“Lee?”
“Oh, hi, Daisy!” He grinned. The Velcro landing strip of beard was gone from his chin and he had a new haircut. He still had the steel hoops in his earlobes, but now they contributed a mild hint of subversiveness. He looked surprisingly good, in a heroin-chic-meets-Abercrombie-&-Fitch sort of way. “So what’s up? Are we on the verge of a zombie apocalypse?”
Clearly, I’d been distracted. I shot Jen a WTF, girlfriend? look. She shot me a We’ll talk later look in return.
“Um, yeah,” I said belatedly. “I mean . . . I don’t know. I hope not, but we’re on the verge of something, that’s for sure.”
“You’re recruiting ghostbusters?” Jen set down a shopping bag and picked up one of the hammers, hefting it. “Cool. I’m in.”
“Those are for the coven,” I said without thinking. “Not you.”
“Why not?” Her voice turned cool, but the hurt registered in her brown eyes. “I’m not good enough to help?”
I could have kicked myself. “No, I didn’t mean that! But they’ve got spells and magic and stuff to protect them.”
“You don’t.”
“No, but—” I sighed. “Jen, if you really want to help, the biggest thing you could do is convince Brandon and his friends to call off the Easties vs. Townies fight. That would be huge. The fewer kids out there I have to worry about, the better.”
“Fine,” she said promptly. “Actually, I’ve already talked to him about it. Now can I be a ghostbuster?”
“You did say we might need all the help we could get,” Sinclair reminded me. Lee didn’t say anything, glancing back and forth between us. Lee was a pretty smart guy.
“I just don’t want to put you at risk,” I said to Jen.
She smiled wryly. “Look, Daise, I know I’m the Xander in your Scooby Gang. But at least Xander could hammer a nail. So can I. And I promise, whatever happens, I won’t freak out. Let me help?”
I hesitated, then nodded. “Deal.”
Forty-five
As if to mock my sense of impending doom, Halloween day dawned bright and clear and unseasonably warm.
By noon, the festivities in the park were in full swing.
The sky overhead was that deep, vivid blue that you sometimes get in October in Michigan. A light breeze ruffled the river, but the thermometer registered seventy-four degrees. A band played in the gazebo. Grown-ups danced and drank beer. Kids with jack-o’-lanterns and black cats with arched backs painted on their cheeks laughed and shrieked, chasing one another over the grass, bobbing for apples, burying their faces in pies donated by Pomona Orchards, rolling pumpkins for prizes.
“I feel kind of silly now,” Jen muttered to me. She was wearing an old carpenter’s apron she’d appropriated from her father at some point in time, nails in the front pocket, hammer slung through a loop.
“I can live with silly.” I was sporting dauda-dagr on my hip and I had the spirit lantern tucked under my arm. As far as I was concerned, “silly” was a luxury that meant everything was quiet and calm. Ken Levitt was present in uniform representing the Pemkowet PD—Cody was on road patrol until later that evening—and he had a hammer and nails, too. Stefan’s second lieutenant, Rafe, was perched solitary on a motorcycle on the rise at the far end of the park, observing from a distance, his inhuman pallor hidden behind riding leathers and a helmet with a dark visor.
Sinclair was off on his tour bus route, but he was only a phone call and ten minutes away, tops. Sandra Sweddon, Mrs. Meyers, and Sheila Reston were all volunteering to help staff the festival.
So was my mom, which was a bit of a sticking point. Once it was clear that the event was going forward, she’d refused to back out of her commitment when I asked her. At least she’d promised to go home when the shindig in the park ended.
And right now, it looked like I was being an alarmist. If it meant we got through the next twelve hours without a catastrophe, that was okay with me, too.
I nudged Jen with my shoulder. “So tell me about you and Lee.”
She shrugged. “Nothing to tell.” I gave her a look. “Okay, okay! I talked him into letting me give him a makeover.”
“Good job.”
“I know, right?” Jen couldn’t resist a quick satisfied smirk. “He’s got a good frame for clothes.”
“So . . . would you ever?” I asked her.
“Date him?” She started to grimace, then caught herself. “Seriously, I don’t know, Daise. I mean, there’s a part of me that thinks, hey, why not? He cleans up sort of cute, he’s really smart, and a fairly nice guy once you get to know him. Then I think . . . ew, but it’s Skeletor.” She glanced guiltily in my direction. “I’m not proud of that, but I can’t help the way I feel.”
