Thirteen
B
ack at the river’s edge, Lurine deposited me gently on solid ground before shifting back to her human guise, the imposing millennia-old monster resuming the form of every heterosexual fourteen-year-old boy’s wet dream.
I’d always been fond of Lurine, but I had a whole new respect for her.
“Did you get what you needed, baby girl?” she asked me.
I nodded. “More than I’d hoped. Thanks, Lurine.”
“Anytime.” Lowering her voice, she gave me a serious look. “Sweetheart, if you need backup, don’t you hesitate to call me. You might be getting in over your head here. I’ll keep my promise; I won’t say a word about this, not even to your mother, but it sounds like we’re talking about a murder, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “It kinda looks that way.”
She sighed. “Goddamn ghouls.”
It seemed to genuinely disturb her. I wondered fleetingly about Lurine’s wealthy octogenarian husband’s death, and pushed that thought firmly away. Still really, really didn’t want to know. And then I thought about dark-haired ghouls who were neither young nor old, and Stefan Ludovic’s patient, piercing, ice-blue gaze.
I shivered a bit. Didn’t want to know if he was involved in this, either. Or at least I didn’t want it to be true.
“Daisy, baby!” Mom hurried over to the shore, a pair of clean, dry towels over her arm. “Are you cold? I brought towels.”
“I’m fine.” It was true; I didn’t have a drop of water on me.
“
You’re
not.” Since Mom couldn’t fuss over me, she fussed over Lurine, who bore it with amused fondness. “Look at that muck! You don’t want to get it all over your pretty sundress.” Picking up Lurine’s discarded dress, she eyed it critically, examining the seams. “Is this a Marc Jacobs? Because you know I could make it for you at a fraction of the price with twice the workmanship.”
“It’s from last season. Don’t worry about it.” Having wiped the river water and clinging bits of rotten plant matter and other unidentified muck from her legs, Lurine held out her hand. Mom hesitated. “Okay, fine. Let’s talk about a commission, but
not
at a fraction of the price. I don’t want to have this fight again. Can I get dressed now?”
“Yes, please!” Gus’s voice boomed in answer. He was still standing sentry duty, now with his massive back pointedly turned and a ham-size hand shielding his eyes. As it happened, the ogre was a gentleman. “Can she get dressed?”
“Hey, Gus! Can we come out now?” someone called from one of the mobile units, peering cautiously through the curtains. “I’ve got hungry kids and burgers turning to charcoal on the grill.”
I laughed.
Nothing was funny, not really. It was just that the absurdity of the exchange in the midst of some very scary and ominous goings-on reminded me that I loved this place and these people.
“It’s okay, Gus.” I patted his arm, which unsurprisingly was a lot like patting a boulder. “They can come out now.”
“Do you have time for a cup of coffee, honey?” Mom asked me in a hopeful tone.
I shook my head. “I need to touch base with Cody.”
She did her best to look crafty. “Oh, of course.”
Lurine took my mom’s arm in hers. “If it’s no trouble, I’d love a cup of coffee, Marja. We can talk clothes.” She glanced at me, her gaze light, masking her concern. “Don’t worry about me, cupcake. I’ll call my driver to pick me up.”
“Okay.”
In my car, I slid my phone from my purse. No reply from Jen—oh, well. The ball was in her court now. Suppressing the tiniest pang of guilt, I called Cody. He answered right away, sounding disgruntled. “What’s up, Pixy Stix?”
I cradled the phone against my ear. “No luck?”
“No,” he said shortly. “You?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “And it’s a pretty major development. Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to meet?”
There was a pause. “You had dinner?”
“I never even had lunch,” I said, only just now realizing it.
“Me neither. Meet you at Callahan’s in ten.” He hung up.
It turned out to be more like twenty. Parking in downtown Pemkowet is a nightmare in the summer, and I had to circle the block several times before, miracle of miracles, a car pulled out of a space right in front of Callahan’s Café just as I was about to begin another circuit. I whipped into the space and was fumbling for my purse, which had fallen onto the floor, when someone rapped on the passenger-side window, making me jump.
Cody’s face peered at me. I leaned over to unlock the door. He opened it and squeezed his tall figure into the passenger seat.
“Change of plans?” I asked.
“No, I just thought you could give me a quick rundown.” He nodded at the café. “Too busy for privacy tonight.”
