Sweep of the Heart E-Book

Ilona Andrews

• Herausgeber: NYLA
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 617

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

From the New York Times #1 bestselling author, Ilona Andrews, comes a fun and action-packed new adventure in the Innkeeper Chronicles! We invite you to relax, enjoy yourself, and above all, remember the one rule all visitors must obey: the humans must never know. Life is busier than ever for Innkeeper, Dina DeMille and Sean Evans. But it's about to get even more chaotic when Sean's werewolf mentor is kidnapped. To find him, they must host an intergalactic spouse-search for one of the most powerful rulers in the Galaxy. Dina is never one to back down from a challenge. That is, if she can manage her temperamental Red Cleaver chef; the consequences of her favorite Galactic ex-tyrant's dark history; the tangled politics of an interstellar nation, and oh, yes, keep the wedding candidates from a dozen alien species from killing each other. Not to mention the Costco lady. They say love is a battlefield; but Dina and Sean are determined to limit the casualties!

Leseprobe

SWEEP OF THE HEART

ILONA ANDREWS

This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Sweep of the Heart

Copyright © 2022 by Ilona Andrews

Ebook ISBN: 9781641972390

Cover by Doris Mantair

Interior art by Isabeau Backhaus

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NYLA Publishing

121 W. 27th St, Suite 1201, NY 10001, New York.

http://www.nyliterary.com

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Letter to the Reader

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Cast of Characters

Candidate Funnies (Courtesy of MOD R)

Dina’s Apple Cake Recipe

Also by Ilona Andrews

About the Author

In memory of Gerean Ejosa (Geri Reads)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to many people who have helped this manuscript on its journey to become a book. We would like to thank our agent Nancy Yost and the wonderful team at NYLA, our developmental editor Rossana Sasso, our copyeditor, Stefanie Chin, and our installment copy editor, Stephanie Mowery. We’re grateful to Doris Mantair for the beautiful cover and Isabeau Backhaus for the striking interior illustrations. Our world never looked so good.

We would like to extend our thanks to Kimberly Maciejczyk, DVM, for Gorvar’s veterinary care, and Rosie McGraffin and Kerris Humphreys for all things Scottish.

Thank you to the beta readers who generously donated their time and suffered through the early drafts: Harriet Chow, Francesca Virgili, Loredana Carini, and Fern DeYoung.

Most of all we would like to thank you, our readers, for your dedication to the Innkeeper Chronicles. You keep us going.

LETTER TO THE READER

This was a long fun book to write. We wanted to bring the vibrance of the Innkeeper galaxy to you, and this book has many characters, so we are providing you with a quick reference for the candidates as well as the Dominion players and most important observers. You will find it under Character List.

Those of you who followed this story on our website, when it was posted every Friday, really enjoyed the “Story So Far” summaries before each new chapter, so we kept them in.

We also included Dina’s delicious apple cake recipe from Chapter 1 and some of the funnies that helped the Book Devouring Horde vote for their favorite candidate on the blog.

1

A new adventure begins. But first, cake.

There was great wisdom in striking the iron while it was hot.

I took a sip of my iced tea and brushed a little bug off the skirt of my yellow sundress. I was sitting on the back porch of Gertrude Hunt Bed and Breakfast in a comfortable wooden recliner. In front of me our backyard spread, flooded with golden sunshine. The lawn was still green – we’d had a lot of rain this year – but the heat of Texas summer poured from the sky, bringing everything to a standstill. The squirrels napped in their nests deep within the oaks. The mice and bunnies hid in their burrows. Even the bugs fell quiet, too hot to trill. Beast, my tiny black-and-white Shih Tzu, lay on her back by my feet and snored softly. The fan in the porch roof above me was going full force, but my forehead was still sweating.

Such a lovely hot day. Perfect day to take a nap.

I drank another swallow of my tea and closed my eyes. Behind me, Gertrude Hunt unfolded, a complex collection of rooms and passageways many times larger than its physical footprint visible from the street and the subdivision on the other side of it. I focused on the kitchen. A seven-foot-tall shape moved within it, big, with foot-long quills thrusting from its back. The shape wiped down the counter, holding the rag with large, clawed hands.

Nap. Nap, nap, nap, you want to nap… If only I had powers of suggestion, my life would be so much easier.

I opened my eyes.

Next to me Caldenia fanned herself with a glittering fan and took a sip of her Mello Yello. “Still no luck?”

I shook my head.

“Then I will have to help you, my dear.”

She rose, put her straw hat on, and strolled into the kitchen. At first glance, our permanent guest looked just like an older Southern woman with a gentle tan, long platinum-gray hair pulled into an elegant updo, and a beautiful face with what people called “good bones.” She chatted with neighbors, grew tomatoes with resounding success – I made sure that the inn watered them and added fertilizer at appropriate times – and mastered the art of smiling without showing her teeth. They were pointed and sharp, like those of a shark.

I concentrated on the kitchen.

“This heat is stifling,” Caldenia announced. “I’m going to retire for the afternoon. You could use some rest as well, Orro. If I were you, I’d take this opportunity to nap before dinner begins.”

Orro rumbled something.

I felt Caldenia move through the kitchen and up the stairs toward her suite.

In the kitchen, Orro stopped, stared out the window…

Come on…

He carefully folded the towel, hung it on the towel rack by the sink, and ambled out of the kitchen, heading toward the narrow winding stairs leading down.

I held my breath, tracking him with my magic. Down the stairs, down, down, and to the cozy den where he made his lair. He stepped inside and shut the door.

Now!

I jumped out of my recliner. Beast leaped three feet into the air, landed on her feet, and barked once, looking from side to side.

“Shh!”

I swung the back door open and dashed inside the kitchen. Beast chased me.

I sprinted to the oven, turned it on to bake at 350°, and spun around. The door of the pantry flew open, displaying 3,000 square feet of space filled with shelves and refrigerators. Tendrils of striated wood burst from the ceiling, shot into the pantry, and dragged ingredients onto the island: sugar, flour, baking powder… I grabbed eggs, butter, and a bag of Granny Smith apples from the only refrigerator visible in the kitchen. The inn hauled a heavy KitchenAid mixer out.

“Not that one, the small one,” I hissed. “That one is too loud.”

