I made myself count through some of the slow inhalations and exhalations that Mary had suggested. I couldn’t tell if it helped. What if my condition got worse instead of better? What if I ended up having some massive asthma attack while I was on a mission, and I had to go to the hospital? Or I died in front of a creature I was supposed to slay?
“Stay here and watch the cat, please,” I told Sindari, giving up on activating my parasympathetic whatever.
A plaintive yowl came from Maggie’s carrier.
The small feline has no wish to stay with me.
“I won’t be long.”
Are those geese? Sindari asked as I got out and walked up to the front door.
I glanced toward the river where a group of them were hanging out on the bank. Yes. I’m sure they don’t want to meet you.
Such an assumption to make. I am the equivalent of royalty in your world. They will be honored to make my acquaintance.
I really doubt that.
As I walked up to the front door, I wondered if Mom even knew I was in town. The night before, I’d left a message on her answering machine, a hulking box on the kitchen counter that was attached to the landline, the only form of communication with the outside world that she had. She wasn’t a technophobe, and I’d seen her throw down some sophisticated Google searches at the library, but she had zero interest in having technology in her house. That had been true in the 80s when I’d been growing up, and she’d refused to have a television, and I was sure it remained true.
I knocked on the sturdy wood-plank door, eyeing another piece of art mounted on it, a bulbous bronze thing that seemed a mix between a gargoyle and a shrunken head. The magic was faint, but I guessed it was the equivalent of an alarm system or maybe a doorbell camera. When had Mom decided she needed all of this stuff?
The door opened, and the pock-faced, scarred, refrigerator of a man looming inside almost had me running back to the car for Chopper and Fezzik. He was six inches taller than my six feet, his head almost brushing the door frame, and there was no way he weighed less than two-fifty. And none of it was fat.
See? Sindari observed from the car. She has found a mate.
Uh, I really doubt it.
The guy couldn’t be more than twenty-five.
He is young and virile. Good for her. Your mother must be a powerful and strong female to attract such a mate at her age.
“I’m Val.” I decided to get to the bottom of this rather than listening to Sindari’s commentary. “Is my mom here? I left a message…”
Yes, I’d successfully left that message. That had to mean this was still my mom’s home. Unless she’d moved and had the number transferred…
He squinted at me. “You made the opekun go off.”
“If that means cat detector, there’s a reason.”
He glanced at the door hanging. “The guardian. It detects magic.”
“There’s a bunch of it in the car. My mom? Did she move or what?”
He went back to squinting at me. I couldn’t tell if this guy was slow or only looked slow. “You say you are Sigrid’s daughter, but I have lived here six months, and you’ve never visited. She’s spoken only rarely of you.”
“Yeah, we’re not that close.” I wasn’t about to explain to the Neanderthal why I stayed away from the people I cared about.
“The opekun tells me not to trust you. You may be a demon in disguise.”
“Does it talk to you often? I know a therapist, if you need a referral.”
The uproarious squawking of geese interrupted whatever his response was going to be. I whirled in time to see my silver tiger bounding through the trees and springing for his prey.
“Sindari!” I yelled as the birds flew away en mass, feathers fluttering down in their wake.
Only when he hit the water did I realize the geese hadn’t been his target. He could have caught one if he’d wished to. He landed in the river with a great splash, then proceeded to frolic like a kitten in the shallows.
“Is that a tiger?” my mom’s nutty houseguest asked.
“Really more of a service animal. I’ll be right back.” I jogged toward the bank, glancing at the house visible through the trees to the right. A dog was barking through a fence at Sindari.
“What are you doing?” I wrapped my fingers around the cat figurine, prepared to send him back to his realm.
Cleansing my nostrils. Sindari flopped on his side below the bank, water lapping at his hips.
“What? Cats don’t like water. What are you doing?”
I am a tiger, not a cat, and swimming is joyous. I have webbed paws. He stuck one into the air, demonstrating his soggy webbing. But I had to clean myself because that dreadful pet urinated in its cage and stank up the air. And those sitting in the air. I do not believe it is pleased to have been left in a box in the car with a tiger.
Ugh. I dropped my forehead into my palm. When I find the crazy elf that tried to blow up Colonel Willard’s building, I’m going to slice her in half with Chopper. I don’t care if she’s the last elf on Earth.
