Clean Sweep (9 page)

The woman finished her song. The file said it was a lullaby. I wondered if Sean had heard it in childhood.

"Okay," he said finally. "Hit me with it."

"You won't like it."

"Why don't you let me decide that?"

He did ask. I would remind him of that if he freaked out.

"There is a star system with two habitable planets, Auul and Mraar." The image changed, pulling the image of the two planets out of the file. "It's not clear if Auul was habitable at the start or terraformed. Everyone agrees that civilization began on Mraar. If you ask the Sun Horde, a splinter group occupied Auul and declared independence. If you ask your people, they were exiled to Auul and abandoned. We don't know what the truth is, and we never will. Everyone does agree that after the civilizations had existed independently for almost a thousand years, the Raoo of Mraar invaded Auul."

I sat in the chair. I was tired of standing.

"How do you know this?" Sean asked.

"I'm an innkeeper."

"That explains nothing, but okay. What happened with invasion?"

"The Raoo got their butts kicked. It's difficult to occupy a planet."

"Makes sense in theory. Getting enough troops to the surface would be a challenge."

He was taking all this rather well. He probably thought I was crazy and had decided to stay calm in case I started putting tinfoil on my head.

"The war dragged on for years, really more a cycle of invasions and hasty retreats, until the Raoo acquired a gate. Whether someone sold them the technology or they stumbled on it, we don't know. Most likely they bought it somehow."

"What's a gate?"

"It's an Einstein-Rosen bridge. A miniature traversable wormhole, which permits nearly instantaneous travel from one part of the universe to another. There are naturally occurring wormholes, but the Raoo built a synthetic one. It took a huge amount of energy to keep it running, and it could only be active for a short time or it would destabilize the planet. In the fourteen days it was open, the Raoo dumped millions of their troops on Auul. Mraar was overcrowded and Auul had always been sparsely populated. Your people were losing. With two-thirds of the planet occupied, they resorted to drastic measures and engineered werewolfism. They proceeded to administer it to every citizen, raised a new generation of superfighters, and the tide of war began to turn."

"Back up." Sean held his hand out. "What do you mean engineered?"

"They created an
ossai
, an artificial microscopic programmable virus. They loaded it with a program and used it to rewrite the genetic code of living organisms. Once it was administered, the ossai made the current generation stronger and faster and reshaped their offspring into werewolves. When you change shape it must hurt, but it doesn't hurt as much as it should. That's because when you change, the ossai in your body releases a painkiller."

"I've been in the military," Sean said. "I've had a lot of blood tests."

"The ossai is tiny. It also self-destructs when removed from the body. Cursory tests wouldn't detect it, so unless someone sequences your genetic code, you will pass for a native."

He grimaced. "Never mind. What happened with the invasion?"

"It took the Raoo almost a century, but eventually they reverse engineered the ossai and made their own version, bigger, better, badder --the werecats, also known as the Sun Horde. Your people had anticipated that this would happen because by the time the Sun Horde emerged, they were already building their own gates. The decision was made to abandon Auul, but your people didn't want the Mraar to have it. They left the gates opened, knowing it would lead to a catastrophe, and evacuated as much of the population as they could to other places in the universe. It took years. To hold the gates against the incoming Sun Horde, they bred a second generation of werewolves, which has been described to me as more powerful but less stable, to which you apparently belong."

"Nice," Sean said.

"The alpha strain werewolves held the gates as long as they could until finally their operation created a tiny black hole. The black hole consumed the planet, releasing enormous amounts of energy, until Auul was completely gone. The resulting cataclysm created a very small but super-dense mass, which upset the balance within the star system, rendering Mraar uninhabitable. Some of the Sun Horde got out, but not many. The death count was in the billions. Now Mraar is a dead rock and Auul is an asteroid belt. The people of both are refugees on the known worlds."

I waved the broom and the screen disappeared.

"That's an interesting story," Sean said. "So according to this creative narrative, when did all this happen?"

