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LONG TIME WAITING

Manitou Springs, Colorado, 1900

Amelia’s scrying brought her to a cottage perched on the hill overlooking the road. Tucked in the woods, the place was meant to be charming, but the blue paint had faded to gray and the shadows of the surrounding trees fell across it strangely.

The feeling of doom that had brought her here grew stronger. I am too late. For the thousandth time she rebuked herself; she should have heeded the warning on that crossroads tomb …

Dismounting, she tossed her horse’s reins over the porch railing and charged inside.

Lydia Harcourt, nineteen, lay in the foyer, sprawled on her side on the hardwood floor. A pool of blood had spread around her, a scarlet carpet. Her blue cotton dress was stained and spattered with it. Her throat had been cut so deeply, the head lolled back at an angle that caused it to stare inhumanly over her shoulder. The wound exposed muscle, bone, torn vessels, and windpipe. One would think the girl had been mauled by an animal, but the cut was too clean. A single swipe of a claw, not the work of teeth and limbs. The blood was still wet, shining in the light coming through the window. This hadn’t happened long ago, but the perpetrator was gone, vanished into air quite literally, same as last time. Last month, she’d tracked the demon to a village in Juarez, where it had slaughtered a herd of cattle. She had known it was only a matter of time before it chose a human target, and one likely to most infuriate Amelia.

Nothing in the place was broken, no struggle had taken place, no one in the neighborhood had been alerted by screams. Lydia might have simply fallen where she stood.

“Damn,” Amelia whispered. She cursed herself for having the ability to know what was happening, to mark it and track it, but not the speed to catch the thing. As if the demon knew this, it seemed to taunt her.

She opened the satchel she wore over her shoulder.

Chalk. A red candle. A bundle of sage. Flint and steel. A round mirror the size of her hand. The body had not yet stiffened. A trace of warmth still lingered in the blood. If Amelia hurried, she might be able to catch the trail of the demon. Keep such slaughter from happening again.

She set the candle near the girl’s head and lit it. Next, she drew a circle in chalk. To contain the girl and all the blood, she had to draw it clear to the walls. She paused a moment to take direction, found north, and drew the proper symbols, the ancient signs that communed with the stars overhead and the elements on earth, that opened doors between worlds.

Lydia watched her with eyes like frosted glass.

“Rest easy, my dear,” Amelia murmured. “Soon you can tell me what you know, and I’ll stop the thing that did this.”

She lit the sage, set it smoldering. Placed the mirror by the candle. It reflected golden light back into the room. Amelia knelt before it, and watched Lydia.

The smoke from the incense set Amelia’s eyes watering. Closing them in a moment of dizziness, she drew a breath. Her mind was entering another state. Opening passages, picturing a great ironbound block of a door that separated the world of the living and the world of the dead.

“Lydia Harcourt, I need to speak with you,” she said, and imagined the door cracking open.

Fog appeared in the mirror.

“Lydia. Can you hear me?” Amelia breathed slowly to keep her heart from racing. If she panicked now, she’d lose the trail and would never vanquish this creature. She focused all her attention on the room, the door, the body, the dead eyes.

“Lydia, please. I know it’s difficult. I want to help. Can you hear me?”

The eyes blinked.

Amelia’s heart jumped, and she steadied her breathing. The dead eyes swiveled to look up at her, and something stared out of them. Amelia found the courage to look back.

“Lydia. I know you can’t speak. But I need you to remember what happened. Think of who did this to you, live through it one more time, just once. I’ll see it in the mirror here. Then I can find what did this. Punish it. Do you understand? Can you do this for me?”

The eyes blinked.

“Oh my dear, thank you.” Amelia brushed a strand of the girl’s chestnut hair off her forehead, as if she could still feel comfort. But who could say what she felt, with the door open? Even if it was only a crack. “Follow the light. Show me in the mirror.”

The mirror presented an image of fog. Figures began to emerge. A dark form had the shape of a man, tall and stout, but it was featureless. When it reached, the fingers were as long as its arm, and it had claws, extending, curling. In the mirror, Lydia showed a picture of herself, her mouth open to scream as one of the claws raked across her neck.

“Lydia, you must try to remember. Where did it go?”

The shadow in the mirror took on red eyes. Again and again, the claw tore through her throat, and she fell before she could make a sound. That was all she had, all she could give Amelia. The corpse, its gaze still locked on her, blinked again, and a tear slid from the outside corner of its eye, down its cheek.

Amelia sat back and clenched her hands in her lap. What was she doing here? Abusing the dead for no good purpose. She fancied herself a wizard, an arcane scholar, a demon hunter. She’d traveled the world to learn what she knew. It all should have been good for something.

She touched Lydia’s face and closed her eyes. “Sleep, Lydia. Leave this world. May the next treat you better.” In her mind, she closed the door, slid shut the bolt. The mirror was a mirror again. She snuffed the candle with her finger.

Then she heard footsteps on the porch. Perhaps Lydia had had time to scream after all.

The rumble of a carriage and horses came up from the road beyond. More steps on the porch. Her heart in her ears, Amelia was too shocked to move, so when the men opened the door, they found her kneeling by the body with blood on her hands and the occult circle drawn around her.

Cañon City, Colorado, Four Months Later

Doors, passages, worlds. A skillful magus could travel between them by his thoughts alone, or so Amelia had read. In the East she had seen orange-clad monks who could stop their own breathing by meditation and seemed to be dead, but they awoke safely.

Did she believe a person could travel between life and death? Pass through that iron door and return unharmed?

The bricks of the prison where she was housed were old enough, at least by this country’s standards. Their roots stretched into the earth. They had seen forty years of life and death. They had passages and portals the wardens did not know about. Lying on her canvas cot at night, she traveled them. She bound together a bit of candle and a lock of hair and burned them until neither remained.

Would it work?

The iron door was open wide, gaping like a mouth.

They had cut her dark hair short and put her in a poor cotton dress, a bleached gray prison uniform. They had let her keep her boots, thank God. These boots had traveled the world and were well broken in, comfortable. At least her feet were not sore. The boots would walk her to the scaffold. She could travel between worlds, but not escape a steel-barred prison. A sore irony.

The day was blustery, a wind pouring from the mountains, carrying dust and the promise of rain. For now the sky was hazy, washed out by an arid sun. A crowd of spectators had gathered, all men in proper suits and hats, hairy mustaches making their frowns seem fiercer, more judgmental. They were all no doubt horrified at what she’d done. What they thought she’d done. The bastards had no idea. They would truly be horrified if they knew what lived in the world, dime-novel monsters they could not believe.

She stood on the platform. A man tied her hands in front of her. A noose hung. Part of her wanted to look away, but part of her studied it. She had seen men hanged, but had never seen a noose from this angle, so close. The knot had been tied correctly. She had never seen a woman hanged.

Her thoughts were scattered, her mind already partway gone. Not through the door, but into a little room she had built beside the door with hair, candle, and incantation. She would fool that iron slab. Doors and rooms existed between life and death.

The candle, the hair. The light, her life.

How had it come to this? part of her wailed. Her parents had been right, she should have stayed home, married the unremarkable suit they’d put in front of her. Too late, the scientific part of her mind reprimanded. She followed this path of her own free will and she must continue on. When the path seemed to end, you blazed a new trail through the wilderness.

“Amelia Parker, you have been tried and convicted for the murder of Lydia Harcourt and sentenced to death according to the laws of the state of Colorado.”

She cleared her throat and tried not to sound nervous. Her voice came out halting anyway. “Lady Amelia Parker. I’d prefer my title entered into the records, if you please.” Her throat closed, and she swallowed. Just a little longer. Stay focused on that room beside the iron door.

“Lady Amelia Parker, do you have any last words?”

“None whatsoever. Thank you.”

“Then may God have mercy on your soul.”

Closing her eyes, she left the scaffold. It was a strange feeling. She merely thought, Breathe out. Breathe it all out. Focus on the small symbols she had built, make them real, go there. Light, life, the room beside the door. Then she was watching a slim waif of a girl standing on the scaffold. It was her, pale and despairing. She’d hardly eaten for days and it showed. The prison dress hung limply on her. Hood over her head, rope around her neck. Still she could see. Was pleased the body did not tremble. But the executioners had to guide it into place, as if the person was no longer truly conscious.

The floor dropped with a creak and a snap, and everything went dark.

Cañon City, Colorado, The Present

Cormac took another step forward in line and tried not to think too hard. This place was built on routine, rhythm. If he let himself fall into it, the days flew by. He’d be out of here in no time, if he could keep up the rhythm and not let anything—anyone—knock him out of it. He made sure not to get too close to the guy in front of him—big guy, beefy shoulders, white, tattoo-covered—and tried not to think of the guy behind him—shorter, wiry, which probably meant he was quick—breathing down his neck. Cormac didn’t look at anyone, didn’t meet anyone’s gaze. Let himself be carried by the rhythm. He’d pick up his tray, his plastic utensils, find a place to sit where he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, and eat to keep himself going for another day. Try not to think about the way the orange jumpsuit didn’t fit right across his shoulders, or the way this place smelled like fifty years of bad cooking.

He had his tray in hand when a shove hit his shoulder. Because he’d been expecting it, the tray didn’t go flying.

He didn’t have to look to know it was the guy behind him, the scrappy freak who’d tried to stare him down before at meals or out in the yard. It wasn’t an accident, though if Cormac confronted him the guy would say it was. More than that, he wouldn’t apologize; he’d turn it around, accuse Cormac of trying to start something, then he really would start something—a fight to knock him a few pegs down the pecking order. Cormac had seen this play out a dozen times. The black guys had their gangs, and they picked on the Latino gangs who picked on the white gangs who picked on everybody else, spouting some kind of superiority shtick, which was a riot because they were all locked up in the same cinder-block box wearing the same prison jumpsuits. Even their tattoos blurred together after a while. Cormac didn’t try to keep score.

He turned his head just enough to look at the guy, whose eyes were round, whose lips were snarly. The collar of his jumpsuit was crooked. He was bristling, teeth bared, like he was getting ready to jump him. But Cormac didn’t react. Just looked at the guy, frowning. Cold. The big mistake these jokers made was thinking Cormac cared about his rep, cared about the pecking order, wanted or even needed to join up for protection, for friendship, for some sense of belonging. Like they were all some pack of wolves, he thought with some amount of irony.

They stood like that for maybe a full minute until the next guy behind muttered, “Hey, move it.” Cormac only turned back around when the scrappy freak ducked his gaze. No need to get excited, no need to say a word. You just had to keep to yourself. He wasn’t here to make lifelong friends or be the boss of anyone.

No one else bothered him as he picked up his tray and went to an empty table at the far end of the cafeteria. Prison guards stood at the doorways, watching. Cormac didn’t pay them any more attention than he did to his fellow prisoners. There was no point to it.

He hadn’t been trying to earn a reputation over the last few months, but he seemed to have one anyway. No one else sat with him; the others gave him plenty of room. He didn’t talk, didn’t try to make friends. That cold stare was enough to keep trouble away. So he ate greasy chicken and mashed potatoes with watery gravy in silence.

He didn’t want to think too hard about it, but keeping stock of his surroundings was too much a habit to quit: noting where the people around him were, how they carried themselves, where the exits were, what dangers lay in wait. The hunter’s instincts. He should have been grateful—those instincts were keeping him safe here. But they also made him edgy. Maybe it was the feeling of being trapped, that he couldn’t go anywhere in this place without being watched, without the chance that one of those uniformed, frozen-faced guards might decide to take him down for no reason at all. He hadn’t seen open sky in weeks. Even the yard was ringed with concrete and barbed wire.

He set down his fork and flattened his hand on the table, just for a moment, until the tension went away. He was doing all right. He just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And he had to get rid of the tightness in his spine that said someone was watching him. That something around here was just a little bit … off.

The inmates told ghost stories.

“There’s a warden fifty years ago who hung himself,” the guy in the next cell, Moe, was saying. “Can you believe that? A warden. Hung himself on the top floor. That knocking sound? That’s him. Walking around.”

“Shut up,” hollered another inmate in another cell.

“You’ve heard it,” Moe insisted.

“It’s pipes. It’s old fucking pipes,” Cormac’s cellmate Frank said.

“You know the story, you know it’s true.”

The pipes acted up once a week or so, and every time Moe had to talk about the ghost of the warden who hanged himself. Cormac thought it was just the pipes.

Trouble was, inmates told lots of stories, and something here wasn’t right. That tingling at the back of his neck made him reach for a gun on his belt. Easy enough to brush it off, to tell Moe to shut up. But something dripped off the walls here. Of course a prison was going to be tense, all these angry guys penned up together.

But Cormac knew what was really out there. A prison filled with ghosts wasn’t the worst of it.

“I’m going to beat you if you don’t shut it!”

“I’m just telling you. I’m warning you!”

This would go on for another minute before Moe finally shut up. Wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.

Cormac pressed his pillow over his ear and tried to think himself away from this place. To a meadow up in Grand County, miles from anywhere. Tucked on the side of a valley, east facing so it got the first sun of the morning. Green grass, tall trees, blue sky, and a creek running down the middle of it. His father had taken him hunting there when he was a kid, and he never forgot it. Camping, waking up before dawn when a layer of mist clung to the grass. Drinking strong coffee heated over a campfire. He went back there, when he needed to get out of his own head.

