Don’t look down, a voice said inside her head.

But she did. And there he was, silhouetted by flames.

The smiling man’s features were sharp, and a large, purple scar ran diagonally from the right side of his jaw to his left temple. His gaze shifted to a point behind her. He bared his teeth like an animal.

Izzy turned.

Within the arched curves of a medieval monastery, a figure scanned the horizon. It was another man, very tall, with a riot of hair that tumbled down his shoulders, like her own….

Then a voice rumbled like thunder, shaking her spine with a low, masculine timbre.

“Isabella? Je suis Jean-Marc de Devereaux des Ombres. Je vous cherche. Attendez-moi. Je vous cherche.”

This time Izzy woke slowly, clutching the sheets as she whispered to the darkness, “Oui. Je suis ici. ” “Yes, I am here,” in French.

Only, she didn’t speak French.

Dear Reader,

When I think of the word heroine, I look at two bright pink stickies clinging to my computer monitor just below a swath of my daughter’s school pictures (I have a very big computer monitor!) The stickies read: “Feel the fear and do it anyway” and “I am a warrior, and I will not turn my back on the battlefield.” To me, a heroine is someone who pushes through her fear and does what she must—be she a mom, a friend, a coworker, a caretaker, a wanderer, or the heiress of a magical House founded in medieval France.

For most of us, it takes an act of courage just to get up and face a busy day in an uncertain, lightning-paced world. There is magic in knowing that if we can muster the courage to step through the shadow, the sun and the moon await with light both golden and silver. I believe the universe does honor our dreams, and that there is more—much more—to each of us than meets the eye. These are the lessons I am learning, and what I hope to share in the story of Isabella “Izzy” DeMarco in THE GIFTED trilogy and hopefully, many other books to come.

Please let me know at www.nancyholder.com about your own journey.

Take heart, and be bold!

Nancy Holder

Daughter of the Flames
Nancy Holder

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For my strong, compassionate and courageous daughter,

Belle Claire Christine Holder,

who lives the tenets of Tae Kwon Do:

courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control

and indomitable spirit;

and brings honor upon herself, her family and her instructors.

NANCY HOLDER

is the bestselling author of nearly eighty books and two hundred short stories. She has received four Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association, and her books have been translated into two dozen languages. A former ballet dancer, she has lived all over the world and currently resides in San Diego, California, with her daughter, Belle. She would to love to hear from readers at www.nancyholder.com.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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

Epilogue

Acknowledgments:

My sincere thanks to Gillian Horvath, who first told me about Bombshell, and to Susan Wiggs, who encouraged me to persist. Thank you to the Bombshell team, past and present: Natashya Wilson, Julie Barrett and Tara Parsons, for your warm welcome and editorial vision.

Howard Morhaim, my agent and friend, you’ve been there through oy and joy. And sincere thanks to Howard’s assistant, Allison Keiley. Many thanks to Pat McEwen, JoysofResearch; my San Diego sheriff’s deputy and my N.Y.P.D. contacts, both of whom have requested anonymity so their thoughtful colleagues won’t make their lives a living hell. Thank you, Steve Perry, for the marksmanship and ER data. My sincere gratitude to Karen Hackett for navigating New York for me. A very big thank-you to Special Agent Jeff Thurman, for many years of friendship, plot parsing and all the dirt he could tell me without killing me. Mucho mahalo to Wayne Holder, who stepped up to the plate when my laptop ate my homework and set the whole thing to rights despite the best efforts of all geekdom to make computers far more complicated than they need be.

Thank you, SF-FWs, bryant street, IAMTW, and novelscribes for various neepery and encouragement; and to my sisters in Persephone, for the prayers and candles, and the fellowship, especially after my laptop ate my homework. My gratitude to Christie Holt, for teaching me to walk with purpose. To Amy Schricker, Charlotte Fullerton, Ashley McConnell, Debbie Viguie, Liz Cratty, Lydia Marano, Brenda Van De Ven, Monica Elrod, Abbie Bernstein, Kym Rademacher, Terri Yates, Lisa Morton, Leslie Jones, Sandra Morehouse, Anny Caya, Lucy Walker and Elise Jones, for showing me that sisterhood is powerful. A shout-out to MariAnn Palmer and Lisa Swyrs, clothiers and cookie monsters extraordinaire. Dr. Ellen Greenfield, thanks for the illegal loquats and the free psychological help. Thanks to my nephew, Richard Wilkinson, for checking in and loving us. Many thanks to Yasmine and John Palisano, Del and Sue Howison, Art Cover and Lydia Marano, and Paul Ruditis for inviting me to cross your thresholds. Mr. Andrew Thompson and everyone at Family Karate, thank you for instilling black belt principles in my family. REV, you listen every day. And you write back. May you walk in Beauty.

Chapter 1

I sabella DeMarco was moaning in her sleep. Her fists clenched her pale blue sheets; tears and sweat trickled down her forehead as she rolled her head against her pillow.

Hustle it up, a voice urgently whispered to her. They’re dogging you!

Izzy raced through the nightmare forest, a terrifying landscape of fleshy black trees garroted with hangman’s necklaces of Spanish moss. A fiery moon blazed overhead, casting flickering shadows over rotting ferns and a matted bunting of ashy gray leaves.

Her surroundings heaved with menace and danger. The surface of a blood-colored swamp roiled as shapes glided toward the boggy earth where she ran. She saw it all with a strange clarity, as if part of her was a camera recording every moment instead of a young woman in flight for her life.

She heard herself panting in counterpoint with her over-cranked heartbeat. Her footfalls ricocheted like shell casings pinging off a tile floor. Heat seared her lungs and her ankles ached from running too long and too hard. Then the screaming of night birds swallowed up the sounds.

The voice echoed all around her. If you don’t move it, it’s all over. They’ll die, too. You’re on point.

Then everything shifted and the panting was inside her head, echoing in her temples. The monsters that lived in the forest were after her. They were always after her. They hunted her, night after night. She ran, night after night. She could not stop. She must not stop.

Deep in Izzy DeMarco’s soul, she knew that if they caught her, she would die.

And die horribly.

She tried to remind herself it was only a dream. But it wasn’t, not when she was in it. It was all so very real. Her gauzy white nightgown molded to her body as she raced barefoot over sharp rocks that sliced the soles of her feet. Slimy, shredding vines tumbled from twisted canopies of dank, dripping leaves. Skeletal branches yanked painfully at the untamed corkscrews of her sable-black hair.

As she raced past a gnarled live oak, four huge gashes in the bark warned her that they had been here first, crisscrossing the forest, searching for her. They were always hunting for her.

But they had never found her.

Not yet. Don’t get cocky.

Refracting the beam of the burning moon’s light, her mother’s gold filigree crucifix flashed between her breasts. She put a hand over it to hide the gleam in case it might give her away.

A wind whipped up, twisting her nightgown around her knees. Branches slapped her arms and face; wincing, she pushed them away and tried to move on. Then the hem of her gown caught on something behind her, drawing her up short.

A wolf howled, its wail piercing the fierce rush of the wind. It was joined by another. And another…until the forest rang with eerie, inhuman cries.

Get out of here!

About fifteen feet to her right, a shadow glided through the darkness. The crazed whooping rose to a shrill shriek. The trees and vines jittered in a frenzy. Clouds raced across the moon, slicing the bloody sphere in two, fog spilling out like clots.

They’re coming!

She tugged wildly at the nightgown. It wouldn’t give. She tried to run, was held fast. The fabric had tangled around a tree root that looked like a gnarled hand, gripping the ruffled hem so that she couldn’t get away.

When she grabbed the nearest piece of the root, it curled upward as it tried to capture her hand.

Isabella yanked back her arm in horror. The root slithered back to rejoin the main section, which was still holding on to her nightgown.

The forest is alive.

It wants to kill you.

She pulled again, and again, but it was no use.

Then she reached up to her shoulders and gathered up the gauze around the sweetheart neckline. She jerked her hands toward her shoulders, trying to tear down the front so she could strip the gown off and get away. Try as she might, it would not rip.

She balled her fist and brought it down on the finger-like root.

Another howl echoed through the forest, bold and feral and eager. Ice-water chills skittered up her spine; she looked frantically around and—

Get out of here! the nightmare voice commanded.

That was when the gun went off.

Izzy gasped and sat upright in bed, gasping for air.

Sweat trickled between her breasts and ran down her cheeks like tears. She wiped it away with a clammy hand and blotted her palm on her sheet, which was wrapped around her body like a shroud.

“Just a dream, just a dream,” she chanted, her heart beating so fast it was out of rhythm. She pressed her hand against her chest, feeling the damp ivory satin ties of her nightgown against her fingertips. Touching reality.

“Where are you? In your room. In your home. You’re fine,” she said out loud, a technique she had learned to quell her night terrors.

She forced herself to take a deep breath in, a deep breath out, looking for her center, finding the calm place where the monsters could not go.

It was increasingly difficult to go there.

Because it wasn’t just a dream. It was the dream. The blood-red moon, the swamp, the root that grabbed at her and the whispering—that insinuating, sandpapery voice—Izzy had been having the same dream ever since her mother, Anna Maria DeMarco, had died of a lingering, undiagnosable illness ten years before. Today was the tenth anniversary of her death. Izzy had been sixteen then. She was twenty-six now. For ten years, shrieking creatures had hunted her half a dozen times each year. For seventy nights or more, she had outrun them.

What if, one night, they caught her?

“Don’t go there,” she ordered herself. Forcing her body to stand down, she rolled her shoulders forward, made herself slump and lower her head. It was a submissive posture, a surrender, and it frightened her to perform it, even in the safety of her bedroom.

She was still on high alert. Her body was flooded with adrenaline. She glanced over at her clock. It was three in the morning. Nevertheless, she was half tempted to dress and go for a jog.

Dr. Sonnenfeld, the shrink she had finally agreed to see seven years ago, said a recurring nightmare was caused by unresolved issues. In Izzy’s case, the obvious trigger was her mother’s death.

Izzy fully accepted that she had been angry with Anna Maria for dying. It also made sense that she was trying to flee the pressures of her role in the family. She didn’t need a stranger to point out that the dream had started the day after her mother’s funeral, coinciding with the fact that her father had held her close and whispered brokenly, “You’re the lady of the house, now, honey. You need to look after Gino.”

And look after her father, too. He hadn’t said it, but she knew that was what he was hoping for. Izzy had taken to calling him “Big Vince” when she was five—everyone called him that—and maybe there was a reason she didn’t call him “Pa” the way Gino did. Her father was an excellent cop, but he was the kind of man who needed a female family member to look after him. Before his marriage, that woman had been his sister, Izzy’s aunt Clara. Then Ma.

By the time of her mother’s death, it had been Izzy. At sixteen, she had already been doing all the housework and cooking for years. Gino was supposed to help, but her parents had never enforced that, and she couldn’t make him. Frankly, it didn’t leave a lot of time for being the “lady” of the house. Despite the urgings of her schoolmates and their moms to develop some fashion sense and cultivate a little style, she had found it necessary to skip over a lot of the detail work of growing up. Makeup, hairstyles—maybe later, after Ma got better.

But Ma didn’t get better.

The death had made it official—as if the closing of the coffin lid over her mother’s tired but still lovely face had also signaled the end of Izzy’s girlhood, such as it had been.

