The Banshee's Divorce Attorney

• Chapter 1 Grounds for Severance
• Chapter 2 A Wailing Retainer
• Chapter 3 Summons to the Underworld
• Chapter 4 The God in the Deposition
• Chapter 5 Irreconcilable Omens
• Chapter 6 Division of Mourning Goods
• Chapter 7 Cold Hands, Colder Terms
• Chapter 8 Discovery in the Catacombs
• Chapter 9 Spousal Immunity
• Chapter 10 Cross-Examining the Reaper
• Chapter 11 Keening in the Conference Room
• Chapter 12 Motions in Limbo
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Mediation
• Chapter 14 Breach of Sacred Vows
• Chapter 15 Shadows on the Stand
• Chapter 16 A Brief Stay of Execution
• Chapter 17 Unholy Restraining Orders
• Chapter 18 Spectral Evidence
• Chapter 19 The Currency of Grief
• Chapter 20 Contempt of Courtship
• Chapter 21 Closing the Veil
• Chapter 22 Joint Custody of Souls
• Chapter 23 Rebuttal of the Damned
• Chapter 24 The Final Offer
• Chapter 25 Motion to Reconcile
• Chapter 26 Sealed in Eternity

The brass nameplate on the door read Finneas Thorne, Esq. — Supernatural & Trans-Planar Jurisprudence. Below it, somebody had scratched a small warding glyph against blood-curses with a pocketknife, but Finneas left it there because it worked better than the building’s deadbolt.

He was halfway through a tepid mug of instant chicory when the humidity in the room dropped thirty percent and the fluorescent tubes began to hum in B-flat.

Finneas didn't reach for a holy symbol or a shotgun loaded with salt. He simply took a pair of heavy, lead-lined acoustic earplugs from his desk drawer and set them next to his yellow legal pad. When you ran the only matrimonial law practice in the Greater Tri-State Area willing to take clients with no pulse, no physical tether, or three distinct astral manifestations, you learned to anticipate the atmospheric shifts. A dropping barometric pressure usually meant an elemental dispute; a smell of scorched marrow suggested a hell-spawn contested will; but this sharp, ozone-and-peat tang was distinct.

The frosted glass door vibrated once, a high-frequency tremor that made the water in his drinking glass dance in concentric rings. Then the latch gave way without a sound, swinging inward on hinges that instantly frosted over with a thin sheen of white rime.

The woman who walked into the office did not touch the linoleum. Her feet hovered roughly three inches above the scuffed floorboards, clad in gossamer wraps that trailed like frozen cobwebs. Her hair was an unruly tempest of silver and shadow, billowing as though caught in an Irish gale that existed solely around her shoulders. Her face possessed that terrible, knife-edge beauty common to the Sidhe, but her eyes were red-rimmed and surrounded by dark hollows that spoke to centuries of unceasing wakefulness.

"Mr. Thorne?" she asked.

Her voice wasn't loud, but the acoustic tiles above Finneas’s head shed a fine drizzle of dust. The vibration rattled his molars.

"Mrs. MacCarthy," Finneas said, rising and buttoning his tweed jacket. He gestured toward the vinyl-and-steel armchair opposite his desk, which had been reinforced with cold-iron bolts to prevent spontaneous phase-shifting. "Please, have a seat. Or hover comfortably. Whichever serves the current state of your estate."

She didn't sit. She drifted toward the window, looking out over the grimy brick facade of the industrial park below. Rain beat against the pane, but where she stood, the droplets froze on impact, forming intricate, jagged ferns of ice.

"I am not a MacCarthy any longer," she whispered. The glass pane shivered. "I have not answered to that clan name since the battle of the Boyne. My name is Clídna. And I am here to terminate a union."

Finneas pulled his chair back, sat down, and picked up his fountain pen. "Well, Clídna, that is generally what brings people to the fourth floor of a building zoned for light manufacturing. To ensure we are on the same page regarding jurisdiction: you are a recognized harbinger under the Western Fae Accords of 1704, classification Bean-Nighe, commonly termed a banshee?"

"I am the herald of the fall of houses," she said, turning her pale gaze toward him. "When the bloodline ends, I sing the sorrow into the soil. I am the sorrow."

"Understood. Sub-clause C of the Paranormal Domestic Relations Act applies," Finneas murmured, jotting down a quick note. "And the respondent? The spouse in question?"

"Lord Thanatos."

