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her imagination had gone wandering, the lecture hall had completely emptied.
    And she hadn’t even noticed.
    This has got to stop
, she told herself, but managed a smile for the woman making her way down the aisle toward her. Bailey Harper looked a lot like a pixie who had recently tangled with a werewolf, which meant she’d come straight over from work. Bay’s wavy blond hair was desperately trying to escape the ponytail she’d wrestled it into, and the ancient jeans and T-shirt she wore were absolutely covered in a rainbow of dog hair. Lily’s eyes dropped to Bay’s sneakers, which looked as though they’d been recently chewed. Probably with her feet still in them, if Lily knew anything about Bay’s clientele.
    “Does every dog you bathe maul you?” Lily asked, frowning as she realized that there were indeed fresh chew marks on Bay’s Nikes.
    Bay narrowed her eyes as she came to a stop beside her. “Pretty much. And since you’re avoiding my question, I guess I can assume there isn’t an answer I’m going to like. Damn it, Lily, would you please get your ass to a sleep clinic before you just drop dead of exhaustion?”
    Lily sighed and huffed an errant lock of hair out of her face. She had learned early on in their friendship that it was an exercise in futility to argue with Bay. The woman wasvery short, deceptively cute, and a human steamroller when she thought she was right about something, which was almost always. The only thing that kept Lily from wanting to clock her sometimes was that Bay’s heart was permanently affixed in the right place.
    “I’m fine, Bay. It’s been a while since I hooked up with Prince Insomnia, so I guess he was due for a visit. He hasn’t changed—all tease, no action,” Lily said, deciding to go for humor in her latest attempt at defusing this ongoing argument.
    “Ha.” Her friend’s look was bland at best. “Lily, I’m aware that I’m no fashionista, but those dark circles under your eyes aren’t doing it for you. Or me, for that matter. I worry. You’ve seemed a little out of it since Friday night. Are you sure you were okay when you left the ghost hunt? Did something freak you out and you’re just not telling me?”
    Lily covered her discomfort with an amused snort. Bay was a lot closer to the truth than she liked, and she wasn’t interested in talking about it yet, if ever.
    “You mean besides having to listen to that couple getting it on in the closet? No. I still think they say that place is haunted just as a gimmick to add local color or something. Speaking of local color, how’s the cute techno-geek?”
    Bay pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “Another detour. We are not done talking about this, Lily Quinn. But since I have you to thank for it, cute techno-geek—otherwise known as Alex—is good. At least, I think he is. We couldn’t manage to hook up this weekend, but I’m heading to dinner with him in”—Bay glanced at her watch, and her eyes widened in horror—“Jesus, an hour.” She looked down at her dog-hair-covered clothes, thenback up at Lily with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “First date is way too soon for him to discover the real me, don’t you think?”
    “The real you is fabulous. I just hope he isn’t allergic to animal hair,” Lily replied. She leaned against the heavy metal desk that sat off to the side of the podium. Exhaustion, hovering like a phantom over her all weekend, seemed to be coming in for a landing. She’d been honest with Bay about one thing: It had been quite a while since her so-called insomnia had acted up. What Bay didn’t know, and what Lily had no intention of sharing, was that her bouts of sleeplessness were entirely self-inflicted and born out of self-defense. Even this bone-deep weariness was better than falling into the nightmare about the woman in the temple, over and over and over… the nightmare she had spoken about only once and never would again.
    In any case, the end result was the