The nameplate sitting on the desk read “Dr. Ronald Olson.” Cormac sat in the not-so-comfortable chair across the desk from an unassuming man in an oxford shirt and corduroy jacket. He even had glasses. He was maybe in his fifties, and his hair was thinning. He looked soft rather than weathered. Cormac classified him as prey.

“How are you doing today?” Olson asked.

Cormac shrugged. This was just another hoop to jump through. Play nice for the camp counselor. He doubted the guy could tell him anything about himself he didn’t already know. Both his parents had died violently when he was young, his whole life had been filled with violence, he’d fallen back on violence as a solution to every problem, and that was what landed him here.

He didn’t know if Olson expected him to try to manipulate him, play some kind of mental hide-and-seek, Hannibal Lector–style. Cormac didn’t want to work that hard for so little payoff. But Olson was free to think Cormac was a puzzle he could pick apart and solve.

“How are you adjusting?”

“It’s just a place,” Cormac said, shrugging again. “One day at a time.”

“Any problems? Anything you’d like to talk about? It can be a shock, going from the outside to this.”

Cormac smiled and looked away. “Am I supposed to get pissed off because I can’t run out to McDonald’s and get a hamburger? That’s a waste of energy.”

“That’s an admirable stoicism. Are you sure you aren’t in denial? That can be dangerous as well.”

Cormac had a feeling the two of them looked at dangerous in completely different ways. He resisted an urge to glance at the clock, to see how much time they had left. He hadn’t asked for this—the guy had gotten hold of Cormac’s file and decided he must be crazy.

“I figure I keep my head down and get out of here just as quick as I can.”

“Goal oriented. That’s good.”

Now Cormac wondered if the guy was for real. He shifted, leaning forward just a little. “There’s one thing you could maybe tell me about.”

“Go on.”

“You hear many ghost stories around here? Do guys come in here telling about … things. Noises, spooky stuff.”

Olson’s smile seemed condescending. “I suppose every prison has its share of ghost stories. Some inmates have active imaginations.”

“There seem to be a lot of them around here. Like the guys have passed them down over the years. They say some warden hanged himself and now his ghost walks around, that a serial killer came in slitting inmates’ throats, that sort of thing.”

“You believe that?”

“The one about the warden? No. Not that one.”

“But you believe … something.”

“People tell stories because there may be something to some of it.” He wasn’t trying to rattle the guy; wasn’t sure much would rattle a prison therapist. That wasn’t a game Cormac wanted to start. But there had to be something to the constant chill that had settled in his spine.

Olson leaned forward to study a page in an open folder, Cormac’s file, as if he hadn’t already memorized it and was working from a script.

“In your deposition, you claimed your victim wasn’t human,” he said.

“I didn’t say that. I said she wasn’t all human.”

“Then what else was she?” He didn’t ask like someone who was really interested in the answer. He asked like a psychologist who expected his patient to say something damning. Hell, how much more damned could he be?

“It’s hard to explain,” he said.

“You think something like that is going on here? Something that’s hard to explain?”

This isn’t about me, Cormac wanted to yell at the guy. But he settled back, didn’t look away, didn’t give an inch. “Maybe it’s just being in jail.”

“I just have a couple of more questions for you. Your parents both passed away when you were quite young. What do you remember about them?”

Cormac stared at the guy, his expression unchanging. “I don’t remember anything.”

Of course Olson didn’t believe him; Cormac hadn’t expected him to. They stared at each other, waiting for the other to break.

Olson glanced at his watch and said, “I think that’s enough for today. Until next week, then.” He smiled kindly. A guard took Cormac back to his cell.

Part of the general population, he was allowed out of his cell for meals, showers, time in the yard, and his work detail washing dishes. He’d put in for a better job, but that would take time, a review. He had to prove that he wasn’t going to cause trouble. He was trying to do just that. The days ticked on, hour by hour. Best not to count the time, but there it was.

His half of the cell was starting to look like it belonged to him—his small shelf displayed a growing collection of books, a small stack of letters he’d gotten, a couple of magazines. Frank had been here longer and had a radio and pictures of his two kids on display. None of those details could disguise the bars, or the fact that their bedroom was also a bathroom, with a stainless steel toilet and sink mounted in the corner. This was a cage in a zoo.

Yet another night after lights out he lay on the top bunk, staring at the shadowed ceiling, waiting for sleep to pull him under. He could almost hear the shadows shifting across the walls, moving through the building, claws scratching on concrete. The place was old, haunted. A prison had been on this spot for almost a hundred fifty years. If any ghosts had taken up residence during that time, he was stuck with them.

“Hey,” said Frank from the bottom bunk. Cormac didn’t answer, but Frank continued. “You got a girl waiting for you on the outside, don’t you?”

It was an odd question. Cormac kept staring up. “What makes you say that?”

“The way you stare, like you’re looking somewhere else. Guys only stare like that when they’re thinking about a girl. Not just a hot piece of ass, but someone they really like.”

Cormac’s thoughts flashed on a face and a name. The girl he liked. The one who wasn’t waiting for him on the outside.

He rolled over on his side and didn’t say a word.

Ghosts haunted the place. She built up her walls and they left her alone. She waited.

The first one who went mad was a veteran of the Great War who’d returned home to few prospects and been caught stealing an automobile. She had thought perhaps the chaotic visions swirling in his mind would prepare him for her. She was wrong. She slipped in quietly, tentatively, like dipping fingers in the surface of a pool of water to test the temperature. She whispered words, told him what would happen, that it wouldn’t hurt—she didn’t think it would. She hoped it wouldn’t. But it did. Her presence pushed an already disturbed mind past breaking. He woke from sleep screaming and wouldn’t stop. Said he heard voices.

Madmen who speak of the voices they hear was such an awful cliché. And yet.

She tried to be more careful. Her second attempt was a family man convicted of fraud. A stable, quiet man who’d committed a nonviolent crime and had much to keep him levelheaded. When he heard the voice, the whisper, and felt her tendrils in his mind, the spirit that wasn’t his own moving through his flesh, he split his skull trying to fight his way out of the cell.

And so it went. No matter how carefully she chose her targets, how gently she pressed against their thoughts, she broke minds, searching for one that would fit her. She was waiting for a certain quality of mind: intelligent, astute, observant, patient. So many of the minds that passed through here were troubled, ill, wracked by demons of their own making that had nothing to do with the supernatural. Weak, prone to violence, which was what brought many of them here in the first place. She waited a long time.

She might have given up entirely, let what was left of her fade to shadow, but the murders followed her. The curse of the demon should have ended with her death. But she hadn’t really died, had she?

She needed a body to resume the hunt, to finally destroy the curse. So she kept trying, kept making morbid sacrifices.

If she’d had any fear in her state, any feeling beyond the instinct to seek out what she needed, she’d have been afraid. She would lose herself in this place. The spell would never work to completion. She’d never find the vessel. She would fade, become simply another voice calling purposelessly to madmen. Another shade to the miasma seeping from the stones.

Then, one of the minds recognized her.

He’d been primed, and he had the instincts. He recognized the irregular, the uncanny. Magic. He didn’t even know it. He’d lived with it so long, he only noticed it as a tickling in his mind.

He was violent, here for killing. But it was a controlled, chilled violence of necessity and will. In some ways, his ability to kill was less understandable than the ones who lashed out in the heat of violence and caused mayhem. They lost control and that was reason enough.

This man approached it like a job, with no more passion than he might mend a shirt or dig a hole. She was drawn to him and horrified—her, horrified! What was he?

Human, nothing more. She could see by the glow of him.

Most of all, though, she felt he was a hard mind. Resilient. He might hear a voice, but wouldn’t break from it like the dozen before him had. She was sure of it.

After breakfast the next day, an alarm sounded. Lockdown. Cormac lay on his bunk, waiting for news. The grapevine would start feeding rumors soon enough. Probably it was just someone trying to get out. It happened more often than he would have thought, inmates packing themselves into crates to be shipped out or squeezing through barbed wire. He didn’t understand how that could look like a good idea to anyone, even someone who spent twenty-three hours a day in a ten-by-ten cell. People succeeded more often than he would have thought, but seldom for very long. The guy who packed himself into a crate was found when they unloaded the truck at its destination. He was hauled back with a few more years added to his sentence.

The gamble wasn’t worth it. Just a few years, keep his nose clean, get out. That was the plan. He’d still have a life when he got out of here. Maybe even more of one than when he arrived. He could stare at the ceiling for a few years and not go crazy.

Moe, the flighty guy in the next cell over, said, “They found Brewster.”

Frank stood by the bars in the corner to talk to him. “Found him where?”

“Dead, throat cut, blood everywhere. Right in his cell.”

“So Gus did it?”

Cormac listened, almost amused. Gus must have snapped. The guy was half Brewster’s size, but he could have managed it.

“No, that’s the thing, Gus’s pissing his pants. They don’t think he did it.”

That piqued Cormac’s attention.

“They were locked in together, what else could have happened?” Frank said.

“All I know is he got cut up, but they didn’t find a knife, and Gus is pissing himself. Says he didn’t even see what happened.”

Frank chuckled. “Yeah, that’s a good story. That’ll get him off the hook for sure.”

“It’s just like what happened with that serial killer, the one from the thirties, remember?”

“I thought that happened in the sixties,” Frank said.

“Maybe it was a vampire,” Cormac said. “Turned to mist, come in through the bars.”

Frank stared at him. He was young but worn down, a stout white guy with a dozen tattoos scattered piecemeal across his back and arms. He’d spent more of his adult life in prison than out of it.

From the other cell Moe said, “What’d he say?”

“You’re not serious,” Frank said. “Can they do that?”

One thing was for sure, the world had gotten a whole lot more interesting over the last year, since the NIH went public with data proving that vampires and lycanthropes were real. Cormac loved throwing out bombshells like that. He loved that people acknowledged the existence of monsters without knowing anything about them. It made terrifying them so easy.

“But it probably wasn’t that,” Cormac said. “Vampire wouldn’t have left all that blood lying around.”

“Jesus Christ,” Frank muttered. “Now how am I supposed to sleep?”

Cormac knew that vampires didn’t turn into mist. They moved quickly, with faster-than-the-eye reflexes, and that was probably how the mist stories started. They couldn’t break into a locked cell. But if Gus had nothing to do with the murder, then something had gotten in and killed Brewster.

It was just the rumor mill. He’d wait for more reliable information before drawing conclusions.

That night, Cormac woke up sweating, batting at a humming in his ear. The place had bugs. Rolling to his side, he settled his arm over his head, and tried to imagine he was outdoors, camping at the edge of his meadow, his father sleeping a few feet away, his rifle beside him. Any sign of trouble, Dad would take care of it.

Cormac hadn’t thought much of his father in years, until he ended up here. Here, he thought about everything. What would his father think of him now? Would he be surprised his kid ended up in prison?

The breathing and snores of the dozens of other men on the block echoed and kept Cormac rooted to this place. Best not to let his mind wander too much. Had to stay here. Pay attention. He shouldn’t have thought of his father.

A voice plucked deep in his mind, a buried place carefully covered over, where not even his dreaming self went. That place had lain quiet as a matter of survival.

What are you?

A shadow stirred, rustling, looking for the light. Cormac shut the door on it.

Olson would see him next week and ask, Anything troubling you? Anything you want to talk about? That shadow would start to rattle around the inside of his mind, but Cormac would just shake his head no. Nothing to talk about. Except that the inside of his skull itched. Again Olson would ask, What’s on your mind? And Cormac would say, Let me tell you about my father, who died when I was sixteen. Let me tell you how, and what I did to the monster that killed him.

The buzzing wasn’t a fly; the legs crawled on the interior surface of his skull. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to take the top of his head off and scratch.

It was just this place getting to him. Well, couldn’t let that happen. Had to hold on, stay sane. He had too many reasons to stay sane and get out of here in one piece. He never thought he’d say that. Never thought he’d have anything to live for except the next job, the next hunt.

He drifted off and again woke up sweating. This time it was light out, sun coming in through distant skylights. Cormac still felt like the bugs had gotten to him.

He thought of all the things that could slice up a man in a locked cell. A guy could do himself in like that if he put his mind to it, and it wasn’t too hard to think of how captivity could drive a man—the right kind of man—to it. That was the simplest explanation and the one the warden would probably settle on. Let the psychologists hash it out.

While Cormac had been joking about vampires turning to mist and coming in through the bars, other things could appear from nowhere, things that didn’t have physical bodies, demons with knifelike claws that fed on blood, curses laid from afar. Ghosts that tickled the inside of your mind. If he’d been in charge of an investigation and the physical evidence couldn’t explain it, that would be the first trail Cormac followed: Did Brewster know anyone who could work that kind of magic, who also had it in for him? Without seeing the body for himself, Cormac didn’t have much to go on. They’d probably find some reasonable, nonsupernatural explanation.

Two guards didn’t come to work the next day.

Yard time was cut short. Half the block didn’t get time at all, which set up an afternoon of trouble. Guys yelled from their cells, hassling guards during counts, which happened half a dozen times a day. The warden even added a count, which started up a rumor that somebody was missing and probably cut up the same as Brewster.

