Poison Fruit: Agent of Hel

by Jacqueline Carey

  She knit her brows. “Yuh think—”

  “I just think it’s worth taking the precaution,” I said. “I’m going to look into it. And if it happens again . . . call me. Oh, I’m Daisy, by the way. Daisy Johanssen.”

  “Ah know who yuh are,” Dawn said, fishing for her phone so we could trade numbers. “Yer the ghostbuster. Ah seen yuh on YouTube.”

  I winced. “Right.”

  “Ah ’preciate it,” she said to me, direct and forthright. “And ah’d ’preciate if you didn’t say nothin’ to Scott ’lessen yer sure. He’s got enough bad thoughts in his head. He don’t need no one else puttin’ none there.”

  I nodded. “Understood.”

  Dawn reached out to grasp my hand and squeeze it. “Thank yuh.”

  “Anytime.” I returned her squeeze. “Seriously. Even if you just need to talk . . . call me.”

  Seeing Scott approaching, she stood. “Ah will.”

  Call me crazy, but I just don’t get the whole concept of a war of choice. I mean, war’s awful, right? I guess at some point there’s a choice involved in everything, but when it comes to war, it seems to me it should be the absolute last resort. And it’s a choice that should only be made for majorly compelling reasons, like defending your loved ones, or at least a grand humanitarian cause, not some trumped-up excuse to carry out a political agenda that turns out to be totally ill-conceived.

  But hey, that’s just the opinion of one lone hell-spawn. Humanity’s been waging war against itself since the dawn of recorded history, so maybe I’m missing something. All I know is I’m glad it’s a choice I’d never had to make.

  Anyway.

  I put in a couple of hours filing, then used the department’s laptop and secure connection to covertly check the Pemkowet Ledger, which is the name of the top secret online database that Lee created for me. Covertly, because Chief Bryant was a little touchy on the subject of my refusal to allow anyone else in the department access to the ledger.

  I felt a little guilty about that, but not enough to change my mind. For one thing, the eldritch code requires that I respect the privacy of members of the community, and as Hel’s liaison, I had to honor it. For another, it turns out that the ledger was a valuable tool in terms of negotiating with the community. The eldritch have a healthy regard for the notion of favors and debts owed, and I’d realized that I could use my ledger to influence individual members who were eager to rack up favor points or have past transgressions erased.

  The Pemkowet Ledger was a work in progress—I was still inputting data from the past few years—but I did several keyword searches to see if they turned up any cases I’d forgotten that involved a scary old lady sitting on someone’s chest or attempting to throttle them in their sleep.

  No dice.

  I checked the Vault and the Penalty Box, which aggregated favors and transgressions. Nothing useful there, either, but one entry in the Vault gave me a pang.

  Jojo (nickname) the joe-pye weed fairy: One large favor owed for identifying a hex charm created by Emmeline Palmer.

  Jojo the joe-pye weed fairy never got to claim that favor. Talman Brannigan—or at least his reanimated remains—had cut her down in midflight while she was attempting to defend my ex-boyfriend Sinclair Palmer, whose secret twin sister had hexed me some weeks earlier.

  Have I mentioned that my life is complicated?

  I let the cursor hover over Jojo’s entry, thinking I should probably delete it, then decided against it. Maybe someday I could repay the favor to one of her clan, assuming joe-pye weed fairies had a clan.

  Since there was nothing of use to be found in the ledger, I elected to pay a visit to one of my favorite resources: Mr. Leary, my old high school Myth and Literature teacher, who knew more eldritch folklore than most members of the community themselves.

  Mr. Leary lived in a charming old cottage in East Pemkowet, which is a separate governmental entity from the city of Pemkowet proper and Pemkowet Township; a distinction that often confuses tourists since the three are joined at the hip for all intents and purposes.

  “Daisy Johanssen!” He greeted me effusively at the door, waving a mug. “Welcome, my favorite ontological anomaly. I hope you’ve brought me an interesting conundrum to ponder. Can I entice you to join me in a hot rum toddy on this dreary day?”