The KitchenAid vanished back into the pantry and another tendril delivered the handheld mixer into my hands. I put two large bowls onto the island and reached out with my magic.

The creature who ruled our kitchen with an iron claw was settling into his nest bed. Operation Apple Cake was a go.

I creamed the butter in the bowl and added a ¾ cup of sugar to it. Baking a cake for the man you love was stressful enough. Baking a cake in a kitchen run by a Red Cleaver chef was an impossible feat. Orro viewed both the kitchen and the pantry as his sole domain. Trying to cook anything meant being observed over your shoulder, treated to a detailed critique, followed by multiple offers to help, followed by hurt feelings when said offers were politely and repeatedly declined, culminating in pouting and declarations of woe. If he was really in the moment, he would throw an existential crisis into it.

Orro typically slept for at least an hour and a half. My cake only took 50 minutes to bake. If I played my cards right, it would be cooked before he ever caught on. He would not mess with it once it was cooked.

I folded my dry ingredients into my wet ones, mixed everything, poured it into a greased springform pan, and focused on peeling the apples.

Sean had gone out this morning to get more firewood. The inn required wood in the worst way, and we’d been going through a cord, sometimes two, every few days. It wouldn’t have been a problem if we were a BBQ joint, but we were masquerading as a quaint bed and breakfast that did very limited business. Sooner or later, someone would start wondering what we were doing with all that wood. Sean staggered our firewood orders between different suppliers and bought waste wood whenever he could find it. Usually we ordered firewood online, but he had found a supplier a couple of hours away who would deliver a full tri-axle load, seven and a half cords. The only catch was, they wanted payment up front in cash.

Sean didn’t like to leave the inn.

He didn’t mind it as much when he had to go to places other than our planet. Earth was home, the place where he was born and grew up, and Sean had learned how to pass for a human. But then he walked out into the Great Beyond. The universe bathed him in its breath. He saw the countless stars and other planets, fought enemies he couldn’t have imagined, and learned the true nature of his people.

Out there, he could be himself, an alpha strain werewolf. Here, on Earth, he had to pass for an ordinary man and, after years in space, it no longer came easily to him.

I mixed cinnamon, sugar, and lemon juice into my peeled, sliced apples, added a bit of flour, layered them on top of the dough, popped the pan into the oven, and exhaled. Halfway there.

“Thirty minutes,” I told the inn.

The inn creaked in acknowledgment.

Sean wanted to get the firewood. I offered to go with him, but he declined. I couldn’t make it easier for him while he was out, but I could greet him with his favorite cake when he came back.

A gentle chime rolled through my mind. A familiar presence entered the boundary of the inn. I motioned with my fingers and the wall sprouted a screen. On it, Officer Hector Marais carefully maneuvered his Red Deer PD cruiser up my driveway. Usually, he parked on the street. Driving up like that meant he had a special delivery.

I wiped my hands with a kitchen towel and headed to the garage. No rest for the wicked.

* * *

Officer Marais opened the trunk of his cruiser and bent down to give Beast a pet. In his mid-thirties, bronze-skinned, athletic, with blue-black hair cut short and a clean-shaven jaw, he was the very definition of the modern police officer. Everything from the collar of his uniform to the soles of his boots was “squared away” as Sean said. If the police department ever needed a model for a recruitment poster, there was nobody better.

He truly was a model police officer, completely committed to protecting residents in his jurisdiction. Which was why once he found out that aliens existed, and that Earth enjoyed the special protected status, he took it upon himself to add extraterrestrial policing to his regular duties. If any normal Earth mechanic ever popped the hood of his cruiser, they would faint on the spot. We were very fortunate that Red Deer made its officers buy their vehicles through a subsidized program.

I looked into the trunk. A woman lay inside it wrapped in a stun net. She was a little older than me and wore a gray combat suit. In good shape, lean, with attractive, bold features. On Earth someone would think she was a star athlete, track, or tennis maybe. Her tan skin had a slight cinnamon tint, her hair was dark red and braided away from her face, and her green eyes regarded me with open hostility.

The stun net, one of the fun modifications Sean and Marais had added to the police cruiser, was self-guiding and acted like a taser on contact, short circuiting the neural pathways. Marais had practiced firing it on Sean in an abandoned warehouse parking lot. He’d chase him with the cruiser and Sean would do his best to evade, while I served as a lookout and tried not to have a heart attack every time I heard a car coming. Marais hadn’t had a chance to use his new gadget until now.

The net should have stunned the woman into a mild coma. Instead, it seemed to just piss her off. She glared at me like I was everything that was wrong with her life. I leaned closer. A faint golden sheen rolled over her irises.

A werewolf. Made sense.

“Where did you find her?”

Marais nodded at the car. “I’ll show you.”

I nudged the inn. A thin wooden tendril slipped from the floor and brushed against the hood of the vehicle, accepting the transmission from the cruiser. Gertrude Hunt produced another screen showing the view from Marais’ dashcam camera. He had two sets in his car, one the standard issue from Red Deer PD and the other bootleg from us.

The street looked familiar. He was on Rattlesnake Trail, by the high school, heading east, with the walled subdivision on one side and the school’s baseball diamond on the other. Bright summer sunshine flooded the mostly empty road. The record temperatures chased the kids inside or to the pools, and their parents were still at work.

A dark humanoid shape shot past the car. Marais was going at least 35. Top human speed was 28 miles per hour and whatever that was blew by his vehicle like it was standing still.

“Someone was running at superhuman speeds in broad daylight for all the honest world to see,” Marais said. “Apparently, she thinks the Earth Treaty doesn’t apply to her.”

The Treaty applied to everyone.

I motioned to Gertrude Hunt. A much thicker tendril emerged from the ceiling and plucked the woman out of the trunk. The stun net dropped to the floor. The inn’s tendril split into smaller branches, wrapping around the woman, and spun her in the air, rifling through her clothes. Weapons rained to the floor of the garage: a short-range energy sidearm, two knives, a monomolecular cleaver short sword, and three small sticky bombs, each the size of a large grape. When attached to a door and detonated, they could blow a hole through the strongest terrestrial safe.

Nice.

The tendrils twisted my captive upright and lowered her to the floor, anchoring themselves through the floorboards. She glowered at me and snarled.

