Chapter One

I stood in the shadows of a deserted shop front across from The Blood and Brew Pub, trying not to be obvious as I tugged my black leather pants back up where they belonged. This is pathetic, I thought, eyeing the rain-emptied street. I was way too good for this.

Apprehending unlicensed and black-art witches was my usual line of work, as it takes a witch to catch a witch. But the streets were quieter than usual this week. Everyone who could make it was at the West Coast for our yearly convention, leaving me with this gem of a run. A simple snag and drag. It was just the luck of the Turn that had put me here in the dark and rain.

"Who am I kidding?" I whispered, pulling the strap of my bag farther up my shoulder. I hadn't been sent to tag a witch in a month: unlicensed, white, dark, or otherwise. Bringing the mayor's son in for Wereing outside of a full moon probably hadn't been the best idea.

A sleek car turned the corner, looking black in the buzz of the mercury street lamp. This was its third time around the block. A grimace tightened my face as it approached, slowing. "Damn it," I whispered. "I need a darker door front."

"He thinks you're a hooker, Rachel," my backup snickered into my ear. "I told you the red halter was slutty."

"Anyone ever tell you that you smell like a drunk bat, Jenks?" I muttered, my lips barely moving. Backup was un-settlingly close tonight, having perched himself on my earring. Big dangling thing -- the earring, not the pixy. I'd found Jenks to be a pretentious snot with a bad attitude and a temper to match. But he knew what side of the garden his nectar came from. And apparently pixies were the best they'd let me take out since the frog incident. I would have sworn fairies were too big to fit into a frog's mouth.

I eased forward to the curb as the car squished to a wet-asphalt halt. There was the whine of an automatic window as the tinted glass dropped. I leaned down, smiling my prettiest as I flashed my work ID. Mr. One Eyebrow's leer vanished and his face went ashen. The car lurched into motion with a tiny squeak of tires. "Day-tripper," I said in disdain. No, I thought in a flash of chastisement. He was a norm, a human. Even if they were accurate, the terms daytripper, domestic, squish, off-the-rack, and my personal favorite, snack, were politically frowned upon. But if he was picking strays up off the sidewalk in the Hollows, one might call him dead.

The car never slowed as it went through a red light, and I turned at the catcalls from the hookers I had displaced about sunset. They weren't happy, standing brazenly on the corner across from me. I gave them a little wave, and the tallest flipped me off before spinning to show me her tiny, spellenhanced rear. The hooker and her distinctly husky-looking "friend" talked loudly as they tried to hide the cigarette they were passing between each other. It didn't smell like your usual tobacco. Not my problem, tonight, I thought, moving back into my shadow.

I leaned against the cold stone of the building, my gaze lingering on the red taillights of the car as it braked. Brow furrowed, I glanced at myself. I was tall for a woman -- about five-eight -- but not nearly as leggy as the hooker in the next puddle of light over. I wasn't wearing as much makeup as she was, either. Narrow hips and a chest that was almost flat didn't exactly make me streetwalker material.

Before I found the leprechaun outlets, I had shopped in the "your first bra" aisle. It's hard finding something without hearts and unicorns on it there.

Chapter One

I hitched the canvas strap holding the watering canister higher up on my shoulder and stretched to get the nozzle into the hanging plant. Sunlight streamed in, warm through my blue institutional jumpsuit. Past the narrow plate-glass windows was a small courtyard surrounded by VIP offices. Squinting from the sun, I squeezed the handle of the watering hose, and the barest hint of water hissed through.

There was a burst of clattering computer keys, and I moved to the next plant down. Phone conversation filtered in from the office past the reception desk, accompanied by a belly laugh that sounded like the bark of a dog. Weres. The higher up in the pack they were, the more human looking they managed, but you could always tell when they laughed.

I glanced down the row of hanging plants before the windows to the freestanding fish tank behind the receptionist's desk. Yup. Cream-colored fins. Black spot on right side. This was the one. Mr. Ray raised koi, showing them in Cincinnati's annual fish show. Last year's winner was always displayed in his outer office, but now there were two fish, and the Howlers' mascot was missing. Mr. Ray was a Den boy, a rival of Cincinnati's all Inderland baseball team. It didn't take much to put two and two together and get stolen fish.

