Chapter 1

I died when I was twenty-three, pushing up daisies died. Heaven hadn't wanted me quite yet, evidently, and I guess neither had Hell. Either way, I found myself back in the world of the living and in so much pain, I'd wished one of them would have taken mercy on me...but it wasn't to be.

Dallas, Texas

2015

As I peered through the evening’s gloom at the cabin I’d been working on in my spare time, I climbed the steps and onto the cabin’s porch. After crossing its wooden width, I entered through the doorway, then pausing several feet inside, I shone my light around the living room.

I’d been remodeling the exterior of the cabin for several months now, but the interior had remained pretty much the same. Every item within it contained so much of my grandmother, it was hard for me to get rid of any of it.

With slow steps, I moved further into the house, walking from room to room, the beam of my flashlight landing on memory after memory.

I continued to wander, losing myself within the past and as my mind recalled my youth, my feet—on autopilot—took me the rest of the way into my old bedroom. The weakening beam of my flashlight greeted the shadows looming within, and I shook my head at my procrastination. I hated making decisions, and as such, I hadn’t removed the quilt hanging across the window. I just… I don’t know…the quilt had always been there.

With only a few more steps into the room, the flashlight blinked on and off, stuttering out its dying breath before, with one last weak effort, it went out altogether. Lowering my arm, I allowed the now useless light to hang at my side—I hadn’t planned to do much anyway, I’d just needed to come inside to…remember. With a sigh, I turned toward the doorway. Before I’d even taken ten steps, however, the natural harmonic balance of the surrounding air shifted; the peculiar sensation I was no longer alone, as if someone or some…thing…had slipped into the room, washed through me. The sensation of disturbed air skated across the back of my neck and sent a chill across my flesh.

I hadn’t been expecting company, so the sense of another presence was far from welcome. With bumps scuttling along my skin, I swung the arm holding the flashlight in an arch, but I punished nothing but the air around me—I’d hit nothing. I felt like Luther Heggs in the 1966 film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and shook my head, a slight apprehensive giggle escaping my lips. Yet, the nervous laugh cut short when a lower, deeper echo of a returned laugh came from within feet of where I stood.

At the sound, the earlier rise of bumps started to chase one another across my flesh, and I found myself wishing like hell the flashlight in my hand was still working.

“Why in the hell,” my inner voice chided, “didn’t you uncover the damn window?”

Too late to bitch at me about it now, I silently griped back. Though the room wasn’t a complete black-out, the shadows within the darkness blocked me from seeing whom or what occupied the room with me.

Breath exiting my mouth in tiny puffs of uneasiness, I began inching my way toward the doorway again, trying to reassure myself with each step the laugh had been nothing more than my imagination.

When the laughter began filling the surrounding air once more, my heart burst into a fast-paced stuttering tattoo of—oh, hell to the fuck no—against my chest, and turning, I began running, heading in the opposite direction of a few seconds earlier.

My new goal was—yup, you guessed it—the fucking quilt covered window. The laugh had come from somewhere between me and the doorway, and under the circumstances of no way in hell was I putting myself any closer to my specter, the window would have to be my savior.

Feet moving across the floor as if I were a character in the movie Kung Fu Hustle, I reached my destination.

My hands began pushing at the quilt, trying to get to the window frame. However, before I could get the window open, I felt fingers wrap around my arm and tug me around.

The action was quick and it caused me to pull the quilt off the window, and bringing it with me, I stumbled backward, finding myself for a brief moment pressed against a solid male figure.

As the soft, subtle scent of one fine as shit panty-melter named Ethan Townsand—my team leader within the F.B.I.—circled around me, I found myself ricocheting off him like a ping-pong ball from a paddle.

My arms flapped and my legs tangled in the quilt, as I tottered like a top, fighting gravity with an ever-increasing lean to the right, my mind screaming, “Tilt… Tilt….”

Seconds later, coming up the victor, I kicked the quilt out of my way. Afterward, I took on a defensive pose and then swore softly. “Dammit!” I’d dropped the flashlight when I’d bounced off Ethan, and now, no longer having it as an option for a weapon, I could do nothing but use what God had given me.

With both hands together, I created a fist and swung with all my might, my month-long anger with Ethan overtaking me. As my fist made contact, I began spewing words. “You goddamn mother fucker! Don’t you ever sneak up on me like that again! And while I’m at it, I don’t know what your problem has been, but get the hell over it!” Then, raising a leg, I kicked at him just for good measure.

An evil smile spread across my lips when I heard him grunt out a curse, then with his breath laboring from within his chest, his silhouette sunk toward the floor as a gust of, “Holy—hell!” wheezed from his lips.

Still wearing the Joker’s grin of earlier, I followed his dark outline, watching as his fallen frame rolled until he rested on his side, where curling into a ball, he began emitting soft, agonized groans.

As I gazed at what I could make out of Ethan's crippled form, the sensation of disappointment washed over me. The gloom of the shadows cradled his features, denying me the vindication I’d have felt at seeing the pain on his face. Yet, I found a small amount of comfort anyway, for as he lay on the floor, wreathing like a damn earthworm in sunlight and gasping for breath, I knew I’d nailed the family jewels.