Clean Sweep

Chapter Six

Beast and I watched from the inside of the inn as Sean paced back and forth. He was talking to his parents and it wasn't going well.

"Aha. Were you ever going to tell me? ... When did you think I would be old enough? I'm a grown goddamned man, Dad. I've fought in two wars. ... No, sir, I'm not being disrespectful, I'm angry. ... I do have a right to be angry. You lied to me. ... Not telling the whole story is still lying, Dad. It's lying by omission. ... I think we're doing a fine job discussing this over the phone. ... Yes, please, do put me on speaker. ... Hey, Mom. ... Yes. ... Yes. ... No, I'm not upset. ... A girl. ... No, you can't talk to her."

And now I was involved. I could just imagine how that conversation would go. "Yes, hi, who are you and how do you know so much about werewolves and what exactly is your relationship with my son..."

"An innkeeper."

Now what?

Sean walked down the steps, heading deeper into the orchard. I strained. His lips were moving, but he was out of my earshot.

I sighed and looked at Beast. She licked my hand. Sean was getting a crash course in inns and innkeepers and I had no clue what they were telling him.

Ten minutes later Sean put away his phone, came back inside, and landed in a chair.

"So, how did it go?"

"About as well as you think it did." He leaned against the chair and exhaled. "They both were in their twenties when they came over here, enlisted in the Army, and built a new life. They didn't tell me because apparently our particular second-generation kind isn't welcome among other Auul refugees, and they didn't want me to have a chip on my shoulder."

A chip? Now he was carrying a two-by-four.

Sean fixed me with his stare. Uh-oh.

"How does the broom work?"

"Magic."

He locked his jaw. "Don't give me that. You hit me with the planets and wormholes. You cracked the door open. Might as well just swing it wide."

No, he cracked the door open with his midnight marking expedition. I petted Beast. "Have you ever heard of Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction? It states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Take a smart phone and hand it to an ancient Roman. He'll think it's a magic window into the world of the gods and that the Beyoncé video playing on it is showing him Venus. The broom is magic. The inn is magic. I'm magic. I can feel it, I can manipulate it, but I can't explain it. You've transformed hundreds of times in your life under the belief that it's magic. Why does it matter now that it's not?"

Sean drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair. "So this place is supposed to be a sanctuary?"

"Yes and no. It's an inn, a neutral ground. An abnormality in the ordinary reality of this planet or whatever passes for it. I'm an innkeeper. Here I'm supreme. If you are accepted as a guest, you fall under my protection and as long as you stay here, you will enjoy the right of sanctuary. For various reasons, Earth is a way station for many travelers. We're the Atlanta of the galaxy: many beings stop here for a layover. Some are alien and some are not. The innkeepers maintain the order, provide them with a safe place to stay, and minimize the population exposure and the bloodbath that could result. Nobody wants a worldwide panic. It has been so for hundreds of years."

"So the old lady is a guest?"

"Yes."

"How long will she be staying?"

"She paid for a lifetime stay."

"Clever." Sean leaned forward. "So she stays in your inn and nobody can get her out. What did she do?"

"You don't want to know."

"You're not going to tell me."

I shook my head. "No." I protected my guests and that included safeguarding their privacy.

Sean pondered me. I could almost feel the wheels turning in his head. He was disturbingly quick on the uptake.

"My father told me that, as an innkeeper, you're supposed to remain neutral."

"It's customary that I do. There is no compulsion or law that forces me to maintain my neutrality."

"And you can't ask for help."

"Your father is wrong. It's up to each innkeeper's discretion whether or not to ask a guest or a third party for assistance. Most innkeepers never resort to such requests because we don't want to put others in danger. The safety of our guests is our first priority."

Sean smiled. Under ordinary circumstances, I might have enjoyed seeing it—he was really handsome—but the way he was smiling now made me want to turn my broom into a shield, preferably with spikes, and brace myself.

"So you asked me for help and now I'm in danger because of it."

What? "I did no such thing. At no point did the words 'Help me, Sean Evans' come out of my mouth."

