That and I’d just killed two people. “Yeah, I think so.”

He shone his flashlight into my eyes. “Pupils are normal.”

For some reason, that made me laugh hysterically. Something to do with having dealt with a dozen or so ravening ghouls, I guess.

“Come on.” Cody helped me stand. “Let’s get you inside. I’ve got to call this in.”

Leaning on him, I examined dauda-dagr. There was blood on it. I wasn’t sure whether there would be.

“Here.” Stefan handed me a bandanna.

I wiped the blade clean before sheathing it. “I don’t understand this,” I said to him. “You . . . What are you? Are you alive or undead? Are you even real?”

Stefan was silent a moment. “These are not questions I can answer,” he said at length. “The nature of our existence is a mystery. Is it part of heaven’s unfathomable plan or hell’s boundless cruelty? Or is it merely a flaw in the divine edifice, a crack through which we have fallen?” He shook his head. “I cannot say. I can only tell you that we think and feel. We possess awareness of self.” He laid one hand over his recently impaled heart. “Although I die and am cast back into the world again and again, my heart beats in my chest. Blood courses through my veins. I believe myself to be real.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“It is a difficult thing you did tonight, Daisy.” His voice was gentle. “You did it well. Had you not, they would have continued to prey on the unwilling. Neither of them would ever have found redemption in this world. Perhaps they will find it in the next.”

I hoped so.

Chapter Forty

Forty

Inside, Cody argued for holding Johnny and his rebel ghouls and charging them with kidnapping.

As the kidnappee, I argued against it. “Under Hel’s authority, Stefan’s within his rights to pass sentence on them. Banishment is a fitting sentence.”

“But they broke the law, Daisy,” he said impatiently. “And you’ve got rights, too. You’ve got a birth certificate and legal citizenship.”

“I know.” My head ached. “But in the eldritch community, Hel’s authority supersedes the law. And since her justice has been done, as her liaison I have to decline to press charges against them.”

Cody jerked his thumb at Jerry Dunham, who was propped shirtless against a wall, a field dressing over his gunshot wound. “What about him?”

“Him? Oh, yeah,” I said grimly. “It’s the only thing we can legally charge him with.”

“Might want to rethink that, blondie.” Dunham was pale and shivering with the onset of shock, but as remorseless as ever. “You want this whole clusterfuck coming out in a court trial? Ghouls, werewolves, hell-spawn?”

“No,” I said to him as Johnny and his battered troop beat a hasty retreat. “I was thinking you’d plead guilty.”