Poison Fruit

by Jacqueline Carey

  “Damn, she really got you,” he said. “Let me go get some disinfectant. God knows what you could catch from a Night Hag’s bite.”

  I shuddered. “Good point.”

  Cody left and came back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bag of cotton balls and a tube of antibiotic ointment. I took off my belt, setting dauda-dagr safely aside while he administered a little basic first aid. “No offense, Daise, but from what I could make out of it, that must have been the least sexy girl-fight ever.”

  “No kidding.” I watched hydrogen peroxide bubble and fizz in a long furrow on the underside of my right forearm, gritting my teeth against the sting of it. “You try tying a single strand of hair around a Night Hag’s throat.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll leave that to you if it ever happens again.” Cody rotated my left arm to examine it. “You’re the seamstress’s daughter.”

  “Do you think more are coming?” The prospect dismayed me. I could subdue another Night Hag if I had to, but I wasn’t sure I could stand to revisit that nightmare.

  He glanced up at me. “No, not really. There’s no reason to think so. Especially not if they read Gruoch’s TripAdvisor review.” Despite the comment, his expression was serious. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I looked away, knowing full well he wasn’t talking about eldritch tourism. “You heard what she said.”

  Cody smeared ointment on a bite mark. “Yes.”

  “I watched myself do it, Cody.” Tears filled my eyes. “There wasn’t even a reason for it! I just . . . did it.”

  His hands went still on mine. “You invoked your birthright?”

  I nodded, unable to answer, my body jerking with the effort of holding back sobs.

  “Daisy, it’s okay.” Setting down the antibiotic ointment, Cody slid onto the bed and put his arms around me. “It’s okay. It wasn’t real,” he murmured against my hair. “It was just a dream. And you’re right, people do terrible things in their dreams all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Cody, it felt so good,” I whispered. “Before I realized what I’d done. That scares me. It scares the shit out of me.”

  “I know.” Cody tightened his arms around me. I clutched his shoulder blades, yearning for even closer contact, my nails digging into his skin. “But I promise you, it wasn’t real. You did what you had to do, Daisy. And it worked. It’s over.” Lifting his head, he gave me a fierce look, eyes shimmering green. “You did it. You caught the bitch, bound her, and banished her. It’s done.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  There was a moment, maybe as long as it takes for a heart to beat four or five times, where one or the other of us could have withdrawn, could have disentangled ourselves. Neither of us did.

  And then Cody kissed me savagely, his fingers sliding through my hair. I kissed him back with equal fervor, squirming to kneel astride his lap. He found the hem of my tank top and yanked it off. Placing my hands on his chest, I shoved him down onto the bed and straddled him.

  “I need to be on top tonight,” I informed him. The memory of waking with the Night Hag crouched on my chest was a little too fresh. “Understand?”

  He flashed a wolfish grin. “Totally.”

  It was enough. I didn’t think about my dream or the Night Hag. I didn’t think about anything but this moment, here and now. About Cody’s mouth on my breasts, suckling my nipples to aching points. About working my way down his lean, muscled torso, nuzzling the treasure trail of wiry bronze hair that led from just below his washboard abs to the waistband of his pajama bottoms. I untied the drawstring, easing them over his hips and freeing his erection—and no, for the record, neither boxers nor briefs. Cody watched with narrowed eyes while I took him into my mouth.

  “Enough!” he growled after a minute. “Come here.”

  My tail twitching with anticipation, I wriggled out of my own pajama bottoms and crawled back up the length of his body, wrapping one hand around his throbbing cock and fitting it to me.

  Cody let out a deep, guttural sound of satisfaction as I sank down onto him. I might have, too.

  “Are you okay?” he asked me.

  I leaned down to kiss him. “Uh-huh.”

  “Good.” He ran a few strands of my blond hair through his fingers, his expression turning uncertain and vulnerable. “Because I hate to see you cry, Daisy. I really fucking hate to see you cry.”

