Poison Fruit (32 page)

I pushed aside an unbidden memory of Janek Król’s face as he died. “Yes, my lady.”

“That is well.” Hel closed both eyes briefly, then opened them again. “I have no weapons to fight this battle of words and mortal laws,” she said grimly. “But if there is merit to your fears, I would have this unknown adversary know that I will defend my territory with every weapon at my disposal.”

There was a low rumble as the frost giants murmured in agreement. I inclined my head. “Duly noted, my lady.”

“Convey my warning to this
hell-spawn
who has claimed his birthright in service of the Greek Hades,” Hel said in distaste. “It is in my thoughts that he parses the truth to a fine edge in denying his master’s role.”

It took me a moment to translate that into twenty-first-century lingo. “You think Hades is involved?”

Hel’s stare shifted back onto the distance. Damn. At least this time
it returned before I lost feeling in my fingertips. “You speak of one who is well acquainted with matters of judgment,” she said. “The Greek Hades appointed not one, but three former mortals to judge the dead and determine which were worthy of the Elysian Fields, and which were condemned to Tartarus.”

I shrugged. “So maybe Dufreyne lied.”

“Perhaps,” Hel said. “Or perhaps the Greek Hades acts in the interests of another.”

“Who?” I asked her.

Hel shook her head slowly and deliberately, giving me a disconcerting twofold glimpse of her fair, unspoiled profile and her blackened, ruined one. “To name a god in a place of power is to draw their attention, my young liaison. We have spoken enough of the Greek Hades. I will not speculate further.”

Well, okay then.

I rubbed my hands together, the padded nylon of my gloves rasping. “As you will, my lady. Do you have counsel for me?”

“Watch,” Hel said. “Listen. Convey my warning as I have bidden you. Perhaps the matter will come to naught.”

Yeah, I wasn’t buying it, either. “And if it doesn’t?”

The oppressive atmosphere in the old sawmill intensified, the air thickening until I had to fight to draw breath. Somehow it brought to mind my vision of the dome of heaven cracking open above me.

“For the sake of all involved, let us hope that it does,” Hel said in a low, ominous tone that made the rafters tremble, the blackened claw of her left hand curling on the arm of her throne. She raised two fingers of her fair right hand in dismissal. “Although your report is unwelcome, it is appreciated, my young liaison. You have my leave to depart.”

I took it, hieing myself out of the sawmill and waiting beside the dune buggy for Mikill to catch up to me. Scores of
duegar
clustered at a respectful distance on the main street of the buried lumber town, watching me with a mixture of hope and apprehension, but none of them spoke.

Neither did the Norns when Mikill drove past their well at the base of Yggdrasil II’s roots, although they watched me with grave eyes, and
one tapped her chest with one long silver fingernail, reminding me of prior soothsaying.

Right. Trust my heart—
El Corazón
in my mom’s reading.

Like I could forget.

Mikill drove me home in silence, pulling into the alley beside my
apartment. To my surprise, he laid one massive hand on my shoulder before I could get out of the dune buggy, chilling me through my down coat. “Whatever comes, remember that one battle does not a war make, Daisy Johanssen,” he said to me. “Do not be quick to lose heart.”

My teeth began to chatter. “I’ll try.”

The frost giant gave me one last solemn nod, regarding me with his slush-colored eyes. “That is well.”

Once safely back inside my apartment, I took a long, hot shower, standing under the spray and letting the warm water sluice over my skin and chase away the bone-deep chill of Little Niflheim.

I hoped it would ease the chill in my heart, too.

It didn’t.

Thirty-one

O
n the day after the news broke, Chief Bryant issued a statement on behalf of the joint codefendants that they would be pooling their resources and their respective legal counsel to review the situation and determine how to proceed, calling for cooler heads to prevail in the interim. He noted that there was a sixty-day opt-out period before the case could go to trial, which meant it probably wouldn’t be scheduled until early February.

Apparently, once a judge has certified the plaintiffs as a class—in this case, any visitors to Pemkowet who sustained injuries or damage due to supernatural causes during the time the PVB was actively promoting the ghost uprisings—all potential plaintiffs have to be notified of the class action by mail or advertisements.

