Clean Sweep(25)

"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?"

I didn't want him going to the Assembly. I had a feeling he wouldn't, but the risk was there and I couldn't ignore it. And, setting that aside, I needed help. Werewolf kind of help. Which is why I had approached him in the first place.

"Dina?"

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."