If Sean were home, he would hunt them down, put their heads on a pike, and then present it to Peterson like a shish kebab.

I tapped my fingers on the table. The leading ninja, a man, judging by the height and the shoulders, sank into the ground up to his knees.

Everyone froze.

The intruders scanned the brush, listening for any noises. When nothing out the ordinary happened, two of them stepped closer to their leader and tried to pull him out. I let them work him free and then sank the one on the left up to his hips.

Everyone froze again.

It took them three minutes to get their friend out. They huddled up and made fancy hand gestures, some of which included forceful pointing, making fists, and drawing lines across their throats. Finally, a consensus must have been reached, because they backed up a few yards, fanned out, and started north, trying to skirt the troublesome patch of ground.

I let them take ten steps and then sank the one on the right down to their knees.

Caldenia cracked a smile.

They pulled my victim out and formed a single line, the leader taking point. He unsheathed a large knife, hacked off a sapling, and tested the ground with it. The ground held. He raised his hand and moved two fingers, motioning the team forward. They started moving again, single file, each intruder putting his feet in the steps of the one in front of them.

I let them take fifteen steps and sank the last ninja into the ground down to their waist. The masked human frantically pawed the ground, as the team kept moving.

“Help,” the ninja hissed in a female voice.

The leader whirled around. The balaclava hid his face, but his body radiated “what the fuck” with every cell of his being. The two other gate-crashers grabbed their sunken friend and tried to pull her out. I held her still.

They strained.

One, two, three…

The intruder popped free with sudden force and the three ninjas collapsed on the ground in a heap. Caldenia chuckled.

The leader raised his arms.

The three ninjas scrambled upright. The woman I had sunk dusted off her pants, pointed to herself, and jabbed her thumb to the right, indicating the direction they had come from.

The leader shook his head and pointed toward the inn.

The female ninja shook her head.

The leader pointed to himself, pointed to the ninja, and pointed at the inn again.

The female ninja gave him the finger, pretended to wash her hands off, and raised them in the air.

I sank the three remaining ninjas down to their armpits.

The woman nodded, executed a crisp about-face, and marched back the way they had come.

“The voice of reason,” Caldenia commented. “She deserves the chance to skulk another day.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Mercy, your Grace?”

“Natural selection,” Caldenia said.

The door to Baha-char opened deep within the inn. Sean.

In thirty seconds, he came into the kitchen, put his arms around me, and kissed me. He came back. The relief was so real, I almost slumped down in my seat.

Sean smiled at me and saw the screen. “Visitors?”

“Rudolph Peterson came to see us this afternoon.”

“Do me a favor, hold them just like that.”

Sean pulled off his shirt and walked out of the kitchen door.

On the screen, the three figures struggled to free themselves. Digging yourself out when you are in dirt up to your armpits was difficult under normal circumstances, and I had no intention of letting them go.

I felt Sean move through the grounds, unnaturally fast, and whispered, sending my voice to his ear. “Don’t kill them.”

The moon slipped out from behind a ragged grey cloud, flooding the scene with silver light. The brush parted.

The three struggling humans held still.

A lupine beast emerged from the undergrowth, so large, his head would be even with my chest. Sheathed in dark fur, huge, silent, the king of wolves lowered his head, his amber eyes glowing with reflected fire, and padded toward the three intruders.

They didn’t move. They didn’t blink or breathe, as his hand-sized paws landed next to them.

Sean circled them, inhaling their scent. He stopped before the leader, in plain view of the two others.

A long moment stretched by.

Sean opened his jaws. In the light of the moon, his fangs glinted like daggers. He bit the leaders head.

The ninja on the left screamed, a hoarse cry of pure fear.

“Oh dear,” Caldania said. “I think he broke that one.”

Sean pulled the man’s mask off and spat it to the side. The leader gaped at him, a light-skinned man in his early forties, with brown hair cut military short, his eyes glassy and wide open.

Sean lowered his head and stared at the man, his fangs an inch from the intruder’s face. For a torturous few seconds nobody moved. Then Sean turned and melted back into the darkness of the woods.

I jettisoned the ninjas from the dirt. They scrambled to their feet and ran back the way they came.

Sean had bought enough spare parts and weapons to outfit a small army, so much so, that he could only carry a small fraction of his purchases, which he referred to as the “really cool stuff.”