That couldn’t have been the case, because when a count turned up short the whole facility went into lockdown, and that hadn’t happened since the body was found. Lockdown then had only lasted a day, but that made two days now that the routine had been trashed. Without routine, inmates floundered.

At dinner, Cormac took his tray to his usual corner in the dining hall. A couple of tables over, his neighbor, Moe, was tugging on another guy’s arm. Big guy, bald, tattooed arms, glaring across the room with murder in his eyes. Cormac followed the gaze to a group of black men who seemed to be minding their own business. Moe was trying to get the guy to sit back down.

Cormac took his tray and moved another table down, farther away from them, and put his back to the wall. Sure enough, the shouting started, the big guy broke away from Moe’s grasp and lunged toward one of the black guys, who lunged right back at him. The fight turned into a full-blown melee in seconds, two gangs pounding into each other, surrounded by a ring of more men screaming them on.

This was what passed for entertainment around here.

Cormac kept quiet and wolfed down as much of his dinner as he could, because sure enough, guards swarmed into the place, clubs drawn to beat the crowd into submission and drag the worst offenders to the hole. They cleared the whole room. When a guard approached Cormac, he raised his hands, lowered his gaze, and went back to his cell without argument. The prison went into lockdown yet again, which mean a lot more staring at ceilings and grumbling.

“He said it was voodoo,” Moe said right after lights out, in a hissing voice that managed to carry down the row. The guy had somehow managed to extricate himself from the worst of the mess and got out of any kind of punishment. “Hal said that Carmell knew voodoo and made a voodoo doll of Brewster and ripped it to pieces. That’s what got Brewster.”

Somebody muttered at him to shut up.

“Voodoo doesn’t work like that,” Cormac said. He shouldn’t be encouraging the guy.

“It don’t work at all,” Frank said.

“You know so much about it, how does it work?” Moe said.

Cormac sighed. Maybe a scary enough story would shut him up—or make it worse. “That voodoo doll thing is Hollywood. Saturday morning cartoons. Real voodoo, you want something done you have to make a sacrifice. Usually a blood sacrifice for something big. You’d slaughter somebody in order to do the curse, not as the curse itself.”

Now there was a thought that halfway made sense. It wasn’t a murder, but a blood sacrifice. That still didn’t explain who or why.

The others shut up for at least half a minute.

“Christ, you’re worse than him,” Frank grumbled.

Moe perked up with what seemed to be a new theory. “Hey, if it wasn’t Carmell, maybe it was you. You seem to know all about this shit.”

“Forget I said anything,” Cormac said, rolling to his side and pulling his pillow over his head.

“Maybe it was Satanists. I heard this story about a cult of Satanists here like twenty years ago—”

In winter, the creek froze solid, but in spring it ran white and frothing with snowmelt, lace waterfalls tumbling over sheer boulders. He could watch it for hours and stay calm.

Elk came down into the meadow to graze early, an hour or so after dawn when the sun began to peek over the mountaintops. Dad would stake out the herd, choose his target, and fire. Never missed. This was where he’d taught Cormac to do the same. He didn’t bring his clients here. He’d run an outfitting service, worked as a private guide for hunting parties made up of folks with more money than sense. Got them their big stuffed trophy heads and stories for their fancy cocktail parties. But this place was different. This place was for family.

As Cormac watched, the elk vanished. Like someone turning off a TV.

A woman appeared before him, gray, ghostlike.

Terrifyingly out of place, she stood on the dewy grass, hands folded demurely before her, chin tipped up. Her clothing was old- fashioned: a dark skirt that draped to the ground, a high-collared neckline with tight little buttons going all the way up, lace around the wrists of her long sleeves. Her black hair was twisted at the base of her neck, and she wore a hat, a flat thing with a brim and a few feathers curling down the side.

Cormac had an urge to unwrap that hair to see how long it was.

She opened pale lips to speak. The inside of Cormac’s skull itched.

Shivering, he opened his eyes to darkness. Twisting, he looked over his shoulder through the bars, fully expecting to see the woman standing outside the cell. His instincts told him someone was standing there. But deep into night, the place was still. Nothing moved. No one stood there, the pressure at the back of his neck notwithstanding.

“Goddamn,” he whispered. He scratched his head, fingers scraping through his rough hair. The itching faded, but didn’t go away. The skin on his back crawled.

This place was doing its best to make him crazy, but he’d be damned if he let it.

Moe’s cellmate’s screaming woke the block in the morning, at dawn.

Cormac hadn’t slept well and was already awake. He jumped off the top bunk and pressed himself to the bars, trying to see next door. Frank was right beside him.

In the next cell over, Moe’s cellmate, Harlan, was throwing himself against the bars, reaching through them, lunging like he could push his way through. His breaths came in full-throated screams, over and over.

Cormac smelled blood, and the only way he could smell it from ten feet over was if there was a whole lot of it. Looking down, he saw a dark puddle pushing out, oozing on the floor from the cell to the walkway outside. Harlan must have been standing in it.

A pair of guards came, annoyed looks on their faces, as if they were fully prepared to beat the shit out of the guy. When they reached the cell, their expressions changed. They radioed the control room to open the door, and as soon as the bars slid away, Harlan fell out and ran smack against the railing opposite before the guards caught him and hauled him upright. He was gibbering, unable to stand on his feet. He kept looking back into the cell, eyes wide and horrified. His socks left bloody footprints on the concrete.

It had happened again.

Cormac thought they might move him and Frank to another cell while they investigated Moe’s death, but they didn’t. They didn’t have anywhere else to put them while the block was under lockdown. Harlan had been dragged to the infirmary.

Frank paced. The prison equivalent of cabin fever was getting to lots of them. Some of the guys were shouting about cruel and unusual punishment, that none of them should have to stay here until the warden figured out why men were dying. Someone had started an Ebola rumor—the disease had infected the prison and was now spreading. Or that the government was using the inmates in experiments. None of that was right. Cormac wondered if that ghostly woman carried a knife under her skirt.

He leaned against the bars, arms laced through, to watch as much of the investigation as he could. The lead investigator, a burly middle-aged guy in a blue Department of Corrections uniform, stepped carefully around the pool of blood. A photographer snapped his camera, recording the crime scene.

An hour or so later, the guards brought the body out on a stretcher. They didn’t cover it up at first, and Cormac got a pretty good look. Moe’s throat had been slit from ear to ear, torn maybe, though the edges weren’t clear through the blood. He didn’t seem injured or cut in any other way. Cormac was willing to bet the same thing had happened to Brewster.

The investigator noticed him watching. The guy had probably been around long enough to have seen a few wild crime scenes and was probably already cooking up some story about how Gus and Harlan had gone crazy and killed their cellmates in exactly the same way. He studied Cormac, taking in details, probably figuring he knew everything about him from those few seconds of looking. Gruff-looking thirty-something hanging on the bars of a prison cell. What else did he need to know?

“You see anything?” the investigator said. “Hear anything unusual from over here?”

Cormac made a shrugging motion with his hands. “I was laying on my bunk. I didn’t hear anything until Harlan screamed.”

The investigator smirked. “Does that mean you didn’t hear anything, or you ‘didn’t hear anything.’” He put up finger quotes the second time.

Why the hell did the guy bother asking if he wasn’t going to believe him? “I figure he must have woken up and seen Moe already like that.”

“Then who do you think killed Moe?”

“Don’t know. Bogeyman?”

Now the guy looked disgusted. “What are you in for?”

“Manslaughter.”

“So you killed somebody but you didn’t mean to?”

“Oh, I meant to all right. I’m here on a plea bargain.”

The investigator walked away in a huff.

“Christ, man.” Frank eased up against the bars next to Cormac. “It’s like I watch you trying so hard to stay out of folks’ way but you just can’t help aggravating them.”

“I just told the truth.”

“Yeah, right,” Frank said, laughing. The laughter sounded wrong and put Cormac even more on edge.

He wasn’t much surprised when a guard came for him and went through the process of pulling him out of the cell. Frank, standing facing the wall, hands on his head, was still laughing, quietly, like he thought Cormac had brought this on himself.

He expected to be put in a closet and worked over by the smug inspector, but the guard led him to Olson’s office. The doctor looked busy, gathering manila folders and setting them aside, indicating for Cormac to sit while he did. He slouched into the chair opposite the desk.

“Thank you for coming,” Olson said.

Cormac chuckled. “Seriously?”

Olson granted a thin smile. “That we’re sitting in a prison is no reason not to be polite.”

“I didn’t think I was up for another session yet,” Cormac said.

“You’re not, but I wanted to talk to you. What have you been hearing about recent events?” He had finished filing and now leaned forward, arms on his desk, his full attention on Cormac.

“My cell’s right next to Moe’s,” he said. “Kind of hard to avoid it.”

“Do you think his cellmate did it?”

“What—both his cellmate and Brewster’s, going batshit and turning killer in the same way? Neither one of them’s a killer.”

“But if they didn’t, what did?”

“‘What did?’ Not who?” Cormac said.

Olson paused, considering, gathering his words. “I’m sure you’re hearing more rumors than I am. People are saying what killed him couldn’t have been human. It was too brutal.”

For a prison full of medium- to high-security inmates, that was saying something. “So what else could it have been?” Cormac said, straight-faced, disingenuous. “Some kind of monster?”

“You’ve had a long association with monsters.”

Cormac wondered how much he’d have to say before he got a referral to the psychiatric ward. Deciding to play out a little line, he said, “Some of my best friends are werewolves.”

“Yes, so your file says.”

Nothing flustered this guy. Olson was starting to look less like prey.

Olson continued. “An autopsy on Brewster’s body showed no fingerprints, no fibers, no sign of a struggle. His throat seemed to have spontaneously opened, the cut reaching all the way to his backbone. Gus is in the infirmary, under sedation. He hasn’t been able to communicate since the guards found him with Brewster’s body. No weapon was found, and Gus didn’t have any blood on him. Because of that he’s not being considered a suspect. Now Harlan is in the same state. I suspect Moe’s autopsy will reveal the same set of mysteries.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Cormac said.

“I’m asking for your advice. Do you have any idea what could have done this?”

Cormac’s first impulse was to blow him off. Olson was part of the establishment that locked him in here. Bureaucrats like him didn’t have room for the bizarre, couldn’t understand that the woman he’d killed was a wizard, powerful and evil, and he’d had no choice but to destroy her. As Frank had observed, Cormac could piss people off just by sitting in one place and looking at them funny. Olson couldn’t force him to help. Why should Cormac volunteer?

“There’s so much shit out there that could have done this,” Cormac said.

“Vampire? Werewolf?”

“Maybe. But you’ve got the same problem with them—how’d they get through the locked door?”

“So what can murder someone behind a locked door? What should we be looking for?”

“Something without a body,” Cormac said. “Some kind of curse or magic. Ghost, maybe. Demon.”

He could see Olson trying to process, trying to keep an open mind, his mouth pursed against arguments. Finally he said, smiling wryly, “You’re getting into issues of physics, now. A physical action requires a physical presence. Doesn’t it?”

Cormac couldn’t tell if he was being rhetorical or asking a genuine question. “There are more things in heaven and earth,” he murmured.

“Hamlet,” said Olson. “You like to read, don’t you? You have a friend who sends you books.”

“I thought this wasn’t about me. This is about your bogeyman.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

A werewolf had transformed on live TV late last year. Congress had acknowledged the existence of vampires, werewolves, and psychics and brought them to testify in Washington. Cormac had known his whole life that these beings were real, and now the rest of the world was catching up. That didn’t stop a lot of folks from pulling the shades down. If Olson were one of those, this whole thing could be a setup. A trap. Get him in here, get him talking crazy, giving them an excuse to pin the deaths on him and lock him up good and tight. No visitors, no parole. Then he really would go crazy.

Cormac said, “Are you serious about this? Are you serious about looking for something that a lot of people don’t even believe exists?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if we had a logical, mundane explanation for what’s happening here.”

Not that Cormac had a choice but to trust him. Like so much of his life right now, the decision was out of his hands. “This place has been around a long time. Has anything like this happened here before? Rumor, ghost story, anything.”

Olson glanced away briefly, nervously. “It’s hard to tell. There’ve been so many attacks over the prison’s history—”

“But have there been any cases of somebody getting their throat cut in a locked cell?” Any sightings of a dark-haired woman in Victorian clothing?

“In fact, there have,” Olson said. “A handful over the last hundred years. But they were isolated—never more than one at a time. In every case another inmate was charged with the murder. Are you saying they may be connected?”

Cormac was both shocked and thrilled at the news—he hadn’t expected Olson to answer. This meant there was a thread tying these deaths together. Which meant there was a way to hunt the thing doing it.

This thing had been killing here a long time, but that didn’t bother Cormac. He was even a little amused—even inside prison walls where he ought to be safe, this shit just kept following him around.

“Even if you don’t know what’s doing this, you can try to protect the place. Put up crosses above the doorways, at the ends of hallways. Get a priest in to throw some holy water around, do an exorcism.”

“Seriously?” Olson said. “That works?”

“It’s not a sure thing.”

“That’s the trouble with this, isn’t it? It’s never a sure thing.”

Cormac had to grin. “That’s why it never hurts to cover all your bases.”

