Sweep of the Heart

17

When we last left our inn crew, Dina, Karat, and the werewolf fought the corrupted ad-hal. The Sovereign’s date with Ellenda is looming ever closer. Will our trio get back to the inn in time for Dina to fulfil her role as an innkeeper and will they survive that journey? Stay tuned for the next exciting instalment… Okay I will stop now.

The door leading from Baha-char to Gertrude Hunt swung open, and Karat and I staggered through it, smeared with blood and fetid fluids and carrying the unconscious werewolf between us, her arms draped over our shoulders. We took a step down the hallway and ran straight into Sean.

“God damn it,” he snarled, grabbing the werewolf woman out of our arms.

“We don’t have time for this. She’s critical, and Karat is injured.”

“I’m perfectly fine.” Karat gave me a trademark vampire-knight sneer.

Of course, she was. The left side of her face was the color of a pomegranate, she was taking short shallow breaths, and her armor would need hours of repairs. Vampires didn’t bruise easily. She either took a hard hit or landed on her face.

I opened the tunnel to the medward in the floor. Sean lifted the werewolf like she was a child and started down. “Once this is handled, we will make time.”

It sounded like a threat.

The moment Sean lowered the werewolf into the nearest med unit, it unfolded like one of those three-dimensional greeting cards. Scanners slipped out from under the bottom of the bed, sliding diagnostic lights over her body, and robotic arms sprung from the frame, stripping her clothes. The results of the scans flashed above the unit. Three broken ribs, shredded lung, internal bleeding… Oh wow. The corrupted ad-hal had sliced right through her hardsuit and her ribs like they were tissue paper.

Ironically, hardsuits were considered soft armor, soft being a relative term. There were many variations of it, but the essential requirements dictated that it was flexible, close fitting, and able to stop a typical blade. I could hack at the werewolf woman all day with an ordinary knife and not leave a mark. One look at her chest told me her suit was beyond repair.

Karat touched the House Krahr crest embedded in her breastplate. Her syn-armor came apart at the seams. She lowered it to the floor. Oh. It was worse than I thought.

Normally, getting a vampire out of their armor was an impossible task. They took it off only in the privacy of their quarters, for rest and intimacy. For them, the armor was a second skin that kept them safe, and sometimes they fought to keep it on even when severely injured. Karat dropped hers without any hesitation.

It was an unprecedented show of trust. Of course. She was Maud’s best friend and I was Maud’s sister. Karat trusted me to keep her safe.

The vampire woman winced as the last of her armor slid free. The dark gray suit Karat wore underneath was thankfully blood-free.

“If I fall asleep, wake me up,” she said. “I can’t miss the Sovereign’s dates.”

“We will,” I promised.

She climbed into the unit, and it sprang into action. The scan flashed on the holographic screen above the bed. She had a broken rib, and there were early signs of sepsis.

Sean stepped in front of me, his face harsh. “Dina. Decontamination shower.”

I touched the nasty goo drying on my skin, looked at my stained fingers for a second, and went to clean up.

Ten minutes later, I emerged with clean hair and skin and wearing another robe over my shorts and T-shirt. The runoff from the shower drained into a tank under the floor. The fetid slime I washed off my body felt inert, but I heated the tank until the dirty water evaporated and then flushed the reservoir with acid just to be on the safe side.

Karat was napping in her med unit with a dreamy smile on her face. Sean was staring at the werewolf woman, Gorvar sitting by his side.

I came to stand next to them. “How is she?”

“She’ll live.”

“Karat will be happy. She’d carried her most of the way.”

“Tell me,” he said. “All of it.”

I did.

He looked up at the ceiling, his face unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“For what?”

“I had no idea she would jump from the roof and start a fight.”

It had been a priceless opportunity to communicate with Wilmos’ kidnapper. I didn’t even know if the corrupted ad-hal could speak or understand me, but I would’ve tried my hardest. Every crumb of information was precious. It killed me that I didn’t get anything more out of the corrupted ad-hal.

Sean exhaled. “Nothing it could tell us would be worth you getting hurt.”

“I wasn’t hurt.”

“I smelled your blood when you came in, and I can feel the way the inn is hovering around you. How much magic did it cost you?”

“More than I thought I had,” I said quietly.

Sean looked at the werewolf woman, his face grim. “She shouldn’t have started that fight.”

“Have you met her before she showed up at the inn for the first time? Maybe on one of the trips with Wilmos?”

“If I did, I don’t remember.”

