Poison Fruit (21 page)

The Night Hag glanced at him. “Wrong, wolf. I’ve
been
in her head and I know what’s inside there.”

I really, really didn’t want to continue that particular line of conversation. “Did I or did I not just bind you to my will?” I inquired. “So I’m asking again, on pain of cold steel, what’s your name?”

“Gruoch,” she muttered.

“Gruoch,” I repeated. “Okay, here’s the thing. You’re in Hel’s territory without permission, preying on innocent victims. Whether you’re willing to own it or not, you caused a woman’s death. As Hel’s liaison, as far I’m concerned, that’s a mortal offense.”

Her crimson eyes widened. “I was invited!”

“Excuse me?” I said. “I don’t think so. Hel herself told me you weren’t welcome here.”

“Not by Hel,” Gruoch said in an aggrieved tone. “I never claimed it
was Hel. But it’s written plain and simple on the Pemkowet Visitors Bureau’s website. It says Pemkowet is an inclusive community that welcomes all visitors.”

I stared at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re citing the PVB’s website as justification?”

She sniffed again. “In accordance with eldritch protocol, that constitutes an invitation. This seemed like a nice place for a getaway,” she added. “I’ll be noting otherwise in my TripAdvisor review.”

Oh, gah!

“No one invited you to
hunt
here,” Cody reminded her in a low voice tinged with a hint of growl.

“It was not my fault that the old woman’s heart stopped.” Gruoch drew herself up with a semblance of dignity. “I did not cause the dreams that plagued her, no more than I did any of them. But she suffered. She suffered greatly. If I must be held responsible for her most timely death, I will claim it as an act of mercy.”

“And the soldier?” I asked. “What about
him
?”

The Night Hag shrugged her bony shoulders. “He is a broken thing. It might have been better for him.”

“He’s a human being who served his country with valor and distinction,” I said. “No matter how ill-conceived the cause. And broken things can be mended.”

“Oh?” Her bloodred gaze fixed on me. “Will you be able to mend the vault of heaven after you’ve broken it, child?”

I hesitated, then shoved
dauda-dagr
back into its sheath. “Gruoch, in accordance with the binding I’ve laid upon you, I forbid you forevermore to prey upon innocents.”

She let out an earsplitting screech. “You cannot deprive me of my very sustenance!”

“I can,” I said. “Unless you’d care to try to convince me that the boy you attacked deserved it? Danny Reynolds?” I reminded her. “Seven years old? Afraid of the night? Is he somehow better off for having been terrorized by you?”

Gruoch glowered at me, but held her tongue.

“I’m sure there are plenty of mortals with guilty consciences out
there for you to prey on,” I said to her. “Mortals who actually
do
deserve nightmares. If you want to haunt the dreams of someone who committed murder and got away with it, fine. But not here. Not in Pemkowet, and not on
my
watch.” I held up my rune-marked left palm. “Gruoch the Night Hag, in Hel’s name, I banish you.”

To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen. It was my first banishing. When Stefan banished members of the Outcast who rebelled against his leadership last summer, I’m pretty sure they just picked up and left town.

But then, they weren’t fey dreamwalkers with a complicated relationship to corporeal reality. Well, actually that last part isn’t exactly true, but they definitely functioned more like mortal humans than like fey. The Night Hag pulled a slow vanishing act, crumpling into an even tighter ball, the contours of her body fading. Her eyes were the last thing to go, crimson orbs filled with fury hanging in the air above Cody’s pillows like the Cheshire cat’s grin, only creepy as hell.

I was glad when they finally blinked out of existence. Now that it was over, the adrenaline rush that had sustained me drained away, leaving me wobbly and shaken. I sat down abruptly on the edge of Cody’s bed.

“Good job, Daisy,” Cody said quietly. “How are you, really?”

“I don’t know.” I glanced down at my trembling hands, gouged and scratched by the Night Hag’s teeth and nails. “A little shaky.”

“Damn, she really got you,” he said. “Let me go get some disinfectant. God knows what you could catch from a Night Hag’s bite.”

I shuddered. “Good point.”

Cody left and came back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bag of cotton balls and a tube of antibiotic ointment. I took off my belt, setting
dauda-dagr
safely aside while he administered a little basic first aid. “No offense, Daise, but from what I could make out of it, that must have been the least sexy girl-fight ever.”

