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"Miss Spell, what in tarnation have you been doing with the books?"
"I'm sorry, what?" I asked, coming over.
Ajax was glowering at me through his bushy eyebrows. He pointed his finger at the registry. "We have twenty John and Jane Does who checked in this month, half of them never checked out, and none of them paid. Let's hope they were a couple because that's a bare minimum of over twenty rooms you comped, more likely forty!"
"Me?" I turned to him with a bemused smile. "Ajax, I don't know what you're getting at, but I most certainly did not check in or out any of these guests."
"Well, I didn't."
We both paused.
"If you didn't... and I didn't..." A suspicion started to dawn and my blood began to boil. I hiked up my ruffled organza skirt and stalked around the counter. I touched the page and felt a slight pull. Just what I had thought! "Warlocks," I cursed, spitting on the floor. "Flipping warlocks."
"I'm sorry?"
I pointed at the registry book with disgust, not even wanting to touch the dirty page with my finger. "The power is in the signature. When we look at it, the Jane Doe signature completes the spell and it erases their memory from our mind."
"Our mind?" Ajax asked pointedly, raising an eyebrow.
I bit my tongue, knowing what he was getting at. Dwarves are not affected by subtle magic. You have to hit them with a brick of power to get a spell to stick. It's why he could work with me so comfortably. I held all the blame for this disaster. And what made me angriest was that if I still had my powers, I would have detected this spell the first time I laid eyes on it. Instead, it took twenty spells for me to feel even the slightest twinge that something might be wrong.
"Why is it I always gave them the same room?" I spun around and dug through the room boxes. I snatched the key to 3D. "I'm thinking I might need to give the place a good airing," I pronounced.
Ajax just grunted, settling in with his newspaper and having the good grace not to rub in that I was a downright liability.
I stalked up the stairs, grabbing the brass railing as I got angrier and angrier with each step. I never thought someone would be so foolish as to try magic on me. First the gargoyles disappeared, then we got goblins, and now I had sorcerers working wicked magic on my third floor. I reached the room and flung open the door.
It was one of our plainer rooms. In fact, we tried not to rent it out if we could help it. The walls had strange corners that only allowed for a single bed and the view was lousy. I tried to dress it up with a sweet garden theme, but it was like putting lipstick on a budget traveler. Oh, sure, I had the traps in place for any unruly monsters - holy water sprinkler systems and stakes stored in strategic places. But safety features aside, it was definitely no frills.
I stood in the center of the room, trying to detect what was out of place. It would have seemed normal to the untrained eye, but the brass bed wasn't made quite right and our John or Jane Doe had no idea how to fluff a pillow. I walked over and ran my hand over the floral duvet. Unfortunately, whoever did this knew how to clean up their magical signature. That or I didn't have enough power to detect it, which could be the case, too.
Who had been staying here? What had happened here? And where did they go after everything was done?
I walked out of the room and turned the corner toward the stairs. There was a large window at the other end of the hall. I just happened to glance at it, but what I saw stopped me in my tracks.
"AJAX?" I called, needing someone else to confirm I wasn't going mad.
I heard his little legs pound up the steps until he was standing beside me, staring at the window.
"Where did all the stained glass go?" he asked in horror.
"That's what I was wondering myself."