“Of course not,” Dufreyne said in a virtuous tone. “As I told you, beyond a general interest in the well-being of the community, Elysian Fields has nothing whatsoever to do with the lawsuit.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said flatly.
“I don’t care.” His tone shifted again, this time taking on a genuine intonation of boredom. Daniel Dufreyne, hell-spawn lawyer, was finished with this conversation. Of course it didn’t matter what I believed. What mattered was what the judge believed, and the judge would believe whatever Daniel Dufreyne told him. He turned to open the door of his Jaguar and eased into the driver’s seat. “I’ll see you in court, Daisy.”
Wait a minute.
I caught the door before he could close it. “What do you mean, you’ll see me in court? Am I named as a defendant?”
“You?” His sharklike smile returned, filled with gloating and schadenfreude. “Of course not. You’re a witness for the prosecution.”
With that, he yanked the car door closed, started the Jaguar’s motor and backed into the street. Shards of broken glass from the streetlight crunched under the Jag’s tires as he put the car in drive and roared away, crushing the symbol of my impotent rage into dust.
Oh, crap.
This was bad.
Thirty
Needless to say, the lawsuit was all anyone in Pemkowet could talk about. The town was buzzing like a hornet’s nest, the tone a mixture of outrage and salacious curiosity as details emerged and rumors circulated.
I found myself in the unlikely position of feeling sorry for Stacey Brooks. Apparently, the ghostbusting footage that she’d shot and uploaded, the footage that had gone viral, received national attention and brought a thousand or so thrill-seeking tourists to Pemkowet last fall, provided the impetus for Dufreyne’s case.
After all, it wasn’t like he could sue the ghosts of Pemkowet’s dead that had risen last fall or the no-longer-reanimated remains of Talman Brannigan or the duppy of Sinclair’s dead Grandpa Morgan’s spirit. Aside from the Tall Man’s moldering bones, they couldn’t even be proved to exist at this point, let alone summoned to appear in a court of law.
But what could be proved was that the Pemkowet Visitors Bureau, with the blessing of the tri-community governing authorities representing Pemkowet, East Pemkowet, and Pemkowet Township—and members of all three sat on the PVB’s board—had deliberately and willfully used Stacey’s videos to entice tourists to visit.
Hell, she’d just gotten a promotion for it.
And no, nowhere had there been any disclaimer, any mention that there was the possibility it could be dangerous.
It was stupid and shortsighted. I’d thought so for a long time, even before the events of last fall. Even under the best of circumstances, the eldritch community wasn’t safe. A simple will-o’-the-wisp could lead tourists astray for days out in the dunes. Fairies could abduct children and replace them with changelings. Hobgoblins mostly confined their antics to relatively harmless pranks and scams, but it’s not like being bilked on vacation is exactly a selling point.
And that was just the nature fey. God knows there was nothing safe about Lady Eris’s vampire brood. Since Stefan’s arrival, the Outcast had become a far more benevolent force in the community . . . but that didn’t make them safe. Hell, Cooper had practically zombified that tourist and his teenaged daughter.
Based on the fact that the plaintiffs were suing for emotional and psychological damages, I had an uneasy feeling that Dufreyne might have tracked down that particular family, along with other bystanders who’d sustained physical injuries. There was a part of me that felt vindicated by the repercussions of the PVB’s careless promotion, but I didn’t have it in my heart to blame Stacey the way others were. She’d just been trying to please her mother—and right up to the point where it looked like Amanda Brooks’s strategy to make Pemkowet a destination for paranormal tourism was about to blow up in our faces, pretty much everyone in town had thought it was brilliant.
Now . . . not so much.
I’d fully intended to use one of my remaining bark chips to request an audience with Hel that evening, but it was already dark when I left the station, and halfway down the block, Mikill the frost giant pulled up alongside me in his dune buggy.
“Daisy Johanssen!” He hailed me in a booming voice, holding up his rune-marked left hand. “I am bidden—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I tugged my Pemkowet High School ski cap down further over my ears and climbed into the buggy. “Hi, Mikill. I take it Hel’s heard the news?”
