Autumn Bones

Eight

After getting off to a wild start, Labor Day weekend seemed to be settling into a more sedate pace, which was okay with me. Having had the chance to debrief with Jen, I felt more settled myself, no longer bursting at the seams with my news.

I called my mom to touch base, giving her an edited version of last night’s events. Like everyone else in town, she was dying to know about the orgy.

“Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed when I gave her the lowdown. “Well, that explains why Lurine isn’t answering her phone today.” She paused. “Are you sure she’s all right?”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “At last glance, I’d say she had the situation well in hand. Literally.”

“Daisy!” Mom tried to sound scandalized, but I could tell she was laughing. “So no one was hurt? And you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” I assured her. “No one was hurt.”

I hoped it was true, anyway. Stefan had said he sensed no one had taken great harm from the experience. Which reminded me that in my capacity as Hel’s liaison, I probably owed him a formal thank-you for his assistance last night.

If I thought about it for too long, I’d talk myself out of it, so instead I drove over to the Wheelhouse after I ended the call. Not that long ago—like, just earlier this summer—the Wheelhouse wasn’t a place I’d have gone to alone. It’s a biker bar and a ghoul hangout, and it’s always had a dicey reputation.

But now it was Stefan Ludovic’s headquarters, too.

Even so, I took dauda-dagr out of the hidden inner sheath in my messenger bag and belted it around my waist before I ventured into the Wheelhouse. The first time I’d walked into this bar, I’d been on an investigation with Cody and the atmosphere was markedly hostile. But that was before Stefan had successfully squashed a rebellion and consolidated his power over the Outcast in Pemkowet. It was also before I’d killed two ghouls: poor Emma Sudbury’s deranged sister, Mary, and her . . . boyfriend, I guess, who I only ever knew as Ray D.

I hadn’t been in here since.

It hadn’t changed all that much. It was still a rough place where rough-looking guys in leather vests or jackets with Outcast motorcycle club colors gathered to shoot pool and drink beer, many of them with eyes that glittered a little too brightly in the dim light, watched by tired-looking mortal women who had histories of violence and hardship etched on their faces. But it was different. It felt different. Still dangerous, but somehow not quite as seedy, not quite as dissolute.

Huh.

“Hey, darlin’.” The blond kid from last night peeled himself off the wall he’d been leaning against. He checked me out with an impudent look. If I hadn’t known he was more than two hundred years old and had been hanged to death, it might have tickled me. “Here to see the big man himself, are you?”

“If he’s free.” I put out my hand. “Cooper, right?”

“Best you don’t.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He wore a chambray shirt with the sleeves cut off and his bare arms were thin and wiry. “Miss Daisy, right?”

“Right.” I was having a hard time reconciling his age with his appearance. “So no leathers for you, huh?”

“Haven’t passed the initiation yet.” He looked me up and down again, pupils flaring briefly in his angelic blue eyes. “No disrespect, m’lady, but you’re a wee mite to be carrying such a big dagger.”

“Yeah, well.” I laid my hand on dauda-dagr’s hilt. “You know what it can do, right?”

“Oh, I do!” Cooper flashed a grin that was at once charming and unnervingly fearless. “You’re the angel of death in a feckin’ ponytail. C’mon, I’ll take you to see him.”

I followed him to Stefan’s office in the rear of the bar. Patrons moved out of the way with alacrity. Cooper may not have been initiated into the motorcycle club yet, but he’d obviously gained their respect. No one here showed any inclination to challenge Stefan’s choice of lieutenant.

“Daisy.” Stefan rose to greet me. He sounded surprised. “Is everything well? I thought the situation resolved.”

“It is.” The room seemed to get smaller as Cooper exited and closed the door behind him. Conscious of Stefan’s gaze on me, I had a vivid and not entirely unwelcome memory of the hunger in it last night. Taking a deep breath, I suppressed it. “As Hel’s liaison, I came to offer my official thanks for your assistance.”

Stefan smiled.

It was a genuine smile, one that brought out the dimples he had no earthly right to possess. One that gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach and made me wonder if that really was why I’d come here in the first place, and . . . oh, gah! What the hell was wrong with me, anyway?

