Autumn Bones (17 page)

“I’m sure. If they’re going to work, then they’ll work. But I don’t want to waste time waiting if they’re not.”

She shrugged. “Let’s go.”

Luckily for me, the Sisters of Selene was only a block and a half away. I still had to hold on to Jen’s arm the whole way, wincing at the sunlight behind my dark glasses as she steered me around the lingering tourists and reemergent locals on the sidewalks.

“Hey, Miss Dais—” Casimir began greeting me as we entered the shop. “Holy Hecate! Girl, you look like seven miles of bad road.”

I wished he’d lower his voice. “I feel like it. Cas, I need a favor. I’ve been hexed. Can you undo it?”

Casimir came out from behind the counter to lock the front door and turn the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
. “I don’t know, sugar, but I’ll do my best. Tell me all about it.”

I filled him in on the details to the best of my ability. He let out a long, low whistle when I finished.

“Damn! Bitch has balls.” There was a hint of admiration in his voice. “Did she get her hands on something personal of yours? Hair, nail clippings?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?” he pressed. “Maybe a few strands of hair caught in your boyfriend’s hairbrush? Pillow? Towel?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe. I did borrow his toothbrush. But I don’t know how she’d know
that
.”

“Neither do I,” Casimir said. “But I told you before, I don’t know a lot about obeah.”

“So you’re saying this bitch hexed Daisy with a fucking
toothbrush
?” Jen asked in disbelief.

“I’m saying it’s possible, Miss Jenny-bird,” Casimir said to her. “If you can take a DNA sample from a cheek swab, you can build a spell around a toothbrush.”

All of this standing upright and talking was setting off fresh waves of agony in my pounding skull. “So can you undo it?”

“Well, we’ll see, won’t we?” He beckoned, or at least the two overlapping blurred figures of Casimir made a gesture that I interpreted as beckoning. “Come into my altar room, Miss Daisy. Ritual participants only,” he added apologetically to Jen. “But there are some back issues of
Vogue
and
Occult Monthly
under the counter.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

Casimir led me through the door at the rear of the shop into his altar room. From what I could make out, it was a lot more clean and spare than I would have expected given his relative flamboyance.

“Step over the circle.” He guided me unobtrusively. “Good girl. Now, just make yourself comfortable on the kneeling pad while I get everything ready.”

Getting everything ready turned out to be a pretty complicated business involving numerous invocations, the donning of a tasseled and knotted scarlet cord around the waist, the lighting of candles and incense, the consecration of water with salt, the blessing of various instruments including an athamé knife and a sharpened quill feather, and the grinding of special ink in a mortar.

If I hadn’t been in excruciating pain, it would have been fascinating. I’d never actually seen the Fabulous Casimir—or anyone, fabulous or otherwise—perform a ritual like this before. Under the circumstances, I pretty much just knelt quietly in front of the altar with my eyes closed and let it all wash over me, clutching my messenger bag and concentrating on remaining upright.

“Okay, Daisy.” Casimir knelt opposite me. “I need you to hold still while I draw the seal.”

“No problem.”

He dipped the quill in the magic ink and began tracing a design onto my forehead. “This is a seal of protection. If it works, you’ll be protected for as long as the image lasts, about as long as a henna tattoo.”

Great, so I was going to look like a freak with a henna tattoo on my forehead.

The tip of the quill scratched against my skin. “You’ll still need to find the charm and dismantle it to be safe.”

“What charm?” I did my best to ask without moving my head.

“Whatever she used to fix the spell,” Casimir said patiently. “Hair, toothbrush, whatever. It could even be a photo of you.”

“Like a voodoo doll?”

“It’s the same general idea.” He dipped the quill again. “Sympathetic magic, basically. You know, in your line of work, you really should invest in a high-quality amulet,” he added. “Or ideally, a permanent tattoo.”

“On my
forehead
?” I said in alarm.

“Hold still,” he reprimanded me, which I thought was a bit unfair under the circumstances. Kind of like when the dental hygienist asks you a question, then sticks an instrument in your mouth. “No, it doesn’t have to be on your forehead, Miss Daisy. Protection spells work a lot better if you employ them
before
you’re the victim of a magical attack.”

I squinted at his blurred face. “Cooper said she had a ward. A powerful one. Is that like a protection spell?”