Mikill nodded gravely, his beard crackling with ice. “Her harbingers brought word today.”
I scrunched down in the buggy’s passenger seat, bracing myself for the arctic blast of wind. “Let’s go.”
Twenty minutes later, we’d successfully navigated our way across the dunes, appeased Garm—another distinctly not safe eldritch entity—and spiraled down the vast interior of Yggdrasil II’s trunk.
I knelt before Hel’s throne, feeling the weight of her displeasure. It wasn’t directed at me personally, but oh, I could still feel it. The air in the abandoned sawmill was almost humming with tension.
“Rise, my young liaison,” she said to me. I got to my feet and met her gaze with an effort. Both eyes were blazing; the left with malevolence, the right with stern disapproval. “It has come to my attention that this infernally begotten lawyer has shown his hand. Tell me what this lawsuit betokens.”
“Nothing good,” I said. “I can’t be sure, my lady, but I think that this lawyer Dufreyne means to bankrupt the city of Pemkowet and force us to sell a large, valuable piece of land.”
Hel’s voice dropped to a subterranean register that echoed in the marrow of my bones. “My territory.”
“Yes.”
“To whom? For what purpose?” Her ember eye flared. “Is it the Greek Hades? Does he declare war after all?”
I shook my head. “Dufreyne didn’t deny that he worked for Hades, but he said Hades isn’t declaring war on you and isn’t interested in Pemkowet.”
Hel’s gaze sharpened. “And you believed this to be true?”
“Yes,” I said. “Again, I can’t be sure. But to the best of my ability, I believe he spoke the truth. Not the whole truth, but a part of it. Beyond that . . .” I turned up my hands in a helpless gesture. “I’m sorry, my lady. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Hel did that immortal deity thing where she sat motionless on her throne and stared into the unknowable distance for a seemingly endless period of time, thinking unknowable thoughts. Mikill and the other frost giants attending her did the same, standing like ice sculptures.
I did that chilled-to-the-bone mortal thing where I shifted from foot to foot in the biting cold of Little Niflheim in an effort to keep my blood circulating, periodically removing my gloves to blow on my fingers.
Right about the time I was beginning to worry in earnest about frostbite, Hel’s gaze returned from the distance. “In the days of old, I would have heaped great wealth upon my champion without a thought,” she mused. “I would have sent the duegar forth to delve beneath the mountains for the precious stones and metals that all humans prize beyond reason, and bidden them wreak their craft to create treasures of such cunning and magic and beauty that mortals would fight and die to possess them. But now I preside over an empire of sand, and I have hoarded no treasure against this day. I have already bestowed the greatest gift in my possession upon you, Daisy Johanssen.” She paused, letting that sink in. “I trust dauda-dagr continues to serve you well?”
I pushed aside an unbidden memory of Janek Król’s face as he died. “Yes, my lady.”
“That is well.” Hel closed both eyes briefly, then opened them again. “I have no weapons to fight this battle of words and mortal laws,” she said grimly. “But if there is merit to your fears, I would have this unknown adversary know that I will defend my territory with every weapon at my disposal.”
There was a low rumble as the fros
t giants murmured in agreement. I inclined my head. “Duly noted, my lady.”
“Convey my warning to this hell-spawn who has claimed his birthright in service of the Greek Hades,” Hel said in distaste. “It is in my thoughts that he parses the truth to a fine edge in denying his master’s role.”
It took me a moment to translate that into twenty-first-century lingo. “You think Hades is involved?”
Hel’s stare shifted back onto the distance. Damn. At least this time it returned before I lost feeling in my fingertips. “You speak of one who is well acquainted with matters of judgment,” she said. “The Greek Hades appointed not one, but three former mortals to judge the dead and determine which were worthy of the Elysian Fields, and which were condemned to Tartarus.”
I shrugged. “So maybe Dufreyne lied.”
“Perhaps,” Hel said. “Or perhaps the Greek Hades acts in the interests of another.”