When he arrived at the visiting room, he saw that Kitty had joined Ben this time. The joy—or relief—at seeing them both was a physical pain, a squeezing of his heart, though he kept his face a mask. He wanted to melt into the floor, but he only slumped into his chair and picked up the phone.

“Hey,” he said, like he always did.

“Hey,” Ben said back, and Kitty smiled. They sat close together so they could hold their phone between them. Cormac had gone to live with Ben’s family after his father died, and now he was the closest thing he had to a brother. Kitty was … something else entirely. The two of them had gotten married a month or so back. Ben had sucked her into the family. She couldn’t escape now.

Kitty was cute. Really cute, and not just the way she looked with her shoulder-length blond hair, big brown eyes, and slender body. She burst with optimism, constantly chatting, always moving, and usually smiling. She and Cormac never should have met much less become friends. She represented a lot of lost chances. A lot of things he should have done, and maybe some he shouldn’t have. But he wasn’t sure he’d want to change any of it. Better to have her as a friend than not at all.

She was better off with Ben. He was man enough to admit that.

Small talk got real small when he didn’t have anything new to say. What was he supposed to tell them, when the same thing happened every day? But this week was different, and he wondered: How much should he tell them? Wasn’t like they could do anything to help.

Then Kitty mentioned her own demon, derailing the whole routine of their usual visits. It seemed she was in the middle of an adventure, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He didn’t know whether to throttle her or laugh. He ended up just shaking his head. He’d come to her rescue, all she had to do was say the word, any time. Except for now. He hoped they didn’t get themselves killed before he could get out of here to help them. He hoped whatever was haunting this place left him alone until then.

He’d developed an inner clock—they were running out of time, and he had a bad idea.

“Can I talk to Kitty alone for a minute?” he said to Ben. Ben wouldn’t understand—he’d try to fix everything, and he couldn’t, not this time. Kitty didn’t know him well enough to be suspicious.

Ben left, not looking happy about it.

Alone now, Kitty seemed almost accusing. “What is it? What can you say to me that you can’t say to him?”

His lip curled. “You really want me to answer that?” She looked away; so did he. “I don’t want him to worry. Kitty, do you believe in ghosts?”

He liked her because nothing ever seemed to shock her. “Of course I do.”

He leaned forward. “Can you do some of that research you’re so good at?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I need to know the names of any women who were executed here. Let’s say right around 1900, give or take a decade. And any history you can find on them.”

She narrowed her gaze, and he wondered if he’d said too much. Now they were both going to worry, because she wouldn’t keep this secret from Ben. “Are you being haunted or something?”

“I don’t know. It’s a hunch. It may be nothing.” That last was a lie.

“Is everything okay?”

He hoped she didn’t tell him to get some sleep, that she didn’t see the stress written on his face. He tried to smile, failed. “Hanging in there. Sometimes by my fingernails. But hanging in there.”

He played the visit over in his memory, like he did every time, even though he knew he shouldn’t. He made himself sick, worrying that maybe this was the last time they’d visit, maybe they’d skip next week, maybe they’d decide they didn’t need him—they wouldn’t do that, they weren’t like that. But he had a hard time not imagining it, so he dwelled, reflecting on every word they spoke, every loose strand of Kitty’s hair, just in case they didn’t come back.

Noises here echoed. The hollered complaints kept up even after lights out, and the warden and his guards couldn’t do anything about it. They’d have had to put every damn inmate into solitary. Cormac was betting that nobody even knew why they were leaning out, as far as they could, faces pressed to bars and yelling. They were scared and had to do something. Nothing was right and as far as they could tell the folks in charge weren’t doing anything about it. The idea that they didn’t know what to do was worse than the usual apathy.

Cormac could take care of any problem that bled. But this—without the help of someone like Olson or the warden, he couldn’t do anything. He lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling, trying to block out the noise. Trying not to think too hard about what might be lurking in these walls.

No priests came in to perform an exorcism. Cormac wasn’t surprised. He made a cross of his own, borrowing scraps of pine from the wood shop and lashing them together with a shoelace, and hung it over the door of his and Frank’s cell. Things got worse.

The dream was a form of escapism, he recognized that. The images kept him from wanting to break things, and that was good. Here, he remembered being safe, when everything was right. Almost everything. Enough of it was right that he didn’t think about the rest, the vague memory of a woman who’d died when he was young. He should have loved her, but anymore she was a shadow. A face in a few old snapshots. She didn’t enter into calculations of whether he was happy. But sometimes he wondered, What if. What if she had lived. Would having a mother have kept him from all this?

He sat on a rock overlooking the stream, squinting into a searing blue sky. Crystals embedded in the granite dug into his hands. He could even smell the sunbaked pines, meadow grasses cooled by the running water, snow-touched air coming down from the peaks. If he had to pick an opposite smell from the prison, this would be it. Clean and natural instead of antiseptic and institutional. Bright instead of sheltered.

He saw the woman again. Not at all ghostly this time, she walked obliquely up the hill toward him, watching where she stepped, lifting her heavy skirt with gloved hands. Some ten paces away, she stopped, smoothed her skirt, and folded her hands before her. She had color in her cheeks and wore a gold cross on a chain. Donning a small, bemused frown, she regarded him as if she had walked a long way to get here, but hadn’t found what she expected. Her gaze was cynical.

She didn’t look like a murderer or a demon. She looked far too real to be a ghost.

They could stay here, staring at each other for hours. If this had been real, he would have asked her what she was doing here. Or she would have spoken. This was a dream, his imagination, and so they simply stared. Trouble was, he’d never have imagined anyone like her. Nothing in his conscious mind could account for her. His mother had had auburn hair, not so dark as this woman’s.

He finally asked, “Who are you?”

The woman’s frown disappeared, but her smile was not comforting. She wanted something from him.

“I should be asking you that,” she answered. She had a crisp British accent, clipping her words like she was in a hurry.

He looked to the distance. He could wait. She wouldn’t stand there staring at him forever, and he was willing to bet his stubborn would outlast hers. Then again, how long had she been lurking here?

“Why won’t you let me in?” she said next.

This was getting a little too obvious to be a stray bit of psychoanalysis bubbling up from his subconscious. He didn’t want to be talking to his subconscious, his feminine side or whatever. Or maybe he was reading too much into it. A woman he didn’t know was standing here, asking him a question that had an obvious answer. Why not just answer her? Why not treat it as real?

“I don’t know you,” he said, looking at her. “I don’t know what you want.”

“That’s wise, I suppose, and I ought to respect that. But you see, Mr. Bennett, I’ve been waiting such a long time. I need you. More than anyone I’ve met I think you’d understand that.”

For the first time, she looked uncertain, clasping her hands together, ducking her gaze. Cormac thought, It’s an act. She was trying to soften him up.

“Wrong sales pitch,” he said. “Is that what you told Moe and Brewster? Is that how you killed them?”

Clenching her hands into fists, she said, “I did not kill them. I could have saved them, if you’d only listened to me.”

He felt the thunder of a sudden storm in the core of his bones, and his skull screamed in pain. She’d done something, he hadn’t seen what. Like banging on a door—Let me in.

With the flashing light of a migraine, he jerked awake, nearly toppling out of his bunk. He sat up, clutching his sheets like they would anchor him and gasping for breath. Sweat chilled his skin.

“Jesus, fuck, what is it?” Frank, half out of his bunk, clutched the bed’s frame and looked up at him.

Cormac felt the remnant of a scream in his throat. Closing his eyes tight, he swallowed and forced his breathing to slow. Everything was fine. He wasn’t in pain. Nothing was happening. Except for that almost constant itching in his brain. He scratched his head hard, ripping at his hair. The cell block was dark, quiet.

“I don’t know,” Cormac said. “Must have been a nightmare.”

“You’re not getting killed?”

“No. Doesn’t look like it.”

“There’s no blood? Look around—you don’t see blood?”

Although he felt silly doing it, he checked himself—and was relieved when he didn’t find any blood. “I’m in one piece.”

“Jesus Christ, man, don’t ever do that again. You have another nightmare I’ll beat it out of you, understand?”

Cormac didn’t argue because he couldn’t blame him; he’d have told Frank the same thing if the roles were reversed. His cellmate was still muttering as he rolled back into bed.

Lying back, Cormac didn’t try to sleep. He stared at the ceiling, a field of thick, institutional gray paint full of cracks and shadows. How many hundreds of eyes had stared up like this over the years? What did that do to a building? Cursing himself, he looked away. That was how far gone he was, attributing malevolence to a building.

Somehow, this woman, this demon, whatever she was, had dug into his brain and found his meadow, his refuge. The chink in his armor.

She thought she could get control of him through that weakness. Fine. He just wouldn’t go there anymore.

Her overriding goal, the purpose of her being—however truncated it had become—became more imperative than ever.

She found herself in a bind she had not expected. Not that she’d even known what to expect. Hacking her way through a jungle of unknown size and density was the least of it, really. But she was hacking and had faith that if she continued long enough, she would persevere. She had lasted this long, hadn’t she? At some point, time had no meaning. Science had discovered that fossils could lie in the earth undiscovered for millions of years. So would she.

Once she found her proper vessel, though, she assumed it would simply let her in. The paradox presented itself: A mind pliant enough to recognize her and not go mad would also have the ability to resist her. A mind that recognized her would know better than to let her in. So it was with this man. The door between them remained closed, barred with iron, stubbornly locked.

How much simpler it would be if she could persuade him! She called through the door, picked at the lock, tried battering it down with her will, which was all she had left. And he resisted.

She found another entry, however—a wedge he himself provided: the meadow. A magnificent, beautiful scene she would not have thought his troubled mind capable of conjuring. He himself didn’t seem to recognize that the memory of the place was filled with sadness and regret, the safety of a world and home he believed he had lost forever.

She hadn’t been able to delve farther, to learn where this memory had come from or the circumstances that tainted the air of his refuge, that he didn’t even seem to notice or refused to acknowledge.

She must win him over. The rituals of thought had become second nature over the century. The focusing of the mind, visualizing action, making action real. When nothing was real, the world became nothing but thought. She focused on the single cell, the single bed, where a man lay and put himself to sleep with thoughts of a meadow. She became tendrils, thin lines of energy melding into the patterns of his mind. Think of the meadow, put herself there, approach the man sitting on the rock. Listen to the birds in the trees, the water of the brook tumbling over smooth stones—

But the meadow wasn’t there anymore. It had lain so close to the surface before, almost as if he could transform this prison into his mountain vista through force of will. Now, he’d managed to lock her out.

There she was again, back at the start, battering at the door.

Oddly, she found herself admiring him.

“You can’t keep me out forever!” she shouted. “I’ll drive you mad! I’ve done it before, to men better than you!”

A smug satisfaction barred the door. The emotion roiled off him.

Time for a different approach—send a quiet thought, so quiet he would think it was his own. A bit of intuition granted from the supernatural. Surely he believed in such things.

“I can help you.” She didn’t even imagine her voice, did not give the words form. Merely let the thought linger. “I know this murderer, this demon. I have hunted it. I can help you.”

Create the thought, set it drifting, let him find it. That was all. She felt one impression out of the thought snag him: hunted.

The request for a visit surprised Cormac; this wasn’t Ben and Kitty’s day for it. He wasn’t sure this was a visiting day at all, and he didn’t need another anomaly making him twitch.

He sat, looked through the glass, and saw Detective Jessi Hardin of the Denver Police Department sitting across from him.

“Christ,” he muttered, looking away, rubbing his cheek.

“Hello,” she said. “You look terrible, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“What do you want?”

“I have to be blunt, Mr. Bennett,” she said. “I’m here looking for advice.”

Cormac had picked up some bad habits when he was young. The way he looked at cops, for example. They were the bad guys. They wanted to take your guns, they put bugs on your phones, they followed you, they worked for a government that wanted to suck you dry. They were fucking Commies—never just “Commies,” it was always “fucking Commies.” That’s what he learned from his uncle when he was a teenager. That’s what he learned from his dad, before he died.

He had to remind himself that the outlook was paranoid. Cops were just doing their jobs like anyone else. They weren’t the bad guys—usually. He had to work to not think of Detective Hardin as an enemy. But she wouldn’t be here unless she wanted something from him, and he remained suspicious. What his family had taught him: Cops weren’t your friends, they weren’t going to help you, they’d take you down the minute you did something wrong—the way they defined wrong. He learned to avoid the cops; he definitely never learned to respect them. Especially not after they sent Uncle David to prison. He didn’t go to prison because he was wrong, but because he got caught. Same as Cormac.

Hardin didn’t have a whole lot of respect for Cormac, either, to be fair. She’d have locked him up herself if she’d had the chance. She came from the overworked and driven mold of detective, her suit jacket worn and comfortable rather than fashionable, her dark hair pulled back in a functional ponytail. She didn’t wear makeup, and the frown lines around her mouth were more prominent than the laugh lines around her eyes. The nicotine from cigarettes stained her fingers. She always seemed to be leaning forward, like she was listening hard.

“Not sure I can help you,” he said.

“You mean you’re not sure you will. Maybe you should let me know right now if I’m wasting my time. Save us both the trouble.”

“Did Kitty tell you to talk to me?”

“She said you might know things.”

