Autumn Bones

Sixteen

The bad news was that the Fabulous Casimir’s failure meant that Emmeline Palmer’s power exceeded his by a considerable degree.

The good news was that Cas was pissed off about it. “Let me talk to the coven,” he said to me. “We’ll schedule a ritual with the full circle. There’s no way she’s a match for all of us.”

I nodded gingerly. “Okay.”

“We can do this, Daisy,” he promised me. “Don’t start looking for alternatives, you understand?”

“You mean my father?” I asked.

He shuddered. “Hell, yes, I mean your father, girl.”

I wasn’t looking. As always, I kept a tight lid on that thought. But as always, it was there. And I had to admit as I walked blindly home, clinging to the arm of an uncharacteristically quiet Jen, doing my best to support the pain-filled balloon that was my head, my tail lashing with impotent fury, that I was really fucking tired of being so goddamn powerless in a position of responsibility.

Powers of persuasion and seduction would come in really handy right about now. So would a splendid set of bat-veined wings and a fiery whip, just because.

Oh, the possibilities!

But there was that whole business about cracking the Inviolate Wall.

As much as I wanted to face down dear Emmy on my own terms, it certainly wasn’t worth unleashing Armageddon. And, too, in the back of my mind was the well-dressed hell-spawn lawyer I’d seen in the PVB office the other day, attempting to work some kind of wiles on Amanda Brooks.

He’d smelled bad. Rancid.

I didn’t know what that was all about, what the lawyer was up to, and why his presence and his apparent acceptance of his birthright didn’t threaten the Inviolate Wall, but I knew I didn’t want that stink on me.

As if on cue, Jojo the joe-pye weed fairy popped up from her lurking place amid the rhododendrons alongside the alley by my apartment. “Stupid reeking slattern!” she screeched at me in a brain-drilling octave that didn’t exist on any human scale, not even Mariah Carey’s. “It’s in your bag!”

Jen’s arm tightened under my grip. “What the fuck?”

“Seriously, Jojo?” My head hurt so badly, I wanted to lie down and cry. “Not now, okay?”

Hovering several feet above the ground on agitated wings, Jojo swore up and down and sideways in what I suspected was a variety of languages. “It’s in your bag! The charm is in your bag, dullard!”

I blinked. “What?”

Jojo let out another piercing shriek and tugged at her purple hair. “I can’t touch it, you fool! There’s cold steel and iron in there!”

“Um, Daise?” Jen said. “I think the fairy’s trying to tell you that Emmy’s charm is in your bag.”

Jojo bared a mouthful of teeny-tiny shark teeth. “The dark-haired one is not such a lackwit as you.”

“Gee, thanks,” Jen said.

I had no idea why Jojo would switch from plaguing me to helping me, but right now I couldn’t care less. Kneeling on the sidewalk, I eased dauda-dagr out of its hidden sheath and dumped the rest of the bag’s contents unceremoniously onto the concrete. I sorted through them by feel. Wallet, phone, keys, comb, hair scrunchies, a packet of tissues, lipstick—okay, I may be a hell-spawn, but I’m still a girl—a tangled set of earbuds, receipts, the lollipop that Doc Howard gave me . . . and there, buried in the heap, a small leather sack tied shut with a cord. I picked it up and gave it a cautious squeeze. It held something hard and lumpy, something soft and yielding, and something sharp and poky.

“Is this it?” I asked Jojo.

A few pedestrians were rounding the corner toward the park. With a huff, Jojo cast a glamour over herself, her appearance shifting to that of a five- or six-year-old girl. “What else would it be, you beetle-brained churl? Open it!”

Now that I actually had the thing in hand, I hesitated, squinting at Jojo’s blurry child-face. “Why should I trust you? Why would you help me?”

“You bade me spy upon her,” she said impatiently. “The sister. She wants to take him away from here. At least you don’t.”

Aha. So dear Emmy had managed to piss off Sinclair’s lovelorn fairy. Good enough for me. I began picking at the cord tied around the sack.

“Here.” Jen held out her hand. “Give it to me. You can’t even see straight.”

“Does it matter who opens it?” I asked Jojo.

The fairy shook her head. “No. But I can’t touch it.” She shuddered. “Iron. I loathe iron.”

It took a few minutes for Jen to get the cord untied, and she had to use her teeth. Jojo rummaged for a tissue in the pile of junk from my bag, spreading it on the sidewalk. Jen opened the leather sack and poured the contents out carefully onto the tissue, and . . . ah, bliss.

Once again the pain vanished; the agonizing spike drilling into my forehead, the throbbing in my tooth. The blurriness and double vision went away and the world returned to clarity, bright and crisp and beautiful.

This time it stayed that way. I held still and took a few cautious breaths before examining the sack’s contents, which appeared to be one discolored human molar, a crude iron nail, and a pile of dirt.

