He takes a grateful sip and says, “Shoot.”
“What do you know about Oleander?”
“Oleander—as in the plant?”
I nod, watching as he adopts a thoughtful expression as I reclaim my seat. “Phyre made a weird reference to it. Going on about how it’s her middle name. Given to her by her father on her sixteenth birthday. It seemed so strange. So completely out of context, yet she clearly wanted me to know. Is there something unusual about it? What are its properties? What makes it unique from other shrubs that you’d name your daughter after it, other than the fact that the name itself is kind of pretty?”
“Well, I’m a veterinarian, not a botanist,” he says, fingertips tracing the table’s rough wood grain. “But I think it’s safe to say that it’s a common, ornamental shrub that’s considered to be extremely toxic. It’ll kill a horse easily. A person too. What else did she say?” Chay sits up a little straighter, eyes glinting, jaw clenching, granting me his undivided attention.
“About the Oleander—nothing. Though I did watch her pull a bloom from her pocket and eat it.”
Chay leans toward me. “Describe it.”
“You think it was an oleander?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, as someone who never had a home, much less a garden, I can’t say for sure. I’m not that great at identifying different species of plants, but it certainly could’ve been. Especially considering the way she made such a big deal about it. But honestly, there’s not much to describe. It was small, pink, pretty. But when she lit the stem, it emitted this horrible cloud of noxious smoke. Come to think of it, she also had a torch of dried twigs that did the same thing.”
“Were there any other effects?” Chay’s posture grows stiff, his voice tense.
I think back. “Whi
le it didn’t seem to affect her at all, for Dace and me, it was rough going. The smoke was acrid and heavy. And it wasn’t long before I started to grow really dizzy, and my vision went all blurry and weird to the point where everything around me bore this sort of strange halo-effect. I figured it was the influence of the Lowerworld. But you think it might be the oleander?”
“And you watched her eat the flower?” Chay dodges my question for one of his own. Nervously working the eagle ring on and off his finger.
I lean forward, needing to know what he knows. “Chay, what are you thinking? Does all of this actually mean something?”
Without answering, he pushes away from the table and peeks his head into the back room where Leftfoot is still examining Dace. “Chepi,” he calls. “I need you to come out here and join us. I need you to tell us everything you know about poison women.”
thirty-eight
Daire
“There hasn’t been a poison woman for years,” Chepi says. “So many years, most assume it’s a myth. Why do you ask?” Her eyes dart suspiciously toward me. As though she suddenly suspects I might be one.
I locate her son and restore his soul, just like I promised, and she still doesn’t trust me! What more do I have to do to gain her approval?
“Many cultures have stories of poison women,” Leftfoot says. Having finished examining Dace, he comes in to join us as Dace follows behind. “In Eastern Indian culture, they’re known as Vish Kanjas. Japanese myth features them as well, they’re called Dokufu. As the myth usually goes, a poison woman is chosen from infancy when she begins receiving small but regular doses of the poison in order to build up a tolerance. Over time, her bodily fluids become so contaminated that making physical contact with her becomes extremely dangerous, if not fatal.”
“But surely an oleander isn’t capable of that—aren’t they the landscaping plant of choice on the L.A. freeway system?”
“Oleander is highly toxic,” Chepi says, sliding her arm around Dace and pulling him close. “One of the most poisonous of all the common garden plants. Ingesting the nectar from the flower or chewing the leaves can prove fatal.”
“And when burned, it emits highly toxic fumes that can impair vision, cause dizziness, and worse,” Leftfoot adds.
Dace and I exchange a look. Between our dizziness and impaired vision, coupled with Phyre’s bizarre fascination with her saliva, the way her breath alternately inflamed and tempered the fire—it jells.
This has got to be it.
Phyre Oleander Youngblood is a poison woman.
“Her dad’s that crazy snake-handling prophet,” Dace says. “You remember, Suriel Youngblood. The one who used to live on the reservation that everyone sought to avoid? The one who handles the rattlers to prove how righteous he is? Claiming God would never allow him to get bit—and if by chance he did, it would only be to prove his powers to the disbelievers when he was instantly healed.”
“The one who took his wife’s maiden name?” Chepi makes a disapproving face.
“So, you think maybe he’s been feeding her a mix of rattler venom and oleander sap since she was a baby, in place of the pureed bananas and carrots the rest of us were raised on?” I ask, my gaze darting between the elders, before settling back on Dace.