Daughter of the Flames

Acknowledgments:

My sincere thanks to Gillian Horvath, who first told me about Bombshell, and to Susan Wiggs, who encouraged me to persist. Thank you to the Bombshell team, past and present: Natashya Wilson, Julie Barrett and Tara Parsons, for your warm welcome and editorial vision.

Howard Morhaim, my agent and friend, you’ve been there through oy and joy. And sincere thanks to Howard’s assistant, Allison Keiley. Many thanks to Pat McEwen, JoysofResearch; my San Diego sheriff’s deputy and my N.Y.P.D. contacts, both of whom have requested anonymity so their thoughtful colleagues won’t make their lives a living hell. Thank you, Steve Perry, for the marksmanship and ER data. My sincere gratitude to Karen Hackett for navigating New York for me. A very big thank-you to Special Agent Jeff Thurman, for many years of friendship, plot parsing and all the dirt he could tell me without killing me. Mucho mahalo to Wayne Holder, who stepped up to the plate when my laptop ate my homework and set the whole thing to rights despite the best efforts of all geekdom to make computers far more complicated than they need be.

Thank you, SF-FWs, bryant street, IAMTW, and novelscribes for various neepery and encouragement; and to my sisters in Persephone, for the prayers and candles, and the fellowship, especially after my laptop ate my homework. My gratitude to Christie Holt, for teaching me to walk with purpose. To Amy Schricker, Charlotte Fullerton, Ashley McConnell, Debbie Viguie, Liz Cratty, Lydia Marano, Brenda Van De Ven, Monica Elrod, Abbie Bernstein, Kym Rademacher, Terri Yates, Lisa Morton, Leslie Jones, Sandra Morehouse, Anny Caya, Lucy Walker and Elise Jones, for showing me that sisterhood is powerful. A shout-out to MariAnn Palmer and Lisa Swyrs, clothiers and cookie monsters extraordinaire. Dr. Ellen Greenfield, thanks for the illegal loquats and the free psychological help. Thanks to my nephew, Richard Wilkinson, for checking in and loving us. Many thanks to Yasmine and John Palisano, Del and Sue Howison, Art Cover and Lydia Marano, and Paul Ruditis for inviting me to cross your thresholds. Mr. Andrew Thompson and everyone at Family Karate, thank you for instilling black belt principles in my family. REV, you listen every day. And you write back. May you walk in Beauty.

Chapter 1

I sabella DeMarco was moaning in her sleep. Her fists clenched her pale blue sheets; tears and sweat trickled down her forehead as she rolled her head against her pillow.

Hustle it up, a voice urgently whispered to her. They’re dogging you!

Izzy raced through the nightmare forest, a terrifying landscape of fleshy black trees garroted with hangman’s necklaces of Spanish moss. A fiery moon blazed overhead, casting flickering shadows over rotting ferns and a matted bunting of ashy gray leaves.

Her surroundings heaved with menace and danger. The surface of a blood-colored swamp roiled as shapes glided toward the boggy earth where she ran. She saw it all with a strange clarity, as if part of her was a camera recording every moment instead of a young woman in flight for her life.

She heard herself panting in counterpoint with her over-cranked heartbeat. Her footfalls ricocheted like shell casings pinging off a tile floor. Heat seared her lungs and her ankles ached from running too long and too hard. Then the screaming of night birds swallowed up the sounds.

The voice echoed all around her. If you don’t move it, it’s all over. They’ll die, too. You’re on point.

Then everything shifted and the panting was inside her head, echoing in her temples. The monsters that lived in the forest were after her. They were always after her. They hunted her, night after night. She ran, night after night. She could not stop. She must not stop.

Deep in Izzy DeMarco’s soul, she knew that if they caught her, she would die.

And die horribly.

She tried to remind herself it was only a dream. But it wasn’t, not when she was in it. It was all so very real. Her gauzy white nightgown molded to her body as she raced barefoot over sharp rocks that sliced the soles of her feet. Slimy, shredding vines tumbled from twisted canopies of dank, dripping leaves. Skeletal branches yanked painfully at the untamed corkscrews of her sable-black hair.

As she raced past a gnarled live oak, four huge gashes in the bark warned her that they had been here first, crisscrossing the forest, searching for her. They were always hunting for her.

But they had never found her.

Not yet. Don’t get cocky.

Refracting the beam of the burning moon’s light, her mother’s gold filigree crucifix flashed between her breasts. She put a hand over it to hide the gleam in case it might give her away.

