“Hey, wait!” Lee clambered out of the dune buggy. “What about me?”

Mikill fixed him with an implacable slush-colored stare. “You are not expected.”

“Daisy—”

I spread my hands. “Look, I told you I couldn’t promise you anything. I’ll ask, but don’t hold your breath. She’s a goddess, Lee. She’s not some imaginary character made of bits and bytes and pixels.”

“Okay.” He swallowed hard, then glanced around at the misty darkness, the watching eyes of the silent duegars. “Right. Of course. Do what you can, and I’ll . . . I’ll just wait here with the car.”

“Fine.”

With that settled, Mikill escorted me into the sawmill.

Being in the presence of a living deity is another experience that’s hard to describe. There’s just so much . . . well, presence. It’s awesome in the oldest sense of the word. It makes the very air feel different, charged and intense. It makes your skin prickle and raises the hair on the back of your neck. Whether you’re a worshipper or not, you will tremble. And you will kneel and bow your head, whether you intended to or not.

Don’t get me wrong—as Hel’s liaison I was more than prepared to offer her honor and respect. I’m just saying it would have happened regardless.

“Rise, Daisy Johanssen,” the goddess bade me, her voice tolling like a bell.

I rose.

Seated on a throne wrought from the immense saw blades that the duegars had salvaged and brilliantly repurposed, Hel regarded me. “So, my young liaison. What compels you to seek an audience?”

With an effort, I made myself return her gaze evenly, which wasn’t an easy feat. On her right side, Hel resembled some Renaissance painter’s idea of a goddess, fair-skinned, beautiful, and luminous, with boundless depths of compassion and wisdom shining forth in her gaze. That part was easy. The left side . . . the left side was another matter, burned and blackened and withered, her sunken left eye glowing like a baleful red ember in its hollow socket. It was hard to meet that eye.

“There’s something I’d like to do, my lady,” I said to her. “But I felt I should ask your permission.”

Her right eye closed, the right half of her face lovely and gracious in repose. Her left eye continued to blaze at me. “Tell me.”

I outlined my idea for a database, floundering as I tried to couch it in terms that would be comprehensible to someone whose idea of modern innovation was the Gutenberg printing press. Aboveground, there were plenty of members of the eldritch community who have embraced technology. It was different in the underworld. Well, except for Mikill’s dune buggy.