Page 2 of Xel: Broken Bond
“Do you know her well?”
I nodded. “She organises my shifts. When I arrived here, my master put her in charge of most of my work.”
“And how would you describe Ms Norris?”
I glanced across the room. Kathy was now consoling one of the kitchen staff, a young woman who had only been working for the hotel for a week or two. No doubt this was far from the level of excitement she’d been expecting when she’d taken the job.
“She’s very organised,” I told the officer. “She tries to make sure everyone has enough shifts to cover their bills, but not so many that they get overworked.”
“What about personality-wise?” he pressed. “Is she friendly? Approachable?”
Nobody would describe Kathy asfriendly. She was efficient. She was capable. But what she lacked in warmth, she made up for with a firm morality that meant she would always look out for the underdog.
“Kathy didn’t hurt Mr Ronson,” I told the officer, skipping right to what he actually wanted to know. “Whether or not she’slikeable, she’s far too honest for that sort of thing.”
“No, I did not poison the food!” a shrill voice shrieked from across the room, and I turned to see Holi, one of the head chefs,glaring at another one of the officers. She was a Wasop, with vibrant black and yellow stripes across her skin, and she wore her jet black hair in a mohawk. And though she was only a touch over four feet tall, she wasn’t the slightest bit intimidated by the human officer towering over her. “The cantankerous old fart had a heart attack,” she stated, gesturing angrily towards the sheet-covered body on the floor. “And as soon as someone does a proper autopsy, I’m sure that will be perfectly obvious.”
It seemed the police were pushing the murder angle fairly heavily, then. Did they honestly believe that someone had enough of a grudge against him to kill him? And should it alarm me that I wasn’t all that surprised by the idea? Not everyone had liked my master. For all my loyalty to him, I was aware of that.
Kathy looked over then and saw me watching the spectacle. And she also saw the officer still trying to get answers out of me. She came marching over, her fists clenched at her sides. Kathy was not a tall woman, though long days of hard work had given her thick arms and thighs. But she had a way of carrying herself that more than made up for her lack of height. “For goodness sake, would you leave the poor lad alone,” she scolded the officer. “He’s just lost his master and he doesn’t need you prodding at him. And as Holi just said, it’s far more likely that Mr Ronson died of a heart attack. Come over here, Xel,” she said, taking my hand and leading me away, ignoring the officer’s affronted look. “How are you doing, hm? Are you holding it together?”
I was not ‘holding it together’. I had far too many questions about what I was going to do now. Would I still work here at the hotel? Would I have to go and live somewhere else? Who would decide when I got to eat, and where I should sleep, and what clothes I should wear? Without my master, I didn’t know how to do the simplest things. But Kathy wouldn’t know the answer to any of those questions either, so I nodded and said, “I’m fine.”
“You’re certainlynotfine,” she said, with equal parts empathy and exasperation. “Just sit down here and take a breather, okay?” She led me to a chair near the entrance to the dining hall, away from the bulk of the crowd. “I’ll come and check on you in a bit. Some of the wait-staff are in a tizzy about whether or not they’re still going to get paid, and I need to go and calm things down. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll get you a cup of coffee… Oh, no, you can’t drink coffee, can you. Never mind. What about a lemonade? I’ll have Raf bring you over a lemonade. And don’t you worry about a thing. I know some people who might be able to take you in, so we’re going to getsomethingsorted, you hear me? I don’t know what the official protocol is for dimari who…” She stopped suddenly, and I followed her gaze across the room to the rear entrance. A tall, lanky, human man had just wandered in, looking for all the world like he owned the place. And for all I knew, maybe he did now. I felt Kathy bristle beside me. The man – Dorral was his name – caught my eye from across the room and smirked at me. Then he schooled his features into an appropriate look of concern and hurried across the room to my master’s body.
