“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.