Chapter Seven
I used a spatula to rescue the last piece of French bread from the pan. I'd melted a bit of butter in a nonstick skillet and fried each piece until it turned golden brown. The trick wasn't getting the bread completely fried but instead just toasted enough for each slice to form a lovely golden crust.
I'd peeled some garlic cloves, so I took one, chopped the top off it, and began rubbing each slice of bread with the clove.
The first thing I'd done when I'd taken over the inn was update the kitchen with much larger windows, bring in new appliances, and replace the cracked and chipped white tile countertops. Money had been tight, so I'd gone with butcher block. The maple wood gave the kitchen a warm and inviting feel, and it was easier for the house to assimilate. Any building materials brought into the inn became part of the inn eventually. The inn could synthesize wood and stone, but it took a lot of energy, and providing it with the basics made things much easier. The inn fed on its environment, but the bulk of its life energy came from the guests and me. Without guests, it would fall dormant trying to conserve energy and when that happened, an inn decayed and fell apart just like any other house. When I had come to awaken Gertrude Hunt from its hibernation, it had been sleeping for so long, its siding had rotted away and a lot of the outside plumbing had succumbed to tree roots.
The day was in full swing, the afternoon golden and beautiful outside, and the countertops all but glowed as if glazed with honey. From my vantage point at the island, I could see the north patio facing the street. It was one of my favorite places to hang out. I'd sit in one of the canvas chairs and read my book.
Now the patio featured a smoker grill and Sean, armed with huge tongs. Beast lay by the grill. He'd bribed her with ribs.
I had to give it to him, the man knew how to build a fire. I kept the windows closed but even so, I could smell the spicy, tangy bite of hickory smoke. It smelled like childhood and it brought back the long, lazy summer days, barbecue, watermelon, and freeze pops. If I closed my eyes, I could almost convince myself it was Dad grilling outside rather than some werewolf with entitlement issues.
Best of all, the smoke drowned all other smells. Last night Sean had built an outdoor fire pit behind the house. He'd drawn a wide circle on the concrete, then built a wall of concrete blocks around it, leaving space to add wood. Next he lined the inside with fireproof bricks, leaving vent spaces, and installed the grill. We set the pots up, filled them with water from a hose, and let them cook through the night. The hickory chips in the fire pit drowned most of the stench, but if you stood right by the pot, you could smell an acrid, toxic odor. But to get to the back, any visitors would have to first pass by Sean's grill at the front of the house, and once they smelled the aroma of that barbecue, they wouldn't go any farther.
Sean raised the grill lid and checked the meat. He wore jeans and a plain green T-shirt. The T-shirt molded to his muscular shoulders. Sean had a peculiar kind of strength, powerful but lean, quick and supple, but without weakness. Like flexible steel.
And I've been looking at him entirely too long.
I finished with the bread, took a bowl with egg mixture out of the refrigerator, and started spreading it on the bread, arranging the slices on a pretty green platter as I went.
The screen door banged open and Sean sauntered into the kitchen. "What smells so good?"
How could he even smell it over the smoke? "Here, have one."
Sean snagged a sandwich off the platter and bit into it with a crunch. "Mmm. What's in this?"
"Egg, Miracle Whip, garlic, and French bread."
"So it's like an egg salad. It doesn't taste like an egg salad."
"That's because of the garlic and bread." I chopped green onion and sprinkled it on the sandwiches. "How are the ribs?"
"Good. We're about ready."
Sean reached for another sandwich. I raised my knife.
"Don't threaten me unless you mean to use it," he said.
"Don't steal food until it's served and I won't have to."
He laughed and went to wash his hands.
I took the lemonade and iced-tea pitchers to the table outside. Sean helped me bring out sandwiches, corn on the cob, napkins, and paper plates. Kayley Henderson and her boyfriend, Robbie, came down the sidewalk and stopped by the hedge.
"Are you the barbecue people?" Kayley asked.
