He fell silent for a moment.
“It feels fake,” he continued. “I get up, I wave at neighbors, I go to the grocery store, I gas up my car. The whole time I’m pretending to be someone else and I worry I might get my lines wrong.”
“Sean…” I had no idea he felt that way.
He glanced at me, his face resolute, his eyes clear. “Peace and quiet doesn’t help, because what’s wrong isn’t out there. It’s inside me. This right here is the most normal I've felt since I got home.”
I reached out and took his hand. He took his gaze off the road and looked at me. His eyes caught the light, their irises golden-brown amber. “And this.” He squeezed my hand. “This feels normal. This feels like coming home.”
Sirens blared behind us. He was still holding my hand, his strong fingers wrapped around mine. I remembered him walking away from me into the tear between the worlds. He’d wanted to see the galaxy and he owed Wilmos a favor. He went through it and was gone, and I'd stood on the grass, hugging myself. Guests left and we stayed. That was the fact of the innkeeper’s life. My parents vanished, my brother left to look for them and disappeared, Maud had gotten married… But I got Sean back. He was in the cab with me, holding my hand and not wanting to let go.
“Slow down,” I said. “It’s coming up.”
We passed a sign for Leona.
The sirens chased us, getting louder. I glanced into the side mirror. The police cars were right behind us. Half a minute and they would ram right into the back of the Ryder.
“Make a right,” I told him.
Sean let go of my hand and cut across the grass. The Ryder rocked side to side, struggling with uneven ground, and pulled onto a narrow access road. The fleet of State Troopers tore past, wailing in fury.
Sean laughed a happy wolfish laugh under his breath.
“Don’t go back to Wilmos.” I hadn’t meant to say it. At least not like this, but I’d started it and now I had to finish it. “Stay here with me. At least for a little while.”
“I’ll stay,” he promised.
I looked away.
He eased off the brakes.
“Keep going down this road,” I told him. “It will come out at a Buc-ee’s.”
“I love Buc-ee’s,” Sean said.
Everyone loved Buc-ee’s. A chain of massive gas stations that doubled as restaurants and travel centers, Buc-ee’s offered everything from parfaits and fifty different types of jerky to Texas themed merchandise. They were always full of cars and travelers who enjoyed easy access to the gas pumps and clean bathrooms. All we had to do was creep past any State Troopers guarding the exit and blend into the crowd.
Finally, Mr. Rodriguez would owe me a favor instead of the other way around.
“Why do you want to help the Hiru?” I asked Sean as we pulled into the huge parking lot.
“Because someone blew up their planet and is hunting them to extinction. Somebody needs to do something about it. Also, because you’ll take them up on their offer and get involved, and I don’t want you to deal with all that on your own.”
“What makes you so sure I’ll take them up on it?”
He grinned at me, turning into the old Sean Evans. The transformation was so sudden, I blinked to make sure I didn’t imagine it.
“You’re a carebear.”
“What?”
“You’re the type to get out of a perfectly dry car in the middle of a storm in your best dress so you can scoop a wet dog off the road. You help people, Dina. That’s what you do. And the Hiru need help.”
“I’m sensible,” I told him.
“I’ll give you till tonight,” he said. “You won’t even last twenty-four hours. I bet my right arm on it.”
* * *
Sean backed the truck up my driveway and paused for a moment, pondering something.
“What?”
“I’m wondering if your sister murdered Arland in the back.”
“Did she?”
He tilted his head, listening. “No. I still hear both of them. Damn it. Oh well, a man can dream.”
We parked the truck. I got out and opened the back. Maud hopped onto the grass, shielded from the street by the bulk of the vehicle. Her face was a cold neutral mask.
Arland heaved the Ku and the bike to the edge of the truck. I waved my hand. Long flexible shoots burst out of the ground, wrapped around Wing and the bike and dragged them under. “Take him to the stables,” I murmured. “And keep him there.”
Arland jumped off the truck. “I quite enjoyed that. Thank you for this pleasant diversion.”
“Thank you for your assistance.”
Arland smiled, displaying sharp fangs, and went inside the inn.
I closed the truck back up and waved to Sean. He drove out. He’d return the truck and drive his car back.
Beast exploded out of her doggie door and jumped into my arms. I hugged her, but she was wiggling too hard, so I set her down and she streaked away in a fit of doggie excitement, tucking her tail between her legs for extra speed.
“Where is Helen?” Maud frowned.
“In the kitchen.” I pointed. A window opened in the wall. Helen was perched precariously on a stool above a large pot. Someone had trimmed one of my old aprons, the one with sunflowers, and put it on her. She was stirring the stuff in the pot with a big spoon. The inn’s tendrils hovered on both sides of her, ready to catch her if she fell.
I dug my phone out of my pocket and took a picture.
“He put her to work?” Maud stared.
Orro said something in his gravelly voice.
Helen nodded and sprinkled something into the soup and squeaked, “Yes, chef!”
“Give me that phone!” My sister grabbed the phone out of my hand and started snapping pictures.
Maud couldn’t feel her daughter in the kitchen. It would come back. It had to come back. She’d spent years at our parents’ inn and she never had any problems connecting to it.