"So," the cheerful woman behind the desk said as she stood to drop a ream of paper into the printer's hopper. "Mark is on vacation? He didn't tell me."

I nodded, not looking at the secretary dressed in her snappy cream-colored business suit as I dragged my watering equipment down another three feet. Mark was taking a short vacation in the stairwell of the building he had been servicing before this one. Knocked out with a short-term sleepy-time potion. "Yes, ma'am," I added, raising my voice and adding a slight lisp. "He told me what plants to water, though." I curled my red manicured nails under my palms before she spotted them. They didn't go with the working plant-girl image. I should have thought of that earlier. "All the ones on this floor, and then the arboretum on the roof."

The woman smiled to show me her slightly larger teeth. She was a Were, and fairly high up in the office pack by her amount of polish. And Mr. Ray wouldn't have a dog for a secretary when he could pay a high enough salary for a bitch. A faint scent of musk came from her, not unpleasant. "Did Mark tell you about the service elevator at the back of the building?" she said helpfully. "It's easier than lugging that cart up all those stairs."

"No, ma'am," I said, pulling the ugly cap with the plantman logo on it tighter to my head. "I think he's making everything just hard enough that I don't try to take his territory." Pulse quickening, I pushed Mark's cart with its pruning shears, fertilizer pellets, and watering system farther down the line. I had known of the elevator, along with the placement of the six emergency exits, the pulls for the fire alarm, and where they kept the doughnuts.

"Men," she said, rolling her eyes as she sat before her screen again. "Don't they realize that if we wanted to rule the world, we could?"

I gave her a noncommittal nod and squirted a tiny amount of water into the next plant. I kinda thought we already did.

A tight hum rose over the whirl of the printer and the faint office chatter. It was Jenks, my partner, and he was clearly in a bad mood as he flew out of the boss's back office and to me. His dragonfly wings were bright red in agitation, and pixy dust sifted from him to make temporary sunbeams. "I'm done with the plants in there," he said loudly as he landed on the rim of the hanging pot in front of me.

Chapter One

I took a deep breath to settle myself, jerking the cuff of my gloves up to cover the bare patch of skin at my wrist. My fingers were numb through the fleece as I moved my next-to-largest spell pot to sit beside a small chipped tombstone, being careful to not let the transfer media spill. It was cold, and my breath steamed in the light of the cheap white candle I had bought on sale last week.

Spilling a bit of wax, I stuck the taper to the top of the grave marker. My stomach knotted as I fixed my attention on the growing haze at the horizon, scarcely discernable from the surrounding city lights. The moon would be up soon, being just past full and waning. Not a good time to be summoning demons, but it would be coming anyway if I didn't call it. I'd rather meet Algaliarept on my own terms -- before midnight.

I grimaced, glancing at the brightly lit church behind me where Ivy and I lived. Ivy was running errands, not even aware I had made a deal with a demon, much less that it was time to pay for its services. I suppose I could be doing this inside where it was warm, in my beautiful kitchen with my spelling supplies and all the modern comforts, but calling demons in the middle of a graveyard had a perverse rightness to it, even with the snow and cold.

And I wanted to meet it here so Ivy wouldn't have to spend tomorrow cleaning blood off the ceiling.

Whether it would be demon blood or my own was a question I hoped I wouldn't have to answer. I wouldn't allow myself to be pulled into the ever-after to be Algaliarept's familiar. I couldn't. I had cut it once and made it bleed. If it could bleed, it could die. God, help me survive this. Help me find a way to make something good here.

The fabric of my coat rasped as I clutched my arms about myself and used my boot to awkwardly scrape a circle of six inches of crusty snow off the clay-red cement slab where I had seen a large circle etched out. The room-sized rectangular block of stone was a substantial marker as to where God's grace stopped and chaos took over. The previous clergy had laid it down over the adulterated spot of once hallowed ground, either to be sure no one else was put to rest there accidentally or to fix the elaborate, half-kneeling, battle-weary angel it encompassed into the ground. The name on the massive tombstone had been chiseled off, leaving only the dates. Whomever it was had died in 1852 at the age of twenty-four. I hoped it wasn't an omen.