"We are," I confirmed.
"We could smell it all the way from the bus stop." Robbie eyed the grill.
Sean emerged from inside. Kayley's eyebrows crept up.
"Why don't you join us," I said. "There's plenty to go around."
"Thank you!" Kayley chirped.
They came around and pulled up the chairs. A moment later Caldenia joined us.
Sean pulled the first rack of ribs off the grill and onto a wooden block. "Have to let them rest a bit."
Caldenia gifted Kayley with an inviting smile. "How are your studies going?"
For the next ten minutes we were entertained with stories of Cedar Creek High. Someone stole someone else's boyfriend, someone was selling their ADHD medication, and three boys were busted stealing the school flag. I wasn't that much older and things I'd been through would turn their hair white, but after hearing all that, I was really glad I was done with high school.
Sean carved the ribs and started passing them around the table. I cut a small piece from mine. It was delicious, just right, sweet and tangy with a hint of heat.
"Hey, you!" Margaret came up the street, her Pomeranian bouncing by her feet like a small fluff of fur. "Kayley, your mother is looking for you."
Kayley got up. "Can we take the food with us?"
I waved at them. "Please do."
"Thank you, Dina. The sandwiches are awesome."
The kids fled with their plates.
Misha ran around the hedge and Beast chased her, the two little dogs running in circles in the yard.
"Join us," Sean invited.
"Are you cooking for Dina?" Margaret opened her eyes wide. "Oooh."
"Don't they make a cute couple?" Caldenia said.
I resisted the urge to stab her with my fork. "We're not a couple. Sean fixed my smoker, so we decided to try it out."
"You're not cooking a dead body in there, are you?" Margaret asked.
I almost dropped my plate on my lap. "What? Eeew!"
Sean raised his eyebrows. "Why would you ask that?"
Margaret came around and sat in the chair. "You haven't seen the news? Turn on channel five."
Suddenly I got a cold nagging feeling that something was terribly wrong. I got up. "Excuse me a moment."
Sean followed me inside, into the front room.
"Screen," I said. "Channel five."
The wall opened, revealing the monitor. It came to life, showing footage of a rural house shot from above, likely from a helicopter.
"...Scene of a terrible tragedy," a male anchor's voice said. "What's the death count now, Amy?"
The footage switched to a blond reporter standing in front of a driveway. Behind her in the distance, the house loomed, flanked by police cars.
"Police officials confirmed that all forty-two cows were killed and partially eaten, Ryan. There is no official word on the condition of John Rook's body; however, sources close to the investigation tell us that he suffered the same fate as his livestock."
"Are you saying someone fed on his body?"
Amy looked like she was about to vomit. "It appears so, Ryan. He was dismembered postmortem and part of him and the cows has been... cooked."
I almost gagged.
"Nobody had seen John Rook for several days; he could've been dead for quite a while. We'll have to wait for the coroner's official..."
Below the footage a news update flashed: local farmer found dead, his livestock mutilated.
It had to be the dahaka. How horrible. It killed the farmer, cooked him, and fed him to its dogs. I had to stop it.
Sean pulled out his phone and typed in it. "It's less than ten miles north of here."
"What are you thinking?"
"Let's say I'm the dahaka. I have a pack of stalkers on my hands and I have to feed them, but I don't want to be found. Stalkers would likely require a lot of meat. They're large and carnivorous. So I find this farm with a herd of cattle. It's remote enough for me to hide for days. I kill the farmer, start slaughtering his cows, and use the stalkers to patrol the boundaries of my territory and make sure nobody is coming. Except if the stalkers are like dogs, then they'll get bored and start to roam farther and farther until they find something interesting."
"Like our subdivision."
"Exactly."
On the screen a shot of the butchered herd flashed again. It made me sick to my stomach. "Forty-two cows. That's a huge amount of meat."