Funny, I’d seen those kinds of ads plenty of times on TV—the ones that promise if you suffer from, say, mesothelioma, you might be eligible for compensation and should contact Dewey, Cheatham & Howe, etc. I’d never really thought about it.

I’d never given any thought to why someone would opt out of a class-action law, either—which, in a nutshell, was because they thought they might get a better settlement suing as an individual.

Yeah, somehow I was pretty sure
that
wasn’t going to happen. Any potential plaintiffs that came forward during the opt-out period were going to do exactly what Daniel Dufreyne suggested to them.

At any rate, the fact that there wouldn’t be any trial for at least two months gave us breathing room.

What, exactly, we could do with that time was another matter.

At least one person took a pragmatic approach: Lurine, who offered
the services of Robert Diaz, an attorney at a high-powered Los Angeles law firm she had on retainer. Robert Diaz was famous for, among other things, successfully defeating the attempt of Lurine’s late husband’s family to overturn his will.

“I tried to be diplomatic about it,” Lurine told me confidentially when I stopped by her place to discuss it. “But this is a huge case, cupcake. Anything over five mill, and it’s got to be decided in a federal court. Pemkowet’s not going to stand a chance with any of these small-town yokels who’ve never settled anything bigger than a sexual harassment claim at the local high school.”

“You do know it’s not going to matter how good the defense attorney is, right?” I said to her. “Dufreyne’s a goddamn hell-spawn with powers of goddamn persuasion. He doesn’t
need
to be good.”

Lurine shrugged. “You’ve got to take the long view, baby girl. The more holes Diaz can poke in the case, the more grounds for appeal.”

“Which we’re also likely to lose against Dufreyne’s powers of persuasion,” I pointed out.

“Maybe,” she said. “I suspect he’ll have to be judicious about how he uses them, no pun intended. If he’s
too
obvious, at some point it’s going to raise more suspicion than he can control. He doesn’t want to risk being the first lawyer in history to get disbarred for supernatural coercion. Anyway, Robert Diaz has a high profile, and a little extra media scrutiny can’t hurt.”

“Did you warn him about Dufreyne being a hell-spawn?” I asked.

“No.” Lurine pursed her lips. “If the city and township boards vote to take me up on my offer—which they’d be idiots not to do, but stranger things have happened—I thought I’d wait until Robert’s gotten a feel for the eldritch community before I broke the news to him.”

“Does he know about you?” I asked her.

“That’s privileged information, cupcake.” Her tone was light, but the warning in it was clear. “I can’t divulge it.”

“Sorry.” I spread my hands. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

Lurine studied me. We were sitting in her living room, wintry light pouring through the big glass windows that looked onto the landscaped yard and woods surrounding her private mansion. “You seem a
little out of sorts, honey. Is it just this lawsuit or is there something else going on?”

“Isn’t the lawsuit enough?” I said drily.

“Your mom told me about your nightmare,” Lurine said. “And the reading she did for you at Thanksgiving. She just needed to talk,” she added when I didn’t respond right away. “You can’t blame her for worrying.”

“I’m not mad that she told you,” I said. “I just . . . It’s like this shadow hanging over me that never goes away. And now there’s this lawsuit, and Dufreyne smirking at me with his birthright and his goddamn schadenfreude, and I’m just so sick of feeling
helpless
!”

The atmosphere in the room tightened as I lost control of my emotions, a hot, acid-tinged wash of pent fury spilling over me. A flawless crystal vase on an end table vibrated with a high-pitched sound in protest. Lurine reached out to lay one hand atop the rim, stilling it. “I know.”

Closing my eyes, I struggled to control my anger, putting it in a box. No, a trunk. A trunk reinforced with steel bands. “I had so much power in my dream, Lurine,” I whispered. “And it felt
so good
.”

“I bet it did.”

It wasn’t exactly the response I’d expected. I opened my eyes to find Lurine watching me, a neutral expression on her beautiful face. “Shouldn’t you remind me that it was all just an illusion or something?” I said to her. “Or maybe just reassure me that I’m not capable of it?”

“You know perfectly well that it was just a dream,” Lurine said. “Daisy, you invoked your worst nightmare. On purpose. And you set your friend Sinclair on a dark path he didn’t want to walk to do it.”

