Sweep with Me (Innkeeper Chronicles Book 5) Read online

  I had a feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.

  5

  I sat at the kitchen table, facing Caldenia. Two glasses of water and two plates waited between us. The first plate contained a freshly purchased Grand Burger. The second held its exact replica. It looked like the real thing—plump sesame-seed bun, thin patty, a stack of lettuce, pickles, and tomato, and melted yellow cheese. It smelled like the real thing.

  We had now bought thirty Grand Burgers, which had caused no end of fun making by the Favor delivery driver. Red Deer wasn’t that large, so we had gotten the same delivery driver three times in a row for an identical order of ten burgers each. When she made the final delivery, she asked if the Hamburgler was renting a room or if we were just making a documentary about fast food.

  To the right, Orro stood completely still in the kitchen, like a monument to culinary failure.

  Caldenia and I regarded each other like two duelists. Both burgers had been cut in half with surgical precision.

  “Shall we?” Caldenia inquired.

  I picked up my half of the Grand Burger and took a bite. It tasted just like the other four Grand Burgers I had tasted in the last four hours. I swallowed, drank some water, and picked up Orro’s burger. The first burger he presented to us several hours earlier tasted like heaven. The second was too chewy, the third was too mushy, the fourth was too salty. Taking another bite was kind of scary.

  I inhaled and bit into the burger.

  Cardboard. Soaked in meat juice.

  Caldenia picked up a napkin and delicately spat into it. “You know I live for your cooking, dear, but this wasn’t one of your better efforts.”

  Orro moved. Claws fanned my face and the two plates vanished, their contents hurled into the garbage. Orro leaned against the island, his back to the countertop, his face raised to the heavens, his arms hanging limp by his sides.

  “I cannot do it.”

  The defeat in his voice was so absolute, I wanted to hug him.

  “Of course you can’t,” Caldenia said. “You simply cannot make bad food.”

  “I should be able to replicate it. It’s a simple dish. I have all the ingredients.” He sounded so hollow.

  “This hamburger is not natural,” I told him. “Most dishes evolve naturally. Stews have meat and root vegetables because livestock is slaughtered in early winter and root vegetables keep well in the cellar through the cold months. Spring salad is called that because it’s made with the leafy greens and grasses available in early spring. The hamburger is an artificial construct. Cows are slaughtered in winter, tomatoes are best in late summer, lettuce is in season in spring, and that’s not counting the extra cow required to produce the milk used to make cheese for the patty and butter for the bun.”

  Orro stared at me.

  “It’s mass-produced, inexpensive, and meant to be quick and convenient, but still pack enough calories to be filling.” I couldn’t tell if I was making any headway. “They use a particular cut of meat for it, likely the cheapest possible, and they add things to it, which accounts for the texture and moisture of the patty. No matter what I do to ground beef, it doesn’t have that texture.”

  “But you don’t have my training and experience. I have tried everything,” Orro said, his voice still flat. “I added fat, I added stock, I emulsified the meat. I have tried corn starch, oils, and spices. For the sake of this hamburger, I have committed the sin of adding MSG and silicone dioxide. It’s all for naught. I’m a failure.”

  He spun around and marched out of the kitchen.

  I took a deep breath and slowly blew the air out.

  “We have to let him stew in his despair,” Caldenia said. “Otherwise, we may never again be served a decent meal.”

  “That’s a bit harsh, your Grace.”

  “Coddling never leads to improvement.”

  The inn’s magic brushed against me, as if someone had tossed a rock into a placid pond and the waves from it splashed against me. Someone had crossed the inn’s boundary.

  It was past nine, and Sean was still out.

  I called up a screen from the northeast side of the property. Four people in dark clothes crept through the brush. They wore black balaclavas that hid their heads and faces except for a narrow strip around the eyes and carried submachine guns.

  I pivoted the screen to Caldenia with a flick of my fingers. “Rudolph Peterson’s ninjas.”

