Autumn Bones (11 page)

“Loose him, you churlish, ewe-necked trollop!” a voice shrilled. The Bieber-goblin squirmed out of my grip and broke into a run.

“Dammit, Jojo!” I scrambled to my feet. A dozen cameras went off as I confronted the hovering fairy. “I’m working!”

Jojo didn’t even deign to reply, just gave an indignant sniff and winked out of sight.

“Aw, man!” one of the tourists complained, fiddling with his camera. “Why’d you have to scare her off, lady?”

My temper stirring, I gave him a look that shut him up, then scanned the area. Three of the four hobgoblins were nowhere to be seen. They couldn’t vanish into thin air like fairies, but they were fast, and they could camouflage themselves as rocks or bushes in the blink of an eye. As long as they held still, it was hard to spot them.

Lucky for me, the bagman-goblin wasn’t as speedy as the others; when the Bieber-goblin yelled scatter, he’d taken off down the dock, where there was nowhere to hide for a good hundred yards.

I raced after him, my Keds thudding against the wooden dock. Hearing my footsteps, the bagman-goblin turned on the jets. If I’d had a clear shot, I could have caught him, but there were tourists strolling along and that little bugger was agile. He scooted underneath a distinguished-looking Great Dane being walked on a leash and bounded over a baby stroller being pushed by a young couple.

I had to go around them, apologizing breathlessly. I
should
have caught up to the bagman-goblin in the park with the gazebo, but by the time I reached it, he’d gone to earth, hiding.

“Where are you, you little creep?” I looked around. “C’mon, I know you’re here.” A group of tourists gave me an odd look.

I ignored them. There was a hedge of boxwood around the base of the gazebo. And unless I was mistaken, that bit of shrubbery on the end was trembling. Squinting, I peered through the camouflage glamour to see the bagman-goblin trying very hard to hold perfectly still, his narrow chest heaving with exertion.

So lazy hobgoblins could get out of shape. Who knew? I tackled him before he could run again.

“Oof!” Lying on his back, he raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay! I give.” He batted his beady, lashless eyes at me. “We were just having fun.”

“I know.” I plucked a crumpled wad of twenties from his clutches. “And I’m just doing my job.”

“Spoilsport,” the hobgoblin grumbled.

“Uh-huh.” I sorted through the bills, separating the real ones from the fairy gold counterfeits.

“We’ll give you half our take,” he said in a wheedling voice.

“No can do.” I dropped the false twenties on his chest, where they turned to dry, brittle oak leaves. “And I’d like my sunglasses back.”

“Yeah?” The hobgoblin smirked. “Good luck with that.”

I got off him and stood, patting my messenger bag. “You know, I could have drawn steel on you and I didn’t.”

A hint of fear crossed his face. “You wouldn’t. Not for this.”

“Don’t push me,” I said sternly. “You know you’re not supposed to break mundane laws. Do you want me to report you to Hel?”

“Over a pair of cheap dollar-store sunglasses
I
didn’t even take?” Now the hobgoblin sounded incredulous.

“No, you nitwit. For defrauding tourists. What’s your name?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. Reaching into my bag, I unsheathed a few inches of
dauda-dagr
, enough to let him see the hilt. “On pain of cold steel, what’s your name?”

Although they’ve developed a higher tolerance in the last few centuries, most of the fey retain an aversion to iron and its alloys. They can be around it, but they can’t bear its touch. “Tuggle,” the hobgoblin said sullenly. “Name’s Tuggle. You really going to tell her?”

There was no way in, well, hell, that I was going to bother the Norse goddess of the dead by reporting on a relatively harmless hobgoblin scam—and Hel has her own ways of keeping tabs on what’s going on aboveground in the mundane world—but Tuggle didn’t know that. I thought about forcing him to rat out his accomplices and decided against it. I was here to keep order, not make enemies. “We’ll see,” I said to him, easing
dauda-dagr
back into its hidden sheath. “Tell the others to consider this a warning. And I really would like those sunglasses back.”

Tuggle shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Tuggle.” I gave him a hand up, which he accepted. “No hard feelings?”

He shrugged again. “Eh.”

“Hey, lady!” a concerned voice behind me called. “You okay?”

I turned around. “Fine. Why?”