“Who?” I asked her.
Hel shook her head slowly and deliberately, giving me a disconcerting twofold glimpse of her fair, unspoiled profile and her blackened, ruined one. “To name a god in a place of power is to draw their attention, my young liaison. We have spoken enough of the Greek Hades. I will not speculate further.”
Well, okay then.
I rubbed my hands together, the padded nylon of my gloves rasping. “As you will, my lady. Do you have counsel for me?”
“Watch,” Hel said. “Listen. Convey my warning as I have bidden you. Perhaps the matter will come to naught.”
Yeah, I wasn’t buying it, either. “And if it doesn’t?”
The oppressive atmosphere in the old sawmill intensified, the air thickening until I had to fight to draw breath. Somehow it brought to mind my vision of the dome of heaven cracking open above me.
“For the sake of all involved, let us hope that it does,” Hel said in a low, ominous tone that made the rafters tremble, the blackened claw of her left hand curling on the arm of her throne. She raised two fingers of her fair right hand in dismissal. “Although your report is unwelcome, it is appreciated, my young liaison. You have my leave to depart.”
I took it, hieing myself out of the sawmill and waiting beside the dune buggy for Mikill to catch up to me. Scores of duegar clustered at a respectful distance on the main street of the buried lumber town, watching me with a mixture of hope and apprehension, but none of them spoke.
Neither did the Norns when Mikill drove past their well at the base of Yggdrasil II’s roots, although they watched me with grave eyes, and one tapped her chest with one long silver fingernail, reminding me of prior soothsaying.
Right. Trust my heart—El Corazón in my mom’s reading.
Like I could forget.
Mikill drove me home in silence, pulling into the alley beside my apartment. To my surprise, he laid one massive hand on my shoulder before I could get out of the dune buggy, chilling me through my down coat. “Whatever comes, remember that one battle does not a war make, Daisy Johanssen,” he said to me. “Do not be quick to lose heart.”
My teeth began to chatter. “I’ll try.”
The frost giant gave me one last solemn nod, regarding me with his slush-colored eyes. “That is well.”
Once safely back inside my apartment, I took a long, hot shower, standing under the spray and letting the warm water sluice over my skin and chase away the bone-deep chill of Little Niflheim.
I hoped it would ease the chill in my heart, too.
It didn’t.
Thirty-one
On the day after the news broke, Chief Bryant issued a statement on behalf of the joint codefendants that they would be pooling their resources and their respective legal counsel to review the situation and determine how to proceed, calling for cooler heads to prevail in the interim. He noted that there was a sixty-day opt-out period before the case could go to trial, which meant it probably wouldn’t be scheduled until early February.
Apparently, once a judge has certified the plaintiffs as a class—in this case, any visitors to Pemkowet who sustained injuries or damage due to supernatural causes during the time the PVB was actively promoting the ghost uprisings—all potential plaintiffs have to be notified of the class action by mail or advertisements.
Funny, I’d seen those kinds of ads plenty of times on TV—the ones that promise if you suffer from, say, mesothelioma, you might be eligible for compensation and should contact Dewey, Cheatham & Howe, etc. I’d never really thought about it.
I’d never given any thought to why someone would opt out of a class-action law, either—which, in a nutshell, was because they thought they might get a better settlement suing as an individual.
Yeah, somehow I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. Any potential plaintiffs that came forward during the opt-out period were going to do exactly what Daniel Dufreyne suggested to them.
At any rate, the fact that there wouldn’t be any trial for at least two months gave us breathing room.
What, exactly, we could do with that time was another matter.
At least one person took a pragmatic approach: Lurine, who offered the services of Robert Diaz, an attorney at a high-powered Los Angeles law firm she had on retainer. Robert Diaz was famous for, among other things, successfully defeating the attempt of Lurine’s late husband’s family to overturn his will.
“I tried to be diplomatic about it,” Lurine told me confidentially when I stopped by her place to discuss it. “But this is a huge case, cupcake. Anything over five mill, and it’s got to be decided in a federal court. Pemkowet’s not going to stand a chance with any of these small-town yokels who’ve never settled anything bigger than a sexual harassment claim at the local high school.”