“Kitty’s got a real big mouth,” Cormac said.

Hardin was still studying him, glaring through the glass in a way that was almost challenging. Maybe because she felt safe, because she knew he couldn’t get to her here. Except she’d looked at him like that outside the prison, the first time he’d run into her.

“How did you two even end up friends?” Hardin said. “You wanted to kill her.”

“It wasn’t personal.”

“Then, what? It got personal?”

He considered a moment, then said, “Kitty has a way of growing on you.”

That got Hardin to smile. At least, one corner of her lips turned up. “I have a body. Well, half a body. It’s pretty spectacular and it’s not in any of the books.” She pulled a manila folder out of an attaché case, and from there drew out a pair of eight-by-ten photo sheets. She held them up to the glass, and he leaned forward to see.

The first showed a crime scene, lots of yellow tape, numbered tent tags laid out on the ground, a ruler set out for scale. The place looked to be a small, unassuming backyard, maybe one of the older neighborhoods in Denver. The focus of the photo was a small toolshed, inside of which stood a set of human legs, standing upright. Just the legs, dressed in a pair of tailored feminine slacks and black pumps. He might have guessed that this was part of a mannequin, set up as a practical joke. But then there was the second photo.

This showed the top of the legs—which had clearly been separated from their owner. A wet vertebra emerged from a mass of red flesh, fat, and organs. The tissue all seemed scorched, blackened around the edges, bubbling toward the middle, as if someone had started cauterizing the epic wound and stopped when the job was half done. The wound, as wide as the body’s pelvis, was red and boiled.

He’d seen a lot of gory, horrific stuff in his time, but this made his stomach turn over. In spite of himself, he was intrigued. “What the hell? How are they even still standing? Are they attached to something?”

“No,” she said. “I have a set of free-standing legs attached to a pelvis, detached cleanly at the fifth lumbar vertebra. The wound is covered with a layer of table salt that appears to have caused the flesh to scorch. Try explaining that one to my captain.”

“No thanks,” he said. “That’s your job. I’m just the criminal reprobate.”

“So you’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Hell, no.”

“Have you ever heard of anything like this?”

“No.” She’d set the photos on the desk in front of her. He found himself leaning forward to get another, closer look at the body. The half a body. “You have any leads at all?”

“No. We’ve ID’d the body. She was Filipina, a recent immigrant. We’re still trying to find the other half of the body. There has to be another half somewhere, right?”

He sat back, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“You’re sure you don’t know anything? You’re not just yanking my chain out of spite?”

“I get nothing out of yanking your chain. Not here.”

Wearing a disappointed scowl, she put the photos back in her attaché. “Well, this was worth a try. Sorry for wasting your time.”

“I’ve got nothing but time.”

“If you think of anything, if you get any bright ideas, call me.” She looked up at the guard who had arrived to escort Cormac back to his cell. Hardin had a parting shot. “And get some sleep. You look awful.”

It was almost nice that she cared.

He could have sworn he heard banging on the bars of the cell, as if someone was hanging on the door, rattling it, trying to get his attention.

You have to let me in! You have to trust me!

Not even bothering to tell her no, he put his hands over his ears, squeezed shut his eyes, ignoring her. That didn’t stop the noise.

I know what it is! Listen to me! I’ll prove it to you. Those photographs—I know what did it!

He woke up, covered in sweat, a foreign word on his lips and knowledge he didn’t know he had flitting at the edge of his mind. He’d had a nightmare—another one, but this one was different. Images of a tropical country full of brown-skinned people. A village wailing in despair because so many women had suffered miscarriages over the last few months, losing babies before they were even born. The vampire has taken them, the vampire has drunk them. Which didn’t make sense to Cormac. Vampires drank blood, not babies.

This one takes babies. It travels by separating from its legs and can be destroyed by salt.

He knew what it was. She’d told him. The word was on the tip of his tongue.

When he asked for an extra phone call that week in order to talk to a cop in Denver, the warden gave it to him. Apparently Hardin had left the request in advance, like she had a hunch that he’d get a sudden attack of memory. But this wasn’t memory, it was—

He didn’t want to think about it.

He called collect and waited for the operator to put him through. She answered, sounding surly and frustrated, then rushed to accept the charges when she heard his name.

“Hello? Bennett?”

“Manananggal,” he said. “Don’t ask me how to spell it.”

“Okay, but what is it?”

“Filipino version of the vampire.”

“Hot damn,” she said, as happy as he’d ever heard her. “The victim was from the Philippines. It fits. So the suspect was Filipino, too? Do Filipino vampires eat entire torsos or what?”

“No. That body is the vampire, the manananggal. You’re looking for a vampire hunter.”

“Excuse me?” she said flatly.

“These creatures, these vampires—they detach the top halves of their bodies to hunt. They’re killed when someone sprinkles salt on the bottom half. They can’t return to reattach to their legs, and they die at sunrise. If they’re anything like European vampires, the top half disintegrates. You’re never going to find the rest of the body.”

She stayed silent for a long time, so he prompted her. “Detective?”

“Yeah, I’m here. This fits all the pieces we have. Looks like I have some reading to do to figure out what really happened.”

She was really not going to like the next part. “Detective, you might check to see if there’ve been a higher than usual number of miscarriages in the neighborhood.”

“Why?”

“I used the term ‘vampire’ kind of loosely. This thing eats fetuses. Sucks them through the mother’s navel while she sleeps.”

“You’re kidding.” She sighed, because he clearly wasn’t. “So, what—this may have been a revenge killing? Who’s the victim here?”

“You’ll have to figure that one out yourself.” He could hear a pen scratching on paper, making notes.

“Isn’t that always the way? Hey—now that we know you really were holding out on me, what made you decide to remember?”

“Look, I got my own shit going on and I’m not going to try to explain it to you.”

“Fine, okay. But thanks for the tip, anyway.”

“Maybe you could put in a good word for me,” he said.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Maybe she even would.

He was curious. Itchingly curious. But if he let her in, he’d never get her out again. She already had her foot in the door, and now she was pushing. The bars of the cage rattled, claws scraped the inside his skull, worse than ever, a coarse rasp working on him, over and over. He could beat his head against a wall to make it stop.

Kitty came through. He could tell by the smug, triumphant look on her face when she put a manila folder on the desk in front of her, before she and Ben even sat down on their next visit.

“You found something,” he said.

“I did.” She grinned.

He tried not to laugh; it would annoy her. “Which means, I assume, that the demon problem is all fixed and everything’s okay.”

“Would I be smiling if it weren’t?” she said.

“Sorry,” Ben said. His cousin leaned back in his chair, smirking at Kitty just as much as Cormac was. “We forgot to tell you. The genie is bottled and everything’s okay.”

Cormac pointed. “See, I know when the problems are solved even when you don’t tell me, because you just stop talking about them. And did you say genie?”

“Can I tell you about your executions now?” Kitty said quickly, clearly not wanting to explain the adventures they’d been having without him. She opened the folder, and he leaned forward, trying to see. “If you take in the twenty or so years before and after 1900, there were about a half-dozen women executed. There was only one woman executed in 1900.”

“What was her name?” Cormac said.

“Amelia Parker. Her story’s a little different.” The pages looked like photocopies, text from books, a couple of old newspaper articles. She lectured. “Lady Amelia Parker. British, born 1877, the daughter of a minor nobleman. By all accounts, she was a bit of a firebrand. Traveled the world by herself, which just wasn’t done in those days. She was a self-taught archeologist, linguist, folklorist. She collected knowledge, everything from local folk cures to lost languages. She has her own page in a book about Victorian women adventurers. She came to Colorado to follow an interest in Native American culture and lore but was convicted of murdering a young woman in Manitou Springs. The newspaper report was pretty sensationalist, even for 1900. Said something about blood sacrifice. There were patterns on the floor, candles, incense, the works. Like something out of Faust. The newspaper’s words, not mine. She was convicted of murder and hanged. Right here, in fact. Or at least, in this area, at the prison that was standing here at the time.”

Bingo. He hadn’t expected Kitty to hit the jackpot like this. The fuzzy, old-fashioned photo of the young woman on one of the photocopies even looked like his ghost—black hair, serious frown. Everything fit. Cormac leaned forward. “The victim. How did she die? Did it say what happened to her?”

“Her throat was cut.”

They were connected. The murders and his ghost were connected. It was a revelation, she’d been a murderer in life, and kept murdering in death—but no. Hunted. He remembered the words, the thoughts she’d flung at him. She was hunting. And she’d been wrongly executed. No wonder she was still around.

“What is it?” Kitty asked, probably seeing the stark shock on his face. The wonder in his eyes. “You know something. This all makes sense to you. Why? How?”

Finally, he shook his head. “I’m not sure. May be nothing. But she’s got a name. It’s not all in my head.”

“What isn’t?”

He met her gaze. “She didn’t kill that girl. She was trying to find who did. What did.”

She blinked back at him. “What do you mean ‘what’?” Ben’s lips were pursed, his gaze studious. So much for not making the two of them worry about him.

“Never mind,” he said, leaning back and looking away. “I’ll tell you when I know more.”

“Why is she important?” Kitty said. “She’s been dead for over a hundred years.”

His smile quirked. “And you really think that’s the end of it? You’ve been telling ghost stories for years. Are you going to sit here now and tell me it isn’t possible?”

Ben leaned forward. “She just doesn’t like the idea that someone else is having adventures without her.”

Kitty pouted. “I’ll have you know I’m looking forward to a good long adventure-free streak from here out.”

As long as he’d known Kitty, she’d been getting in trouble. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut, or she had to swoop to the rescue like some kind of superhero. She was a lightning rod for trouble. She’d been the werewolf caught shape-shifting on live TV. Cormac and Ben had been there to clean up after that mess.

“A month,” Cormac said finally. “I bet you don’t go a month without getting into trouble.”

“How are we defining ‘trouble’?” she said. “Are we talking life-or-death trouble or pissing-off-the-boss trouble? Hey, stop laughing at me!”

Ben said, “I’m not taking that bet.”

Kitty straightened the papers and closed the folder. “I could try to mail this to you, but I’m not sure it would get past the censors.”

“Just hang on to it for me,” he said. Like the rest of his life. Just hold on.

They said their farewells, and they both wore that pained and pitying look on their faces, the one he’d put there because they could walk out and he couldn’t. At the door they hesitated—they usually did—glancing back one more time. He almost stopped them, standing and reaching, calling back. He’d have to shout through the glass because they’d put the phone down. He could feel the guard at his back, but he had the urge to do it anyway. Press his hands to the glass and tell Kitty everything: I have to tell you what’s going on, the murders, the ghost, my meadow and what it means and why I can’t go back, I want to tell you everything—

But he didn’t say anything. Just like he always didn’t say anything. Without a word, without a flicker in his expression, he stood when the guard told him to and allowed himself to be marched back to his cell.

It sounded like claws scraping on concrete, an insect mash of legs running straight up the wall without rhythm. Like a million other nightmare noises that anyone’s imagination might trigger, that would freeze the gut.

But Cormac hadn’t been asleep. He was on his back, staring at the gray ceiling, refusing to sleep, refusing to let her in when the noise rattled by outside the cell. He remained still, wondering what would make a noise like that. The sound of a thousand souls that didn’t know where to go.

Cormac rolled to his stomach, propping himself up just enough to look out, letting his eyes take in the patterns of light and shadow that made up the prison’s weird internal twilight. Resting on his pillow, his hands itched for the feel of a weapon. This was like hunting; he could lie still for hours waiting for the prey to come to him. But here, when he was weaponless, behind bars, which one of them was prey? Did he think he could just stare it down?

He kept his gaze soft, not letting himself stare at any one thing, which would reduce his peripheral vision. So he saw it, when a clawed black hand reached across the ceiling, brushed his throat …

He half jumped, half fell from the top bunk, stumbling to the floor in a crouch. Pressing himself to the bars, he looked in the direction the thing must have gone

“Hey! Dude!” Frank hollered. “What did I tell you about your fucking nightmares?”

“Quiet!” hissed the guy in the next cell over. Not Moe’s old cell but the one on the other side.

Cormac had his face up to the bars, but he couldn’t see anything to the sides. He couldn’t see a damn thing from here, though he could still hear claws on concrete, maybe even a voice, growling. He didn’t know where it was coming from. If he could just get out of here—

A light shone, the deep orange glow of coals in a forge, across the prison block, inside one of the cells. It flared, turned black—like an eclipse of the sun, a moment of dark terror—then collapsed. All of it without a sound.

He could see it, a demon’s claw scraping across a man’s throat, and in his mind he heard a voiceless, inhuman laugh of triumph. Another inmate dead.

“No!” he screamed at the block, the sound echoing.

Hands grabbed the back of his T-shirt, twisted, and yanked him back. Cormac led with his elbow, striking hard, hitting flesh and bone—a man’s chest. Frank wheezed, falling back, and Cormac followed through, swinging his body into a punch. Frank’s head whipped back, but he stayed on his feet and came right back. Deceptively powerful, his blows pounded in like rocks, hitting Cormac’s cheek and chest. He was dazed, but he shook it off. He should have explained, but it was too late, and this was more his speed anyway.

Ducking another blow, Cormac delivered his own, tackling Frank in the middle, shoving him against the bunk frame.