It didn’t surprise me. When werewolves encountered Sean, they either stared at him with worshipful eyes, hit on him, or tried to fight him. He made it a point to interact with his people as little as possible.

“She really cares about Wilmos. She risked her life for him,” I said.

“That doesn’t make her special. Every werewolf I know cares about Wilmos,” Sean said. “If you’re a werewolf and you have a problem, you come to see Wilmos. He will either fix it or know someone who will.”

“The way he fixed your problem by sending you to Nexus?” I shouldn’t have said that.

Sean faced me. “Back then I wanted three things: to learn about werewolves, to learn about the galaxy, and to learn about myself. I wanted to know how far I could go, so I’d asked him for the most dangerous job he had. He thought it was a bad idea. Tried his best to talk me out of it. Told me that he hadn’t brought my parents up from babies just so I could get myself killed because I thought my father saw a bigger moon.”

I hadn’t heard that werewolf idiom, but the meaning wasn’t hard to figure out. Nothing Earth could throw at Sean could compare to the kind of combat his parents endured. He’d wanted to know if he could measure up. I would have to apologize to Wilmos.

“Is that what his projects are about? Helping random werewolves?”

“It’s either removing a threat or getting money. He never keeps any of it. It all goes out as soon as it comes in.”

“I had no idea Wilmos was the werewolf fairy godfather,” I murmured.

Sean barked a short laugh. “You should call him that when we rescue him.”

“And you sure she isn’t Wilmos’ family?”

He shook his head. “He doesn’t have any. Unless you count the alpha strain. A chunk of his DNA is in all of us.”

Sean glanced at the female werewolf.

“You really don’t like her,” I told him.

“She barged into the inn and then put you in danger.”

“We’ve discussed this before. There will be times I will be in danger.”

“I would like those times to be less frequent. This was avoidable.”

“I stand by my decision. I’ve met the woman in the shawl. There was no way she would ever set foot in the inn or let me change the location of the meeting. You should have seen her eyes, Sean.”

“I don’t care about her eyes.”

The line of his jaw hardened. He stepped closer and kissed me. I tasted Sean, and the forest inside him swallowed me whole. The trees closed in, sheltering me, and the scarred wolf who lived in there wrapped himself around me to keep me safe.

The kiss ended, and I looked up at him. He hugged me to him, his strong arms warm. There was no place safer.

“Were you worried?” I asked softly.

“A little.”

I leaned my head against his chest. “I was worried too.”

In Sean’s perfect world, we would live happily ever after in complete safety and nothing bad would injure us. But even he knew that a future like that wasn’t just unrealistic, it would be boring. Even before we were together, he was a werewolf soldier looking for adventure, and I was an innkeeper who took it upon herself to police the neighborhood. We’d had multiple chances to get out and settle into a more peaceful life, and we’d rolled right past them. We didn’t look for trouble, but we didn’t back down when it found us.

“I’m okay,” I told him.

He kissed me again.

“If you keep doing this, we’re going to miss the Sovereign’s date,” I murmured.

“It would be worth it.”

“We can’t. He might get murdered.”

He sighed. “Do you believe your informant?”

“Yes. And I know how we can quickly verify it.”

He frowned. “Cookie?”

I nodded. Clan Nuan’s information network was one of the best in the galaxy. Cookie wanted Lady Wexyn to win. If the pirate candidate got eliminated as a result of this, Lady Wexyn would face less competition.

“If he can confirm this, I would do something right.”

Sean bared his teeth. “You did everything right. You kicked ass. You beat a corrupted ad-hal outside of the inn. That’s fucking amazing.”

It was kind of amazing. And I shouldn’t have been able to do it.

The first time I had put that much effort into using my magic outside of the inn, I ended up gasping for breath in my car outside of Costco. If Sean hadn’t found me, I would’ve died. The second time we fought Michael, and I almost died then, too, but not because of the magic drain. Actually, now that I thought of it, I had committed a lot more magic to that fight than I did to the one in Costco, and I’d managed to hang on to consciousness.

This time, I killed the corrupted ad-hal and then came home. I was tired, but I was still talking and walking.

Did my power grow without me realizing it?

“If I was the one who kidnapped Wilmos, I would be worried right now,” Sean said. “This did not go the way they expected.”

No, it didn’t. “I wish I knew what the hair meant. Is it ‘hurry up and come get him’ or is it ‘do as we say or he’s dead?’”

“No way to tell.”

The only way to find out was to finish the spouse selection and get to Karron.