“A three-coil liquefier?”

Sean hefted the six-foot-long cannon that resembled some ridiculous video game gun. Two tendrils of striated wood slithered from the ceiling, wrapped around the gun, and sucked it up. Gertrude Hunt and he seemed to have no trouble communicating.

“Why would you ever feel the need to turn carbon-based life-forms into primordial soup?”

“Because it’s easier to dispose of the remains.”

“Why not an anti-matter death ray then?” I was only half joking. There were several weapons in existence that would have qualified for that description.

He winked at me. “Liquefier was on sale.”

I rubbed my face, trying to adjust to the new arsenal. Above us, Gertrude Hunt creaked, installing the cannon.

I’ve had to shut down the koo-ko “discussions” twice in the past four hours. A liquefier was entirely too much temptation at the moment.

“Wilmos is going to deliver the rest tomorrow. Do you think we have enough firepower to survive one night with the Drífen in the house?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I loaded a house’s worth of sarcasm into my voice. “We will have to muddle through somehow.”

“I said I was sorry about Marais.”

“I appreciate the two of you conspiring to keep me safe, but the inn and I had it under control and there are strict rules that govern what we can and cannot do. Marais is not a guest. He’s not staff. He’s an aware outsider. That means that the responsibility for his awareness and what he might do with it rests on our shoulders. You already broke the rules when you gave him a subatomic vaporizer. If the Assembly finds out, it will create a problem.”

Sean grunted. “First, Marais is cool. Second, the vaporizer is telepathically linked to him and is indistinguishable from a normal police baton. It’s harmless, until he decides it’s not. Third, I keep hearing how the Assembly doesn’t like this and there will be trouble if they find out about that. What has this Assembly ever done for you?”

“They gave me a magic inn and access to a treasure trove of galactic knowledge.”

“They gave you an inn that was a hair away from dying, and you nursed it back to health, while they didn’t lift a finger to help.”

I held out my hand. Sean’s copper robe fell out of the ceiling into my fingers. I thrust it at him. “It’s fifteen minutes till midnight. Put the robe on and quit complaining. You knew the deal when you signed up.”

“You sound like my drill sergeants.”

I stuck my tongue out at him and we went down to the kitchen, as he slipped on his robe.

The backyard had been transformed. Colorful lanterns hung in the air, lavender, pink, green, and a warm, happy yellow. Lengths of silky fabric draped the outer wall of the inn, curving to both sides, forming canopies over the porch and part of the lawn. Delicate lantern flowers, turquoise, pink, and magenta, bloomed on the lawn. To the left, a pair of lantern peacocks the size of a car, perched among the flowers. To the right, a lantern tiger pair guarded their cub. A path stretched from the porch to the spot where the Drífan herald had entered yesterday, bordered by lantern jellyfish, suspended from nearly invisible wires. Their colorful paper tentacles swayed in the breeze.

It was just me and Sean. Caldenia was watching from her quarters, but I didn’t think it would be wise for her to be present. Orro had disappeared into his rooms. When I had notified him that the Drífen were incoming, he hadn’t responded.

The night was quiet. A cold wind stirred my hair.

Sean reached into his sleeve and pulled out a flower. It was white and frilly, with brilliant blue specks on the petals and a deep blue center. He held it out to me.

Awww. He brought me a flower.

I took it and smelled it. “Thank you. It’s lovely.”

We were standing on the porch together at midnight, with the magical lanterns glowing all around us. In a few moments, all hell could break loose, but for now it was just us. When I got old, I would remember this moment, the moment when Sean brought me a flower from Baha-char.

The Drífen arrived.

There was no power surge, no bright light from the sky, no gate in the fabric of existence. They simply appeared at the edge of the field and walked toward us. There were six of them: Zedas; the Akeraat from the previous evening; the small creature that had accompanied him; a very large woman in silver armor, with nearly white skin and equally pale hair, carrying a halberd on her back; a man dressed in black with dark brown skin and a wealth of glossy dark hair pulled back from his face, who was like a dagger, compact, fast, and probably deadly; an olive skinned woman in her early forties, her hair twisted into elaborate knots, walking primly in a green and white robe; and in front of them all, a woman in her early thirties, wrapped in an old cloak.