Poison Fruit

A few minutes later, Lurine exited alone. She had a word with her driver, then got back into my car, stowing her sunglasses. “Keys?”

I managed to find them and hand them over. “Is everything . . . okay?”

“It will be.” Lurine started the Honda. “There’s a panic room in the back for restraining ravening ghouls. Stefan will be fine once it passes.”

“And you didn’t, um, have to hurt him?” I asked her. “You got him to enter it of his own will?”

She pulled out of the parking lot. “Mm-hmm.”

“How?”

Lurine gave me a pointed look. “I told you I’d be gentle.”

Oh, right. The lamia’s kiss. Yeah, if Lurine had given Stefan the full business, that would have been enough to render even a ravening ghoul docile with ecstasy long enough to persuade him to enter a panic room.

Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind, I was aware that I should have strong feelings about this whole situation—horror at Stefan’s attack; mortification that I’d provoked it; a complex mixture of gratitude and jealousy that my immortal former babysitter had subdued my immortal ravening lover with a kiss.

Somewhere, anyway, but right now, all I felt was empty. And it wasn’t a good feeling.

But I had no one to blame but myself.

      Forty-one

Bit by bit, my emotional state returned to normal. Well, normal for me, anyway.

It took days, though, and while the effects lasted, I definitely wasn’t myself. For better or worse, my emotions defined me. They were what made me me, and with a core part of myself missing, I was hollow and vague. I lost time, finding myself staring into space only to realize that the better part of an hour had passed. I couldn’t focus long enough to kindle a shield, let alone invoke an unobtrusibility spell, and I had to cancel a couple of practice sessions with the coven—not a good thing with the court date bearing down on us.

At least the rumor mill hadn’t gotten hold of the incident. In a small town, that was almost a miracle, but the Outcast had their own reasons for not wanting anyone to know that their leader was out of commission, and apparently Lurine had decided to be discreet.

It was actually a relief when my emotions began to trickle back to normal levels, including all the violent guilt and shame I deserved to feel.

I rehearsed my apology to Stefan a hundred times, and picked up the phone more than once to leave a message on his voice mail. I didn’t, though. It seemed like the sort of thing that really had to be done in person.

Instead, I called Cooper and asked him to let me know when Stefan was no longer ravening. He agreed to, although he didn’t sound pleased about it.

I didn’t blame him. I mean, I’d seen Cooper ravening, but that had been because of an error in judgment on his part, not because some idiotic hell-spawn had pitched a temper tantrum.

During my recovery, I thought a lot about that father and daughter that Cooper had drained, though. At least I’d walked into this with my eyes open. I’d known I was playing with fire. They hadn’t had a clue. And Cooper had drained them dry. He’d done it in the blink of an eye, and when it was done, neither one of them looked like they knew who or where they were.

God, what was it like for them? I’d looked into the void, and I never, ever wanted to get that close again. Stefan had said they’d be fine in time, but Stefan had never been drained by a ravening ghoul. Maybe he didn’t understand that the void inside him was every bit as terrifying as the eternal void of nonbeing that the Outcast faced.

Come to think of it, maybe those voids were one and the same. Either way, once seen, it couldn’t be unseen.

Oh, I’d be okay . . . eventually. Wiser and warier, but I understood what had happened to me and I knew full well that I’d brought it on myself. Cooper’s victims had been innocent and ignorant. They’d had no idea what had happened to them or why, and there wasn’t any counseling out there in the mundane world for victims of an eldritch attack suffering from a supernatural form of post–traumatic stress disorder.

No, just a smooth-tongued hell-spawn lawyer with an offer to join a class-action lawsuit.

Too bad there was no way to prove how much worse things would have been that night if Cooper and the other Outcast hadn’t been there to help disperse the panic and control the crowd. As it was, there had been a number of fairly serious injuries and a couple of nonfatal cardiac incidents.

By the time Cooper left me a voice mail saying that Stefan’s ravening had passed, it was a full two weeks later. And in case you’re wondering, yes, two weeks was a long time for that sort of thing.

With profoundly mixed emotions, I went to see Stefan.

I probably should have called or texted him in advance, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure he would want to see me. And to be equally honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt about him after his attack. Wary enough that I didn’t want to meet him alone just yet, anyway. But the one thing I was sure of was that I owed him a huge apology for acting like . . . well, a stupid, stupid girl, which is why I screwed up my courage and paid a visit to the Wheelhouse.

It felt like I was returning to the scene of a crime. Hedging my bets, I paused on the front porch, murmured the unobtrusibility invocation and willed my aura to disperse before slipping into the bar.

It was the first real test of my hard-won ability since my emotional strength and focus had returned. Entering into a nest of ghouls may have been a little ambitious for my first outing, but the truth was, I didn’t feel like dealing with Cooper’s disapproval, and I needed to know I could do this. A courthouse in the heart of mundane territory was going to be a lot riskier.