My Demon Husband novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: Eighty Candles

I didn't sleep after Lacey's call.

At six I went down to my folding table and made a sign of my own, on the back of the pizza box.

TENANTS' MEETING. SATURDAY. EVERYBODY.

The boy from 4D looked at it and shook his head.

"It needs free in it."

"There's nothing free."

"Put free sandwiches," he said. "Opal will make them."

Opal made them.

On Saturday, fifty-three Greaves tenants came to the Larkspur lobby.

They sat on the stairs, the floor and the radiators. The young mother from courtroom two brought her whole building.

I stood on my table in my socks and told them what Lacey had told me.

A tower. A council vote on the twenty-first. A whole block declared blighted, starting with us.

"So that's the city," I said. "Here's what we do about it. We stop being two hundred and twelve problems. We're one union. We go to that vote together, and every one of us brings a lease that's already burned."

"You can't read us all by the twenty-first," somebody said. "You read one a day. We've seen you."

He was right. I'd done the math too.

Then the young mother from courtroom two raised her hand.

"I want to try something," she said.

She came up to my table with a lease. Not hers. Her neighbor's, an old man with a cane.

"When you read mine in court," she said, "I was holding your arm the second before. And I saw it. Just for a second. Red, like little scratches."

I stared at her.

"Hold his hand," she said, "and hold mine. Let's see."

So I did.

The old man held my right hand. The young mother held my left.

I looked at his lease, and the red line came up at the bottom.

"I see it," the old man whispered.

"Then read it," I said. "I'll say it with you."

He opened his mouth.

The hearth-tongue came out of him, rough and slow, stumbling over every word.

I said it under him, half a beat ahead.

The lease burned in his lap.

He sat back in his chair and laughed out loud.

I touched my nose. A drop of blood. One.

Malphas was beside me, watching my face.

"It's split," he said. "The cost. He paid half."

"Is that bad?"

"It's a few minutes of being tired. For him." He looked at the stairs full of people. "The hearth is sharing you."

By the end of November, the circle had burned thirty more.

Not me. Them.

Every Saturday, the tenants' union sat in the Larkspur lobby in a circle, holding hands, reading their own clauses out loud.

Lacey kept a spreadsheet on her laptop.

Every burned lease got a green box.

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, there were a hundred and forty-eight green boxes.

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