“No,” Jo insisted. “No, no, no…”

This wasn’t happening again, she told herself, looking to see how badly Zack had been hit. Head wound. Oh, God. Blood was fingering down across his unshaved cheek.

One moment, Jo had been doing a perfectly fine job at taking cover, watching for a chance at opportunity fire. The next moment, Zack had wedged himself between her and danger.

Had she asked him to? Had she wanted him to? This was the exact opposite of what she wanted from him!

“No!” Every man she ever wanted, ever kissed, was not going to end up dead from protecting her, damn it.

Dear Reader,

This month we have something really special on tap for you. The Cinderella Mission, by Catherine Mann, is the first of three FAMILY SECRETS titles, all of them prequels to our upcoming anthology Broken Silence and then a twelve book stand-alone FAMILY SECRETS continuity. These books are cutting edge, combining dark doings, mysterious experiments and overwhelming passion into a mix you won’t be able to resist. Next month, the story continues with Linda Castillo’s The Phoenix Encounter.

Of course, this being Intimate Moments, the excitement doesn’t stop there. Award winner Justine Davis offers up another of her REDSTONE, INCORPORATED tales, One of These Nights. A scientist who’s as handsome as he is brilliant finds himself glad to welcome his sexy bodyguard—and looking forward to exploring just what her job description means. Wilder Days (leading to wilder nights?) is the newest from reader favorite Linda Winstead Jones. It will have you turning the pages so fast, you’ll lose track of time. Ingrid Weaver begins a new military miniseries, EAGLE SQUADRON, with Eye of the Beholder. There will be at least two follow-ups, so keep your eyes open so you don’t miss them. Evelyn Vaughn, whose miniseries THE CIRCLE was a standout in our former Shadows line, makes her Intimate Moments debut with Buried Secrets, a paranormal tale that’s as passionate as it is spooky. And Aussie writer Melissa James is back with Who Do You Trust? This is a deeply emotional “friends become lovers” reunion romance, one that will captivate you from start to finish.

Enjoy! And come back next month for more of the best and most exciting romance around—right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor

Buried Secrets

EVELYN VAUGHN

Books by Evelyn Vaughn

Silhouette Intimate Moments

Buried Secrets #1205

Silhouette Shadows

[*]Waiting for the Wolf Man #8

[*]Burning Times #39

[*]Beneath the Surface #55

[*]Forest of the Night #66

EVELYN VAUGHN

believes in many magicks, particularly the magic of storytelling. She has written fiction since she could print words, first publishing a ghost story in a newspaper contest at the age of twelve. Since then, along with four Silhouette Shadows novels (recently republished as Dreamscapes), she has written four historical romances and a handful of fantasy short stories, some under the name Yvonne Jocks. She loves movies and videos, and is an unapologetic TV addict, still trying to figure out both how to time-travel and how to meet up with some of her favorite characters. Even as an English teacher at Tarrant County College SE, in Fort Worth, Texas, Evelyn believes in the magic of stories, movies, books and dreams. Luckily, her imaginary friends and her cats seem to get along.

Evelyn loves to talk about stories and characters, especially her own. Please write her at Yvaughn@aol.com or at P.O. Box 6, Euless, TX, 76039. Or check out her Web site at www.evelynvaughn.homestead.com.

This time around I owe particular thanks to:

• Kelly, for Zack, for sharing the world and for her encouragement.

• Lisa, for liking explosives better than diamonds.

• Kayli, for Ashley, and for being the flow queen.

• Sarah, for good sense, fast eyes and happy faces.

• Toni, for Cecil, and for being Cliffy.

• Matt, for plotting so well that some of it rubbed off on me.

• Deb Stover and Maureen McKade, for friendly professionalism—or professional friendship. Probably both.

• And to Leslie Wainger, my editor, and Paige Wheeler, my agent, both of whom had a hand in resurrecting me.

This book is dedicated to the memory of
Kevin Tod Smith, the best god of war ever,
1963 to 2002. I hope the time was as good for him
as for all the rest of us.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Prologue

If his in-laws hadn’t reached the cemetery first, Zack Lorenzo might never have learned the truth. Not about evil. Not about magic. Not about himself.

But when he rounded a corner in the old Santa Teresa Cemetery and saw the cluster of Romanos by his wife’s three-day-old grave, he ducked behind an angel statue, shutting his eyes against the close call.

He was a big man, a cop. Until last week, he’d thought he could face anything. But he couldn’t face this, or them.

He’d made it through the viewing, the rosary and the finality of the funeral in pure shock. His beautiful Gabriella…dead? They’d had their problems, yeah, but what couple didn’t? They would’ve worked them out, same as his parents, her parents, their neighbors and grandparents always had, right?

Now it was too late. Done. God didn’t grant do-overs.

They’d argued that night about her weird new ideas. He’d taken a double shift, to stay away from her. And now…

Zack couldn’t face her parents yet. Sooner or later someone would ask why he hadn’t protected his precious wife, and he wouldn’t have jack to tell them. He didn’t know, himself.

“Best leave the family to their grief, eh?” asked an accented voice, and Zack opened his eyes to see who else was avoiding the Romanos. The scrawny young man had two-toned hair and carried a backpack with the logo of a local college. “Pardon my intrusion. Are you here to see…somebody?”

Zack hadn’t brought flowers. In his pocket he had a blue beanbag bunny that had once been Gabriella’s favorite; he’d won it for her on a date. She stopped carrying it everywhere sometime during their first year of marriage, he guessed, but he’d thought maybe wherever she was, she might want it….

To distract himself from the idea of putting a stupid toy bunny on his wife’s new grave, Zack challenged, “Are you?”

“Oh no, I’m doing schoolwork, actually. This cemetery’s my semester project. Did you know, Santa Teresa has served the Little Italy area of Chicago since…”

Zack let his grief mute the kid’s ramble. How was it people still attended college, took vacations, planned futures when his young wife was dead? Dead because he hadn’t loved her better.

The student—British, Zack guessed—blathered on about tombstone rubbings and epitaphs and how different cultures ensured peaceful rests for their loved ones. Egypt’s mummies. Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Burial versus cremation. Then he said, “Like that new one over there, where that poor family is.”

That new one?

“What about it?” Zack challenged, dangerous.

“That grave, Gabriella…” The student drew some battered note cards from his pocket. “Gabriella Francesca Bianca Lorenzo, buried just last Saturday. Isn’t it interesting, how people can take comfort in burying an empty casket?”

For a long moment, Zack could only stare, strangely dizzy—like part of him knew something the rest hadn’t figured out yet. The wind off Lake Michigan shook the trees and made a Mylar balloon on a nearby grave bob and struggle at its tether. Finally, he went with the obvious. “Her casket’s not empty.”

“Oh, I think it may be. My equipment…” But the young man’s face paled with comprehension. “Ah. You knew her. My apologies for intrud—”

Too easily, Zack had the student face-first against the Gallo mausoleum, skinny arms behind his back. Now he just had to decide how bad to hurt the little ghoul. “Who are you?”

“My apologies.” Marble muffled the kid’s voice. “Cecil Taylor. How do you do? I’m studying Urban Archeology, and—”

“What the hell are you doing, desecrating holy ground?”

“Pardon?” Even with his face smooshed, Taylor sounded insulted. “I’ve desecrated nothing—if anybody respects the dead, it is I! Now if you would be so good as to—”

“You said equipment.”

“Ah. Yes. That.” Taylor remained surprisingly composed. “I apologize. I was taking readings on a different grave, you see—Ugo Casale, 1914–1978. I used nothing invasive—a metal detector and a, well, a portable sonar of sorts. It’s rather like a fish-finder. I did not even stand on the grave. But as I turned away, I noticed readings from Ms. Lorenzo’s…plot…which indicated the absence of a corpse, so I made note of it. That’s all.”

“Well you’re wrong.” Belatedly, Zack released his hold on the guy’s skinny arms. “And don’t call my wife Ms. anything. Gabriella wasn’t one of those feminist types.”

She hadn’t even worked outside the home. Until a few months ago, she hadn’t even had friends who weren’t his friends, too. That’s how things worked in their neighborhood. Then she’d up and decided to attend community college. She’d begun to explore New Age crap that had made Zack’s Nona mutter under her breath.

He felt guilty for still hating those things even though she was dead.

“I am sorry for your loss,” said Taylor gently, as if Zack hadn’t just made a love connection between the student and marble. “And for intruding. But if you are indeed her husband, you should know that the casket buried in that plot is very likely empty.”

Like hell it was!

Or was it?

Once the Romanos left, Zack made the Englishman use his equipment to show him those so-called readings, both on Gabriella’s grave and others…and he half wished he hadn’t. It convinced him enough to risk the wrath of his friends and family by having Gabriella officially exhumed. Her father protested—but Zack was her husband. In this, at least, he had final say.

Nobody would stand with him for that except his elderly grandmother, the priest and Cecil Taylor, the latter as if seeing some unplanned duty to its proper conclusion. Zack set his jaw as the casket was opened, half afraid, half hopeful—for what, he still wasn’t sure. Maybe just to see her one more time.

But somehow he’d failed her again. Even before Nona began muttering under her breath, either prayers or incantations, Zack knew that much.

The silk-lined casket was empty.

And when they reburied it, all it held was the last of Zack Lorenzo’s peace of mind—and a blue beanbag bunny.

Chapter 1

West Texas—Four Years Later

Jo didn’t realize how deadened she’d become until she saw the man in her jail’s only cell—and breathed.

Not that she hadn’t been breathing all along. But this was the first breath she’d actually noticed in years. One quick, sharp inhalation, instead of just monotonous existing.

It unnerved her.

She distracted herself by getting a cup of coffee. Then she half leaned, half sat on her desk, eyeing the stranger and noticing what it felt like to breathe…and wondering why anything should seem different.

The prisoner, who’d sat up on his cot at her entrance, stared expectantly back. For a brief moment, Jo felt like she knew him. Or should. Or would. His broad chest expanded and contracted under his button-up shirt. He was breathing, too.

Then the moment passed, and she just felt silly. Everyone breathed; it was a handy habit. If the air suddenly felt sharper than usual in her lungs, that was probably just spring coming.

“Well, Mr….” She glanced down at the desk, hoping her deputy had left a note. He had. Fred loved filling out reports. Speeding…city boy…smarty-pants. “Mr. Lorenzo.”

She met his dark, intense eyes again, quirked her mouth into a noncommittal smile. “What brings you to Spur?”

Then she took a deliberately casual sip of coffee, which was a mistake because she choked on his answer.

Lorenzo said, “Zombies.”

Jo put her mug down so quickly that hot liquid sloshed over her fingers and onto Deputy Fred’s report. You misunderstood, screamed the logical part of her brain as she bent over, coughing. He’s using some Yankee slang. Or maybe he meant drinking; weren’t zombies a mixed drink? That would explain the speed at which he’d been driving, even if he had passed Fred’s Breathalyzer test.

This was West Texas. The man couldn’t mean walking-dead zombies, could he?

There was no such thing.

And he couldn’t know.

“It’s pretty early for the late show,” she hedged, catching both her breath and her composure. “You came here why?”

She noted wary concern fade from his expression at her recovery—and appreciated it. Lorenzo’s solid face fit his big, rangy form. His nose wasn’t completely straight; his whisker-dusky jaw looked stubborn; and his dark eyes were unnervingly calm for a guy who’d spent the night in jail for a simple speeding violation.

Much less one who talked horror stories.

This was the sort of man who either made a woman feel threatened, or wholly safe. No in-between. And Jo didn’t feel threatened by him.

Breathing and horror stories aside.

So why was she trembling?

“Forget it,” he muttered, scrubbing a splayed hand through shaggy, black-brown hair that licked his collar, a bit longer than her own. “Look, you got any more coffee? That yokel who left me here has been gone for over an hour.”

Jo ignored the slight to her deputy and concentrated on getting a second mug of coffee without her hands shaking. Nothing was different today than yesterday, last week, last month…last year? No, more. It had been years since she took refuge here, and nothing was out of the ordinary.

Certainly nothing that she’d only imagined. Nothing she’d been trying to forget ever since.

“We’ll get you some breakfast within the hour,” she promised, carrying the mug over to him.

She somehow breathed deeper, the closer she got, like a closed-up room with newly opened windows. It wasn’t her imagination. So what was it?

When Lorenzo came to the bars, he stood a good head taller than her. His shoulders matched the width of his chest. If she was a room, he felt like a whole house to her—a house painted in pure testosterone.

His strong fingers awkwardly trapped hers when he took the mug’s handle, big but careful, so careful of her. She made sure he had a good grip on it before she pried her own fingers loose.

“Real security-conscious around here, aren’t you, deputy?” he asked. He took a sip, just like the perfectly normal prisoner he was. “I could’ve thrown hot coffee in your eyes, or had you against the bars and my arm around your throat, and be out of here before you could think.”

He sounded like a city boy. Swarthy, not like the local Latin or Native American population so much as Greek or Italian. Lorenzo. Duh. The collar of his blue shirt was unbuttoned enough to reveal a triangle of dark, hairy chest. His trousers had once been pressed, but not recently enough.

“Most speeders aren’t moved to such acts of desperation,” Jo noted, feigning boredom. “And I’m the sheriff. Sheriff James.”

“Ted Bundy only got caught when cops picked him up for traffic violations,” Lorenzo reminded her, clearly an annoying, last-word kind of guy, before sipping the coffee again.

Then he went still, mug to his lips. At least he didn’t choke. “James?”

“Yup,” said Jo, heading back to her desk.

“Joe James?” Jo could hear the “e” in his incredulity.

She paused, not liking that he knew her name. The ridiculous word he’d used earlier—zombies—pounded in her head, but she pushed it away. “That’s me, Mr. Lorenzo.” Again she consulted Fred’s now-stained report. “Zaccheri Lorenzo?”

“Zack. Lady, you’re the reason I came to this hellhole! But I was expecting a guy. No offense.”

Deep breath—again with the breathing. Jo turned to face him, folding her arms across her chest. “Am I the reason you came to this hellhole at ninety-three miles per hour?”

“Some cars gotta go fast,” he dismissed. “I’m a private investigator, Miss James. My partner found a statement you once made to the press, and I want to ask you some questions about it.”

Spur didn’t have a supermarket, much less a press. It wasn’t a statement Jo had made anytime recently. And that other time…

She stiffened, her stomach protesting the coffee, but knew she could hide it. She’d learned to hide it. Living in the middle of nowhere helped. “What statement?”

Better a hypocrite than a basket case.

“The reporter told us his source was a Joe James. Seven years ago you were in a mining accident in New Mexico, right?”

Oh. That statement. “And if I was?”

“You made some unusual claims about the cause of the cave-in.” Damn, but he had an intense way of looking at her.

Maybe she didn’t feel so safe around him, after all.

“I’d been trapped underground for almost two days with no food or water, diminishing air and dead co-workers.” One who had been far more than a colleague. “I think it’s safe to suppose I might have been disoriented after my rescue.”

Zack Lorenzo leaned on the crossbar of his cell, as casually as on a fence. He was almost too large to be graceful, but he did have a distracting ease about him. “It’s safe to suppose that,” he agreed dryly, but his eyes were more insistent than his voice. “Were you?”

“What business is it of yours?” Jo sat in her chair and leaned back, deliberately propping her cowboy boots on the desk. Let the man rot…at least until his fine was wired to him.

“Look, I know this is out of the blue. But I’ve got my reasons for asking,” he insisted. Now the look of incredulity she cast toward him was legitimate. “That’s right,” he defended with macho peevishness. “And I’m here to get your…”

She waited, intrigued. She had something he wanted?

He had to look away and swallow to choke the word out. “Your help. By getting your story.”

Jo didn’t want to think back to the cave-in. She had too much trouble with nightmares as it was. It had been a hallucination. She’d just been disoriented.

But this man struck a chord she’d forgotten, and she drew yet more charged air into her lungs. “Help?”

He grinned. It might be a good-looking grin if it weren’t so damned superior. “Yeah. Against the forces of evil.”

Fred had been pretty accurate. A smarty-pants.

Jo no longer felt guilty for thinking the man was riding a stirrup short. She let her boots and the front legs of her chair thunk to the floor, and she picked up Fred’s report again. The blotchy photocopy of Lorenzo’s P.I. license looked legit…for what she knew about official documentation for the state of Illinois, which wasn’t much.

She took a swallow of coffee and wished it were tequila. “Says you’re on a case, next town up the road.” Almanuevo was only a few years into its boom as a center for New Age revelations and so-called vortexes. But Jo saw a pretty clear distinction between exploring one’s past lives and hunting down evil.

“I am. Missing persons.” This time his grin was positively grating. “That’s where you come in.”

“You want me to help fight evil or find a missing person?”

He snorted. “Neither. I just want you to tell me about the missing persons you ran into during that cave-in.” His tone took on a patronizing edge. “I wouldn’t want to put you into any scary situations, lady.”

The fact that she didn’t challenge his disrespect proved how upset she was. Jo stood. “Whatever I said to that reporter, I was mistaken. I’m afraid you wasted a trip, Mr. Lorenzo.”

He swore beneath his breath. “Helluva trip to waste! You know how far Almanuevo is from here?”

“Over an hour away.” Jo paused on her way to the filing cabinet, then qualified herself. “Going the speed limit.”

“Real scenic, too,” the prisoner groused, while she opened the top drawer and looked for something, anything, to keep her busy and official. And normal. And sane. “Sand. Cactus. More sand. More cactus. A few rocks. And hey—”

“Don’t you go sassin’ the sheriff,” drawled Deputy Fred as he walked in, two McDonald’s bags in his hand. But Jo had gotten the gist.

“More sand,” finished Lorenzo with a snarl, flopping back onto the cot. “It’s a garden spot, all right.”

“It’s West Texas,” clarified Jo, taking one of Fred’s bags. She fished out an Egg McMuffin and tossed it neatly between the cell bars. “Have some breakfast.”

He easily caught it one-handed. “This is cold.”

“The McDonald’s is in Almanuevo, near the Western Union. The lady who runs our diner is on vacation at Tahoe for three more days.” Jo aimed her own superior smile toward the prisoner. “West Texas.”

Then she turned to Deputy Fred, who was looking mighty uncomfortable. “Did his folks wire him the money?”

He nodded, and Lorenzo whooped. “I get out of this hellhole, right?”

Fred started to say something and stopped. Jo had to lean close before he’d divulge it. “They done sent him one thousand dollars. In cash! I put it in my shoe, just in case I got jumped.”

Jo tried not to smile. Fred was, to put it kindly, a stocky man. In his tan uniform, star on his pocket and gun on his hip, he shouldn’t have to worry—especially not around here. Sand, cactus, etc. What was going to jump him, a jackelope?

Still, it was a pretty piece of money, and at least he cared. He was one of the good guys.

“Good job,” she whispered back.

“Do I get out now, or what?” demanded the prisoner, sounding even more like a pushy city boy. Jo scooped the keys off of her desk and opened the cell door.

When he walked by her, his sleeve brushed her shoulder, clean and warm. She took a deep breath, inhaling a scent she’d gone without too long.

Alive. Safe.

But that made no more sense than zombies. Jo didn’t look to others for her safety. Never again. That’s why she wore a badge, carried a gun. That’s why she lived alone.

She said, “You’re welcome.”

Lorenzo groaned when he realized why Fred was taking off his shoe. He turned back to her as a distraction, which was just as well since she had to return his wallet, his car keys, his mobile phone, his automatic pistol.

“Look,” he said, sliding a card out of his wallet. It read Lorenzo and Company, Private Investigation, with a P.O. box in Chicago, phone numbers and Internet addresses. “Clearly you don’t want to think about it, much less talk, and hell—that’s your call. But unlike a lot of blind schmucks, you know. You’ve seen what’s out there. Whether you’re admitting it or not, it’s still there. Maybe you can help. Think about it.”

He pressed the card into her hand, his own hand solid and warm around hers. It made Jo wonder when the last time was that someone had touched her, even that briefly, that casually. Christmas with her brothers, she guessed.

Lorenzo paid his fine, pocketed the nearly $900 he had left over, and departed the jail like he was shrugging off an unnecessary chore. The man had lost a lot of money and a couple hours’ drive…. On a chore?

Now that he was gone—mere moments after the door shut—Jo didn’t feel safe at all. She felt like a doctored tooth as the Novocain wore off. Tingly. Worried.

Braced against certain pain—the downside of feeling alive again.

“Don’t want to think about what?” asked Fred, halfway through his platter of soggy pancakes.

“Whatever I don’t want to talk about.” Jo heard an engine purr to life. She waited a moment and then, against her better judgment, stepped into the narrow street to watch a shiny black sports car skim off into the scrub-dotted hills toward Almanuevo, the Sedona of West Texas.

The air felt strangely warm for this early in the morning. Especially for March. Especially for Spur. Overhead, a hawk swooped by.

Whether you’re admitting it or not, it’s still there, the private investigator had said.

“No, it’s not,” murmured Jo beneath her breath. “It’s dead. I killed it.”

But the stranger had said the magic word, help. That word had power Jo might never understand. So she braced herself—and went back into the jail to ask Fred if he’d heard anything at all about missing persons in Almanuevo.

Jo James lived with two mongrel dogs in a little ranch house five miles outside the tiny town of Spur. She had big windows, on every side a view of open desert, and she liked it that way. Ever since the cave-in, she’d chosen wide-open spaces over small, enclosed areas. She liked being able to see sky forever, feeling that nobody could sneak up on her.

Or so she’d thought, until meeting Zack Lorenzo this morning. Zombies?

She’d told herself she only had to guard against human intrusion. Dangers that could be repelled with guns, fists, dogs—the kind that stayed away from little places like Spur. Now, as she watched the waning moon rise over her backyard, she noticed herself shivering—from more than the night air. That damned detective had stripped away her illusion of safety.

According to Fred, a couple of folks in Almanuevo had vanished. Enough that the town’s mayor worried about bad press, and an increasing number of their New Age tourists were talking about UFO abductions, which was almost as crazy as…

As the things she’d seen. Or thought she’d seen.

Jo whistled for the dogs. As soon as they loped inside, she shut and locked the back door. It was the first time she’d locked her door since her older brother’s visit. He was a security specialist and had insisted on it last Christmas. She loaded the .22 rifle that usually hung in her sparsely furnished living room. After she fixed some chocolate milk she headed back to her bedroom, and made sure to take her revolver and loop the holster on the bedpost of her twin-size bed.

Dogs or not, the house seemed achingly empty all of a sudden. She felt her isolation in her veins…in her lungs.

A Navajo medicine blanket covered the wall behind her bed, and an octagonal god’s-eye, strung from yarn and sticks, hung to face the window. The remaining wall space was dotted with framed pictures, mostly of relatives. Only on nights like this did Jo notice how far away her family lived, how few friends she’d made since taking the job in Spur…how many years ago?

Maybe that had been her plan.

Her younger brother, Max, was a photojournalist, so she had pictures of her grandparents and her late parents, her aunts and uncles, her older brother, Lee. She had more recent pictures of herself, not quite thirty, looking decidedly average beside her vivacious cousins in East Texas. She had pictures of her dogs, even—of every person who’d ever held importance in her life…except one man.

Except Diego.

Jo told herself not to think of Diego. People died. She’d gone on without him and was doing fine by herself.

She drank the milk and put the empty glass on the barrel that was her night table, rather than carry it back out to the kitchen—but not because she was afraid. Then she turned off the light and tried to sleep. She had work in the morning. She almost always worked, despite the town council’s worries over all the vacation time and sick time she’d been accumulating. And she prided herself in not frightening easily. She’d faced everything from rabid dogs to armed robbers, and she’d defeated them all. She’d even faced—

No. After all this time, she wouldn’t let one bigmouthed detective make her believe in monsters.

But tonight the bed seemed awfully empty, too. Small.

Despite the moonlight glowing through her windows, Jo closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

In her dream, she saw Diego and jerked awake with a sharp, real breath. Too real. She preferred the half life she’d been living since she moved here; it hurt less. She preferred the Novocain.

But another attempt at sleep—another gasped return to consciousness—confirmed that the numbness had worn off at just about the same time Zack Lorenzo opened his big mouth.

“Damn it,” Jo whispered brokenly, sitting up in bed so that her Navajo blankets slid to her waist, dragging her hands through her short hair. She wouldn’t dream of him again. Not tonight. Not now. Not Diego.

It hadn’t even been real. Except for him being dead.

But the next morning’s rising sun found Jo sitting at her kitchen table, dizzy from hours of fighting the dreams that haunted her each time she closed her eyes. Both Butch and Sundance lay at her feet, eyeing her with mutual doggy concern.

She glared blearily at Zack Lorenzo’s business card, on the table in front of her. He’d somehow robbed her of her sense of safety. Business hours or not, Jo meant to take it back.

She picked up the phone.

Chapter 2

Zack was in Hell—Hell with Formica countertops, contoured bedspreads and a window air conditioner that made the carpet smell like wet socks. Almanuevo didn’t rate a Holiday Inn, much less a Hilton. Unless he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast or tourist resort, he was left with the Alpha Inn, a “motor hotel” of unparalleled luxury—if you lived in the freaking 1950s.

He still stayed awake most of the night, for his own reasons. But even though he was awake ungodly early, taking notes at the pink “kitchenette” table, Zack swore when his mobile phone rang out its programmed Journey riff. It didn’t matter if he was awake or not. Who the hell called at dawn?

He snatched up his phone. “Whaddaya want?”

“Mr. Lorenzo?”

A woman? “Yeah, this is Lorenzo.” So whaddaya want?

“This is Sheriff James, from Spur.”

He guessed the sheriff counted as a woman. Cocky, yeah. Butch even. But Josephine James couldn’t hide being female, even from a man who wasn’t particularly interested. Jeans and short-sleeved cotton tops just fit differently over feminine curves. Her shiny brown hair, shorter than some men’s, had bared the nape of her neck. Zack never really thought before then about how soft and vulnerable napes looked. And her pixie nose had undermined her no-nonsense, I’m the sheriff attitude.

So, now, did the caffeinated strain in her voice. He felt a twinge of guilt for maybe giving the lady a fairly sleepless night, but he fought it. Gotta break a few eggs, yada yada. This was his job. Worrying about other people wasn’t, not anymore.

He wasn’t any damned good at it, anyway. “What can I do for you this morning? It is morning, right?”

“Look, Mr. Lorenzo, I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to talk to you. If you’re still in the area, I mean.”

The area. Yeah. Right. “I’m still in the state, anyhow. You want I should drive back down there?”

“No,” she said quickly, then paused. “It’s a small town, and I don’t want questions. I’ll drive up and meet you.”

“You know,” he pointed out, “as many car accidents are caused by exhausted drivers as by drunks.”

“I’m a good judge of my own limits.” He’d heard that before. It was usually a lie.

“I’d make better time,” he insisted.

“I’m sure you would. Where are you staying?”

Stubborn, wasn’t she? “The Alpha Inn. Room 7.”

“I’ll be there by lunch.” And she hung up, which Zack found annoying, even though he generally did the same thing.

“I could be there by breakfast,” he muttered, and went back to his note-taking so he could maybe catch a nap before Little Jo moseyed on into town.

A nervous woman. Great. Even the well-rested ones were trouble.

He hoped she had something worthwhile to tell him.

Relieved to have that decision made, Jo managed a quick nap on the cot in the jail’s cell before she left Fred in charge for the day. She couldn’t help remembering that the last person to stretch out on that cot was one rangy, thirty-something Chicago P.I. Despite having changed the sheets, she imagined that she could smell the faint scent of aftershave. Or was that just the whole “breathing again” business?

Either way, she slept better.

She drove her old Bronco into Almanuevo a little after 11:30 a.m., marveling at how quickly the once-deserted little town had risen from the dead. Was it even five years since some real-estate developers started marketing the area as an Eden for psychic enlightenment? Not that it wasn’t pretty in its red-rocked, desert-y way—Big Bend National Park lay several hours south of them and the Guadalupe Mountains almost as far to the north. But when the closest metropolitan area was El Paso, how could Jo not be surprised by Almanuevo’s success?

And it was, against all probability, succeeding. Billboards advertised vortex tours, psychic readings and even a dude ranch that offered everything from chakra alignments to rattlesnake roundups. The signs were set too far back to shade the two-lane highway as she drove into town, her windows open to the unseasonably warm March sunshine. But they were entertaining.

She knew the Alpha Inn, with its pitted parking lot and faux-adobe bungalows. It was one of the oldest businesses in town. Its first incarnation had been as the Tumbleweed Motel, before interstates had put the original town out of business. Jo spotted Lorenzo’s black Ferrari, a rental with New Mexico plates, and she parked her battered blue Ford beside it.

God, she was tired.

For a moment, right after she killed the engine, she let her head fall back and wondered what the hell she was doing here. The sensation felt very much like panic, but at what? The story she finally was going to tell?

Or the man she meant to tell it to?

Since she never allowed herself to panic, Jo grimly shook it off and got out of the truck, sand crunching between her boots and the warm, worn asphalt. At least her cowboy hat—stained white straw, for summer wear—kept the worst of the sun off.

She knocked on door #7. Then she waited, squinting even through the shade of her hat brim and sunglasses. She noticed the drapes were closed.

She knocked again, harder. Nearby a snake of some kind flowed off a flat rock and into the desert. Jo thought she might just fall asleep on her feet out here.

Then the door swung open, and she found herself surrounded by a burst of air-conditioned coolness and nose-to-hairy-chest with the P.I.

Lorenzo had obviously just woken. His thick, dark hair was messy, his shirt was halfway open, his jeans partly unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. For a long moment, Jo just stared—breathing again. She forced her gaze slowly upward. From the small, gold medal nestled in his chest hair to his throat, his shadowed jaw, finally his intense eyes squinting down at her against the glare of Texas sunlight. The awareness that whispered through her from his proximity surprised her. It was another sensation she didn’t generally allow herself to feel.

When Lorenzo covered a wide yawn and waved her in—“Nice hat”—Jo entered his cool, dark cave. She didn’t like caves.

Yet it was so unlike anyplace she expected a man who drove a Ferrari to stay that she found herself grinning. “Pink Formica?”

He snorted. “You got something against Formica?”

But her attention had moved on to the rumpled, king-size bed. It looked particularly inviting, more than this morning’s cot had, and Jo hid her own yawn as she took off the hat and sunglasses. “It’s kind of dark in here,” she hinted.

“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Lorenzo flipped on the lights.

Accepting that as the best she’d get, Jo sank into one of the hard plastic chairs by the paper-strewn table. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“No problem.” Belatedly, Lorenzo buttoned his jeans, then sprawled with his odd, lumbering grace into the other chair. He dwarfed it. “I’m gonna send out for lunch—you want anything?”

She tried not to look at the bed, wishing she didn’t feel so…so alert, around this man. “Almanuevo has delivery now?”

“Not exactly.” He smirked at the rotary phone as he dialed, as if something about it amused him, then said, “Yeah, this is Lorenzo at the Alpha. Send me the usual, and….”

He widened his eyes, waiting on her.

“Just coffee,” she insisted.

“Toss in a slice of apple pie and an extra coffee. Yeah.” And he hung up. “Delivery in Almanuevo is me saying I’ll give five bucks extra to whoever carries my order across the street from the Ambrosia Café. Sometimes it’s a waitress, sometimes it’s another customer.” He shrugged at the quirks of small-town life. “So you thought about what I said yesterday?”

“I thought about the cave-in,” she admitted.

“Want to tell me about it?” It wasn’t exactly concern, but she appreciated his pragmatism. Concern might make her want to cry, or say something embarrassing, and she didn’t need that. Lorenzo found a legal pad buried amongst the pile of loose pages on the desk and fished a pen out of the mess as well.

Jo hesitated. She hadn’t told anyone what she’d seen—thought she saw—since the reporter, and she’d been doped up on painkillers at the time. Since she’d been quoted as an anonymous source, she doubted even her brothers knew she was the one who’d started the rumor about zombies.

A laptop computer sat on the kitchenette bar, plugged into a phone jack, and paperwork covered the table. But did she really mean to recite the whole, unbelievable story to a stranger from Chicago?

She was here to make the dreams stop, that was all.

“You changed your mind again,” guessed Lorenzo, sagging back in the chair and looking ceilingward.

“I’d just like to know more about why I’m telling it,” Jo challenged. She’d been more comfortable in her jail. Now in his motel room, his messy bed sprawled beside her and his chest hair staring her in the face, she felt distinctly out of her league.

Like the world had started vibrating at a faster speed. But to hear some folks talk, maybe that was just Almanuevo.

He seemed to consider the request, then shrugged. “Right. I can handle that. What I do, Miss James—”

“Ms. James,” she corrected easily. “Or Sheriff.”

He stared at her, then tried again. “What I do, Mzzz. James, isn’t the usual private investigation stuff. I do that too—cheating spouses, skip-traces on bounced checks, crap like that. A guy’s got to make a living, no matter how well-off his partner is. But our specialty is the weird stuff. Cults. Curses. Ghosts.”

Zombies. Jo’s discomfort settled into her gut as she pursued the less remarkable claim. “You believe in ghosts?”

“My partner does. Me, I’m careful not to disbelieve in anything nowadays. What with the Internet, it’s pretty easy for people with, let’s call ’em special requirements, to find me. Most of them are major flakes, by the way, same as the assholes who generally suck them in. But a few of ’em aren’t.”

And that, apparently, was important.

He shifted in his seat, though it looked a bit small for him to get truly comfortable, then continued, one hand sculpting the story out of air. “So a few weeks back, we get a call from a mother whose son vanished, maybe four months ago, in Almanuevo. Not a child—a college kid. Thing is, he vanished dead. Seems he and his buds tried rock-climbing under the influence of God-knows what, with the expected, pancakelike results. No biggie.”

Jo didn’t bother to hide her scorn. “No biggie?”

He was unfazed. “So one minute his remains are safe in the town clinic, toe-tagged and body-bagged. Next thing you know—” He snapped his fingers. “Gone. Like he got up and walked away.”

“But clearly,” said Jo, “he didn’t get up and walk away. Corpses have been stolen before….” Though not around there. That she knew of. “Haven’t they?”

Lorenzo’s rugged expression stilled. Then he frowned.

When a knock sounded at the door they both jumped—then avoided each other’s eyes. “Lunch,” the detective said, rolling to his still-bare feet. He checked the peephole before cracking the door, more cautious than Jo would have expected. He was a big guy, after all. And his automatic pistol lay on the bedside table.

It was lunch. He handed the kid some bills, then shut and chained the door and carried the bag back to their table.

“Yeah, corpses get stolen,” he agreed finally, exhuming cardboard cups and Styrofoam containers of food and laying them on top of his papers. “But usually their buddies don’t claim to see them wandering around a few days later. Have some pie.”

He got the pie for her? “I only asked for—” Did he say wandering around? “—coffee,” Jo finished lamely.

“Have pie anyway. I can’t eat if you aren’t eating.” Considering how he tore into his hoagie, she questioned that.

“His friends saw him wandering where?” she demanded.

“That,” said Lorenzo, covering his mouth behind his thick wrist until he could swallow, “is the tricky part. They don’t know for sure. Not our best or brightest, they were having a memorial out in the desert, honoring their fallen comrade—no pun intended—when whaddaya know? They see him ambling along in the distance. They take off after him, lose him in the rocks, then decide not to report it to the cops because they weren’t exactly smoking Marlboro 100s out there. But later they feel guilty and admit it to the kid’s mom, who then calls—” And he pointed a thumb at himself.

Jo hesitated. She didn’t want to insult the man, but…. “And these guys don’t fall under the category of flakes?”

Lorenzo grinned full agreement with her conclusion. He had a great grin, wide and honest. It almost turned him handsome.

Almost.

“Like Christmas snow,” agreed Lorenzo. “And along with their sterling testimony, the kid’s mother has contacted a psychic who says the kid’s neither alive nor dead. As probably won’t surprise you, this upsets her. Thing is—” And he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, turned more serious. “The psychic she contacted is one of the most reputable in the country.”

Jo hadn’t fully realized that some psychics had better reputations than others. Better publicists, sure. But… “So you looked into it?”

“And found out that this kid’s not the only stiff to go missing in the area. Not all of ’em are from Almanuevo, but close enough that the Chamber of Commerce is no-commenting on the issue. Also, he’s not the only John Doe to be sighted wandering the desert in a daze, though others weren’t recognizably dead at the time. This, I had to look into. So I flew into Albuquerque, and here I am.”

Bingo. “El Paso’s closer.”

“Yeah.” He took another big bite of his sandwich, then muttered through it, “But it has a smaller airport. Lousy selection in car rentals.”

She shook her head as she took a sip of coffee, still ignoring the pie. The way her stomach cramped up at the very thought of telling her own experience, she meant to continue ignoring the pie. “Still, you can’t think that this kid—these missing persons—are the walking dead, can you?”

She wasn’t sure which she wanted more—for him to say no, and keep her safe, or yes, and prove her sane. Besides, it wouldn’t prove her sane. It would just make him another flake.

Lorenzo shrugged. “Guess I won’t know until I meet up with one of them. But it’s my job to think outside the box, so on that outside chance…”

That was her cue. He’d told her his story; now he wanted to hear about the zombies…or what could maybe have been, but surely weren’t, zombies. Part of Jo wanted to trust him, maybe to be believed or, better yet, to have everything explained at last. But if it turned out he couldn’t believe her either…

“Can I see your P.I. license again?” she asked.

With exaggerated patience, he leaned to the side in his chair, fished his wallet out of his jeans’ tight back pocket, and handed it to her. It was still warm with his body heat.

She wished she knew what a real State of Illinois private investigation license should look like. She also wondered who the pretty Italian girl displayed next to it was. It looked like a high-school graduation picture.

“Anything else?” Lorenzo asked as Jo handed back the wallet, and she shook her head.

“The cave-in,” she began hesitantly, and he slid his pad loose from beneath his lunch. “There’s so much I can’t be sure even really happened. How much do you want to know?”

He groped through stray papers until he reclaimed his pen. “As much as you’re willing to tell me—whether you’re sure of it or not.”

So she did.

She hadn’t looked scared once, not even during his undead-frat-boy story, and that one still made Zack’s partner, Cecil Taylor, shudder like a wet cat. Zack liked that about Josephine James. He liked feeling he didn’t have to sugarcoat what he did. He could almost stop thinking of her as a woman and just think of her as a law-enforcement colleague. For whole minutes at a time.

The hat had helped.

Then, as she readied to talk about the mine cave-in, damned if Jo James didn’t start looking all female and vulnerable after all…despite how her story began.

“During summer break after college, I worked as an underground blaster in a New Mexico coal mine,” she admitted. “I calculated quantity of explosives to tons of rock, loaded and tied-in blast patterns. Stuff like that.”

“Damn.” Zack sat back in his chair. “I’m impressed.”

She narrowed her eyes, suddenly less vulnerable. “I grew up with brothers, Mr. Lorenzo. I’m not exactly a frail flower. Anyway, it’s good money. Surface blasting pays well, underground blasting even better.”

“And I said I’m impressed. So what happened?”

“The insurance companies blamed it on an earthquake. I’m not sure what to believe. One minute I was walking along with Frank and Gil—and the second foreman, Diego—in the third-level tunnel. The next, we all just…stopped. Dead-still. It was eerie.” She swallowed, hard. “We looked at each other, without even knowing why. And then…”

She shrugged, fidgeting with an unpainted fingernail, looking vulnerable again. And small. She was small—Zack had finally noticed that today. The sheriff didn’t walk small or talk small. But when she’d stood directly in front of him, at the door, the top of her white cowboy hat had barely reached his collarbone.

He felt more comfortable when he thought of her as tough. As it was, when he prompted her—“And…?”—he felt like a bully.

“And…” She narrowed her eyes, as though to recall the events as accurately as possible. Maybe she was tough after all. “I heard bits of dirt trickling onto our hardhats, and then the world exploded into this blast of dust, too dark to imagine….”

He thought maybe he would shudder like a wet cat. Instead he suggested a less immediate description. “It caved in.”

“Yeah,” she agreed gruffly. Her blunt lashes lifted long enough for her to meet his gaze with something like gratitude.

Her eyes were blue. Pretty. Definitely a woman’s eyes.

They both looked back at the table. “It was dark when I regained consciousness. Mr. Lorenzo, have you ever been underground with the lights out? The dark’s so thick, it’s as if you’ve been swallowed. You feel the weight of all that…that rock above you. I was trapped under something heavy, it turned out to be Gil—I think he must have thrown himself on top of me. I turned on my helmet-lamp and got loose and tried to help him, but…” She stopped again.

“He died,” Zack finished.

“And then Frank, and farther down the shaft…”

Great. Resenting his chivalrous impulse, he still tried to nudge her past that particular catalog of corpses. “Did you find anyone alive?”

“Diego.” But she didn’t look happy about that, either. “Just Diego. And he was badly hurt, though he pretended not to be. He kept insisting that the Safety Response Team would be pulling us out any minute. Then we both heard something. I turned to look—with the helmet light, I could only see one direction at a time—and it was Frank. His fingers were…they…”

And she curled and uncurled her own small, solid fingers, to illustrate. Even without long nails or polish or rings, her hands were clearly female, too. Strong, but small.

“Rigor mortis?” Zack suggested hopefully.

“Except he got up. His neck was broken, and his skull was crushed. He shouldn’t have been able to get up, but he did. I told you that I probably imagined it….”

It occurred to Zack that, if he wasn’t watching Josephine James tell this, he might agree. Even after four years of learning to see this stuff, looking for answers. Maybe she was making it up, or had imagined it all. The line between reality and perception was thinner than most folks admitted. And yet…

He didn’t think so. Her face was pale, her jaw set, her eyes really still like she was focusing on the memory. “So at first I thought, Hey, Frank’s okay! Stupid, I know, but…I really wanted him to be okay. I went to him and took his arm, told him he needed to lie down and wait for emergency response. But his hand felt funny…fake. And his eyes were blank, blank like I’ve only seen on road-kill. It wasn’t Frank, anymore. And he…it tried to bite me….”

She took a deep breath, still pale but otherwise determined. “I pulled loose and grabbed a pickax, and I told it to stay back, but it came at us—at Diego—so I swung. And…” Again, she shrugged. Clearly, she’d made sure Frank wouldn’t be getting up again, friend or not.

Tough broad.

“I think I would’ve thrown up,” she said, “but then Diego shouted a warning, and Gil grabbed me, so I…stopped him, too. Then I just sat there with Diego, waiting, talking about stupid, everyday stuff. He seemed worse, but I heard digging, so I knew we were being rescued.”

Zack took a deep breath as he made more notes, then frowned at a thought and looked up at her. “Newspaper said you were pulled out unconscious.”

Josephine James met his gaze evenly, “I was wrong. The digging wasn’t them coming to pull us out.”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Zack stood, started to pace. “You had to fight more?” This was why women weren’t supposed to do dangerous stuff. This was why they should stay safe at home, like his mother and Nona did.

Like Gabriella should have done. She’d died at home, but maybe if she hadn’t been going out, without him knowing…

“One, mainly,” the sheriff insisted. “We had a strange driller working with us that summer—everyone called him Tio. Rumor was, he was some kind of mayombero, into the bad magic. Some of our crew quit rather than work for him. He wasn’t the one doing the digging, but I realized he was in control of them.”

Them. “More zombies?” Zack asked, standing still now.

“If that’s what they were. If it even really happened. They were things, not people. Not alive. I somehow knew Tio was the one who wouldn’t let them die. Don’t ask me how, but I did. I started to fight them off, and Diego managed to get up and stand in front of me, trying to protect me. I thought he’d recovered enough to help. But I was wrong about that, too.”

Merciful God. “He died.” And turned on her.

“I wasn’t thinking real clearly by then, but I knew I had to stop Tio. Even then I didn’t completely believe what he was doing, but there were so many….”

“But you were just a girl.” Zack sank onto the bed at the idea of it. He felt sick. He hated hearing stories like this, watching innocents—women—suffer, unable to reach back in time and help or protect them.

But damned if Sheriff Jo’s chin didn’t come up, if the agony didn’t ease from her gaze in place of grim pride. “A girl with explosives in her pack.”

“You blew them up?”

Jo kind of liked the way Zack Lorenzo stared at her—awed. Maybe finally telling the story, after so many years, robbed it of some of its power. Maybe having someone believe her was what did it. But suddenly, instead of the nightmare owning her, Jo owned the nightmare. She had survived, after all. No matter how awful, even if it had been real—and had it?—she’d survived.

“I didn’t blow them up, exactly,” she clarified. “I dodged through the tunnel they’d come in, and I blew the wall.”

Then she’d lost consciousness, buried in rubble. She hadn’t expected to survive—not the blast, not the toxic gas that explosives emit after detonation, not the…zombies. But miraculously, she’d come-to in the hospital, her older brother asleep in a chair beside her. Since he’d been in D.C. before the accident, she could only imagine how long she’d been out. At first she wondered if she was in an asylum, but no.

Nobody but her seemed to realize that the corpses had died twice.

Sitting here with Zack Lorenzo, the rest of the details—an uncle somehow killed while helping with the rescue, a reporter who appeared while she was still dopey from painkillers—finally eased, far more than when she’d just told herself she’d imagined it all. Jo didn’t believe she was done with the nightmares, of course. But maybe, just maybe, she might sleep for real, now.

For the first time since she could remember.

Except, of course, that there was a big Chicago detective sitting on the only bed in the room, his weight making it dip. His bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought about a man and a bed in the same moment…Diego, she guessed. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the awareness that fluttered deep in her stomach. She didn’t trust the sharpness of her breath. It felt dangerous in its own right.

Was it possible that she could ever handle dangerous again?

Lorenzo rose from the bed and came back to the table. She took another deep breath as he passed her, big and warm and solid. Some risks were probably better than others. And he didn’t feel dangerous, just the awareness of him did.

Zack Lorenzo still felt remarkably safe, for a stranger.

When he sat on his plastic chair and began scribbling, she waited for him to glance up at her, wanting to see his eyes again. She couldn’t remember what color the detective’s eyes were. He seemed to be avoiding her gaze deliberately.

“I don’t think I even used the word zombies, the reporter did,” Jo admitted, reaching for the partially eaten piece of pie he’d pushed away from him earlier. He’d offered it once, after all. And he didn’t seem to want it. “I could’ve been delirious.”

“Yeah,” he muttered through his note-taking. “Right. You sound like the real flighty type.”

Since he said that sarcastically, she took it as a compliment. She also took a bite of pie, and it tasted wonderful, sweet and syrupy. She actually ventured a question. On the off chance they were both sane, after all. “But zombies are from Haiti, right? Or maybe Louisiana. Not the southwest.”

“Uh-huh,” Lorenzo agreed, still scribbling. When he finally looked up, it was all business. Business with deep, brown-green eyes. “There’s theories about whether real zombies were ever dead or maybe just drugged. Some scholarly types even talk about philosophical zombies…living people who just go through the motions, without thinking anymore, you know? But you’re right. None of that seems to fit with this Tio guy you described. Wasn’t Tio one of the Jackson 5?”

“That was Tito,” she told him, pleased. Who else listened to old ’70s music, anymore?

Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “Well, that’s a relief. So think back. Could he have been into voodoo?”

She swallowed another bite of pie and decided to at least pretend this was possible. Why not err on that side, for once? “Nope. If anything, it was something like Santeria.”

Lorenzo blinked at her. “You couldn’t have mentioned this earlier in the story?”

It impressed her that he knew what Santeria, a form of Cuban witchcraft, even was. Her grandfather was a scholar of this kind of stuff, but most people… “I’m just guessing. Tio wasn’t Mexican, and I’ve heard that a lot of the Brujas have a bias against mixed bloods.”

Zack rubbed a hand down his face, then squinted at her. Something about uncertainty on a face as rugged as his looked downright endearing. “Any chance you know someone around here who could tell me more about local Santeria or Brujeria?” He considered that. “Someone relatively sane?”

Her first urge was to call him crazy. But when she pushed past that urge and thought about it… “Ashley Vanderveer, the nurse practitioner at the Almanuevo clinic.”

The one where the boy’s body had gone missing.

“Peachy.” When he saw the question in her face, Lorenzo added, “I already tried her, asking where the corpse wandered off to, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Said I’d have to hurt myself—and that it wasn’t an invitation.”

Jo laughed. She’d always liked the new nurse…though to be honest, she guessed Ashley wasn’t really new. She’d been running the closest medical facility to Spur for two years now. It was a sign of how strictly Jo had kept to herself, that she’d never pursued that possibility of friendship. “Well, she might talk to me. Or us,” she conceded quickly, at Lorenzo’s widened eyes. Definitely brown-green.

“Us,” he repeated. Like he didn’t want her to help.

“You don’t think I can just go home and forget that all this…this whatever’s-going-on is going on, do you?”

That she could go back to that half life? Sure, it was safe. But that’s all it was. And she’d thought she’d stopped them. On some level she’d really thought…

He stood. Wow, he was a big guy. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think. It’s my job, not yours.”

“Arguable.”

“This isn’t your jurisdiction. Mayberry is your jurisdiction.” Which was true, sarcasm aside. But Almanuevo wasn’t exactly his jurisdiction either.

Jo stood, too—not that it made a big difference—and folded her arms. “You’re the one who said I could help.”

“By telling me your story, in case there’s any connection. You did, and I’m thinking there isn’t.”

“You also said Ashley won’t talk to you.”

“Yeah, well maybe I just need to turn on the Lorenzo charm.” When she lifted an eyebrow at him, he looked mildly hurt. “Hey, I can be charming!”

“Look,” insisted Jo. “I’m still not sure what to believe. But if there’s any connection between those missing persons and what happened at the mine, I am not letting it go until I find out more. I can either work with you, or on my own. Your call.”

Now he folded his arms. The pose looked impressive on him; probably more than on her. “I don’t want to distract myself baby-sitting you while I’m going after whatever this is, okay?”

