I gazed at my hands, weak and empty, before turning to face the angel. “It’s done.”

The angel’s voice chimed over the dunes as it spread its wings, rising aloft. “Farewell.”

It departed like a meteor in reverse, a shining figure arcing into the broken sky. One last burst of golden radiance emanated from the jagged crack in heaven’s vault as the angel passed through it, and then the crack sealed itself and vanished.

The Inviolate Wall was intact once more.

It was over.

      Fifty-five

In the wake of the angel’s departure, Persephone fell to her knees in the sand, burying her face in her hands and uttering a heartrending cry. “Ah, no! What have I done?”

Even with the devastation she’d wrought, I couldn’t help but pity her. “You’ve made a terrible mistake, my lady,” I murmured.

“Yes.” Lifting her head, she gazed at me with sun-spangled eyes. “Forgive me, young Daisy. I will do what I may to rectify it. The title to the Norse Hel’s demesne shall be restored to you.”

Daniel Dufreyne cleared his throat. “You’re under no legal obligation—”

“Be silent!” Persephone drew herself upright, regal and shining. “Call a cease-fire. We shall withdraw from the battlefield. Bid your warriors to retrieve their wounded and dead,” she said to her mercenary commander. “I will make restitution to their families.”

The commander bowed his head to her. “My lady.”

“May I point out that the company we contracted signed a release indemnifying—” Dufreyne caught her glare and fell silent.

As long as they were leaving, that was good enough for me.

I retrieved dauda-dagr and found Stefan at Cody’s side, pressing a bandanna against his gunshot wound. “How is he?”

“Weak from loss of blood,” Stefan said. “But I think the bullet passed through cleanly and struck no vital organs.”

“How are you?” I asked.

Stefan paused. “The wolf has done some damage to my shoulder, but it will heal. Beyond that, I do not know how to answer you, Daisy,” he said simply. “Except to say that I am very, very grateful.”

“You took one hell of a risk today, Pixy Stix,” Cody whispered with the ghost of a smile. “Holy shit! I’m just glad the world’s still standing.”

Tears stung my eyes. “Oh, shut up and save your strength, will you?”

Cody closed his eyes. “Okay.”

If war was chaos, the aftermath wasn’t a lot better.

The mercenaries packed their gear and retrieved their fallen comrades with unnerving efficiency, or at least all of their comrades that they could find. The Wild Hunt was still out there giving chase to those who had fled the battlefield in the initial panic. Horns echoed faintly in the distance, a reminder that there were things in the world that, once unleashed, no one could take back. Field medics administered first aid to the wounded, and a few motionless figures were hustled quickly out of sight. There would be no final tally of the casualties until the next day dawned.

The gnarled figures of the elusive duegar scurried around the woods and dunes, gathering deadfalls and loose branches, heaping a cairn of dry wood over the massive corpse of the hellhound Garm in preparation for a funeral pyre.

There would be no pyre for Mikill.

All that was left of the frost giant I’d come to consider a friend was shards of ice melting into the sand.

There had been other losses.

The surviving troll sat slumped on the blood-soaked sand, mourning for his fallen mate. The indeterminate number of hobgoblins had lost two of their brethren.

Skrrzzzt’s baseball bat was in splinters and he’d lost an arm. “No worries, mamacita,” he said to me in a weary voice after trudging up the slope of the basin to join us. “It’ll grow back in time.”

Mrs. Browne was miraculously unscathed. I’d known brownies were tough, but that broom of hers must have had some serious mojo in it. She examined Cody with a critical eye and summoned a number of spiders to spin a bandage to bind his wound. Which, yes, ew, but at least it stanched the bleeding. “Ach, this one will live, all right.” She thumped his chest with one knotty fist, causing Cody to grimace. “Got a fine, strong constitution, he does.”

There were no further casualties in the Fairfax clan, who’d played a canny game of cat-and-mouse—or werewolf-and-mouse—with the mercenaries in the dunes. And of course there were no casualties among the Outcast save for their immortality, although a number of them had sustained nonfatal injuries that could no longer be eradicated by dying and reincorporating.

It made them cautious, something they hadn’t had to be for a very, very long time.

With the aid of Gus the ogre, we got Cody loaded into the back of his cousin Joe’s pickup truck and covered with a blanket, then made the trek back to our campsite on the Cavannaugh property.

What do you say to the people you love when you’ve just come within a hairsbreadth of unleashing Armageddon? Now that it was over, I was dazed and exhausted, and I didn’t have the faintest idea. No one did. We just gazed at one another in silence.

It was my mom who broke the silence. She opened her arms, tears in her eyes. “Oh, honey!”

That’s all she said, but it was enough.

I walked into her embrace, feeling her arms close around me. Mom hugged me hard, and we stayed that way for a long time.

After that we set about the business of breaking down the camp. The Fairfaxes hauled Cody off to Doc Howard to get patched up, and a number of the injured, now-mortal Outcast, including Stefan, followed suit.