One Fell Sweep (Innkeeper Chronicles #3)(25)

“Where is Helen?” Maud frowned.

“In the kitchen.” I pointed. A window opened in the wall. Helen was perched precariously on a stool above a large pot. Someone had trimmed one of my old aprons, the one with sunflowers, and put it on her. She was stirring the stuff in the pot with a big spoon. The inn’s tendrils hovered on both sides of her, ready to catch her if she fell.

I dug my phone out of my pocket and took a picture.

“He put her to work?” Maud stared.

Orro said something in his gravelly voice.

Helen nodded and sprinkled something into the soup and squeaked, “Yes, chef!”

“Give me that phone!” My sister grabbed the phone out of my hand and started snapping pictures.

Maud couldn’t feel her daughter in the kitchen. It would come back. It had to come back. She’d spent years at our parents’ inn and she never had any problems connecting to it.

“So what did you and the vampire talk about in the truck?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Was it a small talk kind of nothing or not going to tell you kind of nothing?”

“It was a keeping my mouth shut nothing. We didn’t speak. I have no interest in vampires. I’ve had enough of them for a lifetime.”

I smiled at her.

“Have you decided what to do about the Hiru?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Dad would approve,” she said. “He never could resist a down-on-your-luck story and there is no one more down than the Hiru.”

“Mom wouldn’t,” I said.

“Mom would, too. After the first Draziri showed up on the doorstep and issued threats.”

“I pity any Draziri who tried to threaten Mom.” If anyone could make them rethink an invasion of Earth, it would be our mother.

Our mother and our father. This was the entire point of the inn. This was why I had come back to Earth and hung their portrait in the front room. I’d planned to grow Gertrude Hunt into the kind of inn that was flooded with visitors. Sooner or later one of them would recognize my parents and tell me what happened to them. The galaxy was huge and the chances of that happening were tiny, but it was all I had.

“What do you think I should do?”

Maud pursed her lips, pretending to be deep in thought. “I think you should do what you think is right.”

“And you said I turned into Mom!”

Maud headed for the kitchen door. “You’re not pawning the decision off on me. You’re the innkeeper.”

I rolled my eyes and followed her into the kitchen.

“Mommy!”

Helen leapt off the stool, dashed across the kitchen, and jumped into Maud’s arms. It would’ve been an amazingly high jump for a human five-year-old.

“Here is my cutey!” Maud wrinkled her face.

Helen wrinkled hers, and they rubbed noses.

“I’m a soup chef,” Helen announced.

“Sous,” Orro growled from the pantry.

“And I have to say ‘yes, chef’ real loud.”

They were so cute. That’s not an adjective I normally would associate with my sister. How could I possibly ruin that?

But then, the ugly truth remained: the Hiru needed help and we needed to find our parents. Maud and I had so carefully talked around it, but both of us knew what was left unsaid. This was our best chance to find Mom and Dad. And if I let my sister catch one whiff of me wavering because I worried about her safety, she would skin me alive.

“When you and Klaus showed up that time to tell me the inn disappeared, I was in a different place.” Maud threw Helen up and caught her. Helen squealed and laughed. “I was the wife of a Marshal’s son, who was making a bid for the post of the Marshal. My world was very defined then. I knew where we were going and how we were going to get there. I had my husband and his House, all the other knights who served with him and respected him. I had friends. We were admired, me and Melizard and our beautiful baby.”

“And now?”

“And now I’ve learned the truth. Husbands can fall out of love. Friends can betray you. But when you’re stuck in a hellhole far from home, your family will move heaven and earth to get you back. We need to get them back, Dina. They would do it for us.”

The inn chimed twice,fast. Well, of course.

“Who is it?” Maud asked.

“Local law enforcement.” I made a beeline for the door.

“Friendly?”

“No.”

“Does he know?”

“He knows. He just can’t prove it.”

I composed myself, swung the door open, and smiled at Officer Marais through the screen. He didn’t smile back. He was generally not in a smiley mood around me. Trim, dark-haired, and in his thirties, Officer Marais peered at me through the screen door as if I were already in the back of his cruiser with handcuffs on. Beast squeezed in front of me and let out one cautious bark.

“Officer Marais. What a pleasure.”

“Miss Demille.”

My father always told me that all people had magic. Most never learned they did, because they never tried to do anything out of the ordinary. But in a few gifted individuals it bubbled to the surface anyway. Officer Marais was one of those bubblers. His sense of intuition was honed to supernatural sharpness. He had identified the inn as a place where odd things kept happening and mounted a full-scale surveillance of us. Which is how he ended up getting into a fight with some vampire knights. Predictably they took a blood axe to his vehicle, and Officer Marais was deposited, trussed up like a deer, in my stables, while I twisted myself into a pretzel trying to falsify the footage from his dashcam and repair the damage to his vehicle so he couldn’t prove any of it happened.