"I found a leaked photo." Sean showed me his phone. On it a bloody carcass of a cow lay on the grass. Its head, back, and legs were intact, but its stomach was missing, and the entire front of the body was a mess of shredded red tissue.
"They went for the soft parts. Wasteful. This tells me that either he doesn't have great control of them or he doesn't care."
"Either way, he has to find an alternative food supply." I knew exactly where that supply was. Either he would hit more farms or he would come south, toward us.
Toward a subdivision filled with families.
I took a deep breath and plastered on a smile. We had to go out and chat with Margaret before she decided to come in and investigate what was taking us so long.
*** *** ***
I sat at the kitchen table. The werewolf sat across from me. Two perfectly round wooden spheres lay on the table, each about the size of a small kiwi. A complex pattern of dark, crisscrossing spirals wove through the wood. We'd fished them out of the pot once the flesh had fallen off the stalkers' bones. The inn grounds had swallowed both skeletons and the disgusting broth and pots with them. I wouldn't be reusing them.
The trackers waited on the surface of the table, quiet and inert. No magic emissions. No electromagnetic signals. Just two harmless-looking chunks of wood. But when I reached for them with my magic, I felt a spark. It curled deep inside them, vibrant and alive, waiting to be released so it could blossom.
Around us the inn was quiet. Caldenia had gone to bed, having delicately devoured enough meat to satiate three grown men. Outside the windows, a sunset burned down, one of those glorious Texas sunsets when the color grew thick and vivid and long stripes of clouds glowed orange on a nearly purple sky. Beast lay by my feet, gnawing on a bone Sean had given her. Through the day she had upgraded his status from kill on sight to suspicious to the man with delicious treats who can't be trusted. She would take a bone from him, but petting was still out of the question.
Sean regarded the spheres with calm interest. "Can you activate them?"
"Yes."
"Did the trackers turn themselves off because the stalkers died?"
"I don't think so. From the scans, they look simple: turn on, turn off."
"So the dahaka deliberately turned them off."
"Probably."
Sean leaned back. "If I were him, stuck in an unfamiliar place, I would want to know where my dogs were at all times. He turned off the trackers. He's hiding, but not from us. From someone who can track him by whatever signal these things send out."
I thought out loud. "He could be hiding from someone he's hunting."
"Or someone who's hunting him," Sean said.
If someone was hunting a dahaka, that someone would be armed to the teeth, ruthless, and powerful. In other words, someone we would be wise to avoid. Or befriend.
Sean picked up one of the spheres and studied it. "You have to decide how involved you want to be."
"I know." If we left the dahaka to his own devices, he would kill again. I had no doubt of it. He had turned off the trackers for a reason, and he would want them kept off. If we reactivated them, he would stop what he was doing and come directly here to investigate. And not just him, but anyone else who could pick up his signal, predator or prey. "We can ignore him or we can give him a target."
"Agreed." Sean leaned back in his chair.
As long as the dahaka concentrated on the inn, the rest of the people would be somewhat safe. I was better equipped to deal with him than pretty much anyone else in the county. And if I did activate them, it would have to be here. I wasn't quite useless away from the inn's grounds, but I was a great deal weaker.
Activating the trackers on the grounds went against the fundamental principle of keeping an inn. The safety of the guests had to be maintained at all times. If I turned these things on, I would be putting Caldenia at risk. But the dahaka graduated to killing human beings. I was in a position to do something about it. Then again, if I made the inn a target, I would put my neighbors at risk. I would have to make sure to hold his attention here at the inn, where I was at my strongest.
I realized I was looking at the portrait of my parents. I wished so desperately I could ask for advice. I might as well wait for money to rain from the sky. I was alone. Nobody would offer me any guidance. I wasn't even sure guidance would do any good. I knew the appropriate course of action: sit on your hands, guard the inn, and do nothing.
Somebody had answer for the murder of John Rook.
"What happened to them?" Sean asked.
"Mmm?"
He nodded at the portrait.