The inn chimed. 30 minutes before the Sovereign’s first date. I sighed and went to wake Karat up.

The broadcasting schedule of the Dominion had a definite pattern. Formal occasions of little interest, like the reintroduction of the candidates, were the most edited and presented to the audience with a significant delay. The trials were almost live, with only a few minutes of lag to make the emergency adjustments. The dates with individual candidates were practically in real time.

Nothing could go wrong.

When Orata realized just how much power the innkeepers had over our environment, she’d hopped up and down in excitement. Thanks to Kosandion’s PR chief, every candidate was asked their preferred theme for their date. Ellenda had chosen trees. No other guidance. Just one word: trees.

I took them to the orchard.

Back when I was growing up in my parents’ inn, I was responsible for the gardens. They were my favorite part of innkeeping, and the massive magnolia tree that ruled over the other trees and flowerbeds had been my crowning achievement.

I’d been an innkeeper for about four years now, and Gertrude Hunt’s orchard was a place of beauty. From the street, it looked like any typical backyard garden you might find in a house with a bit of acreage. Ornamental shrubs, a few apple trees, some oaks. If you worked your way through the bushes, you would run into my camouflage wall, a tall barrier designed to perfectly mimic the shrubs around it. Very thin and undetectable from the street, it changed with its environment and ran all along the property, keeping the actual orchard out of view.

Kosandion waited in the inner orchard now, the one nobody except the guests and us ever saw. Tall apple trees flanked a wide stone path. They had finished blooming, and their branches bore tiny fruit. The sun shone through the green leaves. Flowers grew between the trees and along the path’s edges, raspberry-colored coras, purslane in every shade from pink to lemon yellow, zinnias bursting with magenta, pink, and crimson, and finally, in brightly lit spots, red yuccas. Ruby-throated hummingbirds hovered near the tiny yucca blooms. The air smelled of flowers and summer grass.

“Could you put up the screen please?” Orata whispered through my earpiece.

I had my doubts about the screen. The date seemed like it should be a private affair, but Kosandion had asked me to defer to Orata’s wishes.

I moved my hand, and a massive branch slipped through the canopy and grew a screen on it. The view of the Ocean Dining Hall appeared on it. We had packed all the delegates into it, with snacks and refreshments. The live feed from the date was projected onto several massive screens, so they would see every moment in real time.

Sean parked himself at the back wall of the dining hall. He wore a gray robe and turned his usual spear into a staff for the occasion. Originally, he was going to chaperone the date, but I was too tapped out to handle a dining room filled with that many creatures right now.

And right now he didn’t have Tony for back up. In the few minutes before the date, I had explained the fake spouse candidate and the corrupted ad-hal encounter to Tony. He’d left the inn to look at the scene of the fight. Very few things could knock a smile off Tony’s face, but that one did. Michael was his best friend. Tony wanted revenge. He didn’t talk about it, but his eyes said plenty.

A stir ran through the delegates in the Ocean Dining Hall. Everyone turned.

Karat entered the room.

Repairing syn-armor was a delicate art requiring years of practice. Karat didn’t have time to fix it, so she didn’t bother. Her once pristine black armor was scuffed. A big rip crossed her chest, and two smaller ones marked her ribs. The injury to the left side of her face had faded from bright red to a less fresh but obvious bruise, and she wore it like a badge of honor.

Dagorkun turned purple, from jealousy or curiosity, I couldn’t tell.

Karat raised her chin and marched to the observers’ table. House Meer practically dislocated their necks trying to get a better look.

“Quite an entrance,” Kosandion murmured next to me.

“Look at Bestata’s face,” I said.

Bestata’s eyes narrowed. She focused on Karat like a tiger who just saw another tiger bleeding from its wounds and was desperately trying to figure out what kind of predator made them.

Six tiny globes, about the size of a walnut, rose into the area, floating around us and above. Orata’s cameras.

“You are live,” Orata said into my earpiece.

Right. No more private conversations. I muted the sound on my screen so it wouldn’t interfere.

The back door of the inn opened, and Gaston emerged, leading Ellenda into the light. She still wore the gold paint and her rough-woven dark garment. Her expression was flat.

Tony melted back into the dark entrance. He would be going back to the Ocean Dining Hall to help Sean.

Ellenda approached Kosandion. He inclined his head a couple of inches. “Welcome, kalenti.”

Ellenda bowed her head slowly. No response. Off to an awesome start.