Cementing someone into the ground to keep him or her from rising again sometimes worked -- and sometimes it didn't -- but in any case, the area wasn't sanctified anymore. And since it was surrounded by ground that was still consecrated, it made a good spot to summon a demon. If worse came to worst, I could always duck onto sanctified ground and be safe until the sun rose and Algaliarept was pulled back into the ever-after.

My fingers were shaking as I took from my coat pocket a white silk pouch of salt that I had scraped out of my twenty- five-pound bag. The amount was excessive, but I wanted a solid circle, and some of the salt would be diluted as it melted the snow. I glanced at the sky to estimate where north was, finding a mark on the etched circle right where I thought it should be. That someone had used this circle to summon demons before didn't instill me with any confi- dence. It wasn't illegal or immoral to summon demons, just really, really stupid.

I made a slow clockwise path from north, my footprints paralleling the outside track of the salt as I laid it down, enclosing the angel monolith along with most of the blasphemed ground.

The solid thud of David's car door shutting echoed off the stone face of the eight-story building we had parked beside. Leaning against the gray sports car, I shaded my eyes and squinted up at its aged and architecturally beautiful columns and fluted sills. The uppermost floor was golden in the setting sun, but here at street level we were in a chill shadow. Cincinnati had a handful of such landmark buildings, most abandoned, as this one appeared to be.

"Are you sure this is the place?" I asked, then dragged the flat of my arms off the roof of his car. The river was close; I could smell the oil and gas mix of boats. The top floor probably had a view. Though the streets were clean, the area was clearly depressed. But with a little attention — and a lot of money — I could see it as one of the city's newest residential hot spots.

David set his worn leather briefcase down and reached into the inner pocket of his suit coat. Pulling out a sheaf of papers, he flipped to the back, then glanced at the distant corner and the street sign. "Yes," he said, his soft voice tense but not worried.

Tugging my little red leather jacket down, I hiked my bag higher on my shoulder and headed to his side of the car, heels clunking. I'd like to say I was wearing my butt-kicking boots in deference to this being a run, but in reality I just liked them. They went well with the blue jeans and black T-shirt I had on; and with the matching cap, I looked and felt sassy.

David frowned at the chunking — or my choice of attire, maybe — steeling his features to bland acceptance when he saw me quietly laughing at him. He was in his respectable work clothes, somehow pulling off the mix of the three-piece suit and his shoulder-length, wavy black hair held back in a subdued clip. I'd seen him a couple of times in running tights that showed off his excellently maintained, mid-thirties physique — yum — and a full-length duster and cowboy hat — Van Helsing, eat your heart out — but his somewhat small stature lost none of its presence when he dressed like the insurance claims adjuster he was. David was kind of complex for a Were.

I hesitated when I came even with him, and together we eyed the building. Three streets over I could hear the shush of traffic, but here, nothing moved. "It's really quiet," I said, holding my elbows against the chill of the mid-May evening.

Brown eyes pinched, David ran a hand over his clean-shaven cheeks. "It's the right address, Rachel," he said, peering at the top floor. "I can call to check if you want."

"No, this is cool." I smiled with my lips closed, hefting my shoulder bag and feeling the extra weight of my splat gun. This was David's run, not mine, and about as benign as you could get — adjusting the claim of an earth witch whose wall had cracked. I wouldn't need the sleepy-time charms I loaded my modified paint ball gun with, but I just grabbed my bag when David asked me to come with him. It was still packed from my last run — storming the back room of an illegal spammer. God, plugging him had been satisfying.

David pushed into motion, gallantly gesturing me to go first. He was older than I by about ten years, but it was hard to tell unless you looked at his eyes. "She's probably living in one of those new flats they're making above old warehouses," he said, heading for the ornate stoop.

I snickered, and David looked at me.

"What?" he said, dark eyebrows rising.

