Exhausted as I was, it seemed I couldn’t let sleep claim me. Not yet.
So after a futile hour I staggered out of bed and drew a hot bath, stripping off my clothes and sinking into the soothing warmth. Mogwai perched on the side of the tub, reaching out one cautious paw to bat at drops of water dripping from my leaky faucet. It was an old building with old plumbing.
I mulled over the mistakes I’d made, evaluating them without dwelling on them, hugging my knees and swishing my tail back and forth in the warm water. Bit by bit, my tense muscles relaxed.
I let myself grieve for Jojo in all her ridiculous, foulmouthed valor. If I hadn’t screwed up, Jojo would still be alive. Hell, I hadn’t even known fairies could be killed. Not like that.
But Jojo had made her choice, too. I hadn’t asked for her help, I hadn’t promised her credit in my ledger this time. If she’d offered, I would have told her to stay far, far away from Sinclair tonight.
Her choice, her sacrifice.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, brushing my fingertips over the Oak King’s talisman, the silver acorn strung around my neck. “She died bravely.”
Somehow, I thought he would understand.
The water was tepid by the time I finally hauled myself out of the bath, dried off with a towel, pulled on a clean tank top, and crawled under the covers.
According to the glowing red numbers on my clock radio, it was almost three in the morning. Midnight had long since come and gone. Halloween was over and I’d beaten its deadline with time to spare. Downstairs, I could hear the sounds of Mrs. Browne bustling about efficiently in her kitchen. From the warm, yeasty smells of bread rising through the vents, I could tell she’d already fired up her ovens for the first batch of the day. I was one of the few people who’d ever been privileged to witness Mrs. Browne at work in her bakery.
Oh, in case I haven’t mentioned the obvious, Mrs. Browne isn’t human. Mrs. Browne is a brownie.
Eyes closed, I inhaled deeply. It smelled like warm bread baking, it smelled like comfort, it smelled like normalcy; at least in Pemkowet, where Mrs. Browne bakes her supernaturally delicious crusty bread, meltingly flaky pastries, and cinnamon rolls like spicy clouds with cool drizzles of icing.
Curled against my side, Mogwai purred loudly in approval.
All was well with the world.
The gate between the realm of the living and the dead was closed. I was Hel’s liaison, and I had kept my town safe.
At last, I slept.
Forty-eight
For about a week afterward, Pemkowet was crawling with reporters.
To no one’s surprise, Amanda Brooks managed to spin the Tall Man’s return from beyond the grave to carry out the curse of the Cavannaughs into an enthralling, multigenerational ghost story, glossing over the finer points of how and why it had occurred.
At my insistence, she also made it clear that the episode was over and that Pemkowet’s days as a destination for ghost hunters had come to an end.
Okay, she may have hinted that the cycle could repeat itself in another generation, but I could live with that.
Although my image was out there, thanks to Stacey Brooks’s earlier ghostbusting footage, not to mention a handful of spectators who’d had the presence of mind to document the battle with the Tall Man, I kept a low profile. So did Cody, my partner in ghostbusting, and Stefan, whose skill with a broadsword was drawing a fair amount of attention in historical reenactment circles. In fact, everyone in the eldritch community kept a low profile. Whatever else may be true of us, none of us are media whores.
Well, in another day and age, Lurine may have been an exception, but times change. There’s a big difference between being immortalized in prose by John Keats and being outed by Gawker.
Anyway.
Once it was apparent that Pemkowet’s dead were staying put, interest waned and the town was left in peace again.
The coven took up a collection to buy Sinclair a ticket to Kingston to lay his grandfather’s spirit to rest. He was gone for four days and quiet upon his return, saying only that it was done and there would be no more trouble from his family, living or dead.
I’ll admit it, there was a part of me that felt a little cheated by the lack of resolution in my own confrontation with Letitia and Emmeline Palmer. Obviously, there wouldn’t have been any point in my going all the way to Jamaica with Sinclair, even if I could have afforded a ticket, which I couldn’t, but it would have been nice to know that they were smarting at their defeat.
But that was just pride talking, and pride was one of the Seven Deadlies. I had to tread carefully there. I reminded myself that it was enough to have kept Pemkowet safe, that I’d made mistakes, that a member of the eldritch community had paid the ultimate price for them.
Speaking of Jojo, after Sinclair returned from laying his grandfather’s spirit to rest, we went together to do the same for the fairy’s remains.
