Chapter 7 — Two Fathers in One Kitchen
The sheriff got home at seven and found a thousand-year-old man cooking in his kitchen.
He stood in the doorway with his jacket half off and looked at the back of a grey sweater and a dish towel over one shoulder and something on the stove that smelled better than anything that had come out of that room in a decade.
"Sheriff," said the man, without turning around.
"Uh huh."
"There's a beer in the door of your refrigerator. It's been there since August. I'd have it now rather than later."
Noah got the beer.
He opened it and leaned against the frame and watched the man move a pan off the heat with his bare hand on the metal handle.
"You're her father," Noah said.
"I am."
"Klaus."
"Niklaus. Klaus is fine." He turned around then. "You have questions and I'd rather you asked them before your son comes downstairs, because he hovers."
"He does hover."
"He's been hovering since four o'clock. It's a form of courage, I think, but it's exhausting to be near."
Noah took a drink.
"Alright," he said. "First question. Should I be worried about you?"
"Yes."
Noah's eyebrows went up half an inch.
"That's not the answer I usually get."
"You usually get *no*, from people who want something." Klaus went back to the stove. "I'm not going to be useful to you if I start with a lie. Yes, you should be worried about me. I have done a great many things you would arrest me for. Some of them recently. Some of them to people who deserved considerably less than they got."
"And I'm supposed to have you in my house."
"You're supposed to decide," Klaus said, "based on the only fact that matters, which is that my granddaughter lives here. Everything I am is pointed at that. You'll find I'm extremely reliable inside that circle and I'd advise you not to test the edge of it."
Noah looked at him for a while.
"See, that's interesting," he said, "because that's almost exactly how I'd describe myself."
"I know," said Klaus. "I read about you before I came."
"That's not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be comforting, it was meant to be efficient." He tipped the pan. "Sit down. You've been on your feet since six this morning and your knee is going."
"My knee is fine."
"Your knee is favouring and it has been since you walked in. Sit."
Noah sat down.
"Second question," he said.
"Go on."
"Is my son in danger from your family?"
Klaus set the spoon down.
"No," he said. "Not from mine."
"That's a very particular way to answer."
"It's a particular situation." Klaus turned around and leaned back against the counter and folded his arms. "Sheriff, in a thousand years I have had four people I would burn the world for. Now there are five and one of them is three months old. Your son made her. That buys him a great deal of patience from me that nobody else alive has."
"But."
"But he's lying to all of you," Klaus said. "Including you. Probably especially you."
Noah's face did not change.
"About what?"
"That's the question, isn't it."
"You tell me."
"I don't know yet," Klaus said, "and I'd like you to understand how rarely I say that sentence."
Noah turned the bottle a quarter turn on the table.
"Say more."
"He isn't human," Klaus said. "That's not a metaphor and it's not an insult, and I don't believe he'd be able to tell you what he is if you held a knife to him. But his heart doesn't move. Not when he's frightened, not when he means something. He bled a considerable amount two nights ago in the woods and there's not a mark on him. And there's a thing under his scent that I have never encountered before, and that alone is notable enough that I'd have come out here for it whether there was a baby involved or not."
Noah sat very still.
"Now," Klaus said, watching him, "that's the part where a father says, *that's ridiculous.*"
Noah did not say it.
He looked at the table.
"Ah," said Klaus, quietly.
"Don't."
"You know."
"I don't know anything."
"You know *something*."
Noah rubbed his thumb along the label of the bottle.
"When he was seven," he said, "he got run over in our driveway."
Klaus went completely still.
"A neighbor backed a Buick out of her garage," Noah said. "Rear tire went over his chest and stopped on him. Claudia got it off him. I got there twenty minutes later and there was blood on the concrete and my kid was sitting up talking to a paramedic and complaining about his shirt."
"And?"
"And the hospital said he was lucky." Noah's jaw moved. "They kept him overnight. Did everything. Nothing was broken. Not a rib. They told me the tire must have caught his shoulder and rolled him, and I said okay, because that's what you say when somebody hands you the good outcome."
"You didn't believe it."
"I believed it for about eleven years," Noah said, "because the alternative was a thing I had no language for, and because my wife got sick six months later and I had one thing in front of me at a time."
"And Claudia?"
Noah looked up sharply.
"How do you know her name."
"Your son said it in the living room this afternoon."
That was a lie, and Noah knew it was a lie, and he let it sit.
"Claudia," he said, "washed the blood off that driveway with a hose at eleven o'clock at night, by herself, in the dark. I came out and told her I'd do it in the morning. She said no." He turned the bottle again. "And she wouldn't look at me. That's the part I've never been able to put down. She wouldn't look at me."
Klaus said nothing for a moment.
"She knew," he said.
"Yeah," Noah said. "I think she did."