The dream had begun then. But Dr. Sonnenfeld kept prodding her to come up with something more than what she told him, some deeper problem between mother and daughter.

“The fact that no one could figure out why she was so sick, for example,” he’d suggested. “You feel menaced by unseen shadows. They’re chasing you, trying to kill you as they killed your mother.”

“Okay. So now what?” she had challenged him.

“So we keep talking,” he’d replied.

It did no good, did not stop the dreams. Izzy thought he was crazy and, besides, her insurance would only cover a finite number of sessions. Also, he took a lot of calls during her sessions and one time asked her if she was seeing anyone special.

Her father had approved of her decision to stop seeing him.

“We’re Catholics,” he told her, making a fist with his big, beefy hand and waving it at the crucifix on the living room wall. “Talk to our priest.”

Only at that point, they were lapsed Catholics at best. They had stayed lapsed until her little brother, Gino, had been accepted by Holy Apostles Seminary in New Haven, Connecticut. After that, Big Vince had taken to attending Mass on Saturday nights or Sunday mornings if possible, as well as two or three mornings of his workweek—a schedule that varied all over the place since he was a patrol officer. Izzy often accompanied him to Mass, but she had never talked to Father Raymond about her dream. She was a very private person.

Taking another breath, Izzy unwound the damp sheet from around herself. Her hands were still trembling.

I wonder what this is doing to my life span.

She stepped into her slippers and walked to the window, pulled back the dark blue curtains and stared out onto the familiar, snow-covered street. Her parents had moved into this row house on India Street when she was three months old. Though her life had changed drastically since then, the old Brooklyn neighborhood had not. The old twin Norway maple trees still guarded the entrance to the pocket park, magical in their dustings of frosty-white.

Beside the park stood Mr. Fantone’s old one-story cobbler shop with its pitted brick exterior and grimy storefront window of multiple panes crisscrossed with security bars. The neon sign in the window had been missing the “e” in “Shoe” for so long that people had nicknamed it the “sho-nuff store,” all the more humorous for their nasal Brooklyn accents imitating a Southern drawl.

Russo’s abutted Fantone’s, the Italian deli owned by the DeMarcos’ next-door neighbors. Her little brother Gino had worked at Russo’s during high school part-time to pay for college. She still shopped there, and all she had to do now was to close her eyes and she could smell the garlic and dried cod, mortadella and hard salami.

The Russo family brought over a lot of “excess inventory”—cold cuts about to go past the sale date—for the cop and his kid. Izzy took them, but Big Vince cautioned her. They had to be careful not to let the Russos presume. “One day a guy is giving you free coffee, the next day he wants you to ignore that he double-parked in the alley. And the day after that, he’s asking you to help him with a little scrape his nephew’s gotten himself into….”

You’re fine. Everything’s fine, she thought as she watched snowflakes drift across the windowpane.

To her right, on her bureau, the little votive candle at the feet of her mother’s statue of the Virgin Mary had burned out hours ago; but the light from the street cast a gleam on the frosted glass that made it appear to burn. It comforted her. Its warmth reminded her that Gino had blessed their home tonight. He was asleep in his old room; he’d stayed over an extra night from his weekend visit home so they could go to Mass together tomorrow morning. Surely God watched over His own.

It was chilly in the silent room; she rubbed the goose bumps on her arms as she grabbed up her pink chenille bathrobe and slid her arms through the sleeves. An embroidered French poodle sporting a pompadour of turquoise rabbit-fur “hair” beneath a black-velvet beret trotted along the hem. The robe was nothing she would have ever purchased, but her nine-year-old cousin Clarissa had given it to her last Christmas. For that reason alone she treasured it.

Izzy loved her big, noisy Italian family.

Smiling faintly, she opened her door and headed for the bathroom. As she moved into the hallway, her father’s door opened at the opposite end. He poked his head out; in the darkness, it looked like a floating white balloon.

“Iz?” he said. “You okay, honey?”

“I’m fine, Big Vince.” She gave him a wave. “Just need a drink of water.”

“I thought I heard you talking.” He paused. “You talking in your sleep again?”

She made a face that he probably couldn’t see, a combination of a wince and an apologetic frown.

“Did I wake you up?” she asked.

“Nah. I was already awake. I’m just restless tonight. A little agita. Heartburn.” He chuckled. “Maybe it’s your rigatoni.”

“I make fabulous rigatoni!” she protested, putting her hands on her hips and facing him squarely. “The best…okay, second best you ever ate! You know I got Ma’s cooking genes. And her rigatoni recipe.”

“Then it has to be the garlic bread,” he said decisively. “Gino made that.”

They shared a laugh. For all his having worked in Russo’s Deli, Gino was famous for his pitiful ineptitude in the kitchen. He couldn’t even successfully microwave a frozen entrée.

Her father added, “Let’s hope he serves Mass better than he serves dinner.”

It was an old joke, but it felt good to hear it. Her crazy bathrobe, her father and his gentle ribbing—she was beginning to feel reconnected with the real world. It always took her a little while to lose the feeling that the nightmare forest was real, too. She would often awaken very disoriented and confused, and check her body and feet for cuts and bruises. Tonight she could almost still feel the slap of the branches against her cheeks and hear the voice whispering in her head.

“It’s late,” she said gently. “Go back to bed.”

The job was taking a toll on him. Sore knees, flat feet, the light in his eyes a little dimmer. He was starting to talk about taking early retirement. It was hard to accept. Her father had always been a burly, noisy, old-style Italian male, heavy on the machismo, even though he was proud of his “little baby girl” for her holding her own in a man’s world—Izzy worked for the NYPD, too, although in an administrative support capacity, and as a civilian.

But there was no denying that Vincenzo “Big Vince” DeMarco was slowing down. The muscles were slackening; his helmet of black hair was shot with silver. There were wrinkles. There was a little less opera in the shower.

“Yeah, well, whatcha gonna do?” he murmured, which was what he said whenever he wasn’t certain what to say next. Izzy took it as her signal to go on into the bathroom.

“Mass in the morning,” he reminded her, as if she could forget.

“Of course,” she replied.

“Good night, bella mia, ” he replied.

“Buona serata,” she answered.

His door closed.

She clicked the light switch as she went into the bathroom, papered with Ma’s vivid roses and ivy trellises. Rose-colored towels hung on ornate brass towel racks. A filigree cross twined with brass roses hung on the wall beside the turned oak medicine cabinet. Everything about her mother had been graceful, soft and feminine.

Izzy was nothing like that. Izzy was about traveling light and getting it done. No frills, no frou-frou, no time for bubble baths and very little time for herself. Not that she was complaining. It was what it was.

Leaning forward, she scrutinized herself in the mirror. She didn’t know what she expected to see. She looked the same as she ever did. There was the wild tangle of ridiculously thick black curls, the kind of hair women gushed over and said they wished they had—because they had no idea how hard it was to so much as run a brush through it, much less style it in any way besides a ponytail or wrapped with a gigantic clip.

There were the large brown eyes, a little puffy from lack of sleep, with the same gold flecks in them; and lashes that were so thick some people thought she wore false eyelashes. The small, straight nose dotted over the bridge with freckles, which neither of her parents had. Ditto the lush mouth—Ma and Big Vince had thinner lips and fuller jaws. As did Gino. Everyone called her the family oddball, made jokes about the milkman. Be that as it may, her appearance this early January morning was as it should be.

Izzy took a ragged breath. Still looking at her reflection, she turned on the water and let it run a minute. It was chilly in the bathroom; she rubbed her arms and yawned, moving her shoulders.

She tested the water; it was warm now. She began to lower her head to splash water on her face.

She stopped.

The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Fresh goose bumps sprouted along her arms and chest.

She had the strangest sensation that someone was watching her. She could feel it, like a piece of wet velvet sliding across the nape of her neck. She imagined a police flashlight clicking on, traveling up and down the walls of the bathroom, the ceiling, the floor…

…looking for her.

And if she looked into the mirror, she would see—

“Nothing,” she said sharply, doing just that. Lifting her head and staring directly into the glass. Her own reflection stared directly back.

Huffing at her own melodrama, she turned off the water and left the bathroom.

She padded back into her room, shut the door, took off her slippers and got back into bed.

And Isabella Celestina DeMarco did not sleep for the rest of the night.

Chapter 2

M ass.

Gino and Big Vince flanked Izzy as the three knelt and prayed in the front pew of St. Theresa’s. Beneath his heavy blue-black jacket, her father wore his NYPD uniform. She smelled his Old Spice. On her left, Gino was a handsome chick magnet in street attire: gray sweater, coat, black cords. His hair was still damp from a shower, droplets clinging to his straight, dark brown hair. She wondered how the celibacy thing was going for him. She wasn’t so fond of it, herself.

Ah, well, whatcha gonna do?

Izzy had on work clothes: black wool trousers, a gray turtleneck sweater and a black jacket. Her black leather gloves were stuffed in her jacket pocket. New York at this time of year was dark clothes and darker skies. Izzy knew she looked pale, with deep smudges under her eyes. Her father and brother both had said something about her appearance, fretting over her as they’d walked three abreast through the snow to the church.

There was one other parishioner, an elderly lady sitting six pews back, all alone. Izzy had seen her a few times before. Daily morning Mass was always sparsely attended; Catholics were just as stressed out and overscheduled as anybody, trying to make a living and get the kids to soccer. Even Mass on Saturday night or Sunday morning was hard to fit in—the congregation had been steadily dwindling for years, with few new parishioners—newcomers to the neighborhood, babies—filling the pews.

It was six-thirty in the morning and chilly in St. Theresa’s, the little stone parish church three blocks from their row house, on Refugio Avenue. The lacquered pews smelled of lemon oil and the dim room flickered with light from four clear-glass votives among the three dozen or so unlit ones arranged before the statue of the Virgin. The DeMarco family had lit three of them.

It was the time in the Mass for the Prayers of the Faithful, when parishioners could petition for prayers for their special needs and concerns. Izzy cleared her throat and said, “For the repose of my mother’s soul, Anna Maria DeMarco, I pray to the Lord.”

All present responded, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

Ma, I miss you, Izzy thought, as her father sighed.

Then something shifted in the frosty air. The room sank into a deep gloom; the light from the leaded-glass windows angled in like the dull sheen of gunmetal. As she gazed upward, the arched stone ceiling seemed to sink. The sweet, young face of the Virgin became blurry and hard to see, and the votive candles at her feet flickered as if viewed through murky water.

Izzy glanced left, right, behind herself, trying to figure out what was creating the disorienting effect.

The other worshippers seemed not to notice that anything had happened. The priest continued with the Mass. In the back of the church, the elderly woman’s head was bowed in prayer. Gino and Big Vince were praying, as well.

“Izzy?” Big Vince whispered as she shifted again. He opened his eyes and gazed at her.

Maybe it was her mood. Her spirits were low and she hadn’t slept.

She shook her head and placed her hand over his to reassure him that nothing was wrong. Her mother’s black-onyx rosary was threaded through his large fingers and the smooth beads rolled across her palm.

“It’s nothing,” she whispered back. “I’m just tired.”

Then she jerked as a hand molded cold fingers along the small of her back. The frisson swept up her spine, cat’s-paw creeping, something ready to pounce….