It was a teenaged kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, out wandering the town with his girlfriend. They were doing that thing where they had their arms wrapped around each other’s waists and their hands in each other’s back pockets. All the cool couples in high school used to stroll the halls that way. Of course, Jen and I had made fun of them, but secretly I was always a little envious of them. I’m pretty sure Jen was, too.

“It’s just that you’ve been talking to that bush for a while,” the kid said in an apologetic tone.

His girlfriend blinked. “Wait a minute. What bush?”

Apparently, Tuggle the hobgoblin was skilled at maintaining a glamour and had a knack for timing a getaway. Glancing behind me, I saw he’d made his escape, probably shifting back to his freckle-faced-kid guise when no one was looking.

Oh, well. At least I’d made my point.

“Welcome to Pemkowet,” I said to the teenagers. “Where weird shit happens.”

Ten

I
backtr
acked along the dock to see about refunding the actual money to the hobgoblins’ marks, but the crowd had already dispersed. Unless the marks had checked their wallets, they probably didn’t realize they’d been ripped off yet.

So I swung by the police station to log my time and fill out a report for the X-Files, leaving the money I’d retrieved in the desk clerk’s keeping in case anyone came to claim it. At the risk of courting avarice, I hoped no one did. What can I say? Working irregular hours on a part-time basis, I was always short of cash. I’d collected two hundred and forty dollars from Tuggle, and if no one claimed it in three months, it was mine.

Upon returning to my apartment, I found my sunglasses placed neatly on the doorstep in the alley, each lens cracked into a perfect spiderweb. That’s what you get for messing around with hobgoblins; and I’d taken it
easy
on them.

“Ha ha,” I said aloud to thin air. “Very funny.” It got me more peculiar glances from a trio of middle-aged ladies passing by, their arms laden with shopping bags, but the rhododendrons lining the park rustled, sounding distinctly like a snicker.

Upstairs, I discovered that Mogwai had gotten up onto the kitchen counter. Based on the mess and the sticky pawprints, he’d explored the bowl of wet ingredients before knocking the bowl of dry ingredients onto the kitchen floor and dashing in a panic out his escape hatch on the screened porch.

At least the chocolate chips were safe. I sighed, dumped the ingredients, and cleaned up the mess.

By the time I finished, the urge to bake was a distant memory. I spent the remainder of the afternoon with my battered old laptop, looking at images of shields online and practicing the visualization Stefan had tried to teach me. It probably didn’t help that I took a break every ten minutes to trek into the kitchen for a handful of chocolate chips. And okay, yes, I also searched for information on obeah. There really wasn’t a lot out there, at least not a lot that looked credible. I jotted down a couple of obscure out-of-print book titles I came across, resolving to pursue it later.

I gave up in time to freshen my makeup, change my clothes—a black linen sheath dress, my classic fallback—and meet Sinclair at Lumière at seven o’clock.

Since it was only a few blocks away, I walked. Sinclair was waiting for me on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, his touring bicycle chained to the wrought-iron fence that hemmed the patio.

Oh, crap. I was a
terrible
girlfriend. Sinclair’s place was a couple miles north on the rural highway and he didn’t have a car, just the tour bus and the bike, which he used for transportation when he wasn’t working. Hence, those Tour de France–worthy thighs I mentioned earlier.

He smiled at me. “Hey, girl! There you are.”

“I’m so sorry!” I said in dismay. “I should have picked you up—”

“Daisy—”

“I just wasn’t thinking! You should have reminded—”

“Daisy!” Sinclair raised his voice. I shut up. He held out a single red rose. “This is a date. A romantic date. No way I was going to let you drive. Okay?”

“Okay.” I accepted the rose, hiding my face in it to conceal the fact that I was blushing a little. No one had ever given me a rose before. I peeked over it at Sinclair. He was wearing a fitted black T-shirt that showed off his torso, neatly creased khakis, and a pair of huarache sandals. Upscale casual. It looked good on him. “You look nice,” I said. “Did you bike down here wearing that?”

“Nah.” He grinned. “Spare clothes are in the saddlebag. I changed in the bathroom. You look great, too.” He crooked his arm. “Ready, sistah?”

Although I don’t have anything to compare it to, I’m pretty sure that as potentially awkward post-hookup dates go, this one was close to perfect. The hostess seated us on the patio near the gently splashing fountain. It was an intimate space, and the surrounding buildings blocked the light of the lowering sun, giving us a jump on candlelit ambience. The music of Édith Piaf was piped in at the exact right level to enhance the French bistro atmosphere without overpowering it.