“Mm-hmm.” Having drawn what felt like a couple of circles and a series of straight lines, Casimir began drawing smaller, squigglier bits. “Who’s Cooper?”

“A ghoul,” I said. “He wouldn’t touch her.”

“Really.” Casimir’s hand went still. “That
would
be a powerful ward,” he mused, more to himself than me.

“I think it was a cowry shell.”

He resumed his squiggly drawing. “Cowry shells have a long, rich history of occult association.”

Too much talking. The pain in my head protested by rising to a fresh crescendo. I squeezed my eyes shut, taking refuge in the darkness. I couldn’t let myself rest there, though. “Cas?”

“Hmm?”

“Would a powerful ward protect dear Emmy from a physical ass-kicking?”

“Not in the slightest,” he assured me.

“Good.”

“All right, my dear.” There were bustling sounds as Casimir fussed with his implements. “I’m going to invoke the spell. Try to keep your eyes open.”

I cracked my eyelids and peered at his vague double image as he took up the black-handled athamé blade.

“Bound be all powers of adversity from the north, south, east, and west,” Casimir chanted, touching the blade lightly around me. “Bound be all ill-wishers and those who practice violence against the bearer of my seal! Bound and sealed by my hand and name shall be all who to seek to harm Daisy Johanssen.” He pressed the tip of the athamé against the center of the seal etched onto my brow. “By my will, so mote it be!”

Light flared around me.

For a brief, blessed instant, the pain simply vanished. It went away as though it had never been, and I could have wept with gratitude for the absence I’d taken for granted all of my healthy life. My vision cleared. The Fabulous Casimir’s face sprang into sharp focus. He was wearing a bouffant wig today, looking like a 1950s housewife. I could see the pores of his skin beneath a thick layer of makeup, his shrewd, concerned eyes studying me behind the long false lashes he wore.

And then the seal on my forehead contracted with a sizzling sound, drawing my skin tight. I doubled over in agony as the pain came thudding back—the spike between my eyes, the jackhammer in my jaw.

Through blurred eyes, I saw bits of dried ink sift to the floor like rusty snowflakes.

“Well,” Casimir said, “
that
didn’t work.”

Sixteen

T
he bad news was that the Fabulous Casimir’s failure meant that Emmeline Palmer’s power exceeded his by a considerable degree.

The good news was that Cas was pissed off about it. “Let me talk to the coven,” he said to me. “We’ll schedule a ritual with the full circle. There’s no way she’s a match for
all
of us.”

I nodded gingerly. “Okay.”

“We can do this, Daisy,” he promised me. “Don’t start looking for alternatives, you understand?”

“You mean my father?” I asked.

He shuddered. “Hell, yes, I mean your father, girl.”

I wasn’t looking. As always, I kept a tight lid on that thought. But as always, it was there. And I had to admit as I walked blindly home, clinging to the arm of an uncharacteristically quiet Jen, doing my best to support the pain-filled balloon that was my head, my tail lashing with impotent fury, that I was really fucking tired of being so goddamn powerless in a position of responsibility.

Powers of persuasion and seduction would come in really handy right about now. So would a splendid set of bat-veined wings and a fiery whip, just because.

Oh, the possibilities!

But there was that whole business about cracking the Inviolate Wall.

As much as I wanted to face down dear Emmy on my own terms, it certainly wasn’t worth unleashing Armageddon. And, too, in the back of my mind was the well-dressed hell-spawn lawyer I’d seen in the PVB office the other day, attempting to work some kind of wiles on Amanda Brooks.

He’d
smelled
bad. Rancid.

I didn’t know what that was all about, what the lawyer was up to, and why his presence and his apparent acceptance of his birthright didn’t threaten the Inviolate Wall, but I knew I didn’t want that stink on me.

As if on cue, Jojo the joe-pye weed fairy popped up from her lurking place amid the rhododendrons alongside the alley by my apartment. “Stupid reeking slattern!” she screeched at me in a brain-drilling octave that didn’t exist on any human scale, not even Mariah Carey’s. “It’s in your bag!”

Jen’s arm tightened under my grip. “What the
fuck
?”

“Seriously, Jojo?” My head hurt so badly, I wanted to lie down and cry. “Not now, okay?”

Hovering several feet above the ground on agitated wings, Jojo swore up and down and sideways in what I suspected was a variety of languages. “It’s in your
bag
! The charm is in your bag, dullard!”

I blinked. “What?”