Anxiously she glanced behind herself again.

Her father frowned, clearly puzzled. She shook her head and pressed her hands together in prayer.

I’m fine, she told herself. But she was beginning to wonder if she was losing her mind.

“Iz?” Gino said. He raised his brows. “You bored?”

“Shut up.” Brother-sister interactions; some things never changed.

Mass ended. The DeMarcos took the Five, riding the subway as a trio until Grand Central, where they got out.

“Well, I’m off to save the damned,” Gino said cheerfully.

With a big hug and a kiss for both of them, he raced off to catch his train to New Haven. Izzy and Big Vince transferred to the Six.

There were no seats in the rush-hour crowd, so Big Vince and Izzy stood. He was quiet and reflective as they watched a woman with curly dark hair knit a pretty fuchsia sweater. “A decade. Hard to believe.”

She nodded.

“I see an elevated white blood cell count on the streets today, I’m shooting it,” he declared. “Screw Internal Affairs.”

They both smiled grimly at his dark humor. Izzy saw the anger behind it, and the despair. She wondered if her father ever sensed a cold hand against his backbone. Maybe it was Death tapping her on the shoulder, reminding her that no one lived forever.

And could I be any more morose?

At the 103rd Street stop, they got off and joined the crowd going up to ground level. The noise and traffic of the day were in full force; commuters rushed everywhere and car horns blared. Bicycle messengers rang their bells.

Walking briskly together, they headed toward her Starbucks. He said, “You asking that man over tonight?”

She hesitated. “It’s Ma’s day—”

He waved his hand. “We talked about this, Iz. It’s fine. So?”

“Okay,” she replied. Then, “You know his name is Pat.”

“What a name for a man.” He rolled his eyes. “Well, whatcha gonna do?”

“I’ma gonna invite him,” she said, giving him a lopsided smile.

He kissed her forehead. “I love you, baby,” he said, and trotted off to the station house, which was located on 102nd Street between Lexington and Third, while she went to fetch her coffee drink.

Twelve minutes later, heavily fortified with a venti latte with an espresso shot, she made certain her work badge was visible as she walked through the station house, answering all “good mornings” as she sailed down the hall toward the elevator. The switchboard—actually a pair of push-button phones—chimed incessantly; the patrol officers’ utility belts and leather shoes squeaked; doors slammed opened, slammed shut.

Captain Clancy was in; her frosted-glass door was half-open and Izzy heard her talking on the phone, although she couldn’t make out the individual words. Detective Attebury hurried past Izzy, giving her a wave as he talked on his cell.

At the end of the hall, in front of the elevator, she swiped the first of three IDs necessary to admit her into her subterranean domain: the Twenty-Seventh Precinct Property Room. Like most NYPD Prop rooms, the Two-Seven’s was located in the basement of the building, which had seen better days. It used to depress her; down in the bowels and away from the action, she felt as if she were buried alive. But now that she had a plan to get up and out, she felt a growing nostalgia for the familiar odors of dirt and old, musty furniture.

The elevator dinged and let her out. She walked the short distance to what looked like the reception area of a doctor’s office and tried the door. It was locked, and she didn’t see Yolanda in the cage beyond it—she had probably secured the door to use the restroom—so Izzy punched the code in the keypad beside it. It clicked open and she left it open as she walked through the area. Once she was in the Prop cage, it was all right to leave the reception door unsecured.

She glanced around to make sure everything was in order. On the wall beside the sofa, the damaged bookcase still sat; the pale orange silk flowers on the coffee table needed dusting. The aging linoleum floor smelled of lemon polish and decades of grime that couldn’t be cleaned away. She glanced through the slide-open window into the Prop cage itself. It was deserted, but someone was always on duty in Property, 24/7, unless there was a lockdown. That happened twice a month at most.

She coded in the Prop room lock and swiped her badge. The metal door clicked and she pushed her way in. The warning buzz vied with the zing of the overhead fluorescents for most annoying sound of the day.

The Property cage looked just like that—a cage, ringed with diamond-mesh lockers of various sizes, one by one by one up to longer sizes to accommodate rifles and shotguns. Metal chart holders like those on the doors of medical doctors’ examination rooms held the paperwork for the property in each locker. The individual three-by-five cards told the story of the chain of custody for each item, through a series of tags with bar codes, signatures and a rainbow of tapes. Each individual who received the evidence, from collection to storage, had their own rolls of identifying tape. Prop’s evidence tape was candy cane. After a few months on the job, Prop personnel could tell at a glance who had custody of what, and when.

Each person who worked in Prop had their own territory consisting of various lockers and they—and no one else in Prop—had a set of keys to their set. Izzy’s were all over the place, mingled in with those who had come through Prop and moved on to something else. Aside from two retired police officers—Joe Fletcher and Steve Jones—everyone else, like Izzy, was a civilian who had two years of college and had completed the ninth-month internship program.

The Dread Machine—their computer—hummed along. The radio beside it was playing banda music—Yolanda Sanchez’s choice—and Izzy turned it down low. She still needed a little time to get her work groove on.

Beside the radio was a yellow stickie from Yolanda. “Morning, Izzy, in the ladies’.”

She set down her latte and logged in on the computer. She took a brief tour of the cage—both online and visual—to see what had gone on over the weekend and during Yolanda’s graveyard shift. Lots of newly filled lockers. Business had been brisk.

She flipped open the logbook, the cover of which was plastered with Yankees stickers—the guys, a couple of Marc Anthony stickers—Yolanda and a Holy Apostles sticker from Gino. There, on the two-foot-long sheets of security paper printed with thermochromatic ink, were Yolanda’s careful notations and the UPC codes she had generated.

Less than a minute later her first pissed-off customer of the day was blustering at her. He would not be the last, because she did her job well.

“This is ridiculous,” Nick Nelson flung at her. He was tall and muscular, and very photogenic. “You are obstructing justice.”

“This is procedure,” she shot back. “You filled out my form wrong. Fill it out right, and you get your evidence.”

Nelson scowled at her as if he wanted to reach through the reception window and throttle her. The media darling of Forensics, he was running late for court and he wanted her to hand over the murder weapon in his case, a .44 Magnum, right this very minute. That would not have been a problem if he hadn’t written the incorrect case number on his Evidence Order form. He wanted to scribble it out and write over it. No could do. Big procedural sin. No write-overs, no correcting fluid. Ever.

She had already handed him a fresh form and suggested he hop to it…and that he do so before she left the cage window to retrieve the gun. No, she would not bring it out until he had complied. She was very serious about breaching chain of custody.

He was livid. She stood her ground. Yolanda had nearly gotten fired last month, and if the boys around here thought Izzy DeMarco had gone by the book before the incident, they were in for even more bad news.

On December fourth at 3:12 in the morning, a tired cop named Elario “Haha” Alcina, already on overtime, had brought in a bomber jacket from a crime scene. He could have had Prop drive it in—there were Prop van drivers on-call 24/7 for just this purpose—but he had his own reasons, which he did not share, for dropping it by himself.

He told Yolanda, who was the evidence clerk that night, that the jacket had been thoroughly checked out and was ready to be admitted into the Prop room. Yolanda had no cause to disbelieve him, so she’d processed it in and put it in one of her lockers.

Alcina went back upstairs, filed the rest of his voluminous paperwork and went home. A week later, Forensics wanted the jacket.

Her locker, her key: Yolanda had efficiently complied, fetching the jacket in the plastic bag she had closed a week before with a red paper security strap. The card with its signatures, UPC tag and evidence tapes matched the logbook: yellow from the initial collection, black dot for Alcina, candy cane from Prop.

And just as she handed the bag to the forensics tech, a loaded SIG-Sauer P-228 semiautomatic concealed in a hidden pocket discharged. The round barely missed the tech’s hand and now there was a sign on the shattered remains of the bookcase in the receiving area that read Yolanda Shot Me!

The brass wanted to blame Yolanda, of course. She was a civilian and she was brand-new, twenty-two years old and still on probation. She was in the most vulnerable position; cops took care of their own first. The official argument went that the Prop Department was supposed to refuse to process any and all firearms that weren’t rendered safe, and a loaded weapon had remained unaccounted for for a week because of her “negligence.” Maybe Yolanda hadn’t checked carefully enough, but surely this one was on someone else’s shoulders—whoever collected the jacket, who maybe was or maybe wasn’t Alcina—Prop was not getting a clear answer on that.

It was Christmastime and Yolanda had worked hard in Prop for sixty-four days. Her probationary period was ninety days. Besides, she had just broken up with her hideous boyfriend and moved in with her girlfriend Tria and Tria’s little boy. She had enough to contend with.

“Orale, they’re blaming me, Izzy,” Yolanda had sobbed in their break room after she had had yet another meeting with the bosses. They seemed determined to fire her—despite the fact that six months before, an officer in the men’s locker room had dropped his loaded weapon, caught it and almost blown his own head off—with total impunity.

Incensed, Izzy had stormed out of the cage and through reception to the elevator, with the express intention of going upstairs to their precinct captain, Lisa Clancy, and demanding justice. Thirty years her father had been on the force; is this how they treated people who worked for this woman’s newer, friendlier NYPD?

Luckily—in more ways than one—she had run into Detective Pat Kittrell instead. She was not in a position to demand anything from Captain Clancy, and the last thing she’d needed was a reputation for attempting to pull rank because she was a cop’s kid.

No matter, of course, that every detective in a hurry tried to pull rank on the Prop staff. NYPD figured they were doing the “real” work. So if they wanted some slack, Prop should give it to them, right?

So wrong. Especially when their own failure to follow correct procedures nearly got a sweet young woman like Yolanda canned. So…there would be no quarter given when someone wanted Izzy to leave the labyrinth of codes and procedures to save his lazy butt from a redo.

She calmly sipped her latte while the imposing cop tried again.

“If we lose this case because of you —”

“Talk to the form,” she said, tapping the Evidence Order with a short, unadorned fingernail.

He snatched it from her and stomped off like the diva he was.

“He thinks he’s all that since he got that profile on ‘Court TV,’” Yolanda grumbled as she reentered the Prop cage from the bathroom. As usual, she had on so much makeup that she looked like an airbrushed Maxim model. Yolanda was wearing brilliant red polish that matched her lipstick. Her smooth black hair was pulled back with a red-and-silver ponytail clip. Her earrings were red-and-silver hoops. As a rule, Izzy appreciated her flamboyant style.

Despite her successful FBI background check, upstairs wasn’t fully aware of some of the rough patches Yolanda had been through. They didn’t need to know; Yolanda was trying hard to “overcome” her past, as she herself liked to phrase it. Izzy supported her in that, protective of the young woman and of her budding self-esteem.

So when she invited Izzy over to “fix her up”—i.e., to teach her how to trowel on a few layers of foundation and do something, anything, with her crazy hair—Izzy went. But Yolanda’s evil boyfriend had hung around, making gibes at Yolanda and coming on to Izzy when Yolanda had to use the bathroom. It was too depressing to repeat the experience, so Izzy had found reasons not to go over to Yolanda’s again. They socialized by going out for lunch during the workday and occasionally out to dinner. Because she didn’t want to go to Yolanda’s, Izzy didn’t invite her into her own home, either. Now that Yolanda had moved, maybe they could try again.