  Caldenia rubbed her hands together. “Would it be too presumptuous to ask for one? I’ve been eating these dreadful hamburgers.”

  “You know our policy. Gertrude Hunt doesn’t serve sentient beings as food.”

  Caldenia rolled her eyes.

  The four “commandos” snuck through the bushes, painstakingly careful where they put their feet. The original plan was to pretend to be just a normal establishment, but guns upped the stakes.

  If Sean were home, he would hunt them down, put their heads on a pike, and then present it to Peterson like a shish kebab.

  I tapped my fingers on the table. The leading ninja, a man, judging by the height and the shoulders, sank into the ground up to his knees.

  Everyone froze.

  The intruders scanned the brush, listening for any noises. When nothing out the ordinary happened, two of them stepped closer to their leader and tried to pull him out. I let them work him free and then sank the one on the left up to his hips.

  Everyone froze again.

  It took them three minutes to get their friend out. They huddled up and made fancy hand gestures, some of which included forceful pointing, making fists, and drawing lines across their throats. Finally, a consensus must have been reached, because they backed up a few yards, fanned out, and started north, trying to skirt the troublesome patch of ground.

  I let them take ten steps and then sank the one on the right down to their knees.

  Caldenia cracked a smile.

  They pulled my victim out and formed a single line, the leader taking point. He unsheathed a large knife, hacked off a sapling, and tested the ground with it. The ground held. He raised his hand and moved two fingers, motioning the team forward. They started moving again, single file, each intruder putting his feet in the steps of the one in front of them.

  I let them take fifteen steps and sank the last ninja into the ground down to their waist. The masked human frantically pawed the ground, as the team kept moving.

  “Help,” the ninja hissed in a female voice.

  The leader whirled around. The balaclava hid his face, but his body radiated “what the fuck” with every cell of his being. The two other gate-crashers grabbed their sunken friend and tried to pull her out. I held her still.

  They strained.

  One, two, three…

  The intruder popped free with sudden force and the three ninjas collapsed on the ground in a heap. Caldenia chuckled.

  The leader raised his arms.

  The three ninjas scrambled upright. The woman I had sunk dusted off her pants, pointed to herself, and jabbed her thumb to the right, indicating the direction they had come from.

  The leader shook his head and pointed toward the inn.

  The female ninja shook her head.

  The leader pointed to himself, pointed to the ninja, and pointed at the inn again.

  The female ninja gave him the finger, pretended to wash her hands off, and raised them in the air.

  I sank the three remaining ninjas down to their armpits.

  The woman nodded, executed a crisp about-face, and marched back the way they had come.

  “The voice of reason,” Caldenia commented. “She deserves the chance to skulk another day.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Mercy, your Grace?”

  “Natural selection,” Caldenia said.

  The door to Baha-char opened deep within the inn. Sean.

  In thirty seconds, he came into the kitchen, put his arms around me, and kissed me. He came back. The relief was so real, I almost slumped down in my seat.

 
; Sean smiled at me and saw the screen. “Visitors?”

  “Rudolph Peterson came to see us this afternoon.”

  “Do me a favor, hold them just like that.”

  Sean pulled off his shirt and walked out of the kitchen door.

  On the screen, the three figures struggled to free themselves. Digging yourself out when you are in dirt up to your armpits was difficult under normal circumstances, and I had no intention of letting them go.

  I felt Sean move through the grounds, unnaturally fast, and whispered, sending my voice to his ear. “Don’t kill them.”

  The moon slipped out from behind a ragged grey cloud, flooding the scene with silver light. The brush parted.

  The three struggling humans held still.

  A lupine beast emerged from the undergrowth, so large, his head would be even with my chest. Sheathed in dark fur, huge, silent, the king of wolves lowered his head, his amber eyes glowing with reflected fire, and padded toward the three intruders.

  They didn’t move. They didn’t blink or breathe, as his hand-sized paws landed next to them.

  Sean circled them, inhaling their scent. He stopped before the leader, in plain view of the two others.

  A long moment stretched by.