Finneas’s nib caught on the paper, tearing a microscopic flap in the yellow fiber. He lifted his head slowly. "Thanatos? As in the Thanatos? Non-violent aspect of mortality, psychopomp of the Hellenic pantheon, son of Nyx, elder sibling of Hypnos?"

"The very same," she said, her voice dropping into a tone so cold it smelled of dead lavender and wet granite. "And he is an impossible, emotionally barren, bureaucratic son of a void."

Finneas laid the pen down with deliberate care. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and wiped them on the sleeve of his jacket. "Clídna, let me be very plain with you. I have represented a sylph who discovered her husband was an underground coal-fire elemental. I have handled the dissolution of a partnership between a nine-hundred-year-old strigoi and an accountant from Delaware who thought she was marrying an eccentric cosmetic surgeon. But a death god? Hellenic primordials don't sign separation agreements. They don't divide the 401(k). They simply absorb the grief into the fabric of the universe and ignore the process servers."

"He will not ignore this," she hissed.

The small brass lamp on the corner of the desk shattered with a clean ping, its lightbulb popping into a shower of white filament.

Finneas didn't flinch; he simply used his legal pad to brush the shards away from his coffee cup. "A bill for thirty-four dollars for the bulb and fixture will be added to your administrative intake fee. Now, please. Sit. Let us discuss the grounds."

Clídna drifted downward, the skirts of her spectral shroud settling over the iron-bolted chair. The cold radiating from her made Finneas’s breath plume in small, pale clouds between them.

"The grounds," she began, her chin coming up with an ancient, regal fury, "are total and irreconcilable alienation of affection, dereliction of ceremonial duty, and constructive desertion extending over three distinct human centuries."

"Three hundred years is a significant period of separation," Finneas noted. "When was the last time the two of you cohabited?"

"The year the mortals call 1847," she said, her eyes darkening like peat water. "I was working. God in heaven, was I working. The western shores of Ireland were starving, Thorne. The families were perishing in the ditches with nettles on their lips. The cries went up day and night, and my throat was raw. My ribs felt as if they were splintering beneath my breastbone with the weight of the laments I was bound to carry. I called to him. I begged him to leave his ledgers, to come from his pale gardens and help me shepherd them. Do you know what he sent?"

"A proxy?" Finneas guessed.

"A memorandum," she spat. "A clay tablet wrapped in black linen, marked with his personal seal, informing me that the Great Hunger fell under the sovereign administrative district of the Famine aspects and that Hellenic protocols strictly prohibited cross-pantheon intervention without a certified treaty from the high councils."

"Well," Finneas said mildly, "jurisdictional boundaries among immortal pantheons are notoriously thorny. A border dispute between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Underworld could have triggered—"

"I was his wife!" Her voice hit an octave that bypassed human hearing entirely, vibrating Finneas's sternum and setting the filing cabinet into an involuntary lateral shimmy. "I was not a clerk asking for a border permit! My voice was breaking. When a banshee loses her voice, she loses her soul. He remained in his marbled hall, checking tallies on papyrus, sipping water from the Lethe, and sending me condolences on parchment!"

Finneas rubbed his ears, where the pressure had built up dangerously. "And since 1847?"

"Silence," she said. The rage abruptly receded, leaving behind a hollow, brittle exhaustion that Finneas recognized instantly. It was the same look he saw on human mothers from suburban developments who had spent twenty years keeping the lawn manicured while their husbands lived in corporate suites three states away. "Occasional wreaths of asphodel delivered on our anniversary. A silver coin slipped under my pillow when I fell into exhaustion after the trench battles in the Somme. He thinks kindness is an audit that balances out. He thinks because he does not strike me, because he does not betray me with mortal nymphs or water-sprites, that he is a good husband."

"Is he unfaithful?"

"He hasn't touched another creature since the fall of Mycenae," she said with a dry, bitter laugh. "He doesn't have the imagination for infidelity. No, Mr. Thorne. It is worse than that. He is completely, impeccably indifferent. He has confused eternity with stability."

Finneas picked up his fountain pen again, testing the nib against his thumb before returning to his pad. "Let us talk assets. In a mundane proceeding, we look at real property, liquid capital, shared debts. In a cross-realm divine union, the division of the marital estate is somewhat more... metaphysical. What did you bring into the marriage?"

