CHAPTER 1
Vicki
Leading up to Sunsday, Grau 30
It wasn’t my fault.
Okay, it sort of was my fault because I should have realized that the Crowgard who worked for me would be wildly excited about a human celebration called Trickster Night and want to participate firsthand—firstwing?—in such an event. I also should have realized they would tell the rest of the Crows and other forms of terra indigene who lived in The Jumble about a human custom of dressing up and putting on masks to try to look scary. In the weeks prior to that actual night, Aggie, Jozi, and Eddie Crowgard pestered every human who visited The Jumble about how to “Trickster properly”—choice of costumes, choice of treats, what to say and what to do.
Wayne Grimshaw, Sproing’s chief of police, was sparse with details whenever he dropped by to check up on me. Julian Farrow, who owned Lettuce Reed, the village’s bookstore, was cautious with his explanations. Paige and Dominique Xavier, on the other hand, gleefully told the Crows about their childhood adventures and what they wore when they knocked on neighbors’ doors and shouted, “Trick or treat!”
After receiving one of Grimshaw’s patented grim looks, which turned his blue-gray eyes a steely gray, Paige and Dominique quickly emphasized that playing tricks was not the point of the evening.
“It won’t be that bad,” I had muttered to Ineke Xavier one afternoon as we waited by her car for Paige and Dominique to finish “explaining” a few more details about Trickster Night to my Crowgard employees. “My bookings for the lake cabins and the suites in the main house are all adult guests. No children.”
“Have you bought enough bags of candy to hand out?” Ineke asked, sounding mildly curious.
“Mildly curious” coming from a woman who had a tattoo on one thigh that included the words “I Bury Trouble” was not to be mistaken for actual mild curiosity.
“Who is going to come out to The Jumble for a piece of hard candy?” I asked.
“Pops Davies mentioned that you hadn’t come by the general store to pick up the bags of candy he’d set aside for you. Small chocolate bars.”
I blinked. “Chocolate? Really?” Ever since the Great Predation—a terrifying time last year when the Elders and Elementals swept over the world and seriously thinned the human population as retaliation for the Humans First and Last movement starting a war and killing shifter forms of terra indigene—some things weren’t as readily available as they used to be, and that included small bars of chocolate. I could put out some of the chocolate for my guests and keep a stash for myself for the times when I needed a reward for getting through a difficult day.
I made a mental note to call Pops and let him know I was interested in the chocolate so he wouldn’t sell it to someone else.
“You’re fully booked for the days before and after Trickster Night?” Ineke asked, still sounding mildly curious and calling me back from my distraction-by-chocolate.
“Yes.” I had been fully booked for weeks, so I hadn’t thought there was anything unusual about these reservations since we were just coming to the end of our peak tourist season and still required a three-day-minimum reservation—but I was catching on that maybe, just maybe, I had done something to earn the look Grimshaw had given me last night when he came over to play pool with Ilya Sanguinati, who was a very yummy-looking vampire and my attorney.
“So am I,” Ineke said. “It’s unusual to have people specifically booking a three-day stay midweek to make sure they are here for Trickster Night.” She took pity on me. “The Jumble’s residents are going to have the most amazing costumes.”
“They don’t need costumes. Most of them . . .”
I finally got it. Aggie, Jozi, and Eddie could pass for human unless they got excited and started sprouting black feathers. Robert “Call Me Cougar” Panthera and Conan Beargard could pass for human if you ignored Conan’s excess body hair and the fact that the boys still had trouble with their teeth. They were getting those sorted out as they spent more time around humans, but the teeth were still an unnerving mix of human and large predator. As for the rest of The Jumble’s terra indigene residents . . .
The between form isn’t fully an individual’s animal form and it isn’t fully human, and it sure isn’t whatever they look like in their true form, which is a form no human gets to see unless the human is the main course for that night’s dinner. Maybe not even then, because the one time I asked Ilya why the Others’ true forms were such a big deal, he said very, very quietly, “You don’t want to know, and you should not ask anyone else.”
I took the hint and never mentioned it again.
The days prior to Trickster Night, I juggled looking after my current guests, getting ready for my soon-to-arrive guests, and approving the “costumes” of The Jumble’s full-time residents. After I persuaded Aggie, Jozi, and Eddie that a between form that mixed too much Crow with their human forms would be bad for business, they agreed to keep their shifting to a human-size Crow head and a few feathers on their hands, which would be startling enough but wouldn’t freak out the guests. I hoped. It also meant they couldn’t talk to the guests or convey any messages about what the guests might want, but I could live with that for one evening. As for the rest of the Others who wanted to mingle with the humans in order to study them during this celebration . . .
Female Fox with foxy ears, foxy tail showing through a slit in her capris, and foxy front paws with elongated digits that were necessary to hold her treat sack. Cute.
Male Bobcat who looked the way he usually did when he took guests on a donkey-cart tour of The Jumble—in other words, he looked more Bobcat than human but could converse with humans. More or less. His “costume” consisted of a short cape that might have come from the large cardboard lost-and-found box I had tucked away in one of the first-floor rooms I wasn’t currently using. I was certain some guests left things behind on purpose—a book, a sweater, a hairbrush—so that the Others could use them. And some things were left behind because the guest was in too much of a hurry to leave to check the closet or drawers.
Interestingly enough, it was the guests who were rude, too demanding, or “handsy” with Aggie, Jozi, or me who were motivated to leave in a hurry. I never asked who did the motivating, since there were scarier forms of terra indigene living around Lake Silence than a Panther, a black Bear, and the Sanguinati, and I really didn’t want to know for sure that they were studying my guests in the same way some of my guests studied the more . . . benign? . . . forms of Others.
Back to the costumes. There were other blends of human and animal that . . . Okay, the individual was going for scary, and that included Cougar and Conan, which forced me to explain that there were degrees of scary, and if they didn’t want to pour a thick layer of sand—or kitty litter—in front of the door to soak up all the pee from terrified children and adults, they needed to adjust their Trickster Night look to something that wasn’t too scary.