  Sean opened his jaws. In the light of the moon, his fangs glinted like daggers. He bit the leaders head.

  The ninja on the left screamed, a hoarse cry of pure fear.

  “Oh dear,” Caldania said. “I think he broke that one.”

  Sean pulled the man’s mask off and spat it to the side. The leader gaped at him, a light-skinned man in his early forties, with brown hair cut military short, his eyes glassy and wide open.

  Sean lowered his head and stared at the man, his fangs an inch from the intruder’s face. For a torturous few seconds nobody moved. Then Sean turned and melted back into the darkness of the woods.

  I jettisoned the ninjas from the dirt. They scrambled to their feet and ran back the way they came.

  Sean had bought enough spare parts and weapons to outfit a small army, so much so, that he could only carry a small fraction of his purchases, which he referred to as the “really cool stuff.”

  “A three-coil liquefier?”

  Sean hefted the six-foot-long cannon that resembled some ridiculous video game gun. Two tendrils of striated wood slithered from the ceiling, wrapped around the gun, and sucked it up. Gertrude Hunt and he seemed to have no trouble communicating.

  “Why would you ever feel the need to turn carbon-based life-forms into primordial soup?”

  “Because it’s easier to dispose of the remains.”

  “Why not an anti-matter death ray then?” I was only half joking. There were several weapons in existence that would have qualified for that description.

  He winked at me. “Liquefier was on sale.”

  I rubbed my face, trying to adjust to the new arsenal. Above us, Gertrude Hunt creaked, installing the cannon.

  I’ve had to shut down the koo-ko “discussions” twice in the past four hours. A liquefier was entirely too much temptation at the moment.

  “Wilmos is going to deliver the rest tomorrow. Do you think we have enough firepower to survive one night with the Drífen in the house?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I loaded a house’s worth of sarcasm into my voice. “We will have to muddle through somehow.”

  “I said I was sorry about Marais.”

  “I appreciate the two of you conspiring to keep me safe, but the inn and I had it under control and there are strict rules that govern what we can and cannot do. Marais is not a guest. He’s not staff. He’s an aware outsider. That means that the responsibility for his awareness and what he might do with it rests on our shoulders. You already broke the rules when you gave him a subatomic vaporizer. If the Assembly finds out, it will create a problem.”

  Sean grunted. “First, Marais is cool. Second, the vaporizer is telepathically linked to him and is indistinguishable from a normal police baton. It’s harmless, until he decides it’s not. Third, I keep hearing how the Assembly doesn’t like this and there will be trouble if they find out about that. What has this Assembly ever done for you?”

  “They gave me a magic inn and access to a treasure trove of galactic knowledge.”

  “They gave you an inn that was a hair away from dying, and you nursed it back to health, while they didn’t lift a finger to help.”

  I held out my hand. Sean’s copper robe fell out of the ceiling into my fingers. I thrust it at him. “It’s fifteen minutes till midnight. Put the robe on and quit complaining. You knew the deal when you signed up.”

  “You sound like my drill sergeants.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him and we went down to the kitchen, as he slipped on his robe.

  The backyard had been transformed. Colorful lanterns hung in the air, lavender, pink, green, and a warm, happy yellow. Lengths of silky fabric draped the outer wall of the inn, curving to both sides, forming canopies over the porch and part of the lawn. Delicate lantern flowers, turquoise, pink, and magenta, bloomed on the lawn. To the left, a pair of lantern peacocks the size of a car, perched among the flowers. To the right, a lantern tiger pair guarded their cub. A path stretched from the porch to the spot where the Drífan herald had entered yesterday, bordered by lantern jellyfish, suspended from nearly invisible wires. Their colorful paper tentacles swayed in the breeze.

  It was just me and Sean. Caldenia was watching from her quarters, but I didn’t think it would be wise for her to be present. Orro had disappeared into his rooms. When I had notified him that the Drífen were incoming, he hadn’t responded.

  The night was quiet. A cold wind stirred my hair.