“No kidding.” I watched hydrogen peroxide bubble and fizz in a long furrow on the underside of my right forearm, gritting my teeth against the sting of it. “You try tying a single strand of hair around a Night Hag’s throat.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll leave that to you if it ever happens again.” Cody rotated my left arm to examine it. “You’re the seamstress’s daughter.”

“Do you think more are coming?” The prospect dismayed me. I could subdue another Night Hag if I had to, but I wasn’t sure I could stand to revisit that nightmare.

He glanced up at me. “No, not really. There’s no reason to think so. Especially not if they read Gruoch’s TripAdvisor review.” Despite the comment, his expression was serious. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I looked away, knowing full well he wasn’t talking about eldritch tourism. “You heard what she said.”

Cody smeared ointment on a bite mark. “Yes.”

“I watched myself do it, Cody.” Tears filled my eyes. “There wasn’t even a
reason
for it! I just . . . did it.”

His hands went still on mine. “You invoked your birthright?”

I nodded, unable to answer, my body jerking with the effort of holding back sobs.

“Daisy, it’s okay.” Setting down the antibiotic ointment, Cody slid onto the bed and put his arms around me. “It’s okay. It wasn’t real,” he murmured against my hair. “It was just a dream. And you’re right, people do terrible things in their dreams all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Cody, it felt so
good
,” I whispered. “Before I realized what I’d done. That scares me. It scares the shit out of me.”

“I know.” Cody tightened his arms around me. I clutched his shoulder blades, yearning for even closer contact, my nails digging into his skin. “But I promise you, it wasn’t real. You did what you had to do, Daisy. And it worked. It’s over.” Lifting his head, he gave me a fierce look, eyes shimmering green. “You did it. You caught the bitch, bound her, and banished her. It’s done.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

There was a moment, maybe as long as it takes for a heart to beat
four or five times, where one or the other of us could have withdrawn, could have disentangled ourselves. Neither of us did.

And then Cody kissed me savagely, his fingers sliding through my
hair. I kissed him back with equal fervor, squirming to kneel astride his lap. He found the hem of my tank top and yanked it off. Placing my hands on his chest, I shoved him down onto the bed and straddled him.

“I need to be on top tonight,” I informed him. The memory of waking with the Night Hag crouched on my chest was a little too fresh. “Understand?”

He flashed a wolfish grin. “Totally.”

It was enough. I didn’t think about my dream or the Night Hag. I didn’t think about anything but this moment, here and now. About Cody’s mouth on my breasts, suckling my nipples to aching points. About working my way down his lean, muscled torso, nuzzling the treasure trail of wiry bronze hair that led from just below his washboard abs to the waistband of his pajama bottoms. I untied the drawstring, easing them over his hips and freeing his erection—and no, for the record, neither boxers nor briefs. Cody watched with narrowed eyes while I took him into my mouth.

“Enough!” he growled after a minute. “Come here.”

My tail twitching with anticipation, I wriggled out of my own pajama bottoms and crawled back up the length of his body, wrapping one hand around his throbbing cock and fitting it to me.

Cody let out a deep, guttural sound of satisfaction as I sank down onto him. I might have, too.

“Are you okay?” he asked me.

I leaned down to kiss him. “Uh-huh.”

“Good.” He ran a few strands of my blond hair through his fingers, his expression turning uncertain and vulnerable. “Because I hate to see you cry, Daisy. I
really
fucking hate to see you cry.”

Since I didn’t have a response, I kissed him again with lip-bruising savagery, then pulled myself upright to ride him for all it was worth, his hips thrusting upward to meet mine, my tail curling between us, shuddering my way to one minor and one fairly earth-shattering
climax before Cody swore and arched his back in his own, his nails raking my thighs, his cock spurting inside me.

Okay, so that happened.

The thing I loved best about the aftermath with Cody was the sheer
physical easiness of it. We were comfortable together. I lay with my cheek pressed to his chest, one leg thrown over him, while he stroked my spine from the nape of my neck to the tip of my tail, occasionally scratching the base of it with perfect and delicious unself-consciousness.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” I mumbled.

“Probably not,” he agreed, his fingers working their magic on the base of my tail. “Are you sorry?”

I wriggled against him. “No. But I should go.”