  I considered the offer. After all, it was a dreary day, and technically speaking, I wasn’t on the job. “You know what? That sounds delightful.”

  “Wonderful!” Mr. Leary beamed at me. Well, maybe beamed wasn’t the right word. With his long, saturnine features and majestic mane of white hair, Mr. Leary wasn’t a beamy kind of guy, but he definitely looked pleased. I guess when you’re that passionate about your libations, it’s nice to have someone to share them with.

  He ushered me into his tidy bachelor’s kitchen, where I perched on a stool and watched him set about making a rum toddy with all the ceremony of a priest preparing to offer communion. The teakettle was filled with fresh water. Once that reached a boil, Mr. Leary used a pair of silver tongs to place one sugar cube in the bottom of a mug. After dissolving the sugar in boiling water, he added two precisely measured ounces of rum, topped the mug with more water and garnished it with a slice of lemon.

  “La pièce de résistance,” he announced, retrieving a whole nutmeg and a microplane grater from the counter. With judicious care, he passed the nutmeg over the grater three times, studied the results, then took a final swipe. “One simply must use fresh whole nutmeg.” He handed me the mug with a grave nod. “I consider that one of life’s great truths, Daisy. Heed it well.”

  I hid my smile behind the mug. “I will.”

  In the living room, we followed our familiar ritual and took our seats on the overstuffed furniture draped with old-fashioned crocheted antimacassars. For the record, I had no idea what Mr. Leary’s sexual orientation was. Although he always seemed pleased to see me, he also seemed perfectly content without companionship. I thought for a while, when he was spending time with poor old Emma Sudbury, that that might turn into something, but it appeared their friendship was purely platonic.

  “So!” Mr. Leary set his mug on a coaster and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “What do you have for me?”

  I took a sip of my rum toddy—and he might be onto something with that fresh nutmeg, because it was delicious—and told him about Scott Evans’s experience.

  “Oh, dear.” Mr. Leary gave a disappointed sigh. “I was so hoping for a good challenge.”

  “Not so much, huh?”

  He gave me a look. “What an appalling colloquialism that is. The good news is that the phenomenon is easily identified.” Rising, he perused his bookshelves and selected a volume of folklore. “In layman’s terms it’s called Night Hag Syndrome,” he said, finding the page he wanted and handing me the book. “It’s actually a common form of sleep disorder called sleep paralysis.”

  I skimmed the entry, which fit Scott Evans’s description to a T. So did the accompanying illustration of a beaky old crone crouching on the chest of a nubile young woman. Well, the crone part, anyway. “So you’re saying the Night Hag doesn’t exist?”

  Mr. Leary shook his head. “It’s a hypnopompic hallucination. It’s been well documented at clinics that specialize in sleep disorders,” he added. “There’s one affiliated with the hospital in Appeldoorn. You might suggest that the young fellow pay it a visit.”

  If Scott Evans wasn’t even taking whatever meds he’d been prescribed for post–traumatic stress disorder, I doubted he’d be willing to go to a sleep clinic, but it couldn’t hurt to suggest it to Dawn. Maybe he’d be amenable to the idea once his mood was stabilized.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I will.”

  Mr. Leary hoisted his mug. “At your service, my dear.”

  Five

  There was another line of inquiry I was planning to pursue regarding the Night Hag—it was good to have a name to put to her, even if she was a hallucination—just to cover all my
bases, but I was distracted by a call from Lee Hastings asking if we could meet for an update on his investigation.

  Long story short, there was a mysterious lawyer representing an unknown entity that was buying up large tracts of undeveloped land in Pemkowet. I’d caught a glimpse of him, and I was pretty sure he was a hell-spawn like me.

  Not only that, I was pretty sure he’d claimed his birthright. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I did. He smelled wrong. Well, that’s not exactly right, but it was something like a smell; and since he’d handily persuaded a number of people to sell property that they’d cherished for years, I was willing to bet he had demonic powers of persuasion, which meant that he had to have invoked his birthright.