“The Night Hag—”

She raised one hand. “Baby girl, I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it. You did what you had to do, and now you’re paying a price for it. That’s all.”

“So you
don’t
think I’m capable of it?” There was a part of me that really, really wanted to hear those words spoken out loud by someone who knew and loved me.

Lurine didn’t oblige me. “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t?” she asked with genuine curiosity in her voice.

I thought about it.

No. No, I wouldn’t. Because it wouldn’t scare me so much if I didn’t believe in my heart of hearts that I
was
capable of invoking my birthright, of risking destroying the entire freaking world because I’d been pushed to the point where I couldn’t stand my own powerlessness another second longer.

Strangely enough, the realization was bracing, maybe because it also made me realize that I was a long, long way from that point. “No.”

Lurine smiled a little. “Good. Look, I know you’re upset and frustrated, but there’s nothing you can do about it right now, Daisy. Like it or not, sometimes you just have to accept it.”

“Just like that?” I asked ruefully.

“Ah, well.” Lurine’s expression of deliberate neutrality shifted to something more complicated, a hint of the millennia-old monster surfacing behind the gorgeous mask of a B-movie starlet. “I didn’t say it would be
easy
. But patience is a virtue worth practicing, especially in the face of the unknown.” She paused. “Did Hel offer any insight as to who might be behind this?”

I shook my head. “Hel suspects that Hades, or the Greek Hades, as she likes to call him, is acting on behalf of another’s interests. Beyond that, she refused to speculate. Any thoughts?”

“When it comes to the Olympians, none worth voicing,” Lurine said with disdain. “The mere thought of them makes me restless.” She shivered, then wriggled herself upright with serpentine grace, her entire body undulating. “In fact, I think I’d like to go down to the lake for a swim.” She winked at me. “Want to come watch?”

Um, yeah. Totally.

I flushed. “I’ll pass.”

Extending one hand, Lurine tugged me off her couch. “Your loss. How
is
your love life these days, cupcake?”

I thought about my upcoming date with Stefan. “Interesting.”

“Interesting,” she echoed. “Care to clarify?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” Lurine cocked her head slightly, contemplating me, then flicked her tongue like a snake, leaned forward, and kissed me.

I was too startled to react. It wasn’t much more than a light, friendly peck on the lips, and coming from anyone else, it would have been almost innocuous. Coming from anyone else, it wouldn’t have resulted in my lips getting numb and tingly in a not-unpleasant way, followed by a rush of euphoria that warmed my skin all over and set the blood to singing in my veins. All I could do was blink at her in a stupefied manner.

“That’s better,” Lurine said with satisfaction, as though she’d just fixed my lipstick or wiped a smudge off my cheek. “You need to get out of your head, cupcake. Stop worrying so much.”

I blinked a few more times.

“It’ll wear off in a minute or two.” She gave me an affectionate pat on the head. “Don’t feel you need to mention this to your mother, okay?”

I ran my tongue around the inside of my tingling lips and tested my voice. “Um . . . okay.”

“Good girl.” Lurine patted my head again. “Oh, and tell that tall hunk of a ghoul that if he hurts you in any way, I’ll crush him to pieces. Slowly. All right?”

“Uh-huh.” Apparently she’d figured out what
interesting
meant, or at least I assumed that’s what she meant. It was hard to think clearly. It still felt like there were firecrackers going off inside me, in a good way, if that makes any sense.

“Okeydokey.” Taking my arm, Lurine steered me toward the foyer. “Edgerton, will you bring Miss Johanssen’s coat?” she called down the hallway. “I’ll be out at the lake for a while.”

By the time Lurine had escorted me to my Honda, the blissful
fizzing in my blood had subsided and I felt more or less normal, though I couldn’t help but regard her with a new wariness.

Standing in the driveway, Lurine rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t give me that look. You needed a jolt, baby girl. You’ll make yourself crazy obsessing over things that are beyond your control.”

“You could have just slapped me and told me to snap out of it,” I said mildly. “It would have been less disconcerting.”

She gave me a wicked smile. “Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”

I couldn’t help but smile back at her. Lurine was what she was, which wasn’t human and definitely wasn’t safe. “Oh, fine. Do you want a ride to the end of the driveway?” It was, by the way, a long driveway.