The coven’s under investigation. Its future is in peril. And for one troubled young psychic, the coming battle will threaten her newfound freedom—and brings back a dangerous desire . . .
Exploited as a child medium, Emily Adams escaped to grow up on the streets—and hit rock-bottom. She took shelter with the prestigious Northern Circle, intent on staying only long enough to get back on her feet. But the Circle is still reeling from a devastating supernatural attack and betrayal. And vengeful High Council of Witches investigator Gar Remillard is determined to make Em surrender the truth—and disband the Circle forever.
When Em’s psychic ability allows her to see Gar is haunted by a formidable ghost, her attempts to free him challenge Gar’s rugged French Canadian heart and rancorous loup-garou instincts. But even as their new alliance and past connection kindles into raging desire, a malevolent force rises up to destroy them—the Circle and even the High Council.
With all she’s grown to love on the line, Em must draw on her darkest nightmares and alliances with the dead to outwit and out magic a force who can imprison souls with a flick of the fingers and command legions of wraiths with one word. . .
Praise for Pat Esden and her Dark Heart Novels “A compelling, atmospheric, paranormal that feels fresh.” —Publishers Weekly “Esden creates a world of incredible atmosphere.” —RT Book Reviews
Release date:
October 22, 2019
Publisher:
Lyrical Press
Print pages:
304
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Slush splattered the police cruiser’s windows. Em focused on the schwup-shuwupp of the windshield wipers and tried not to think about the stench of vomit coming from the seat beside her.
Her stomach cramped. She folded forward. The floor. She needed to hit the floor this time. But the target was a narrow space, and the wooziness in her head and the handcuffs biting into her wrists made it impossible for her to lean far enough forward.
Relax. Breathe deep, she told herself. Sit still. Stay quiet.
She swallowed the taste of bile and turned slowly toward the side window, swiveling only her shoulders so the seat wouldn’t squeak and the handcuffs wouldn’t rattle. Beyond the slush-coated glass, motels flickered into view, darkness returning as they passed. An inn materialized. A life-size statue of a horse. Old-fashioned streetlights glimmered in the haze. Wet snow. Empty streets…
Her head bobbed, eyes closing. Her thoughts wavered toward oblivion. How much had she drunk, anyway? A bottle. Two. Wine. Vodka. Gin. She remembered them all. She remembered. A concert. They were going to one. Or everyone else had. No money. No ticket. Tired. Cold. A stretch limousine. Unlocked. She needed to lie down. Sleep for a minute. She’d be gone before the owners returned. The limousine’s overhead light flashed on. Someone screamed. Security. Police. She didn’t remember having drugs on her. No needles. Never needles. The cop had asked her about that.
Her forehead thumped the window, snapping her back to her senses. Slush and haze. Slush and haze. The rhythm of the windshield wipers. The world dipping and reeling—
A voice touched her ear. You stand at a crossroads, my child.
She jolted fully awake, her sixth sense screaming for her to look out the window.
In the haze, a ghost stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to a city park. Congress Park, the sign said. An older woman. Modern. Not someone from the distant past. Statuesque. Stylish coat. Boots. A cashmere scarf flowing out from around her neck. Her gray hair piled on top of her head, defiantly exposed to the elements.
The ghost of a witch.
Em knew that’s what the woman was with profound clarity, a lucidness that defied her drunken state. A lucidness that was as strong as Em’s gift for seeing and speaking with the dead.
The witch’s gaze locked onto Em’s—and across the distance she offered Em a choice to either be accepted or refused. In that frozen moment there were no second chances. This was it. She could stay on the road she was traveling or take a new one. No promise the new road would be easy—it wouldn’t be. But what Em chose to do would make all the difference.
Not just for her, but for the ghost on the sidewalk and for others as well, the living and the dead.
Chapter 1
A ghost followed me home from the school bus stop.
We had a home back then, not an endless string of hotel rooms.
I can’t recall the ghost’s name. Mine was Kate,
back before I became Violet Grace.
Before the beginning. The middle. And the end.
—Journal of Emily Adams, age 22
Memory from second grade. Massachusetts.