“It doesn’t matter if he’s on every cable channel,” Izzy said to Yolanda. “We’ve got rules for a reason. We do it wrong, the bad guys walk. It’s that simple.”

“Okay, well, I’m getting out of here,” Yolanda said. Then she looked past Izzy to the window and said, “Oh, hey. Hi.”

“Yo, Yo, Yo, Yolanda.” John Cratty, a plainclothes from SNEU—Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit—trotted up to the window with a doughnut-size box filled with plastic Baggies. It was bagged in a very large Ziploc-style container, and a little paper-and-metal tag, like the price tag at a yard sale, was attached to the zip-tie. His signature turquoise tape was attached to the tag.

His brown hair was long and dirty, and in his jeans and Kurt Cobain T-shirt, he looked like an underachieving, very low-end drug dealer. It was a good look for him.

Yolanda said, “Yo, yo, yourself. You brought your own stuff in again?”

“Van drivers had been on sixteen hours,” he explained. “I said I’d do it.”

“You’re so nice,” Yolanda cooed. She said to Izzy, “I can get it.”

Izzy glanced at the computer and said, “I already logged in. You’re off the clock, girlfriend.”

“No, I’ll catch it. I need to show a little more effort. I, um, spent a little time in the bathroom….”

Putting on makeup, Izzy silently filled in. And perfume. Whoa, is she seeing Cratty?

Izzy read the case number off the tag and typed all the specs into the computer—case number, detective on the case, date, yada yada. The NYPD had made over four hundred thousand arrests in the prior year; fifteen hundred of the Two-Seven’s arrests had been in the seven major crime categories: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and auto theft. By contrast, the Nineteenth Precinct, which was a much nicer neighborhood, had three thousand, nine hundred and forty-two arrests, most of them for grand larceny—theft of personal property of one thousand dollars or more.

She knew all these stats because the Dread Machine took her raw data and added it to the enormous NYPD database and processed it. There were two end results: updated stats for them that cared and a set of UPC tags for her. Since this was drugs, she ordered a good dozen of the tags.

She put one strip in the logbook and began to write in all the data.

Watching her, Cratty rested his forearms on the ledge of the window.

“You look tired, Ms. Iz,” he said. “You go out dancing last night without me again?”

Looking up, Izzy gave him a faint half-smile. “When have I ever done that, Justin Timberlake?”

She accidentally brushed the back of his hand with her fingertips as she picked up the bag, and remembered a time when her fingers had touched more than the evidence she was booking for him in a street bust. Not that they had gone to bed. It had ended before then. Not so much ended as fizzled out. Never started.

Which was a bit of a pity. When he wasn’t working the streets, Cratty cleaned up nice, with his square jaw and his hazel eyes and his sandy-brown hair. She’d had a brief crush on him about two years ago, but she’d known even then that he didn’t really think of her as a girl.

Most of the guys thought of her as one of the guys—someone to drink beer with after work, shoot some pool and ask for advice about the girls they wanted to date. Girls who had learned about hair and makeup back in high school, and frequently returned to the Secret School of the Feminine Arts for refresher courses.

Girls exactly like Yolanda.

Cratty whistled “Rock Your Body” to himself, grinning abstractedly at her.

“Hey, you see that Justin Timberlake special the other night?” Yolanda asked Cratty.

He gave her a look. “I’m a man,” he said. “A real man.”

“Well, you’re a real silly man,” Yolanda retorted. “Because he had these hot backup dancers.”

“Bet none of them were as pretty as you two girls,” Cratty replied, taking in Izzy, too.

“Yeah, but they were half-naked,” Yolanda said.

“HBO naked?” Cratty asked, more interested.

They launched into the vulgar sort of repartee that police precincts are known for, no matter all the seminars and counseling sessions about how to act in public. Police work wasn’t lollipops and teddy bears unless you worked in traffic safety or child abuse. It was harsh and nasty and cold. It was the front line and being on point. So personnel blew off steam, repackaging their hostility and angst in sexual innuendos and merciless teasing.

As long as it didn’t get out of hand, most women in the station house dealt with it in one of three ways: recognizing it for what it was and letting it go; showing the guys the line in the sand that they’d better not cross; or giving as good as they got. It was pretty much a tap dance any way you looked at it.

The dance was more extreme if you were a female cop, because suddenly you were challenging an army of alpha males on their home turf. They were already jockeying among themselves to be leader of the pack. They didn’t need any bitches getting in their way. Civilian women as a rule were less intimidating because their jobs were in admin support.

“You could see all that? ” Cratty asked Yolanda incredulously as she continued to needle him about what he had missed by boycotting Justin Timberlake.

Izzy hid her grin. Yolanda was giving him the business. After Izzy put on a pair of blue latex gloves, she laid a fresh evidence bag on the scale and zeroed it out. Now the scale would not include the weight of the bag when she checked in Cratty’s evidence.

She picked up her wire cutters and snicked off the zip-tie on the evidence bag.

She broke the red paper security sticker, reached in and gathered up the box.

Her stomach clenched; her skin felt too tight. Sweat broke out across her forehead. She wondered if she ought to excuse herself and head for the restroom. But she didn’t feel sick, exactly. Just…very tense.

“Iz?” Yolanda asked.

“I’m okay,” Izzy replied, and just as suddenly as the moment arrived, it left. “Really.” She smiled to prove it.

Yolanda glanced over Izzy’s shoulder and stabbed at the topmost page of the intake stack. “Where’d you go to school, J.C.? You spelled contraband wrong.”

“The streets are my halls of higher education,” Cratty shot back. “But give me the form back and—”

Yolanda exhaled impatiently. “By the book, Detective,” she informed him. “We’ll take it as is or you can redo the whole thing.”

Cratty huffed. Yolanda and Izzy smiled pleasantly at him, a wall of solidarity.

Izzy put the bag on the weight scale and peered at the digital readout. She said tactfully, “It’s a little light, John. I weigh the bag in at two hundred forty-eight grams.”

“That’s how much my earrings weigh,” Yolanda said, mocking herself as she wagged her head. “You confiscated my earrings in drugs. Good for you.”

Cratty looked confused and pointed to the form. “That’s what I wrote down. Two hundred forty-eight Undertaker.” Undertaker was a brand name for heroin. There were all kinds of brand names, and sometimes rival dealers murdered each other for trademark infringement.

“No, you said two hundred fifty-three,” Izzy replied. She was confused. “Didn’t you just tell me it was two fifty-three?”

“What?” Cratty paled. He looked from her to the scale, then craned his neck to read his paperwork upside down. She glanced down at his hands, clenched so tightly that his knuckles were white.

“You said two-five-three. When you walked up,” Izzy insisted. She thought back, replaying the last couple of minutes, and realized that he hadn’t.

“No.” He ducked forward and reached out his hand as if he were trying to yank the paperwork back from Yolanda. “I wrote—”

“Two hundred forty-eight, Izzy,” Yolanda read off, pointing at the appropriate spot on the form. She held it up for Izzy to inspect. “See?”

She recognized Cratty’s writing: 248 gm.

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” She rubbed her eyes and shook her head as if to get rid of the cobwebs. “I don’t know what’s up with me.”

“I never said two hundred fifty-three,” Cratty insisted.

“I know. It’s okay, John,” Izzy replied. She understood his unease—to an extent. Drugs were a delicate subject in Property rooms. Cops were human, just like everyone else, and drugs posed a serious temptation even for saints. Skimming off a few ounces of heroin here, a line of cocaine there, whether for personal recreation or to sell on the side—drugs brought cops down.

“Hey. No big deal,” he said generously.

But there were droplets of moisture on his forehead and a muscle in his cheek jumped. She wondered if he’d been written up for something. Maybe he’d been told to get it together. His love life seemed to be going okay, by the looks of Yolanda’s flushed pink cheeks. But cops as a rule had a lot to contend with—usually alimony somewhere, child support…

“All right,” Izzy said, lifting it off the scale. The jittery feeling was threatening to return. What the heck was up with her? She had anxious cops for breakfast.

Yolanda and Cratty continued to chat while the room whirled faster and faster. She felt as if she were standing in the middle of a whirlpool.

And then she heard a voice in her head.

He’s on his way. You had better be ready.

Or he will kill you.

Chapter 3

I zzy jerked her head up.

“What?” she said out loud.

Not this one, said the voice.

Then it all faded like a strange, bad dream and she was left to wonder if it had happened at all.

The Prop elevator opened, to discharge the one guy in the precinct who didn’t think of Isabella DeMarco as a semi-guy. Detective Pat Kittrell entered the reception area and ambled up to the window beside Cratty, loose and easy and minus the balled-up tension tearing at Izzy this morning.

Or maybe he was just better at hiding it. Their previous captain, Hal Schricker, had said that anyone who spent more than six years in law enforcement was certifiable, himself included. Pat had been at it a lot longer than that.

He was six-two; white-blond, including his eyebrows; sunny green eyes; no visible scars in the field of tanned skin, but she knew his history. He had a wound: his pregnant wife had been murdered by a drunk driver years ago. Maybe the tragedy had healed over into a scar by now, but she didn’t know that yet. Texas born and raised, he had been with the Dallas police at the time of the murder.

Afterward, he’d bounced around; there was a stint in Arizona, one in Albuquerque and then New York. He’d put in enough time with the NYPD to become a detective, and he had transferred into the Two-Seven just before Thanksgiving.

But there was nothing New York about Pat Kittrell. He was all Southern gentleman, with plenty of time for the niceties. Courtly, old-fashioned, and in some ways as traditional as Big Vince. He talked slowly, he smiled broadly…and she was beginning to suspect that he really liked her.

They had been out a few times—coffee, a quick meal after work, cut short by a call back to the precinct for him—what to outsiders would appear to be ridiculous and short-circuited attempts to date. There were reasons so many cops were divorced and drank too much.

They were trying to go to a movie, but so far their schedules hadn’t cooperated.

And I’m going to invite him over for dinner, she thought, her stomach doing a flip. Big Vince wants to sit down with him and make sure he’s good enough for me, even if he is a non-Italian.

“Mornin’, Iz,” Pat said as he came up behind Cratty at the window.

She put up a hand in greeting, but shifted her attention back to Cratty as Yolanda smacked his hand. He was attempting to fish out one of the pens in Izzy’s Walk for the Cure coffee cup beside their terminal.

“I want to spell ‘contraband’ right,” he whined.

“Too late. Unless you want to do the whole page over, like Yolanda said,” Izzy told him.

“You go, Iz,” Yolanda said in support, pointing a red nail at Cratty. “Don’t listen to him. He’ll try to flirt you into it.”

Cratty whined some more. “Wrong. That would be sexual harassment.”

“Not coming from you,” Yolanda teased him. “Because it has to be sexual. ”

“God, she’s mean,” Cratty said, sighing as he turned hopefully back to Izzy. “C’mon. You’d let Kittrell here change it.”

Izzy felt her cheeks go hot. She hadn’t realized anyone had noticed their mutual interest.

“Wrong,” Izzy said sternly. “The rules are the rules.”

“Woof,” Yolanda said approvingly. “Venga, mami.”

“Okay, okay,” Cratty muttered. “Let it stand.”

“No one is going to care,” Izzy reminded him, glad they could proceed. “The bosses are after collars, not spelling errors.” Cratty was a very ambitious cop. Izzy wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him make captain—unless whatever was bugging him was big enough to tarnish his sterling reputation.