  Which, of course, shouldn’t be possible without breaching the Inviolate Wall. Like I said, mysterious. And it had Hel concerned enough to ask me to look into it. All I’d had to go on was a cell phone number and a Gmail address—again, pretty mysterious for a lawyer—on the card he gave Amanda Brooks at the Pemkowet Visitors Bureau after talking to her about purchasing some property that had been in her family for ages. When he didn’t respond to my calls or e-mails, I asked our resident genius and computer whiz, Lee, to investigate.

  At any rate, since a request from Hel took precedence over a sleep disorder in my book, I drove over to Lee’s place to meet with him. He actually owns his own house, which given the property values around here is unusual for someone in their mid-twenties, but Lee made a lot of money in video games out in Seattle, where he was headhunted right out of high school. He moved back to Pemkowet to take care of his mother, who has severe rheumatoid arthritis, which is particularly admirable of him given the fact that she’s a nasty, controlling old bitch. Hence, the purchase of his own house.

  I suppose Lee could have rented, but privacy was important to him. Or, to put it less charitably, he had a paranoid streak. Either that, or the gaming industry is rife with corporate espionage like he claims. Or both. But at least Lee seems to trust me now, and I think he considers me a friend, too.

  “Hey, Daisy!” he greeted me at the door. “Come on in.”

  “Thanks.” I eyed him. “Hey, you got the cast off?”

  Lee waved his right arm, which had been broken in an altercation with Jen’s newly risen vampire sister, Bethany, earlier in the fall. “Last week.”

  “You look good,” I said. It was true; he looked less gaunt, fuller in the face. “Do they have you doing physical therapy?”

  “A little.” He flushed with pleasure. “Mostly just some light strength training. And I, um, joined the gym.”

  “Good for you.”

  His flush deepened. It was sort of cute. “Thanks. Do you, um, want a protein shake? I was just going to make one for myself.”

  “I’ll pass,” I said. “But go right ahead. What have you got on our mysterious lawyer friend?”

  Lee gave me the basics while he whipped up a vile-looking protein shake for himself in the kitchen.

  In a nutshell, our mysterious lawyer, Daniel Dufreyne, was listed as a senior advisor at a financial services firm based in Detroit, although there was no direct contact information for him on the company’s website. He was a member of the Michigan and International Bar Associations, and he owned a residence in Birmingham, a wealthy suburb of Detroit.

  “That’s as far as I’ve gotten on Dufreyne,” Lee said, beckoning me over to the dining table where he had a laptop with a large screen set up. “It looks like he’s gone out of his way to leave a light electronic footprint. I can dig deeper if you like, but I don’t think he’s the real story. Look.” He called up a map of the Pemkowet area.

  I peered at it. “What am I looking at?”

  “See these properties in red?” Lee pointed. “Here, here, and here. Those are purchases that Dufreyne negotiated in Pemkowet over the past six months. I checked the current property records, and they’re all registered to Elysian Fields LLC.”

  “Which is . . . ?” I asked.

  Lee shrugged. “You tell me. It’s a privately held company, and they haven’t released a public profile.”

  I studied the map. “That’s a lot of property.”

  He nodded. “It is.”

  “And it’s adjacent to Little Niflheim, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  For the record, Little Niflheim is the unofficial—call it irreverent but affectionate—term for Hel’s demesne, the underworld beneath the dunes. Once upon a time, back in the nineteenth century, it had been an actual aboveground community, a logging town called Singapore. After the terrain was deforested by the likes of Talman Brannigan and the other shortsighted lumber barons, the dunes rolled over the town and swallowed it. Hel, Norse goddess of the dead, took up residence here in the late summer of 1914, relocating her entire cosmology in advance of the tides of World War I in Europe. The most powerful earthquake ever to occur in Michigan was recorded when Yggdrasil II, a pine tree the size of a missile silo, erupted from the sands.

