Clean Sweep (10 page)

I didn't want him going to the Assembly. I had a feeling he wouldn't, but the risk was there and I couldn't ignore it. And, setting that aside, I needed help. Werewolf kind of help. Which is why I had approached him in the first place.

"Dina?"

And he had to stop saying my name in that voice. "I'm wondering if I should make you grovel more."

"That's probably all the groveling you're going to get. If you say no, I'll go for it by myself. It will be messy and ugly."

I exhaled. There was no point in fighting with him anymore. "How's your sense of smell?"

"Acute."

"Do you think you could smell a foreign object inside one of these creatures?"

Sean blinked. "I'll give it a shot."

"Okay. We work together. But only until this is over. And if you betray my trust, I will banish you out of this inn. I mean it, Sean. You have my word that it won't be gentle. You won't like it, and it will take you a long time to find your way back to your house."

*** *** ***

I had two options. I could bring Sean into my lab under the house or I could bring the body of the stalker to him. The first involved letting him into my private place where I stored books and other things. Typically guests were not allowed in the lab and for a good reason. The second involved rearranging the architecture of the inn.

I wasn't ready to let him into the lab. I wasn't ready to let him see what I could really do inside the inn either, but that seemed like a lesser evil at this point.

I tapped the floor with the broom, letting my magic stream through it and down into the floor, into the walls, into the laboratory table below us. I pushed. Wood and metal flowed like molten wax. A long, narrow fissure formed in the floor of the living room. The wood dripped down, the hole widened, and the lab table emerged, complete with the body of the stalker on it, still secured with metal restraints. I had tried to autopsy it, and the front of it lay open, the skin pinned aside with surgical clamps. I wasn't quite sure what the stalker's inner organs were supposed to look like, but my spear had done a number on its insides, and currently it was a mess of torn tissue. Dry tissue. Its blood had evaporated despite me sealing it in plastic.

"Son of a bitch." Sean stared at the table. "What else can this place do?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

"Yes, I would."

"How about you sniff out the tracker instead?"

Sean circled the body. "I know you stabbed it at least twenty times."

"How?"

"Well, the fact that its internal organs are a mess is a clue, but I went down to the Quirks' place once the cops left. There are scratches on the brick of the eastern wall, the kind a bladed weapon makes. So what did you use?"

He didn't miss much. "A spear."

Sean bent closer to the body. His nostrils flared.

"Well? What's your professional opinion?"

"A few years ago, our unit came home from a tour of duty in an ugly place. For the whole last month of that tour, a buddy of mine, Jason Thomas, was talking about how he would get home and eat a hotdog. He wanted a hotdog with everything on it. So we get home, we go out that night, and he gets himself two hotdogs with everything on them. Then we hit the bars and he goes straight for Jose Cuervo. Long story short, two hours later he threw up in an alley."

"And?"

"My professional opinion is that this smells just like that hotdog-tequila vomit."

Ha. Ha. "I could've told you that and I'm not a werewolf."

Sean took another whiff. "Look, I've smelled decomposing bodies before. Human bodies, animal bodies. This smells wrong. Where is it from, because it's not from around here."

"It's from some hellish corner of the universe I know pretty much nothing about."

"What am I smelling for? Metal, plastic, what?"

"I don't know."

Sean inhaled again. "The carcass is too acrid. Metal and plastic don't give off strong scents. If there's something in there, the stench is blocking it."

"So far you're not much help."

"Dina, I don't even know what I'm looking for."

He had a point. I wasn't being fair. I was being snippy too, and it really had nothing to do with Sean and everything to do with me being frustrated. "Would an X-ray help?"

"You X-rayed it?"

I raised my hand. The X-ray slid through the floor and I held it out to Sean. He lifted it to the window, letting the light shine through the film. "What the hell...?"

"That's what I said." I sat in the chair. "I've tried magnets. I've scanned it for magic emissions, radio signal, radiation, and I went over it with a voltage detector just in case. Nothing."

"Are you sure it even has a tracker?"

"No."

Sean pondered me. "How about starting at the beginning?"

I explained about dahaka and stalkers and the now-destroyed inn.

