Clean Sweep(31)

I realized I was looking at the portrait of my parents. I wished so desperately I could ask for advice. I might as well wait for money to rain from the sky. I was alone. Nobody would offer me any guidance. I wasn't even sure guidance would do any good. I knew the appropriate course of action: sit on your hands, guard the inn, and do nothing.

Somebody had answer for the murder of John Rook.

"What happened to them?" Sean asked.

"Mmm?"

He nodded at the portrait.

I missed them so much. Telling him this probably wasn't a good idea, but I was hurting and lonely and I wanted him to understand why. "My parents owned an inn in Georgia. It was very old and very powerful. Most inns top out at four marks. My parents' inn was rated at five. It was a thriving, magical place and I loved living there. But I wanted to go to college. Two months into my first semester, I received a message from my brother. He'd come home after a long trip and he couldn't find the house. I dropped everything and got back. I stood next to my brother and looked at the spot where the inn used to be. The trees, the garden, and the house had vanished. There was just an empty lot with bare dirt."

The lot had been completely stripped of any life. Even the grass had disappeared. I remembered this terrible hollow feeling inside. When I was a child, I went swimming at a friend's house and when we ran to the pool, we saw a dead kitten on the bottom. The kitten was a stray who had climbed the fence, fallen into the pool, panicked, and drowned. Kelly's father had tried so hard to revive the little cat. He tried to clear her mouth and pushed on her chest and even held her upside down while we stood there and cried, but the kitten was dead. Seeing that empty lot had felt like that, awful and final. Something terrible had happened there, something irreversible, and the footprint of it had made my heart speed up. The anxiety, fear, and desperate need to reverse it, to somehow rewind time and undo what happened, had gripped me and wouldn't let go, not even after I had emptied my stomach on the bare patch of dirt that used to be our front lawn.

"Where did it go?" Sean asked.

"Nobody knows."

"Did your parents have any enemies?"

"They were like most people: they had some acquaintances they avoided and some of those acquaintances didn't like them, but nobody I would consider an enemy. After the inn disappeared, my brother and I talked to anyone we knew. We came up empty-handed."

"Did you look for them?"

"I did." I had spent two years looking for them and another year drifting aimlessly, because I didn't know what to do with myself.

"What about your brother?"

"Klaus? He's still out there, looking." Klaus had always been a wanderer and he never gave up. I hadn't given up either. I nodded at the portrait. "My sister had married and moved away, but I don't think my brother will ever stop searching. That's why the inn's rating is so important. The more marks we earn, the more people will visit. One day this inn will thrive and every guest who passes through these doors will have to look at the portrait of my parents. Eventually one of them will react and then I'll start looking again."

The two trackers waited on the table in front of me.

"What would your parents do?" Sean asked.

"I don't know. I know they would do something. They would never tolerate someone from outside killing people in their neighborhood." I looked up at Sean. "If you're going to bail, now is the time."

"I'm in," he said. "No conditions, no strings attached. He doesn't get to come to my planet and use our bones for dog toys."

I reached over the trackers and passed my hand over them, sparking the tiny flame of magic with my power. The spiral lines on the spheres glowed brick red. I held my breath. The spheres came apart, the sections of wood turning like a Rubik's Cube. The trackers realigned themselves, the spirals arranging themselves into concentric circles, and lay still, emanating a steady pulse of magic.

Sean and I looked at each other.

"I guess that's it," he said.

"Did you expect them to explode?" I had, a little bit.

"It crossed my mind." Sean leaned back. "There's a good chance he'll show up tonight."

"Would you like to spend the night here?"

"I think it would be wise. I promise not to try anything funny. Unless you want me to." The wolf winked at me.

"Let me make this perfectly clear: try something and you'll find yourself tied to a metal table with steel cables even you can't break."

An evil light sparked in his eyes.

"Don't," I warned him.

He raised his hands, palms up. "I'll be an angel."

Ha-ha. Right. "What are your preferences for the room?" He would want something clean and simple. Probably with a touch of country so it felt more like home and less like Spartan barracks. I could put him in the Romantic Bedroom for giggles. The look on his face when he saw the canopy bed would be priceless. I began moving the walls upstairs, shaping the room and bringing the furniture out of storage. I had just the thing in mind...