“Beastly man,” Kathy hissed. Dorral was the general manager of the hotel, and people tended to like him even less than they liked my master. “Xel, you listen to me. I want you to stay here… No, wait, I’ve got a better idea. Don’t go anywhere,” she ordered me, then rushed off across the room. A minute later, she was back, with a Solof man in tow. He had lavender-coloured skin and a lean build, with vivid purple eyes. “Xel, this is Captain Moss. Captain, this is Xel, Mr Ronson’s dimari. I’m very concerned that without a master, he’s going to be feeling rather lost and directionless, and might be likely to wander off unannounced. So would you be able to help me keep an eye on him? There’s a lot going on at the moment, and it would be easy for him to be overlooked.”
Overlooked? Wasn’t that normally a good thing? I looked down at the scales on my arms. I usually adjusted my scales so they were purple while I was working, to blend in and let most of the guests believe I was a Solof. But now, I let the colour fade, returning to my natural sky-blue. My master had never said anything in particular about my colouring, but given his general displeasure at being disturbed, I had decided early on in our relationship that blending in with the other species here would be a good idea.
“I’ll keep an eye on him, ma’am,” Captain Moss said, not batting an eyelid at my colour change. “But if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to go and speak to the paramedics before they leave.”
He marched quickly away, and Kathy watched him go, then pursed her lips, the way she did when she was annoyed. Normally, I would check my own behaviour if I saw that expression, wondering if I was the one annoying her… but this time, I couldn’t quite be bothered. Given that my master was dead, I probably didn’t work here anymore. So it was hardly going to matter if Kathy got annoyed with me.
“Xel, I need you to listen to me,” she said, turning back to me once the Captain was gone. “Do not leave this room without telling me first. Do you understand? It isvitalthat I know where you’re going. All right?”
I nodded. I didn’t understand why she was suddenly so insistent about it. I’d worked at this hotel for three years, and after the first week or so, I’d been given plenty of freedom to complete my work without supervision. But if Kathy had decided this was important, I wasn’t going to argue with her.
A moment later, she was cursing and dashing off across the room. “Roshtan, where are you going with that? No, we don’t need to throw it away. Just put it in the fridge and we can re-use it later. The guests are still going to be hungry after all this is cleaned up…”
I watched her go, then sighed, wishing that a cold tray of breakfast food was the worst of the problems I had to deal with right now. There was a hollow feeling in my chest, and I wondered whether dimari could get physically sick from losing a master. My trainers had always treated it like it would be the end of the world. I had the vague idea that I should be working… but now that my master was dead, what work was there to do? Perhaps the hollowness was more confusion than anything else…
“Xel. My sweet treasure,” a saccharine voice said from beside me, and I looked up to see Dorral peering down at me. “You must be distraught with poor Jacob’s passing.” The look on his face was a brazen attempt at sincerity, which nonetheless spectacularly failed to measure up. He sat down beside me and put a hand on my knee. “But I’ve got just the solution. Why don’t you come upstairs with me, and we can figure out what we’re going to do next. I’m sure there are plenty of options that would suit you very well. I know some people who would love to make use of your unique… skill set.” He slid his hand higher up my thigh as he said it, and gave it a firm squeeze. “So come on.” He stood up, offering me his hand. “Let’s go up to my suite and get you sorted out.”
My first impulse was to obey Dorral. I’d gone plenty of places with him before. He was the general manager of the hotel. He’d asked me to perform services for him almost every day for the past three years; in his office, in his suite, in the storage rooms.
But Kathy had been so emphatic about telling her before I went anywhere. I still wasn’t sure why she was being so insistent about it. But she was still my supervisor – or as near as mattered, at least, until any new arrangements were made – so I would have to find her and tell her where I was going.
But then it occurred to me that I didn’t actually want to go with Dorral, and the realisation startled me. It had been a long time since I’d thought in terms ofwantinganything.
“I gave you an order, Xel,” Dorral said, his tone sharpening when I didn’t move. “Come upstairs.”
Dorral had never harmed me. But he was rude and demanding and always quick to remind me that he was more important than me. And I’d obeyed him, for as long as my master had expected me to. But now my master was dead. “You are not my master,” I said to Dorral. “I don’t have to follow your orders.”
“I’m currently the closest thing to a master you’ve got,” he snapped.
That made absolutely no sense. Masters were not interchangeable. A dimari was capable of bonding with exactly one master in their lifetime, and I had not bonded with Dorral.
“You are not my master,” I repeated.