Clean Sweep (Innkeeper Chronicles, #1)(23)

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."