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.”
Nine
A
lt
hough I meant to make an early evening of it, I ended up staying at Mom’s later than I had intended. We were on our second wine cooler when her neighbor Gus lumbered over to offer us a couple of the bratwursts he was grilling, which, by the way, I confirmed he hadn’t made himself. Gus is an ogre, and while he hasn’t eaten anyone in the last century, I have my suspicions regarding a few of the neighborhood cats and dogs over the years.
Anyway, the bratwursts were store-bought, so we invited Gus to join us on the deck, where he sat hunched to approximately the size and shape of a boulder-strewn hillock and gazed adoringly at my mom.
I think it’s sweet that he has a crush on her, and aside from his latent appetite for human flesh, he seems to be a gentle soul.
Once the sun set, the mosquitoes began swarming. But by then it seemed a shame to go home
too
early, so Mom and I said good night to Gus and went inside to watch an episode of
Gilmore Girls.
Which, yes, I’ve seen half a dozen times, but if you’re not familiar with it, it’s about a single mom in a quirky little town raising a teenaged daughter she’d had out of wedlock when she was just a teenager herself, and it’s cute and smart and funny, and since it originally aired when I was, like, twelve years old, it’s always been our show. I bought Mom the first season on DVD with my first official paycheck.
Of course, one episode turned into two, then three, before I finally made it home to find an indignant Mogwai demanding that I refill his bowl.
“That’s all there is,” I told him, emptying the dregs of a bag of cat food. He flicked one notched ear in my direction. “Hey, it’s not my fault if you struck out today and were forced to survive on kibble alone, mighty hunter.”
Mogwai lifted his head from his dish long enough to give me a look of disdain.
“I’ll go to the store in the morning,” I promised.
Lying alone in bed, I let myself relive the memory of waking up this morning in Sinclair’s bed with his arm over me, trying to decide how I felt about it. Short answer: I felt good.
So as I drifted off to sleep, I resolved that tomorrow I’d do something nice and distinctly girlfriend-like for him. Cookies. Yeah, cookies. He didn’t know it yet, but I knew my way around the kitchen, too. I’d bake cookies for Sinclair.
It was a good idea, anyway.
The morning started out well enough. Since it was Sunday, I was technically off duty. I woke up in time to make a run to the grocery store, stocking up on cat food and baking supplies before the after-church hordes descended.
By noon, I had my wet and dry ingredients whisked, sifted, and separated and the late, great Katie Webster blasting some Swamp Boogie Queen blues on the stereo. My trusty electric hand mixer was plugged in and ready to go when my phone rang. It was a local number, but not one I’d programmed into the phone.
I lowered the volume on Katie. “Hello, you’ve reached Daisy Johanssen.”
There was a lot of noise in the background on the other end, too. “Hi? This is Mark Brennan at Bazooka Joe’s. You asked me to call?”
My mind was a blank. “I did?”
“If those kids came back?”
Oh, crap. Right. I shifted my phone to a better angle. “The kids running the shell game? They’re back?”
“Yeah, right here down on the dock,” he said. “Got a pretty big crowd, too.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
Okay, so the cookies would have to wait. On a hunch, I exchanged my cute but slippery-soled sandals for a pair of white Keds sneakers. If my suspicions were right, I might need speed and agility. For the sake of mobility, I would have preferred to wear
dauda-dagr
on my belt, but since I didn’t want to spook the alleged kids, I went with the messenger bag instead, strapping it across my torso. Since I wasn’t sure how well my face was known in the wider eldritch community yet, I added a pair of sunglasses.
Being an agent of Hel sometimes requires compromise. At least I looked enough like a tourist to pass.
Truth be told, I actually enjoy this part of my job. It’s a game in a way; one that involves enough adrenaline to make it fun, but low enough stakes that I won’t castigate myself if I lose a round. Although I do
like
to win. It’s when things get serious, like they did earlier this summer, that it gets scary.
My apartment was a couple of blocks away from the docks. At a brisk walk, it only took me minutes to get there.
