“You’re making me hungry,” Gaston said, “But I still don’t see the point.”

“No single ingredient is the star of that dish,” Orro said. “It is a whole. I could cook it in a dozen ways, altering amounts of ingredients and spices and creating new variations. How is the stock made? What vintage is the wine? A second year cooking student can make this dish and it would be edible. The very complexity of its preparations makes the recipe flexible. Now consider the humble egg. It is possibly the oldest food known throughout the Universe. The egg is just an egg. Cook it too long, it becomes hard. Cook it too little and it turns into a jellied mess. Break the yolk because of your carelessness and the dish is ruined. Gouge the gentle skin as you peel the shell and no culinary expertise can repair it. The egg allows no room for error. That’s where true mastery shines.”

Jack slipped into the kitchen and walked out onto the porch. “There is a police car parked in the subdivision two houses over. The male cop inside is watching the inn.”

I sighed. “That would be Officer Marais.” Like clockwork.

“Should we be concerned?” George said.

“Officer Marais and I have a history.”

All people had magic. Most of them didn’t know how to use it, because they never tried, but magic still found ways to seep through. For Officer Marais it manifested as intuition. Every gut feeling he had was telling him that there was something not quite right with me and Gertrude Hunt. He couldn’t prove it, but it nagged at him all the same. Officer Marais was both conscientious and hardworking, and tonight a hyper hunch had warned him that something “not quite right” was about to happen, so he must’ve driven to the Avalon subdivision and settled down to watch the inn.

“He has an over-developed sense of intuition,” I explained. “That’s why I’ve made sure everyone knows to enter through the orchard. As long as he doesn’t see anything, we’ll be fine.”

“Did you confirm with the delegates?” George asked.

Jack nodded. “Otrokar at seven, the Merchants at seven thirty, and vampires at eight. I heard something interesting from the home office. They say we’re in for some rough waters with vampires.”

George raised one eyebrow. “House Vorga.”

Jack sighed. “This thing when you know things before I tell them to you is really annoying.”

“So you’ve told me.” George turned to me. “The delegation includes knights from every House immediately engaged in combat on Nexus. There are three major Houses and two minor. All major Houses initially were receptive to the peace talks; however, in the past few days, House Vorga began to lean in favor of continuing the conflict.”

“So what does that mean?” Gaston asked from the kitchen.

“Your guess as good as mine.” George grimaced. “It could mean House Vorga made a secret alliance with House Meer to bring down the other Houses. It could mean someone in the House Vorga has been offended by someone from House Krahr stepping on their shadow, or wearing the wrong color, or not pausing long enough before a sacred altar. It could mean someone saw a bird fly the wrong way over the steeple of the local cathedral. It’s vampire politics. It’s like sticking your hand into a barrel filled with forty cobras and trying to find one garden snake among them by touch.”

The best thing about vampire politics was that they were the Arbiter’s problem. I just had to keep the vampires safe.

George was looking at the orchard, his face distant.

“Say George?” Gaston asked. I glanced at him and he winked at me. “Why forty?”

“Because it’s a sufficiently large number to make the odds of finding a garden snake improbable,” George said, his voice flat.

“Yes, but why not fifty or a hundred? Why such an odd number? Forty? Snakes aren’t commonly measured in forties.”

George pivoted on his foot and looked at Gaston. The big man flashed a grin.

Jack chuckled to himself.

“When he concentrates like that,” Gaston told me, “if you are really quiet, you can hear the gears in his head turning. Sometimes you smell a faint puff of smoke coming out of his ears…”

The air above the grass tore like a transparent plastic curtain, showing a deep purple void for a fraction of a second. The void blinked its purple eye and a group of otrokar appeared on the grass. One, two, three… twelve. As expected.

The otrokar in the front started toward us. Huge, at least six five, and muscular judging by the powerful arms and legs, he was wrapped in the traditional otrokar half-cloak, which was more of a really wide long scarf designed to shield your arms and face from the sun. While worn, it covered their head, shoulder, and torso to mid-thigh. The handle of a giant sword wrapped in leather rose above the otrokar’s shoulder. The second ortokar followed the first’s footsteps. He was slender and shorter than the leader by about four inches. The difference between the two was so pronounced, they almost didn’t look like the belonged to the same species.

The others followed.

The leader reached the porch and pulled the cloak off in a single fluid move. An enormous otrokar woman stood before me, clad in leather and wearing the traditional half-kilt. Her skin was a deep, rich bronze with a hint of orange. Muscles corded her frame. Her hair was French-braided on her temples, the braids running toward the back of her head. The remaining wealth of hair was brushed back into a long mane. At the root, the hair was so dark, it seemed black, but it gradually lightened and at the tips, the color turned to deep ruby, as if her hair had been carefully dipped in fresh blood. Her dark violet eyes under black eyebrows examined us, assessing. Her posture shifted slightly. In the split second she glanced at us, she had seen everything: Jack, George, me, Gaston in the doorway and Orro in the kitchen, and she formulated a battle plan.