I entered the building before him, shoving the door so he could follow tight on my heels. "I was thinking if you lived in one, it would still be a warehouse. Were house?...

Chapter One

Dappled sun shifted upon my bare shoulder as I leaned against a rough boulder bigger than my long-absent car. Frustrated, I unclenched my teeth before I gave myself a headache. The sound of people swimming at the nearby lake was loud, but the happy shrieks only tightened my gut. Leave it to Barnabas to try to shift four months of practice into success in a mere twenty minutes.

“No pressure,” I muttered, glancing across the sneaker-flattened dirt path to the reaper leaning against a pine tree with his eyes shut. Barnabas was probably older than fire, but appearing the age of the person you’re trying to save helped light reapers blend in. And Barnabas blended in nicely with his jeans, black T-shirt, and his lanky physique. I couldn’t see the wings we’d flown in on, but they were there, making him an angel of death with frizzy hair, brown eyes, and in a pair of holey sneakers. Would that make them holy holey-sneakers? I wondered, as I nervously rolled the pinecone in my hand back and forth.

Feeling my attention on him, Barnabas opened his eyes. “What’s so funny, Madison?” he asked, and I sighed.

“Nothing.” My gaze dropped to my punky sneakers. Yellow with purple laces and sculls and crossbones on the toes. They matched my hair, not that anyone had ever made the connection between them and the purple dyed tips of my blond bangs. “Maybe if I wasn’t so hot I could do this.”

His eyebrows rose as he looked at my shorts and tank top. I wasn’t hot, but nerves had me jittery. I hadn’t known that I was going to summer camp when I’d slipped out of the house this morning and rode my bike to school to meet Barnabas for my first scythe prevention. I wasn’t complaining. It felt good to get out of New Covington. The college town my dad lived in was okay, but spending the summer with a light reaper lurking within twenty miles tended to put a damper on making friends. Being the new girl sucked eggs.

Barnabas frowned across the path at me. “You need to concentrate,” he said, and I spun the prickly pinecone between my palms faster. “Feel for your aura, and thin it. God help you, Madison. I’m right in front of you. Do it, or I’m taking you home.”

Dropping the pinecone, I scowled. If we went home, whoever we were here to save wouldn’t have a chance. “I’m working on it.” The boulder behind me seemed to press harder into my back, and I reached to hold the black amulet around my neck, trying to think of a hazy mist around me thinning until my thought could break free of the envelope of “self,” trying to imagine the haze of color around Barnabas—listen for it, maybe—and then give my thoughts that same color so it could slip past his own aura and he could hear me. It was a two-stage process. I’d been trying for months, and Barnabas bringing me here to tempt me with the chance to help him on a scythe prevention wasn’t making me work harder, it was ticking me off.

Irritated, I looked up at Barnabas. Stuck babysitting me, he hadn’t been on a scythe prevention in months, and it showed in his increasingly cross expression and failing patience. Dark reapers killed people before their allotted time when the probable future showed they were going to make decisions that went contrary to black reaper’s grand schemes of fate. Light reapers tried to stop them to ensure humanity’s right of choice. I was one of Barnabas’s rare failures, but I hadn’t gone gentle into that good night when a dark reaper had killed me, but whined and protested the entire way, taking an out when I found it—an out in the form of stealing the amulet of the same black reaper who had scythed me. The stolen stone currently warming in my tight grip gave me the solid illusion of a body when my real one was somewhere over the rainbow. Not only was I dead, but I didn’t even have a real body.

Having flubbed up my scythe prevention—my prom night no less—Barnabas had been assigned to shadow me in case the reaper who’d killed me came back for the stone. Watching me had put a crimp in his real job of Reconnaissance Error Acquisitions Personnel, Evaluation and Recovery, and he was losing status. Even worse, I felt like it was my fault. If I could just figure this thought-touching out, he could resume his regular duties with me reasonably safe back home and able to contact him if I had to. But it wasn’t happening.

“Barnabas,” I said, weary of it. “Are you sure I can do this? I’m not a reaper.”

“Neither is Ron,” he said, pulling his toe out of the hole he had wedged in the soft earth.

