Clean Sweep(44)

The house creaked in acknowledgment. I stepped out, made show of locking the front door in case Officer Marais skulked about, and headed to my car.

*** *** ***

There was something almost serene about walking through Costco in the morning. The clean expanse of the floor just rolled on and on, interrupted only by twenty-foot-tall shelves and stacks of merchandise arranged in neat bright islands in the gray sea of concrete.

Maybe it was the feeling of plenty. Everything was supersized. Things came in huge boxes and volume was measured in pints, not ounces. It was a false but pleasant feeling of buying a lot at once and getting it at a good price. I could buy ten enormous jars of peanut butter and stuff it in the back of my car. My home was a battleground between a surly werewolf and an arrogant vampire, and a murderous alien was trying to kill us, but I would never run out of peanut butter again and I would get it for a steal, too.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I checked it. Sean. How had he even gotten my number?

I let it buzz. He didn't leave a voice mail. It wasn't urgent then.

I pushed my cart forward past the tables filled with stacks of clothes, toward the corner of the store where giant packs of paper towels and toilet paper waited. This early, the warehouse was practically empty. Here and there a mother pushed a cart with a toddler in tow. A retired couple debated which huge can of coffee to buy. A regular morning in an ordinary store, quiet. Just how I liked it. Nice and calm.

Unfortunately, walking through a nice and calm store pretty much by myself also tended to clear one's head. My head got itself cleared fast and I ran straight into a hard thought. One way or another, I had to get rid of the dahaka. I had zero ideas about how to do it.

No matter how I turned it around, Arland was my best bet. He had all the answers. However, the rules of hospitality dictated that I treat him as a guest. He'd asked for sanctuary, and I'd granted it. Our verbal contract was binding and could be broken only under very specific circumstances. The grant of sanctuary could be revoked if a guest had lied about the severity of his situation, if his presence inside the inn posed a risk to other guests beyond the innkeeper's ability to counteract, or if the guest willingly and knowingly aided in breaking the concealment provision.

Arland hadn't lied about the severity of his situation. His uncle was truly near death and both of them were in clear and immediate danger. The second clause was usually invoked when a guest was a violent maniac who attempted to attack other guests within the inn. Not only did Arland not fit that description, but invoking this clause almost always resulted in having your inn marked down. It was an admission of failure on the innkeeper's part. If an innkeeper knew she couldn't handle a violent guest, she shouldn't have let him in. Once she did, she had to contain the guest or she had no business running the inn in the first place. It was like holding a sign that said "Hi, over here, I'm incompetent." I reminded myself that Gertrude Hunt could not afford to lose a mark.

The last clause had to do with a guest who deliberately and knowingly compromised the secrecy surrounding the inns. Every planet and every world whose citizens sought refuge at the inns had sworn to conceal their existence and that of the innkeepers. Our planet at large wasn't ready for the big reveal of the universe. People had tried to test the waters --in October of 1938, for example --and the results weren't positive. However, Arland showed no inclination to approach random strangers on the street, declare that he was a vampire from a distant corner of the galaxy, and offer to let them touch his fangs. Back to square one.

I took some paper towels and stuffed them on the lower shelf of my cart. Maybe on my way out I'd treat myself to a slushy. Not that it would help me find my way out of this mess, but it would make me feel better.

I rounded the shelf. Sometime soon I'd need to make an excursion to a home-improvement store and buy some lumber, paint, and PVC. If the inn was going to expand, I'd need to help out by providing some raw materials. Gertrude Hunt had the advantage of age --the inn had really deep roots, but it had stood abandoned for so long. Even though the flurry of recent activity wasn't really straining it, I'd rather be safe than sorry...

A plump, dark-haired woman ahead of me stopped dead in her tracks and I almost ran my cart into her.

"Excuse me." I smiled.

She glanced at me, her eyes wide. "Did you see that?"

"I'm sorry, see what?"

"Over there." The woman pointed to the seven-foot-tall freezers.

I studied the units. Bright square packages of frozen pizza, bags of corn, peas, and Normandy mix. Nothing out of the ordinary.

"I guess I'm just going crazy." The woman frowned.

"What do you think you saw?"