Baby-sitting? Luckily, she felt too good to hit him. He looked so serious—and annoyed—that she grinned instead. “And how many monsters have you blown up, tough guy?”

It degenerated into a staring contest, which Jo won. Lorenzo’s eyes were a lot easier to resist when he was being this obnoxious. And watching them kept her gaze off his body.

“Fine,” the detective spat. “Fan-freakin’-tastic. Lemme shower and we’ll go talk to the nurse. Finish the damned pie.”

That last sounded like an order, so Jo resorted to equal familiarity.

“You need a shave, too.” She didn’t just feel good, she felt cocky. Alert. Awake, after having been asleep for far, far too long. Willing to try a risk or two—maybe with him.

Breathing.

Lorenzo began to move a hand—and not to check his jaw—but lowered it self-consciously before disappearing into the bathroom. He’d probably been raised not to flip off ladies.

Jo felt more stunned than if he had. She slowly sank back into her chair. The man was wearing a ring. How long had she been out of the dating world, that she hadn’t even looked until now?

A wedding ring.

She heard the shower come on in the bathroom and forced herself not to think about a big, swarthy, naked Zack Lorenzo. Wet. She tried not to look at the shadowy, rumpled bed.

The man was married. Maybe to the Italian girl pictured in his wallet. Some risks, you couldn’t pay her to take.

Jo told herself that it didn’t matter; they were investigating missing persons, not flirting. In fact, it was probably better that he was married. Safer. It meant she could stay casual with him. It meant she didn’t have to worry about messy romantic complications. The last man she’d been interested in had died and then tried to kill her. In that order.

For the first time in years, she let herself admit that.

But when she phoned Deputy Fred, to let him know she’d be out the rest of the day, Jo felt disappointment dull the bright edge that her life had taken on a few minutes earlier. Because of a man. One she’d barely even been attracted to.

It pissed her off.

Good thing she had something worthwhile to do…even if it might yet prove a little insane.

Chapter 3

It felt weird, showering with the sheriff in the next room.

Hell, it felt weird thinking of Jo James as a sheriff. In Zack’s world, most sheriffs were overweight, balding and—oh yeah—men. He might not agree that’s how it ought to be, but it’s what he was mainly used to. It even seemed safer.

If he didn’t like women, that would be one thing, but he did. Grandmas and toddlers, housewives and businesswomen. That was his problem. He liked women enough that he couldn’t stand by to see one hurt. And if Jo James insisted on “helping” with this investigation, stirring up powers she couldn’t see or believe, the odds were on hurt. Zack didn’t need that responsibility or the guilt of failing at it.

Again.

Having a lady sidekick, even for the few days he was in Almanuevo, wasn’t going to help. It would just distract him.

So he lathered up and rinsed off and did his damnedest to think of Jo James only in terms of her professional role, rather than her small build. Or how crossing her arms plumped her breasts under the plain blue T-shirt she wore. Or how the hip-holster for her revolver—talk about your Old West cliches—emphasized the curve of her hips. A revolver, despite that most law-enforcement officers carried 9mm automatics like his.

Tomayto, Tomahto. It wasn’t like she needed quick reloads or stopping power in greater metropolitan Spur. But distractions were distractions.

She was female.

If he hadn’t had enough proof, her mood swings had confirmed it. By the time he was dressed and back in his tacky motel room, Jo had gone serious on him. Not I-really-survived-a-zombie-attack serious, either. Closed off.

“We’ll take my car to the clinic,” Zack announced as he buckled his shoulder holster on over his shirt, then threw on a light jacket to cover it.

The sheriff nodded, heading for the door with her hat in hand. It seemed too easy.

Zack pushed his luck. “You can help me with Nurse Vanderveer, but after that I’m working—holy crap, is this March?” It took less than two steps out the door to know that he’d overdressed. He turned around and stalked back inside, unbuckling the holster to strip to his white undershirt.

“After that you’re working what?” challenged Jo from the doorway. At least she’d averted her eyes—but her cheeks looked a bit pink. Blushing, or sunstroke?

Distractions. Zack slung his holster back on, using his long-sleeved shirt to conceal it—badly—before heading out again. “How hot is it out here?”

“Eighties…the weather’s been strange this last year. But there’s a breeze. After I help with Ashley, you’re working what?”

“I’m working alone.” He locked the hotel door behind them with a key; key cards were apparently beyond local technology. Actual sand—sandy dirt, anyway—overlapped the edges of the rutted parking lot, and beyond that, reddish-brown rocks and clumps of cactus. No grass, unless you counted some strawlike tufts. Things seemed kind of…dead.

He used his keyless remote to unlock the Ferrari with a beep, then headed for the passenger door. Sheriff Jo reached it first. “We’d make better time working together.”

“You shouldn’t be working this at all.” He swung into the driver’s side while she fastened her seat belt. She had to take her hat off, because of the headrest. Good. “For one thing, I’ve been doing this for almost four years. I know what we might be up against better than you do. For another, you’re…” A woman. But even his sisters would have bristled at that. And the only thing worse than a moody woman would likely be a well-armed moody woman. “Little.”

From the way Jo arched an eyebrow at him, she didn’t like that version of his argument either.

“And none of that matters, ’cause it’s my job,” he finished, smoothly starting the car.

“I’m not asking for payment,” she pointed out.

“Did I say you were? I still work alone.”

“I thought you had a business partner.”

“He’s a silent partner.” He considered young Cecil Taylor, the student who’d first told him Gabriella’s casket was empty and how talkative he could get, then qualified that description, “Technically speaking.”

“Look,” said Jo. “You tell me that dead bodies may be walking off on their own, not an hour away from where I live.”

Funny that she didn’t say, from my home. “Yeah. So?”

“So I’m one of the few people who’ll probably believe you. Since I do, I can’t just ignore that. Especially not if it has anything to do with what happened in the mine. I won’t just drive home and sing la-la-la and pretend it isn’t happening.”

Like she’d done after the cave-in. So the sheriff had something to prove—peachy. Zack squinted sidelong at her, sitting beside him, as he shifted gears. “La-la-la?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

He said, “Just don’t get in my way.”

“Am I in your way?”

He was tempted to say yes—but she wasn’t. Not yet.

Give her time.

At least she proved useful with Nurse Vanderveer.

“Jo!” exclaimed the tall blonde, peeking from a back room into the empty waiting area. The clinic wasn’t exactly County General. “It is so good to see you again!”

She didn’t say the same to Zack.

“Hey, Ashley,” greeted the sheriff, awkward under the nurse’s friendly, one-armed hug. “Is it still a good time? You said on the phone…”

“Nothing’s come up,” the nurse assured her. “Wednesdays are generally pretty quiet.”

Zack said, “That wouldn’t have anything to do with you misplacing bodies, would it?”

Ashley Vanderveer flared her pale eyes at him. She was a pastel kind of person, especially in the pink smock she wore over her jeans, pure contrast against the smaller, sturdier sheriff. Jo looked more real, more competent…more touchable.

Though equally annoyed. “You really earn a living at this?” Jo asked him.

So maybe he’d been a little over the top. “Sorry,” he admitted, if with effort. “I just want to know what happened, and last time I came by here, Ms. Vanderveer here blew me off.”

“Go figure.” Now the sheriff looked amused.

“Jo said you wanted to ask questions about local Craft activity.” Ashley caught a chain around her neck with one manicured finger and tugged a small pentagram out to show him. She was witchy in more ways than one. “That, I will talk about.”

“But not about the dead boy,” Zack challenged.

“It’s all in the report I filed.”

“Don’t mind him,” said the sheriff in that voice—the condescending voice women use when discussing men right in front of them. “He’s from Chicago.”

“Hey!” he protested, but at least the nurse grinned.

“Come on into the break room, and we’ll talk,” said Vanderveer. “Over tea.”

Zack wasn’t real comfortable with getting this interview on Jo’s credentials, but he wasn’t dumb enough to turn it down, either. Not if he could learn why certain dead people weren’t staying dead around here. “You got coffee?”

A card table and metal folding chairs, two Salvation Army sofas, a sink, a microwave and a minifridge crowded the break room. Not a top-of-the-line facility. Though Vanderveer ran the clinic, she wasn’t even a doctor. From what Zack gathered in their previous talk, before she’d decided to hate him, a doctor visited on Mondays. Any other serious cases were sent to El Paso.

“I’m glad you thought of me,” Nurse Vanderveer assured Jo as they sat with their drinks. The sheriff, like Zack, took coffee. Either Jo didn’t mind instant, or she was good at hiding it, since it was pretty bad. “I’m a Wiccan and a curandera.”

“Which is like some kind of healer.” Zack leaned a cautious elbow on the flimsy card table.

“Which is a healer,” corrected Vanderveer. “Nurses and curanderas are both legitimate healers.”

Did he say they weren’t? Zack had no problem with women being healers. That was something they should be good at, what with all that nurturing and emoting. Women warriors? Barring some TV-show babes, he had to withhold judgment on that one.

Jo asked, “So you know something about the local, well…”

This was always the hard part in the interview, especially when you realized how thin the veil of normalcy really was.

“About local magic,” clarified Zack. “Not so much Wiccans; your type are generally benevolent. Sorcerers. Ceremonials. Wizards. The kind of magic users who aren’t real worried that instant karma’s gonna get them.”

Ashley stared at Zack, sleekly amused. “In Almanuevo?”

“Aren’t there any?” asked Jo, not understanding, and took a brave sip of bad coffee.

Ashley smiled—Zack had met plenty of Wiccans in his time, and she had that wise-woman look down pat. “Finding magic users in Almanuevo won’t be your problem.”

Considering the town’s reputation, Zack wasn’t surprised. “The problem’s gonna be sorting them all out, isn’t it?”

“That, Mr. Lorenzo, is only one of your problems.”

For once, the nurse didn’t sound like she meant it as an insult.

The way Jo James snorted into her coffee indicated she took it that way.

For years, Jo had assumed anybody who heard her story about the cave-in would find her certifiable. She liked that Zack Lorenzo hadn’t doubted her, despite his spotty people skills. He believed things.

The kind of man who makes a woman feel safe.

She pushed away the thought. He’s married.

Despite knowing that Ashley was into herbs and shiatsu, Jo would never have dreamed of walking in and asking the nurse practitioner about Almanuevo’s magic scene. But Zack would. And it turned out the town was crawling with every known flavor.

“The Wiccans really are the biggest group,” Ashley admitted casually, while the P.I. took notes. Jo knew that Wiccans, often called witches, were neo-pagans, but remained hazy on some things.

“Are we talking religion or magic?”

Ashley smiled. “Both. Magic is all about belief, and faith definitely affects beliefs. You don’t need one for the other, but they’re connected all the same. Just among the Wiccans we have Gardnerians, Dianics, Hellenistics, Celtics, faeries, some Hermetics—like the Greek or Egyptian pantheons—solitaries…”

Trying to absorb all this, Jo found herself watching Zack’s big hands, particularly his thick wrists. The sprinkling of dark hair on the back of his hands seemed to thin for maybe an inch, like the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirts had rubbed them smooth. She’d never thought of wrists as sexy before.

She didn’t mean to start now.

“You might consider talking to some H.P.s—high priestesses,” Ashley continued. “Even if they don’t mess with the dark stuff, they may know who does. On another front, there are several well-respected Brujas living in the hills.”

“Mexican folk magicians?” translated Jo cautiously. From what she understood, they were similar to Wiccans, but practiced a different religion. Or a different kind of magic. Or both.

“Mexican and Indian,” clarified Ashley. “And you’ve got your shamans too, though most shamanism around here is modified for the tourists. There’s a debate going on about cultural integrity and Anglos misappropriating native rituals, but either way, shamanism’s a pretty big moneymaker right now.”

“Shamans,” repeated Lorenzo as he wrote it out. While his head was bent, Ashley caught Jo’s gaze and slanted her eyes toward him, clearly questioning.

It had been so long since Jo had hung with female friends, it took her a moment to understand the signal. Did Ashley want to know if she was interested in him?

Jo held up her left hand, just over the edge of the card table, and waggled her empty ring finger. He’s married.

Ashley frowned and shook her head, which didn’t make sense. Of course Lorenzo was married—and, now, looking up at them expectantly. At least he didn’t seem to have caught their exchange. “Other than shamans?” he prompted with mock patience.

“Rumors of Santeria, but that’s low key. A biker couple outside town practices Asatru. But there doesn’t seem to be any Candomblé or Quimbanda in the area.”

Jo fought the urge to dismiss all this as craziness.

Lorenzo shifted his weight in his chair. “Any voodoo?”

“Surprisingly, yes.” With a grace Jo had never possessed, Ashley brushed her hair back. She was the kind of woman who kept her nails polished, who wore earrings and perfume, who somehow managed to look accessorized even in a medical smock. The kind of woman who made Jo feel vaguely like a lawn gnome. Maybe Ashley was interested in Zack Lorenzo. “Good Vibrations—one of the local supply shops—has a Vodoun priestess who does rituals every other Friday. I don’t think she’s particularly powerful, though.”

“Maybe.” Lorenzo tapped his notebook with the pencil eraser, looking amused. “But if we’re dealing with…”

He caught Jo’s gaze knowingly. Zombies.

She nodded, catching on. “Good point.”

Ashley looked from one of them to the other. “Hello? If we’re dealing with what?”

“Too bad you don’t want to talk about the missing body.” Lorenzo had the nerve to look smug as he took a sip of coffee.

Jerk. Jo said, “One of the possibilities Zack suggested was….” Then she hesitated too. Up until now, they’d been talking about real religions—on the fringe, but legitimate all the same. Nothing downright fantastical.

But she’d committed herself now. “We’re wondering about…something like…zombies.”

Ashley stared at her blankly, just like she’d feared.

Then, instead of questioning Jo’s sanity, Ashley said, “But zombies aren’t really dead, they’re just given a neurotoxin to seem dead. Believe me, that boy who vanished was dead dead.”

Lorenzo said, “Yeah, well, that whole business about tet…tetro…”

“Tetrodotoxin,” supplied Ashley.

“—doesn’t mean there can’t also be living-dead zombies.”

The nurse shook her head. “In any case, Vodoun priestesses don’t create zombies, Vodoun bokors do, and I’ve never heard of a bokor in the area. Not that they advertise.”

“How do you know the priestess isn’t also a bokor in secret?” demanded Lorenzo.

Ashley rolled her eyes. “Oh please! How do I know you aren’t one yourself?”

Jo was risking a stiff neck, looking from one to the other. “I’m having trouble believing this and you two are arguing it?”

“You could just go home,” suggested the P.I. immediately, then grinned. He still looked almost handsome when he grinned, even when he was being an ass. “And sing.”

Ashley squinted at him. “Sing?”

“Inside joke,” explained Jo. “And no, I’m not going home, so stop trying to make me.”

“I’m not working with you if you’re gonna freak out.”

“I’m not even close to freaking, I’m just…disoriented.” Jo took another sip of the coffee. The instant stuff wasn’t good, but it had the benefit of at least being coffee. “This isn’t the sort of thing you expect normal people to discuss over drinks.”

“What isn’t?” Lorenzo held her gaze, daring her.

She lifted her chin. “Real magic. The walking dead.”

There. She’d said it. No qualifiers. No hesitation.

Neither he nor Ashley so much as gave her a strange look. Ashley appeared concerned, sure—the walking dead should concern a person—but all she said was, “I’d be more suspicious of a certain Santero who’s rumored to live a couple of hours out of town. He might be into big magic.”

Lorenzo held Jo’s gaze a moment longer, almost approving. It eased something that seemed stuck inside of her—for a moment, anyway. Why did Ashley think he wasn’t married?

The P.I. turned back to the nurse. “If it looks like a duck and smells like a duck and quacks like a duck, at least let me interview a few ducks. Call me crazy, but when I think zombie, I think voodoo.”

Jo and Ashley both obediently said, “You’re crazy.”

He closed his eyes and sighed, scrubbing a hand down his face in exasperation. It was his left hand, complete with wedding band. Jo noticed Ashley notice her noticing.

Not married, the nurse mouthed. Then, Ask him.

Jo shook her head. Yes, she wanted to stop feeling guilty about watching Lorenzo’s wrists—or at least enjoying it. But to ask about his marital status would show interest. She refused to be interested.

She’d just barely joined the living, again. She wasn’t anywhere near ready to think about dating them.

Not that she dated the dead.

No, she mouthed firmly back at Ashley. You ask.

She didn’t expect the nurse to say, “So, Mr. Lorenzo, why do you wear a wedding ring if you aren’t married?”

Jo especially regretted it when the P.I. stiffened, then leveled a look of pure annoyance at her friend. “To fend off nosy broads like the two of you?” he suggested. “Now, can you give me some phone numbers for these magic users we’ve been talking about, or am I wasting my time here?”

Ashley made a face as if to say, touchy! Jo, uncomfortable to have been lumped into the nosy broad category, wasn’t sure she agreed. Life was easier when people minded their own business.

“Just the ones you think will be okay with us visiting,” Jo suggested, more politely. “If there are any you’re unsure about, feel free to contact them first, to clear it with them.”

“You’ll go along and make sure this guy doesn’t turn the entire occult community against us, right?” Ashley walked to one of the filing cabinets that held up the break room’s sidebar. “Because it’s bad enough when the mundanes are ticked off.”

“I promise,” said Jo.

“Us again.” Lorenzo sighed. “Great.”

“So are you two best friends or something?” asked Zack, reaching the Ferrari a step ahead of Jo. Her hand collided with his as they reached to open her door.

She didn’t pull back, just met and held his gaze. Stubborn.

He let go first and she opened her own door. Did nobody outside of Little Italy learn how to be a gentleman, anymore? Or did the women in Texas just no longer appreciate it?

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Lorenzo,” said the sheriff after he got in on his side, “I don’t have a lot of friends.”

“Zack,” he corrected, bringing the sports car to life with a twist of his fingers. “Now the ice queen, I could understand. Not that you’re the pink of perfection, but compared to that one…”

“And you’re such a judge of congeniality?” But at least she came close to smiling. He liked that expression better than that worried look she’d been wearing in the clinic.

Not that it was any of his business whether Josephine James worried or not. Or whether she had friends. Or whether she, like Nurse Vanderveer, gave a rat’s ass about his marital status.

“Look, when I mentioned I wasn’t married the other day, it was no big deal. At least she didn’t go fishing with stupid comments about what my wife thinks, or where she is.” That had annoyed him even before Gabriella’s death; did a wedding ring mean nothing anymore? “But this time, that was just nosy.”

He turned a corner onto the old highway, in the direction Jo indicated.

“She could be my friend,” cautioned Jo, lest he criticize the ice queen too heavily. “If I start making friends again.”

He almost asked, Why wouldn’t you?

Luckily he caught himself. Taking care of her wasn’t his job, even if he did like her better than Mzzz. Vanderveer. And he did; unpainted nails, uneven tan and all. Jo James was solid, and real—and a distraction.

“All I’m saying is, you might want to aim a little higher for companionship.”

“I didn’t ask you,” she reminded him, stubborn.

“Your loss.”

“I’ll survive.”

He grinned and continued to drive toward the first address on Ashley Vanderveer’s short list. This lady, she’d claimed, was a Bruja who would talk to anybody who came by.

Even, Jo had teased, him. Which Zack kind of liked. The sheriff was a lot safer to deal with on an antagonistic level. If he didn’t glance over at her, he could almost pretend she was one of the guys. And if she was one of the guys, he wouldn’t have to worry about her.

Well, not as much.

They were heading out into the middle of nowhere to interview what sounded like Jo’s first, full-fledged witch.

Chapter 4

The last fifteen miles to the Bruja’s house were on a dirt road. State-of-the-art suspension or not, the car bounced enough to make Zack’s classic-rock CD skip. Almanuevo was so far out, the only radio stations that came in were AM. Pushing the scan button landed the radio on Spanish stations, sermons, commentary and—heaven help them—polka music. So they stuck with the CD.

Not for the first time, he wondered how the hell Josephine James lived out here. Then he reminded himself that, oh yeah, living hadn’t exactly been the lady’s priority. It sounded like she’d pretty much retired from life after that mining accident.

He guessed she’d been going for safety. But most safety-conscious women wouldn’t leave her mobile phone in her truck.

“I forget I have it,” she’d explained, after she caught him sliding his glance toward her lap, looking for a belt-clip, and demanded an explanation. “It’s personal anyway. My brother signed me up. Spur doesn’t provide extras like that.”

Extras?

So if they got into trouble it would be up to him, his Nokia and the Ferrari to get them out. Peachy.

Zack was used to visiting scary, out-of-the-way places by now. He doubted Jo, what he and his partner called a “civilian,” was as prepared. Even if she was as tough as she made out, this was no thief or drug dealer. This was a witch. Old school. Unlike Wiccans, Brujas weren’t above the occasional curse.

Something about owls eating out one’s innards came to mind.

Not a standard stop on the safety-conscious tour of Texas.

Zack kind of hoped the old crone would scare Sheriff James right out of helping with his investigation. But he also hoped Jo would get over her fright without losing years and moving to an even smaller town—if such a thing existed—to do so.

At least he had a life…albeit one devoted to hunting down and killing things most people didn’t even believe and therefore didn’t see. Things he once hadn’t seen or believed himself.

Gabriella’s young death, even her body’s disappearance, hadn’t been enough to open Zack’s eyes. First he’d tried investigating through normal channels—despite the lack of witnesses, security footage, fingerprints or hair. Only when that proved a dead end did he turn, reluctantly, to the death itself.

He’d found her drowned in their bathtub. The front door had been locked and her clothes were where she had always hung them. Even in shock, he’d noticed those things; he’d been trained to notice. He’d dragged her from the water, so strangely beautiful even in death, and he’d called 9-1-1, her long black hair soaking him, and he’d cried, wanting her back, barely believing—but some damned cold part of him had still noticed the other details. Nothing pointed to suicide or murder. An autopsy revealed that she’d had some kind of mild heart attack and passed out. If she hadn’t been in the bath… If he’d just been home… It was an accident.

Or was it?

Her corpse’s disappearance upped Zack’s suspicions. He began to ask the M.E. how a bright, healthy woman of twenty-three could have even a mild heart attack, and whether it could have been drug induced, and whether drugs existed that were new enough to not show up in the tests. Then, needing more answers, he went after her new friends. The Life Force, they’d ironically called themselves. He hadn’t known she was even in a club until some of its members, other college students, showed up at her funeral. And if the death hadn’t been an accident…

Murdered women generally die at the hands of family or friends, not strangers. Zack had known Gabriella’s family his whole life. But these new kids—they were into reincarnation and near-death experiences, stuff he’d laughed at while Gabriella was alive. Was that why she hadn’t told him? With her dead, he found himself tracking her friends down and asking so many questions that they began to whine about police harassment.

His captain told him to let it go, and Zack quit to become a private investigator. There was something suspicious about the Life Force, even if most of its members were goofs.

Something dark. Something beyond the normal world, even.

And at the point that Zack finally tracked down the club’s president, that something tried to kill him. Either that, or in one weekend he developed the worst luck in human history. Three car accidents. A runaway bus. An electrical fire. Dizzy spells. A nurse in the E.R. came within a needle-prick of giving him penicillin, despite his chart labeling him as deathly allergic. His Nona began to babble about the evil eye. After his pistol went off by itself, grazing him and barely missing a three-year-old nephew, Zack didn’t dare disbelieve.

Out of possibilities, he’d turned to impossibilities—and to Cecil Taylor, the young man he’d met at the cemetery. Instinct said to trust Mr. If Anybody Respects the Dead, It Is I, and Zack’s instinct proved right. Taylor knew some honest-to-God, twentieth-century, Windy City magic users who managed to break the curse that was haunting him.

Barely.

When Zack went back to find the sonovabitch who’d run the Life Force Club—certain that nobody would freakin’ curse him unless they were guilty of something—the boy had vanished.

Unlike Gabriella, he’d done it alive.

He’d been searching ever since, Cecil’s help becoming a partnership. That’s when he’d learned that once you started looking, really opening your eyes, monsters and dark magic lurked everywhere. Lorenzo Investigations began to specialize.

Bringing him here. With a civilian woman.

Pulling up in front of the Bruja’s adobe hut, braking to avoid some scrawny chickens, Zack made a grudging stab at shielding Jo. “Wait in the car while I see if she’s home.”

“Hah,” said Jo, climbing out unaided.

So much for that plan.

Jo doubted she’d ever met Doña Maria Ruiz, but in her job as small-town sheriff she’d visited several homes like this one—dry, sparse and proudly neat for a house made of baked clay. The curtains in the open window were white and starched.

So this was how Brujas lived.

Zack knocked on the wooden door, and Jo rubbed her hands nervously down her jeans. These old Latin ladies could be pretty disapproving of a woman in pants, even in this day and age. It was daunting even when they weren’t witches.

The door cracked, revealing only a narrow shaft of the shadowy interior. One rheumy eye regarded them from a visible strip of dark, craggy face—classic witch. A potpourri of candles and herbs and something strange wafted out, something that sent shivers of warning through her. “Quién es?”

“Uh, hi,” said Zack. “Do you speak English?”

The one rheumy eye seemed unimpressed.

So he didn’t need help, huh? Jo stepped closer. “Buenos dias, Señora. Estoy…él está…nosotros…” I am, he is, we are—freshman conjugations! She hoped her pidgin Spanish was up to the occasion. “Buscamos a la Bruja. Por favor.”

We seek the witch, please.

“La Bruja?” That one eye looked plenty suspicious.

Zack slanted a dry gaze down at Jo, as if she’d peed in his yard. “Si,” he mimicked awkwardly. “Bruja.”

The woman asked, “Por qué?”

“She wants to know why,” translated Jo quietly. It’d been hard enough asking about magic at the clinic. Now she had to do it in Spanish?

Before she could try, Zack said, “Look, ma’am, we think there’s something evil in Almanuevo. We think it’s desecrating the dead. If it is, I’m gonna stop it. Can you help?”

“You can pay?” challenged Doña Maria cagily. So she understood English after all.

“Twenty dollars,” offered the P.I.

The Bruja eyed the Ferrari. “Fifty.”

Well, he was the one who insisted on the expensive toys.

“With all due respect,” Zack said dryly, “thirty.”

After a moment’s pause, the old woman nodded—and opened the door wider. “Come in,” she granted, so solemnly that Jo wondered if they could have entered without permission. Trying to think magically was starting to mess with her head, wasn’t it?

The mix of abnormal scents was almost overwhelming.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Zack, extending one long arm to hold the door open for Jo to go first. For a pushy guy, he sure was polite about doors.

Then Jo noticed the older woman nodding satisfaction to herself at the gesture. Ah.

Suck up, she mouthed at the P.I., who grinned.

Instead of the apple-peddling wicked witch from Snow White, the Bruja now looked more like Aunt Bea from the Andy Griffith Show…if Aunt Bea were Mexican. She wore a long, embroidered white dress, a black lace shawl piously covering her neatly braided white hair.

“Mi santuario,” she directed, taking them through her portrait-lined kitchen to what looked like a lean-to or pantry—or it did until they entered. Then Jo, again going first, saw that it was some kind of magic room, complete with a wooden table covered with a black cloth, shelves of strange-looking supplies and a shrine to what she assumed was the Virgin Mary.

Other statues of saints, as well as little cards with religious pictures, were set neatly about the room alongside flowers and candles and several rosaries. Though no expert on Brujeria, Jo knew it was a Mexican religio-magical system that worshipped Mary as Guadalupe. Just this afternoon, Ashley had suggested that Guadalupe stood for a more ancient Aztec goddess, providing a safe way for native women to continue their worship after their long-ago conquest by the Spaniards.

Ashley had also suggested not casually mentioning that theory to the Brujas, many of whom considered themselves devout Catholics, not goddess worshippers.

Jo noted the stranger items in the room—old jars holding mysterious mixtures, sewing needles and what looked to be three dead and partly mummified hummingbirds. A human skull in one corner startled her. A second look showed it to be plastic.

Not that this made it normal or encouraging.

“Are these your grandchildren?” asked Zack from the kitchen, and the old crone, in the doorway between them, smiled.

“Si,” Doña Maria said, and began to list children and grandchildren alike. She’d gone through at least twenty names before she and the P.I. deigned to join Jo in the santuario.

Not that Jo needed Zack here. But she felt more at ease in his presence, anyway. She’d already sat, but when Zack settled onto the bench beside her, she felt his size and warmth and presence like an anchor in otherwise unsteady waters.

It occurred to her that the strange feelings might in fact be magic, filling the room, surrounding them. Was that possible?

“We were wondering if you’d noticed—” Zack began, but the Bruja held up a commanding hand, then bowed her head and began to pray.

“Ave Maria, gratia plena…”

It took Jo several more lines to recognize the Latin version of the “Hail Mary.” At the end, Zack crossed himself when the witch did.

Jo tried crossing herself, but—not being Catholic—sensed that she’d done it in the wrong order. She glanced at Zack, who shook his head. Then she glanced uncertainly back at the witch—

Whose head snapped up so suddenly, Jo stiffened.

“The Virgencita shows me great evil,” announced the Bruja in a hollow voice.

Could She could be a little more specific? Since that would come out more sarcastic than she meant it, Jo kept her tongue.

Zack asked, “Can the Holy Virgin help us learn more about this evil?” Look who’d just grown some people skills!

The older woman’s words sounded hollow, distant. She rocked slightly on her bench, as if focusing on something only she could see. “You will not find your way to this malvado, this evil, through Nuestra Señora La Guadalupana, nor of her angeles or santos. This is not of their working. This hides from their light. They can only provide protection for you.”

“That’s nice,” said Zack. “Protection from what, exactly?”

The old lady startled Jo again by suddenly grabbing her hand. The Bruja’s hand felt dry, strong for her age. “You wear the disguise of a marimacho,” she murmured. “But you are not evil. You think because you were robbed, you have nothing, but Guadalupana sees the truth in your heart. She wants for you what all virtuous women want.”

“That being…?” asked Jo, wary. She didn’t know the word, marimacho. She wasn’t sure how she’d been robbed. Diego…?

But the old woman was turning to Zack, using her free hand to take his. “You too were robbed of your life,” she murmured, still rocking. “But you, you chase it. You are a good husband, but you seek too far, too deep into the darkness. You strain even the protections of Nuestra Señora in this chase.”

Jo felt torn between concern and confusion. Zack had been robbed of his life?

“Still, Guadalupana smiles on you both,” the woman continued. “For you must face this darkness together.”

Zack slanted a look down toward Jo, less than enthusiastic.

“I will make you a protection,” announced the Bruja, releasing their hands. Even her normal voice felt tinged with power. “By the grace of Nuestra Señora and her santos and her angeles, a powerful protection against the evil you seek.”

“Thanks for that,” said Zack, while she stood. “But what we could really use is some idea of who or what we’re hunting.”

Doña Maria lit a candle, murmured a prayer over it, then set to work. She took a wooden bowl from her cupboard and began to add ingredients from unlabeled jars. She measured the way Jo’s grandmother had cooked, by practice and guess. A pinch here. A dollop there. “You are facing a diablero.”

“A devil,” translated Jo uncertainly. “The devil? No, that would be a diablo, right?”

“The diablero works the magic of El Diablo,” explained the older woman, still mixing and measuring. Jo only half watched, not wanting to know if any dead hummingbird got added.

“So it’s human, anyway,” said Lorenzo, as if that had even been in question. Or maybe it had.

“Perhaps,” hedged the Bruja. “Or no. Hombres son brutos.”

“Men are beasts,” translated Jo, trying not to grin.

“Thanks a lot,” said the P.I.

The older woman finished her mixture, then measured dollops of it into two squares of red silk, tying them with red cord.

“Keep these with you,” she instructed, giving a pouch to both Jo and Zack. “Pray the Ave Maria on them every night and morning, and together you may carry enough of the Lady’s light to shine upon and destroy this evil. You understand, si?”

“Sure.” But Zack warily sniffed the pouch.

“Si,” agreed Jo politely. “We understand.” Then she mouthed at Zack, Pay her. Which he did.

As they moved to leave, the Bruja stopped Jo with a hard grip. “For you,” she whispered, pressing a second pouch into her hand. This one was made of white silk.

“What is it?” asked Jo, watching Zack go ahead.

“A charm of love,” murmured the witch. “Pray to lead him from his darkness.”

To lead…Zack Lorenzo?

“Oh no,” said Jo quickly. “I mean, that’s nice of you, but I’m not interested….” The woman’s dark eyes brooked no deception. “Not in that way,” Jo qualified weakly.

Watching the man’s body and feeling safe around him had nothing to do with loving him or leading him from darkness!

“Hombres son brutos,” repeated the Bruja. “But this strengthens them, si? Protecting us, it raises them from the animals. It is our calling to keep them holy in return.”

Jo looked more closely at all the photographs lining the kitchen, almost covering the front wall. School pictures. Family portraits. Clearly that was how Doña Maria had led her life, witch or not. But Jo had once tried for a normal life, once let a man protect her.

Never again.

“Say the prayers,” insisted the Bruja, releasing Jo’s hand.

“I’m not even Catholic.”

“Do not be afraid of life, marimacho.”

“Hello?” called Zack, partway to the car. The Ferrari chirped and flashed its headlights as he approached it. That’s when he stopped still.

Jo awkwardly thanked the woman, then hurried to catch up—until Zack said, “Stay where you are.” Even over the unending Texas wind, she heard the sharpness in his voice.

“Why…?”

But then she heard the snake.

Chapter 5

Zack had always thought rattlesnakes rattled. This one buzzed, coiled in front of the Ferrari—way too close to him. It was the biggest snake he’d ever seen outside the zoo.

At least he stood between it and the women.

“Stand still,” advised Jo, approaching from behind. Great. If anything, the snake buzzed more loudly. “No sudden movements.”

“You’re the one who’s moving,” he said, slowly reaching under his outer shirt.

“You might shoot the car.”

“I buy the insurance for a reason.” He aimed. The Ferrari was just beyond the snake.

“We’re over thirty miles out of town,” Jo reminded him. “And I don’t see any other cars here.”

She was getting closer! “Will you stay the hell back!”

“I know rattlesnakes,” she continued, low. “You don’t.”

Okay, that was it. Now he was pissed. So Jo hadn’t let the old witch shake her? Kudos for her bravery in the face of grandmotherly Brujas. This was a freakin’ rattlesnake, and he didn’t need her showing off how tough she could be just now!

Besides, men were beasts, right? He liked killing things that threatened his life.

“Just leave it alone a minute,” Jo soothed, now right beside him, “and it should go away. It’s a lot more frightened of us than we are of it.”

“Oh,” he challenged. “So you’re scared of it, huh?”

He felt her stiffen beside him. “Not particularly. But it would make sense if you were. Being a city boy and all.”

Right. Like cities didn’t have snakes right alongside the rats. “News flash. First, I’m no boy. Second, I’m not exactly crumbling under the pressure here. I’m just trying to keep you out of harm’s way while I calculate how to avoid the gas line.”

But when Jo touched his wrist, staying him, he knew she would get her way. Wasn’t that just like a woman? He couldn’t aim his pistol now without shaking her off, which he was pretty sure counted as a “sudden movement.”

For a moment they just stood there, facing down a snake that was clearly more frightened of them than they were of it, since it turned out neither of them was scared. Jo continued to hold his wrist, her hand soft and steady, and Zack noticed again that she was smaller than he generally thought she was. Not that he had reason to think about her. Incense from the Bruja’s sanctuary clung to Jo’s short, shiny hair. The Texas heat felt magnified, with her so close, despite the wind. He began to feel flushed.

It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the rattler.

Finally, just as the sheriff had predicted, the snake’s buzzed warning softened. It began to lower its triangular head.

Then, in a sudden whiplike movement, it slithered right at them. It was not scared!

Zack elbowed Jo away from him to raise his pistol, but she was already stepping between him and his target—damn it!—and stomping.

Like that, she was standing with a cowboy boot firmly planted on the snake’s head. She crouched, a jackknife in her hand. In a sure, firm movement, she cut right through its neck.

Zack lowered his pistol to point at the desert floor and started to breathe again.

Backing away, Jo lifted one foot to wipe her blade on the sole of her boot first and then—the worst gone—on her jeans. If she’d had hair of any real length, the cocky little lift of her head when she looked at him would have tossed it. “There.”

She’d blocked his shot, risked her life, and that’s all she had to say? There?

He stared at her, short and solid and smug. More protests than he had words for pushed up into his throat before he gave them up and stalked past her to the dead reptile. He knelt, picked up the long, headless body, and stood. The thing was so thick around, his fingers didn’t meet his thumb as he held it. It had to be at least five feet long. Unless he held his arm up almost shoulder height, its rattle dragged in the sand.

He’d seen a lot of postcards about everything being big in Texas, but—Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

“Watch out for the head,” cautioned the sheriff, behind him. “The fangs are still poisonous.”

Her words were tough, but her voice was still a woman’s.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Zack demanded, turning on her. “It could have killed you!”

“Not likely,” she assured him, slipping her knife back into her pocket. “There’s antivenin in town.”

“But possible. And what happened to it going away? Maybe I’m just some dumb city guy, but I’ve got to ask—do snakes normally charge at people like that?”

Jo had the grace to look uncomfortable. “Actually…no.”

He waved the headless snake closer to her. “Exactly!”

To her credit, she didn’t flinch from the gory trophy. Any of his sisters would. Gabriella would’ve fainted by now; she’d always needed him to deal with the creepy-crawlies.

Then again, Jo was the one who’d beheaded the thing.

“You know,” she murmured, leaning closer to the reptilian corpse, “that was exactly what a snake shouldn’t do. Snakes don’t get rabies, do they?”

He shrugged. “Like I should know?”

Then their gazes met. They both knew who might. Ashley Vanderveer.

Doña Maria strolled past, startling them both. The old woman, her white skirts not quite brushing the rocky ground, bent low over the abandoned snake head.

Zack considered warning her that the fangs were still poisonous, but she lived out here. She probably knew.

When she produced a large cooking knife and skewered the thing, lifting it on the point of the knife, he was just as glad he’d kept his mouth shut—unlike some women he could name.

“Señora,” said Jo after a moment, following as the Bruja carried the snake head back toward her adobe house, “Do you—or the Holy Mother—consider snakes as evil omens or anything?”

Since it was a good question, Zack followed. Besides, who knew what trouble the sheriff might get into otherwise?

“No,” assured Doña Maria, circling the house. “Spiders, si. Wolves. But snakes, they are medicine animals.”

Well, that’s a relief, thought Zack—until they rounded the corner of the house and saw the old shed back there, its wooden wall papered with nailed strips of what he realized were snake-skins, undulating in the constant breeze.

There had to be…ten…thirty…fifty…?

How many snakes had the old lady skinned? And why?

“But these,” continued the Bruja, moving the lid of a large, clay jar and dropping in the fanged head. “These have been called, I think. They answer the diablero.”

Zack said, “Our diablero?”

“Say your thanks to Guadalupana for protecting you,” Doña Maria suggested, heading back to the house.

“But what about the snakes and the diablero?” asked Jo.

The old woman went into her house and shut the door behind her. So much for that line of questioning.

“Is…?” Zack looked over his shoulder at the wall of reptiles. “Never mind.”

He stalked back toward the car with their headless snake.

“Is what?” demanded Jo, following him.

He’d been going to ask if this was normal, but when had he started wanting backup? “This can’t be normal. The number of snakes she’s put under the knife isn’t, and the way this thing came at us definitely isn’t. We’ll take its body back to Vanderveer. If we ask nice, maybe she’ll test it for rabies.”

“Wouldn’t she need the head to check for rabies?” asked Jo. It annoyed him that he hadn’t remembered that much.

“You wanna go fishing in her jar-o-venom for it?” he challenged, then regretted it. Jo James might turn around and go back, in some feminista show of courage.

Instead, she caught up with his longer stride and gestured toward the body. “We might as well leave this too.”

“Maybe I want to keep it,” he said, aware that he was just being contrary now. “Make a belt or something.”

She shrugged, all suit yourself.

Though he doubted the rental agency would appreciate snake guts in the trunk any more than they would’ve liked him shooting the car, insurance or no insurance.

Then he heard another rattle—and the headless snake writhed in his hand!

With a yelp, Zack threw it. The thing arced awkwardly through the air like a heavy rubber hose, landing on a flat rock. It wriggled some more, still headless, while he slapped his hand against his pants to wipe off the traces of the cursed thing.

“What the hell was that?” Magic?

Then he heard a snort, and guessed not. If it was magic, Jo James wouldn’t be trying—unsuccessfully—not to laugh. Another quick glance into the desert proved how uncoordinated the dead snake’s movements were. The adrenaline in his system eased back to a trickle, allowing normal thought.

“Rigor mortis,” he guessed out loud, even more disgusted.

“Same thing happened to me once,” Jo assured him, which just annoyed him further. Like he wanted her sympathy!

“Oh really?” he challenged, swinging himself into the driver’s seat. He let her open her own damned door.

“When I was twelve,” she agreed, climbing in. Her lips were pressed together, but her eyes danced with mirth. When he turned to glare down at her, Zack knew he was in trouble.

Even keeping things antagonistic, he couldn’t pretend Jo was one of the guys.

As they drove back toward Almanuevo, Jo rolled the second “charm” the Bruja had given her in her hand, hidden from the driver’s seat by her body. A love charm, huh? It felt lumpier than the protection charm did. Now that they’d left the incense and the props, neither bag seemed particularly magic. But would they? Did she expect them to glow, or tingle or something?

Would she want them to? Would she want them to work at all?

The protection charm, maybe. But the love charm? Jo wasn’t looking for any man, hadn’t looked in years. Even if she did, the last thing she needed was a guy like Zack Lorenzo, who reeked of testosterone like cheap aftershave, to fall in love with her.

Except that his aftershave smelled expensive, not cheap, in the close confines of his powerful car. Rich and delicious.

“So you’re widowed, huh?” she asked finally, rubbing her trigger finger over the silk of the bag. The callus on her finger caught against the fine fibers.

“More or less,” admitted Zack. Sort of. “Why?”

Jo made a face. No magic was powerful enough. “Do you think that’s what the Bruja meant, saying we’ve both been robbed?”

“Could’ve been.”

Not big on personal answers, was he? “You aren’t still sulking about the snake, are you?”

“I don’t sulk.”

She raised a hand to fend off his vehemence. “Just asking.”

“Just because a guy doesn’t want to talk through every detail of his life doesn’t mean he’s sulking. Geez!”

“Forget I asked!” And she leaned her seat back a little farther, braced a boot against the dash, and made herself comfortable.

Finally he said, “I don’t like talking about my wife.”

“Fair enough,” she said, and for a while they just listened to classic rock. He had a good ’80s mix—Journey, Cheap Trick, The Eagles—and a better sound system. She could do with less air-conditioning, though. It was only March.

“Do you think it works?” she asked. “Spells and stuff?”

Casually steering with one hand, Zack said, “Yeah.”

“I thought a lot of these people were flakes.”

“A lot are. But some are scary powerful.”

“Do you think Doña Maria is powerful?” She’d been scary, that was for sure. In an incongruous, matronly way.

Zack considered that for a while. “I think she’s legitimate, anyhow. Powerful’s harder to tell. She didn’t give us much.”

True. But they hadn’t left empty-handed, either.

Jo’s fingers curled more tightly around the secret gift. She’d never had magical amulets, before. “It seemed so normal,” she admitted. “I mean, not normal normal. But it wasn’t…”

“No special effects,” Zack translated, to her relief. So she wasn’t the only one who’d ever noticed that, huh?

“Yep.”

“Look, I’m no expert either—I investigate the stuff, I don’t practice it—but I’ve seen magic work, and it…it’s like it hides itself in reality. I’ve never heard of a spell yet that couldn’t be called coincidence by some mean-spirited dweeb with a hard-on for skepticism.”

Jo admired the metaphor, but was vague on the point, “Uh-huh…?”

“Say someone does magic for money. He’s not gonna open his eyes and find a pile of money on his coffee table, you know? He probably won’t even win the lottery or have a relative drop dead and leave him an inheritance. More likely he’ll get offered a second job, or a lot of overtime, or his tax return will come early, or he’ll finally sell that old car that’s been sitting dead in his driveway for a year. So is it coincidence? Hey, get the map out of the glove box.” He considered it. “Please.”

Jo guiltily pocketed her love charm and retrieved the map. “Hard to say if it’s coincidence or not.”

“Exactly. But either way—” He glanced toward her for a split second, just long enough to convey his earnestness. “He does get the money.”

She liked that he generally kept his eyes on the road; he was a safe driver, for a tough guy. “So these charms—I mean, the protection she gave us—they really might guard against evil? They might be why the snake didn’t bite either of us?”

She liked to think she was the reason the snake hadn’t bitten them. She liked the sense of competence, of control, of not needing anybody else’s protection—and she didn’t want to believe the love charm had any real power. But if it did…

“See if we’re anywhere near the red X I marked,” instructed Zack, about the map. “As for the charms, I wouldn’t go skydiving to see if they work. But the woman didn’t seem like bad news either. So I’ll carry mine, all the same.”

Like avoiding the topic of his late wife—it seemed fair enough.

But he wasn’t carrying a love charm.

Zack wasn’t sure at what point he and Jo James ended up in a pissing contest. Maybe it had started with the snake. Either way, it escalated after they pulled over at a crudely graded scenic outlook, about ten miles out of town. Zack’s notes said that Brent Harper, the college kid, had fallen to his death near here. The afternoon was lengthening, but they had sunlight left.

“This isn’t so bad,” said Jo as they looked down the rocky hillside. “It’s not like we need ropes or anything.”

Actually, there were a few steep stretches where ropes might come in handy. But that would mean going to town to get ropes, maybe rappelling equipment. And that would mean losing the rest of the daylight and putting this off until tomorrow.

It wasn’t like they were drunk.

“You want we should check it out?” asked Zack.

Jo lifted her chin. “Sure. Don’t you?”

“No, I just like to hear myself talk. Yes, I do.”

And the next thing he knew, they were both sidestepping down the rocky slope, complete with sand and cactus and those dried tufts of scrubby grass. At first, Zack did distract himself glancing toward Jo, making sure she was okay—by unspoken agreement they were keeping within maybe fifteen feet of each other. But she wasn’t exactly tottering across the rough spots. She moved like someone used to her environment, despite wearing smooth-soled cowboy boots. And like him, she was armed.

He almost hated to admit it, but she seemed like a competent lady. Maybe she’d be more of a help than a hindrance, after all. It was kind of nice, to have company for once. Except…

He hadn’t lied, back at the Bruja’s place. The snake by the car hadn’t scared him. The thought of watching it take a bite of Jo or Doña Maria right in front of him…that scared him.

But the longer he and Jo searched the hillside in competent, companionable silence, the less often he felt the need to glance her way. At least, not to check on her safety.

The way she wore those jeans, on the other hand…

“Found it!” she called over the wind, and he saw that she’d stepped out onto a particularly large, flat slab of sandy rock and was crouching by its edge, craning her neck to look over it. The crouch did particularly nice things for her jeaned bottom. “At least, I think I have. Beer cans.”

He headed in her direction, sidestepping a clump of low cactus. “How bad a drop is it? Are we gonna need a rope?”

The sky was getting vaguely orangey. He hoped they wouldn’t need a rope.

“Hard to say. We can try this side….” And she sat on the edge of the rock, clearly stretching her booted foot downward toward some kind of support.

“Wait up.” He’d almost reached her.

“It’s not as steep over here,” Jo insisted with a reassuring grin. The smile was what got him. She’s pretty, he realized, somehow surprised.

Right before she dropped out of sight.

Chapter 6

No! Zack threw himself onto his stomach, across the last few feet, grabbing for Jo as he did. Too late—

But then his hand closed around slim, solid arm. Her sudden weight jerked him, hard, and dragged him closer to the edge—over which he could now look a good twenty feet.

Jo James dangled, staring downward.

Zack glanced downward, too. Her not-that-steep path, from the looks of the rocks and pebbles still bouncing down the hillside, had crumbled right out from beneath her.

Zack tightened his grip. “Damn it! Jo, grab my arm.”

She just hung there as he reached, stretching his free hand out and down. Her arm was starting to slip in his dusty grasp. That damned wind ruffled her hair. Was she conscious? “Jo!”

Her head tipped back so that she could squint up at him—she’d lost her sunglasses—and she looked…confused?

After only knowing her a day, that scared him.

“Josephine!” Zack barked. Jo blinked. Her eyes slowly focused on him—then widened. Then, finally, she grabbed his wrist and held on. Noticing his reaching hand, she twisted and managed to catch that, too.

She was holding on tight now. They readjusted their grips until they had each other’s wrists. Big guy or not, Zack couldn’t have held all her weight with one hand for much longer.

He wasn’t sure how long he could do it like this.

Maybe Jo had been in momentary shock. Damned if she wasn’t trying to pull herself up alone, now. She wasn’t screaming, wasn’t crying, just…pulling. Her booted feet peddling empty air. What, even this didn’t scare her?

But it did. They held each others’ gazes, as firmly as each others’ wrists, and Zack could see a flare of fear creeping into the blue eyes that locked on to his. It wasn’t a frantic fear, not helpless, not uncontrolled, but it was there. About damn time.

“You did realize we were looking for the site where a boy plunged to his death, right?” demanded Zack through gritted teeth, trying to figure how he’d get the leverage to fix this.

So much for not taking care of any more women!

“Uh, yeah….” Again, she tried to pull herself up on her own. Right. Even really muscular women rarely had that kind of upper body strength. Fit though Jo James seemed to be, she was no bodybuilder. “Look, could you…?”

“Hold on a minute while I brace myself,” he muttered, trying to edge his knees forward and under him, trying to keep his grip on her wrists at the same time.

At least she had strong hands.

“Not to sound all woman-in-jeopardy here,” Jo grunted, “But I may not have a minute.”

That was when Zack really noticed a sound that he’d thought—hoped?—was the wind.