Ron, short for Chronos, was his boss—the only other human who had direct contact with the divine plane. “I’m only seventeen, not seventeen hundred,” I complained. “And maybe I can’t because I’m dead. Ever think of that?”

Silent, Barnabas looked out at the pine-rimmed lake. The worried lift to his shoulders told me he had. His shoulders fell in a sigh. “Try again,” he said softly.

I tightened my grip until the silver wires holding the stone pressed into my fingers, trying to imagine Barnabas in my thoughts, his easy grace that most high schoolers lacked, his nice figure and attractive face, his riveting smile. Sighing I rolled my eyes at myself. I wasn’t crushing on him, but every angel of death I’d seen had been attractive. Especially the bad one.

My thoughts drifted back to my prom night, and my shoulders slumped. Being dead sucked, but I didn’t have anyone to blame but myself. If I hadn’t been playing queen bee, I could have swallowed my pride and stayed at the prom after finding out I was Josh’s pity date. It wasn’t like Josh was a dweeb, but if I’d ever had the chance to make it with the cool girls at a new school, being a pity date had killed it. And when a sexy senior had offered to drive me home, I’d said yes. Sexy senior turned into psychopath Seth, a dark reaper bent on killing me. Which he did, using a scythe when rolling his convertible down an embankment hadn’t done it. I’d woken up in the morgue to Barnabas arguing with another light reaper as to whose fault it was I was dead. Even better, Seth showed up, shocking the b-juice out of everyone. Apparently he wanted to throw my soul in front of someone to “buy his way to a higher court,” whatever that meant. But only Barnabas and I knew that last part.

Seth’s interest should have ended when my life had, an oddity that was overlooked when I snagged his amulet and claimed it in my effort to stay somewhat alive. It hadn’t been a reaper’s stone I’d taken but something else. Ron still didn’t know what it was exactly. So far, despite all the long nights spent on my roof practicing with Barnabas, I hadn’t been able to do anything with the shimmery black stone. I couldn’t reach Barnabas’s thoughts, couldn’t make a sword from the amulet’s energy, couldn’t even go an afternoon without a freaking babysitter. Barnabas had been hanging around so much that my dad thought he was my boyfriend and my boss at the flower shop thought I should take out a restraining order.

My arms crossed over my chest, and I pushed myself away from the rock. “I’m sorry, Barnabas,” I said feeling stupid. “You go on and do your prevention. I’ll just sit here and wait. I’ll be fine.” Maybe this was why he brought me. I’d be safer here then several hundred miles away. I knew it was killing him not being able to do his job.

Barnabas pressed his lips together, clearly upset. “No. This was a bad idea,” he said, coming forward to take my arm. “Let’s go. I’ll tell Ron to send someone else.”

Affronted, I jerked out of his grip, not liking that my inability was holding him back. “So what if you can’t hear me. I can hear you!” I said. “If you don’t want to leave me here, then I’ll just follow you and stay in the shadows. Jeez, Barnabas. It’s a summer camp. How much trouble can I get into just watching?”

“Plenty,” he said, his smooth, young-looking face grimacing.

Someone was coming up the path, and I rocked back a step. “I’ll just sit out of the way. No one will even know I’m there,” I said, and Barnabas’s eyes crinkled in worry. “Ron said the amulet will keep me hidden even if a reaper touched me. What’s the problem, here!”

His brow furrowed. “Ron would skin me alive if something went wrong.”

“Well it was his idea to include me on your reap preventions, wasn’t it?” I countered.

Barnabas kicked softly at the huge rock. “When you were properly trained. You aren’t.”

The people were getting closer, and I fidgeted. “Come on, Barnabas. Why did you fly us out here if you were just going to take me home again? You knew I couldn’t solidify in twenty minutes what I’ve been trying to do the past four months. You want to do this as much as I do. I’m already dead. What more can they do to me?”

