The last couple of tears had left tracks in the mortar on the ARB chairperson’s cheeks. Chastity left them there.
She stepped back, looked at her sister and at the littles. Then she nodded to Damek.
Silently, he finished strengthening the building. Each brick and every stone he placed solidified its security and strength.
When he was done, the sisters and their young siblings went up the stairs, and Damek began humming again.
SEVERAL DAYS PASSED as Damek continued his work in the house. On the third day, Chastity found another letter in the mail. Nervously, she clutched it in her hand as she read the first paragraph: The River Glades Community prides itself on high community standards. As such any and all exterior architectural alterations must receive approval of the Architectural Review Board. Please file the attached approval FOR FENCE CONSTRUCTION for your records.
She smiled.
“What does it say?” Alison came to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her sister.
Chastity held up the paper so they could both read it. “They’ve approved our fence!”
Alison let out a whoop of triumph, and the littles came careening into the room.
“I told you it would all be okay.” Alison bumped her shoulder against Chastity’s. “The littles will have their safe home and safe play yard.”
“We owe thanks to Justine.” Chastity nudged her sister back. “And to you.”
Remus bumped his head gently against her hand. “Go catch yellow birds now?”
At that, Raven and Alison exchanged a worried look, but Chastity smiled at him and then said, “If you keep eating them, we won’t have any left.”
“Is a feeder though,” Remus complained. “Feeder is for food.”
Chastity laughed. “True. We need to mark the fence line anyhow. Come on.”
And the sisters led their younger nestmates into their soon-to-be-fenced yard.
Woolsley’s Kitchen Nightmare
E. E. KNIGHT
There’s a joke over in Europe that if you find yourself in America’s Upper Midwest, it’s time to switch your GPS. Any reputable routing service provider should program its devices to keep you well clear of these bleak woods and cornfields, connected by old two-lane highways linking bits of crossroad nothing.
They can’t imagine why anyone would want to be here. Bland as processed cheese, either too hot or too cold and dreary in the spring and fall. Whatever the charts say, the region’s not on anyone’s cultural map—devoid of interesting incident since the last Sioux uprising was put down during the American Civil War and populated by flannel-wearing bumpkins; they might say antipathy is the best policy . . .
Feck the snobs, I say. I’ve been there a couple of times. Few of the snobs will say that. What’s more, I look forward to returning, which none of the snobs would say, even if it were true. You may laugh, but it’s a land of quiet surprises and secret treasures. One moment you’re on a winding country road counting cows, the next you’re in a Swiss village or Cornish mining country, with Norwegian troll statues grinning at you from the roadside.
That’s just Wisconsin, perhaps my favorite of the Midwest states. It’s a rich land in its own way, sharing the stolid wisdom displayed by the locals in my own home county in Ireland, and with life in the country moving to the rhythm of the livestock and harvest. The grass is the same emerald green as well, at least until the July sun hammers the countryside into straw and clay. Maybe that’s why it always seems half-familiar to me.
Ah, Ireland. You can leave it, but it never leaves you, even if you escape. I grew up wild and woolly with nothing but ravens and barn rats for friends, sneaking from one paddock to the next and scrounging from bins and feed sheds. I left the Auld Sod with a caravan of translife first chance I got. Quite an eye-opener, that, learning there were others not unlike me, full of anxiety and appetite. Because I was the new guy they dumped the worst duty on me: food prep and disposal. Of course the weres and the troupe’s leader, a one-eyed vamp named Jack who taught me the Discreet Art of Wandering Translife, had all the fun of procuring the food. Once the blood was drained and the excitement of sticky red died down, I took over and turned the meats and vitals into road cuisine that would see everyone through to the next carefully chosen kill.
Then on my night rides I’d get rid of the bits of evidence that weren’t reduced to sauces and stock.
That was how I found out I had a knack for cooking—a gift, even, as the others styled it. Dear old One-Eyed Jack plunked down the cash for my first translife eatery in Paris and handed over the deed. It was a dying bistro beneath an old nunnery when he bought it.
Two holes and a corner, it was, connected to the vast Paris sewers and a smuggler’s tunnel on the Seine that dated back to Napoleon’s Continental System. I put in twenty-two-hour days for a year and made a go of it. Word got out and I opened a second in Prague—my first and only instant success. I did a true restaurant in New Orleans, following with Shanghai, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and finally my crown jewel, Nippers, in London, not far from Jack the Ripper’s old kills. I did well in that very competitive market. The Secret Eyes, who pretty much run things in the translife world, put my London staff on retainer, doing the catering for their seasonals. That took me and my team all over the world, since the Secret Eyes never meet in the same city twice in the traditional human life span of three-score-and-ten. “Everyone served anywhere” went on my business cards.
But arse-over, such public recognition made me some enemies. Rivals in the translife foodie world got my place in Prague shut down. You’d think even white-hot jealousy wouldn’t make any of us night folk do a deal with the Templars, but that was just what happened. Someone sent a note or an e-mail and three promising caterers on my team there saw their last night. The Templars dispatched and exorcised them in the prime of translife. What could happen in Prague could happen in Paris and Shanghai and so on, so I sold off my catering empire.
Tragedy, right? Worst year of my life? Not a bit of it. I’m a born wanderer, I’m happy to say, always kicking on for a new horizon. I needed to earn money so I went into consulting—you go through a lot of cash as a translife, between covering your tracks and bribing the local constabulary. So now I advise other would-be or troubled restaurateurs in the translife catering trade. I like going somewhere with fresh faces, fresh preferences, fresh customs, and fresh victims. Fresh horses, too, for a good, sweaty night ride, since most translife eateries keep out of the cities for safety’s sake.
So, the call came to go to Wisconsin in the early summer, in the southwest corner on the bluffs overlooking that big, winding river through the heart of North America. Beer and dairy farm country, smelling of hot asphalt, manure, and crabapple trees. Sounded like a challenge; that bit of the world’s almost off the translife grid, culturally and logistically. I had to wonder who’d be mad enough to try to cater to translife in the middle of a teat-pulling human nowhere.
A madman or a visionary, I guessed. I drew up a mental sketch of a discerning vampire retiring from hectic urban life, or an old banshee reconnecting with her childhood roots. As usual in matters unrelated to food, I was wrong.
THE SECLUDED SKYLINE Restaurant had a promising enough setting for catering to translife appetites. From the outside, not even visible from any highway, it didn’t look like anything much—just another distressed barn in a part of the country full of them.
I had to follow the verbal directions given by the owner, as the little farm access road leading to the Skyline didn’t appear on any database. The road had cheap, mass-produced red-and-white NO TRESPASSING and NO HUNTING signs, with a BEWARE OF DOG as you came to the flat ground surrounding the barn. I pulled up in my rental van—in this business you never know what you might have to run out and acquire at the last minute, and a van is perfect for discreet haulage—and decided I liked the look of the place. The barn was green rather than the more usual reds or whites, with a pinkish-white roof. Lonely, windy, remote. Cold as Jadis’s tit in January, certainly, but on a deliciously firelit Beltane . . .