It wasn’t the wind. It was a buzzing. And it sounded like a lot more than one snake. Maybe even called by the diablero? Or, on the bright side, merely venomous. Or rabid.

Peachy.

One minute, Jo had been savoring the familiarity of rock beneath her boots—solid earth and standard investigation, no magic or weirdness. The next, she was falling. The earth just disintegrated out from under her. Instinct made her grab for anything, everything. When her hands hit rock she clutched at it, tearing her palms, breaking fingernails—

Then she’d stopped, hanging there. Looking down, down, down at the sharp rocks and cactus far beneath her. And for the briefest heartbeat she’d actually thought, oh, what the hell.

There were worse ways to die. And what would she be losing, really? All she had to do was drop….

But someone was calling to her. She looked up from those obliging rocks to the man she’d only known one day, even if it felt longer. Concern creased his forehead—and he was clutching her arm. Damn. She couldn’t die on Zack Lorenzo’s watch.

“Josephine!” he’d yelled. That’s when, with a whiff of incense, the strange lethargy of the moment deserted her. Of course she wanted to live. Whether she got to was another story.

She felt her arm slip a bit in his painful grip. When she saw his other hand reaching toward her, she somehow managed to strain upward and catch it. His big hand swallowed hers.

In that moment, Zack Lorenzo was life.

They readjusted their grips palm-to-wrist, in unspoken agreement, for a better hold. That’s when Jo heard the buzzing of the snakes near her booted feet. She’d never felt such gratitude for someone’s assistance, even if he did have to go and be snarky about it—plunged to his death. Like the ground wouldn’t have been just as eroded if Zack had gone first.

Still, with nothing but her untried faith in him between her and the snakes, she’d forgive snarkiness. She bent her knees to draw her feet closer to safety and said, “Hurry?”

“Almost there,” Zack grunted from above her, his grip tight and steady. “You ready?”

Gee, was she? “Yes!”

And Jo felt herself rising against the rock shelf as Zack lifted her. She slung a jeaned knee over the side of the ledge as soon as she could, not minding the likely bruise. In one more great effort Zack—who’d levered himself onto his knees now—yanked her the rest of the way up.

Suddenly, gravity stopped working against them.

He fell backwards, his grip taking her with him. She sprawled hard on top of him, her cheek landing on what felt like his collarbone, gasping for breath, too weak to even move.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. If he hadn’t been there…

Jo swallowed another grateful mouthful of air, newly appreciating the reddening sky above them, the sandy desert stretching off around them, the breeze. And the man beneath her.

That’s when she noticed herself breathing again. She noticed the simple movement of her chest against his. She noticed the way energy tingled through her, powerful and alive, and the scent of desert around her, of sandstone and hot air and baking grass—and incense? That one vanished even as she thought it. But mainly she inhaled the scent of clean, sweaty man, panting heavily himself, right beneath her.

Oh God…

Zack Lorenzo didn’t seem to be so appreciative—every few gasps he breathed out a swear word. Jo hoped it was displeasure at her close call, not at the rescue itself.

She should say thank you. Thank you. Two easy enough words.

As soon as she caught her breath.

Each time her chest expanded and contracted, it did so against his. Her breasts pillowed the motion and soon Jo wasn’t just aware of her breathing, anymore. She was feeling, too.

Not that she’d completely lost her sense of touch, over the years. But how long had it been, really, since she’d noticed it this much? And oh, she noticed it. The way a button on his shirt dug into her turned cheek as their mingling breaths rocked her. The heat from his big body, a different and more humid heat than from the rocks. The thick scent of aftershave and sweat and man. The way the denim of her jeans rasped against the denim of his—and the hardness of his thick, muscled legs beneath that.

She savored it, and that unnerved her. That was just feeling this man on the outside. How overwhelmed would she be if she ever let that feeling work its way into her emotions?

At some point, while she’d been busy feeling, Zack’s curses slowed. Any second now, this moment was going to shift from stolen intimacy to major awkwardness.

Thank you. It was no less than common courtesy, considering what he’d done for her.

With a burst of self-preservation, Jo rolled off the P.I. and onto the rock beside him. Somehow her head ended up pillowed on his flung-out arm—also hard muscled, also hot and damp—but it would seem childish to move again just because of that. Especially while her whole body trembled from the strain she’d put on it. She felt about as strong as your average strand of spaghetti.

She even attempted common courtesy. “Thank—”

“This,” announced Zack over her nice attempt, still panting, “is exactly why I work alone.”

What, the full-body contact? The tingling?

Almost too late, she realized he meant the fact that she’d had to be rescued. “So I’m guessing you’d rather work alone?” she panted, taking shelter in the obvious.

“Big surprise?” he groaned, full sarcasm ahead.

“Then you could have fallen into the nest of snakes without any help around.” Although really, could she have saved him?

She would have had to watch him fall, maybe watch him die—helpless. She’d been scared this time, scared of the fall and the snakes. But that legitimate fear was nothing against the flush of sheer panic that now closed her throat at the idea of being so horribly helpless, ever again.

“Who says I would’ve fallen?” demanded Guido the Nature Guy.

At least his conceit allowed her to swallow, to relax more into the idea of his annoyance instead of his heroics—or the memory of his body beneath hers. “You would so have fallen!”

“Dream on, cowgirl.”

“Please! You would have seen those beer cans—I’m assuming. And you would have figured this side was the best way down, just like I did. And then you would have dropped headfirst.”

“Even if I did,” he said, “I might’ve caught myself and pulled myself back up. And if I couldn’t, I’ve got the mobile.”

She considered that, turning her head to better see his profile—hyper aware of his hard upper arm still beneath her cheek. This was almost like pillow talk, except that he was being obnoxious and they hadn’t had sex. It was still more intimate than anything she’d had in years. How sad was that?

“Hanging from the ledge, you would have managed to use your cell phone?” she challenged. Would he even have a signal?

Zack rolled his face toward hers. “I’ve got speed dial.”

She had to grin. “You are so full of it.”

“Maybe. But you nearly died.” Her sin clearly outweighed his.

“Yeah,” she conceded, noticing how soft his lips looked this close. She noticed the tiny little nicks and scars on his whisker-shadowed jaw, from years of shaving gaffes. His nose had definitely been broken once, maybe more than once, and only his eyes and his smile were truly handsome, but—

But even without the smile, the eyes were dangerously handsome enough.

The sky had turned increasingly orange. They were about to have one hell of a red sunset. West Texas might seem barren, but its sunsets transcended mere beauty, richer and brighter than any romantic could hope—or fear.

It was with fear, and the remembrance of that damned love charm in her pocket, that Jo pushed herself up into a sitting position. “Yeah, well maybe I would have gracefully landed and used my desert knowledge to soothe the snakes into—oh, hell.”

“What?” he asked, starting to sit up even as she unsnapped and drew her revolver. She leveled it past his hiking boots, where a current of sandy brown movement resolved into a large rattlesnake slithering right at them. She squeezed the trigger, the gun discharged—and the snake flew back over the drop in a small spray of blood. Ugh.

“Oh, hell,” echoed the P.I., groaning as he stood. He then offered a big, open hand to Jo.

She knew she should stand on her own. When wrestling with her brothers, accepting a hand up had always been a signal of weakness….

Except that she still felt drained, having strained every muscle in her body once today already. Reluctantly, she gave him her hand. Even now, his solid grip felt like life.

He boosted her to her feet as easily as if he hadn’t strained every muscle in his body, too.

“Thanks,” she managed, hoping it didn’t sound grudging. Did she smell a gust of incense again?

“Sure.” And he reached into his open shirt, drew his pistol, and shot—hitting a second snake. “What are we here, bait?”

“Maybe it’s just the sunset,” suggested Jo, glancing behind her before she began to back uphill, toward the car. Cowboy boots weren’t the best hiking footwear in the world, but she’d had years of practice. “Snakes like to sleep during the heat of the day, then come out at night. In the summer. But it’s been hot.”

Why did the argument taste as moldy as all those years when she’d told herself she’d hallucinated the attack in the mines?

Zack had told her magic hid itself in reality, right?

Now he said, “Or maybe whoever called the one at the Bruja’s place is calling these, too. Look out.” And he shot something else, past her leg.

“That was a cactus,” said Jo. “Prickly pear.”

“Not just a cactus. Look behind it.”

They climbed the hill like cops, respective firearms drawn and braced, each of them covering his side of the desert in slow sweeps. They heard more snakes than they saw—at least three buzzing rattles sounded out from the lengthening shadows. Jo didn’t have to fire again. Zack fired four more times. He killed another snake, but he also seemed to be venting frustration.

In unspoken agreement they checked around the Ferrari, then inside it—under and behind the seats, the floor-mats, even in the glove compartment—before they climbed in and shut the doors.

Power locks snicked into comforting place with a flick of Zack’s finger. He and Jo holstered their weapons at almost the exact moment. Then they sat, silent and shaken and relieved.

Life sure had gotten interesting since yesterday morning.

Zack broke the silence first. “So I’m thinking I’ll have my partner look up everything he can about local rattlesnakes.”

“Several area cafés serve rattlesnake stew as a tourist attraction,” Jo told him, deliberately gazing out the window. The tinted glass robbed the sunset of some of its flame. “The town holds regular rattlesnake roundups for the same reason. And the school’s mascot is the rattlesnake.” The dozen kids in Spur, grade school and high school alike, got bussed to Almanuevo.

When Zack turned the key, the car’s engine came alive, thrumming through her body. “I thought this was some New Age resort town.”

“And yet somehow the Fighting Gurus just didn’t have the right ring to it.”

He snorted a laugh at that, and she liked it. She liked that he was a good shot. Him saving her life hadn’t hurt either, even if she disliked the helplessness of it.

She suspected she liked too damned much about this man.

He made her notice her breathing.

“Are we coming back tomorrow?” she asked, watching as the hillside they’d been forced to abandon glided into their past. She could still smell his maleness mixing with the car’s leather scent. No more incense—not now that they were out of danger. “Check for clues into the boy’s death? I did see beer cans.”

Zack released a deep breath. “We could. On the other hand, I’ve got the EMT report from when the locals retrieved his body. It’s one thing to take a quick look, see if they missed anything. But if we’re gonna have to rent climbing gear and maybe some snake handlers just to get down there…”

His hand brushed across the outside of her knee, making her jump. Then shiver. “Sorry,” he muttered, shifting gears.

“Maybe it should drop lower on the to-do list?” she finished, her knee tingling. Her body felt imprinted by his. And there he sat, filling his side of the car, inches away….

“Not that we can’t come back, if we think there’s something out here we really need,” Zack added quickly.

“Well sure,” she agreed, in case he thought she was some kind of wimp. She would go back if she had to. If they had reason to believe there was anything out there to warrant the risk. Now that they knew the risk. They were just being practical.

“But there’s other ways we can be using our time,” he continued. “It’s one weird town.”

“No argument here.”

“Good,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

“Then it’s a plan,” he said—and turned up his CD player.

Except that it was a nonplan. Would they start interviewing other magic users tonight? Seek out Ashley for more questions?

How long was Jo going to have to sit this close to him, with all this intense feeling going on? She tried not to relax into his nearness, having someone else do the driving for once. Why get used to it? That was another good reason why she shouldn’t enjoy Zack Lorenzo’s size, strength and warmth right beside her. The expert way his hands moved on the steering wheel and the gearshift, sometimes brushing her leg again.

His thick wrists…

By the time they reached the highway, she felt ready to jump out of her skin. That was a bad place to be on a job, wearing a gun. When they pulled into the motel parking lot, and parked by his room, she felt so alert she could have exploded.

This meant they were calling it a day, right?

She remembered his big, unmade bed and wasn’t sure she could stay sane with him and a bed in the same place just now. With him widowed. More or less. She might do something stupid, and then he’d refuse to work with her—for real—and maybe she could investigate alone, but what did she know about fighting evil? Beyond blowing it up, anyway?

Climbing out of the low-slung car woke every ache in her ill-used muscles, reminding her of the rescue all over again. Of Zack’s life-giving strength. Of his thick body, under hers…

God help her, she actually said, “So…”

“So…” he echoed, hesitating between the car and the door to his room. The maid must have been in to clean. The drapes were wide open and the bed, visible through the window, sat neatly made. “I don’t suppose you’re willing to stay home tomorrow.”

They were calling it a day, thank God. “I don’t suppose so.”

By tomorrow she would be in better control again. Except she wasn’t leaving yet. Why didn’t she? It wasn’t like she expected an invitation to dinner. In fact, that would be a bad thing!

“See you tomorrow, then.” He took a step backward and folded his arms. Yep. Calling it a day. That was them. “Eightish.”

His clear determination to watch her get into her truck allowed Jo to relax into mild exasperation, far safer than the other feelings she fought. After all, a gal never knew when she might need manly protection in a well-lit, small-town parking lot.

She went to her Bronco, thought to check it for snakes and climbed in. Zack was still standing outside his motel room.

When she cranked the engine, which hurt her scraped hands, it took three tries to catch. It was just old, but the comparison to Zack’s Ferrari felt sad. Finally the engine caught and settled into a regular rumble, if not a purr. When Jo glanced back to #7, Zack was closing the door behind him.

She relaxed for the first time in what felt like hours and steered from the parking lot toward the highway. Only as she stopped to wait for a passing car did she look behind her one more time, at the motel room.

Zack Lorenzo had pulled his drapes.

Some men shouldn’t take that first drink, or light that first cigarette—or hell, pick up that first Playboy.

Watching to be sure the sheriff was safely on her way, Zack wished his problem was so easily monitored. It wasn’t like he could shun all women for fear they might need rescuing. But of all the ladies who should have been self-sufficient and safe…

Jo fell, he rescued, and now he was even more responsible for her than ever. Just what he didn’t need.

It made her matter far more than she should.

Seeing her old truck start moving—finally—he stepped inside and quickly pulled the cords to close the drapes. With a practiced twitch, he made sure they overlapped in the middle, so he wouldn’t accidentally catch a glimpse out. Better.

Only then did he turn on the room lights.

Zack didn’t like uncovered windows at night, not for a couple of years now. Not with the lights on inside anyway, which was the only reason he could still drive at night. For one thing, lights turned rooms into bright displays for any buttinsky who bothered to glance in. And for another…

He just didn’t like them, was all.

He hated to admit that anything scared him. Most things didn’t. Once a guy faces down what could’ve been a demon—the junkie he’d rescued from near sacrifice claimed it was—average scares don’t pack a lot of punch. Today’s Bruja had been strange, sure, but not scary. The snakes had put him on alert, yeah, but he’d been too busy dealing with them to be scared.

But Jo…

What if he’d been standing farther from her? What if he hadn’t caught her in time, or his hand had slipped? What if one of the rattlesnakes had made good on its buzzing threat, before he’d gotten the leverage to pull her up?

He didn’t want another woman’s death on his conscience, damn it. Sure, he wouldn’t be actively at fault here, any more than with Gabriella. But there would’ve been something he could have done and hadn’t, all the same. He’d still have to live with the guilt of that omission.

Not that Jo was anything to him like Gabriella.

From his suitcase, Zack unearthed a bottle of bourbon and poured an inch into one of the generic motel glasses. The swallow of liquor eased into his aching shoulders, his tense arms. It helped him remind himself that he hadn’t let Jo die. He’d dragged her up until she’d landed on top of him, soft and safe and alive.

And for that, more than anything, Zack was suddenly and increasingly scared. Because damn, he’d liked how she felt on top of him. He’d liked her panting breaths, and her funny, macho conceits and the fact that she might be as good a shot as he was. Against snakes, anyway.

Despite his best efforts, he liked the sheriff. He was attracted to her. Nothing long-term, of course—she lived in the middle of nowhere, she was a pain in the butt and from the look of how badly she’d done the sign of the cross for Doña Maria, she wasn’t even Episcopalian, much less Catholic.

But he was attracted all the same—the first time since Gabriella’s death. That meant seeing her die would hurt, and he had enough to hurt about to go looking for any more.

After another swallow of liquor, Zack relaxed enough to sink onto the neatly made bed. He had calls to make—Cecil Taylor, the Ambrosia Café, even Ashley Vanderveer. But he could make them from the bed as easily as from one of those puny plastic chairs.

Even against the too-soft mattress, something poked him in the butt. He groaned, rolling onto his hip and feeling the coverlet beneath him. When he felt nothing, he stood and felt it more thoroughly. Still nothing.

Then he touched his back pocket—and fished out the silk-wrapped charm the old Bruja had sold him. One for him, one for Jo. Protection, the old woman had said.

He looked at it suspiciously, then sniffed it. It smelled like incense, like her santuario had. It made him wonder—

Zack stiffened then at a new sound. A bad sound.

Tickety-tick-tick.

Alone in the middle of his motel room, he forced himself to turn toward the covered windows—where he could clearly hear something skittering across the glass.

Tick-tick, tickety-tick-tick. Like little fingernails being drummed along a tabletop, or—

For a moment, there was silence. Then—

Tickety-tick-tick. Scratching. Like something barely corporeal trying to scrabble its way in from the darkness….

Zack tried to force himself to draw a breath; for a moment, even that seemed touch and go. Damned windows! Finally, somehow, he managed. After that, he was able to draw his gun.

More scrabbling. God only knew where he got this sickening certainty that seized his gut, his chest, but he had it. Something was out there in the dark, and he did not want it in.

Somehow, Zack managed to count to three, then duck across the room and slap off the lights. For a moment, he felt safer.

Then he heard it again, scratching.

Tickety-tick-tick-tick-tick. And a long, inhuman moan.

It was the moan that finally keyed him in.

“Hell!” Zack exclaimed—at his own foolishness, not whatever-it-was trying to get in. There was no whatever-it-was!

The room still dark, he checked out the peephole, then silently undid the chain lock on the door. He turned the knob and lunged out, all in one smooth movement, just to make sure…

And saw nothing but a darkening parking lot.

The wind moaned again, hot and unending. Then he got hit in the face with blowing sand, even as it skittered across the window. Tickety-tick-tick-tick.

“Damned son of a…” He went back inside, still muttering, and turned on the lights. At least Sheriff James hadn’t been here for that little farce!

He dumped out the rest of his glass of bourbon, in case those two swallows had made him more susceptible to mind games.

People in his line of work couldn’t afford to get scared.

It made them dangerous.

Chapter 7

Dane and Sigrid Thorson’s den was done in whites—carpet, furniture, drapes and glass-topped tables. Silver-framed snow-scapes hung on the walls. But none of that could erase the fact that they lived in a double-wide mobile home with a broken air conditioner. Jo, with Zack, conducted the entire interview—their third, counting Ashley’s—under the hum of a box-fan.

Still, the older couple were gracious hosts, offering cold “mead”—which tasted like a flat, highly alcoholic beer—and answering questions. As a priest and priestess of Asatru, a Norse form of paganism, they were apparently used to questions.

“First of all, we aren’t Nazis,” said Dane, while Zack scribbled notes. Jo tried not to watch Zack’s wrists. “Some Odinists are, but not our clan. Asatru simply means a belief in the old gods, the Aesir—Odin, Freya, Thor, Frigga. We’re into strength, valor, honor, ancestry. Warrior pagans.”

Jo noticed an ornate sword hanging over their front doorway. “And you believe in magic?”

Sigrid, who wore a silver knotwork headband—in honor of their visit, or everyday?—cocked her head. “Don’t you?”

Jo noticed Zack slant his dark gaze toward her, maybe curious himself. “I’m not sure I really understand it.”

“Magic is changing your reality through your will, which everyone does daily,” Sigrid explained. “But of course it’s more than that, too. It’s everywhere. We’re just used to discounting it, is all. Try this. Sometime when you’re alone, close your eyes, take a deep breath and imagine your feet growing roots deep into the earth—like Yggdrasil, the World Tree. Imagine your arms are your branches, spreading into the cosmos, connecting you to everything in the world. Then slowly open your eyes, and make note of what you see before what you call reality crashes back. You may surprise yourself.”

“That sounds awfully…easy,” said Jo.

“You’d be surprised.” Sigrid winked, then looked at Zack as he shifted impatiently. “But you had other questions?”

“Yeah. World Trees aside, have you or anyone in your clan sensed anything unusual in the area? Magically speaking, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Dane. Jo noticed some mail on the coffee table addressed to a David Thorson. Huh. “But this is Almanuevo, Mr. Lorenzo. A great deal of the unusual goes on—magically speaking.”

Zack said, “Unusual as in necromancy?” And despite the heat—the temperatures were pushing the 90s now—the room chilled.

“We’re not into that stuff,” stated Dane flatly. “Try the guy who runs the Pet Mummification place.”

Jo said, “We didn’t mean to upset you.”

“We realize that,” agreed Sigrid. “Before you go, perhaps you would let me do a rune-cast for you. If you mean to battle forces of darkness, perhaps the Gods will help guide you.”

“The more the merrier,” said Zack.

Sigrid’s runes weren’t the prepackaged, ceramic kind Jo had seen in bookstores. These were cut from a length of branch with the bark still on it, runic letters carved into the faint rings of the wood. Jo watched Sigrid spread some sort of animal fur—white—over the coffee table, then toss a handful of runes.

As she interpreted them, the runes agreed with Señora La Guadalupana on two important points. One was that they faced a great evil—“Interesting,” mused Sigrid, “since the concept of evil is less clear-cut among the Aesir than some religions.”

The other was that Zack and Jo would be strongest if they faced it together.

Once they were back in Zack’s car, he muttered, “That was a waste of time.”

But Jo had to wonder.

Zack didn’t wholly trust Dave and Susan Thorson, any more than the Bruja, but he wouldn’t call them flakes. Neo-pagans were big on renaming themselves, like he imagined hippies did. And they were bikers. But it’s not like they charged people for their services. “Dane” made a good living as an accountant. Maybe a warrior accountant. Who could tell, around here?

Now Sirus, who ran the Eternal Companion Pet Mummification Shop downtown, he was a flake. Not that he’d decked himself out like an extra from The Mummy Returns or anything. In fact, what with his paunch and his bad toupee, Sirus reminded Zack of his Uncle Maury. But Uncle Maury had always been kinda off, too.

It was Interview Number Five, sort of. They’d stopped off to question a Santero—a priest of Santeria—en route, but he hadn’t talked. Now they’d gone from the silent to the silly.

“As you can see,” said Sirus, with a gesture toward shelves of gilded sculptures, “I’ve designed repositories to ensure the eternal life of all kinds of animal companions. Dogs. Cats—which were sacred to the goddess Bast. Over there I offer sarcophagi designed for smaller pets such as gerbils or hamsters.”

It was at moments like this that Zack really enjoyed having Jo along—who else would even believe this? What did hamsters go for now, five bucks? The rodent’s eternal rest would probably cost a hundred times that much.

On second thought, maybe it wasn’t that funny.

“You have pets?” asked Sirus. Since Zack knew Jo did—she’d mentioned her dogs their second day out—he cut in before this glorified puppy undertaker could sniff any further.

“Actually, we were hoping you could share some information with us, Mr….”

“Sirus,” said Sirus. Just a one-name guy, like Madonna. “My brochures give you some of the basic information about the care with which I select the linens and resins for my process, and—”

Zack took the brochure but said, “About Egyptian magic.”

Sirus blinked at him. “In Almanuevo?” As if Zack would be asking about Disney World or the Vatican. Although actually, considering some of the rumors he’d heard…

“Really, any Egyptian magic would be a good start,” said Jo in that way Zack was starting to admire. She had a natural ability to soothe people, not by coddling them but just by being quiet and forthright and, well, Jo. It was almost impossible not to trust her, when she used that tone.

And Sirus did try to help. “Mummification itself was a form of magic in ancient Egypt, performed by their highest priests. Some people cremate their pets, and the big news now is cloning them. But if you want magic, mummification’s the way to go.”

Zack said, “We were thinking more along the lines of Kemetic Reconstructionists. Hermetic magicians. Tameran Wiccans.”

Sirus stared at him. So, behind the man’s back, did Jo. Zack made a mental note to explain the terms to her later and prompted, “Temple of Set?”

Sirus took a step back. “Aren’t they some kind of Satanists?” Which horribly oversimplified the TOS. Not that Zack would want to meet one of them near any dark altars.

“So you don’t do magic?” asked Jo. Looking to her, Sirus blinked away his confusion.

“I do pet mummification, Ms. James. Preserving your animal companions for eternity. Isn’t that magic enough?”

After they left, Jo said, “He has to be magic in order to make a living at this.”

“Grief makes us do funny things.” Zack glanced at the brochure and nearly choked, because he’d misjudged the prices. Mummification would cost at least a thousand times the price of a hamster. “Can we at least pretend he’s the guy we’re after?”

“No,” said Jo simply, opening her own car door. “Play nice.”

Which was exactly what he needed to hear. This kind of legwork would be driving Zack crazy by now, without Jo.

Actually, no matter what the Bruja and the Asatru had predicted, that could become a problem.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” said Ashley Vanderveer, as the waiter served them their two margaritas. “I’m almost surprised you’re here.”

The nurse practitioner wore a white Mexican peasant dress with colorful embroidery scrolling down the front. She looked nothing like a Mexican peasant.

They weren’t in a fancy restaurant, just a family-run Tex-Mex joint with plastic tablecloths and Tejana music playing from a radio over the cash register. Still, Jo felt increasingly drab in the same clothes she’d worn with Zack all day.

She didn’t like the idea that she’d looked drab with Zack. “I’m kind of surprised myself. I’ve just felt…more like socializing, lately.”

“Well, here’s to our first ladies’ night out.” And Ashley lifted her salt-rimmed glass for Jo to clink with her own.

Jo did. Then she licked a bit of salt off the edge of the glass and took a sip of her margarita on the rocks, made just right. “Our first, huh?”

“If it turns out we hate each other’s guts, it can be our only,” Ashley assured her with an easy laugh. “But since the other day, when you came by with Zack Lorenzo, I’ve been thinking…. Okay, this may sound odd, but ever since I met you, I had the weirdest feeling we were meant to be friends.”

The weirdest feeling? That’s because it’s a weird town.

Jo didn’t say that, partly because after only three days, she was struggling to keep Zack Lorenzo quotes from dropping into her head every other minute. Besides, she’d felt the same connection to the nurse practitioner, like they were both tuned into a similar frequency.

Kind of like how she’d felt when she first saw Zack—minus the sexual frustration. With Ashley, the sensation had been quieter, easier to dismiss, and Jo had done just that. Good bedside manner, she’d told herself, to explain the feeling. Whenever possible, she’d tried to handle her little first-aid emergencies on her own. Long drive to Almanuevo, she’d think.

Now, what with all this breathing and feeling, Jo was seeing her past more clearly, too. All those nights with a book, or the TV, and just the dogs for company—for years—and friendship had been in her reach the whole time. Why had she refused to even look for it, much less grasp it?

Why did you almost not take Zack’s hand, on the rocks?

She curled her healing hand protectively closed under the table. “I haven’t exactly been Miss Congeniality, in Spur.”

Ashley quirked an eyebrow. “On purpose?”

“I guess I needed to get away from everything for a while. From people. From confusion. From…” Breathing. From feeling.

Jo sipped her drink, deliberately letting some of that confusion creep back. When she’d moved to Spur, she’d gotten away on several levels. Did her mixed feelings for Zack and her dinner with Ashley mean she was returning? And was that necessarily a good thing, or did it depend on what she returned to?

“You needed to lie fallow,” said Ashley, nodding. Like a field that was left to grow over a few years to get back its nutrients. Which was pretty much on the mark.

“I suppose.” The waiter brought them little bowls of salsa and a basket of chips for dipping. Tomatoes, vinegar, peppers, cilantro—absolute heaven.

“And now,” added Ashley, “you’re ready to be plowed again.”

Jo dropped her chip onto the tablecloth. “Excuse me?”

Ashley laughed. “You know I didn’t mean it like—” Then she stopped and her eyes widened, as did her smile. “Should I have?”

“No!”

But Jo was too late. Ashley leaned partly across the table, ready for secrets. “Come on, there was something between you and Farmer Lorenzo the other morning.”

Absolute proof that the nurse practitioner was off-base. That morning there’d been nothing between Jo and Zack except annoyance. Maybe some impatience. No plow. No fallow field. No farming innuendo whatsoever.

After several days, though…

Jo did enjoy her time with Zack. During that brief, tired moment when she’d almost let go, out on the rocks, he’d called her back, pulled her out of her isolation and onto him. It had been so long, so achingly long since she’d felt a man’s body against hers even casually, much less…

Much less a body like his.

Jo didn’t like being distracted this way, not when she should be thinking about whatever the hell they were tracking. Diablero. Necromancer. God only knew what. Her first priority should be stopping evil, not exploring her slowly reviving sexuality. If this magic was like Tio’s, in the mine, she owed poor Diego—and her dead friends Frank and Gil—that much.

But Zack Lorenzo’s body was really something. Maybe, she thought grimly, thinking about Zack’s body was safer than thinking about the walking dead.

“He’s good-looking in that blue-collar, caveman way of his,” Ashley insisted. “You don’t think that’s sexy?”

Oh, yes. Breathing and feeling were making it a lot harder to concentrate on this investigation. But Jo couldn’t regret either, any more than she regretted the slight burn of jalapeños in the salsa. Salsa was supposed to be spicy.

And life?

Still… “There’s nothing between Zack and me,” she said firmly, and she meant it. There’d been no flirting, no kissing.

Not even any consideration of plowing.

“Nothing except the investigation,” she added quickly. “Which reminds me. I had some questions—beyond what you already explained about snakes.” A phone call had clarified that only mammals got rabies and yes, Ashley had seen an increase in the number of snakebites over the last year, to the point that she’d doubled her supply of antivenin.

Now Ashley held Jo’s gaze a moment longer, deliberating her honesty—or maybe reading her aura? She was a curandera, and a Wiccan. Then she smiled. “What do you want to know?”

Jo said, “Tell me about magic.”

And with a nod, Ashley did. For the entire meal, and into their dessert of sopaipillas and honey. Hardly anything in her explanations seemed concrete—and yet it all felt right, which was something Jo was already beginning to associate with the idea of magic. Magic might be abstract, but it was real.

And individual. “We all have certain powers,” said Ashley. “Mine is healing. Lorenzo’s abilities are clearly protective. Yours…I think your talent lies in grounding.” She described a visualization very much like Sigrid Thorson’s World Tree imagery.

“Do that, and you’ll empower yourself, every time,” Ashley said. “Anything you deliberately think, during that meditation, may also carry more weight in the universe, so think ethically.”

“Think ethically?”

“Many Wiccans believe that any harm you magic toward others comes back at you three times as powerful,” Ashley cautioned. “And we’re against doing manipulative magic.”

“Like love spells,” Jo guessed, remembering the charm.

“Exactly—at least if you name someone. Why would you want a person you have to capture through magic in the first place?”

Even once she was home for the night, to the happy greeting of Butch and Sundance, Jo couldn’t forget Ashley’s question—or the answer that felt far too clear and powerful to be ignored.

Because it seems safe, she’d thought. Because the idea of risking rejection can be scarier than zombies.

Or was that the idea of risking acceptance? Blaming magic would make the pain easier, if it fell apart—and it would taint everything. Jo still wasn’t sure how much she believed in magic. But just in case, she took the dogs for a long hike, where hardly anything could sneak up on a person, and she brought the love charm the Bruja had given her. It smelled of dried roses. She untied the ribbon and let the silk fall open, and let the contents blow away in the Texas wind. “No harm,” she whispered.

Maybe it was just superstition. But as the dogs escorted her back to the comfortable normalcy of her house, loping by to lick her hand—Jo felt increasingly tempted to end this craziness.

Tempted to leave the socializing to social people.

Tempted to leave the investigating to the investigator.

Zack had been right. Missing bodies in Almanuevo weren’t under her legal jurisdiction. True, things in Spur weren’t busy. She had vacation time, and Deputy Fred had her pager number. But who would it hurt if she left the complications and the people—and the breathing and the feeling—alone, and went back to her nice, quiet existence in her nice, little town?

She went to bed, almost convinced. But instead of zombies, her sleep was plagued by more pleasant scenarios concerning a certain private investigator and what could’ve happened if she’d put the love charm to use, and a voice. Is there harm here…?

When she startled herself awake, aroused and aware in the windy night, Jo changed her mind. Giving up on the investigation would be cowardice. If there was one thing Josephine James was not, it was cowardly.

That the desert air blowing through her cracked window smelled faintly of roses…that had to be her imagination, right?

At least the weather was cooling off again.

“You have got to be kidding,” deadpanned Angelique Dupres, hands on her gauze-wrapped hips as she glared at Zack. This was Interview Number Twelve—Jo had dubbed the previous day “Wiccan Wednesday,” since they’d chatted with practitioners of Gardnerian Wicca, Faerie Wicca and Dianic Wicca. Well, Jo had talked to the last group; that particular coven did not like men.

Today they were debriefing a voodoo queen in the back room of the Good Vibrations occult shop. Folding chairs formed a big, empty circle—for rituals, drumming, or discussion? Zack, Jo and Miss Dupres stood.

“I’m not kidding,” said Zack. “Necromancy. Walking dead.”

“Honey, I do not do zombies,” stated Miss Dupres.

“Lucky zombies,” said Zack; not that Angelique was hard on the eyes. But that big boa she wore over her shoulders—and not the feather kind—tended to distract a guy from the mocha-colored cleavage she had on display. “That doesn’t answer my—”

“What Mr. Lorenzo probably means to say,” interrupted Jo, “is that we realize you have nothing to do with whatever’s going on in Almanuevo. But as one of the leading practitioners of voodoo in the area—”

“Vodoun,” corrected Angelique, though clearly intrigued.

“Excuse me, Vodoun,” agreed Jo, “you are our best hope to finding out who is responsible…and hopefully stopping him.”

Zack was so impressed, he decided to forgive her for that What Mr. Lorenzo means to say crap. He liked that Jo wasn’t thrown by the snake. Or the cleavage. He was kinda thrown by the cleavage. Angelique’s top was tight and low-cut, under the snake.

“Honey, if you are dealin’ with zombies you’ll need more than guns or badges,” advised Angelique. “Only way to stop a zombie is to kill him again—cut off his head, sew up his mouth so he can’t be answerin’ the bokor. Like that.”

Jo cocked her head, encouraging. “The bokor being…?”

“Bokor’s a houngan—a priest—who does black magic. But you’ve been visitin’ the Almanuevo two-plex too much, if you’re thinkin’ that’s what Vodoun is all about. We are a legal religion, we worship the old loas, and yes, we do magic.”

Zack said, “This town just has a two-plex? Only two movies at any given time?” No wonder the place was full of nut-jobs.

Jo said, “Including necromancy, right? Vodoun has been known to do magic dealing with dead people.”

“Could say the same thing about Christianity,” noted Angelique. “That whole Lazarus story—how do you explain that?”

Zack opened his mouth to protest that there were a few important differences between voodoo bokors and Jesus Christ, but Jo surprised him by putting her arm around his waist, and he shut up. Again. When he glanced down at her, she shot him a dark look.

At least she hadn’t kicked him.

“Santeria, there’s a few of them who do necromancy too,” Angelique continued. “And you’ll be findin’ more of them around here than us. You find mayomberos—black witches, Santero witches—and maybe you’ll find your necromancer. But don’t you be tryin’ to frame Vodoun.”

“We’re not trying to frame anyone,” Jo assured her in that forthright voice. “We’re just trying to find out what’s going on in Almanuevo.”

“Somethin’ sure is,” muttered Angelique. “Somethin’ bad.”

But the priestess would admit to nothing more.

“See, this is the part of the job that I hate,” griped Zack, climbing into the passenger seat of Jo’s blue, ’80s model, four-door truck. After another of their sources—supposedly a gypsy woman—had looked at the Ferrari before naming a ridiculous fee, Jo had insisted on doing at least some of the driving. Zack didn’t like it. Mainly, he’d prefer to drive, but they’d had that argument. Neither did he enjoy feeling like he was in the opening credits for the Beverly Hillbillies. Jo’s shocks weren’t what he was used to and there were places on the bench seat where only duct tape held the springs into the upholstery. She didn’t have either a CD player or air-conditioning—if the weather hadn’t dipped into the fifties the previous day, still windy of course, that would have been a deal-breaker.

He particularly didn’t like being on the passenger side with nothing to do but look through her box of tapes. Actual audio cassettes with the names of the bands written on them in a satisfyingly messy hand. At least it was good music. For tapes.

“What don’t you like,” challenged Jo with an easy grin. “Buxom priestesses?” The door squeaked painfully when she slammed it shut—and it did need slamming, for the latch to work.

“Who the hell says buxom anymore? The woman was stacked, and no, that was not the problem. What I don’t like is that the flakes are bad enough but at least they talk. What they say may be bull, but they say it—and say it and say it. Even nowadays, when you’d think anything goes, too many legitimate practitioners are either under vows of secrecy or scared off by the badge.”

He looked deliberately at the star pinned to Jo’s denim hip.

She snorted, and started the truck. It took two tries to catch. “So now I’m the one intimidating them?”

“Satan as an IRS agent couldn’t intimidate that woman. All I’m saying is, it gets frustrating.” And that wasn’t the only frustration about their search. Despite his best efforts not to notice, Zack liked how the sheriff slanted her laughing blue eyes toward him, her soft lips fighting a smile. She wore another of her T-shirts under a denim jacket—today’s shirt was green—and despite being neither tight nor low cut, it didn’t do a lousy job at delineating how buxom Jo was, either. Not that he’d call her stacked; her figure was more understated, enough so that he’d gotten the impression she didn’t wear a bra.

Which, he reminded himself, was really none of his business.

What he liked most about Jo, though, was that she spoke her mind. Gabriella used to agree with him a lot when they were dating, enough to make him feel really good about himself—until they had married and he starting seeing how much she’d held back. Then he felt like something of a stooge. He’d loved her even more when she stood up to him—but he’d never been sure whether to believe her, when she got agreeable. He’d found himself holding back, if she agreed too fast, and that was no good either.

If ever Jo James did agree with him, he guessed he would believe her. She sure had nothing to gain from flattery.

“You know, sometimes you just don’t sound like an investigator of paranormal phenomena,” she said now.

“See, now you’re making me sound flaky too,” he protested. “I’m a legitimate P.I. who just has an open mind about weirdness.”

“You said Crystal, at the rock shop, should report to her mother ship.”

“Did I say it to her face?” No, he did not.

“That’s real big of you.”

Zack refrained from either joking about how big he really was—professionalism, Lorenzo—or asking when Jo’s truck had last gotten a tune-up. Especially since the answer probably hadn’t changed since the last two times he’d annoyed her by asking.

He hated her truck. They weren’t taking her truck again.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Jo admitted as she bounced them toward their next appointment. This meeting, Zack’s partner Cecil had set up with a man who claimed personal concerns about Almanuevo’s missing dead. “One minute, you seem to really believe in this magic stuff, the next, you’re mocking it.”

“I never mock magic,” he protested.

“Her mother ship?”

He held up a hand to fend off her sarcasm. “I was mocking a woman who is pretending to be magic,” he clarified. “Did you hear some of the jargon coming out of her mouth? ‘Auric vibrations’ and ‘attuning energies’ and ‘tapping the earth force’? I bet she didn’t understand half of it herself.”

“The way I see it,” said Jo, “magic seems pretty hard to describe. You said yourself that it cloaks itself in reality.”

“Yeah, well I’m a smart guy.”

“So if magic is abstract,” Jo forged on, “then it makes sense that different people would describe it in different ways. Why should ‘vibrations’ and ‘attuning energies’ seem silly when we’re already talking magic?”

“You forgot about ‘tapping into the earth force.’”

She flipped him off, which made him grin.

He relented. “Half of the crystals she was selling were enhanced, synthetic, or flat-out imitation. I work with a supplier in Chicago—it’s a good way to monitor the magic community—so I know the Federal Trade Commission requires sellers to disclose which gems are man-made. For fair-trade reasons, though you’d think it would also affect how well the stone taps into the earth force.”

Jo said, “Well…they were manufactured on Earth, weren’t they? It’s not like they’re attuned to the Mars force.”

Was there nothing this woman wouldn’t fight him on?

Zack said, “And her stock was overpriced. Jade, turquoise, obsidian—semiprecious stones at precious stone prices.”

Jo considered that. “Really?”

“Really. Trust me on this. The lady makes out like she’s Wiccan, with her pentagram and saying ‘Blessed Be’ when we walked in, but unlike some magic users—like a certain Bruja I won’t mention—most real Wiccans are iffy about the charging for their magic, definitely about overcharging. Either Crystal’s putting some expensive spell on the crystals without mentioning it—big no-no—or she’s selling baskets full of overpriced rocks. She’s using the whole magic angle—and the fact that most tourists are probably long on want and short on knowledge—to run a con. Not only should she contact her mother ship, she should take the first flight home, which is probably just Suburbia U.S.A.”

Not that he felt strongly about people duping suckers hungry for a taste of something beyond the harsh reality of their lives, right? Hell, that sort of thing had angered him even before he realized some of the magic was real.

And that Gabriella may have been duped of more than money.

“Besides,” he added, a touch less strident, “She hasn’t noticed anything wrong with the vibrations around Almanuevo, and even the other flakes can sense that much.”

Jo cocked her head for a moment. “Okay.”

“Not to mention—” Zack paused, confused. “Okay?”

“Yes. You made your point.”

“I did?” Huh. Well, he believed her.

“So which of the other ones did you think were flakes, and which seemed legitimate? In your professional opinion?”

She really couldn’t tell? “Crystal’s a flake, and Sirus the mummy guy. The massage therapist knew his stuff—I can see why he and Vanderveer are buds—but I’d tag him as a health professional more than a magic user. Seriously,” he added, in case Jo thought he was being sarcastic. “The slacker coven—”

Jo slanted a warning gaze at him, like it was her job to defend the world from verbal slights.

“Fine, that group of Wiccan twenty-somethings who happen to hold jobs in food service or low-level retail, they were earnest enough. But they’re short on training, discipline and connections—they have no idea how big their own occult community even is. Did you hear them going on about being such a minority?”

Jo shrugged. “Point taken.”

“Now the Bruja, the Gardnerian and Faerie Wicca high-priestesses, the Thorsons, our silent Santero and our friend the voodoo queen—they might just be legitimate.”

“Vodoun,” Jo corrected him.

“Tomayto, Tomahto,” he warned.

She just shook her head, coaxing her truck into the parking lot of the Soul-Food Bistro. “So who’s this fellow we’re meeting here, again? Is he into magic?”

“Apparently not. My partner’s been putting out feelers over the Internet, looking for other area disappearances. This guy wanted to talk in person, despite not being local.”

“Someone came all the way out to Almanuevo to talk to us?”

“To talk to me.” He unlatched his lap belt—no wimpy shoulder harnesses or airbags for Jo. The belt didn’t retract.

“Tomayto, Tomahto.” She killed her engine. It coughed a few times before accepting death. They should have taken the Ferrari.

The Soul-Food Bistro tried to be cutting edge, with all its neon spirals and twinkly light stars and synthesizer music. But the multiply pierced hostess had a Texas tan that all the black clothes and makeup in the world couldn’t return to Goth. When Zack gave her his name, she led them to a row of private booths off the main room. A particularly well-dressed stranger stood beside one, seriously eyeing both Zack and Jo before finally shaking their hands.

Zack took one look at the guy—the suit, the ring, the quiet, dangerous attitude—and had to rethink his small-town stereotypes. He also wished he’d rethought bringing Jo.

What the hell kind of business did the mob have in a New Age resort town?

Chapter 8

By the end of their lunch appointment, Jo had gotten an intriguing new look at Zack Lorenzo. By nighttime, despite the distraction of their less-than-normal investigation, she still hadn’t gotten over it.

“That guy was really a mobster?” she asked again as they carried plastic bags of Chinese take-out to his motel room. After a week together, it seemed silly to fear the room—except for how cavelike and close it felt. Jo really didn’t like caves.

“Speak up,” Zack suggested. He seemed to have something against his door key. “But this time, make sure to clearly say his name, so it gets reported back to the right family.”

She watched as he ditched his bags on the shadowy table, then went immediately to the window and pulled the drapes. Him and drapes. “It’s just so…Sopranos.”

“You watch The Sopranos?” His delivery was what she’d come to think of as classic Lorenzo—dry, low and just a touch condescending. The way he adjusted the drapes before flipping on the light switch seemed both automatic and out of place.

“Well, no. But I read magazines.” She entered the room a little more cautiously. They’d been seeing snakes only at a distance over the past few days—not counting Angelique Dupres’s boa constrictor. But after her experience on the rocks, Jo didn’t want to take chances. Even at a distance, it seemed like a lot of snakes. “It’s just that…this isn’t exactly Chicago, you know?”

“Really? Musta slipped past me.”

“We don’t get a lot of mobsters around here.” She moved paperwork off his table, trying to stack it in staggered piles so nothing that wasn’t mixed would mix. It was a lot of paperwork.

“I told you,” said Zack, taking the papers from her. His hands were much bigger than hers. “It’s wiseguys. Not mobsters, not gangsters. When you talk like that, I expect to see men in fedoras carrying tommy guns. And don’t act like Chicago’s got a lease on organized crime. It’s a good city.”

“No offense meant.” She began to pull at the knot tying the closest bag of Chinese food. “Texas has its crime problems too. The Big Bend Park, a couple hours south of here, has to deal with drug runners across the border.”

He grunted, less than satisfied.

She looked up to where he’d moved his papers onto the huge, neatly made hotel bed. “Do you suppose that’s why there were wiseguys here in the first place? Drug running?”

He shook his head and watched her work the plastic knot. “You do realize, right, that you’re having a harder time adjusting to the reality of the Mafia than you are to the idea that one of their associates may be among the walking dead?”

“That’s an exaggeration.” The comparison. Not, sadly, the walking dead part.

He came back to her side, solid and there, took the bag from her hands, and simply tore the plastic apart, lifting out Styrofoam boxes and little paper sacks. “I’m just saying, here.”

Jo went to work on the second bag’s knot. “Maybe it’s because I’m, oh, a sheriff? As in, law enforcement? Organized crime, a possible mob hit in my neighborhood…”

“Not your jurisdiction,” he reminded her, sing-song. When he reached for her bag, she snatched it back from him.

“Take that one,” she ordered, pointing at the third sack, unknotted, with colas and such from a gas station food-mart.

“It’s just plastic.” He reached for her bag again.

She lifted her chin to better glare up at him. “And I want a few bags whole to put trash in. Can we open the blinds?”

“No.” Okay. Zack started carrying colas to the minifridge of his kitchenette. “Anyway, Capelli was talking to me off the record, so he has client privilege,” he said over his shoulder. “I knew as soon as we walked in that I shouldn’t have brought you. I really shouldn’t have told you what he was, later.”

“I think I would have figured it out.” She lowered her voice, a little raspy, to mimic their lunch appointment. “‘I, too, had an associate. Word reached our administration that he had met an unfortunate end near Almanuevo. Then we hear conflicting reports. This disturbs us.’”

“You don’t sound like Capelli,” warned Zack, grinning. “You sound like Marlon Brando’s and Kathleen Turner’s love child. Or my Uncle Maury. Eat.”

Jo sank into a plastic chair and peeked into Styrofoam containers until she found her beef-with-snow-peas. It had been refreshing, ordering Chinese with Zack Lorenzo. Her extended family, when they all got together, usually ordered the strangest things offered. Sometimes they attempted to do it in Mandarin. In contrast, she and Zack both went with the simplest dishes they saw. “What, your Uncle Maury’s a wiseguy too?”

Zack leveled a plastic spork—half-spoon, half-fork—at her. They’d both ignored the chopsticks. “Do not even joke about that,” he warned. “Just because we’re Italian doesn’t mean we’re connected. We’re a cop family. Straight cops, not meat-eaters.”

She raised an eyebrow at his almond chicken.

“Meat-eaters means corrupt cops,” he clarified.

“Oh. Well, some people think all Texans own horses.”

“See?”

She certainly could picture him as a police officer. He had that air of competent authority that so many people in law enforcement attempted, and not all of them managed. Not that he made a bad private detective, either.

After their visit with Capelli, they’d driven out to the Tierra del Oeste Resort and Dude Ranch, which had cancelled their most recent rattlesnake roundup and some of their “vortex tours” because of all the snakes. The resort offered them a spa treatment—including aura cleansing and chakra realignment—but they’d begged off. If it was possible to know this supernatural stuff without actually being a follower or practitioner, Zack Lorenzo was the go-to guy. Though how he’d gone from police officer to collecting rumors about the walking dead….

“So why’d you quit the force?” she asked. It had been four days since she’d risked a personal question. Live a little.

Zack looked up from shoveling in mouthfuls of food, seemingly more surprised than annoyed. “Hunh?”

“You said you come from a cop family. I’m guessing you were a cop yourself. Why’d you quit?”

Zack sat back in his chair, considering her for a long, serious moment—then shrugged one shoulder. “People can’t exactly file reports against most of the things I’m after now.”

“So you quit going after the everyday bad guys to track the otherworldly bad guys?”

“Something like that.” He folded his arms, and it still looked more impressive on him. “You had to have been a cop before you took the job in Spur, right? At least for academy training.”

He was a private investigator, all right. “Albuquerque,” Jo agreed. “I thought it would help me feel more in control.”

He snorted at that likelihood—and it was true that Jo had never realized how much crime surrounded them every day until she took up city police work. In control? Hardly. And yet…

“I did really well at first. I was kind of driven, pretending so hard that the cave-in hadn’t happened—not all of it, anyway—that I’d about convinced myself. But…”

He waited, eyes intense despite his casual posture.

But, given the statistical probabilities, she’d been partnered with men on the force. Good men. She’d found it impossible to trust her partners to not foolishly risk themselves to protect her. That constant fear made her jumpy, and jumpy cops were dangerous cops. She was so unwilling to risk another man dying for her, she’d gotten in their way trying to stop them.

