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Hadn’t even tried to understand what she herself couldn’t explain. Three weeks, and she was still so sorry.
    Layla dropped her backpack on a box and shuffled into the living room. If she recalled correctly, there was no food in the fridge—Tyler had done the grocery thing—and she was too tired to wait for delivery.
    The dining table–cum–desk was covered with her notes, the adjacent wall tagged with photos of possible wraith sightings. At the center was the blurry image of Talia Thorne. Talia, whom she’d give anything to interview up close and in person.
    Talia.
    Still, two leads in one day: a several-year shift in the wraith disease time line and a motivated informant. Layla smiled. She’d do her research and connect the dots. Then Adam Thorne wouldn’t be able to boot her anywhere. Nope. He’d be forced to answer some real questions, and his wife, Talia, would finally have to come out of her shadows and face the light.
    kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
    Layla gripped her head. Phantom sounds. Visions. She just hoped she could keep her head on straight long enough to tell the story.

Chapter 3
    Finished.
    The hellgate shook on its posts with a loud, metallic bone rattle that filled Shadowman’s mind until he was near mad with the sound. He let the hammer fall from his hand, its impact with the floor mute. All world noise was silenced, overcome by the hideous clanging of the gate.
    The kat-a-kat morphed, deepening in meaning with new vowels and consonants, and became intelligible, commanding, Open me!
    The words carried a compulsion that slid cold and coercive into his thoughts, urging him to step forward. To put his blistered palm to the handle. To test the resistance of the mechanism with the weight of his hand.
    After the labor of the gate, opening the doorway would be so easy. There would be a strange pleasure, a dark rightness, in answering that call: Make a thing; use the thing. Simple.
    But Shadowman turned his face away. When he crossed that cursed threshold, he had to be a seethe of intent. He’d enter Hell as fae Death, with Shadow at his back.
    Open me!
    Not now, Shadowman answered, but soon.
    At long last, he allowed his weary corporeal body to shred. The atoms of his bone and flesh evaporated into clinging smoke that hovered, man-shaped, in the air, and then dispersed into the deepest corners of the warehouse. His consciousness opened and spread with the loss of his body. It was a relief not to bear the burden of that mass. Mass, the substance and magic of mortality, was difficult to manage for a fae, even one as canny as Death.
    In his native Twilight, strength would have come quickly, but he could not leave a passage such as the gate untended. Some weak mortal would find and open it. Instead, he was forced to wait, impatient, as silky layers of Shadow reached through the variegated patches of light and dark, cast by the fire, to cloak him in power again.
    He could hear the roar of the fire echoing within the empty warehouse space, the mournful bellow of a ship on the river beyond the docks, and the soft pats of a trio of footsteps moving down the street, the bearers’ heartbeats an overlapping, near-tribal drumming of life. The gate’s Open me! was reduced to an insidious whisper in his mind.
    Yes, insidious and perilous. Damnation was infested with devils, twisted souls of those who’d spurned life and love and hope for evil and destruction and pain. Once cut from mortality and delivered to the Hereafter, they existed in agony, suffering eternity by torturing each other.
    Soon, Kathleen. I will rescue you.
    The heartbeats quickened when they neared the warehouse. The atmosphere became tinged with burgeoning mortal fear. The unease rapidly escalated to terror.
    Shadowman cast his attention outward, away from the gate, beyond the walls of the warehouse, to find a young woman pursued on the street by two swarthy thugs. The lust coming off the men reeked like