190 days later
Em lengthened her strides, hurrying to get ahead of the crowd leaving the A.A. meeting. The last thing she wanted was for someone to offer her a ride home. Not that she didn’t like the group. Since she’d left the halfway house in Upstate New York less than a month ago and moved to Vermont, they’d made her feel more than welcome.
She picked up her pace, jogging through the slush, across a narrow street, and down the sidewalk. She totally got why the group didn’t like the idea of a woman walking home alone at night, especially someone as small and skinny as her. But she’d lived on the streets in much larger cities. She knew how to handle herself. She had a phone—and a knife, if worse came to worst. Besides, walking in the dark and slush was a good reminder of the night she’d bottomed out, of what life had been like before she chose to live sober, a choice that had led her to join the Northern Circle coven and live at their complex here in Burlington. On top of that, there was an even more vital reason for her to walk alone: During the A.A. meeting a spirit had reached out to her, begging for help. She needed to locate it and find out what was going on.
Em stopped on a curb, shifting her weight from one foot to the other while she waited for the crossing signal to change. Damp leaves shone in the gutter, their bright autumn colors darkened to brown and black. Some people might have thought this time of year gloomy, but she found comfort in everything about it: the lengthening nights and leafless trees, the pumpkins and cornstalks on the front stoops of homes and shops, all the witch decorations. She smiled. If only those people knew that all the powers they imagined around Halloween were real, that witches and psychic mediums with powerful inborn gifts were right here in their midst.
A lifted pickup truck with four doors and oversize tires rumbled up to the intersection. Country music thudded out from the open driver’s window. The driver glanced her way, camo cap pulled low over black curly hair. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she could feel the intensity of his stare, studying her as if she were someone he knew. But her gaze only stayed on him for a second before it flicked to the occupant of the passenger seat, an apparition so misty it was almost imperceptible, even to her.
A haunting, her sixth sense murmured.
Sadness gathered in Em’s chest. It was impossible to know in such a brief encounter why the ghost was haunting the guy, but she had no doubt the ghost was in turmoil over something it couldn’t resolve. That was the heart of all hauntings. In turn, the ghost’s unrest would reflect in every aspect of the man’s disposition—spikes of frustration, seething anger, restlessness…. It was a horrible situation, and the fact that hauntings weren’t common didn’t make that any less true.
As the truck moved on, the ghostly outline swiveled to watch her out the back window. Em sighed heavily. If only she were in a position to help them. But the truck was already disappearing around a corner and she needed to focus on the troubled spirit who’d reached out to her at the meeting. She was certain they weren’t one and the same. The spirit at the meeting had felt small, young—and frantic.
Traffic slowed to a stop and the crossing signal changed. Em dashed across to the other side, past a bookstore and a jewelry shop. She let her sixth sense draw her down Church Street, with its restaurants and boutiques. The tug grew more insistent, the small spirit’s pull becoming even more desperate with each passing moment.
She headed into blocks of apartment houses, bars, vacant lots. The distance between streetlights lengthened. Her focus narrowed, her vision of the world constricting into a tunnel. As late as it was, she was grateful the tug was taking her closer to the coven’s complex, closer to home rather than farther away. But what if—
She shuddered as she remembered last week, when she’d been at an A.A. meeting and felt a similar tug, only to discover the other coven members had been trapped in a fire at a nightclub. She should have left that meeting—and this one—sooner.
Something low to the ground slapped her ankle, claws digging in.
She wheeled around, backing up and glancing down.
A kitten. A ghost kitten. The small spirit that had reached out to her, she was certain of it.
It vanished into the roadside darkness, a vacant lot of rain-soaked weeds and tall grass. She followed, the tangle of plants taller than she’d expected, the darkness more encompassing. Muck sucked at her feet. Her teeth chattered from a sudden drop in temperature. Her breath became white vapor. Something was wrong here. Very wrong. One small spirit couldn’t affect the temperature like that.