  My skin prickled.

  “This is the old Cavannaugh property that belongs to Amanda Brooks.” Lee pointed to a sizable green wedge on the map. “You can see why someone would want to acquire it if they were looking to develop here.”

  I could. “What about Little Niflheim? Who owns that property?” Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me to wonder before.

  Lee’s cursor hovered over it. “It’s actually owned by the City of Pemkowet.”

  I relaxed a little. “So that’s not on the market.”

  “None of these were ever on the market,” Lee observed. “At least they were never listed. Apparently Elysian Fields made them an offer they couldn’t—”

  “Dammit!” I didn’t mean to interrupt him, but a thought had struck me. “I’m an idiot.”

  He blinked at me. “Any particular reason?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know how to get hold of Dufreyne.”

  “Well, you can try the general number for the investment firm,” Lee said in a dubious tone. “I’m sure they’ll get the message to him. But if he hasn’t returned any of your other calls or—”

  “Right,” I said. “He’s not going to return this one. Which is why I’m not going to call him. Amanda Brooks is going to call him to set up a meeting about selling the Cavannaugh property.”

  “You think she’d do that for you?”

  “She’d better.” I stood up and slung my messenger bag over my shoulder. “She owes me. Meanwhile, keep looking. See if you can find out anything more about this Elysian Fields outfit.”

  “Will do.” Lee escorted me to the door. “Hey, did Jen happen to mention that we’re getting together for coffee tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” I said, playing it cool. “Why?”

  A tinge of pink had returned to his face. “No reason. It’s just . . . she probably wants to talk about my mom, right?”

  Jen had been helping out with Mrs. Hastings while Lee’s arm healed. She’d actually offered Jen a job as her full-time caretaker, and Jen had even considered it before deciding that the old crabapple would make her life miserable—which was saying something, since working for the Cassopolis family business cleaning houses wasn’t exactly a bed of roses.

  “Well, I don’t think she’s changed her mind about the job,” I said. “And I doubt she’s been missing your mom since you got your cast off.”

  He laughed self-consciously. “So you think it’s a date?”

  “I think it’s coffee, Lee. Ask her out to dinner. Tell her you want to thank her for helping take care of your mom.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Just call me Cupid.” Hopefully, Lee would never find out I was the one who had sent the text in the first place. Given his paranoid streak, he’d probably think we were making fun of him.

  I drove over to the Pemkowet Visitors Bureau office to talk to Amanda Brooks. Somewhat to my surprise, her daughter, Stacey—also known as my old high school nemesis—wasn’t working the reception desk. Instead, a pleasant young woman I
vaguely recognized as being a couple of years behind me in high school informed me that Amanda could meet with me in ten minutes and offered me a cup of coffee. I liked the improvement, although in terms of people offering me beverages today, Mr. Leary won hands down.

  Ten minutes later, I was sitting across from Amanda Brooks.

  “What can I do for you, Daisy?” she inquired, almost sounding sincere. There wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between us, but we both knew that if she’d taken my advice and called off the Halloween parade last month, hundreds of innocent spectators wouldn’t have gotten injured. Frankly, we were lucky there were no fatalities. Oh, and I’d pretty much saved Stacey’s life, although Stacey didn’t give me the credit for it.

  “Do you remember that lawyer who wanted to buy the Cavannaugh property?” I asked her. “I need you to call him and set up a meeting.”

  Amanda raised her brows, or at least tried to. Botox, I suspect. She was an attractive woman, in a brittle, highly groomed fashion, and she worked hard at maintaining her looks. “Why? I have no intention of selling it.”

  It hadn’t looked that way to me—before I’d talked her out of it, she’d shown every appearance of considering it. “No, I know,” I said. “I don’t think you should. But I want to talk to him.”

  “Why?”

  My tail twitched with suppressed irritation. Once, just once, it would be nice if she trusted me. “He’s representing a company called Elysian Fields,” I said. “They’ve bought up a good chunk of property around Hel’s demesne.”