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Autumn Bones

Jacqueline Carey
Chapters (50)
  1. Cover
  2. Roc Books by Jacqueline Carey
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-one
  24. Twenty-two
  25. Twenty-three
  26. Twenty-four
  27. Twenty-five
  28. Twenty-six
  29. Twenty-seven
  30. Twenty-eight
  31. Twenty-nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-one
  34. Thirty-two
  35. Thirty-three
  36. Thirty-four
  37. Thirty-five
  38. Thirty-six
  39. Thirty-seven
  40. Thirty-eight
  41. Thirty-nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-one
  44. Forty-two
  45. Forty-three
  46. Forty-four
  47. Forty-five
  48. Forty-six
  49. Forty-seven
  50. Forty-eight

Cover

Cover for Autumn Bones

Roc Books by Jacqueline Carey

Agent of Hel

Dark Currents

Autumn Bones

One

Labor Day weekend in Pemkowet started off with a bang. Or more accurately, a whole lot of banging.

I was sitting at a table down at Union Pier, listening to a band with my boyfriend, Sinclair—well, I’m not sure I can call him that yet. We’ve been dating for about three weeks and taking it slow.

Okay, maybe I’d better back this up.

My name is Daisy Johanssen, and I’m an agent of Hel. That’s Hel, the Norse goddess of the dead, who relocated to Pemkowet during World War I and currently presides over a modest underworld located in a buried lumber town beneath the shifting sand dunes that make Pemkowet one of Michigan’s premier resort destinations. Wild, untrammeled dunes, white sand beaches along the Lake Michigan shoreline, and a booming business in paranormal tourism.

Most of the time, things run fairly smoothly, but not always. That’s where I come in. As Hel’s liaison, it’s my job to keep the peace between mundane authorities, such as the police, and the eldritch community. Things got ugly earlier this summer when a young man from a nearby college was found drowned in the river. Undines witnessed it, there were ghouls involved—long story short, it was a mess.

Anyway, the one good thing to come out of it was that Sinclair Palmer and I started dating.

So on Friday evening of the last big weekend of the summer, we were listening to music at Union Pier, a riverfront bar located in the shadow of the SS Osikayas, the old steamship permanently docked there.

Most people who know me can tell you I have a thing for music, though I have to admit that the Mamma Jammers wasn’t a band I would have picked. As you might guess from the name, they were a jam band, which meant they played long, improvisational songs that went on for-freaking-ever while stoned-looking kids in retro T-shirts swayed and nodded.

But they were friends of Sinclair’s from Kalamazoo and he’d gotten them this gig, so I was glad to be there. It was nice to feel Sinclair’s thigh brush mine under the table, nice to feel like maybe I was a couple of dates away from using the b-word out loud, even if that wasn’t entirely fair to him.

See, my life is . . . complicated.

It’s not that there are other guys in it. Well, okay. There sort of are. Just not nice, normal human guys. Not that Sinclair’s entirely normal. For one thing, he sees auras. For another . . . well, we’re still in the getting-to-know-you phase, and I’m pretty sure there are some significant things I don’t know, like why his parents split. Why his dad took Sinclair and emigrated from Kingston, Jamaica, to Kalamazoo, Michigan.