Poison Fruit (8 page)

“Cody said there was no scent,” I said. “Which seems odd.”

Lurine waved one hand. “Oh, you know those dreamwalker types. They have a complicated relationship with corporeal reality.”

I did not, in fact, know those dreamwalker types. Being Hel’s liaison came with a steep learning curve and a lot of on-the-job training. “Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning the Night Hag only exists physically for the person whose dreams she enters, cupcake,” she said patiently. “Or nightmares, I should say. That’s what they feed on.”

“Okay,” I said. “So Night Hags are basically the Freddy Kruegers of the eldritch community?”

You might think a pop culture reference like that would be lost on someone whose origins date to the Bronze Age, but in Lurine’s case, you would be wrong. In the current incarnation of her identity, she left Sedgewick Estate when I was in my late teens and attained B-movie fame starring in a couple of cult-favorite horror films. After that, she married an octogenarian real-estate tycoon who died within a year, leaving her the bulk of his massive fortune.

Hence, the mansion and the boot-warming appliances. Although to be fair, Lurine’s probably thrown away as many fortunes as she’s gained over the course of centuries.

“More or less,” she said. “As far as I know, Night Hags don’t have the ability to actually kill people in their sleep.”

“Just to make them think they’re dying,” I said. “Or crazy.”

Lurine nodded. “All good fodder for nightmares.”

“Or suicide attempts,” I noted.

“That, too,” she agreed. “The mortal human mind’s at once a powerful and fragile thing, baby girl.”

“Okay,” I said. “So how do I find and catch the bitch?”

“No idea, cupcake.” Lurine shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, not my area of expertise. If I were you, I’d ask around among the fey. Night Hags are kin to bogles, if I’m not mistaken. I have a hard time keeping track of them all.” She eyed the pendant around my neck. “You could ask
him
.”

My right hand rose to close over the silver acorn-shaped whistle. “The Oak King?”

“Well, you might not want to start by pestering eldritch royalty,” she said in a pragmatic tone. “But it’s something to keep in mind.”

“I’ll think about it,” I promised. “Thanks, Lurine.”

She smiled at me. “Anytime.”

Okay, so that boot-warmer thingy? Totally awesome. Plus, Lurine’s butler/manservant Edgerton had waxed and shined them, so that they not only felt toasty warm but looked completely undamaged and as good as new when I put them on. He seemed embarrassed when I thanked him profusely.

Lurine escorted me to the foyer. “Hey, how’s your love life, cupcake?” she asked me. “Any less complicated?”

I hesitated. “You might say so.”

“Cody?”

I shook my head, my heart aching a little. “Taking himself out of the picture.”

“So who’s still
in
the picture?” Lurine’s gaze sharpened. “Stefan Ludovic?” I didn’t say anything. She frowned at me. “You’re walking on thin ice with that one, Daisy.”

I temporized. “Well, he’s in Poland. Outcast business.”

She sighed. “Oh, baby girl!”

“I thought you were okay with Stefan.” I was feeling a bit defensive. “Look, he’s been a strong ally. You helped him rescue me last summer! And if it wasn’t for Stefan, that Halloween debacle would have been a bloodbath.”

“
I’m
fine with Stefan, but I can handle myself. It’s you I worry about.” Lurine’s cornflower-blue eyes began to take on a stony basilisk stare. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it would be for you to consort with a ghoul?”

I kindled my mental shield between us, something I’d never done before. “Yeah. I do. Apparently, I’m drawn to dangerous things.”

Lurine’s expression was unreadable, and she held her silence long enough that I began to fear I’d crossed a line. But at last she gave me a rueful smile. “Touché.” She nodded at the shield of energy I wielded,
invisible to the mundane eye, bright and shining to the eldritch. “Just tell me you don’t actually think you need that with me.”

“No, of course not.” I let it dissipate. “I just wanted to show you that I can take care of myself, too.”

“Daisy—”

“Look, Stefan knows you’ve declared me under your protection,” I said to her. “He knows you’d crush him to a pulp if he ever did anything to harm me.”

Lurine folded her arms over her baby pink Juicy Couture jacket, managing to emphasize her admittedly spectacular cleavage in the process—maybe an attempt to distract me, probably just reflex. Lurine knows perfectly well that her human bombshell form doesn’t faze me. But her real one . . . that’s something else.