I told Cody the gist of what I’d learned. He heard me out in silence, an increasingly dark scowl on his face.
“Damn!” He pounded the dashboard with one fist when I’d finished. My poor little Honda rocked under the impact. “Sorry. I was really hoping this would turn out to be nothing sinister.” His face looked grim. “Now I’ve
really
got to find Ray D. I don’t suppose your mysterious friend has any pull in the ghoul community?”
“No, sorry.”
“Too bad.” Cody searched my face, his gold-flecked topaz eyes unnervingly intense. “How sure are you about this info, Daisy?”
“Pretty sure,” I said reluctantly. “Those undines really didn’t want to talk about it. None of the water elementals wanted to get involved. They’re scared. They wouldn’t have given it up if Lur . . . if my friend hadn’t made them. I don’t think they’d lie.”
“Undines.” He ran a hand over his chin. I couldn’t help but notice that his stubble was gone. “God help us. That’ll stand up in court.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, Chief says we ought to have the autopsy report tomorrow. Hopefully, that’ll give us something more substantial to go on.”
My stomach grumbled. “Can we still get dinner?”
“Yeah.” Cody’s expression eased into a smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I think we’d better. I’m starving.”
“Me, too.” Unable to resist, I brushed the line of his jaw with one fingertip. “Plus, you shaved, didn’t you?”
“I might have,” he admitted.
“And you smell good.” I did successfully resist the urge to sniff his neck. Yay for me! “Is that aftershave? What is it?”
“Ralph Lauren’s Polo.” Cody made a face. “It was a gift, okay? No special occasion—I just didn’t want it to go to waste. Don’t read anything into it.”
“I won’t.” I paused. “A gift from a lady friend?”
He wagged a finger at me. “None of your business, Pixy Stix. C’mon; let’s get a bite to eat.”
It was a nice piece of lighthearted banter and a welcome counterbalance to the day’s grave revelations. And on that note, both of us exited the Honda and headed for the door of Callahan’s . . .
. . . just in time to encounter Jen and her friend Greta Hasselmeyer standing on the sidewalk and staring at us, having just emerged from the café.
Oh, crap.
“Hey!” My voice came out overbright and chipper. “Oh, hey, Jen!” I cleared my throat. “I’ve been trying to call you. Did you get my message?”
She continued to stare at me for a long moment, then slowly and deliberately shifted her gaze from me to Cody and back. “Yeah.” Her tone was flat. “Thanks. I got it. Loud and clear, Daise.”
I winced. “It’s not—”
Jen held one hand out. “Whatever.”
“It’s just work!” I protested.
She walked away without a word, her dark, shining hair hanging down her back and swaying like a river. A pissed-off river. Greta Hasselmeyer, who worked alongside Jen in the Cassopolis family industry of caretaking and cleaning for the privileged and wealthy, folded her arms over her chest and shook her head, voicing her disapproval in equal silence.
I probably shouldn’t have stroked Cody’s jaw.
Crap.
We entered the café and took seats across from each other in a corner booth. “Sorry,” I muttered.
“Not your fault.” Cody studied the menu, although, like me, he probably had it memorized. “I called her. She wasn’t too thrilled by the ‘it’s not you; it’s me’ routine.”
“I know.”
He glanced up at me. “Oh?”
I pretended to study the menu, too. “It is my fault. I shouldn’t have intervened.”
“You did it for the right reasons.”
I coughed. “Not entirely.”
“Oh?”
Honestly, this laconic thing could drive a person crazy! “I like you,” I admitted. “I can’t help it, Cody. I’ve liked you since I was ten years old and Freddie Cooper tried to pull my pants down on the bus to see if it was true that I had a tail. You told him to stop, and when he wouldn’t, you punched him in the head. Remember?”
His eyes crinkled. “Uh-huh.”
“So . . .” I gestured helplessly.
“Daisy.” Cody reached across the booth, capturing and stilling my hands. “That was a long time ago. You know enough to understand why it wouldn’t work now.”
“Time is relative,” I murmured, trying not to feel hurt. “Rather like age.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
He squeezed my hands, and let them go. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me . . .” He hesitated, searching for a safe topic. “Okay, tell me this.
Daisy?
What the, um, hell kind of name is that for a hell-spawn? Where did that come from?” Despite everything, I laughed. “I’m serious!” he insisted. “You can’t tell me it isn’t a little odd.”