With rapid-fire efficiency, she finished his paperwork and added one of her bar codes. She handed him back some dupes, his receipts for the drugs, which she would keep in one of her lockers until there was enough accumulated in the department sufficient for a pickup. Then it would go to central holding, supposedly for destruction, but no one really believed that. The Justice Department used a lot of contraband to pay for the return of CIA field personnel and other clandestine activities.

“Thank you, ladies,” Cratty said, recovering his charm. “Your turn, Detective,” he said to Pat.

He moved off and Pat took his place. Pat had a five o’clock shadow. His beard was light brown. There were deep dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, and he was smiling now. He was wearing a black suit and he looked sharply masculine, more like a businessman who had just tiptoed out of a date’s bedroom than someone who put away bad guys for a living.

He said to her, “I pulled an all-nighter. Had an Aided I picked up in Two-Seven David. He got messed up by some At-Risks trying to loot a Bombs R Us.”

An “Aided” meant he’d had to accompany someone, victim or perp, to the hospital—the Metropolitan, in this and almost all cases. That meant reams of paperwork and, usually, hours and hours of overtime. An “At-Risk” was a juvenile offender. And “Bombs R US” was any electronics store where a wise perp could buy all the components he needed to build a bomb, which had been located in the sector referred to as 27D.

She could ask for details, but it was shoptalk and she was trying to develop an other-than-work relationship with him.

“You’re okay, though?” she said.

“Sure. I’m going home to sleep for a year. Or maybe until you get off work.”

Her smile was frozen into place by a surprise attack of butterflies. “Ah,” she croaked. “Then you’ll be hungry when you wake up.”

His gaze was direct, his eyes sparkling. They reminded her of the Pacific Ocean, although she had never seen it. “Yes, I will be,” he said. “Starving.”

“Yeah, well.” She touched the tortoise shell clip restraining her insane hair. “Um, that’s good, because I want to…”

“You reading your patrol manual?” he asked her. “Thought after I catch some Zs and you piss off some more law-enforcement officers, we might have dinner and I could quiz you.”

Pat was helping her study the official handbook of the Department because she was getting her application together for the Police Academy. She had the sixty units of college level courses; she was still young enough—there was really nothing stopping her. Learning the manual was to give her an added boost of confidence—Pat’s suggestion. He had sussed out that she was afraid she wouldn’t measure up, despite being a cop’s kid and the NYPD’s fondness for families continuing the tradition. But because she was so anxious, Pat wanted her to have an edge. She did, too.

Her father would lose his mind if he found out. He had made it more than clear that he did not want her to become a cop. The streets were brutal. He had lost Jorge Olivera, his partner, to a bullet from Jorge’s own gun, grabbed away by a suspect in a stupid convenience-store robbery attempt. He had lost his wife to an incurable disease no one could name. Izzy knew that if something happened to her, it would kill him.

And yet…what she had was not enough. What she did, not enough. She processed forms and organized evidence. She knew it was important work, that it contributed to putting away the bad guys and protecting the innocent. She understood that without clear-cut procedures, the machinery of justice, such as it was, would shatter, precisely because police officers operated under the rule of law. Chaos belonged to the street. Order, to those who wore the blue. Otherwise, it was only a matter of might making right.

She liked learning the manual with Pat, but she hadn’t come clean about her real problem. She had a phobia about guns. They scared her. Badly. Every night of her recurring nightmare ended with a gunshot.

She had not even told Dr. Sonnenfeld that.

Because what if her phobia was insurmountable? The goal of becoming a cop was what made it possible for her to swipe her tag into that elevator security lock every single workday.

The tenth anniversary of her mother’s death made it seem more important that she follow her dream—also, more frustrating. She had thought her father would have moved along by now, too. Found someone to take care of him—a woman his own age.

As the years ticked by, that seemed less and less like it was going to happen.

Izzy licked her lips. “Great minds think alike,” she said, “except for the ‘quizzing me on the book’ part.” How to deliver this news? “Big Vince wants to check you out.”

She went blank. This was new territory for them, and she was groggy from lack of sleep. “Because, you know, he doesn’t want me to apply to the Academy. So, tonight’s not good for the multiple choice…” She trailed off.

“Iz?” he asked, peering at her. “Are you asking me over for dinner at your place, darlin’?”

Darlin’? She worked overtime not to blush. For God’s sake, she was twenty-six years old. She’d even had sex…twenty-six million years ago.

Trouble was, she seemed to pick men like her father—very macho on the outside, but in search of some woman to dump all the detail work on, including the housework and the day-to-day details of, well, daily life.

Or maybe that was part of the definition of macho.

Maybe this invitation was a mistake.

“Iz?” he prodded, smiling at her with all the patience and good humor a seasoned detective could muster.

“I am,” she confirmed. “I am inviting you to our place for dinner. Tonight, if you’d like. Short notice, but what does it matter in our line of work?”

“That would be lovely,” he drawled, pulling a smile across his exhausted features. He was the kind of man who could say words like “lovely” and drench them with masculinity. “I’d like that.” He snaked his hand through the window and caught up hers. Warmth and lovely tingles. “Don’t be nervous. I’ll pass muster. Your father’s just looking out for you. He’s a cool old guy.”

“Say that to his face and he’ll deck you,” she shot back, smiling faintly, enjoying the sensation of flesh on flesh. They’d brushed lips, hello and goodbye, not done much else. She was the one who had pulled back every time. He was the one who let her.

He flashed her a quick wink. “Let him try.”

“Say that to his face and he will. Seven? That work?”

“That works. I’ve got the address.” He chuckled when she looked slightly surprised.

She released his hand, picked up her Starbucks and sipped. “We’ll be waiting. Big Vince will notice if you’re late.”

“Got it.”

They shared another smile and he sauntered off into the day. His back was broad. His hips, not so much. Sigh.

Yolanda poked her in the ribs with her elbow.

“Snag him, mami, ” she said. “He is totally sweet.”

“You snag him,” Izzy teased her.

Yolanda closed her eyes and shook her head. “Chavela, I am finished with men. Never, never. Until at least next Tuesday.” She opened her eyes and giggled. “It doesn’t hurt to look. And that guy’s looking at you, so you might as well return the favor.”

“Whatever,” Izzy said noncommittally, picking up Cratty’s bag of drugs. “Meanwhile, I have evidence to stow.”

“Another day, another box of junk,” Yolanda said. “As if it mattered very much.”

“It has to matter,” Izzy said. “Doesn’t it?”

Yolanda sighed. “You have stars in your eyes, amiga. Me, I just want to do a good job and collect my paycheck. Find a guy, marry him, become a housewife and get fat.” Her eyes gleamed with predatory eagerness. “The simple life.”

“Believe me, there is nothing simple about it,” Izzy replied.

At five, Izzy was done for the day. She walked a few blocks in the setting sun to 110th where the Five had a stop. She went back down into the bowels of New York City and caught the train, groaning because it was packed.

As she held on to a strap in front of an old woman with a shopping bag, she reviewed her meal preparations for the evening. Cooking relaxed her, and she began to smile to herself as she envisioned the dishes she would prepare.

Serving and eating them with Pat and her father at the same table was another matter entirely.

The Five screeched to a stop and she joined the line dance as the other passengers shuffled toward the double doors and into the borough of Brooklyn. The train was steamy from riders sweating in their outerwear, rather than bothering to unpeel in the close confines of the car.

The doors opened to the underground station, letting in the stench of urine and the haunting refrain of a sax busking in the distance. Over the echoing clack of footfalls, two people argued loudly in Korean.

The escalator was broken, as usual; she took the cement steps, slowing behind a young Asian girl in a Yankees bomber jacket. Anticipating the chill outside, Izzy pulled her own jacket closer, wishing she’d worn her long coat.

Yeah, a coat like that one, she thought idly as she reached ground level and began to cross India on the same side as Russo’s and Fantone’s.

A man in an ankle-length black coat was standing in front of her row house. His legs are probably toasty…

An unexpected chill shot up her spine.

There was something about that man. Something she didn’t like.

She narrowed her eyes. There was nothing odd about him, at least when seen from the back. He was standing at the far end of the row house, closer to the Russos’ than hers, which was the one in the middle. He wasn’t particularly tall, and there was nothing menacing about his stance. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, his head of dark hair tipped back as if he were gazing at the stars.

Her body went rigid; adrenaline coursed through her in classic flight or fight.

Why?

She didn’t have a clue. There was nothing about him to elicit her extreme reaction. But the sense of danger heightened as she reached the crosswalk and prepared to cross to her side of India.

Feeling foolish, she slunk behind the closer of the two maple trees to her right. The pocket park was padlocked after dark, and by the gleam of the streetlight, she could see that it was deserted.

Izzy peered between the branches of the tree. The man in the coat was nowhere to be seen. Snow fell where he had stood. Her heart still pounded; she was wet with sweat.

I’m insane.

She reminded herself that she knew self-defense; she also reminded herself that in the Department, the cops who trusted their instincts and knew their limitations were the ones who survived long enough to retire.

So she dialed Big Vince’s number, hoping he had beaten her home. She’d ask him to step outside and wait for her. Her father always answered her summons if he could—he had programmed his Nokia to play “Donna e mobile” from an opera by Verdi when his daughter called.

But she got his voice mail, so she left a message.

“Just wondering if you’re home. I’m almost there,” she said. Then she disconnected, put her phone back in her small black leather hobo bag and squared her shoulders. Her gaze alternating between her path and the street, she got to the crosswalk, waited for the light and crossed the tarmac, which was shiny with ice.

Warm, cheery lights from the windows of the other homes splashed across bushes and snow.

See? It’s all good, she told herself.

Then she neared the spot where the man had stood. Footprints. And a cigarette butt.

“Jerk,” she muttered, bending down to retrieve it.

If she had felt a sense of dread before—upon waking, at Mass—now it was so strong that she actually recoiled, taking a step backward.

Baffled, she turned and hurried up the three stairs leading to her stoop, unlocked the door and went in, and slammed the door behind herself.

What the hell is wrong with me? she wondered as she dropped her purse on the recliner and hung her jacket on the coatrack.

She entered her private domain—the kitchen—and started dinner. She decided that she had imagined the whole thing, and let it go.

Once she got the lasagna in the oven, she changed into a long black skirt and scoop-necked black sweater. When Pat knocked on her door in his black leather coat, black turtleneck sweater, jeans and cowboy boots, he looked a little bit like the Marlboro Man. Izzy had always thought the Marlboro Man looked hot, except for the cigarette.

The cigarette reminded her of the man loitering on the street and she debated about mentioning him to Pat. But there were flowers to coo over—a big, lavish collection of roses and baby’s breath. Besides, there was nothing Pat could do and he was not her knight in shining armor.

“That was delicious,” Pat said three hours later as he finished drying the dessert plates with the gold borders and stacking them on the counter. He took another sip of Amaretto from an ornate hand-blown Venetian liqueur glass, then folded the kitchen towel into a neat rectangle and hung it on the hook beside her mother’s collector plate of Pope John Paul II.

Izzy smiled appreciatively at the compliment. He had eaten heartily, thereby earning points with her and her father both. Big Vince had also been gratified to find out that Pat was a widower, like himself.

