Prologue
Crunch.
The sound was a relief. So was the sudden limpness in the form underneath her. It was over.
She jumped off the body before it started leaking as they all did. Then she stood at attention, careful not to look directly at the old man who watched her from behind a thick layer of glass. He didn’t like it when she stared into his eyes.
The man pursed his lips as he considered the results of her latest test. Not a muscle moved, but inwardly, she smiled at the melody that kept repeating in his mind. Her other instructors rarely sang in their thoughts, yet he did. Every time. If it wouldn’t have made him mad, she would’ve told him she enjoyed it, but her instructor didn’t like people prying into his mind. She’d overheard that shortly after getting the ability, so she never told him about it.
“Seven seconds,” he said at last, glancing down at the body. “These subjects no longer represent a challenge to you.”
He sounded pleased, but still she didn’t smile. Displays of emotion led to too many questions, and she wanted to get back to her manuals.
“It’s time to move on to the next phase,” he continued.
The words seemed to be directed at her, yet he was really speaking to the man behind the mirrored glass twenty meters above him. Since she wasn’t supposed to know he was there, however, she nodded.
“I’m ready.”
“Are you?”
The way he drew out the words warned her that this next test wouldn’t be easy, which was why she couldn’t stop her surprised blink when the chute above her opened and a new subject tumbled into the arena. It looked similar to the others she’d neutralized, but when it leapt up and faced her, she understood. Her new opponent had no heartbeat.
“What is it?” she asked, her own heart starting to beat faster.
Her opponent had a question, too.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Neutralize it,” her gray-haired instructor commanded.
She hid her disappointment. Perhaps if she finished quickly, she’d be rewarded with an answer. At the very least, neutralizing this . . . thing would give her more information.
She charged without another moment’s hesitation, sweeping its legs out from under it before slamming her elbow down on its throat.
Crunch.
Its bones shattered with the usual sound, but instead of going limp, the thing threw her off and leapt upward while giving the old man a disbelieving look.
“What have you done?”
As it spoke, its neck snapped back into place, losing its misshapen angle in less time than she took to blink again. She stared in confusion. What sort of creature could heal itself like that?
“You want to live?” her instructor answered the thing coolly. “You’ll have to kill her.”
Those same words had been spoken to many opponents before this one, yet for the first time, her hands felt damp. With its incredible healing ability, was it possible that the thing couldn’t be neutralized?
She glanced up at the old man, meeting his gaze for a second before she looked away. Even in that brief moment, she had her answer.
The thing could be killed. She just had to figure out how.
One
Ignoring a ghost is a lot more difficult than you’d think. For starters, walls don’t hinder their kind, so although I shut the door in the face of the spectre loitering outside my house, he followed me inside as if invited. My jaw clenched in irritation, but I began unloading my groceries as though I hadn’t noticed. Too soon, I was done. Being a vampire married to another vampire meant that my shopping list was pretty short.
“This is ridiculous. You can’t keep shunning me forever, Cat,” the ghost muttered.
Yeah, ghosts can talk, too. That made them even harder to ignore. Of course, it didn’t help that this ghost was also my uncle. Alive, dead, undead . . . family had a way of getting under your skin whether you wanted them to or not.
Case in point: Despite my vow not to talk to him, I couldn’t keep from replying.
“Actually, since neither of us is getting any older, I can do this forever,” I noted coolly. “Or until you ante up on everything you know about the a-hole running our old team.”
“Madigan is who I came to talk to you about,” he said.
Surprise and suspicion made my eyes narrow. For months, my uncle Don had refused to divulge anything about my new nemesis, Jason Madigan. Don had a history with the former CIA operative who’d taken over the tactical unit I used to work for, but he’d kept mum on the details even when his silence meant that Madigan had nearly gotten me, my husband, and other innocent people killed. Now he was ready to spill? Something else had to be going on. Don was so pathologically secretive that I hadn’t found out we were related until four years after I started working for him.
“What?” I asked without preamble.
He tugged on a gray eyebrow, a habit he couldn’t break even after losing his physical body. He also appeared to be dressed in his usual suit and tie despite dying in a hospital gown. I’d think it was my memories dictating how Don looked except for the hundreds of other ghosts I’d met. There might not be shopping malls in the afterlife, but residual self-image was strong enough to make others see ghosts the way they saw themselves. Don had been the picture of a perfectly groomed, sixty-something bureaucrat in life, so that’s what he looked like in death.
He also hadn’t lost any of the tenacity behind those gunmetal-colored eyes, the only physical trait we had in common. My crimson hair and pale skin came from my father.
“I’m worried about Tate, Juan, Dave, and Cooper,” Don stated. “They haven’t been to their homes recently, and as you know, I can’t get into the compound to check if they’re there.”
I didn’t point out that it was Don’s fault Madigan knew how to ghostproof a building. Heavy combinations of marijuana, garlic, and burning sage would keep all but the strongest spooks away. After a ghost had almost killed Madigan last year, he’d outfitted our old base with a liberal supply of all three.
“How long since you’ve seen them?”
“Three weeks and four days,” he replied. Faults he might have, but Don was meticulous. “If only one of them was away that long, I’d assume he was on an undercover job, but all of them?”
Yes, that was strange even for members of a covert Homeland Security branch that dealt with misbehaving members of undead society. When I was a member of the team, the longest undercover job I’d been on was eleven days. Rogue vampires and ghouls tended to frequent the same spots if they were dumb enough to act out so much that they caught the government’s attention.