Chapter Seven
Idroveby to check on the penguin in Mrs. Yates’s yard. The thing had become a sort of celebrity in our town ever since someone, or multiple someones, had started stealing it, then leaving it to be found in ridiculoussituations.
It’d been tied to the top of a church steeple, stuffed in a cannon, dressed up and dangled over a busy intersection. It had been left floating on a buoy, hidden in the dinosaur bone museum, and once, duct-taped face-first to the camera the TV station in Portland used to check the weather along thecoast.
Its blog,The Ordinary Penguin,had over a millionsubscribers.
If anything happened to the penguin–say, like a beheading–the entire town would go into mourning. There might even be a vigil. Or a manhunt. Could go eitherway.
So the little penguin was one more problem we had to keep an eyeon.
Mrs. Yates’s yard was looking beautiful in the misty cool October evening. The Japanese lantern plants lining her path had gone from drops of bright lantern-shaped orange flowers to skeletal-lace teardrops on spiny sticks with a single red berry inside each lantern. Hearty bushes were trimmed into neat round shapes, and a lovely ornamental maple’s trunk and limbs twisted and curled like smoke frozen inplace.
She had decorated for the season: corn stalks behind bright fat pumpkins stacked along her porch, more out amongst her wide flower beds, and what appeared to be a handmade scarecrow propped up in onecorner.
Her yard was pretty enough to be displayed on the cover of a magazine. And right there in the center, where the eye of the average passer-by naturally paused, stood the penguin wearing a witch’shat.
The penguin very much still had a head. So that was one worry off my plate for now, atleast.
I drove the neighborhood, noting the position and number of gnomes. They all seemed to be where they should be. None of them seemed equipped to pull off abeheading.
But I’d learned the hard way to never underestimategnomes.
I passed one of our beach accesses and noticed a man sitting on the top of the fence. Since the fence was rickety enough, and the rocks and sand below were far enough, I decided he might need to be told to get off the fence before hefell.
I pulled the truck all the way to the end of the access, which was empty of vehicles since it was nearly the end of October. It was wet and the winds were picking up. A few tourists still visited, but usually only on weekends and mostly they stuck to the hotels andshops.
There was something familiar about the man. Even from the back. Something that made me pause before stepping out of the truck. Something that made me put a call in to Delaney to tell her where I was and what I wasdoing.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. “Do not approach him until I getthere.”
“If he moves, Imove.”
“If he moves, youwait.”
I didn’t answer and Delaney bulled on. “That’s an order, OfficerReed.”
“Yes, Chief,” Igrunted.
She was really getting overprotective since that car had hitme.
Yeah, I guess that made sense. I was worried about her a lot more lately too, since she’d been shot. So I could understand where she was comingfrom.
But then the man turned his shoulders and looked back atme.
I’d know that hard-angled face and piercing gazeanywhere.
Death.
As in the god of. Thanatos, himself. Last I’d seen him, he was kicking some ass and forfeiting his vacation time for a year so that he could deliver death to an undeadvampire.
I’d missed him. On the outside, he was sort of stilted and stuffy. But on the inside, when he wasn’t carrying the power of death, Thanatos was kind of like a little kid who hadn’t gotten nearly enough time on theplayground.
Helikedbeing mortal. Liked experiencing mundane things like flying kites and peeling sunburns. But he did it all with a droll sort of detachment that didn’t for a single second hide how much he loved being inOrdinary.
Being around Delaney and us other Reedstoo.
I’d been sad when he’d had to leave town to pick up his power again and had hoped he’d show back up when the required one year absence had beenpaid.