Beast snarled back by my feet.

The werewolf woman didn’t seem impressed. In her place, I wouldn’t have taken the seven-pound shih tzu seriously either. It was a potentially deadly mistake.

“You are in violation of the Earth Treaty,” I told her. “Do you know what that means?”

She didn’t answer.

“The Treaty expressly forbids exposing the human population to the existence of extraterrestrial life. Any traveler wishing to visit Earth must make arrangements with an inn like this one. Have you made such arrangements?”

No answer.

“She knows,” Marais said. “I read her the rights on the way. She was heading this way when I apprehended her. Probably to see you.”

“Not you.” The woman sneered.

Oh. Another one.

“Thank you, Officer,” I told Marais. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Never a dull moment.” He opened the front door of his cruiser, reached for a hidden button in the dashboard, pressed it, and the net slid back into the trunk, primed and ready to be reused.

“Oh! I have something for you.”

I held out my hand. The ceiling parted and a vacuum-sealed parcel landed in my hand, two skeins of wool yarn, shimmering with blue and green. “For your wife.”

“Thanks. She’ll love it. What kind of wool is it?”

“Tell her it’s muskox.” It was close enough unless someone did a microscopic analysis. It was a gift from a guest, and Officer Marais’ wife ran a knitting blog. She would enjoy it much more than I would.

“Thanks again.”

I watched Officer Marais get into his vehicle and drive off. A moment later I felt him cross the boundary of the inn.

It was just me, the female werewolf, and her undying hatred for me. I didn’t take it personally.

The werewolves of Auul were poets, and storytelling was in their blood. Sadly, the saga of their planet had turned out tragic, the way sagas often do. They were invaded by an overwhelming force, so they bioengineered werewolfism to repel it. Then decades later, the enemy made their own version of supersoldiers and invaded again. The people of Auul built teleportation gates, knowing they would destabilize their planet, and created even better werewolves, the alpha strain, more dangerous and deadly, to guard them as they evacuated.

The alpha strain werewolves protected the gates to the bitter end, until the cosmic forces that powered them tore Auul apart. Almost all of them died in that last stand.

Sean was the son of two alpha strain werewolves who somehow made it out just before the cataclysm. He was born against all odds, he was freakishly powerful, and after serving in the military, he met me, learned where he came from, and caught a glimpse of the galaxy. It had beckoned, and Sean had followed its starlight. Everything he had done since had become the stuff of legend.

He had fought a devastating war on Nexus, bringing both the Hope Crushing Horde’s and the Holy Anocracy’s offensives to a halt. He was a superb strategist, an excellent tactician, and he had no equal in close-quarters combat. He could lead an army or stand alone against overwhelming odds.

It was simply too much for the werewolves. Here was the son of their heroes who came out of nowhere and became the best werewolf ever. They were a people without a planet, refugees scattered across dozens of worlds. They needed a folk hero in the worst way, and Sean proved to be irresistible. Everything about him was legendary and mythical. The fact that he shunned fame and glory only made it worse.

Werewolves favored a direct kind of courtship. In the past few months, we’d had several female and male visitors who’d arrived at Gertrude Hunt to declare their admiration and interest. Luckily for me, the man was very different from the legend he had inspired.

The image on the screen changed into a big timer counting down. 30… 29… 28…

My cake!

“I have to go,” I told her.

“I want to talk to him!” the werewolf woman snarled.

“He should be back soon.”

“When?”

“Hopefully not for another twenty minutes. It will give you a chance to rehearse your speech.”

She blinked but recovered. “I don’t have a speech!”

“You say it like it’s my first time. There is always a speech.”

The timer reached zero and went off.

“Got to go.”

I took off down the hallway, escorted by Beast, while the woman’s curses slowly grew fainter behind me.

2

Are we about to witness werewolf courtship? Will Orro discover the illicit baking happening in his very own kitchen, right under his quills? Or is something even more dangerous afoot?

The story continues…

The cake rested in the springform. The meringue topping was blush and slightly crispy. It cracked a little, which would get a side eye from Orro, but I didn’t care.

I reached out and poked the springform. Barely warm. Okay.

A familiar presence crossed the inn’s boundary. The magic of the inn shifted in response. If Gertrude Hunt was a dog, it would’ve raised its head and wagged its tail.

Sean was home.

Another presence followed, creeping up our driveway. I motioned to the inn, and it produced a screen for me and tossed the feed from the side cameras onto it. Sean’s truck had driven up and parked in front of the garage. Behind it, a massive white tri-axle with a black dump bed filled with firewood slowly backed its way up the gentle slope of the driveway and around the house.

I took a long knife and carefully worked it around the perimeter of the springform, slicing through the meringue. If you tried to open the pan without it, half of the meringue would come off.

Sean got out of his truck. He was tall and corded with hard, lean muscle. You could tell just by looking at him that he was both strong and fast, but there was more to it. Sean looked ready. He projected a kind of calm but alert assurance, and you knew with a deep, instinctual understanding that if a threat appeared, he would respond instantly and with overwhelming force.

People sensed it and felt the need to label it. Since we lived in Texas, most of the time they ended up asking him if he played football, because somehow saying “that guy played football” provided a reasonable explanation for Sean’s combat readiness.

Beast took off, out through the doggie door, and straight to Sean, dancing around his feet and wagging her tail. He bent down to pet her.

I unlocked the latch on the pan and gently eased it up and over the cake. Perfect.

I dropped the springform into the sink, set the coffee pot to brew some decaf, and went outside, just in time to watch the dump truck unload a huge pile of firewood onto our grass. I went to stand next to Sean. He smiled at me and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. I leaned against him and felt him relax.

You made it home, honey. It’s all good.

The driver, a middle-aged heavyset man with a ruddy face and short salt-and-pepper hair, got out and eyeballed it.

“Seven cords,” he told me proudly.

“Looks great,” I told him.

“Your husband didn’t pay for stacking,” the driver reported. “He said he needs the exercise.”

I smiled at Sean. He wasn’t my husband, but there was no reason to point that out. “We’ll take care of it.”

The driver winked at us. “You two are a cute couple. Say, were you a linebacker in high school?”

“Yeah,” Sean lied with a straight face.

