“The offenders cannot be permitted to endure.” Her voice was implacable. “The mortal man I cede to mortal authorities. But the ghouls who violated my order must be dispatched.”

“Oh,” I said again. Dauda-dagr tingled on my hip. “By me?”

Both sides of Hel’s face were stern. “By you or the newcomer who lays claim to authority over their kind.”

“Stefan?”

Hel tilted her head slightly. In the rafters, blue jays squawked and muttered. “Stefan Ludovic, yes. Unless he is complicit in this?”

“No.” Funny how quickly that denial came out of my mouth. I amended my words honestly. “Forgive me, my lady. I cannot be entirely sure. But I believe him to be innocent in the matter.”

Hel regarded me with both eyes, the compassionate and the baleful alike, and I had the feeling she could see straight through my vulnerable mortal flesh to the dense and conflicted knot of pride, anger, desire, fear, confusion, and a thousand other tangled emotions that lay within my restless hell-spawn’s soul, always fighting for ascendance.

I half hoped that she would say something painful and insightful to sever the knot. I half feared that she would dismiss me from her service as unworthy. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Instead, she made her voice gentle. “It is well that you possess hope, Daisy Johanssen. Do not lose it.”

“I’ll try not to, my lady.”

Gentleness fled, and Hel’s ember eye blazed, eclipsing the compassionate one. “It need not be done by your hand, but it must be done. Bear a message from me to this Stefan Ludovic. If he fails to administer my justice to his kind, he will be banished from my domain. Is that understood?”

I nodded. “It is.”

“And if he fails?” Hel asked me.

My left hand dropped to dauda-dagr’s leather-wrapped hilt, my fingers closing around it for comfort. Death day. Its bracing coolness seeped into my palm.

Could I kill?

It wasn’t a threshold I’d ever imagined myself crossing. But I thought about what I had seen on Schtupernatural.com, about the printouts Casimir had given me, the mermaid’s distorted face above an anonymous phone number. About the anguished hunger in Emma Sudbury’s eyes, the entire span of her mortal life sacrificed in service to her sister’s needs. About Twilight Manor, and Bethany’s emaciated frame and hollow-eyed gaze.

Yeah, maybe I could.

“If he fails, it falls to me,” I said steadily. “And I will not fail you, my lady.”

Hel inclined her head. “You may go.”

Chapter Thirty-six

Thirty-six

The frost giant Mikill was wrong about one thing. As we approached the sacred well at the base of Yggdrasil II, one of the Norns set down her bucket and beckoned to us. I glanced at Mikill, who lifted his massive shoulders in a shrug and braked the buggy.