“You do know it’s not going to matter how good the defense attorney is, right?” I said to her. “Dufreyne’s a goddamn hell-spawn with powers of goddamn persuasion. He doesn’t need to be good.”
Lurine shrugged. “You’ve got to take the long view, baby girl. The more holes Diaz can poke in the case, the more grounds for appeal.”
“Which we’re also likely to lose against Dufreyne’s powers of persuasion,” I pointed out.
“Maybe,” she said. “I suspect he’ll have to be judicious about how he uses them, no pun intended. If he’s too obvious, at some point it’s going to raise more suspicion than he can control. He doesn’t want to risk being the first lawyer in history to get disbarred for supernatural coercion. Anyway, Robert Diaz has a high profile, and a little extra media scrutiny can’t hurt.”
“Did you warn him about Dufreyne being a hell-spawn?” I asked.
“No.” Lurine pursed her lips. “If the city and township boards vote to take me up on my offer—which they’d be idiots not to do, but stranger things have happened—I thought I’d wait until Robert’s gotten a feel for the eldritch community before I broke the news to him.”
“Does he know about you?” I asked her.
“That’s privileged information, cupcake.” Her tone was light, but the warning in it was clear. “I can’t divulge it.”
“Sorry.” I spread my hands. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
Lurine studied me. We were sitting in her living room, wintry light pouring through the big glass windows that looked onto the landscaped yard and woods surrounding her private mansion. “You seem a little out of sorts, honey. Is it just this lawsuit or is there something else going on?”
“Isn’t the lawsuit enough?” I said drily.
“Your mom told me about your nightmare,” Lurine said. “And the reading she did for you at Thanksgiving. She just needed to talk,” she added when I didn’t respond right away. “You can’t blame her for worrying.”
“I’m not mad that she told you,” I said. “I just . . . It’s like this shadow hanging over me that never goes away. And now there’s this lawsuit, and Dufreyne smirking at me with his birthright and his goddamn schadenfreude, and I’m just so sick of feeling helpless!”
The atmosphere in the room tightened as I lost c
ontrol of my emotions, a hot, acid-tinged wash of pent fury spilling over me. A flawless crystal vase on an end table vibrated with a high-pitched sound in protest. Lurine reached out to lay one hand atop the rim, stilling it. “I know.”
Closing my eyes, I struggled to control my anger, putting it in a box. No, a trunk. A trunk reinforced with steel bands. “I had so much power in my dream, Lurine,” I whispered. “And it felt so good.”
“I bet it did.”
It wasn’t exactly the response I’d expected. I opened my eyes to find Lurine watching me, a neutral expression on her beautiful face. “Shouldn’t you remind me that it was all just an illusion or something?” I said to her. “Or maybe just reassure me that I’m not capable of it?”
“You know perfectly well that it was just a dream,” Lurine said. “Daisy, you invoked your worst nightmare. On purpose. And you set your friend Sinclair on a dark path he didn’t want to walk to do it.”
“The Night Hag—”
She raised one hand. “Baby girl, I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it. You did what you had to do, and now you’re paying a price for it. That’s all.”
“So you don’t think I’m capable of it?” There was a part of me that really, really wanted to hear those words spoken out loud by someone who knew and loved me.
Lurine didn’t oblige me. “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t?” she asked with genuine curiosity in her voice.
I thought about it.
No. No, I wouldn’t. Because it wouldn’t scare me so much if I didn’t believe in my heart of hearts that I was capable of invoking my birthright, of risking destroying the entire freaking world because I’d been pushed to the point where I couldn’t stand my own powerlessness another second longer.
Strangely enough, the realization was bracing, maybe because it also made me realize that I was a long, long way from that point. “No.”
Lurine smiled a little. “Good. Look, I know you’re upset and frustrated, but there’s nothing you can do about it right now, Daisy. Like it or not, sometimes you just have to accept it.”