Jojo peered over my shoulder. “A coffin nail and graveyard dirt, like as not.”

“What about the tooth?”

She looked at me as though I were an idiot. “’Tis a tooth.”

“Gross,” Jen commented.

I poked at the objects. “She must have put it in my bag when I went to the restroom last night. But I don’t see any hair or anything of mine.”

“Maybe she brushed the tooth with the toothbrush you borrowed at Sinclair’s place,” Jen said.

Gah. “Maybe.”

Jojo heaved an impatient sigh. “You had the charm on your person, lackwit, or at least near it under your own roof. The sorceress had no need to bind it to you further. Your warlock made a careless assumption based on his own knowledge of the craft. He condemned his effort to failure when he allowed the charm within his own altar circle.”

“You know what they say,” Jen said. “‘Assume’ makes an ass out of ‘u’ and ‘me.’”

“That’s a clever turn of phrase,” the fairy said approvingly to her. To me, she said, “You should be grateful that I recognize the reek of iron and magic.”

“I am.” I’m not sure how sincere I sounded, but I meant it. “I owe you a favor, Jojo. A big one.”

Her eyes widened. “Truly? Then I beseech—”

“I’m not breaking things off with Sinclair,” I said. “That’s not on the table. But if there’s anything I can do in my capacity as Hel’s liaison, ask.”

“Oh.” Jojo looked disappointed; and I have to say that her crush on Sinclair was even more disconcerting with the little girl glamour over her.

I concentrated on seeing through it. In her true form, Jojo exuded a miniature green-skinned pubescent sexuality that was disconcerting enough, but it was better than the toddlers-and-tiaras vibe. “Look, I’ll put it in my ledger, okay?” By ledger, I meant the database I planned to create. “You can claim it anytime.”

That appeared to mollify her. “Very well.”

“So is this thing . . . defused now?” Jen asked, indicating the leather sack and its former contents. “It’s not going to reactivate again, is it?”

“The charm is broken,” Jojo assured her. “The sorceress would have to cast the spell anew.”

“Good to know.” I began returning items to my messenger bag, starting with dauda-dagr, then glanced up at the throaty sound of a motorcycle chugging down the street.

Oh, duh. Given the surge of panic I’d experienced when I woke up, the only surprise was that I hadn’t had a concerned ghoul on my doorstep within the hour.

Stefan Ludovic pulled into the alley astride a gleaming black motorcycle. Well, parts of it gleamed, while others were a matte black that seemed to swallow the light. I happened to know that it was a Vincent Black Shadow, one of only seventeen hundred in existence; I knew this not because I knew anything about motorcycles but because Cody told me so when we spotted it in the garage of a suspect who couldn’t possibly have legitimately afforded it.

Apparently, it now belonged to Stefan. I hadn’t noticed that the other night at Rainbow’s End.

He lowered the kickstand and cut the engine. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, just a pair of wraparound sunglasses that should have looked tacky, yet somehow didn’t. In the daylight, the pallor of his skin was vivid. Not undead pallor like a vampire, just sort of otherworldly. His slightly too long black hair brushed the collar of the leather vest he wore over a plain, skintight black T-shirt. I couldn’t figure out how the hell Stefan made that look elegant, but he did.

“Holy shit,” Jen breathed fervently beside me. “That’s the hot ghoul you told me about, isn’t it?”

“Outcast,” I whispered. “That’s what they call themselves.”

Stefan took off his sunglasses, revealing those pale eyes, a shade of blue seldom seen outside the interior of a glacier. His pupils were contracted and steady as he met my gaze. “Hel’s liaison.”

“You know,” I said to him, “you don’t have to come running or send Cooper to check on me every time I have a little emotional blip.”

“A . . . blip.” The word sounded funny in his mouth. He looked down at the contents of my bag and Emmy’s charm strewn across the sidewalk, then back at me, arching one evocative eyebrow.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I handled it. By the way, this is my friend Jen. Jennifer Cassopolis, Stefan Ludovic. And . . .” I looked around for Jojo, but she’d made herself scarce. “Um, never mind.”

Stefan dismounted from his bike in one fluid motion, took Jen’s hand before she could react, and bowed slightly. “It is a pleasure, Miss Cassopolis.”

Jen gave me an uncertain look. With a sister in thrall to a vampire, she tended to be wary of predatory eldritch species, although a bit less so since learning that Cody was a werewolf. It makes a difference when you’ve known someone since high school.

“It’s okay,” I said to her. “Stefan’s got centuries of self-discipline under his belt.”

She relaxed. “Nice to meet you.”

Releasing her hand, Stefan nodded at the items on the sidewalk. “This is the work of the sorceress Cooper encountered last night, I take it?”

