He had me there.
"I've spent years being dragged halfway around the world and fighting because someone told me to do it. I chose this place to settle down. This is my territory as your house is your territory. This is home. I will fight for it. And for the record, I never intended to let the dog killings slide."
"And if I don't want your protection?"
Sean looked at me like I wasn't right in the head. "As I said, your house is in my territory. I will keep you safe."
Right. He was genetically engineered to withstand sieges and guard things against overwhelming odds. He probably couldn't overcome the protective impulse even if he wanted to, and he definitely didn't want to. "Aren't you too young to be guarding the gate, Sean?"
He frowned. "I don't follow."
Maybe he really didn't know. "I'm an innkeeper. Does that mean anything to you?"
He chuckled. "I hate to break it to you, but you own a bed-and-breakfast and your only guest seems to be a freaky old woman. Calling yourself an innkeeper is a stretch if you catch my drift."
He had no clue what I was talking about. "How about Auul? Does that ring a bell?"
When pronounced the right way, the name rhymed with Raul, but it was softer, said with more longing, each vowel stretched until it sounded like the howl of a lonely wolf under the full moon.
"Cute," he said. "Are you going to bark at me next? I don't mind being mocked, but I'd like to keep this conversation productive."
I pushed with my magic. "Terminal, Auul file, please."
The house shivered. A big screen formed on the far wall. On it a vast forest spread, viewed from above, a place of giants. Enormous trees with blue-green leaves shimmered in the night breeze, and above them midnight sky reigned, sprayed with sparkling stars that glittered like jewels. An enormous moon rose on the right, taking up a quarter of the horizon, glowing with blue and green, and past it the second moon, an intense gold shot through with red, hung in the distance. An enormous bird, the tips of its feathers glowing with pale blue, flew above the treetops.
Sean strained. His eyes lit up, catching the light. Muscles bunched under the strands. The elastic metal cords snapped and he stepped from the wall, staring at the image.
Wow. I let him go—there was no point in holding him. The torn metal ligaments melted, dripped down, and flowed across the floor toward me, reshaping themselves. They surged up and a broom handle touched my hand. I took it.
"Auul," I quoted. "Soft like the whisper of love on a mother's lips, harsh like a cry for vengeance, you are a memory, a child's dream, a debt still owed, watered with our blood, lost forever but never forgotten."
"Who wrote that?" Sean asked, his gaze still fixed on the image.
"A werewolf. Your kind got very poetic about your planet after you blew it up."
Sean turned to me. "My planet? I was born in Tennessee."
"Where do werewolves come from?"
"We were always here. We're a genetic mutation, an abnormality. Where does your broom come from?"
Aha. "Tell me this image doesn't call to you, Sean."
He looked at the moon again.
The image melted, replaced by a lean woman with fiery eyes. Her hair spilled over her back in a long reddish mane, held back by gold hair clasps. Delicate metal lace sheathed her shoulders. A narrow gold chain ran under her uncovered breasts. Music came, quiet, haunting, and she began to sway, her long, diaphanous dark skirt flaring as she turned. She sang in a dead language and Sean listened to it as if he understood every word.
The woman finished her song. The file said it was a lullaby. I wondered if Sean had heard it in childhood.
"Okay," he said finally. "Hit me with it."
"You won't like it."
"Why don't you let me decide that?"
He did ask. I would remind him of that if he freaked out.
"There is a star system with two habitable planets, Auul and Mraar." The image changed, pulling the image of the two planets out of the file. "It's not clear if Auul was habitable at the start or terraformed. Everyone agrees that civilization began on Mraar. If you ask the Sun Horde, a splinter group occupied Auul and declared independence. If you ask your people, they were exiled to Auul and abandoned. We don't know what the truth is, and we never will. Everyone does agree that after the civilizations had existed independently for almost a thousand years, the Raoo of Mraar invaded Auul."
I sat in the chair. I was tired of standing.
"How do you know this?" Sean asked.
"I'm an innkeeper."
"That explains nothing, but okay. What happened with invasion?"
"The Raoo got their butts kicked. It's difficult to occupy a planet."
"Makes sense in theory. Getting enough troops to the surface would be a challenge."
He was taking all this rather well. He probably thought I was crazy and had decided to stay calm in case I started putting tinfoil on my head.
"The war dragged on for years, really more a cycle of invasions and hasty retreats, until the Raoo acquired a gate. Whether someone sold them the technology or they stumbled on it, we don't know. Most likely they bought it somehow."
"What's a gate?"
"It's an Einstein-Rosen bridge. A miniature traversable wormhole, which permits nearly instantaneous travel from one part of the universe to another. There are naturally occurring wormholes, but the Raoo built a synthetic one. It took a huge amount of energy to keep it running, and it could only be active for a short time or it would destabilize the planet. In the fourteen days it was open, the Raoo dumped millions of their troops on Auul. Mraar was overcrowded and Auul had always been sparsely populated. Your people were losing. With two-thirds of the planet occupied, they resorted to drastic measures and engineered werewolfism. They proceeded to administer it to every citizen, raised a new generation of superfighters, and the tide of war began to turn."
"Back up." Sean held his hand out. "What do you mean engineered?"
"They created an ossai, an artificial microscopic programmable virus. They loaded it with a program and used it to rewrite the genetic code of living organisms. Once it was administered, the ossai made the current generation stronger and faster and reshaped their offspring into werewolves. When you change shape it must hurt, but it doesn't hurt as much as it should. That's because when you change, the ossai in your body releases a painkiller."
"I've been in the military," Sean said. "I've had a lot of blood tests."
"The ossai is tiny. It also self-destructs when removed from the body. Cursory tests wouldn't detect it, so unless someone sequences your genetic code, you will pass for a native."
He grimaced. "Never mind. What happened with the invasion?"
"It took the Raoo almost a century, but eventually they reverse engineered the ossai and made their own version, bigger, better, badder—the werecats, also known as the Sun Horde. Your people had anticipated that this would happen because by the time the Sun Horde emerged, they were already building their own gates. The decision was made to abandon Auul, but your people didn't want the Mraar to have it. They left the gates opened, knowing it would lead to a catastrophe, and evacuated as much of the population as they could to other places in the universe. It took years. To hold the gates against the incoming Sun Horde, they bred a second generation of werewolves, which has been described to me as more powerful but less stable, to which you apparently belong."
"Nice," Sean said.
"The alpha strain werewolves held the gates as long as they could until finally their operation created a tiny black hole. The black hole consumed the planet, releasing enormous amounts of energy, until Auul was completely gone. The resulting cataclysm created a very small but super-dense mass, which upset the balance within the star system, rendering Mraar uninhabitable. Some of the Sun Horde got out, but not many. The death count was in the billions. Now Mraar is a dead rock and Auul is an asteroid belt. The people of both are refugees on the known worlds."