Jojo let out another piercing shriek and tugged at her purple hair. “I can’t touch it, you fool! There’s cold steel and iron in there!”

“Um, Daise?” Jen said. “I think the fairy’s trying to tell you that Emmy’s charm is in your bag.”

Jojo bared a mouthful of teeny-tiny shark teeth. “The dark-haired one is not such a lackwit as you.”

“Gee, thanks,” Jen said.

I had no idea why Jojo would switch from plaguing me to helping me, but right now I couldn’t care less. Kneeling on the sidewalk, I eased
dauda-dagr
out of its hidden sheath and dumped the rest of the bag’s contents unceremoniously onto the concrete. I sorted through them by feel. Wallet, phone, keys, comb, hair scrunchies, a packet of tissues, lipstick—okay, I may be a hell-spawn, but I’m still a girl—a tangled set of earbuds, receipts, the lollipop that Doc Howard gave me . . . and there, buried in the heap, a small leather sack tied shut with a cord. I picked it up and gave it a cautious squeeze. It held something hard and lumpy, something soft and yielding, and something sharp and poky.

“Is this it?” I asked Jojo.

A few pedestrians were rounding the corner toward the park. With a huff, Jojo cast a glamour over herself, her appearance shifting to that of a five- or six-year-old girl. “What else would it be, you beetle-brained churl? Open it!”

Now that I actually had the thing in hand, I hesitated, squinting at Jojo’s blurry child-face. “Why should I trust you? Why would you help me?”

“You bade me spy upon her,” she said impatiently. “The sister.
She
wants to take him away from here. At least you don’t.”

Aha. So dear Emmy had managed to piss off Sinclair’s lovelorn fairy. Good enough for me. I began picking at the cord tied around the sack.

“Here.” Jen held out her hand. “Give it to me. You can’t even see straight.”

“Does it matter who opens it?” I asked Jojo.

The fairy shook her head. “No. But I can’t touch it.” She shuddered. “Iron. I loathe iron.”

It took a few minutes for Jen to get the cord untied, and she had to use her teeth. Jojo rummaged for a tissue in the pile of junk from my bag, spreading it on the sidewalk. Jen opened the leather sack and poured the contents out carefully onto the tissue, and . . . ah,
bliss
.

Once again the pain vanished; the agonizing spike drilling into my forehead, the throbbing in my tooth. The blurriness and double vision went away and the world returned to clarity, bright and crisp and beautiful.

This time it stayed that way. I held still and took a few cautious breaths before examining the sack’s contents, which appeared to be one discolored human molar, a crude iron nail, and a pile of dirt.

Jojo peered over my shoulder. “A coffin nail and graveyard dirt, like as not.”

“What about the tooth?”

She looked at me as though I were an idiot. “’Tis a tooth.”

“Gross,” Jen commented.

I poked at the objects. “She must have put it in my bag when I went to the restroom last night. But I don’t see any hair or anything of mine.”

“Maybe she brushed the tooth with the toothbrush you borrowed at Sinclair’s place,” Jen said.

Gah. “Maybe.”

Jojo heaved an impatient sigh. “You had the charm on your person, lackwit, or at least near it under your own roof. The sorceress had no need to bind it to you further. Your warlock made a careless assumption based on his own knowledge of the craft. He condemned his effort to failure when he allowed the charm within his own altar circle.”

“You know what they say,” Jen said. “‘Assume’ makes an ass out of ‘u’ and ‘me.’”

“That’s a clever turn of phrase,” the fairy said approvingly to her. To me, she said, “
You
should be grateful that I recognize the reek of iron and magic.”

“I am.” I’m not sure how sincere I sounded, but I meant it. “I owe you a favor, Jojo. A big one.”

Her eyes widened. “Truly? Then I beseech—”

“I’m
not
breaking things off with Sinclair,” I said. “That’s not on the table. But if there’s anything I can do in my capacity as Hel’s liaison, ask.”

“Oh.” Jojo looked disappointed; and I have to say that her crush on Sinclair was even more disconcerting with the little girl glamour over her.

I concentrated on seeing through it. In her true form, Jojo exuded a miniature green-skinned pubescent sexuality that was disconcerting enough, but it was better than the toddlers-and-tiaras vibe. “Look, I’ll put it in my ledger, okay?” By ledger, I meant the database I planned to create. “You can claim it anytime.”