Lights came on in the cell block, an alarm siren started, and the door to the cell rolled open. Guards came in, swinging batons. Cormac didn’t have a chance against them. They dragged him away, though he kept lunging forward, into the fight. Blows landed on his shoulders, kidneys, gut. He fell, then was hauled up again by his arms.

Waking from his fog, he saw the guards surrounding him. He was totally screwed.

Frank was yelling. “I don’t know, man, he’s gone crazy! It’s not my fault, he jumped out of bed screamin’ and he just went crazy!”

Frank’s protests didn’t matter; the guards dragged both of them out, hauling them in different directions. Cormac tried to get his feet under him—they were keeping him off balance on purpose. Again, his instinct was to lash out. He locked it down, tried to keep still, tried to speak.

“There’s another body. Another guy’s been killed, I saw it, I saw what did it. I need to talk to Olson. To Detective Hardin. Somebody. Let me talk to somebody!”

It wasn’t their job to listen to him; they were dumb brute enforcers. But the walls were closing in around him. All he really wanted to do was scream.

Another inmate was already screaming. The newest body had been discovered.

The cell in administrative confinement—solitary—had a solid door with a wire mesh—reinforced glass window at face height, a single bed, a toilet and sink, and no room to pace. This was what he’d been so desperate to avoid. They’d put him in smaller and smaller boxes until he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Only thing left to do now was lie on the bunk and sleep. Escape to that meadow, breathe deep and imagine he smelled pines and snowmelt.

No. This had all started with her, that thing, lost spirit or demon, whatever she was. Everything had been fine until she appeared and started scraping the inside of his skull. His head ached. The walls were collapsing.

He leaned on the wall opposite the bunk, refusing to even lie down. His jaw ached in a couple of places. Bruises bloomed. In a strange way the fight had felt good, and the bruises felt real. It had felt good to finally hit something. To strike back. He hadn’t had a chance to strike at anything in so long. He could take his gun to the range, unload a couple boxes of ammo. Feel a hot gun in his hand. That cleansing noise.

Put the gun against his own skull next and make it all stop.

He paced. Three steps one way, three steps the other. Stopped, sat down against the wall. He had to pull his knees up to keep from hitting them on the edge of the bunk. But he wouldn’t lie down. He couldn’t.

He couldn’t tell the difference between exhaustion and the pain of insanity gnawing at him. But he’d beat this thing. Beat it to a bloody pulp.

He closed his eyes.

A storm rode over the mountains and into the valley.

He didn’t want to be here—it meant he was weak. He’d let his guard down, and now she’d found him, battering at him with wind and thunder—that rattling of the bars again, even though there weren’t bars anymore. On a slope, he ducked toward a tree at the edge of the valley with his arms over his head, trying to wait it out.

Her shouts were the wind. “Let me in, damn you! I must speak with you! You stubborn fool, let me in! I will speak!”

It was a cosmic wail. He, who could wait out statues, couldn’t stay silent against it.

“I can’t help you!” He turned to the sky, screaming a year’s worth of frustration. Maybe a lifetime’s. “Leave me alone!”

“Let me speak!” She was a ghost, a stuck record, a moment in time. She was drawing him into her loop, driving him mad. He would never again leave this room or crawl outside his mind.

“No.” The only word he could throw at her, his voice faltering to a whisper. The blowing wind made him deaf.

“Listen, just listen to me! What must I do to make you listen!” she howled. The wind blasted through the forest; trees groaned.

“Try asking!” he shouted to the sky.

Then, like a whisper through pine boughs, a breath against his cheek, “Please talk to me. Please.”

His legs gave out, bringing him heavily to the ground, sitting on grass that was damp with rain. This was all in his mind. He shouldn’t feel the wet soaking into his jeans. He shouldn’t smell the clean, earthy damp in the air.

“Okay,” he said.

And she was there, standing a few paces away, clutching her hands together. Still poised, back straight and chin up, as if refusing to admit that saying “please” had cost her pride. Like she didn’t want him to see the pleading in her gaze. The wind-touched strands of her dark hair, curls fallen loose from her bun and resting on her shoulder. He might touch the curl and smooth it back into place.

He looked away from her and across the valley. The stream ran full, frothing over rocks. The green seemed even greener. It was high summer here, and he relaxed. Maybe because he could see her now he knew where she was, what she was doing. He could keep an eye on her.

She’d wanted so badly to talk, but she just stood there, like she was waiting for punishment. Waiting to be hanged. If she really was a ghost, if she really had been executed, she would have been hanged. He didn’t want to think about that.

“Well?” he said finally. “After all that, you going to say anything?”

She glanced at the hem of her skirt and wrung her fingers. “I’ve not engaged in conversation in a very long time, and even then I was not a paragon of courtesy. I’m sure I’m more than a little mad.”

That made two of them. “Amelia Parker,” he said. “You’re Amelia Parker. What the hell’s going on?”

She blinked at him. “You know my name? How?”

“I looked it up. You could have just told me, instead of this garbage you’ve been pulling. You want to explain?”

“It’s difficult,” she said, glancing behind her.

“Try me. I have a pretty open mind,” he said.

“Yes, I know. That’s how I found you. I needed an open mind.”

He glared at her. “For what? So you could break it into pieces?”

“No, so I could … so I could control it. I need a body, Mr. Bennett.”

“Let me guess: It’s harder than you thought it’d be.”

“Yes. Minds … they tend to twist up into knots in spite of my intentions.”

“You’ve tried this before?”

She didn’t answer.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

She swallowed, wetting her lips to speak—which made no sense, because she was a ghost. Cormac could almost smell the soap on her skin. The contradiction was making him dizzy.

“I was hanged for murdering a young woman, but I didn’t do it. I’m innocent. I know what did do it, and it’s here now. I hunted this thing a hundred years ago, Mr. Bennett, and while I’m not inclined to believe in an omnipotent God, I believe I have survived—or rather that this small part of me has survived—so that I can stop it now. But I need help.”

Put like that, it did seem like fate. How much did she know about him, besides his name? Had she done enough digging in his psyche to learn that he was also a hunter? That she couldn’t have picked a better body for her purpose?

He said, “Olson—the psychologist here—said this has happened before. Half a dozen bodies over the last hundred years or so, with their throats cut in locked cells. Just like the girl you were hanged for. You say you didn’t do it, but you seem to know a lot about it.”

“I hunted it. Tracked it to Lydia Harcourt, where they found me. Then it followed me here.”

“Why? Why you? You were supposed to be dead, why’d it stick around?”

“I know I can stop it—”

“Where’d it come from in the first place? Do you know?”

“—but I need hands, a voice. I’m so close—”

“I’m not giving you my body,” he said, turning away. “Why not tell me where this demon came from?”

Her brow furrowed, and she seemed to grapple with something. Guilt? Shame, even? “I suppose I ought to have taken it as a lesson not to meddle. Yet I keep on meddling, don’t I?” Her smile was pained.

“What happened?”

“A scene from a boys’ adventure novel. I’m sure you’ve had a few of your own. Something had been buried at a crossroads—imprisoned, rather. I should have heeded the warning carved into the headstone. But there was a promise of treasure.”

“This is all about a pot of gold?” he said, disbelieving.

“No. A Sumerian cuneiform tablet meant to be buried alongside. I thought I could secure the demon, prevent its escape, obtain the tablet that promised tremendous knowledge. I was wrong.”

“The tablet was bait, wasn’t it?” Cormac said. “It didn’t really exist.”

Bowing her head, she hid a sad smile. “The thing bound itself to me. Cursed me. It always stayed just out of reach. I could watch it kill and never stop it. Even now.”

He could almost feel sorry for her. He considered the saying about the road to hell.

She paced a few steps down the slope, across his field of vision, looking at the scene, his private valley. Hilltops emerged through misty, breaking clouds. The air was cool on his skin, a different kind of cool than a prison cell in winter. This felt like living rather than being in storage.

“You’ve gotten better at this,” she said, gazing around, squinting against the breeze and surveying the valley as if it were real. “What is this place? It’s somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, I should think.”

Don’t open the door, he thought. After a hesitation, he said, “My dad used to take me here when I was young.”

“What was he?”

“A hunter,” Cormac said, remembering, and flinching at the memory.

“And you?”

“Same,” he said.

“You were sent here for murder, yes?”

He considered his words. Picked at the grass, which felt real, waxy between his fingers. “I killed a skinwalker. She was a monster and needed to die.”

“Who are you to decide that?”

“She was trying to kill my friends.”

“Ah.” She paced a few more steps; her fingers were no longer wringing, but her expression had turned thoughtful, almost resigned. “The friends who come to visit you?”

“That’s none of your business,” he said.

“I’m sorry—it’s hard not to pry. I can tell they’re good people.”

“Don’t touch them.”

“I won’t,” she said and paced a few more steps. “So you hunt monsters.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Then you understand. You must let me in, you must let me do battle with this thing.”

“Do battle yourself,” he said.

“I need physical form to work my spells.”

“Then tell me what to do. I’ll do it, I’ll get rid of it.”

“I spent a decade learning what I know, I can’t just tell you.”

“Then I guess that’s it.”

“Is it because I’m female? You don’t think I’m capable?”

He chuckled. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Then why are you being so stubborn?”

She’d keep picking away at him, like a swarm of gnats. “Look. My mind, this place—it’s all I have in here. It’s all that’s left until I get out. You can’t have it.”

“You would sacrifice everyone here because of that?”

The situation wasn’t that bad. Couldn’t be that bad. Somebody would notice before the whole cell block was wiped out. Somebody would do something. Except for a tiny suspicion he had that maybe she was right.

He started awake. Aching from his shoulders to his hips, he straightened from where he’d slumped against the painted cinderblock wall and stretched out the kinks. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. He hadn’t meant to even talk to her.

A wave of shouting echoed down the corridor. Hundreds of angry male voices raised in frustration, turned fierce, animal.

He was blind and stupid inside this box. He could look out the window—to the opposite wall, more institutional cinderblock. He couldn’t talk to anyone—he didn’t even know the time of day. His stomach told him it was late. Somebody should be bringing a meal soon. But the shouting told him that the whole place had been turned upside down. This wasn’t right.

Standing, he rammed his shoulder into the door, pounded it a couple of times, hit the intercom button, called for a guard. The shouting outside was like an ocean, like a war.

No one would come to his call. No one would be bringing food. Of all the things that could have happened here, of all the things that could make serving time harder than it already was, he hadn’t expected this. If it wasn’t a riot, it was close to it. A cold knot grew in his gut, something he thought he’d built walls against a long time ago, so he’d never have to feel it again. He hadn’t felt like this since his father died.

He was afraid.

His father taught Cormac as much as he could before he died, because that was what their family did. Cormac’s grandfather, his father, and his father, who’d fought in the Civil War and then come west, part of the great migration of fortune seekers. At least that far back. The family didn’t have any stories for how they’d learned about werewolves, vampires, and the rest of it. Maybe the line stretched farther back than that. Cormac had always known that monsters were real. When he was twelve, his father started taking him hunting. At first it was the normal kind, deer and elk, living off the land, all that crap. Then they’d tracked and killed a werewolf. His father trailed a wolf where there shouldn’t have been any—wild wolves had been hunted to extinction south of Montana fifty years before Cormac was born. More than that, the creature was bigger than any wolf had a right being. They’d tracked it, baited it, Douglas Bennett had shot it dead, and brought his son to watch the body transform. It turned into a naked, bloodied human as they watched, a scruffy guy maybe thirty years old, rangy and dangerous looking even as a corpse. They weren’t like us, Douglas had said, and it was us or them. That had been the order of the universe, laid out by the center of his universe.

When he was sixteen, they tracked another werewolf. This one turned the hunt back on them.

They’d gotten word a month before—wolf kill in Grand County, a couple of head slaughtered out of a herd of cattle. A lot of ranchers would have written off the loss and not thought about it again. Maybe set traps or poison. But too much about this didn’t sit right—the care with which the prey had been chosen specifically not to draw too much attention, stragglers that weren’t as likely to be missed. The fact that wolves hadn’t been seen in the area in seventy years. There’d been a light snow and the prints were clear in the damp earth. Douglas Bennett had a reputation for being able to handle problems like this.

Douglas and Cormac spent the week before the full moon checking the lay of the land, where the lycanthrope had struck last time, where it might be likely to strike this time. There was always a chance that it would head out for new hunting grounds before then and they wouldn’t find anything. But the creatures were territorial—it’d probably stick around. They asked the ranchers in the area to keep their cattle penned for the full moon and the nights on either side. Except for one fat cow, which they slaughtered as the sun was setting. Then they hunkered down to wait.

The blind, made up of deadwood and laid over with sap-drenched scrub oak, was twenty paces downwind from the carcass. Cormac’s father sat on a piece of decayed log, his rifle resting across his lap. His hand lay across the stock, the finger on the trigger guard. He could fire a shot in half a second from that position. Cormac copied him, sitting behind him and a little to the side. Studied the way he held his rifle and tried to do the same. Admired the quiet way he sat, not fidgeting even a little. He barely seemed to breathe. Cormac struggled to stay quiet, though his heart was racing. His breath fogged in the chill air. This prey wasn’t like any other, his father said over and over. It had the mind of a person under all that fur and monstrous instinct. You could see it, when you looked into its eyes. His father told him he could fire the killing shot this time. If he sat quietly.

