Poison Fruit (31 page)

And
that
was owned by the City of Pemkowet.

My skin prickled under my old down coat. The reek of the hell-spawn lawyer’s wrongness filled my sinuses. “You don’t give a damn about the Cavannaugh property,” I whispered. “You’re going after Hel’s territory.”

Dufreyne widened his eyes in mock innocence. “Now, why in the world would I do that?”

“I don’t know.” My initial shock was giving way to a rising vortex of anger. “But if this lawsuit bankrupts Pemkowet’s tri-community governments, something’s going to have to be sold, isn’t it? Something big?”

“In the event of a decision in favor of the plaintiffs, the terms of the settlement would be determined by the presiding judge, Ms. Johanssen,” he said primly.

I ignored the comment. “Why? Who’s behind Elysian Fields? Is it Hades?” I asked. Dufreyne’s eyelids flickered. “I saw his mark on your palm.”

“Ah, is that what you think you saw?” His voice turned smooth and velvety. “You were mistaken.”

Now that he was trying to use powers of persuasion on me, the theory seemed a lot more convincing. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you were.” Dufreyne’s voice took on a new, weird resonance, like his voice was an electric guitar and he’d just stepped on an invisible reverb pedal. It washed over me like a vibrating wave of sound, broke, and receded, leaving me unaffected. He raised one manscaped eyebrow. “Hmm.”

I folded my arms over my chest. “It doesn’t work on me, does it?”

Dufreyne was unperturbed. “Apparently not.”

“Is that how you’re planning to convince the judge to settle in your
favor?” I inquired. “Because I’m pretty sure there’s no legal precedent for holding mundane authorities responsible for eldritch transgressions. And you should have done your homework, because unfortunately for you, the nearest courthouse is in Allegan.” I pointed south. “Miles outside of Hel’s sphere of influence. It won’t work there.”

Daniel Dufreyne burst into laughter—laughter filled with cruelty and genuine unfettered mirth. “Is that what you think?” Reaching into his coat, he drew out a silk pocket square and wiped his eyes. “Ah, Daisy! You poor, provincial little thing.” He replaced the pocket square. “You’ve lived your whole life in this town, haven’t you?”

“Not my
whole
life,” I said defensively.

Abandoning his insouciant pose, Dufreyne drew himself upright to his full height. “I’m a demon’s son,” he hissed in my face, his breath filled with that awful stench of wrongness. “Offspring of a genuine apex faith, not some pathetic remnant of a dwindling pagan god’s twilight years. Do you really think
my
power is dependent on having a functioning underworld beneath my feet?” He touched his chest. “I carry the underworld inside me, just like you do, cousin.”

I held my ground, trembling with fury. “Does your master Hades know you talk about him that way?”

His nostrils flared. “Hades is not—”

“Hey, there!” Chief Bryant’s gruff voice interrupted. “Dufreyne, is it?” He settled his meaty hands on his duty belt. “Step away from her.”

Dufreyne paused, then took a deliberate step backward. His eyes were black and icy. “We were just talking, officer.”

“Well, keep moving.” The chief jerked his chin at the lawyer. “Or I’ll write you up for disturbing the peace.”

“Oh, but you wouldn’t do that, officer.” Dufreyne skipped the dulcet tone and went straight for reverb. “Would you?”

Chief Bryant frowned. “No. No, I guess I wouldn’t.”

Dufreyne nodded. “Leave us.”

And just like that, Pemkowet’s chief of police, a stalwart, strong-willed man who’d been a father figure to me for almost as long as I could remember, turned and walked back into the station, meek as a lamb.

I felt sick with rage and helplessness. “
Why
? Why are you doing this? What does Hades want with Pemkowet? Is he declaring war on Hel? And why the fuck are you hell-bent on tormenting me?”

“So many questions!” Daniel Dufreyne steepled his gloved fingers, tapping his lips. “Oh, my. Why do you think you deserve answers?”

“Because this is
my town
!” I shouted at him, unable to contain my fury. Overhead, a power line whined and a streetlight burst into shards, littering the pavement below.

“Ah, see!” Dufreyne said with satisfaction. “There you go. It’s not that I want to torment you, per se, but there’s just something unspeakably delicious about your impotent rage. And let’s face it,” he added. “The last time we met, you must admit, you were unbearably smug about your innocent and oh-so-loving mother.”

