He tested his throat, clearing it. “More or less. You?”
“I’m fine.”
“You were pretty tough in there tonight, Pixy Stix.” Cody gave me an appraising look. “I hope you meant what you said to Lady Elvira, because if anything like this happens again, I’m not playing by her rules.”
“I know,” I said. “I meant it.”
“Good.” He nodded. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”
My pent tail twitched uncomfortably. “I’m not on anyone’s side, Cody. I’m just trying to keep the peace.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I echoed.
He gave me a little sidelong grin, one of his wolfish ones. Light from the convenience store windows glinted on his bronze stubble. “Anyway, it was a pretty good fight, don’t you think?”
I smiled back at him. “Yeah, it was.”
Leaning across me, Cody reached to open the door of the cruiser. “Look, I’m still on patrol. Take care, partner.”
I got out. “You, too.”
So that was that. I stood in the parking lot watching the taillights of Cody’s squad car vanish down the highway, feeling a little alone, a little melancholy. Also, a little hungry, since my dinner had been cheese and crackers at the Fabulous Casimir’s house. I went into the convenience store to buy a frozen pizza, then home to my apartment, where I baked and ate said pizza, sitting on the futon and watching reruns of
I thought about Sinclair, wondering if he felt he’d found a path he could follow in Casimir’s coven. And I thought about Cody, wondering if there would come a time in his life when his own nature put him on the wrong side of the law and what he would choose if that ever happened.
Letting my thoughts roam, I thought about Stefan Ludovic with his father’s fourteenth-century parade shield on display in his twenty-first-century condominium, wondering what untold stories lay behind his oblique facade. I thought about Cooper and the fierce passion of the unexpected diatribe he’d unleashed on me.
And I thought about Heather Simkus with her soft, pretty sixteen-year-old face and a lattice of self-inflicted scars on her arms, wondering what she felt was so wrong with her life that the House of Shadows looked like a haven of belonging.
I thought about Bethany, too.
When I was done thinking about them, I turned off the TV, put away the leftover pizza, poured myself a few inches of scotch, settled Mogwai on my lap, and put Patsy Cline on the stereo. Usually I go for more traditional blues, but there’s a certain kind of ache that Patsy’s voice always speaks to, her voice floating above the pain with deceptive ease, timeless and yearning and poignant.
The last time I’d listened to Patsy had been the day Sinclair and I met the Oak King. Not long ago at all, really, just a couple of months. It felt like longer. Cody was right—a lot could happen in a short time. Two months ago, I don’t think I would have had the bravado to pull a Dirty Harry gambit on a vampire. Hell, I’d barely learned to create a mental shield two
Now he was my ex-boyfriend, and even though we’d only dated for three weeks and ending it was entirely my decision—and I was pretty sure it was the right one—I was home alone on a Saturday night, thinking Patsy Cline didn’t sound at all crazy for feeling so lonely and blue.
I guess when it comes down to it, we all yearn for a sense of connection, humans and eldritch alike, hell- spawns and vampires and werewolves, fairies and hobgoblins, Outcast and moody teenaged high school students. Even Gus the ogre had a thing for my mom.
Lying on my chest where he’d inched his way up from my lap, Mogwai stretched out one deliberate paw, unsheathing his claws just enough to prick the hollow of my throat. Amping up his purr, he fixed me with one of those implacable cat stares that could mean almost anything. Behind those round green eyes, he could have been plotting my demise or preparing to impart the feline wisdom of the ages.
Or maybe he was just reminding me that I wasn’t alone after all and shouldn’t be throwing myself a pity party when I had such an awesome sort-of-familiar in my life, as well as a lot of people, human and otherwise, whom I cared about deeply.
“You know what, Mog?” I stroked his head. “You have a point. Thanks.”
Retracting his claws, Mogwai closed his eyes in satisfaction and purred just a bit louder.
Twenty-seven
For the next week or so, things were fairly quiet in Pemkowet. No rutting satyrs, no threatening obeah women, no suspicious hell-spawn lawyers, no abducted teenagers, not even a hobgoblin prank.
It was a relief. Tourist season doesn’t actually end after Labor Day—the PVB does its damnedest to make Pemkowet a destination all year long, and with the exception of the frigid months of January, February, and March, it’s gotten some results—but every local I know, myself included, counts on things ratcheting down a notch. This year, between Emmeline Palmer’s ultimatum, an unexpected visit to Little Niflheim, and the melodrama out at the House of Shadows, I hadn’t had the chance to properly appreciate the fact that I could find a parking place downtown on a weekday without circling the block or get a cinnamon roll at Mrs. Browne’s bakery without waiting in line.
Now I did.
There wasn’t more than a few hours’ worth of filing to be done at the police station, but I had the entire backlog of the X-Files to comb through, and in a moment of expansive generosity, Chief Bryant had agreed that I should be paid for the time spent developing the database. On the one hand, it made sense—it would, after all, enable me to do my job better—but on the other hand, since I’d made it clear that I would be the only person to have access to it, he would have been within his rights to deny my request to log those hours on the department’s budget.
To be honest, the chief hadn’t been too thrilled with my stance. It had come up when I’d reluctantly refused to identify the membership of our local coven after their meet and greet with Sinclair. But we had a long talk about confidentiality, honor, respect, and the eldritch code, and although he didn’t like it, he understood. A lot of the same principles apply in the police force, even in a tiny one like ours.
For example, Chief Bryant knew that Bart Mallick had been first on the scene at the satyr orgy and had failed to respond thereafter. Given what had gone down at Rainbow’s End that evening, there could pretty much be only one reason for it, but Cody and I had covered for him—I think our report said something to the effect that Officer Mallick was engaged in conflict resolution, which was certainly one way of putting it—and the chief hadn’t requested clarification. Like I said, he understood.
Anyway, I was grateful to get paid for the work.
I took a shot at tracking down the mysterious lawyer, whose full name was Daniel Dufreyne, in my spare time and hit a dead end. I got his name and contact info from a business card he’d left with Amanda Brooks at the PVB, but the weird thing was there was no business listed on it, nor a physical address—just a cell phone number and a Gmail address. Definitely sketchy. Amanda seemed surprised that she hadn’t noticed, which I chalked up to the whole powers-of-persuasion thing. All I could do was leave a vague voice mail message and send an equally vague e-mail and hope Dufreyne responded. So far, he hadn’t.
Most of the time, I concentrated on poring over the X-Files. While I didn’t have an actual base in which to enter the data yet, the process helped me identify concrete working examples and additional criteria to provide to my genius programmer, Lee. For instance, I’d completely forgotten about the phooka that haunted the fields around Columbine Creek. One of the Donaghue kids came away with a broken arm a couple of years ago after the phooka took him for a wild ride. So, yeah, while I’d be responsible for entering all sensitive data such as the particulars of the incident, Lee needed to create a listing for phookas under the categories of eldritch beings, and a location listing for the creek.