Lips pressed tight, he looked up the path at the noisy group. “If you knew, you wouldn’t be arguing with me." [ . . . ]

Chapter One

I leaned over the glass counter, squinting at the price of the high-grade redwood rods, safe in their airtight glass coffins like Snow White. The ends of my scarf slipped to block my view, and I tucked them behind my short leather jacket. I had no call to be looking at wands. I didn't have the money, but more important, I wasn't shopping for business today—I was shopping for pleasure.

"Rachel?" my mom said from halfway across the store, smiling as she fingered a display of packaged organic herbs. "How about Dorothy? Make Jenks hairy, and he could be Toto."

"No friggin' way!" Jenks exclaimed, and I started when the pixy took off from my shoulder where he'd been nestled in my scarf 's warmth. Gold dust sifted from him to make a temporary sunbeam on the counter and brighten the drab evening. "I'm not going to spend Halloween handing out candy as a dog! And no Wendy and Tinker Bell either. I'm going as a pirate!" His wings slowed as he settled atop the counter next to the stand of low-grade redwood dowels suitable for amulets. "Coordinating costumes is stupid."

Normally I'd agree, but, silent, I drew back from the counter. I'd never have enough disposable income for a wand. Besides, versatility was key in my profession, and wands were one-spell wonders. "I'm going as the female lead in the latest vampire flick," I said to my mom. "The one where the vampire hunter falls in love with the vamp?"

"You're going as a vampire hunter?" my mother asked.

Warming, I plucked an uninvoked amulet from a vanity rack to size my chest up. I was hippy enough to pass for the actress I was trying to mimic, but my excuse of a chest wouldn't match her spell-enhanced bust. And it had to be spell enhanced. Naturally big-chested women don't run like that. "No, the vampire," I said, embarrassed. Ivy, my housemate, was going as the hunter, and despite my agreement that coordinating costumes was stupid, I knew Ivy and I would stop conversation when we walked into the party. And that was the point, wasn't it? Halloween was the only time doppelgänger charms were legal—and Inderland and the braver slice of humanity made the most of it.

My mother's face went serious, then cleared. "Oh! The black-haired one, right? In the slut outfit? Good God, I don't know if my sewing machine can go through leather."

"Mom!" I protested, though used to her language and lack of tact. If it came into her head, it came out of her mouth. I glanced at the clerk with her, but she clearly knew my mother and wasn't fazed. Seeing a woman in tasteful slacks and an angora sweater swearing like a sailor tended to throw people off. Besides, I already had the outfit in my closet.

Frowning, my mother fingered the charms to change hair color. "Come over here, honey. Let's see if they have anything that will touch your curls. Honestly, Rachel. You pick the hardest costumes. Why can't you ever be anything easy, like a troll or fairy princess?"

Jenks snickered. " 'Cause that's not slutty enough," he said loud enough for me to hear, but not my mother.

I gave him a look, and he simpered as he hovered backward to a rack of seeds. Though only about four inches tall, he cut an attractive figure with his soft-soled boots and the red scarf Matalina, his wife, had knitted him wrapped about his neck. Last spring, I'd used a demon curse to make him human-size, and the memory of his eighteen-year-old, athletic figure, with its trim waist and broad, muscular shoulders made strong from his dragonfly-like wings, was still very much in my memory. He was a very married pixy, but perfection deserved attention.

Jenks made a darting path over...

Phone cradled between her shoulder and ear, Ivy Tamwood scooped another chunk of chili up with her fries, leaning over the patterned wax paper so it wouldn't drip onto her desk. Kisten was bitching about something or other, and she wasn't listening, knowing he could go on for half her lunch break before winding down. The guy was nice to wake up to in the afternoon, and a delight to play with before the sun came up, but he talked too much.

Which is why I put up with him, she mused, running her tongue across the inside of her teeth before swallowing. Her world had gone too quickly from alive to silent on that flight back home from California. My God, was it seven years now? It had been unusual to foster a high-blood living vampire child into a sympathetic camarilla, taking her from home and family for her last two years of high school, but Piscary, the master vampire her family looked to, had become too intense in his interest in her before she developed the mental tools to deal with it, and her parents had intervened at some cost, probably saving her sanity.