The waitress drifted over to our table, bringing glasses of water. Cody ordered ribs again. I ordered the spaghetti-and-meatball special.
“It’s from a book,” I said. “My name, I mean.”
Cody looked perplexed. “If it’s
The Great Gatsby
, we read it in Mr. Leary’s class, and no offense, but I don’t get it.”
I sighed. “Not Daisy Buchanan.
Princess Daisy
.” Cody looked blank. “It’s the title of a romance novel. A big, sprawling one with dethroned royalty and secret twins and incestuous half brothers.”
“Still not getting it,” he commented. “Possibly more than ever.”
“Not a lot to get. It was guilty pleasure reading for my mom and my grandma back in the day, long before I happened. That was one of their favorites.” I tugged on a lock of my pale Scandinavian hair. “It has a blond-haired, dark-eyed heroine, okay? And a happy ending. My mom’s a big believer in happy endings.”
“Ah.” Cody’s expression changed. “That must take a special kind of strength.”
“Yeah.” I drew a line through the condensation on my water glass with one fingertip. “She was nineteen when Belphegor knocked her up,” I said without looking at Cody. “A freshman in college, the first person in her family to go. One of her roommates’ parents rented a cottage in Pemkowet over spring break. The girls thought it would be fun to use a Ouija board. No one knew enough to warn them. At three o’clock in the morning, they found Mom levitating several feet above the bed in the act of, um, congress with a shadowy figure with glowing eyes, bat wings, and a tail.”
“Yeah, I heard.” His voice was low. “She told you herself?”
“Not that part, no.” I fell silent as our food arrived, then busied myself twirling spaghetti around my fork. “Two months later, Mom found herself pregnant. She dropped out of college to have me. Grandma and Grandpa weren’t happy about it, but they stood by her. Pretty much everyone else tried to convince her it wasn’t a good idea to carry the baby to term.” I glanced at him. “Either because they believed her, or because they didn’t and they thought she was mentally ill and that the pregnancy would totally unhinge her.”
“I’m sorry,” Cody said quietly.
“It’s okay.” I gave him a wry smile. “I’m here, right? Mom refused to listen to any of them. She decided I was her baby, dammit, and she was going to love me no matter what. And that that was all that mattered, no matter who or what my father was. And if part of that was naming her little black-eyed hell-spawn after her favorite character in her favorite book, no matter how silly or inappropriate it sounds . . .” I stuck a forkful of spaghetti into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “You know what? I’m okay with it.”
Cody picked up his ribs. “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Exactly.” I pointed my fork at him. “What about you, Officer? I know what made you turn your life around the second time and become a cop. But in eighth grade, you were a JV all-star. A year later, you were a burnout. What happened?”
He tore a hunk of meat from the bone with his teeth. “Puberty.”
I waited for more. “That’s it?”
Cody didn’t elaborate. “Yep.”
Okay, then.
I thought about it while we ate our meals. I didn’t know a lot about werewolves. They were too clannish, too secretive. But I knew adolescence was hell on wheels for me, trying to control my temper, trying to cope with unexpected desires. There had been a few . . . incidents. A few things had spontaneously combusted or burst in my presence, most memorably the hot-water pipes in the girls’ locker room.
I got suspended for that one. So did Jen, for defending me from the girls who’d been taunting me. Well, actually for threatening to cut off Stacey Brooks’s hair in her sleep if she didn’t shut up.
The memory drew a reluctant smile from me, accompanied by a pang of guilt.
Anyway . . .
If it was at all the same for werewolves, no wonder Cody had sort of dropped out. Real life isn’t like the movies. If he’d gone all
Teen Wolf
on the basketball court, parents on the opposing team’s side would have been screaming for an animal control unit, and the entire Fairfax clan could have been outed against their will.
“I get it,” I said. Cody looked up at me from his dwindling plate of ribs. “I’m curious. As an adult, do you have full control?”
He glanced around. The café was emptying and no one was seated near us. “Depends on your willpower and self-discipline.”
“Do
you
?”
“Yeah.” He gave me an unexpected grin that it’s only fair to describe as wolfish, sending a shiver down my spine and setting my tail a-twitch. “Twenty-nine days out of a lunar month. The chief would never have hired me if I didn’t. Do
you
?”