I missed them so much. Telling him this probably wasn't a good idea, but I was hurting and lonely and I wanted him to understand why. "My parents owned an inn in Georgia. It was very old and very powerful. Most inns top out at four marks. My parents' inn was rated at five. It was a thriving, magical place and I loved living there. But I wanted to go to college. Two months into my first semester, I received a message from my brother. He'd come home after a long trip and he couldn't find the house. I dropped everything and got back. I stood next to my brother and looked at the spot where the inn used to be. The trees, the garden, and the house had vanished. There was just an empty lot with bare dirt."
The lot had been completely stripped of any life. Even the grass had disappeared. I remembered this terrible hollow feeling inside. When I was a child, I went swimming at a friend's house and when we ran to the pool, we saw a dead kitten on the bottom. The kitten was a stray who had climbed the fence, fallen into the pool, panicked, and drowned. Kelly's father had tried so hard to revive the little cat. He tried to clear her mouth and pushed on her chest and even held her upside down while we stood there and cried, but the kitten was dead. Seeing that empty lot had felt like that, awful and final. Something terrible had happened there, something irreversible, and the footprint of it had made my heart speed up. The anxiety, fear, and desperate need to reverse it, to somehow rewind time and undo what happened, had gripped me and wouldn't let go, not even after I had emptied my stomach on the bare patch of dirt that used to be our front lawn.
"Where did it go?" Sean asked.
"Nobody knows."
"Did your parents have any enemies?"
"They were like most people: they had some acquaintances they avoided and some of those acquaintances didn't like them, but nobody I would consider an enemy. After the inn disappeared, my brother and I talked to anyone we knew. We came up empty-handed."
"Did you look for them?"
"I did." I had spent two years looking for them and another year drifting aimlessly, because I didn't know what to do with myself.
"What about your brother?"
"Klaus? He's still out there, looking." Klaus had always been a wanderer and he never gave up. I hadn't given up either. I nodded at the portrait. "My sister had married and moved away, but I don't think my brother will ever stop searching. That's why the inn's rating is so important. The more marks we earn, the more people will visit. One day this inn will thrive and every guest who passes through these doors will have to look at the portrait of my parents. Eventually one of them will react and then I'll start looking again."
The two trackers waited on the table in front of me.
"What would your parents do?" Sean asked.
"I don't know. I know they would do something. They would never tolerate someone from outside killing people in their neighborhood." I looked up at Sean. "If you're going to bail, now is the time."
"I'm in," he said. "No conditions, no strings attached. He doesn't get to come to my planet and use our bones for dog toys."
I reached over the trackers and passed my hand over them, sparking the tiny flame of magic with my power. The spiral lines on the spheres glowed brick red. I held my breath. The spheres came apart, the sections of wood turning like a Rubik's Cube. The trackers realigned themselves, the spirals arranging themselves into concentric circles, and lay still, emanating a steady pulse of magic.
Sean and I looked at each other.
"I guess that's it," he said.
"Did you expect them to explode?" I had, a little bit.
"It crossed my mind." Sean leaned back. "There's a good chance he'll show up tonight."
"Would you like to spend the night here?"
"I think it would be wise. I promise not to try anything funny. Unless you want me to." The wolf winked at me.
"Let me make this perfectly clear: try something and you'll find yourself tied to a metal table with steel cables even you can't break."
An evil light sparked in his eyes.
"Don't," I warned him.
He raised his hands, palms up. "I'll be an angel."
Ha-ha. Right. "What are your preferences for the room?" He would want something clean and simple. Probably with a touch of country so it felt more like home and less like Spartan barracks. I could put him in the Romantic Bedroom for giggles. The look on his face when he saw the canopy bed would be priceless. I began moving the walls upstairs, shaping the room and bringing the furniture out of storage. I had just the thing in mind...
He shrugged. "I don't need much. A bed. A bathroom would be nice. As long as it's clean."
I glared at him. How to insult an innkeeper in five words or less...
