Night of the Raven

With her eyes closed and her hair and clothes askew, she mumbled and swayed and breathed in choking fumes. Then suddenly she froze. In the next flash of lightning her head began to turn. Slowly, creepily, like a rusty weather vane in a bad horror film.

Her eyes locked on McVey’s hiding place. He heard the black thing in her hand plop to the floor. She raised a dripping finger and pointed it straight at him.

“You,” she accused in a voice that made him think of rusty nails soaked in whiskey. “You saw what passed between me and the one she would have you call Father.”

Whoa, McVey thought on an unnatural spurt of fear. That was a whole lot, what she’d just said. A whole lot of nothing he understood, or wanted to.

“You have no business here, child.” She started toward him. “Don’t you know I’m mad?”

Right. Mad. So why the hell couldn’t he move his—? He stopped the question abruptly, backpedaled and latched on to the other word. Child?

Shock, slick and icy, rolled through him when he looked down and saw his feet encased in tiny, shin-high boots.

Thunder rattled the house. His head shot up when he heard a low creak. Watching her smile, he realized with a horrified jolt that she was beautiful. He also realized he knew her, or at least he recognized her.

When she pointed at him again, the spell broke and he reached for his gun on the nightstand. Except there was no nightstand, and the next streak of lightning revealed a hand that wasn’t his. Couldn’t be. It was too small, too pale and far too delicate.

“Don’t be afraid, child.” Her voice became a silky croon. Her ugly clothes and hair melted into a watery blur of color. “I won’t harm you. I’ll only make what you think you’ve seen go away.”

McVey wanted to tell her that he had no idea what he’d seen and the only thought in his head right then was to get out of there before her finger—still dripping with something disgusting—touched him.

He edged sideways in the dark. He could escape if the lightning would give him a break.

Of course it didn’t, and her eyes, gray and familiar, continued to track his every move.

“There’s no way out,” she warned. With an impatient sound she grabbed his wrists. “I don’t want to hurt you. You know I never have.”

No, he really didn’t know that, but wherever he was, he had no gun. Or strength, apparently, to free himself from her grasp.

She laughed when he fought her. “Foolish child. You forget I’m older than you. I’m also more powerful, and much, much meaner than your mother.”

His mother?

She dragged him out of the corner. “Come with me.”

When she hauled him upright, he stumbled. Looking down, he saw the hem of the long dress he’d stepped on.

“Why am I...?” But when he heard the high, unfamiliar voice that emerged from his throat, he choked the question off.

The woman crouched to offer a grim little smile. “Believe me when I tell you, Annalee, what I will do to you this night is for your own good....”

* * *

MCVEY SHOT FROM the nightmare on the next peal of thunder. The dark hair that fell over his eyes made him think he’d gone blind. A gust of wind rattled the shade above his nightstand and he spotted the stuttering neon sign outside. It wasn’t until he saw his own hand reaching over to check his gun that he let himself fall back onto the mattress and worked on loosening the knots in his stomach.

That they remained there, slippery yet stubbornly tight, was only partly due to the recurring nightmare. The larger part stemmed from a more tangible source.

It was time to do what he’d known he would do for the past two weeks, ever since his nineteenth birthday. Ever since his old man had pried a deathbed promise from his only son.

He would set aside the disturbing fact that every time he fell asleep these days he turned into a young girl who wore long dresses and old-fashioned boots. He’d forget about the woman he thought he should know who wanted to give him amnesia. He’d focus strictly on keeping the promise he’d made to his father. If that meant turning his back on the people he’d worked with since...well, not all that long actually, so nothing lost there. He was going to walk away now, tonight, keep his promise and change the course of his life.

Maybe if he did that, the nightmare would stay where it belonged. Buried deep in the past of the person he feared he’d once been.

Chapter Two (#ulink_a79fa37c-543b-56aa-85b9-9372f8343581)

New Orleans, Louisiana

Present Day

“Make no mistake about it...”

Moments after the sentence had been passed, the raspy-voiced man with the stooped shoulders and the tic in his left eye had looked straight at Amara Bellam and whispered just loud enough for her and the two men beside her to hear.

“Those who brought about my imprisonment will pay. My family will see to it.”

Although her eyewitness testimony had played a large part in his conviction, at the time Jimmy Sparks had uttered his threat, Amara had thought his reaction was nothing more than knee-jerk. After all, life in prison for someone of his dubious health surely meant he wouldn’t see the free light of day ever again.

But the word family crept into her head more and more often as the weeks following his incarceration crept by. It took root when Lieutenant Michaels of the New Orleans Police Department contacted her with the news that one of her two fellow witnesses, Harry Benedict, was dead.

“Now, don’t panic.” Michaels patted the air in front of her. “Remember, Harry had close to two decades on Jimmy.”

“Lieutenant, Jimmy Sparks is the two-pack-a-day head of a large criminal family. He has a dozen relatives to do his legwork. Harry was a hale and hearty seventy-nine-year-old athlete who hiked across Maryland just last year.”

“Which is very likely why he died of a massive coronary just last night.” The detective made another useless patting motion. “Really, you don’t need to panic over this.”

“I’m not panicking.”

“No, you’re not.” His hand dropped. “Well, that makes one of you. Chad, our overstressed third witness, knocked back two glasses of bourbon while I was explaining the situation.”

“Chad dived off the temperance wagon right after Jimmy Sparks whispered his threat to us.” She rubbed her arms. “Are you sure Harry died of natural causes?”

“The path lab said it was heart failure, pure and simple. The man had a history, Amara. Two significant attacks in the past five years.”

Hale and hearty, though, she recalled after Michaels left.

For the next few weeks she fought her jitters with an overload of work. Even so, fear continued to curl in Amara’s stomach. She had thought she might be starting to get past it when the harried lieutenant appeared on her doorstep once again.

“Chad’s dead.” She saw it in his dog-tired expression. “Damn.”

The lieutenant spread his fingers. “I’m sorry, Amara. And before you ask, the official cause, as determined by the coroner’s office, is accidental suicide.”

“This is not happening.” A shiver of pure terror snaked through her system. When the detective spoke her name, she raised both hands. “Please don’t try to convince me that suicides can’t be arranged.”

“Of course they can, but Chad Weaver was surrounded by eleven friends when he collapsed—in his home, at a party arranged by him and to which he invited every person in attendance. No one crashed the event, and the drugs and alcohol he ingested were his own.”

She swung around to stare. “Chad took drugs?”

“Like the booze, he got into them after Jimmy Sparks’s trial. As witnesses, you all had—er, have—impeccable credentials.”