"The weeping willow groves of Connacht," she replied, counting on fingers tipped with nails as sharp as slate. "The right of first lamentation for seven royal lineages, none of which survive, though their lands remain psychically fertile. And my freedom."

"And him?"

"Half the western bank of the Styx. A palace carved from volcanic basalt. Three hundred thousand shades of the heroic age who answer to no other master. And the Golden Sickle of the Asphodel Meadows, which was granted to him by the Titanomachy."

Finneas whistled softly. "A celestial artifact of the third epoch. The gift tax alone on that would crater the municipal bond market."

"I do not want his sickle," she said, leaning forward. The temperature in the room plummeted another five degrees; Finneas’s fingers were growing stiff around the pen. "I do not want his basalt halls or his shades. I want the severance. I want my name restored to the rolls of the Unbound Sidhe. I want the ring off my finger."

She held up her left hand. On the third finger was a band of dull, unpolished lead, set with a stone that didn't reflect the light; rather, it seemed to swallow it, creating a small, spherical hole in the air where the gem should have been.

"You can't take it off?" Finneas asked.

"If I attempt to remove it without his consent or a decree of higher annulment," Clídna said, "the stone will draw my essence into the Underworld's bedrock. I would become part of the floor of Tartarus. A paving stone for the shades of sinners to march across."

"The standard Stygian matrimonial seal," Finneas muttered, nodding. "Designed by ancient legal minds who believed divorce was an aesthetic flaw in the cosmic order. It’s an adhesion contract, Mrs. Thanatos. Highly coercive by modern supernatural standards. We can challenge the validity of the original consent if you were under duress at the time of the wedding."

"I was not under duress," she confessed, her gaze dropping to the frosted desk. "I loved him."

The words sat in the cold air between them, heavy and stubborn as unworked iron.

"I loved him," she repeated, softer this time, without the thunder in her tone. "When I was young, Thorne, the crying was too much for me. To know every death before it came, to sit on the thatched roofs and taste the blood in the chimney smoke before the fever even took the child—it was madness. The mortals hated me. They threw stones at the shadows. They cursed the sound of my skirts in the briars. But he... when he came for them, he was quiet. He didn't have the wild, butcher's grin of the war gods. He didn't smell of terror. He was cold, yes, but he was peace. He took them by the hand and the crying stopped. For a thousand years, I thought if I stayed beside the man who ended the pain, I wouldn't have to carry it alone."

"And then?" Finneas asked gently.

"Then I learned that to him, my grief was merely another harvest," she said. "He didn't want to end it. He needed it. I was the scythe's sharpening stone, Mr. Thorne. Nothing more."

Finneas leaned back, the cheap springs of his swivel chair groaning in the chill. He had seen hundreds of these. Not with death gods, perhaps, but with high-powered surgeons, corporate raiders, long-haul truckers, and immortal sorcerers. The pattern never varied. Two beings drawn together by a mutual need to tame the dark, only to discover that one of them belonged to the dark entirely and the other was merely passing through it.

"There is an issue," Finneas said, tapping the pad with the end of his pen. "A legal one, beyond the terrifying logistics of serving papers on a primordial entity whose residence has no physical zip code."

"Name it."

"The Lex Mortis of the Hellenic Concordat," Finneas told her. "Section Twelve, Paragraph Four. It states that an immortal union sealed under the old chthonic rites cannot be dissolved by unilateral declaration unless there is a material failure of the divine compact."

"He deserted me for three hundred years!"

"In human law, that's abandonment," Finneas said. "In immortal law, three centuries is considered a long weekend. Thanatos can simply tell the Arbiter that he was giving you space to perform your ancestral tasks, that his duties kept him in the nether regions, and that his love for you is as immutable and silent as death itself. The Court of the Grey Veil—which is where this will have to be heard—is notoriously conservative. They favor preservation of bonds. If a death god says he still wants his wife, the judges are likely to order three thousand years of mandatory trans-realm counseling before they even consider a preliminary decree."

Clídna’s hands curled into claws. The air pressure dropped so violently that Finneas’s ears popped. The lead earplugs on the desk began to slide toward her, pulled by a sudden, violent updraft of grief that smelled of stagnant river mud and moldering lilies.

"I will not go to counseling with him," she whispered. The tone was rising, climbing toward the fatal crescendo that historically caused sheep to drop dead in their pastures and stone towers to split along their mortar lines. "I will not sit across a table from that silent, marble-faced creature while an arch-demon tells us to practice active listening! If the law cannot break this lead, Thorne, I will scream down the gates of his city. I will tear the veil with my nails and let the living drown in the memories of the dead until the Arbiter has no choice but to—"

"Clídna."

