Autumn Bones

“Yeah.” I shifted Mogwai’s bulk into a more comfortable position. “Look . . . I don’t want to get in the middle of this.”

“What did she say to you?” Sinclair repeated.

I gazed out into the night, listening to the sounds of Pemkowet. It was quieter than it had been in months. It would get even quieter in the months to come. “Do you ever regret not following the same path as your sister?”

“No.” His reply was prompt and sure. “Daisy . . . listen, it’s a long story. It’s part of the conversation I promised you. But the short answer is no. A definitive no.” He paused. “Are you going to answer my question?”

I scratched Mogwai under his chin. He lifted it to allow me access, curling his lip with pleasure to reveal a sharp eyetooth. “Emmeline asked me to stop seeing you. To call off the fairies, use my influence in the eldritch community. To give you a reason not to stay here. To go home.”

There was a short, shocked silence. “She what?”

“Yeah.”

Sinclair laughed. “Oh, hell, no! Emmy, Emmy! I know she only just met you, but what in the world made her think you of all people would agree to it?”

See, here’s where it got tricky. Vague, creeping menace does not a coherent threat make. And I might be entirely in the right here, but I was also the outsider in this equation. Families, even dysfunctional families—hell, maybe especially dysfunctional families—tend to turn on outsiders who slander another member of the clan. I’d seen enough of it with the Cassopolis family to know that. Jen could bitch about her abusive father, her passive mother, and her blood-slut sister, Bethany, all day long, but heaven help anyone else who did the same. That right was reserved for family.

So I temporized. “Oh, I think she thought I’d be swayed by her formidable nature. She is pretty formidable, isn’t she?”

“Mmm.” He made a noncommittal sound. “What about the ghoul?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a duppy?”

Again, Sinclair hesitated. “It’s . . . sort of like a ghost, only not a ghost. A spirit. A duppy’s what happens when someone dies and their earthly soul gets loose instead of going where it belongs.”

“Okay.”

“Sometimes they look like animals,” he said. “But mostly like dead people. Daisy, did my sister threaten to set a duppy on you?”

“Um . . . no?” At least I didn’t think so.

“Good.” He sounded relieved. “Look, let me talk to Emmy. She’s headstrong and she’s used to getting her own way. But if I ever do go back to the island, it will be on my terms, because I decided it, not because my sister decided it was time. I’ll tell her to leave you out of this, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “But as long as she’s here, I’m staying out of the way.”

“Fair enough.”

After a few more innocuous comments, we said good night and ended the call. I sat on the porch for a while longer, petting Mogwai and thinking about the conversation while the candles guttered into wax pools. On a Daisy-and-Sinclair basis, I felt good about it. I’d taken Lurine’s advice and cut him some slack. Other than dodging the whole ghoul issue, I thought I’d handled it pretty damn well from the standpoint of a supportive girlfriend, especially considering that the whole secret-twin-sister thing had just been sprung on me this morning.

As Hel’s liaison, I wasn’t so sure. Emmeline Palmer hadn’t just threatened me. She’d threatened my town. My territory, my turf, my responsibility.

I hoped that it was all just posturing, that dear Emmy would back down when Sinclair confronted her.

But if she didn’t . . .

“Bring it on, bitch,” I said aloud.

Okay, so I wasn’t entirely sure what it was or what I’d do about it if she did, but it felt good to say it.

Fifteen

I awoke with a splitting headache, an excruciating toothache, and blurred vision. And I panicked.

Here’s the thing: I don’t get sick. Ever. Oh, I’ve had headaches due to stress or fatigue, like the other night, and I found out the hard way that I can get hangovers, but I’ve never been sick. Never had the flu, the chicken pox, not even the common cold. Toothaches? I’d never even had a cavity. My mom’s theory is that it’s because my average body temperature runs higher than a normal human’s, around a hundred and five degrees. She thinks it kills the germs and bacteria. Maybe it’s even true, although I’ve never known a doctor to sign on to her theory.

So anyway, yeah, I freaked. First at the pain, which seemed to be simultaneously radiating from a molar on the right side of my jaw and pounding like a spike into my sinus cavity; second at the blurred vision.

That was the one that really got me. I pried myself gingerly out of bed, trying to hold my head as still as possible. In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face and into my eyes, blinking furiously and willing my vision to clear.

No luck.

Oh, crap.

The small corner of my brain that wasn’t panicking went into damage-control mode. I didn’t know if I was having a stroke or an aneurysm or what, but I knew I needed help. And clothing. Hell if I was going to the emergency room in nothing but a tank top. I fumbled my way to the laundry hamper and pulled out yesterday’s clothes.

Okay, that would work. Sidling along the edge of my bed, I felt atop my nightstand until I found my phone, the shape of it familiar and comforting in my hand.

The problem was that I couldn’t make out the icons on the screen. And when I finally got to the keypad, through dint of trial and error, I couldn’t make out the numbers to call 911. Every time I tried to focus, they shifted and blurred. I kept pushing numbers I didn’t mean to, squinting in an agonized effort, unable to get to that magic combination. It was like a bad dream.

At some point I realized two things. One was that whatever the hell was happening to me, it wasn’t getting any worse. Oh, it was bad. My jaw was throbbing, my head was pounding, and I couldn’t see for shit, but I probably wasn’t dying.

The other was the first inkling of suspicion that whatever the hell was happening to me might not be medical in nature.

If you’re thinking I should have suspected that from the get-go, I’m not arguing. But it’s really, really hard to think straight when your skull feels like it’s being split open with a railroad spike and you can’t see.

And . . . I wasn’t sure what to do with that suspicion.

So instead I hoped like hell it was a medical issue and went through the whole trial-and-error bit to pull up my contacts on my phone. Elusive letters and numbers skittered across my vision, but if I concentrated like crazy, I could make out the contacts with photos assigned to them. Since I was kind of lax about that, there were only two, my mom and Jen. And while, on the one hand, I really wanted my mommy right about now, I also didn’t want to freak her out, so I jabbed at the screen until Jen’s contact came up.

“Hey, Daise.” She answered on the second ring. “What’s going on?” I was so relieved to hear her voice, I had to choke back an involuntary sob. “Daisy?” Jen’s voice sharpened. “What’s up?”

“Not sure,” I whispered. “Either I’m having an aneurysm or I’ve been hexed.”

“Are you serious? Jesus! Did you call 911?”

“No.” I closed my eyes. Blocking out the light helped a very little bit. “Can’t see to dial.”

“Okay, hang on. I’m coming to take you to the ER.”

“Wait, wait!” Now that my panic was ratcheting down a notch, the prospect of massive medical costs