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.”