“Thanks,” I said. “You’re the best.”
“Damn straight,” Casimir said. “Don’t you forget it.”
After calling Cody to give him a quick update on Plan Hex, I headed down to the police station. Pemkowet was a small town and the rumor mill worked fast. It had only been a couple of hours since the news of Mrs. Claussen’s death got out, but the phone was ringing off the hook with people calling in to ask about the danger posed by the Night Hag, and Chief Bryant was seriously disgruntled.
“I’ve got half the town afraid they’re going to be attacked in their sleep!” he thundered at me in the lobby. “And the other half will be by the end of the day! And I can’t promise that they won’t be. What, exactly, am I supposed to tell them, Daisy?”
The chief almost never yelled, but I hated it when he did. It made me feel about six years old.
“Tell them we’re working on it,” I said. “Tell them we expect to have the situation under control in the next seventy-two hours.”
Chief Bryant fixed me with a long, hard stare. “Do we?”
“Absolutely,” I said with a bravado I didn’t feel. “In the meantime, the Sisters of Selene is back open for business, and people can buy steel chain to wrap around their beds down at Drummond’s.”
He looked dubious. “And that will do the trick?”
“It ought to,” I said. “Anyone who’s unsure or thinks they’re at high risk can always leave town for a few days.”
“I’d prefer not to tell anyone to leave town.” Chief Bryant sighed and rumpled his graying hair. “You know, people wouldn’t have gotten so worked up over this before the whole Halloween debacle. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be concerned—a woman is dead, after all—but they wouldn’t have panicked like this.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I know it’s not your fault,” he said to me. “So, seventy-two hours, eh?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” The chief returned my nod. “Then I’m going to put you on desk duty today, Daisy. You can give Patty a break, man the phones, and reassure folks that everything’s under control.”
My gut clenched a bit. I hoped like hell it was true. “Will do, sir.”
“Oh, and the official word on Mrs. Claussen is that she died of natural causes,” he added. “Right now, the less fuel we can add to the fire, the better. Doc Howard says that in her condition, she could have gone at any time, Night Hag or not. That’s his verdict and we’re sticking to it. Got it?”
“Got it.”
I spent a long day fielding calls from the anxious citizens of Pemkowet, repeating the same advice and reassurances, praying that they didn’t ring hollow. At least the chief spared me a confrontation with Amanda Brooks, who called to blister his ears with a rant about the fact that all the work she’d done promoting Pemkowet as a destination for the holidays was in jeopardy.
From what I could hear through the closed door of Chief Bryant’s office, he gave as good as he got this time. Yay, chief.
Mercifully, the calls had begun to taper off by the time my shift finally ended, though that eleven o’clock meeting I’d agreed to with Sinclair was looking awfully far away. The last twenty-four hours had been kind of exhausting, and now that I’d accepted the fact that there wasn’t anything I could do to catch the Night Hag tonight, all I wanted to do was order a pizza, open a bottle of wine, curl up on the couch with Mogwai and fall asleep watching some guilty-pleasure TV; something fluffy and girly to offset last night’s Saw marathon.
Well, at least I could do the pizza, couch, and cat part, and I flipped around the TV channels until I found Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, which, while not the girl-power tour de force of the original, was a good antidote to three hours of torture-porn. Instead of opening a bottle of cheap cabernet, I made a pot of strong coffee, which got me through the subsequent feature, Failure to Launch—the programming gods must have decreed tonight mediocre rom-com night, which was fine by me—and over to Sinclair’s by eleven.
I wasn’t exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—no pun intended—but I was awake and coherent.
“Come on in.” Sinclair ushered me into the living room, where his altar was located on a sideboard.
I glanced around. “No Jen?”
“Lee took her out to dinner and a movie,” he said. “I asked them not to come back until eleven thirty or so. This won’t take long.”
Despite the fact that I’d set them up, I felt an irrational surge of jealousy. It was Friday night, after all, and tired or not, I’d rather be out on a date than getting hexed. “Okay, let’s do it.”
Sinclair sat cross-legged on the floor with his back to the altar. “Have a seat across from me.”
I did as he said.
He opened one hand to reveal a small leather sack that looked a lot like the one his sister had used to place a hex on me a few months ago. Hell, for all I knew, it was the same bag. “All right. Tell me your deepest, darkest fear.”
Steeling myself, I told him.
Sinclair’s eyelids flickered. “Yeah, that’s a pretty big one.” Holding the bag cupped in both hands, he bent over and whispered into it, then tied it shut with a length of cord. Rising, he turned and placed it in an empty half of a coconut shell on his altar, which also held a handful of seashells, including a bead-encrusted conch, a dried starfish, and a framed print depicting Yemaya. There were three black taper candles surrounding the coconut shell, unlit, and a single blue pillar burning brightly.