Poison Fruit

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

Needless 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.”