The kitten circled back, its ethereal glow urging her on. Another glow joined in. Then a third. A fourth. All ghostly kittens, their mews wailing in the darkness. Their tails swished like eerie torches, leading her farther from the street, past a shack, and up a coarse gravel bank to a line of railroad tracks.
Something black lay on the tracks. The size of—
A trash bag.
Kittens.
“Fuck!” Em shouted, running to the bag. No need to look for trains. The only light came from the kittens’ glow. There had to be a live kitten in the bag. Why else would the ghosts have reached out to her?
She dropped to her knees, and the railroad bed’s sharp stones stabbed through her jeans. She clawed at the bag’s drawstring, struggling to rip it open. It didn’t give. She tore at the plastic with her fingernails, panicking until she remembered her knife.
She pulled it from her peacoat and flipped it open. Carefully she cut the drawstring, then worked her way down, slicing the bag from top to bottom like a coroner opening a corpse. Garbage and stench spewed out. Milk cartons. Banana peels. Balled up paper towels. Rags. Meat wrappers—
A dead kitten. Its body covered with coffee grinds, stiff and gray.
Another kitten. Dead. Cold.
Her stomach lurched. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks as she rifled through the rubbish.
The ghost kittens’ yowls circled her, panicked sirens, bringing on more tears. She winced as one of the ghosts batted her hand, claws slicing. Above their cries another sound caught her ear. The whistle of a distant train. Approaching. Quickly.
She grabbed hold of the bag to drag it to safety. But she’d sliced the bag in half and the contents tumbled out onto the rails. She dove her hands into the pile, feeling her way through the garbage. It was too dark to see well, just dim outlines—and stench.
Her fingers found damp, cold fur. Another stiff body. What if there wasn’t a living kitten? What if the ghosts just wanted their murder discovered?
The clang of lowering railroad-crossing arms echoed nearby. Another whistle sounded. Louder this time.
A soft mew reached her ear, barely discernible. Not ghostly.
Her fingernails caught on wet things, hard things.
The train’s rattling vibrated through the tracks on either side of her. The brightness of its headlights reached her, widening and surrounding her, moving closer.
Please, please, she prayed. Please. Let me find it.
Light brightened the wasteland all around her, the tracks, the garbage bag. Brightness growing stronger by the second. Rattling echoed in her ears.
She touched something tiny and warm. Her fingers found a second one. Lukewarm, gritty fur. Unmoving.
The train’s whistle shrieked. The ghost kittens scattered into the weeds. She scooped up the warmer body, then the cooler one. Not wriggling, but maybe alive.
Another mew came from the rubbish.
With one hand, Em claimed the third kitten, then she slid down the gravel bank and away from the tracks just as the train’s engine screamed past.
The ground shook, the train clattering and clanking behind her as she wiggled out of her coat and bundled the kittens up in it. She was sure they were alive. But how close to death they were, she wasn’t certain. They were far too still and quiet. And small.
She got out her phone and called the Northern Circle’s complex.
Chloe—another recent initiate—answered. “Hello.”
“I need a ride,” Em blurted. “It’s an emergency.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m okay. Sort of. I found some kittens. They’re in bad shape.”
“Is that a train I hear?”
“Yeah. Hurry. I’ll be on Pine Street. The north end.” Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t certain where she was. Sometimes when she was with ghosts it was like that, time and space evaporating as she reached into the ethereal. “If I’m not there, look down by the ferry docks.”
“I’ll be right there.”
As Chloe hung up the last of the train cars rattled past, dragging their noise and vibrations with them as they moved on. The air stilled. Darkness settled around her, except for the glow from her phone. She realized then that she could have used its light to help her find the kittens in the garbage. But she couldn’t change that now. The important thing was that the ghost kittens had vanished, a sign that she’d found all the living ones—living for now, at least. Truthfully, she might have been a skilled medium, but she was no kind of adept witch or healer. She’d never even had a pet. All she could do was keep them warm and hurry.
Em gathered up the coat, snugging it against her chest as she started back through the weeds. When she reached the street, half of her wanted to keep walking toward the complex. A wiser part pulled her under the safety of a streetlight to wait for her ride.