“Spur was a better opportunity,” she finished weakly, then frowned. “And how did this conversation get to be about me?”

He grinned. Don’t investigate the investigator.

She wanted to ask again why he’d quit the force—he’d admitted to wanting to fight evil, but not to what opened his eyes to it in the first place. But she’d asked once. That was clearly her quota on personal questions for the week.

They still had files to look over, maps to chart, theories to advance. Jo was looking forward to seeing what kind of ideas a man who’d been tracking evil for a couple of years would offer. Why complicate matters?

She’d worked too hard, since he’d rescued her—

Since he’d drawn her back into life and safety, since she’d sprawled on top of him, since the Bruja had advised her to “lead him from his darkness.”

—to lose the easy working relationship they’d built for any but the best of reasons. Her top priority, like his, had to be uncovering what kind of evil had set up residence here.

Because almost everyone they’d talked to, including Capelli, had in large ways or small somehow confirmed it.

There was some kind of supernatural evil in Almanuevo.

And it was getting stronger.

Zack had avoided inviting Jo back into his motel room since that first morning together, but it wasn’t as uncomfortable as he’d feared. Within an hour of finishing dinner, they had food containers stuffed away—in knotted plastic bags—and paperwork spread again across the table for both of them to study. An area map lay spread across the bed, too. It would’ve been easier to tack the thing up, but Jo defended the fuzzy wallpaper—flocked, she called it. Apparently it was older than they were, and pinning the map up there would be like vandalizing a museum.

A butt-ugly museum, to his way of thinking, but still.

Besides, it kept the bed as focused on work as they were. And just in case Zack started to forget that Jo James was just a colleague—instead of, say, watching the nape of her neck—sharp pushpins bristled from the map in four separate colors.

In blue they’d marked the general location of almost every known death in town over the past year. Red tacks marked the deaths for the six people who were rumored to either have vanished or been seen alive afterward, including the presumed resting place for Mr. Capelli’s “associate.” Yellow tacks marked the area that two dead people had been glimpsed walking.

Zack hoped these zombies, or whatever they were, weren’t like cockroaches—that when you saw one or two, you knew there must be hundreds. That could be really, really unpleasant.

Jo, beside Zack, stared down at the map. “This is so sad.”

“You don’t think, disturbing?” Zack wished they had one more confirmed report of a walker; with three, they could triangulate. He’d used green pins to mark a handful of reports about strangers wandering aimlessly through the desert, but there wasn’t enough connection to the missing bodies yet.

“Not just that,” admitted Jo, hooking thumbs in her belt loops. “That this many people die at all. Heart attacks, illness, accidents. I hate to see it all mapped out like this.”

For a year’s yield, the town didn’t seem to be doing all that bad. Not compared to a city. But Zack understood.

“When you’re a kid,” he said, “you get this idea that if you’re good enough, everything will work out in the end. Blame fairy tales, or sitcoms, or Sunday school. Whatever. You think you’re gonna get one of the happy endings. Then something blindsides you, and along with everything else you’re feeling—”

Grief. Shock. Fear that it could happen again or might never stop. More feelings than even an enlightened man could admit to, and Zack had never considered himself enlightened.

Jo said softly, “Along with everything else…?”

“Part of you just wants to yell like a kid that it isn’t fair. Like if you yell loud enough, and long enough, they’ll give you back your ball. You know?”

She didn’t look at him, which was a relief. But she nodded.

Like anything in life was fair. He and Gabriella had been young, seemingly healthy, in love—and she’d died. Murder or not. Evil or not. The real horror was mostly that she’d died.

Things weren’t supposed to work that way.

“My parents were killed when I was sixteen,” admitted Jo, her calm uneven. “A car accident. I was home with my little brother when we got the call, and he did yell. He said I was lying, then he yelled that it wasn’t fair.”

“Did anyone give him back his ball?” asked Zack, sliding his gaze toward her.

She shook her head. In that moment, Zack wanted to hold her more than ever. He wanted to make her hurt better. Hell, he wanted to give her back her parents, while he was at it. Surprise. It wasn’t going to happen. No happy endings.

He looked back at the map. “Let’s cross-reference whatever we have on the vanished bodies with the reports of people seen wandering the hills,” he suggested. “There’s got to be at least one match. I want a third positive sighting.”

“As positive as any of them are,” Jo reminded him, boosting herself easily onto the bar, but she picked up the obits folder all the same. Was it his imagination, or did she look relieved?

They went back to just working together, Jo reading and Zack pacing around the bed, searching for a pattern in the push-pins. The center of all this—if there was one—was in the desert. But this whole damned country was desert. That didn’t say much.

Jo’s cowboy-booted heels thumped against the wall of the bar beneath her. “Wait a minute…”

Zack turned to her. “You found something?”

He already knew how pretty she was—and honestly so, without makeup or hair gel or anything helping. That was a given, by now. But if she found something, she’d be beautiful.

Jo lifted her gaze from the folder balanced on her blue-jeaned knees, and her eyes were bright. “Kathy Hurd, the tourist who dropped dead of the heat last July? She had a record.”

“Yeah.” Cecil, Zack’s partner, sent him a lot of paperwork, but Zack did read it. Especially in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t sleep. “Child abuse, right?”

Jo nodded, excitement flushing her tanned cheeks. “Her obituary said something about her children being estranged from her, which seemed odd. As opposed to the rest of all this,” she added with a grin, before he could. “So I looked deeper and it turns out the abuse cost her custody. According to the records, she threw a bigger fit about losing her welfare benefits.”

So far, she was still just pretty. “So?”

“So wouldn’t you say this woman was a bitch?”

“Depends on how obnoxious the kids—okay, okay!” He laughed at her annoyance. He liked that she could take a joke. That and her nape. “Yeah, I noticed that much when I first saw her story. Nobody likely cried too hard when she forgot to drink her Evian.”

Jo stared at him with one of those smug, womanly expressions. The waiting-for-him-to-catch-up look.

Zack shook his head, nowhere near catching up.

“She was a child abuser, and Capelli’s associate was probably a criminal, maybe a runner, here.” Jo waited.

Zack still wasn’t catching up.

“One might even call them…evil?”

“Drug runners and child abusers aren’t the same kind of evil we’re dealing with,” Zack reminded her. “There’s a long road between felonious intent and the dark arts.”

Jo put down her folder and looked at him straight-on. “Why?”

“Why? You don’t think there’s a difference between, say, slapping around your wife, or robbing a liquor store, and performing human sacrifice to invoke the powers of darkness?”

“Different manifestations, maybe,” Jo conceded, but that was as much as he got. “Who’s to say that the forces at work, the actual vibrations, aren’t the same? In every case, you have someone thinking their own life and needs are so damned important, they justify screwing up someone else’s. Whether they do it with a fist, or a gun, or black candles and inverted holy symbols, they’re all doing basically the same thing.”

Zack had honestly never thought of evil that normally before. It intrigued him. But… “We’re talking the walking dead here,” he said. “This is a little bigger than domestic disputes.”

“Not for the individuals involved, I bet it isn’t,” she retorted. “And magic hides itself in reality, right?”

Fine. Throw his own explanations back at him. “So?”

Jo leaned forward with impatience, which unintentionally gave her more cleavage. He assumed unintentionally. The heels of her boots thudded more gently against the bar for balance. “So what if this diablero is only drafting evil dead people?”

“Like in the Bruce Campbell movies?”

“I think those turned evil after they were dead.” Trust her to know the Evil Dead films. He was impressed. “These…oh.”

Some of her excitement drained from her. He may have been arguing with her, but that’s because he thought she could take it. Now that she drew back, Zack felt disappointed. He liked that she pushed back. It let him cut loose, too.

“Oh, what?”

“You’re right. It’s a stupid theory.”

“Did I say it was a stupid theory? Just because I make a tiny distinction between little Joey kicking over his neighbors’ trash cans and little Damion drinking the blood of innocents…?”

“The college boy,” Jo explained. “Brent, right? He was just out drinking beer with his friends. He wasn’t evil.”

“Actually,” Zack said slowly, thinking. “Give me a second.”

He picked up his mobile and dialed from memory.

“You know it’s after midnight, right?” Watching him, Jo used her braced arms to readjust her position on the bar.

Definitely no bra, he thought, noticing in spite of himself.

“Yeah, I know.” When the line picked up with a sleepy, British-sounding hello, Zack said, “Hey, I need you to dig up some dirt on the Harper boy.”

“Zack?” asked Cecil. “You do know that it’s past midnight.”

“Jo just told me. How soon can you do it?”

“Josephine is there?” asked Cecil, with his strange knack of completely overlooking the important stuff for the minor, social details. “Oh, do say hello for me.”

“Cecil? Making a request, here. I remember something about Brent Harper having a juvie record. Find out what for.” Zack slid his gaze back to Jo, who was watching with interest.

She had the slightest natural curl in her shiny brown hair. Her tanned arms had muscles—subtle, but there. She still wore her sheriff’s star on one hip, though she’d taken off her gun belt to eat. Not a lot like most women of his acquaintance.

Unique.

“Those records will be sealed,” Cecil protested.

“Then ask the mother.”

“Not at one-thirty in the morning I shan’t. I’ll e-mail her, but the rest simply must wait for dawn.”

“Call me with what you do find,” Zack insisted. “I’m working a theory, here.”

Jo arched her eyebrows at him, and he rolled his eyes.

“Sheriff James and me are working on a theory, here,” he corrected himself grudgingly.

“Will do,” agreed Cecil, sounding increasingly awake. “Have you said hello for me, yet?”

“Cecil says hello,” said Zack to Jo as he hung up the phone. “He’ll call back when he finds anything more.”

“When he finds anything more about what?” asked Jo, eyes bright with shared interest. “What kind of juvenile records?”

Zack came to stand beside the bar, sorting through the folders beside her blue-jeaned hip, increasingly excited himself. He loved when ideas snapped into place like this. “His mother mentioned him getting into trouble. At the time, I didn’t follow up on it. Stupid, I know, but why make a grieving mother linger on her dead son’s mistakes. But in Nurse Vanderveer’s initial report on little Brent’s body, she mentioned…”

There! The folder with the report she’d filed. He found the description of the body, skimmed it, and poked one finger at the pertinent piece of information before holding it in front of Jo, not even considering that it would disgust her. And it didn’t.

Seated on the bar, she was as tall as him. If he leaned a little closer, while she read, he could have rested his chin on her shoulder. She smelled good, womanly and natural. Not like Gabriella’s perfume, which he had loved. Soapy and sunshiny, instead. The scent tugged his interests in a new direction.

“A swastika tattoo,” Jo read softly.

Zack closed the file and nodded. “A swastika tattoo.”

“Which could mean anything, among teenage boys.”

Zack was too busy savoring the existence of any theory at all. “Or it could mean the kid was into white supremacy, which plenty of folks, myself included, would equate with evil.”

Jo’s face was only inches from his now. “Whatever diablero’s doing this, he may be targeting morally corrupt people.”

“Yeah.” Bracing one hand on the bar, beside her thigh, Zack scanned her face. Smart lady, to have figured this out. Beautiful lady. “Now, I know you’re new to this stuff, Sheriff. But in the private investigation biz, that’s what we call a clue.”

“Oh is it?” Jo demanded, her words low with amusement.

“Damn straight,” he agreed, his voice husky—and enjoyed watching her soft smile widen, her blue eyes brighten.

“You’re welcome,” Jo said smugly, which was even better.

So Zack kissed her.

Chapter 9

The kiss didn’t surprise her.

Not at first, it didn’t. Although Jo hadn’t been expecting it—had expended considerable energy not expecting it—the minute Zack stepped between her knees and brushed his mouth across hers felt too right to be a surprise.

The kiss was pure Zack Lorenzo—part bluster, part investigation, all competence. His lips felt firm, warm, provoking…and either safe, or truly dangerous. Maybe both.

Her world shook, like standing too near a blast site.

Once he kissed her, Zack stood there, his face very close to hers, and waited. His green-brown gaze searched hers, expectant. He’d planted one big hand on either side of her thighs, on the counter, so that even when she dropped her gaze, his sheer size filled her field of vision. A glimpse of chest hair and a gold religious medal.

Her lips felt…alive.

“Thank you,” Zack said. Careful. Feeling her out.

Jo looked back up, startled. “Thank…?” For the kiss?

“You said, ‘you’re welcome,’” he reminded her, eyes teasing. And she realized what he was doing, here.

He was giving her an out. Asking—without the messy business of actually asking—if it was okay for him to kiss her like that. Maybe if it was okay to kiss her some more.

At the moment, she could think of nothing more okay in the world.

“Anytime,” she agreed—and lifted her arms to drape across his big, burly shoulders in invitation.

Zack clearly didn’t need it engraved. He leaned even closer now, one big hand sliding behind her to cup the small of her back. Jo arched into the sensation, the support of him.

Then he kissed her more deliberately, more intensely, and she arched into that instead.

Oh God…how long had it been since a man had kissed her? Diego, of course. Everything had ended with Diego’s death, not just because she’d loved him but because of what his death showed her. Darkness haunted this world. Good didn’t always win.

No amount of crying would get your ball back.

But damn it, there was life in this world, too. And heat. And heartbeats, and raspy, gasping breath. And hot, increasingly confident kisses from big Italian P.I.s.

Jo slanted her mouth across Zack’s, to better respond to the dare of his lips. Had they been trying to one-up each other, during this investigation? It didn’t stop when the kissing started. He slid a hand into her tight back pocket. She looped her legs behind his, her heels hooking behind his thighs, and drew him hard against her. He kissed across the line of her jaw to her ear, then the side of her throat, almost the back of her neck, his breath hot, real. She rubbed her nose across his cheek, savoring the rasp of his shadowy whiskers.

And still they kept returning to lips.

Alive. She felt alive enough to wonder where her heart had gone, all these years. Alive enough to be glad Zack had shown up to help drag her out of that self-inflicted stasis. Had the Bruja wanted her to lead Zack from some kind of darkness? Maybe the old witch had confused things. Jo was the one peeking out of the darkness, now. She could breathe again. She could feel things.

And oh, she was feeling this. Hot and hungry and real.

“Josephine,” murmured Zack, anchoring her against him with a hand on her back. Her breast scraped briefly against the leather of his shoulder holster; they grinned and readjusted accordingly.

“It’s Jo,” she corrected him with a half laugh, kissing and tasting down his throat. Josephine would never kiss like this.

“Josie?” He breathed it into her ear, like an offering. He was still imagining an “e” in Jo, wasn’t he?

“Get over it,” she warned, nuzzling his collar. “Zaccheri.”

He groaned at what she assumed was her mispronunciation. Or maybe it was at the collar nuzzling. “Aw, Jo…” he murmured, spreading fingers into her short hair, cradling her head, holding her in place for more kisses. She was happy to oblige.

Lips made way for tongues in a silent, delicious game of double-dog-dare. Each going just a little deeper, just a little longer, hands wandering toward places just a little naughtier….

And something thudded against the curtain-shrouded window.

Jo jumped, startled and suddenly aware. The way Zack spun out of their embrace to face it, drawing his pistol while shouldering himself between her and the interruption, was the only thing that kept her from drowning in that awareness.

What was she doing? What was he doing? And—were those footsteps she heard?

It was one thing to enjoy being alive, what with breathing and feeling and all—but weren’t they going a little fast, here?

Thank God for distractions! If they were lucky, it would be something dangerous that needed immediate attention. More likely, though… “It sounded like something flew into the window,” Jo assured Quick-Draw Lorenzo, hopping off the bar. The ugly shag carpet muffled her boots’ landing.

“Uh,” said Zack.

She crossed to the drapes. “That happens more during the daylight, but it could have been a bird.”

“Nuh…” said Zack, like some kind of preverbal warning, even as Jo extended one hand, caught the edge of the curtain, and drew it aside to peek out at the parking lot.

She tried to stay out of his line of fire.

The lot was fairly dark, the better to see the waning moon overhead. Most of the lights by individual doors had been turned off, for a better night’s sleep. Beyond that, pools of light from high streetlamps lit the asphalt. The only cars in view—some with trailers, one hopeful SUV with a boat—looked parked and locked. Nothing moved on the two-lane highway; it was that late.

Jo was in a motel room with a big, sexy man, this late.

She distracted herself by focusing on the noise, looking downward to where a fallen bird might have dropped. She had to squint to make out the shape that marred the white sidewalk.

“It’s a snake!” she called over her shoulder. “But I think it’s dead. Either it hurled itself at the window hard enough to knock itself out, or someone threw it, but why….”

Did she see something moving past the parking lot?

When she glanced back, Zack hadn’t moved from the bar, except to lower his pistol. But he’d paled. And Jo’s heart, only so recently aware of its renewed rhythm, stumbled.

Lorenzo was staring at the window—but his left hand was moving, unconsciously fingering his wedding ring.

Windows at night. Only a fear that irrational would have Zack drawing against a freaking noise, from the middle of the best damned kissing of his life. Faced with instincts he couldn’t even name, he barely managed to lower his pistol when Jo stepped into his line of fire. Even as she opened the drapes to reveal shiny, glass-covered blackness, Zack felt that old, unnamed paralysis wash over him. He couldn’t draw breath even to protest. Then he was staring at it, losing himself in that mirror into darkness. Clearly, from words he heard only at a distance, Jo could see things beyond it. He clung to her voice like a lifeline. Bird, no. Snake, yes. Dead, maybe.

But mostly, all Zack could see was a glimpse of his own small reflection floating against the blackness. All he could feel was the certainty of failure, loss, death. Some kind of threat waiting in the glassy darkness. Some kind of ruin. Loss like he never wanted to know, ever again….

Blessedly, Jo let the drapes fall back into place as she turned back to him. But even as Zack found himself able to swallow again, able to draw breath, she attacked.

“You are still married, aren’t you?”

He blinked at her. “What?”

Only then did he follow the line of her gaze and see that at some point during his embarrassing check-out, he’d begun to twist at his wedding band. Nervous habit, that was all. So he had one nervous habit. So sue him. “No, I’m not still married.”

Had she not noticed the kissing? What kind of bastard did she think he was? What kind of woman did she think he thought she was?

He holstered his pistol with one sharp movement.

“Something’s going on,” she insisted with a quick shake of her head, striding back to the table for her gun belt.

“Something?” Zack challenged, starting to regain his sense of balance. “A lot of things are going on. Wanna prioritize?”

After all, he wasn’t just unnerved from her flashing dark glass at him. He’d kissed her. He’d liked kissing her. He wanted to kiss her some more, hold her some more, maybe…more. If they ever hit another stopping point. But in the meantime…

“I am prioritizing.” Jo buckled the belt, pulled on her denim jacket. “I’m seeing what that snake’s doing out there.”

“Not alone you’re—” Several shrill bars of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” sang from Zack’s mobile phone. “Aw, crap.”

Jo was already unchaining the door—would it kill her to wait for backup? He flipped open his phone, said “Cecil, I’ll call you back,” and flipped it closed again, even as he shouldered after her into the windy night.

Zack had given up wondering why darkness never bothered him through doorways, or anything else but glass. That didn’t mean he threw caution to the wind. To his relief, nothing jumped them.

“It’s dead, alright,” noted Jo, extending a pointy boot-toe to nudge the reptile that lay doubled across itself like a length of forgotten siphoning hose. “But not from hitting the window.”

Zack looked at the window—with the lights on inside, glowing through the drapes, that didn’t bother him so much either. Only windows into darkness…

He shook off his primal reaction to that thought and instead noticed how a smear of blood marked one corner, where the slain rattlesnake had impacted it. “So someone had to throw it.”

Together, they turned to better scan the parking lot, the silent highway, the desert that stretched into true darkness beyond until, to judge from the appearance of stars, it became sky. The only place that seemed to hold anyone awake was the Ambrosia Café, down the road.

“If it was even on purpose,” said Jo. “Maybe a prank…”

“You are freakin’ kidding me if you think this was some kind of accident.”

“I’m just trying to keep an open mind.” Yeah. The way she avoided meeting his gaze just screamed Open Mind, didn’t it?

As far as that went, “You thought I was married?”

“Not until you slammed into reverse,” she snapped back, still stubbornly pretending to scan the rocky desert. “Whoever it was, they’re gone now.”

She sounded downright disappointed, but he had a feeling she was disappointed for the wrong reasons—not because they’d lost a clue, but because she couldn’t keep avoiding him. Or what had just happened. Maybe she hadn’t thought he was married. Maybe it would just make things easier on her if he was. Otherwise, she might have to wake up and live a little, for once.

“What, you aren’t gonna put your ear to the ground and figure out which way they went?”

“Tracking’s a lot easier by daylight,” Jo insisted, then confirmed at least some of his suspicions. “I should probably get home, so I can be back first thing in the morning.”

Reason number bazillion and three for not working with women. Nothing could ever be straightforward with them, could it? Whether she’d liked kissing him at the time or not, she wasn’t interested in return business, but God forbid she say so.

“Yeah, you go on back to Spur,” he said. La la la. “If you aren’t here by eight, I’ll assume other duties called.”

“I’ll be here,” Jo said.

Maybe she even believed it. “I’m just saying.”

She backed away, into a golden pool of illumination from one of the streetlights. “I’ll be here,” she insisted.

Zack felt something then. Sixth sense, common tactics, God knew what. But he felt the danger, and he went after her. “Jo!”

Which was when the window of the car beside her exploded in a burst of pebbled glass.

She didn’t scream. She jumped, sure, but then she dropped into a defensive crouch, drawing her revolver to face the expanse of desert from where the rifle report echoed.

A lure. The snake had been a freakin’ lure!

Zack didn’t breathe until he’d reached Jo’s side, planted himself between her and danger. He fired one clean shot, at the streetlight above them, dropping them back into shadows. The shooter had waited until Jo was in the light to make his move, so that should help.

Then he sighted against the darkness beyond.

“Zack!” exclaimed Jo, leaning out from behind him.

“Stay down!” he snarled, edging in front of her again.

“You stay down! I don’t need—”

Which is when he saw the burst of blue, heard the retort from their sniper’s location. Zack squeezed off one more shot, in unison with one of Jo’s, before everything vanished.

It was happening again. Damn it, it was happening again!

One moment, Jo had been doing a perfectly fine job at taking cover, watching for a chance at opportunity fire. The next moment, Zack had to wedge himself between her and danger.

Had she asked him to? Had she wanted him to? This was the exact opposite of what she wanted from him!

And none of that helped when he dropped to the asphalt like so much dead weight.

“No,” she insisted, squeezing off a second shot toward the rifle fire while there was even the slightest chance she might hit something. “No, no, no…”

It became a desperate chant, of sorts. What folks around here might call a mantra. This wasn’t happening again, she told herself, looking to see how badly Zack had been hit. Head wound. Oh God. Blood was fingering down across his unshaven cheek.

“No.” Every man she ever wanted, ever kissed, was not going to end up dead from protecting her, damn it. Even if she had to kick them into submission to make them quit it!

Please let me have to kick him into submission….

The moment seemed to stretch into a torture of waiting—waiting for the sniper to shoot, so that she could return fire at the resulting flash. Waiting for Zack to come to, or maybe even to die. Just waiting.

She’d been doing too much of that lately, hadn’t she?

Jo’s revolver felt like an extension of her right hand. With her left, she covered Zack’s wound and pressed, to try to slow the bleeding. Even with the streetlamp out, she felt like a target out here, but she didn’t have any more hands.

Her breath rasped angrily in and out of her lungs. Hooray for breathing, right?

Then a bungalow door opened onto the parking lot. “Hey,” called a sleepy voice. “Did anybody else hear gunshots?”

“I’m Sheriff Josephine James,” she shouted, despite the risk of making herself a target. Better her than him. “Go back inside, shut and lock your door and call the operator! A man’s been shot—ask for police and paramedics. Everyone stay inside and away from the windows, and turn out your lights. Okay?”

Please say okay. Please. She remembered from her training how often help didn’t get called because everyone thought someone else would do it. Someone had to say okay.

“Okay,” echoed the original voice—which would’ve relieved her more if another window of the car above her didn’t explode under another rifle shot.

Jo fired back. Three bullets gone, two left. Only an idiot carried all six chambers loaded. She guessed Zack wasn’t using his weapon, which carried more rounds. Still, this was not good. “So much for magical protections,” she muttered—and strangely, smelled incense.

Then Zack groaned under her sticky-wet hand. “Ow?”

And breathing meant something after all.

“You macho son of a bitch.” Jo slumped against the side of the car, fighting angry tears. “You’d better stay alive.”

Another rifle shot, loud impact. Jo smelled gasoline.

“Good…plan,” groaned Zack, pushing off her sticky hand and levering himself onto his hands and knees.

“We have to get back to the room. Can you walk?”

“What, you can’t carry me?” He made a strangled sound that in some cultures might signify amusement. “’Course I can walk.”

Kicking him into submission was starting to sound better and better. “That’s one reason I never become a fireman, Lorenzo. Height requirements.”

“Fire person,” he corrected smarmily, with a groan.

“Firefighter,” she countered. Even when he tried to be politically correct he had a hard time of it, didn’t he? He was also having a hard time sitting up, even with her left-handed tugging. Normally, she would tell him to lie still. But as long as they were out here, they invited more gunplay.

And possible gasoline explosions.

“C’mon.” Somehow she got an arm around him, helped haul him up. His weight on her shoulders almost drove her to her knees.

Almost.

But at least it left one hand free to squeeze two last, wild shots toward the darkness as they staggered together, like a broken-down version of a three-legged race, to his motel room.

As soon as they pushed through the door Jo fell, half-dropping her partner onto the shag carpeting.

“Crap,” he muttered with a groan, while she kicked the door closed. “Way to walk into an ambush, Sheriff.”

“Keep it up,” she growled at him, half to hide the extent of her relief that he was still talking.

Then again, Diego had talked almost to the end, hadn’t he?

On her knees, she strained upward to switch off the light. She slid the deadbolt home and latched the chain lock.

“I’m kinda distracted,” he grunted back. “There’s blood dripping into my eye.”

“Lie still, will you?” A glance at the bed, faintly lit from the bathroom alcove in back, reminded her of why it was just as well she hadn’t gotten him that far. Thumbtacks. At least the pillows were safe; she grabbed one, adjusted it under his head.

He grabbed her arm, made her go still. “I’ll be fine, Jo.”

She could suffocate on how badly she wanted to believe him. “I’ll get towels, then I’ll call the police.”

“Hand me the phone, I’ll call ’em.”

“It’s not 9-1-1 out here,” she warned, heading for the back, staying low.

“That and a two-plex. This is one freakish town.”

Ice still floated in the ice bucket, which they’d filled for their sodas. That and the towels allowed Jo to manage some basic first aid on Zack’s head where, she hoped, he may have only been grazed. She used a spare blanket from the closet to drape over him, to protect against shock. Only then was she able to make a full report to the Almanuevo sheriff’s office without her voice shaking. All habitual. All by rote.

And in the meantime this man she’d been working with, and holding, and kissing, passed out again. He lay there with blood soaking into the pillow and the shoulder of his button-up shirt, hurt, maybe dying, all because he’d risked himself to protect her. The idiot.

Her having the gun, the badge, the training—none of it made any difference to him, did it?

She couldn’t do this again, Jo thought wearily, settling down beside him and reloading her revolver, then waiting. Waiting for another attack. Waiting for help. Either one would distract her from the weight of responsibility, of déjà vu.

She’d meant never to do this again.

Even if it meant no more kissing, no more friendships, no more recreational breathing—she just wasn’t doing it.

So she sat there on the shag carpeting of Zack’s motel room, one hand holding her revolver, the other pressing a compress against Zack’s still-bleeding head, and she waited.

As soon as she finished this night out, she wasn’t doing this ever again.

During a more lucid moment Zack said, “You’re welcome.”

Jo said, “Bite me.”

“What?” Okay, so scrunching up his forehead hurt like hell, but—what? “Why are you mad? I’m the one who got shot.”

“By stepping in front of me like you’re my bodyguard or something. I’m not about to thank you for that.”

Well there was gratitude for you. And to think, he’d actually kissed her. Actually, in a twisted way, he still wanted to kiss her. Maybe then she’d thank him….

The thought made him smile, which hurt, so he passed out.

It probably wasn’t such a good sign that he kept sliding in and out of consciousness. A Journey tune drew him back into awareness, along with the encouraging thought that Jo James was messing with his pants. When his eyes opened, Zack realized the room’s door was open, the lights were on, and people were moving around. Damn—had the shooter gotten in?

Then he recognized Ashley Vanderveer kneeling beside him. “He’ll need some stitches, and we’ll have to watch him for a concussion. He must’ve hit the concrete pretty hard.”

“No kidding,” he muttered, still wondering why he’d heard Journey. Where was Jo?

“Hey, you’re back with us,” greeted the nurse practitioner with an encouraging smile. “Good for you.”

“Where’s Jo?” When he finally saw her, he realized she was talking on a cell phone. His cell phone. That explained the Journey riff.

“—says he should be fine by morning,” Jo was explaining. “I’ll call if anything changes. You really don’t—I’m sure it’s not— Well, I guess that’s your decision. Mmm-hmm.”

“Great,” muttered Zack while she hung up. “Cecil’s coming here, isn’t he?”

“’Fraid so,” said Jo, snapping the phone back onto his belt clip. Ah. So she had messed with his pants.

He hadn’t even realized he was on a gurney until Jo, Ashley and a couple of Almanuevo cops lifted it to full height and rolled him out the door, toward an old-model ambulance. Between that and the three police cars—what he suspected was the whole Almanuevo fleet—the parking lot was a blur of red and blue flashing lights. They hurt his head, but not as badly as the thought of someone taking potshots at him and Jo. Speaking of which—

He caught Jo’s hand and scowled at her. It was a surprisingly soft hand, for such a capable lady. “Did you tell me to bite you? What kinda language is that?”

But she didn’t rise to the bait. “Look, Ashley’s going to keep you at the clinic tonight.”

“Screw that. There’s someone out there with a rifle.”

And, clearly, a death wish.

“Yeah, well the locals can handle that just fine,” insisted Jo as they slid him into the back of the ambulance with what felt like way too many unnecessary bumps. “Rest, will you?”

Her asking it made him a little more amenable. “Fine. But we’re going out in the morning.”

“Maybe,” cautioned Nurse Vanderveer herself, shutting the doors between him and Jo.

He made himself try to relax. The locals wouldn’t screw this up…would they? The sniper hadn’t been throwing magic at them, after all. He’d been shooting what seemed like perfectly normal rounds from a perfectly normal rifle.

But he’d also been aiming at either Zack or Jo. So maybe they should hang back. Except—

As the ambulance pulled away from the Alpha Inn, Zack stopped relaxing, because through the rear window he could see Sheriff Jo, arms folded, talking with one of the other cops as she watched his and Ashley’s departure.

She was staying behind?

Chapter 10

In the midst of what, for Almanuevo, had become quite a manhunt, Jo’s cell phone rang again. A nice, normal, digital ring, not some ’80s’ tune.

“I swear I’m going to turn this off,” Jo said, by way of answering. No need for niceties like Hello or To Whom Am I Speaking? She knew damn well it was Zack, calling from the clinic.

“Well, if you’d get your butt over here where you’d be safe, I wouldn’t have to keep checking on you.” He sounded sulky.

Jo guessed that was an improvement from the first three calls, when he’d just sounded pissed. Either he was losing steam—Ashley may have given him something for pain—or Jo was getting used to him. Or both. From the way things had headed not so many hours ago, she’d been getting used to him just fine.

Whether she should, or not.

“Where I’ll be safe?” She looked across the rocky stretch of desert by the hotel, stark under a halogen floodlight, and shook her head. Between cops and volunteers, there had to be at least fifteen well-armed Texans within shouting distance looking for the shooter. Most were damned good shots against snakes, too. “What makes you think I’d be safer there?”

It surprised her that he didn’t answer.

“Zack, I said I’d come by as soon as I’m finished here, and I will,” she offered, trying to sound less snappish. The man had been shot, after all. “I won’t be but another hour or so. Let me know what you need me to bring from your hotel room.”

“There’s nothing I can’t get in the morning,” he grumbled.

“Then let me do—” She saw one of the deputies, by yet another waist-high stack of rocks, waving his flashlight to signal the rest of them. “Oops. Gotta go.”

“Why?”

“They found something.” Jo started that way. “Bye.”

“What’ve they found?”

She’d left her hands-free headset in the truck, foolishly thinking she’d only need it for driving. “I can tell you better once I see for myself. I’m turning off the phone now.”

“Wait—”

But she’d disconnected and turned off the phone.

“It looks like this is where he was firing from, ma’am,” explained the deputy, as Jo reached the boulder in question. She hardly had to glance at the spent shells to nod agreement.

“Musta waited here awhile, too.”

She crouched, to better see what he meant—and got a strange, prickly feeling at the back of her neck. Someone had carved a symbol into the weathered sandstone. It didn’t look like anything specific, but it felt like something. Strongly.

Magic, she thought, with no more proof than her instincts.

Stepping back so that the other officers could take a look, Jo reluctantly turned her phone back on. It rang immediately.

She answered it. “Lorenzo, stop bitching and tell me if you’ve seen this symbol before.”

By the time Jo drove up to the clinic it had to be four in the morning. The police had no suspects, but they had rifle shells to fingerprint and trackers waiting for dawn. And they’d taken pictures and rubbings of the symbol on the rock.

It had helped that Zack talked Jo through using the digital camera from his motel room.

She pulled her Bronco into the sandy parking lot, stopped it in front of a spiky cluster of yucca, killed the engine. Then, for a minute, Jo just let herself sit. She wasn’t used to this much companionship. She needed the quiet.

The desert got a kind of a hush about it, this early in the morning. It wasn’t true quiet, what with the wind, coyote yips, owl hoots. But it was the kind of hush that made individual problems seem insignificant. It was that quiet, muffling perspective that had drawn her to West Texas in the first place. It soothed her, somehow. Balanced her.

Maybe the vortex tour guides weren’t all that wrong, after all. If magic was real…

She’d enjoyed being part of the manhunt, tonight. Once she knew Zack would be okay, she’d liked it. Yes, there was darkness in the world. Someone tried to kill them—had come too close.

And maybe would have hit her, if not for Zack.

Jo didn’t like thinking that way. She hadn’t asked him to take those risks. She sure didn’t want to feel grateful for it.

But in the hush of the morning, she guessed she did feel grateful. Which just scared her all the more—and circled back inexorably to what she’d been thinking.

Yes, there was evil in the world. But being around the entire Almanuevo force tonight, and the volunteer trackers, and the ladies with coffee from the Ambrosia Café…it reminded her that there was as much good as evil out there. By drawing away from the one, maybe she’d drawn too far away from the other.

Which would be more heartening, if not for the dogs. Texans knew hunting dogs, but the hounds brought in tonight had proven useless.

They’d sniffed the shells, the symbol, the candy wrapper caught in a bit of cactus—and they couldn’t find a trail. It was almost as if the dogs wouldn’t track. One of them had acted downright scared, head down, tail tucked.

“I’ve never seen ’em this way,” their handler, a local rancher, had insisted sheepishly.

Several of the deputies agreed. “Damnedest thing.”

Literally, maybe? Zack was right. The shooter had been more than your garden-variety sniper. He may have come after them with a mundane weapon, but he wasn’t mundane evil. He was magic.

Jo really was hunting honest-to-God magic. And the police force of Almanuevo just wasn’t prepared to fight that.

But two people inside this clinic were.

She glanced around to make sure the lot was clear—clear except for the parked ambulance and Ashley’s Jeep—before she got out of the Bronco, shouldered her duffel, and headed to the building. She found herself touching her revolver as she walked.

It reminded her of Zack Lorenzo’s paranoia, that first morning in his motel room. And it wasn’t enough.

Ashley leaned out of the break room at Jo’s first knock, her fine blond hair sleep-tousled, and came to let her in.

“He’s asleep,” the nurse practitioner whispered, relocking the door. “Finally. Thanks for keeping him distracted earlier.”

Jo shrugged. “I really didn’t know how to use the camera.” She still wasn’t sure if she’d done it right, wouldn’t know until he plugged it into his laptop and downloaded the pictures. But it had been worth a try. Zack might have a lot of gee-whiz toys, but they were useful ones.

“I’m camped on the sofa,” Ashley said. “Standard operating procedure, with an overnight. There’s a spare couch, if you want, or you can take the other hospital bed, in with him.”

Thankfully, she didn’t make any clever quips about the romantic possibilities therein. Jo had never been good at sexual double-entendres even on a good night’s sleep. Tonight, she was just too tired to deal.

“I’ll go check on him,” she murmured.

Ashley nodded and padded back into the break room.

Jo ventured into the main back room, full of shadows and ominous-looking medical equipment…some of it secondhand, but advanced enough to save lives all the same. Almanuevo boasted two hospital beds, separated by a curtain which, at the moment, was drawn back.

Zack Lorenzo lay asleep in one of them. The other, four feet from him, lay empty and inviting.

Uncertain, Jo lowered her duffel bag to the floor. She’d packed anything from his hotel room she’d thought he might need, whether he admitted it or not. The laptop. The camera. His shaving bag. That alone had felt weirdly proprietary. The idea of sharing a room, even a stark room like this…

She remembered how he’d kissed her, and shifted her weight. Then she stepped closer to Zack’s bedside. Looking at him while he slept felt proprietary, too. It also felt safer.

Zack had a bandage wrapped around his head, like one of the Sons of Liberty. His dark lashes smudged into the shadow under his eyes. Even in sleep, his face wasn’t exactly handsome. Rugged, yes, and bristly. His lips looked soft, definitely kissable. Even unconscious, he was sexy as hell. But nothing about Zack had the polish it would take to pull off handsome.

Only when he smiles.

Jo backed slowly away from the bed and from her sudden urge to touch his face, to let him know she was here, to whisper good night. Had she forgotten what it felt like when he’d fallen? What it felt like to try to stop his blood with her bare hands?

What it felt like to risk tearing her soul in half?

She’d promised herself—never again. So she should sleep in the break room. Except…

She hesitated, framed by the doorway.

Except then he would be alone. True, the room seemed secure—one door, no windows. But still. They really weren’t just fighting evil. They were fighting magic evil. Even after a week of interviewing more kinds of magic users than she’d realized existed, Jo didn’t wholly understand what kinds of risk that entailed. Did Zack even have the Bruja’s charm bag on him?

Jo lowered her shoulders, sighed, and sank all the way down to sit on the linoleum, her back braced against the doorjamb between the room and the hall. She could see the break room from here, so she could keep an eye on Zack and Ashley both.

If things stayed quiet, she could sleep a bit, sitting up.

Zack woke with one hell of a headache. “Crap,” he muttered, raising a hand to touch his head. Was he wearing a hat? And why was someone holding on to his wrist?

Then Ashley Vanderveer murmured, “Shhh,” and he saw her and the clinic ceiling, and he remembered what was what. His head was bandaged. She was taking his pulse. Helluva night.

“Why shhh?”

“Jo’s asleep.” And Ashley inclined her head at the doorway.

Zack levered himself up on his elbows to see what she meant; the sheriff lay curled on the floor, her head tucked on one jean-jacketed arm, dead to the world. He shook his head at the picture she made. “Oh, that looks comfortable.”

“I offered her the bed,” Ashley insisted. “Open.” And she slid a thermometer into his mouth before he could point out that to accept the bed, Josephine James would have to admit that she wasn’t Superperson. Or she would have to trust him. He wasn’t sure which she would find tougher.

What makes you think I’d be safer there? That had been a low blow, especially since keeping her safe had landed him in the medical ward in the first place. If it weren’t for him, Almanuevo’s finest might have been scraping bits of Sheriff Jo into their evidence bags, the night before.

Somehow, that thought didn’t keep Zack mad; it just made him woozy. Especially since he was the one who’d sought out Jo and her zombie stories in the first place. If not for him, she’d be safe in Spur. He’d gotten lucky, last night. It didn’t mean he could always protect her.

And if he couldn’t protect her, he should keep his distance, no matter how good the kissing had been. How good she’d felt in his arms. How much he’d liked holding someone again. Not just someone. Her.

“98.6,” announced Ashley softly, and whipped out a penlight. “Let me check your pupils.”

“This is gonna take all morning, isn’t it?”

“If you hold still a few more minutes, you get stickers.”

Okay, so Nurse Vanderveer was growing on him. “Could you at least get her a blanket?”

“One patient at a time.”

By then, Jo was already taking one of those deep breaths that usually signaled a person waking up. She squinched her face up funny before yawning, too. It was cute.

“So far, so good,” said Ashley, stepping around Zack to unwind the gauze headband and check out his four measly stitches—apparently head wounds just bled like crazy. The bullet had barely grazed him. She’d been as worried by the knot on his head, from his fall onto the asphalt, as by the wound.

Then Ashley spread her hand over the wound and just held it there a few minutes, breathing deeply. It felt warm.

“Hey, James,” called Zack softly. “Sure you don’t want a nice pile of scrap iron to sleep on, next time?” Would it have killed her to take the bed beside him? It had metal railings to keep him out and everything.

“I…” Jo yawned again. “I had to keep an eye on things.”

Nice story. You keep telling yourself that. “It works better if you don’t close them both at the same time.”

“He’s got to be feeling better,” deduced Jo, opting for the ever popular talk-about-him-like-he-wasn’t-there tactic of annoying him. But she also stood and stretched, arms above her head, neck arched back. The stretch elongated her waist and raised her breasts under that incredibly soft green T-shirt; he knew how soft from last night. Both breasts and shirt. That made for enough distraction that Zack didn’t bother protesting.

“Good as gold,” agreed Ashley, moving her hand just before the heat of it grew uncomfortable. But she wasn’t as cute.

“You mean the kind of gold that feels like my head’s about to fall off?” Except it no longer felt that way, not as much. What kind of juju had Nurse Vanderveer been working?

She smiled when he slanted a suspicious glance her way. But she was also flexing and shaking out her hand. “I can prescribe a heavier painkiller, but you wouldn’t be able to drive.”

“Or shoot things,” agreed Jo.

Strength in numbers, he guessed. “I’ll survive.”

To prove it, he sat up and slung his legs over the edge of the bed. At least Ashley hadn’t made him wear some stupid hospital gown. She’d put his shoes somewhere, though.

“Whatever you’re hunting, take a day to rest,” Ashley advised as she left. “You were shot, you know,” she called.

“Or I could get to the motel and check out those pictures the sheriff took earlier this morning,” Zack muttered, leaning farther forward to peer under the bed for his shoes.

“I brought the camera and laptop with me,” offered Jo, still in the doorway. He clearly remembered telling her he didn’t need anything. But he found himself distracted by the way she scrubbed her hands through her short hair, then shook off the last of her sleep like a wet dog—and, amazingly, looked like Jo. Just like that. First thing in the morning.

It had taken Gabriella how long to do her face and hair in the morning? She’d gotten good results, but still…

“Did you bring coffee?” he asked, remembering the cruel pseudo-coffee Nurse Vanderveer had served them last time.

“I can get some,” she promised, and actually entered the room—far enough to fuss with a duffel bag in the corner, anyway. Then, still crouched, she tossed him his shaving kit. “While you clean up. You look like hell.”

Which he guessed was her way of saying they were more or less okay. Zack gave up on his shoes and stood. Some pain. No dizziness. “And your breath’s morning fresh, huh?”

She grinned up at him, and it felt like he’d won a don’t-blink-first challenge. “Probably.”

Since she was still crouched by the bag, Zack offered her a hand. Jo took it. He drew her up to a standing position in front of him and suddenly wanted to kiss her again, morning breath or not. He wanted to remind himself that neither of them was hurt—not seriously—and that last night’s intimacy hadn’t just been a fluke. He wanted it badly enough to feel that want tangibly, even past the ache in his head. “Good morning.”

But he didn’t want it badly enough to miss how her gaze avoided his, all of a sudden. “Morning,” Jo returned.

Then a too-familiar voice in the doorway said, “Am I interrupting something?” And Zack’s morning got complicated.

Cecil Taylor, his business partner, had arrived.

Jo liked Cecil. She would have liked him even if he hadn’t brought coffee. Now the investigation wasn’t just about her and Zack, and that had to be a good thing, right? Considering how personal things had started to get. In light of that, Cecil’s arrival was a godsend.

Besides, it was gourmet coffee. Cold, but easily reheated.

Even Zack bore the younger man’s fussing as if he liked him—for the first five or ten minutes, anyway. Then he started to sulk again. She guessed it could be the headache.

A slim man in his mid-twenties, Cecil had an immediate friendliness about him that contrasted against Zack’s burly grumpiness as sharply as Cecil’s pale English complexion and creatively dyed blond hair contrasted against Zack’s Italian swarthiness. The younger man’s polished features—high cheekbones, arched brows, lashes so dark he could be wearing eye-liner—made Zack look even less obviously handsome. Especially since Zack had cracked only one reluctant smile, and that of welcome, since the younger man’s arrival.

And yes, Jo found herself noticing. Worrying. The man had been shot, after all.

Cecil had shed his long, black wool coat to reveal gray slacks, a tawny long-sleeved T-shirt that looked to be silk, and a rich-looking watch. His clothes, of an even better quality than Zack’s, weren’t wrinkled either. His British accent made Zack sound more like an extra in a mobster flick. Except for being male, Cecil was Zack’s walking opposite—though actually, considering how enthusiastically he took over the already crowded break room, more like a dancing opposite.

Suddenly, Zack made a lot more sense. The good clothes. The gee-whiz gadgets. The money. All of that probably came from Cecil’s world. Zack really was just an old-neighborhood Chicago cop. He simply had a cosmopolitan partner.

That made him both more comfortable and a lot more open-minded than Jo had originally guessed, even if Cecil didn’t turn out to be gay.

“I am not overreacting,” protested the younger man, simultaneously connecting Zack’s laptop to the digital camera and heating coffee with ease. “You were shot.”

Yeah, Jo liked Cecil.

“Barely,” Zack reminded him, scowling. He and Jo leaned against the counter just inside the door while Ashley folded blankets from the sofa. The break room had seemed crowded with three of them. With Cecil, it almost overflowed.

“This job is clearly a great deal more dangerous than we anticipated, and I for one think that merits reconsideration. Cream, Jo? Ashley?” Cecil asked as the microwave beeped.

“Cream, please,” said Ashley, clearly won over from the tea camp by the heavenly smell of gourmet coffee.

Cecil looked expectantly toward Jo.

Zack said, “Jo drinks it black. You didn’t have to come out here to reconsider this job. We aren’t reconsidering anything.”

“Mmm. Which is exactly why I did fly down here. I knew you’d say as much. Careful, dear, it’s hot.”

“Thank you,” said Ashley, sinking onto the arm of the sofa as she accepted the drink, and exchanged a mutually appreciative smile with him, despite their age difference. Huh. Cecil did not appear to be gay.

“You knew right,” insisted Zack, beside Jo. “So you can drive back to El Paso and fly back to Chicago and—”

“And leave you here to delve into heaven-knows-what kind of evil you’ve unearthed, getting shot and cursed and whatnot? I think not. Here you are, Jo.”

“Thank you.” She inhaled caffeine from the coffee’s steam, it smelled that good. It tasted even better.

“I’m fine, and the rest of it’s my job,” said Zack, taking his mug without a thank-you. Cecil didn’t seem to notice. “There’s nothing for you to do here except distract me.”

“And do what I always do, which is to provide backup. Now let’s take a look at those photographs, shall we?” And the younger man settled into one of the folding chairs.

Zack shook his head—and winced. And took a sip of coffee.

“Of course, you’ll have to relocate.” Cecil did something that made little pictures of the carving appear on the laptop’s screen. “You mustn’t stay at that inn any longer.”

Zack slid his gaze up from the coffee. “Mustn’t I?”

“It’s dangerous,” agreed Ashley. Suddenly, Zack and Jo’s investigation seemed to have become a group effort. A good thing, Jo reminded herself. “Obviously someone knows you’re there, if they tried to shoot you.”

“They shot at Jo,” Zack protested, then dropped a glance toward her when she drew breath to protest. “Well, they did.”

She said, “They hit you.”

“We might as well assume you’re both at risk,” said Cecil. “As long as you’re both working on the investigation.”

“Which means Jo should quit,” said Zack.

“Like hell!” She wasn’t about to give up now that someone had started taking potshots at her!

“We’ll talk,” Zack muttered under his breath.

Under her breath she repeated, “Like hell.”

“In any case,” said Cecil, “if you continue to stay in a public place…”

Which at least seemed to distract Zack from glaring down Jo. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his gaze was aimed back at his partner—and it was raw. “Then we’re putting other people at risk, too. You’re right.”

Jo wanted to touch him, to reassure him that it hadn’t been on purpose, that nobody else had been hurt. And maybe just to touch him. But she suspected Zack didn’t want to hear it, just now.

“A private residence would be best,” continued Cecil, choosing one of the thumbnail images of the carving, magnifying it, and somehow making it brighter. “We could rent something.”

Or they could stay at her place.

Even as Jo thought it, she rejected it—and not just because Spur was a good hour away. She wanted to help. Hell, she was ready to fight for her right to help. But to bring any of this back to her monastic little home…

Dangerous enough to spend time in Zack’s hotel room, but to bring him into her life…no.

She slanted a glance up at him, relieved that he wasn’t watching her, wasn’t somehow reading her fears. She hadn’t thought she was afraid of anything, but the idea of getting closer to him than she already had…

It was already too close. And not just because of the crowded break room, or the way Cecil’s quiet glance in her direction seemed to read everything she’d hoped Zack wouldn’t.

Then Ashley said, “You can stay at my place.” And foolishly, Jo felt jealous. “It’s the obvious choice. I have two spare rooms. It’s nearby. And rest assured, my home isn’t without magical protections. What rental can offer that?”

“You’re a practitioner?” asked Cecil, impressed.

“Curandera,” she told him. “And a Wiccan. You?”

“Urban archeologist,” he said. “But I dabble.”