“Oh, I figured you for a divorced man,” he’d remarked casually. He’d worn his navy-blue sweater from Gino’s seminary, a Christmas present, advertising that they were Catholics and not so much fans of divorces.

“No, sir,” Pat had told him. Izzy was glad he’d said “sir.” Maybe he outranked Izzy’s father at work, but this was the patriarch’s table…and the patriarch’s daughter, too.

“But you’re not a Catholic,” Big Vince had ventured, as if that would be hoping for too much.

“Raised a United Methodist,” Pat had offered, clearly the best he could do. Izzy had winced. In her father’s hierarchy of Christian denominations, United Methodists hardly counted.

“Well, we were lapsed for a while,” Big Vince had said, dispensing religion largesse. “If you two will excuse me…”

He’d made himself scarce in his room, watching TV alone. Izzy knew this signaled his approval; had he disliked Pat, he would not have left him alone with his baby girl for one second.

Izzy poured Pat another shot of Amaretto, then gave herself one. She tipped her glass against his and said, “Cheers.”

“Dinner was great, dishes are done, bodyguard has left. So you can relax,” Pat said, sliding his arm around her waist and drawing her close as he leaned against the counter.

She put down her glass; he set down his own, and cupped her chin. He smiled at her. “Good?”

She nodded. He kissed her. His tongue slid between her parted lips and she tasted the sweet Amaretto, the saltiness of him. Her heart picked up speed; her body tensed. She felt his excitement. His hand moved down to the small of her back.

She put her hand around his neck and kissed him hard. He grunted as if in surprise—she usually kept their kisses short and easy—but after her victorious meal, it felt supremely right to kiss Pat Kittrell like she meant it.

When she ended the kiss, he settled his arms around her and said, “Seems I passed muster.”

“Seems you did.”

“It was washing the dishes, wasn’t it?” He kissed her again.

“Yes,” she concurred. “Think what will happen if you do the vacuuming.”

He guffawed and wrapped both his arms around her waist. “Let me at your Dirt Devil.”

“We both have to work tomorrow,” she said. “But next time, come over a little earlier and I’ll get you right on that.”

“Next time.” He stroked her cheek. “Nice to know there’s going to be one.”

“Yes. It is,” Izzy agreed.

Then he was gone, and her father said grudgingly, “He’s okay.”

She said, “Glad you think so,” and that was that. Then she added, “There was this guy outside when I came home. He was standing in front of our building, smoking.”

“Yeah?” Big Vince narrowed his eyes. “He bother you?”

“Not like that,” she told him. “He just seemed wrong, somehow.” She gestured. “He was about six feet, long black coat, smoker.”

“Hair color?”

“Mmm.” She made a face. “Some kind of dark. Streetlight, couldn’t tell.”

“Okay.” She could see the wheels of his cop brain filing it all away. “I’ll mention it to Hackett.” Grace Hackett was the beat cop for their neighborhood.

“I don’t think it was a big deal,” she continued. But she did. “Strike that.”

He drew an invisible line in the air. “Done.” He considered. “Maybe we ought to rethink that argument about you carrying some kind of protection. Such as a gun.”

There it was, her phobia. Once she conquered that…

Tell him. Tell him that you’re going to apply to the Academy.

“I think we should,” she said. “Rethink it. Because…” She took a breath.

But at that precise moment, a cheer rose up from the TV and his glance ticked back toward it. He shouted, “No! Oh, damn it!”

Exhaling—she had just squeaked out of that one—she said, “Good night.”

“Sleep,” he ordered her, watching the set. “Oh, for crying out loud!” he shouted, raising his hands into the air. “Well, whatcha gonna do?”

Smiling faintly, she left him to his travails.

She laid out her clothes for tomorrow, got into her nightgown—a fresh one, silky and lavender—and put her hair into a sloppy bun. She knelt at her bedside for the first time in a long time and prayed.

Take care of my mother, and let her know—

And again, as in St. Theresa’s, something shifted around her. Lowered, darkened.

Spooked, she crossed herself and climbed into bed.

Blood streamed down her face.

She was leaning over the lacy balcony as the creatures rushed the mansion. The trees were ablaze. The wounded were screaming.

He was gasping at her feet. If she didn’t get him to safety soon, he would die.

In the beating center of the battle below, a faceless man looked up at her.

A gun went off.

Chapter 4

“O kay,” Pat said to Izzy, “the movie was bad. But do you have to punish me all night for it?”

She shifted against the maroon-leatherette booth of the diner as she smiled apologetically at him. She knew she was terrible company.

They were having an after-movie snack, he a burger; she, a bowl of chicken noodle soup. She had scarcely eaten a thing since the night he had come over for dinner. Scarcely eaten and hardly slept.

That was three nights ago, when the nightmare had changed. That was an understatement—taken a quantum leap was more accurate. Maybe that helped to explain the growing feelings of unease that had been plaguing her in the waking world. The anniversary of her mom’s death usually churned her up for a couple of weeks, but this was ridiculous.

“You’re all het up,” Pat went on, putting down his burger and wiping his hands on his napkin. He tented his fingers as he leaned toward her. “Something happened to you. Recently.”

“No.” Looking down at her bowl of soup, she shook her head, fully aware that she wasn’t convincing anybody, least of all a sophisticated cop who ferreted out lies for a living. She didn’t know him well enough to talk to him about it. She didn’t know anyone that well.

His face quirked; his dimples showed. “Well, it can’t be kissing me that did this to you.” He sounded so sure of himself that she had to smile back. “Forsooth, she maketh the candles to glow.”

“That’s nice. Shakespeare?”

“Kittrell,” he answered. He took her hand and wrapped his fist around her fingers, shaking them as if to loosen her up. “A guy who cares about you. Cares if there’s something eating at you. Can I help?”

“It’s nothing, really.”

He sighed. “Okay, I give. For now.” He checked his watch. “I have to go in. I’m putting you in a cab.”

“I’m fine on the subway,” she insisted.

“Maybe on some other guy’s watch.” He cocked his head and took a breath, as if he were about to ask her a question. Maybe if there was another guy. But he didn’t. He didn’t push, and she was grateful.

He paid the check—insisting that he had to or his mama would find out and hit him upside the head. Then they put on their coats and walked outside, while Pat flagged down a cab in record time for a nonnative.

As she climbed into the back, he leaned down and kissed her. “You get some rest, you hear?”

For an answer, she kissed him back. His lips were soft and he smelled so good, like soap and limes, and she lingered, her senses tantalized.

Beaming at her, Pat shut the door and Izzy waved a bit shyly at him through the frosty window.

She got home without incident, no strange men loitering in front of her house. As she let herself in, her father looked up from the TV in the front room. When he saw her in the foyer, he said, “Hey. How was it?”

“Nice.” She unwound the scarf from around her neck. “He’s nice.”

“He didn’t walk you in.” He peered around her, as if he expected Pat to appear.

“I took a cab. He had to go in to work.”

Big Vince drank his beer. “Big bust coming down. They briefed us on it. Sting operation. He tell you about it?”

“We don’t talk shop,” she said, yawning. “I’m going to bed.”

“Good.” He nodded thoughtfully. “You got to take care of yourself, Iz. You’re getting too thin.”

She sighed. Everyone was on her case tonight.

“Night,” she said.

She took the stairs, washed her face and brushed her teeth, changed into her white nightgown and crossed to her bed. For a moment she thought about pulling back the curtains. Then she ignored her impulse and pulled back the coverlet, and slid into fresh sheets and, hopefully, some rest.

Don’t look down, a voice said inside her head.

But she did. And there he was, silhouetted by flames.

The smiling man’s features were very sharp, and a large purple scar ran diagonally from the right side of his jaw to his left temple. His face was all angles; his almond-shaped eyes were dark and fierce beneath brows that slanted upward. He looked devilish.

She had a gun in her hand and she raised it slowly. Her hand began to shake as she pointed it at him. His eyes widened in fear, and then his gaze shifted to a point behind her. He bared his teeth like an animal.

Izzy turned.

They are looking for you. Both of them, a voice said.

Within the arched curves of a Medieval monastery, a figure scanned the horizon. It was another man, very tall, with a riot of hair that tumbled down his shoulders, like her own.

A blue-tinted fog boiled up and around the long-haired man in the monastery, sharply casting him in chiaroscuro. He was holding a glowing sphere. It illuminated his fingers; on his left ring finger, something heavy and gold glittered, more like a signet ring than a wedding ring.

Then a voice rumbled like thunder, shaking her spine with a low, masculine timbre.

“Isabelle? Je suis Jean-Marc de Devereaux des Ombres. Je vous cherche. Attendez-moi. Je vous cherche.”

This time Izzy woke slowly, clutching the sheets as she whispered to the darkness, “Oui. Je suis là.” “Yes, I am here,” in French.

Only, she didn’t speak French.

Haggard, feeling as if she’d been run over, Izzy went down into the bowels of the Two-Seven. Yolanda was taking a personal day, but the new-hire, Julius Esposito, was there. He had had his black hair processed and she thought it looked a little silly, like he was an extra in a movie about Harlem in the thirties or something. Or maybe she was just looking to find fault. She didn’t like him; there was something about the vibe he threw off that didn’t sit well with her. This was only his third day, and she hoped the situation improved. On the other hand, she could use it as further incentive to get herself out of Prop. “Good morning, Isabella,” he said rather formally as she entered the Property room.

“Oh, everyone calls me Izzy,” she told him. There was an evidence bag beside the terminal tagged with Cratty’s signature turquoise tape. She gestured to it with her head. “What did he bring in?”

“Crack,” he told her.

“He’s been busy lately,” she said, crossing to the terminal to log herself in. Her elbow brushed the bag.

It’s light. The words came to her as clearly as if someone had spoken them to her. She looked at the monitor. In the column for the weight, Julius had typed in 98 gm. It was almost a hundred ten when he confiscated it. Cratty took some before he sealed the bag

And there is no way for me to know that. None.

Freaked, she moved away from the terminal as casually as she could, while Julius finished his intake procedures, put the bag in one of his lockers and slammed it shut. Then he returned to the cage window and started fiddling with the radio. “Do you like smooth jazz?” he asked without looking at her.

“Sure,” she said, although she hated it. Right now music was the furthest thing from her mind. A wave of vertigo made her wobbly. She felt as if she were standing under water and the air in her lungs was all the air she was going to get—so she’d better hang on to it.

Eye-level on the shelf to her left, she saw one of Yolanda’s lockers. The three-by-five card in the pocket showed a strip of turquoise tape—Cratty’s. She walked over to it. Touched it.

She heard his voice inside her head.

“Beating him down in the subway tunnel. Filthy skel, lowlife piece of crap, hold out on me? Me?”

Izzy jerked her hand away. She glanced at Julius, who took no notice. I am hearing things. I’m crazy.

She spotted another of Yolanda’s locker cards marked with Cratty’s turquoise tape, on the same wall but two-thirds of the way down. She stared at it for a long, hard minute.

Then she walked over and touched it.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

She touched the eye-level container for the second time.

Nothing there, either.

Hallucinations, she thought. Her heart thudded; she could feel the vein in her neck pulsing hard. I need some sleep and maybe I need to see a shrink again. I’m in trouble.