Finneas didn't shout. He spoke with the firm, flat, midwestern clarity of a man who had been raised by two high school principals and had survived three separate audits by the Internal Revenue Service's Esoteric Division.

She stopped. The scream died in her throat, catching like a bone. The frost on the desk began to melt into greasy puddles of water.

"If you scream in here, you’ll blow the window out onto Fifth Avenue," Finneas said calmly. "The debris will hit a patrol car, the municipal thaumaturges will be called, and within forty minutes you will be bound in silver chains for disturbing the peace under the Masquerade Enforcement Act. Thanatos will have to come bail you out. He will do so with immense patience, perfect courtesy, and total condescension. He will pay your fine, he will hold the door for you, and you will be more married to him than you were when you floated into my reception area."

She closed her eyes. Her shoulders shook once, twice, not with tears—banshees did not weep, they only caused weeping—but with the dry, awful shudder of total frustration.

"Then what do I do?" she asked, her voice small and ruined. "How do I make him let me go?"

Finneas picked up his pen again. "We don't go to the Court of the Grey Veil with a complaint about loneliness, Clídna. Lonely doesn't move gods. We hit him where the Underworld actually functions."

"Where is that?"

"In the administrative pipeline," Finneas said, a small, cold smile touching the corners of his mouth. "Death is not an emotion, my dear. It is a logistical operation. It requires precise intake forms, clear transit corridors, and uncontested transitions. By virtue of your marriage to him, you are legally an officer of his court. You hold the title of Lady of the Western Threshold, do you not?"

She frowned slightly, the silver hair drifting back down around her neck. "I... I hold that title by right of the wedding gift, yes. I have never used it."

"You haven't used it, but you hold it," Finneas said. "Which means that every soul that crosses from the North Atlantic sector into his jurisdiction requires your co-signature on the metaphysical manifest before the ferryman can legally accept the obol."

Clídna’s eyes narrowed. The red rings around them seemed to glow with a sharp, calculating intelligence that had been buried under centuries of keening. "Charon cannot take them without the seal."

"Charon can't even untie his skiff without the seal," Finneas corrected. "Under the Revised Trans-Styx Navigation Treaty of 1648, an unsealed transit is an illegal salvage operation. If you exercise your spousal right of administrative injunction, the entire intake of the Hellenic Underworld grinds to a halt at the edge of the river. The shades will back up into the borderlands. The paperwork will pile up to the high vaults of Erebus. And Lord Thanatos, who has spent the last three thousand years being calm, orderly, and indifferent, will suddenly find himself facing a cosmic health-and-safety violation of catastrophic proportions."

Clídna stared at him. The lingering rime on the floor was turning to grey slush, but the air in the room was warming, returning to the normal, musty scent of damp paper and old coffee.

"You are a very devious human, Mr. Thorne," she said.

"I am an attorney," Finneas replied, reaching into his lower drawer and pulling out a fresh client intake dossier bound in blue cardboard. "Deviousness is merely what we call efficiency when the opposing party has more power than we do. Now, if we are going to do this, we need to file a preliminary petition for provisional separate maintenance, along with an emergency freeze on all inter-realm assets held in the joint marital trust."

"He will come here," she warned. "He does not leave his realm for mortals, but if I choke the river, he will come."

Finneas uncapped his pen and placed the dossier between them. "I certainly hope so. I can't serve him with the summons if he stays in Hades. Process servers charge triple for planar travel, and their survival rate is frankly embarrassing for the firm’s insurance premiums."

He slid the retainer agreement across the desk, right through the puddle of melted frost.

"Sign at the cross, Clídna," Finneas said. "Use your full name. The mortal one, the fae one, and the one he gave you. We’ll start with the injunction on the Styx. By tomorrow morning, your husband is going to realize that while death may be inevitable, divorce is an entirely different kind of eternal judgment."

Clídna reached out. Her pale fingers, long and sharp as bone needles, took the pen from his hand. Where her skin brushed his knuckles, Finneas felt a shock of cold so pure it felt like a burn, but he didn't pull back.

She looked down at the contract, her silver hair falling forward like a curtain of rain. "And if he refuses to sign the severance?"

"Then," Finneas said, leaning back and lacing his fingers together over his vest, "we take him to trial. And God help the Reaper when I put him on the stand."

