The wolf waited for me on the second-floor balcony, in the spot I had come out to meet him in the middle of the night. It seemed like so long ago, but it was only a few days. I stepped out on to the balcony, Beast weaving around my feet.
Sean leaned against the wall on the left side of the doorway. He saw me. His eyes flashed amber, catching the light. He didn’t say anything. Apparently, it was up to me to start the conversation. That was only fair. My errand almost got him killed, and without him I would’ve died on that Baha-char street.
I heard you killed some people and put their heads on sharpened sticks. I wanted to check to see if you are feeling okay… It was probably best to start with something simple.
“Hi.”
“When you are in the inn, I trust you with my life,” he said. “When you are outside, you have to trust me with yours.”
“I do.”
“That means when I say run, you run. You don’t argue. You don’t cry. You do as I tell you, or we both die.”
Oh. It was that type of conversation. I crossed my arms.
He faced me. “I trust you to do your job. You have to trust me to do mine.”
“I trust you. I don’t trust your priorities.”
I wanted to reach over and pull that stone-hard expression off his face.
“My priority is making sure you survive.”
“Exactly. My priority is keeping my guests safe. They’re not always one and the same.”
“The Hiru was safe at the inn,” Sean said. “Your insistence on bringing the tank in because you wanted to impress him—”
“It wasn’t about impressing anyone. It was about trust. I promised to retrieve the tank. I had to come back with it.”
“— endangered you, me, Cookie, and Wilmos. Instead of concentrating on retrieving the tank from Wilmos’ shop, I had to carry you.”
“I’m sorry for inflicting this horrible burden on you.” I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth.
“It also endangered everyone in the inn. If you had died, Maud wouldn’t be able to hold off the Draziri. The Hiru would die.”
“My sister would’ve done just fine.”
Beast barked by my feet, unsure, but feeling the pressure to provide canine support. Sean ignored her.
“I have skills and abilities you don’t. More, I have experience.”
“So do I.”
“I’ve watched you kill,” he said. “You kill only when you have to. Of all the responses to a threat you face, killing someone is the last choice for you. For me, it’s not a choice. It’s instinct. I don’t think about it. I see a threat and I neutralize it. Of the two of us, I’m better equipped to handle an attack outside of the inn.”
“This doesn’t make you sound any more trustworthy.”
“It kept me alive. And, if you let me, I’ll keep you alive. I’ll do everything I can to make sure you survive.”
“Believe it or not, I somehow managed to survive for all these years without your help.”
“Either you trust me or you don’t. Decide, Dina. Because if you don’t, there is no point in me being here. I can’t do my job if you dig your heels in when I need you to follow my lead. I’m packed. Let me know what you decide.”
He jumped off the balcony.
Great.
“Idiot werewolf.”
Beast whined.
“Hush,” I told her and stomped back downstairs. He had a point. One of us ran the inn and the other killed hundreds of sentient beings. Of the two of us, he was a much better killer and a much better bodyguard. He’d made the call and I should’ve trusted it. I implied that I would follow his lead when I hired him for a dollar. Instead I did what I had to do to ensure that Sunset didn’t lose confidence in my ability to deliver. Was it truly necessary or did I do it out of pride? I didn’t want to think about it.
That whole conversation didn’t go the way I was hoping it would have.
A delicious smell permeated the downstairs, floating on the breeze. It smelled like… chicken.
Oh no.
I marched into the kitchen.
“Orro!” My voice cut the air like a knife.
He raised his head from a pot and turned toward me.
“Are you cooking Draziri?”
The needles stood up on his back.
“Don’t lie to me. I thought I made it perfectly clear. I won’t tolerate any…”
Orro jerked the oven open and yanked out a large roasting pan. On it, roasted to a golden-brown perfection, sat a medium-sized bird.
“Roasted Duck,” Orro said. “With buckwheat porridge and apple stuffing.”
Crap.
He drew himself to his full height, somehow taking up most of the kitchen, looming like some demon hedgehog of legend.
“In all my years, since I was a lowly apprentice barely tall enough to slide a pot onto a stove, I have broken the kitchen code only once. Once I have let a dish I hadn’t tasted leave my kitchen. I have never broken it before or since. The code is my life, my religion, and my conscience. Without it,” he ripped the air with his claws, “I am but a lowly savage.”
There was no stopping it. I brought it on myself, I had to stand there and take it.
“Rise early to be at your station early,” Orro intoned. “Keep your knives sharp. Never touch other chef’s knives. Keep yourself, your station, and your food clean. Never let a dish out of your kitchen without tasting it. Know your ingredients. Respect the creatures on your prep table; honor their lives. Know your diners. Cook to the tastes of those who dine, not your own. Never serve a dish that harms your diners’ health or soul. Never settle for second best. Never stop learning. These are the cornerstones of everything I am. They are the firmament of my universe.”
He paused over me.
I nodded.
“Am I some vagrant you found on the street cooking rats in a rusted pot?”
Oh for the love of…
“Do you honestly think I would sink so low as to harm your soul by serving you a sentient being? Do you think so little of me?”
“I apologize.”
He slapped his clawed hand over his eyes in a pose that would’ve made any Shakespearean actor proud. “Go. Just… go.”
I fled the kitchen before he decided to continue with the speech.
So far I fought with Sean and Orro. The way today was going, if I lingered long enough, I would probably mortally offend Caldenia. Clearly there was only one place where I could safely be right now. I opened the floor and took the stairs down to the lab.
The corpse of the corrupted creature lay on the lab table. When Maud said “encased in a plastic container,” I took it to mean they put it in some plastic tub. They didn’t. A block of clear plastic greeted me, ten feet long and four feet wide. The corpse lay inside it, like some demented version of Snow White sleeping in a glass coffin.
How… Oh. Maud must’ve stuffed the corpse into an anchor tube, a clear cylinder of inert PVDF plastic. I had a whole section devoted to them in storage. They came in all sizes and were usually used to quarantine odd objects, provide microhabitats for small aquatic guests, and generally contain things when low thermal conductivity and high chemical corrosion resistance were a must. PVDF didn’t conduct electricity, was impervious to most acids, and resisted radiation. The argon chamber I used for the Archivarian was made of PVDF.
Maud must’ve found my storage set, or Gertrude Hunt had dug up a large container in response to stress. But securing the corpse in said container didn’t prove to be enough. The inn had somehow managed to encase the anchor tube in plastic.
I reached out and touched it. The inn creaked in alarm. No, not plastic. Clear resin. The inn had secreted resin and sealed the anchor tube in it until eight inches of its own sap shielded it from the corpse.