  Sean reached into his sleeve and pulled out a flower. It was white and frilly, with brilliant blue specks on the petals and a deep blue center. He held it out to me.

  Awww. He brought me a flower.

  I took it and smelled it. “Thank you. It’s lovely.”

  We were standing on the porch together at midnight, with the magical lanterns glowing all around us. In a few moments, all hell could break loose, but for now it was just us. When I got old, I would remember this moment, the moment when Sean brought me a flower from Baha-char.

  The Drífen arrived.

  There was no power surge, no bright light from the sky, no gate in the fabric of existence. They simply appeared at the edge of the field and walked toward us. There were six of them: Zedas; the Akeraat from the previous evening; the small creature that had accompanied him; a very large woman in silver armor, with nearly white skin and equally pale hair, carrying a halberd on her back; a man dressed in black with dark brown skin and a wealth of glossy dark hair pulled back from his face, who was like a dagger, compact, fast, and probably deadly; an olive skinned woman in her early forties, her hair twisted into elaborate knots, walking primly in a green and white robe; and in front of them all, a woman in her early thirties, wrapped in an old cloak.

  I searched for their magic. The woman in the cloak felt almost inert, but the others were saturated with power. I could feel them moving through the inn grounds, dense concentrated knots of magic. Gertrude Hunt creaked.

  Steady. I won’t let them hurt you.

  They came within fifteen feet of us and stopped.

  “Greetings, innkeepers,” the woman in the cloak said. “Thank you for accepting my request and extending your hospitality to us.”

  This was the liege lord? I didn’t know who I expected but she wasn’t it. She looked perfectly normal. About thirty, maybe thirty-five, with deep bronze skin, pretty, athletic build, average height. The only remarkable thing about her were her dark eyes, the same nearly black as Rudolph Peterson’s, and dark green hair. Even here in Red Deer, Texas, I saw people with green hair on a regular basis. I could have passed her in the store and never looked twice.

  My brain was still processing, but my mouth was already moving. “Welcome, honored guests. Let me show you to your rooms.”

  The door behind m
e slid to the side. A hallway formed, cutting straight through the kitchen and other rooms, sectioned off from them with invisible walls. I didn’t want any interference.

  The liege lord and I entered, walking side by side. Behind us, her entourage followed. Sean brought up the rear and the tunnel collapsed behind him as soon as he passed.

  “Did you make the call?” she asked. She seemed, not tired exactly, but resigned, like a person facing a mountain she didn’t want to climb.

  “I did. I told him your conditions. He arrived this morning.”

  “Did he try to force his way into your inn?”

  “Twice. He did attempt to buy me first.”

  She glanced at me. There was a magnetic authority in her gaze. I still felt no magic.

  “He cannot enter while I’m here,” the liege lord said. “Not until the appointed time. I don’t wish to see him.”

  “He won’t be a problem,” I told her.

  “My uncle is the very definition of a problem. He’s persistent.”

  That cinched it. She was definitely American. “Here I own the air we breathe. Your uncle won’t enter without my permission.”

  “I hope so, innkeeper.”

  I had miscalculated with the bedroom. There was a weariness in her, a kind of bitter determination. She needed comfort in the worst way, and when we sought comfort, we went home. That’s why the hamburger. She didn’t want the beautiful Drífan bedroom. She wanted an echo of home.

  I reached out with my magic, carving a new room off the bedroom I had made yesterday. And now the symmetry of the original bedroom was off. I frantically shifted the columns.

  “Is something the matter, innkeeper?” the liege lord asked.

  “No. Are you hungry?”

  “Not tonight.”

  We came to the massive double doors. They swung open before us and the common room of the Drífan palace glittered beyond. The trick to building successful rooms wasn’t in duplicating the guest’s original environment. When they travelled, they wanted to see something new. If they arrived at an exact replica of the palace they left, they would be disappointed. Instead, a successful innkeeper took the elements of the original and used their imagination to create something new, familiar enough to be comfortable yet different enough to not feel stale.