“It was my pleasure, Hel’s liaison,” Stefan said. “I’m glad that you called upon me, and I hope you will not hesitate to do so again.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.” He sounded serious. “With practice, discipline, and will, the Outcast can become a force for order in this community, and learn to take sustenance in the process.”

See, he had me right up until the bit about taking sustenance, which unfortunately reminded me that I’d let Stefan take sustenance from me, which meant he was attuned to my emotions, and . . . um, yeah. That outburst of lust I’d let loose last night that had blown one of the Mamma Jammers’ amps? He’d probably sensed it. And maybe the bom-chicka-wow-wow that followed it.

My face got hot.

I don’t know how Stefan followed my train of thought, but he did. Hell, it probably wasn’t that hard. After all, he’d had centuries of practice. He smiled a little, but soberly, without dimples. “Your personal business is your own, Daisy,” he said in a quiet voice. “It is as I have said. Your emotions are exceedingly powerful. If you desire my aid in expressing them without consequence, I will gladly give it to you. But the bond between us does not exist for the sake of prurience, and I am capable of deflecting my awareness at need.”

Oh, my God, he totally knew. “Can it be broken?”

Stefan raised one eyebrow. “I assure you—”

“It’s okay.” I held up one hand—the left hand, letting him see the rune etched on my palm. “I believe you. But I have a right to know.”

He hesitated. “Not that I’m aware of, no. Even if there were a way, I would be reluctant.” He took a sharp breath, his pupils dilating in a rush. “Your position is not without its dangers, Daisy. It brings me a measure of comfort to know that if you are in distress, I will sense it.”

The memory of Stefan coming to my rescue, sword in hand, rose in my mind. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by the memory of Stefan impaling himself on that same sword, dying, and being restored to wholeness.

“Did it leave a scar?” I asked him. He looked blankly at me. “The sword. The other month, when you . . .” I touched my chest with my fingertips.

“No.” He shook his head. “No matter how many times we die, we remain as we were when we were first Outcast.”

“Oh.”

Stefan cleared his throat. “There is one method you may employ to deflect your own emotions from my awareness, and indeed, the awareness of others among the Outcast. It is a temporary measure, and one that requires discipline and concentration, but I can teach it to you if you wish.”

I thought about it. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

I ended up staying for a while. As it turned out, Stefan’s method was a lot like the creative visualization techniques my mom taught me when I was a kid, except instead of focusing on containing my emotions and getting rid of them—or wrapping them up to be dealt with later—it was about deflecting them. Stefan had me visualize a shield with an interior polished to mirror brightness and then hold it between us in my mind.

Sounds simple, right? Well, it wasn’t.

For one thing, I’d never seen a shield in real life. All I had to work from was movies. God knows I’d seen enough of them, but still, it wasn’t the same. Apparently, you had to be really precise about the details, and I kept waffling between one half-remembered vision—Perseus in Clash of the Titans, Captain America, Richard the Lionheart in various versions of Robin Hood—and another.

After an hour, Stefan gave up. “You’ve a good grasp of the concept, Daisy,” he said to me. “You just need to articulate your vision.”

“I know, I know.” My head was aching with the effort. “I’ll try looking online later. Or maybe the library has a good book on armor.”

Again, there was a brief hesitation. “I may be able to procure something that would assist you. Allow me some time to . . . assess the matter.”

That seemed a little unnecessarily cryptic, but then, that was par for the course among the eldritch. “Okay, thanks.” My phone buzzed. Glancing down, I saw that it was a text from Sinclair, and also that it was later than I’d realized. “I should really be going.”

“Of course.” Stefan inclined his head to me. “Thank you for the courtesy of your visit. It is appreciated.”

Cooper escorted me out of the bar, his hands shoved back into his pockets. Oddly enough, I felt safer in his presence than I did with any other ghoul except Stefan—and maybe even than with Stefan, come to think of it, since there was no risk of my being attracted to a skinny Irish kid who looked six or seven years younger than me. But between the fact that he’d died daring God and the deference with which the others treated him, I had a feeling he was pretty badass in his own right, and given the care he was taking not to touch me, I suspected he was rigorous about enforcing Stefan’s orders.

