Page 7 of The Badger in His Burrow (Beyond the Veil #8)

7

Elliot Crane

Where are you?

Seth Mays

Renting a carpet steamer.

After I’d talked him into shifting, we’d gone out into the woods and been caught in a rainstorm that can only be called ‘torrential.’

We’d gotten absolutely soaked, and then we were so covered in mud that there was no possible way for us to not get it all over the house. Elliot’s rueful face this morning as he looked at the carpet had been enough to send me out in search of a carpet steamer.

What for?

Have you ever tried to get that much mud out of a carpet?

Maybe not that much mud.

Trust me. You need a steamer.

He hadn’t said anything in response, so I rented the steamer, bought a bunch of pet-rated carpet cleaner and a scrubbing brush, winced a little at the bill, and assured the woman at the counter that I would be bringing it back within 24 hours because I definitely didn’t want to pay either the late or replacement fees.

Elliot was sitting at the kitchen island when I got back to the house, having left the steamer and its equipment—and manual—in the living room. There were muddy paw-prints leading to both the guest bathroom and Elliot’s room, but I figured I should probably start where the mud was the thickest.

He looked up when I walked in. “Hey. You didn’t need to do that.”

I shrugged. “I’m the reason we were out in the mud.”

Elliot made a face I couldn’t read. “Mom hated it when I got mud on her carpet,” he said softly. “Val and I did once. I think I was twelve or so. I wanted to go out and shift, and Val came with me.” He looked up, and a small half-smile flitted across his lips. “He always came with me, when we were kids.”

I felt an odd flash of jealousy—not because I thought Elliot was in love with Hart or anything, because that wasn’t the impression I got. But because Elliot had let Hart in. Because Hart knew him well enough to know everything there was to know about him, and I barely knew anything at all.

I desperately wanted to. I got drips and drabs, breadcrumbs that I was slowly putting together to get a sense of the whole loaf. Like how his mom hated mud on the floor. How Hart and he had been inseparable. How he knew how to cook. How he loved chocolate and liked country music.

I wanted to know more. His birthday. His favorite color. His favorite food. His favorite movie. The places he wanted to visit before he died. Whether he was a dog person or a cat person.

I opened my mouth, but he kept going, so I shut it again.

“We came in, and Val took his shoes off, because that was the rule, but I was in fur.” His lips quirked again. “I got halfway across the living room before Dad grabbed me and threw me in the bathtub.”

“He picked you up?” Elliot was a huge badger. It was hard to imagine anyone picking him up if he didn’t want to be picked up.

“Dad’s—Dad was a shifter, too.” Another lip twitch, although this one felt sad.

I’d caught the correction. And the sadness. I didn’t know what to do with that. What do you say to someone who’d just reminded himself that his father had been murdered? In the house he was now living in. I wondered what that was like—why he’d chosen to stay here in spite of it.

I hadn’t asked to see his dad’s office—and he hadn’t shown it to me. In fact, I hadn’t been down that particular hallway at all. And neither one of us had walked down that hall in our muddy feet, so at least there was one part of the house I didn’t have to clean.

Elliot gave himself a little shake. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I returned. “I’d forgotten he was a shifter, too.”

Elliot nodded once. “You’d have liked him,” he said, then, and I felt my pulse quicken. Not because he thought I would have liked his dad—although I’m sure that would have been nice—but because Elliot was thinking about it.

“He seems like a really great person,” I said. I didn’t know much about Elliot’s dad, but I definitely hadn’t heard anything that would make me think otherwise. Hart liked him, and Hart was, in my experience, a pretty good judge of people most of the time.

Elliot nodded again. “He was,” he said softly, then looked up and gave me a less-sad crooked smile. “And he’d skin us both for what we did to the carpet.”

It took me almost four hours to get the carpet clean. During those four hours, Elliot decided that the solution to the mud-on-the-carpet problem would be building an outdoor shower where he could stash clothes—or at least a robe—and a towel, hose himself off, and then put something on before coming back in the house.

He’d then disappeared to literally design said shower. I didn’t mind—the whole reason he’d decided to plan the outdoor shower was because I’d threatened to steam clean him if he didn’t get out from underfoot.

By the time I’d left to return the steam cleaner, he was already in the garage cutting things.

I stuck my head in. “I’m returning the cleaner,” I told him.

“Okay,” he replied, distracted by what he was doing.

“Should you be using a saw while alone?”

He looked up at me, then snorted. “I have lived alone for most of my adult life,” he replied. “Aside from rooming with Val in college. I haven’t cut off my hand yet.”

I frowned a little, but left anyway. I supposed he had a point—he was a master carpenter. He’d been doing this for years, and there was no possible way he’d had someone in his garage or basement every single time he needed to saw something.

It did worry me a little, though. Not because I thought he wasn’t careful, but because it only takes one mistake for someone to end up missing a finger or even dead. I haven’t seen a lot of home-project-related deaths, but two was enough to make me extremely cautious about power tools.

Although Elliot had been using them as the foundation of his employment for like twenty years at this point, so I probably shouldn’t be too worried.

I also knew that he liked to do a lot of his work by hand—hand saws, hand sanding and carving—which was much less likely to end with him losing a finger or two.

Returning the steam cleaner itself was entirely uneventful, and I stopped on the way back to pick up ice cream—chocolate fudge swirl for Elliot and cashew milk caramel ribbon for me—because the lady at the hardware store where I’d rented it gave me some money back for returning it extra early. I didn’t think she was supposed to, but I wasn’t going to say no.

I could hear the saw as I carried the ice cream to the kitchen and put it in the freezer, although it had stopped by the time I poked my head back into the garage.

Elliot looked up. “Care to give me a hand?”

I shrugged. “As long as you tell me what to do.”