Beast barked to underscore my point.

"You approached me"—he counted off on his fingers—"you admonished me for my inaction, you tried to elicit an assurance that I would do something about the situation, and then, after I assured you I would, you still involved yourself in a violent action, escalating the level of danger for both of us. All of this can be construed as a plea for assistance and cooperation, and now because of you, my life is in jeopardy."

"No." This was crazy. There were so many things I wanted to say at once if the words would just get out of each other's way.

"Fine." He grinned again, flashing white teeth. "Is there someone we can contact and settle this dispute? Somebody with the power of oversight, perhaps?"

The Innkeeper Assembly. Oh, you bastard. His father must've told him about it. "Are you threatening me?"

"I don't make threats. I solve problems."

"And that didn't sound conceited. Not at all."

He spread his arms. "I'm simply stating facts."

The Assembly was an informal self-governing organization of innkeepers. If Sean went to them, their investigation would begin and end with one question: "Was the inn directly threatened?" I would have to answer no. Technically I hadn't broken any written laws because we didn't have any, but I'd broken the unspoken canon of neutrality. They would view it as unwise, advise me to not do it again, and bump the rating of the inn down to one mark, which would broadcast to everyone that staying at Gertrude Hunt equaled gambling with your safety. The inn was at already at two marks due to having been abandoned and me being an unknown commodity. My parents' inn had been rated at five. Getting branded with one mark would kill any chances of reviving Gertrude Hunt. We would not recover.

Argh. He had me and he knew it. "Just what exactly did your parents do in the military?"

"My dad was arrested once because he didn't know the laws, so he decided he would learn all of them. He went green to gold, which means he became an officer and worked as a JAG Corps attorney. My mother really enjoyed watching people's heads explode from far away, so she served as a countersniper."

Great. "What do you want?"

"I want us to work together."

"So let me get this straight. First, I ask you to work together and you refuse, then you invade my property, make fun of me, attempt to intimidate me, attack my dog..."

"I think calling her a dog is a stretch."

"Her ancestors were Shih Tzus, so technically she's a canine derivative. You attack my dog..."

"She chased me up a tree!"

Beast growled.

"You deserved it. Where was I?"

"Dog," he said helpfully.

"Yes. You attack my dog, then you attack me in the yard, and now you're blackmailing me into cooperating. Wouldn't it have been easier to just work with me when I asked you to?"

He pointed at himself. "First, lone wolf. I work alone. That's my natural setting. Second, I thought you were just a normal person who somehow knew about werewolves. I didn't have all the relevant information. Had I known you had a haunted house, a magic broom, and a devil dog on your side, my initial response would've been different."

I crossed my arms.

"I'm sorry for intimidating you," he said. "I'm sorry if I scared you."

"You didn't."

"Well, I'm sorry in any case. Like it or not, you asked me for help, and now we're in this together. It's in your best interest and mine to nuke these assholes as soon as possible. You know more about what's going on, but I can kill them faster and cleaner than you can."

That was true, but I didn't have to like it.

"If you work with me, I promise I won't keep secrets from you, and I will take your opinion into consideration before I act. I also promise not to seek revenge on the small demon in your lap for a completely unprovoked attack."

Beast growled and he smiled. It was a disarming, boyish smile. The wolf was still in his eyes, but now he pretended very hard that he was just a small fluffy puppy. "What do you say?"

I didn't want him going to the Assembly. I had a feeling he wouldn't, but the risk was there and I couldn't ignore it. And, setting that aside, I needed help. Werewolf kind of help. Which is why I had approached him in the first place.

"Dina?"

And he had to stop saying my name in that voice. "I'm wondering if I should make you grovel more."

"That's probably all the groveling you're going to get. If you say no, I'll go for it by myself. It will be messy and ugly."

I exhaled. There was no point in fighting with him anymore. "How's your sense of smell?"

"Acute."

"Do you think you could smell a foreign object inside one of these creatures?"

Sean blinked. "I'll give it a shot."