Sean frowned. "So wait a minute, someone destroyed that inn and your Assembly didn't do anything about it?"

I shook my head. "No. Each innkeeper is on his or her own. The Assembly just sets policies and rates the inns, kind of like a cosmic Triple A. If someone walks in here and kills me, they'll do nothing about it. If you went to them complaining about me, they'd just rate my inn unsafe, which means nobody would stay here."

"So I would be taking away your livelihood."

The way he said it suggested he felt guilty about it. Huh. What do you know, a werewolf with a conscience. "Not only that, but an inn is a living entity. It forms a symbiotic relationship with its guests. Without guests, the inn will weaken and fall dormant, almost like a bear slipping into hibernation. If the inn stays dormant for too long, it will wither and die."

The house creaked around me, the thick timbers in its wall groaning in alarm.

"There is no chance of that happening," I told it. "You have me and you have Caldenia."

"Is it sentient?" Sean peered at the walls.

"The house understands some things. I don't know if it's sentient in the way you and I are, but it's definitely a living thing, Sean."

Caldenia walked through the door. She was carrying a tomato vine with four ripe, red tomatoes on it. Caldenia saw the stalker's body. Her carefully shaped eyebrows rose.

Now what? "Yes, Your Grace?"

"I'm glad that after months of a perfectly boring existence, the inn is now a hotbed of interesting activity. I do have to tell you that the reek is abominable. What are you doing?"

"We're trying to determine if this corpse has a tracking device somewhere inside it."

"Ah. Have fun, but before you dig into it, look at this."

She showed me the tomatoes.

"I just had a perfectly lovely conversation with the woman who lives down the street. Her name is Emily, I believe."

"Mrs. Ward?"

Caldenia waved her fingers. "Yes, something or other. Apparently she grows tomatoes in her backyard."

"Did you go off the inn grounds?"

"Of course not, dear, I'm not an imbecile. We spoke over the hedge. I would like to grow tomatoes."

Whatever kept her occupied. "Very well. I'll purchase some plants and gardening tools."

"Also a hat," Caldenia said. "One of those hideous straw affairs with little flowers on them."

"Of course."

"I'm going to grow green tomatoes, and then we'll fry them in butter."

"Your Grace, you've never tried fried green tomatoes."

"Life is about new experiences." Caldenia gave me a toothy smile.

"I'd eat it," Sean said.

I stared at him.

He shrugged. "They're good."

"You blackmailed me. You are not invited for these theoretical fried tomatoes."

"Nonsense," Caldenia said. "They're my theoretical tomatoes. You are invited."

I sighed. That was all I could do.

Caldenia headed up the stairs and stopped. "By the way. Back in my younger days, a man broke into my estate and stole the Star of Inndar. It was a beautiful jewel, light blue and excellent for storing light-recorded data. I was keeping my financial records on it. I'd thought the man was perhaps a revolutionary come to heroically overthrow my rule, but sadly he was just an ordinary thief motivated by money. He was a karian, and he'd hidden dozens of pouches in his flesh. Before he was captured, he'd hidden the Star somewhere in his body. I required the jewel that evening to complete a certain financial agreement, and I didn't have time to dig through him and risk damaging the Star in the process."

"So what did you do?" Sean said.

Never ask that question.

"I boiled him, my dear. It is still the only sure way to separate hard bits from all that flesh. And you have the added advantage of your captive being already dead, so there will be none of those annoying screams to alert the neighborhood. Good luck."

She went up the stairs.

Sean looked at me. "Is she for real?"

"Very much so." I looked at the body. "If we try to boil it, there's no telling what sort of gasses or poisons it will release. We'll have to vent it outside, and it's going to stink." And it will be the kind of stench that would cause the whole neighborhood to call 911.

Sean thought about it. "Is that smoker I saw on the back porch okay to use?"

"Probably. Are you suggesting we smoke it?" What in the world...

"No, I am suggesting we smoke a side of pork ribs. With lots and lots of hickory wood."

