Still, duty beckoned, so I made the call. I was braced for the worst, but Amanda actually sounded a bit distracted.
“I’ve got to take a meeting,” she said. “It won’t be long. Can you be here in half an hour?”
“Sure.” Ending the call, I quickly called Jen, only to get her voice mail. Damn. I sent her a text asking if she was free to meet for lunch, which left me with twenty-five minutes to kill and an urgent need for girl talk. I thought about calling my mom, but . . . yeah, no way. Mom’s great, we have a great relationship, and I’m pretty honest with her about almost everything, but this was a bit too far outside the mother-daughter comfort zone.
Unfortunately, the only other person I could think of calling was Lurine, who I figured was still engaged in a marathon shag-fest with a horny satyr. On the other hand, I really did need to talk to her, since she was probably the best person to ask about preventing another satyr-funk incident.
Maybe they took breaks. I gave her a try, but no such luck. So I left a message asking her to call me when she had the chance, then spent the remaining twenty-four minutes tidying my apartment.
The Pemkowet Visitors Bureau, in a charming little shingle-sided building on the riverfront near the main entrance into the town, is adorned with sleek, modern furniture, glossy magazines, and Stacey Brooks’s haughty-faced presence behind the desk since her mother gave her a receptionist’s job there. She was usually yammering into the fancy Bluetooth earpiece of the office phone—why the hands-free option was so important I don’t know, since it’s not like she did anything but answer calls—but not today.
“Daisy.” She greeted me in a snide tone. “My mother’s meeting is running a little late. Have a seat.”
“Thanks.” Determined not to be baited, I sat.
“So I hear there was a big gay orgy out at Rainbow’s End last night.” Stacey arched her perfectly plucked ash-brown eyebrows at me. “I hear you were there.”
“I was.” I fished my Pemkowet Police Department ID out of my bag and showed it to her. “On official business.”
“Oh, please!” She sniffed. “Everyone knows you’re just a file clerk.”
I shrugged.
Stacey let the silence stretch for a moment, but she wasn’t the type to handle silence well. “So what was it?” she asked. “Kevin McTeague heard it was a bad batch of ecstasy, but Jane Drummond heard it was witchcraft.” Lowering her voice, she gave me a significant look. “Was it a succubus thing? A gay succubus thing? Is that why you were there, Daisy?”
Oh, for crying out loud. Despite my resolve, my temper stirred. “I’m not a succubus!”
She smirked at me. “Oh, so it’s just a gay thing?”
Yeah, I know. In this day and age, that shouldn’t be a viable taunt. Especially in a town that prides itself on welcoming diversity, especially coming from the freaking receptionist of the tourist bureau of said town. But there you have it. High school bully tactics never change. I shouldn’t have let Stacey know she’d gotten to me with the succubus thing. Now she’d just keep pushing gay, gay, gay until I couldn’t stand it and issued a denial I knew was (a) perfectly unnecessary, (b) beneath me, and (c) exactly what Stacey wanted.
Or, I could go with a classic change of tactics. “You know, I really can’t discuss the incident before I’ve had a chance to talk with your mother,” I said to her. “So, are you seeing anyone these days?”
Bingo! Of course I knew she wasn’t. It’s a small town. Stacey’s eyes narrowed. “Are you still seeing that bus driver?”
Nice try. I smiled. I’d actually met Sinclair for the first time in this very lobby and I knew damn well Stacey thought he was cute, too. “Yeah, I am. It’s going really well. I mean, except for the gay orgies and all.”
Her expression turned ominous. “Wait until he finds out what you—”
I interrupted her. “He knows.”
At that moment, the door to Amanda Brooks’s office was opened by a man with a briefcase showing himself out. My skin tingled with the telltale sign of eldritch presence and all thoughts of exchanging barbs with Stacey went clean out of my head. The man strode into the lobby, then stopped in his tracks and looked in my direction.
My tail twitched with alarm . . . and a sort of kindred recognition.
At a glance, he looked normal. Average height, early thirties, a decent build. Good-looking in a GQ sort of way, with a summer-weight suit that looked expensive and short, stylish light brown hair in a hundred-dollar haircut.
But his eyes were black, as black as mine. Ordinary mortals don’t have truly black eyes. A brown so dark it looks black, yes. Not the kind of black where the only way you can differentiate between the iris and the pupil is that the iris doesn’t admit light.
