From the book

Delia Banks crouched by the front display window of Same As It Never Was antiques, not the least bit dressed for cleaning. Flowing blouse, dark slacks, multiple bracelets jangling, and long dark hair tossed out of the way over her shoulder, she tackled the small handprints and smeary mystery marks with Windex. "I don't get it," she said. "These weren't on the glass when we closed last night. And they're on the inside."

"Energetic mice?" Melinda Gordon suggested, admittedly without giving it much thought. She sat behind the marble-topped sales counter at the back of the store, scrolling through the online listings for local estate sales on her beloved laptop. Ooh, nice. "This looks good -- JWC is having an estate sale not far from here a week from now." She reached for her pen and a pad of Same As It Never Was stationery to note the particulars in an absently neat hand. The counter otherwise held the business phone, the register, and an appropriately antique keepsake box where Melinda stashed notes and paper clips and other clutter bits. Beyond that, the counter gleamed as clear as she could keep it, with gift wrapping papers, small bags, and ribbons on the shelves beneath. Every possible personal touch... and it made her customers' eyes light up when they saw the care with which their purchases were handled.

"Not mice," Delia said, still at work. "So definitely not mice. Mice always leave..."

Melinda looked up, perfectly willing to play fill-in-the-blank. "Poop?"

"I was going to say signs." Delia flipped the rag over to buff the window one last time and pushed herself to her feet. "Oof. I swear, this used to be easier." She gave Melinda a wry glance, tugging her blouse into place over her generously shapely form. "You just wait, Miss Young-and-Beautiful."

"I'm supposed to buy that?" Melinda looked up from the laptop screen, giving Delia -- forty-something, mother to teenaged Ned, as fit as stair-climbing could make her -- a skeptical look writ large.

"Yes," Delia told her. "And if you say You're only as old as you feel or anything like it, I'll..." And there she trailed off, because Delia was too gentle at heart to come up with anything truly wicked.

But sensing a note of true frustration in Delia's voice, Melinda held up her hands in surrender. "Okay, okay," she said. "You win. You're old. Happy now?"

Delia appeared to give this some thought. "Strangely," she said, "not so much." And went to return the cleaning supplies to the back room, a long narrow space crammed with furniture making its way to the sales floor, following restorations and cleanup downstairs. The cramped space was defined mostly by a desk, with just enough room for Melinda to engage in a hastily clandestine encounter with an unexpected visitor of the spiritual sort.

Once, before her store partner Andrea had been killed in the crash of Flight 395, Melinda hadn't gone to such extremes -- hadn't rushed to hide such encounters. But as Delia spent more time in the store, Melinda had grown used to concealing her gifts once again. Too many personal betrayals had taught her well, and she knew Delia wasn't even close to coming to terms with her recently acquired knowledge that her employer and friend spent a great deal of time talking to earthbound spirits.

A very versatile place, that back room. Not to mention that it was the only route to the bathroom.

Melinda tucked her long, dark hair behind her ear and returned her attention to the laptop, found she'd reached the end of...

From the book

1

Sleep my child, and peace attend thee,
All through the night;
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night...

All through the night...Melinda Gordon opened her eyes into bereft sadness. A sob filled her throat; her lashes stuck together with unshed tears. She lay in the silent darkness, struggling to separate the wash of inflicted, outside feeling from her own inner self. I'm in my wonderful bed with the castiron headboard, she told herself. I'm in my gorgeous old home, renovated by my amazing husband. The same husband who lay beside her, a warm, strong presence in the cool of this spring night, with a breeze from the barely cracked bay window blowing pale curtains into dancing shadows and drawing out a chill on Melinda's skin.

The tears spilled over anyway, even though they weren't quite hers; she let them run down to the pillow, but couldn't stop her sudden intake of breath, or the sniffle that came afterward.

Jim's voice was quiet in the night. "Again?"

She laughed -- a weak thing, not meant to convince either of them. "Looks that way."

He shifted up to his elbow, looking down on her. After a moment, he used his thumb to wipe away the tear lingering in the corner of her eye. "Still don't have a handle on this one?"

She shook her head, even so slightly. "Honestly, I'm not even sure this is a ghost reaching out to me. It feels more as though..." She hesitated, and shook her head again. "It's hard to explain. It feels as though I'm on the edges of something. As though...I'm coincidental."

He laughed, and it was a lot louder than hers had been. "Trust me," he said. "You are anything but coincidental." And he gathered her up into his strong arms and kissed the damp edge of her eye, then rested his face against her hair and pulled them both back into sleep.

Late, late, late! Melinda gave her reflection a dissatisfied look, leaning forward at the drop-front dresser across from the foot of the bed. Her eyes -- almond, long-lashed, and expressive -- were normally a morning routine no-brainer. A little soft mascara, a little smudgy liner, maybe some earthtone shadow. "The puffy look," she informed herself, "is not in. It will never be in." And she dabbed on a little more concealer.

But only a little more, because really, it was a lost cause. She set the little pot of makeup aside, stood up, and gave herself a critical inspection. On this spring day, the outfit would just have to speak for her -- sky blue top with spaghetti straps and a wide ribbon gathering the empire waist, snug jeans with slim legs that showed ankle above strappy sandals. Long, dark hair drawn up in an offset ponytail and falling in waves, a jeweled-clip accent perfectly matching the blue of the top. Cheerful, bright energy -- and maybe it would be enough to fool her way through the day.

And maybe tonight she would get the sleep she needed, after so many days of imposed sorrow brought her awake in tears that had at first been so obviously someone else's but now seemed more and more like her own.

Determined to think of better things -- for there was nothing she could do for this unhappy spirit until she had more information -- Melinda smoothed down her top, turned on her sandaled heel, and put energy into her step as she skipped down the stairs and snagged up her big satchel of a shoulder bag -- going for practical today, a decision that might...