The carcass smelled of blood and rot. The blood had poured out and soaked most of the clearing where it lay. The moon blazed down and painted it black and silver. Cormac caught himself bouncing his foot and stopped it, glancing at his father to see if he’d noticed. He hadn’t seemed to. Cormac blushed, wanting so badly not to make a mistake. He hunched inside his army surplus jacket, thankful for his layers of clothing. He adjusted the sleeves, pulling them over his bare hands. He didn’t wear gloves; neither did his father. Gloves interfered with the trigger.

A werewolf’s natural instinct was to hunt people. A smart werewolf might avoid attention by keeping away from people; but eventually he’d drift back to civilization. He might have a pack to keep a rein on him, but if that pack ever fell apart, then it would scatter and a dozen werewolves, without leadership, would wreak destruction. Best to get them before that happened.

Nobody knew about the threats that lurked not just in the wild, but in cities, everywhere. Wild and inhuman, all the old nightmare stories grew out of truths that most people had forgotten. Didn’t want to remember. Folk didn’t want to consider that there was something modern technology couldn’t solve. It was up to people like the Bennetts and all who’d come before them to protect, to stand guard, with silver bullets and wooden stakes, protecting humanity against evils they didn’t know they needed protecting from.

Cormac had learned all of this from his father, as his father had learned from his. He felt proud, part of an unbroken tradition. They were warriors, and no one even knew.

His father pointed with the barest movement of his left hand, no more than a finger lifted from the barrel of the rifle, replaced just as subtly. Cormac wouldn’t have seen the wolf as quickly. It didn’t make a sound—the clearing was as quiet as ever, but a huge beast, a furred canine as big as a Great Dane, two hundred pounds easy, stepped carefully from the trees across from them. Dark gray and silver, it might have been a shadow come to life. Its fur made it indistinct, its outline hard to see. A few paces from the cow, it paused, raised its head, its eyes sparking gold in the moonlight. Cormac couldn’t breathe.

His father’s hand had closed around his rifle stock, but he didn’t yet raise the weapon. This was going to be Cormac’s shot.

Cormac worked to keep his breathing steady. He had one shot, had to make it good. Couldn’t move too fast or the creature would see it. Best thing was to let it start in on the bait, distracting it. With silver bullets, they didn’t have to get a good target. They only had to break skin and the silver would poison it.

His father leaned out of the way, giving Cormac a clear shot. He watched the wolf, large and unnatural, pause, nose leading, searching the carcass. Any second now, he’d aim and shoot, all in a heartbeat. He could do this.

Then the wolf was gone.

Its coloring blended with the wooded clearing, but Cormac had been watching carefully, he’d followed the thing’s movements, he knew where it was. He imagined putting the bullet into it—a good clean shot that meant they wouldn’t have to track it. But it had just vanished.

“Where’d it go?” Cormac whispered in a panic.

“Hush,” his father breathed. He raised his rifle in a clean movement. Didn’t take aim yet; just looked out, waiting.

Somehow, it had sensed them. Maybe smelled them on the cow or noticed the knife cut in the animal’s throat, showing that its death wasn’t natural, that this was bait and not scavenging. Maybe it had simply backed up the way it had come and slipped into the woods, avoiding the hunters. Cormac started to feel disappointed.

Then his father hissed, “Get back, get back. Cormac—” Douglas threw his arm and hit Cormac, shoving him out of the way as the creature leapt.

His father was strong, and Cormac fell hard and rolled, reaching to stop himself while keeping hold of his rifle. Turning onto his belly, he scrambled to look.

Another thing that made werewolves and wild wolves different: A wild wolf would have run away from the hunters, disappearing into the trees, finding safety in speed. This one attacked.

The thing planted front paws on Douglas Bennett’s shoulders and shoved. Douglas fired, the mouth of his rifle flashing, but the shot did nothing, flying uselessly into air. The man screamed while the monster clawed and bit, shaking its head, ripping at flesh like this was an unfortunate rabbit. Douglas kicked and bucked, his hands on the wolf’s head, fingers digging at its eyes and twisting its ears. The wolf kept on, lips curled back from red-stained teeth. Emanating from deep in its throat, its snarls sounded like the revving of a broken engine. And still Cormac’s father screamed. Full-lunged, tortured, gasping screams.

“Dad!” It happened in a heartbeat. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think. His scream was an echo of his father’s.

He raised his rifle, took half a second to aim. Fired. Later, he’d never know how he managed to hold the weapon steady, to exhale and squeeze the trigger rather than blasting off in a panic.

He got it. That perfect shot in the wolf’s head. The blast knocked the wolf away from Douglas, and it lay still.

“Dad?” He dropped the rifle and ran, sliding to the ground next to his father’s prone form. His voice sounded suddenly high-pitched and weak, no better than a child’s. He was five years old again. “Dad?”

His father reached, clutching at his son with bloody hands. Looking at him, Cormac’s gut jumped to his mouth, but he didn’t vomit.

Douglas’s face was gone, gory meat instead of nose, eyes, lips. His throat was gone, turned into frayed tubes and tendons and a hint of backbone, glistening in moonlight. A wheezing breath whistled and gurgled. Somehow, Douglas pulled another through the mangled windpipe, and his hand closed on Cormac’s arm, bunching his jacket in rigid fingers. He didn’t breathe again, and the fingers went slack a moment later.

Cormac knelt there for a long time, holding his father’s hand. A pool of blood was creeping under him, soaking into the ground. The air reeked. He’d never get that smell out of his nose.

A couple of feet away, a naked man sprawled on his side. He had stringy, shoulder-length hair, black going to gray. He was burly, powerful, the muscles on his arms and back well defined. He was weathered, older, maybe in his fifties. Blood and fragments covered his face.

“Dad?” He swallowed, trying to get his throat to open up. But his father didn’t move.

Cormac didn’t know what to do. The truck was a couple of miles away and had a CB he could use to call for help. He was pretty sure he had to get help, though he wasn’t sure what anyone would make of the situation when they saw this. He couldn’t tell them it was a werewolf.

He squeezed his father’s hand one more time, placed it gently on the body’s chest, found his rifle, checked it to make sure it was loaded and ready for another shot—just in case—and set out for the truck.

He radioed an emergency channel, told them where to go, then went back to wait with his father. To chase coyotes and ravens away from the body. A forest service ranger, county sheriff’s deputy, and EMTs arrived to find him standing guard, still holding the rifle, covered in blood.

Slumped against the front corner of the cell, he stared at his hands.

It wasn’t your fault.

Everybody said that. But they didn’t know, they hadn’t been there. They were just words, didn’t mean anything. “Leave me alone,” he muttered. But he could feel her, as if she’d put a hand on his shoulder. He batted the imaginary hand away.

He heard shouting, ringing—inmates banging on the bars of their cells, echoing, thunderous. He couldn’t see anything out the window but the wall across from him. Pressing his ear to the crack along the door, he tried to make out what was happening. Not that it helped. Not that it gave him a clue what to do next. Not that he could pick his way out of this door. He couldn’t do a damn thing about anything.

Cormac had once felt that he’d been part of an unbroken tradition, a long line of warriors, secret and proud. It had all fallen apart. The line would end with him. He’d made his father’s legacy worthless. No better than dust. Nothing more than blood on his hands.

He was trapped, helpless in the face of a threat his father hadn’t taught him how to handle.

You aren’t helpless.

He tried to shut out the voice. “Leave me alone,” he muttered.

It’s a prison riot. I’ve seen it before. Too many guards stopped coming to work after the murders. The prison is understaffed and the inmates are frightened.

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

The demon will take advantage of it. There will be slaughter.

“I’m safest here.”

Not if the rioters unlock the doors.

The locks were electronic, connected to both individual and master switches. They’d have to take over the whole prison to do that. Which it sounded like they were on the way to doing.

He put his hands over his ears, shut his eyes, tried to block out the world. “Get out of my head. You’re driving me crazy.”

She scratched at the inside of his skull, like fingernails on a chalkboard. With the pain came a promise—that it would stop if she would just let him in. Open wide the door to his mind. He was almost there.

I won’t hurt you, she said, and he imagined the young woman in the meadow, proud and calm. If I tried to dominate you we’d both go mad. I see that now.

“I can’t trust you.”

You don’t trust anyone. He could see the scowl on her refined face.

He almost laughed because it was true. Mostly true.

You’re strong, Cormac. I’ll need that strength, to do what must be done. We both will.

He wasn’t strong. He just faked it real well. He saw his father’s blood on his hands and felt like a child.

Cormac—

Don’t use my name, he almost shouted at her. The noises outside grew louder, closer. The sound of the riot had changed, from defiance to triumph. A celebration, chaotic and fierce. It didn’t sound human anymore.

Then the lock on the door clicked and slid back with a metallic thunk. Cormac felt the vibration of it under his hand.

He thought of weapons, whether he could break off part of the bedframe, use the sheets as some kind of garrote, or find anything he could throw. Even a shoe. He had nothing but his hands.

Best to stay out of the way, then. Maybe he could get outside. Participating in a riot wasn’t going to get him anything but more years to his sentence. The door was unlocked, but he didn’t have to walk out. On the other hand, he sure as hell didn’t want to get stuck in this hole with no place to run if the mob came after him.

Carefully, he slid the door open, keeping his back to the wall. Waiting, he listened.

A man ran past, a young guy Cormac didn’t know. His orange jumpsuit was torn, hanging off his shoulder, one leg shredded, and he bled from a wound on his temple. He was trying to hold his jumpsuit up while looking over his shoulder as he ran. Not that he had any place to go but in circles.

A second later, a mob of about a dozen followed, screaming in fury. A few of the men held makeshift weapons—a broken two-by-four as a club; a toothbrush handle, melted and sharpened, as a shiv.

Cormac waited until they’d passed and the corridor was empty again.

The cells in solitary were in a long corridor off the main block. From there, the sounds of riot swelled. Bullies used the chaos to take advantage. A prison riot was a thousand angry men trying to show they couldn’t be kept down. It was all a big lie.

To get to a corridor that would take him to the yard, where he could hunker down to wait out the riot in relative safety, he had to go through the central bay of the main block. He crept along the wall, looking ahead and behind, trying not to move too quick, careful not to get noticed. This wasn’t hunting; this was stumbling across a mama bear with her cubs and hoping you didn’t catch her eye. It was the most nerve-racking thing he’d done in his life. Any minute now, the goon squad would arrive and the tear gas would start flying. He had to get out.

He’d meant to take a quick look, just to get the lay of the land, then slip out. But the scene froze him.

They’d killed at least two guards, it looked like. A mob of maybe a hundred or so was crowded together in the main block, passing the bodies overhead, ripping apart the blue uniforms—and more, when hands couldn’t get a grip on fabric. On the fringes of the crowd, inmates turned on each other, clawing and fighting. Others cheered them on. Another group of a dozen moved along the cells, slamming open doors and pulling out the few people who hadn’t rushed to take part. The established gangs had splintered. No longer organized by race, affiliation, or anything visible. They’d become opportunistic, chaotic.

Good God, Amelia said. This isn’t right.

“I thought you’d said you had seen prison riots,” Cormac whispered.

This is something else.

Rage, fear, a million emotions that made a guy crazy when he was lying in a prison cell at night and the quiet closed in on him. What did that taste like to a demon who gained its power from fear and blood?

There!

He could almost imagine the woman pointing. He liked to think he’d have seen it on his own, eventually, but he wasn’t sure. Human in shape but somehow otherworldly, the figure lurked, slinking across the edge of the ceiling, no brighter than a shadow, no more real than the phantom hints of movement anyone might catch in the corners of their vision and discount as imagination. The little voice that whispered sometimes, Take it, steal it, break it. Or, Kill him, you know you could kill him.

A lot of the guys in here probably listened to that voice more often than most people.

Cormac could not have said the thing had eyes, but somehow he knew that it looked at him. That it saw him and didn’t like him. The thing had clawed hands and feet that clicked on beams as it traversed the ceiling. The claws glinted like steel, sharp as knives. There must have been dozens of them, like the thing was holding bouquets of daggers.

Cormac stood at the end of the corridor, watching the creature run toward him, a figure made of oil, and wondered what to do. Running wouldn’t help. Doing so would only rile it. Like a gang of bullies. But he also couldn’t fight it.

It’s looking for me, she said. I told you, I’ve been hunting it for a century. It knows me.

“And you think you can kill it? Get rid of it?”

I can.

“I don’t believe you.” He believed in bullets. He believed in being stronger than anything else on the range.

Cormac, we must stop this.

He shook his head. He’d worked too hard to hold on to himself to let his identity—his soul—go now. He’d kept such fierce control, all so he wouldn’t lose it and do damage that he couldn’t recover from. Now, he nearly laughed, because it had all been for nothing. The thing drew power from blood, and it would kill them all, slicing them to pieces.

“I can’t let go,” he murmured.

You can. You can keep your core. I’ll keep you safe, I can do that, I promise you. But I need you!

He felt how easy it would be to let go. He understood how it was that a psychotic gunman could walk into a crowded room and open fire. It was because they had let go, given themselves over to something that wasn’t them.