"Okay. We work together. But only until this is over. And if you betray my trust, I will banish you out of this inn. I mean it, Sean. You have my word that it won't be gentle. You won't like it, and it will take you a long time to find your way back to your house."

I had two options. I could bring Sean into my lab under the house or I could bring the body of the stalker to him. The first involved letting him into my private place where I stored books and other things. Typically guests were not allowed in the lab and for a good reason. The second involved rearranging the architecture of the inn.

I wasn't ready to let him into the lab. I wasn't ready to let him see what I could really do inside the inn either, but that seemed like a lesser evil at this point.

I tapped the floor with the broom, letting my magic stream through it and down into the floor, into the walls, into the laboratory table below us. I pushed. Wood and metal flowed like molten wax. A long, narrow fissure formed in the floor of the living room. The wood dripped down, the hole widened, and the lab table emerged, complete with the body of the stalker on it, still secured with metal restraints. I had tried to autopsy it, and the front of it lay open, the skin pinned aside with surgical clamps. I wasn't quite sure what the stalker's inner organs were supposed to look like, but my spear had done a number on its insides, and currently it was a mess of torn tissue. Dry tissue. Its blood had evaporated despite me sealing it in plastic.

"Son of a bitch." Sean stared at the table. "What else can this place do?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

"Yes, I would."

"How about you sniff out the tracker instead?"

Sean circled the body. "I know you stabbed it at least twenty times."

"How?"

"Well, the fact that its internal organs are a mess is a clue, but I went down to the Quirks' place once the cops left. There are scratches on the brick of the eastern wall, the kind a bladed weapon makes. So what did you use?"

He didn't miss much. "A spear."

Sean bent closer to the body. His nostrils flared.

"Well? What's your professional opinion?"

"A few years ago, our unit came home from a tour of duty in an ugly place. For the whole last month of that tour, a buddy of mine, Jason Thomas, was talking about how he would get home and eat a hotdog. He wanted a hotdog with everything on it. So we get home, we go out that night, and he gets himself two hotdogs with everything on them. Then we hit the bars and he goes straight for Jose Cuervo. Long story short, two hours later he threw up in an alley."

"And?"

"My professional opinion is that this smells just like that hotdog-tequila vomit."

Ha. Ha. "I could've told you that and I'm not a werewolf."

Sean took another whiff. "Look, I've smelled decomposing bodies before. Human bodies, animal bodies. This smells wrong. Where is it from, because it's not from around here."

"It's from some hellish corner of the universe I know pretty much nothing about."

"What am I smelling for? Metal, plastic, what?"

"I don't know."

Sean inhaled again. "The carcass is too acrid. Metal and plastic don't give off strong scents. If there's something in there, the stench is blocking it."

"So far you're not much help."

"Dina, I don't even know what I'm looking for."

He had a point. I wasn't being fair. I was being snippy too, and it really had nothing to do with Sean and everything to do with me being frustrated. "Would an X-ray help?"

"You X-rayed it?"

I raised my hand. The X-ray slid through the floor and I held it out to Sean. He lifted it to the window, letting the light shine through the film. "What the hell...?"

"That's what I said." I sat in the chair. "I've tried magnets. I've scanned it for magic emissions, radio signal, radiation, and I went over it with a voltage detector just in case. Nothing."

"Are you sure it even has a tracker?"

"No."

Sean pondered me. "How about starting at the beginning?"

I explained about dahaka and stalkers and the now-destroyed inn.

Sean frowned. "So wait a minute, someone destroyed that inn and your Assembly didn't do anything about it?"

I shook my head. "No. Each innkeeper is on his or her own. The Assembly just sets policies and rates the inns, kind of like a cosmic Triple A. If someone walks in here and kills me, they'll do nothing about it. If you went to them complaining about me, they'd just rate my inn unsafe, which means nobody would stay here."

"So I would be taking away your livelihood."