Perverse, but true. What can I say? Eldritch tendencies manifest in unexpected ways.

“I don’t think he’d hurt you on purpose,” she said. “But if you send him ravening, all bets are off.”

“I know, I know!” I said. “Lurine . . . I’ve got to make my own choices. And you’ve got to decide whether you’re going to treat me like a child or a grown woman. You can’t keep doing both.”

“Oh, cupcake.” She laughed softly. “You can’t tell people how to feel. You know, I like the young woman you’ve grown into very much. You’re determined and brave and loyal. But you’ll always be that impetuous, hot-tempered hell-spawn toddler I first knew, too, and I’ll always worry about you. You’ll just have to live with it. You and your mother are the first mortals I let myself care about in a long, long time.”

It’s kind of hard to argue with a declaration like that, especially when you’re a bit misty-eyed.

“Thanks,” I said. “And I’ll be careful. I promise. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about Stefan anytime soon. Like I said, he’s off on some mysterious errand in Poland.” I strapped my messenger bag across my chest. “And I’m off hunting a Night Hag.”

“Good luck,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said again. At the door, a thought struck me, and I
turned back in curiosity. “By the way, what were you and those undines singing?”

“Naiads,” Lurine corrected me. “They’re prickly little bitches, but they can sing. It was a hymn to Helios.”

“Really?” I don’t know why it surprised me. It’s not like I ever forgot what Lurine
was
, but I guess sometimes I lost sight of exactly what it meant, and where and when she came from.

There was a faraway look in her eyes. “Some of us try to keep the old traditions alive, Daisy. At least when we can.” Her gaze returned from the distance. “Off-season is the only time I can greet the dawn properly.”

“It was beautiful,” I said honestly. “Truly.”

“Thank you.” Lurine smiled, looking genuinely pleased. “Sorry about accidentally luring you into the lake.”

I shrugged. “Totally worth it.”

“Don’t mention it to your mother.”

“I won’t.”

Nine

B
ack in my car, I checked my phone and saw I had a text from Sinclair inviting me to attend his ritual tattooing at noon today, which was perfect. Well, mostly perfect. If you wanted to talk to one of the fey, especially a nature elemental, without spending hundreds of dollars on cowslip dew, Sinclair Palmer was the man to see. He ran Pemkowet Supernatural Tours, and thanks to the generous support of the Oak King, there were almost always nature fairies along his route.

Obviously, there weren’t as many around this time of year—it’s a seasonal thing—but there were a few species hardy enough to endure the winter. Plus, it helps that nature fairies freakin’
love
Sinclair.

I can’t blame them, since Sinclair’s a great guy. He’s also my ex-boyfriend. That would be the less than perfect part. Okay, it’s not like we dated that long—it was only about a month—and I’m the one who broke it off, but still.

It’s not that I
regret
ending things with Sinclair, but the relationship didn’t have a chance to run its natural course. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that it involves his secret twin sister, obeah magic, and a Jamaican duppy.

Anyway.

Since I had time to kill, I drove over to East Pemkowet. Realizing I was starving, I got a cheese Danish to go at the Sit’n Sip and ate it on the way to the library.

Let me just say that for my money, the Pemkowet District Library is one of the best things about this town. Seriously, it’s awesome. It’s small and quaint—it’s actually lodged in a charming old building that was a church in the 1800s—but the services it offers are huge in comparison.

The library was a big part of my life when I was growing up. Mom and I didn’t have a lot of money, but as long as we could use computers and check out books and videos and music CDs from the library for free, it didn’t matter that we couldn’t afford cable or satellite TV or an Internet connection at home. Being a small facility, the library doesn’t have an extensive collection, but it’s good—you can also request anything you want from another library in the region, and they’ll deliver it within days. Very cool.

Plus, there’s the Sphinx, which is why I decided to pay the library a visit today.

The Sphinx is either an oracle or a very eccentric old librarian with an incredible memory and a penchant for riddles. I’m honestly not sure which, and I don’t know how or when she became known as the Sphinx. According to Mr. Leary, whoever gave her the nickname was probably thinking of a Sybil instead, although he allows that the Sphinx was also known as an oracle.