I hadn’t been smug. I’d committed the crime of feeling sorry for him and letting it show. It punctured my anger like a balloon.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “Please, don’t punish Pemkowet for my offense.”

Dufreyne shrugged and shoved his hands into his coat pockets. “Look, I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but this isn’t about you. As far as I’m concerned, the schadenfreude’s a bonus. Everything else is just business. You can’t take it personally.”

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “Yeah, it’s kind of hard not to when you show up on my doorstep to revel in my impotent rage,
cousin
.”

His black eyes gleamed. “Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. But you’ll never take that risk, will you?”

Daughter . . .

I shuddered, remembering my nightmare, the vault of heaven cracking open above me. “No.”

“Pity.”

“Does your master Hades know you feel that way?” I asked. “Hankering for Armageddon and all?”

Dufreyne didn’t rise to the bait this time. “I represent an investment on the part of my sponsor,” he said. “Any investment carries a certain amount of risk.” He showed his white teeth in a grin. “So far, I’ve proved worthwhile.”

“Good for you,” I said. “But I’m still wondering what in the hell Hades wants with Pemkowet, because I have it on pretty good authority that no god can maintain two demesnes. Am I wrong?”

“Do you expect me to answer that?” Dufreyne inquired.

“It would be nice,” I said.

He considered it. “All right. I’ll give you one for free. No, Hades isn’t declaring war on Hel. Hades has no interest in Pemkowet.”

I searched Dufreyne’s blandly handsome face, trying to determine if he was telling the truth. I thought he might be—he had that same barely hidden smirk, hinting at the delightful irony that the truth was as bitter as a lie. You’d think a hell-spawn would have a better poker face, but then again, if his emotions ran as high as mine did, I guess it made sense.

“So who does?” I asked him. “Whose behalf are you acting on?”

Removing his hands from his pockets, he spread them in a gesture of wounded innocence. “Why, the plaintiffs, of course.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Do the plaintiffs have a stake in Elysian Fields?”

“Of course not,” Dufreyne said in a virtuous tone. “As I told you, beyond a general interest in the well-being of the community, Elysian Fields has nothing whatsoever to do with the lawsuit.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said flatly.

“I don’t care.” His tone shifted again, this time taking on a genuine intonation of boredom. Daniel Dufreyne, hell-spawn lawyer, was finished with this conversation. Of course it didn’t matter what I believed. What mattered was what the judge believed, and the judge would
believe whatever Daniel Dufreyne told him. He turned to open the door of his Jaguar and eased into the driver’s seat. “I’ll see you in court, Daisy.”

Wait a minute.

I caught the door before he could close it. “What do you mean, you’ll see
me
in court? Am I named as a defendant?”

“You?” His sharklike smile returned, filled with gloating and schadenfreude. “Of course not. You’re a witness for the prosecution.”

With that, he yanked the car door closed, started the Jaguar’s motor and backed into the street. Shards of broken glass from the streetlight crunched under the Jag’s tires as he put the car in drive and roared away, crushing the symbol of my impotent rage into dust.

Oh, crap.

This was bad.

Thirty

N
eedless to say, the lawsuit was all anyone in Pemkowet could talk about. The town was buzzing like a hornet’s nest, the tone a mixture of outrage and salacious curiosity as details emerged and rumors circulated.

I found myself in the unlikely position of feeling sorry for Stacey Brooks. Apparently, the ghostbusting footage that she’d shot and uploaded, the footage that had gone viral, received national attention and brought a thousand or so thrill-seeking tourists to Pemkowet last fall, provided the impetus for Dufreyne’s case.

After all, it wasn’t like he could sue the ghosts of Pemkowet’s dead that had risen last fall or the no-longer-reanimated remains of Talman Brannigan or the duppy of Sinclair’s dead Grandpa Morgan’s spirit. Aside from the Tall Man’s moldering bones, they couldn’t even be proved to exist at this point, let alone summoned to appear in a court of law.

But what could be proved was that the Pemkowet Visitors Bureau, with the blessing of the tri-community governing authorities representing Pemkowet, East Pemkowet, and Pemkowet Township—and members of all three sat on the PVB’s board—had deliberately and willfully used Stacey’s videos to entice tourists to visit.

Hell, she’d just gotten a
promotion
for it.

And no, nowhere had there been any disclaimer, any mention that there was the possibility it could be dangerous.

