look sweet, but that ain’t our fault and we’re trying our best to overcome it.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear that. What are you doing with all these vehicles? You going to renovate? I hope you don’t gut the place. All these houses were built from 1957 to 1975 by Frank Pedrewsky. Graham, you ever heard of Frank Pedrewsky? Like Frank Lloyd Wright, but better.”
Maybe I was a bad girlfriend, because at this point I just straight up abandoned Graham and went inside the house. And so did everyone else.
“This is a real test of Graham’s demonic powers of charm,” Jake said. “Don’t feel bad. He has to work on it.”
“Hmm…” It was easy to forget about Graham once I was faced with the first interior room of Bel Tramonto.
The very first room was an entrance room that definitely did not have, and could not have, any other purpose. A patch of terrazzo floor faced a minimalist fountain set into a wall made from huge stones. The fountain fed into a little trickling stream that flowed out of the house and fed the garden outside. At least, it used to. Now it was dry.
“Doesn’t California have water issues?” Jasper asked. “Can we even get this thing going again?”
“Witches have their ways,” I said. “Maybe. Hopefully there isn’t some spirit of the spring we need to bargain with.”
Two bridges crossed the stream, leading to two more doors, so when you came in, you passed through a front door and then another door.
“I can only imagine how awkward this gets when you’re greeting guests,” I said. “I would definitely take these doors down, if not move this entire wall and…”
“I would ditch the fountain,” Jake said. “And this whole Meet the Flintstones rock wall.”
“I was gonna say Brady Bunch,” Billie said.
“Can we open it up into…oh…wow,” Jasper said. “This living room.”
Byron was standing in the center of the sunken living room holding out his hands. “Welcome to Bel Tramonto. I told you that you might want to make a few changes. You might have noticed that Fiore and Deveraux inherited grand old family homes, but Sam had to make his own way in the world, and this was his final home, the one he bought when everything was going well. The perfect house for entertaining glamorous movie stars who also happened to be demons…in the peak of the 1970s.”
My brain was collapsing into 1970s overload. The living room was sunken. There was this huge groovy fireplace in the middle of it that had sort of the shape of a lava lamp, with a couch wrapped around it to seat about twenty people. All the carpeting was orange, the sort of orange that was making my eyeballs bleed on contact. One of the walls were that same stone treatment as the entrance, one wall was just glass overlooking palm trees, and one wall had been done in a psychedelic green wall paper, and that was also the wall that had a huge stereo system and shelves of records. Ash trays were scattered around and the smell of cigarettes permeated the carpet in such a way that this house would still smell like cigarettes in the year 2400 if we didn’t ditch all of this.
Gaston, of course, took this as an invitation to light a cigarette.
“Go outside!” I said.
“As if it would matter at all if I smoked the ten thousandth cigarette this house has ever seen…” He shrugged and opened a door in the wall of glass, which led to a small deck that was shaped in a point, like the prow of a ship. It had sort of a tiki vibe in back, by the looks of it.
“At least we have an open floor plan,” Jasper said.
The kitchen connected to the living room, blocked off by a half wall. When you stepped up from the living room, you were in the kitchen and dining area. The kitchen cabinets were all that dank dark midcentury wood color, with light formica tops, green and chrome appliances and big globe lights hanging down over an island. More expansive windows looked out over the palms. I wondered if there was a pool down there in the backyard.
“This hardly even seems like a wizard house,” Jake said. “It seems to be loaded with electricity and I don’t know where you would make spells or anything.”
“I agree,” I said. “Definitely one of the least magical warlock houses I’ve been in. But he was a lawyer.”