Which, by the way, anyone who’s ever seen
The NeverEnding Story
could have told him. That’s one of the classic movies from Mom’s childhood that we watched on loan from the library. I recommend it, although I’ll warn you, unless you have a heart of stone, you
will
cry at the part where the pony dies.

There weren’t a lot of patrons in the library at this time of day. I approached the Sphinx, who was puttering around behind the checkout counter, returning DVDs to their filing units.

For the record, the Sphinx’s given name is Jane Smith. If you think that sounds too generic to be true, I’m right there with you.

Generally speaking, the eldritch always recognize one another.
Even if we can’t identify the other’s exact species, there’s a telltale tingle. I have to admit, I’d never felt it with the Sphinx. Sinclair can see auras, and he says that hers is very muted, which means that either she’s near the end of her life, or she’s powerful enough to suppress it.

It’s a tough call. The Sphinx has looked ancient since I was tall enough to see over the checkout counter.

“Good morning, Ms. Smith,” I greeted her. “I’m looking for information on Night Hags.”

The Sphinx looked at me without blinking. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Her shoulders were hunched with osteoporosis, and her skin was beyond wrinkled, etched with deep crevasses. We’re talking apple-head doll territory here. It was impossible to determine her ethnic heritage. Egyptian, East Indian, Native American, light-skinned black—she could have been any or all of the above. I was pretty sure she wasn’t Asian, anyway. Not only did her eyes lack an epicanthic fold, but they were disconcertingly round and an almost luminous brown, without a lot of white showing around the iris. Her eyes looked more like a monkey’s or a chimp’s than a human’s, and I knew for a fact that she could stare an unruly child into silence in three seconds flat without a single “Shush!”

The memory made me wriggle my tail a bit.

At last the Sphinx did blink once with great deliberation, crepe-skinned lids closing and opening over those unusual eyes. She rattled off a string of numbers in her surprisingly deep voice, and went back to filing DVDs.

Luckily, I’d been braced for the possibility. When you asked the Sphinx for advice, she either posed you an impenetrable riddle or directed you toward the appropriate research materials.

I retained enough of the sequence of numbers she’d recited to plunge into the stacks in search of a particular volume. And yes, that does mean the Sphinx has the library’s entire catalogue memorized by the Dewey Decimal System call numbers.

Unfortunately, the volume in question was a book on sleep disorders. I went back to the counter. The Sphinx ignored me. Her head, wrapped in a paisley scarf, remained bowed over her task.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Ms. Smith? I’m sorry, I’m actually looking for Night Hags in folklore.”

Her head came up. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I’m trying to catch one. A Night Hag, that is.”

“Ah.” The Sphinx nodded sagely. “Some pass through the gate at dawn crowned; some do not. Some pass through the gate at nightfall crowned; some do not.”

I waited to see if there was more.

There wasn’t. Just a long, unnerving stare from those round, luminous brown eyes that set my tail twitching.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

I was halfway across the library when the Sphinx called my name. “Daisy Johanssen.”

I turned. “Yes?”

The power of her stare didn’t lessen over distance. “Learn to see with the eyes of your heart as well as your mind,” she said, tapping her chest with one gnarled forefinger. “When the time comes, you will need it.”

I hesitated. “Um . . . is this still about the Night Hag?”

The Sphinx made a shooing gesture. “When the time comes, you will know.” She paused, then added, “Or not.”

One of the library patrons, a portly gentleman who looked to be of retirement age, strolled past me to approach the checkout counter holding a book from the New Releases shelf. Pemkowet’s resident oracle took his book and scanned it while he pulled out his wallet and fumbled for his library card.

Ohh-kay.

Clearly, I’d been dismissed. Well, as far as encounters with the Sphinx went, that wasn’t entirely unproductive. At least I’d gotten a riddle
and
a piece of soothsaying out of it, even if I had no idea what either meant.

Next up, Sinclair’s ritual tattooing.

If you’re wondering what that’s all about, Sinclair is apprenticed to the local coven. He’s actually descended from a long line of obeah
practitioners, but until recently, he’d been avoiding claiming his heritage—
which, now that I think about it, is something else we had in common. Well, except for the part where claiming it could breach the Inviolate Wall and unleash Armageddon.