*** *** ***

The stalker's body sprawled on the table like some grotesque butterfly straight out of a drug-induced nightmare. Although most of the blood had evaporated, it still had to weigh close to a hundred pounds. We'd have to take it apart.

"Do you have a really large pot?" Sean asked.

"Follow me."

I led him into the kitchen and to the door of my pantry, located a couple of cabinets away from the refrigerator. Sean leaned back out of the kitchen doorway, checked the wall width --it was a regular six-inch wall --and leaned back. "Follow you where? Into the closet?"

Oh, you chucklehead. I opened the door and flicked the light on. Five hundred square feet of pantry space greeted Sean. Nine rows of shelves lined the walls, all the way to the nine-foot ceiling. Pots and pans filled the front shelves, and past them flour, sugar, and other dry goods waited in large plastic containers, each with a small label. A large chest freezer stood on the right against the wall.

Sean surveyed the pantry, turned on his foot, went to check the wall again, and came back. "How?"

I waved my fingers at him. "Magic."

"But..."

"Magic, Sean." I walked in and pulled the enormous sixty-quart pot from the shelf in the corner. "I have several of those."

"Where did you get all this stuff?"

"Before this inn was orphaned, it was a thriving place. Many guests meant a lot of large meals. The question now is how will we boil the bodies? I'm not too wild about having them in my kitchen. I suppose we can get some electric hotplates, set them on the back patio on the slab, and put the pots on top of that."

"Mhm." Sean didn't seem convinced. "Would it be hot enough, that's the question."

"We might have to take that chance. We want low heat anyway."

He smirked at me. "Boiled many bodies, have you?"

"No, but I've made a lot of pulled pork."

"Sixty quarts is a lot of water to heat."

"What's the alternative?"

"Let me think about it," Sean said. "I'm off to Home Depot, then. I should be back in an hour. Do I need to pick up some pork ribs?"

"No." I opened the chest freezer. Sean stared at a three-foot-high tower of pork rib sides vacuum sealed in plastic. I'd stacked them up like cordwood.

Sean struggled to process the ribs. Clearly he had been slapped with one surprise too many today.

"Okay," he said finally. "I'll bite. Why?"

"Beast likes to eat them."

"That explains it." He turned to the door.

"Sean, how much money do you need?"

He gave me a flat look. No outrage, no anger, just a wall of no. "I'll be back in an hour." He went out the door.

Hell would bloom before Sean Evans started taking care of my bills. I'd make him take the money. I just had to be smart about it.

I looked at Beast. "I'm having serious doubts about our partnership."

Beast didn't answer.

I still had to do something about the stalker bodies. Folding them in half wouldn't do it. They still wouldn't fit. I picked up my broom and pushed my magic. The metal flowed, folding itself into a razor-sharp machete blade.

This would get messy.

Fifty-two minutes later, I heard a truck. The magic boomed as the vehicle came up my driveway... and kept going, around the house, rolling over my grass until it stopped at my back patio.

I strode to the back door. It opened for me and I stepped out onto the porch. Beast followed me. An orange rental truck from Home Depot waited on the grass, parked so the truck bed faced me. It was filled with stacks of paver stones. Next to them rested bags of gravel, sand, a two-by-four, fireproof bricks... Sean hopped out of the front seat, opened the tailgate, and picked up two fifty-pound bags of sand without any apparent effort, as if they were jugs of milk.

"What happened to the hot-plate plan?"

"I did some thinking and one, it won't generate enough heat and two, we need additional fire to cover the stench."

"Aha."

"I checked the fire ordinance and it says all fire pits of this type should be twenty-five feet from any flammable structure. This patio is too close to the house, so I'm going to build you a new one."

I smiled at him and tapped the patio with my broom, sending a pulse of magic through it. The concrete slab rose out of the ground and slid over the grass. I put it about thirty feet out. "Far enough?"

Sean blinked.

"Sean?"

He recovered. "Sure. Saves me some work."

"Do you want help?"

"No, I got it."

"Suit yourself. I'll go make some lemonade then."

I went inside and sat at the bay window. Sean went over to the patio, looked at it for a while, then tested it with his boot. The patio predictably stayed where it was. Sean pondered it.