He had done all sorts of sports in his childhood, but none through his schools. He was too good and too physically gifted, and his parents wanted to avoid attention. Most of his high school extracurricular activities had been split between several martial arts schools with carefully vetted teachers. He’d had an easier time blending in while in the Army. High school sports prioritized individual achievement and stardom, while the Army emphasized teamwork.

“Thought so,” the driver said. “Well, you folks have a good one.”

“Take care.” Sean raised his hand.

The driver got back into his truck and started down the driveway. The grass around the wood pile shivered.

“Not yet,” Sean said.

The lawn became still.

The dump truck rolled to the end of the driveway, sat there, letting the traffic pass, turned left, and sped down the road.

“Okay,” Sean said. “Take it.”

The lawn split, opening a black pit under the firewood. Gertrude Hunt gulped the whole seven cords in a single swallow, and I felt the impact roll through it. The lawn knitted together, as if zippered. No sign of the wood pile remained.

Sean raised his head, and his lips stretched into a slow, lazy smile. “Mmmm, apple cake.”

Surprising a werewolf with food was a lost cause. “We have a visitor.”

“I know. I smelled her by the garage. What does she want?”

“To talk to you.”

He sighed. “Fine. Let’s get it over with.”

We walked over to the garage. The door slid open. The werewolf woman blinked against the sudden sunlight and saw Sean. Her shoulders straightened. She tossed her hair back with a strategically impatient jerk of her head.

Here comes the speech.

“So that’s what you look like.” She’d pitched her voice lower, going for husky sexiness. “Not bad.”

No reaction.

“A man like you stuck in a place like this. What a waste.”

Sean said nothing.

“Wilmos is missing,” she said.

Wilmos was a first-strain werewolf, a veteran, one of the oldest survivors of Auul. The werewolfism kept him spry, but he was an adult when Sean’s parents were born, and he was instrumental in creating their alpha strain. After Auul was destroyed, Wilmos made his name as a mercenary. Now he ran a weapons shop at Baha-char and served as a go-between for mercenaries and the people who needed them.

Wilmos thought Sean walked on water. We’d met by chance, and when Sean decided he wanted to see the universe for himself, Wilmos showed him the ropes. He was the one who’d gotten Sean into that Nexus mess, and I would never forgive him for that. Ever.

Wilmos was also responsible for our current enthusiastic suitor problem. During the war on Nexus, Sean had assumed the identity of Turan Adin, an unkillable general who led the Merchant forces of Clan Nuan. In reality, Turan Adins dropped like flies, but their armor covered them completely, hiding their faces, so when one of them died, the Merchants simply hired a new one, put the armor on them, and sent them back into the slaughter. Some only lasted a few days, others a few weeks. Sean was the last Turan Adin. He had survived for 18 months.

When that war finally ended, Sean gave the armor back to the Merchants and stayed with me because he loved me. Nobody was supposed to find out that he used to be Turan Adin. However, Wilmos couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He was bursting at the seams with pride and little by little he let that cat out of the bag, one secret conversation at a time. The werewolves knew.

The werewolf woman narrowed her eyes at Sean. “Word is, Wilmos asked you for help and you turned him down because you were too busy playing house with a human girl. People say you’re a coward. That you’ve gone soft. The wolf who subdued otrokars and vampire knights, reduced to a mere shadow of himself. So, I came to see for myself what happened to the hero of Nexus. You used to be somebody. What’s that like? To just give up and turn your back on a friend?”

She leaned forward as much as the restraints would allow, focused on him. She’d challenged him in his territory, and now she expected him to react. She would’ve liked it if he’d hauled her upright, slammed her against the wall, and growled in her face. It would be a display of dominance she could understand. She would submit, and then they would go to search for Wilmos together, without me, so she could prove to him how much more awesome she was as a potential mate.

Sean opened his mouth. “I don’t know you.”

The werewolf woman blinked.

He held his hand out. His broom landed into his fingers, except for him it was always a spear, a sturdy shaft tipped with a razor-sharp blade.

“Your welcome is withdrawn.” He tapped the butt of his spear on the floor.

The inn opened, walls and rooms flying out of the way, revealing a hallway leading to a distant door. It snapped open, and the bright sunshine of Baha-char flooded through it.

The tendril binding the werewolf woman jerked her off the floor.

“Wait!” she screamed.

The tendril shot toward the door and tossed her out, into the light. The door slammed shut. The normal architecture of the inn reasserted itself. Beast let out a satisfied bark.

“A little rough,” I said.

“She’ll land on her feet. This is getting tiresome. They need to get the message.”

We started toward the kitchen.

“What was that about Wilmos?” I asked.

Sean shrugged. “No idea.”

“Liar. You big fat liar. Did he ask you for help?”

“He always asks me for help.”

That was true. From Wilmos’ point of view, every job could benefit from Sean’s presence. He visited the inn at least once a month, and Sean always stopped by his store when we went shopping at Baha-char. I couldn’t recall a single time the conversation didn’t end with, “I’ve got this little project I’m working on.”

Wilmos genuinely liked Sean, and not just because Sean was the pinnacle of everything the people of Auul had tried to achieve. Sean also cared about me, and that made me important to Wilmos as well. If anything happened to us, the old werewolf would come running with a truckload of weapons and would sacrifice himself to save us without a second thought.

Sean saw Wilmos as the closest thing to a grandfather. Logically he knew that his parents were superb fighters, but they were his parents, who had settled into a mundane life on Earth. Wilmos wasn’t just an old, grizzled veteran who told war stories and went on adventures. He was bigger than that. To Sean, he was an elder, a link to the planet that was forever lost. A part of Sean knew that he never quite fit into the “normal” life on Earth. I had introduced him to Baha-char and aliens, but Wilmos was the one who had opened the door to the galaxy for him.

“You think he might be in trouble?” I asked.

“Last I checked, Wilmos was fully grown. He is well-armed, well-connected, and able to take care of himself. Just like he did for fifty years before he met me.”

We walked into the kitchen. Sean sighted the cake and went straight for it.

I took a plate out of the cabinet, added a fork, and handed it to him. He took a knife from the butcher block, cut a quarter of the cake, slid it onto the plate, and looked at me, his eyes hopeful. “Coffee?”

“Freshly brewed.”