“How long have you known Stefan?” I asked him at the door.

“Oh, a while.” His narrow shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “Since the late eighteen hundreds, I reckon.” He gave me a challenging look. “He’s a good one, you know. Most of us aren’t.”

“Why is that?”

“Too easy to get bitter. It’s hard to have a good relationship with the world when you’re in it but not of it.” Cooper’s mouth twisted. “It passes us by. Even a vamp can turn a mate. All we can do is use ’em up and throw ’em away. Can’t even be with our own kind. You know how that goes.”

I did. A romance between two ghouls, like the late Mary and Ray, was doomed to set off a ravenous loop. “What about other immortals?” I asked him.

He shot me an amused look. “Going to fix me up with a nice dryad, are you? It’s no good.” He shook his head. “They won’t have us. Even if they did, it’s human we were, and it’s human companionship we crave.”

“I’m sorry.” Without thinking, I put my hand on his arm. Oops.

Cooper’s pupils waxed alarmingly, sending a jolt of fear through me. Licking his lips, he took a step backward, removed one hand from his pocket, and wagged a disapproving finger at me. “Don’t go giving me a taste, Miss Daisy. Not if you want you and me to be friends.”

“Sorry!” I tried raising my imaginary shield. Nope, still couldn’t get it quite right. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” His pupils steadied anyway. “Go on, now. Mind yourself.”

Outside, the late-afternoon sun beating down on the parking lot intensified my headache. I got into the Honda, turned it on, and cranked up the air-conditioning before checking out Sinclair’s text.

THINKING OF YOU! :)

It made me smile, but it also made me realize that I was no longer feeling settled. After an hour with Stefan Ludovic, I was feeling distinctly unsettled. My poor aching head was roiling with shields and ghouls and gallows, satyrs and orgies and werewolves on the down low, hell-spawn lawyers and sketchy land deals, island magic and African gods disguised as saints, shell games and pickpockets, pancakes and bacon and pissed-off fairies.

I called Sinclair.

“Hey, girl!” His voice sounded warm and cheerful. “Just getting ready for the last tour of the day.” He lowered his voice. “Got any plans tonight?”

Okay, just hearing his voice made me feel more settled again. “No,” I admitted. “But honestly, I don’t feel great. I’ve got a killer headache.”

There was a brief silence on the other end. “For real?” he asked. “Or are you freaking out on me, Daisy? Because you know, if anyone in this situation should be freaking out, it really should be me.”

“Are you?”

Sinclair laughed. “Are you serious, sistah? Yeah, a little. But I still want to see you.”

I smiled. “Me, too. But I really am beat. Is it okay if we take a step back today and start over where we left off tomorrow?”

“Regrets?” His tone was light, but there was a worried edge to it. “Or is it about what we talked about this morning?”

“No regrets,” I said firmly. “And, um, I’d like to talk more about what we talked about this morning, but . . .” I remembered the Fabulous Casimir’s warning. “But only if and when you feel like it. If you don’t, you don’t, and I’m good with that, too. Okay?”

“Hang on.” In the background, I could hear the muffled sound of Sinclair in his Jamaican accent directing a group of tourists to begin boarding the bus. I fidgeted with the air vents in the Honda. “Yeah, okay. You’re sure?”

I nodded. “I’m sure. So, tomorrow?”

“Deal. But I want to take you out on the town,” Sinclair warned me. “Dinner at a fancy restaurant, the whole nine yards. I want the full-on Labor Day weekend in Pemkowet experience.”

I laughed. “Okay, but if you want the real Pemkowet experience, you’ve got to do the Bridge Walk with me on Monday morning.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

He sighed into the phone. “Okay, you’ve got it. So we’re on for tomorrow night?”

My tail tingled, remembering his lingering touch at its base. I shifted in the driver’s seat, wriggling a little. “Absolutely.”

