After I got off the phone with Sinclair, I called Stefan to inform him that I needed a posse. I mean, we’d talked about it before, so he was expecting my call. He just wasn’t expecting me to call it a posse.

“We will be there,” he assured me. “Cooper, Rafe, myself, and two others. I trust that will suffice?”

“Do you think I’m overdoing it?” I asked him.

“No,” Stefan said after a moment’s pause. “She challenged you on your own turf. I think a show of strength is wise.”

“Good,” I said. “And . . . thank you.”

“I owe you my life,” he said. “I remain in your debt. And it is your right as Hel’s agent to call upon your allies to defend her demesne.”

With that, he hung up.

If you like cemeteries, Pemkowet’s was charming. It dated back to the 1800s, when the town was founded, and featured lots of weathered headstones turning green with moss and lichen under somber pine trees and a few scattered maples. I arrived around seven o’clock, a good twenty minutes before the sun was due to set, steering my Honda along the narrow two-track that wound through the grounds, pulling off near the designated meeting place, which was in front of the elaborate Italianate mausoleum where the remains of axe murderer Talman “Tall Man” Brannigan were said to be interred. If you were to guess that it was a popular place for high school boys to bring girls to ply them with cheap beer and scare them with ghost stories, you would be correct.

But tonight it was Sinclair and his father who stood waiting before the sealed door of the mausoleum. The other members of the coven were arrayed on either side of them in a semicircle some twenty yards away. We nodded at one another.

“Daisy,” Sinclair greeted me. “Dad, this is Daisy Johanssen. Daisy, my father, Thomas Palmer.”

I held out my hand. “A pleasure.”

Mr. Palmer studied me, his eyes wary. He didn’t take my hand. He was a good-looking man, and I remembered Sinclair had said he was also a hardworking, God-fearing man. “So you’re . . .”

My tail flicked. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m the hell-spawn.”

“Huh.”

Apparently, he was also a man of few words. I hoped they would be enough to persuade his daughter.

Stefan’s posse arrived in a rumble of motorcycle engines. He directed Cooper and the others to array themselves around the cemetery in a loose circle, straddling their bikes and guarding the egresses, then parked his own gleaming Vincent Black Shadow behind my Honda and came to acknowledge me with one of his courtly half bows. He had a sword strapped to his back, and his pupils glinted in the fading light. “Hel’s liaison. I ask the honor of serving as your personal guard tonight.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That would be great.”