I poured him a mug of decaf, added some creamer, and brought it over to him. Sean took a sip of his coffee, then a bite of his cake, and sighed happily.

“The cake is delicious,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

I cut my own slice and sat down across from him. He reached out. I took his hand. He squeezed my fingers, smiled, and ate another bite of cake.

3

Mysterious things are happening in Baha-char, the intergalactic bazaar we know, love and yearn to shop at. Will Sean and Dina really not investigate Wilmos’ disappearance?

Sean frowned at the communication unit. We stood in the narrow alley just outside the door leading to Baha-char, dressed in our travel innkeeper robes. His resolve to not look for Wilmos lasted about as long as his piece of cake.

“Nothing?” I guessed.

“It isn’t picking him up.”

He pulled his hood on, hiding his face. I did the same, and we started down the alley toward the wide street, where the myriad of galactic shoppers of all shapes, colors, and species flowed like a river through the canyon of tall, terraced buildings.

Wilmos’ shop lay off the beaten path, just inside an alley branching off from the main street, its door sheltered by an archway. Sean turned into the alley and stopped. I stopped too.

He inhaled. A second passed. Another.

“What is it?” I asked him softly.

“It smells like Michael.”

Dread washed over me. My fingers went ice cold. Michael Braswell had been my older brother’s best friend. He’d become an ad-hal, an innkeeper enforcer, one of many responsible for neutralizing threats the innkeepers couldn’t handle, then he’d disappeared. Nobody had seen him for over a year until he blocked our way on the street at Baha-char and tried to kill us. He was no longer the Michael I knew. He was decay and rot, a living corruption oozing foul magic. He’d almost killed me, and then his corpse had infected Gertrude Hunt and tried to kill another ad-hal.

“The scent is old,” Sean said. “Stay behind me.”

I followed him to the door. Sean keyed a long code into the electronic lock. It clicked, and the thick, reinforced door swung open. He stepped into the gloom. The automated lights came on, bathing the store in a sharp artificial glow.

The shop was in shambles. Wilmos had a place for everything, and his wares were arranged with military precision. Now the place looked like a bomb had gone off inside it. Weapons littered the floor among shards of glass. Store shelves hung half torn from the walls. Ahead, a counter had been split in two and by it, on a piece of glass, sprawled a large lupine body covered with blue-green fur. Gorvar, Wilmos’ pet and guard, one of the last Auul wolves.

Dear universe, what the hell happened here?

“Clear,” Sean said.

I rushed to Gorvar. His fur was matted with congealing blood, still viscous but old. I put my hand on his neck, searching for a pulse. His eyelids trembled. He raised his head, trying to snap, but he had nothing left.

“It’s me,” I told him.

Recognition sparked in his green eyes. Gorvar whined softly.

“Hold on, big guy.” I spun to Sean. “We have to get him to the inn.”

Sean scooped the massive beast into his arms and carried him out like a puppy. I followed, pushing the door shut behind me. The lock clicked.

We hurried through the streets, dodging traffic. The shoppers of Baha-char had seen everything, and nobody paid us any mind. In fifteen minutes, we reached the inn’s entrance. Sean handed Gorvar to the inn.

“I have to go back.”

I brushed a kiss against his lips. “Be careful.”

He nodded and took off at superhuman speed.

I entered Gertrude Hunt. “Medward. Quickly.”

The inn gulped Gorvar’s body and opened the stairs. I took them two at a time. I had no idea how, but I had to save Wilmos’ wolf.

* * *

The medward was hidden in the lower levels of the inn, just under the main floor. A sterile room that could be hermetically sealed off in an emergency, it housed a decontamination shower, a storage with six different stasis pods, and until recently, a single ancient med unit that was barely up to the task. Fortunately, we had junked it three months ago and replaced it with three brand new, state-of-the-art robotic stations, upgrading our medbay to the full medward.

The new med units were a gift from Maud. My sister was now the Maven of House Krahr, which meant she was in charge of all of their diplomatic efforts, and her position came with a significant salary. She bought the units for us with her new Maven money and had them sent over on one of Arland’s scout ships. According to Maud, Gertrude Hunt was seeing more action than an average vampire stronghold on a hostile planet, and thinking of us trying to cope with our outdated med unit kept her from sleeping at night.

When I was a kid, Maud would buy me cute clothes at discount sites online. Now she bought me advanced medical equipment. Nothing really changed. My big sister was still trying to take care of me.

I looked at Gorvar sprawled in a complex medunit. He had four deep lacerations that carved him from his belly halfway up his side. Something had dug into his stomach with its claws and dragged them up, ripping gashes in his flesh. The edges of the wounds were trying their best to turn necrotic, but Auul wolves had insane immune systems. It was part of the reason their DNA had been used to bioengineer werewolfism. Whatever contamination had invaded his body had to be very potent, because normally the wounds would’ve closed by now.

Gorvar had lost a lot of blood. Our old medunit wouldn’t have known what to do with him, but the new one analyzed his injuries in seconds. It had pumped him full of antibiotics and fluids, and its robotic surgery arms repaired the cut in his liver, cleaned his wounds, cut off a very thin sliver of the injured tissue to combat the worst of the necrosis, and sealed the lacerations. His pulse was weak but steady, and the medical unit’s read outs assured me that in its opinion, he was stable.

Now I just had to wait for Sean to come back.

He had smelled corruption by Wilmos’ store. Wilmos wasn’t at the store, so Sean would follow that corrupted trail. He told me before that the stench of corruption lingered much longer than normal scents. It stained everything it touched.

Corrupted Michael had thick yellowed claws. Sometimes I had nightmares of him chasing me through Red Deer dripping decay and reaching for me with those claws while I desperately tried to find my way back to the inn. My distorted memory made them much bigger in my mind, but objectively speaking, the wounds on Gorvar could have been made by claws just like those.

After I brought Michael’s corpse to the inn to analyze it, the corruption that inhabited his body acted almost like a living thing, a pathogen that actively tried to contaminate the inn. I had purged that infection from Gertrude Hunt, but I had done it in my inn, where I was strongest. When Sean and I fought Michael on the streets of Baha-char, we almost lost. We might have died, if Wilmos hadn’t jumped in with a high-impact version of an alien Gatling gun.

