“No immediate danger?” Dean repeated. When she nodded, he leaned back in his chair, continuing to spin the knife. “That’s, um, interesting phrasing. What about long-term danger?”
“That depends.”
“On what, then?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“There’s a whole lot you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
“There’s a whole lot I don’t know.”
“Mr. Smythe was supposed to leave you more information?”
Claire snorted, sounding remarkable like Austin at his most sardonic. “At the very least.”
“Which is why we need you,” the cat told him, looking up from a damp patch of fur. “Smythe’s not here, and you are.”
“But I don’t know anything,” Dean protested.
“You should make a good pair, then. She thinks she knows everythi…Hey!” he protested as Claire picked him up and dropped him onto the floor. “It was a joke! Keepers,” he muttered, leaping back up onto the chair, “no sense of humor.”
The wisest course, Dean decided, would be to ignore that observation altogether. Stilling the knife, he looked up from her elongated reflection in the blade. “If you don’t mind me asking, where do Keepers and Cousins come from?”
“Just outside Wappakenetta.” When both Dean and Austin stared at her blankly, she sighed. “We have a sense of humor, it’s just no one appreciates it. If you’re asking historically, Keepers and Cousins are descendants of Lilith, Adam’s first wife.”
Dean started to grin.
“I’m not joking.”
“You’re not serious! Adam’s first wife?”
Enjoying his reaction, she waved off his question with a dismissive gesture borrowed from Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “I only know what I’m told, but some of our people are very into genealogy.”
“But you’re talking about Adam and Eve!”
“No, I’m talking about Adam and Lilith.”
“The Bible, the Christian Bible, as literal truth?” Dean suspected that his granddad, who held some fairly radical views for an Anglican minister, would be appalled.
“No. Not truth as such. The lineage—that is, Cousins and Keepers—consider all religions are attempts to explain their energy. Think of them as containing capital T Truths as opposed to merely being true.”
“But you said Adam and Lilith,” Dean reminded her. “Twice.”
Were all bystanders so literal, she wondered, or was it just this one? “Forget them. Forget them twice. If you prefer, there had to have been, at some point, a breeding pair of what was essentially the first humans. Postulate, a second female, with genetic coding to handle magic that the other didn’t have. It’s the same story in a different language.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath, followed that theory out to its logical conclusion, and half prepared to duck. “So essentially, you’re not—that is, not entirely—human?”
She took it better than he’d thought she would and seemed more intrigued than insulted, as though the idea had never occurred to her before. “I suppose that depends on where you set your parameters. If you’re speaking biologically…”
“I wasn’t,” Dean interrupted before she could add details. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop her.
“…we’re, certainly able to interbreed, but that doesn’t really mean anything because so could the old Greek gods.”
“They were real?”
“How should I know?” One painted fingernail tapped against the side of her mug as she thought it over. “Under those parameters, I suppose you could say, we’re…” She smiled suddenly and taken totally by surprise, he found himself lost in it. “…semi-mythical.”
Austin snorted. “Spare me. Semi-mythical indeed.”
“It does cover all the bases,” Claire protested.
“You want to cover the bases? Play shortstop for the Yankees.” Swiveling his head around, Austin stared up at Dean. “She’s human. The Keepers are human. The Cousins are human. I barely know you, but I’m assuming you’re human. I’m not saying this is a good thing, it’s just the way it is.”
“Okay.” Dean held up both hands in surrender. “So, if Mr. Smythe is a Cousin, and she’s a Keeper, what are you?”
Austin drew himself up to his full height, his entire bearing from ears to tail suggesting he’d been mortally insulted. “I am a cat.”
“A cat. Okay.”
While Dean did the breakfast dishes and slotted the morning’s experiences into previously empty places in his worldview, Claire went through the papers Augustus Smythe had left in the hotel office in the hope of discovering some answers. If the registration books were complete, the hotel had never been a popular destination and bookings had fallen off considerably after Smythe had changed the name from Brewster’s Hotel to The Elysian Fields Guest House in 1952.
“Might as well call it The Vestibule of Hell,” she muttered mockingly, turning yellowed pages and not at all impressed by her earlier flash of prescience. It appeared that windowless room four had been popular throughout the existence of the hotel, and the guests who stayed in it seemed to have had uniformly bad handwriting.
She had to call Dean out of the kitchen to open the safe.
“The very least Augustus Smythe could’ve done,” she grumbled, arms folded and brows drawn into a deep vee over her nose, “was leave me the combination.”
“He left you Dean,” Austin observed from the desk. “Something he probably figured you’d get more use out of.”
Ears red, Dean cranked the handle around and got up off his knees as the safe door swung open. “Anything else, Boss?”
Having chased Austin halfway up the first flight of stairs before being forced to acknowledge that four old legs sufficiently motivated were still faster than two, Claire ducked back under the counter. “Not right now.”
As she straightened, their eyes locked. “What?”
Dean felt a sudden and inexplicable urge to stammer. He managed to control it by keeping conversation to a minimum. “The combination?”
“Good point. Write it down. Use the back of that old bill on the desk,” she added, walking over to the safe. Squatting, she heard pencil move against paper then the combination appeared over her shoulder. “Six left, six right, seven left?”
“That’s right. I should, uh, finish the dishes now.”
“Good idea.” As he returned to the kitchen, Claire grinned. He really did turn a very charming color at the slightest opportunity.