Minutes passed. She paced to the edge of the streetlight’s brightness, then paced back. She adjusted the coat to give the kittens more air. But she didn’t want to risk looking at them. Not here in the cold. Not until they were safe.
Finally, a familiar orange BMW coupe pulled up to the curb. Em climbed in with her bundle. The car belonged to the coven’s high priest, Devlin Marsh, but Chloe was driving. Em was glad about that. She really liked Chloe. She was not only pretty, in a long-legged and fashionable-blonde sort of way, but she was also kind and headed-for-med-school smart. Best of all, it wasn’t just people Chloe cared about. She loved animals, especially cats and Devlin’s excitable golden retriever. She’d know what to do for the kittens.
“How many are there?” Chloe asked, pulling the car away from the curb.
“Three. But one is barely moving.” Em dared to open the bundle and take a closer look under the brightness of the car’s interior light. Two sets of shiny eyes stared up at her. The third set were closed. The kittens didn’t look quite as tiny as she’d thought. Still, they were really young.
“I messaged my friend Juliet. She used to volunteer at a cat rescue. I’m sure she’ll have all kinds of advice.”
Em cradled the kittens closer. “I just hope they all make it.”
“I do too.” Chloe fell silent, then stepped heavily on the gas.
Em glanced Chloe’s way. She’d expected her to ask how she’d found the kittens or to give her advice about what they should do. But Chloe’s attention was trained on the road ahead, her jaw working as if she were lost in thought.
“Is something wrong?” Em asked.
Chloe skimmed her hand along the steering wheel, leaving behind a slight sheen of sweat. “Yeah. Something happened at the complex while you were gone.”
Em swallowed hard. There was only one thing that could have upset Chloe this much—and the coven had been worried about it. Despite the upturn Em’s life had taken since she’d joined the Circle, the coven itself had gone through a terrifying upheaval that had culminated on the night of the club fire. Actually, “upheaval” was far too mild a word for what had happened, and for the depth of the threat it represented to the coven.
Rhianna Davies—a witch with a longstanding grudge against the Northern Circle—had murdered Athena Marsh, the coven’s high priestess and Devlin’s sister. She’d then used necromancy and strips of Athena’s skin to create a necklace that allowed her to transform into a likeness of Athena. In that disguise, Rhianna had manipulated the coven members into awakening the wizard Merlin’s demonic Shade. The coven had later managed to banish it. But Rhianna had escaped, leaving the Circle holding the bag for bringing the Shade into this world, an incident the Eastern Coast High Council of Witches and their legal system would never overlook.
Worry sent a chill up Em’s arms, and she shivered. To make matters worse, awakening the Shade wasn’t the only violation the High Council could accuse the coven of committing. Their battle to banish Merlin’s Shade had caused citywide chaos and briefly exposed the existence of true witches and magic to the mundane world. No matter how good a cover story the coven created, it was still impossible for an entire city to overlook flying monkeys made from scrap iron rampaging through the streets, not to mention glowing swords, energy balls, and the strange lightning that had caused the club fire.
Em steadied her voice. “I’m guessing you heard from the High Council?”
“Worse. They’ve sent a special investigator.”
“What? The investigator is here already? That was quick.” Em rubbed a hand over the bundle in her lap, feeling the stir of the kittens’ tiny bodies. An investigator. At the complex. That wasn’t good. They could recommend the coven be disbanded for their violations. If they saw fit, they could even abolish individual coven members’ ability to work magic and seize their assets, including sacred objects and the complex itself.
Though Em hated how selfish it made her feel, an investigation like this could also put an end to her personal plans. She’d joined the coven mainly so she could live in the sanctuary of their complex while she got her act together. Once she reached a year of sobriety, she intended to leave and never be dependent on anyone or anything again. But right now, she wasn’t prepared to leave. She had no money, no job, no other place to live—other than the hellish halfway house or the streets.
“The investigator is interrogating Devlin right now.” Chloe’s voice strained upward, her anguish for her boyfriend undisguised.