"The werewolves have been visiting Earth for centuries," I said. "Some via other gates, some by different means. But the last refugees from Auul arrived here forty-two years ago."

Most people would've told me I was insane by now. Sean was calm like a rock.

Beast ran down the stairs, leaped into my lap, and showed him her teeth.

He bared his own teeth at her. "I'll deal with you later." He looked at me. "I need to make a phone call. Do you mind?"

I nodded at the back door. "The porch is all yours."

He went out. The screen door shut behind him, and I heard his muted voice. "Hey, Dad. It's me. Does the word Auul mean anything to you?"

Chapter Six

Beast and I watched from the inside of the inn as Sean paced back and forth. He was talking to his parents and it wasn't going well.

"Aha. Were you ever going to tell me? ... When did you think I would be old enough? I'm a grown goddamned man, Dad. I've fought in two wars. ... No, sir, I'm not being disrespectful, I'm angry. ... I do have a right to be angry. You lied to me. ... Not telling the whole story is still lying, Dad. It's lying by omission. ... I think we're doing a fine job discussing this over the phone. ... Yes, please, do put me on speaker. ... Hey, Mom. ... Yes. ... Yes. ... No, I'm not upset. ... A girl. ... No, you can't talk to her."

And now I was involved. I could just imagine how that conversation would go. "Yes, hi, who are you and how do you know so much about werewolves and what exactly is your relationship with my son..."

"An innkeeper."

Now what?

Sean walked down the steps, heading deeper into the orchard. I strained. His lips were moving, but he was out of my earshot.

I sighed and looked at Beast. She licked my hand. Sean was getting a crash course in inns and innkeepers and I had no clue what they were telling him.

Ten minutes later Sean put away his phone, came back inside, and landed in a chair.

"So, how did it go?"

"About as well as you think it did." He leaned against the chair and exhaled. "They both were in their twenties when they came over here, enlisted in the Army, and built a new life. They didn't tell me because apparently our particular second-generation kind isn't welcome among other Auul refugees, and they didn't want me to have a chip on my shoulder."

A chip? Now he was carrying a two-by-four.

Sean fixed me with his stare. Uh-oh.

"How does the broom work?"

"Magic."

He locked his jaw. "Don't give me that. You hit me with the planets and wormholes. You cracked the door open. Might as well just swing it wide."

No, he cracked the door open with his midnight marking expedition. I petted Beast. "Have you ever heard of Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction? It states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Take a smart phone and hand it to an ancient Roman. He'll think it's a magic window into the world of the gods and that the Beyoncé video playing on it is showing him Venus. The broom is magic. The inn is magic. I'm magic. I can feel it, I can manipulate it, but I can't explain it. You've transformed hundreds of times in your life under the belief that it's magic. Why does it matter now that it's not?"

Sean drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair. "So this place is supposed to be a sanctuary?"

"Yes and no. It's an inn, a neutral ground. An abnormality in the ordinary reality of this planet or whatever passes for it. I'm an innkeeper. Here I'm supreme. If you are accepted as a guest, you fall under my protection and as long as you stay here, you will enjoy the right of sanctuary. For various reasons, Earth is a way station for many travelers. We're the Atlanta of the galaxy: many beings stop here for a layover. Some are alien and some are not. The innkeepers maintain the order, provide them with a safe place to stay, and minimize the population exposure and the bloodbath that could result. Nobody wants a worldwide panic. It has been so for hundreds of years."

"So the old lady is a guest?"

"Yes."

"How long will she be staying?"

"She paid for a lifetime stay."

"Clever." Sean leaned forward. "So she stays in your inn and nobody can get her out. What did she do?"

"You don't want to know."

"You're not going to tell me."

I shook my head. "No." I protected my guests and that included safeguarding their privacy.

Sean pondered me. I could almost feel the wheels turning in his head. He was disturbingly quick on the uptake.

"My father told me that, as an innkeeper, you're supposed to remain neutral."

"It's customary that I do. There is no compulsion or law that forces me to maintain my neutrality."