  Since I didn’t have a response, I kissed him again with lip-bruising savagery, then pulled myself upright to ride him for all it was worth, his hips thrusting upward to meet mine, my tail curling between us, shuddering my way to one minor and one fairly earth-shattering climax before Cody swore and arched his back in his own, his nails raking my thighs, his cock spurting inside me.

  Okay, so that happened.

  The thing I loved best about the aftermath with Cody was the sheer physical easiness of it. We were comfortable together. I lay with my cheek pressed to his chest, one leg thrown over him, while he stroked my spine from the nape of my neck to the tip of my tail, occasionally scratching the base of it with perfect and delicious unself-consciousness.

  “We shouldn’t have done this,” I mumbled.

  “Probably not,” he agreed, his fingers working their magic on the base of my tail. “Are you sorry?”

  I wriggled against him. “No. But I should go.”

  Cody looked at me. “Don’t.” Hoisting himself on one elbow, he fished the leather pouch of Sinclair’s hex charm from beneath the pillows and threw it as far away as possible. “Stay.” His topaz eyes were gentle, without a trace of green. “You shouldn’t be alone, Daisy. Not tonight, not after what you went through. It’s late—the sun’s coming up in a few hours. Stay with me.”

  So I did.

  Twenty-one

  I slept soundly in Cody’s bed, with Cody wrapped around me. I’m not going to lie—it was nice. Very nice. It made me feel warm and safe and protected, which was exactly what I needed.

  Of course, there was a certain irony to the fact that the thing I feared the most was the result of my own impulsive desires and struggles with temptation, but . . . never mind. I’d think about that later.

  Thanks to daylight saving time, it was late when the dawn woke us, after seven thirty. I felt Cody stir, the bristles on his chin catching on my hair, and turned over beneath his arm. “Good morning.”

  “Morning, Pixy Stix.” He smiled at me, eyes crinkled with sleep. “Did you sleep okay?”

  “I did.” I rubbed one hand over his raspy cheek. “You?”

  Cody’s smile deepened. “Mm-hmm.”

  I glanced at the clock. “You’re not on duty this morning, are you?”

  “No.” He shook his head against the pillow. “I’m back on the night shift tonight. But one of us ought to call the chief ASAP and let him know the Night Hag’s been bound and banished,” he said in a more pragmatic tone. “He’ll want to hold a press conference to announce it.”

  “Good point.”

  Cody levered himself upright, groping for his pajama bottoms. “You should have the honors, Daise. You’re the one who got the job done.” He yawned. “If you want to wash up first, go ahead. I’ll put on coffee.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  Okay, so I felt a little self-conscious calling Chief Bryant while wrapped in Cody’s plaid bathrobe, but the satisfaction I got from the chief’s sincere praise more than made up for it. In the kitchen, Cody got a pot of coffee brewing.

  “Help yourself when it’s done,” he said. “Let me brush my teeth. Then I’ll see about breakfast.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “Let me guess. Venison sausage?”

  Cody raised his eyebrows back at me. “For your information, Daisy Jo, there are bagels and cream cheese in the refrigerator. I just need to get the toaster out of my workshop. And, um, a butter knife.”

  “I’ll get it,” I offered.

  “No, you sit tight.” He pointed at the couch. “
Relax. Turn on the TV, read the paper. You’re my guest.”

  Thinking that I could at least tidy a bit and make room to sit, I hauled the ridiculously large—and frankly, quite hideous—brown-and-orange crocheted blanket off Cody’s couch and folded it into an unwieldy parcel. Since I hadn’t seen anything resembling a linen closet, I figured he stored the blanket in the battered steamer trunk that did double duty as a coffee table. At the moment, it had a couple of recent issues of the local newspaper and Cody’s clunky old laptop sitting atop it.

  I swear, I was not snooping. All I did was shift the laptop to the couch, but I must have hit a key or the touchpad. The screen was already up, and when the laptop emerged from sleep mode with a low, grinding whir, I couldn’t help but see.

  I froze.

  Apparently, Cody had been carrying on an IM correspondence with a young woman named Stephanie. Based on her profile picture, she was lovely in a wholesome, sporty kind of way, with a frank, open face, blue-gray eyes, broad, high cheekbones, and glossy brown hair.