Leaving Sindari to clean himself, I headed back to the front door. A squirrel chattered angrily at me from a tree branch. It was possible I shouldn’t have called Sindari out for my road trip.
The houseguest was staring back and forth from me to the tiger, a smart phone raised to his ear. Who was he calling? The police? Given the dubious way I’d acquired my current vehicle, I didn’t want to deal with the law.
“Could you put that down, please?” I offered my most polite smile while resisting the urge to knock the phone from his hand.
He lowered it, but I had a feeling he’d already made his call.
“Police?” I glanced toward my bathing tiger. “Or animal control?”
The squirrel cursed me in his chatty tongue. No question which he would prefer.
“Deschutes County Search and Rescue,” he said.
I almost asked if my mom was missing, but then I remembered she’d been training her golden retriever for the program the last time I’d been here. And that it would be shocking if my mom of all people got lost in the woods.
“Are she and Rocket out volunteering?” I asked, hoping to prove to this guy that I wasn’t some trickster trying to pass as my mother’s daughter with plans to do nefarious things to the cabin. Or the yard art.
His shoulders did grow a little less hunched when I used the dog’s name. “Yeah. They found the guy. Some idiot who flipped his ATV on an old logging road in the mountains.”
“It wasn’t found twenty feet up in the trees, was it?” I remembered the dragon flying past the rest stop.
“What? No.” There was that squint again. This guy was positive I was shifty.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but who are you, and why are you hanging out in my mom’s house?”
“Dimitri, and I live in the van, but she lets me come in for showers and to use the kitchen.”
“Do you pay her?” I couldn’t imagine my mom letting some charity case intrude on her life. She’d risk her ass in a snowstorm to rescue a drunken idiot in the mountains, but that wasn’t the same as having someone in her personal space.
“Three hundred a month. It’s less than an RV park, she lets me use the shop for my projects, and it’s got a great view—usually not as weird of a view as now.” He pointed at the river. Sindari was now sunning himself in a sunny patch of grass, hopefully one devoid of goose droppings.
I wished I could let Maggie out to explore here, but she would probably take off and get eaten by a mountain lion or a coyote.
I have excellent hearing, Sindari informed me without looking over. I heard you call me a service animal and that man call me weird. You’re both in danger of having your feet gnawed off.
Will that be before or after you dry off while napping in the sun?
After.
“I’m saving up for my own place,” the guy—Dimitri—went on, “so it’s good not to spend money on an apartment. I do some work for a landscaping company and sell my art at the farmers market.”
“Does my mom need the money?” I cared less about his life aspirations than the fact that my mom had felt compelled to take on a renter. “She didn’t have to get rid of her apartments, did she?”
Was I a bad daughter because I hadn’t been sending money home? I already knew I was a bad daughter for other reasons, but guilt tramped into my heart. I’d assumed Mom did fine with finances. She’d won a settlement back in the nineties and used the money to buy an eight-unit apartment building. The last she’d told me, the rents had gone up enough to pay off the mortgage and give her enough to live on.
“I don’t know anything about apartments, but she said the property taxes have gone up a lot.” Dimitri scratched his cheek with the corner of his phone. “Maybe if I take a picture of the deadly tiger on the bank and send it to the county, they’ll adjust the land value down a few hundred thousand dollars.”
“He’s a guard tiger. He would add to the value, not detract from it.”
For that astute comment, I’ll spare your foot, Sindari told me.
Thank you.
“He does look really cool. Is it legal to have a tiger?”
The rumble of a vehicle turning onto the gravel driveway saved me from having to come up with an answer. Ah ha, there was Mom’s old green Subaru. The cat yowled as it drove past. The car was parked in the shade, and it wasn’t that hot, so I was sure Maggie wasn’t in distress—especially with Sindari out of the vehicle—but I felt bad about her being cooped up. I hoped my mom would let her out in the house.
A furry dog head thrust out of the car window and barked. Sindari sat up.
You may want to head back to your realm for a while, I told him, hoping he was listening. I had no power to project my thoughts, so he had to be monitoring me through our link for him to hear me.
It is getting tediously crowded here.
I think the geese and the squirrels feel that way, yes. I touched the charm and whispered the word to dismiss him.