At a late lunch the next day, in a joint around the corner from work, Yolanda pushed a business card across the expanse of red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloth and said, “Just go see her. There is something terribly wrong with you. You look like you’re dying.” She grimaced. “Sorry if that’s a sore subject.”

“It’s okay, Yolanda.” Izzy reluctantly read the card. It was for Dr. Mingmei Wei, Yolanda’s Oriental medicine doctor. Yolanda swore by her. She also paid her out of pocket, because their Department health insurance wouldn’t cover her services.

“It’s your chi, ” Yolanda opined. “It’s out of whack. What she does is like feng shui, only for people. Psychic chiropractic. You need to get readjusted.”

“Does your priest know about this?” Izzy gibed.

“This is not funny. You are psychically ill.”

She indicated Izzy’s untouched barbecue-beef sandwich. “When’s the last time you ate a decent meal?” She gazed hard at Izzy. “Are you pregnant?”

Izzy burst out laughing. “Please. There’s only been one Immaculate Conception.”

“I didn’t think you were.” Yolanda stabbed her finger at the card. “But—”

Flames. Heat, smoke. Lungs…searing…

The image of her father’s red, sweaty face filled her mind.

She heard him gasping, coughing. “Izzy…Gino…”

“Oh, my God!” Izzy cried. She jumped to her feet. Her chair clattered to the tile floor. “My father’s in danger!”

“What?” Yolanda said, reaching out to her as she rose from her chair. “Izzy, wait!”

Izzy bolted and ran outside. A black cloud of thick, oily smoke billowed on the horizon. In her mind she saw her father, saw a hallway, saw rats and shapes moving in the flames.

I’m not asleep, she thought as she ran. I’m awake, and Big Vince is in that.

She flew toward the smoke, picking up speed until her feet were barely touching the ground. Her lungs burned but she kept going, weaving around pedestrians who yelled and jumped out of her way like missed targets in a shooting simulation. It was as if someone else was operating her body and she herself had no choice but to propel herself forward.

Images roared into her mind.

Flames…rats screeching down the halls. Shapes moving in the smoke. Officer Vincenzo DeMarco. Detective John Cratty.

And a semiauto pistol—a .9 mm Glock—in a closeup that filled her field of vision.

Pointed straight at her father’s head.

A voice. “Filthy cop, you’re gonna die; no one shakes me down.”

“Hit the floor!” she screamed out loud.

Then abruptly and without warning, her astonishing burst of energy left her. She staggered forward, swaying wildly left, then right; she smacked against the side of a brick-faced building and slid down it, pitching painfully onto her side.

She was dimly aware of people crowding around her, asking her if she was all right. Should they call an ambulance?

“Hey!” Yolanda caught up with her. She was carrying Izzy’s coat and purse. “Hijo de puta, did someone mug you?”

“I’m okay.” Izzy ground the words out. Yolanda put her arm around her waist, helping her to her feet.

“Are you loca? ” Yolanda said. She whistled and waved as a cab approached. The cab swerved to the curb.

“Come on, Iz,” Yolanda said, helping her to the cab.

The cabbie peered at them and frowned as his window rolled down.

“Go toward 108th,” Izzy told him as they got in. To Yolanda, she ordered, “Get my cell phone, and call my father. Number one on my speed dial.”

The cabbie shook his head. “No way. See that smoke? The cops have got it blocked off.”

“You have to go there!” Izzy yelled.

Yolanda squeezed Izzy’s hand as she opened up Izzy’s hobo bag with her other hand and dug around. “Easy, mi amor. We don’t know your father is in that building.”

“You need a cab or not?” the driver snapped.

Ignoring him, Yolanda found Izzy’s cell phone and pressed a couple of buttons. She put the phone to Izzy’s ear.

“Cratty, ten,” came a raspy, hoarse voice. “Ten” was the same as saying “over” on a police radio phone.

“This is Izzy,” Izzy announced, confused.

“It’s John, Izzy. We’re in an ambulance. Smoke inhalation. They’ve got him sucking some oxygen but it’s just a precaution. We’re going to the Metropolitan.”

“He wasn’t shot?” she asked, her voice shrill. “Tell me if he was shot!”

“No, Iz. No. Just smoke.” He sounded a little off. “Meet us at the Met.”

Located on First, it was the nearest hospital. It was where Pat had taken his Aided last night.

And her father was with the guy she had seen in visions, beating people and skimming drugs. Why was he with him? Had he tried to shoot him?

Izzy said neutrally, “Thanks. Tell him we’ll be there.”

Disconnecting, she said to the cabbie, “Take us to the Metropolitan.”

“You got it.” He screeched into the traffic.

She said to Yolanda. “Call in and explain. You’re taking me in because I’m injured.”

“Works for me, mi’jita, ” Yolanda said, biting her lower lip as she smoothed Izzy’s hair away from her wound. “Especially because it’s true.”

Izzy and Yolanda both knew the way to the ER entrance of the Metropolitan Medical Center. Anyone who worked for the NYPD in this part of town eventually found him or herself here, if not for a perp or a personal injury, then for someone close to them.

She half crawled out of the cab while Yolanda paid the driver. An ambulance sat in the dock as two men in scrubs burst out from the ER double doors, a gurney rattling between them.

John Cratty got out of the ambulance, appearing from behind the open back door of the rig. He was wearing kicker boots, jeans, a T-shirt, and a heavy dark brown leather jacket. His face was covered with soot, but he was walking under his own steam. He motioned to the two men, pointing back into the ambulance.

Within seconds, Izzy’s father was loaded onto the gurney.

“Big Vince!” Izzy cried, hurrying toward them while Yolanda worked to stay up with her.

Izzy saw the portable O2 bottle propped against his shoulder, the mask over his face. There were saline bags and a defib machine on the gurney with him—oh, God, had he had a heart attack?

As Izzy approached, Cratty put his arms around her, giving her a tight hug. She stiffened, but he didn’t notice.

He said, “Your father’s in good shape.”

“The defib—”

“Wasn’t used. But what the hell happened to you? ”

“Just a fall,” she said as she pushed past him and ran up to her father’s gurney.

His eyes were closed.

“Daddy!” she cried. “Daddy!”

The orderlies pushed the gurney through the double doors, Izzy holding Big Vince’s limp fingers. Yolanda and Cratty brought up the rear.

Inside the building, a short man in dark blue scrubs barked orders at the two men, then said to Izzy, “We’re taking him in.” He held up a restraining hand. “You can’t go with him. Let us do our job. Besides, you look like you need help.”

“No,” she protested, but Cratty took her arm.

“You know the routine,” he reminded her. “They need their space.”

The gurney zoomed on past her as the trio hung a left and disappeared down a corridor.

“You two were in a building?” Yolanda asked him as she led Izzy to the left, through a door marked Emergency Waiting Room. “The one on fire?”

“We got the hell out of there as soon as the real firemen showed up,” he concurred, puffing air out of his cheeks. “Had a couple of rough moments.”

“What were you doing in there?” Izzy asked sharply. All her alarm bells were going off at once, and at full volume.

“We were on a detail,” he said, locking gazes with her. “Confidential.”

She didn’t know what to say. They kept walking, past people sprawled in rows and rows of orange-plastic chairs, looking pale and sick and tired of waiting.

Cratty flashed his badge and the three passed through to a second security door to the curtained sections filled with ER cases. Her father was lying on his gurney with a sooty face and bloodshot eyes barely visible above an oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth. When he saw Izzy, his eyebrows met over his nose and he tried to take off the mask.

She knew he was staring at her injury. “It’s nothing, Big Vince,” she insisted, touching her cut.

The dark-haired nurse who had just wheeled a blood pressure monitor to the side of the gurney said, “We’ll look at that.”

“It’s fine,” Izzy repeated. But the truth was, her vision was blurring and she was dizzy. “Maybe I’ll just sit down.”

And then she fainted.

Chapter 5

I t’s the gun. They will shoot him with the gun. It will stop his heart.

Izzy woke up in a softly lit room.

Pat was bending over her, the tan lines across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes softened by the dim illumination. But the worry on his face was evident, and she was touched.

“You passed out,” he said by way of greeting. He had on a sweatshirt that read Dallas Cowboys and a pair of jeans. Off-duty attire, since he wasn’t undercover. He looked sexy…and worried. “They’re keeping you under observation.”

“My father…”

Pat chuckled softly. “He’s awake, alert, and ready to leave. They want to keep him overnight, but frankly, I fear for their lives.”

She smiled at that. “Where’s Cratty? And Yolanda?”

“Back in the world. Yolanda’s very worried about you.”

“That’s so sweet,” she said.

An IV had been inserted into the back of her hand. Her gaze trailed up the clear plastic tubing to the bag hanging from a metal carrousel.

“Your electrolytes were out of whack.” He smoothed her hair away from her forehead. His fingers were calloused, but his touch was gentle. “They’re running some tests. Just as a precaution.”

His voice was low and steady. She felt calmed by his air of quiet authority.

“What happened, Izzy?” he asked her, stroking her cheek with his thumb. “Yolanda said you freaked out in the restaurant.”

“I…” She didn’t want to try to explain it to him. It was all beginning to fade. She had seen her father, hadn’t she? “I had a funny feeling…” She trailed off.

He urged a cup with a straw to her lips again. “It’s okay, darlin’. You don’t have to talk if you’re too tired.”

They sat in stillness for a moment—or what passed for stillness in a busy hospital. Doors opened, shut. The PA system paged a doctor. Machines beeped.

After a few moments Pat said, “I had a funny feeling like that, once.”

She looked up at him. He nodded calmly, but she could see the sorrow etched in his face. She assumed he was talking about his wife. She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

She said, “Is my father very upset? About me? He knows I’ve been admitted, right?”

He nodded. “Yes, he knows. And he’s upset. Bombastic is more appropriate, I’d say. But that’s because he loves you.”

She sighed heavily. “If he’s upset now, it’ll be nothing compared to telling him I want to go the Academy.” She considered. “If I can still get in. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Neurologically,” she elaborated.

“Don’t go looking for trouble,” he chided her gently.

“Why was John Cratty partnering with him?” she asked him. She debated about telling him about all the weirdness in the Prop room. But if she was wrong, she could bring a man down for nothing.

“Can’t rightly say.” Pat’s face was blank. She got it: private Department business, some kind of organized raid, something he wasn’t at liberty to discuss.

Maybe she wasn’t the only one who had felt a twinge of wrong around Cratty lately. That decided her.

“About Cratty,” she said.

He gave her a little nod. “Yes?”

“Nothing firm, nothing provable.”

“Same here,” he said.

“Whoa.” She nodded back. Their gazes locked. “I feel better.”

“Me, too, Iz.” He took her hand.

She took a deep breath, then said something that would humiliate Big Vince if he heard her say it. “My dad is…over fifty, Pat. He’s gone through a lot. Please remind whoever’s in charge of this Cratty thing. If it’s dangerous…”

“Understood.”

She was grateful to her core that he did understand. Suddenly it was the best thing in the world that the man she was attracted to was a cop. She was a cop’s daughter, and she wanted to be a cop. It was the only world she knew—no matter how dangerous or strange.

Pat had had to go back to the station. The physician on duty refused to release Izzy until she could prove that someone was going to stay with her for the next twenty-four hours.

