“Did it leave a scar?” I asked him. He looked blankly at me. “The sword. The other month, when you . . .” I touched my chest with my fingertips.
“No.” He shook his head. “No matter how many times we die, we remain as we were when we were first Outcast.”
“Oh.”
Stefan cleared his throat. “There is one method you may employ to deflect your own emotions from my awareness, and indeed, the awareness of others among the Outcast. It is a temporary measure, and one that requires discipline and concentration, but I can teach it to you if you wish.”
I thought about it. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
I ended up staying for a while. As it turned out, Stefan’s method was a lot like the creative visualization techniques my mom taught me when I was a kid, except instead of focusing on containing my emotions and getting rid of them—or wrapping them up to be dealt with later—it was about deflecting them. Stefan had me visualize a shield with an interior polished to mirror brightness and then hold it between us in my mind.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it wasn’t.
For one thing, I’d never seen a shield in real life. All I had to work from was movies. God knows I’d seen enough of them, but still, it wasn’t the same. Apparently, you had to be really precise about the details, and I kept waffling between one half-remembered vision—Perseus in Clash of the Titans, Captain America, Richard the Lionheart in various versions of Robin Hood—and another.
After an hour, Stefan gave up. “You’ve a good grasp of the concept, Daisy,” he said to me. “You just need to articulate your vision.”
“I know, I know.” My head was aching with the effort. “I’ll try looking online later. Or maybe the library has a good book on armor.”
Again, there was a brief hesitation. “I may be able to procure something that would assist you. Allow me some time to . . . assess the matter.”
That seemed a little unnecessarily cryptic, but then, that was par for the course among the eldritch. “Okay, thanks.” My phone buzzed. Glancing down, I saw that it was a text from Sinclair, and also that it was later than I’d realized. “I should really be going.”
“Of course.” Stefan inclined his head to me. “Thank you for the courtesy of your visit. It is appreciated.”
Cooper escorted me out of the bar, his hands shoved back into his pockets. Oddly enough, I felt safer in his presence than I did with any other ghoul except Stefan—and maybe even than with Stefan, come to think of it, since there was no risk of my being attracted to a skinny Irish kid who looked six or seven years younger than me. But between the fact that he’d died daring God and the deference with which the others treated him, I had a feeling he was pretty badass in his own right, and given the care he was taking not to touch me, I suspected he was rigorous about enforcing Stefan’s orders.
“How long have you known Stefan?” I asked him at the door.
“Oh, a while.” His narrow shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “Since the late eighteen hundreds, I reckon.” He gave me a challenging look. “He’s a good one, you know. Most of us aren’t.”
“Why is that?”
“Too easy to get bitter. It’s hard to have a good relationship with the world when you’re in it but not of it.” Cooper’s mouth twisted. “It passes us by. Even a vamp can turn a mate. All we can do is use ’em up and throw ’em away. Can’t even be with our own kind. You know how that goes.”
I did. A romance between two ghouls, like the late Mary and Ray, was doomed to set off a ravenous loop. “What about other immortals?” I asked him.
He shot me an amused look. “Going to fix me up with a nice dryad, are you? It’s no good.” He shook his head. “They won’t have us. Even if they did, it’s human we were, and it’s human companionship we crave.”
“I’m sorry.” Without thinking, I put my hand on his arm. Oops.
Cooper’s pupils waxed alarmingly, sending a jolt of fear through me. Licking his lips, he took a step backward, removed one hand from his pocket, and wagged a disapproving finger at me. “Don’t go giving me a taste, Miss Daisy. Not if you want you and me to be friends.”
“Sorry!” I tried raising my imaginary shield. Nope, still couldn’t get it quite right. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.” His pupils steadied anyway. “Go on, now. Mind yourself.”
Outside, the late-afternoon sun beating down on the parking lot intensified my headache. I got into the Honda, turned it on, and cranked up the air-conditioning before checking out Sinclair’s text.
THINKING OF YOU! :)
It made me smile, but it also made me realize that I was no longer feeling settled. After an hour with Stefan Ludovic, I was feeling distinctly unsettled. My poor aching head was roiling with shields and ghouls and gallows, satyrs and orgies and werewolves on the down low, hell-spawn lawyers and sketchy land deals, island magic and African gods disguised as saints, shell games and pickpockets, pancakes and bacon and pissed-off fairies.
I called Sinclair.
“Hey, girl!” His voice sounded warm and cheerful. “Just getting ready for the last tour of the day.” He lowered his voice. “Got any plans tonight?”
Okay, just hearing his voice made me feel more settled again. “No,” I admitted. “But honestly, I don’t feel great. I’ve got a killer headache.”
There was a brief silence on the other end. “For real?” he asked. “Or are you freaking out on me, Daisy? Because you know, if anyone in this situation should be freaking out, it really should be me.”
“Are you?”
Sinclair laughed. “Are you serious, sistah? Yeah, a little. But I still want to see you.”
I smiled. “Me, too. But I really am beat. Is it okay if we take a step back today and start over where we left off tomorrow?”
“Regrets?” His tone was light, but there was a worried edge to it. “Or is it about what we talked about this morning?”
“No regrets,” I said firmly. “And, um, I’d like to talk more about what we talked about this morning, but . . .” I remembered the Fabulous Casimir’s warning. “But only if and when you feel like it. If you don’t, you don’t, and I’m good with that, too. Okay?”
“Hang on.” In the background, I could hear the muffled sound of Sinclair in his Jamaican accent directing a group of tourists to begin boarding the bus. I fidgeted with the air vents in the Honda. “Yeah, okay. You’re sure?”
I nodded. “I’m sure. So, tomorrow?”
“Deal. But I want to take you out on the town,” Sinclair warned me. “Dinner at a fancy restaurant, the whole nine yards. I want the full-on Labor Day weekend in Pemkowet experience.”
I laughed. “Okay, but if you want the real Pemkowet experience, you’ve got to do the Bridge Walk with me on Monday morning.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
He sighed into the phone. “Okay, you’ve got it. So we’re on for tomorrow night?”
My tail tingled, remembering his lingering touch at its base. I shifted in the driver’s seat, wriggling a little. “Absolutely.”
“Good. Look, I’ve got to go. Meet me for dinner at Lumière at seven o’clock tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
Sometimes it’s good not to think too hard, especially after a day of thinking too hard. Putting the Honda in gear, I drove to the convenience store just down the road that still carried a certain brand of wine coolers. I think they may be the last store on earth to stock them, which they do for the sake of my mother, who may be the last person on earth to drink them. I bought a four-pack and drove out to Sedgewick Estate, the riverside mobile home community where I grew up. Mom still lives there. As of three years ago, she paid off the mortgage on her lot and so she owns her home outright now.