“I hope so, too.” I contemplated Stefan. “You said it was Cooper’s heart’s desire. Is it yours, too?”

His pupils dilated, then steadied. “Yes.”

There was a lot unsaid in that simple “yes.” I sighed, leaning my forehead against his and closing my eyes.

It would be nice to have a lover I didn’t have to worry about turning into a ravening monster, a lover in whose arms I could safely sleep, a lover with whom I could contemplate a future.

But we were what we were, Stefan and I.

“I should go,” I murmured. “You probably have a lot of work to do.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t move, though, and neither did I, not for a long moment. “We’re okay?” I asked at length. “You and me?”

“Yes, Daisy.” Stefan shifted me off his lap, and both of us stood. “Somewhat to my surprise, you and I are okay.” Okay was another one of those words that sounded incongruous coming from his mouth, making me smile. He raised an eyebrow at me. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” I shook my head. “Oh, and by the way? It’s pack a wallop. Not have a wallop.”

Stefan laughed softly, tossing back his hair. His eyes gleamed. Leaning over, he kissed me, his lips lingering on mine. “Well, then, you pack a very large wallop.”

Yep, still hot.

And still dangerous.

      Forty-two

The trial date arrived with unnerving speed. It seemed as though the New Year had barely started when the lawsuit was upon us.

Local media had picked up on the precedent-setting case, thanks in part to the involvement of Lurine’s celebrity lawyer, Robert Diaz, and there was nightly coverage on all the networks.

Unfortunately, that gave Daniel Dufreyne a chance to make his case in the court of public opinion, as well as to the jury, and oh, did he. The sole piece of good news was that his powers of persuasion only worked in person. Dufreyne’s televised sound bites reviling Pemkowet’s tri-community governments for the decision to knowingly lure unsuspecting tourists into a deadly situation didn’t translate into infernal influence in living rooms across west Michigan.

It worked on the reporters, though. Coverage turned hostile right out of the gate. I felt sorry for Robert Diaz. In addition to providing counsel to the Pemkowet legal defense team, he’d appointed himself their spokesperson, assuming that his media savvy would prove an invaluable asset.

Wrong.

Dufreyne turned it against him with sly digs about how the powers that be in Pemkowet thought they could buy their way out of trouble using a slick Los Angeles attorney. And that did play well in living rooms across west Michigan. It was a conservative area and there had always been a strain of fear and resentment toward Pemkowet with its underworld and eldritch community. Hell, just last summer, we’d had protestors picketing the town hall, chanting, “No sanctuary for Satanism.”

Ironic, given the fact that a hell-spawn was prosecuting the case, but it meant that the seeds of resentment Dufreyne planted fell on fertile ground. Sensing a rising tide of bloodlust in their audience, reporters took savage glee in describing the cavalcade of eyewitness testimony for the prosecution in the days following the opening arguments.

It was an impressive array. I was right—it included the victims of Cooper’s ravening, but there were dozens of others, too, and those dozens represented more than five hundred additional claimants.

The majority of them had been present at the fateful Halloween parade, but some claimed to have been scarred by gruesome hauntings that they witnessed after Stacey Brooks’s footage went viral. With the exception of two nonfatal heart attacks and one case of broken ribs and a punctured lung, most had suffered only minor injuries—scrapes and bruises, a few sprained ankles. But each and every one of them was claiming severe emotional and psychological trauma, and court reporters described the witnesses as “haunted,” “fearful,” and “hollow-eyed.”

No cameras were allowed in the courtroom, but that’s pretty much what the sketch artists’ work reflected. Then again, the sketch artists were vulnerable to Dufreyne’s powers of persuasion. All he had to do was plant the suggestion during the course of his questioning.

It pissed me off. I may have had sympathy for Cooper’s victims, but those idiots who flocked to town, bought copies of Bloody Pemkowet from the historical society, and staked out likely sites for grisly ghost uprisings didn’t have the right to blame us when their macabre curiosity was rewarded.

It wasn’t fair.

But all I could do was pray that the judge would realize it. And that was only going to happen if our plan to offset Dufreyne’s influence with the coven’s charm was implemented.

To the naked eye, the charm wasn’t much to look at—just a plain silver cross pendant. But it had been consecrated in holy water, dedicated on an altar beneath an entire moon cycle, and imbued with the combined magic of the entire coven. When Casimir strung it on the chain I wore around my neck, I could feel the subtle vibration of power in it.

Lee, who had been granted coven privileges, promised us that the mechanism was in place to deliver a highly credible nerve gas bomb-scare warning via an untraceable phone call, although he wouldn’t provide any details, saying that the less we knew, the better.

“All I need to know is exactly when you’ll be on the witness stand, Daisy,” he said to me. “It’s going to take some time for the, um, relays to function.”