The ink in Finneas’s fountain pen did not freeze, but it thickened to the consistency of black engine oil as Clídna’s signature settled onto the vellum.

She did not merely sign her name; she pressed it into the paper with three distinct flourishes that smoldered faintly at the edges. The first stroke was an archaic Ogham cipher that smelled of rain-soaked turf; the second was an intricate knotwork script recognized only by the courts of the High Fae; the third was a sharp, geometric line of Mycenaean Greek that left an imprint resembling oxidized lead.

"Now," Finneas said, blowing softly across the bottom of the document before sliding it into an asbestos-lined folder, "we discuss the matter of consideration. Even in the realm of trans-planar jurisprudence, an attorney cannot live on existential dread alone. The overhead on an office with protective wards is formidable, and the city’s water board charges extra whenever a client inadvertently causes the copper pipes to sing in tongues."

Clídna lifted her chin, the veil of silver hair drifting lazily across her shoulders like mist over a peat bog. "I carry neither gold nor paper scrip, Thorne. The dead do not leave currency in the ditches where I wash their shrouds."

"I am aware," Finneas said smoothly, stowing his pen. "Mundane fiat currency is generally useless when dealing with cross-pantheon filings anyway. The Clerk of the Grey Veil will only accept payments denominated in sovereign metaphysical weight. Which brings us to the retainer."

"And what does a mortal advocate demand from a herald of the Sidhe?"

"Your song," Finneas replied.

The banshee froze. The gossamer wraps around her wrists tightened, the pale fabric turning rigid as frozen cobwebs. In the corners of the ceiling, the rime began to crawl back toward the molding. "My voice is not a parlor trick, counselor. To take my lamentation without a death to anchor it is to invite the collapse of your own lungs. You would choke on the air before the first verse cleared your teeth."

Finneas opened the lowermost drawer of his heavy oak desk. Instead of legal pads or extra staples, the drawer housed an antique, heavy-gauge brass cylinder equipped with an intricate clockwork mechanism, an acoustic horn made of cold-hammered silver, and several runic dampeners wrapped in red silk. It looked like an unholy hybrid of a nineteenth-century phonograph and an ordnance detonator.

"This is an enchanted acoustic accumulator," Finneas explained, lifting the contraption onto the desk with a grunt. It landed with a dull, solid thud that displaced another shower of broken lightbulb shards. "Constructed in 1892 by an eccentric Swiss horologist who had an unfortunate romantic entanglement with a Rhine siren. It uses counter-harmonic bellows lined with lambskin parchment and mountain ash. It does not simply record; it captures and suspends the vibrational intent of a vocal curse."

Clídna looked down at the horn, her pale eyes narrowing with deep suspicion. "You want me to keen into a machine?"

"Precisely three bars," Finneas said, holding up three fingers. "A standard minor-third lamentation. No higher than a B-flat in the sixth octave. I need enough raw metaphysical grief to post the initial administrative bond with the court. If we are going to file an emergency freeze on the Styx navigation manifests, the High Magistrate will demand a deposit to cover potential demurrage costs in the event our injunction is deemed vexatious. Your sorrow is worth more on the inter-realm exchange than five hundred ounces of minted electrum."

She drifted closer to the edge of the desk, her ethereal weight exerting no pressure on the floorboards, though the air grew so thin Finneas felt a familiar ache behind his sinuses. "Three bars of my true voice would shatter this entire tenement, Thorne. It would curdle the milk in every refrigerator within three city blocks. The women in the maternity ward across the avenue would start weeping for children they haven't yet conceived."

"The brass is lined with three inches of compacted lead and salt from the Dead Sea," Finneas said, completely unimpressed. "And the silver horn is calibrated to disperse ninety-nine percent of the psychic backsplash directly into the municipal sewer lines, where it will merely cause the local rat population to experience a brief, constructive bout of melancholy. We will both survive the transaction, provided you do not indulge in an improvisational solo. Modulate your delivery, Mrs. Thanatos. Think of it as a down payment on your maiden name."

Clídna stared at him for a long, quiet moment. For the first time since she had glided through his frosted door, something resembling dry amusement flickered across her sharp features.

"You have very little survival instinct for a man with such tidy fingernails," she noted.