From the first time we’d met, small talk had come easily to Sinclair and me. There was an affinity between us. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we were both only children raised by single parents coming from adverse supernatural circumstances, although it’s not like I’d known
that
until just the other day. Anyway, I was glad to find that the easy connection was still there, that the new level of physical intimacy between us just took it to a different, more charged level. We held hands atop the table and played footsy under it. We pored over the wine list and pooled our limited knowledge of French wines. We talked about favorite movies, an inexhaustible topic, over salad and bread. We exchanged stories about our respective days over salmon almondine (me) and coquilles St. Jacques (Sinclair), debating his prospects for running a scaled-back tour in the coming fall and winter months, the antics of vengeful hobgoblins, the depths of Jojo the joe-pye weed fairy’s crush, and exactly who the hell St. Jacques was and what the hell he had to do with scallops.

I thought about asking Sinclair back to my place, which I hadn’t done yet. This whole boyfriend–romantic date thing was awfully seductive. Based on the steady heat in his eyes, he was thinking about it, too.

But . . . yeah. There was a pretty big elephant on the patio with us. And every time I tried not to think about it, I did.

“It’s killing you, isn’t it?” Sinclair asked me over dessert. “Not asking about it.”

I winced. “Is it that obvious?”

“Not really, no.” He leaned back in his chair, cocking his head. “But I know you
just
well enough to be able to tell.”

“Do you blame me?” I met his gaze.

“No.” Sinclair gave me a rueful look. “I truly don’t.”

I looked down at the table, my spoon toying with the ramekin of chocolate mousse we were sharing. I know, you’d think I’d had enough of chocolate today, but you’d be wrong. “I guess it’s just that I’ve been really up-front with you.” I kept my voice low. “You, not so much.”

“Look, Daisy.” Reaching across the table, he took my hands in his, spoon handle and all. “For a long time I didn’t have a choice in the matter. My father sent me back to my mother one month out of every summer. It was part of their . . . agreement. When I turned eighteen, I got to decide for myself. I haven’t been back to the island since, even though . . .” He fell silent a moment. “Well, I haven’t. I put it behind me.”

“Things don’t always stay where we put them,” I said softly.

“No, I know.” Sinclair squeezed my hands, his gaze earnest. “But can we leave it there for just this weekend? Let’s enjoy tonight and tomorrow. Things in town are going to slow down after this, and we’ve got all fall and winter to talk about it.”

My stomach did a flip-flop. He made it sound like he was in this for the long haul, which both delighted and, yeah, terrified me. “Promise?”

“Yeah.” His strong thumbs rubbed the backs of my hands. “I promise.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Did you happen to pack a toothbrush along with a change of clothes?”

“Maybe.” Sinclair smiled. “Does that question mean what I think it does?”

I glanced out toward the darkening street. “Well, I’d hate to think of you biking down the highway at night.”

“Oh, I’ve got good lights on my bike,” he said with a straight face. “Don’t go to any worry on that account, girl.”

“Fine.” I withdrew my hands from his and folded them on the table. “Would you like to come over to my apartment?”

He grinned. “Love to.”

After finishing dessert and paying the tab, we strolled slowly back to the apartment, Sinclair walking his bike alongside me. There were a lot of people out, and most of them smiled at us. Maybe a few of them recognized Sinclair from his tour, but mostly it seemed like they were smiling because we looked like a young, happy, attractive couple having a fun night out on the town. And okay, maybe we were too old to do the hands-in-each-other’s-back-pockets thing, but I have to admit, for the first time in my life, I got what it felt like to be one of the cool couples.

Sinclair was right, I decided. It would be stupid not to enjoy the moment for what it was.

It felt strange to have him in my apartment, but a good kind of strange. The place was modestly furnished and decorated, but throughout my childhood my mom and I had gotten good at salvaging and rehabbing stuff from thrift stores, yard sales, and, yes, even Dumpsters, and I thought it looked pretty decent. After checking in vain for Mogwai, I gave Sinclair the tour—living room, kitchen, screened porch, bedroom, and bath—then left him to poke around while I found a bud vase for my rose and poured us each a few inches of single-malt scotch, my one mature indulgence.