Maybe she was coming down with the flu or something. Now that she thought about it, she definitely felt a little feverish.

The day had not started out well in spite of the promise of the exclusive with Fontana. For starters, she'd endured a sleepless night, unable to escape the creepy feeling that someone, somewhere, was watching. She knew it was a totally irrational sensation, but that didn't make any difference. Her intuition did not respond to logical argument.

Elvis had seemed restless as well, although that was probably because he had picked up on her unease. He was very sensitive to her moods. Countless times she had risen from the rumpled bed and gone to the window. Elvis had followed every time, hopping up onto the sill.

Together they had surveyed the narrow street two floors below, but there had been very little to see. That was hardly surprising, of course. It was early fall, and the fog was thick in the Quarter. The locals referred to the season as the Big Gray for a very good reason. The seemingly endless mist that blanketed the city at this time of year was legendary. On the rare occasions when the fog lightened temporarily, rain moved in to take its place.

The lack of sleep had definitely affected her edge this morning, but the real disaster had occurred en route from her office to Guild headquarters. She had taken a taxi because parking spaces were notoriously hard to find in the Quarter in the vicinity of the Guild offices. The driver had let her out on the side of the street opposite the entrance of the Colonial-era building.

She never saw the big Oscillator 600 bearing down on her in the heavy fog. It was only her intuition and Elvis's anxious chortling that had caused her to leap back onto the curb in the nick of time. The close call had left her already sleep-deprived senses badly jangled.