I probably shouldn’t have stroked Cody’s jaw.

Crap.

We entered the café and took seats across from each other in a corner booth. “Sorry,” I muttered.

“Not your fault.” Cody studied the menu, although, like me, he probably had it memorized. “I called her. She wasn’t too thrilled by the ‘it’s not you; it’s me’ routine.”

“I know.”

He glanced up at me. “Oh?”

I pretended to study the menu, too. “It is my fault. I shouldn’t have intervened.”

“You did it for the right reasons.”

I coughed. “Not entirely.”

“Oh?”

Honestly, this laconic thing could drive a person crazy! “I like you,” I admitted. “I can’t help it, Cody. I’ve liked you since I was ten years old and Freddie Cooper tried to pull my pants down on the bus to see if it was true that I had a tail. You told him to stop, and when he wouldn’t, you punched him in the head. Remember?”

His eyes crinkled. “Uh-huh.”

“So . . .” I gestured helplessly.

“Daisy.” Cody reached across the booth, capturing and stilling my hands. “That was a long time ago. You know enough to understand why it wouldn’t work now.”

“Time is relative,” I murmured, trying not to feel hurt. “Rather like age.”

“What?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He squeezed my hands, and let them go. “Let’s talk about something else. Tell me . . .” He hesitated, searching for a safe topic. “Okay, tell me this. Daisy? What the, um, hell kind of name is that for a hell-spawn? Where did that come from?” Despite everything, I laughed. “I’m serious!” he insisted. “You can’t tell me it isn’t a little odd.”

The waitress drifted over to our table, bringing glasses of water. Cody ordered ribs again. I ordered the spaghetti-and-meatball special.

“It’s from a book,” I said. “My name, I mean.”

Cody looked perplexed. “If it’s The Great Gatsby, we read it in Mr. Leary’s class, and no offense, but I don’t get it.”

I sighed. “Not Daisy Buchanan. Princess Daisy.” Cody looked blank. “It’s the title of a romance novel. A big, sprawling one with dethroned royalty and secret twins and incestuous half brothers.”

“Still not getting it,” he commented. “Possibly more than ever.”

“Not a lot to get. It was guilty pleasure reading for my mom and my grandma back in the day, long before I happened. That was one of their favorites.” I tugged on a lock of my pale Scandinavian hair. “It has a blond-haired, dark-eyed heroine, okay? And a happy ending. My mom’s a big believer in happy endings.”

“Ah.” Cody’s expression changed. “That must take a special kind of strength.”

“Yeah.” I drew a line through the condensation on my water glass with one fingertip. “She was nineteen when Belphegor knocked her up,” I said without looking at Cody. “A freshman in college, the first person in her family to go. One of her roommates’ parents rented a cottage in Pemkowet over spring break. The girls thought it would be fun to use a Ouija board. No one knew enough to warn them. At three o’clock in the morning, they found Mom levitating several feet above the bed in the act of, um, congress with a shadowy figure with glowing eyes, bat wings, and a tail.”

“Yeah, I heard.” His voice was low. “She told you herself?”

“Not that part, no.” I fell silent as our food arrived, then busied myself twirling spaghetti around my fork. “Two months later, Mom found herself pregnant. She dropped out of college to have me. Grandma and Grandpa weren’t happy about it, but they stood by her. Pretty much everyone else tried to convince her it wasn’t a good idea to carry the baby to term.” I glanced at him. “Either because they believed her, or because they didn’t and they thought she was mentally ill and that the pregnancy would totally unhinge her.”

“I’m sorry,” Cody said quietly.

“It’s okay.” I gave him a wry smile. “I’m here, right? Mom refused to listen to any of them. She decided I was her baby, dammit, and she was going to love me no matter what. And that that was all that mattered, no matter who or what my father was. And if part of that was naming her little black-eyed hell-spawn after her favorite character in her favorite book, no matter how silly or inappropriate it sounds . . .” I stuck a forkful of spaghetti into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “You know what? I’m okay with it.”

Cody picked up his ribs. “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Exactly.” I pointed my fork at him. “What about you, Officer? I know what made you turn your life around the second time and become a cop. But in eighth grade, you were a JV all-star. A year later, you were a burnout. What happened?”

He tore a hunk of meat from the bone with his teeth. “Puberty.”

