Alone.
Sweating through my sensible button-down blouse and wondering if I should’ve joined him.
Because Texas?Texas is as hot as Hell’s left armpit after leg day.
I mean, I’ve never personally been to the Underworld, but I’ve interrogated enough Demons to get the gist.
If Hell is fire and brimstone, then Arrhythmia is its dry-heaving cousin, complete with cactus and an air so thick with magic it crackles like static across my skin.
It’s the kind of place that buzzes the moment you cross city limits.
Like a psychic sunburn.
Like something’s watching you before your tires even hit gravel.
Honestly, I should’ve seen it coming.My job title literally has the word “paranormal” in it.
I’m Megan DiNapoli.Special Agent, Department of Paranormal Creatures & Activity.DPCA if you’re nasty.Or if you just like government acronyms.
And no, I’m not a Shifter.Not a Witch, either—not in the properhas Coven, will waltz naked around a bonfiresense.
I’m what they callsensitive, which sounds like I cry at dog food commercials.
I don’t.
Unless the dog is really cute.
What I can do is sense when the world isoff.
Like when your neighbor’s aura doesn’t match his smile.
Or when a grocery clerk’s shadow moves faster than he does.
Or when you walk into a diner and get hit with the overwhelming smell of blood, even though no one’s bleeding.
Oh, and sometimes, I get visions.
They’re never fun.
Like the one when I was eight that showed Mr.Polanski next door eating his way through the local cat population—turned out he was a Vampire with a taste for tabbies.
Or the time I warned my dad that the librarian was stealing children.
No one believed me because technically all the kids were still accounted for.But I knew something was weird.
And sure enough, she was Fae.Swapping kids out like overdue library books and replacing them with Changelings.
That one got messy.
My dad—forty-year beat cop veteran of Jersey City—didn’t know what to do with a daughter who saw Monsters everywhere.
At first, he told me to knock it off.
To stop making things up.
To be normal.
But when he saw enough of my visions come true, he changed his tune.
