Emmeline ignored me. “I want you to stop seeing him,” she repeated in a clipped Anglo-Caribbean accent. “You wield influence here, no matter how ignorantly or clumsily. I want you to use it. Bid the fairies and whatnot to cease their appearances. Give my brother a reason to come home where he belongs. It’s long past time.”

“Are you serious?” I stared at her in disbelief. “Why in the freaking hell would I do that?”

She didn’t answer, but I felt a palpable sense of menace rolling off her. As the legendary blues musician Muddy Waters would say, Emmeline Palmer definitely had her mojo working. A trickle of ice water ran the length of my spine.

“Are you threatening me?” In the moment, I was too incredulous to be angry. “Seriously?”

She glanced across the restaurant at Sinclair, who was making his way toward us. “Let’s just say I’ll give you a month to think about it, shall we?” Her gaze returned to me, hard and implacable. “You’ve got a charming little town here. It doesn’t need my brother and neither do you.”

Her ultimatum was delivered as Sinclair reached the table, which gave me only a split second to decide whether to respond in public and make a scene or suck it up and deal with it later. I chose option number two, getting to my feet so fast it startled Sinclair.

“Daisy? You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, fine. I, um, spilled beer on my skirt.” I pushed past him. “Just going to rinse it out.”

I got halfway to the bathroom before a tidal wave of fury hit me, leaving me shaking with the effort to control it. I turned the cold water tap on full blast, leaning over the sink and splashing my face.

You’ve got a nice little town here. Be a shame if something happened to it.

Jesus! Seriously? I mean seriously? I was Hel’s own agent in Pemkowet. Emmeline had insulted me to my face, then demanded that I help her drive Sinclair out of town. That took a hell of a lot of nerve. Or stupidity.

But what exactly could I do about it? She hadn’t made an explicit threat. She hadn’t broken any mundane laws and she wasn’t in violation of Hel’s rule of order. At least not yet, anyway.

What I could do was talk to Sinclair, which I fully intended to do. But not here, not now. What I wanted to do was vent my fury. Give it full rein, let it bring the roof crashing down on our heads if that’s what it took. The old pipes in the bathroom began to creak alarmingly and the sink began to rattle.

Uh-oh.