Autumn Bones

taste, Miss Daisy. Not if you want you and me to be friends.”

“Sorry!” I tried raising my imaginary shield. Nope, still couldn’t get it quite right. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” His pupils steadied anyway. “Go on, now. Mind yourself.”

Outside, the late-afternoon sun beating down on the parking lot intensified my headache. I got into the Honda, turned it on, and cranked up the air-conditioning before checking out Sinclair’s text.

THINKING OF YOU! :)

It made me smile, but it also made me realize that I was no longer feeling settled. After an hour with Stefan Ludovic, I was feeling distinctly unsettled. My poor aching head was roiling with shields and ghouls and gallows, satyrs and orgies and werewolves on the down low, hell-spawn lawyers and sketchy land deals, island magic and African gods disguised as saints, shell games and pickpockets, pancakes and bacon and pissed-off fairies.

I called Sinclair.

“Hey, girl!” His voice sounded warm and cheerful. “Just getting ready for the last tour of the day.” He lowered his voice. “Got any plans tonight?”

Okay, just hearing his voice made me feel more settled again. “No,” I admitted. “But honestly, I don’t feel great. I’ve got a killer headache.”

There was a brief silence on the other end. “For real?” he asked. “Or are you freaking out on me, Daisy? Because you know, if anyone in this situation should be freaking out, it really should be me.”

“Are you?”

Sinclair laughed. “Are you serious, sistah? Yeah, a little. But I still want to see you.”

I smiled. “Me, too. But I really am beat. Is it okay if we take a step back today and start over where we left off tomorrow?”

“Regrets?” His tone was light, but there was a worried edge to it. “Or is it about what we talked about this morning?”

“No regrets,” I said firmly. “And, um, I’d like to talk more about what we talked about this morning, but . . .” I remembered the Fabulous Casimir’s warning. “But only if and when you feel like it. If you don’t, you don’t, and I’m good with that, too. Okay?”

“Hang on.” In the background, I could hear the muffled sound of Sinclair in his Jamaican accent directing a group of tourists to begin boarding the bus. I fidgeted with the air vents in the Honda. “Yeah, okay. You’re sure?”

I nodded. “I’m sure. So, tomorrow?”

“Deal. But I want to take you out on the town,” Sinclair warned me. “Dinner at a fancy restaurant, the whole nine yards. I want the full-on Labor Day weekend in Pemkowet experience.”

I laughed. “Okay, but if you want the real Pemkowet experience, you’ve got to do the Bridge Walk with me on Monday morning.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

He sighed into the phone. “Okay, you’ve got it. So we’re on for tomorrow night?”

My tail tingled, remembering his lingering touch at its base. I shifted in the driver’s seat, wriggling a little. “Absolutely.”

“Good. Look, I’ve got to go. Meet me for dinner at Lumiere at seven o’clock tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

Sometimes it’s good not to think too hard, especially after a day of thinking too hard. Putting the Honda in gear, I drove to the convenience store just down the road that still carried a certain brand of wine coolers. I think they may be the last store on earth to stock them, which they do for the sake of my mother, who may be the last person on earth to drink them. I bought a four-pack and drove out to Sedgewick Estate, the riverside mobile home community where I grew up. Mom still lives there. As of three years ago, she paid off the mortgage on her lot and so she owns her home outright now.

She’s proud of that fact, as she ought to be. And I’m proud of her.

“Daisy baby!” My mom greeted me at the door of her double-wide with delight and a big hug. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

I hugged her back with one arm, holding up the four-pack of wine coolers with the other hand. “I’m sorry, I should have called. Is it okay? I brought libations.”

“Libations!” Her blue eyes sparkled at me. “You must have visited Mr. Leary recently. Of course it’s okay. Come in, come in. Let’s go sit on the deck.”

Mom’s place was tidier than usual—she hadn’t had a major commission since the Sweddon wedding last month—but there was still a hint of organized chaos about it. She rolled a rack of samples out of the way, and we trooped past it and out onto the deck, which overlooked a broad, marshy expanse of the river. We settled into a pair of Adirondack chairs that I remembered her salvaging and refinishing when I was in ninth grade, and cracked open a couple of wine coolers.

Despite having been the unwed teenaged mother of a hell-spawned half-breed, my mom’s got a very calming presence. When Sinclair met her, he said she had a tranquil aura. It didn’t surprise me. As we sat together in companionable silence, sipping our wine coolers and gazing at the river, I felt my headache dissipate.

“I would have thought you’d be out on the town tonight,” Mom said after a while, stealing a glance at me.

I shook my head. “I needed a little escape. This is perfect, thanks.”

She reached over to pat my hand. “Any time.”

“Sinclair’s taking me out to dinner tomorrow night,” I admitted.

Mom gave a little sigh of relief. “Oh, good! I didn’t want to pry. So things are still going well with the two of you?”

“Yeah, they are.” I picked absently at the label on my bottle. “I mean, I think so. It’s really too early to tell, right?”

She gave me a universal mom look, one of those looks mothers give their kids when they know there’s something more going on. “Do you want me to read your cards?”

Okay, so that’s not exactly a universal mom gambit, but she’s got a knack with the cards. Which, by the way, aren’t a traditional tarot deck. She taught herself to tell fortunes using a deck of loteria cards left over from a high school Spanish class, library books, and a system of symbolism that she invented on her own.

I kind of did, but at the same time, I kind of didn’t. I already had enough going on in my head. “Not right now, thanks.”

“Okay, honey.” She used the universal mom tone for “I know there’s something more going on and I’ve given you an opening to talk about it, but you’re not ready yet. I’m here to listen when you are.” It’s pretty amazing how much moms can communicate by tone alone.

We went back to sitting in silence and watching the river together. I loved the way it was so vast and open here, sedge grass growing along the verges, and even a few poplars and one big willow tree where it was especially shallow. A slight breeze ruffled the surface of the water. There wasn’t any hint of autumn in the air yet, but it was late enough in the summer that the evening sun hung lower on the horizon, slanted rays gilding the tops of the ripples. A flock of sandhill cranes passed overhead, calling to one another in their wild, chuckling voices.

“Oh, Daisy!” Mom’s voice was hushed. “Look, the willow’s awake!”

Across the water, the great willow tree stirred, raising her graceful, trailing branches in salute, the dryad’s delicate features emerging from the slender trunk. I held my breath as she swayed in the evening breeze. It was the first glimpse of magic I remembered from my childhood. Droplets of water fell from the leaves of her uplifted branches, sparkling in the sunlight.

And then the cranes passed into the horizon and the breeze died. The willow’s branches sank back to droop gracefully into the water, the dryad’s face vanishing once more beneath the bark.

I couldn’t help but think of Cooper—not his remark about fixing him up with a nice dryad, but the bitterness in his voice when he said it was hard to have a good relationship with the world when you were in it but not of