Upstairs, a door opened. Footsteps on the landing.
Noah leaned forward and lowered his voice.
"Now you listen to me," he said. "If that boy is carrying something, he's been carrying it since he was seven years old and nobody helped him. So whatever you're doing here, whatever it is you want to find out — you don't corner him with it. Not in my house."
"I've no intention of cornering him."
"Then what's the intention."
Klaus picked the spoon back up.
"I'm going to wait," he said, "and be extremely pleasant, and cook things, and hold that baby, until he decides to tell someone. And when he does, I am going to make absolutely certain it isn't held against him."
Noah studied him.
"That's not what I expected you to say."
"No," said Klaus. "People rarely expect it. It's why it works."
Stiles came down the stairs.
He stopped at the bottom and took in the kitchen: his father at the table with a beer, and Hope's father at the stove, and the entire room smelling like somewhere else.
"Okay," he said. "This is a lot."
"Sit down," said both men at once, and then looked at each other with mutual, visible irritation.
They ate at the table like people.
That was the part Stiles could not get over. Hope came down with Mira in the crook of her arm and ate one-handed. His father asked Klaus where he learned to cook and Klaus said *a siege*, and his father laughed, and then stopped laughing, and Klaus let him work it out on his own.
And then Klaus set his fork down.
"There's a practical matter," he said.
"Here we go," said Hope.
"It isn't a lecture."
"It's always a lecture."
"It's logistics." He looked at Noah. "Sheriff, I'd like to buy the house across the street."
Noah put his fork down.
"Say that again."
"The one with the sign in the yard. It's been listed since July, it's overpriced by sixty thousand dollars, and the owners are in Sacramento and want to be finished with it." Klaus said all of this as though reading a grocery list. "I'll be closing on it Friday."
"You're going to buy the Hendersons' house."
"I'm going to buy the Hendersons' house."
"Dad," Hope said.
"You're eighteen," Klaus said, "and you've been sleeping in a guest room in a house that has one bathroom. My family arrives Sunday. There are, at current count, six of them, and two of them have not been in the same building for a month without an incident. I am not putting that in this man's home."
"So you're putting it across the street."
"Across the street has nine bedrooms and a wall."
"It has a *hedge*."
"It'll have a wall," said Klaus.
Noah put his hand over his eyes.
"I want to say something," he said.
"Please."
"I have lived on this street for twenty-two years. I know everybody on it. The Hendersons' place backs onto the Delgados', and Rosa Delgado runs the neighborhood association, and she is going to come over with a casserole and a list of questions within forty-eight hours of you moving in."
"Good," said Klaus.
"Good?"
"I'm very charming and I'm excellent with casseroles." He picked his fork back up. "Sheriff, I'm not going to pretend this is a normal thing to do. It isn't. But my daughter has chosen to build her life in this town, and I have spent a thousand years learning exactly one lesson worth anything, which is that you keep the people you love where you can see them. I'd rather be the strange neighbor than the man who visits."
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Stiles said, "Nine bedrooms?"
"Nine."
"Is one of them mine?"
Hope's head came up.
Klaus looked at him.
"Ask me that again in a month," he said, "when I've seen how you do on a bad night."
"That's fair."
"It is."
"That's a completely fair answer and I hate it."
"You'll find both those things are frequently true," said Klaus, and went back to his plate.
Later, when the dishes were done and the sheriff had gone up, Stiles stood on the back step in the cold with a mug he wasn't drinking from.
The door opened behind him.
"He likes you," Hope said.
"He absolutely does not like me."
"He cooked."
"He cooked for you."
"He cooked for *my father's* — " she stopped. "He cooked for your father. That's different. He doesn't do that."
Stiles turned the mug in his hands.
"He knows something's wrong with me," he said.
"I know."
"He said it out loud in front of your kid."
"*Our* kid," Hope said, "and yes, he did, because he's incapable of holding a piece of information without putting it on the table to see what it does."
"And what's it going to do?"
Hope came and stood next to him on the step.
"Nothing yet," she said. "He'll circle it for weeks. He's patient in a way that's genuinely unpleasant to be on the wrong end of."
"Great."
"But Stiles." She looked over. "When he finds out — and he will find out, that's not a thing I can stop — I need you to have told me the rest of it first."
Stiles's hands stopped moving.
"The rest of what?"
"You told me the driveway," Hope said. "You told me the bee sting. You told me about your mother, and you cried about nine percent of the amount you should have, and then you made me coffee and changed the subject."
"Hope."
"You have not told me the worst one."
He looked out at the dark yard.
"No," he said. "I haven't."
"Okay," she said. "Not tonight."
"Not tonight."
"But soon," Hope said, "because Sunday this street is going to have eleven supernatural people on it, and I would like to be the one who already knows."