“Good. Look, I’ve got to go. Meet me for dinner at Lumière at seven o’clock tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

Sometimes it’s good not to think too hard, especially after a day of thinking too hard. Putting the Honda in gear, I drove to the convenience store just down the road that still carried a certain brand of wine coolers. I think they may be the last store on earth to stock them, which they do for the sake of my mother, who may be the last person on earth to drink them. I bought a four-pack and drove out to Sedgewick Estate, the riverside mobile home community where I grew up. Mom still lives there. As of three years ago, she paid off the mortgage on her lot and so she owns her home outright now.

She’s proud of that fact, as she ought to be. And I’m proud of her.

“Daisy baby!” My mom greeted me at the door of her double-wide with delight and a big hug. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

I hugged her back with one arm, holding up the four-pack of wine coolers with the other hand. “I’m sorry, I should have called. Is it okay? I brought libations.”

“Libations!” Her blue eyes sparkled at me. “You must have visited Mr. Leary recently. Of course it’s okay. Come in, come in. Let’s go sit on the deck.”

Mom’s place was tidier than usual—she hadn’t had a major commission since the Sweddon wedding last month—but there was still a hint of organized chaos about it. She rolled a rack of samples out of the way, and we trooped past it and out onto the deck, which overlooked a broad, marshy expanse of the river. We settled into a pair of Adirondack chairs that I remembered her salvaging and refinishing when I was in ninth grade, and cracked open a couple of wine coolers.

Despite having been the unwed teenaged mother of a hell-spawned half-breed, my mom’s got a very calming presence. When Sinclair met her, he said she had a tranquil aura. It didn’t surprise me. As we sat together in companionable silence, sipping our wine coolers and gazing at the river, I felt my headache dissipate.

“I would have thought you’d be out on the town tonight,” Mom said after a while, stealing a glance at me.

I shook my head. “I needed a little escape. This is perfect, thanks.”

She reached over to pat my hand. “Any time.”

“Sinclair’s taking me out to dinner tomorrow night,” I admitted.

Mom gave a little sigh of relief. “Oh, good! I didn’t want to pry. So things are still going well with the two of you?”

“Yeah, they are.” I picked absently at the label on my bottle. “I mean, I think so. It’s really too early to tell, right?”

She gave me a universal mom look, one of those looks mothers give their kids when they know there’s something more going on. “Do you want me to read your cards?”

Okay, so that’s not exactly a universal mom gambit, but she’s got a knack with the cards. Which, by the way, aren’t a traditional tarot deck. She taught herself to tell fortunes using a deck of lotería cards left over from a high school Spanish class, library books, and a system of symbolism that she invented on her own.

I kind of did, but at the same time, I kind of didn’t. I already had enough going on in my head. “Not right now, thanks.”

“Okay, honey.” She used the universal mom tone for “I know there’s something more going on and I’ve given you an opening to talk about it, but you’re not ready yet. I’m here to listen when you are.” It’s pretty amazing how much moms can communicate by tone alone.

We went back to sitting in silence and watching the river together. I loved the way it was so vast and open here, sedge grass growing along the verges, and even a few poplars and one big willow tree where it was especially shallow. A slight breeze ruffled the surface of the water. There wasn’t any hint of autumn in the air yet, but it was late enough in the summer that the evening sun hung lower on the horizon, slanted rays gilding the tops of the ripples. A flock of sandhill cranes passed overhead, calling to one another in their wild, chuckling voices.

“Oh, Daisy!” Mom’s voice was hushed. “Look, the willow’s awake!”

Across the water, the great willow tree stirred, raising her graceful, trailing branches in salute, the dryad’s delicate features emerging from the slender trunk. I held my breath as she swayed in the evening breeze. It was the first glimpse of magic I remembered from my childhood. Droplets of water fell from the leaves of her uplifted branches, sparkling in the sunlight.

And then the cranes passed into the horizon and the breeze died. The willow’s branches sank back to droop gracefully into the water, the dryad’s face vanishing once more beneath the bark.

I couldn’t help but think of Cooper—not his remark about fixing him up with a nice dryad, but the bitterness in his voice when he said it was hard to have a good relationship with the world when you were in it but not of it.

And I thought that despite the fact that my life was far from perfect, I was very lucky to have it. Leaning over, I gave my mom a kiss on the cheek.

She smiled at me. “What’s that for?”

I smiled back at her. “Just for being.”