Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #5)(5)

No reaction.

“A man like you stuck in a place like this. What a waste.”

Sean said nothing.

“Wilmos is missing,” she said.

Wilmos was a first-strain werewolf, a veteran, one of the oldest survivors of Auul. The werewolfism kept him spry, but he was an adult when Sean’s parents were born, and he was instrumental in creating their alpha strain. After Auul was destroyed, Wilmos made his name as a mercenary. Now he ran a weapons shop at Baha-char and served as a go-between for mercenaries and the people who needed them.

Wilmos thought Sean walked on water. We’d met by chance, and when Sean decided he wanted to see the universe for himself, Wilmos showed him the ropes. He was the one who’d gotten Sean into that Nexus mess, and I would never forgive him for that. Ever.

Wilmos was also responsible for our current enthusiastic suitor problem. During the war on Nexus, Sean had assumed the identity of Turan Adin, an unkillable general who led the Merchant forces of Clan Nuan. In reality, Turan Adins dropped like flies, but their armor covered them completely, hiding their faces, so when one of them died, the Merchants simply hired a new one, put the armor on them, and sent them back into the slaughter. Some only lasted a few days, others a few weeks. Sean was the last Turan Adin. He had survived for 18 months.

When that war finally ended, Sean gave the armor back to the Merchants and stayed with me because he loved me. Nobody was supposed to find out that he used to be Turan Adin. However, Wilmos couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He was bursting at the seams with pride and little by little he let that cat out of the bag, one secret conversation at a time. The werewolves knew.

The werewolf woman narrowed her eyes at Sean. “Word is, Wilmos asked you for help and you turned him down because you were too busy playing house with a human girl. People say you’re a coward. That you’ve gone soft. The wolf who subdued otrokars and vampire knights, reduced to a mere shadow of himself. So, I came to see for myself what happened to the hero of Nexus. You used to be somebody. What’s that like? To just give up and turn your back on a friend?”

She leaned forward as much as the restraints would allow, focused on him. She’d challenged him in his territory, and now she expected him to react. She would’ve liked it if he’d hauled her upright, slammed her against the wall, and growled in her face. It would be a display of dominance she could understand. She would submit, and then they would go to search for Wilmos together, without me, so she could prove to him how much more awesome she was as a potential mate.

Sean opened his mouth. “I don’t know you.”

The werewolf woman blinked.

He held his hand out. His broom landed into his fingers, except for him it was always a spear, a sturdy shaft tipped with a razor-sharp blade.

“Your welcome is withdrawn.” He tapped the butt of his spear on the floor.

The inn opened, walls and rooms flying out of the way, revealing a hallway leading to a distant door. It snapped open, and the bright sunshine of Baha-char flooded through it.

The tendril binding the werewolf woman jerked her off the floor.

“Wait!” she screamed.

The tendril shot toward the door and tossed her out, into the light. The door slammed shut. The normal architecture of the inn reasserted itself. Beast let out a satisfied bark.

“A little rough,” I said.

“She’ll land on her feet. This is getting tiresome. They need to get the message.”

We started toward the kitchen.

“What was that about Wilmos?” I asked.

Sean shrugged. “No idea.”

“Liar. You big fat liar. Did he ask you for help?”

“He always asks me for help.”

That was true. From Wilmos’ point of view, every job could benefit from Sean’s presence. He visited the inn at least once a month, and Sean always stopped by his store when we went shopping at Baha-char. I couldn’t recall a single time the conversation didn’t end with, “I’ve got this little project I’m working on.”

Wilmos genuinely liked Sean, and not just because Sean was the pinnacle of everything the people of Auul had tried to achieve. Sean also cared about me, and that made me important to Wilmos as well. If anything happened to us, the old werewolf would come running with a truckload of weapons and would sacrifice himself to save us without a second thought.

Sean saw Wilmos as the closest thing to a grandfather. Logically he knew that his parents were superb fighters, but they were his parents, who had settled into a mundane life on Earth. Wilmos wasn’t just an old, grizzled veteran who told war stories and went on adventures. He was bigger than that. To Sean, he was an elder, a link to the planet that was forever lost. A part of Sean knew that he never quite fit into the “normal” life on Earth. I had introduced him to Baha-char and aliens, but Wilmos was the one who had opened the door to the galaxy for him.

“You think he might be in trouble?” I asked.

“Last I checked, Wilmos was fully grown. He is well-armed, well-connected, and able to take care of himself. Just like he did for fifty years before he met me.”

We walked into the kitchen. Sean sighted the cake and went straight for it.

I took a plate out of the cabinet, added a fork, and handed it to him. He took a knife from the butcher block, cut a quarter of the cake, slid it onto the plate, and looked at me, his eyes hopeful. “Coffee?”