The entity who entered was unlike either of the beings already in the room. Skidoo was a Tlellan, which humans sometimes called Squids for their resemblance to one of the few Terran creatures left alive. Her ten limbs functioned as either arms or legs to propel her sacklike body along. Atop that squat bundle was a lump that served as a head, fixed with three bright blue eyes. Unlike Terran squids, she was colored as brightly as a festival, purples and reds variegating across blue and yellow dots and stripes.

“I am being securing an important reservation!” she announced.

“We’re not taking any more reservations for tonight,” Niko told her. “I said that already. We’ve got this stupid food critic arriving.”

Skidoo wilted. “But this is being a very large party,” she said.

“Even worse,” Dabry said. “How large?”

“Possibly they are being saying as many as twenty.”

“Twenty! We don’t have room for that. We’d have to rearrange one of the back chambers,” Niko protested.

“They are being saying they are knowing you, Captain, so I am being taking the reservation,” Skidoo said.

“Did they give you a name?”

Skidoo drew herself up as much as possible in order to deliver this information in a suitably grand manner: “Admiral Taklibia.”

“Taklibia? Here?” Niko was flabbergasted.

“The one you served under?” Dabry asked.

“I did, but I was only an aide. They wouldn’t remember me.”

“Apparently they do, and enough to seek out your restaurant.”

Niko shook her head. She was about to tell Skidoo to cancel the reservation when the door flew open with a crash. Milly, her new pastry chef, stuck her head in, just the beaked face at the end of a long white-feathered neck, giving the impression of a disembodied head. “The boys are fighting in the storage room again!” she gasped in her high, fluting voice, and clacked her beak urgently.

Swearing under her breath, Niko rose. She pointed at Skidoo and Dabry. “Take care of it!” she told Dabry, and went to tame her lions.

2

Thorn and Talon were indeed at it in the storage room. Worse, both twins had reverted to their were-forms, becoming two enormous male lions, currently writhing on the floor, wrestling furiously in a tangle of golden fur and amber manes and flashing teeth. The smell that Niko had come to associate with shifter magic, sharp citrus and musk heavy to the point of stink, hung in the air.

Niko narrowly avoided their smashing into her, stepping back into the doorway and out of their path. The room was in chaos already, shelves tipped over, containers strewn in heaps, and an overturned vat of pickles adding their briny tang to the air, seeping over to turn a mass of spilled flour into a gluey mess.

“Ah-ten-shun!” she shouted.