“It had red ink on it. Also, we might have a ghoul in town. Hogan walked into the garage and smelled ghoul.”
There was a pause, a stretch of silence as I flicked on my indicator and pulled out into traffic.
“A ghoul,” she finally said.
“Whose ghoul?” Bathin’s voice rumbled in the background.
“Nobody’s,” Myra answered. “What does ghoul smell like?”
“Rotted flesh and melted vinyl, according to Hogan. How about I stop by and fill you in on it?”
“No.”
“No?”
“You only want to come by because you’re avoiding something—and I’m going to guess it’s dinner with your very patient, if slightly cheese-obsessed, fiancé.”
I groaned. “But I have more stuff to tell you about the case.”
“He’ll figure out the cheese, Delaney.”
“But then it will be flowers, and not just flowers, but award-winning flowers. He’ll probably have them flown in from some exclusive hothouse in Antarctica, because only tropical frozen Baby’s Breath will do.”
“He’ll figure out the flowers too.”
“It was the crab,” I said.
“Ryder wants crab? Well, at least that can be sourced locally.”
“No. The ghoul was the crab.”
“In the car? Are you sure?”
“No, but the chewed up crab claw we found could mean the ghoul saw you and Jean coming, found something to eat and boom. Crab escape.”
“Crab escape,” she repeated. “So you want me to put out an APB on a crab?”
“I’m guessing it switched forms pretty quickly after getting harangued by seagulls.”
“And now it could be anything. Including seagulls.”
I made a quick decision and headed toward the Puffin Muffin. Apology dessert might be a good move tonight.
“Yeah,” I replied, “anything living.”
“But how does that work with mass? I mean if a ghoul is of a certain size can it become something much smaller in mass, and also expand into something much larger? Are there rules for how it can take on likenesses? Does it have to change size in incremental amounts? Work its way up to a size or down to a size?”
“That sounds like something my brainy sister is going to figure out.”
She huffed a little laugh. “Okay, yes. I’ll check the lore. See what I can find about ghouls. If it was a ghoul in that car, then it wasn’t breaking any of the god rules to get here. Other than falling out of the sky.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t have to put down powers or sign a contract to get into town. But still, if it didn’t have anything to hide, it should have at least checked in with one of us and explained it wanted to live here.”
“Maybe it’s just visiting,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe it’s just delivering a bunch of stolen god weapons, for reasons unknown.”