"And you can't ask for help."

"Your father is wrong. It's up to each innkeeper's discretion whether or not to ask a guest or a third party for assistance. Most innkeepers never resort to such requests because we don't want to put others in danger. The safety of our guests is our first priority."

Sean smiled. Under ordinary circumstances, I might have enjoyed seeing it --he was really handsome --but the way he was smiling now made me want to turn my broom into a shield, preferably with spikes, and brace myself.

"So you asked me for help and now I'm in danger because of it."

What? "I did no such thing. At no point did the words 'Help me, Sean Evans' come out of my mouth."

Beast barked to underscore my point.

"You approached me" --he counted off on his fingers --"you admonished me for my inaction, you tried to elicit an assurance that I would do something about the situation, and then, after I assured you I would, you still involved yourself in a violent action, escalating the level of danger for both of us. All of this can be construed as a plea for assistance and cooperation, and now because of you, my life is in jeopardy."

"No." This was crazy. There were so many things I wanted to say at once if the words would just get out of each other's way.

"Fine." He grinned again, flashing white teeth. "Is there someone we can contact and settle this dispute? Somebody with the power of oversight, perhaps?"

The Innkeeper Assembly. Oh, you bastard. His father must've told him about it. "Are you threatening me?"

"I don't make threats. I solve problems."

"And that didn't sound conceited. Not at all."

He spread his arms. "I'm simply stating facts."

The Assembly was an informal self-governing organization of innkeepers. If Sean went to them, their investigation would begin and end with one question:
"Was the inn directly threatened?"
I would have to answer no. Technically I hadn't broken any written laws because we didn't have any, but I'd broken the unspoken canon of neutrality. They would view it as unwise, advise me to not do it again, and bump the rating of the inn down to one mark, which would broadcast to everyone that staying at Gertrude Hunt equaled gambling with your safety. The inn was at already at two marks due to having been abandoned and me being an unknown commodity. My parents' inn had been rated at five. Getting branded with one mark would kill any chances of reviving Gertrude Hunt. We would not recover.

Argh. He had me and he knew it. "Just what exactly did your parents do in the military?"

"My dad was arrested once because he didn't know the laws, so he decided he would learn all of them. He went green to gold, which means he became an officer and worked as a JAG Corps attorney. My mother really enjoyed watching people's heads explode from far away, so she served as a countersniper."

Great. "What do you want?"

"I want us to work together."

"So let me get this straight. First, I ask you to work together and you refuse, then you invade my property, make fun of me, attempt to intimidate me, attack my dog..."

"I think calling her a dog is a stretch."

"Her ancestors were Shih Tzus, so technically she's a canine derivative. You attack my dog..."

"She chased me up a tree!"

Beast growled.

"You deserved it. Where was I?"

"Dog," he said helpfully.

"Yes. You attack my dog, then you attack me in the yard, and now you're blackmailing me into cooperating. Wouldn't it have been easier to just work with me when I asked you to?"

He pointed at himself. "First, lone wolf. I work alone. That's my natural setting. Second, I thought you were just a normal person who somehow knew about werewolves. I didn't have all the relevant information. Had I known you had a haunted house, a magic broom, and a devil dog on your side, my initial response would've been different."

I crossed my arms.

"I'm sorry for intimidating you," he said. "I'm sorry if I scared you."

"You didn't."

"Well, I'm sorry in any case. Like it or not, you asked me for help, and now we're in this together. It's in your best interest and mine to nuke these assholes as soon as possible. You know more about what's going on, but I can kill them faster and cleaner than you can."

That was true, but I didn't have to like it.

"If you work with me, I promise I won't keep secrets from you, and I will take your opinion into consideration before I act. I also promise not to seek revenge on the small demon in your lap for a completely unprovoked attack."

Beast growled and he smiled. It was a disarming, boyish smile. The wolf was still in his eyes, but now he pretended very hard that he was just a small fluffy puppy. "What do you say?"