"What?"
"No, it's filthy, but I didn't think rotten food and dead hookers under the bed would bother you." The room was almost done.
"I've slept in worse."
Finished. I rose. "Come with me."
I led him up the stairs to second bedroom on the right and opened the door. A spacious square bedroom stretched in front of us. Very light, knotty alder-wood paneling covered the walls and ceiling, giving an illusion of a rustic log cabin. A large, simple bed with a polished headboard that still managed to pretend it was roughly cut from a random block of wood sat against one wall, supporting a soft mattress with white sheets, a small army of pillows, and a sage-colored bedspread. Two side tables, a dresser, and a bookcase, all matching the headboard in style but clearly not part of the same set, completed the room.
"Nice," Sean said.
"The bathroom is on your right." I nodded.
He walked through into the bathroom, which was almost as large as the bedroom, looked at the garden tub, the shower, and stopped by the small windows.
"That's a huge bathroom," he said.
Bathrooms were my pet peeve. "At least it's clean."
He turned. His eyes narrowed. "We're on the southeast side of the house. I can see the road."
"Yes."
"I've spent a lot of time studying your house from the outside."
"Aha." Where was he heading?
"I know for a fact that there are three arched windows side by side with a small balcony in the place where this bathroom is." Sean pointed to two small, rectangular windows situated one under the other to flood the tub with light.
"If you would like a large arched window so people can view you in all your naked glory while you bathe, that can be arranged."
"Dina," he growled.
"People say that physics has laws," I told him, walking to the bedroom door. "I prefer to view them as a set of flexible guidelines."
Sean followed me out. A flat screen TV slowly materialized on the wall across from the bed. The ceiling spat out a remote and Sean caught it reflexively.
"Thank you for staying, Sean," I told him. "I'm glad you're here. You know where the kitchen is, so if you get hungry in the middle of the night, you're welcome to the food. Please let me know if there is anything else you need."
He opened his mouth, closed it as if he'd changed his mind, and said, "Sure."
I stepped out and closed the door. I needed to take a good long shower and wash all the smoke out of my hair.
Two hours later I was in bed, catching up on my reading and trying to ignore the fact that Sean was three rooms away, when Beast barked. A few seconds later I heard a car roll up and stop by the inn. I checked the window. Two Hummers parked on our street. The doors opened and the vehicles disgorged large men in trench coats.
Hmm. And who might you be?
The last man out leaned into the vehicle and took out something long wrapped in cloth. With my luck, it would be a missile launcher. Prepare to be exploded in three, two, one...
The man straightened, his coat shifting. Long dark hair spilled out.
Not a government agent. Last I checked, neither the FBI nor CIA permitted their operatives to have long flowing locks.
The man handed his burden over to another, pulled a couple more out, and closed the car door. As if obeying some invisible signal, the men stopped and bowed their heads, their hands together, arms bent at the elbow, as if holding their hands in prayer. I squinted. Fingers of their hands together, palms apart, thumbs and pinkies touching and held horizontally. The Holy Pyramid. Got you.
I grabbed my bra and pulled my keeper robe out of the closet. They would want to talk and they were sticklers for formality, and I didn't have time to actually get dressed.
Ten seconds later I went down the hall, dressed in a long gray robe with a cowl, broom in hand. Sean was already out of his room and dressed.
"Who are they?"
"The Holy Cosmic Anocracy. I don't know which House."
"That doesn't tell me anything. And why are you dressed like a monk?"
"I need to get you a primer to read." I went down the stairs. "If we're lucky, it's just men-at-arms. If they have a knight with them, things could get complicated."
"How complicated?" Sean asked.
"Very."
The magic pinged, letting me know someone stood at the edge of my territory. They didn't cross onto the grounds. They just let me know they were there. A good sign.
I reached the door.
"Dina," Sean said. "I need to know what we're dealing with."
"Vampires," I told him. "Please let me do the talking."