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 you had to be there. “To return the incorporeal dead to rest, you must fix their shadows with a hammer and an iron nail. To cast an incorporeal shadow, a spirit lantern is required.”

The frost giant Mikill chuckled faintly into his icy beard. I resisted the urge to shoot him a dirty look. Maybe that was common knowledge in days of yore, but I was a child of the twenty-first century, and it’s not like this job came with an instruction manual. Maybe that should be my next project after I finished entering the backlog of files into the database. A handbook for agents of the underworld.

Anyway.

“Ah . . . do I need a special hammer and nails?” I asked. “Can I buy them at the local hardware store? Because if the nails have to be pure iron, I’m pretty sure I’d have to order them from, like, Restoration Hardware or something.”

Hel looked at the dwarves, who huddled to confer among themselves.

“An ordinary hammer and nails will be fine, liaison,” one of them assured me. “The iron content suffices.”

“Great.” I tucked the spirit lantern under my left arm. “So all I need to do is find Grandpa Morgan’s duppy and fix his shadow?”

“Perhaps.” The slightest hint of a frown creased Hel’s brow. Well, the fair-skinned and luminous right side, anyway. The blackened-skull side was pretty immobile. “This spirit that has never been laid to rest has no rest to which to return, save the vessel which contained it. Your young sorcerer must be prepared to recapture it.” Her ember eye flared in its socket. “That responsibility lies on his head.”

“Yes, my lady.” I hesitated. “Um . . . just in case, what if there are zombies?”