up from where? Where did you get them?”
“Oh, you know.” He grinned. “They were just hanging around.”
“So was this one,” a cheeky fourteen-year-old named Jesse added, carrying in one of the hula girl posters from the tiki bar downstairs.
One of the very scantily clad hula girl posters.
“Nice try,” Tami said, stopping her son with a hand on his chest.
“But you said we could decorate our rooms any way we want—”
“I also said I’m trying to cut down on the tacky.”
“It’ll be in my room. Nobody’ll see it! Not like those things,” he added, nodding at a bunch of statues being hauled in from the balcony.
Or what had bee
n a balcony. But the expansive space had been enclosed since I last saw it, with curving windows arching overhead like a solarium, and plants, columns, and statues framing the pool. It looked like a Grecian grotto—or maybe an Olympian one, I thought, staring as a familiar visage was carted past.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Part of the tacky,” Tami said, frowning at it. “We’re fighting the gods and she’s decorating her garden with them? And whoever heard of a painted statue?”
“Used to be all the rage, back in old Rome,” Marco said, coming in from another room. “Painted clothes and skin, shells for eyes—so they’d glisten—and decked out in flowers for the festivals. Idea was to make them look like real people, not those creepy white things they fill the museums with.”
“Then why’d they make so many of the other kind?” Jesse asked.
Marco shrugged. “They didn’t. The paint just wore off.”
“Tami,” I said grimly. “Why. Are. We. Here?”
She blinked at me. “You told me to manage things; I’m managing them.”
“Yes, but—”
“And first priority was more room. Two dozen people stuffed into a three-bedroom suite? And that was just the girls. I’m surprised the fire marshal wasn’t out here—”
“Probably too scared,” another vamp said, heading out the door with a statue tucked under each arm. And having to perform a balletic move to avoid the two guys in painters’ whites coming in with cans and a ladder.
“Mural in the master. Get rid of it,” Tami told them shortly.
“Wait. What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I want to know,” Jesse said, starting to follow them.
Until Tami caught him by the collar. “Aren’t you supposed to be entertaining the kids?”
“Jiao’s got that covered.”
“Do I want to know what that means?”
He pursed his lips. “Probably not.”
“Go help him,” Tami said, and pushed him toward the lounge.