Feeling her hunger crawling over me, I panicked and stabbed her in the rib cage.
Her pupils shrank. “Ouch!”
“I’m sorry!” I said in anguish. “I don’t want to do this!”
A strange clarity settled over Mary Sudbury’s face, her pupils dwindling further. It was as though the pain had given her focus. Or maybe it was something more. Reaching between us, she fingered the inch of dauda-dagr’s blade that wasn’t buried in her flesh. “It burns with cold,” she mused. “Yet it purges, too.”
I yanked it free, feeling the blade grate against her ribs.
Mary rolled off me, staring into the outdoor lights of the Locksley residence, staring at the night sky, or maybe staring at nothing at all, not caring that she was injured and bleeding. “I murdered my son, didn’t I? My precious baby boy. I didn’t put him to sleep. I drowned him in the bathtub.” She turned her head toward me. “I did, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “You did.”
Her hands found mine, wrapped around dauda-dagr’s hilt. “Let it burn, so long as it makes an end to it. There has been too much suffering.” She guided the tip to a point beneath her breastbone. “Purge me.”
“You’re sure?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Help us, O God of our salvation,” she murmured. “For the glory of Thy name. Deliver us, and purge away our sins, for Thy name’s sake.” Her hands tightened on mine. “Now!”
I shoved dauda-dagr home.
It wasn’t as hard as Stefan had led me to believe, not with Mary positioning the blade at the exact right angle, anyway. Up and under the breastbone, not through it. Not as hard as it should have been.
Mary Sudbury sighed, shuddered, died . . . and vanished, her corporeal body taking leave of the mortal plane.
I rolled onto my back and stared up at the night sky, wondering whether Mary had seen the terrible truth of her existence written in the black places between the stars, wondering whether that fleeting moment of sanity would cost her eternal damnation, wondering about the state of my own soul. I had a lot of unanswered questions.
“Daisy?” Cody squatted beside me, feeling at the back of my skull. “You okay? You’ve got quite a lump.”
That and I’d just killed two people. “Yeah, I think so.”
He shone his flashlight into my eyes. “Pupils are normal.”
For some reason, that made me laugh hysterically. Something to do with having dealt with a dozen or so ravening ghouls, I guess.
“Come on.” Cody helped me stand. “Let’s get you inside. I’ve got to call this in.”
Leaning on him, I examined dauda-dagr. There was blood on it. I wasn’t sure whether there would be.
“Here.” Stefan handed me a bandanna.
I wiped the blade clean before sheathing it. “I don’t understand this,” I said to him. “You . . . What are you? Are you alive or undead? Are you even real?”
Stefan was silent a moment. “These are not questions I can answer,” he said at length. “The nature of our existence is a mystery. Is it part of heaven’s unfathomable plan or hell’s boundless cruelty? Or is it merely a flaw in the divine edifice, a crack through which we have fallen?” He shook his head. “I cannot say. I can only tell you that we think and feel. We possess awareness of self.” He laid one hand over his recently impaled heart. “Although I die and am cast back into the world again and again, my heart beats in my chest. Blood courses through my veins. I believe myself to be real.”
“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“It is a difficult thing you did tonight, Daisy.” His voice was gentle. “You did it well. Had you not, they would have continued to prey on the unwilling. Neither of them would ever have found redemption in this world. Perhaps they will find it in the next.”
I hoped so.
Forty
Inside, Cody argued for holding Johnny and his rebel ghouls and charging them with kidnapping.
As the kidnappee, I argued against it. “Under Hel’s authority, Stefan’s within his rights to pass sentence on them. Banishment is a fitting sentence.”
“But they broke the law, Daisy,” he said impatiently. “And you’ve got rights, too. You’ve got a birth certificate and legal citizenship.”
“I know.” My head ached. “But in the eldritch community, Hel’s authority supersedes the law. And since her justice has been done, as her liaison I have to decline to press charges against them.”
Cody jerked his thumb at Jerry Dunham, who was propped shirtless against a wall, a field dressing over his gunshot wound. “What about him?”
“Him? Oh, yeah,” I said grimly. “It’s the only thing we can legally charge him with.”
“Might want to rethink that, blondie.” Dunham was pale and shivering with the onset of shock, but as remorseless as ever. “You want this whole clusterfuck coming out in a court trial? Ghouls, werewolves, hell-spawn?”