Cody looked at me. “Don’t.” Hoisting himself on one elbow, he fished the leather pouch of Sinclair’s hex charm from beneath the pillows and threw it as far away as possible. “Stay.” His topaz eyes were gentle, without a trace of green. “You shouldn’t be alone, Daisy. Not tonight, not after what you went through. It’s late—the sun’s coming up in a few hours. Stay with me.”

So I did.

Twenty-one

I
slept soundly in Cody’s bed, with Cody wrapped around me. I’m not going to lie—it was nice. Very nice. It made me feel warm and safe and protected, which was exactly what I needed.

Of course, there was a certain irony to the fact that the thing I feared the most was the result of my own impulsive desires and struggles with temptation, but . . . never mind. I’d think about that later.

Thanks to daylight saving time, it was late when the dawn woke us, after seven thirty. I felt Cody stir, the bristles on his chin catching on my hair, and turned over beneath his arm. “Good morning.”

“Morning, Pixy Stix.” He smiled at me, eyes crinkled with sleep. “Did you sleep okay?”

“I did.” I rubbed one hand over his raspy cheek. “You?”

Cody’s smile deepened. “Mm-hmm.”

I glanced at the clock. “You’re not on duty this morning, are you?”

“No.” He shook his head against the pillow. “I’m back on the night shift tonight. But one of us ought to call the chief ASAP and let him know the Night Hag’s been bound and banished,” he said in a more pragmatic tone. “He’ll want to hold a press conference to announce it.”

“Good point.”

Cody levered himself upright, groping for his pajama bottoms. “You should have the honors, Daise. You’re the one who got the job done.” He yawned. “If you want to wash up first, go ahead. I’ll put on coffee.”

“Deal,” I said.

Okay, so I felt a
little
self-conscious calling Chief Bryant while wrapped in Cody’s plaid bathrobe, but the satisfaction I got from the
chief’s sincere praise more than made up for it. In the kitchen, Cody got a pot of coffee brewing.

“Help yourself when it’s done,” he said. “Let me brush my teeth. Then I’ll see about breakfast.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Let me guess. Venison sausage?”

Cody raised his eyebrows back at me. “For your information, Daisy Jo, there are bagels and cream cheese in the refrigerator. I just need to get the toaster out of my workshop. And, um, a butter knife.”

“I’ll get it,” I offered.

“No, you sit tight.” He pointed at the couch. “Relax. Turn on the TV, read the paper. You’re my guest.”

Thinking that I could at least tidy a bit and make room to sit, I hauled the ridiculously large—and frankly, quite hideous—brown-and-orange crocheted blanket off Cody’s couch and folded it into an unwieldy parcel. Since I hadn’t seen anything resembling a linen closet, I figured he stored the blanket in the battered steamer trunk that did double duty as a coffee table. At the moment, it had a couple of recent issues of the local newspaper and Cody’s clunky old laptop sitting atop it.

I swear, I was
not
snooping. All I did was shift the laptop to the couch, but I must have hit a key or the touchpad. The screen was already up, and when the laptop emerged from sleep mode with a low, grinding whir, I couldn’t help but see.

I froze.

Apparently, Cody had been carrying on an IM correspondence with a young woman named Stephanie. Based on her profile picture, she was lovely in a wholesome, sporty kind of way, with a frank, open face, blue-gray eyes, broad, high cheekbones, and glossy brown hair.

I closed the laptop softly, feeling like I’d been punched in the gut.

Cody emerged from the bathroom. “Daisy.”

I turned to face him. “I’m sorry,” I said dully. “I didn’t mean to pry. It was an accident.”

“Daise.” He sighed and ran both hands through his hair. “I’m so sorry. We were chatting before you called last night. She’s a member of one of the Seattle clans. They set up a private forum where we could
look over each other’s profiles before the mixer, maybe get to know each other in advance.”

“Okay, well, I’m glad this is about the mixer and not some random online flirtation, but you don’t owe me any explanations, Cody,” I said in a clipped tone, trying not to betray the irrational extent of the hurt I felt. “You’ve been upfront with me the whole time. I’m a big girl. I knew what I was getting myself into. Last night . . . I needed that. I needed something to banish the nightmare; and you’re right, I needed to not be alone. So thanks for that.”