“Hold it,” protested Zack. “Not that I don’t appreciate everyone just pitching in like this, but it was bad enough when Jo was at risk. Now I’ve got all three of you to worry about?”

“Excuse me?” challenged Jo, and he rolled his eyes.

Rolled. His eyes. At her. It annoyed her more than it probably should have. “We’ll talk,” she warned, low.

He mouthed back, Like hell.

“Zack,” insisted Cecil. “If this evil is as vile as your notes and interviews imply, people are already in danger. You need some sort of headquarters—the more protection, the better. You need someone like myself organizing the information you and Sheriff James have gathered. And I hardly see the downside of involving a magically adept medical expert.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Zack.

“Whatever personal issues you may have with the situation,” Cecil continued with deliberate evenness, his brandy-colored eyes sharp, “cannot be allowed to get in the way of the job.”

Jo felt Zack stiffen beside her. “We’ll talk,” he warned his partner.

But he was clearly outvoted.

Chapter 11

Zack loved Cecil; really he did. The kid had helped keep him sane after Gabriella’s disappearance and through the shifting of realities that had followed. But the general rule of play was, Zack went out to fight the big bad monsters, and Cecil stayed safely back at the office to research them.

Cecil arriving in Almanuevo, where all portents pointed to Bad Things a’Coming, hardly started Zack’s day out right. Then the investigation—his investigation—suddenly became a team effort and set up shop in Nurse Vanderveer’s home. Since nobody was at the clinic, the nurse practitioner clipped on a cordless headset and walked them over. It was a great house; adobe-walled, wood-beamed and tile-floored, built around an inner patio. Lots of herbs and pottery. Not too many windows. It had a peaceful feeling about it, like he might feel at church or his Nona’s, which Zack assumed were the protections at work. But he couldn’t help thinking that Ashley was taking a hell of a risk, handing over her spare key.

“It’s not just because something shot at you,” she insisted as the four of them strolled back to their cars. “Though being Jo’s friend, that’s more than enough reason.”

Jo’s head came up, as if that surprised her, and she shared a shy smile with the blonde. It was a surprisingly vulnerable expression, on a woman who was again wearing a cowboy hat.

“But I’m part of this town,” continued Ashley. “I know something’s going down. Some of my patients know something’s going down—and not just the ones getting snakebit. It’s got everyone on edge, which is hardly healthy. On top of that, Brent Harper disappeared from my clinic, and you still have no idea whether it could have been voluntary. This is already personal. Why shouldn’t the three of you stay at my place?”

“The three of us?” asked Jo, before Zack had to.

Ashley said, “Zack was right, Jo. You can’t be sure which one of you was the target last night.”

The idea made Zack’s head hurt for more reasons than the stitches. He scooped a sandy piece of rock up off the road and flung it into a clump of cactus, maybe twenty feet off, with more force than was probably necessary.

A buzzing noise warned them not to head toward that clump of cactus anytime soon.

“You’re the one who wanted to help,” he told the sheriff. It came out as an accusation.

“Yes.” Jo met his gaze. “I do.”

Well, he was just saying.

The team decided that Jo would return to Spur for the day. It would give her a chance to collect some belongings and make sure Deputy Fred wasn’t having any trouble holding down the fort.

“And to recharge my cell phone,” she teased, as they reached the parking lot. Ashley, with a wave, headed inside.

Zack wasn’t wholly comfortable with Jo being so far from the rest of them, even for the day. Not now that they’d become targets. Still, while he might not be Mr. Sensitivity—or empathic, which is what Cecil was—he could guess how poorly Jo would take the suggestion that someone go with her. Besides, he and Cecil had some catching up to do in private. So he handed her his phone. “Check in.”

“It’s Spur. Barely an hour—” she started to protest, then shut up. Maybe she could compromise too. “Thanks.”

She took the phone.

“Cecil’s #2 on the speed dial,” he told her, stopping beside her Bronco. “Check in when you get to the office, again when you head out. You sure you’re okay to drive?”

She couldn’t have slept well, on the floor like that.

“Asks the man with stitches in his head,” she challenged—but with a smile.

“It’s a hard head.” The assurance came out more gently than he’d meant.

“Yes,” said Jo. What, about his head? “I’m okay to drive. Yes, I will let you know when I get home. Yes, I will let you know when I head out again. But you let me know if you figure out why our diablero’s stealing evil people’s bodies, ’kay?”

“Fine,” he said, though something about the way she said that tickled a thought. It didn’t feel like a thought he’d like, so he ignored it for Jo. “Look, why don’t you take the Ferrari?”

She said, “Because I like my truck.”

“Your truck doesn’t start.”

“It always starts.” She raised her chin at the look he gave her. “It just takes a few tries.”

“The Ferrari starts on the first try.” He winced when she climbed into her driver’s seat and shut the squeaky door.

“The Ferrari is across town at the Alpha Inn.”

“And we all know what rush hour traffic is like in greater metropolitan Almanuevo,” he told her, through her open window. “Across town is what, two miles?”

Jo said, “I like my truck. Now don’t go interviewing any stepmothers or surprisingly efficient housewives without me.”

Changing the subject with witch jokes. “Cute,” he said, but he let her. “You know, I do have backup, now.” And he jerked a thumb toward where Cecil waited with his rental.

When Jo glanced in that direction, a little line showed at the bridge of her nose, like something worried her. Something other than roadside safety. Maybe even…

“What, you’re jealous of Cecil now?”

She grinned then. It made her blue eyes sparkle. He never would’ve thought he’d find himself falling for a lady who would wear a cowboy hat. But he’d kissed her, and he’d liked it. And now he was lingering by her truck door, as if they had more to say to each other than just have a nice day.

“I finish what I start,” she said. He hoped that was a promise. Then she started the truck, which only took two tries. “Be careful,” she warned, before he could—and waited for him to step back before she reversed out of the parking space.

Zack watched her return Cecil’s friendly wave, then pull onto the blacktop and drive off toward the horizon. The wind ruffled his hair, and he saw a hawk circling, high above them.

Then he headed toward Cecil’s rental so they could go clear out his motel room. Thank God Jo could take a little teasing. And she hadn’t actually been jealous of Gabriella, last night—

Zack stopped. Frowned.

Stealing evil people’s bodies, she’d said. Which they’d pretty much agreed on, though they’d debated what evil meant. Their diablero wasn’t claiming any old bodies. He was taking the bodies of criminals, abusers, bigots. For a moment, the two thoughts, that and Gabriella, overlapped.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

For the first time, after four years of dead ends, Zack found himself hoping the sonovabitch he was after had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.

It felt good to swing by the house, feed the dogs, shower and change clothes. Guilty for spending so much time away lately, Jo let Butch and Sundance come with her to the office, which made their week.

Only dogs could find that exciting.

After everything that was happening in Almanuevo, she enjoyed driving back into the familiarity of Spur. The town boasted one gas station. A general store doubled as the post office. A few old companies that had set up shop back when the highway was a main thoroughfare still clung to life, mainly through trucking—certainly not from walk-in business. A freelance blaster let Jo do contract work for him now and then, to keep up her license. One restaurant. One bar.

Jo suspected the Jinglebob—the bar at the edge of town—was the only reason Spur needed any law enforcement at all. Cowboys from several area ranches tended to congregate there of an evening. Things sometimes got lively around payday.

Sometimes. Other than that, it was a hell of a quiet town.

Quiet as a tomb, she thought, parking beside Fred’s antique cruiser, in front of their Depression-era jail. She felt tempted not to call Almanuevo—to keep her worlds separate—but she’d promised. And it was Zack. So she pressed #2 on his speed dial before she got out of the truck.

“Lo!” sang Cecil’s voice, after the second ring. It startled her. She’d been expecting…

Well, she didn’t know why. “Hi, Cecil,” she said, pushing Sundance’s eager nose away from her face. “It’s Jo. Let Zack know I got into town just fine, okay?”

“Will do, love.”

It was less satisfying than she’d expected. “Bye, then.”

Cecil seemed like the kind of person you actually said goodbye to, instead of just hanging up.

Then Jo was alone in Spur again. Except of course that she wasn’t alone, not really. She had the dogs. And Fred.

In the jail, Fred looked up from his computer—on which he liked to play solitaire by the hour—as if it was any other morning. “Howdy, Sheriff,” he said, and reached out his free hand to scratch the dogs’ heads. “Boys.”

“Hi. Anything happen while I was gone?”

“Not really. Bud’s back.” A jerk of his head indicated someone with matted gray hair and a stained duster, asleep on a cot in the cell. The cell door stood open. Crazy Bud wasn’t dangerous, just a vagrant who showed up several times a year, when he needed a place to stay. Nobody in town seemed to mind the jail being used for that.

It added some variety to the job.

“I appreciate you keeping an eye on things for me, this last week,” said Jo, getting a cup of coffee and settling into her chair. She’d taken official vacation time, but last night she’d also called Fred to feed her dogs for her. Usually, she only asked that when she left town to visit family. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Fred looked startled. Then he ducked his head, clearly unsure what to make of her sudden sharing. “Wasn’t nothing.”

We had some excitement in Almanuevo. Jo drew breath to say it—Fred would hear about the “manhunt” the next time he drove into town, anyway.

But something about the jail, the morning, the routine made her swallow back the words. If she told Fred about the shooting, she’d have to mention that she’d been in Zack Lorenzo’s motel room past midnight. Working, of course. Mostly.

Fred might ask what she was working on, and the answer—snakes, snipers, witches, Mafia, the walking dead—just didn’t belong in this old building, with its beige walls and window air conditioner and gun-metal furniture.

None of it belonged in Spur. Spur was where she’d come to get away from craziness like that.

Except it’s not crazy. I’m not crazy. I never was.

Unless she counted moving into the middle of nowhere in her mid-twenties. Hardly ever dating—it wasn’t as if some of the cowboys down at the Jinglebob hadn’t asked. Making no close friends. She’d been here for years, not living at all, just breathing. Hardly even that.

In the meantime, the evil had never gone away. She’d just refused to look. Out here in Spur, it was so easy not to look.

Why not keep it that way a little longer?

Jo went through a week’s worth of mail and paperwork in under two hours. By then it was almost lunchtime. Fred offered to make the run to the diner, since they had Crazy Bud to feed, and she took him up on it.

After Fred headed out, Jo stood to go do some filing—and stopped, dead still.

Crazy Bud had sat up on the cot, in his cell, as Fred left.

Now he was staring at her.

And he was petting what looked like a rattlesnake.

“This one’s getting rather personal, isn’t it?” asked Cecil, with his unique knack for reading people.

At least he waited until Zack had showered and changed, back at the Alpha Inn. But Zack, hating even the suspicion that Gabriella could have been evil, remained in a foul mood.

Now he saw that, along with packing their files, his partner had cleared the minifridge, including the Diet Cokes.

Zack didn’t drink Diet Coke. Jo did.

“We’re working together. Once she knew what was up, she wouldn’t drop it.” Which he had to admit, he kind of respected, even if it did annoy the hell out of him. “I told you that.”

“Actually,” said Cecil, “I was talking about Gabriella. But I’m happy to discuss Jo first.”

Crap, thought Zack, going to the closet to pack his clothing. This was typical Cecil. Most guys—Zack’s brothers, uncles and cousins—could go months without mentioning their relationships. Or they’d keep their talks focused on basics, like Gettin’ any?

Since Gabriella’s death, Zack hadn’t even had that deep a conversation about his love life. But Cecil was a talker.

“What about Gabriella?” he demanded, just to be obstinate, and stuffed some shirts into his suitcase.

“Do you think this necromancer you’ve been tracking is the one?” Cecil stepped in to do a better job with the clothes. Zack moved on to what computer equipment Jo hadn’t taken.

“I’m supposed to know? This is our third necromancer.”

“Neither of the others had this kind of ability,” Cecil reminded him. One had turned out to be a group of teenagers—powerful teenagers, but still—on their way to becoming self-made Satanists before Zack put a stop to things. The other guy had turned out to be more of a necrophile.

Yeah, that job had been pretty gross.

“Gabriella died in Chicago,” said Zack. “This is Texas.” But it was a weak argument.

Cecil proved it. “We’ve connected missing bodies to the Life Force Club in six states.” Eventually their investigations forced the network so far underground, even Cecil couldn’t find them. “The leadership could be based anywhere.”

So maybe this is the one. But Zack couldn’t force his throat around the words. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to take out whoever had gotten Gabriella; God, that one goal had kept him going, these last few years. But if this was the one…

What if this diablero is only drafting evil dead people, Jo had asked.

But then again—Cecil was right, too. Over the past four years they’d uncovered eight more victims, college students, dead after joining clubs similar to Gabriella’s. And that wasn’t counting the handful of missing bodies with no sure connection to the club. Zack let names and photographs and histories play through his memory, gaming nerds and cheerleaders, slackers and honor students. Few of them had had a record, and those just for misdemeanors. None of them…

He sat down at the stupid Formica table. “Did you get hold of Brent Harper’s juvie records?”

Cecil, still doing his magic with folds and creases, gently said, “We were talking about Gabriella.”

Zack held up a hand. “I’m going somewhere, here. Did you?”

“His mother e-mailed me right back with the basics, not long after we talked,” admitted Cecil. “Apparently the poor woman doesn’t sleep any better at night than you do.”

“And?”

“Her son was a little neo-Nazi who may have helped cause several deaths, during high school.” Cecil shook his head. “The youth today, eh?”

“Jo thinks—” But that was a cop-out. “We think the folks vanishing around here, vanishing dead I mean, were all evil.”

Cecil looked excited. “Ooh! Interesting theory!”

Zack waited.

“And in absolutely no way connected to Gabriella,” added Cecil quickly. He even made a face; that’s how silly he thought the idea was. “Zack, you can’t be thinking…”

Not thinking. Just worrying. “The other kids who’ve vanished—not around here, but the one in Idaho, and Arkansas, and California…nothing in their files shows they were evil either. I’ve got that.”

So why wasn’t he relieved? Why wasn’t he happy?

Oh yeah. Maybe because his wife had died, possibly been murdered, and instead of resting in hallowed ground her body had been stolen? Lots of loved ones’ bodies had been stolen.

This wasn’t happy material, here.

“The two investigations may be wholly unrelated,” offered Cecil. Then he sighed, because of course that wouldn’t be real good news either. “Or perhaps the magic user we’re after has grown increasingly selective?”

Yeah. That was it. Gabriella had been a throwaway.

“Which is not to belittle Gabriella,” Zack’s partner added.

“Stop doing that,” warned Zack. Cecil insisted he couldn’t read minds, just emotions, but it got creepy all the same.

“I only meant to say, the earlier bodies could have gone toward preparation, or experimentation, or any number of other purposes. What does Jo think of all this?”

“All what?”

“The disappearances outside of Almanuevo. The connection to Gabriella. Information which I now see from your expression you’ve not shared with her at all, have you? Zack, really!”

“Like you said, they might not even be related.” Zack stood to continue packing.

“I also said,” cautioned Cecil, “that this investigation seems to be getting rather personal. I am right, aren’t I?”

Zack scowled at him. “It’s my business, personal or not.”

“Actually, Lorenzo Investigations is our business. Half and half. More important, you’re my friend. If your judgment is becoming skewed, then it becomes very much my concern.”

“I get it. Gabriella wasn’t evil. I knew that.”

“Actually,” said Cecil, “Now I’m talking about Jo.”

“We’re working together,” Zack repeated.

Cecil waited. But if he thought Zack was going to unburden about the sheriff, when even Zack wasn’t sure what was going on between them, even after last night’s make-out session….

Cecil looked at the bar and raised an eyebrow.

“Shut up,” Zack warned. Whatever existed between him and Jo was just that—between him and Jo. It probably wasn’t helping the investigation. Or keeping him professional.

“I like her,” Cecil offered.

“Nobody asked you.”

“Are you carrying protection?” asked Cecil helpfully.

Zack thought Shut up, as loudly as he could, but of course it didn’t work that way.

He hoped Jo was having a better day than this.

“Uh…Bud?” Jo hadn’t moved from beside the filing cabinet except to slowly—so very slowly—raise one hand far enough to signal her dogs to stay. “Maybe you should put down that snake before it gets testy. Huh?”

She tried to talk low. After all, the snake didn’t seem testy yet. It wasn’t coiled, or rattling—but it was sliding sinuously across Bud’s tattooed wrist, clearly alive. It seemed to like being stroked by the crazy vagrant.

Still…

“You see it now, Sheriff,” offered Bud, eyes sharp. Nobody had ever been sure of the old man’s background. Indian? Spanish? Mestizo? Nobody had much cared. But suddenly, seeing the set of his shoulders and—and feeling something in the air about him—Jo found herself desperately wishing she knew.

Because after a week of interviewing magic users, she now knew at least one reason people thought Crazy Bud was crazy, and she wished she had a label for it. Shaman? Santero? Colombé?

“I see you’re holding a rattlesnake, Bud. Let’s not upset the snake.”

“But she’s already riled, Sheriff. You and your partner know that, she done told me so. Her kind’s in one hell of an uproar, I’ll tell you.”

Then maybe you should put this one down? But Jo did see. Because instead of going with the part of her mind that wanted Bud to shut up, go away, stop his crazy talk, she took a deep, slow breath and felt the connection between her booted feet and the earth beneath her. Growing roots, Sigrid Thorson had said. Grounding, Ashley had called it.

The air seemed to hum. Sort of. Then Jo asked, as casually as she could, “What’s got the snakes in an uproar, Bud?”

“That dark one you and your partner been tracking. Tappin’ into the old powers. Mine. Other folks’. He ain’t choosy. Mixes ’em willy-nilly. No good comes of that, Sheriff. No good never comes of that. Makes us all look bad, fer one.” He shook his matted head. “Disrespects the laws, too—laws of the old ’uns, laws of nature. Nature don’t much like it.”

Jo watched him lift the snake toward her like an offering—or maybe just to second the opinion. Even from the other side of the cell bars, and half a room past that, she had to set her shoulders to keep from shuddering. When nature came in the form of reptiles, she could definitely see the value of playing nice.

She chose her next question carefully. “Do the snakes know why this…this dark one wants the dead bodies he’s stealing?”

Bud narrowed his eyes. “Thought you saw now, Sheriff.”

“I’m still learning, here, Bud.”

“Ain’t just stealin’ bodies,” said Bud. “The bodies, that’s the least of anyone’s concern. Ain’t you figured that out yet?”

He paused to whisper something to the snake. Or vice-versa.

“Only got one to go,” offered Bud. “You and that partner of your’n best stop him once he gets that. Otherwise all hell will break loose.”

Jo had a sinking feeling that wasn’t just a figure of speech. “But if you know what’s going on, why don’t you stop him, Bud? Why don’t the snakes? If they’re so, uh, concerned?”

“Ain’t qualified,” said Bud simply. “Takes somethin’ special to fight evil. Takes somethin’ powerful to counter hate. Any fool knows that. You and t’other ’un, you’re the ones have the best chance of doin’ that now.”

Maybe the snake said something; Jo couldn’t tell. All she knew was, Bud nodded and stood. “Best of luck, Sheriff.”

“Bud, wait.” Not that she didn’t want him to leave. Every sane cell in her body was screaming to be away from this strange man, and his little snake, too. But if he was legitimate—

And she was no expert, but oh, this felt legitimate.

—this might be the best chance she had for information.

Even if he did stop at arm’s length from her, on his way to the front door. With his snake.

“I appreciate you coming to tell me all this,” said Jo, surprised by the evenness of her own voice. “And, um, you can tell the snakes, we’ll try to be more careful of them, too.”

“Oh, sometimes they need killin’,” admitted Bud with a shrug, as if it were a joke between him and his reptilian girlfriend. “Cain’t let ’em bite you, no matter how riled the rascals get. Ain’t like they don’t have plenty of lives.”

Oh? thought Jo, a little wildly. That’s not just cats? “But Bud, we don’t know where to look. To find this—this dark one.” The description seemed way too inefficient. And vaguely racist. “Is he some kind of wizard, or priest, or what?”

“Yep.” Bud grinned. His remaining teeth made for a uniquely unsettling grin.

Perhaps the strangest part of the encounter was when Jo found herself grinning back. “Could you—or your friends—please tell us where to look?”

“He’s robbin’ death,” said Bud, with an implied duh. “Look where the dead things go.” Then he nodded—“Ma’am”—and left.

At least he took the snake with him.

Jo followed to the door, though at a distance. As Bud headed off down the road, the tails of his duster flapping behind him, he called, “Good to have you with us, Sheriff.”

“Thank you,” she said—probably way too weakly for him to hear. Assuming he was using normal, human hearing.

Then she went back inside the jail. Casting a suspicious look toward the now-empty cell, she fetched a billy club and poked the cot. Then she crouched—from several feet back—and peeked under it. Just in case Bud had left some friends.

When Sundance nuzzled her elbow, to see what she was doing, Jo let out a yelp. Then she sat down, right there on the worn linoleum, and practiced breathing again. “Oh. My. God.”

Sundance licked her face. Then Butch joined them, panting.

That had been…insane. In so many ways! The temptation to dismiss it as just that—Crazy Bud, being his crazy old vagrant self—felt familiar…but, now, somehow false, too. That’s what she’d done when she first came to Spur, after all.

This time, she knew better.

This time she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t alone!

With a last hug for the dogs, Jo went to her desk for the borrowed cell phone.

She had to tell Zack about this before she forgot anything important.

Chapter 12

Zack still hadn’t forgiven Cecil for prying into his personal life—much less forcing him to take a handful of condoms, just to shut him up—when Cecil’s phone rang.

“It’s for you.” Cecil handed it across Ashley Vanderveer’s tiled tabletop without even answering it. Not that this took any psychic ability, since Zack’s own name and number scrolled across the phone’s display.

Jo.

Damn, but he felt weird about having accepted those condoms. “Yeah,” he said, answering. “Zack!” Jo sounded surprisingly excited—especially for Jo. “You’re not going to believe what happened….”

But when she told him, talking fast except for the dramatic pauses, he completely believed it. Crazy men. Snakes. Cryptic prophecy. Par for the freakin’ course, in his world.

Just Spur, she’d said this morning. Barely an hour away, she’d said. And he’d thought hell, middle of the day, what could happen?

Clearly she was in his world with him, now, whether he wanted her to be or not. His twisted, dangerous world.

Zack turned away from Cecil’s increasingly curious looks and frowned into the phone. “So you’re on your way back, right?”

“As soon as Fred gets here with lunch. I’m leaving the dogs with him for the weekend. Isn’t that something, though?”

He assumed she meant the crazy snake man, not her deputy taking in the dogs. “I knew one of us should’ve gone with you.”

There was a long pause. Then Jo said, “What?”

She suddenly sounded a lot less excited.

“I shouldn’t have let you go there on your own.” Zack noticed Cecil dramatically plaster a spread hand over his face. What, he couldn’t have concerns?

“Okay, first of all,” said Jo, “you didn’t let me do anything. Second of all, I wasn’t about to drag one of you into the office like it’s some twisted, Take-Your-Paranormal-Investigator-to-Work Day.”

Like they couldn’t have come up with a better cover than that.

“Third, I think I handled myself just fine, thank you very much. Remarkably well, even. And fourth,” she finished—he could imagine her ticking off fingers—“Did you not hear anything I just said? Whoever we’re after is mixing powers, whatever that means, and Nature doesn’t like it. And yet again, you and me are apparently the ones with the best chance of stopping him.”

“According to a snake,” Zack reminded her. This her and him business was a whole ’nother issue for debate.

He’d said she could help investigate. He hadn’t planned on taking her into a demonic war zone.

Jo said, “Look where the dead things go! I know you’re the professional, but is this not a pretty big clue? ’Cause it seemed big at the— Hi, Fred!”

Zack squinted at the phone, piecing together what was going on at the jail. Being a professional, and all. Then he scowled at the ceiling, waiting her out while she explained Bud’s absence to her sharp-as-a-tack deputy. The one who’d left her alone with the crazy snake guy in the first place.

But it wasn’t Deputy Fred’s fault Jo was involved in this. That responsibility fell on the shoulders of Zack himself.

Cecil whispered, “According to a snake?”

Zack waved at him to shut up.

“I’m back,” Jo said.

“Yes,” Zack admitted, to her previous question. He liked to think he sounded calmer. “It’s big.”

For some reason, Cecil snorted.

“Would a little enthusiasm kill you?” Jo asked.

“I’m excited, okay?”

Now Cecil full-out laughed, belatedly muffling it with one hand, and Zack realized why. Dirty mind, that’s why. Like they needed any more proof of that today.

He flipped Cecil off and said, “I’ll be happier when you get back here, that’s all.”

“Fine,” she conceded—but at least she sounded increasingly less annoyed. “Consider this my official checking-in-before-I-eat-lunch-and-head-back call.”

“Thank you.” See? He could play nice.

“You are so very welcome.” Smart-ass. So why was he starting to smile, even before she asked, “How’s your head?”

“My head is fine. Now—” Come home. He came so close to saying it, the words kind of echoed in his head, confusing him. He replaced them with, “—leave. If your truck starts.”

He could be a smart-ass, too.

Jo groaned, deep in her throat. It sounded surprisingly sexy, though he doubted she meant it that way, what with the dogs and Deputy Fred listening in. Then she hung up on him.

He’d take that as a, Yes, Zack, I will of course do as you ask.

He gave Cecil back his phone. “New rule. From now on, the sheriff doesn’t go anywhere alone.”

His partner arched an eyebrow. “Until when, exactly?”

“Until we take down whoever the hell shot at us. She was alone with some rattlesnake-wearing shaman and she doesn’t even realize how dangerous it was.”

Would a little enthusiasm kill you? Zack didn’t like to think how easily it could kill her, if they weren’t careful.

“A shaman? What did he say? Does she know more—” Either reading Zack’s glare or his aura—with Cecil, who could tell?—the younger man returned to the original point. “Is it that she doesn’t realize the danger, or she simply doesn’t mind?”

Like that made a whole hell of a lot of difference!

“You go alone to meet unsavory people all the time,” Cecil reminded him. “It hardly fazes you.”

“Well, she’s a woman.” And yes, Zack knew just how badly that one would go down with Jo. So he added, with what he felt was full justification, “And an amateur.”

Cecil said, “Since she seems to have survived well enough, what did she learn?”

And Zack grudgingly told him, while they unpacked the files from the motel. But he didn’t rest easy until Jo pulled her clunker into Ashley’s driveway, almost an hour and a half later.

The relief he felt, at the sight of her crossing the nurse’s rocky front yard, unsettled him just as much as the idea of rattlesnakes. Her joking, “Hi, honey, I’m home”—though said to Cecil as well as Zack—didn’t help that disorientation.

Zack decided it was all Cecil’s fault for implying there was something between them. He just wanted to know she was okay.

“When you move into a place,” Jo teased, gesturing one hand toward the file-covered table as she dropped her duffel and sleeping bag, “you really do make it your own, don’t you?”

Zack swallowed. Then he said, “Well, it’s short on Formica.” His voice sounded normal, and Jo grinned.

She got herself a drink, rising onto her toes to reach the glasses, then cocking a hip out a bit as she leaned forward to fill the glass. “Want some?” she asked, over her shoulder.

Zack shook his head. Cecil said, “No, thank you, love.”

Jo turned one of Ashley’s kitchen chairs away from the table, so she could fold her arms across its back while straddling it, glass in one hand. She looked healthy, today.

Really, really healthy.

Zack finally admitted to himself that he wasn’t just eyeing the sheriff’s tanned arms or her spread, blue-jeaned legs to ascertain her well-being. Again—all Cecil’s fault. Since the investigation was their real goal, here, he forced himself to focus on unearthing a clean legal pad instead.

“So the crazy snake man waited until you were alone,” he prompted. By yourself. Without one of us.

By which he meant, Without me.

“Except for the dogs,” she agreed, like that made him feel better, and launched into the story.

Jo seemed to enjoy describing her encounter to Cecil even more than she had to Zack, probably because Cecil was good at nodding and oohing at appropriate places. Empath crap. Zack didn’t like the story any more this time around. But he also started to notice Jo watching…his pen? Sometimes her story slowed, and he’d see she was staring at his hand on the legal pad. Then she’d blink and start talking faster again.

She’d done that the first day, too—not the uneven storytelling, but watching his hands. What, did he have ink on his fingers? Freaky handwriting? She wasn’t used to lefties?

When she noticed him notice her noticing, Jo bit her lip and quickly looked away. That brought up other, more intriguing implications which had nothing to do with this investigation.

Zack still felt drawn to investigate them.

“Wait—did he say we’re fighting evil, or countering hate?” He asked it to pull them both back on topic. “Which one?”

“Both,” said Jo. “He said something special fights evil, and something powerful fights hate.”

She seemed to make a deliberate effort to turn her gaze to Cecil. At least, it felt deliberate to Zack.

Cecil said, “But he didn’t clarify what those were, eh?”

Jo shook her head. “He said fools already knew it.”

“Takes one to know one,” Zack muttered.

“I know it seems crazy.” Jo leaned forward to hug the chair-back as she turned to him. “It was crazy, but so’s half the stuff I’ve heard since you drove into Spur. You said yourself that magic hides in normalcy. I think it also hides in insanity—so people who don’t want to see it can dismiss it as craziness. Which probably sounds old hat to you, but it really feels significant when I think of it that way. Like I’ve…like I’ve cracked some kind of code. Like there could be all kinds of things going on in the world, right under my nose, that I’m not ready to see for fear of seeming…”

Her gaze, watching his mouth, seemed less than focused.

Zack took a deep breath, more aware of her than seemed at all professional. The idea that his partner was watching every move, looking for romance in it, made him uncomfortable, like he was on camera or something.

“Crazy,” Jo finished quickly, pressing her lips together, shaking off the moment. She braced her elbows on the back of the chair and clasped her hands. “Anyway, once I started thinking that way, everything Bud told me just felt…right.”

Cecil said, “I do believe we have a convert.”

Zack considered that while he wrote, Special/Evil and Powerful/Hate. He didn’t want Jo to be converted, if it meant she was putting herself in danger. He wanted Jo…

Hell, he just wanted Jo. When her gaze crept back to his hands, his palms itched to do something about that.

Definitely Cecil’s fault. And now…

Zack put down the pen. “Well, it gives us more to go on, anyway. Even if it’s a wild-goose chase, at least it’s something to do.”

“But we have plenty to do,” Cecil reminded them. “I’ve set up an exciting little database—of my own design—to transcribe the main points of each of your interviews into a file, using keywords, so we can search by similarities. Won’t it be lovely to see it all laid right out in front of us?”

“Yeah,” said Zack, watching Jo slowly tuck her head so that her mouth rested against her knuckles. She didn’t wear lipstick, but her lips looked as soft as he remembered, all the same. Soft, and just a little moist. Maybe she wore lip balm—and Cecil had said something, hadn’t he? “Nothing gets my heart pounding like a good spreadsheet.”

Or lip balm. Maybe it was flavored. That didn’t seem like Jo’s style, but she did have her feminine moments….

Aw, crap. Some days, Zack hated Cecil’s intuition.

“Or if you prefer research,” continued Cecil, “that symbol the sheriff found last night is still eluding identification. It looked vaguely Hebraic, but I’ve scoured my files and found no match there. If it’s a rune, it’s none of the known standards. Now I’m going through online encyclopedias of symbolism—but it may just end up being a doodle. And then there’s the involvement of the snakes to pursue, thanks to Crazy Bud. Myths. Herpetology….”

Jo’s lashes lifted and her wry gaze touched Zack’s, as if to say, Goody. Of course their attention would wander, as long as they sat here listening to Cecil gush about paperwork. And herpetology.

Zack said, “Or we could go check out some places of the dead, while it’s still daylight,” and she perked right up.

“Without a plan?” Cecil gulped visibly. “There could be any number of locations that fit that description. At least you should make a list, before you wander off.”

“Cemetery,” offered Jo, going for the obvious.

“Oh dear,” said Cecil.

“Or morgues,” added Zack. “If they have any in Almanuevo.”

“Funeral homes,” Jo suggested.

Cecil said, “Now, let’s not be rash.”

“Anyplace that’s reputed to be haunted,” Zack said.

She slanted a private smile at him. Her true-blue eyes really did sparkle, when she smiled. “The Eternal Companion Pet Mummification Shop. It is a place of the dead,” she reminded him, when he snorted his disgust.

Cecil said, “Why don’t I keep working here while the two of you go see what you can find?”

“You don’t want to come along?” asked Jo politely. And somehow real annoyingly, too.

“Yeah,” Zack said. “You like funeral homes, right?”

Cecil glared. Okay, so it was a low blow. Then again, talking about Jo as if Zack meant to drag her back into Ashley’s bedroom and have his wicked way with her had been low, too. They’d only even kissed that one time.

And if there was something between them, then damn it, Zack wanted to be in on it before Cecil was.

“No, really,” said Cecil. “You two seem better suited for fieldwork. And better armed. Just be careful, please?”

“When am I not careful?” asked Zack, standing. He hoped that the younger man didn’t mean those damned condoms.

Cecil wisely left that particular debate alone, for now.

“You should probably drive,” Zack told her, as they headed out the door. Jo stopped so suddenly that he bumped into her. She stumbled, and he caught her by the shoulders to steady her, and she so very much wanted to kiss him again she ached with it.

She was starting to wonder what she’d been refusing to notice—to empower, Ashley would say—for fear of seeming crazy. True, there was no way not to notice the energy running between her and Zack, this afternoon. But the fact that she liked it, that she might deliberately encourage it…that was something she was only starting to believe in.

The more she let herself admit that likelihood, the more aware she felt of Zack’s size; his voice; his clean, manly smell. And now his big hands on her shoulders, and his warmth buffeting hers like melding auras or something.

“I…” She had to swallow, to catch her balance. “Maybe I’m hallucinating. I could swear you just said I could drive.”

He narrowed his eyes in that way he had, half challenge, half amusement. “The Ferrari,” he warned, still holding her shoulders and marching her through the door. “Ashley doesn’t want me operating heavy machinery today.”

She was ready to argue—partly because she was more comfortable in her truck, partly because she just liked arguing with Zack. Especially about unimportant things. And this really wasn’t terribly important.

Then she was hit in the face with a cold blast of sand, and ducked her head against the gust. Maybe a low wheel-base would be better this time, after all. “Okay,” she called, through the wind, wishing she hadn’t left her hat in the truck.

“Am I hallucinating?” he called back, shading his eyes as they bolted for the sports car. It beeped and flashed its lights at their approach as he unlocked it by remote. “It sounded like you agreed with me.”

Then they were both diving into the Ferrari’s shelter, slamming the doors, their breaths harmonizing in the silence.

“Well, we have to agree about a few things,” Jo admitted, suddenly feeling awkward—and not just because she wasn’t used to sitting so low, or surrounded by such vehicular opulence, or because the seat and mirror needed adjusting. “Or else we’d drive each other crazy.”

Zack brushed some sand out of his hair, but held her gaze as he did it. “Can’t have that happening.”

“No,” she murmured, lulled again into that sense of fascination which had so badly distracted her inside. What was it about him? Maybe it was not having to wonder what he was thinking; Zack spoke his mind whether you wanted to hear it or not. Maybe it was his devotion to this otherworldly hunt—which showed both decency and a courage of conviction that she feared she’d never shown. Not until recently, and only because of him.

Or maybe it was that the man was big and strong and so blatantly sexy that she felt like squirming, right here in this embarrassingly expensive car, with the need to reach past the stick shift and touch him. She wished they were in the truck. The truck had a convenient bench seat, without hard pokey obstacles rising between driver and passenger.

The way Zack stared at her, maybe he thought the same thing. Maybe he wasn’t about to cower in the face of gearshifts.

“Aw, hell,” he groaned—and closed the distance between them by sliding an arm behind her and pulling her, hard, into his chest as he covered her mouth with his, and she was home.

Yes. Jo opened her mouth to him immediately, excited by the command of his lips, thrilled by the boldness of his tongue. His hands were big enough that while his thumb rubbed a seductive circle against her spine, the fingertips of that hand still fit under her arm to press against the side of her breast. The other hand opened across her blue-jeaned thigh while they kissed. Now she did reach, sliding her own hands over his hard shoulders and then behind him, using the leg still tucked half under her to push more determinedly into him. The steering wheel caught on her hip, and when she tried to compensate for that, something else jabbed her inner thigh. And not in a good way. “Ow.”

“Ow?” Zack drew back from her lips just enough to scowl into her eyes. His own were wary. “I hurt you?”

His worry drew her even more firmly to him. “The parking brake hurt me,” she confessed into his ear, enjoying how his cheek scratched under hers. “This car’s not made for…”

She felt her cheeks flush. For what, exactly?

“No?” And like that, he’d lifted her across the brake and gearshift both, onto his lap, so he could kiss her unimpeded. Her left elbow bumped the tinted passenger window, and for a moment her butt wedged against the glove compartment, but it was definitely better.

She straddled him, fully aware of the heat and a far more enjoyable hardness between them, arching into the kiss. Kisses. They melded, one into another, tasting each other’s mouths, battling deliciously with their tongues. Jo rocked, and Zack moaned. He also dragged her T-shirt free of her waistband, so he could slide his hands underneath, quickly finding and claiming her unbound breasts. She arched into that, too, groaning return appreciation.

She heard his elbow thud against the passenger door—heard his grunt—and grinned through one of their kisses.

Crazy or not, she knew exactly what they were doing. They were making out, no holds barred, right here in Ashley Vanderveer’s driveway. She dug her nails into his shirt yoke, already stretched across his shoulders, gasping happily as his hidden touch sent fingers of pleasure through her. She felt…

Alive. And on fire. And hungry for way, way more.

From the way his hips moved with hers—the way one of his hands slid back down her spine to cup her bottom and pull her more tightly against that ageless movement—Zack was hungry, too.

They had way too much denim between them, and way too little room. One of Jo’s knees wedged up against the parking brake, still. Her head bumped the car’s roof. Well, denim was the price they paid for being in the driveway, right?

But the cramped quarters…

Jo untangled fingers from Zack’s thick, dark hair on the side that didn’t have stitches to fumble down beside his hip until she found the seat release. When she yanked it, Zack dropped backwards with the seat back, taking her with him. His eyes widened, but he laughed, and then they were much more comfortably positioned for this kind of making out, so they did.

Maybe the Ferrari had a few things on the truck, after all. Even if Jo’s boot-heel did catch against the CD player.

“We’re in a driveway, here,” Zack gasped. The way his hands were stroking her, savoring her, it wasn’t exactly a protest. Just a comment. But his hands stayed under her T-shirt; she had enough presence of mind—just—to notice that. The shirt hadn’t gone anywhere, in the way or not. A driveway.

“I know,” she breathed, detouring across his thick, hard thigh on her way back from the seat release, sitting up just a little on her knees to make room. “Damn it.”

“I’d rather not break any—oh, God….”

Well, if he could feel her up under her shirt, why couldn’t she explore more boldly across his button-fly?

She liked what she felt. He seemed to, too. “Any laws?” she prompted, sliding her hand farther between his legs.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t answer that with anything but a more deliberate thrust into her welcoming palm. Then his hand on her butt slid neatly between her legs, a reminder that her jeans weren’t exactly armored either. Jo gasped at the jolt of sheer satisfaction that exploded through her, so he did it again, and her world pitched deliciously around her. “Zack!”

He fingered her again, and her mouth opened in wordless bliss—and somehow, while she was still melting from that, he managed to roll her off him and back into the driver’s seat.

More or less.

Both the parking brake and the gear shift were poking against the backs of her legs—since her booted feet were still tangled with Zack’s legs—and she hardly minded. He could be the biggest chauvinist she’d ever met, but with hands like that, she doubted she’d ever mind.

She minded the idea that they were stopping more. And despite him following her partway, kissing her with a clear assurance that this wasn’t over, Jo knew Zack was stopping.

“The way I see it,” he growled down at her, panting, “we’ve got two options. We either get inside—Ashley’s, or the motel, or somewhere—real damn soon, or we figure out how to control ourselves for now and put off this…”

Another kiss, hot with tongue and longing, emphasized just how hard this would be to put off.

“…until we can do it right.”

Were we doing it wrong? But his restraint impressed her easily as much as his hands had. Jo wouldn’t do either of them any favors by teasing, at this moment. And she liked that Zack not only wanted this…he wanted it right. She liked that a lot. As if whatever was between them was worth more than just this.

This having been pretty damned good too.

She admired Zack all the more for having the guts to say it. Besides… “Cecil’s inside.”

“And we’ve got work to do,” he agreed, sounding mad at the work for being there.

Jo took a deep breath, and it quieted some of the excitement still roiling through her. Some. “Places of the dead to go. Magic users to see.”

“Yeah.” And somehow he managed to push himself back into his own seat, so they weren’t pressed against each other anymore. “Better visit the cemeteries while it’s still daylight.”

“Just one.” It felt almost sad, retrieving her feet from his, though she really would need them for driving. “Only one in Almanuevo, anyway. I already checked out the one in Spur.”

The way Zack sat up then didn’t seem regretful at all. “You did what?”

Chapter 13

“You what?” Zack felt she’d knocked the breath out of him. Considering what had just happened between him and the sheriff, he could use all the breath he had.

Her. Cemetery. Alone. Talk about your buckets of ice water!

“I stopped by the Spur cemetery on my way back,” she repeated, more deliberately. Like she either thought he was slow, or more likely was figuring out that this bothered him.

Hell yes, it bothered him! “You went by a cemetery. Alone.”

“What part of that didn’t you understand?” asked Jo.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

She didn’t quite roll her eyes—if she had, he might’ve had to launch himself out of the car, windstorm or not, to keep from punching something expensive. But she looked deliberately away, and not with remorse. Or contrition. Or even a freakin’ clue.

The woman kissed like heaven on a hot day. Under his questing hands, her skin and her curves and her responsiveness to his touch was more than he’d known sex could be. Considering that Zack had held sex in pretty high regard all along, that was saying something. But at this moment, between his frustration with her—and the fear, bitter in his mouth, of what could have happened—he would sooner kiss Cecil.

And no, he didn’t find Cecil particularly attractive.

It didn’t help when she said, in that calm way of hers, “Zack, it hardly even counts as a cemetery. Thirty graves, tops. And that’s dating back a good hundred years.”

“Oh, well that’s different then. We all know how much less dangerous the old walking dead people are!”

“Well, it’s not like they suck brains,” she defended, then at least had the grace to doubt herself. “Is it?”

“You’re the one who saw some of them up-close and personal in the mine,” he challenged. “Did they want to dance?”

The only animated corpses Zack had ever seen, he’d never been positive had been corpses. He’d been too busy carrying a hysterical eight-year-old out of one of Chicago’s largest funeral homes at the time. But there shouldn’t have been anyone else in there, and the figures he’d glimpsed watching from shadowy viewing-room doorways had vacant stares, sickly floral smells and fancier clothes than fit anyone’s funeral but your own.

Even he’d had the sense to not stop and ask questions. “You’re the closest thing we have to an expert, and yet you walk in like the blue plate special.”

Jo busied herself with readjusting the driver’s seat, then the mirrors. “That was underground. This was sunny.”

“You should have called me anyway.”

“I did call you.” She started the car—which started on the first try, as if anxious to please. Unlike either of them.

“Called me to come check out the cemetery with you.”

Her expression was dangerously close to incredulous. “An hour each way? That’s ridiculous. It was on my way.”

Zack yanked more sharply than necessary on his shoulder harness to fasten his seat belt. “I can’t talk to you like this.”

And he couldn’t; his throat hurt and his pulse was throbbing so hard that his headache was back. So he scowled out at the low-blowing sand. It hissed against the door, sometimes the window.

Finally he looked back and asked, “How am I supposed to feel if you get yourself killed?”

Jo had backed out of Ashley’s driveway, but slowed on the all-but-deserted two-lane road to look at him again. Her eyes softened, as if he’d just said something significant.

Zack suddenly realized why—realized that it sounded as if his problem with her getting killed was because he cared so freakin’ much. He didn’t want her going mushy on him because she misunderstood. “I’m the one who involved you in the first place.”

Not that he didn’t care, but that part he was still figuring out. And the issue of trust….

He wasn’t about to put himself in another relationship, working or personal, that couldn’t support complete trust.

“No, you didn’t.” Jo slowly accelerated the powerful car down the street. Sand writhed across the road in low waves.

“Yeah. I was there. I remember.”

“I’m the one who saw zombies up-close and personal in the mine,” she mimicked, using his own damned words. “You reminded me of what I already knew was out there, that’s all.”

“Just in time to get you involved with a necromancer.”

“Just in time for me to maybe do some good. The kind of good you’ve been doing for years. You did me a favor.” She barely slid her gaze from the road to him, then back. She was a good driver, anyway. “Zack, I was dying out there in Spur. Now I’m helping…I think I am, anyway. That’s because of you. It’s a good thing.”

Which wouldn’t mean jack if she went and got killed.

She asked, “Have you ever investigated cemeteries alone?”

“Not when I thought the residents might be out and about.”

“Which means you have on other occasions.”

He remembered that funeral home. The eight-year-old girl who’d gone missing on Halloween night. The frantic phone call about a neighbor’s prank, gone terribly wrong. The funeral director had called him, afraid to contact the authorities or to venture into his own place of business, that one night. The man had agreed to meet Zack at the employee entrance and unlock the door, but except for that, Zack had been on his own.

He usually was, when it came to fieldwork. He’d had to be, until now.

He waited until Jo pulled to a stop outside the wrought-iron gate of the Almanuevo Cemetery, so that she could look at him, too. And so that he could speak more calmly. Calm being relative.

“Look,” he said. “This isn’t the sort of job you advertise for in the Sunday Times. There wasn’t anybody else. Now there’s you. But if I can’t trust you, I can’t work with you. Period. So from now on, you do not go anywhere alone. Someone’s shooting at us, remember? I bet you made a great target out in the open.”

Her eyes narrowed as he spoke; he could see how angry he’d made her from the set of her jaw, the force of her swallow. Well, too damned bad. If she didn’t want to be talked to like a child, she shouldn’t act like one.

He said, “We have work to do, Sheriff. Are you in or out?”

But Jo said, “You either.”

That confused him. “What?”

“You don’t go anywhere alone either. As long as I’m on restriction, so are you.”

For Pete’s sake. Zack spread his hands, tried to look superior. “I’m fine with that.”

“Then so am I.”

“Good,” he said, getting out of the Ferarri. He put on his sunglasses against the wind, thankful that most of the sand whipped across his jeans and hiking boots.

“Good,” Jo agreed, following him. She’d left the hat back in her truck but wore her sunglasses, so he couldn’t read her eyes. Her posture was none too welcoming.

At least they had a working arrangement he could trust.

But he didn’t exactly want to kiss her anytime in the near future.

At first, Jo felt so angry that she couldn’t talk to him. Not more than what she’d managed in the car, anyway. She just stalked along first one row, then another, of gravestones—wary of snakes. But the wind helped, there. Snakes didn’t seem to enjoy blowing sand any more than humans did.

Who the hell did Zack think he was? You do not go anywhere alone. Like he had the right to permit her to do anything. Nothing gave him that right, not even the incredible way…

No. She didn’t want to think about kissing him, much less the rest. She kind of wanted to stay angry; it felt safer. Stopping by the cemetery on the way out of Spur had seemed perfectly reasonable, damn it. It was daylight, and Spur, not a corpse-strewn mine tunnel. And as for shooters—even if last night’s sniper was aiming for Jo instead of Zack, how would anyone possibly know where she’d be ahead of time? Clearly, since nothing had happened, she’d been safe. Zack was paranoid, just like that first morning at the Alpha Inn. Except…

The part that confused Jo was that the longer she walked, the more reasonable Zack’s request seemed. The tone of voice he’d used; okay, that still pissed her off. But in the week or so she’d known Zack Lorenzo, when had she imagined him to be a diplomat? He said what he thought, blunt though it may be.

And at least he’d agreed to follow the same rules. That took some of the edge off his bossy tone.

And he was right that they had work to do.

Finally, she unbent enough to ask, “What are we looking for anyway?”

“Hell if I know,” he said, also scowling at tombstones. “Hopefully if we see something important—”

“We’ll know it,” she finished for him.

“I’m figuring this out as we go along,” he reminded her. Because that’s how magic worked. Except…after this morning, she found herself believing that on deeper levels than ever.

Look where the dead things go. She hadn’t imagined that.

That’s when she sensed something—eyes upon her. The hair on the back of her neck prickled, and some powerful instinct urged her to keep her head down, not move, not become a target. Luckily, she was getting better at pushing through that temptation to disbelieve in the magic. She was able to look up.

Then she blinked. She could have sworn that she saw someone standing beside one of the larger crypts, but when she blinked, all she saw was cemetery, desert and blowing sand.

Just your imagination. She was turning away, silent, when she recognized the danger of that and turned back.

“Zack, I think I saw something.”

He was at her side in a moment, seeming to scan the area where she was looking. “What?”

“I thought I saw a man, maybe a boy, standing over here.” With Zack beside her, it seemed less foolish to stride across the graveyard, weaving around tombstones until they reached the tomb. She crouched to look for footprints where whoever it was had stood, and saw nothing. Eerie.

Then again, the wind was blowing pretty hard.

“What did he look like?” At least Zack wasn’t dismissing it as feminine jitters.

“I got barely a glimpse, but…” She closed her eyes, imagined her feet rooting into the ground, her arms as branches into the cosmos. If she had seen something, what would it be?

“Light hair, broad shoulders, what looked like a letterman jacket,” she recited quickly, and opened her eyes, pleased. “Does that fit the description of our frat-boy neo-Nazi?”

“Brent Harper was brunette. Good thought, though.” Zack circled the tomb. Luckily, it was low enough that Jo could see him even on the other side.

That don’t-go-anywhere-alone rule was sounding increasingly wise, all of a sudden. Even in broad daylight.

“I don’t see anything,” he admitted, reaching her again. He studied the tomb. “Montoya,” he read. “Ring any bells?”

