Death and Relaxation (Ordinary Magic #1)(3)

I strode past Sven, across the yard, alongside the house to the backyard.

Looked like someone had used dynamite to start a bonfire. The fire wasn’t spreading—early May was still too wet for anything to do much more than smolder—but the hole had blown the heck out of the burn pile and a couple nearby tire planters.

Dan Perkin stood in front of the fire, cussing. From the dirt on him, he’d either been standing right in front of it when it’d blown, or had fallen on his way to see what the commotion was about.

“Hello, chief,” Pearl said from his porch at my right. “Everyone’s all right here.”

Pearl was in her early seventies—mortal—and a retired nurse out of Portland. She wore her hair back in a long braid and always carried her emergency kit backpack wherever she went.

Dan Perkin was lucky to have her as a neighbor.

“Thanks for coming over, Pearl.”

“Couldn’t sleep through this excitement, could I?” she said with a smile.

“Hey-up, chief,” a male voice called out behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder. Ben Rossi, the angel-faced, pale-haired, slender but incredibly strong chief of the volunteer fire department grinned as he hauled a hose out across the lawn. A lot of the Rossis held jobs in the first-responder and emergency departments.

It might seem weird to have a fire department full of vampires, but they were cheerfully immune to human suffering, and their strength and un-aliveness made them solid allies in times of disaster.

Building burning down? Send in the guys who don’t need to breathe and can’t die by fire. Stuck in a ditch? A vampire was one of the fastest, surest climbers around. Kitten stuck in a tree? You’ve never seen a scary fanger go gooey and sweet so fast. Turns out vampires loved cats.

I wasn’t sure if that was a Rossi thing or a fanger thing, but it was adorable.

Jame Wolfe, Ben’s partner both at work and home, strode along behind him, the hose over his shoulder. Built like a wrestler, he had the Wolfe family dark good looks and swagger that pretty much made sure he never went to bed alone.

“Boys,” I said.

“Chief Reed,” Jame replied.

Jame wasn’t a vampire—he was a werewolf. Big family of them owned the rock quarry south of town.

It had been quite the gossip—well, among those who knew about the supernatural inhabitants of the place—when Ben and Jame had moved in together. There had been more than a little speculation as to how the cross-species relationship would be handled. So far, they seemed to be dealing with it just fine: both the gossip and the relationship.

“About time you got here!” Dan Perkin yelled at the firefighters. “My whole house could have burned down by the time you showed up.”

“He’s not very happy,” Pearl said.

Right about then, Dan zeroed in on me. “Chief!”

Dan Perkin was a small man—mortal—in his sixties, thin as a plucked feather. He was wearing a baseball hat, dirt-stained jeans, and John Deere jacket. He was also dusty, angry, and pacing the dirt in front of the burn pile.

He stopped pacing and stomped right up to me instead.

“Cuff him to the wreck at the bottom of the lake and throw away the keys!” he yelled.

“Mr. Perkin.” I put one hand on his upper arm and guided him to the overhang of his back porch. I tried to get him to sit, but he was having none of it.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Canoe dummy wet napkin?” he yelled. “What are you talking about?”

“Blast blew his ears,” Pearl said. “You’ll need to speak up.”

I raised my voice. “What happened?”

“I almost died is what happened! Heard something out here. Came to look. Then: boom! Worse than that, my patch, all of it is gone! Blown to bits.”

“Patch?”

“My garden. My rhubarb.” He pointed his finger at the sky. “As God is my witness, I’m telling you it was Chris Lagon.”

I was pretty sure that the gods really couldn’t be bothered to stand witness to most of anything Dan claimed to be true. He was always mad at someone, always convinced he’d been cheated, walked over, victimized.

Still, someone had just blown up his brush pile.

“Chris Lagon blew up your rhubarb?” I asked. “Did you see him?”

“No. But he knew I was going to enter the contest this year. Knew I was going to beat him in the drink category. Rhubarb root beer. It’s gonna make me millions.”

It was probably terrible, but I nodded and pulled out the notepad I kept in my pocket. I clicked the pen and jotted down Chris’s name.

“He threatened me!”

“When? What exactly did he say?”

“Yesterday. At his place.”

“House or business?”

“Brewery. Bum sleeps there in the boat. Did you know that? That must be a health violation.”

I knew exactly where Chris slept, and why. Saltwater creatures always stayed near water.

“He threatened you at the brewery?” I said in an attempt to derail his next rant.

“Yes! He said, this is what he said. He said, ‘Bring it on, old man.’” Dan stabbed a finger down with each word as if he’d just hammered the last nails into Chris Lagon’s coffin. “He wants me out of the picture. He wants the rhubarb trophy.”