She thought about staying with Aunt Clara, but their place in Queens was always pure bedlam. There would be endless calls between Clara and Big Vince, and a lot of yelling. Yes, she did love her big, noisy Italian family, but she needed some quiet tonight.

When she called Aunt Clara and the phone was busy, she took that as a sign not to pursue it. Then Yolanda arrived, telling her that her shift was over and she could take her home with her. “That okay?” Yolanda asked her excitedly. “I’d come to your house but Tria is working tonight so I need to watch Chango.”

Izzy raised a brow. She was fairly certain that chango meant “monkey” in Spanish. She rethought her decision. Except that Clara had five children, two dogs and several very noisy finches.

One night won’t kill me, she thought, making her decision.

“Okay. Thanks so much,” Izzy said.

“Bueno,” Yolanda said, clapping her hands. “Now, let’s go see your father before we go.”

Finally. Izzy had been begging them for hours to take her to him.

The doctor agreed to prepare Izzy’s discharge papers on condition that she sit in a wheelchair while Yolanda did the steering. Bouncing along, radiant in her helpfulness, Yolanda wheeled Izzy to an elevator.

They went up to another floor and Yolanda breezed her straight down a corridor, hung a left and paused on the threshold of a dimly lit room.

“Officer DeMarco? It’s us!” Yolanda sang out.

“Izzy?” her father croaked from the nearest bed.

“Yes.” Izzy began to rise from the chair. Yolanda clamped a hand on her shoulder and forced her to stay seated. She wheeled her into the room and around the side of the bed. “How are you, Daddy?” she asked softly.

“Everyone keeps asking me that. I’m fine.” Big Vince sounded exasperated and hoarse.

“It’s because they don’t want you to sue them,” Yolanda informed him. “If they let you out but you were still messed up, you’d have a case.”

“That so,” he said politely. He turned to Izzy. “How you doing, princess?”

Big Vince had not called Izzy “princess” in years. And she had not called him “Daddy” in years. It was as if those two softer people had been buried with her mother.

She said, “I’m okay.”

Yolanda cleared her throat. “I need a Diet Dr Pepper. I’ll check on you later, Izzy.”

She smiled gratefully. “Thanks.”

Yolanda left. Without taking his gaze from her face, Big Vince grunted. “This from falling?” he asked her, hand hovering above her temple.

Before she could answer he said in a rush, “Izzy, I have to tell you something.” His eyes got watery; his mouth pulled up in a smile. “Your mother saved my life.”

Izzy blinked. “What?”

He nodded eagerly, sitting up and grabbing her hands. “She looked down from heaven and warned me to hit the ground. The shooter was aiming right at us. I heard her voice in my head. If she hadn’t warned me, I would be dead.”

Izzy was stunned. She said slowly, “Did you really hear her voice? It was Ma?”

“Yes,” he said, seizing a couple of sheets of tissue from the box on the end table. He wiped his three-cornered Italian eyes. “I heard her loud and clear.”

His face was literally glowing.

“Your mother is still with us, baby. She hasn’t left us. And she saved my life today.” The tough Big Vince exterior cracked a little more. “My Anna Maria is back. ”

Izzy stared at him. “It’s a miracle,” he whispered.

She reeled. The nightmare…all this time, had it been in preparation for this day, this danger? Was her mother really with them? She looked up, around, joyful and a little anxious, half expecting to see her mother’s ghostly apparition floating in the room.

“Did you tell Gino about all this yet?” she asked, not sure what else to say.

“His phone was turned off. Maybe he’s at Mass. I left a message for him to call me back.”

He held her hands and began to weep.

“Your mother,” he sobbed. “Your sainted mother.”

She didn’t know what to say.

Upon her discharge, the doctor informed Izzy that she was anemic, gave her a prescription for iron pills and sent her home to bed.

“And have a steak,” he told her.

Yolanda’s roommate, Tria, picked them up at the curb in a beat-up, old, pale green Chevy station wagon. McDonald’s wrappers and yellowed copies of The Star littered the floor. Izzy sat in front and Yolanda wrapped herself around the chubby-cheeked baby who was strapped into an infant car seat in the back.

They didn’t live far away, which was to say that they lived in a bad part of town. It wasn’t the projects, but it was close. They parked on the street, behind a broken-down truck and a low-rider guarded by a boy of about eleven wearing a black bandana over his hair. Tria sprang Chango—whose real name was Calvin—from car seat prison. As they walked toward the entrance of a twelve-story brick apartment building, Yolanda got quiet, as if she were embarrassed that she had brought Izzy here. Maybe in the enthusiasm of inviting Izzy to recuperate at her place, she had forgotten that her new place wasn’t half as nice as her old place.

The entrance was coated with graffiti. The elevator reeked of booze, marijuana and pee. As they rode it to the ninth floor, Yolanda’s perfume wafted toward Izzy and she was grateful for the sweet vanilla scent.

They entered the tiny one-bedroom apartment. Posters of movie stars had been tacked up on the cracked pale-green walls with pushpins. There was a broken-down, green corduroy couch, a pile of books, the top of which read Medical Assistant Test Preparation. A sliver-size kitchen was fairly clean, the counter dotted with baby food jars, bottles and a container of powdered formula.

Incongruous in the extreme, an enormous state-of-the-art high-definition TV sat about three feet from the couch. It took up over half of the entire room.

Yolanda saw Izzy looking at it and said, “Flaco gave that to me.” Flaco was her evil ex-boyfriend.

“Girl, you told me you bought that thing,” Tria said accusingly. “What, he give you that when you moved out? He probably stole it.”

Yolanda looked stricken. Izzy said, “Well, it’s a very nice TV.”

“Unless it’s stolen. Then it is not nice,” Tria insisted.

Izzy really didn’t want to know any more sordid details, so she excused herself, called her father from the bedroom and assured him that all was well. He sounded tired and she didn’t stay on long.

Gino called and she said, “I’m okay.”

“Aunt Clara’s upset that you aren’t staying with her,” he informed her. “She wants to call you and tell you so. I told her they’ve got you on drugs. That may buy you some time.”

“You’re a saint.”

“Working on it,” he replied. “I’ll get the boys to pray for you.”

“Make sure they’re getting A’s in praying.”

“Our permanent records are very accurate.”

He hung up.

“We’ve got it all worked out,” Yolanda told her.

It was like a teenager overnight. Izzy was supposed to take the double bed in the bedroom. The sheets, which featured angels with big eyes, were clean. Yolanda would sleep on the couch until Tria came home around five in the morning or so. Izzy wasn’t sure what Tria did, and she didn’t ask. When Tria got home, Yolanda would move from the couch to a pile of cushions on the floor. Izzy wanted to object, but didn’t. Her head hurt and she was exhausted.

While Yolanda fussed over the baby, Tria said to Izzy, “You have whatever you want in the fridge, honey. We got some leftovers from the Roy Rogers down the street.”

“Thank you,” Izzy said politely. She thought with fleeting longing of the baked ziti she had made last night, with plans to microwave the leftovers tonight. At least her appetite was back.

She accepted an oversize T-shirt that read ¡Suave! beneath a faded picture of Marc Anthony and put it on, got into bed and closed her eyes. Through the closed door, she could hear Calvin fussing and crying.

About an hour into it, she got out her cell and called her aunt’s house. The phone was still busy.

Calvin keened like a banshee.

Finally she got up and walked into the living room. Yolanda was jostling the baby on her lap while she watched TV and talked on the phone. She saw Izzy and smiled.

“Hold on a sec,” she said to the person on the other end.

“Hey,” Izzy said. “I’m thinking of going to my house.”

“Oh? No, no,” Yolanda told her. “Look, I’m talking to Jax. He lives across the hall. I’ll go over there with Chango. It’ll get quiet.” She wrinkled her nose in a moue of apology. “Okay?”

Before Izzy could reply, Yolanda disconnected, zapped the TV with the remote and said to Izzy in a motherly tone, “Now, please, mami, go back to bed. I’ll check on you in a little bit.”

Izzy complied, shuffling back into the bedroom. Her head was hurting again and she exhaled deeply as she lay down. The ticking of a clock grew louder in her ears as she settled in. She could feel herself begin to doze.

Allez! Vite!

Izzy’s eyes flew open at the sound of a male voice in her room.

“Yolanda, is your friend over?” she called. Maybe he had mistaken the bedroom for the bathroom or—

Isabelle!

She knew that voice. It was the man who had appeared in her dream—the second man, the one with the wild hair tumbling over his shoulders and the golden ring. The one whom she had answered, in French.

She started fumbling for the light, but she was in a strange room and she didn’t know where it was.

C’est moi, Jean-Marc de Devereaux des Ombres.

His voice was insistent, urgent. But it was inside her head. In her mind. Experimentally, she touched her head, feeling for headphones. Patting the pillow. “Who are you?” she demanded again, squinting into the darkness. “Where are you?”

A friend. Trust me. They’re looking for you.

I’ve gone crazy, she thought. But as she looked around again, she said hopefully, “Ma?”

No, I’m not Marianne. But I speak for her. I speak for Maison des Flammes…the House of the Flames. They’re searching for you. I’ll do all I can to protect you.

Suddenly a violent pain blossomed behind her eyes. With a gasp, she pressed her fingertips against the bridge of her nose. It was so bad that she doubled over, losing her balance, and tumbled on her knees to the floor.

“Did you do that?” she yelled.

Shh. Lower your voice. They don’t know where you are. But they’re closing in.

Holding on to her bed, she got to her feet. Rubbing her forehead, she saw a rectangle of light around the venetian blinds. She stood to the side of it, then lifted the corner of the dark blue curtain and spied out onto the street below.

Her heart turned to ice.

The man in the long black coat stood across the street. He was smoking; she saw the glow of his cigarette against the dark outline of his head. He was not looking at her window; his gaze was focused a floor or two above it. But he was searching, scanning. She felt the familiar irrational dread at the sight of him.

She murmured, “Is that you or a friend of yours?”

Is someone outside?

“Yes,” she said.

Get out! Get out immediately! Don’t let him see you or you are dead!

“Okay, wait. Time out,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

Maintenant! Vite!

“I have to get dressed—”

Non! Get out! Get out now! Move!

The man outside shifted his attention to the very window she peered out of. He threw down his cigarette and began to walk across the street.

“I need to warn Yolanda—” she began.

He won’t even notice anyone else! He wants no one but you! Get out of there!

Something inside her made her listen—she had saved her father’s life this way—and she whipped into action, bounding across the little room to the chair where she had piled her clothes.

Get out now!

She gathered up her sweater and pants, stepped into her boots and pulled on her own long black coat over the Marc Anthony T-shirt. Her purse…she couldn’t remember where it was. In the darkened bedroom? In the bathroom?

She couldn’t leave without it. Her cell phone was in it. Her money, her house key—

—and then she felt the wet velvet sensation wash over her, the same as in her bathroom—was it four nights ago? She stood stock-still, feeling like a prisoner eluding the searchlight of a prison guard tower. Her heart was thudding so hard she felt dizzy again.

The sensation passed.

Where are you? the voice demanded. Are you leaving?

“Oui,” she replied, shocking herself. She was speaking in French again.

Ah, c’est bon, he replied, and rattled off a barrage of French.

She shook her head, not understanding anything more, mincing backwards out of the bedroom.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.