She shook her head.

“Me nei—” Then he stiffened, jaw tight, sunglasses aimed across the cemetery. Jo looked that way too—and saw nothing.

“What?”

“Girl,” Zack said. “Lots of skin.”

“Oh really?”

His sunglasses blocked the brunt of what she assumed from the rest of his face was a screw-you glare. “The impression I got was a teenager—you know how skimpy the kids are dressing lately. I thought I saw her, then she wasn’t there at all.”

Just like the boy she’d seen. “Ghosts?”

“Let’s find out.” And he headed in that direction.

“Do people see ghosts during the day?” Jo asked, following.

“Sure. A lot of the time they look just like real people, too—substantial, not all transparent. But what I don’t get, and don’t go calling me a racist here, is what kind of fair-haired guy would go by the name of Montoya?” When they reached the place Zack thought he’d seen the girl, Jo crouched and looked for any sign of a track. Again, she saw nothing but blowing sand.

After looking around, Zack said, “Or why some teenager’s ghost would hang around a cluster of graves from the ’50s, when everyone buried nearby seems to have lived into their eighties.”

“So maybe they’re not ghosts,” said Jo. Zack offered his hand as she straightened, but she’d managed by herself so didn’t take it. “They don’t match the descriptions of our walking dead.”

He took his hand back, arching a brow. As if she was just ticked about earlier, and she wasn’t. He’d been right, hadn’t he?

Surely she wasn’t contentious enough to be ticked because he’d been right.

“Maybe something…” But Zack stopped, staring at yet another section of the cemetery. “Look. Slowly.”

Jo turned slowly this time, hoping she wouldn’t startle whatever it was—and saw nothing. Maybe the briefest impression of shoulders, a shadow. Nothing more.

“I wasn’t fast enough,” she admitted.

“Another man,” Zack muttered. “Red-haired. Glasses. Skinny. But it’s like whatever he was blew away.” He shrugged, disgusted. “Damned sandstorm.”

Jo snorted. “This isn’t a sandstorm, Zack.” She’d seen sandstorms, and this wasn’t a sandstorm. “It’s just wind.”

“Damned wind, then.” He shoved his hands into his pockets—and just stood there.

“Aren’t we going to go check it out?”

“I’m thinking,” he offered slowly, as if working it out as he spoke, “that’s just what it wants us to do. I think something’s playing games with us.”

“Or using whatever those are to watch us,” she suggested. She still hadn’t lost that sense of being stared at.

“Either way, the longer we chase phantoms, the better it is for whatever thinks it’s in charge here.”

“So we do what, leave?”

Zack scanned the cemetery one more time, then nodded. “Yeah. If this is something’s version of a delaying tactic, then here probably isn’t where we need to be. We’ll give the information to Cecil and see if he has a better idea.” He started back for the Ferrari. Jo followed.

“He’s the brains and you’re the brawn, huh?”

Zack’s answer was wry. “Something like that. Damn it!”

“What?”

“We forgot to lock the car.” And that was clearly Jo’s fault, because it was Jo’s fault they’d been arguing, right? Okay, and she had the remote.

“No harm, no foul?” she asked, then sighed defeat as he gestured her back—what he seemed to think was a safe distance—while he opened the passenger door, examined the car’s interior, looked beneath it. When he then circled the car, still not satisfied, Jo looked back toward the cemetery…and froze.

For a second, she saw a young woman, just inside the cemetery gates. Curly black hair blew into her face, blew her dress, as she reached for Jo—then dissolved into particles, blown away like the low-sweeping sand. But she wasn’t gone; Jo still felt her. Deep inside, like the pounding bass on a stereo, Jo felt her overwhelming loss. Her helplessness. Her neediness.

Damsel-in-distress neediness.

The desperation lingered long after the illusion faded.

“It looks safe,” said Zack, from behind her. Then, “Jo?”

“One more,” she reported. “Gone now. It was a woman. Early to mid-twenties. Dark hair, a little taller than me. She felt so…sad.”

“Yeah, well I’d be sad too, if I was dead in my early to mid—” Suddenly, Zack stopped.

Jo turned away from the cemetery, from that throat-clutching desperation. “What?”

“Nothing.” He swung into the passenger seat. “We’ve got work to do.”

Jo looked over her shoulder, unsure whether she wanted to see the woman again—or feared it. Either way, she saw nothing.

“Sometime today?” prompted Zack, loudly.

The woman’s desperation echoed in Jo’s head. Soon. Soon.

And Jo couldn’t tell if that was need…or warning.

Was it Gabriella?

Zack got through the rest of the afternoon focusing on work instead of his completely unfounded suspicion. Plenty of dark-haired women died in their mid-twenties, even if around here they weren’t likely Italians. Plenty would be taller than Jo.

But the barest chance that it might’ve been his late wife unsettled him anyway. Especially after what he and Jo had been doing in the car, not an hour earlier.

She felt so sad, Jo had said.

Crap.

It didn’t help that their next stop was the only funeral parlor in Almanuevo. The most time he’d ever spent at a place like this had been arranging things after losing Gabriella.

The funeral director was having a slow day. When Zack flashed his license, the man proved surprisingly accommodating. He gave Zack and Jo a tour of the whole place, from its tasteful selection of coffins and urns to its dark-paneled viewing area to its sterile back rooms. No matter how clean those rooms were, they never lost the stench of formaldehyde, did they?

No matter how empty a funeral home got, it never lost the memory of grief and loss that permeated it through the years.

Zack looked at the preparation table and thought: They put Gabriella on one of those. That’s one way he knew for sure she was dead. She’d been autopsied and embalmed.

Nobody could survive that, even if they hadn’t really…

“Hey, Zack,” murmured Jo, and he jumped when she touched his sleeve. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he muttered, shaken from the dark memories. That had been old history—unlike the apparition Jo had seen just this afternoon.

“Yeah,” he repeated, tempted to hold her hand, just to remind himself that they were alive. He didn’t. “I’m peachy.”

It annoyed him that she looked skeptical.

Even if she was right.

Chapter 14

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Jo that evening. Zack had been unusually quiet ever since the cemetery. Not that anyone would choose morgues or mausoleums as their Happy Place. But it seemed to go deeper than that, or the fact that the Almanuevo Police still had no leads into their shooter.

She’d given up asking what was wrong after he’d all but snarled, “You keep asking me what’s wrong, that’s what.”

Now the sun had set, dusk was deepening, and surely this would divert him. So she grinned. “You sure you’re up to it?”

Zack just shrugged, eyeing the old town square around them.

Jo spent the rest of their silent wait looking over the other eight tourists who’d gathered at the historic gazebo, in Almanuevo’s town square, for their Spirit Tour. The idea was a little silly, investigation-wise, but could it hurt?

Even evil magic-using criminals, Zack had assured her, rarely posed a threat in well-lit, public places.

With them stood a small family, some elderly ladies and what—from the way they were draped around each other—looked to be a honeymooning couple. The bride caught Jo’s eye and shared a smile, as if by being the only two couples they had a great deal in common. Jo smiled back, but only to be polite.

Whatever romantic possibilities she’d been considering with Zack, earlier today, faded steadily the quieter he got.

“Good evening, everyone,” greeted the lanky man who approached their group, wearing a brown-and-black T-shirt with the tour agency’s logo. He began to collect their tickets. “And welcome to Almanuevo’s one and only Spirit Tour. I’m King, your guide into the world just be-yond the veil.”

He pitched that last bit in a way that managed to sound spooky without quite overdoing it. Not bad, thought Jo.

But Zack, handing over his and Jo’s tickets, just sighed.

King’s slow gaze included them all. “The West has long been a place of death—it’s where the sun sets, where Natives believe that their spirits go upon leaving their old bodies. Almanuevo, as you’ll be hearing tonight, fits that tradition. We have a long and bloody history of Spanish conquistadors, Apache raids, outlaws. Events that a power point like this remembers—and then, slowly, leaks back out on nights just like tonight. Y’all did sign your legal waivers when you purchased the tickets, right?”

Pretty much everyone nodded, the older women more nervously.

King looked dramatically relieved. “Good. Not that I expect trouble, but the psychic activity around here can get intense. You’ll want to stay close…if only for your own safety.”

At least Zack let the guide have his hushed effect, a whole moment or two, before saying, “So basically it’s a ghost tour.” That was why they’d signed up. They needed a quick overview of Almanuevo’s most haunted locations, and this was it.

“I’m glad you mentioned that.” At least King was a diplomat. “No, sir, this is not a ghost tour, and I’ll tell you why. The term ghost is a painful one—too often they’re trapped souls, folks taken so suddenly or in a moment so painful that they don’t realize they are dead. That’s hell on earth, and here in the spiritual oasis that is Almanuevo, we would never try to profit from it. In fact, I and my associates at Spirit Tours work to lead such lost innocents into the light, where they ultimately belong, so that they may have peace.”

Some of Jo’s fellow tourists seemed particularly touched by that sentiment. The honeymooning couple was too busy kissing.

“The spirits who remain despite our efforts are rarely victims—at least, not to their afterlife,” King continued. “We may glimpse mere recordings of the horrors that once existed, being replayed over and over until time’s end. And some souls freely choose to remain, although—” he smiled his slow, spooky smile again “—not always for the best of reasons. Now let’s go see if they are wandering tonight.”

As King began to lead them through the three square blocks that encompassed almost all of Almanuevo’s historical district, Zack bent down to Jo’s level. “Spiritual oasis,” he muttered.

She elbowed him.

He said “Ow.” But his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

He’s hiding something. Jo hadn’t liked that thought at the morgue, and she didn’t like it now. She’d come to count on Zack to speak his mind, just in time to get shut out. And she felt vaguely jealous of the young, cuddling couple who had so clearly gotten past their own personal reserves.

King kept up a running narration, sharing legends of Indian fights and bank robberies, cheating wives and bootleggers. Jo made sure to examine each building, tree and rock that their guide indicated as having a haunted past, and to imagine growing roots. If I could see ghosts, what would I see here?

Tonight, the trick didn’t work. Maybe she was too distracted by Zack, big and silent beside her, and his damned secrets.

“Normally,” continued King, slowing as they approached a gully with a stream creeping down its center, “we would stop at an old footbridge that once spanned this creek. But two months ago, flash floods washed away that particular piece of history. Hopefully its loss finally gave release to one of our saddest local haunts—the spirit of La Llorona.”

La Llorona—the Weeping Woman—was native to the southwest, not just Almanuevo. The peasant woman, grief-stricken by the loss of her wealthy lover, was said to have murdered their children.

Grief makes us do funny things, Zack had said the other day.

Legend told of her wandering creek bottoms, wailing for her lost babies and sometimes, like a Latina boogey man, stealing live ones to take their place. It made a dramatic story, and King told it well. But since Jo knew it, she found her mind wandering.

She remembered those record-setting storms. In the middle of a drought, the area got almost five inches of rainfall in one day. Dry, rocky ground like theirs couldn’t handle that kind of water, and the runoff had turned deadly. Almanuevo was lucky to lose no more than a stretch of highway and a historical footbridge. She’d heard that someone drowned, down in Marfa.

Hank, whom Jo sometimes contracted for at Spur Blasting, had joked that someone must have pissed off the rain gods. He’d had extra work, but Jo avoided the jobs blowing up carcasses that were decomposing in local ranchers’ water supplies. Yuck.

King said, “What we used to do here was form a circle, hold hands, and send our healing energies out toward the Weeping Woman, to help her find peace. But perhaps she has. We may never know—unless, on a night like tonight, the weeping begins again.

“Now, let’s move on to Almanuevo’s most haunted place of business, the saloon, and I’ll tell you what sort of spirits this gin joint doesn’t sell while you have a drink. Everyone thirsty?”

The majority of the group agreed that they were, but Jo was only half listening. Now that she thought about it, they’d had a blizzard last November, too. A blizzard, not three hours from the Mexican border, and then record rainfall three months later.

Like Nature had a complaint to file?

As soon as they reached the Old Soul saloon—originally named the Two-Bits—Jo drew Zack aside at the ornately carved bar and tried to explain her half-formed idea.

“You think all that water brought the snakes topside?” he asked, not even close to understanding. He also raised two fingers at the bartender, and pointed at something.

“No, I think Nature itself is riled, just like Bud—”

“So what gives with you two, anyway?” asked King, beside them, and Jo jumped. How long had he been there? What might he have overheard? “That is, are you enjoying yourselves?”

Their beers arrived, so Jo answered while Zack paid. “It’s a good tour, really.”

King considered that. “Thank you, ma’am. But it seems to me that you two aren’t particularly spooked by my stories.”

“No,” admitted Zack, with a shrug.

“No,” said Jo. “But that’s not your fault. It really is creepy.” King just didn’t know the week she’d been having.

Zack added, “Besides, she doesn’t have the sense to be scared even when she should.”

Jo narrowed her eyes at him. He took a sip of his beer and smiled dangerously.

“Here’s the thing,” said King, looking from one of them to the other. “Most people go on a ghost tour—”

“A spirit tour,” Zack corrected him dryly.

“—to get a little scared. It’s a group energy thing.” That’s when Jo noticed the odd pendant he wore, wire forming a bar with three interior lozenges, tiny gems at each of the ten points. When he saw her noticing, King tucked it back into his shirt. “Y’all seem to have a different agenda, and it’s dragging down the fun for everyone else.”

“Yeah,” said Zack. “Just look at them.” Almost everyone was watching the couple making out in the corner, some more blatantly than others. The little girl was waving a ghost-shaped pendant.

Jo offered, “Would it help if we walked in back?”

King waited a few beats too long to look away from Zack, but when he did, he smiled again. “Sure, ma’am. That’d be fine.” And he moved on to see how the two elderly ladies were holding out.

But Jo got the feeling he was still watching them. “Did you recognize that symbol he was wearing?”

“It might represent the Kabbalah,” Zack muttered. “Jewish tree of life. Mystics and ceremonials are big into that.”

Jo took a sip of her cold beer, glad Zack had ordered it. Even if he could have asked her first. “Are you hating this?”

“What, the tour?” He looked surprised. “Nah, it’s fine. Hokey, but—” He shrugged. “You can’t score every time out.”

“Then what’s—” She cut herself off at his scowl, so he wouldn’t have to tell her, one more time, that nothing was wrong.

He clearly didn’t want to have to say it, and frankly, she didn’t want to hear it.

Not if it was a lie.

“What’s the difference between a psychic hunch and guesswork?” she asked Ashley later that night as they made up her bed in the nurse practitioner’s second guestroom. What was usually a wide sofa converted easily into a narrow bed.

One little, lonely bed for lonely little Jo.

Not that she’d expected to pursue anything with Zack tonight. Not with Ashley and Cecil so close.

“Psychic hunch versus guesswork?” repeated Ashley, taking back one of the lace-edged pillows she’d asked Jo to hold. “Most guesswork probably incorporates psychic hunches without people even realizing it. That’s how magic—”

“—works,” Jo finished softly.

Settling the second pillow into place, Ashley nodded. With its lace-edged sheets and earth-toned quilt, its polished tables with doilies and its lingering scent of fresh air and sunshine, the room—like the whole house—seemed warm and welcoming.

Even if Jo wasn’t exactly the lace-and-doilies type.

Then Ashley sank into one of the two wing-backed chairs that, with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, finished out the room’s furniture. “What do you think you’re having a psychic hunch about? Or do you even want to talk about it?”

And Jo realized she did want to. She’d wanted to talk about it all afternoon. It was Zack who kept shutting her out.

So she perched on the other chair. “I think Zack’s hiding something. At first I thought he was angry at me. Long story,” she added, when Ashley arched a curious brow. “But now I don’t think that’s it at all. Zack isn’t exactly someone who hides his annoyance at the world, you know?”

“I got that impression.” Ashley smiled.

“It was after we left the cemetery that Zack got quiet,” Jo continued. “Well, sort of. He was fine with the business talk. He just seemed…closed off.”

“Did you ask him about it?” suggested Ashley.

“I think if I ask him one more time, he might shoot himself to escape me.” Funny, how she couldn’t imagine him threatening her, just himself. One more reason she’d been able to relax into the feel of his big, competent hands, earlier this afternoon, into his kisses. Not only did she trust herself to manage trouble…she increasingly trusted Zack not to be trouble.

He’d pretty much become the opposite of trouble. But as long as he was holding back from her, she couldn’t help but instinctively hang back from him, too.

“Maybe it’s just that caveman thing. I’m not saying you shouldn’t honor your instincts,” Ashley added quickly. “If you think he’s hiding something, he probably is. But if he’ll open up to anybody outside of Cecil, it’ll be you. Just give him space.”

That wouldn’t be easy, after this afternoon and the defunct promise of more. All Jo had to do was smell leather, and her body felt heavier, hotter…more eager than it had in years.

Everything kept coming back to breathing, didn’t it?

“That really is your gift,” offered Ashley. “Your power.”

Jo’s mouth opened. Heavy petting in a Ferrari?

“You’ve got a calming effect,” the nurse continued solemnly. “Not healing, like me, so much as…grounding.”

“Imagining my feet have roots?”

“Sort of, but you provide roots for other people in your presence, too. You’ve got a very matter-of-fact way of looking at things, which makes you a good anchor when energies get intense. I was noticing that when you and Zack told us about your ghost tour, in the kitchen. Didn’t you see us looking at you?”

Jo had only noticed Zack glancing toward her—and quickly scowling away. Mixed messages. “Not really.”

“Whenever the discussion got a little wild, you were our touchstone. You’re also the reason we’re together. That’s your gift, your prime energy, as sure as empathy is Cecil’s and protection is Zack’s.”

Jo sighed. “It doesn’t sound like much.”

Ashley smiled encouragement. “It’s a lot. The more Zack’s around you, the more easily he’ll probably work out things in his own head, until he can share it.”

But even as she learned to believe in unseen currents and realities, Jo couldn’t quite make herself believe that.

“Jo’s the last person I’m talking to about this,” warned Zack. Cecil had been good enough to cover all of Ashley’s windows so that by the time Zack and Jo got back, at least Zack didn’t have that distraction. But he had Jo.

Curvy and warm, Jo had been distracting him for most of the day, especially during that young couple’s live demonstration of what Zack wanted to do with her. His night would’ve been hell-like even without the fear that his dead wife was checking him out from beyond her empty grave…and despaired of what she saw.

“She knows something’s wrong,” insisted Cecil, talking to his computer screen. At Zack’s request, he’d been looking through the descriptions of the students across the country who’d vanished like Gabriella had. He’d found someone who might match one of the ghosts Jo had seen at the cemetery.

Assuming the fact that one of the missing kids had been blond and lettered in football could be termed a “match.”

“I’m not gonna discuss my wife with my—” But Zack stopped. His what—partner? Only on this case. Girlfriend? Juvenile.

The woman I felt up in the car? Too rude for what had happened. There’d been feeling going on, all right—and there’d sure been up—but what he’d stolen with Jo, for a few mind-blowing minutes there, had been far more than a hot grope.

“Well, well, well…” murmured Cecil, studying him instead of the computer. “I believe I’ve missed something.”

“Work,” Zack commanded.

“Four of the missing young men wore glasses,” Cecil retorted, proof of his industry. “One of them was a redhead, twenty-three years old. It could be coincidence. And you do understand that Gabriella is dead, don’t you?”

Zack glared down at him. “Like I missed that?”

“I mean, you understand it,” Cecil repeated. “You’re not letting her haunt anything between you and Jo, are you?”

Haunt. Cute. “Work.”

Cecil looked back at his computer. “For what it’s worth, three of the girls had dark hair. Not counting—hello, ladies!”

Ashley and Jo came back into the kitchen, from where they’d been making up Jo’s bed in the guestroom. The second guestroom. As opposed to the one Cecil and Zack were sharing.

Probably for the best, what with the danger of distractions.

“Find anything interesting?” Ashley peeked at Cecil’s laptop while Jo propped her hip against the counter, waiting. But damned if Zack could talk to her about any of this. They’d moved too fast, gone too far. Just because he liked her, liked kissing her, didn’t mean they should have taken it any further.

He had old business to finish up first. Anything else wouldn’t be fair to Jo or him. Whether Jo liked it or not.

Cecil looked from Jo to Zack, then offered, “We’re pursuing a possible link to a different case. Missing bodies still, but not local, and no rumors of animation. They’re just gone.”

“That’s not so unusual, is it?” asked Ashley.

Cecil nodded agreement. “Except that we’ve confirmed twenty-one incidents, and fourteen of these missing persons—or ex-persons—had connections to a New Age club that met on college campuses. The specters Jo and Zack glimpsed this afternoon may resemble profiles from this sampling. It’s only a hunch—we’d need more examples to pursue it further. But it is curious.”

Zack said, “So we get you more details.”

Cecil blinked—then understood. “Go back to the cemetery?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Ashley shuddered. “It’s one thing to see them by accident. But to go back looking for them….”

Someone had to. But Zack wasn’t paying that much attention to Ashley. He looked at Jo, wishing he had a good excuse not to take her with him this time, knowing he’d lost that possibility in his nobody goes out alone talk. “You game?”

“Of course I am.” She stared back as stubbornly as if he’d dared instead of invited her. Considering the way energy seemed to buzz between them, even now, maybe he was daring them both. But at least he knew to worry.

He hadn’t lied to King-the-tour-guide.

Jo didn’t have the sense to be scared, even when she should.

They spent the next morning at the Almanuevo cemetery, just far enough from each other to discourage casual touching, catching half-glimpses of forms and faces until Zack thought he’d go crazy.

And not just from the ghosts. Or even the snakes.

As long as the two of them walked carefully, then stayed safely if irreverently atop the Montoya crypt, the snakes didn’t try to threaten them. Neither Zack nor Jo wanted to shoot up a graveyard. But now that the windstorm had passed, the reptiles were out en masse. It was unnerving to see rattlers sunning on top of tombstones, curled around the little lamb-topped markers that denoted dead children, tucked waiting and half-invisible behind vases of faded silk flowers.

“It’s like they’re waiting for us,” Jo commented, on one of the rare occasions that they spoke. Zack told himself that it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence between them. They just weren’t disturbing the snakes.

Yet another reason not to reach out to her, draw Jo against him, let himself relax—just a little—around her. That, and the idea that even now, Gabriella might be watching.

“Scaly bastards,” he muttered.

And Jo said, “As long as they don’t bother us, I don’t mind them.” As if the snakes were what he minded.

After four hours of what had to be the weirdest stakeout in history, they saw nothing definite enough to advance Zack and Cecil’s theory about the missing members of Life Force Clubs. Just peripheral glimpses. Flashes. Teases. By midday, Zack suggested they get the hell out of there.

“You’re not quitting already, are you?”

Since he was already annoyed, Zack took it as a double-dare.

“We’re wasting time,” he reminded her. “There have to be other dead places to go.”

Not that the only other thought they’d had so far—the Eternal Companion Shop—was much of a challenge. But at least Egyptians knew something about necromancy. Zack and Jo made themselves listen to all the grisly details that Sirus could eagerly divulge about the mummification process. They nodded through the part about different internal organs going into different canopic jars. The part about scrambling a corpse’s brains in order to suck them out through its nose. The part about killing the deceased’s family and servants, so that he would have helpers in the afterlife.

“Hungry?” Zack asked Jo deliberately, as they left the shop.

“Starving,” Jo retorted. Stubborn!

So they forced down a late lunch, cleaning their plates.

They drove back to the site of Brent Harper’s rocky death. But they couldn’t even get as far as where Jo had fallen before, because of all the rattlesnakes that writhed out of the desert. Unlike in the cemetery, these snakes coiled, rattled, hissed. One, which had been camouflaged behind a clump of prickly-pear cactus, even struck. If Jo hadn’t been wearing leather boots…

Zack didn’t like to imagine what could have happened. But it made opening fire, out here in the desert, a hell of a lot easier. So did the pissy mood they both shared.

Shooting at the rattlers that came too close—even killing a few—felt surprisingly cathartic. But it was also useless. Zack had emptied a clip and Jo was reloading her revolver a second time when she said, “They aren’t going to let us closer.”

“You can’t handle a few little—” He shot another one. It flew backward from the impact. “—Snakes?”

“I’d rather not kill just to kill!”

“You think I like it?” He meant that.

“So we go back to the—look out!” And she shot one that reared up from behind a rock, too close to Zack’s hiking boots.

He assumed she meant, back to the car. “After you.”

Jo covered the area on her side of the slope, holding her revolver in a two-handed grip. “No, really, you first.”

If she weren’t putting them both in danger, Zack might have found it funny. But she was, and he didn’t. “I get it already. You’re tough enough to chew nails for fun. Now will you just—”

“On the count of three,” she conceded.

At least they both moved at three, instead of trying to fake each other out. They hadn’t descended to quite that level of childishness. Zack hit the remote lock as they arrived, swinging into the driver’s seat as fast as Jo ducked in on the passenger side, then relocked the doors as they closed. Safe.

There in the Ferrari, Zack still wasn’t sure whether he wanted to hold Jo or shake her. Especially when she hiked up her jeans leg, on one side, and wiped away a streak of what was clearly venom from the ornate stitching outside her protective boot. Its smear glistened on her finger.

“There’s water behind the seat and tissues in the glove box,” he told her, concern coming out as bossiness. “Wipe that stuff off before it poisons you through your skin or something.”

“Yessir,” said Jo, sarcastic.

Then she opened the glove box—and a rattler struck out from its depths, right at her throat.

Jo didn’t even scream. But she ducked. Somehow, she ducked. The snake’s freakishly wide mouth sank into the leather headrest, fangs first. That kept its triangular head still long enough for Zack to grab it, lower the power window, and throw the writhing length of it out before they’d even drawn their next breath.

Then they sat there, him and Jo, silent except for the hum of the window sliding quickly back up.

Zack wasn’t sure what he could even attempt saying that wouldn’t end in dragging her into his arms to prove that she was still safe, still okay—like that could happen around him. When he did reach past that invisible boundary, into the passenger side, her eyes seemed downright wary as she tracked his hand.

With his sleeve, Zack wiped away the poison that dribbled down the headrest, beneath two puncture holes in the leather. Then he turned back to the console and twisted the ignition key.

The engine stuttered and died.

Jo released a long, shuddering breath, and for the first time Zack thought she was worried. She should be. If a snake had gotten into the glove box, God only knew where else the things were hiding. Somehow, this didn’t seem the safest place to get out and check.

He turned the key again. The engine stuttered once, then caught. He drove back to town, pulled off at the first parking lot, and made Jo get out so he could search the rest of the car.

He found no more snakes. But when he popped the hood, the engine was spattered with blood.

Jo looked past his elbow and said, “Huh. More than one.”

Then she leaned back into the passenger seat, deliberately opened the glove box, and got out the tissues. Sort of like a silent screw you to whoever, whatever was trying to scare them.

At the rate they were going, was it any surprise that when she remembered an old Indian burial ground, forty minutes away, neither of them was willing to suggest they leave it for later?

Even if the shadows were lengthening to almost deformed shapes. It wasn’t like the sun would set for another hour or two.

Part of Zack warned that he was being irrational. But a stronger part wasn’t about to put the brakes on now. That was the anger, he realized. Anger that Jo refused to stay home and out of trouble. Anger that Gabriella might be one of the trapped souls King-the-tour-guide had talked about. Anger that he shouldn’t be falling for the one woman while the other woman…haunted him.

Just because he knew he was angry didn’t diffuse it.

They would reach the burial ground before dark, anyway—they weren’t idiots. And they had good lights in the snake-free trunk, just in case. They could call Cecil and Ashley from the car, warn that they’d be late.

And maybe one or the other of them, finally, would give.

Chapter 15

It isn’t as if we’re walking into trouble, Jo told herself on the long ride north toward the Guadalupe Mountains. She’d visited these burial grounds twice before—her older brother had an interest in Native American history—and they were so old that all evidence of their funerary past, outside of oral tradition, had vanished. There was even disagreement among the locals about which tribe had once used the grounds—the Comanche, the Apache, even an ancient clan of Navajo back during their warrior days.

Okay, so the general consensus was that whoever’d been buried here had been warriors, and vicious ones. That could be a problem. But neither Jo nor Zack meant to disturb their ancient graves. And as for the snakes—that phenomenon seemed focused far closer to Almanuevo. The only snake Jo saw in Spur was Crazy Bud’s, and Bud seemed to have brought his own.

There was no reason to be second-guessing her willingness to do this now. And even if there was reason, she wouldn’t.

Second-guess herself that was.

If Zack wanted to back off, that would be one thing. He was the professional, right? But if he was waiting for her to regress into some annoying, damsel-in-distress mode….

Like the woman in the cemetery.

Jo frowned out the window, at the desert sweeping past her. Was that brief link of emotions between her and the dark-haired ghost behind some of her posturing today? True, the woman’s desperation had lingered after her image. A longing for someone—not just someone, a man—to take care of her….

Jo rejected that option with every bit of strength she had.

They still had some kind of diablero to catch—and soon, if Crazy Bud’s warnings carried truth. The burial ground was another clue in their investigation, no more. Why should they put off till tomorrow what they could accomplish before sunset today?

But Jo still noticed how long the light seemed to be getting, starting to throw cacti and rocks and scrubby mesquite trees into dark relief against it like some African safari picture. She still noticed the tightness to Zack’s jaw, his hand firm on the steering wheel instead of on her.

No, she didn’t fear anything at the old burial ground.

She only hoped that she and Zack, uncompromising as they’d become, could sense if something evil really was out there.

At least they could clearly see nobody had followed them.

They took the lonely dirt road she remembered and a few times almost bottomed out; it was too rutted and uneven for the Ferrari to comfortably manage. They pulled off at the eroded wooden post someone had long ago sunk as a marker. Then they hiked out toward a rock wall some quarter mile away, into the late-afternoon light. The burial ground lay beyond those rocks, sheltered in a small canyon.

And when they reached its mouth, the rock walls were high enough that the canyon had already filled with shadows.

“This is a burial ground?” asked Zack. Although he spoke quietly, his words echoed back from the thick, tangible darkness.

Earlier on, Jo might have teased him—had he expected feather-crowned corpses laid out on biers, or animal skulls posted as no-trespassing signs? The death that lurked here was so huge, so timeless that even bones proved temporary.

Against that vastness, she took comfort in Zack’s life, bright and warm beside hers. The only two living souls here.

Amidst God knew how many dead ones.

The last time she’d visited this place, Jo would have dismissed such thoughts as imagination. Now she knew better. No snakes slithered out of the rocky crevasses to threaten them. No faces appeared or vanished at the edge of her vision. But a throng of ancient dead surrounded them—probably from all three tribes at one time, probably from beyond that—and she and Zack together, with their bodies and their breathing and their beating hearts, were the outsiders.

“Can’t you feel it?” she whispered, stepping a little closer to him. The desert around them seemed to be growing actively darker by the second, like a time-lapse film of night falling. There would be no moon tonight. Eerie.

“It’s…” Zack hesitated, but also took a side step of his own. His elbow brushed Jo’s upper arm. She was wholly grateful for the human contact.

Because this place was filled with death. Eternal. Inevitable. Not the sort of death that plotted against any one person—orphaned children, hopeful fiancées, widowed husbands. This death was larger than personalities, than lifetimes, than generations. This death was a force so vast, so powerful, she could easily imagine ancient peoples naming it as a god.

She could imagine some of the neo-pagans they’d interviewed doing the same thing.

There are trees here, too, she thought desperately, squinting into the shadows. Grass. But why would this great, hulking death deign to even mark such tiny flickerings of life, any more than a horse might notice floating bits of pollen? It was above such labels as good or evil. It was beyond envy at their presence.

Jo didn’t think the death here even noticed them, much less wanted them gone. The wanting gone was a hundred percent her.

Somehow Jo managed to swallow. “It’s not unnatural.”

“Yeah,” Zack said. “We’re looking for something unnatural.”

At some point, they’d begun backing away. Somewhere toward their distant right, a coyote yipped into the deepening night.

“I don’t think there’s anything here for us,” Jo said.

“Me neither,” Zack agreed quickly. “Call it a night?”

“Done.”

“Good.”

They were backing away more quickly. It didn’t feel quick enough. Zack’s hand closed around Jo’s wrist as they turned out of the canyon, striding quickly across the uneven ground, with its out-of-proportion sense of depth in the twilight, toward where they’d left the car.

The sun had set; how long had they been standing there, for the sun to set? Dusk was quickly fading into night, but it didn’t seem as deep, out here. The darkness wasn’t as intense. But Jo could still feel the larger darkness, radiating out from behind them, and they did not slow. She had to take three steps for every two of Zack’s, lest he drag her—or just throw her over a shoulder and carry her. She was glad to.

She felt marginally relieved to see the Ferrari waiting for them, a bright symbol of technology in the ageless desert. It flashed its lights and beeped once in welcome as Zack triggered the remote locks. In moments they were inside, securing the doors, making sure the windows were up. Like with the snakes.

But it wasn’t like the snakes, Jo realized hollowly.

What frightened her this time, no mortal could ever lock out.

They just sat there, in their bucket seats, and breathed. Zack found the sensation weirdly exotic, after standing who knew how long at the mouth of that canyon. Alive. He wasn’t sure what he sensed in there, exactly. Nothing evil, he admitted. No aberration against the natural order of things.

But holy crap, that had felt big.

Based on the tightness in Jo’s expression—something he might taunt as fear, if he wasn’t feeling it so sharply himself—she’d gotten a similar impression.

“You okay?” he asked, grudgingly aware of the irony. He hadn’t wanted her asking him that, after all; had even yelled at her about it. Maybe he’d been a little stubborn.

“We’re going to die,” Jo said slowly.

He spun to face her in the little car. “What?”

“You, me, Ashley, Cecil. Fred. My dogs. My family. Everyone, everywhere…we’re all eventually going to die, aren’t we?”

Oh geez. Zack slumped back against the door and window, glad he didn’t have a weak heart. He’d thought she meant, immediately. Like, soon enough to pencil into her appointment calendar.

Jo reached past the gearshift and punched him on the knee. “Why do you have to go and do that?”

It wasn’t as hard as he figured she could hit, not even hard enough to hurt, but it got his attention. “Do what?”

“Die!”

Zack wasn’t a big thinker, sticking mainly to reviewing cases or judging character. A philosopher, he was not. And this was the kind of thing philosophers worked with, right? “I heard somewhere that it’s part of the deal,” he admitted, inadequate.

“Well, the deal sucks.”

He guessed he’d just have to do his best with the brains God gave him. “It could be worse. I mean, we do get to be born and to live and to have all these friends and loved ones and beers and ball games in the first place, right?”

“And then to see them all die,” she reminded him.

“Unless you die first.”

“Breaking their hearts.” Jo shook her head. “It sucks.”

Zack felt himself frown. Not that he wasn’t sympathetic or anything—only a day’s extended effort kept him from pulling her into his arms for the kind of comfort his words couldn’t handle. But she sounded suspiciously like someone crying in hopes that she’d get her ball back.

And she’d been orphaned at what, sixteen?

“You lost someone else,” he guessed. Or predicted. Same difference. “More recently than your folks.”

Jo didn’t say anything then.

“Look, if this job is getting personal for you, I ought to know. Especially if your judgment gets…” What was the word Cecil had used? “Skewed.”

“Diego,” she said.

“Who’s Diego?” And why did that name sound familiar? He’d have it in a minute—

“He was the foreman at the mine,” Jo reminded him softly, and now he did have it. The foreman was the one who’d survived the initial cave-in, only to die and…

And to turn on her.

Holy crap. “You two were involved?”

He could tell she nodded, because her silhouette moved against the lighter leather interior. “We were kind of engaged.”

He wanted to say he was sorry—hollow words, but sometimes the only ones fitting. He even considered saying that life went on, or she’d see him again in Heaven, in hopes it might prove true. But he fought the temptation because he didn’t know for sure, and this was Jo. It wouldn’t feel honest.

Hell, some nosy part of him wanted to know how long they’d been engaged, what Diego had been like. If Jo had loved him, he couldn’t have been a slouch.

But what Zack somehow ended up saying was, “You couldn’t mention that the first time?”

“It wasn’t any of your business the first time!”

Never had he met a woman so clear on her own boundaries. Whether he liked them or not, he had to appreciate the clarity.

So instead of fighting it further—God knew they’d done too much fighting today—Zack gave up and reached for her. He drew her gingerly against his side, so that her head could sink onto his shoulder. Gearshift, holster and everything.

Jo came willingly enough that he was glad he did, and not just because it might give her comfort. As she nestled her cheek against him, her breasts brushed his ribs and she rested a hand on his sternum, and relief slid through him like a salve. Whatever reason he’d had for trying to keep his distance, it had to be wrong. He needed her touch, her presence. He needed to feel his heartbeat against the palm of her hand.

He needed to be alive. Which they both still were.

“This Diego,” he offered. “Didn’t you say that he spent his last hours chatting with you, pretending he was gonna be okay?”

“Yes.” Her voice warmed across his collarbone. “And I know he was still alive when he stood up to fight the others. I could see it in his eyes. He wanted to protect me.”

“Well, duh.” Okay, not diplomatic. But why wouldn’t the guy?

“If he’d just laid there, been careful, he might’ve survived long enough to be rescued. Instead, he had to be a hero.”

Zack could hear the bitterness in her voice, and some of her behavior over the last week or so started to make sense. He said softly, “There are worse ways for a man to die.”

Except for the part where the man had then been zombified and tried to eat her. He decided not to mention that part.

Jo drew back from him, just far enough to protest, “He didn’t have to die at all!”

But she’d already admitted that they all had to, sooner or later. Nobody was giving back her ball, and she knew it.

Zack drew her more decisively against him—at her soft “ow” he let up a little, until she could readjust against the inanimate obstacles—then he held her tighter. He even kissed her hair, short and silken and clean against his lips. Jo. “So you think you could have dragged him through the tunnel with you, when you blew the wall, and he would have survived just fine.”

Then he left her alone to think it through. The answer was obvious, but she would believe it more if she said it.

What she said was, “Screw you, Lorenzo.”

Close enough. He kissed her hair again, with a loud “smack” this time. Then they simply sat like that, resting, thinking, their upper halves cuddling despite the Ferrari’s impediments. It was almost enough to make Zack wish they had her truck. Almost.

Not quite.

God, but he was tired. The amount of legwork they’d been doing, on top of his worries about Jo, and Gabriella, and everything else, had exhausted him. Jo felt delicious against him—warm and real and alive. Beating heart. Pulsing blood.

Diego and Gabriella were dead, but he and Jo were alive.

His thoughts started to slow down a little, at that. No big thinker, for sure.

“I feel like I should be crying,” she admitted softly. “But I hate to cry. Besides, it’s not just him that’s upset me. It’s…everything. How temporary everything is.”

He guessed denial was useful, on that subject, and hey, her hand was still on his chest, and her hair smelled really good.

He had to work harder than usual to string together a fitting sentence. “So we’re all gonna die,” he conceded. It didn’t come out as comforting as he’d hoped. “We’re alive now.”

“But for how long? Even assuming we keep healthy and avoid accidents—how likely’s that, in this business?—we’ve only got maybe forty to sixty years left. And then—boom.”

Zack took a deep breath, to focus on what was clearly an important issue to her. It probably would be to him too, if she wasn’t smelling so good at this moment. He leaned his forehead against hers. “I don’t think you can say ‘boom’ about something that takes forty to sixty years to happen.”

She fisted the hand on his heart and gently thumped him. “You know what I mean.”

“Hiding out in Mayberry probably won’t help either,” he reminded her. “You only get so much life—at a time, anyway.” They’d been hearing a lot about reincarnation this week, too. “Refusing to live it doesn’t buy you extra.”

“You’re right,” she conceded. Which was always nice to hear.

And since he at least tried to be a good guy, and not a testosterone-ridden pig, Zack asked, “So what else is—?”

Then she tipped her face up and kissed him, and his self-congratulations hit a new level.

Jo’s kiss held everything great that he’d loved about their previous kisses, and then some. Her lips seemed to search his for some kind of validation, some kind of promise. If the questions were whether he wanted her, then the answer was hell yes, and he quickly relayed that with his own opening lips. He cradled the back of her silky head with one hand, holding her still so that he could explore her mouth even more deeply.

Hot. Wet. So incredibly, primitively alive that the air around them seemed to sing. Her fingers dug into his shoulder, wove into his hair. She half exhaled and half moaned around his tasting, questing tongue—so sweet, so real—and he shuddered at the hum it sent through him.

He wasn’t thinking about the meaning of life anymore. They were living it. He was already getting hard with wanting her.

His elbow knocked the horn and sent out a blare that startled them both. Then they looked at each other, panting—he wasn’t sure what she saw, but he could barely make out the shine of her eyes, the pale shape of her face. Somehow that was still enough to be surprisingly beautiful. Then he bent down to her, taking her mouth again, and she moaned happily.

He tried to turn to her more completely, and one of his feet wedged up against the door-panel. Now he did wish they were in her truck, with its bedlike bench seat. When he leaned into her, the gearshift stabbed him in the hip.

His thoughts were fragmenting. Damned car. And, Jo. Then, need room. And, Jo. Then—

“Crap,” he breathed, barely pausing in his exploration of her mouth as he tugged at the western shirt she’d tucked into her jeans. Her hip holster was getting in the way.

“Now you know how I felt,” she teased. But he didn’t really mind that, because she also murmured, hot in his ear, “It snaps.”

Not enough room, part of him realized dazedly, even while he took hold of the collar of her shirt and pulled, like some movie caveman. It popped neatly open, all the way down. Yes!

As before, Jo wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were small, but large-nippled and inviting, and he bent quickly to their invitation. Jo….

The gearshift jabbed him again. He swore again, increasingly frustrated. Then he readjusted his body to come at her kind of sideways—as long as he came at her—and lifted one of her delicate breasts to his mouth.

She tasted better than anything, than life. He loved how she hardened in his mouth, matching his own body’s willingness.

Jo made more of those happy, lustful sounds that she’d made the last time they tried something like this. When she found his denim-captured erection with one questing hand, Zack moaned something similarly wordless back at her. Déjà vu all over again.

But more intense, because this time their need for each other had gone primal.

But still stuck in a damned tiny sports car.

That last time, Zack was pretty sure he’d gotten her to come. The way she’d shuddered against his hands, thrown her head back. But they’d been in opposite seats. This time he couldn’t pull her into his lap, much though his lap demanded it, because of the steering wheel. If she tried unbuttoning his fly, an almost impossible task one-handed—especially now—they’d find out just how in the way the wheel was. Even if he dropped his seat back, like before, his feet would catch in the pedals.

All of which simply registered as, no damned room.

So they made do. He kissed his intentions onto her other breast, so it wouldn’t feel left out, covering the abandoned one with his hand. He’d left it wet. What with the nails of her free hand, digging through his shirt, Jo didn’t seem to mind.

Even if they put her seat back, he couldn’t get across the gearshift and parking brake like she had. He was just too big. So to speak. But somehow they had to do this. They could get out—it was the middle of nowhere. The idea of covering Jo James on the hood of the Ferrari had fantasy attractions. A nice insult to the burial grounds, to death itself. But he wasn’t that young or that stupid. He’d been a cop and a city dweller too many years.

Besides, this was Jo. And their first time. She deserved so much better; lovemaking, not sex. They both did.

“Not—” his kiss, deep and desperate, muffled the words “—outside.” Especially not here. Death lurked out here.

“We can go to my place,” she offered, all breathy and writhing. “It’s about an hour and a half away.”

An hour and a half? Damned Texas…

But what was the alternative—at least, in this car?

“You drive,” he warned, proud to manage even two words in a row, even if his laugh came out uneven. Then he groaned at the way her hand was working him, hot, willing. “I’m distracted.”

Joyfully, deliciously, frustratingly distracted.

Jo had to know all those blood-diverted-from-his-brain jokes. And she sure seemed to appreciate where his blood had drained to. Zack was appreciating that too, unable to sit still against her squeezing, encouraging hand. This was the kind of hard-on that a guy didn’t just turn off again. If they couldn’t finish things out now, he’d do well to just slump into the passenger seat and remember how to breathe for a while.

And he sure as hell didn’t want to delay setting out.

Jo plucked at the top button of his fly, futilely, one-handedly, and leaned close to his ear, “Well, Zack, we can at least do something about that. Put your seat back.”

Sometimes he could take orders like a rookie. He groped at and found the seat-release, easing back slightly, so ready for Jo—her, in any way he could have her—that he was dizzy with it. She boosted herself up, to manage his straining fly with both hands—

And her head hit the dome light, switching it on.

Turning every window in the car into a freakish, nighttime mirror.

Chapter 16

Suddenly every window on the car became a surrounding mirror—Zack and Jo’s wavering reflections floating ghoulishly against deep blackness—and he wasn’t breathing after all.

Failure waited in that darkness. Loss. Paralysis.

Why bother? Why bother with anything?

Somehow, Zack slapped at the roof and turned the light off. Breathe. He felt humiliated. It was definitely too late to just soak that up and carry on as they were. But at least he could breathe, and he could move.

Moving, at this moment, meant lifting Jo physically back into the passenger side, readjusting his seat, then starting the car and U-turning viciously back onto the deserted dirt road.

“Zack?” Jo asked in a little voice, from where he’d put her.

He just drove. His dashboard lights stayed relatively dim, enough so the car windows no longer seemed dangerous. And all he wanted at this point—more than life, more than Jo, more than sex with Jo—was to get the hell out of here.

FIDO, his brothers sometimes said. Polite translation: Forget It, Drive On. That he could do, so he did, the car lurching and bumping over ruts despite its state-of-the-art suspension. The fan of headlights on the rock-strewn dirt road ahead of them sometimes caught the reflective green of an animal’s startled eyes. Usually a rabbit’s or a rodent’s. Once, what looked like a low, skinny dog. No snakes.

The animals did a good job of getting the hell out of his way before he could find out whether he had it in him to stop.

It was probably too much to hope for, that Jo would pretend along with him that nothing had happened. “Zack?”

He just kept driving, not trusting his voice, hating his life. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what the hell was wrong with him? And why now?

He punched the play button on the CD, in hopes that noise would distract her. An old Eagles song filled the car.

But no, Jo had to push the matter. Hell, in her cowboy boots, so would he. “Zack, what’s wrong? What happened?”

Of course something had happened. Even if he’d gotten her back into her seat before she felt the ice-water effect the unreasonable fear had on his erection, that had been a helluva sudden end to their lovemaking.

Or their almost lovemaking.

Zack shook his head. He so did not want to have this talk.

The two-lane highway loomed out of the desert ahead of them, dark and completely empty, so Zack hardly had to slow to turn onto it. Sure, sand flew. But this was a freakin’ Ferrari. It knew how to hug even a dirt road when it cornered.

Back to the modern conveniences of blacktop, he accelerated.

Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. Seventy-five.

He’d only just reached the speed limit. Of all the things western states sucked at, speed limits weren’t one of them. This much nothingness between one place and another made it pretty hard to put anybody else in danger even at a hundred, in the right car. Eighty.

Zack leveled out at eighty. Jo was with him. Soothed by the sense of control and power the car gave him, he glanced in her direction. It was dark, but he should’ve seen the outline of the lighter shoulder strap across her front.

Her resnapped-up front. Not that he was surprised not to have heard that, upset as he was. “Put on your damned seat belt.”

“Tell me what’s wrong.” But he heard a comforting metal snick as she did what he said.

I don’t want to. That had to be the most childish response he could make, closely followed by the ironic Nothing. But what was he supposed to say—that he was a grown man, an ex-cop, a demon-chaser and he was afraid of the dark?

Only through windows, he reminded himself stubbornly. Only with the lights on inside.

Then Jo had to go and say, “If I can’t trust you, how am I supposed to work with you?” In case he didn’t recognize his own words from the other day, she added, “Period.”

Fine. So she needed to talk. She was a woman, wasn’t she? He slowed the car, braking. Seventy. Sixty. Fifty.

“What are you doing?”

“Stopping so we can talk.”

Forty. Thirty. Twenty. He pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, left the headlights on, opened the door and got out. Music from the stereo harmonized into the night, through the door he left open as he walked around the Ferrari to Jo’s side, where she just sat there looking confused and worried.

“Well?” he said. He hoped she didn’t ask him to explain this, too. All he knew was he had to be out of the damned car, away from the sharp memory of her kisses, of her hands, of her breasts under his lips. He couldn’t bare his soul surrounded by all that.

Instead he got a barren desert, a safer distance from that damned burial ground, and a starry—

Zack paused, really noticing them for the first time. Big stars. Little stars. Washes of stars, bright as a planetarium field trip, but real. Distant. Infinite. Holy God—he’d never seen that many stars in his life!

He realized that what he could see of the desert around them, except in the Ferrari’s headlights, he was seeing by the illumination of all those stars.

Jo unfastened her seat belt. Zack opened her door. She got out without his help and, like him, left the door open. Then, when he made no move to walk away from the car, she hiked herself up onto its hood. “So…?”

She looked a lot like she had on that pink Formica bar in his former motel room. The first time they’d kissed.

He had a pang of guilt, to think that if he’d made love to her without her knowing everything, he’d be a real sonovabitch. Just because he wanted her wasn’t enough. She had to want him.

The real him. All of him. Flaws and all.

And there was only one way to find that out.

He used one of Cecil’s words. “It’s kind of a phobia.”

Jo looked confused. “The dome light?”

Even Zack had to laugh at that, though not a happy laugh. “The windows,” he clarified. “At night. With lights on inside. I can’t—” But it was beyond explaining even to himself. “Something about windows at night turns me freakin’ useless.”

There. Now she knew. She’d thought he was some heroic demon-hunter, but he wasn’t invincible at all.

Jo bent forward thoughtfully, bracing her elbows on her knees, and said nothing.

Unwilling to add anything more until he knew how she’d taken this much, Zack leaned onto the hood beside her, arms folded.

Finally Jo said something. “For me, it’s being underground.”