“So what did you and the vampire talk about in the truck?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Was it a small talk kind of nothing or not going to tell you kind of nothing?”
“It was a keeping my mouth shut nothing. We didn’t speak. I have no interest in vampires. I’ve had enough of them for a lifetime.”
I smiled at her.
“Have you decided what to do about the Hiru?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Dad would approve,” she said. “He never could resist a down-on-your-luck story and there is no one more down than the Hiru.”
“Mom wouldn’t,” I said.
“Mom would, too. After the first Draziri showed up on the doorstep and issued threats.”
“I pity any Draziri who tried to threaten Mom.” If anyone could make them rethink an invasion of Earth, it would be our mother.
Our mother and our father. This was the entire point of the inn. This was why I had come back to Earth and hung their portrait in the front room. I’d planned to grow Gertrude Hunt into the kind of inn that was flooded with visitors. Sooner or later one of them would recognize my parents and tell me what happened to them. The galaxy was huge and the chances of that happening were tiny, but it was all I had.
“What do you think I should do?”
Maud pursed her lips, pretending to be deep in thought. “I think you should do what you think is right.”
“And you said I turned into Mom!”
Maud headed for the kitchen door. “You’re not pawning the decision off on me. You’re the innkeeper.”
I rolled my eyes and followed her into the kitchen.
“Mommy!”
Helen leapt off the stool, dashed across the kitchen, and jumped into Maud’s arms. It would’ve been an amazingly high jump for a human five-year-old.
“Here is my cutey!” Maud wrinkled her face.
Helen wrinkled hers, and they rubbed noses.
“I’m a soup chef,” Helen announced.
“Sous
,” Orro growled from the pantry.
“And I have to say ‘yes, chef’ real loud.”
They were so cute. That’s not an adjective I normally would associate with my sister. How could I possibly ruin that?
But then, the ugly truth remained: the Hiru needed help and we needed to find our parents. Maud and I had so carefully talked around it, but both of us knew what was left unsaid. This was our best chance to find Mom and Dad. And if I let my sister catch one whiff of me wavering because I worried about her safety, she would skin me alive.
“When you and Klaus showed up that time to tell me the inn disappeared, I was in a different place.” Maud threw Helen up and caught her. Helen squealed and laughed. “I was the wife of a Marshal’s son, who was making a bid for the post of the Marshal. My world was very defined then. I knew where we were going and how we were going to get there. I had my husband and his House, all the other knights who served with him and respected him. I had friends. We were admired, me and Melizard and our beautiful baby.”
“And now?”
“And now I’ve learned the truth. Husbands can fall out of love. Friends can betray you. But when you’re stuck in a hellhole far from home, your family will move heaven and earth to get you back. We need to get them back, Dina. They would do it for us.”
The inn chimed twice,fast. Well, of course.
“Who is it?” Maud asked.
“Local law enforcement.” I made a beeline for the door.
“Friendly?”
“No.”
“Does he know?”
“He knows. He just can’t prove it.”
I composed myself, swung the door open, and smiled at Officer Marais through the screen. He didn’t smile back. He was generally not in a smiley mood around me. Trim, dark-haired, and in his thirties, Officer Marais peered at me through the screen door as if I were already in the back of his cruiser with handcuffs on. Beast squeezed in front of me and let out one cautious bark.
“Officer Marais. What a pleasure.”
“Miss Demille.”
My father always told me that all people had magic. Most never learned they did, because they never tried to do anything out of the ordinary. But in a few gifted individuals it bubbled to the surface anyway. Officer Marais was one of those bubblers. His sense of intuition was honed to supernatural sharpness. He had identified the inn as a place where odd things kept happening and mounted a full-scale surveillance of us. Which is how he ended up getting into a fight with some vampire knights. Predictably they took a blood axe to his vehicle, and Officer Marais was deposited, trussed up like a deer, in my stables, while I twisted myself into a pretzel trying to falsify the footage from his dashcam and repair the damage to his vehicle so he couldn’t prove any of it happened.
I’d managed to successfully overwrite the dash cam and the vampires did repair Marais’s cruiser, hiding all traces of the damage. Unfortunately, when a vampire engineer told you that the internal combustion engine you are trying to get him to fix is an abomination and repairing it violated his oath to do no harm, he meant it. During our last meeting, Officer Marais shared with me that he’d driven his vehicle back and forth to Houston for a week and he’d yet to gas it up.
I opened the screen door. “Please come in.”
Officer Marais took a careful step inside, but stayed by the door. I turned to Maud and Helen, who was hiding behind her mom’s legs.
“This is my sister, Maud, and my niece, Helen.”
Maud smiled at him. Helen hissed and took off like a rocket into the kitchen.
“Did that child just hiss at me?” Officer Marais blinked.
“Yes,” Maud said. “She’s pretending to be a cat. Children do that.”
“How may I help you this time?” I asked.
“There was a disturbance here three days ago. People reported loud noises and the loss of power.”
“Yes, I remember. Someone was joyriding a very loud motorcycle.” And I couldn’t wait to give him a piece of my mind.