And there was a smell, like a whiff of sulfur . . . only not really a smell. More like a bad taste lingering in my mouth, like I’d eaten something rancid. Only that wasn’t right either. It wasn’t a sense I could put a name to.
Anyway, he was definitely a hell-spawn. And I suspected that, unlike me, he had claimed his birthright.
Now that was a scary thought.
I held my breath, half expecting to feel the Inviolate Wall tremble and threaten the architecture of existence.
But it didn’t. The man inhaled briefly, his nostrils flaring, his black eyes curious. Even without seeing, I could tell his own tail was swishing back and forth beneath his well-tailored linen-blend trousers.
And then he left, striding out the door.
I let out my breath and eased my hand out of my messenger bag. I’d been reaching for dauda-dagr without realizing it.
Oblivious to it all, Stacey gazed after him in a reverie. “See, that’s the kind of guy I’m looking for,” she murmured. “We need more like him in Pemkowet.”
Yeah, right.
Ignoring her, I admitted myself into Amanda Brooks’s office. She was seated at her desk, but her chair was swiveled to allow her to gaze at the river, and she didn’t turn around when I took a seat opposite her.
“Ms. Brooks?” I cleared my throat. “Daisy Johanssen. You wanted to see me?”
“Oh . . . right. Yes, of course.” Her reply sounded absentminded. She spun her chair around slowly. There was a vagueness to her usually keen features. “I’m sorry, Daisy. What was it again?”
My skin still felt prickly. “Ms. Brooks, who was that guy? What did he want?”
She blinked behind the lenses of chic glasses that probably cost more than I made in a month. “Who?”
I concentrated my gaze on her. “That guy! The one who just left.”
“Mr. Dufreyne? Oh, he’s a lawyer. He was just inquiring on behalf of a client about purchasing some lands that have been in the Cavannaugh family for generations.” Her expression began to swim into focus. “As I’m sure you’re aware, the Cavannaughs are one of the original founding families. It’s my maiden name, of course.”
“Of course.” I echoed her. “Whatever he was asking, you didn’t agree to it, did you?”
“No.” Amanda Brooks frowned. “You know, the Cavannaughs were here before there was a Pemkowet. We trace our ancestry back to the lumber days of Singapore.” She glanced toward the river, her expression veering back toward uncertainty. “I can’t imagine why I’d even entertain the idea.”
“Don’t,” I said bluntly. “I’ve got a bad feeling about that guy. Whatever he wants, don’t give it to him.”
Under ordinary circumstances, Amanda Brooks would have reacted with indignation if I’d dared to speak to her that way. Today, she simply cleared her throat. “Yes, well. As I said, I can’t imagine why I would.” Her gaze sharpened to its usual level of piercingness. “Now, about this orgy—”
Back on track, the infernal cobwebs cleared away, she delivered a scathing fifteen-minute diatribe on public health hazards, risks, liabilities, negative publicity, and my general irresponsibility in allowing such a thing to occur. I was relieved enough to see her back in form that I just sat and nodded in agreement, waiting for the tongue-lashing to end before explaining what had happened at Rainbow’s End and promising to do my utmost to ensure that nothing like it ever happened again.
As soon as she was finished, I beat a quick retreat. In the lobby, Stacey gave me the traditional Pemkowet High mean girls farewell, flashing devil horns at me with her right hand. Since she wasn’t on the phone, she stuck out her tongue, too.
Nice.
On the off chance that he ever asked her out, I debated telling her that the GQ-looking lawyer was a hell-spawn.
I decided against it.
Seven
Having faced down the dragon in her den, I went to the station to write up a report on the orgy. Since I was there, the desk clerk, Patty Rogan, gave me a stack of yesterday’s reports to file.
I browsed through them first, looking for signs of eldritch involvement. That’s how I had come by my unique role in the department in the first place, which led to Hel’s invitation to serve as her liaison to mundane authorities. Nothing jumped out at me in the first few reports—a minor fender bender, an altercation outside a bar, a citation for public urination—but the fourth one intrigued me. Some irate tourists had come in to file a complaint about being pickpocketed after playing a shell game that a pair of kids was running on the dock.
“Did you take this one?” I asked Patty. “The shell game?”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “I thought that one might interest you. There are a couple of others like it.”
I flipped through the paperwork and found them. In all three instances, the complainant had won money at the shell game, only to find nothing but dry, brittle leaves in his or her wallet afterward. “Anyone check it out?”
Patty nodded. “Oh, sure, but the kids running the game were long gone.” She raised her eyebrows. “If they were kids in the first place.”