Was the damage at Wilmos’ shop a retaliation for that fight? If so, why now? That happened months ago. Or was it something else? It couldn’t be a coincidence.

I had hoped Michael was the only one. I had alerted the Innkeeper Assembly to what happened, but they hadn’t said anything about it.

Sean would be fine. He was strong and fast, and this wouldn’t be his first encounter with a corrupted creature.

Of course, he would be fine.

There was no reason to worry.

There was definitely no reason to rush to Baha-char. If another corrupted ad-hal like Michael attacked him, Sean would draw him here, to the inn, and I needed to be ready for it.

Gertrude Hunt groaned. It was an odd sound of wood stretching.

The inn was branching. Shortly after Maud and Helen left the inn, Gertrude Hunt began to grow. Right now, in the far corner of Gertrude Hunt, a simple hallway led to a barrier glowing with pale silver. Eventually that barrier would vanish, and a door would form, opening to another world or possibly a different dimension. That’s why the inn had been gobbling up firewood by the cord. When that door opened, which could be any minute, one of us needed to be there because we had no idea what lay on the other side. Another reason to sit tight.

How long did it take to inspect the store anyway? He should have been back by now.

Magic chimed in my mind. The Baha-char door opened, and Sean entered the inn. Finally.

I jumped up. The inn dropped a staircase in front of me and I climbed it into the kitchen.

By the island, Orro drew himself up to his full seven feet. His dark quills rose slightly.

“You have made a cake,” he started.

“Not now,” I told him and hurried into the hallway.

Sean was waiting by the Baha-char door. It was still open. His eyes had that focused, clear look they got just before he expected to jump into a fight. My pulse sped up.

“I need your help.”

My robe was still on. The inn dropped my broom into my hand. I jogged out the door back into the Baha-char sunshine, and we rushed through the streets, dodging passersby.

“Gorvar?” he asked.

“Stable. Where are we going?”

“One of those corrupted assholes took Wilmos out of his store and went through a temporary portal gate. There was a witness. He says he knows where the portal leads, but he refuses to tell me.”

* * *

The gate lay far from the center of the bazaar. We’d been walking and jogging for over twenty minutes, and we had left the brightly decorated streets behind a while ago. Here the air was ominous, the canvas roofs of the stalls faded and tattered, and trash littered the cobblestones. This wasn’t the fun-shopping part of Baha-char. You didn’t come to this place unless you wanted something specific you could only get here, and the grim-faced vendors gave us dark looks as we passed.

A merchant on our left, a strange creature with the shaggy body of a sloth, a massive beak, and furry tentacles instead of limbs, screeched at our approach. It was hanging upside down from the top frame of its shop, anchored by its hind tentacles, and I had no idea what species it was, which almost never happened. When we got home, I would have to look it up.

A large stone arch loomed ahead, its brown stone worn and scarred. Remnants of red banners hung from it, bleached by the sun to a dirty pink and torn to shreds by the desert wind. Tall buildings with barred windows crowded the arch on both sides, creating a long gloomy tunnel.

We strode through it. A draft fanned us, bringing a thick, potent scent, an off-putting musk. Some large animal had marked its territory here.

The musk grew stronger. I fought the urge to clear my throat. I could taste it on the back of my tongue. Next to me, Sean grimaced and kept going.

The tunnel ended, and we emerged into a round plaza formed by a single circular building. Three oversized stories high, the building stretched to the sky, offering rows and rows of balconies and stone benches. Strange creatures and elaborate glyphs had been carved into its sandy stone façade, once sharp, but now smoothed and blurred by elements and time.

The plaza itself was perfectly round, formed with remarkable precision and paved with giant triangular slabs of stone that radiated from its center. In the middle of it two stone towers rose, each shaped like a fifty-foot-tall, three-dimensional crescent. The two crescents faced each other, crowned with green flames burning in metal braziers at their apexes.

“This is the Old Arena,” I whispered.

Sean glanced at me.

“They used to have gladiator fights here thousands of years ago, before they built the other two arenas. See that gate across from us? The gladiators entered there and then fought to the death. When a fighter died, their flame would go out.”

Something shiny caught the light at the base of the closest crescent. I squinted. A metal bug as big as my fist. There was another one on top of this crescent, and two more at the opposite tower. Soot marked the stone around the bugs. Sean was right. Someone had set up a short-term portal. The beetles packed enough power for a couple of hours and then burned themselves out.

Directly opposite us, something stirred in the gloom of the gate. Something large.

A massive leonine paw moved into the light, easily five feet across. Claws shot out and struck the stone.

Oh no.

A colossal shoulder followed, then the other, then the broad muscular chest sheathed in sandy fur, a thick neck crowned with a dark rust mane, and finally the giant head, a strange, disturbing mix of lion and human, anthropomorphic, horrifying, yet cohesive. This wasn’t a mishmash of two species. This was a naturally evolved being, who just happened to resemble a huge predatory cat with human eyes on its face.

Sean’s upper lip wrinkled in a precursor to a snarl. If there ever was a monster designed to terrify his people, an Auul kaiju guaranteed to evoke instant revulsion among the werewolves, the creature in front of us would be it.

“Is that the witness?” I asked.

“Yep.”

A sphinx. Crap.

4

When we last left our intrepid heroes, they found clues that Wilmos’ disappearance was linked to the corrupted ad-hal threat encountered in previous adventures. A most mythical guardian now stands in the way to more answers.

Settle in for a guessing game.

The sphinx approached, his movements unhurried, almost lazy, circled the two towers, and lowered himself to the ground. His head was by the left tower, his tail by the right. He curled around the two spires like a cat clutching a toy to his belly. The huge gold hoops in his ears tinkled.

Sean watched him. He wasn’t focusing on him the way he sometimes zeroed in on his opponent. Rather he was watching him with the detachment of a satiated wolf seeing a bunny hop around in a distant field, curious, but not enough to get up. It was a ruse. Sean was all in. The sphinx had put himself between Sean and Wilmos, and Sean wouldn’t tolerate that.

The sphinx stretched. The sun slid over his isabelline fur, highlighting the paler belly and chest and drawing the eye to the rust-brown bands on his limbs and tail. A thick line of darker fur ran from the inner corners of his brilliant violet-blue eyes over his upper lids to the outer corners and across his cheeks, a feature that once inspired centuries of kohl eyeliner.