It was stupid and shortsighted. I’d thought so for a long time, even before the events of last fall. Even under the best of circumstances, the eldritch community wasn’t
safe
. A simple will-o’-the-wisp could lead
tourists astray for days out in the dunes. Fairies could abduct children and replace them with changelings. Hobgoblins mostly confined their antics to relatively harmless pranks and scams, but it’s not like being bilked on vacation is exactly a selling point.

And that was just the nature fey. God knows there was nothing safe about Lady Eris’s vampire brood. Since Stefan’s arrival, the Outcast had become a far more benevolent force in the community . . . but that didn’t make them safe. Hell, Cooper had practically zombified that tourist and his teenaged daughter.

Based on the fact that the plaintiffs were suing for emotional and psychological damages, I had an uneasy feeling that Dufreyne might have tracked down that particular family, along with other bystanders who’d sustained physical injuries. There was a part of me that felt vindicated by the repercussions of the PVB’s careless promotion, but I didn’t have it in my heart to blame Stacey the way others were. She’d just been trying to please her mother—and right up to the point where it looked like Amanda Brooks’s strategy to make Pemkowet a destination for paranormal tourism was about to blow up in our faces, pretty much everyone in town had thought it was brilliant.

Now . . . not so much.

I’d fully intended to use one of my remaining bark chips to request an audience with Hel that evening, but it was already dark when I left the station, and halfway down the block, Mikill the frost giant pulled up alongside me in his dune buggy.

“Daisy Johanssen!” He hailed me in a booming voice, holding up his rune-marked left hand. “I am bidden—”

“Yeah, yeah.” I tugged my Pemkowet High School ski cap down further over my ears and climbed into the buggy. “Hi, Mikill. I take it Hel’s heard the news?”

Mikill nodded gravely, his beard crackling with ice. “Her harbingers brought word today.”

I scrunched down in the buggy’s passenger seat, bracing myself for the arctic blast of wind. “Let’s go.”

Twenty minutes later, we’d successfully navigated our way across
the dunes, appeased Garm—another distinctly
not
safe eldritch entity—and spiraled down the vast interior of Yggdrasil II’s trunk.

I knelt before Hel’s throne, feeling the weight of her displeasure. It wasn’t directed at me personally, but oh, I could still feel it. The air in the abandoned sawmill was almost humming with tension.

“Rise, my young liaison,” she said to me. I got to my feet and met her gaze with an effort. Both eyes were blazing; the left with malevolence, the right with stern disapproval. “It has come to my attention that this infernally begotten lawyer has shown his hand. Tell me what this
lawsuit
betokens.”

“Nothing good,” I said. “I can’t be sure, my lady, but I think that this lawyer Dufreyne means to bankrupt the city of Pemkowet and force us to sell a large, valuable piece of land.”

Hel’s voice dropped to a subterranean register that echoed in the marrow of my bones. “
My territory.
”

“Yes.”

“To whom? For what purpose?” Her ember eye flared. “Is it the Greek Hades? Does he declare war after all?”

I shook my head. “Dufreyne didn’t deny that he worked for Hades, but he said Hades isn’t declaring war on you and isn’t interested in Pemkowet.”

Hel’s gaze sharpened. “And you believed this to be true?”

“Yes,” I said. “Again, I can’t be sure. But to the best of my ability, I believe he spoke the truth. Not the
whole
truth, but a part of it. Beyond that . . .” I turned up my hands in a helpless gesture. “I’m sorry, my lady. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Hel did that immortal deity thing where she sat motionless on her
throne and stared into the unknowable distance for a seemingly endless period of time, thinking unknowable thoughts. Mikill and the other frost giants attending her did the same, standing like ice sculptures.

I did that chilled-to-the-bone mortal thing where I shifted from foot to foot in the biting cold of Little Niflheim in an effort to keep my blood circulating, periodically removing my gloves to blow on my fingers.

Right about the time I was beginning to worry in earnest about frostbite, Hel’s gaze returned from the distance. “In the days of old, I would have heaped great wealth upon my champion without a thought,” she mused. “I would have sent the
duegar
forth to delve beneath the mountains for the precious stones and metals that all humans prize beyond reason, and bidden them wreak their craft to create treasures of such cunning and magic and beauty that mortals would fight and die to possess them. But now I preside over an empire of sand, and I have hoarded no treasure against this day. I have already bestowed the greatest gift in my possession upon you, Daisy Johanssen.” She paused, letting that sink in. “I trust
dauda-dagr
continues to serve you well?”