I could keep Freud in Havana cigars all by my lonesome, Ivy thought, taking another bite of carbs and protein. Twenty-three ought to be far enough away from that scared sixteen-year-old on the sun-drenched tarmac to forget, but even now, after multiple blood and bed partners, a six-year degree in social sciences, and landing an excellent job where she could use her degree, she found her confidence was still tied to the very things that screwed her up.

She missed Skimmer and her reminder that life was more than waiting for it to end so she could get started living. And while Kisten was nothing like her high school roommate, he had filled the gap nicely these last few years.

Smiling wickedly, Ivy gazed through the plate-glass wall that looked out on the floor of open offices. Weight shifting, she crossed her legs at her knees and leaned farther across her desk, imagining just what gap she'd like Kisten to fill next.

"Damn vampire pheromones," she breathed, and pulled herself straight, not liking where her thoughts took her when she spent too much time in the lower levels of the Inderland Security tower. Working the homicide division of the I.S. got her a real office instead of a desk in the middle of the floor with the peons, but there were too many vamps -- both living and undead -- down here for the air circulation to handle.

Kisten's tirade about prank phone calls ended abruptly. "What do vamp pheromones have to do with humans attacking my pizza delivery crew?" he asked in a lousy British accent. It was his newest preoccupation, and one she hoped he'd tire of soon.

Rolling her chair closer to her desk, Ivy took a swig of her imported bottled water, eyes askance on the boss's closed door across the large room. "Nothing. You want me to pick up anything on the way home? I might be able to wing out of here early. Art's in the office, which means someone died and I have to go to work. Bet you first bite he's going to want to cut my lunch short" -- she took another sip -- "and I'm going to take it off the end of my day."

"No," Kisten said. "Danny is doing the shopping today."

One of the perks of living atop a restaurant, she thought, as Kisten started in on a shopping list she didn't care about. Pulling her plate of fries off her desk, she set them on her lap, being careful to not spill anything on her leather pants. The boss's door opened, catching her eye when Art came out, shaking hands with Mrs. Pendleton. He'd been in there a full half hour.

Music Hath Charms

Tanya Huff

As Glen maneuvered his car over the rutted field the sign insisted was the parking lot, Ali frowned out the tinted window at a line of teenagers dressed in white and leading enormous brown cows and wondered if her partner had lost his mind. Bands that played the county fair circuit might be a step above garage bands, but it was usually a small step. Bedford Entertainment needed to sign a group that could pull in some numbers, and she didn't think they'd find that here.

"What's up with the kids and the cows?" she wondered as they bounced to a stop next to an impressively rusted pickup.

Glancing past her as he shifted into park, Glen shrugged. "Different leash laws in the country, I guess. Come on, they're on in twenty minutes."

He'd brought her here to see a band named NoMan. Five-man, country-rock, fronted by two brothers, Brandon and Travis Noman. One sang lead, one played—well, in country-rock she supposed it was a fiddle, wasn't it? She wasn't sure about the name but names were easy enough to change. They were backed by guitar, bass, and drums but she had no information on the musicians.

When asked, Glen laughed. "Backup doesn't matter, Ali, it's the brothers you're here to see. You could back those two with...with boy-band leftovers and they'd still kick ass."

"A ringing endorsement."

He laughed again. "You'll see."

The stage had been set up at one end of the midway. It had a back and a roof of sorts and the ubiquitous three guys in black t-shirts screwing around with the sound system, but there was no disguising it was actually a hay wagon or that hay bales had been arranged in rows for the audience. This explained Glen's instruction to wear jeans.

"How rustic," she murmured as they settled on a bale at the end of the fourth row.

"Trust me."

She closed her hand around his arm. "Please tell me you didn't sleep with them and you've dragged me out to the middle of nowhere to hear a thanks-for-the-fuck audition."

He laid his hand over hers, large and warm and calming. "I didn't and it isn't. Although I would have. Couldn't get close."

Leaning around him, Ali realized the bales were filling fast with an interesting cross section of humanity. She hadn't known baseball caps came in such a wide variety of colors. A closer look at the packed first three rows—the rows between her and the stage—and she realized no one sitting there could be considered either old or young and they all exuded a certain visceral anticipation as they waited for the show to start.