“Shit.” Em’s chest tightened. Devlin was usually cool and collected, a poster boy for Ivy League success. But right now, he was suffering deeply, full of remorse and guilt, shaken by the loss of Athena, a sister he loved with all his heart.
The car tires skidded as Chloe winged into the complex’s driveway a little too fast. Anger tinged her voice. “I knew the Council would send someone soon. But this soon? It’s ridiculous. It’s barely been a week. Devlin—all of us—are grieving. It’s not fair.”
“It’ll be okay. Devlin can handle himself,” Em said. A lump knotted in her throat. She looked down at the bundle of kittens. This certainly wasn’t the best night for bringing home orphans.
Ahead, the outline of the complex’s main building came into view, an old three-story brick factory that the Circle had transformed into an artsy group living quarters. Devlin and Athena technically owned it and the adjoining smaller buildings, all surrounded by a chain-link fence broken only by an elaborate and funky arched gateway—but Devlin owned the entire complex now that Athena was gone.
Em’s gaze went back to Chloe. “So what’s the investigator like? A man or a woman? Suit-and-tie, by-the-book asshole?”
“You got the asshole part right. He walked in the front door, then just hauled Devlin into the office and started firing questions at him. He barely took time to introduce himself.” As Chloe drove under the gateway, she glanced through the windshield toward the peak of the gate where the remaining flying monkey sculptures stood sentinel, their non-animated wings glistening in the darkness. “I bet the inspector will have a field day quizzing Devlin about them.”
Em cringed. “I feel so bad for Devlin. What’s wrong with the investigator? Is he just old and crotchety?”
“No, not at all. He’s only a little older than Devlin, maybe thirty. He’s more of a backwoods enforcer, all alpha and bad attitude. Not at all like the elderly examiner that investigated my dad’s business. His name is Gar Remillard…”
Chloe kept talking, but her voice faded into the background as Em’s entire focus went to a vehicle parked by the front door of the complex’s main building. Most likely the special investigator’s ride. A vehicle that should have been unfamiliar to her. But she knew the big, lifted truck instantly, its oversize tires made for mudding. The truck she’d seen right after she’d left the A.A. meeting. The guy with the camo cap, the black curly hair, and intense stare.
The haunted man.
Chapter 2
Invisible friends. Vivid imagination, other parents would have said.
My aunt knew the truth. She sold my mother
on the possibilities, as shiny as a new car or a diamond ring,
their ticket away from sugar daddies and welfare fraud.
—Journal of Emily Adams, age 22
Memory from second grade. Amherst, Massachusetts.
It was almost eleven. Em sat on her bed with a nurser bottle, feeding the littlest kitten an emergency formula she’d made from a recipe on the Internet. The other kittens slept curled up in a box, kept warm with a heating pad and towel.
The kitten stopped sucking and closed its eyes, a purr vibrating from its scrawny body. The other two were brown tigers with the incandescent blue eyes of super young kittens. This one was white, and its eyes were changing to golden-amber. Em had originally thought it the weakest kitten, but it had drunk greedily and kneaded its claws into her as it sucked.
She glanced away from the kitten to where her phone and a six-month A.A. medallion sat on the nightstand. It was late, and she didn’t feel like calling, but she needed to touch base with her therapist or she’d catch hell tomorrow. Her therapist wasn’t just the person at the halfway house in Albany who had hooked her up with the coven, she’d also agreed to be her temporary A.A. sponsor: someone she was supposed to check in with daily.
She put the kitten in the box with the others and retrieved her phone. She could leave a message if no one answered—better to do that than nothing.
The phone rang once. Twice.
Her therapist picked up. “Hey, Emily. I was just thinking about you.”
“Sorry it’s so late. I found some abandoned kittens in a trash bag on my way home from a meeting.”
“That’s horrible. Are they going to be okay?”
“I think so. We’re going to take them to the vet tomorrow. They’re really little.”
Her therapist’s voice went from concerned to firm. “While you were at the meeting, did you talk to anyone about being your sponsor? You’re welcome to call me anytime, day or night. But it’s important for you to have a local support system.”
“Ah—I was planning on asking someone at the women’s meeting. . .
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