“No,” I said to him as Johnny and his battered troop beat a hasty retreat. “I was thinking you’d plead guilty.”
He gave me a rictus of a smile. “Ain’t got no incentive.”
“I’ll give you one.” Unless it was to speak to the rusalka in a low murmur, Lurine had been silent during the discussion. Now she uncoiled from around the tank with unnerving speed and loomed over him, her upper body swaying back and forth like an immense cobra’s. Her voice had taken on that implacable bronze edge, and I didn’t have to see her face to know her eyes were glittering with a deadly basilisk stare. “If you don’t, I will hunt you down and find you. And I will crush you, bit by bit, bone by bone.” The tip of her tail caressed his cheek with sensuous grace. “You understand a bit about suffering, don’t you? I’ll make it last for days. Did you know that as long as your heart’s still beating and blood’s flowing to your brain, you can live for a long, long time?”
“Rather like a headless chicken,” I added. “Only with more nerve endings.”
For the first time, Jerry Dunham looked well and truly afraid. It was pretty damn gratifying.
Cody shuddered and shook himself. “Jesus!”
“You should get out of here, too,” I said to Lurine. “We’ve got cops and paramedics on the way, and I can’t vouch for their discretion.”
Lurine glanced at the rusalka, obviously reluctant to abandon her.
“She will be safe until such time as arrangements can be made,” Stefan assured her. “I will see to it myself.”
A look passed between them, and then Lurine nodded. “My husband was on the board of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’ll start making calls.”
“You’re not—” I began in alarm.
“No, cupcake.” Her tail circled my waist, giving me an affectionate squeeze. “Of course not. Calls about arranging to transport her safely back to where she came from. Or at least to Puget Sound, which is where she got tangled in a fisherman’s net. She’s a long way from home.”
“Sorry; I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Lurine squeezed me again. After the fate she’d threatened Dunham with, you wouldn’t think that would be entirely comforting, but it was. “It’s okay. You’ve had a rough day, baby girl. I’m just glad you’re all right.”
For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder how Lurine had gotten in on this, and I asked her.
Releasing me, she nodded at Stefan. “He called me.”
“You did?” I asked him.
He inclined his head. “Of course. She declared you under her protection. It was a necessary courtesy.”
“Oh.”
Lurine shifted, dwindling abruptly from a glorious and terrifying monster to a naked B-movie starlet. “Speaking of courtesies, would you be so kind as to fetch my clothes?” she asked Stefan. “I left them in the Town Car.”
I caught Cody staring.
“What?” He shook himself again. “It’s just that I’ve seen all of her movies. Was she really your babysitter?”
“Yeah.” I smiled wearily. “Still is, apparently.”
“Oh, you’re all grown-up now, cupcake.” Lurine blew me a kiss. “But do me a favor and call your mom, okay?”
“I will,” I promised.
Minutes after Lurine departed the premises, the chief arrived. He stepped through the wreckage of the front door and surveyed the scene without comment for a long, long time before exhaling heavily. “She going to be all right?” He nodded toward the rusalka.
“I hope so, sir,” I said. “We’ve, um, already got someone working on arranging to transport her home.”
“Good.” His gaze skated over the wreckage again, taking in the shattered glass, Dunham’s shivering form propped against the wall, Stefan, his lieutenant Rafe, and half a dozen other loyal ghouls standing in the shadows by the bar, their eyes gleaming softly in the dimness. Outside, sirens sounded and red lights flashed as the EMS vehicle pulled into the driveway. The chief’s gaze shifted to Cody and me. “You two care to fill me in on the details? Wilkes and Sheriff Barnard are on their way.”
The paramedics halted in shock at the sight of the rusalka in her tank, although not as much as one might imagine. They were Pemkowet locals, and had seen a few unusual things in their day. Regaining their composure, they worked efficiently to examine Dunham and check his vitals while Cody and I reported to the chief.
It was another matter altogether when Detective Wilkes and the county sheriff arrived. Wilkes turned pale, but at least his recent dealings with the eldritch community had done a little to prepare him. Sheriff Ross Barnard let out an involuntary grunt, as though someone had punched him in the gut, and stood rooted to the spot, staring at the tank. “Holy Mary, mother of God.” Since that didn’t seem adequate, he repeated it. “Holy Mary, mother of God! Is that thing real?”