“Shall we walk?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The two of them strolled down the path, leaving about a foot of space between them. I followed a couple of steps behind. Orata’s orbs followed. My screen did too, sliding along the path.

“What branch do you hail from, kalenti?” Kosandion asked. His voice was calm and light. Reassuring with its warmth.

“My people come from Sahava.”

“The land of cliffs and dark forests, where the glowing ava flowers bloom in the deep.”

A little bit of life came back into Ellenda’s voice. “Yes. Have you ever been?”

“My mother took me there when I was young. We spent four days in the House on the Cliff. I remember sleeping in the spider cocoon hammocks suspended over the raging sea. I thought it was the best bed ever invented.” Kosandion chuckled softly.

“I’m surprised. The cocoon hammocks scare outsiders.”

“I’m not an outsider. I’m a child of the Dominion and a child of the Uma. One doesn’t exclude the other.”

“I meant no offense.” Caution iced over her voice.

Kosandion offered her another smile. “I took none.”

They reached the pond where the stone path curved around the water. The pond took up a whole acre, a shallow, crystal-clear body of water with a large flat rock jutting out a few feet from its left shore. Little fish darted in the cool depths, and brilliant water lilies bloomed on the surface. Stone benches along the path offered places to rest. This was Sean’s favorite spot. When the inn had a lull of visitors, we came here to swim in the pond, sunbathe on the hot rock, and drink beer.

Kosandion and Ellenda continued down the path.

“Do you truly mean that?” Ellenda asked softly. “Are you a child of the Uma?”

Kosandion pulled his left sleeve up and raised his arm. A row of intricate white tattoos shot through with gold marked his dark skin.

Ellenda stopped and turned to face him, a resolute expression on her face. He pivoted toward her. They stood on the path, perfectly still, the same straight posture. In that moment, the two of them looked like they belonged to the same people.

Ellenda took a deep breath.

I braced for an attack.

“Tell me what troubles you, kalenti. You can tell me anything.”

“Anything?” she asked.

“Anything at all. This is our moment. My time and my attention are yours.”

Ellenda exhaled and shut her eyes.

If she moved a muscle in his direction, I would drop her right through the floor. I had expended a lot of magic, but it wouldn’t take much, and my reaction time was just fine.

The Uma woman opened her eyes. “Do not choose me.”

On the screen behind them, the Ocean Dining Hall went perfectly still. Nobody moved.

“What do you mean?” Kosandion asked.

“Do not choose me. I don’t want to be your wife.”

Oh wow. I did not expect that.

“My branch owes a debt to the Kyporo outsiders,” she said. “I came here to repay it.”

Duty over happiness. Of course.

“My presence was required. I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to stay in the Dominion. Don’t try to take my freedom, because I will defend it with my life. So please don’t choose me.”

A silence fell. Birds chirped in the trees, a fish broke the surface of the water and splashed, but the two people in front of me were perfectly still and silent.

On the screen, the faces of the Frowns delegation looked contorted, some with alarm, others with outrage. Their leader clenched his fists on the table.

A subtle change came over Kosandion. He seemed larger somehow, formidable, majestic, no longer a man but an embodiment of power.

“What is it you truly want, daughter of the Uma?” he asked.

Ellenda opened her mouth and then spoke, as if jumping off a cliff. “I want to go home to my planet and the man I love.”

“It is done,” the Sovereign said.

There was a resounding finality to his voice. Goosebumps ran down my arms.

“Innkeeper, take Ellenda to the portal. Once she passes through it, the Dominion will chart a ship to take her back to her homeworld. No citizen of the Dominion will ever trouble her or her branch again.”

On the screen one of the Frown delegates, a man wearing white and green, stood up and walked down the aisle to the door.

Where the hell was he going?

The man reached the table where the Holy Ecclesiarch sat with his entourage.

A transparent column shot out of the ground, sealing the holy man and his retinue inside. Wind jerked their hair as Sean flushed the inside of it with fresh air. At the same time a second column caught the man from the Frowns delegation, cutting him off from the dining hall. He jerked and collapsed.

I turned the volume back up, and the sound roared in, beings jumping to their feet.

Sean leaped over the tables and landed in the middle of the room, his gray robe flaring around him. The staff in his hand split, releasing a brilliant green spear head. His mouth opened, and he roared in the deep snarling voice of an alpha-strain werewolf. It was the same voice that had thundered over the battlefields of Nexus.

“Freeze!”

The three hundred creatures in the dining hall stopped as one.