A wind whipped up, twisting her nightgown around her knees. Branches slapped her arms and face; wincing, she pushed them away and tried to move on. Then the hem of her gown caught on something behind her, drawing her up short.

A wolf howled, its wail piercing the fierce rush of the wind. It was joined by another. And another…until the forest rang with eerie, inhuman cries.

Get out of here!

About fifteen feet to her right, a shadow glided through the darkness. The crazed whooping rose to a shrill shriek. The trees and vines jittered in a frenzy. Clouds raced across the moon, slicing the bloody sphere in two, fog spilling out like clots.

They’re coming!

She tugged wildly at the nightgown. It wouldn’t give. She tried to run, was held fast. The fabric had tangled around a tree root that looked like a gnarled hand, gripping the ruffled hem so that she couldn’t get away.

When she grabbed the nearest piece of the root, it curled upward as it tried to capture her hand.

Isabella yanked back her arm in horror. The root slithered back to rejoin the main section, which was still holding on to her nightgown.

The forest is alive.

It wants to kill you.

She pulled again, and again, but it was no use.

Then she reached up to her shoulders and gathered up the gauze around the sweetheart neckline. She jerked her hands toward her shoulders, trying to tear down the front so she could strip the gown off and get away. Try as she might, it would not rip.

She balled her fist and brought it down on the finger-like root.

Another howl echoed through the forest, bold and feral and eager. Ice-water chills skittered up her spine; she looked frantically around and—

Get out of here! the nightmare voice commanded.

That was when the gun went off.

Izzy gasped and sat upright in bed, gasping for air.

Sweat trickled between her breasts and ran down her cheeks like tears. She wiped it away with a clammy hand and blotted her palm on her sheet, which was wrapped around her body like a shroud.

“Just a dream, just a dream,” she chanted, her heart beating so fast it was out of rhythm. She pressed her hand against her chest, feeling the damp ivory satin ties of her nightgown against her fingertips. Touching reality.

“Where are you? In your room. In your home. You’re fine,” she said out loud, a technique she had learned to quell her night terrors.

She forced herself to take a deep breath in, a deep breath out, looking for her center, finding the calm place where the monsters could not go.

It was increasingly difficult to go there.

Because it wasn’t just a dream. It was the dream. The blood-red moon, the swamp, the root that grabbed at her and the whispering—that insinuating, sandpapery voice—Izzy had been having the same dream ever since her mother, Anna Maria DeMarco, had died of a lingering, undiagnosable illness ten years before. Today was the tenth anniversary of her death. Izzy had been sixteen then. She was twenty-six now. For ten years, shrieking creatures had hunted her half a dozen times each year. For seventy nights or more, she had outrun them.

What if, one night, they caught her?

“Don’t go there,” she ordered herself. Forcing her body to stand down, she rolled her shoulders forward, made herself slump and lower her head. It was a submissive posture, a surrender, and it frightened her to perform it, even in the safety of her bedroom.

She was still on high alert. Her body was flooded with adrenaline. She glanced over at her clock. It was three in the morning. Nevertheless, she was half tempted to dress and go for a jog.

Dr. Sonnenfeld, the shrink she had finally agreed to see seven years ago, said a recurring nightmare was caused by unresolved issues. In Izzy’s case, the obvious trigger was her mother’s death.

Izzy fully accepted that she had been angry with Anna Maria for dying. It also made sense that she was trying to flee the pressures of her role in the family. She didn’t need a stranger to point out that the dream had started the day after her mother’s funeral, coinciding with the fact that her father had held her close and whispered brokenly, “You’re the lady of the house, now, honey. You need to look after Gino.”

And look after her father, too. He hadn’t said it, but she knew that was what he was hoping for. Izzy had taken to calling him “Big Vince” when she was five—everyone called him that—and maybe there was a reason she didn’t call him “Pa” the way Gino did. Her father was an excellent cop, but he was the kind of man who needed a female family member to look after him. Before his marriage, that woman had been his sister, Izzy’s aunt Clara. Then Ma.

By the time of her mother’s death, it had been Izzy. At sixteen, she had already been doing all the housework and cooking for years. Gino was supposed to help, but her parents had never enforced that, and she couldn’t make him. Frankly, it didn’t leave a lot of time for being the “lady” of the house. Despite the urgings of her schoolmates and their moms to develop some fashion sense and cultivate a little style, she had found it necessary to skip over a lot of the detail work of growing up. Makeup, hairstyles—maybe later, after Ma got better.

But Ma didn’t get better.