“No,” I corrected him. “I said I didn’t know the first thing about handling edged weapons, which is true.” I withdrew the sheathed dagger and sat upright, straddling Cody’s lean hips. And yes, that felt pretty damn good, too. I smiled at him. “When I was a kid, I was a star pupil in Mr. Rodriguez’s Li’l Dragonz tae kwon do class four years in a row. Mom thought it would be a good way for me to get out my aggression.”

Cody laughed. It was a good laugh, full-throated and deep, his topaz eyes sparkling. “Was it?”

Reluctantly, I climbed off him. “Yeah, actually. It was.”

“Okay, my bad.” He bounded to his feet and shook himself all over. “Shall we try it again?”

We did.

It was fun, it was sexy, and it was educational. By the time we finished, I was a lot more comfortable handling dauda-dagr. I was also tired enough to collapse on the ground. I hadn’t exactly kept up with my Li’l Dragonz training in the past decade or so.

“You’re not half-bad, Daisy.” Lying on his back, Cody folded his arms behind his head. “How did you become Hel’s liaison, anyway?”

“She asked me,” I said simply.

“Really?”

I nodded. “Really. I’d already started helping out the chief with a few cases. It came to her attention, and she summoned me. She gave me the choice. I took it.” Surreptitiously, I scratched my rune-marked left palm. “I said yes.”

Cody turned his head toward me. “Why?”

The sun was hovering low above the tree line, gilding the bronze stubble on his cheeks and throat. His gold-flecked eyes, so close to mine, were wide and questioning. The clean fragrance of pine hung in the air.

“Because I wanted to believe there’s some purpose to my existence,” I said softly. “Because I want to side with order and good. You know?”

He nodded. “I know.”

It was a moment.

And maybe it could have been more, except it was the exact moment that Cody’s brother Caleb arrived with his family in tow.

“I forgot to tell you,” Cody said in an apologetic tone. “I thought it might be nice. Take a little downtime with family, grill a few steaks. You don’t mind, do you?”

On the one hand, I did; on the other hand, if my initially reluctant partner in crime fighting wanted to introduce me to his family, I wasn’t going to object. Rising and retrieving my satchel, I stowed dauda-dagr away. “No, of course not.”

Caleb Fairfax was several years older than Cody and a bit broader, with thick rusty auburn hair, and, as I remembered, he was indeed rocking the muttonchops. On him, they looked good. Or okay, anyway. If Cody was laconic, his brother was downright taciturn. Not in an off-putting way, just in the manner of a man inclined by nature to silence.