Poison Fruit (37 page)

Stefan and I regarded each other in silence for a moment. The background murmur of voices in the restaurant increased in volume. The clumsy busboy made a careful exit with his reloaded tray of dirty dishes.

I had a feeling we’d just provided the patrons of the Brookdale Country Club with a month’s worth of gossip.

I cleared my throat. “Would you be offended if I asked you to take me home?”

“Of course not.”

It was a silent drive through the gray drizzle back to my apartment. I didn’t quite know what to think about Stefan’s past. I felt like a vampire who’d just learned she was dating Van Helsing, although that wasn’t entirely fair. As he’d said, it had been a different time and he’d been a different man—a mortal man.

A mortal man who’d executed a thirteen-year-old boy. A sociopathic hell-spawn of a boy bent on bringing about Armageddon.

“What was his name?” I asked Stefan as he pulled into the alley. “The boy.”

He parked the Lexus. “Tomik.”

“Why did he kill the horses?” I asked. “Why was he angry at the
horses
?”

“He wasn’t.” Stefan came around to open my door. “He was angry because one of the brothers had refused to allow him a horse to ride to market that day.”

“That’s all?”

Stefan nodded. “That’s all.”

I shuddered.

“Daisy.” He reached out and touched my hair lightly, running a few strands through his fingers. “You asked for candor and I have given it to you. I do not think you have extended me the same courtesy.”

I gave him a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”

“I knew that this matter would be disturbing, but I did not expect you to take it so closely to heart,” Stefan said. “It is more than this infernal lawyer. Something has been troubling you since you dispatched the Night Hag. There is a fear that preys on your mind, something of which you are reluctant to speak.”

I didn’t deny it. “You know, it’s not fair that this bond only works one way. I don’t know what
you’re
feeling.”

“Yes.” Stefan inclined his head to me. “Which is why I have respected your privacy, and have made no inquiries. Which is why I recant the words I spoke on our last meeting. I will not press my suit, Daisy. I am willing to wait.” Leaning over, he brushed my lips in a fleeting kiss, one that left me yearning for more. “You know where to find me when you are ready.”

Standing on the doorstep, I watched him get into his Lexus and drive away.

Well, damn.

Thirty-six

I
did a lot of thinking.

Stefan was right—I
hadn’t
been candid with him, but it’s not like I wasn’t planning to be . . . eventually. We were still in the getting-to-know-you phase, and revealing my deepest, darkest fear seemed a little heavy for a second date, especially since that fear was that I would be responsible for the world’s destruction.

Then again, one could say the same of Stefan’s revelation, although to be fair, I was the one who had pushed for it. Oh, I could blame it on the lawyer, but it was Stefan who brought it up in the first place and then went all cryptic on me. And Dufreyne was right; there was history there that I needed to know. On the other hand, Stefan was probably right about him, too. Odds were, Dufreyne had his own nefarious reasons for wanting me to doubt Stefan.

Or maybe he just saw a chance to mess with my head and took it.

I could drive myself crazy thinking about it. I was willing to set aside my doubts and give it a try, I really was, but I didn’t know if I could handle another devastating favor or horrific revelation.

In the end, I waited three days before calling him. “Okay, here’s the
thing,” I said. “Is there anything else in your past that’s likely to freak me out?”

There was a brief pause on the other end. “I have lived a long life, Daisy,” Stefan said carefully. “There have been times when I was filled with anger and despair. I do not doubt that I have done things that you would find . . . troubling. But I do not believe that there is anything else in my past that would strike such a personal chord with you.”

“How about your present?” I asked him. “Can you tell me there won’t be another Janek Król?”

“I cannot promise you that no other Outcast will ask you to end his or her existence,” he said. “I can promise you that I will never ask again on another’s behalf.”

“Good,” I said. “Let’s take this slow. Do you like jazz?”

“Yes.” Stefan sounded mildly bemused. “Are you inviting me on a date?”

“Yeah, but not right away,” I said. “You’re right. I’ve been holding back, but I need more time to figure out how I feel about Stefan Ludovic, Hell-spawn Hunter. Next Saturday? I heard there’s going to be a fantastic harmonica player sitting in with the house band at the Bide-a-Wee Tavern.”

“I look forward to it,” Stefan said.

