My Demon Husband novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Housing Court

A demon sits in the housing court gallery while a 34-year-old Greaves tenant who looks sixty collapses at Dorrie's window, holding a lease signed by her own broker.

The housing court on Fourth Street opens at eight.

At seven-forty, a demon was sitting in the back row of the gallery with his coat buttoned to the neck.

He'd walked the two miles beside me without a word.

He'd stopped once, to stare at a man selling hot dogs.

Lacey Tillman leaned out of the window next to mine.

"Okay," she said. "Who is that?"

"Nobody."

"Dorrie. There's a seven-foot man in the gallery who looks like he eats priests."

"He's six-five."

"So you measured."

Lacey has worked the window beside me for four years.

She has bleached hair in a claw clip, red lipstick at seven in the morning, and no indoor voice.

She handed me a gas-station coffee and kept staring past me.

"Is he your new landlord?"

"Sort of."

"Is he single?"

"Not anymore."

She choked on her coffee.

I didn't explain. I opened my window and the first person stepped up.

Every case at the filing windows is the worst day of somebody's life.

Most of them are evictions.

By ten I had stamped forty-one filings, and nineteen of them said GREAVES HOLDINGS on the top line.

Same law firm. Same broker's name on the leases. Same thirty-day notices, served on day twelve.

I knew the pattern. I'd been one of them yesterday.

At ten-fifteen, a man stepped up to my window holding a crumpled lease.

He had gray hair, gray stubble and a gray face.

His hands shook so hard the paper rattled.

"I need to file an answer," he said. "They're saying I owe four months. I paid."

"Okay. Let me see."

I took the lease and checked his date of birth on the first page.

He was thirty-four.

I looked up again. He looked sixty, easy.

"Sir, are you all right?"

"I've been sick," he said. "Since they put me out in June. I'm staying with my sister. I just keep getting older. The doctors don't know why."

Behind me, Lacey had gone quiet.

"I'm going to stamp this for you," I said. "You'll get a hearing date."

He tried to smile.

Then his knees went out.

He fell straight down in front of my window, and his head hit the tile.

People in line screamed.

I came around the counter so fast I knocked my stool over.

"Call nine-one-one," I yelled at Lacey.

She was already dialing.

The man was breathing, but barely. His lips had gone blue.

Then a shadow fell across us both.

Malphas knelt on the tile beside me.

People moved out of his way without knowing why.

He didn't touch the man.

He picked up the lease from the floor and lifted it to his face, and smelled it.

"Are you serious right now?" I said.

"Andras," he said, low.

"What's an Andras?"

"Not what. Who."

His eyes had gone red at the rims.

The court officer pushed through the crowd and got down beside the man.

"Back up, ma'am. Sir, you too. Give him room."

We backed up.

Malphas held the lease out to me.

"Turn it over."

I turned it over.

The back was blank. Clean white paper.

"There's nothing there," I said.

"Look the way you looked last night."

I looked.

The white paper stayed white.

Then, at the very bottom, a line of red scratches came up.

I couldn't read it yet. It moved under my eyes.

"What is it?" I whispered.

"Something that doesn't belong in any lease," he said. "Something of his."

The paramedics came running in with a stretcher.

They loaded the man up and wheeled him out with an oxygen mask over his face.

His sister would get a call. I hoped she'd get there in time.

The line went back to being a line.

Somebody even complained about the wait.

Lacey stood beside my window with her arms crossed tight.

"That's the third one this month," she said.

"The third what?"

"The third Greaves tenant who looked like that. You didn't notice? Gray, shaking. The woman last week was thirty."

I hadn't noticed.

I'd been too busy getting evicted by the same company.

I flattened the man's lease on my counter.

I read the first page this time, slowly, the way I should have from the start.

The broker's signature was at the bottom, in blue ink, with a little hook on the G.

My stomach dropped.

I dug through my tote for my own lease.

I laid the two side by side on the counter.

The same blue ink. The same hook on the G.

The same broker in the same gray suit, signing a lease for a dying man and a lease for me.

Malphas looked down at the two papers.

The lamps over the filing windows flickered, every one of them, all the way down the hall.

"Dorrie," he said, very quietly. "Who sent you to my house?"

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