Autumn Bones

“Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Daisy, I want to apologize to you,” Casimir said to me. “We concentrated our efforts on protecting Sinclair. That was a mistake.”

I shrugged. “We all agreed it was the right approach. The question is, what happens next?”

Mrs. Meyers was sitting primly on the stoop of Talman Brannigan’s mausoleum. She’d taken her knitting out of her handbag and her needles were clicking away. “No one knows, dear. That’s the problem.”

“Maybe it just . . . fizzled,” I suggested. No one was buying it. Another thought struck me. “Or maybe . . . maybe Hel claimed Grandpa Morgan’s spirit herself! She is a goddess of the dead, after all.”

It was a nice idea, and it cheered me up while it lasted, which was as long as it took for Mikill the frost giant to pull into the cemetery in his dune buggy and summon me to an audience with Hel.

Oh, crap.

Thirty-five

Hel did not have the spirit of Grandpa Morgan in custody. Hel’s sway over the dead was limited to those of the Old Norse faith, of which there were actually more than you might guess these days, but still few enough that it probably wasn’t a good idea to comment on it to a goddess.

Especially a pissed-off goddess.

To make a long story short, I was an idiot for having agreed to a parley without dictating the terms of the meeting. I was an idiot for allowing it to be held in the cemetery. I was an idiot for not knowing in advance that a second, more powerful sorceress would be in attendance. I was an idiot for not ensuring that they were disarmed of any and all magical weaponry, including what appeared to be an empty pickle jar.

Hel didn’t actually say “idiot.” She said I was foolish and that I was remiss in my duty, her voice as cold and implacable as ice, her ember eye glaring at me.

The worst part of it was that I agreed with her. I’d known better. I just hadn’t trusted my instincts.

So I didn’t defend myself. I didn’t blame anyone else. I didn’t point out that if Jojo hadn’t intervened at exactly the wrong moment, everything might have been fine. I just stood there, miserable and shivering, until Hel was finished.

Then I said I was sorry.

Hel closed her ember eye and opened her compassionate one. To be perfectly honest, I’d preferred the baleful stare. You know that look parents get when you’ve disappointed them by screwing up really, really badly? The one that makes you feel sick and squirmy inside? Well, magnify that by the power of divinity. I’d almost rather Hel punish me with her heart-squeezing trick than look at me that way.

“Is there aught else you wish to say, Daisy Johanssen?” she inquired in her sepulchral voice.

I took a deep breath, and envisioned dauda-dagr cleaving a line between me and my guilt and discomfort. At this moment they were useless emotions, and I set them aside. “Yes, my lady.” I was glad to hear the words come out firmly. “I beg your counsel. What’s going to happen because of the mistakes I made? And how can I set it right?”

Her disappointed look didn’t vanish, but it softened. “A powerful spirit has been unleashed and the dead of Pemkowet are restless. If the spirit is not contained, I fear some of them will rise.”

I swallowed. “Are we talking zombies?”

Hel hesitated. “Necromancy is an uncertain magic, and not even I can say what will manifest. I do not believe the dead of Pemkowet will rise in corporeal form. As for this . . . duppy . . . it should not be possible, since his body lies many leagues across the sea.”

“But you’re not sure.”

She inclined her head. “It would be for the best if the young sorcerer fulfilled the terms of the burden his mother has laid upon him.”

There hadn’t been a lot of time for Sinclair and me to discuss the issue, not with his father present, but there had been enough for me to sense his fury and frustration at the catch-22 situation in which his mother had placed him.

“I don’t know if he can, my lady,” I said. “It’s an unwanted burden, and I don’t know if he can accept it in good faith. But even if he can . . .” The icy mists of Little Niflheim were creeping into my bones. I balled my hands into fists and pushed them into the pockets of my motorcycle jacket, hunching my shoulders into its collar against the cold. “He’s claimed your demesne as his home. And as your agent, I’ve declared him under my protection.”

“I see.” Hel’s ember eye blazed open. Behind her, the attendant frost giants murmured and then fell silent.

Hel gazed at . . . I don’t know what. Although I stood in her line of vision, I was pretty sure she was looking through me, her lucent, long-lashed blue eye and the smoldering red one in its charred socket gazing at whatever goddesses contemplate in the unfathomable distances of time.

I stood and shivered, alternating between blowing on my ice-cold fingers and shoving them back into my pockets.

Hel’s gaze came back from the distance. “Then it is a matter of honor, Daisy Johanssen,” she said somberly to me. “And we must fight.”

“How?” I asked her.

She beckoned to Mikill. He strode forward, bowing and leaning toward the saw-blade throne to hear her bidding, then striding out of the old sawmill.

We waited.

It’s hard to calculate the passage of time in the underworld, at least for this half-human mortal. Hel and her attendants simply went motionless, suspended in a kind of divinely patient stasis. I had the feeling that whether minutes or days or years passed, it was all the same to them.

Me, not so much. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, trying to stay warm without looking utterly uncomfortable.

When Mikill returned, he was followed by a retinue of duegars, the taciturn dwarves whose magic had carved out the realm of Little Niflheim beneath the shifting sands. All of them knelt before Hel’s throne, and the foremost among them raised something bright and shiny in his gnarled hands. Returning once more from the distance, Hel accepted it with both hands, the fair and shapely right hand, the hand of life, and the blackened claw of her left, the hand of death.

She held it aloft. It was an old-fashioned lantern wrought of silver metal, the kind with shutters that block out the light, the kind you could imagine smugglers using to signal ships at sea. But either it wasn’t lit or the infamous dwarfish workmanship was so exacting that not a single ray of light escaped it.

Hel opened the shutter with her right hand.

Light spilled forth: white light, gloriously radiant, tinged with the faintest ethereal hint of blue. It emanated from a crystal that hung suspended in the center of the lantern, and in the dark, misty confines of the abandoned sawmill, it threw everything into stark relief. I raised one hand without thinking to shield my eyes, my shadow stretching behind me.

Hel closed the shutter.

The light winked out as though it had never been, plunging us back into an underworld of murky darkness lit only by the lichen glowing faintly on the walls. Yep, definitely dwarfish craftsmanship.

“Come.” Hel beckoned to me with the withered forefinger of her left hand, the crabbed claw of the hand of death.

I approached the throne. “It’s very beautiful, my lady,” I said respectfully. “May I ask what it is?”

She placed it into my hands. “It’s a spirit lantern.”

“Um . . .”

Hel sighed. Okay, she didn’t really sigh. She regarded me with an expression like a sigh, or like the immensely patient and divine equivalent of an expression like a sigh, if you know what I mean. Maybe not. Maybe