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his arm. Heat flooded his veins, sending his pulse into an irregular pattern. “You’re lying, Vincent. You’re afraid that I’m right. That there is an evil presence here, that it’s taken root in the town, and that you can’t stop it.”
    “I know there’s evil—that’s the reason I became an agent,” he snapped.
    She leaned closer to him, her breath bathing his neck. That sweet scent enticed him to forget her words and drag her in his arms and taste her.
    “Then it’s the evil inside you that you fear,” she whispered. “That’s the reason you left here. The reason you became an agent.”
    He swallowed hard and shook his head, but her words hit too damn close to home. Worse, her touch made him ache inside, made him want to feel her delicate hands on his flesh, her lips soothing and cool on his skin, her body welcoming his inside her.
    Blood surged to his loins, his cock swelling with arousal.
    He struggled for control, for a reason why she made him so damn hot, for a reason he shouldn’t sleep with her, for rational thoughts to resurface.
    Thankfully the sheriff rushed in, and Vincent clawed his way back from the brink of insanity.
    “Clarissa, you were right.” Sheriff Waller heaved for a breath. “A jogger out at Hell’s Hollow just found Tracy Canton’s body. Someone slashed her throat and left her at the edge of the canyon.”
    Vincent fisted his hands. No denying it, this sounded like murder.
    Sheriff Waller grabbed his gun and hat and headed to the door.
    Vincent followed. “Hell’s Hollow?”
    “A small canyon between two of our highest ridges,” Waller said. “Developers built a bunch of houses there a decade ago, but they burned down one night. Killed all the people home at the time, about a hundred.” He wheezed a tired breath and scrubbed a hand through his hair.
    “Arson?” Vincent asked.
    “Never determined the reason. But since then, two developers have tried to build on that land and stopped.”
    “Why?” Vincent asked.
    “Ghosts,” Clarissa filled in as she came up behind him. “People claim they can still smell the smoke and the charred bodies, that they hear screams of women and children dying as they were burned alive.”
    “The devil’s work,” Sheriff Waller added. “No other explanation. Grass won’t even grow there.”
    “It was another year of the eclipse,” Clarissa said in a cryptic tone.
    “What the hell does that mean?” Vincent asked.
    “That more deaths will follow,” Waller said. “The massacre at Hell’s Hollow happened during one eclipse year. And a mine collapsed, killing and trapping dozens during
another
.”
    Vincent’s chest clenched. There had been an eclipse the year his parents disappeared.
    The year he suspected his father had killed his mother.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he scent of burning cedar and flesh assaulted Vincent as he approached Hell’s Hollow. Not a deep canyon, but a groove carved out of the mountains. The earth was dry, the ground hard, the trees bare of leaves as if life couldn’t survive on the plot of land. For a moment, he actually paused to listen for the spirits of the dead Clarissa had described, but other than the whine of twigs snapping and the cry of the vultures stalking the hollow as if they smelled fresh blood, the air was eerily silent. And hot, so hot that sweat trickled down his jaw and back, plastering his shirt to his skin. Even the soles of his shoes felt the infernal heat from the ground, as if that fire still burned beneath the soil, ready to strike any second.
    Déjà vu suddenly hit him. He’d been here before.
    He turned around and scanned the area, his gut tightening. This place was familiar, was where his own childhood home had sat. The house that had become a torture chamber . . .
    Sheriff Waller gestured toward a path to the right and a ridge that overlooked the hollow, and Vincent followed him, drawing in the mountain air but smelling the heat and stench of death mingled with dry pine.
    Clarissa