  I closed the laptop softly, feeling like I’d been punched in the gut.

  Cody emerged from the bathroom. “Daisy.”

  I turned to face him. “I’m sorry,” I said dully. “I didn’t mean to pry. It was an accident.”

  “Daise.” He sighed and ran both hands through his hair. “I’m so sorry. We were chatting before you called last night. She’s a member of one of the Seattle clans. They set up a private forum where we could look over each other’s profiles before the mixer, maybe get to know each other in advance.”

  “Okay, well, I’m glad this is about the mixer and not some random online flirtation, but you don’t owe me any explanations, Cody,” I said in a clipped tone, trying not to betray the irrational extent of the hurt I felt. “You’ve been upfront with me the whole time. I’m a big girl. I knew what I was getting myself into. Last night . . . I needed that. I needed something to banish the nightmare; and you’re right, I needed to not be alone. So thanks for that.”

  He closed his eyes in frustration. “I’m just trying to do what’s right for my clan.”

  “I know.” I shoved my hands into the pockets of his bathrobe, balling them into fists. “I get it—I do. I just wasn’t expecting to be slapped in the face with it the first thing this morning. So if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll skip breakfast. Just give me a minute to get my things and I’m out of here.”

  Without giving him a chance to respond, I turned and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind me. I changed into yesterday’s clothes, belted dauda-dagr around my waist, and shoved my pajamas and toothbrush into my overnight bag. My dramatic exit was somewhat spoiled by the fact that I had to hunt around for the hex charm, but I finally found it under the couch in the living room where it had rolled after Cody had hurled it.

  Cody stood before the front door; not exactly blocking it, but not making it easy to pass, either. “Daisy, look. We can talk about this.”

  “We have talked about it.” I pushed past him, reaching for the doorknob. “There’s nothing left to say.”

  Halfway down the walk to his driveway, I changed my mind. Cody looked at me in wary surprise as I reentered the house.

  “Okay, here’s the thing,” I said to him. “Jen said something last week that made me think. Maybe you and I can’t have kids, but it’s not like there aren’t thousands of couples struggling with the exact same problem. You don’t just ditch someone because they might have fertility issues. And hell, we don’t even know for sure, do we? Maybe there are medical solutions that didn’t exist years ago. Outside of paranormal romance novels, I’m guessing there aren’t any case studies on hell-spawn/werewolf cross-breeding. What if we could have kids, just not werewolf kids? I’m not even saying I want kids,” I added. “I mean, at least not right now. But interracial couples deal with that kind of thing all the time. Do you think Sinclair would have broken things off with me because of the possibility that our babies might have looked more like their white mom than their black dad?”

  Cody winced. “That’s a low blow, Daise. Race in humans is mostly an artificial construct. Humans are all the same under their skin. We’re not. And if we don’t mate within our race, it will vanish.”

  “Tell me, is that a big problem in this day and age?” I gestured toward his laptop in the other room. “When you can use the lycanthropic version of Match.com to set up a transcontinental mixer?”

  His jaw tightened. “It’s a problem if we don’t, Daisy.”

  “All of you, sure,” I agreed. “But we’re not talking about the entire werewolf community. We’re just talking about you and me, Cody. Or is there an epidemic of werewolves developing feelings for someone their clan would consider an unsuitable mate? Because there aren’t a lot of other hell-spawns running around and I seem to remember you telling me relationships with humans don’t even count.”

  Cody drew a sharp breath, nostrils flaring. “It’s not just the survival of the race! Do I have to say it? There’s a huge part of my life, of who I am, that you could never, ever share. That’s not fair to either of us.”

  “Yeah, Jen said something about that, too,” I murmured. “What if you were a marathon runner and I was in a wheelchair? Would that be a deal breaker?”

  He snarled, eyes flashing green. “It’s not the same thing!” Cody thumped one fist on his bare chest, his upper lip curling back from his teeth. “I am me, and so is the wolf. The other day in the woods, you blamed the wolf for keeping us apart. You don’t understand. The wolf is me. And no matter how well you think you know the man, you can never know the wolf.”

