Prologue
She came out of thetrance on a crashing wave of adrenaline that flooded her veins with a euphoric sense of relief. Once again, she had survived the treacherous crossing that separated the dreamstate from the waking state. For a wild, glorious moment she was a sorceress, a queen, a goddess. There would be a price to pay, but the ice fever would set in later. In this moment she could almost fly.
She took off her mirrored sunglasses and waited for the artist’s reaction.
He screamed.
She winced. “Please don’t do that. It’s very unnerving.”
It was midnight and the alley was heavily shadowed but in the light from his phone she could see the artist’s face. His handsome, dramatically sculpted features had been transformed into a slack-jawed, wide-eyed mask of horror.
“No,” he gasped. He stumbled back a few steps, both hands stretched out in front of him. “Stay away from me. I know what you are.”
“You said I was your Muse.”
“You’re a succubus.”
He whirled and fled to the mouth of the alley and disappeared into the foggy San Francisco night. She listened to his pounding footfalls until they faded away to nothing.
Another failed experiment. This serial dating project was becoming very depressing. She was starting to doubt Aunt Bea’s assurance that sooner or later the right man would come along.
She dropped the small set of chimes and the little mallet into one of the pockets of her long, puffy coat. The adrenaline would wear off soon. She needed to get back to her apartment and make herself a cup of Bea’s special herbal tisane. It would ward off the worst of the ice fever.
Clapping a gloved hand over her nose and mouth, she willed herself to ignore the stench of urine-soaked bricks and made her way toward the entrance of the alley. She sidestepped the dark psychic stain that marked the spot where the murder had occurred.
She heard the scurrying of small rodent claws in the dense shadows and picked up her pace, careful to avoid the detritus of used needles, empty liquor bottles, and garbage. She always wore a pair of sturdy leather boots when she went out on dates in dark alleys.
Safely back on the sidewalk, she moved into the glow of a streetlamp, took out her phone, and used the app to call a car service. She confirmed the booking and glanced up. At the edge of her vision she glimpsed the dark silhouette of a man. He emerged from the fog and came toward her, moving too quickly. She did not need to see the glint of the knife in his hand to know that his intentions were not good.
Irritated, she waited until he was closer and then she turned, locked eyes with him, and smiled.
“I’m not in the mood,” she said.
The would-be assailant froze. A heartbeat later he uttered a choked scream, turned, and ran.
At least he hadn’t called her a demon. Maybe he didn’t know fancy words likesuccubus.
At the intersection a car turned the corner and coasted slowly to a halt in front of her. She checked the license plate and confirmed that it was the vehicle she had booked. A woman on her own at midnight in the city could not be too careful.
She slipped on the mirrored sunglasses before she opened the door and got into the back seat. If the driver wondered why she was wearing shades in the middle of the night, he kept his curiosity to himself.
She fastened the seat belt, sat back, and concentrated on analyzing the disastrous evening. She was forced to admit that she had to take most of the responsibility for the failure. She had misread the artist. Live men were a lot harder to read than dead men.
Sometimes she was tempted to abandon the dating project altogether, but Bea insisted that she keep trying.“Harpersdon’t give up.”
Bea had evidently given up, though. She was in her late forties now and, while she had plenty of friends in the small community of Mirror Lake, she had never found a life partner.
Perhaps the venue had been the problem tonight. Murder scenes were not particularly romantic. But there was no other way to run the test on potential lovers.
She would ponder that issue later. All she wanted to do now was get back to her snug little apartment and brew the tisane. Once she was sure the fever was under control she would enter the artist into her log of failed experiments. The list was growing uncomfortably long.
The first image of a demonic female figure wearing mirrored sunglasses and holding a set of chimes arrived by encrypted text three days later. The wordsYOU ARE MINEaccompanied thesketch.
One
“I can’t believe my auntis having an affair with your uncle.” Sophy Harper stared at the rumpled bed, shocked to the core. “He’s aWells.”
“So am I,” Luke Wells said. “We can discuss the feud between our families some other time. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a situation here. There is every reason to think your aunt and my uncle are in serious trouble. Someone died out there in the front room of this cabin.”