Sure enough, it appeared that a trio of kids was running a shell game. To the mundane eye, it was a charming affair. There was the hawker, who looked like a miniature version of a young Justin Bieber in an oversize baseball cap, sweeping bangs over his eyes, doing the whole “Ladies and gentlemen, step right up!” bit. And there was the operator, a solemn-looking towhead, kneeling on the dock over a piece of cardboard, his hands moving swiftly as he shuttled a dried pea among three empty walnut shells. Last was their bagman, a chubby-cheeked, freckled redhead holding twenty-dollar bills fanned like playing cards in one hand. Norman-freaking-Rockwell would have been proud of these three.
I sidled through the crowd, ignoring a few protests. Blinking my eyes, I concentrated on seeing through the trio’s glamour.
Hobgoblins, all three.
I have to say, it was obvious they were having great fun. Their feral nut-brown faces were contorted with gleeful malice, long, pointed noses drooping toward wide, grinning mouths filled with an erratic straggle of teeth. Sharp, bristly ears twitched with mirth and bright little hedgehog eyes gleamed with delight.
“You, sir, you look like a sharp-eyed gent!” the Bieber-goblin said encouragingly in a clear, piping voice, identifying a new mark. “Try your hand?”
A portly tourist in a polo shirt and Dockers cleared his throat. “I don’t want to take advantage, son.”
“Oh, it’s all right, sir,” the Bieber-goblin assured him. He laid one hand on the towhead’s shoulder. “Nate here just needed to find his rhythm. He’s got it now.” He winked. “Right, Nate?”
The ostensible Nate returned his wink, hands moving more swiftly as he passed the pea from shell to shell. “Right you are, Tommy!”
Oh, gah! It worked, though. I watched the portly tourist pony up a twenty-dollar bill for his bet. The seemingly freckle-faced bagman made a big show of inserting the twenty into the array of bills he held fanned in his hand. The towheaded operator made a number of smooth passes with the pea and the walnut shells, just fast enough to be credible, just slow enough to be detectable. The portly mark was sharp-eyed enough to follow him. With a show of reluctance, the bagman plucked out two twenty-dollar bills and made good on the bet.
“Double or nothing, sir?” the Bieber-goblin asked.
And again, I had to admit, it was a pretty damn clever scam. It was a
reverse
shell game. The hobgoblins were paying out worthless fairy gold in exchange for cold, hard, mundane cash.
I almost hated to bust them.
Almost.
While the mark debated whether to go double or nothing, I pushed my way to the head of the crowd. Beneath my skirt, my tail swished back and forth in an involuntary stalking reflex. The Bieber-goblin’s long nose twitched as he detected an eldritch presence in the gathered throng. His bright, beady eyes scanned the faces before him, pausing with uncertainty when he reached mine.
I held up my left hand palm outward, revealing Hel’s rune. “Sorry, guys. You’re busted.”
“Scatter!” he shouted.
I lunged forward to grab him . . . and promptly went sprawling as someone clipped me hard behind the knees. Damn. Apparently, there was a fourth hobgoblin. I caught myself on my hands on the piece of cardboard they were using as a gaming table, which promptly slid out from under me, sending me to my belly. The air went out of my lungs with a
whoof
sound and my sunglasses clattered to the dock.
“Thanks!” The Bieber-goblin vaulted over me, stooping to snatch up my sunglasses with one gnarly, long-fingered hand. “I’ll take these.” Someone let out a startled shriek as he put them on his face. In the heat of the moment, he’d dropped his glamour. “Oops.”
Spinning on the cardboard like an old-school break-dancer, I took him down with a leg sweep and pinned him to the dock. “Gotcha.”
Behind me there was more shrieking and a loud, angry buzzing sound interspersed with oohs and ahs. I barely had time to wonder what the hell was going on before someone grabbed my ponytail and yanked it hard enough to make me yelp. The buzzing sound was right at my ear, vibrating the air like a hummingbird on steroids.