  I held my ground. “How can you be sure? Has your wolf-self ever tried to connect with a human? What about Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves? What about that guy in the documentary who lived with grizzly bears?”

  “Ah, God, Daisy!” Cody let out a ragged gasp of despairing laughter. “Dances with Wolves was a work of pure fiction. And that guy in the documentary? The grizzly bears killed him.”

  Crap. I hadn’t actually watched the documentary; I just remembered seeing it on a shelf at the library.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “Bad examples. My point is that it’s possible that our problems aren’t insurmountable. Maybe they are. Maybe your clan is right. But we’ll never know, because we never tried.”

  Cody sighed. “Daisy, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but clan lore has the wisdom of centuries of experience on its side, passed down from generation to generation. I’m just trying to spare us both a world of hurt.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “And how’s that working out for you so far?”

  “Not so good,” he admitted.

  “Me either.” I settled the strap of my overnight bag on my shoulder. “All right, I’m going. I’ve said my piece. At least the citizens of Pemkowet can sleep easier at night,” I added. “Good work, partner.”

  Cody gazed at me with profound regret, but he didn’t try to stop me from leaving. “You, too.”

  This time, I didn’t turn back.

  Twenty-two

  Things settled down in the aftermath of the Night Hag attacks. There were a few more false reports, but those tapered off quickly. People in Pemkowet placed a lot of trust in Chief Bryant. If he said the Night Hag was gone for good, that was a promise you could take to the bank.

  Of course, there was no guarantee that another Night Hag might decide Pemkowet looked like a nice place for a getaway, but I was hoping that Gruoch’s negative testimonial would help dissuade others. And I actually had a reasonably civilized meeting with Stacey Brooks in her capacity as the PVB’s recently appointed head of online promotion regarding tweaking the wording on the website so it didn’t constitute an open invitation to all and sundry, especially predatory members of the eldritch community.

  I left Stacey mulling over new taglines like “There are no strangers in Pemkowet, only friends we haven’t met yet.” Cheesy, yes; safer, definitely.

  Needless to say, I returned Sincl
air’s hex charm to him for disabling the same day I left Cody’s place. Whatever he did to undo it worked. I didn’t have the nightmare in all its immediate visceral sense of reality again.

  But it hung over me.

  Whatever I did, wherever I went, the memory of that nightmare hung over me like a dark cloud, casting a shadow over my thoughts.

  Stefan called me from Poland the day after I dealt with the Night Hag, asking delicately if all was well. I should have known he’d have sensed my terror, though I hadn’t been sure how well our one-way emotional bond held up with an ocean between us. Apparently, just fine. I gave him a brief rundown on the whole Night Hag affair without going into the particulars of my nightmare.

  “You did well to bind her,” Stefan said to me, his faint Eastern European accent more pronounced than usual. “I am glad the situation is resolved.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Me, too. How about you? How’s your . . . situation?”

  “I believe the matter is settled,” he said. “I will remain a while longer to be certain.” Stefan hesitated. “You may recall that I spoke of the possibility of asking a favor of you upon my return.”

  Actually, I’d totally forgotten. “Of course.”

  “I fear it will come to pass.” He sounded somber. “And I wish you to know in advance that I do not ask it lightly.”

  “Stefan, I don’t think you do anything lightly,” I said. “You’ve done me plenty of favors. Of course I’d be happy to do you one in return.”

  “Do not be so swift to make assurances you may not wish to keep,” he said. “Not until you know what I ask of you.”

  I sighed. “Oh, for God’s sake! Enough with the cryptic eldritch crap. Can’t you just tell me?”

  “Forgive me.” There was a hint of amusement in his tone. “It was not my intention to subject you to cryptic eldritch crap. But it is a grave thing I mean to ask of you in your role as Hel’s liaison, Daisy.” Any trace of levity vanished. “And it is a matter best discussed in person. I merely wished to forewarn you.”