That wasn’t what Zack had expected. “What?”

“I can’t go underground anymore. Did I tell you I sometimes work contract blasting? I can’t do caves, or mines, even the deserted ones. Not even ten feet in. I feel the weight of all that rock and dirt on top of me, and…” She rolled her eyes. “One of my cousins invited me to New York with her, for a weekend, and when the cab went through the Lincoln Tunnel I passed out.”

“You?” Zack challenged—and it must have been the right thing to say, because she smiled. If he’d ever met a woman who didn’t seem likely to swoon, it was Jo.

“Me,” she agreed wryly. “Even basements make me uncomfortable, though I manage. There aren’t a lot, around here.”

Zack considered that, but he couldn’t take as much comfort in her confession as she probably meant him to. “You’ve got reason,” he reminded her. She’d been in a collapsed mine; claustrophobia kind of went along with that. Why would he be afraid of windows at night?

It wasn’t like he’d been traumatized as a child by someone jumping up against the glass. It wasn’t like anything had ever crashed through at him.

“You probably do too,” Jo insisted loyally. “I mean, everything has a reason, doesn’t it?”

Maybe in make-believe land.

As if on cue, she added, “No such thing as coincidence.” It was one of the favorite phrases of the magic-user types they’d been interviewing. Zack was never sure whether he believed that or not. It depended on the day.

It wasn’t anywhere near as painful as he’d thought, to tell her this. Probably because she was Jo. Because he could trust her after all.

So he said, “It started sometime after Gabriella died. But before I got into this ghost-busting biz, so it’s not like I was cursed or anything. I don’t think.”

Jo, elbows still on her denim-covered knees, slid her gaze toward him and said, “Gabriella’s your wife, right?”

And Zack felt a completely different jolt from the whole selection of surprises that had shaken him tonight. Had he really not told her that much? He’d been trying so hard not to let on about failing Gabriella, not to let Jo think he was working some personal vendetta, that he hadn’t told her Gabriella’s name?

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “She was.”

Jo just waited easily, seemingly willing—now that he’d finished his James Dean impression—to let him do this at his own pace. He watched her, not even touching her, and for the first time he thought he could really love this woman. Completely.

So he added, “She’s dead.”

Just in case she was wondering.

Jo’s smaller hand found his. “I’m sorry.”

They both knew how meaningless those words were—and how much healing power even that insignificance had, to someone drowning in grief. Zack wasn’t drowning, anymore. If he still were, after four years, it was time he figured out that he could drop his feet, touch ground and keep his head above water.

Jo reminded him of that. The death of her parents, and Diego, reminded Zack that he wasn’t alone in having lost someone. Nobody was. Her friendship over this past week—fighting, laughing, refusing to take crap off him—reminded him that he didn’t necessarily have to be alone in finding someone, either.

He closed his hand around hers, took a deep breath and said, “Her name was Gabriella Romano. We knew each other our whole life, but it wasn’t until junior year—my junior year, her freshman—that we started, you know, noticing.”

Lanky Gabriella turned pretty. Zack had grown shoulders. They’d gone from hanging to dating to going steady over the course of a year. Nothing near as fast as with Jo.

And look how good that worked out, he thought, his mood as gloomy as the piano music into the darkness. Glenn Frye had never sounded so sad as when he sang about Wasted Time.

“I married her when I was twenty-three, and three years and change later, she was dead. She passed out in the bathtub, probably a heart attack. I was mad at her that night. Hell, I’d been angry for weeks—I still loved her, but that doesn’t keep the mad off, you know? I took a double shift to get out of the house.” And when he came home…

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Jo firmly. Even though she couldn’t really know, that helped too.

“Then her body disappeared,” he said.

“Oh.” Jo put an unknown gulf of meaning into that oh.

And Zack finally admitted to Sheriff Josephine James just how personal this job had gotten.

Jo had been fascinated by Zack before now, sure. She’d felt vaguely linked to him from the minute she started breathing again. She got hotter for him than for any man in her life, too. But listening to his fears and frustrations, watching them play across his solid face and hearing them thicken his voice—that’s what really started to validate those feelings.

It scared the hell out of her, how much she liked the man he was letting her see.

He’d been confused, even hurt when Gabriella up and decided to go to college—he didn’t say that, but she could tell. He’d seemed to think it meant he wasn’t enough for her. He hadn’t known about the Life Force Club either, though he’d noticed her weird interests, and the betrayal he felt about the secrecy still colored his voice. That, and the guilt.

“You think she’s one of the people we saw in the cemetery,” Jo finished for him, and Zack raised dark eyes to hers.

“I don’t know. There might be no connection. I’m not even sure if I want…” He frowned, looked down, but she got the gist. He wasn’t sure which would be better—to confirm that Gabriella’s soul had been imprisoned, these four years, or to continue living in limbo.

He’d been living in limbo just as surely as Jo had. His version of limbo just had a lot more activity in it. His limbo had accomplished more. His limbo took more courage.

But he still hadn’t gone on with his life, other than the hunt. And it sounded like it had been such a sweet, normal life. Childhood sweethearts. Extended families. A clear idea of where good and bad parted ways.

“So we’ll find out,” she told him firmly.

He lifted his dark, intense gaze to hers, his head still ducked. For such a big guy, he looked almost boyish for a moment—half hopeful, half skeptical. “Easy to say.”

“We’ll find out,” she repeated. The music from the open doors of the car had moved out of Wasted Time and through most of Hotel California, one of the Eagles’ most disturbing hits. Now the last guitar riff was finishing out its trancelike sorcery.

Zack lifted his head to look at her full-on. They were almost at an equal height, with her sitting on the car. Almost. He still stood a bit taller than her. His eyes burned as he gazed at her, warning her to be careful what she promised.

She could understand how he’d feel that way, after the years of impasse regarding his wife’s fate.

His late wife, she told herself. She’s dead.

Whether Gabriella’s soul had been imprisoned or not, she was dead. That much they knew.

The song ended.

“Hey, Lorenzo,” Jo said, into the silence. “C’mere.”

That she tried to say it with a Chicago accent drew a rueful grin from him. For once, he didn’t argue just to argue. He stepped closer, between her splayed knees, just like he belonged there. He looped his arms loosely behind her back, so that his big hands rested on her hips—if anybody knew how to work around a holster, it was another cop. He leaned his forehead down to hers and let their noses touch while the next song started.

Jo wrapped her arms around his ribs, locking her grip with one hand on the opposite wrist. Then she wrapped her legs around his thick, solid thighs, pulling him even more firmly against her, and he belonged there, too. Just like she’d known he would.

They were no longer groping each other like teenagers at Make-Out Point, but oh, it felt good. Even before Zack ducked closer and gently covered her lips with his, in the softest, truest kiss she’d ever known, it felt good.

Alive.

Jo returned the kiss just as tentatively, nuzzling up into it a little more as his mouth opened, as his intensity climbed. Their hands weren’t seeking. Their hips were barely moving, though the way she had him tucked between her legs, she thought she was sensing the return of his interest in more ways than one. They kept accidentally rubbing noses as they moved from one kiss to another, then another. Accidentally brushing lashes. It made them grin, until maybe it wasn’t just accidental.

Even once they started swaying, to the drum from the Ferrari’s stereo, it was somehow quieter. Deeper. More certain.

Jo recognized this song, too. Take It to the Limit.

Since that’s just what she meant to do, she laughed.

Zack leaned his forehead against hers again, grinning, curious. “What?”

“It’s like we’re dancing,” she admitted.

He kissed her again, and his voice rumbled in her. “Mmm-hmm.”

“You’re coming to my place tonight, right?” she asked.

His dark, intense gaze found hers again— “Mmm-hmm.” And she shivered. Their intimacy might have taken on a quiet maturity, here and now, but that Italian gaze of his promised a lot more passion, once they hit privacy.

As opposed to the deserted highway. But deserted highways were still public. And they were both sworn to uphold the law.

She loved that he kept his vows, even under pressure.

“Good,” she said, still swaying with him. His heat between her legs, through two pairs of blue jeans, was starting to unbalance her. He’d stirred an ache, deep inside her, that even his skilled hands couldn’t relieve. She wanted him. All of him. Soon. “I’ll warn you where Fred usually sets his speed traps.”

Okay, so there were laws, and there were laws.

“Nuh-uh,” warned Zack—and this time, he kissed her like he meant business. His tongue probed deep, hot, hungry, and she let her head sink weakly back against the hard support of his bracing forearm, opened her mouth to his sensual assault, shivered under it. The ache inside her deepened—and he was saying no?

“You, uh…” And he demonstrated, with a not-so-gentle movement of his hips, the challenge. “You’d better drive.”

One thing Jo would say for that fancy rental of his—it went fast better than any car she’d ever driven. Not that she was a connoisseur of fine automobiles, but she might just change her mind. She kept under the unofficial speed limit, which was ten miles over the posted signs, but just barely.

Zack made a quick phone call while they drove, letting Cecil and Ashley know not to expect them, telling them little else. Jo felt so right about doing this with him, she didn’t even wonder about their friends’ reaction.

Then, finally, they were home.

“So this is Casa James,” Zack said, following her to the door of her little ranch-style house. “You’re going to give me the tour, right?”

But he said it with a lascivious grin.

Once she unlocked the door, and drew him into the foyer, Jo made him wait there while she went from room to room making sure the curtains were closed. She also stopped in the bedroom to use her bootjack, a forked piece of wood on the floor, to wedge off her boots, and to leave her holster on the bedpost where it belonged. Then she padded back to where Zack still stood, studying family portraits while he waited—and since her top snaps were undone, she simply pulled her shirt up and over her head, then dropped it on the floor. “This is the entranceway,” she told him.

Zack stared at her for a long, unblinking moment—then stepped closer. He slid his big hands slowly, savoringly, up her naked back while her breasts pressed against the fabric of his own shirt, against the warm ridges of his ribs beneath the linen. “Great entranceway,” he said thickly. His thumbs found the sides of her breasts and began to massage them.

Jo was too happy unbuttoning Zack’s own shirt to answer. He joined in, unbuckling his shoulder holster and letting it dangle from one hand. As she finished his buttons, he yanked his corded arms out of the sleeves—one at a time, so he could swap out the holster—and dropped the shirt on top of hers. He wore a tank top under the shirt, but she could admire him even through that. Dark, springy hair escaped around the edges of the insufficient cotton with abandon, more fodder for his caveman image. The white of the undershirt emphasized the triangular narrowing of his body from his broad shoulders and chest toward his narrower waist. Relatively speaking. And his arms, thick and hard and swarthy…

Either Zack Lorenzo worked out, or monster-hunting was normally even more strenuous than she’d been led to believe.

He drew her back against him with his free hand for a long, teasing kiss, until Jo sank, nearly boneless, into him. Into the heat of his pulsing blood. Into the rise and fall of his cotton-covered chest, springy with more covered hair. Into his strong, solid arms. Into his life.

He was so male, and so very alive.

When he handed her the gun long enough to peel off his tank, revealing the hard abdomen he’d been hiding and the way his hair thickened toward the center of his chest, Jo began to lose that newfound breathing skill of hers. Just from looking at him. She wanted to touch him, explore him, follow that trail of hair downward into his jeans….

Not yet, she told herself, as if they were in another of their stubborn contests. A whoever-touches-inappropriately-first-loses contest. But she could imagine him on top of her.

In her.

“Now this—” and she drew away long enough to lead him, by one hand, to where the foyer opened into the main living room “—is the den.”

“Nice,” Zack said on a heavy breath, swinging his holster, unbuckled, back over his naked shoulder to free his hands. But he hardly spared a glance at the living room, because Jo was already undoing her jeans, sliding them over her hips and down her legs, stepping out of them and her socks both and kicking the mess off toward the couch. Then she stood there in front of him, naked except for her white cotton briefs and her wristwatch. She had a few sexier panties than this—her cousins were eternal optimists—but she hadn’t packed any of them for her sleepover at Ashley’s. She relaxed considerably when Zack, his hot gaze sliding down the length of her legs and back up to her breasts, growled, “Very nice. Den.”

Belatedly, his hands went to his own jeans, and he proceeded to unbutton them and peel them slowly down his hard-muscled, hair-roughened legs. Everything about him was so male, Jo thought. Especially the incredible erection tenting against his briefs. And the way he’d left his socks on.

“And yourself,” she barely managed to whisper.

The mix of daring and just a little uncertainty—all tucked beneath breathless anticipation—reminded her of her first day at college or the academy, of riding amusement park rides or leaping off a high-dive at the YMCA pool. It reminded her of all those things, except that this time she was wet from that anticipation, needy, ready. She could feel her pulse between her legs….

She held out both her hands, and he took them, and she backed the rest of the way into the bedroom, him trailing her. “And then there’s this part.”

“What part?” Zack challenged. Jo turned to look and felt suddenly embarrassed by the twin bed. Way to look like a nun. A guy like Zack would dwarf the thing….

Then he slid his arms around her waist, tugging her back against his chest. Back to chest. She could feel his erection, hard against the small of her back, through only two layers of cotton now. Cotton was a much more exhibitionist material than denim. She could feel his chest hair, thick and warm and snuggly, against her shoulder blades—and a strap of his leather holster. When he folded his arms around her, and slid one hand up to cup her breast, she definitely felt that.

“This part?” he whispered, nuzzling the back of her neck.

“Nuh-uh,” she managed to gulp. It came out less certain than his had, back on the deserted road, listening to the Eagles.

He repeated the maneuver with his other hand, her other breast. “This one?”

She was wrapped in him now, in his arms and his chest, his legs supporting her, his hardness….

Good thing he was holding her so firmly. Still, she wanted to see what he did next. “Nuh-uh.”

He released a breast long enough to slide one big hand down her chest. Over her tummy. His fingers dipped beneath the waistband of her panties, and then he was sliding deeper, learning for himself just how ready she was for him.

If she hadn’t been ready before, his fingers between her legs would have seen to it. Especially when one slid deeper yet.

“Zack!” She bucked against him at the explosion of pleasure, hot and shuddering, glad he was holding her so tight.

“Yeah.” He was still nuzzling. Teeth. Tongue. “Yeah, Jo.”

He tried two fingers, and her hips rocked to help him with the fit, rocked against the maleness of him, as tight behind her as he was tight inside her. That same hot ecstasy washed through her again. She’d thought breathing again was something? She’d thought everyday feelings were exhilarating? She’d woken up all the way, now—woken up to sensations she’d only dreamed of, sensations only Zack could give her, only because she—

Because I love him, she thought. Sanity protested—too fast, too soon, rushing in—so she made herself stop thinking that for now. Sometimes magic disguised itself as craziness. Besides, he was doing it—oh yes, always, everything—again.

She thought she might be crying. She didn’t care.

“Zack,” she repeated, because it was so important that it was him, only him, who made her feel like this. “Oh, please….”

He slid his fingers out of her, slid them wetly back up her tummy, her navel. “For you, Jo,” he whispered, and walked her to the edge of the bed, his legs instructing hers. “For you…”

She sank onto the mattress, and he unslung his shoulder holster long enough to hang it on the bedpost with hers.

Still trembling, but no longer afraid of falling, Jo attacked his briefs. Their particularly tight fit at this moment made the maneuver a bit tricky, but Zack helped.

Then she attacked his erection—tongue first. Lips second.

She did owe him, after all.

“Ah—” Zack closed his eyes, and his knees seemed to buckle. It took very little nudging on Jo’s part to guide him down onto the mattress with her, then to slide between his now-splayed legs until she was kneeling on the floorboards, to take what portion of him she could fit into her mouth and draw more groans out of him. “Aw, Jo….”

She’d never done this before, but something about him made her feel…adventurous. Made her enjoy adventure, the way she was enjoying this. He tasted good, salty and primal, so big and hot and hard that she marveled at the cleverness of nature. From the way Zack dug his hands into her hair, almost holding her face against him, she guessed she was doing it right.

He also slid one shin between her legs, giving her something else to play against. And it was partially play, wasn’t it? Like investigating together. Shooting together. Fighting together. They were testing themselves against each other….

And so far, passing every test.

She quickly began to wish they’d ditched her panties, but she was too busy with Zack to deal with them just yet.

“No,” he began to protest. “No, Jo. C’mere—”

And whether she’d wanted to stop or not, he was lifting her off of him, laying her out onto the bed, kissing her. Deeply. “It’s got to be right,” he reminded her, stroking her side, her hip. “It’s—crap!”

The exclamation, in the middle of all his husky murmurings, made her jump. “What?”

“Damned…jeans….” He wasn’t making a lot of sense—not that he’d been wordy before—and she missed the petting.

“My jeans? Or yours? What about the jeans?”

“Condoms,” he managed. “Wallet.”

Oh. “Here.” And she rolled partly away from him to reach across the bed and open a chest on the bedside barrel—then rolled back with a handful of condoms. “Here.”

“Optimistic,” Zack said, looking at the handful, but he seemed encouraged by her expectations.

She laughed, pressed one packet into his hand and then opened her fingers to drop the rest onto the floor beside the bed. Way to not look like a nun! But she didn’t want Zack thinking she did this a lot, with just anybody.

“I didn’t buy them,” she explained, even as he tore open the little packet, took out the rimmed circle of rubber. “Ashley made me take them awhile back. Health-care worker….”

“Damned buttinskies,” he muttered—for some reason making it plural. But he also slid the condom onto himself. Jo shimmied out of her panties as quickly as she could, tossing them off past the foot of the bed.

Then Zack slung a thick leg over her, covered her like a wonderful, furry, hard-muscled human blanket. He took her mouth with his and kissed her again. Possessive. Protective. Imminent.

“Zack,” she pleaded. The ache, the anticipation, was overwhelming. It owned her. Only he could ease it.

He wasn’t talking anymore. He readjusted himself between her legs, instinctively found her core—and then he held her gaze.

He might not be talking, but his gaze said a lot. It asked her to be sure. It promised her that he was. And his burning, dark eyes made it very clear. This was no longer play.

Jo wriggled encouragement against the thick tip of him. She didn’t want it to be play either. She wanted it to be forever. With him. She’d been alone, and empty, for so long.

Then, with a satisfying thrust, Zack more than filled her.

Chapter 17

Jo.

The pleasure of her under him, around him, was more than Zack ever expected. This wasn’t just sex; this was Jo. Steady, solid, sexy-as-hell Jo.

And he wanted to be part of her so badly, he was already thrusting again.

And again.

She happily arched backward into the mattress and laughed her satisfaction with him. Not a sound most men wanted to hear in bed, but it was a good laugh. Cocky—so to speak.

Like she was reminding him that she wouldn’t break, whatever he threw at her. One hell of an invitation.

Zack kissed her sloppily but wholeheartedly. He braced his elbows to better take his weight, and he pillowed her head in one hand, and he tested that invitation. Faster…

She panted with him, holding his gaze. Steadying him.

Harder…

She clenched around him and he almost lost it right then.

Deeper…

Jo’s gasps increased, and she didn’t seem to care if he heard her, and he loved that. He loved her face—had he ever thought she wasn’t pretty?—free of makeup or artifice. He loved how she stretched up to bite him on the chin, how tightly her thighs held him, how she scored her nails lightly down his naked back, just hard enough for him to feel it. For him to arch into the feeling. For him to thrust even more deeply, so that her gasps became a happy moan.

The bedsprings moaned with them—damned puny bed, but better than the car. While he thrust into her, losing all thought in this living link with her, Jo slid one hand down his back and over his butt. Her touch was deceptively light, but Zack buried his face in her shoulder to muffle his growl of pleasure.

Jo laughed again, definitely alive.

He covered her mouth with his, drinking her laughter, and buried himself deeper into her body than he would have thought possible. Faster now. Over ninety. Over a hundred—

Jo bucked under him, shouting his name and then only mouthing it as she lost her voice, and her eyes closed. He drank in even her silent shouts—and he loved her.

Even before his body exploded into one of the most intense, shuddering completions he’d ever known, he loved her. When he bellowed his fulfillment, his being—his essence—seemed to rush into her. There were no prophylactics for energy surges, right? He could think of no better person to share himself with.

Jo, not to be outdone—never outdone—covered his mouth with hers and drank in his bellow.

Then Zack could only gasp—try to gasp—and kiss her, and love her. And send up a prayer of thanks for this woman. And hope to God he hadn’t been too rough for her. If her sloe-eyed satisfaction was any indication, he hadn’t been.

It felt so damned good, to trust that she’d smack him one if he got rough. To trust her with all of him. Maybe there was a limit to how far he should protect her, at that….

Then again, this was lovemaking, not battle.

Zack barely had enough strength to fall to his side, to dispose of the condom with a tissue she groped from the bedside table. He wasn’t sure he’d manage consciousness much longer. Not after that.

Especially since Jo wasn’t trying to talk—about this. About them. About all those things women seemed to latch on to, to diffuse a perfectly good afterglow with chatter.

Jo’s kiss, that he would always have strength to return. It felt good to lie there with a woman, holding her tight, and to dare to think always.

Only as sleep claimed him—his heavy-lidded gaze enjoying how their holsters looked sharing a bedpost—did it occur to Zack that he hadn’t discussed this always business with Jo yet.

Zack had been nothing like Diego except for one thing.

The sleeping.

Jo lay there with him, her body humming, safe and complete in the solid circle of his arms and under one heavy, hairy leg. She wished she were psychic, so she could talk to him without having to breathe around the effort.

She was still recovering that ability to breathe.

At first, they exchanged happy, sated kisses. Then—boom. He was out. A man thing, she guessed. He was one hell of a man.

She considered getting up to wash, but decided to draw the Indian blanket from the footboard up and over them instead. She wasn’t sure her legs could support her, anyway. That’s how raw, how powerful this had all been.

Besides, she wasn’t sure he would let go.

Even if she’d felt mere affection for the man, it would have been the best sex of her entire life—including the forty-to-sixty years remaining before, boom, one of them died.

Somehow, wrapped in a blanket and Zack Lorenzo, the thought wasn’t anywhere near as upsetting as it had felt earlier.

He’d been right. Hiding from life didn’t buy more of it. But living it might. Maybe not in quantity, but in quality.

Adjusting her cheek on Zack’s shoulder, swirling fingers through his chest hair, Jo watched him sleep for a while. He looked so…open, in his sleep. Vulnerable. Real. Even sweet. He wasn’t just a Chicago P.I. He was Zack.

Her Zack. Every big, obnoxious, wonderful inch of him.

Then he scrunched his face up in his sleep and turned away from her, and she was left watching the blind-covered window beyond him. She remembered what he’d told her about windows at night—and she blamed Gabriella. Call it a guess, or a psychic hunch, but what with the timing, it had to be Gabriella.

Immediately, Jo felt guilty for the thought. She didn’t know the woman enough to judge even her secrets. Wasn’t death punishment enough for even worse crimes?

Still, it was too easy to imagine the woman outside her bedroom window, wanting a glimpse of her adulterous husband—

But he’s not adulterous. He’s a widower.

Wanting Zack’s help now that it was too late. Jo imagined it, and she felt a primal simmering of possessiveness.

“He’s mine,” she whispered at the covered window. “As long as he’s willing, he’s mine. You can’t have him back.”

Zack’s brows drew together in his sleep. “Wuh?”

Jo turned her attention back to the living, where it belonged. “You’re mine,” she murmured, brushing her lips over his raspy, shadowed cheek. “She can’t have you.”

“No,” he agreed sleepily, so she kissed his sleep-soft lips and cuddled tighter into him…and she tried not to think of the only way Gabriella could have Zack. A way that made Jo’s insides cramp up with foreboding.

If he joined her.

Now she only thought the words—but why not? If she bought communication with the dead, was telepathy that big a stretch?

He’s mine, she thought.

And she hoped that Gabriella—and Zack—agreed.

It was one of those dreams that don’t seem like a dream. Jo woke up in her own bed, still wrapped in layers of Zack Lorenzo. The only surreal part was the light—a purplish non-illumination that still made everything else in the room brighter and more intense, like black lights do—and a hum, white-noise, like the voices of dozens of people. Hundreds of people. All talking.

In the dream, Jo had someone to meet, and she needed to hurry. So she wriggled free of Zack’s embrace, and she walked naked to the window on the east side of her bedroom. With a decisive pull on the cord, she opened the blinds.

She saw only her own purplish reflection in the night.

It didn’t make sense. She had someone to meet….

That’s when she heard it, over the wavelike background murmuring that filled her head. It was a faint knocking, determined, desperate even.

Jo lowered the blinds and went into the hallway, still lit with the same, amorphous light. She followed the noise to the kitchen. The tiles were even colder under her feet than the wooden floor had been, but the thumping clearly came from the kitchen window.

Jo’s real self would surely be more cautious. But her dream-self just stepped up to the counter, reached across the stainless-steel sink, and pulled back the blue curtains.

Her face and naked torso reflected in the glassy darkness. And outside, also surrounded by swirling nonlight, Gabriella Lorenzo stood staring back in, so that their faces overlapped.

Gabriella looked vaguely like the picture Jo had seen in Zack’s wallet, but her hair was permed curly. She wore a pretty blue dress, some silky material that wouldn’t wear well, and a tiny gold cross on a chain around her waxy neck.

“You have to hurry,” said Gabriella. Or maybe she just thought it. Her mouth didn’t seem to move. Maybe it had been sewn shut to make her look prettier in the casket. “It’s almost too late. You have to bury him.”

“Why didn’t you just use the bedroom window?” Even as she asked that, Jo wondered at her logic. But it was dream logic.

“Ashes to ashes,” Gabriella told her, as if that made perfect sense. “Where else would the dead go?”

Jo said, “Oh. Okay, then.”

“You’re the only ones who can do this,” Gabriella insisted. “There was a time when we could have, but now it has to be you.”

That again. “But why?”

“It takes something special to fight evil.” Gabriella backed away, now. “It takes something powerful to counter hate….”

“He’s mine!” Jo tried to warn, before the ghost vanished. But Gabriella was gone. Jo felt frustrated.

Isn’t that just like Gabriella? she thought.

Then she returned to the bedroom, crawled back into the warm bed with Zack, lifted his arm around her. And the purplish glow of nonlight slowly faded back to normal.

Jo woke to morning—the light seeping through the cracks in the blinds held a pink-tinged gray that was completely natural.

Just as natural as the feel of Zack against her—particularly against her hip, proof that he was having a hard, happy dream. Smiling at her discovery, Jo reached over the edge of the bed and found one of the condoms Zack had dropped there the night before. She freed it from its packaging, then reached back under the covers and drew her palm down Zack’s length, curved her fingers around his width.

Her body was already humming again, in expectation.

Zack groaned welcome, so she took that opportunity to roll the condom down the hot, hard length of him. By the time she’d finished that, and peeked back up, his eyes were open.

And burning at her.

“Good morning,” said Jo, and kissed him. It was another wonderfully sloppy, wet kiss like last night. She loved that she could kiss him without worrying about doing it properly.

“Fan-freaking-tastic morning,” Zack murmured back.

Now that he could protest—unlikely, but it was important that he could—Jo braced herself on his hairy chest with both hands, slung a leg over his waist, then slid deliciously lower.

Zack’s hot gaze held hers, telegraphing full approval as she found his hardness again. He bent his legs to support her, circled her waist with his big hands to help steady her as she lifted and then carefully slid—oh!—lower.

She’d never done this, either. But it felt so good!

Better than good. Fan-freaking-tastic.

She still felt tender from last night, but it was a good tender, like the subtle ache that came from a day-hike or a long ride on horseback. It intensified the way she could somehow stretch around him, taking him all in. She marveled at the rippling joy that leaning forward or back, inching up or sliding down him sent rocketing through her. Soon, she’d found her own sensuous rhythm.

Maybe since she was doing so well on her own, Zack slid his hands from around her waist up to her breasts, savoring them as completely as she’d savored his erection while he slept.

Mine, she thought happily, gazing down at him—his hair curly from sleep, his jaw rough with whiskers, his eyes seeming to adore her. The pleasure of their lovemaking was intense, but more intense was how thinking that one word doubled it. Mine.

The orgasm struck her by surprise. Not that she wasn’t enjoying herself! But she’d thought she’d just begun when all the heat that had been sizzling through her body suddenly coiled, front and center and then broke.

She convulsed with a happy cry, closing her eyes to better savor it—and when she opened them, Zack was watching her with bemusement. And pure lust, of course.

“Fast,” he marveled. If a grunt counted as marveling.

“Good…incentive,” Jo panted, still dizzy.

“Finished?” An upward thrust of his hips—and all that went with them—confirmed her hopes on that.

“No,” she gasped, squirming happily atop him. Mine. “But—”

Here it came again! She rode out the surge of pleasure, more than once. As if her body could hardly contain the power of this joining. Finally she sank weakly, blissfully forward onto Zack’s chest, still straddling his continued interest.

Even then, her body was shuddering in answer to his.

“But you’d better drive,” she whispered.

Somehow, Zack managed to lift her off of him—grinning self-satisfaction at her mew of protest—then to roll her beneath him without either of them falling out of bed. A miracle itself.

“Hang on,” he warned. Or promised.

And drive he did.

So he fell back to sleep afterward. So sue him. Considering how thorough he’d been, Zack didn’t see any harm in resting.

Except that when he woke again, Jo wasn’t there.

He pushed up in bed and looked around her little room—plain, but pretty—then spotted his briefs on the floor and slid them on. He wasn’t sure what level of casual nudity Jo was comfortable with yet. Why take chances?

He wasn’t sure about a lot of Jo’s life.

He meant to have fun learning.

But first he headed into the bathroom to clean up, leaving the door cracked. Bits of steam on the mirror hinted that she’d had the same idea. After a basic wash-up, with a nice normal bar of soap—none of those little flowers or seashells Gabriella had lived for—Zack shaved with a pink, plastic razor.

He should probably mention this always thinking of his. She might want to be in on that. He thought she felt the same, a certainty rooted deep down inside him where he knew that he was meant to protect innocents, that pizza was the perfect food and that there was a God. He felt like he’d known her, been meant to be with her, all along.

But she might fuss about not being asked, all the same.

He’d only just finished rinsing the razor, and splashing stubble down the sink, when Jo’s voice called, “Zack?”

He leaned out of the bathroom. “Yeah?”

“Zack?” Her voice sounded higher than he’d ever heard it.

Zack bolted for the kitchen—then stopped, one hand still on the doorframe, wondering what could be wrong.

A wet-haired Jo stood in the kitchen, dwarfed by his long-sleeved shirt over what otherwise seemed like perfectly good nudity, with a bottle of milk and a box of cereal in her hands. She’d put two empty bowls out on the counter, and spoons—a non-cook’s version of getting breakfast, he realized. And she was staring at the sunlit desert outside a window over the sink.

“What?” His fear quickly degenerated into annoyance. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she coulda given him a heart attack!

Then he realized just how pale she looked, and annoyance faltered. He went to stand behind her, wrapped his arms around her, and it felt good, except for her being upset. “What is it?”

“Did you open these curtains?” she asked, her voice uneven.

“Why would I open your curtains?”

“Oh God,” she said. When he led her to one of the chairs at her plain pine table, she sat without protest. “Oh, Zack.”

She was scaring him again. He crouched beside her. “What?”

Her gaze seemed troubled as it met his. “What color dress was Gabriella wearing when you buried her?”

The question hit Zack in the gut—Gabriella was the last person he wanted Jo thinking about this morning. He straightened up enough to slide into the other chair. Its wooden seat felt smooth under his bare thighs. “Why?”

“Humor me?” she pleaded.

“Blue. It was this silky, knee-length blue thing with big ruffles around the shoulders, kinda like from the forties.”

“And she had a little gold cross,” said Jo. That’s when he understood. The certainty of it, even before she explained, sank a hole right into the middle of him. A cold, ugly hole.

“Why?” This time he didn’t ask. He growled.

“I think she visited me last night,” she admitted.

While he tried to absorb that, Jo recounted the dream that might have been real. More verses about only him and Jo being able to defeat this thing. Some lunacy about Gabriella and Zack once being able to do it—this was the Gabriella who freaked over pretty much anything that crawled, except babies.

Of course, Jo could have sleepwalked, and only dreamed Gabriella after all. He said, “Blue’s not an uncommon dress color.”

“Her hair wasn’t straight, like in the picture you carry,” Jo said solemnly. “It was shorter, and curly. Like a new perm.”

The hole inside him expanded as his certainty did. He’d hated her perming that beautiful hair, and now it meant Jo had been visited by his wife’s ghost—here, and in the cemetery.

Gabriella wasn’t resting in peace—and she’d come after Jo.

And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, Zack could hear a faint ringing from the living room. A Journey riff.

“Wait here,” he insisted, going to find his mobile phone—which meant finding his pants. Jo, being a docile and obedient woman—hah—trailed him.

“Some of it was just what Crazy Bud said,” she said. “And the rest—it made sense last night, but now I don’t get it.”

If she’s trying to kill you, that’s probably a good thing.

Zack flipped open his telephone just before it transferred to voice mail. “Yeah.”

“Zack!” exclaimed Cecil. “I hope you rested well.”

Zack narrowed his eyes, hoping that wasn’t an insinuation about him and Jo. Yeah, they’d had a wild night. And morning. But he felt more alive than in years. Kinda terrified, since this latest bombshell, but intensely alive all the same.

Even with birth control, sex really was about life.

“You called me,” Zack snarled, instead of answering the question. Fortunately, his partner moved on. Assuming Cecil had meant anything in the first place.

“Ah. Yes, that. Something seems to have developed.”

Zack hated the pressure to keep making Go on noises when Cecil got dramatic. His current choice of a Go on noise was, “Don’t make me drive back there just to yank it out of you.”

Jo asked, “Yank what?”

“I’m telling you!” Cecil defended. “Are you familiar with the resort dude ranch west of town? Tierra del Oeste.”

“Yeah,” said Zack. “Now don’t make me drive out there—”

“Someone died last night.” Cecil seemed oddly unsympathetic toward the dead person. Especially for Cecil. “Ashley was called over, but when she arrived the body had vanished.”

“Ah,” said Zack.

“But some busboys seem to have seen him strolling into the desert, toward the caves, shortly before her arrival.”

Now Zack said, “Ah, hell.”

“Hell what?” asked Jo. His shirt looked really good on her.

“Dead guy walking at the resort,” Zack muttered. Then he asked, more loudly, “So why didn’t you call sooner?” It better not have been to give him and Jo privacy. They didn’t need help.

Jo asked, “What resort?”

“I wanted to do a thorough background check on the gentleman first,” Cecil explained, even while Zack leaned over so Jo could stand on her toes and put her ear against the phone, too. Her hair brushed water dampness onto his cheek. She smelled soapy. “It turns out he had connections to terrorism.”

First a child abuser, then a white supremacist, then a Mafia associate—why not a terrorist? And Crazy Bud said the necromancer only needed one more servant. “Aw, hell.”

Jo said, “Was it the Tierra del Oeste?”

Cecil said, “You two should probably—”

“We’re on our way.” Zack straightened, to end the call.

“Wait,” protested Jo, capturing his wrist to take the phone. “Cecil, have you got the promo material we picked up at Tierra over there?” Listening, she caught the edge of Zack’s tank from the floor with one foot, tossed it upward. “Uh-huh.”

Zack caught the undershirt and put it on. Then his pants.

His shirt, however, was occupied.

“Uh-huh,” said Jo again, much better at Go on noises than him. “Good. The map’s what I wanted. Would you cross-reference the map to the places they’ve stopped taking tourists?”

Because of the snakes, Zack remembered as he put his shoes back on. Tierra del Oeste had started avoiding certain areas because of the snakes. It was an interesting thought, except that a patron’s death hardly put the resort at suspicion, any more than Brent Harper’s death put the desert under suspicion.

“Good, thanks. You too.” Jo disconnected, gave Zack his phone, and headed for the bedroom.

Zack followed, appreciating the view. “What’s with the map?”

“Tierra del Oeste,” Jo said conclusively.

“Tierra del Oeste to you too.”

He liked how she grinned over her shoulder at him, prettier by the day. “It means ‘Land of the West,’” she translated, opening a drawer to pull out clean clothes.

“Uh-huh.”

“Remember the spirit tour? Indians believe that when they die, their spirits—”

“Go west.” He wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed to have missed it, or damned impressed.

She was unbuttoning the shirt, so he chose impressed. “You think this necromancer might be at the Tierra.”

“Yup,” said Jo, tossing him his shirt. “Look where the dead things go.”

He missed it on the first grab, being distracted, but shirts fall slowly; he caught it before it hit the floor. “And he may have just completed his collection of evil dead people.”

“Yup.”

“Hurry,” he suggested, sliding his arms into the sleeves.

She pulled a blue T-shirt over her head and rolled her eyes at him. Okay, so she was hurrying.

He valiantly kept himself from saying, Hurry faster.

It felt completely natural to dress together—encouragingly so, considering the excellent scenery. He saw no good openings to swing the discussion from imminent evil back to the fact that he loved her. Imminent evil being pretty important, just now. But their ease with each other spoke volumes.

She dressed fast, too. What wasn’t there to love?

In only a few moments, they headed out of her house—and into the stillest damned day Zack had ever known. For the first time since he’d arrived in West Texas, he felt no wind. He heard no animals or insects. It felt as if something were sucking the oxygen right out of the day—something enormous.

He looked at Jo, but Jo was looking west. While she did, the sunlight began to fade into an unnatural, brownish dusk.

“Duck,” she warned, lifting an elbow over her face as she sprinted for the car.

Right before hell hit.

Chapter 18

The day was too damned still.

When Jo looked toward the southwest, she saw why.

A bruised aura of brown rose over the horizon, and it kept rising in quarters, then a semicircle, darkness filling the sky.

It was a wall of West Texas dirt—breaking speed limits.

“Duck!” Jo turned her face into her arm and ran for the car, but the dust storm outran her. Gale-force wind knocked her over, dirt stinging her hands and face and neck. She gasped as she hit the driveway, inhaled a mouthful of dust and started choking.

Dirt was everywhere! In her eyes, nose, ears, throat. The wind screeched its displeasure, disorienting her further. Then, squinting, she glimpsed a flash of dirt-filtered light.

Zack had unlocked the Ferrari by remote.

Zack. Jo somehow stood against the wind, stretching out a hand toward where she’d seen the light, still choking on dirt. Dust thickened in her watering eyes until she couldn’t even squint. She took a step, feeling for the car in front of her, but her hands touched nothing but blowing sand. Alone. No matter how she’d spent last night, she was ultimately alone here. Like being buried alive. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust—

Then a horn honked, loud and long, to her left. She wasn’t alone; she had someone else. Zack.

Jo flailed in that direction and her hand met fiberglass. The Ferrari’s hood! She banged on it, hard, so Zack could hear that she’d found him and wouldn’t come looking for her. God, don’t let him do that. Then she groped her way around it—thumping it with each step, to show her progress—until she felt a windshield, then a passenger window, then a door latch.

Luckily the car itself sheltered her door from the brunt of the wind. She managed to get it open and then, falling inside, even closed it, still choking on dirt.

Zack quickly snicked the automatic locks shut, then grabbed her. Dirt dusted his face, his hair. “Geez, Jo! Don’t do that!”

She was still just trying to breathe, hacking like a four-pack-a-day smoker, pinching mud off her eyelashes. “Do…what?”

“Vanish like that. Wait a sec.” And he reached behind her seat, where they carried drinking water, and drew out a bottle. He also pulled a handkerchief from his pocket; he really carried handkerchiefs! “Here, baby. Drink.”

The water helped Jo manage the choking, anyway. Once she could breathe better, she squinted up at him. “Baby?”

He sighed, splashing water onto the kerchief and moving to wipe her face. “Sheriff, then. Hold still.”

When Jo took the cloth from him to do it herself, he shook his head and sat back. But really. Would he want her washing his face like a child’s?

Of all the things Jo wanted from Zack Lorenzo, it definitely wasn’t to be his baby.

“Good idea, honking the horn,” she said as a peace offering, her voice gritty. She hated to think what would’ve happened if she’d staggered out into the desert, thinking she was pointed toward the car. Worse, she hated to imagine him coming after her—and he would have. She knew he would have.

At least this time, he didn’t have to. “Great idea.”

“I didn’t know how the hell else to find you in this. Is this kinda thing normal?”

“I don’t know.” When he raised his eyebrows at that, she widened her eyes back at him. Then she coughed. “Dust storms, sure. But I haven’t heard of anything this bad since the ’80s.”

“Nature itself,” he muttered.

She chugged more water, then made a muddy streak wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “What?”

“You started to tell me on the Spirit Tour, but King distracted us. Crazy Bud said Nature is ticked off by whatever’s going on, right? When did you say that big rainstorm hit?”

It was easy to remember, being the only rain they’d had in months. “Last week in January.”

“When the wiseguy died. Anything last November?”

Jo nodded more slowly. “Freak blizzard.”

Zack blew out a breath. “That would be Brent Harper’s.”

She didn’t get it. “When someone dies, Nature freaks out?”

“Or whenever someone’s reanimated,” he suggested.

“So if Mother Nature’s upset about that,” Jo said, “and this is how she acts out, how angry do you think she’ll be over whatever our diablero means to do now?”

“I’d rather not find out.” Zack ducked his head to peer out the window. Dirt hissed and slithered against the side of the car, across the glass, darkening everything past the edge of the driveway. “We can drive in this, right?”

His phone beeped its Journey riff, and he answered it with a dirty hand. “Yeah.” Pause. “Too late, Einstein. It’s here.”

Cecil. Jo found a clean corner on the handkerchief, dampened it, and wiped her face again. Not quite so much mud, this time.

Zack said, “Yeah, that sounds right.”

Jo turned down the sun-visor to check her appearance in its mirror—and groaned. Her hair had been damp, so now it looked like it was made out of red clay. She was sexy as a lump of mud, just when it had started to matter. She hated that it mattered.

Whatever was happening out there was powerful enough to affect the weather, and she was worried about her hair?

Disgusted, she flipped the visor back up.

“Peachy,” said Zack. “No, but Jo won’t like it. I’ll explain later.” Pause. “Fine.”

Then he hung up, and repeated, “We can drive in this, right? Kinda like a blizzard, but without that pesky freezing-to-death?”

“We can creep, as long as we don’t lose the road, and what won’t Jo like?”

The Ferrari sighed to life on Zack’s first turn of the key. “Cecil has an idea where our diablero may have set up shop, if it’s really on the Tierra del Oeste resort grounds.”

She waited, already bracing herself.

Zack concentrated on backing slowly down the driveway. She felt the asphalt under their rear tires at the same time he must have, because he cut the wheel sharply over, found the road. “It’s a cave, Jo. Something del Muerte. Apparently that means—”

“Of the Dead.” She hadn’t braced enough. Of all the hiding places around here, they were searching for a cave of death.

“Look,” said Zack. “You don’t have to come along—”

“Don’t even think I’m hanging back while you of all people go cave crawling.” The idea would have upset her before last night. Now it terrified her.

How could she possibly bear the risks he took now?

“Me of all people?” Zack looked insulted as he swerved the car, finding the road’s shoulder under the right wheels, keeping pavement under the left. It kept them on the road. Mostly.

“A city boy,” Jo clarified miserably.

He rolled his eyes. “First of all, lady, I’m not a boy. I kinda thought you’d figured that one out last night. Second of all, we do have caves in Illinois, too. Lots of ’em.”

Jo said, “Oh.”

“Not that I’ve been in any of them.” He grinned. Her return smile felt wan, but it was a start. Apparently it encouraged him, because he said, “Look, let me drop you off somewhere. Just this once. Between Gabriella targeting you, and it being caves…”

“No.” She noticed how tight his hands were on the wheel as he squinted ahead of them, noticed the speedometer barely registering ten miles per hour. Dirt seemed to rush into the headlights and then part at the last minute, hinting at shapes or faces in its blowing depths. Something about today felt…big.

She wasn’t going to let him do it alone. “But we can stop at one place on the way through town—if we can see it. Low, brown building with no windows. Gravel parking lot.”

Spur Blasting’s clientele generally didn’t need pavement.

By the time they left town, they had maybe ten feet of good visibility. Zack sped up to a blistering twenty miles per hour. And Jo was a felon.

At Spur Blasting, she introduced him to an older man named Hank. Hank looked like a cowboy, no big surprise around here, but apparently his true trade was blowing things up. And Jo, the woman Zack loved, sometimes worked for him. For fun.

He’d known she was tough. He hadn’t realized the extent.

Zack had thought the red tape involved in police work was bad, but explosives? Whatever story Jo murmured to Hank, before the introductions, must have worked though. She got started on the paperwork, apparently falsifying records with abandon, while Hank explained his business in more detail. He blew the occasional basement for houses, got rid of stumps, brought down dilapidated buildings. Sometimes he contracted out of state, decommissioning underground missile silos for the military or blowing back fire lines during a wildfire. Who knew?

It sounded innocent enough—except for the blowing things up part. But in the meantime there Jo had stood, grimly filling out forms for the BATF and OSHA and maybe God. Then they had to get the actual goods from separate, double-locked bunkers—explosive agents, blasting caps and a large, hand-held blasting machine.

“Safer than using the car battery,” Jo explained, back in the car, though the word safer was probably relative. “And I do still have my license.”

Zack looked significantly at her duffel bag of death.

She said, “Last time I was in a cave with zombies, this stuff saved my life.”

“Did I say anything? I’m just adjusting to being an accessory.” Using her credit card to pay Hank had seemed silly—an unnecessary complication—when he had cash on him.

At least now that she had incendiary devices, Jo seemed a lot calmer. But he’d rather she stayed scared. And home.

Unfortunately, when they finally reached Ashley’s place in Almanuevo, the rest of their “team” was no better.

“Since you’re taking the truck anyway,” announced Cecil, “we’d best come with you.”

“We’re taking the Ferrari,” said Zack—while Jo asked, “Why do you want to come with us?” As if it was even an option!

“We’ve got a great deal to tell you, for one thing.”

Zack looked at everything they’d collected—boxes, goggles, what looked like a machete—and said, “So tell.”

“Why you two may be meant to defeat our necromancer, for one thing,” Cecil said. “What can best fight evil? Good! Both of you are very good people, protecting and serving and such.”

Zack slid his gaze to Jo’s. She looked unconvinced, too. Not only weren’t they paragons, here, but— “It can’t be that easy.”

Cecil said, “But as a healer, Ashley belongs in that category as well. And hopefully myself, just for being such a nice fellow. So we might provide useful backup.”

Zack said, “Which you can do from here.”

“Some of it, perhaps,” Cecil countered. “But not all, and certainly not medical support, and stop shaking your head, Zack! You sense it too. Whatever is happening, it’s happening now.”

“We aren’t saying we should go into the cave with you,” said Ashley, which might have cheered Zack up a lot more if he couldn’t hear the but coming so loudly, he coulda been psychic himself. “But we should be within running distance.”

“In case you do need us,” agreed Cecil.

What Zack needed was to go alone. The idea of leading Jo into this sickened him, and at least Jo could shoot and blow things up. But Ashley and Cecil?

“Too bad you won’t fit in the Ferrari,” he said. “Now give the map to Jo so we can go after this sonuva—”

“The cave is here, Zack,” Cecil insisted, holding up the unfurled map and pointing at the glossy, colorful drawing—not to scale, Zack guessed. “In these hills. Off road by more than two miles, over what appears to be an ancient lava bed and through a ravine. You’ll need the higher wheel-base and four-wheel drive.”

“The truck’s more likely to flip over in the wind,” Zack reminded them. Did nobody else here read Consumer Reports? “So we’ll walk the last two miles.”

Now all three of them stared at him, like he was the crazy one. In the sudden silence, blowing sand hissed across the outside of Ashley’s living-room windows, to make their point.

He was outvoted and it pissed him off, even more than normal. What had begun as his own damned job had embroiled a fragile-looking nurse, a friend who was like a kid brother to him—and Jo.

The woman he loved.

They could get hurt, maybe even die, because of him, and he couldn’t allow that. Anything but that. “I’m going by myself.”

Ashley, hefting a first-aid chest, looked bemused.

Cecil, opening a package of two-way radios, said, “You mustn’t. Everyone says it has to be the two of you.”

And to make Zack’s afternoon, Jo just looked pissed.

Jo insisted on driving her own truck, which apparently did nothing for Zack’s mood. Well, he’d just have to live with it, wouldn’t he? She wasn’t particularly happy with him, either.

The contrast from this morning’s euphoria felt sharp.

Part of her bad mood could be blamed on this driving-into-possible-death business. And part of it was the fact that, damn it, Zack was still trying to protect her at his own expense!

I’m going by myself, he’d said. Jerk.

Sexy, intense, overly protective jerk.

What was it going to take? She’d shot snakes beside him. She’d visited with Brujas and Santeros and even mobsters beside him. And the way they’d made love—did anything about their lovemaking imply that she was some kind of fragile flower? Because she didn’t know what else it could be.

Angry to be worrying about relationship issues at a time like this, Jo scowled through the windshield at the reddish dust that billowed, like a living thing, into the headlights. Or like living things. She could almost swear she saw shapes in it, a face here, a shoulder there. Amorphous. Eerie.

Visibility had increased to four car lengths, at best—and that, only sporadic. But it would have to do. With the death of this latest evil, and Nature’s rebellion, they seemed to be running out of time. And in the meantime, Zack slouched on the passenger side of the front seat, hardly winning friends.

Jo, for one, was glad to have Ashley and Cecil along. They had good ideas, for one thing. Ashley had provided goggles from the clinic, and Cecil found some bandannas to wear over their lower faces, like Old West outlaws—though currently, both hung at their throats. And Ashley and Cecil had information.

“If that symbol Jo found is Hebraic,” said Cecil, from the back seat, “then it might point toward King. He wore that Kabbalah pendant. But if it’s a rune, I’m more inclined to suspect Dane Thorson.”

“If it’s a man at all,” added Ashley, beside him. “Crazy Bud may have been speaking in the abstract. And if we truly are dealing with zombies, Angelique Dupres may yet be involved.”