The way he said it suggested he felt guilty about it. Huh. What do you know, a werewolf with a conscience. "Not only that, but an inn is a living entity. It forms a symbiotic relationship with its guests. Without guests, the inn will weaken and fall dormant, almost like a bear slipping into hibernation. If the inn stays dormant for too long, it will wither and die."

The house creaked around me, the thick timbers in its wall groaning in alarm.

"There is no chance of that happening," I told it. "You have me and you have Caldenia."

"Is it sentient?" Sean peered at the walls.

"The house understands some things. I don't know if it's sentient in the way you and I are, but it's definitely a living thing, Sean."

Caldenia walked through the door. She was carrying a tomato vine with four ripe, red tomatoes on it. Caldenia saw the stalker's body. Her carefully shaped eyebrows rose.

Now what? "Yes, Your Grace?"

"I'm glad that after months of a perfectly boring existence, the inn is now a hotbed of interesting activity. I do have to tell you that the reek is abominable. What are you doing?"

"We're trying to determine if this corpse has a tracking device somewhere inside it."

"Ah. Have fun, but before you dig into it, look at this."

She showed me the tomatoes.

"I just had a perfectly lovely conversation with the woman who lives down the street. Her name is Emily, I believe."

"Mrs. Ward?"

Caldenia waved her fingers. "Yes, something or other. Apparently she grows tomatoes in her backyard."

"Did you go off the inn grounds?"

"Of course not, dear, I'm not an imbecile. We spoke over the hedge. I would like to grow tomatoes."

Whatever kept her occupied. "Very well. I'll purchase some plants and gardening tools."

"Also a hat," Caldenia said. "One of those hideous straw affairs with little flowers on them."

"Of course."

"I'm going to grow green tomatoes, and then we'll fry them in butter."

"Your Grace, you've never tried fried green tomatoes."

"Life is about new experiences." Caldenia gave me a toothy smile.

"I'd eat it," Sean said.

I stared at him.

He shrugged. "They're good."

"You blackmailed me. You are not invited for these theoretical fried tomatoes."

"Nonsense," Caldenia said. "They're my theoretical tomatoes. You are invited."

I sighed. That was all I could do.

Caldenia headed up the stairs and stopped. "By the way. Back in my younger days, a man broke into my estate and stole the Star of Inndar. It was a beautiful jewel, light blue and excellent for storing light-recorded data. I was keeping my financial records on it. I'd thought the man was perhaps a revolutionary come to heroically overthrow my rule, but sadly he was just an ordinary thief motivated by money. He was a karian, and he'd hidden dozens of pouches in his flesh. Before he was captured, he'd hidden the Star somewhere in his body. I required the jewel that evening to complete a certain financial agreement, and I didn't have time to dig through him and risk damaging the Star in the process."

"So what did you do?" Sean said.

Never ask that question.

"I boiled him, my dear. It is still the only sure way to separate hard bits from all that flesh. And you have the added advantage of your captive being already dead, so there will be none of those annoying screams to alert the neighborhood. Good luck."

She went up the stairs.

Sean looked at me. "Is she for real?"

"Very much so." I looked at the body. "If we try to boil it, there's no telling what sort of gasses or poisons it will release. We'll have to vent it outside, and it's going to stink." And it will be the kind of stench that would cause the whole neighborhood to call 911.

Sean thought about it. "Is that smoker I saw on the back porch okay to use?"

"Probably. Are you suggesting we smoke it?" What in the world...

"No, I am suggesting we smoke a side of pork ribs. With lots and lots of hickory wood."

The stalker's body sprawled on the table like some grotesque butterfly straight out of a drug-induced nightmare. Although most of the blood had evaporated, it still had to weigh close to a hundred pounds. We'd have to take it apart.

"Do you have a really large pot?" Sean asked.

"Follow me."

I led him into the kitchen and to the door of my pantry, located a couple of cabinets away from the refrigerator. Sean leaned back out of the kitchen doorway, checked the wall width—it was a regular six-inch wall—and leaned back. "Follow you where? Into the closet?"

