Underground

PROLOGUE

If ghosts and monsters had someone else to harass, my life would have been a lot quieter, like it was before I died. But something happened while I was gone for those two minutes—something no one has been able to explain to my satisfaction—and now I not only see ghosts and monsters and things that go “bump” in the night, I seem to be some kind of stepsister to them. I’m a Greywalker: a dual citizen of the regular world and the Grey—the creepy interference fringe between the normal and the paranormal. The Grey overlays the normal world, invisible to most people but there nonetheless. Its a place of misty shapes and memories, shot with hot lines of living energy, layered with time and magic, where ghosts, vampires, and monsters are as real and common as dogs and cats and just as likely to bite.

I’m a private investigator. I like the job most of the time, but I have to admit it isn’t a great occupation if I want to have a reasonable social life, even at the best of times and without the complication of a client list that reads like the cast of a gothic horror novel. My profession and my ability to work in the world of ghosts and magic seems to have tangled me up in the needs, cases, causes, and disputes of every undead thing in the Pacific Northwest. They aren’t very good at taking no for an answer and they don’t stick to office hours, either. As much as I might want to leave that part behind, its a job I can’t quit and it’s hell on my love life.

It’s my bad luck, I suppose, that I met a great guy just when my life was being turned upside down by my own death and a permanent residence halfway into the uncanny. I’ve never been able to explain it—I don’t even try. Most people can’t really swallow the idea of murderous ghosts, helpful witches, uncanny artifacts, living energy, necromancers, vampires, and psychotic poltergeists.

They are even less inclined to accept that those things are all part of my daily life. I have a few friends and acquaintances who know, but they aren’t exactly life-mate material and some are downright nasty. It’s not surprising that my life and relationship are both pretty messed up.

My boyfriend, Will, and I were giving it another go over the holidays. A pretty rough go, I’m afraid, what with ghostly things demanding my attention whenever they took a shine to the idea. Thanksgiving had been OK, but Christmas hadn’t gone so well. By the second week of January, both the weather and my relationship got hit with an unexpected cold snap. And that was when I made the acquaintance of my first frozen corpse.