"A robust survival instinct is entirely incompatible with a career in high-conflict divorce law," Finneas countered. He pulled the acoustic horn toward her and flipped a small brass toggle on the side of the machine. The interior gears began to whir with a low, metallic purr that sounded like a cat chewing on tin foil. "Whenever you are ready. Three bars. Controlled grief. Focus on the abandonment. Think of the memorandum he sent you during the potato famine."

Clídna’s jaw tightened. Her eyes lost their iris and pupil entirely, washing over with the milky, blind opacity of deep well-water. She leaned in toward the silver horn.

When she opened her mouth, no sound emerged that mortal ears were built to comprehend.

It wasn't a scream; it was the acoustic manifestation of a hearth fire going out in an empty house while the winter wind piled snow against the sill. It was the realization that a loved one’s coat still hanging in the hall would never be worn again. Finneas gripped the edges of his desk so hard his knuckles turned white. Even through his heavy lead-lined earplugs, his teeth hummed like tuning forks. The water in his glass turned instantly to solid ice, cracking the tumbler from rim to base with a sharp snap. The wallpaper behind his head began to peel back in long, mournful curls, shedding dry paste onto his collar.

The accumulator’s clockwork spun violently, its internal bellows expanding and contracting with furious, metallic groans. Blue-gray vapor plumed from the exhaust vents at the back of the cylinder, smelling heavily of damp peat moss and ancient cold.

One.

Two.

Three.

Finneas slammed his palm down on the brass shutoff lever.

The spring-loaded dampener dropped over the mouth of the horn with the finality of a guillotine. The whirring stopped instantly. The room plunged into a silence so profound, so heavy, that Finneas could hear the dull thumping of his own heart against his ribs and the sluggish drip of melted ice off the desk.

Clídna slumped slightly, drifting down until the soles of her gossamer slippers actually touched the linoleum. Her silver hair had lost some of its wild, tempestuous volume, falling limp around her pale neck. She looked hollowed, but there was a fierce, vindictive spark burning in the centers of her eyes.

"That," she whispered, her normal speaking voice now sounding like dry leaves skittering across cobblestones, "was the winter of 1847. The memorandum arrived on a Tuesday."

Finneas carefully unplugged his ears, working his jaw to clear the pressure. He picked up his fountain pen, noting with satisfaction that the nib hadn't bent. "An excellent vintage. That should easily cover the filing fees, the courier bond, and leave enough in the trust account to retain an independent surveyor to assess the borderlands of the Styx."

He picked up a wax candle, lit it with a safety match that sputtered twice in the damp air, and sealed the cylinder's pressure valve with a dollop of crimson wax. Into the cooling wax, he pressed his signet ring—a simple seal bearing the scales of justice crossed with a warding stave.

"Now that the retainer is satisfied," Finneas said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, "we must address the tactical realities of your husband’s response. Thanatos is not merely an absentee spouse, Clídna; he is an institutional pillar of the Classical underworld. When I serve him with an emergency injunction halting transit on the western bank, he will not respond with an emotional outburst. Gods of his lineage do not throw crockery. They file counter-motions."

"Let him file," Clídna said, recovering her composure and rising an inch above the floor once more. "Let him drown in his own papyrus. For three hundred years I have suffered the silence. Let him see how quiet his marble halls become when the dead begin to pile up on the landing."

Finneas stood up and pulled a heavy wool overcoat from the wooden coat rack near the door. He swung it around his shoulders, buttoning it against the lingering chill that still clung to the room like a wet sheet.

"The silence will not last long," Finneas told her, picking up his leather briefcase and opening the latch. He carefully nestled the sealed acoustic accumulator inside, securing it between two thick volumes of the Corpus Juris Planaris. "In fact, if the Styx navigation authority operates with anything resembling its traditional efficiency, we have roughly six hours before the backlog at the ferry terminal creates an administrative crisis large enough to register in the mortal atmosphere. We need to lodge this petition with the Clerk of the Grey Veil before the close of the nocturnal session."

"And where is this clerk?" she asked, gliding toward the doorway. "In the mounds of Tara? In the deep caves beneath Mycenae?"

"Worse," Finneas sighed, picking up his briefcase and reaching for his umbrella. "A subterranean sub-basement beneath the Municipal Archives building in Lower Manhattan. The subway rumbling overhead makes the magistrates irritable, and the elevator has been broken since the Taft administration. Come along, Mrs. Thanatos. Let us go remind the Lord of the Gentle Passing that marriage is legally considered a hazardous joint venture."