Evidently, NoMan had groupies. A decent enough showing for a Saturday afternoon gig at a county fair but not the kind of numbers that would have kept Glen away from the prize. Nor, more importantly, the kind of numbers that would make them the saviors Bedford Entertainment needed.

On the other hand, if they were as good as Glen said they were, she could build their numbers to the point where they'd become what she needed. And if they weren't...at least she'd got out of the city for the afternoon. There had to be some truth in what everyone said about fresh air.

"If you'd got to them, would they?" she wondered, determined to distract herself.

Mouth by her ear, he murmured, "I pegged them as enthusiastically nondiscriminating."

Well, she was all for enthusiasm. Settling her weight against Glen's shoulder, she found a certain amusement in noting the envious looks being sent her way. Six foot meant a lot of leg in tight jeans, the heavy white shirt emphasized the breadth of his shoulders, and the rolled-up sleeves...

Chapter One

I stuck the end of the pencil between my teeth, brushing the eraser specks off the paper as I considered how best to answer the employment application. What skills can you bring to Inderland security that are clearly unique to you?

Sparkling wit? I thought, twining my foot around the kitchen chair and feeling stupid. A smile? The desire to smear the pavement with bad guys?

Sighing, I tucked my hair behind my ear and slumped into the kitchen chair. My eyes shifted to the clock above the sink as it ticked minutes into hours. I wasn't going to waste my life. Eighteen was too young to be accepted into the I.S. intern program without a parent's signature, but if I put my application in now, it would sit at the top of the stack until I was old enough, according to the guidance counselor. Like the recruiter had said, there was nothing wrong with going into the I.S. right out of college if you knew that's what you wanted to do. The fast track.

The faint sound of the front door opening brought my heart to my throat. I glanced at the sunset-gloomed window. Jamming the application under the stacked napkins, I shouted, "Hi, Mom! I thought you weren't going to be back until eight!"

Damn it, how was I supposed to finish this thing if she kept coming back?

But my alarm shifted to elation when a high falsetto voice responded, "It's eight in Buenos Aires, dear. Be a dove and find my rubbers for me? It's snowing."

"Robbie?" I stood so fast the chair nearly fell over. Heart pounding, I darted out of the kitchen and into the green hallway. There at the end, in a windbreaker and shaking snow from himself, was my brother Robbie. His narrow height came close to brushing the top of the door, and his shock of red hair caught the glow from the porch light. Slush-wet Dockers showed from under his jeans, totally inappropriate for the weather. On the porch behind him, a cabbie set down two suitcases.

"Hey!" I exclaimed, bringing his head up to show his green eyes glinting mischievously. "You were supposed to be on the vamp flight. Why didn't you call? I would've come to get you."

Robbie shoved a wad of money at the driver. Door still gaping behind him, he opened his arms, and I landed against him, my face hitting his upper chest instead of his middle like it had when we had said goodbye. His arms went around me, and I breathed in the scent of old Brimstone from the dives he worked in. The tears pricked, and I held my breath so I wouldn't cry. It had been over four and a half years. Inconsiderate snot had been at the West Coast all this time, leaving me to cope with Mom. But he'd come home this year for the solstice, and I sniffed back everything and smiled up at him.

"Hey, Firefly," he said, using our dad's pet name for me and grinning as he measured where my hair had grown to. "You got tall. And wow, hair down to your waist? What are you doing, going for the world's record?"

He looked content and happy, and I dropped back a step, suddenly uncomfortable. "Yeah, well, it's been almost five years," I accused. Behind him, the cab drove away, headlamps dim from the snow and moving slowly.

Robbie sighed. "Don't start," he begged. "I get enough of that from Mom. You going to let me in?" He glanced behind him at the snow. "It is cold out here."

"Wimp," I said, then grabbed one of the suitcases. "Ever hear about that magical thing called a coat?"

He snorted his opinion, hefting the last of the luggage and following me in. The door shut, and I headed down the second, longer hallway to his room, eager to get him inside and part of our small family...

Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title!

Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title!

Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title!