I felt good about the decision. I wished I could say the same about the latest idea Sinclair and the coven laid on me.

While I’d been absorbed in my fraught pas de deux with Stefan, not only had the coven been working on developing the mother of all protection charms, but they’d been wrestling with the issue of how to get it onto the judge’s person or hidden in his briefcase.

“There’s one major problem with that plan,” the Fabulous Casimir said after convening a meeting at his house. “Metal detectors. It’s a federal courthouse. Everyone, lawyers and judges included, entering the building gets scanned. The minute they find a strange metal object in the judge’s briefcase . . .” He fanned his hands. “The jig’s up.”

Oh, crap. I hadn’t thought of that. “Does the charm
have
to be metal?”

The eight members of the coven looked at me with varying degrees of pity. Apparently that was a stupid question. “It does in this case, Daisy,” Sinclair said. “Pure silver, consecrated with holy water.”

“So we’re screwed?” I asked.

“Perhaps not.” Casimir steepled his fingertips. “You shouldn’t have any difficulty conveying the charm into the courthouse. Jewelry is permitted, and the charm will appear to be nothing more than a simple
silver cross on a chain.” He peered at me from beneath his luxuriant false eyelashes. “You can wear a cross without harm, can’t you?”

“Of course.” Actually, the only reason I knew it to be true was because back in high school, I’d gone to an eighties-themed dance as vintage Madonna, including dangly cross-shaped earrings I’d found at the flea market, but I figured it counted. “But if we can’t risk slipping it in the judge’s briefcase, what’s the alternative?”

“You’re gonna stick it to the underside of his chair,” said Kim McKinney, who worked at the deli counter at Tafts Grocery. “That way it never leaves the courthouse, but it’ll always be in virtual contact with him. I got the idea from my brother,” she added. “He used to punk us with a remote-controlled fart machine.”

I stared at assembled members of the coven. “Look, no offense, but I was already pretty wigged out about trying to sneak it into a coat pocket or a briefcase. How, exactly, am I supposed to get past the bailiff, crawl behind the desk, and stick something under the judge’s freakin’
chair
?”

“Two words,
dahling
.” Casimir smiled at me. “Invisibility spell.”

“Is that a real thing?” I asked.

“It’s a real thing,” Sinclair assured me. “Well . . . sort of. It’s really more of an unobtrusiveness spell than full-on invisibility. You’d have to practice. Sandra’s offered to help teach you. It’s mostly about aura manipulation, and she’s got mad skills.”

Sandra Sweddon gave me a little wave. “At your service, honey.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Sweddon,” I said automatically. “Sinclair, what do you mean by
mostly
?”

He glanced at Warren Rodgers, who owned the nursery. “We’re
looking into old recipes based on wolfsbane and working on an amulet for you. It should intensify the effect.”

“Already got the wolfsbane,” Warren added in his laconic way. “Just need a chameleon skin to wrap it in.”

“I can get you a chameleon skin,” Casimir said to him. “Miss Daisy, we just need to know if you’re still on board with this.”

“Tell her about the distraction, dear,” Mrs. Meyers said, not looking up from her knitting.

“Right.” The Fabulous Casimir raised his artfully plucked brows. “We thought it would be ideal if we could arrange some sort of distraction on the day that you testify. Something to clear the courtroom, and give you a chance to do your thing in the ensuing confusion.”

I sighed. “Please don’t tell me you want me to pull the fire alarm.”

Casimir pursed his lips. “Don’t be absurd. You can’t take
that
many chances,
dahling
. No, no. We’re thinking a bomb scare.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I demanded. “Do you know how easily that could be traced these days?”

“No, but Lee does,” Sinclair said. “Or at least he knows people who do. He’s sure he can make it happen without being traced, and you know how paranoid he is. Lee’s really thought this through,” he added. “If we call in a highly detailed threat regarding a bomb releasing nerve gas into the ventilation system, they’ll
have
to evacuate. And the bomb squad can rule out the threat without conducting an in-depth room by room search that might turn up the charm.”

I looked blankly at him. “Nerve gas.”

Sinclair shrugged. “Hey, apparently Lee did a lot of research into it for one of the video games he worked on. Some
Splinter Cell
knockoff. All I know is that he sounds awfully convincing.”