“Did you see the vehicle?” His face told me that he was just going through the motions.
“No.”
“Are you aware that a high-speed pursuit took place today on I45?”
“Did it?”
“Were you involved in that matter?”
“No.”
“Did that pursuit have anything to do with the disturbance here?”
Officer Marais was wasted on the Red Deer P.D. We barely had any crime. In a bigger city, with his intuition, he would be knocking cases out of the park faster than they could bring them to him.
Officer Marais treated me to the serious cop stare. I did my best to keep from wilting.
“Is this the part where you tell me that you intend to get to the bottom of what’s going on here?”
“What is going on here?”
“We are considering granting asylum to an alien who is a victim of a religious crusade,” I told him. “We have a vampire and a werewolf on our side, but we’re not sure it will be enough.”
He put away his notepad. “Let me know if you see or hear anything unusual, ma’am.”
Wow. I got ma’amed. “I will, Officer.”
He left and even though I could feel him, I pulled the curtain aside on the front window and watched him until he got into his modified cruiser and drove away.
“Conscientious cop,” Maud said. “No bigger pain. I feel sorry for you.”
“Oh you don’t know the half of it. You want to come with me to talk to the Ku?”
“Actually, I thought I would take a bath.” She smiled.
“You should.”
“What are you implying? Are you saying I stink?”
“Touchy-touchy-touchy.” I stuck my tongue out at her and headed out to the stables, Beast trailing me.
Wing and his bike, still netted up, lay in the wide walkway between the stalls. He watched me approach with bright round eyes. I sat on the bench and looked at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Sorry was a step in the right direction. “You endangered the inn. You made trouble for Mr. Rodriguez. You almost got yourself killed. What do you think those policemen would do to you if they caught you?”
He tucked his head down as much as he could, trying to look smaller.
“What was so important that you had to run out in daylight?”
He blinked his eyes. “A present.”
“What present?”
He struggled in the net.
I nodded. A narrow barrel descended from the ceiling and fired a pulse of blue light at the net. It fell loose.
The Ku rolled to his feet and opened a large compartment on his boost bike. He reached in it and took out a bright red poinsettia. It was growing from a pot wrapped in gold foil.
“This is it?”
He nodded.
“Did you steal it?”
“I bought it.”
“What did you pay with?”
He reached into a pocket in his harness and showed me a handful of small gold drops shaped like tears. Well, someone got lucky today.
“Why?”
He crouched on the floor above the poinsettia, his voice hushed. “It’s like home.”
“Do you miss home?”
He nodded.
My righteous anger evaporated. The universe was very big and the Ku was so very small. “Why did you leave?”
“Adventures,” he said.
“Can you go back?”
He nodded. “When I’m a hero.”
“You know, bringing the message about my sister to me was pretty heroic,” I told him.
“Not enough.” He raised his arms, drawing a big circle. “Big hero.”
He looked at me as if waiting for me to confirm that it was a worthy goal.
“Everyone has a dream,” I said. “You’re brave and kind. You’ll be a big hero one day.”
The Ku smiled at me, showing a mouth full of scary dinosaur teeth.
“Meanwhile, you
’re going to stay here at the inn,” I told him. “Don’t try to leave. The inn won’t let you. Let’s go make a nice place for your flower and give it some water. Did you know they come in white, too?”
* * *
Creating a room for a Ku was infinitely easier than crafting the moving ceiling for the Hiru. I’d made a few before I was even an innkeeper, while still living at my parents’ inn. I went with the usual theme of wooden walls, braided together from wooden strips, and three levels; the first being the main floor, the second strewn with floor pillows, and the third a loft nest with a hammock right next to the window that let him look out onto the street. I added a few ropes and a vine swing. By the time we came to the door of his room, Gertrude Hunt had pulled plants out of stasis storage, and garlands of flowering vines and a swing greeted Wing as he came inside. He clutched his poinsettia, dashed up the rope to the loft, and landed in the hammock. Testing all the ropes and the swing would occupy him for at least a couple of hours.
I had just finished settling him in when magic chimed in my head. This chime was deeper than usual. I puzzled over it for a moment and then it hit me. Mr. Rodriguez.
I glanced out of the hallway’s window. A white windowless van politely waited at the end of the driveway. When I went to see Mr. Rodriguez, I did the same thing. I stepped onto his inn’s grounds and waited. When nobody came to throw me out, I went in. I didn’t know what the proper etiquette was, but sitting here making them wait didn’t seem like the polite thing to do.
I went down the stairs, stepped outside, and waved at the van. It reversed, turned, and rolled up my driveway. Mr. Rodriguez got out. He was in his early fifties, with bronze skin and dark hair, touched with gray. A trimmed beard hugged his jaw.
“Dina.”
“Mr. Rodriguez.” I stepped forward and we hugged. That was probably a breach of etiquette, too, but I didn’t care.
A young version of Mr. Rodriguez hopped out of the vehicle on the passenger side.
“My son, Tony,” Mr. Rodriguez said.
We shook hands. Tony seemed to be about my age, with the same dark hair and dark eyes as his father.
“Please, come in.” I led them to the front room. “Would you like some iced tea?”