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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I GAVE THE HERBS BACK to Trevalyan and told the pair of them what Stonebrunch had said, then headed into the kitchen. I had way too much to do to stand around any longer.

While I was clearing out the remains of breakfast from the dining room, King and his agents had claimed the empty tables. Harper sat in the corner once more, looking normal. That is, she looked annoyed. Her arms were crossed.

I washed and cleaned the kitchen, resetting it. Then I pulled out the kitchen laptop and set it up on the counter. I went through the pantry, shelves and cold room and checked every fresh ingredient I had, looking for food that might have gone over. I couldn’t check the eggs without cracking them. I had to assumed they were bad and added another three dozen to my order.

I also found that more than the eggs was unusable. The avocadoes that had been fresh yesterday were weeping brown ooze. The bananas were black, soft, and smelly. The sliced bread I’d put on the shelves while preparing breakfast was now a solid, hard lump of dough that could substitute as a blunt weapon.

I tossed spoiled food into the garbage, my temper building at the sheer waste that I could do nothing about. The cost that I must bear through no fault of my own.

Then I realized that most of the food I was forced to pitch had been sitting on the open shelves at the front of the kitchen, right up against the wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room and the foyer.

If Stonebrunch was doing this, that made sense.

I moved with even more grim determination and speed, transferring anything I thought might be vulnerable to Stonebrunch’s influence into the cold room or onto the counter that ran along the back wall. That left the shelves bare of everything except canned goods. Those, I would thoroughly inspect when I opened them. I couldn’t move the hundreds of gallon cans anywhere else.

I finished the order to the grocery store in Gouverneur. They would deliver by late afternoon, if I paid a rush fee. I sighed and paid it, then got on with prep for lunch.

I made a no-brainer meal, a quick recipe I didn’t have to think about, that everyone could eat no matter what their dietary preferences were. Tacos, with a variety of fillings that everyone could pick and choose from. Avocadoes were not one of them.

I had lettuce and tomatoes in the cold room, onions on the counter, and frozen ground beef. I made a lentil “meat” filling for the vegetarians, and two types of beef—one spicy and one with zero heat for Finch and anyone else with a baby mouth.

I had canned guacamole, canned refried beans, sour cream in a bucket in the cold room that needed using up. I opened a can of whole corn from the shelves and sniffed and stirred cautiously, then even more tentatively, ate one of the kernels. Satisfied, I threw it into a frying pan and seared it, along with a dusting of chili powder, chopped cilantro, sliced green onions and lime juice from a bottle on the back of the shelf in the cold room. I made a pico de gallo out of the last of the tomatoes, corn, green bell peppers and onions, and separated it into two batches. One got jalapenos out of a jar. The other remained innocent.

Grated cheese, well over a pound of it, was in the cold room beside the non-dairy cheeze. I dumped them in bowls.

I had the oven heating to cook the shells and was heating the refried beans and the meats when I heard a deathly groan of timber and nails and paused.

The sound had come from the stairs, on the other side of the passage door.

Alarmed, I dropped the wooden spoon back into the pot, hurried to the door and stepped out under the stairs. They sent out strained sounds that were unmistakable. I moved around them, intending to halt Stonebrunch before he stepped into the foyer, in full view of King and his people through the arch into the dining room.

I halted on the big round rug and watched Stonebrunch descend the stairs, speechless.

It was Stonebrunch. His height and those shoulders told me it couldn’t be anyone else. He gripped the wide balustrade, his hand easily stretching over its width, and used it to navigate the stairs, which were too narrow for his boots. He carefully placed the heel of his boot on the step two below the one he was on, then transferred his weight.

He had reason to be cautious, I judged, because if his boot heel slipped off the step, he would roll all the way to the bottom.

It was Stonebrunch, but he had changed. His skin was no longer blue, but a brown shade that could easily pass as human. He’d also changed the shape of his ears. They looked human, now. They were peaked at the back, but no more than a human’s might be.

Those two changes, combined with his human clothing, made a huge difference to his appearance. He appeared to be human. A tall and muscular human, but definitely human.

He stepped onto the rug I was standing on and looked at me. “I fix.”

I nodded, and reached out for the newel post, as relief weakened my knees. “You did,” I agreed. And he hadn’t razed Haigton to the ground to do it.

“I eat,” Stonebrunch added. He pointed at the archway into the dining room.

“Ten minutes,” I told him. I pointed at the doorway into the bar. My finger shook. “Have a drink, then you can eat.”

He considered that. “I drink.”

I mentally wished Hirom luck as Stonebrunch walked with surprising grace over to the barroom door.

Then I noticed that the handsome, lush fern that sat on the pedestal between the front door and the barroom door had wilted and was sagging over the side of the enamel pot like a dying, gasping fish.