Almost forty guests, most of them high-ranking. One misstep and my reputation and the inn’s ranking wouldn’t recover. My mind kept cycling through the preparations: quarters, ballroom, instructions to Orro… At the last minute I had reactivated the stables. The Merchants of Baha-char sometimes traveled with animals. They didn’t do it all the time, but when my parents hosted them all those years ago, they occasionally showed up with a beast of burden or a pet. The inn had already formed the stables once, many decades ago, so all I had to do was move it out of the inn’s underground storage. Unearthing them strained the inn and me both, but it was better to have the stables and not need them than let someone’s prized racing dinosaur soak in the cold rain while you made them available.
I’d thought of everything. I went down my checklist and crossed off every item. Still, I felt keyed up. If I were an engine, I would be idling too high. I could handle forty guests. I had handled more than that at my parents’ inn but only for a short time, and none of them had been actively at war with each other.
It would be fine. This was my inn, and no amount of guests could change that.
I reached out and touched the post supporting the roof over the back porch. The magic of the inn connected with mine, restless. The inn was nervous too.
The posts and the roof were a new addition the inn had grown on its own. I hadn’t realized it, but I had developed a habit of walking out onto the back patio, which used to be a concrete slab, and watching the trees. Sometimes I would bring a folding chair out and read. The Texas sun knew no mercy, and after I burned for the second time by staying out a minute or two too long, the inn took the matters into its own hands and sprouted stone and wood porch posts and a roof. It also replaced the concrete slab with pretty flagstone, and I wasn’t sure where the inn had gotten it.
“It will be fine,” I murmured to the house, stroking the wood with the tips of my fingers. The inn’s magic leaned against me, reassured.
“It will,” George said. He stood next to me wearing the same outfit as this morning, but now he also held a cane with an ornate top, a dark wood inlaid with twisted swirls of silver. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a knife in it. He’d also developed a mysterious limp. It appeared the Arbitrator liked to be underestimated.
Behind us Gaston and Orro carried on a quiet conversation. The window was open and the sound of their voices carried to us.
“So if it was your first meal, why eggs?” Gaston asked. “Why not caviar or truffles or something complicated?”
“Consider coq au vin,” Orro answered. “Even the simplest recipe for this dish requires a long process. One has to have a mature bird and marinate it in burgundy for two days. Once marinated, thick slices of bacon must be sautéed in a pan. Then the chicken must be browned, smothered in Cognac, which is then to be set on fire.”
That was definitely an Earth recipe, specifically French. Where in the world did he learn it?
“Then the chicken must be seasoned. Salt, pepper, bay leaf, and thyme. Onion must be added, chicken must simmer, flour is to be sprinkled onto the whole endeavor, and then it will be simmered again. More ingredients are added—bacon, garlic, chicken stock, mushrooms—until it all blends into a delicious harmonized whole.”
“You’re making me hungry,” Gaston said, “But I still don’t see the point.”
“No single ingredient is the star of that dish,” Orro said. “It is a whole. I could cook it in a dozen ways, altering amounts of ingredients and spices and creating new variations. How is the stock made? What vintage is the wine? A second-year cooking student can make this dish, and it would be edible. The very complexity of its preparations makes the recipe flexible. Now consider the humble egg. It is possibly the oldest food known throughout the universe. The egg is just an egg. Cook it too long, it becomes hard. Cook it too little, and it turns into a jellied mess. Break the yolk because of your carelessness and the dish is ruined. Gouge the gentle skin as you peel the shell and no culinary expertise can repair it. The egg allows no room for error. That’s where true mastery shines.”
Jack slipped into the kitchen and walked out onto the porch. “There is a police car parked down the street, two houses over. The male cop inside is watching the inn.”
I sighed. “That would be Officer Marais.” Like clockwork.
“Should we be concerned?” George said.
“Officer Marais and I have a history.”
All people had magic. Most of them didn’t know how to use it because they never tried, but magic still found ways to seep through. For Officer Marais, it manifested as intuition. Every gut feeling he had was telling him there was something not quite right with me and Gertrude Hunt. He couldn’t prove it, but it nagged at him all the same. Officer Marais was both conscientious and hardworking, and tonight a hyper hunch had warned him that something “not quite right” was about to happen, so he must’ve driven to the Avalon subdivision and settled down to watch the inn.
“He has an overdeveloped sense of intuition,” I explained. “That’s why I’ve made sure everyone knows to enter through the orchard. As long as he doesn’t see anything, we’ll be fine.”
“Did you confirm with the delegates?” George asked.
Jack nodded. “Otrokar at seven, the Merchants at seven thirty, and vampires at eight. I heard something interesting from the home office. They said we’re in for some rough waters with the vampires.”
George raised one eyebrow. “House Vorga.”
Jack sighed. “This thing when you know things before I tell them to you is really annoying.”
“So you’ve said.” George turned to me. “The delegation includes knights from every House immediately engaged in combat on Nexus. There are three major Houses and two minor. All major Houses initially were receptive to the peace talks; however, in the past few days, House Vorga began to lean in favor of continuing the conflict.”
“So what does that mean?” Gaston asked from the kitchen.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” George grimaced. “It could mean House Vorga made a secret alliance with House Meer to bring down the other Houses. It could mean someone in House Vorga has been offended by someone from House Krahr stepping on their shadow or wearing the wrong color or not pausing long enough before a sacred altar. It could mean someone saw a bird fly the wrong way over the steeple of the local cathedral. It’s vampire politics. It’s like sticking your hand into a barrel filled with forty cobras and trying to find one garden snake among them by touch.”
The best thing about vampire politics was that they were the Arbitrator’s problem. I just had to keep the vampires safe.
George was looking at the orchard, his face distant.
“Say, George?” Gaston asked. I glanced at him and he winked at me. “Why forty?”
“Because it’s a sufficiently large number to make the odds of finding a garden snake improbable,” George said, his voice flat.
“Yes, but why not fifty or a hundred? Why such an odd number? Forty? Snakes aren’t commonly measured in forties.”
George pivoted on his foot and looked at Gaston. The big man flashed a grin.
Jack chuckled to himself.
“When he concentrates like that,” Gaston told me, “if you’re really quiet, you can hear the gears in his head turning. Sometimes you catch a faint puff of smoke coming out of his ears…”
The air above the grass tore like a transparent plastic curtain, showing a deep purple void for a fraction of a second. The void blinked its purple eye, and a group of otrokars appeared on the grass. One, two, three… twelve. As expected.