“No wings?” Sean murmured.

“We don’t want to see the wings.”

“You came back,” the sphinx purred. His deep voice reverberated through me. “And you brought a friend.”

This was bad.

“Did he ask you any questions?” I whispered.

“I offered to answer his question if he solves my riddle.” The sphinx studied the claws of his right forepaw. “He declined.”

I exhaled.

“Would you like to solve my riddle?”

“No. Why are you here? Your kind is not permitted at Baha-char.”

The creature’s tanzanite eyes flashed with an angry fire. “Permitted? I go where I please.”

Only four dark rings on his tail, and the gold hoops in his ears were simple. This was a very young sphinx, an adolescent. Fully grown adults had seven rings and their jewelry was ornate and elaborate. This one couldn’t be more than 300 years old.

“It’s a simple bargain,” the sphinx said. “Solve my riddle, and I will tell you where the thing took the old werewolf. Is it your father, your grandfather, male human? Is he family? I would do anything for the sake of my family.”

“Don’t,” I warned Sean.

The sphinx inhaled, sucking the air in. A slight draft pulled on my hair and robe.

His eyes flashed again. “I smell fear. Scared little werewolf. Don’t be afraid. There is nothing to worry about. I promise to make your riddle very simple. Just hard enough for your little brain.”

“Don’t answer that,” I told Sean.

There had to be a way around it.

“I’ll do it!”

I turned. The female werewolf from earlier strode into the arena, her head held high. Oh no.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I started.

“Be quiet, human.” She marched forward, giving Sean a look of withering scorn. “Ask your riddle. I’ll answer.”

The sphinx pivoted toward her.

“You’re in danger. This is a terrible idea,” I told her. “He—"

“Unlike some people, I’m not a coward.” She faced the sphinx.

“Stop!” Sean snapped.

She ignored him. “Ask your riddle.”

Magic swirled around the sphinx. Two massive golden wings thrust from its back, unfolding, each synthetic feather sharp like a glossy metal blade. A shadow fell upon the arena as they blocked the sunlight.

“The pact has been made,” the sphinx announced.

Thin tendrils of gold light wound about the werewolf woman, binding her in place.

“Say my name, and I will disappear. What am I?”

The werewolf woman opened her mouth. Uncertainty flared in her eyes.

“Not another word,” I said. “If you answer wrong, he will devour your mind.”

The sphinx’s feline lips stretched, revealing a row of four-foot fangs, white and sharp like swords.

The werewolf woman paled.

“This is why they’re banned from Baha-char,” I told her. “They trap beings with their riddles and when they don’t get the right answer, they absorb their minds. Your body will live on, but you will not. Don’t say anything. Don’t even cough. He can’t touch you until you make a sound.”

She clamped her lips shut.

I had to save her. I had to do something.

Sean had a familiar contemplative look on his face. There were many species Sean could kill with a knife, but a battle with the sphinx would be incredibly difficult. No, we needed to beat him on his own terms. We needed…

Wait.

“I’ll be right back. Sean, don’t do anything until I come back.”

I took off at a run. Behind me the low rumble of sphinx’s chuckle rolled through the Old Arena.

I dashed through the streets, veering left and right. Here’s hoping he hadn’t left yet.

The side street spat me out onto one of the main thruways. I crossed it and climbed the stone stairs on the side of a building leading up to a terrace above. The Tooth of Shver, a massive ivory fang twelve stories tall and carved into a terraced palace, rose to my left, and the sapphire glass tower was straight across. Okay, I knew where I was.

I jogged along the terraces, crisscrossing the streets on narrow bridges, turned right, jogged for another four blocks, turned right again, and finally emerged onto a wide street.

A towering tree rose in front of me to a hundred and fifty feet, its bark hard and smooth, more stone than wood and swirling with deep red, gold, black, and creamy white as if it were made of brecciated jasper. Its thicker limbs were a full twenty feet in diameter, its thinner branches were about five feet across, and most of them were hollowed, punctured with windows and ornate doors. Balconies curved around the entrances, cushioned in the tree’s foliage.

I headed to the entrance, a ten-foot-tall door in the thick trunk, and knocked.

Twin cameras swiveled toward me from above, looking like two dandelions on thin stalks. A high-pitched voice emanated from a hidden speaker.

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to see the First Scholar.”

“The supplicant hours are not now. Come back tomorrow.”

“I must see him. It’s an emergency.”

“The First Scholar is busy. He has no time for you now. Come back tomorrow.”

Oy. “The First Scholar knows me.”

The voice let out an exasperated chirp. “Human! The First Scholar is very important. Very busy. You are a not-important stupid human. Go away!”

If making a good impression wasn’t crucial, I’d have been hopping up and down from sheer frustration. “Tell him Dina of Earth is here to see him.”

“Dina?” A voice asked from above.

I backed away from the door. Far above me, the First Scholar emerged onto the balcony of one of the higher branches. He was about three feet tall, plump, and old, with feathers that had gone completely white except for the touch of scarlet on his bushy tail and the tips of his wings. Two dinosaurian arms thrust out from under his wings and gripped the balcony rail with clawed hands. His beak was yellow, and his eyes were round and bright like two brilliant zircon jewels.

The official name of the species was koo-ko. Sean called them space chickens and refused to keep to the proper name. They had held a philosophical debate at Gertrude Hunt during last Treaty Stay, an innkeeper holiday, and since nobody died, it was considered a resounding success.

The First Scholar spread his wings. “Dina!”

“First Scholar!”

“We meet again!”

A smaller, younger male koo-ko with turquoise tips on his wings emerged from the doorway behind the First Scholar and plopped an elaborate headdress of golden wire and jewels onto his head.

“Your tree has many branches,” I told them. Flattery never hurt.

The First Scholar preened. “Yes, it is splendid, isn’t it? It can house all our students, faculty, and staff. What brings you here?”

“I need your wisdom, Great Scholar.”

The First Scholar’s eyes sparkled. “What may I do for you?”

“Someone I know has been trapped by a sphinx.”

The First Scholar’s feathers stood on end. “Here? At Baha-char? They are banned from the Great Bazaar!”