Please trust me. He felt something, someone, take his hands and squeeze. Soft hands, but firm, as if he and a woman were about to jump off a cliff together. He suddenly wanted to kiss her. Not an abrogation, then. A merging. He wasn’t giving himself over. He was loaning. Sharing.

He hoped she was right.

He couldn’t feel his muscles suddenly. His nerves were fire, but he couldn’t move. Closed his eyes, tipped his head back, thought of a meadow, opened a door, and felt Amelia step into the place where he was—

—and she looked out of his eyes, living eyes, for the first time in over a hundred years. Her body flared—his body. It was powerful, brilliant. Already rangy and athletic, he had kept himself fit, even locked behind bars. She wanted to shout, to sing. Tipping her head back, she felt the smile on her face, and hair on her jaw, odd and tingly, scratchy. This anatomy was most certainly not her own, feeding her a confusing flood of sensations that must have been maleness.

Time for that later.

With a body came life, and with life came power, and that was what she had traveled all this way for, waited for all this time, so she could face down the darkness, raise her hand, curl her fingers into a fist as if holding a ball, and shout a word of Latin in a strange, deep, male voice that wasn’t hers.

A crackling purple sphere of light came to life in her hand.

He felt it, the power burning through him, and it was like dying, because he couldn’t move, react, or change the outcome, and he didn’t want to because he felt closer to the source. To God, maybe.

Amelia was using his body to create something astonishing.

The demon approached, arms raised for a killing blow.

She lifted her hand and the light crackled and snapped, sending out tendrils of static, like some mad scientist’s machine. The demon paused as if confused, its claws extended midreach.

“Back!” she shouted, startled again that it wasn’t her voice, but his, the vessel’s. Cormac. She had chosen well—he burned with so much life. The man watched through her eyes, which looked through his.

Respect him. He wasn’t simply a tool to be used at will. That had been her mistake. No more.

Her power struck it. It might have been their combined wills as much as anything that forced the demon to fold back on itself. It shrank, screaming—the sound of static dissipating, of a star contracting. The shadow turned red.

It lashed out with fire. The wave of heat scalded—please, let his body be strong enough!—but she stood her ground, raised her other hand and built a shield, an unseen wall painted on air with a gesture and a word of power. The demon beat itself against the shield—it buckled, and she stumbled back before she could brace herself. She was still not used to the bulk, solidity, and sheer inertia of this male body. Cormac was a man who relied on brawn more often than not. Perhaps she would do well to learn to use such brawn.

If they got through this, and did not go mad after.

His muscles strained against the force. What this must look like to an observer: A great clawed shadow pushed against nothing as if throwing itself against a door, and a man dressed in an orange jumpsuit braced and leaned forward as if trying to keep the door closed. She couldn’t stand this for much longer.

But she had an ally. She needed to call up power again. To do that, she needed life, energy that a bodiless soul and a shadow creature couldn’t draw on.

She turned inward and cried, “Cormac!”

And he shoved. Imagined every muscle in his body working at once. Wondered what it might be like to have light pour from his soul and illuminate the world.

Spheres of energy formed in both his hands. She brought Cormac’s callused fists together, aimed them at the beast. She couldn’t contain the power, couldn’t guide it. Could only force it away from her and hope for the best.

Colored light bathed the world, at least the space of it in front of her. She closed her eyes, ducking away from it, and still it burned.

The demon took the full force of it. The light chipped away at its form, tearing off pieces until it became pockmarked, full of holes, and the holes grew larger, and it screamed. Then there was nothing but light, and the light itself disappeared.

She blinked—or he did. She was having difficulty with pronouns. They looked around together.

An amplified voice filled the cavernous room, barely audible. Prisoners milled, confused, staring perplexed at bloodstained hands. Projectiles flew in from far corridors, people scurried out of the way, and white smoke began to fill the air. Someone shouted.

Tear gas, Cormac supplied. Then he collapsed, and Amelia fainted for the first time in her life.

A soft hand lay across his brow. A woman’s hand, smelling clean, like soap and lavender. He opened his eyes and saw Amelia sitting at his bedside.

Taking stock: He wasn’t in a cell, but in a soft, single bed, part of a row of them lined up, heads against the wall. Several of the other beds were occupied by sleeping, bandaged figures. Prison infirmary.

He didn’t feel hurt. Only tired. He also didn’t want to try and move.

Amelia smiled at him. “Good morning.”

He was confused. He was here, awake, and she looked solid. He could feel her, flesh against flesh.

“Are you real?” he said.

She tipped her head, acknowledging the question. “A bit. Partly. I’m not sure.” The smile faltered.

“I can smell you.” He reached for her hand. She gazed at his for a moment, almost startled. Then took hold of it. Then disappeared.

A man in a white lab coat walked to the bed. “Good, you’re awake. How do you feel?”

His fist was clenched at his side, as if he had grabbed at something that had slipped away. That was it, then. She’d done what she came here to do. Stuck around long enough to say good-bye. And now she was gone.

He tried to tell himself that was okay.

The doctor checked his chart, then picked up Cormac’s wrist and counted against the numbers on his watch.

“I’m a little tired,” he answered finally. It was his body she’d used to battle the demon. Of course he was tired.

“You have second-degree burns on your face and hands,” the doctor said. “There was a fire—you’re probably lucky to be alive. You’re sedated to help you rest and to keep the pain down, but in a week or so you should be back to normal.”

He remembered the fire, the riot, and the demon—but what did the people in charge think had happened? So he asked, feigning amnesia.

“The warden’s still trying to figure that out,” the doctor said. “Now, get some rest.”

Cormac felt like something was missing. He’d lost something.

At night, the infirmary never got completely dark. A nurse was on duty in the next room, and light from the hallway filtered in. A piece of monitoring equipment made a faint clicking noise. Red status lights peered out. Cormac stared at the ceiling, wondering. He could live a million years and never understand what had happened. Maybe she wasn’t a ghost but an angel. Trying to give him purpose in the world.

So. Now what?

Lift your hand. It was a woman’s voice, speaking from a distant meadow.

“Amelia,” he said.

I’m still here. Lift your hand. I want to show you something.

He uncurled his right fist, the one without the IV needle in it, and raised the arm a few inches. It glowed. Faint, blue, with a nimbus of static. Without his bidding, his fingers, snapped, and the glow dissipated in a crackle of energy. A wizard’s spell.

She was still with him, her power still flowed through him.

We’re bound, you and I. And I thank you for it.

He settled more firmly on the pillow. He hadn’t realized he’d been fighting the sedative, holding himself taut. But now, he was floating. He had stopped worrying.

He was ready to go after two days, even if it meant returning to solitary. He still didn’t know what the fallout from the riot—and his part in it—was going to be. If the powers that be would blame him for something and add a decade or so to his sentence. Hardly seemed to matter because he’d won. They’d won.

But two days on his back was plenty. He didn’t even hurt much. The aggravating itching was all on the outside, now—the burns were healing. At least they’d let him take a couple of books from the prison library. He was in the middle of another of Kitty’s recommendations: Middlemarch, by a guy named George Eliot.

George Eliot was a woman. Can’t you find something modern? This was stale when I read it as a girl. Cormac smiled.

When Olson entered the infirmary, Cormac scowled, preparing the arguments to get him out of here. The counselor didn’t seem to notice and pulled over the chair at his bedside. “You’re looking much better.”

When had he been here before? Cormac wondered. Thinking of Olson looking over his unconscious form made him twitch.

Cormac frowned and looked at the ceiling. “You’re going to ask me what happened, and you won’t believe what I tell you.”

Olson made a thin, wry smile. “Actually, I think I might. We have surveillance footage of most everything that happened. We’ve collected the evidence we need in a few assault and murder cases we’ll be prosecuting. You’re not involved in any of them, if you’re worried. But you did … something, didn’t you?”

“That didn’t actually show up on film, did it?” Most of this stuff didn’t record too well in any form, or it would have come out a long time ago.

Olson narrowed his gaze, a perplexed expression. “I can’t exactly say what I saw. I saw you. You did something—and it all ended. I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

Cormac stared. Where did he even start? There are more things in heaven and earth … “I don’t know how to explain.”

“Just tell me,” Olson said. “Tell me everything.”

Cormac did. Everything except Amelia. He made vague explanations about a demon haunting the place, hungry for blood, gathering power, and about how he’d picked up a spell that banished it. He tried to make it sound matter of fact, like he hadn’t even been sure it would work and he’d have been just as happy to mind his own business. It all sounded crazy and Olson wasn’t buying any of it, he was sure.

“What would have happened?” he said at the end of it. “If you hadn’t done what you’d done to stop it?”

Cormac shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose you folk would have dropped in your tear gas and knocked everyone out anyway. The riot would have died down eventually.”

“But that thing would still be on the loose.”

The statement didn’t require commentary. Cormac kept quiet, lying calmly, book folded across his stomach. Olson’s smile was grim, tired and his eyes shadowed. He probably had a lot more patients after the last week. He straightened his jacket as he stood to leave.

Cormac said, “What happens to me now?” He had a flare of hope that they’d be so grateful they would just open the doors and let him leave. He could call Ben, Come get me, please. The hope burned, no matter how unrealistic the thought was. But maybe they’d shave a few months off. He was pecking away at his time, day by day.

“You’ll go back to your cell when the doctor okays it. A regular cell, not the hole. Things go back to normal.” He shrugged. “I’ll put in a good word with the parole board. We’ll see what we can do.”

He walked away.

About a year later, lying on his bunk, staring at the ceiling for the last time, he was scared again.

Maybe it was more accurate to say he’d been scared his whole life. Fear had become background noise that he never noticed. He’d built up this front, these walls, trying to convince everyone he wasn’t afraid. Sometimes the walls cracked. He was starting to notice now that he was scared of being normal, scared of being dependent—scared of being scared, even. He could observe it, acknowledge it. But he wasn’t going to take down the walls. They kept him upright.

He noticed fear when it slipped over the wall: his lack of control during the riot, his fear of having friends because they might leave. And now.

He was getting out tomorrow.

Hardin and Olson had both spoken for him to the parole board. Ben had put up a hell of a case, showing that Cormac had family, a place to stay, potential work waiting for him—legitimate work, even. It had gone so smoothly. Despite all the help, Cormac hadn’t expected it to. He’d expected to have the parole hearing go wrong, but it hadn’t. He was getting out more than a year early as a result. Surprise.

When he had a job to do, he wasn’t afraid. The job kept him focused, and the scary usually came so fast he didn’t have time to think, only react. His reactions were fast enough to match, most of the time. If they hadn’t been, he wouldn’t still be around.

Right now, he had to wait, which wore him down. He should have been excited. Happy. Anticipating. But transition was hard, and the world he was about to enter was a different one than he’d left two years ago.

No, tell the truth: The world was the same. He’d changed. He wasn’t sure he could handle it anymore.

Closing his eyes, he let out a sigh and thought of his meadow. His muscles unclenched, and he fell into sleep.

In a bright and magnificent summer, wildflowers covered the meadow, purples, yellows, blues, reds dotting the grasses like a painting on a postcard. The sky was too blue, it couldn’t possibly be so blue in life. But he knew if he hiked out to the valley and looked, it really would be that blue, and he’d stare up at it marveling at how his memory hadn’t done the scene justice. The air smelled fresh, clean, as if a thunderstorm had just passed, scrubbing the world, making it new.

Amelia was there, standing close. He could touch her with a straightened arm, if he wanted. He almost did. Her face was calm. The storms were long gone, but he couldn’t seem to tell what she was thinking.

He moved toward the set of boulders overlooking the stream where he was used to sitting, watching elk, or sunrises, or just the water playing.

“You want to sit down?” He gestured. She nodded, and he picked a smooth, flat stone with room enough for both of them.

He expected her to be awkward in the long skirt and formal clothing, but she wasn’t. She moved like she was used to it, even in wilderness like this. Tucking her skirt just so, she perched on the boulder, back straight, and folded her hands before her.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. Even her smile was serious, like she couldn’t quite stop thinking about tragedies of past and present.

He shook his head, only able to think, What am I going to do with myself? What can I possibly do? He couldn’t imagine what guys who’d been in here ten, twenty, thirty years must feel like, when the world outside really had changed in their absence. What would it be like to disappear into prison before cell phones and come out to find you had to learn a new technology? A new language even? He’d only been out of the world a blink.

But still, the world looked different to him, and he wasn’t sure how he’d live. Tomorrow, the gates would open and he’d walk out a free man.

“Except that you’re saddled with me,” she said.

“No. Both of us walk free. That’s the plan.”

She put her hand on his arm and squeezed. She wasn’t wearing the thin leather gloves anymore, and he wondered where they’d gone.

The weight of her touch was strange—she wasn’t real, she didn’t exist. But here she was, with her hand on his arm, her skin warm against his, and he didn’t quite know what to do next. If this had been real, if she had been real, he might have turned away. Walked away to avoid the contact entirely. But this wasn’t real, so it didn’t matter. He could do anything. So he put his opposite hand on hers, just resting it there. He waited for her to flinch, to pull her hand away, to argue. But she didn’t.

They sat like that until morning, watching the meadow.