Zack said, “Now you distrust the voodoo queen.”

Ashley firmly said, “Vodoun.”

“And snakes,” Cecil interrupted loudly from the back seat, before Zack could retort. “They’re involved as well. They are used in Vodoun, though of course not rattlesnakes.”

Ashley said, “And snakes have goddess connections, which throws the Garden of Eden story into an interesting light, don’t you think?”

Zack didn’t seem to appreciate that.

“And immortality,” added Cecil. “As long ago as the Epic of Gilgamesh, snakes have represented everlasting life.”

Zack muttered, “Well, if Gilgamesh thought it was true…”

Jo surreptitiously smacked him in the leg while she caught Cecil’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “Go on.”

Zack surreptitiously flipped her off. And to think she’d slept with…

But damn it, even now she didn’t regret that. They hadn’t just had sex, no matter how volatile things felt just now. They’d made love. Her and Zack. Because she loved him.

Even the traits that were currently making her teeth ache.

Cecil said, “It seems to be the skin-shedding. To ancient cultures, it looked as if the snake died and was reborn from its skin. That makes snakes the guardians of immortality.”

Something about that felt right.

Zack shook his head. “Immortality. Peachy.”

“It would explain why Nature is upset, though,” suggested Ashley. “Assuming she is. No matter one’s beliefs about the afterlife, we do all have healthy options for becoming immortal. It’s a natural part of living a full life, leaving an impression on the world. We can create works of art—poems and sculptures—for example. Or save lives. Or bear children! If someone is scorning those options for a darker, less natural means of living forever…”

Jo thought about the years she’d spent in Spur, making no more impressions than necessary, and felt guilty. And foolish. And she hated driving in this damned blowing sand!

Zack said, “So you’re thinking the guy we’re after decided against the poetry option, huh?”

Ashley sighed.

Cecil said, “Jo, can you make out that split-rail fence to our right? When it opens into a gate, that’s where we turn in.”

She had to lean closer to Zack to see the fence. That meant feeling Zack’s nearness again. Breathing him. Sensing him.

She didn’t want him to die. She’d rather go alone, herself.

“Here,” he told her gruffly.

She turned, and the truck swooped down a sharp bank, rocky and uneven. Jo stomped on the brake, slowing their rushed descent, and only eased off it in short starts until the land leveled out. But level out it did—and right in front of her was the opening in the fence.

“Thanks,” she murmured, easing onto the gas again.

“Yeah,” Zack said, then hooked his elbow on the seat back to ask Cecil, “So if this guy’s doing some kind of immortality ritual, what would it entail?”

In the mirror, Jo saw Cecil and Ashley exchange uncertain glances.

Zack turned to face front again. “Crap.”

“It’s just, we don’t know what tradition he’s using,” insisted Cecil quickly. “Santeria, Quimbanda, Vodoun, Wicca—”

“Wiccans don’t do necromancy,” said Ashley.

“Not normally, but my point is, he could be following any magical system from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to some paperback called Spells to Be Immortal. There’s no way to tell.”

Jo felt she ought to mention, “And Crazy Bud said he’s mixing traditions. Mixing powers, anyway. Willy-nilly.”

“Which means Jo and I are going in blind.” Zack thumped a closed fist against his window, like he wanted to get out.

Cecil said, “To our left, the track should veer down into a ravine, right around here. It may be difficult to find….”

It was difficult. Jo crept the truck forward, then braked, then crept forward, then braked, craning her neck as if those extra few inches between her and the windshield were going to somehow cut through the blowing dirt and whatever lurked in its swirling frenzy. For a moment, the path seemed to smooth into something like a trail—

Suddenly figures seemed to lurch out of the darkness, throwing themselves at the windshield. Gasping, Jo not only stopped but yanked on the parking brake—and stared into the nothingness of dirt again. No bodies. No faces.

The words hit before the thought. “Something’s wrong here.”

“What?” Zack already had his hand on his pistol, peering out his own window as if he’d seen nothing. “Someone, or something?”

“I thought I saw…” Frustrated, Jo pulled her goggles back on, then her bandanna. She wasn’t sure what she’d find, but she knew she needed to look. Even out there. “I’ll just be a minute.”

When she opened her door, the wind jerked it out of her hand. She needed all her strength, after climbing out, to push it closed. Dirt filled her clothes and her ears, flapping the triangular end of the bandanna and scraping across the goggles as she felt her way around to the front of her truck. Then, her stomach shrinking into a small, hard thing, Jo peered through the blowing sand at the ground not a yard ahead of the tires.

It was a sheer drop. If someone or something hadn’t stopped her, she would have rolled the truck, possibly killing herself and her friends too.

And Zack. She’d only just found him, and she could have killed—

A sharp whistle in her ear, over the wind, made her jump. It was Zack, bandit-masked, eyeing the ravine. She punched him in the shoulder for scaring her—then kept her hand on him, because he was solid and sure in the midst of this blowing, howling uncertainty. And he didn’t make a half-bad windbreak.

He yelled, “So did we overshoot, or turn too soon?”

Damn it, she’d only just found him!

“I don’t know,” she admitted. When he yelled “What?” she clutched a handful of his shirt for support, rose onto her toes, and repeated more loudly. “I. Don’t. Know!”

“So we’ll figure it out,” he shouted back. “Get inside!”

Jo didn’t want to. She didn’t want the responsibility anymore. She didn’t want to fight evil, she didn’t want to risk driving her friends over cliffs, and she sure as hell didn’t want to watch this lover die. She was scared. Finally terrified.

Because her only other option seemed to be not to watch.

She yanked on Zack’s shirt, and he bent obligingly closer to her, and she asked, “Will you drive?”

She felt guilty for being a coward. But who else was she supposed to ask for help?

Zack’s intense eyes searched hers from behind his plastic goggles. But all he said was, “Sure.”

When they climbed back into the Bronco on opposite sides than they’d gotten out, neither Cecil nor Ashley mentioned it. They simply looked over the map, double-checked the trip odometer, and decided they’d turned a tenth of a mile too soon. So Zack backed the truck up, then continued to carefully parallel the ravine until they hit a better ford.

Jo sank back into her seat, on the passenger side, and marginally relaxed. At some point, when she wasn’t looking, she’d gotten used to this. Zack driving. Zack carrying the weight of everyone’s safety on his broad shoulders.

Hers included.

It didn’t mean she couldn’t do it herself. But she no longer fought him doing it either. Life was too short.

Maybe literally.

Chapter 19

By the time Zack pulled the truck to a stop beside the box canyon outside where the cave should be, Jo no longer suspected the transitory faces and figures in the blowing sand were mere illusions. They were taking on momentary form.

A shoulder here. A glimpse of blowing hair there. Saddened eyes reflected the struggling headlights, then vanished.

It was downright creepy. But the creepiest part was watching for Gabriella to appear. And Jo didn’t even know the woman.

What must Zack be going through?

She knew him better than to ask if he was okay, anyway.

“Wear these,” Cecil insisted, passing two-way radios with hands-free headsets over the seatback. “The channels are already set. I don’t know how well they’ll work through rock, but it’s worth a try. If you see something, describe it so Ashley and I can try to narrow down what traditions are being used and, if possible, how.”

“I hate going in dead blind.” But Zack took the radio.

Cecil’s eyes widened mournfully. “Don’t say dead!”

So maybe we don’t go in, Jo found herself thinking, even as she secured the earplug of her own headset, even as she slid the goggles over her eyes and pulled up her bandanna mask. We can leave. You and me. We can pretend none of this is happening, that we imagined it.

It hadn’t worked so badly for her last time, had it? She’d been alone, sure, but she’d survived. If the world could go on after parents or lovers died, why wouldn’t it continue with an evil immortal or two in it?

This time she wouldn’t even be alone. She would have Zack.

Let me have you.

But Jo knew damned well that she would be alone if she gave up. Even if she pleaded Zack into leaving with her, she wouldn’t have the whole man, only a ghost of who he could be. She wouldn’t have all of herself, either, just the hollow reflection she’d been for years. Being lost from oneself was an even worse kind of aloneness, a worse kind of death, than even the grave.

Or maybe it wasn’t really worse—just more avoidable.

That had to be enough.

So she shrugged on her backpack, heavy with explosives and the hand-held blasting machine. She popped the cylinder on her revolver and added a sixth bullet before snapping it into place. When Cecil offered his machete, she hooked its hilt to her belt. There would be no such thing as overdoing it, today.

Too much of her—her blood and bones and soul—sensed danger out past that sand. She hoped to never ignore that sense again.

“Ready?” asked Zack, looking like a nearsighted bandito.

I love you too much to ever be ready for this, she thought. But with so many other factors stealing their attention, now was not the right time to mention that. “I am if you are.”

He got out of the truck. She did too, into screaming wind.

Her and Zack. Alone—but together.

Or maybe not alone.

As they waded through buffeting dirt, nearing the crevice that seemed to be the cave entrance, a figure moved. A whole, solid figure, not just a glimpse of skin and sand. They both dropped to the ground, in the shelter of a sandstone boulder.

And Jo landed nose to nose with one of the largest rattlesnakes she’d ever seen.

The snake wasn’t coiled in a threat to strike; its swollen-jawed, triangular head rested casually across a few of its heavy, arm-thick coils. It stared at her through tiny, cold-blooded eyes. Its tongue flicked out and in, out and in, tasting the scent of her.

Jo didn’t move. At all. Even to breathe.

In her ear she heard Zack’s murmured voice sound more clearly than the storm around them—except for the rush of the wind, like static, in his mike. “Some kind of guard,” he told Cecil. “Only caught a glimpse through all this damned Texas blowing around. I’m gonna look closer, see if it’s human.”

Nobody wanted to end up hurting a living human being—although, in the case of their diablero, they might have to.

Jo wasn’t sure if she sensed Zack rising up for another look, or merely heard the heavier wind on the headset. She was too busy watching the snake’s forked tongue flicker at her, in their little sheltered pocket out of the worst wind.

After a moment, Cecil’s voice prompted, “What do you see?”

Zack didn’t answer.

Uh-oh. Still holding the snake’s beady gaze, Jo found she could move after all. She reached behind her, hand wide and grasping—and could have moaned her relief when her fingers touched the denim of Zack’s jeans. He was still there, at least.

But something was still wrong.

Snake, or Zack? Snake, or Zack?

The snake didn’t seem to be buzzing a warning, not that she could hear anything over the wind. He still lay casually coiled.

Oh hell.

Jo fisted her free hand tight around her own microphone and whispered to the reptile, “We’re taking care of it now, okay? Let us do our job.”

She doubted even a snake could hear her, in the midst of this dust storm, but logic held that it couldn’t understand anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Cecil’s voice sounded increasingly worried. “Zack? Jo?”

She uncurled her fingers from the mike. “I’m here.” Then she made herself turn to Zack—giving the snake her back.

Zack wasn’t just staring over the boulder. He was standing.

Jo rose onto her knees—her back tensed, waiting for fangs that didn’t come—and looked too.

The “guard” walked slowly closer to them, her mascara-lined eyes cold. Dead. Nothing else about her seemed dead, not even the dry, glittery sheen of her skin and clothes, and certainly not the rock clutched in one carefully manicured hand. But the lack of expression in those eyes, that was enough.

Even if Gabriella Lorenzo was merely existing, like Jo had for all these years—letting her heart pump forgotten blood, letting her lungs draw unnoticed air—her eyes were dead.

That was when Jo fully understood just how close she’d come to walking-dead status herself, before Zack arrived. With one big difference. Jo hadn’t been killed or buried yet. Jo still had a chance. If she took it.

Gabriella wore a blue, silky dress, flapping around her in the wind as she stepped within arm’s reach. A funeral dress.

And she was raising the rock, while Zack stood and stared.

Zack had readied himself for this for four years. Seeing Gabriella again, that is. Maybe seeing her dead.

He hadn’t expected her to try to kill him.

If she’d succeeded, it would be because he’d underestimated things. The punch to his gut that just seeing her caused. His guilt at not having understood. His pain at her not telling him.

And he’d underestimated the horror.

This was a worse horror than toothy monsters or unstoppable killers. The worst those monsters could do, generally, was kill a person. Awful though that was—and God knew it was terrible—people did die anyway. Sooner or later. Everyone. No exception.

Gabriella, whom he’d once loved body and soul—whom he would in some ways always love—hadn’t been allowed to die. Suddenly, clearly, that was worse. She’d lost her life but was imprisoned in some kind of in-between, outside the flow of Nature, outside the peace of God. And Zack could barely swallow in the face of that horror, could barely see, could barely breathe.

Gabriella. His wife. His love. His responsibility.

He barely noticed that she was swinging one arm back….

Which is when Jo rammed herself into his ribs, body-checking him to the ground.

Zack jammed his elbow, breaking their fall. Chunks of sandstone rained across them, heavier than the blowing sand. “What the hell—” he began to protest.

Then he noticed the snake coiled by Jo’s boots as she sprang back up. “Jo, snake!”

“I think it’s friendly,” she gasped back, more audible through his earphone than from standing over him, and vaulted the boulder. Zack scrambled up too, and away from the snake, just in time to see Jo duck another swing from Gabriella’s vicious-looking rock. “Friendlier than her.”

Crap. He jumped over the boulder himself, and grabbed Gabriella—or tried. For the first time in four years, he reached for her, and it was to keep her from hurting Jo.

But she vanished in a blown-away armful of sand, the rock dropping harmlessly to the desert floor.

A trick. It had been some kind of sick trick. “Maybe something’s just reading our minds,” he guessed—prayed—as he watched the sand flutter out of his palms. The hurt in him, deep in his chest and his soul, was only an echo of the moment he’d first seen Gabriella in that damned bathtub, first known he’d lost her…but even the echo choked him. He wondered how he’d survived it full-strength, how anyone did.

But he also knew he had survived. Just like Jo had, more than once. Just like almost everyone else had to, sooner or later. It took more strength and courage than fighting evil—but they’d done it. And now it was time to clean up the mess.

He remembered Cecil and explained, “The guard was Gabriella, but she turned into sand. Maybe something’s just reading our—”

Jo said, “So why don’t any of those look like Diego?”

Zack looked up from his empty hands to see, between gusts of flying dust, three more figures standing between them and sandy glimpses of a jagged-looking cave entrance. Two boys and a girl, late-teens, early-twenties. Two held rocks, and one held some kind of branch as a club. All of them wore somber fineries appropriate for a funeral, except for the boy in the letterman jacket. Zack could imagine grieving parents burying their son, the proud athlete, the star player, in that….

His anger was what freed him. Damn this thing! Bad enough that kids had to die, but for someone, anyone, to use them for his own twisted attempts at outsmarting God—

Not just no, but freakin’ Hell no!

“Okay, so it’s not reading our minds. They’re the kids from that club, the Life Force,” he explained curtly, both to Jo and the headset. “They’re probably just sand, too, but their weapons aren’t. Whoever’s sending them probably knows we’re here. I say we go through them and go in fast, and whatever happens, happens. You with me?”

Silence. Except for Cecil’s murmured, “I’m not sure those are the best possible tactics, Zack. Perhaps if you—”

It was their only possible tactic, so he switched off the headset. “Jo?”

When she still didn’t answer, he dragged his gaze off the approaching…ghosts? Zombies? He glanced down at Jo and saw how pale she’d turned. It was different from a few minutes ago. Her goggle-covered eyes weren’t on this newest batch of walking dead.

She was staring at the dark rock crevice.

Oh crap. He’d forgotten. Caves.

Zack looked from her to the approaching trio and back—and felt a selfish surge of hope. This was the perfect opportunity to send her away. Go back to the truck, let me do this. It would be so easy, and then he wouldn’t have to worry so much about her getting herself killed the way Gabriella had, and he could keep her. For himself. Maybe even for forty to sixty years before, boom, it all happened again.

That’s when Zack realized just how well he did already know Jo, and just how much he must love her. It would kill her not to go on, at this point, to not finish the job she’d started. It wouldn’t kill her quick; would maybe take years, decades. In the meantime, he would have some of her. But she’d be a zombie, all the same. The worst kind. The most common, living kind.

That’s when he knew that he didn’t just love her enough to die for her. He loved her enough to let her die, too.

If that was the chance she took, in order to live, he loved her that much.

The thought shook him, hard—but he didn’t have time to be shaken. He grabbed Jo with rough hands, turned her toward him, and switched off the radio clipped to her belt, too. This wasn’t for Cecil’s ears. “Jo!” he shouted. “You coming or not?”

She glanced away from him, toward the cave entrance.

The kids—the sand-kids—were maybe ten feet off. They weren’t moving fast. He guessed when you were already dead, you didn’t have to.

“Josephine!” And Zack took a deep breath through his rapidly dampening bandanna. “I dare you.”

Her gaze darted back to his, and she blinked, startled.

He looked from her to the approaching danger to her again, and he actually felt himself grinning. Hell, he had to do something with all this adrenaline. “Double-dare you.”

And blessedly, her blue eyes flared back at him. “Zack—”

The kids had almost reached them. “You gonna come fight evil with me, or just stand there like some scared girl?”

And he stepped forward to throw a punch at the closest of the sand guards, fairly sure that—

Yeah. There was Jo, dusting the little female one. Good! He didn’t want to have to hit a girl, even one made of sand. Sure enough, the guards dissolved and blew away once hit, their weapons thudding ominously to the ground.

“Race you!” Jo called, bolting for the cave.

Like he needed an invitation. Zack ran after her—and when she slowed, staring, he caught her around the waist and half carried her the rest of the way into the stony windbreak that was the jagged cave entrance.

He prayed he wouldn’t have to leave her, comatose with fear, while he went on alone, and not just because she’d be helpless.

Because he’d been fighting alone for too long.

To his relief—and admiration—Jo managed to tug her goggles and her bandanna down around her neck without any help from him. She was breathing harder than maybe she had to, sure. And her face remained weirdly pale under her tan as her too-wide eyes took in stone walls around them, the harsh contrast of thickening darkness and flickering light from deeper inside. But she was moving, breathing. “Double-dare?” she demanded, her voice uneven.

He didn’t insult her by asking if she was okay. He could only trust she was strong enough to get over it. “You aren’t gonna pass out like in the Lincoln Tunnel, are you?”

She pointed deeper into the cave, where he heard sandy shuffling. “Not with the welcoming committee there.”

“By the way,” he said. “I love you.”

Since it couldn’t hurt to have it on record.

Then, while she stared at him, he turned to face down more of the sand-bodied ghosts of college students whom the Life Force Club had been seducing for at least five years. Zack and Cecil had collected information on eight students whose deaths, and disappearances, seemed directly connected. They’d suspected at least seven more, without the information to confirm anything.

Zack lost count of the people now coming at them—people he and then Jo were knocking back into piles of fallen sand with every kick and swing. One dozen. Two dozen. So many that, even slow, some of them did hit. A rock to the ribs hurt. A lucky strike at his head hurt more. He heard Jo cry out once, though she didn’t go down. Sticks and stones, even in ghostly hands, made pretty damned good weapons. The ghosts themselves still dissolved to dirt at the first return shot. But they kept coming.

What the hell was this?

Only when Gabriella came at him again, then dissolved again, did Zack understand—and remember to switch his radio back on.

“—don’t answer in the next minute, I’m coming after you!” Cecil was all but screaming from his side of the connection, loud enough that it hurt Zack’s ear.

“Do and I’ll kill you myself,” Zack warned. “We’re okay—”

Then he picked up a dusty branch and took out the letterman kid. Again.

“The missing kids—not the evil ones, the ones from the Life Force—they’re running interference. They keep turning into sand, then coming— Hey!”

Luckily, Jo ducked the rock one of the sand-boys swung at her. She kicked, hard. The kid hung for a moment, then filtered into mere dirt. The sand didn’t blow away in here; it collected in small, sad piles that rasped under Zack’s hiking boots.

“—coming back. Probably made out of different dirt each time. They aren’t real good fighters,” he added, poking an annoying, nerdy-looking form in the chest before it could hit him with its rock. It dissolved.

Cecil said, “They’re probably a delay tactic. You need to get through them.”

“Gee, ya think? Thanks—” he jumped back when a cheerleader type almost beaned him “—Sherlock.”

“Ashley suggests telling them they’re dead.”

Now Jo’s voice came over the line; she must have turned her radio back on, too. “You don’t think they noticed?”

Zack grinned. Damn, he loved her.

“She says magic can be pretty literal, sometimes,” Cecil insisted. “Can it hurt to try?”

Another line of students in funeral clothes headed for them, their faces increasingly familiar. Zack drew a deep, pained breath when he recognized Gabriella again, there on the end.

It should be easier now. He’d taken her out what, twice in the last ten minutes? But it just got worse.

Luckily, Jo spoke before he had to. “You’re dead, you know,” she said firmly, convincingly, to the advancing crowd. She did have a talent for sounding earnest and convincing. “You are all dead. You need to stop fighting us—”

Suddenly she was talking to nothing but a sandy cave floor.

“—now,” she finished, more softly.

Without the shuffling dead between them, they now heard the foreign, singsong words being chanted from deeper inside the cave. Lots of consonants. Ks and Ts.

“Can you hear that?” Zack whispered to Cecil. “There’s some kind of torches or candles farther in, and someone’s chanting. It’s a guy, so I guess that clears the Bruja and Angelique.”

“It’s not Spanish, either,” added Jo. “So it’s probably not the Santero.”

Cecil, over the radio, said, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear.”

So they headed deeper in, walking through the students’ sandy remains, because they were dead, but he and Jo weren’t.

The chanting grew louder, the closer they crept—and then the static started in his ear. “—op!” Crackle. “Losi—ou—”

Zack and Jo touched gazes and backed up until Cecil was just saying, “I’m losing you,” with only a few crackles.

“So you’ll lose us,” Zack said. They couldn’t stop now.

“Wait a moment,” insisted Cecil firmly. “I think it’s Egyptian. I’m not sure, since the vowels are really anyone’s guesswork, historically speaking, but it’s our best guess.”

Egyptian?

“Sirus,” spat Zack. “The freakin’ pet undertaker.”

The fact that he’d never seriously considered the guy pissed him off almost as much as whatever the man was in there doing.

“Egyptian,” Jo said, slowly. “Which means we may not be dealing with zombies at all.”

“No,” said Cecil, his voice increasingly unhappy. “I fear you may be dealing with mummies.”

Every time Zack thought he’d hit his weirdness quota…!

“So how do you kill mummies?” he demanded.

“Considering that the only reanimated ones I’ve ever known of are in the movies, Zack, I’m afraid I don’t know.” Cecil sounded tense. “But what I am fairly certain of is that Egyptians achieved immortality after their death, not before it.”

“Which means?” Zack demanded.

“Now that he has his dead helpers—probably some sort of entourage into the underworld—he may be about to kill himself.”

Well, wouldn’t that be convenient? “Good!”

“At which point, if his spell works, he may remain immortal and indestructible.”

Oh. “Not so good.”

“Ashley says that kind of magic takes incredible power,” said Cecil. “If you can’t stop the spell, destroy the power source. But we highly recommend stopping the spell.”

“We’ve got to go now.” And Jo started deeper into the cave. She still looked wan, shaken. The claustrophobia was still hurting her, but damned if she wasn’t working through it.

“Check in as soon as you—” pleaded Cecil, but Zack turned his headset off to follow Jo. Yeah, he loved her enough to let her die, if she had to.

That didn’t mean he was gonna let her go first.

As they crept deeper into the cave, the darkness curled around them like a living thing, thick and depthless. If not for the flickering of firelight, far ahead, it might swallow them alive. Instead, as they ventured deeper, he was able to make out drawings on the walls. Hieroglyphics, right? The chanting grew louder. A sharp incense began to surround them—

And then he and Jo reached a rocky outcropping and were able to peek around the edge of it, into a larger chamber.

A velvet-draped object, flat and square, stood to the west. A huge, symbol-painted urn squatted in the east. Six bandage-wrapped bodies were laid out on the ground like a gruesome, synchronized-swimmers’ choreography to form a star of mummies. And Sirus, the shopkeeper who’d seemed so strange all along, knelt in the middle of them.

All of this, Zack saw in an instant—just as Sirus fell onto some kind of ceremonial sword.

Jo drew her revolver and fired in unison with Zack. Once. Twice. No more waffling about the ethics of killing—this whole thing was way beyond the scope of the justice system! But unless they’d both suddenly become terrible shots, they were too late.

Sirus looked up at them, his bald head and paunchy body catching the firelight, his eyes kohled like Cleopatra’s—and he smiled, because his magic had worked. Immortal. Indestructible.

At least she wasn’t noticing the cave as much.

The priest pulled the sword from his chest, with a sucking sound. He gripped its hilt as he stood, and this was magic the way Jo had always pictured it. Not just that hides-in-reality business Ashley and Zack kept describing. Not even the ghosts, which could have been phantoms of her mind as well as of sand.

This was flat-out supernatural power. So either Jo really wasn’t crazy, or she was beyond help.

And what the hell did Zack mean, saying he loved her now?

No—she filed that particular gripe away for a moment when they weren’t facing down a now-indestructible necromancer in a rocky tomb of a deep, dark cave. Instead, she turned and shot one of the mummies. “Cecil said to destroy his power source!”

Zack shot another one of them.

Jo shot another. But Sirus just laughed—and came at them, raising his sword. “My associates are dead,” he chided him. “You cannot kill something already dead.”

“You’re dead too,” Jo reminded him firmly, putting all her power into the words. And her words did have power. She’d felt it, when she spoke to the sand zombies. Unfortunately, unlike them, Sirus just kept coming.

Zack shot the priest, just for sheer cussedness, but it did no good. Sirus’s body seemed to absorb the bullets.

“No, Ms. James,” he corrected her, lifting the sword higher. Blood laced across its blade. “I did not die. I killed myself, but clearly I did not die. Now I never will.”

“We’ll see about that.” But Jo began to sidle away from this madman. Zack headed the opposite direction, probably so Sirus couldn’t come at both of them at once.

Sirus chose to come at her. He came slowly, deliberately, like he had all day. Being immortal, maybe he did.

“Hey,” yelled Zack. “Cueball! Over here!”

Sirus smiled. “I’ve already captured from my mummified acolytes what I most needed,” he explained. “Their Ba. Their Ka. Their Khaibit. And mostly, mostly their Akhu, their immortality. Now the power of their evil fills and protects me.”

What can best fight evil?

Jo saw Zack slowly approaching Sirus from behind. He had one of the clubs they’d taken from a sand-guard. He swung with all his protective power—power she realized she’d felt in him from the start—and the branch connected in an ugly, hollow thud.

Good can fight evil.

Sirus’s head lopped sideways under the blow. But somehow he then turned—and with one foot, kicked Zack back across the cave.

Zack stumbled, almost fell, but grabbed on to the cloth-draped square. Velvet slid sideways, but he kept his feet.

Sirus used his beringed, braceleted hands to straighten his head with a popping, wet sound—and Jo, the closest to him, thought she’d throw up.

“The Akhu, that’s the most powerful part for my purposes,” he told her, as if nothing had happened. He was certainly chatty. Must be lonely, being an evil necromancer, she thought.

“True, I needed the help of Vodoun to call my servants to me, but there is a power of darkness in Voudun, too. And Quimbanda. And Satanism. All for the taking, if one knows where to look.”

He did not seem to notice Zack heading for the huge pot.

The power source? Please let it be the power source!

Jo tried very hard not to look, lest she give him away.

Sirus said, “Once my servants were here, the ancient secrets of mummification allowed me to—”

Zack gave the jar a hard shove. It tottered—then went over with a crash that echoed almost painfully from the cavern walls. Cracks zig-zagged across its painted surface, but it did not actually break open.

Please, thought Jo, still backing up. Please.

Zack stood back, swore, and shot the thing for good measure.

The jar wasn’t indestructible or immortal. With a gray cloud of dust, it shattered to the cave floor—and along with it, hopefully, did Sirus’s immortality. Soft dirt slid from between jagged chunks of pottery. When Zack kicked the shards farther apart, to disperse its power further, more dirt spilled out.

“See anything familiar?” asked Sirus, glancing coolly over his shoulder. “Your wife’s ashes are among those.”

Zack stopped still.

That’s when Jo truly knew hate—and a grimmer determination than ever. Sirus is bluffing. That was his source of power.

“Only her ashes, though,” continued Sirus. “I am the one who holds her soul. And I will never—”

Which is when Jo stepped forward, thrust her revolver’s muzzle under his smooth-shaven chin and fired upwards.

The impact tore a hole through the back of his head. She hoped never to see something like that, this closely, ever again—but it was exactly what she’d wanted.

Then, in a flash, Sirus had not only slapped the revolver from Jo’s hand, he’d slashed downward with his ceremonial sword.

The urn had not been the power source after all.

Jo threw herself back from him, from the flashing blade, her cry echoing off cave walls. The way she fell awkwardly, at the last minute, made her think she’d tripped. But at least the priest seemed to have missed her.

Then she heard Zack scream, “Jo!”

And she saw the blood spattered across the rock floor beside her.

Chapter 20

Gabriella’s ashes. Jo’s blood.

Despite years of searching, Zack had new priorities.

“Jo!” He’d aimed his pistol as the priest’s blade sliced a dark line of blood across her leg. Now Zack fired while she fell. Once. Twice. Again.

Sirus absorbed the shots. The gaping hole Jo had blown through the back of his bald head knitted closed.

Immortality was freakin’ gross.

Even crawling away, Jo asked, “Then you did steal their bodies?” Her glare at Zack said, Keep him talking!

Trust Jo to try calming the situation, even while crabbing backwards. Not only was their necromancer chatting like a geek with his first girl, giving them information to use later—

—if they survived—

—but his explanations helped them stall for time.

Jo left a bloody smear where she dragged her leg behind her; did she have time? Zack hated not being able to help her or even, apparently, stop Sirus. But he could see this through.

“Sirus couldn’t have stolen all the bodies,” he challenged quickly, and eyed the ashes spilling in dusty clouds from the urn. Human ashes. Gabriella’s? “There were too many.”

Zack began to back toward what slipping velvet now revealed to be some kind of…picture frame? Something in this damned cave had to be Sirus’s source of power!

“I had them stolen,” the priest agreed. “You white-light types underestimate the darkness that is rising in this world, underestimate how many fools blindly pledge their souls without checking the fine print. I needed young people for their energy, their ambition—their life forces. Assistants would nudge death along for likely candidates, then steal the bodies under the cover of magic. As you’ve surely noticed since I tried shooting you, magic is useful for masking one’s trail and if you go any farther, I will kill her!”

Zack froze, barely four feet from the velvet-covered frame.

The good news was, from the way Sirus’s heavily lined eyes had widened, burning at him, the frame had to be a power source.

The bad news was, Sirus still held his bloody sword.

Beyond him, Zack saw Jo pulling herself to her feet—and drawing Cecil’s machete. “He’ll try,” she said grimly. “Do it!”

So Zack turned, lunged for the frame, and yanked the velvet the rest of the way off to reveal—

A mirror.

A huge, black mirror.

Zack’s heart clutched with strange and familiar horror. He took an instinctive step backward, sand and ashes gritty beneath his shoe. His pulse throbbed in his ears. His throat closed.

The mirror was as black as a window at night. And in its reflective surface writhed the faces of the innocent souls whom the priest had imprisoned over the years. Faces of pain. Faces of longing. Faces of despair.

Zack’s priests sometimes tried to describe the worst punishment in Hell as despair—a separation from Nature, from God Himself. He’d never fully bought it until now, and knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Even before Gabriella’s image glided into the forefront of the dark mirror’s surface, her pretty face wet with tears.

She pressed her left hand, her ring hand, against that glass, as if only that stood between their worlds. Maybe every reflective nighttime window had drawn them this close since the moment of her death—her capture. Maybe on some level Zack had been seeing her in the dark glass, knowing his helplessness, remembering his guilt, over and over. That had been his hell.

Behind him, he heard a roar of male anger—and the clash of blade against blade. Jo yelled, “Break it!”

Zack wanted to touch the glass over Gabriella’s fingers, so lifelike. His heart would always remember her. But she really was dead. By keeping secrets, she’d kept him from protecting her. He was only allowed so much say in other people’s decisions, even people he loved. Jo had taught him that.

It was time to move on.

The farewell rasped out of him. “I’m sorry for taking so long, cara.”

Gabriella’s dark, dark eyes seemed to understand.

And Zack stepped back and shot the glass.

It didn’t break.

“What?” he demanded, stunned. He shot it again—with the same results. Why the hell didn’t it break? Was it a Nature thing? Since this was ancient Egyptian magic, did firearms have no effect? Quickly, Zack grabbed a rock and slammed it against the mirror’s glassy surface with all his strength.

Gabriella, inches and worlds beyond him, did not flinch.

The impact jolted Zack’s arm—but the glass remained whole. And Gabriella hid her face in her hands, despairing again.

What the hell? Zack spun to face the cave to see that Sirus had stopped trying to kill Jo long enough to stare, frightened and increasingly pleased.

The fright told Zack that the mirror, with its trapped souls, really was the priest’s power source.

The pleasure—that was probably a bad, bad sign.

“What did you do?” Zack demanded while Jo, momentarily unnoticed, began to hobble along the wall behind Sirus, toward Zack. The leg of her jeans was dark with blood now, spreading down below the knee. How much longer could she stay conscious—or alive? “How did you trap them?”

“With magics you could never comprehend,” Sirus assured him condescendingly. “I used evil.”

But good was supposed to counter evil. Simplistic though it seemed, Zack knew now that he believed it completely. As surely as he believed that pizza was the perfect food, that there was a God and that he loved Jo James with all his body and soul.

That last thought somehow made sense of everything else.

“You used more,” Zack challenged, carefully not watching Jo, trying to keep Sirus’s attention off of her—and on him. “Something you thought was even greater than evil, didn’t you?”

Just to be on the safe side, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a replacement clip for his automatic.

Sirus shook his head at Zack’s seemingly futile exchange of ammunition. “Perhaps not greater. But powerful enough.”

“The ingredient you needed off of those mummies of yours.”

“And it cannot be stopped,” Sirus agreed.

Jo limped closer, her poor leg leaving intermittent smears along the cave wall in the flickering firelight. Come on, Jo!

“Hatred,” Zack clarified.

Sirus nodded. “Hatred.”

But any fool—except those blinded by hate—knew what best countered that. Love.

Zack had always thought that meant loving the asshole who hated you—that’s how Catechism class had presented it. Without the word “asshole,” anyway. If that was the case now, he guessed they were screwed, ’cause he could never love this bastard. But maybe the secret was more obvious than that.

He sensed Gabriella, in limbo behind him—and Jo, ever closer. Magic could be damned literal, sometimes.

Maybe it meant him and—

As if alerted by Zack’s thought, Sirus suddenly whirled to find Jo. His lined eyes narrowed at the bloody trail across the wall to where she’d gotten within maybe fifteen feet of Zack.

Fifteen long feet, and her barely able to hobble.

“Stop!” commanded the priest, raising his sword.

But when Zack shot him, even with an indestructible, immortal body, the man was still knocked backward a half step. That was the beauty of hollow-point bullets. Stopping power.

Jo limped closer. Zack shot Sirus again, then again. At best, Sirus managed one step forward between each shot. When Jo crumpled to the ground with a gasp, still too damn far, Zack ran for her, caught her hand, and pulled her not just to her feet but the rest of the way to the mirror—still shooting.

She didn’t cry out. Zack wasn’t sure he could have done it even to save the world, if she’d cried out.

“What best counters hate,” she gasped instead, proving that she understood too. She kneeled to scoop up a rock, then stayed down. “The reason we have to do this together.”

“Yeah,” said Zack, and fired again. Despite being repeatedly knocked back, Sirus was inching nearer.

Then Zack’s pistol clicked, empty and useless.

Sirus laughed his triumph, sandaled feet slapping the floor as he rushed them. Zack dropped between Jo and the priest, and caught her small, strong hand in his. They both understood.

“I love you too,” she said—and together, they swung.

Jo barely had time to hear the glass breaking before Zack pushed her onto the stone floor and covered her with his body—and a good thing! From beneath him, she saw the river of power that exploded from the mirror. What must be souls poured out, a current of faces and forms reflecting off jagged shards of glass, all aimed in one direction.

Sirus.

The priest screamed and tried to cover his face, dropping his sword, but it did him no good. The glass debris cut through him like shrapnel, each wound accompanied by a silent sigh from each spirit he’d enslaved. For a moment it felt unending, like the rapid-fire finale to a bloody fireworks show.

Then the necromancer’s scream drowned into a gurgle of blood and he fell, shards covering him like shiny, jagged fur. Dead. And the river of souls, finally freed from their prison, flashed around the room, free, at last, to go.

They dispersed into the far corners of the cave’s rock walls, some toward the sky, some into the ground, some rushing out the way Jo and Zack had come in. Going wherever souls should go. Because they did have to go, in the end.

It really was the way life worked.

And finally, there was silence.

The cave no longer smelled of magic or evil. Only lingering incense. Only rock. Only blood. Then, from dark cracks and crevices, snakes began to flow out.

“Oh, crap,” muttered Zack.

But Jo thought she understood. “They’re going home too,” she suggested. And sure enough, no longer attracted or upset by the immortality magic, the sleek reptiles slithered away.

She let out her breath, barely aware she’d been holding it until her head swam from the effort. “Oh…”

“Jo!” Zack sat up, then sat her forcibly up like some really big doll to be positioned. He grabbed the edges of her cut jeans and tore them wider, to better see the wound beneath. Despite his decent poker face, his eyes flared. “Oh, hell.”

Jo’s head swam more when she looked—too much exposed muscle, too much shiny blood, a little too real, thanks—so she closed her eyes. “It doesn’t really hurt,” she insisted.

But now that Sirus lay dead, and she had time to notice, it was starting to hurt, to throb and burn the way deep cuts could.

“Hardly,” she added, not too convincingly.

“We’re getting you out of here,” said Zack—and when she heard a ripping noise, she looked anyway. He was tearing off strips of his shirt to tie as a tourniquet. Then he folded another hunk of shirt into a bandage, pressed it onto the wound, and said, “Put pressure here.”

The sort of man who either made a woman feel threatened, or wholly safe. In the sudden absence of evil, Jo had never felt so safe. Good thing Zack was an ex-cop, and knew first aid.

Good thing he was a big man, with a lot of shirt.

Still… “We can’t go yet,” she reminded him, taking regular breaths. It got easier, with him here. “Unless there’s a clean-up squad you haven’t mentioned.”

So he picked her up and carried her to the edge of the main cavern, then settled her carefully against a rock. Jo almost protested, but she felt woozy enough that she reconsidered. Zack had enough strength for them both, just now. And she loved him. Why not let him support her a little? Still light-headed, practicing her breathing, she watched as he strode partway down the rough-hewn corridor to where the two-way radios would work, then barked orders for Cecil and Ashley into his headset. Pure Zack.

Her heart had ached at his visible longing when he stood in front of that mirror, staring at his wife. It was better proof of his capacity to love than anything she’d seen yet, and she’d seen a lot. More than enough. She loved him.

Maybe it’s too soon, she thought, and selfishly, the ache deepened. But when Zack came back and sat beside her, his arms sliding around her, the longing was still visible. For her.

“They’ll be here in a minute,” he assured her. “Apparently the storm ended right about the time everything else did. Just hold on a few minutes longer, got it?”

“I’ll hold on longer than that,” she promised.

He grinned, wide and handsome. “You’d better.”

There he went, telling her what to do again. Increasingly comfortable in the circle of his arms, she had the strength to lightly punch his shoulder. “‘By the way, I love you?’”

Zack actually had the nerve to look confused. “What?”

“You wait until we might die to tell me you love me?”

“I wanted—” But he stopped, scowled and changed his mind. “What, wasn’t it romantic enough?”

Like packaging mattered. “I want you to love me alive.”

Instead of arguing, Zack tipped his head closer, rested his forehead against hers. “I do,” he assured her, his voice an intimate rumble that eased through her, better than painkillers. “Love you. Alive. Every tough, nail-chewing inch of you.”

I don’t chew my nails. Then she realized what he meant.

“Well, good,” she said, appeased. “Because I love you too.”

Enough to let him take care of her. Enough to let him risk himself for her. Enough to stake her own wounded heart on that risk. Zack—and what she and Zack had between them—was worth any danger, any vulnerability.

“I know,” Zack said, smug. “You mentioned it.”

Jo was too dizzy to laugh. Instead, she said, “Fine, then.”

Zack grinned. “Fine.”

“So kiss me.” Well, maybe she wasn’t that dizzy. And Zack complied without argument. Definitely better than painkillers.

Ashley Vanderveer said, “That wound doesn’t look like something mouth-to-mouth’s going to help, Zack.”

“Hey, Vanderveer,” said Zack pleasantly toward her, though his dark, intense eyes continued to smile at Jo. “Bite me.”

“Sorry. Jo’s too good a friend for me to move on you.”

Jo laughed at them both, happier at this moment—bleeding, surrounded by mummies and ashes—than she’d been in years. “Go help Cecil do the manly stuff.”

Zack kissed her once more before he obeyed, but that was okay. If he ever started obeying her immediately, he wouldn’t be Zack. The man she’d been waiting for. The man for forever.

True, they hadn’t talked about it. But she knew it anyway. Instinctively. Maybe magically. As surely as she knew that margaritas were the perfect drink, that people were meant to take care of each other…and that resisting that help was just one more way of dying a little.

Jo had no intention of dying again, not that way, for a long, long time.

Ashley cleaned and stitched up Jo’s laceration, feeding her painkillers and antibiotics. Cecil took pictures and film footage of the entire chamber, building theories. And Zack…

Zack got some plastic sacks from the back of the Bronco and filled them with shards of pottery and ashes from the big urn, just in case Sirus had been telling the truth. He didn’t carry them far—just out of the cave’s shadows and into the sunny desert, where he could let the Texas wind carry them away to wherever they needed to be. But he couldn’t leave them.

He wouldn’t want Gabriella’s remains trapped with those of the man who’d ultimately killed her. He assumed the families of the others would—if they could know about this—agree.

It felt strange, watching the last of the ashes blow off over rocks and sand. After all these years, it felt…ended.

Almost.

When he went back inside, Jo was drinking a snack-box of fruit juice—to replenish lost blood, he guessed. He watched her, more grateful for her than he’d ever hoped to be again in his life. No endings without beginnings, right?

Between sips Jo asked Cecil, “So Sirus was killing people for two completely different reasons?”

“Exactly,” Zack’s partner said, studying yet another symbol painted on the wall. Cecil was going to have months of fun, deciphering some of this. “First, it seems he needed souls with a great deal of energy, human batteries for his magic. That’s where the Life Force Clubs came in. I suppose he had disciples on the lookout for students who were interested in immortality and who had very strong auras, like—oh! Hullo, Zack.”

“Like Gabriella,” Zack finished for him, standing in the doorway. They could talk about her. “And those other kids I just carried out. If he had help, we’ve got disciples to go after.”

“They shouldn’t be too difficult to trace, now,” Cecil assured him. “Assuming he left them alive. Cut off the snake’s head, and the body—rather, what I meant to say…”

Ashley came to his rescue. “So the people who worked for him used magic to help kill students and steal their bodies.”

“Which they either sent to him and then cremated, or more likely, cremated and then sent to him. Between owning their remains, and the pledge of their souls, he could apparently summon them at will. Like…incorporeal slaves.”

Zack reloaded his pistol with regular rounds, just in case he got the urge to, oops, shoot Sirus’s body a few more times.

Ashley was packing away her medical supplies. “But that was just the students. How about the other people? The evil people?”

“Ah, yes.” Cecil had kept a wide berth from the mummies, but now glanced nervously toward them.

Zack said, “He probably put out some kind of call for evil—maybe on a psychic level—so real lowlifes found themselves all of a sudden wanting to visit Almanuevo. Once they got here, I guess he did what he could to convince them to die.”

“You mean he killed them?” asked Jo.

Ashley said, “It’s pretty hard to kill someone magically, but an unethical practitioner can stack things against someone.”

“Nudge them,” said Zack, remembering Sirus’s word.

Ashley nodded. “It sounds more like…encouraged suicides. Brent Harper drinking out on those rocks was just stupid. Kathy Hurd, the one who abused her children, was out all day in the desert, without water, before dying of heat stroke. The fellow last night had a heart condition, but he’d been exercising for hours. To call it murder is too easy. But their evil responded.”

“At which point,” Cecil finished, “Sirus used Voudun powers, or something like, to reanimate them long enough to get them here. Then he began the mummification process, which not only preserves the body but—”

“Different aspects of the soul,” finished Jo, nodding.

Zack said, “Especially their hatred. That’s what he used to trap the innocents in whatever dimension he had them, behind that mirror. They couldn’t get through the hatred.”

“Until we broke it.” Jo, still sitting on the floor, met his gaze. She’d said she loved him, too. He believed her.

No way had they finished fighting this kind of darkness. But it sure helped to have a secret weapon like theirs.

“Until we broke it,” Zack agreed, and offered his hand. “So, Sheriff. Ready to blow this place back to hell?”

She grasped his wrist. He clasped hers and drew her easily to her feet—or in this case, her foot. She was still favoring her bad leg, neatly wrapped beneath the now-slit blue jeans.

It would heal. They had time. As much time as anyone ever had, anyway. And the things they could do with it…

“To what?” Cecil’s eyes widened when he understood. “But Zack, there are symbols from at least five different magical systems—so far—painted on the walls of this cave! Including a hieroglyph that looks like the one Jo found.”

“Which we should keep around because…?” Zack prompted, his arm tightening around Jo, and Cecil sighed.

“Let me take a few more pictures, anyway,” he said.

“Should we take any of the other bodies out?” Ashley had no qualms about looking over Sirus’s mummification job. Maybe Jo wasn’t the only tough broad around here. “Brent Harper’s?”

While Jo, still leaning on him, examined the structure of the cave walls, Zack said, “Would you want to know your son had been reanimated and mummified so a pseudo-Egyptian priest could use his evil to work bad magic on countless innocents?”

Ashley said, “Good point.”

Even with his help, it took Jo longer than Zack expected to set out the explosives—what she called a slurry compound, in gel-packs that looked like big sausages. She pierced the skin of the sausages with blasting caps attached to wires, then unspooled the lead wire behind her as they left the cave.

“We’ll meet you at the truck,” Ashley suggested, hefting her economy-size first-aid kit.

“I’ll help you carry that,” said Cecil quickly.

That left just Zack and Jo, settling themselves behind the sandstone boulder that had protected them on the way in, side by side. This time, there was no sandstorm or snakes. Just sunshine and blue sky and one hell of big life stretching out in front of them. It felt good to just take a breath.

As if Zack hadn’t been really breathing for a long, long time. Weird thought.

“You know I’m not Catholic,” said Jo suddenly, as she opened the lid on the blasting machine she’d brought with her. It was the size of a car battery.

“Yeah.” It once had mattered that he marry Catholic, but a lot had happened since then. Now he just needed someone he could trust, right down to her soul—and that was definitely Jo. “You know I don’t want to live in Mayberry, Texas, don’t you?”

“I guessed that much.” She sighed. “But Chicago…”

Chicago was where he’d lived with Gabriella. Where his family thought his greatest dangers were simple criminals…or girls who weren’t Catholic. They would adjust, of course. But it would be easier in short visits.

He said, “I always liked the sound of the northwest. Oregon. Washington. Someone’s gotta need a sheriff, up there.”

“I could handle that.” Jo looked relieved as she attached the lead wire to the machine. “Not right smack in a city, though.”

“No more than two hours out of one,” he countered.

She kissed him. “If you like dogs, it’s a deal.”

“I like dogs.” Overhead, a hawk circled in the blue sky.

“Hey, Jo,” Zack said, after another quiet minute.

“Huh?”

“Any reason why the cave isn’t exploding yet?”

She looked into his eyes, searching them for something. If it wasn’t already there, he didn’t know how to fake it. But apparently she found it, because she smiled. And loved him.

“Not a single one,” she admitted. Then she pushed down one switch on the box, causing a little light to come on, and whispered off the count to herself—“One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi”—and turned another switch.

For a moment, a breath, nothing seemed to happen. Then the ground shook. With a roar, dust flew over their heads as what had once been some kind of aberrant temple collapsed to become a grave to bury five evil mummies, a once-immortal necromancer…

And the wedding ring Zack had left behind.

Zack held Jo, curled protectively around her body, until the worst of the dust cleared. He loved the feel of her, warm and sturdy in his arms. He loved that she knew how to shoot, and fight, and blow things up. Her strength strengthened him.

When finally they both peeked, the wall of rocks didn’t look all that different from before—except for the rubble where a cave entrance once stood. But he knew that, like their world, it was very different.

It was finally buried, and life could start again.

“I’m carrying you back to the truck,” announced Zack. He scooped Jo into his arms as soon as she’d put away her toys.

“Just this once.” Like she could have stopped him, the gimp. Then again, if any woman was tough enough…

But she also looped her arms around his neck, so she couldn’t mind too much.

“Damned thing had better start,” he added, as he walked.

“It will start!”

“I’m buying you a new one anyway,” he decided, and casually added, “After we’re married.”

Jo laughed. “Dream on.”

What? When he slanted his gaze to hers in silent challenge, she added, “About buying me a new truck. I like my truck.”

So the marriage part, that was settled. “You actually mean to drive that hunk of junk up to Oregon? Or should I say, partway to Oregon, because it probably won’t make New Mexico.”

“Or Washington, and it’s not a hunk of junk.” When Zack rolled his eyes, Jo added, “Tomayto, Tomahto.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she leaned closer in his arms to cover his lips with a kiss. Good distraction. Then, leaning back in his embrace, she said, “Live with it, Lorenzo.”

He meant to.

ISBN: 978-1-4268-8257-9

BURIED SECRETS

Copyright © 2003 by Yvonne Jocks

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[*]The Circle