“It’s a juvenile male. The riddle has been asked, and by the time the authorities catch on, it might be too late. Please help me, First Scholar. I will be in your debt.”

The First Scholar drew himself to his full height. His headdress listed to the left, threatening to fall off his head. “Not another word. I will take care of this.”

The koo-ko assistant pointed at the doorway and murmured something.

“It will be a teachable moment,” the First Scholar declared and waved his wing at the doorway. “Come!”

A flood of koo-ko of all sizes and colors erupted onto the balcony. They spilled over the rail, spread their wings, and glided to the ground around me. One, two, five...ten…I lost count. Their belts and harnesses differed but every single one came with a holder containing a fat scroll. It looked like they were carrying a personal roll of toilet paper with them. Normally it made me giggle in my head, because somewhere deep inside I was seven years old and potty humor was still funny, but right now any humor was in short supply.

The First Scholar pushed his headdress back onto his head. “Pay attention, young ones. This will be an experience you must commit to memory. Form a flock and bring me my teaching stick!”

* * *

I rushed through the streets. The koo-ko had no trouble keeping up with me despite being about half my height. If needed, all of them could outrun me and then some. Including the First Scholar and two of his helpers, one carrying his hat and the other dragging a long stick of polished blue wood with a bright red tassel attached to its tip.

“Tell me the riddle,” the First Scholar asked.

“ ‘Say my name, and I will disappear. What am I?’ ” I was pretty sure I knew the answer but "pretty sure" didn't count when a life hung in the balance.

“You’re right. The sphinx is very young. No matter. Youth isn’t an excuse for willful flouting of the rules, although it is certainly the right time for it.”

We turned into the dark alleys. The shaggy sloth creature saw us and waved a little piece of bright red cloth like a flag as we passed. The other vendors stared. They had now seen Sean run into the Old Arena, then run out, then come back with me, then I ran out, and now I was back leading a flock of koo-ko. It was more excitement than they probably had seen the entire month.

We spilled into the Old Arena. Everything was as I had left it: the sphinx, Sean, and the female werewolf, still locked in the glowing golden helix of the sphinx’s power.

“Why don’t you answer?” the sphinx purred, power vibrating in every vowel. “Go on. Take a chance. You cannot wait forever. Soon you will soil yourself. Then will come thirst, then hunger. You are a brave warrior. Is that how you want to die? Alone, wasting away in your filth because you are too scared to answer a simple riddle?”

“Keep quiet,” Sean told her.

“She has answered you,” the First Scholar declared.

The sphinx turned its massive head and looked at us.

The First Scholar’s assistant on his left deposited the headdress onto the elder’s head. The assistant on his right thrust the stick into his clawed hand. The three dozen koo-ko arranged themselves into a crescent behind the First Scholar.

A violet sheen rolled over sphinx’s eyes. “And who are you, small bird?”

His voice was back to normal. The power-saturated sound only occurred when he spoke to the one bound by his riddle.

The First Scholar raised his stick, sending the tassel flying. “Do not change the subject. By the very act of remaining quiet, she has answered your riddle, for the answer to your question is silence.”

The sphinx frowned.

“The right answer has been given. Release this creature as per your bargain,” the First Scholar demanded.

The sphinx pondered it, clearly stumped.

“That is not a proper answer,” he finally said.

“Then ask me another question, and I will answer for her,” The First Scholar declared. “She is but a humble warrior, while my mind holds decades of academic knowledge. She is a snack, but I am a delicious feast.”

The sphinx smiled, and the nightmarish forest of fangs in his mouth glinted in the sun. The golden glow around the female werewolf died and she tumbled to the ground.

The sphinx opened its metallic wings, the golden feathers reflecting sunlight in a blinding glow. Golden light spiraled around the First Scholar. He was barely three and a half feet tall, counting the headdress, and the sphinx was forty feet at the shoulder.

The koo-ko scholars cooed in unison, the sound of collective anxiety.

The First Scholar raised his head. “Ask your question.”

“The more there is, the less you see. What am I?

“Darkness.”

The Sphinx opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

“That is an embarrassingly easy question. Ask another,” the First Scholar said. “Go ahead.”

“Once offered one, you shall have two or none at all—”

“A choice. Let us try again. Reach deeper.”

“I have one color but many sizes. I touch you yet you never feel me. Light gives me existence, darkness--”

“A shadow.” The First Scholar sighed. “Let me save you the trouble. Wind, time, self, light, youth, fire. Shall I continue?”

The sphinx stared at him, mute.

A few seconds passed.

“How?” the sphinx managed finally.

“You’re obviously going through Bartran’s Guide to the Questions of an Inquisitive Mind and the Nature of Existence.” The First Scholar turned to his students and waved the stick. “Note this moment.”

The koo-ko pulled scrolls from the holders on their belts and produced styluses.

“Those of you who idly wonder why you should read the classics and when you would ever have the opportunity to use the fundamental knowledge contained within, take heed, for you never know when you may encounter a sphinx on the crossroads of life. This sphinx,” the Scholar pointed at the towering creature with his stick, “is but an allegory. He and his kind are forbidden here, so you would be forgiven for thinking your mind is safe, yet here he is, ready to devour the unprepared. Such is the existence of a scholar, forever seeking knowledge and defending one’s right to obtain and share it while perils await at every turn. It is a noble pursuit.”

The First Scholar’s voice quivered with emotion. The koo-ko students dutifully recorded every word.

“Always remember, knowledge is a product of labor. It is to be shared but never taken. For if you set out to rip knowledge away from others and hoard it like a jealous merchant hoards their wealth, you too will be shunned like this sphinx and banished from the circle of your peers.”

No doubt, this would become one of the koo-ko philosopher legends.

The First Scholar turned to the sphinx and waved his stick at him. “And you, you are not supposed to be here. More, you have come here unprepared. Bartran provides the first building block to one’s understanding of existence, but he, by design, shows you the mere tip of the iceberg, just enough to demonstrate that the enormous underwater mountain is there and to prompt you to dive into the frigid waters to seek your own understanding. You have decades of study ahead of you before venturing forth again. Answer the question of my dear human friend and then return humbly to your teacher, who is, without a doubt, deeply disappointed in your conduct.”