In one reality...

A young Tuingas demon moved respectfully through the special pocket universe it was his honor to maintain. He was slightly small for his clan, but endowed with the usual assortment of limbs and quite a masculine long-nose that he liked to drape back over his shoulder in an affected habit. He said it kept his long-nose out of the dust he often raised while tending the less frequently visited family shrines, but in what served as his heart even he knew that he merely liked tossing the long-nose around.

The demon moved from one family shrine to another within the pocket dimension created and sustained by his people. At this shrine he checked his protective amulet, buffing it slightly against his leathery skin. Only family members and highly trained priests could withstand the presence of the deathstones without amulet protection, and this particular deathstone was newly arrived, potent not only in its freshness, but because of the demon from which it had come. One of their warriors, and a great hero. His deathstone was a handsome one, a solid fist-sized oblong with unusually consistent color and texture. A stone the outside world could never fully appreciate... or even survive.

Reassured by the amulet's icy response to his touch, the demon entered the marble-walled shrine, pulling a little red wagon liberated from the human world. As fresh as it was, this shrine would need little in the way of maintenance; he rummaged through the contents of the wagon and withdrew a bright yellow feather duster. Humming a nasal tune through both face-nose and long-nose at once, he applied the duster with enthusiasm, sweeping clean the empty stone nooks and crannies that would hold future deathstones for this now-exalted family, and working in toward the single occupied central pedestal. With the wagon trailing behind him, he bent over to pluck a gum wrapper from the plush shag rug, not the least bit annoyed when his long-nose fell forward. After all, it merely offered him another chance to toss it back over his shoulder.

But he neglected to put aside the feather duster when he reached for his long-nose. In fact, he all but jammed the feather duster up his long-nose in a painful collision that at first seemed to have no particular consequence. He stood mildly stunned, long-nose smarting, his dull black little eyes watering, when he felt the first tingling warning way at the back of both noses. Frantically, he patted down his broad waist belt in search of tissues, horrified at the thought of a sneeze -- a doublesneeze -- in this quiet, sacred space.

The doublesneeze rose in an inevitable wave of nose-spasm, violent enough to bend him in half. He lost his balance, staggered backward, and -- oh horror -- found himself caught in a second spasm, a double doublesneeze right here in the hero's shrine. He fell, kicking the wagon in one direction while his arms windmilled in the other and his head fetched up against something hard.

He lay stunned.

After a moment he whimpered, opened his gummy little eyes, and pulled himself upright. His wagon and his supplies had tipped over, but to his great relief the red paint had not marred any of the marble walls. He heaved a great thankful sigh and crawled over to it, set it upright, and reached for the spilled supplies.

From the book

Chapter One

Deep in the tangle of night-blacked foliage, slick fur slid between thickly leafed branches, making no more than a whisper of sound beneath the clamor of myriad insects crying out for the company of their own kind.

A shriek ripped through the chorus, startling it to silence.

Bones crunched.

Night in the Fandrean jungle.

"Lions and tigers and bears," said Geordi La Forge, more or less under his breath.

Entirely without inflection and without missing a beat, Lieutenant Commander Data said, "Oh, my."

Silence fell over the conference room. Geordi, who had not intended that his comment garner quite so much attention, winced.

Data faced that attention without any apparent concern. "The Wizard of Oz, MGM 1939. I believe Geordi was making an analogy between the imagined threat of the beasts in the movie, and the very real beasts on the planet..." And finally he trailed off, taking in Captain Picard's thinly veiled impatience, Deanna Troi's quiet amusement, the spark of humor in Will Riker's eye. "But you knew that," he concluded.

"They knew that," Geordi confirmed. The movie was, after all, still popular enough to list in the holodeck programs.

"We did," Troi confirmed, as solemnly as possible.

"Ah," Data said. "My apologies for the unnecessary digression." But he hesitated, as though he might say something else. In the end he decided against it, but Geordi knew that expression. Data's insatiable curiosity -- about something -- had been triggered.

Worf stared intently at the creature on the view-screen -- an indistinct image, captured from beneath the creature as it swooped from one tree to another in the dense growth of the Fandrean jungle. Even blurred, the two barbed and prehensile tails were evident, along with the teeth gleaming in that long-snouted face, and the impression of size and strength. An arborata. Typical Fandrean jungle fare, according to the notations, right along with half a dozen other oversize flesh-eaters. "What does this have to do with the Ntignano evacuation?" he asked, with much interest.

"The Tsorans control this part of space," Troi said, "and we want to talk to them about the evacuation. They want to go hunting. Attending to their wants in this matter may well grease the wheels when it comes to our wants."

"Grease the wheels," Data repeated, as if he'd made some discovery.

Geordi glanced at him and decided now was not the time. He returned his attention to his padd, which held the details of the Ntignano evacuation -- not that he didn't know them by heart. One prematurely doomed star system -- thanks to a doomsday cult with inappropriate out-system technology on its hands -- and not quite enough time to evacuate the moderately populated planet within it. He'd known that the Federation had an ambassador on Tsora, trying to obtain the charts for the hard-to-navigate area -- but why the Enterprise had ended up here, he had yet to figure out. "We've got to concentrate on getting those people out of there, Captain, not on hunting with the Tsorans. And that means getting -- or making -- maps of that graviton-free corridor they've surveyed. It'll cut evacuation time in half."

"Some of the more sensitive Ntignano people are already showing signs of damage from exposure to the star's fluctuations." Beverly Crusher, her long-fingered hands loosely entwined and resting neatly on the table, reflected none of the challenge in her eyes as she looked directly at Picard. That do something about...