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m…the house. As I said, everything is fine.”
    “Sugar—”
    “I’ll try not to inconvenience you again. Good-bye.”
    The phone went dead in his ear and he swore pungently, glad his mama wasn’t there to hear him. His army drill sergeant had never intimidated him like her five-feet-nothing of southern belle charm.
    He hadn’t meant to hurt Claire, and he had not called to check on the damn house. His jaw ached from clenching it as he reset the alarm. He checked his messages and e-mail, but couldn’t get the hurt tone of Claire’s voice out of his head. Finally, he gave in and called her again.
    She didn’t pick up, and he checked her schedule only to realize she had a class and would be working later that night. He left a message telling her he had re-armed the system, but didn’t know what to say to undo the damage he’d done to her feelings, or even if it was a good idea to try.
     
    Choking back tears, Claire unlocked her front door.
    Lester was dead. She couldn’t believe it. He’d been at Belmont Manor practically since she started working there three years ago. There had been other deaths over that time. How could there not be, with the average age of the residents seventy-five years? But Lester was different. Lester was special. She’d loved him like family.
    For a woman who had known as little family as she had, that meant something.
    Just the night before, they had sat talking for over two hours and he had been mostly lucid. He’d told her more about his life as a paid assassin and she was convinced now that most of what he told her was real. He’d only started telling her about it this last year, since his senility had worsened, so it had taken a while to sort truth from hallucination. Unless he hallucinated the same things consistently, the stuff about his dark alter ego was real.
    She’d told him she was surprised he’d lived so long, considering what he did, but he said he’d kept his real identity a strict secret. The government and clients for his private jobs had only known him by the name Arwan…Celtic god of the dead. It was fitting for what he had done.
    Only she didn’t care what he’d been in his past; he had been an important part of her life now and it hurt so much that he was gone. He was the closest thing she’d ever known to a father figure she could respect, which was pretty darn pathetic, but there it was.
    She shut the door as the tears started to fall. She swiped at them and belatedly remembered the alarm. Saying a word she rarely used, she rushed across the room to its hidden keypad and coded in her entry before it went off again. She made it just in time and disarmed the system through the veil of moisture blurring her vision.
    It was a good thing she really did plan to move, because she hated having to remember the alarm. She would miss this house, but just like everywhere she had ever lived…it wasn’t her home. It wasn’t permanent. She was just a renter.
    She’d lived a lot of places in her life, some of them scarier than others, but they’d all had one thing in common…they had been temporary stops, and this house was, too.
    She wasn’t hungry and she couldn’t face studying. She was exhausted from grief over Lester and working after almost no sleep for the second weekend in a row. She stumbled down the hall to her bedroom, stopping along the way to reset the alarm.
    That should make Hotwire happy.
     
    Claire was dreaming. She was sleeping in the front seat of the old Buick she and her mom had called home for a few months when she was twelve. Part of her knew it was a dream, that she was a grown-up woman now, living in a house, not a car, but everything felt so real. She could even smell the must of the perpetually wet floor carpets.
    She could hear her mom’s slow breathing from where she slept in the backseat and she could hear a siren’s wail. It was really close. The cops were coming…they would arrest her mom and put her in jail, too. Or maybe