I fought the urge to yank my hair out. “Okay, so assuming that works, how am I supposed to stick a silver cross to the bottom of the judge’s chair? Chewing gum?”

“We’ve got industrial-strength mounting tape we use to hang artwork at the tattoo parlor,” Mark Reston said. “Sheila and I are testing it with a pendant that’s about the same weight. Once you get inside the
courthouse, you’ll need to wrap the cross in a piece of duct tape for a more adhesive surface, but so far, so good.”

“Crap.” That sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach had returned. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Did you hear the latest, Miss Daisy?” Casimir inquired.

“Yeah. I did.” The judge had dismissed the request to assign a different lawyer to the case, citing the fact that Dufreyne had voluntarily recused himself from representing Elysian Fields’s interests in
Pemkowet for the duration of the case. I steeled my resolve. “Do you really think you can teach me to turn invisible?” I asked Sandra Sweddon.

“Unobtrusive,” Sandra corrected me. “I don’t see why not. After all, you’ve been working on visualization exercises since you were a little girl. Would you feel better if I demonstrated it?”

“Yes, please.”

The Fabulous Casimir clapped his hands. “Break time! Daisy, you try to keep your eye on Sandra as everyone else mills around the house,” he added. “Oh, and people! Help yourself to the lovely cheese tray Kim brought from the deli.”

Clearly, this little exercise had been planned in advance.

I stayed seated while everyone else rose, watching intently as Sandra Sweddon’s lips moved in an invocation.

“Excuse me, dear,” Mrs. Meyers apologized, passing between us en route to the cheese tray.

That was all it took. One moment of lost visual contact, and I had a hard time locating Sandra. It’s not that she wasn’t
there
—she couldn’t have made it out of the living room in the time it took Mrs. Meyers to place a slice of cheddar cheese on a Ritz cracker—but my gaze skated over and past her.

I got up and paced the room, counting the members of the coven as they moved to and fro. Sandra moved unobtrusively with the flow, drifting from one place to another, periodically obscured by others. I kept losing sight of her, and if I hadn’t known she was there, I’m not sure I would have seen her at all. My mind simply refused to register her presence. No matter how many times I counted the people in the room, I kept coming up short.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Sinclair said behind me.

It was.

“Okay,” I said to the room at large. “I’m in. Sign me up for invisibility lessons.”

Sandra Sweddon appeared as a solid presence in Casimir’s living room, standing next to a sleek Art Deco–looking bronze sculpture and beaming in my direction. “Wonderful! We’ll start tomorrow afternoon.”

So
that
was decided.

The following afternoon, I reported to Sandra’s house for my first invisibility—unobtrusibility?—lesson.

The Sweddon place was a big old farmhouse on the outskirts of East Pemkowet. We sat in the breakfast nook in the sunlit kitchen. Outside the windows, chickadees, juncos, goldfinches, and cardinals vied for birdseed at a welcoming array of feeders while Sandra taught me the basics of invisibility.

In theory, it shouldn’t have been that difficult. The visualization exercises I’d done since I was a kid provided me with a solid grounding in the concept. The problem was that for the past several months, I’d been assiduously applying those methods to the shielding technique Stefan had taught me, which was essentially the exact opposite of what you needed to do to make yourself unobtrusive.

“You need to let go, Daisy,” Sandra explained patiently for the umpteenth time. “Allow your aura to disperse.”

“I’m trying!” I protested.

“You’re trying too hard,” she said. “Every time you do, you gather energy. Let it go. Imagine that you’re insubstantial, inhabiting only your etheric body. Envision particles of light passing through your physical being.” She extended one hand into a sunbeam, offering an invocation. “Light pass through me, gaze pass over me.”

At point-blank range, the effect was subtle. Sandra didn’t vanish before my eyes or anything, she just turned . . . vague. When I tried to look directly at her, my eyes prickled and my brain felt skittery.

“Light pass through me, gaze pass over me,” I echoed, willing myself to relinquish the energy Stefan called pneuma.

It didn’t work.

The harder I tried, the more present, immediate, and solid I felt, aware of my heart beating steadily in my chest, the air moving in and out of my lungs, my pulse sounding in my ears, the hard surface of the kitchen chair beneath my butt and my neatly tucked tail. I stared at dust motes swirling in the wintry sun until my eyes dazzled, and didn’t feel one iota less substantial.