I gave a final nervous look around the yard—still empty and quiet. Exercising the better part of valor, I didn’t look behind the shed to see if a murderer was crouched there. Instead, I retreated to the sliding glass patio door and yanked it open, slipping inside before closing and locking it. Why the hell had I never listened to Dad when he’d told me to buy a length of board to jam in the door’s track as an added security measure?
Dragging in deep, steadying breaths, I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my phone off the counter. Twenty-six years old, and this was the first time I’d ever dialed emergency services, I realized.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” The voice on the other end of the phone call answered promptly. She sounded bored.
“Hello. There’s... uh... there’s a dead body in my back yard shed. I was going to mow the lawn and—”
“Your name, please?”
“Zorah Bright.” I spelled it out, forestalling the inevitable question about the ‘h.’
The woman rattled off my cell phone number from the caller ID and asked me to confirm that it was correct.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Address?” she asked, still sounding like she wished her shift would hurry up and finish.
“Three-eighteen Evian Street, St. Louis, six-three-one-one-eight.”
“Thank you. Do you need an ambulance?”
I blinked. “Not... really. The guy’s dead.”
“Did you check his vital signs?”
“Yes,” I said. “His skin’s cold. No pulse. No breathing. Big hole through his chest.”
My nausea rose, and grayness threatened the edges of my vision again.
“Police and ambulance services are on their way to your location.”
Still with the ambulance. I wondered if they got a lot of people calling in dead bodies that turned out not to be dead.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
I felt shaky, but wired. If I tried to sit down, I knew I’d be crawling out of my skin in five minutes flat, so I paced instead. I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to wait. The idea was that they were supposed to get to you in only a few minutes, but I’d caught an exposé piece on the local news not too long ago about how slow police response in the city could be. Sometimes it took them half an hour or more. The talking heads on television had argued back and forth about how much of the problem was down to poor management, and how much was due to insufficient budgetary allocations.
No matter the cause of the problem, the practical upshot was that it might be a while.
Maybe the wait would give any murderers hiding in my back yard enough time to sneak away, so the ultimate police confrontation could take place somewhere besides my house. Preferably, someplace far, far away from here.
I checked the time on my phone obsessively, still pacing despite my throbbing head and aching body. The seven-minute mark had just passed when I heard pounding noises. I froze, my feet abruptly glued to the worn hardwood floor. It wasn’t the pounding of police officers at my front door. There’d been no sound of sirens, and the sound was coming from the back of the house, not the front.
Heart in throat, I crept toward the sliding patio door. This hadn’t been the noise of a fist against glass. More like noise from a neighbor working on some kind of construction project. But... it had sounded closer than that. I sidled up to the wall next to the glass door, feeling vaguely ridiculous as I darted a peek into the yard.
Nothing.
The pounding came again, and I chanced a longer look, not so concerned now about trying to stay hidden.
Thump.
My eyes were drawn to the shed.
Thump, thump.
The shed door rattled against its hinges ominously.
Crash!
The latch and one of the hinges tore loose, the door half-falling open.
My jaw went slack. I stared like an idiot at the damaged shed, watching open-mouthed as a figure stepped past the twisted remains of the door. Red stained the front of his torn white shirt, drying to a darker shade of rust around the edges. He staggered a bit, catching himself on the doorframe with one hand as he looked around, clearly disoriented.
Unerringly... inevitably... his gaze settled on the glass door, peering directly at me through a too-long fringe of black hair. Even from this distance, I could see that his eyes were the same color as the ice in the center of a glacier—a blue so cold and brilliant that they seemed to be glowing from within.
I stood unmoving as he approached, those eyes pinning me like a cobra mesmerizing prey.
He’d been dead. I was sure of it. He had a freaking hole in his freaking chest, for Christ’s sake. And why wouldn’t my feet move? He stopped on the other side of the door, and we regarded each other through the flimsy barrier of glass. His eyes still glowed with that unnatural blue light.
“Open the door.”
His voice was muffled, but not so much that I couldn’t make out a panty-melting British accent. My hand crept toward the little lever that controlled the lock without conscious thought. I gasped and yanked it back just in time, appalled at myself. I would have staggered backward a step, but my feet were still rooted beneath me.
His brow furrowed as if I’d surprised him, two tiny lines marring the perfect planes of his face. “Right, then,” he muttered, and lifted a hand to the door handle. A single, sharp jerk and the inadequate lock popped open, the sliding door jumping a bit on its track in the wake of the force he’d applied.
He stepped over the threshold, frowning down at me. His skin looked like alabaster, it was so pale.
Run, I thought furiously. Why are you standing here, you idiot? Run!
“Apologies for this, pet.” His voice was low—maybe even a bit distracted. His hand, when it curled around my nape, was gentle. His skin still held that unnatural coolness. “I don’t normally eat and run.”
My skin prickled into gooseflesh as he gazed down
