Not only that, I was pretty sure he’d claimed his birthright. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I did. He smelled wrong. Well, that’s not exactly right, but it was something like a smell; and since he’d handily persuaded a number of people to sell property that they’d cherished for years, I was willing to bet he had demonic powers of persuasion, which meant that he had to have invoked his birthright.

Which, of course, shouldn’t be possible without breaching the Inviolate Wall. Like I said, mysterious. And it had Hel concerned enough to ask me to look into it. All I’d had to go on was a cell phone number and a Gmail address—again, pretty mysterious for a lawyer—on the card he gave Amanda Brooks at the Pemkowet Visitors Bureau after talking to her about purchasing some property that had been in her family for ages. When he didn’t respond to my calls or e-mails, I asked our resident genius and computer whiz, Lee, to investigate.

At any rate, since a request from Hel took precedence over a sleep disorder in my book, I drove over to Lee’s place to meet with him. He actually owns his own house, which given the property values around here is unusual for someone in their mid-twenties, but Lee made a lot of money in video games out in Seattle, where he was headhunted right out of high school. He moved back to Pemkowet to take care of his mother, who has severe rheumatoid arthritis, which is particularly admirable of him given the fact that she’s a nasty, controlling old bitch. Hence, the purchase of his own house.

I suppose Lee could have rented, but privacy was important to him. Or, to put it less charitably, he had a paranoid streak. Either that, or the gaming industry is rife with corporate espionage like he claims. Or both. But at least Lee seems to trust me now, and I think he considers me a friend, too.

“Hey, Daisy!” he greeted me at the door. “Come on in.”

“Thanks.” I eyed him. “Hey, you got the cast off?”

Lee waved his right arm, which had been broken in an altercation with Jen’s newly risen vampire sister, Bethany, earlier in the fall. “Last week.”

“You look good,” I said. It was true; he looked less gaunt, fuller in the face. “Do they have you doing physical therapy?”

“A little.” He flushed with pleasure. “Mostly just some light strength training. And I, um, joined the gym.”

“Good for you.”

His flush deepened. It was sort of cute. “Thanks. Do you, um, want a protein shake? I was just going to make one for myself.”

“I’ll pass,” I said. “But go right ahead. What have you got on our mysterious lawyer friend?”

Lee gave me the basics while he whipped up a vile-looking protein shake for himself in the kitchen.

In a nutshell, our mysterious lawyer, Daniel Dufreyne, was listed as a senior advisor at a financial services firm based in Detroit, although there was no direct contact information for him on the company’s website. He was a member of the Michigan and International Bar Associations, and he owned a residence in Birmingham, a wealthy suburb of Detroit.

“That’s as far as I’ve gotten on Dufreyne,” Lee said, beckoning me over to the dining table where he had a laptop with a large screen set up. “It looks like he’s gone out of his way to leave a light electronic footprint. I can dig deeper if you like, but I don’t think he’s the real story. Look.” He called up a map of the Pemkowet area.

I peered at it. “What am I looking at?”

“See these properties in red?” Lee pointed. “Here, here, and here. Those are purchases that Dufreyne negotiated in Pemkowet over the past six months. I checked the current property records, and they’re all registered to Elysian Fields LLC.”

“Which is . . . ?” I asked.

Lee shrugged. “You tell me. It’s a privately held company, and they haven’t released a public profile.”

I studied the map. “That’s a lot of property.”

He nodded. “It is.”

“And it’s adjacent to Little Niflheim, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

For the record, Little Niflheim is the unofficial—call it irreverent but affectionate—term for Hel’s demesne, the underworld beneath the dunes. Once upon a time, back in the nineteenth century, it had been an actual aboveground community, a logging town called Singapore. After the terrain was deforested by the likes of Talman Brannigan and the other shortsighted lumber barons, the dunes rolled over the town and swallowed it. Hel, Norse goddess of the dead, took up residence here in the late summer of 1914, relocating her entire cosmology in advance of the tides of World War I in Europe. The most powerful earthquake ever to occur in Michigan was recorded when Yggdrasil II, a pine tree the size of a missile silo, erupted from the sands.

My skin prickled.

“This is the old Cavannaugh property that belongs to Amanda Brooks.” Lee pointed to a sizable green wedge on the map. “You can see why someone would want to acquire it if they were looking to develop here.”

I could. “What about Little Niflheim? Who owns that property?” Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me to wonder before.

Lee’s cursor hovered over it. “It’s actually owned by the City of Pemkowet.”

I relaxed a little. “So that’s not on the market.”

“None of these were ever on the market,” Lee observed. “At least they were never listed. Apparently Elysian Fields made them an offer they couldn’t—”