On an overcast November day, we took the limp sprig of joe-pye weed to the meadow where I’d first summoned a gaggle of fairies with cowslip dew last summer. It had been lush and green then, filled with indigenous plants and wildflowers. Now the meadow was brown and desiccated, dry grass and the thin stalks of weeds crunching underfoot. I stood shivering in my leather jacket while Sinclair cleared a patch of earth. He dug a hole in the dirt with his bare hands, laying the ragged bit of joe-pye weed in it and covering it tenderly. Side by side, we gazed at his handiwork.
“Maybe she’s not gone for good,” Sinclair said. “Maybe she’ll return in the spring. Do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured.
He shook his head, beaded dreadlocks rattling. “I don’t know what I did to deserve that kind of loyalty.”
“She loved you,” I said simply. “Why not? You’re a pretty awesome guy.”
Sinclair smiled, but there was sorrow in it. “Thanks. You, too, Daisy. An awesome girl, I mean.”
Hands in my pockets, I nudged him with one elbow. “You should say something.”
He took a deep breath. “Jojo . . . thank you. Wherever you are, I hope you’re at peace. I promise, I’ll never forget you.”
Inside my jacket, the silver acorn strung around my neck on a chain tingled against my skin. Overhead, the gray clouds parted to let a single shaft of sunlight angle across the meadow, illuminating the shadows beneath the dense pine trees, pinning a gilded mantle on the tall figure that stood there, crowned with antlers.
It was the Oak King.
Although he didn’t move, the meadow seemed to contract around him, growing smaller. From where we stood, I could see the bottomless wells of grief and knowledge in his deep, deep brown eyes, and I understood that although he was older than history, older than the written word, he still mourned for the least of his subjects.
Across the meadow, the Oak King raised one hand in salute, sunlight streaming between his spread fingers.
I raised mine in acknowledgment.
And then the clouds closed, obscuring the sun. The bright shaft of golden autumn light vanished, and the Oak King vanished with it, fading back into the pine shadows without a single motion.
I let out a long, shuddering breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Beside me, Sinclair did the same.
“I don’t think Jojo’s coming back, Daisy,” he whispered. “Not ever.”
I reached out to slide my hand into his, entwining our fingers, and squeezed. “Yeah. I know.”
Some things come to an end.
And some things begin, too.
You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Hel. Well, that’s deliberate, because I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about what happened the night that she summoned me to Little Niflheim in the aftermath of the Halloween affair.
It’s . . . complicated. As usual.
I don’t mean the visit to Little Niflheim. Although I was a bit apprehensive, far from satisfied with how I’d handled the whole crisis, that part went fine. I should have known it would. It may have come down to the wire, but I’d upheld Hel’s rule of order, which was all that mattered. Whatever mistakes I’d made along the way were forgiven and forgotten in light of the fact that I’d produced the desired results. If Hel were a CEO rather than the Norse goddess of the dead, I’d say she was outcome-oriented. She even let me keep the spirit lantern as a bonus. Well, more of a precaution, but still.
It was on the way out of Little Niflheim that the first disconcerting thing happened. As Mikill and I approached the sacred well beneath the canopy of Yggdrasil II’s massive root system, one of the Norns stepped forward and held up a hand to halt the dune buggy.
I clambered out of the buggy for a little soothsaying. At a distance, the Norns don’t look terribly intimidating. At close range, it’s another matter. It was the youngest of them who beckoned to me now, fingernails like long silver talons, her eyes as colorless as mist.
“Young Daisy,” she said to me, her voice echoing as though it came from the depths of the well that lay beneath the roots of the world tree. “Embrace your mistakes. Learn from them. When the time comes, the fate of the world may hinge on the choices you make.”
Oh, great.
“Do you have any counsel for me, my lady?” I asked her.
The Norn maiden reached out with her long, long silver talons to caress my cheek, razor-sharp edges rasping against my skin and drawing a shudder from me. She gave me a faint smile, the pale mist that filled the hollows of her eyes swirling. “Trust your heart.”
I waited to see if any more sooth was forthcoming, but she withdrew her hand and returned to rejoin the other two Norns in the endless process of tending Yggdrasil II’s roots, drawing buckets from the well.
“Any idea what that was all about?” I asked Mikill, climbing back into the dune buggy.
The frost giant shook his head, the ice in his beard crackling. “The Norns see many possible futures.”
“Are they ever more specific about them?” I asked.
“No.” Mikill revved the engine. “They reveal as much as they may without breaking the skein of time.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s just . . . um, the fate of the world? I mean, no pressure or anything.”