Poison Fruit

Ohh-kay.

Clearly, I’d been dismissed. Well, as far as encounters with the Sphinx went, that wasn’t entirely unproductive. At least I’d gotten a riddle and a piece of soothsaying out of it, even if I had no idea what either meant.

Next up, Sinclair’s ritual tattooing.

If you’re wondering what that’s all about, Sinclair is apprenticed to the local coven. He’s actually descended from a long line of obeah practitioners, but until recently, he’d been avoiding claiming his heritage—which, now that I think about it, is something else we had in common. Well, except for the part where claiming it could breach the Inviolate Wall and unleash Armageddon.

At any rate, he’s claimed it now, on his own terms. The tattoo isn’t mandatory or anything, but according to Casimir, having a seal tattooed on your own skin is one of the most powerful protection wards you can obtain. And conveniently enough, two of the members of the coven, Mark and Sheila Reston, happened to own a tattoo parlor. Since the events of Halloween, they’d been working with Sinclair to develop his own personal sigil.

There were a fair number of people crowded into the tattoo parlor when I arrived. I wasn’t surprised to see Casimir, since he was the head of the coven and his shop was right across the street, or Warren Rodgers, who owned a nursery and landscaping business and had taken Sinclair on as a mentee and part-time employee during the off-season when tourism was slow. I was a little surprised to see Jen and Lee—but then, Jen and Sinclair had become fairly good friends since she’d sublet a room in his rental house last fall.

Stacey Brooks, though . . . that I was not expecting. At all.

“Hey, girlfriend,” I greeted Jen. “What are you doing here?” I lowered my voice. “And what the fuck is she doing here?”

Jen grimaced. “Yeah, um . . . Sinclair invited me, and since Lee and I were going for coffee, we figured we’d stop by. And . . . okay, they’ve been spending time together, but I was really hoping it wouldn’t last and I’d never have to mention it to you.”

“Son of a bitch!” My tail lashed, and the atmosphere in the crowded tattoo parlor crackled with rising tension. A set of chimes hanging over the front door, probably part of a protection ward, shivered and clanged unhappily.

“Daise, be cool,” Jen warned me.

“I’m cool, I’m cool.” I visualized stuffing my volatile mix of jealousy and profound irritation in a box, tying a bow around it, and setting it aside for later. Above the door, the chimes quieted.

“Hey, Daisy!” Sinclair threaded his way through the parlor to greet me with a hug. “Thanks for coming. Sorry about the short notice.”

“No problem,” I said. “I need to talk to you anyway. It’s a professional matter. Will you have a minute later?”

“Sure.” Sinclair nodded, the beads in his short dreadlocks rattling. “Stick around.” Stacey Brooks came up behind him to slide a possessive hand around his arm. “You two know each other, right?”

I want to say Stacey gave me a simpering smile that did nothing to mask her gloating look, because that’s what the Stacey Brooks I’d known since kindergarten would have done, but the truth is, she looked nervous—possibly because the last time we’d seen each other, I’d been dispatching the zombie skeleton that was trying to hack her into pieces, possibly because we were getting too old for all this adolescent bullshit. My money was on the zombie.

“Of course,” Stacey said in a tentative voice. “Hi, Daisy.”

“Hi,” I said. “I saw your mom the other day. Congratulations on the new position.”

“Thanks.” She looked relieved. “I’m looking forward to taking on more responsibility.”

“That’s great.” I turned back to Sinclair. “I didn’t know you were allowed to let, um, civilians attend this.”

“Oh, it’s fine as long as they stay outside the ritual circle,” he assured me. Flashing his infectious grin, he gestured at Jen and Lee. “Plus, they’re your Scooby Gang, right? Of course they can be here.”

I sort of wished I’d never made that joke, or at least never explained it to Sinclair, especially now that Stacey was apparently making a bid for the role of unlikely mean-girl ally.

Oh, well.

“People!” The Fabulous Casimir clapped his beautifully manicured hands for attention. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

The ritual itself was simple. Sheila Reston drew a chalk circle on the floor of the parlor large enough to encompass her husband’s tattoo station and sufficient room for the other members of the coven who were present. The rest of us squished ourselves into the outskirts while the coven called the four quarters and invoked the blessing of the Lord and Lady, bringing a charged sense into the space. The chimes hanging above the front door stirred and sounded again, this time on a harmonious note.

“This is fascinating,” Lee murmured. Jen nudged him with her elbow to silence him. For being on a sort-of first date, they seemed more comfortable together than I would have expected.

After the invocation, it was pretty much just a matter of Mark Reston giving Sinclair a tattoo while the rest of us watched.

I have to admit, I drew a sharp breath when Mark applied the stencil to the upper part of Sinclair’s left pectoral and I saw the details of the sigil. When we’d talked about it earlier, Sinclair had said he couldn’t wait for me to see it, but he wanted to keep it a secret. The outer circle of the sigil incorporated the curving lines I associated with the split-tailed figure of Yemaya, the orisha to whom Sinclair was dedicated. I recognized some of the squiggly talismanic glyphs in the inner circle from the Seal of Solomon that Casimir had given me for protection. I wore it on a silver chain around my own neck, right next to the Oak King’s token.