“I get it,” I said. “But it’s probably way past time to let that old high school shit go, you know?”
“I know, I know!” Jen sighed. “But if it were that easy, they wouldn’t make movies about it.”
“True words, Romy. Or were you Michele?” It’s not like I was one to talk, although I was pretty sure Stacey Brooks had earned a lifetime exception to the “grow up and get over it” clause.
She smiled. “Can you imagine the two of us turning up at our ten-year class reunion on Lee’s arms?”
“I can imagine worse things.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Jen’s smile faded. “Listen, if Lee ever does ask me out, I’ll think about it, I really will. But it’s not just the Skeletor thing. He’s got this weird paranoid, secretive streak, you know?”
“It’s not paranoia if they’re out to get you.” I dodged the halfhearted smack Jen aimed at my arm. “Okay, seriously! I don’t know about that whole corporate espionage thing—maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. But remember, Lee’s got his own high school damage. I think he’s been burned a lot of times and it’s hard for him to trust people. He was so sure I was trying to trick him when we visited Little Niflheim, and I was nice to him back in the day.”
“Point taken.” Jen cocked her head at me. “Um, speaking of secretive, Miss Johanssen . . . ?”
“What?” I flushed. Jen folded her arms. “Okay, look . . .” I glanced around, half hoping for a timely manifestation. Unfortunately, the scene in the park was the very picture of a charming small-town harvest festival. If it weren’t for Sheila Reston’s neck tattoo, it could have been a Norman Rockwell painting. Since everything was quiet on the Western Front, maybe it was finally time for me to spill the beans. “It’s complicated.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Remember the day the Tall Man’s remains went missing?” I said in a low voice. “Well, Cody and I sort of hooked up that morning.”
“Sort of?”
“Sort of as in totally,” I admitted. “And one other time. After the ghost uprising at the old hospital.”
“Wow.” Jen let out a long breath. “How was it?”
“Intense.” I shivered, my tail twitching involuntarily. “Especially the first time. He was still a little . . . wolfy.” There was a look on Jen’s face I couldn’t quite decipher, a look that said she was suddenly seeing me as a someone unfamiliar. “Look, don’t say anything to anyone about it, okay?”
The look turned to indignation. “Duh. So?”
“So . . . nothing,” I said ruefully. “I mean, we’re still not the same freakin’ species. Like I said—”
“It’s complicated,” Jen finished. “So that’s it?”
“Not exactly.” I looked around again to confirm that no one was in earshot. “Yesterday, Stefan kissed me.”
Her eyes widened. “No shit! The hot ghoul?”
“Uh-huh.”
She glanced toward Rafe, sitting motionless on his motorcycle. “Is that him up there now?”
“No,” I said. “That’s one of his lieutenants.”
“Okay.” Her gaze returned to me. “So?”
“I don’t know, Jen,” I said honestly. “Any of it. I don’t know what to think about or even how to think about it, let alone talk about it. Any of it. All of it. Either of them.” My tail began lashing with the pent-up agitation I’d been suppressing for days. “And I feel like with Halloween barreling down on us and Grandpa Morgan’s duppy out there, I’ve barely had time to breathe—”
Across the park, a beer keg blew a gasket and my mom sent an inquiring look in my direction. “Whoa, whoa!” Jen grabbed my arms. “Daise, chill.”
With an effort, I chilled. “Sorry.”
“No, my bad.” She let go of me. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“It’s okay.” I gave my mother an apologetic wave. She nodded and returned to duct-taping down plastic sheeting on the table for the pie-eating contest. Up on the rise at the other end, Rafe was pointing at me, his helmeted head cocked in a questioning manner. Great, so he’d felt it, too. When I waved him off, he settled back into a watchful pose astride his bike.
Jen glanced toward him again. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Stefan’s lieutenant keeping his distance. You’d think he’d want to get his ghoul on in a place where everyone’s happy and having fun. I mean, I know they’re not supposed to feed on the unwilling unless it’s an emergency,” she added quickly. “But as long as he’s here doing panic control, you’d think he’d want to skim a little of the good stuff off the top. I would.”
“Cooper says it’s painful,” I murmured. “Happiness, that is.”
“Who’s Cooper?”
I gave Jen a sharp look, but the question was genuine. In the weeks that I’d gotten to know Cooper, I hadn’t mentioned him to her. It made me realize how much distance my role as Hel’s liaison was creating between me and my best friend. “He’s Stefan’s other lieutenant.”