“Yep.”

He met my gaze again and this time his pupils did the wax-and-wane thing. “This is a grave breach of protocol, Daisy Johanssen. For an outsider to enter a community such as ours and give insult to a vested agent of the resident deity is tantamount to a challenge.”

“Yeah, I figured.” I prodded the pile of dirt with my toe. “Don’t worry. I plan on confronting her.”

Stefan inclined his head. “I remain in your debt. My services and my forces are at your disposal.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’d like to try to handle this discreetly.”

He smiled at me, those unexpected dimples forming in the creases of his smile. “I can be discreet.”

I flushed and cleared my throat. “Um . . . yeah, no doubt. But it’s complicated. She’s, um, actually kind of my boyfriend’s sister.”

“Or more accurately, her kind-of boyfriend’s actual sister,” Jen added, not entirely helpfully. I shot her a quick glare. She responded with a “What?” face.

“As you wish, Hel’s liaison.” Thank God, Stefan chose to ignore our silent but not exactly subtle interplay. “The decision is yours, of course. When it’s convenient, there’s another matter I would discuss with you.”

“Oh, right.” Belatedly, I remembered that Cooper had mentioned it last night. “Sorry, I’ve been distracted.”

“For obvious reasons,” he acknowledged. “Call me when you’re less distracted.”

Sometimes the whole cryptic eldritch thing could be a bit much. “Can’t you just tell me now?”

One corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s not something I can tell you, Daisy. It’s something I wish to show you. I believe it will help in the work we undertook together.”

Oh. “Okay. Will do.”

He inclined his head again. “Until then.”

Jen and I watched him return to his Vincent Black Shadow, straddling it with easy grace before putting his wraparound sunglasses back on, kick-starting the motorcycle, and chugging away.

“Damn,” Jen said. “Just . . . damn! You weren’t kidding.”

“Nope,” I said. “I was not.”

She punched me in the arm. “I think he’s into you. So what’s this work you’re doing together? What’s his story anyway? I thought ghouls—excuse me, Outcast—were all gross redneck bikers that fed on the pathetic emotional dregs of skanky meth-heads.”

“Ow!” I rubbed my arm. “I don’t know. He hasn’t told me his story yet. But he doesn’t allow drugs on his turf. And he told me once that ghouls in America tend to come from areas where . . . I can’t remember exactly, but something about a conjunction of extreme ignorance and extreme faith. I think it’s different for some of the old ones from back in ye olden times.”

“Huh.”

“He said he could teach me to deflect my emotions,” I said. “That’s what we were working on.”

“I think he’s into you,” Jen repeated. “Did you even bother to ask him what his story was?”

“Yeah, I did,” I admitted. “It was, um, a little too soon in our acquaintance. That’s a big question, you know?”

“I guess. So, Mr. Ludovic,” she intoned, “tell me, exactly what did you do to get kicked out of heaven and hell?”

“Something like that,” I agreed.

“I wonder, though,” she mused.

I wondered, too. But right now I had more pressing matters to deal with. Stooping, I finished gathering the scattered contents of my messenger bag. I wrapped up the graveyard dirt, coffin nail, and tooth in the tissue and stuffed it gingerly back into the leather sack, ready to dump it back out at the first twinge of pain. I wouldn’t even have bothered if the nail wasn’t already poking holes in the tissue. But it seemed that Jojo had spoken the truth, and the charm was well and truly broken.

“So what happens now, Daise?” Jen asked me.

I took a deep breath, slinging my bag over my shoulder. “First, I need to tell Casimir that he can call off the coven. Second, I need to talk to Sinclair before I confront Emmy. I can’t leave him out of this. He needs to decide where he stands.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” Jen offered. “Because I’ll be there if you do.”

“I know.” I gave her a quick hug. “You’re the best. This, I think I can handle. But I couldn’t have gotten through this morning without you. Don’t tell anyone how badly I freaked out, okay?”

She returned my hug, then did the lock-the-lips-and-throw-away-the-key gesture. “I’ll take it to the grave, Hel’s liaison.”

It was the first time Jen had ever called me by my title, and I have to admit it felt a little weird. Not bad, just . . . weird.

“Thanks,” I said. “Consider yourself the first member of my own personal Scooby Gang.”

Like most everyone else our age in Pemkowet, Jen and I had grown up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “That would be a lot cooler if I wasn’t totally the Xander.” She smiled wryly. “No skills to offer but loyalty and a smart mouth.”

“Yeah, and life would be a lot easier if I had Slayer super strength,” I said. “But we make do with what we’ve got.”

“True,” Jen agreed. “And it could be worse. We could be stuck with Stacey Brooks as our unlikely mean girl ally Cordelia.”

I shuddered. “Perish the thought.”