Oh, you chucklehead. I opened the door and flicked the light on. Five hundred square feet of pantry space greeted Sean. Nine rows of shelves lined the walls, all the way to the nine-foot ceiling. Pots and pans filled the front shelves, and past them flour, sugar, and other dry goods waited in large plastic containers, each with a small label. A large chest freezer stood on the right against the wall.

Sean surveyed the pantry, turned on his foot, went to check the wall again, and came back. "How?"

I waved my fingers at him. "Magic."

"But..."

"Magic, Sean." I walked in and pulled the enormous sixty-quart pot from the shelf in the corner. "I have several of those."

"Where did you get all this stuff?"

"Before this inn was orphaned, it was a thriving place. Many guests meant a lot of large meals. The question now is how will we boil the bodies? I'm not too wild about having them in my kitchen. I suppose we can get some electric hotplates, set them on the back patio on the slab, and put the pots on top of that."

"Mhm." Sean didn't seem convinced. "Would it be hot enough, that's the question."

"We might have to take that chance. We want low heat anyway."

He smirked at me. "Boiled many bodies, have you?"

"No, but I've made a lot of pulled pork."

"Sixty quarts is a lot of water to heat."

"What's the alternative?"

"Let me think about it," Sean said. "I'm off to Home Depot, then. I should be back in an hour. Do I need to pick up some pork ribs?"

"No." I opened the chest freezer. Sean stared at a three-foot-high tower of pork rib sides vacuum sealed in plastic. I'd stacked them up like cordwood.

Sean struggled to process the ribs. Clearly he had been slapped with one surprise too many today.

"Okay," he said finally. "I'll bite. Why?"

"Beast likes to eat them."

"That explains it." He turned to the door.

"Sean, how much money do you need?"

He gave me a flat look. No outrage, no anger, just a wall of no. "I'll be back in an hour." He went out the door.

Hell would bloom before Sean Evans started taking care of my bills. I'd make him take the money. I just had to be smart about it.

I looked at Beast. "I'm having serious doubts about our partnership."

Beast didn't answer.

I still had to do something about the stalker bodies. Folding them in half wouldn't do it. They still wouldn't fit. I picked up my broom and pushed my magic. The metal flowed, folding itself into a razor-sharp machete blade.

This would get messy.

Fifty-two minutes later, I heard a truck. The magic boomed as the vehicle came up my driveway... and kept going, around the house, rolling over my grass until it stopped at my back patio.

I strode to the back door. It opened for me and I stepped out onto the porch. Beast followed me. An orange rental truck from Home Depot waited on the grass, parked so the truck bed faced me. It was filled with stacks of paver stones. Next to them rested bags of gravel, sand, a two-by-four, fireproof bricks... Sean hopped out of the front seat, opened the tailgate, and picked up two fifty-pound bags of sand without any apparent effort, as if they were jugs of milk.

"What happened to the hot-plate plan?"

"I did some thinking and one, it won't generate enough heat and two, we need additional fire to cover the stench."

"Aha."

"I checked the fire ordinance and it says all fire pits of this type should be twenty-five feet from any flammable structure. This patio is too close to the house, so I'm going to build you a new one."

I smiled at him and tapped the patio with my broom, sending a pulse of magic through it. The concrete slab rose out of the ground and slid over the grass. I put it about thirty feet out. "Far enough?"

Sean blinked.

"Sean?"

He recovered. "Sure. Saves me some work."

"Do you want help?"

"No, I got it."

"Suit yourself. I'll go make some lemonade then."

I went inside and sat at the bay window. Sean went over to the patio, looked at it for a while, then tested it with his boot. The patio predictably stayed where it was. Sean pondered it.

Oh, this was too good. I reached for the patio with my magic.

Sean stepped onto the concrete, putting his weight on the slab. The patio sank six inches into the ground. Sean jumped. He went straight up like a startled cat, twisted in the air, and landed on the grass. He-he! I raised the patio back up.

Sean took a step toward it. The patio slid back a foot. He took another step. The patio slid back again.

Sean spun to the house and saw me in the window. "Knock it off!"

I laughed and went to make the lemonade.