I waited for more. “That’s it?”

Cody didn’t elaborate. “Yep.”

Okay, then.

I thought about it while we ate our meals. I didn’t know a lot about werewolves. They were too clannish, too secretive. But I knew adolescence was hell on wheels for me, trying to control my temper, trying to cope with unexpected desires. There had been a few . . . incidents. A few things had spontaneously combusted or burst in my presence, most memorably the hot-water pipes in the girls’ locker room.

I got suspended for that one. So did Jen, for defending me from the girls who’d been taunting me. Well, actually for threatening to cut off Stacey Brooks’s hair in her sleep if she didn’t shut up.

The memory drew a reluctant smile from me, accompanied by a pang of guilt.

Anyway . . .

If it was at all the same for werewolves, no wonder Cody had sort of dropped out. Real life isn’t like the movies. If he’d gone all Teen Wolf on the basketball court, parents on the opposing team’s side would have been screaming for an animal control unit, and the entire Fairfax clan could have been outed against their will.

“I get it,” I said. Cody looked up at me from his dwindling plate of ribs. “I’m curious. As an adult, do you have full control?”

He glanced around. The café was emptying and no one was seated near us. “Depends on your willpower and self-discipline.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” He gave me an unexpected grin that it’s only fair to describe as wolfish, sending a shiver down my spine and setting my tail a-twitch. “Twenty-nine days out of a lunar month. The chief would never have hired me if I didn’t. Do you?”

I sighed with regret. “Me? Not even close.”

Fourteen

After dinner, Cody insisted on escorting me home.

“I want to take a look at that Dumpster,” he said in a pragmatic tone when I objected. “And I’ll sleep better knowing at least you got home safe. You’re in the thick of it now, Daisy Jo.”

“Oh, fine.”

We poked around the Dumpster behind the apartment. No one was lurking back there. Cody shone his flashlight beam on the dented lid to examine it. I had to warn him not to step in the puddle of dried Mogwai puke that obscured the boot print, but I showed him the photo I’d taken of it. Across the street, a handful of guys were playing a late game of pickup basketball beneath the streetlights over the court, the ball thudding rhythmically, a poignant reminder of Cody’s younger days.

“Looks like it may have been a peeper,” he said. “I still don’t like it. You’re sure you won’t stay at your mom’s tonight?”

I nodded. “No way I’m putting her in danger.”

“What about the other friend you mentioned?” he asked. “The one who helped out with the naiads?”

“Yeah, um . . .” The memory of Lurine’s coils wrapped firmly around my waist was a little too fresh. I felt my face grow warm, and cleared my throat. “For reasons I’d rather not go into, no. Not tonight.”

Cody gave me a dubious look. The light above the side door that opened onto the stairway leading to the apartments upstairs did him all kinds of favors, casting shadows on his chiseled features, glinting on a new growth of stubble that I very much wanted to touch again. Plus, he still smelled good. “Okay. You’ve got my number?”

I clasped my hands behind my back, concentrating on willpower and self-discipline. “Yep, sure do.”

He shrugged. “Then I’ll see you at the station in the morning.”

I waited until Cody was out of sight to open the side door . . .

. . . and froze.

Al the Walrus, the big pool-playing, mustache-sporting ghoul from the Wheelhouse, loomed above me on the bottom stair. His eyes glittered, all pupil. He lumbered toward me, his hungry eyes like twin abysses. “There you are!” His voice was low and grating. “Give us a taste, just a taste!” His nostrils flared, and I felt my terror drain unnaturally, and spike again. “Oh, yes! More!” He licked his lips with his thick tongue. “More and more and more!” He leered at me, coming closer. “You’ve got all kinds of more, don’t you?”

I unfroze enough to back away, raising my voice. “Get the fuck out of here!”

“That’s right.” He kept coming. “Go ahead, get angry.” He made a nasty slurping sound. “I like angry.”

In a panic, I let my anger rise, feeling my hair lift. The lightbulb in the lamp above the door burst with a popping sound.

Al the Walrus moaned, draining my anger. “Oh, so delicious! Keep it coming, little girl!”

Gah, gross! I could feel my emotions going into him, and it was disgusting, like a part of me was trickling into a sewer. Also terrifying.

Since I didn’t know what else to do, I screamed. High, loud, and piercing, like a victim in a slasher film.